Zero Hour

by Keller O'Brien

  Pretty soon his erection had reached its full length and he grunted as she spit on it and used the saliva for lubrication, running one hand back and forth along the length and then using both hands to create a tunnel, working them over his cock in a steady motion and then putting the whole thing in her mouth.

  “We’re not exactly on the desk,” Stone said.

  She looked up at him as she took his one-eyed snake to the back of her throat, her cheeks sinking in as she sucked, letting his head of his cock feel the back of her throat before she opened her mouth and let him out. Saliva dripped from her lips and she wiped it away.

  “You want me on the desk?”

  She moved him out of the way and leaned over to rest her elbows on the desktop.

  “I’m on the desk,” she announced.

  Stone’s eyes followed both toned legs from the floor all the way up. The narrow calves turned into fleshy thighs, creamy white thighs, that vanished up the hem of the mini-skirt.

  Stone found the zipper on the side, pulled it down, and let the skirt fall to the floor, revealing her tiny lace thong and rounded bottom that was so tight he could bounce a quarter off each cheek.

  The thong offered no resistance as he pulled it down to let it fall with the skirt and then there was only the puff of fur between him and her cock pocket.

  He couldn’t help but run his hands over her ass and feel the warm skin. Then he spanked her, hard, leaving a mild imprint of his hand. She yelped but quickly covered her mouth.

  “They’re gonna hear us if you aren’t quiet,” he said.

  She mumbled something through her hand.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  She moved her hand. “Quit talking and stretch my pussy.”

  He shrugged. After all, what the hell. He first probed her with two fingers, feeling the heat within, and the wetness, which lubed her more and more as he probed. She moaned, covering her mouth again, urging him with her eyes as she looked back.

  He shoved his length into her and rolled his eyes. Her muscles gripped him softly, flexing as he moved in and out, and he wanted to pound her and watch her butt cheeks jiggle and then keep pounding her until she passed out and be blew his load inside her, but that would alert the rest of the troops so he maintained slow, easy thrusts, breathing hard but not making any other noise.

  Beads of sweat covered her forehead, the hand still over her mouth, but her eyes reported nothing but pleasure as he probed within her.

  She came first, her body suddenly tensing, Tori grabbing the edges of the desk with both hands. Her face twisted as she tried to contain a cry of delight, and then Stone made one last deep thrust, her public hair tickling his balls, and his own release took place. He put his hands on the desk, leaning over her back a little, to keep himself upright. When he pulled out, fluid dripped from her snatch onto the tiled floor.

  He pulled up his pants and zipped up. She took a little longer, her body still shaking, but she finally got the thong back in place and then the skirt.

  “I picked the wrong underwear today,” she said.

  The wet spots on the floor were more than obvious.

  “You probably don’t want to call the janitor for that,” he said.

  She grinned.

  “Good luck on your mission,” she said. “Come back in one piece.”

  “You mean my dick?”

  “No, all of you.”

  It wasn’t her usual answer. Stone wasn’t sure how to reply. She kept up a poker face so he wasn’t sure how to read her expression.

  It would wait. He winked at her, pocketed both USB drives, and left her office.

  San Francisco

  He couldn’t hear anything through the glass.

  Simon Lassiter had lost a little hair and grew a bit of a paunch over the years, but his mind was still sharp, and he still enjoyed the custom fit of Saville Row. The glass reflected a portion of his face, the rest of it faded from the bright afternoon over the city.

  He stood in the View Lounge on the 39th Floor of the San Francisco Marriott, overlooking the top of great San Francisco and the busy streets below. The large half-circle window, with its crisscross framing housing multiple panes of glass, substituted for a wall. Behind Lassiter, the bartender kept busy filling drinks, while customers in the lounge either stood or sat on small, very plush couches.

  Lassiter kept his back to all of the activity, staring into space. He absently started counting pedestrians walking along Market Street.

  They’d be coming for him, and he knew it.

