Feather Intelligence (m/f, f/f)
by
Kid Indy
Lacey remembered the line from The Wire, or something like it: there are only two days in prison, the day you go in and the day you get out. She hadn't kept count of the days while she observed the one boat arriving at the island and leaving the island, but there were enough days there to know that it followed a strict schedule. And today was going to be the day that she was on that boat headed back to land.
What she would do there she wasn't quite clear on: no doubt the port would be somewhere on the coast of Chile, but she doubted it would be Santiago or any other major city. She knew well enough that her red hair and her bright green eyes would make her stand out, and her young figure always drew attention, so she had to move fast, but before that became a problem, she would have to get on the boat.
And that meant the loading dock and the shipping containers.
Carlos, the kind guard who had given her the tip, was hitting a thousand so far: shift change at the dock happened just when it should, and she maneuvered herself as quickly as she could underneath one of the piles of shredded-paper disposal bags that left the island periodically, no doubt to conceal the government's true operations there. She made herself an opening large enough to let air in through the bags but not enough to be seen easily, and she made sure that the crate's vents were both open to allow her ventilation as the boat made its trip to the mainland.
When the container's door shut and she felt the lift suspend the crate off the ground, she knew that this stage of her escape was over; now all she had to do was wait.
* * * SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER * * *
"So, MIss Thompson, what we're offering is fifty thousand dollars, plus room and board, for your participation in our study."
Lacey had her apprehensions about the project. After all, this was no university lab but a private consulting firm with known ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, but at 24, with a Master's degree in psychology in hand and a grueling doctorate program ahead, pocketing fifty thousand dollars and picking up some valuable CV material was a good idea on all fronts. She'd be away from her family, to be sure, but that would be the case if she started a doctoral program far away anyway.
Lacey tried to show her interest and her preparation. "And the study deals with non-violent intelligence gathering, right?"
The large man in the gray suit nodded appreciatively. "Exactly. As you no doubt know, the intelligence community went seriously astray in the first decade of the twenty-first century--you were no doubt just a child then--and turned to violent coercion of prisoners. Throughout the Cold War, non-violent intel and interrogation had reached true innovative heights, but then, for political reasons, all that went by the wayside. Plumatech is picking up where they left off so that this country can restore its moral reputation in the world."
Lacey had always held on to a patriotic sentiment, even when her graduate-school friends had scoffed at such feelings as unsophisticated, and this project was looking better and better. "And the contract is for one year, right? So I can come back to the States and start my doctorate?"
"Absolutely. We've had researchers stay on longer, but the contract is for one year."
Lacey took the pen and signed the contract. "Plumatech. So we're talking intelligence gathering with a feather rather than a hammer, right?"
The man smiled behind his sunglasses. "Absolutely."
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
She was starting to worry; the passage of time is hard to detect in the dark, but she knew that the ship should have been back to land within a couple hours, and this trip already seemed longer. Against her own judgment, she forced the container door open--Carlos had taught her how to do that as well--and started to prowl around the hold. Her luck was still holding--she found a bathroom not far from her container and got a drink of water--but something was definitely off.
Opening heavy doors and navigating stairs as quietly as she could, she made her way to the deck and looked out. The sight took her breath away: from the island, she could see other islands to the east, miles away but still a sign that she was still connected to South America.
With the sun setting behind her, Lacey only saw open ocean.
* * * SIX MONTHS EARLIER * * *
Her journey to Chile had gone by without a hitch, and at a small cabana the young researchers were beginning to get a feel for each other. All American citizens--as Lacey would expect for this kind of work--they nonetheless came from all over the country. Marcus, from Alabama, who had played cornerback for Samford, had a magnetic personality and an irresistible baritone voice to go with his ebony muscles. Lacey was immediately drawn to him. She also met Nalani, another graduate student whose family was originally from Hawaii, and Will, a Korean-American from Seattle. She introduced herself as from Ohio, though she had gone to graduate school in Virginia, and she soon found out that all four had plans, after the study, to go back to the States to pursue doctoral degrees and to work in psychology. The four drank coffee together until the van came to pick them up. They rode to the docks at the edge of town, and they boarded a medium-sized vessel, something that could pass for a riverboat and that could haul a fair number of people plus cargo.
The ride to the island was a short one--Lacey had to guess that it was about an hour, since they had to surrender their phones for security reasons. The four talked to each other in English as the crew spoke Spanish, and when they arrived at the island, the recruiter met them, told them that their luggage had arrived before them, and welcomed them to Plumatech and to the study. He led them inside an impressive glass-and-steel building and to a conference room, where the recruiter departed and a blonde woman--Lacey guessed she was in her forties--took over the presentation.
"In your first year at Plumatech, you are the experimental subjects. If you sign on for another year, you'll help us administer the studies." The four looked at each other with a mix of concern and bravado. "As you know, our mission is to return to the intelligence community a sense of humanity, relearning and refining non-violent techniques of information-gathering and presenting the nation's intelligence agencies with real alternatives to Abu Ghraib and the waterboard."
Marcus spoke up. "So we're going to be prisoners here?"
"No, you're not prisoners, but we wanted to recruit some of the best and smartest subjects so that you can take over the day-to-day after this year, to be sure, but also so that we can simulate trained hostiles, who we have to assume will be intelligent and able to resist ham-fisted interrogation techniques."
Now it was Will's turn. "How is this going to work, then?"
The woman smiled. "Good question. During each round of the trial, each of you will receive instructions assigning you to be the interrogator or the detainee each round." Another exchange of glances. "We want to make sure that intelligence officers can learn these techniques quickly, so you're going to take turns being the subject for the training experiments and the interrogation subjects. The biometric gauges that we implant on each of you will make sure that the interrogation remains nonviolent--after all, we are trying to forge new tools here, not hold on to the failed tools of the last generation."
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
Lacey ducked back under cover as she heard someone coming. Making her way back into the hold, her heart beat fast as she tried to formulate a backup plan. If she knew where the ship was going she could estimate whether she could last without supplies, but to find that out she'd have to ask someone onboard, which was out of the question.
She didn't have long to think about such things. The vessel's public address system crackled to life, and she heard an all-too-familiar voice fill the air.
"Good evening, Lacey!"
She gasped to herself. "Matilda!"
"I hope you're enjoying your evening cruise. Did we mention that the medical gauge was also a tracking device? We knew you were aboard this ship as soon as you knew. Rest assured, when we recover you, you're going to find out just how intense nonviolent interrogation can get."
Lacey's eyes widened. She scrambled to find a hiding place.
* * * SIX MONTHS EARLIER * * *
"Please, Lacey, call me Matilda."
She made a mental note: the program director was no longer Dr. Rosenstein. "Thank you. So the bonus thousand is in addition to the ten thousand?"
"Of course! Your base salary never goes away. But as you win and lose rounds, you stand to increase that substantially. Plumatech wants to make sure that you're doing everything full speed rather than going easy on your new friends."
"So if he gives me the code, those thousand dollars are mine."
"And if he does not give you the code but can reproduce the code at the end of three days, then they're his, and you lose your first thousand."
Lacey grinned at the prospect. A random number generator had made her the interrogator, and Marcus was her first mark. She was confident that she could get that bonus from him in the first round. She put on a little extra perfume before she was led into the interrogation room, where Marcus sat in a chair at a table. His hands were cuffed and linked to the strong steel table with short chains. Lacey was dressed as she imagined an intelligence agent would, a conservative jacket, some slacks, and low-heeled shoes over hose.
"Hello, Marcus. Can I get you something to drink?" He stared straight ahead. "You know why we're here, and we've got all the time in the world to talk, so why don't we start with your story?"
Marcus kept silent for a spell, but Lacey knew enough psychology to know that silence would break him. After a long time just breathing in the quiet room, eventually he did start to talk, and then to answer questions. Lacey's confidence grew: this was working! She worked him verbally for the duration of the morning, and when she started to feel herself fatigue, she exited the room and walked around the corner to the observation room, where she and Matilda looked at Marcus through a one-way mirror. "He'll tell me the code before long."
"Are you so sure?"
"I'm confident. He wants to tell me--"
"He's stalling for time, trying to tire you out. You have to offer him something he wants."
"Even beyond getting out of that room?"
"When the subject has discrete information that you can't piece together from narrative, some kind of exchange has to be on the table."
"What in the world do I have to trade?"
"That's for you to work out!"
She returned to the room. Marcus, whose initial stone-faced silence hadn't lasted long, greeted her with a smile. "I do love talking with you, Lacey. Maybe when we get out of here, I can use these thousand dollars to take you out for a nice dinner."
"Who's to say that you're going to come away with this money?"
"You can't hurt me--that's against the rules. I know that. So there's nothing you can do to me to make me give up this code."
"What if you gave me the code, and we'll split the money once I've got it?"
"You think I'm going to trust you to do that? I'm just going to win it and keep it anyway."
She leaned across the table. "What if I gave you half the money and something else to make things worth your while?" She tugged at one side of her collar, teasing a glimpse of flesh.
Marcus smirked. "You think I can't get girls on my own?"
"Maybe I can do things that your other girls can't."
Marcus missed a beat responding, and Lacey knew that she had him thinking. He shook his head. "Nah. I'll just keep the money, and I bet you come to me anyway."
"But that's twelve months away. What if we were talking about here and now, while we're still on this island?" She took her foot out of her shoe and began to rub up and down his leg. She could almost feel his breath shorten.
She could hear him grit his teeth. "With all this money I'm going to win, I can wait a few months."
Lacey slid her other foot out of its shoe and scooted her chair back, putting both legs and feet up on the table. "Oh, I can't imagine that long a wait when there's so much to enjoy now!"
He glared at her. "Alright. I'll give you the code, and you can keep all the money. But I want something else from you. Right here. Right now."
Lacey started to imagine what he wanted from her. "And what is that?"
"I want you to put your feet where I can touch them."
Lacey's eyes widened. So was that Marcus's thing? "You just want to touch my feet?"
"I want you to give me your feet for as long as I want them, and when I'm done, the code is yours. That's my promise."
Now it was Lacey's turn to be confused. But the first day wasn't even over, and two days of rest while the rest of the first round ended sounded good. "Alright. But you're still wearing those chains so that I can get away if you try anything."
"I'm going to try all sorts of things. But yeah, I'll still have the chains on."
"So you like feet, do you?"
"No more talk until you give me what I want."
The table was too big for Lacey to remain in her chair and get her feet to where Marcus could reach them, so she lifted herself onto the edge of the table and extended her pant legs and the hosed feet to the center, where he could reach them. "So tell me, Marcus, do you like feet?" She wanted to save the word "fetish" for later, when she could use it as a weapon.
"Not feet on their own, Lacey. But I knew back on the mainland that I liked your laugh." As he said this, he took one of her ankles on one hand and started to run a finger along her sole. The hose turned the fingertip into a live wire, and Lacey jumped, nearly falling off the table. She jerked her feet out of his grasp and started to climb down onto the ground.
"No, I'm not going to let you do that."
"Then no code. I can sit here for a while."
Lacey looked to the one-way mirror, which offered no counsel. She took a deep breath. "Alright. I'm going to give you ten minutes to touch my feet, but then you have to give me that code."
"Thirty."
"No way!"
"I'm going to wait you out, then."
"Twenty."
His undeniable smile returned. "Deal." She started to make her way back onto the table. "You must be pretty ticklish to jump that quickly. I'm going to enjoy this."
Lacey gritted her teeth and sat herself back on the table. "Alright. Twenty minutes, and then you give me that code."
She put her feet back within his hands' reach and looked at her watch. "Alright. Twenty minutes start--" She didn't get to "now" before he had started in on her soles again. This time he didn't grab anything but tickled with both hands, and as she yelped, her knees instinctively drew up, bringing her feet out of his range again.
"If you pull those feet away from me again we're back at square one, Lacey. Give me what I want!" She was giggling through an attempted scowl as she made herself extend her legs again. This time he grabbed with one hand again and started raking the other hand's fingertips over her soles. She yelped at the sensation, and her hands raised to cover her mouth in embarrassment. Marcus quickly poked his finger in between her toes, stretching the hose and making Lacey squeal.
