Howdy, all. I wrote the first installment of this story a while ago but didn't have time to finish it. If folks would like me to, I can go for a third. Just let me know. As usual, I live for feedback!
KI
Augmented
by
Kid Indy
To say the weather in Montana is unforgiving in the winter does not begin to capture the reality. NSA Agent Ryan Watson took what comfort he could from a cup of coffee as he maintained radio contact with the other two vans on the stakeout. This November Monday morning the world gave him a little favor in that Greg Kinsey did in fact leave for work just a few minutes early. Ryan gave the signal for his team to synchronize their timers: their plan was to initiate the strike ten minutes after Kinsey left the house, and an agent would tail him to make sure he went to work, giving an abort signal if he turned back.
He did not turn back.
The target of this raid was not Greg Kinsey, a somewhat henpecked husband and moderately successful attorney who was now on his way to work in town, a good hour away; his wife was the dangerous one. Julia Kinsey had, through her strong personality and ideological inflexibility (not to mention her twenty-five-year-old swimmer's body and seductive eyes), become the ringleader of a local militia, and the NSA wanted to find out what connections her small band of weapons-hoarders had with other upper-midwestern anti-government groups. Watson coordinated the movements of seven agents as they surrounded the house.
"Remember, boys, at the very least we know that she has connections to machine gun dealers, so proceed with caution."
Watson began to sweat as the minutes passed. His radio suddenly crackled, making him jump. "No problems at all, boss. She was playing on her computer, and she didn't get to a phone or to a gun. We've got her cuffed and ready to take out of here."
"What you call playing on the computer our bosses call coordinating sedition, Jackson, but good job regardless. Be sure to leave the Arabic note out in the open, and get her in the van. I want to start working on her as soon as possible."
Tied to a sturdy chair, wearing a long dress, Julia would periodically poke a toe out from under the hem, like a mouse looking for a cat. She had maintained a strong presence for the first twenty minutes or so, making short speeches about liberty and government oppression to the one-way mirror before giving up on talking to herself. As she sat in solitude, finally getting quiet as she started to wonder whether anyone was coming, Watson observed her with his glasses, letting them get a good look at her and noticing that the program predicted vulnerable sides and hips on this one. Once more, except for the moments when her toes crept out, he could not get a read on them. He could, however, appreciate how this woman could become a leader among the paranoid set--her dark eyes did not sparkle so much as smolder, and her long black hair, still in its pony tail even after his team transported her to this bunker, shone even in the fluorescent light of her interrogation room. Watson was glad that the glasses did not cover up those particularly lovely things about the women that the government sent to him.
Ryan Watson was now two months in on his new duties for the NSA. After recruiting him away from the FBI, the NSA had put him in charge of a new program designed to assist in investigating and countering domestic terrorist groups, the sort that Julia's militia had the potential to be if circumstances fell right. His particular niche in that program was to develop means of coercive intimidation for the women involved in the operations, the sort that left no medically detectable damage and did not fall under conventional definitions of torture but nonetheless would cause enough distress that interrogators could more easily extract information.
Ryan Watson was a government tickle torturer.
To assist him in that role, the NSA was in the process of developing, with Watson's help, an augmented-reality system to make tickling scientific enough for interrogators' use. The glasses, equipped with a heads-up display that predicted the most ticklish spots on a woman based on body position, shapes of limbs and torso, and earlier reactions to tickling touches, would suggest not only locations to touch but also whether fingers, feathers, brushes, or the engraving tool that Watson had dulled down to a cruel vibrating tickling tip would bring the women the most discomfort. The government had flown Watson from one end of the nation to the other, and none of the state-college anarchists had lasted beyond the twenty minutes of feet-tickling that his handlers allowed him in the "first round"--none of them had all that much to lose, and with some promises of informant protection, they had all begged to be relocated rather than face the second round, which in theory lasted an hour but had not yet materialized.
Watson looked through the window at this beauty, hoping that she'd last through the first round. Obviously closer to his own age than the college-aged radicals had been, Miss Kinsey glared into the one-way mirror with an intensity that represented a challenge to the increasingly-confident "preparation man": he wanted to get inside this woman's head because he could tell there was enough in there to make it a challenge.
Ryan stood behind the official interrogator as he asked standard questions about contacts, the movement of shipments, and the flow of money. Predictably, the beautiful militia-girl answered every question with right-wing slogans and lines that sounded vaguely John Wayne. As the interrogator turned away from Julia and towards Watson to leave the room, he flashed him a brief grin--he knew full well what fun it was to watch Watson work a target. Watson's glasses, coming within range of Kinsey, started to light up as they assessed her body type, skin tone, and other variables that made for ticklish spots. As he walked forward, he grabbed his portable stocks, rolling them towards Kinsey.
"You really should have worn some shoes today, Julia."
"Yeah, I know--it's cold outside. Who the hell are you?"
Watson knelt and grabbed an ankle, prompting the futile kicking that always began his sessions, Watson quickly secured both feet in his padded restraint and took a step back. "Sorry we had to do that a bit rough, Julia, but it's for your own safety. Once we get started here, we can't have you moving around too much."
"You government stooge! When the citizens of Montana find out about this, we're going to sue you for everything you've got and put your little operation right out of business!"
Watson reached into his bag, casually began to look in a file folder, and ignored her threat. "So it says here that back in '06, you garnered some infamy online for some blog posts that defended water-boarding at Guantanamo Bay."
"Is that what this is? Are you going to torture a U.S. citizen?"
"No, dear. You forgot that terror suspects aren't really citizens, haven't you?"
"I'm no terrorist! Our group is a band of patriots!"
"You and Tim McVeigh, I'm sure. Nice website, by the way. I think it's bizarre how quickly you got back to being anti-government once the president switched, but I've never much understood politics." He pulled a short stool over close to her feet, sat in it, and opened his bag just enough so that Julia could see it was open. "Anyway, Julia, the reason I note this is because nothing we do today is going to be anything like water-boarding. Personally, I'd never try to drown anyone, American or otherwise."
Julia's face revealed the dilemma in her own mind: should she talk tough on terror, or should she stay quiet while she was ahead? The answer came quickly enough: "I didn't think you looked man enough to be tough on terrorism!"
"Oh, you're right, Julia, in this case. We're not going to be 'tough' on you at all. In fact, whether you admit it or not, you're going to like what happens to you today. And that's what's going to drive you crazy enough to talk to the interrogator."
Julia's face registered apprehension for a moment before regaining her composure. "You're not going to get in my head. I know my rights."
