Hey TMF!
Here's the latest episode in my most involved commission ever, Andromeda. I STRONGLY recommend reading the other episodes before you jump in on this one--I've had time and space to work with recurring characters in ways that I haven't for some time.
Part 1: https://www.ticklingforum.com/showt...-part-1-(fff-f-non-con)&p=4697766#post4697766
Part 2: https://www.ticklingforum.com/showt...-part-2-(fff-f-non-con)&p=4697967#post4697967
Part 3: https://www.ticklingforum.com/showt...omeda-part-3-(f-f-ff-f)&p=4713292#post4713292
Part 4: https://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?341137-Andromeda-part-4-(fff-f)&p=4741088#post4741088
I hope you enjoy part 5, and I especially hope that you leave a comment. And after you've left a comment on this story, find another author's work you enjoy and leave a comment there too!
KI
Andromeda part 5 (fff/f)
by
Kid Indy
The elevator slowly, quietly rose past floor after floor. Inside the giant office building the cold rain outside could not reach the floor, but no place is safe from the chill the night after election day for the losers.
Without the old-fashioned chime when the elevator reached its destination, the steel doors opened, and the sudden change in air pressure, without the sound to confirm, was even more unsettling than usual. Jen Chung stepped out of the elevator onto the marble floor of the executive area. Her high heels clicked on the floor as she made the walk that she had always taken in daytime hours before. A lone security guard waited by the entrance to the office complex–by this time of night, nobody was making new appointments, and nobody was calling phones, so the formal reception area was dark.
“I’m here to see Mr. Auerbach.”
The guard, who had seen Chung on television a dozen times a day for the last five months, did not even bother to check her identification; he just nodded to her and jerked a thumb at the door, and she made her way to the senior bankers’ offices. The lonely night guard did indulge in a long, leering look at her legs as she receded down the hallway.
Jen knew that Auerbach was likely the only person in the offices this time of night, and that was by design: as the person who had been taking secret meetings with Councilwoman Chung, Fred Auerbach had kept closest track of her campaign and arranged connections between the bank and Political Action Committees that were legal but not often flattering. Auerbach had a long-running reputation of making kings–and in this case queens–in Massachussetts politics. Tonight the imposing surroundings of his downtown Boston banker’s office only compounded in the dread of night.
Jen knocked at the heavy wooden door.
“Come in, Councilwoman.” Jen winced; she knew exactly why he would use her city-council title. She walked in and waited for Auerbach to begin the talking. She did not have to wait long. “You had the incumbent on the ropes, Councilwoman. Ten points up with two weeks to go. From where I’m sitting it looks like you stopped punching in the last round.”
“We were always going to be a long shot against Sanders, Mr. Auerbach. I don’t care how liberal everyone thinks Massachusetts is; it’s not easy to get elected as a Korean-American woman against a New England white man who’s been here since the Puritans.”
“Let’s dispense with the false modesty, Coucilwoman. And let’s face facts. Polls two weeks before election day had you up by double digits and rising to an unbeatable margin. Something happened in the last fourteen days.” He pushed a stack of colorful papers across the desk. “You still had money in the advertising budget–our money–and you didn’t spend it. Sanders put people in every suburban neighborhood during the week before the general, and you sent yours home early.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to get at, Mr. Auerbach, but sometimes political campaigns lose.”
“I think you threw this bout, and I think I know why.”
Jen tried not to swallow too loudly as Auerbach typed rapidly on a laptop. A monitor facing Jen suddenly illuminated, and she saw the frame and menu bar of a media-player program. She saw herself sitting in a rolling office chair, her head back in the throes of sexual excitement. At her feet a young Black woman took the toes of one of Jen’s feet in her mouth, and a young Chinese man stroked her other sole with his fingers. Jen had seen this clip before; an anonymous email account had sent it to her private inbox and told her to lose the election but make it look like a mere strategic misjudgment.
“How did you get that?”
“Who do you think had it emailed it to you, Councilwoman?”
Chung jumped out of her chair. “WHAT? I could have been the first Korean-American Senator from the east coast, and you blackmailed me out of it?”
“Tell me, Councilwoman, was this the first time you pressed interns into satisfying your perversion?”
Jen’s whole body broke out in a sweat. She had held some kind of public office almost every year since she graduated law school, and at 40, she had set up at least half a dozen interns with good corporate management positions, good campaigns to work with, and other very good jobs in exchange for their silence. “Before this one I never–”
“Never got caught on video, Councilwoman? And did you think that all of those interns–and all of them who no doubt could have had lobbying leverage on you once you made your way to Washington–would never have sold what they knew to your enemies?” He leaned forward in his chair. “Did you think some of them already hadn’t?”
Jen stammered, then tried to take her stand. “This was my private life, Auerbach. This is not 1998, and I’m not Bill Clinton. America knows that public officials’ sex lives are none of their business!”
“Not for the predictable sorts, Councilwoman. But your fetish for having underlings play with your feet? That comes out once you’re in Washington, and the entire party goes down with your sexual oddity and your exploitation of your power. I wasn’t going to let things get that far.”
Auerbach leaned back in his chair, put his elbows behind him, thrust out his chest. “Of course, since I had the video made, I’m now the one with the power to end your career. But you’ve spent a lot of our money, Councilwoman, and we will have to deal with that.”
“Look, sometimes people win campaigns, and sometimes people lose them. Nobody can help that. And I don’t have the kind of money to pay that back!”
“I know you don’t Councilwoman.”
Jen’s spine stiffened. She knew the look–for a lot of older white men, an Asian girl with long legs was enough to put this look on their faces. This one seemed to smell an Asian girl and exotic sexual possibilities in the water. She started to back away towards the door. “I’m sorry you lost this election for me, Auerbach. But that’s on you. I’m going to walk out of here and figure out what I’m going to do next, and if you ever try to sexually harrass me again, I’ll have you and your bank on every hash-tag-me-too list faster than your bosses can deal with it. I’m leaving now.”
Auerbach remained in his chair. “Let’s not harbor any illusions, Councilwoman. You still owe me, and I am going to get exactly what I want from you. And if I don’t, then I’ll wait until the party has dispensed with you and then release this video to the press.”
“You listen to me: if you release that video, I’ll get the best lawyers in Boston and sue this bank so hard that they’ll throw you out the window just to save the office space. Don’t ever contact me again!”
Auerbach did not respond as Jen pivoted, marched to the office door, and left. She made her way back towards the elevators without looking back, either at Auerbach’s office or at the security guard who was now ogling her behind.
On the elevator Jen entered the building’s address into her ride-share ap so that she could get a car there quickly. She wanted to get in touch with her campaign manager that night so that they could prepare a counter-attack against Capricorn Group, but first she wanted to get away from their building.
The elevator came to a jarring stop on the third floor instead of the ground floor. The doors slid open, and in front of Jen were two women in sunglasses and gray suits. The blonde one spoke first, her Texas drawl a strange sound in downtown Boston. “Madam Councilwoman, we have a credible threat situation. A right-wing anti-Asian group has been sharing your location on Internet forums, and we have reason to believe that they’re waiting streetside to attack you. We’re taking you out of here in an unmarked vehicle.”
“Wait! Who are you?”
The other woman, whose hair was wavy and black and whose skin was darker, spoke in a Central American accent. “Pennsylvania Bureau of Investigations, Ms. Chung.” She flashed a badge-wallet quickly and took Jen’s arm. “Follow us.”
Jen instinctively ducked her head down and went with the women quickly through the third floor’s hallways and to a parking deck that occupied the side of the building that didn’t face the main street. A black SUV awaited them, and the white agent opened one of its side doors. The Latina agent went in first, and she pulled on Jen’s wrist as the white agent pushed her into the vehicle. With the same thick accent–Jen guessed Honduran–the agent told the driver, “Drive!” Jen sat between the two bodies and could feel how strong they likely were.
The SUV, which had not been in a parking spot, pulled forward and towards the garage’s exit. Jen turned her head in the direction of the white agent and asked, “Where are we going?”
That agent did not respond; in the silence Jen heard a firearm chamber a round, and she felt a small, hard pressure on her back. The woman behind her, with her Guatemalan accent, said, “That’s not for you to worry about. Just stay quiet as we leave the parking garage, or you’re not going to live to the end of the night.”
Jen froze. “Who are you?”
Now the blonde woman spoke. “The ones who are not going to hurt you as long as you cooperate.” Jen nodded. She didn’t like her odds against both of these women, unarmed, so she decided to wait. “Now stay quiet.”
The van pulled up to the checkpoint to get out of the building. A security guard, in his twenties by Jen’s guess, was the only person between the SUV and the open road. Jen saw the driver’s window roll down and felt the pistol’s barrel press even more firmly into her back. In her silence she saw the guard take parking fare from the driver and heard the driver say, “Good night, David! When do you work next?” Jen thought she could hear an East-Asian accent.
“Tomorrow night.”
“Maybe I’ll see you again if I have another pickup, then. Have a good night!”
“You too, Miss!”
And that was it: the SUV pulled out into the street, and the blonde woman’s strong hands took Jen’s, binding them in front of her with a zip-tie. Once they were bound, the same blond woman took what felt like a thick silk bag and slid it over Jen’s head. The material was smooth, and she could breathe, but she couldn’t see a thing. “Alright, Hana. Let’s get home.”
That was an extra level of indignity: if Jen heard her name pronounced right, the driver had a Korean name, and she did speak English with something like a Korean accent. The gun was no longer poking her, but Jen sat still anyway; she wasn’t about to fight two women, one with a pistol; and with her hands tied she definitely had no chance. But she had to get some information so that she could call for help at her first opportunity. “Who are you? Do you work for Capricorn group?”
She heard the Texas accent. “We’re not unrelated. Save your energy, though. We’re going to have a long night.”
“Where are you taking me?”
This time the Central-American accent. “Not important. What matters is that if you cooperate with us, you’ll be returned to your apartment unharmed.”
“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re going to be able to accomplish here, but I’m just a City Councilwoman. I lost the Senate race. I have nothing that I can give you.”
Jen heard a voice coming from the driver’s seat. “Just enjoy the ride, Miss Chung! Nobody’s going to hurt you!” Yes, definitely a Korean accent.
“Who are you people?”
Texas again. “You’ll find out who we are and how you play into the night’s proceedings soon enough. Just stay quiet and don’t speak unless one of us speaks to you.”
“What does that mean?”
The Korean accent piped up again. “Have you been reading the Katie Jones stories in Interest?”
Jen gasped into the silk bag.
* * * * * * *
SEVEN DAYS EARLIER
The young secretary glanced at her laptop screen, then stood up behind her small desk. “Ms. Jones, Captain Pascal will see you now.” The reporter had noticed the younger woman stealing glances at her while she waited, dwelling on her legs and her shoes. She sighed as she rose from the waiting-room chair: now her work would have to be to break some other grand story so that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her career as the tickling-terrorist reporter.
She crossed the State Police Headquarters’s tile floor and walked through the wooden door. A tall redhead, at most a year or two younger than the reporter, extended a hand and gave a firm but welcoming handshake. “Ms. Jones, I’ve been keeping up with your work in Interest.”
“Please, call me Katie.”
“I had no idea how extensive this operation was when we scooped up those three girls, Katie.”
“I didn’t either until…”
“Yes, I’ve been reading your series. I didn’t even remember Congressman Banksman, but certainly I never would have imagined that Angie Hamilton was part of this story.”
“And here’s what I can’t figure out–how much did the state of Virginia know when they traded those three Andromeda girls for the drug cartel?”
“I don’t know–my hunch is that the state AG would have traded Andromeda for Mama Sam’s cartel even knowing that, but they might not have. But they gave an order, and I follow orders.”
“State police are always going to go for drug gangs over political corruption.”
“That’s right. But you already knew all of this, Katie. Is there something I can help you with that’s not already in your files?”
“Yes, but you’re not going to like it, Captain Pascal.”
The tall redhead smiled quietly. “You can call me Kelly. And I didn’t get as far up the ranks as I have without answering a few difficult questions from a few reporters, Katie.”