She surprised herself when she started laughing in earnest; she knew that she was getting the code and the money out of this encounter, but he had decidedly seized control of the moment, and she found herself in the position of the suppliant: "No, please! Stop!"
"If you want that code, you'd better be begging me not to stop! There's no way we're up close to twenty minutes yet!" The tickling did not let up, and Lacey's hips squirmed as he explored every ticklish spot from her ankles to her toes. When she could muster a moment of control she looked at her watch--only six minutes had passed! And yet Marcus's hands stayed hungry, at one moment finding one electric spot and sliding across it without letting up, the next roaming all across a foot and keeping all of those nerves sizzling with ticklish energy. Those hands knew what they were doing, and when the clock finally started approaching eighteen minutes, Lacey's abdomen was beginning to ache with laughing. By now she had curled up on one side, her bottom facing Marcus as she writhed at the foot-tickling. Bleary eyes stared at the final seconds ticking away.
"Alright! Stop! That's twenty minutes!" Marcus's hands withdrew as promised. Lacey gasped as she tried to muster a commend. "Now give me that code!" Marcus dutifully recited a string of twelve alphanumeric characters, and at once a red light above the interrogation room turned green.
Lacey had won the money, but her body told her that she had lost something else.
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
Lacey looked frantically for the thickest metal she could find: if that chip were a transponder, she might be able to block its signal long enough to devise another plan. Finding a blind corner, she pressed herself against a bulkhead and tried to catch her breath. Her mind reeled as she tried to devise some way out. Looking down, she realized that she was wearing the same gray UVA T-shirt that she had worn when the experiment first started to make her suspicious.
* * * FIVE MONTHS EARLIER * * *
Lacey's time since the first interrogation session had been more leisurely: the new study participants had to attend classes on the history of interrogation and the psychology of intelligence-gathering, but instead of more interrogation sessions they had been given chances to leave the island and enjoy life as good-looking people in their twenties, with money in their pockets, in a beach city. Her Spanish was improving, and she began to befriend Nalani and Heather, two other participants in the study. Marcus had also continued to spend time with her, sometimes sneaking a tickle when they were in the town's small dance clubs but never bullying her with what he knew.
She also had ample opportunities to call her parents back in the United States, and she let them know that the study was going along well but that she could not disclose what precisely they were studying.
Then, after a few weeks of this leisurely life, she found a letter under her door one morning. The next round of experiments was starting, and she had to memorize an eight-character code before dressing in comfortable clothing and reporting to the interrogation room.
She was now the subject.
When the guards arrived to escort her to the room, she was wearing black yoga pants, a University of Virginia t-shirt a size too big, and flip-flops. She figured that was the definition of comfort--good for study sessions anyway--and she walked casually towards the metal door, reviewing the code in her head so that she could recite it and claim her prize after she refused to disclose it to her interrogator.
When they led her into the room, Marcus awaited, dressed sharply in a maroon shirt and black suit pants. She winked at him, flirting to throw him off, as the guards fastened her hands in the cuffs mounted to the top of the table and left.
"Alright, Lacey, you know what we need here, and we've got plenty of time for you to tell me."
"Are you sure you don't want to give up now, Marcus? Or are you going to take off your shoes this time?"
Marcus smirked and looked at the one-way mirror on the wall. "No, I don't think you'd enjoy that the way I enjoyed yours. But you do seem to know basically what's coming today, so let's get started, shall we?" With that he began to talk towards Lacey's side of the table and behind her chair. She felt a hand reach underneath her t-shirt, and she inhaled sharply as he felt his hand start to brush against her side.
She shot a panicked look towards the one-way glass. "Hey! You can't touch me! This is nonviolent interrogation! You're supposed to do this by talking to me!"
She gasped as his other hand rested on her unguarded side, and she jumped as one hand lightly pinched at the flesh above her hip. "If they come in and stop me, so be it. But in the meantime, let's have some fun, girl!" She could feel his fingers moving around under her shirt, finding where the top of her yoga pants was, brushing against the contours of her bra. Her breath quickened and she looked with a desperate plea at the one-way mirror as his hands sized up how much tickling they could do and she realized that she had no way to make the hands stop.
"No! You can't touch me! That's the rules!" And that was all the words that she could muster before his hands started in on her at full speed. One soft claw got a handful of her side and started to wriggle and pinch, and she had no way to grab the hand to hold it at bay. The other started tracing the top of her pants, a ticklish trail that once again she could not defend. She threw one more desperate look at the glass and, she assumed, Matlida behind it. "Make him stop! Get in here!"
Marcus's hands stopped and withdrew, and she saw his eyes look into hers as he joined her staring at the mirror. Then she felt his breath at the side of her neck. "Nobody's coming to save you, Lacey. Just enjoy the ride!" And as quickly as they had started before, the cotton under her arms became extensions of his tickling hands. She let out an almost-silent squeal as she tried to bring her elbows down, but he was already there, and she couldn't do much but hear her own voice turn into the ticklish laughter that he had drawn out of her when she was the interrogator. She slumped forward, and his hands stayed under her arms, squeezing her with a pulsing rhythm and keeping her laughing as her elbows came together in front of her. With lightning speed they shifted down and around her sides, and his fingertips poked and rubbed the front of her t-shirt. Here she could not reach, her wrists bound to the top of the table, and a whimpering sound joined her laughing.
Then the whimper turned into a short-lived scream as she felt one hand, then the other find a way under her shirt, returning not to cotton but to skin. Fingertips whipped past her navel, dipped in, scratched at the flesh of her belly. He was clearly enjoying this spot, and his fingers wreaked havoc on her ticklish skin for some time, and she was starting to feel some fatigue in her abdomen from the laughing. But that sensation only lasted a moment at a time--his fingers moved from spot to spot with such fluid quickness that a new tickled squeal pierced the air every time he moved from here to there. When his fingers relented, she could only wonder what the line was, in the minds of Plumacorp, between nonviolent and violent interrogation.
She heard Marcus's shoes pacing around to the front of the table, and she looked up to see him sit down across from her.
"Oh, you're in all kinds of trouble, aren't you? Now I know just how non-violent I can get with you! I wonder what would happen if I got down under this table and started working on those feet, now that you're all ticklish?"
"No... please..."
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
Lacey had hidden herself behind a stack of crates in the hold--she couldn't get any doors other than the bathroom's to open--and hoped that they had enough signal-blockers that she wouldn't be detected. She heard footsteps pass her position a number of times, but nobody had started a thorough search of that hold yet.
As she waited, she felt the ship lurch. Had they turned back towards land? Lacey's desperation got the best of her, and she came out from hiding and started climbing up, hoping that the chance to escape to land--some land--was finally close enough to make her escape.
What she saw when she reached the deck was not land but a much larger vessel, what looked almost like a cruise ship. And sure enough, she thought she could hear a jazz band playing on the other ship's deck high above her.
"There's the redhead! Get her!"
Lacey began to run from them, screaming upward, trying to get someone's attention, hoping someone on the other ship would look down and see her.
* * * FIVE MONTHS EARLIER * * *
She woke up sore--nothing in her experience before had prepared her to laugh that long or to have a man's hands tickle her that intensely, but she hadn't given up the code during either day of the interrogation, so today she at least wouldn't be chained to the table and made to sit in the chair for another tickling. And she had gotten her extra thousand dollars again. But that wasn't what she woke up looking forward to.
When the next round started, was her turn to be the interrogator, and she hoped Marcus would be the body she could get her hands on.
A knock came at the door, and Lacey opened it to find Matilda waiting on the other side.
"Good morning, Lacey!"
"Is it my turn to interrogate Marcus?"
She laughed and smiled at her young intern. "You're certainly eager to get back to work! But no, today's a beach day. So here's your phone so that you can call home today." Matilda handed Lacey's smart phone, which they were not allowed to keep in their rooms, to her. "Just be sure you have some sunscreen--you want to be feeling your best when that next round starts, don't you?"
"You have no idea."
Lacey rode in a company van next to Nalani, who seemed to want to disclose something. Lacey asked the driver to turn the radio's music up and leaned in to talk to her.
"Nalani, what's going on in this place?"
"I don't know, Lacey--they're doing terrible things to me."
Lacey pulled up short. "What kinds of things?"
Nalani's dark eyes looked up at the driver, then did a quick check around her to make sure everyone else had their earbuds in. They did. "They took me to the interrogation room, and Will tickled me for two days!"
Lacey's own green eyes widened. "Me too. Do you get to tickle him now?"
Nalani's look turned incredulous. "What is wrong with you? Do you hear what you're saying?"
Faced with another human being who knew of her experience, Lacey realized just how absurd her own anticipation had become. All the same, against her own judgment, she began to wonder how ticklish Nalani's dark skin would be. "You're right. Do you think we should report this?"
"Not unless one of us can get away from the group. I don't think they monitor us as closely when we're away from the facility, and they gave me back my phone."
"Me too. Let's split up once we've got our towels put away, and maybe one of us can get a call in to the mainland."
A few minutes later, the van arrived at the island's beach. The girls walked out onto the sand and laid towels down. Neither Marcus nor Will was anywhere to be seen, but guards from the facility were with them. Lacey was very generous with the sunscreen--she was a redhead, after all--and waded out into the water so that she could turn around and get a sense of where the guards were watching and where they were not.
Lacey kept observing as she strolled along the beach and lay down on her towel. They kept their eyes on the girls--all ten of the beach-visitors were girls--but never did seem to follow any of them to the shack that had been pointed out as the bathroom. She knew that had to be her opportunity, and she waited for a girl she hadn't met to return to the beach before she palmed her phone and made her way up the dune. Checking over her shoulder as she entered the shack, she ducked into a stall and powered it up. She had prepared mentally for exactly what she'd tell her parents so that they could contact the FBI and get them on the case, and as she touched the last number and the Call button, her mind was a steel trap.
"Hello, Lacey."
What? That wasn't her mother or her stepfather! "Who is this?"
"We've intercepted your phone signal, Lacey. Now you're going to tell us everything you know about Plumatech." With that she heard boots on the shack's concrete floor, and she screamed as two masked men rounded the corner and tore the stall door open. With speed and efficiency that were terrifying on their own, they pounced on her, red hair flying as she tried to resist; taped her mouth without obstructing her nose; and zip-tied her wrists and ankles. One of the two then threw her over his shoulders, fireman-style, and as quickly as that they were out of the shack, up a hill, and into the woods. There the man who was not carrying her put a cloth bag over her head so that she could not see but could still breathe, and she felt herself being hoisted over the back of a horse.
She could feel the horse begin to move slowly, and she knew that they were headed into the deep woods. After some time she could feel the air grow warmer, and she once again heard the Pacific Ocean. Off the horse those same hands lifted her, and she could tell that they were wading out into the ocean. She thrashed in fear, not wanting to drown, but found herself in what she had to assume was a rubber raft. A small motor started up, and she wondered how long it would take for the guards at Plumatech to realize she was gone.
The ride on the raft seemed to last forever, and when it did come to rest, the same hands lifted her out of the vessel and several yards before they set her onto her feet in sand, where they turned her and shoved her into some kind of vehicle. A door slammed, and they were off again. When the jeep finally stopped, she was lifted out of the jeep onto the cool concrete floor of a climate-controlled garage. A hand removed the bag, and she looked around to see four armed men surrounding her. One of them unsheathed a knife, and Lacey gasped in fear, but he quickly and efficiently cut the zip-tie around her ankles so that she could stand more naturally. Another brought a box from inside the humvee (she could see the vehicle now), and he pulled out a pair of slippers, which he placed at her feet.
Her red hair and green bikini were a strange match for the black fuzzy slippers, but she slid them on nonetheless, and they started to march her out of the garage and into a hallway. They turned left, then right, and Lacey could see that every door had a number on it but no identifying labels. When they reached door 193, one of the guards opened it with a key and led her in.