"Somehow I knew you'd say that." Noting that the glasses were pointing him to the soft skin between the ball and heel of her outstretched foot, Watson grabbed Julia's toes with his left hand and stretched them slightly backwards, a ritual that never lost its pleasure once it became his job. "Now Julia, since I'm not man enough to try to drown you, how about we just stimulate some of the nerve endings on the bottom of this foot?"
Julia's panic was evident, though she tried to put on a tough face. "Are you going to burn me or something?"
"No, dear. As I said, I don't think I could ever damage a prisoner's body. It just doesn't seem right. On the other hand, I might want to do this to a beautiful woman." And his fingers, now becoming practiced tools of his tormenting trade, began to stroke the sole of Julia's right foot. Even though he could pretty well predict at this point how the muscles of her face would broaden her mouth into a look of uncomfortable surprise, how her eyes would widen for a moment before they clamped down, the initial reactions still gave him a rush, and this session was going to be no exception. "As you can feel, Julia, what you're going to be experiencing over the next nineteen minutes is a sort of pleasure that you can't keep out of your mind and that I won't stop, no matter how scary it gets." Julia's mouth clamped shut, and he knew that the laugh was trying to get out. "You might as well let yourself laugh, Julia. It's going to happen sooner than you think." The glasses, doing their work as well as they always did, began to narrow the focus of the ticklish zones on her foot, drawing a slightly different pattern on the left foot. He knew that when he turned his attention to that sole the pattern would adjust, but as his fingers wriggled and rubbed and scratched the soft skin of her sole, the glasses, re-programmed after every session, were getting precise enough at this point almost to identify individual nerves' most likely spots to register tickling sensations.
Watson's thoughts were disrupted as Julia let forth a closed-lipped moan. The initial tickling exploration, of course, did more than set the glasses up to make the endgame more of a torment: it also loosened the prisoner up so that there would be no resistance left for that later, precise tickling that Watson had very nearly perfected. His fingers continued to work on her right sole, tracing the paths that the glasses charted for him over and over, sharpening up the image and tickling Julia worse and worse as her body betrayed her sensations to the computer. Watson never knew when or how a woman would break into laughter--the moment was as individual as her fingerprint--but it always was a satisfying moment. For Julia, the moment came as a trio of high-pitched whines, sounds that nobody would mistake for words, then a bubbling series of giggles punctuated with gasps for air. The sound was a drug to which Watson was fully addicted, and after playing her right foot for perhaps a minute longer, he quickly switched feet, catching the beautiful patriot off guard and drawing a scream of protest as he went to work on the left. As he worked on the other foot, the heads-up display on his goggles flashed to alert him that he'd been tickling her feet for nine minutes. It was time to start using some tools. But first, he wanted to play with her mind. He lifted both hands from her feet at once, and her neck slumped.
"As you can no doubt deduce, Julia, my own training, and your discomfort, has to do with tickling. It's a common enough sensation, at least for short bouts, but when I've had your feet at my disposal for twenty minutes, I'm sure you'll agree that it's almost unbearable for that span."
"I'm not giving up my men just because you're getting off on my feet!" Bright lines now punctuated both soles, and the skin between them glowed.
"Don't be so sure, Julia. Although tickling your soles with my fingertips has its own pleasure--I will grant you that--there are other ways I have of making you laugh. Let me plug this in." Julia's head raised, and Watson held up for her inspection an electric medical saw, the sort that cuts away plaster casts. After he had put the plug into the wall, he brought it closer to her face for her inspection. The metal disc on the end had been replaced by a four-pointed metal star, the edges of which were not sharp but covered with some kind of transparent red rubber tubing. The effect looked like some sort of drink coaster. Watson threw a switch, and the device leaped to life with a loud buzzing. Watson had to shout to be heard over the electric motor. "I'm going to enjoy putting this beauty between those lovely toes, Julia!"
Julia, panicking, clenched the toes on both feet together as tightly as she could, but all it took was a firm, slow tug on her pinky toe to start to separate the toes on her right foot, and as the fourth toe followed the pinky, Watson maneuvered the flexible star's edge between toes three and four. This time there was no resistance, no whining: Julia's voice soared as the tickling saw vibrated between her toes, her head thrashing as the sensations overwhelmed her. Watson just held the saw steady with both hands, moving slightly as her foot tried to escape but never letting the saw's modified blade, that tickling edge that caught her foot in the "V" easily enough, move far from the skin between the toes. Working that same tender bit of skin, Watson worked from the tube-covered point to the joint between the points, and Julia's laughter never got quieter than the saw's motor.
Five minutes left.
"I wanted to save my personal favorite tool for last, Julia. I'm sure before your career as an insurrection leader you've been to a shopping mall, right?" Julia caught her breath but could not manage a scowl as Watson reached into his bag. "I'm sure you have. Anyway, one of the big gift items towards Christmas time is the personalized Christmas ornament. They're all made out of cheap materials, of course, but there's something about one's name on the ornament that will make people drop cash. Right?"
"Go to Hell. I'm not telling you anything."
"We already covered this, Julia--you don't tell me anything anyway. It's the reporter who comes in after me." He pulled the battery-powered engraver, with fresh batteries, out of his bag. "Anyway. Back to my point. What they use is a tool like this. It's a great little racket for making a few bucks at the shopping mall, but once I filed down the tip so that it would be nice and round, it became a perfect weapon of sorts. And I want you to remember what this feels like so that you can cooperate with the nice man who comes in behind me."
Julia started to retort, but Watson had already turned on the engraver and hit one of those glowing lines right next to the center of the heel. Julia screamed as the ticklish vibrations shot up her leg, and Watson, one hand holding back the toes, slowly traced the nerve-line with the other. Julia thrashed and bucked, moving the heavy chair but never getting out of Watson's grip.
Three minutes.
Watson quickly set the engraver down, grabbed her other foot's toes with the hand he'd been tickling with, and picked up the engraver with his dominant hand. He liked to start with his off hand when he used the engraver so that the home stretch would be as precise and as full of torment as possible, and Julia's gasping, shrieking laughter was a reward that just kept on rolling. The tip of the engraver slowly, deliciously traced its way up the glowing line that the glasses gave him, and Julia was laughing and gasping like a woman about to break.
Thirty seconds.
Watson brought the tip of the engraver within a centimeter of the center of the sole, then pulled back. He leaned in with a sneer. "I knew you were weak, Julia. I bet you squeal like a pig before the door even closes behind me! Terrorists like you never do stand up to what good Americans like me can dish out!"
Time was up.
As Watson walked out, he could hear the steel coming back into her voice as she cursed him. As he walked into the observation room to watch the interrogation, his commanding officer fixed him with a glare.
