The Slave World (6)

(6): Tradecraft

Hmm, Rebecca wasn't kidding when she described them as big lads. I snapped a couple of pictures with my phone of the man who stood on the street corner watching Rebecca's building. Like she said they weren't trying to be inconspicuous and they definitely were of 'a type'. They had short cropped hair, were probably six feet two inches tall or taller, wore nondescript jeans, boots and dark colour tops and they obviously worked out in some serious gyms. If I had to guess I'd say they were East European gangsters, Russian even. I could see why Rebecca was worried.

They looked 'tasty' as East End gangsters might say. For me that meant dangerous.

One of the advantages of the current mobile phone age is that everyone walks around London staring at their phones which makes it dead easy for me to appear to be doing the same, while in fact I'm photographing you. I do that thing where I appear to be lost in my little Snapchat world, giggling or pouting while posing for selfies or talking to my phone while I hold it, but in actual fact I'm taking shots of my surveillance target. It helps also that I'm a girl, because you expect girls to be obsessed with their phones and you're hardly likely to think one of them is following you around.

I wore jeans, sensible boots, cheap t-shirt and a casual jacket that cost me £25 from Primark. I didn't want to spend a lot on the jacket as I'd ditch it once it was time to look a little different. Hopefully a homeless girl might be able to make use of it after me. I had my hair gathered up behind my head with clips, and one of my changes of appearance would simply be to take the clips out and let the hair back down again. Simple, straight forward and by losing the jacket I would have another look too.

Right on cue Rebecca left the front door of her building to walk around London. I had told her to act like she normally did, and that meant spotting the men who obviously wanted to be spotted. It was genuine concern I saw in her face as she saw the man watching from the corner of the street. He made no sign of looking at her but it was obvious he was. She hurried down the road away from him towards the nearest tube station, clutching her handbag close to her body. She was wearing a dress that came to just above her knees, perhaps afraid what they might do if she didn't.

Despite my specific instructions not to, she was scanning the nearby area hoping for the reassurance of seeing me in place. When she spotted me apparently talking to my phone she relaxed a little, a sign that the man on the corner picked up on. He glanced curiously around the street taking everything in but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. There were at least twenty people there besides me and none of them seemed out of place.

Last night it had been raining heavily. I had curled up in my bed with one of the tatty paperbacks Adam had given me and had read Captive of Gor while the rain tapped a rhythm on my window panes. My first impression was that Eleanor Brinton was possibly the most irritating character I'd ever come across in the history of fiction, and if she had been a client of mine then the slavers of Gor would have been welcome to her quite frankly.

The first few chapters had been interesting, detailing the surveillance she had been under as the men came to abduct her. She showed some courage in trying to evade capture in her Maserati, but in the end they had run her down in some country lane close to their drop ship. Soon after she woke up on this Gor planet.

I think I would have done a lot better than her though.

It had been a hot and humid evening even with the rain and I had lain in my bed in just my black M&S cotton knickers, t-shirt and white ankle socks, flicking the well thumbed pages as I read on to see how she was put through a series of ordeals on her new alien world. She was branded, collared, trained as a slave and taught to be pleasing to men, but resisted all the while to the best of her limited ability. I was surprised at how coy many of the descriptive passages were. There were practically no sexual passages at all, rather things implied and left to the reader's imagination. Miss Brinton certainly complained a lot and seemed to be a little naïve as to what was going to happen to her. The prose style was simple, a little repetitive and hardly subtle, but it painted a realistic world, albeit one based heavily on ancient Earth cultures.

After a while I became a little engrossed in the narrative and I paused to get a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka from the fridge. I drank it chilled and neat with ice as I carried on reading while the rain continued to fall. I could see what Adam meant when he had said the book was sexy. No actual sex, but sexy regardless. I drank some more vodka and after a while began to imagine what I myself would have done if I'd been in El-in-or's position.

It was a warm, muggy night. I couldn't sleep. I'd been drinking neat chilled vodka. The rain was still pattering at my window panes.

It had been nine months now since I'd shared my bed with a man. Well, eight months and a bit. Round that up. I was feeling a bit horny.

So, yes, I felt restless and a bit on edge. Perhaps the story had reminded me how long I'd been without sex. Too long, perhaps.

I imagined I was Eleanor Brinton, chained and collared, kneeling in the cage of a slave pen, feeling helpless on this savage alien world of dominant men. Propped up against my pillows I began to stroke softly along my inner thighs, feeling a warm sense of arousal from the combination of pulp erotica, vodka and my own hand. After a while I wriggled to pull my black cotton knickers down to my knees and down around one ankle as I pulled my other foot free. I touched myself more intimately now and slipped a couple of fingers into my wet sex. I trembled a little on my bare sheets as I pressed my thighs against my hand and stroked myself on to a pleasurable climax, my eyelids fluttering and my breath escaping my mouth in sharp hissing motions.

Afterwards I felt a bit ashamed and I put the book away, two thirds read. I lay on my back, knees raised, savouring the afterglow of the orgasm. I ran my hands though my hair and twisted so that I could see the droplets of water rolling down the surface of the window pane in my bedroom. It was just a fantasy, like Adam said. Just a harmless fantasy leading to a pleasurable hand fuck.

