My Only Talent Ch. 24

You could have heard a pin drop in the van when he turned and focused his conversation totally on me. "Good Morning, Robbie. It's nice to see you again. Do you play tennis?"

"Yes, although I have no racket, shoes or proper clothes with me on this trip. Isn't it a little cool and wet for tennis in England in December?"

"We'll deal with all that. Everyone is coming to a party at my place tomorrow afternoon and evening, but I would like you to come out early in the morning to play tennis with my wife and my step daughters and some of their crowd. Will you?"

"Love to."

"Very well - my assistant will be in touch to set up scheduling and transportation with you. May I ask what level of player you are?"

I suppose it wouldn't do to brag about beating the woman's high school state champion, at tennis or in bed. "Well above the average social club player, but I could never make a living playing real professionals in tournaments. I could probably be a successful country club instructor, not that I'd actually want to be."

He smiled mischievously. "That should be just about right! I suspect you will even have some time between tennis and the afternoon tea party for a little birding with one of our other guests, eh? She knows the area and can show you around."

"Sounds wonderful."

"I'm sure!"

There were surprised and vacant stares from Senex Pedo and Ben Whani, but Barry Fermy and Penelope Profico seemed to smile at each other knowingly. Alexis Quandry seemed oblivious to it all. We drove to the nearby military airbase, which looked as big as DFW airport but was surrounded by forests and green fields. We all got in a slippery looking grey helicopter with a finish that looked melted and poured on, including a shroud around the tail rotor. It didn't look big on the outside, but it had 8 seats inside. The engine was very loud outside, but pretty quiet inside, quiet enough to hear the CEO's narration of the stuff we flew over, which seemed to go on forever.

We flew over buildings, dry docks, train stations, airports, dams, harbors, wharves, and loading docks. We heard about megatons of concrete poured, millions of man hours worked, and billions of dollars invested. I fought to stay awake and aware, trying desperately to tie what I was hearing to the framework of Brujo's research report that I had by now pretty much committed to memory. What factors drove risk? What did we need to know to price the coverage right and not lose our asses paying off on losses? I was still trying to make sense of it all when we were suddenly over water and leaving land behind. Soon I could see nothing but water in every direction, which made me a little nervous. Alexis T Quandry, the guy who was supposed to be the Zen master of all this stuff, just sat quietly, taking it all in and occasionally shooting his cuffs and checking his distorted reflection in the double glass of the aircraft windows. How the heck did we figure all this out?

The pilot kept looking out the windscreen and then at the flat screen in the middle of the cockpit, where a red blinking dot on a blue background grew larger as we approached it. Just as I spotted something in the water, he turned and changed course a bit so he approached it from the northeast. At first it looked like a little speck on the water, but as we got closer I could see that it was at least as big as my ten story dorm back at ESU, except it was mostly steel and aluminum, not brick and mortar, and it was lit up like DKR Memorial Stadium for a night game. It sat on three huge metal pilings and there were two huge cranes overhanging everything just like in downtown Austin. People in orange and blue overalls with yellow or orange hard hats scurried around on catwalks and around huge pipes as we approached, and we landed on a big flat slightly elevated hexagonal area with an "H" on it as big as a basketball court. I then followed the tour around like a zombie, trying to absorb the sheer magnitude of it and the billions that had been spent on this offshore platform, and how rapidly something this massive could be moved to from drilling site to drilling site. Why it actually weighed less than most aircraft carriers. It was cold and wet outside, and we rushed through the tour, finishing up in the galley, where there were steam tables full of bangers and mash, and fish and chips, and everyone there was big, male, smelled of tobacco, and seemed to be between 40 and 50 years old. Despite my growling stomach, this was not a meal I was interested in sitting down to. No one else in the tour group was either.

