by Jesse Jordan
“About four miles or so, but about half of that is open to the public, so we’re not interested in that,” I reply, looking to my left. “We’re looking for Dumpy or Esplanade most likely.”
“Dumpy?” Stephen asks, and I shrug. British naming, it’s hard to explain. “Oookay then.”
“They named it, not me. It was dug to be an emergency seat of government even in the event of atomic war. It’s also the part that was the most secured.”
Unfortunately, my ‘simple’ idea turns out to be not so simple, and we explore the tunnels for nearly three hours before Stephen puts his hand on my shoulder, pointing. “There.”
I look, and see something that certainly doesn’t belong in World War II tunnels. “Hmm, fiber optic trunk line cabling,” I whisper, taking a closer look as the conduit that’s running along the ceiling. “I do say Watson, we’ll make a detective of you yet!”
Stephen rolls his eyes, still smiling though as we follow the conduit down a tunnel, making three turns before coming to the end of this particular tunnel with an open room to the side. “Well...”
A man steps out, his eyes going wide when he sees us. “What are you doing down here?” he asks angrily, taking a step back when Stephen raises his pistol. “Say now....”
“Shut the fuck up and get on the floor,” Stephen says harshly. “You sound like a fucking Monty Python skit.”
“I say, that’s not very-” the man starts, shutting up when Stephen cocks the hammer on his pistol. “Bloody Yanks.”
“You mind tying Master Pip here up?” he asks, and I go over, finding the man’s belt in his trousers quite useful. As I do, I laugh a little and he notices, turning his head in indignation. “What’s so bloody funny?”
“Oh, just that men used to pay me thousands of dollars to tie them up. Count yourself lucky,” I say as I finish the quick hogtie. “Now, what’s got you down here? Dover?”
“What are you talking about?” the man says, but I can see it in his eyes he’s fully aware. “Shit.”
“Yeah well, let’s poke around some,” Stephen says, punting our prisoner in the head and knocking him out before crossing into the main part of the room. “That feels better.”
The room has a small tunnel in the back and we follow it down, emerging into what I can only call an office. There’s a sturdy metal desk, and it obvious that the man we knocked out was the worker, there’s only one chair, but the lights are a modern LED, and the computer on his desk is top of the line. “Well, at least we know what the Internet connection was for.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Stephen says as he looks at the screen on the computer. “Larissa, check this out.”
I go around, amazed at the pure volume of data that’s flowing across the triple LCD screens. On one is camera feeds from the United States, including the briefing room at the Pentagon it looks like, a shot from what is certainly the White House, and more. “Hmm, looks like someone’s using the loo.”
Stephen looks as on one window a door opens and a man comes out, adjusting his suit pants, and Stephen gasps. “That’s the Director of the CIA. That’s inside Langley!”
“Yes well, look over here,” I whisper, pointing at another screen. “My my William, how naughty you and Kate get!”
Stephen looks at what I point out, and it’s not so much the fact that a Prince and his wife are rubbing their bits that’s shocking, but the fact that it’s all on camera. “What is this place?”
“It looks like Dover,” I whisper. “Okay, let me poke around, this is a Unix system that I’m familiar with, MI6 uses a similar architecture. Can you make sure nobody comes to disturb us?”
“Good idea,” Stephen says, leaving the room. “But hurry.”
He leaves, going up the tunnel to the other room while I quickly scan the hard drive of the computer. There’s millions of documents and files, most of them coded with what looks like a system of numbers for file names, but I can’t figure them out in the amount of time we have. Instead, I look in the desk drawers, finding what I need quickly, a set of screwdrivers. “All right, let’s hope you didn’t hard encode these.”
I tell the system to shut down, waiting for the power to blink off before opening the casing on the system. There’s three hard drives inside, whichever computer geek set this up knew what they were doing, and I quickly pull all three. As I take out the third, a yellow light starts blinking on the ceiling, and a phone on the desk starts ringing. I ignore it, hurrying out to Stephen who’s looking around worriedly. “Got what you need? Because the power company’s going apeshit with the lights.”
