by elle`attend
FOR MATURE READERS ONLY
Chapter Fourteen
Final Interviews…
Beatrix Mackay tapped impatiently at the ‘Page Down’ key, scrolling through screen after screen of files covering the activities of the Hekmatiyar cartel for the last fortnight. She was going through the blizzard of communiques, IO memos, and agents’ reports on her laptop for the second time, having found nothing unusual, or unexpected in them on first viewing. Still, a nagging doubt gnawed at the edges of her consciousness, one that she could not quite put her finger on, nor dismiss. It put her in mind of Conan Doyle’s famous dog.
The one that didn’t bark.
She was just about to give it up for the evening when her attention was drawn almost subliminally to the ‘Date’ column on the left of the screen. She stopped abruptly, then scrolled back, her forest green eyes narrowing, their color deepening to almost jade as the flickering LCD screen reflected in her half-height reading glasses. A smile spread slowly over her classically beautiful porcelain features as she reached for her cell phone.
So, Métis…I think it’s time that you and I had another little talk, darling…
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Jolie wondered why she hadn’t heard the maddening metronome-like ticking of the ancient pendulum clock earlier. She shouldn’t have been able to miss it; it was nearly driving her insane now. Her mind wandered hazily to an old film she had seen once, that had included a scene about brainwashing. There had been an old clock in that as well, she remembered… ticking, and ticking, getting louder and louder, driving the poor woman who was being tortured almost mad…it had all seemed kind of hokey, and far-fetched to her at the time.
She didn’t imagine she would find it so now.
She twisted helplessly on the rough surface of the low wooden table, tugging ineffectually at the leather thongs that bit into her wrists, anchoring them to the corners of the table above her head. Sweat slithered off of her body in little snake-like rills, dampening the splintery wooden surface beneath her. That’s a break, at least, she thought; less chance of getting another fucking sliver this way. Several large, painful pine splinters were already lodged in her ass, and another in her left shoulder blade. She thought that she should probably try to be a bit more still, to try and lessen the chance of getting any others, but her current circumstances were militating against that just at the moment.
That warm, wet tongue slid into her again, like an exotic sea creature, and she jerked spasmodically, gouging another thin shaft of wood into the tender skin of her buttock. She hissed in pain, and then again in startled pleasure as the clever oral appurtenance traversed her slippery crease, and insinuated itself beneath the little fold of flesh that now scarcely served to conceal her distended clitoris. The tongue’s tip began making lewd little circuits at the base of her engorged lovebutton, lifting at each pass near twelve o’clock, in order to avoid the small wire and clamp that were affixed to it.
Each time that tongue lifted, the antique Regulator clock on the wall clicked another second of her life away.
Jolie shivered in apprehension, and sheer sensory overload at the same time. Her skin began to buzz, and tingle, and felt as if it were too tightly stretched, and incapable of covering her body any longer. She struggled frantically to stave off the orgasm that had her in its headlights again.
Love hurts, she thought dizzily, but THIS is fucking RIDICULOUS…
Then the tongue made a long, slow flat pass, roughing her clit from root to tip, almost against the grain, and Jolie began to hitch and gasp, her soft buttocks beginning to lift and fall back rhythmically against the damp wooden planks with a wet, slapping sound…
“God no, oh God no no no NO…”
First she heard the current, like a loud humming in her blood, rushing through her head, an invisible conch shell pressed to each ear. Then she smelled it, a sharp tang of ozone just at the edges of her senses.
Then she felt it.
It hit her like a blow, a fist to her body’s nexus. Her back and her hips arced clear of the table, and she drummed a little tattoo on it with the back of her head while she shuddered and shook through her climax. She screamed, whether in release or agony she could never have said. The electrical current pulsed in counterpoint to her spasms, and the clock ticking her sanity away, all blending to form cunning little triplets that trilled across her body, and her mind. Somewhere in the dim recesses of her brain she heard Brenda Carlisle singing moronically that ‘She had the beat, she had the beeeeaaatttt…’
Jolie took a short sabbatical from her body again.
She knew she hadn’t been gone very long, and her messages were waiting for her when she returned. She could still smell the blue haze of electricity around her like a fog, mixed with the scent of her own arousal just underneath the harsh smell of the ammonia popper being waved beneath her nose. Her eyelids fluttered as her soul floated gently back down from the ceiling to settle into her nearly spent body. Her limbs still tingled from her body’s temporary employment as a high-tension line. She woozily raised her drenched head an inch or two clear of the table’s surface, and gazed down her body to the platinum head floating just above her crotch in the dimness. She thought disorientedly of a Dali painting.
