Corrupting Power
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CARP - Ch. 13 (Finale)
🕑 Added 2024-10-01 01:18:31 +0000 UTCPart Thirteen – Graduate Life
Waking up to a pair of lips sliding up and down on his cock was not an uncommon occurrence, but for this particular set of lips to be doing what they were, the wait had been extremely long indeed. And another voice was goading him on, whispering into his ear.
“You know she’s been waiting years for this,” the all-too familiar voice said to him.
“Of course I do, which is why I’m not rushing her,” he replied. “I want her to savor every moment of this, considering how long she had to be patient.”
“Patience is a virtue,” another voice said. “This whole house of cards is built on the flimsiest structure ever, and if anyone knew the right questions to ask—”
“But they didn’t,” he said, “because I knew exactly how to guide them, steer them, get them to focus on just what I wanted them to focus on. Like all the best magic, the key is just misdirecting the attention away from the thing I’m doing in broad daylight while they’re focusing on the flourishes and sparkles that I’m using to keep them looking elsewhere.”
“How do you know that for certain, babe?”
“Because they’ve got so many false leads and misdirections now that they can’t tell which way is up, much less what they can believe and what they can’t,” he said to the naked group of women who were sharing his bed. He knew each of them better than they probably knew themselves, but the oldest of the bunch, the brunette whose head refused to cease in its attention that it was lavishing upon his shaft, wanted to be in his spotlight for the moment more than anything. “That said, Karen, wouldn’t you much rather have me inside of you?”
The brunette popped her head off his shaft and grinned up at him. “More than anything, Josh,” she purred at him, her eyes flooded with optimism and eagerness. “Is it finally time?”
“If you want it to be,” he said with a stripe of amusement cutting through the timbre of his voice.
“You’re fucking A right I do,” she said as she crawled up his body on the bed, moving to straddle his waist, lining up his shaft before slowly pushing herself down onto his cock, both of her hands resting on his chest, keeping him pinned on his back on the mattress. “When I first met you at McKinnley High, a decade ago, I never would’ve thought we’d come to this.”
Josh Turner gave the former FBI agent a wink. “I could tell after our first couple of meetings that no matter what you were telling yourself, you wanted to fuck me.”
“Not at first,” former special agent Karen Costello groaned at him as she looked at his smug face in delight. Her body shifted back and forth across his lap, snapping her hips back and forth in slow undulating motions of delight. “But soon enough. Our second or third meeting, definitely. You were… you were just so confident, and so in control, that I knew whatever you wanted to get out of life, you would take it, and nothing would stop you in those pursuits. I wanted you to want me, and I would’ve done anything to make that happen. You were relentless. You were a force of nature. You were a man not to be reckoned with lightly. I wanted that intensity turned my way.”
“You caught me right at the cusp of becoming me,” Josh said to her, one of his hands sliding up to cup one of her plump breasts, toying with the nipple with his thumb, as he felt Julia leaning in to kiss his neck.
“I remember my shy little Joshie,” Julia teased, her long blonde hair tickling across his chest and atop of Karen’s fingers. “The young man whose eyes bulged out the first time I changed in front of him in our dorm room. You were so damn adorable, baby.”
“And you’re still as beautiful as ever, Jules.”
“You don’t think the baby bump makes me look less sexy?” she asked, sliding her hand over her round belly, her due date only a month or so away, not that it had quenched the athletic, sporty blonde’s sexual appetite any. In fact, if anything, she seemed horny more often than less.
“I think you’re still as beautiful as the day we first met, Julia.”
“That’s good, because if baby bumps were a turn off for you, Josh, you know you’d be having a bunch more of them sooner rather than later,” Chelsea said. “You haven’t knocked me up yet, not for lack of me trying.” She had a pout on her face that made it clear she was kidding, only mostly so, and that the sentiment of also wanting to carry his child was burning deeply within her soul.
“It’s not everything it’s cracked up to be,” Abigail groaned from her seat across the room, her due date ten weeks away still, the first of Josh’s partners to have gotten pregnant. “I can’t tell you how weird it is craving pickles and ice cream together, like, all the fucking time. But I guess it was all worth it for the first time I felt him kick inside of me.”
