The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The Adjusters V: Intermezzi

Intermezzo: Eve Shawbank (1)

Eve Shawbank sat at table in the back of the restaurant, away from the few other patrons, savoring what she considered the best gulyás in the city, thick and meaty, the csipetke perfectly cooked. Gulyás, of all things, was what reminded her of home the most, for better or for worse.

She pressed her thighs together. She was aroused. It had been building up for the past few hours, and she was looking forward to later in the evening, when she could give free reign to her lust. It had been a while.

The restaurant was quiet this evening, the way it often was in the middle of the way, and the way she liked it. The owner, an older Hungarian man called Bognár, barely spoke English and spent most of his days—when he was not cooking—sitting in a corner of the restaurant with equally ancient friends and watching European football games on a flat-screen television against the wall, the only concession to modernity in the small rustic Hungarian restaurant.

She loved the food, but she felt that tinge of anxiety that always bit at her conscious mind whenever she was here. The answer, should Shawbank have chosen to think about it for more than a second, would have been obvious to her. Between the gulyás and the atmosphere, this place was a bubble that held the essence of her youth, the essence of her home, and it was her home, even though she had not been there for a long time, that she bore no desire to return, that as far as she was concerned it was earth she had scorched when Davenham had found her so long ago and brought her back with him.

But it was home—her roots. And roots ran deep. And while the conscious mind may hate something with a burning passion, the subconscious may long for that same something with a searing ache.

Shawbank count not put words to her feelings, but part of her wished she could take Magenta, her trusty hunting knife, and hack that part of her to shreds.

She would laugh doing so.

Laugh and laugh, the way her father used to.

She stopped herself when she realized she was clenching her spoon hard enough to hurt her fingers.

Relax, she told herself. It’s all good.

“What THE FUCK is this SZAR?”

The angry outburst came from the front of the restaurant. Shawbank was pulled out of her reverie, and looked over. The other patrons looked as well, but soon turned their attention back to their meals, nervously. Shawbank was not alarmed. She knew she was not the target—her work for Investigation and Enforcement Division tended to leave precious few people with grudges. And no one from her old life knew her here.

So when she turned to the source of the outburst, it was out of curiosity. And growing annoyance at being rudely bothered.

There was a young man at the register of the restaurant facing Mister Bognár. the owner. The young man was pointing at a bunch of carry out packages on the counter, one of them open.

Papa Bognár—as everyone called him—said something that Shawbank did not hear, but he did not seem particularly worried. She was surprised to realize that she liked Bognár, and did not want anything to happen to him. She stood, and slipped on her leather duster.

Shawbank did not hear Bognár’s answer, but the young man did not seem to like it.

“I don’t give a flying FUCK, boss. I said this tasted like shit, and if you serve people shit then you deserve whatever the FUCK happens to you!”

He wore a too tight leather jacket and blue jeans. His hair was short, almost shaved but for a fringe on the left side. A single earring. A chain belt.

The boy—for now that she neared the front of the restaurant she could see that he must not have been much older than seventeen, full of the swagger and arrogance of youth—was almost stomping in place, and Shawbank could see that he was about to lose it. Alcohol? Drugs? Poor upbringing?

“Please, Gyuri, don’t—” the girl standing next to the boy said, her voice soft and high pitched.

Gyuri exploded, and Shawbank expecting him to slap the girl. She was sure he thought of it. “You don’t open your mouth, okay?” he snapped at the girl, who shut up promptly. She seemed even younger than he was.

Shawbank looked at her—petite, thin, with a leather jacket, a long flowing skirt, and black army boots. But her facial expression belied the vaguely rebellious attire she wore. She looked young, too young, her features elfin, small, fragile, hanging on to her boyfriend’s arm, trying to calm him down.

The boy was still yelling at the Papa Bognár when she reached the front of the restaurant, and the old man gave her a side glance. He did not seem afraid. Maybe he could have handled the boy himself, maybe not. For all she knew, this was a regular occurrence, one that she never witnessed because she was not a regular. But tonight she was here, and she was tense, and perhaps a confrontation would do wonders for her nerves.

Is there a problem here?” she asked in Hungarian, the words flowing from her mouth with the strength of long habit.

The boy and the girl turned to her, the boy with a “What the fuck do you want?” look, the girl with wide eyes, looking like the whole world was a scary place and Shawbank was the scariest part of it.

