Double Team
Chapter 206
“Good neighbors always spy on you to make sure you are doing well.”
—Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
I GOT AN EDUCATION on how to use public transit in DC. Everyone else had been getting accustomed to it for the past two months. Remas knew it like the back of her hand and led Desi, Brittany, Cindy, and me to the right connections for the school. Donna, Emily, Joan, Rachel, and Beca caught a different bus to the OCS office. Sophie stayed home because we had some kind of appointment this morning with the security guys to install an alarm system. Nanette tagged along to the school. Everyone went a different direction after Remas showed me to a practice room. Nanette stayed with me.
I got settled to practice and she took my hand and oiled it.
“I can’t touch my guitar with oil on my hands,” I complained.
“Don’t worry. I have a cleanser that will strip off the oil before you play. But Jacob, you need to work these stretches each time you sit down. We’re going to limber your hands up and strengthen them.”
“I’ll follow instructions, Nan. Thank you for helping me.”
“Excuse me. Are you Jacob?” a man asked from the doorway.
“Yes, that’s me,” I said.
“I am Jose Hernandez. I teach classical guitar here. I’ve been told you are to be one of my students. You can play, can you not?”
“I could,” I said. “My hands have been kind of abused the past two months. Nanette is massaging and stretching them.”
“May I?” my instructor asked. Nanette slipped aside and Jose took my hand and examined it carefully, turning to the other when he was done. “And you are?” he asked turning to Nan.
“I’m his physical therapist. I expect to get full range of motion in a week to ten days. It could take longer to restore speed and flexibility.”
“Excellent,” Jose said. “We’ll work together. Whoever did this to your hands, Jacob, is a criminal. I’d like to hear what you can do. You have a way to get the oil off his hands?” Nanette pulled a small bottle of dish detergent from her bag and handed it to me. Dawn gets grease out of the way. I stepped out to wash my hands while they chatted about proper strengthening exercises.
“Some of the exercises you will need to do will feel very basic. Probably things you have not done in years. Determination, Jacob. You want to play the guitar. You will need to practice like never before,” Jose said. “Your friend showed me video of your playing. I remember you now. You auditioned with the flute player a year ago. We will make your guitar live again in your hands.”
I liked Jose. He demonstrated on his own guitar some nice riffs so I would know he actually knew how to play. Then we got to work.
We worked all morning and I was thankful Nanette had worked on my hands but by noon they ached. Jose then gave me some non-guitar exercises, told me to go have lunch and soak my hands in warm water for half an hour, and then return to exercises.
I had just one job these days: Get my hands healthy and play the guitar. Such a difference between this life and the life I lived in high school with studies and trying to fit guitar playing in around my other commitments. Even my wives seemed suddenly more relaxed as we built relationship time into our days.
After dinner, I soaked my hands in Epsom salts and did the exercises one more time. I was sure I could feel a difference already. After the soak, I used a heavy lotion—Nanette called it an emollient—and worked it into my joints and up into my wrists and forearms. I forgot how sore my forearms got from working my finger muscles.
I almost dropped my pen when I sat down to write. I started making notes.
Having a pen in my hand was like a magnet for Donna. She perched her naked butt on my leg and wrapped an arm around me.
“What are you writing, love?” she asked.
“Just making notes so far. When we start touring, I need to have material ready to convince people to vote for reform. I don’t want to just go off the handle because I’m mad. And I am. I feel like I wasted four weeks of my life that I could have been playing the guitar and making love to my wives. And as a result, I need to spend another two or three weeks in recovery before I can play anywhere near the level Cindy deserves to support her. But you know what? I think the other eleven were there because it was what they truly had an aptitude and desire for. They worked together as a great team. And I’ll tell you, if I was trapped in a collapsed building or fell off a mountain trail and broke a leg, they’d be the people I’d want to rescue me. Why did they have to take me?”
“I know, love. It wasn’t fair but it’s over. What did you learn? Besides your anger, what did you take away from the experience?” Donna asked me. I laid my pen on the pad and stroked her breast as she bent to kiss me. One thing she’d taught me since she became part of our pod was that this was really the ideal way to hold a serious conversation. Take the edge off with physical touches and little kisses. And when the conversation became passionate, let the touches become passionate as well.
“I learned a lot about emergency first aid. Trauma relief. Immobilizing an injury. I learned I could tread water for an hour. That I could scale a hundred-foot cliff. That I could run all day if I needed to. I learned which plants I could eat. How to set a rabbit snare and how to catch a fish without a hook. Donna, they were all good skills. I’m glad I learned them. They were just the wrong thing for me at the time.”
“You might be surprised. It’s possible this time was more valuable to you than any time spent in music camp could have been. You learned to survive. And you learned how to keep your mates, us, alive in an emergency. Can you put the hurt and anger and interruption to your life in a compartment and focus on making sure the National Service is restructured to prevent abuses like that? It wasn’t the training that was at fault. It was deliberately snatching you out of what you’d been promised and dropping you in the middle of a nightmare. You need to find out who was in a position to manipulate this and who had motivation to do it. Then you need to destroy him.”