Jolie’s knees were elevated, and bent at a ninety degree angle, so that her lower body had assumed a seated attitude while lying on her back. Leather thongs digging deeply into her legs just above and below each knee secured them to metal posts extending vertically from the lower corners of the table to a height of almost three feet above its surface. Her hip flexors ached from the strain of her legs being drawn so widely apart. None of this physical discomfort held her mind for more than a fleeting moment or two, though. Her full attention was riveted on the blonde woman’s head hovering between her legs.
She could only see the woman from just below her collarbones up; she must have been kneeling or squatting somehow at the foot of the table. Her arms were splayed wide, in spreadeagle fashion above her, her wrists lashed with leather thongs to the same vertical posts that Jolie’s knees were bound to. Jolie could see at a glance what a torment it must be for the woman to get her mouth down to Jolie’s sex. She shuddered softly, not wanting to think about what they must have done to her to induce her to do so.
Her pale face was visible now, though, a wan moon rising over the dark-auburn furzed curve of Jolie’s groin, framed by Jolie’s naked thighs, and a quaint pageboy bob of nearly white platinum blonde hair.There was a dazed, far away look in her unearthly light-gray eyes, or the one that Jolie could see at any rate. Her left was puffed completely closed – in fact, the whole left side of her face was swollen grotesquely and covered by a huge, purpling bruise, giving an odd, harlequinish look to her startlingly youthful features. Her chin was speckled with rust-colored flecks of dried blood, overlain with a glaze of rapidly drying come from Jolie’s pussy. Her lips were swollen outrageously, the lower one split nastily in the center, and still oozing a drop or two of fresh blood. But what struck Jolie so forcefully was how thin the girl looked. Not thin in the physical sense of the word, but stretched, somehow, almost translucent, like a skin stretched too tautly over a drum head; one that might break at the next blow of the sticks.
Jolie shuddered reflexively again.
“Oh, but she is enjoying this, Ms Bennett. Nearly as much as you are. You might even say she was ‘bred’ for it.”
Jolie turned her head lethargically toward the voice that had answered her unspoken question
“You could think of all this as a sort of hybrid parlor game, in fact. A combination of ‘Twenty Questions’ and ‘What’s My Line’, if you like,” Colonel Zahra al`Ajii continued matter-of-factly.
Jolie’s cactus-dry tongue flicked uselessly at her lips as she tried to focus on the shadowy figure seated just to the left of the table she was bound to. She squinted against the glare of the harsh white light suspended directly above her, but could make out no more than the woman’s glittering coal-black eye, and one gloved hand that rested quietly on the handcrank of a small, crude electrical generator at her side. Jolie tried to speak, but retched instead, a small stream of clear fluid dribbling from the corner of her mouth. The gloved hand moved, and a small cloth dabbed at her chin, and her mouth almost tenderly, cleaning up the vomitus.
Jolie sighed, closing her eyes as she nearly gagged again on the bitter, acid taste of her own reflux. Her overtaxed synapses were calming now, and the slow cadenced throb of pain reasserted itself on her consciousness again, almost comforting as it moved in and out of sync with the infuriating ‘tock tock’ of that damnable clock.
“There is really only one question that you need to concern yourself with, though,” the voice purred, closer now. She sensed rather than saw the woman at her side, leaning over her almost solicitously. “How much ‘discomfort’ are you willing to endure to keep from supplying me with a simple invitation to your friend.” Jolie felt the cool touch of leather clad fingers on her trembling body, tracing little whorls in the perspiration oiling her skin.
Tick-tock…
“Just a sentence or two, so absurdly simple.” The fingers were busy now, affixing something soft, and cool to her left breast, just above the nipple. They moved to her other breast, pressing the white self-adhering electrical contact pad in place over the nipple there as well.
“But Ms.Analeiou does seem to be enjoying herself with you, Jolie…I think we might even be getting close to a breakthrough with her, though I would frankly be surprised if a simple act of same-sex cunnilingus would be the key that opens up her particular little bag of tricks.”
Tick-tock…Jolie’s feverish skin blossomed in goosebumps…
More pads, each successive application soft and derangingly sensual now, as they were smoothed into place on her; one pressed firmly into each armpit, and others affixed to the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. She squirmed as little jolts of her own self-generated sexual voltage raced through her body in spite of her terror, converging on her still-twitching sex. She felt herself moistening again; indeed, she wondered if she had ever stopped lubing herself.
