Hard to know what to believe, these days, what was hokum, wishful thinking, hard science, pseudo-science, or just plain witchcraft. Added to the jumble in his head, and just made profiling people that much harder. Psych profiles depended in part on historical circumstances and the events and headline news helping to shape people’s psyches. But if the end result just made everyone shellshocked, that kind of took away from their uniqueness, subtracted from their profiles.
Piper breathed excitedly in response to the raised odds against him, instead of feeling intimidated. He seemed to come alive in the underdog role. Just what the doctor ordered for raising the gods within him, triggering whatever hero function lay dormant in the absence of sufficient provocation.
Iona said, as dryly as she could, though she was clearly marshaling her emotions, “I specialize in impossible-to-get-in and impossible-to-get-out scenarios. Art museums with elaborate deterrents. Private collections in the hands of the rich and famous with even more sophisticated anti-crime measures. Waltzing around security teams in excess of the kind of protection surrounding the President of the United States.”
“Why make it so hard on yourself?” Cliff asked. “It can’t just be the challenge. You could increase the odds against yourself without making things entirely impossible. You need to take a graduated approach to your work like me and Piper, build to the big wins, one skill level at a time.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing,” she said. “Though, maybe I am pushing too hard too fast.” She set down her glass for emphasis. “Maybe we all are.” Piper wondered if that was double or triple entendre.
Cliff scratched the top of the dog’s head. “If you are taking a graduated approach, I have to ask myself, what security teams are even larger and more impossible to get around than the ones on your list?”
Iona squirmed on the bar stool she had jumped on to conceal the fact that she was buckling at the knees.
Cliff said, “The only people harder to get at are petty dictators and second world drug lords with entire armies surrounding them.”
“Bingo!” Piper said, reading past Iona’s poker face. She was doing a fairly professional job of hiding her tells, just not good enough. Cliff was right; she needed to up her game if she was going to make it to her intended mark. Part of her was squirming with delight at getting a chance to do just that in their presence.
“What do you mean, bingo?” Cliff said, still not getting it.
Piper explained, “She aims to destabilize whole regions of the globe.” That was just a stab in the dark, but her adjusting her earring casually, as if they couldn’t be further from the truth, told him all he needed to know. That and her relaxing out of her anxiety altogether, to throw them further off the mark. She was taking her game up a level in their presence, in real time, responding to Piper’s ability to see past her tells.
This chick was going to be a whole lot of fun.
Piper took a seat on the stool next to Iona, played with her hair. “She knows she’s over her head. She’s not a professional killer, and she’s no politician, either. Hard to calculate who will replace the dictator or crime lord she takes out, if it’ll really change things at all. For that she needs a profiler, not just a trained killer. Would explain why she drew us two, particularly, into her life, in support of your universal magnetism theory, Cliff.”
She laughed. “You two need to be writing Alistair Maclean novels. Now that he’s passed, there’s a definite void to fill. The real world is just too dull for both of you. You have me believing what you’re saying not because it’s true, but because it beats what drama I could squeeze out of life.”
“Oh, it’s true,” Piper said. “Want to know how I know?”
Iona poured herself another drink from the flask with rock-solid hands.
Piper flipped her hair behind her shoulders. “If you showed any more cool under pressure, you might actually be convincing. But you don’t want us to lose interest in you and slip away in the night, do you?”
He wiped the last of the smudged makeup off her face. “You’re better than ever just being in our presence, better at hiding your tells, at reading people, at reacting in real time when there are numerous parties to defuse in one room.” He rubbed her cheek bones to restore the blush. “Best of all, you’re tickled pink by Cliff’s idea that our unconscious desires could hold more sway over our future than our conscious desires. Means that, by attracting us into your life, you’re closer to reaching your target than you ever imagined.”
She smiled without saying anything.
“Hey, even I could read that one,” Cliff said excitedly. “She’s getting all hot and bothered. I have to admit, that’s pretty impressive profiling.”
