As you spot him from across the bar, you’ve got to admit John Christie cleans up well.
One good thing about these on-site assignments with the bank is that nobody’s ever sorry to see you leave on the dot. Nobody likes the inquisition. So as soon as it hits five, you make your brief apologies—little white lies, special pleading about having a life, they love these signs of human frailty—and catch the rush-hour tram back into town. There’s still no word on the other, mystery job—the no-knock ethics audit you’re meant to do on some NDA’d client’s local management sometime next week—but that’s no bad thing. You’ve got enough on your plate right now.
There’s safety in numbers, up to a point. Liz has got your name on some kind of watch list, bless her, but that’s a fat lot of use if your mystery stalker decides to jump you in the bushes while you’re stranded between half-hour buses on a deserted industrial estate due to working late. Or if they decide to have a little tête-à-tête in your hotel room, just them and you and Mister Rubber Hose. But you’re damned if you’re going to turn up on her door-step, shivering and small. Liz is desperately, blatantly monogamous, and if she clocks that Julian isn’t your primary anymore . . . let’s just say you need a wife like a fish needs a bicycle.
Speaking of bicycles, since you and he decided to plough your different respective fields, you’ve not dated a man. Much less ridden one. It’s turning into a still, small irritant at the back of your head: Am I losing it? Turning into a hairy-legged man-hater . . . Well no: But there’s been a distinct shortage of cock-meat on the buffet lately, and it’s leaving you feeling a bit unbalanced. If nothing else, dinner with John should beat room service for amusement value. And if he’s thinking along the lines you think he’s thinking along, maybe he’s good for dessert, too. Subject to certain reservations—
“Hi.”
“Hi yourself. Can I buy you a drink?”
He offers you a chair.
“Sure. White wine spritzer. How about you?”
“I’ve already ordered. I wasn’t sure you were going to show,” he says disarmingly, tapping on the menu. “Agree on impulse, regret at leisure.”
“Oh really?” You raise an eyebrow. “You’re absolutely right: I nearly didn’t. On the other hand, mysterious strangers have a draw of their own. How does it work for you?”
He’s stealthed, and you’re letting him know you know. He doesn’t have a Facebook page. He’s not on LinkedIn, or Netwerked, or any of the others. The only match your agents could find was a local listing on DoggerBank, but it didn’t come with a headshot. On the other hand, he’s not in the public sex-offenders register either.
“Sometimes well, sometimes badly,” he admits. “I value my privacy, but sometimes it gets a bit lonely.” He looks at you, and you think, My, what big eyes you have, Mister Wolf.
“So tell me, Mr. Christie, where do I go to find out more about you?” you ask teasingly. “Besides the personals on DoggerBank? Wikipedia?”
He flushes slightly but doesn’t deny anything. “I got a lot of shit about my name in high school. When they found out about him.” He means the other John Christie, the one they hanged seventy years ago.
“No relative, I assume.”
“None whatsoever.” He waves a hand dismissively. One of the waiters is coming, starched apron and silver tray loaded with a tulipshaped glass and a whisky tumbler. You wait for them to depart.
You lick your lips from behind the cover of your glass. “So, do you post to DoggerBank often?”
“I wouldn’t know. Do you often read personals on DoggerBank?” He’s echoing your posture, you think. To test it you rub one finger on the side of your nose. Sure enough, five seconds later he raises a hand. “I might,” he says coyly. “If you want me to.”
Well, it wasn’t an off-puttingly bad ad. (SWM seeks SWF for edge-play, penetration-OK, RF, safeword-OK.) You sip your spritzer and breathe in, pushing your breasts up a little. “Do you want to fuck me, Mr. Christie?” His pupils dilate. Clearly, the answer is yes. But he’s well-trained enough to say nothing, waiting: like a wolf, intent but distant. You feel a wave of heat, nipples tightening. “The safeword is fish, Mr. Christie. Can you live with that?”