"What the hell was that, Watson? Do you WANT her to refuse to talk?"
Watson's only response was a slight smile.
"Oh, I see. You've got a little crush on Miss Tea Party in there, and you want to have her naked."
"Well, we never have had a chance to try out stage two. We might as well try it out here, and maybe we'll have something to offer the boys down in Gitmo."
"Or you might find out that you've just missed an opportunity to break up a domestic terrorism ring. Your libido is writing checks that this agency can't cash, Watson."
"Oh, there's money in the bank. Just watch and learn, boss."
When Watson entered the room again, the chair had been replaced by a modified surgeon's table, and Julia was stretched out naked on it. Padded leather straps held her calves and wrists, and her neck was free to move about. She lifted her head slightly to observe him and his second bag, this one brown leather, in his hand.
"I told your buddy that this was no way to treat a citizen, but the goons who stripped me don't seem to care. You do realize there's trouble coming for you, don't you? I'm going to take your agency to court for rape, and that'll be the end for you!"
"Not if you tell our people where your safe houses are first, Julia. Then you'll have to go into witness protection to protect yourself from the ones who remain. No court case then, huh?" He set the bag down next to his stool for this session.
"What, are you going to tickle me again? Look, bub, this is fourth-grade stuff. I was a pretty girl even back then. The boys used to tickle me on the playground."
"I'll bet they did. But I'll bet you didn't get turned on like you were getting turned on with me earlier."
Julia's blush, along with her anger, brought a red flush to her tanned complexion. "I was not getting turned on, you creep! You were tickling me, and I was laughing. That's it."
"Are you willing to bet on that?"
"What do I have to bet right now?"
"I suppose you're right. But let's test it anyway, shall we?" He reached into his new bag, which was sitting next to his black bag. As his hand emerged, Julia could see that he was holding a shallow jar of something, about the size of a can of chip dip.
"What the hell is that?"
"It's a biofeedback chemical, Julia. Do you know what pheromones are?"
"Yeah. It's what animals give off when they're in heat."
"And of course, human beings are at our roots animals. Now, this stuff is specially engineered so that when your pheromones start coming out of your skin, it bonds with those pheromones and creates an airborne aroma. When that aroma gets back into your nose, it sends a biofeedback signal to your nerve endings to increase sensitivity."
"What are you saying?"
"The more you get turned on, the more ticklish you get!" Julia suddenly tugged at her bonds, and Watson laughed out loud. "What happened to 'you creep'? It looks like you're getting genuinely worried here!" She strained against her bonds as he dipped out a generous glop with two fingers. As he began to smear the goop on her sternum and up towards her collarbones, he leaned in. "And you won't even believe what you're going to feel if you climax. What comes after that--do you get the pun?--will be like nothing any man or any woman has ever done to you."
"You're just trying to get inside my head, you stooge! I've never cheated on my husband!"
Watson laughed as his back straightened out. "I didn't say you had, Julia. But it doesn't matter. Shall we begin?" He wrapped her left foot in his strong hand, long fingers grasping the smooth flesh and his thumb resting on the crescent of her foot. His other hand's fingers began to flutter on her sole, not with the frenzied pace of the last session but as a guitar player might pluck strings. "Don't get excited now, alright?" Julia's resistance did not last nearly as long this time; within a minute she was laughing, not gasping as she had the last time but nonetheless reacting nicely to the ticklish touches and strokes on the smooth skin of her sole. Watson tried to keep his focus on the sole and the lines that the glasses were laying out for him as targets, but his eyes kept drifting up to her writhing body, itself developing the glowing targets that the goggles painted on any target. Watson licked his lips, switched hands, and started working on her right foot. He wasn't going for the kill just yet; her body was too delicious to behold, and he wanted to enjoy using those hips and that tummy really to break her. But her feet were the gateway to that undiscovered country, and his fingers were pushing her just far enough, drawing her just close enough to desperation, to make her naked body respond instantly to every touch, her resistance already rinsed away by the stream of her laughter.
When he first imagined having Julia naked he thought he'd want to make a sudden switch from feet to torso, but his interrogator's instincts kicked in, and he stopped tickling her feet and leaned in close to her face first. Fear, he remembered, was what made discomfort worth inflicting for an interrogator. "Now, Julia, I'm going to start touching your body. You're not going to be able to stop my fingers from going wherever they want. I'm going to find out just where to tickle you, find that spot that would make you break a man's arm just for touching it, and I'm going to keep tickling that spot. You know why? Because it's going to turn you on to have someone touch you there. What do you think of that?"
Julia, catching her breath, looked around the room for an escape, for help, for anything.
"How does that pheromone solution smell now? You've been breathing it in--when you start getting turned on, I'll know it--every touch is going to tickle you more than you thought you could get ticklish, and you're going to have no way to stop me. Shall we start?" As he spoke, he saw her hips and the area where a panty line would hit a woman with clothes glowing, inviting him to touch and enjoy. The computer was predicting that her lower torso was going to be his goldmine, and that suited Agent Watson just fine. He twisted his fingers into claws, raising them high so that Julia could see them well, and began a slow descent towards her lower abdomen. Julia was screaming before he even touched her, and when he did begin to pinch her hips, rubbing them gently with each fingertip as he applied pressure and rubbed across her skin, her hips began a desperate dance to get away, and Watson, although he had never had the chance to take a target into this stage, danced every move with her, following her body up and down with his hands and tickling without stop. Julia's hair thrashed, and wonderful squeals punctuated her laughter as Watson worked the ticklish spots just around her pelvis over and over. Her sides were starting to light up now, the most intense areas flashing underneath her ribs, and Watson followed--was it the glasses or his own instincts?--up her sides rather than to the center of her body. A few sustained pokes under the ribs raised a new howl of laughter, and Watson continued to work her sides, his fingers holding her slim body in place as the insides of his thumbs pressed in over and over, throwing Julia into gasping bouts of giggles.
His fingers switched from prodding like claws to the flurrying pecks of a typist as his hands moved up to her underarms. Beneath his ravenous eyes, the fruits of editing all of that tickling video footage was becoming reality: Julia's naked body pulsed with ticklish zones, and as his fingers continued to work as if on autopilot, and as Julia's laughter became by the minute more desperate and breathless, he saw rivers of sensitivity flowing from under her ribs, across her hips and down the middle of her belly, forming not so much a sea as a saddle around her lower body. Where his fingers did their ticklish work, more streams ran down, then up, culminating in those wonderful twin hills, glowing so much that, in a moment of fancy, he thought might light up the whole room. Watson withdrew his hands and held them aloft, triumphing in his ticklish recital. Julia panted as she collected her breath. Having mastered her body, he fought hard to keep his own from exploding.
