Alan
Chapter 16
Prey
“Hey, Paul, I could lose my job for this, you know,” the paunchy middle-aged retired NYPD detective said sotto voce to his former colleague as he hesitantly pushed a plain white envelope across the Formica tabletop.
“I know, Mike, but this should make it right,” Paul Riley, known on his current job as Agent Nine, replied to his former partner as he passed a paper bag containing a hundred hundred dollar bills under the table.
They were sitting in a diner in lower Manhattan, not far from where the towers once stood. The nervous man was now employed in the corporate security department of the most-popular cell phone carrier in the metropolitan area (rhymes with “horizon”). The day before they had met at a bar in midtown, and the agent had given his old buddy a cell number he wanted traced, including the carrier frequency for that phone, and the billing information. Once they had this data they could send out a few vans with sensitive antennae and get a location for the target by triangulating the signals they monitored.
The break had come a few days earlier; Agent One, the team’s leader had decided that they had exhausted their leads. The target had not been spotted during long weeks of mind-numbingly boring surveillance—neither at the lawyer’s office nor at Grand Central Terminal.
After consulting with his boss in London, Agent One and a team of three other agents had broken into the law office again. They couldn’t gain access to the steel-doored room, and the attorney’s office itself contained nothing of use to them, but the secretary’s desk yielded an important clue. Her desk calendar, the calendar upon which she logged her boss’s appointments and calls, showed an appointment with Carl Sutherland (a name which they knew to be a pseudonym) at the exact time they had first spotted the target; more importantly there was a phone number next another, more recent entry in the call log, 914 area code, indicating that this Sutherland lived in one of the suburbs north of New York City, in Westchester County, most probably, but perhaps Rockland or Orange counties, or even one of the other more distant suburban regions.
Further investigation—there was no entry for the number in the reverse directories, and Agent One had called the number itself the outgoing voicemail announcement indicated it was a cell phone, and this complicated things, making it harder to pin down their prey. This was why One had dispatched Nine, the retired detective to meet and bribe his old friend from the force, ten thousand up front, another ten when the info was delivered.
“Hey,” Soren greeted him as Alan returned to their room on a cloudy Saturday morning in October. Alan could sense the dejection in his voice.
“What are you doing back?”
Soren had left Friday morning and taken a train home; he was from Rockville, a suburb of Washington, DC, and his girlfriend was a freshman at the University of Maryland, about halfway between the nation’s capital and Baltimore.
“My girlfriend wanted me to meet someone: her new boyfriend. His name is Charlie, and he’s a senior. Pre-med. Isn’t that great?” he asked facetiously, grimacing.
“Oh shit. Jeez man, that’s terrible,” Alan commiserated. “Come, I’m taking you out for brunch.” Soren demurred. “Seriously,” Alan insisted, “Come on, we’re going to La Rosita.”
La Rosita is a Cuban coffee shop on Broadway and 108th Street. It’s cheep and delicious, and Alan ate there at least once a week. After a brief bit of haggling Soren agreed; it was one of his favorite eateries too. The crisp autumn air made Alan wish he had worn a jacket, but since it was a relatively short walk he decided not to run back into the dorm for one. Soren, Alan could sense by scanning his roommate’s mind, was on the cusp of a serious depression. His now ex-girlfriend, Debra, had been his first serious relationship, and he seemed devastated by the loss; they had spoken on the telephone almost everyday since school had begun.
After their cafes con leche had arrived Alan started the conversation, because his roommate had said nothing for a long while.
“Look, don’t blow a head gasket over this, dude. I can spout off all of the clichés: long distance relationships almost never work out; she’s your high school girlfriend, and those relationships aren’t meant to be permanent; there are plenty of other fish in the sea; etc. But you don’t want to hear them, so I’ll leave it at that and not try to chew off your ear. What I do want to say to you is this: these are supposed to be the most fun years of your life. Don’t fall into a funk about some girl who broke your heart. I know it sucks for you, and I know you loved her—” Soren looked up at Alan and stared him in the face, a questioning look in his eyes, “—Yeah, I heard you on the phone, I could tell by the way you talked to her, and about her that you loved her, but you have to move on. Now, I don’t mean go out and marry the next girl who rocks your world. Just go to parties, drink beer, flirt, you know? I’m not going to let you stew in the room for the rest of the semester. Anytime I have someplace to go, you’re coming with, and I wont take no for an answer. OK?”
