2013

The word was Boston. That was what Nicola had told Kara Kraft, but she hadn’t had many other details.

Kara had scared up a few of her own - for once, Google had actually been quite helpful in her hunt for mind controllers.

In 2002, a secret society had been exposed within the city’s leadership. Calling themselves the Anointed, their number included high-ranking civil servants, administrators, corporate heads, charitable and religious leaders, and key members of law enforcement.

Recruitment had unrolled over more than a decade, and by the time they were discovered, it had been systematised; there were some key areas of Boston society where you simply did not rise up the ranks without joining the ranks of the Anointed.

Simply put, the Anointed had turned the city itself into a criminal enterprise. They had created entire office blocks which were hidden from official scrutiny. These were then used to conceal multiple kinds of smuggling operation.

It had all come to light six months after Ms Triumph followed a lead she stumbled over in the Carolinas far enough back to uncover one of the buildings. Two of the Anointed responsible for the facility in question were turned over, not to the Boston PD, but to the FBI. With no simple exit, they confessed to what was known, but gave no indication of their affiliation or any wider conspiracy.

The Anointed had breathed a collective sigh of relief, shuttered that operation with plans to reactivate it once scrutiny died down, and started making plans to infiltrate local FBI offices. But then something they hadn’t anticipated had happened.

The mind control affecting their sacrificial lambs had not been reapplied for a hair over a half a year, and it wore off. Carole Sanders, her free will returned, swallowed her horror at what had been done and where she found herself and confessed everything she knew. Federal investigators, aided by Ms Triumph’s Safeguard colleague Red Fox, uncovered the rest from there, exposing not just the wider organisation but also (as more and more members were detained and deprogrammed) the man behind it, the crime boss formerly known as the Cardinal. C.A.L.I.B.R.E. deprogrammers were busy for upwards of a year uncovering the Anointed’s cell structure, fell only slowly.

Reading it all, Kara had been left breathless by the daring of the initial scheme followed by the utter mundanity it had evolved into. In the seventies and eighties, the Cardinal had been one of the more flamboyant crime bosses on the East Coast. After stumbling on the core of the idea for the Anointed he must have realised there was a way to make more money, faster, and for less risk - until it finally collapsed.

There had been someone else, too, more recently. Someone called Thoughtsmith had made inroads into the city’s organised crime in 2008, lasting a little under a year before being arrested in 2009. He’d subsequently been broken out of custody while en route to his trial that year, evidently by some of the police officers who’d investigated him. At least, those same officers had disappeared, not being seen since.

Apparently his control took effect on people almost instantaneously, through eye contact alone (although while it did affect anyone, he mostly seemed to use it on women - an attitude Kara was wearisomely familiar with).

Reports differed on how willing those in his service became and how much they enjoyed it, but all the articles of the time agreed that those affected could not help but obey him, and special polarised lenses had been used to make his arrest possible. Kara read that with interest, wondering where she could source the equivalent. Somehow she thought that regular polarised sunglasses wouldn’t cut it.

Since then, his name hadn’t appeared in local news for almost four years.

The Cardinal certainly wasn’t Doctor Bimbeau, and it seemed unlikely that Thoughtsmith would be either - the methodology was wildly different - but other rumours Nicola had dug up in the past indicated that Bimbeau had been experimenting with physical and genetic modification. Kara assumed as a matter of course he would be applying his choicest techniques to himself, and if he had the power to do so, why wouldn’t he give himself a hypnotic gaze?

In any case, there was no guarantee that this latest rumour was the return of Thoughtsmith. Nothing about his story suggested he would follow the Cardinal’s lead and learn to lay low. So whispers about a mind controller active in Boston might well be Doctor Bimbeau, who eight years previously had reprogrammed Kara’s mother, leading her to steal much of the family money from Kara and her father before destroying the university lab where she and Bimbeau had worked together and fleeing the country.

Kara had been in her mid-teens at the time, and had only realised what was happening when it was too late; before then, too, her interest in martial arts had been purely that of a hobbyist, her marksmanship was still entirely in the future, and she wasn’t yet a detective. After that fateful day, she took all these things much more seriously, pushing herself to absorb as much as she could, honing her body into the weapon she knew it would need to be.

That training - and that determination - had proven themselves several times already, the first time in Switzerland when she had discovered the purpose of her finishing school was in fact to produce society-ready slave wives for auction to the world’s rich and privileged. She’d escaped, along with some friends, but only once her own determination not to be lost to her father had overcome the compulsion from the control watch on her wrist.