“I think I triggered some form of alarm,” I reply, showing him the three hard drives. “Let’s move.”
Stephen nods, taking the hard drives from me and slipping them into the backpack we brought just in case. We hurry back, going up levels as quickly as we can find them, hoping to get into one of the publicly available spots. The overhead lighting goes dark, but up ahead I can see a normal fluorescent, and Stephen takes my hand. “Looks like the way out.”
“If my internal map is right, we’re close to the former underground hospital,” I whisper, taking my pistol and slipping it in my pocket. I reach out, taking his hand and entwining our fingers. “Let’s look like tourists.”
We’re nearly at the lights again when someone calls out. “What are you two doing?”
We turn, and it’s a park guide, one of the ones that runs guided tours of the war tunnel exhibitions, her uniform spiffy and tidy in the light. Stephen gives my hand a quick squeeze before putting a big grin on his face. “Entschuldigen Sie, ich musste die Toilette benutzen und wir verirrten uns, unseren Weg zurück zu finden. Ahh… I have to piss.“
The guide rolls her eyes, pointing down the hall. “Well, the toilets and the group are up ahead. Please stay with everyone.”
“Danke,” Stephen says, while I give her a smile as we hurry down the hall towards the exit. “That was easy.”
“Nice German accent. You should have a talk with Claudia some time.”
“Hmm… that’d be interesting, having tea while talking with Claudia and Lihua. What would your customers think if we did that some night, just sit around, them in their bondage gear while I wear a suit and we talk?”
I giggle, the image ridiculous in my mind. “I think Claudia would enjoy the chance to use her German. Don’t know about in the club though.”
We rejoin the group and make our way through the rest of the tour, acting for most of the time as just a pair of lovers on a holiday tour. It’s not that hard really, and as we walk out and head back towards the car park, part of me goes back to being confused. I enjoyed the last part, and as we get back in the car, I wish we weren’t going back to my safe house but to a hotel that would be just the next step on a holiday of our own.
“Stephen?” I ask as Stephen looks out the window, it’s my turn to drive. “Would you mind if we stopped for dinner along the way back?”
Stephen looks over, a small smile coming to his face. “I’d like that very much.”
We stop at a pub, just some random place on the way back up north, but it’s got a definite classic British feel to it. The pubman greets us, and I take the lead, ordering a shepherd’s pie along with fish and chips and a couple of pints of Guinness. We find a table, and Stephen looks around in appreciation. “It’s different, but I like it.”
“We do try and please our visitors,” I quip, sipping my Guinness. “There are times I miss this back home.”
“Kalamata?” Stephen asks, and I nod. “Just how many places do you consider home, anyway?”
“Well, there’s Kalamata, and my flat here that’s currently not available,” I think, ticking them off. “And Mum and Da’s place, but there’s no way I’m going to them right now, too dangerous. Oh, and Caccamo. That’s my place in Sicily.”
“Three homes. Impressive,” Stephen says, sipping his drink. I give him credit, he doesn’t wince at the dark drink, which is served in the typical British style, warmer t
han most Americans like it. “So which is your favorite?”
“Kalamata for sure,” I reply. “Not that I don’t like Caccamo, but in Kalamata, I can be as close to being the real me as possible. It’s something that… well, if I had my heart’s deepest desire, I’d like a place like that.”
“Like what?” Stephen asks, his look making me feel both uncomfortable and willing to be uncomfortable at the same time. Like I’ve finally found someone I can trust with all of this burden on my soul.
“I’d like one place, one person where I can be one hundred percent me. With Mum and Da, I love them, but I do have to be… polite. They don’t know about the bedroom side of me. In Caccamo and Kalamata, I have to be The Dryad, and while there’s a certain freedom in that, there’s also the stress of not being able to let anyone know who I really am as well. Even in my flat up here, I can be myself, but there’s nobody I can be myself with. That’s… difficult.”
