Double Team
Chapter 210
“What you’ve got to understand, son,” says the doctor, “is it’s all the fault of the alien space bats.”
—Cory Doctorow, The Rapture of the Nerds
“LOOK AT THIS,” I said when we got up Tuesday and were sitting at breakfast. I’d opened my tablet to check the news. “What other secret organizations have been started with National Service black op funds?”
“You can’t be looking at one of those fake news sites, please,” Donna moaned.
“New York Times,” I said. “An article probing the secret funds administered by the General Director of the National Service—where the funds come from and how they are distributed. You can’t imagine our office seeded the article, can you?”
“I wouldn’t put it past them,” Rachel said. “Our very own Beca might have leaked the headline. It sounds like her.”
“The article suggests the funds come from private organizations and corporations but are channeled through the Senate Committee on the National Service.”
“The Senate has a committee for the National Service?” Desi asked.
“Apparently. Is that the committee that would hear the reform bill before it went to the floor of the Senate?” I asked.
“Beyond my pay grade,” Rachel answered. “I’ll send a query up the channel. Is anyone else having more of these blueberry pancakes? This inn is at the top of my list of places to come back to.”
“Me too,” I said, setting the tablet aside.
Hurricane Delilah hit Florida near Kennedy Space Center and began chewing its way up the coast toward Jacksonville. There was no news of the SSR entering the fray but in all fairness, that region of Florida is more sparsely populated than Galveston. The forecasters weren’t sure how it was going to progress. It could turn inland across the Panhandle, continue up the Coast toward Savannah, or return to the sea. It was a toss-up at the moment. SSR’s location continued unknown.
We relaxed on our journey into Vermont, covering less than a hundred miles a day, stopping to see anything that looked interesting, and arriving at little inns in plenty of time to get a good run in and some quality loving. I didn’t stress Lamar with any more twenty-mile runs, but the four of us got five to ten miles a day in.
And we kept our IDs in the Faraday bag.
Per Ron’s advice, we picked up two cars at Troy, New York. One led us and the other fell in behind. Lamar and Leah were trailing a couple of miles back and we talked to let them know we’d picked up additional security. The campground where our motorhome was parked was out near Schenectady. It was a few miles to drive in to Albany for the performance, but it was extremely peaceful out here. We were all thankful to have a day of just sitting by a campfire, playing music, and cooking our own food for a change. I grilled chicken breasts and zucchini. Donna made a salad, and we invited all the security people to join us for dinner so we could learn to recognize them. It turned out they had a bunkhouse travel trailer parked not far from us, so they’d be staying at the campground.
And for all our preparations, we didn’t see any sign of the general or SSR.
Albany had a hotly contested seat for the twentieth congressional district. Unlike the generally reform-friendly districts of New York City, the incumbent here, and those across the northern tier of the state, was adamantly opposed to service reform. We couldn’t perform in every district but would hit three of the hottest campaigns in Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo.
I spent a couple of hours in the motorhome with my notes spread out in front of me. Four weeks previously, Ron had given me a list of candidates for office who had received donations from one or more of the eight companies I’d identified as making a ton of money off the National Service. One of the companies, a major food packager and distributor, was headquartered in upstate New York. It was interesting to find that particular agribusiness had donated heavily to the representative’s campaign fund. But my continued research, helped along by Ray’s company in Chicago, showed that Representative Lancaster’s campaign chest was also enriched with donations transferred from Senator Jeffries’ incredibly rich campaign funds. The more I looked at it, the more it appeared Jeffries was a central conduit for funds to representatives and senators to keep them in the fold, so to speak. Jeffries was even more powerful than I originally thought.
“Jacob?” Rachel sang at the door of the dressing room in Albany Friday evening. “You have a fan who would like to see you.” What the fuck? We never allowed audience members in the dressing rooms. For one thing, I was standing in my boxers, just getting ready to put on my first act outfit. For another, where the hell was security?
“Oh, my. Am I overdressed?” Abigail asked as she stepped into the room.
“Oh, God! Abby, what are you doing here? I mean in my dressing room?”
“Mmm. I came here with a couple messages, but at the moment, I’m just enjoying the scenery.”
“Well, just relax then while I get dressed, why don’t you?”
“Okay. Thanks.” She sat down across the room from me and watched me pull my trousers on, completely oblivious to the sarcasm in my invitation. “There are some hot contests up here and Mom wanted me to deliver some personal assurances to the pro-reform candidates running for office. It just happened to work out that my first stop coincided with yours in Albany.”
“I’m sure that was just a coincidence.”
“I wanted to check in to see how my neighbors were doing. The rest of them, I mean. I’ve had some nice chats with the ones who came back to DC last week. I really like them—especially Nanette and Rebeca. Coolio.”
“I’m glad.” I buttoned up my shirt and turned to face her. “So does the President have a message for me? Am I creating trouble?”
