All characters & events fictious
We don’t like people interfering in our business. We much prefer to be left to ourselves. I mean every organisation has some aspects that wouldn’t look to good if paraded before the public. The odd sweetener paid here, the bit of nepotism there, maybe a little tax avoidance, even evasion, the occasional corners cut on corporate ethics. Politicians have the same problem. You can’t get things done if you have to explain all the time what you are up to. And our business is no different. Well, of course the fact that it’s illegal does sort of make it even more of a problem, I guess, but the way I look at it is, we’re traders. We source a commodity for a market and we seek out customers and sell them the things that they want. I mean how bad can that be? Except, of course, the commodity is women. So when we heard about Judy Close we weren’t too happy.
Now Judy was a bright lady. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against intelligent women, but sometimes the smarts get pointed in the wrong direction. She was about twenty six. She’d graduated from Oxford with a degree in English and gone into journalism. She’d found herself working for the business section of one of the Sunday papers, doing pieces on consumer finance, environmental issues in business, stuff like that.
Then she got her big break. She was working on a story about how one of the banks had managed to dip into its employee pension fund in order to cover up some unsuccessful dealings in the futures markets. It caused quite a stir. The Financial Services Authority had to step in, there was a major fall in the bank’s shares, their chairman resigned, of course. And Judy got a reputation as someone that could ferret things out. She wrote a book, "Why Your Pension Isn’t Safe", and used the proceeds to set herself up as a freelance, specialising in dodgy dealings in the personal finance market.
She should have stuck to banking.
I’m not sure how she got involved with us. Maybe through one of our clients, I guess. I mean owning a woman isn’t a cheap hobby and a lot of our clients make their money in the banking business. So maybe she came across something in her other enquiries. I guess we first knew she was taking an interest when we picked up someone trying to hack our email systems. We get as many intrusion attempts as the next business but all of a sudden we were getting a lot of attempts from one IP address, using a valid user id but with the wrong password. We knew whose user id it was and we checked if they’d been having problems but they said no.
Then one of our sales guys said he’d been approached by a woman. Said that she’d heard we could help with a problem that she had, said she’d heard we could find her someone to own.
Now that’s not how it works. New clients are introduced and we have really strict rules about who we’ll talk to. So, our sales guy is suspicious and says, "Nah, not our line of business. You must have got that wrong." But we didn’t think she was just going to go away so we did a little research. Our sales guy had got a few snapshots of her with his mobile phone. We showed them around. Turned out one of the receptionists at our office building had seen her too. She’d showed up, claiming she had an appointment with our finance director. When the receptionist left her for a minute or two to check, she came back and found Judy looking in the waste bin -- Judy claimed she’d dropped something in there by mistake but couldn’t find whatever it was that was supposed to have been there. She’d been asking questions, too. What sort of people they had coming in, that kind of thing.
We felt if she was showing that much interest in us we should return the compliment.
Research is something we are really good at. Well, if you are going to snatch some lady for sale you want to have a bit of background before you walk up to her and ask politely if she’ll just put these ropes around her wrists. So, we spend a bit of effort and we get the goods on Miss Judy Close. It doesn’t take too long to track her back via her PC and now we know we are dealing with a nosey reporter. Before too long we’d got her history, where she worked (from her home on the eastern edge of London), plenty on her personal life (no boyfriend, too busy; not much contact with her family; no real hobbies apart from work and maybe the odd cinema or theatre trip) and a selection of snatched photographs that suggest she was better looking than she gave herself credit for, especially without the blonde wig she wore when she came calling on us.
Then we found out she had got in to our IT systems after all. That one of the password attempts had worked. That made us very unhappy. We really needed to do something. I mean the boss would be really displeased if anything went adrift because of something like this and one thing I’ve found in my career here is that I do not want to make the boss unhappy.
I’m in favour of taking direct action on these things so we reckoned the best bet was to go and have a chat with the lady, find out exactly how far she had got and make sure she doesn’t go any further. The assumption was that there would need to be an interruption of her current lifestyle (well life actually) but it’s a dog eat dog world this, as she should have realised.
