No Room for Amateurs

 

 

 

1953

 

One against six, and she was giving them a hard time. If they weren't such good and skilled fighters they knew that they should be down or dead by now, and they knew that no matter how good they were it was a matter of time before she defeated them.

 

When the fight started they were in NINE... against HER.

 

Of their many captives only one was able to see the fight, the young socialite and would-be-detective (only in America such a naive and foolish thing could be allowed to exist!! An amateur detective!!!). The local traitor/killer was lying on the floor at his left, darted and still semi-mummified with tape and rope. The two waitresses and their co-worker were most likely still heavily (and gagged and blindfolded) in the office behind them with their former captor, the giantess was probably still drugged and bound as well. The busty PI probably was another gal in that room since Misha and Orley had taken her so they could... before the fight started, since she hadn't appeared it meant that they had time to bind her legs together or to something before... they hadn’t reappeared. None of them both...

 

Where were they? Could they have been the first to... die?

 

Then they all heard the sound of an explosion, then another and another, and then she really started to fight his men. She was only pretending up to now?

 

Six... five, four... three against one. She was taking down his men!!!

 

He was going to fail… and die... at the hands of an accursed Oriental WOMAN???

 

And specially HER???!!!!

 

He grabbed his gun, something that he never done ever since he got promoted (now other people shot and killed for him), and with firm hands he pointed at the petite woman as she broke the right arm and then the neck of Vassili, a quick move and her right feet landed deadly in Georgi’s throat and left him alone with her and his captives.

 

But she was with her back to him and at a safe distance for a shot…

 

 

 

 

LESS THAN 48 HOURS BEFORE

 

The night had been nearly perfect. One nice time at the opera, a fancy dinner in one of the town's finest restaurants and while they enjoyed it she had a long and very interesting conversation with Bryant (who didn’t let her pay for it all). Not that he could afford it regularly, but that night was the second one in less than ten days!

 

If he could only grab her in his arms and take her to bed!

 

But that would never ever happen... because the reason of Bryant's 'sudden' generosity towards her and Laura Mathison (his most regular brunette 'girlfriend') and Charlotte Pruett (his jet black hair one) was that probably someone was digging into his real sexuality.

 

And yet... she had fallen in love with him, an homosexual man!

 

They shared a kiss that few Hollywood movies had presented as she left his car, she went up nine floors and entered her room. Dumb stupid idiot!

 

IDIOT! Greatest idiot of all times! Of the whole UNIVERSE! Ah, what the hell...

 

She grabbed a glass and poured some milk straight from the refrigerator, then she took off her clothes after she turned on the TV (and after she was sure that the curtains were closed), standing in front of it in her black bra, panties, opera gloves, gather belt and hose as she heard about the aftermath of the war in the Koreas, the latest political scandal, the sport news, some Hollywood gossip (not very well disguised as news) and that weird attack in a psychiatric clinic four days before that was still being talked about.

 

Seven orderlies beaten to a pulp, six nurses found bound and gagged in their underwear in the garage; four doctors that now should be looking like mummies and twenty one patients missing, nine yet at large. The most bizarre part of the whole story was that all patients’ files had been delivered to important newspapers by the attackers, and the doctors would most likely lose their licenses as soon as they got out of the hospital beds and did some jailtime. They had been 'treating' people that weren't sick in the first place! The place was a safe deposit for 'inconvenient persons' as long as the doctors got paid!!!

 

Because her attention was focused on the story on the news she didn't heard nor felt anything wrong behind her. Until it was too late. The glass of milk fell on the floor as she was suddenly grabbed from behind and yanked off the floor.

 

Her attacker was taller than her, at least by half a foot, and way stronger. A huge paw was covering her lower half of the face. The other paw (and its arm) was holding her airborne. She tried everything to get herself free, she elbowed the giantess (those had to be breasts what she was feeling on her attacker's chest), kicked (backwards) her and even tried to headbutt her. All she got was a 'Stop with that or I will have to be mean'.

 

In a voice that she had heard once... Morgan had a photographic and auditory memory, just two of her many talents that she kept hidden for too long behind a bimbo attitude, and recognized the owner of the voice. Thelma Beatrice Rutherford, AKA Thelma Sanlans.

 

'I came here to hire you... and before you say anything I know that you'd NEVER accept any money that I'd use to pay you, so I'll have to be an unorthodox client, a very peculiar one... But first, stop fighting you wildcat!!! It's pointless anyway, isn't it?'

 

It was. Thelma was probably the strongest human being she had ever met or heard of.

 

She had knocked out cold three prison guards (of the five that stood in her way during her escape) with a single punch for each one! And during the six heists that she had took part of (that Morgan knew about) she had at least once in each displayed her incredible muscular power! Morgan went limp in Thelma's arms who made her soles touch the floor again right away. Thelma shoved a balled up scarf inside her mouth and went to work.

 

Seven minutes later both she and Thelma were sitting on the sofa side by side. Thelma had kept her military haircut and was wearing a black T-shirt, black leather jacket, black jeans pants and black boots. And with what she had bound and gagged Morgan?

 

Black scarves! Lots of it on the ankles, above the knees, looping the elbows close (as much as Morgan could take for a few hours – what a consideration from her part!...), plus a few more for the wrists and one last holding a sponge inside her mouth.

 

'Comfy?' - Morgan's glare was of the deadly kind, but it didn't affect Thelma – 'It will only be safe for me to take you out in two or three hours, so I need to know... Comfy? Cause if you're not I'll have to think in another way to bind you... naked.'

 

Her stare was way more effective than Morgan could handle. And the bound blonde found herself nodding and trying to say 'Yes' through the gag.

 

'Good. Do you mind if I turn off the TV and pick something to read while we wait?'

 

And so, for the next two hours and fourteen minutes, Morgan was completely ignored by her captor who devoured a pulp magazine while Morgan tried unsuccessfully to get herself free. When she finally finished Thelma checked all Morgan's bonds (no slack at all, 'uncle Benny wherever you are thank you' thought Thelma) and, to be a lil' bit safer, she decided to wrap some medical bandage over Morgan's cleave gagged lips, and use some more scarves. Then she grabbed her in her arms, positioned the sultry blonde in the right corner of the large carpet she had in her living room, and rolled it trapping her inside it. She lifted the carpet, threw it over her right shoulder and left the apartment, going to the underground parking lot. After a quick thinking she unrolled the carpet and put Morgan inside her own car's trunk, added a few more scarves (that beside furthering her immobility, hogtied and blindfolded her) and closed the lid, putting the rolled and bent carpet in the backseat.

 

She drove for about 40 minutes, the only thing that Morgan could recognize in the trip was that Thelma was taking her away from Manhattan, upstate and beyond Bronx (Yonkers perhaps?), then Thelma stopped, wrapped her precious nearly naked cargo in a smelly blanket and carried from somewhere in the open (a chilling wind reached Morgan's feet) to a closed space. In which more than one woman was mewling desperately under her gag.

 

Morgan could recognize that sound anywhere since she either bumped on captive women every now and then, made some women (usually gun molls and very uncooperative ladies that needed to be put 'out-of'-the-way') her captives when needed to or, like now, became someone's bound and gagged (and almost naked) captive.

 

Thelma deposited her on the cold tile floor, made her kneel in it facing the... two captive women and removed her thick blindfold. She knew those two young girls. They worked in that fancy restaurant, with an unique atmosphere and very good food, that Bryant had took her not a month before. One of the waitresses... Lilly (5'3”, long black hair held in a ponytail, 21/22 years old, the body of a covergirl now displayed completely), and the hostess... Rhonda (5'5”, short – tomboy look – brown/red hair, 20 years old tops and a bit more athletic – thin but with a few muscles –, but with long killer legs).

 

What they were doing there?

 

'Ah... I see that you recognized them... didn't you?' – Morgan nodded without breaking eye contact with the two frightened girls– 'Great! That'll save me the time to tell you that. Straight to the point: there's a woman that is hiding somewhere in the Big Apple and I need you to find her current whereabouts AND bring her to me. I have a deadline, 6 p.m. of the day after tomorrow. It's... now... 1:18 AM of Saturday and I need to have the dame in my hands Monday 18:00. So, since I know how good you are at finding people, I need your services. But I know that you wouldn't accept me as a client. So...'

 

NO WAY!!! She... she had kidnapped TWO INNOCENT GIRLS in order to force her to do what she wanted? The girls were now not only scared but crying even more profusely than they were one moment ago. The... disgusting woman seemed to have done nothing to them so far (except tie them in the buff of course). Before she could do anything Thelma's large left hand was holding her chin still and unmovable while holding something in her right one, something large and beige... an envelope.

 

'Pay attention. I will give you this envelope in which there is everything about your target. Unlike them...' - and she pointed at the pole in which both girls had been bound to - '... she definitely is NOT an innocent bystander. The contents will tell you everything. This...' - and Thelma waved her hand around the place (an unoccupied fishing shack?) - '...is but a provisory stop for me and them. Even if you manage to find this place, none of us will be here. The envelope also carries the way you can get in touch with me so I'll be able to know that you have her in your power. Use it only when you have her nicely roped like a calf inside your car's trunk. Finally, since I am not a bad girl at heart, not as much as you and them might be thinking of me right now, I will give to you and them 1% (to each one of you) of what I believe your target will grant me. Donate the money or burn it, I don't care what you'll do after I give it to you. But I will give it anyway. That means that Tuesday morning you will have 5 to 6 thousand dollars to do whatever you want to with it. But, if you fail to deliver me the girl until 6 PM of Monday, then I'll see how much I can get for this two skinny babes in the right places... Exactly what you are thinking...'

 

Now all three captives' eyes were bulging, and the mewls of the two single pole tied girls were renewed with earnest. The paw was abruptly removed from over her mouth, but almost immediately replaced with a foam ball, and four strips of black tape followed it in a quick motion. Darkness came unexpectedly to Morgan as her head was sacked by Thelma and a scarf was used to tie the sack around her neck (not too tightly, just enough to keep the sack in place), then her body was engulfed by the blanket, which was rolled up, and she was carried bridal style back to the trunk of the car.

 

After Thelma closed the lid she looked around. Moonless night in a deserted spot of the East bank of the river. No one but her and three captive girls in a radius of miles.

 

Yet, why she was feeling like she was being observed? She grabbed her .45 and checked the shak inside (and the girls' bonds to be sure that they were not pretending to be helpless) and out and around it. No one. Still feeling uneasy, Thelma returned to her car and drove back to the big town while she thought in which way she'd bind her busty cargo.

 

The buxom girl had quite some strength in her elbows so she deserved some punishment!

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting. She couldn't have heard nor seen nor smelled anything different, yet the muscle-bound woman had somehow sensed her presence.

 

Very few people could do that when she wasn’t really doing hard to hide her presence.

Interesting, at the very least.

 

Time to check on her pupils...

 

My-OH-my!!! Quite some ropework on those two! The same (very long) piece of rope that wrapped one girl's ankles was used to anchor them both to the pole and then on the other girl's ankles. And the same went for the calves, thighs, waist, bust (above and below the breasts, even considering the difference of height between them) and the intricate pattern that kept their torsos almost melted to the wooden column. The arms and hands were a case apart. Since they were (technically) back to back (with a bulky pole between their backs), she had bound one girl's right hand to the other's left one (and vice-versa) and had tied two medium sized lengths of rope to connect their arms as close as possible.

 

Only after she recognized the quality of the Canadian criminal's work she took a look at her pupils' faces. Good girls. They haven't bothered her with pleas of release.

 

Not that those huge masses inside their mouths (scarves perhaps?) would let any sound pass through them. No black eyes, no scars nor mean bruises... they were a little roughed up but nothing really serious. Both girls were silent and ready to obey any order from her.

 

'Girls, I am sorry but I will not release you right now. The giantess said something about a five to six hundred thousand dollars prize if she gets her hands on this mysterious woman she's after. WE could use those five to six hundred thousand dollars much better than she, couldn't we?' - both captives did their best to nod – 'So I beg you both to endure a few more hours, perhaps days, of discomfort from her hands. Is she treating you badly?'

 

With one eye blinking for 'yes' and both for 'no' both girls answered the quick interrogatory and got ready for the monotony of waiting Thelma returns as Himiko thanked them and left. She knew Morgan Blackport... and her address as well.

