My Only Talent Ch. 25

The captain docked back at the Marina during the night, and the limos were there early to take us to the airport. I had checked in with Nora via email, and she was back in London, and I was invited to dinner tonight at their home at Eaton Square. But she had to leave the very next morning on a flight to Chicago, where she would stay two nights with family friends before going on to Austin. Given that, I could actually move up my flight back to DFW. The concierge saw me searching the website, and offered to set everything up for me. That was real service. Zick Haggerty had a full planeload, with all the original party plus the four new girls on board. He did spend a lot of time in the cabin making sure the girls were all comfortable. He barely noticed anyone else, except I did occasionally catch him looking at me with disbelief. Gig 'em, Aggie. When we landed at Biggin Hill, about ten hours of flight time later, it was only six hours later on the local clock, so it was early afternoon in London.

The concierge stopped near my seat. "I finally got you on an earlier flight, but there was something squirrely about your reservation. There should have been four or five alternative flights open to you with that ticket, but the system would only let me book one particular British Airways flight that is code shared with American. It's the same direct route to DFW, just a little later in the day, and with a Brit crew instead of Americans. I am not sure why I could only swap your ticket for that one, but that's what happened." He gave me a printout with the flight data, and I thanked him for his help. Reggie was waiting to drive us, and we offered Elizabeth a ride.

"Sorry but I can't Robbie. I have to go directly to Cheltenham for a meeting. We may never see each other again, but I certainly enjoyed the trip!" She presented her cheek for a kiss, but instead she got a big wet one on the lips. Were those tears in her eyes?

I hugged her hard and put my lips to her ear. 'Anytime you want me, Bright Eyes, you can have me. Just crook your finger and I am yours." I turned and walked back to the limo, where Peggy and Reggie were watching me with funny looks on their faces. When I turned to look back, I saw a black Range Rover speeding away.

We dropped Peggy at the museum, where she could just make a regularly scheduled weekly all hands meeting. I walked her in and we had a tearful goodbye, with me promising to come back when I could, and she planning a trip to Texas for a conference sometime soon. When I got back to the car, Reggie put it in gear and zoomed away toward Horse Guards.

"Reggie, I missed lunch, and I think it's my turn to buy the Chinese food!" He insisted on leaving me in the car while he brought the food, but he did find a parking place nearby and we had quite a conversation while we both enjoyed a fantastic lunch. When he dropped me back at Horse Guards, it was almost time for tea, but in my jet lagged state I could only manage to dial in a wakeup call in time for dinner at Nora's and fall asleep.

*******

Elizabeth grew increasingly impatient on her very well supervised ride to Cheltenham. They called it a debriefing, but she knew it was going to be closer to a hostile interrogation. They assumed the worse: you had been turned by the opposition and were there to systematically deceive them about what happened in the field; therefore they made every attempt to confuse, stress, and fatigue you. The interrogators were graded on how well they battered you and tripped you up, not whether or not they got the truth – the people behind the glass that you never saw decided what was true, and they never informed the interrogators of those decisions. Compartmentalization, don't you know.

She had nothing to hide, really. She would tell them everything about what she learned on the trip, except perhaps for how much she had liked the young American lad. They would value the information, and would also now feel her qualified for a honey trap assignment in future if required. She realized she needed to get that side of her ticket punched to move up the ranks. She could get in trouble for the little unauthorized operation she was planning, but if they kept her in the box too long, that plan would become moot.

*******

When the wakeup call came, I felt a lot better, but my stomach began growling loudly in the shower. I checked my stuff and discovered a peanut butter PowerBar that I had stashed away from the plane, and ate it quickly, then brushed my teeth again. I put on my already well used but still new British outfit, and set out; Google having told me it was about a thirty minute walk to the Upman's house. I was glad for the zip in lining in the coat, as it was very cool and damp January evening. I soon was near St. James Park, and then passed through some commercial buildings, and then entered what appeared to be another park, but was actually Nora's neighborhood. I suddenly remembered her stripper name: Elizabeth Eaton Square. Wow.

