Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4)

by Campbell, Nenia

  But she was trembling, and I knew from that expression — that expression I knew far too well — that she was on the verge of tears.

  Exasperated, I said, “What's wrong?”

  “She's all alone out there somewhere, doing God knows what, in the hopes that she'll lead us to Adrian. It's not even a sure thing, Michael, and yet to put her through what we did — well, it's wrong.”

  “We've been over this before. You couldn't have gone, even if you'd wanted to — which I know for a fact you don't. You wear your thoughts on your face as plain as day. You can't hide a single thing. You're not sexually confident. You think you could fuck for money? You fucking blush when I say 'cock.'”

  But she didn't. Not this time.

  “Who am I to send her to her death?” she whispered. “If Adrian finds her, he'll kill her.”

  “Would you rather he killed you?” I pulled away from her breast, knotting my fingers in her thick hair instead. “Do you even know what he'll do to you if he catches you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “you gave me a pretty good idea the other night when you listed out all my weaknesses for me. Thank you for that.”

  “You're the bullet in his leg, darlin, the constant reminder that on at least one occasion, the prey got the best of the predator—and trust me, he fucking hates that. He will hurt you, hurt you bad, hurt you in ways you can't even imagine. Whatever he might do to Suraya will be one hundred times worse for you, because you showed the bastard, and all of his men, that he's still capable of bleeding.”

  She drew in a shuddering breath. “That's true,” she said, “I did do that, didn't I?”

  “At this point, I think he might hate you more than he hates me.”

  Her mouth twisted into an unhappy smile. “I should put that on my list of accomplishments.”

  “Very funny. Look, I'm getting real tired of having this conversation with you. What do you want from me? You want me to send you on another suicide mission? You want to be trafficked through to an unlicensed whorehouse where you'll have to fuck men who hate women, and do it with a smile? Is that what you want from me?”

  “You know that's not what I want.”

  “Then accept things the way they are,” I said.

  “Fine.” She put my hand back on her breast. Her eyes were still dangerously bright, but there was something else behind them — a hardness that was new, that I wasn't sure what to make of. She slipped my pants down my hips, pulling it out from the waist so it wouldn't catch on my erect cock. “I'll accept it.”

  Her behavior disturbed me a little, as anything did that was beyond the norm. She had initiated sex before, but it was unusual, and she was rarely so…blunt. “Promise me you'll stop bringing this up.”

  “Make me forget,” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “I want you to make me forget how to think.”

  “Your confidence in my prowess is flattering, darlin,” I said dryly. “I'd hate to disappoint.”

  Her smile was a thin crescent. “Then don't.”

  Christina

  I did not think of myself as brave. Bravery, to me, meant being fearless; it meant standing up to those things in life that terrified you, and striking them down. It meant approaching life in a take-charge way, being daring, taking risks. Fearless. Dauntless.

  Reckless.

  Fear was made for a very good reason — to keep you out of harm's way. If you felt afraid, there was generally a good reason for it. Despite a high rate of recidivist dare-devils, we wouldn't have evolved such a trait if there weren't an evolutionary basis for it. Life was short enough without taking unnecessary risks, so why flirt with death to prove a point?

  No, I was not brave. I was a survivor, but being a survivor is different from being brave. Being a survivor means that you managed to weather through some unpleasant experiences; it meant you were tenacious, living through what other people threw at you instead of seeking out those situations to confront them head-on.I never signed up to be a revolutionary, I was forced to become one against my will when I made the IMA's hit list.

  I was tired of people calling me 'brave.' It made me feel as though I had to live up to their expectations. It made me feel as though I were weak when I inevitably failed.

  Despite Michael's assurances, and his threats, I couldn't help but feel that I should have gone in Suraya's place. I didn't have much sexual experience, but I knew enough to suspect that the men who frequent a brothel of sex-trafficked women aren't expecting a pampered and world-weary courtesan. Men like that, they get off on the fear and the taboo. They want powerlessness in their women, not experience. They want slaves.

  Michael had been like that in the beginning. He had known I was at his mercy, and he was willing to exploit that if it meant keeping me under his thumb. That was why he had known all my weaknesses. Once, it had been his job to make people feel miserable. To make people feel as though they hadn't a hope in all the world.

  He was a better person now, but I could still see who he had been like a dark overlay looming over his current persona. And there were times — like when he used his body to get what he wanted, or when he listed off all my vulnerabilities — where he seemed to be reverting back to that dark self, which made me respond to him in all my old ways.

  Saying that would cause the tenuous bond of trust between us to splinter, but I was thinking it hard, because I wondered if that was the reason for his adamant refusal to even consider me for the mission. If it brought back memories he didn't want to face of how he had treated me when we first met. I knew what it was like to be forced to have sex with someone against your will. I may have offered myself up to him in a desperate sort of plea bargain, but it had been his job to say “no,” to put space between us, to be the better man — and he hadn't. Maybe because, in some ways, he was weak, too.