  For Lassiter, it was part of the game. He’d won a major portion of it in convincing the U.S. government that he was dead. He’d spent the last few years perfecting malware and computer viruses that were unparalleled in their destructive capability. And he did it all freely, albeit in hiding, with none of the need to stay ahead of the F.B.I. domestically, or the C.I.A. while overseas.

  Now it was for a new game.

  He wouldn’t be hard to find, and the authorities would have a laugh when they found out about him giving a keynote at Future Dreams, but what they didn’t know was that during the keynote, his latest creation would be unleashed across the nation, a super-worm designed to bring Wall Street to its knees, and help his client regain his lost fortune.

  The muted voices in the lounge didn’t stir his thoughts, and then once voice cut through the mix.

  It was a higher-pitched voice than what a normal man might have, and Lassiter turned to see Earl Bryant and his assistant, Zahra Tajik, making their way through the lounge and stopping here and there to share words with people who reached out to shake his hand.

  Bryant had his fans. He’d made a huge name for himself with his company, which included building the tallest building in the city which, to Lassiter, looked like a giant dick. Some said the design of the building was reflective of Earl Bryant’s personality, and it was a joke he rolled with. He had more money than his critics could ever dream about anyway, so who cared?

  He was a bit of a porker even in his own custom-tailored suit, balding on top but with long hair in back and on the sides, and the tech CEO trademark, a goatee going slightly to gray. Lassiter didn’t understand why these tech folks wanted to all look like each other; there were half a dozen other men similarly attired, with similar haircuts and facial hair. It was insane. Nobody wanted to be their own person; they had to look just like the next guy or face some sort of odd consequence that nobody could truly quite define but feared nonetheless.

  It was Zahra who was the real eye-catcher.

  They called her The Indian Princess.

  She was just shy of six feet with legs that went on forever with a face as striking as her figure.

  When they finally reached Lassiter, he welcomed them with a straight face.

  Bryant was more jovial. Lassiter smelled liquor on his breath.

  “Did somebody die, Simon?”

  “Got a lot of my mind.”

  “I bet. Don’t worry, we’re all set up. We got the streets blocked off, everything in place at Moscone, I even got U2 and Sting for the concert, did I tell you?”

  “You told me.”

  “Private show at AT&T Park. It’s going to be great, Simon.”

  Lassiter made eye contact with Zahra; they nodded at each other. Her face showed as much expression as his. Her blouse was open in a narrow V.

  “I’d rather not be introduced,” Lassiter said, “prior to my keynote.”

  “Of course, we gotta keep up the suspense.”

  Lassiter turned back to the view.

  “We’ll see you at dinner, Simon,” Bryant said.

  “For sure.”

  Lassiter let out a sigh. He had a lot on his mind and there was no room for a party attitude. Bryant, of course, never missed the opportunity to have a good time, but he also wasn’t engineering the fall of the Western economy.

  He finally smiled.

  He’d be on the run for the rest of his life after releasing the super-worm, but ant
icipating the damage caused by his create made the prospect almost worthwhile.

  Chapter Seven

  Tatiana Ivanov entered the lobby of the Marriott through a pair of automatic doors that swung open ahead of her. She dragged her rolling suitcase behind her, and wore simple street clothes which helped her blend in with the crowd.

  The lobby was packed, and not just with guests. The hotel had two very fancy restaurants in the lobby, one out in the open with a upscale sports bar setting, and the other on the second floor, accessed by escalator. She knew from her research that nobody escaped from the second floor restaurant for less than $200.

  The biggest hassle with checking in was the line, and while she waited, she listened to the chatter around her as others talked about how excited they were for the opening of the Future Dreams Conference and which speakers they were looking forward to. Of course, there were sales people who wanted to make deals, and she caught some of their strategy sessions too.

  Her room was very quiet with a view overlooking the Bay Bridge, the span covered with lights that periodically changed colors.

  She unpacked and returned to the lobby. There was a sitting area adjacent to the sports bar, and after fetching a martini from the bar, she sat down with her back to the wall. She wanted to watch the comings and goings and immerse herself in the crowd.

