Remote (10 page)

His employer.  That was how Tanner preferred to think of the man on the island, the one he’d never met face-to-face.  It was true, he was handsomely compensated for the tasks he performed—but an employer was someone you could walk away from.

Tanner couldn’t walk away from Remote.

The truth was, Remote owned him.  He belonged to the man just as surely as Tanner’s pricey apartment and sports utility vehicle belonged to him.  Tanner had a very clear understanding of that concept, had an immaculate grasp of the consequences should he ever try to rebel.  Remote would destroy his oh-so-comfortable existence, would make sure he spent the rest of his life either in prison or as a hunted fugitive.  Neither were options Tanner considered to be viable.

But that wasn’t a problem, not now and probably not ever, because Tanner had no problem in carrying out Remote’s orders—in fact, he enjoyed what he got to do a great deal.  This was no happy accident, either; Remote had found and recruited him as carefully as any corporate headhunter, zeroing in on exactly the kind of person he needed.  After some consideration, Tanner had actually been flattered—though not at first, of course.  He’d raged against his servitude, sworn to find a way to kill his new master and gain his freedom.  Tanner was used to being top dog, and he hated giving up control to anyone.

Except
, Tanner thought,
that wasn’t strictly true, was it?
  There were some people, some situations, where he
was
willing to surrender control, was even willing to pay for the privilege.  That was how Remote had found him in the first place.

The aggressive businessman or politician who needed to be sexually dominated to get off had become a twenty-first century cliché, but it was a cliché because it was true--men in a position of extreme responsibility or power often found that giving up that control for a brief period to be a tremendous relief.  Tanner had needed that relief, and sought it out in the person of a professional dominatrix named Mistress Erie, a tall, statuesque woman with long, violet-streaked black hair.  Tanner’s personal flavor of kink had to do with humiliation, with being forced to do things he didn’t want to.  Mistress Erie was very good at her job; she’d discovered a number of things about him that he’d barely suspected, and was very adroit at forcing him to perform.

Tanner had always known that the fear of being humiliated in public was a strong element of his fantasies, but he’d never explored that until Mistress Erie forced him to.  She’d dress him up in a leather outfit complete with leash and hood and take him for a walk in a public park at 3 AM, making him crawl around on the wet grass on all fours; he couldn’t believe how much it excited him, especially when she told him she’d arranged for some of his work colleagues to meet them there.  A lie, of course, but just the idea had been incredibly arousing.

And then came the night that everything changed.

“I have a special task for you tonight,” she’d told him.  He wore a skin-tight latex bodysuit, his hands manacled to a chain around his waist.  She draped a beige trenchcoat over his shoulders, sleeves stuffed to mimic arms, ends tucked into the pockets as if he were just warming his hands.  She belted the coat loosely over his waist and smiled at him with jet-black eyes.  “You’re going to take a little stroll.  You’re going to meet someone.  They’ll ask if your name is Felix, and you’ll say yes.  You won’t ask them any questions; you’ll follow them and do as they say.  You won’t see me, but I’ll be watching—and listening.  Do anything wrong and you won’t be able to sit down for a week.”

He knew it hadn’t been an idle threat.  She had blindfolded him and driven him somewhere, then helped him out of the car, taken off the blindfold and driven away. 

He was on a cracked and broken sidewalk, beside the dark, silent bulk of an industrial warehouse.  A freeway thrummed and hissed somewhere close by.  Streetlights cast harsh orange pools of light between black stretches of empty road. 

He could see a cluster of women at the corner, a block away.  Tanner thought he knew where he was, now—the red light district, where low-rent hookers looking to finance their next visit to a crack house plied their trade.  Tanner preferred a higher class of prostitute himself, usually chosen from an escort agency; cruising for sex down here meant running several risks, including being robbed or arrested.  Which, of course, was exactly why Mistress Erie had picked it. 

He took a few tentative steps toward the group on the corner, not sure if he was supposed to stay where he was.  He hadn’t gone far when he heard a soft voice from the shadows at the corner of the warehouse: “Hey.  You Felix?”

