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Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 01

By: jezzaz



Authors note – Chapter 1 doesn't have any sex in it, since it's all just set up. However, later chapters most definitely do. Also, the prequel to the Ingrams Stories can be found under Ingrams & Assoc Prequel : Broken.

I want to thank PennLady for her invaluable assistance in proof reading and editing. And I mean, serious attention to detail. This is 2x better than it was because of her eyes on this.

Lastly, I want to thank an anon feedback I got from someone who actually has experience doing this kind of thing. He corrected me in lots of ways and I'm trying to incorporate some of that feedback into these stories. But let's be clear, these are _just_ stories and in no way could these ever happen. Way too many laws get broken and people just wouldn't get away with the kind of meddling with other people's lives that go on here. 

Still, it's fun to imagine though

Chapter 1

April Carlisle took a deep breath, steadied her nerves and opened the office door, entered the room and sat down in the easy chair on the near side of the desk.

She smiled as sincerely as she could at the woman on the other side of the desk, who sat back in a deep plush leather chair, looking her over.

Both were dressed in office best; trim skirts, hose, heels, fitted blouses and both had their hair done – April's resplendent red hair was styled so it draped around her neck, and the other woman was currently sporting a blond bob that highlighted her eyes and cheekbone - and immaculate but sparse makeup. 

April was a slim woman, 26 years old, unattached and very aware of her place in the world. She was a 34b and not over endowed in the chest area, and her rear end, honed through many volley ball games and rock climbing, was pert and also rock hard. She was tall – 5'9", elegant and moved like a gazelle. She had long legs and wasn't afraid to show them, but didn't flaunt them either. She thought of herself as elegant and classy, but like everyone, she had her slutty moments. April had green eyes, red silky hair that reached down to her neck. She spent a lot of time on her hair, because it did tend to get away from her if she didn't. One thing she was grateful for was the fact that she didn't have the traditional extremely pale skin that went with red hair – she tanned just fine in fact, and she had a good one currently, since she'd just come from her apartment in Arizona, where there was no shortage of sun.

Educationally, she had a double degree in criminal investigation and behavioral psychology, further studies in therapeutic psychology and plenty of other investigative qualifications. Her original plan was to sign up with the FBI, but on discovering the background to her uncle, or, rather as she discovered later, her father, she'd rededicated herself to helping those in a pain they could never reveal. And that had led her to this meeting.

The woman behind the desk was typing at a laptop, and peering through glasses – she looked up as April entered the room, tilting her head forward and looked over her glasses. She looked back at the screen, waved her hand at the chair on the other side of the desk and finished typing as April took her seat.

As always when she was in this room, April couldn't believe the amazing view of the Potomac that was outside the windows behind the desk of her potential employer. They were on the 7th floor of a low-rise office building in Washington DC and she did idly wonder what floor space must run too around here. It had to be at least a $100 a square foot. They – the company - were obviously doing ok, but then she already knew that.

She thought back to the preceding weeks. Ever since she had got the business card from the woman behind the desk – the shiny hard metal jet black business card, with almost completely indecipherable inscriptions that you could only see in just the right light – and she had called the number, she'd been in a hotel in Washington DC the next day, and then the testing had begun. There'd been psychological testing, where they'd wanted to know about her relationship with her father and uncle – that was a pretty quick meeting since she'd never really known her dad. There'd been physical exams, - a real in depth prodding, - there'd been mental aptitude tests, and there'd been obstacle courses, even a night in locked room where they'd played weird sounds at her. It had gone on and on and she still wasn't sure what some of them were for. Oh, she'd worked out what most were for and what they were looking for, or not looking for, and she'd been careful to display exactly what they'd expect to see from someone being tested as a field agent, but still, it had been tedious and lengthy and she was glad when it was all done. She'd even had her ability to perform a blow job tested, which was really hard to do when there were three people in lab coats and clipboards on the other side of the one way glass. The poor sap she was supposed to make cum was nervous and that had made it even harder. But she'd done it. With flying colors. And she'd even shown them the mouthful of cum she'd got out of out of him in the mirror before swallowing it and showing them she had. She'd surprised herself there – she'd known this kind of testing was coming but when it had, she hadn't hesitated – she'd just gone for it and she felt no guilt or insecurity about it afterwards. She'd found that really interesting and spent the evening looking up papers of the lack of sexual morals on the internet, knowing full well she was probably being monitored at the time. She figured that would give them something else to talk about.

The woman behind the desk finished typing and then closed the lid of the laptop and gave April her full attention.

"Dr. Ingrams," said April, with a small touch of deference.

Jessica Ingrams smiled at April and said, "April. So nice to see you. So what do you think? You've had time to digest it and God knows we've prodded at you enough."

April chuckled. "Oh, it's been educational. I think I've come to a decision though."

Jessica leaned forward and said, "Good. Would you like a drink?"

April nodded. "A bit early in the day for me, but sure, why not."

Jessica stood and walked over to the built in bar in the corner of her office. She started making a martini and said, "Dirty, right?"

April nodded. Of course they knew how she liked her drinks. They knew everything else.

Jessica fixed the martini and made herself a Manhattan, neither woman speaking while she played bartender. She brought the drinks over and said, "Let's talk in the easy chairs. It's more...intimate."

April took her drink and followed Jessica over to the small couch and easy chair. Before sitting down, Jessica stuck her head out of the door and said, "Angela, no calls for the next hour, ok?" and shut the door. Immediately all sounds of the outside office ceased. More evidence of money being spent.

"So, April, tell me your thoughts," said Jessica, taking a sip of her drink and not taking her eyes off April.

April took a sip of her own drink and then put it down on the coffee table, being careful to use a coaster. "I think I'm going to like it here," she said.

Jessica laughed, then stood up and walked over to April. She embraced the other woman and said, "I think so too! We are lucky to have you. Now, for the unpleasant part. Before we put this on record, I have to give you the downsides here. Yes, there are some. I'm sure you've worked out some of them yourself.

"Firstly, there's the sex. Yes, I know you know that – God knows we've all been through that. But, even though you passed the testing phase, I doubt you realize how this can...change you. This job is intense and it stops any real relationships forming. It may be years before you can settle down, and even then, the nine-to-five soccer mom routine will never be for you – you just won't be capable of it. 

"After this, everything pales, and honestly, unless the man you marry knows everything about you, the marriage will fail. Mine did and so did most of my ex field agents. I need to warn you, seriously, about this. While you will be out there doing good and fixing up marriages, relationships and lives, yours will take a back seat. Not to mention some of the weird things you may be asked to do that may give you either some strange tastes or sour you forever on other things."

April nodded with the over emphatic nod of someone who thinks they know something, but is dismissive of it; the nod of every impatient person.

"Then there's the sense of manipulation. Now, I know you have strong character – the tests indicate that – and you also have a strong sense of justice, but sometimes things...happen to field agents. The sense of superiority, of godhood almost – the God-given right to exploit and manipulate people. This can sometimes have an effect on people and we can never predict who they will be. We know the signs, but I'm letting you know up front, if we see it in you – and we'll be looking, be sure of that – then we'll be on you like a ton of bricks."

Jessica stopped to take another sip of her drink and April jumped in with, "Oh, I'm not worried about that. I know I can handle it. The sex thing, well, I'm sure the tests showed how I can divorce from that too."

Jessica put her drink down and leaned back in the chair, considering before speaking. "Yes, the tests did suggest a casual arrogance – a tendency to overestimate yourself and underestimate everyone else. Oh, you thought you were so clever with those tests, giving us exactly what you thought we wanted? Did it ever occur to you that those tests were there exactly to see what you'd do? We don't care about the results in terms of appropriateness. We only care about what you actually wrote or did. You were a psychology major, you should know this. We have been at this a while and we weren't all entirely stupid before you showed up you know."

Jessica leaned forward and put her hands on April's knees. In a low voice she said, "You aren't as smart as you like to think you are. Or maybe you are, but you aren't out of the ordinary here. There are people out there who could manipulate you into dressing up like a clown and doing a gig at the Presidential inauguration if they wanted to."

April was taken aback. and Jessica pushed back again, taking her hands off April's knees and picking up her drink again. Jessica considered that drink, examining the way the light refracted through the liquid inside, before saying, "But a little arrogance is good, I think. Particularly at the beginning, when you really need it. A couple of missions and you'll have that knocked out of you. Now, questions?"

April was trembling slightly – after the weeks of testing, she knew Jessica Ingrams' reputation and to be so squarely in her sights was quite a scary prospect. She controlled herself because she also knew that this was likely her only time to get real answers to all her questions. 

April took a deep breath. "Firstly, why me?"

"I thought I answered that when we met in Arizona, my dear. We've been watching for people like you. You have the skill set we want and you also have the background of desire to help. We know what happened with your father and uncle and we've a good idea of what that did to what you want to do. Sure, we could be wrong, but we are exceedingly good at figuring this stuff out. You need what we offer because it puts you on the ground and helping directly, all on your terms. And helping people you normally wouldn't because they'd never come to get help. They'd just go on being broken and doing damage everywhere."

"Isn't what you do a bit... well, it's more than underhanded, isn't it?" asked April after digesting this response. It was pretty much what she'd expected but it was good to hear it.

"Underhanded? Of course it is, April. That's the point. I founded this agency specifically to do those underhanded things, because no one else would or could. Do you imagine that CIA agents who've spent three years in the field are seriously going to entertain talking to a shrink on their return? Without playing mind games? People who've had to survive on their wits aren't about to sit down and talk about their relationship with their father or their wife. Those are the people I want to help, and there's no way we can do it overtly, since they won't let us. So we do it covertly instead. Now, I know this doesn't honestly bother you – as I said, I've seen your test results. So I can only assume this is an attempt to prod. Very well then, this once, prod away."

"Ok, fair enough. Yes, I'm not that bothered. I was just wondering if you were," replied April.

"If I was, I'd hardly be running this company, would I?" 

"Yes, I suppose not. OK. So, what about the...um...illegal stuff?"

Jessica steepled her fingers. "The illegal stuff. Yes. Well, we have been known to break the law on occasion. There's two degrees here – one is the treatment of people without their knowledge. This is a clear breach of traditional medical ethics. I would argue that the results justify it – certainly we've helped people who would never have been helped otherwise. My feeling is that ethics, like most things, are contextual. There is no blanket statement that you can make that covers everything. But that is just justification. Yes, we do break that commandment, although, as I said, I look at it as more guidance than a commandment. 

"Secondly, while most of what we do here isn't illegal – there is no law about you passing yourself off as someone else, unless you are passing yourself of as a government officer, and most of what we try to do flies below the radar of legal/illegal. But on occasion we will do things that might be construed as illegal. Looking people up, gathering credits scores, occasional breaking and entering. If that offends you or scares you, then now is the time to go. Not that I think it does. I think it excites you."

April smiled at that. Jessica had her there.

"No, I'm not worried about that. I think it's all very exciting – very cloak and dagger. OK – if we get caught, then what?" April asked.

"Well, that's a good question. Worst possible case is that we all go to jail. However, in most cases where this has arisen we've had good lawyers and we've also been hired by people who have the power to make a lot of these kinds of charges go away. To date, we've been careful and it's never really come to that point. We've never been caught. That could change though, depending on the operation we embark on. You should know that."

Jessica unlaced her hands and took another drink.

"How many times have you been caught?" asked April on impulse.

"Caught? Oh, you mean, it was discovered what we were doing? Twice so far. We've done about forty-five operations since we formed the company, and we've been discovered twice. Once was an ex-CIA operative who was highly unstable. He'd come home from a deep field assignment where he'd had to do some fairly horrible things to maintain his cover, to discover his wife had moved on and was pregnant with his neighbor's child. 

"We tried to help him, but he was so unstable that he suspected everyone. His combination of instability, operational brilliance and paranoia eventually led him to figure out that we were an organization. 

"He didn't understand we were trying to help him – he even penetrated our office here. It took three people to talk him down from killing everyone in here. He's currently incarcerated in an NSA facility in Virginia, where he will be for the rest of his life, I'm afraid. He is truly broken and we should have seen that before we took the case. I was very sad about that. One of the few times were we've not only failed, but made things worse."

There was silence for a minute, and then April prompted, "And the other?"

There was another silence and then Jessica cleared her throat. "That was...a computer IT guy out in Washington State. I was personally involved – it was in the early years of this agency."

April was incredulous. "You got caught helping someone by an IT guy? Seriously? All this tech and people and an IT guy caught you?"

"Yes, well, he was very smart and he ducked his profile. It all still worked out in the end. You'll read the case notes I'm sure."

April nodded and another question occurred. "So, how often have you failed? To accomplish your mission, I mean?"

"So far, we've completed forty-three operations and we have three ongoing now. In that, we've completed all operational requirements in about thirteen operations. That doesn't sound like a lot, but most of the time the extended desires of the client are never going to be met anyway. Most of the time we do a pretty good job of patching up whatever issue we have to deal with, but frequently we simply cannot wish away what has happened. Most of the time we make things better to some degree. I'd say that we probably, for want of a better word, 'fix' the situation about seventy five percent of the time. We've only made things worse twice, and in all those cases, I don't honestly know what else we could have done – they were going to deteriorate anyway, and all we did was hasten the end.

"Really though, it depends on the clients requirements coming in. If they say something like 'Make it like it was before X cheated' then no, it's unlikely that we are going to be able to hit that operational objective one hundred percent. There's just almost no way to do that. However, if the client says, 'Make it so this couple can forgive each other and move on,' then that's a more realistic goal in the first place. In that case, we can often hit it a hundred percent.

"I work with the clients to refine the initial operational requirements, but you know how it is. Some clients just don't want to listen and, of course, it's their money."

April nodded. She knew exactly what Jessica meant.

"Also, you have to understand," Jessica continued. "The best we can really do here is a large Band-Aid, or in the worst-case scenario, triage. The kind of healing that lots of our clients need is years in the making. You know yourself that when there's a serious breach of trust in a relationship, it takes years to overcome that. We don't have the time for that. 

"What we need to do is get in there, sort out the immediate issues and put the respective parties on the path to healing. We can't be there for the whole process – we are usually hired to get someone past a specific situation, and we'll do our best to get them pointed in the right direction for them to heal themselves. But, this is not an exact science. We do the best we can. Which, I have to say, is usually a hell of a lot more than other people can." Jessica paused at the end to take another sip of her drink and toyed with the ice in the glass.

Something else occurred to April. "Aren't you taking a hell of a risk here? I mean, I've gone through all the testing, I know people here, I know who you are. You've just got done telling me you break the law. What if I didn't like this idea? What if I went to the authorities or the press?"

Jessica chuckled. "Again April, do you not think we do our homework? If there was any likelihood of that in your profile, we would not be having this conversation. We didn't just drop out of the trees yesterday, you know. But since you ask – on day one of testing we dropped twenty five thousand dollars in your savings account. Its there now, a gift from us to you. Call it a service fee for the testing you indulged us in. Even if you walk away from us now and turn us down, it's a gift. However, if you go to the authorities, well, you've been here for three weeks. You have twenty-five k in your account traceable from us. How do you think that would play if someone were to inquire where that came from?"

"That's pretty underhanded," pouted April.


Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 01



Jessica shrugged "Yes, well, as you pointed out, we are underhanded. The thing is, April, I know you want to do this. I know you are just testing the limits and that's ok. I would expect and encourage that. But we are also experienced at this and I would like you to not forget it. I'm not going to give you any crap about us being a happy family or any shit like that. We are a business, we help people, we go covert to do it and we are good at it. The people here are the best I could find and we are offering you a place in it, as an operational field agent. The hardest job we have. You are alone, in the field and making life-changing decisions for other people. It's hard, scary and you second-guess yourself constantly. But when you get it right, you change multiple lives forever for the better, maybe even save them. What do you say?"

April put down her drink, straightened her skirt and looked up. "When do I start?"

-----

A week later, April was ensconced in her new office, on the 6th floor of the building that, she'd found out since her hiring, Ingrams & Associates owned.

On reporting to work on the next Monday morning, she'd been introduced to Dermot McConaughey – an able and older Scotsman, complete with a soft burr in his voice. Dermot was a huge man, graceful in his movements, but large in the extreme, he was tall – over six feet six inches- and he was replete around the stomach, but he knew his business. He was Ingrams' Operations Chief – all operations were planned with his input and run under his auspices. 

Dermot was Jessica Ingrams' right hand man, responsible for ensuring that operations came off without a hitch, that resources were available when needed and basically running shotgun on all operations in the building. He was also her immediate manager. She found out quickly that Dermot was icily efficient. He knew every nut and bolt of the building – who did what, how often and with who. If she asked for something via email, it was done that day, and if it couldn't be she was given daily updates as to when it would be. She began to realize the care with which Jessica had chosen her people.

Dermot was wed to his job. He had an iPad permanently glued to his hand and was the fastest typist she'd ever seen – he kept laughing and saying the sooner he could get some Google Glass input devices, the happier he'd be. He was a congenial man, quick with a joke and then straight down to business and very easy to be around. She couldn't help feeling he was judging her, and it was probably true, he was. She noticed he didn't wear a wedding ring but refrained from asking.

On entering the office, April had been greeted by Dermot, shown her office, set up with email and given the paperwork common to all new employees – insurance forms, payment forms and so on, a copy of the company handbook – she had to smile at that. She was then presented with a dump of thirty plus project reports – project plans, profiles, analyses and final operational reports. And told to read them all – there would be a quiz at the end of the week.

Before she was allowed to start, she was taken around and introduced to the department heads as 'the new field agent newbie'. She met the head of Research – a mousey woman named Talia Cronkite - who ran five analysts who did the background research for an operation. Talia was the kind of soft-spoken woman who blended into the background. Pale, brunette with short hair, no makeup and huge glasses. The epitome of the female nerd. When April encountered her later as the in house self-defense instructor, she was astounded, and had to remind herself once again to not judge by appearances. 

Then she was taken to the field operations center – there were three of them, with full on monitors over the wall and desks with people in it 24/7. It was straight out of a spy movie. She couldn't help but gape as she was led in, and everyone craned their necks to look at the visitor blinking their eyes as the light came in from the open door. April was introduced to each of the operations center managers, all of whom reported directly to Dermot. She learned that the operations center kept tabs on agents on the field, responded to calls for information, resources or requests for help and also presented the front end of any companies that the agents claimed to be representing.

Next up was the resources center, where agents were given communications and monitoring devices. She looked around the lab and picked up devices and wondered what they were for and if she'd be instructed in their use. The owner of the room looked like another nerd and April realized that the more people she met, the nerdier the entire operation seemed to be. The head of this department was Tom Mercy. He was the archetypal nerd, even wearing a Lord of the Rings t-Shirt when she met him. He had greasy long hair that hid half of his face. He wore black jeans and a studded belt. She could barely stop herself from shaking her head at just how much of the stereotype he embodied.

It was only a week later when he showed up in slacks and a polo shirt, with his now clean hair neatly tied in a ponytail, nodded at her in the kitchen while getting coffee that she realized she'd been had.

Then it started to perk up. She was introduced to the field agent's pool, of which she was now one. There were seven currently between operations – three who'd just come out of the field and four who were in the midst of preparations to go out. The moment she was led into the briefing room – complete with top-shelf coffee and donuts, she noticed, no expense shared here – she knew she was being sized up. Dermot introduced her, "Hey guys. This is the newbie. This is April. Now each of you remembers your first time out, if you want her to avoid that, take her under your wing. Give her whatever help she needs, ok?"

He nodded at April and said, "Make yourself at home. Remember, quiz at the end of the week. After that, we are going to pair you up with an ongoing operation, so you can sit in the co-pilot's seat and see how it's done. It'll be a while before we send you out yourself. You have some training first." Then he looked at his iPad and left the room.

Everyone just looked at her. "Umm...." she said, brilliantly. "Hey. I'm April. So, what's going on?"

The group of seven people, most in the process of helping themselves to coffee or donuts looked at each other and she saw some barely suppressed smiles.

One of them – an attractive blond woman with large boobs that seemed to approach April by themselves – came over and held out her hand. "I'm Megan. Nice to meet you. So, investigation or psychiatry?"

"Excuse me?" said April, a little confused.

"Everyone here has a post graduate degree in one or the other. It's one of the things this place looks for. Coffee?"

"Yes, please," responded April, understanding. "And it's both."

Megan looked at her, appraisingly and said, "Well, aren't you just the purpose-made catch then?" She did it smiling broadly to ensure April understood she was not making fun of her. Not knowing what to say back, April said nothing and just smiled, tightly.

They got coffee together, and Megan started introducing April to the others. Everyone made an effort to make her feel welcome, and a couple of the men commiserated at her career choice. She noticed that while most were relatively attractive, none of them were stunning. It made sense – these agents were pretending to be real people out in the world. Being model-pretty would detract from that. They had to be attractive enough that they could insinuate themselves in the lives of their targets, but not so hot that everyone would be hitting on them.

She asked a few of them what cases they were working on. Megan told her, "I'm just back in. Had a college professor – widely tipped to be the researcher who cracked cold fusion. But his repressed bi-sexuality just came rampaging out when he was seduced by one of his TA's. He was confused, messed up, guilt ridden and his wife had no idea what to do. It took a while to sort out. I think all three of them are living together happily now though." She smiled when she was done talking and April could quite see why she was a field agent. Her smiled was genuine and infected all of her face, including her eyes. She wondered if she'd be able to do that.

Sitting down at the conference table, April took a sip of coffee and asked, "So, who is it that hires us? I mean, who knows we exist?"

One of the guys, Ryan, put down his smart phone and said, "You'd be surprised who knows about us. Most of the major government institutions do. We get hired by universities, the military, the NSA and FBI, sometimes even the CIA. We've done work for MI6 in the UK, Mossad in Israel and other places. We've worked for private individuals – anywhere, really. Anyone who needs someone's life fixed up without them knowing they are being fixed."

April asked a question that had been on her mind for a while. "But why? I mean, I get it. I know what we do. I understand that. But is there really that demand? If people are so fucked up, why not just get them to a shrink? Why do we have to go sneaking around so much? It feels like too many people have watched too much Mission: Impossible."

Ryan chuckled and said, "April, you'd be surprised at how many bosses and managers care. How many want their people to be doing well. And everyone is fucked up in some way or another. The interesting part is that often the people who are going to make the most difference are often the most fucked up – or has the potential to be, anyway. And they are almost always the ones who won't accept help, either. So someone has to help. Someone has to care. Someone has to have the skill and sheer balls to sort it out. And that's us. Believe me, there's the demand."

"I'll bet my balls are bigger than yours," said Megan to Ryan, eyes sparkling.

"Only because you play volleyball. I play golf. My balls might be smaller, but they go further, and no one is slapping them around a net," Ryan joked..