Inside the room, an array of strange equipment awaited her. She saw what looked like gymnastics equipment with padded leather cuffs attached, a twin bed with the same, what appeared to be an obstetrician's delivery bed, once again with restraints. She shuddered as she looked around but took some limited comfort in the fact that the room was so clean--there were no signs that anyone had ever bled in here, and the room had a strangely pleasant scent.
But she had little time to figure out what the smell reminded her of, as the guards led her to a pair of the cuffs attached to a trapeze-bar and began to secure her wrists in them. The leather straps were fur-lined, meaning that she was tied fast but not uncomfortably as she had been with the cuffs in PlumaTech's interrogation room. When they had fixed her to the bar, one of them pressed and held a button on a control panel nearby, and the steel cables that held up the bar began to pull the bar and her hands upwards. Within seconds she was standing flat-footed--her weight was not resting on the cuffs or her wrists--but unable to lower her arms. She faced the room full of equipment, her back to the room's door.
The guards left the room, and Lacey was left for a few minutes to ponder her fate.
Before long the door opened behind her, and she heard one set of footfalls approach.
"They're going to find me, I hope you know. We're connected to the CIA. They're not going to let an intelligence asset just float in the wind!"
The figure behind her did not say a word.
"Let me out of this, and I'll contact the people over at the other island. We might be able to work out a way for you not to die for this."
Still nothing. Lacey heard slow footsteps, and she saw a man in a mask, his face and neck completely covered save his eyes, walk around to her front. The figure was Black, judging by the little skin exposed. As his hands approached her midsection, that impression was confirmed.
"Don't touch me! I'm an American citizen, and you're going to regret this!"
The hands started to pinch at the skin around her navel, and Lacey strained to pull her hands down and keep those fingers off of her flesh. But the restraints were well-made, and both hands had all the time in the world to tickle her midsection. She tried to scream at him at first, but his quick pinches at the base of her ribs plunged her into squealing giggles, and once she was there, one hand streaked fingertips from her ribs across to her navel, and her knees gave way. The other hand started swishing back and forth just outside her navel, and Lacey suddenly had to laugh with every breath. Her weight hung from the padded cuffs, and she tried to get her feet underneath her, but the tickling fingers kept finding spot after spot, places that in normal circumstances she would cover up--just before punching someone who tickled her like this--and nothing in her experiences with boys prepared her for it. Soon, as her head thrashed, she could only see the mysterious tickler between strands and locks of her own red hair, and she felt like she could taste that ticklish electricity as it went from her core throughout her body.
As her body tried to twist away from the tickling, the ropes connecting the trapeze-bar to the metal frame above it doubled over themselves, raising her ever so slightly off the ground, like a swing set on a playground. When it had twisted over itself three or four times--Lacey realized too late that the tickler was working her in one direction but not the other--he broke off the tickling and began to maneuver quickly around her, against the direction that the ropes wanted to twist. Lacey tried to follow him, to keep him in front of her, but she only managed to give the ropes another level of kink. With two more rapid steps, he was behind her, and a hand snaked out to grab her at the edge of her swimsuit, where her upper thigh met the swimsuit's fabric. He squeezed, and Lacey shrieked, and her leg came off the mat. With only one foot on the ground, the trapeze went into a spin, whipping her around twice and disorienting her utterly. Only for a split-second did she realize that the man in black was not in front of her any more; his hands soon confirmed his new position, and now both of her upper thighs were under attack. Her knees pumped in a running-in-place motion as he squeezed. The tickling was unbearable, and she could feel her body tiring from the big motions of her legs. When his hands stopped tickling her legs, she slumped on the ropes, breathing heavily.
She heard him walking away from her, and she had a fleeting thought that he would go away, but then she heard a zipper, and her legs found new strength. She stood again and turned herself far enough to see her tormentor. He had knelt down, and he was reaching into what looked like an expensive leather overnight bag. When he stood, he held a long feather, stiff and shiny, in each hand. In a moment that she couldn't explain to herself later, she squared her feet as he approached, ready to kick him if he got too close with the feathers. She did throw a snap kick his way as he approached, but he stepped easily enough to the outside of the kick, grabbing her leg with one arm. With his free hand he put both feathers in the hand holding the leg up, and with his newly-freed hand he reached down and started squeezing the captive thigh up towards the swim suit line again. Lacey, unable to get a hand or her remaining leg around to strike him, fell into a frantic spasm of laughter as he tickled her leg. She twisted this way and that, but his arm had her knee hooked, and without hands to grab at the hand, she could only squeal as his claw worked at her ticklish upper thigh.
When he stopped, Lacey panted as she fought to get her breath back. The tickler leaned forward and whispered in her ear. "I'm going to tickle you with these feathers, and if you fight me, we're going to start all over again."
Lacey's head raised. "Marcus?"
A low chuckle greeted her. He set her leg down and stepped backwards, and she could see that indeed the body under the mask was Marcus's.
"Marcus! You've got to help me get out of here and back to Plumatech!"
Now he spoke in his familiar, full voice. "Where do you think you are?"
"But those men kidnapped me from Plumatech!"
"And that's what the people back in the States are going to think about both of us. But we're on another Plumatech island, Lacey. And every day now I'm going to tickle you as long as I want to, and there's nothing you can do to make me stop."
Lacey's gut fell. Mustering what courage she could, she tried to confront him. "You know that they're going to find us, Marcus. Don't be a fool."
"I need you to stand up straight, Lacey, and when I'm done tickling you with these feathers, you can go to your new room. It's much nicer than on the other island."
Lacey set her mind in that moment: she would let him tickle her, and when he was done, she would figure out a way to escape. Taking a deep breath, she nodded and set both feet firmly on the ground. Marcus stepped forward, one feather in each hand again, and reached his arms forward. One feather swiped across her belly, jumping her navel as it met the innie, and Lacey jumped at the sensation. As much as he had tickled her, as much as she had laughed, the stiff feather's tip was still like a live wire on her skin, and she jumped at its touch. The other was tracing her hip-bone where her swim suit gave way to skin, and she could imagine every nerve lighting up as the feather found it.
"Please--I can't hold still!"
"I know you can't. I don't want you to. I want to hear you laugh again!"
He got his wish soon enough as the belly-feather snaked its way into her navel and he gave it a twirl. The feeling was too much, and her knees buckled as she started to giggle. The hip-feather was dashing back and forth across her lower abdomen now, igniting her skin with its hungry blade. This wasn't the kind of tickling that made her body buck as before; these were cruel, precise lashes not of a whip but of a flexible, merciless feather, and this time Lacey did not lose her breath but had all of her lungs' capacity to beg Marcus to stop. And every time she begged him, every cry of "No!" only brought more torture with the feathers, and Lacey soon hung by her wrists, wanting only for the tickling to stop, not sure that Marcus would relent before her body gave out and... what? She died from tickling?
She had no idea how much time had passed when Marcus finally did relent, but she was confident, when her eyes raised and she saw him leave the room, that she had descended into madness and returned only when the feathers withdrew to whatever circle of Hell they had emerged from.
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
Lacey shouted upward at the people she imagined on the larger vessel as the guards dragged her, but nobody looked over the edge. Soon she was back inside the smaller ship, and the sailors frog-marched her purposefully through the corridors.
When they had rounded the third corner, Lacey gasped: Matilda was approaching, and behind her two large men were wheeling a familiar piece of metal apparatus. She squirmed against her captors' grip, but ultimately she could only watch as her doom drew closer.
"Hello again, Lacey. I'm so glad you were the one who tried to escape--I've wanted to take you to the next level of this experiment for some time."
* * * THREE MONTHS EARLIER * * *
Lacey had no concept of time as the day started. She had not been able to contact the outside world, though she had heard Matilda mention in passing that someone in the organization was feeding updates on the terrorist kidnapping situation to Lacey's parents. And she had lost count, but she knew that almost every day for many days guards had shown up in her room--she was never quite sure what time--to escort her to the torture chamber to let Marcus tickle her. They had let her take strings of days off here and there, and she could guess the reasons, but more or less her only contact with human beings had been with guards to walk her to the chamber and with Marcus, who never seemed to tire of tickling her, even as he had refused her offers several times to stop in exchange for favors that Lacey had never offered to a man before. (She was not proud of this last detail, but she also knew that anything at this point sounded appealing compared to another lengthy tickling session.)
Her room on the island was not a bad facility, in its own right. Were it something other than a holding chamber for tickle torture, she could likely enjoy the comfortable bed, whose bedclothes often got changed while she was down the hall. The view of the ocean would have been great for a vacation condominium, though it had its own torments for someone who could not escape. She also had a private bathroom and a television but no computer to contact the outside world. And she would have felt grateful for the exercise equipment in the corner of the large room--a Bowflex and an elliptical and some gymnastics mats for stretching--had it not become known, early on, that skipping a day of exercise or failing to exercise until the 45-minute timer expired would double the length of her tickling.
And there was no need to change into a bathing suit when that time came. Since she arrived on the island in a bikini, her drawers in this room included two-piece lingerie and two-piece swim suits only. She did not get cold, as the climate in the room was controlled, but her ticklish spots, as she came to think of them, were always accessible, whether she wore her "inside clothes" or the array of bikinis that they provided her so that she could spend an hour or so each day--always under guard--on the beach.
In a detail that was reassuring but wicked in its own right, boxes of books and notebooks would periodically appear when she returned from the chamber, and each box included a graduate student's reading list for one of the doctoral programs she hoped to apply for when she got back to the States. So with time on her hands, she limited herself to a bit of televised international news each evening before she set to work reading and making notes on the psychology books. They also gave her a cookbook on occasion, and the kitchen in the apartment always had food stocked. And the dishes were always washed when she got back, and that wasn't nothing.
When the guards did arrive--as they did, like clockwork, they would always let her finish the paragraph she was reading, and then she would put on slippers and walk between them to the chamber, where Marcus, who evidently also exercised every day, would be waiting.
On this day, like every other day, the configuration only revealed itself when Lacey got to the chamber. Marcus stood by a piece of metal-framed apparatus with padded cuffs--they were at least always padded--attached to what looked like the extended foot-rest of a recliner. The chair had a back, at least, but her hands, she could tell by the second set of padded cuffs, would extend above her head as she sat. She sat obediently, as she had learned to do, and let the guards extend her hands above her head and fasten her ankles in the foot-rest-cuffs.
Marcus pulled up his customary stool, a simple three-legged wooden piece, and sat where she had become accustomed to seeing him, over the tops of her toes.
"I do love foot days, Lacey. Don't you?" She did not even bother to smile--he had forced her to laugh too many times, and she knew it was coming again. "And today's extra-special. We have a new, experimental lotion for you." He reached into the bag that he kept in that room and held up a flask, its clear glass showing a tan liquid inside.
"What is that stuff?"
"Don't know what it is. Just know what they said it would do." He removed the cap and poured some of it onto his right hand. The liquid came out of the bottle quickly, like an oil and vinegar dressing. With a gentle touch he started to rub it into her foot, and she giggled in spite of herself as he carefully coated the sole, the skin between her toes, the heel, and everything on the bottom of one foot, then the other.
"Do they ever let you contact home, Marcus? Don't you ever worry about your family?"
"When our twelve months are up, Lacey, we're both going home, and we'll have money in the bank. In the meantime, you'd better brace yourself for this."
"You've ticked my feet a dozen times, Marcus. I think we both already know I'm ticklish."
"But not like this, baby. They're only letting me use this lotion on you once a month. If what I'm reading is right, this is going to be like nothing you've ever felt before."
"Why are they doing this to me, Marcus?"
"They don't tell me. I just know I enjoy it. Maybe when we get back stateside we can get together and do this without the lab-coats watching us. How does that sound?"
“When we get stateside, I’m going to call the cops if I ever see you on the same block as me.”
Marcus wiped his hands off with a wet wipe. “Well, if all we’ve got is the island, I’d better enjoy it, right? They said that lotion should only take a minute or two to soak in and take its effects. So let’s give it some time to do its work, shall we?” He took three steps to get from her front to behind her, and she braced herself for what she assumed was going to be underarm tickling.
