Strip Poker

by Lisa Lawrence

  “Don’t you have anywhere else to go?” I called out impatiently to the darkness. “A tipple down at the pub? Lead a few insurgents in Iraq or something?”

  “I don’t do that kind of thing anymore,” said Simon, walking into the light from the streetlamp.

  “I’m not sure what you do lately, except be a pain in my ass.”

  “I see you didn’t take my advice,” he replied. “I did say it would get worse. It’s getting to the point where I might not be able to help you.”

  “Help me?” I laughed scornfully. “How are you going to help me, Simon? You won’t tell me who you’re working for! And what you’re after.”

  “Because you won’t believe me.”

  “I may surprise you.”

  He shook his head. “Doubtful. I don’t believe it myself sometimes. It’s too fantastic.”

  Right on schedule, I thought. I’d warned Helena and Janet he would leave me baited on a hook and then try reeling me in. Here goes.

  He pointed off to the great complex looming in the distance over the bank of the river. He was right. It was too fantastic. He had to be kidding me.

  Legoland. Babylon-on-Thames. Vauxhall Cross.

  MI6 Headquarters.

  “Oh, come on!” I laughed. “I stand corrected. No, Simon, I don’t believe you.”

  I started walking again, and he fell in stride next to me.

  “I was recruited in Khartoum two months after you and I said goodbye. They didn’t have anyone in the region who could find his own arse. And they’re a cheap outfit, cheaper than you’d think. They expect a bloody freelancer to have oversight on Uganda and Congo as well.”

  “Spy work’s a bitch, huh?”

  “You asked who I was working for. Teresa, think about it. The region’s barely stable. The British government went through a shit storm over Coltan like everyone else, and now it’s determined that the traders don’t fuck up their interests or their representatives.”

  “Why not come to Janet then and tell her to behave? Your alleged employers have a lot of muscle.”

  “Kind of closing the barn door after the horse is out, don’t you think? And given Janet Marshall’s political leanings…”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “This is a Labour government that jumped on board George Dubya’s Baghdad invasion! I’m sure they’ve learned not to see every leftie as a potential security threat.”

  “Yes, well…Let me put it this way. They’re not worried only about martyr red or conservative blue.”

  I stopped walking. Every black person on this cloud-covered island has a little invisible Geiger counter, and the needle on mine just ticked into the hot zone.

  He watched me hit boiling point and put up his hands. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I made a case for briefing her.”

  “Well, isn’t that fucking typical!” I snapped. “Our cloak-and-dagger brigade doesn’t want to trust a woman who could be our next High Commissioner because she’s black, even though she’s the victim of an international conspiracy! Nice to know the Cold War’s over but the Race War’s still going strong. So they won’t brief Janet? Which means they allegedly care about the Coltan trade but not how these bastards are willing to ruin a British politician over it?”

  “In a word, yes. They’re afraid if Janet is briefed and decides to go public in her outrage, it will, umm—” He cleared his throat dramatically. “It will embarrass old friends who haven’t quite extricated themselves yet financially. They’re supposed to be hurrying up with that.”

  “And you work for these pricks?”

  “Now just a minute,” said Simon. “I’m trying to hunt down an illegal mining network. That’s what I’m in for. Your Ms. Marshall is a big girl, and no one put a gun to her head and made her pay to fuck Neil, and no one said go spread your legs for Cahill, Westlake and Giradeau the other night. Don’t look so surprised. Yes, I heard about it. Cahill’s got a big mouth sometimes.”

  “What she chooses to do in her private—”

  “She’s a politician, Teresa! In Britain! She has no private life.”

  I didn’t have an answer to this because he was right. Janet herself admitted she’d been stupid from day one. And lately she had almost resigned herself to public humiliation like a walk to the gallows.

  If I wasn’t so sure it would go to her head, I would have told her the truth of how I gave her a lot of credit. Facing tabloid ruin had not made her change who she was. It hadn’t intimidated her into diminishing her own sexuality.

  “You all right, miss?”