 

Courtney was at her post, she gave her orders to keep an eye on the giantess and her captives and do her best to not be noticed neither by Thelma nor by anyone else. If only Beckett or Fran (her two best pupils in the hiding skill classes she gave to her girls) were not in Houston as of now! But they had to have that 'meeting' with that Big Oil's wife's jewelry collection and with the former beauty queen as well. He had not paid the fee for the job both girls had done for him one month before (and thought that they would never find out his real identity), now he would be forced (the job was to be as public as possible) to pay five times the fee for his wife' safe return! But that left her with only Courtney (who was a great fighter but not so great in hiding) to be her lookout...

 

As she was parking her car in an alley behind Morgan's building, Himiko saw the giantess leaving it through the fire escape and realized that she had been seen.

 

She put her best 'drunk face' and got out of the car acting as if she had drunk a dozen shots more than she could take, singing sluggishly an old enka song and walking in shaky legs. Thelma acted as if she was fearing that the 'drunkard Japanese' was about to puke on her clothes, and avoided her the best she could as they passed by each other.

 

And thus was their first meeting.

 

Himiko entered the building and went straight to the roof. She saw Thelma watching the back of the building. She could get to the 9th floor through the stairway and enter Morgan's apartment by the front door, or she could wait a few minutes and use the fire escape.

 

She decided for the second. Twenty minutes later Thelma decided that she had enough of her paranoia for one night and that she had two girls to move back to that closed storage facility and went to her truck and left. Himiko used the fire escape and entered Morgan's apartment by the bedroom's window one minute later. Nothing seemed wrong except that one of the pillows of the bed was missing, and she could hear Morgan squirming and trashing somewhere in the front of the apartment, apparently in front of the front door.

 

Not wanting to be surprised by the PI, it was obvious that sooner or later she would have to  'meet' the girl again but that would happen on her terms, Himiko went to check on her. And found the owner of the apartment and the missing pillow.

 

Morgan was partially lying on the floor right in front of her front door.

 

All the extension of the back of her torso was touching the floor, her head was resting on the pillow and her legs were suspended in the air, since her ankles had been tied together and to the knob of the front door. Mean sailor's knot, not a chance for Morgan to lower her legs anytime soon, also applied on her legs (above and below the knees) and in her wrists, who were tied together and also to the junction of the leg to the torso and to her waist. She had been white tape gagged and blindfolded and was totally unaware that she had an attendance to her plight. And putting quite a show to her usual ‘mysterious foe’.

 

What a spectacular body! She should be in Hollywood as of now, as one of those busty blonde living temptations that seemed to be in order those days, not going after unfaithful husbands or wives or (more rarely) finding herself in such tight spots (what a lame joke thought Himiko). Why had she decided for the FBI (in the vain hope of becoming a field agent) and after living them such went straight to such a dangerous job?

 

It was obvious that she had the necessary stuffing for the job though...

 

No desperation nor fear in her attempts of getting free, a bit of frustration and a lot of anger but still, no chance in sight (another lame pun thought Himiko) for her to get free... And, as always, she looked so... yummy!... when inescapably bound...

 

Her current problem, not Himiko's. She went back to the bedroom to check the envelope.

 

And was surprised with what she found. And immediately on guard.

 

Thelma's target was a certain ‘Adele Peraux’ (so that was her once most promising pupil’s name these days), 36 years of age (presumed), brunette of big brown eyes, thin waist, long legs, large bust and very bad habits. There was a copy of the girl's rap sheet, she was a professional black widow that had already buried six husbands!

 

So... of all the men and women that the giantess could be interested in, to the point that she decided to kidnap two ‘innocent waitresses’ to force a PI to work for her, she was after HER former pupil? And had kidnapped two of her current ones?

 

The whole story has HIS fingerprints all over!

 

Current modus operandi of ‘Adele’: she arrived in a newer state with a new hairdo and color of the hair plus a new background and name, did what was necessary to be employed by her future husband (there were suspicions regarding the mysterious disappearance of the secretaries of her 2nd and 5th husbands) in less than six months and be married with him in another six months (again there were some suspicions about the mysterious deaths of the then wives of her 3rd, 4th and 5th husbands), then he died and she got the husband's small fortune (she never went after the big ones, just the small to middle ones in the Who's Who local names) for herself. But since she always managed to spend it all in a semester she moved to another state and... The interesting part was that she had moved to New York City while in the middle of one of her  'operations'.

 

Her latest target was some Kenny Bratter from Idaho who had been shot and killed in an apparent robbery not two weeks before, the same day in which Estelle Locart (her identity until that night) went missing. Besides newspapers' articles about the incident there was a police file about it... how did Thelma managed to get her hands on that? As if she didn’t knew the answer! Plus a list of places in which Thelma was sure that Adele had been seen in the past week, all in downtown Manhattan. Seven recent pictures of the woman (six after Himiko took one for herself) and how Morgan was supposed to get in touch with Thelma.

 

Now why Thelma was after ‘Adele’? From where could she expect to get (at least) half a million dollars with (or from) her? For a moment she considered to grab Thelma and make her talk. But the feeling that such act would be counterproductive was very strong.

 

She decided to let Thelma and Morgan 'dance' as she observed them for a while more.

 

Then she heard the front door opening, and a girl's voice almost screaming 'Ohmygod!!!'.

 

She could easily run to the window and disappear before the newcomer started to free the imprisoned PI. But she knew very well to whom belonged that voice...

 

Lizzie Pembroke. The Pembrokes were regular clients of her 'Secret Hideout', and Lizzie regularly appeared in the newspaper due to her latest (usually comical) attempt to 'help' Morgan. If Morgan was a comic book character Lizzie would be her sidekick, her comical sidekick. Naive, arrogant, practically unable to do anything useful (in Morgan's line of work) right (specially drive cars) and always 'hanging around' Morgan.

 

And all because Morgan had helped her sister to cope with the horrible experience she had lived a few months before! Due to her looks it was a bit obvious that, MUCH more than once, Morgan had to deal with guys that tried to rape or otherwise sexually assault her (she had been groped while bound a few times...). All of them got a lot of bruises, and in some cases a few broken bones or missing teeth, before being delivered to the cops. So Morgan told... (What was her name again?) about her experiences and how she dealt with them, Lizzie's younger sister cried in her shoulder for ten minutes and told her (and her mother) about the nightmares she had been having ever since and went after professional help the very next day. Morgan didn't accept any cent for what she did, but the Pembrokes did recommend her to everybody that they knew and thus she got a lot of new clients.

 

And a 'sidekick' called Lizzie...

 

Himiko hid under the bed and after two minutes of wait (Lizzie had to fetch a pair of scissors to cut her free), and Morgan had to be reminded by Lizzie to put on some clothes since she went straight to the files in the envelope over her bed. As she dressed herself she told Lizzie what was going on and Lizzie explained how she had appeared at her door.

 

Thelma Sanlans had phoned her. They soon found out that Thelma had opened Morgan's phonebook in which Lizzie very private number was. Why Thelma had picked Lizzie to be Morgan's 'rescuer' was a mystery that lasted until Morgan could sit and rationalize the whole story. What a great analytical mind that girl had!

 

Thelma, like half America, probably knew about Lizzie's 'exploits'. But also knew that the Pembrokes got relationships of all kind with the majority of New York's elite. So she must have rationalized that Lizzie would be perfect as Morgan's helper in the search of Adele. While Morgan checked the regular world and the underworld, Lizzie would look around in the so-called high society, since if Adele was in New York then she it was possible that she have gotten in touch with a relative or a friend of one of her late husbands, and Lizzie was way more qualified to obtain such information than Morgan.

 

And that was just the start of Morgan's analysis on the whole story. She couldn't ask Bryant for help (Thelma made sure that she'll know if the cops were involved and that the captives would pay harshly for that), but she knew all of his informants and had a few of her own. She'd use them to find the truth about 'Adele Peraux'.

 

Lizzie asked Morgan if she didn't wanted to sleep a few hours (since she was up since nine AM of the previous day), but Morgan answered that first she'd talk with her informants and check a few things, then she'd have a quick lunch and do more searches. She was only planning to sleep by 6 or 7 PM. Four minutes later both women were out, a quick stop for a quicker coffee and they would start their errands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Himiko returned to the 'Secret Hideout' she heard that Courtney had gotten in touch.

Thelma's base was in an abandoned storage deposit near the Hudson and the Bronx, but since the failing local economy in Yonkers had created many of those, unless Courtney gave more instructions in her next call, she wouldn't be able to get there.

 

Nora looked at her and immediately almost ordered her to go to bed.

 

Himiko was up for nearly three and a half days straight (it had taken too much time to find out where Thelma had taken her two wards, and just by sheer luck she had found it, and she had just arrived after the Boston job when she heard about the double kidnapping), and 'obeyed' Nora (but her smile told Nora that she would have to pay for such 'display of arrogance', not that Nora was worried one bit about it...). Nora guided her to their bedroom as she told how were faring their guests, how was faring the still very frightened lawyer's trophy wife (while they waited for her husband to hand them the documents they wanted) and how she had dealt with the sudden disappearance of Lilly and Rhonda.

 

Fourteen minutes later Himiko was sleeping and Nora was admiring her savior and lover, again. Petite, apparently frail, not very attractive (yet not ugly at all) and with a natural ability to pass unobserved by anyone. And yet, when she had broke through the mob that was about to beat (perhaps lynch) her, the smallest one and one of the two women in eleven persons in that parking lot, she had sent her two ex-brothers-in-law and their buddies to the hospital! Of course, she didn't loved Himiko just because of that... and she did understand that Himiko's heart that way more room than she could ever fill (hence the small harem she had helped her to build for themselves). And there were the illegal activities (kidnapping, arson and murder include) that she was so proud of committing...

 

She had fallen for an outlaw! A female Casanova one! But it was so good!!!

 

Himiko awoke four hours later as refreshed as if she had slept for an entire day, she then had a bath and checked the 'guests' and the frightened brunette that (no matter what she was told) still thought that she was going to be shanghaied to somewhere in Asia, then she ate something while waiting for Courtney's report be told to her.

 

There was none.

 

Courtney hadn't reported back at noon as she was supposed to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who was this girl? She almost had lost the fight to her! And she was smaller and far weaker than her! But had some pretty punches and mean kicks, good speed and weird attacks (was it Chinese kung-shu or tea-kon-doh? Or that Japanese stuff, carat-the?). If it wasn't for her endurance and the fact that she had managed to conk the girl's head against the floor...

 

She was breathing, bleeding and... and was one of the waitresses of that restaurant!!!

 

First thing first, they had to get away from that office. The moment Thelma had seen the reflection of her binoculars against the sun she had decided to pay her a visit. The girl had been smart enough to realize the mistake she had done and had tried to hid in an office of that abandoned warehouse (which was the next building on the left of the one she was using as hideout), but she had no furniture to hide behind in that whole bare building so it didn’t took long for Thelma to find her. And the fight had started right away.

 

Her punches and kicks were surprisingly strong for a girl that obviously hadn’t a lot of muscles in herself, not that Thelma had to fear them if she managed to land one or two of her own on the girl’s body. But she dodged each and every attack that Thelma tried to gave on her, and her hits were precise enough to give her some trouble after nine minutes of the fight, then the girl slipped on something, and Thelma tackled her and with one hand forced her head three/four times against the floor, knocking her out cold.

 

Thelma had nothing with her to restrain the girl, except the girl’s clothes. Strong good stuff she thought about the trousers, not very reliable to bind someone so she threw it away. But the blouse was another deal, Thelma easily shredded it and used the sleeves to bind the girls’ legs and the strips of what had been the torso to trap the arms. A hankie that she found in one of the pockets of the trouser was balled up and placed inside the girl’s mouth and her bra was used to keep it there. Thelma took a look at the street, no one near (it was a very deserted spot of that abandoned area of the county) so she dashed out of the building (with her nearly naked bound cargo hanging over her right shoulder) and was inside her hideout in less than two minutes. And the girl was still out.

 

The two captives’ eyes bulged noticeably when they recognized the newcomer, and they got very agitated in the next moment (not that they had any chance of freeing themselves from those bonds thought, erroneously, Thelma). Thelma got a few pre-cuts lengths of rope and started to really bind the ‘commando waitress’ as she was already nicknaming the girl.

 

She had done her legs and was cinching the first knots on her arms when her instinct kicked in, and she dodged the attack of the redhead's left feet! The girl was free?

 

No, BOTH of them were free!!!