“m’kay,” he answered morosely mumbling into his coffee.
Two middle-aged men with short haircuts and flesh-colored wires snaking out of their jackets and into their ears came in an took a table near Alan and Soren. They made an effort not to look directly at the two teens. One of them sat facing them, not looking their way, while the other sat opposite, observing them in a mirror on the wall in front of him. He put his hand on his cheek and whispered into a microphone his sleeve. No one in the coffee shop took any notice. A surveillance van was parked across the street on Broadway.
Soren digested this little speech as he ate his eggs, rice, and beans. He was still very quiet, trying to hold back the tears. On the way back to the dorm they had stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change, and Soren put his arm around his roommate, around Alan’s shoulder. “Thanks,” he croaked, a half of a smile forming on his lips.
Alan smiled inwardly as he gave his roommate a pat on the back. “Lock up your daughters: Soren’s on the loose!” he joked, and was rewarded with Soren’s hearty laughter.
“Yes, I understand, Your Lordship. Your instructions will be carried out to the letter. We will take the boy on the first of December. Surveillance teams have him covered twenty-four hours a day. It will not be a hardship. I will call again if there are any, ah, unusual developments.” Agent One was consciously avoiding saying the word “problem.”
“You do understand, Tadeusz, the penalty for failure,” the voice on the other end of the phone said, the arctic coldness—intensified to a great degree by the clipped tones of an upper-class British accent—of his voice easily transmitted through the international circuits.
“Yes, Your Lordship, I understand.”
“You are doing an adequate job. Continue down this path.”
Tadeusz Karick hung up, shuddering slightly. He knew very well the consequences, for he had executed the leader of the failed London team, the team that had failed to capture Massimo. A bullet to the back of the head would ruin your day, and he resolved not to be the next recipient of such a treatment. He had done a great deal of “wet work during his dozen year’s service with the StB, the Czech equivalent to the KGB, and he had hoped his now freelance status meant murder was a part of his past.
He gave another shudder, thinking of that terrible summer night just a few months ago; he had coaxed the last “Agent One,” a disgraced former commander in the French Surete, his true name unknown to him even as he rested the barrel of his pistol, silencer attached, against the back of his head, pulled the trigger, and then shoved him into the Thames.
Two mornings later, sitting in a cafe and sipping coffee, his stomach lurched violently as he spied the front-page photo in the morning’s paper, a picture of two bobbies standing near the riverbank holding two long poles with hooks at the end, fishing out of the water the corpse he himself had deposited in those waters. He didn’t want to, but found himself compelled to read the article anyway. Yves-Marc Didiere. “Shit! I didn’t want to know his name,” he had thought at the time. “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Now Karick leaned back in his office chair, looking out the window and zoning out while watching the cars crawl downtown in heavy Lexington Avenue traffic, hoping that his second-in-command wouldn’t be tasked with the job of dumping him into the river—in this case, the Hudson.
Little did he know that his date with a nine millimeter headache was forthcoming, no matter the outcome.
On the other side of the Atlantic the photographs and reports were being closely examined by the man Karick referred to as “Your Lordship.” The former Czech intelligence operative had good reason to address him that way, for the man who employed him was indeed a member of Britain’s upper house, a hereditary Lord whose mother’s second husband just happened to be Jean-Pierre Massimo’s father’s second wife. The London team had bollixed the job, though the death of Massimo, his step-brother, was hardly saddening for him.
“Alan Marshall,” Lord Thornbow thought to himself. “I should have known.” All of this could have been avoided if Swindon-Smythe had contacted him sooner. This Marshall, this boy, is a much fatter target than Jean-Pierre ever was. Probably new to his powers, unsure of himself. A satisfied grin crept across his leonine features. Soon, very soon, the power would be his. He pressed a button on his desk, and his assistant, Mr. Patel, entered through a side door.
“You have reviewed the files of all the New York team members?”
Patel nodded, he was a man of little talk.
“I have just spoken with Mr. Karick in New York. We will be taking action on the first day of December, in the late evening. That is the last day of a four day holiday weekend in America. Thanksgiving. You will depart two days earlier. You know what you must do.”
Mr. Patel bowed in the formal fashion and withdrew. The day before they grabbed the boy all but three members of the New York team would be dismissed, sent packing with extremely generous cash bonuses. Karick and two others would take the boy to their secure location, a warehouse in the Bronx. There, Mr. Patel knew, they would meet their end; he himself would do the deed. After that he would transfer Alan Marshall to another van, and set the warehouse afire as he left, then proceed to the second secure location and rendezvous with Lord Thornbow.