I was still having a strange emotional reaction to it all when we loaded back up into the helicopter and took off again. The pilot complained that the winds had shifted and it would take us longer than planned to get back, and that we would have to take on fuel in Scotland. I suppose I wouldn't have time to search Aberdeen and the shire for long lost relatives. The soft drone of the engines inside the cabin put me to sleep, despite my growling stomach. When the noise changed to signal landing, I discovered we were actually at someplace called Sumburgh, which also turned out to be cold, wet and windy. I went to sleep just after we took off again, and didn't wake up until we began to descend and I could see the city and buildings all around us. The pilot complained again, this time about the fact that landing here busted his expense budget. Reggie was waiting for me and Senex and Ben, and took them to the Four Seasons and then me to Horse Guards. Another driver took Alexis, Barry, and Penelope to another one of their endless meetings at Canary Wharf. "Fundraising" was all Barry would say about it.

I realized that I was totally exhausted as Reggie pulled up to the hotel, but he passed it by and detoured a few blocks and then double parked on Ebury street, leaving his flashers on. "I'll be right back, young sir. I didn't want you to have to face hotel room service food this evening." He came back ten minutes later with a big white paper bag with red twine handles that smelled like the best Chinese food in the world, started the car, and dropped me back at Horse Guards, with a cheerful "Goodnight sir!" I walked up to the room in a daze, my ravenous hunger demanding that I open the bag and eat right then. There were napkins, wooden chopsticks and plastic utensils on the top of the bag and several containers underneath them. The first little white folded paper container I pulled out and opened appeared to be quick fried lamb with peas, onions, and rice. It was wonderful, what there was of it. The next was a paper bowl of crabmeat soup that didn't last long. Finally there was some very spicy chicken with asparagus and some kind of wonderful noodles, and I was a happy boy. My sweet tooth was still talking to me, and the final container proved to be honey glazed apples and bananas accompanied by a pastry thing that looked like a cross between a puffy taco and a fortune cookie and tasted very much like almonds. But I was not inclined to speculate, as I needed the sugar quickly, and it was all good.

I brushed my teeth and tossed off my clothes in random spots on the carpet, and got into bed. Just before my head hit the pillow, I noticed the light blinking on the phone. With my last iota of consciousness, I listened to the message, which told me I would be met by someone with a "Liverpool Tennis Centre" shirt on in the lobby at 6 in the morning. I knew I was too far gone to get up and set the alarm on my phone, so I dialed zero and asked for a wakeup call at 5, and then I was out like a light.

It may have been the hours in the unfamiliar environment of the helicopter, the jarring visit to the offshore platform, or just the exotic spices in that wonderful and fragrant Chinese food late at night, but something activated my dream center like never before. They say that when you wake you only remember your most recent dream, not all of them, but while my stomach was settled, and I slept soundly, my emotions must have tossed and turned all night. What I remembered dreaming about was a very big and very strange party.

* * * * *

Elizabeth was sure that Tessa Formby was withholding some things from her. She was electrified to find that young Roberts had been to the 'addicted to' party in Austin, as she and her mates had followed the gossip coverage of that rabidly. Tessa even dished to her on a few celebs that danced naked that Elizabeth had never even heard mentioned before, including one who went ahead and danced even though her not quite as famous hubby was rabidly opposed to it. Elizabeth would give her eye teeth to get invited to something like that, even if she had to agree to dance, too. Maybe especially if she had to dance. Tessa said that she did not think Nora Upman had not been to the party: in fact Tessa did not even seem to have known that the Upman girl was going to school in America. Come to think of it, Tessa said absolutely nothing definitive about Roberts or Pliskin, either, except that she could not believe either of them would be involved in anything treasonous. She did say that she heard a rumor of an attempt on the Italian billionaire during a charity tennis tournament, and that it had been somehow foiled and the kidnappers captured, but there had been no official word or even rumors in the press about it.

So Elizabeth was left to her own investigative devices, a situation she was used to. She had the metadata that linked these folks together, but not the content of their conversations, texts, Skypes, or emails. All the phone calls from America were stored a spectrum slice at a time in petabyte palaces in the western USA, and there was still enough of a 'special relationship' that GCHQ could access them, but there were other considerations. There was another storehouse of all the LTE and other cell network data which made it possible to access all the texts and emails that went to smart phones. Even the cowboys in Maryland could draw inferences from what one asked for from their data warehouses, and set their own bots searching for relationships and new data. So, she had to come up with a valid reason to try to access conversations around the date and time she was interested in without giving the no such agency any more of a heads up than they already had. She finally created an ersatz connection from the disappeared Spetznaz elements to a kidnap attempt on a royal, a very plausible reason for her to access things around the time of the party in Austin. Soon she was looking at the metadata and finding some key things missing, especially some calls and text messages from some of the unidentifiable burner phones to Miss Pliskin and Mr. Roberts, and some between the two of them on the morning of the rumored kidnap attempt. Such detailed metadata without the voice content suggested that someone had pre-deployed their own ringer femtocells in the neighborhood of the tennis tournament before the action took place, and only the dweeb boys from Fort Meade did that stuff in the USA. That also raised the issue of how they knew that they should be there and when.