"So, you admit you enjoy having your balls slapped with a steel rod, then?" retorted Megan.

April watched the interaction. She could see Megan and Ryan liked each other – there was a comfort level here that was easy to ignore and just accept as 'the way things were,' but April was smart enough to know that this happened because Jessica had set up the company and employees to think that way. A company's culture always came from the top and once again, April had to revise her opinion of Jessica Ingrams.

Changing the subject, April asked, "So, are there social events? Do we have a softball team or anything? Barbecues?"

Megan answered her this time. "Well, we don't have anything official. We can't have sports teams since people will ask who Ingrams is and what we do. We do enough lying professionally, no point in adding to it. But yeah, we get together every now and then for casual parties and stuff. That's about the extent of it. We all help out on each other's cases when we can. It pays to know everyone here. Trust me, you'll find out about everyone just through osmosis."

April thought of the reports and said, "I need to get going. Those reports won't read themselves." As she got up to go, Megan said, "If you need help going through them or have questions, I'm in the next office. Don't be a stranger. We are all here to help."

April smiled and said, "That's awesome Megan, thanks. Thanks, everyone!" and went back to her office to get started. Once inside, she sank into the comfortable Aeron chair, put her coffee down and looked at the desk covered in files – real files, not digital format – and sighed, then reached for the top one and opened it.

-----

At the end of the week, Dermot quizzed her on the reports with written and verbal questions; April scored 89%. It was judged sufficient. April was a little sore because she knew she could have got 100% if she'd been allowed to take the reports home and study them, but Ingrams had a strict policy of not allowing any data home, which made sense. The information sitting in Ingrams archives could bring down governments and ruin any number of marriages.

When she was done, April sat back and looked at Dermot and said, "Ok, so past history is understood. When do I get my first case?'

Dermot finished a flurry of tapping on the iPad and looked up at her. "April, there's a lot more training before you go solo. I want to put you with Charlie's case right now. I want you to shadow her preparation – see what she is doing, who she interacts with, see the profile she comes up with and how she builds it, and then look at her operational plan. I expect you to comment on it and offer suggestions. There is a briefing tomorrow at nine a.m.; be there. Go find Charlie and get started, then take the rest of the day off. You've done ok so far – it's got to be stressful. Have you found an apartment here yet?"

April shook her head. "No, not really had time to look."

Dermot reached into his pocket and said, "Here, check this place out. I just moved out of there. They have a vacancy in the penthouse suite. It has a hell of a view and you get roof rights, too."

She took the card and thanked him. She knew she could afford it – her salary was outrageous. She was going to make more in her first year than any of her tutors at college did in five years.

She spent the afternoon talking with Charlie, a small brunette who was slim, lithe and had the dirtiest laugh she'd ever heard on another human being. It was genuine too, which made it even sexier. Charlie went over her case, a four-star general whose wife had been seduced by a professional lothario. He was entirely unprepared for this and had no idea what to do about it, and had gone to pieces while in charge of an operation in Iraq. The Army and the Chiefs of Staff felt responsible and had requested Ingrams' help. Charlie went over her profile of the general, his wife and the lothario, and outlined the plan she had started to put together.

When she was done, April went to look at the apartment. It was lovely, and she signed the lease documents there and then. Next she hit a furniture store, bought what she wanted and arranged for expedited delivery. Within a week, she was moved in.

Over the next four months, April shadowed Charlie, absorbing all she could. She learned how she was expected to request background from the IT group, get out and interview people, in a very roundabout way, gather intel and then generate a profile of the target / victims. She was expected to prepare an operations plan or what she intended to do to resolve the situation, alternates and contingency plans. She was expected to generate resource requests and basically plan the entire operation. 

She learned that every operation was overseen by Dermot and also reviewed by two other field agents for validity and new ideas. She saw how information leading to a profile of the target and others around him was gathered – how other field agents that weren't on a current operation were drafted in to go out into the field to befriend those involved, learn about them and generally dig for information. Of course the primary agent couldn't do this, because they'd blow their cover before the operation had already started. This was done in conjunction with the IT department who did online footprint gathering. 

She learned that the resources department had a set of throw-away identities already built for this process in the operation – that finding background information on people was a time-consuming process and required a bunch of different ways to do it. Getting close to people took time, so Ingrams had learned how to do it quickly – become someone's assistant, the 'security services interview' – where the agents pretend to be agents from some covert alphabet agency, doing background interviews on the prospect for a potentially secret job. That one required some finesse, since it required them to be scary enough that the interviewee wouldn't alert the target about an interview for a job that didn't exist. That approach had to be used judiciously.

April watched as, once the profiles were written and the plan formulated, it was reviewed, modified and then approved by others. Once it was finalized, Charlie went out into the field. April sat in the operations center and watched Charlie's requests of help or information. She even got in the act herself in the principal operation, playing the part of one of Charlie's girlfriends and being introduced to the couple Charlie was trying to help. It was only a peripheral part, but it got her feet wet.

April also discovered a whole army of part-time contractors that the agency had on call. People that specialized in following others, Breaking and Entering, security work, the whole shebang. She was further astounded to discover that almost none of these people knew the agency for which they did occasional work – beyond the fact that it was an agency dedicated to helping people behind the scenes. Ingrams was very good at protecting themselves.

In her personal life, she'd finished transferring her life from Arizona to Washington – she'd moved what little furniture she had that she cared about – most she'd just sold in a weekend estate sale she'd flown back to organize. The only thing left in Arizona was her uncle Marcus's large antique Cadillac. It was vintage 1965, in immaculate condition and had been left to her in her uncles will. She honestly didn't know what to do with it, but she couldn't part with it either, since it had so many memories in it, of him taking her to the Grand Canyon and other places. In the end, she'd just left in storage in Phoenix and decided to make a decision later. 

April did allow her self one indulgence – a new car. She'd gone down into the building parking lot to look at the cars everyone else drove, at least while they were not in field. They were nice. Lexus, BMW, Porsches – not one car was over 2 years old and none of them under $50k. She knew she wanted something nice, above normal, but not too flashy. One of the instructors in seduction had explained how, for some people, cars were an extension of their personality. She wanted something that said Fun, Elegance but not Ostentatious. She loved convertibles and in the end she settled for a convertible Nissan 370z. It was powerful enough to push her back into the chair if she let it go, and feminine enough to complement her personality. She enjoyed driving it and sometimes went on weekend excursions to New York just to do that.

She liked her new apartment and never got tired of the view, particularly at night. She even took a couple of cooking classes, attempting to be able to make the perfect soufflé, failing every time but having fun trying. It was five weeks before she realized that not one other person besides herself had ever been in her apartment besides the delivery furniture guys, not even friends from work. After that, she organized a roof barbeque the following weekend, just to have company.

Professionally, her skills training had also started, in between observing Charlie at work. She was instructed in lock picking and the use of everything the resource department provided: how to hack phones, how to install bugs and there were even evasive driving lessons. She received self-defense training – hoping she'd never need it, and boy, did it hurt. She was given tasks to prepare false personalities and backgrounds. She'd probably never use them, since each identity they created internally was usually specific for the operation undertaken, but it was good to know how it was done. She was tested on the identities, to prove she had learned them and could 'be' that person.

She'd spent an instructive afternoon with the R&D networking guys. They'd gone through her Facebook accounts looking for pictures of her to remove; Ingrams didn't mind people having an online presence, but drew the line at pictures, where they could be identified. They went through old websites, removing pictures, and April got a whole new appreciation of just how good some of these 'white hat' hackers were, since they didn't own any of the websites where the pictures were removed or corrupted. 




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 01



The most outlandish training was the whorehouse. She was assigned to shadow a couple of high-end call girls. She learned the arts of sexual release and gratification – she ended up fucking one of the girl's johns herself, to see if she could get away with it. She learned the finer arts of a blow job, how to slowly seduce a man or a woman, how to dance provocatively, how to make sex last or to get it over with as fast as possible. 

She had thought she was pretty hot stuff before this, but after this, she knew she could make a night memorable for anyone. She began to see what Jessica had hinted at in their initial conversation– the more she learned about the mechanics of sex, and got better at it, the more it felt like a planned act than a spontaneous one. It was less about the moment and the partner and about working out how to do what in what order.

Directly following that, she was given some training in seduction. She was told to read 'Rules of the Game', and then go out and seduce several people, to prove she knew what she was doing. She would go out for dinner with one of the other agents, who would select a target at random and she was told to go get a phone number, or make an rendezvous with them (that she would never follow through on.) 

At first it was exciting, but then she got some of the agents with a wicked sense of humor. Attempting to seduce a man who was on an anniversary dinner with his wife was a hard call for anyone, let alone someone with no time. She had to do it while he was on the way to the bathroom. She felt bad about doing it, and made a point of paying for the couple's dinner, anonymously, once she'd got his number. She'd only managed to do it by suggesting that they have a threesome –she wasn't going to potentially destroy a marriage on an anniversary night at the whim of a co-worker.

Once the seduction phase of training was complete, she was assigned two targets– one knew she was coming and the other did not. She was given the task of extracting a specific piece of information from both and came through with flying colors. The unaware target was the wife of a local city councilman and she had to get the minutes of a specific meeting from him. That was a first for April, seducing a woman. When she was given it, she'd raised an eyebrow and made some acidic comments about the automatic assumption of female bisexuality, and how a man would never be assigned to seduce another man. She'd been told that, in fact, all of their male agents had experience with another man; it was just part of the job. She'd shut up after that. 

The job was complicated by the fact that the woman identified as strongly heterosexual and had never had an experience with a woman before, and although April had, she'd never pursued a woman before – her experiences had been purely in passing. It was new for both of them and April enjoyed it – a woman was an entirely different kettle of fish from a man; she had to totally change her style of seduction to get where she needed to go. Strangely enough, once it was done, April felt like she'd done the wife a favor. She'd not expected her to enjoy it as much and she did worry a little bit about what she'd awakened. When she looked in on them three months later, she found both her and her husband sharing a girlfriend. She had to smile internally at that.

It was at this point, when she was out with Megan one Friday night and they were both fending off would be suitors, and playing mind games with them, pitting one potential interested party against another – just because they could, not because it was any part of any training – when April had another enlightening conversation.

The two of them were sitting at a bar, dressed in their Friday night finery, perfectly made up and just eating nachos, drinking coke and doing shots and people watching in the rest of the bar. They made jokes about the other patrons and took turns shooting down the men that approached them.

After doing another shot of tequila, Megan reached out and grabbed April's arm. "Wait, wait. I've got a good one. The next guy who shows up, we throw this glass of water on the floor, and then tell him he has to throw down his jacket on it, so we can walk to the bathroom!"

They both dissolved into the giggles that comes of too much alcohol and not enough food. 

After they finished laughing, April wiped her eyes, then looked around at the bustling bar scene, at couples and people hitting on each other and suddenly got subdued.

"Megan, what do you do for fun? Besides bar hop?" she asked. 

Megan took her question seriously. "Not much, to be honest. The job...it doesn't leave much time for anything else. Then there's no way you can join any kind of club that requires regular attendance. I was on an operation once that required me to be a part of an amateur dramatics play – it's how I met the target. I found I loved it. I loved going to rehearsals and belonging to something, you know? I had a speaking part and everything. And then the operation concluded before opening night, and I had to drop out, once the job was done. You know the rules, and they are there for our protection. I think that's one of my big regrets, letting the cast down. I went to the opening night in disguise and sat at the back and watched. They did such a good job and I wasn't there. Wasn't part of it, if you know what I mean? Sometimes this job demands way too much sacrifice."

April nodded. "I know. I've tried to join some clubs around here. I'm part of a volleyball league, but I'm an alternate on a team. I just can't let them depend on me. You know something else I did? I've always wanted to learn archery. I have no idea why. I think it's because it's a solitary sport, not a competitive one. Well, I thought so, anyway. You know what? I'm really good. I barely need to practice; I can just do it. A few weeks back, there was an internal competition and I went in for it, just for kicks, and I realized half way through that even though I could win it, easily, I couldn't. I couldn't get into the competition set – articles get written and my picture in places it shouldn't be. I had to throw it. And it sucked. It was then that I realized exactly how much this job takes from you. I don't even want to think about having a relationship."

Megan nodded and they both sat there for a moment in silence, fiddling with their shot glasses. 

After a moment, April asked Megan point blank, "Do you have any friends that aren't at Ingrams?"

Megan looked at April with a look April couldn't identify. Sadness mixed with relief?

"Not really. I have a couple of friends back in Idaho, where I come from. I have to keep them at arms length most of the time. It's nice to go home and see them though, with their normal lives. No one around here though – the job makes it very difficult to meet people who you aren't scoping out, and frankly the amount of lying I'd have to do would make it a friendship that wasn't based on honestly or reality, so what's the point?"

April nodded and took a sip of her coke. She had come to the same conclusion. "What about family?"

"My family won't speak to me – I come from a religious family and you can imagine how they would take my sexually liberated personality. I was thrown out of the family home at eighteen. The only person who still talks to me is my brother, and even that is rare. He knows I'm in Washington and that I do something hush-hush, but that's it. What about you?"

"I have no family. My parents – well, my mother and who I thought was my dad, died when I was an infant. I was raised in the system, but my Uncle Marcus – who, it turns out, was my dad all along, unbeknown to either of us – kept an eye on me and made sure I was ok. He's the closest thing to family I ever had. The only person who's ever loved me, in fact."

Megan's eyes widened in sympathy. April nodded at her, gave her a smirk and an eye roll, "I know, my life is a like a bad soap opera in some respects."

Megan didn't say anything - she just leaned over and put her hand on April's. "I don't know what to say. You are one tough lady, you know that?"

They just looked at each other for a moment, and then April broke eye contact. After a second, she looked back and said, "You think either one of us will ever find someone to love us? With what we do? I mean, what man would understand, be ok with it? How could you possibly have a relationship with someone who is out there, screwing and using sex to manipulate people? How could you trust that person not to do it to you?"

April bit her lip. This was more than she had planned on revealing. She knew it was the alcohol speaking, but she had been thinking a lot about this recently, as the job training was opening her eyes to new ways of being. She was smart enough to know what she might be giving up. She saw understanding, acceptance and experience in Megan's face.

"April," said Megan, in a low voice, "I completely understand what you are thinking and what you are saying. I grapple with this every day. I mean, look at you, what are you, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? I'm thirty three. My clock is ticking even louder than yours is. I've been doing this a while now and I totally get what you are talking about. But there are guys out there who could handle this. And if you find one that can't, well, that's a decision you have to make at the time. 

"This job is not forever, no job is. If I met someone I really couldn't be without, then this job is toast. It's all a question of priorities. Right now, my priority is this – I get excitement, I get intrigue, I get to live on my wits and I get to help to people. And the sex isn't too bad either! But I'm not blind to what this job is. That's why there is so much bed-hopping going on among the field agents. We are all looking for a connection we can't have in real life. Don't tell me you haven't been hit on?"

April smiled at that. She had been, but she'd been respectful and ensured that her relationships with the other guys in the office was purely based on professionalism.

Megan caught the smile and then said, "April, you know all the training you've had to make a guy happy? Think about this. The guys have had the same training to make a woman happy."

Megan signaled the waitress and ordered another round of drinks and said to April, "Enough soul searching, babe. You need to come up with the next torture for a guy hitting this table!"

April smiled back. She had a lot to think about, but Megan was right, it was Friday night. Time for fun, not navel-gazing.

-----

Four months from when she was initially hired, the call came. Dermot knocked on her door as she was re-reading the report that Jessica had mentioned, where Ingrams had been caught, fair and square. She liked that one – it was a textbook operation that had gone off the rails and had required some inspired improvisation. Her respect for Jessica had gone up yet again when she realized that even though Ingrams had been discovered, she had still managed to get the job done. 

Dermot stood in her doorway and said, "So, think you are ready? Because it's your turn. Here's the background." He threw the file onto her desk – with astonishing accuracy, she noted - and then said, "There are emails coming in. Read that, have thoughts and there is a briefing tomorrow at 0800."

April always smiled when Dermot used military parlance – it was so out of place with everything else he was. She reached for the file and said, "I'll be there..."



Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 02



Chapter 2

Despite working late the night before, reading the operation doc and doing web research, April came in early the next day. She felt she had a handle on what needed to happen to fulfill the operation goals and had printed out various documents to distribute at the morning briefing. 

As she went to the conference room, she stopped before opening the door, psyching her self up, doing mental relaxation exercises. As she did so, she became aware of someone behind her. She turned and looked up at Dermot, who looked down at her kindly.

"Nervous?" he asked.

"A bit," she replied.

Dermot smiled at her and said, "You are going to do fine, April. One thing, though, before we go in. I've asked Desirea to ride shotgun on this. I have confidence in you, but this is a big deal and you know it's operational procedure. All newbies are closely supervised on their first op."

April's eyes widened. 'Desirea!' she thought. 'Oh crap!'

Dermot read it in her eyes and said, "Don't let her reputation worry you. The ball buster is an act. In reality she's all about people doing their best and her helping them to reach their potential. Good luck, April!"

He moved past her and opened the conference room door and entered. April stayed outside for a few moments more, thinking about what Dermot had just said.

Desirea McGee. The most experienced field agent in the office, apart from Jessica Ingrams herself, and she didn't do field work any more. Desirea had some legendary operations under her belt and she was a figure of awe from the rest of the agents. She was forty-two, looked thirty-two, and was a statuesque Amazonian woman – she was the splitting image of Wonder Woman.

She was also hard-nosed, did not suffer fools gladly, swore like a sailor and told it as she saw it. She had been devious beyond belief when out in the field, but when at the office, she was open as she could be. She was detail-oriented, almost as much as Dermot. She was the anti-blink, never making a statement till she knew everything about a situation. However, once she'd done that, if she thought something sucked, she said so, and sometimes it rubbed some of the agents wrong.

But she could also be persuaded she was wrong, which was a rarity, and she was scrupulously fair. But she was terrifying – the concept of having this woman breathing down her neck for the next four to five months was not a comforting one. 

April took a deep breath and opened the conference room and went inside.

She got coffee and a Danish – gourmet, of course – and sat down near the head of the table. Dermot was already sitting and finishing his pastry before he got the meeting started. April looked around the table. Desirea was at the other end, along with Talia from research, Tom from resources and others. Jessica herself stopped in for a moment, nodded at April, helped herself to coffee and walked out again, after exchanging a knowing look with Dermot that April didn't miss.

After he finished his Danish, Dermot wiped his mouth and stood up.

"Right, you rabble," he started, grinning, "we've got a good one here. This is an unusual one. This is preventative, not picking up the pieces like we usually do. Now, you all know our new field agent, April Carlisle, and this is her first op. So everyone pay attention and give her everything you can. You know this shit can go south easily and we need to give her all the support we can. April, you are up."

With that, he sat down and looked at her. There was a moment's silence and then April stood up, cleared her throat, glanced at the documents in front of her and began speaking.

"Ok folks, this is what we have. Targets' names are Paul Silverano and his wife, Jenny Silverano. Both are resident here in Washington. They have three children: Milly, who is four, Tommy, who is six and Paulie, Jr., who is nine. Paul and Jenny are all about their kids – their last vacation was at DisneyWorld. They, on the surface, have a happy marriage. Neither one is messing around, at least not obviously and there appears to be genuine love between them, or at least that's what they show people. Jenny is a bit of a ball buster and can be abrasive, while Paul is laid back but totally in charge and in control.

"Paul is a negotiator over at State. He's been on staff about fifteen years now – he's an indispensible part of their team there – and they are elbow-deep in some negotiations for an under-the-table treaty with China about cyber warfare, and he's regarded as pretty much the only person they will talk to seriously. 

"Now, tangentially, the IRS apparently has some new toy they've been experimenting with. It's all very hush-hush and I can't tell you about it, beyond the fact that it does handwriting recognition and is used to match up bank accounts with their real owners, based on signatures. The idea is to track down those hiding their wealth. Like I said, it's all very experimental and we can't talk about it, so read it for yourselves in the briefing document.

"What is interesting is the fact that a calibration pass using this new toy turned up an account that the IRS is pretty convinced belongs to Paul Silverano, which has almost four hundred and seventy thousand dollars in it. It's not in his name, but they are convinced it's his. They don't know where the money came from, and are worried that he might be compromised, have sold out or is being blackmailed – this could be a slush fund for payments, and so they did more digging.

"Given the treaty negotiations, State is very concerned about his welfare right now, which is a pity, since Paul is about to get some very bad news, namely that Tommy and Paulie Jr. are not, in fact, his kids. There is a medical office at the building where Paul works – he's not based in the official State Department building, but in a satellite office -, and his kids get seen there if there are any issues, simply because there's almost no wait, and since it's all on the government anyway, it's just easier all round.

"So they have a DNA system in government now; it's for use in identifying bodies in case of terrorist attack. Everyone that goes through that medical office gives a sample, and one of the researchers doing extended information gathering noticed that the DNA profiles for our Paul and two of his kids don't match. 

"Now normally the government would look at something like this, tsk a bit and move on. They don't get involved in this kind of domestic issue. However, what they didn't take into account is the fact Paul's uncle has now just been diagnosed with untreated Hepatitis B, and his liver is failing. Of course they are looking for a donor who matches genetically, and guess how they are going to do that? 

"The DNA test is going to reveal to Paul that his children are not his and the fear is he's going to fall apart and the treaty with China will do the same. The moment that marital strife entered the picture, all the other agencies that State would normally tap to look into this dropped this like a hot potato, and it landed in our lap. So, our mission here is to 'handle it', whatever that means. We have to ensure that he's able to successfully conclude the treaty negotiations. And preferably not go into a straight jacket afterwards." 

There was silence as everyone digested the mission. April took the opportunity to take a quick swig of coffee, and then she continued.

"Now, as to whose kids they actually are, it looks like they are the result of two different trysts by Mrs. Silverano. As luck would have it, the individual fathers' DNA is on record in the same system. Paul and Jenny Silverano are part of a close-knit group of about four other couples, and the fathers of these two children are Michael Corano and Tony Fastino. Both are married themselves, both with children. Apparently this little lot grew up together in New York, in the Bronx, and have stuck together through thick and thin over the years. They all made government their careers and are spread out throughout the Washington political infrastructure. Corano and Fastino all use the same medical facilities that are on offer for government employees that Paul Silverano does, hence them being on file.

"According to the files, there's one other of this little group who is not local, one Brad Tomlinson. He grew up as part of this little gang, but went into the sciences and works at a bioresearch lab out in Palo Alto in California, working on DNA analysis. As a group, they meet every six months in Vegas and Paul gets out to San Francisco when he gets the chance to go fishing with Tomlinson.