  When Greshnev Denisovna revealed the name Simon Lassiter to her, she knew it probably cost a fortune to have him create the kind of malware required to sabotage the U.S. economic engine and help Denisovna’s boss, Kazantsev Ruslanovich, regain his fortune. Lassiter had a long relationship with Earl Bryant, the software king of Silicon Valley, so the Future Dreams Conference was the perfect spot to find them both. For sure, she’d find Bryant. He loved the spotlight. Lassiter could stay in hiding all he wanted. All she had to do was put the screws to Bryant and he’d sing like a canary. But she didn’t think it would come to that once she overheard talk of Lassiter’s keynote. She smiled and sipped her drink. Sometimes all a shark had to do was wait for the minnows to come to her.

  Then she saw Devlin Stone cross the lobby, heading for the elevators.

  She frowned. Why would the Eagle Alliance be here, instead of the F.B.I.?

  She knew Stone from a previous encounter overseas, in Belgium, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d be an ally or an antagonist on this case. He was probably after the same thing she was, and a partnership couldn’t hurt, but she wouldn’t know for sure until she talked to him about it.

  She drank a little more of her martini.

  This job was shaping up to be quite interesting indeed.

  Devlin Stone took the key card to his room and crossed the lobby to the elevators.

  This wasn’t his first trip to San Francisco but the place had certainly changed a lot since his last visit.

  Traffic, of course, was worse, and he’d had the cabbie drop him off a block away from the hotel rather than sit and let the meter keep ticking. He went the rest of the way on foot, aggressive homeless people asking for money, and trying not to step in the smelly brown presents said homeless people left on the sidewalk. The whole block smelled of human shit and bad weed, and Stone wasn’t sure which was worse.

  But what he did know, as he entered his room and dropped his suitcase on the bed, was that when the conference opened tomorrow, Earl Bryant would be giving the welcoming speech.

  That meant he’d be absent from his penthouse, located at the top of the “tallest building in San Francisco” which he’d had built for him. It looked like a giant dick, which matched Bryant’s personality.

  At least, that’s what Stone had heard. He didn’t know the man. But he was a tech CEO in Silicon Valley; being a giant dick was part of the job requirement. You had to be a self-centered, egotistical asshole to be a tech CEO. You had to think the world revolved totally around you and have a marketing team to make sure everybody else knew the world revolved around you. If one lacked any of those tools, you weren’t a tech CEO, you were probably the janitor. You might be a rich janitor because of company stock options, but you were still pulling the CEO’s used condoms out of the toilet and trying not to think about why they were brown.

  There would be a bonus to knocking Bryant off his perch when Stone took down Lassiter. A small bonus, but a bonus nonetheless.

  For now, he needed a shower and a night’s sleep. After the shower, where he had to keep turning the spigot to keep the hot water coming, as the multitude of guests in the building were more than likely causing a strain on the water heater, he had dinner sent up, and spent the rest of the night relaxing with the glow of the television filling the room.

  But he couldn’t relax. With his hands linked behind his head, he felt his father’s ring dig into the back of his head.

  He looked at his right hand. The silver eagle’s head ring, taken from his late father’s body, now adorned his finger. He’d polished it as best as he could when Preston presented the ring to him, but the silver still bore carbon scarring from the cabin fire in which his father had died.

  Preston had told him not to let emotions get in the way of good judgement. He knew that Stone’s blood would be boiling over the death of Monty Stuart, and it was. Stone wanted Lassiter between his hands so he could squeeze the life out of the man.

  But lately, especially after his last mission in Mexico, he’d been wondering if there was a difference between justice and vengeance. He tried to tell himself they were the same thing, but lingering doubts made him question his reasoning.

  He knew what vengeance was. Vengeance meant standing over the corpse of your enemy with a smoking gun in your hand.

  What did justice look like? Justice, to Stone, meant court delays, plea bargains, technicalities, basically a laundry list of ways the enemy could escape “justice” and walk free.

