Brewster's Brood - Part 31 (Patreon)

Part Thirty-one

Kelly Coleman – 3/10/2017 – Saturday – 8:28 pm

Coming out of the bedroom, Kelly felt her head was spinning, but there was something wild and exciting about all of it that she hadn’t anticipated. She’d come into this whole thing with a clear cut game plan and somewhere along the way, the plan had been jettisoned and she’d caught fucking feelings for Max.

That wasn’t the fucking plan.

But was it a problem? Kelly wasn’t so sure.

Max was exactly right about how she’d been. She’d had a plan and when that plan had fallen apart, she’d kept looking back at the tattered shreds of her old plan waiting for it make sense again, and it hadn’t, when she realized she should’ve been making a new plan.

Why the hell couldn’t that new plan include Max?

He was remarkably more mature than she’d expected him to be, and there was no way around that. She needed to give the man credit where credit was due – he was so much more emotionally developed as a person than she would’ve taken him for on first glance.

When it came men, she was starting to realize that maybe first impressions were complete and total horseshit, and that it took more than a couple of minutes to learn what lay beneath the surface. The problem was that it was still insanely early and there were still plenty of other women who wanted to get their say in the matter pushed in front of Max.

The whole thing had seemed like such a laugh at first, but she’d been sure that getting knocked up by this stranger wouldn’t be all that complicated, as long as she made a concerted effort at it. She’d had a couple of attempts already, and felt like unless the man was firing blanks, she’d already gotten decent odds of having a bun in the oven. But it had been so easy to think of just dismissing the guy before she’d actually met him. Now that she had, she didn’t know if she wanted to let go.

That meant she needed to have a plan, and she needed one quick. As soon as she and Max had set foot on the floor, she’d locked eyes with Jenny, who’d come over with a big smile, giving her a hug before moving in to lock lips with Max like she was already working on laying the foundation. At some point in the next couple of hours, they would need to step to one side and have a chat about the idea of them working together. They hadn’t talked a lot, but Jenny had come across as easily the most reasonable of the other women she’d seen in Brand Game so far, and certainly not as desperate as some of them. The plan was to join forces, lock arms and work together, if she could convince Jenny that they needed to collaborate. What Danny had said earlier made perfect sense – by the end of all of this, one singular woman would never be enough for Max, so the answer had to be building a small group of women to work as a collective.

The DJ was spinning tunes, with a high-intensity, fast tempo banger playing through the speakers, not so loud to as to disturb the whole neighborhood but enough to fill the area with plenty of people throwing shapes in the area, and while there were a bunch of familiar faces, all of Foxtrot Group had shown up and not a single one of them was content to wait, so they were all over the public space, some of them were in swimsuits, some in evening wear, some in club wear, a handful in attire that would’ve been far too risqué for anywhere but a private club. (At least a couple of them were just wandering around topless, like that was a fine bit of etiquette. But nobody was totally naked, at least, so that was something.)

Still, despite all the beauty on display, most of them didn’t have the brains to avoid making the same mistake the majority of new girls in the Brand Game always seemed to make – they were expecting Max to come to them. It was the one element of the whole thing that Kelly thought had to make for hilarious watching – all these women were used to being the hottest thing in town whenever they put in the slightest bit of effort, but Max was literally drowning in beautiful women, so his head wasn’t turning casually for anyone. These girls needed to get their grafting boots on, because Max was highly unlikely to go chasing after anyone, no matter how good looking they were.

Most of them were trying to figure out how to approach, but women who’d come in early knew better and were just sort of moving into Max’s space, crowding around him. If Kelly hadn’t known better, she would’ve assumed that Max was drunk, because he was dancing his ass off, shaking his butt like he genuinely didn’t care. He was laughing like crazy, as if maybe the whole thing had tilted him a little bit, like a pinball machine who’d been smacked too hard on one side. But yet, the smile on his face seemed genuine, and Kelly hoped they’d just crossed some other hurdle, where all this was starting to feel natural for him and maybe he’d embraced the insanity that his life currently was.

The DJ had on some ridiculous Usher song about falling in love, but mostly it was a thick bass line that let the girls all start to push around him and grind up into him. She felt like leaving him alone there for a couple of minutes would probably be okay, as she slid her hand around Jenny’s waist, pulling her away from the crowd before moving them just to the very outskirts of the area visible from the dancefloor.

“Hey,” Kelly said. “I wanted to take a few minutes to chat with you about teaming up.”

“Yeah, I saw your little speech to Max on the livestream,” Jenny said, biting her bottom lip for a moment. “I’m not traditionally a sharing kind of girl, but I also realize we’re about as far from tradition here as I’m ever gonna see in my lifetime.”