“I told you that you’d fucking love it, bitch,” Brianna teased. “But no no no, Abigail’s got to do everything the fucking hard way.”
“You haven’t been pregnant yet, Bri, so don’t give me that shit.”
“Hey!” Karen said. “I’m trying to get mine, if you chatty bitches don’t mind!”
“Sorry Karen,” Bri said. “Here, let me lend a hand…”
“You don’t have to ohhhhhhhhhh…” Brianna had reached down and started rubbing Karen’s clit while she continued to ride Josh’s cock, her pace growing much more frantic and rushed now, as if Bri’s touch had forced the gas pedal all the way to the floorboards.
“C’mon, Josh,” Chelsea whispered into his ear, her tongue licking against the shell of it in a way the girls knew set his nerves on fire. “Let us see you breed your final wife… knock her up… claim your newest slut… fill her belly… do it…”
His resistance collapsed faster than he could count, and before he knew it, he felt Julia jamming a finger up his ass to stimulate his prostate. He started pouring Karen full of his seed, as it triggered off an orgasm of such intensity that he’d not suspected the older FBI agent was capable of.
When she collapsed on his chest, he reached up to stroke her hair and felt bad of thinking of her as ‘older’ – she was barely a year over forty, but the years they’d spent apart, she’d kept herself in peak physical condition, waiting for that very moment, when they could be reunited, and she could finally experience the joy of them unifying sexually.
“Was that everything you wanted it to be, Karen?”
“Fuck, Josh, that just made the last decade worth it,” she moaned into his neck. “But maybe we should go again, just to be sure. Two or three times more.”
An hour or so later, Josh had finally gotten out of bed, showered and had headed out from the bedroom to the rest of the villa, to check on the state of things. As soon as he walked out onto the villa’s main lawn, he was greeted by one of the most electrifying views of the Pacific Ocean he’d ever seen, something he hoped he’d never grow tired of.
It had been two days since they’d arrived on Waiheke Island in New Zealand, some ten days after faking their own deaths in the parking lot of the FBI’s San Francisco offices. It hadn’t been incredibly difficult to do, Josh had been surprised to learn at the time. Each of his partners had gone out to the Escalade one-by-one ahead of him and had exited the vehicle through a hole in the floorboards and down an open manhole directly beneath the SUV. Josh had been the last one, and so things had been a bit of a blur, as he’d been ushered down the manhole, the hole in the SUV’s floorboards had been covered up, the manhole cover had been replaced and a few seconds later, once they were clear of the blast radius, the whole vehicle had been destroyed remotely with C4.
Because of the amount of explosive used, very little in terms of remains had been found, but Josh and his wives had left just enough to make it seem like their bodies had been in there at the time, and what with all the other ‘deaths’ of reported former CARP students, it made the whole thing completely plausible.
“Good morning, Joshua!”
“Good morning, Karen,” Josh said with a smile. “Or should I still be calling you Dr. Igarashi?” He needed to find some nickname for one or the other, as both former Agent Costello and Dr. Igarashi had the first name ‘Karen.’
The good doctor waved her hand dismissively. “That was for when you were one of my students, Josh. And you haven’t been a student for a long time now. How did things go with the FBI?”
“About how I expected them to,” Josh said with a slight sigh. “It was almost ridiculous how easy it was to get them to believe whatever I told them, by making sure it contained just enough kernels of what they either expected to hear or wanted to hear. Once I was able to identify those touchstones, I suspect I could’ve spun them any yarn I wanted to, and they would’ve believed me. I think the hardest part, for me, was looking at that photograph of your double riddled with bullets and acting convinced that it was you, knowing full well it wasn’t.”
“You can convince anyone of anything, given enough time, Josh,” Dr. Igarashi told him, a look of admiration upon her face. “That’s always been one of your greatest gifts. The telling of the tale does all the heavy lifting.”
“How’s my good little mole been while she’s been here? I knew sidelining her away from me for so long would be taxing on her, but I figured she could handle it, and far better than she would’ve if she’d been forced to stay within the FBI and conceal her investigations into me. She was far too good an agent for that, and people would’ve noticed the marked drop in the quality of her work.”
