Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) (19 page)

“Are you sure you want this?” Carol said.

But even as the words came out of her mouth,
they were choked by Sai’s tongue, which was suddenly hot and strong, forcing
its way inside Carol’s mouth. As it did, she felt Sai’s fingers begin to enter
her, not quickly, but decidedly, as if there was nothing that could stop her
from taking her fill of Carol’s body.

“Do you want me to...” Carol struggled to ask,
as she felt a soft, deep pleasure grow within her.

“Yes!” came the reply.

She didn’t need any further encouragement. She
reached down and began fingering Sai’s pussy. The lips were still together, a
little swollen but no more than slightly damp. As soon as Carol eased a
fingertip inside, though, she felt the juices that had begun to well up inside,
as if they’d been kept back, her lust hidden deep within her.

Sai, unable to control herself, yelped, her body
twisting as she widened her legs and let Carol push deep into her, two fingers
up to the hilt, in and out, as smooth as silk. Their mouths now came together
again, so eager that it felt as if they were going to eat each other; their fingers
went faster and faster, and their tongues stabbed and rubbed together.

As they writhed and moaned on the bed, their
legs gradually became so entwined that their sexes were just inches apart.
Their hands, now working each others’ pussies furiously, knocked against one
another. Then, quite naturally, they eased even closer, until their fingers,
slippery and frantic, could dance together in one juice-sodden tangle. They
were finger-fucking each other, but then following the other woman’s fingers into
their own sex, in and out, two hands jumping from one vagina to the other until
there was so much action down there that it was more than simple masturbation;
more even than frenzy; it was pure physical love, for themselves and for each
other.

They could have done so much more, gone further,
explored each other more profoundly. But they didn’t need to. They both knew
that this was enough. As they came, in dithering little flushes, they knew
there’d be time for much, much more. More ways to take each other, to gulp and
imbibe of each other’s fabulous bodies. To be together.

Carol could sense that whatever was now
spreading through her was something new and powerful. She was unable to stop
it, and not completely sure she comprehended its true meaning. She had always
loved sex. But she had never wanted it to go on forever, without end, with the
same person, for the rest of her life. Sex had never been the source of transformation,
it had never given definition to life itself. But now she could feel the lines
of her life shifting beneath her, and she was helpless to stop it.

The feeling, it seemed, was mutual. Sai clung to
Carol and kissed her ardently, longingly, as if all she wanted was to remain like
that, the two of them on the bed together. As they arrived at the shivering
ends of their climaxes, they laughed and gasped and looked with wonder and
bafflement at each other: this was something very, very different.

Carol brought her lips to Sai’s ear and
whispered: “If I were you right now, I’d let me lick the juices off of your
fingers.”

“Jesus Christ,” Sai said, her hand still down
between her legs.

She kissed Carol, letting her tongue fall and
roll inside her mouth as if it belonged there and the two of them were going to
kiss like this forevermore, living inside each other. As they kissed, she
slowly drew her fingers up over her heavily swollen vagina, squirming with
pleasure, knowing that she had never felt remotely like this before.

Carol reached down and brought Sai’s hand up to
her mouth, opening her jaws wide and taking four wet fingers between her lips.
They smelled sweet and fresh, and as she sucked them clean she knew that no one
had ever turned her on like this. No one had ever responded to her this way. It
was like a mirror image of her own sexuality, a perfect reflection of her own
desire, the two of them there on the bed, with the Manhattan traffic moving up
and down Broadway down below, right outside Trump International.

*

The afternoon ebbed slowly away, and the
half-darkened room became more and more exciting, their secret lair. And all
they did was talk, and talk, and talk.

“It’s a little ironic, you know,” Sai said, as
the topic finally moved onto her boyfriend, “you being an intellectual property
lawyer.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because that’s what this is all about. Alex’s
business. Alex Strange. You know who he is, right?”

Carol shook her head, but hated herself for
lying to Sai.

“He’s a software guy. The conqueror, he calls
himself. In private, of course!”

“Conquests? What, sexual?”

“No. Computer software. He’s a pretty big deal. Only
he doesn’t actually write software. Never has. He takes it all from other
people. Legally. That’s his business model, and he’s so proud of himself, you
couldn’t even begin to imagine it.”

“Theft?”

“Nah. He doesn’t see it as theft, he genuinely
doesn’t. The way he looks at it, the system needs someone like him, someone to
take good ideas and turn them into great products. He thinks
he’s
the
genius. He’s a megalomaniac. And a fucking asshole.”