It looked like my densely treed old Highland Park neighborhood in Dallas, but with much older houses dropped in. Better gardeners, too: the landscaping was immaculate. I found the right address under the watchful eyes of a roving security guard, and rang the bell. A butler answered. He looked much older and much less physically fit than Jeeves. "Hello, I'm Robbie Roberts."

"You are expected. Please come in"

Nora's father greeted me first. He looked remarkably like the president of ESU, but spoke with an entirely different accent. We sat alone in a formal parlor just to the right of the entryway, presumably so he could take my measure.

"So you met my daughter at a fresher dormitory?" he asked with a note of incredulity in his voice.

"Yes, sir. We had a similar early schedule for the fall semester, so that we saw each other at early breakfast almost every day, and after a while, we just introduced ourselves. But it turns out we have a mutual friend, who soon introduced us formally." That sounded quite proper, I thought.

"The Pliskin girl?"

"Yes. Suzanne."

"Remarkable family, that. What are you studying?" There was that unwelcome but now familiar emphasis on the word 'you' again.

"Electrical Engineering is my primary major."

"You are from Texas originally?"

"Yes, and before emigrating to America, my family was mostly from Scotland, England, and France."

"Our family is primarily English all the way back to the dark ages, which at times I am afraid our country is rapidly reverting to." I could think of no safe response to that, but I was saved by the belle.

"Daddy, you are not allowed to keep Robbie all to yourself any longer!" Nora appeared at the doorway to the rest of the house, an absolute vision. Her face was freshly tanned from her Christmas in sunny Bermuda, and perhaps her platinum hair was lighter and even more vibrant. Her eyes flashed intelligence and her scent reached out and grabbed me, giving me flashbacks to her standing nude in those stage lights in Dallas. I had almost forgotten how transcendentally wonderful she was. My cock had not. Then she reached out and physically grabbed me by the arm and steered me out into the hallway to present me to her mother. I made my standard disclaimer as I declined the offer of some very nice wine before dinner, and from then on it was a relatively pleasant and low pressure dinner experience, except for the dessert, which was another absolutely putrescent brandied rice pudding. I learned several things about the family and their neighbors, the two closest being that old mustachioed guy that starred in the early James Bond movies who was now a semi recluse that Mrs. Upman often took food to, and another guy that owned most of the cable TV systems out in the English countryside. Our conversation also repeatedly underscored Mr. Upman's unhappiness with the current government, and the hope that the parliamentary processes would soon bring a new one into being.

Finally they mercifully suggested that we leave the dinner table and move to the drawing room card table to play 'social contract bridge' while we all talked. My grandmother had forced me to learn this game, much in the same way my father had forced me to learn to play golf: as a social tool. I was fine on the basics of the rules and playing the hands, but was not very advanced in terms of bidding. I tended to gather the basics of distribution and point count and then wing it on a hunch, rather than try to do extended statistical inference about which hand the eights and nines resided in order to make a deep finesse, which frustrated my grandmother no end. She said it was no use to make your contract if you didn't understand precisely how you were supposed to have arrived at it. She had a plethora of rules of thumb and layered and nested exceptions to those rules, recited in no particular systematic manner, and that I had refused to memorize without some organizing principle to rely on.

It didn't take me long to deduce that Nora and her father were ultra-competitive bridge masters who played for blood and gave no quarter, even worse than my grandmother, while Mrs. Upman, like me, just wanted to have a nice conversation, and the game was secondary at best. It was the equivalent of mixed doubles tennis, except this time I was to be the one who was going to be making all the unforced errors. With my brain thus dazed and confused during the bridge game, they began to question me. I suppose they thought that if they could not achieve 'in vino veritas', they could get 'in turbatio veritas', and perhaps they did.

