A Case of Revenge Ch. 04

"All right, you're under arrest." Muscone said. But as he moved towards the orderly, four uniformed State Asylum security guards moved forward, brandishing semi-automatic assault rifles. The eight Federal agents then moved in to protect Muscone. It was a standoff, and getting more tense by the minute.

"Hold on, Jack." I said, then turned to the orderly. "Would you please ask the Warden to come speak with us."

"I will do no such thing." the orderly replied. "The Warden is busy and has neither the time nor need to speak with trash like you. Now get off Asylum property or our guards will remove you, and if you resist, they'll kill you."

"Yeah, right. Let's go, Jack." I said. As we left, Jack was boiling mad, and I asked him to take a breath.

"We can't let them push us around like that!" Jack said as we walked to our cars outside.

"And we won't, but we can't do anything right now." I said. "We have to know where Kearns is when we raid the place, or they might kill him."

"Yeah you have a point." Muscone said. "I'm going to head straight back to the City from here and consult with my people in Washington... and pick up a few more friends along the way. I'll be back tonight."

As I got into my Police SUV and turned onto the road, a flash of white hair popped up in the back seat. It was Dr. P. Harvey Eckhart, founder and leader of 'The Vision', hitching a ride.

"How are you, my young friend Donald?" Eckhart said jovially, as if his presence in the car was the most natural thing. "I was wondering if you could drop me off at my Headquarters just up ahead."

"Sure thing, Harvey." I said. "I take it you got my call."

"Yes." said Eckhart, throwing an envelope onto the passenger front seat.

"So what's it going to cost me?" I asked.

"Oh, this ride back to my offices will do." said Eckhart. "Oh, and I must congratulate you on handling that situation between your wife and the adorable Inspector Maxwell so efficiently. That was quite a possible problem for you."

"And thank you for the warning about the threat to my family. Mrs. Burke did turn out to be a danger." I replied.

"As part payment for the information in that envelope, would you mind terribly telling me how you stopped Mrs. Burke?" asked Eckhart.

"You really don't know?" I said, then recovered. "To tell you the truth, Harvey, I didn't figure it out. My mother did. It was all her plan."

"Ah, so that's where your tremendous abilities sprouted from!" said Eckhart. "Wonderful! Ah, here's the turn to my place. Oh, just one other... small thing. When you make your raid into the Asylum, there will be a couple of bottles of a certain experimental drug in the same room in which you'll find Mr. Kearns. I'd be ever so grateful if, in payment for that information, you'd bring those bottles and give them to me."

"What are they?" I asked. Eckhart told me. Okay, nothing too bad. I agreed.

I drove Eckhart to the front door of the World Headquarters of The Vision. His security people looked totally shocked when their great leader sprang out from my vehicle. I politely declined his invitation to come inside for tea and headed home.

Once back in my office I looked at the contents of the envelope. As I'd asked, Harvey Eckhart had given me the exact location of Phil Kearns inside the Asylum, complete with schedules and possible scenarios. I texted Jack Muscone.

---

At 4:00am on June 2nd, we made the raid. I deputized myself into the SBI, and Jack Muscone essentially deputized my SWAT team into 'Federal assistance', as he called it. I did not really care about the legal niceties at this moment. We were going into combat.

The Asylum is composed of the front building and offices, then behind it to the north, stretching east and west, was the main dormitory. The left (west) side was the prison side, while the east side was where people 'voluntarily' were receiving 'treatment'.

Jack Muscone had his team as well as 60 Federal Marshals and FBI agents in heavy armor, and I had my eight SWAT team members... mostly for my own personal protection.

"Okay, here's the plan." I told everyone. Twenty FBI agents would storm the front building, grabbing every file they could find per a freshly printed Federal warrant. Twenty others would assault the dorm from the front building. The last twenty and the rest of us were going to breach the back fence near the entrance to the east wing of the dorm, hit the dorm more quickly and get Kearns out. All-in-all, we would extract six men: Mr. Kearns and five others that Eckhart had alerted me had been kidnapped and imprisoned illegally in the Asylum.

---

"MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!!" I yelled as my team ascended the stairs to the third floor. We'd breached the fence just as Muscone led the raid on the front building. Sporadic gunfire was heard, but most of the guards conceded in the face of the overwhelming Federal and State force.

