There should be one more installment of this one before all is said and done. As usual, I live for feedback, so let me know what you think!
KI
Part 1: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?t=178563
Part 2: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?t=190888
Augmented, Part 3
by
Kid Indy
Whipping winds threw the fronds of the palm trees almost to the ground, then up in a thrashing motion, the trunks bending in ways that trees in Agent Ryan Watson's hometown simply did not bend. Looking out of his window at the Caribbean storm shaking Cuba gave him an appreciation for what sailors must have experienced navigating these waters hundreds of years ago. He appreciated a certain camaraderie with those privateers and pirates of the old days. His own work here was at the bidding of one of the world's great powers, but like those old sailors, his own government could not acknowledge the sort of work that he was about to do. The prison for foreign detainees (mostly) had been operative for years, and despite the protests of a certain segment of the population, the inmates were still rolling in just as fast as they were being sent back home. Watson's apartment, in a building apart from the detention center, looked out on the sea, but he knew that this was no vacation; he was here to work.
Impressing his superiors at NSA hadn't been hard; Watson not only did his job out of a sense of professional pride but because it gave him kicks that he had kept entirely to himself before his government had discovered and exploited them. Six months before this Caribbean storm Ryan Watson had been a normal young FBI agent, hoping to catch those breaks that would send him up the career ladder in normal fashion. Instead, the NSA, the government agency that Watson would have called too creepy to take seriously just a year before, picked him out, not for the conventional traits of a good federal investigator but because of a particular disposition of his, something he had kept so secret that it was not so much a hobby as a secret, guilty pleasure, and one that he dreamed of rather than carried out. Now, here in Guantanamo Bay, Ryan Watson was about to enter the international war on terror as his country's chief tickle torturer.
Most of the equipment that Watson carried with him on this assignment to Cuba was the standard fare from the fetish stories: stiff feathers that combined a concentrated touch with the flexibility of the spine; oils to make the skin slick and thus to make the fingers slide more quickly over the nerves; battery-operated devices from dulled-down engravers to toothbrushes that would vibrate the ticklish flesh of his victims. But what made him the weapon he'd become were the goggles. On the surface they appeared merely to be black sunglasses, something between Men in Black and Top Gun in their aesthetic. But the frames held some of the most sophisticated wireless micro-routers and nanochip processors that Watson had ever even heard of, and the lenses did not serve mainly to filter light but to relay to Watson via heads-up display the secrets that Elmo (that's what the team that worked with the computer had come to call it, much to Watson's chagrin) brought before him. The combination of a powerful computer, transmitters, and display allowed Watson to see, as an overlay to his normal vision, Elmo's predictions of the most ticklish spots on any woman's body and the kinds of attacks that would likely produce the most intense stimulation of those spots. Combined with Watson's own growing base of experience actually touching women in those torturous spots, Elmo had become the interrogation tool du jour for domestic threats, whose citizenship made body-damaging tortures off-limits, but Watson genuinely worried about this assignment: he knew that Gitmo did not house the college co-ed student radicals whom he'd tickled so easily into submission or even the militia leader who had felt his touch back in February and lasted only marginally longer.
This was the real deal: this was a genuine foreign terrorist he was facing.
The prisoner this time was one Delkash Ali, daughter of a computer programmer in London. She sat in the interrogation room, hands tied behind her back to the chair but feet free in front of her for the moment. Watson observed her through the glass: obviously she had been somewhere civilized, because her clothes appeared neatly pressed and free of any dust. Stylish boots stuck out from beneath a long skirt, and her shirt was the sort of long-sleeve look that Watson would expect any Westernized young Muslim to wear. Her hijab was one of the ornamented silk print garments that Watson had seen in big cities on the more style-conscious Muslim women, not the sort of thing he expected from someone coming from Taliban country in Pakistan or even from a more repressed country. "Sleeper cell," he told himself. Her face was a classical Persian beauty: her light brown skin did not show any blemish of age or any of the shine of youth, and Watson only knew because he had seen her dossier that she was twenty years old. Her large, dark eyes took in the room and often glanced past the chief interrogator, staring into the one-way mirror at him, and her full lips bespoke the potential for sensuality that Watson just knew that the life of an extremist had taken away from her. He licked his own lips as he imagined what her skin must feel like. Twenty seemed very young for a sleeper agent, Watson thought at first, but then again, he was a criminal investigator by training and a tickle-torturer by recent experience, so counter-terrorism wasn't his expertise by any means. He hadn't even bothered to turn on his goggles yet--they could not get much of a read on her at this distance, and since her boots were still on, they would not get any reading yet from her feet. But he knew that he already had plans for her body just as soon as the chief interrogator got done with the initial interview.
The senior agent came through the door and grabbed Watson's elbow. "You have your normal twenty minutes, and you're on feet only, but you have special orders this time."
"What?" In all of the sessions that Watson had conducted, nobody had yet given him any special conditions.
"If she starts to beg, negotiate with her to get her hijab."
"Couldn't you just take it from her?"
"Do you really think that's the point?"
"So when do I make offers?"
"You don't. When she starts begging, you make her suggest it."
Watson's brow furrowed. "In every op before this--"
"You need to get beyond this 'every other op' crap, kid. This is Gitmo. You do a good job here, and you could be looking at serious career advancement."
"I don't like this."
"What does it matter what you like? You do as we tell you, and you'll go far."
Watson's spine straightened, and he bent his knees to pick up his bag. As he left the room to head for the interrogation room, he pressed the button on the hinge of the frames, and the heads-up display leaped to life. He entered the room, and the young woman sneered. She almost spat at him as she addressed him in her London accent:
"So you're the muscle, are you?"
Watson smiled slightly, then pulled his stool for sitting around to face her. The footstool that would eventually hold her feet in place he left behind her. "Why would we need muscle, Miss Ali? All I'm interested in doing is having a good time together before my friends come back to ask you some questions again."
