“I want information,” Monique Calhoun said, grinding ever so slowly and tantalizingly, “and you don’t get to come till I get it.”
“I’ll never talk!” Eric declaimed in the best over-the-top cine hero voice he could muster. “You can’t make me!”
“Then you won’t mind if I give it a good long try,” Monique purred, and she slid herself slowly up the core of his aching pleasure, and paused there without granting him a downstroke.
“Do your worst!” Eric declared mock-heroically. “I cannot be broken!”
But it was true, for despite the physical configuration, his knowledge that they were both breathing the pheremonic vapors and his desire to appear to be “broken” under prolonged sexual torture actually put him in command of the situation.
Monique slid slowly down. And halted. And around. And halted. And up. And halted. And down. And halted. And around.
She was good. She knew just what she was doing, applying an agonizingly slow and intermittent rhythm that brought Eric right to the edge and could hold him there indefinitely.
But Eric, cocksman that he was and often enough in the line of semi-professional duty, had often enough sustained just this situation willingly himself in the name of prowess and had long since learned to enjoy it.
He could always come.
He would come later.
But best to make his resistance credible. Best not to seem to give up too soon. No indeed. A hard job, but Eric had reason to believe he was definitely up for it.
Monique found Eric Esterhazy’s controlled endurance impressive as he lay there supine and helpless beneath her ministrations grinning up at her as if he wouldn’t mind at all if she tortured him like this for hours or possibly decades.
Was it an act? Was it ego? Was it sheer enjoyment of the endless tantalization?
Or, she began to wonder, might Eric be taking this bedroom game a bit more seriously that he pretended? Might he really be hiding a secret?
Be that as it may, Monique found, rather to her surprise, that as it went on and on and on, she was building up a more and more urgent need in herself for a second release. It was taking more and more discipline and control to keep her rhythm slow and intermittent rather than climactically urgent, while the son of a bitch beneath her by comparison seemed to be taking it all as cool as stiffly frozen cucumber.
It seemed to Monique that she had better give it a try while she could. With no little psychic effort, she paused panting on the upstroke and held it, managing to pulse her nether muscles slightly.
“You know what ‘Lao’ is, don’t you?” she said.
“I might . . .” Eric sighed, looking up at Monique, sweaty, panting, obviously moving toward the urgency of another orgasm under the influence of the pheremonics, but not knowing it.
Time for the next move.
“And you know what’s inside the mysterious tent, don’t you . . . ?”
“I might . . .” said Monique, but it seemed that even under the influence of lust and pheremonic vapors, a dark cloud passed across her visage.
Eric used what limited penile prehensibility he had attained to wriggle the organ in question enough to hopefully recenter her attention.
“And I might tell you mine if you tell me yours. . . .”
It seemed to work.
“Who’s torturing whom here?” Monique said, sliding down, and returning to her tantalizing rhythm.
“That remains to be seen, Mata Hari,” Eric told her.
But he then granted her a rolling of his eyes in pleasurable agony, a groan, a sigh. It was approaching the moment when he must appear to lose control.
After which, he could allow himself the pleasure of actually doing so.
Eric was finally writhing and rolling beneath her and against his bonds in agonized ecstasy, but Monique doubted that she could endure this sexual torture much longer herself, and if this was turning into a perverse endurance contest, she was at a disadvantage, since she was the one in control, the one who must hold back her body’s burning desire for fleshly apotheosis by act of swiftly eroding will.
A little while longer, a little while longer. . . .
“All right, all right,” Eric moaned, judging by the increasing frenzy of Monique’s accelerating rhythm that the time had arrived. “Let me come, and I’ll tell you what I know about Lao.”
“Tell me first!” Monique said raggedly.
“Why should I trust you?”
Monique looked him directly in the eyes.
“Because you know damn well that I want to come as much as you do, Eric Esterhazy,” she said.
Eric laughed.
“Takes one to know one,” he admitted. “But since you want to reach the climax of this little sexual theater piece as much as I do, it’s only fair I get my quid pro quo. You have to tell me what you know about what’s in the tent.”
“You first!”
“You first!”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Damn it Eric, can’t you at least be a bit of a gentleman now!”
Eric made a great show of sighing.
“Lao is the reference code for some kind of operation the Siberians are running against Big Blue here,” he lied. “Something to do with Davinda and his climate model.”
Monique’s rhythm began to increase, her breath was coming in pants, but she still was making an effort to hold back.
“What kind of operation?” she demanded. “Was Ivan maybe repeating the word to Davinda as some kind of posthypnotic key or something?”
“You think the Marenkos tell the hired help stuff like that?” Eric moaned. “That’s all I know!”
Her rhythm was picking up. Eric’s show of impatience was becoming genuine.
“Come on, Monique,” he groaned, “isn’t that enough?”
She didn’t reply in words. She didn’t have to. Eric didn’t want her to. Not yet, anyway. She just moaned, and sighed, and let herself go. It didn’t take long for Eric to come along with her. After all that twisted psychic foreplay, finally letting his body do what came naturally didn’t take long at all.
