The Final Veil: Who had kidnapped America's favorite belly dancer? Page 6

  "OK," Jeff said. "Thanks for the warnings, anyway."

  "No problem," I said. "Do you have anyone to help you deal with the media?" I asked.

  "One of our mentors and his slave run a PR firm," Jeff said.

  "Hire them," I said. "You can use the media to keep pressure on the cops to find April."

  "I thought they'd want to, because she's a celebrity," said Jeff.

  "The reason they care that she's a celebrity is that they are afraid of a media shitstorm hitting them," I responded. "Your PR firm can keep things flying to keep them at it."

  "OK, I see now," said Jeff.

  "Right," I said. "Now, you want to follow me to the station?"

  Jeff lived in the northern suburbs in an unincorporated area, so I took him to the Fulton County sheriff's department, which was the right thing to do. I figured they'd note that the kidnapping itself had occurred in a restaurant in Atlanta proper and kick the football to the Atlanta P.D., which is exactly what happened. But we did get a report filed and the Fulton County sheriffs were a savvy crew themselves and would be working on it with the Atlanta P.D., if only to cover their asses. The Olympic Park bombing, and the "missing children" case had taught everybody a few lessons in ass covering, chief among them is that it takes cooperation to cover your ass. So after a couple of hours of sitting in waiting rooms and at desks in the sheriff's department, we hied it over to Atlanta P.D. headquarters.

  I had contacts at the Atlanta P.D., and I used them. Half an hour after walking through the front doors -- lightning fast by Atlanta P.D. standards -- I was sitting at Lt. Jack Polti's desk and explaining things.

  It was fun to watch the level of alarm go up as he realized what kind of case I had just dumped on him. In a few minutes we were in a conference room talking to Lt. Polti, Captain Mundricks and a few others I hadn't met before. They had a TV/VCR combo in the room and I showed them the video and explained the circumstances under which it had been obtained.

  After watching the video, Mundricks said, "We'd better move this one into the active files, guys. It's a snatch. Get on it."

  And those were the words I had wanted to hear. I knew that in private they would discuss how to cover themselves if and when the media got cranked, and whether and to what extent they might want to use me as a lightning rod for the media. They'd for sure want to call in the FBI, if only to use as a target of opportunity for the media.

  We spent a lot of time sitting in waiting rooms between interviews, so I talked with Jeff. You never knew what weird little fact would surprise you by turning out to be the key to solving the case.

  "So, how did you become a Gorean?" I asked.

  "I had this girlfriend in college," said Jeff. "She was in what I'd guess was a sexually experimental phase, and I was happy to go along with her because we did all sorts of wild things. One night she asked me to tie her up and dominate her while we where making out. So I did. I tied her wrists behind her back and told her she was a very bad girl and I was her master and she was my slave. I made her kiss my feet. After some more stuff along those lines, I tied her spreadeagled to the bed and gagged her with her thong and took her. She liked it well enough, but it was just another thing we did. But for me, it was different. It was THE thing we did. And from then on I always wanted to do that. But she didn't care for it nearly as much as I did, and she wanted me to play the slave now and then. And I didn't get off on that. So we drifted apart, but I'll always remember her with love and affection because thanks to her, I figured out that I liked bondage."

  "So how do you find women who like bondage?" I asked.

  "Lots of different ways," said Jeff. "You date women, tie them up and see how they like it. If they like it a lot, you're home. If they like you so much that they learn to like it, you're home, and that's the more common thing."

  "So, that's how you learned about bondage," I said. "How did you learn about being Gorean?"

  "Well, there were some clubs on campus," said Jeff. "There was a non-official club for students who like BDSM that held munches, which are just luncheons where BDSM folks can get together and meet each other without being on a date or at a scene or anything -- a very low-pressure thing. I attended them, but most of the people there were into things like SM and cutting, and a lot of them were gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it wasn't what I was interested in. But while attending a couple of munches, I heard a lot of talk about how terrible and awful Goreans were, with all that maledom/femsub stuff. What I didn't realize was that a lot of BDSM folk are classical liberal feminists and have strong prejudices against maledom/femsub sex, not to mention some of the gay women didn't like heterosexuality, period."

