Strip Poker

by Lisa Lawrence

  His hand first. Fingers feeling me from behind, penetrating me, and then he rolled me onto my side and masturbated me as his mouth sucked on my nipples. My wrists squirmed, my legs began to tremble from this game of violation as much as the stored energy of being kept in place, needing to be set free. He brought me to a squirting shower all over again, coming violently until I thought my limbs shaking would loosen the bonds enough to pounce on him. But the ropes held. Perspiring badly now, my own scent thick in my nostrils, and still he kept me coming.

  When he thrust his cock into me, I screamed but no sound came out. Such overwhelming waves of surrendering release, the pleasure of helplessness, as his hard cock filled me, and I fought only for show. Oh, fuck me, please fuck me hard, take me completely! A revelation of rope. I came again and again, and when at last he untied me, I was dying of thirst. I thought I had sweated five pounds away from struggling against my bonds. Incredible.

  Daniel was in the bathroom when I took a moment for my scheduled snoop around. Naturally I wandered over to his desk, but I wouldn’t have time to boot up his computer. In fact, I didn’t think I needed to, because I spotted something that piqued my interest right away. The fax machine.

  Yet more and more pages lying on the out tray, each one almost blank except for the reassuring message:

  Transmission:OK

  Transmission:OK

  Transmission:OK

  Transmission:OK

  Transmission:OK

  I remembered I had considered an explanation for this—that Daniel was sending sketches of his work to his client for approval. But then I noticed the time intervals—they didn’t add up. I don’t care how good an artist or architect you are, it begged credibility that anyone can whip off an impressive drawing and then send it across the Channel to Paris all in the space of 47 seconds.

  But it did give you enough time to type out a message and send it.

  The time intervals, however, weren’t the clincher. What sealed the deal for me was that the exact same sketches still sat on the drafting table right where they were the last time I was here. There was even a fine layer of dust on the edge of the T-square. Daniel would have to be pretty lousy at his job, for which he was brought all the way over from the States, to abandon his project like that. Or else he was working at a glacial pace. It occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t looking at tools. These were props.

  He wasn’t an architect.

  What if I was right about an intelligence presence involved in this whole scandal? I had thought corporate intelligence, but what if Simon was telling the truth about MI6 only he was telling it about someone else? He had simply appropriated Daniel’s motivation to make himself look innocent.

  That fax machine wasn’t for sketches.

  Maybe it was for checking in with higher-ups.

  Okay, you’re a spy, and you need to report. If you’re faxing a typed message, why not simply use a Messenger programme or email? Yeah, they can be hacked into, but wouldn’t it be the same with a fax?

  “Actually, no,” explained Jiro Tanaka as he cinched up his belt in front of me about five hours later. Get your head out of the gutter—he was cinching up his black belt, and we were at the dojo where I train. Jiro was not only a buddy, a karate student with his third dan who liked to slingshot his reverse punches across the floor at amazing speed, he was one of the sharpest minds in IT in London. Kind of weird reconciling those Japanese features with the Liverpool accent, but hey, his dad was a merchant seaman originally out of Buenos Aires, so Jiro had quite a diverse background. He’d been my answer-man on computer stuff before, and now I was trying to wrap my head around his techno gobbledegook before we got down to practice.

  “It’s very difficult to tap a fax message, Teresa,” Jiro was telling me now. “If this is your baddie, he’s got a bloody brilliant scheme.”

  “I don’t get it,” I admitted. “It works on a phone line like email, but you’ve got hackers ripping off messages on those—”

  Japanese people almost never interrupt, but Jiro was Japanese-British, and his wincing expression told me I was on the wrong track. I ought to shut up and listen.

  “Fax technology gave IT wizards the notion for email,” said Jiro. “It’s kind of like the granddaddy of the web. But faxing also works like your television. All the data is converted into a serial stream, going left to right. Now just like telly, if the receiver loses sync, the result isn’t viewable. When the receive end loses sync or senses an error it asks for a resend. Right, you want to eavesdrop. If you lose sync, who do you ask? And because of line noise, this can happen several times during a message. With me?”