“Yeah. That’s one of the other reasons for me to be here. She just wanted to say thanks for keeping the heat turned up and to please watch your back.”
“A little late on that message. The general himself came to arrest us in Boston. We’d just left. I wonder how long I would have disappeared for this time. Permanently?”
“I was in Will’s office when Ron brought him that news. Will about tore the office up when he exploded. So, here’s one of Mom’s plain white envelopes,” she said, handing me the number 10 envelope. I glanced at the package on the floor in front of her.
“What’s that?” I asked. I locked the envelope in my viol case where I kept the Faraday bag.
“An early birthday present from Will, Jo, and Simon,” she said. She shoved the box toward me. It was a lot heavier than it looked. There was a card on top signed by all three.
“Things have been tense for you lately. We picked up this little toy from a shop in Chicago and thought you would have fun relaxing with it. Maybe you can teach it to sing! Happy birthday.”
I opened the box and looked at a pile of shit. I mean that’s what it looked like. You know that Facebook background that is a bunch of happy little piles of shit? This looked like it stepped off the page. It was about a foot in diameter and a foot tall and probably weighed about twenty pounds. It even had googly eyes and a painted white smile. I pulled it out of the box and set it on the floor.
“Teach me to sing!” it squawked.
“Oh, the family is going to love this,” I said. I put it back in the box. “Later, little fella.”
“Jacob,” Abby whispered. She’d come very close to me while I was examining the toy. “That little fella knows a lot of shit. You’d be surprised what you can learn from him. Or her. You get to decide. And when you teach it to sing, the song will advance reform at every level. Remember. It came from a very special toy shop in Chicago.”
I looked at her with my mouth open. It wasn’t a pile of shit toy. This little device had Design Intelligence. Thank you, Ray.
It’s got to be really difficult for people in this district to vote for reform. I understand it. One of the biggest anti-reform forces is located just a few miles west of here. It employs a lot of people in upstate New York. You’re loyal to it because it provides a ray of hope for a depressed economy here. It pays your wages and you owe it.
It pays the wages of others, as well. People who are in our government. Those people owe that company. So, the real question is whether the people of the twenty-first district have the fortitude to stand against dollars and vote for the betterment of the people, or to continue to take the money and live off the slavery of others.
Because that’s where that money comes from. What people in this district get paid and what is contributed through the taxes that aren’t avoided is a paltry percentage of the profits this company makes off the underpaid and mistreated labor provided by the National Service. They don’t want service reform because the service is a goose that lays a golden egg. Costs of processing, packaging, and distributing food have fallen dramatically in the past year and a half, due to the lucrative contracts with the service to provide slave labor in the fields of America. But you haven’t seen the benefits of that in the grocery store. You see the price of a can of beans rise from eighty-nine cents to two dollars. The distributors say this is because of the tensions along our border and the lack of good labor for the fields in this time of crisis. But production costs have fallen. On one hand, they are telling you to support their stance against reform or your jobs will be threatened. On the other hand, they are stealing back from you the wages they pay by gouging you on the prices at the grocery store.
Now all that extra profit has to be going somewhere. I won’t say it is lining the pockets of the people you elect to represent you. I’m not an accountant. I’m not saying some of it doesn’t improve the stock value for those here in the community who own a piece of the pie. I’m not a financial analyst. But it is hard for even a teen like myself to ignore the siphoning of profits by the holding company that owns a majority of that company’s stock, nor to miss seeing that company is part of a Chinese conglomerate. So, who is it that’s really buying your representatives? Not that nice local company that employs so many, but the foreign company that was significant in helping cut off the flow of foodstuffs from Mexico and South America into our country.
When the National Service is being used to line the pockets of competitors on the world stage, it is time to reform the service. That is not the dream we saw when the twenty-eighth amendment was passed. We saw a system that would make our young people proud to have contributed to the betterment of America, not one that would enrich foreign nations through our slavery. We will recover the dream. Vote only for reform-positive candidates and against anyone who says the system isn’t broken.
The youth of this district will be among the slaves sent to the fields.
It was the first time that I’d directly tied one of the incumbents to the Chinese conglomerate that was buying influence in American government. I could almost feel the target growing on my back. The motorhome had left for our next location in the morning when we headed into town for rehearsal. After the performance, we loaded into the coach and settled back for the three-hour trip to Syracuse. I much preferred this late-night ride to a location where I could sleep all day the next day if I wanted to rather than getting a shorter night’s sleep and traveling the next day when we could be sleeping.
My thoughts that as we moved west, we would have smaller audiences proved false. The Landmark Theater in Syracuse seats some 2,800 and it was full for two performances Sunday afternoon and evening. Someone had done prep work at the local newspaper and the Post-Standard had a reporter at the concert in Albany. We were front page news in Syracuse.
Who owns America?
