by Pat Powers
"Sounds kinda dull," observed Jamie.
"It is, compared to dancing," said April. "But if you've got to sit around talking about stuff, it's much more interesting stuff to talk about than the stuff moms usually talk about."
"You have a point there," Jamie agreed.
"Plus the moves I saw, some of them were INCREDIBLE," April said. "I've got to learn them."
What April never told any of her friends, or anyone at all, was how she practiced her moves. She practiced them naked.
There was no practical or logical reason why she should practice her moves naked, and a pretty good one why she shouldn't have done so. Her costume was part of her dance, she should practice in it so that she'd be aware of its effect when she danced.
And she DID wear her costume when she practiced in public, and sometimes when she practiced at home. But mostly when she practiced at home, she wound up dancing naked. There was no logic here, she just felt RIGHT when she danced naked. And she had discovered that while there were many moves that were enhanced by her costume, there were many others where the costume seemed to be an hindrance -- just something that got between her and the moves she wanted to make.
But basically, it was just more fun to dance naked, and imagine all the guys watching her with their mouths falling open and their eyes bugging out of their heads.
She would start out her sessions clothed, and during those sessions she would dance for an entire imaginary audience, expressing joy and vitality and general peppiness, as well as displaying grace and technical skill.
But after awhile her hips would start sliding around and her butt would start wiggling. Once her clothes were removed, her dance would start getting seriously sexy. It would start out generically sexy, but eventually became pure raw animal sex in dance form. Her goal became to arouse an imaginary man until he creamed his jeans, unable to control himself. She found the fact that mens' sexual parts got bigger and harder -- a lot bigger and harder, not like nipples -- to be very exciting. She had masturbated several dates to orgasm not so much because she like them, but because she was fascinated with the way men's genitals worked.
"They're just so WEIRD!" she once told her friend. "They get big, and the minute they start getting big, they suck all the blood right out of the guy's brain and they just completely lose it! They'll do and say ANYTHING to get it in you after it gets hard. I know everybody says that's true, but it's, like, SO true!"
And of course April was very interested in having guys put things in her. She had been letting guys put things in her since she was 14. Always with a condom of course. Mom had drilled her hard on that one. Dad was never going to tell her anything about sex.
April once heard her mother and father arguing the topic -- it wasn't hard, they rarely bothered to conceal much of anything from the kids except that they had sex, which was more than problem enough for them given how often they did it.
"They're my daughters and I'll tell them whatever I think they need to know and they definitely need to know this," Jean said in tones that indicated that this was definitely not a new argument.
"C'mon, Jean, they're just kids, they don't need condoms for god's sake," said Arthur. "You give them condoms they're just going to figure it's all right to sleep with guys."
"They already know it's all right to sleep with guys," Jean responded. "Their bodies are telling them that constantly, and in voices we can't possibly match."
"How do you know that?" Arthur asked, "because I sure don't. They still play with dolls, they still watch cartoons, they still like those boy bands."
"I know because I remember what it was like when I was their age," said Jean. "I wanted to do it with boys ... a long time before anyone thought I should. I wanted to do it BAD Arthur. Really bad. The only thing that kept me from going all the way with boys at April's age was that no one did it at that age, back in those days. I had the feeling the sky would crash down and rain flaming lava on me if I did. Actually, it wasn't even that. It wasn't fear of some horrible punishment, it was just that going all the way with a boy was unthinkable. And to tell the truth some of my classmates thought of it, and did it anyway. And I wasn't that far from being one of them, which is a scary thing, because nobody told kids about birth control in those days. Which got a lot of girls pregnant."
"But things are different now," said Arthur in vaguely sarcastic tones.
"Yes, things are different now," responded Jean. "Now there's sex all over. Whether we like it or not, our little girls know what sex is, and that they can have it, and I will be DAMNED if I'm letting them get knocked up because of that knowledge. And it's a LOT easier to tell a horny teenager she has to take precautions when she has sex, than to tell her she can't have sex at all."