A thrill of fear went through him. “Uh.  Yes.”

“Okay, Felix.  Follow me.”

The speaker was a woman with a bushy afro, wearing a miniskirt, though it was too dark to see much more than her general outline.  Her voice was low and husky, with just a touch of amusement. 

He followed her around the corner of the building and into the alley.  She led him to a pickup truck parked beside a dumpster, with a plastic tarp draped over an A-shaped frame in the bed forming a crude tent.  She’d had to help him under the tarp, since he couldn’t really use his hands.

What had followed was an extended session of foreplay on a foam mattress, with the girl whispering in her ear all the things she was going to do to him while she fondled him.  It had been heightened by the fact that the plastic tarp was semi-translucent, making Tanner feel exposed as well as helpless.  The fact that the girl was black bothered him, too, even though Tanner had never thought of himself as a racist. 

But the fondling and whispering went on for a long, long time, and by the time Tanner realized the prostitute wasn’t even female, he no longer cared.  The reek of the garbage in the dumpster, the anonymous lights of the cruising johns that drove down the alley, nothing mattered to him by that point but release.

He had no idea that the word ‘release’ was about to take on a very different meaning for him.

Thinking about now, Tanner still wasn’t sure of Mistress Erie’s role in his subsequent extortion.  Was she aware of the camera equipped with nightvision concealed in the cab of the truck, or had the underage prostitute placed it there because he’d been instructed to by Remote?  Was Mistress Erie a willing partner in the blackmail of one of her regular clients, or had Remote somehow extorted her, as well?  Was Tanner the only target, or did Remote implement the same strategy multiple times until he had the best candidate? 

Tanner chose to believe that his former dominatrix had no choice in the matter, and that Tanner wasn’t the only victim—just the best candidate for the job Remote needed him to do.  And once Remote had documented Tanner having sexual congress with a minor, release had become an impossible dream.

When Tanner had finally surrendered to the inevitable, though, he’d felt the same paradoxical freedom he used to only find under Mistress Erie’s latex heel--except this was better.  Better and just as paradoxical, because when he was stalking and capturing a subject for Remote, he was both completely free and utterly subservient at the same time.

But that was how Remote operated
, Tanner thought
.  He just gave me an excuse to do something I already wanted to do.  All he did was remove any sense of responsibility—and who the hell wants that in the first place?

 As Remote’s agent, Tanner stood outside the law, above it, yet there was no weight of responsibility on his shoulders.  He was like an avenging angel, better than humanity but in the service of something much more fearsome. 

He chuckled to himself as guided the cruiser carefully through the dark water.  Remote was no god, and Tanner was no angel.  Maybe a demon in service to the Devil was a better comparison.

In which case, the man he’d just dropped off was about to enter Hell.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

For Nikki, the nerve-wracking part had come later, after the drive.

After she’d taken care of Parkins’ needs—she fed him and let him use the bathroom—she’d gone to check on how her new charge was doing.

She had to make sure Goliath was properly secured, that he had no weapons concealed on him, that his shackles were securely locked and no key was hidden nearby.  She’d had a gun in one hand, shaking the whole time, sure he was going to abruptly roar to life and break her neck with a single blow from a massive fist. 

When she was done, she’d gone outside, locked the trailer, and walked down to the seedy bar she’d noticed at the end of the block.  It had taken three shots of Jack Daniels to get her breathing under control.

It wasn’t that Nikki was afraid of violence—hell, when they were starting out she was the one who’d schooled Jack in martial arts.  But she’d known guys like Goliath, and their size was only a small fraction of what made them terrifying. 

They weren’t part of mainstream culture, didn’t have the same value system or standards.  They prided themselves on being predators, on living on the outskirts of civilization and taking what they wanted; things that would horrify any normal person was just another day at the races to them, and they got a huge kick out of shocking straight citizens.  Nikki had met one guy whose favorite pastime had been to get high on PCP and bite the heads off small animals at parties.  He’d usually bring a couple of white rats with him, but pets were fair game, too.  He especially hated cats.