“Well . . . ?” Eric said as Monique lay catching her breath atop him in the rosy sweaty afterglow.
“Well what . . . ?” Monique muttered, physically exhausted, sexually satisfied, but dumbfounded to discover that she still didn’t quite feel sated.
“Well we had a deal. What’s hidden under guard in the Grand Palais?” Eric said, and Monique was equally amazed to feel what should’ve been thoroughly deflated beginning to stir beneath her.
“Oh . . . the computer that they’re going to run Davinda’s climate model on,” she said dreamily, reaching down to affirm this formidable fact, and sliding herself into position to take carnal advantage.
“Oh really?” Eric said snidely. “That’s hardly the point now, is it?”
“This is the point,” said Monique, slipping the tip of the organ in question into her, “and it does seem to be hard enough for now, now doesn’t it?”
“This is your idea of a fair trade of information?” Eric said angrily as she began a slow smoky rotation. “You’re hiding something, I know you are, what is it?”
Her sexual fires on the rise yet again, Monique was nevertheless brought up short by that, for yes, she was hiding something, had been hiding something, from herself as much as from him, something she had been constrained to push below the level of emotional awareness to be able to continue her professional services to the client at all.
And now, here she was, in the midst of the most profound sexual experience of her life, and the man who was giving it to her was asking for the truth that in this passionate moment she realized she wanted to shout from the media rooftops.
Eric Esterhazy looked up at her. Perhaps it was an illusion of the sexual afterglow through which they were moving toward yet another round of lovemaking, but it seemed to Monique that she had never seen such a look of concerned s
incerity on this phony prince’s theatrically handsome face, a face which, in that moment, she could almost imagine herself loving.
“What’s the matter, Monique?” Eric said softly. “Don’t be afraid. You can tell me.”
So she did.
“There is . . . reason to believe that there’s a polymerized human brain installed as a processor. . . .”
“What!” Eric found himself shouting.
“Just a supposition . . .” Monique whined defensively.
“That’s . . . that’s . . .”
“Horrible? Disgusting? Illegal in any jurisdiction . . . ?”
Eric could only nod numbly, having just learned something about himself the hard way. He had no particular regard for the laws, rules, or regulations of any jurisdiction save those of the syndic of which he was a citizen-shareholder, and Bad Boys’ charter specifically mandated its citizen-shareholders to violate any of them in the syndic’s service if necessary.
He had certainly committed acts which the majority of the planet’s population would consider reprehensible. Including removal operations which the bluntly punctilious might be so tasteless as to style “murder.”
But apparently imprisoning a human brain, polymerized or not, in a machine to serve as the core of the operating system was enough to arouse even a confirmed Bad Boy’s moral outrage. Who, after all, could say if it would be “conscious” or not, and in what horrible manner, except the hapless meatware chip itself?
“Why . . . ? What could they possibly hope to—?”
“Credibility,” said Monique. “Because it’ll be seen as such an unacceptable atrocity, the Siberians and the world will believe a climate model that proves Condition Venus is under way with a human brain in the computer running it. Because the Big Blue Machine would never risk doing such a thing unless they sincerely believed it . . . and so . . . so I believe it too . . .”
This was more than enough to wilt Eric’s erection psychically, but the aphrogas wouldn’t let the flesh succumb to the detumescent will of the spirit.
Monique gazed down at him, miserably, longingly, pathetically. “A necessary evil, Eric, isn’t it?” she said imploringly. “Your syndic specializes in that, doesn’t it? A terrible evil, but if it’s the only way to save the world from Condition Venus . . . and the white tornadoes—”
Eric quite lost it.
“Are a fucking fraud!” he shouted.
“Turn off the aphrogas!” Eric Esterhazy shouted.
“What . . . ? What . . . ?” Monique stammered in confusion.
“Purge the room with forty percent oxygen!”
“Do what?”
Now Monique began to realize that Eric hadn’t been ordering her to do the incomprehensible, as he looked more directly at her, and said in quite another voice, “Unchain me, Monique.”
Monique sat there immobile athwart him as she felt him detumesce out of her, as her own fires began to cool, as the rosy fog began to clear from her head, as she found herself feeling used and ridiculous, straddling a manacled man in a tacky disney of a medieval torture chamber. . . .
“Come on, let me loose!”
Aphrogas? Purge the room with oxygen?
She leapt rather shakily off of him.
“Let you loose, you son of a bitch!” she screamed.
Her eyes scanned the torture chamber disney for anything that might serve as an appropriate instrument—an ax, a sword, even a baseball bat would do!
“Oh, I’m a son of a bitch for playing a little harmless prank which you can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy, but of course you, and the capitalist slime you’re working, for are as pure as the uncut Bolivian snow!”
“It isn’t like that . . .” Monique said, unconvincingly even to herself.
“Oh, of course not,” Eric said insinuatingly. “What’s using a human brain as a computer chip and faking the end of the world to turn a profit, after all, just . . . Bread & Circuses as usual, right?”