Twenty minutes.
"You're starting to realize it, Julia. This isn't like anything you're ready for. Pain always comes at you from the outside. What you're feeling right now, what the solution is doing even as you breathe it in, is changing everything inside you." He unzipped the main compartment of his tickling tool bag slowly. "You thought if you wanted to keep your secrets badly enough, you could stand up to me. But now you're starting to want this. And when I'm done with you, there's nothing else you'll want more. No, there's no way you'll be able to imagine wanting anything more." With a flourish, he produced two long, stiff feathers, presenting them in large circular waves and finishing his motion with each feather's blade pointing straight upward, shaft between his thumb and forefinger. Each looked like an assassin's dagger, long and pointed.
"No..."
"Yes, Julia. What I want to hear is 'Yes.' And I'm going to teach you how to say it!" With a quick sawing motion he drew the feather in his right hand across her right breast, starting with the base of the blade and making sure that all of it, down to the tip, ran its torturous course across that most sensitive skin. Julia's mouth contorted in a moan of despair and of pleasure. With his left thumb and forefinger he began to twirl the second, drawing it closer and closer to Julia's left breast until the spinning feather-blade started making rapid contacts. She screamed at the sensation and began to beg. Watson leered. "Just think, Julia. Every little bit you get turned on now is going to pay me back big when I get ahold of your most ticklish spots in just a little bit. And I know where they are now! I think you should have cooperated with the interrogator!" All the while the feather continued to spin, first clockwise, then counter, then clockwise, then counter, and Julia's nipples were already standing at attention. His right hand began to trace large semicircles on the left breast now, the nipple and the flesh each receiving a particular sort of touch from the feathers. As the feather in his left hand continued to spin, he moved back to the sawing motion, and Julia's mouth was letting forth sounds that she'd never heard herself make. Whether it was a laugh or a moan, a squeal or a gasp, the sounds began to run together, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Watson kept working her left breast--he knew this would not render her unconscious--and Julia's tortured sounds made him feel intoxicated. Julia's breath got shorter and shorter, and Watson backed off, reaching into his ticking bag for the engraving tool.
"Now's the fun part, Julia. I'm going to turn this on and stick it to the table about an inch from your body. It'll never touch your body if you don't want it to, but if you pull yourself down on it, you might be able to get off. But you know as well as I do that getting off is going to make your nerve endings explode, and when they do, I'm going to be all over it. So how much can you deny yourself, Julia? I want to see." Watson stuck a piece of two-sided tape to the engraving tool so that its tip pointed up just slightly, and with a press of his thumb it came to life. Julia moaned slightly--she could feel the vibrations in the air. Her eyes shut tightly as she fought the impulse to pull on her ankle restraints. Watson laughed out loud as he picked up his feathers again. With two slow, agonizing, delicious downward movements, the blades of each feather, starting at the lowermost point, ran their way, inch by inch, over Julia's breasts at the same time. This time there was no mixture--with the air between her legs vibrating, with nothing but an inch of empty space between her and satisfaction, the feathers' touches produced a moan that Watson and Kinsey knew was the beginning of the end. Watson started again at each feather-blade's base, and the instruments of torture ran down her breasts again. At this point talk was worthless: Julia and Ryan knew that this was going to go on, that he was going to keep her on the edge of orgasm, until she flexed her legs and invited it. Another stroke. Another. Watson began the fifth stroke, then stopped until Julia looked at him out of her reverie, then continued. And again. And again.
Forty minutes.
The feathers had become the tongues of lovers to Julia, each pass sending her farther than she had imagined before into her own body, her own pleasure. Every touch tickled in ways that she could not describe, but the erotic charge, pulling at her from behind her ears all the way down to her ticklish soles, made it impossible to laugh through her own moaning. Still the engraving tool vibrated, inviting her. Every inch of her body was becoming one ticklish nerve ending, and those feathers still managed to make her think that her own breasts must be the most ticklish flesh in the entire human race. What voice of conscience remained strove, told her that she could not flex, could not betray her husband.
Then her knees flexed.
The engraving tool did not enter her, but it did not have to--even the glancing blow sent her into a thrashing climax, and Watson put away the feathers as her body settled down. He let Julia lie silently and the clock run down to five minutes left before he spoke again. "I want you to look at these feathers, Julia." Her eyes opened, and she could see in his hands two feathers, perhaps as long as inkpens, shiny and stiff. Her breathing began to quicken as her panicked memory recalled the pheromone solution. "What you're about to experience will be nothing like anything you've felt before, from a man or from a woman. And if you don't cooperate with our interrogators this time, we're going to turn you over to our lesbian Saudi operatives, and they're going to make you feel this for days at a time before the interrogator comes back. Do you understand?"
Julia nodded.
"This is the feeling that used to keep harem girls satisfied with only having a tenth of a man to themselves. When one of them was getting lonely, the girls would do to the lonely one what I just did to you. Of course, those ancient harem girls didn't have the solution. Our agents from Baghdad will. When they've got ahold of you, you'll be calling out to Allah just to get off one more time. You'll want those women more than you've wanted anything in your life, and they'll keep you right where they want you until they take your very soul. But I've only got four minutes left, so let me leave you with some reasons not to cross me again, alright?"
When the tip of the black, shiny feather ran its course from Julia Kinsey's heel to the ball of her foot, a screaming laugh filled the room, and everyone in Julia's interrogation room and the next knew that she had nothing left to fight with.
When three more minutes had elapsed, the door opened behind Watson, and the agent lifted the feathers. Julia Kinsey's feet twitched in muscle memory from the feather-tickling, and Watson's commanding officer escorted him to the observation room.
"Lesbian Saudi operatives, huh?"
"Hey, I did learn in agent training that fear was better than pain in interrogation. Once she realized that she wanted more, I could make her think that she might desire what she hates and fears most. I had her right where I wanted her."
"I'm just glad the poor kid didn't make it to round three--I'd hate to see what happens one level of mean up from that. Actually, Watson, on that note, I've got some interesting news for you. The CIA wants you down in Gitmo next week."
"I'm not going to have to tickle dudes, am I?"
"No, no. Women terror suspects."
"They keep women at Gitmo?"
"Where the cameras can't see them, sure. I just put in a phone call recommending you--I think what you did here can be immensely helpful for getting operative info."
"Thanks for the recommendation, sir. Am I done here?"
"Pack your bags and await further orders. Oh, and Watson?"
"Yes, sir?"
"What was that gunk you put on her chest?"