“Stay out of this, you hülye kurva,” the boy said.

Pointedly ignoring the boy, she looked at Papa Bognár. “Problem?”

He did not answer, but he looked at her meaningfully. Papa Bognár did not know what she did, did not know how dangerous she was, but he was not stupid. He could tell that she was not someone to be trifled with. She had that aura, she knew—she cultivated it on purpose.

He had never asked her about her life or where she came from. He had always respected her privacy. When they talked, it was about Hungarian recipes.

But in that look, Papa Bognár told her a lot: he told her that it was all under control, that she should not escalate the situation, that he knew what boys were like, that they were good boys, just misguided.

She did not know what he saw in her eyes, but she could guess—an excuse to unleash a simmering rage, to vent frustration.

“I said what the fuck do you want, you bitch? Yeah, I did.” he said, in English.

“Gyuri,” said the girl next to him, and there was fear in her voice. She knew her boyfriend. She could smell trouble.

Shawbank wondered for a second whether she was worried about her, or whether she was worried about him. Who did the girl think would get hurt?

The thought amused her, and she smiled—knowingly, strategically—and the boy did not like that smile, did not like it one little bit.

“What the fuck you laughing at you bitch?”

He took a step toward her, but Shawbank did not move. She did not pull back, did not move away. Her hand was in the inner sheath of her duster where Magenta waited to be pulled out and used—she knew exactly how long it would take her to draw her hunting knife and slash it across the boy’s wrists or face or neck, depending on how aggressively he begged to be hurt.

She was not looking forward to it, nor was she dreading it. It was his choice. She was merely happy to oblige him.

The girl must have have known something was up, must have seen something in her eyes, because she gasped and pulled on the boy’s arm and when he turned to her to tell her to back off she pulled herself up and kissed him and then whispered something in his ear, her eyes never leaving Shawbank.

The boy’s eyes widened and for a second he had forgotten everything. He stared at the girl, who was looking down bashfully—a good act, Shawbank thought, relaxing slightly.

“You would?” he asked the girl, a note of doubt mixed with wonder in his voice, revelatory of just how young he actually was. “Tonight?”

The girl nodded, and Shawbank admired how she managed to blush on command, looking coy and innocent. “Please, Gyuri,” she added with a hint of something in her voice.

Gyuri gave one last venomous glance toward Shawbank, then turned on his heels and left, taking his food, dropping bills on the counter. “So long losers” he snickered as he flipped them the finger.

Shawbank relaxed fully, her hand dropping to her side.

Papa Bognár was looking at her, and she raised an eyebrow in his direction, a silent question.

“Lucky boy,” Papa Bognár said, and Shawbank wondered whether he was thinking about what the girl had undoubtedly offered to do to Gyuri to get him to leave, or about how close the boy had come to getting hurt without even realizing it.

Shawbank looked at the clock on the wall. It was getting late. And she had the first of two appointments to keep that evening.

“Go,” Papa Bognár told her. “You don’t pay tonight. A gift of gratitude. Of friendship.”

Shawbank stared at him for a long time—he was old, old enough to have been her grandfather in another life, but still sparkling with vitality, a zest for life that she could not help but admire. She nodded to him, once, less curtly than she would have otherwise.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No, gyerek. Thank you. For not hurting him.”

She pondered that last statement as she left the restaurant.

* * *

Davenham’s estate was close, 30 miles from Washington, near Leesburg, in Virginia, centered around a large colonial-style mansion that Davenham had designed himself. It was a short half-hour drive away.

She usually drove in silence, and when she did not feel like silence she listened to talk radio, the nonpolitical kind. Sports, generally. It was the sort of mindless chatter that kept her from thinking but still did not require any sort of attention. Tonight, though, she was still under the effects of the nostalgia that had plagued her at Bognár’s restaurant. It had been an easy matter to connect her phone to the car stereo system and stream Hungarian folk music.

She was glad not to have to trek all the way up to Headquarters. Davenham had recently started to meet her at his estate instead of ADCorp. In fact, he rarely went up north anymore, and she feared he was getting worse.

Were Shawbank at all prone to introspection, she would have noted that the upcoming meeting was making her nervous.