  I kept expecting that the fighting between us would dissipate, but it never did; when we tired of one subject we simply found another to argue about. He could be conversing with me and being pleasant one moment, and then a storm cloud would descend, and I could see it in his face as that hesitant sense of openness closed off, leaving only hard, indomitable stone in its place.

  I loved Michael, and I wasn't quite sure why because he gave me so little recourse in this twisted excuse of a relationship. Was it because I wanted to fix him, or because the sex was good? Was it years of Catholic repression rearing its head, or was it because he had loved me first, and I loved the idea of being loved more than I actually loved the man?

  He'd said it before, that he wasn't a love letters and candlelight kind of man. He didn't do romance. He was boorish, and temperamental, and had a striking lack of education that often made him seem unpolished. He had plenty of money, but a lot of it was tied up in material assets and property holdings; he was far too conspicuous to ever live large. He couldn't sing, and wouldn't be playing me any moonlight concertinas on a baby grand piano. He was the antithesis of everything I had ever been taught to see as romantic.

  As I watched him get dressed against the backdrop of the sunlit bay window, gilding his profile in liquid gold, I wondered whether romance was something that existed entirely in your head. Love was almost a form of craziness — it could make you see things that weren't really there.

  How much of his redemption was illusory? How much of what I loved about him was only there because it was what I wanted to see?

  “You ready to go?” he asked me.

  I nodded, and he grabbed a leather satchel that was identical to the thousands of others toted by the metrosexual businessmen of San Francisco.

  “Do you think your Japanese friends will be gone?”

  “No.” His face set. “But it's a big city and they're poorly organized. Finding us will be difficult.”

  They found us before, I wanted to say, but that would only remind him that it was my fault they found us in the first place when I suggested we go to China Town.

  “I hope you're right,” wa
s all I said. Showing great restraint, I thought, but his mouth tightened.

  “Well see.”

  Michael didn't touch me on the walk back, and he didn't say much. I glanced at his profile from time to time, but I didn't say anything, either. It was better not to, when he was like this. Silent and deadly, like the perfect predator. Even though we were on the same side now, I knew the potential for violence existed inside of him — to forget that would be naive.

  And I was no longer naive.

  Chapter Ten

  Entrapment

  Christina

  I opened the door to the office suite and held it open for Michael, who grunted his thanks. The first he had spoken since we had left his privately owned building. I could smell percolating coffee, so at least one member of AMI was up and around.

  “Do you think — ?”

  But when I looked around, Michael was gone. A flash of movement in the corner of my eye had me turning instinctively to my left, where I saw a male form heading in the direction of Angelica's office.

  I sighed, and shook my head. As I turned towards my own, I almost collided with a broad chest. Cliff. I looked up, and my frustration disappeared as soon as I saw his face. He looked more concerned than usual, and it was tinged with an urgency that made my pulse quicken in nervous anticipation.

  “Is something wrong?” Only with great effort did I manage to keep my voice calm. Secretly, all I wanted to do was scream, “Really? This bullshit again?”

  “Yes.” His jaw worked. “There was a break-in.”

  “What?” Michael was behind me, with Angelica in tow. His humor hadn't improved at all, and beneath that icy facade I could see his temper rising like a boiling sea. “How the fuck did that happen?”

  “It happened while you were gone.” A note of accusation. “Five men, dressed in black. They came in. Disabled the security camera over the door somehow. Just that one, though. I checked the others — they seemed to work fine.”

  “Seemed to?” I ignored the look of impatience Michael shot in my direction. I had a job to do, and I was going to see it done. “Have you tested them?”

  We — ” he nodded at Angelica “ — headed into the panic room with Jatinder until they were gone, and watched them on the monitors.”

  Which would be a 'no.' I thought of our files, the information I had spent hours decoding. All that information just lying around like cyber gold. The thought was infuriating. “Did they take anything?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  Michael swore. “We ran into some trouble yesterday, as well. I doubt it was a coincidence.”

  Cliff looked uneasy. “Is that where you were?”

  “Where did you think we were? Tahiti?”

  Cliff shook his head slowly, pinching the bridge of his nose. He closed his eyes. “Wait…. You think — you think this was a planned attack?”

  “It was obviously orchestrated,” I said. “Five men decide to hit us — us — when there's a bank across the street and a diamond jewelry store a block away?”

  Michael nodded his agreement. “We must have probed too deep. The bastard must suspect where we are — if he doesn't already know,” he added darkly, “he will soon. I'm sure he's been having this city watched, and this will light up on his radar like it's the fucking Fourth of July.” To Angelica, he said, “Destroy the files. Have the girl help.”

  For a moment I thought he meant me. For a while, he always referred to me as “the girl.” A method of depersonalization, to put emotional distance between him and me. I opened my mouth in protest. Then I realized he meant Jatinder. I hadn't even stopped to think about the toll this must be taking on her. But Cliff's subsequent question drove me from this chain of thought.

  “Do you think that's necessary?”

  What a stupid question. Of course it was necessary. Adrian had hackers, just like we did. Probably a lot more. He wouldn't want to face the same embarrassment the IMA had suffered before when my father had accidentally hacked into their mainframe. Not when he had so much to lose.