* * * * * * *
The SUV was on the road for some time, and Jen lost track of how many turns they had taken. But she felt the change in the vehicle’s vibrations when it pulled off of the paved road and onto gravel. Her breathing sped up again, and she started making plans mentally for how she was going to escape. Would they let her go to the bathroom? Would there be no door on the bathroom like in the Katie Jones reports? Would she be able to get to her phone? Any phone? The rumbling of the gravel under the tires kept going, and she wondered how far back from paved roads they would be.
The SUV came to a stop.
The strong hands that had led her to the kidnapping vehicle now led her out of the same. She could feel cold air on her neck, where the silk bag stopped, and none of the sounds of Boston were anywhere to be heard. They marched her across gravel for eighteen paces, then told her to step up onto what felt like a wooden porch, then through a door into heated interior air.
Then, after three more turns, she heard a creaky door open, and the Central American voice gave the command that she dreaded most. “Stairs going down. Fourteen.” Her high heels met each step firmly, and she could hear three people descending with her. The basement space was also heated, and they made two more turns after the stairs were done.
“Sit down.” The hands forced her down into what felt like a recliner, and a retractable foot-rest pushed the backs of her calves up to confirm that suspicion. On the padded footrest Jen felt something like a leather belt brush against her ankle, and panic took over: her legs kicked out into the dark, warm air, never connecting with anything but moving too violently, she hoped, for anyone to restrain them. Her hands were still tied, so she could not get her balance to get out of the chair, and in what felt like less than seconds one set of hands pushed her shoulders back into the chair’s back while another wrapped around her calf to hold it steady. The third set of hands quickly and efficiently wrapped a thick leather strap, padded on the side that touched Jen’s ankle, around her lower leg, and even as Jen struggled, her movements became smaller in scope as the strap tightened. Her leg was in no pain and had good circulation, but her foot, extended out on the footrest of the recliner, had nowhere to go. The hands that had been pushing her shoulders back now fastened padded cuffs around her wrists as the other four hands held her steady and restrained her right ankle. Jen, unable to see and unable to separate her hands from each other, was entirely helpless.
With the cuffs on her wrists, she felt a tugging at the plastic zip-tie that had restrained her on the ride, and with a click and a clatter she felt a blade cut the plastic and heard the scraps fall to the floor. And to complete her indignity and her terror, she heard a mechanical winch start to turn. As it did the cuffs on her wrists slowly began to rise against her will, and though she attempted to pull them down close to her body, within a few seconds her wrists, though unharmed by the padded cuffs, were suspended higher than her head, and her hands could not cover her body. Only then did a hand grasp and pull up on the silk bag on her head. Once again Jen gasped as she saw one of the faces in front of her.
“Hana! It is you!”
“Hi there, boss! Isn’t this a great party?”
* * * * * * *
“Why did the Andromeda girls just turn themselves over to you?”
Kelly Pascal laughed. “Is that what they told you?”
“You read the story, right?”
“Of course I did, but I didn’t recognize the operation when I read it. Those girls were trying to make themselves seem like they were in control, pure and simple.”
Katie Jones scribbled furiously in her notebook. “Then how did you really catch them?”
“Did they make mistakes? Sure they did. Every criminal does, and that’s why they don’t run the world. But they weren’t trying to get caught. At least not on purpose.”
“Then why didn’t you come forward to correct the first story when I published it?”
Pascal looked over Katie’s shoulder at the door. “We have to be off the record if I’m going to answer that one.”
Katie placed her notebook and her pen on the desk in front of her. “We’re off the record until you tell me we’re not.”
Pascal nodded. “As soon as Traci Carter went missing Congress went into full damage-control mode. Whatever Carter told you, Andromeda wasn’t just out to make her leave Washington. She had access to Congress that few people have, and Andromeda must have tortured her until she gave them something valuable.”
Katie swallowed as she remembered the merciless tickling that the same three Andromeda girls had given her to make her give up the password to her phone in South Carolina. “And that’s still not part of the official Traci Carter story.”
Pascal shook her head no.
Katie cursed herself silently–why hadn’t she pursued that question? But then another occurred to her. “The Virginia State Police weren’t the only agency working to bring in Andromeda, were you?”
“We still off the record?” Katie nodded. “Homeland Security was on this case within hours of Traci Carter going missing. Americans already don’t trust Congress–you see all the news stories about social-media bots and such. If they knew that some lesbian shadow organization was making high-level lobbyists disappear, we’d have a Constitutional crisis. DHS kept their involvement secret, but we wouldn’t have been able to track those Andromeda girls without federal surveillance.”
“Who was your point of contact?”
“Off the record?”
“Off the record.”
“Assistant Deputy Director Elizabeth Morton.”
* * * * * * *
“Hana, you have to let me out of here! You know this is a sexual thing for me!”
Hana squatted in front of Jen’s left foot. “You bet I know, boss. And do you know how I know, Carla?”
The Guatemalan flashed a smile at her Korean counterpart as she knelt in front of Jen’s right foot. “We all know, Hana, but I know you love to tell this story.”
Hana giggled as the third girl, a tanned blonde, sat on a barstool behind the other two girls. “Once the rumors got to us, I applied for an internship, and it didn’t take me long to become one of the Councilwoman’s tickle-girls!”
The blonde got in on the fun. “So once they told us to grab you, we knew this was going to be a really fun night. Hana, you already know some of her first-round tickle spots, don’t you?”
Jen’s eyes shuttled hurriedly between the three girls. “First-round?”
Hana laughed again. “That’s right, boss! When I was tickling your foot and you got off, that wasn’t even the first phase of what you’re going to get tonight. We’re going to tickle you worst than most women even know how to fear!”
Jen pulled frantically at the cuffs suspending her wrists. “Please! Don’t touch me! This is my sexual identity!”
The blond was now laughing. “Councilwoman, you’re a creepy politician. That’s not a sexual identity–it’s why people don’t trust the government.”
“Who are you?”
“Well, I think you’ve already guessed that we’re Andromeda. I’m Lisa, and you’re about to find out just how sexual your feet can be.”
“You can’t do this–I’m not like Katie Jones. I’m different! My sexuality revolves around tickling! This is going to be torture!”
Hana began to take off Jen’s shoe. A small foot, toenails painted bright red, protruded from her suit pants. “It doesn’t have to be, boss–just roll with it! You definitely liked it when I tickled you in the office!”
Jen thrashed in vain as Carla pulled off her other shoe. Jen tried to clench her toes like a fist, then moved them from side to side, unable to figure out how best to flee from what was to come. “I can’t take this! I don’t have anything for you! Please let me go!”
Carla spoke. “You have precisely what we want, Miss Chung. But first we want to get to know you better.” She placed one fingertip on the ball of Jen’s foot and kept it there as Jen tried to thrash away. She didn’t tickle yet, but she wanted Jen to feel the finger that would soon be her undoing. “And tonight you’re going to find out what you’ve been missing. Hana tells us that you always sent your interns away so that you could finish yourself alone. You’re not doing that tonight.”
“No… I can’t let you…”
Lisa jumped in. “And once you’ve climaxed, you’re going to learn things about yourself that aren’t even what we got hired for. You wouldn’t believe how ticklish a woman’s feet become after an orgasm.”
Jen’s panic soared, but her arms and legs weren’t anywhere near strong enough to break her bonds, and she felt Hana’s single finger on one foot and Carla’s fingers pulling back on her big toe. “Please! I’ll give you anything! I’ll give you anything!”
Lisa smiled, her teeth brilliant in the dimly lit torture-basement. “I know you want to, Jen, but you need to get something in that beautiful corrupt-politician head of yours. You don’t have anything to give us. Nothing you say or do is going to make us stop tickling you, and when your body tells you that you can’t even take any more of the sexual pleasure or the human indignity of the tickling you’re going to get, that’s when the real tickling is going to start.” Jen stopped tugging at the ropes and slouched in resignation. Lisa looked to her counterparts. “Let’s take what we want, shall we, girls?”
Carla’s firm fingernails–the ones on her free hand–leaped to life, scribbling across Jen’s instep as her other hand pulled back on Jen’s toe, making the skin of her sole into a smooth, inviting canvas. Jen screamed as she felt not only the unstoppable urge to laugh but the sudden onset of an arousal that her interns sometimes took minutes to build up to. Carla was an artist, her four fingers and her thumb scratching lightly at angles that changed by the second, each of her five digits sweeping in towards the center of Jen’s foot as she rotated her wrist here and there, drifting up towards the base of her toes and down towards her heel. Jen’s head rocked back, then came forward to lean against her bound wrists, as Carla turned her entire leg electric, the ticklish touches on her sensitive flesh immediately making her hips wiggle.
Meanwhile Hana was moving her one finger deliberately in looping, leisurely paths across Jen’s other foot. Jen’s ankle writhed and tried to elude that single, maddening fingertip, but Hana knew just now to match the foot’s motion and keep on that relentless, torturing path. Though she didn’t feature prominently in the videos–she had seen the young man plant the camera, so she always turned her face away from its lens–she had become the Councilwoman’s favorite by finding just the spots that would send her boss into ecstasy. And she was doing the same here in the Andromeda safe-house basement. But this was different: Jen had no power to make the tickling stop, to give orders so that she could find some privacy and carry herself over the edge out of view. Somewhere in her laughing-ticklish gut she knew that these girls were going to make her climax while all three of them watched. Jen would not be able to step away from the attention of these lethal ticklers and back into her office to finish, then to sit alone before returning to work. They were going to humiliate her, and the Councilwoman didn’t even know what they wanted from her.
Lisa watched from the bar stool, saw Hana’s sensuous touches adding a sexual edge to Carla’s rapid, precise, relentless fingers, and she let these two artists do their work for some time. Jen Chung, though she no doubt thought of herself as sexually liberated and above the normal people whose votes she coveted, was completely unprepared for what Andromeda could bring into a woman’s sexuality, and Lisa could at the same time watch for the jolt–she was about to tag Carla out and exploit some sensitive spots that were emerging–and enjoy the grand turn that played out on the tortured, laughing face of Jen Chung.
A girl can only watch so long, and Lisa tapped Carla on the shoulder to switch places. Feeling the rapid tickling stop, Jen opened her eyes and looked at Lisa taking her position. Able to breathe and even form words–even as Hana kept up her sensuous sole-tickling, Jen intoned, “It’s real!”
Lisa grinned. “You’d better believe it’s real, Jen. I’ve been watching for your jolt. And now I know where you’re most ticklish!” Jen’s eyes widened, and Lisa began to pinch playfully at the top of Jen’s instep, just where the ball of the foot starts. Jen screeched as Lisa’s fingers squeezed, and through her laughter she begged for them to stop. There was no denying it–Hana was still exploiting her libido and her ticklish skin, but Lisa was attacking tickle-spots with precision that not even Hana was matching. And when she opened her eyes Jen could see Carla watching for the sake of even greater precision.
Lisa’s pinching fingers worked their way down Jen’s instep, and her toes instinctively spread wide in the warm basement air. And when they did, Lisa turned up the volume. Moving her neck downwards she caught Jen’s big toe in her mouth, and her tongue began to circle the stem of her toe. Jen screamed at the new sensation, and her hips twisted in the agony of unwanted, invading pleasure. With Hana’s slow touches increasing the tension in Jen’s body for so many minutes, Jen’s feet were primed for Lisa’s tongue like nobody in her office–or in her love life–had ever primed her. Jen screamed and begged, but the very air in the basement was telling everyone just what Jen wanted most of all.
Hana knew that was not the Andromeda way, though–she sped up her own tickling to delay Jen’s gratification. The Councilwoman let out a giggling growl as Hana made her scream at her tickling touches. The councilwoman’s erotic desires and her ticklish feet pulled against each other, and she could feel Lisa and Hana tugging at her very soul the way that teams pulled at a tug-of-war rope. Carla watched closely as Hana’s fingers kept pulling Jen back from where she wanted to go, and Lisa’s tongue pulled her towards ecstatic erotic oblivion, and Carla’s own appetite for that ticklish skin grew. But she waited for now: Jen couldn’t be far away from an orgasm that could break through Hana’s tickles.
