He’d built this file in a no-star hotel room overlooking the luminous night-time surf of the Caribbean. Hammett McColl sent two teams out to the NAME - one highly publicised visit, booked into the Bogota Hilton, whose function was largely cosmetic, and one stealth audit crew, flown in undercover of a shoestring movie company’s location scouting. It had been a stupid kind of fun at first, until the policing data started to flow in.
Chris remembered velvet black nights, street life and lanterns strung in the street outside. Sweat rolling off his body and brow, pricked out in almost equal quantities by the humidity and the details from the detention records. His fingers leaving damp prints on the keys of the laptop. He drank cane rum and smoked atrocious local cigarettes and somehow kept it all in perspective most of the time. Just sometimes he paused and lifted his fingers from the keyboard as if he had heard something, because even the rum could not keep out the animal-instinctive knowledge that the things the reports described were going on right now in police stations across the city.
He never heard screams, he told himself, then and later. It was the reports talking, working at his imagination like a feeble dentist at an infected tooth. That was all. He heard nothing.
The telephone rang.
He jerked round, one hand on the neck of the whisky bottle and looked out towards the lounge. It was the home phone, the unscreened line. He left the office and stood in the connecting doorway, staring across at the little blue screen. The call bell symbol pulsed on and off in green, in time with the soft chiming.
Who—
Can’t be Carla. He checked his watch. The seminar still had half an hour to run, and anyway he’d had the thought before he knew what time it was. As their separate work schedules chewed off more and more of the time they used to spend together, they’d fallen out of the habit of checking in with each other for anything other than pure necessity.
The telephone rang.
He watched it stupidly, holding the whisky, thoughts locked up.
Work would have used the datadown. From habit and from the manual. There was a Shorn directive against talking shop on unscreened lines.
The phone rang.
Erik, ringing to back down from the ludicrous sulk Carla had described when Chris got back from the north. Chris grimaced. That particular Viking? Not likely.
Just answer the fucking thing, for Christ’s sake.
He crossed to the terminal and thumbed the accept. The blue background blipped out and a picture sank into place.
For a curious moment, Chris wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He made out dark glossy hair and a profile, seemingly pillowed on twin cushions that ...
Moaning gusted through the air from the speaker.
The profile turned, mouth open.
A hand appeared, enamel red-tipped.
Adrenalin bubbled abruptly through Chris’s head as the picture made sense. He was watching a slice of holoporn, downloaded direct to the phone link. A heavily made-up woman with long black tresses was crouched over an equally painted blonde partner, sucking and nibbling at a pair of breasts so large and so perfectly rounded it was hard to believe they were physically attached to either participant.
Chris sank onto the arm of the sofa, watching.
The shot dilated a little and background detail emerged. The two women were sprawled on what appeared to be some kind of exercise bench and wore nothing beyond a few studded leather accessories that served only to lift and separate curved areas of flesh. The blonde half of the duo was on her back and upside down, hair trailing to the floor. The other woman had somehow contrived to straddle her partner but leave her own backside raised high in the air like the top of a child-drawn heart. The twin mounds of buttocks mirrored the silicone-enhanced globes of the woman below so that a bizarre kind of vertical symmetry was created. You could almost believe you were looking at a single hourglass-shaped creature with the incidental appendages of limbs and faces added after the event.
Chris felt the blood stirring through his stomach and puddling into his prick as the two woman faked their way towards a mutual climax. The dark-haired performer was evidently cast in the role of dominatrix and she worked the other woman’s flesh with much snarling and flashing of purple-painted eyes, while the blonde beneath her moaned and rubbed semi-convincingly at her own improbable breasts.
The dominatrix—
The thought skated almost casually across the rink of his mind, replacing something else he’d been going to think.
It was Liz Linshaw.
He leaned forward uncomfortably over his erection. Confirmed, the recognition sent a small shiver up his spine. Liz Linshaw had aged a few years since the footage was shot, but behind the purple eyeshadow and the dyed black hair, the face was unmistakable. It was the same line of cheekbone and nose, the same long, mobile mouth. The same slightly crooked teeth.
Chris’s eyes flickered from the face to the exposed flesh below it. Six weeks ago, at the Tebbit Centre studio, he’d seen the steep curve of her cleavage loaded into just-glimpsed lingerie under an open-necked blouse. He’d fallen asleep that night thinking about it and - he only admitted it to himself now - he’d looked for it on the morning Prom and App bulletins since.
Now, here it was laid out for his perusal at leisure, and it was, he noticed, the same steep curve. Liz Linshaw’s breasts were not of the same epic proportions as those of her performing partner, but they were still cosmetic-standard enough to defy gravity without external support. The nipples, now being forced mock-sadistically into the blonde woman’s mouth, were large and dark and blunt. If there were scars where the implants had gone in, they were lost in the all-over tan.
Chris was rock hard.
He watched as the blonde woman’s mouth dragged and smeared down the length of Liz Linshaw’s body to the juncture of her thighs.
The panting and moaning grew mutual as the two women got into the inevitable top-to-tail clinch and filled their brightly taloned hands with bronzed flesh. Chris’s hand moved unwillingly across the buckle of his belt. Semi-convincing or not—
White lights splashed across the window and drenched the curtains. The Landrover crunched up the drive.
Chris leapt up and snapped the phone off. The liquid sounds of orgasm evaporated into stillness. For a moment he stood over the unit, glaring at it. The message option pulsed, download message, dump message, replay message, download, dump, replay, download, dump replay, download—
He stabbed the screen and the copying bar filled from left to right like a tiny, unrolling carpet in mauve.
The Landrover’s engine stilled. A door clunked, open and closed.
He stabbed the eject button and snatched the minidisc as it emerged. It fell from his fingers, hit the floor and rolled.
Footsteps on gravel.
He cast about, tiny triphammers in his temples. The disc glinted silver from under an armchair.
Carla’s recognition tag scraped on the lock.
He bent and grabbed the disc, buried it in his pocket on the way out of the lounge. He heard the front door open as he reached the study. He made it to his seat.
‘Chris? I’m home.’
‘Just a minute.’
The erection, he was relieved to find, had melted in the panic. His jeans felt almost loose. He swivelled on the chair as Carla came in and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Work?’ There was just a hint of weary resignation in the single word as she glanced past him at the screen.
‘That’s right.’ He returned the kiss, feeling as if he fitted badly into his own skin. The words were jumbled and overlarge on his tongue. ‘It’s some stuff I’m digging out for Michael.’
‘You eaten?’
‘Yeah, the rest of the curry. You?’
‘On the way.’ She grimaced. ‘Kebab.’