Market Forces

Chapter 72 : Island Ideas

 

The following day started early. I heard the drone of aircraft engines as the sun started to stream through the slats of the shutters. Angela had gone. I pushed back the shutters expecting to see the Beaver winging in but instead it was a Twin Otter, its two turbo props whining as it banked around to make its approach into the bay.

 

Steve put his head around my door. “We’re going to start with some breakfast on the veranda, if that’s OK,” he said.

 

I nodded, took a quick shower, pulled on a shirt and a pair of slacks and headed off to join him.

 

Steve and Angela were already there with their guests when I reached the veranda. I recognised two of them from my last trip, Narod Jesper and Daphne Challis, the other three were new to me. Steve introduced them. One woman, two men, all Americans. They’d each brought their own slaves - five girls shackled and chained together by their collars were being led shuffling up the path from the jetty.

 

“Well, hi everybody. Thanks for coming over. I’m sure you’ll have a good few days but I hope you won’t mind if we spend this morning on some business. Some of you will have met Larry here,” Daphne and Jesper nodded, “but for those that haven’t he’s working with a bunch of Brits who are pretty good at sourcing the sort of amusements we all hold dear. I thought it would be useful to give him some first hand input on how you guys see things going.”

 

The column of shackled girls arrived at the house, looking uncertain about their surroundings. Their neck chains removed they each knelt beside their owners. Each equally well trained, they knew not to interrupt proceedings.

 

Jesper kicked things off. He talked about how he had sourced the half dozen slaves he now had in his collection and complained about how difficult it was to get slaves with specific skills. He didn’t seem to know what we’d been doing on customised pick up but there was no real reason why he should, we hadn’t tried to promote what we’d done in the States. I talked a bit about the stuff that Rick had done with the web site and all of Steve’s guests seemed interested. The others chipped in their experiences. Daphne had had some problems with training new intake and some of the preparation techniques being used in the States sounded a bit primitive compared with what we were doing.

 

There were, however, two themes that the group kept coming back to; toys and new sources.

 

They were all agreed that the old idea of slaves for house work was disappearing. What was the point of keeping slaves for housework, was the general conclusion. Once you take into account the security costs they are expensive compared with hiring in and they need too much attention. There might be an argument for slaves for agricultural work but why not just use the right machinery. What they wanted slaves for was recreation, for fun. Sometimes (mostly) sexual but sometimes just for companionship. OK some of the recreation might be a bit extreme – one of the women’s eyes really lit up as she described the delight she felt keeping her slave caged under her bed while she fucked one of her male lovers – but it was recreation nevertheless. They also agreed that hey were keeping toys for longer than they had kept slaves before. It took time to find a good one and it wasn’t just a question of the slave’s skills and looks but once you found one you tended to hang on to them.

 

Daphne was holding forth about her experiences. Narod was looking bored, stroking the hair of the girl kneeling beside him. Angela and two of Steve’s house-slaves arrived with drinks. I hadn’t realised it but most of the morning had already gone. I tried to pull the discussion back to the second point at issue, new sources.

 

“This one,” Narod said, patting the girl at his side, “is a good example. I found you in cyber space didn’t I, pet?” The girl nodded. “She was looking to be owned, looking to be kept and cared for. Of course, she was maybe looking for something not quite as permanent as she has found but she has at least found that.” The girl looked around at the others. She was kneeling, sitting on her haunches beside Narod. She looked a little embarrassed as she toyed with the chain that ran between her wrists. I could see that she bore a tattoo with the letters N and J entwined together on her right shoulder. “Now the good thing,” Narod went on, “is that this young lady was very cheap to acquire. But,” he stopped. “And it’s a big but. I’ve had to prep and train her myself. That’s a big job and I’ve not done a lot of it. I’d far rather be able to acquire willing source through the current channels, properly prepped and trained but just starting with a willing source. Do you see?”  

 

I nodded. What he was saying fitted in with some of my own prejudices.

 

The others dived in as well. Each outlining their own experiences of trying to use so-called “willing” sources. By the end of it I could see that there were opportunities for us, if we wanted to follow them up.

    

Chapter 73 : Colonial Collection

 

I got back to the UK to find complete chaos at Heathrow Airport. The place was stuffed full of armed police. They even had armoured troop carriers lurking around the airport roads. Nobody was saying anything about what was going on. A security alert was the best I could get anyone to admit to. The main focus seemed to be on international departures and I didn’t have any trouble getting out of the airport once we’d been able to find a gate for our aircraft – with no international flights leaving, the place was filling up.

