Rete and Trident Vol. 02 - Pt. 06

This is part six of a seven-part story. See Author's note of Rete and Trident Vol. 2 - Part 1 before reading this.

***

Chapter 21

On Monday morning, Olivia and I were in the living room of the rental home in Jamestown.

Her suitcase was opened up and I'd spread the contents out all over the floor. I'd just unpacked it and removed half a dozen items I didn't want her to take. Olivia was pissed about that.

"I told you, no identifying information, Olivia," I said angrily. "You brought your fucking address book that's personalized with the name Riley Gilbert Kintrell. Of what possible use is an address book when you're going to be out-of-pocket for weeks at a time?"

"I was going to send out postcards," she said. She quickly figured out that was indefensibly stupid and shut up.

I pulled out her laptop. This was an old model Apple MacBook she's had for a few years. "Oh, come on, Will, I need my laptop."

"I gave you a brand new laptop four weeks ago that doesn't have years of your personal shit on it," I said. "You can take that one."

That one was protected with a super hard password, had an encrypted drive, and she didn't even have admin privileges on it, so she couldn't compromise herself with it.

"This one has the software I need already installed," she said.

"What software?" I thought that was a reasonable question, but it made her angry.

"My games, my coloring books, and my trauma journal," she said.

Olivia was still dealing with PSTD from the Darden County Massacre. Her shrink had her playing games to distract her, coloring digital coloring books to alleviate stress when she was hit with anxiety, and journaling about her episodes.

"Bring me your new laptop and I'll install it there. I'm sorry, but we cannot risk exposing our history to someone from the CIA, Olivia. I trained with these people. Do you remember how you thought the best friend you ever had was Kimsu, but she turned out to be the worst person you'd ever met?'

She nodded.

"All these CIA people are like that. They seduce you into friendship and then they use you. The CIA selects people for that particular skill."

She got up and came back with her new laptop. I went to the App Store and within fifteen minutes, I had all the games, coloring books, and a copy of the journaling software installed for her. I didn't transfer over any of her documents or data for her back journal entries, though.

After I cleaned out her bags of personally identifying information, I helped her repack her stuff.

"Look, we need good relations with this guy, so I'm going to get friendly and I will work to ingratiate myself," I said. "Don't read anything into that. At no time will I actually make friends with this guy. You should do the same. Glaukopis has a couple of people ensconced in the upper-level civil servants of the CIA. We cannot give them a back-channel of information about us. Do you understand?"

She nodded.

We put our bags in to the car we'd brought down from DC and locked up the Vrbo we were using as a safe house.

We didn't have any food left at the house, so I drove us to the nearest McDonalds to get a hot breakfast. As we were driving there, we passed this quaint little place called the Jamestown Pie Company, which was out in the middle of nowhere on this rural road. Olivia loved that kind of stuff, so she whipped out her burner phone in a hurry and was rapidly googling it.

"Will, you should see these reviews!" She enthused. "It opens up at 9:00 AM. It will be open on our way back. We should bring a pie with us!"

I looked at her, and she was so delighted it amused me. After we had our McDonalds breakfast, we went back there a bought an apple pie and a pumpkin pie, which were emblematic of the season.

***

We drove over to the Jamestown Settlement Museum. We were told to get out of the car and then go sit at the outdoor picnic tables to the left of the main entrance. We were there for fifteen minutes or so, when a guy who was unmistakably ex-military, arrived. He started walking over the pathways outside of the museum, like he was getting his morning exercise. He was wearing an enlisted sailor's pea coat and black cap which said "Oakland Raiders" on it.

To identify ourselves, I was instructed to bring up the outcome of the previous day's Washington Commanders game. Nil Onaral was supposed to say he was a Raiders fan and didn't care. This had to be our contact.

As the guy meandered around, I realized that there was something familiar about him. I'd seen this guy before. After staring at him for maybe twenty seconds, it came to me. When I'd known him before he was Petty Officer Third Class Renold Zoeller. His buddies called him "Renzo". I knew him because he'd been stationed on my second ship and had been part of a seal team doing interdictions in the Med.

He'd bullied one of my sailors by stealing his tray of food right after he got it. It happened on the mess deck in front of dozens of witnesses. The incident pissed a lot of our sailors off and the Seals found themselves the victim of a mountain of petty retaliation. Their laundry never got done, their service tickets got lost, their mail showed up soaking wet, and they mysteriously got locked out of internet for no reason. Stuff like that.

Renzo's seal team commander, a likable Lieutenant named McMurphy, learned what Renzo had done and was enraged. We didn't have a brig, so McMurphy confined him to a storage room next to my stateroom for a week. He slept in a sleeping bag on the floor and the room had no climate control. I saw him several times a day getting escorted to the bathroom or receiving MREs. McMurphy believed in group punishment, so every man on his team, himself included, ate nothing but MREs that week. The CPOs on the team were pissed and Renzo had become persona non-grata with his teammates very quickly.

What the fuck was he doing here? I asked myself. Seal Team guys frequently worked with the CIA spooks. I guessed that had to be the connection.

"Heads up," I whispered to Olivia. "I see the guy who is our rendezvous. This is not Nil. This is probably Nil's bodyguard. He's a Navy Seal. I met this guy in the Navy. He's a bully. Don't let him mistreat you or hit on you. That's in his nature. Don't allow it. If he makes you uncomfortable, you come to me right away. Got it?"

She nodded.

I picked up my phone and called Matt Gilbert. "This is Gilbert," he said.

"I'm in Jamestown to meet our CIA contact," I said. "The person who is picking us up is former Navy Seal Renold Zoeller. He's known by his friends as Renzo. I knew him when I was in the Navy. I'm guessing this is Nil's bodyguard. Can you do a backgrounder on him and find out what we can about him?"

"You don't like this guy?" he asked.

"How did you know?" I replied.

"I can hear it in your voice," he said.

"Some leverage would be nice," I said. "Back in the day he was married with kids."

***

After about twenty minutes of dicking around, Renzo finally came over to us.

"Good morning," I said. "I wish I had a coat like yours. It looks like rain."

I looked up meaningfully at the overcast sky.

"Shit, first the Commanders got blown out yesterday, and then we get weather like this on the first day of our vacation," I said.

"I'm a Raiders fan," he said, pointing to his had. "Who'd the commanders lose to?"

"Fucking Denver," I replied.

He raised up his hand to shake. "I'm Nil Onaral."

"Unlikely," I responded. "Unless I miss my guess, you're the guy who is going to take us to Nil." I pitched it so it didn't come across as unfriendly.

He gave me an appraising look which was less friendly than before.

"You can get a coat just like this," he replied. It wasn't unfriendly. "All it costs is four years of your life."

"I've got one," I said. I didn't tell him mine had lapels and brass buttons.

***

He pointed out his vehicle, which was a four door pickup. It was ludicrously jacked up.

"Get in your car and follow me, okay?" he said. "Pull into the garage next to me."

He didn't wait for an answer.

I looked at Olivia who had an appreciative look on her face and was staring at Renzo as he marched away.

"Jesus, Olivia," I said. "Don't please don't tell me you're mooning over that asshole."

"He's very fit and muscular. He fills out a pair of jeans quite nicely."

"Yes, and he'd be a horrible person to tie yourself to," I observed. "I knew this guy in the Navy. He's arrogant, entitled, sociopathic, and is a bully. He'd make a horrible boyfriend. Keep your distance from him, okay?"

***

We drove behind him right into the neighborhood where we rented the Vrbo.

"You've got to be kidding me!" said Olivia.

"This is where he's going to go through our shit," I predicted. "We'll end up on a boat. I can feel it."

He pulled up to a house that I'd see on the Vrbo site. Renzo got out of the truck and opened the garage door by punching in a code on a number pad mounted to the side of the door. Renzo then backed his truck into the garage, which took a minute. While he did that, I noted the number and the street and dictated it as verbal message on my phone, which I sent to Matt. I then wiped the call history and the messaging logs.

We were in an Outback, which was older, but it was in good shape. I pulled up too far and then reversed into the garage, pulling in just far enough to clear the door with a couple of inches to spare. I wanted to place myself on the opposite side of his door so he couldn't see me when I got out, and I also wanted to leave room to open the hatchback to get our luggage out.

By the time we climbed out of the car, the garage door was almost all the way down. Renzo was already on the steps to the interior door. "Grab your bags and bring them in here," he said. He didn't wait for us, he went straight into the house. This was a strategic blunder on his behalf.

I opened the hatchback and pulled out Olivia's suitcase and sent her on to stand at the top of the steps waiting for me. It would block his view if he stepped out. When she cleared the space, I pulled my suitcase out and set it on the floor. I also pulled out the magnetic box which I prepped. It was the size of a small lunch box. It contained two of the disposable 9 mm pistols out of the Kimsu stash, four spare magazines, several GPS trackers, two burner phones, a couple of tiny IP cameras, a really nice folding knife, and some flexicuffs.

The box had super strong magnets and it attached nicely onto the back of the heavy duty custom steel bumper that Renzo put on his truck. If he divested us of our electronics and our carry weapons in the house, as I suspected, I'd just detach the box and slip it back into my suitcase when we got to where he was taking us.

Olivia and I went into the house and Renzo was standing right there with a gun drawn.

He motioned us into the dining room and zip tied us to chairs. They were shitty Home Depot ties and wouldn't withstand a determined effort to break them, so I didn't worry too much.

He emptied my pockets and immediately took away the Glock 26 I'd pulled out of the stash to serve as my carry. I assumed that this gun would be confiscated and I carried this one because I wasn't too butt-hurt to see this one go. He sneered at it. "Glock," he said with disapproval.

He then went through Olivia's tiny backpack and immediately found the sip pouch with her P365 micro-compact in it. He said to Olivia, "At least you have some taste."

He then went through our suitcases. As expected, the phones and electronics were taken. When he went to take the laptop, I said, "Nope. The laptop stays with us. She's got PTSD and that is her lifeline. You can have that other shit, but if you take the laptop, we're outta here and you can explain to Nil how you fucked this up."

He looked at me to see if I was bluffing. "Fine," he said. The laptop and the charger went back into the suitcase. I looked over at Olivia who was gazing at me with a surprised admiration. She was surprised I went to bat for her.

He started going through our medicine kits. He left the razors. A pair of scissors went into the "naughty pile". He looked for a long time at the inhalers and the epi-pens. I thought he almost figured out they were weapons, but he asked, "What are you allergic to?"

"I'm allergic to bee stings," I said. "If I'm stung, I could die, so I carry a pen everywhere."

"I carry one in case he needs it," she said.

"Are you asthmatic?" he asked.

"I am," said Olivia. "He carries a backup for me."

Renzo shook his head in disgust and threw the inhalers and the Epi-pens back into the medical case. He pulled out the two boxes of Dramamine. "Why this?" Renzo asked.

"I figured we're going on a boat. I'm not sure if Olivia gets sea sick," I explained.

"Why do you think we're going out on the water?" he asked.

"The only thing that is convenient to this location is the James River," I said.

He took the items into the kitchen then came back into the dining room and cut us loose with a knife he pulled out of his pocket. he said, "Pack your shit back up. We leave in three minutes." He then went to the bathroom.

I said, "Pack quickly, then bring the bags out into the garage." I then ran into the kitchen. I looked around quickly trying to figure out where he stashed the stuff. The first place I checked was the oven. I figured he'd want the faraday effect for the electronics. I was right. It was all there. I quickly grabbed everything and ran and put it back in my case with the exception of my pistol. which went back into my pocket. Olivia and made eye contact. I slid her pistol to her and she put it back in her purse.

I covered over the items I recovered with a windbreaker that was in my case and not fifteen seconds later, Renzo came back into the room and watched us finish. By then we were back to packing our own bags. He wasn't the least bit suspicious. It was a case of severely underestimating us.

When the bags were packed he said, "We leave through the garage."

I went first and asked, "The bags go in your car or mine?"

"Neither," he said.

"If we're walking, I need to pee first," said Olivia.

I turned to look to see what he wanted. "Go pee! Quick. We're losing time."

Olivia left her bags, and went into the house. I could see indecision on Renzo's face. He said, "Wait here and don't move."

He stepped into the house to watch Olivia come back. That was all the distraction that I needed.

I ran around to the other side of his car, pulled out the magnetic box, which was a pain in the ass to detach, and quickly stashed it in my bag. I then opened the front passenger seat of my car to grab the pies.

Renzo came out and caught me reaching into the car. He asked, "What the hell are you doing?"

"I wanted to get the pies we brought," I explained.

"Pies?" he asked in confusion.

"From the Jamestown Pie Company," I explained. "Dude, they got amazing reviews on Yelp."

I brought the pies over to him and showed him. He looked at them and said, "Is that pumpkin? Nils will like that. You carry them."

We then walked from the neighborhood over the marina where my boat was stored. There was a slip with a small Highfield rigid hull boat which was obviously a tender for a larger vessel. It would seat about eight people and it had a large Yamaha outboard on it.

Olivia and I looked at the cleat where he'd tied the dinghy off and the hitch was backwards. He was lucky the dinghy hadn't gotten loose and drifted away.

"This is yours?" I asked.

"Yep," he said. "Throw your bags in the front. Put the pies in the compartment over there so that they don't get wet."

"Get in," he said.

I got in and Olivia nimbly jumped down beside me. He didn't know what he was doing. He untied the line and threw it into the boat. Before he could step down, the boat drifted too far away for him to get in. I didn't have the key to start it up to bring the dinghy back.

"Throw me the keys," I said. "I'll drive it back."

He had zero choice, so he tossed me the keys.

I started the motor and expertly whipped the dinghy around. As we pulled back up to the dock, Olivia pulled out a fender and lightly stepped out onto the dock and held us fast using the cleat Renzo had just untied from.

Renzo stepped down and told me to move to the front seat, so he could sit behind the wheel.

Olivia then cast off and lightly stepped back down to the boat. She made it look easy.

"You guys know how to drive these?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

He started to gun us out of the marina which was bad form.

"Dude," I said. "This is a no-wake zone. Have some decency."

"What does that mean?"

"Drive slow enough that you don't make a wake," I said. "Pull the throttle way back."

He slowed us down. As we emerged from the mouth of the marina, he turned us onto Powhatan creek I became concerned he was going to ground us.

I walked around behind the console and turned on the GPS chart and turned on the depth finder.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Showing you the depths so you don't run us aground," I said.

I took the wheel and moved us back to the center of the creek just in the nick of time.

"See the depths here?" I asked. "Stay where it is deepest."

He motored us out of the Powhatan and when he got us into the James, he turned Northwest and opened it up to full throttle. He over planed the boat and it was a very wet two or three minutes before I got back behind the console and forcibly took the throttle out of his hands and reduced the power by 15%. The dinghy leveled off, the ride was dryer, and it was a lot more comfortable for everyone.

He looked like he was mad at me, but it was obviously the right thing to do, so he didn't say anything.