  I nodded, barely keeping up.

  “I’ll try to simplify this a bit for you,” Jiro went on. “Unlike email, it’s bloody difficult, if not close to impossible, to hack into a fax because faxes are sent in packets of data. And that’s because all phone lines aren’t created equal. You know that irritating skree and squelch noise you get when you accidentally call up a fax number? That’s the fax machine trying to talk to another fax machine. First, there’s a speed-up test to determine how fast the incoming stuff can go—a test message. That’s the protocol for start-up, then you have what’s called a check-sum, and—well, I don’t know how much you need all this, but the point is you get varying speeds of transmission. The two fax machines kind of shake hands before they do business.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Got it.”

  Jiro grinned. “No, love, you haven’t, have you?”

  “Nope,” I confessed. “I don’t. Faxes use modems, don’t they? So why can’t you just tap in and…” I shrugged. I didn’t know how to put it in geek-speak.

  “Remember what I said? All phone lines aren’t created equal. A fax transmission algorithm is a complicated animal, and they came up with this bird back when folks still had to make do with 1200-bit modems. As a result, it’s completely different to the modem you got in your shiny new PC at home today, which by the way uses a different algorithm. Like I say, if your guy is thinking fax for foiling hacks, he’s got imagination.”

  Or his bosses do, I thought.

  “Okay, I’m with you,” I said. “I am with you this time.”

  “Then,” Jiro went on, “your baddie can go one better to make it impossible to eavesdrop. Now all this is based on somebody attaching a connection directly to the phone line, yeah? In theory, you could, I suppose, record all the tones and use a sophisticated programme to download the message—if you know what you’re doing.”

  “And you have something like that?” I said coyly. Jiro shook his head. “I can get one, but it wouldn’t help.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nowadays, your intelligence agencies use equipment that scans large groups of lines looking for key words instead of whole messages. Okay, it takes several scans to reproduce a text line, and their gear looks for the predictable bits that make up text letters. But if he knows what he’s doing and wants to keep his messages secret, he can do something very simple to spoil any salvage operation you’ve got in mind.”

  “What?”

  “Hand write his message.”

  I stared at him blankly.

  “Told you before,” explained Jiro. “A fax is sent in a serial stream, left to right, like lines on a picture tube. Now that’s all well and good if you want to intercept a typed message, but nobody’s handwriting is uniform.”

  He took a pen hanging by a string on the dojo bulletin board and scribbled on a tournament notice. In neat block printing, he wrote: “Teresa is a girl.” And he wrote it on a slant.

  “My ‘e’s are different, even if this is subtle. My ‘g’ is different from my ‘l,’ and if I write it on an angle, you’re buggered,” he said. “So much for trying to replicate a left-to-right serial stream. The only way you’re going to be able to tell what was written is if you’re looking directly at the page itself. And this is assuming your monitor doesn’t lose sync. You want to confound modern technology, you go back in time
to old technology.”

  Yes, I thought, but the new can always come back with a second wind. If the only way I can tell what Daniel is writing is to view the pages themselves, then I would just have to get myself a good look.

  Since I was getting my fair share of exposure to webcams lately, my next shopping trip would be for a nifty hidden eye. And then I would have to either charm my way back into Daniel’s apartment or do some more “scrubbing.”

  Five hours of doing the spider, watching and waiting outside Daniel’s Canary Wharf apartment.

  I decided it might look a little strange me doing an about-face and dropping my frosty bitch act with him, calling him up out of the blue for one of our liaisons. Especially when he seemed to get off so much on calling me when he felt like it. It was tempting to tail him for a while and check his movements, but he knew I drove a Beamer, and I still had my hopes pinned on that fax machine upstairs to reveal all.