 

But she had used the ‘double twisted one’ knot in all their bonds (wrists, elbows, torso and legs)! The funny part was that they were still gagged with scarves, the only parament in both bodies. And both nude babes were using the same fighting style of the girl who had given her such a hard time not ten minutes before! They were of the same... gang?

 

But none of them was as good in that fighting style as the previous one. The ponytailed babe was out after Thelma managed to strike a punch in her chin. The taller one demanded a mild suffocation (Thelma grabbed her in a vicious lock and held her left hand over her mouth and blocking her nostrils for a few minutes) to be subdued.

 

After five minutes it was over. Five MINUTES!!! Usually two young and frail chicks like them would not make her waste more than ten SECONDS!!!!

 

And now Thelma had three skilled fighters and two (perhaps three) skilled escape artists to deal with. She was going to use everything she knew in ‘knotage’ with those three, then she’d wait for them to wake up and would extract the truth from them. But first she had to find the rest of the rope she had bought for the job (besides the waitresses she was planning to use it in Morgan, her sidekick and their target). It took her nearly an hour to cinch the last knot and now all three captives were tight balls of human flesh.

 

And were still out. Or were really feigning it well...

 

She was going to find out who they really were, that’s for sure!

 

 

 

 

 

 

While Morgan rode half Manhattan and talked to nearly everybody she knew in those parts, and got no useful clue about Adele’s whereabouts at all, Lizzie didn’t took more than forty one minutes to find her. Leonard McPierce, Lizzie’s best childhood friend and the owner of the famous (‘gentlemen’s only’) club White Lion’s, was proud of knowing everybody that was somebody in the state of New York (from personally to just by name).

 

He had never met any of Adele’s late husbands, but knew the addresses of three of their relatives in the city. The first two were useless for Lizzie (and made her waste a lot of time), but the third… Grace Breggard knew Adele as ‘Louise DuLac’ and, at first, tried to deny that she had met her former stepsister’s daughter-in-law in any moment after Vincent Breggard’s death three years before. Then, after seeing the evidences that Lizzie showed her about Adele/Louise’s pattern of crimes, she admitted that her daughter Libby had phoned her a couple of days before and told her that ‘Louise’ was staying at her apartment (apparently running from her second husband, a man that had ‘completely fooled her’ into believing that he was ‘as good as Vinnie’) for a couple of days. Grace gave Lizzie Libby’s address and, as soon as Lizzie got out of her house, she phoned her daughter.

 

Libby Breggard was a young and very ill woman that needed constant medical supervision due to a congenital problem with her heart, so as soon as she heard that she was being fooled by someone whom she considered as family she started to have a seizure.

 

Her private nurse Mary took care of everything and in a matter of minutes Libby was fine, but where were her maids Karen (that she had ordered to call the police?) and Dee (that she had ordered to lock ‘Louise’ in her room)? The answer came abruptly.

 

Both Karen and Dee were shoved into the room by ‘Louise’. They still wore their very conservative black & white maid uniform (long skirts, no cleavage and long sleeves), and were tied with the main room’s curtain’s tiebacks and gagged with napkins held in place with their shoelaces (both were wearing their stockings but no shoes).

 

Behind them came ‘Louise’, still wearing her white underwear and green robe, and holding a gun in each hand and with an expression that Libby had never seen on the older woman’s face before. It was emotionless, cold and brutal. She warned both Libby and Mary to not scream and obey her orders to the letter, and ordered Mary to strip completely.

 

 

 

 

 

Fortunately for Rhonda, Lilly and Courtney, Thelma had strong objections to torture. After trying vainly with treats and menaces to force the girls to say anything, she did thought for a moment about slapping, punching and beating them into doing what she wanted…

 

…Then she remembered the girl she had harshly beaten because her first boss had told her that said girl had stole him 5K and he wanted the money back.

 

It was a lie, the girl had only publicly rejected him and he wanted her to spend some time in a hospital bed without the cops tracing the beating back to him. When Thelma found out the true she took the girl to the hospital, and then she visited her now EX-boss.

 

He spent more time in a hospital bed than the girl who had rejected him.

 

Thelma beat all four women (and two prison guards) that he paid to ‘give her a lesson’ while she served her time for the beating. And she swore to herself that she would not do THAT again no matter what. And had been true to her word ever since.

 

So Thelma regagged all three captives and spent a few minutes thinking about what she should do now, then she had the answer. Obviously, the waitress was a lookout and would have to report to her boss (that Southern lady, the owner of the restaurant, was behind those three? Unlikely… yet…) at some point. There were no telephone booths in the area that still could be used, so the nearest place that she could use for that was that joint were she had bought herself a drink two nights before (with the two unconscious and bound girls in the trunk of her car). Time to pay another visit to that rat-hole…

 

But first she would have to make sure that, no matter how good these three little babes were at escapology, they wouldn’t have a chance to get free. For the next forty five minutes Thelma either glued or taped (or both) every knot of the batch she had applied to every nude girl’s body, added more rope or tape to them and turned them into mummies that had been mummified while sitting on chairs. She wrapped five turns of medical bandage for gag and blindfold to each girl and carried the girls (and the chairs in which they had been mummified to) to different spots of the large office room of that storage deposit.

 

Then she checked if they had room for breathing under all that rope and tape and left the room. The girls tried their best, but this time they were stuck for good.

 

Thelma was in her third cup of a horrible coffee when she saw the Japanese ‘drunkard’ lady entering the joint. Two men who had fought in the Pacific a lifetime ago started to gave her their whole lot of racial/ethnic slurs but she completely ignored the pair, then they broke their bottles of beer and tried to intimidate her. She knocked them out cold too fast to anyone realize how she had did it. The owner of the joint tried to expel her but she gave him a cold stare that stopped him in the middle of an angry remark about her ancestry.

 

Thelma had already paid for the ‘brew’ she had drunk and was walking in her direction.

 

 

 

 

 

‘Very well Ms. Peraux, a friend will be arriving there in half an hour to take you to a safe place. Don’t worry, your first million was deposited yesterday and he will bring another million in small currency as you requested. Don’t do anything to the sick lady and her entourage until he arrives, please. He will take care of them…’

 

‘Okay, okay, but hurry! It’s a matter of minutes before the old hag calls the police!!! And there’s that ridiculous and pathetic PI-wannabe that is already coming to here!’

 

‘Capture and restrain her as you did with the others…’

 

Mary was lying on the bed with her. While she had been just cleave gagged and had each wrist tied to its respective bedpost (a bit too tautly), Mary had been forced to strip completely and was bound in a way that Libby had never seen before. Her body was bent backwards like a taut arch with her hands touching the soles of her feet, and many shoe laces of her large collection of rarely used shoes had been used to tie her in such position.

 

It was obvious that she was in pain! It was obvious that she was the most frightened of all four captives! And it was so weird to be with such a curvaceous naked beauty in her bed!

 

She tried to comfort the poor girl, but that darn multi-layered gag didn’t let any intelligible sound pass, so all she had were her dry eyes and what emotion she could transmit with them. Mary, like the two maids bound back-to-back sitting on the floor, was crying non-stop and profusely ever since she had been forced to take her last strip of dignity, her white panties. And what did that ************ (she was an exception to Libby’s strict ‘no swearing’ rule) meant with ‘dispose quickly of those bitches’?

 

The phone call had finally finished. She looked at her captives as if they were less than maggots and left the room. Libby did try to free herself, but even if she had enough strength in her arms to do that she was way well bound.

 

Mary’s efforts were little and pointless. And the maids had been bound with each girl’s wrists linked with a rope that passed under the other girl’s leg, and both ties were connected (thanks to a strand of rope that was also wrapped around their waist) to each other and passed right between their legs and… every time they pulled it…

 

After twelve minutes ‘Louise’ reappeared.

 

She was wearing one of Libby’s most expensive dresses (probably made by some French maison – Libby wasn’t sure – and in three shades of blue) with a matching cap, shoes and (black and blue) gloves. She was also holding a key ring with both hands and, as she looked at it, all captives could see a weird glee in her eyes.

 

‘If he thinks he can fool me with that ‘safe place’ shit... No one can fool me!’

 

‘Louise’ then looked all over the apartment for cash, jewels and things that she could use to bind her captives a little more. She found a roll of duct tape under the basin and soon all four women were forced to sport it over their bodies, but the scariest part for all four was that ‘Louise’ didn’t bothered to say or do anything to them while she wrapped loop and loop of the tape on them, they weren’t relevant for her anymore.

 

Not even for taunts or mocks. They were simply nothing to her now.

 

Then, exactly thirty one minutes after the call they all heard the ring of the front door.

 

‘Louise’ grabbed her gun, checked herself in a mirror and went to the front door; they heard her opening it and then a commotion, like in a fight. A huge one. A vase was broken (not her Ming!) and some furniture was trashed. Then… nothing.

 

For thirteen or fourteen minutes there was nothing but silence.

 

Then Lizzie’s face appeared at the door, with a strip of tape dangling from her left cheek.

 

‘Oh my god! I’ll have you free in a moment! Hold on!’

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the second time in less than an hour their beloved mistress’ face appeared in front of them as the blindfold was removed. She was all business, but her eyes had a special glint to each and all of them. And the giantess' black eye was now covered with a beef.

 

Thirty minutes before they suppressed their surprise as they saw her mistress and their captor working together in the process of removing their blindfolds.

 

The giantess took some distance and stood by the door of the office, each girl was tied to a chair located at one corner of the room (there was a pile of boxes in the fourth one) and Himiko stood in the middle of the room and spoke to them.

 

She and Thelma, so that was the giantess’ name…, had talked about the current 'job' of the giantess while drinking a horrible coffee and ended up making an agreement; they would fight and if (when) Himiko won the giantess would follow her orders about the whole business (that was going to stay a secret for the captive girls); if Thelma won (as if such miracle could happen...) then Himiko would follow her orders.

 

Himiko turned to Thelma and bowed to her, Thelma in return charged at the much smaller woman… and was out cold in thirty three seconds. Himiko awoke her with a glass of water threw in her face. They fought again, and this time it took Himiko one minute and twelve seconds to KO Thelma. Again she reanimated Thelma with water and they fought one last time. This turn Thelma decided to do a subtle approach, to study her opponent a little more and better, and with that she managed to land a punch in Himiko’s face…

 

…and was KOed by the petite Japanese woman not ten seconds later.

 

After being reanimated one last time by Himiko Thelma conceded, and they decided to prepare their strategy for the next day but, since Himiko didn’t wanted the girls to know what was really happening and why, she blindfolded each one and added a pair of earplugs to their restraints. About twenty minutes later they were able to hear and see again.

 

‘Girls, believe in me please when I say that none of you, not a single one of you, would like to know what is happening here. It’s too big and too dirty, even for me. Unfortunately, your participation in the whole matter hasn’t ended and will not move one inch from its current status. Oh, and Courtney, as a punishment for your ineptitude in hide your presence better and try to spy on someone with binoculars while being against the sun!, you’ll join Lilly and Rhonda in their captivity. Is that clear?’

 

Courtney nodded while the other two eyed her with a funny look.

 

‘Thelma will free you now while I return to my car, I brought some food for you (for you too Thelma) and clean toilet paper. I believe you managed to have water back to this facility, didn’t you Thelma?’ – Still wondering how could a woman who was half her size and a third of her mass have such great punches and kicks, Thelma barely heard Himiko’s question, but ended up nodding while she cut Lilly’s bonds – ‘Very well. I’ll be back…’

 

After the girls were refreshed Himiko showed Thelma, with Rhonda as model, how they should be tied up in order to, while giving the impression of being severely restrained, be able to free themselves in less than two minutes. Each girl received a long (almost obscene) kiss full in the lips (‘they all swing that way?’ asked herself Thelma) before being gagged, and Himiko was gone. Thelma looked at her ‘captives’ with some disdain and incredulity, and all three girls promised that after all was over they would teach her to never ever look at them that way again. With or without their mistress' consent!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

‘One last time, tovarich, repeat to us what happened.’