  "So you didn't do well at the BDSM munches," I said. "You were kind of an outcast."

  "I wouldn't say an outcast, really," said Jeff. "The BDSM people were too cool to shun me because of my sexual leanings -- I mean, most of them know how that feels from experience. True, there are some gay men who just plain don't like heteros. They've taken a lot of shit from heteros for being gay and they don't like it, so they're looking to send some of it back. And there are gay women who don't like hetero men on political as well as sexual grounds."

  "I know about that," I said, remembering my interview with Rossovich and the houseful of books about the evils of men.

  "But the basic problem was, there wasn't a lot of real communality of interest," said Jeff. "I did not want to tie up guys or be tied up by guys. I did not want to be tied up by women. And there's a surprising number of BDSM people who believe in freedom of sexual expression for everyone -- EXCEPT hetero maledoms and hetero femsubs. And of course, there's the whole chudwah thing."

  "Chud-what?" I asked.

  "Chudwahs," Jeff answered. "Clueless Hetero Dom Wannabees. "They're guys who really don't have any feel for dominance and submission sex fantasies -- vanilla heteros who have figured out that they can have sex with a woman completely on their own terms if she's their slavegirl. So they pretend to be doms. They're a pretty common problem."

  "Why are they a problem?" I asked. "How would you know, and why would it matter, that they were just pretending to have dominance fantasies?"

  "Oh, subs know," said Jeff, grinning. "If you're just faking it, if you don't have the instinctive feel for what to do to really give the sub a thrill, they know. Chudwahs just try stuff they've seen in magazines and movies. And since they're really just vanilla heterosexuals, they tend to want to get the foreplay over with fast and get to the fucking and sucking and then lose interest immediately. Add to that the fact that submissive women tend naturally to pay close attention to the feeling of their doms, and, well, chudwahs get found out fast. Thing is, though, BDSM types who don't like hetero male doms tend to paint using the term "chudwah" with a broad brush. I've seen it used on guys who've spent years as an active maledom."

  "It's been used on you, I take it?" I asked.

  "Of course," said Jeff. "Every hetero male dom hears it at some point. If you hang out with general BDSM types, you hear it a lot. Even Goreans use it, though we tend to use it only on guys who really are clueless, rather than as a blanket term for hetero maledoms."

  "I see," I said. "You said you heard about how bad Goreans were in the BDSM group," I said.

  "Yeah," Jeff said. "I heard remarks, and read remarks on various websites, about how Goreans were basically a bunch of chudwahs who were just using Goreanism as cover to restore the evil patriarchy which oppresses women, about how they're not really friendly to gays. Well, the gay part is true enough for some Goreans, though not all, but they started throwing rocks at us long before we started throwing rocks at them. Anyway, I suspected that since I wasn't fitting in with the general BDSMers, I might do well to hang with the Goreans. I found I liked them a lot better. Not that they were saints and the BDSMers were sinners. I just had a lot more in common with them."

  "Well, still, it sounds like there might be some bad blood between BDSMers and Goreans," I suggested.

&nb
sp; "There's not a lot of love lost there," said Jeff. "But if you're thinking there's ever been clashes between the two groups, no, nothing like that. The most I can recall is vigorous debates online, maybe a little flaming. Nothing exceptional, certainly nothing on the level that exists between gays and some conservative religious types."

  "Another idea I've been toying with is that maybe April has been the victim of some kind of Gorean capture-the-slave game that got a little out of hand," I suggested.

  "Well, we do have capture-the-slave games at meets," said Jeff. "But it's something more in the nature of a three-legged race or a sack race than a kidnapping. We'll wrap bells around a slavegirl so they jingle with her every move, then blindfold a bunch of masters and they have to try to capture her by sound as she moves about."