Believing the technology to have come originally from Doctor Bimbeau she had taken the time afterwards, with her friend Mike, to track down the manufacturers, but the woman in charge of the operation had proven entirely unconnected.

Her hunt continued. A rumour had circulated that Bimbeau lived on a private island and a series of reports of women disappearing in the Florida Keys led Kara down there to investigate. It was there that she met the Serpent, who used a mix of psionic ability and psychotropic venom to condition the women he preyed on into a regiment-harem of combat-capable sex-soldiers.

Kara had been with him for six months, drugged on his venom, her very thoughts reshaped by his will, until she had broken free again and, with the aid of a heroine in the area, had brought him to justice.

That had been the first rumour that Nicola had pointed her to. The two had met in Switzerland before the unpleasantness. Now, Nicola lived and worked in New York, working as a reporter on the metahuman crime beat. Kara had never been clear on how her friend, who had seemed so perfectly on course to be a style magazine editor, head ended up with a career that was about as far away as you could get in the same industry.

She was more than happy it had happened, though, as it allowed her to take full advantage of her friend’s access to information. She had given over too much of her young life already to the pursuit of Doctor Bimbeau, she firmly believed, to fail now; and in any case, she was a Kraft, and the Krafts treated failure as a stranger while pushing for perfection.

Whatever twisted meaning her mother might take as perfection now, Kara had no doubt that Candace Kraft still strove for it.

Kara’s quest for the man who had stolen away and enslaved her mother had driven her to learn, she was fairly sure, as much about mind control as anyone who didn’t apply it.

In particular she knew that what had happened to the Anointed was something to be expected; there seemed to be something about the human brain, or will, or spirit, according to your particular blend of science, emotion, or faith, which would reassert itself against even the strongest mental control if given six months, free and clear, with which to do so.

While the Cardinal ran his scheme the drugged communion wafers and psychoactive oils his Anointed received in regular ceremonies had acted as a regular reset of the process. She had deduced that the Cardinal must have carried out these ceremonies without knowing why, otherwise he surely would have reacted differently after two of his Anointed were arrested.

The Cardinal was accounted for. Thoughtsmith, most likely, had gone somewhere else where people wouldn’t be watching for him. But Nicola had heard that there was a suspicion of mind control in Boston.

Kara Kraft, accordingly, had come to Boston. It wasn’t the worst place she’d gone hunting for mind controllers; for one thing, it boasted luxury hotels. Kara having inherited her parents’ wealth, she elected to travel that way whenever someone might notice.

It was a habit, but it was also a form of bait, as was travelling under her real name. She very much hoped Bimbeau would notice that name one day, and then notice her; it would certainly bring them into contact (for Kara was not naive about the effect her looks had on those around her) which would give her the opportunity she needed.

Now she was in the city, the only problem she foresaw was figuring out where she needed to look. Even there, she had a few advantages; after the problems with the Anointed, Boston had become one of the very few cities with its own city deprogrammer on staff, and it was a requirement of public office that they attend meetings with the deprogrammer regularly.

Some might have said that this ruled out anything happening with these people. To Kara, it simply created a quick shortlist of people who needed to be investigated, namely: the secretaries and PAs of those officers, and the deprogrammer. These were the two obvious vulnerabilities in the system, and in Kara’s opinion, mind controllers loved to find and exploit vulnerabilities.

She decided to start with the deprogrammer. Bureaucracy being bureaucracy, a name that really should have been kept under tight security was listed on the city council website, albeit in small print on a minor page way out of the main navigation. Finding their office address wasn’t hard from there.

Around eight-thirty that evening, when Kara could feel fairly confident that the office would be empty, she left the hotel and took a cab to the nearest restaurant.

Stepping inside the front door, she paused long enough for the cabbie to be gone, politely rebuffed the maitre d, and walked the rest of the distance to the office, confident that while she would be remembered - she would always be remembered, the way she looked and carried herself - the connections that could tie the woman in her hotel to the figure about to break into an office just weren’t there to be found.

If you were going to stand out when someone looked for you, the best solution was always to make sure they’d look the other way. As a further nod to this, loitering out of camera range at the edge of the parking lot to which the office attached she paused on a corner to turn her reversible coat the other side out.