So that’s how me and two of our goons (sorry, field operatives) were sitting in a non-descript van in the lane that led to the back of her property at one of clock in the morning, watching to see the lights go out in her house.
When that happens, we leave it for half an hour or so and we’re off. It’s quite an easy crib. Scrubby woodland around the end of her garden; a back gate from there into the lane which lets us in. Around the back of the property there were a few outhouses but it didn’t look like she used them. She’s basically a city girl; just happened to live out of town. There was a back door into her kitchen. We stopped outside it. Ski masks on, latex gloves. Check the goody bag -- cable ties, tape, foam wadding. Normally for a pick up we’d have an auto-injector with some appropriate anaesthetic but we wanted this lady awake. We were going to have a nice little chat about her current project.
Gerry got the door unlocked. It was hardly a challenge for his skills. Zak slipped in first. It was all nice and quiet. There was a cat sitting on the floor of the kitchen. It gave us a cursory glance but didn’t take any further interest in us, preferring to go back to cleaning its whiskers. We check the downstairs first, the last thing we want to do is find out we’ve got our little friend secure but there’s someone else around. But, as we thought, she was alone in the house. Or at least there was no one in the living room, the kitchen or her study. I borrowed a ten inch cooking knife from the block beside the cooker.
Gerry led the way upstairs. Three bedrooms and a bathroom. We guessed she’d be in room at the front. The other rooms were clear.
The next bit we did real slowly. Zak to the left, Gerry to the right, me on the door. It opened quietly. I love it when things go right. I’d got a clear view. She was in bed. Asleep. Alone. I was into the room moving slowly towards the bed. I knew Zak and Gerry were in behind me and I knew what we’d do. We’d practiced it often enough. I couch down beside the bed. The first thing she knew about us is the feel of my gloved hand on her mouth. She woke up quick, saw me, saw the knife and got the idea pretty quickly. Zak was around the other side of the bed, he pulled off her sheet. She was wearing a pink fleece tee shirt and pants. He grabbed her wrists and slipped a cable tie tight around them. Gerry did the same thing with her ankles.
I put down the knife, grabbed a sponge ball from my pocket and pushed it in her mouth. She wasn’t keen. Once I’d got it in a few strips of tape served to keep it there. Gerry pulled her legs up to her wrists and tugged another cable tie into place. We wanted a bit of time to take a look around and she’d be OK hogtied on the bed. By now she was wide awake and squealing. I showed her the knife again and she quietened down.
The guys and me went downstairs to see what we could find.
Well, it was embarrassing how much she’d found out. One file headed up with the name of our client had copies of bank statements showing his payments for some of our products and a trail of other accounts leading back to us. There was a handwritten note where he’d scribbled out a list of qualities he wanted met in one of his purchases and the words "the lads think $350k should do it" and a name -- the name of a girl whose mysterious disappearance had attracted a lot of media attention six months or so before. There were even a couple of photographs of the girl; the ones we take just after a pick up so the client gets a chance to OK what we’ve got before we start prepping them to their spec. Then there was the lap top. Even a cursory glance told us we’d need a lot more time with that. Encrypted files, hidden directories, plus it was obvious she had stuff stored in servers elsewhere. It looked like we needed to have a long chat with Judy before anything else.
There was a thump from upstairs. We all guessed what was going on. Zak got to her bedroom first. Judy had been struggling to get free and rolled herself off the bed. She was a bit winded but otherwise OK. I looked across the room and saw her mobile phone on a chair. She’d obviously been trying to get to it. I guess I couldn’t blame her.
Zak put her back on the bed. I peeled off her tape gag and Gerry cut her ankles free. "We’re going down stairs," I told her, pushing the point of the knife up under her chin, "and you’re going to give me all the files I need." She gulped. I could tell she was scared.
"Sure," she said. "Just don’t hurt me. I’ll let you have the files if you’ll let me go."
