CHAPTER 251: CLEANING HOUSE

Jack’s Tuesday had started normally in his sociology class, but then made a pleasant detour when he learned Madison was finally being released from prison, with the charges against her dropped.

Then he had an unexpected encounter with Evalyn Tanner and wound up soul bonding her.

During second Tuesday he talked to summoned copies of Lars and Astrid Jensen at the urging of Phineas, learned of Lars cancer and soul bonded both Jensen’s.

His encounter with Lars and Astrid prompted Jack to offer his girls the opportunity to soul bond any loved ones they could not bear to lose.

Samantha asked him to soul bond her mother, and Katie asked him to consider soul bonding her father, Orin.

His meeting with a summoned copy of Samantha’s mom, Lorraine, did not go as expected. This led to Samantha leaving the room with a beet-red face and Lorie taking Jack for a ’test-drive’, much to their mutual pleasure, and her eventual inclusion in Jack’s outer circle.

His meeting with a summoned copy of Orin took an even more unexpected detour when he learned that Orin’s best special forces team, was trapped and likely to die.

Saving Orin’s team required soul bonding all of them, and the rescue that followed ate up much of Jack’s EP reserves.

After the rescue, when Jack asked Orin for recommendations to help Jack establish proper security for his girlfriends, CEOs, and companies, Orin recommended a risk management company named Castle Group.

Orin suggested this company because the owner’s granddaughter might have been kidnapped and saving her might garner Jack some additional loyalty.

A meeting with Graham Sinclair, the owner of Castle Group, confirmed Orin’s suspicion and after some discussion, Graham agreed to a soul bond.

After a successful rescue of Graham’s granddaughter, with an assist from Naoko, Graham asked Jack to talk to his son, Ethan, and daughter-in-law, Mariel.

That discussion led to both of them also accepting a soul bond. And they then asked Jack to help them interrogate employees of Castle Group to try and find any possible betrayers that might have helped their enemies kidnap their daughter.

What followed was a flurry of summoned copies and several soul space days of interrogations.

Not only did they find who had compromised their daughter’s security, they found three moles, and a plethora of people that had accepted bribes.

None of the moles were involved in the kidnaping of Graham’s granddaughter, but one of the people who took bribes had provided information about her security to an unknown person.

All communication between the person who took the bribe and the briber had happened online, and they were unable to figure out who was ultimately responsible.

Communication between the kidnappers and Graham had also been purely electronic and untraceable.

From questioning the guards at the villa where Graham’s granddaughter was being held, they learned that all the men were part of a small mercenary company and even the owner of that company didn’t know who hired them.

And when they traced the ownership of the villa, they found that it was a rental property owned by a real estate management company that handled resort rentals. And as far as they knew, the property was supposed to be vacant.

The client, whose security the kidnappers wanted Graham to compromise, was a company that provided space in its data center to companies that wanted to collocate their servers near the major stock exchanges.

In the end, they were unable to identify the kidnappers or even learn their ultimate goal. The best they could determine was that the kidnappers probably wanted to gain some kind of economic advantage.

The Sinclairs were a lot less angry at the discovery of the moles and bribe takers than Jack had expected, and when he asked why they weren’t angrier, Graham had answered, "This is actually not as bad as we expected. Some amount of corruption and corporate infiltration is normal."

And the Sinclairs, while frustrated, were also thoroughly impressed with how well the kidnappers had covered their tracks. Even with Jack’s ability to question anyone, anywhere in the world, they still didn’t manage to track down the kidnappers.

Jack even tried using Jeeves to find the kidnappers, but Jeeves could only find someone if he could follow a trail of direct knowledge.

If Jack knew someone who knew someone who knew the person he was looking for, then Jeeves could find that person.

But in the case of the kidnappers, the trail went dead at the first digital link, and Jeeves couldn’t sift through the entire internet to find someone via some ephemeral encrypted communication.

With no knowledge of who the kidnappers were, or what their actual goal might be, the best the Sinclairs could do was clean house and keep their house clean. And Jack’s ability to interrogate anyone made doing that fairly easy, if a bit tedious.

During the interrogations, they had found five people that were willing to accept a soul bond.

[Soul Bond Accepted: Helga Eldridge]

[Soul Bond Accepted: Tito Strom]

[Soul Bond Accepted: Isaac Lavoie]

[Soul Bond Accepted: Ossian Lindstrom]

[Soul Bond Accepted: Amanda Damgaard]

Helga was going to be the overall account manager for all of Jack’s corporations.

Tito would be responsible for arranging facility security, including security guards.

Isaac would be responsible for managing the personal protection of Jack’s corporate executives.

Ossian would head the team of analysts that would perform risk assessments and help craft risk management plans.

And Amanda would be responsible for managing the teams that would provide personal protection for Jack and his girlfriends.

Like Orin, his team, and the Sinclairs, four of them got what he was now thinking of as a follower, or employee bond. No emotional connection, gated mental access, and boosted respect and loyalty.

However, Amanda had surprised him by requesting to join his outer circle. She was in her mid-thirties, but was still very fit and attractive.

She had also suggested that, since they would need to have several women on each of the teams assigned to his girls, they should try to find women that would want to join his outer circle.

When he asked why, she had said, "Those that will be working interior security will be close enough to your girls to figure out something weird is going on. Better to have them on your team, then be at risk them leaving and leaking something later."

She went on to explain that effective security would require that some of the protection detail would need to be in close contact with him and his girls on a regular basis and that close contact would lead to those people learning more than an unbonded person should know.

If those people were bonded to him, then he would not need to worry about what they learned.

When he had asked why she wanted him to add them to his outer circle instead of just keeping them as followers, she had said, "Because spending all that time near you, but not getting a taste, would be torture."

When he had shown Amanda his training room and the training dummies, she had said that offering access to the training dummies would convince many women to accept that would have otherwise balked.

He introduced her to Katie, Miranda, and Samantha, and asked her to work with them to select suitable candidates for the girls’ protection teams.

When he was done with the Castle Group cleanup, Orin asked him to help interrogate a few of his own people.

Then Phineas asked him to do the same for some of his people, and finally Heidy and Cindy asked him to help vet some people they were considering for key positions in the new Radius 10K corporate structure.

By the time Wednesday morning rolled around, Jack was tired of interrogations, but also amazed at how much he had accomplished in a single physical world day.

It was only his third week in college, and he had already accomplished so much. The next few months would be busy, and he hoped that when January rolled around, they would be ready to present something amazing at the CES conference.

He was also looking forward to the beach room party he planned for that weekend, and he hoped that Analise and Robin got along with his other girls.