Prologue: Tangier.. Heathrow.. Vauxhall

I heard the sea breaking below my window just before dawn and woke. I knew I was to fly back to London that morning. My leave of absence was over and I was to return to work. I lay in bed, feeling the grumble in my belly and rubbing the stubble on my chin from three days' growth.

The heat was rising now, inexorably moving the coolness of the night aside as the blinds rippled in the rising haze.

I raised myself up, wincing from the pain in my side, and drew the blinds and sat, watching the sun rise slowly over the rim of the bay, the smells of the waking souks spiralling up through the stillness of the morning air.

Sweat sprang over my body as the temperature climbed, and I watched a gecko scuttle over the plaster ceiling, little sticky toes, as I lit my last cigarette. I closed my eyes.

Seven hours later, I was stepping onto the tarmac of a rainswept Heathrow apron.

Henderson awaited me.

"Afternoon, Commander," he said, flipping me a sheaf of papers, "and welcome home, sir. How was Tangier? You're fully recovered, I hope, sir."

I grunted a noncommittal reply and took the papers. Just the usual port of entry documents. As a member of His Majesty's Secret Service, it was customary to bypass the usual immigration channels when re-entering Britain. I signed the papers without studying them and handed them back. Henderson led me back to his parked department Focus. I eschewed the front seat and clambered in the back, allowing him to take my bags.

The journey up the M4 was punctuated only by the metronome of the windscreen wipers and the spark of my duty-frees; every time I lit one, apparently oblivious of the sign on his dash that read 'thank you for not smoking', I took pleasure in seeing the back of Henderson's neck stiffen. It was a way of kicking downwards in the pettiest possible way, just as I fully expected would happen to me back at Vauxhall.

At Heston, we pulled in to take on fuel.

The rain was increasing; the sky brightening behind us, to the West, but London to the East was obscured by sheets of darkness.

***

I sat opposite Doctor Amanda Marsden, head of 'M' Branch, watching her read through my report for the third time. She closed the file and paused. At length, she stood and walked over to the large bay window overlooking the Thames, so she stood framed by light, her back to me. She clasped her hands behind her, and finally spoke.

"Thank you for your report, Pierce. Very thorough. Very interesting"

She turned to look at me. I could make out nothing in her expression.

"I had the opportunity to glance over your service record earlier this morning," she continued, walking back to sit and face me, her heels clicking over the oak flooring.

"Lieutenant Commander Anthony Pierce. Age 32. Honours in Artificial Intelligence, Imperial College, London. Top of 1998 graduate pool at the Royal Navy Officer Training College, Dartmouth. Rose to become youngest head of the cryptography division of the RN Communication Corps within two years and subsequently transferred to the 'service' at my predecessor's request."

She opened up her laptop and punched a couple of keys, viewing God knows what about me, or nothing to do with me at all, perhaps.

"Notable successes included the decoding of the Santander armament cartel encryption key algorithms, leading to information which proved crucial in the seizure of 20 kilos of Uranium intended for Russian Mafia use on Merseyside in December 2005. You requested transfer to field ops in 2008 and completed basic in six months. Transferred to 'M' division in November 2010, where you received your license to kill and took over as agent 004 in early 2012."

She looked up.

"You've shown yourself to be dedicated, self- motivated and ruthless in the execution of your license to kill. In short, 004, you were a high- flyer in the Service."

Here it comes...

I listened to Marsden's measured breath as she again consulted her screen. She typed a few words and hit the 'send' button, then raised her eyes.

I met them.

"I'm debriefing you personally, Lieutenant Commander Pierce, because your failure to complete your mission has not only jeopardised our chances of retrieving the goods in question, but your actions have severely compromised the cover of many of our people in the field.

We've been receiving fragments of encrypted material that your home team has been sifting; we believe that they indicate that Lime has been compelled to break cover and make a border run. We also know that Hignett is dead and of Section Chief Grice we have no intelligence."

I endeavoured to maintain eye contact with her, but this information was causing a spiralling sink to drain in the pit of my stomach. Marsden continued.

"These events have all been precipitated by your break of cover and subsequent extraction by 'F for Freddie'."

She paused again, looking intently into my eyes.

I finally dropped my gaze for a moment, then met it again with resolution. I took a breath.

"I accept full responsibility, ma'am. I will, of course immediately tender my resignation."

Marsden smiled tartly.

"I'm afraid not, Pierce. That would be contrary to our interests and for you, if I may be permitted a cliché, an easy way out."

She decisively closed her flip terminal and pressed the tips of her fingers together. When she next spoke, I knew I was expected to give my life for my country.

"We're going to reinsert you."

***

As I drove to the 'Q' Branch facility in Oxfordshire, my mind mulled over the contents of the rest of my debrief. 'M' had informed me that I was 'dead' - standard operational procedure for field agents whose cover had been compromised during the course of an uncompleted assignment. I had signed the release papers and was now effectively at the mercy of His Majesty's Government with all its vagaries and whims; to refuse to comply now would be seen as treasonous and punishable in suitable fashion. I was to be allocated a new identity and reinserted into the operation in Japan; the precise details remained opaque.

I was to be briefed by an unidentified superior upon reaching Bicester.

CHAPTER ONE: Bicester, Oxfordshire - 'Q' branch Special research facility

A 'Q' branch man called Dennis met me in the anonymous looking waiting room of the divisional facility. Like all really top secret establishments, it was hidden in plain view, in this case in the cover of a large and rambling country house in four acres of deciduous British woodland. A couple of semi- retired agents ran it as a perfectly normal house and answered the door to me as if I was a long awaited friend.

The pretence was short-lived and they had soon ushered me into the cellar. As the cellar door shut behind me, I saw a man dressed identically to me take his leave, and soon after, the sound of my car being driven away.

At the bottom of the cellar was a two way airlock door hidden behind a false brick party wall.

Penetrating this facade led me to the waiting room and the waiting Mr. Dennis.

Dennis appeared to be the personification of the waiting room, carrying as he did no perceptible hint of personality or character save the faint whiff of detergent and antiseptic, as well as the slightly shabby air of a well thumbed Sunday supplement. He had an irritating and apparently unnecessary habit of pushing his completely immobile black rimmed glasses back onto his face with his middle finger and a definite problem with pronouncing the letter 'r'. He was as anonymous as this facility, with its air of cleanliness and its look, positioned somewhere inbetween lab complex and industrial park unit. A faint but pervasive reek of disinfectant was the only thing that distinguished it from the IT facility at Denham. The staff, from what I could see, were all dressed in laboratory coats, and there seemed to be more than the usual complement of clean areas, in which I glimpsed masked figures in white one-piece overalls.

As we toured the facility, Dennis efficiently pointed out the various amenities at my disposal, including a nautilus room, a swimming pool and a well stocked library cum lounge, before conducting me to my quarters. He left me, informing me that I would be collected for a briefing and medical at 16:00. I glanced at my TAG. It was one thirty in the afternoon.

***

After unpacking and familiarising myself with my drab confines - "Holiday Inn for agoraphobes" - I left my room to wander and gain my bearings. I very soon realised that there was a compelling reason for the efficiency and brevity of Dennis' tour.

There was really very little freedom to be had for 004.

After a few fairly fruitless minutes peering in at various depressingly restricted areas, I sat for a while in the deserted library, eating some fresh fruit from the food dispenser (sadly no junk food in sight), drinking spring water and leafing listlessly through a copy of Vogue that had been left on the table. After contemplating a swim, I decided against and went to the gym to try and loosen up. I returned to my room and changed into sweat gear, and returned to the nautilus room, where I was surprised to find I had a companion, an attractive young woman with a fit air and a cascade of red curls surmounting a pretty freckled face. She completed a set of bench presses as I began to go through some stretches, and then looked up and smiled.

"Commander Pierce, isn't it?"

"That's right," I replied, unsurprised by her perspicacity.

She stood and extended a hand, which I shook, before climbing onto a treadmill. She continued in a voice which carried a pleasant hint of Irish.

"I'm Doctor Dwyer - Mary Dwyer". I nodded assent as she continued, "I'm afraid we're going to be seeing rather a lot of each other. I'm on the away team working on your reinsertion project."

At this, I looked up at her more closely, and smiled. "In which case, I wish we could have met under more pleasant circumstances."

She moved onto a set of standing weights and started a rather radical set as I went on, "I presume that there's to be some sort of plastic surgery involved?"

"Yes..." She paused, finishing her set again before proceeding.

"There will be a fair amount of reconstructive work..." She paused again and I was aware that she was looking over thoughtfully at me now, examining where she had previously been conversing. Then she put down the weights and stepped away from them, continuing in a more formal fashion.