She also gathered up her long red hair in one hand and tied it back, the better to prevent herself leaving noticeable evidence on her visit. Lastly, she unclipped the strap of the hip holster she’d worn beneath her coat, just in case of trouble.

Kara had collected a set of skeleton keys while following up a previous lead from Nicola, one which had turned out to involve an enchanted deck of playing cards and a rolling poker game in which people could stake months of their free will if they didn’t have the money for buy-in. Dr Hendricks’ office door posed very little difficulty; once inside, Kara dipped into a coat pocket, producing a slim silver flashlight and a compact camera designed for high-detail, close-up shots.

With these preparations made she began to search the small building extensively. This was the other problem with mind controllers; you couldn’t guarantee that they’d try to hide their evidence thoroughly, and so you have to check all the obvious places as well as the concealed ones. A mind control victim might completely forget one of the folders in their filing cabinet except when their programming required them to update it, after all.

*

Her attention had been caught from half a block away by a sudden flash of bright material moving just at the corner of her eye. She did not pick up the pace of her patrol - it could be anything - but her senses were on full alert as she approached one of the parking lots under her supervision. She paused under the streetlight at the edge, sweeping her gaze around the gathering gloom.

There seemed to be nobody else around; there was no movement on the streets. Her memory was, she knew, only human, but there were only two cars in the lot and she was sure they had been there in the same places on her last check.

Perhaps whatever she had seen before had been nothing to worry about, but her instincts said otherwise. Something about the scene still seemed off to her. What was it?

It was another twenty seconds or so, perhaps, before her conscious mind caught up to her eyes and instincts and she realised what she’d been missing. Infrequently, and for only a moment or two at a time, a light slid across the blinds of one of the windows.

Someone was inside, and they carried a flashlight.

She headed in to investigate, as she had to.

*

Kara heard the key click in the front door. She felt a calmness settle over her, rather than nervousness; the thing she had been worried about, however slightly, had come to pass. It was much easier, to Kara, to deal with a known quantity than with uncertainty.

She couldn’t simply flee; the thumb driver was still in the PC, and its light was red. It ran a program, on loading, which downloaded the contents of whatever computer it was plugged into, and normally it did so swiftly and efficiently.

Unfortunately the desktop in this office was old and underpowered. Kara had known it would take longer than usual when the machine itself had spent twice as long as she’d expected booting back up.

She closed the filing cabinet drawer she’d been riffling through and tiptoed across to the door, shutting off her flashlight as she did so. With luck she’d have a couple of seconds to let her eyes acclimate to the near-darkness.

A couple of seconds was about right. Whoever it was had let themselves in - quietly if not quietly enough - and closed the outer door behind them before crossing swiftly to the door of the room where Kara waited. She watched as the door swung open, but whoever had come to investigate didn’t follow through it.

It would be a lesson for Kara in future to consider before she acted, in case she might be being baited into a trap. She pivoted into the doorway, one arm braced against the doorjamb, the other lifted to throw a strike, only to catch a kick to the temple.

As she staggered backward she caught a dim glimpse of the leg which had done it, calf-length leather boots (with heels, she thought irrelevantly, how dare someone land the first blow on her while fighting in heels) with fishnetted bare legs emerging from them.

Well, she thought, if I didn’t already think someone was mind controlled around here I would now.

The other woman was in the room now, following up to capitalise on that first head-rattling strike, and Kara was operating purely on instinct as she caught the second kick on her forearm, pushing her attacker backward immediately afterward in an attempt to unbalance her.

In the dim light reaching them from the computer monitor across the room, a pair of black short shorts were visible atop the long legs, then a tight blue blouse with a deep V-neck and a security badge pinned against one breast.

From the shoulders down to gloved hands her forearms were bare and well-muscled; her blouse suggested huge, perky fakes. A peaked cap kept whatever hair she might have hidden and under control. She looked for all the world like a stripper cop, or some kind of fetish singing telegram.

As Kara braced her hands against the filing cabinet behind her, lifted both feet off the ground, and kicked forward to drive the other woman back, she was already beginning to form a mental picture of the controller responsible.

Another high kick arced up toward her as her assailant closed in again; Kara ducked fluidly under it, shifting her stance during the duck so that when she straightened up she was facing her opponent’s side rather than her front, and she drove one hand forward in a palm strike, aiming for the base of the jaw. Her opponent blocked with a raised shoulder and swept that arm around in a vicious karate blow which Kara again caught on a forearm, only for the security guard (if that was actually the best way to describe her) to lean in closer, using Kara’s block as the pivot point on an elbow strike which struck Kara on the temple.

