“I really am sorry, sir, but the only way we could get a better picture is with night-vision cameras.”
“Then why the hell don’t you have night-vision cameras?”
Before the frazzled man could respond, Oscar intervened, laying a firm hand on the guard’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Sam. We can see more than enough. How long have you been monitoring Mr. Grey?”
“Ever since he returned to his room, sir. Just like you wanted.”
“Have you noticed any unusual behavior?”
Sam shook his head. “No, sir. He watched some television for a little while, then jumped in the shower. That’s it. If you ask me, I think Mr. Grey is adjusting just fine.”
Carver snorted dismissively, then noticed that Oscar was staring hard at him. The man appeared to be pissed about something, but Carver had no idea why. Carver liked Oscar for the most part. He appreciated Oscar’s no-nonsense attitude, and he respected the fact that Oscar could keep a place like Forty Acres running like clockwork. What he didn’t like about Oscar were those cold, titanium eyes. Especially when Oscar had them trained on him. “Something wrong?” Carver asked.
“We’re done here, Mr. Lewis.” Oscar moved to the door and pushed it open. “Let’s let Sam get back to work.”
“Go ahead if you have to. I want to stick around and watch Grey a little while longer.”
“Not possible. The doctor would be displeased to know that I allowed you in here at all. Now please, after you.” Oscar gestured to the open doorway.
Judging by the stone carving that Oscar called a face, Carver knew there was no point arguing. The two men exited the surveillance room and Carver paused just outside the door. They were standing inside a storage room in the cellar of the house. Neat racks of food and other supplies lined the stone walls. The unmarked door to the surveillance room was tucked inconspicuously between two shelving units. “I just hope that kid knows what he’s doing,” Carver said to Oscar. “Grey needs to be watched very closely.”
“And he will be, Mr. Lewis. But quite honestly, from what we’ve just observed, I believe your suspicions are . . . unwarranted.”
“It’s not a damn suspicion. It’s more than that.”
“Really? Please explain.”
Carver frowned. He prided himself on his uncanny ability to read a man’s character cold. All his life he had possessed a keen intuition that he had come to trust completely. It was that intuition—a sort of nervous tingling in his gut—that helped him to steer clear of dishonest brokers and bad deals and ultimately to accumulate his large fortune in the real estate game. Very recently Carver had felt the stirrings of his internal alarm once again. It was the day that he first met Martin Grey. He had read about Grey in the newspaper. The black civil rights attorney with his white partner. The article said they were not only partners but good friends. Jesus. That fact alone made Carver’s gut tight. He tried to tell Solomon and the others that there was something off about Martin Grey, but they paid little attention. Damon vouched for Martin completely, and the others took an instant liking to the young lawyer. Of course, Carver could understand why. Martin was smart, strong-willed, and, with his activist background, appeared to be a perfect candidate for their private club. And that’s exactly why Carver did not protest Martin’s candidacy too strenuously—because on the surface, despite his white shadow, Martin did appear to be a good fit. Carver’s intuition was strong, but it wasn’t infallible. He supposed that maybe he was wrong this time. Maybe Grey was truly as perfect as he appeared, and in the future they’d grow to be tighter than brothers.
Maybe. But then there was that moment in the library that changed everything. The moment when Grey finally broke down before Dr. Kasim’s truth. On the surface Martin’s tearful submission appeared believable, but it was at that instant that Carver’s belly spoke up once again—only this time it was far more insistent. What Carver felt wasn’t the usual fleeting tingling sensation. It was as if an abyss had opened up inside him. What was making him react so strongly? Was Martin’s breakdown just an act? Was Martin just playing a role until he could get back to the world and expose their secret? Carver couldn’t be certain, at least not yet, but he did know one thing for damn sure. Martin Grey could not be trusted. He could feel it in his gut, literally. Of course, this gut feeling wouldn’t be enough to convince Dr. Kasim and the others that Grey was a threat that needed to be eliminated. Carver needed real proof.
“It’s hard to explain,” Carver said. “I just know that something’s not right about that guy. You know what’s at stake here. We can’t risk even the smallest doubt.”
