REJOINING SCHUYLER - Chapter 2
Jack Jr. and Eric
Gay Erotic Fiction by Simon Mohr
I included nothing intended to resemble any person living or otherwise in this work of fiction. It is for adults. If this material is illegal where you live or you are a minor, please do not read it. Please donate to the Nifty Archive using the donor information on this site.
Threats to a protected person can only come from two sources. The first is outside the protecting service; the second is from within. Inexperienced security personnel tend to think of the most likely harm to a protectee. Those with experience, brainstorm responses to imagined threats or have experience dealing with all possible situations and a plan to deal with each threat.
The Schuyler Trust adequately funded the security team and paid its officers well. They had every piece of equipment they needed. Much of that equipment was electronic devices known to each member of the team. None of them saving the operations center knew about all the gadgets and moves.
The days at college were never identical. Different classes and different events including exams made each day different for Jack and Eric. They became aware that like wearing an old pair of slippers, their days were becoming more comfortable together. Meals together, a few classes, exercise, a little drinking, commenting on cute guys in the college yard, athletic lovemaking after studying was done, sometimes just before studying, sometimes studying each other naked, taking showers together--all began to paint a lovely picture of student bliss, two men who had become each other's friend, lover, and companion. Both had imagined a future together silently and the idea for both was becoming sweeter as the days went by.
The fall leaves were down now; the rain and colder weather had arrived for good in Cambridge. On the previous weekend, Jack and Eric had spent a fair amount of time in the same bed under the covers together until they were exhausted. On the following Thursday, the men emerged one afternoon from their last class of the day, meeting up on their accustomed path to the gym.
Jack and Eric walked across the quad, skirting buildings on their way. They turned a corner around Kellin Hall, one of the peripheral science buildings, heard a grating metallic noise, felt instability like an earthquake under their feet, and found themselves falling through a collapsing metal grate of some kind embedded in the sidewalk. They both fell about ten feet onto thick straw with an oomph, remained conscious, and assessed their situation.
The two men found themselves in a dark hole, some light above, not close to other students passing by at the moment, a wooden door on one wall of the chamber.
Jack Jr., dazed, clacked his teeth hard, deliberately, three times in a row that activated a tiny molar sensor and touched a bracelet on his arm three times and waited. Eric held Jack, convinced that his world was at an end, unaware that help was anywhere possible or likely to come. The event traumatized both of them.
Instantly a variety of emergency lights flashed In an SUV across the street. Within a fraction of a second, a dedicated network passed a 'kidnapped' signal to the Operations Center at the Schuyler Museum in Manhattan. The operations room already had a low-orbit satellite with eyes on the Boston campus itself as part of Jack Jr.'s security plan.
The low-flying satellite had been up for nineteen years, paid for and maintained by the Schuyler Trust to aid beneficiary's and their related family's security in different situations.
The satellite took high-resolution images and video, relaying the precise GPS location and backing up the highspeed internet connections between the SUV and Manhattan. Cameras on the satellite slew over to that sidewalk, and software began to analyze what the cameras saw. Boston and Cambridge police were instantly notified as well as campus security.
In Manhattan, Security personnel at the operations center brought up all of the Boston details' names, which then came up, their bank accounts, their debts, their social media accounts, their 'friends,' their posts, and their partner's information mirroring the same data. A high-speed computer spinning out petaflops of operations per second began to look for unusual data patterns.
Several bees made their way from the van to the hole in the ground and sat on the edge of the crater looking downward with their micro-cameras, and the home office had eyes on Jack and Eric, a little disheveled but moving around. The bees were programmed to follow the two and to attack any other moving object emitting heat that entered the hole. The wooden door opened after a couple of minutes. A man pointed a gun with a silencer and entered. The bees attacked and the man collapsed. After five minutes, the SUV crew approached gingerly, then looked down into the hole. "Boys, you plan on having supper down there?"
"It's about time you rescued us. How was your coffee break, anyway?" Jack's hands were trembling as a rope ladder tumbled down to them. Eric was shaking hard.
"What was all that about, Jack?"
The Cambridge police department and the college campus security departments were accustomed to helping protect students from wealthy, famous, and royal families from around the globe. The Schuyler family was unusual in one regard. Other than Jack's mom being the first woman President, the family tried to live in obscurity, not currently famous, and not close to royal unless one counted the son of a former President, the very first women President of the United States.
Boston being Boston, that didn't even come close to being royal. Proper Bostonians had worked hard through the years to reject royalty. The town did, however, respect wealth. No family in the world managed a larger fortune than the Schuylers. Boston, Cambridge, and the college were uber-aware of that fact.