Tick-tock… the sound was like a hatpin in her eardrum now, nails on a chalkboard. Jolie ground her teeth, making a little gurgling noise in the back of her throat…
Zahra al’Ajii’s face loomed suddenly into her view.
“Well, Jolie? Feel your writer’s block lifting at all, or do we need to provide you with a bit more inspiration?” She stroked the girl’s flushed cheek softly with the back of her gloved hand.
Tick-tock…
“Guh…go fuh… fuck yourself, you one-eyed cuh…cunt,” Jolie husked.
“Oh, but I’d so much rather fuck you, Ms.Bennett...”
Zahra al’Ajii smiled, and made a gesture of almost infinite grace at the blonde stretched between Jolie’s splayed thighs. The woman’s blank expression never changed as she suddenly dove at Jolie’s crotch, snarling in pain as the muscles in her shoulders bunched, and tore. Her arms were nearly dislocated as she fastened her bleeding mouth onto Jolie’s cunt, and buried her searching tongue in the girl’s delicate folds.
Tick-tock…
Jolie convulsed, her body already anticipating the agony that it would so shortly own. She heard the mechanical whisper of the handcrank, and rolled her hips lasciviously at the blonde woman’s mouth, no more able to control her own body now than she was the current that began to dance teasingly over it. She sobbed as the voltage randomly reawakened the nerve endings in her nipples, her armpits, her thighs, while the elfin-faced blonde chewed mindlessly at her sex …
Tick-tock…
When the screaming began, she was at first confused, uncertain as to who was being hurt, who was making these soul-wrenching sounds.
Too soon she found herself wishing that she had never found out…
Tick-tock… Tick-tock… Tick-tock…
**********
Knock-knock-knock…
The tapping was so tentative that had she not been listening for it, Beatrix Mackay would surely have missed it entirely. She crossed to the door and, after taking a quick look into the spyhole, slipped the chain and turned the lock. She swung the door open and stepped aside as Métis Faroda slipped apprehensively through it.
“Come in, Métis …”
The woman looked as though she had spent a very rough night, and the ensuing day had probably not been very conducive to her composure, either. Her thick, deep mahogany highlighted hair was disheveled, and her lovely olive complexion had a pasty, unnatural undertone to it. Her sand-colored skirtsuit looked as if it might have been slept in. She hazarded an uneasy sidelong glance at Dr Beatrix Mackay as she entered the room timidly, taking up a position in the center of the suite, shifting her weight nervously from one high-heeled foot to another. She looked around uneasily, and was just about to settle in a small upholstered chair when the snap of Beatrix Mackay’s fingers and a quiet, monosyllabic utterance brought her rigidly to attention. Her eyes glazed over at once, staring and vacant, fixed on a spot on the wall just above Mackay’s left shoulder.
Stupid sow…how this one ever got past pre-conditioning screening was just another in an increasingly complex sequence of mysteries to her. She struggled to keep her temper in check as she circled the unresponsive woman slowly.
“Remove your jacket, Métis.”
Métis Faroda’s fingers moved woodenly to the closure on her suit coat, opening it and shrugging the linen garment from her shoulders, letting it fall in a careless heap at her feet.
“Now your blouse, please…”
Métis fingers moved expertly, but indifferently along the front of her blouse, then she let it slip from her arms as well. Her skirt joined it almost immediately, leaving the woman wearing only her thigh-high black lace top nylons, Charles Jourdan pumps and a dazed, vacant look.
Beatrix Mackay stepped closer to the woman, close enough to feel the heat pouring off her nude body, and smell the fear oozing from her pores. She reached out with her right hand, and pressed the ball of her thumb against the hard pebble of the woman’s erect left nipple, simultaneously slipping her index finger into the humid warmth of her armpit, and applying a gentle pressure there as well. The woman’s legs buckled as if she had been poleaxed, dropping her to the plushly carpeted floor of the suite in the universal posture of submission – on her knees, head bowed, thighs parted slightly and hands resting limply upon them, twitching now and again like soft, pale crabs.
The woman’s breathing came in shallow, rapid gasps now. Beatrix Mackay frowned slightly. She detested doing things this way, but she hadn’t the time to spar with this woman, and cut through her lies and obfuscations to get to the information that she possessed.
