Chapter 2

He had to be careful. He, meaning his agency, mailed things all the time. Usually there was no need to maintain secrecy about where those mailings came from. But sometimes, secrecy was demanded. In the old days, couriers had been used in those situations. But with the advent of computers, it was possible to route a message to any number of locations where there were automated services. What that meant was that the computer that received the message would print it, along with the envelope it would be sent in. Both items would be routed to a machine that would fold the message, if needed, insert it in the envelope, and then shoot it into a vacuum tube that would take it to a mail room. It would be run through a postage machine there, and mailed. And the whole thing could be done without the involvement of a single human being.

The original message could be generated in Richmond, Virginia, but to the person who received it, it could be made to look like it had been mailed from Alexandria, Egypt.

Bob used that system now to mail a short message to the address his system had identified for the house with the sheet on the roof and the sunbathing girl in the back yard. It was addressed to "occupant". He'd wanted to address it to "Bikini Girl," but if somebody in the mail room saw it, that might draw attention.

The message said, simply, "I do see you now. It's just my opinion, but you'd look a lot better without the top of that bikini."

He knew he shouldn't do this. If anybody found out, he'd be in trouble. They might even jerk his security clearance while they investigated the girl, and tried to figure out if what he'd written was a code of some kind.

But he couldn't resist.

He took a deep breath ... and punched "send."

He'd intended to show the picture to Jerry, but he decided not to. Better if only he knew about the girl who was trying to thumb her nose at a major, powerful government agency.

He made up a batch of tuna and noodles. The agency supplied a variety of foods to the analysts, and there was a full kitchen. He had eight hours of sleep coming, and then one last eight hour shift in "the office." Then he could go home for two days and do whatever he wanted. He knew he'd be assigned a different bedroom when he got back for his next rotation, because whoever replaced him would still be living in the room he was currently in. But all the bedrooms were the same, so it didn't matter. All the analysts brought a suitcase with them, with clothes for three days. When they left, they took everything from the room except the combination TV, Radio, CD player and alarm clock supplied by the agency. While he was doing his last eight hours of this rotation, some faceless person would change the sheets on the bed, and empty the trash can. His suitcase would be waiting for him just inside the door.

Such was his life.

Riley Franklin took her hand off the mouse, leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. They felt dry, but she knew that was only a side effect of staring at a computer screen for the last three hours. She should have taken breaks, but she wanted to get this project done. It was the graphics she created on her computer that brought home the bacon. Once she got the current job finished, then she could engage in her real passion.

She cast a practiced eye at the screen one last time. It was a book cover. On it, a snarling dragon held an almost lifeless female form in its toothy jaws, blood dripping down one of her arms. The terrain around the dragon suggested rocky, barren wastes. The stake jutting from the rock, with its hanging manacles, was a clear reference that the girl had been held there against her will. Never mind that, had the dragon actually pulled her from her shackles, her hands would probably have been torn off. But it didn't have to mimic reality. The image communicated a dragon accepting the offered sacrifice, and that was what the customer wanted.

She examined the scales on the curled and twisting tail of the beast. The instructions had said the dragon must be black, in an environment of burned and blasted rock. Delineating dark colors was a lot of work. It involved the judicious use of lighter colors in tiny amounts. Such as the thin rim of sixteen different colors that edged each and every scale on the dragon's body. Without those arcing lines, there would be no scales, only a dark blob in a flat shape that was supposed to be a moving dragon.

She looked at the book cover critically. She should have followed her first instinct and used pen and ink, with paints to fill in the color. It would have taken just as long, but it would have looked better. Computer generated graphics were a little sharper, though.

She sighed. It didn't matter. Most people couldn't draw more than a stick figure, and when they saw her creations, they were almost always awed by the complexity. People see graphic images by the thousands every single day, but most of the time they just think they're photographs. They don't realize someone sat and painstakingly created the image, pixel by pixel until, like the author of the book she was working with, they asked for something in their imagination to be made visible. When she gave that to them, it almost never matched their imagination ... but it always awed them, because it was "their" imagination that had created it.

Riley didn't care that people usually credited themselves with the splendor of her art work. They paid her, and they paid her well. That was what mattered. That was what kept a roof over their heads, and food on the table.

Life hadn't been kind to Riley Franklin, for the most part. Raised in a dusty Texas panhandle town, Riley had lived in a trailer court. Her mother was a waitress, and her father was a drunk, who couldn't keep a job, and rarely looked for one. There was no extra money for an allowance, or new clothes for the first day of school each year. Most of her clothes came from the Goodwill store. She was short for her age, but had developed, as a female, early. By the time she was twelve, if a tape had been put around her chest, it would have read 32 inches. When she walked into the high school building for the first time, though, the only two bras she owned were sized at 36CC. On a five foot three frame, with a waist that measured 24 inches, and hips that swelled to 32 inches, she was like a miniature Barbie Doll. She drew the boys like moths to the flame, and all the popular girls hated her. She had waist-long black hair that was straight, and thick. Her pug nose and bright eyes sat on a rounded face that never seemed to lose a thin layer of baby fat.

In short, Riley Franklin was a babe, and she stiffened the cock of every boy who saw her. And not a few of her male teachers as well.

Based on her "economic circumstances", Riley only had one commodity to barter with, at least in her own opinion. The problem was, you could only lose your virginity once. After that, you were either someone's girlfriend for life ... or a slut.