 

‘We arrived at the address comrade Nilinkov gave us exactly forty two minutes after the end of the conversation between him and the woman. We could have arrived there sooner, but there was a car accident that halted the traffic completely and... There were three police cars and one ambulance in front of the building and another police car parked right behind comrade Plinsky parked ours. And there was a large crowd and reporters and we were dressed as we are now. Our covers were of a lawyer and his assistant/bodyguard and with that we asked to the policeman what was happening because we were supposed to meet a client in one of the apartments. He told us that ‘some very rich and very sick lady’ had been robbed by a woman that was her relative and that the ‘famous Lizzie Pembroke’ was involved in the story, and then his superior told him to shut up. I protested, not too much to not attract his attention, and claimed that I had a client to meet. Since all the apartments of that building belong to very rich capitalists, whom have a strong penchant for secrecy, he didn’t pressured me too much when I refuse to say whom I was supposed to meet. Then Liberty Breggard was brought by her very attractive personal nurse and two paramedics in a gurney and I pretended to not know who she was, she left the premises while I joined the group of people wanting to enter the building but was being blocked by the police while comrade Plinsky asked here and there in the large crowd of people gathered in front of the building what had happened. He gave a twenty American dollars bill to a reporter to loosen his tongue, and another twenty American dollars bill to a policeman and reported me what I have reported you comrades. Word by word!’

 

Alexei Vralinrin was sweating. What was going on? As if he really wanted to know!

 

Mikhail ‘žnets’ Bordilov was in the room! If he was there then whatever was that mission in American soil it was big and bigger than he could think of and handle!

 

And he didn’t wanted to know about it! He would do whatever ‘žnets’ ordered him to without questioning the whys for a second!

 

‘Comrade Vralinrin? Are you sure that this… Elizabeth Pembroke is not involved in the disappearance of the woman you were supposed to meet?’

 

‘Be really sure I am not. But the reporter and the policeman told comrade Plinsky that for some reason that capitalist cow, who likes to pretend to be a detective like in their cheap literature’s magazines, was after Adele Peraux, or ‘Louise DuLac’. She was about to ring the bell of the apartment when two or three (there was a divergences in our sources at that point) ‘masked men in business suits’ grabbed her, used white tape to bind her hands behind her back and gag her and ambushed (somehow) Adele Peraux while they shoved her inside the apartment. She worked her hands free with the help of a piece of a broken vase and freed the captives of the now missing Adele Peraux…’

 

‘This is not good comrades, not even remotely. I am supposed to be in Moscow with what that pathetic greedy woman wants to sell to us in five days! And now she is missing! Is that what you are telling me?’ – All the other men in the room nodded at the famous enforcer of the KGB – ‘That is not, I repeat comrades… THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!!! Summon all operatives!!! We need to find that woman before the Americans!!!’

 

‘But comrade, if we summon all operatives, then the Americans might…’

 

‘Sum-mon-all-o-pe-ra-ti-ves… is it such a hard thing to understand… comrade?’

 

His eyes… he had looked at him like a cat which refuses to play with a mouse because the mouse is ‘unworthy’. Alexei gulped, what had he done with himself?

 

 

 

 

'Good night, Rogers...'

 

What? How... how did she had gotten in there? And where was...?

 

'Your secretary is in the closet, I see that you still favors brunettes of the vixen kind...'

 

Always the mind-reader! Oh well... if she was here then she must have had met Thelma...

 

His suspicion were proven true when the all black clad Japanese woman slapped him in the face. He didn't even bothered to pretend to be surprised with her next question.

 

'How did you managed to convince Thelma to kidnap two of my girls?'

 

'Indirectly of course. Morgan Blackport is a good PI, and she's in love with a homosexual detective of the NYPD. Since he have to keep his predilections a secret I managed to put some pressure on him so he had to make some public displays of 'manhood'. One of those was a dinner at your restaurant (thanks to a tip one of his ex-boyfriends told him after we paid him), and all I had to do afterwards was tell the girl that while she could kidnap any girl in order to force Morgan to work for her, it would be interesting to kidnap someone that she (Morgan) would end up thinking that was 'selected' as a hostage because of herself. I hope Thelma Sanlans wasn't too harsh with your girls?'

 

'None of your business, yet. But why are you using this woman, and why did you put up such an elaborated ruse in order to have ME involved anyway?'

 

'Before I answer, can I check if my secretary is able to see or listen to anything?'

 

Pamela was inside the closet, wearing the see-through white chemise (without a bra) and lacy panties, and lots of rope! She was tied to a ball, head smashed against the knees and tightly held in place, legs melted together and folded, the arms were as close as she could handle, and she was tape gagged and blindfolded, and with earplugs.

 

She reacted at his touch with fear, trying to shriek and back away and almost falling out of the closet. He grabbed her and held her in his arms for a moment.

 

Poor girl, he had selected her only due to her looks (mostly) and skills as a secretary (after all his cover did demand an efficient one), and obviously being surprised by a shinobi in HIS room wasn't what she expected to happen as job hazards. He tenderly kissed her forehead and put her back in the closet and closed the door. She obviously expected to be released, but with the door closed her muffled screams were no longer audible.

 

'I know I promised never ever call you again, Himiko-sama, but I need to have all bases secured in this particular job. To put it simple, after all you did for us I kept my word and there's no papertrail anywhere in the Agency about you. At least, that I know of and I have good reasons and proofs to believe in that. Thus I am most likely the only one (man or woman) in the government that still lives and knows about you Miss Himiko...'

 

He was pushing his luck. This woman was by far the most deadly and lethal human being that he had ever heard of, and really disliked to being lied to.

 

'...but this is such a big business that the Soviets brought ‘žnets’ Bordilov to...'

 

'The 'Reaper' is here?'

 

'In the Soviet delegation to the UN.'

 

Himiko and ‘žnets’ Bordilov had quite a history of mutual hate among them. Still alert she allowed him to sit on the bed and stood in front of him as they talked. It was worst than the tidbits of info that Thelma had gave her had made her believe that it was, and to be honest with Rogers she did understood why he had broke his promise. But she did punch him with gusto (and stole a few files of his legitimate insurance business) before she left.

 

Nine minutes later 'Randall Rogers' (real name classified) awoke and freed his secretary.

 

Twenty minutes later he was talking with the police and making quite a fuss about the security of the hotel he was staying in (one of the best of New York).

 

Two hours later, while his secretary slept in the bed behind him thanks to a very powerful sedative, he read all the reports that his agents had brought to him while pretending to provide him with copies of the stolen documents. So far so good.

 

The American shinobi nowadays known as Adele Peraux was a captive of Morgan Blackport and Lizzie Pembroke at Morgan's late aunt's house in Long Island. Check.

 

Thelma Sanlans was playing poker (and losing miserably) with her captives. Check.

 

The soviets were in turmoil, and many men suspected of being agents infiltrated in the US had their covers blown as they reported to what seemed to be summoning calls made by an Italian novelist/playwright that lived in Manhattan. Check.

 

Miss Himiko was in the case...

 

OK, how he would be able to do to put that genie back in its bottle?

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Were you being follow... Hello... Bryant...'

 

Lizzie was at his side, begging with her eyes for her to forgive her latest clumsy act, while Bryant was standing at her right with a very mean look in his face. They were alone in the front porch of the house and, apparently, hadn't been followed.

 

Morgan let them enter the house.

 

'You know Morgan, I think I had some kind of auditory hallucination back at the precinct. Lizzie was trying to tell me and Holt what had happened at the entrance of Ms. Breggard's apartment and, as you may already know..., she was constantly biting the right side of her lower lip as she did so. That, like we both know very well, always happen when she's really nervous and tries to lie. So I told Holt to get out of the room and... ARE YOU BOTH HOLDING A WOMAN AGAINST HER WILL IN THIS HOUSE???'

 

'Yes we are, coffee and cookies?'

 

They were now in the living room and, as Bryant sat on the sofa besides Morgan (who had hanged his overall and was pointing at a tray with fresh coffee and some very good looking cookies) and grabbed a cookie while looking at the buxom blonde with very inquisitive eyes and a 'don't try to play with me' look, they all heard some banging coming from above them. Adele..., trying to attract his attention. Lizzie, still very constrict for having spilled everything to Bryant's inquisitive eyes, was standing by the stairway when the noise started and made a mute question to Morgan. Her 'boss' (she wasn't an employee and never had received a salary, just orders) nodded and she went upstairs to check on the black widow.

 

Of course, Morgan couldn't have tied her but in the walk-in-closet of her late aunt's bedroom. And there she was, stomping her feet as she was tap dancing. Attractive was the first thing that Lizzie thought as she ignored the muffled pleas for help, that quickly into muffled obscenities, and checked the older woman's bonds.

 

Morgan had forced her to remove her clothes and she was standing naked inside the closet with her arms held above her head by a what seemed rope with duct tape covering it all.

For some reason that particular cabinet was all made with heavy wood that was absolutely immovable, including the bars that were supposed to be there for hangers to hang on them  They were too thick for that and even if three musclebound men had their hands tied to it, they would not be able to get themselves free through the sheer use of their strength.

 

Adele Peraux was at the left of those who entered the walk-in, standing in a light blue set of bra and panties and a pair of white socks. Morgan had used black duct tape on her??

 

That was going to hurt when they took it off...

 

Lizzie grabbed Adele's ankles (who had gotten themselves free from the rope Morgan had used on them) and removed the socks, then she re-lashed the crossed ankles and tied the rope to a hook in the floor at her right. Now why did Morgan' aunt had a hook in the floor of her closet? A kinky mystery, even to Lizzie's past experiences...

 

When Lizzie returned downstairs both Morgan and Bryant were yelling at each other. The first was begging to the second to not interfere in her upcoming meeting with Thelma. The second was still furious due to the masquerade Morgan and Lizzie had done in order to capture Adele (and the subsequent kidnapping of the now criminal at large), and was about to use the phone to call for reinforcements when the unexpected happened.

 

The phone rang.

 

Morgan wasn't expecting any call and, after answering it, she handed the phone to Bryant. It was Bryant's superior, the lieutenant. They talked for few minutes and Bryant's anger only grew exponentially as he heard the orders that he was supposed to follow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, she wasn't going to let them sleep tied to chairs. They weren't her captives anymore, they apparently were that but not really in fact.

 

So Thelma did allow the girls to have a bath with a hose and ate with them the dinner that the Jap lady had brought for them. Tasty, really tasty, was Thelma's opinion about it. Then it was time for some dental hygiene and finally tie them for the night.

 

Each girl didn't fought back as Thelma applied loop after loop of rope over their arms and legs until it seemed that they had only one arm (all girl's elbows could touch each other) and one leg. No packing inside the mouth and three turns of rope around their heads, cleavegagging them with it, and they were ready for the night.

 

Thelma carried them one by one to a single mattress and after making Rhonda's head was between Lilly and Courtney's feet, and her feet between the other two's heads, in a most satisfactory tight package (but not enough to really hurt them) she provided a pillow for each girl and covered the trio with a thick blanket.

 

They were all asleep, or just pretending it very well, in a matter of minutes.

 

Time to think a little about herself...

 

It had been six months since that insurance dude, something 'Rogers', had hired her when he appeared at her supposedly safe house in Atlanta out of the blue. He wasn't paying her with money, although all expenses that she had claimed that she had had in her 'jobs' for him had been paid with cash up front, but with an unusual display of power.

 

As a way to convince her that he was for real he had managed, with a single phone call, to have her father transferred to a lesser security facility in Ohio. With another phone call her mother was hired by a big bucks company in Ottawa in a good position (compatible with her college diploma) in spite of her long criminal record. And with a third phone call her father would be out of jail, paroled. But to get that third phone call...

 

What was this 'Rogers' wanting from that cajun chick? From what she had managed to learn the woman's latest late husband was involved in some sort of dirty negotiation when somehow Adele learned about it, killed him in a heated argument that followed the discovery, and was now trying to negotiate whatever her husband had stolen from very creepy fellows of the South. But what was she selling anyway?

 

Something very risky, very illegal and very lucrative. Five hundred thousand dollars? What was she selling and to whom? Secret government plans to commies? She shook her head and thought about reading only western and sci-fi pulps for a while...

 

Speaking of pulps, she had a couple of magazines that she hadn't read yet...

 

 

 

 

 

'Randall Rogers, Chief Manager of Fraud Investigations – Guehmann & Sons'.

 

The firm was a legitimate insurance company, a big one although not exactly well known by the general public. But this guy wasn't definitely who he claimed that he was, so with whom exactly he was speaking now? And why was he so powerful so the Commissioner in person (plus some high ranked officer of the NYPD and Mayor's office) was in the room as a form to put some pressure on Bryant's shoulders? Okay, dude, play along...

 

'So let me get this straight: Something really, but really big is happening right now in town and I am not supposed to interfere? That's what you are saying?'