She searched earlier and later in time and discovered other voice and data content recorded from regular phone company cells sites and presumably not intercepted by special femtocells. It gave her some insight into the relationship between Roberts and Pliskin, and some juicy gossip, too. On one of the calls, Miss Pliskin sounded extremely jealous, and Elizabeth would bet a month's salary she knew just exactly who 'Miss Teats and Ass the Art History Major' was. Elizabeth was jealous too. Lara the billionaire's daughter and Suzanne Pliskin were amazingly close and communicative, and it was soon pretty obvious that they were both sleeping with each other and with young Roberts, separately and all at the same time. Now Elizabeth was really intrigued. It's a wonder the kid didn't flunk out of all his classes. Have to look up some images of these two girls. Better not mention all this to the techie team.

Tessa had assured her that Robbie Roberts would never be involved in terrorism, and she knew the Pliskin girl could not either. The insurance billionaire wasn't a very likely prospect, but perhaps the people who worked for him or some of the folks who worked for Tier Group and had access to explosives should come under a little more scrutiny. She tuned the parameters on a few of the bots and set them off again.

* * * * *

Suzanne woke to the smell of Lettye cooking an egg white omelet for her downstairs. She descended the stairs in her robe and ate in a bit of a fugue state, depressed enough to consider just vegging out and marking time until having to dress for Handel's Messiah and the late Wassail and Dinner party tonight. She realized that she had turned her phone off last night, and when she turned it on again seven emails immediately beeped in. She scanned them with dread, her seller's remorse returning, cutting her eyes to make sure Lettye could not see the screen. One was from Robbie, with a photo of him standing on the river bank with London Bridge in the background, and wishing her an early Merry Christmas. Gee thanks. Who took the picture, asshole? Certainly not Miss Nora Upman, that bitch, who was occupied playing the perfect daughter in Bermuda. Now Suzanne was really pissed.

She attacked the other emails with fire in her eyes. They were all responses to her personal ad. She would show Robbie a few things. The first was wishy-washy and had no identifying information, with just a suggestion to meet at a neutral public place. No way, Jose'. The second was the same. Then came one complete with a name, address and a photo. This one was meeting her requirements so far. Completely revealing and honest, but a very tough customer to please -- he wanted to be completely submissive to her (unlike Robbie) and whipped to the point of bleeding (which Robbie richly deserved, too) but he was also HIV positive, and hoped she was too. No, and no thanks. She shivered. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.

A good long run should clear her head. She went back upstairs and changed into her running stuff, with plenty of layers because it was very cold and windy out, and the pockets of her outermost windbreaker were loaded with her father's required personal protection kit, plus a water bottle. She was going to challenge herself and really feel the burn today. She went south on Wisconsin, past the Thai Embassy, and then over to 23rd by the park, then Lincoln, and Constitution. She took 14th to Madison and down the Mall, which was full of bundled up tourists even today. Pennsylvania Avenue and the Capital flashed by, then the Supreme Court and RFK. She passed the Library of Congress, then the Rayburn Building, and turned towards the Washington monument, then finally past the WW2 memorial and back towards GWU, the almost half-way point. Then she went down Virginia and took the Canal Road all the way out to Chain Bridge, then along Chain Bridge Road to almost under the Parkway, then reversed course and headed back, beginning to sprint as she passed the tennis courts and hitting it hard all the way back to N Street NW. 23 miles: now she was pumped. The endorphin rush was almost as good as sex with Robbie and Lara. Top of the world, Ma! Robbie was still a selfish asshole, and there were more unopened emails on her phone.