“So why are you with him?”

Sai sighed, shook her head. She knew she could
be totally honest with Carol, but this still wasn’t easy.

“Because I’m scared? Because I want all this,
the lifestyle, the glamour.”

“Nothing wrong in wanting that. I want it
myself. Can’t get enough of it. Seriously!”

“But you work for it. You deserve it.”

“So,” Carol said, “in a perfect world, what
would you want? Who would you be?”

“I’d be you.”

“Me? But you don’t know who I am.”

“I know you’re smart, successful, beautiful, and
you don’t need assholes like Alex to pay the bills.”

“Neither do you!” Carol said, resisting the
temptation to add
I’ll pay your bills, I’ll pay whatever you ask of me
.

Sai let the air escape from her mouth, as if she
was suddenly deflating.

“What I’d really like to do is let the world
know what a piece of shit Alex Strange is.”

“Does he hit you?”

Sai laughed. “And the rest. He’s into
humiliation. Only he doesn’t realize it. He thinks it’s normal to treat people
like crap, he’s been doing it so long. My job is to look good, and not to show
myself up if I open my mouth, although he doesn’t encourage me to do that. But
what he does to me in private is degrading, hurtful. He knows I’ll put up with
it for this lifestyle, though.”

“You don’t have to put up with it.”

“What else am I gonna do? I dropped out of
college. Six months ago my parents died, one right after the other. We’d always
been well-off, but when they died they left a pile of debt, bad investments,
stock that had nose-dived. The only thing I inherited was a love of being rich.
Jeez, I feel like such a fool saying that...”

“Hey, I love the five-star life more than you
could possibly know.”

They laughed, two people giddily aware of how
similar they were, yet mature enough to know that it was not just about luxury
hotel rooms. It was about the simplicity of suddenly finding someone with whom
you could be honest, however much of a self-centered, materialist bitch you
were. It was about being OK with yourself, and knowing that someone else was OK
with you, too.

“You know what I think?” Carol said, kneeling up
on the bed and folding her arms. “I think you’ve been lost. You need someone to
show you a way out.”

And with that she made a decision, in a split
second. It had definitely not been part of the plan. Perhaps it would
destroy
the plan. It was a massive risk. But Alex Strange was her job. It had been her
idea to go after him, and she knew she could screw it up if she wanted. The
Cardinal had just given her a million dollars. He’d set her free. She could do
whatever she pleased.

So she decided.

She decided to tell Sai who she really was.

And to hell with the consequences.

“Where
is he?” she asked the following evening, holding her cell to her ear as she
looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, admiring her flat stomach and the
modest amount of cleavage that her short, black De la Croix evening dress
allowed.

“In the shower,” said Sai, her voice low and
just a little scared.

“Don’t worry!” Carol told her, although she too
was anxious.

This was no ordinary seduction, and a million
things could go wrong tonight. But if everything went according to plan, who knows
what the future might hold? One thing was for sure: tomorrow morning Alex
Strange was not going to be walking out of Trump International with the
fabulously beautiful Sai Boynes on his arm.

“What if he doesn’t go for it?” Sai said,
knowing that until the three of them sat down for dinner there was nothing more
she could do.

“He will,” said Carol, perhaps trying to
convince herself. “Just make it all seem as natural as possible.”

It was a minor miracle that Strange had agreed
to the idea of inviting a relative stranger to his table for dinner. The fact
that she was a copyright attorney had peaked his interest, and knowing that she
was young, unknown, and worked for a Hong Kong legal firm specializing in music
industry litigation didn’t arouse his suspicions.

Of course, on learning that Sai had invited her
to join them for their evening meal, Strange had immediately checked her out.
According to the Cardinal (who had been holed up in a room on the eighteenth
floor all week, attending to the preparations for tonight) Strange had hacked
the hotel’s system that afternoon and accessed her surname, billing address,
and all other available information on Ms. Sandra Wells.

Their story was sound. Sandra Wells was an
intellectual property lawyer based in Hong Kong. There was a small photo of her
on the company website. Just an hour before Strange started looking into her,
the company website had itself been hacked and a recent photo of the newly
blond Carol uploaded in its place.

So, all that Alex Strange would learn about the
woman who would be dining with him tonight, just days before the flotation of
his company, was that she was a junior lawyer who worked on minor cases for the
Asian music industry. Plus, if he were to try contacting her, he would discover
that Ms. Wells was away from her office, moonlighting on a staggeringly
lucrative job for a mysterious client in Bangkok. Yes, the Cardinal had covered
all his bases on this one.

