Carol (Carol Schmidt Series)

by Cook, Lori

  “Persuade me otherwise.”

  The Cardinal had predicted this. That’s why Carol had spent a week in a London hotel being schooled in the basics of music sampling and copyright infringement. She knew enough to hold her own in any conversation on the topic. They had rehearsed questions and answers, planning their strategy with care.

  “Not that simple,” she answered. “You can manipulate sounds, change the frequencies, mix them heavily into the track. It’s tough to prove beyond doubt that you’ve lifted someone else’s sounds.”

  Strange was thinking, his brow furrowed, as if there was something he didn’t understand.

  “But if I sample, say, part of a track by Eminem and use it on my own track, you can hear it, no? I mean, if you can’t hear it’s Eminem, what’s the point in using it?”

  “A drum beat?” she said. “You can lift a single drum beat from a recording, use it all the way through your own track. Or a special effect. Anything. They sample individual sounds, if there’s something really good out there, just take what they want...”

  “And make it into something new, right?”

  “No. They steal what someone else has made.”

  He nodded, clearly not particularly interested in digital sampling, or the legal ramifications.

  The menus arrived. He didn’t even open his, ordering melon and Palma ham, followed by steamed cuttlefish with fries.

  The women glanced quickly through their menus, and placed their orders. It didn’t seem to matter what, because Strange had handed his menu back to the waiter, and was waiting impatiently for them to do the same.

  “So,” he said as the waiter left the table, “let’s take a more interesting example. What if I steal a photographer’s digital image and use it in a work of my own?”

  “Theft.”

  “What if I take a photo of his photo and use that?”

  “Theft.”

  “What if I take his digital photo, manipulate it, but leaving it basically the same...”

  “Theft.”

  “What if I look at his photo, then take my camera, go to the exact same spot, same conditions, take the same photo... Only I sell my photo and he never sells his?”

  “Tricky, but I’d say he might still have a case.”

  Strange nodded, but he wasn’t done.

  “OK, so let’s say I lend this photographer my camera. No, better: I employ him as my assistant, and I lend him my camera, and he takes a shot. Then I take the same shot, only I manage to sell mine. Do I owe him anything?”

  “Not a penny.” She pauses, knowing that he’s expecting something else. “You wouldn’t be the artist, of course.”

  And now Strange was interested, just as they had known he would be.

  “You defend creative pride, then? Is that was intellectual property is, in the end?”

  She smiled. “I guess that’s a lot to do with it. In my experience, the creative minds, people who really achieve anything special, are pathologically incapable of copying.”

  “Korean hip hop artists, for example?”

  “You got me there!” she said. “But even if I was working on anything that really mattered, rather than junk pop music, the principle is the same. Creators versus copiers.”

  The appetizers arrived.

  “What,” Strange said, taking his fork in his hand, “if the copier makes something fantastic, something far bigger and better with what he steals? What if that part of the process is more important, and it’s those guys are the real geniuses?”

  “Then I’m in the wrong business.”

  With that they ate.

  For the remainder of the meal, Strange made wisecracks about lawyers and “creatives,” letting it be known that he wasn’t that interested in a debate on the subject. As far as he was concerned, the young lawyer before him was simply naive, and he was tolerating her only because she was such a great visual addition to his already glamorous table.

  But something must have gotten under his skin, because he drank a little more wine than usual, and talked a little more bombastically. Heads in the restaurant began to turn. Most people in there recognized the white hair, the tall, pale-skinned man whose photo had been in all the financial pages over the last few weeks. Now they saw that he was a braggart, a self-satisfied bore, holding forth to table at which sat two of the most radiant women imaginable. As people looked, they all thought the self same thing: God, those poor girls!

  Could anything have been further from the truth? Sai and Carol tried desperately to avoid each other’s eyes, and to play their parts with care. When they did speak, it was with a measured caution, as if the two of them were wary of each other, like a couple of lionesses on the plain, weighing each other up, taking their time. They behaved, then, like any two very attractive women might in each other’s company. But it was all an act.