We started to approach the place where the State Route 31 Ferry docked. It was obvious to me that he was going to drive us right in front of the ferry just was it was departing from the Jamestown side. It would have been suicide to do that.

I went back and pulled the throttle all the way back.

"What the hell man?" he said, just as the Ferry blasted it's horn. We both looked over and the captain was giving Renzo the finger.

"That ferry has the right of way and you almost put us right in front of it," I said. "No one on board that ferry would have even felt it."

It took him a minute to process what I said.

"You don't know what you're doing, do you?" I asked.

He said nothing. It was obvious he didn't.

"Slide over and let me drive," I said. "Tell me where to take us and I'll get us there in one piece."

He wasn't happy,

"Look, this is what I do. I'm an expert at this. It's okay to let the experts do what they are experts at, right?" This was something that the Seal team folks kept saying to the Skipper when he tried to get involved in planning their interdictions.

He thought about it and relented.

"On the other side of that ferry dock is an anchorage. There is a boat there called 'Avanta'. That's where we're headed," he said.

I wanted for the ferry to shoot by us and for the strongest part of the wake to roll under us. I then smoothly accelerated us around the ferry dock.

There was a large power cat. It was at least a sixty footer with a thirty foot beam. It was a huge honking boat compared to the Blue Escape.

I could tell that it was anchored with insufficient scope. With a stronger breeze or a change in weather, it would drag anchor right into the Ferry dock. I cringed internally.

I drove us to the rear of the Avanta. In a catamaran, in the stern, there is usually a swim platform near the water line at the back of each hull. Above the swim platform is a set of stairs for mounting the vessel. Those are called 'sugar scoops'. Usually the tender would dock with a catamaran at the sugar scoops. As we got there, there was a platform which was submerged in the water which would hold the dinghy.

Olivia got up, used the fender, and wrapped the bow line around a cleat to keep us in place.

"Can you maneuver us onto the platform?" he asked.

I turned the wheel and gunned motor to put us crossways to the centerline of the Avanta. I shut the motor off just before we drifted over the platform. I hit the switches on the tender to raise the motor prop up out of the water.

Remzo was shocked when I did this. He didn't know the dinghy would do that. We got over the platform, and Remzo stepped off the tender. Using some controls in a waterproof panel built into the sugarscoop, he raised the tender out of the water. As the platform raised up, I stepped out and began to attach the tender to the platform using straps and pins that were build into the platform.

I shut the electronics down and handed Renzo his keys. When the platform was up, I was about a foot below the cockpit deck. I passed both of the bags into the cockpit. Olivia jumped into the tender from the cockpit and down and retrieved the pies from the storage compartment.

I followed Olivia back onto the cockpit.

I looked over into the salon just beyond the cockpit. The salon inside was absolutely huge. It was nearly thirty feet across and probably forty feet long. In the salon, I could see a woman who was seated. she was wearing a sweatshirt and a pair of cotton shorts. She had long brown hair and olive skin.

She sensed the movement and looked over. When she saw us, she stood up and walked over to the door in the retractable wall between the salon and the cockpit. As she approached, I noticed she had a bump on the belly of her sweatshirt that indicated that she was at least three months pregnant.

She opened the door and spoke to Renzo. "Did everything go all right?" He walked up and gave the woman a huge kiss and an embrace. He squeezed her butt cheeks so hard that it lifted her up on her toes.

"Clockwork," he responded. "I disarmed them, and took their electronics away. God, you look sexy this morning Nil." That made her smile.

This woman, who was apparently Nil Onaral, pivoted to Olivia and I. Olivia was holding the pies in front of her like an offering.

"Hello," I said. "You can call me Will Archer, and this is my partner Olivia Archer. Olivia's the trainee."

I leaned forwards and offered my hand to shake. She took it and gave me a no-squeeze hand shake. Strangely, she stepped into me and gave me a hug. It was the kind where the person wraps their arms around you, but your own arms are at your sides and you don't really participate. I felt her hard belly and her soft breasts against me. It was an uncomfortable moment.

I looked over at Olivia as if to ask her, "What the hell?" She shrugged at me.

Nil stepped back and turned to Renzo. "What the fuck, Ren?" She sounded angry. "You said you disarmed them!"

"I did!" he responded.

She held a gun out in her palm like an accusation.

I reached down and patted my pocket. My gun wasn't there. That was my gun. She'd disarmed me while hugging me.

"What the hell?" he said, glaring at me.

"With the assignment we're working, I'm disinclined to go disarmed," I said to them both.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, becoming enraged.

"From the oven where you stashed it," I replied.

Nil turned back to Renzo. Her glare would have melted glass. "How could you be that careless?"

"Look," I interjected. "Renzo's technique had some flaws, but for the most part, he did disarm us just like you asked." They both goggled at my reference to his name.

"How the fuck did you know my name is Renzo?" he asked.

"That's not your name, it is your nickname. I met you personally several years ago. When I knew you, you went by the name Renold Zoeller, aka 'Renzo'. You were a navy petty officer assigned to Seal Team eight," I said. Both Nil and Renzo goggled.

"You were in the Navy?" he asked. It was a good guess.

"Sure was," I admitted. "I was a surface-warfare officer for several years. Our paths crossed."

"You gotta be fuckin' kidding me!" he said.

"Nope. That's the honest truth. Back then, you were married with children, Renzo. You've still got a ring on, so I suppose you still are." I paused to let the implicit threat germinate in his mind. When I saw him flinch, I continued.

"Admittedly, my information is a few years out-of-date, so that may have changed. I've got my boss doing a work up on you as we speak. In a few hours, I'll know everything there is to know about you."

He advanced on me, and I heard Olivia anxiously putting the pies down onto the cockpit table.

"Tell me why I shouldn't X you out right here!" he said with a growl designed to intimidate.

"Three reasons," I replied. I turned toward Nil, who was clearly the decision maker.

"First, we really did come here for training. That is our only agenda and the only reason why we are here. Olivia needs the training Nil can provide. If we came here to take you two out, you would both be dead already. This is so obvious, I shouldn't have to spell it out for you."

That scored some points with Nil.

"Second, I have skills that can help you. This boat is brand-spanking-new and Renzo clearly doesn't know what he's doing at all. I was a professional surface navy officer. I drove five-hundred-foot-long ten-thousand ton vessels professionally for years. I have every seamanship and boating qualification you can think of. I can move this boat around the Chesapeake for you while you dodge whatever you are dodging and I can teach the two of you how to do it for yourselves."

That scored some more points with Nil.

"Third, you don't really understand the nature of the threat you are facing. In our mission, I'm the asset who is the planner and in command. I don't actually do the direct action or the wet work. I am, by far, the less dangerous of the two of us."

My eyes flicked over to my right, where Olivia was now standing. She'd had the presence of mind to keep the table between her and Renzo, which would make it hard for him to charge her. She had her Sig drawn on Renzo. At that range, she couldn't miss and he'd never even noticed her.

Both Nil and Renzo followed my eyes to Olivia and then flinched gratifyingly. Renzo immediately put himself between Olivia and Nil.

"Renzo," I said to get his attention. "Stepping in front of Nil was a romantic gesture, but it's not in Olivia's nature to shoot a pregnant woman. You're the threat to me, not Nil. Standing in front of Nil doesn't protect her, it puts her into the line of fire. If you step nice and slow to the side, you'll see that Olivia's gun stays on you."

"Do it," said Nil.

He slid over to the side and actually relaxed as he saw Olivia's gun following him.

"I'll take that gun back, now," I said to Nil, holding out my palm to Nil.

She handed me my gun. I immediately took the magazine out and ejected the round in the chamber. I put the bullet back in the magazine, and stashed the gun and magazine in my pocket. I did it with a practiced ease that neither Renzo or Nil missed.

"Your name is Olivia, right?" Nil said to Olivia. "Have you actually killed people?"

"Yes," she said. Her shooting arm didn't bob by a centimeter.

"How many?" she asked.

"That's classified," I said.

"Humor me," she said. "A number doesn't give any secrets away."

"A couple dozen," I said.

"No shit!" said Nil. She was impressed. "That's more than me. What do you need my training for?"

"Tell her Olivia," I said.

"I need training for developing and maintaining cover, status for cover, clandestine operations, covert assassination, money laundering, and most of all, how to handle the psychological impact of killing people," said Olivia. "We were told that you could do that for me."

"You expect to kill more people?" she asked.

"Don't answer that," I said to Olivia. It sent a clear message the answer was 'yes'.

"How many more?' she asked.

"That's classified," I said. "She will be expected to kill more. That's all I can say. Can we deescalate this bullshit now? Look, you two severely underestimated the two of us. That happens. That's a lesson for you, learn from it.

"I, in turn, severely underestimated you, Nil. That was a hell of a nice pick, by the way. Shit, I had no idea you pulled the gun right out of my pocket." I laughed, which made Nil smile. "Shit girl, you are deadly as fuck! Olivia, learn the lesson that I just did not to underestimate Nil."

The way I said this made both Nil and Renzo laugh, as I intended.

"Now, Renzo. Can we let bygones be bygones?" I asked. "If I tell Olivia to put her Sig away, will you handle it like a gentleman, or are you going to try to get some sort of revenge."

"I'm not an asshole," he said.

"To the contrary, Renzo. You forget that I knew you when you were a petty officer third class," I replied.

"That was a long time ago," he said. "I've grown up a lot since then."

"Can you handle this, or will there be a reprisal?" I asked.

"No reprisals," said Nil. "I promise it."

"You will answer for Renzo's behavior?" I asked.

"I will," she replied.

"Olivia and I will not go unarmed," I said. "We've seen too much shit and our lives are sufficiently complicated that we feel justified in keeping our pistols. Can you live with that?"

This was the million dollar question.

"Yes," said Nil. "I can see that you are not the enemy."

"Olivia, put the gun away," I said.

She activated the safety on the sig and slid it back into her mini backpack, which she slung over her shoulder.

"I brought some pie," said Olivia. The incongruousness of it made Nil laugh.

"In gratitude for your generosity," she added.

Nil stepped over to the table. She opened up the pie box and said, "Is that pumpkin pie?" She smelled it and groaned. "I've had these insanely intense pregnancy cravings and I was telling Ren just last night, that I'd kill for some pumpkin pie."

She picked up the box. "Let's go inside," she said.

She walked into the salon and Ren followed her.

***

Chapter 22

Over a slice of apple pie on the foredeck of the Avanta, I told Renzo, "So when you anchor, you need five to seven times as much length on your chain as the depth of the water. The depth finder says 12 feet here, so you will need sixty to eighty-four feet. You've got way less than you need."

I used the anchor handheld to let out more chain. The handheld had the chain length on a display right on it.

"See, you had thirty-six feet of chain. That's not enough. Let's take it up to about seventy."

As the chain slowly let out, the boat's motion in the water eased.

"The reason you need that much chain is that you want a sideways load on the anchor, which will cause the anchor to bite deeper," I explained. "If you don't put out enough chain, the load is from the top and it will pull the anchor free. A purely vertical load is how you weigh anchor. You follow?"

He said, "Yes," as he took in another fork of pie. "This pie is pretty good," he admitted.

"Olivia found it," I said. "If you tell her that, it will make her day."

"I will," he said.

"Now, as you do this, you've got to take a look around you," I continued. "You're perfectly fine here for now, but depending on wind, current, and tide, you will pivot in a full circle around the anchor. You need to be clear for a circle with the radius of your scope, plus your hull length. You need to consider where the shallows are, where the shore is, and the scope radius of other boats."

He nodded. He totally got it. He wasn't stupid, just ignorant.

When the chain was out far enough, I put the anchor control back in the locker and sealed it.

"Did you see the forecast for tonight?" I asked.

"No," he said. "Why do you ask?"

"You live on the water now," I said. "Checking the forecast becomes your religion. You need to worry about storms, waves, winds, tides, and everything. Even in a river like this, you can get yourself into serious shit if you don't pay attention."

"Okay," he said.

"We can go up to the fly bridge and I'll show you how to look up the forecast."

We climbed up to the fly deck. The fly deck, which is normally open to the elements, had a canvass enclosure installed, and it was several degrees warmer than the outside, where it was chilly. We went over to the control console and I pulled the forecast up on the display for Renzo to read.

Renzo said, "It says that the storm front coming through will have lightning, rain, and wind gusts up to forty miles per hour. That sounds bad. Is that bad?"

"The storm is coming out of the North East," I said "Where is that?"

He had good directional awareness. Without consulting the compass on the control panel, he automatically pointed North East, which was straight up the James River from where we were.

"So, we are totally exposed to the North East. What happens if the wind forces us to drag our anchor?" I asked rhetorically. "We go in that direction." I pointed right at the Ferry dock. The peril was obvious.

"So, we don't want that," he said.

"This might be a good night to tie up at a marina," I suggest. "I'm guessing, however, that you want to stay on the hook because you want a moat around the boat, right?"

He smiled and nodded.

"Look, you don't need to tell me anything you're not comfortable with, but how much threat are you two under?" I asked. "Is there someone actively looking for you?"

"We pissed some people off," he said, confessing the minimum. "Well, to be honest, Nil pissed them off. They are under the impression we may have died, so there isn't a huge incentive for them to come looking for us."

"Who are these people?" I asked.

"They are criminal actors rather than state actors. They have surprisingly long reach. We're trying to stay off their radar until things blow over some. I am trying to keep our exposure down up by staying out on the water as much as possible. Nil wants us to be at marinas every night."

"Why don't you discuss it with Nil?" I offered. "If she wants a better experience tonight, then we can relocate to an anchorage with better shelter. I know where there is one and I can show you how to plot a course to get us there."

We heard the women coming up the stairs chattering away at a mile a minute. Nil said, "Babe, the boat feels so much more comfortable now. What did you do?"

"We put out some more scope on the anchor chain," he said. "It's giving us a smoother ride at anchor in this current."

"Well, I'm loving it. Are you two getting along?" she asked.

"Yeah," Renzo replied. "Will knows his shit. He's teaching me a lot."

They kissed and he ran his hand up under her sweatshirt to caress her belly. She liked that.

"Say, Nil, there's a storm front coming in tonight. The river's going to get rough. Will says he knows where there is an anchorage that is sheltered and will be a more comfortable place to spend the night."

"How long will it take to get us there?" she asked.

"We'll have to plot it," I said. "Several hours, though."

"Take us there, please," she said. 'Come on Livvie, let's leave these boys to their toys. It's chilly up here."

Livvie? I asked myself.

They went back down to the salon.

It took about an hour to show Renzo how to plot a course. We talked about no wake zones, river traffic, and the restrictions around Newport News and Norfolk due to the military stuff there. We had enough fuel to get us there, but we would have to refuel immediately afterwards. It made sense to refuel on the way, so we set up way points to fuel up at a marina in Hampton.