 

It was the following morning when I heard what had been going on. Allegedly British intelligence had received a tip off from “a credible source” that Chechen terrorists intended to attack an aircraft leaving the UK for Russia.

 

Wherever that tip off came from, it sounded like they hadn’t found anything or that nothing had been really intended or whoever was planning the attack had been scared off. It was only later that evening that I learned that one very large piece of excrement had come into contact with rotating blades.

 

“Kremlin Deny Naked Girl Kidnap” the headline on billboards outside the underground station said when I emerged from the office. I picked up a copy of the London Evening News. According to the article the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, successors to the KGB, had denied any involvement in a plot to transport a drugged and naked woman out of the UK in an airline cargo container. The woman had allegedly been discovered during the anti-terrorist alert following a baggage and cargo search of an aircraft flying to St Petersburg. The British Government had refused to comment on security issues, seemingly bouncing the press between the security services, the police, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, the Department of Transport and the CAA without anyone giving them enough to confirm their suspicions.

 

My first reaction was, “bollocks.” It was obviously Tricia. She’d been due for shipping while I was in the Caribbean.

 

I had a message from Freddie, which seemed to confirm my thoughts. “Don’t bother about the current excitement,” it said. “I’m calling in a few favours.”

 

By the next day even the Government had given up, trying to avoid commenting. The Daily Mirror had found that a girl had been admitted to hospital near Stansted airport. According to The Mirror, Stansted was handling a lot of cargo traffic to Russia; ATRAN Cargo Airlines, a spin off from Aeroflot, was running transports out of there. Interviews with doctors suggested that the girl was in a seriously confused state, apparently mentally disturbed, and with no memory of her identity. The paper had even managed a shot of the cargo container – or at least a cargo container – it was taken from so far away that in reality it could have been any of a hundred containers lying around at the airport. The questioning caption, “Was This Russian Girl’s Flying Prison?” probably deserved the answer, “Maybe”, “No,” or at best “Who can tell?” but that wasn’t the point.  

 

I tried to reach Freddie and then Elly but I couldn’t get through to either of them. When I found out where they were, I guess I wasn’t surprised to learn that they had flown out for a meeting with Anatoly.

 

I didn’t think there was much I could do about it, anyway. If there was anything about Tricia’s trip to point to us, then I didn’t think our first problem was going to be “what is the right PR spin to put on this?”

 

I spoke to Rick, He didn’t think we had too much to worry about. “First,” he said, “she has zero awareness of what’s happened to her. Freddie had been really keen to get a deep burn on anything that might relate to her life with us, especially after he found to that she’d had a briefing from my lot that should have told her the target was a problem. He got quite cross when he found out she’d had the set of email intercepts from the Kustenky email as well as the Oblumov one. Tricia had somehow buried them at the bottom of her files. After that Freddie was pretty insistent that she got the works. We were really worried about whether she’d actually be able to function when she got to the other end.”

 

“And second?”

 

“Second; it’s not one of our containers.”

 

How come?” I asked.

 

“Anatoly wanted to use one of his own. Said it would make it easier getting clearance at the other end. Plus Freddie had agreed with Anatoly that she should be shipped FOB anyway. His team picked her up from the Prep Centre, we just handed her over naked and clean.”

 

“Is that going to cause difficulty for him?”

 

“His boys over here are hopping mad but after that business with Litvinenko they reckon that MI5 and the SVR are going to be tripping over each other enough to keep Anatoly out of the picture.”

 

“So what’s the word on the Chechens? Was this genuine? Where did the tip off come from?”

 

“Nobody on Anatoly’s team is saying, even if they’ve got any idea. My take is that its one of four possibilities. Either it was a genuine security alert and we were just unlucky. Or someone here didn’t want to see Tricia go. Or someone’s trying to trip Anatoly up. Or someone’s trying to make us look dumb.”

 

“I don’t buy the second,” I said. “Nobody seemed that bothered and there would be too big a risk that it would come whistling back into our organisation. Any of the others could be right.”

 

“And I can think of at least one person that might be interested in making us look dumb.”

 

“Who?” I said.

 

“Constanza,” Rick said. “Got to cherchez the old femme, that’s my thought. She’ll be wanting to cream off as much as she can from the Russian Toy contracts and she’ll still be pissed about Lady Marchmont.”