"So, we know this little bombshell is coming, and coming fast. We need to get in there and build in some damage control. What documentation we already have is on the table, I did some preliminary research on these guys with stuff I could find on the web and also some very sketchy thinking into what his reaction is likely to be and possible counters. Any questions?"

She looked around the room. Everyone was digesting the information or looking at the papers in front of them.

Desirea said, "Can we head this off at the pass? Make it so he never knows?"

April answered, "I doubt it. While State employs this medical group, they don't own them. They can bring pressure to bear but ultimately it's both a question of medical ethics, and I should point out that this medical group has a high degree of moral integrity. The top guy makes a lot of bones about it. But it's also a question of inevitability. You can't go around shutting down every DNA test that might be applied to these boys. It's going to happen at some point."

Desirea persisted, "Yes, but down the line isn't now. Not when there is a treaty being negotiated."

April nodded but then said, "Yes, that's true, but if it doesn't come out now, the medical group leaves themselves open for a lawsuit later, when it does come out. They did DNA tests. They knew. Why didn't they tell him? You can see it from their point of view."

Desirea nodded back, acknowledging April's point.

Talia raised her hand and asked, "Do we know why the wife did it? I mean one child could be an accident. Two seems premeditated...?"

April nodded again and said, "I agree.-We don't have the research to really know though, and I'm uncomfortable making those kinds of assumptions. We need to know. I think finding out is going to matter, but it won't be everything here. Without knowledge of the situational psychology, we are going in blind."

One of the research assistants asked, "Do we know how he's going to react?"

April pursed her lips and then answered, "I don't have a profile yet, but reading what I have, I don't think it will be good. This guy appears to have a great marriage and life going on. He's doing well at work, pretty wife at home, three kids, hell, he even coaches the kids' swimming teams! Now, Silverano does have some history with coming apart at the seams. He had a breakdown in his senior year at university, when he discovered his mother was cheating on his father. While he's a rock solid negotiator, he's a man just like any one else. This news will impact him and given his history, it's not going to be pretty, and State is justifiably worried. They have a lot riding on these negotiations, and they just can't take the risk. Yeah, I don't think this is going to go down well at all. But then if it was, we wouldn't be here, would we?"

They spent another few minutes going over the research to date, and then April said, "Ok folks, this a high-pressure situation. We have about twenty-five days before the DNA results come in. We need to be in place by then. I need research to give me background on both targets, the kids and the other fathers and their families in five days. I will be working on a profile and plan and we'll reconvene a week from today. OK? Let's go, people. I need everyone here to step up their game. We all need to prove why we are paid the very large salaries we are."

There was some grumbling from the research people about the compressed time frame as the meeting broke up but April was pleased with her performance. She was gathering her documentation when she realized that Desirea was standing next to her. She looked up and waited for the other woman to say something.

"You did well in that meeting, but you understand the pressure you've just put these people under, right? There is no way you'll get enough background in five days to do a proper profile."

"Yes," replied April, "but there's not really any choice, is there? I'm pretty sure that most of this op is going to end up improvisation, and I'll have to do some modification of the profiles and plan as I go; I just don't think there's any way around that. We don't have the time to do the normal in-depth stuff."

"No," replied Desirea, "I think you're right. Wow, what a first op to lose your virginity on! Ok, well, good luck. I'll be watching with interest."

April let go of a breath she didn't know she was holding as Desirea left the room. She smiled as she thought about what Desirea had said, and then stopped smiling when she thought about all the work she had ahead of her.

-----

They rushed it. Desirea was not happy with the final profile results, nor was April. They got what info they could in a short time, and even though it was a lot – particularly from online, since government employees shit paper and webpages — there were still gaps. They were nowhere near understanding the psychology of either participant in this drama, and all April could do was plan ahead for every contingency she could think of. Everyone knew that this one was going to be more seat-of-the-pants than most of their missions, but it couldn't be helped.

Seven days later everyone regrouped in the conference room. Desirea walked in last, clutching her personalized coffee mug, which had the phrase "You don't have to be mad, disturbed, criminally insane, a psychologist to work here, but it helps" inscribed on it.

When the door had closed, a tired-looking April stood up and said, "Ok. So we all know where we stand. We've all shared the Intel and background we've gathered. I've circulated my preliminary plan and most of you have seen it and commented on it. For those that haven't or haven't had time to do a deep dive, the basic idea is that I'm going in to replace Paul Silverano's PA, who has just gotten shingles. Apparently." She paused as a few chuckles went round the room, then resumed. "Silverano leans on his PA more than most, and she's almost a part of the family. If I can behave appropriately, it should allow me to get close to Jenny too, and figure out the lay of the land. Fingers crossed that I'm good enough to do that. I'm going in as an adopted kid, and we are going to make a lot of that, so he gets comfortable with the whole concept. Seeing a well-adjusted person who was adopted is a step in the right direction of getting him more comfortable with the whole idea of raising someone else's kid."

Dermot nodded and jotted something down.

"Ok, so we all know what we are doing? We are going to have to be majorly flexible with this. I honestly don't know what is going to need to be done until I am in there and get an idea of the personalities involved. So everyone be on their toes, don't turn off your cells and be available. This is my ass on the line. Questions?"

There were only a few, regarding communications protocols. After that, it was time for April to leave on the assignment. She visited her office for the last time for a while and as she exited, she saw Jessica Ingrams standing outside.

"Got a second?"

April looked at her watch, then realized who she was talking to, and said brightly, "Sure. Can't be too long though, gotta report for duty."

"I just wanted to say good luck. This is a bit of a twisted one for you to lose your cherry on – very much a baptism of fire. But you can pull this off. I have confidence in you. So far I've not seen any reason to regret hiring you, so get out there and make this bad situation better, ok?" Jessica smiled at the end of her statement.

"I'll do my best," replied April. Jessica offered her hand and April shook it and then April was on her way down to the garage, where her pick of the company's fleet of cars – all older model sedans and pickup trucks – awaited her. She looked longingly over at her Nissan Z, parked at the back and now covered for the duration and sighed, and got in the silver Honda and drove out of the parking lot.

An hour later, she was sitting in the office of Gary Mercer. Mercer was the only person outside of Ingrams who knew who she was what she was doing. He was older – past fifty-five she judged – lots of product in his hair, that could not possibly still be as dark as it was presented, and his tan was fading. He radiated the word gray. April thought he probably slept in gray pajamas. He wore a sharp suit with iron creases in it, and she idly wondered if he was a player – when he smiled he had the look of a shark. When he smiled, it gave her the uncomfortable feeling he was about to go for her neck.

"So Miss... Hougham, is it?" he asked with that insincere smile.

"Yes. Mary Hougham," she replied.

"So you are one of Ingrams' people are you? I thought you'd be, oh, I don't know. Older? More glamorous?" Mercer made no bones of his doubtfulness of the whole enterprise.

April smiled back patiently. "We like to blend in, Mr. Mercer. Makes it easier to be forgotten when we are done."

"I see," he said. "Well, we've got you in as his PA. I hope to God you can actually do the job. Right now is a stressful time for everyone, with these negotiations. If you are going to pass as a girl from the pool, you'd better be competent or you won't last long. Paul Silverano is used to his old PA, and does not like change."

April nodded. "I'm sure it will be no problem, Mr. Mercer. I've been briefed and I think I can handle it." She did wonder what this guy's deal was, and decided to give him a flaunt, as they called it back at the office, and see if he bit.

She leaned forward to get something out of her bag and in doing so, deliberately gave Gary Mercer a good look down her blouse, and when she sat back, she uncrossed her legs, leaving them just slightly apart, using body language to send an invitation.

The moment she made eye contact with Mercer, she knew she'd made a mistake. His eyes were cold and his expression was closed and icy. He said, "I hope to God you did more homework on Paul Silverano than you have on me, because if you had, you'd know I'm gay. Your little tricks won't work on me, Miss Hougham. Please remember that."

April avoided looking at him as he handed over her pass and details of her assignment.

She was silent as Mercer led the way to her desk in the antechamber of Silverano's office. He knocked on the closed mahogany door as April looked around. It was a standard reception room – desk, filing cabinets, computer, nice window overlooking parking. Wooden paneling all round, plus carpet, decent chair, recessed lighting – a comfortable and well-appointed office, as she had expected. 

She turned her attention back to Mercer when she heard a voice shout, "Come," from within the office itself. Mercer twisted the handle and opened the door and ushered her inside.

"Paul, do you have a moment? I wanted to introduce you to your temporary PA. This is Mary Hougham – the pool just sent her up."

Paul Silverano sat at his desk. His office was messy but well designed with lots of storage built into the wood paneling. There was a small couch in the corner, with a TV table, plus coffee table and small occasional table for very small conferences. One wall was covered in pictures – everything from portraits of Silverano with various dignitaries to pictures of him fishing with friends, and even hand-drawn pictures from his kids were framed and arranged. 




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 02



Another wall was a huge white board. There were markers scattered around and lots of cryptic messages already marked. On his desk was a large 27-inch Apple iMac, lots of documents and post-it notes, various small executive toys, a hand exerciser and three framed photos – one of his wife, one of his kids and one of him and a large group of children, all posing with bows and arrows.

Silverano looked up and April saw that the photos they had of him didn't do him justice. He looked younger in person. He wore a charcoal suit, but the jacket was on the back of his chair, he'd removed the tie and rolled up his sleeves. Bifocals sat low on his hawk nose. His short black curly hair looked slightly slick and his aquiline features clashed with the warmth his eyes promised. She took in the laugh and frown lines on his face, and wondered how he could tamp down that much emotion when conducting negotiations. He stood up to offer his hand to April and she saw that he was tall, at least 5'10" and well built, without being fat or appearing too buff. 

He smiled at her and said, "Hi there, Mary. Sorry for the mess. Debra picked the damndest time to get sick, I'm afraid. We are in what my programming friends like to call 'Crunch mode' right now, with the negotiations with the Chinese. I lean on my PA a lot, so I hope you know what you are doing. You'll need to hit the ground running I'm afraid, no time to get up to speed slowly."

April smiled, nodded and shook his hand, not too firmly, glanced briefly into his eyes but then kept them averted as she said, "I understand, Mr. Silverano. I'll do my best. I know you are under pressure right now." She wanted him to be sure she was issue free, professional and knew her place. She also filed the fact that he had programming friends under the title 'Something to ask R&D about', since there'd been no mention of that in his brief. Now that she thought about it, he was negotiating a cyber warfare treaty, of course he'd have programming friends. They'd let that one slip past them.

"I'm sure you'll do just fine, Mary," said Silverano, and April realized he had already sized her up. She didn't know if it was purely professional or not, but she figured she'd soon find out, either way.

Mercer said, "Well, I'll leave you two alone. Paul, we should do another round of golf some time. You need to let me win back that fifty."

Silverano grinned and said, "Gary, if you want to lose another fifty bucks, then I'm all for it. Don't imagine it'll be any other way."

Gary Mercer looked back at him and, rather startlingly, gave him one of those Italian gestures that April had always believed was quite rude. Silverano just smiled wider and said, "Yeah, your mother too."

Silverano then noticed April looked a bit uncomfortable and said, "Don't worry. Gary is an honorary Italian. We have to give each other shit. It's in the contract."

April didn't know what to say, and just said, "Oh."

Silverano turned his attention back to Mercer and said, "Ok sonny, off you go. Go practice your swing. And practice getting your wallet out."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," replied Mercer, leaving the room.

"So..." said April, looking for something to say, "What can I do for you first, Mr. Silverano?"

"First, you can call me Paul. I'm only Mr. Silverano in the negotiating room, ok?"

April nodded.

"And then, I need all the department heads from State and the Pentagon civilian attachée for cyber black ops in the conference room by three p.m. today. Do whatever you need to get them here, we have some stuff we need to go over that has just come up. Can you do that, Mary?"

"Oh, I'm sure I can, Mr. Silv...Paul," said April, smiling demurely and thanking her yesterday self for spending the evening studying the operations manual for the State Department. She knew who to look up, who to call, all she had to do now was get started.

"The big deal right now are these upcoming negotiations with the Chinese. There's a preliminary meeting with some of their people in a couple of weeks – it's ostensibly a trading negotiation, but the real reason they are here is for this cyber warfare treaty we are trying to work out - and it needs to go smoothly and I'm going to be relying on your abilities, ok? You understand, this is important stuff. For you, for me and for the country. You get that, right?"

April nodded, letting her eyes widen just slightly.

"Good. And I don't normally ask this, since I have a Keurig coffee machine in my office, but it's broken right now. Can you get me some coffee? Black, one sugar, none of that macchiato shit. My countrymen have a lot to answer for when it comes to fucking up coffee. I just like mine regular."

"Sure," replied April. "I just need to find the break room."

"Third door down on your left," said Silverano, turning back to his desk and picking up the phone.

The agent part of her wanted to study how he worked, but as his PA, she had to get started on her duties. First though, coffee.

-----

Over the next three days, April did her best to be efficient, smile a lot and be as prescient as she could be. She immersed herself in the work, watched Silverano in his meetings and studied him as best she could, to be ready to adjust the parameters of what she needed to be to him to help him over what was coming. 

He was clever, smart, and understood the value of silence. He was passionate when he truly believed something, and could turn on some pretty good artificial passion when he believed the situation demanded it. She caught him doing it twice and had to smile into her iPad as she watched one meeting's occupants believe that he cared about teenage hackers in Beijing.

She noticed he was all about balance. When talking with his counterparts in other offices, he was careful to balance out what he offered them, based on what they offered him. She noticed it again when he was talking to the Chinese. His success in negotiating came partly from that strong, ingrained sense of fairness and balance he had. He even went as far to admit some of what the U.S. was asking for was not balanced, and argued back in meetings with other departments, as though he were the Chinese and representing their point of view. It was interesting to watch; April got the distinct impression that balance and fairness were an essential part of Paul Silverano's makeup, something that was going to make the incoming DNA results even more painful for him.

One moment of note was the first phone call from Jenny Silverano, his wife. April had been sitting in the office, trying to match up travel schedules for a couple of delegates for the upcoming in-person negotiations, when she'd answered the phone and been treated to a shrill, nasal voice, that reminded April of every New York Jewish Princess she'd ever seen, that declared, "So, you the new office bimbo eh?"

Not knowing quite how to respond to that, April had replied, "This is Mr. Silverano's office. How may I direct your call?"

There was a snort on the other end of the phone and April heard, "Oh my God, he's got Siri working for him now?"

April was taken aback. If this was who she thought it was, her mission required her to be on good terms with who was on the other end of the phone, but she still hadn't identified herself yet.

"Um, hello? Can I ask who is calling?"

"This is his wife. I'm Jenny. You can call me Mrs. Silverano."

"Oh! I'm so sorry, Mrs. Silverano. I'm Mary, I'm new here. I didn't know it was—"

Jenny interrupted, laughing. "I know, I know. I'm just giving you a hard time. Think of it as hazing. I really like Jenny, his last PA, so you have big high heels to climb in. So, is the dirt bag in?"

"Mr. Silverano is on a conference call. I can get him to call you back right after that, if that's ok? Probably at least an hour though."

"Sweetie, if you can actually get him to call me at all, I'd be impressed. He never calls me back."

"Sure, Mrs. Silverano. I'll have him call."

"I'll believe it when I hear it," replied Jenny Silverano drily. "Later, Barbie." And the phone went dead.

April sat there, thinking about the phone conversation, and thought, 'I'd better be sure and make sure he calls back then.'

Thankfully, she remembered to push him, and while Paul seemed to be good about returning almost anyone else's call, he dragged his feet calling his wife back. In the end, April found the number in the previous PA's rolodex, made the call and transferred it directly to Paul's phone.

The next day, Paul came in and dumped a Starbucks card on her desk. She looked up at him, surprised- and he said in the tones of a man who doesn't want to say what he's going to say, but he has to, or His Wife Will Be Upset, "It's from the wife. She says if you can make me call her back, you're worth keeping. This is her gift. It's for fifty bucks."

April's eyebrows raised. A fifty-dollar Starbucks card was some gift for someone you've never even met. Having delivered his message, Paul went red, turned away and went into his office, closing the door firmly behind him.

She had primed the pump of getting to know him in a less-professional capacity – she was wearing a wedding ring on her right hand, she was wearing a very conspicuous chain around her neck with a half heart on it, and her earrings were carefully chosen to be conversation starters. She even had a signed baseball on her desk, prominently displayed, hoping he'd ask about it. In fact, almost everything she wore or had as part of her image was designed to get a conversation started, and while it worked far too well with the other girls in the office – she couldn't get coffee without being asked for her life story from all and sundry – Silverano alone seemed immune to curiosity.

She did make some headway one afternoon as she delivered some paperwork and while she waited for his signature, she hovered and looked at the pictures on his wall. He looked up and saw her examining the pictures, particularly of his kids and just watched her. She recovered herself and blushed when she realized he was looking at her looking at his kids and she murmured, "Sorry. I just... it's nice to see a family like this. Makes me wish..." She picked up the papers and made to leave.

Silverano said, "Makes you wish what?"

April looked at him and said, "That I had a family like that. Well, I do, but not biological. I'm adopted. I love my parents like nothing on earth, but sometimes, you just look at this kind of family and wonder...you know?"

Silverano studied her. "Adopted? Nothing to be ashamed or upset about there. Your parents are undoubtedly very fine people. I have a special place in my heart for those who adopt. It shows they don't let biology dictate who they love."

April smiled shyly and bit her lip and said, "Of course. I know they love me. It wasn't a hard upbringing at all. At times I think I got more love than most because they had to fight so hard to get me. No just getting pregnant, they had to go through so much, you know."

Silverano nodded. "Yes. No question."

"Sometimes I think everyone should be adopted. I think if every parent had to go through what they did, a lot of kids would end up better adjusted."

Silverano laughed. "Perhaps you're right. Definitely food for thought there, Mary."

April smiled weakly and left the room. She was pleased. She'd got that thought out there, and it was an essential plank of her intended therapy plan.

On the way back to her small office-supplied one-bedroom apartment – carefully chosen in terms of location so it was just further out from the office than the Silverano's house, so she could follow Paul Silverano's white BMW to work every morning and tail him home, without arousing suspicion. It was standard operating procedure to gather as much Intel as was possible on an intended client, and this was one more way she could see what his life was like. Twice a week she saw him stop off to pick up his and his friends kids in his BMW and take them to archery classes, or take them to the park where he organized flag football games. 

She made the decision that offering a seduction was probably going to be the only way she would get the inside scoop on his decision-making and thought processes. She could do it without pillow talk given enough time, but there just wasn't any. When the DNA results came in, she needed to be someone he would lean on and confide in, and she didn't have any other way to integrate herself in the short term.

However, she didn't take the decision lightly. A sexual relationship with him would mean enticing him to break his marriage vows. From what she'd seen so far – certainly from the conversations she'd had with his wife Jenny over the phone and what she'd heard from his office when the door had been open — it didn't seem that strong of a marriage, but still, she knew that with her skill set, Paul Silverano would likely put up little resistance, and therein lay the rub. 

In the end, she compromised. She would make the offer, but in a deniable and subconscious way. He would know, but what he decided to do about it would be entirely up to him. She'd put him in a situation where the likely result would be the two them ending up in bed, but make the decision all his. She knew damn well she was splitting hairs, but it was necessary for her to be able to look at herself in the mirror. She was beginning to understand that being a field agent meant making hard decisions, and decisions on the behalf of other people – decisions that would impact their lives and turn things around a pivot. She had a couple of sleepless nights wondering why she felt she had the right to do this to people? But then she thought that this is what she was hired for. She just had to believe in herself and her ability to help and move forward. It was arrogant, but this is what she had intended from the start. It was just harder to actually do it now she was there. The gap between theory and practical reality had never been so great.

That night she made her evening phone call to the office and spoke to Desirea about her decision. Desirea was forthright in her assessment.

"I really don't like this. We don't know what you're getting into – you may well end up doing more damage than good. This needs to be done in a very deniable way and for Christ's sake, be careful. I'm really not happy about this, but I do concur that in the short term, we need some pillow talk. You just...be careful, April. Let us know exactly what is going on."

So the next day, she wore her little pencil skirt with the long slit up the front, the black thigh hi stockings, heels and the tight tailored white blouse with the open front that she had for just such occasions as this. The slit in the pencil skirt was in the front and with careful manipulation, at the right angle, it provided glimpses up to her stocking tops.

She tied all this off with a black velvet choker and some hoop earrings, designed to catch the light. Red lipstick, hair pulled up in a bun, and glasses and she looked the stereotypical secretary.

That morning, she found an excuse to be in his office, crouched down by a lower drawer, sorting through some papers. Silverano was on the phone, walking back and forth, expounding in Chinese and sounding quite frustrated.

He paced the room, attention on his call, gesturing as some people are wont to do when talking on the phone, even though no one on the other end can see. April wondered how long she'd have to be down there before he noticed. She'd arranged her self so the skirt slit was uppermost, and had had to pull it back a bit so she could crouch down. Her legs were slightly parted, and if Silverano looked down, he could without doubt see the tops of her stockings. Her blouse was also arranged so the from the angle of above, it was possible to see down to her bra. The bra was carefully chosen to be extremely low cut – more of a breast hammock than a bra, and even potentially get a nipple peek. April sorted through papers, doing her best not to obscure the view.

She heard Silverano finish the call, sigh, and throw the phone on the desk. He walked around the desk towards her – she could see his shadow moving along the floor – and then he stopped. She held her breath; it was the moment of truth. She knew she needed to say something inane, in order for the moment to work; he had to believe it was an accident.

"So, do you think the Redskins...." she began and looked up. He was standing over her, looking down intently. She trailed off as she met his eyes, doing her best to create a moment. He took it as genuine, and there was no doubt it was a moment.

He'd seen her stocking tops, seen down her blouse and he'd seen that she'd seen. Both knew what the moment had been, and both knew that in that second, a subtle shift had occurred. A shift of what their relationship was based on, what it could be and how it might get there. Power had slightly shifted to April, which would put her in the driving seat now.

They sat there for a moment, neither saying anything, then Silverano turned and walked back behind his desk, putting it between them, and hiding his rather obvious erection at the same time.

He didn't meet her eyes but said, "That'll be all for now, Mary, thank you. I need to make a private call."

April came to her feet as smoothly as she could, gave him a small smile, even though he wasn't looking at her, and left the room, closing the door behind her.

-----

The next day was another step forward in Operation Silverano Seduction. April wore prim and proper clothes, but with scandalous high heels. At lunchtime she sat in her office, picking at a salad as Silverano came out of his office on his way to have lunch with some friends. He stopped and studied her a moment.

"Mary, do you ever eat away from your desk?" he inquired.

