True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(32)



“Now,” she begged him. “Please.”

Ivanka Anasenko was physically fit, supremely so, but he knew she didn’t have the stamina for full Seiteki chōetsu. The only woman he’d ever known who did was the one who’d taught him the ancient art. But Anasenko had endured longer than most women could.

“Are you sure?” he whispered into her ear. Even his words, the feel of his breath on her ear, made her eyelids quiver with desire. The right pitch of his voice would be enough to push her over the edge, but not enough to accomplish his goal.

“God, yes,” she said but it sounded more like a moan.

He slowly pulled out of her, making her body shudder, and sat on the edge of the bed, studying her. This pause, too, was part of the technique and perhaps its most exquisite expression. She was beautiful in this state of transcendent arousal. He could almost forget that she was an enemy agent and a coldhearted killer.

“You can’t leave me like this,” she whispered imploringly, as if she were tied naked to the rack rather than lying unbound on her bed, her body frozen with erotic tension and aching, bone-deep lust.

He flicked one of her hard nipples like a light switch. She instantly began convulsing as one powerful orgasm after another roiled through her body, her eyes rolling back in her head as she endured the mind-blowing pleasure.

Straker stood and dressed, paying little attention to her ecstasy, until she finally slipped into unconsciousness. He tied his shoes and then checked her pulse, just to be sure he hadn’t accidentally killed her. Deaths often occurred when amateurs attempted Seiteki chōetsu, even without knives. It had never happened to him, of course, but he couldn’t be certain she didn’t have a family history of congenital heart defects that wasn’t noted in her file. Her pulse was healthy. She was still alive but he was certain that she wouldn’t regain consciousness for hours, perhaps days.

That gave him more than enough time to break into the Kremlin, steal the Miernik dossier, and still make it to Pamplona tomorrow to run with the bulls.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Klamath Falls, Oregon. July 20. 7:07 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

The Walmart had just opened and there were more employees in the store than customers. The aisles were virtually deserted. Ian and Margo moved down the snack food aisle, Ian filling their cart with bags of chips and cookies on the go without giving any attention to what he was grabbing. She was dismayed by his choices.

“I thought we were trying to stay alive,” Margo said, picking up a bag of pork rinds as an example. “This stuff will kill us before the CIA can.”

“It’s not for us. It’s for Ronnie.”

“Who’s Ronnie?” She dropped the pork rinds back into the cart and absently wiped her hand on her pant leg to remove grease that wasn’t there.

“He’s the guy we’re on our way to see,” Ian said. “He rarely ventures out and he loves junk food.”

Ian wheeled the cart to the self-serve checkout station. He wasn’t worried about being seen on security cameras. He doubted that the CIA could monitor every camera in every store in America for their faces, but he didn’t want to spend time with a cashier. They were paying with cash, and they weren’t wanted felons, so the odds of anybody coming along later and asking about them were slim. Even so, he still thought it was better to avoid giving anyone much of an opportunity to see and remember them. The cashier probably didn’t see many people with duct-taped casts on their arms.

Ian scanned the items over the bar-code reader while Margo bagged them.

“How far do we have to go?” she asked.

“A few more hours.”

“How long has it been since you saw him?”

“About five years, right after he left LA for Nevada to live off the grid,” Ian said, passing some Ho Hos and Ding Dongs over the scanner. “I went out and tried to talk him into coming back but it didn’t work.”

“Why did he exile himself?”

Ian sighed. “To escape constant government surveillance and to survive the man-made pandemic that the global elites will unleash to exterminate fifty percent of the world’s population so they can keep earth’s limited resources for themselves.”

“Oh, that,” Margo said. “Now that you’ve given me the executive summary, let’s hear the details.”

He didn’t want to go into the details because he knew how it would sound but there was no way to avoid it. “It goes back to 9/11.”

“Of course it does,” she said.

That was the reaction he was afraid of. He fed some bills into the machine and pocketed the change, and Margo pushed the cart to the door. Usually at Walmart, a retiree in a blue vest was posted at the door to double-check customer receipts against whatever was in the cart. But there was no old fogey there this morning. So they simply walked between the two hard plastic security panels that scanned them for shoplifted items and then they went out the door to the parking lot.

Ian resumed his explanation as they walked to the car. “Ronnie believes that our government knew the attack on the World Trade Center was coming, and either instigated it or smoothed the way for it to happen, to get the country behind the invasion of Afghanistan and the Second Gulf War.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

Ian opened the trunk and they began loading the groceries inside. “The global elites control the government and own the military-industrial complex so the war kept them rich and funded the production of the weaponry they’d need for world domination. It also led to the creation of the Patriot Act, which granted the government enormous and unprecedented surveillance and warrantless search-and-seizure powers.”

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