I didn’t say anything, just pulled her to her feet and dragged her to the door. We went down to her study. She was being really cooperative. Told us where we could find stuff. Even gave us the keys to her desk and her brief case. It was a great help. She was too co-operative really. That’s when I realised she had it all backed up on-line and we’d need more time with her. But at least that way we managed to clean out everything that was in the house. Once we were sure we’d got the lot we taped her mouth up again. I think she thought we’d just tie her ankles, take the stuff and leave her somewhere. She was disappointed.
Gerry appeared from upstairs carrying a suit case he’d filled with enough clothes and other stuff to make it look like she’d left for a few days away. Zak pulled an over coat on to our helpless journalist, we slipped her feet into a pair of shoes and took her out the way we’d come, down through her garden and into the van.
Zak got to ride in back with her as we took her to one of our little hideaways. From the squealing that came back to us, I guess he was having a little fun on the journey but, hey, there have to be a few perks in this job, don’t there?
We went to an old farm we use up in Norfolk. It’s a fair way from any place. There’s an old barn with a couple of chambers under ground that we’ve used a few times to keep ransom hostages in. Plus there’s a couple of nice secure rooms in the house itself, no windows, heavy doors, plenty of sound proofing.
Zak hustled Judy inside. Well I guess it’s a cliché but we sat her on a big, heavy chair and Gerry roped her to it. Her pink sleep shirt had got rucked up a bit where she and Zak had been playing in the van. I pulled it down to save her modesty. She tried struggling against the ropes but Gerry is pretty good at that sort of thing. She wasn’t going anywhere and she knew it.
I took her gag off and all I got for my trouble was a mouthful of abuse.
"Why the fuck have you brought me her? You’d better let me go. Plenty of people will be wondering where I am."
I always reckon that being blunt is the best strategy in these cases. "I don’t think so. There isn’t anyone who will be the slightest bit concerned about your disappearance for several days and even then they’ll just think your off on one of your little investigative trips that you are always so secretive about. So before you mouth off again, just think how much unpleasantness we might be able to cause you in that time."
"All right," she said, "all right. But you didn’t need to bring me here. You’ve got all the stuff. You’ve got all the files. You’ve got my lap top. What else do you want? Why don’t you let me go?"
"What else do we want? I’ll tell you what we want, Miss, nosy fucking reporter, lady." I was snarling now, my face inches from hers. She’d got back into scared mode, which was fine with me. "This laptop isn’t the whole story. You’ve got the whole lot backed up, on-line." The furtive flicker in her eyes told me I was right, but she shook her head. "OK," I said and nodded to Gerry. He took a length of rope, knotted it in the middle, jammed the knot in her mouth and tied it off behind her head. It doesn’t make a very effective gag but it didn’t need to keep her too quiet. It sure is uncomfortable for whoever is wearing it, though. We left her for a while, had a couple of beers, watched some TV.
When I went back she was more cooperative. I took the rope gag off.
"Please," she begged, "I need to - you know."
"You think you’re going to mess this floor?" I said, pointing down at the bare concrete. "Peeing your pants isn’t the biggest problem you’ve got right now."
She looked haunted. I could tell she was defeated. "OK," she said, "OK. Bring me the laptop, I’ll show you how to get into the backups."
We let her use the toilet. She was as good as her word. Eventually. We logged on to her back up server and cleaned off the files she had there. I looked through them before we hit "delete", it looked like scanned copies of all the stuff we’d seen in the paper files as well as the data stuff from her laptop. She needed a bit of a slap before she owned up to the second back up set. But, after all, she had promised to show us the back ups. Plural.
I put the gag back on her while we rooted around for a while longer. I was pretty convinced that she’d told us about all of it. Of course it was still a problem. We couldn’t let her go. Somewhere, in the vault of whatever data centre these servers were in, there would be a series of tapes with security copies of her encrypted stuff. If we had let her go she’d have been able to get the tapes re-loaded. Without her around they’d be wiped eventually.