“Fish.” He nods. “Yeah.” His close-cropped scalp shines slightly under the overhead spotlights. There’s a moment of glassy-eyed focus, then he blinks, breaking the slightly creepy stare. “Sorry.” He smiles shyly, losing ten years of age, suddenly cute. “I wasn’t—I really was inviting you to dinner. The invitation stands, by the way. Do you always do a background check on dates?”
You smile and nod, let him see your teeth, let him know who’s in control here. It took you a long time to train yourself to be this assertive, but it pays dividends. “Goes with the job.”
“Really? What do you do?”
“I’m an auditor. Ethics compliance. It’s not just a country next door to Sussex.” You pull a self-deprecating face, but it’s okay, he’s nodding sympathetically. “I’m in town to check a bank—” You natter for a while, reassuring him you’re a normal person when you’re not answering DoggerBank personals, then he natters for a bit, ditto. He’s in intellectual property, 3D extrusions, rapid manufacturing franchisees, and neighbourhood workshops making bespoke toys. It sounds pretty tedious, a needle-stick puncture to your fantasy of a dangerous but controllable stranger—
—You’re sharing a bowl of organic-farmed oysters with him, he’s laughing as you pour one down your throat, lip-smacking suggestively, then he’s—
You’re rubbing your ankle against him under the table. His breath catches, and you’ve got him in sharp focus. Your mouths are flapping, but the words are unimportant. Half-eaten salad in front of you, unappealing. You don’t want to overfill yourself. His gaze has caught you: You’re the focus of his world right now. Totally centered in his gunsights. Funny, the idea of a toy salesman who reeks of danger and makes your heart pound is ridiculous on the face of it. But it’s not going to stop you playing footsie with the devil.
“Your room,” you tell him, mindful of the listeners in your own.
You know what you want for dessert, and you’re not going to find it on the hotel menu. So you lead him to the lifts and let him show you the way to the buffet, and then he feeds it to you hard and fast. Total abandon, clothes everywhere, barely time to roll on a condom before he pushes you down on the real bed. He’s very dominant, not trying to hurt you but not asking for a lead, either. No ropes or toys, but he’s somehow managed to immobilize you—not painfully, but. But. (SWM seeks SWF for edge-play . . .) He’s frighteningly focussed when he enters you: For a moment you have second thoughts, wonder if he’d hear you if you said anything, but he’s using his mouth and working a finger up your ass with a skill that is so exactly what you need that you grind back against him and begin to let go and flail around wildly as he pins you down and fucks you hard enough you’re going to have bruises. You’re close to coming when he stops: pulls out, rolls you face-down on the bed, and shoves himself up your anus. It’s shocking, and you’re trying to muster a protest—having difficulty getting enough air—then you feel him tense and shoot his load. And a few seconds later he rolls off you.
You’re lying there in frustrated confusion. Your left wrist aches where he gripped it with fingers like handcuffs, and your backside is sore. He’s in the en suite, you can hear by the splashing. What the fuck? He didn’t even stay around to use his fingers. So much for the evening—it’s not yet ten, and it’s a fucking disaster. One star review: Could screw better.
You lever yourself up on your elbows. “You going to be long?” you ask.
The toilet flushes in reply. Christie comes out, wearing a hotel bath-robe. “You can go now,” he says.
That wasn’t what you were asking about, but you could do with the loo, so you nod gratefully and dash for the bathroom. Your make-up is mostly beyond repair, but you can manage a hasty wipe-down, then back on with panties, bra, leggings, and top. You flush the toilet. Yo
u’re still trying to figure out what happens next when he calls again, “You can go now.”
What the fuck? You step back out into the bedroom. He’s sitting at the desk, back to you, focussing on a pad with the exact same degree of obsessive focus he was deploying on your tits an hour ago.
“Excuse me?” you ask, picking up your shoes and handbag.
“You can go now,” he says for a third time, his voice empty of expression. “I have work to do.”
The words sting you into anger: What does he think you are? But the lack of affect behind them suddenly chills you. It’s as if there’s something missing, something that was missing all along but you made yourself ignore.