She was right, and Marcus’s technique was getting more refined by the day. Although she knew just what was coming, his fingers still worked their magic on her skin, and she writhed at his touch, her initial whine turning into giggles and giving way to full-voiced laughing as his lightning-quick digits poked and pinched at her armpits. He had tickled her for hundreds of minutes, yet every time he touched her unguarded body, her unprotected skin erupted and overrode any sense of perspective she might bring, and she withered again under the attack. Her head tossed, her hair whipped, and once again she knew she was giving Marcus the satisfaction of knowing just what kind of torture she was enduring as she squealed and laughed at the tickling.
He stopped sooner than he might have on other days, and Lacey watched him circle around in front of her. From his bag she saw him draw two objects, the size of feathers but with a glossy sheen to them. The edges were bristled like a brush for a short-haired pet, and each came to a cruel point.
She didn’t want to sound afraid, but her voice would not hide her panic. “What are those things, Marcus?”
“They give off a super-low-voltage electric current that interacts with your nerves and the lotion in a way that… well, let’s give it a try and see how it works!”
“Marcus! Don’t touch me with those things!”
She saw his thumb depress a button, and she could hear a thin, whining buzz from one of the objects, the one getting close to her foot.
“Marcus!”
When the buzzing bristles made contact, Lacey tried to leap at the touch. The restraints held her down, but the scream that Marcus heard was like nothing he had heard from her. She bucked and thrashed like someone who had never been ticked before, her voice crackling from a screech to a desperate rising laughter and bringing her to an inhaling gasp of a drowning person, then into a hoarse, wild, laughing song as the bristles slowly worked their vibrating way from her heel towards the ball of her foot. Marcus’s jaw dropped; she had never responded this way before, and he would never forget this. As the tool approached her toes, he looked up to her face and, seeing the shape into which her face contorted, pulled the device back, afraid for a moment that she might never return to the Lacey he had come so much to enjoy tormenting.
Her red hair hung over her face, and she panted as if afraid that she might never breathe again. Marcus just looked down in wonder at the tool. “Wow, this thing really is as great as they said!”
“Please… Marcus… stop!”
“I’m not even touching you right now, Lacey. But I do want to try out the tip of this thing on your other foot. If a row of bristles could do that, what happens when it’s just one concentrated spot?”
Lacey’s look was priceless as she begged. “Please, Marcus! I’ll do anything! Right here! Right now! But please don’t touch me with that again! I can’t take it!”
“I told you it was going to be extreme, didn’t I?” Both devices jumped to life with a high hum, and Marcus licked his lips as both approached Lacey’s writhing left sole.
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
The guards fastened Lacey into the tickle-chair--just like the one on the island, except on wheels, presumably for easy transport--and stood back as Matilda examined her prey. The guards easily removed her slippers, and Lacey gasped as she saw Matilda produce a bottle of the feet-oil, just the same kind that Marcus had tortured her with those two terrible times, and from which she had run.
"Boys, hold her feet for me."
She tried to squirm, but Matilda rubbed the oil on her soles, under her toes, and all over her heels and insteps.
"As you know, Lacey, this oil was one of the augmentations that Marcus taught us to use on you to heighten your sensations. We're going to give it some time to set in, but in the meantime, I want you to have a look at some pictures for me." She held a stack of photos of men in the island's guard-uniforms in one hand. "We're going to figure out who it was who helped you escape, and when we do, we’re going to kill him and his family.”
Lacey gulped, then tried to put some steel into her voice. “I’m not going to let you do that.”
“We’ll see, won’t we? But first, I want to give you a chance to avoid the cyber-feather. Let me know when you see the guard who helped you escape.”
Lacey resolved to watch the pictures go by, then tell them Marcus helped her escape.
Matilda held up the first one. “This one?” Lacey shook her head at the face she had seen in the hallway but had never been one of her escorts. “This one?” No again. “This one?” No. “This one?”
Lacey focused herself on replicating her true answers as she saw on the photo paper in front of her the face of Carlos.
* * * ONE MONTH EARLIER * * *
Lacey staggered over to her bed and slumped into it. The day's tickling session had been exhausting, with Marcus working her feet mercilessly before he received his message to cease. She would use her time later to exercise and to study and to swim in the ocean, but for right now, she was exhausted, and she needed a nap.
Her body told her it was too early for the guards to show up again when she heard boots on her floor. She started and sat up, seeing not the usual quartet of guards but only one, and he was looking over his shoulder, looking systematically at the surveillance cameras.
Lacey panicked; none of the cameras’ lights were on! She jumped out of the bed and put the furniture between herself and the guard. “You stay away from me!”
The guard put his finger to his lips to signal that she shouldn’t scream. He started speaking to her in Spanish. “I don’t have much time. My name is Carlos, and I’m a guard here. I don’t think it’s right what they’re doing to you, and I can help you escape.”
“But they’re going to let me go when my year is up!”
“You don’t know that! Look, things are going to get worse before they get better. And there’s no saying that they’re going to honor their bargain. Your family thinks terrorists have you, right?”
Lacey nodded.
“So what’s keeping them from killing you to keep you quiet? Look, I’ve got a daughter at home, and I would hope someone would rescue her if these people had her and might kill her.”
Lacey scowled and glanced up at the cameras, which were still off. “Alright. If I did try to escape, how would I do it?”
“Every week, on Tuesday morning, a recycling ship comes to the dock. Its security isn’t as tight as the ships that transport prisoners or even the trash. If you move at just the right moment, you should be able to get on board that boat and get to the mainland.”
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
With Carlos’s picture looking into her eyes, Lacey shook her head no. Matilda shuffled through four more, and at each Lacey shook her head no.
“I don’t think you’re telling us the truth, Lacey.”
“It was Marcus.”
“What?”
“Marcus came to me, and he said that he had fallen in love with me, and that he’d help me escape so that we can be together back in America.”
Matilda looked at Lacey over the top of her glasses’ rims. “Go on.”
“So he helped me sneak on the ship, and he said that he would blame it on the guards when I turned up missing.”
“I’m still not sure I believe you, but we’re going to find out the truth. Guards, take her to the interrogation room.”
The chair beneath her started to roll down the hall. “What? I told you who helped me escape! You don’t have to do this!”
“Oh, Lacey, don’t you know that prisoners lie to avoid torture? We’ve got to have something better than the confession of fear to go on!” The chair kept rolling, and the wheels bumped over a door’s threshold, carrying Lacey into a space that looked like the wings of a small theater. As the chair kept rolling, she heard a voice booming over a public-address system.
“We have undertaken six months of tickling experiments on our subject, Lacey. Tonight what you will see is the result of those six months of careful modulation of her biometrics and adjustments of precisely what spots and what techniques tickle the most. And the results, I promise, will show you the future of intelligence work with captured subjects.” As the chair rolled, Lacey’s eyes were overwhelmed by the brilliance of stage lighting, and she could hear the quiet reactions of a hall full of people. She suddenly became aware in a new way of her exposed belly and underarms, and she wished she could pull her arms down.
Lacey peered out past the blinding lights and saw people in suits and military uniforms. She heard boots approaching her, and she squirmed as she saw Marcus approaching her from across the stage. The voice on the PA, Lacey suddenly realized, was the same man who had recruited her all those months ago, and he had turned from the podium microphone to watch her and Marcus. Marcus leaned in and whispered to her, “I fell in love with you, huh?”
Lacey just glared.
“I know what these cyber-feathers do to you, Lacey, and I know Matilda got your feet all ready for them. I’m going to enjoy this.”
Marcus held up the two devices, and their humming started. Marcus aimed the tip of each between Lacey’s toes, and she knew she had no chance. His fingers, in all of those daily tickling sessions, could reduce her to a puddle when they worked on the sensitive skin between her toes, and the cyber-feather was worlds worse. Her feet, brought to an intensity of reception that was beyond natural, began to sing to her mind as they approached, and at their first touch they became explosives in her nervous system. Whatever dream she had of maintaining dignity in the face of this torment shattered as her arms pulled at her wrist-restraints and her hips bucked at the terrifying ticklish torture that tore through her toes. The tips of the devices traced the curves between her big and second toes, then the next valley between toes, then the next. Her bottom bounced on the bench, and her only wish was that she could trade something, anything, to make the tickling stop. But the cyber-feathers, once they had traced all of the curves between her does, found their way to the borders between the balls of her feet and her soles, and each tip continued to trace a way across her suffering skin. Lacey’s laughter soared as the cyber-feathers traced every cluster of nerve-endings that she most feared to be touched, and she could already feel herself sweating as she laughed harder than a woman’s body should laugh. Marcus relented and turned the devices off, and she hated him with a burning intensity as he took a bow for the audience and they applauded.
“And now you’ll see just how effective this enhanced interrogation can be. Now that our subject knows what the cyber-feathers can do, my colleague Matilda will show her photos of the facility’s guards, and you’ll see that PlumaTech interrogation, without harming the subject, can get actionable intelligence in minutes, not months!”
Lacey gritted her teeth. There was no way she was going to let Carlos, much less his family, die because of what this corporation had done. And Marcus. Yes, she would still point the finger at Marcus.
Matilda crossed to center stage with the photos again. She flashed the first, and Lacey shook her head no. Then the second one came up, and it was a face she had never seen before. She hesitated, then shook her head no. Then one of her escorts, who hadn’t been in the first stack, and she shook her head no as she blinked the picture into focus. Then Carlos’s face came up, and she quickly shook her head no, fearing that she sighed too readily when Matilda went to the next picture. Photo after photo went by, and Lacey could taste the moment when she would accuse Marcus in front of all of these people.
The man at the podium spoke up again. “As you can see, and as we’ll put in parallel boxes so that you can see the difference, our medical monitoring system did not turn up any differences when we interrogated Lacey backstage before the tickling.”
What?
Backstage?
Lacey craned her neck so that she could see the screen behind her. Projected were a series of biometric readouts, she assumed from her own transponder when she had first been captured. What were they doing?
“But by monitoring a patented range of biometric variables, you can see that a subject, after we’ve tickled her, simply cannot lie to a Plumatech interrogator. You’ll see that graph number four, the one for our guard Carlos, will read substantially different.” The new biometrics flashed up, and the spike in activity was undeniable: Lacey’s body had given away Carlos.
“No! It wasn’t him! It was Marcus! Marcus helped me escape!”
The man at the podium turned for a moment to smile at Lacey, and then he went back to talking. “You see? A prisoner can lie all she wants, but the biometrics always tell the truth. Don’t they, Lacey?”
Lacey’s heart pounded. Her mouth went dry as she imagined Plumatech’s goons breaking down the door to Carlos’s house. “Please! He has a family! Don’t hurt him!”
The gasp from the audience was sudden and undeniable, and a round of applause slowly swelled until the whole crowd clapped their approval.
“Now you shouldn’t take my word for Plumatech’s effectiveness, and you shouldn’t believe our prisoner either, so let’s hear it from someone who knows, shall we? Come on out here, Carlos!”
Lacey’s eyes went wide. What was happening?
With bold, long strides, Carlos, now in a tuxedo, crossed the stage and shook the man’s hand. “Carlos Sanchez is one of our CIA contacts who is learning Plumatech’s interrogation methods. We planted him among Lacey’s guards to make her think she was escaping so that she would think that he would die if she gave him up. So believe us, a moral young lady like Lacey has all the reason in the world not to give Carlos up.”
Tears started to come out of Lacey’s eyes as she looked at the traitorous Carlos. “Why? Why did you do this to me?”
Carlos flashed her a smile. “Don’t get down, Lacey. You get to go home now!”
“What? But I thought…”
The man in the suit once again spoke into the microphone. “Yes, young Lacey can go home now, having helped Plumatech and thus America to learn new ways of getting the truth. Lacey, you’ll get a completion bonus, and your participation will be a big bonus when you apply to graduate schools.”
Lacey’s head was spinning. What was going on?
“But Carlos, you’ve been such a good part of this experiment, it would be a shame not to let you show off some of what you’ve learned in your training. What do you say to one more crack at the beautiful, ticklish Lacey?”
Carlos grinned.
The crowd roared their approval.