  "What's to keep her from staying still?" I asked.

  "Guy with a whip," said Jeff. "If she doesn't move within a certain amount of time, he gives her a stroke with it."

  "But you don't have any games where you capture each others' slaves on the sly?" I asked.

  "No, too dangerous," said Jeff. "We Goreans are suspicious enough to the mainstream as things stand. If we went around playing kidnap games, and anything went wrong, we'd be up the creek without a paddle."

  "Kinda like the present situation," I said.

  "Yeah, whoever did it is definitely going to be up the creek sans paddle, if we catch them," Jeff said coldly.

  "I've got more hope that we'll find April now that we know it's a group," I said. "Until that point, I'd been thinking the most likely option was that she was hanging out with some mentor and keeping it a secret. My biggest fear is that it was some loner psycho, because they're the hardest to catch. But a group, well, with a group somebody generally starts talking sooner or later."

  "I hope it's sooner," said Jeff.

  "So do I," I said.

  Chapter 5

  We mean you no harm

  April always liked doing gigs at Athena's Palace. The media had not made much of the fact that she was a regular performer there, and the folks at the Palace didn't advertise her, as they had to turn people away at the door on the nights when she danced as it was. So the crowd was a home crowd of sorts, people who knew and appreciated beledi dance as an art.

  Since she had become famous, the crowds at many of her gigs were frequently composed largely of people who were strangers to beledi dance -- men who thought it was only an erotic display, and women who thought the same, and who either admired her or considered her sluttish for doing it.

  At Athena's Palace, she didn't have to deal with a lot of that kind of ignorance. The crowd was sophisticated enough to enjoy both her artistry and her eroticism.

  She watched Kitten drive away in the van, mentally prepping herself to be "on" for her performance, as Lady Astra had taught her so many centuries ago, letting the customers stroll past her.

  Suddenly hands grabbed her from behind. Simultaneously, a sack was pulled over her head, shutting off all light. She struggled, but she couldn't see her attackers and there seemed to be a lot of them. She felt herself lifted off the paving and shoved into a van. She could tell it was a van by the feel of the rough carpet on her bare skin (she was wearing the thong and bra set that she danced in at Athena's Palace) and the amount of space she had.

  She yelled for help, but the hood muffled her cries.

  April heard a door slam, felt motion. Her hands were forced together behind her back and tied together. The same with her feet. Her feet and wrists were pulled together behind her back, and a cord was loosely tied around the sack on her head.

  In scant seconds, she was hogtied, hooded and totally helpless, unable to move or see. It was not a totally new situation for her. She felt a rough blanket being thrown over her.

  April heard voices.

  "How's it going back there?" a voice said.

  "Prisoner secure," said a voice.

  "That went well," said a third voice.

  "Knock on vinyl," said another voice. "I won't feel good about this until we've made the transfer and dumped the van."

  The voices frightened April, because they sounded frightened. April had leaped to the conclusion in the first few seconds that her "kidnapping" was probably some new Gorean capture game, and that she'd have to serve her kidnappers in some delightful sexual ways. But Goreans on a lark would have had a happy, thrilled note to their voices, a sense of anticipation. These voices had none of that. There was some satisfaction that things had gone well, but there was a lot of edginess and fear. These people were really, really afraid of being caught.

  And that made April very afraid. Frightened people sometimes did terrible things.

  For a long time they rode in near-silence, punctuated only by the occasional desultory remark. The engine noise wasn't loud but served to drown out most sounds. They made a series of turns and it seemed to take a long time for them to get wherever they were going.

  April was accustomed to being tied, so she knew how to relax. She began working on the knots as well. The way you escaped from something like this was to relax your body and focus on the ropes around your hands, feeling the knots and then working them. She probed the knots around her wrists.

  Sadly, whoever had tied her knew what he or she was doing. There were many loops around her wrists, and many loops around her ankles. That kept the pressure distributed across a larger portion of her body and lessened the danger to her nerves and her circulation. It also made the knots harder to untie, because there were so many loops. It got progressively easier, but those first few loops could take a long time to untie. And April didn't know how much time she had or how important it was that she get free.