  A curry delivery guy on a scooter. Must have been zipping by when he saw us arguing. Helmet on, but the voice sounded about eighteen at most.

  “She’s fine,” snapped Simon. “Piss off.”

  Delivery Guy ignored Simon, looked at me.

  “Thanks, I’m okay,” I said.

  He looked doubtful, so on the spot, I did a roundhouse kick to Simon’s shoulder, prompting an “oomph” and nearly knocking Mr. MI6 to the pavement.

  “You sure you all right?” asked Delivery Guy.

  “Jeez,” I muttered, losing my patience.

  “Not talking to you anymore, love. Was talking to your husband.”

  “Piss off,” groaned Simon.

  And Delivery Guy started up his bike again, cracking wise again about the happy couple before his scooter putputted away.

  “Nice shot,” growled Simon, rubbing his shoulder.

  We resumed the stroll. I didn’t say anything for a moment, and neither did he.

  Then I pointed out, “They don’t need you here. They’ve got home-grown spies to pick up the thread. You could have stayed down in Africa.”

  “They needed me exactly because I am known down there,” he explained. “A new fellow popping out of the blue, dropping names and waving African credentials that can’t be checked out? Looks awfully suspicious. So they called me home. And the trail led to the games.”

  “What trail?”

  Simon shrugged. “A long and winding one, having to do with a mining concession north of Goma for Buccaneer Cape. Past that, I can’t really get into it. Classified.”

  “That’s convenient,” I snapped. “So who’s behind all this?”

  “Our old friend Orpheocon. They were once headquartered in Johannesburg, now they have offices in London. I can’t prove it yet, but the jigsaw is slowly coming together. We’ve got a whole dossier of shell companies, gobetweens, a bank in Herzegovina—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I cut in. “Herzegovina? That makes no sense. Banks in a place like that can’t do international money transfers at the speed London wants.”

  “Oh, these guys can wait!” Simon laughed mirthlessly. “Time is money, but what they really go for is the lack of ‘transparency’ in the process, as the bankers put it. The money gets funnelled to Brussels, and then—”

  I hurried him along. “Simon, what I meant was, who is behind all this here? Who killed Lionel and Anthony?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Simon. If you know…”

  “No. No way, Teresa. For Christ sake, I’ve already told you too bloody much and compromised myself. When the moment is right, they will take the bugger out.”

  “Who’s they, Simon? You mean you, don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Before or after Janet’s career gets ruined by this creep?”

  Again, no reply.

  I spotted a cab with its light on and flagged it down. Simon could get his own.

  I didn’t believe anything he’d told me, and I had learned next to nothing. In so far as Simon Highsmith could be a spy, well, sure, he could be a spy. He had been an Englishman down in Sudan, fighting the Khartoum regime, and he spoke fluent Arabic. He could also muddle through one or two of the southern dialects and knew the terrain and the players. Acquaintances had heard rumours about him popping up everywhere from Zimbabwe to Mozambique. If not a spy then at least a mercenary.

  What I had problems with
was that he was a spy for them, and that they would care at all about the destructive toll of the Coltan trade. I didn’t think the powers that be in this country, whatever the political party, gave a damn what happened there, and the fact that it all grew worse in Darfur last year was my proof.

  He had really insulted my intelligence. The big mining and oil conglomerates were not so embarrassed by what they did that they needed to launder their money through the back end of Europe. Once their front companies made their transfers to respectable branch offices of European banks in say, Cairo or Johannesburg, the money was “clean” as far as PR trouble went.

  I had to sift through Simon’s bullshit to decide what, if anything, was true. This whole thing was about Coltan. Lionel had analysed it. Janet had protested it. Anthony had followed it—the same trail Simon claimed to have uncovered.

  Okay. If Simon subscribes to the old theory that a whopping fantastic lie works better than a small one, and knowing this Herzegovina bank business has got to be rubbish, let’s assume he’s trying to send me in the opposite direction. Look at the opposite of everything he’s telling you.

