The Best Laid Plans

by Troy Conway

  After that it was apple pie with ice cream. She put herself out like a carpet, at my complete disposal. I went from cellar to attic space in the hospital, I met doctors and nurses and interns. The hospital itself is run quite legally and aboveboard, except for the operations involving the implanting of the radio stimulators. Those took place in the new wing of the second floor.

  During those moments when we were alone, I found opportunities to draw the blonde nurse, whose name was Jeannette Lons, into empty rooms, to kiss her pouting lips with darting tongue and assess the curves of her body with wandering hands. I found out she wore a brassiere to hold in her C-cup shapes and a garterbelt to hold up her nylon stockings.

  “We could lock the door of an unused room,” she challenged,

  “Later, pussycat. I want to see the other unit.”

  The back of her hand brushed my front. “You’ll lose it. I don’t want that to happen.”

  “It won’t. You’ll find that abstinence, for a brief period, will make the hard grow fonder.”

  “Oooh,” she half-giggled, “you made a funny.”

  We went all over HECATE territory, through the maze, which I discovered was quite a layout, with machinery hidden inside the partitioned walls that could cause ail kinds of accidents and oddments to happen in the maze rooms themselves. Those walls could blaze with blinding light, with heat, they could form psychedelic patterns of color combinations that could make a man so dizzy he would fall down. They could even grow frigid, turning the maze rooms into refrigerators. HECATE must have spent a fortune on this labyrinth.

  The heart of this murder maze was up above, in a combination control and observation booth. Here were the glittering metallic panels fitted with the levers, dials, studs and buttons that controlled and governed the actions of the HECATE agents, sending out their radio directions to the control buttons inset in their heads. It was a large room, there were chairs for any onlookers invited to witness the testing of a candidate. Like diplomats’ wives, especially one named Margot Metayer.

  “Sometimes a man is executed in the maze,” Jeannette murmured. “When an agent fails his assignments too often, or needs a lesson in discipline, he’s put in here. Nobody fails HECATE very often. Only one man was executed. He was roasted to death. He took two days to die, they did it so skillfully. He was screaming in pain all that time. We were all forced to watch.

  She shuddered. “I’ll never forget it. Never!”

  I thought about what she had said. If I did not fulfill my next assignment, they might do that to me. It was not a nice thought. I felt like puking.

  To take my mind off unpleasantness, I ran my palm down the blonde nurse’s back to her behind. I toyed with her cheeks for a few minutes, until she was wriggling her thighs together.

  “I guess I’ve seen it all,” I murmured, kissing her soft throat. “Except for the way in or out. The private way, the HECATE way.”

  Her eyes got misty as she turned her head so my lips could move down into the vee of her white, starched uniform. “There isn’t any. Or if there is, they don’t tell us nurses. The front gateway is the only way I know.”

  She was telling the truth, I was positive. There had to be a private way in or out. But maybe they didn’t tell the nurses.

  She breathed, “However, I myself possess a private way.”

  “I am going to find that out for myself, my little pussycat.”

  She turned, clamped an arm about me and spread her lips over mine. For a moment we wedged together, grinding bellies. There was a heat in her dying to explode, as there was in me, I found, responding to her savagery. My fingers clamped in her soft buttocks, I lifted her up by her behind and ground her against me.

  She sobbed and whimpered; she threw back her head and stared blindly at the ceiling, gasping. This one was a volcano rumbling to overflow, deep inside. In a moment, her juices would be spewing forth as Vesuvius erupted with its lavas.

  I told myself it would be cruelty to wait. If I had to cement a friendship, if I must get to know my fellow worker, there was no time like the present. Besides, if Jeannette Lons were to go for me and my love-making, I would have made an ally inside the HECATE curtain.

  I caught her tongue between my teeth. I bent down, drawing her after me, still gripping her tongue. My hands went to her stockinged thighs under her short skirt. As I drew my palms along her stockinged thighs up to bare flesh, my wrists raised her skirt.

  My fingers held her nude buttocks.