  As she worked, she rolled to one side so that her hands were concealed against the side of the van, trying to look as if she were writhing from discomfort.

  She attracted some attention.

  "April, I have to tell you something," said a woman's voice that was probably deep and calm but was now stressed by excitement. "As you may have guessed, you've been kidnapped. We know you must be worried sick. I want to assure you that we mean you no harm. This is not a kidnapping-for-ransom or anything like that. All we want to do is keep you for a while, educate you, and release you back into the world. We will not keep you long, and we will not hurt you. We will keep you under restraint for as long as we feel it's necessary, but we don't really like doing it. As soon as we can safely do so, we'll set you free. That's why you're wearing a hood -- we don't want to make you less safe by letting you see us. I hope you'll bear that in mind and not try sneaking any peeks at us. Just relax and enjoy the ride insofar as possible. Since you like to be tied up, that should be possible."

  April was somewhat comforted by these words, but not all that comforted. She wanted to believe what the voice was telling her, but it didn't take a wizard to know that someone who'd kidnap you for real would also lie to you for convenience. Or to keep you from trying to escape.

  She kept working at the knots.

  She had about three loops over her wrists when the van stopped. She quickly pulled the ropes back over her wrists, pushing her arms out against them to hide how loose they were.

  It was strange, lying on the carpeted floor of the van with the motor turned off. Her body still seemed to be vibrating with the engine noise with some kind of weird echo effect.

  She heard footsteps and doors slamming. Moments later, she felt a rush of fresh air on her body as the door at the van's rear was opened. Hands lifted her out, slowly and carefully. There was no rush here, her captors felt safer. This made April feel less safe.

  Unable to see, she felt herself being lifted out of the van and carried into another space. Not a van, but still cramped compared to, say, a room in a house. She was dumped on a soft surface -- felt like a cot, and hands held her gently but firmly on the surface of the cot. She heard an engine cough into life and then felt movement again. The movement of the vehicle she was in was very slow and cautious at first. It
has the acceleration-with-hitching quality she remembered from her days riding a school bus. She wasn't sure if she was on a bus, but it was something big and slow to pick up speed.

  The vehicle picked up speed and began rolling at a steady pace. Once that occurred, hands rolled her over and inspected her, feeling her bonds.

  "Naughty, naughty," said a voice in mock disapproval. "She's been picking at her ropes. Looks like she made some progress, too."

  "Not surprised," said a second voice. "Most Gorean slavegirls are expert escape artists. One of their favorite games at meets is to tie girls up and see which can escape first."

  "I wonder if that's such a good idea," said the first voice.

  "What does it matter, they've got them so brainwashed that they don't WANT to escape," said the second voice. "Anyway, if ropes won't do, there are always chains and cuffs."

  As the women spoke, April felt cuffs being attached to her wrists and ankles. Soft, lined cuffs which you could wear comfortably for long periods of time but from which you could not escape. She knew them well, she pretty much lived in such cuffs at home. It was always so nice to know she could be rendered helpless at a moments' notice.

  Or had always been nice. It didn't feel so nice right now.

  April felt the ropes on her arms and legs being loosened by her captors, and then removed. But she was not free. Her cuffs were linked together.

  "OK, now let's get that hood," said a voice. "Where are those? Here they are ... Now, April, we're going to take your hood off now. Scream if you want to be gagged right away. Otherwise, keep quiet."

  She felt hands untying the rope that held the hood over her neck. Guess they were going to let her see them after all. But, no. Before the hood came off, she felt fingers slide under the bottom edge of the hood, causing bursts of light to assault her sensitized eyes. The fingers then pressed large cloth patches over both her eyes, patches with adhesive edges. The woman took her time doing so, being careful to press the adhesive down securely all around the margins of her eye. When she was through, the hood was whisked off April's head, and she was still as blind as she had been in the hood.