* * * * *

When the phone rang with my wakeup call, I was absolutely sure it was just the desk clerk calling right back to confirm the time to call me in the morning, but was astounded to find it was actually 5:02 AM. I jumped in the shower and turned it on cold, and stood there in the stream and let it warm up with me in it, hoping it would prove therapeutic. I needed to do some DIY psychoanalysis on my very disturbing dream. Unlike the proverbial dead frog, I did jump when the water got too hot, and adjusted the funny looking English spigot valve.

My dream was about a big, big dance party: bigger than the Halloween party or the Addicted to Austin bash. I started out dancing with hot little red headed Janet Arroz, who was a great dancer, but then she made me dance with Melanie, and when I did, she got pissed and dumped me, and Melanie went crazy. Then I chased Suzanne around for a while but could never catch her and she wanted to dance different steps than I did. Lara found me and we danced several dances, but then she didn't want to let go dance with anyone else. I danced with Millie, and it was great, and then Jay Kincaid cut in and I never saw her again. Alley and Nora were up on stage with the band stripping, but I couldn't touch either one of them. Vaya Perez was dancing with Peggy Duchenne, trying to put her hand down on her ass, but Peggy kept saying no, and making eyes at me. I finally caught up to Suzanne and she had changed into her red Dominatrix getup and was whipping some guy tied to a chair. "You're next, Robbie!" she laughed. I don't think so. I looked up to a balcony and saw Country Chrissy naked except for a Stetson hat, boots and chaps, and Dana Duke in burnt orange golf shirt with holes cut out for her nipples staring at me. Then I saw Suzanne dancing with three guys at the same time. Horrified, I jumped into Peggy's arms, and she cuddled me like a baby to her massive breasts, and I woke up.

I turned off the shower and rubbed my skin dry and almost raw with one the hotel's big thick towels. I was back to my standard outfit, hung up in the closet since tea with Peggy: dark grey pleated slacks, pale pink dress shirt, navy blazer, black shoes. I added an overcoat over my arm just in case. I didn't even think about my lack of tennis togs or another change for later, as the dream was still reverberating in my mind. I expected to see Reggie or another of his ilk or some burned out tennis court bum in a sweat stained "Liverpool Tennis Centre" shirt waiting to pick me up when I entered the lobby. Instead I saw two incredibly hot looking young blonde twins, barely stuffed into little thin white knit tennis shirts with the right message embroidered in pink on them, plus super short tennis skirts. These girls were stacked and packed and loaded for bare (pun intended). You would think they had been airbrushed and photo shopped for a skin mag centerfold: they did really look that perfect. One of them pointed to me, and the other one giggled. Then I was hit with a coherent wave of matched Suzie signals with an intensity that made me think of a room full of big puppies on a cold morning. The signals wiggled and squiggled and jumped and pounded at me. I couldn't tell if they wanted me or they just wanted any male -- the signals were that overpoweringly strong.

"Robbie!" they cried in unison, their voices as perfect and identical as they were. They were about five feet eight inches tall, with perfect skin, honey blond hair, and light blue eyes. Their eyes were pretty, but did not quite dance with intelligence and fire I saw in Lara, Suzanne, or Millie's eyes, nor did they compare to my recent memory of Elizabeth's eyes from the plane trip over. Most guys, however, wouldn't even notice their eyes for some time, as their faces were plastic surgery perfect and their bodies were almost obscene in their bubble butted showiness. It was as if they were drawn in a cartoon, but they were very real and right in front of me. "I'm Jerry!" and "I'm Terry!" they cried, again in unison, in that breathless Valley Girl/Spice Girl intonation now seemingly universal to English speaking teenagers everywhere. Their makeup was perfect, they had on new looking Adidas tennis shoes and when they bounced up and down with excitement, you just couldn't look away.

"We brought a driver with us so that both of us could sit in the back seat with you!" Another wave of Suzie hit me, like aftershocks of an earthquake. I looked up to see the expected tennis bum, with a two day beard and a harried look and carrying two very expensive looking women's Burberry overcoats. Just so the girls could look hot and exposed in their tennis clothes in the lobby? No wonder he had that resigned hang dog look on his face, and maybe he was a little hung over, too.