Lisa never lost these battles.
The moment came, and so did Jen. Lisa’s unstoppable mouth pushed Jen’s glorious, sexy body past its breaking point. With a shriek and a rattle, Jen’s explosive climax took the force out of her desperate hips, and her head dropped back, leaving her head leaned back on the back of the chair even as her wrists remained suspended high.
Hana giggled again as she took her hand off of Jen’s foot. “You really broke her, didn’t you, Lisa?”
* * * * * * *
THREE DAYS EARLIER
The ocean breezes in Jamaica were pleasant, but they couldn’t take the edge off the waiting. Katie scanned the entrance to the beach bar and waited for the woman she had only seen in photographs. In a crowd of tanned, middle-aged white people, Morton was hard to mistake: her dark skin and natural hair drew eyes from all over, and her lean, athletic physique kept the eyes there once they landed. Katie didn’t move as Elizabeth Morton scanned the bar and fixed her eyes on the reporter. She shifted her weight smoothly and headed for the table. As she sat, she spoke distinctly but quietly.
“Everything today is on background.”
“Roger that. Everything came from a senior official at Department of Homeland Security.”
“Good. I want to help you, but I can’t be involved with the story.”
“How long have you been with DHS?”
“Almost as long as there’s been a DHS. Fresh out of college and onto the field.”
“And now you’re directing the hunt for a tickle-cult?”
“I’m directing the hunt for an organization that threatens to compromise the institutions that let America continue to function as a republic.”
“And you think that Andromeda is in a place to threaten that kind of thing?”
“You could say I have personal acquaintance with the possibilities.”
Katie wished she didn’t suddenly get a thrill through her abdomen, but she did. “What do you mean?”
“Angie Hamilton had already fallen into their hands, but nobody knew her story until your story broke, so they caught me completely off guard.”
“When did it happen?”
“I was heading a team out of the South Texas bureau hunting down a kidnapping operation affiliated with a post-Zapatista Mexican nationalist militia. We had turned an asset in their inner circle, and we were closing in on their commander.”
“How did they get to you?”
“Even special agents take a weekend on occasion.”
“In the middle of the operation?”
“I wasn’t lead agent on the mission, so another agent stepped in. I hadn’t had a day off in four months, so the boss let me go away for a weekend a few weeks before we made our big move.”
“Go on.”
“I was in Corpus Christi with some friends from college. I was planning to get back to the operation in just a few days, but my bosses wanted me on the job with a clear head. None of my friends ever saw who got me, and Andromeda left a note in my name, with handwriting that looked like mine, telling them I had been called back to the border because of a break in my operation.”
“What about the DHS?”
“They knew I hadn’t checked in, but by the time they could get a real search going, Andromeda was done with me. Turned me loose three days after they picked me up, and my higher-ups ran with the cover story that we had a break on the cartel operation. Nobody outside DHS knows about it, and I don’t want you to print it–it would do more harm to current operations than it would help. What you do need to know, and what you can print, is that whoever’s running their operation has some serious intelligence background–they knew exactly where to find me, when I would be alone, how to extract, and I couldn’t find their safehouse afterwards.”
“When was it?”
“Three months before Traci Carter went missing.”
“Did they tell you that the Carter abduction was upcoming?”
“Negative. Didn’t ask me for any classified information either, even though I had plenty. Just said that they wanted to make sure they pointed me in the right direction. I wasn’t a target for them, Katie. They weren’t working for the militia or the drug cartel funding the militia. I was just a messenger for an entirely different operation. When I got back and the cover-up was in place, they moved me off the militia and put me on Andromeda full-time. By the time they grabbed Carter, I knew exactly what modus operandi and what kind of mission structure I was looking for.”
“So they pointed you towards Carter’s case?”
“They didn’t hand it to me, but yes, they let me know there was going to be something to look for.”
“Did you reach out to Kelly Pascal, or did she find you?”
Though she tried to hide her reaction, Katie could see an angry scowl start to form at the mention of that name. “I headed up a joint operation with the Virginia State Police, and we provided intel and assistance bringing in the three Andromeda operatives.”
“And then you both lost the girls when the State Attorney General traded with them to get the heroin cartel.”
Liz Morton laughed, and Katie couldn’t help fantasizing for a flash about what it would sound like for this powerful, confident woman to be trapped by Andromeda and for them to tickle that laugh out of her. “Is that the story that Pascal is telling you? She was right out front of that one–she knew that Andromeda was too weird, too unbelievable to be useful to her career. So she took the Andromeda cell to the state to get them out. How do you think she got in the sights of the National Security Agency?”
Katie started scribbling in her notebook again. “What? She never said anything about NSA.”
“Of course she didn’t. She wants it to look like she stumbled onto Andromeda and that the feds just knew talent when they spotted it. Kelly Pascal doesn’t have any plans to finish her career in the State Police, Katie. She’s moving up in the world, and breaking up Mama Sam’s cartel is one rung on that ladder. And if you dig in the right places, you’ll find out that she’s using Andromeda as the next rung.”
More furious scribbling. “Was Mama Sam’s group the one funding the militia?”
Morton laughed again, and Katie didn’t like how excited that sound made her. “No, Katie, the international drug trade is a big, big world. Mama Sam’s cartel ran mainly through the Caribbean, not across the Mexican border.”
Of course not, Katie thought. “So how big is Andromeda on the federal radar right now?”
“Big. When they snatched me up, that was the first time they had come after someone as high up as me in the federal intelligence community. And when they made their move on Carter and we caught them, that was the biggest splash they had ever made in politics. Angie Hamilton was in the non-profit world for the most part. Carter had access to big players with bigger money. Then of course they made national news with you, and my agency and the NSA are moving as fast as we can to figure out how all of these pieces add up.”
Katie’s brow furrowed. “If Pascal is trying to get a place in NSA, do you think she can be trusted not to make contact with Andromeda and cut deals?”
“We off the record?”
Katie nodded.
“Intelligence work is all about cutting deals. If we can get to whoever is running Andromeda by giving a mid-level operative what she wants, we’ll do it. If it means giving Kelly Pascal the corner office she’s always wanted, we’ll do it. Intelligence is not about doing the right thing, Katie. It’s about doing what we need to do so that the country is safer.”
Katie set down her notebook and pen and pushed them towards Morton, to the center of the table. “Did they tickle anything higher than your feet?”
Morton leaned across the table and whispered. Morton’s light eyes and dark skin undeniably fascinated Katie: these were the eyes and the face of someone who had been where Katie had been. “They didn’t have to. However those girls got trained, they were the best I’d ever encountered. I’ve been waterboarded and shocked in my counterintelligence training, and this was something else entirely. The ways they touched my feet, they weren’t there to intimidate me. Intimidation comes from the outside. These girls were getting inside of me in ways that no spy should be able to. They were stealing my mind with every fingernail and every tickle.”
“Would you have given up secrets if they wanted them?”
“I don’t know. I want to think I wouldn’t, but I don’t know. Like I said, what they did to me was very personal and very terrifying, and by the time they were done with me, I’m not sure I had any energy left to love my country or my family or anything else beyond my own ticklish self.” Once again Katie reproached herself for the excitement that the phrase “ticklish self” raised. “That terrifies me, Katie, and I’m going to make them pay for it.”
Katie hesitated, then spoke. “Did it ever get…”
“Sexual? Yeah, more than once a day. And I’ll tell you so you don’t have to ask–I’ve never been gay a day in my life. But they didn’t care. They wanted me to know that they could make me do anything for them.” Katie nodded, her heart pounding as she heard someone say out loud what she had only let herself think. “Yes, I know you didn’t write those parts in your stories, Katie, and I don’t blame you. That’s not something that anyone but a handful of us is ever going to know about, and I’m going to make sure that number stays as low as possible. I’m going to learn their endgame, Katie. Because until I do, there’s no telling what kinds of torture they’re putting another woman through right now.”
* * * * * * *
Jen Chung panted in the recliner, sweat rolling off her forehead. In all the times she had convinced interns to play with her feet she had never let them push her to a climax, and her mind was swimming in the immediate ticklish memories of these three women’s attention.
Hana was once again amused at Jen’s torture. “Hey, boss! Isn’t this more fun than having to wrap it up behind closed doors?”
“Alright. You proved your point. Now let me go home!”
Lisa laughed at the bound politician. “You think you’re here to prove a point? Is that what you think?”
“If that’s not it, why am I here?”
Carla grinned that one. “Girls, do you think she’s earned any answers yet?” She began to scratch at the ball of Jen’s foot with one fingertip, and Jen squirmed to try to stop the tickling.
“Please! I don’t need answers! Just let me go!”
Lisa strolled casually behind her, and Jen pulled at the rope, trying to turn and keep her in view. The torturer stooped down to purr in her ear. “You’re not ready for answers yet, Jen. We’ll decide when you’re ready.” Jen gasped as she felt Lisa’s fingers start to graze the sides of her breasts through her blouse. Jen gasped as she realized how sensitive her skin was getting.
“Stop that! Don’t touch me!”
“Come on, Councilwoman. We were all here when you got off on the tickling!” Jen moaned as Lisa’s fingers traced their way to her nipples. Her bra was still on, but she could feel them nonetheless. “You don’t have to be shy with us!” Lisa continued to caress her, and Jen would have done anything, given anything, to make her stop. And somewhere deep in the pit of Jen’s being something would give anything for her not to stop. Jean moaned in frustration.
“Please… just let me–” Jen’s sentence shot into another musical register as Carla’s fingers, without warning, started tickling faster even than before at the base of Jen’s toes. Hana started scratching at the base of the other foot’s heel. And suddenly Lisa’s fingers, still on Jen’s breasts, became electrically charged. Jen could almost feel the sparks jumping between the tickling fingers on her feet and those on her chest, and her lips flexed into a letter “O” as they continued tickling. As lightly as a butterfly lighting from a flower Lisa’s fingers left Jen’s body, and she made her way back to the spotter’s stool as Carla and Hana tickled Jen’s feet. Now there was nothing distracting from fingers on soles, and Jen felt her abdomen start to tighten. Could she be heading into a second climax already?
As Hana and Carla tickled, Jen could hear Lisa address her from the stool. “It takes a few minutes to tune up, but after an orgasm a woman’s feet become much more ticklish. Don’t you think so, Jen?” All Jen could do was squeal and laugh as four expert hands scratched and pinched and rubbed and traced from her ankles down to the back of her heel on one foot, across the center of the sole on the other, then moving to the toes’ stems here and the instep there, then heels on both feet, then toes on both. The sensations that she had chased after the office closed for the day, with interns tickling her toes, was now overwhelming her, flooding her senses and forcing her to shriek every time one of these girls found a new way to tickle her smooth skin.
Lisa tagged Hana out, and Jen moaned “NO!”, imagining and anticipating her mouth once again pushing her over the edge. But this time her hands wanted the action, and Jen felt smooth, practiced fingertips rub against her sole, each short path making her giggle, through her terror, and building on the growing wave of sensations. Carla continued to move here and there, her hands faster than hands should ever move, and Jen’s post-climactic nerves had nowhere to run from their expert technique. Jen thought she might start to lose consciousness, but her own laughing seemed to find wells of energy that kept her aware and aroused and giggling as they kept her body ready to explode into another orgasm. Hana and Carla switched spots, and Hana went to a spot that Carla had been exploiting, harvesting Jen’s squeals. Some dim ghost of a memory came to the Councilwoman: Katie Jones had written about “following the jolt,” and Jen knew that these girls were using that technique, along with her own sexual release, to turn these intimate touches into a torture that Jen had never before had the imagination to fear. She moaned and laughed and squealed as girls whose lives were dedicated to spycraft and to making women ticklish executed the one in that pair that they did better than anyone else in the world.