"But they didn't ask any questions!"
Watson paused for a moment but quickly enough decided that this must be part of her counter-interrogation training: get the left hand confused about the right. He reminded himself of the job before him and got back into character. "Well, I'm sure you'll remember the questions by the time we're done. For now, let's get comfortable, shall we? Let's start by taking these off." Delkash resisted as much as she could, but soon enough one boot was off of her foot, and Watson's glasses quickly enough picked up on the panty hose that covered the foot. Watson smiled; it had been a while since he got to tickle a girl in nylons. The other boot came off after a similar struggle, and Watson shoved them off to the side. "Now, don't you feel a bit more comfy?"
"You're not going to be able to strip me naked while I'm tied to this chair, you know."
"You London girls move fast, Miss Ali! But I'm not going to take any more clothes off of you just yet." He leaned in on his stool so that his face was close to hers. "Unless you want me to."
Delkash turned away in disgust. "You Americans are all the same."
"Perhaps, Miss Ali, perhaps. But I'll bet no American has ever done this to you." With that he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around her right angle and pulled it up towards him, giving his right hand an angle where all four fingers could stroke downward on her sole.
"What are you doing?" A yelp followed her question as the fingertips, started working their way from pinkie to index, over and over, down her sole. The goggles picked up on her reaction to these first touches and immediately started mapping the ticklish spots on her foot, and Watson, who once might have doubted the efficacy of this kind of technology, adjusted his approach ever so slightly towards her instep, away from the outer edge of her sole, and leered at her as the computer's pixel-precise sense of nuance guided him to the places on her foot that would send her through the roof. She began to kick with the other foot, and Watson, the practiced tickler, interposed the bulk of his upper body between the feet as his fingers continued to work. He could feel her body start to wiggle in response to the touches now, and the goggles had led him into a rhythmic movement up and down, from the ball of her foot to the heel, as the fingers continued to do their tireless ticklish work. Delkash was moaning in agony, humiliated already by her body's unbreakable desire to laugh, to release the energy that was building up in all of the nerves of her leg.
"The longer you try to put off laughing, Miss Ali, the more horribly this is going to tickle. Believe me, I've tickled a lot of women for business and for pleasure."
Delkash managed a smoldering glare through her pressed-lip moans, and Watson was smitten by those eyes. And as he kept fluttering his fingers over her clad soles, he could hear the moans slowly changing, heading just where he wanted her to go. The transformation of her face as her resistance broke was nothing short of magical: her laughter leaped forth into the air of the interrogation room, and her face glowed with full-facial smiles even as Watson knew that she hated every second of his fingers' attention. Her left leg wrapped around his body, and Watson chuckled as he felt it attempt to kick but ultimately just bump into him over and over. That foot would get its attention soon enough, but right now fingers on the right foot were putting her out of her mind, and he was loving it. Obviously whatever cell had recruited this one had not checked her susceptibility to this kind of treatment! The legs of the chair bumped up and down, and Delkash's head thrashed as he continued to torment her sole, and when he did finally let up, her head dropped for a moment, only to rise again to look into Watson's technology-darkened eyes.
"Please, you have to believe me! I don't know anything about terrorism! I can't stand for people to touch my feet!"
"I figured that much out already, Miss Ali. But I don't think you understand how this works. I don't care what you know and don't know. My job is to convince you to talk to the interrogator when he comes back."
Delkash's voice was cracking with panic. "But he had no questions! How can I tell him what he wants to know when he won't ask me anything?"
Watson, confused about this encounter, was nonetheless enjoying this: here he was, worried that his techniques would not be up to par in a real war-on-terror situation, and in five minutes he already had the bird singing. "Well, Miss Ali, you're in some trouble, because I still have you for a while, and the more ticklish a girl is, the more I enjoy tickling. It's the way of the world, isn't it?"
"Please! Don't touch my feet! I'll do anything!"
Watson's head cocked to the side: this seemed too easy. Nonetheless, he knew he had a stunning and ticklish Anglo-Iranian at his mercy, and he had no intention to waste that opportunity. "I'm sure you would, Miss Ali. But you know? What I want most of all right now is that other foot."
"No!" She tried to hide the foot under the chair, but Watson quickly enough extracted it and began to work on it with his left hand. Plucking this one as one might pluck a banjo, Watson worked on the area from the bases of the toes to the edge of the sole, and once again, Delkash was out of her mind. With his back propped against her right knee, Watson had full access to that wonderfully ticklish foot, and the goggles, adjusting for the nylons, were guiding his greedy fingers to the juiciest bits of foot, skin covered and amplified for fashion now betraying the young woman's terribly ticklish nerve endings. Shifting his grip from her ankle to her toes, Watson managed to get in a good swipe at her extended sole, drawing a ticklish shriek before she pulled it away. Watson enjoyed watching it flail in a vain attempt to escape before he secured it again and went back to work, this time at the base of the heel. The goggles, adjusting his targets slightly more than once per second, gave him all of the advantages of cool examination that he was incapable of performing himself. The goggles never got an erection (as Watson was sporting by this time); they never lost their sharp focus to the waves of desire that would take Watson, and this victim made him realize more than the others just how valuable that was.
Delkash panted and giggled softly. "No more..."
"On the contrary, Miss Ali, there's plenty more to come. I don't return you to the interviewer for some time now, and I've got some toys I'm just dying to play with!" As he had spoken, his hand had grasped the engraving tool, and when he held it up and pressed its power switch, the sudden vibration drew an audible gasp from Delkash.
"What do you want from me? I don't know anything!"
