Bound and Initiated (2 page)

Visible in the frame were three of the red-robed men. Two of them were lost in shadow, but a red oval encircled a face, well lit though seen only in profile, because the man had presumably taken a small step forward, allowing the light of another man’s torch to cast a ray upon him.

Sarah’s jaw dropped. She looked sharply at Seth. He nodded grimly. Suddenly Sarah understood why they were meeting here, down the hall from the rabbit warren of cubicles where she worked, rather than up where Seth and Joe worked, above ground. She understood why they had chosen her, an eighteen-year-old analyst recruited straight out of her freshman year in college, where she had shown a remarkable facility with Farsi and Arabic. She had thought it must have something to do with the Middle East, but really, Sarah saw now, it had much more to do with her youth, because it meant she was unlikely to have been corrupted.

Unlikely to be in the pocket of David Chilton, director of the CIA, the man whose face had a red oval around it on the screen.

“We apologize, Sarah,” Seth said, “for putting you in this position.”

Sarah closed her mouth, compressed her lips, consciously set her jaw, and turned to him. “I don’t see that you had any choice, sir,” she said. “I guess I wish you’d chosen another girl, but you needed someone like me, and I took this job because I wanted to make our country safer and the world better. I don’t suppose there’s any chance it’s really just a wild party? I mean, it still wouldn’t be wonderful optics for the director to be seen at that kind of party, but…”

“Nope,” Joe said. “We’ve theorized the existence of this organization for several years. Now that we know why the relevant intelligence never got followed up, Seth and I have been able to put some of the pieces together.”

“A
league,
you called it?” Sarah asked.

“The League of Mithras,” Joe answered, nodding.

Suddenly several things came together in Sarah’s head. The bull, the Latin. Ostia.
Mithras.
“So they’re bringing back the ancient cult of Mithras? The one that the whole Roman army pretty much practiced?”

“We think that’s the surface of it at least. Sex rituals under the banner of an ancient cult.”

Sarah looked at Seth. “But there’s more, I take it?”

He nodded. “Manipulating markets and controlling elections in every developed nation in the world, and most of the undeveloped ones, too.”

“To what end?” Sarah asked. Seth looked back at her quizzically. She turned to Joe, who also had a puzzled expression on his face. “I mean, you’ll say it’s just to perpetuate their power, but I don’t think you go to the trouble of reviving some twisted version of Mithraism if that’s all there is. Have you uncovered anything about their agenda?”

Seth shot a
She’s good
look at Joe, but now Sarah didn’t even feel pride—just pure annoyance. “Mithraism is about virility. As far as I can recall, although we don’t know very much about real, historical Mithraic rituals, they didn’t involve sex, let alone whatever kind of S and M sex that was. I’m sure you know all this.”

“Yes,” Joe said. “So it’s just a cover for the kind of party that ensures that everyone can blackmail everyone else if necessary. Game theory.”

“That doesn’t explain why they’d go to the trouble of having their ritual in the actual Mithraeum in Ostia, though, does it?” Sarah said, speaking very rapidly. “Wouldn’t it be much easier to have your sex party in Dubai? Or even in New York? If it’s based in Italy, a villa in Tuscany?”

“Conspiracies do that stuff,” Joe protested.

“Yes,” Sarah said, “but they always do it for a
reason,
even if that reason eventually gets lost. The mafia’s rituals are about solidarity, and consciously echo the Catholic Church’s practices, because they want to inspire and feel the same devotion to the dons that people feel to the saints and the priests.”

“Fine,” Seth said, in a tone of challenge. “What does anal sex mean, then?” He looked at her intently.

Sarah blushed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But that shouldn’t mean we don’t keep asking.”

“Well,” Joe said, “I think you’re intelligent enough to have figured out by now that we’re going to try to put you in a position to do the asking.” He gave her a raised-eyebrow
This is where you say whether you’ll take the assignment
look.

Sarah felt her brow furrow.
Your crazy, stupid, sexual mission, should you choose to accept it.
For a moment she tried to decide whether she really did not have the slightest doubt that she would do it, or whether the impulsive, instinctive side of her had somehow blinded her to her doubts. Leaving college to join the CIA had worked the same way: the idea that she would help her nation in its intractable security challenges, combined with the ambition to do something important as soon as possible, had made the call a very easy one. Nor had she come to regret it.