Cliff and Piper started chuckling and couldn’t stop. Her eyes watered from all the dammed up emotions finally spilling over. And she had to stifle a smile next. “Don’t be so satisfied with yourselves,” she said. “We haven’t actually accomplished anything yet.”
Piper’s mood, riding as high as a kite, took a sudden nosedive. Cliff picked up on it. “What’s got under your skin now?” Cliff asked. “I swear I’m beginning to think you have blood sugar problems.”
“This daring-do is all well and good—but what about building character?” Piper said. He poured himself a drink as he pondered his own question. Cliff’s face suggested he could have used a segue to help him get around this latest bend of the conversation.
“Isn’t character what you build when you fail?” Cliff said. “Who can afford to fail? You get rewarded in this economy for being the best at what you do. God help everyone else.”
“God save everyone else.” Piper snorted. “Ever occur to you that maybe that’s what they mean by the last shall be first?”
“Leave it to you to profile God.” Cliff’s tone had turned pissy for Piper spoiling the mood.
Piper thought about it. “Perhaps you’re right. Maybe character only emerges in the face of excellence. Everything else is just loser psychology.”
“There you go,” Cliff said. “You do what you’re best at and leave the big picture to God. He’s about the only one qualified to handle that.” Cliff poured Piper his drink, suddenly intent on him taking it, and handed him the glass. “Besides, you become such a towering success only after a long line of failures and picking yourself up faster and better than everyone else, learning more from failure than the next guy, being bold enough not just to succeed, but to fail. So we’re both right in our own way, yin and yang, as always, huh?”
Piper hesitated. Then took the glass and tinkled it against the one Cliff was holding up to him. “As always.”
He was glad neither of them could read him as well as he could read them. In truth, Piper wasn’t sure at all about the path they were on and where it was leading him. He wasn’t sure he liked the people they were becoming.
FIFTEEN
Piper gazed upstairs, unnerved by the dead silence. “No one makes love that quietly. They’ve gone stealth on me to conceal how long they’ve been going at it. Bastards. Tell me I’m wrong.” Sasha barked to suggest he wasn’t wrong.
Returning his attention to the TV on low, Piper listened to the news channel with the report on Syria’s incumbent president, Bashar Al-Assad. Surely there had to be some alternate reality out there where this bastard had been assassinated already. What did he have to do to find his way into that timeline? He supposed his mind had segued into sci-fi scenarios per the Popular Science magazine in his hand. It featured a device promising to turn the entire multi-verse into a kind of Disneyland.
Any outlandish idea percolating through his mind was already being deeply investigated by one or more teams somewhere in the world, not only intent to embrace the preposterous, but to go from the dream stage to the engineering stage in order to beat the next guy to market.
Piper listened with impatience as the newscaster attempted to explain the nature of Middle Eastern reality to him. From prettily parted lips, the Italian spokeswoman
said, “On 20 June 2011, in response to the demands of protesters and foreign pressure, al-Assad promised a national dialogue involving movement toward reform, new parliamentary elections, and greater freedoms. It has been the failure to live up to those promises…”4
“Yada-yada.” Piper changed the channel. “Well, that’s definitely one to look into for Mission Impossible.”
He muted the news broadcast and glanced upstairs at the ongoing route of silence against his self-esteem. He swore he heard whispers coming at him from all angles, as if ghosts inhabited the house. Proof the two lovers were straining to keep things on the down low from him. “Bastards.”
He unmuted the TV. The Italian newscaster, looking one hundred percent Vietnamese, and speaking English with a better Italian accent than Piper could fashion, said, “North Korea is a ‘hereditary dictatorship’ with a pronounced cult of personality organized around Kim Jong-un.”5 The news report went on to characterize the atrocities of North Korea’s supreme overlord. Apparently most every country came with one. Business was likely to remain brisk if he, Cliff, and Iona stuck to the path they were on.
Piper muted the broadcast to return to his surveillance of Cliff and Iona’s lovemaking upstairs. “You hear anything, Sasha?” The Bullmastiff barked. “That was a yes, right? Bark once for yes, twice for no.” The dog barked once. Piper sighed. He shouted upstairs for their benefit. “Bastards! You aren’t fooling anybody.”