"Like I said, it doesn't matter what you know. All that matters is how ticklish I can get you before you talk to your interviewer again. And I'm guessing that this little beauty" --he set the engraver, now powered down, on a small table next to him-- "is going to take you to ticklish heights you've never even dreamed of before!" One of his hands grasped her ankle, which yielded to him much more easily than before, and the other began to tear at the fabric of the nylon hose, exposing her sole.
"Please, no! I can't do this any more!"
Watson's fingers wrapped around the engraving tool. "Perhaps you'll think of that when the interviewer comes back in!" The device jumped to life, and Delkash began to scream as he brought it close to her sole. The glowing lines showing her most sensitive spots looked like a map of a gold mine, and to be sure, when he began to trace them with the vibrating tool's dulled point, her shaking body and squealing laughter were as good as gold to him. After a couple trips from her heel up to the skin between her toes, tears were streaking down her cheeks, and Watson turned off the device. He had six minutes left on the timer, and he wanted to move in for the kill. "I really can't wait to work on your other foot with this beauty."
"I don't know anything..."
"It wouldn't matter if you did. All I do is get you ready for the interview."
"I'll give you anything..."
"You don't have anything to give me but that other foot, do you?"
"What do you want?"
"Are you ready to talk to the interviewer?"
"Yes! I'll tell him what he wants to hear."
"Then maybe we can stop. But I want something out of this."
"I'll do anything. Just let me go!"
"Offer me something. Something you can give me."
"I can get you money!"
"Not likely. The government has probably frozen your accounts."
"Then what?"
Watson began lazily to trace a finger along her sole, and she twitched. "What do you still have?"
"Take my clothes! Take anything!"
"Can't get to your clothes--you're tied to a chair."
"Then take my hijab! My father brought it to me from Pakistan!"
"Whoa, now--that's a pretty big offer."
"Anything if you'll stop!"
"If you say so." Watson carefully unbound her hair, and when he removed the hijab he saw beautiful black hair and knew that not many had ever seen it. "I'll just keep this as a souvenir, shall I?"
Delkash hung her head. "You've brought me to shame, American."
"I could tickle you some more to cheer you up."
Delkash Ali's head snapped to attention, and she glared at her captor. "You promised! I surrendered a gift for your promise!"
"Relax, Miss Ali. After all, I'm still in the driver's seat."
"What do you mean?"
"If you don't give the interviewer every bit of information he needs, I get you back, but this time, it'll be your whole body, not just your feet."
Delkash could not suppress the shudder that took her. "What do you people want with me?"
"I don't even know, Miss Ali. I don't even know." With hijab in hand, Watson walked towards the door and left the room.
Watson was not called back to the interrogation room. He sat in his apartment that night running his fingers over the hijab, wondering what the powers that be had in store for himself and for the beautiful Persian girl. As he went to sleep for the night, he could not shake the mental image of that beautiful, full hair as he revealed it. When he woke in the morning, he was still holding the hijab.
At his morning briefing, his commanding officer was all smiles. "You did well in there, Agent Watson. You really put the fear into her."
"For a terrorist, she wasn't that hard to break down. But even when I did, she didn't want to say she was a terrorist."
"It's part of her strategy, Watson. But we have one of our own. Have you read much about Stockholm Syndrome?"
"Sure. Basic psychology, right? Identification with the hostage-taker and all that."
"We're going to be working some of that with Miss Ali. You've still got her hijab, right?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"You're going to go into her holding room today instead of the interrogation room and toy with her, make her earn it back. She's not going to be tied up, but we will have agents at the ready in case she gets the drop on you."
"What do you mean toy with her?"
"Keep the encounter loose, but make sure that she has to humiliate herself just a little bit to get it back."
"This is getting stranger and stranger. What happened to all of the protocols that I've been working under?"
"This is Gitmo, kid. Protocols are for the mainland."
The commanding officer led a reluctant Watson to an observation room, where he saw that the room was wired with security cameras. Looking at one of the monitors, Watson immediately saw that Delkash had changed clothes. Instead of a conservative Muslim Londoner, she now dressed the part of an American college student--loose jeans, long-sleeve Michigan State T-shirt, and no shoes or socks. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail now, and Watson glanced down at the hijab in his hand, then back at the monitor. Her room was not what he expected of a terrorist-detention facility: on one wall was a comfortable looking couch, on another a recliner, and between the two a coffee table, a scene of domestic comfort except for the security cameras. "You want her to earn this back, then?"
"That's the idea."
Watson entered the room with a long cardboard box tucked under his arm, and Delkash sprung to her feet. Watson heard the bare skin hit the floor as she glared at him. "What do you want with me? They said I could relax today!" Her sweatshirt, just a bit too small, pulled up to reveal smooth belly-flesh, and Watson's glasses kicked into overdrive, calculating her body type's most ticklish spots. She self-consciously pulled the sweater down. Watson was falling in love with her reflexive modesty and that wonderful accent.
"It's not what I want from you. It's what you want from me!" He reached into his pocket, then held up the hijab and let it sway a bit. "Do you want this back?"
Delkash reached out for it. "Give it to me!"
Watson pulled it back. "Not for free, I won't."
"You know I don't have any money. And now they've even taken away my clothes, as I'm sure you've noticed."
"It's a good look for you. I know you don't have anything to trade, but you could win it back."
"Is this some kind of game you're playing?"
"Only if you want to." He tapped the box he was carrying. "Your dossier says you know how to play chess."
Delkash's brief delay and glance away from Watson's face told him she thought she was getting an upper hand. "Yes, I've played some. What, do you want to play chess for my hijab?"
"That's exactly what I want. But we play by my rules."
"Okay, so now the truth comes out."
"If you win, I give this back. If I checkmate your king, I get to tickle you again."
"What, like tie me down again?"
"No, just here in your room. I want your whole body, and I don't want cameras."
Delkash looked more than a little disturbed. "But If I win, I get the hijab back, right?"