They received the kidnap signal with a great deal of consternation and unleashed the contingency plans for just such an event.
The youngest detective on the Cambridge force loved his job. The town had hired him some eight months before when their oldest detective, one Calvin Salinski, discovered suddenly that his diet of meat, potatoes, pizza, and beer probably wasn't ideally suited to keep his cardiac blood vessels free of the pasty plaque material that caused heart attacks. The coronary artery that clogged at work one day happened to be the worst artery that Calvin might have chosen, had he had any say in the matter prior to his oblivial plunge.
Calvin's replacement, Joe Kelly, got hired after Calvin's fine Cambridge funeral mass, accompanied by motorcycle police escort, and Joe now became the youngest, possibly the smartest detective on the job in Cambridge. His recommendations from New York PD and the Police Union there along with high marks in school confirmed that the Cambridge PD had made a good choice.
Only Joe's older sister Maria knew he was not destined to have children the 'regular' way. At some point, Joe confided to Maria that his sexual preference was gay. His parents, staunch churchgoers, and his little brother, Charles Kelly, didn't know that about him as far as Joe knew. Joe's parents treated him as their own in every possible way, had privately adopted him at birth, and treated him as their own in every possible way. His parents knew nothing about his biological parents.
When the alarms rang in the Cambridge Police department, he and the chief of police, still his mentor for the first year, went to the site.
A Schuyler Security supervisor put his arm around Eric. "Here's a warm blanket. You'd better go back to your room and rest together, guys. We've got some things to figure out. I'd take it as a personal favor if you would keep your door locked and ignore the security guy outside the door. If you go to the Nook, take him with you. We'll feed and water him. Three short knocks, and it is OK to let me in, OK?"
Joe and the chief ducked under the yellow tape that the campus police had placed around the pit in the sidewalk. They began to inspect the area for minute details and after about a minute Joe found something that the SUV bodyguards had not retrieved. A small artificial bee lay in the straw, a strange place for a real honeybee to occupy, a fact that didn't escape Joe's attention. "Sir," Joe motioned his chief over, "You might want to see this."
Joe continued. "I read about two cases where these were used in the last twenty years. Both were Schuyler-related incidents. The first prevented injury and possible robbery. The second was used to collect evidence in a Washington, D.C. case involving a lobbyist bribing a Senator, taking pictures of the Senator's wife in an elevator accepting the check and recording the conversation. The Senator resigned later."
"We already know that Jack Jr. is a Schuyler and protected by their security types who must have had access to these devices," said the chief.
"My point was that this bodyguard staff may have access to other tracking devices with sound and video capabilities, possibly GPS tracking."
"We'll keep that in mind, Joe. Good find."
Jack's body heat and explanations comforted Eric, and soon Eric was sleeping the nightmare off. Jack couldn't sleep. He found himself oddly disturbed by the danger he had brought to Eric. Leaving Eric asleep, he took the security guard outside the door and trotted off to the Nook.
The super-computer in Pennsylvania took about eight minutes to send two pieces of information to the Security Operations Center in Manhattan.
A member of Jack's team in Boston, Tim Jevex, was married.
His wife, Nelda, had been on a clothes shopping spree for the past two months. The computer software reviewed ATM cameras near those stores and identified several faces: Nelda, Timothy, and a drug boss from Brooklyn.
It appeared Tim's second job had something to do with drugs, as circumstantial as the evidence was.
The campus and Boston police forces sealed off the building close to the hole and underground tunnels leading to it. Advancing through from the perimeter, they found Timothy hanging in one tunnel from the pipes overhead, his hands tied behind him in a way that precluded suicide.
An unofficial murder investigation began and ended at that point. The Schuyler beneficiary called the Security chief in and briefly told him to fix it, and he wanted a report by morning. Boston police found the drug boss and just happened to introduce him to Schuyler security in a harbor location where an awaiting rented helicopter gave the drug boss a ride at 11 p.m. somewhere over the ocean near Cape Cod at altitude. The boss was given the boot out the helicopter door and not heard from again. Campus workers poured concrete into the sidewalk crater after they screwed the wooden door shut and reinforced it with metal strips.
Eric awoke in Jack's bed alone. Darkness was falling. He rang Jack's cell. No answer. He tried to figure that out. Maybe the cell wasn't charged. Maybe Jack couldn't hear it. Perhaps Jack didn't want to answer his phone. Maybe he had dropped and lost it. Eric's anxiety level wasn't low after the incident that day; it rose exponentially thinking about where Jack might be. He looked outside the door. No security guard stood there.
