The Best Laid Plans

by Troy Conway

  This powder she began patting onto my swollen flesh. I felt the effect almost at once. The red stuff stung. The combination of stinging powder on my manhood, the bamboo rod beating me where I was most sensitive, and the knout cutting into my buttocks, drove me crazy. I thumped my body against the Saint Andrew’s cross, I fought the manacles until my wrists and ankles were bleeding.

  Somewhere, a woman was sobbing. It took me several minutes to realize that her sobs were coming over the intercom. Whoever was watching what the five girls were doing to me was becoming affected by it.

  The room began to reel before my eyes. I had reached my pain tolerance level, all right; I was getting dizzy. Everything was going around and around.

  But no. It was the X that was moving. A mechanism was tilting it parallel to the floor with me still fastened to it. I lay on my back now—they must have freed and turned me over while I was unconscious—the manacles no longer pained me since my weight was supported by the crossbars.

  Nobody was whipping me any more.

  The cross was being lowered until I lay about two feet above the floor. My five tormentors came to stand on both sides of me, with one of them directly between my thighs. Each girl held a rattan fly-swatter. They began beating on my legs, the girl between my thighs was using her swatter against my genitals. Slowly the swatters worked, then faster.

  I would not beg. I bit into my lower lip with my teeth until I drew blood but I would not beg. My body tried to squirm but the strength was all gone out of it.

  Then the fly-swatters were tossed aside and the girls knelt down. They began kissing me, one my lips, another my throat, a third my nipples, a fourth my belly, the fifth my private parts. I could smell their perfumed flesh, the musky odors of their excited femininities. The hands and lips adoring my manhood was an added aggravation.

  I could not help it. My lips parted, I shouted out an unintelligible sound that was a combination bellow of pure pain and a cry of unsatisfied lust. Never in my memory was my flesh so desirous of sexual satisfaction. The girls were rubbing their swollen breasts against me, leaning over me, their pretty faces smiling down at me in the lewd grin of the excited female with a man to play with, to arouse and refuse.

  I thought, Is every woman HECATE employee a man-hater? Do they all get their kicks from teasing a male until he goes crazy with frustration? My body was bouncing up and down, my straining excitement was a monstrous mace demanding relief.

  From somewhere far away a bell sounded.

  The five females drew back, away from me. Now, I could see sexual tension in their faces, and I understood that they would have liked nothing better than to throw themselves on me and take the manhood that was almost bursting with its need. The naked girls padded toward their doorways, their nude behinds jiggling as if in protest to the electrodes in their brains which they were obeying.

  The five doors slid shut.

  I was alone in a rage of lust, in an agony of frustration. It was the worst of all the tortures.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I was in hell. My body ached, it hurt, it demanded fleshly satisfactions. I could only lie there and suffer.

  If I ever got out of this fix, I would kill every HECATE man or woman I could lay hands on. They were not testing me, they were torturing me to death because I was a Coxeman. My body flopped this way and that to seek respite from the torment in which I lay bathed.

  “Professor Damon!” a voice cried.

  “I hear you—damn you!” I growled.

  A voice chuckled, “We must apologize, Professor. Your test turned out completely differently than we had anticipated. We have been unfair to you but we will try to make amends.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” I yelled. “Make them, make them! I’m dying, dammit.”

  Again came that soft chuckle. “Observe, Professor!”

  The pain was gone. Intense pleasure had taken its place. I lay there in a spell of unendurable delight. My pleasure centers were being affected by the radio commands and electrical impulses penetrating into my brain. I was not a human being, I was a guinea pig being rewarded for a good performance, as the clever monkey gets the banana, I was getting my pleasure centers titillated. I lay there in a semi-trance, a beatific grin on my face, and reveled in ecstasy.

  I do not know how long I lay insensible to anything but a mental nectar which I drank as a thirsty man gulps water. I could not get enough of it. I cared about nothing but the joys I was receiving. Five hours? Ten hours? I felt like a good Mohammedan who had died and gone to the houri heaven Mahomet had promised to his followers.

  Even such things must end.