  My knees were bent in a crouching position. “Step on my knees,” I whispered, letting go her tongue. I felt her weight add itself to my own. My leg muscles bulged.

  “Squat!” I rasped, hastily baring my manhood.

  She squatted, sliding herself onto me.

  This was not a posture to recommend for general use. But my body was physically fit, I was in perfect condition for fight or frolic, so it added piquancy to a situation that had threatened to get sloppy. My hands held her behind, supporting her weight, her own legs against mine gave further support. This way, should there be an interruption, all Jeannette had to do was dismount and her skirt would fall into place. Now if only I had a chair under me.

  She was twisting her hips in a rotary motion, making little circles. Her breath was a bellows in the air, thick and heavy. Slowly, so as not to unbalance her, I backed up, with my blonde nurse riding me.

  “I’ve never—tried anything like—” she sobbed.

  “I’m an expert in this sort of thing,” I reminded her. “I know ways and means from all over the world, which I teach my L.S.D. pupils.”

  She gasped, squirming. “America! What a land! Do they—really—teach this in—in your country?”

  I felt a chair with the backs of my straining legs. I lowered myself, at the same time easing her shoes off my lower thighs. Her heels had been digging into me, but the pain had been a kind of algolagnic thing, where it became almost pleasure. Now straddling my thighs, her feet were on the floor and she could raise and lower herself like an erotic elevator.

  She went on and on, sobbing and moaning, tightening herself about me, hips jerking spasmodically from time to time. Once her eyes opened to stare blindly at me, and I thought I could detect tears of sheer delight behind her lashes.

  I guess we were just lucky. Nobody walked into the control room while we were there, and my watch said we had been at it for over an hour. In that time, Jeannette Lons became my sexual slave. I brought her to more than a dozen orgasms. She was so limp when she was done that she lay against me, incapable of moving.

  I had to lift her off, help her stand.

  “Claudette didn’t know the half of it,” she whispered. “You’re a god, Professor. A human Priapus. But I guess a lot of women have told you that.”

  “You’re just flattering me,” I said, grinning, “but I love it. Here, let me help you pull your uniform down—there.”

  “No, I mean it. I’d do anything for you. If you’re going to be here long, why don’t you come live with me?”

  She sighed, smiling faintly as if with post-coital sadness. “I guess you’re laughing at me. You must get a lot of offers like that.”

  “You have an apartment near here? I thought everybody stayed here. I didn’t know the personnel had outside living quarters.”

  “Most everybody docs. A few live here most of the time, like Doctors Roger-Viollet and Matelot, and some of the guards who rotate around-the-clock duties. They’re only in the maze compound, though. The hospital itself is run quite normally.”

  I was learning things. I didn’t know how I could take advantage of the knowledge, or whether I ever would, but I stored the facts away in my head as a squirrel stores nuts in autumn.

  “I suppose you think this is a ridiculous question, but if I wanted to sneak in without being noticed—for instance, suppose you and I were out on a date and I had to drop you off at your place—let’s say I was on call here at headquarters and I didn’t want anybody to know I’d been goofing off—w
hen could I best slip in unobserved?”

  She giggled. “Oh, between one and two in the morning. The guards change at one. By the time they make their rounds and take up their positions, it’s two. If you knew how they make those rounds, you could anticipate them and be where they were sure not to be.”

  I hugged her. “You’ve got to tell me about all that, Jeannette. We may forget that sort of thing while we’re out dancing—”

  “I should hope so!” she exclaimed.

  “—so it’s better to know beforehand.”

  She glanced at her wristwatch. “I’m off duty in half an hour. Why don’t you go rest in your room? Then we can go some place and talk.”

  “Just talk?”

  She patted my frontal bulge, eyebrows raising. “Oh? What’s this? You still want more?”

  “I’m just a hungry lover.” I laughed.

  “May you always have a hearty appetite!” she giggled, squeezing, groping. Her eyes turned thoughtful. “Really, I mean it. There’s no law says we can’t go dancing tonight. I know a little place. Not expensive.”

