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"No, I just need to talk to a glass of water about a dream. For a minute there--" Jean Marie’s voice trailed into nothingness. Cold suffused her feet. You don’t get cold feet in dreams. She looked down. In her eagerness to escape the dream, she hadn’t bothered with shoes.
His feet were bare too, elegantly arched and boned. They rose to strong, cleanly chiseled ankles and finely muscled calves with just the right dusting of hair. So that’s what he hides in those heavy boots.
Jean Marie sucked a corner of her lower lip between her teeth. I can’t believe I, of all people, am actually gawking at a man’s legs. Meanwhile, her lizard brain inched stealthily under his long terry-cloth robe, and--
"Aren’t you afraid the rats will bite your toes?" he asked conversationally.
"I can’t believe you’d let rats anywhere near your ladies."
"Maybe that’s how I keep them in line. I am not generally renowned for my chivalry."
"I don’t believe it," she repeated.
"Neither do they. They’re making it harder and harder for me to pretend I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be," Adam sighed. "The harem thinks you should stay."
The harem--not him. Still, it was kind of him to mention it.
"Sorry," she said. "Have to get to Mons. Fate of the free world and all that."
Adam smiled like a holy man at the memory of his first great sin. It didn’t matter. Jean Marie had a death grip on the door jamb behind her, and she didn’t let go until his light disappeared into a doorway at the far end of the corridor. She melted into a small puddle over the threshold, muttering, "He read the book. He went and read the gd book..."
Fate of the free world? Hah! It was a bargain-basement screw-up that would’ve gone completely unnoticed by the press and Pentagon brass if the wart colonel acting as Support Group executive officer hadn’t managed to turn it into a three-ring cover-up. The Support Group’s commanding general wasn’t bright enough to figure out the problem himself, but he did ask his buddy the under secretary to send help before the NATO press corps sunk their teeth into it. Since Jean Marie was the only career public affairs officer whose chain of command led directly to the under secretary, the under secretary volunteered her instead of trusting his golf partner to the uncertain mercies of the Pentagon's offical media wranglers.
Jean Marie spent most of her first day at Support Group Headquarters calmly ignoring the wart’s various tirades, insults and snide remarks. With help from other members of the general’s staff, she began assembling a collection of documents and anecdotal reports related to the pertinent issues. She also began the careful process of assessing personalities and agendas. Simple conversation and requests for small favors often worked best for this purpose. It helped to have a great cover story that happened to be true.
"I’m trying to send a really nice thank-you present to the family who rescued me in Paris. Where’s the best place to buy chocolate?" "Do you know any place that sells really unusual fabric? "A few days before I left Virginia, I was in a store that sold these three-dimensional Brussels lace medallions. Do you know if it’s factory production or piecework? Where’s the best outlet?" It just went to show you never knew what you needed on assignment until your feet hit the ground.
She would’ve liked to part friends with Adam, instead of however it was they left it. Now that was what Jean Marie considered a real screw-up. First, she made all the wrong assumptions about everything. Then, she couldn’t keep her emotions and hormones in the box long enough maintain the semblance of good behavior.
Where did she, of all people, get off quoting Sam Spade at him? At the very least, she should’ve apologized when she met him in the hall. Jean Marie realized he’d given her as many openings as his pride would allow. But realistically, it’s hard to translate male English with a mind unhinged by imagined recollections of steel and velvet sheathed between your thighs. Specifically, his steel and velvet. That she was able to gabble out almost complete sentences should count as scientific proof the mouth operates independently of the brain.
At least both of them knew enough about the rules to keep their mouths shut about what passed between them. Her absence from the evening revels confused the few ladies simulating consciousness when Jean Marie made her 6 a.m. appearance in the kitchen. But it evoked no hostility. They still considered her harmless, and Jean Marie trusted Adam to lie like a rug if the subject ever came up. That’s what she would’ve done.
Jean Marie sank into the bed of her suite in the Support Group’s bachelor officer quarters weary in body and soul but untroubled by any deeper uncertainty about her assignment in Mons. Nits and noids she knew she would face, and it didn’t surprise her to find those routine tribulations translated into a dream of beetles and water bugs scuttling through an endless series of hallways. Only the hallways weren’t the pre-fabricated, plasterboard hallways of Support Group HQ, they were the chateau’s.
Jean Marie’s Italian grandmother once told her that she would always dream true dreams if she placed a clear glass of water beside her bed each night. At two o’clock in the morning, with a sinking feeling of where her subconscious was headed, Jean Marie reasoned her grandmother’s prescription couldn’t hurt. True dreams obviously excluded erotic fantasies about a man who never planned to see her again.