April had been careful to eat only at her desk, trying to look as pitiful as possible. It had been hard to turn down the invitations from the rest of the floor to go places – she always replied that she was trying to learn the systems there and needed to spend the extra time at her desk. She got some sympathetic looks, but mostly she was left alone at lunchtime. She made sure that Silverano saw her sitting at her desk, with a sandwich or a salad, looking sad and staring at her monitor. She was sure that at some point the basic decency he had would prompt him to take her with him for lunch. Perhaps today.

"Um, mostly, yes," she replied, poking at her salad with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

"Why?" asked Silverano.

"Oh, I have lots to catch up on, lots to learn so I'm ready for when you need me," she replied, not meeting his gaze.

Silverano had been a negotiator long enough that he knew a transparently false statement when he heard one. He stood there, not moving and not saying anything, letting the silence go on so April would attempt to fill it.

Eventually she did. "Ok, so I don't know what there is around here to eat, ok? And frankly, some of the people in this office feel a little...predatory. I feel like I'm being undressed visually."

The last statement was a deliberate attempt to play on what had happened the previous day, and it worked. She watched Silverano turn himself away so that she couldn't see his erection.

"Um, well, I'm sorry you feel that way, Mary. Let me make it up to you. Let's go to lunch," he said, still facing way from her and talking to the door lintel. April had to hide a smile. "You know, I really need to have a word with the cleaning staff," he said, as he ran his finger along the top of the door jam and inspected it for dust.

"Um. If you're sure..." said April, hamming up the little-girl-lost aspect and unexpectedly hating herself for doing it.

"I'm having lunch with some old friends at the Convection Club. You can come along. It would do them good to see that I have an attentive PA!" joked Silverano, trying to lighten the mood and draw her attention away from the fact that he could see that April was wearing that lacy bra again. 




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 02



April looked coquettishly at him and pursed her lips. With the appearance of a snap decision she said, "Sure. Let's go," and grabbed her bag, tipping the salad into the trash as she did so.

They left together and she followed him down to the parking lot, under the building, where the concierge went to find his car. Silverano rated a company car and could have had a driver too, but he made the point that he was capable of driving his own car and besides, having a driver encouraged after-work drinking and he had other things to do with his life. He only used a driver for official functions.

While they waited for the Jaguar to arrive, Silverano entertained April with stories about growing up in Brooklyn, and telling her about the men they were about to have lunch with, and explaining why the Convection club was named – apparently it was a reference to the people inside of it making contacts and being exposed to people they normally wouldn't – a convection oven works by pushing hot air and circulating it – the club operated by the same principles. She laughed in all the right places and took the opportunity to hang onto his arm. He didn't object and it was a step forward in the seduction, since physical touching was now on the table.

The car arrived and they drove to the Convection Club – a gentleman's club, of the older English variety. Lunch was served in the main dining room, next to a large wall of French windows, most opened to allow the cool midday breezes in.

As they were shown to the table, April saw that several of Silverano's childhood friends where there - both Michael Corano and Tony Fastino, as well as another man who she didn't recognize. All three rose from their chairs when they saw Silverano arriving with April. All three had predatory smiles that April didn't like at all.

"Paul! And who is this gorgeous creature?" said Corano, reaching out to shake his friend's hand. 

"This is my new PA, Mary Hougham. She needed to get out of the office, and unfortunately today is the day with you guys," said Silverano, pumping first Corano's hand, then Fastino's, and at last the mystery man.

"It is nice to be graced with such beauty for lunch," said Fastino. April gave a small smile, but already didn't like his oily manner.

"Mary, meet Mike Corano, Tony Fastino and this is Gene Rainer – did I get that right?" Silverano enquired of the small trim man.

The trim man nodded and Silverano continued, "Yeah, PA to PA, Gene is Mike's PA. His right hand man, eh, Mike?"

Corano smiled in a leering manner – April wondered if he knew how he looked from the point of view of other people -, and then she went round the table shaking hands. When she got to Rainer, he kissed the back of her hand and looked right into her eyes and she had an involuntary shiver. There was nothing there looking back, just empty blackness. She had the uncanny feeling that this man knew everything there was to know about her. She knew it was ridiculous, but he seemed to be looking through her. She couldn't wait to get her hand back and fought the desire to head to the bathroom to wash it.

"Enchanted," he said as he gave her a crooked smile.

She forced a smile back, as insincere as the one he was giving her. "Likewise," she managed.

The table was set for four, but the waiter was summoned and another place was set. There was some banter between the three friends, and April was conscious of Rainer's gaze on her, along with those of Corano and Fastino, whose stares were hungry with desire. She knew exactly what they wanted.

After they ordered, April pulled out her phone and tapped at the screen. Silverano noticed and said, "Work? Here? It's lunchtime Mary. Put it away."

She gave him a bright smile and flicked her eyes at him while she concentrated on her app. "Actually, no. I'm trying to lose weight and I'm tracking calories. It's one of those calorie app things, look." She showed him the screen, with a little spreadsheet of time, what was eaten and calorie intake.

"Just me being me. Have to track it all." She laughed and put the phone down on the table and said, "Excuse me, gentlemen. Please amuse yourselves," in a put-on haughty voice, grabbed her bag and left the table.

In fact, April's calorie-counting app was anything but. When she'd been given the phone by the Ingrams tech team, it had been preloaded with apps, and she'd spent a boring afternoon being lectured on what a lot of them did. The calorie app was actually a recording app, for voice and audio. At 64 gigabytes, she had to watch her space, but the data was uploaded to the cloud, she doubted it would be a problem in most situations.

Her trainers at Ingrams pointed out that most socializing, and hence talking, happened over food, whether it be a meal or a coffee. This was a natural time to take out a calorie-counter app, which would lead to some small talk, and it did count calories. Only Ingrams' employees knew the space to tap to activate the recorder. You could show it to people, and what's more, the app actually works as a calorie counter as well. But everyone can see what it is, and can see that it is not the UI of the voice recorder.

When she'd be given instruction in this particular app, April had been unable to suppress an eye roll and muttered something along the lines of 'geeks with too much time on their hands'. This was the first time she'd ever used any of the apps on her phone and she made a mental note to write an email apologizing for her comment now it was coming in handy.

April stayed in the bathroom for as long as she dared – almost 10 full minutes, before returning to the table. She wanted them to have plenty of time to chat without her.

When April returned to the table, she looked enquiringly at everyone as she sat down. Obviously something had been discussed since everyone had shut up as soon as she approached, and no one would meet her eyes.

"Something amusing guys?" she asked, as she picked up her phone.

Paul said, straight-faced, "Just catching up on old times. Now, what are we eating here?" He picked up the menu, doing his best not to look at anyone.

April looked around the table at everyone suddenly so interested in their menus and decided she couldn't wait to check out the voice recording of their conversation. She was sure it was going to be most revealing.

Lunch progressed, with various joking among the men, and the gradual relaxing of the fact there was a 'girl' at the table, and an attractive one at that. After lunch, after returning to the office, April pulled out her Apple earbuds, and listened to the recorded conversation while she was in the bathroom.

-----

There was silence at the table and then Corano said, "Jesus, Paul! Look at that! Please tell me you are hitting that? Please? Because if you aren't, I'm going to."

"Hold on there, horse," butted in Fastino, "I saw her first. And she needs a real man, not his breakfast."

Silverano snorted and said, "Yeah, hands off, both of you. And you, Gene. I saw your look. No one, and I repeat, no one is going to go after my PA, ok? She's persona non grata for you. I need this one, you already broke the last one, Tony. It took me a month to get her back on an even keel after that night with you. So leave it out. I should never have brought her here. Look at you, with your tongue hanging out. Stop drooling. It's disgusting."

It was all said with humor, but there was an edge to it.

Corano replied, "Oh, so you are going for it then? You dirty old man. What would Jenny say?"

Fastino said, "She'd want one of her own I think. She doesn't share well, as I recall."

There was laughter at the table. In her office, April smiled at both the naked lust of the other men, and at how Silverano had defended her.

"D'you think those are real?" asked Corano.

"They are real. Trust me," said Silverano.

"Oh? Seen them have we? Are they as firm as they look?" said Corano.

"Don't be stupid. No, she was wearing this low cut blouse thing the other day. I got an eyeful. It was... stunning. They are definitely real," replied Silverano.

"Ooooh, I think the man is in love! Oh, he is! Look, he's going red. How the hell do you get to be the top negotiator in our group when you go red at the touch of a button? Jesus..."

'That was interesting,' thought April, wondering how much truth there was to this and how much was just general joshing.

Rainer interjected, quietly and thoughtfully, "I guess Jenny might have some issues with you being interested in someone else?"

There was silence at the table and April had to wonder what he meant by that? Was it a direct challenge to Silverano? A basic observation? Without visual cues, it was hard to tell.

"I'm sure she would. Not like she has that much to complain about," Silverano replied. April noticed that when this was mentioned, everyone else got quiet. That probably meant something. There was silence for a few seconds, then...

"Oh man. You know who she reminds me of Paul? Remember that chick back in a college? What was her name? Pamela? Paula? No, Trudy. That's the one. Remember her, Paul? That night? Oh my God, I still get hard thinking about that night," said Corano. He was obviously changing the subject.

There was most silence as April imagined them all sitting there, reliving past glories, until Rainer said, "Is anyone going to clue me in?"

"Oh right, yes, sorry. Wasn't thinking. We were all at college. It was a sorority party night. We all went and when we got there, we were pretty blitzed. We came up with this stupid idea of seducing three girls, banging them, then trying to persuade them to swap with us. The idea being that we'd all swap the three girls that night. I don't know what we were thinking – we were blasted and highly doubt we could have got it up three times that night anyway, and the prospect that any girl would go for that is even more distressingly stupid. But we were young and dumb, so in we went.

"It went great. Too great in fact. We met three gorgeous girls, and it went like clockwork – we met these girls and they basically said 'oh hell yes, lets party', and we thought we were in...except for Paulie here. He was smitten. This girl had him at hello. He followed her around like a puppy with his tongue hanging out all night. She was wearing this shimmering silver dress, and she wasn't wearing a bra under it – I think the theme that night was Studio 54 or something? All very seventies, complete with perms and the Hustle and everything. They were even playing Sacha Destelle I think. Anyway, when he comes over to her and says some lame line like 'Do you come here often?'..."

"It was 'Do you party like this often?'" interrupted Silverano.

"Yeah, something awesome like that. Such a smooth line. Anyway, this chick leaned in, ran her hand over his chin, looked right in his eye and said, 'I'm not wearing any panties. What's your name?' I mean, wow, right? And the boy wonder over here, well, that was it. He walked around with an erection in his pants for the next three hours. Or course we were all trying to close business and while these girls all seemed hot for it, none of us were closing the deal. We found out later that they had their own version of what we were doing going. Their bet was to find three hot to trot guys, and lead them on as far as they could, and see what the most extreme thing they could get one of these guys to do in order to get with them. So in we trot, all hot for the ladies and they couldn't believe how ready-made for their bet we were."

There was the sound of drinks being drunk.

Corano continued, "The funny thing was, we did still get laid. They made us do stupid shit – Paul here ran around the building naked at one point. He was out of his head and he kept telling us 'It's really cold. Understand that.' Worried about that small dick, eh? Someone ended up wearing panties or something – it was pretty out there. Anyway, they did reward us in the end. Hell, fucking that chick – I don't even remember her name – on the bed next to you Mike, that was just out of this world. We even got into a competition to see who could last the longest. I mean, it was a wild night. I think Paul got the best deal, from what he said though. But you never saw her again, did you Paul?"

"No, I went back there and ask her for a date and she smiled and laughed and said that we had a perfect night, and we shouldn't spoil the memory. I know where she is, though. She's HR for one of those big oil companies in Texas.' 

"Oh wow. Stalking now Paul? What are we going to tell Jenny?"

Paul smiled and replied, "Anything you damn please. She knows all about this. I told her. Even showed her Trudy's Facebook page."

"Damn. More good leverage going to waste," laughed Fastino.

-----

Eight days later they were out to lunch again, just April and Silverano this time. He'd taken her to a local Japanese steakhouse – one of his favorites and he kept going on about how authentic it was, even down the menu. They sat and laughed about his attempts to pronounce some of the sushi they were offered. 

April stopped laughing long enough to say, "For God's sake Paul. You are a negotiator. You go to Japan and say all that and they'll disembowel you with a katana."

Silverano sat there, a fake pompous look on his face and said, "No, they won't. I'll have people telling me how to pronounce it. And even if they did, I'd throw you in front of me first."

"Oh thanks!" replied April, sarcastically. 

Lunch arrived and as she ate, she realized that she liked Paul Silverano. He'd been straight with her, and since the day she had started her seduction, he'd acted like a gentleman. He'd gotten an eyeful all right, but he'd never been too forward. She knew that door was starting to open, but she was taking it slow. He seemed stable, except for a few blazing rows she'd heard him have on the phone with his wife. She'd heard several arguments coming through his door – never actual words, but raised voices and she knew it was Jenny he was fighting with because April had put the calls through.

There'd been another one this morning, and when it was over, Silverano had thrown open his door, his face red and seething and he'd had to force himself calm down as April looked up at him from her desk, doing her best 'deer in the headlights' expression. He'd looked at her, and could see him calming and eventually he'd just said, "Mary, any chance of an espresso? I...could use one."

She'd smiled timidly and said, "Sure, coming right up," and decided she needed to know what these arguments were about. Since his office was regularly swept for bugs, April figured she might have to start 'forgetting' her phone in his office.

She'd still not met Jenny Silverano, but it was coming. There was a State Department sponsored gala welcoming event for the Chinese negotiators in a week and she'd have to go. Silverano would be there with his wife. April was quite looking forward to meeting her. They'd spoken more than a few times on the phone and the woman had been often sarcastic, sometimes abrupt, other times rude and a few times, genuinely warm; quite an enigma.

As their drinks arrived and they tucked into their first round of capri rolls, April tentatively said, "Paul, can I ask you something? It's personal and you can tell me to get lost."

Silverano paused, a piece of sushi on his way to his mouth in chopsticks and then nodded, popping the morsel into his mouth.

"Is...is everything all right with your wife? Only this morning... I put her through and even through the door, I could hear your voice. And it's not the first time. Is...everything ok at home?"

Silverano chewed for a while, looking at April and deciding how to answer. In the end he swallowed and said, "You are right, it's not really your business. But, since you obviously give a crap, I'll say this. Jenny has control issues. Hell, I have control issues. We butt heads a lot. It's part of our relationship. We are quite... stormy, but she's my wife and I'll deal with it. It's not like it's anything new."

"Is she...is she bossy?" asked April, doing her best to seem nosey but timid at the same time.

Silverano threw back his head and laughed. "Bossy? That's hilarious. I haven't heard anyone described as that since the eighth grade. That's terrific. I'm going to remember that."

April just looked at him, food on the way to her mouth, with an "uh oh" expression on her face.

"To answer your question, yes, she is bossy. She rules her roost and I rule mine, at work, and the trouble is the two overlap. We are both alpha personalities and, well, they spark. Some of the time they spark well, sometimes not. She doesn't always understand the demands of the job, but then I don't always understand the demands of her job either."

"What does she do?" said April.

"Damned if I know. She's a full-time socialite. Well, that's what she calls it. I call is social climbing. She spends time on committees, does charitable things. Holds galas. Plays tennis. Has sex with the golf pro, I have no idea."

April choked on her morsel on that last statement and stared at Silverano.

"I don't mean literally. I mean, she's a good mom and she fills her time. But I honesty don't know where her day goes. She could be entertaining the entire Red Sox baseball team for all I know. But, despite all the fireworks, I love her and I think she loves me. Trust, Mary, trust. Anyway, enough of that. You don't get paid nearly enough to get in the middle of my marriage."

April managed to keep her reaction to a nod.

At that precise moment, Silverano's phone chimed indicating an incoming text. He picked up the phone, said, "Saved by the cell?" then read the message and grimaced.

April asked, "Bad news?"

"Just these damned DNA tests. I have to go get the results this afternoon."

"DNA tests?" asked April, feigning surprise.

"Yeah, my uncle has hepatitis. They are testing all family members for compatibility to be a marrow donor. I had to get samples from the kids. They were not interested, let me tell you. It may only be a swab but those kids of mine are a pain in the ass to get nailed down to one place at one time. There are all these rules you have with the swab – not eating for an hour, not drinking, all that. Try doing that with kids like mine. Not fun."

"You want me to swing by and pick them up? They won't send stuff like that out, will they?"

"Not this group, no. Do you have time to do it? That would help."

"Sure," replied April. "I'll be happy to."

So D-Day was here, earlier than she had anticipated. The results were in and she was not sleeping with Silverano, and he was about to have his world come crashing down on him. She'd done a lot of supporting relationship generation over the past couple of weeks, in preparation for a seduction. 

She needed the resulting relationship to be one where he would confide in her – a frantic coupling generates intense sexual attraction, but doesn't necessarily result in a relationship with trust or closeness, and she needed that. So she'd been taking it a bit slower, getting closer to Silverano, talking about things other than work and generally developing a real basis for a relationship with him. And it was working, but she wasn't there yet. 

She'd been stressing the whole adoption angle with him – they'd even spent an afternoon playing pro's and cons of adoption vs biological conception. He'd surprised her with his willingness to accept the concept of cuckoo's and misplaced children, but there was underlying steel to him on the subject that she wasn't sure about. She had to be careful on her questioning. 

Now it was all coming to a head and she wasn't sure she was ready – if he'd confide in her or not. Perhaps the offer of sex once his world had crashed would be better anyway, since it would give him a guilt free way of accepting it, once he had such concrete proof of his wife's infidelity.




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 02



After lunch April dropped Silverano back at work and, silently missing her Nissan Z as she did everyday, and swung over the medical center to get his results. They almost wouldn't let her have them; thankfully, she'd thought ahead and get a note from Silverano to release them, but even then, they'd had to call him to confirm it. But it was done. She had them in her hand. 

The first thing she did was head to Staples, to find an envelope that matched the one the results came in. Silverano had an afternoon meeting at the FBI building across town, so she spent a productive hour scanning in the envelope the results were in, to get the medical center logo on it and then generating new envelopes of the same type.

She opened the results, scanned those in, put them back in the replacement envelope and dropped them on his desk.

Taking advantage of Silverano's absence, she spent an hour going through the results, doing it twice, because she didn't believe what she read. 

April had done a post grad course in DNA analysis – it had been that course that had lead to her discovery that the person she thought was her uncle was in fact her father – so she understood what she was looking at. And it did not make sense. At all. 

She closed down the images of the scanned results, thought for a moment, then got up and went down to the garage, where her car was parked. Looking around to be sure no one was watching, she pulled out her phone and called Ingrams.

She waited for the connection to Operations and after giving the call / counter call to indicate she was not under duress, she was connected to Desirea.

"April, you aren't due for a call until this evening. What's up? Is everything OK?" asked Desirea.

"Yes, I'm fine. The DNA results arrived today. I just scanned them in – I'll forward them on to you in a bit. But I need to talk to you about them."

"What? Are you prepared for his impending crises?" replied Desirea, curiously.

"That's just it, Des. I don't understand it, but according to these results, all three of his children are his."

"What?" shouted Desirea. "That can't be right. There's got to be some mistake."

"Not according to these results. I've been over them twice. They are legit. For the kids, they are three distinct results – it's not the same one copied three times. These are three different kids, and they are 99.9% certain they are his, since we have his DNA results to compare against. I can only assume that the results that got me here in the first place must be tainted or contaminated in some way, or that a mistake was made somewhere along the line. I mean, what other explanation is there? This was a third party group doing the testing; he's not had access to them. They have no reason to falsify the results. What else can it be? The original samples must have been wrong."

There was silence for a moment and then Desirea said, "OK, we need to go back and check the flow here. I know we went over it when the mission came in – hell, you did too. It's not like State commissioned just one test. They did two or three, to be sure. Something is screwed up here and I don't know what it is, and I do not like it."

There was another pause, then April said, "What do you want me to do?"

"What do you want to do, April? You're closest to it all. This is your mission. We follow your calls."

"I think I need to stay in place. We don't have a handle on what's going on here and I've already seen some cracks in Paul and Jenny's marriage, just from listening to the fighting going on behind closed doors. I'm looking more into that now, since I figured he'd need more stability when the news came in. I think that's still a valid cause for me to stick around. But right now... it seems like the entire reason for this mission is pointless. At least for the reasons we thought, anyway."

"Well, you never know what might be going on, April. Until we have more information, I think you are right. We need to ensure these negotiations go well, and if there's no work to be done on our end, then we can just call it a win. But for now, stick it out there and continue on course for what you were going to do. We may have more need of pillow talk than we think. Do you think Silverano knows? That somehow he did something to the samples?"

April snapped her fingers and said, "Brad Tomlinson."

There was a second while Desirea ransacked her memory. "He's the guy in Palo Alto, isn't he? The genetics researcher...oh. Right. I see where you are going."

"Yeah. I think we need to look into this. That would explain the money too. Imagine that old friends Brad Tomlinson and Paul Silverano have come up with a way to modify DNA samples, so they could reflect whatever you wanted. That would be worth money, wouldn't it? Lots of money. At least four hundred grand."

"Hmm. You have a devious mind, April. I knew I liked you for a reason. Yes, we'll get into this, definitely something to look at. In the meantime, I'll start backtracking and talk to the client and figure out who had access to the original samples. You carry on and let's see where this takes us. Still make your regular call this evening and be sure and get us copies of those results. The guys here in R&D will want to look those over."

"I'll be in touch tonight. Man, it's never easy is it? What the hell is going on here? How could anything have happened to those samples?"

Desirea chuckled and said, "Maybe his kids are the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers - who knows? We'll get to the bottom of it, April. Better get back to work."

"Yeah, you're right. Talk to you later, Des." 



Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 03



Chapter 3

"Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?" yelled Jenny Silverano to her husband. "I cannot believe you just said that, you fucktard."

April sighed as she cradled the phone in the crease between her head and neck. She'd spent a very instructive hour with the instruction manual for the phone system that the State Department used, and found that it had multiple features, one of which was silent participation. She could pass through a conference call, but mute the phone doing the pass through, which meant she could stay on the line and eavesdrop on Silverano's phone calls.

The only problem was that one of the LED's on his phone would be lit, indicating there were other people on the line. It had taken her all of twenty minutes with a micro screwdriver to remove that LED bulb from his phone, not that she imagined he understood all the features of his office phone or would have a clue what the light meant. But better safe than sorry.

She'd just passed through a call from Jenny and April already knew it was going to precipitate a screaming match, and she'd been right.