I noted that Renzo had really good focus, good intelligence, and an almost fanatical attention to detail. Once he learned the craft, he would be a good skipper.

I went down to the salon and asked for help from Olivia. I had her pull the anchor from the bow while I showed Renzo how to work the engines and the bow thrusters to keep us from getting cattywumpus in the current while we brought the anchor in.

I then told Renzo, "I taught Olivia how to set and retrieve an Anchor last weekend. I expect with your Teams experience and all the fantastic training you have, I'll only have to show you how to do something once."

There was an implicit challenge to that. He saw it and smiled.

Once we were underway, I said, "You have first watch. Call me if you get yourself into a situation you don't know how to handle."

I went downstairs to the salon. I could hear the ladies downstairs in the port side hull. I went down the steps into that hull, and it was just Olivia. She was unpacking in the aft cabin.

"Where's Nil?" I asked.

"She ate about two-thirds of that pumpkin pie and twenty minutes later, she was exhausted and had to lay down for a nap. The pies were a hit." She was excited.

"They were," I agreed. "I expect Renzo will eat what's left of the apple."

"You didn't get a tour below decks, but there is a master suite, three guest rooms, and a crew room," she enthused. "Each room has its own private head. Your boat is cozy and lovely, but by comparison this place is a palace."

That made me a little pissy.

"Well, the Blue Escape's top speed is almost three times more than this one," I responded. "It is going to take us forever to get anywhere."

"Really?"

"On the water, you pay a penalty for luxury," I said. "Where's my bag?"

"I put your bag in the guest room next door," she said.

"How are you getting along with Nil?" I asked.

Olivia immediately gushed. "She's amazing! As soon as you guys left, she opened up right away about her own issues with PTSD. She has it too and she has a lot of the same symptoms. She's on the same path but is a half year ahead of me. I think I can learn a lot from her."

"That's good," I said. "Look, Olivia. I'm very sorry, but until we spoke this morning about needing your apps on the laptop, I was unconscionably ignorant of how your PTSD was hitting you. You deserved me to notice. I'm sorry I didn't."

She looked moved. "I was trying not to worry you with it," she said. "It is out of your control and you have so much on your plate already."

"Even so, I am sorry and you have my apology for that," I said. "I will do better."

"This training is going to be good," she said. "Nil knows I'm an MBA in Finance and she's been picking my brains about how to invest her inheritance. She has a lot of money. She bought this boat full-price about three weeks ago. What do you suppose something like this costs?"

"Between six and seven million," I said. "I googled it."

"Wow," she said. "Where are we going?"

"Back to North River," I said. "I'm going to recommend that we stay out of the James."

"Why's that?" she asked.

"Not as much traffic as in the rest of the Chesapeake," I said. "Most of the craft on the James that we saw were day boats. We stuck out like a sore thumb."

I went into my stateroom and removed the magnetic box. I took the GPS receivers and both the guns out of it.

I went up into the Salon, and stashed one of the pistols by taping it to the underside of the counter almost all the way at the back of the top drawer.

I then went out into the cockpit. I opened up the storage compartment designed to hold deck toys, scuba gear, and the like, and I stashed a pistol by taping it to the deck where it could be quickly reached, right from the hatch.

I then went to the diving platform, which we raised to hold the tender out of the water. I got on the tender and put the GPS tracker under the dashboard of the center console where the GPS antenna was located. I reasoned that if the GPS antenna would work, the GPS tracker would too. The manufacturer promised that the battery on the tracker would last a year.

Next, I went into the salon and looked at the supplies. They had maybe four or five days worth of supplies on hand. We'd need more. I used the pilot console in the salon to get an accounting of the state of the water tanks and the amount of black water we were storing. The water was half empty and the black water tank was half full. With twice as many people on board, the rate at which that would become an issue doubled.

Olivia came back up and asked, "What are you doing?"

"Trying to figure out how we are for supplies. We need two weeks of groceries. Want to make a list for two weeks of groceries?" I asked. This was the sort of logistical thing she was amazing at.

"Sure" she said.

***

I rousted Olivia up from below as we approached the fuel dock at the marina on Hampton. I talked Renzo through how I was carefully neutralizing our motion as we pulled into the dock. We were parallel to the dock and three feet away I hit the bow thrusters and it was just enough to get us alongside.

Olivia was there with the fender and threw the bow line to the attendant. He tied us off on the cleat and I backed the outboard prop, which pulled our stern into the dock. Once again, Olivia was there with the fender before we hit.

As soon as we were tied up, Nil came out wearing a soft shell coat and one of a navy watch cap. She was carrying a bunch of reusable grocery bags. Olivia called out, "See you in a bit." They opened up a hatch on the side of the boat. Olivia hopped down to the dock using her perfectly unselfconscious grace. She turned and carefully helped Nil down. They were chattering as they walked over to the store.

Renzo was going to get nearly 500 gallons of diesel, 100 gallons of water, and he was going to have the black water tanks pumped out. We were going to be here a while. This marina had a famously good naval supply store, so I decided to stop in.

After Renzo finished explaining to the guy about what he wanted. I said to Renzo, "You need anything from the naval supply store? I've got to pick something up."

"What are you getting?" he asked.

"Naval supplies," I responded.

"I don't need anything," he said.

***

When I came back, I was just in time to help the women carry a bunch of bags of groceries back to the boat.

"What'd you get at the store?" asked Olivia.

"I'll show you when you're done putting stuff away," I said.

About ten minutes later, the attendant asked us to go to the next dock over, which is where the black water pumps were. There was another boat waiting for their turn at the fuel dock.

"Let's see what you can do," I told Renzo. He maneuvered us nicely, getting us in line by using both props for differential steering and then neutralized us along the dock and using the bow thrusters to get us in, It was nicely done and I told him so.

Down in the salon. I opened up my bag and I handed a brand new life preserver to Olivia. It was the same kind I had on my boat and it was the same color. She was delighted.

For Nil, I pulled out two life jackets. One like Olivia's, and a maternity jacket, which was also inflatable, but it didn't latch across the stomach and it had leg strap to keep it from riding up over the belly uncomfortably. I demonstrated those features to her and helped her get it adjusted. Nil seemed touched.

I threw one at Renzo, who immediately put it on. "I didn't think of this," he said. "I should have."

I pulled two seamanship guides out of the bag and handed them to Renzo. "Some poop reading for you," I said.

He was extremely grateful.

"Those will be on the test," I said in a cheeky tone.

***

That evening, we anchored exactly where we had in the North River in the Blue Escape. I actually had Renzo do it.

Olivia cooked the dinner for us. Neither nil nor Renzo were great hands at cooking, so they ate a lot of frozen dinners. Olivia made one of her best dishes with three kinds of fresh vegetables. She made herself a friend for life.

After Renzo and I cleaned the dishes, he brought a large plastic box to the salon. "Go get your gun. Not the throwaway Glock, but the one you actually like to shoot. Leave your bullets in your cabin but you'll need an empty mag. We'll do some target practice. You're teaching me how to skipper for free. We'll, I'm a small arms instructor. A good one. I can pay you back by helping you get better at this."

"I want to do it, too," said Nil.

"Me too," chimed in Olivia.

The four of us shot for over an hour. The system worked by putting a bullet that contained a laser into the barrel of the gun.

Renzo was the real deal. He was a fucking machine-- one of those honest-to-God 999 out of a thousand guys. What was more impressive, he never shot unless he'd done a full set up pushups first. "When you're in combat, your blood is going to be pumping," he explained.

After Renzo, Olivia was our next best shooter. She was second by a long ways. Her thrice-a-week practice over the last few months had made her an extremely proficient and deadly shooter. I was a close third behind Olivia. Nil was close behind me. Renzo had a surprising store of games and ways to handicap it so that we could shoot competitively and everyone had a rough toy equal chance to win by having a better-than-usual run.

As we were cleaning up, Renzo said, "I've got my air rifles on the boat. We can do some rifle shooting and air rifles are a lot cheaper and quieter than shooting bullets."

"You mean like BB guns?" I asked.

He laughed. "No. These shoot spin-stabilized slugs just like a rifle," he said. "Brutally lethal with a well-placed shot at a couple of hundred yards and in. They are much quieter than rifles and they don't sound like guns at all. You'd be surprised at what they are capable of. We've used them to good effect on the teams."

***

The first two weeks we spent on the Avanta went very quickly. Each morning Renzo and I would wake early and check the weather and wind. If circumstances dictated that we relocate, we'd formulate a travel plan and get underway. I usually took the first watch while Renzo worked out. After an hour, he would spell me and allow me to work out. When we were on the move, the only cardio available was a portable standing stair climber. It was miserable to use, but it gave a semblance of a workout.

If we were going to stay put, I'd usually take an inflatable kayak to shore and I would get in a run. If there wasn't a convenient place to run, I'd do a vigorous kayak ride for an hour or so. Renzo, perversely, would swim in the cold-ass water of the Chesapeake.

Olivia the like usually wake at 6:30 AM. She would go to the galley and prepare breakfast for us. Nil, who was still struggling with morning sickness, was exempt from cooking duties, so it fell to Olivia. She didn't mind at all. She liked being useful in that way. Nil placed a blanket ban on sausage due to her reaction to the smell. Strangely, she did not have a problem with the smell of thick-cut bacon, to which she was utterly addicted.

Every morning, Olivia would cook up an entire two pound package of thick-cut bacon scramble some cheese eggs, and would toast up an English muffin for Nil. She'd leave it on the counter in a warmer. Renzo and I would take four sticks each. The ladies would each take a couple of sticks of bacon and act like they were full, leaving another eight to ten sticks in the warmer. Somehow, by the time 10:00 AM rolled around, all of the bacon would have disappeared from the serving tray. Neither Olivia nor Nil ever owned up to eating it, but it was curious to Renzo and I that they were rarely hungry at lunch time.

After breakfast, the women would usually roll out mats and do Yoga together. If the weather was warm and pleasant, they'd do it on the fly bridge. They'd slide the couches aside and do it in the salon, otherwise. Olivia had become a yoga and cardio fanatic in the early days of our post-Darden county mission, and she led the yoga. After yoga was over, Olivia would attach the portable stair climber with a ferocity that was impressive even to Renzo.

I heard Nil once ask Olivia why she was fanatical about that. I heard her reply. "He said I looked good skinny. I want to look good for him."

When we arrived at our daily destination, I usually made Renzo drop anchor and judge for himself whether the boat was secure on the hook. He'd been reading the sailing guides, which spoke about diving on the anchor. The crazy fucker, ex combat swimmer that he was, would frequently put on some trunks and would dive the anchor to verify the condition.

He got a lot of his cardio swimming in the frigid mid-Autumn water in the Chesapeake and her estuaries. When I shook my head at it, he'd usually quote some Teams aphorism like, "Pain is weakness leaving the body."

From ten to lunchtime and then from two to four was school. Nil would teach Olivia about covers, status for cover, clandestine ops, money laundering, and covert assassination techniques from poison, to knives, to improvised explosives. Olivia, in turn, taught Nil about finance and investment.

While they did that, I taught Renzo seamanship. In turn, Renzo taught me weapons and small arm tactics. If we were in an isolated place, we'd place targets on the shore, and practice rifle marksmanship using his air guns.

The air gun we used the most was an FX Airguns Impact M4 with the extended barrel. It looked mostly like a rifle, with a trigger grip that looked like an M4 with a fancy stock and a screw-in carbon fiber air tank where the forestock would normally be. It had a long barrel which would add accuracy and also increase the velocity of the 9mm slugs being shot.

The barrel was fitted with a sound suppressor. The idea of a sound suppressor on an air gun seemed ridiculous to me until Renzo had me shoot the rifle with the suppressor removed. It produced a hard crack, not unlike a rimfire.22. With the suppressor, however, the sound was negligible. The shooter hears a sound kind of like a person aggressively spitting but with a metallic overtone. The rifle was outfitted with a scope and a folding bipod. This rifle could easily kill any person within 200 yards almost silently.

While we practiced, Renzo had a camera that would take video through the scope. It was easy to review and endlessly critique every single shot. Renzo was a demanding instructor and really stuck it to me when I was not meeting his expectations. Utter perfection was his standard and the results he got out of me by being a hard-ass instructor like that were pretty impressive.

Renzo was also as serious as a heart attack about learning seamanship. I guessed that the hunger to learn and master a new skill was something that had been burned into him by his SEAL training. I often saw him cramming his seamanship guides in his spare time, and making and working flashcards obsessively. He was also a fiend with tools: he always had a sextant or a dyneema splicing kit in his hands. He had boundless energy for the craft of it.

Nil and Renzo spent at least two hours a day in the master cabin fucking. They did little to hide it. In fact, it wasn't unusual for Renzo to walk out of the cabin shirtless so that he could display newly-acquired scratches and hickies to Olivia and myself. They figured out pretty quickly that Olivia and I were not intimate.

Renzo picked up on this and asked me, "What is the deal with you and Olivia? You seem to have the familiarity and rapport of a married couple, but you aren't intimate?"

"We used to have a thing going, but we are exes now," I said.

"You let something that hot get away from you?" he asked..

"The issue was infidelity," I said. "I wasn't the one to stray. Hot is as hot does, Renzo. That whole incident is classified, though. Do us a favor and drop it."

He backed off after that.

Every evening, the four of us would practice pistol shooting with Renzo's laser device. When we all grew very proficient. Renzo made Olivia and I practice combat drawing and even had us doing pushups before our turns. As would be expected, we sucked at first, but rapidly improved. Renzo never expressed encouragement or approval over anything I did. "Adequate," was his most enthusiastic response. At the same time, he openly admired Olivia. He started calling her 'Nikita', after the character in the French film La Femme Nikita.

After a week, I could say that Renzo and I basically tolerated each other. Olivia and Nil, however, had become absolute besties, having rapidly developed rapport, inside jokes, and a shared vocabulary. During that entire week, I never interacted with Nil once unless Renzo was there.

Olivia tried to explain this to me one evening after they went to bed. "Nil asked me to apologize to you for being so standoffish, but she says that Renzo is crazy jealous. She knows that this training is important to us and doesn't want to jeopardize it by alienating him. She hopes you'll understand."

***

I heard from Sunny a week into the training. It was in the late afternoon and the sun would be down in the next hour or so. Nil and Renzo had excused themselves and gone below for their daily afternoon sex. Olivia was going to make her special lasagna for dinner, so she was in the galley working.

My phone rang, and to my surprise, it was Sunny.

"Will?" she asked. "Are you alone??"

"I am. Now is a good time to talk. What's up?"

"I've got that report you wanted on Renold Zoeller," she said. "Mr. Gilbert tasked me with it, so I worked on it this week."

"What do you have?" I asked.

She gave me the rundown. He was in his thirties, married with two boys, ages 14 and 12. They live in a comfortable neighborhood in Fairfax, Virginia. He's been out of the Navy for four years now and works for a security contracting company.