  The entrees came and went. Strange ordered desert for all three of them: cheese and grapes. He had simple tastes, Carol noted, as she picked at a small piece of brie, telling herself that it was probably just as well that dinner had not been too heavy. There was work to be done.

  By now they’d moved onto a desert wine, and Strange was sensing the tension between the women, enjoying their subtle rivalry, knowing that he was the cause of it.

  “How do you like the wine, ladies?” he said.

  There was a glint in his eye. This wasn’t about wine. Or was it?

  “You see,” he continued, holding up his glass and admiring the topaz liquid in it. “This is a copy. The original wine is Hungarian. Tokay, or tokaji in Hungarian. These days they make imitations of it all over the world. Who can tell?”

  Carol took a sip.

  “I had Tokay in Budapest once. This tastes better.”

  They all laughed, raising their glasses as Strange smugly took game, set and match on the evening’s main theme of copying.

  For a moment they all savored the wine, which was staggeringly good.

  Then Carol said:

  “There is, in my experience, one thing that cannot be copied and exploited.”

  “And that is?” he asked.

  “Sex.”

  “Sex?”

  “It’s real. Ultimately, it’s the only truly authentic thing that passes between us. The basis of all life, and the thing which drives us all. You can reproduce images of it, you can fake it, you can disseminate all kinds of sexual material...” She lowered her voice. “But that moment, the beautiful moment, cannot be stolen or copied. Two people together. That is pure.”

  “Or three,” Sai added, staring straight at Strange, something incredibly horny in her eyes.

  He looked at Sai, then at Carol, two of the sexiest women he’d ever met. And he realized that he wanted them both. Now.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Half an hour later, Alex Strange was sitting in an armchair in Carol’s suite, watching as the two women wrestled on the bed, still in their g-strings, but nothing else.

  He chuckled as he gave them directions, watching them fondle each other’s breasts, and kiss like teenagers. His prick, quite long and thin, was in his hand and he stroked himself slowly as he thought up new ways of seeing the two women pleasure themselves.

  “Sai, lie face down,” he said, leaning forward, making sure he had a good view. “Lawyer girl, fuck her with your hand from behind. She likes it hard. Spread her legs, I wanna see.”

  Carol waited for Sai to do as she was told, then pulled Sai’s g-string off and eased a hand between her thighs. Lying down next to her, Carol kissed her on the side of the face, and whispered don’t worry as softly as she could, sensing that Sai was losing confidence.

  “Harder!” Strange barked, now working himself faster.

  Carol was disgusted by every aspect of this man, down to his silver-white pubes. She desperately wanted to take Sai in her arms and protect her from his vileness. That would come. Soon enough.

  So she faked it, pretending to push down hard between Sai’s legs. To divert Strange’s a
ttention, she shifted slightly until she was kneeling with her ass almost directly toward him.

  “And you, play with yourself.”

  She obeyed, reached behind herself and sliding a hand down inside the string of her g-string. There wasn’t a lot she could do, awkwardly pretending to grope Sai with one hand, and herself from behind with the other.

  “Sai,” he said, realizing that it wasn’t working. “Flip. I want to see our lawyer friend eat your pussy. Let’s see about the purity of sex!” And by now he was standing above them, right next to the bed, his stiff cock pointing at them. “I’m betting this is gonna look like any fucking porno in the world. Pure? You’re like two hookers on a fucking bed anywhere on the planet. Sai! Flip, for christsake!”

  Reluctantly, the two women did as they were told, managing a brief moment of eye contact as they changed positions. And it was enough. This, Carol’s expression told Sai, is worth it; this humiliation is the price we’re gonna pay, and it’s worth it. Hang on in there.

  Sai did hang on. She lay back and opened her legs, as Carol knelt and lowered her lips onto her sex, kissing it with such tenderness that Sai almost cried, not with ecstasy, but with love. As she closed her eyes and felt Carol’s tongue caress her like the kiss of an angel, she actually forgot that anyone else was in the room.