  “It’s a date. I’ll change my clothes and wait in my room.” I drew her to me for a last kiss. “You’re my girlfriend, remember. Stay away from those guards.”

  Her laughter rang out. “Those milksops! Pah! The most manly of them is too effeminate for me.” Her wise eyes taunted me. “It is what makes one so easy to tumble, working here. There are so many nurses and so few real men. You understand?”

  I kissed the corners of her mouth. “Je comprends.”

  I went down to my room after parting company with my pretty blonde nurse. I lay down on the bed to think, not to sleep. I was no nearer a solution of my assignment—the destruction of HECATE—than I was when I set foot on French soil. If it had an Achilles’ heel, I failed to see it. I’d damn near murdered a man, I’d failed a woman in the love act, I’d gotten a radio stimulator put into my skull. That was it, the whole bit.

  Well, I had made a friend of Jeannette Lons. I had thought my way out of the bag with Henri Planget. I was a more-or-less trusted member of HECATE. Maybe this was something. I could be dead right now.

  I had to lay the groundwork for my final Armageddon, here in Dampierre. I had begun by getting my blonde nurse to show me all around the hospital and HECATE headquarters. But all alone, I’d never be able to do the destruct bit.

  I needed help.

  Jeannette Lons might be that help, she might not.

  At any rate, I would try to swing her over to my side and fasten her there with some erotic epoxy, if that was what was needed. It might not be; I might just have caught her in a weak moment.

  So when she poked her head in the door, dressed in a simple peasant blouse and skirt—she was off-duty, I remembered—I caught her cheeks in my palms and drew her gently into my room for a tender kiss. Our lips merged, I let my mouth tell her mouth that I loved her very much. Her eyes were like stars when I drew away.

  She understood I didn’t think of her as just a body. There was also what was inside the body, the soul, the ka, the essence, which attracted me. Even her mind. It all played a part in the whole Jeannette Lons.

  “Tell me what you are,” I breathed into her parted lips. I smiled at her look of surprise. “You eat food, you like certain foods. I want to know them. I want to know what games you played as a child. What it is that frightens you, what you like or dislike. Everything. Tell me everything.”

  She put her arms about my neck and hugged me. “It will take forever, you goose. You nice goose. I think you are trying to make me fall in love with you. Are you?”

  I kissed the tip of her nose. “Who can tell?”

  It took four days, actually.

  We went to the flea market in Dampierre, we bought silly things like a cracked vase with flowers on it (she liked roses, and there were big red Scarlet Knights on the vase), a small toy soldier made by Mignot (she had been a tomboy as a child, playing with her brothers’ lead soldats), and a book of poetry all about love. We ate escargots at a sidewalk table and drank tart red wine while we took turns reading the poems out loud. She wept a little at one of the quatrains, saying she had heard it as a child.

  In the red Lamborghini Miura, we drove to the chateau for which Dampierre is famous and walked through its park, hand in hand. She stopped to sniff the flowers and flirted with me as if we were, in truth, the lovers we pretended to be. Perhaps we were. As I traveled on my Coxeman assignments about the world I have discovered one fundamental truth, that a man or a woman may fall in love over and over again. It is a philosophy that has protected me against a lot of heartaches.

  We motored to Chartres and visited the cathedral. We made a trip to Versailles and strolled through the Pare de Trianon and along the walks of the Great Canal. The sunlight on her cheeks, the wind in her blonde hair, the laughter from her red lips, built a song in my heart.

  I stayed overnight in her little room some blocks from the hospital. We were like husband and wife, newlyweds. We made love tenderly, we explored the love-in likes and dislikes of each other. Sometimes in the very early morning, I could hear her sigh as she lay naked beside me under the covers.

  Our little idyll was going to end some day soon. She knew it, I knew it, we both pretended we did not. When she would sigh, I would lean over and kiss her bare shoulder, or perhaps the upper swell of a breast. She would smile weakly, then laugh and tousle my hair with her gentle hand.