The golden glittering of tiny hoops, and a delicate chain winked up at her from the woman’s shadowed crotch. Beatrix Mackay insinuated the toe of her pump between Métis’ copper colored thighs, and ran it lightly along the length of her seam, setting up a soft, all but inaudible chiming between the girl’s thighs. Métis’ shuddered, and the scent of her arousal rose up around them like a fog. She spread her thighs further still, and laced her fingers in her thick hair at the nape of her neck. She arched her back, lifting her heavy, large-nippled breasts, thrusting them almost obscenely at Beatrix Mackay.
Beatrix Mackay gave a soft snort of disgust. This one should have been turning tricks in Lahore. She made a mental note to herself to speak again with Ardeth Eriyenouk about her sexual proclivities, and mixing same with business in the future.
She crouched down before the glassy-eyed, heavily sweating woman, and tethered her with her verdant stare, whispering to her softly and urgently. Now and again the girl cried out in despair, her fingers clawing at her darkly stubbled mons, tearing at herself with polished nails in a frenzy of unrequited need. She retained just enough awareness to keep from ripping the hoops from her genitalia, as she answered Beatrix Mackay in a tremulous monotone. Her narrative was only interrupted when her body was wracked by the choking sobs of still another orgasm…
As the glabrous light of dawn gilded the walls of the suite, Beatrix Mackay slipped quietly out, leaving the empty husk of Métis Faroda crumpled on the floor in a wet, twitching ball.
**********
I held the rim of the chilled glass against my lip, and pretended to swallow as my eyes swept the room once again. Elegantly dressed gentlemen and fabulously turned out women gathered in small bejeweled knots, then swirled and drifted apart in colorful swarms, to reform again in new constellations of exotic beauty and glittering opulence. If there were international terrorists or drug cartel overlords in this aggregation, they were at least very cultured, and well dressed ones.
“Good evening, Mme. Cournoyér,” a woman’s voice like watered silk murmured at my elbow. I knew that the voice had come from outside of me, but it made me feel as if its owner had her tongue in my ear.
“Ardeth Eriyenouk, Director of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern bureau of WISDOM,” she smiled, extending a hand. I took it automatically, my brain doing its new parlor trick, comparing the face before me against the database of photographs now evidently permanently etched into it. Glossy dark black hair, slightly almond-shaped hazel eyes that hinted of Oriental blood, prominent model’s cheekbones in a pale, cream colored complexion that was somewhat shocking for this climate, and full lips painted a pale ruby. Fifteen-hundred dollar puce silk brocade suit with a jacket whose neckline plunged precipitously enough to reveal a generous expanse of rather breath-taking cleavage. I was reminded of Hamilton Jordan’s impolitic comparison of Jehan Sadat’s assets to the pyramids.
“Isaulteé Cournoyér,” I replied, a small, cautious smile on my face. This one was a match. The feeling of recognition was not necessarily reassuring, somehow. I extricated my hand from her strong grip.
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to meet you personally this afternoon, Mme Cournoyér. Things have been rather hectic around here recently, as I’m sure you know. I hope that your accommodations are comfortable?”
“Yes, very.” I smiled noncommitally at her again, waiting her out, trying to move her, make her take the first gambit.
“I’d like very much to speak with you in my office tomorrow, actually,” she said at last, a new glimmer of respect in her jet eyes. Whatever she had been expecting, I evidently had given her something new to factor into the equation. “Things are moving quite rapidly now. We need to coordinate our next moves as soon as possible. My number one is in conference with Dr Mackay right now, in fact…”
I tried to keep the shock of surprise I felt at this revelation from showing in my face by raising my martini glass to my lips again and lowering my eyelids. What was Beatrix Mackay doing in Alexandria? Had something changed, something in the plan been altered? I counted ten before I replied.
“What time would you like me to come to your office tomorrow, Ms Eriyenouk? I have an errand to run in the morning, I’m afraid, but any time after noon would be fine for me.” My heart was pounding so violently that I thought it must be visible beneath the ridiculously inadequate scrap of black spandex covering my breast. But my eyes never wavered from hers, and she knit her brows in the barest hint of a frown, considering me carefully again.
“How would one be for you then, Mme Cournoyér? We could perhaps get a bite of lunch, and talk at greater length in a more private setting.”
“Fine,” I answered.
I was just raising my glass again when I was jostled rather roughly from behind, and a hand grasped my arm while another thrust something into my hand. I turned, startled, just in time to see a woman in the full abayah and hijab retreating across the floor, melting into the throng of people. I stared after her as Ardeth Eriyenouk stepped to my side.