 

The Commissioner stood up as if he was to say something but 'Rogers' shook his head and he sat back on his chair. Holt and the others were trying to realize what was happening inside the lieutenant's office, just like two or three usual 'clients' of the precinct.

 

'Mister Bryant, Thelma Sanlans is doing a favor to this country, THIS country (and please remember that she's Canadian), in exchange for some leniency of our part towards her adoptive folks. She's not being paid, she's not supposed to have any form of back-up and what she is doing is of utmost importance for THIS country, yours and ours. So, whatever, and I do mean WHATEVER, she needs to do to achieve her goals, she can do it and will do it because NO POLICEMEN WILL INTERFERE. Simple like that...'

 

'But what about Adele Peraux or the two girls that Thelma abducted?'

 

'Does Thelma have any record of brutality or even bad behavior towards any captive?'

 

'Humm, no. No, I haven't heard of...'

 

'Neither did we. Mister Bryant... do you really think that we would let her hurt two innocent girls for the sake of the country?' - And to perplexity of everybody, but 'Rogers' and the lieutenant, Bryant nodded while looking at Rogers with a very unpleasant look in his face!

 

'You are a clever man Mister Bryant, but don't worry. All will be over by tomorrow and NO ONE will be hurt in that story except for those who does deserve it, and definitely none of the THREE pretty young girls that are now captives of Ms. Sanlans fall on such category. If somehow she has to kidnap... say.... a school bus full of 6 to 7 years old kiddies or rob the money that an orphanage is counting to pay its mortgage or whatever, right in front of your eyes to achieve OUR goals, YOU WILL LET IT HAPPEN!!!'

 

And then the Commissioner stood up and reminded him that he was going to do exactly what he has been told, or he was going to be kicked out of the force and sent straight to the farthest prison for whatever reason they could came up with! Cornered like that Bryant nodded to his superior, but he claimed that there was one little problem...

 

'I know what you are thinking, 'How to explain my presence and all those gentlemen in this office', is that right?' – Bryant nodded – ‘Well, I do have quite some contacts and yesterday I was the victim of a robbery. Somebody broke into my hotel room, tied up my secretary, beat me (hence this black eye...) and stole a few business files of ‘utmost importance’. I demanded to my two old friends, the mayor of New York City and the Commissioner, that the best detective of the police force was assigned to the case and... here we are.'

 

Then all were out, 'Rogers' posing as a ridiculously arrogant man who was a big friend of the Commissioner (who in turn kept saying to him how Bryant was great and good) and all the others following the pair. The lieutenant told Bryant that he had no options but obey and it was a very furious detective that left the room.

 

The other detectives made jokes about his lack of luck, and then as he described what he was expecting for that night (a private dinner with Morgan at her late aunt's home in Long Island with her making his favorite dishes and having promised to wear the 'white silk one') they all started to laugh harder. 'Resigned', Bryant phoned Morgan as if he was canceling their date, but actually he was warning her that whatever Adele was involved in it was so big that the FBI, if not the CIA, was involved and had forced him to back down.

 

She, and Lizzie, were on their own.

 

Then, after Morgan apparently became furious with Bryant (earning new jokes and funny faces aimed at him) and ended the conversation abruptly, he went to 'Rogers' hotel and started his 'investigation' and his real investigation.

 

He knew that Morgan had fell in love with him, it was so obvious!, and while he would never be able to reciprocate her feelings, he considered her a very good friend. He needed to know more about the whole business, and especially 'Rogers', so he could be able to know after whom he would have to go if anything happened to Morgan (or Lizzie).

 

 

 

 

 

In spite of having a 'port' in her surname, Morgan had never met the sea until five years before. It was a love at the first sight case, and she simply loved to go to the beach and wear a bikini and bask under the sun... but today she was not enjoying it as she was used to.

 

Would Thelma be so bold and brass to meet her in public? Only if she wasn’t caring one bit about discretion, half the attendance’s eyes were converging on her as of now so anyone that met her would be spotted right on... as Thelma was.

 

‘MORGAN!!!’

 

While Morgan was fitting perfectly well a zebra patterned bikini (and why in hell did that giantess demanded that she looked like one of those comics’ jungle girls?), Thelma was wearing a dark blue one piece with a matching fisher cap.

 

‘Pretend that I am an old acquaintance, now!’

 

‘Oh my God... Carter!!!!’ – And Morgan stood up and shared a hug with Thelma –

 

And to the rest on the sea and sand the ‘Jungle Goddess’ had just met an old friend from...?, and was now talking about the good old days and what she and the ‘Pro-Wrestler Lady’ had done ever since they had parted ways. They even went to the point of showing some pictures (that they picked in their purses) to each as they chatted under the beach umbrella...

 

‘As you can see..., I have her. What about the two poor girls...?’

 

‘They are now in three...’ – said Thelma as she showed her Polaroids to Morgan.

 

‘THREE????!!!’

 

‘-Hug me again, now!- Yes, three little lovely angels my dear! And don’t you dare to ask if I named them after Donald Duck’s nephews, you little...!!!’

 

The fake smile and attitude was a bit more forced, but Morgan managed to do a good job.

 

‘Three?’ – she whispered in Thelma’s ear as they shared the hug.

 

‘What can I say? The girl must be a great fan of those girl detective stories, Nancy Drew and the likes you know (I find them a bit silly but...)... she went to look for her friends and literally bumped on me, after a very dumb attempt of spying on me. Fortunately we were in a secluded spot of that deserted area of the town, so there was no one to hear her ‘help me’ cries... for as long as they lasted of course. I had her stripped and securely tied up and even more securely gagged inside my car’s trunk in no time... and she quickly joined her friends’ captivity. Don’t look at me like that... look at the pictures... does it looks like I am being mean to her or her friends? Come on Morgan, look at the pictures... please?’

 

There were four pictures in Morgan’s hands. All three captives appeared in each of them. One shot from the front, another from the back and one (in perspective) for each side of the row. They were lined up in chairs placed side by side in the middle of a large room, an abandoned storage facility in Yonkers most likely, wearing their bra and panties and lots of duct... no, it was black electrician tape. It covered their lower face from below the nose to below the chin, holding their arms as close as they could take behind the chair’s back and wrapped to it and their torsos (the busty one among the three had a couple of turns of the tape wrapped over her breasts, squashing them), keeping them seated with the turns around their legs and the chair’ seat and holding their crossed ankles tightly together.

 

There were no close-ups on the girls’ faces, but it was obvious for Morgan that they had been crying, probably before, during and after the photo shoot...

 

She had to remember to put a joyous look on her face as she turned back to Thelma... who was... admiring her ropework on Adele??? No, it was more like an evaluation of her skills.

 

Adele was tautly stretched over her aunt’s bed, wearing nothing but her white lacy and silk set of bra and panties, some rope around her ankles and wrists and another around her waist lashing her to the bed as well. Nothing that anyone couldn’t handle if he or she had about half an hour (at most) alone and unobserved. The close-up picture made it clear that she was asleep when Morgan had took the picture, and that it was really Adele.

 

‘Not a good job you know... If you haven’t improved it before you left it is most likely that you will find Lizzie stripped to her bra and panties, or perhaps even stark naked, and locked bound and gagged in a closed when you return to wherever you are holding her...’

 

‘As if you already don’t know where is it...’

 

‘Excuse me?’

 

‘A man called ‘Randall Rogers’ made sure that the police will not interfere with...’

 

The mere mention of the name changed Thelma’s expression in a bad way. She acted like she had just seen someone else (as if it was her day to meet old acquaintances at the beach) and took a good look around, and found them. A couple. Mid thirties and prematurely bald for him, early thirties and a common and plain body for her...

 

They weren’t following her, they were following Morgan...

 

‘Do you know... do you happen to know if you’re going to have some back-up?’

 

‘Nope, I... Me and Libby are on our own...’

 

‘Which means that you are all by yourself, and carrying a heavy burden... Do yourself a favor girl. Tonight, before you deliver Peraux to me, lock the brat in a closet with enough rope and tape and chains to keep her there for a few hours and a very effective gag to muffle any call for help! DO IT or you will...’

 

‘I did once, it didn’t worked.... and put HER life in an unnecessary treat...’

 

What the... she seemed serious!

 

‘Anyway... Here’s the address of a roadside motel about seventeen miles away from where I am keeping them. The last three cabins on the right are way out of sight of the road and the management building, and yes I already used it more than once to stash a girl for a while there, as long as you pay an extra ‘tip’ to the guy in charge...’

 

‘So you and whoever is your partner...’

 

‘No! Look. You are being followed..., behind me, the couple... he in green polka dots and she in blue and pink... There’s probably more of them. Whatever this ‘Rogers’ guy is involved in... It’s big, it’s way too big  for the likes and tastes of common women like you and me... they operate in a far higher level than we usually do... Let’s stay together a few more minutes and make everybody believe that we’re just chatting and remembering our ‘gold ol’ days’. Then you’ll go to your car and straight to wherever you and Liz are keeping ‘Adele’ or whatever is her real name, keeping an eye to see if you are being followed...’

 

And as she acted and ‘talked’ like she was telling something incredibly funny to her ‘friend’, Thelma did gave a few warnings to Morgan. It soon became obvious to Morgan that she wasn’t doing it for any consideration for her, but for her folks. If Morgan delivered the ‘goods’ to her she would have her father out of jail... so Thelma was going to make sure that Morgan wasn’t intercepted by the ‘competition’.

 

But Morgan had already decided that she wasn’t going to use the motel indicated by Thelma, she knew a suitable fleabag for such purposes (twice she had found herself forced to ‘prevent’ ultra-spoiled daughters of her clients to do something stupid and bad for their health by making them a ‘guest’ there, and once she had hid the witness/wrongly accused of a murder – by force – in the very same room), all she had was to call Lizzie in advance.

 

Forty one minutes later Sgt. Hudson, at the dispatch table of the **th Precinct, had a very enjoyable sight when Morgan Blackport; barely covering her divine-like forms with a zebra patterned bikini top, a tight fitting jeans trousers and a blouse (that showed a lot of her generous cleavage); showed up and asked him a couple of little favors.

 

As she phoned Lizzie and told her to move Adele, disguising the order as request to move the girl whom they were protecting from a very abusive boyfriend, Hudson had sent a couple of policemen to check on the green Buick parked across the street in front of the precinct. The couple inside it, whom Morgan had told Hudson were friends of the ‘abusive boyfriend’, put the car in motion immediately but no chase was ordered after them.

 

Morgan spent two hours making sure that she wasn’t being followed before she went to the motel where Lizzie and Adele were staying. She managed to fool her pursuers who then reported to ‘žnets’ Bordilov their failure, but he had already found Thelma’s whereabouts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a way, it was a torture for her to not free herself from the ropes that amateur had tied her with. The knots were out of reach, true, but she had tensed her body (as best as she could without warning the naive girl of her act) as she pretended to be asleep.

 

She could have overpowered the girl fourteen times!!!

 

Fourteen!!!! And just today!!!!

 

But she had to allow the dilettante to believe that she was her prisoner...

 

And this bed? She was anticipating the first bite of the first flea! And it was a bit smelly as well...  And all the while she had to pretend that she was trapped!!!

 

Then there was a knock a the door. Two quick strokes, two more and one barely audible for last. The girl, who had jumped on her and was using both leather covered hands (and why did she had to put on those gloves anyway?) to handgag her, terminated the absurd pressure over her face and stood up, opening the door to the vixen (who was ridiculously dressed as a girl ten years younger...) whom, before anything, checked her bonds.

 

She was good, for someone who wasn’t in the field...

 

‘Better safe than sorry, help me doing her legs...’

 

But she was already (convincingly) bound hand and foot! Not for the blonde’s tastes. As they added three times more rope (than the amount she was using previously), the PI told her unwanted assistant what had happened. The fun part afterwards was that the younger girl did realize in what they had stumbled on, but the buxom PI still had reservations about believing that she was involved in a espionage/counterespionage act happening in NYC.

 

She checked her three guns and one blackjack and put on more sober clothes...

 

The way the younger woman was looking at her as she was undressing herself...

 

So her ‘partner’ wanted her and she hadn’t realized it yet?

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Do you think that I can be fooled so easily?’

 

She looked at ‘žnets’ as if she was looking to an idiot, and answered by doing something that he hadn’t see anyone doing before. She lifted Andrezj of the floor with one arm (the very same that he was holding at her side with both of his own) and threw him forward, onto ‘žnets’ body. Next she sent her elbow to Jin’s nose, smashing it very painfully.