I had a word with Zak about what we needed to set up next. He was always reliable when it came to disposals.
We let her think we were going to let her go, that we were just keeping her a while until we knew all was OK. We took off the ropes and the gag; left her to recover. She stayed locked in the cell of course but free apart from that. It took a few days for the bruises around her wrists and ankles to heal up but they would have been a bit of a give away for what we had planned.
We were set up to organise her demise. A little late night swimming. In a canal. Without the option of getting out. Then Gerry made things complicated. He took her some clothes from her suitcase and told her to change. She said she didn’t want her jeans, why didn’t he fetch her a dress? He said, how did she think it would look - being pulled out of the water with her skirt up round her waist?
I didn’t take her long to work out the implications. Needless to say she was upset.
"I did what you wanted," she screamed. "Now you’re going to kill me anyway?"
I nodded. There didn’t seem any point in disagreeing.
"No," she begged. "Please no. You don’t have to kill me. I’ll do anything." That’s when she had a bright idea. "Look," she said turning to me. "You’re slave traders. Trade me!"
"What?" I exclaimed. "Look, we’re the ones that decide who we take and who we sell. We don’t have volunteers."
"What’s the difference? Come on. I don’t look so bad, do I? You’d get a price, wouldn’t you? I’d be out of circulation. Why wouldn’t that work?"
"She’s got a point," said Gerry, unhelpfully, I thought, given that he’d caused all this.
"I’ll tell you what the difference is, lady. We are not your run of the mill, pick girls up off the street, auction them off for whatever you can get, slave traders. What we do not do is snatch women just on the off-chance of finding a buyer. That sort of irresponsible, speculative, behaviour gets this business a bad name. If your research told you anything you should know that we trade strictly in premium products; daughters of the aristocracy, high gloss products generally. Now, no offence lady, but I’m not sure you’re in that class. Plus you’ve got more of a brain than most of our clients are looking for. First class honours at Oxford, wasn’t it?"
She nodded sheepishly.
"Yeah, I thought so. Well, let me tell you that top of the list of desirable attributes from our clients is not ‘must be able to engage in a discussion on the evolution of the novel in late Victorian literature’.
"But I did learn some other stuff at Oxford," she said. "Stuff your research didn’t uncover. You should have been more thorough."
I was puzzled. "Stuff that might help you now?" I said, "Stuff that might make you a more saleable asset for me?"
"If what I think makes for a more saleable asset is right," she said. She looked at the suitcase. "Let me get changed," she said. "I’ll show you and the others something."
I said OK. After all, we weren’t that worried when we arranged her late night swim. Anyway, we watched while she changed out of her pink pj’s and pulled on a black bra and panties. She pulled a brush through her hair. As she stood up, I thought, "Actually she hasn’t got a bad body. She must keep herself pretty fit, somehow." She found a short skirt and a tight white top in the case and put those on too. It was a different look from the one we’d seen s far. I wasn’t complaining.
"Now this is a bit difficult without music," she said. "But you’ll have to imagine it."
She launched into an athletic dance routine that would have brought cheers from the most hardened (if you’ll pardon the expression) audience in a lap dancing club. There was a narrow, cast-iron column in the centre of the room which we’d normally use for securing guests. She gave it some very personal attention. If it hadn’t been rigidly erect before she started, it would have been afterwards. I looked across at Gerry and Zak. It looked like they were, too.
She finished the routine with a swing from the pillar, down into a split, and looked up at me. I guess she thought I enjoyed it. She wasn’t wrong. I’ve seen this sort of thing done a few times (Hey, a guy need to relax after work doesn’t he?) and she was pretty good at it.
"Is that more the sort of thing you’re looking for?" she said.
"I can think of some clients that might value that sort of skill," I said, "but even so..."
"That’s not all," she said, moving towards me on all fours with cat like smoothness "I guess you boys must be a bit stiff after that. How would you feel about a little blow?"