I was beginning to put together a picture of this case as I followed the man with the broad shoulders and the close cropped hair.

Fact one: Rebecca WAS being followed. That was beyond any doubt when after half an hour of walking around London the first man promptly left and a second man, also strong, broad shouldered, tall - a monster of a man in fact - took his place, emerging from a nearby shop front.

Fact two: the symbol marked on Rebecca's thigh had something to do with the fictional Gor universe of the books. It had to be these men that had marked Rebecca with the indelible marker pen.

Surmise: these men were motivated and/or inspired by a series of trashy pulp sci-fi erotica novels. They were acting out some abduction fantasies on women and they were modelling what they did on the source material.

What Adam had told me yesterday fleshed things out from there. If we supposed that the men wanted to keep to the flavour of the books they wouldn't simply try to abduct Rebecca. The nature of the books dictated that they would play with her first in this sadistic pattern. What had Adam told me?

They would find a woman who was beautiful, intelligent and articulate. Well, Rebecca was beautiful, no doubt about that. She studied English Literature at university, so I guess the second holds true as well. And she seemed well spoken, so yes, articulate. She's their type.

The so called slavers of Gor would assign a woman to an acquisition list, record every pertinent detail they might need, and then observe her for a time to get to know their prey. Typically the woman would not know she was under observation. She would not know that she had been watched for maybe months. Perhaps they would break into her apartment, go through her things, observe her even while she slept. They would not be deliberately obvious during this time.

She had no way of knowing how long all of this had been going on.

A scary thought. Rebecca thought it had all begun a week ago, but maybe not. Maybe that was simply when they wanted her to know.

So, yeah, the woman on the abduction list would not know she was being watched until the time came when they wanted to make their presence known. Then the game would begin. They would make the woman aware of Gor through a subtle series of contrivances. People might tell her things about Gor. She would learn about slavery, again through contrived pre-planned situations. They wanted the woman to understand something of the books they were inspired by. They wanted the woman to understand something of the fate of women like her who might be abducted and taken to Gor to be enslaved.

Even at this stage, as she learnt details of this fictional world from various people, the woman might be naively unaware that she was their target. She might not know or comprehend that men wanted her in a collar with a brand on her thigh. She might think it would happen to other women but couldn't happen to her.

And then the game would proceed along pre-arranged lines. She would become aware of the men. She would see them for the first time, because they arranged things so that she would. She couldn't be sure they were watching her, but gradually her paranoia would build. Then the creepy stuff would really begin. Things taken from her apartment or left there. The messages and the indications that they knew what she did, who she spoke to, and where she went.

And then finally the net would close in around her.

All of this of course supposed a fairly sophisticated operation. In actual fact it had to be a lot more amateur than that. Oh yes, in the books the slavers of Gor had tendrils everywhere, but in reality these men who were simply inspired by the books, they would have limited resources.

At the junction to Tottenham Court Road the second man disappeared into a side alley as the third man took his place from the steps leading in to an underground station. As before I took a number of photos as I pretended to pose for a selfie. I was getting them all captured on camera and I hoped that one of them might then lead me to their place of residence. To be honest this was going better than I had expected. Yesterday I had assumed they would be cautious and that I would have to arrange with Adam and Mark on another day to triangulate and follow them more professionally, but the overconfidence of these men surprised me. They were focussed entirely on Rebecca to the point where I probably didn't need to adjust my hair style or discard my jacket the way I did. Their tunnel vision meant I was practically invisible to them. Good.

Rebecca followed the plan and made a few pre-arranged stops at a cafe and to buy a newspaper and then to browse through a department store on Oxford Street. By now the first man had returned and taken over from the third man. They obviously knew the basics of how to tail someone but they were very sloppy when it came to ensuring they weren't being watched too.

Very sloppy, lads, I thought to myself. Occasionally one of them would take the time to observe the area but nothing seemed to cause them any alarm. I was just one girl in amongst a crowd of people worshipping their phones.

Just one girl.

At some point in the afternoon they decided their job was done for the day. They had routinely swapped over from each other every twenty to thirty minutes, but now as the second man had completed his watch he wasn't replaced by the third man. Instead he simply thrust his hands into the side pockets of his jacket and walked away without looking back. There was an air of finality to this and although I was tempted to linger and see if the replacement was simply late, something told me this was it and I'd do well to see where this man was heading. I followed him down main roads at first and then down short side roads, but always in public. I was wary of following him alone down quiet roads leading who knows where because I didn't have any back up, but that never happened.

He hardly looked back as he walked and when he did it was only at the point of wanting to cross the road. We took the tube and then we walked for maybe thirty five minutes and I could see he wasn't taking the direct route home for the route didn't make sense wherever you might be heading. Eventually we closed in on Hampstead Lane, home to some very expensive sprawling properties situated on large expanses of land. He paused at a gate that led to a four storey detached town house and punched in a recognition code. Silently the iron gates swung open and he entered the driveway of the house. I watched as the gates slowly swung back in place and rotating security cameras followed him as he approached the main building set astride floodlit grounds.

Whoever these people were, they certainly weren't poor.