The Goddess Of Fortune Page 7

  “Rex, I am a politician. I talk, I don’t read; you tell me why that old codger’s speech is important, and get me a drink while you’re up.”

  Tugwell proceeded to do both, after giving the President a dry martini; it was his third for the afternoon.

  “Beveridge’s gist is that the Pacific is the ocean of commerce, the most important ocean in the world, and as such is critical for the U.S. to dominate. The loss of control or even the impingement of control of the Pacific would be a disaster for this country. As Beveridge stated, ‘the Pacific is the ocean of the commerce of the future. Most future wars will be conflicts for commerce, for example for oil. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world.’ I have to admit that is astounding prescience for something written over 40 years ago. With the current situation, his words ring true.”

  Roosevelt said nothing for a moment, then impulsively he picked up the telephone.

  “Have Johnston come in, please. OK, then send him in.”

  There was a knock on the door and a man entered. It was Johnston’s junior that all three knew by sight.

  “Send over WPR please.” the President said.

  The man nodded and left.

  Tugwell and Hopkins looked at each other, it was clear neither knew what the President had just requested.

  In retrospect, it was hard to say if it was the martinis or just the President’s natural impulsiveness with all things, from the national economy to the government’s Hyper Secrets.

  The President smiled,

  “By rights, I should not be showing either of you this material as it is graded HS, but I think in the current circumstances it is justified.”

  Both men knew that Hyper Secret, or “HS” as the President called it, was a rare grade of document above Top Secret. Both were secretly thrilled to see this document as neither had seen a Hyper Secret before.

  After the President’s request, the duty officer called B3 of the Archives and requested WPR be sent to the White House immediately.

  The request caught the archivist by surprise as requests for Hyper Secrets were rare.

  The archivist in turn called the transport pool and spoke to the officer in charge,

  “I need a Locked Wrist to go to 1600.”

  The transport officer swore under his breath—he and Hoffmann were the only two Locked Wrists on duty, and he sure as hell was not going to do it; for one thing, a Locked Wrist was duty bound to stay at the White House until the President was finished with the document, and he still remembered the time in ‘37 when he was the Locked Wrist and the President had forgotten to return the document and had gone to bed—he waited all night at the White House until 9 a.m. the next morning.

  “Hoffmann, you’ve got a LW for 1600. Go to B3 and get the documents. Here, take this.”

  The officer passed Hoffmann the key to the wrist bracelet.

  “Obviously, keep this hush hush as I should not be giving you the wrist key, but these Locked Wrist assignments are a huge pain in the ass.”

  Hoffmann knew as the officer often regaled him with the horror of the night in ‘37 and how the briefcase locked to his wrist had been a millstone when he tried to relieve himself—“God, it’s like having one arm cut off” the officer had told Hoffmann. Hoffmann nodded.

  Hoffmann locked the bracelet to his wrist, dropped the key into his left-hand pocket and departed.

  On the way out, Hoffmann dialed a local Washington telephone number and let it ring three times.

  Those three rings electrified the man hearing it. The special phone had only rung twice in the past year. The man jumped up and ran down the hallway.

  “Sir, we just got a three-ring.”

  Schneider, the cultural attaché of the German embassy, looked up.

  “We are very lucky today,” he said with a smile.

  “Alert the team and have Louise come to see me.”

  The man nodded.

  Louise Koch’s title was Deputy Assistant Cultural Attaché and, like her boss Schneider, she was a security agent—a polite word for spy.

  While Schneider was starting to run to fat, Louise personified the German ideal of womanhood: tall—in sling backs she was half a head taller than Schneider, blonde with blue eyes. But all men’s attention was drawn to her body—her legs were model-thin but her chest was a breath-taking 36 with a C cup that actually was closer to a D. And her breasts were uncommonly firm and taut—she wore a brassiere not, as most women do, for support, but rather to tone down her appearance.

  For this assignment there would be no brassiere and under her skirt just a garter belt and stockings—“commando” was Schneider’s term. Only 24 years old, her judgment was surprisingly good, and she knew how to control just about every man. Schneider was an exception and she liked him a great deal for his professionalism, which was just another term for his organizational and training skills.

  When she had first arrived at the embassy, he had spoken to her in depth about controlling the men who were her targets, and they both had enjoyed the “training” in his office—she loved the feel and smell of men and she liked to be able to combine this pleasure with the training with Schneider. He had shown her a few secrets that she had already put to good use. However, his training on responses to accidents was the most useful. She herself had never thought about—and was thus embarrassed by—accidents; she did not know what to say. He had taught her how glib and superficial most men are and how just a few choice words were all that were needed: for an early completion: “Oh my God you made me come so hard, please stop now or I will have an attack of the heart;” for a very small man, “that’s too big for me;” for a fat man, “thank God you’re not all skin and bones;” for a skinny man, “thank God you’re not fat—I hate it when a fat man is on top of me and often I cannot feel him inside me.”

  They both laughed when she had recounted to Schneider how these lines of flummery were perfect—“they always work,” she said, surprised.

