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Page 23.
Scene 6. Credits, Please
 Jack had been to this street, and this ornate Victorian mansion, once or twice before. He already knew, as they entered and servants took their coats, that there was a reception in progress. Unlike the reading at the History Club, however, this was a most secret affair, attended only by a very select group of guests.
His employer, Johannes Rector, came out to meet them, holding a drink and wearing a smoking jacket. "Jack," Rector said, "We had expected a fun, uneventful evening. Can't you leave it at the office?"
"I'm not really myself when I'm away from home," Jack said. It was not just a quip, but a true statement. Only Rector and Claire understood what he meant. His private life at the D Ranch near San Diego was as separate as oil and water from all that happened when he left home on business.
"Come on, let's get you into a shower and some decent clothes," Rector said. "Oh, you and" (he winked, without looking at Minica) "can spend the night here. She'll love it."
"So will I," Jack said.
"Hurry—don't keep the guests waiting. We'll only take an hour or so, and then you can do what you want. You can feel safe here. This place is a fortress, built during World War II. Under the paneling, the walls are foot-thick, reinforced concrete set extra strong, with enough rebar to support a battleship."
Rector was a prematurely white-haired Afro-American gentleman of considerable mystery to all who knew him. Jack estimated his age at around 50. As founder and CEO of Compass News Corporation, a private espionage concern, Johannes Rector was impeccable, unflappable, and unstoppable. It wasn't even clear to Jack—who after all was a hired hand and not an insider—who were the board members of Compass News, if any. The firm was small and privately held, but its clout was considerable. By far its biggest client was Camelback Consortium, which included Claire Lightfield's Sigma 2020 company.
Compass News were the go-to guys when you really needed to get a tough job done right. From Jack's perspective, Claire was his favorite co-worker—a wonder-worker, a benevolent and pretty spider at the nexus of that entire web of power and intrigue.
Jack showered in a luxuriously paneled suite with Persian carpeting and stained glass. Its walnut shelving held nick-nacks ranging from intricately detailed old Chinese vases to Art Deco lighters and radios, from Versailles ormolu clocks to Victorian Big Bennish chimes.
"Oh Jack," Minica gushed, "this is so cool."
"Secrets of the rich and famous," Jack said. It was a joke, because Minica's family were zillionaires. Her uncle Carmine was sort of a Big Yang of Neapolitan origin, with nice suits, who spoke all the various dialects of brass knuckles. Her other relatives were priests and nuns who prayed and lit candles night and day to make up for Carmine's enthusiasm.
Jack stood before Minica, naked and dripping after his shower.
She lay on the bed, languidly examining him. "If this is the house of Mr. Rector, you must be Mr. Erector."
"Get thee to a punnery, my dear little friend." He wiped himself with the towel and shivered. He'd love to throw himself into bed with her, but did not want to sleep on a damp mattress.
Seeing his discomfiture, Minica said: "Let's crank up your heat index, baby." She was not little, but nearly as tall as Jack, and as lean. She was a black belt in aikido. They shared yoga and tai chi in common—went to different schools together, as the local saying went.
She spotted a pile of fresh, folded towels in a guest closet, and fetched him one.
While he dried himself in an extra-large white towel, Minica hunted among the copious closets for something that fit him. She laid out a gray suit on the bed, along with fresh undies, a pink shirt, with matching breast pocket kerchief.
"What the hell is this?" Jack said, holding up a silky, mauve thing.
"It's a neck jobbie," she said as she sprawled across the enormous round bed on which they would spend the night. She rolled luxuriously over and over, so that her long legs peeked bare from under her white sheath dress. The sprawl became her. Jack's eyes glazed over as he relished a privileged and lascivious vision of her.
"I'm going to look like your personal gigolo by the time you finish dressing me."
"Humor me, Jack. Let me get turned on really good and hot, and we'll have ourselves a little Nevada road house right here."
"The things you say, darling."
"I only tell you what I want you to know." She sat up and fingered one arm of his gray suit jacket. "Look, it's quietly elegant. Gray goes with anything."
"Yes, but anything goes with Gray." It was her favorite color on him.
"You said it." Gray threw himself across the bed in a swan dive, so that he landed with her between his arms. She shrieked as they bounced, face to face. He gripped her (gently) in a bear hug.
She squealed as they wrestled. The bed bounced. When he got her into a submission hold, she laughed. He leaned over her and said gruffly: "Surrender."
"Never!"
She melted apart under him, inviting him into her car.
She shuddered so that her body repeatedly shook, while Jack groaned with pleasure as they merged.
Her red nails made claws on his shoulder blades, as her rouged lips sought the sensitive inner shell of his ear.
Her hot breath and tongue on his ear drum made him lay pipe like a lineman.
She womaned him between sweet, strong thighs as she expertly moved in practiced jiu-jitsu come-alongs. She raised first one leg, then the other, as if he were a potato rolling between her thighs. Her heels alternately banged against his buttocks. She rotated her hips and womanhandled him as close as she could, while she thrust herself up, up, up against him.
He let her.
It was a delirious ride.
He groaned like a space walker, falling into her galaxy.
Rector's guests all met on the first floor an hour later, for Jack's award celebration.
Jack and Minica came down the stairs in fresh evening dress, each on the other’s arms as if they were stiff from having jogged a long distance. Their radiant smiles were met with formal applause and some hear-hears.
Over congratulatory cocktails over the success of the Baidu event, the guests honored Jack for his five years of service to Compass News, which had come upon his retirement from twenty years of corponation service with Camelback Consortium (Special Forces, then CIA, and later Sigma 2020).
The clock struck ten. The guests chatted in a sumptuous downstairs room that enveloped them in luxury—draped in crushed velvet curtains, filled with stuffy furniture that looked as if it had been stitched together with tens of thousands of dollars of antique Yazd carpeting from Persia. In corners stood glass cases showing off ivory statuettes and lapis lazuli beads and turquoise Hopi jewelry and more. Like so much of the safe house, this part was paneled in deeply gleaming, rare woods harvested when it was still legal—some native American, others exotic and foreign.
"We are going to show a little video in honor of our guest," announced Johannes Rector.
Two CN technicians had set up an extemporaneous entertainment center in the Compass News lounge, complete with multi-stereo, all around speaker system. Compass News, for all the sound of it, was not a media organization, but a mission statement: North, East, West, South—the four compass points.
The techs operated a powerful holographic projection engine, whose floor-ceiling staging chamber that made you feel as if you were inside of the action, rather than watching a flat screen.
Must get me one of those, Jack thought as he sat with Minica, Claire, and Tony among the other guests. That would be so cool back home at the D Ranch.
No folding chairs here—more like an enormous living room full of couches, love seats, and arm chairs. Very much your classic men's club, but with women.
Rector said a few words into a hand-held mike, drew some cheerful laughter, and worshipfully introduced his leggy counterpart at Sigma 2020. “I give you the ever so amazing Claire Lightfield.”
Applause.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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