Hana’s fingertip swept this way, then that, then found one spot and started to press and twist there. Jen’s back arched, and her arms pulled her weight up, but her foot had nowhere to go. She screamed as Hana’s demonically precise finger drilled into a spot that drove straight into Jen’s libido. Her thighs clenched, and she threw her hair back, and she felt the spasm between her hips as her scream turned into a moan of release that she never dreamed she had in her. Lisa kept tickling with her relentless fingertips, and sobs of unstoppable desire and inexplicable shame mixed in with Jen’s laughter. She could feel her underwear sticky under her pants, and Lisa’s fingers just kept tickling.
Carla, now sitting in the spotter’s position, tapped both girls on the shoulders. The tickling stopped instantly, and Jen breathed in a gigantic sigh. The spotter offered a suggestion. “I think we should let her get more comfortable, ladies. What do you say we put her in the Flying V?” Hana and Lisa smiled at her, and Jen sighed and panted as the tickling stopped. Some part of her wanted to protest as their hands reached for her waist and unfastened her waistband, and she knew that she should probably struggle as they pulled off her pants, then her panties, but getting the wet fabric away from her body was a small relief, so she just kept panting. They unbound her ankles, and then her wrists, and Lisa caught her as she slumped towards the back of the recliner.
They carried her smoothly to another piece of equipment, and Jen felt them lower her torso to floor level, onto a soft mattress, then lift her legs together into the air as her head stayed comfortable on a pillow. Fighting seemed simply out of the question; Jen just let them move her body, wracked with tickling and sexuality, into the positions that pleased them.
The cool air was gloriously refreshing on her naked lower body, and as they fastened padded cuffs to her ankles, she found herself arching her back, cat-like, against the thin mattress below her. She offered no resistance when they strapped her wrists into another pair of padded cuffs at her sides. Once again she could not move, but her arms weren’t suspended over her head, so the sensation was almost luxurious. Gentle hands adjusted the soft pillow beneath her head so that she would remain comfortable as they continued to steal her soul.
Lisa stayed at one of her feet, and Carla re-assumed her position at the other. Hana, at the stool, once again grinned her manic grin. “What do you think the writer will do to her?”
Jen attempted to protest as she looked up at the ceiling between her bare legs and restrained feet. “The writer? Auerbach is a banker, not a writer!”
The three girls exchanged looks and laughed loudly. Hana spoke up again. “She still thinks that Freddie Auerbach sent us!”
A buzzing sound started up, and Jen looked frantically around for it. Suddenly her own nudity was an utmost horror to her. “Then who’s the writer? And Auerbach didn’t hire you?”
Lisa held up a hairbrush with plastic bristles. Jen gasped. Lisa said, “More questions, Jen? Are we going to have to tickle the questions out of you?” Jen gasped as her body blamed her mind for ever asking.
“No! I won’t ask any more questions!” Jen let out a scream as she felt Lisa’s hands rubbing oil on her sole. “NO! DON’T PUT THAT BRUSH ON MY FEET!”
Lisa licked her lips. “I’m just going to put it on one foot right now, beautiful. Your other foot is going to meet the writer!”
Jen looked to her other foot, and to Carla, and saw that her brown hand held a plastic tool, the source of the buzzing sound, and that she was lowering its vibrating tip towards Jen’s upturned sole. “NO!!!”
This time, with two more orgasms than had ever accompanied any tickling, Jen had no barrier and no buffer between her and the betrayal of her sensitive skin. The writer’s tip touched down, and she let out a scream. Her head thrashed on the pillow, and her laughter sped into a turn from desperate to ecstatic as the vibrating tip, meant for engraving plastic, turned everything from her soles to her breasts into one nerve ending. When Lisa started in with the hairbrush, she had less than nothing left to resist, and the tickling tools pulled energy out of her body, from her abdomen through her legs into the flesh of her feet, that to Jen’s horror got renewed second by second. Exhaustion was no ally: these ticklers were going to keep her here, at the edge of a third climax, as long as they wanted.
The brush slowed down into a lazy, looping spiral, and the writer–Jen knew full well that it was a cheap engraving tool from a craft store, but on her foot it was the unspeakable terror called the writer–consumed not just her attention but her ability even to imagine a world. The hairbrush was tickling her, no doubt, and she felt that wave of sexual pleasure wanting to crash between her hips, but the writer was something else. Everywhere that Carla guided that tip became Jen’s world, the center of a shrinking galaxy of ticklish nerves that would only let Jen hear her own laughter, a sound that every moment came from nowhere but her body, even when her mind shut out the rest of the world. To orgasm would have required that Jen possess a body larger than the circle where the writer touched her foot. Jen had no such awareness of her body–that vibrating nub was the pulsing center of her universe. The writer’s tip was pulling at every part of her from somewhere beyond her fantasies and even her memories of the boyfriends, the interns, everyone who had ever tickled her feet.
In the eye of that ticklish storm some hidden part of Jen’s mind remembered that Hana, the only one of the three that had ever tickled her before, did not have any hands or any tools on her at the moment. She just watched and giggled. Jen couldn’t decide whether she was imagining Hana giggling or hearing her, but she knew that voice was somehow inside of her mind, her spirit, her body. The climax would not happen this time–these demons in young women’s bodies might at some point let her orgasm again, but they might not. They might just keep her here forever, on the edge of an experience pulling at her from beyond her body, a climax that would shake her bones and–Jen knew all to well–make her even more ticklish so that they could control her even more completely. But they wouldn’t let her tip over that edge. And no loss of consciousness promised to rescue her. The writer was all, and the brush’s bristles on her other foot just betrayed her ticklish nerves so that the writer could more easily find them, exploit them, torture them.
The hairbrush lifted off of Jen’s sole, and she saw Lisa hand it to Hana. But Lisa did not ascend to the stool. Instead, as Hana began tracing zig-zags down Jen’s sole, Lisa descended and escaped Jen’s view. The writer kept tracing torturous paths around the edge of Jen’s heel, and in a moment that Jen didn’t even feel the way that normally she would feel a lover’s touch, Jen’s hips exploded and her abdomen contracted violently, and only then did she feel Lisa’s tongue stimulating her. The orgasm was a kind of sonic boom–the event happened, and only moments later did Jen realize what her body had done.
Jen groaned through her desperate laughter, her climax and her ticklish feet no longer competing for sensation but blending together. The orgasm rolled on into her giggling, and her whole body was a rocket engine, energy coursing up through her feet and outwards into the basement air through her navel. Neither the hairbrush nor the writer stopped, but Lisa, who rose into Jen’s field of vision, was licking her lips, savoring Jen’s body but even more the soul that the three girls now had completely at their will. For a moment she thought that she would at this point just let herself go and enjoy what was happening, but then she wondered whether she was having that thought or whether they were giving her that thought.
Jen wanted to do what they wanted, strained her mouth to beg them, to profess that they owned her, but the tickling did not stop. Three girls, not much more than half Jen’s age, managed to keep her feet ticklish and tickled and drew laughter out of her body and into the air for moments that dragged Jen to the bottom of her despair and to the heights of ecstatic, transcendent pleasure. Jen had no idea, when they stopped, how long she had been in the flying V, how many times her body had exploded under their power, what kinds of things she had promised, even what it felt like when they took the brush and the writer off of her soles.
All she knew was that nobody was tickling her, but they could start again at any moment.
Carla’s voice cut through the air. “Do you really want to know why you’re here, Jen?” With a terror that her life before never could match, Jen found herself really wanting them to tickle her more. She nodded her head. “You’re going to go to Katie Jones and compare notes.”
Jen could not distinguish her mind from her ticklish skin, but that confused her. “What? Why can’t you just go to Katie Jones?”
Lisa leered from the spotter’s stool. “Do we get to tickle her some more, girls?”
“NO! NO! I’ll compare notes! Just tell me what to do!”
Carla picked up again. “You’re going to tell her everything that we did to you tonight, and you’re going to make her promise not to reveal your secret that this turned you on.”
“I’ll tell her that this turned me on.”
Hana giggled, and it was the same sound that Jen thought she had imagined. “You’re doing so well, boss!”
Again Carla: “We’re going to give you some fresh clothes now and take you to where you live. And then you’re going to reach out to Katie Jones.”
“But what do I do after that?” And like a lightning bolt she felt Hand swipe a finger down her sole. She screamed at the touch, then fell back to her obedient voice. “I’ll reach out to her and answer whatever questions she asks.”
Hana was all smile. “That’s better, boss. No questions. Just do what we say.”
Carla jumped in again. “Once we get some clothes on you, we’ll let you know the rest of the plan. But you wait for us–no questions.”
Jen was still panting when they loosened her straps and let her exhausted body out of the flying V.
* * * * * * *
The phone rang.
The banker picked up. “Auerbach.”
“We have a deal for you.”
“How did you get my personal line?”
“Your end of the deal is that you’re going to use some software that we give you to trace and destroy every copy of the Jen Chung blackmail video.”
“I’m not sure what video you’re talking about.”
“Our end of the deal is that we’ll connect you to powers much greater than footage that threatens a failed politician. We’re not talking about blackmailing a city council member. We’re talking about real power.”
“I’m listening.”
“Capricorn Group is getting a new partner, and you’re going to be our contact person. You’ll still know about Jen Chung, and she’ll know that you know, but we’re moving her out of electoral politics and into a new kind of operation. You’re going to make all of your money back and then some, and after that our partnership should continue to be quite fruitful to Capricorn.”
Auerbach leaned back in his seat. “It is a pity, though–I was going to have Chung make more videos for me.”
“Your personal rewards will be better than that, Mr. Auerbach.”
“Oh, do tell!”
“This time you won’t have to be content with watching on video–or with interns. You’ll have a front-row seat to see Jen Chung and two more powerful women tickled out of their minds. We know that your influence and your tastes run beyond those of normal men, and we’re going to make sure that we honor both. Our agent will meet you at an address that comes to your phone via encrypted text.”
“I’ll be there.”
* * * * * * *
As the van rolled to a stop, Hana was doing the talking now. “You need to listen carefully, Jen. We’re at the park three blocks from your apartment. You’re going to walk there when we let you out, and you’re not going to try to follow us. You’re going to reach out to Katie Jones by whatever means you can, and you’re going to give her a message from Gamma Squadron. Say ‘Gamma Squadron,’ Jen.”
“Gamma Squadron.”
“You’re going to tell her that Epsilon Squadron, the ones who tortured her and Traci Carter, are a breakaway Andromeda squad. They’re out of communication with Andromeda’s chain of command and making splashes that are getting the attention of the federal government. And her next story needs to tell the public that Epsilon Squadron is out of control and dangerous; and they’re developing an asset in the federal intelligence and law enforcement community.”
“What? Who?”
“She’ll know who. You just tell her that the story needs to be in print the next time Interest publishes a new issue. If it isn’t, Gamma Squadron is going to show her what a real tickling feels like.”
Beyond the bag that obscured her vision Jen heard Lisa chime in. “And you’re going to tell her all about the tickling we gave you, right, Jen?” Carla chuckled in Jen’s darkness.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Everything?”
“I’m going to tell her that they exploited my foot fetish.”
“And?”
Jen gulped under the hood. “And make her promise not to print that.”
Hana took the lead again. “Good. We don’t need to go over the rest. Follow our instructions down to the letter, and you’ll do well going forward. If you change anything in the plan we’ll know, and you’ll be sorry. You know your job, and you’re going to make sure Jones knows her job. And if anything goes sideways, you’re both in for a tickling that’s going to leave you both wishing you’d never crossed Gamma Squad.” Jen nodded in her silk head-bag.
Within seconds she felt strong hands lifting her down out of the van, and a blade the zip-tie cut off her wrists again. A hand lifted the bag–Jen saw Lisa holding it–and the van’s door slid shut. Carla threw Jen’s purse out the window onto the parking lot, and the van sped off into the morning. Rubbing her wrists where the zip-tie had bound her wrists, Jen Chung pulled herself to her feet. She wore discount-store sweat pants and cotton underwear and flip-flops. The blouse she had worn to Fredrick Auerbach’s office was still on, creating a disjointed ensemble for her long walk back to her apartment.
Jen squinted her eyes to try to identify the vehicle. The van did not have a rear license plate attached.