That is the challenging question musician Jacob Hopkins presents to his audience as Marvel and Hopkins continue their National Service deputation tour in Syracuse today. And whether or not you agree with his politics, you will want to be present for the music Hopkins plays with his principal partner, Cynthia Marvel, and their partners Desiree Whitcomb and Remas Hayek.
Often an outspoken critic of the National Service, Hopkins has seemingly been unleashed on this national tour with one message: Vote out any candidate or incumbent who does not favor National Service reform. That message is not being received well by incumbents across the northern tier of New York State, all of whom have joined in voting to table discussion of the President’s National Service Reform Bill. And observing that Hopkins and company are living the dream of performing their music during their National Service, one must ask what they have to complain about.
But in his brief plea for voters to turn out in favor of reform, Hopkins levels some serious charges that the Post-Observer felt had to be confirmed or debunked. What its investigation uncovered is disturbing. There is no question that Allied Foods Association has profited from its relationship with the National Service—a profit that people of upstate New York have benefitted from with solid employment, even when the agricultural industry is beset with problems. But discovering the chain of ownership of AFA leading to a Chinese conglomerate is shocking.
And that this Chinese conglomerate pushes money back down the political chain to fund anti-reform incumbents and candidates is an indictment against the SEC controls over foreign ownership and the campaign committees of those candidates.
The article went on, not committing itself regarding service reform, but attacking the money chain as a direct interference from foreign powers in American elections. I nodded over it. And changed nothing for my spiel Sunday afternoon or evening.
“I’m not going to wait any longer,” Cindy said, sliding into the seat beside me for the ride to Buffalo late that night. “You’ve been too busy doing research and writing speeches to take care of my needs. I’m as upset about what’s happening as you are. I’m as mad at the service for letting you get kidnapped and taking you away from us. I’m as committed to getting reform legislation pushed through congress. And I’m horny!”
Well, okay then. I glanced around the coach and saw Emily, Remas, Desi, Donna, and Rachel all looking at me. With only seven of us on the bus, we had plenty of room to spread out and there were seats that were sofa-like as well as comfortable captain’s chairs and recliners. The curtain had been pulled across the front of the coach so our driver couldn’t see in the back, but we’d been pretty discreet about our behavior on the coach.
Cindy peeled off her top and shimmied out of her pants. She stalked toward me down the aisle of the bus. I backed up and felt hands catch me from behind as Emily and Rachel started removing my clothes. They pushed me back on the sofa and I saw all my girlfriends—wives—had stripped for action. The three hours from Syracuse to Buffalo were not going to be spent sleeping.
I had to admit, I’d been a little preoccupied since Boston and the discovery that General Gerhardt was out to get me. Maybe I’d been burning too much energy running each day instead of making love with my wives. We were going to remedy that tonight.
Cindy was unusually assertive as she fell onto my cock and all but swallowed it. With her working that end and Remas kissing me and letting me paw her breasts, I hardly noticed Donna and Desi or Emily and Rachel fall into chairs nearby. The noises that began to fill the coach, however, were unmistakable. My cock was rising to its ability to fulfill some fantasies.
“You haven’t even played with my tiddies when we change costumes,” Cindy complained. “I grew these just for you.” She crawled forward and captured my hands from Remas to place them on her breasts. Remas backed off for a moment, but I could feel her getting ready to straddle my face. Mmm. Cindy’s fabulous tiddies. Perfectly round with pointed nubs just begging for the attention of my fingers or lips. She wiggled her way into position I felt her swabbing my cock through her moisture.
“It didn’t take you long to get ready,” I said. “You feel very wet and slippery.”
“Remas has been playing down there ever since we finished the show. You were too busy on your tablet to notice,” Cindy said. She pushed down and my stiff pole was gradually immersed in her hot pussy. She whined as she became fully seated. “Do you still like my pussy, Jacob? Even though it’s an old seventeen-year-old’s pussy instead of that tight little sixteen-year-old’s?”
“God, Cindy. I still have problems when I look at you with not thinking I’m fucking the fourteen-year-old pussy I fantasized about three years ago.”
“Ooh, yes. If you’d wanted it, you could have had it then. I knew it was going to be you in the middle of playing Mozart on Fire at my recital. I almost came on stage.”
“It’s no longer Mozart who’s on fire, Piper. You are burning me up with your hotness.”
“Maybe you should have something nice and wet on your face, then,” she giggled. Remas took that as her cue to edge forward and plant her wet slit on my mouth as I played with both girls’ boobs and they kissed each other.
With Remas’s legs on either side of my head, I felt more than heard Cindy’s first orgasm. The flood on my mouth accompanied Remas as she peaked. And then I was there, feeling Cindy squeezing and pulsing around my cock as I let go a torrent I hadn’t realized I’d been saving.
All that and we were scarcely beyond the lights of Syracuse. It was going to be a good night.
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