Silverano had answered the phone and his wife had immediately launched into an attack on the fact that he hadn't started looking at vacation homes in Colorado as he'd promised he would. He'd protested mildly that he did actually have a job to do, and that's what he should be spending his days working on. She'd responded abrasively, belittling his contributions around the house, attacking his manhood and generally just going ballistic in the manner of a pissed-off woman with nothing else to do.

"Look, honey, I just said that we need to prioritize," said Silverano, exasperatedly.

"No you didn't, dipshit. You said I needed to prioritize. Like those things that we've already discussed and agreed on suddenly stop being important. Like you saying 'this is all your problem'. Well fuck you too, buddy. I'm making it your problem. Look Paul, just fucking do what you said you'd do. I'm not asking you to jump out of a fucking plane. Just do the shit you are supposed to do. As a husband and father. You know. Like what you are supposed to be."

Even April winced at that.

"I don't fucking care what you have to do at work. Get it fucking done. Do what you said you would. Tell yourself whatever you need, but get the job done." There was a click and the phone went dead.

April sat and listened for a moment, listening to Silverano breathe on his phone, then he said, quietly, "Sure thing, bitch," and hung up.

April considered what she'd heard. It was the usual stuff, after many years of marriage, both parties were taking each other for granted, arguing about inconsequential stuff and neither one of them reaching out to the other after hostilities had commenced. In all good marriages, both sides have ways of de-escalating conflict once it's started – making the other side laugh, physical touching, changing the subject, whatever. But neither Jenny nor Paul had those methods, or if they did, they weren't using them. April wondered if it had always been like this, or whether this was recent.

Either way, she was going to have to figure out how to introduce some of these techniques for de-escalating fighting to both of them. Without them knowing. Good thing she was trained for this.

-----

It was two weeks later and the negotiations with the Chinese were on. All the work and planning and smiling insincerely were over, and the Chinese party had arrived in Washington, and that night, there was a welcoming gala at the Presidential Hotel, in downtown D.C. The State Department had taken over the ballroom and three floors of the hotel. The Secret Service was in evidence, checking things out – which April found ironic, bearing in mind they were called the Secret Service. It seemed strange that an agency designated 'secret' was so public.

The gala included a large dinner, speeches and everyone dressed to the nines. It was ostensibly for the 'trade negotiations', but the reality was that everyone there was a part of the cyber warefare treaty talks – they just couldn't admit it. I April had chosen an off-the-shoulder ivory wrap dress that hugged her figure, cut just above the knee and with a daring plunging back. She was wearing some jewelry that glittered in the light, with large red gems set in the necklace and earrings that matched the color of her lipstick. With her hair curled and set up – with a few locks of hair styled to look like they had escaped from her hairdo – she knew she looked dynamite.

She was finishing up her makeup in the room that State had assigned to her in the hotel – they were taking no chances and had four rooms reserved for the negotiating team, including Silverano – when her phone chimed. She looked down and saw Silverano's name on the screen.

"You ready?" he asked, with no preamble. "They'll be here in about twenty minutes – I just heard from the babysitters."

"I'll be down in a second. Where are you?"

"In the main lobby." He broke the connection and April took one last look at herself in the mirror before heading down.

When she arrived in the lobby, she was aware that she was being noticed by the Chinese delegation as she made her way across to where Silverano was standing. He was wearing a custom-tailored tux and he looked damn good in it. He'd gotten a haircut that day too, she noticed.

She smiled at him and he reached to her and said, "Wow, Mary. You clean up nice! You look phenomenal!"

April smiled back, shyly. "Why thank you, kind sir. You do a girl a lot of good with your compliments."

He turned and nudged a woman standing behind him. "Hey Jen, meet Mary."

The woman turned and April was face to face with Jenny Silverano.

She was shorter than either April or her husband – not by much, but enough to be noticeable. She had long elegantly-coiffed hair in a loose ponytail that curved around her neck. She was wearing a lavender dress, with a neckline that showed off her considerable cleavage to great effect, that was cut at her knees, and gathered around the waist. It was a clever effect to avoid being too tight around the ass – something women concerned they had too big a butt often put into effect. April was surprised Jenny was such a woman – she had always struck April as someone who was not that concerned with how other people viewed her. Yet another lesson that their preparation on this mission had been incomplete 

"So this is the famous Mary, is it? He won't shut up about you," said Jenny, in an arch tone.

April knew that in situations like this, she needed to let the other person dictate the greeting – so she waited for Jenny to actually do something, and noticed Jenny watching her, waiting for her to do something. In the end, she just offered Jenny her hand. Jenny looked at it for a second, then shook it.

Jenny gave her an appraising look, from top to bottom, pushing out her lips in a pout as she did so, in one of those 'so you think you are hot stuff' impressions.

She nodded as though she was giving final approval. "I see why he talks about you. The dress looks good, fits you in all the right places." It was grudging, but it was there.

"Why thank you! And I must say, your dress is...daring. You carry it off well."

"You think?" Jenny responded with a little warmth. "He thinks I look like a cupcake, but I like it. Besides, this lot wouldn't know a Micheal Kors if it slapped them in the face." She indicated some of the Chinese delegates, who were also milling in the lobby.

April laughed, and then said without thinking, "Oh, I'm sure they'd love to try an American speciality like a cupcake." She realized what she'd said, and her face went beet red.

That got her another appraising look, but in a different way, and Jenny said, "Oh I think we are going to be great friends," before Silverano turned and grabbed Jenny's hand, to introduce her to some other dignitary.

The evening wore on. Dinner came and went, and April was acutely aware of some of the Chinese delegation viewing her with either suspicion – she figured those were the Army Intelligence people – or almost naked lust – she decided those would be the ones who were the actual nerds. They'd be People's Army too, but less security-conscious than their intelligence brethren. 

One of them had approached her and used his broken English to indicate how 'fabulous' she looked. She gave them eight out of ten for using the word in the right context, but minus several hundred because he'd attempted to put his hand on her ass as he did it. He was smiling broadly to all his friends as he did it, and she had to laugh at his audacity, although it was embarrassing, bearing in mind she was almost a foot taller than he was.

She'd disengaged as gently as possible, but also explained, quietly in his ear – leaning down significantly to do so and aware that she was giving his friends a great view down the front of her dress that if he did that again, he'd be walking with a limp for weeks because she'd kick him in the balls so hard. His eyes had gone wide and he'd gone back to his friends, and no doubt told them some extreme lies about how she was going to meet him later or some such, as geeks of this kind are wont to do.

One other event of the evening struck April as odd and worthy of consideration occurred when she was in the bathroom straightening her dress – the fact that she was in a sheath dress that was strapless, on occasion meant it sometimes ran down her body. Very occasionally she needed to hit the bathroom to straighten everything up and push down that which should be put back in place. 

At one of these occasions, Jenny Silverano had come out of one of the bathroom stalls and seen April hiking the dress up and attempting to push her boobs down into it, so it was more secure and she came over to watch, with an amused smile on her face. She watched for a moment or two, and said, "Here, let me," and launched herself at April. 

Jenny grabbed the front of her dress from the back, circling April's body with her hands, and yanked the dress up, her hands spending entirely too much time on the dress bodice for April to be entirely comfortable. Then she adjusted the zip at the back of the dress, then she spanked April on the ass, hard, and said, "There, all done".

The spank was hard enough to make April wince and she saw that Jenny smiled even wider when she saw April's reaction. The door opened and two other women came in, and Jenny took the opportunity to leave.

April spent a couple more minutes reapplying her lipstick, thinking about Jenny's actions, and decided there was more going on with Jenny than April had originally thought.

After the dinner was done, the evening became more of a circulation event and it became more and more apparent that Jenny was drinking herself into, if not oblivion, some adjacent limbo. She'd already said a few things to some of the Chinese delegates that were unbelievably rude, that the interpreters were having trouble even deciding what she was asking. When she asked one of them if the cats in the immediate vicinity were safe, or if they'd all be dining on them later, Silverano acted.

"Right, Jenny, I think that's enough. Time to call it a night," he said, as he stepped in to grab her arm. April happened to be nearby and also stepped in to take over the conversation, doing her best to ooze sexuality and give the delegates something else to concentrate on, asking them about what kind of music they liked, and if they had heard anything since they were in the US that they liked? It was very smoothly done and managed to avoid them taking offence.

"Nicely done," Silverano whispered in her ear. "I'm getting the drivers to take Jenny home. She can't stay here, God knows what she'd ask at the breakfast tomorrow. I'm sending her home, so it'll be just the two of us holding the fort here. I'm leaving it in your hands, so don't fuck it up."

"I.. had actually.." said April, a little alarmed.

"Mary," snapped Paul, interrupting her, "I'm not fucking around here. I've got to deal with her. Don't mess up. Be sociable."

April nodded and made more polite conversation while Paul hustled Jenny off and stuck her in a limo.

When he returned five minutes later, he apologized to the group she was talking to.

"Thanks for that. Jenny is out of it. She gets resentful at events like this – it makes her realize that what I do matters and all the social climbing she does, well, it doesn't. And it comes out in some spiteful comments. I should have seen it coming and stuck a handler on her to make sure she didn't drink too much. Although I tried that once before and she wouldn't speak to me for a week," he said ruefully.

"Is she going to be all right? I mean, you are staying here, aren't you?" asked April.

"Yeah, it's not the first time I've had to do this, and I doubt it will be the last. It's going to be just you and me for the breakfast. By the way, you are doing great tonight. Really impressed with the diplomacy you are showing here. If you want to get out of the admin pool, there's a future here for you."

"Wow," said April, genuinely pleased. She looked around and saw one of the Chinese hovering – the one she'd asked about. He obviously had something to say, so April took the opportunity to advance her seduction plan. What she was about to do was risky, but also fairly basic. She looked at Silverano and said, "Actually Paul, there is something I need to tell you, but it's a secret, ok?"

He just looked at her quizzically and she leaned in, putting her hand on the side of his head and her lips next to his left ear, where she breathed, "I'm not wearing any panties."

As she moved away, with Silverano's eyes bulged and she drifted her hand across his chin, as she turned away to talk to the hovering Chinese nerd.

"Yes, Lo Peng, isn't it? Lets talk," she said, giving him a beaming smile and not looking back to Silverano, who was standing stock still, eyes wide, barely breathing. April leaned forward, took Lo Peng's arm in hers - much to the broad smiles of his group of friends across the bar - and walked off with him.

The evening ended as April expected, with Silverano asking her for a nightcap. She had a whole ruse arranged to get to be with Paul in his room, but as it turned out, it wasn't necessary. Once everyone had retired to their rooms, he just came over to where she was standing and grabbed her arm, apologizing to the Secret Service agent she was talking to, saying, "I'm sorry, need to debrief Mary here," and hustling her to the elevators.

April debated saying anything but settled for avoiding his gaze as they stood in the elevator. She wondered if he could smell her – she was aroused. Even though this is what she did for a living, and she was in complete control, she was still a woman, and Silverano was quite a man. He was in control, knew what he was doing, was good looking, dressed to the nines and he was just the right amount of forceful – not overbearing, but not about to take no for an answer. And he wanted her. She reacted just like any woman would, to a successful masculine man who wanted her.

They went straight to hism room, and barely got the door shut before he was on her. Literally As soon as the door was closed and he was pressing her into it, his mouth on hers. April was delighted to discover that Paul Silverano was a talented kisser. She hadn't been laid in quite some time and she found that despite her guilt over what she was doing, she was quite looking forward to finding out if Silverano measured up as a lover, and so far, so good!

April could feel his erection through his expensive suit, meaty and hard. He kissed her hard, then, still pinning her to the back of the door, one hand ran itself up the outside of her dress, while the other held her neck. He kissed up and down the other side of her neck, running his tongue along her skin. He breathed heavily into her ear, but didn't insert his tongue, which April, in some dream state, found interesting.

She also found the fact that she was as hot for this as he was, interesting as well. Despite all the training, all the practice, she was as into this scene as Silverano was. She gave a mental shrug and let the thought go; better to concentrate on the feelings of the moment.

His free hand ran down to the hem of her dress and dragged it up. April was almost on fire and moaned has his fingers dragged across her inner thigh. Unconsciously she repositioned hersel so she could part her thighs moe easily and allow him access.

Just as his fingers brushed her vulva, Silverano stopped, pulled his head away from her and said, "Last chance to say no."

April just smiled back and leaned forward and kissed him hard, then leaned back against the door, exposing her neck and body to him in a classic submission pose and said, "You do your worst."

He did. His fingers were in her, and she was so wet they slid in unimpeded. She arched and took in a hard breath as he did so, turning her head to look him in the eye as he did so. He maintained eye contact with her, just staring at her, not blinking, checking her reactions.

"Ohmygod," she murmured, moving her body so she sank more fully into his fingers.

Silverano smiled and withdrew his fingers abruptly. April was disoriented by the removal, but she understood the ploy for what it was. Silverano was testing her.

He moved his other hand higher up and grabbed her hair tightly. It gave him the leverage to move her head in any direction, and he moved his other fingers to her nose, giving her a dose of her own smell.

"You like that? Go on, lick it."

April was both in control – she knew exactly what she was doing and why and what all the implications of the scene were -- and was also hot as she could be, and she wanted it. So she did exactly as he asked. She took his fingers in her mouth and sucked on them, savoring her own taste. She gave a little moan, and when Silverano removed his fingers, she smiled at him and said, "You like that, don't you Paul?"

He leaned in close and shocked her when he said in a low and very tight voice, "Speak when you are spoken to."

In that moment, April's evaluation of the situation changed. This wasn't her getting close to him to get him to open up and have pillow talk. This was about domination. Paul was a closet dominant – a sexual alpha male.

He led her to the chair and ottoman in the sitting area of the suite, and with no ceremony, pushed her over it and yanked her dress up, exposing her ass. She'd been honest about the lack of panties. Unable to see him, April bit her lip in anticipation. She heard the rasp of his zipper, the rustle of clothes, and then he shoved his cock into her. 

April was surprised but ready; she'd been wet and waiting all night, and Paul's cock was more than adequate. He filled like her exactly as she needed right then. 

From that point onward, April followed directions. 

She was on fire and it felt good. Very good. She couldn't help moaning and trying to push back to get more of it in her. Silverano grabbed both of her hands and in one of his and pulled them behind her back, forcing her down onto the ottoman. He used his free hand to spank her ass in time with his thrusts.

April was surprised to realize she was enjoying being the submissive to Silverano's dominance. In a way, it took all the pressure off her – she didn't have to be creative, just be present and be involved. Silverano took her for almost fifteen minutes before she felt his strokes get faster and harder. To his credit, he slowed down and pulled out, leaving her feeling empty. She hadn't come yet – although she had gotten close, and he had stopped himself from blowing too soon.

He let up on the pressure on her body and said, "Not yet. I want to make this last." then he moved around to where her head was and presented his cock to her face. April didn't need a second invitation. She looked at the end of the penis bobbing in her face, and was pleased to note she'd gotten the dimensions almost exactly right. Score one for the training.




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 03



She reached up to grab it, and he slapped her hand away. "No, no hands, just mouth. Make me come, bitch. You've been teasing me for weeks. Now it's time to pay."

April lifted her head and grinned wolfishly at Silverano, then engulfed his penis in her mouth. She deep throated him without even thinking and his whole body spasmed as she did so, pushing his cock even further down her gullet. Another score for the training, she thought.

It took her almost seven minutes before she felt the contractions and breathing change, signaling Silverano's impending eruption and she managed to get the cock out of her throat, and even out of her mouth, when he exploded. It coated her lips and lower face and she was glad of it, since someone coming directly down her throat, when being deep throated, is not the nicest thing in the world and can lead to vomiting and breathing issues if not done correctly. As it was, he blew all over her face and looked happy about that.

She looked up at him and risked moving her hands, using them to scoop up some of the ejaculate on her face and put it in her mouth, making every sign of enjoyment.

He looked down at her, breathing hard, nostrils flaring and eyes wide.

The evening progressed – April went into the bathroom to clean up and came out, exactly seventeen minutes later and Silverano was ready to go again. She marveled internally at the man's constitution, but willingly went on to round two.

He had her in every position and over every piece of furniture: over the desk, on the coffee table, against the door, reverse cow girl on the easy chair, even out on the balcony. They were sixteen stories up, so apparently he wasn't worried about them being identified. They were going at it almost an hour before Silverano announced again that he was expecting to come – and this time he did it deep inside April. She'd come three times so far and had hit that point where she was feeling slutty and ready for this man to empty into her.

She noted that neither one of them had discussed protection; she wasn't worried because she was protected in two different ways, both the Pill and a subdermal implant. There was the risk of STIs, but she was reasonably sure that Silverano was not one to mess around too much, and there was risk in her job. She just had to accept that. She wondered what he was thinking.

As she hobbled off to the bathroom – on very wobbly legs – she did throw the comment of, "Um, Paul.. err.. protection?" back at him, just to see what he said.

As she did so, she realized it was the first thing either one of them had said since he had told her to be quiet.

Silverano lay flat out on the couch, staring at the ceiling. "I'm clean and I'm no trouble for kids. I had the snip three years ago."

April smiled to herself as she went to the bathroom to start the cleaning process – she always felt uncomfortable with a mans semen dripping out of her..

When she was done, she returned to the main suite, naked except for her heels, and stood by the doorway.

"Ready for round three?" she said, wondering what his response would be.

To her surprise, Silverano sat bolt upright and said, "Time to take it into the bedroom, I think."

He wasn't ready yet, so he had April lie on his chest and play with herself, with her pussy almost in his face. Watching her masturbate herself and hearing her moans and breathing get faster as she excited herself to orgasm did the trick, and Silverano was ready for action again. By this time April was sure that a blue pill had been popped earlier in the evening.

However, this time it was both slower, but yet, despite that, more urgent. He took her on the bed, and again, she noted, she was not asked for input. He just did whatever he wanted and took whatever reaction she chose to give. He fucked her in many positions, and when she was lying on the bed, length wise, facing away from him, he had his arm around her neck, making sure she was not capable of movement. He wasn't cruel, or hurting her in any way, he was just in total control of her movements. 

It was at the point that he withdrew his extremely hard cock from her pussy and pressed it against her ass. As an experiment, April tried to turn her head and say, "No, Paul", but he was having none of it. He inched his cock into her ass, doing it properly and taking time for his cock head to breach her sphincter, and then gently eased into her until he was balls deep. Once set, he did slow strokes, again, completely controlling her. 

He was lucky that she had been so wet that his cock was pretty much pre-lubed, but she was also aware that without lube over time, the friction would wear her juices off and it would be painful. She needn't have worried – Silverano groaned and shook as he came for the third time that night less than three minutes after he had penetrated her ass.

Why was it that men didn't last when they fucked ass? April wondered. She'd seen it several times in her life – the moment the man got the ass, they just didn't last. Maybe it was the naughtiness of it, the taboo, the thought that they were getting something no one else had. She had no idea, and when she really thought about it, she didn't much care. The important thing was, he had got off again.

There was no fourth act. Silverano vanished into the bathroom, came out with a towel and a glass of water, which he handed to April and said, "Stay with me tonight. You probably need sleep as much as I do."

April took the water, knowing how good sex dehydrated a body. She visited the bathroom herself and cleaned herself up with a wash cloth and then re-entered the bedroom, where Silverano was already asleep. She turned out the light and joined him in bed, dragging the smooth sheets over her exhausted frame. Her last conscious thought was, "So much for pillow talk!"

In the morning, Silverano took her again. She woke to feeling his hard cock probing at her pussy. She was facing away from him and felt the hardness poking into her. She thought "Why not?" and let him have his way, adjusting her position slightly to allow easier access.

However, if she'd thought last night's sex had been one sided, the mornings events where even more so. Silverano had apparently regained his strength, and was tossing her around like a rag doll from position to position. Again, her opinion was never asked, and he just did to her whatever pleased him. She knew she could stop it in an instant if she'd cared to, but she was more interested in what Silverano wanted and what it revealed about him.

Another major difference was that this morning, Silverano spoke to her. He called her slut, bitch, whore, and admonished her to, "Take it, bitch" as well as to tell him how much she wanted and needed it.

April played along, but she was nearing her limit of what she'd accept without handing some out herself. April wasn't a D/s fan – she knew what she had to do and would do it, but it wasn't something she got off on. A little power and confidence was a sexy thing, but like most kinks, there was a difference between using a feather and using the whole chicken. Silverano wasn't using the whole chicken, but there were definitely drumsticks involved.

When he was done – and she had not come and was debating whether to say anything, he rolled off her without a word and went to shower.

April lay on the bed, cum leaking from her well-used pussy, to consider the sex they'd had. She'd been used, there was no doubt of that. There had been no romance, just sheer overwhelming sexual power on Silverano's side. He wasn't bad – his technique was more about power than it was finesse, but she'd still gotten off several times the night before. She suspected this was more a side effect though – Silverano just wasn't that interested in making sure she got hers. She had gotten off despite him, not because of him.

Silverano was a sexual dominant, and it was even more interesting because she'd seen no hint of it in their work and social interactions so far.

It explained a lot about his fractious relationship with his wife. April couldn't imagine Jenny putting up with that kind of behavior for a New York second. It did beg the question of why they were still together at all, but in the mean time, April had to cope with the more pressing question of what next? She only had her dress, and she had to get back to her room to get showered and changed with no one seeing her, because if they did, there was only one conclusion they could come to as to why she was still in the same dress. 

-----

April sat on her couch in the temporary apartment in her underwear, wincing again at how the cheap fabric of the rented seat rubbed her skin the wrong way, particularly after the evening and morning she'd had.. She picked up the phone, checked the time, and called Ingrams HQ. She coded in and was connected to Dermot.

"Evening, April. How goes it?" he asked in his deep Scottish voice.

"Well, this part of the mission accomplished, in so far as I've shared Paul's bed," she replied.

"How was it?" chuckled Dermot in response.

"A lady never tells," retorted April,.

"Good thing you are no lady then," answer Dermot.

They both had a laugh and April settled down. "He's good, but there was no pillow talk, which was the whole point of the exercise, from my point of view. He wanted sex, not talk."

"Hmmm..." said Dermot.

"It's ok, though. I got other things out of the experience," continued April.

"I'll bet you did," said Dermot.

"Don't be crude. No, I mean, I learned some things that are important."

Dermot cleared his throat, ready to say something.

"Oh for God's sake. I can't seem to say anything, can I?" chuckled April. "Look, he's a dominant. I mean real alpha male when it comes to sex. When he's el-flagrante, he takes and whatever he gives, you get. It's so unlike his normal persona. I think there's something there. I think his marriage is and has been in trouble because this is what he needs and there is no way Jenny is giving it to him. I think there's damage and I think we may need to help."

There was silence for a moment, while Dermot digested the news. "Ok, say you are right. What next?"