"You'll receive a full specification at your briefing this afternoon.

Speaking of which -" She glanced at the clock above the door "- I'd better get going so I can go over the major points with the team before Commander Bond briefs you."

I was surprised. "Bond's in charge here?"

She laughed. "No, no. But I understand that 'Mandy' Marsden's assigned him to supervise your reinsertion project". She lowered her voice, her eyes twinkling. "- which I gather he's none too pleased about. I don't think Commander Bond's at all fond of 'Q' Branch."

With that, she turned and left. I watched her recede down the corridor for a while, then turned back to the machines.

***

Commander Sir James Bond, VC, MBE, KCMG, perhaps the most celebrated, certainly the most flamboyant of all the Cold War MI6 operatives, had aged exceedingly well. The musculature was still evident under the classic lines of the charcoal grey bespoke Hardy Amies suit; the silk Old Etonian tie; the Alfred Dunhill cufflinks; the shock of silver hair surmounting the deeply-lined but still strikingly handsome face with those infamous steel grey eyes that had reputedly turned many a beautiful spy's allegiance, not to mention her heart. A mythological collage, or some sort of antediluvian PR spin? Perhaps. I had thought so, but now, in his presence for the first time, I could see that his equal reputations for charisma and cruelty were indeed founded in reality.

Bond's evident displeasure at his current assignment didn't make the briefing any more pleasant for me. He was flanked to his left by the primly white- coated Dr. Dwyer and a middle aged Q Branch operative called Easton, who did not utter a word during the whole two hour meeting, but was constantly looking at me and tapping away at her flip terminal. To his right was a young and dazzlingly beautiful brunette called Miss Loth, who was clearly everything but, judging from the obvious enthusiasm with which she took notes of the Commander's utterances and leaned over to pass him various papers.

Bond wrapped up the formal introductions and stubbed out his third Cartier of the session, smoked in flagrant disregard of the overzealously deployed signage, and turned to face me.

"Well, Commander Pierce, I suppose you're wondering exactly how we're intending to reinsert you into the situation in Fukui."

Bond proceeded at great length to brief the room on the strategic and technological significance of the situation that had arisen in Japan, which was an effective and calculated slap in the face for myself, being the operative closest to the principals in the operation.

It had begun when we received a triple blind 128-bit encrypted message via an anonymous server in New Zealand.

It arrived in a top secret ministerial eyes-only mailbox marked urgent, which is why myself and my hastily hand picked away team had been assigned to decrypt it. This happened in due course and the contents and the implications had proven to be the proverbial dynamite.

The message was part of a string of secret correspondences between a research Physicist at the MRC in Cambridge and a Japanese terrorist organisation called the Red Fist of Justice, whose objective was to bring about the total collapse of the Capitalist powers by a shady process they called attrition deconstruction, whereby they would systematically degrade and destroy European, Asian and American civilisations through the continued supply of drugs, prostitution, gambling and armaments and the active encouragement of military and civil insurrection in sensitive areas.

Once the ordained collapse had been engineered, Red Fist argued, then they would mobilise a global return to permanent Revolution, and the second international Supreme Soviet would reign for eternity. The Red Fist had storefronts everywhere, and links with the major crime lords throughout the globe and, more dangerously still, was actively bankrolling the expanding sphere of armed unrest in the former Soviet bloc states. Being a diffuse and amorphous organisation made them difficult to pin down, let alone prosecute, so any possible lead was welcome.

The correspondence told how the MRC scientist, Professor Adrian Lime, currently seen as the world's foremost authority in the burgeoning field of molecular engineering, popularly referred to as nanotechnology, and being a good Marxist with little regard for the late capitalist landscape of Europe, was on the verge of agreeing to sell his research on the applications of nanotech and brain chemistry to the Red Fist.

Naturally, we stepped in and naturally, during the course of protracted 'negotiations', Lime conceptually re-defected, pledging undying allegiance to the King and mammon. Having been "induced" to realise the error of his ways, it was now put to him that he would be serving his country best if he proceeded with the sale and, better still for the technocracy of the Red Fist, agreed to a physical defection. It would then be a matter of simplicity for Lime to insist on bringing his brilliant young assistant (yours truly) with him on his journey.

The bait proved irresistible and soon Lime and I found ourselves in the back of a Red Fist Mercedes on the way to our new accommodation on the outskirts of Fukui, a bleak post-industrial coastal city pockmarked by pollution and waste, where a Red Fist research complex had been set up.

I was detailed to break the ice surrounding Red Fist's mainframe and squirt the data on their global whereabouts and operations back to London, while Lime made suitably distracting foreground noises.

In any event, it all started promisingly, with Lime wowing the local Red Fist commissars with some spectacular results using nanotech smart drugs on several "volunteers".

This induced the Red Fist to work their hardest to procure many more loyal 'volunteers' from the local community of petty criminals, failed Red Fist-niks and the down and outs, and Lime kept them amused while I made steady progress on the network security surrounding the Red Fist central core. Two and a half months passed in this happy state.

Then the unhappy event happened.

I was close to securing the desired information when I saw the local cell leader, a frighteningly efficient sadist called Sato, shepherding the latest batch of volunteers into the complex. I was shocked to see that among their number were Grice and Hignett, two agents with whom I was familiar from the Osaka field office. My mistake was clear. I reacted visibly, and Sato noticed.

I then made one of the most cowardly decisions in the history of espionage. I collected all the data I had amassed, left the compound directly after lunch, and requested extraction. Bond went to great lengths to explain exactly what this action implied to the continuing good health of Lime, Grice and Hignett. He was very emphatic on the fact that I should not have left, but stayed and worked it out. But I had seen one thing that he hadn't.

I had seen what Lime's smart drugs had done to the 'volunteers'. Now they were going to send me back.

***

Having completed the ritual humiliation, Bond lit another Cartier and prepared to continue. Dr. Dwyer looked a little bored and Miss Loth was making coffee. Easton was still tapping into her terminal.

"As you'll no doubt have gathered, Pierce, an opportunity has emerged which will allow for your reinsertion. You know the Fist systems better than anyone else, which is why it has to be you." Bond smiled, showing immaculate white teeth. "As you know, the Red Fist central committee chairman has a private residence in the mountains down the China Sea coast, which he visits at least once a month. He also entertains there and his two children are there most of the time. The staff is all female." He walked over to stand by Dr Dwyer. "Now, part of the cachet with this place is that a lot of the staff are Western women. You can probably understand why this is a big thing with the Fist, Pierce?"

I nodded.

"Now, obviously there is an extensive vetting process that goes on to ensure that the girls he hires are clean. This is," he smiled again, "where you come in. We've managed to place operatives in his screening organisation here in London".

So that was it.

I was going to be helping insert a female agent into the Red Fist dacha to spring a honey trap. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Just sit in an enemy office in London and ensure that one of our agents was on the next plane East. I stayed quiet and listened.

Bond lit another cigarette and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke.

Dwyer and Easton looked on expectantly.

When Bond next spoke, it was to utter the most surprising ten words I'd ever heard in my entire life.

"You are going to become one of those girls, Pierce."

To be continued...

The beginning of a new life for disgraced British Intelligence agent Anthony Pierce, 004, as he prepares to embark on a mission into enemy territory in a deep cover disguise he didn't expect to be wearing in his wildest dreams. The transformation begins...

CHAPTER ONE continued

I must have sat in complete and stunned silence for quite a while as Bond, who was clearly expecting a reaction, was forced to continue.

"Doctors Easton and Dwyer will be the principals you report to from now on, Pierce. I'm also leaving Miss Loth here to help with your reorientation. I'll return to finish your brief when your time here is complete. To answer your question, that will be 120 days from tomorrow."

He began to collect his papers, then looked up, with a faint smile on that cruel, handsome mouth.

"Good luck, Pierce. It's an unusual mission."

With that, Commander Bond nodded smartly to Dwyer and Easton and left, accompanied by Miss Loth.

For a moment, there was silence. I was unable to make eye contact with Dwyer or Easton, nor make any sense of the thoughts tumbling freely through my head. Finally, I rose.

"It's impossible!" I shouted. "How can you do what he said you were going to do to me! I refuse to co-operate."

"I'm afraid the release you signed at Vauxhall leaves you with very little option, Commander, as you well know," said a voice from the doorway. It was Miss Loth, re- entering the room with a clipboard and a quietly efficient air quite at remove from that she had exhibited in Bond's company.

Sadly, she was right. I had signed my life away in a few seconds of remorse. I felt a bitter coldness churn in my belly when I realised quite how skilfully 'M' had manipulated my guilt this morning.

I sat down again, and tried to gather myself. I looked up at Loth, who was smiling quite pleasantly at me.

