Under His Watch (3 page)

“Not if I resign. And your parents are my real bosses anyway.”

What
had
she meant? It had just come out, that thing about how the spanking had made her want him to stay. He had spanked her because he wanted to keep her safe. She just needed him to keep her safe some other way. Was that so hard? She stood there fuming, while he nonchalantly went about plating the eggs and the bacon.

“Sit down and eat, Charity,” he said.

“Only if you promise to stay, and not to spank me again.” She felt she was pleading now, and she realized that some idea, deeper than any she had yet understood about the spanking, had arisen in the very back of her mind.
What the hell?
She had thought she was making him promise not to spank her because spanking women was wrong, and there were better ways to keep her safe. Suddenly she was wondering if she was trying to wring the promise out of him because she didn’t want to confront… something. Something about the spanking and what it meant.

“Goodbye, Charity,” Ryan said, with a sort of sad smile on his face. He put the plates on the table and the frying pan in the sink. “Wash the frying pan, okay?” Then he went to his room.

“Goodbye, former Navy SEAL
Ryan Bedford,
” Charity called bitterly after him. “Thanks for the dirty dishes!” She was about to put the eggs and bacon in the trash when she saw how very good they looked, and noticed that there was toast, too, in a little basket on the table—a little basket she didn’t even know she owned—and a cup of take-out coffee.

It would serve him right if I ate his breakfast,
she thought. Halfway through, she heard the front door of the apartment open and then close.
Good riddance, former Navy SEAL Ryan Bedford. You can go spank some other girl.

It was Saturday, so after breakfast Charity got online, to keep searching through the documents that had led to the death threat. She put off the matter of what she was going to tell her parents: they would have to find her another bodyguard, obviously. It wasn’t the
idea
of having a bodyguard that was the problem, and she admitted she shouldn’t have snuck out. She was willing to promise not to do it again, and to keep that promise, for a bodyguard who wasn’t as insane as Ryan Bedford apparently was.

Fucking Ryan Bedford.
She sat back from the computer and pictured him coming toward her. She felt like she could feel his hands on her again, putting her into position, taking down her jeans, her panties. Spanking her.
Great,
she thought.
Dude gave me PTSD.

Do you like videos, Charity?

The window popped up into the middle of her desktop. But Ryan had said this computer was clean now.
What the fuck. What the fuck.

The words, in their blocky Geneva font, disappeared. Where was the malware? Was it on her PC, or was it in the HTML code of the pages she was looking at?

A little video replaced the words. Charity, leaving the bar, walking back to her apartment slightly unsteadily. Last night. The video had been shot from street level.

Then another video replaced it: the same thing—Charity, leaving the bar and walking home—but from a different angle.

Charity’s heart threatened to pound its way out of her chest, and she gasped for air. Fear gripped her entire body like a vise, forcing breath and reason out of her at once.

A third video. Same thing, high angle. Sniper’s angle.

The video disappeared, and words replaced it.

We just thought if you’re such a fan, Charity, you should know that we are, too. But we’re also a fan of other things.

A picture of a sniper rifle, succeeded by a picture of a bullet.

This is your last chance.

Videos had got her into it—that was the joke. Charity had made a video called “Handristan: Precious Heritage Site or Mithras Mining’s Piggy-Bank?” She had made insinuations, all true but none of them provable with the available documents. Standish had been behind her one hundred percent, and Becca had shot the video, mostly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Charity had talked rapturously into the camera about the treasures that might be found in the Temple of Apollo in the half-buried ancient city of Alexandropolis, on the shores of the Caspian Sea—one of the several little towns founded by Alexander the Great on his way into India.

The rest of the video consisted of a narration by a ‘voice of God,’ with the script by Charity, over shots of Mithras Mining’s past efforts (no shots of what they were doing to Handristan were available, of course, though there was a picture of Cliff Hodges shaking hands with Marut Herzyov, the president of Handristan). Mithras had destroyed cultural heritage before, but on previous projects the company had been subject to oversight, and the heritage sites had been thoroughly catalogued and preserved, even if only digitally, at great expense to Mithras. There was no evidence that Alexandropolis, which, it appeared, sat above extraordinarily rich veins of cerite, would be the subject of any such preservation at all. Marut Herzyov was on record as saying, “Anyone who will destroy that pagan temple for me can have all the dirt he wants,” to thunderous applause from his political party congress—the only political party in Handristan.

Of course, when the suitors for the dirt had lined up, the matter had, as far as could be told from public documents, proven rather more complicated. Here the video had, in its final minute, gone entirely speculative, and Charity had suggested that Herzyov saying a mining company could have the rights for free was a way to conceal enormous transfers of wealth to Herzyov personally.

She had been careful in the script itself, not to name anyone as guilty of anything. But when the video went mildly viral, and Charity, with the help of Standish and her parents, had had a weekend worth of news coverage, she had not hesitated to say that she thought Cliff Hodges and Marut Herzyov needed to answer a great many questions about Mithras’ new deal, and what was going to happen to the Temple of Apollo—not to mention the rest of the site, which undoubtedly, though perhaps it didn’t hold treasures, could be studied for many years by archeologists without yielding up all its secrets concerning Alexander and his army.

“All we’re asking,” she had said to a famous interviewer on a famous network, “is a few months. How difficult can that be? Clearly Handristan isn’t going to make it happen, but I have a letter from their cultural attaché saying that they would have no objection. How can an American company be allowed to pillage the way Cliff Hodges’ corporation is pillaging? What does that say about us, and about how we care for our legacy?”

If only the response hadn’t been so encouraging,
Charity thought as she looked at the picture of the bullet that had remained on her screen in a pop-up window that refused to be closed. There were so many cultural heritage emergencies around the world; Charity might have simply moved on. But FPCH had gotten a huge surge in donations, and Standish had been so enthusiastic. Becca had been more than game to do a series of longer videos in a true documentary style.