"And you have to put your feet in my lap while you play."
"What?"
"While I'm moving, you can rest, but while you're moving, I get to do whatever I want to with your feet."
"No. Not again. I won't let that happen. You had enough of my feet yesterday!"
"You want the hijab back?"
Delkash was clearly conflicted at this point. She bit her lip and sighed as the seconds passed. "Alright. I'll take your challenge."
"One other rule--if you pull your feet off my lap, I get to tickle you for a full minute, wherever I want."
Delkash looked at the game's box and steeled her eyes. "I'll take your challenge."
Watson set the box down on the table in her room. "Set up the board." Watson sat down on the couch next to her, and as she pulled the coffee table close and began to set up the board, he stroked one sole with the backs of his fingers. Delkash jumped.
"Hey! You said you'd wait until it was my move!"
"Sorry--I just love these feet of yours! I think it might be worth losing just to have a few more minutes with them!"
"Let's just play chess, shall we?"
Delkash made her moves quickly, confirming Watson's suspicions that she still retained some of the long-term memory of playing competitively as a tyke. (Her dossier did mention that.) Watson watched each move carefully, half-expecting that his goggles would kick in and start suggesting moves on the board. They didn't. Watson, who had spent his college years hustling smart kids (play it dumb for the first game, then turn it on when the big bets were down), made conventional moves to counter Delkash's memorized opening, and after about a dozen moves on each side, he could tell that her memorized moves were running out. Her long, delicate finger went to her lips as she contemplated her next series of moves, and Watson knew this was his time. Grabbing her toes with one hand and pulling them back, he started fluttering his fingertips across her sole with the other. Her concentration suddenly broken by that flurry of feeling, she immediately started laughing out loud.
"Stop that! I can't think of my next move!"
"I was hoping you couldn't! I'm trying to win this bet, after all!" He kept working on her sole, and her hand darted out to the board to make a hasty move. Watson stopped, and her face suddenly dropped as she saw what she had done.
"Wait! I need to take that move back!"
"No taking moves back, Miss Ali! You live with your own moves!" Watson advanced a knight, checking Delkash's king and forcing a bishop into the open. Within a couple moves Watson had captured the bishop and begun to exchange pieces, having established a material lead. As Delkash looked sternly at the deteriorating game, Watson picked up the bishop and beheld it with his glasses. Immediately the computer picked it up as a potential weapon and told him precisely where on her feet to touch her with the chess piece. "I've never noticed the shape of a chess bishop before, Miss Ali. I wonder what it would feel like on your foot!"
Delkash's eyes flew open, and she made another move. "This really isn't fair, you know?"
Watson stared at the board, then moved his queen along a diagonal. "Check." As Delkash began to think about where to move, Watson grabbed her big toe and started to trace those glowing lines with the tip of the bishop. Delkash screamed as she felt the new sensation, and her knees reflexively bent, pulling her feet off of Watson's lap. "Oh, no, MIss Ali. You've pulled your feet back. You know what that means, don't you?"
"Please--I didn't mean to!"
"I know, Miss Ali. That's what makes this fun!" Watson gently scooted the table back from the couch as Delkash cowered. He didn't need the glasses to tell him that getting his fingers on her side was going to send her into space, and he grabbed her denim-clad ankle and pulled her body towards him to create an opening. As her hands went backwards to steady herself, Watson pounced, digging one hand into each side. Delkash screamed as her legs kicked out, and her hands feebly flailed as he worked on her ticklish flanks. Her grip on his forearms was wonderfully shaky as he kneaded and squeezed her delicious flesh underneath the sweatshirt and, as it rode up, as he moved his hands to get at her skin itself. Watson had forgotten what it felt like to have a woman able to squirm and struggle without restraint, and this was turning him on in a way that exceeded even his experiences with bound women. When he had ticked her for a while (he didn't have any way of checking the time), he sat back, slid back to his position, and scooted the table back towards them. "Your move. I'll take your feet, please."
Delkash tried to compose herself through the giggles. "I don't think I want to play this any more."
"You could resign, but then I'd get your body as long as I want!"
"You know I can't win at this point!"
"Just remember what happens if you resign!"
"What?"
"Oh, I didn't say, did I? If I checkmate you, I get to tickle you wherever I want. If you resign, you take your shirt off and I get to tickle you wherever I want."
"You didn't say that at the beginning!"
"Well, you didn't ask for clarification, did you? Now your feet, please!"
Delkash grunted her anger, a sound that was not so much angry as adorable with her giggles still on the edge of coming out, and put her feet in Watson's lap. She quickly moved a pawn to avoid the attention of the bishop. Watson countered quickly, and Delkash moved quickly back before he could get around tickling her. Watson could see the moves she was going to make in haste, and over the next several moves, he had exchanged her out of all of her major pieces captured all of her pawns. With a rook and four of his own pawns still on the board, he began marching them towards the back rank. Delkash's eyes narrowed, and she started to look carefully at the board again. Watson knew what she was thinking, and he began to scratch at her heel with his short fingernails. Once again those beautiful Persian eyes lit up, and her laughter began to fill up her small room. She moved her king just where someone playing for a draw should, and Watson quickly advanced a pawn. Over the next several moves, Watson would keep her ankle in his grip, move then tickle, move then tickle, but Delkash, with only one piece of her own to watch, was moving exactly where she should, waiting for a mistake, praying for a stalemate. Knowing that the tickling was coming every time, she had stopped resisting the urge to laugh, and Watson could see her tickled face blend into an expression of good-natured amusement between moves. She was starting to enjoy Watson's game, especially as she realized that she might just catch him in a mistake.
Watson advanced one more pawn to the back rank. "Give me a queen. Stalemate." Pushing her ankles off his lap, he stood up and started towards the door.
"Wait! You can't do that! We have to play again!'