  He wouldn’t name the killer, but he gave up the company. Why? He must know I’ll try to find a link between Orpheocon and one of the suspects, unless he wants me to be spinning my wheels. Which brings us to his next assurance: “When the moment is right, they’ll take the bugger out.” Which really meant he would take the bugger out.

  Translation: you shouldn’t interfere. You should do nothing and wait. Wait, because he didn’t know who it was yet. Or perhaps he did, but he did have to wait for the right timing.

  A stall, a big stall. Had to be.

  And then there was the most valuable bit of information he had given by trying to steer me off course. He implied that his employers didn’t give a toss about Janet.

  Only a couple of weeks earlier, he had suggested Janet and I go on holiday until the whole shit storm blew over. He had suggested things would get more ugly—the corollary of that was he would be powerless to stop them.

  Okay. So for his MI6 cover story he had to come up with a plausible explanation for why his taskmasters didn’t warn Janet. Simple. They didn’t care about Janet. Well, he had always been a cynic, and he could reasonably assume I’d be cynical, too, about MI6.

  Uh, uh, Simon. Not buying it. I’ll believe you’re a spook, just not their spook.

  Opposites. He had wanted me to think his employers didn’t care about Janet. Yet he had also wanted her out of the way, had suggested she go on holiday. Perhaps someone cared very much what happened to our Ms. Marshall.

  If there were powerful corporate forces at work trying to prevent Janet from getting Pretoria and speaking out on Coltan, was it possible that someone else wanted very much for her to get the appointment?

  Not exactly a guardian angel or concerned for her personally, but who thought she would be the right appointee for their interests?

  Which brought us back to the same question: if so, why hadn’t they warned Janet what was really going on? There could be only one possible answer. They couldn’t. To tip her off about their involvement meant a risk to Janet’s chances of actually getting the job. Any kind of meeting could be construed as Janet being allied with their powerful organization or whatever it was, this someone else, and it would look like she wasn’t impartial or ready to act solely in Britain’s interests.

  And I think I knew who that someone else was. I just wasn’t sure how they had dreamed up sending Simon Highsmith.

  When I got back to Richmond, Helena asked me how it was going.

  “Simon has told me he’s working for MI6,” I said blandly.

  She was flippant as well. “Ah. Naughty girl for telling me. I’ll tell Janet. Then we can all break the Official Secrets Act.”

  I plunked myself down in front of Helena’s computer and surfed through archive pages of The Star newspaper in Johannesburg. I thought that if someone was eager to get Janet into the High Commission, the current situation in South Africa could use a little more scrutiny. They would want more of an ally in Janet Marshall than just another diplomat who spoke out against the Coltan trade.

  One innocuous item a few months before caught my eye, and I hit the link. Last September, there were angry words exchanged in the country’s National Assembly during a debate on black empowerment. Minerals and Energy Deputy Minister Lulu Xingwana let fly, complaining about “rich white cartels that are continuing even today to loot our diamonds, taking them to London; that are continuing today to monopolise the mining industry.”

  The heated row in the House happened only days after Tony Trahar, CEO of the Anglo American mining company, told The Financial Times: “I think the South African political risk issue is starting to diminish—although I am not saying it has gone.” Oh, oh.

  South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki had fired back a salvo in his Internet column, writing: “Both the ANC and the government would not know what political risk Mr. Trahar is talking about. What is this risk that has started to diminish, but has not gone? Is this the risk that persuaded Anglo American that it should list and re-domicile in London, while speaking to us only about the size of capital markets?”

  He observed tartly that black South Africans had been paid a pittance while working for Anglo American and other companies in the years of minority rule yet they had “chosen reconciliation rather than revenge”—they hardly deserved to be “computed as a political risk.”

  The Star reported that Mbeki and Trahar apparently patched up their political differences over a phone call.

  Fine, but it got me speculating. There had to be many like Lulu Xingwana who thought white cartels were still trying to suck their country dry after apartheid was gone. Just as you could bet there were other white corporate CEOs who thought democracy in South Africa was still somehow “at risk.”