He continued to watch the muted broadcast of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. “My vote is for taking out this guy first. We need to rack up what points we can towards the preservation of our souls.”
A noise on the terrace caught his attention.
A male huskie was determined to get over the railing to get at their Bullmastiff. Piper only now realized the bitch was in heat; a couple telltale drops of blood spotted the rug. “I’ll be damned. He’s coming a courting, Sasha. What do you say to that?” The dog watched silently as the huskie—having finally cleared the railing, after a very close call that threatened to send it cascading down the cliff—charged the sliding glass door to the terrace.
The dog came sailing at her through shattering glass, still airborne, barking and whining. Annoyed by his efforts to mount her despite warning yaps, Sasha stood, took the dog by the neck. In one svelte maneuver, she whipped her neck, sent him flying over the balcony and down the hillside.
Piper, jaw hanging open, trudged to the terrace to confirm the dog’s fate. The huskie was sprawled a little too flexibly over a rock, its spine clearly broken. “Sasha, you could have let him down gently.” Sasha, leaning against the railing with her forepaws to see over, emitted a whiny yap to indicate, “I tried.”
“You’re awfully strong,” Piper said. “And large, too, come to think of it, almost like the Old English Mastiffs you were bred off of. Someone toyed with your genetics, didn’t they?” The dog barked in the affirmative. Piper shook his head disapprovingly. “All this best-in-class shit is going to leave us with a world full of snobs with their noses so turned up they’ll snap their own necks.”
He returned to the house, and to his snooping on Cliff and Iona upstairs, in between sweeping up the mess. Frustrated, he let the subject of the two paramours go.
Setting aside the broom, he asked, “Where does she keep her laptop?” Sasha eyed him like she might not answer. “I need to get in some research on these world-killers. There’s so many of them and so little time.”
Sasha brought him the laptop.
Piper wiped away the drool from the casing.
He opened the computer and Googled Kim Jong-un. “Let’s see what the internet has to say about our friend. TV news is so shallow.”
***
“Ainsley folded his legs like this,” Iona said. Cliff adjusted his dick to keep it from being squeezed to death in the vice grip of his interlaced thighs, then crossed his legs to suit. He winced uncomfortably until he could settle into the position more naturally.
“Why do I have to be Ainsley? He was the more persnickety one,” Cliff said. “I’m the butcher of the two of us.”
Piper took the remark on the chin, choked off a grin. “Me thinks he doth protest too much.”
“Yeah, screw you and this dog too,” Cliff blurted.
“The role play will do you good,” Piper explained.
Cliff said, “If that’s your concession, I accept your peace offering.”
Iona just smiled then continued her makeover seminar. “When you pick up the magazine, get a little bouncy with the top leg, as if a doctor was hitting you with a mallet on the knee. That’s it. And play up the self-conscious way Ainsley used to do everything, as if he was aware of being watched.” Cliff shifted poses, folding his leg under him as he read the magazine, making sure to look every bit as GQ in this position. He attended his hair with a brush of his hand.
“That’s it.” Iona sounded pleased. “He was a damned handsome man, so he got used to eyes always being on him, got to feed off it. I think that’s the prissiness you’re talking about; his feminine side came out in his showiness.”
Cliff shifted poses on the couch again to give his adoring fans another angle on him, stretching out on the sofa this time as he turned the pages of the magazine. He was getting a feel for the role.
“I think he liked sending out mixed signals to encourage both sexes to hit on him,” Iona said. “The more he had to say no, the bigger his ego.”
“She’s not so bad at this profiling stuff, Piper. Maybe I’ll throw you over for her.”
Piper took the dig hard, and noticed how Iona just smiled casually. She was evidently working hard to drive a wedge between him and Cliff. The question was, was he playing along for her sake, or for Piper’s sake?
“One more time,” Iona said. “Not bad, but still a little too much like a professional hit man trying to convince everyone he’s the dentist.”
