Puppet On A String (2 page)

The transatlantic flight proved uneventful; the weather monotonous, nothing to see with hardly a cloud in the sky. She slept a while, knowing she’d need the sleep just to catch up with the time change. Then she read when she awakened, only to find herself dozing off again from time to time until the huge jet began its descent into the
Vienna
Airport
.

      
Though
Shelby
moved through customs with practiced ease, she always sighed with relief once the ordeal was over. This time seemed no different as she passed through the security checks without a hitch, at least until two security guards stepped in front of her just as she’d gone through the final gate. She practically banged into their puffed-out chests, and stepped back, momentarily stunned. “Something the matter?” she looked up, trying to maintain her cool.

      
“Shelby Ryan?”

      
“Yes. That’s me.”

      
“Your passport, please.”

      
“My passport, why? I thought—” A nervous shiver ran down her spine.

      
“Please, if you will, Ms. Ryan—” The fair-skinned guard peered down his haughty nose at her. He looked like a classic Aryan foot soldier.
Little Nazi
,
Shelby
thought to herself.

      
“Yes, of course,” she tried to redeem herself with a soft smile, then handed over the document she held in her hand. Both guards glanced through it carefully, then the fair-skinned one took hold of her by the arm, escorting her to an area behind a metal screen.

      
She struggled against his firm grip, “Where are you taking me?”

      
“We need to search your bag,” the dark-haired guard answered tersely, as he followed them behind the screen. His expression was much more surly and forbidding than that of his patronizing colleague. Strangely enough he spoke in perfectly modulated English with just a trace of an accent, which made something about him rather chilling. As if she’d been overtaken by some dark force, her determination to contest the frightening procedure seemed to vanish

      
Shaking like a leaf by then,
Shelby
handed over her shoulder bag and watched as the fellow began to sift through its contents. When he reached the carefully taped and folded manila envelope at the bottom of her bag, a cold smirk crossed his lips.

      
“What’s this?” He held up the small goldenrod-colored package.

      
“A computer disk.”

      
“Tell me about it, Ms. Ryan.”

      
“There’s nothing to tell. Music, I was told. You can see that I haven’t opened it.”

      
“And where did it come from?”

      
“A friend gave it to me. It’s nothing subversive, if that’s what you think.”

      
Seemed his smirk would be perpetually evil. He studied the innocuous wrapper as if he might find some clue to its contents, though it was obvious with a single glance that the wrapper had no markings. Abruptly, and without explanation, he slipped through a door and was gone for a very long time. Maybe twenty nerve wracking minutes passed during which
Shelby
was forced into a plastic chair while the blond, blue-eyed guard looked down at her, barely disguising his scorn. In time, he rifled a cigarette from his pants pocket and lit up. Then he cocked the open pack in her direction, silently offering her one.

      
“No, thanks. I don’t smoke. Do you suppose you could figure out what’s going on? I really have to get going.”

      
“You go when we tell you to go. Right now, you stay in the chair.” He too gave her every reason to shudder in fright.

      
It wasn’t but a few minutes later that the dark-haired guard emerged from the inner office and finally motioned the two to follow him.

      
“Can you tell me what’s going on? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

      
“This way, Ms. Ryan.” She was pushed along a long corridor, through a door and down a hall to a dimly lit cell-like space that was as creepy as it was cold. The chill draft made her quake. Here it was the middle of summer and she felt like she’d descended into the darkest hours of winter.

      
“You can wait here. Director Raich will be with you shortly,” she was told.

      
Then the door closed and she was alone in the room with a sick greenish-yellow glow and the faint smell of disinfectant.
Wait?
What did they mean by wait? Why was she here? What was on that damn disk that could threaten her like this? Her head spun, a little jet-lag making it throb and her mind oddly sleepy.

      
Suddenly, the sound of the door opening jerked her back upright. “Ms. Ryan,” the curt voice leapt out of the space behind her. She turned around.

      
“I scare you?” The man wore a shirt, tie and a dark grey suit, an officious and peculiar fellow, who kept fingering his mustache. He zeroed in on
Shelby
with single-minded concentration, then pulling out a chair he sat, resting his arm on the table in a casual and familiar pose intended to put her at ease. Following him into the room were two burly men in t-shirts and jeans who moved around behind the frightened
Shelby
, standing guard as if they figured she might bolt any second. She took no note of them. How could she, with this swarthy creature in the dark suit claiming every bit of her attention?

      
“Yes, you scared me,” she finally answered the question, “this whole business scares me. Why are you keeping me here?”

      
“Well, yes, of course, you have a right to wonder why you’re here. First, I should introduce myself: Director Raich.” He held out his hand, which she refused to shake. Then a perfunctory smile followed before he resumed his ardent attention on his prisoner. “I take care of irregular situations here at the airport, so that any unpleasantness in our city can be avoided. But back to your question. I honestly think the reason you’ve been detained should be obvious to you, considering what you carry in your bag.”

      
“You mean the disk?”

      
“I mean the disk. Who was it meant for, Ms. Ryan?”

      
“For me. It’s mine.”

      
“Really now.” His lip curled oddly as he spoke. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you? I want to know who you are and why you’re here. And why you would bring such sensitive material with you from the
United States
.”

      
“I’m Shelby Ryan, I’m here on vacation. I don’t know anything about sensitive material. The disk was given to me by a friend. In fact, he was not much of a friend. Just someone I met at a party who thought I’d like the music. That’s all I can tell you.”

      
“You have any idea what’s on that disk?”

      
“I told you, music.”