If her head had spun before now it was really rattled. She had a sense that she couldn’t win this fight; maybe if she’d landed the first hit, but certainly not now.

Kara’s hand dipped to her holster and she drew the dart gun out swiftly and smoothly.

The other woman was retreating before Kara could raise it high enough to aim, the sight of a gun barrel clearly galvanising her into retreat. Kara didn’t fire a shot but waited for the other woman to have retreated clear.

She checked the USB, confirming that the data pull was complete, and went in search of a rear exit from the building.

*

“I failed you, Master.” Ellie’s head was bowed, her feet side by side and knees apart as she knelt, her hands resting on her knees. This was not a posture of atonement, though she felt the need for one; this was simply how Master liked his slaves to present themselves while reporting.

“In what way, and to what degree?”

“Master, someone broke into one of the premises under my surveillance.”

“Go on.”

“I attempted to detain them, but they were armed. I was forced to choose to fail you or to deprive you of a part of your property.” By this, Ellie meant herself. Years into her brainwashing she had ceased to consider herself a person in any way.

She saw herself either as an extension of her Master’s will or as an object, and while there were complex rules governing which she held herself to be at any given time, Ellie neither knew them or even knew they were there, just as she was completely unaware of most of the programming she had undergone.

“Who was it?”

“I do not know, Master. I have checked our records since but their face is not in there. They are a woman, they can fight, and they carry a handgun.”

“And so you fled.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Did you watch for them to leave?”

“I watched from across the street, Master. Signs of their presence did not remain for long, but I didn’t see them emerge.”

“Which property were they in?”

“The deprogramming clinic, Master.”

“Hm. You can’t see the front and back exits from anywhere, can you?”

“No, Master.”

“Maybe I should have you install cameras.”

“Master’s will be done.” Long ago, these four words had become the only thing that would leave Ellie’s lips when she might otherwise have criticised her Master. She had advised installing security cameras around the key locations of their return to Boston at the start, and he had looked at her and said “Why would I spend money on that when I have your use for free?”

“Did you see any insignia?” he continued.

“No, Master. But the room was dark.”

“We need to identify her,” he said. “Prepare a photofit and pass it to the patrols.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Keep in close contact with them. I want to know what’s going on as soon as possible.”

“Yes, Master.”

“But you still failed me.”

“Yes, Master.”

He was silent a little longer. “Henson,” he called, once he had decided, and Mrs Henson appeared in the doorway. Mr Henson knew he would not be the one wanted.

“Yes, Master?” she asked.

“Come here.”

“Yes, Master.” She did as asked. She was the oldest member of his harem, and it amused him to have her dress like the youngest. But the Hensons had had money when he met them, and he had spent some of it on cosmetic surgery, and besides she now had an indoctrinated fitness and beauty regimen. At present she wore a red thong, a pair of thigh-high stockings in a darker red, and shimmery metallic red nipple tassles, with her dark hair tied up in bunches, her makeup overemphasised like a younger woman who hadn’t learned might do.

“Stand directly in front of her.”

“Yes, Master.” Mrs Henson obeyed.

“Lower your panties and turn to face her.”

“Yes, Master.” Now Ellie would have been eye-to-pussy with Mrs Henson, were it not that her head was still lowered.

“Now sit on her. If she makes you cum four times before she passes out, you may rise. Otherwise tell me once she’s unconscious.”

“Yes, Master.” Mrs Henson stepped over Ellie’s shoulder with one leg, then the other, grinding her pussy into Ellie’s face. This done, she began to kneel, bending Ellie over backward.

Ellie allowed herself to be bowled over, this being a part of her Master’s express wishes for Henson’s actions. Her lips had parted and her tongue flicked out, questing for the parting of the pussy lips against her.

Her thighs remained knelt back on her calves, with the flexibility Master had required her to train in herself the only reason her discomfort was only mild. Not that Ellie registered the discomfort.

Some part of her was dimly aware this was a punishment, but as property she barely noticed. The drive to make Henson cum repeatedly had been implied in Master’s orders to Henson, and she would obey even second-hand orders. Shame, embarrassment, punishment, these were concepts for people. What galled her was simply that she had failed her Master.