“If you’re not into it—”

“No!” Jenny said so suddenly it almost made Kelly jump. “No. I am into it, but do you think he’s going to go for it?”

Kelly offered her a smile, seeing the statuesque cop in a totally new light for once – the insecure woman afraid of rejection. It was a nice reminder that for all her bluster and confidence, the towering undercover cop was just as human as the rest of them. “I think anyone, and I do mean anyone who tells you they know what this guy’s going to do at the end of three months is out of their fucking mind. I think Max is just as likely to tell each and every one of us to go fuck off and die as he is to want to keep, like, twenty of us. I have no idea what that much sudden money is going to do to one person. I don’t think anyone does. It’s like winning the lottery on steroids. What do you do when you suddenly find out you can, y’know, go private island shopping? Or if you want to fly to another country, you can either just buy out all the seats on a plane, charter a private flight or just buy your own private plane instead? And that each of these options, as ridiculous as they are, won’t cost you a more money than you make in a single day? How do you even process that?”

Jenny nodded, sliding her hand around Kelly’s shoulder. “You’re right. Nobody knows which way he’s gonna jump. I’m just… is it weird that I think I actually like the guy?”

She shook her head, patting her on the back. “I think there’s a bunch of us starting to feel that way. It’s nice to see the guy without the tainting effect of money on him, because Max… he’s just a genuinely normal nice guy. Like, a lot older than I probably would’ve gone for on my own, but.. but he’s been super fucking kind to all of us. There are women totally throwing pussy at him, and each and every time, he’s like ‘Are you all having a good time? Anybody not get off? Do I still have work to do?’” Both women laughed a bit at that. “Who does that? I’ve had boyfriends less attentive than this guy who’s randomly boning me and a hundred other women.”

The detective couldn’t help but laugh so hard she was almost crying. “Right?! It’s like every other guy we’ve ever met before now seems like shit compared to the one guy we’re incredibly unlikely to be able to keep! What the fuck, universe? How the hell did my karma get to this?”

“You’re coming over to my side, where I don’t believe in karma or religion or any of that bullshit anymore,” Kelly said. “It’s chaos; be kind. Anyway, if you’re willing to team up with me, I think you and I could do pretty well together. If you’re up f—” She hadn’t even been able to finish her sentence when Jenny had grabbed the back of Kelly’s head, pulling the small ex-athlete’s lips to hers, Kelly only able to give a little excited whimper before slumping into Jenny’s controlling arms.

“Yeah,” Jenny said, breaking from the kiss just enough for the two to look in each other’s eyes. “If you think you can handle that on the reg, I think you and me can work well together.”

“He’s watching, isn’t he?” Kelly giggled.

“I sure as hell hope so, but even if he wasn’t, that was worth it by my reckoning,” Jenny said. “Now, we need to make sure he’s not getting overwhelmed by all the new girls pushing and pulling for his attention. I heard he made a pact with Danny’s girlfriend Liane that if he’d start fucking someone new on the dancefloor, she’d do Danny on the dance floor right next to him. Think she meant it?”

“I think her and Danny are people of their word, so if that’s what they said, they’re definitely gonna do it,” Kelly said. “You got one of the new girls who you think would be up for having it all be a public spectacle?”

Jenny rolled her eyes a little. “Anywhere we fuck with Max, it’s basically a public spectacle, what with all the cameras around.”

“You know, I’ve almost forgotten they’re there?”

“Don’t get too comfortable,” the strawberry blonde cop told her. “Anyway, I bet if we approached that girl over there, her name is Kristen, she’d probably go for it. She’s a teacher, so I think the idea of it being out in front of everyone wouldn’t bother her one bit. Should we see if we can talk her into it?”

“Better get to it soon,” Kelly laughed, “because Liane is grinding on Danny’s crotch out there like she’s impatient and wants to get to it pretty damn quick.”

Jenny giggled with her. “You’re right. Any longer, and Liane’s just gonna have at them. Let’s go introduce ourselves to Kristen.”

Mrs. Churchill – 3/10/2017 – Saturday – 9:13 pm

Looking at the video feed from her office, Mrs. Churchill had to smile for a moment, seeing that Max was giving a standing fuck to one of the new girls, Kristen, right there in the middle of the dance floor, and while Max wasn’t necessarily in the shape needed to make that kind of thing work, the girls had crowded in around him, giving their assistance to whatever help he needed to jerk her up and down on his dick, surrounded by half naked beautiful women.