I grinned at her and devoured her mouth. She moaned when I caressed her breasts. Her legs fell open when my hand trailed downward. My cock rose between us as we petted and fingered each other.
I was sitting on the sofa in the living room and Donna shifted to press her perfect round butt into my abdomen. She reached between her legs and positioned my cock at her fiery opening. She sank down on me as I continued to maul her breasts. Her head came back to rest on my shoulder and I spread kisses from her ear to her shoulder and back as she rose and fell on me. My cock was in ecstasy as I felt her warmth enclose me, pull at me and beg for the fluids that were building for me to ejaculate. One time my teacher. Once, my fantasy. Always my mentor and sure pillar of support. I thrust my hips and she settled down on me as I began to pour out my semen into her waiting vagina. Always. Always my lover.
We continued to work daily. I missed rehearsing with Cindy and Desi and Remas. But right now, I’d just make them sound bad. I wanted to get up to where I was before this nightmare began. Each morning, Lyle showed up to run at six o’clock. Nanette and I ran a good ten miles, usually finishing in about an hour and a half. He was impressed. When Livy came out to run with us on Saturday, though, Lyle was stressed to keep up and Nanette finished ten minutes behind us.
After running, we showered and Nanette massaged my hands. She wrapped them in cotton gloves before I left for school and once there, I carefully washed them in warm water and dish washing detergent. It was having an effect and every day I saw improvement in my movement and flexibility.
Sunday afternoon we were relaxing and thinking about a movie when the doorbell rang. We don’t get much company and were all on alert, looking out windows and arranging ourselves defensively. I finally opened the door to see a woman dressed in a baggy tracksuit and baseball cap with a brown ponytail pulled through the opening in back. She wore dark glasses. Beyond her, far enough away to not look like a threat, two people in black tracksuits stood, looking around—a woman looked toward us at the house and a man looked out toward the street. I’d been around enough of them lately to tell they were security of some sort. But I had no idea who I was facing. I kicked a wedge behind the door to prevent it from opening more than a foot.
“May I help you?” I asked cautiously.
“Jacob, I’m your new next-door neighbor. We’ve never met, but you might recognize my name. I’m Abigail Johnson,” she said. “May I come in to get acquainted? You know, neighbors and all.”
“Does your security provide names for people you decide to introduce yourself to?” I asked. She called me by name. WTF?
“Oh. No. My mother did. You really don’t know who I am, do you? I guess that’s a relief.” She didn’t seem to have much control over what she said or how much she jabbered on. “You met my parents at a concert a few months ago. My father is Ronald Johnson and my mother is Evelyn di Marco.”
“The President?” I shrieked. “You’re President di Marco’s daughter?” She immediately held a finger to her lips to quiet me.
“Is that Abigail?” Rachel asked coming up beside me. “Girl, what are you doing here?”
“Um… Miss Evans… I came over to get introduced. I’m your new next-door neighbor,” Abigail said.
“Well, come in and tell us about why you’re here. Are those secret service guys out there?”
“Yeah, but they promised not to approach the house unless I hit my panic button.” Rachel kicked the doorstop out of the way and opened the door, moving me out of the way. I noticed a couple of bare butts scampering for the stairs and hoped everyone else had found something to cover up in. I’d just been in the back yard to start the grill for dinner, so I had my cutoff sweats and a T-shirt on. I’d just come upstairs to get the chicken breasts when the bell rang.
Once she was in the house, Abigail pulled her sunglasses off and placed them above the bill of her cap. She had a round face, pursed lips that were a little wider than you’d expect, and hazel eyes. In short, she looked nothing at all like the petite dynamo that was her mother.
“Anyone care to explain?” I asked.
Eventually, I was sent to the grill with the chicken and Rachel took Abigail to the music room to interrogate. By the time they were finished, Abigail had an invitation to dinner and we all sat at the big table in the dining room.
“You could be a chef at the White House, as good as this chicken is, Jacob,” she enthused. She certainly had a healthy appetite. She took a second heaping helping of potato salad.
“So, is this all something that I’m going to be kept in the dark about? Rache, how do you know Abigail?” I said a little testily. Everyone else seemed to have just accepted her presence.
“This pest works in the OCS office. Do you even have a job title, Abby?” Rachel said.
“They made something up about being a researcher.”
“Researcher. Which explains why you can go to anyone in the office with inane questions.”
“Mother wants to know.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“She wants to know the office isn’t straying from her ideal for service reform. She got kind of militant about it when I went into service last fall. I was assigned to the reform commission first and then transferred to the OCS as soon as it was created. Like Rachel. I never had a very high profile during the election, so no one really recognized me at the office. Will knows, of course.”
“No one would ever guess that the go-fer of the office was someone high profile by the people who follow her everywhere,” Rachel said.
“I can’t help that. But I managed to get minimal staff for the house next door. It still feels like a huge empty box to me,” Abby said.
“How’d you get the house next door?” I asked. “I didn’t even know it was for sale.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t. Daddy has a way of finding things and when Mother said she wanted security near you without having to issue a bunch of orders, he found out where you were buying and got hold of the property as a residence for his little girl. They spent a lot of time remodeling and installing all kinds of security systems, so I only managed to move in this week.”