She did not fear Davenham, unlike many at ADCorp. He was her boss, and he could be difficult, but he was also the one who had taken her in when she was in no shape to be good to anyone, an angry young woman hell bent on destroying herself and others, unfocused, uninhibited, unable to do anything but wallow in her wrath. Davenham had saved her from herself.

Davenham and Control—those two men had shaped her. The first found her, all those years ago, and brought her back to this country and gave her a chance to redeem herself. The second had taken her under his wing and turned her into the agent she was today. Control, the head of Investigation and Enforcement Division, had been a mentor. Davenham had been a shepherd, and her a lost sheep.

The music succeeded in keeping her nervousness at bay. Half an hour later, when Eve Shawbank buzzed the intercom at the gate of Davenham’s mansion, the gates swung open without any response from the other end.

Shawbank eschewed the main driveway that lead to the mansion barely visible in the background—it was extensive but low on the ground, with only a partial second story. She turned onto a smaller path forking off to the side. There were no guards to be seen, but Shawbank knew that security was high—cameras were trained on her and they fed into the larger ADCorp security grid. A small strike team from Investigation and Enforcement Division lived on the estate, and were ready to deploy at the first sign of trouble. Shawbank knew, because she had trained them.

Shawbank drove to a small pavilion by the side of the mansion, hexagonal in shape with a slanted roof, three of its east-facing sides covered with large plates of tempered glass which, according to Davenham, gave an incredible view of the rising sun.

She stopped the car by the pavilion, and stood in the night for a minute. The darkness was deep, and the silence almost oppressive. The estate was isolated enough that the night sky was filled with stars. Orion stood above the pavilion, as if on guard duty.

Shawbank walked up to the pavilion entrance. She put her hand on the handle of the door, and waited for the automated security system to recognize her. It did, and the deadbolt slid out with a subtle clang.

The internal sensors recognized her presence, and a subdued light greeted her, giving an odd eerie glow to the large room. Bookshelves lined the non-glass walls, reading chairs, a large desk. Davenham had an office at ADCorp, of course, and one in his mansion, but he liked spending time in this pavilion, which he called his Refuge. He read here, and he wrote. (“My memoirs,” he had told her with a dry chuckle, and Shawbank did not know whether he was serious.) And he often held meetings here. Meetings like the one tonight.

Davenham was not there yet. She was early.

She looked around, taking in the scene, observing. Out of habit, her mind analyzed the layout of the room—even though she knew it well—for potential security risks. Nothing had changed since last time. She still did not like the large windows. (“Too easy for a sniper to shoot through.” — “They’re bulletproof.” — “Fine. A rocket launcher then.” — “Even a wall wouldn’t help then.” — “Exactly my point.”)

She looked at the books, seeing them but not interested in them particularly. She read online when she read, often light entertainment—murder mysteries, crime novels, thrillers—ridiculous things that did not require philosophy or deep thoughts. Nothing good ever came out of thinking too much was the lesson she had learned over too many years of life. At least, out of the kind of thinking that made you look at the world more carefully.

As far as she knew, there was no light reading in the pavilion. Here, it was economics, world affairs, and the classics.

It took only three minutes for her to recognize what was different in the room, the one thing that had changed since the last time she had been here—since the last four times she had been here.

There was no hesitation when she took two steps toward Davenham’s desk to look at the framed photograph that now stood in one of the corners.

The photograph looked to be twenty years old, judging from the clothing worn by the three men in the picture. They were standing around a patch of sand, on a sports ground somewhere. Someone had raked a sigil of some sort in the sand, three strokes defining a capital A, inscribed within a circle. Two of the men looked to be about thirty, while the third on the right, shorter than the first two, looked to be forty. The two younger men were grinning madly. The shorter older man was Davenham—he had changed little—and he already wore that seriousness and intensity that rarely left him. She did not recognize the two happy younger men. She did not recognize the buildings in the background either, but it looked like a university campus. She made a mental note to look it up when she had time.

She felt Davenham appear behind her before she heard him. She did not try to hide what she was doing. Davenham knew her well enough to predict that she would have noticed the addition. If it was there, it was for her to see.

He walked up to stand next to her, his breathing more labored than she remembered from the last time she talked to him. She kept looking at the picture.

He answered her unspoken question. “I guess I’m feeling nostalgic.” His voice was slightly raspy.