Little snippets of her past like this would pop into her mind out of nowhere as she sat in her hazy excuse for awareness, and go spinning down trails of memory that led to sleep, or nowhere.
April's captors kept her tied at all times, and very securely so. This was an important fact, somehow. This thought drifted through April's mind before she was awake enough to seize on it and do something with it.
Finally her mind cleared briefly, and she was lucid enough to think about why it was important that she was so well tied up.
The reason was ... the reason was that it meant that whoever had tied her up was probably into bondage at some level. The way she was tied up with the ropes going around her upper arms and her arms tied together at the forearms behind her back. It was a form of shibari, the Japanese bondage art. April had had a master once who was into shibari, it was quite the art form, almost made her feel like a piece of art. And the bondage tended to be quite comfy once it was on. But there was an awful lot of sitting around waiting to be fully tied up before she got molested. And frankly, although April liked the bondage for its own sake to a certain extent, what she really liked was the role playing and having sex while bound. Especially especially having sex while bound.
It was strange for someone like her, a dancer who so loved to express herself through movement, to enjoy sex so much while her movement was restricted by bonds. But she did. She loved it. Maybe there was some deep underlying meaning to it. April didn't know and didn't care. She loved what she loved.
To be fair, she didn't really like the super-strict bondage that left her unable to so much as twitch. That got boring quickly.
Once, she had been wrapped from neck to toe in cellophane, unable to to so much as twitch, the bottom half of her face encased in a huge leather harness ball gag. A tiny slit was torn in the saran wrap by her master, and he pushed his cock into her through it, mounting her from behind as she lay on the floor. That had been exciting, because she was so totally helpless, so totally unable to respond in terms of movement to the vigorous thrusting inside her tightly bound buttocks. All she could do was mmmph into her ballgag and shake her head, so she did that.
When her master came inside her, April was very excited, but had not come herself, so she had to lie there and feel the cum puddling on her thighs while her master lay spent beside her.
She mmphed in protest a few times at this treatment, all trussed up and no way to come, as it were, but her master ignored her of course.
Later, her master's wife came by. She casually worked a vibrating dildo into April's pussy, using her master's cum as lubricant, pressing it in slowly until just the last inch or so of it stuck out. Then she turned it on with a twist of the base and slapped some transparent sticky tape over it, securing it in place while it did its buzzy work. She could not move, she could not dislodge the vibrator, she could only lie there and feel the vibrator relentlessly driving her crazy.
Her mistress reclined on a sofa, happy with her work.
Hours later, when the ropes came off, her inner thighs were so coated with dried love juices that the skin of both thighs pulled apart slowly and reluctantly, like skin coming off a vinyl upholstered chair after falling asleep in it on a hot day.
That had been a wo
nderful experience. But she still preferred being able to move around at least enough to writhe.
Chapter 32
If a belly dancer is closing in on me, I eat the pad
When I left the Dancers, they were one very unhappy family. Jim put up some resistance initially, but with Mom leaning on him, he caved eventually, and I got a complete description of the people who had visited him and what they'd said and a copy of the release Jim had signed, giving them cover for kidnapping his daughter.
I assured him that this was good news, that it indicated that April had been kidnapped by people who wanted to keep her alive. I didn't completely believe my assurances -- the black ops people and the ideologues that were apparently behind this play worried me -- they were not a crew noted for their unwillingness to shed human life when principles or convenience were at stake.
I sensed that Jim was in for a couple of decades of outbursts and recriminations, and given that he had pretty much signed off on his own daughter's kidnapping, deservedly so. It WAS one of the stupider things I had ever heard of someone doing.
It was easy enough to see what had happened. A weak-willed man living among a group of strong-willed women who lovingly ignored his every attempt to take charge among them, finally given a chance to really make his opinions felt by some "family friends" who REALLY looked up to him for doing so. Oh, they'd made a complete and utter fool of him all right, and he'd never live it down, even if April turned out to be all right.