He decided that was enough of that. He decided he hadn't signed up for any of this. His mom had hired a security couple for Eric to live in an apartment a block away from the college. They doubled as his chauffeur, his friends, and paid his bills. On call 24-7, they always had a cell on. They never answered it but received texts regularly. A pound sign meant 'I'm OK' and a hashtag meant 'I'm coming over-big problem.' Two capital 'T's mean 'Come and get me out of this emergency.'
Eric had them on speed dial and when their cell answered, he sent a hashtag. He put dark glasses on and left his room. Within a few minutes he had reached their apartment and asked them to clean out his room within a half hour which they managed, just. One stayed behind.
The other, under the cover story known to his mom and the landlord, was his 'brother, Daryl.'
Eric put on another pair of jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with faded sneakers and another color of dark glasses. They piled into an old blue Toyota Corolla with valid North Carolina plates slapped on just before leaving.
Daryl and Eric crossed the Charles river. The men turned onto Storrow Drive where Daryl put on his own sunglasses and sweatshirt with hood at the first roadside turnout they found. They found Highway I-90, then Highway I-93, heading south to meet I-95. At the first truck stop they found, now in darkness, they switched out to another set of valid Florida license plates and filled the gas tank.
Jack got back from the Nook by himself at ten p.m. He opened the dorm room door with his card key and stepped inside.
Eric's side was empty. His books, his computer, his blankets and pillow, his clothes in the closet, his wall ornaments and pictures weren't there. Eric was gone.
A note on the desk said: "I can't do this. Don't try to find me. I love you. Eric."
Jack's heart began to shatter into little pieces, and he fell on his bed, curling into a fetal position. It was the first time that money or the desire to drink had robbed him of something, someone, of great value to him. Jack Jr. wasn't prepared for the loss.
Jack's security detail noted he wasn't up the next morning and didn't attend classes; by noon they knocked at his door. They were aghast to find him still in the fetal position, barely responding. The college medical staff arrived, and the dean notified, only to observe to himself that he hadn't seen love to that depth before.
Jack was asked to return to school the next semester by the President of the college after a rest and treatment in Manhattan. The details were worked by telephone between that august individual and the beneficiary of the Schuyler Trust. A behavioral health physician accompanied Jack and the team back to New York on a private Schuyler Gulfstream, while the security team packed up his belongings to bring down.
The psychiatrist who first evaluated Jack felt that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would be the better start for Jack and referred him to a colleague in the city. Jack was convinced he would never see Eric again and that his going for a drink had led to Eric's disappearance. "I should have been there for him. I could have saved him."
"Let me suggest a different approach to consider," said the therapist. "What if you said that could have been there for him, instead of 'should.'"
"There is a difference. Should implies an obligation, as you know. 'Should' implies some moral imperative, perhaps. Eric is a grown man and responsible for his own actions and behavior, right? Had he asked you at some point to direct his actions? No, of course not. If you substitute, 'could have been there' you are correct, I suggest. As you know, you were not because you were elsewhere tending to your needs after the events of the day as you experienced them. You left him sleeping and safe in a locked room.
"On another note, are you clear yet that something more awful than his absence as occurred?" The therapist was looking for a positive note, perhaps a focal point for Jack to bounce his feelings toward another stage if he was ready.
"No, I don't know if he is alive, whether he's mad at me or angry or frightened. I just don't know."
"Excellent."
Jack's head snapped up in anger. "Why is that good?"
"Because there are only three answers to the question, and you went straight to the problem. You might have said that you know what the problem is, and it is too terrible to contemplate right now or you might have told me that you know, and it is something easily repaired. What you said was 'I don't know.'"
"You clearly are in charge of your thoughts. That makes a difference in diagnosis and treatment, Jack. People who are sociopaths or psychopaths not only lack empathy (not you), but some may enjoy causing harm to others. Again, not you. You are not delusional in that you think you are Napoleon or the President. It doesn't appear that you are hearing voices or sounds that no one else hears or seeing things that no one else sees. You were normal before this sequence according to your family."
"You have reacted like a normal person would to this sequence in your life, so your prognosis for recovery will take work, but it is likely to happen. More data, as it comes to you, will speed the process of healing."
"I will see you in three days to continue, Jack. No homework for now, just live and eat and breathe and listen for data, write the data and your thoughts in this journal and bring it in three days."
Jack could not have foreseen the next three days, which, it turned out, were hell on earth.