 

And then Misha shot her nearly point blank three or four times with the tranq dart gun.

 

She went down face first one second later as her former captives screamed in despair, or tried to at least, since she had gagged them very well.

 

With a little help of Vassili, who removed Andrezj from over him, ‘žnets’ Bordilov managed to resume his usual intimidating pose and spat and kicked his drugged assailant. Then he realized that he was still holding the garbage that the giantess had given to him while pretending that it was the real stuff, what his superiors wanted so badly.

 

He grabbed his cigarette lighter and was about to lit them all when he realized that, perhaps and just perhaps, the giantess was telling the truth. They could be the real documents.

 

They at least looked like what he was told to ‘achieve’.

 

He pondered the whole situation for while. The connections between this Thelma freak and the traitoress were unclear. He knew (and had enough evidences to back it up) that Thelma had made a lot of business with the late Ken Bratter, so it was possible that she had been betrayed by ‘Adele’ (or Glynis Mowpell as was her real name that she hadn’t been using for over a decade), and yet had managed to get her hands on the papers that (he knew) Ken had hid in a locker in the 30th St. Station in Philadelphia a few days before he had... died.

 

He knew that Thelma had been seen in Philadelphia a couple of days after his death, the two women that she had bound and stolen were adamant in their identification and there were a few other eye witnesses (given her size, appearance and fame she wasn’t someone that could easily disappear in a crowd). And that she had tried to get in touch with Olson before he was arrested by the FBI due to the help he had given to him...

 

‘žnets’ knew all that, so could it be possible that Thelma was the one that had the papers all the time, and that she only wanted to get her hands on ‘Adele’ so she could be able to get in touch with him and thus sell him... these sheets of paper?

 

Better keep them in a safe place, wait for ‘Adele’ to be delivered to him and confront her with those papers. If anything, he would have to deliver TWO sets of documents to his superiors, who then would have to check which one was the correct...

 

What was that?

 

Oh, yes. The unknown girls that Thelma had kidnapped in order to force that ‘Private Eye’ to work for her. He looked at them, standing up straight (thanks to the men holding them from behind) side by side while heavily bound and gagged in their nakedness... They couldn’t manage to look at him, and were all crying and sobbing desperately...

 

Should he dispose of them right now? Better not, they could be useful after all...

 

‘<Andrezj, Vassili and Misha... take the girls and that ********* to the office in the back of the building. Make sure that they won’t be able to free themselves and leave them after that. Koyenko and Federenc will go to the place where the blonde amateur is suppose to phone to and will answer the call. Here’s what you will tell her...>’

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hours passed slowly until 08:30 PM finally arrived. Thelma had given Morgan a phone number and told her to call her at 08:35 PM, so Morgan gave one last check into her bonds, handed a gun to Lizzie and went to the lobby of the hotel to make the call.

 

She was absurdly pale when she left the telephone booth nine minutes later, and had to compose herself as she walked back to the hotel. There were two women waiting for the elevator but she barely registered their presence, until they got into the cabin.

 

One of them was a young girl in her early thirties, dressed very casually in white and blue. The other was the smaller woman in the cabin, dressed all in black as if she was a widow and whose face Morgan couldn’t see due to a veil. But this woman was using a well known perfume for Morgan. A scent of jasmine and something else...

 

Madame Qi.

 

Morgan reached for her gun, but the brunette (no, blonde, she was wearing a wig!) was quicker and hit her wrists with one of those kung-fu/carate chops, then grabbed the very same wrists and twisted and forced her arm to move to behind her back in a tight armlock. A kick in the back of her leg and she was now kneeling on the floor, and with the other hand of her younger girl was covering her mouth.

 

The lift stopped after the veiled woman pushed a button.

 

‘Enough, Miss Blackport. My assistant have orders to merely restrain you so you can listen to me without interrupting me, but she also has orders to knock you out cold, strip you and lock in a closet in this run-down place... naked as in the day you were born and totally helpless against any... ‘indelicacy’ that anyone that finds you might want to do...’

 

She had only met this Chinese born lady three times, and knew that she meant it.

 

‘Believe me, I have unpleasant ways to make you tell me where is the place you are supposed to deliver that ungrateful traitor that is now your prisoner. And I have a girl who, for the safe return of her mother and sister, will gladly pose as you for that meeting...’

 

Alright, alright... Morgan relaxed and became completely still in the arms of her captor.

 

‘Very well. As you may know, Thelma Sanlans was captured by an unknown party a few hours ago. That means that she and her three captives are in the ‘clutches’ of very mean and dangerous folks, trust me in that, I know them... which is why I am having a little trouble in controlling myself as of now... ‘Adele Peraux’, that little <*******> that is now your guest in your room, fooled me and Thelma... we would not have put our fingers in that poisonous matter if we knew with whom she was dealing with...’

 

Madame Qi and Thelma Sanlans? Well, she didn’t knew much about the woman in front of her. She spoke English speaking all the right phonemes and still with a slight hint of her foreign Ancestry/nationality, she always preferred to have her (Morgan) looking up to see her veiled/masked face, was the best fighter she had ever seen and had a cunning criminal mind. Her own private ‘Moriarty’, far more better in her own field than Morgan (how she hated to admit it!) was in hers... So it was possible that she was involved in this case.

 

‘Now pay attention. I don’t care about ‘Adele’, I don’t care about the three waitresses or whatever they are that are sharing Thelma’s fate. I care about Thelma since she has... some contacts that are of my interest and I care about the half a million dollars that was the promised pay for ‘Adele’... hmm, shall we say her business with those atheists...’

 

COMMIES???!!! She was dealing with espionage??!!! That was WAY out of her league!!!!

 

‘Oh yes, the late and unlamented husband of ‘Adele’ somehow, through means that are not (yet) clear to me, got in his possession something very interesting for the KGB... Which is why you MUST not lie to my question. Blink only your left eye for ‘yes’ and only the right eye for ‘no’. Would you sacrifice the lives of four helpless women for the sake of National Security? If you try to lie to me, if you DO lie to me... May the dead have mercy of your soul little girl, for I certainly won’t gonna have any of it!’

 

She wasn’t managing to get her right arm free of that lock, Madame Qi was twisting her left thumb in a way that made her arm useless and she couldn’t scream for help... And to be honest she wasn’t sure if she wanted any help from the usual ‘attendance’ of the hotel...

 

And most important, she knew she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she let anything happen to any of the three captives (and Thelma as well)...

 

She was going to try something, anything that she could think of, to save them all (and with any luck managing to contact the proper authorities while doing so).

 

She blinked with her right eye one time...

 

 

 

 

For the first time in nearly three years she was scared, really scared. It was worse than when she was locked in that padded cell; with that monstrous straightjacket keeping her immovable and all those harnesses preventing her to see, hear and talk; being guarded by orderlies that liked to treat her like **** and roamed their hands...

 

She had long lost hope until the night in which she was saved by her, her mistress...

 

And now she was praying for it to happen again!

 

True, she was still bound as her mistress her taught the now drugged giantess to do. But they had added more rope, and glued the knots! How was she going to free herself?

 

What was that?

 

‘(Are you girls alright?)’

 

Beckett!!!

‘(Courtney, don’t make me report to the Mistress that you are in verge of panic! Get a hold of yourself girl! Just pretend to be scared!!! Don’t be for real!!!)’

 

Easy for her to say that! Those guys beyond the door were SOVIETS!!!

 

Armed, trained and dangerous... and little Gabby Beckett, 4’8” of pure stealthiness had managed to pass through/besides/in between them and reach the locked room in which they had been stashed by the reds. And was now ‘talking’ with her by using Morse Code.

 

She remembered when, over two years before, their mistress had decided to teach them all the forms available of communication that were possible when using your voice was not safe nor remotely workable... she had found it so silly!!!

 

Seven hours bound hand and foot and well gagged and blindfolded (all done with long blue scarves tied tight), receiving every thirty minutes a tip of the whereabouts of the ball that was positioned somewhere in the room, and that she only had to touch to get her freedom back, through light taps in her skin had made her think otherwise...

 

The long week that followed those hours with she as everybody else’s ‘toy’ (not that it was so bad but...) made her sure that she would excel in the art of non-talking communication!

 

They could use blinks (when not blindfolded of course), tip of the fingers or even their very well muffled moans to communicate between themselves while posing as captives. They knew the American Deaf/Mute Sign language and its Japanese/Oriental counterpart and lots of ciphered languages... So Gabby hadn’t had to touch their bonds nor raise her voice to communicate with them. She held Courtney’s right hand and put the index and middle finger over the palm of her own right hand, and thus they ‘talked’ for nearly thirty minutes.

 

Suddenly she had to hid as she heard someone coming.

 

Misha turned the keys and entered the office room in the back of the building, he took a good look in all directions before holstering back his gun. There were no lights in the room but the one coming from behind him. They were alone, all four of them.

 

The heavily bound and even more heavily drugged giantess was lying at his left. Scattered (almost piled over each other with one girl’s legs over another’s face and the third’s bosom against the knees of the first) at his right were the giantess’ captives...

 

Where did she had found them? Who were they? Better check the room. No one under the table or behind the door and the room had only one window (a vent actually) about two feet above his head at the left... they were alone. He didn’t looked up not even once...

 

‘žnets’ had ordered him to pick one of the girls for questioning, he chose the one on top and carried her like a sack of potatoes out of the room one minute later.

 

Thanking once again her mistress for all those long hours of training, exercises and lessons, Gabby waited for more three minutes before she went back to the floor. Equilibrating herself with the tip of her toes over the door frame and her fingers passing through the ceiling (thanks to tiny holes she had made with her knifes) and pressed against the roof of the office (which was nothing but a giant sized box shaped compartment in one of the back corners of the building) wasn’t something that she couldn’t do for a couple of hours, but she felt really good to have solid ground under her feet.

 

She was counting the seconds ever since she left the reunion point and went to invade the building, and if she wasn’t wrong about the time her mistress wasn’t due to appear for at least another hour... She ‘talked’ a little more with Courtney and Lilly, and went back to behind the door. They were so scared!!! Well, she was as much as they were...

 

She once had wished to be a nurse, now she was a thief, a murderer and a kidnapper... But this was too much. Too much. Espionage? And what would be next?

 

She spent the next hour thinking about the pet shop in Wisconsin, she had spared enough money to buy or build it. She already had a new ID and everything ready... That would be her last job for her mistress. She prayed that she managed to pass through it untouched.

 

Then there was some movement at her right...

 

‘You shouldn’t leave your guard so open my dear...’

 

Her mistress!!! Who was now holding both of her wrists in a tight clench of her fingers and covering her lower face with an iron claw! Where did she came from? How had she...?

 

‘Free the others... the show is about to start...’

 

Moments later, as Courtney and Lilly massaged their limbs and she was waiting to give them a couple of knifes to each, they saw their mistress turning on and off her flashlight for brief moments. The signs for ‘someone is coming’ and ‘keep still no matter what’... They got ready, whoever it was he would be dead before he had a chance to warn the others...

 

They were in two and no one was following them.

 

One was carrying Rhonda (who was playing the ‘frightened captive’ role very well, perhaps the ‘frightened’ was not a make-believe...) over his right shoulder. The other was carrying the beautiful PI that she had stripped stark naked, tied up in a tight ball shape and locked in a closet a few months back (after she had taken a few Polaroids as trophies), Morgan ‘something with a port’, and she was unconscious and wearing only her underwear...

 

The one carrying Rhonda was the first to enter, he immediately didn’t saw them were they were supposed to be but instead of raising the alarm he grabbed his gun (all the girls got tense and grabbed their weapons but obeyed their mistress), turned around and shot his partner point blank in the forehead as soon as Miss Himiko closed the door behind them.

 

Her mistress prevented that his unconscious cargo was hurt as he fell dead on the floor, she was holding the nearly naked girl with care and surprising strength in her arms as she turned to the man who had cautiously deposited Rhonda on the floor on her feet.

 

‘Miss Himiko?’

 

‘Mikhail Bliendsko?’

 

‘They are...’

 

‘Nine men. All armed and, now that they got what they think that it is what they wanted, they have their guard down. Girls, help this man to be at the address he will give you in exactly thirty two minutes. Take Morgan with you and don’t look back...’

 

‘Remember... none of them is supposed to....’

 

The look in her eyes... ‘žnets’ had the same inhuman look when he was mad and angry...

