Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) (17 page)

“Right,” he said as their plates at the Jewish-Rumanian place were
taken away. He looked at his watch. “I have some bad news.”

“OK...” she said, slurping on her chocolaty egg cream.

“Tomorrow morning at nine I have a meeting with Mr. Alex Strange.”

“Master of the universe...
the tech behind the tech...
”

“You know what that means?” he said, frowning with mock
apprehension.

“No,” she said, expecting something about code, or how great this
company was.

“It means we only have twelve and a half hours left before I have to
get up and go see him. And to be honest, I’d like to spend that time lying
naked with you in bed.”

He expected an embarrassed giggle. Instead she was up out of her
seat, a couple of fifty dollar bills tossed onto the table. There was nothing
remotely giggly about her now.

As they made their way out of the restaurant, he could feel an
embarrassing stiffness inside his pants.

They screwed half the night, but finally she told him she was going
to leave him to get a few hours’ sleep. He begged her not to, but she promised
him she’d be waiting in her own room, and that he was to come and see her as
soon as he’d finished his presentation with Alex Strange.

Back in her room, she slept soundly for the remainder of the night,
a pillow between her legs, dreaming of Jason.

The next morning she showered and grabbed a late breakfast in the
restaurant. True to her word, she then went back to her room and waited. She
stayed in her clothes and tried not to fantasize; she didn’t want to appear
too
keen when he arrived.

Around twelve there was a knock on the door. When she opened it,
Jason was standing there with a bottle of champagne in one hand and two glasses
in the other.

“You got the job!” she squealed, ushering him in and kissing him all
over his face, as he struggled to keep hold of the bottle and glasses.

He couldn’t have cared less about the job. His cock was already
straining to get out of his Chinos, and he was kissing her hard, and letting
her tug at his belt.

Without thinking, she knelt there, unzippered him, and helped his
erect penis out into the open. It was so firm it seemed to be made of steel.
She’d sucked him off a little the previous evening, but only briefly as they
caressed and fondled each other, hugging and exploring each other’s bodies playfully.

Now it was different. She eased back his foreskin and admired the pink
helmet, squeezing the shaft with one hand and hearing him moan. As she opened
her mouth and guided him inside, he dropped the bottle and the glasses onto the
carpet, his hands balled up, and his pelvis in little spasms.

There was something she wanted to try, but she didn’t now if he’d
like it; she didn’t know anything about men apart from what she was learning
with Jason. She wanted him to come in her mouth, to feel his hot liquid spurt
over her tongue. Apart from anything else, she wanted to know what it tasted
like, and to feel herself getting screwed in the mouth.

He began cooing and purring as she moved her mouth carefully on his
shaft. Quite clearly, he was loving every second of it. And as she went on,
exploring his cock, letting her tongue run along its length and dig tentatively
into its slightly grooved underside, a thought occurred to her: where had she
learned to do this so well?

The answer, obviously, was nowhere. But now she realized that there
are people who just
know
certain things. When it came to sex, she didn’t
need to watch porno or read sex manuals. She didn’t need to learn; she was a
natural. As soon as she took his cock in her mouth, letting it ride against the
insides of her cheeks and on her tongue, she instinctively knew exactly what to
do.

It must have been a reasonably good first attempt, too, because
before long he was crying, unable to control himself. His pants around his
ankles, his legs were wobbling, and he was dying with pleasure...

Well
, she told herself a few minutes
later, discretely spitting his semen into a tissue. It tastes salty and a bit
like badly made grits without the grittiness. Not exactly nectar, but she could
put up with it, she reckoned, now that she knew that she absolutely adored
giving head.

Then Jason pushed her onto the bed, yanked her pants off, and went
down on her. At that moment, her understanding of the word “adore” underwent a
very serious and very profound revision. She had thought that she adored
chocolate; now she realized that she just liked it. She adored
this
.

It took only a couple of minutes for her to come, loud and
horrifically strong, the feeling so deep within her that it actually frightened
her. After a little break, he gave her more, on and on, until the sensation was
so overpowering that she had to push him off. She curled up into a ball,
shivering, in a state of shock. Jason wrapped his body around hers, as if to
comfort her.

They spent the rest of the afternoon sprawled naked on the bed,
discovering that oral sex could go on more or less forever, even for a man, if
you treat him gently. They made each other come many, many times, with big,
full-throttled sixty-nines, squeezing and pummeling each others’ buttocks, their
tongues going mad, juices lathering to a froth in their mouths.

But they also discovered that they could go at it with infinite
slowness, playing, kissing, stroking their genitals with immense fondness. It
could be bliss. It was that simple.
This
, she began to realize, was what
all the fuss was about!

At some point, however, they both found themselves incapable of
taking any more. So they popped the champagne and drank. By now the wine was as
hot as the room. But they didn’t care. He’d got the job with Strange Tech. His
future was bright, brighter than he had ever dared to dream.

They toasted the glorious future that lay ahead of them both.

Those few days
with Jason had been perfect. But then he’d had to fly out west to start work
for Strange Tech. On Times Square, they’d kissed so long and hard that the
enamel was almost chipped off their teeth. They promised that they’d be
together again at the first opportunity, and they tried not to cry.