"Mr. Gilbert was able to obtain his confidential jacket for us. He is essentially a paid contractor for the CIA. He was assigned to be security for an agent named Nil Onaral, a female the same age as Zoeller. She was working as a clandestine operator in Turkey and Azerbaijan. She was said to have been an extremely successful agent.

When the war in Ukraine popped off, Zoeller was suddenly assigned to her and the two of them took several trips together to Moldova. She was involved with a known arms dealer there, a guy named Silviu Sulak. Something happened there and their mission went to shit. Onaral and Zoeller called for an emergency extraction which failed. Two pilots working as contractors died and a multi-million dollar aircraft was lost. They were both assumed to be dead.

"Eight weeks later, they showed up alive and kicking in Wilmington, North Carolina. When her supervisor showed up to collect her, she was visibly pregnant and refused to be separated from Zoeller, even during bathroom trips. Her official jacket denotes that she was less than cooperative in her debrief. The CIA doesn't know what went wrong on the mission or how they escaped from Europe. She thinks that she was burned by a mole and refused to give any information on the people who helped her exfiltrate.

"She was wealthy before going into the CIA, but she is conspicuously more wealthy now. She bought an enormous yacht two months ago with nearly eight million in cash."

"Yes," I said. "We're living on it."

"You are?" she asked.

"Yep. it is called the Avanta," I replied. "Zoeller is openly cohabitating with Onaral and they have both told me first hand that the child she is carrying is his."

"Oh, shit!" said Sunny. "Does his Zoeller's wife know?"

"I was wondering that," I said.

"We should interview her," said Sunny.

"No," I said. "we don't want to spook her or antagonize him."

"Wait, there is a way we can do this and not have it blow back on us," she said.

"How?" I asked.

"We send in an Alba," said Sunny. "This is exactly what they excel at doing."

I considered it and refused. "We'll keep that card in our back pocket," I said. "They're playing nice for us, so we'll play nice for them."

We talked about a few consequential things and suddenly Renzo and Nil climbed up onto the fly bridge.

"Oh, there you are," said Renzo before he noticed I was on the phone.

"Okay, Sunny, I've got to go," I said. "Take care now. Bye."

As I hung up, Nil smiled and asked, "Whose Sonny? I thought you said you didn't have kids."

"That was Sunny with a U. It is the word meaning the opposite of cloudy," I said. "I have no children."

"And who exactly is Sunny?" asked Renzo, very interested. "Is she your girlfriend?"

"No, she's Olivia's girlfriend," I said.

I wasn't sure what possessed me to say it, but I added, "They've got a pretty serious thing going."

Nil suddenly looked like the cat who ate the canary. "Really? Olivia is a lesbian?"

"You'll have to ask her about that," I said. "She only dated men until recently. Sunny is the first woman she's dated."

***

A few days later, the weather forecast looked really bad. The remnants of a late-season named tropical storm was zooming up the Carolina coast and would hit the tidewater region head on.

"We want a sheltered marina for this," I told Renzo. "We're also low on groceries. I suggest we go to the marina near Hampton where we fueled up last time. That had a very well-protected sea wall and slips protected by large pilings. We don't want to be on the boat during the storm. I suggest that we get a hotel room inland. We'd want someplace away from the water. There are thousands of rooms in Williamsburg. That's only twenty minutes away.

He waffled, so I said, "Talk to Nil."

Later that day, we pulled into the marina. This late in the season, there weren't many boats, so they were able to give us a slip protected by eight sturdy pilings. While the ladies packed up and locked down the Avanta, I took Renzo to a naval supply store where we bought a bunch of blocks and heavy deck lines. I then showed Renzo how to use blocks and crossties to secure a boat to pilings against severe tidal changes.

We took a ride share to Williamsburg and I dropped the ladies off.

"Where you going?" asked Renzo.

"I need to secure my boat," I said.

"Your boat?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied, getting back into the ride share. He jumped into the back before the driver got the car into gear.

"You don't want to stay to protect Nil?" I asked.

"She's with Nikita," he said. "Nikita is a serious badass."

When we got to the Jamestown marina, Renzo was stunned. "You have a boat here?" he asked.

"When you told us you wanted to meet in Jamestown, I thought it was prudent to have my boat here," I explained.

"I walked him down to the Blue Escape. The marina manager was there with one of his guys, trying to figure out how to secure it. He was glad to see me.

"Sorry," I said. "This marina isn't good for this storm, so I'm leaving." I undid the rigging he'd just put into place.

I lowered the outboards, and asked Renzo to cast off. I carefully picked our way out into the James and then opened up the throttles. Renzo was exhilarated and couldn't believe how fast we were going.

I kept him watching for traffic as I carefully plotted our way through the channels. I was technically breaking speed zones in a few areas, but there wasn't much traffic out to witness and complain.

"Why did you think it is prudent to have your boat in Jamestown?" he asked.

"My backup plans have backup plans," I said.

Renzo was surprised when I didn't turn to head towards the marina where the Avanta was tied up. Instead, I went to a larger marina a little further down. I chose that one because they operated a dry-stack storage facility. They were waiting for me when I got there. A forklift pulled the Blue escape right out of the water and it went into a protected birth inside of a shed.

"This is a better option for a boat the size of the Blue Escape," I said. "The Avanta is too large for storage like this."

***

The women were wide-eyed and shocked when we returned to the marina after the storm. The Avanta was sitting pretty, but a couple of boats had torn loose of their slips and had been crushed against a sea wall. One was in its slip, but had part of the bow smashed in. There was also one vessel that had capsized.

As we prepared the Avanta for departure, I explained that the blocks we used were why Nil's boat escaped injury. For the first time, I saw real respect in Renzo's eyes towards me.

We filled up at the fuel dock and departed without Renzo. He'd been called in by his employer to do some paperwork and he had to make an appearance at home. He would join us in a week.

With Renzo gone, the boat was a very different environment. For one thing, Nil would actually talk to me. She was a charmer and had a way of digging information out of people. She was gifted at that. I was friendly and fun with her, but I conspicuously gave her nothing. A couple of times, when I caught her digging, I said, "Sorry, Nil. I don't think it prudent to give up any of my secrets."

This made her laugh. She was treating it like it was a game.

The other thing that was different was that without Renzo around during lesson time, I had nothing to do and I was bored as hell. Every single day at breakfast, Nil would say, "I'm feeling morning sickness today. I want to do my lesson in my cabin Olivia. Is that all right?"

Olivia smiled and joined her in the cabin. I didn't think too much of this the first time it happened, but at the end of the week, Olivia had spent almost the entire day every day in Nil's cabin. I was suspicious. Olivia was acting like she always did and there was nothing to indicate anything was amiss, but something just didn't feel right.

I wanted to find out what was going on in Nil's cabin. I had some IP cameras in my bag of tricks. All I needed was an opportunity to plant them.

That opportunity came at the end of the week when Nil clogged the toilet in her cabin. Toilets on a boat are not like toilets at home. Your toilet at home uses water and gravity to wash the sewage into the sewer. A toilet on a boat uses a pump which either pumps the sewage into a black water tank or, if you are off the coast, into the sea. Boat toilets tend to be fragile and they break easily.

I went in there and cleared the sewage hose that was clogged. While I did that, I took the liberty of planting two very inconspicuous pinhole cameras. One gave a broad view of the whole stateroom. The other gave a view of the en-suite head.

Later that afternoon, while the ladies were ensconced in the master stateroom, I pulled out my laptop and configured the two IP cameras to record to my team's cloud storage account. I peaked at the live footage, and they were working together on the couch in the seating area.

The next day, we were due into the marina to pick up Renzo.

When we tied off in a day slip, Renzo was there to handle our lines. He jumped on board and was all over Nil.

I grabbed the bag I packed and left the boat.

Nil suddenly broke off her embrace with Renzo and asked, "Where are you going, Will?"

"I have shit to do, and hanging out on a boat doing nothing keeps me from doing it," I said. "I will rejoin later."

Neither Renzo or Olivia seemed pleased at the sudden change of plans.

***

Chapter 23

My plan for the next ten days in DC was to start rounding up the Owls who were formerly managed by the Glaukopis members we executed.

There was a protocol for how the Glaukopis guys arranged to meet with owls. I followed it and waited for the responses to come in. I was shocked at how quickly the women responded. I was doubly surprised that I managed to get two immediate takers. I had a lunch and a dinner scheduled for that same day.

My first lunch date was with Amelia Palmer. She was forty-one years old and had been an Owl for fifteen years. She had been managed by Burton McKee for her entire career. I read through her jacket. She was a very high-energy person who was a natural leader, was popular at MarCat, had an ability to effortlessly network, and she was married to the chief of staff for the senate minority leader.

I looked at her picture on the folder. The picture was eighteen months old. She was in a bathing suit and she was a stone-cold fox. In her early forties, she bore a striking resemblance to what Brittany Murphy would have looked like had she not passed so tragically young. She was a dark brunette and she was extremely fit. No doubt, she used that high energy to work out. She was the mother of two high-school-aged girls.

An hour before the meeting, I texted a message to her. "You will meet your new controller today." I attached a headshot of myself taken with flat affect like it was a passport photo.

Sunny had encouraged me to dress up for these meetings, so I showed up at the restaurant Amelia chose in a Tom Ford suit that had been very tightly tailored.

Amelia was already there when I arrived. She stood up and waved to me as I walked in. She was in a high-backed booth in the rear. It was a very private setting.

As I got to the table, she smiled, leaned forward, and kissed my cheek like we were dear friends of long acquaintance. She smelled good and she smiled at me fetchingly. She was extremely attractive.

After we sat, she said, "Wow, your picture didn't do you justice at all. You aren't at all what I expected. I mean... I was wondering who they'd send, but you're younger than I expected." She was legitimately flustered.

"Hello, Amelia," I said with an amused smile. "For the time being, I want you to call me 'Will'. That's not my real name, but it will do for now. If you want to keep it more formal, you are welcome to call me 'Boss' or 'Sir', but that is not required."

After we ordered, Amelia suddenly found her equilibrium.

"I want to see your tats," she demanded.

I looked around the restaurant meaningfully.

"I'm not to talk with anyone that doesn't show them to me. Burton... I mean, Mr. McKee, was adamant about that." she said.

I made a mental note that she was on a first name basis with McKee.

Acting put upon, I pulled the small black light flashlight out of my pocket. I shined it on the backs of my hands, to show the lines of my glow-in-the-dark tattoos.

Her eyebrows raised up. "You're the wrangler?" she asked. "You're leadership cadre?"

She was remarkably well informed. I gave her a look that communicated I wasn't pleased and I said, "Admitting that you know about such things isn't good for your health, Amelia."

"Burton knew that I was loyal and he treated me like an adult," she retorted. "I acted in the best interests of the organization. Burton trusted me and treated me accordingly."

Her file had a notation that she got off on being an insider with privilege. I knew McKee had been manipulating her by treating her like the teacher's pet. It was a weakness of hers and it was a cynical ploy for Burton to use it.

Amelia withstood my silence and screwed up her courage.

"Where is Burton McKee?" she demanded with force.

I stared at her for a good long second just to test her mettle. She held her ground. She was feisty.

"What do you know?" I asked.

"He's disappeared," she said. "A top official at the Department of the Treasury completely disappeared off the face of the earth and all I could find is one page-twelve article in the Washington Post that said he was missing."

"Then you know what I know," I said.

She gave me a hard stare. She was trying to discern if I was lying to her.

I laughed. "Do you honestly think they'd tell me what happened to him?" I asked.

"You sure as shit know something," she replied. "I can read that much in your expression."

"I was officially told that what happened was above my pay grade." I said this matter-of-factly. "I honestly know nothing for sure."

She gave me a slight nod. She expected me to say this.

"However, I have eyes to see, and what I know is this: one guy disappeared, a second guy died of an overdose of Fentanyl, and a third guy was found dead in a murder suicide. Right after that happened, a major policy change was sent down from the top at the same time. If you read into it, it forms a picture."

"What was the policy change?" she asked.

"Consensual sex only," I replied. "There is to be no contact between the Owls and their handlers unless the Owls explicitly request it. The Owls will be regularly questioned about the behavior of their Controllers going forward. Controllers were cautioned under no uncertain terms that to mess with an Owl against her will would be a terminating event."

She looked stunned as I said it.

"Is Burton McKee dead?" she asked.

"I don't know for sure, but I assume he is," I replied. "I suspect his body I'll never be found."

She began to cry.

I pulled out my handkerchief and she took it readily and dabbed at her eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I've been trying to prepare myself for this eventuality, but I just.... getting hit with what you just told me is pretty hard."

"You liked Burton?" I asked.

Her expression was fierce. "Liked him? I loved him!"

My expression must have been surprise, because she said, "I was his lover for fifteen years. I really grew to know him intimately over that time. He was such an amazing man. Sure, he had some rough spots, but for someone who carried as much power as he did, he was remarkably caring and humble. I owed him so much. To have him simply disappear is so hard. I bet this is killing poor Joanie."

"Joanie?" I asked.

"Burton's wife," she said indignantly. "Didn't you know her?"

"No. I didn't know Burton either," I replied. "We are kept apart. I don't know many of the other members at all."

She nodded as if she figured this was the case. She reeled in her emotions.

"I have been instructed to say that this situation had the leadership scrambling. That's why some of you have been out of contact for as long as you have." I reached into my messenger bag and pulled out a brick of cash in a box and a pay check from MarCat that was worth fifteen thousand dollars.

I handed it to her and said, "This is for your trouble and for the service interruptions."

She peeked into the box and when she saw the cash, she nodded. After that, she opened up the check and read it. She was shocked by the amount. She folded it back up and put it into her tote along with the box of cash.

"That's a lot of compensation," she said.

"As we will be working together, Amelia, I'd like to get to know you a little. I've read through your file, but I want to get a sense for who you really are. What can you tell me about yourself?"

The food came soon after. As we ate, she told me about her job and her kids. The only thing she said about her husband was that he worked for a Senator. Her file noted that the Glaukopis had blackmailed her husband at Amelia's request. A picture began to form in my mind that Burton McKee had replaced her husband in her mind.

I asked her, "How is your relationship with your husband? Has there been any change?"

"No change," she replied. "We still maintain a good rapport. We reached a 'don't ask, don't tell' equilibrium ten years ago and never looked back. I turn a blind eye to his dalliances, and he is smart enough to not rock the boat or interfere with me too much. Despite his flaws, he's good to me and great with the kids. We still make love."

"How is the psychologist working out for your daughter Larissa?" I asked.

Amelia brightened. "That worked out so well!" she said. "Larissa is in a whole different headspace now. The psychologist was amazing."

"I'm glad to hear that. Is there anything that the organization can do for you?" I asked.

She thought about this and shook her head. "Not right now. Next year, we start the college search process. Burton told me that the organization can help sometimes with college admissions."

"We can," I confirmed. "When you decide where to apply, drop me the list and we'll do what we can."