Sandra Wells, then, seemed to be who she said
she was. Plus, Strange remembered having seen her in the lift. He had a
photographic memory, and what he remembered about her was that she was hot. The
country’s next billionaire was allowed to surround himself in beautiful women,
wasn’t he? That’s what women were for, right?

Back in her suite, Carol went over all the
arrangements a dozen times. Cell phone signals had been blocked to a radius of
twenty yards, enough to stop any of Strange’s devices working once he was in
here, but not affecting adjacent rooms noticeably. Incoming calls to the phone
in Strange’s own suite, meanwhile, had been rerouted to the Cardinal’s room, in
which a young actress sat patiently with a script, ready to tell anyone who
might call that Mr. Strange was taking a bath and had been asked not to be
disturbed. The hotel’s head of telecoms had pocketed a hefty five figures for
access to the phone system’s digital exchange. He’d had the good sense not to
ask what the rerouting was for, but insisted that it could remain for a few hours.
It would be enough.

The Cardinal’s team had been in and out of the
hotel for a week, staying in different rooms, making sure that the blocking
technology worked at its specified radius, installing and reinstalling the
miniature cameras and making sure they were invisible
and
that the video
and audio quality was absolutely the best possible. The cameras were on the
wall lights opposite the bed, one trained on the center of the bed for
close-ups, and one for wide shots. They’d taken their lead from Bad Daddy, the
pickup blogger who Carol had so expertly taken down a few months ago. But this
was going to be better. Better than anything Carol had ever done for the
Cardinal before. This was going to be a work of art. If, that is, it worked at
all.

Bad Daddy? Where was he now, she asked herself
as she paced up and down her suite, knowing that everything was ready, and that
she only had to reel in the biggest catch of her glittering career. It was time
to play, and this time the stakes could hardly have been higher. The money?
This was not about money. It was about the only two people Carol had ever truly
loved. For Jason she wanted revenge; as for Sai, Carol wanted her more than
she’d ever wanted anything in her life. And the feeling was absolutely mutual.

*

“So, Sandra,” Strange said, as he watched the
sommelier pour the wine, “Sai tells me you’re a lawyer.”

She waited as Strange tasted the wine, nodded,
ignoring the sommelier.

“That’s about it,” she said. “You?”

“Tech.”

“Interesting?”

“Depends. Are you interested in tech?”

She smiled, shaking her head as all three of
them they lifted their glasses and drank.

“I’m afraid if it’s not about sound patterns and
audio sampling, I’m about as ignorant as they come. I’m the one in the office
who can never get the printer to work.”

“Sampling?” he said, raising his white eyebrows,
ignoring her joke.

She laughed a little, waving her hands as if in
defense.

“Nothing very technical. We have experts for
that. I’m just a regular attorney. Principles of law, presenting cases,
paperwork, paperwork...”

He shrugged, all too aware of how ignorant
lawyers could be of the very companies they worked for and the kind of businesses
they were supposed to be protecting. He also knew how much he had paid them
over the years. Literally millions of dollars, money that they didn’t deserve,
but which they knew they could charge, because all your competitors were paying
equally expensive lawyers. It was a game. And there was only one winner: the
arrogant, know-nothing attorney on five hundred dollars an hour.

“You know,” he said, laughing to himself as if
the idea of actually having dinner with a lawyer was amusing, “I’m involved in
something at the moment, and the legal fees, all told, are set to reach eight
million.”

“Wow,” Carol said, “that sounds like a huge
deal.”

“Sure is for the lawyers. And all for what?
Boiler plate contracts and the kind of advice a paralegal could give you.”

Carol considered what he said, swirling the wine
in her glass.

“Corporate law, I agree. It’s excessive. But
with someone like me, I think I add value. My clients are normally victims, and
I try and get redress.”

“Intellectual property, no?”

Carol had to be careful not to overplay her hand.

“It’s all a bit trivial when you look at it,”
she said. “Korean hip hop. Who gives a crap, right? But someone is making
money, and it should be the right person.”

“Sampling? Someone steals a sound. So you use
sound pattern recognition, right? That’s straightforward stuff. Where’s the issue?”

She grinned. “I can tell you’re suspicious of
the value-added a lawyer can bring to the table...”

“Persuade me otherwise.”

The Cardinal had predicted this. That’s why Carol
had spent a week in a London hotel being schooled in the basics of music
sampling and copyright infringement. She knew enough to hold her own in any
conversation on the topic. They had rehearsed questions and answers, planning
their strategy with care.