Adam came upon her from behind. His strong teeth fastened over the angle of her neck and shoulder like those of a lion claiming his mate. His fingers played her body, teasing nipples and breasts, stroking her secret places until she was hot and damp and whimpering in the urgency of her need. The alarm rang, and Jean Marie buried her head in a pillow to stifle the moans.
The following night Jean Marie ditched the water glass. As she watched first light creeping up the wall opposite her window the next morning, the military rule of three rang its changes over and over inside her head. One is an accident. Two, a coincidence. Three is enemy action.
Enemy action.
Enemy action.
Jean Marie’s heels clattered the refrain as she marched down the hall from her temporary office to the unassuming door behind the general’s situation room. The sign card over the buzzer read "Information Management Systems." To the side of it, some one had pasted an index card inscribed "Here be cyber monsters" next to a familiar parody of the Army mule.
The corners of Jean Marie’s mouth curled in the little smile she almost never let her colleagues see. Two weeks’ pay said the face she’d glimpsed in the cafeteria wasn't a mirage.
The all-purpose scowl on the face of the lanky sergeant who opened the door evaporated in astonished delight. "Jean Marie! You’re the pirannha they sent from Washington!"
Jean Marie closed the distance between them with a practiced swagger. She pressed the first two fingers of her right hand against his breastbone and mimed pulling a trigger. She raised the hand pistol to her lips, blew imaginary smoke from her fingers and lowered it slowly to her hip.
"I prefer to think of myself as the under secretary’s own personal Delta Force," she drawled.
"Spiderwoman, you haven’t changed a bit!" her victim crowed. "Come in! Come in! What can I do for you?"
"How are you and your staff fixed for on-the-job training this quarter?" she asked.
"You got a project in mind?" His eyes sparkled in anticipation. His grin grew wider as she explained what she wanted.
"Piece of cake," he said. "Why don’t you stick around? The shift ends at four, and there’ll be plenty of free terminals."
"Nah, start without me. I’ve got to go feed the press. If everything goes as planned, I’ll be back in about an hour. We can do dinner around seven--with whichever members of the crew choose to stick around, of course."
"Does this mean?" The sergeant let the question trail, glancing significantly at the security cameras overhead.
Jean Marie shrugged. "Sometime tomorrow, probably. Friday’s a good day for this sort of thing. For all practical purposes, the weekend editions of the print and on-line media went to bed at noon today. By Monday everything’s old news."
It would’ve been surprising if she hadn’t dreamed of Adam that night. Cross-referencing from specifics unwittingly provided over the course of Jean Marie’s visit, the Support Group hacking crew quickly located the Watchers’ corporate billing account. From there, in the words of Jean Marie’s old friend, it was strictly paint by numbers. The fire walls to the Watchers’ operational and archival databases were trash. The systems didn’t even recognize them as intruders.
Jean Marie read until her eyes burned and lied until she thought her tongue would break. While the crew tracked money and property, she cruised the Web for independent confirmation of the outrageous notions coalescing in her brain. Home-town newspapers in the West Coast and Pennsylvania reported the disappearance of several very familiar young women. Few follow-ups. No outcry. Recent crime stats for selected locations in the United States, Canada and France included an unconscionable number of unexplained decapitations.
"Jean Marie, you’re shadowing the Watcher named Adam Pierson, right?" asked the young enlisted woman who chose the Immortal Duncan MacLeod as her quarry. "I think I got something for you."
"He knows MacLeod?"
"They met through MacLeod’s Watcher, Joe Dawson. You know, I was beginning to think you were scamming us about this being a game, but look at this. Dawson and a couple of Watchers loaded personal files on the main server without fire walls or anything. Dawson filed his under bar:/receipts.doc. Can you believe it? Nobody could be that stupid."
Jean Marie shrugged. "Look at it this way," she said, "you have to give the players a break every so often or they lose interest. So what does Adam’s tab look like?"
"Major bizarre. The section you’re interested in starts out with Dawson talking about Pierson working on something called the Methos Project. It’s all about this 5,000 year-old guy who--"
"Cut to the chase."
"Okay, Dawson’s going on about MacLeod and Pierson and this hard-a named Kalas, and suddenly he starts talking about Methos like he’s *there*."