She smiled.

"Boss... Will, what can you tell me about you? Where do you work? What do you do? You're very young and you're not like Burton at all." She knew this was a big ask, so her request had a pleading tone.

"I work for a three letter agency," I said. "I cannot talk about my career, nor can I say what I am doing currently. It is classified and is clandestine in nature. I have been appointed to a new post and this will be publicly announced soon. When it is announced, my name may change. Don't be shocked by this. That's how it's done. I won't be able to talk about my job until then."

"Are you married?" she asked. She'd dropped that on me hoping to get a facial reaction out of me.

I gave her a poker face. After a long pause which made her squirm, I said, "When my new post is announced, that information will become available." She shivered at how I said that. She was thrilled that I had been doing clandestine operations. She liked bad boys and this was a dream come true for her.

My picture of her marriage suddenly transformed again. Her husband was the sweet and kind guy. He was her gentle partner and the father to her kids. McKee had been the powerful bad boy who was her secret flame, lover, and protector. She got off on being used by McKee, and justified it because a McKee used his power to make things better for her family. Her husband was her teddy bear. McKee was her Rottweiler and security blanket. With McKee's disappearance, she'd been in free fall. It would be easy to control her simply by giving her glimpses at the fact I was a badass.

As the meal finished up, I dropped a credit card into the tray and handed it to the waitress. Amelia suddenly became nervous. She reached into her purse and pulled out a slip of paper and a plastic hotel key in a paper folder with a hotel name and a room number written on it.

I looked at the paper and it was an STD test result pronouncing her clean. The hotel key was self-explanatory. I wasn't expecting this, but I had an instant insight that this was a ritual. Every single Owl that I met with would do the same.

I let the mask drop a little bit and allowed her to see me look both concerned and embarrassed.

"I was serious about the policy change, Amelia. Sex will neither be demanded nor expected. If you want me to come with you to that room, you have to ask me," I said.

"I want this," she said. "I need this. I need the security of knowing that we share something and that you have some stake in the game, Will. Just... just be gentle, okay? I haven't taken a new lover in fifteen years."

I put my hand on top of hers to assure her. The tenderness of this gesture startled her. "You are in control of whether we do anything," I said.

This made her smile wickedly. "With Burton I was never in control. Can you give me fifteen minutes before you come up?"

I nodded.

She picked up her purse and stood. I stood as well. She leaned over and kissed my cheek as if bidding goodbye to an old friend.

I watched through the window as she walked across the street confidently and into the lobby of the hotel.

***

I stood outside of the hotel room door for a moment and composed myself. She'd already hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign on it. Having sex with a complete stranger in that circumstance was just plain weird. I didn't really know Amelia at all and we had zero personal connection. At the same time, I was enough of a horn dog that I wasn't going to turn down free pussy if a hottie like Amelia was willingly handing it out.

I also recognized that if I refused sex, it would be suspicious as hell and would probably ruin Amelia's relationship with me for all time.

I tapped the key against the door and let myself in when it unlatched. Amelia was sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed looking at me. She was really quite sexy.

I walked into the room, and I decided it would be best to let her get a good look at me. I slowly disrobed, taking off my tie, then my jacket, and then my suit pants. I hung the jacket and pants on a hanger in the closet. Amelia was clearly enjoying the show.

I slowly undid my shirt buttons and on a lark, I passed the shirt into Amelia's hands. Olivia had always like smelling my shirts right after I took them off. Sure enough, Amelia raised it to her nose and sniffed. She had a secret inward smile as she did so.

I took the tee shirt off next, which caused her to gawk a bit. "You are really fit," she observed. "You don't have a desk job, do you?"

I did not answer. Instead, I slid my boxers down and revealed my cock. I walked over to her.

She suddenly stood and then sank down to her knees. It wasn't one of the classic BDSM postures that Greta demonstrated to me, but it was a ritualized posture. Amelia suddenly leaned forward as if to take my cock in her mouth. I had a sudden insight that the Owls were taught to do this. Every encounter started with the Owl on her knees and the man's cock in her mouth.

I decided to subvert that.

I backed away, taking my cock out of her reach, causing her a moment of confusion. I quickly bent down and picked her up bodily with one hand under her crotch and the other in an armpit.

She squealed as I lifted her effortlessly. I dropped her down onto the mattress. I reached underneath her and unzipped her dress. I read anxiety all over her face and realized she was deathly afraid of showing herself naked to me for the first time.

I decided it would be best to give her a taste of pleasure before I asked to see the sight of her.

I quickly raised up, put my hands under the skirt of her dress and slid her panties down in one smooth movement. It was unexpected and caused her to moan. She was quite aroused and her aroma wafted out from under her skirt. Her panties were soggy in my hand. I sniffed them and threw them over my shoulder.

I crawled up the bed until my head was right at the opening of her skirt.

"You've got to ask for it, Amelia," I said.

"Please!" she said.

"Please what?" I asked.

"Please take me, Will."

***

An hour and a half later, a fully naked Amelia lay on the bed floating in the afterglow of what we'd just done.

"Oh my God, Will," she said. "That was amazing. I've never had sex like that."

My hand was resting on her pelvis between her vulva and her belly button. I slid it up to her breast, which I gently cupped in my hand. She shivered at my touch.

"That was easy Amelia," I said. "You were on fire. You are quite a lover." I said it honestly because it was true. We didn't have the kind of chemistry together that Sunny and I did, but even so, it was pretty hot.

I started by putting my head under her skirt and going down on her. I gave Amelia three very hard orgasms with my tongue before I'd even kissed her. After that third orgasm, the look she gave me was nothing short of reverent. It wasn't too hard to see that neither her husband nor McKee were big on giving pleasure, because it had been ridiculously easy to make Amelia come that way and she acted like she'd never experienced that before.

Once I'd pleasured her like that, Amelia was going to do whatever she could to impress me. She went down on me to the point where she was forcing herself to gag. I got the sense that she was actually trying to get my cock all the way down her throat by sheer force of will. She clearly had no idea what she was doing, but she was adamant it was going to happen.

Fearing that she would make herself vomit, I pulled her off me and kissed her. She wriggled herself until she was positioned over my cock and she sat herself down, sinking my shaft into her depths.

"You don't want me to use condoms?" I asked.

"No!" she replied as she fucked me in a frenzy. It was clear she brought her A-game and was trying to 'shock and awe' me with this fuck. It didn't work. She was trying too hard and was getting in her own way.

When I had enough, I stood up and picked her off the ground. I fucked her standing up for a few minutes. She had no leverage against me and was powerless to stop me. I totally ragdolled her. She'd clearly never had this done to her and it drove her wild. She came in the first minute and pretty much lost physical control after that.

When I got tired of holding her up, I wanted a position where she wouldn't have the ability to be so frenetic, so I dropped her back down on the bed on her tummy. I fucked her in prone. She was tight, had a nice ass, and as aroused as she was, it was amazing. I did notice, however, that she wasn't going to orgasm in this position. As I fucked her I growled at her, "Get your hand underneath you and touch yourself while I do this."

She snaked her hand underneath her and began fiddling with her clit as I pounded into her. "Oh my god!" she immediately moaned. It didn't take her but two minutes and she had an absolutely massive orgasm. In terms of intensity, it put the three hard oral orgasms to shame, and her moan was as loud as a shout. Her spasms were too intense for me to withstand and I came so hard it hurt.

That was just the first time. After she gave me a nearly hour-long massage, we had a second session that was every bit as intense.

"My God, I'm utterly spent, Will," she said. "If I go home like this, my husband will know I was out today fucking another man." Implicit in this statement was that McKee had never laid waste to her like I had.

"How much does he really know?" I asked.

"He knows I see someone," she said. "He knows this person is powerful and not to be trifled with and he knows not to interfere. I work hard at making sure my husband feels respected and that he knows I adore him. Since I became an Owl, I have never once turned him down for sex and I initiate quite often. He also knows I will not interfere or complain about his dalliances."

"Can I ask for something next time?" she asked.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Burton liked to tie me up. It drove me wild. I want to do that position where I was on my belly. but with my hands tied up behind me," she said.

"If I tie up your hands, how will you touch yourself?" I asked.

This was a puzzle to her. "A big part of the pleasure of that position for me is feeling your pussy spasm on my cock."

This caused her to flush. "I did that, didn't I?" she asked, pleased.

"That you did. That was fucking hot, Amelia. I've got to say you're already one of my favorites." This was what she wanted to hear and she shivered when I said it.

"I was a good girl for Burton and I will be such a good girl for you, Will," she purred. "I only know how to do things one way: flat out. Please let me show you. You won't ever be disappointed in me. I promise you." I believed her. If only Olivia had been the same way.

As I got dressed, she stayed in the bed and watched.

"Will, there is something that the organization can provide for me," she said.

"What's that?" she asked. "I want sex lessons. I wanted to deep throat you today and couldn't. I want to learn how to do that. I'm certain the other Owls would want lessons too."

"I'll see what I can do."

***

My evening meeting with Mackenzie Phipps was a very different experience. Mackenzie was extremely shy and a tad bit introverted. Her personality read bookworm or nerd to me.

She was not fit like Amelia and didn't put a whole lot into her appearance at all. That didn't mean she was unattractive. She had a very plump ass and nice hips. Beneath her thick eyeglass frames, she had beautiful eyes.

She had the flavor of someone who was dealing with serious trauma. She had been and Owl for seven years. She started out under a controller who had died of cancer. After his death, she was moved under Naeem Carter. She had been a very productive Owl for him, but his annotations in her files indicated that he considered her a behavioral problem and had motivation problems. Reading between the lines, they didn't like each other.

I walked into the restaurant and she was sitting at a table in the back. She had a thousand yard stare.

She became aware of me as I approached and looked up. She remained seated. "Mackenzie?" I said.

She looked down and would not make eye contact. "That's me," she said.

I realized that was all the greeting I was going to get. I took the seat across from her.

"Where's Naeem?" she asked.

"Dead," I replied.

"Is this some kind of trick?" she asked. "He's done that before, you know. He had one of his buddies pretend he was the replacement and then in the hotel room, Naeem was waiting for me. He tortured me for two hours."

"Mackenzie, look at me." I said it so forcefully, she flinched.

Her eyes darted up.

"Naeem Carter, that fucking monster, is dead," I said. "I would never participate in a trick like the one you described. As you get to know me, you'll realize that."

Her eyes searched my face for treachery. "How'd he die?" she asked.

"He got caught up in a murder suicide," I said. "He was the murder victim. It was a bad scene. From what I know about him, he fucking deserved it, too."

"Why wasn't it in the news?" she asked.

"Are you really going to ask that question?" I asked with a look of disbelief. She just nodded.

"You knew Naeem?" she asked.

"Just enough to know I will not mourn his passage," I replied. "We have totally different approaches to the organization."

"You do?" she asked.

"I support the Owls working for me," I said. "I help them when they want it or need it, and I never, never impose."

She nodded. "My first controller, David Malcom was like that. We had a good rapport and we worked well together. I was very happy until David fell to cancer. Then I got assigned to Naeem three years ago. My life has been a living hell since then."

"Did he torture you regularly?" I asked.

"The asshole would hurt me so bad that I was screaming in pain and then he'd make me orgasm and gaslight me that the orgasm was proof that I loved what he was doing to me. Please tell me you're not like that."

I put my hand lightly on top of hers.

"Mackenzie, you need to listen to me," I said.

She looked up at my face again.

"I won't ever do that to you," I said. "I promise. In fact, the organization has undergone a policy change. From here on out, all contact between Controllers and Owls is strictly consensual. You won't ever have to do anything you don't want to again."

"You're not putting me on, are you?" she asked.

"No, I'm not. In the future, the Owls will be interviewed about what their Controllers are doing. We've been told that if a Controller is caught forcing himself on an Owl, it will be a terminating event. You won't ever have to have sex with any of us again unless you want to."

During the meal, we talked about her. She worked at the Library of Congress. Her husband, who was aware she was being blackmailed, was an expert at the think tank which writes most of the regulation regarding food. She got co-opted by the Glaukopis by one of the other Owls, whom she knew from a book club they were both in.

She and her husband were planning to have kids, but the introduction of Naeem Carter into her life killed those plans for her. She tried for two years to push her husband into divorcing her, but he was an old-school Catholic and refused. He'd been a rock for her.

When I asked her if I could provide anything for her, she requested two things. She wanted a trauma counselor to work with her on her issues. She also wanted the location of Naeem Carter's gravesite.

"Why do you want to know his gravesite?" I asked.

"So I can piss on his grave," she said. She then laughed.

"I'll get it for you," I promised.

When she handed me her STD panel result and her hotel key, I stopped her.

"I wasn't kidding about the new policy, Mackenzie. You don't have to have sex unless you want it," I said.

"Are you for real?" she asked. She looked at me with those beautiful eyes. It broke my heart.

"This is the honest truth," I insisted. "If you don't want to, there is never a need to arrange for a hotel ever again."

She started to cry. I went around the table and held her as she cried silently for a few minutes. When she realized that a couple of the people in the restaurant were watching her make a spectacle, she pulled it back in.

"If you don't mind, then, I'd like to skip the hotel," she said.

"Certainly," I replied.

As we departed, she thanked me for my kindness. I said, "On behalf of the organization, I apologize for Naeem Carter. I can give you a solemn promise that won't ever happen again."

***

Over the next nine days, I met seventeen more Owls. Of the nineteen owls, eleven of them demanded sex. Not only was it shocking that so many of the women wanted the sex, it was shocking that they all felt entitled to it. Most were offended that I assumed they might not want it.

I'd made it a point to pleasure these women thoroughly before I got my dick involved. After I gave a woman one or two big orgasms, they invariably wanted to do whatever they could to impress me.

A couple of them throat fucked me. One even begged me to ass fuck her. Most, however, were like Amelia and simply deployed their number one A-game fuck on me. As the women were in it for a thrill, and I pleasured them with skill, most of them were totally uninhibited in the act. There was no pretense at all about what we were doing. We were just using each other to get off.

It was fun at first, yet at the same time, it was strangely alienating. The only connection we had was a mutual desire to receive pleasure. Believe it or not, this became both boring and monotonous.

What kept me upbeat was the fact that this was just one encounter in what would be a string of many such encounters. Over time, I'd develop a relationship with each of these women and our time together would developed some meaning beyond seeking out a spasm.

After the first few encounters, I realized that the secret sauce in enlivening the experience for me was to be aggressive and dominant. The more forceful and controlling I was, the wilder the women got. Not one of them objected to me taking total control, and reacted well if I used my necktie or belt to bind them. I started bringing silk scarves and would tie them up. It drove them wild.

At the end of each hotel session, I was surprised that many women expressed gratitude. "Your predecessor never cared about making it fun for me, and he wasn't half as sexy as you. You were magnificent," was one such comment. I knew those women would be back for more.