Lacey’s toes curled in anticipation.
by
Kid Indy
Lacey remembered the line from The Wire, or something like it: there are only two days in prison, the day you go in and the day you get out. She hadn't kept count of the days while she observed the one boat arriving at the island and leaving the island, but there were enough days there to know that it followed a strict schedule. And today was going to be the day that she was on that boat headed back to land.
What she would do there she wasn't quite clear on: no doubt the port would be somewhere on the coast of Chile, but she doubted it would be Santiago or any other major city. She knew well enough that her red hair and her bright green eyes would make her stand out, and her young figure always drew attention, so she had to move fast, but before that became a problem, she would have to get on the boat.
And that meant the loading dock and the shipping containers.
Carlos, the kind guard who had given her the tip, was hitting a thousand so far: shift change at the dock happened just when it should, and she maneuvered herself as quickly as she could underneath one of the piles of shredded-paper disposal bags that left the island periodically, no doubt to conceal the government's true operations there. She made herself an opening large enough to let air in through the bags but not enough to be seen easily, and she made sure that the crate's vents were both open to allow her ventilation as the boat made its trip to the mainland.
When the container's door shut and she felt the lift suspend the crate off the ground, she knew that this stage of her escape was over; now all she had to do was wait.
* * * SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER * * *
"So, MIss Thompson, what we're offering is fifty thousand dollars, plus room and board, for your participation in our study."
Lacey had her apprehensions about the project. After all, this was no university lab but a private consulting firm with known ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, but at 24, with a Master's degree in psychology in hand and a grueling doctorate program ahead, pocketing fifty thousand dollars and picking up some valuable CV material was a good idea on all fronts. She'd be away from her family, to be sure, but that would be the case if she started a doctoral program far away anyway.
Lacey tried to show her interest and her preparation. "And the study deals with non-violent intelligence gathering, right?"
The large man in the gray suit nodded appreciatively. "Exactly. As you no doubt know, the intelligence community went seriously astray in the first decade of the twenty-first century--you were no doubt just a child then--and turned to violent coercion of prisoners. Throughout the Cold War, non-violent intel and interrogation had reached true innovative heights, but then, for political reasons, all that went by the wayside. Plumatech is picking up where they left off so that this country can restore its moral reputation in the world."
Lacey had always held on to a patriotic sentiment, even when her graduate-school friends had scoffed at such feelings as unsophisticated, and this project was looking better and better. "And the contract is for one year, right? So I can come back to the States and start my doctorate?"
"Absolutely. We've had researchers stay on longer, but the contract is for one year."
Lacey took the pen and signed the contract. "Plumatech. So we're talking intelligence gathering with a feather rather than a hammer, right?"
The man smiled behind his sunglasses. "Absolutely."
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
She was starting to worry; the passage of time is hard to detect in the dark, but she knew that the ship should have been back to land within a couple hours, and this trip already seemed longer. Against her own judgment, she forced the container door open--Carlos had taught her how to do that as well--and started to prowl around the hold. Her luck was still holding--she found a bathroom not far from her container and got a drink of water--but something was definitely off.
Opening heavy doors and navigating stairs as quietly as she could, she made her way to the deck and looked out. The sight took her breath away: from the island, she could see other islands to the east, miles away but still a sign that she was still connected to South America.
With the sun setting behind her, Lacey only saw open ocean.
* * * SIX MONTHS EARLIER * * *
Her journey to Chile had gone by without a hitch, and at a small cabana the young researchers were beginning to get a feel for each other. All American citizens--as Lacey would expect for this kind of work--they nonetheless came from all over the country. Marcus, from Alabama, who had played cornerback for Samford, had a magnetic personality and an irresistible baritone voice to go with his ebony muscles. Lacey was immediately drawn to him. She also met Nalani, another graduate student whose family was originally from Hawaii, and Will, a Korean-American from Seattle. She introduced herself as from Ohio, though she had gone to graduate school in Virginia, and she soon found out that all four had plans, after the study, to go back to the States to pursue doctoral degrees and to work in psychology. The four drank coffee together until the van came to pick them up. They rode to the docks at the edge of town, and they boarded a medium-sized vessel, something that could pass for a riverboat and that could haul a fair number of people plus cargo.
The ride to the island was a short one--Lacey had to guess that it was about an hour, since they had to surrender their phones for security reasons. The four talked to each other in English as the crew spoke Spanish, and when they arrived at the island, the recruiter met them, told them that their luggage had arrived before them, and welcomed them to Plumatech and to the study. He led them inside an impressive glass-and-steel building and to a conference room, where the recruiter departed and a blonde woman--Lacey guessed she was in her forties--took over the presentation.
"In your first year at Plumatech, you are the experimental subjects. If you sign on for another year, you'll help us administer the studies." The four looked at each other with a mix of concern and bravado. "As you know, our mission is to return to the intelligence community a sense of humanity, relearning and refining non-violent techniques of information-gathering and presenting the nation's intelligence agencies with real alternatives to Abu Ghraib and the waterboard."
Marcus spoke up. "So we're going to be prisoners here?"
"No, you're not prisoners, but we wanted to recruit some of the best and smartest subjects so that you can take over the day-to-day after this year, to be sure, but also so that we can simulate trained hostiles, who we have to assume will be intelligent and able to resist ham-fisted interrogation techniques."
Now it was Will's turn. "How is this going to work, then?"
The woman smiled. "Good question. During each round of the trial, each of you will receive instructions assigning you to be the interrogator or the detainee each round." Another exchange of glances. "We want to make sure that intelligence officers can learn these techniques quickly, so you're going to take turns being the subject for the training experiments and the interrogation subjects. The biometric gauges that we implant on each of you will make sure that the interrogation remains nonviolent--after all, we are trying to forge new tools here, not hold on to the failed tools of the last generation."
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
Lacey ducked back under cover as she heard someone coming. Making her way back into the hold, her heart beat fast as she tried to formulate a backup plan. If she knew where the ship was going she could estimate whether she could last without supplies, but to find that out she'd have to ask someone onboard, which was out of the question.
She didn't have long to think about such things. The vessel's public address system crackled to life, and she heard an all-too-familiar voice fill the air.
"Good evening, Lacey!"
She gasped to herself. "Matilda!"
"I hope you're enjoying your evening cruise. Did we mention that the medical gauge was also a tracking device? We knew you were aboard this ship as soon as you knew. Rest assured, when we recover you, you're going to find out just how intense nonviolent interrogation can get."
Lacey's eyes widened. She scrambled to find a hiding place.
* * * SIX MONTHS EARLIER * * *
"Please, Lacey, call me Matilda."
She made a mental note: the program director was no longer Dr. Rosenstein. "Thank you. So the bonus thousand is in addition to the ten thousand?"
"Of course! Your base salary never goes away. But as you win and lose rounds, you stand to increase that substantially. Plumatech wants to make sure that you're doing everything full speed rather than going easy on your new friends."
"So if he gives me the code, those thousand dollars are mine."
"And if he does not give you the code but can reproduce the code at the end of three days, then they're his, and you lose your first thousand."
Lacey grinned at the prospect. A random number generator had made her the interrogator, and Marcus was her first mark. She was confident that she could get that bonus from him in the first round. She put on a little extra perfume before she was led into the interrogation room, where Marcus sat in a chair at a table. His hands were cuffed and linked to the strong steel table with short chains. Lacey was dressed as she imagined an intelligence agent would, a conservative jacket, some slacks, and low-heeled shoes over hose.
"Hello, Marcus. Can I get you something to drink?" He stared straight ahead. "You know why we're here, and we've got all the time in the world to talk, so why don't we start with your story?"
Marcus kept silent for a spell, but Lacey knew enough psychology to know that silence would break him. After a long time just breathing in the quiet room, eventually he did start to talk, and then to answer questions. Lacey's confidence grew: this was working! She worked him verbally for the duration of the morning, and when she started to feel herself fatigue, she exited the room and walked around the corner to the observation room, where she and Matilda looked at Marcus through a one-way mirror. "He'll tell me the code before long."
"Are you so sure?"
"I'm confident. He wants to tell me--"
"He's stalling for time, trying to tire you out. You have to offer him something he wants."
"Even beyond getting out of that room?"
"When the subject has discrete information that you can't piece together from narrative, some kind of exchange has to be on the table."
"What in the world do I have to trade?"
"That's for you to work out!"
She returned to the room. Marcus, whose initial stone-faced silence hadn't lasted long, greeted her with a smile. "I do love talking with you, Lacey. Maybe when we get out of here, I can use these thousand dollars to take you out for a nice dinner."
"Who's to say that you're going to come away with this money?"
"You can't hurt me--that's against the rules. I know that. So there's nothing you can do to me to make me give up this code."
"What if you gave me the code, and we'll split the money once I've got it?"
"You think I'm going to trust you to do that? I'm just going to win it and keep it anyway."
She leaned across the table. "What if I gave you half the money and something else to make things worth your while?" She tugged at one side of her collar, teasing a glimpse of flesh.
Marcus smirked. "You think I can't get girls on my own?"
"Maybe I can do things that your other girls can't."
Marcus missed a beat responding, and Lacey knew that she had him thinking. He shook his head. "Nah. I'll just keep the money, and I bet you come to me anyway."
"But that's twelve months away. What if we were talking about here and now, while we're still on this island?" She took her foot out of her shoe and began to rub up and down his leg. She could almost feel his breath shorten.
She could hear him grit his teeth. "With all this money I'm going to win, I can wait a few months."
Lacey slid her other foot out of its shoe and scooted her chair back, putting both legs and feet up on the table. "Oh, I can't imagine that long a wait when there's so much to enjoy now!"
He glared at her. "Alright. I'll give you the code, and you can keep all the money. But I want something else from you. Right here. Right now."
Lacey started to imagine what he wanted from her. "And what is that?"
"I want you to put your feet where I can touch them."
Lacey's eyes widened. So was that Marcus's thing? "You just want to touch my feet?"
"I want you to give me your feet for as long as I want them, and when I'm done, the code is yours. That's my promise."
Now it was Lacey's turn to be confused. But the first day wasn't even over, and two days of rest while the rest of the first round ended sounded good. "Alright. But you're still wearing those chains so that I can get away if you try anything."
"I'm going to try all sorts of things. But yeah, I'll still have the chains on."
"So you like feet, do you?"
"No more talk until you give me what I want."
The table was too big for Lacey to remain in her chair and get her feet to where Marcus could reach them, so she lifted herself onto the edge of the table and extended her pant legs and the hosed feet to the center, where he could reach them. "So tell me, Marcus, do you like feet?" She wanted to save the word "fetish" for later, when she could use it as a weapon.
"Not feet on their own, Lacey. But I knew back on the mainland that I liked your laugh." As he said this, he took one of her ankles on one hand and started to run a finger along her sole. The hose turned the fingertip into a live wire, and Lacey jumped, nearly falling off the table. She jerked her feet out of his grasp and started to climb down onto the ground.
"No, I'm not going to let you do that."
"Then no code. I can sit here for a while."
Lacey looked to the one-way mirror, which offered no counsel. She took a deep breath. "Alright. I'm going to give you ten minutes to touch my feet, but then you have to give me that code."
"Thirty."
"No way!"
"I'm going to wait you out, then."
"Twenty."
His undeniable smile returned. "Deal." She started to make her way back onto the table. "You must be pretty ticklish to jump that quickly. I'm going to enjoy this."
Lacey gritted her teeth and sat herself back on the table. "Alright. Twenty minutes, and then you give me that code."
She put her feet back within his hands' reach and looked at her watch. "Alright. Twenty minutes start--" She didn't get to "now" before he had started in on her soles again. This time he didn't grab anything but tickled with both hands, and as she yelped, her knees instinctively drew up, bringing her feet out of his range again.
"If you pull those feet away from me again we're back at square one, Lacey. Give me what I want!" She was giggling through an attempted scowl as she made herself extend her legs again. This time he grabbed with one hand again and started raking the other hand's fingertips over her soles. She yelped at the sensation, and her hands raised to cover her mouth in embarrassment. Marcus quickly poked his finger in between her toes, stretching the hose and making Lacey squeal.
