Predator Ch. 03

That's what living on a boat with two sadomasochistic nymphomaniacs will do to you.

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Paris is, I suppose, simply Paris -- and it always will be, right? Another big city with a phallic monument in the center. A male phallus, of course -- at least that was Liza's version of the city as we drove in from the airport -- but she seemed more than a little put out by the whole thing. Like she was anxious, even angry about men and their penises -- and how we'd, figuratively speaking, of course, rammed our dicks down the world's throats since the beginning of time.

"Excuse me," I said to her sulking reflection in the window, "but is it that time of month?"

Which was, of course, not the right thing to say. At all.

Arms crossed over chest, steam coming out ears, she glowered the rest of the way into the city. Sephie, of course, looked out the window, oohing at the Eiffel Tower while Liza snorted derisively. Yin and Yang, Ego and Super-Ego, two sides of the same coin -- falling through time. One was Conscience, the other Lust, and isn't it a simple truth that we go through life attracted to both -- and yet we can never decide which we hold most important?

Someone had booked us into a little hotel on the Ile Saint Louis; we walked up to our room and I showered while the girls unpacked, and as I dressed I heard Liza talking to Sephie.

"You stay here, keep an eye on the room."

"I want to go with him," my Persephone said. "You're so mad right now you'll get him in trouble."

"I will not."

"You will to."

"Uh, girls. I'm sorry, but Daddy doesn't like to see his baby girls acting like three year olds. Can we get it together? Or does Daddy have to go out by himself?"

Then Liza cut to the heart of the matter, holding up my bottle of Viagra: "Does Daddy want a little blue pill, make little stick big again so he can go boom-boom?"

Touché.

Why is it that girls are always right?

Maybe because it's so easy to lead men around by the balls?

So, Sephie stayed in the room while Liza and I walked out of the hotel -- and Tate was gone. Vanished. We looked around, got our bearings and walked the few blocks to Notre Dame, and we sat on a bench at the south end of the little park by the river, and we waited.

He was lanky, that's what I remember most about Ben Acheson. Tall, and lanky, and he had a kind of Jimmie Stewart air about him that day. Kind of an "Aw, shucks, Ma'am..." thing going. Like he'd screwed the pooch big time, and didn't mind if we knew it.

He ambled up and sat on the bench beside ours, then he sighed.

"Woodward?"

"Yup."

"Who's she?"

"The person I most trust with your life."

"Okay."

"So, why are we here?" I asked -- and I noticed Liza scanning the sky overhead.

"To share notes, I think."

"Drone," Liza whispered. "Overhead. We're blown."

At least the kid had the good sense not to look up. "Okay," he said, "what's next?"

"Why don't you tell me what you know?"

So he did. Everything that had happened in Dallas, all the Ninja stuff from the summer before, the attacks this week, then the stuff about Rutherford in his house -- which as far as I could tell no one else knew about.

"So, she's an AD in the NSA?"

"Yes. Kind of clever, don't you think? Get yourself on the inside, the head of the snake..."

"That's what Anders, my chief, said. 'We've got to cut off the head of the snake.'"

"So, how'd all this get started out there?"

So I told him my story, including Persephone and Liza's part in the drama, and of the Tottenham twins demise.

"I take it," he sighed, "you know your department is compromised, from top to bottom. The FBI, too?"

I nodded. "From the first, when Chief Tottenham was killed."

"So his brother killed this Mary Jo, and that precipitated the split?"

And for the first time, Liza spoke about that night. She cleared her throat, then looked at me.

"Not quite. MJ was protecting Woodie," she said to Acheson, then she turned to me. "She was from the beginning. Tottenham and his clique wanted you out of the picture, she intervened, kept you from being killed -- at least three times that I know of."

"What?"

Then she turned to Acheson again. "What's eating you?" she asked. "You look like you've swallowed a squirrel."

"I think they got me this morning?"

Liza just looked at the kid, then I could see it all over his face too.

"What did they get you with," I asked. "A woman?"

He nodded his head, told us about the encounter.

"You married?" I asked.

"Not yet. I guess that means no, as in it ain't gonna happen now."

"Man," Liza said, shaking her head, "I am so glad I wasn't born with a dick. Don't you guys ever stop thinking with that fucker?"

"Alright, knock it off," I scolded. "So, your girl either gets over it or she doesn't. They think they've got you over their barrel now, that they own you, and maybe we can use that to our advantage..." But I could tell the kid was turning something over in his mind, like he was working a math problem in his head. "What is it, Ben?"

"Rutherford," he whispered. "She kissed me, seemed vested in me somehow."