"Good question. Still formulating that."

"How long do you think you'll need?"

"I don't know. Not too long. What with this DNA thing, the pressure is off a bit. We are in the negotiation phase now, so I'm going to stick around. I'm convinced there is something we can do here, and I'd like to see it through. What's the news on the DNA testing?"

"Well, there are some confused people here, April, let me tell you. We've had our people go over the process and what the labs did, and they can't find the flaw. Everyone did exactly what they were supposed to. We thought there might have been a substitution but we've been over everyone who had contact with the samples with a fine-toothed comb. No one had motive. Hell, no one beyond the receiving doctor even knows Silverano. No one has had money unexpectedly show up; as far as we can tell, the whole process was clean. What's more, it was clean both times – both on the initial showing up of the results and on this go round. Different sets of people, no overlap. We just don't know what to make of it."

"Well. That sounds...conclusive."

"Our best guess is that your idea about the genetics researcher friend in Palo Alto is the truth. We've got a couple of PhD's from Cal Tech to look over his research and see if there is anything there that could be applied to DNA tests – their initial conclusions are that it is a related field, but they need more time to do a more thorough analysis. They were quite excited when we outlined what we suspected. If what you posited is true, this will be an upheaval for DNA testing in general."

"I dunno Dermot. It doesn't ring true, but I truly haven't got anything else. Well, look, I'm going to go have dinner, then take a long bath because my God, that workout was more than I've had in a while."

"You rest up, April. I'm sure there is more to come."

April winced at the double entendre, and disconnected the phone. She was so looking forward to that bath. Maybe dinner afterwards? Perhaps a glass of wine? She deserved it.

-----

Three days later, April stood on the front porch of Paul Silverano's house, in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. It was an old house – one of a row of houses with walkups from the cobble tile road. It was pure history and must have cost a mint, and April wondered what it he'd paid for it and what the upkeep was.

She rang the bell and, clutching her folder of documents she had to deliver, considering if Jenny Silverano was even home. She looked up at the three-story building and wondered if it really took that long to get from the top to the bottom. 

She was about to ring the doorbell a second time when the door opened, and there was Jenny Silverano, in workout clothes, huffing and puffing and with a scowl on her face.

"Well, well, it's Barbie the PA. What ya doin' hanging around here, Paris Hilton?" Jenny asked, sarcastically. 

April smiled hesitantly back, the smile of someone who is determined to be nice even if she doesn't understand why someone is mean back. She still hadn't quite sussed out Jenny. In the meantime, she had a job to do.

"Good evening, Mrs. Silverano. I'm sorry to bother you at home. As you know, Paul is in conference today and I was..."

"Mary, call me Jenny. I think you've earned that right. We've spoken enough on the phone," interrupted Jenny. She was brusque even when she was saying something nice.

"Ah, yes. So, Jenny, um, I have some documents here that Paul will need to look over before tomorrow's negotiations. It seemed best to drop them here so he has enough time to examine them before speaking tomorrow."

Jenny eyed April dubiously and said, "You wanna come in? I'm done with the exercising. Quite frankly I could do with a vodka tonic. Yeah, I know, missing the point but fuck it. It's been a long day. You want one?"

April was taken aback. This was the first nice thing Jenny Silverano had said to her, and honestly, the idea of a vodka tonic was appealing. Jenny didn't even wait around to hear her reply before she turned and walked inside.

"Sure, why not? Get a load off and all that," she said to Jenny's retreating back, as she entered the house.

April looked around. It was tastefully decorated, pictures on the walls of the kids, family time, all the usual stuff. The furniture was also tasteful – which surprised April given her impression of Jenny to date – but also expensive, in keeping with the neighborhood they lived in..

"You want lime in yours?" Jenny asked over her shoulder as she busied herself at the bar.

"Yes, thanks, that would be nice," replied April, looking around the living room. There was a grandfather clock against one wall and a full marble fireplace took up another wall, with a painting of Jenny and Paul Silverano on their wedding day above it. There were two couches and an easy chair, deep pile carpet and no less than three sets of fresh flowers on various side tables, which made the room smell summery.

Jenny turned and handed April her drink. April noted they it was an actual martini glass and the drink came complete with an olive. When she tasted it, it was perfectly balanced. 'Another secret talent for Jenny,' she thought. 

"Ahhh, yes, just what the doctor ordered," gasped Jenny, taking a long drag from hers.

She gestured and April sat down on one of the two couches, as Jenny sat opposite her. "So. Documents? Couldn't you have just emailed them?" Jenny asked.

"These have confidential marked on them. I can't email them, only deliver them in person," answered April, putting down the drink and placing the folder on the coffee table. "To be honest, I don't really think there's any thing that confidential in them, but you know what these government agencies are like. They'd make the toilet paper confidential if they could."

Jenny was taking a drink as April said this and she gagged and spat some of it across the room, and then laughed.

"Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Those men and their fragile egos. It's all about what they know that other people don't. They just don't get that most of the time, the things that they are know are things that no one else cares about."

April smiled back and took and other sip of her drink and looked around. "Lovely house."

Jenny made a sour face. "It is, no question. Bitch to keep up though. So much cleaning and all that. I hate cooking. We so need a housekeeper here – I'm just too busy to do it and who the hell enjoys all that menial shit anyway, but who do you hire? I mean really? Paul was supposed to take care of that, but like most things husbandly, he's just dropped it on the floor."

April didn't know how to answer this without confrontation, and she had a part to play of sincere PA, so she just nodded and took another sip.

She felt relaxed, which surprised her given her trepidation about Jenny. Jenny had an odd expression on her face; she appeared to be studying her. Jenny noticed April's stare and said, "Oh sorry. I was just checking you out. I was curious."

"Curious about what?" asked April. She frowned; she'd slurred her words.

"About what he sees in you," answered Jenny, taking another sip of her drink. "I mean, my husband has high standards. If he fucked you, he must really have wanted you."

April's eyes widened, and she was started to stand up but her legs were rubbery.

"I...er... I don't think...I don't think that's..." she got out before she collapsed down back in the chair again. Something was wrong; she wasn't in control as she should have been.

Jenny got up and came and sat down beside her. "Look, bitch. I'm not stupid. I know what he likes and what he gets up to and how he reacts, and how he behaves afterwards. You fucked him when I went home that night. Don't deny it. I know. A wife knows."

April looked at her desperately, trying to come up with the sentence that would make it all right, and failing miserably.

"Oh hush. It's ok. I can understand why. You are a hot one. But I think I deserve to know, don't you? What he got? After all, fair is fair."

April just sat there, unable to move or think. Jenny leaned over and reached out and stroked April's hair, pulling her in for a hug.

"There, there, little Mary slut. It's ok. We'll make it ok." With no warning, Jenny grabbed a fist full of April's hair, yanked and yanked her head back. As she did that, Jenny leaned in and mashed her mouth down on April's, kissing her hard, tongues and all.

Two things happened. The first is that the sudden pain brought April's senses back instantly – whatever Jenny had slipped in her drink, its effect was undone for a second by the violence and adrenaline the kiss generated and the second was that April just decided in that split second to go with it, and kissed Jenny back. 

Jenny was a damn good kisser. Just enough power and force, with the control of April's head to make it interesting, but soft enough and lithe enough with her tongue to get under April's skin and get her hot.

They made out for a minute or two before they broke apart, breathing heavily. April looked at Jenny, who smirked and said, "Oh come on. I barely put a drop of a roofie in your drink. It would have barely made a difference. You kissed me because you wanted to. And why not? You've already had my husband, and we'll talk about that later. Now it's my turn. I want what he had. So come on, bitch, show me what you've got."

April was pissed at herself. She knew better than to accept a drink she hadn't watched being made, particularly from a woman she knew to have 'issues' with her. But this was also a golden opportunity to figure out what Jenny's deal was. She mentally flipped a coin and decided to see where this let.




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 03



She leaned in and April let it happen again. Jenny ran her hands over April's breasts, and started kissing her neck, up and down. April loved that – it was pure luck that Jenny had hit on one of her personal hot spots, but she had and April started to get wet. She might not have gotten pillow talk about of Paul, but she might out of Jenny. With that justification, she surrendered to what would come.

Jenny was different from her husband. If anything, she was far more forceful. She controlled April with touch and small sharp gestures – when licking April's nipples; she would suddenly bite one, gently. She bit April's neck sharply enough to make April inhale.

She gave April a hickey – something April only realized afterwards and when she protested, Jenny sneered and said, "You're mine, bitch. And I'm marking my territory."

She made April get naked, while shoving her fingers in her panties the whole time. She was playing with her pussy lips and clit, making April shudder as she disrobed, looking her right in the eyes the whole time. When April was fully naked, Jenny withdrew her fingers, licked them, and rubbed them all over April's lips.

As before with Paul, April noticed that everything was done to her, not with her. Any time she reached out to touch Jenny, her hands were slapped away. At one point Jenny had April over her lap, spanking her and saying, "This. Will. Teach. You. To. Leave. Other. People's. Husbands. Alone." After every third spank, she'd run her fingers up April's thighs, sink them deep into her pussy, wiggle the hand around, then remove it and start the spanking again.

April was surprised at how she was reacting. She was wet beyond belief. Her whole submission act was certainly getting a work out.

Finished with spanking, Jenny grabbed April by the hair and forced her to walk to the bedroom upstairs. The Silveranos had a large four-poster bed. Jenny pulled open the closet, went inside and came out with some leather strips with chains on them. She made April sit up and attached a leather choker around her neck, with the word "slut" picked out in silver letters. Attached were two chains, each with a handcuff on the end. Jenny clicked them on April's hands, leaving her with restricted range of motion. April sat there and let her do it, reasoning that objecting at this point would end the scene, and she needed to see it through. 

Jenny produced more chains – this time finer ones, with heavy clips on the end. She clipped one end of each chain to April's nipples, making her gasp with the initial pain, then wrapped each chain around one of the posts on each side. April was now effectively restrained – she had range of motion on the bed, but couldn't leave, nor could she move her hands enough to remove the clips on her nipples.

She was pretty well tied up, and then Jenny went to town on her. Jenny tore her own clothes off, pushed April back and then sat on her face, reverse cowgirl style.

"Right,bitch, this is where you pay the piper. Get me off, or I'll make your life a misery for the next few hours."

April was presented with Jenny dripping wet and shaved pussy in her face, and April's hands were in the perfect place to pull Jenny's lips apart, as she dove her tongue in.

Over the next hour, Jenny came three times, and April didn't at all. It didn't take her long to understand that Jenny was a master at getting a girl almost there and then backing off. She fingered April, and stopped when April was on the point of coming. She sixty-nined with April and did the same thing. She even ground April's pussy into hers, climaxing right before April was about to, and stopping.

By the end of it, April was begging her to let her come. She couldn't touch herself, but every touch from Jenny was like liquid fire on her skin.

It was while she was begging for it that Paul walked into the room.

There was silence for a second, then Jenny shouted "Welcome home, dear!" Her voice dripped with venom as she said it.

Paul stopped and stared. The tenting in his pants betrayed his arousal at the scene in front of him, but there was silence as everyone considered what they were going to do next.

Jenny spoke first. "Yes, I was just putting your slut through her paces. She has some talent, but she needs more training."

Paul replied, "My slut? One night hardly makes her mine." He didn't even try and deny it, noticed April. This had happened before.

Jenny grimaced back at him with that twisted one side smile of someone who was laughing at you, not with you. "Well, I thought I'd take her for a spin. She got me off, but I can tell her heart isn't in it."

"Do you care?" replied Paul, taking off his jacket and throwing it on a chair.

"Not really," admitted Jenny. "I got off, so who cares?"

April's eyes went from one to the other during the exchange, like a tennis match, watching their interaction.

Paul looked over at April, who was still stuck on the bed, chains everywhere, legs splayed and pussy on display.

Jenny followed his eyes and said, "So, you wanna fuck her again? She's gasping for it. I've been very careful about not letting her get off. Wanna do her? I'd love to watch you..."

Paul smiled his savage-dog smile, without taking his eyes off April and said, "I thought you'd never ask," and started taking his clothes off.

April said, "Wait a moment, don't I get a say..." before she was interrupted by Jenny.

"Shut up, bitch. You lost your rights in this the moment you touched my husband's cock."

April had to make a choice at that moment. The restraints she was in were more of the kind that looked good but weren't really going to stop someone determined to get out of them. They were the kind of thing bought at the sex shop as a gag gift, rather than the heavy-duty leather restraints of the committed bondage enthusiast. They were enough to hold her in place and she'd have to really pull, but if she really wanted out, April could probably do it. And, at root, she had both of them by the short and curlies – a fast blood test would reveal the drugs in her system and Jenny would have a fast trip to the clink. She even had a test in the false bottom of her handbag, if only she could get to it.

But did she want that? It was just sex, and this is what she was trained for. Seeing how they worked together would be revealing, so on balance, she decided to continue going along. Plus she already knew Paul was a good fuck, so what the hell.

When Paul Silverano climbed up on her and without any preamble sank his hard dick into her sopping pussy, April came almost instantly. She was primed, hot, and desperate to be given what she needed, and Paul gave it to her. 

Jenny sat on the bed next to them, encouraging Paul to "Give it to the bitch. Fuck her, fuck her good. Make her come, the little whore,", holding her open for him and more.

For the next two hours, they both used April. She was fucked, made to lick both cock and pussy, forced to rim Jenny for almost ten minutes straight, then played with Jenny's tits while she deep throated Paul. They called her names, slapped her tits and ass, made her say the vilest things and treated her like the ultimate sex toy.

By the end of the session, Paul had come three times, once in Jenny and twice in April, once in her pussy and once in her ass.

After the ass fucking, Jenny had pushed her head under April's ass and proceeded to lick the cum as it dripped down her crack, then pulled her head out and jumped up to April and kissed her hard, sharing the cum. As she pulled back, a stream of cum spread between them, and Jenny had smiled and kissed April even harder. 

For April's part, she had marveled at how Jenny and Paul had managed to work together. When Paul was fucking April, Jenny was egging him on and helping out, massaging his balls or fingering April. While Jenny was playing with April or making April make her cum, Paul helped by fucking Jenny, or suggesting new things they could do.

For the sex part, she was exhausted. She had played the part and played it well, but she was tired and wanted no more of this. In some ways, like the evening with Paul, it was refreshing – no requirement on her part but showing up and being naked and coming like an express train – but in terms of who she was, she needed to be involved and an active participant in the sex. 

Still, it had been good, and she could even forgive the small amount of date rape drug she had been given to get it started, although it was very indicative of who Jenny Silverano really was at heart. You could take the woman out of the Brooklyn, but you couldn't take the Brooklyn out of the woman. As she climbed into her clothes, she thought about the evening, everything she had learned, and decided she had a plan. One that would help out the Silveranos' marriage, and hopefully complete her assignment, now that the DNA issue seemed to be a non-issue.

-----

"It's a wonderful day in the city," said April, sitting on her couch at home. She had called Ingrams operations at the usual time and Desirea answered.

"Hello, April. How's it going?"

"It's going. I think I have a much better understanding of the relationship issues now. I suspected, but now I've pretty much confirmed that Paul and his wife Jenny are both dominant personalities. The fireworks I'm seeing here is that each is trying to control the other – Jenny is overt and Paul is covert – and to some degree supressed, but they are both doing it."

"Interesting...I look forward to your report. I'm presuming you found this out in the old-fashioned way?"

April laughed and said, "You might say that."

"How far did they go? You aren't hurt, are you?"

"Oh no, they are more verbal. There's some restraint but nothing beyond a gentle slap. I can handle that just fine. If they'd have gone too far, I'd have stopped it. It would have been awkward, but I could have if need be."

"Good. So, now you know this, what are you going to do about it? Restructuring a dual dominant relationship is, well, you know it's hard. Takes forever."

"I know. We don't have that time. I do have a plan. I'm going to give them a muse."

"Third-party focus? Good call. You need our help with anything?"

"I don't think so. I think I can handle this."

"You go, girl. Same time tomorrow?"

"Talk to you then, Des."



Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 04



Chapter 4

April studied the interior of the building. It was new and old at the same time – recently built but constructed in an old style – high molded ceilings, ornate murals, wall sized paintings of various turn of the century aristocrat types, resplendent in hunting garb, or ball gowns, high wood paneling on the walls, even a few stuffed animal heads. If April had ever been in an old English Gentlemen's club, at the turn of the century, she would have recognized the blueprints for the building she was in. Dark, stuffy and aching with memories the building was too young to have. She sat in the foyer, in a high-backed red leather chair, looking around at all the other leather couches scattering the room, the small side tables, the three different fire places – all lit– and various butler types wandering around refilling port glasses and looking disdainfully at her while she waited.

She'd hesitated when entering the building, since it was a standalone building, very few windows and it looked compellingly desolate. It was new and stood alone which meant that whoever owned it had money; land was at a premium in Washington DC. It was a forbidding building and she checked the address she'd been given twice before walking up past the immaculate front gardens. 

Over huge oak doors was a stone carving, with a coat of arms woven in, and the words 'auctoritate sua remuneratio' engraved on it. She pulled out her iPhone and used Google Translate to convert the Latin to English. It translated as 'Authority is its own reward.' Fitting for a group called the 'Storm Clouds Gentlemen's Club'.

April had entered and given the name of her contact to the first uniformed person who had stopped to ask her business. While she was doing that, her phone pinged and the person she was there to meet texted to ask if she'd arrived yet. April replied she had and was told to wait.

So April sat down and waited, studying her surroundings. The heady musk of pipe smoke was in the air – a building you could smoke inside of in Washington, DC, was a rarity, but here people were puffing on pipes, smoking cigars and one person even had a hookah next to his chair. It was silent apart from the occasional cough or rustle of someone turning a page. 

April waited for several minutes, ostensibly using her iPhone in that interesting way that modern women do, as a mirror, where they turn on the front facing camera and check their makeup in the image. In actual fact, she was taking pictures of the immediate area. Right across from her was a large wall painting, depicting a hunting scene, where a small man was being hunted by riders – both male and female – on horseback. It was an interesting image, but its position bothered her. Only someone sitting in this chair, in this foyer, would see it.

She'd already noticed that while the rooms had motion detectors, they were too high up and at the wrong angle to do the job. Motion detectors have a limited angle of view and area distance they work in and when they are up twenty feet off the ground, this particular set – designed for small house observation – would be completely ineffective. They were obviously there more for show that actual usage, which did beg the question, why? She had also noticed that all the butlers had earpieces. That, in itself, wasn't out of the ordinary – lots of restaurants give the wait staff walkie-talkies to seat people and so on. What was peculiar was that this particular model was the same military grade model that Ingrams used on occasion.

This whole building screamed "Wrong!" at her, although she couldn't pin down why beyond the things she'd already noticed.

-----


Behind the painting there was a room. It was filled with expensive electronics and displays, like every security room always is. The painting itself was faux and one sided – some of the newest technology that made opaque textures one sided. The room had three full time security guards in it, and they were observing April as closely as possible, even to the point of running facial recognition software against her image.

One man was whispering quietly into a mike, "Yes. She's here for one of the cattle. I don't know, sir. No, she just came in and asked. Yes, we can hold her. We can hustle her into a side meeting room without the clients being aware, if that's what you want...Yes. I'll send a couple of the Buttle Boys. Yes sir."

He nodded at another guard, who picked up a phone.

-----

April was still looking around when a side door opened in the wood paneling and a small, elfin young woman came out. She was nervous, clutching a large bag to her chest. With her short dark hair and pixie features, the girl looked like a young Audrey Hepburn. She looked around and spied April and made a bee line for her in that slightly desperate way people do when they really want to run but understand they are being watched. She moved as fast as she could without running. 

"You're Mary right? We need to go. Now," the girl said when she reached April .

April stood up and said, "Lara? Are you sure we need to rush?"

"Yes. We need to go. They won't be happy. We should go now. I'll do whatever you want, we just need to go." Lara gave April a tight smile while her eyes darted around 

"I don't want to get you into trouble—" said April.

Lara grabbed April's hand hustled them to the door. Before they reached it, two butlers appeared out of nowhere. Lara stopped abruptly as she noticed them, and looked imploringly at April. April could only look puzzled, having no idea what was going on. The stares they were getting did make her palm itch and she did wonder if she was going to have to fight her way out for a second. She kept her hand on her handbag, ready to push past the false bottom and grab the taser she had stashed there. It would only take care of one of them, but it would at least be one dealt with.

-----


The men in the security booth looked back at the man who'd just come in behind them. They were looking out at the one way images behind the large pictures, and also on the monitors. One of them was whispering into a mike, talking to the two butlers.

"Hold them, don't let them..."

"No." said the commanding presence behind them. "Let them go. I know her. We will gain more from watching. Let them leave."

The man with the mike didn't even look back, he just whispered, "Let them go. All clear."

The man in the shadows nodded and leaned forward into the light. When the light fell on him, it revealed the chiseled features of Gene Rainer.

-----


April let out a slow breath as the two men opened the doors. Lara pulled April forward and the women left. April nodded to the men, who bowed slightly. As they got out into the sunshine, Lara winced and put her hands over her eyes.

"Are you all right?" April asked.

Lara shaded her eyes with her hand and looked at April. "Sorry, it's been a while since I've been outside. It's so bright. Is your car here?"

"Sure," replied April. "Just over here. Look, what is going on?"

"Nothing," said Lara, as she again tugged at April's hand. "I'll just feel better once we get in your car and are away."

"Did they hurt you or something?" asked April as she popped the locks on her Honda.

"Or something," Lara answered, opening the passenger door and sliding in.

April got in the other side and turned on the engine and pulled out into traffic.

"Right, we are away. Speak," she told Lara, reflecting on the events that had drawn her here.

-----


After her unexpected threesome with the Silveranos, April had gone home and spent all night revising her profiles. She'd spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with Ingrams HQ and Desirea in particular, and they'd agreed that the best thing they could do under the circumstances was to build up the relationship between Jenny and Paul as much as possible, since there was obviously something else going on with the DNA results. 

Were the kids Silverano's or not? They didn't know, they weren't going to know and so they had to deal with the situation as it was. Currently the situation was stable, but without a clear understanding of what was going on, they had to focus on the relationship and get that as stable as possible, so if the possible infidelity and questioned paternity came out, the relationship had the strongest chance of survival.

There were obviously issues with the marriage – the shouting matches on the phone were testament to that, and now she'd discovered they competing sexual drives of both Jenny and Paul, April was even more surprised that the marriage had lasted as long as it had.