She surprised herself when she started laughing in earnest; she knew that she was getting the code and the money out of this encounter, but he had decidedly seized control of the moment, and she found herself in the position of the suppliant: "No, please! Stop!"
"If you want that code, you'd better be begging me not to stop! There's no way we're up close to twenty minutes yet!" The tickling did not let up, and Lacey's hips squirmed as he explored every ticklish spot from her ankles to her toes. When she could muster a moment of control she looked at her watch--only six minutes had passed! And yet Marcus's hands stayed hungry, at one moment finding one electric spot and sliding across it without letting up, the next roaming all across a foot and keeping all of those nerves sizzling with ticklish energy. Those hands knew what they were doing, and when the clock finally started approaching eighteen minutes, Lacey's abdomen was beginning to ache with laughing. By now she had curled up on one side, her bottom facing Marcus as she writhed at the foot-tickling. Bleary eyes stared at the final seconds ticking away.
"Alright! Stop! That's twenty minutes!" Marcus's hands withdrew as promised. Lacey gasped as she tried to muster a commend. "Now give me that code!" Marcus dutifully recited a string of twelve alphanumeric characters, and at once a red light above the interrogation room turned green.
Lacey had won the money, but her body told her that she had lost something else.
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
Lacey looked frantically for the thickest metal she could find: if that chip were a transponder, she might be able to block its signal long enough to devise another plan. Finding a blind corner, she pressed herself against a bulkhead and tried to catch her breath. Her mind reeled as she tried to devise some way out. Looking down, she realized that she was wearing the same gray UVA T-shirt that she had worn when the experiment first started to make her suspicious.
* * * FIVE MONTHS EARLIER * * *
Lacey's time since the first interrogation session had been more leisurely: the new study participants had to attend classes on the history of interrogation and the psychology of intelligence-gathering, but instead of more interrogation sessions they had been given chances to leave the island and enjoy life as good-looking people in their twenties, with money in their pockets, in a beach city. Her Spanish was improving, and she began to befriend Nalani and Heather, two other participants in the study. Marcus had also continued to spend time with her, sometimes sneaking a tickle when they were in the town's small dance clubs but never bullying her with what he knew.
She also had ample opportunities to call her parents back in the United States, and she let them know that the study was going along well but that she could not disclose what precisely they were studying.
Then, after a few weeks of this leisurely life, she found a letter under her door one morning. The next round of experiments was starting, and she had to memorize an eight-character code before dressing in comfortable clothing and reporting to the interrogation room.
She was now the subject.
When the guards arrived to escort her to the room, she was wearing black yoga pants, a University of Virginia t-shirt a size too big, and flip-flops. She figured that was the definition of comfort--good for study sessions anyway--and she walked casually towards the metal door, reviewing the code in her head so that she could recite it and claim her prize after she refused to disclose it to her interrogator.
When they led her into the room, Marcus awaited, dressed sharply in a maroon shirt and black suit pants. She winked at him, flirting to throw him off, as the guards fastened her hands in the cuffs mounted to the top of the table and left.
"Alright, Lacey, you know what we need here, and we've got plenty of time for you to tell me."
"Are you sure you don't want to give up now, Marcus? Or are you going to take off your shoes this time?"
Marcus smirked and looked at the one-way mirror on the wall. "No, I don't think you'd enjoy that the way I enjoyed yours. But you do seem to know basically what's coming today, so let's get started, shall we?" With that he began to talk towards Lacey's side of the table and behind her chair. She felt a hand reach underneath her t-shirt, and she inhaled sharply as he felt his hand start to brush against her side.
She shot a panicked look towards the one-way glass. "Hey! You can't touch me! This is nonviolent interrogation! You're supposed to do this by talking to me!"
She gasped as his other hand rested on her unguarded side, and she jumped as one hand lightly pinched at the flesh above her hip. "If they come in and stop me, so be it. But in the meantime, let's have some fun, girl!" She could feel his fingers moving around under her shirt, finding where the top of her yoga pants was, brushing against the contours of her bra. Her breath quickened and she looked with a desperate plea at the one-way mirror as his hands sized up how much tickling they could do and she realized that she had no way to make the hands stop.
"No! You can't touch me! That's the rules!" And that was all the words that she could muster before his hands started in on her at full speed. One soft claw got a handful of her side and started to wriggle and pinch, and she had no way to grab the hand to hold it at bay. The other started tracing the top of her pants, a ticklish trail that once again she could not defend. She threw one more desperate look at the glass and, she assumed, Matlida behind it. "Make him stop! Get in here!"
Marcus's hands stopped and withdrew, and she saw his eyes look into hers as he joined her staring at the mirror. Then she felt his breath at the side of her neck. "Nobody's coming to save you, Lacey. Just enjoy the ride!" And as quickly as they had started before, the cotton under her arms became extensions of his tickling hands. She let out an almost-silent squeal as she tried to bring her elbows down, but he was already there, and she couldn't do much but hear her own voice turn into the ticklish laughter that he had drawn out of her when she was the interrogator. She slumped forward, and his hands stayed under her arms, squeezing her with a pulsing rhythm and keeping her laughing as her elbows came together in front of her. With lightning speed they shifted down and around her sides, and his fingertips poked and rubbed the front of her t-shirt. Here she could not reach, her wrists bound to the top of the table, and a whimpering sound joined her laughing.
Then the whimper turned into a short-lived scream as she felt one hand, then the other find a way under her shirt, returning not to cotton but to skin. Fingertips whipped past her navel, dipped in, scratched at the flesh of her belly. He was clearly enjoying this spot, and his fingers wreaked havoc on her ticklish skin for some time, and she was starting to feel some fatigue in her abdomen from the laughing. But that sensation only lasted a moment at a time--his fingers moved from spot to spot with such fluid quickness that a new tickled squeal pierced the air every time he moved from here to there. When his fingers relented, she could only wonder what the line was, in the minds of Plumacorp, between nonviolent and violent interrogation.
She heard Marcus's shoes pacing around to the front of the table, and she looked up to see him sit down across from her.
"Oh, you're in all kinds of trouble, aren't you? Now I know just how non-violent I can get with you! I wonder what would happen if I got down under this table and started working on those feet, now that you're all ticklish?"
"No... please..."
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
Lacey had hidden herself behind a stack of crates in the hold--she couldn't get any doors other than the bathroom's to open--and hoped that they had enough signal-blockers that she wouldn't be detected. She heard footsteps pass her position a number of times, but nobody had started a thorough search of that hold yet.
As she waited, she felt the ship lurch. Had they turned back towards land? Lacey's desperation got the best of her, and she came out from hiding and started climbing up, hoping that the chance to escape to land--some land--was finally close enough to make her escape.
What she saw when she reached the deck was not land but a much larger vessel, what looked almost like a cruise ship. And sure enough, she thought she could hear a jazz band playing on the other ship's deck high above her.
"There's the redhead! Get her!"
Lacey began to run from them, screaming upward, trying to get someone's attention, hoping someone on the other ship would look down and see her.
* * * FIVE MONTHS EARLIER * * *
She woke up sore--nothing in her experience before had prepared her to laugh that long or to have a man's hands tickle her that intensely, but she hadn't given up the code during either day of the interrogation, so today she at least wouldn't be chained to the table and made to sit in the chair for another tickling. And she had gotten her extra thousand dollars again. But that wasn't what she woke up looking forward to.
When the next round started, was her turn to be the interrogator, and she hoped Marcus would be the body she could get her hands on.
A knock came at the door, and Lacey opened it to find Matilda waiting on the other side.
"Good morning, Lacey!"
"Is it my turn to interrogate Marcus?"
She laughed and smiled at her young intern. "You're certainly eager to get back to work! But no, today's a beach day. So here's your phone so that you can call home today." Matilda handed Lacey's smart phone, which they were not allowed to keep in their rooms, to her. "Just be sure you have some sunscreen--you want to be feeling your best when that next round starts, don't you?"
"You have no idea."
Lacey rode in a company van next to Nalani, who seemed to want to disclose something. Lacey asked the driver to turn the radio's music up and leaned in to talk to her.
"Nalani, what's going on in this place?"
"I don't know, Lacey--they're doing terrible things to me."
Lacey pulled up short. "What kinds of things?"
Nalani's dark eyes looked up at the driver, then did a quick check around her to make sure everyone else had their earbuds in. They did. "They took me to the interrogation room, and Will tickled me for two days!"
Lacey's own green eyes widened. "Me too. Do you get to tickle him now?"
Nalani's look turned incredulous. "What is wrong with you? Do you hear what you're saying?"
Faced with another human being who knew of her experience, Lacey realized just how absurd her own anticipation had become. All the same, against her own judgment, she began to wonder how ticklish Nalani's dark skin would be. "You're right. Do you think we should report this?"
"Not unless one of us can get away from the group. I don't think they monitor us as closely when we're away from the facility, and they gave me back my phone."
"Me too. Let's split up once we've got our towels put away, and maybe one of us can get a call in to the mainland."
A few minutes later, the van arrived at the island's beach. The girls walked out onto the sand and laid towels down. Neither Marcus nor Will was anywhere to be seen, but guards from the facility were with them. Lacey was very generous with the sunscreen--she was a redhead, after all--and waded out into the water so that she could turn around and get a sense of where the guards were watching and where they were not.
Lacey kept observing as she strolled along the beach and lay down on her towel. They kept their eyes on the girls--all ten of the beach-visitors were girls--but never did seem to follow any of them to the shack that had been pointed out as the bathroom. She knew that had to be her opportunity, and she waited for a girl she hadn't met to return to the beach before she palmed her phone and made her way up the dune. Checking over her shoulder as she entered the shack, she ducked into a stall and powered it up. She had prepared mentally for exactly what she'd tell her parents so that they could contact the FBI and get them on the case, and as she touched the last number and the Call button, her mind was a steel trap.
"Hello, Lacey."
What? That wasn't her mother or her stepfather! "Who is this?"
"We've intercepted your phone signal, Lacey. Now you're going to tell us everything you know about Plumatech." With that she heard boots on the shack's concrete floor, and she screamed as two masked men rounded the corner and tore the stall door open. With speed and efficiency that were terrifying on their own, they pounced on her, red hair flying as she tried to resist; taped her mouth without obstructing her nose; and zip-tied her wrists and ankles. One of the two then threw her over his shoulders, fireman-style, and as quickly as that they were out of the shack, up a hill, and into the woods. There the man who was not carrying her put a cloth bag over her head so that she could not see but could still breathe, and she felt herself being hoisted over the back of a horse.
She could feel the horse begin to move slowly, and she knew that they were headed into the deep woods. After some time she could feel the air grow warmer, and she once again heard the Pacific Ocean. Off the horse those same hands lifted her, and she could tell that they were wading out into the ocean. She thrashed in fear, not wanting to drown, but found herself in what she had to assume was a rubber raft. A small motor started up, and she wondered how long it would take for the guards at Plumatech to realize she was gone.
The ride on the raft seemed to last forever, and when it did come to rest, the same hands lifted her out of the vessel and several yards before they set her onto her feet in sand, where they turned her and shoved her into some kind of vehicle. A door slammed, and they were off again. When the jeep finally stopped, she was lifted out of the jeep onto the cool concrete floor of a climate-controlled garage. A hand removed the bag, and she looked around to see four armed men surrounding her. One of them unsheathed a knife, and Lacey gasped in fear, but he quickly and efficiently cut the zip-tie around her ankles so that she could stand more naturally. Another brought a box from inside the humvee (she could see the vehicle now), and he pulled out a pair of slippers, which he placed at her feet.
Her red hair and green bikini were a strange match for the black fuzzy slippers, but she slid them on nonetheless, and they started to march her out of the garage and into a hallway. They turned left, then right, and Lacey could see that every door had a number on it but no identifying labels. When they reached door 193, one of the guards opened it with a key and led her in.