Watson turned and winked. "There's always tomorrow."
KI
Part 1: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?t=178563
Part 2: http://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?t=190888
Augmented, Part 3
by
Kid Indy
Whipping winds threw the fronds of the palm trees almost to the ground, then up in a thrashing motion, the trunks bending in ways that trees in Agent Ryan Watson's hometown simply did not bend. Looking out of his window at the Caribbean storm shaking Cuba gave him an appreciation for what sailors must have experienced navigating these waters hundreds of years ago. He appreciated a certain camaraderie with those privateers and pirates of the old days. His own work here was at the bidding of one of the world's great powers, but like those old sailors, his own government could not acknowledge the sort of work that he was about to do. The prison for foreign detainees (mostly) had been operative for years, and despite the protests of a certain segment of the population, the inmates were still rolling in just as fast as they were being sent back home. Watson's apartment, in a building apart from the detention center, looked out on the sea, but he knew that this was no vacation; he was here to work.
Impressing his superiors at NSA hadn't been hard; Watson not only did his job out of a sense of professional pride but because it gave him kicks that he had kept entirely to himself before his government had discovered and exploited them. Six months before this Caribbean storm Ryan Watson had been a normal young FBI agent, hoping to catch those breaks that would send him up the career ladder in normal fashion. Instead, the NSA, the government agency that Watson would have called too creepy to take seriously just a year before, picked him out, not for the conventional traits of a good federal investigator but because of a particular disposition of his, something he had kept so secret that it was not so much a hobby as a secret, guilty pleasure, and one that he dreamed of rather than carried out. Now, here in Guantanamo Bay, Ryan Watson was about to enter the international war on terror as his country's chief tickle torturer.
Most of the equipment that Watson carried with him on this assignment to Cuba was the standard fare from the fetish stories: stiff feathers that combined a concentrated touch with the flexibility of the spine; oils to make the skin slick and thus to make the fingers slide more quickly over the nerves; battery-operated devices from dulled-down engravers to toothbrushes that would vibrate the ticklish flesh of his victims. But what made him the weapon he'd become were the goggles. On the surface they appeared merely to be black sunglasses, something between Men in Black and Top Gun in their aesthetic. But the frames held some of the most sophisticated wireless micro-routers and nanochip processors that Watson had ever even heard of, and the lenses did not serve mainly to filter light but to relay to Watson via heads-up display the secrets that Elmo (that's what the team that worked with the computer had come to call it, much to Watson's chagrin) brought before him. The combination of a powerful computer, transmitters, and display allowed Watson to see, as an overlay to his normal vision, Elmo's predictions of the most ticklish spots on any woman's body and the kinds of attacks that would likely produce the most intense stimulation of those spots. Combined with Watson's own growing base of experience actually touching women in those torturous spots, Elmo had become the interrogation tool du jour for domestic threats, whose citizenship made body-damaging tortures off-limits, but Watson genuinely worried about this assignment: he knew that Gitmo did not house the college co-ed student radicals whom he'd tickled so easily into submission or even the militia leader who had felt his touch back in February and lasted only marginally longer.
This was the real deal: this was a genuine foreign terrorist he was facing.
The prisoner this time was one Delkash Ali, daughter of a computer programmer in London. She sat in the interrogation room, hands tied behind her back to the chair but feet free in front of her for the moment. Watson observed her through the glass: obviously she had been somewhere civilized, because her clothes appeared neatly pressed and free of any dust. Stylish boots stuck out from beneath a long skirt, and her shirt was the sort of long-sleeve look that Watson would expect any Westernized young Muslim to wear. Her hijab was one of the ornamented silk print garments that Watson had seen in big cities on the more style-conscious Muslim women, not the sort of thing he expected from someone coming from Taliban country in Pakistan or even from a more repressed country. "Sleeper cell," he told himself. Her face was a classical Persian beauty: her light brown skin did not show any blemish of age or any of the shine of youth, and Watson only knew because he had seen her dossier that she was twenty years old. Her large, dark eyes took in the room and often glanced past the chief interrogator, staring into the one-way mirror at him, and her full lips bespoke the potential for sensuality that Watson just knew that the life of an extremist had taken away from her. He licked his own lips as he imagined what her skin must feel like. Twenty seemed very young for a sleeper agent, Watson thought at first, but then again, he was a criminal investigator by training and a tickle-torturer by recent experience, so counter-terrorism wasn't his expertise by any means. He hadn't even bothered to turn on his goggles yet--they could not get much of a read on her at this distance, and since her boots were still on, they would not get any reading yet from her feet. But he knew that he already had plans for her body just as soon as the chief interrogator got done with the initial interview.
The senior agent came through the door and grabbed Watson's elbow. "You have your normal twenty minutes, and you're on feet only, but you have special orders this time."
"What?" In all of the sessions that Watson had conducted, nobody had yet given him any special conditions.
"If she starts to beg, negotiate with her to get her hijab."
"Couldn't you just take it from her?"
"Do you really think that's the point?"
"So when do I make offers?"
"You don't. When she starts begging, you make her suggest it."
Watson's brow furrowed. "In every op before this--"
"You need to get beyond this 'every other op' crap, kid. This is Gitmo. You do a good job here, and you could be looking at serious career advancement."
"I don't like this."
"What does it matter what you like? You do as we tell you, and you'll go far."
Watson's spine straightened, and he bent his knees to pick up his bag. As he left the room to head for the interrogation room, he pressed the button on the hinge of the frames, and the heads-up display leaped to life. He entered the room, and the young woman sneered. She almost spat at him as she addressed him in her London accent:
"So you're the muscle, are you?"
Watson smiled slightly, then pulled his stool for sitting around to face her. The footstool that would eventually hold her feet in place he left behind her. "Why would we need muscle, Miss Ali? All I'm interested in doing is having a good time together before my friends come back to ask you some questions again."