  Nobody walked free after a bullet punched through their head. The only thing they did after that was stay dead forever.

  What did he owe Monty?

  What did he owe himself?

  He’d sworn over the graves of his family that the Enemy, the universal antagonist in all forms, would never hurt anybody the way they’d hurt them, or hurt him. He survived the fire, yeah, but he died a little inside, too.

  Was he going too far?

  Was he becoming the monster he wanted to fight?

  But how else was one to slay a monster without taking on aspects of the behavior, to meet the monster on its own turf. You couldn’t reason with the Enemy. They lived for destruction; he lived to stop them.

  It was enough to drive a man crazy. He could spin his head in circles trying to come up with the answer, and still not have the true answer he desired.

  What would his father have done?

  Stone had to admit he didn’t know. His father’s work had been secret. All he remembered was Dad leaving for weeks at a time, coming home for weeks at a time, and never talking about “business”.

  Stone locked his hands behind his head again and stared at the ceiling, ignoring the television, knowing only that when he put his hands on Lassiter the cyber terrorist would never break free.

  He’d deal with the consequences later.

  The Future Dreams conference started with great fanfare and a lot of noise within Moscone Center West, but the build-up to the opening ceremony is what had people on the street talking.

  Moscone Center, divided into West, South, and North buildings all within a few blocks of each other, is normally quiet and slightly imposing. Mostly steel and glass, the West building is the largest of the set, and where the big trade shows and car shows take place.

  The crowd arrived slowly at first, just prior to nine a.m.; within twenty minutes, a flood of people crowded Fourth Street as they moved inside Moscone West to take their seats. Security personnel in full force, ticket checkers never getting a break, the mass of people like an onrushing flood that not even Moses could stop. Traffic ground to a halt because of the mass of people filing cross walks, and horns and ang
ry shouts filled the air.

  One of the cross streets at Moscone West, Howard, was blocked off entirely between 4th Street and 3rd Street, the entire length of asphalt covered in AstroTurf and set up with a stage, outdoor vendor booths, huge video screen, and scaffolding with holding lights, speakers, and banners.

  Private security stood at either side of the street, uniformed and armed with semi-automatic rifles, because you never knew if ISIS was going to attack the big tech show where computer nerds talked about their tools and platforms and development engines. One would suggest that such an attack really wouldn’t hurt anybody, since tech people aren’t real people, but Earl Bryant wanted to emphasize “safety”, so he hired a crew of guys who looked like ex-cops and carried military weapons and brooded while they stood waiting for the opportunity to shoot something.

  The biggest pre-ceremony draw was a coffee shop in the nearby Metreon shopping complex called Café X, where robot servers made and served the coffee. The tech people loved it, and goofier ones continuously making “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” jokes and snorting as they laughed. The stainless-steel machines carried on as programmed, and even in that state they had more personality and warmth than any ten coders combined.

  Devlin Stone watched the crowd from above. He stood near one of the buildings at Yerba Buena Gardens, which housed a carousel, bowling alley, a few restaurants, and other spots of entertainment. On the upper level overlooking Howard and 4th, he watched the crowd with a sense of awe. How could so many converge on so small a space all at the same time?

  He couldn’t help but notice the lack of homeless in the area, and the sidewalks had been cleaned. Future Dreams meant tourist dollars; people were flying into San Francisco from all over the country. The very liberal city couldn’t have said tourists stepping in poo and dealing with aggressive panhandlings, so the cops must have rolled in overnight and swept the people to the Embarcadero waterfront, while the cleaning crews took care of the sidewalks. The city that was “proud” of its progressivism wasn’t beyond sweeping the less-attractive aspects of the city away from prying eyes, and the hypocrisy would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad and typical of those who considered themselves the betters of everybody else. We should help the homeless, until they get in the way of tax revenue, and then we should sweep them away like so much rubbish while still touting how wonderful progressive policies are for the poor.