“Not that simple,” she answered. “You can
manipulate sounds, change the frequencies, mix them heavily into the track.
It’s tough to prove beyond doubt that you’ve lifted someone else’s sounds.”

Strange was thinking, his brow furrowed, as if there
was something he didn’t understand.

“But if I sample, say, part of a track by
Eminem
and use it on my own track, you can hear it, no? I mean, if you can’t hear it’s
Eminem
, what’s the point in using it?”

“A drum beat?” she said. “You can lift a single
drum beat from a recording, use it all the way through your own track. Or a
special effect. Anything. They sample individual sounds, if there’s something
really good out there, just take what they want...”

“And make it into something new, right?”

“No. They steal what someone else has made.”

He nodded, clearly not particularly interested
in digital sampling, or the legal ramifications.

The menus arrived. He didn’t even open his,
ordering melon and Palma ham, followed by steamed cuttlefish with fries.

The women glanced quickly through their menus,
and placed their orders. It didn’t seem to matter what, because Strange had
handed his menu back to the waiter, and was waiting impatiently for them to do
the same.

“So,” he said as the waiter left the table,
“let’s take a more interesting example. What if I steal a photographer’s
digital image and use it in a work of my own?”

“Theft.”

“What if I take a photo of
his
photo and
use that?”

“Theft.”

“What if I take his digital photo, manipulate
it, but leaving it basically the same...”

“Theft.”

“What if I look at his photo, then take my
camera, go to the exact same spot, same conditions, take the same photo... Only
I sell my photo and he never sells his?”

“Tricky, but I’d say he might still have a
case.”

Strange nodded, but he wasn’t done.

“OK, so let’s say I lend this photographer my
camera. No, better: I
employ
him as my assistant, and I lend him my
camera, and he takes a shot. Then I take the same shot, only I manage to sell
mine. Do I owe him anything?”

“Not a penny.” She pauses, knowing that he’s
expecting something else. “You wouldn’t be the artist, of course.”

And now Strange was interested, just as they had
known he would be.

“You defend creative pride, then? Is that was
intellectual property is, in the end?”

She smiled. “I guess that’s a lot to do with it.
In my experience, the creative minds, people who really achieve anything
special, are pathologically incapable of copying.”

“Korean hip hop artists, for example?”

“You got me there!” she said. “But even if I was
working on anything that really mattered, rather than junk pop music, the
principle is the same. Creators versus copiers.”

The appetizers arrived.

“What,” Strange said, taking his fork in his
hand, “if the copier makes something fantastic, something far bigger and better
with what he steals? What if that part of the process is more important, and
it’s
those
guys are the real geniuses?”

“Then I’m in the wrong business.”

With that they ate.

For the remainder of the meal, Strange made
wisecracks about lawyers and “creatives,” letting it be known that he wasn’t
that interested in a debate on the subject. As far as he was concerned, the
young lawyer before him was simply naive, and he was tolerating her only
because she was such a great visual addition to his already glamorous table.

But something must have gotten under his skin,
because he drank a little more wine than usual, and talked a little more
bombastically. Heads in the restaurant began to turn. Most people in there
recognized the white hair, the tall, pale-skinned man whose photo had been in
all the financial pages over the last few weeks. Now they saw that he was a
braggart, a self-satisfied bore, holding forth to table at which sat two of the
most radiant women imaginable. As people looked, they all thought the self same
thing: God, those poor girls!

Could anything have been further from the truth?
Sai and Carol tried desperately to avoid each other’s eyes, and to play their
parts with care. When they did speak, it was with a measured caution, as if the
two of them were wary of each other, like a couple of lionesses on the plain,
weighing each other up, taking their time. They behaved, then, like any two
very attractive women might in each other’s company. But it was all an act.

The entrees came and went. Strange ordered
desert for all three of them: cheese and grapes. He had simple tastes, Carol
noted, as she picked at a small piece of brie, telling herself that it was
probably just as well that dinner had not been too heavy. There was work to be
done.

By now they’d moved onto a desert wine, and
Strange was sensing the tension between the women, enjoying their subtle
rivalry, knowing that he was the cause of it.

“How do you like the wine, ladies?” he said.

There was a glint in his eye. This wasn’t about
wine. Or was it?

“You see,” he continued, holding up his glass
and admiring the topaz liquid in it. “This is a copy. The original wine is
Hungarian. Tokay, or
tokaji
in Hungarian. These days they make
imitations of it all over the world. Who can tell?”