April had made the diagnosis that Jenny was a bully and a social climber and that was probably had it's roots in the place they'd all come from – darkest Brooklyn. She wasn't as professionally accomplished as her husband, and as a result, she got her jollies from the demeaning of others, since that's what she saw other wives – that usually came from old money – doing. But it was all masking a deep-seated sense of inferiority that she was overcompensating for. Paul, well, he is both smarter and more emotionally stunted than Jenny. He'd realized what he had inside, looked around at the world and the way it worked, and buried it deep. He played the part of the laid back negotiator, when internally, he was anything but. He didn't face his demons or find a way to express it in society, as Jenny did, even if her way was personally less than pleasant. But at root, Jenny's expression was actually healthier for her state of mind than Paul's was. If the wheels hadn't already fallen off their marriage, it was obvious they were going to. And when they did, it would be explosive.

Given the alpha nature of both players in this relationship, what was needed was a beta player. A toy. Sexual plaything. April had already played that part, unwittingly, and witnessed the results. Neither partner would give an nch to the other, and so they both needed someone on whom they could exercise those alpha tendencies.

In many Dominant/submissive relationships, the dominant one was often a latent sub. Often they required too much trust and acceptance to let that side of them out, and in some cases, it was too tightly wound to ever come out, if it was there in the first place. In this case, both April and Desirea agreed that both Paul and Jenny were competing, and any sign of weakness in the other would be viewed as just that – weakness. Not vulnerability or acceptance, but weakness, a weakness that their own dominance would overrule. They couldn't be a submissive for each other, because that would end their game.

But that was also destroying them. They needed an outlet for those power games, and so April had decided to give them one.

What they needed was a consensual plaything. Someone willingly along for the ride, a submissive would give them what they needed, and also get what they needed, too.

April had considered looking for a male submissive, but she didn't have enough data to know if Paul would go for that. However, she did know that Jenny liked to dominate women, so a woman it was.

Given the need for a specific type of individual, needing this kind of consensual relationship, April did what anyone in North America would do in that situation. She put an ad on Craigslist.

She received several answers and spent a few days exchanging emails, trying to get a feel for the person on the other end. In the end, she settled on one, where the girl indicated she was in a situation she wanted to get out of, was looking for a new position, of live in help – 'with benefits'. She wanted to be maid / housekeeper to a couple, in all the ways you could be. She was submissive and docile and desperately in need of control, dominance and shelter. She seemed perfect, and both the pictures supplied – taken after April asked for specific poses and holding up a local newspaper – looked appropriate and the specific questions asked were answered in a way that satisfied April that this woman was for real.

They had arranged to meet the following day, where April would pick her up and take her for an 'interview'. April had smiled at that. She had a damn good idea what that meant. And it would be nice, for once, to be on the other side of that coin.

So she'd taken the day off – her first personal day in almost five weeks – and gone to pick up Lara.

-----


Lara lowered her eyes.

"I worked in the kitchens in that place. They have a dormitory downstairs. I...there were people there, they weren't...nice. I know I like that sometimes, but it needs to be done in a loving situation. I need to feel like those who...use me, they care about me. The people there...they didn't care. But they don't want to let you go. I had get out. I had to leave. I needed someone to come get me. I wouldn't have had the courage to go otherwise." Her words tumbled out.

April looked at Lara with concern said, "Did someone hurt you? Did they abuse you?"

Lara kept her eyes down and answered in a small voice, "No, not...like that. They just...weren't nice. You could see it. I... it's not what I wanted. But I had nowhere else to go. You sounded nice in the emails. I need to be around people who will...treat me better."

April snorted. "Yes, that I quite understand. What's your story, Lara? Why don't you have anywhere to go?"

In the same quite voice, that was all one note, Lara said, "I made a mistake. I cheated on my husband. Found out some things about myself that, well, he didn't like. I don't really blame him. He threw me out, I ended up at Storm Clouds. I have very little that is mine any more – I didn't take anything with me. I didn't deserve that. I betrayed a man who loved me and trusted me and I needed the penance. I thought I could start again there, but it became clear it was a dead end. I needed the courage to leave, to have something to go to. You are still interested, right? Now you've seen me?" she added the last line in a worried tone.

"You're fine, Lara. Exactly what I was looking for. Is that everything you have?" April said nodding at the bag that Lara still clutched.

She nodded back.

"We need to do something about that. Before the interview, let's go shopping."

And they did. April took Lara first to Walmart, where they did the basics – underwear, training shoes, some clothes, new toothbrush and some makeup, some costume jewelry, and a new set of luggage to put it all in. Lara protested the whole time that she wouldn't be able to pay April back. April just smiled and said, "We'll work something out."

Next they went to a mall. They hit Victoria's Secret, Frederick's, Claire's, a beauty store, she even took her to Brookstone and bought her a modern looking vibrator.

After the shopping, they returned to April's temporary apartment. Lara entered, hesitantly. Once inside, she wandered around, touching and studying the furnishings.

"It's nice," she said. April made yet another mental note to thank the setup crew at Ingrams – the apartment looked lived in, had pictures on the walls, even some of her, taken from her old Facebook page, before it had been excised clean of all revealing pictures. There was dirt under the couch, small rips in some of the bed clothes, a layer of dirt around the tub – All the touches that said 'Someone lives here.' She hadn't seen the point in it but now, bringing someone in like this, she thanked the Gods of Preparation. 

"It's ok. Now, we need to be clear. You understand that I'm the intermediary, right? That I'm not looking for me? I'll run you through your paces, but I'm looking for friends of mine. A couple. They need some home help, and a submissive at the same time? This will be an in-house situation, as housekeeper, with benefits on the side. Are you sure you are ok with that?"

April could see that Lara was still unsure, but she could also see the resignation on her face.

"I...yes, I understand."

"Ok, but more than that, I want you to understand some other things. These people will never harm you physically, unless you indicate to them that it is something you want, ok? There will always be a safe word, and if at any time you feel that you need to get away or this is not what you want, I'm going to give you a throw-away phone with my number in it that you hide and only use to call me, ok? I am always here for you, day or night. I will always be watching and available to you if and when you need me, you understand? I know that you are moving into a an unknown situation, and that has to be scary."

April also made a mental note to look into the Storm Clouds Gentlemens' club in more detail. She needed to know what had happened that made Lara so willing to take a leap into the unknown in quite the way she had. Whatever it was, it was scary enough that she was prepared to leap out of the frying pan and into the fire, all from a Craigslist ad. That meant she must be running from something pretty awful, and April felt like she owed it to Lara to find out what. There might be other Laras there who needed help.

"Do you understand?" April continued. "I want you to be safe. Yes, I'm sure the submissive situation will be great, but we both know that a true sub's happiest when there is trust on both sides. You have no idea who these people are, and yet, here you are, willing to take a leap into the unknown. You are either very brave or very scared of what you left behind. Or both. Either way, that is over. You are safe now. I want you to understand that. If this doesn't work out, I will find another place for you. Do you understand, Lara? You're safe here."

April was making her voice and timbre as slow and low as she could go, trying to get through the darting eyes that indicated Lara's mental state of worry, resignation and fear at that moment. Hearing that last sentence, Lara turned her gaze to April and she physically saw Lara That was step one. Trust would take time, both for her and for the Silveranos, but if they gave it a chance, this might actually work.

Lara nodded and gave her first genuine smile. April realized how pretty her elfin face was when she did that, and couldn't help smiling back. 

"I understand, Miss Mary. Thank you for helping me out. I honestly don't know what I'd have done if... I just...thank you. I feel better already. I just need...to be wanted and useful and worth something. Isn't it strange that I feel useful and worth something when people are treating me as though I am not?" 

Lara turned and walked into the kitchen, dropping that last sentence over her shoulder. April thought about it, and said, "Well, yes and no. It's a bit ironic, but it's the dichotomy of Submission and Dominance. Both sides need the other, but in very different ways. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it, honestly. You know what you are, just relax and accept it. But don't ever not have respect for yourself. 

"You are worthy and helpful and useful, and just because you get off on people humiliating you doesn't mean you aren't. It just means you have... particular tastes. It doesn't mean anything else, other than that. Respect for yourself is something completely different, and I think you've already got some of that, or you wouldn't have left that last situation."

Lara, now behind the kitchen counter and looking at the coffee maker, smiled at April over the counter. "You are nice. And smart. I think I'm going to like this."

April nodded and said, in as cold a voice as possible, "Ok, nice time over. Get in the bedroom, do the makeup, and I want you in the Fredericks stuff, with the heels. Get moving. I don't like to be kept waiting. I said move it, bitch."

Lara almost jumped out of her skin, but then lowered her eyes and said, "Of course, Mistress." And she ran into the open bedroom door, dragging her new suitcase behind her.




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 04



April sighed. She didn't enjoy this. She could do it, but it wasn't where she got her jollies. She knew her friend Megan enjoyed this, but April found that she didn't have the same kind of sadistic imagination that you needed to have to be a really successful dominant. 

But that wasn't possible here, so this was necessary.

Fifteen minutes later, Lara opened the bedroom door and came out, eyes down. She walked over to April and curtseyed.

April had gotten herself a beer and was sitting at the kitchen table checking her phone. She looked Lara over, critically.

Lara wore a stereotypical French maid's outfit – all satin and black, with a white apron. She had made herself up in an almost whoreish way – too much rouge, eye shadow and lipstick. To April's surprise, Lara made it work, whereas most women looked like they have on a disguise, or are trying to hide something when they were made up like that April started to wonder if she might have hit the jackpot here.

Along with the maid's outfit, Lara wore stockings and garters, and four-inch spiked heels. The skirt barely covered her stocking tops – if she bent over, anyone could see them.

She had on a chain choker with the word 'Bitch' picked out in rhinestones, and matching earrings.

"Hmm. Passable I guess. Wait, is that a run in that stocking?"

Lara looked down and moved her legs, looking at them. "Er... I can't see one, Mistress."

"Don't contradict me, bitch. On your hands and knees. Crawl to me. Slowly. Make eye contact. I want to see how sorry you are."

April tried not to laugh at how ridiculous the whole situation felt, but she understood the need to keep the atmosphere tense. She had to see how Lara would react for real to ensure she was what Paul and Jenny needed. 

Lara immediately got on her hands and knees and crawled towards April, keeping eye contact and having a wicked smile on her face. She was clearly getting off on all this She arrived at April's feet and looked up at April. "I'm so sorry, Mistress, please forgive me," she murmured.

April pursed her lips and picked up the paddle from the table in front her of her She spread her legs, pulled up her skirt – and Lara saw she was not wearing panties – and said, "Here's the deal, slut. I want to come. And you are going to make me. Twice. You have thirty minutes. If I don't come twice, you get the paddle on your ass. You understand me? Thirty minutes. Starting now."

With that April turned off her iPhone, put it down on the table, and holding the paddle with the other hand and leaning back and gesturing for Lara to get started.

Lara was lucky. April was extremely turned on and had been all day. She got her first orgasm within the first five minutes. The next, well, she was feeling naughty, like she needed to be punished. The woman sitting in front her made her feel safe and that feeling made her act out even more. She knew this woman wouldn't hurt her any more than she was comfortable with, so she deliberately failed in making her cum, and then, well, she'd take what was coming to her. She was wet with anticipation already.

-----


For a change, April was running out of doors. She couldn't make her calls to the office in the apartment with Lara around. She'd been pleasantly surprised at how much she enjoyed running in the open air, having to dodge around obstacles and people – at how much she had to look at her feet as she ran, unlike when you run on a treadmill.

After running three miles, she stopped, found a bench to sit on, pulled out her phone and called Ingrams HQ. She waited till she was connected to the ops room and started out with the all clear call sign.

"It's a beautiful day in the city," she said, first thing.

"It certainly is," replied a voice with a Scottish burr to it.

"Dermot! How nice to hear your voice," said April, delighted.

"I happened to be in the neighborhood. Thought I'd take the call. How goes it, April?"

"Well, I have the sub we needed. That's all taken care of."

"I spoke with Desirea about it. She seems to second your approach here. The marriage needs a supplement and she thinks this is it. At least in the short term."

"Yeah, I don't honestly know what else to do. This will at least get them talking about shared experiences and the girl needed a place to go. Actually, while we are on that subject, Dermot, what do you know about the Storm Clouds Gentlemen's club? That's where she came from and she's told me a few disturbing things about it."

"Yes, I've no doubt. It's part gentleman's club, based on some concept of what such a club was back at the turn of the nineteenth century, and part S&M club. Lots of the members there are active doms or subs. They do a sideline in couples that are into that. It's very private, very quiet and only appeals to the top one-percenters as clients. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised at her coming from an environment like that. Are you very sure that she's up for this? We are messing with her life. What's her name again? Lara?"

"Yes, I think so. From what she's told me, she needed to get out and this will be a far better environment for her. Interfacing with their kids, stable household, and she has the deferential personality that they need to assert dominance over."

"Ok, well, if you are sure."

"I'm going to introduce them tomorrow, at dinner. Now, what have we got on the DNA testing? Anything on the biogenetics guy in Palo Alto?"

"Yeah, that. Ok. So we got the guy at MIT to look over Brad Tomlinson's work. Best he can tell, he is working on DNA manipulation, but it's more for cloning purposes. From what I can understand – and I'm very much the layman here – he's looking for some way to detect and repair busted DNA that occurs during cloning. It's got some technical name that I can't remember. 

"Anyway, when pressed, our researcher basically said that what Tomlinson is doing is not remolding DNA so it would pass a test when it shouldn't, but the research is analogous to that. It's possible it could be redirected along those lines, but that's not what the research is about. The example I was given that if you were doing research to make rocket engines, while those engines are directly pointed at getting a man into space, the research could be used to make missile engines too. They aren't the same – there are different requirements and payloads and weights and boring stuff like that, but the two are analogous."

April digested this and then cut to the chase. "So what does that mean? Have these DNA tests been modified or what?"

Dermot sighed and said, "Honestly, April, I don't know. It's possible that the test results were modified in some way. If they were, we don't know how. And there's a prevailing feeling here that it doesn't really matter."

April nodded, even though Dermot couldn't see her. "Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Looking at the bigger picture, the big fear here seems to have been avoided. How, I don't know. But he's still good for negotiations and while we've discovered other cracks, I think the plan in place should deal with those, at least in the short term, and also put them in a place where longer term there is communication and a stable place to start conversations."

"Our thinking exactly. Desirea almost used the same words," replied Dermot.

"So, I hook up Lara and get the hell out of dodge?" asked April,.

"Yeah. I don't think you can just walk out. I spoke to Mercer earlier today and he said you'll need to give a week's notice. That should be it, though."

"Fine. I can do that today. I can't say I'm happy though, Dermot. I wish we understood what was going on with the DNA samples. Were they contaminated or messed with or what?"

"I wish it was clearer too, April, but also understand – you've done a great job. Your analysis has been spot on, everyone here is in total agreement with your decisions and your improvisation has been first rate. You've done the overall task we were hired for. Paul Silverano will be in a stable place to finish negotiations, you've uncovered issues within his marriage and you've put a plan into place to cope. There's not much else that can really be expected of you. Close down the operation and come back and have a rest, ok?"

April could see the smile through the phone line. "Will do, Chief. I'll check in again tomorrow."

"Speak to you then, April. Have a good evening." 

April put down the phone and spent the next five minutes watching people walk around, engaging in all the mundane things that people do while living their lives, and reflected on her choice of career.

After watching a family walk past, a little boy on his father's shoulders and the mother chasing after a little girl intent on feeding the ducks at the park's lake, she got up, set up her running app and started jogging back to the temporary apartment.

-----


April and Lara were fashionably late to dinner. April had fussed over Lara's outfit, and Lara had been letting her. The past few days had been interesting, April considered. In the four days that Lara had been residing in April's temporary apartment, she had proven her worth as a housekeeper. The apartment was spotless and April had been extremely thankful that it had been so well prepared. Lara had even tried her hand at cooking – April realized how nice it was to come home to a place that was full of cooking smells, when she wasn't doing the cooking.

The food had been ok – not great, but to April, anything edible that she didn't have to cook got a passing grade. In return, she'd started to teach Lara about wine – what is was, how to drink it, the myths, how to recognize what it was you were drinking and so on.

And they'd had...moments. Lara had spent the nights in April's bed, and April had even taught her a few things. April had never had so many female-driven orgasms, and had dealt a few out herself. 

She'd learned that Lara came hardest when her hands were restrained, and she was fully dressed, and April just had her hand in Lara's panties, and was talking about events of the day, not referencing what she was doing at all. She'd come home, Lara would have a drink ready for her, often dressed in the maid's outfit, she'd sit down in the big easy chair to take the load off, and Lara would come over and sit in her lap, slowly kissing her neck. April would just talk about her day, her one hand slowly creeping up Lara's leg, slowly up her skirt and into her panties. The first time she'd done it, she'd pushed Lara forward and used the excess tie from the apron to imprison her hands before she started her own hands' journey. The second day, Lara had just handed her handcuffs she had in her apron.

She'd learned that Lara squirmed and responded to her alternately playing with her clit, slowly and deliberately, then switching to fingers inserted – never more than three at a time, and also to a single finger inserted in her ass. Before she did that, she made Lara clean off her fingers and get it wet, ready for insertion. But Lara REALLY went wild when April did all three at once. It required some finesse of position, but she made it happen, and she gave Lara three orgasms in a row, each larger than the last.

They'd talked a lot more, and April had learned about how Lara had discovered her submissive side, to her husband's boss, of all people. Quite the cliché. How her husband had discovered it, beaten the boss into a coma, quit his job and turfed Lara out instantly. 

Lara had no family – her parents had died when she was thirteen and she had no other close family she knew of – and she'd literally had nowhere to go. She'd answered an ad on Craigslist, had three very strange interviews at the Storm Clouds club and ended up there, working as a waitress and in the kitchens. They had dormitories and she'd been allowed to stay there. She'd ended up servicing various members of the club, and some of them had been physically abusive. She'd enjoyed it to start with, until she realized that for them, this wasn't a game. It was about control and nothing else and it wasn't anything to do with give and take. She'd started to panic and needed to get out, and ended up answering April's ad.

The more April heard about the Storm Clouds club, the more she felt she needed to look into it at some point. Something was not quite right over there.

But right now, she needed to get this mission completed, which meant bringing Lara to Paul and Jenny Silverano. 

April had made the dinner reservation, made sure that Paul knew about it from her day at work, and then dressed up Lara and off they went to the very posh eatery near Arlington, in DC. She was taking a risk with what she had planned; it was a very public place – but she was sure that at least Jenny would go for it, and Paul too, probably. Paul and Jenny had no idea she was bringing a guest – it was all risk but April didn't see how else she could do this. She needed to make a splash.

They were shown to their seat by the maître d', who ogled them both before seating them. Paul and Jenny were already seated, but Paul stood up as they came to the table.

After the waiter had left with drink orders, April said, "Paul, Jenny, meet Lara. Lara, this is Jenny and Paul, the couple I told you about."

Looking puzzled, Paul nodded and held out his hand. "Nice to meet you Lara."

She took his hand and didn't meet his eyes as she shook it.

Jenny sat there, eyes darting between After a moment of silence, Jenny hissed, "Mary, what the fuck is this? Talk, Bitch, before I make you come over here and eat me under the table."

April's eyes flickered at Jenny for a second, and then she leaned forward and grabbed Jenny's hand. She dug her nails into Jenny's palm and squeezed. All the instruction and working out she'd done over the past few months suddenly came into play and she knew it hurt. Jenny's eyes bulged out and she stared at April in astonishment.

"That... hurts."

"It's meant to. What happened the other day was...exciting. Interesting. A once-in-a-lifetime thing. For me. I let it happen, you didn't impose it. Now understand this. If you disrespect me again, I will end you, and him. Do we understand each other, Jenny? Paul, Sit. Down," April said, in a low and steady voice, without even looking over at Paul, who had half-risen from his seat He sat back down.

Jenny looked at her, then back at her hand, which was going white, and then back at April, and she nodded.

"Good." April released her and leaned back. Jenny snatched back her hand and started rubbing it, unobtrusively. "Now," continued April, "we are here to have dinner, and I don't want this to be a tense affair. I have, after all, brought you a gift. Lara, show them."

Lara was wearing a black suit jacket and a black skirt that came to just above her knees. Only April knew that she wasn't wearing any panties, or a bra. The jacket was buttoned in one place and Lara, with a nervous smile, and after looking around to see if anyone could see, gently unbuttoned it and opened her jacket, so Paul and Jenny could see what was underneath.

Her breasts were bare, the only thing that sparkled was the nipple clamps with the chain between them. Lara glanced at April, who nodded. Lara licked a finger and ran it over a nipple. April nudged her leg and Lara closed her jacket as the waiter arrived with their drinks.

Jenny was mesmerized. 

April spun the wine around in her glass, getting air into it, and Lara did the same. They both took a sip and April crooked her eyebrow at Lara, who said, "Earthy. It's a merlot? Hint of...berry, some kind of berry I think?"

There was a sudden explosion of air from Silverano as he thumped his hand on the table as hard as he could without it actually making a sound, while furtively looking around.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing, Mary? What the fuck is this? This is a public place – it's a fucking top-of-the-line restaurant. I'm a chief negotiator for the U.S. Government and you bring this...this slut to the table? Showing her tits here? Are you trying to get me fired? Jesus H. Christ, woman." His eyes flashed with anger.

Jenny tore her eyes from Lara and looked at her husband and, with one hand, grabbed one of his, and the other vanished under the table.

Silverano's eyes suddenly bulged as she said, "Can it, Paul. It's all good. And don't tell me you aren't aroused...ooohh, yes you are, aren't you? You want this little bitch as much as I do. As long as we are careful, it's fine." She smiled lasciviously at Lara and said, "So tell us about yourself, hon. You're interested in the position we have available?"

Lara looked at April, who nodded and took another sip of her wine, watching Jenny and Paul. The latter was turning read and breathing quickly, as Jenny's hand remained under the table.

"Yes ma'am. My understanding is that you need a housekeeper? I can do that. I've been working for Ms. Hougham here for the past week and she's been...pleased. With my abilities. I understand this is an in-house position?"

Jenny licked her lips and replied, "Oh yes. Most assuredly. When can you start?"

Lara lowered her eyes to the plate on the table and said, "I am available now, ma'am." 

"In that case, I may need your assistance in the bathroom. Right now. Lets go, whore." Jenny snarled that last word, but in a way that was full of sexual promise rather than just cruel.

Lara glanced at April, who just smiled back at her. Jenny and Lara slidk their chairs away from the table and left, Jenny taking Lara's elbow to guide her.

Paul breathed a sigh of relief as Jenny got up. He'd been turning purple with her under-the-table ministrations, and was obviously relieved that she had left.

"So..." he said, toying with the knife and not meeting April's eyes.

"Paul, while they are gone, there are things to say. The first is an apology."