The women who were most grateful were those who had been with Naeem Carter. That fucker had been horribly toxic.

***

While I was working on the Owls, I managed to hang with Sunny for a couple of hours most days. We'd talk about the mission, what Olivia was doing on the boat, and how the process of reeling in the Owls was going. I was honest with her about the fact that the women were asking to have sex with me. Sunny thought it was hilarious. "You're probably the only guy in the world who'd have any qualms about that," she said with a laugh.

She'd been working with the Albas. "You've got to spend time with the other three," said Sunny.

"I will, once I get done with the stray owls," I said.

"What can you tell me about them?" I asked.

She told me about Tabitha, Miranda, and Stacy. She also told me that Sloane had done a good job preparing the way.

The fourth day I was back, Sunny showed up to our mid-afternoon meeting stiff and sore.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Greta gave me a tattoo today," she said.

"Where?" I asked.

"On my back," she said.

"It must be large. What is it?" I asked.

"I want to give you and Olivia a reveal once it's quit healing. I think you'll get a kick out of it."

***

After nine days or so on shore, I got a call from Olivia.

"Renzo needs to leave the boat," she reported. "Can you be back in two days?"

The timing was good. The next day was my last day of scheduled Owl appointments. The only disappointment was that the air gun I ordered hadn't come in yet, I'd ordered the exact same gun as I had been using with Renzo, down to the same scope, range finder, and scope camera.

"I can be back tomorrow," I said.

"Where do you want us to pick you up?" she asked.

"I will come to you," I replied. "Send me a grocery list of what to bring. Also, it will be a very late arrival in the middle of the night. Tell Renzo not to shoot me when I tie up."

After I finished my last Owl appointment, who thankfully declined a sexual encounter, I made my way to the marina where my boat had been in storage.

Earlier in the day, I'd called them up and asked them to get my boat in the water and fuel it up. When I arrived, it was in a slip and ready to go. All I had to do was load my groceries and bag and boat away.

I'd been tracking the location of the Avanta on GPS while I was gone, so I knew it was about two hours away from the marina.

As I pulled up, I put out fenders, and I tied up along side the Avanta. I threw my bag over. I heard someone in the fly bridge of the Avanta so I said, "Ahoy, the Avanta! Permission to come aboard."

"Is that you, Will?" I heard Renzo call out.

"It's me, Renzo," I replied.

"Come on aboard," he said.

He helped me take the groceries to the galley and stow them.

"That was a crazy couple of weeks," he said. "I got too used to you being aboard and splitting shifts. Going at it solo, sucked."

"That was my experience when you were gone," I agreed.

"The women are asleep. There's still some food in the galley if you want it. Are you tired? Do you need me to take first watch?"

"I'll take first watch," I said. "I've got some paperwork to do."

***

The next morning, we checked the weather. Renzo asked, "Rather than take the Avanta back to the marina, can I just take your boat?"

"Do you think you can handle it?" I asked.

He thought about it for a long time, which was a credit to him. He was really considering it. "I think so," he said.

"Cruising speed is 4,000 RPM," I said. "That's your best fuel economy at speed."

With a bit of trepidation, I handed him my spare keys.

"When are you coming back?" I asked.

"Four days," he said. "I picked up a quick gig down in Atlanta."

***

During the three days that Renzo was gone, I worked on getting the Owl files updated with the information that I'd gathered in the previous two weeks.

I also coordinated with Matt Gilbert to get the resources that the Owls had requested. In the leadership turnover book, there was an up-to-date list of discreet psychologists whom the Glaukopis had used before. I was miffed to find that Mackenzie wasn't the first Owl that Naeem caused to be sent to a psychologist for trauma.

From a marina in Maryland, I sent Makenzie a box. In the box, I placed the contact information to the psychologists. I also included a sixty-four ounce water bottle that had encouraging messages on the volume graduations ("48 oz -- No excuses!, 32 oz -- half way there!, 16 oz -- You got this!"). Inside the bottle, I left a sheet of information that included the address to the cemetery where Carter was buried, along with a map of where his exact plot was.

A few days after I sent it, Mackenzie texted my Glaukopis burner phone. "Thank you Will. The therapist is awesome and I really needed that laugh."

I replied back. "My pleasure."

***

Chapter 24

Author's note. The characters of Marlowe, Victoria, Tony, and Cassie in this section belong to author Oneagainst and are a part of the sublime Wonderland universe. Oneagainst kindly gave me permission to use them in this story. Please see the note at the conclusion of this part for more details.

On the day that Renzo was supposed to return, Olivia and Nil

once again spent the entire day in Nil's cabin. This had become their habit when Renzo wasn't around.

It was warm outside, so I was hanging out on the fly bridge. I was surprised when Nil came up to the salon from her stateroom just before 4:00 PM. She was kind of disheveled, which was unusual. She was wearing one of Renzo's tee shirts and a very loose pair of cotton shorts.

As she stepped out, she said, "Wow, it is lovely out here."

"You miss out when you spend too much time in your cabin," I said.

She laughed and said, "I doubt it."

She sat Indian style on the couch opposite of mine. As she did this, I could see up the leg of her shorts. She wasn't wearing panties and I caught a glimpse of her bush. I wondered if she flashed me on purpose, but I decided she wasn't aware she was exposing herself. It took an act of will, but I pointedly concentrated on her face.

"Renzo just called," she said. "He's back. Olivia is working up a grocery list for him. Once he gets the groceries, he's going to boat out to meet us. Can you text him our GPS coordinates?"

"Sure," I said.

I couldn't help it, as I stood, I took another glimpse back down at her bush. There was no mistaking that she was not wearing panties. I thought it was damned peculiar because I was certain I'd seen a panty line under her shorts at lunch time.

I stood up and walked over to the pilot station. I took a photo of our GPS position on the dashboard. I texted it to Renzo.

"I sent it," I told Nil.

Olivia bounded up from below. She was wearing only an oversized tee shirt and her hair was up in a ponytail. At lunch time, she'd been wearing leggings, socks, and shoes, and her hair was down. At the top of the stairs, she was backlit by the sun which was pretty close to setting. I could see the silhouette of her body through the material of her tee shirt. She had no bra or panties on.

I thought to myself What the fuck?.

When Olivia had Nil's attention, she said, "I got the list. You want me to text it to him?"

"Yeah," replied Nil. "I left my phone on the table downstairs."

Olivia went down looking for it. As she turned back around to descend the steps, to my shock, I saw that she had a hard bite mark on the back of her neck with a hickie. It looked brand new.

Nil snapped me out of my reverie by asking, "Will, are you cooking tonight?"

"Yes," I replied. "There's a pot roast already in the crock pot."

"Yummy," she said. "Well, I'm heading down for my nap."

I followed her down to the salon. She went down to her stateroom from there. I did a quick check of the crockpot, and then I went down to my cabin.

I got out my laptop and opened up the camera feed from Nil's stateroom. On the screen, I saw Nil emerge from the bathroom. She walked over to Olivia and took her by the hand. "Come," Nil said, pulling Olivia over to the bed.

Nil dropped her shorts to the floor and pulled off her tee shirt. She was naked underneath.

Nil then proceeded to kiss Olivia while pulling her shirt over her head. This clearly wasn't a first kiss between the two. Nil was well acquainted with the shirt removal procedure. Olivia moved her body in those subtle and insignificant ways to make taking her shirt off easy for Nil. It looked choreographed.

Nil then put her hands on Olivia's shoulders and pushed her onto her knees. Olivia kissed down Nil's pregnant belly and began to pleasure Nil without being asked.

Nil then sat on the edge of her bed and lay back and luxuriated as Olivia went to work with her tongue.

"Shit, Livvie," said Nil. "Your tongue is just magic."

I only watched for a minute after that. After the first time Nil orgasmed, I turned off the monitor. It was still being recorded to the cloud and I'd seen enough. I was beyond shocked to see Olivia so cavalierly cheating on Sunny.

I quickly reviewed the footage stored in the cloud. They'd been at it all afternoon. Further, every nap time for the last three days, Nil and Olivia had sex. I went back in time, and I randomly sampled the nap times. Olivia didn't appear in any of those videos.

I was immediately faced with the dilemma of whether I should tell Sunny. I thought she would want to know that Olivia was not faithful. At the same time, Sunny knew that I wanted her and if I ran to her to tell on Olivia, there was a risk she would think that I was simply doing it to sabotage Olivia to get with her. It felt like a lose-lose scenario to me.

I was in the galley putting finishing touches on dinner when I received a phone call. It was Matt Gilbert. "We've got an emerging situation. We need you to do some international travel on short notice. How soon can you get here?"

"Late tonight," I said.

"Get as much rest as you can tonight. Meet me at my safe house at 8:00 AM tomorrow. I'll brief you there. Prepare to be gone for an entire week."

Sunny and Nil came up into the Salon just as I was hanging up. They'd washed up and changed. I looked at them closely and honestly couldn't tell that they'd just had sex.

"Who was that?" Olivia asked.

"My boss," I replied. I could have said 'your father', but I didn't want to do that in front of Nil.

"What's up?" asked Olivia.

"Emergency at work," I said. "I've got to go for at least a week. International travel."

"Shit!" said Nil. "Do you have to? Renzo will be disappointed. He was miserable when you left last time."

"Duty calls," I said. "I've got to go pack."

I caught Olivia looking at me with concern.

"Am I going, too?" she asked. It was hard to tell if she was disappointed that she wasn't going, or disappointed that she would have to leave.

"The boss didn't say he wanted you to do that. Continue your studies here. For God's sake, behave yourself while I am gone."

The look she gave me was one of intense scrutiny. I didn't know what she was thinking, but I suspected she was trying to figure out if I knew she was hooking up with Nil.

***

I was in the room with Matt Gilbert. He said, "A few months back, you reported on your interrogation of Vance Cameron that Burton McKee devised a plan to try to co-opt Deputy Director Rosa Mullins of the FBI using a behavior-control drug from a foreign supplier. You mentioned two men by name: Terrance Smith and Mehul Srinivas."

I nodded.

"We have been monitoring their communications for a while and the two frequently text each other about a forthcoming trip to a place that they describe as 'Wonderland'. There's never enough context to place where this location is.

"Four days ago, there was some excited chatter between them that they are finally getting to go to Wonderland and that this is their chance to get a demonstration of something that they are calling 'blue goo'. We believe that 'blue goo' might be the behavior-control drug."

That made sense to me.

"Yesterday afternoon, their names showed up on the passenger roster of a Sunday flight from DC to Vancouver, BC, connecting through Chicago," said Gilbert. "There is some sort of convention with Western hemisphere diplomats going on at the convention center there. They are leaving tomorrow afternoon and will return home first thing next Saturday. I'm sorry, it is not very much, but that is what we have.

"Secretary Bollard wants eyes and ears on them at all times. We are going to send you there. We have the upper hand as we know their flight information in advance. We are going to send you today, so that you will be on the ground and rested for when they arrive tomorrow.

"The bad news is that we are doing this on-the-volley. We really aren't supposed to send assets to friendly nations without informing their government at some level. I can't do that through normal channels, because that request would be routed through the state department and we don't want to risk that exposure.

"Consequently, we have no choice but to send you using your Archer cover, ostensibly as a private citizen on business. You are not officially a government employee under that identity, so you will not have diplomatic cover. To try to make the offense a little less egregious, I've contacted my counterpart in the Canadian government. He is named Étienne Chénier. We go way back, and he's going to give a little cover, sanction, and assistance on this op.

"We are going to send you to Ottawa this afternoon, and Étienne himself will accompany you to Vancouver. The good news is that the budget is coming out of the Glaukopis vault, so we've chartered a private jet for you. You'll fly out of Reagan at noon.

"Be on your best behavior for Guy. He's doing me a solid. No doubt, he's going to tell you the same thing I will: you are there for surveillance only. Étienne pulled some strings and you will not go through customs when you arrive in Ottawa. Even so, no guns. You are authorized to take an inhaler and an epi-pen, but it will be packed in your bag and not on your person when you cross the border."

"Understood," I said.

"If, during the course of your surveillance, you get wind that something illegal is going down, you call Étienne and let him take care of it. Do not obstruct. Do not attempt to get involved, understand?"

"Perfectly." I replied.

"Smith and Srinivas will be at the conference from Monday through Friday. I assume that the drug demonstration won't be at the conference. In fact, we don't even know whether this drug demonstration will take place in Vancouver, or somewhere else. You'll have to be flexible and keep up with what they're doing. If you have to scramble and relocate, do what you have to. If you get in a pinch and lose them, Étienne is going to track their cell phones.

"We are working on finding out where Smith and Srinivas are staying. By the time you get to Vancouver, we'll have arranged for you to stay in the same hotel."

I nodded.

"I've got some listening devices that you can use. They communicate via Bluetooth Low Energy, so their maximum range is about 80 meters. It is the best that I could find on short notice."

***

I'd been in Canada for almost an entire day before Smith and Srinivas arrived in Vancouver on a Sunday, I got along extremely well with Étienne. He was dark haired, laconic, and spoke only in understated irony. He had me in stitches.

I was literally standing in the YVR airport customs monitoring booth when Smith and Srinivas stepped off the plane. When they got to the customs officer, the customs officer noted that they had diplomatic passports and called over a compatriot to escort Smith and Srinivas straight to the customs office. Étienne had arranged for the day manager of the customs office to give them a red carpet treatment.

While they did that, their luggage carts were pulled into a conference room, where I bugged it. I put listening devices in both of their suitcases, Smith's backpack, and Srinivas' messenger bag. It took all of two minutes.

Once that was accomplished, Étienne and I got in a car and followed Smith and Srinivas all the way to the hotel. While Étienne drove us, he gave me the exact same admonition that Matt Gilbert gave in his DC safe house: no violence, do not get involved, call Étienne directly if a situation develops. He then handed me an envelope that had a pass to the convention center, which marked me as a private contractor. "No government employee ever pays attention to, no?" he said with an ironic shrug. "Hide in plain site, Will."

His work was done, so Étienne left me. He flew back to Ottawa on the private jet.

I was able to monitor Smith and Srinivas through the listening devices. I was staying two rooms down from them in the same hotel where they were staying and had pretty good reception.

During the day, they were over at the conference center. During lunch, they usually went out to lunch with people I assumed were their diplomatic counterparts from Western Hemisphere nations. They always talked shop and never discussed 'blue goo'.

After the conference sessions were over for the day, they usually hung out in a bar a brisk ten minute walk from the hotel. The bar was pretty amazing. The building it was in was very architectural and the bar had indoor and outdoor spaces, funky chandeliers, wicker furniture and dark wood paneling. It was quite busy during happy hour. They had great appetizers there and the ambience appealed to a young professional crowd. Lots of lawyers and accountants went there to limber up after work.

