by elle`attend
FOR MATURE READERS ONLY
Beatrix Mackay closed her eyes and tried to slip into pure nothingness. But sometimes nothing was the most elusive commodity in the whole world.
The nearly hypnotic whisper of the powerful jets of her Gulfstream IV provided the perfect backdrop of white noise for her meditations, but her mind kept slipping its leash and racing ahead, down the labyrinthine twistings and turnings that her affairs had taken in the last seventy-two hours, plunging her orderly world into chaos.
This can’t be happening, was the mantra that her mind kept returning to and grasping at desperately, over and over again.
“Excuse me, Doctor Mackay.” The cabin attendant leaned solicitously toward Beatrix Mackay, shattering what little remained of her meditative mood.
“Yes, Kalin?”
“We’ve just received a satlink transmission, 256k encryption, eyes only, Doctor.” The impeccably tailored young woman handed her a Visor, and walked smartly back toward the state-of-the-art comshack just aft of the pilot’s cabin. Beatrix Mackay sighed, and pushed back into the soft leather seat, her lips tightening grimly.
Now what, she thought.
She punched a button, and the device’s LCD screen came to glowing life. She rapidly keyed in her security code and password, then entered other codes on several subsequent screens before a list of files popped up. She selected the transmission marked ‘OracleofDelos’ and clicked on it. She read for several minutes, her expression becoming blacker by the moment. Furiously, she tapped out a terse reply, encrypting it and saving it for transmission.
“Kalin!” She nearly shouted, as the woman came striding hurriedly down the cabin toward her. “Send this immediately, same security, same encryption. And get me a landline. What is our ETA in Athens?”
“Sixteen forty-five, Doctor,” she replied briskly, taking the proffered device, and turning to fetch the required phone handset.
Doctor Beatrix Mackay gripped the plush leather armrests of her seat convulsively. She felt like a trapped beast, in a pressurized cage five miles above the earth. She needed to be on the ground again. Urgently.
Before anything else blew up in her face.
**********
The Voice told me what I was, and I knew it to be so. The Voice told only truths.
“Whore.”
My nipples began to tingle softly again. I didn’t know whether the clamps and electrical leads were still attached to them or not. It hardly seemed to matter any longer. Only the sensations coursing through my titflesh mattered. The Voice had told me that as well.
“Worthless hole.”
The tingling took on a deeper, richer undercurrent, and slithered seductively through my abdomen, beginning beneath my navel, and moving lower still, setting up its urgent rhythms in my sluttish body. I felt myself warming, moistening, my nerve endings afire, every sensation around me now amplified, enhanced. Colors, sounds, smells, all blended into a swirling collage of raw physical stimulation, a kind of pastiche which was absorbed through my pores, as though I were a sponge of carnality.
I began to cream, my worthless body’s exudates dampening my tramp’s thighs, creating the rich stink of pheromones and bodily odors that would summon them, all the animals that would use me. Should use me. I existed only to be used. The Voice had told me that, too.
Nothing mattered now; nothing existed in the universe but that burning, tingling ache at the juncture of my thighs. I felt as though my vulva were moving, physically reaching, questing about in the void between my legs for someone, something, anything to fill itself with. Anything to assuage the wretched emptiness inside of me.
I was scarcely aware that I was speaking aloud.
“Fuck me…use me…hurt me…fuck me… fuckmeusemehurtmefuckmefuckme…”
There may still have been some vestige of the woman that had been Van Worth buried somewhere within this wriggling mass of blistering need, and it may have been responsible for the slight blush coloring my cheeks. But it was more likely my raging lust to be taken, taken and used in the crudest ways imaginable that reddened my face. After all, hadn’t the Voice told me that Van Worth was dead? That there was no more Van Worth?
Only fucktoy.
The door slammed open just as I climaxed for the first time, my teeth clenched, tendons standing out rigidly in my neck, as I made noises like a rutting beast in heat. Beads of sweat popped out on my forehead, and between my breasts, and under my arms. My own heady scent enveloped me, making me want to come again almost before this first cataclysm had receded.
“Cassandra!”
I nearly swallowed my tongue. I knew that voice, too. I began to shiver, this time not with sexual heat, but with raw, primal terror. My body seemed to literally draw up, to fold in upon itself. I could not stop trembling. I peed myself, hot urine splashing on the plank floor beneath me, spattering my thighs, and calves. I moaned in an agony of dread.
Mistress.
I hung my head in a daze, staring vacantly at the wet floor beneath me, at the slender dark-green plastic coated wires spiraling from my nipples and my clitoris like the tendrils of some exotic tropical plant, snaking across the floor into the shadows. Tiny pulses of current still licked and tickled at me, but they no longer elicited those heated, syrupy sexual responses from my quivering body.
Now I felt only terror.
That voice.
Mistress.
I vomited on the sodden planks beneath me, and pitched face forward into my own mess.
**********
“Her resistance was extremely strong,” Cassandra Bétancort was saying. “Given the time constraints placed upon me, I felt that extraordinary methods were called for, techniques quite outside of our normal conditioning routines. After all, Bea,” the woman smiled pointedly at Doctor Mackay. “You yourself set the time frame and parameters for this little ‘experiment’. It hardly seems constructive now to cavil at the methodology employed in order to achieve the results you required.”
Beatrix Mackay nodded slowly, her penetrating green gaze riveted on the copper-haired woman seated calmly across from her. Cassandra Bétancort had been doing final training and jump off operational inserts in the Balkan and Near and Middle Eastern spheres of influence for six years now, nearly as long as they had been operational. Bea had known her for almost eight years, going back to their first meeting at an abnormal behavioral psych symposium in Bern. The two women had gravitated to each other at once, sharing not only professional interests, but surprisingly similar and strongly held world views.