  I figured I should keep it for caution’s sake to a tight five minutes to snoop around. Still nothing moved or disturbed on the drafting table. Nothing today on the output tray of the machine, not even confirmation pages. Good. Maybe I haven’t missed anything.

  Fifteen minutes to install my little pin camera and make sure it would give me the view I wanted. Amazing thing. Don’t ask me how it worked, that would need another explanation from Jiro, but suffice to say, I could see what Daniel saw when the print-outs emerged, all the while back at the surveillance monitors in Helena’s house in Richmond.

  Of course, now I had to wait until he got something.

  It was mid-afternoon when my friend Thembi called me back from South Africa. I was in a robe at Helena’s, having poured myself a glass of wine, watching a bit of television as I thought about the case. I was just about to finally crack a book on winning poker strategy when the phone rang.

  Thembi’s voice was all business, asking me—no, telling me: “Get out of where you are, go down the street and call me from another line. Not a cell.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Do it. I’ll wait.”

  I quickly dressed, grabbed my purse and locked the house up. I would have a long walk before I hit a BT call box, but I had to humour Thembi. For one of her documentaries, she had looked into surveillance networks like ECHELON. That’s the international version of Big Brother (NSA, Britain’s GCHQ, Australia’s DSD and more alphabet soup) that allegedly spied on millions of people’s cell phone calls and emails. France had its network. So, apparently, did China, Israel, India—it’s enough to make anyone paranoid.

  God, had I brought enough change? Who makes a long-distance call using a pay phone anymore? By the time I realised I had only £2.10 in coins, I was on the high street.

  I went into a certain department store that shall go nameless but that I loathe because of its return policies, and I slung a pair of slacks over my shoulder. Shameless, I breezed up to the sales counter.

  “Hi. That girl over there”—I pointed towards empty air—“she says it would be all right if I was to use your phone. My card got declined, and I know I’ve paid my bill, so I just wanted to check with Visa and see what the hell’s going on.”

  Stone-faced clerk. “I don’t think we can do that. Our phones are not supposed to be used for personal calls.”

  How I love the cooperative attitude in this nation of shopkeepers.

  I replied sweetly, “Well, she went and checked it with your manager, so I guess it has to be all right, doesn’t it?”

  “Wait right here,” the woman said. She actually said it like a command. “I’ll go ask.”

  “You are getting a sale out of this,” I argued gently.

  “Just wait, please.”

  And she was off. Once her back was turned, I was dialling.

  Thembi answered on the first ring. She picked up the sounds of the Muzak and the PA staff announcements and laughed. “Oh, God, you’re using them again! You’re terrible.”

  “They should have exchanged that blouse, you know they should have,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “What are you mixed up in?” she demanded.

  “What’s the matter? What’s up?”

  “Your friend Simon Highsmith. You’re right. All the ‘private military firm’ stuff is rubbish. The best information from my source says he’s probably never been to Sierra Leone. But he can set off bells. Big ones.”

  Not the MI6 gig, not that, please.

  “A few years ago when the Scorpions were formed, the first thing they started was a data bank on British nationals because of all the hell raised over the conflict diamonds. They have an old photocopy of the stamps in Simon Highsmith’s passport. Ones showing entry in and out of Nigeria, Angola, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia…So they plugged in the passport number to check recent entry here. Makes sense, doesn’t it? British passports are still good for ten years, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was one of those obvious facts that made you double-check your own common knowledge. Were they valid for ten years? Of course they were.

  “The passport for Simon Highsmith in their database was issued in 1993. The passport he waved in front of a Customs officer here seven months ago has a completely different number and was issued in 1998. No stamps anymore for Sudan or Ethiopia. Passport Control in London and Pretoria both say the 1993 one was never reported as lost or stolen. Then my friend says phones began to ring, and he was told politely to stop asking questions about this guy.”

  “Why?”