  As for the cameras, Carol had told her to try and keep her face looking towards the pillow end of the bed, out of shot. She’d managed that quite well, and even though Sai would be recognized on the video, it would be fleetingly, as a victim, dutifully obeying the horrible, domineering Alex Strange.

  Carol buried her face in Sai’s sex, and Strange knelt behind her on the bed. He had his cock in one hand and with the other he began fingering Carol’s pussy and ass crack.

  “Like any porno in the fucking world!” he said, again and again, as he rammed two fingers into her. “Ah, the purity of the sex act. Can’t be copied, eh!”

  After a while, Carol realized that this was Strange’s way of turning her on. The jerk thought that by depriving her of his wonderful penis, holding back as he watched the two women, she’d start to beg for him.

  She’d met guys like this before, but she’d never seen anything quite so flagrant. It was pathetic, and only the thought of those tiny cameras, now streaming everything live onto a number of anonymous sites across the globe, gave her the strength to tolerate his vanity.

  “I’m fucking her for real,” she said, her voice loaded with sarcasm.

  She felt his fingers stick into her, sharp and nasty, as if to demonstrate the power he had over her. She didn’t care, she knew the worse this got, the better it was for her and Sai in the long run. So she goaded him some more.

  “You think that turns me on?”

  “’Course it does, you slut!”

  “You can’t do it, Alex. You can’t just make it happen. You’ve gotta want it. Then it’s real.” She returned to Sai’s sex, groaning with pleasure as she indulged herself. And, as if on cue, Sai shifted beneath her and emitted her own moans of delight.

  He grabbed Carol’s hair and yanked her head back. Before she knew it, he’d rammed his cock into her mouth.

  “Get off the bed!” he snarled at Sai, who jumped off in an instant, tears welling in her eyes.

  He lay on his back, and in one powerful move, gabbed Carol’s hips and hoisted her above him, until he had her pussy in his mouth, and she was left to suck on his cock.

  He went at her with a horrible, mechanical lunge of the tongue. This guy had no idea how to treat a woman. It was appalling, and the thought of Sai having to put up with this made her sick inside. For a few seconds she tried to bear it, but it was no good; she was going to have to try something else.

  “This isn’t sex, you asshole!” she said, hauling herself off of him. “You can’t make a woman fuck you. You can’t copy the feeling, the act, none of it!”

  He roared with laughter, almost a scream, like a kid who just can’t believe what’s been said to him. He struggled to a sitting position, and grabbed Carol by the shoulders.

  “What do you think Strange Tech is, you fucking know-nothing lawyer!”

  “Alex!” came the voice of Sai as she tried to intervene. “Calm down.”

  Strange didn’t want to calm down, though. His erection was harder than ever. He grabbed it in one hand, pushed Carol down onto the bed, straddling her and forcing her to take him in her mouth.

  “Come on, lawyer! Just what do you think Strange Tech is?”

  Sai watched, powerless to intervene. Carol had made her swear that whatever happened in the room, unless it was life-threatening, she must not stop Strange, she must let him do whatever he wanted. Carol had been very, very insistent on the point, although she also said it was better if Sai didn’t know too much; just keep her face out of shot.

  So Sai watched, helpless, as Strange closed his eyes, feeling Carol’s lips against his shaft as excruciating pleasure rushed through his body. He rocked back and forth, crying out as he felt her tongue gouge his helmet with astonishing force, until he hardly knew whether he was even enjoying the deep, burning sensation that shot up from his cock.

  Carol pulled her head away briefly.

  “I think you write boring computer programs, asshole. Now let’s see if you can really fuck me.”

  With that she took his full length in her mouth again, and thrust a hand up between his butt cheeks, pushing a finger into his anus hard and fast as his body almost gave way above her.

  By now he was laughing out loud, mixed in with it the trembling, hollering of a man on the very threshold of unbearable pain, but knowing that nothing could stop him now, that the climax that was coming would be so massive that no amount of agony could prevent him from seeing it through.