  Goes to show that out of sight, out of mind. There’s a nice sculpted head of Nelson Mandela outside the Royal Festival Hall, and most folks in London can tell you blacks rule in Johannesburg now, happy outcome long overdue, the end. But of course it wasn’t as simple as that.

  The country did have to worry about its neighbours. It did have to worry about how stable the region was. The newspaper websites had conflicting reports on whether South Africa had handed over intelligence that helped get those alleged mercenaries picked up at Harare Airport last year. You know the ones—accused, along with Margaret Thatcher’s son, of trying to topple the government in Equatorial Guinea.

  It seemed South Africa had grown very concerned about security in the region.

  It was time, I thought, to ratchet up Helena’s BT bill. I had a friend down in Johannesburg, Thembi Sindiswa, who worked as a documentary producer for one of the radio stations. They were only one hour ahead down there, so no worries about phoning, except it was late in the afternoon and getting into crucial drive time for journo types. She’d want to kill me.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey,” I half-yelled back. Lousy line, she could barely hear me as I made my request.

  “Listen, T, give me a day or so. I’ll phone around. I got a source with the Scorpions. Maybe he knows something.”

  The Scorpions. South Africa’s version of the FBI, the Directorate of Special Investigations. They looked into major, high-profile crimes, ones involving organized syndicates and millions in profit.

  “No promises, though,” she warned me.

  “I understand. Thanks, Thembi.”

  I should have learned my lesson after the very first time a boy tied me up.

  I remember the boy, Jimmy Sanderson, and I recall we boldly did this outdoors. Of course, we were both seven, and Jimmy used my bright pink skipping rope. We were supposed to be playing cops and robbers, and I had the double part of being the hostage at the bank hold-up, but after he had me good and knotted, he ran off with my Action Man doll that I used for occasional rescues of Barbie. The big liar.

  Men, huh?

  This time, of cour
se, was very different.

  Daniel had called me, wanting to continue my “sexual tuition,” as he put it, and though I was wary, I had my own agenda, wanting to check something out. I didn’t know why he insisted on a special request, but I complied. “You got any clothes you’re giving away? You know, to charity? Goodwill? Wear ’em.”

  So I didn’t feel terribly sexy when I showed up at his door in a long faded, ratty Janet Jackson concert T-shirt, a hand-me-down from a boyfriend, and old red track pants. As soon as I stepped inside, he quipped that he wanted to show me “an old rope trick,” and I had a good idea what he had in mind. I submitted.

  Stupid, right? Because for all I knew, this guy could be the guy. Lionel was bound up before he was murdered. If Daniel was the one, if he was onto my role in this whole drama, he could kill me then and there in his flat. Really stupid. And I had gone there to take another look around and try to rule him out conclusively as a suspect. If I was wrong—

  Taking all kinds of stupid risks on this case. With my health. My safety. My heart.

  “I believe you said you weren’t into this Halloween shit,” I reminded him.

  “And I believe,” he replied smoothly, “I was referring to all the doggy collars and leather fashion victim stuff. I do believe in erotic restraint—”

  Out of nowhere, he produced a paring knife, and before the acid in my stomach could churn with reflexive, instinctive panic, he poked its point into my shirt and began to tear upward, cutting my bra clasp in the blade’s wake. Then he was slicing away at the track pants and my knickers, and within thirty seconds, I was not only bound, I was naked as well. My nipples were hard, and my thighs were drenched in my juices, getting off on him slicing away my clothes. I watched the mirror flash of the knife as his other hand roamed over my breasts and my belly, his mouth kissing me with urgent hunger.

  He pushed me gently to the floor, and I heard myself gasp out, “Wait, wait,” but he didn’t, and I only put up a half-hearted fight. Too turned on, getting too slurping wet, breathing too hard. Feeling my bare breasts against the low-pile carpet, starting to feel the muscle ache in my arms behind my back. He had another long stretch of rope, and within a moment, he had my legs bent and then hog-tied to my wrists. And I moaned in anticipation. Delicious vulnerability.