In the meantime, the case was breaking. These people had given Jim contact information. Was it bogus or not? I sure as hell intended to find out as fast as possible. I got on the phone with Andrew.
"Are you sure your phone is secure?" was Andrew's first question. He was in full paranoia mode after finding out about the CIA encryption.
"Of course it's a secure phone," I said. "Everybody loves it."
"You know what I mean, and why I mean it," said Thomson.
"All right, it's not secure, certainly not by your standards," I said. "But I'm a little less concerned about that now because I have information that leads me to think the guys you're worried about aren't all that involved. They may be side players, at best."
"I wouldn't let my guard down unless I was absolutely sure of that," said Thomson. "These people play for keeps."
"Granted," I said. "Anyway, how do you suggest we communicate if not by phone? We have a case to solve here, and I can't take the time to hook up with you face to face every time we need to talk."
"If you can meet with me one more time I think we can resolve the issue," said Thomson.
"OK, where and when?" I asked.
Twenty minutes later, I walked through the doors of a Chinese restaurant a few miles from Thomson's business -- a place we'd met after the "Cornflake case" referring to a perp who'd hidden some stolen goods in a box of corn flakes in his home. I wasn't very hungry, but I ordered a spring roll and some egg flower soup and some sweet tea -- a light snack that would keep me going without leaving me feeling bloated.
"Anybody follow you?" asked Thomson.
"No," I responded.
"You sure about that?" asked Thomson.
"C'mon, Andrew, I follow skip traces on credit card frauds around for a living," I said. "I've had my radar turned way up ever since I heard about the Greyman code. No one followed me."
"They've probably got us bugged," said Thomson.
"I don't know about that," I said. "There have been developments that make me think the CIA ops, if any, involved in this case are cowboys. If so, they're not going to be able, or likely to in an event, to pull a wiretap warrant on us. Could bite 'em back if they do."
"What makes you think that?" Thomson asked, so I filled him in on the results of the interview with Professor Bulloch and with Dancer's family.
"And so I think it might be mostly the culture war types -- the MOPs or the feminist belly dancers, trying to convert a major public figure to their viewpoint through this intervention," i said finally.
"I don't hear anything in all that that keeps the CIA out of this," said Thomson. "So, the cover is an intervention. But it still sounds like some CIA mind control types are probably in there, too."
"Mind control types?" I asked, brow raised.
"You know, like the guys who were running the black ops interrogation program that Abu Ghraib was based on," said Thomson. "That stuff didn't come out of nowhere, you know."
"I know," I said. I'd heard the tales from some of my vet friends who'd been stationed in Afghanistan about the secret prison-within-a-prison run by intelligence types with carte blanche to do just about anything they wanted to that didn't leave a mark, so long as they got good intel. It had not been happy news to me. It was always a bad things for a society when the cops started acting like perps.
"OK, but still, I think an op against a nationally famous woman who's clearly not at all interested in politics is a very different thing from picking up a bunch of potential terrorist guys in the distant corners of the Third World and giving 'em the third degree," I said. "Especially since Dancer is an attractive young woman. Maybe some cowboy would go for it, but the hierarchy at the CIA would avoid it. The potential political fallout is just too great if things go fuck-ugly, and this is a scenario with plenty of opportunity for things to go fuck-ugly, from their point of view."
"Bah," said Thomson. "I wish I believed you. But you know, prior to Abu Ghraib I would have said the interrogation methods used at Abu Ghraib would never be used on anyone outside a very few hard-core terrorists. Now I know better -- and so do you." That might be one of the worst fallouts from Abu Ghraib. Now guys like Thomson had an excuse -- a really GOOD one -- for their paranoia.