"So what happens? Am I going to have a sex change? Is that it? Then what? I'm not sure that a whore in the Red Fist dacha's going to have much access to sensitive information-" I choked as I realised what I was saying.

"Is that what I'm going to become..?" I buried my face in my hands, unable to continue.

Loth came over and put her hand on my shoulder, knelt by my face, and spoke in a surprisingly sensitive tone.

"I'm sorry. I really am, but it's been decided that operational details such as those aren't going to be divulged to you until we've completed your transformation.

"You're going to be in a very fragile state mentally, and we don't want that to prejudice how you view your new mission objectives until you stabilise. Please understand. It's for your good and the good of the mission.

"Yes?"

I nodded dumbly.

"Good." She rose and leant back on the desk, crossing her black tights- clad legs at the ankles. I again noticed how beautiful she was, quite dark, with big green eyes, long, straight brown hair and unbelievable legs. She noticed me looking and smiled unselfconsciously. She glanced over at Easton, who paused very slightly in her note-taking, then went on.

"To answer your first question, no you are not having a 'sex change'." She parenthesised the words deliberately. "We will be carrying out some of the therapy associated with gender reassignment techniques, but none of the non- reversible surgical work."

She could see the relief in my face as she went on, "in fact, there's absolutely no reason why you wouldn't be able to revert to a completely normal male life after the completion of the mission.

Now, are you ready for a brief medical? I realise it's been a long day, but time is of the essence."

With that I realised that it was this morning that I had awoken in Tangier. Amazing how your life can change in a day. I took a deep breath and nodded.

"Excellent," smiled Miss Loth.

***

Doctor Easton was a cosmetic surgeon. During the briefing, she'd been taking initial notes on my appearance and physique. Doctor Dwyer was explaining this as she conducted a brief medical examination in a room adjoining one of the clear areas. A pretty blonde nurse called Kirsty Reeves has taken my clothes a sample of blood and some urine from me and given me a powder blue gown to wear. Now I was breathing in and out as Dwyer examined my thoracic area from behind a radial PET scanner. Dwyer kept up a constant stream of chatter as she tapped away at her terminal.

So I discovered that Easton was a plastic surgeon and Dwyer was a research endocrinologist. I knew enough to be able to translate this in my head as 'hormone doctor'. In the glass partition behind the endocrinologist' s head, I could see the reflection of the 3D colour display of the inside of my chest cavity as she directed the cursor around.

After a while, she paused and clicked an icon which allowed her to freely rotate my physical position so that my genital area was on display. She looked up, with an apologetic look on her face.

"I can do most of the internal examination on the computer, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to do a very quick cavity inspection to check the state of your prostate."

I closed my eyes and nodded. She went on, "it's good that you're still quite young, you know."

Good for whom, I wondered.

"Your body will be more tolerant to the therapy.." she tailed off, concentrating on the screen for a moment.

"What exactly is the therapy to entail?" I asked pointedly, sick of the magical mystery tour.

Dwyer sighed, looking up. "I'm afraid I'm under instructions not to tell you. Commander Bond and Miss Loth are insistent on that. I'm sorry."

"Not as sorry as me," I muttered.

"Pardon?"

"Nothing."

I decided to change tack.

"What's your background, Dr Dwyer? How did you end up on this mission?"

She didn't look up from her work, but answered promptly, "This is the perfect job for me. I wanted to do security work - my father was in the Service. When the endocrinological research post came up, I went for it."

Somehow that didn't ring true, but I decided not to press it. How about Dr Easton. Have you worked with her long?

"No. In fact we only met yesterday. But her reputation is brilliant, both in reconstruction and cosmetics. I think you're in safe hands."

"I hope so. I don't want to end up looking like her."

Dwyer sniggered, looking askance at me from her monitor. "I don't think there's any danger of that.

"She told me that from her initial look at you that she was confident of an excellent result."

Excellent for whom, I wondered again. "And what about Miss Loth? She seems an interesting character."

Dwyer pursed her lips.

"Yes... I'll bet you find her very interesting...

"Actually, I don't know her very well either, but she is the Director of this facility, so it doesn't do to argue much."

Noting the surprised look on my face with another of her smiles, she got up and reached for a box of sterile gloves.

As if on cue, Nurse Reeves returned with a tube of lubricant.

It was time for my cavity exam.

***

Apparently, I was in perfect condition inside and out. Dwyer told me that I could please myself for the next hour, and suggested that I might want to go to the canteen to eat. It was 20:30. She asked me to return at 21:30 to finish my exam. I got up and must have been looking a little confused.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"I - er, my clothes?"

"You'll be fine in your gown for now, Commander.

"Everyone in this complex is used to it." I looked down at the gown which covered me to just below my groin, and shook my head.

"I don't think so. My trousers please." Again, she looked a little embarrassed, and gave her little sigh.

"I'm sorry Commander. Miss Loth has instructed us that you are not to wear trousers from now on. It's for-"

"The good of the mission. I know.

"What can I wear?"

"Leggings or a skirt."

I sighed. "Give me some leggings then." I guess I wasn't quite ready to lose the seams between my legs.

Nurse Reeves brought in a pair of navy blue leggings, which I struggled into with a great deal of embarrassment. I then turned and left the examining room without a word.

In the corridor leading to the canteen, I passed a couple of security staff, who turned out to be tough-looking RN maritime policewomen. They saluted and I saluted back, feeling foolish.

I glanced back as they passed me but they were either well trained, or completely disinterested in my plight or my ridiculous appearance. The canteen was similarly deserted to the rest of the complex. I got a light pasta from the bored looking girl behind the counter and sat down with a glass of apple juice to eat in lonely silence.

All I could hear was the hum of the omnipresent air-conditioning and the clatter of my cutlery. I wondered what was going on in the house above me. Probably the two old dears were watching the box. Suddenly feeling emotional, I finished my pasta and left the canteen, walking quickly to my room. I lay face down on my bed in the darkness, thinking about my parents.

They'd be doing the same as the old couple above now, settling down for a quiet evening before bed. I wondered if my funeral had happened yet. Probably. I wondered if Dad had cried with Mum. If only I knew either way it'd be a little better. And Christine. We'd split up just before the mission. But she had remained close to my parents. Had she been at my funeral? I thought of her often, still.

Ridiculously, I realised my eyes were watering. I wiped them with the back of my hand and lit another cigarette.

It was nine o'clock, and I was quite alone.

***

"Are you all right, Commander Pierce?"

I nodded. I must have seemed very subdued after the relative levity of just an hour before.

Dr. Dwyer was looking at something on her flipscreen. I was lying on the examining table in my gown and leggings, looking blankly at the ceiling. I heard her rise.

"You'll be pleased to know that the result of your blood and urine was very positive. We can proceed as planned." She walked over with a glass bottle filled with a clear liquid.

The bottle had a rubber cap into which she was inserting a hypodermic needle. "I'm just going to give you a small injection, then you can go to bed. I'm sure you're exhausted."

She put the hypodermic on a tray exposing my left arm and swabbing it inside the elbow joint. She picked up the hypo and leaned over. In a rapid movement, I grabbed her wrist and dug my index finger into her tendon, painlessly rendering her unable to hold the needle. She gave a startled yell as the hypodermic clattered to the floor. I held onto her arm, careful not to hurt her. I looked into her face, which was set, and beautifully calm.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Just please tell me what it is. Do you have any idea what it might be like for me? I'll take it, but tell me what I'm taking."

I let go of her wrist. She continued to look into my eyes for a moment, then broke off, picking up the needle and throwing it in a sterile disposal unit. She got a new hypodermic out of a vacuum pack and refilled it, before coming over, and sitting down by me so that her head was next to mine. She held up the needle so I could see it.

"This is a dilute solution of the complex of hormones which my away team and I have synthesised for your treatment programme. I'm not obliged to tell you anything, but I'm going to because I respect you and the sacrifice you're about to make. I'm administering this low dose tonight so that we'll know if you have an allergy to any of the constituent drugs in the mixture." She got up again and swabbed my arm.

She looked down at my face. I nodded. I felt the needle enter the vein and closed my eyes as the liquid entered my system. Doctor Dwyer continued, "this dose won't have any effect on your body, but very soon, if the allergy test proves negative, I'm going to start you on an aggressive treatment programme, which, over the next few weeks, will give you the body chemistry of a pubescent girl."

She pulled out the needle and I heard it clatter into the disposal. Dwyer went quiet and I could hear her tapping notes into her terminal. I turned my head.

"Please go on... I don't want to lie in silence.." I heard her come over to me and sit. Her hand took mine. She went on in a soft voice.

"There are four main types of hormone in your personal cocktail.