I soon revealed to them my only talent, which surfaced only after a relatively late puberty, and then developed rapidly, as it had in my grandfather and father. They told me the males in their family had no such talent, but the females had the ability to suppress and in some cases modify and direct their signals. They had learned to protect the females in their line from 'talented' males because such matings often resulted in wild variations of talents in the subsequent generations. They related one unfortunate instance where the resulting female offspring had very wild libidos, and zero ability to suppress the resulting super strong signals. I wondered about the twins. Finally, they repeated the legend of the Druid ancestors that were thought to be the origin of the talents, and the belief that talent males were often inherently evil. It was all very civilized and upper crust, with the idea that I might someday impregnate their darling girl with monstrous children being only tangentially implied.

I wanted to get to the meat of the matter: tell your daughter that it is okay to fuck me. I thought about telling them that Nora and I could certainly practice successful birth control, but rejected that idea. I thought about telling them that since we would often be taking Suzanne to bed with us too that Nora would be more protected from evil, but decided against it.

I was running out of potential approaches when Nora took the reins: "Robbie is a nice young man with a good heart, a good mind, and a fine soul. I have ample evidence of that from many sources, including my own direct observations of him. He is already my good friend, and it will be my decision, and his, whether or not he will be my lover, or the father of my children! I am not asking for permission or even your blessing, I just wanted you to meet him for yourselves."

After that it was mostly "tut tut" and "harrumph harrumph" and glibly pretending that there had been no real confrontation. Nora and I then sat alone in that front parlor for some time, talking and making out like teenagers, which I was but she wasn't. It was fantastic. She had an early flight tomorrow morning for her stopover in Chicago, and I had that afternoon British Airways flight back to DFW. She advised not walking back since it was after midnight, and she called me a cab. By the time I got back to Horse Guards, my stomach was growling again, from skipping that awful dessert. I scrounged my last stashed Clif bar and ate it, then brushed my teeth, turned in a late morning wakeup call that would let me make my early afternoon flight, and was then out like a light. I had a very bad dream. Three guys were doing Suzanne at the same time, and she loved it, and Nora was watching with great interest.

*******

The checkout process at Horse Guards was painless, especially since all the charges had been posted to Barry Fermy's account, including the car to take me to the airport. I was please to find Reggie outside, and we got to LHR in record time. Since my seat was in 'club world', I sped through the priority check in lines and was among the first to board the aircraft. My seat was 14A, not as far forward and secluded as first class in the American aircraft, but it had lots of leg room and space and a nice view out the window. I settled in and went through both the High Life and SkyMall magazines before we rolled for takeoff.

By the time we reached cruising altitude I had just about resigned myself to spending the eight hour trip in lonely depression and/or slumber when a very attractive cabin attendant, not the one assigned to my area, approached me. "Mr. Roberts?" I nodded. "We are pleased to have you with us as another member of a very good long term customer family, and the captain would like to offer you a tour of the flight deck and some of the other spaces of our aircraft. Bring your carryon bag with you, as we may want to offer you another seat for the remainder of the flight. Will you follow me?"

She walked, very attractively, back toward the rear of the aircraft and up a stairway I had not noticed before, with me following close behind. We went up a level, to a space that had much less headroom, and much more Spartan wall coverings, and passed by what looked like four bunk beds like they had on the trains in the old movies, complete with curtains on them. Centered ahead of us was a very secure looking door that obviously led to the flight deck. On the opposite side of the corridor from the bunks was a similar sized area that was sealed off, behind another sturdy and secure looking door that was completely unmarked. She paused and then smiled very widely and said "I have to get back to my area. Someone will come to collect you in just a moment." She headed back down the stairway and disappeared.

I stood in the narrow corridor, growing impatient, when the door to that mysterious unmarked area opened, and an arm and hand snaked out, making a come-hither gesture towards me and focusing a pair of very bright and sparkling eyes at me. It was Elizabeth! She grabbed me by the lapels of my coat and pulled me through the door, shutting it behind us, and delivering an electrifying kiss.

"What are you doing here, and what is this place?"

"First grab your carry on. You left it in the corridor. It would be quite a cock-up it someone was to trip over it and be hurt!"