The room I was headed for was locked, but Hugh and another man battered it down. The orderly inside was quickly forced to give up and was thrown to the ground.

"Nobody's here." one man said. "It's empty." I looked around. The room had what looked like a dentist chair in the middle, but the purposes for which it was used were far more sinister and caused far more pain than any dentist could dish out.

"Wait... do you hear something?" I asked. A cabinet on the left side of the room was locked, and I thought i heard scraping. The blue crowbar came out and I pried open the locked door. Stuffed into the bottom section of the cabinet, his mouth duct-taped, his ankles duct-taped and his hands manacled with one of those plastic ties, was Phil Kearns.

As the men helped Mr. Kearns out and freed him, I went to a cabinet and removed two large bottles of a bluish liquid. I told two SWAT agents to duct-tape the tops to seal them. Mr. Kearns could not walk without help. Grabbing a wheelchair, I sat Mr. Kearns in it and put the two bottles beside him, one on each side.

"We have Kearns. Extracting him now." I said into my police radio. "Okay guys, let's go." I said to the team. But just as I was about to wheel Kearns out the door, the tingling sensation of danger that I sometimes got hit me full force and I stopped. SWAT team members actually banged into each other and my backside.

"Hold on." I said. I peered out the door. Suddenly an orderly peered from around the corner, wearing green scrubs and a black silk cowl that masked his face. He fired a volley with a submachine gun at me. The bullets whizzed past as I felt myself being pulled back into the room just in time.

"Get back, Lieutenant!" Sergeant Hugh Hewitt ordered. He and four of his team sprang out into the hall, firing at the corner of the hallway from which the orderly had fired. They pursued the orderly, but he was gone. I was still feeling that aura of sensation, my mind knowing that something about that orderly was important. But I couldn't worry about it at this moment; I had a citizen to extract and protect.

"Group up, guys, let's get Kearns out of here!" I ordered. We rushed Kearns down to our cars, got him into an ambulance which drove away quickly. I put the bottles of liquid into my SUV as I heard the call on the radio that the other men we were looking for had been extracted. Jack Muscone called for the general retreat, and we all drove away, back to my County. We were not pursued.

Part 19 - Aftermath of Torture

"This is Bettina Wurtzburg, KXTC Channel Two News! Channel Two News has learned that the FBI and elements of the SBI conducted a heavily armed raid upon the State Asylum, rescuing Mr. Phil Kearns and five other men from illegal imprisonment there! Details are rapidly pouring in, but the case of the Bryant Brothers, two contractors who disappeared two years ago after reporting for a job at the Asylum, is now solved as the brothers were found illegally imprisoned at the Asylum. Three other men who also had been kidnapped and incarcerated there were freed.

"Four Asylum orderlies resisted the raiders and were wounded, as were three Asylum security guards. None of the nearly seventy law enforcement agents that participated in the raid were injured. The FBI was acting under several Federal and State Court-issued warrants for the release of these men. Special Agent In Charge Jack Muscone of the FBI has confirmed that the raid became necessary when the Asylum refused to release Mr. Kearns into his custody earlier that afternoon.

"The FBI is not giving details of how they came to know where the men were, but sources tell KXTC news that the raid was conducted with surgical precision, which suggests the raiders knew where the victims were. Channel Two News has also been told that the County's own Lieutenant Donald-" I winced as she said my name; I was hoping my part in this would go unnoticed, "- was the actual leader in the raid to free Mr. Kearns. Channel Two News will break in with details as we get them, including the Governor's statement, which will be issued in one hour, at 8:00am. This is Bettina Wurtzburg, KXTC Channel Two News!"

--

It was pandemonium in the County, with local, State, and even National Media pouring into Town for more information. Lt. Scott Peterson, the Police Force's Media Relations man, had to implement what he called 'Plan Bravo' for handling large press attention to big-deal cases. This was more than that; it was a 'BFD' case. Midtown was similarly assaulted by the media, and Coltrane County was swarming with reporters. In opening a can of whoop-ass on the Asylum and Nathan Allen, we had just opened a can of worms on one of the biggest stories to hit the State in years.

I was at University Hospital, where Mr. Kearns and the other man had been taken. All of the other men were reporting how they'd been doing work at the Asylum when they were grabbed and imprisoned as patients in the room, and of the torture and psychological experiments done on them while they were there.