Mithras had responded to Charity’s round of interviews with a terse press release saying that they were following the accepted standards of the international community for the preservation of cultural heritage sites, and that all cultural heritage materials would be preserved by professionals. Standish had responded to that by telling Charity, “You’re on to something, or they wouldn’t have given us that much. You need to hold their feet to the fire and make them tell us what kind of professional preservation they’re talking about. Whatever it is, it’s not going to be what’s necessary for a site like Alexandropolis. If I’m right, they mean one person who happens to have a PhD in anthropology, who’ll sign the documents saying he’s taken pictures of things. I’m funding you as much as you need for this, Charity, and promoting you to the management team. Congratulations.”

With the new funding for the project, Charity had been able to follow up the leads that flowed in after the first video. She flew to meet with three disgruntled past employees of Mithras. None of them had specific knowledge of the Handristan deal, but one of them, a software engineer, gave her a backdoor into the Mithras databases.

Charity had been petrified of being found out and arrested, but the programmer had taught her how to cover her digital tracks. “They could conceivably trace you,” he said, “but they could never prove in court it was you.”

Still, she had worried about the police knocking on her door as she conducted her late-night searches, finding tantalizing leads concerning a project called ‘H.’ Project H was definitely overseas, and it definitely involved a foreign government. It also clearly involved very large transfers of funds. She scanned document after document, trying to find something more solid, jumping at any noise from the refrigerator or the street down below.

She had not worried about sniper rifles. Silly her.

For long minutes she could do nothing but keep clicking the little X in the upper-right corner of the picture of the bullet, even though it was clear that they had frozen her PC somehow. Finally, blindly, she picked up the wireless mouse and smashed it down onto the desk, where it shattered in her hand, one of the shards digging into her palm.

She dropped the fragments of the mouse, and turned over her hand to see that she had cut herself. When a drop of water fell onto her palm, she realized she was crying, too.

Charity reached for her phone. There was only one person who seemed to her to have any capacity to make this better.

“Bedford,” came his voice at the other end of the line.

Charity felt better instantly, but the relief of hearing him opened the floodgates of her fear, and she went from silent terror to babbling fright in an instant: “Oh, God… oh, God… Ryan… they… they… th-they f-filmed m-me last… last night, and… and they’re going to k-kill me. They hacked m-my… my PC and th-they sent the v-video and they’re g-going to kill me.”

“Stay right there. I’m on my way. Go to the kitchen until I get there, and don’t touch the PC again.” The kitchen was the room farthest away from the apartment’s external windows; Charity went there and sat at the table, looking at the frying pan, which, of course, she had not washed. That at least made her laugh, though the laugh sounded to her ears more than slightly maniacal.

Chapter Four

Ryan knocked on the door, wondering whether he could persuade Charity at least to go to her parents’ house. He could get her there himself, and then work out the details of his resignation, as well as give the Phillipses some advice in person about how to help their daughter. He didn’t know how serious the death threats really were; it depended on who had actually issued them, and Ryan wasn’t as sure as Charity apparently was that Cliff Hodges lay behind them.

When she opened the door, though, the look in her eyes told him he was going to have to work very hard to calm her down before he took her anywhere. He strode in and took Charity in his arms before the door could swing shut behind him on its steel spring.

“Shh,” he said. Charity sobbed into Ryan’s chest, wetting the white cotton of his T-shirt. “Shh, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to keep you safe.”

“We? Not you?”

“I will, too,” he murmured, as soothingly as he could. “And I’ll help your parents find a new bodyguard.”

“I don’t want a new bodyguard.”

Ryan felt his brow furrow. “Well, I’m going to take you to your folks’, but you’re going to have to have a new guy eventually, and as soon as possible.”

“I want you!” she wailed. “You can’t leave me!”

Ryan shook his head involuntarily, not in negation but just to try to get her off this subject until she had calmed down a little. “We can talk about that later.” He hugged her tightly for a while, just letting her feel his strength surround her, knowing that would be the best thing right now. Charity’s sobs gradually quieted.

“Feeling better?” he asked. Having her in his arms, all 5′5″ of her, stroking her long, fine blond hair, was beginning to seem a little too wonderful for his complete comfort. She needed him, and he couldn’t deny now that if circumstances were different, he could definitely see himself needing her back. And
wanting
her… well, he had to admit that he had wanted her from the moment she had opened her door the first time he entered her apartment. Charity had been clad in her Columbia sweatshirt and her jeans, with her hair in a ponytail—yet somehow she had looked to him as hot as any lingerie model.

“A little,” Charity sniffled.

“Alright,” he said. “Go back into the kitchen and sit at the table there while I have a look at your PC, and make sure your picture windows are secure.”

“Okay,” she answered, and he released her from his arms. “You’re not going to leave me, though, right?”

“No, Charity, I won’t leave you until you tell me it’s okay to leave you.”

That seemed to settle her down, and she made her way to the kitchen. He heard the water turn on.
Dammit,
he thought.
It’s not like it’s really dangerous, but I told her to sit at the table.
He strode to the kitchen to find her at the sink washing the frying pan. He nearly laughed, but instead he said sternly, “Where did I tell you to be in this kitchen?”

Charity whirled around, the fear returning to her eyes.
Good,
Ryan thought grimly,
if I need to make you afraid of me rather than the bad guys, so be it.

“Answer me, Charity.”

“P-please don’t spank me, Ryan?”

It was a question—it was definitely a question.

“I won’t spank you for this, honey, but when you’re done with the dishes I want your disobedient backside in that chair.” He pointed. “If I’m going to keep you safe, I need to know that you’re listening to everything I ask you to do.”