  “Better safe than sorry,” I said. “Especially when it's his brand of sorry.”

  Cliff nodded grimly. “I'll wipe the hard drives of the computers.”

  “Use the rare earth magnets,” I called after him.

  Cliff left the room without responding.

  Ugh. I'd have to go over them all a second time myself, later, before I destroyed the hardware.

  “Good call,” said Michael, staring intently at the door Cliff had vacated. “With the magnets.”

  Praise from him was as rare as a solar eclipse. I didn't feel like basking in it, though. His behavior from this morning had left me feeling cold.

  “Kind of sucks that we have to destroy several months' worth of work, though. I can't tell you how many all-nighters I pulled, getting some of that stuff to paper.” I looked at him. “You really think it was Adrian's doing? That he found us already?”

  “Pack your things,” he said. “We're leaving—and we're not coming back.”

  Which wasn't exactly an answer. And yet, it told me everything I needed to know.

  Suraya

  On the other side of the windowless room, the days continued to pass unrelentingly. There was no transition period — I was catapulted into their disgusting business without prelude. They had me working at all hours, sometimes rousing me from sleep to get on my back. I was permitted no forms of technology. I wasn't even allowed to handle the money.

  Time seemed to no longer exist. When I slept and woke, I wasn't sure how much time had passed. It gave my life a surreal, nightmarish quality that was extremely disquieting. It was as though I were in limbo, hell's waiting room, and had just been told to take a ticket.

  The man who had been fucking me left. He had paid up front, ordering his woman of choice the way one would a pizza. Exotic woman, eighteen-years or older, hold the anal. I often didn't find out what a client had requested until one of the Albanians brought him to my door.

  “Give him what he wants,” they would say, with threats of punishment if I didn't comply.

  Prostitution and sex work is highly romanticized in American media, often turned into a modern-day Cinderella story. Women are forced into sex-work out of desperation, to save their families, or else as someone's savage act of revenge.

  Working for the Albanians merely cemented what I already suspected was true: the men who frequented brothels were forced to pay for their sex for a reason. Many were unattractive. Fat. Ugly. Excessive body hair. Odor. I hated it when the ones who smelled bad kissed me; it seemed like I couldn't get the taste of them out of my mouth for hours afterwards.

  Some of the men had perversions that made BDSM look like hand-holding in the park. I had men who brought their own costumes or sex toys. Men who wanted to be shouted at, men who wanted to shout. Men who wanted someone to play with their prostate until they got off.

  Still others were hiding from someone or something—the law, a suspicious wife, their closeted homosexuality, the knowledge that they were terrible people. One man felt the need to tell me that he had never fucked a “nigger” before, had never felt the need to. I told him, in the halting accent I'd perfected for myself, that I was not an African American, that I came from India — not that it mattered. He nodded sagely and said that, “sand niggers were worse because of that 9/11 bullshit.” I said nothing else after that. I didn't trust myself to.

  I was the very flower of restraint.

  I did all my “work” from my cell. That was upsetting. Not just because of the obvious reasons — the filth and the squalor — but also because I had been hoping to have the run of the brothel. Better chance of overhearing something vital that way.

  But no, my captors had imprisoned me, and the only thing I heard in my dark cell was the incessant, often xenophobic prattle of my so-called clients.

  There was a button by the door I could press if the men wanted food or alcohol. Eating the food here seemed like a mistake, and the alcohol
had a 500% markup. A $20 bottle of decent champagne cost $100. For the price of a bottle of Cristal, you could pay the deposit fee for an apartment in a good area of New York. No wonder they kept this business running, I thought. The alcohol alone would fuel it.

  Michael had given me a transmitter, which I had been forced to conceal in my anus, and I'd managed to drop the transmitter in the room where the Albanian boss had debriefed me. I wasn't sure if that was the room where he conducted the bulk of his business, though. The smart thing would be to move from room to room, but I doubted whether they planned ahead that far. They looked — and acted — like thugs, more swagger than any real sense of business.

  Although if they were able to get this far, I reasoned, they're probably more intelligent than I gave them credit for, or they're working for someone who is.

  Regardless, I shouldn't underestimate them under any circumstances. And I didn't. I worked as if they were watching my every move, because they probably were. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.

  That was what kept me going even at my lowest points, when my body was sore and I was filled with self-disgust. I was doing this because Adrian Callaghan was a monster who needed to be stopped—if not for my sake, then for my sister's sake, and other men and women like her, who were the casualties in his tactical chess game for power, wealth, and suffering.

  By owning my subjugation, I could rationalize it, dissociate from it; I turned it into a lie that I was willing to believe.

  The men were always provided with condoms — I suppose they believed I might use them as a weapon or to harm myself if they were left in my possession — although whether they used it or not wasn't really up to my discretion. Management enforced it loosely, on the pretense that this was a “clean” establishment, but the clientele had different ideals. Some men were willing to pay more money, a lot more, to go without, but I always insisted. The type of man who would have sex without protection in a brothel is the type of man for whom they were made in mind.