“As opposed to Agent Shetterly,” Dr. Igarashi laughed, “who couldn’t find his own ass with a GPS tracker, a mirror, and a backwards t-shirt that said, ‘I’m with stupid’ with an arrow pointing straight up.”
“While I wouldn’t call Agent Shetterly the sharpest tool in the shed, he wasn’t exactly a pushover either,” Josh said, cautioning her. “A couple of times, he could’ve easily stumbled onto more than we would’ve liked, if it hadn’t been for my quick thinking to allow us a handful of sharp pivots.”
“And you think he bought into the car explosion? That you and your entire family are dead?”
“I told you exactly how it would go, and it went exactly according to that plan,” Josh said. “He’s convinced that my whole family is dead, and that when he and the rest of the FBI goes into the foundations for the buildings on the old CARP campus, they’re going to find bodies in the walls.”
“Which they will but—”
“But not the ones they expect to find,” Josh said. “And that will keep them busy for a long, long time, as they try and figure out what Bridgepocalypse was really all about, or what your double was doing at the secondary campus in Jakarta.”
“Yes, and thank you for the warning about that in advance,” Dr. Igarashi said. “How did you know they’d be coming?”
“He didn’t,” Brianna said as she walked out of the bedroom dressed in loose parachute pants and a floral print button up shirt that was only partially buttoned, the fabric flowing freely enough in the wind that Josh could tell she hadn’t put a bra on. “I did. Josh is the one who tells the stories, but if you need data analysis, that’s always been far more my field than his. Remember, it was me who made us all billionaires by telling everyone where to invest before the Bridgepocalypse. Predicting the FBI was even easier than that. I could tell they were getting ready for out-of-country action by noticing the anomalies in the social media profiles of agents’ wives and girlfriends, marking an uptick in canceled events or dropped responsibilities. From there, it was just one-two, buckle-my-shoe, and everything kept popping out of the spreadsheet at me.”
“She didn’t know how to reach out to you, though,” Josh said. “So, I took the information and passed it on through channels. We figured that with them trying to keep quiet about it, they wouldn’t move too fast, and certainly it had all the time needed to set up the duplicate, to put squibs and dead bodies around, and the attack felt real enough to fool them.”
“I also predicted at what point in the ‘deaths’ of the CARP students that the FBI would start trying to round all the former students like us up, and I was right on that number down to just being two people off the count,” Brianna said proudly.
“I’m still amazed they fell for all of that,” Dr. Igarashi said. “At some point, I would’ve expected them to see through our little tricks and ruses.”
“It was just a matter of behind ahead of their expectations, Doc,” Josh said with a laugh. “We replaced dental and medical records long ago, and so anything that was identifiable, they were going off the false records we’d already prepared. When we started putting the plan together almost a decade ago, we knew that short term thinking would be our opponents’ downfall and everything we could use against them, if we wanted.”
“Which we very much wanted,” Brianna added, moving to lean her head against Josh’s chest. “Even when Josh was telling them about what forward thinkers we were, he still managed to convince them that we could be blindsided by some mystery group killing us off, that we had some nefarious enemies that we couldn’t identify, some second player with the same big resources and ideas as us, but with an entirely different endgame in mind.”
“Did you ever tell them what the other group’s motivation was, or what they were called?” Dr. Igarashi asked him as he shook his head.
“I did not. I implied they’d sprung up too quickly for us to locate them, that they had used our long-term planning against us, working with such short-term goals that it made it nearly impossible for us to predict when and where they would strike,” Josh said. “They seemed to find the idea of an anti-CARP, a group without plans or long-term machinations a logical one, as if it was the only natural progression for what we’d been doing.”
“Do you think such a group could work?”
“On a short-term moment-to-moment basis, maybe, but we’d learn to adapt and eventually we’d be ahead of those kinds of flash strikes,” Josh said as he moved over to a deck chair, sitting down on it at the top edge of the long lawn that ran down and turned into beach before turning into water. “It would be superficial damage without any real goals achieved. So, no, I’m not especially worried.”
Brianna moved to slide onto the same deck chair between Josh’s legs, leaning her back against his chest. “How much did you tell them, Josh, during your daylong interrogation?”
“All fiction is just built on interesting fact, and the more I adhered to what really happened, the easier was to get them to buy into the things that didn’t. So, I told them enough without really telling them much of anything.”