"But they didn't ask any questions!"
Watson paused for a moment but quickly enough decided that this must be part of her counter-interrogation training: get the left hand confused about the right. He reminded himself of the job before him and got back into character. "Well, I'm sure you'll remember the questions by the time we're done. For now, let's get comfortable, shall we? Let's start by taking these off." Delkash resisted as much as she could, but soon enough one boot was off of her foot, and Watson's glasses quickly enough picked up on the panty hose that covered the foot. Watson smiled; it had been a while since he got to tickle a girl in nylons. The other boot came off after a similar struggle, and Watson shoved them off to the side. "Now, don't you feel a bit more comfy?"
"You're not going to be able to strip me naked while I'm tied to this chair, you know."
"You London girls move fast, Miss Ali! But I'm not going to take any more clothes off of you just yet." He leaned in on his stool so that his face was close to hers. "Unless you want me to."
Delkash turned away in disgust. "You Americans are all the same."
"Perhaps, Miss Ali, perhaps. But I'll bet no American has ever done this to you." With that he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around her right angle and pulled it up towards him, giving his right hand an angle where all four fingers could stroke downward on her sole.
"What are you doing?" A yelp followed her question as the fingertips, started working their way from pinkie to index, over and over, down her sole. The goggles picked up on her reaction to these first touches and immediately started mapping the ticklish spots on her foot, and Watson, who once might have doubted the efficacy of this kind of technology, adjusted his approach ever so slightly towards her instep, away from the outer edge of her sole, and leered at her as the computer's pixel-precise sense of nuance guided him to the places on her foot that would send her through the roof. She began to kick with the other foot, and Watson, the practiced tickler, interposed the bulk of his upper body between the feet as his fingers continued to work. He could feel her body start to wiggle in response to the touches now, and the goggles had led him into a rhythmic movement up and down, from the ball of her foot to the heel, as the fingers continued to do their tireless ticklish work. Delkash was moaning in agony, humiliated already by her body's unbreakable desire to laugh, to release the energy that was building up in all of the nerves of her leg.
"The longer you try to put off laughing, Miss Ali, the more horribly this is going to tickle. Believe me, I've tickled a lot of women for business and for pleasure."
Delkash managed a smoldering glare through her pressed-lip moans, and Watson was smitten by those eyes. And as he kept fluttering his fingers over her clad soles, he could hear the moans slowly changing, heading just where he wanted her to go. The transformation of her face as her resistance broke was nothing short of magical: her laughter leaped forth into the air of the interrogation room, and her face glowed with full-facial smiles even as Watson knew that she hated every second of his fingers' attention. Her left leg wrapped around his body, and Watson chuckled as he felt it attempt to kick but ultimately just bump into him over and over. That foot would get its attention soon enough, but right now fingers on the right foot were putting her out of her mind, and he was loving it. Obviously whatever cell had recruited this one had not checked her susceptibility to this kind of treatment! The legs of the chair bumped up and down, and Delkash's head thrashed as he continued to torment her sole, and when he did finally let up, her head dropped for a moment, only to rise again to look into Watson's technology-darkened eyes.
"Please, you have to believe me! I don't know anything about terrorism! I can't stand for people to touch my feet!"
"I figured that much out already, Miss Ali. But I don't think you understand how this works. I don't care what you know and don't know. My job is to convince you to talk to the interrogator when he comes back."
Delkash's voice was cracking with panic. "But he had no questions! How can I tell him what he wants to know when he won't ask me anything?"
Watson, confused about this encounter, was nonetheless enjoying this: here he was, worried that his techniques would not be up to par in a real war-on-terror situation, and in five minutes he already had the bird singing. "Well, Miss Ali, you're in some trouble, because I still have you for a while, and the more ticklish a girl is, the more I enjoy tickling. It's the way of the world, isn't it?"
"Please! Don't touch my feet! I'll do anything!"
Watson's head cocked to the side: this seemed too easy. Nonetheless, he knew he had a stunning and ticklish Anglo-Iranian at his mercy, and he had no intention to waste that opportunity. "I'm sure you would, Miss Ali. But you know? What I want most of all right now is that other foot."
"No!" She tried to hide the foot under the chair, but Watson quickly enough extracted it and began to work on it with his left hand. Plucking this one as one might pluck a banjo, Watson worked on the area from the bases of the toes to the edge of the sole, and once again, Delkash was out of her mind. With his back propped against her right knee, Watson had full access to that wonderfully ticklish foot, and the goggles, adjusting for the nylons, were guiding his greedy fingers to the juiciest bits of foot, skin covered and amplified for fashion now betraying the young woman's terribly ticklish nerve endings. Shifting his grip from her ankle to her toes, Watson managed to get in a good swipe at her extended sole, drawing a ticklish shriek before she pulled it away. Watson enjoyed watching it flail in a vain attempt to escape before he secured it again and went back to work, this time at the base of the heel. The goggles, adjusting his targets slightly more than once per second, gave him all of the advantages of cool examination that he was incapable of performing himself. The goggles never got an erection (as Watson was sporting by this time); they never lost their sharp focus to the waves of desire that would take Watson, and this victim made him realize more than the others just how valuable that was.
Delkash panted and giggled softly. "No more..."
"On the contrary, Miss Ali, there's plenty more to come. I don't return you to the interviewer for some time now, and I've got some toys I'm just dying to play with!" As he had spoken, his hand had grasped the engraving tool, and when he held it up and pressed its power switch, the sudden vibration drew an audible gasp from Delkash.
"What do you want from me? I don't know anything!"
"Like I said, it doesn't matter what you know. All that matters is how ticklish I can get you before you talk to your interviewer again. And I'm guessing that this little beauty" --he set the engraver, now powered down, on a small table next to him-- "is going to take you to ticklish heights you've never even dreamed of before!" One of his hands grasped her ankle, which yielded to him much more easily than before, and the other began to tear at the fabric of the nylon hose, exposing her sole.