      
“Music, that’s it?” He raised his eyebrows skeptically.

      
“That’s all I know.”

      
“So, if I said that it was some kind of coded message, that wouldn’t loosen your memory?”

      
“No, no it wouldn’t. There must be some mistake.”

      
The man had a very unpleasant face, but it was not one that was particularly distinguishable from a thousand other faces you might see every day. Bland but very disagreeable. Gritty, hard when he was playing the heavy, which he was now.

      
“A mistake? I think not. You’ve been caught with sensitive intelligence information on your person, and unless you are willing to cooperate with us now, I’m afraid that you will be detained for further questioning.”

      
“What do you mean, detained for further questioning? I’ve told you all I know.”

      
“You’ve told me nothing, Ms. Ryan. Nothing truthful. Perhaps you could wrack your brain a bit and maybe find the truth rattling around somewhere.”

      
He pulled the offending disk from his suit pocket and pushed it across the table toward her. She’d never seen the disk before, not without the envelope. Not a mark on it. Nothing to distinguish it from any other standard
DVD
.

      
“I swear, I know nothing about it. A casual friend of mine gave it to me. Said there was a lot of good music. That’s it.” As her frustration grew, tears began to well in her eyes, and her body began to shake, overcome by the cold in the room and the coldness of the man’s frozen heart.

      
It took a long while for Raich to answer. Until he did, the other men in the room shifted a bit on their feet, getting restless with the process.
Shelby
was restless too, more fearful every minute.

      
“You know, you’re a very pretty girl, Ms. Ryan? Sometimes pretty girls get all kinds of opportunities to do things…” He purposely did not finish his statement, though the cruelty
 
in his delivery had changed with his tone of voice turning sexual and vulgar, innuendo dripping from every overwrought syllable.
Shelby
sat before him, blank-faced and terrified, knowing that nothing good could come of this.

      
Perhaps their movements had been choreographed. Otherwise, there was no other reason to explain why one of the jean-clad brutes suddenly moved in, grabbed her arms and pinned them behind her. She started to struggle, but the talking man immediately slapped her face, scowling. “You resist, you’ll get hurt.” With both hands bearing down on her, he tore her jacket and blouse wide open, leaving her breasts nearly exposed in her lacy bra, the nipples nearly bared. Overwhelmed by the frightening circumstances, her beautiful chest rose and fell with every breath she took.

      
Once her accuser moved to his feet and walked off, the third man moved around in front and began taking pictures of
Shelby
’s face and chest. When the flash of his camera blinded her eyes, she tried to look away, but a pair of hands roughly forced her face forward.

      
“Open your thighs!” the disagreeable Raich barked the order but she didn’t move. In fact, her knees remained locked together by force of will.

      
The man who had been holding her from behind clamped her wrists in cuffs to keep them out of the way,
then
he too moved around to the front and crouching down in front of her pushed her knees wide open with a force much stronger than her own. He worked with some efficiency, strapping her upper legs to the legs of the chair so that in seconds,
Shelby
was utterly bound and could barely move.

      
When he pulled out a knife, she froze, her eyes glued to the shiny blade.

      
“No, no, please don’t hurt me. I’ve done nothing!” She started to weep, hot tears streaming down her cheeks.

      
She might have given in to the feverish chaos of hysteria, but with the knife so very close, she feared for her life and was determined to keep her wits about her.

      
The man with the knife went on with his task despite
Shelby
’s protests, and sliced away at her brown pants, exposing her crotch to further humiliation. Meanwhile, the eye of the digital camera continued to record the scene.

      
“So, Ms. Ryan, you have something to tell me now?” Her accuser came around from behind, bearing down on her again.

      
“I swear if I did, I would,” she sobbed.

      
“Tsk, tsk, too bad you can’t cooperate. Perhaps Colonel Jessup will be able to get the truth.” His scowl made her blood run cold. But perhaps not as cold as when he snapped off his next order. “Prepare her for transfer to the anti-terror unit.” Giving her one last glance and a very dismissive one, he left the room while his two accomplices got to work.

Once Director Raich left, the table was pushed to the side and
Shelby
was released from the chair. Her hands were rebound in front of her then lifted high above her head where they were attached to a hook that dropped down from the ceiling. Her pants were in shreds and useless and her jacket had been discarded before her hands were tied. This left her in nothing but her underwear, her thin blouse and her high heeled boots.
   

      
After getting a good long look at the lovely young female dangling before him, the man behind her laughed, “Ooo, Jessup’s gonna like this one!” Too bad for him, he didn’t have time to ogle her body further. Getting on with his task, he stuffed a ballgag in her mouth and tied the attaching straps behind her head. “There’s nothing about this that you’ll like,” he pulled her head back by her hair, and spoke in terse tones directly into her face. “But you’d better get used to rough treatment, because where you’re going that’s the only way they treat lying cunts like you.”

The next several minutes went by in a blur of activity all directed toward one purpose. First was the gloved hands yanking down her bra, followed by the tattoo needle pressing into her delicate skin, leaving the mark JPX7 on the soft skin of her left breast. Next were metal thigh bands snapped around her upper thighs, a connecting chain between them. This way she could walk, but she couldn’t run away. Then, once her arms were lowered, she was bent over the table, her torso flat against the surface while thick gloved fingers probed their way into her anal cavity, giving her a thorough body search. That finished, the one glove was discarded and another one snapped over the hand that would probe her vagina in the same thorough way. Neither man would find anything, except perhaps some evidence of arousal, given the amount of fluid in Shelby Ryan’s velvety sex hole.