That wasn’t entirely what made Mrs. Churchill smile as hard as she was, though. Kristen’s arms were reached behind her back to interlock with Liane’s arms, the two women back-to-back, as Danny drilled Liane, the four of them making a connected pair, Liane’s hair tossed back over Kristen’s shoulder some of the time, falling between the curvier woman’s exposed tits even as they jiggled and bounced when Max did his best to thrust up into her.

It was fun to watch her best security operative let his hair down a little bit. The old Danny from a few years back would’ve never been so daring or bold as to have sex in public, but Liane had been good at making sure he opened up and stepped out of his shell, letting his wild side come out to play every now and again.

Lynne came strolling over to her, a heavy glimmering bag in her hands. “So I’ve been poking around with those things you found, the ones you wanted me to be incredibly careful with, and I’ve got bad news, crap news, awful news and a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Start with the bad news and work down to the bottom before bringing us back up again,” Mrs. Churchill said to her. “I would rather know what kind of mess we’re stuck in and how I can start trying to plan my way out of it instead of you jerking me around all night.”

“The bad news is that the IP address this shit was relaying back to is now a dead end. It was a small receiving terminal inside of a colo that was connected to a couple of other relays, but according to the manager of the colo, all of that stuff was removed about the same time as you found the splice. And whoever it was didn’t leave behind anything that I could use to track them.”

“The crap news?”

“I’m not entirely sure how they got it into our networks, but I’m pretty certain one of the girls was in on it, which means if they’re tenacious enough, they could probably do it again, although I’ve set up a handful of things that will let us know if there’s additional signals going out, unless they’re using cellular, in which case they’ll probably only get audio reliably, or if they are getting video, it’ll all be in low resolution. I can’t imagine they’d get much in the way of useful information out of it if they went that route, but so far, these are some clever motherfuckers so I wouldn’t put it past them for trying something new and different that I haven’t thought of yet.”

“The awful news is that I can’t think of any way to make us completely isolated from having vulnerability, but in one of the two bits of light at the end of the tunnel, I’m mostly certain that they can’t get into our main lines, and even if they did, they couldn’t break our end-to-end encryption, so all they’re going to get is a horrible mess.”

“What’s the other light at the end of the tunnel?”

“I set up a snake trap for them on the existing camera threads coming from the house, that gets removed once it gets over to us, so if anyone’s trying to show off that they’ve got access to our feeds, it’ll actually give us a ton of information on where their system is,” Lynne said. “But I don’t think they’re going to be showing off our streams to anyone. Everything I can tell you about this gear is that is isn’t going to get full resolution piggybacks. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that the way these things are devised? I’m pretty sure they’re just audio bugs.”

“What the hell good would audio only do anybody?” Mrs. Churchill asked with a frown.

“If you’re trying to blackmail somebody? None at all. If you’re just doing basic intel gathering? Loads. I think this is somebody who couldn’t afford to get in on our streams who I think wants to get some baseline information on Max for when he comes out on the other side of the Game. I don’t think it has anything at all to do with us, the women or the terms of his inheritance. In fact, if I had to put money down on an option, I’d say it’s someone who wants to get into bed with Max after he’s gotthe inheritance and is trying to figure out what kind of man he is. That help you at all, boss?”

“Not especially,” Mrs. Churchill grumbled. “Once he gets his money, Max Brewster is going to be the apple of everyone’s eye, but until then, he’s basically a nobody that I don’t think anyone is looking into.”

“Oh, last thing. Probably doesn’t mean anything. The data trail probably extends past the last point I could track it back to, but the last point was a colo near Lyon, France. Some suburb called Saint-Priest, on the southeast side. That mean anything to you?” Lynne asked.

Mrs. Churchill felt her face drop into a meaningful scowl. “It means I need to make a phone call and I need to yell a bit,” she said, standing up from her chair, grabbing her cell phone. “Excuse me, Lynne. You don’t want to be around for this.”

As her technician returned to her post, Mrs. Churchill stepped back out onto the balcony into the cool evening air, as she started to scroll down deep into the dregs of her contacts before an old, familiar and unpleasant name jumped out at her.

Finley.

Aldus Finley.

She stared at it long and hard for a moment then tapped his name before bringing it to her ear, listening as it began to ring across the world. A couple of rings later, a voice sprang to life in her ear. “Ah, bonjour, Madame Churchill,” Finley said to her. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this breaking of the long silence that laid between us?”

“Cut the crap, Finley,” Mrs. Churchill growled. “You were trying to tap into the secure lines of the gig I’m working on, and I want to know why.”