The following morning Jean Marie’s eyes were almost as red as her suit. Not that anyone at the meeting noticed. Staff officers and senior civilians flailed each other to within an inch of their professional lives. The wart feverishly worked the room, assigning blame wherever he smelled blood. The general alone retained the dignity of command, staring gravely and unblinkingly at nothing in particular. Her hands folded on the eight-legged conference table, Jean Marie waited as patiently as her namesake for the cue she knew would come. Her opening came not from one of the earnest lieutenant colonels or the wart’s personal hate club but from the senior civilian executives who made a point of eyeing the equipment every time she walked in a room.
"Why don’t we ask Jean Marie how she’d handle it? Somebody in Washington must think she’s pretty good, or they wouldn’t have sent her." His tone made it plain what he expected in return for the signal favor of his attention, despite the picture of wife and kids on his desk. More fool he.
Jean Marie favored him with a ravishing smile. The room stilled. She turned to the general and drew a deep, serious breath. "Even if you were subpoenaed, sir, this isn’t an Ollie North/John Poindexter situation. I’ve worked on cases like this before. The Appropriations Committee would probably let you testify in closed session. At worst you’d be looking at early retirement."
The general’s florid complexion greened nicely. He thought he was on a fast track to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"But that’s the worst case scenario, and it’ll only happen if you try to retroactively classify the documents under the Secrets Act. Your problem is you can’t classify routine emails. And the way your system works, with back-ups to Atlantic Command and JCS, you can’t even destroy them. That means one postcard mentioning the Freedom of Information Act, and all the message traffic about all the documents sitting in your file safe are all over the evening news." "Yesterday I had a long talk with the reporters covering this story. A couple of them mentioned they’d already spoken to their stateside counterparts about making the requests."
"Your point?" the wart sneered.
"Simply, sir," she told the general, "it’s reached the point where you can’t run, and you can’t hide. Not that you’re the sort of officer who would. You already know what has to be done, and you’re doing it. Now it’s time to tell the world." Jean Marie placed two sheets of paper between the general’s hands. "Given the speed with which things were moving yesterday, I took the liberty of anticipating your next request and drafted this press release."
The general blinked at the papers. Jean Marie continued. "If you read it carefully you’ll see it positions the Support Group to be the white hats in this situation. It also positions you to take control of the review process which, as the colonel stated, must be command’s ultimate goal in this situation."
The general donned his bifocals and ran his finger down the margins of the text. "You think Public Affairs in the Pentagon would handle it this way?" he asked dubiously.
"Yes, sir. But if you have any doubts, it’s still early enough to give the assistant secretary a call. This number will take you straight to his military aide." She handed him a business card with the seven digits of the assistant secretary’s DSN number written in ink on the back. "I can give you the commercial number, if you prefer."
The wart’s nostrils flared. "Why don’t you do that," he said. The general ignored him. The general couldn’t make head or tail of the press release, but he dialed the Pentagon often enough to know the DSN prefixes. And the redhead had it right. In a hearty voice, the general explained his "little situation" to the assistant secretary for public affairs. Abruptly he yanked the receiver away from his ear. The tag end of one of the assistant secretary’s trademark explosions of profanity rattled the ceiling tiles in their metal grid.
"Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll get on that right now," the general said, gingerly replacing the receiver in its cradle as if it was liable to rise up and bite him too. "I don’t suppose you prepared any questions and answers to go along with this?" the general asked Jean Marie. "The assistant secretary said it was kind of important."
It was all over except for the wart shouting. Jean Marie could phone it in from here. That was the problem. With the exception of Adam and the harem, this whole assignment had been nothing but a paint by numbers job from the very beginning. No challenge. No risk. How long had she coasted in this professional limbo? No wonder she fixated on Adam and his games. He was the one who got away, the hand she lost. Lord, she hated losing. The only thing she hated worse was losing badly. And the the more it hurt to think how badly she had lost.
She continued to dream about him, as Adam and as Methos, in a variety of guises and positions. The dreams remained shocking in their sensory immediacy--sight and sound, taste and smell and touch. Most definitely touch, inside and out. Jean Marie felt branded as she limped through the rest of her routines with the Support Group, the press and her handlers back home. It was unthinkable that they should accept her condition as normal. Yet they did. So did the hacking crew, but to them she was probably just the means to "the Game."
"Tell me about Troy," Jean Marie dreamed herself saying to Adam a few days before her scheduled departure.
"All right. Troy Donahue: 1950s screen actor of less than remarkable presence. Later stared in the Divine epic ‘Lust in the Dust.’"
"Not that Troy."