Here's the latest episode in my most involved commission ever, Andromeda. I STRONGLY recommend reading the other episodes before you jump in on this one--I've had time and space to work with recurring characters in ways that I haven't for some time.
Part 1: https://www.ticklingforum.com/showt...-part-1-(fff-f-non-con)&p=4697766#post4697766
Part 2: https://www.ticklingforum.com/showt...-part-2-(fff-f-non-con)&p=4697967#post4697967
Part 3: https://www.ticklingforum.com/showt...omeda-part-3-(f-f-ff-f)&p=4713292#post4713292
Part 4: https://www.ticklingforum.com/showthread.php?341137-Andromeda-part-4-(fff-f)&p=4741088#post4741088
I hope you enjoy part 5, and I especially hope that you leave a comment. And after you've left a comment on this story, find another author's work you enjoy and leave a comment there too!
KI
Andromeda part 5 (fff/f)
by
Kid Indy
The elevator slowly, quietly rose past floor after floor. Inside the giant office building the cold rain outside could not reach the floor, but no place is safe from the chill the night after election day for the losers.
Without the old-fashioned chime when the elevator reached its destination, the steel doors opened, and the sudden change in air pressure, without the sound to confirm, was even more unsettling than usual. Jen Chung stepped out of the elevator onto the marble floor of the executive area. Her high heels clicked on the floor as she made the walk that she had always taken in daytime hours before. A lone security guard waited by the entrance to the office complex–by this time of night, nobody was making new appointments, and nobody was calling phones, so the formal reception area was dark.
“I’m here to see Mr. Auerbach.”
The guard, who had seen Chung on television a dozen times a day for the last five months, did not even bother to check her identification; he just nodded to her and jerked a thumb at the door, and she made her way to the senior bankers’ offices. The lonely night guard did indulge in a long, leering look at her legs as she receded down the hallway.
Jen knew that Auerbach was likely the only person in the offices this time of night, and that was by design: as the person who had been taking secret meetings with Councilwoman Chung, Fred Auerbach had kept closest track of her campaign and arranged connections between the bank and Political Action Committees that were legal but not often flattering. Auerbach had a long-running reputation of making kings–and in this case queens–in Massachussetts politics. Tonight the imposing surroundings of his downtown Boston banker’s office only compounded in the dread of night.
Jen knocked at the heavy wooden door.
“Come in, Councilwoman.” Jen winced; she knew exactly why he would use her city-council title. She walked in and waited for Auerbach to begin the talking. She did not have to wait long. “You had the incumbent on the ropes, Councilwoman. Ten points up with two weeks to go. From where I’m sitting it looks like you stopped punching in the last round.”
“We were always going to be a long shot against Sanders, Mr. Auerbach. I don’t care how liberal everyone thinks Massachusetts is; it’s not easy to get elected as a Korean-American woman against a New England white man who’s been here since the Puritans.”
“Let’s dispense with the false modesty, Coucilwoman. And let’s face facts. Polls two weeks before election day had you up by double digits and rising to an unbeatable margin. Something happened in the last fourteen days.” He pushed a stack of colorful papers across the desk. “You still had money in the advertising budget–our money–and you didn’t spend it. Sanders put people in every suburban neighborhood during the week before the general, and you sent yours home early.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to get at, Mr. Auerbach, but sometimes political campaigns lose.”
“I think you threw this bout, and I think I know why.”
Jen tried not to swallow too loudly as Auerbach typed rapidly on a laptop. A monitor facing Jen suddenly illuminated, and she saw the frame and menu bar of a media-player program. She saw herself sitting in a rolling office chair, her head back in the throes of sexual excitement. At her feet a young Black woman took the toes of one of Jen’s feet in her mouth, and a young Chinese man stroked her other sole with his fingers. Jen had seen this clip before; an anonymous email account had sent it to her private inbox and told her to lose the election but make it look like a mere strategic misjudgment.
“How did you get that?”
“Who do you think had it emailed it to you, Councilwoman?”
Chung jumped out of her chair. “WHAT? I could have been the first Korean-American Senator from the east coast, and you blackmailed me out of it?”
“Tell me, Councilwoman, was this the first time you pressed interns into satisfying your perversion?”
Jen’s whole body broke out in a sweat. She had held some kind of public office almost every year since she graduated law school, and at 40, she had set up at least half a dozen interns with good corporate management positions, good campaigns to work with, and other very good jobs in exchange for their silence. “Before this one I never–”
“Never got caught on video, Councilwoman? And did you think that all of those interns–and all of them who no doubt could have had lobbying leverage on you once you made your way to Washington–would never have sold what they knew to your enemies?” He leaned forward in his chair. “Did you think some of them already hadn’t?”
Jen stammered, then tried to take her stand. “This was my private life, Auerbach. This is not 1998, and I’m not Bill Clinton. America knows that public officials’ sex lives are none of their business!”
“Not for the predictable sorts, Councilwoman. But your fetish for having underlings play with your feet? That comes out once you’re in Washington, and the entire party goes down with your sexual oddity and your exploitation of your power. I wasn’t going to let things get that far.”
Auerbach leaned back in his chair, put his elbows behind him, thrust out his chest. “Of course, since I had the video made, I’m now the one with the power to end your career. But you’ve spent a lot of our money, Councilwoman, and we will have to deal with that.”
“Look, sometimes people win campaigns, and sometimes people lose them. Nobody can help that. And I don’t have the kind of money to pay that back!”
“I know you don’t Councilwoman.”
Jen’s spine stiffened. She knew the look–for a lot of older white men, an Asian girl with long legs was enough to put this look on their faces. This one seemed to smell an Asian girl and exotic sexual possibilities in the water. She started to back away towards the door. “I’m sorry you lost this election for me, Auerbach. But that’s on you. I’m going to walk out of here and figure out what I’m going to do next, and if you ever try to sexually harrass me again, I’ll have you and your bank on every hash-tag-me-too list faster than your bosses can deal with it. I’m leaving now.”
Auerbach remained in his chair. “Let’s not harbor any illusions, Councilwoman. You still owe me, and I am going to get exactly what I want from you. And if I don’t, then I’ll wait until the party has dispensed with you and then release this video to the press.”
“You listen to me: if you release that video, I’ll get the best lawyers in Boston and sue this bank so hard that they’ll throw you out the window just to save the office space. Don’t ever contact me again!”
Auerbach did not respond as Jen pivoted, marched to the office door, and left. She made her way back towards the elevators without looking back, either at Auerbach’s office or at the security guard who was now ogling her behind.
On the elevator Jen entered the building’s address into her ride-share ap so that she could get a car there quickly. She wanted to get in touch with her campaign manager that night so that they could prepare a counter-attack against Capricorn Group, but first she wanted to get away from their building.
The elevator came to a jarring stop on the third floor instead of the ground floor. The doors slid open, and in front of Jen were two women in sunglasses and gray suits. The blonde one spoke first, her Texas drawl a strange sound in downtown Boston. “Madam Councilwoman, we have a credible threat situation. A right-wing anti-Asian group has been sharing your location on Internet forums, and we have reason to believe that they’re waiting streetside to attack you. We’re taking you out of here in an unmarked vehicle.”
“Wait! Who are you?”
The other woman, whose hair was wavy and black and whose skin was darker, spoke in a Central American accent. “Pennsylvania Bureau of Investigations, Ms. Chung.” She flashed a badge-wallet quickly and took Jen’s arm. “Follow us.”
Jen instinctively ducked her head down and went with the women quickly through the third floor’s hallways and to a parking deck that occupied the side of the building that didn’t face the main street. A black SUV awaited them, and the white agent opened one of its side doors. The Latina agent went in first, and she pulled on Jen’s wrist as the white agent pushed her into the vehicle. With the same thick accent–Jen guessed Honduran–the agent told the driver, “Drive!” Jen sat between the two bodies and could feel how strong they likely were.
The SUV, which had not been in a parking spot, pulled forward and towards the garage’s exit. Jen turned her head in the direction of the white agent and asked, “Where are we going?”
That agent did not respond; in the silence Jen heard a firearm chamber a round, and she felt a small, hard pressure on her back. The woman behind her, with her Guatemalan accent, said, “That’s not for you to worry about. Just stay quiet as we leave the parking garage, or you’re not going to live to the end of the night.”
Jen froze. “Who are you?”
Now the blonde woman spoke. “The ones who are not going to hurt you as long as you cooperate.” Jen nodded. She didn’t like her odds against both of these women, unarmed, so she decided to wait. “Now stay quiet.”
The van pulled up to the checkpoint to get out of the building. A security guard, in his twenties by Jen’s guess, was the only person between the SUV and the open road. Jen saw the driver’s window roll down and felt the pistol’s barrel press even more firmly into her back. In her silence she saw the guard take parking fare from the driver and heard the driver say, “Good night, David! When do you work next?” Jen thought she could hear an East-Asian accent.
“Tomorrow night.”
“Maybe I’ll see you again if I have another pickup, then. Have a good night!”
“You too, Miss!”
And that was it: the SUV pulled out into the street, and the blonde woman’s strong hands took Jen’s, binding them in front of her with a zip-tie. Once they were bound, the same blond woman took what felt like a thick silk bag and slid it over Jen’s head. The material was smooth, and she could breathe, but she couldn’t see a thing. “Alright, Hana. Let’s get home.”
That was an extra level of indignity: if Jen heard her name pronounced right, the driver had a Korean name, and she did speak English with something like a Korean accent. The gun was no longer poking her, but Jen sat still anyway; she wasn’t about to fight two women, one with a pistol; and with her hands tied she definitely had no chance. But she had to get some information so that she could call for help at her first opportunity. “Who are you? Do you work for Capricorn group?”
She heard the Texas accent. “We’re not unrelated. Save your energy, though. We’re going to have a long night.”
“Where are you taking me?”
This time the Central-American accent. “Not important. What matters is that if you cooperate with us, you’ll be returned to your apartment unharmed.”
“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re going to be able to accomplish here, but I’m just a City Councilwoman. I lost the Senate race. I have nothing that I can give you.”
Jen heard a voice coming from the driver’s seat. “Just enjoy the ride, Miss Chung! Nobody’s going to hurt you!” Yes, definitely a Korean accent.
“Who are you people?”
Texas again. “You’ll find out who we are and how you play into the night’s proceedings soon enough. Just stay quiet and don’t speak unless one of us speaks to you.”
“What does that mean?”
The Korean accent piped up again. “Have you been reading the Katie Jones stories in Interest?”
Jen gasped into the silk bag.
* * * * * * *
SEVEN DAYS EARLIER
The young secretary glanced at her laptop screen, then stood up behind her small desk. “Ms. Jones, Captain Pascal will see you now.” The reporter had noticed the younger woman stealing glances at her while she waited, dwelling on her legs and her shoes. She sighed as she rose from the waiting-room chair: now her work would have to be to break some other grand story so that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her career as the tickling-terrorist reporter.
She crossed the State Police Headquarters’s tile floor and walked through the wooden door. A tall redhead, at most a year or two younger than the reporter, extended a hand and gave a firm but welcoming handshake. “Ms. Jones, I’ve been keeping up with your work in Interest.”
“Please, call me Katie.”
“I had no idea how extensive this operation was when we scooped up those three girls, Katie.”
“I didn’t either until…”
“Yes, I’ve been reading your series. I didn’t even remember Congressman Banksman, but certainly I never would have imagined that Angie Hamilton was part of this story.”
“And here’s what I can’t figure out–how much did the state of Virginia know when they traded those three Andromeda girls for the drug cartel?”
“I don’t know–my hunch is that the state AG would have traded Andromeda for Mama Sam’s cartel even knowing that, but they might not have. But they gave an order, and I follow orders.”
“State police are always going to go for drug gangs over political corruption.”
“That’s right. But you already knew all of this, Katie. Is there something I can help you with that’s not already in your files?”
“Yes, but you’re not going to like it, Captain Pascal.”
The tall redhead smiled quietly. “You can call me Kelly. And I didn’t get as far up the ranks as I have without answering a few difficult questions from a few reporters, Katie.”