“Why?” I asked. I was immediately alert to the President wanting security near us. “Why is the President interested in us or our security?”
“You should know that answer by now. Ever since she put you on the road to do your music thing, there has been a credible threat to you. She thought we had some breathing room while you were in basic and then you disappeared.”
“She could have done something to find me.”
“She’s a demigod, not the omnipotent. And let’s face it: As much as she cares about your safety, she has to deal with things like China sending military advisors to Mexico.” Well, that put things in perspective. My happiness wasn’t exactly a matter of national security.
“So, you’re supposed to be our babysitter?” Beca asked. Leave it to her to get right to the point.
“Oh, hell no. All I am is an excuse to have secret service people living next door to you. And…” She looked around the table and finally let her eyes linger on Rachel.
“What is it, Abby?”
“It would be nice to have some friends. Even in boarding school, once Mother decided to make a play for the presidency, I always had security around me. It’s not very conducive to establishing friendships. And living in the monstrosity next door isn’t going to improve things. I wish I could live here with you all.”
Oh shit! I had a verbal shotgun ready to shoot that idea out of the sky if any of my wives said ‘pull!’ There was a nervous pause and then they all started laughing.
“Good one, Abby,” Rachel said. “I can just see the President’s face when she discovers you’re running around naked in the biggest harem in DC. And your secret service people—where are they going to hide their weapons? I promise we’ll be good neighbors, though.”
“Naked? Harem? You mean… I mean… All of you? Together?”
“We are a plural domestic partnership,” Donna said. “We married each other in April.”
“Except me,” Remas said. “I’m just a fiancée.”
“That doesn’t stop us from ravishing your pretty body in bed every night,” Cindy said. “Like tonight.”
“Wow! TMI. I guess I’ll just stay in my room and dream,” Abby said. “No one would be interested in seeing this body running around naked.”
“What? Why? You’re cute,” Brittany said.
“Ha! Why do you think I never appeared with Mother and Daddy on the campaign trail? I’m overweight. My mouth is too wide and my tits are too little. If I went on a diet—as I have many times—I’d still end up the same funny shape. Will I be a big pear or a little pear? What’s the difference?”
I listened to the girls all comforting her and reassuring her. I had to wonder if that had been a genuine self-deprecation or if Abigail Johnson was that skilled at manipulating people. I was going to be on my guard whenever she was around.
Excuse my paranoia, but I don’t trust her or her mother.
Monday afternoon, I started working with Cindy, Desi, and Remas at last. Jose was pleased with my progress and said the best way to recovery now was to try to keep up with the group. Professor Jamison worked with us as an ensemble. I noted there were some changes to the program. Well, they didn’t know if I’d be here to play and they inserted pieces that made use of Desi’s voice and Remas’s cello. We began to slowly add the Flamenco section back into the program. I struggled, but was gradually able to keep up, at least with some of the slower tangos.
Wednesday, after rehearsal, we were packing our instruments and getting ready to catch the bus home when Ron Starling came into the room.
“Jacob? Could I have a word?” he said.
“Sure, Ron. You know my mates have access to everything I do.” He glanced at Cindy, Desi, and Remas and nodded.
“Thanks to a certain super computer company in Chicago, we’ve gained footage of your abduction and a profile of the selection criteria fed to the AI that put together the team you were made a part of.” He opened his computer and pressed the play button on a video. It was sped up footage of me entering the bathroom with my duffle and guitar. Then four other guys entered the bathroom. A few minutes later, five came out. We were all in green jumpsuits. I was held up between two other guys. It was obvious I could barely walk but one of the others carried my guitar and duffle. Dana stepped up to me and shoved a pill in my mouth and made me drink water.
The scene shifted to a different camera and showed all of us getting on the bus and it pulling away from the induction center.
“It’s concrete evidence that you were drugged and abducted from the induction center. The bus was not on any schedule for the center. But the AI has coughed up some interesting information with the help of Design Intelligence out of Chicago. Parameters for selecting a team were very specific. We have names for the other eleven who were on that bus and are searching for them. They seem to have disappeared once they got on that bus. Just like you did. And, like we assume someone is doing with you, we have a tracer set up to detect if any of their IDs go active. There’s still no ID on the trainer and he was apparently not on the bus with you.”
“No. He was waiting at the cabin. Has it been checked?”
“Yes. Abandoned. Nice set up, not far off the Appalachian Trail. We’re guessing they boogied before you were down the mountain.”
“Do you think the others were in on it?” I asked.
“At the moment, evidence suggests they were moved into this training event from different locations all over the country and had some orientation before your induction day. They’d all completed basic and most had completed an NSO training of some sort. A couple had been in service for over a year. It’s not impossible that they were briefed on this, but my guess is that most of them had no idea it was anything other than what you thought of it.”
“Two weeks,” I sighed. “If they stick with standard NSO training, they’ll come back online in two weeks.”
“We’ll be waiting.”
So will I.
End Part XVI
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