  A doorway slid open and a nurse entered the room. Gently she unfastened the manacles and quite tenderly she assisted me off the wooden crossbars.

  I said, “Come on back to my room with me, pussycat. I’m in the mood for love, as the song says.”

  “Later,” she said, smiling and taking my left arm and most of my weight across her shoulders. “Your body’s been through a lot today. We mustn’t strain it.”

  I stared down at myself. I no longer had any excitement in my loins, I felt numb there, as if I were a eunuch. I told myself that maybe my pleasure centers needed a rest. No sense in overdoing things.

  The nurse was joined by a male orderly on another floor and side by side they got me back to my little cubicle and into bed.

  “Sleep,” said the nurse bending over to kiss my forehead.

  I wanted to grab her wrist and pull her under the covers. I was too weak for that, so I did what she told me. I slept.

  Twelve hours later, a different nurse was in my room. She was busy setting out a Pierre Cardin suit, a Hathaway shirt, English boots and silk underwear, all for me. As she moved around, I watched her unbrassiered breasts shake and bounce. I still felt nothing except annoyance.

  “Are you sure they didn’t castrate me?” I worried.

  Her laughter was spontaneous. “HECATE never castrates its males. HECATE never knows when their maleness will be needed in the interests of HECATE.”

  “Well, that’s good to know.”

  I threw back the covers and started out of bed. The nurse smiled gently. “You’re on a case right now. You have no time—nor ability—for anything else.”

  “You don’t know me,” I bragged, but apparently she did. I hugged and kissed her, but it was like hugging and kissing a straw woman.

  “All right, all right, I’m still feeling the effects,” I admitted. “What do I do now?”

  “You go to the office.”

  I got dressed and went to the office. Yves Roger-Viollet was sitting behind a desk, waiting for me. Cyrano Matelot was not in sight. Doctor Roger-Viollet got to his feet, came around the corner of the desk and shook hands with me.

  “You are going to be a most welcome addition to our organization, Professor,” he told me.

  “I seem to be in a blue funk, sexually. What’d you do to me? And when do I go back to normal?”

  “Just as soon as you kill a man.”

  “Good. Let’s get it over with so I can go back to doing my thing. It isn’t any fun being like this.”

  “At once, Professor. At once.”

  Roger-Viollet reached into a desk drawer and brought out a Luger automatic. It was of blued steel, a perfect specimen of the handiwork of Hugo Borchart and Georg Luger. The automatic Roger-Viollet was handing to me across his desk was the 1917 model, fitted with the eight-inch barrel used by machine gunners in the first World War.

  I took the gun into my hand, then glanced inquiringly at the HECATE leader. “Who do I use this on? And when?”

  Roger-Viollet said, “The man you are to assassinate is Henri Planget.”

  “The NATO man?” I asked incredulously.

  “Exactly! He has angered HECATE by working with the North American Treaty Organization despite our repeated warnings to back out. His death will teach other malcontents a lesson.”

  I nodded. It made no nevermind to me who they pic
ked out as my victim, I did not intend to kill him anyhow. So I let Yves Roger-Viollet go on saying his piece without interruption.

  “There is to be a summit meeting of NATO brass in Brussels. Planget will fly there to attend. He is staying now at the Chateau Frontenac on the Rue Pierre Char-ron. It is best he die in Paris, walking out of his hotel.” “And the manner and means of the assassination?”

  Yves Roger-Viollet waved a casual hand. “These details I leave to you. You will naturally make certain that you are not captured. We don’t want to lose any of our operatives. Since you are an experienced secret agent, you will have your own modus operandi. HECATE never interferes with such personal idiosyncrasies. We believe an experienced man like yourself will work better if he is more or less on his own.”

  This was a relief. It meant that I would not be under constant surveillance by HECATE while carrying out my job. I could come and go as I liked, I could pretend to carry out the assassination assignment, but never go through with it. I heaved a sigh of relief as I accepted a brown leather shoulder holster and strap from the doctor. I removed the Pierre Cardin jacket, fitted on the holster, slid the Luger into it. I put the coat on, shifted my shoulders for a better fit, and announced I was ready to travel.