“Why would I—”

“I don’t know why, but I know it was you, Finley. My tech traced the signal back to your hometown of Saint-Priest. You don’t forget a name like that.”

The voice on the other end of the line paused and then let out a very deep sigh. “If I tell you everything, will it buy me a little bit of leniency?”

“Depends on how much you have to tell me, so start talking, and hope I’m feeling generous.”

“I was contacted a week ago by someone who heard you were putting together some sort of large-scale op near San Francisco, and they thought it might have been tied to Max Brand, since you’d been spotted with him before his demise.”

“Who spotted me talking to Mister Brand?”

Finley scoffed. “You didn’t exactly make a secret of it, nor should you have. Whenever job you’re working on, I’m wagering it has to do with inheritance, since nothing has been announced on that front. Is that a fair assumption to make?”

“I haven’t told you to stop talking yet.”

“Yes. Well. The idea was that you might have a lead on who the person who’s going to inherit all the Brand estate was going to be, and if someone could use you to gather that information in advance, it might be worth quite the tactical advantage to anyone looking to get into business with the new owner of Brand Everything.”

“And you thought if you dispatched a spy or two into my gag, they’d be able to pick up information about who’s coming into that money and could maybe start hitting him up sooner rather than later.”

He chuckled softly. “Can you blame me? It’s a lot of money, and there’s a lot of options on ways people could trade this into profit.”

She sighed. “No, Aldus, I can’t fault you for wanting to try and get an edge, but in doing so, you’re tapping into a very carefully controlled closed environment and I can’t afford to let any information get out of it, and you stomping around throwing taps on my lines is only going to piss me right off. You’re right – there’s a literal shitload of money being thrown around right now and it means we’re all doing everything we can to keep it all on lockdown.”

“So what’s going on then? What can you tell me?”

“Tell you? Now? Next to nothing. But in about three months’ time, if I give you an edge, a week’s worth of advantage, you need to give me a name.”

“I don’t like ratting people out,” Aldus said. “But I also don’t like being caught in-between two old friends, especially when both of them have reasonable expectations. The other party isn’t trying to hurt you; he’s just trying to get a leg up and make sure his own ass is covered. With this much money on the line, everybody’s worried about what kind of shakeup we’re in store for.”

“Oh, it’s a hell of a shakeup. And I’ll tell you what. Just to show there’s no bad blood, I’ll even give your other friend a pass and extend to them the same courtesy. No anger, no repercussions, just information exchange and a promise not to do it again.”

“No repercussions?” Finley chuckled. “That’s unlike you. This must be important.”

“It’s extremely important, which is why I’m willing to be so generous in being lax about it. But this is a one-time offer,” Mrs. Churchill warned. “You’re either in or you’re out. Right now.”

Finley hesitated for a moment longer than she would’ve liked, but with the amount of money up for grabs, she could at least respect the hesitation. “Pajak,” he sighed. “She came to me and wanted to find out anything I could about Brand’s death and where his money might be going. She had a contract that she was in negotiations with that fell apart when he died, which is how she knows he died, and her company was banking on that deal to pull them out of their slump. It wasn’t just a little thing – this is her livelihood, and I know she and I haven’t been together for decades, but she and I were engaged to wed back in the eighties, and even though we didn’t go through with it, she’s still a good friend of mine, much as you are. So you will hold to your word? No punishment for her or her people?”

“Mmmm. I don’t know that I can entirely promise—”

“You said—”

“Tell you what. I won’t eject the girl involved in placing the taps, but I’m going to give her a warning and a timeout from the competition she’s engaged in, more of which I’ll tell you about in a few months. Not so much that’s she’s entirely out, but enough that it’ll set her back a bit,” Mrs. Churchill said. “I can’t have people involved in this being anything less than dependable. So it’ll be a slap on the wrist, and a time out, but not a total disqualification. Fair?”

Finley clicked his tongue. “She did such a shit job that her work got found, so I suppose that’s only fair, as long as you promise me she’s still in the running for whatever competition she’s a part of. A penalty is fine, but a total disqualification would feel like repercussions, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I can agree to that. The woman’s name?”

“Esme Santiago,” Finley replied. “She said she would do everything she could to make sure we got a tap into your lines, but most of what we got was merde because your encryption is remarkable. You should give your tech woman a raise, because we genuinely had nothing for all our hard work.”

Mrs. Churchill laughed heartily at that. “Finley, you clever bastard. Did you just barter yourself into a better position than you were when this whole conversation started?”

“I may have had a crap hand, Helen, but you must remember, I’m still me, and I know how to bluff with the best of them.”