For both of them, their meeting had been an awakening, and as they
said good-bye they were still only emerging from the delirium of each other’s
company. Finally, though, he swung his big sports bag clumsily over his
shoulder and went in search of the airport bus.

Not long after that, the Cardinal had turned up. Carol was just eighteen,
but she had already crossed the threshold into womanhood. His manner was calm,
and he asked few questions about the young man that she had just said good-bye
to. The Cardinal always seemed to know everything, and he knew that Carol’s
first few days of freedom had been important to her. As they discussed the
future, he made it clear to her, right from the start, that she was free to do
whatever she wanted, and that her life was now entirely hers to live as she
pleased. She was free.

However, he also made it very apparent, without having to spell it
out, that if she decided to work for him, there would be no half measures. She
would have to commit herself completely and be available anywhere in the world
at any time. What she did between jobs was entirely up to her, the Cardinal
explained, but his work must come first. Without exception.

She could have continued seeing Jason, she knew. But would it really
have been fair, when she would always have a massive secret to conceal from
him? Because even then, she was beginning to understand the opportunity being
offered to her. And she loved the very idea of it.

So she decided not to see Jason again. How could she have explained
to him what she had done back in Mexico City, and the kind of satisfaction it had
given her? How could she have shared his bed, his body, in the knowledge that
her new career would entail sharing herself with others? She
wanted
him,
but she wanted more. The Cardinal knew it. He had seen something in her, and he
had offered her the means of achieving it.

Thus had the young Carol Schmidt made her choice. And she made it in
full knowledge of what it would entail. Even in her brief voyage of
self-discovery, from the bulb shed behind the convent to the glorious sexual
awakening with Jason, she knew where her true skills lay.

Over the months and years that followed, she would quickly come to
master those skills, like a child prodigy learning the piano or violin, not
gradually, but in leaps and bounds, rapidly outclassing all those around her.
She would become, then, a seductress.

Setting Jason free had been the right decision. Anything else would
have been a cruel deception. As the years rolled by, whenever she arrived in a
place, Istanbul or Moscow or Monaco, emerging fresh and well rested from
another first-class trip, she would take comfort from the fact that simply
explaining the endless stamps on her passport would have been impossible. She
was a seductress, first and very much foremost.

*

Ten years later and Carol was walking up Broadway, alone. Her hair
was now relatively short and blond. It was not the only thing that had been
changed in anticipation of this job, either. She was an entirely new person,
her disguise complete.

You can tell a lot about someone, she told herself as she looked up
Broadway, by their choice of Manhattan hotel. Alex Strange, already a
millionaire, was about to join the ranks of the world’s billionaires. Yet he
had foregone the predictable opulence of the Waldorf-Astoria and the
Ritz-Carlton; so too had he ignored the almost endless array of chic, up-scale
places that the city had to offer, any of which would have been a cool,
left-of-field statement of his independence of mind, just days before his
impending elevation to the financial stratosphere.

His choice of home-base for the biggest event in the financial and
commercial life of Strange Tech was the Trump International.

“Pathetic!” she told herself as she arrived at the bottom corner of
Central Park, looked up, and saw Trump Tower in all its shiny, overbearing
vulgarity.

She’d walked up from Times Square, leaving the
Marriot
behind, which, although not the city’s most spectacular hotel, held the very
best memories for her. It had not only been where she stayed when she had first
set foot in the US, but where she had first known the touch of a man.

She walked into the lobby of Trump International, admiring her brand-new
hairstyle in the many available mirrors. It was a blond bob and it suited her
pretty well, she thought. It was also exactly right for
Sandra Wells,
the name under which she now checked in.

As she did so, the crushingly powerful air-conditioning reminded her
that the life-defining decision she had made ten years ago had been the right
one. Since then her existence had been glamorous beyond her wildest dreams,
most of it spent in the very best, most thoroughly air-conditioned hotels in
the world. There was a streak of self-centeredness in her, and she had never
tried to conceal the fact from herself: she loved her life, she loved herself, and
she wouldn’t change it for anything. Or anyone. That, at least, is what she
thought.

Meanwhile, Jason’s future had not turned out quite so well, his
hopes long since withered, his talent exploited and stolen from him. But now,
as if to compensate for losing him, and for everything that had happened to the
poor guy, a strikingly attractive blond called Sandra Wells was going to take
Alex Strange down, quite literally.

She looked around the lobby, still appalled by the place. Alex
Strange was about to become richer and more powerful than could easily be
imagined, yet
this
was the kind of statement he was making about his
approaching mega-wealth? Trump International! It seemed so uncreative, so
undeserving, like he almost
wanted
someone to burst his bubble...

After about an hour hanging around in the lobby, she saw him come
through the front doors. She’d seen him before, ten years ago, just a glimpse
of a young, white-haired man in the
Marriot
. He had the same
short-cropped white hair now, and a fabulously attractive woman at his side.