“I agree completely. That is why Dr. Kasim always insists on an initiation. I think you will agree that if Mr. Grey completes tomorrow night’s ceremony, his loyalty will be unquestionable.”
A smile creased Carver’s face. Oscar was right. The ceremony was an extreme test, to say the least. Carver couldn’t imagine how anyone, including Grey, could get through it unless he was truly committed to Dr. Kasim’s philosophy. But still, Carver had an idea. A way that he could up the ante on Grey’s big night and leave zero room for doubt. As Carver unconsciously ran a hand over his fit midsection, he thought, Maybe then my gut will leave me alone.
CHAPTER 48
After Master Grey finally rolled off her, Alice watched him lying there with his eyes closed, panting. His sweat-soaked body glistened in the pale moonlight filtering into the room through sheer white curtains. Alice wasn’t sure how she should feel. Frightened? Confused? Grateful? She wasn’t even certain of what had just happened. Did she do something wrong? Would Master Grey tell her other masters about it? Would she be punished for not satisfying Master Grey—even though it wasn’t her fault?
Alice played back what had happened in her mind. She did exactly what she was taught to do when masters took her to their beds. Smile. Always smile. Make them believe that there was no place else you’d rather be than in their bed. When Alice removed her dress and climbed into the bed, she could tell by the way Master Grey stared that he was sexually attracted to her. Then, when he threw off his towel, there was no doubt. He was erect and his eyes were devouring her. And as Master Grey climbed into bed with her, she remembered thinking that at least he wasn’t fat or old or mean. When she’d met Master Grey for the first time in the hallway, she got the feeling that Master Grey wasn’t like her other masters. Then, later, when Master Lewis brought her to his room, she felt it again. It wasn’t just his kindness—most of her masters were usually kind to her—it was something deeper. Something about the way he looked at her. When the other masters spoke to her, their eyes were cold and indifferent, as if they were addressing a piece of furniture. But Master Grey really saw her. In the hall he had spoken to her as if she were a person who actually mattered, not just a slave there to do his bidding. Whenever Alice was forced to share a bed with one of her masters, she never knew what to expect. Some preferred to just lie there and be titillated and pampered for hours. Others enjoyed the illusion that their unwelcomed caresses brought Alice genuine moans of pleasure. And there were even a few mean ones, masters who seemed to derive pleasure only by inflicting pain. But whatever their desire, beneath the masters’ sheets, one thing always remained the same. They treated her like an object. Like some life-sized sex doll that they could bend and twist and inflict any depraved act upon that they pleased without any concern for her feelings. Maybe Master Grey would be different from her other masters in bed as well, Alice hoped. And he was, but not in a way that she ever could have expected. When Master Grey first reached out and stroked her body, he seemed oddly hesitant. He caressed her curves gingerly, as if he feared that he might break her. When he lowered his mouth to her breasts, instead of sucking or licking her nipples, he seemed content to let his lips just rest there. That’s when Alice realized that there was no lust behind his caresses. He was just going through the motions of sex without any real desire. But it didn’t mak
e sense to her. Alice could feel his erection pressed up against her leg. He couldn’t fake that. So why was he holding back? Alice thought that maybe he was shy or nervous. But when she tried to encourage him by moaning and squirming and stroking his penis, he pushed her hand away and whispered, “No. Don’t.”
Confused, Alice opened her mouth to ask why, but before she could get a word out, he smothered her words with a kiss. The kiss was unpleasantly firm and just as passionless as his caresses. When they parted, he nuzzled her neck and whispered into her ear. “Don’t talk. Just listen to me.”
That’s when Alice began to get frightened. Because instead of telling her all the nasty things that he wanted to do to her, like the other masters did, Master Grey moved his mouth even closer to her ear and whispered, “I am not going to have sex with you. I just want us to pretend. Can you pretend with me?”