 

It sounded plausible to me but I didn’t have any more evidence than the Daily Mirror did. Still, that wouldn’t stop rumours spreading around the organisation any more than it stopped newspapers writing good stories.

   

I disentangled my self from Rick and went to talk to Harry about the pick up of the girls for Basher. He didn’t see any reason to put a hold on it so everything was going ahead as planned.

 

I’m not sure who had come up with the idea. Maybe it just sprang out of the stuff we’d been doing with video generally and the sting behind the All Spice pick up all those months ago. Anyway we’d worked out a plan for the Colonial Collection as it was becoming known.

 

I needed to brief Clegg about my trip but I guessed that he would have plenty on his plates for a while so I sat in on Colonial Collection to kill some time until he got back.

 

Harry ran the briefing session personally. It was a resource-intensive project but then we were planning to lift twelve girls in one go and that wasn’t something even Harry’s team did that often. We’d got the house set up and we’d sent out the invitations. We just had to wait for the girls to turn up.

 

Harry ran through the photos we had of each of the targets. The research team had chosen them using the basic database that we had already built up plus some custom work at Heathrow and Gatwick airports. We’d been able to tap into the CCTV coverage of international arrivals and some judicious monitoring around the time of landings from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and so on, we had been able to identify a number of possibles. That had been followed up by our conventional surveillance and target screening before any of the girls was approached.

 

We’d kept Basher updated through the web site; he’d been involving himself enthusiastically all the way along. Sebastian showed me the log of his emails. “Like the look of that one.” “She’ll do.” “Try to find one with longer legs.” “Mylene – ha, with tits like that they should call her Melons J ” “Like the idea of Miss Monique Devent : General Wolf had the right idea about French Canadians!!!”

 

Finally we had an agreed list for the next step. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” the canvassers had said. “Imagine, Big Brother - but on a global scale. It’s a reality show syndicated live around the world; right across the English speaking world. It’s a passport to instant, worldwide, fame.” We’d come up with the idea of ‘International House’ – a TV show that put girls from arrange of cultures and countries together in one house for two months. The real hook for viewers was that the whole thing was going to be kept secret until everyone was already in the house and the programme was about to start; that way (we said), we’d build up a real cult status among those that get into it from day 1.

 

We showed the girls the promotional material that we planned to use once the programme started. “The International House – 12 House Mates – 12 Nations – One World - One Winner” the ads said. We made a big thing of the housemates being part of a demonstration of the ways in which different cultures could get along. That was why they were their by invitation, we said. But also, it must be said, we didn’t under emphasis the opportunity for global TV exposure or the $250,000 prize money. We only needed 18 approaches to get our 12 house mates. (The other six are on a list back in the Prep Centre somewhere, it seemed a shame to waste the research. We told them afterwards that the whole idea had fallen through).

 

With the lift team briefed we headed off to the house. We’d set it up with a few (not very well).hidden cameras for the girls to find but the basic premise was that it was a normal London house, except that the girls would have no access to the outside world. They’d been told to tell people they’d be away for two months but they absolutely couldn’t tell anyone where they were going: that would have made them ineligible for the prize.,

 

They started to turn up in the middle of the afternoon by 4 o’clock, as requested, they were all assembled in the house’s living room. Even the dimmest of them worked out there was something strange from the start; there were thirteen of them. We’d put Eva in as part of the team to oil the wheels.

 

We were monitoring their discussions from the Porta-Cabin that had been installed in the garden as a studio.

 

“Hey, I’m Mylene,” one of the taller girls said smiling and giving a wave to the others. “I guess I’m representing ‘Oz if we’re all from different places.”

 

The others all pitched in with their names and their home countries. “Tsai Lin – Hong Kong,”; Angie – Canada, Lucy – New Zealand, Eva – I’m from the UK, and so on.

 

Angie mentioned the odd number of participants first of all. “Weren’t there supposed to be twelve of us?” she said.

 

Yes, you’re right,” cut in Eva, “that’s odd. Maybe another country signed up for broadcasting rights or something and insisted on having a representative.”

 

“Yeah, could be,” said Mylene, “or it could be part of whatever’s going to go on here. You don’t think they are just going to turn the cameras on and leave us to get on with it do you? There will be all sorts of weird things going on before the winner gets out of here, believe me.”