"Hall's Vap-O-Rub mixed with cinnamon, sir. Absolutely no physiological effect. It just let her mind go where her body already wanted to."
KI
Augmented
by
Kid Indy
To say the weather in Montana is unforgiving in the winter does not begin to capture the reality. NSA Agent Ryan Watson took what comfort he could from a cup of coffee as he maintained radio contact with the other two vans on the stakeout. This November Monday morning the world gave him a little favor in that Greg Kinsey did in fact leave for work just a few minutes early. Ryan gave the signal for his team to synchronize their timers: their plan was to initiate the strike ten minutes after Kinsey left the house, and an agent would tail him to make sure he went to work, giving an abort signal if he turned back.
He did not turn back.
The target of this raid was not Greg Kinsey, a somewhat henpecked husband and moderately successful attorney who was now on his way to work in town, a good hour away; his wife was the dangerous one. Julia Kinsey had, through her strong personality and ideological inflexibility (not to mention her twenty-five-year-old swimmer's body and seductive eyes), become the ringleader of a local militia, and the NSA wanted to find out what connections her small band of weapons-hoarders had with other upper-midwestern anti-government groups. Watson coordinated the movements of seven agents as they surrounded the house.
"Remember, boys, at the very least we know that she has connections to machine gun dealers, so proceed with caution."
Watson began to sweat as the minutes passed. His radio suddenly crackled, making him jump. "No problems at all, boss. She was playing on her computer, and she didn't get to a phone or to a gun. We've got her cuffed and ready to take out of here."
"What you call playing on the computer our bosses call coordinating sedition, Jackson, but good job regardless. Be sure to leave the Arabic note out in the open, and get her in the van. I want to start working on her as soon as possible."
Tied to a sturdy chair, wearing a long dress, Julia would periodically poke a toe out from under the hem, like a mouse looking for a cat. She had maintained a strong presence for the first twenty minutes or so, making short speeches about liberty and government oppression to the one-way mirror before giving up on talking to herself. As she sat in solitude, finally getting quiet as she started to wonder whether anyone was coming, Watson observed her with his glasses, letting them get a good look at her and noticing that the program predicted vulnerable sides and hips on this one. Once more, except for the moments when her toes crept out, he could not get a read on them. He could, however, appreciate how this woman could become a leader among the paranoid set--her dark eyes did not sparkle so much as smolder, and her long black hair, still in its pony tail even after his team transported her to this bunker, shone even in the fluorescent light of her interrogation room. Watson was glad that the glasses did not cover up those particularly lovely things about the women that the government sent to him.
Ryan Watson was now two months in on his new duties for the NSA. After recruiting him away from the FBI, the NSA had put him in charge of a new program designed to assist in investigating and countering domestic terrorist groups, the sort that Julia's militia had the potential to be if circumstances fell right. His particular niche in that program was to develop means of coercive intimidation for the women involved in the operations, the sort that left no medically detectable damage and did not fall under conventional definitions of torture but nonetheless would cause enough distress that interrogators could more easily extract information.
Ryan Watson was a government tickle torturer.
To assist him in that role, the NSA was in the process of developing, with Watson's help, an augmented-reality system to make tickling scientific enough for interrogators' use. The glasses, equipped with a heads-up display that predicted the most ticklish spots on a woman based on body position, shapes of limbs and torso, and earlier reactions to tickling touches, would suggest not only locations to touch but also whether fingers, feathers, brushes, or the engraving tool that Watson had dulled down to a cruel vibrating tickling tip would bring the women the most discomfort. The government had flown Watson from one end of the nation to the other, and none of the state-college anarchists had lasted beyond the twenty minutes of feet-tickling that his handlers allowed him in the "first round"--none of them had all that much to lose, and with some promises of informant protection, they had all begged to be relocated rather than face the second round, which in theory lasted an hour but had not yet materialized.
Watson looked through the window at this beauty, hoping that she'd last through the first round. Obviously closer to his own age than the college-aged radicals had been, Miss Kinsey glared into the one-way mirror with an intensity that represented a challenge to the increasingly-confident "preparation man": he wanted to get inside this woman's head because he could tell there was enough in there to make it a challenge.
Ryan stood behind the official interrogator as he asked standard questions about contacts, the movement of shipments, and the flow of money. Predictably, the beautiful militia-girl answered every question with right-wing slogans and lines that sounded vaguely John Wayne. As the interrogator turned away from Julia and towards Watson to leave the room, he flashed him a brief grin--he knew full well what fun it was to watch Watson work a target. Watson's glasses, coming within range of Kinsey, started to light up as they assessed her body type, skin tone, and other variables that made for ticklish spots. As he walked forward, he grabbed his portable stocks, rolling them towards Kinsey.
"You really should have worn some shoes today, Julia."
"Yeah, I know--it's cold outside. Who the hell are you?"
Watson knelt and grabbed an ankle, prompting the futile kicking that always began his sessions, Watson quickly secured both feet in his padded restraint and took a step back. "Sorry we had to do that a bit rough, Julia, but it's for your own safety. Once we get started here, we can't have you moving around too much."
"You government stooge! When the citizens of Montana find out about this, we're going to sue you for everything you've got and put your little operation right out of business!"
Watson reached into his bag, casually began to look in a file folder, and ignored her threat. "So it says here that back in '06, you garnered some infamy online for some blog posts that defended water-boarding at Guantanamo Bay."
"Is that what this is? Are you going to torture a U.S. citizen?"
"No, dear. You forgot that terror suspects aren't really citizens, haven't you?"
"I'm no terrorist! Our group is a band of patriots!"
"You and Tim McVeigh, I'm sure. Nice website, by the way. I think it's bizarre how quickly you got back to being anti-government once the president switched, but I've never much understood politics." He pulled a short stool over close to her feet, sat in it, and opened his bag just enough so that Julia could see it was open. "Anyway, Julia, the reason I note this is because nothing we do today is going to be anything like water-boarding. Personally, I'd never try to drown anyone, American or otherwise."
Julia's face revealed the dilemma in her own mind: should she talk tough on terror, or should she stay quiet while she was ahead? The answer came quickly enough: "I didn't think you looked man enough to be tough on terrorism!"
"Oh, you're right, Julia, in this case. We're not going to be 'tough' on you at all. In fact, whether you admit it or not, you're going to like what happens to you today. And that's what's going to drive you crazy enough to talk to the interrogator."
Julia's face registered apprehension for a moment before regaining her composure. "You're not going to get in my head. I know my rights."