Inside the room, an array of strange equipment awaited her. She saw what looked like gymnastics equipment with padded leather cuffs attached, a twin bed with the same, what appeared to be an obstetrician's delivery bed, once again with restraints. She shuddered as she looked around but took some limited comfort in the fact that the room was so clean--there were no signs that anyone had ever bled in here, and the room had a strangely pleasant scent.
But she had little time to figure out what the smell reminded her of, as the guards led her to a pair of the cuffs attached to a trapeze-bar and began to secure her wrists in them. The leather straps were fur-lined, meaning that she was tied fast but not uncomfortably as she had been with the cuffs in PlumaTech's interrogation room. When they had fixed her to the bar, one of them pressed and held a button on a control panel nearby, and the steel cables that held up the bar began to pull the bar and her hands upwards. Within seconds she was standing flat-footed--her weight was not resting on the cuffs or her wrists--but unable to lower her arms. She faced the room full of equipment, her back to the room's door.
The guards left the room, and Lacey was left for a few minutes to ponder her fate.
Before long the door opened behind her, and she heard one set of footfalls approach.
"They're going to find me, I hope you know. We're connected to the CIA. They're not going to let an intelligence asset just float in the wind!"
The figure behind her did not say a word.
"Let me out of this, and I'll contact the people over at the other island. We might be able to work out a way for you not to die for this."
Still nothing. Lacey heard slow footsteps, and she saw a man in a mask, his face and neck completely covered save his eyes, walk around to her front. The figure was Black, judging by the little skin exposed. As his hands approached her midsection, that impression was confirmed.
"Don't touch me! I'm an American citizen, and you're going to regret this!"
The hands started to pinch at the skin around her navel, and Lacey strained to pull her hands down and keep those fingers off of her flesh. But the restraints were well-made, and both hands had all the time in the world to tickle her midsection. She tried to scream at him at first, but his quick pinches at the base of her ribs plunged her into squealing giggles, and once she was there, one hand streaked fingertips from her ribs across to her navel, and her knees gave way. The other hand started swishing back and forth just outside her navel, and Lacey suddenly had to laugh with every breath. Her weight hung from the padded cuffs, and she tried to get her feet underneath her, but the tickling fingers kept finding spot after spot, places that in normal circumstances she would cover up--just before punching someone who tickled her like this--and nothing in her experiences with boys prepared her for it. Soon, as her head thrashed, she could only see the mysterious tickler between strands and locks of her own red hair, and she felt like she could taste that ticklish electricity as it went from her core throughout her body.
As her body tried to twist away from the tickling, the ropes connecting the trapeze-bar to the metal frame above it doubled over themselves, raising her ever so slightly off the ground, like a swing set on a playground. When it had twisted over itself three or four times--Lacey realized too late that the tickler was working her in one direction but not the other--he broke off the tickling and began to maneuver quickly around her, against the direction that the ropes wanted to twist. Lacey tried to follow him, to keep him in front of her, but she only managed to give the ropes another level of kink. With two more rapid steps, he was behind her, and a hand snaked out to grab her at the edge of her swimsuit, where her upper thigh met the swimsuit's fabric. He squeezed, and Lacey shrieked, and her leg came off the mat. With only one foot on the ground, the trapeze went into a spin, whipping her around twice and disorienting her utterly. Only for a split-second did she realize that the man in black was not in front of her any more; his hands soon confirmed his new position, and now both of her upper thighs were under attack. Her knees pumped in a running-in-place motion as he squeezed. The tickling was unbearable, and she could feel her body tiring from the big motions of her legs. When his hands stopped tickling her legs, she slumped on the ropes, breathing heavily.
She heard him walking away from her, and she had a fleeting thought that he would go away, but then she heard a zipper, and her legs found new strength. She stood again and turned herself far enough to see her tormentor. He had knelt down, and he was reaching into what looked like an expensive leather overnight bag. When he stood, he held a long feather, stiff and shiny, in each hand. In a moment that she couldn't explain to herself later, she squared her feet as he approached, ready to kick him if he got too close with the feathers. She did throw a snap kick his way as he approached, but he stepped easily enough to the outside of the kick, grabbing her leg with one arm. With his free hand he put both feathers in the hand holding the leg up, and with his newly-freed hand he reached down and started squeezing the captive thigh up towards the swim suit line again. Lacey, unable to get a hand or her remaining leg around to strike him, fell into a frantic spasm of laughter as he tickled her leg. She twisted this way and that, but his arm had her knee hooked, and without hands to grab at the hand, she could only squeal as his claw worked at her ticklish upper thigh.
When he stopped, Lacey panted as she fought to get her breath back. The tickler leaned forward and whispered in her ear. "I'm going to tickle you with these feathers, and if you fight me, we're going to start all over again."
Lacey's head raised. "Marcus?"
A low chuckle greeted her. He set her leg down and stepped backwards, and she could see that indeed the body under the mask was Marcus's.
"Marcus! You've got to help me get out of here and back to Plumatech!"
Now he spoke in his familiar, full voice. "Where do you think you are?"
"But those men kidnapped me from Plumatech!"
"And that's what the people back in the States are going to think about both of us. But we're on another Plumatech island, Lacey. And every day now I'm going to tickle you as long as I want to, and there's nothing you can do to make me stop."
Lacey's gut fell. Mustering what courage she could, she tried to confront him. "You know that they're going to find us, Marcus. Don't be a fool."
"I need you to stand up straight, Lacey, and when I'm done tickling you with these feathers, you can go to your new room. It's much nicer than on the other island."
Lacey set her mind in that moment: she would let him tickle her, and when he was done, she would figure out a way to escape. Taking a deep breath, she nodded and set both feet firmly on the ground. Marcus stepped forward, one feather in each hand again, and reached his arms forward. One feather swiped across her belly, jumping her navel as it met the innie, and Lacey jumped at the sensation. As much as he had tickled her, as much as she had laughed, the stiff feather's tip was still like a live wire on her skin, and she jumped at its touch. The other was tracing her hip-bone where her swim suit gave way to skin, and she could imagine every nerve lighting up as the feather found it.
"Please--I can't hold still!"
"I know you can't. I don't want you to. I want to hear you laugh again!"
He got his wish soon enough as the belly-feather snaked its way into her navel and he gave it a twirl. The feeling was too much, and her knees buckled as she started to giggle. The hip-feather was dashing back and forth across her lower abdomen now, igniting her skin with its hungry blade. This wasn't the kind of tickling that made her body buck as before; these were cruel, precise lashes not of a whip but of a flexible, merciless feather, and this time Lacey did not lose her breath but had all of her lungs' capacity to beg Marcus to stop. And every time she begged him, every cry of "No!" only brought more torture with the feathers, and Lacey soon hung by her wrists, wanting only for the tickling to stop, not sure that Marcus would relent before her body gave out and... what? She died from tickling?
She had no idea how much time had passed when Marcus finally did relent, but she was confident, when her eyes raised and she saw him leave the room, that she had descended into madness and returned only when the feathers withdrew to whatever circle of Hell they had emerged from.
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
Lacey shouted upward at the people she imagined on the larger vessel as the guards dragged her, but nobody looked over the edge. Soon she was back inside the smaller ship, and the sailors frog-marched her purposefully through the corridors.
When they had rounded the third corner, Lacey gasped: Matilda was approaching, and behind her two large men were wheeling a familiar piece of metal apparatus. She squirmed against her captors' grip, but ultimately she could only watch as her doom drew closer.
"Hello again, Lacey. I'm so glad you were the one who tried to escape--I've wanted to take you to the next level of this experiment for some time."
* * * THREE MONTHS EARLIER * * *
Lacey had no concept of time as the day started. She had not been able to contact the outside world, though she had heard Matilda mention in passing that someone in the organization was feeding updates on the terrorist kidnapping situation to Lacey's parents. And she had lost count, but she knew that almost every day for many days guards had shown up in her room--she was never quite sure what time--to escort her to the torture chamber to let Marcus tickle her. They had let her take strings of days off here and there, and she could guess the reasons, but more or less her only contact with human beings had been with guards to walk her to the chamber and with Marcus, who never seemed to tire of tickling her, even as he had refused her offers several times to stop in exchange for favors that Lacey had never offered to a man before. (She was not proud of this last detail, but she also knew that anything at this point sounded appealing compared to another lengthy tickling session.)
Her room on the island was not a bad facility, in its own right. Were it something other than a holding chamber for tickle torture, she could likely enjoy the comfortable bed, whose bedclothes often got changed while she was down the hall. The view of the ocean would have been great for a vacation condominium, though it had its own torments for someone who could not escape. She also had a private bathroom and a television but no computer to contact the outside world. And she would have felt grateful for the exercise equipment in the corner of the large room--a Bowflex and an elliptical and some gymnastics mats for stretching--had it not become known, early on, that skipping a day of exercise or failing to exercise until the 45-minute timer expired would double the length of her tickling.
And there was no need to change into a bathing suit when that time came. Since she arrived on the island in a bikini, her drawers in this room included two-piece lingerie and two-piece swim suits only. She did not get cold, as the climate in the room was controlled, but her ticklish spots, as she came to think of them, were always accessible, whether she wore her "inside clothes" or the array of bikinis that they provided her so that she could spend an hour or so each day--always under guard--on the beach.
In a detail that was reassuring but wicked in its own right, boxes of books and notebooks would periodically appear when she returned from the chamber, and each box included a graduate student's reading list for one of the doctoral programs she hoped to apply for when she got back to the States. So with time on her hands, she limited herself to a bit of televised international news each evening before she set to work reading and making notes on the psychology books. They also gave her a cookbook on occasion, and the kitchen in the apartment always had food stocked. And the dishes were always washed when she got back, and that wasn't nothing.
When the guards did arrive--as they did, like clockwork, they would always let her finish the paragraph she was reading, and then she would put on slippers and walk between them to the chamber, where Marcus, who evidently also exercised every day, would be waiting.
On this day, like every other day, the configuration only revealed itself when Lacey got to the chamber. Marcus stood by a piece of metal-framed apparatus with padded cuffs--they were at least always padded--attached to what looked like the extended foot-rest of a recliner. The chair had a back, at least, but her hands, she could tell by the second set of padded cuffs, would extend above her head as she sat. She sat obediently, as she had learned to do, and let the guards extend her hands above her head and fasten her ankles in the foot-rest-cuffs.
Marcus pulled up his customary stool, a simple three-legged wooden piece, and sat where she had become accustomed to seeing him, over the tops of her toes.
"I do love foot days, Lacey. Don't you?" She did not even bother to smile--he had forced her to laugh too many times, and she knew it was coming again. "And today's extra-special. We have a new, experimental lotion for you." He reached into the bag that he kept in that room and held up a flask, its clear glass showing a tan liquid inside.
"What is that stuff?"
"Don't know what it is. Just know what they said it would do." He removed the cap and poured some of it onto his right hand. The liquid came out of the bottle quickly, like an oil and vinegar dressing. With a gentle touch he started to rub it into her foot, and she giggled in spite of herself as he carefully coated the sole, the skin between her toes, the heel, and everything on the bottom of one foot, then the other.
"Do they ever let you contact home, Marcus? Don't you ever worry about your family?"
"When our twelve months are up, Lacey, we're both going home, and we'll have money in the bank. In the meantime, you'd better brace yourself for this."
"You've ticked my feet a dozen times, Marcus. I think we both already know I'm ticklish."
"But not like this, baby. They're only letting me use this lotion on you once a month. If what I'm reading is right, this is going to be like nothing you've ever felt before."
"Why are they doing this to me, Marcus?"
"They don't tell me. I just know I enjoy it. Maybe when we get back stateside we can get together and do this without the lab-coats watching us. How does that sound?"
“When we get stateside, I’m going to call the cops if I ever see you on the same block as me.”
Marcus wiped his hands off with a wet wipe. “Well, if all we’ve got is the island, I’d better enjoy it, right? They said that lotion should only take a minute or two to soak in and take its effects. So let’s give it some time to do its work, shall we?” He took three steps to get from her front to behind her, and she braced herself for what she assumed was going to be underarm tickling.