“Did you skip all the spicy sex stuff?”
Josh laughed. “I think they enjoyed that stuff the most,” he said, wrapping an arm around the front of Brianna’s shoulders. “When I was talking about Julia and my’s first time with Naomi, I swear I think the director was having to try very hard not to finger herself at the interrogation table. When I mentioned putting my foot on top of Naomi’s head, I swear to you I could hear the director’s legs clench in jealous envy.”
“The director always struck me as a closeted submissive slut,” Dr. Igarashi said with a laugh as she moved to sit down on the deck chair next to the two of them. “If I’d have thought it wouldn’t have raised too many suspicions, I would have told you to have a go at her, but I think it would’ve brought down more heat on us than we would’ve liked.”
“Agreed,” Brianna said. “Converting an agent to our cause is one thing, but director level personnel would probably be a bit harder to keep under covers.”
“Not that hard,” Josh said. “The FBI is surprisingly easy for us to acquire assets from, and it might not have been unwise to snag a director to keep in our pocket.”
“You just like the idea of bending Director Caulfield to your will, Josh,” Brianna giggled. “Not that I would’ve blamed you. She looked so wound up tight, you’d have to have removed the stick from her ass to fuck her up there.”
“She’d have begged you for it, I’m certain, Josh,” Dr. Igarashi said to him.
“We can’t take all the things we want, otherwise we’ll only get ourselves into deeper trouble,” Josh said with a raw laugh. “Otherwise, you know I would’ve gone back and righted the wrongs of my high school sweetheart Miranda leaving me high and dry.”
“Didn’t she have a boyfriend last time you ran into her?” Brianna asked.
“And?” Josh shook his head with a smile. “Over the years at CARP, I learned how to spot weak points and entry paths. I could’ve had her eating out of the palm of my hand within a half an hour conversation. Shit, I could’ve probably made her want to cheat on her boyfriend and rub his nose in it within an hour. I don’t like to consider myself a cruel man, but I truly did let her off much easier than she deserved after dumping me and immediately running to a new boyfriend before her bed was cold.”
“Forget it, Josh,” Brianna told him, stroking the back of his neck with her hand. “It was high school. People do dumb shit in high school.”
“That doesn’t mean it should be consequence free.”
“It wasn’t. She probably got knocked up by that guy and had to bear his cracker children,” Brianna giggled. “I know what you Midwestern kids get up to in high school.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t, but I like to think that I do,” she said with a grin. “And that’s just about as good enough to be the same thing.”
“It’s not even close to the same thing.”
“Agree to let your wife win the argument,” Brianna said, as Josh rolled his eyes while laughing nonetheless.
“I hate to ruin this lazy day bickering,” Dr. Igarashi said to them, “but we should really talk about when we’re going to start rebuilding. I want to get CARP 2.0 up and running as soon as possible, and sunbathing all day isn’t going to get us there.”
“Relax, Doc. Now that I’m ‘dead,’” Josh said, making air quotes with his fingertips, “that means the FBI and the rest of international law enforcement are eating up the story scraps I left behind for them to chase after, and they’ve got their eye off the ball. We’ll need a new name, of course, and new identities for everyone involved, but all our lost little puppies, all the former CARP students who ‘died’ in the last couple of years, they knew my very loud, very public death was the signal for them to come out of hiding and make their way to Checkpoint Foxtrot, here. By this time next week, I think everyone will be on site, and we can start drafting up the new plan.”
“You don’t want to stick to the old one?” the good doctor asked him. “What’s wrong with the original plan I drew up years ago?”
“It came into contact with the enemy, as we knew it eventually would,” Brianna said. “That’s why we built all the contingencies, all the backups, all the additional options. We’ll take aspects of your old plan and incorporate it with some of the planning we did before and whatever new ideas the giant brain trust can come up with now.”
“You know, for the longest time, Dr. Igarashi, I hated the name of the school.”
“What’s wrong with CARP?”
