When the day and time came for my talk, I parked my electrocar 3 blocks away from PISS headquarters, as close to an intersection as possible so no cars were in front of it, and with it’s nose pointing in the direction of our village and beach house. I’d picked up ten pounds and struggled daily to stay there, so Zoltan’s tailoring, with its snug pencil skirts, stayed in the closet, still looking sharp as ever.
But my now casual clothes, ready for the beach at any time, like all the rest of Portland, were mandatory; I lived by the beach! These clothes were now chosen to give me options other than firearms purse carry. I normally wore my snubby in a shoulder rig, snugged into my left armpit, gun level and butt forward, with a couple of speed loaders on the other side.
This new look and the extra ten pounds made it marginally harder to spot me as a whore, but any pimp sharp enough to do it could also see by my arm movements that I was carrying something extra, and a smidge heavy, in each of my armpits under my casual, open front jacket. Of course, where I was going required the equipment to visit the electrocar gun safe between the seats, but I kept the harness on anyway. It would be useful to make one of my points to the students. There was no metal on it so it didn’t raise a chirp at the security entrance to the building. With a full house in a small, space saving, and vertically rising auditorium in front of me, and with a fringe of mature PISS curiosity seekers scattered among the 30 or so students, I began.
“Friends, your Chief of Service David has introduced me as a “real spy”, one of the few he’s ever encountered. That’s something of an inside joke from the events I’ll be speaking of today. But in it’s own way it’s true.
“I’m a whore who will never be able to leave “the life” of a whore, even though I’m now wealthy and no longer need to offer sex for pay, and I’m of an age where most Johns would pass me by.
“More often than not the Johns are pullet chasers who aren’t up to real chickens, but we real chickens do what pullets do a whole lot better. We call ourselves High Class Tarts, the top of our service profession. In fact, since I worked in a house and then ran a house that was totally legal, and under ideal conditions, I’d say my girls, my old Madam and fellow spy “Elizabeth”, and I are the best of the best, even though we two are wealthy enough not to have to do it any more. So don’t ask.”
The audience began to listen more intensely, as everyone always does when I label my title and my profession with so matter of fact a tone.
I continued, “But the girls were just girls, very far from being women however skilled they were. And that, frankly, was why Johns always sought them out. Generally speaking Johns were afraid of real women. But those who asked for me, particularly if they were younger and inexperienced, got a great deal more than their money’s worth. Anyone in “the life” and quite a few out of it can easily make me as a whore even here today in Portland, and most in the life can also tell I’m a Madam.
I let my voice become a little confidential, “Just between you and me, I spot Johns pretty well, too, by their knowing little smiles. Those of you in the audience who are Johns, should really exercise more discretion. All that stuff is illegal in Pacifica and could get you very much in trouble in your profession.” A few male faces in the audience lost those knowing little smiles, and the seriousness of the atmosphere stepped up a notch. By now I and the audience were in our own, dead quiet, little world.
So, going on, “I deliberately became a whore and the Madam of a whorehouse in order to be a completely clandestine spy. I was totally on my own in deep cover whoring in the Matriarchal Zone, beyond any genuine help my agency could give me, for almost ten years. On the second day of my deep cover briefing, the head of my agency, my now very good friend ‘Julie’, the 3rd Chief of GLCIS, told me straight from the shoulder that my chances of returning alive from my assignment were 1 in 3.
“I returned, I retired, but I’m still a spy, and by now I’m also a killer. Even in retirement. Unfinished spy business of someone trying to kill me, and my retired friends, chased us here to Portland, where the incident that made me, finally, a killer, occurred. And this is what I will be talking about today.
“I’m still a spy because being in clandestine deep cover is so convoluted a story that I have no idea how many enemies I might have made who still would like to kill me, if they could. And some of them are serving long term sentences for espionage in Pacifica’s maximum security prison. I helped to put them there.”
I stopped for a moment of absolutely dead silence from an audience now on the edge of their seats.
“That’s why you will only know me by a call name, “Sally”, which is a different name than is on my refugee visa, and a totally different name from the one I was born with. My mother and father never saw or heard from me again after I went into deep cover. They were both dead by the time I returned.
“I had no secure way to even find their graves, and every record of my original birth, education, and growing up in GLC was destroyed by GLCIS long ago so I couldn’t be traced.
“As I said, I’m also a killer, and I became one in the baroque shoot out I’ll be speaking of today. Your boss Angela was in the shoot out with me and is not only, like all the rest who survived, lucky to be alive, she is also very lucky not to have on her conscience what I have on mine: the fact that I put three bullets through a man’s femoral artery and more two bullets through another man’s head and killed them both.
“From the time the second man I shot and killed hit the floor, I was stripped of about 2/3 of what was once a very strong will to survive and be happy.” I paused briefly and then, “I may deserve that for everything else I’ve done as whore, Madam, and spy, but Angela certainly doesn’t. She and David are still decent human beings,” I paused again.
“Security Services need decent human beings, but Spy Agencies can’t use them. I ceased to be a decent human being the first day on my job at my agency, and will never have another chance to do so in this life. I don’t regret that. I served my country well in the perfect deep cover because the people I spied on came to me, rather than me running to them while carrying a live GPS inside my wrist wherever I went in the Matriarchal Zone.”
The Matriarchal Zone 