Kearns had been worked over very brutally during his three days of imprisonment, and injected with myriad drugs. He was struggling to remember what had happened when I went in to visit. Laura Fredricson was there as well as two other psychiatrists, one being Dr. Bonnie Karpathian. The other was named Dr. Tom Yates. He had dark brown hair in a style resembling Scooby Doo's friend Shaggy, though Yates sported a mustache and beard that made him look a bit more scholarly.

Laura said with some disparagement that Dr. Yates had graduated from my School and was a psychology professor with her when she was there. "Wildcats rule!" Yates said in reply to the introduction. "I think I like this guy already." I told Laura as I shook hands with Dr. Yates.

Dr. Yates was a preeminent psychiatrist in retrieving memories of patients that had lost them or had been drugged, and he was doing yeoman's work in getting Kearns to remember.

"He still doesn't remember much about being arrested." Laura said. "He got hit on the head at that time, which might've killed his short-term memory on that. He does remember a lot of being in the hospital and what they did to him. As to what you want, a connection to Nathan Allen... we don't have that yet. And Don... there's one more thing, something all of these men have told us.

Their stories were the same: among the atrocities at the Asylum was that, after dark, every woman imprisoned in the facility was being raped, every night. Literally every woman was used for the sexual pleasure of the male guards, orderlies and some male patients during the hours of darkness when the powers of Evil were exalted. Any women that became pregnant were given forced abortions. When Kearns talked of it, he began sobbing uncontrollably, saying how the screams of some of the women could be heard for hours...

---

"What can we do about these women in the Asylum?" I said, my mind still reeling over what I'd learned . I was in the Chief's office with him, SBI Deputy Director Tom Conlan, and FBI Special Agent In Charge Jack Muscone.

"Kid, this is a very important lesson for you." Chief Griswold said, trying to teach me something. "I know you want to charge in there and stop it; we all do. But unfortunately, we can only do so much, and unfortunately there are some things that are beyond your and my capacities to accomplish in our positions. You are not 'Superman' from the comic books; you are a human being doing all you can."

"Don, the Chief is right." said Muscone. "He's talked to the Governor and I've talked to my superiors at the Bureau. They're working on it. But on the flip side of the coin, the Asylum beefed up security and brought in nearly 100 State Troopers with SWAT training, ostensibly to help the guards keep prisoners from escaping, but actually to oppose any future raids by us. So we won't be going in there again any time soon."

"I understand." I said. "But it sucks. It sucks like hell. By the way, why in the world did the Asylum kidnap those contractors on their site and keep them?"

"Money." said DD Conlan. "My people have been investigating, and some serious ugly stuff is going to come out about the Asylum in this election year. But to answer your question: the Asylum gets money from the Legislature based solely upon the number of people that it has incarcerated, with some extra money for any new people brought in there. A couple of State Board of Accounting people go through, count the people there, and send their report. By kidnapping and holding these extra people, the Asylum gets extra money for them. And there is not one shred of accountability of the patients, either. Before your raid, we had no idea that anyone other than Mr. Kearns had been put there illegally. By the way, Don, how did you find out about that?"

"Confidential source." I said. "I can't tell you even if I wanted to. But it looks like a couple of the guys we rescued were hidden away there by other State Senators, in the same manner that Nathan Allen put Kearns away. Don't know if anything can be proved, but I'm sure they're worried."

"Speaking of Allen, no one can find him right now." said DD Conlan. "His office in Midtown says he's in this County doing campaign work. His office here says he's in Midtown, 'taking care of important State business'. He's not at his home, and his wife says she doesn't know where he is."

"Just one other question." I said. "Is anyone at all pursuing Nathan Allen, Steven Ikea, Dick Ferrell, and the judge who issued the warrant to arrest Kearns?"

"The Governor and some very high-level Legislators and State Supreme Court members are looking into the Coltrane County judge." said the Chief. "That's another one that's above our pay grade, Crowbar." I nodded in acquiescence.

"As to Ferrell and Ikea," DD Conlan said, "those slippery little eels are swimming away scot-free. We questioned them at length, and we made sure to read them their rights and offer them legal representation. They waived and answered all our questions. The problem is that they technically did nothing wrong and they know it. Their stories match. They say they served a warrant that they had no reason to believe was not legitimate."

