by Aer-ki Jyr
The Archon planted his fingers on the side of the man’s head, linking to his mind and ensuring that he’d be unconscious for a good long while, but unable to access any information. Maybe someday in the future his Ikrid skills would be good enough for that, but at present he and the other Archons needed the individual to be conscious in order to access their surface thoughts. Even dreams were too ‘low powered’ for him to monitor, meaning he wasn’t going to get any intel out of this one right now.
David stood up, leaving the man sprawled on the floor, and stretched out his mind to the surrounding area. No one was lingering outside their door, and the nearby rooms were empty, save for one.
Looking around for something to tie the man up with, he eventually settled on disrobing the operative entirely and taking his clothes and the woman with him across the hall to an empty room that he accessed using the master keycard. That way, even if he did wake up, he couldn’t leave the room without roaming the hallways naked.
David tossed the bundle of clothes and his own satchel to the floor, then set Milla on the bed in the new room before backtracking and locking the door, then he emptied his own pockets of the operative’s belongings onto the table and did another quick mental check of the hallway, finding it still clear.
“Now, for you,” he said, looking down at the woman.
3
Milla woke up in bed, rubbing her head as she blinked away the sleep, wondering where she was. She leaned up on her elbow, seeing that she was in a hotel room. It took her a moment to remember the last thing that’d happened before she blacked out, but when she did she cautiously glanced around, looking and listening to see if anyone was about, then she pulled off the covers and slipped out of bed…only to discover that she was naked.
“O que o inferno?” she said, pulling herself back under the covers as she tried to think through the situation. She took a minute to wonder, then braved the cold room air and got out of bed, cautiously looking around the room for her clothes. Finding none she went into the bathroom and gladly found a towel that she wrapped around her, then as she saw her reflection in the mirror her hand darted up to her ear, confirmed what her eyes saw, that her jewelry was also gone.
When she walked back out into the room and across into the small kitchen/breakfast nook she did a double take, seeing a man sitting on the bed she’d just left.
“Sleep well?” David asked sarcastically.
“What happened?” she asked, slinking up against the wall and holding the towel tight against her chest. “And where are my clothes?”
“You did volunteer for a strip search,” David pointed out.
“Did you like what you found?” she said, starting to slip back into character.
“Not really,” the Archon said, holding up a small device that caused Milla to blanch. “You can drop the act, I already disabled the homing beacon. It’s just you and me now. Your friend is elsewhere and won’t be joining us.”
Milla’s mind flashed back to the last moments before she was knocked out, and there was a suppressed look of fear on her face as she remembered. “You drugged me?”
“No, that was your boyfriend’s plan. By the way, I can understand why you cheated on him. Not a very attractive fellow.”
“So what happens now?” she asked neutrally, though at the same time she loosened her hold on her towel so it dipped an inch or so.
David tapped his hand on the bed beside him. “Have a seat.”
She eyed him for a moment, then gingerly walked over and sat down next to him, loosely clutching her towel. “I don’t suppose you’re going to give me my clothes back?” she said with a smile.
“Depends on the answers I get.”
Milla sighed. “In that case, I might as well tell you the truth,” she said, pulling off her towel and tossing it on the floor. She scooted back on the bed and leaned back on her outstretched hands. “I’m not shy.”
David smiled back. “And you’re not Brazilian security either.”
“I’m not?” she asked coyly.
“Look,” David said, his tone getting a bit gruff. “We can either do this the easy way, or the fun way. Your choice.”
Milla frowned a bit, but kept the smile on her face. “Not the normal cliché there. What’s the fun way? That sounds interesting.”
David pointed a finger at her and spun it around in a circle. “Roll over, face down.”
“Why didn’t you say so earlier,” she said, sprawling out on the bed chest down and spreading her legs. David pushed them back together and sat down on top of them, straddling her and reaching up to her shoulders as he pinned her to the bed, then began hacking into her nervous system again as he gave her a massage.
“Hmmm, I like the fun way,” she mumbled, her face half buried in the bed covers.
“How’d you mark me?” he asked, running his hands up and down her back.
“You Star Force types stand out,” she said, pretending to enjoy it, though her mind was in panic mode, trying to find a way to maneuver herself out of this jam.
“There were others, in uniform, but you spotted me. How? Did you know I was coming?”
“I was helping with a drop and you happened along. I needed to get you out of there,” she repeated, using the same cover story from before.
David pressed a bit harder, and felt her starting to enjoy the massage. He locked onto that feeling and boosted it as much as his Ikrid skill would allow, slowly bleeding away the panic in her mind, though it was a stair step process. He didn’t have the mental power for a direct override.
“Why was I a problem?”
“Our contact was an independent contract. If anything suspicious was around the drop would be scrapped and he wouldn’t return for another 2 weeks. I had to get you out of there, the information is too important to wait that long.”
“And your boyfriend?”