I grabbed it and ducked back in, pressing my crotch against her butt. "Funny that you should mention 'cock-up'!"

She smiled and shook her ass a bit. "I think it means something entirely different to you Americans, but I feel very comfortable with your interpretation."

She stood near a little jump seat in front of some video monitors. There was one bunk, and no curtains.

"This is the air marshal's berth. These screens are used to monitor the various spaces in the aircraft for suspicious activity."

"Where are the air marshals and how many are there on board?"

"Usually none, one, or two. When there are two onboard, one usually is in the cabin with the passengers and one monitors things from up here. Today both are working in the cabin, so this space was available for me, and I used some connections to get myself on this trip. I hope I didn't manage to get myself a trip to Glass House, to boot."

I saw that there was another monitor above the main one, and it was switching around to various views inside the aircraft. There was a seat map on the bottom screen, and as the video switched, the area shown on the video was highlighted on the seat map, I watched the videos for a moment, then pointed to the screen.

"Is that guy with the crew cut and the suit and tie an air marshal?"

She giggled. "No, although in the early days it might have been that obvious. Today half of them are women, and the guys are more likely to have long hair with an earring and to wear a vintage tee shirt and ratty jeans."

"How do they pick where to go in the aircraft?"

She pointed to the seat map, and I saw that some seat numbers were highlighted with an orange box. "Some passengers that meet certain criteria are chosen for extended observation. We have several on this flight, thus the two marshals. She pointed to a seat in the very back of the plane. "For example, this guy has a first cousin that has been a guest at Guantanamo for three years." Wow, I thought, maybe he has met Pavel, that Russkie piece of shit.

She pointed to another highlight box. "This guy is a senior chemical engineering major at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has been spending lots of time on Jihadist websites recently, including some that provide bomb design information, and his family attends a very radical mosque in London."

She then pointed up toward the front of the plane to another seat. "But this guy is the reason I got on this flight. He is a freshman electrical engineering major at ESU, who suddenly travels to Saudi, Bahrain, Dubai, and YEMEN, spends two days on a yacht with an arms dealer, and then flies back to the states!" I realized that it was my seat was highlighted.

All the while I had been running my hands all over her buttocks, and savoring the memories thus evoked. I knew I was an ass kind of guy, and her ass was extra special in every way.

"His roommate also spends lots of time on illicit file sharing websites, where he may just be downloading porn and pirated movies, but those sites are also havens for image files laden with steganographically encoded communications. And this freshman also stands out because he doesn't surf porn the way his roommate and most young uni gits do, except for some surprisingly in depth research he conducted on sadomasochism early in the term."

"That was research for an assigned class project and I got an 'A' on it, Bright Eyes! And, when a young fellow can get his hands on a primo ass like this (as I gave hers an extra squeeze) in the real world, porn seems to pale by comparison." Suddenly a light bulb went on in my head. "Did you enjoy listening to my phone calls? How far back did you search?"

Her gluts stiffened for a minute, then relaxed. "I am afraid that's classified." The monitor made the same little noise that my laptop does when an email comes in and a little preview window flashed up for just a moment. All I caught was the subject line, which was 'immediate action required'. This didn't stop my hands from moving on her wonderful ass.

"You certainly seem to have a predilection for the female posterior, don't you?"

"I certainly appreciate yours, Bright Eyes. It is well formed, well toned, well tanned, and delightfully responsive to certain stimuli!" I used my thumbs to make the motion that would open up her ass cheeks, if she didn't have these slacks on, and she involuntarily spread her legs and moved back towards me a little. Wonderful! "For example, as I recall, if I put my tongue......"

The monitor made a loud 'beep beep boop!' like something was wrong, and then four new seats on the map began to blink red. Two were in the exit rows right over the wings, and the other two were seats in world club near the galley, closest to the stairs that I had used to come up to the flight deck. Another 'beep beep boop!' sounded and the two seats other than mine that had been highlighted in orange now turned blinking red, too!