“Was that all you wanted?” you ask him, trying to keep your voice from wobbling.
“I have to work now.” He turns to look at you irritably. “Don’t you have a room to go to?”
“Fish,” you say. Then, uncertainly: “Safeword.”
“Go away.” He turns back to the screen.
Next.
You’re standing with your back to the closing door, in the corridor. You slide your feet into your heels and shudder with an emotion you can’t name: Then you turn and walk with exaggerated self-control towards the lifts. Bastard. Try not to think about him. What might have happened in there. The afterglow is shredded and faded to rancid rags that smear a greasy patina across the memory of pleasure. You have a nauseating awareness that you’ve been used: But you went in there meaning to use him for your own ends in turn. It’s not as if you’re a stranger to ass-play. So why do you feel so wrong? As you go back to your room and deadbolt the door behind you and run a long, hot bath, you’re haunted by a simple question.
If you’d used the safeword on him, would he have stopped?
TOYMAKER: Abused
After you get rid of the bitch, you take half an hour to catch up on some admin work. You left the pad in here just in case: You pull your VM down from the cloud and write up a brief summary of your thoughts about what’s going on and your revised business plan, and send it back to the Operation’s servers. Doubtless next time you check in, there’ll be some helpful notes from Control.
Factory-wiping the pad, you shove it back in the hotel safe and pull your clothes on again. You weren’t planning to stay the night here anyway, and the Straight woman’s presence makes it all the more important to move out. So you leave the room, walk to the fire stairs, and descend to the ground floor.
It’s still daylight outside—the sun never seems to set on this fucking city—but you feel drained. It’s some combination of the dour stone architecture, the weird Scottish people, a smidgen of your own paranoia, and the fact that a fucking murderer is stalking your start-up: It’s getting you down. Perhaps you should’ve hit the meow-meow and taken the bitch clubbing first, taken the time to relax: But you’re not planning on hanging around, and anyway, she was tedious. You’ve met her type before, needy thirtysomething singles: Thinks she’s a swinger, but if you take the effort to keep her hot, the next thing you know she’ll be making cow eyes at you and expecting an engagement ring. They get desperately serious when all you want is a fuck (and why are all these Anglo hotels so uptight about room service?). The hell with that.
You walk across the plaza in front of the hotel—a barren flagstoned plinth—towards the round theatre on the other side of the road. There are some bars clustered behind it: In your Rough Guide overlay, they’re helpfully tagged as “the pubic triangle.” Maybe you should have gone there instead of scouring the hotel for desperate would-be housewives.
Five minutes’ walking brings you to a corner where yet more of the desperately grey stone shit looms over you—they have houses with fucking battlements here, stone cannons carved into the eaves—haven’t these people heard of earthquakes? You’re still a bit nervy-scratchy from the day’s events, so rather than piss around outside, you nod amiably at the bouncer and duck through a brass-trimmed door into a venue that promises two hundred kinds of whisky and beer besides.
You order an Irish and Coke, then look around for the darkest corner you can see and go hide in it. There’s a secure note-pad app on your skullphone, works with your shades. You fingertwitch under the table, working out your priorities:
• Get your DNA off the police incident database. It’s not vital, but if you can’t manage it, you’re going to have to go to extremes—find someone who’s died and get the records corrupted—do-able, but very costly.
• Find out who’s after your people and where they’re getting their information from.
The latter . . . you’d bet good money that there’s a leak inside the Operation. Otherwise, how else do they know who you’re targeting? So you’re going to set up a target. Mister family man diplomat seems like a suitable option; fat, happy, and dumb. (Move in with him, put word up the line that he’s your new COO, wait for someone to try to whack him, grab the killer, and extract names.) You do not commit this latter plan to your note-pad. You’ve got to assume that anything in your skullphone is being monitored by Control, and that Control is leaking information to the—no, they don’t exist. There are no killer lizards bleeding through from the other side of reality, the side that’s all washed-out and grainy gray and suicidal. That’s just a delusional fantasy, a side-effect of bad headmeat. And you’re not delusional, are you?