Pretend to have sex? Alice wasn’t sure what Master Grey meant, but she nodded anyway. He was the master and she was his slave. She couldn’t tell him no even if she wanted to. Beneath the sheets she felt his hand gently tug on her thigh. She obediently parted her legs and Master Grey mounted her. Staring down at her with reassuring brown eyes, he reached beneath the sheets to guide himself into her. Alice tensed, expecting to be penetrated, but that familiar filling sensation never came. Instead, as he began to pump his hips, she felt his stiff penis gliding back and forth over her shaved pubic mound. Master Grey panted and grunted with each stroke as if he were fucking her, but he wasn’t. Was this some kind of kinky game he enjoyed?
“Come on. Pretend with me,” he whispered in her ear.
Alice did as she was told. She thrust her hips upward to match his rhythm and groaned and squirmed with mock pleasure. “Yes, master,” she moaned, doing her best to please him. “Yes, yes!” It occurred to Alice that, with their intertwined bodies concealed beneath the sheets, anyone watching would never suspect that they were only dry humping.
Alice was reminded of all the times that she had played hooky from high school with Ryan, the only boyfriend she’d ever had, and how they would make out in his bedroom all day until his mother came home from work. Alice would never let Ryan go all the way, but she remembered how exciting it was getting so close. Now, thinking back, Alice wished that she and Ryan had spent all those stolen afternoons doing it for real instead of wasting their precious time pretending. If only she had let Ryan take her virginity instead of telling him to wait until their prom night, a night that, for Alice, would never come. Then she would know what it felt like to sleep with a man she cared about. Then at least she would have the memories of truly making love.
Alice felt Master Grey’s body stiffen, then begin to shudder as he pretended to climax. The knowing look on his face urged Alice to continue playing along, so she gasped and squealed and arched her back, riding out an imaginary orgasmic rush. Then Master Grey rolled off her, and whatever they had just done was over.
As Alice continued to watch Master Grey lying there beside her, she studied his face. His eyes were closed and his breathing had slowed but he wasn’t asleep. He didn’t appear angry or displeased. Actually, he looked relieved. But not in the way men usually looked in that quiet moment between orgasm and drifting off to sleep. Master Grey had the look of someone who had just completed a stressful task and was happy that it was finally over. This confused Alice even more. If Master Grey didn’t want to have sex with her, why pretend to? For a moment she considered that perhaps he was gay and wanted to keep his secret from the other men, but then she remembered his erection. Would a gay man react that way to the sight of a naked woman? She didn’t think so. Besides, everyone knew that one of the other masters slept with men, so there would be no reason for Master Grey to hide his homosexuality. The more Alice thought about Master Grey, the more confused and worried she became. She just hoped that he was as nice as he appeared and that his strange idea of sex wouldn’t lead to her being punished.
Finally Master Grey opened his eyes and looked at her. For a moment his face was unreadable. Alice smiled nervously at him. “Did I please you, master?”
He smiled and nodded. “Yes, Alice, you did very well.”
Alice felt a wave of relief wash over her. She cuddled closer and laid her head on his chest.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“From, master?”
“Before you were brought here.”
Alice tilted her head and regarded him with a puzzled expression. Why was he asking her this? Was he testing her? “There is no ‘before here,’” Alice said with an edge of fear in her voice. “Master Lennox doesn’t allow us to talk about that. Please don’t make me answer that, master. Please.”
“Okay. It’s all right. Forget I asked you.”
“Thank you, master.”
As Alice watched Master Grey return his gaze to the ceiling, she glimpsed a touch of sadness in his eyes; but just as suddenly as the emotion appeared, he pushed it back and donned a neutral expression. Alice nestled her head back onto his chest. She listened to the steady pounding of his heart. She felt his hand gently stroking her hair. She thought about that fleeting sympathetic look in his eyes. Now she was certain that there was something different about Master Grey. He was nothing like her other masters.
CHAPTER 49
Kwame was keeping himself occupied with the pastime he loved most, reading. He was seated up in bed, huddled close to the bedside lamp, the only light in the room, reading an old book that he had found in Dr. Kasim’s library. One of Kwame’s favorite things about Forty Acres was that whenever he visited, he had access to Dr. Kasim’s extraordinary library. Whenever he traveled, Kwame had visited many libraries with collections devoted to the literature, culture, and history of people of African descent, and although most of these libraries, either government-run or owned by major universities, possessed vastly larger collections, Kwame had yet to find one that came close to the depth and rarity of the volumes found on Dr. Kasim’s shelves. Some of Dr. Kasim’s books were so old and rare that Kwame could not find even a mention of them recorded anywhere else.