“Didn’t get a good look at him before I blacked out…how’d you do that, by the way. And I don’t have a boyfriend,” she added sensuously. “Feel up for the job?”
“Today I’m simply your masseuse and interrogator,” he said, leaning down so he could whisper just above her neck. “How’s my technique?”
“You can interrogate me any time,” she said, half meaning it as David continued to loosen her up with small Ikrid adjustments to her current emotions…like diverting a river the direction he wanted by planting stones in the water, and drying up her worry and suspiciousness.
David adjusted his massage again, constantly giving her mind new sensations to work through. He didn’t want her to numb up to him…rather the opposite.
“Where’d you learn that three tap code?”
“It’s old school…something I was taught by an old timer. I’m glad you took the meaning, not all persons would, especially when they’re drunk.”
“I don’t drink alcohol,” David added casually, continuing to delicately adjust her mood.
“I noticed that when we met and your soda fizzed up,” she said with a giggle. “Also typical Star Force.”
“Do I really stand out that much?” David asked, actually wanting an answer. He knew he could only hide his fitness level so much, but he thought he and the others had gotten good at blending in with the crowd.
“Yeah, afraid so,” she said, sighing with a particularly forceful shoulder rub. David could sense the lie, however, and the part of her mind that constructed the falsehood, easy as it was, briefly accessed her memory of the real way she’d identified him and he was quick enough to catch the gist of it.
She’d been told he was coming, and had been given a photo ID in order to find him.
That made him feel better and worse at the same time. He knew his face was probably known to The Word by now, given how many missions he and Green Team had run against them, and he would have been disappointed if they hadn’t been on the lookout for him, but how and when they picked up their arrival was critical in determining if they had a mole, electronic or living, within Star Force,
or if they’d been monitoring the BOTS passenger feeds and spotted him when he’d booked passage onboard the starport in orbit.
If that was the case then this was a quick assignment.
“When did you first spot me?”
Again, her mind started constructing the lie almost instantly, but in doing so referenced the truth in order to make sure she avoided it.
“As soon as you got to the bar…you’ve got good hands,” she added, flexing under David’s firm massage. “I waited for a while, hoping you’d move on, but when you didn’t I had to get you out of there in a hurry. When you didn’t take my initial offer I decided to confide in you, though now I wish you did. You certainly know all the right spots to hit.”
David listened to her story, but was focused on piecing together the brief glimpses he got into her memories, for as soon as the lie was constructed they vanished, replaced by the fiction she was espousing…to the point where he could even get imaginary images as her mind constructed them, meaning she was the type of liar that lived the lie inside her head, making any cover story hold up to biological cues.
What had really happened had been a rush job, with her arriving in the lounge area moments before she approached him. That meant The Word hadn’t known he was coming ahead of time, which David found reassuring…as well as impressive, considering the quickness by which they responded.
“By the way, I saved your earrings. Where did you get them? And I’m not married, by the way.”
“I didn’t think…you were,” she said, starting to moan a bit as David continued to amplify her positive emotions. “They were a gift…from a friend,” she said, having trouble concentrating enough to construct a complicated lie. Even as she tried her body kept tugging her mental focus back to the massage, making it hard for her to be devious.
The ‘friend’ she mentioned was the operative that had followed them, and it had in fact been a gift given to her at the same time as she’d been given the assignment, allowing him to track her and David to wherever she took him in the city, hence the ‘lazy’ tail that didn’t require him to stay within visual contact.
David leaned in close to her neck again, after feeling her let go of most of her resistance. “The Word.”
“What…word?” she asked, not really caring to hear the answer.
That surprised David…or rather the lack of recognition within her mind. As far as he could tell she’d never heard the term before.
David leaned back up and kept one of his hands working on her spine, but slipped the other around the side of her body and began tracing a gentle line around the outside of her breast, feeling her libido spike, which he then mentally boosted. He kept it up for a few seconds, then paused his finger, mentally implanting the suggestion that he’d continue when she answered him.
“Who do you work for?”
“Oh god…don’t stop,” she said, half playing, half serious. He made one more trace then held off, waiting for an answer.
“I work freelance,” she said, feeling him just barely start to move his touch again. “Contract work…out of Aerotrop.”
David recognized the name, and continue on with his massage, feeling her mind slip so far that she forgot what she’d just said, basking in the sensation.
Aerotrop was a private intelligence network that hired out to various parties. Part of their services were corporate, with another section that hooked up freelance agents with employers, while taking a percentage of their contracts.
“Who did you work for before you went freelance?” he asked, not stopping, but rather slowing his massage this time.
“Brazil…that’s how I knew the tap code,” she said, getting to the point where she was starting to volunteer information. Right now David was her favorite person in the galaxy, and all other considerations had been pushed to the back of her mind, though he knew if he let the massage subside for long, or if he let it get predictable her mind could start to restructure and she could find her nerve again.