 

All of the girls looked up as Harry entered the living room in his role of master of ceremonies. “Good afternoon, ladies,” he said, in his most avuncular tone. “As we discussed in your briefing sessions you’ll have a day before the cameras are turned on.”

 

“Like we believe that,” the microphones picked up Mylene muttering beneath her breath. In the control room one of the sound engineers gave me a thumbs up sign, “See, pick up is sensitive enough,” he smirked.

 

We’d invited Basher along too. Well, not so much invited as acquiesced in his instance to be there. Harry had not been keen, Basher had said he wanted to be sure they’d be alright when he saw them in the flesh. I was worried in case he wanted to reject any then but he claimed that wasn’t the case. In the end we’d compromised ; he could turn up for the girl’s arrival but he’d go before we did the lift. “Colonel Snell here is representing our main UK sponsor,” Harry explained introducing Basher. He beamed at the girls from his wheel chair. “I’m sure you’ll join me in thanking him and his organisation for making this show possible.” The girls smiled tolerantly but without much enthusiasm.

 

Basher grinned back. “It’s a great treat to have you all here,” he said. “Such a delight to have representatives of some many places.” He pointed to one of the girls. “You. Where are you from?”

 

A dark haired, rather studious looking girl responded, “Boston, Colonel,” in a quiet New England accent.

 

“Ah,” said Snell, “excellent. Our representative from the Province of Massachusetts Bay.” The girl looked puzzled at this reference to her home’s old colonial name.  “Well, stay away from the tea my dear. And you others, “Rhodesia,” the girl from Zimbabwe looked affronted, “The Malay States, and you dear where are you from?”

 

“Dahka, Colonel,” the girl said politely.

 

“Ah, yes, East Pakistan,” Basher responded cheerily.

 

“We call it Bangladesh, now, Sir,” the girl said. “We are an independent country, no longer part of Pakistan.”

 

“Hmm, too popular an idea, independence,” Basher said. “You’ll soon find out you need to depend on each other and on the mother country too.”

 

I looked along the line of girls. Basher’s intervention was clearly disturbing them and he was in danger of spooking one or more of our house mates. I decided to interrupt. “Well, Colonel,” I said, “we need to get things going.”

 

Basher span his wheel chair around. “Quite, quite, Barry, my lad,” he beamed. You get these young gels started off. Don’t mind my ramblings.”

 

Mylene, the Aussie girl walked across the room to join Eva. As she passed Basher’s wheel chair, she seemed to jump about six inches into the air before landing again clutching her backside. She gave Basher an accusatory look as she joined the other girls. I thought I saw the trace of a smirk across Basher’s face for an instant before it resumed its normal impassive stare. I overheard Mylene hiss under her breath to one of the others, “He’s a real pervert. I caught him staring at my backside when I was looking in the mirror earlier on. And he’s always got his hands in his pockets, I’m sure he’s playing with himself. He makes my flesh creep.”

 

Harry went on with the introduction. “So you’ll be able to have a relaxing evening, get yourselves settled in, choose your room mates – you’ll be sharing four to a room – and get yourselves a meal. There’s plenty of food in the pantry and you’ll find plenty of drink as well. Now, I’m going to leave you to get on with things. Don’t forget you can use the ‘Speak To The World’ room at any time if you want to talk to any of us. Remember this show is all about showing how well people from different parts of the world can get along together. Whoever wins, I’m sure you’ll all want to be seen as ambassadors for your countries but whatever happens I hope you all have a great time. Enjoy yourselves.”

 

There was a small ripple of applause from some of the girls. Harry smiled and asked if there were any questions. There weren’t. “Well, I leave you to it then,” he said. “Good luck.”

 

Chapter 74 : Colonial Reality

 

Harry was sat at the bank of CCTV monitors watching the girls in the house. He looked bored. There wasn’t much going on. The girls had all had a good go at the drinks cupboard and now they were sleeping it off. “Do people actually watch this stuff on their televisions?” Harry asked.

 

I nodded. “Yepp. It’s pretty popular in the real world. But then getting to vote someone out on a reality show is probably the closest a lot of people get to having the sort of control over someone else that our clients take for granted. Maybe the desire for ‘ownership’ is more deeply seated than we know.”

 

“Given the choice between a dozen sleeping women and your ideas of philosophy, I think I’ll go with the women,” he said, turning back to the monitors.