"Please, no! I can't do this any more!"
Watson's fingers wrapped around the engraving tool. "Perhaps you'll think of that when the interviewer comes back in!" The device jumped to life, and Delkash began to scream as he brought it close to her sole. The glowing lines showing her most sensitive spots looked like a map of a gold mine, and to be sure, when he began to trace them with the vibrating tool's dulled point, her shaking body and squealing laughter were as good as gold to him. After a couple trips from her heel up to the skin between her toes, tears were streaking down her cheeks, and Watson turned off the device. He had six minutes left on the timer, and he wanted to move in for the kill. "I really can't wait to work on your other foot with this beauty."
"I don't know anything..."
"It wouldn't matter if you did. All I do is get you ready for the interview."
"I'll give you anything..."
"You don't have anything to give me but that other foot, do you?"
"What do you want?"
"Are you ready to talk to the interviewer?"
"Yes! I'll tell him what he wants to hear."
"Then maybe we can stop. But I want something out of this."
"I'll do anything. Just let me go!"
"Offer me something. Something you can give me."
"I can get you money!"
"Not likely. The government has probably frozen your accounts."
"Then what?"
Watson began lazily to trace a finger along her sole, and she twitched. "What do you still have?"
"Take my clothes! Take anything!"
"Can't get to your clothes--you're tied to a chair."
"Then take my hijab! My father brought it to me from Pakistan!"
"Whoa, now--that's a pretty big offer."
"Anything if you'll stop!"
"If you say so." Watson carefully unbound her hair, and when he removed the hijab he saw beautiful black hair and knew that not many had ever seen it. "I'll just keep this as a souvenir, shall I?"
Delkash hung her head. "You've brought me to shame, American."
"I could tickle you some more to cheer you up."
Delkash Ali's head snapped to attention, and she glared at her captor. "You promised! I surrendered a gift for your promise!"
"Relax, Miss Ali. After all, I'm still in the driver's seat."
"What do you mean?"
"If you don't give the interviewer every bit of information he needs, I get you back, but this time, it'll be your whole body, not just your feet."
Delkash could not suppress the shudder that took her. "What do you people want with me?"
"I don't even know, Miss Ali. I don't even know." With hijab in hand, Watson walked towards the door and left the room.
Watson was not called back to the interrogation room. He sat in his apartment that night running his fingers over the hijab, wondering what the powers that be had in store for himself and for the beautiful Persian girl. As he went to sleep for the night, he could not shake the mental image of that beautiful, full hair as he revealed it. When he woke in the morning, he was still holding the hijab.
At his morning briefing, his commanding officer was all smiles. "You did well in there, Agent Watson. You really put the fear into her."
"For a terrorist, she wasn't that hard to break down. But even when I did, she didn't want to say she was a terrorist."
"It's part of her strategy, Watson. But we have one of our own. Have you read much about Stockholm Syndrome?"
"Sure. Basic psychology, right? Identification with the hostage-taker and all that."
"We're going to be working some of that with Miss Ali. You've still got her hijab, right?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"You're going to go into her holding room today instead of the interrogation room and toy with her, make her earn it back. She's not going to be tied up, but we will have agents at the ready in case she gets the drop on you."
"What do you mean toy with her?"
"Keep the encounter loose, but make sure that she has to humiliate herself just a little bit to get it back."
"This is getting stranger and stranger. What happened to all of the protocols that I've been working under?"
"This is Gitmo, kid. Protocols are for the mainland."
The commanding officer led a reluctant Watson to an observation room, where he saw that the room was wired with security cameras. Looking at one of the monitors, Watson immediately saw that Delkash had changed clothes. Instead of a conservative Muslim Londoner, she now dressed the part of an American college student--loose jeans, long-sleeve Michigan State T-shirt, and no shoes or socks. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail now, and Watson glanced down at the hijab in his hand, then back at the monitor. Her room was not what he expected of a terrorist-detention facility: on one wall was a comfortable looking couch, on another a recliner, and between the two a coffee table, a scene of domestic comfort except for the security cameras. "You want her to earn this back, then?"
"That's the idea."
Watson entered the room with a long cardboard box tucked under his arm, and Delkash sprung to her feet. Watson heard the bare skin hit the floor as she glared at him. "What do you want with me? They said I could relax today!" Her sweatshirt, just a bit too small, pulled up to reveal smooth belly-flesh, and Watson's glasses kicked into overdrive, calculating her body type's most ticklish spots. She self-consciously pulled the sweater down. Watson was falling in love with her reflexive modesty and that wonderful accent.
"It's not what I want from you. It's what you want from me!" He reached into his pocket, then held up the hijab and let it sway a bit. "Do you want this back?"
Delkash reached out for it. "Give it to me!"
Watson pulled it back. "Not for free, I won't."
"You know I don't have any money. And now they've even taken away my clothes, as I'm sure you've noticed."
"It's a good look for you. I know you don't have anything to trade, but you could win it back."
"Is this some kind of game you're playing?"
"Only if you want to." He tapped the box he was carrying. "Your dossier says you know how to play chess."
Delkash's brief delay and glance away from Watson's face told him she thought she was getting an upper hand. "Yes, I've played some. What, do you want to play chess for my hijab?"
"That's exactly what I want. But we play by my rules."
"Okay, so now the truth comes out."
"If you win, I give this back. If I checkmate your king, I get to tickle you again."
"What, like tie me down again?"
"No, just here in your room. I want your whole body, and I don't want cameras."
Delkash looked more than a little disturbed. "But If I win, I get the hijab back, right?"
"And you have to put your feet in my lap while you play."
"What?"