“But . . . but if Condition Venus is beginning—”
“Didn’t you hear what I said, Monique?” Eric said somewhat less sardonically. “Condition Venus isn’t happening. The white tornadoes are fakes. We’ve got recordings that prove it!”
“And the humidity waves and the heat waves and the Indian Ocean El Niño—”
“Probably more smoke and orbital mirrors too!”
“They wouldn’t—”
“Right,” said Eric. “People who would stick a human brain into a computer would never dream of faking the beginning of Condition Venus.”
“Shit,” said Monique.
What was that punch line to Ivan Marenko’s dumb joke?
Why is a planet like a nymphomaniac?
Much easier to heat up than cool down.
“Now will you please let me loose, Monique?” Eric said gently. “We have to talk. And I don’t think you really want to continue the conversation here.”
Fresh air seemed to be a good idea, and so once they were dressed, Eric took Monique up through the main salon and along the promenade to the bow, where they secured a bubble of privacy by, ironically enough, pretending to be in the process of seducing each other.
This took some glad-handing and small talk en passant, and by the time they were standing side by side in the bow of La Reine with the river breeze in their faces as it rounded the Ile St. Louis, Eric’s head had quite cleared and he fully realized the perilous magnitude of what he had done under the influence.
Eduardo would not be pleased. Nor would the Marenkos.
On his own initiative, or to be more embarrassingly precise, under the influence of aphrogas and sex as much as moral outrage, he had made a major policy decision without syndic authorization. He had revealed the existence of the white tornado recordings to Monique Calhoun.
To an operative of Bread & Circuses under contract to the Big Blue Machine.
He had been a bad Bad Boy. His big mouth—or, as Mom would no doubt say, his big dumb dick—might have landed him in deep dark shit.
“These recordings . . .” Monique Calhoun said coldly, “they really prove that the white tornadoes are being faked?”
Eric nodded. “Maybe not legal proof in most jurisdictions, but in the court of public opinion where it counts,” Eric told her. “And any halfway conscious spinmeister could use that to convince even the True Blue that they’ve been faking the rest of the recent weird weather too, true or not.”
“Faking Condition Venus . . .” Monique muttered. “Heating up the planet even further to get fat contracts to cool it back down. . . .”
“Those recordings get released to the media, and the Big Blue Machine, UNACOCS, any further talk of Condition Venus, is as dead as . . . as dead as . . .”
“A human body after its brain has been ripped out and installed in a computer?” Monique suggested sardonically. “You know what I think?”
They were leaning against the rail, bodies touching, faces turned close together like a couple soon to become lovers for the sake of cover, but the eye contact was not exactly romantic.
“That I am an egotistical shallow ruthless phallocratic son of a bitch for pumping aphrogas into the boudoir and taking shameless advantage of your sweet innocence?”
Monique Calhoun did not seem to be amused. But she did seem to have passed beyond her anger at him.
“That too,” she said. “But you’re right. What you’ve done is just some stupid schoolboy prank compared to what the . . . capitalist slime I’ve somehow found myself working for have done. If they’ve really done it.”
“I told you, we have proof that the white—”
“But I don’t know if there’s really a human brain in the Davinda climate model computer, it’s just a deduction from—”
“You don’t want to believe it!”
“Do you?”
Eric shrugged. “Who would?”
“What are you going to do with those recordings?” Monique said slowly.
“Not my decision to make,”
Eric told her all too truthfully.
“Your . . . syndic, then.”
How much more could he tell her?
Only what she could figure out for herself.
“Sell them,” he said. “For quite a lot of money.”
“To the media?”
“Or . . . the highest bidder . . .”
“Like the Marenkos? Who’d use them to destroy UNACOCS and Big Blue and discredit the Condition Venus hypothesis forever . . . or until it’s too late?”
“You might think that,” said Eric. “I couldn’t possibly comment.”
“You can’t do that, Eric,” Monique said. “What if we are about to slide into Condition Venus even if the white tornadoes are fakes? What if the Davinda climate model does prove it, human brain or not? You really want to discredit the truth because the messengers happen to be unprincipled capitalist liars? Without being sure? Without knowing?”
“So let’s find out!” Eric blurted.
Of course.
Eric looked directly into Monique Calhoun’s eyes, all superciliousness purged from his expression, or so he hoped.
“When you want to pry open an oyster,” he said, “you use a big tough knife. Do you know what I’m thinking?”
Monique just shook her head.
“I’m thinking you’re going to report what you’ve learned up some chain of command. . . .”
“You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”
“So the . . . people at the top of that chain of command are going to know we can blow the whole scam open with the white tornado recordings anyway . . .”
“So . . . ?”
Eric paused. He expanded his chest with a deep breath of river air as his boat rode the current westward past the klieg-lit glory of Notre Dame cathedral. Was he not the master of La Reine de la Seine? Did that not make him a Prince of the City? Or was he just a fancy doorman?
Eric knew he was about to cross another river, not the Seine, but a personal Rubicon. Could he do it? Could he not? If he succeeded, he would redeem himself with Eduardo Ramirez and his syndic. If he presumed such authority and failed, the alligators of the Seine might enjoy a princely dinner.
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