"They're going to work together in your body to make it all happen. There's the two female hormone types, oestrogens and progestogens which will do the main work of transforming your body shape into a woman's.

"But they need help because of all the testosterone floating round your body which will stop them having the optimum effect.

"We're sending in two more types of hormone to work against these - otherwise we'd have to castrate you. The androgen receptor antagonist will effectively stop the testosterone from being able to have any effect on your body, and the androgen inhibitors will tell your testes that there's enough testosterone already in your body and they'll cease producing any more."

She got up but continued talking as she went back to her terminal. "Once the hormones kick in, you'll notice many changes. Your breasts will grow, maybe by even a cup size or two. Your aureolae and nipples might swell a bit too and everything will be much more sensitive.

"Your penis and testes will shrink. Your face will become more typically female in shape. Your body fat will move away from the waist and toward the hips and bottom. Your body hair growth will slow and becomes less dense, and may lighten in colour. You'll tend to lose muscle tone and be prone to putting on weight with less food. Your skin will become finer and softer, and more sensitive.

"You'll sweat less and smell nicer. Your hair will become fuller and grow faster. You may lose your male sex drive but gain a female one." She sighed. "All these things have been documented, but you might only experience some of them. It's all very unpredictable."

She came and helped me sit up. "There's one thing you should know. We've tried to calculate your programme so that we'll get the best results possible in the shortest possible time.

That was the brief. That means the treatment programme is exceptionally aggressive. You will be very ill for a week or so once we start the course. I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about that."

She paused looking into my eyes, pursing her lips. "I thought you should know."

I took her hand. "Thank you Doctor Dwyer." I said.

She placed her free hand over mine. "Mary," she said.

***

The terminal in my room woke me with a triple chime. I knew as soon as I awoke where I was and why, and felt curiously more purposeful today. I flipped the screen open and checked the morning headlines. The arms buildup in Kazakhstan was continuing, and fresh combat had broken out in Georgia and the Ukraine. The little red flag waving on my mailbox icon showed that I had correspondence.

I clicked it open and was greeted by a video message from Miss Loth.

"Morning Commander. I hope you slept well. The enclosed document is your agenda for today. We have no items until eleven hundred so please feel free to take a stroll and a swim, and we'll see you at eleven. Please do not shave this morning, Commander."

I opened the agenda file:

========================= Agenda - Commander Pierce =========================
11:00 | Procedural and Welcome | D Loth | Director's Office
11:30 | Initial consultation | Dr S Easton | Room 206
13:30 | Lunch | D Loth | Lake Consequence Room
15:00 | Laser therapy | Dr S Easton | Room 206
17:00 | Consultation | Dr M Dwyer | Room 214

I bluetoothed the agenda to my personal tablet and then looked in the wardrobe.

There was my first shock of the day. My clothes were all gone. In their place a range of unfamiliarly feminine-looking garments.

Frowning, I picked out a rather fitted black top with a low-cut neck and a pair of black leggings. I looked in the mirror.

Ridiculous, and the leggings did very little to conceal the unfeminine looking bump on my groin. I selected a pair of brand new Fila trainers and left the room carrying my data tablet.

***

I had noticed one thing. Well, noticed is probably not the right word. A realisation had seeped into me over the last hours suddenly surfaced in me as I waited for Ms Loth.

There were no men here.

Apart from Dennis, who had vanished as quietly as he had entered my life the previous evening, and Commander Bond, who had also, I presumed, left the facility, everyone in the complex, from MP to cleaner, was female. I was in a world of women. Of course, I was no fool and the reasoning behind this situation was obvious, but he realisation hit me with some force nevertheless.

So I sat in Ms Loth's spare but elegantly furnished office, awaiting my appointment.

The small, kidney-shaped desk seemed to be finished in a black, stone- like surface like obsidian. I looked at my pale face in the mirror-like stone, wondering how long it would remain familiar to me.

"Good morning Commander!"

Loth's voice snapped me from my reverie.

Once again she looked spectacular, dressed in a simple but beautifully cut black trouser suit; I found myself admiring her as she poured tea and we made small talk. Then a small thought popped, unbidden, into a corner of my mind...

....I hope I look as good as that by the end of this...

What was that all about? I sipped my Lapsang Souchong and continued to smile and listen, smile and listen.

***

Pep talk aside, one aspect of my meeting with Ms Loth had been useful. In her schedule overview for the first fortnight, she had indicated that I would be spending most of the first ten days out of commission due to Dwyer's drug therapy.

That in itself was worrying. More so was what I was hearing from Doctor S. Easton as I lay naked under the scrutiny of a vast array of scanning equipment. Ms Loth had walked me to Easton's consulting rooms where I had for the first time spoken to this extraordinary dried out husk of a woman. Tall and exceptionally slender, she was a sinister combination of schoolmarmish frump and vampire glamour.

She spoke in a cigarette-ravaged basso profundo and punched the air with half inch scarlet talons as she made a point. The faded tweeds she sported were an uneasy counterpoint to the black patent stilettos on her feet. Every five minutes or so she would emit a rumbling cough from her red, lipsticked mouth.

"Good. Your body hair is quite fine," she said as I lay naked, cold and embarrassed before her, fearing for the little hair I possessed. She continued her computerised examination of my anatomy, droning on in her bass monotone about the changes I was to undergo.

Much of it sounded a little too permanent for my liking, and I said so.

She paused and walked over to me. "Commander Pierce," she said, "I think you know that we all owe a debt to our country. Some more than others." She turned and went back to her console, then went on to finish her consultation in silence.

***

That afternoon I had my body hair removed.

Permanently.

Doctor Easton had had me drink a strange, tasteless blue fluid at lunch which she had explained to me was a specially developed enzyme with a radioactive marker attached to it, designed to affix itself to the base of all the hair follicles in the body. This was used to create a targeting matrix for an advanced computer-guided laser system that her laboratory had developed that would quickly and painlessly remove all the targeted hairs.

There was a large machine at the back of her consulting room which comprised of a metallic framework inside which was a suspension harness big enough to accommodate a human body. The framework was mounted on a set of articulated gimbals which permitted 360 degrees of free rotation in all axes. At the top of the framework was the laser projection assembly. It seemed like a pretty efficient solution and I wondered if the government developed these sorts of things all the time. I supposed that they could make quite a lot of money in the commercial market.

"This will be going into production and on sale in the US later this year," said Doctor Easton, clicking over to me in her spike heels, as if reading my thoughts.

"Remove all your clothing please."

Dumbly, I complied, and stood self- consciously, trying to cover my groin. Easton had a tube of a colourless gel in her hand, which she proceeded to smear all over my scalp, eyebrows and pubic area.

"This is a barrier gel which prevents the marker signal from being read by the targeting system," she explained efficiently as I stood in acute embarrassment while she worked the excruciatingly cold gel into my pubic hair. She then gave me a pair of dark blue goggles to put on. "These will prevent removal of your lashes and protect your eyes from the laser mesh".

After a while, she stood back and looked me over. Apparently satisfied, she nodded, and indicated that I should follow her to the depilation machine. I stepped inside the spherical framework and Easton began to strap me into the harness, which attached at the wrists, upper arms, ankles, knees, waist, chest and neck with translucent straps which I supposed would allow the laser mesh to penetrate. Then she went over to the control panel and pressed a combination on the touchpad which made the harness retract into the framework so that I was raised up and suspended in mid-air, my arms and legs wide open. It felt utterly perverse.

I heard her moving around behind me, then a cold sensation in my buttocks, followed by a sharp needle. A coldness seeped out from where she had injecting me, and I realised I couldn't move.

"The targeting computer works best when the subject is immobile," I heard her intone emotionlessly. I heard her pressing another combination of keys and the framework began to rotate slowly. I was bathed in a cold, blue light in which I could just distinguish individual, infinitesimal laser beams. It was not an unpleasant sensation, somewhat like being tickled very gently all over my body; after a while I drifted off into a semi-sleep.

When I came to I was covered in a thin layer of ash. Easton was using a small hand-held vacuum cleaner to remove it all, and I realised that this was the remains of my hair. The paralysing drug was wearing off, and I began to flex my arms and legs, which had pins and needles. Easton went away and came back with a rather nasty looking pen- shaped implement.

"What's that?"

"Pen laser depilator. I'm going to sculpt your eyebrows and bikini area."

I thought that that sounded too much. "Wait a minute. I mean, is that really necessary? I thought women did that kind of thing themselves?"

Easton stopped, and shrugged. "I thought it might be more convenient for you. It's your choice."

"No thanks. I'm not going to be wearing any bikinis anyway.