"Oh really?" said Paul, raising an eyebrow. "For what?"

"Well, for fucking your wife. I know it was quite a scene when you came home... I know we haven't talked about it. I know it led to things...good things I'm sure, but still, I was there and she had me at her mercy and, well, it's cheating. I'm sorry."

This was obviously more that Silverano had not expected. He didn't say anything for a moment, then picked up his wine glass, pretended to study it and took a sip. Then he said, "Well, I can't say I'm thrilled, but it's understandable and it's not like I can cast stones. And as you said, it led to...good things. Lets leave it at that." He smiled at her sincerely when he said that.

"I know. I just needed to say it. So the second thing. Another apology. For coming onto you in the first place. That was...unprofessional. I won't say it wasn't good, because it was, and god knows, I needed that. Oh and while we are there, you are very good, Paul. But still, you are a married man. I don't make a habit of going to bed with married men. The only reason Jenny got me was because of what we'd already done."

She crossed her fingers behind her when she uttered that huge lie. All part of the service.

He laughed at that. "Yeah, we are shits, no question there. Good shits, but shits. Look, Mary, I'm sure all this confession is good for your soul, but I'm more interested in what's going on here with that little toy you brought?"

April bit her lip. "Yes, well, we'll get to that. In the mean time, the last thing. I quit. Please accept tonight as my week's notice."

That stopped Silverano. The smile vanished and he just said, "Oh." Then, "Look if it's about the other night, we can work something out. You are one hell of a PA, Mary."

"Well, it is about the other night. It was fun and interesting and not something I've been a part of before, but it's not me. It never would be. You saw how I reacted to Jenny earlier. I can't...be a part of that. And seeing you every day, well that would just bring it all home. I've quit and I'm telling you I am quitting. I'll be around for a week, and you'll just get someone else from the pool in until your regular PA gets back. I need to move on. Do something different. And Lara, well, Lara is pretty much exactly what she looks like. She really has been house keeping for me, and she's such a submissive soul, well I couldn't help putting two and two together here. Think of her as a parting gift."




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 04



"And what's in it for you?" asked Silverano.

"Sorry?"

"Oh Mary. You show up here with this little sex toy and then tell me you're quitting. Why bother dropping her at our door? What's it to you?"

April had to be careful here – the weakest part of the whole plan was Silverano believing in her altruistic gesture. She knew she had Jenny – Jenny was more sexually charged and less likely to look for reasons she would take what was offered and enjoy it, but Paul Silverano, he was a negotiator. This was what he did – look for the reasons why people do what they do.

"What's it to you? I mean, seriously, what do you care? You'll owe me a favor. A man in a powerful position, owing me a favor, that's not a bad thing for a girl out in the big bad world, is it? Also... well, she needs a place. While she's been great helping me out, what she needs is not something I can give her, at least not like you can. I like Lara and she needs something good in her life. I pulled her out of something and I feel like I owe her, to get her someplace she can thrive. I just want her to be happy, and I can't do that for her."

Silverano studied her. She did her best to maintain an open face, and it wasn't that difficult because everything she had said was the truth, if not the whole truth. She met his eyes and they stared at each other until it became uncomfortable and she looked away, pretending embarrassment.

Silverano took in a deep breath and released it. "Ok," he said, "I don't totally buy it, but she does look fun, so ok. I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. Are you sure she's...what we need? Jenny and I? And what's her back story? Pretty little thing like that – surely she should be some suburban soccer mom?"

April hid a smile. She'd got him now. "Her backstory, well, she fucked up a good marriage when she discovered her own desires that she'd never acknowledged. She got thrown out, unsurprisingly, when her husband discovered her indulging in those desires. She's bummed around since then and got herself into some hot water and that's when I met her. I gave her a place to stay. That's as much as I can really tell you; if you want to know more, ask her. She'll tell you what she wants to. As for appropriate for what you and Jenny are looking for, oh yeah. Most definitely. No question there. She'll take all you dish out and ask for more. Don't hurt her though, do you understand? That is not part of the deal, and I will be around for her."

Silverano looked up when Jenny and Lara returned to the table and leapt up to pull out his wife's chair. As he did so, he winked at April and said, "Message received and understood."

Jenny sat down with a smug expression on her face as well as a receding flush. Lara hesitated until Jenny looked up and nodded at her, at which point she sat down.

"All good, dear?" asked Silverano in a weary voice.

"Oh yes. I'm sure Lara here will be a fine housekeeper. I was just...inspecting her credentials," replied Jenny, with an even larger smirk, if that was possible. "She definitely pays more than lip service to the role." 

Silverano just stared at her, then leaned in and said, "Again dear, this is a public place. I have a reputation to keep up. It's not going to go well if people are listening to you come hard in a bathroom stall at a top-rated restaurant. I mean for God's sake – I'm still sitting at the table."

Jenny just waved a hand at him. "Oh, be quiet. You'll get yours in a bit. Trust me, it's worth the wait. Mary, hon, thank you," she said, taking April's hand in hers. "I think this is going to work out for everyone." She stroked the back of April's hand, then leaned in and said, "You might want to sniff that hand. See if you can tell which one of us that is... She's got instructions to touch as many people tonight and transfer her scent as much as she can. I think this is going to be fun."

Jenny leaned back, picked up her wine glass and took a long drag, looking April directly in the eye.

April rolled her eyes at Jenny and turned to Lara and said, "All right?"

Lara gave a small smile back and said, "Oh yes. I love imagination."

April nodded and picked up a menu and turned to the others and said, "Yeah, steak I think. It's on you, Paul, so I'm having the best there is."

The rest of dinner went well, with Lara contributing very little, apart from asking to see the ring of the waitress, holding her hand carefully, and then touching the bald head of the waiter, after asking him if he shaved it or not. Paul and Jenny had at least two glasses of wine too much. After dinner, as they were waiting for Paul's driver – he'd given in and used a service for his evening events – in the foyer, April held Lara's hand.

Lara smiled hesitantly at her and said, "I think this is going to work out. Thank you, Mary. I can't believe how I've landed on my feet. Thank you."

April squeezed her hand and replied, "Well, you remember me, okay? You have the phone. Call me every now and then."

Lara gave her the dazzling smile back and then the car arrived and Silverano, Jenny and Lara were whisked away. April stood, waiting for her car to be brought around and staring after the red lights of the car, hoping she had done the right thing.

-----


The next day April sat across from Paul Silverano, watching him, as he watched her. So much had happened since she'd first been shown into this office. Silverano was dressed almost exactly as he had been the first time she'd seen him: jacket tossed across his chair, same charcoal suit, but different tie – purple this time.

They stared at each other for silent minutes before Silverano coughed and sat forward in his chair and said, "Well, I suppose we should get through this, then. I don't really know why we are doing an exit interview bearing in mind dinner last night, but HR demands it, so here we are. Is there anything you want to say, Mary? Anything we haven't already covered in our...er, time together?"

April debated what to say. With all that had happened, where did she start? How far did she go?

"I—" she began before Silverano interrupted her.

"Because I have a lot to say. Mary, if that is your name, do you know why I'm such a good negotiator?"

April shook her head.

"Because I'm a good poker player – same set of skills. When you are negotiating with someone, you read the tells, just like you do in poker. And I'm very very good at poker. Hell, when I go to Vegas with the boys, I spend one evening alone, just playing at the high-stakes tables. I've done very well for myself over the years. It's what my friend Brad and I do when we get together. We have a little competition to see who can play better."

He paused to grab the bottled water on his desk and internally April exalted. She now knew where the money that had started this whole operation came from. He wasn't crooked or being blackmailed, he was just hiding it from the IRS! This was a crucial piece in the puzzle, and the fact that he didn't just come out and tell her he had a hidden bank account made her feel even more like This Was The Truth.

With all that in her head, she kept her expression neutral.

"I've studied the art of micro-expression reading, I've read everything I can find about looking at people and seeing if they are lying or not. All part of the profession. And you, Mary, well, you are lying about something. Quite a lot of something I think. You are a PA from the pool like I am an astronaut. You sleep with me, you sleep with my wife, you then suddenly replace yourself with a little sub toy for me and Jenny, how very..." he groped for the right word, "altruistic of you. You show up here, go on and on about your adopted family, seduce people and so on. It's almost as if you have an agenda here, don't you agree?"

April didn't know where to go with this, so she just tilted her head, pursed her lips and said, "I think you may be reading into this whole situation a bit more than is there, Paul."

"Yes, I'm sure I am. But still, you are lying. I'm still not entirely sure what you are lying about, but I'm pretty sure you are from one of the service groups. Oh, I wouldn't ask which one – what would be the point? You'd lie to me anyway. But I'm sure you are here to watch over me during these negotiations. I'm sure of it."

It was time to grab this bull by the horns. April narrowed her eyes and said, "Even if what you were saying is true - and I'm most assuredly not saying it is – so what? What do you care? You got a more stable relationship, realized a few fantasies, had some hot sex. What does it matter?"

He gave a mirthless laugh. "Yes, I suppose you can look at it that way. Yes. You certainly can. I don't think that's the only dimension though, is it?"

April wanted to change the subject, although her curiosity about other aspects of this operation still bothered her and she just didn't know how to ask Silverano without confirming everything he suspected. Her eyes fell on the pictures of his family and the other neighborhood kids on his desk, and wondered at how strong the Italian gene was, since they all looked so alike.

It clicked and she knew. She knew it all. She knew what had happened, how and why Silverano was so stable, and why they'd had no luck working out what had happened with the DNA results.

Her eyes flicked up to Silverano who was still watching her closely. She saw the ghost of a smile; he'd seen her make the connection. He also knew she'd have no chance of proving it, not without doing a hell of a lot of damage.

She rolled her lips around her tongue, trying to decide how to drop this little bomb.

"You know what Paul? If I were what you thought, the one thing that I'd be wondering about is, what happened to those DNA results? I think we both know what they should have shown, don't we?"

He met her eyes, unperturbed. He would, indeed be a good poker player.

"I mean, imagine a situation where a man has kids, and the DNA results from those kids change over time? One minute they are not his, then they are re-tested and they are? That's strange, don't you think?"

Paul rubbed his nose and remained silent.

"I mean, imagine further this man has a friend who is into cutting edge molecular biology research. It would stand to reason that he might be able to adjust those tests, perhaps even modify the DNA samples, yes? It's certainly an interesting line of research. People might be prepared to pay a lot for a process like that? As much as, oh, four hundred and seventy thousand, perhaps? You can see how people might be concerned about such a situation?"

April knew she was playing a dangerous game, revealing some of what she knew and confirming what he already suspected. But it wouldn't matter at all if what she suspected was reality, and the more she considered it, the more she thought it was.

"But even then, there are other answers. I mean, what if the samples didn't come from his kids at all? What if they came from some other kids?"

More silence and April filled it as Silverano sat, stone-faced.

"What if there was a man,for whom balance and justice was paramount? And he discovered that his wife had cheated on him not once, but twice. What if this man was an ethical man – and he loved his children, even as he discovered they were not biologically his. This man is a mover and shaker, and one who is not afraid to take a risk. What would he do, do you think?"

Paul stirred and answered, "Oh, I've no idea, but I'm sure you'll come up with something creative."

"You know what I think our man, who is obsessed with balancing the scales, would do? I think he'd find a way to ensure that the people who gave him kids to raise got one back. From him. I think he found a way to ensure his sperm was used to impregnate the wives of the men who had cuckolded him. He's a clever man, this guy, so I don't doubt he found a way. Perhaps he intercepted a sperm bank. Perhaps he seduced these women. Perhaps he even told them what he was doing. It doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is that he retained balance. They gave him a bastard child? He gave them one right back. That would explain where the DNA results came from, wouldn't it? They didn't come from the children in his immediate family; they came from the ones in other people's families."

April stopped and took a breath. Paul Silverano stared at her intently, but still with no expression on his face.

"It would also explain how the two new DNA samples indicated that he was, indeed, the father of two boys, when we all know he wasn't the father of his own boys. He'd just substitute one for the other, particularly if he was responsible for getting those samples in the first place. Wow. I have to admit, that's some pretty cold shit there, don't you think? A man who could do that, methodically cuckoo those who've have cuckolded him, without their even knowing it. That's a man to reckoned with, don't you think? A man who would know his place, know his worth and be pretty balanced. A man who could negotiate treaties. I guess the only thing that would rattle him would be unexpected DNA tests."

Paul Silverano rubbed his jaw as he stared at April. She couldn't tell if he was nervous or trying not to smile. 

"See, the thing I wouldn't understand about this extremely hypothetical situation is why he stuck with his wife in the first place? I mean, why stay with someone who had such disrespect for him in the first place? Why not just leave?"

Silverano pursed his lips, then slowly answered, "Well, you might try the oldest reason in the book, Mary. Maybe he just loved her."

April raised her eyebrows at that. "Seriously? You think that was enough?"

Silverano shrugged. He took a breath and let it out and said, "This guy you talk about. Maybe he's been knocking around with the same group of guys for years. Maybe these friends have shared a lot. Scrapes, their first beer, driving, girl friends?" He looked hard at April when he said that but it was her turn to remain impassive.

"When they were first married, maybe there was a lot of experimentation. Maybe they shared too much. Maybe they did something that alienated one of the group to the point where he left, ran away to California. Mistakes were made. And they agreed to just drop it. Go back to being regular Joes. Maybe one of them loved his new wife to the point where he didn't deny her anything, after all, he was getting some strange too. Maybe things went on behind his back once they agreed that they'd settle down."

Silverano shrugged again and played with one of the executive toys on his desk for a moment before speaking again.

"Maybe this guy was aware that his wife was playing, but knew it was a short-lived thing. Maybe he just went with it for the time being. And when a pregnancy occurred, and he did the math, he realized who was responsible. Maybe this guy knew that balance had to be restored, and so he did what he needed to. I'm sure we can make up ways he did it. I'm sure that there are many ways you can imagine that would happen."

April sat there, absorbing what was being said. She interrupted, "Would they have even been aware of it? The other women I mean?"

Silverano arched his eyebrow at her and said, "Mary, whatever else this guy is, he doesn't go around raping people or tricking them. Of course he'd make sure they understood what was going on. And to be fair, I would imagine that both of the women were mighty pissed and justifiably ok with some revenge in that way."

April snorted and said, "Oh, I'm sure."

"The thing is, this guy would love his own children anyway. Regardless of who the sperm donors were. Let them laugh, if they ever did. Balance was restored and marriages and friendships spared. It would have been an effective solution, I'm sure. This way, this man gets two extra children to love. Who wouldn't want that? Anytime I, sorry, he felt disrespected, he'd look at those two children and know he had the last laugh. Strangely enough, in the years following, this guy would have recognized the regret that both his friends felt at what they'd done, and both would make sacrifices and do their part to ensure his career rise was meteoric. He wins from all angles."

"Apart from having a faithless wife," replied April.

Silverano chuckle. "Does she seem faithless to you? Like I said, it was experimentation. It was checking out if the grass was greener. This guy would have done some of it too, it's not like there's not blame to go around here. He knew where the grass was most green, and she came to understand it too. Once they had that out of their systems, they recommitted themselves to each other and their kids. Of course, there were other...issues, that needed resolving. I'm sure you understand that..."

Now it was April's turn to chuckle. "Oh yes. Does she know? That the children she bore are not yo...from the guy in question?"

"Well, honestly, does it matter? She's going to love those children just as much if she knows as if she doesn't."

"I don't know. Does it matter? You tell me. If she did, I would assume there was some self-imposed penance to pay?"

"Perhaps."

"How do you know it won't happen again?"

"He doesn't. That's the point about relationships and trust, Mary. You can never guarantee it won't happen again. You can't stop it. You can only react once it's happened. Would this guy deal and accept it again? Probably not. But putting your foot down doesn't stop desires in other people – it just drives them underground where they'll come out at inopportune moments. I'm sure you know that. Either you trust someone or you don't. 

"Whatever else this wife has been in the past, right now, he's convinced they have a partnership that she won't betray any more. I know, I know, once a cheater – but by the same token, sometimes you have to visit Paris to know it's a city you detest once you are there. That doesn't make it ok, but life isn't about ok. 

"It's not like this guy is any saint, is it? He got seduced by a hottie who worked for him. Willingly. She might have been a pro but he could have said no, and he didn't. He's as much of a failure at monogamy as she is. You could look at it as tit for tat, or that he makes mistakes too. But I can guarantee you this – he'll spend a lot of time making up for it."

"So, to be clear, in this situation, the other parties are unaware and the wife may or may not be aware, but this guy knows all and has played God?" asked April.

"If you want to put it that way, yes. I wouldn't. I would put it more as a man who was pushed against a wall and held justice and fairness in high regard, and who did what he had to in order that the scales were balanced. That's how I'd put it," replied Silverano, in a harder tone.

"I understand. Well, good thing this is all very hypothetical then," said April.

Silverano steepled his fingers and sat back in his chair. It creaked as it leaned back. "Indeed," he said.

"Wait," said April, suddenly, as something occurred to her. "What happens if the kids end up a match for the donation? I mean, the DNA tests are being done in the first place because of need for bone marrow. What if one of the kids was a match?"

Silverano smiled at her and said, "Wouldn't matter if they were. That's already covered. The guy concerned is already a match."

"Why bother with this at all then?" persisted April.

"Because it has to be above board. This could happen again. The guy would need these results on record."

"Still, it's a hell of risk if anyone runs those results against, say, the mother? It would show that she wasn't the biological mother." April wouldn't let it go. Her nature required her to run every detail down.

Silverano actually chucked at that. "Mary, there comes a point where you have to just organize what you can, get the ducks in the row and know you can't cover everything. You just do the best you can."




Ingrams & Assoc 1: Double Bluff Ch. 04



They looked at each other again for a moment and April said, "Well, I supposed you are right. So, is that it? Are we done? Meeting adjourned?"

Silverano grinned and said, "Sure. We're done, but Mary, one thing. If you ever get tired of...whatever it is you do, come and find me. There'll always be a position for you here. Despite my suspicions, I think you've been extremely helpful, both professionally and personally. I owe you. That's why we are having this talk at all."

April sat, wanting to say something. In the end she just smiled back and said, "It's nice to be wanted, Paul. I have to run. It's been...interesting."

She got up walked to the door, and turned just as she left and said, "It was all there, right on your desk, wasn't it? Pictures of your family. All of them. Right in front of everyone. You have a good life, Paul. Don't hurt Lara. Share and be nice."

And with that, she was gone.

Epilog

April sat in her office at Ingrams, staring at the screen as she tried to finish her report. She'd made the preliminary result report required on the first day back, but was now working on the in-depth report. In this she would give her opinion of the mental states of each of the targets, what the situation was, how it was left, why she had made the decisions she'd made and so on.

She'd written down her conclusions – what she believed had happened, overt or covert. All her suspicions, conclusions and theories were there. She was just unsure about how it would all be taken – she had no concrete proof yet, but she was sure in her bones she'd got it right. Hell, Paul Silverano had all but confirmed it.

Ultimately though, she figured, it didn't really matter. The relationship between Paul and his wife was back on solid ground again, and getting firmer by the day. If and when revelations were to come to light, they could take it. Lara gave them both a fixation, one they could share, and express their desires the way they needed to, to make their relationship work. And Lara was as happy as she could be.

The negotiations with the Chinese had gone off without a hitch, and a major signing had occurred. As an act of goodwill, the Chinese had even provided the source code for one of their major virus intelligence gathering applications.

It was, she mused, about as satisfactory a conclusion as could really be expected.

When the report was done, she printed it and sent it via email to all the major department heads. After it was stapled, she took the printed copy to Jessica's office.

Surprisingly, Jessica's door was closed. Angela, sitting and looking efficient and brainy with her big spectacles and pouty lips, looked up from her computer monitor as April arrived, saying, "She has someone in there. I don't think she'll be long, if you want to wait?"

April did – she sat in the long easy couch outside the office, looking through her report and listening to the clack clack of Angela's hellaciously fast typing. She insisted on using an old IBM style keyboard – which were getting harder to find and she was famous for demanding it from the IT group. As she typed, she giggled. April was absolutely consumed to know what she was typing, - was it jokes? A novel? A comedy script? What? - but it would be rude to ask, so she didn't.

Jessica's door opened and she appeared in the door, flanked by a tall bald man April had never seen before. They were still engrossed in conversation as they walked out the door.

"Well, I think we've got you covered, Jess," the man said. "We've beefed up security encryption and requirements, and we've added a honey trap set of CPU's, as Tina suggested. We've set them up with deliberate tunnels, so anyone probing around will find those and find these machines. There's also a database, and created some fictional case studies, so if anyone does get in, they'll think they've got the real deal." The man chuckled. "I got our poor unpaid intern to type of the top forty stories from Literotica as your case studies, carefully reformatted."

"How is Chloe doing?" asked Jessica. April could tell she was genuinely interested.

"Oh, you know. Complaining a lot about the kids. But good. We're good. Thanks, Jessica."

It hit her then, who this man was, and who Chloe was. This was the case that got away. Jessica's one failure, where she'd been caught.

April stood up, report in her hand, as Jessica and Jace noticed her.

Jace stopped and looked at her. "Is this the newbie that Tina wouldn't stop talking about?"

Jessica looked at April, then at Jace and nodded, smiling. "She is that. Just had her cherry popped, too. Very satisfactory conclusion. She's a keeper."

April stood there as Jace gave her a shrewd once over. Neither said anything for a moment as they sized each other up to the quiet clacking of Angela's typing.

"Right, well, if we are done with the psyching out bullshit, April, do you have something for me?" Jessica asked.

April moved forward to give her the report when Jace said, "Yeah, I think she'll do, Jessica. Treat her well, ok?"

Jessica nodded and took the document from April. Jace nodded at April and said, "Good luck, April. You'll do ok here. Keep your nose clean, or as clean as is possible"

She nodded back, curious and desperate to ask questions, but said nothing.

Jace gave a quick grin, gave Jessica a peck on the cheek and walked away.

-----


The only other thing of note of the whole operation was a note that April found on her car three days later. It was tucked under the windscreen wiper of her car, which was parked in her apartment's underground lot. She almost just threw it away, imaging it was some kind of advertising flyer. It was only when she noticed that no other car had one that she opened it up and read it.

The note read, "You stole from us. We'll let it go this one time, since we know why, but don't do it again. We'll be watching you. Don't imagine we'll let you interfere with us again. Just a friendly warning."

She had no idea what it meant – some kind of threat? -, and was tempted to throw it away, something told her to keep it around. You never know what the future might bring.

Authors Note – Well, there are lots of threads left hanging there, aren't there? I wonder if any will get followed up in future stories? Time will tell.

April Carlisle and Ingrams & Assoc will return in story #2 – Retreat.