 

The Americans had chose a monster to kill another!!!

 

Now carrying the busty gal that (apparently) was a detective or the likes, without having any chance to better admire her assets, Misha and the three naked girls and another one dressed from head to toe in black left the room, managing to not attract any attention from the men gathered in the front, and moved to the back. There they found another girl dressed in black and the corpses of Vaclav and Ivanovich, and an open door.

 

There was a shootout... and now a fight, and a big one!, happening in the front of the building right now... Now outside the girls were running faster (much faster) and stealthier (way more stealthier) than he could do (even without a cargo as he was now), the one that had killed those two stayed behind them. To set fire on the cars of the spies...

 

He was having trouble running fast enough to be able to follow the girls, until they reached a vacant parking lot of an abandoned factory a couple of blocks away from the warehouse. They slowed down and entered one of the buildings and he followed them.

 

There he found them putting on some clothes that had been provided by another young girl, was he being helped by the ‘Sororoty/sotority House’ Squad or the likes?, wearing a ‘swing’ blue with white polka dots dress, white small hat and gloves...

 

There were two cars behind them. One was a brand new Buick ‘53 red convertible, the other was what they called a woodie (who but Americans would use wood in a car), a ’47 Pontiac Streamliner. He was told to take Morgan to the Pontiac and then go to the Buick.

 

‘OK... Me and my friend here were returning to New York after a weekend upstate, you jumped in front of our car apparently running from some criminals who wanted your life. As soon as we let you enter our car you pulled a gun at us, forced me to drive to an alley and tied and gagged us both, locking us both in the trunk of the car before you drove to a safe place in which you could call for ‘help’... Is that correct?’

 

‘Pretty much...’

 

He could see two girls ‘working’ on the still slumbered PI, she was now naked and quickly becoming a spool of white rope. One of the redressed girls approached him and told him to ‘rough she and her friend a little’ before he tied them up, so he slapped and shook both girls (who stood completely passive as he did so) a few before roping them.

 

Since he was supposedly in a hurry for he had to find a safe phone booth in less than... twenty minutes now, he simply forced them to cross their wrists behind their back and with the same long piece of rope that he used to tie them he anchored them to the small of their back, then he tied their crossed ankles together (and for some reason found appropriate to tie their heeled shoes to their feet in the process) and their legs right above the knees. Finally he used their scarves to gag and blindfold them roughly (that would leave marks!) as they had requested, finally he placed them in the trunk and went to the driver’ seat.

 

He was leaving the building when he saw her, the woman that had stayed behind to do a big favor to the world (and avenge his father and two uncles) by killing ‘žnets’ Bordilov...

 

It had to be her.

 

What would an Oriental woman, she looked Chinese to him, wearing a formal business suit and carrying a briefcase would be doing in such a place at such an hour of the night?

 

And why was she walking with that bratty heiress who wasn’t restrained in any way?

 

 

 

 

 

 

TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE

 

‘Gag her. You all know your places and what you are supposed to do. Do it.’

 

One man slapped five or six strips of tape over her mouth while leering at her, the others moved swiftly to their positions. She was yanked off the chair and threw over some hairy dude’s right shoulder. Somebody opened the door for him and she was now outside.

 

It was cold and chilling and that wind!!!

 

She was almost dumped on the ground, and the lights of the approaching car blinded her for a second. Here they come. The sultry PI (she really wished she had a chance to tie her up as Gabby and Louella had had, those lucky *******!!!), her ‘sidekick’ (why oh why she hadn’t had got rid of her yet?) and the famous ‘Glynis’, the fool who had tried to betray the Mistress about five years before... and was now working with the commies.

 

Even being unnecessary to lie to play the ‘scary’ part of her act, her confidence in her mistress had made her be convincing enough to fool them. They truly believed that she was what she was pretending to be, an innocent and helpless captive of ruthless men.

 

The PI got out of the car, her sidekick was next dragging by force a roped and taped up (almost cocooned) Glynis/’Adele’. And now... they were looking at her...

 

She felt the gun’s barrel against her left temple, and now someone was ordering the PI to throw away her guns... and strip? And she obeyed?

 

The skirt, the jacket, the white dress shirt, the shoes and socks... If she was into women (she only liked to tie them up) she would have fell for that one! That’s for sure!!!

 

Somebody had just darted her... and she could see why.

 

Taped in her back was a small pistol, a .22 perhaps?

 

Now her sidekick and Glynis were walking towards the building, side by side with the heiress raising her hands a little above her head and looking very scared. A guy picked the PI and threw her over his shoulder while another picked her clothes and a third got behind the wheel and went to park the car somewhere nearby.

 

The dreadful tall man that was in charge of the communists operation ordered that she and the PI were ‘stashed’ with the others. The guy carrying her was a bit respectful, the one carrying the PI was obviously feeling her all over...

 

Then they entered the room in the back of the warehouse...

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEN MINUTES BEFORE

 

‘I... I... can explain...’

 

He shot the dart gun nearly point blank on her belly, then he checked if his anger had made him slip and threaten the life of a potential asset so stupidly.

 

That was going to leave an ugly mark, but she was otherwise fine.

 

He checked the papers that now he was starting to get sure that were legit. Just to be on the safe side he decided that they would ‘interrogate’ her when she came to (about thousands of miles away from where they were now) and extract the location of what safe/locker the key in his hand opened. As soon as he left this country, her country of choice... the better.

 

He took a look at the other captive... an useless tramp!!! But a well known one... as much as it would be easier to make her, and her ‘boss’ and the others, disappear... that should and would have to be done in a proper way, to avoid any unnecessary risk of the Americans ‘connecting the dots’ and discovering what he really planned to do when he came to this country. A traitoress that was known as a ‘black widow’, a giantess who was about to be on the ‘Top Ten’ Most Wanted list of the FBI, three waitresses or the likes (those would be the easiest ones to dispose), a bosomy and attractive girl who should have stopped playing ‘Cops and Robbers’ more than a decade ago, a spoiled rich little girl...

 

Spoiled rich little girl... rich little girl? That’s it!

 

‘<Georgi! Interrogate that wench and extract everything that it is related to the case! Make sure that she does not lie to you. Then make her write a ransom note to her parents and...’

 

A kidnapping gone horribly wrong, because the kidnappers (Thelma and ‘Adele’ had got greedy and shot each other after they had killed the kidnapped girl (Lizzie) and her would-be-rescuer (Morgan)... as for the three other captives... well, there was a river about a few blocks away from him... That’s how he was going to dispose of them all!

 

He picked up the phone and made the only call that he was supposed to do with it.

 

‘Harry, my dear friend!!! How are you? (...) I am fine thank you... (...), I have great news! I got the job I was expecting to achieve!!! (...) I want to celebrate!!! (...) And pay you back all the money you loaned to me!!! (...) I’ll be arriving in one hour at most!!!’

 

There. Simple like that. Andrezj would meet some guy that the Americans may or may not be trailing and giving him about two hundred American dollars during a dinner in a ‘fancy’ restaurant. But the truth was that he had just warned his superiors of the success of his mission. Finally, after years ‘on hold’, his career was about to take off once again and...

 

Jin’s body fell dead on the floor at the same time that he put the receiver back on its hook. Then it was that Hungarian’s turn, and then he saw HER...

 

She had waited for him to phone his superiors to start killing his men?

 

It was a trap!!! The whole operation was a trap, an hoax!!!

 

He motioned to pick up the phone as his men went for their guns. One of her accursed four pointed metal stars cut the line of the phone in the next moment. The shootout started but after Kerenk shot and killed Olaf they had to stop. She was playing with them, using her incredible velocity to kick or cut or punch one of them and move in the next moment to behind another of his men. They were scattered around the place, but not very far one from each other, and she was aiming for their hands and wrists every time one of them tried to point his gun at her (with any real chance of success). Then they heard the explosions...

 

She started to kill his men faster than he could believe that it was possible, but left her guard open... all he had to do was pull the trigger...

 

‘Look out!!!’

 

And as he turned his head to see who was the woman that had screamed he felt a body slamming against his torso on his left side. The socialite... still bound hand and foot, she had hopped towards him and jumped on him while he was watching the massacre of his men... His shoot hit the ceiling, he pistol butted her and tried to remove her from over his own body. But by then she was by his side...

 

‘žnets’ Bordilov’s life ended not as slow and painful as she had wished it would, and he still managed to do something against her, one last threat, before he died.

 

He managed to grab her hood, and as his upper torso and head fell backward on the floor he was still clenching it tightly in his hand. Leaving her face, for the first time in her life, in plain view while during ‘action’. And with a regular customer of her ‘official’ source of income right next to her to see it clearly...

 

‘Mi-miss Himiko-san?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THREE DAYS LATER, SOMEWHERE DOWN THE MEXICAN BORDER

 

‘...and that’s when that ****** giantess killed Andrezj, she had gathered a few helpers that were shooting at us and I couldn’t take any chance. I had the papers and had to take them out of there! So I grabbed them and run... And that’s when things got weird.’

 

‘Are you sure that your escape was facilitated?’

 

‘Yes!!! Positively!!! There bullets coming from the front and the back and yet, as I run, no bullet managed to hit me!!! At first I was only thanking my luck and my training... but when I managed to get a hold of myself and calm down...’

 

‘When you was in that house whose homeowner you had made a prisoner?’

 

‘Yes!!! She and her friend were securely tied up back to back over the guestroom’s bed, they couldn’t run because I had tied their legs in a cross-legged sitting position, they couldn’t detach one from each other due to the large amount of rope and even twine that I had used on them and were so well gagged that they barely made a sound... So I thought that I was (finally) safe and went to the kitchen, grabbed a glass and filled it with water and started to think back on what had happened to me in the past three hours...’

 

‘And it doesn’t make sense?’

 

‘Absolutely!!! The Americans... they wanted us to get our hands on these papers!!!’

 

As the interrogation went on and Mikhail was repeating the whole story for the 11th time in a row, two senior officials of the KGB were observing it through a one-way mirror.

 

It made sense, the whole business that had cost the life of that freak (‘žnets’ had no friends nor supporters to lament his death) was too shady, it seemed that the Americans were trying to cover it up as a kidnapping gone wrong, they even had found a scapegoat (a would-be-detective) and someone to blame for the deaths of five ‘known criminals’...

 

This Mikhail Bliendsko was the son of a man who had ‘disappeared’ during one of Stalin’s purges, killed by none other than ‘žnets’ himself although there were no proofs nor suspicions that he was aware of that..., and had a list of good evaluations and reports from all his superiors from the Army to there. And was a hero of the Great Patriotic War...

 

The officer in charge of the interrogation was told to let ‘slip’ (in a few hours when Mikhail would be tired and confused with the marathon of hours of interrogation) to Mikhail that ‘žnets’ was behind his father’s death and see what was his reactions...

 

Then the two KGB officials returned to their room in the Embassy.

 

‘Do you heard about that ruse that the British played on the Nazis during the war, when they managed to make them believe (with the help of a corpse) that they were NOT going to invade Sicily but Greece instead? They are making a movie of it if I am not mistaken.’

 

‘Oh, yes. ‘Operation Mincemeat’ isn’t? And the corpse ‘real identity’ was William... (...)’

‘...Martin. William ‘Bill’ Martin of the Royal Marines... that was a good ruse... But did you knew that before and after the whole operation was put in motion it did happened for real?’

 

‘What?’

 

‘Before and after ‘Operation Mincemeat’ two real couriers/sets of intelligence papers were found by the Nazis detailing incoming Allies military strikes on them. But in the first case the Nazis seemingly didn’t believed that they could have been so lucky (which could explain how they so eagerly and quickly fell for ‘William Martin’), and in the second case (which happened if I am not mistaken a few days before the strike on the Normandy shores) they thought that the Allies were trying to play them for fools again...’

 

‘No way!!!! (...) Ehr, comrade Neminski, are you suggesting that...’

 

‘I am not suggesting anything, comrade Pavlevich, I am saying that we are in the very same position that the Nazis found themselves when they got the papers that did more than just suggest that the ‘Invasion’ of the Allies would NOT be through the Pas de Calais. We were once fooled by them and now we may or may not are being fooled. These documents seems to be the ones that were stolen from our operatives by that Ken ‘something’, and they are very important for us. On the other hand the whole situation through which we recovered them is, at best, imprecise and based on yet unproved declarations of the sole survivor of our field agents in that area of the country... Shady isn’t?’