When Kwame was still a fine arts major at Howard University, he had gone through a phase in which all he was interested in reading were slave narratives. He became fascinated by the firsthand accounts of everyday slave life to the point of obsession. He sought out and absorbed every slave narrative that he could get his hands on, and in the process, he became something of an authority on the subject. For a time Kwame even considered writing a scholarly book on the topic himself, but the demands of nurturing a career in advertising soon overshadowed that ambition.
In all of Kwame’s reading and research on the subject of slave narratives, he had never come across any mention of the book that he was now reading. The binding appeared ancient, its corners and spine threadbare, but somehow the battered tome still held together. The author was a girl named Emma who was born into slavery in the early 1800s. She was sold away from her family as a teenager and purchased by a man three times her age to work not in his cotton fields or in his kitchen but in his bedroom. The narrative describes a decade of continuous rape and beatings, recounting how her master cruelly loaned her out to other white men for their sick pleasures. Emma’s story was tragic and gut-wrenching, and as Kwame read, he could feel his emotions churning.
That’s what had drawn Kwame to slave narratives. Unlike the literature taught in most schools, which was concerned almost exclusively with the triumphs and tragedies of white people, slave narratives were stories about people who looked like him. These were stories with consequences that reached up through the tangle of time and history and influenced the person that he was today. When Kwame read the narratives, he felt as if he were reading about his own family members, a great-great-grandmother or -grandfather, or maybe a distant cousin. These tragic stories stirred Kwame’s emotions like nothing he had ever read or seen before, often making him laugh and cry and sink with sadness—
but mostly making him angry. By the time Kwame had graduated from Howard and started taking his first steps into the world of advertising, he had grown to hate the Caucasian race with a passion.
It was this simmering hatred that ultimately led Kwame to his great success. Fresh out of college and radiating talent, he easily landed an entry position at Miller and Cline Communications, a major advertising company located in Chicago. Kwame hated it there from the first day he arrived. The company was lily-white. He, two Asian employees, and the janitorial staff were the only nonwhites in the entire building. MCC had a good reason for hiring Kwame, their first black employee in the company’s fifty-three-year history. They had decided to go after the growing demographic of African American consumers and thought it would be wise to have a black face along for their presentations. Kwame remained there only three weeks. Long enough to study as well as Xerox every bit of market research MCC had done on the black consumer and fulfill his two weeks’ notice. Armed with a few facts and figures and the determination not to become enslaved to the white man’s paycheck, Kwame opened up his own ad agency. An agency owned and run by blacks that would focus exclusively on reaching the black consumer. Friends and family told him he was unprepared, even crazy, and they were right. He wasn’t even close to being ready to run his own business and it was insane to open up an office without even enough money to pay the next month’s rent. But that didn’t stop him. Instead Kwame used his desperation as fuel to drive him forward. He went door-to-door to the big corporations pitching his firm’s unique perspective and demanding that they give him a chance, until someone finally did. In less than one month Kwame’s storefront agency had landed its first major account and it had never stopped growing since.
Kwame was riding high as the CEO of one of the most profitable ad agencies in the world when his friend and mentor Solomon Aarons first whispered Dr. Kasim’s name into his ear. Kwame was intrigued by the doctor’s unique perspective on race relations and became a full-fledged member of Forty Acres without a moment’s hesitation. Kwame’s only regret about Dr. Kasim’s hidden refuge was that because it had to remain a closely guarded secret, not every black man could benefit from the uniquely freeing experience of owning white slaves. Kwame often fantasized about creating a nationwide ad campaign for Forty Acres. It wouldn’t take much. A few quick reenacted scenes of enslaved Africans being hunted, chained, whipped; then cut to a graphic of a black man holding a white man in shackles with the simple slogan: “Now it’s our turn.” Every time Kwame entertained this fantasy, it brought a smile to his face.
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