"Somehow I knew you'd say that." Noting that the glasses were pointing him to the soft skin between the ball and heel of her outstretched foot, Watson grabbed Julia's toes with his left hand and stretched them slightly backwards, a ritual that never lost its pleasure once it became his job. "Now Julia, since I'm not man enough to try to drown you, how about we just stimulate some of the nerve endings on the bottom of this foot?"
Julia's panic was evident, though she tried to put on a tough face. "Are you going to burn me or something?"
"No, dear. As I said, I don't think I could ever damage a prisoner's body. It just doesn't seem right. On the other hand, I might want to do this to a beautiful woman." And his fingers, now becoming practiced tools of his tormenting trade, began to stroke the sole of Julia's right foot. Even though he could pretty well predict at this point how the muscles of her face would broaden her mouth into a look of uncomfortable surprise, how her eyes would widen for a moment before they clamped down, the initial reactions still gave him a rush, and this session was going to be no exception. "As you can feel, Julia, what you're going to be experiencing over the next nineteen minutes is a sort of pleasure that you can't keep out of your mind and that I won't stop, no matter how scary it gets." Julia's mouth clamped shut, and he knew that the laugh was trying to get out. "You might as well let yourself laugh, Julia. It's going to happen sooner than you think." The glasses, doing their work as well as they always did, began to narrow the focus of the ticklish zones on her foot, drawing a slightly different pattern on the left foot. He knew that when he turned his attention to that sole the pattern would adjust, but as his fingers wriggled and rubbed and scratched the soft skin of her sole, the glasses, re-programmed after every session, were getting precise enough at this point almost to identify individual nerves' most likely spots to register tickling sensations.
Watson's thoughts were disrupted as Julia let forth a closed-lipped moan. The initial tickling exploration, of course, did more than set the glasses up to make the endgame more of a torment: it also loosened the prisoner up so that there would be no resistance left for that later, precise tickling that Watson had very nearly perfected. His fingers continued to work on her right sole, tracing the paths that the glasses charted for him over and over, sharpening up the image and tickling Julia worse and worse as her body betrayed her sensations to the computer. Watson never knew when or how a woman would break into laughter--the moment was as individual as her fingerprint--but it always was a satisfying moment. For Julia, the moment came as a trio of high-pitched whines, sounds that nobody would mistake for words, then a bubbling series of giggles punctuated with gasps for air. The sound was a drug to which Watson was fully addicted, and after playing her right foot for perhaps a minute longer, he quickly switched feet, catching the beautiful patriot off guard and drawing a scream of protest as he went to work on the left. As he worked on the other foot, the heads-up display on his goggles flashed to alert him that he'd been tickling her feet for nine minutes. It was time to start using some tools. But first, he wanted to play with her mind. He lifted both hands from her feet at once, and her neck slumped.
"As you can no doubt deduce, Julia, my own training, and your discomfort, has to do with tickling. It's a common enough sensation, at least for short bouts, but when I've had your feet at my disposal for twenty minutes, I'm sure you'll agree that it's almost unbearable for that span."
"I'm not giving up my men just because you're getting off on my feet!" Bright lines now punctuated both soles, and the skin between them glowed.
"Don't be so sure, Julia. Although tickling your soles with my fingertips has its own pleasure--I will grant you that--there are other ways I have of making you laugh. Let me plug this in." Julia's head raised, and Watson held up for her inspection an electric medical saw, the sort that cuts away plaster casts. After he had put the plug into the wall, he brought it closer to her face for her inspection. The metal disc on the end had been replaced by a four-pointed metal star, the edges of which were not sharp but covered with some kind of transparent red rubber tubing. The effect looked like some sort of drink coaster. Watson threw a switch, and the device leaped to life with a loud buzzing. Watson had to shout to be heard over the electric motor. "I'm going to enjoy putting this beauty between those lovely toes, Julia!"
Julia, panicking, clenched the toes on both feet together as tightly as she could, but all it took was a firm, slow tug on her pinky toe to start to separate the toes on her right foot, and as the fourth toe followed the pinky, Watson maneuvered the flexible star's edge between toes three and four. This time there was no resistance, no whining: Julia's voice soared as the tickling saw vibrated between her toes, her head thrashing as the sensations overwhelmed her. Watson just held the saw steady with both hands, moving slightly as her foot tried to escape but never letting the saw's modified blade, that tickling edge that caught her foot in the "V" easily enough, move far from the skin between the toes. Working that same tender bit of skin, Watson worked from the tube-covered point to the joint between the points, and Julia's laughter never got quieter than the saw's motor.
Five minutes left.
"I wanted to save my personal favorite tool for last, Julia. I'm sure before your career as an insurrection leader you've been to a shopping mall, right?" Julia caught her breath but could not manage a scowl as Watson reached into his bag. "I'm sure you have. Anyway, one of the big gift items towards Christmas time is the personalized Christmas ornament. They're all made out of cheap materials, of course, but there's something about one's name on the ornament that will make people drop cash. Right?"
"Go to Hell. I'm not telling you anything."
"We already covered this, Julia--you don't tell me anything anyway. It's the reporter who comes in after me." He pulled the battery-powered engraver, with fresh batteries, out of his bag. "Anyway. Back to my point. What they use is a tool like this. It's a great little racket for making a few bucks at the shopping mall, but once I filed down the tip so that it would be nice and round, it became a perfect weapon of sorts. And I want you to remember what this feels like so that you can cooperate with the nice man who comes in behind me."
Julia started to retort, but Watson had already turned on the engraver and hit one of those glowing lines right next to the center of the heel. Julia screamed as the ticklish vibrations shot up her leg, and Watson, one hand holding back the toes, slowly traced the nerve-line with the other. Julia thrashed and bucked, moving the heavy chair but never getting out of Watson's grip.
Three minutes.
Watson quickly set the engraver down, grabbed her other foot's toes with the hand he'd been tickling with, and picked up the engraver with his dominant hand. He liked to start with his off hand when he used the engraver so that the home stretch would be as precise and as full of torment as possible, and Julia's gasping, shrieking laughter was a reward that just kept on rolling. The tip of the engraver slowly, deliciously traced its way up the glowing line that the glasses gave him, and Julia was laughing and gasping like a woman about to break.
Thirty seconds.
Watson brought the tip of the engraver within a centimeter of the center of the sole, then pulled back. He leaned in with a sneer. "I knew you were weak, Julia. I bet you squeal like a pig before the door even closes behind me! Terrorists like you never do stand up to what good Americans like me can dish out!"
Time was up.
As Watson walked out, he could hear the steel coming back into her voice as she cursed him. As he walked into the observation room to watch the interrogation, his commanding officer fixed him with a glare.
"What the hell was that, Watson? Do you WANT her to refuse to talk?"
Watson's only response was a slight smile.