 

‘So what are we going to do?’

 

‘Keep on interrogating Mikhail for a few more hours, and if there’s not a single grain of possibility that he is lying to us or that he is a fool that cast suspicions on his own shadow, we will send these papers to our superiors in Moscow first thing in the morning.’

 

‘Better start writing our reports then...’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MORE OR LESS AT THE SAME TIME

 

The impact of the dart on her belly had knocked out all the air from her lungs, and had made her need some medical help. So for the following three days she was the cooperative captive. They had strapped her to a bed with about a dozen of medical straps (although some seemed to have been made for other purposes) and she was already ‘wearing’ a monstrous straightjacket with dozens of straps holding her down, she was kept hooded (and thus gagged, blinded and deafened) all the time and, to be honest, they had tended to her wound in her abdomen very well. She was ready to get the hell outta here!!!

 

She had heard her voice, which meant that she was her captive.

 

It should be better for her to wait a couple of days more, at least, but she couldn’t stand the thought of being her captive. She simply couldn’t accept it.

 

It wasn’t rational, logical or the best thing to do as of now...

 

And that was what she was doing right now.

 

It had taken her more than two hours to be able to unbuckle the first strap, then it was a full hour until she managed to unbuckle the last one and stretch. She felt them coming, two girls (as usual) who, by now, were completely relaxed and completely defenseless when they entered the bare room where the medical bed in which she had stayed all the time was located. Poor girls, with such poor senses they didn’t had a chance at all...

 

She jumped on them before they had any chance of raising the alarm, a couple of punches with the palm open and they were down... Let’s see...

 

One was her size (including in the shoes department), albeit less endowed. The other one was a couple of inches smaller, but had her number on her chest. So she stripped both girls naked and put on her body one’s bra and the rest of the other’s clothes. She was expecting something a bit more fetishistic, but it was a regular nurse outfit...

 

Both girls (one was redhead with freckles and about ten years younger than her, the other was a crop cut blonde and was at least fifteen years younger) were submitted to free use of ripped bed sheets, belts, straps and (in the blonde’s case) the straightjacket.

 

By the time she buckled the last strap both girls were coming to, she patted their heads lightly and left the room. She was in a dark corridor that ended in a curve in both extremities, not as much as well lit as the room behind her, with about five or six door on  each side she choose to go and their counterparts right in front of them. Every door had a small sliding window so whoever was kept inside the room could be watched/monitored before the door was opened (she hadn’t ‘heard’, more like sensed, the pair do that after the second day). Light was coming from under only two doors.

 

Should she check? She did it.

 

In the first she found the PI and her ‘assistant’.

 

While Lizzie Pembroke was merely sitting on the floor and against the wall tied hand, knees and foot with rope, and her hands were raise above her head as they were also tied to a hook on the wall at about six feet high, and cleave gagged with what looked like a white towel, they had done a number with her ‘boss’. She was hanging in mid-air, in the middle of the square room, thanks to half a dozen straps and ropes that were connected to a single (and very big) hook on the ceiling. Besides the straps and ropes they had put another of those horrendous straightjacket on her body (straps and locks all around), tied each ankles to its correspondent thigh and used a couple of straps to reinforce the immobility of the legs, tied her hair on a ponytail and then tied a rope to it (so she couldn’t lower her head) and ball-gagged her. Both women were naked and seemed to be trying to communicate with each other and barely registered her presence.

 

She went to the second floor and heard something, it seemed that someone was reading something (a book or a magazine) to another person...

 

Thelma Sanlans was impossibly tied up to a pole in the middle of the room. At least three different types of rope, plus straps and belts (like the one keeping her ankles together), held her against and to it. She was wearing a black straightjacket, but it seemed like a ‘normal’ one, and was cleavegagged with a white scarf. The only other person in the room was a petite girl (4’9” at best, making the contrast between her and her captive more prominent) standing in front of Thelma and wearing a blue Bermuda shorts, a white shirt knotted right below her breasts and a cowboy hat, who was holding a magazine in her hands.

 

‘Glynnis?’ – asked the girl without turning around.

 

Oh no! Her ‘escape’ had been predicted by Himiko?

 

‘Ah, it’s really you. Nice to meet you I’m Gabrielle, but call me Gabby please...’

 

‘Uh... Hmmm... Hi, Gabby. She knew that...’

 

‘Helen and Val, the two that you most likely subdued before you left your room, are the most ‘anxious’ ones among ourselves. ‘Ourselves’ being our mistress’ apprentices. Hmm, it looks like you really have a problem with this thing of we call her ‘mistress’, and also with the fact that most of us are her... ‘bedwarmers’... and very proud of it, isn’t it?’

 

She nodded without realizing that she was doing it.

 

‘Okay. Here’s the deal. You can’t open any of  the doors of this quarter except for the one that leads to outside, and miss Himiko is most likely waiting for you right after it. Your boss, Randall Rogers, is going to show up in a couple of days so, until then, you’re still, at least technically, ‘our’ captive. But she really wants to talk with you and just that, so please go there, open the door and talk to her. Listen to her proposition, whatever it is, before you say or do anything else. Don’t be stupid or dumb, okay? Bye...’

 

There was a handle in the sliding overture from Gabby’s side. She grabbed it and close the small window and somehow blocked any further attempt of Glynis to open it to succeed. She could clearly hear the girl reading a pulp novel to her captive.

 

For about five minutes Glynis pondered her options, and went after the door that led to outside that corridor, She quickly found it, took a large and deep breath and opened it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THAT NIGHT, AT HIMIKO AND NORA’S ROOM

 

‘But then how did she...?’

 

‘There are hundreds of ways to molest the body and the mind of a child without raping and torturing he or she, and the late and now very much unlamented (by her former friends) ‘aunt Mildred’ of Glynis knew most of them... at least she accepted that she has a trouble and needs help. And, while she is getting it...’

 

‘You will retrain her and make her a better agent for that accursed grinning maggot!’

 

‘No one will ever go to our ‘little house’ knowing what we really do for a living and try to use it for his or hers plans , at least for the next ten years, if I do that... We can do whatever I want us all to do, and he’ll know better than going back on his word...’

 

‘Still... and what about Lizzie?’

 

‘She knows, and having been fooling herself for a while denying it, that she is but a burden to Morgan. And she loves Morgan, truly and deeply. So she practically begged to me to teach her ‘useful stuff’ so she can become a real helper for the woman she loves...’

 

‘I don’t know...’

 

‘She said it before Randall told me to tell her and Morgan, using this ridiculous ‘Madame Qi’ ruse that I use with Morgan, that for the rest of the world all that happened was that she and Morgan managed to make the dangerous ‘Adele Peraux’ and Thelma Sanlans lose a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but they got captured by the duo of criminals (thanks to her clumsiness) and now the criminal pair is demanding a large ransom for their safe return. Of course, Bryant and his ‘pals’ will ‘rescue’ them before any ransom is paid... You have to see her trying (and managing) to convince Morgan that the rest of the world would accept that fairytale because of her: ‘Nancy Drew wannabe’ Lizzie Pembroke!’

 

‘Touching moment?’

 

‘Very touching... she seeing Morgan admitting that (for Morgan) she had been something a little more than a dead weight all these months... both really cried at that point and Morgan looked at me (trying to see through the veil) wishing to have a ‘death look’... touching.’

 

‘Does Morgan knows or at least suspects that she is going to...’

 

‘Nope. That’s part of the deal with Lizzie, she’s not supposed to tell anyone ever of what is going to happen (or will have happened) with her in the next six months. She’s already inclined to be truth to her word. She will be 100% true to it in less than a month...’

 

‘And after a semester with you she’ll become a valuable sidekick for you ‘main foe’?’

 

‘Yes and no. I believe that Thelma will be the decoy I have been looking for all those years. I don’t like that anyone has the slightest hint about who I really am, and I don’t pretend to use this ‘Madame Qi’ ruse forever. To the rest of the world she will be behind all my ‘jobs’, we will split the money in a very satisfactory way for both parts and she’ll get the fame and ‘recognition’ she have been after all her life. Plus, she confided me that she can’t wait for a chance to get back at her three current handlers... She shouldn’t have looked down on them (and myself to start with) the way that she had... But she fears me, and craves for what I might be able to teach her, so when I allow her to have her ‘revenge’ on those four... the girls will be for a rough and joint demanding time but nothing above that...’

 

‘And there’s the pulps... you should have seen Gabby’s eyes when we told her that we had found many ‘Operator No. 5’ magazines within Thelma belongings. Finally a pulp fan like her among our midst!!! She’s been reading ‘Weird Tales’ stories for her in an effort to...’

 

‘Convince her to join our ranks? Completely unnecessary. The moment she awoke for the third time and realized that for the third time I, little Japanese lady with half her corporeal mass, had knocked her out cold. The gleam in her eyes, ‘I need to know her secret!’, was clearly visible... But enough talk talk, ready?’

 

Nora smiled and opened her mouth. It was a bit odd that they always ended up talking like that as she was being carefully restrained by her lover (this nawa-shibari stuff was really mesmerizing for her tastes!) before their intimacies... But both had gotten used to it...

 

The large white scarf knotted in the middle was tied at the base of her skull after four turns around her head, Himiko helped her to lie on her back and shut down the lights...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AFTERWARDS...

 

Morgan Blackport and Elizabeth Pembroke were rescued by Lt. ‘Lucky’ Bryant four days later. He claimed that, while following some clues left by Morgan at the site of her and Lizzie’s ‘kidnapping’, he had managed to find the shack in which they were being held by Thelma. No ransom was paid but, for a week or two, Lizzie was the joke of the town (and country) as she admitted that all hers and Morgan’s ordeals were her fault.

 

Exactly one week after her ‘release’ Lizzie Pembroke disappeared. For the next six months she managed to send a few postcards (from different states) and made two phone calls to her family (on her sister and father’s birthday) stating that she was ‘fine and well’.

 

One month after the incident, Morgan Blackport was hired by a seemingly wealthy couple, who claimed to be the ‘Jolsons’, to find their missing son. She went to their house to get more information for the case. Three days later the real Jolsons returned home after a trip to Nebraska and found her bound spread-eagle to the master bedroom’s bed and recovering from a nearly fatal overdose of unknown chemicals. Three days of her life had been erased from her memory,  although she had a good idea of what had happened to her...

 

Mikhail Bliendsko’s career ended with his death while on a mission in Spain fourteen years later. But nearly fifty years later, on his dying bed, ‘Charles McGraw’ told his son and two daughters the truth about himself and how he had become an American citizen. The proofs he had to back his claims were confiscated by two Federal agents on the day of his death, but to his family it didn’t mattered anyway... He was and would always be ‘Chuck’...

 

On her mother’s birthday party, with all her family gathered to help her mother to cope with her absence, Lizzie Pembroke returned home. She immediately was lectured by her mother for two full hours straight but didn’t told anyone, not even Morgan, about what had happened with her during her ‘time out’ as she called it. Never ever.

 

But it was obvious that she had underwent some kind of training since, while she still was hands down the worst driver of the whole world or even Universe, she had become more stealthier, quicker, agile and knew a lot about self-defense. She became (through a ruse) Morgan’s best ‘asset’ in a month and was ‘promoted’ to a real partner two years later.

 

In the meantime Thelma Sanlans had become the terror of all insurance companies of both coasts. It didn’t mattered for her how valuable (and thus how well guarded/secured) was whatever she chose to steal. She simply ignored any obstacle in her path and stole it. She soon become a legend among criminals and law enforcers.

 

‘Adele Peraux’ resurfaced in Paris seven months after the incident, she became a thief and industrial spy of relative success, at least she managed to fool (and in some cases slightly humiliate) every law enforcement agent sent after her. She did a couple of successful jobs for people she knew were red agents, but by doing so managed to fool them into believing that she was what she seemed to be. Her ‘career’ lasted for fifteen years, before ‘Siobhan Delrios’ moved to somewhere in Arizona, living there until she died in the early 80’s...

 

‘Randall Rogers’ kept finding ways to have Miss Himiko to work for him for at least six more times. He was always true to his word and did what he had promised to, but that did not prevented him to get a black eye every time he found out that his secretary/mistress was locked in a closet/cabinet/bathroom and Miss Himiko was in the room with him...

 

 

 

 

 

Morgan Blackport will return (eventually) in a solo adventure:

 

‘The Old Dark House on the Hills Affair’

 

 

 

 

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