Rape and murder were second nature to men like that.  If Goliath was who Remote said he was—and everything Jack had dug up seemed to verify that—he would kill her without a second thought.  And if Remote had done the things to Goliath he’d claimed, the biker’s current capacity for rational thought might be limited to nothing but destruction. 

***

Jack still had an ace up his sleeve. 

The manacles were regulation handcuffs, but the chains linking them together were not.  He’d bought them at a supply store for stage magicians in Vegas, and despite the fact that they looked extremely solid, there was a trick link hidden among the others that let him free himself within seconds. 

When the inner door swung open, Jack was already moving.

It took him several long, agonizing seconds to unbuckle the straps holding him to the wheelchair, seconds in which he was sure someone with a gun was going to step through the doorway.

Nobody appeared.

The adrenaline surging through his system was helping to clear away the benzodiazepine, but he knew that wouldn’t last.  He thought that the shot he’d just been given was probably weaker than the first one; Remote wouldn’t want his new possession to be comatose for the next twelve hours.  Lower dose, maybe even a less powerful benzo.  He might even be able to fight it off--not everyone given Ro-1788 experienced resedation when it wore off.  Some were merely groggy.

If not, he’d have to find a place to hole up where Remote couldn’t get to him—Remote or the drone that had just dropped him off. . .

***

Nikki opened the door to the trailer.  Goliath was the same as the last time she’d looked, a naked, snoring pile of muscle chained to the floor.  The key to the chains was in her hand, but she had no intention of using it.  She left a water bottle within reach for when he woke up; she didn’t check the bucket in the corner, which had been left there for obvious reasons.

And then his head snapped up.

Nikki froze.  He was chained and gagged, but she still felt like a mouse in the shadow of a hawk. 

His eyes met hers.  He growled through the ball-gag, a deep noise from the back of his throat. 

The gun in Nikki’s hand trembled.  She pressed it flat against her thigh to control it.  “There’s a water bottle with a straw taped to it.  You can’t lift your arms very high, but you should be able to jam the straw between the ball-gag and the corner of your mouth.  You must be thirsty.”

He got to his knees, then his feet, bloodshot eyes still locked on hers.  His dirty brown hair was a long, greasy tangle that reached below his shoulders, his arms and chest covered in tattoos.  He swayed like an oak tree in a hurricane.

And then—still staring at her—he urinated.

It arced between them and spattered off the metal floor, hot drops splashing her legs.  Steam rose into the cold air, filling the trailer with a humid stink. 

Nikki didn’t flinch.  She kept the gun at her side, her eyes on his.  The piss ran in rivulets between her legs and out the door.  It went on for a while.

When he was done, Goliath’s gaze shifted.  He looked past Nikki, at the trees the trailer was parked behind.  He abruptly sank back down, his attention now focused on his shackled wrists.

“Okay, then,” Nikki said.  “I’ll be back with food, later.”

He ignored her.  Nikki closed the trailer door and locked it.

Then she went inside to change her pants.

***

Jack had known almost from the beginning that Remote himself wouldn’t show up in person. 

“That’s not how he operates,” Jack told Nikki.   “He doesn’t get his own hands dirty.  He either doesn’t have the courage or the physical ability to do so.  He’ll send someone else.”

“So then it’s standard operating procedure from there.  We grab the drone, get them to give up what they know—“

“No.  For one thing, they may not know much.  For another, I won’t torture an innocent—especially not someone who’s been turned into a human robot.   We need to get to Remote himself, and that means letting his drone take me wherever he wants.”

“And how does getting you thrown in a cage somewhere help us, exactly?”

“Because I’ll be his brand-new, shiny toy.  Something he hasn’t owned before, something he won’t be able to resist getting his hands on.  He won’t use intermediaries, he’ll have to come see me for himself.”

“This is. . . .” She shook her head.  “You know what this is, Jack. 
Never give up control
, isn’t that what you always taught me?  Always have an out, always make sure the target only
thinks
he’s in charge.”