And I'd prefer not to have no eyebrows for the rest of my life." Easton shrugged again and clicked away. After a while, there was a whine from the mechanism and the harness lowered me to the floor.

"Go and shower thoroughly in tepid water," she said, handing me a towel. "Then report to Doctor Dwyer."

***

The machine had done its work. I was as smooth as a baby all over and it felt very strange. A red rash had appeared on my skin, but Easton had told me this was normal and would wear off overnight. The sensation of clothes on my hairless skin was novel and intense. Mary Dwyer was not in her consulting room when I arrived, and I was puttering about when she walked in.

"Hello, Commander Pierce."

"Doctor Dwyer. What's the news?"

She smiled. "Good. Your blood's come back fine. Any ill effects? Dizziness, nausea?"

I shook my head and sat down.

She stood and looked at me for a while. Then appeared to come to a decision.

"Well, I don't see any sense in delaying." She walked over to a cupboard and came back with a bottle of colourless fluid, with a label that said "PIERCE" on it, and a large syringe. As she was filling the syringe, I began to panic.

She noticed me sweating and shivering, and stopped.

"Afraid?" she asked, gently. I nodded. My mouth had gone dry and I couldn't speak at all. She walked over and put her arm around me.

"You're a very brave man," she said quietly, "and your government doesn't deserve you." I couldn't say anything.

"Shall we proceed," she went on, "or do you want to wait?"

I couldn't answer for a while, then I looked into her green eyes, and whispered, in the tiniest voice, "do it."

She rubbed my upper arm with alcohol and then the needle went in. I watched the colourless fluid drain into my vein.

to be continued...

British Intelligence agent Anthony Pierce, 004 is transformed into someone quite different as the Service prepares to reinsert him into a perilous terrorist situation in the Far East. Will sparks fly as Bond returns to supervise the transformed operative's embarkation?

CHAPTER ONE continued

I don't remember much of the next few days. Mary told me later that they had to keep me sedated for most of the time as I was too sick to cope. I don't remember undergoing any of the procedures that they completed during that time. I don't remember. All I remember is a sensation of falling into a deep, dark well, revolving slowly until I was utterly consumed...

***

I woke up and looked at the bedside clock.

It read 6:30. I had no idea whether it was morning or evening. I had a vague recollection of needles and hands manipulating me in my bed. I had a sick, dry taste in my mouth and a sharp pain in my groin. There were dull aches all over the rest of my body, especially around my face, chest, abdomen and bottom. I tried to raise my head but that was too much.

After a short rest, I found that by concentrating very hard, I could raise my hand to my bedside table for the glass of water there. But when I tried to close my fingers, there was no strength there to lift it. I sighed and closed my eyes, drifting into sleep.

***

I opened my eyes and looked up to see Dr Easton looking down at me. I found it hard to focus on her face. She had taken the sheets off me and was examining me with a terrifying briskness. I felt her hands move over my hairless body feeling my chest and groin, flexing my arms and legs. Then she nodded at someone I couldn't see and covered me up again. I heard footsteps then the light was turned off and my door clicked shut. I let my eyes close again, vaguely aware of a dull pain in my chest.

****

I woke again, feeling stronger. I could turn my head and raise my arms, and felt very much more alert although still dizzy and nauseous. I noticed the drip in my arm through which a colourless fluid was passing. I identified a sharp pain my groin as I moved, and the same soreness in my chest that I had felt earlier. The clock read 2:00 and I had the feeling that it was early morning. The facility was quiet. I was madly thirsty and wanted to get rid of the stale, chemical taste in my mouth. I reached for the glass of water but couldn't locate it, so I turned on the bedside lamp and sat up, letting the sheets fall from my body. I was overcome by a moment's intense nausea, then realised from the tug that the pain in my penis was caused by a catheter. I found the water and sipped eagerly.

I looked down at my body for any changes, but apart from the strange hairlessness the only thing that was apparent was the shocking amount of weight that I had lost.

I had prided myself on my taut and muscular build, but that was gone, replaced by a pale, fragile gauntness. For the first time I wondered how long I had been out. I looked at my chest. I was no idiot, and I knew what the pain signified, but I could detect no changes there. I felt my chest and was greeted by a sharp pain from my nipples which began to discharge a weak, colourless fluid. Shocked, I moved my hands away and mopped up the secretion with a tissue from my table. I smelt it. It had a musty, familiar smell, like milk and old laundry.

Suddenly exhausted, I dropped the tissue by my bedside and collapsed into a sudden sleep, no dreams.

***

I woke sometime later to find that someone had come in and covered me again, taken the tissue and refilled my water glass. The light had been turned off and the clock read 6:43. I sat up again and turned the light back on, noting that I felt much less dizzy this time.

I pulled the sheets down and examined my chest closely.

The pain came again, accompanied by the discharge, which seemed more viscous this time. I also noticed that the sudden pain was accompanied by a feeling of intense pleasure running through my body, accompanied by my nipples standing erect, like little brown jelly beans. I felt the area around the nipples and noticed a hard mass under each nipple, which was extremely tender. I realised with a sinking feeling that my breasts were growing more than I had previously thought. I found that the sensation of manipulating my hard nipples was extremely pleasant, sending little jolts of intense feeling down to my groin. Oddly, but probably for the good, I did not get an erection. I turned the light off and lay down, fiddling with my nipples and spreading the mucus discharge around them. I soon fell asleep and had an intense dream of making love to Mary Dwyer in a huge red bed shaped like a heart.

****

I woke up and was embarrassed to see Mary smiling down at me. I smiled back.

"Good morning," she said, "I hear that you've been waking a bit. How do you feel?"

I thought for a moment. "I feel fine. My nipples are very sore and I think they're growing a bit"

She leaned down and began to examine my naked, hairless body. I noted that the drip and the catheter were gone and I was ravenously hungry, which I took to be a good sign. The sensation of her hands on my chest was driving me crazy and she noticed me squirming.

"Rather an intense feeling?" she said.

I nodded.

"It will be," she continued, "for a while. The development seems to be proceeding fine. Once we get you back on solids, you should experience some real growth."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

There was silence for a while, while she completed my exam. Then she straightened, punching some notes into her tablet.

"Good." She sat down next to my bed. "Let me fill you in on what's been happening.

"You've been in and out of it for a couple of weeks. During that time, the hormone cocktail has done its work and you have the body chemistry of a teenage girl now. What we did a couple of days ago was take you off the aggressive programme and implant a slow release package into your abdomen. This will help stabilise you and get your body used to the dosage which you'll have to maintain for the duration of your mission."

Again, I could think of no suitable response.

Mary rose. "At the same time, Dr Easton has been doing some more work. The body hair is gone for good, and she's started doing some collagen work on your face. it's quite striking actually. Your hair's grown out quite a bit too - that's been accelerated by the hormone programme."

She paused, glancing at her watch. "I have to go now." She started moving towards the door. "Are you cold?"

I nodded. She went to the cupboard and got me something. It was a white silk night-shirt. She helped me put it on. The silk felt fabulous against my hairless body.

"I'll get a nurse to bring you a meal. Liquid for now, I'm afraid." She grimaced. "Bye for now."

After she left, I spent a while feeling myself through the sheer fabric of the nightie. I was assailed by unfamiliar feelings of utter sensuousness and pleasure.

Then suddenly, I felt overwhelmed by fear and anguish and broke down in a racking fit of tears.

I woke again to find that I had made stains in the chest and groin of my nightie. I noticed the glass of Complan by my bedside and felt a wave of shame at the idea that the nurse would have seen the state I was in. But the hunger overcame me and I drank all the Complan and some more water, before drifting off into a confused sleep.

***

When I woke up next, I felt fitter and stronger. There was another glass of liquid food next to me and I drank it down with relish. I decided to try and get up and was pleased to find it quite easy, with only a little shakiness. I walked to the loo and had a pee, wincing at the pain, which I guessed was from the catheter. Then I walked over to the sink to wash, and saw my face.

I was shocked at the change. The face that looked back at me was gaunt and pale, but the changes that Easton had made were clear to see. She had built up my cheekbones and given me a very noticeable lip implant. I looked, in fact, very petulant and, I'm embarrassed to say, kissable.

Then there were my eyebrows, which were thin and arched, accentuating the blueness of my eyes. With a flash of rage, I looked down and saw that my pubic hair too had been sculpted into a neat triangle, sat incongruously on top of my hairless cock and balls. Bitch. My choice, indeed.

Startlingly, though I had not shaved for two weeks there was not a trace of stubble on my smooth face. My hair also seemed much thicker and longer. I stepped back and looked at the whole picture and was astonished at how female I looked already. From the noticeable bumps in my chest to my reduced waist and my almost entirely hairless body.