"Sure," I said, trying to appear nonchalant. We’re not really supposed to play with our guests so it had been a while since I’d had any fun. Besides, this was obviously an important part of our decision making over the future of Miss Close. The other two were lining up as well. I watched as her well manicured fingers slipped down the zip of my trouser fly and prised my cock from within. She didn’t spend long with her fingers bringing it erect, but then after her dance she didn’t need to. She was smiling as she took it in her mouth.
Now, I’m no connoisseur in these matters but I’ve had my dick in quite a few women’s mouths down the years, mostly without their enthusiastic participation. I can tell you, Judy was bteer than average. Much. And when she was done she slurped it down and licked me clean. Did I think someone would pay for that privilege? Yeah, probably.
So did Zak and Gerry when she gave them the same opportunity to experience her skills.
By the time she’d finished on them, I’d had the chance to think about her proposition. Actually it wasn’t such a dumb idea. Certainly it avoided the whole problem of a body turning up somewhere with all the problems of forensics and the rest. I mean, I know there isn’t a TV series called ‘CSI: Norwich’ but that doesn’t mean that all those complicated skills aren’t available out here in the sticks. And it did look as if she had some saleable skills. She was sitting on the floor, brushing her hair.
"Well, what do you think?"
"I think those aren’t the usual skills for an Oxford graduate."
"They are if you’ve got a student loan to pay off and you don’t like the idea of waitressing. I had to do something in my spare time to make ends meet."
"Shame about the waitressing," I said, "quite a lot of our customers like a little help around the house."
"Oh, I can do it," she said. "It was the smell of burgers that put me off. Besides the tips were better doing this. Come on. Admit it. That was the best blow you’ve had for a while, maybe ever. You know the song, ‘Hips Don’t Lie’? Well cocks don’t either. Now tell me you can’t get a price at auction for these skills."
I thought about it. She was right. One thing I’ve learned in business. Sometimes you have to throw the rule book out of the window and go for a little lateral thinking. OK," I said. "We’ll see how it goes. There’s an auction at the end of the month. We’ll put you through the basic training routine. If you make your reserve then we’ll call it quits. If you don’t, well..."
"You won’t need to worry about that," Judy said. "Still, if I’m going to be a slave, I’d better start getting used to it, hadn’t I? I can’t imagine you’re just going to let me ride up front in the van over to your training centre, wherever that is, are you?"
"Err, no," I said, a little nonplussed by her directness. "No, the usual form is for you to ride in the back; chained, gagged and blindfolded."
"I thought so," she said. "Well if you’d like to let me have the things, I’ll get myself ready. I assume you’ll want to get going and you’ll all have enough to do."
I found her a hood, ball gag and handcuffs and left her to get on with it. Me and the lads went to clear up the rest of the house. We like to leave things tidy for the next team, it’s only professional. When we got back to the room that Judy was in and unlocked the door, she’d been as good as her word. There she was sitting in the chair in the middle of the room, blinded by the black leather hood over her head, ball gag strapped into her mouth, hands cuffed behind her back. Obligingly, she’d stripped of her top so that all she was wearing was her black bra and skirt. She obviously had the right idea.
"If you thought this was a good thing to do, you were right," I said, giving one of her tits a pinch. She gave a grunt muffled by the gag and wriggled her shoulders in appreciation. I checked the strap that held her ball gag in place. She hadn’t held back; it was as tight as it would have been if either of the guys had applied it. She’d squeezed her handcuffs tightly shut too; no risk of her slipping her wrists out. I guess she was genuine after all. "Well," I said, "time to go." She nodded and got to her feet.
Zak hoisted her up onto his shoulder. I guess the least we could do was to carry her to her transport. I saw him stroking her arse as he carried her out. She was wriggling a bit but she needed to get used to that sort of thing. I couldn’t help but feel she’d find her new life a lot more challenging than she expected but it was probably better than the alternative we’d had planned. And besides, it was her decision.
<The End>
© Freddie Clegg 2007 Not to be reproduced or reposted without permission.
Email: freddie_clegg@yahoo.com