* * * * * * *
The SUV was on the road for some time, and Jen lost track of how many turns they had taken. But she felt the change in the vehicle’s vibrations when it pulled off of the paved road and onto gravel. Her breathing sped up again, and she started making plans mentally for how she was going to escape. Would they let her go to the bathroom? Would there be no door on the bathroom like in the Katie Jones reports? Would she be able to get to her phone? Any phone? The rumbling of the gravel under the tires kept going, and she wondered how far back from paved roads they would be.
The SUV came to a stop.
The strong hands that had led her to the kidnapping vehicle now led her out of the same. She could feel cold air on her neck, where the silk bag stopped, and none of the sounds of Boston were anywhere to be heard. They marched her across gravel for eighteen paces, then told her to step up onto what felt like a wooden porch, then through a door into heated interior air.
Then, after three more turns, she heard a creaky door open, and the Central American voice gave the command that she dreaded most. “Stairs going down. Fourteen.” Her high heels met each step firmly, and she could hear three people descending with her. The basement space was also heated, and they made two more turns after the stairs were done.
“Sit down.” The hands forced her down into what felt like a recliner, and a retractable foot-rest pushed the backs of her calves up to confirm that suspicion. On the padded footrest Jen felt something like a leather belt brush against her ankle, and panic took over: her legs kicked out into the dark, warm air, never connecting with anything but moving too violently, she hoped, for anyone to restrain them. Her hands were still tied, so she could not get her balance to get out of the chair, and in what felt like less than seconds one set of hands pushed her shoulders back into the chair’s back while another wrapped around her calf to hold it steady. The third set of hands quickly and efficiently wrapped a thick leather strap, padded on the side that touched Jen’s ankle, around her lower leg, and even as Jen struggled, her movements became smaller in scope as the strap tightened. Her leg was in no pain and had good circulation, but her foot, extended out on the footrest of the recliner, had nowhere to go. The hands that had been pushing her shoulders back now fastened padded cuffs around her wrists as the other four hands held her steady and restrained her right ankle. Jen, unable to see and unable to separate her hands from each other, was entirely helpless.
With the cuffs on her wrists, she felt a tugging at the plastic zip-tie that had restrained her on the ride, and with a click and a clatter she felt a blade cut the plastic and heard the scraps fall to the floor. And to complete her indignity and her terror, she heard a mechanical winch start to turn. As it did the cuffs on her wrists slowly began to rise against her will, and though she attempted to pull them down close to her body, within a few seconds her wrists, though unharmed by the padded cuffs, were suspended higher than her head, and her hands could not cover her body. Only then did a hand grasp and pull up on the silk bag on her head. Once again Jen gasped as she saw one of the faces in front of her.
“Hana! It is you!”
“Hi there, boss! Isn’t this a great party?”
* * * * * * *
“Why did the Andromeda girls just turn themselves over to you?”
Kelly Pascal laughed. “Is that what they told you?”
“You read the story, right?”
“Of course I did, but I didn’t recognize the operation when I read it. Those girls were trying to make themselves seem like they were in control, pure and simple.”
Katie Jones scribbled furiously in her notebook. “Then how did you really catch them?”
“Did they make mistakes? Sure they did. Every criminal does, and that’s why they don’t run the world. But they weren’t trying to get caught. At least not on purpose.”
“Then why didn’t you come forward to correct the first story when I published it?”
Pascal looked over Katie’s shoulder at the door. “We have to be off the record if I’m going to answer that one.”
Katie placed her notebook and her pen on the desk in front of her. “We’re off the record until you tell me we’re not.”
Pascal nodded. “As soon as Traci Carter went missing Congress went into full damage-control mode. Whatever Carter told you, Andromeda wasn’t just out to make her leave Washington. She had access to Congress that few people have, and Andromeda must have tortured her until she gave them something valuable.”
Katie swallowed as she remembered the merciless tickling that the same three Andromeda girls had given her to make her give up the password to her phone in South Carolina. “And that’s still not part of the official Traci Carter story.”
Pascal shook her head no.
Katie cursed herself silently–why hadn’t she pursued that question? But then another occurred to her. “The Virginia State Police weren’t the only agency working to bring in Andromeda, were you?”
“We still off the record?” Katie nodded. “Homeland Security was on this case within hours of Traci Carter going missing. Americans already don’t trust Congress–you see all the news stories about social-media bots and such. If they knew that some lesbian shadow organization was making high-level lobbyists disappear, we’d have a Constitutional crisis. DHS kept their involvement secret, but we wouldn’t have been able to track those Andromeda girls without federal surveillance.”
“Who was your point of contact?”
“Off the record?”
“Off the record.”
“Assistant Deputy Director Elizabeth Morton.”
* * * * * * *
“Hana, you have to let me out of here! You know this is a sexual thing for me!”
Hana squatted in front of Jen’s left foot. “You bet I know, boss. And do you know how I know, Carla?”
The Guatemalan flashed a smile at her Korean counterpart as she knelt in front of Jen’s right foot. “We all know, Hana, but I know you love to tell this story.”
Hana giggled as the third girl, a tanned blonde, sat on a barstool behind the other two girls. “Once the rumors got to us, I applied for an internship, and it didn’t take me long to become one of the Councilwoman’s tickle-girls!”
The blonde got in on the fun. “So once they told us to grab you, we knew this was going to be a really fun night. Hana, you already know some of her first-round tickle spots, don’t you?”
Jen’s eyes shuttled hurriedly between the three girls. “First-round?”
Hana laughed again. “That’s right, boss! When I was tickling your foot and you got off, that wasn’t even the first phase of what you’re going to get tonight. We’re going to tickle you worst than most women even know how to fear!”
Jen pulled frantically at the cuffs suspending her wrists. “Please! Don’t touch me! This is my sexual identity!”
The blond was now laughing. “Councilwoman, you’re a creepy politician. That’s not a sexual identity–it’s why people don’t trust the government.”
“Who are you?”
“Well, I think you’ve already guessed that we’re Andromeda. I’m Lisa, and you’re about to find out just how sexual your feet can be.”
“You can’t do this–I’m not like Katie Jones. I’m different! My sexuality revolves around tickling! This is going to be torture!”
Hana began to take off Jen’s shoe. A small foot, toenails painted bright red, protruded from her suit pants. “It doesn’t have to be, boss–just roll with it! You definitely liked it when I tickled you in the office!”
Jen thrashed in vain as Carla pulled off her other shoe. Jen tried to clench her toes like a fist, then moved them from side to side, unable to figure out how best to flee from what was to come. “I can’t take this! I don’t have anything for you! Please let me go!”
Carla spoke. “You have precisely what we want, Miss Chung. But first we want to get to know you better.” She placed one fingertip on the ball of Jen’s foot and kept it there as Jen tried to thrash away. She didn’t tickle yet, but she wanted Jen to feel the finger that would soon be her undoing. “And tonight you’re going to find out what you’ve been missing. Hana tells us that you always sent your interns away so that you could finish yourself alone. You’re not doing that tonight.”
“No… I can’t let you…”
Lisa jumped in. “And once you’ve climaxed, you’re going to learn things about yourself that aren’t even what we got hired for. You wouldn’t believe how ticklish a woman’s feet become after an orgasm.”
Jen’s panic soared, but her arms and legs weren’t anywhere near strong enough to break her bonds, and she felt Hana’s single finger on one foot and Carla’s fingers pulling back on her big toe. “Please! I’ll give you anything! I’ll give you anything!”
Lisa smiled, her teeth brilliant in the dimly lit torture-basement. “I know you want to, Jen, but you need to get something in that beautiful corrupt-politician head of yours. You don’t have anything to give us. Nothing you say or do is going to make us stop tickling you, and when your body tells you that you can’t even take any more of the sexual pleasure or the human indignity of the tickling you’re going to get, that’s when the real tickling is going to start.” Jen stopped tugging at the ropes and slouched in resignation. Lisa looked to her counterparts. “Let’s take what we want, shall we, girls?”
Carla’s firm fingernails–the ones on her free hand–leaped to life, scribbling across Jen’s instep as her other hand pulled back on Jen’s toe, making the skin of her sole into a smooth, inviting canvas. Jen screamed as she felt not only the unstoppable urge to laugh but the sudden onset of an arousal that her interns sometimes took minutes to build up to. Carla was an artist, her four fingers and her thumb scratching lightly at angles that changed by the second, each of her five digits sweeping in towards the center of Jen’s foot as she rotated her wrist here and there, drifting up towards the base of her toes and down towards her heel. Jen’s head rocked back, then came forward to lean against her bound wrists, as Carla turned her entire leg electric, the ticklish touches on her sensitive flesh immediately making her hips wiggle.
Meanwhile Hana was moving her one finger deliberately in looping, leisurely paths across Jen’s other foot. Jen’s ankle writhed and tried to elude that single, maddening fingertip, but Hana knew just now to match the foot’s motion and keep on that relentless, torturing path. Though she didn’t feature prominently in the videos–she had seen the young man plant the camera, so she always turned her face away from its lens–she had become the Councilwoman’s favorite by finding just the spots that would send her boss into ecstasy. And she was doing the same here in the Andromeda safe-house basement. But this was different: Jen had no power to make the tickling stop, to give orders so that she could find some privacy and carry herself over the edge out of view. Somewhere in her laughing-ticklish gut she knew that these girls were going to make her climax while all three of them watched. Jen would not be able to step away from the attention of these lethal ticklers and back into her office to finish, then to sit alone before returning to work. They were going to humiliate her, and the Councilwoman didn’t even know what they wanted from her.
Lisa watched from the bar stool, saw Hana’s sensuous touches adding a sexual edge to Carla’s rapid, precise, relentless fingers, and she let these two artists do their work for some time. Jen Chung, though she no doubt thought of herself as sexually liberated and above the normal people whose votes she coveted, was completely unprepared for what Andromeda could bring into a woman’s sexuality, and Lisa could at the same time watch for the jolt–she was about to tag Carla out and exploit some sensitive spots that were emerging–and enjoy the grand turn that played out on the tortured, laughing face of Jen Chung.
A girl can only watch so long, and Lisa tapped Carla on the shoulder to switch places. Feeling the rapid tickling stop, Jen opened her eyes and looked at Lisa taking her position. Able to breathe and even form words–even as Hana kept up her sensuous sole-tickling, Jen intoned, “It’s real!”
Lisa grinned. “You’d better believe it’s real, Jen. I’ve been watching for your jolt. And now I know where you’re most ticklish!” Jen’s eyes widened, and Lisa began to pinch playfully at the top of Jen’s instep, just where the ball of the foot starts. Jen screeched as Lisa’s fingers squeezed, and through her laughter she begged for them to stop. There was no denying it–Hana was still exploiting her libido and her ticklish skin, but Lisa was attacking tickle-spots with precision that not even Hana was matching. And when she opened her eyes Jen could see Carla watching for the sake of even greater precision.
Lisa’s pinching fingers worked their way down Jen’s instep, and her toes instinctively spread wide in the warm basement air. And when they did, Lisa turned up the volume. Moving her neck downwards she caught Jen’s big toe in her mouth, and her tongue began to circle the stem of her toe. Jen screamed at the new sensation, and her hips twisted in the agony of unwanted, invading pleasure. With Hana’s slow touches increasing the tension in Jen’s body for so many minutes, Jen’s feet were primed for Lisa’s tongue like nobody in her office–or in her love life–had ever primed her. Jen screamed and begged, but the very air in the basement was telling everyone just what Jen wanted most of all.
Hana knew that was not the Andromeda way, though–she sped up her own tickling to delay Jen’s gratification. The Councilwoman let out a giggling growl as Hana made her scream at her tickling touches. The councilwoman’s erotic desires and her ticklish feet pulled against each other, and she could feel Lisa and Hana tugging at her very soul the way that teams pulled at a tug-of-war rope. Carla watched closely as Hana’s fingers kept pulling Jen back from where she wanted to go, and Lisa’s tongue pulled her towards ecstatic erotic oblivion, and Carla’s own appetite for that ticklish skin grew. But she waited for now: Jen couldn’t be far away from an orgasm that could break through Hana’s tickles.