  “No, I don’t!” he said, snarling down at her, his eyes opening only for an instant. “I don’t write programs, you stupid bitch. I steal them...”

  “Alex...” said Sai, as if trying to protect him from himself.

  “I steal code from people right under their noses, and you fucking lawyers can do nothing about it.” He had a nasty snarl now, speaking in hissing bursts as he went harder and harder in Carol’s mouth. “I fucking steal code from programmers who sign it over to me ’cause they’re dumb and frightened and they want a job...” and now he was grimacing, knowing he was about to come, but loving the moment so much it felt like he was flying, “and I fuck lawyers like you in the mouth, you cunt. You can’t get me, a million lawyers like you can’t get me. You’ve tried...” he screamed, his whole body tense, back arching as he felt it coming, “ but I’ve fucked you all, fucked everyone of you, and now... Now!”

  He came with such force that he bounced off Carol, his cock pumping semen out onto the bed. He was gasping for breath, disorientated and in agony. But almost immediately he recovered, and forced his cock back into her mouth, grabbing her hair in his hand as he pushing himself into her again. He thrust so hard that she almost choked, going all the way in, laughing to himself now as he rode the aftershocks of his orgasm, his body jerking violently as he milked himself cruelly in her mouth.

  “I beat everybody,” the rhythm of his words matching that of his long, hard strokes. “And I can remember every one.”

  And then he began reciting their names, the programmers he’d cheated over the years, several dozen of them, every name recalled perfectly, as if he was reading from a list. With each coder’s name he also cited with absolute precision which part of which application their stolen code had been used for. And what Sai had said was true, he really was proud of what he’d done. There was not a drop of shame or remorse in his body.

  As she heard Jason’s name, Carol’s stomach lurched horribly, and she thought she was going to die with anger and hatred.

  “You’re a thief,” she said, yanking his cock from her mouth. “Nothing more, a common thief!”

  He roared with laughter, pulling her head back and ramming himself back into her throat until she gagged.

>   “I’m a fucking genius! You hear me, lawyer woman? Plagiarism? I’m fucking your mouth. Look who just won the argument!”

  With a grunt of disgust, he let go of her hair, and his cock sprang out of her mouth once more. By now he was panting heavily, and laughing contentedly to himself. For a second he seemed to consider hitting her, snarling down at her with such contempt that for a moment even Carol felt defeated and degraded.

  Then he collapsed onto the bed.

  Carol wasn’t defeated, though. She crawled off the bed and joined Sai at the side of the room, both of them evidently in shock. Meanwhile, Strange took his penis, which was still extraordinarily stiff and glistening, and began to yank it so hard it looked as if he was trying to injure himself.

  With his hand running right the way up and down his slippery length, faster and faster, his laughter became manic. His butt was jumping up and down, lifting right up off the bed, and with his other hand he grabbed his balls, gripping and tugging at himself ferociously until it seemed like he was going to expire with the horrific delight of the pain he was clearly in.

  And then, still screaming about stealing code and programmers and lawyers and his own invincibility, he managed, quite incredibly, to make himself come again. He cried like a baby, tears streaming down his contorted face, his lithe body twisting as if it was in the throes of an electric shock.

  With one final roar of agony, he was exhausted. Thin, almost transparent come trickled down his hand as finally he stopped, his head falling to one side on the pillow. Then he closed his eyes.

  Twenty seconds later the live broadcast was cut. The last image was of a white-haired man alone on a bed, his penis in his hand, his body utterly immobile.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Within hours of the footage of Alex Strange being streamed live onto various anonymous websites around the world, his lawyers had begun legal proceedings to have the content removed. But it was too late. The thing had started to go viral, and it couldn’t be stopped, no matter how much you paid your overcharging lawyers. People stared down at their smart phones with disgust, hating the fact that they were watching, but unable to look away as the full horror of the scene was played out on their tiny screens.