He checked the files of all the men on the overall team, and picked the two others to accompany Karick; about half the squad was made up of former NYPD officers and detectives. None of them would die in this operation, because their murders would be too conspicuous.
Kate was in her dorm room, studying for a French quiz, when her roommate came in.
“Hey, Kate.”
“Hey, Scarlet, s’up?” she answered back casually. Scarlet had been acting sort of weird lately. When they first met in person at the beginning of the semester, after spending the summer e-mailing and IM’ing back and forth, they had really hit it off, hanging out together and going to parties together, but about a week ago the amount of time they had been spending in each other’s company had been trickling off dramatically, and it wasn’t due to course load. Even when they alone together in their room over the last seven days or so Scarlet seemed distant, Kate thought.
“Nuthin’ much, you?” she said diffidently.
“Same old, same old.”
Scarlet went over to her desk and started on her own coursework. The radio played softly in the background, and neither spoke or moved from their desks for the better part of an hour.
“Listen, Kate, there’s something I have to tell you, but I’ve been hesitant because I’m not sure if you’d take it well,” her roommate said nervously, breaking the awkward silence between them.
Kate put her book down slowly and swiveled her chair to face her. She could see the tension written across Scarlet’s face. “What is it?” she asked guardedly, thinking she had offended her in some way.
“There’s no easy way to tell you this, and I will totally understand if you don’t want to room with me anymore, but,” she paused, sighing portentously.
Kate looked at her, suddenly very worried, no longer that she had done something wrong, but now simply worried about Scarlet. “You can tell me, I promise. Are you in some kind of trouble? Can I help? What?”
“No, no trouble.” She paused again, her throat suddenly becoming really thick with anxiety. “I’ve decided to become a L.U.G.”
Kate was puzzled, and worried. “Lug, what’s a lug?”
“Not a ‘lug.’ An L.U.G., a Lesbian Until Graduation. See, the thing is, I like boys and all, but I’ve recently found out that I’m bisexual, and while I’m in college I’m only going to, uh, do it, with girls. That way I can concentrate on classes, not guys.”
“Whoa! What brought this on? And when exactly did you find out that you were bi?”
“Are you upset? It sounds like you are. Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! I’m really really sorry. If you’re uncomfortable I could put in for a new room,” she exhaled rapidly, unable to look Kate in the eyes. This was unfolding just as she had feared; she should have waited until later in the semester.
Kate put up her hand to stop her. “No, no no, it’s not that. It’s just a lot to take in all at once. I’m just curious as to when this all happened, and no, I don’t want another roommate, so just relax on that score,” Kate assured her.
Scarlet visibly relaxed. “Well, you could say to some extent I’ve always had certain, um, feelings towards other women, but I never acted on them before I came here. The place I come from is fairly conservative, and I would never have acted on those, um, tendencies, there.” Scarlet was from small-town Ohio, not a place that looks too kindly on most sorts of sexual experimentation.
“I see,” Kate said, hoping that she would continue without further prompting; trying to frame a question that Scarlet wouldn’t think was judgmental was taxing, to say the least, and Kate really, really, really didn’t want to come off that way.
Scarlet said nothing for about half a minute, gathering her thoughts. “You know Jessica, that girl from my seminar? Jessica Starmer?”
Kate knew her. Tall and blonde with large breasts and a curvy behind, a very pretty face. She nodded.
“We were talking, Jess ‘n’ me, and she just kind of brought it up. We got lunch after seminar last Thursday. She has a very serious boyfriend back in L.A. He’s a senior at UCLA, and he’s planning to go to law school out there, so they’ll be on opposite ends of the country for the next four years. So I asked her, like, ‘How can you stand it? Being so far apart for such long periods of time.’ And she said, ‘Phone sex.’ And I laughed, and asked her if that was enough, you know, like as a joke. And there was this twinkling in her eye, and then she explained what being an L.U.G. meant, and I almost choked on my veggie burger! Then I asked her, ‘What does your boyfriend think of you having sex with other girls?’ And she’s all, ‘What do you think we talk about when we have phone sex?’ And then we both cracked up.
“So we talked some more, and I admitted to her that I had had sexual feelings towards other women—OK, she wormed it out of me—but that I was sure I wasn’t completely lez,” Scarlet said softly, almost whispering, a dopey grin on her face. She stopped for a good thirty seconds before mustering the courage to go on. “So I went back to her room—her roommate was at a class—and we, um, did it.” Her eyes were sealed shut in embarrassment for the last part.
