Competition Breeds Excellence in Captivity

In the introductory note to The Devil in the White City, author Erik Larson explains:

“Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.”

My story has the same three aims, though my definitions of each are likely only shared by the kind of reader who has found these pages. In alternating chapters, Larson’s book contrasts the planning of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago with the story of H. H. Holmes, a con man and serial killer who built a supposed ‘Murder Castle’ a few miles west, to lure in expo visitors to his hotel. 

Holmes was nicknamed “the Torture Doctor” by the yellow journalism of his time, and sensational stories were published falsely claiming that Holmes’ architecture hid torture dungeons, gas chambers, trap doors, and a crematorium in the basement. Holmes was a lifelong fabulist and, while his death row confession was verifiably fictitious, he ‘confirmed’ and exaggerated his own legend of the Murder Castle. I am morally opposed to murdering innocents, but took inspiration from Holmes’s descriptions of his blueprints.

I went to great lengths to conceal any connection to the island. I am nowhere near as politically connected as Jeffrey Epstein, and look at what happened to him in spite of all that. One thing I did learn soon after joining the corporate world was how top lawyers are worth their high fees per hour. All my transactions for this island were done through multiple layers of law firms and none of the parties involved ever knew more than one other contact, and certainly no information about me. Payment was routed in whatever hard cash was preferred or cryptocurrency. Given that I was essentially playing telephone trying to communicate my design for the island, I chose to keep it simple.

I explained my island hideout as a large apartment dug into an underground bunker. I joked it should be something like what an unhinged apocalypse prepper might dream of. The island itself was mostly covered in sand, except for a portion with jungle trees. For my own obscurity, the idea was to make the island look uninhabited. I wrestled with whether I should pay to have the runway paved, as I was fairly confident I could land on the sand of an unimproved one. 

Ultimately, I had to hide a modern aircraft under a roof, so the style of a World War II hangar was chosen for the bunker. Thus, a paved runway could be disguised as a relic leftover from the same era. Solar panels were harder to hide, but we managed to find a design that did not look out of place or too anachronistic. 

If someone happened upon the island, well, I had a bunker I could wait them out in, or to defend fitted with some anti-aircraft and anti-ship weapon systems and drones. It’s a little frightening how easy it is to acquire such weaponry. Arms dealer Viktor Bout was freed in 2022 in a prisoner exchange for WNBA player Brittney Griner, and while he was gone dozens of black marketers filled his void. These days an Iranian one-way attack drone costs just $2,000. Since October 2023, Houthi rebels in Yemen have used such drones to paralyze the world’s most vital shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Alden. 

By design and function, I divided the bunker into an upstairs ground floor and the downstairs basement. Upstairs was the ground floor of the hangar, subdivided into my arms room, backup generator, water desalination and treatment, hardware workshop, wardrobe and office. The office was where I managed my investment portfolio and infrequently communicated with the outside world. I had biometric locks on all these upstairs rooms set so that only I could ever access them. 

I am not affluent enough to completely retire and afford my fantasy until I am 100. Luckily, toiling throughout my 20s and early 30s paid off. I have sundry streams of passive income and occasionally am hired for consulting gigs by old colleagues, I would like to think due to their esteem for my accomplishments. Most of my work can be done remotely. Since the advent of COVID-19, it rarely occurs to my professional contacts to even ask where or how I spend my days.

The physical separation of ground floor office and basement apartment would prevent me from accidentally bringing anything down to the underground apartment that the girls could use to hurt me, themselves or call for help. One of my standard operational procedures was to disrobe before I lifted open the hatch that led down a ramp to the basement. The movies make it look easy, but I had learned in a military course how to escape captivity by using common pieces of metal like a pen or hairpin to shimmy out of locks or zip ties. As a nudge for myself to strip down, I had a full-length mirror affixed to the downside of the hatch, so that I would be faced with my reflection when I raised it.

Down from the heavy surface hatch was an automatic reinforced metal door that led into the basement apartment. If a slave was somehow able to get through the basement door, she still would locked downstairs by the metal hatch. The overall architecture of the apartment was contemporary minimalism. Any room could have served as an advertisement for fashionable condominiums in a new skyscraper, complete with one my slaves posing as an elegant lady exposing some skin. Not only was this a matter of my personal taste, but it gave the architects and builders no reason to suppose that they were recreating Ashoka’s Hell.