So she carefully hoarded the one thing she had to trade to get a boy who would love her and take care of her and take her to live in a real house, instead of a rotting, ancient mobile home that shook in even a mild storm.

She cannot be blamed for buying in to the fairy tales about true love. Most of us do that, at least to some degree. There are many princesses, but very few princes. And living happily ever after? It's a myth. Nobody lives happily ever after. She would find that out just like the rest of us ... the hard way.

Because she kept her legs firmly closed, most guys only took her out two or three times, and then moved on to greener pastures. Eventually, the offers stopped altogether. When you have a reputation for being an ice queen, a lot of guys don't even try.

That left Riley with a lot of time on her hands. She used that time, and those hands, to draw things. Pencils were pretty cheap, and if you worked things right you could get paper for free. When you asked a teacher for a piece of paper, they often gave you two or three. And, since there was little in the real world around her of any interest, she drew the things in her imagination.

An art teacher saw some of her work, and encouraged her, eventually providing her with supplies she couldn't otherwise have afforded. When she got her hands on paints, she was happier than she'd ever been. Her talent, and the support of that art teacher, got her to college, still a virgin, but working almost full time to pay her way.

Still, she had no man in her life to demand her time, and she wasn't in a hurry to get a degree. She lived in housing that other students had lived in for decades, but it was still better than her mother's trailer. Another plus was that she had enough to eat, and now it wasn't wrong food orders, hours old, that her mother brought home from the restaurant.

But the most important change in her life was that she now had access to computers.

She was twenty, and probably the best artist in the little community college, when the radar that had served her so faithfully all those years malfunctioned. It was one of her professors who slipped beneath that radar. His name was Chuck Peterson, and the praise he heaped on her, and the extra help he offered, convinced her that his other compliments were genuine, and that he really was helplessly attracted to her. He "resisted" his drives, telling her how hard it was to maintain a professional separation as he touched her shoulder, or arm, or moved her hand on the mouse to show her the next thing to do as beautiful images were created from literally nothing on the screen of the computer.

She was dazzled by the attention that convinced her he was smitten with her, and would love her forever.

When she lay back, opening her legs to a man for the first time, she dismissed the initial pain, sure that she'd found her prince. That he was an accomplished lover helped.

Chuck's behavior after that would have convinced any woman she was the only thing he could think about. He fucked her every opportunity, and in every place he could, including at school, in the janitor's closet, standing up and leaning against the wall. He gave her a key to his apartment, which was a thousand times nicer than hers, and then, every night she stayed with him, rutted in her as if she were the last woman on an earth, and repopulation of the planet was up to them.

He never wore a condom. She was sure his pleadings to have his sons meant she would soon be married. And, when she announced she was, in fact, carrying his child, his elation was unbounded.

Until, one night, after work, she came home, and his apartment was stripped clean, as empty as her hopes that she had somehow entered the wrong apartment. She hoped it was a bad dream. Only a single thing remained in the place where she had become pregnant, and had such high hopes. It was a piece of scrap paper, upon which the words "Sorry. I'm just not the father type," were written.

It wasn't a bad dream. It was a nightmare. He was gone. The administration said he'd resigned to take care of a dying relative. They didn't know who the relative was, or where he had gone. He had left no forwarding address.

She lucked out and got an internship with an advertising agency. It was only six months, but there was a salary and commissions available. That paid for the birth of her child, a little boy she named Curtis, after the grandfather she had met only once before he died. She had been ten at the time, when he had sat her on his lap, told her she was beautiful, and said he loved her.

The ad agency had loved her work. She had a knack for bringing other people's imagination to life in her drawings. They offered to pay her way through two more years of college, so she could get her bachelor's degree, but demanded she give them four years after that. While they loved her work, she didn't love doing it. Providing graphics for the sale of diapers, hair products, cars, and everything else being thrust on American consumers was not her idea of fun. She made a counter offer. She would work for them, and they would send her to the individual classes she wanted to attend. There was some dickering, but in the end, she got the education she wanted, and they got her talent for another year.

She left Texas without a degree, but she did have a place to live. Her grandfather had deeded her a cabin in the mountains of Colorado and, since she was only twelve at the time, her mother had been irate. He'd left it to Riley because he knew that if he gave it to his daughter it would have been sold for whatever they could get, and that money pissed away. So he awarded it to Riley, even though she couldn't take possession for another six years. He had also established a trust which paid the property taxes, but could not be used for any other purpose. The paperwork that went along with his gift had specified the property could not be sold until she was twenty-one. She had owned it since she was twelve, but had never been able to go see it. It was always a sore point with her mother, who refused to take her there, and called it a dump anyway. The first time she had seen it was when Chuck Peterson drove her there one weekend. It was a trip to remember, because he wanted to "set a record for the most number of times they could have sex in a weekend." He routed them through the Oklahoma panhandle and New Mexico, because he also wanted to set a record for the number of States they could have sex in, in a single day as well. He fucked her before they left, of course, so she had a load in her womb when they left. Then he stopped at a rest stop on highway 325 in Oklahoma, and fucked her in the car. 325 turned into 456 when they got into New Mexico, where it was 75 miles of remote nothingness until they got to a road that went up into Colorado. Because it was so remote, he stopped and, within sight of the highway, spread a blanket and talked her into getting naked with him to do it in the sun, under the open sky. They stopped at a park in Colorado, where he at least took her into the bushes to use the blanket again. He lay on the ground and had her ride him, milking him for another load. By the time they got to the cabin, she was sperm-soaked and needed a shower.