  “The information is on the level, believe me. I could get into a lot of trouble for telling you this, but I pleaded with my source that you’re good people.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Teresa, this Simon Highsmith—he’s South African Secret Service.”

  13

  That’s great, I thought, back at the house and pacing Helena’s living room. That’s just great.

  I had to figure out what to do with this information. Telling Helena or Janet would mean more anguished soul-searching on our Ms. Marshall’s part, debating with herself whether her integrity had been undermined, compromised, blah, blah, blah. The way I saw it, if she didn’t have a clue as to who else was out there and how they were watching her back, there was no conflict of interest. Simon and company might foil the plot to ruin her, but they had no pull in crowning her. Either she’d get the appointment or she wouldn’t.

  Apart from being able to rule Simon out as a suspect, I didn’t know what this revelation did for me. I still felt I was right in one assumption: Simon had no more idea who killed Lionel and Anthony than I did. And though he had come to the games with more background than I had, I was catching up fast.

  I could always go to him and tell him what I had learned. Simon, however, wasn’t a team player. Our time in the Nuba Mountains had taught me that.

  I wanted to throw in my vote with Janet for believing I was in over my head. Blackmail, double murder, corporate greed and now political interference from foreign agents.

  And let’s not forget the orgies.

  I sat up as Helena and Janet practically rushed into the house, Helena doing a little run into the kitchen and calling over her shoulder, “I’ve got champagne!”

  “God, champagne,” laughed Janet. “I’m ready for vodka!”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. Janet was bursting with it.

  “I got the call,” she said in a small voice, quietly beaming.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s great, that’s…Congratulations.”

  We had one of those awkward moments where one person puts out their hand to shake—me—while the other makes a move to hug you. I hugged her back clumsily, and Helena returned with the bottle and the glasses.

  “Right, you’ve got packing to do,” she warned.

  “Hey, don’t push me on the plane yet,” said Janet. “There’s probably going to be briefings and more briefings, and I’ll have to get an estate agent to rent out the house. Then all the se
curity stuff and media interviews—”

  Helena clinked her glass to Janet’s to cut this off.

  “Drink up, darling. It’ll be fine. Teresa, tell her it’ll be fine.”

  “It will be fine.” I tried to sound confident.

  In truth, I wasn’t so sure. If our blackmailer had been forced to kill Anthony to cover his tracks, maybe his whole timetable had been upset. With mumblings and innuendo over just what the man’s relationship had been with Janet, maybe her friends in government had pushed hard for a quick decision to spare her any more anxiety. And to get the media to shut up. Editors would shrug and think: well, she’s going, story’s over.

  Not as far as the blackmailer was concerned. In the euphoria over the good news, Helena and Janet forgot that I’d said it was all about timing.

  My job had just got a whole lot harder. If I didn’t find him soon, he could still pull it off.

  “George Westlake wants to throw you a big party at The Lotus Eaters,” Helena was telling Janet.

  “And let me guess,” giggled Janet. “There’ll be a game.”

  “Of course there’ll be a game,” replied Helena. “You don’t get to play, though. Too respectable now.”

  Janet pretended to pout. “That doesn’t sound fair…”

  And I stood by, still thinking to myself: timing.

  Damn it, I had been sloppy. Since I knew Simon had dropped out of medical school and that he was somehow mixed up in this, I had broken off checking deeper into the backgrounds of my other suspects. We knew our killer used drugs on Lionel and had tried to use drugs on Anthony, sooooo…

  I love the web—a living, ever-growing encyclopaedia where you can find almost anything. The General Medical Council regulates and licenses doctors to practice in the UK, and you can easily check a doctor’s registration on its website. Problem was, just because we were in the UK didn’t mean I was looking for a British physician or a disgraced doc who had lost his licence here. It was like the UN at the strip poker games. Simon, I now knew, was an operative for South Africa, while Ayako was Japanese-American and Giradeau hailed from Boston.