Lisa never lost these battles.
The moment came, and so did Jen. Lisa’s unstoppable mouth pushed Jen’s glorious, sexy body past its breaking point. With a shriek and a rattle, Jen’s explosive climax took the force out of her desperate hips, and her head dropped back, leaving her head leaned back on the back of the chair even as her wrists remained suspended high.
Hana giggled again as she took her hand off of Jen’s foot. “You really broke her, didn’t you, Lisa?”
* * * * * * *
THREE DAYS EARLIER
The ocean breezes in Jamaica were pleasant, but they couldn’t take the edge off the waiting. Katie scanned the entrance to the beach bar and waited for the woman she had only seen in photographs. In a crowd of tanned, middle-aged white people, Morton was hard to mistake: her dark skin and natural hair drew eyes from all over, and her lean, athletic physique kept the eyes there once they landed. Katie didn’t move as Elizabeth Morton scanned the bar and fixed her eyes on the reporter. She shifted her weight smoothly and headed for the table. As she sat, she spoke distinctly but quietly.
“Everything today is on background.”
“Roger that. Everything came from a senior official at Department of Homeland Security.”
“Good. I want to help you, but I can’t be involved with the story.”
“How long have you been with DHS?”
“Almost as long as there’s been a DHS. Fresh out of college and onto the field.”
“And now you’re directing the hunt for a tickle-cult?”
“I’m directing the hunt for an organization that threatens to compromise the institutions that let America continue to function as a republic.”
“And you think that Andromeda is in a place to threaten that kind of thing?”
“You could say I have personal acquaintance with the possibilities.”
Katie wished she didn’t suddenly get a thrill through her abdomen, but she did. “What do you mean?”
“Angie Hamilton had already fallen into their hands, but nobody knew her story until your story broke, so they caught me completely off guard.”
“When did it happen?”
“I was heading a team out of the South Texas bureau hunting down a kidnapping operation affiliated with a post-Zapatista Mexican nationalist militia. We had turned an asset in their inner circle, and we were closing in on their commander.”
“How did they get to you?”
“Even special agents take a weekend on occasion.”
“In the middle of the operation?”
“I wasn’t lead agent on the mission, so another agent stepped in. I hadn’t had a day off in four months, so the boss let me go away for a weekend a few weeks before we made our big move.”
“Go on.”
“I was in Corpus Christi with some friends from college. I was planning to get back to the operation in just a few days, but my bosses wanted me on the job with a clear head. None of my friends ever saw who got me, and Andromeda left a note in my name, with handwriting that looked like mine, telling them I had been called back to the border because of a break in my operation.”
“What about the DHS?”
“They knew I hadn’t checked in, but by the time they could get a real search going, Andromeda was done with me. Turned me loose three days after they picked me up, and my higher-ups ran with the cover story that we had a break on the cartel operation. Nobody outside DHS knows about it, and I don’t want you to print it–it would do more harm to current operations than it would help. What you do need to know, and what you can print, is that whoever’s running their operation has some serious intelligence background–they knew exactly where to find me, when I would be alone, how to extract, and I couldn’t find their safehouse afterwards.”
“When was it?”
“Three months before Traci Carter went missing.”
“Did they tell you that the Carter abduction was upcoming?”
“Negative. Didn’t ask me for any classified information either, even though I had plenty. Just said that they wanted to make sure they pointed me in the right direction. I wasn’t a target for them, Katie. They weren’t working for the militia or the drug cartel funding the militia. I was just a messenger for an entirely different operation. When I got back and the cover-up was in place, they moved me off the militia and put me on Andromeda full-time. By the time they grabbed Carter, I knew exactly what modus operandi and what kind of mission structure I was looking for.”
“So they pointed you towards Carter’s case?”
“They didn’t hand it to me, but yes, they let me know there was going to be something to look for.”
“Did you reach out to Kelly Pascal, or did she find you?”
Though she tried to hide her reaction, Katie could see an angry scowl start to form at the mention of that name. “I headed up a joint operation with the Virginia State Police, and we provided intel and assistance bringing in the three Andromeda operatives.”
“And then you both lost the girls when the State Attorney General traded with them to get the heroin cartel.”
Liz Morton laughed, and Katie couldn’t help fantasizing for a flash about what it would sound like for this powerful, confident woman to be trapped by Andromeda and for them to tickle that laugh out of her. “Is that the story that Pascal is telling you? She was right out front of that one–she knew that Andromeda was too weird, too unbelievable to be useful to her career. So she took the Andromeda cell to the state to get them out. How do you think she got in the sights of the National Security Agency?”
Katie started scribbling in her notebook again. “What? She never said anything about NSA.”
“Of course she didn’t. She wants it to look like she stumbled onto Andromeda and that the feds just knew talent when they spotted it. Kelly Pascal doesn’t have any plans to finish her career in the State Police, Katie. She’s moving up in the world, and breaking up Mama Sam’s cartel is one rung on that ladder. And if you dig in the right places, you’ll find out that she’s using Andromeda as the next rung.”
More furious scribbling. “Was Mama Sam’s group the one funding the militia?”
Morton laughed again, and Katie didn’t like how excited that sound made her. “No, Katie, the international drug trade is a big, big world. Mama Sam’s cartel ran mainly through the Caribbean, not across the Mexican border.”
Of course not, Katie thought. “So how big is Andromeda on the federal radar right now?”
“Big. When they snatched me up, that was the first time they had come after someone as high up as me in the federal intelligence community. And when they made their move on Carter and we caught them, that was the biggest splash they had ever made in politics. Angie Hamilton was in the non-profit world for the most part. Carter had access to big players with bigger money. Then of course they made national news with you, and my agency and the NSA are moving as fast as we can to figure out how all of these pieces add up.”
Katie’s brow furrowed. “If Pascal is trying to get a place in NSA, do you think she can be trusted not to make contact with Andromeda and cut deals?”
“We off the record?”
Katie nodded.
“Intelligence work is all about cutting deals. If we can get to whoever is running Andromeda by giving a mid-level operative what she wants, we’ll do it. If it means giving Kelly Pascal the corner office she’s always wanted, we’ll do it. Intelligence is not about doing the right thing, Katie. It’s about doing what we need to do so that the country is safer.”
Katie set down her notebook and pen and pushed them towards Morton, to the center of the table. “Did they tickle anything higher than your feet?”
Morton leaned across the table and whispered. Morton’s light eyes and dark skin undeniably fascinated Katie: these were the eyes and the face of someone who had been where Katie had been. “They didn’t have to. However those girls got trained, they were the best I’d ever encountered. I’ve been waterboarded and shocked in my counterintelligence training, and this was something else entirely. The ways they touched my feet, they weren’t there to intimidate me. Intimidation comes from the outside. These girls were getting inside of me in ways that no spy should be able to. They were stealing my mind with every fingernail and every tickle.”
“Would you have given up secrets if they wanted them?”
“I don’t know. I want to think I wouldn’t, but I don’t know. Like I said, what they did to me was very personal and very terrifying, and by the time they were done with me, I’m not sure I had any energy left to love my country or my family or anything else beyond my own ticklish self.” Once again Katie reproached herself for the excitement that the phrase “ticklish self” raised. “That terrifies me, Katie, and I’m going to make them pay for it.”
Katie hesitated, then spoke. “Did it ever get…”
“Sexual? Yeah, more than once a day. And I’ll tell you so you don’t have to ask–I’ve never been gay a day in my life. But they didn’t care. They wanted me to know that they could make me do anything for them.” Katie nodded, her heart pounding as she heard someone say out loud what she had only let herself think. “Yes, I know you didn’t write those parts in your stories, Katie, and I don’t blame you. That’s not something that anyone but a handful of us is ever going to know about, and I’m going to make sure that number stays as low as possible. I’m going to learn their endgame, Katie. Because until I do, there’s no telling what kinds of torture they’re putting another woman through right now.”
* * * * * * *
Jen Chung panted in the recliner, sweat rolling off her forehead. In all the times she had convinced interns to play with her feet she had never let them push her to a climax, and her mind was swimming in the immediate ticklish memories of these three women’s attention.
Hana was once again amused at Jen’s torture. “Hey, boss! Isn’t this more fun than having to wrap it up behind closed doors?”
“Alright. You proved your point. Now let me go home!”
Lisa laughed at the bound politician. “You think you’re here to prove a point? Is that what you think?”
“If that’s not it, why am I here?”
Carla grinned that one. “Girls, do you think she’s earned any answers yet?” She began to scratch at the ball of Jen’s foot with one fingertip, and Jen squirmed to try to stop the tickling.
“Please! I don’t need answers! Just let me go!”
Lisa strolled casually behind her, and Jen pulled at the rope, trying to turn and keep her in view. The torturer stooped down to purr in her ear. “You’re not ready for answers yet, Jen. We’ll decide when you’re ready.” Jen gasped as she felt Lisa’s fingers start to graze the sides of her breasts through her blouse. Jen gasped as she realized how sensitive her skin was getting.
“Stop that! Don’t touch me!”
“Come on, Councilwoman. We were all here when you got off on the tickling!” Jen moaned as Lisa’s fingers traced their way to her nipples. Her bra was still on, but she could feel them nonetheless. “You don’t have to be shy with us!” Lisa continued to caress her, and Jen would have done anything, given anything, to make her stop. And somewhere deep in the pit of Jen’s being something would give anything for her not to stop. Jean moaned in frustration.
“Please… just let me–” Jen’s sentence shot into another musical register as Carla’s fingers, without warning, started tickling faster even than before at the base of Jen’s toes. Hana started scratching at the base of the other foot’s heel. And suddenly Lisa’s fingers, still on Jen’s breasts, became electrically charged. Jen could almost feel the sparks jumping between the tickling fingers on her feet and those on her chest, and her lips flexed into a letter “O” as they continued tickling. As lightly as a butterfly lighting from a flower Lisa’s fingers left Jen’s body, and she made her way back to the spotter’s stool as Carla and Hana tickled Jen’s feet. Now there was nothing distracting from fingers on soles, and Jen felt her abdomen start to tighten. Could she be heading into a second climax already?
As Hana and Carla tickled, Jen could hear Lisa address her from the stool. “It takes a few minutes to tune up, but after an orgasm a woman’s feet become much more ticklish. Don’t you think so, Jen?” All Jen could do was squeal and laugh as four expert hands scratched and pinched and rubbed and traced from her ankles down to the back of her heel on one foot, across the center of the sole on the other, then moving to the toes’ stems here and the instep there, then heels on both feet, then toes on both. The sensations that she had chased after the office closed for the day, with interns tickling her toes, was now overwhelming her, flooding her senses and forcing her to shriek every time one of these girls found a new way to tickle her smooth skin.
Lisa tagged Hana out, and Jen moaned “NO!”, imagining and anticipating her mouth once again pushing her over the edge. But this time her hands wanted the action, and Jen felt smooth, practiced fingertips rub against her sole, each short path making her giggle, through her terror, and building on the growing wave of sensations. Carla continued to move here and there, her hands faster than hands should ever move, and Jen’s post-climactic nerves had nowhere to run from their expert technique. Jen thought she might start to lose consciousness, but her own laughing seemed to find wells of energy that kept her aware and aroused and giggling as they kept her body ready to explode into another orgasm. Hana and Carla switched spots, and Hana went to a spot that Carla had been exploiting, harvesting Jen’s squeals. Some dim ghost of a memory came to the Councilwoman: Katie Jones had written about “following the jolt,” and Jen knew that these girls were using that technique, along with her own sexual release, to turn these intimate touches into a torture that Jen had never before had the imagination to fear. She moaned and laughed and squealed as girls whose lives were dedicated to spycraft and to making women ticklish executed the one in that pair that they did better than anyone else in the world.