"She wants you," Liza said. "All these Alphas, these leaders, have to take a mate, but they have to take them from another woman, then kill the other woman too, and with their own hands. They have to break down their new mate after that, mentally, emotionally -- and physically, before rebuilding him. The idea is to make the new mate totally dependent, totally demascluinize him. Like a role reversal dominance game, taken to a new extreme," she added, looking at Acheson. "She'll turn you into a girl, what girls were to men in the old order, anyway."

"Right," the kid said. "Over my dead body."

"That's what it'll come down to," she added, looking him in the eye. "These Alphas are predatory, feral, and the veneer of civility they wear is very thin. They've been plotting this for decades, and they know the kinds of sacrifices that are being made won't ever be undone. In their eyes the battle of the sexes was never some kind of joke, or something they were ever prepared to lose, for that matter. They're preparing to completely upend the old patriarchy, to end what was and replace it with something totally new. And they're counting on you thinking with your dick, and not your head, to help them make this happen."

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So, there it was. The end game, the backgammon.

Tate dropped by, had us download an app for our phones, told me what he and Acheson had in mind -- just in case -- then we split again -- he followed Acheson out to the Marriott while we went back to our little hovel.

Acheson was leaving for Dallas in the morning, and we would leave for San Francisco an hour after he.

Would they respond? Had we set an attractive enough trap?

Only time would tell.

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Acheson sat in the back of the taxi, trying to ignore the female driver sneering at him from the driver's seat.

'My God,' he thought, 'they're everywhere. Yet only where they need to be.'

The logistics were staggering, coordinating the movement of millions of assets around the globe, and it would all be impossible, he knew, without the 'net. And without apps to tie-together their vast network, innocent social media apps, that literally everyone had access to.

He looked out the window, at the endless stream of little cars -- tiny little Renaults and Citroens -- and how unlike the scene was compared to Dallas. Pickup trucks and Cadillacs, gas-guzzlers all, versus these tiny gas-sippers, and he saw a vast train station beyond the freeway. Dozens of trains filling with people, ready to leave for the furthest reaches of the country. So very different, yet the same. People moving freely, always on the move: on business, to take care of family, to ramble on an endless vacation.

What would happen if it all just stopped?

Because what loomed on the horizon was a sudden, screeching halt. An end to one way of life, and the sudden imposition of a new, radically different way of life. What had that girl, Liza, implied? Men would be maintained as breeding stock, and dumbed down men would be utilized for heavy labor -- until, presumably, men could be replaced by robots and genetic engineering. The idea was comical, like Our Man Flint meets Blofeld, only now, after watching events unfold in Dallas, and hearing about these groups working around Seattle, he was sure this wasn't a serialized comic book caper.

No, this is just the opposite. This is real, and it's happening now. Right now.

What had she said? Stop thinking with your dicks? How was that even possible?

"Qu'est-ce que vous avez dit?"

"Pardonnez-moi, je ne me rendais pas compte que je parlais..."

"Vous avez dit, 'comment était-ce possible?'"

"Oh je suis désolé..."

"You are English?" she asked.

"American."

"So, what is not possible?"

"Someone just told me something funny, that it is impossible for men to not think without using their, well, their penis."

"Ah. Yes, this is probably true, but that is who and what you are, is it not?"

"Exactly."

"So, why is this funny?"

"I think she was asking me to think like a woman, which is clearly not possible."

"Perhaps. How does a woman think?"

"You tell me?"

The woman thought for a moment, then she brightened. "A woman does not live in the moment. She lives in the future, yet also in the past. She thinks not of pleasure, but how pleasure can be used to her advantage. She thinks of the moment as a stop along the way to what she desires."

"That seems very mercenary to me, very cold and calculating."

"Perhaps. But men's calculations are as narrow. What gets me power, and how do I gain power with the most pleasure attached?"

He shook his head, laughed a little. "We are a doomed species."

"Perhaps, yes," the woman said, "or perhaps it is better to try a new way, while there is still time."

"So, who do you work for?"

"It doesn't matter."

He nodded his head, looked ahead. He could see aircraft landing and taking off at CDG, then his hotel on the left. "Do you know...are they going to kill me?"

She looked at him in the rearview mirror, then shrugged. "Truly, I do not know, but I would not want to be in your shoes."

"Well said."

She pulled up to the entrance and he pulled out his wallet, but she shook her head. "It is not necessary." She turned and looked at him now, and she shook her head just a little. "If I were to give you one piece of advice, I would say act not inside the moment, but within the future you seek."