"And nobody will admit Nathan Allen's presence at Kearns' arrest, despite my evidence to the contrary." said Jack Muscone. "Our only chance to truly connect him is through the Coltrane County judge... and I don't need to tell you what I think of our chances there."

---

"This is Bettina Wurtzburg, KXTC Channel Two News!" blared the lovely redheaded reporterette at 6:00pm from in front of the State Building on the Courthouse Square. "Channel Two News has learned that Governor Jared has already moved to appoint an Independent Select Commission to investigate the State Asylum. The Commission will investigate the finances and procedures of the Asylum, as well as allegations of systematic torture and even rape of the inmates there. The Governor has appointed newly hired SBI Inspector Britt Maxwell to lead the Commission's investigation of the Asylum."

"Channel Two News has also learned that the Warden of the State Asylum and several other officials and psychologists working there have disappeared. The SBI and FBI have issued warrants for their arrests, and they ask for the Public's help in locating these people. Meanwhile, the Governor says that an interim Warden will be appointed, who will answer to the Independent Select Commission as well as to the Governor himself.

"Polls show that voters are responding positively to Governor Jared's quick actions in appointing the Select Panel, as well as his recent appointment of Inspector Maxwell to the SBI. The same cannot be said of Senator Nathan Allen's polls, which have fallen to his baseline of 41%. In the Sheriff's race, longtime Police Captain Harold Malone continues to enjoy an eight point lead over the little-known upstart Daniel Allgood.

"Last, but certainly not least, Vicki Oldeeds, wife of the late Rev. Jonas Oldeeds who was brutally murdered in this County a year ago, will be making a public appearance here over the weekend. She will be offering a one million dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer of her husband. Mrs. Oldeeds has also issued a statement stating that the Town & County Police Department have utterly failed to find her husband's killer due to total incompetence. This is Bettina Wurtzburg, KXTC Channel Two News!"

---

In Room 201 of the Sunrise Hotel, one of the hotel establishments on the road south out of Town, Senator Nathan Allen poured the remainder of the bourbon from the bottle into his drink up, then used the remote to click off the television after listening to Bettina's broadcast.

The SBI had gotten a pass: Ikea and Ferrell's assistance in incarcerating Kearns had been exonerated, but Director Lewis had told Allen that the agents were 'off limits' until the furor over the Asylum died down. In addition, no one seemed to be bringing up Nathan Allen's name in association with any of this, which was fortunate.

"Ah shit, I'm out of bourbon." Allen said. "Could it get any worse?" Just then there was a knock on the door. Allen opened it to find Rev. Robert Patterson, Jonas Oldeeds' disciple, at the door.

"Mind if I chat with you for a moment, Senator?" Patterson said in his friendly, easygoing manner. "By the way, I brought you a new bottle of bourbon." He extended the brown paper bag.

"Ah, the 101-proof stuff." Nathan said, admitting the younger man into the room. "Just what I need. Can I pour you some?"

"No thanks, I'm driving." said Patterson, sitting himself into the chair between the door and the little round table. Allen sat in the far side chair, sipping his fresh, and very strong, drink.

"What can I do for you, Robert?" asked Allen.

"I just wanted to have a moment to chat with you privately, and this might be my only chance." said Reverend Patterson. "Vicki came back to town for her reward speech, and we're going to be speaking at First Baptist, to remember Jonas and to support Harold Malone for Sheriff."

"Well, I'm sorry I can't be there." said Allen. "I'm afraid I'm going to be busy." he continued, not fooling Patterson a bit.

"I quite understand, Senator, you're a busy man." Patterson replied drily. "But I need to tell you some things. First, Jonas Oldeeds was a dear friend of mine, my mentor, like a father to me. He was grooming me not only to assist with and ultimately help run his Ministries, but with... the back side of the business, if you get my drift, Senator."

"I do." said Allen. "Jonas must've trusted you very much."

"Yes, we were very close." said Patterson. "Then poor Jonas was shot dead in this accursed Town, and things started unraveling. Vicki is trying to take us in other directions, directions that neither I nor my colleague Pastor Fred Bundy want to go. We liked what Jonas was doing, and we want to continue it, but Vicki is shutting us down. Senator, how long has it been since you've had some of our fresh young merchandise?"