"While I'm moving, you can rest, but while you're moving, I get to do whatever I want to with your feet."
"No. Not again. I won't let that happen. You had enough of my feet yesterday!"
"You want the hijab back?"
Delkash was clearly conflicted at this point. She bit her lip and sighed as the seconds passed. "Alright. I'll take your challenge."
"One other rule--if you pull your feet off my lap, I get to tickle you for a full minute, wherever I want."
Delkash looked at the game's box and steeled her eyes. "I'll take your challenge."
Watson set the box down on the table in her room. "Set up the board." Watson sat down on the couch next to her, and as she pulled the coffee table close and began to set up the board, he stroked one sole with the backs of his fingers. Delkash jumped.
"Hey! You said you'd wait until it was my move!"
"Sorry--I just love these feet of yours! I think it might be worth losing just to have a few more minutes with them!"
"Let's just play chess, shall we?"
Delkash made her moves quickly, confirming Watson's suspicions that she still retained some of the long-term memory of playing competitively as a tyke. (Her dossier did mention that.) Watson watched each move carefully, half-expecting that his goggles would kick in and start suggesting moves on the board. They didn't. Watson, who had spent his college years hustling smart kids (play it dumb for the first game, then turn it on when the big bets were down), made conventional moves to counter Delkash's memorized opening, and after about a dozen moves on each side, he could tell that her memorized moves were running out. Her long, delicate finger went to her lips as she contemplated her next series of moves, and Watson knew this was his time. Grabbing her toes with one hand and pulling them back, he started fluttering his fingertips across her sole with the other. Her concentration suddenly broken by that flurry of feeling, she immediately started laughing out loud.
"Stop that! I can't think of my next move!"
"I was hoping you couldn't! I'm trying to win this bet, after all!" He kept working on her sole, and her hand darted out to the board to make a hasty move. Watson stopped, and her face suddenly dropped as she saw what she had done.
"Wait! I need to take that move back!"
"No taking moves back, Miss Ali! You live with your own moves!" Watson advanced a knight, checking Delkash's king and forcing a bishop into the open. Within a couple moves Watson had captured the bishop and begun to exchange pieces, having established a material lead. As Delkash looked sternly at the deteriorating game, Watson picked up the bishop and beheld it with his glasses. Immediately the computer picked it up as a potential weapon and told him precisely where on her feet to touch her with the chess piece. "I've never noticed the shape of a chess bishop before, Miss Ali. I wonder what it would feel like on your foot!"
Delkash's eyes flew open, and she made another move. "This really isn't fair, you know?"
Watson stared at the board, then moved his queen along a diagonal. "Check." As Delkash began to think about where to move, Watson grabbed her big toe and started to trace those glowing lines with the tip of the bishop. Delkash screamed as she felt the new sensation, and her knees reflexively bent, pulling her feet off of Watson's lap. "Oh, no, MIss Ali. You've pulled your feet back. You know what that means, don't you?"
"Please--I didn't mean to!"
"I know, Miss Ali. That's what makes this fun!" Watson gently scooted the table back from the couch as Delkash cowered. He didn't need the glasses to tell him that getting his fingers on her side was going to send her into space, and he grabbed her denim-clad ankle and pulled her body towards him to create an opening. As her hands went backwards to steady herself, Watson pounced, digging one hand into each side. Delkash screamed as her legs kicked out, and her hands feebly flailed as he worked on her ticklish flanks. Her grip on his forearms was wonderfully shaky as he kneaded and squeezed her delicious flesh underneath the sweatshirt and, as it rode up, as he moved his hands to get at her skin itself. Watson had forgotten what it felt like to have a woman able to squirm and struggle without restraint, and this was turning him on in a way that exceeded even his experiences with bound women. When he had ticked her for a while (he didn't have any way of checking the time), he sat back, slid back to his position, and scooted the table back towards them. "Your move. I'll take your feet, please."
Delkash tried to compose herself through the giggles. "I don't think I want to play this any more."
"You could resign, but then I'd get your body as long as I want!"
"You know I can't win at this point!"
"Just remember what happens if you resign!"
"What?"
"Oh, I didn't say, did I? If I checkmate you, I get to tickle you wherever I want. If you resign, you take your shirt off and I get to tickle you wherever I want."
"You didn't say that at the beginning!"
"Well, you didn't ask for clarification, did you? Now your feet, please!"
Delkash grunted her anger, a sound that was not so much angry as adorable with her giggles still on the edge of coming out, and put her feet in Watson's lap. She quickly moved a pawn to avoid the attention of the bishop. Watson countered quickly, and Delkash moved quickly back before he could get around tickling her. Watson could see the moves she was going to make in haste, and over the next several moves, he had exchanged her out of all of her major pieces captured all of her pawns. With a rook and four of his own pawns still on the board, he began marching them towards the back rank. Delkash's eyes narrowed, and she started to look carefully at the board again. Watson knew what she was thinking, and he began to scratch at her heel with his short fingernails. Once again those beautiful Persian eyes lit up, and her laughter began to fill up her small room. She moved her king just where someone playing for a draw should, and Watson quickly advanced a pawn. Over the next several moves, Watson would keep her ankle in his grip, move then tickle, move then tickle, but Delkash, with only one piece of her own to watch, was moving exactly where she should, waiting for a mistake, praying for a stalemate. Knowing that the tickling was coming every time, she had stopped resisting the urge to laugh, and Watson could see her tickled face blend into an expression of good-natured amusement between moves. She was starting to enjoy Watson's game, especially as she realized that she might just catch him in a mistake.
Watson advanced one more pawn to the back rank. "Give me a queen. Stalemate." Pushing her ankles off his lap, he stood up and started towards the door.
"Wait! You can't do that! We have to play again!'
Watson turned and winked. "There's always tomorrow."