"What does that mean?"

She sighed, and frowned. "It means you must be prepared to sacrifice yourself to save the ones you love."

"Maybe you could just take me to the airport..."

She laughed, looked him in the eye. "You cannot run. There is no place that far away."

"Okay."

"Good luck, my friend."

"Yes. You too."

He got out of the little Renault and walked through the lobby. A woman looked over her newspaper and watched him pass, then sent a text.

He went upstairs and pulled open the drapes, then got out the little book Genie had read for her ethics class -- 12, 20 & 5 -- and he started reading. The book was about choices, he saw, about choices forced and choices randomly arrived at. It was about choosing who lived, and who died, and all under the most impossible circumstances imaginable. Ultimately, it was a story about trying to impose order when man is surrounded by chaos of his own making. Even if the only thing he'd ever surrounded himself with before was apathy.

He stood up to go to the bathroom and heard people outside his door, so he bent to his phone and sent the emails he'd composed. One to Genie, one to The Duke, and one to Woodward, then he went to the door and opened it.

Five of them came in. All in black, black Ninja, and he walked into the bathroom, left the door open while he took a leak, then he went back to his chair and picked up the book and resumed reading.

Another knock on the door.

One of the Ninja opened it, and she walked in.

Rutherford, the assistant director of operations for the NSA.

She walked in -- black dress, blacks stockings and heels -- and she stopped, looked out the window at the airport, then down at him. Then she put her heel on his groin -- and pushed.

"I liked that book," she began. "Read it years ago. Kind of heartbreaking, in the way Hooker's MASH was."

"The more things change..." he said, trying to hide the pain.

"Yes. Exactly. I want you, but I guess you know that, don't you."

"I'm not sure why?"

"It doesn't matter. What matters is that I do."

"I understand."

"The audio on our end wasn't good. I take it Woodward's little bitch filled you in?"

"Pretty much. You'll have to kill Genie, with your own hands, to sanctify the marriage, that kind of thing?"

"Don't trivialize something so sacred."

"I'm not. I simply I don't understand."

She looked at him with, perhaps, a little compassion, maybe even understanding in her eyes, then she turned to one of the Ninja. "It's time. Turn on the television."

One of the girls found the remote and turned it on, then tuned into CNN.

"The President met in Reykjavík this morning. Secretly, of course," she smiled. "He's about to leave...they're all about to leave, now that their press conference is over. Watch..."

He saw Air Force One taxi to the end of the runway, then make it's run. It lifted into the air and was beginning to make it's turn for the Atlantic when it simply exploded, and a huge black and orange fireball appeared -- where only moments before there had been normalcy.

She nodded at the Ninja -- who turned the sound down -- then she turned to Acheson. "Right now, and I mean right this moment, the vice president and the entire chain of succession is being eliminated. Within the hour, a huge explosion will simply remove the Pentagon from the face of the earth. When Congress convenes in emergency session this evening, that building will fall down around their heads."

"My. You seem to have thought of everything."

The back-handed slap was brutal, as her leather gloves were full of lead shot, and he felt his left eye swell and close.

"I'm not fond of sarcasm," she said.

"Apparently not."

The next blow was more savage, then...

"Director, on the television. Look!"

Rutherford turned to CNN and she saw -- Rutherford, turning to look at the television.

"What is this?" she almost screamed.

"It's CNN, and smile, you're on Candid Camera!" Acheson said, pointing at an air conditioning vent.

She turned, snapped her fingers and all the Ninja made for the door -- only Woodward and Tate and half the FBI was waiting out there already, guns drawn and ready.

They opened fire, and cut them down. All of them but Rutherford.

The war had been joined now. He could see it in the woman's eyes.

Then she turned and looked at Woodward. "Leave us for a moment, please. I need to tell him something."

Acheson nodded, and the team stepped back out into the hall, closing the door -- almost.

She knelt between Acheson's legs and cupped his face in hand: "I'm sorry, Ben. Sorry I hurt you."

And he took her hand and kissed it. "I don't think I'll ever understand why this happened, but I'll try."

"I know you will. That's why I want you."

"That's a good look for you," he sighed, trying to smile. "You look good in black. Sexy."

"And that's why I'll always want you."

"Okay."

"This isn't over, you know?"

He nodded his head. "I know."

"God, I want you so much it hurts."

He watched as one of the agents came into the room, and he looked as the man pulled out a silenced pistol and came up to her from behind. He placed blue steel against the back of her neck, and Acheson turned away.

*

(C)2017 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is fiction, all fiction, and nothing but fiction | tell me...should this end here?