“But how do you know I’m going to hold up my end of the agreement?”

“Because for all the things that you have ever been called, madame – a troublemaker, an instigator, a chaotic force, a cast iron bitch even – no one has ever accused you of welching on your promises and deals.”

“And I intend to hold up that agreement, Aldus, even as annoyed I am that you’ve got the better of me.” She shook her head and smiled, amazed that her old friend still had the ability to surprise her every once in a while. “Then I’ll make a point to talk to you in three months’ time and I’ll fill you in about everything then, and even put in a bit of contact for both you and Mrs. Pajak with the person who’s going to end up with Monty Brand’s money.”

“You can confirm he’s dead then?”

“You know a man with that kind of money can’t take a shit without people talking about it, Aldus. Yes, he’s gone. And we’ll have an heir in three months’ time.”

“Is it tied to your little competition?”

“Don’t push your luck, old friend.”

“Ha ha. Had to try. Talk to you soonish then.”

Mrs. Churchill hung up the phone and walked back into the main room again, seeing that the dance floor debauchery had broken up, and that the bounty hunter and the spy were walking back towards the main house with Max, Jenny and Kelly in tow. Fang even had her hand down the front of Max’s pants as they started to walk up the stairs, heading towards one of the bedrooms that Max had spent the least time in, the one with the windows completely covered in heavy tarp. It was nicknamed The Dark Room, because when the lights were off, the sense of touch was nearly all you had to go on.

“Get it all figured out, boss?” Jacinda asked.

“Found out who our rat was, but we’re not kicking her out,” Mrs. Churchill said, moving to sit back down in her command center chair. “I made a promise to an old friend we wouldn’t, but we’re going to give her a one-week timeout from the game, so I’m having Danny bring her over to us right now, and that way I can make it clear how lucky she is that Aldus Finley and I are such good friends, because if this had been anyone else, I’d have introduced them to Jimmy Hoffa.”

“You’re going to need to let Max have an uninterrupted night’s sleep tonight, Helen,” Dr. Williamson said. “He’s starting to show signs of exhaustion and dehydration, so I want to make sure he’s getting plenty of fluids and loads of rest, otherwise he’s going to be worthless in terms of providing viable offspring.”

“I’ll have Danny leave him a jug of cold water, and I can shoot either Kelly or Jenny a message that tonight he gets a full solid eight hours of sleep.”

“Nine,” the good doctor said. “You’ve been running him ragged the last few days, today especially, and any time you overextend him like that, he needs to get his fair share of rest.”

Mrs. Churchill nodded. “We agreed when we started this that anything you said is top priority, so if that’s what you’re telling me he needs, we’ll make it happen. Anyone else got anything breaking that needs my attention right now?”

“I’ve got one thing for you, boss, but I’m not even sure what it means,” Maia said. “Me and Lynne have been trying to figure out what to do about it for the last fifteen minutes, since you went to take your phone call. Because it’s weird, but it’s a one-off, so we figured we’d let you handle it.”

Mrs. Churchill frowned. “Alright, what now?”

“You know how I worked with my friend over at PornHub to make sure if anything from our streams attempts to get uploaded, it’s held instead so we can track it down and then punish the shit out of whoever it was who decided to break the rules?”

“I do.”

“Well, someone decided to upload just a tiny bit of footage, but it never hit the live service and we’ve made sure it won’t. But it was just one bit, and it wasn’t of everyone… It was of the Travers sisters and you’ll never guess who it was who leaked it up.”

“One of the other team owners? There’s five of them on the watchers list.”

“That’s the thing – I was going to tell you that you needed to go and bust the balls of Donald McDouglas, the owner of the Vegas Raiders, but during the time this recording was made and uploaded, we’ve got proof he was in a meeting with about forty other people. But you know who wasn’t?” She tapped her laptop and threw an image onto the main screen. “But his son, Billy, wasn’t. And I’m pretty sure it was him who was accessing his father’s streams. So how do you want to handle it? Cut off the streams entirely? Let the McDouglas blackmail slip?”

“Nah,” Mrs. Churchill said. “But I’m going to make a few calls and I’m certain we can teach Billy McDouglas a thing or two about trying to low blow his rivals. This wasn’t about anything other than trying to embarrass another team’s owners, but that doesn’t mean I can let it slide by unchecked. I’m sure Mr. McDouglas will be fine with the punishment that’s being meted out to his son in response to this, and if he isn’t, well, then we have the blackmail if needed.”

“You’re one cold bitch some days, boss,” Jacinda laughed.

“Just somedays?” She shook her head with a smile. “Must be losing my touch…”