  Yves Roger-Viollet smiled his approval at my businesslike manner. He lifted out a packet of ten-thousand-franc notes, tossing them to me. “For your expenses. We treat our agents to the finest standard of living known. They never want for anything. As an instance, you’ll find a Lamborghini Miura outfitted and ready for your use, close by the front gate. Until further notice, the Miura is your own.”

  All my clothes were still at the Plaza Athénée. All I need do is drive the Lamborghini Miura from Dampierre through Versailles into Paris. If anyone asked, I could say I’d been on a few days holiday in the countryside. Roger-Viollet assured me no one would bother asking, that visitors came and went, and the hotel staffs in Paris were trained never to ask embarrassing questions.

  Half an hour later I was in the Lamborghini Miura doing sixty miles an hour along the highway. The Miura was fire-engine red, boasted a twelve-cylinder rear engine and was capable of a hundred and eighty miles an hour. It was a beautiful machine. I told myself it was just the sort of thing a secret agent should drive while on assignment.

  The car drew whistles of appreciation through the traffic-crowded streets. I sat behind the wheel as if born to such luxury. If I had to get out of town in a hurry, this brain-child of Italian engineer Ferruccio Lamborghini was the perfect getaway vehicle.

  I tossed the hotel doorman a hundred-franc note and told him to stable my car in the garage. He took the car himself, rather than giving it to an assistant.

  Halfway through the lobby of the Plaza Athénée, I felt eyes devouring my body. I let my eyeballs roll around for a while until I located a woman in a black satin cocktail gown, with a rope of pearls at her soft throat and a pearl bracelet onher arm, seated with crossed legs, smiling invitingly in my direction.

  I sidestepped a bellhop and found myself in front of the lady in pearls. I bowed from the waist. “Countess! How good to see you again! It’s been such a long time since the Grand Bahama party.”

  Her smile was sly, her blue eyes narrowed under false black eyelashes. “You are generous, m’sieu,” she breathed, extending her ringed hand for me to kiss. “I wondered whether you would know me.”

  “How could I not know you?” I replied, wondering who the hell she was. She knew me, I felt intuitively that she did, and moments later she confirmed my notion when she rose and took my arm.

  “We shall dine together, M’sieu Damon. And after that, you shall entertain me,” she announced, letting my thigh know the skirted softness of her own.

  She was enveloped by Chanel perfume, and the cocktail gown was cut low between her breasts so an onlooker—and I onlooked, believe me—could see the pale inner slopes of plump, quivering breasts. She was sex appeal ne plus ultra, a walking invitation to venery.

  I was determined to accept her invitation as a kind of reward to myself for having passed the HECATE tests so successfully. I guided her toward the dining room, I ordered her pheasant under glass, I wined her on Sazerac cocktails.

  The liquor did nothing for me. My companion was just as attractive as she had been when I crossed the lobby, but no more so. I did not engage in mentally undressing her, I did not reach out with a hand to toy with her fingers, I did not reach for her knee with mine. I did nothing at all. I was like a dead man.

  I told myself I was imagining things.

  This had never happened to me. If I were across a dinner table from a bedable female such as this Madame Margot Metayer, usually I was already half under the covers with her. And Mme. Metayer had beddytime play in mind. Her pointed pump caressed my ankle, slid up and down my shin. But I felt absolutely dead where it counts.

  Oh, I was entertaining enough—with my tongue. I talked of the Riviera, of the blue movies I had seen, of Capri and Miami Beach. I made her laugh, I made her full red mouth quiver in anticipation.

  But I was only half alive. I told myself not to worry, everything would turn out aces. I would be turned on as soon as I saw her without her dress.

  And yet—

  The memory of the nurse back at the HECATE Hospital worried me. I had not yanked her skirt up or pulled her into bed. Suppose HECATE had forbidden me any yack-yack until my job was over? I sat there, horrified. It could not be! Even HECATE would not be so tyrannical. And yet come to think of it, Roger-Viollet had said I would be a man as soon as I had killed Henri Planget. Could that be true?