"Oh, I see. You've got a little crush on Miss Tea Party in there, and you want to have her naked."
"Well, we never have had a chance to try out stage two. We might as well try it out here, and maybe we'll have something to offer the boys down in Gitmo."
"Or you might find out that you've just missed an opportunity to break up a domestic terrorism ring. Your libido is writing checks that this agency can't cash, Watson."
"Oh, there's money in the bank. Just watch and learn, boss."
When Watson entered the room again, the chair had been replaced by a modified surgeon's table, and Julia was stretched out naked on it. Padded leather straps held her calves and wrists, and her neck was free to move about. She lifted her head slightly to observe him and his second bag, this one brown leather, in his hand.
"I told your buddy that this was no way to treat a citizen, but the goons who stripped me don't seem to care. You do realize there's trouble coming for you, don't you? I'm going to take your agency to court for rape, and that'll be the end for you!"
"Not if you tell our people where your safe houses are first, Julia. Then you'll have to go into witness protection to protect yourself from the ones who remain. No court case then, huh?" He set the bag down next to his stool for this session.
"What, are you going to tickle me again? Look, bub, this is fourth-grade stuff. I was a pretty girl even back then. The boys used to tickle me on the playground."
"I'll bet they did. But I'll bet you didn't get turned on like you were getting turned on with me earlier."
Julia's blush, along with her anger, brought a red flush to her tanned complexion. "I was not getting turned on, you creep! You were tickling me, and I was laughing. That's it."
"Are you willing to bet on that?"
"What do I have to bet right now?"
"I suppose you're right. But let's test it anyway, shall we?" He reached into his new bag, which was sitting next to his black bag. As his hand emerged, Julia could see that he was holding a shallow jar of something, about the size of a can of chip dip.
"What the hell is that?"
"It's a biofeedback chemical, Julia. Do you know what pheromones are?"
"Yeah. It's what animals give off when they're in heat."
"And of course, human beings are at our roots animals. Now, this stuff is specially engineered so that when your pheromones start coming out of your skin, it bonds with those pheromones and creates an airborne aroma. When that aroma gets back into your nose, it sends a biofeedback signal to your nerve endings to increase sensitivity."
"What are you saying?"
"The more you get turned on, the more ticklish you get!" Julia suddenly tugged at her bonds, and Watson laughed out loud. "What happened to 'you creep'? It looks like you're getting genuinely worried here!" She strained against her bonds as he dipped out a generous glop with two fingers. As he began to smear the goop on her sternum and up towards her collarbones, he leaned in. "And you won't even believe what you're going to feel if you climax. What comes after that--do you get the pun?--will be like nothing any man or any woman has ever done to you."
"You're just trying to get inside my head, you stooge! I've never cheated on my husband!"
Watson laughed as his back straightened out. "I didn't say you had, Julia. But it doesn't matter. Shall we begin?" He wrapped her left foot in his strong hand, long fingers grasping the smooth flesh and his thumb resting on the crescent of her foot. His other hand's fingers began to flutter on her sole, not with the frenzied pace of the last session but as a guitar player might pluck strings. "Don't get excited now, alright?" Julia's resistance did not last nearly as long this time; within a minute she was laughing, not gasping as she had the last time but nonetheless reacting nicely to the ticklish touches and strokes on the smooth skin of her sole. Watson tried to keep his focus on the sole and the lines that the glasses were laying out for him as targets, but his eyes kept drifting up to her writhing body, itself developing the glowing targets that the goggles painted on any target. Watson licked his lips, switched hands, and started working on her right foot. He wasn't going for the kill just yet; her body was too delicious to behold, and he wanted to enjoy using those hips and that tummy really to break her. But her feet were the gateway to that undiscovered country, and his fingers were pushing her just far enough, drawing her just close enough to desperation, to make her naked body respond instantly to every touch, her resistance already rinsed away by the stream of her laughter.
When he first imagined having Julia naked he thought he'd want to make a sudden switch from feet to torso, but his interrogator's instincts kicked in, and he stopped tickling her feet and leaned in close to her face first. Fear, he remembered, was what made discomfort worth inflicting for an interrogator. "Now, Julia, I'm going to start touching your body. You're not going to be able to stop my fingers from going wherever they want. I'm going to find out just where to tickle you, find that spot that would make you break a man's arm just for touching it, and I'm going to keep tickling that spot. You know why? Because it's going to turn you on to have someone touch you there. What do you think of that?"
Julia, catching her breath, looked around the room for an escape, for help, for anything.
"How does that pheromone solution smell now? You've been breathing it in--when you start getting turned on, I'll know it--every touch is going to tickle you more than you thought you could get ticklish, and you're going to have no way to stop me. Shall we start?" As he spoke, he saw her hips and the area where a panty line would hit a woman with clothes glowing, inviting him to touch and enjoy. The computer was predicting that her lower torso was going to be his goldmine, and that suited Agent Watson just fine. He twisted his fingers into claws, raising them high so that Julia could see them well, and began a slow descent towards her lower abdomen. Julia was screaming before he even touched her, and when he did begin to pinch her hips, rubbing them gently with each fingertip as he applied pressure and rubbed across her skin, her hips began a desperate dance to get away, and Watson, although he had never had the chance to take a target into this stage, danced every move with her, following her body up and down with his hands and tickling without stop. Julia's hair thrashed, and wonderful squeals punctuated her laughter as Watson worked the ticklish spots just around her pelvis over and over. Her sides were starting to light up now, the most intense areas flashing underneath her ribs, and Watson followed--was it the glasses or his own instincts?--up her sides rather than to the center of her body. A few sustained pokes under the ribs raised a new howl of laughter, and Watson continued to work her sides, his fingers holding her slim body in place as the insides of his thumbs pressed in over and over, throwing Julia into gasping bouts of giggles.
His fingers switched from prodding like claws to the flurrying pecks of a typist as his hands moved up to her underarms. Beneath his ravenous eyes, the fruits of editing all of that tickling video footage was becoming reality: Julia's naked body pulsed with ticklish zones, and as his fingers continued to work as if on autopilot, and as Julia's laughter became by the minute more desperate and breathless, he saw rivers of sensitivity flowing from under her ribs, across her hips and down the middle of her belly, forming not so much a sea as a saddle around her lower body. Where his fingers did their ticklish work, more streams ran down, then up, culminating in those wonderful twin hills, glowing so much that, in a moment of fancy, he thought might light up the whole room. Watson withdrew his hands and held them aloft, triumphing in his ticklish recital. Julia panted as she collected her breath. Having mastered her body, he fought hard to keep his own from exploding.