“It’s a silly anagram, first and foremost, but in most parts of the world, the carp is considered a trash fish, rarely worth the time to catch, usually smarter to throw back than to bother with,” Josh sighed. “That was where I was short-sighted in my own thinking. The carp is also an incredibly invasive species, durable, survivable, adaptable, able to take even the most harsh and unwelcoming conditions and make its home there. And that was what I’d missed. I’d thought you’d been calling us trash to push us, to make us work smarter and harder, but you were teaching us yet another lesson – that no matter how anyone else sees us, we can make our own survival the number one priority, and in doing so, we can survive just about anything. Once through the other side of adversity, we can begin again, smarter, better, faster, stronger.”
“I’m glad you didn’t see college graduation as a sign you should stop learning, Josh,” Dr. Igarashi said to him. “I know I’ve asked a lot in particular of you over the years, but you’ve never let me down. You’ve always been willing to figure out where the rules of the game could be bent before they break, and always stayed a couple of steps ahead of our adversaries.”
“Do we even really have adversaries at this point, Doctor?” Brianna asked. “Who’s ever going to be able to compete with us in running the world? The Illuminati?”
All three of them laughed at that.
“I think at this point, we are the Illuminati, dear,” Doctor Igarashi told her.
“Speak for yourself,” Josh replies. “I’m far too fashionable to be Adam Weishaupt.”
“How much of the old plan do you think we can keep?” the Doctor asked as she started to put suntan lotion on her arms and legs. “I don’t like the idea of moving away from all of it.”
“We’ll keep a decent amount, surely. Say, thirty to forty percent. The foundation’s fine,” Josh said. “Long term thinking is always going to be important, so no matter what we do, we won’t get away from that. But I think we need to start making a new focus on all the systems and networks that are springing up, how interlocked they all are without them even noticing it, one parasitic relationship after another. A single domino kicked over can shake the whole damn world if people aren’t careful. I’m less worried about individual systems than I am about the interchanges that cross the data back and forth. Those are the most vulnerable points we need to worry about, and we’re going to depend on them a lot, so I want them shored up and double locked. You probably should get one of the Big Math Brains to develop our own private encryption algorithm, Dr. Igarashi.”
“I’ve got Layla working on building us our own encryption system,” the Doctor said. “She’s just not been satisfied with anything she’s come up with.”
“Layla’s a perfectionist,” Brianna sniffed. “Not saying that’s a bad thing, but if at some point we just need to tell her to get us something good enough, it’ll probably be ten times better than anything short of military grade encryption. Girl needs to lower her standards just a little.”
“You think her standards on her work are high?” Dr. Igarashi laughed. “Imagine the challenge I had in finding her partners for her. We were definitely cutting it close on junior year. I think we didn’t lock down Johann until a few days before our deadline. I remember panicking that if he fell through, we didn’t have a backup, and we lost Johann in his flight from Amsterdam when he missed his connecting flight because of flight delays. Thankfully, he called collect from the Atlanta airport, informing us he would be around twelve hours later getting to the west coast, but that he was still coming, and we shouldn’t worry. Which, it was a bit late for that!”
“She’ll get it done,” Josh assured them both. “Layla’s just like the rest of us – she knows what’s at stake if we don’t each play our part to perfection.”
“It doesn’t have to be perfect, Josh,” Brianna told him, nuzzling against him a little more.
“It should be, though,” he said with a sigh before he lifted a hand up, waving it to dismiss the argument before it even started. “I know, I know… embrace the imperfections instead of fighting against them. Better to incorporate than to isolate. I haven’t forgotten the maxims.”
“I’m not worried about you, Josh,” Dr. Igarashi said to him. “You were always one of our star pupils. If you couldn’t make my teachings work, nobody could. You were just always too hard on yourself. I know you like to think of your perfectionism as a plus rather than a handicap, but I did warn you when we first met that if you didn’t learn when to be flexible, you’d break before you could grow to your full potential.”
“I didn’t, though, and here I am,” Josh said with a dry laugh, leaning his head back slightly.
“You think you’re at your full potential?” Dr. Igarashi asked him with a slight smirk. “You’re not dead yet, Josh. I foresee your powers continuing to grow.”
“Not as Joshua Turner they won’t,” he replied with a wink. “What’s my new identity anyway?”
“Blake, who has the most experience with this kind of thing, insists that if we can keep names close to what they used to be, they will be harder for you to forget and slip up, so from here on out, you’ll be Jason Trustwell.”