The white hair was still a real attention-grabber (
is he an
albino?
people asked themselves when they first saw Alex Strange; and,
inevitably,
what about his pubes? are they the same snowy white?
). The
woman by his side was also getting a considerable amount of attention as the
couple made their way through the lobby. Her name was Sai Boynes, Alex
Strange’s current girlfriend. She was a mystery, almost nothing known about her,
other than she was about the luckiest girl in the world.

Even the Cardinal had failed to unearth very much information on Ms.
Boynes. From a comfortable American-Vietnamese family of business people, she
had left UCLA after one term as an Anthropology major. Nominally a model, she
had never in fact been known to have worked as such, and her only previous
known relationship had been with a fellow student back in college.

As the happy couple made their way toward the elevators, Carol
followed, slipping in behind them just as the doors closed.

When she’d made her reservation, she’d wanted to be as close to
Strange as possible. It wasn’t imperative, but it would be convenient, a
convincing means of luring him in. She had not booked a concierge suite,
though. Her instincts told her that Alex Strange wouldn’t want some sycophantic
guy in a suit hanging about outside the door desperate to get you more towels.
He wouldn’t want men doing things for him; Alex Strange was not like that.

She was right. They pressed for the floor below hers. It was a
suite, but no concierge. The three of them rode the elevator in silence. The
two women looked each other over in the way that women will, casually but
critically. And they did it openly, almost ironically, amused and restrained,
there in the close proximity of the elevator, as if it was a game.

It only took a few seconds, but there was a spark, a moment’s deep
and unmistakable understanding between them. They both knew right away that
something had been communicated, although neither of them knew exactly what. Meanwhile,
the man next to them was oblivious, wrapped up in his own thoughts. And that
just was fine, for now.

Sai Boynes was in her twenties, tall and athletic, with a face which
came so close to perfect beauty that people regularly stared out of disbelief,
as if it might have been a mask, or the face of a Renaissance sculpture. As for
the rest of Ms. Boynes, her body was young and taught, a body that seemed to
yearn to be devoured, yet also announced itself as being utterly untouchable.
There was an aloofness to her, something that was intended to set her apart,
something majestic and unattainable. Carol saw through the pretence
immediately. The aloofness wouldn’t last. It never did.

As they left the elevator, Ms. Boynes glanced back behind her, just
for an instant. It was enough. Her resolve vanished, replaced by a desire to
find out exactly who the blond woman in the elevator was, and what she wanted.

With that they were gone, the billionaire and his lover, back to the
dull luxury of their trumped-up suite. Carol watched as the elevator doors came
slowly together again. She was also intrigued. But first there was the matter
of Alex Strange. First impressions had confirmed what she already knew about
him. And she knew quite a lot.

Strange was media-shy, avoiding cameras wherever he could, never
giving interviews, and leading a life that was completely devoid of the
trappings of the super-rich. The
New York Times
described him as
discreet and infinitely modest, with no skeletons in the cupboard and no bad
habits. A coterie of the most expensive defamation lawyers in the country
helped to maintain this pristine reputation. Over the years, nothing with even
the suggestion of impropriety had been published about the founder of Strange
Tech.

This wasn’t just a matter of looking good, either. His software was
used by some of the most security-conscious organizations on the planet, and a
squeaky clean image gave him a competitive edge, especially when defense
contracts and other publically financed initiatives were involved. Also, there
was some truth behind it. He had never been known to take drugs, even back in
college, he had no interest in politics, and he had no links whatsoever to
anybody other than his clients and the faceless coders who worked for him. The
only even remotely interesting character trait was a photographic memory,
hardly unique among the world’s technological elite.

However, you don’t get to the point of floating your multi-billion
dollar business without the kind of scrutiny that goes way beyond a profile in
the
Times
. Several government security agencies held files on him, as
did a number of private security firms, all eager to build-up their
intelligence on major industrial players.

Of the dozen or so confidential reports that the Cardinal had
managed to procure, Carol had read with particular interest about the very
selective nature of Alex Strange’s sexual behavior. He had never been known to
pick up women, and never mixed business with pleasure, and had no known kinks.
Not only had he never had a relationship with a work colleague—not even
fleetingly—he was in fact rarely seen out with women at all. Yet he was known
to be at least
interested
in sex. He was also rumored to be
short-tempered and intolerant of mediocrity. Finally, he had an extraordinarily
high opinion of himself.

The dearth of a long-term partner for Alex Strange had been
interrupted by the appearance of Ms. Sai Boynes. After remaining at the great
man’s side for more than six months, it was assumed that she would become Mrs.
Alex Strange some time after Strange Tech went public. The financial papers had
begun to note, in those six months, that Strange had acquired what they called
a
permanent consort
.

The analysis went on and on, and Carol read it all. Security
agencies like to have a corruptibility rating for business leaders, an estimation
of the extent to which a person is liable to be compromised by his choice of
sexual partners,
how probable it is that he or she
might let their guard down at a crucial and potentially disastrous moment,
foiled by their own lust. The verdict on Alex Strange was simple and
consistent: he could not be seduced.

But as Carol got back to her own suite and
stripped for a shower, she reckoned she had already seen a way of getting
around that one.