Twenty minutes.
"You're starting to realize it, Julia. This isn't like anything you're ready for. Pain always comes at you from the outside. What you're feeling right now, what the solution is doing even as you breathe it in, is changing everything inside you." He unzipped the main compartment of his tickling tool bag slowly. "You thought if you wanted to keep your secrets badly enough, you could stand up to me. But now you're starting to want this. And when I'm done with you, there's nothing else you'll want more. No, there's no way you'll be able to imagine wanting anything more." With a flourish, he produced two long, stiff feathers, presenting them in large circular waves and finishing his motion with each feather's blade pointing straight upward, shaft between his thumb and forefinger. Each looked like an assassin's dagger, long and pointed.
"No..."
"Yes, Julia. What I want to hear is 'Yes.' And I'm going to teach you how to say it!" With a quick sawing motion he drew the feather in his right hand across her right breast, starting with the base of the blade and making sure that all of it, down to the tip, ran its torturous course across that most sensitive skin. Julia's mouth contorted in a moan of despair and of pleasure. With his left thumb and forefinger he began to twirl the second, drawing it closer and closer to Julia's left breast until the spinning feather-blade started making rapid contacts. She screamed at the sensation and began to beg. Watson leered. "Just think, Julia. Every little bit you get turned on now is going to pay me back big when I get ahold of your most ticklish spots in just a little bit. And I know where they are now! I think you should have cooperated with the interrogator!" All the while the feather continued to spin, first clockwise, then counter, then clockwise, then counter, and Julia's nipples were already standing at attention. His right hand began to trace large semicircles on the left breast now, the nipple and the flesh each receiving a particular sort of touch from the feathers. As the feather in his left hand continued to spin, he moved back to the sawing motion, and Julia's mouth was letting forth sounds that she'd never heard herself make. Whether it was a laugh or a moan, a squeal or a gasp, the sounds began to run together, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Watson kept working her left breast--he knew this would not render her unconscious--and Julia's tortured sounds made him feel intoxicated. Julia's breath got shorter and shorter, and Watson backed off, reaching into his ticking bag for the engraving tool.
"Now's the fun part, Julia. I'm going to turn this on and stick it to the table about an inch from your body. It'll never touch your body if you don't want it to, but if you pull yourself down on it, you might be able to get off. But you know as well as I do that getting off is going to make your nerve endings explode, and when they do, I'm going to be all over it. So how much can you deny yourself, Julia? I want to see." Watson stuck a piece of two-sided tape to the engraving tool so that its tip pointed up just slightly, and with a press of his thumb it came to life. Julia moaned slightly--she could feel the vibrations in the air. Her eyes shut tightly as she fought the impulse to pull on her ankle restraints. Watson laughed out loud as he picked up his feathers again. With two slow, agonizing, delicious downward movements, the blades of each feather, starting at the lowermost point, ran their way, inch by inch, over Julia's breasts at the same time. This time there was no mixture--with the air between her legs vibrating, with nothing but an inch of empty space between her and satisfaction, the feathers' touches produced a moan that Watson and Kinsey knew was the beginning of the end. Watson started again at each feather-blade's base, and the instruments of torture ran down her breasts again. At this point talk was worthless: Julia and Ryan knew that this was going to go on, that he was going to keep her on the edge of orgasm, until she flexed her legs and invited it. Another stroke. Another. Watson began the fifth stroke, then stopped until Julia looked at him out of her reverie, then continued. And again. And again.
Forty minutes.
The feathers had become the tongues of lovers to Julia, each pass sending her farther than she had imagined before into her own body, her own pleasure. Every touch tickled in ways that she could not describe, but the erotic charge, pulling at her from behind her ears all the way down to her ticklish soles, made it impossible to laugh through her own moaning. Still the engraving tool vibrated, inviting her. Every inch of her body was becoming one ticklish nerve ending, and those feathers still managed to make her think that her own breasts must be the most ticklish flesh in the entire human race. What voice of conscience remained strove, told her that she could not flex, could not betray her husband.
Then her knees flexed.
The engraving tool did not enter her, but it did not have to--even the glancing blow sent her into a thrashing climax, and Watson put away the feathers as her body settled down. He let Julia lie silently and the clock run down to five minutes left before he spoke again. "I want you to look at these feathers, Julia." Her eyes opened, and she could see in his hands two feathers, perhaps as long as inkpens, shiny and stiff. Her breathing began to quicken as her panicked memory recalled the pheromone solution. "What you're about to experience will be nothing like anything you've felt before, from a man or from a woman. And if you don't cooperate with our interrogators this time, we're going to turn you over to our lesbian Saudi operatives, and they're going to make you feel this for days at a time before the interrogator comes back. Do you understand?"
Julia nodded.
"This is the feeling that used to keep harem girls satisfied with only having a tenth of a man to themselves. When one of them was getting lonely, the girls would do to the lonely one what I just did to you. Of course, those ancient harem girls didn't have the solution. Our agents from Baghdad will. When they've got ahold of you, you'll be calling out to Allah just to get off one more time. You'll want those women more than you've wanted anything in your life, and they'll keep you right where they want you until they take your very soul. But I've only got four minutes left, so let me leave you with some reasons not to cross me again, alright?"
When the tip of the black, shiny feather ran its course from Julia Kinsey's heel to the ball of her foot, a screaming laugh filled the room, and everyone in Julia's interrogation room and the next knew that she had nothing left to fight with.
When three more minutes had elapsed, the door opened behind Watson, and the agent lifted the feathers. Julia Kinsey's feet twitched in muscle memory from the feather-tickling, and Watson's commanding officer escorted him to the observation room.
"Lesbian Saudi operatives, huh?"
"Hey, I did learn in agent training that fear was better than pain in interrogation. Once she realized that she wanted more, I could make her think that she might desire what she hates and fears most. I had her right where I wanted her."
"I'm just glad the poor kid didn't make it to round three--I'd hate to see what happens one level of mean up from that. Actually, Watson, on that note, I've got some interesting news for you. The CIA wants you down in Gitmo next week."
"I'm not going to have to tickle dudes, am I?"
"No, no. Women terror suspects."
"They keep women at Gitmo?"
"Where the cameras can't see them, sure. I just put in a phone call recommending you--I think what you did here can be immensely helpful for getting operative info."
"Thanks for the recommendation, sir. Am I done here?"
"Pack your bags and await further orders. Oh, and Watson?"
"Yes, sir?"
"What was that gunk you put on her chest?"
"Hall's Vap-O-Rub mixed with cinnamon, sir. Absolutely no physiological effect. It just let her mind go where her body already wanted to."