  Once I said, “Why don’t you get a job somewhere else?” I was thinking of the coming destruction of HECATE, if I did my job as I should. I could not think of her being caught in the holocaust.

  “Where would I work?” she asked, turning from the tiny stove where she was making a cheese fondue while I was opening a wine bottle.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere but for HECATE. I consider it dangerous work for a girl.”

  “I’m only a nurse. Nothing criminal about that.” She shrugged with the nonchalance of the young. “They pay better wages than I could get anywhere else. To me, that is reason enough.”

  I discontinued that sort of talk for fear she might become suspicious. I had not put aside the thought that Jeannette Lons might be a spy siceed on me by Doctor Roger-Viollet. If she were, I felt convinced, she was a better actress than any woman on the stage or in the movies.

  One morning I was summoned to headquarters.

  Doctor Matelot was sitting behind the desk, examining the file. He nodded at my entrance, invited me to sit down.

  “Bon jour, Professor. You are in luck. A case has come up where we think you might be the man for the job.”

  “Good,” I exclaimed, wondering what was good about it. I was enjoying my visit to the Elysian Fields with Jeannette Lons, and I didn’t want it to end.

  His eyes regarded me calmly. “You may not think it is so good when you hear what it is. You see, we of HECATE have made certain contacts in the political and military world beyond our gates. We have made friends, we have made enemies. There are also those who try to straddle the fence. They are neither for us nor against us.

  “We have a fourth category, those who have been our friends but who have now turned against us. These we must lure back to the fold—or exterminate. Such a one is General René Bree.”

  “Ah! I am to kill the general.”

  Matelot smiled, “Oh, no. You are to kill his wife.”

  He was right. I did not think it was good at all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I kept my poker face. I even smiled.

  “I see,” I murmured. “First the wife, then the general. It is a military technique of some sort.”

  “It’s nothing of the kind,” Matelot snapped. “The general has been warned several times. He has chosen to ignore our warnings. The death of his wife will be the act that will bring him over to our side.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t see why you don’t control him the way you control other people.”

  “Unfortunately he is one person we
have not been able to implant. Twice we have tried, twice he has escaped an injury which would necessitate his going into a hospital. I believe, myself, that he is suspicious of us. If it were up to me, I would have him killed.”

  “But if—that is, when I kill his wife, won’t he blab to the authorities about this HECATE setup?”

  “While he has not been implanted with a radio stimulator, his secretary—who is also his mistress—has been. She serves us. She will notify us if he has any such ideas. So far, he has been detached from the entire situation. Besides his wife, he has two daughters he loves. Understand?”

  “Hmmm. His wife he does not love? He tolerates her?”

  “She controls the family fortunes. The money is in her name. If she were to die, the general would be a very rich man. In a way, then, HECATE is doing him a favor.”

  “Will he understand and appreciate that favor?”

  “He will understand it, oui. Whether he appreciates it is another matter. If he does not appreciate it, he will infer that as the mother died, so can either or both of his daughters. He is not a stupid man, the general.”

  “And he loves his daughters.”

  Maletot inclined his head. “He will not be happy to see either of them dead, I can assure you of that. And he will want very much to enjoy the vast fortune he will come into when his wife dies. He will not be able to do that if he does not come over to HECATE. And soon.”

  It was arm-twisting on a cold-blooded level.

  I faked admiration at the scheme. “He can’t fail to become one of our allies. I certainly contratulate you on you cleverness. It gives mc a good feeling to know I’m part of such an organization. Provided,” I added slyly, “the underlings do what they’re supposed to, like load guns that are to kill people.”

  Maletot said coldly, “The gun will be loaded this time, never fear. I am going to do it myself.”

  Our interview was not over. Maletot glanced down at the open file before him. He cleared his throat.

  “Madame Sabine Bree is to be in Copenhagen this evening. Her husband is on his way to Moscow for a conference with the military heads of the Soviet Union. When he goes on such extended visits to a foreign country, his wife also takes herself off on holiday.”