Smith and Srinivas would get there about four in the afternoon and set themselves up in a booth that gave them a good vantage of the people coming in. They would then hit on anything with two legs and boobs that walked through the door. To my surprise, they were able to get quite a few ladies into conversation with the offer of a drink. That was as far as it got, though. None of the local talent were interested in spending an evening with a mid-level American bureaucrat.

I found a perch at the very end of the bar where I could see everything they were doing, but they couldn't see me. There were a couple of regulars who liked the same part of the bar for the same reason. One of them befriended me on the second day. He was a beefy, thickset guy by the name of Marlowe. He was pretty quiet and very observant. He knew I was from the US without listening to the way I spoke. He also figured out that I was keenly interested in Smith and Srinivas. He circumspectly asked me what the deal was.

This put me on the spot. I was about to blow it when Marlowe bailed me out by speculating, "The way I figure it, you're an investigator working for one of their wives?" he asked. "Let me guess, you work for the wife of the tall one, right?"

"Got it in one," I said. "His wife is certain he's cheating on her. Judging by his behavior in this place, the only reason why he hasn't cheated yet is that he hasn't had any takers. Look, you aren't going to sell me out here, are you?"

"Hell no," said the man. "I despise cheaters."

"Amen to that. Look, can I buy you a drink?" I asked.

"Yeah," he responded.

I waved the bartender over and ordered us another round.

"My name is Marlowe," he said, offering his hand.

I shook it and said, "I'm Will Archer."

"So, did that guy's wife send you all the way from the states to catch her man out?" Marlowe asked.

"Sure did. All the way from Washington, DC," I said.

"That must be costing her a pretty penny," he speculated.

"And then some," I added. "His wife comes from a wealthy family and there is a prenup in play that expires after fifteen years. She's only eighteen months out and she got the feeling he's playing the field already. She sent me to find out."

"Watching those two carry on, I can believe it," he said.

"Is Vancouver home for you?" I asked.

"Yes. I'm not one to hang out in bars, but my wife is in therapy here down town and I usually have a couple of hours to kill in the afternoon before I can pick her up," he said.

***

Every day after that, I'd show up to the bar at four. While I watched Smith and Srinivas, I'd chat with Marlowe. At ten minutes to seven o'clock, Marlowe would bid me goodbye and take off. I'd stick around until Smith and Srinivas would give up and return to the hotel, usually between ten and eleven.

This held true until my fifth day in Vancouver. While Marlowe and I were chatting, a drama unfolded about twenty feet away from us.

It started with Marlowe surreptitiously pointing at a man walking into the bar. "See that good looking fella over there?" asked Marlowe. "Checkered shirt, the chin, and the very white teeth?"

"Yes," I replied.

"That's Bruce Hayden," said Marlowe. "He's a sports hero. He plays for Team Canada. He's a very popular man with the ladies. He also has a reputation for going after married women."

We watched as Bruce went over to a booth with a "reserved" sign on it. He sat down and set the signed flat on its face. Within seconds, the waitress was there with a cocktail already made.

Over the next hour or so, a number of people stopped by his booth to pay their respects. He was kind to his fans. He had more drinks than he could drink in a night lined up on the table.

Around seven or so, Bruce Hayden suddenly stood up and walked over to a table with four married couples celebrating not five feet from us. He bent and spoke to a woman seated there. The woman was absolutely gorgeous and was wearing a very sexy blue dress. Her husband wasn't bad looking, but he was short for a guy, had a slight build, and had premature baldness so bad that he didn't even bother trying to comb his hair over. He clearly wasn't in her league any more. The blue dress woman had on a ring that was the size of my thumb. The thought that wealth was the equalizer in that marriage did occur to me.

Hayden spoke to the lady and he took her hand and walked her over to the dance floor. He did not speak to the husband first, nor did the wife ask her husband permission to go with Bruce.

Marlowe and I shared a look. "That's not good," he said.

When Bruce Hayden made his move on the wife, there was a frisson at the bar. The whole place, it seemed, was watching them dance.

Hayden's hands were all over her like an octopus. The wife wasn't resisting at all. They stayed out on the floor for three songs. In the foreground, I saw the husband stew and start to lose it, Marlowe saw it too, and he stood up and decisively walked straight across the floor to Hayden and the woman in the blue dress.

Marlowe walked straight up to Hayden and tapped him on the shoulder, Hayden at first tried to ignore it, but Marlowe was insistent and kept tapping. Eventually, Hayden released the woman in the blue dress and spun around in annoyance. He expected to see the woman's husband, but was surprised, instead, to see Marlowe, who was six inches taller and sixty pounds heavier.

It was impossible to hear what Marlow was saying, but it was obvious from his gestures that he was asking to cut in. He held his hand out to the lady in the blue dress. She stared at him blankly because she didn't know what to do.

Marlowe said something to her and pointed at the husband, who was now approaching. Watching another man try to cut in on his wife's dance finally galvanized him into action.

Hayden turned to see what Marlowe was pointing at and saw the husband approaching. He whirled to face the threat, but the threat did not come to him. Instead, the husband went to his wife and immediately demanded that she return to their table. An argument erupted between the two.

Hayden made a move to interject himself in the argument, but Marlowe placed himself between Hayden and the arguing couple and started talking to Hayden rapidly. In response to something that Marlowe said, Hayden looked around. Literally everyone in the whole section of the bar was watching. A half dozen people had their phones held high and were recording it all.

Hayden suddenly turned back to Marlowe and nodded. He stepped back and stood side-by-side with Marlowe as they watched the husband and the wife argue.

After a minute of back and forth, the husband had enough. He said something that looked final. The woman winced when he said it. She was immediately conciliatory, but the husband shrugged her off. He decisively made for the door, dropping some bills from his money clip on the table where their friends were still seated.

The wife followed after him, evidently begging for forgiveness. He didn't even acknowledge her presence. She followed him out.

With the drama over, the oxygen came back into the room. Marlowe and Hayden exchange some words. Hayden slapped Marlowe on the lapel. It looked friendly. The two shook hands and parted.

Marlowe came back and said, "I'm not sure their marriage is going to survive that, but he's not in jail, Hayes didn't tank his career, and Hayes may have actually learned a lesson this time." Marlowe's tone was not hopeful.

"Wow, Marlowe, that was an incredibly generous thing to do," I said.

"I'm paying it forward," he confessed. "I had someone intervene in my marriage recently and it saved my wife and I from a certain divorce. Their kindness changed my life."

I called the bartender over and asked for another round. As the drinks were being poured, I said, "I could have used a friend like you earlier this year."

"Really?" he said.

"Yeah. I discovered my wife was cheating on me. The cheating was her fault, but the way I reacted was bad. I was in a total rage and I significantly escalated the situation.. I'm extremely lucky I didn't end up dead or in prison. I'm ashamed of what I did. It was godawful."

"You never got in trouble with the police?" he asked.

"No," I replied. I didn't dare tell him that Olivia killed everyone involved at my instruction.

"What came of it?" asked Marlowe.

"I split with my wife, but work, life, and financial realities more or less forced us back together. I'm in a living hell, Marlowe. I can neither bring myself to forgive her, nor can I let her go. She hates what she's done to me and is trying to win me back."

He nodded. He understood what I was saying.

"The thing is that she's spiraling. She's starting to act impulsively and she's doing stuff now that she knows will alienate her from everyone she loves. She's doing it because she's trying to get attention from me. She wants me back and is destroying herself to get my attention. It's totally fucking toxic and I just can't let her go."

The expression on Marlowe's face was concern and sympathy. "Buck up, mate," he said. "There's always a resolution available if you look hard enough for it. Not too long ago, I had a bit of a similar situation with my own wife. She was bored and restless. I travel quite a bit and that does us no favors. Even when we were together, she was not present.

"She became very erratic. Money was inexplicably disappearing from the account. Some days, she'd rip my clothes off and attack me in bed. Other times, she'd push me away and claim to have female problems when I damn well knew she didn't.

"Eventually, I couldn't ignore the signs any longer. I skipped work and followed her. Instead of going to a lover, she went to a psychologist's office. It turns out that my wife Vicki was thinking about cheating on me. She started going to the psychologist to try to process her desire to step out on me.

"Her psychologist is quite unconventional. She intervened and applied what she calls 'lateral thinking'. She got Vicki on an unconventional program of exploring her boredom and trying to figure out the root cause of her desire to cheat. When I say her program is unconventional, it is way out there." He made a comical expression to express how crazy it actually was.

"The thing is, this program is working better than I ever would have dreamed," he said with wonder. "This psychologist is the best I've ever seen."

He pulled a business card out of his wallet and handed it to me. The name on it was "Cassidy Hayes".

"She's really good," said Marlowe. "She works by teleconference and she has flexible hours. It won't hurt you to talk to her."

***

The next morning was a Friday. Rather than go to the conference center, I booked a teleconference appointment with Cassidy Hayes.

She wasn't at all what I expected: blonde hair, blue eyes, and exceptionally good looking. If I saw her in a shopping mall or at the gym, I'd be certain she was a trophy wife to a middle-aged billionaire. She had a piercing stare and something about her attitude reminded me of Jillian.

She pushed me a bit to see if I would comply. I'd played this game often enough with Jillian that I simply pushed back forcefully. She was amused. "Call me Cassie," she said with a smile.

When she asked me what I needed from her, I told her the saga of Olivia and I. I left out all of the details that I couldn't ever talk about, but I talked in generalities about Olivia's affair with Kimsu and her involvement with PT Hill, and Mark Litton. I described how our work situation prevented me from just divorcing her. I detailed our cohabited separation and how Olivia became involved with Sunny as a way to try to work her way back into my good graces.

Cassie sniffed out that the relationship between Olivia and Sunny was unconventional, and asked a bunch of penetrating questions until I admitted that it was dominance and submission. She sat up straighter when she pinned me down on this.

I even went so far as to tell Cassie that I recently caught Olivia cheating on Sunny.

The entire time I told this story, Cassie was very still and listened intently. Her blue eyes developed a focus and an intensity that was, frankly, unnerving.

When I was done, Cassie asked me what my expectations were and what I wanted to accomplish. I told her I wanted to either find a way to take Olivia back or to let her go. I also told her I wanted a way out of the toxic cycle of Olivia acting out to get my attention.

Cassie then told me that it was possible that Olivia was simply a slut who was highly motivated by sexual reward. She said the concept of the slutty woman is a somewhat overused cliché, but such women do exist. She said that seeking novelty, adventure, and raised stakes in sexual encounters could be symptoms of her seeking to elevate that reward.

She also said that acting out to get my attention is a form of bratty behavior. She was careful to say that this type of behavior was typically compulsive: no real thought goes into it. It isn't a decision, it is a reflex. To characterize it and treat it like it was a conscious decision is usually harmful and unproductive.

Cassie said that she would not be surprised if Olivia's submissive nature came from the fact that compulsively surrendering her will to Kimsu led to a high-pleasure reward. Once surrender became linked to high-pleasure rewards, it maximized the potential for nonsensical compulsive behavior.

She told me about the concept of the "superstitious pigeon". She explained to me that the psychologist BF Skinner set up an experiment where he fed a pigeon a treat every fifteen seconds. The treats were on a timer and would arrive no matter what the pigeon did. The pigeon, unaware the treats were on a timer, started to think the treat arrived because of the behaviors that it did right before the treat popped out.

Some of the pigeons started walking with a hitch. Some flapped their wings. Some poked at the floor with their beaks. They would then begin to repeat their odd behavior, and the next treat would come, which would reinforce in their minds that their behavior was responsible. Within a minute or two, the pigeon became utterly convinced that the behavior generated the treat when it didn't. Skinner called this 'the superstitious pigeon'.

"And so," I replied, "You think that Olivia has developed compulsive behaviors because she got unexpected treats?" I asked.

"What do you think?" was her answer.

I thought it was plausible. I asked her how I could find out for sure. She said that she would be glad to work with Olivia and make an assessment.

In the meantime, she told me that I needed anger management work. When I questioned this, she told me that I already admitted to escalating and rage and that meant I wasn't channeling my emotions effectively. She had me there. We agreed to continue to work together on my anger management. That's when she absolutely blew my mind.

She asked me point blank, "Will, what I can see is that you want control, but you won't take control. Why not just take control? What is the harm in that?"

When I questioned this, she pointed out a half dozen times in my story where I could have seized control and stopped whatever Olivia was doing, but I hadn't. She asked me point blank what was holding me back.

I was poleaxed, I had no idea why.

When I couldn't answer, she just smiled. She made the point that taking control would give me a certain degree of contentedness, if not happiness. I couldn't refute that at all.

She said she was going to give me homework. She had interviews she wanted me to read. Less than fifteen minutes after our meeting was over, I received the first interview via email. It was an interview with a BDSM Dom who was utterly pitiless.

As I read the interview, I began to realize that I identified with him.

***

I went over to the conference center to catch Smith and Srinivas at lunch. When I arrived, the conference center, which had been full in the previous days, was almost empty. I asked a security guard where everyone went.

"Fridays at week-long conferences are always like this," he said. "Half of the people only show up in the morning for the breakfast and then bust their butts to catch an early morning flight. They want to be home at five o'clock on Friday, so they don't lose their weekend. The conference organizers know this and they don't schedule anything meaningful on the last day."

I sent a text to Étienne. "Lost sight of the targets."

Ten minutes later, he sent me back a map address with the message, "Their phones are here."

It was in a neighborhood called "West Point Grey." I looked at it on google maps. Those homes had walls, driveway gates, tennis courts, and pools. There was no way I could skulk in that area and get within the range of the listening devices. I would stick out like a sore thumb.

I texted back. "Can you let me know when they move?"

"Yes," I said.

"Who owns that house?" I asked.

"Someone who is untouchable," he replied. "Please tell me that you will stay away."

"I am not going to go. There is no cover for me there," I texted back.

"Wise decision, he replied.

***

That evening, I was in the bar when Smith and Srinivas arrived. They looked flushed and drunk already. They were giving each other high fives and acting like they'd just won the lottery.

Intuitively, I knew they'd made contact and that they'd gotten their demonstration. I took it philosophically. Even if I had caught them leaving the conference and making contact with their supplier, I wouldn't have been able to remain close enough to them to electronically observe their meet up.

The answer to the question that I really had was whether they had possession of the drug or not.

Something was different about tonight, It took me a few minutes to recognize that they weren't hitting on anything that moved nor were they buying drinks like it was going out of style.

As I watched, two extremely good looking women walked into the bar, looked around and made a bee line for Smith and Srinivas. I was able to immediately discern that these women were escorts. What convinced me, more than anything, was that they were both clearly psyching themselves up to be hospitable to assholes.

The ladies sat down, and the guys ordered a bottle of Crystal Champagne.

That was when Marlowe arrived. He had a woman with him. She was in her thirties, black hair, and honey-brown skin. Her hair was twisted up into a French twist and she was wearing a light blue dress that looked like a man's button down shirt, but it flared out at the bottom like a skirt. It showed a little cleavage and a lot of thigh. I presumed this was Marlowe's wife.