Kate and Scarlet talked for the next hour. She assured her roommate she wasn’t offended or anything, and that she didn’t mind continuing sharing space.
“I had a feeling, like, you’d be cool with it,” Scarlet said near the end of the conversation, a slight smirk across her face.
“Why is that?” Kate shot back teasingly.
“I can tell you’re into some kinky shit.”
Kate’s face reddened. “Oh?” she said stiffly.
“You deny it?” Scarlet asked playfully.
“Why would you think that?” Scarlet could see the tension spread thought Kate’s whole body, especially her face.
“It’s just something about a girl with pierced nipples and a shaved vagina that set me to thinkin’ I’m not dealing with a future nun here,” she joked, winking, and watched in satisfaction as the color of Kate’s face matched her own name.
“You’ve seen that?” Kate asked in half a state of shock; she thought she had been extra careful in concealing this from her roommate. “Anyhow, I’m not Catholic.”
Scarlet giggled.
“So, it didn’t freak you out?” Alan asked her later that same day, the early afternoon sun shining through the window. The two of them were laying in Alan’s bed, his softening erection slowly slipping from her depths as he held her, spooning her from behind. Even though he was picking up the thread of conversation from before they had fucked, Kate knew what he was talking about. She had told him about Scarlet right before they had started up, but that conversation had been interrupted by the commencing of the “festivities.”
“Which part?” she asked. “The idea of lesbian sex? The idea of living with one, sorta? Am I worried that she’ll try to make move on me?” she giggled, considering her situation. “Nah, it’s just the surprise of it all. Hey, my sex life is nothing to tell momma about, either.” She punctuated this with a laugh.
They spoke quietly for a few more minutes, and then disengaged. Kate cleaned herself down below with some tissues she grabbed off of Alan’s desk, and began to dress. “I spoke to Pauline this morning. She’s getting kind of serious with Brian Lacy, but I think she didn’t want me to tell you.”
“No, I know about them. He’s a great guy.”
“That sounds a little forced, Alan.”
“Not at all,” he assured her sincerely. “Pauline and I, as you surely know, decided that we would each see other people. It’s not as if we were married or anything. We only dated five months, for God’s sake. I love her, but some of that is a brother/sister-type thing. She was always my friend first, and my girlfriend second, even during senior year.”
Kate chuckled, “Alright, alright. You convinced me. If you’re lying, you hide it very well.”
“Well, not to change the subject or anything, BUT, what are you doing for the rest of the day?”
“Library. Paper due on Thursday. Dinner in the dining hall. You?”
“Same. Which library?”
“Lehman. Paper’s for Poli Sci.”
“What a coincidence, mine too. Go get your stuff and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“Deal,” she replied, a smile forming. Sex with Alan was great, OK, better than great, but she also liked spending time with him. Kate returned after a short while and they walked to the other end of campus, out the Amsterdam Avenue gates and up a few blocks to Lehman Library. They filled each other in as to the topics of their respective Poli Sci papers, and then Alan told her about his conversation with Soren earlier that day.
“I might know some people,” she said thoughtfully, her mind sorting out a list of potential candidates for Alan’s roommate’s rebound relationship.
“Cool,” he said back, oblivious to the van slowly following the pair of them up Amsterdam.
They found a big table in a quiet corner of the library, set their stuff down and headed off into the stacks, each in separate directions, reuniting at their table after about a half an hour or so. They put in a good two hours of work; Alan finished up first. Sitting back in his chair he stretched his back, regarding Kate closely; she didn’t look up from the texts she was concentrating on. A slightly wicked thought entered his mind, a very small seed of a plan, though germinating rapidly into a full-bloomed course of action. He entered her busy mind and made a few modifications, both to her mind and to her body, among other things ramping up her latent (though since Scarlet’s revelation, much less latent) curiosity about girl-girl sex.
She looked up, catching him staring at her face, and she blushed.
“What?” she asked playfully, twirling a finger coquettishly through her raven-hued locks. She giggled.
“Oh, nothing really. I’m all done here. How much longer do you have?”
Kate told him not much longer, and Alan volunteered to photocopy the articles she wanted to take back to the dorm for later consideration.