But this assignment… well, it certainly presented some interesting differences. She didn’t hesitate, but she did wonder whether it might be the moment she would in fact later regret.

“I’m in,” she said.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Sarah stood outside the glass doors of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, going over her cover one more time in her head. Her apparent hesitation would register on the security-camera footage, she knew, as the natural nervousness of a girl who had come to be recruited as some kind of Mithraic sex toy.

No change to her name; not much change to her biography. The men who ran what Seth and Joe called the League of Mithras—though they cautioned her that they had not managed to learn the organization’s real name despite clear indications that it practiced a modern form of Mithraism—were such as to be able to penetrate even the most sophisticated hacks of vital statistics databases. She was Sarah James, on leave of absence from an Ivy League college to pursue her interests. Instead of those interests residing in Langley, Virginia, however, they now resided in nearby Alexandria, which was of course where Sarah had rented an apartment for the past year. Instead of fulfilling the duties of an intelligence analyst, Sarah James, however, had been writing romance novels.

Two of these novels had been generated by a computer for her and she had familiarized herself with their contents on the plane. The files, on her laptop, had been given spoofed edit dates so that anyone searching through their metadata details would see that Sarah had been hard at work all year on her cryptically submissive fiction, in which an enigmatic billionaire chose a college student as his forever girl (the books were the first two in the planned
Forever Girl
trilogy:
Meeting Steven
and
Loving Steven
).

Sarah pushed through the revolving door into the soaring lobby of the building, where the bustle of business-suited morning foot traffic made her feel very self-conscious about her knee-length black skirt and white cotton top, worn specifically to show that Sarah James had no real work experience. She had to unlearn all the confidence she had gained over the past year at Langley, working in the real world. Really, she had to become Sara Jane, the heroine of the
Forever Girl
series, she thought with a little smile.

Sara Jane, walking across the lobby of Steven Watney’s tall skyscraper, feeling conspicuous as she alone must read the directory to find Mr. Watney’s office, then small as she enters the elevator with all the very important-looking people. Sara Jane told by the billionaire to sit and wait, while he finishes a very important call. Sara Jane, overhearing to her astonishment that the very important billionaire has had some bad news, and instinctively consoling him.

Actual Sarah, standing looking up at the directory, shook off the impression that she had actually entered the pages of the terrible book her cover story claimed she had written. There:
The Ostia Agency,
31st floor.

Did she feel small, riding up with the very important people? No, of course not. Well, maybe a little, but only because of an irrational fear that she would blurt out, “Actually, I’m a spy.”

Field agent.
That’s what Sarah had become, in a very unlikely way.
Mole.
She smiled to herself:
sex mole
. How could she do anything but smile as she thought about the video? The only other logical response would be terror, wouldn’t it?

The Ostia Agency occupied half of the 31st floor. Through a heavy wooden door in the elevator lobby, next to which an unassuming placard proclaimed the name of the company, a small, opulent lobby waited, where a receptionist sat at a long walnut desk presiding over an antique sofa and two similar chairs, set upon a Persian rug. The effect seemed Victorian in the extreme.

The receptionist, a strikingly beautiful, dark-skinned woman with her hair pulled back into a tight bun, looked up from some paperwork and took in petite, blond Sarah, romance author.

“Hi,” Sarah said uncertainly. “Um, I’m Sarah James. I…”

The receptionist looked at her computer monitor, double-clicked her mouse. She frowned.

“I emailed, and they said…”

“That’s alright,” the receptionist said in a light accent of an undefinable African quality that Sarah always associated mentally with very good coffee. Was it
Out of Africa
that had done that to her? “I have you down here for a 9:15 appointment. Why don’t you have a seat, and they’ll come get you in a few moments.” Her fingers clicked over the keyboard very quickly.

The reply email from [email protected] had not held much enlightenment, whether about the Ostia Agency or about the Mithraic league. As instructed by Joe, she had searched, from her laptop, in her apartment, on
virgin submissive training.
Her heart quailed a little at the images that came up.