  I would find out in a little while, however. Mme. Metayer was reaching for her suede pocketbook and her gloves. Soon we would be in an elevator, rising to my suite of rooms.

  I crowded her across the dining room, I brushed my loins against her girdled buttocks, hoping for some sign on life in my gonads. I stood close to her soft thigh as we waited for the elevator, gently moving my hips. Hidden by the people crowding in around us, I even ran my palm across her buttocks, down where the girdle did not reach.

  There was a secret little smile on her lips all this while, as if she dreamed of things to come. Once she drew her hand across my front, and frowned when she found I was as limp as a dish-rag.

  “Is anything wrong?” she murmured, penciled eyebrows arched.

  My smile was weak. “Of course not. I am—er—but recently out of the hospital, but I’m in perfect health.”

  Her enigmatic eyes regarded me. She let her ripe red mouth smile, and gave a little shake of her head. “I could not have been mistaken. At the hospital in Dampierre? In the maze with those girls, one after another, it was you?”

  The elevator halted, the doors slid back.

  Mme. Metayer and I walked along the thick carpeting. I asked, “How can you know about the maze test patterns? Are you one of the HECATE crowd.

  Her laughter was soft. “Mais non! I was a watcher, a voyeur. Myself and several other married ladies were given permission to watch and observe your reactions under certain stimuli. It was most entertaining.”

  A ringed hand patted mine. “It left me an insatiably lustful state. I hope you can take care of it.”

  I sure hoped I could. If I couldn’t, it meant—but I wouldn’t think of that awful possibility. She went by me with a swish of her rounded hips, a rustle of her slip, a flirtatious cocking of her penciled eyebrows. By this time, with all these indications of intimacy, I should have been in a state of rigid expectation, enjoying a merry-go-up. But I was still a dishrag.

  I caught Margot Metayer in my arms, I took her mouth between my lips and battened on it. Against my muscle-hardened body her large breasts and mounded belly made soft cradles that would have been stirring and arousing at any other time. I held the kiss for a long time.

  When we surfaced for air, her face was dark with suspicion. “They’ve worn you out, those girls!” Contemptuously she flicked a forefinger against my manhood. “You see? You are non sunt
—eunuchized!”

  I reminded myself I was a practicing sexologist, the founder of the League for Sexual Dynamics. It did me no good. I was eunuchized, as the woman said. I was no good to her, I was a flabby fancy. I knew who to blame, it was HECATE in command of my brain. My amygdala, to be specific, the seat of all sexual desire. Then I saw a glimmer of hope.

  I had a counter-stimulator sewn somewhere in my body. It sent out impulses that counteracted the impulses from the HECATE control room. All I had to do was concentrate. The HECATE impulses only impelled, they did not compel my actions.

  I grinned at Mme, Metayer, I lifted her in my arms and carried her about the room. “Non sunt, am I? I’ll show you how non sunt I am! Just get ready for the greatest ride you’ve ever had, pussycat.”

  I tossed her on the divan in the living room. Her black cocktail dress flew back to show her handsome legs in gun-metal stockings and the bare thighflesh above them, bisected by her garters.

  I knelt beside the divan, I kissed her soft thighs up and down, I licked them with my tongue. I became the proper philemaphile, someone who is very fond of kissing. I heard her cry out softly as she wriggled and writhed, letting her skirt slide back until I saw quite clearly that she wore no panties, just a black girdle that hid nothing from view except the tops of her plump buttocks and the lower curve of her belly.

  I kissed her upper thighs as she moaned and quivered. I knew what she wanted me to do, I had no objections, I have been a cunniphilmiast in the past, with attractive women, and I saw no reason to make an exception of Madame Metayer. I let my mouth rove sideways past her taut garter. Her flesh was perfumed, inviting.

  “Oui,” she gasped, letting her thighs widen. “Faire minette!”

  I faire minetted, putting every ounce of yearning into the play of lips and tongue. She was gasping, her head moving back and forth against the divan cushions. Her thighs were warm against my cheeks as she tightened them while her hand moved over my head caressingly.