"Marlowe," I greeted taking his hand with a smile.

"Will, I would like to introduce my wife, Victoria," he said.

I reached out and took her hand and kissed her knuckles. It just seemed the right thing to do. She flushed when I did it and she looked at Marlowe. He gave her a significant look.

Victoria said, "It is nice to meet you Will."

Marlowe took Victoria by the hand and lead us over to a table in an isolated corner. As soon as we got there, a cocktail waitress arrived. Marlowe ordered himself a beer and a sparkling water for Victoria. He didn't let her speak. When she heard him order her a water, she flushed and gawked at him. He gave her a look and she closed her mouth and looked away.

I ordered an Old Fashioned.

We chatted about everyday things while we waited for the drinks. What I did for a living. What Marlowe did. How Victoria and Marlowe met.

When the drinks got there, Marlowe asked, "How's business going?"

He looked significantly over at Smith and Srinivas. With the escorts with them tonight, they weren't going to be discussing the 'blue goo'. I decided to detach myself from them.

"Do you see the two women with them?" I asked.

He nodded.

"They're high priced escorts," I said. "They spent the entire afternoon with them. I got some pretty incriminating photos."

Marlowe nodded, " So you don't plan to surveil them tonight?"

"I got what I need, already," I said.

Marlowe changed the subject. "I had an interesting conversation today with Cassie Hayes," he said.

At Marlowe's mention of Cassie Hayes, Victoria's mouth dropped open. She rapidly closed it.

"You did?" I responded.

"She thanked me for referring you, and she asked me to invite you to join us tonight for a visit to her friend's club. She wants to give you a demonstration," he said.

"We're going to the club tonight?" Victoria asked.

Marlowe silenced her with a look. "Vicky, You are here to be seen and not heard." He said with a commanding tone. "You're here to sit and look pretty. Can you manage that?"

This made her sit up straight and gave her face a heated flush. I suddenly realized that she was a submissive. Her reaction to his command was unmistakable.

"What sort of demonstration?" I asked.

"Impulse control and objectification," he replied. "We are taking the next step tonight, and Cassie thought you might want to participate."

"Marl, I told you already, I only need you," she said. It wasn't a shout, but she said it so urgently it may as well have been.

"You are to be seen and not heard," Marlowe reminded her. "There's only one word you're allowed. Are you using that word?"

She instantly closed her mouth.

"Good girl," said Marlowe. He said it just as Jillian would have said it.

I looked down significantly at my own clothing. "Am I underdressed for this club?" I was wearing jeans and a button down shirt.

"You'll be fine," Marlowe assured me.

***

Marlowe took as to a dance club. The crowd was younger than we were. I found myself wondering if I was ever that young. I was shocked when Marlowe just waved at the woman collecting cover charges and walked right in as if he owned the place, carefully escorting Victoria through the crowd. He gave me no choice but to follow right behind him.

The noise inside the room was relentless. The 'boots and pants', thud and crack of the electronica dance music bludgeoned my senses.

He walked us to the very back and there was a doorway which was cordoned off with a velvet rope. An enormous man stood there. He was big. Big like an NFL defensive lineman. The left half of his face was covered with an intricate tattoo. I cringed even thinking about how painful getting that tattoo was. This guy was not someone I would trifle with.

He saw Marlowe and Victoria, and grabbed the hook of the rope and let them through. He put it back before I could step across.

Marlowe stopped and said, "Tony, he's with us."

"This one's trouble," replied Tony.

"She told me to bring him," said Marlowe.

"Mistress Grace?" asked the big man.

"Yes," said Marlowe.

The big man looked me up and down. He lifted the rope but stood between me and the door.

He gestured with his chin to a spot on the floor which was off the side. When I took the spot he indicated, he put the rope back in place. He then quickly and efficiently frisked me and rapidly confiscated my Epi-pen and my inhaler.

"I think I'll hold onto these," he said.

I brandished my medical alert bracelet. "In an emergency, I might need my epi-pen," I said. It came out like a whine.

The big man just smiled at me with amusement. "Is that what you call it?"

It was evident that he knew exactly what those items were.

"They'll be here when you leave," he assured me. "Unused."

We walked into the club and ended up in a lounge. Even though music was playing, it was quiet. After the crushing volume of the dance club, I felt like I stepped into an oasis.

There was a bar on one side, high topped tables in front of a stage, with booths along another wall. There was a good crowd which was ruly and well mannered. In this room, I felt on the younger side.

I saw lots of BDSM gear. On the stage was an honest-to-God pillory where a twenty-something male submissive in a silver zentai suit was getting teased by a severe-looking gray-haired domme in full-on latex, complete with an enormous black strap-on cock.

Marlowe stopped in the doorway and said to Victoria, "Vicky, time to get comfortable."

She clearly wanted to say something, but she'd been ordered to be quiet.

Marlowe took Victoria's purse from her and said "Hands above your head." Victoria did as instructed, and he pulled her dress all the way off over her head by the sleeves.

Underneath, she had on a lacy bra which was nearly the same color as the dress. She was not wearing panties. Instead, it looked like she had a metal fixture pinned to her vagina. I gaped at it for a long beat before I realized it was some sort of chastity device.

Marlowe handed the dress back to Victoria, who folded it and stowed it in her purse, which was a small tote.

Marlowe led us into the lounge.

There was a wave which came from one of the booths. It was Cassie.

***

"Really?" said Sunny.

Sunny was literally on the other side of the continent and I couldn't see her, but I could perfectly picture her facial expression.

"So Cassie and I just talked for something like an hour, while Marlowe fucked with his wife. Cassie was talking through what we were watching. Apparently, Victoria had a serious thing for being used. Cassie called it objectification."

"That's hot," said Sunny. "A sub who gets turned on simply from being used like an object." There was a silence after that. I sensed that she was plumbing the depths of that line of thought.

"So Marlowe had her tied down over a padded coffee table, that had built-in tie points and hooks for just that purpose. Victoria was facing away from, Cassie and I. Marlowe put noise-cancelling hearing protectors on her. She knew she had an audience, but she couldn't see us or hear us. Eventually, after Marlowe had driven Victoria out of her skull with teasing, he pulled a key off a necklace and undid the chastity device. It was elaborate and it was affixed to her by her vaginal piercings."

"What did that look like?" Sunny asked breathlessly.

"One sec," I said.

I sent her a pic from my phone. When I asked Cassie about it, she'd gotten Marlowe's permission for me to take pictures of it in place. She also gave me the hyperlink to the manufacturer, which was located in Seattle.

"I sent a picture," I said.

A minute later, I could hear a bing on the far end. Sunny immediately said, "Oh my God! I gotta get one of these for Olivia!"

As she said that, my guts twisted, I suddenly felt absurdly guilty that I had not told her about my discovery of Olivia's infidelity. I vowed to her I would tell her tonight on this phone call.

"Let me finish my story," I said. "While Marlowe fucked the absolute shit out of Victoria, Cassie suddenly whispered into my ear that Marlowe was going to offer me a turn when it was over. She wanted me to answer with an enthusiastic, 'Yes', but she said I would not be fucking her.

"They had this scene planned and they were doing it just to fuck with her and to see if the idea of fucking a stranger would get her to use her safe word," I said.

"Oh my God!" said Sunny. She was fully aroused by this.

"Cassie asked me if I was willing to add some realistic elements," I said, playing up the story. "When I agreed, she asked me to walk over to the side of the room where Victoria could see me and take some snapshots with Marlowe's cell phone camera. I volunteered to do it naked and Cassie was delighted with that.

Sunny laughed in delight at the wickedness of the idea. "What did she do when she saw you naked?" asked Sunny. It was clear she was masturbating. I could actually hear it over the phone.

"When Victoria saw me walk into her view totally naked, she immediately orgasmed," I said. "She came so hard it was like a scene from the exorcist. I got three or four action shots that I'm sure Marlowe will treasure for years to come."

"I then walked around so she couldn't see me anymore and Marlowe couldn't hold out any longer," I said. He blasted away and it was like a fucking bukake video. His jizz was just fucking everywhere."

Sunny laughed at this.

"When Marlowe recovered, he removed her ear plugs, and then wiped her down with a damp washcloth," I said, describing the scene. "While he did that, Cassie was heating up a dildo in a bowl of hot water. It wasn't long, but it was very wide. At least twice as wide as Marlowe."

Cassie cackled as she realized where this was going.

"Marlowe then started playing with Victoria's clit," I said. "She was still pretty hot, so he had her trembling in no time. Marlowe turned to me and said, 'It looks like she isn't finished yet. Would you like a turn?' I made a show of trying to be graciously I said, 'Your wife is seriously hot, but I wouldn't want to, you know, interject myself into what you've got going on.'

"Marlowe said, 'She likes being used. She wouldn't mind.' I made a show of hemming and hawing and I said, 'If you wouldn't mind, I would like to.' The whole time this was going on, Marlowe had her on edge and she was moaning and groaning. There was no doubt she would have sold her soul for me to use her at that point."

"I think I said something like, 'I don't mind if I do.' Marlowe and Cassie were on edge, waiting to see if she would safe word out. She didn't. I asked Cassie if she had a condom. This made Victoria groan. I unwrapped the condom and I rolled it onto the dildo which Cassie had warmed up. Cassie then offered some lube to me, so I lubed up the dildo and made sounds like it was my own cock.

"Marlowe then took his phone and went to stand in front of Victoria. Victoria made eye contact with him. Cassie gestured for me to put my hands on the top of her ass, so I did. Victoria flinched and groaned again when I did that. I then remove one of my hands and allowed Cassie to sneak in and press the tip of the dildo against her lips."

"I said, 'I'm pretty big, so I'm going to go slow.' Cassie started to push in. I made a little contact with one of my thighs against her thigh. As the dildo stretched her open and slid in, Victoria came so hard, it was like the exorcist all over again. Marlowe got an incredible video of that. Afterwards, we laughed and laughed about it.

Sunny chuckled in delight. "That wasn't fair to her, Will. Showing yourself naked then denying her the real thing."

"Marlowe wasn't about to give up Victoria," I responded. "He isn't that kind of guy."

"This Cassie sounds like a hoot," said Sunny. "What's she like?"

"Blonde hair, blue eyes. Very pretty. Intense stare. Five to ten years older than me. Frankly, she's a lot like Jillian if Jillian was a shrink," I said.

"Is she a domme?" asked Sunny.

"She has that flavor, but she didn't actually act like a domme," I said. "Not around me."

There was silence from the other side of the line.

"Listen. Sunny, I've got to tell you something that's a very uncomfortable topic. I need to just rip the bandaid off."

"What's going on?" she asked, sounding suspicious.

"I found out just before I left for Vancouver that Olivia is fucking around with Nil," I said.

"What do you mean, by 'fucking around'?" she asked.

"Olivia is having sex with Nil, Sunny," I said. "I've been debating whether to tell you. I didn't know whether it was my place."

"Nil is a woman?" asked Sunny. Her voice was perfectly neutral.

"Yes," I said.

"What makes you think they're having sex?" she asked.

I told her about how I got suspicious when they started spending all day in Nil's cabin. I then told her about planting the cameras.

"So this isn't just a suspicion, you have proof?" she asked.

"I have video," I said.

"I want to see it," she said immediately.

"The cameras are recording to the cloud. I'll send you a hyperlink to the footage." I said.

"How long have you known?" she asked.

"Since last Saturday," I said.

"Jesus!" she said. "What time is it there?"

"Four in the morning," I said. I had waited until 7:00 AM DC time to call Sunny.

"Have you slept yet?" she asked.

"No."

"When are you coming back to DC?" she asked.

"I'll be back around dinner time," I said.

"We'll talk face-to-face then," she said. I'd never heard her so pissed. She was obviously upset about Olivia. but was more upset that I sat on what I knew for basically an entire week.

***

Authors Note

I'd just released Rete and Trident - Volume 1 when I became fascinated with the Wonderland Universe created by the writer Oneagainst.

Oneagainst's writing seemed to live in the Venn diagram intersection of BDSM, Reluctant Consent, and Fetish. Admittedly, this would normally not be my cup of tea at all. However, the writing is amazingly sharp, the characters are interesting and full of real humanity, and the stories are engaging in a way that got completely under my skin.

I became hooked. I think if you read it, you would become hooked, too.

It was during the initial stages of writing Rete and Trident - Volume 2 that Oneagainst announced the Midnight at the Lost and Found event.

I wanted desperately to find a way to tie in Rete and Trident Volume 2 into this event. I even figured out exactly how to do it-- by letting my villains pursue the mysterious blue-tinged liquid mind-control drug that featured in the stories High Life Part 2, and Only Consenting Adults Chapter 3.

There were two things that would be an obstacle. The first obstacle was that I write slowly and whatever I wrote would never make the deadline. This has proven to be true. This is being published years after the Midnight Event was history.

The second obstacle was how to tie the two worlds together so to speak. I wrote to Oneagainst about that. Following the advice that I received, I made the universes compatible by doing nothing to alter the canonical representation of the Wonderland Universe in Oneagainst's own writing.

The main POV characters in Wonderland share no lines of dialogue with my characters. I did it this way to guarantee that I wouldn't violate the original universe. Any intersection between Wonderland POV characters and my story happens off-screen and is described by my characters.

I do feature some interaction between my characters and minor non-POV Wonderland characters: Tony, Victoria, and Marlowe.

I think I did well to represent Tony and Victoria accurately. I took a few liberties with Marlowe, but he is such a minor character, not much about him is known at all. I think what I did with him was probably acceptable.

This left me with one big problem to resolve: where in the world is the Wonderland Universe located?

When I was planning my story, I asked this question to Oneagainst point blank. The answer I got was cagey: "It is wherever you need it to be."

So I broke things down and did my own analysis. From a location perspective, here's what I came up with:

1. The writing uses English in a way that is consistent with the British commonwealth.

2. Due to the "seven pillars" legislation, the Wonderland city has to be in a country other than the USA. This is because the USA has protections built into the Bill of Rights that would make "Seven Pillars" illegal.

3. There are major forest fires which are adjacent to major metropolitan centers. This is seen in The Light Between The Trees.

4. Australia is a long way away from there. We know this because when Aiden flees his destroyed marriage in the A Place Beyond the Horizon, he goes to Australia on a very long multi-hour flight.

So, where in the British commonwealth is a location where major cities are threatened by forest fires that isn't Australia?

I immediately flashed to British Columbia in Canada. I felt good about that choice because the government of Canada has previously instituted moral enforcement mechanisms such as the CHRC.

So, I placed Wonderland in Vancouver, which is a wonderful, vibrant, and picturesque city worthy to be the center of Wonderland universe. This was never Oneagainst's intent, but the way my stories are written, there has to be a location, so that's what I picked. What's done is done. If this bothers you, I can only beg your forgiveness.

--masustacy