But he didn’t think that was going to happen, for the simple reason that she was enjoying this too much. For her sake he almost hated to stop.
“What were the terms of your contract?”
“Snatch…and grab. One time deal.”
“Who was your employer?”
“Brazil,” she said, and he sensed no deception. He probed the open memory while it was there for a heartbeat, and found that she really thought she’d been hired by her former employers for a quick job.
“Now isn’t the fun way better than the easy way?” he said playfully as he slipped his hand off her ribcage and ran it down underneath her body to a more sensitive area.
Milla gaged from the sudden stress, then David latched onto the sensation and amplified it, causing her to orgasm once before he rendered her unconscious again, having got the information he needed out of her.
David stood up on his knees and pulled himself off her and the bed, then he walked into another room and retrieved her clothes from where he’d hid them. He redressed her unconscious form and set her down gently into one of the room’s chairs, slumping her at an angle so her head could rest more or less straight, not wanting to give her a crick in the neck when she eventually woke up.
David left her there, locking the room door on the way out. He stepped across the hall to the room they’d originally tried to take him in and slid in the keycard. The door popped open and he went inside, finding the agent still unconscious and naked where he’d left him over an hour ago.
The Archon took a knee beside him and placed a hand on his head. He was already working his way back to consciousness, so he plunged him back into the depths of the dream world, not intending to try and extract any information from him here. Star Force didn’t interrogate using pain…well, aside from an occasional punch when the person got mouthy. The more ‘traditional’ interrogation methods, being drugs and torture, were something Star Force and the Archons particularly didn’t like, and they came down hard on anyone that did use them.
That said, there were other ways to interrogate, as David had learned over the years. Most of them involved tricks and mind games, though with psionics now in play for the higher ranking Archons that gave them far more options than Star Force security had, including the pleasure option, which was something David had developed on his own, though he knew a few others that used it as well.
Overloading someone with pain was unacceptable, but pleasure…now that was fair game.
He wouldn’t be using that tactic with this guy, obviously, nor he doubted would any of the female Archons, which was a moot point, given that Green Team was all male. Regardless, with this guy being part of The Word, he needed to get him into Star Force custody as soon as possible, else one of his buddies might try to take him out. Very few Word operatives had ever been captured alive, and David wanted to add this one to their collection.
Others would handle his interrogation, and if he got sloppy he might slip up and give them something. If not, they’d at least have taken one more of The Word’s playing pieces off the game board, which was all that David wanted to do at the moment.
He pulled a specialized comm device out of his pocket and flicked it on, selecting the frequency he wanted. “Red Team, copy?”
“Red here,” a voice said that wasn’t Drake’s, and David couldn’t quite make out which of the 10 members it was.
“I’ve bagged a Word operative. We need him quietly evaced into Star Force custody. Green Team will get him to you, just tell us where and when.”
“Give us half an hour to arrange something. Can you hold onto him that long?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll be in touch.”
David switched frequencies and contacted the other members of Green Team, of which only 4 had yet arrived, given that they’d taken different flights to get to the city. Like him they didn’t have earpiece comms, so he waited several seconds before one of them responded.
“What’s up?” Devin-841 replied.
“The Word knows we’re here. One of them tried to pick me up and I got the drop on him. We’re handing him over to Red Team for evac, hopefully in an hour or so. I’m going to need some help moving him.”
“Where are you?” Assad asked, joining the conversation.
“Hotel room just off the promenade. Meritol Suites, I think, or something close to that.”
“You said ‘him?’”
“The girl was a contract job, last minute. They didn’t have much heads up I’d arrived so they improvised. I let her go, or will, once she wakes up. The operative has been deprived of his kill pill and we need to make sure none of the others get to him before we get him out of the city, so start planning. I’m stuck babysitting for the moment.”
“I saw something earlier I think we can use,” Devin commented. “I’ll get back to you in a few.”
“I’ll be nearby, within Ikrid range, if you need to call for backup,” Assad promised. “Which room are you in?”
“Hold on,” he said, walking over to the door and pulling it open so he could look at the outside tag. He closed it before speaking again, even though no one was in the hall, save for one individual at the far end waiting on an elevator. “332.”
“Copy,” Assad said before cutting out. The other two members of Green Team hadn’t responded yet, but even after David shut off the comm the others would have a message light on their devices indicating who’d tried to make contact so they could check in when the situation allowed them to. For security sake no messages were recorded, in case the device was lost or fell into the wrong hands.
“You know, I really don’t feel like staring at your hairy butt,” David said, glancing down at the nude operative and remembering he’d left his clothes on the other side in the same stash he’d placed Milla’s and his satchel…if that even was her name.
“Stay put,” he told the unconscious man, then headed across the hall to retrieve his hidden bundle.
4
May 11, 2430
Alpha Centauri System