Stephen sips his drink, and I start to feel nervous for some reason, self conscious in a way I’ve never been before in my life, until Stephen sets his drink down and nods, looking at me. “I think I’m starting to understand. The hard part for me is that I’ve gone my whole life without really knowing who I am. I’ve always had my parents, my sister, someone else that I’ve held back with, trying to fit an exterior mold rather than be who I am. So thank you for that.”
“For what?” I ask, and Stephen smiles.
“You know what. Ah, here’s the food. So which is mine, the fish or the pie?”
Stephen
We decide to sleep on the information before we try to digest it all, and I’m pleasantly surprised when Larissa pulls me with her into her bedroom, not for sex but just for the comfort of having someone to sleep with. When I wake up and she’s in my arms, I feel a now familiar desire, not just for her body but for her. If only we’d met under different circumstances.
“Did you sleep well?” Larissa asks quietly, nestling into my arms. “You snore a little, but it’s a nice snoring.”
“I think this is the first time I’ve heard my snoring called nice,” I joke, leaning in and stealing a kiss on her neck. She hums, reaching back to run her fingers through my hair and I can see her smile.
“Are you trying to keep me in bed?” she asks, pressing her hips back into me, and I’m tempted to do just that, but instead I chuckle, kissing her neck again and giving her a squeeze.
“Maybe after we get our work done. Remember, a little anticipation adds to the flavor,” I answer her, reaching up to cup a magnificent, perfect breast. “Yes?”
“Yes… sir,” Larissa softly moans as her breast fills my hand and I’m torn between getting up and seeing what we can get up to, but in the end I decide that later, if there’s time, we can explore that all we want.
“Good. Then I’m ordering you to try and hook those hard drives up to our computers while I get us some breakfast ready. I suspect we’ve got a huge task ahead of us.”
Larissa sighs in disappointment, but turns over to look at me with a twinkle in her eye. “You think you can get away with giving me orders all the time?”
I shake my head, giving her a quick kiss on the nose. “No. But I do like giving you orders. We’ll see how often, and how often you obey.”
Larissa shivers at my last word, then smiles. “Yes sir.”
I growl lightly, touching my forehead to hers. “Call me that again and I’m going to turn your ass red tonight.”
Larissa’s grin widens and she suddenly rolls out of my arms and out of bed, almost prancing out of the bedroom. “Yes sir, sir, sir, sir, sir!”
I watch her, amazed at what I just witnessed, awe struck in some ways by what she’s putting in my hands. My cock is raging in my sleep shorts too, and it takes me a good two minutes of deep breathing before I can get out of bed without racing out of the bedroom to just fuck her in the middle of the living room of the cottage, but instead go to the kitchen to make us a simple breakfast. When I come out, Larissa’s already got one of the hard drives hooked up to her laptop, and her eyes are flashing back and forth across the screen as she configures everything.
“How’s it going?” I ask, handing her her breakfast. “And here’s your horse feed.”
Larissa chuckles, taking the bowl of Weetabix and sitting back, looking inside. “Ah, that’s the problem. It’s a lot better if you chunk up the fruit and throw it in with the ‘bix. No worries, I know it’s different from the American version. Thanks. As for the hard drive, no problems at all. I created a shell to protect my system, and this is slaved in. Bring your computer over and I can do the same before you even get your tea finished.”
She’s good to her word, and as I pour us each a second cup of tea she turns my computer around towards me, the file manager open. “Here you go.”
For the next six hours, we work nonstop, in that straight ahead, machine like style that I was famous for in the CIA. File after file is read, the most interesting ones minimized for later, and as the hours past a creeping horror fills me as I realize the magnitude of what we’ve found, what Dover is.
Amazingly, Larissa outworks me, her normal carefree demeanor set aside as she speed reads at a phenomenal rate, documents shrunk and videos perused while she multitasks better than I can. When I finally have to wipe my eyes to clear the ache from them, she sits back, shaking her head. “This is… this is a fucking horror story told in terabytes.”