The day before, in the meeting at Langley, Sarah had blushed again, to her dismay, when her boss’ boss had asked, point-blank, “I’m sorry I have to ask you this, Sarah, but are you a virgin? We have intelligence that suggests that the league only recruits virgins.”

Sarah had swallowed hard, sucked in her lips, and nodded quickly.

“We don’t know at what stage they’ll examine you to be sure about that, but it will probably be early on.”

That was when it occurred to Sarah to ask a question that had been lurking at the back of her mind. If this ‘league’ recruited young women for use in their rituals… “What happens to the girls when they’re no longer virgins?” She managed to keep any quaver out of her voice.

Joe and Seth glanced at one another, their expressions grim.

“We don’t know,” Joe said. “But let’s say we fear the worst, and you should be aware of that.”

Sarah nodded again. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Look for a link in the search results,” Joe said, at the end of that briefing, “that goes to the domain ostiaagency.com. We think it’s a double front: a modeling agency that’s really an escort service, and behind the escort service is the league’s recruitment program. Once you’re recruited, they’ll start sending you to ritzy parties. Your agency handler will find you there.”

The website seemed to consist of a single page, very tasteful. The only image was of a triskelion ring: as instructed by Joe, before she had searched for
virgin submissive training
she had run several searches on more conventional sadomasochism-related subjects, as if her writing about Sara Jane had unlocked sexual fantasies Sarah James had never let herself explore before. The fact that she didn’t really know how to feel about that plausible cover, as she put in the due diligence time to read
Story of O
and several dozen scholarly articles about what she quickly learned to call BDSM, didn’t give her much pause: Sarah had a job to do.

So she recognized the triskelion ring instantly, with a rush of blood to her face that instantly drained away.
Anxiety,
she told herself. The fluttering of her stomach—the same way it did when she happened to catch sight of a nude or near-nude picture of a well-muscled guy online—and the slightly warm feeling between her thighs as she lay prone on her twin bed with her laptop in front of her meant only a slightly more localized version of that same anxiety. Sarah had consented to go undercover on a mission where, if she succeeded, she would at least undergo a good deal of corporal punishment, even if she managed to remain a virgin.

She shoved that entire train of thought far away as she read the words under the image of the ring that she now knew meant,
I belong to any man who knows what this ring means—for whipping, for fucking, for having.
The connection to Mithras seemed rather easy to grasp, despite the lack of historical evidence for anything erotic having played a role in the ancient cult. Ancient notions of sex revolved far more around activity and passivity than around gender, the way modern ones did. It made sense for the ancient Romans to keep sex out of their Mithraism, just as, in its twisted way, it made perfect sense for these modern Mithraists to make their version revolve around dominant men and submissive women—and, apparently, the intriguing figure of the priestess, as Sarah couldn’t help thinking of the blue-robed woman who had forced the blond girl to go down on her while receiving an anal pounding from Cardinal Deriano.

At any rate, in Sarah’s mind the equation ran
Mithras plus Sade equals
what? World domination? That was what Seth and Joe seemed to think, but just as she had said in the briefing, Sarah found it hard to believe that this league saw that as their ultimate goal. Her mind went instantly to lurid, quasi-fantastic novels (so very different from the
Forever Girl
series, but really in their limning of masculine desire not actually far distant) of unleashing the power locked within the Earth, or the ocean, psyche, or the lost continent of Atlantis. The association of Mithras with the image and the symbolism of the bull clearly evoked in his modern followers as in his ancient ones fantasies of surging, uncontrollable energy: the rampant cock, taking its own.

Obviously, that idea could take on a mystical dimension, but everything Sarah knew about David Chilton suggested that he would never be involved in any league or group, let alone any conspiracy, so soft-headed as to imagine that fucking virgins would unleash supernatural forces. She could see a cardinal getting thus involved—though by all accounts Cardinal Deriano was a hard-headed realist devoted to stomping heresy into the ground not with incense but with argument—because priests had to believe in miracles, right? But the Yale-educated, former White House council director of the CIA?