 

I felt he was being a bit unkind but it had been a long day. “I’m not sure I understand why you don’t just scoop them up straight away,” I said.

 

“It would be easier,” said Harry, “but I’m pursuing a cock-up prevention programme on this one. Given that they’ve been told to tell no one where they’ve gone we’re just going to sit on the house for a few days to make sure that they really have been good girls and that there aren’t any tabloid journalists sniffing around for a story.”

 

Basher was getting impatient. We managed to pacify him by letting him have tapes of some of the sessions in the “Speak To The World” room where the girls poured out their hearts and their innermost thoughts and fears to the camera. I could imagine Basher would be watching them with only one hand on the TV remote.

 

As it was we waited a week, just to give the Sundays their chance too, but there wasn’t a sniff. Harry’s team had been checking out their homes too and it all looked O.K. The pick up itself we organised so that we could take them one at a time. I guess we could have walked in with machine guns at the ready but there’s always a risk that something will go wrong and Harry likes safer approaches.

 

The girls had been used to having some sort of competition in the afternoons. The first few days they’d won access to a case of wine on one night, the use of a CD player for an evening on another and a fancy party on a third.

 

For this task we’d installed a tube that ran from their lounge through to a hidden internal room and they had been told that they had to decide which order they would go through the tube. They’d all been given uniform, short-sleeved, white shirt-waister dresses with their country’s logo embroidered on the breast pocket. “No prizes for guessing why we’ve got these,” Angie said as she looked at how short the skirt of her dress was. “They’ll be looking for great arse shots as we crawl into that pipe, won’t they?”

 

One girl was to go as soon as the first green light came on. Then a red light would come on until it was time for the next to and so on. There was more debate than I’d expected. It turned out that Mylene was quite claustrophobic and the others had to persuade her that she really had to do it or they’d lose out on whatever treat the producers had in store for them.

 

As a result Mylene was the first to go into the tube and the first to emerge into the hidden room. Once she started exploring that she found a door to another room. As she went through into the dark room beyond, the door slammed shut and locked behind her and she was grabbed by some of Harry’s team. Within moments she was handcuffed, ball gagged, ankle shackled and carried out. The others followed, each crawling into the tube when the green light came on. Eva was the fourth one through but, of course, avoided the reception that the others had to endure.

 

At the end of half an hour all twelve girls were wriggling helplessly, standing up, chained by the neck in the trailer that they had thought contained the program’s broadcast equipment. 

 

Eva wheeled Basher up a ramp and into the trailer. The girls’ distress and agitation became even more evident as they realised not only that they had been abducted but who had commissioned their kidnapping. The fact that he was grinning like a five year old child in a candy store probably didn’t help.   

 

Basher waved Eva away and wheeled himself along the line inspecting each of the girls closely in turn. He stopped alongside Mylene.

 

Basher reached up to the right breast of the girl standing beside his wheel chair. You will excuse me, my dear,” he said, “my eye sight is not what it used to be.” He ran his fingers lightly across the embroidered badge on her breast pocket. She flinched involuntarily at his touch earning a rap from his stick across her shins. He resumed his touching, eventually deciding that the embroidered form represented a kangaroo. “Ah,” he said, “the Australian representative. You’re going to be suffering for the prowess of your cricketers, I am afraid, my dear. And by the way,” he reached up again groping at the girls full breasts, “you can get used to me touching you young lady, I’ve no intention of letting a pair of tits like these go to waste.”

 

He grunted with satisfaction and moved off along the line. Each of the girls suffered some indignity or other at Basher’s hands. Tsai Linn, worst of all, was almost stripped of her dress by the enthusiastic, orgiastic Snell. “Very nice,” he commented when he had got to the end. “I can hardly wait for you to finish your preparation work. Oh by the way, I’d like them all to be blondes by the time they are delivered. I much prefer blondes.”

 

“Basher,” I said, “that might be a bit of a challenge for the representatives from Hong Kong, Nigeria, India, and Pakistan mightn’t it?”

 

“Don’t worry about it looking too natural,” Basher smirked, “I’ve always quite liked a tarty look on a girl. I’m sure you’ll manage it.” He rolled his chair down the ramp and out of the trailer. We hitched up the trailer and headed off to the Prep Centre. Some of Harry’s team stayed behind to clear up in the house.

 

 

© 2006 Freddie Clegg

Download PDF copies of my other stories at my Yahoo Group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freddies_tales/