Topped by that face. For the first time I believed that they could do it. That I could. And, strangely, it made me feel better. I went to the cupboard and found a pair of black cotton panties, which I slipped on, then put a fitted black v-neck top and a pair of brown flared slacks on top. Suddenly curious, I went back to the mirror to see what I looked like.

"Very good," said a voice behind me. I whirled guiltily. It was Miss Loth. She walked up to me and around.

"Actually remarkable. You look like one of those emaciated and rather strange-looking girls that were popular with the fashion editors a few years back. What do you think? Does it feel all right?"

I sat down on the bed. "Actually, I'm quite surprised at how un-upset I am." I said, speaking slowly and carefully.

Miss Loth nodded. "I hear that a shift in psychological perspective often accompanies these treatments. Are you in pain? Dr Dwyer said that she spoke to you yesterday and that you seemed to be over the worst."

I nodded.

"Good. We need to build you up a bit now so that we can complete the reconstructive program and begin the behaviour training. The schedule is short and Commander Bond is coming to review the results in a month. Are you reading those?"

She pointed to the pile of women's magazines and catalogues on the coffee table. I shook my head.

"I think you should. I've been authorised to buy you any clothing you see that you like in the catalogues.

"I'll call in later to get your choices."

Then she walked briskly away, closing the door behind her. I sat for a while, then walked over to the mirror again, looking at the feminine figure looking back at me. She was right, the chemicals had changed the way I thought about myself. There was no doubt about it. I should have felt disturbed and outraged at what I saw, but didn't. I walked resignedly to the table, sat down and picked up the copy of Scene that was top of the pile of magazines.

***

Over the next two weeks, I went back onto solids then was put on a highly pleasant high protein diet that built me up quickly. This was combined with a regular series of gym and aerobics classes that quickly put some shape onto my bones. And I have to say that the shape was quite a good one.

I had not filled out in the areas I was accustomed to. My breasts had grown and I now filled a 36A bra. Weight and muscle had gone onto my thighs and bottom, but my waist remained a trim 28". My hair grew some more.

Doctor Easton had reviewed my progress and told me sniffily and with some disappointment that she did not consider further reconstructive liposculpture necessary in my case.

Mary and Miss Loth both praised me at all turns, and secretly, I took care of my appearance as I found that I valued their praise. Loth also told me that Commander Bond had been called away to The Honduras on security business and had postponed his review and briefing 'till a fortnight's time.

Meanwhile, I began weapons and combat training again in the tactical arena and found to my pleasure that I had not lost any of my edge. Allied with this, I began to take voice coaching and deportment training.

Suddenly, the facility was bustling with feminine activity centred around me. A hairdresser called Mindy visited me and gave me a nice, fashionable cut.

Beauticians attended me to pamper, manicure, massage and treat me. I learned make up quickly and new clothes arrived daily as I became carried away by the adventure. I began to experiment with different styles of appearance and Mary would often find me turning up to our daily check-ups dressed in a crazy variety of costumes, from slinky evening wear to mutton-dressed-as-lamb club-kid style.

I built up a collection of wicked lingerie and learned cunning ways of concealing my cock to a highly convincing degree. I began to realise that a new personality was emerging and "she" was quite extrovert, and enjoyed attention and dressing up.

By the time I was to be debriefed by Miss Loth, prior to the arrival of Commander Bond the next day, I felt that we had achieved the impossible.

I was a mission-ready Miss.

***

I walked down the corridor to Miss Loth's office. I felt utterly and confidently female. Through aggressive reinforcement therapy, they had turned Lieutenant Commander Anthony Pierce into a convincing analogue of a young, fashionable woman. My mannerisms, my voice, my patterns of speech, everything down to the way that I walked, had been modified and programmed.

So I clicked down the corridor in my red Gucci spikes. I was wearing a burgundy fitted suit from Miu Miu with big lapels, flared cuffs and a pencil skirt with an asymmetric slash up the back. My long, slim legs were encased in sheer pale tights from Jonathan Aston.

My face was made up to match my outfit, with pale shadow, a smudged brown under-eyeline and dramatic carmine lipstick, Rocker from MAC, and matching blusher. There was a coat of clear gloss over my lips which were pouting like they would explode. My bob was pulled back into a severe bun with a diamante butterfly pin from Anthropology offsetting the severeness.

Underneath, I wore black shantung silk underwired bodice and panties from La Perla. My cock was tightly restrained behind. I smelt lusciously of Extravagance d'Amarige, Givenchy.

I knocked and entered. Miss Loth was there, and Mary. Doctor Easton had left the facility a week ago, and most of the other workers were already gone. I suddenly realised that I had not seen another man since Bond had left that eternity ago. I walked over and sat, smoothly crossing my legs at the knees. I smiled.

"Hello Commander Pierce," said Miss Loth. "I must say that you look spectacular as usual." With a pang, I realised that I now must look as good as she did, and thought back to that strange thought that I had had way back when at one of our first meetings.

"Thank you," I said quietly.

"I'm reporting for my debrief, ma'am."

"Yes," said Miss Loth. "First, we have to say goodbye to Miss Dwyer. Her task is finished and she's being relocated back to her research post in Durham. She requested to see you before she went." With a quick smile, Miss Loth left the room.

I got up. Mary walked over to me and we hugged. I was surprised to see that she had tears in her eyes. "Commander Pierce," she began.

"Anthony" I interrupted, aware that this sounded a bit ridiculous now.

"I'm... sorry." she went on.

"Sorry?"

She looked up, smiling. "Sorry, yes. To change you against your will. You bear it so well, and I'm very proud and happy to have worked with you."

"Mary," I said, taking her hand, "you made it easy for me by being my friend." I was crying now too, "like you said, it's not completely permanent. At least I'm fortunate enough to be enjoying it. I must have been some kind of perv in the first place.

"Please let's keep in touch.

"Once I get back and I'm back to normal, I'll call you."

At that, she looked at me for a while with a strange expression on her face, then nodded and squeezed my hand. "Goodbye Anthony. My car's waiting."

I leant and kissed her softly on the cheek. She started to move away, and I stopped her.

"Lipstick." I said, wiping her cheek. She let go, walking to the door. She turned and looked back at me, a little wave, then she was gone.

A moment later, Miss Loth returned, and gave me a hanky for my tears.

"You and she were close, weren't you?" she asked.

I nodded.

***

Miss Loth had informed me that Commander Bond would be coming to see me at 0830 to brief me on my new identity and my reinsertion strategy. She had prepared a Navy dress uniform for me as Bond had requested a formal debrief.

I now sat in my room, dressed in my Royal Navy uniform blouse and skirt suit and regulation black stockings, completing my make-up. I'd eschewed the regulation clumpy heels in favour of a pair of black spikes that were still sober, but a little higher. It was 0814. I gave myself a quick spray of Chanel No.5 and waited, trying to gather my thoughts. I was now extremely nervous about everything from the mission, the start of which would conclude what had turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable phase of my life, to a return meeting with Bond, whose presence I awaited with a strange mixture of terror and anticipation.

How would he judge me, this strange neutered thing? Would he treat me with contempt? Or would he like what he saw? I felt hopelessly confused.

For the first time in a long time, I thought about Christina and my parents.

Would they recognise me now? My dad would be horrified, I was sure. It was better that they thought I was dead. Or was it?

Suddenly overcome, I cried, burying my head in my hands. What had I done? What had I let them do to me? I looked up into the dressing table mirror. Mascara running, my face a mess, I suddenly saw Anthony Pierce in there and realised that in serving my country, I had become irrevocably a traitor to myself. I gazed into the mirror, tears running down my face, unable to move.

The phone rang.

I looked at the clock and realised I was late for my briefing. I picked up the phone. It was Miss Loth. I apologised and set about fixing my face, giving myself an extra, defiant coat of red lipstick.

Then I rushed from the room.

***

Bond said nothing as I entered. He was standing with his back to me, by the desk. I snapped to attention and saluted.

"Lieutenant Commander Pierce reporting as ordered, sir!"

Bond turned, raising an eyebrow as he took in my appearance. A smile twitched across his mouth. "At ease, Pierce. Take a seat."

I sat, crossing my legs. It came naturally now.

Bond sat at the desk opposite me.

"The situation in Japan has progressed since we last met, Pierce. We now have an ideal insertion opportunity for you."

"Sir?"

"How are you with children, Pierce?"

"Sir?'

He rose. "Follow me Lieutenant. We're going for a drive."

***

Bond's DBX was parked in a country lane a quarter of a mile from the concealed hidden exit of the Q branch facility.

I walked, enjoying the fresh air of a cool late summer morning, realising that I had never before been outside in my female disguise. Bond was silent beside me. I felt very tense and alert, nerves on edge.