Halfway down your drink, you notice a couple of low-lifes giving you the eye-ball from across the bar. You don’t move your head, but you study them back from behind your glasses. Skinny, short hair, bad skin, track-suit-and-hoodie stereotypes: One of them’s staring and muttering to his mate, who’s nodding and not looking at you. You’re acutely aware, of an instant, that you’re wearing the Gonet on your wrist. Conspicuous consumption indeed. Shit, part of you registers, the part of you that remembers your time at school and the special education your uncle Al gave you: The rest of you feels a pulse or squeeze of momentary happy anticipation of release, not unlike what you felt with the woman. Sex and violence are all cross-wired at a low level in the brain, anyway. That’s what they say.
You finish your glass, stand, and walk out of the bar with your back straight, not looking back. You slide the glasses into their case and pocket them. There’s some movement behind you. You turn a corner and cut uphill through a grey stone canyon between windowless buildings. It’s twilight now, and there’s movement behind you, a scuffing noise like a rat in a hurry and a breath of air as you spin round.
There’s only one of them and it’s Sweaty McTracksuit, and the back of your head is no longer in front of his fist when he tries to deck you. Instead, your left heel is stamping on his right instep, you’ve got a lock on his arm, and you’re twisting as he drops the home-fabbed knuckle-duster that probably came off one of your clients’ machines and claws at your eyes with his left hand.
A second later, you’ve faceplanted him on a paving stone. Quick scan: Two’s company. For a moment, you wonder if the enemy sent him, but no—he’s just a fucking low-life mugger who’s taken you for a tourist, gone after your watch and your wallet. You can’t be having that. So you kick him sharply in the ribs, pick up the ultrahard plastic knuckles while he’s struggling to draw breath, hold down his right hand against the concrete, and use them to ensure he’ll never play Guitar Hero again.
Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right? Even a fucking mugging?
Evidently not. It looks like Peter Manuel will have to teach the burghers of Edinburgh a lesson.
A lesson they won’t soon forget.
LIZ: Bereavement Counselling
Mr. Hussein is pretty much right at the bottom of the list of all the people you ever expected to be doing the Victim Response Officer tap-dance for. It is, in fact, typical of how fucked-up this week has become that you find yourself sitting knee to knee with him over a cup of tea, commiserating (for tenuous values of commiseration).
Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than e
veryone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal. However, his lack of insight is a two-edged sword; it’s glaringly obvious that he’s worried sick about his cousin, who is lying dead in an upstairs bedroom while the SOCO team pin down the scene, but he’s too dumb to actually help you. So you’re supposed to treat him like any other victim . . . or potential source of material evidence in what is rapidly shaping up to be the mass-murder enquiry of the century. Hence the house-work questions.
It only takes you five minutes to figure out that he is not, in fact, a killer. You don’t even need the speech-stress analyser; he’s not dissembling, his story lines up, and his probationware-riddled phone places him on the far side of town at the time. Everything so far checks out, and if the public CCTV confirms his movements, he’s definitely off the hook. Anyway, he’s not smart enough to have done something like this.
Right now he’s a bit of a mess: not quite a blubbery mass, but obviously very upset. And he’s beginning to push you for details. “I don’t understand. What has happened to my cousin? Why are you here? Who did it? What did they do? Have you arrested anyone?”
“I don’t know,” you tell him, honestly enough. It’s not as if you can give him information that might compromise an ongoing investigation, but even if that was not the case, the scene upstairs is more than slightly mad. “Listen, I’m going to check with my colleagues. I don’t want to say anything until I know what I’m allowed to say, but I’ll be right back. Drink your tea—I won’t be five minutes.”
You rise and step out into the hall, pull the door closed, and nod at the PC on duty, who steps sideways to cover the door.
You go upstairs. Kemal is standing on the landing outside the bathroom—why is it the fucking bathroom again?—airboarding notes. He shakes his head when he sees you. “You’ve seen it. What do you think?” you ask him.
Rule 34 Page 21