  She was proud of her body and found it exhilarating to use it. Even as she walked into Schneider’s office she was already excited and aroused; her nipples broadcast as much.

  “This is a big one, Louise, so take your time. It is Washington, so it is a safe and simple town. The standard approach.”

  And as an afterthought,

  “And do enjoy yourself, you can tell me all about it later.”

  This last remark reminded her how lucky she was—she had come to love having two or three men in a day; together was good, but separately indulged her dreams of misbehaving. And she loved to feel Schneider inside her while still wet from the target. She thrilled to think about his soft, gentle, but dominating techniques.

  The main team had assembled in the back court of the embassy. Louise had already left, walking five blocks before hailing a Checker for the Willard.

  The transport pool driver drove Hoffmann first to the archive building and then to the White House. Hoffmann was pleased to see it was Jones, a dim-witted boy from Biloxi, Mississippi. It seemed Jones’s main interests were disposing of his wages as quickly as possible in illegal poker games, and as Jones put it, “dames.”

  Hoffmann chatted to Jones as Jones drove the dun-colored Packard.

  “With a car like this, you must get all the dames.”

  “I wish, sir.”

  “Well, you’ll get lucky sooner or later. All the pool drivers tell me the dames love just to sit in the back and they are always very generous.”

  Jones snickered.

  “Maybe I will get lucky,” Jones said in an accent so thick Hoffmann would not have understood had he not started the conversation.

  Hoffmann entered the archive building and took the elevator to B3, where the WPR folder was placed in the security briefcase.

  “No idea when I will be back,” Hoffmann said.

  The officer simply grunted, “Yeah, God knows.”

  Hoffmann made his way to the White House and told Jones to wait for him
behind the Willard hotel.

  “I will meet you there—make sure to behave and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Jones laughed.

  “He’s a nice boy,” Hoffmann thought.

  On entering the White House, Hoffmann was taken directly to the Oval Office. The President gave the security key to Hopkins and asked Hopkins to unlock the case and remove the thin, bright-orange folder. Hopkins complied and Hoffmann left to wait in the basement cafeteria while the great men upstairs pondered the contents.

  An hour later, the call came to return to the Oval Office. The President was, as before, sitting behind his desk. Hoffmann placed the brief case on the table and discretely averted his eyes. Hopkins placed the folder in the case and locked the peripheral locks.

  “All set, Captain, and thank you,” said the President.

  “Yes sir, Mr. President,” and Hoffmann gave his best parade-ground salute and left.

  Jones had dropped off Hoffmann and drove the one block to the Willard, almost getting into a traffic accident in the process. Jones parked behind the hotel, locked the car, and sauntered into the hotel, not that he had the courage to even order a cup of coffee, but he liked to look at all the high-class “dames.” Like many, he heard that the Willard was a favorite area for politicians to meet their mistresses. Whether true or not, Jones did not care, he just loved to gawk. He summoned up the courage to change two dollar bills for the Willard Coins—the Willard cleaned all coins they collected in huge vats in the basement and gave all who asked for change these sparkling pristine coins, “just like the moment they were minted” was the hotel’s boast. Many years later the St. Francis in San Francisco adopted the same practice, but by then “Willard Coins” was part of the American vocabulary.

  After an hour and lots of unfriendly looks from the concierge, Jones left to return to his car.

  As he turned the corner, he saw what he first thought was someone trying to break into his car. He panicked for an instant, then he realized it was a “dame” using his side mirror to touch up her lip stick. The captain had been right—it was his lucky day. The car was parked so Louise could not see Jones approaching but she knew exactly what would happen—a ham-fisted and painfully obvious pass.

  “You know there’s a law against that—it’s called illegal use of government property.”

  Louise gasped and turned.

  Jones eyes went directly to her nipples, as she knew they would.

  “Oh please, don’t report me,” she said.

  “You know there is a much bigger mirror inside; let me show you.”

  Louise smiled, demure and vulnerable, as Schneider had taught her.

  Jones unlocked the car and opened the door for the lady. Louise entered, making sure her pencil skirt rode up her legs to mid-thigh. None of this was lost on Jones, who showed her the larger interior side mirror.

  “You’re so kind, but why does a military vehicle have mirrors at all? I mean you soldier men are warriors and fighters.”

  This last sentence she asked with just a hint of breathlessness. Then came the fluttering of the eyelashes, the look down at his baggy serge trousers, and the mandatory touching of her hair—the universal sign of a woman in heat. Jones’s inexperience made him miss this last sign, but he was already well and truly hooked.

  Louise—like all experienced women—loved to tease, to flirt, and to tempt a man-child like Jones. She was expecting him to be a 30-second man. No matter, Schneider would make her climax four or five times when she returned to his office—she could already smell the leather of his chair on which she would be forced face down—she loved to be taken from behind by a confident and forceful man. Power.

  “Well, Miss, you see here in D.C., we drivers drive not just military men, but also their wives and...”

  “Their mistresses,” excitedly Louise finished the sentence.