That was when she turned her head to look at him. Adonai Davenham was shorter than Shawbank was, and he looked frail now. In his early sixties, he looked years older, his face drawn and tired, his eyes too red. His face bore a strange calm, though, an equanimity that would have been foreign on the man she had met years before, the one that saved her life and adopted her almost as his own daughter, though neither of them would have dared admit it. That man had fire in his eyes, a purpose, a drive to achieve something. Utopia, he called it.

“Nostalgic, sir?”

Davenham smiled sweetly, and picked up the framed photograph from his desk. He stared at it a long time. “It’s all about context, Eva.”

He was the only one who called her with her birth name, one of the few who in fact knew it. He even put the accent in the right place.

“You get old enough, and you start to understand that every action, every fact, every thought occurs in a context, and that context can be interpreted in so many ways that it blows a hole in any theory you might have about anything approaching objective truth. It blasts away at any notion of certainty, it wipes out any sense of ground. Every action impacts life, either in the future or in the past, every thought is a pale reflection of a more imposing abstraction. You can’t escape it. Everything is political, if you will, even if you do not ascribe to a political theology.” He paused to catch his breath. He stared at the photograph a time longer. “I miss those days where I was not aware of the context, where an action could be done merely because it was the right thing to do, without second thoughts, without counterpoint. A more… innocent time.” He sighed.

Shawbank looked at him. He was sick. Had been for the past two years. Cancer, she guessed. Davenham did not talk about it, but also did not try to hide his degenerating state from her. He merely treated it as a fact—she wondered whether he might consider that objective reality, his illness, but decided not to bother getting into a debate that she had no interest in.

“Are you okay, sir?”

Davenham put the photograph down and wheezed softly, a small laugh. “Sorry, I forget myself sometimes. I know how much you hate these philosophical discussions.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Yes you do. But you’re too kind to admit it. And I appreciate it.”

He walked to one of the windows, and stared outside at the dark night. In the grass in front of the pavilion, in the distance, a shape could be seen moving, an animal. A fox, thought Shawbank.

“Anything to report, Eva?” Davenham asked her without turning around, his hands behind his back. His voice was softer than it used to be, but it still had the steel that she remembered.

“Nothing, sir.”

“Really?”

Shawbank stiffened at the question. “I would not lie to you, sir. As near as I can tell, the Internal Affairs investigation into Cargyle was conducted appropriately. I have gone over everything, questioned everyone involved, and I found no evidence that Cargyle had any associates helping him steal a vial of the Serum and escape. It looks like he acted alone, and for no other reason than his frustration at the termination of Project Perennial. He was obsessed, sir.”

When Doctor Thaddeus Cargyle, a research in the Advanced Research Division at ADCorp disappeared with a small vial of Serum, Control had dispatched a team to recover him and the precious liquid, the cornerstone of the whole adjustment process.

The Serum was the reason why the process took, why neural pathways were permanently and methodically reforged. Without it, all the attendant neuro-linguistic programming technology did little more than any other form of brainwashing. Recovering the Serum had been the team’s top priority.

Her own orders had been to eliminate Cargyle once the Serum had been recovered. She had not understood why—Cargyle was still an asset, and understood the adjustment process more deeply than almost anyone. He was also the most likely person to figure out how to implement permanent adjustments—Project Perennial, which Davenham had terminated a few years earlier.

Permanent adjustments—a concept which often made Shawbank shiver with an odd repulsion and not a little bit of fascination. To be permanently rewritten—not just with subroutines added in that could be activated for short periods of time, but rewritten from scratch—a death of a sort.

After the Serum had been recovered, and Cargyle had been eliminated, Davenham took her aside and gave her a special assignment, to be kept secret at all costs: find out who had helped Cargyle to steal the Serum and disappear, and why. No one knew of it, not Control, not Brisecoeur, no one.

Davenham hummed, but said nothing.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Eva?”

“Why did you ask me to reinvestigate what IA had already looked at?”

“Why do you think you were not put in charge of the investigation?”

Shawbank did not know. “I was transferred back to Investigation and Enforcement to help train Daniel Malcolm.” She kept her voice carefully neutral.

“Convenient,” Davenham said.

“Sir?”

“Tell me, why would one transfer our best IA agent right before an important investigation?”

“Someone must have had a good reason.”

“Indeed.”

Shawbank paused to process what Davenham was saying. “Are you implying my transfer was part of a cover up? To what end?”