“Are you all right?” She asked, looking at me with concern. “I wonder how she got in here…certainly not an invitee of the gallery, to judge by the look of her…”
I nodded a mute ‘yes’ to her inquiry, discreetly slipping the envelope the woman had placed in my hand into my clutch. “Such an interesting looking person…how could you tell it was a woman?”
Ardeth Eriyenouk laughed huskily. ‘Oh, my dear, only women are obliged to hide themselves from tip to toe in an Islamic society…and many are learning to discard that particular form of subjugation. Still, if you encounter a walking beyt in Egypt, it will undoubtedly be an as yet unenlightened member of our sex, I’m afraid. But come, let’s get another drink, shall we, and I can tell you a bit more about our host country…”
She took my elbow in her hand, and was about to steer me toward the open bar when I stopped, and gently extricated myself from her grasp.
“Excuse me a moment, Ms Eriyenouk…”
“Ardeth, please, Mme Cournoyér…”
“Ardeth…I need to use the little girl’s room for a moment, if you’ll pardon me…”
She smiled and gestured toward the far end of the gallery. “Over there, Mme Cournoyér…I’ll get this freshened up for you while you’re gone.”
She took my glass from my hand. I smiled in return, and began working my way through the crowded space toward the foyer, and the restrooms. Before I had traversed half the distance, I had learned that Arabic men had at least as many hands as western ones, and were if anything much less inhibited in their use of them on any stray female’s anatomy that happened to wander within range. I slipped gratefully into the ladies’room, leaning my back against the door, and took the small envelope from my bag.
It was addressed simply to ‘Vannie’, in ink, in a woman’s hand. I frowned slightly. The handwriting was vaguely familiar.
‘Vannie’. Who knew that ‘Evangeline Worth’ was in Alexandria? And who would address her as ‘Vannie’? I tore the envelope open. There were two notes inside; one on beige vellum, the other, smaller note on simple rag notepaper. I opened the larger sheet, and hastily scanned the note.
Vannie,
Hate to bother you like this, but I’ve gotten myself into a little bit of a jam (I know, I know…again?!? I can hear you saying). No biggie, but I need to see you soonest. The people whose hospitality I am enjoying right at the moment are quite adamant on this point.
Come as soon as you can, Vannie. I think it might be important for my health and well being.
Jolie
‘Jolie’… I pursed my lips in a frown of concentration, trying unsuccessfully to access the area of my thoroughly disarranged brain that was resonating to that beat.
Jolie…
I looked at the other note, much terser, and scrawled in a hurried, almost masculine hand, but one that I knew instinctively was a woman’s.
Silver Lexus limo, in the street, 11.45.
Your friend will be counting the seconds…
‘Jolie’… ‘your friend’…
I frowned again, putting that nagging connection aside for the moment. Whoever this ‘Jolie’ was, it seemed more than likely that this was the contact I had been waiting for…the snare that I had been so meticulously conditioned to slip my head into. I washed my hands at the sink, drying them carefully as I stared into the haunted eyes of the strange woman in the mirror.
What are you trying to tell me? I asked her wordlessly.
I took the most circuitous route possible to the hatcheck counter, taking care to avoid anyone that I had met so far this evening, anyone who might know me, and most particularly Ardeth Eriyenouk. Explaining to the Director of the Middle Eastern bureau that I was skipping out to keep an appointment with I-don’t-know-who on behalf of a ‘friend’ that I had absolutely no recollection of was not part of the program that I had been so scrupulously schooled in over the last several days. I reclaimed my thin shawl from the attractive young woman at the check counter, and hurried through the ballroom’s archway, and across the lobby.
I rushed down the steps, and spotted the silver Lexus limousine at curbside immediately. I strode toward the door of the Lexus with a display of casual complacency that I was far from feeling. A swarthy visaged Semitic man held it open for me. As I settled back into the gloriously cool leather seat, I had the most unnerving, almost out-of-body sensation, as if I were somehow observing myself go through the motions of a pre-scripted, prearranged stage play, whose ending was already foreordained. The car pulled away from the curb, and I leaned toward the window, watching the dark Egyptian night flicker by. Occasionally a light fell obliquely across the interior of the car from outside, illuminating my stranger’s face in the safety glass, ambushing me with that disorienting sensation of duality, of otherness.
As if I were a figment of my own imagination.
The pale reflection’s lips twitched. Or a ghost that doesn’t know that it’s dead.
The car sped on, deeper into the impenetrable night…
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© MEB 2002
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