Bond held the door for me and I slid into the passenger seat of the bullet grey Aston, legs together, like a lady. Again, the smile twitched across his face. Again, I noticed the scar across his chin, and wondered how he had got it. I glanced up and caught the full attention of his steel grey eyes.

We looked at each other for a moment, then I looked away, confused. Bond shut the door and got in the other side. He started up without fastening his seat belt, lit up a Cartier and we drove on.

As we drove through the hazy sunlight, Bond briefed me on my new cover legend. I kept my eyes fixed on the road ahead, very aware of his presence next to me. My new name was Jane Masters. I was 24, a Cambridge graduate in Oriental languages (that fitted with my almost fluent Japanese, at least) who had been temping as an account executive at a West London media agency for the past two years before leaving this week. Prior to that, I had travelled extensively on a parental inheritance. I was by all accounts the sort of posh, fashionable trash who hung out at 192 and the Fifth Floor of Harvey Nicks.

I had a little flat just off Powis Square in Notting Hill and drove a metallic lime green Volkswagen Beetle. I liked soul music, salsa clubs and New York. Now I had applied for a job at the Red Fist's London recruitment organisation to be an English language teacher for their leader, Akaguchi's twin sons. My interview was scheduled for late the following week.

I was to leave Bicester and immediately to immerse myself in Masters' identity. A network of "friends" had been set up for me to facilitate this. As Bond filled in the details of my new life, I began to feel an increasing sense of panic and loss of control. His powerful car was hurtling down the side roads past sleepy Cotswolds villages and I looked across at him as he talked for the first time. I knew just exactly why I felt nervous.

Commander James Bond was a handsome man, even now. I watched him as he spoke and a wave of fluttering heat passed through my body as he shifted up and down the gearbox. He glanced across at me, then down to my legs, where my skirt had ridden up exposing my lacy stocking-tops and the shiny clips of the suspender-belt that held them up. I looked down then back up, catching his eye, and realised that I was flushed with excitement.

"Something on your mind?" he said.

"Nothing at all sir," I replied, having to catch my breath.

He crunched up into fifth as we hit a long, straight stretch of deserted B road. His hand came off the gearstick and his fingers found the inside of my thigh. I gasped as an electric shock of desire coursed through me.

"What do you want, Pierce?" he asked, seemingly amused.

"I... I don't know, sir. I..."

I tailed off as his fingers moved up my inner thigh towards my groin. I looked at his cruel, beautiful face and realised how much this man and his associates had had me changed.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted to please this man and make him find me pleasing. I reached over and cupped his warm groin in my hand. I felt his cock stir to attention, and I unbuttoned the fly of his blue pinstriped suit trousers, struggling to release him. He popped free as I unbuckled my seat belt with my free hand and bent over to service His Majesty's secret man.

***

Later he took me back to Bicester and left me in the deserted complex. The facility was to be shut down after my departure.

Invisible secret hands had mysteriously squirreled away the contents of the building while Bond and I had been away.

Miss Loth was gone. My stuff was gone, to my flat in Notting Hill. I had a make-up bag, a small handbag and nothing else to show for my thirty-odd years of existence.

As I walked through the empty halls with my meagre belongings, I thought about what I had just done. I thought about how much I had enjoyed being James Bond's little cocksucker. I thought about just exactly how much I wanted to do it again, and about the little hormone pump in my belly that was releasing the substances into my body that made me think these things. I stopped, and said out loud, "We are all whores."

Bond didn't care about me. He was somehow testing how far and how convincing my transformation had been. He was as much a company man as any of the others. M, Miss Loth, Doctor Easton; even Mary Dwyer, for all her kindness. For a while I wondered how free Lime had felt when trying to betray his country. But it came back to claim us all in the end. Lime was now dead, or a prisoner of a hostile power.

Was I any different? I didn't know. I just wanted to be right back where I had been before this mess had happened. There in that corridor, I resolved that if I ever made it back and became a man again, that I would resign my commission and do something else with my life.

Again, I thought about Bond. I had heard from people at the Service that he had once married. That he had been in love with a beautiful and unusual woman called Tracy who had been assassinated by an agent of that defunct terrorist organisation SPECTRE as they drove to their honeymoon. How she had wanted to take his bulletproof Secret Service DB5 but he had talked her out of it, frivolously wanting to drive her ragtop Alfa Romeo Spyder.

It was as hard to believe that Bond could ever love anyone again as it was to believe that he thought of me as any more significant than that pot plant in that corner, or the moth fluttering there by the flickering fluorescent light. I felt utterly desolate. I too had loved.

Christine. And now she might as well be dead. A tear appeared at the corner of my eye and rolled down my cheek. I brushed it away and started walking again towards the room from where my new life would begin.

I stood at that door and took a deep breath. Once I entered this room the rest of the complex would be a dead, dark shell, no longer accessible. Here was my future. I reached for the handle, turned and pulled, and entered. A dim bulb clicked on automatically. I could sense and encroaching darkness behind as the complex switched itself off. I walked in. The door swung shut behind me.

I heard the deadlock fall into place; there was no handle on my side, just smooth metal, riveted, impermeable. At the other end of the small, narrow room was another door, next to the door an electronic keypad to which I knew the only combination. I sat at the dressing table and ran my hands through my hair, raising it off my face; the face that gazed back at me in the mirror, becoming familiar now, more familiar than I would have thought possible, back then, at the beginning of a chain of events that would lead me here, to this room, here, today, now. It still shocked me, I suppose; but each time the shock was less.

A young woman looked defiantly back at me, face strangely familiar but subtly softened by surgery and hormones.

Beneath my fashionable clothes, the breasts were quite real - perhaps the most striking change, with their definite, graspable, new mass; just how graspable was indicated by the bruise marks Commander Bond had left on them that afternoon.

They had large and definitely feminine aureolae and full, upturned nipples. No hair, of course, and the body, still toned and muscular, noticeably more slender and delicate in posture and balance.

On the table was a Gucci keychain with car keys and a couple of other keys which I knew belonged to a flat in West London. I let my hair drop and used the fitful light to touch up my make-up. Well, Jane Masters, I thought to myself. Welcome to the world.

I got up, smoothing my tweed, Liz Claiborne skirt and went over to the door to punch the keypad as I had seen Bond do earlier that day. I walked confidently up a short, dark corridor and heard locks shut behind me. In darkness, the only guide another faintly luminous keypad.

I keyed in the combination and the second door swung open, allowing the smells and sounds of a warm August night into me. I emerged, strangely calm, from a door concealed in an overgrown brick wall, which swung noiselessly closed behind me. The harvest moon was huge and coppery near the horizon, so utterly beautiful that I was becalmed for minutes, my head to one side, just gazing. Beyond the road, a rippling field of some corn-like crop; there an owl, hooting, melancholy. In the distance the dull roar of the Motorway.

I opened my handbag and found a pack of cigarettes. I lit one and enjoyed the hit, before walking down the road to find Jane's lime green VW Beetle that was surely parked there, and to which my key would surely fit.

****

The signs read 'London 10'. The yellow sodium lights of the M40 illuminated the inside of my car balefully. I checked my watch. 2.30 AM. I looked at my pretty new face in the rear view mirror, trying a smile. The car sped on towards London.

The end of CHAPTER ONE
Jane Masters will return in CHAPTER TWO

Masters arrives in enemy territory...

Chapter Two: Tsuruga, Fukui Pref., Japan... Red Fist of Justice Complex ("The House")...

It seemed that upon the breakup of the Aum Shinri Kyo in the late nineties, certain elements of that sect had gone into hiding in the mountainous North coast of Western Japan. There they hooked up with an active Japanese Red Army cell who were already harbouring sect refugees after the Shinjuku subway Sarin gas incident earlier that decade.

After the collapse of the Far East economic sphere in 2008, following the multiple nuclear accidents on mainland Japan through that period, the whole region around Fukui prefecture that centred around the enclave had become destabilised and lawless. The decommissioned generating facility at Tsuruga soon became the national headquarters for the faction, who had, by then, realigned themselves and been reborn as the Red Fist of Justice. At their head was the charismatic ex-JRA cell leader called Akaguchi, who had been in hiding in North Korea but had safely bought passage back to Honshu after the collapse had brought chaos to the region.

I thought about this and about a great many other things as I approached Tsuruga station in the silver and red local train that had been waiting for me at a sinister, deserted waystation somewhere up the line from Kyoto station. JR rail services to the Fukui region had been suspended since the Red Fist had made the area an independent enclave. Now a thriving local economy had sprung up, running everything from black medical practices to brothels, data laundering to pirate line local railways.