Hana’s fingertip swept this way, then that, then found one spot and started to press and twist there. Jen’s back arched, and her arms pulled her weight up, but her foot had nowhere to go. She screamed as Hana’s demonically precise finger drilled into a spot that drove straight into Jen’s libido. Her thighs clenched, and she threw her hair back, and she felt the spasm between her hips as her scream turned into a moan of release that she never dreamed she had in her. Lisa kept tickling with her relentless fingertips, and sobs of unstoppable desire and inexplicable shame mixed in with Jen’s laughter. She could feel her underwear sticky under her pants, and Lisa’s fingers just kept tickling.
Carla, now sitting in the spotter’s position, tapped both girls on the shoulders. The tickling stopped instantly, and Jen breathed in a gigantic sigh. The spotter offered a suggestion. “I think we should let her get more comfortable, ladies. What do you say we put her in the Flying V?” Hana and Lisa smiled at her, and Jen sighed and panted as the tickling stopped. Some part of her wanted to protest as their hands reached for her waist and unfastened her waistband, and she knew that she should probably struggle as they pulled off her pants, then her panties, but getting the wet fabric away from her body was a small relief, so she just kept panting. They unbound her ankles, and then her wrists, and Lisa caught her as she slumped towards the back of the recliner.
They carried her smoothly to another piece of equipment, and Jen felt them lower her torso to floor level, onto a soft mattress, then lift her legs together into the air as her head stayed comfortable on a pillow. Fighting seemed simply out of the question; Jen just let them move her body, wracked with tickling and sexuality, into the positions that pleased them.
The cool air was gloriously refreshing on her naked lower body, and as they fastened padded cuffs to her ankles, she found herself arching her back, cat-like, against the thin mattress below her. She offered no resistance when they strapped her wrists into another pair of padded cuffs at her sides. Once again she could not move, but her arms weren’t suspended over her head, so the sensation was almost luxurious. Gentle hands adjusted the soft pillow beneath her head so that she would remain comfortable as they continued to steal her soul.
Lisa stayed at one of her feet, and Carla re-assumed her position at the other. Hana, at the stool, once again grinned her manic grin. “What do you think the writer will do to her?”
Jen attempted to protest as she looked up at the ceiling between her bare legs and restrained feet. “The writer? Auerbach is a banker, not a writer!”
The three girls exchanged looks and laughed loudly. Hana spoke up again. “She still thinks that Freddie Auerbach sent us!”
A buzzing sound started up, and Jen looked frantically around for it. Suddenly her own nudity was an utmost horror to her. “Then who’s the writer? And Auerbach didn’t hire you?”
Lisa held up a hairbrush with plastic bristles. Jen gasped. Lisa said, “More questions, Jen? Are we going to have to tickle the questions out of you?” Jen gasped as her body blamed her mind for ever asking.
“No! I won’t ask any more questions!” Jen let out a scream as she felt Lisa’s hands rubbing oil on her sole. “NO! DON’T PUT THAT BRUSH ON MY FEET!”
Lisa licked her lips. “I’m just going to put it on one foot right now, beautiful. Your other foot is going to meet the writer!”
Jen looked to her other foot, and to Carla, and saw that her brown hand held a plastic tool, the source of the buzzing sound, and that she was lowering its vibrating tip towards Jen’s upturned sole. “NO!!!”
This time, with two more orgasms than had ever accompanied any tickling, Jen had no barrier and no buffer between her and the betrayal of her sensitive skin. The writer’s tip touched down, and she let out a scream. Her head thrashed on the pillow, and her laughter sped into a turn from desperate to ecstatic as the vibrating tip, meant for engraving plastic, turned everything from her soles to her breasts into one nerve ending. When Lisa started in with the hairbrush, she had less than nothing left to resist, and the tickling tools pulled energy out of her body, from her abdomen through her legs into the flesh of her feet, that to Jen’s horror got renewed second by second. Exhaustion was no ally: these ticklers were going to keep her here, at the edge of a third climax, as long as they wanted.
The brush slowed down into a lazy, looping spiral, and the writer–Jen knew full well that it was a cheap engraving tool from a craft store, but on her foot it was the unspeakable terror called the writer–consumed not just her attention but her ability even to imagine a world. The hairbrush was tickling her, no doubt, and she felt that wave of sexual pleasure wanting to crash between her hips, but the writer was something else. Everywhere that Carla guided that tip became Jen’s world, the center of a shrinking galaxy of ticklish nerves that would only let Jen hear her own laughter, a sound that every moment came from nowhere but her body, even when her mind shut out the rest of the world. To orgasm would have required that Jen possess a body larger than the circle where the writer touched her foot. Jen had no such awareness of her body–that vibrating nub was the pulsing center of her universe. The writer’s tip was pulling at every part of her from somewhere beyond her fantasies and even her memories of the boyfriends, the interns, everyone who had ever tickled her feet.
In the eye of that ticklish storm some hidden part of Jen’s mind remembered that Hana, the only one of the three that had ever tickled her before, did not have any hands or any tools on her at the moment. She just watched and giggled. Jen couldn’t decide whether she was imagining Hana giggling or hearing her, but she knew that voice was somehow inside of her mind, her spirit, her body. The climax would not happen this time–these demons in young women’s bodies might at some point let her orgasm again, but they might not. They might just keep her here forever, on the edge of an experience pulling at her from beyond her body, a climax that would shake her bones and–Jen knew all to well–make her even more ticklish so that they could control her even more completely. But they wouldn’t let her tip over that edge. And no loss of consciousness promised to rescue her. The writer was all, and the brush’s bristles on her other foot just betrayed her ticklish nerves so that the writer could more easily find them, exploit them, torture them.
The hairbrush lifted off of Jen’s sole, and she saw Lisa hand it to Hana. But Lisa did not ascend to the stool. Instead, as Hana began tracing zig-zags down Jen’s sole, Lisa descended and escaped Jen’s view. The writer kept tracing torturous paths around the edge of Jen’s heel, and in a moment that Jen didn’t even feel the way that normally she would feel a lover’s touch, Jen’s hips exploded and her abdomen contracted violently, and only then did she feel Lisa’s tongue stimulating her. The orgasm was a kind of sonic boom–the event happened, and only moments later did Jen realize what her body had done.
Jen groaned through her desperate laughter, her climax and her ticklish feet no longer competing for sensation but blending together. The orgasm rolled on into her giggling, and her whole body was a rocket engine, energy coursing up through her feet and outwards into the basement air through her navel. Neither the hairbrush nor the writer stopped, but Lisa, who rose into Jen’s field of vision, was licking her lips, savoring Jen’s body but even more the soul that the three girls now had completely at their will. For a moment she thought that she would at this point just let herself go and enjoy what was happening, but then she wondered whether she was having that thought or whether they were giving her that thought.
Jen wanted to do what they wanted, strained her mouth to beg them, to profess that they owned her, but the tickling did not stop. Three girls, not much more than half Jen’s age, managed to keep her feet ticklish and tickled and drew laughter out of her body and into the air for moments that dragged Jen to the bottom of her despair and to the heights of ecstatic, transcendent pleasure. Jen had no idea, when they stopped, how long she had been in the flying V, how many times her body had exploded under their power, what kinds of things she had promised, even what it felt like when they took the brush and the writer off of her soles.
All she knew was that nobody was tickling her, but they could start again at any moment.
Carla’s voice cut through the air. “Do you really want to know why you’re here, Jen?” With a terror that her life before never could match, Jen found herself really wanting them to tickle her more. She nodded her head. “You’re going to go to Katie Jones and compare notes.”
Jen could not distinguish her mind from her ticklish skin, but that confused her. “What? Why can’t you just go to Katie Jones?”
Lisa leered from the spotter’s stool. “Do we get to tickle her some more, girls?”
“NO! NO! I’ll compare notes! Just tell me what to do!”
Carla picked up again. “You’re going to tell her everything that we did to you tonight, and you’re going to make her promise not to reveal your secret that this turned you on.”
“I’ll tell her that this turned me on.”
Hana giggled, and it was the same sound that Jen thought she had imagined. “You’re doing so well, boss!”
Again Carla: “We’re going to give you some fresh clothes now and take you to where you live. And then you’re going to reach out to Katie Jones.”
“But what do I do after that?” And like a lightning bolt she felt Hand swipe a finger down her sole. She screamed at the touch, then fell back to her obedient voice. “I’ll reach out to her and answer whatever questions she asks.”
Hana was all smile. “That’s better, boss. No questions. Just do what we say.”
Carla jumped in again. “Once we get some clothes on you, we’ll let you know the rest of the plan. But you wait for us–no questions.”
Jen was still panting when they loosened her straps and let her exhausted body out of the flying V.
* * * * * * *
The phone rang.
The banker picked up. “Auerbach.”
“We have a deal for you.”
“How did you get my personal line?”
“Your end of the deal is that you’re going to use some software that we give you to trace and destroy every copy of the Jen Chung blackmail video.”
“I’m not sure what video you’re talking about.”
“Our end of the deal is that we’ll connect you to powers much greater than footage that threatens a failed politician. We’re not talking about blackmailing a city council member. We’re talking about real power.”
“I’m listening.”
“Capricorn Group is getting a new partner, and you’re going to be our contact person. You’ll still know about Jen Chung, and she’ll know that you know, but we’re moving her out of electoral politics and into a new kind of operation. You’re going to make all of your money back and then some, and after that our partnership should continue to be quite fruitful to Capricorn.”
Auerbach leaned back in his seat. “It is a pity, though–I was going to have Chung make more videos for me.”
“Your personal rewards will be better than that, Mr. Auerbach.”
“Oh, do tell!”
“This time you won’t have to be content with watching on video–or with interns. You’ll have a front-row seat to see Jen Chung and two more powerful women tickled out of their minds. We know that your influence and your tastes run beyond those of normal men, and we’re going to make sure that we honor both. Our agent will meet you at an address that comes to your phone via encrypted text.”
“I’ll be there.”
* * * * * * *
As the van rolled to a stop, Hana was doing the talking now. “You need to listen carefully, Jen. We’re at the park three blocks from your apartment. You’re going to walk there when we let you out, and you’re not going to try to follow us. You’re going to reach out to Katie Jones by whatever means you can, and you’re going to give her a message from Gamma Squadron. Say ‘Gamma Squadron,’ Jen.”
“Gamma Squadron.”
“You’re going to tell her that Epsilon Squadron, the ones who tortured her and Traci Carter, are a breakaway Andromeda squad. They’re out of communication with Andromeda’s chain of command and making splashes that are getting the attention of the federal government. And her next story needs to tell the public that Epsilon Squadron is out of control and dangerous; and they’re developing an asset in the federal intelligence and law enforcement community.”
“What? Who?”
“She’ll know who. You just tell her that the story needs to be in print the next time Interest publishes a new issue. If it isn’t, Gamma Squadron is going to show her what a real tickling feels like.”
Beyond the bag that obscured her vision Jen heard Lisa chime in. “And you’re going to tell her all about the tickling we gave you, right, Jen?” Carla chuckled in Jen’s darkness.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Everything?”
“I’m going to tell her that they exploited my foot fetish.”
“And?”
Jen gulped under the hood. “And make her promise not to print that.”
Hana took the lead again. “Good. We don’t need to go over the rest. Follow our instructions down to the letter, and you’ll do well going forward. If you change anything in the plan we’ll know, and you’ll be sorry. You know your job, and you’re going to make sure Jones knows her job. And if anything goes sideways, you’re both in for a tickling that’s going to leave you both wishing you’d never crossed Gamma Squad.” Jen nodded in her silk head-bag.
Within seconds she felt strong hands lifting her down out of the van, and a blade the zip-tie cut off her wrists again. A hand lifted the bag–Jen saw Lisa holding it–and the van’s door slid shut. Carla threw Jen’s purse out the window onto the parking lot, and the van sped off into the morning. Rubbing her wrists where the zip-tie had bound her wrists, Jen Chung pulled herself to her feet. She wore discount-store sweat pants and cotton underwear and flip-flops. The blouse she had worn to Fredrick Auerbach’s office was still on, creating a disjointed ensemble for her long walk back to her apartment.
Jen squinted her eyes to try to identify the vehicle. The van did not have a rear license plate attached.