Adam’s lips tightened in annoyance and his fists burrowed deeper into the pockets of the world’s most dilapidated rain coat. He grumbled, "What is this thing people have about Helen and her damned ships?"
"I have no idea. I want to know about Odysseus."
The wind or her request tinted his cheeks and his ears a delicate, embarrassing shade of pink. "Why Odysseus?" he demanded.
Yes, of all the dust bunnies of useless information scooting under the furniture of her mind, why sweep out Odysseus? Because he was an entertaining rogue? Because she always identified with resourceful Penelope? Because the conflicting reports of Odysseus’ character and deeds reminded her of the Immortal Methos and the man she knew as Adam?
The early morning sun gilded the ribbons on the chocolate boxes and assorted small treasures assembled for mailing on the writing table opposite her bed. Odysseus brought gifts when he visited Aegean island of Skiros. He spread them on the table in the king’s great hall: glittering baubles, embroidered dresses, costly belts, a single bronze shield and a shiny new spear. The women hiding Achilles were so enchanted they never noticed the trumpets at the gate or Achilles’ abrupt departure. Pity for Ithaca the concept of retail had been invented yet. Odysseus was obviously a natural.
Jean Marie sat upright in the bed. She needed more chocolate--about 15 pounds should do it. More ribbons, beads, lace. Men never thought of graph paper; they wrote books on how to generate it from a computer. Add that to the list. Men never thought of cameras either. Think what the harem could do with polaroids. Or better yet, digitals. But they cost the earth. Correction, they cost the earth last year retail. She needed to check to post exchange. Where was that Middle Eastern restaurant the general's wife had took her to yesterday? Maybe a few pairs of those ridiculous Turkish slippers with tassles--bare hardwood floors could get so cold.
And which publisher was marketing stories about the Immortals under the guise of fiction? She'd seen it on the Web. A moster FedEx box would freak the quarter's desk officer and give her credit card company palpitations, but Jean Marie couldn't afford to care. The ball was back in play.
Jean Marie supposed she dreamed the night before her flight to Paris, but her mind was racing too hard over the day ahead for memory to capture anything except the phantom warmth of Adam’s hand resting on her hip. The possessiveness of the gesture was inconceivably erotic in its implications. But then, what else was new?
The stone hunt still threatened the composure of motorists along the narrow allee. The wrought iron gates swung back at Jean Marie’s touch. A host of familiar faces greeted her at the door to the chateau. And host of new ones. Good grief, they multiplied faster than patches foretold. Maybe Jean Marie should’ve doubled the chocolates?
The ladies agreed the light in the second floor gallery was best for comparing shades of silk and matching trim. The gallery also afforded plenty of lamps for harem sisters who couldn’t wait to get at the books.
Jean Marie appeared to have second thoughts. "Maybe we should just use the kitchen. So the light’s not so great. At least you don’t have to go to hell and back to get a beer."
"Don’t be silly," Tree assured her. "This house was made for parties." She led Jean Marie to an anteroom with a kitchenette and a small lounge. "And there’s two bathrooms just through there."
Two bathrooms, a kitchenette and lounge with no outside access. "Perfect," Jean Marie said. "Fully stocked?"
Tree sniffed. "With this harem, what do you think?"
Jean Marie looked appropriately chastened. After that, things got a little confused. Jean Marie explained she packed the boxes with an eye towards securing their contents and protecting protruding decorations. She hadn’t organized them by content. Silks and laces were pressed between books. Harem Dancer found a cloth purse of Venetian glass beads inside the toe of a Turkish slipper wedged in the space between stacked boxes of chocolates. Very nice, very large, very assorted boxes of wonderful Belgian chocolates a number of ladies insisted on sampling immediately.
"But chocolate doesn’t go with beer," Jean Marie protested.
Nobody paid any attention. Those who weren’t rummaging were reading. Dragon Lady found the camera and was fending off all comers until she could figure out why the only manuals were written in German and Japanese.
The harem sisters managing the refreshments chased Jean Marie back into to the gallery, insisting she was still a guest and therefore ineligible to work the samovar or the espresso machine.
Jean Marie slipped from the room, securing the doors at either end before descending to the main library. It took her longer than expected to find the 16th century journal mentioned in Dawson’s "receipts." She congratulated herself on having the foresight to purchase an Italian/English dictionary before leaving Belgium.
Adam’s collection of dictionaries ran towards mammoth tomes written entirely in their respective vernaculars, which wouldn’t help her a bit. In spite of her ancestry, Jean Marie's
Italian wasn't any better than her French.
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To Gamesters Chapter 3
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