"OK, so what do you propose to do about our communications issues?" I asked, giving up on the idea of decreasing Thomson's worries about the CIA involvement. As a cop I knew there were all sorts of people in the world who would kill under varying circumstances, so the CIA didn't strike me as that much of a threat compared to a lot of other people I'd met. At least they had some idea what they were doing and why they were doing it.
"What I have is this," said Thomson, sliding a cell phone across the table to me.
"Ah," I said, picking it up. "A cell phone. Who'd a thunk it?"
"It's not a regular cell phone," said Thomson. "It has some extra encryption built into it that oughtta keep the spooks guessing at least for a while."
"Really?" I said. "I had the impression they could pretty much do what they want to in terms of telecommunications nowadays."
"They can intercept anything they want to," said Thomson, "but that doesn't mean they can understand it. That phone has built-in PGP encryption with a 512-bit key, but that's not the really cool part. It ALSO has another layer of encryption based on a one-time pad. That's what this is for."
Thomson slid a sheet across the table to me. It was filled with short strings of numbers and letters, each about 12 characters long. "Every time you call me on that phone, before you punch in anything else, punch in one of these lines," said Thomson. "That creates the code that will be used to encrypt the message that PGP sends. Basically, you'll talk into your phone, which will scramble what you say using this code, then it will be further scrambled using PGP. I'll punch the same code into my phone and it'll unscramble the PGP, then unscramble the one-time pad code, and we'll hear each other talk in the code known as English."
"If they can crack PGP with its huge numeric keys, why should this little thing give them any problems?" I asked.
"It wouldn't, except it's a one-time code," said Thomson. "It scrambles the information based on a random pattern that they don't have. They could figure out the code given time, sure, but it would take a long time, and since we only use it once and then throw it away, it would be history for us long before they deciphered it. Makes things ... quite a bit harder. Spies used to use it a lot in WWII."
"So, why'd they stop?" I asked.
"They haven't," said Thomson. "It's still pret
ty damned effective. The problem with it is, this" (Thomson tapped the sheet with all the strings of numbers.) "If your opposition has a copy of this, then it isn't much of a code. And there always have to be at least two copies of it -- in this case, mine and yours. If a guy is running a string of agents and they're all using the one-time pads, then if the opposition busts one of them and finds the pad, everyone in your string is compromised, and you have to tell them to dispose of the old pads and go through the logistics of getting them a new set of pads -- those that don't get rolled up by the opposition before you have a chance to react. Because of course it takes you awhile, most of the time, to find out about the bust."
"I get it," I said. "So, if a belly dancer is closing in on me, I eat the pad, right?"
"I know what the fuck you'll do if a belly dancer gets close to you, and it doesn't involve eating any pads," said Thomson with a grin.
"Right you are," I agreed. "Now, how the hell am I going to know if I get this long string of numbers punched in right?" I asked. "I mean, what if I get it wrong?"
"Nothing will happen until you punch in the right string," said Thomson. "Then the '6' button will blink three times, fast. Got it?"
"I've got it. Any progress on any of your fronts?" I asked.
"I think I've got my stuff locked up tight," said Thomson. "The spooks have some scary-smart guys working at Langley, but they're human."
"OK, I need some help; here," I said. "I've got this Arthur doofus, April's father, on tape, and the people he talked to left a contact number. I want to call the contact number and have the people on the other end think it's Arthur they're talking to. Is there any kind of tech that can cover that?"
"Not really, but there's a solution," said Thomson. "I know a guy who does a lot of social engineering that way -- he's really good at imitating people's voices once he hears them, and so he can get people to give up codes and stuff because they don't know who they're talking to."
"Can you get this guy and give him this tape?" (I slid a small cassette tape across the table to Thomson.) "And take him over to the Dancer place and have him make a call to this number and see if he can set up a meeting with them?" (I scribbled a name and number on a note pad and handed the sheet to Thomson.) "If they're as cagey as I think they are, it probably won't work, but I'd like you to tape what you hear and give me a verbal as soon as you hear it."