They had also become lovers in Switzerland, beginning an on-again, off-again affair that had lasted nearly as long as their professional association. Beatrix had finally broken it off for good a little over a year ago. She gave as an explanation that their duties and responsibilities, as well as the physical distance between them, really did not allow for such intimate contact any longer. The true reason for her disengagement from her erstwhile lover and chief operational lieutenant for the Golden Crescent were a bit darker, and more disturbing, for her at any rate.
Beatrix Mackay had in fact begun to fear Cassandra Bétancort, just a bit.
“Anyway, she’s ready. We can begin any time you’d like.”
Yes, she supposed that was true. If what Cassandra had told her was accurate, the subliminal cues and deep pattern programming could be implanted at any time now. But Beatrix Mackay hated it, hated this quick, dirty wiping and reprogramming. It had been done only twice before, with decidedly mixed results. It was sloppy, and unreliable at best. At worst it was a form of psychic butchery, rendering the operative unfit for anything ultimately but a short, unhappy life in one of the brothels they operated as fronts for their operations in Bangkok or Istanbul. She said as much to Cassandra Bétancort now.
The woman shrugged indifferently. “It was that, or insert a totally unprepared, unreliable operative; one who still retained her old life, her old mindsets and ethos, all her old values and inhibitions. Even more dangerous, in my opinion. At least this way, if she melts down, she’ll have nothing to reveal, nothing to share with the opposition to compromise us.” She stared challengingly at Beatrix Mackay, stopping just short of adding an impolitic ‘like Brie Analeiou, for instance.’
Beatrix Mackay put a finger to her lips, pursing them slightly, lost in thought for several moments. Abruptly, she rose from her chair.
“All right then, let’s get started. Where is she?”
**********
I had heard the low murmur of voices in the adjacent room, but hadn’t been able to make out any of their conversation. I heard the words all right, but I was incapable of putting them together in anything resembling meaningful sentences. My mind cast this way and that, frenetically, bolting down first one avenue of thought, then turning and scampering down another, completely unrelated one. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but bright flashes of colored light played upon the inside of my eyelids, as if strobe lights were going off in the room. I wondered if this was what madness felt like.
I wondered if I cared any more.
The door swung back on its hinges, and I heard footsteps crossing the raw cedar plank floor, and stop near my cot. I opened my eyes listlessly, and found myself staring up into the beautiful, intent face of Dr. Beatrix Mackay.
She smiled at me, and stroked my forehead gently, smoothing a strand of damp hair away from my brow.
“How is Van?” she inquired affectionately, as if I was a long lost niece, or much-beloved second cousin happened upon by chance at the mall. I stared dully at her, too confused and disturbed to speak. Beneath my thin silk dressing gown, I felt my skin beginning to burn with that slow fire that I had come to recognize so well. I wanted to scream at her, dredge up the vilest obscenities I could imagine, hurl them like feces at that immaculately coiffed head, that flawlessly glossed mouth, to splatter upon her, and befoul her, as I had been befouled, and debased. My lips twitched and quivered uncontrollably. They formed a word at last. I spit it out.
“Mistress.”
She smiled, and slipped a cool hand beneath my robe, caressing my hot, dry skin, sliding her fingers down across my thatch to my entrance. She slipped a finger between my swollen folds, and I closed my eyes again in horrified shame. I was soaked already, literally sopping at her barest touch. A tear squeezed out of my left eye, and tracked down my flushed cheek, filling my ear with warm salt.
“Magnificent,” she breathed. Taking me gently by the shoulders, she helped me into a sitting position, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. She slowly drew me to my feet, her eyes fixed relentlessly on my own, her face an inscrutable mask of concentration and…something else…could it have been desire? Or regret? I moaned softly, feeling my faithless body betraying me even as I fought against her. She slipped those cool hands beneath the lapels of my wrap, and slid them aside, exposing me to her gaze. Her eyes wandered over my body in a detached, almost clinical sort of way, and I felt my sex pulse and spasm as they came to rest upon it, as if she were physically touching me. I gave another little whimper of shame at my body’s all too evident need.
“Van, darling,” she said, her eyes still studying my body intently, as if the answers to every question in existence were somehow engraved upon it. “You have been an exceptionally strong, and brave woman up till now. But now I must ask even more of you, more willingness, more determination, more sacrifice. Are you willing to make such a commitment to me now?”
I wanted to spit in her face. I wanted to tear myself from her loathsome grasp, bury my nails in her throat, knock her to the floor and flee, screaming, as fast as my rubbery legs would carry me. My breath caught in my throat. My heart literally missed a beat.
“Mistress,” I heard myself whisper.
“Yes,” I breathed, barely a word at all; more like a prayer.
I felt her fingers wandering over my body, touching me lightly everywhere, drawing my desire forth from me like strands of silk from a spider’s spinneret. My breath came in little catches, my nostrils flaring with my wretched need, and my wanton’s lust. I trembled uncontrollably.
“I own you, Van, for I know your names…”
She turned her eyes on me then, those glittering orbs of soft, verdant colors; as filled with the complexity of beauty and danger as a rain forest, and equally as deadly. I felt as if I were falling into them from a great height; fathomless green pools that I knew would drown me, and yet dear God how I longed to plunge beneath their surface, to swim in them for eternity. She whispered to me rapidly, urgently, words that I could not quite make out, could not comprehend, words about darkness, and pain, and fulfillment, in a strange tongue that I should not have been able to understand.
But I could.
‘I’m lost,’ was my last conscious thought, as she slipped the thin silk wrap from my shivering shoulders, dropping it in a whispering pool of silk at my feet. Then her hands were at me like starlings stripping a ripe stalk of corn. All the while she whispered in my ear, turning my body to flame, and my tainted soul to ice.
Then she touched me again, and I knew no more…
© MEB 2002
*********