Later that night in bed Kate awoke with a start, shaken by the potency of her wet dream. In the dream Kate was reliving her encounter with Alan and Kim Hall in the latter’s guidance office.
Alan had thrown one helluva good ass fucking at her that morning, but her dream kept spinning her back to the interplay between herself and Mrs. Hall. On that morning all those months ago she had stripped Mrs. Hall out of her clothes and played with the older woman’s nipples, then Alan had sprayed their faces with his yummy come. In the past when her mind had revisited that particular episode she glossed over the parts when she and Kim Hall had touched each other, but now they were front and center, rolling feverishly around all corners of her brain.
As quietly as she could Kate got out of bed and peeled off her sticky panties, tossing them into the small hamper she kept by the door. As she was pulling on a dry pair she realized the flow of juices secreting from her burning hot pussy had not abated, so she crept back into bed bare beneath her long cotton nightgown. It was just as well; she really needed to frig herself off anyway, knowing somehow she would never be able to sleep without first finding release. Thank God Scarlet had come home drunk this Saturday night/Sunday morning; if she was lucky she would still be able to make a little noise when she came.
Barely two minutes later Kate was astounded by the sheer brute force of her climax, and even though she was doing her best to stifle her howls she froze in terror when she saw Scarlet start to stir. Her nipples were so hard, and seemed to her so scorchingly hot that she thought she could actually feel the metal of the rings which pierced each one start to soften. It was to her great relief that her slumbering roommate merely rolled over and continued to snooze.
Kate was still gasping for breath a few minutes later, flat on her back. “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, that felt good,” she thought to herself. After catching her breath she slowly reached under the blanket and ran a hand over her still-drooling pussy. Maybe forgoing panties was a mistake; as her orgasm hit Kate had felt an enormous spray (’A spray!’ she marveled) of come shoot out of her slit. Her nightgown was soaked with her warm girl juice, practically from the waist to the hem, for the fabric of it had been bunched up on her thighs just below her crotch.
In the end it took more than five minutes for her to even gather up the stamina to sit up in bed, and more to make it across the room so she could have her sopping nightgown join her drenched panties in the hamper. She hadn’t enough energy to strip off the moist sheets from the bed, so she reluctantly slipped back in between them; immediately her fresh nightgown began to become sodden from the residual dampness on her bedding.
She need not have bothered. Four more times before the sun came up she was jolted out of similar dreams, each time to find herself soaked from waist to toes with fresh gushing torrents of warm sticky girl come, each time having to masturbate before falling back asleep, bringing forth yet more streams of ejaculate, never once working up the strength of will to get out of bed and change.
She woke early, making sure she was up well before Scarlet. Her sheets and blanket were tacky from all her semi-dried spendings. She hadn’t planned on doing any laundry that day, but nevertheless she stripped the bed, even flipped the mattress, bagged up sheets and blanket with the contents of the hamper, and took it all to wash. If she was lucky she would be back upstairs before Scarlet woke up to her hangover. She considered taking something to read in the laundry room, but didn’t.
She had some serious thinking to do.
Waiting for the elevator she jerked with the realization that in one of her dreams she was making love, no, fucking Scarlet, and in another she was fucking someone named Mistress Randa, though she didn’t have the slightest clue as to who she was.
“Are you going to use that washer?” a girl she didn’t know was asking her impatiently.
Kate snapped out of her trance. A minute before she had opened her laundry bag while standing in front of this machine, and was instantly transfixed by the delicious odor emanating from within it. Who knew pussy juice smelled so fantastic? Surely not Katie Van Devanter; at least not until today.
She had some serious thinking to do.
After setting off the washer on its cycle she stepped out for some much needed fresh air. Though it was chilly out Kate felt very warm on the inside. She sat on a bench, her mind racing a million miles per hour. She thought if she sat perfectly still she would be able to ignore the gooey wetness in her panties, a wetness threatening to escape out and seep straight through her blue jeans. Thirsty, so very very thirsty; that was her next order of business.
She had some serious thinking to do.
“Patel?”
“I am here, Your Lordship.”
“Report.”
“It is ready, Your Lordship.”
“You’ve done well, though I expected nothing less.”
“You are far too kind, Your Lordship.”
“I will see you in New York.” Lord Thornbow replaced the secure telephone unit’s receiver to its base. He pressed a button, and a liveried servant entered holding a silver tray with a crystal glass and a decanter of brandy. The servant placed the tray before his employer on the desk, bowed curtly and left. They did not exchange words.