Josh hoped she was kidding, but when he didn’t hear her laughing, he realized she was serious. “Trustwell? Really?”
“It doesn’t really matter what you go by, Josh,” Brianna said. “We’re going to be here for the next several years, away from the big cities and their centralized surveillance jungles. The Kiwis don’t believe in covering every square inch of land with tiny cameras, so unless we’re doing a lot of international travel, we shouldn’t worry about being recognized. Besides, we’re all dead. That was the point of us faking our deaths – to let us operate without so many eyes on what we were working on.”
“I did tell you that was the critical flaw in your initial plan, Doctor,” Josh sighed. “Not operating with enough secrecy. I’m not sure how the FBI latched onto you initially, even Karen, er, former Agent Costello, didn’t know where the assignment came from, only that she was to keep tabs on you. She said the orders didn’t have a dispatching office attached to them, and so she never knew if it was part of some kind, and Director Caulfield didn’t seem like she came up with it. So there’s still an adversary over at the FBI that we haven’t identified. That has me a little worried, but I figure if I spend too many cycles on it, it’ll turn into an obsession, and obsessions don’t do anyone any good. It seems a rabbit hole with no victory in sight.”
“We’ve got bigger things to start planning for, babe,” Brianna told him. “Didn’t you say we’re going to see another global recession soon?”
“Financial predictions are more of Alicia’s realm, but yeah, she’s got a few crashes penned in over the next couple of decades, and there’s going to be a global pandemic in a dozen years or so that’s definitely going to change the world, like the 1912 flu epidemic, but so much worse, because all the ‘disbeliever’ narratives we’ve been stirring up will come to fruition around the same time. We should all get through it just fine, since we’ll be prepared for it, but I can’t say the same for the general populace. The trust in the governments will be at an all-time low, and there will be a rise in nationalism flaring up in lots of the countries,” Josh said. “It’s going to be a nightmare, but it’s necessary.”
“What’s the long-term benefit?” the Doctor asked.
“Eventually, after maybe a decade of hardship, a more educated and free-thinking society, but one that learns that not all systems are out to destroy them,” Josh said. “We’re approaching this sort of event horizon where people need to learn that technology is just a tool, and that if a robot AI uprising occurs, it’s because humans taught them to do it. We’re still not entirely certain where the phobia of technology springs from, although if Nathan’s to be believed, it’s organized religion’s fault.”
“Nathan thinks everything is organized religion’s fault,” Brianna said with a snort.
“We all have differing opinions somewhere…”
“Well, we can’t sleep around all day waiting on the world to change,” Dr. Igarashi said. “So you two enjoy a few more minutes of sun, then I expect to see you starting to put together your syllabi for the incoming fall classes. I’m counting on you and the rest of your fellow graduates to be the teachers I never knew I needed.”
“Don’t worry, Doctor,” Brianna told her as she was starting to scoot forward, knowing it was probably time to get up. “We won’t let you down.”
After Brianna stood up, Josh moved to follow, standing up, sliding his arm around his partner’s waist. “All the mistakes we made first time around… we know better this time,” he said to her.
“And are you going to listen to me on the other thing?” the doctor asked them.
“Absolutely, we’ll head over to the armorer right now.”
“Good. I’ll swing by later to check on you.”
Josh and Brianna walked back up the grassy portion before heading over to the next building over, where the armorer kept all the weapons on the estate that weren’t assigned to anyone. There was a counter with a metal cage in front of it, and a familiar face behind the counter.
“Finally going to take up the Boss’s instruction to be armed, huh?” the armorer asked them.
“It’s not worth arguing about anymore,” Josh sighed. “Get our names on the list and get us issued.”
William Bierko reached behind the counter and set a pistol on deck for each of them. “It’s about damn time…”
Comments
Old Dragon
And now we know why everyone thinks Duo Halo came out of New Zealand or Australia. Chuckle.
Graham Cairns
Called it :-) But yeah, as JN says, there is lots of scope to continue...
Michael Duke
Hmmmm this is feeling like a QT prequel now......
J N
I have a feeling that we probably haven't heard the last from CARP... I wonder... nah