“What have you found?” I ask. “Most of mine is… whatever this Dover group is, they’ve got their fingers in so many pies that it’s easier to say what they’re not involved with. I’m not sure they’re involved with pro football.”
“Yes they are, both European and American,” Larissa says, rubbing at her eyes. “I found a document that looks like it’s a sort of briefing folder that’s delivered to the people in our countries who are climbing into the circles that these people operate in. It’s… it’s flat out terrifying. Basically, Dover’s a goddamn hydra that stretches back decades at least. It seems their whole business is corruption.”
“You told me when we first met that I was going to find a world that I wasn’t prepared for,” I note, laying back on the floor and staring at the ceiling. “Just how far down the rabbit hole am I?”
“We’re so far down that I can barely figure out which way is up any more,” Larissa says. “These guys, and not just The Circle, they make The Network look like saints. An hour ago I read a quick little document that said our two governments have squashed technological advances that would assure the planet clean energy and eliminate global warming in less than two decades. And it was discovered back in nineteen seventy four.”
“You want to keep digging?” I ask. “I mean, Larissa from what I’ve found, this truly does go through both of our societies.”
“We have to, if we’ve got any chance to survive,” Larissa says quietly, intensely. “Stephen, these people have to know by now that we’ve got the data. If I were them, I’d use every tool at their disposal to find and eliminate both of us. Just in what I’ve read, I’ve seen enough to bring down the British Crown, and maybe even the American system as well. These people have leverage on the people with their fingers on the buttons of nuclear bombs.”
I sigh, agreeing. “So how do we filter it? Larissa, we could spend the next two months reading all this shit and still not get through it all. My hard drive is three terabytes of information. I don’t care if that’s all high def video, that’s like, what…?”
“I did the math, it’s a hundred and twenty Blu-Rays each hard drive,” Larissa says with a deep sigh. “You’re right. Okay, then we need to start doing some cross referencing. I’ve got a program on my computer that can do that, and I can daisy chain all three hard drives together too. But we need search parameters.”
“Why not the two men we’ve taken down?” I offer. “Start there, see what’s brought up? Most of the videos I’ve seen are more public figures anyway, the sort of stuff you keep to have something you can bla
ckmail people with later if they try to go against you. Audio might be the same.”
“It’s worth a try,” Larissa says, coming over to my computer and disconnecting the hard drive before plugging the cable into hers and typing away. “Arthur Pinchot, Reginald Finch. Okay, at the speeds I can get with this machine… we might be finished tomorrow, but the data will display as it’s found.”
“Guess it’s time for lunch,” I joke, leaning back. “So when do I start giving orders again?”
Larissa chuckles darkly, coming over and straddling my waist before leaning over and kissing me. “As much fun as that would be, and as much as I can feel your body wanting it like I do, there’s been one thing about all the times we’ve had sex that I treasure above everything else.”
“Mmm? What’s that?” I ask, bringing my arms around and stroking her back. “Don’t tell me I’m the best lover you’ve ever had.”
She hums as my hands stroke her for a minute before, shrugging. “What you lack in finesse of technique you more than make up for in enthusiasm and raw talent… and one tremendous cock, by the way. But no, what’s been amazing about sex with you Stephen is that, from the beginning, it’s felt clean to me. That first night when you were just pushed to the point of going overboard, every time since then as well, it’s felt pure and clean. We fuck because it feels good to us. Because we enjoy each other, and each other’s body. But right now, after what I’ve read, I’d be fucking you in order to feel clean, which makes what we have just a little dirty. I don’t want that, because you’re just about the only pure and clean thing in my life.”
Her words touch me too deep to say anything and I instead hold her, letting her straddle my waist even as my cock throbs knowing it’s so close to her perfect body, but she’s right. When Larissa and I have had sex, it’s always been pure between us. Maybe there was frustration, maybe a bit of anger sometimes, but it’s always been pure because it’s always been about us. “Okay. I guess I won’t be turning your ass red tonight then. But I promise you, when the time is right, I’m going to do that and more for the way you teased me this morning.”