“To what end indeed?” asked Davenham.

But Shawbank was frowning, and continuing to think out loud. “Is that why you asked me to keep this assignment a secret? You don’t trust IA’s investigation? But I went over their work, and found nothing amiss. They did a good job.”

Davenham turned and looked at her and there was something in his eyes that she could not understand. “You went over their work, yes, but it’s all about context, Eva. The investigation had been done before, and you naturally and subconsciously followed in the tracks that they had taken. What they examined, they examined accurately, I have no doubt. But they probably did not examine all the things that had you been put in charge of the investigation in the first place you would have examined.”

Shawbank was still working through the consequences of what Davenham was saying. “But, sir. Control was the one who authorized my transfer…”

Davenham nodded. “I know.”

Control had been Shawbank’s mentor for fifteen years, ever since Davenham brought her back from Eastern Europe. And he had helped turn her around.

“Eva,” Davenham said, and his voice was both stern but oddly compassionate. “I believe that there are elements within the company trying to steal our technology and take it in a direction that I have refused to follow. Trying to weaponize the technology, to turn it into a nightmare. Undoing everything that I’ve tried to do all of these years. That’s where Project Perennial was headed, and why I cut it off. And I believe that Doctor Cargyle was in league with those elements. I want to find them, and I want them eliminated.”

Shawbank was still under the shock. “And you believe that Control—?”

Davenham shook his head. “I can’t rule out anything. You’re the only one I trust, Eva. I want you to continue with this assignment. Again, no one knows about this. No one. I want you to expand your investigation into Cargyle, and anyone in the company that may have had something to do with it, or him. Investigate Project Perennial, and anything related. Anything weird, anything odd, I want you to examine and decorticate. I want you to find the cancer within ADCorp and root it out!”

Davenham took a few deep wheezing breath before resuming. “Your authorization codes have been cleared. You’ll have access to everything. Please, Eva.”

Shawbank looked at Davenham, nodding, but feeling the ground beneath her feet less firm than it was an hour earlier.

Davenham took a step toward her. “I know you must be conflicted, Eva. I know how you feel about George.” George Clayton, better known as Control. “I don’t know if he’s involved. I hope not. I dearly hope not. I’ve known him for twenty years, he was there with me almost from the beginning. But you’ll have to work through that conflict, and resolve it somehow. This is important. More important than anything else.”

Shawbank remained silent, Davenham in front of her. He did not look sick any longer, did not look older than he was. For a second, he was the Davenham that she had always known, the one that had pulled her back from the brink. He put a hand on her shoulder.

“Jesus never promised that we wouldn’t suffer, Eva. He only ever promised that we would not suffer alone.”

Shawbank nodded, and guessed that Davenham was saying that he would be there for her, and she felt a surge of emotion that she fought to keep under control. “Is that why I received the order to eliminate Cargyle? Also part of the cover up?”

“That would make sense. Someone was worried he might talk. Though it’s not against protocol either.”

There was something else against protocol, though. The girls adjusted by Cargyle had not been eliminated. And Control had refused to tell her why. Shawbank felt her jaw tighten.

“Understood. I will let you know what I find out, sir.”

Davenham seemed to relax at her statement—she had not even noticed that he was tense, possibly unsure of what her reaction would be. She was not sure either. “Thank you, Eva. It means more to me than you can know. Keep me informed.”

He walked back to his desk, picking up a book from the shelf along the way, a large tome with red leather binding.

“Sir,” Shawbank said, not having moved from her spot, watching this man to whom she owed her life walk slowly, back to looking old and sick. “One last question: why Malcolm?”

“Excuse me?”

“I was told that the order to recruit Malcolm into Investigation and Enforcement came from you. Is that true? Why him?”

Davenham looked at her, and his face was unreadable. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep the reason to myself for a while longer,” he said eventually.

Shawbank bit her tongue.

“I do trust you, Eva,” Davenham said, reading her mind. “But this secret you will learn in good time. I do not want anything to distract you from your investigation.”

“So Malcolm has nothing to do with it?”

“Nothing.”

“Very well.” She felt tired, all of a sudden. “If there’s nothing else, sir, I’ll go then. I’ve got lots of work, suddenly.”

Davenham had the good grace of smiling at what from Shawbank he knew was practically a joke.

“Godspeed, Eva. Godspeed.”