Cliff did a take two on the debonair Ainsley.
He ambled about the room, checked out the magazines by bending down to make sure he stuck his ass out. He viewed the pictures on the walls as if he were a better sculptural exhibit, proven by one pose after another. As if waiting restlessly at the doctor’s office, he flopped down on the couch to leaf through the magazine, strike some dashing poses on the couch, playing to the hungry eyes in the room. “How’s that?” Cliff asked.
“Good enough to try it in public, see if the added pressure throws you off your game,” Iona said.
Cliff chuckled, probably thinking about Interpol that was chasing after them, Piper thought, and appreciative for the help with the chameleon makeovers. They hadn’t exactly come clean with just how much trouble they were in with the law and why, the backwards psychology behind it. Everything in good time, Piper supposed. Nothing can kill a relationship faster than poorly timed disclosures. There were already too many shocking revelations clogging the switching networks in their brains in the squeeze to get through. No surprise they were coming through in no particular order.
Iona shifted her attention to Piper. “Your turn.”
Piper sucked down another drink, concerned over how much he was reaching for the alcohol to numb the pain and dull the awareness, considering their agenda to best themselves from one round to the next. “I’m glad you took the time to take in Augustin and Ainsley this well. I have to admit, we rushed our assessments of both men in an effort to crawl out of our own skins.”
Iona did some seductive posing all her own in an effort to hold the boys’ attention. “Augustin’s body language is easy to construe as more masculine, but it was mostly more controlling. Down to the way he crumpled a paper towel in his hands after wiping off in the bathroom. Wadding it into a ball was his way of bending the future to his will.”
“Nice.” Piper nodded, suddenly more turned on by Iona’s profiling than threatened. The little detail regarding Augustin’s body language was not something he’d picked up on at the time. He tore the paper towel out of the dispenser mounted on the wall above the b
ar. Rubbing his hands with the paper as a car mechanic might, he refused to take note of the abrasiveness of the paper against his skin. He wadded the sheet into a ball when he was done drying, and tossed it into the pail, like shooting a basket for good measure, adding to the need to control the future with yet one more symbolic gesture.
“Excellent.” Iona beamed. “You’re a faster learner than your friend.”
Piper silently applauded her ongoing campaign to come between him and Cliff, noticing Cliff took that comment like a punch to the side. He clamped down on his grin so as not to be so obvious.
“Don’t be afraid to overdo it,” Iona coached. “Augustin was forever broadcasting his ability to bend the future to his will with the smallest of gestures.”
“Figures he’d play this part better,” Cliff said cattily. “An insecure man always has more to prove.”
Iona corrected him. “More salesmanship than lack of confidence.” She sauntered over to the coffee table and reached for the cigar box, held it open to Piper. Essentially giving him another prop to play with. Using her sexy body language the whole time to seduce both boys.
She watched approvingly as Piper bit off the end of the cigar with the trimmer, acrobatically toyed with it to challenge fate for control. “He was forever working his audience,” she said, “selling them on his uncanny ability to predict the future, thus incentivizing them to invest more in his wild speculative bids than they otherwise might have.” When Piper blew smoke rings that drifted longer than they should have, she smiled. “These guys have a healthy dose of gamblers’ willingness to believe in omens, superstitions, jujus, and the rest of the pre-rational pantheon. They’ll do anything to tip the scales in their favor, and mitigate the healthy anxieties they should have over what they’re doing, considering how much money and the people’s futures they’re playing with. Like invest in a man who can make smoke rings last a lot longer than they should.”
Piper smiled, scooched beside Cliff a little too close, invading his personal space. Then he threw his feet up on the glass coffee table, ignoring its engineering limitations, and unafraid of leaving marks with the heels of his shoes. More determination to enforce his will on circumstances, and then to prove his decisions were not miscalculated. Cliff had not moved away from him, despite looking slightly amused. And the coffee table hadn’t cracked, despite the force applied by his legs. “That’s it,” Iona said, reading his body language. “Now, just stir in the casual chitchat of financial futures.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 95