She was right, and Marcus’s technique was getting more refined by the day. Although she knew just what was coming, his fingers still worked their magic on her skin, and she writhed at his touch, her initial whine turning into giggles and giving way to full-voiced laughing as his lightning-quick digits poked and pinched at her armpits. He had tickled her for hundreds of minutes, yet every time he touched her unguarded body, her unprotected skin erupted and overrode any sense of perspective she might bring, and she withered again under the attack. Her head tossed, her hair whipped, and once again she knew she was giving Marcus the satisfaction of knowing just what kind of torture she was enduring as she squealed and laughed at the tickling.
He stopped sooner than he might have on other days, and Lacey watched him circle around in front of her. From his bag she saw him draw two objects, the size of feathers but with a glossy sheen to them. The edges were bristled like a brush for a short-haired pet, and each came to a cruel point.
She didn’t want to sound afraid, but her voice would not hide her panic. “What are those things, Marcus?”
“They give off a super-low-voltage electric current that interacts with your nerves and the lotion in a way that… well, let’s give it a try and see how it works!”
“Marcus! Don’t touch me with those things!”
She saw his thumb depress a button, and she could hear a thin, whining buzz from one of the objects, the one getting close to her foot.
“Marcus!”
When the buzzing bristles made contact, Lacey tried to leap at the touch. The restraints held her down, but the scream that Marcus heard was like nothing he had heard from her. She bucked and thrashed like someone who had never been ticked before, her voice crackling from a screech to a desperate rising laughter and bringing her to an inhaling gasp of a drowning person, then into a hoarse, wild, laughing song as the bristles slowly worked their vibrating way from her heel towards the ball of her foot. Marcus’s jaw dropped; she had never responded this way before, and he would never forget this. As the tool approached her toes, he looked up to her face and, seeing the shape into which her face contorted, pulled the device back, afraid for a moment that she might never return to the Lacey he had come so much to enjoy tormenting.
Her red hair hung over her face, and she panted as if afraid that she might never breathe again. Marcus just looked down in wonder at the tool. “Wow, this thing really is as great as they said!”
“Please… Marcus… stop!”
“I’m not even touching you right now, Lacey. But I do want to try out the tip of this thing on your other foot. If a row of bristles could do that, what happens when it’s just one concentrated spot?”
Lacey’s look was priceless as she begged. “Please, Marcus! I’ll do anything! Right here! Right now! But please don’t touch me with that again! I can’t take it!”
“I told you it was going to be extreme, didn’t I?” Both devices jumped to life with a high hum, and Marcus licked his lips as both approached Lacey’s writhing left sole.
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
The guards fastened Lacey into the tickle-chair--just like the one on the island, except on wheels, presumably for easy transport--and stood back as Matilda examined her prey. The guards easily removed her slippers, and Lacey gasped as she saw Matilda produce a bottle of the feet-oil, just the same kind that Marcus had tortured her with those two terrible times, and from which she had run.
"Boys, hold her feet for me."
She tried to squirm, but Matilda rubbed the oil on her soles, under her toes, and all over her heels and insteps.
"As you know, Lacey, this oil was one of the augmentations that Marcus taught us to use on you to heighten your sensations. We're going to give it some time to set in, but in the meantime, I want you to have a look at some pictures for me." She held a stack of photos of men in the island's guard-uniforms in one hand. "We're going to figure out who it was who helped you escape, and when we do, we’re going to kill him and his family.”
Lacey gulped, then tried to put some steel into her voice. “I’m not going to let you do that.”
“We’ll see, won’t we? But first, I want to give you a chance to avoid the cyber-feather. Let me know when you see the guard who helped you escape.”
Lacey resolved to watch the pictures go by, then tell them Marcus helped her escape.
Matilda held up the first one. “This one?” Lacey shook her head at the face she had seen in the hallway but had never been one of her escorts. “This one?” No again. “This one?” No. “This one?”
Lacey focused herself on replicating her true answers as she saw on the photo paper in front of her the face of Carlos.
* * * ONE MONTH EARLIER * * *
Lacey staggered over to her bed and slumped into it. The day's tickling session had been exhausting, with Marcus working her feet mercilessly before he received his message to cease. She would use her time later to exercise and to study and to swim in the ocean, but for right now, she was exhausted, and she needed a nap.
Her body told her it was too early for the guards to show up again when she heard boots on her floor. She started and sat up, seeing not the usual quartet of guards but only one, and he was looking over his shoulder, looking systematically at the surveillance cameras.
Lacey panicked; none of the cameras’ lights were on! She jumped out of the bed and put the furniture between herself and the guard. “You stay away from me!”
The guard put his finger to his lips to signal that she shouldn’t scream. He started speaking to her in Spanish. “I don’t have much time. My name is Carlos, and I’m a guard here. I don’t think it’s right what they’re doing to you, and I can help you escape.”
“But they’re going to let me go when my year is up!”
“You don’t know that! Look, things are going to get worse before they get better. And there’s no saying that they’re going to honor their bargain. Your family thinks terrorists have you, right?”
Lacey nodded.
“So what’s keeping them from killing you to keep you quiet? Look, I’ve got a daughter at home, and I would hope someone would rescue her if these people had her and might kill her.”
Lacey scowled and glanced up at the cameras, which were still off. “Alright. If I did try to escape, how would I do it?”
“Every week, on Tuesday morning, a recycling ship comes to the dock. Its security isn’t as tight as the ships that transport prisoners or even the trash. If you move at just the right moment, you should be able to get on board that boat and get to the mainland.”
* * * ON THE SHIP * * *
With Carlos’s picture looking into her eyes, Lacey shook her head no. Matilda shuffled through four more, and at each Lacey shook her head no.
“I don’t think you’re telling us the truth, Lacey.”
“It was Marcus.”
“What?”
“Marcus came to me, and he said that he had fallen in love with me, and that he’d help me escape so that we can be together back in America.”
Matilda looked at Lacey over the top of her glasses’ rims. “Go on.”
“So he helped me sneak on the ship, and he said that he would blame it on the guards when I turned up missing.”
“I’m still not sure I believe you, but we’re going to find out the truth. Guards, take her to the interrogation room.”
The chair beneath her started to roll down the hall. “What? I told you who helped me escape! You don’t have to do this!”
“Oh, Lacey, don’t you know that prisoners lie to avoid torture? We’ve got to have something better than the confession of fear to go on!” The chair kept rolling, and the wheels bumped over a door’s threshold, carrying Lacey into a space that looked like the wings of a small theater. As the chair kept rolling, she heard a voice booming over a public-address system.
“We have undertaken six months of tickling experiments on our subject, Lacey. Tonight what you will see is the result of those six months of careful modulation of her biometrics and adjustments of precisely what spots and what techniques tickle the most. And the results, I promise, will show you the future of intelligence work with captured subjects.” As the chair rolled, Lacey’s eyes were overwhelmed by the brilliance of stage lighting, and she could hear the quiet reactions of a hall full of people. She suddenly became aware in a new way of her exposed belly and underarms, and she wished she could pull her arms down.
Lacey peered out past the blinding lights and saw people in suits and military uniforms. She heard boots approaching her, and she squirmed as she saw Marcus approaching her from across the stage. The voice on the PA, Lacey suddenly realized, was the same man who had recruited her all those months ago, and he had turned from the podium microphone to watch her and Marcus. Marcus leaned in and whispered to her, “I fell in love with you, huh?”
Lacey just glared.
“I know what these cyber-feathers do to you, Lacey, and I know Matilda got your feet all ready for them. I’m going to enjoy this.”
Marcus held up the two devices, and their humming started. Marcus aimed the tip of each between Lacey’s toes, and she knew she had no chance. His fingers, in all of those daily tickling sessions, could reduce her to a puddle when they worked on the sensitive skin between her toes, and the cyber-feather was worlds worse. Her feet, brought to an intensity of reception that was beyond natural, began to sing to her mind as they approached, and at their first touch they became explosives in her nervous system. Whatever dream she had of maintaining dignity in the face of this torment shattered as her arms pulled at her wrist-restraints and her hips bucked at the terrifying ticklish torture that tore through her toes. The tips of the devices traced the curves between her big and second toes, then the next valley between toes, then the next. Her bottom bounced on the bench, and her only wish was that she could trade something, anything, to make the tickling stop. But the cyber-feathers, once they had traced all of the curves between her does, found their way to the borders between the balls of her feet and her soles, and each tip continued to trace a way across her suffering skin. Lacey’s laughter soared as the cyber-feathers traced every cluster of nerve-endings that she most feared to be touched, and she could already feel herself sweating as she laughed harder than a woman’s body should laugh. Marcus relented and turned the devices off, and she hated him with a burning intensity as he took a bow for the audience and they applauded.
“And now you’ll see just how effective this enhanced interrogation can be. Now that our subject knows what the cyber-feathers can do, my colleague Matilda will show her photos of the facility’s guards, and you’ll see that PlumaTech interrogation, without harming the subject, can get actionable intelligence in minutes, not months!”
Lacey gritted her teeth. There was no way she was going to let Carlos, much less his family, die because of what this corporation had done. And Marcus. Yes, she would still point the finger at Marcus.
Matilda crossed to center stage with the photos again. She flashed the first, and Lacey shook her head no. Then the second one came up, and it was a face she had never seen before. She hesitated, then shook her head no. Then one of her escorts, who hadn’t been in the first stack, and she shook her head no as she blinked the picture into focus. Then Carlos’s face came up, and she quickly shook her head no, fearing that she sighed too readily when Matilda went to the next picture. Photo after photo went by, and Lacey could taste the moment when she would accuse Marcus in front of all of these people.
The man at the podium spoke up again. “As you can see, and as we’ll put in parallel boxes so that you can see the difference, our medical monitoring system did not turn up any differences when we interrogated Lacey backstage before the tickling.”
What?
Backstage?
Lacey craned her neck so that she could see the screen behind her. Projected were a series of biometric readouts, she assumed from her own transponder when she had first been captured. What were they doing?
“But by monitoring a patented range of biometric variables, you can see that a subject, after we’ve tickled her, simply cannot lie to a Plumatech interrogator. You’ll see that graph number four, the one for our guard Carlos, will read substantially different.” The new biometrics flashed up, and the spike in activity was undeniable: Lacey’s body had given away Carlos.
“No! It wasn’t him! It was Marcus! Marcus helped me escape!”
The man at the podium turned for a moment to smile at Lacey, and then he went back to talking. “You see? A prisoner can lie all she wants, but the biometrics always tell the truth. Don’t they, Lacey?”
Lacey’s heart pounded. Her mouth went dry as she imagined Plumatech’s goons breaking down the door to Carlos’s house. “Please! He has a family! Don’t hurt him!”
The gasp from the audience was sudden and undeniable, and a round of applause slowly swelled until the whole crowd clapped their approval.
“Now you shouldn’t take my word for Plumatech’s effectiveness, and you shouldn’t believe our prisoner either, so let’s hear it from someone who knows, shall we? Come on out here, Carlos!”
Lacey’s eyes went wide. What was happening?
With bold, long strides, Carlos, now in a tuxedo, crossed the stage and shook the man’s hand. “Carlos Sanchez is one of our CIA contacts who is learning Plumatech’s interrogation methods. We planted him among Lacey’s guards to make her think she was escaping so that she would think that he would die if she gave him up. So believe us, a moral young lady like Lacey has all the reason in the world not to give Carlos up.”
Tears started to come out of Lacey’s eyes as she looked at the traitorous Carlos. “Why? Why did you do this to me?”
Carlos flashed her a smile. “Don’t get down, Lacey. You get to go home now!”
“What? But I thought…”
The man in the suit once again spoke into the microphone. “Yes, young Lacey can go home now, having helped Plumatech and thus America to learn new ways of getting the truth. Lacey, you’ll get a completion bonus, and your participation will be a big bonus when you apply to graduate schools.”
Lacey’s head was spinning. What was going on?
“But Carlos, you’ve been such a good part of this experiment, it would be a shame not to let you show off some of what you’ve learned in your training. What do you say to one more crack at the beautiful, ticklish Lacey?”
Carlos grinned.
The crowd roared their approval.
Lacey’s toes curled in anticipation.