  “Oh God, that is so exciting; do you ever get excited doing this, you know driving these girls—does that excite you? Driving the mistresses? Driving these young women who love to do it for money? You know, do sex for money? God, if it was me, I would be so excited. I would love to be paid for sex. Tell me some stories, what have you seen? You must have seen a lot, right? Gosh, that is so exciting. Have you seen things?”

  Her breathlessness was genuine—“just think about it and start touching yourself—excite yourself and you will excite him,” were Schneider’s words. And Schneider’s advice worked.

  While asking, Louise was ever so slightly rubbing her legs, not just for poor Jones, but also because she was getting genuinely aroused and she could squeeze herself to deepen and extend her excitement, just as her mentor had said.

  Jones told her the story of when he picked up a four-star general and his 19-year-old “niece”—“actually, here from the Willard.” The general was a desk soldier in the quartermaster corp or some other backwater.

  “Well, he was three sheets, no make that four sheets,” he said, laughing at his own description.

  The girl looked at Jones in the rear view mirror and their eyes meet.

  “It was as if she was wishing it was me in the back,” Jones said with a rare flash of insight.

  “Go on,” Louise said.

  “Well, she disappeared from view for a minute, and then I could see the old general close his eyes and start to moan.”

  With this, Louise pulled her dress up and started touching herself. Many men think a woman touching them is the most exciting element in foreplay, but as Louise knew so well when she touched herself the man watching was instantly aroused. And Jones was no exception. He looked at her. He was about to say something when she panted, “Keep going, please.”

  Jones continued and Louise could feel herself starting to get very excited—“enough of this, back to work” she said to herself.

  Rasping, she said “I want to be the girl; can I?”

  Jones nodded.

  Before he could change his mind, she had him in her mouth.

  Clean, uncut, reasonable size, she noted.

  She could taste a little early juice and knew if she wasn’t very careful it would be all over very soon, and she wanted a gift for Schneider.

  “You must fuck me—please put that cock inside me and dump all of it inside me, please, please, do it to me, I need your cock today. I never get enough cock. Never enough.”

  The last two statements were true—the more men she got, the more she wanted; today she would need more than Jones.

  As expected, Jones was a 30-second man and Louise had her “come back,” as she liked to call it, ready.

  “God, that was so good; thank goodness you stopped—I thought my heart was going to stop.”

  Jones smiled, the conquering hero.

  “Sir, I have one more request, can you bite my nipples, but bite them a little, not too much, just a little.”

  Jones complied and Louise did actually climax.

  “I don’t know about you, but I need a cigarette, you got any, sir?”

  As Louise told Schneider later, the “sir” made Jones putty.

  Ten minutes earlier, Hoffmann had left the White House and had walked toward the Willard. But instead of going behind it to the car, he kept walking for another three blocks. In the quiet back street was a truck, nondescript with a few streaks of rust on the side. Inside sat a man doing the crossword puzzle from the day’s Washington Post. Or at least that is what he appeared to be doing to the casual observer. In reality, he was watching the two side mirrors. He saw Hoffmann turn the corner. Hoffmann got into the passenger’s side, taking care to lock the truck door. He silently unlocked the wrist lock and passed the brief case behind him through the truck’s internal window into the main body of the truck. Schneider’s hands took the briefcase.

  The inside of the truck was like a tiny, well-lit factory. Along one side of the truck’s wall was a table and standing beside the table were three men all wearing white cotton gloves. Schneider held a roll of 20 keys—all the keys, in fact,
for all Locked Wrist cases made in the past 15 years. The army in its admirable quest for frugality had issued tenders for the locks and like all governments worldwide had not blinked an eye when the tender was won by the Chicago company of Neumann and Braun, a renowned locksmith company, a subsidiary of its German parent. That the bid was under half of the second lowest bidder raised no eyebrows; why should it?

  The fifth key opened the two peripheral locks.

  Schneider removed the folder, passing it to the team. The first man in the team removed all the pages and then passed each page to the center man, who placed the sheet under a mechanical apparatus that looked like a huge black steel spider. The center man pressed a button and a flash of light indicated a photograph had been taken. Then third man took the sheet from the second man and reattached it to the original folder. The entire process took under five minutes. The case was passed back by Schneider to Hoffmann.

  While the photographing was being done, Hoffmann chatted to the driver, secure in the knowledge that he was legally on German soil. Any inquisitive policeman who happened to wander by and ask unwanted questions would have first been told that Hoffmann was simply enjoying a chat with his brother-in-law. If that failed, Schneider would have then appeared and threatened fire and brimstone. True, Hoffmann would have to have been repatriated to Germany but better this than facing a firing squad. In any event, no policeman appeared and Hoffman left the truck and walked to the street behind the Willard.

  Hoffman angrily knocked on the rear door of the Packard; Jones started.

  “What the fuck are you doing Jones; who the hell is this woman?”

  Jones started to splutter.

  Smoothly, Louise said, “Captain, it was my fault; you see I asked this gentleman for help and...”

  “Out!” Hoffmann commanded.

  “What the fuck were you thinking Jones?” Hoffmann asked on the drive back to the archive.

  Jones smiled weakly and turned for an instant, “You were right captain—I did get lucky.”