As the train meandered through picturesque Japanese countryside, I'd used the opportunity to scan the other three passengers in my carriage. A young couple, initially staring at the tall gaijin lady diagonally opposite them, had quickly returned to a subdued canoodling. Soon, the girl fell asleep, her long bleach-blonde hair spilling over her face and into her open mouth. The boy retrieved a breezeblock-sized manga rag out of his rucksack and began to flip listlessly through it, sucking at a tin of vending machine Oolong Tea; they must have been in their early twenties.

The other passenger looked more like an operative. A shabby Japanese man in his forties, he looked too much the nondescript sarariman to truly be so. He studiously avoided catching my attention, instead using the window glass to keep a furtive eye on me. Either he'd been sent by the Fist to monitor me or he fancied me. Probably both. I remembered that he had been with me ever since Kyoto. I'd seen him first smoking a Mild Seven on the Maglev platform as I left the express from Kansai Airport with my baggage. Later, he'd vanished, but reappeared with the passengers switching to the Fukui train as we alighted from the JR local service at the suburban waystation.

Now here we were on the outskirts of Tsuruga, a pretty coastal town a few kilometres up the coast from desolate Fukui City, where I'd been before as Pierce - a different kind of warrior. Dusk was falling as the train slid through still sidings dotted with bits of rolling stock. The orange streetlights and gaudy neon of the town looked welcomingly surreal to my tired, blank gaze. In the distance, the glint of the moon on the sea - sandy beaches, I recalled - and in the lee of the bay, atop a forested hillside, the giant shadow of the disused nuclear facility.

We pulled silently into the station. My companions were already on the move as the train squeaked to a halt. The two youngsters stretching and yawning, hoisting large backpacks off the overhead racks, the young, handsome boy with his spiky hair helping his pretty girlfriend but simultaneously casting a cheeky grin in my direction. I returned it. The shabby man had already debarked and was showing his papers to the guard, pulling another cigarette from his grey suit in the blue dusk.

I stood and stretched, taking my luggage and stepping out from the air conditioned train into the humid evening. I was wearing just a linen shirt and shorts, but the prickly heat I remembered so well immediately began to draw sweat from all over my aching body. I looked up and saw the station guard approaching. Beyond him was the shabby man, fiddling with a vending machine in the brightly illuminated ticket office. The young couple were already gone.

"Excuse me, your transit papers please," the guard said in Kansai-tinged Japanese.

Without replying, I retrieved the papers of authority marked with the logo of the Red Fist, chrome sunburst abstract, and presented them to him along with my passport and ticket. They'd already been examined twice either side of the border with the rest of Japan, but I was just too tired to try and explain.

While he examined them, I lit a Silk Cut and looked surreptitiously over his shoulder. I could no longer see the shabby man. Maybe I'd been mistaken. I knew that there was a maildrop in Tsuruga Town which I could use to make contact with a local operative. Perhaps this had been him - monitoring my arrival into his territory.

"Thank you," said the guard, handing back my papers. As he turned to leave, I said, "Can I get a taxi outside the station?"

"There is a driver waiting for you Miss Jane," he replied, "shall I help with your bags?"

I reached down for my two cases. "Thank you, no."

The operative had arrived in enemy territory.

***

I didn't need any distractions on this mission. Nevertheless, I found myself thinking a lot about sex recently.

My sex.

The thing was, I felt completely void of any "normal" urges. The driver who had come for me was a beautiful American brunette called Lori, typical of the kind of talent that the Red Fist employed in its heartland to service its upper echelons. I felt no attraction for her at all - though I did think she was very attractive - and that was what was worrying me, especially as she was wearing a black shiny catsuit, which one might have described charitably as completely indecent.

Come to that, the blonde girl whose pretty reflection greeted me in the mirror every morning would certainly have stirred Pierce's attention when I had been him. In fact, Jane Masters was just the kind of girl that Pierce might have ended up bedding...

On the other hand, I couldn't stop thinking about Commander Bond. In fact, the events of my last evening in Britain had filled my thoughts on all the planes, trains and cars on the journey over; I'm ashamed to say that it got me quite... excited...

The weeks of acclimatisation in London had passed uneventfully. Essentially, I had to give the impression that I was Jane Masters. As my legend went, I had just returned from a short break and was temping as an Account Executive at a marketing agency on Buckingham Palace Road (Universal Digital, a legitimate company who were nonetheless one of the Department's many front organisations, of course). I dutifully went into work every morning and left at six-ish. I went out for drinks and meals with an artificial circle of friends. In public, I occasionally tried to spot the Fist operatives who were surely surveilling me but of course that was futile. I flirted with male colleagues and went to the women's room with my girlfriends. I went home, ate M&S dinners and watched telly or practiced my feminine Japanese, different as it was to the male form of the language I'd learned at Uni. But mainly, I was bored out of my skull.

I was due to depart on a Saturday afternoon, so that Friday was my last day at Universal. I was going through some oddments of paperwork when an email appeared on my terminal from Diane, my "boss":

Jane, the presentation to Vauxhall's been brought forward. I need you to finish the account plans this evening so I can fly out with them in the morning. I'll come and have a chat at eight to see how you're doing.

Sorry, D

This was a coded message. It meant that someone from Vauxhall (MI6 HQ, just up the road) was coming over at eight to brief me on changes to my mission parameters. The sub basement of this building was linked by tunnel to Vauxhall meaning that operatives could come and go freely. I was to pretend to be working late until the briefing happened.

I went over to the teapoint and refilled my bottle of water. Ashia, one of my "friends", a pretty young black woman with whom I had become genuinely friendly, was there. She turned and smiled. "Not long now eh? When are you off?"

"I'm flying tomorrow afternoon. Can't wait!" I replied enthusiastically and automatically.

"Aw, I'm so jealous. Always wanted to see Japan. Sounds so cool. Listen girl, you still up for drinks tonight? We've gotta see you off properly, after all."

I frowned, "no I can't. Just got a mail from Di. She's got to jet off to the GM Vauxhall planning meeting a day early so I have to finish the account plans tonight. Typical, huh?"

Ashia rolled her eyes. "Well you make sure you come along later. Usual place. OK?"

"Promise," I smiled. "Though I have a feeling it might be a long night."

***

Around six, people started filtering out of the office. I got well wishes, cards, little girly gifts and kisses. By seven, the only two people left were Diane and myself. At seven thirty-five Di also left, wishing me luck. She paused at the doorway and gave me a strange look that I couldn't read. Of the twenty or so people in the building, only she and a couple of others knew of the arrangement their company had with the Secret Service. Perhaps she was curious about me and my history. She knew nothing about my mission parameters nor the fact that this attractive, modern-looking young blonde woman in a dark suit and pink top was, in fact, a man.

The building was empty. I sat and waited. I was a little breathless with anticipation and couldn't concentrate. There was no reason that it would be Bond who'd come and brief me, but he was my operator so there was perhaps hope. Hope for what? I shook my head, confused. There was little doubt that, sexually, I was now as attracted to men as to women. Mary Dwyer had told me that this might happen. I felt guilty, somehow weak, and felt I had to try and control it for the good of the mission.

But what was the problem? I was, in appearance at least (and possibly more) a young woman now. It was clear enough to me that these changes were less temporary the longer they lasted. I might be able to abandon the hormones and return to something approaching my original physical shape. I'd never have the same body again though - no body hair, faint masses in my chest, and those new kinks in my brain... I enjoyed dressing as a woman now. Smelling nice and having men admire and desire me. I did want to become Anthony Pierce again, but could I? Would my brain switch back? Would I be happy?

At five to eight, I got up to go and have a pee and touch up my face. In the harsh light of the toilet mirror, I appraised myself as I blotted my lips. Not bad. A little tired round the eyes, perhaps, but definitely very well put together. "Tidy", as my brother Tim would say. Ooh. That thought gave me a little weird jolt. I tucked a stray lock of blonde hair behind my ear, smoothed out my knee length pencil skirt and left, turning off the light.

He was sitting in the semi-gloom at my desk when I came out. He had switched the other lights of the office off, leaving only my desk lamp illuminated. As soon as I saw him in his perfect suit, my heart started pounding and a nervous heat rose through me, just like I remembered from Bicester, on that road, in that car. He smiled faintly and indicated that I should be at ease.

Bond rose and perched on the edge of my desk, beckoning me to sit down. He loomed over me as he spoke.

"We've got some fresh information, Masters."

He seemed huge as I looked up at him. Controlled power in a made to measure suit. It made me feel small and vulnerable. But I wanted to feel that way; to be enfolded in his big arms and made his. He was obviously looking down the cleavage of my lacy pink top as he spoke. I wriggled and smiled, giving him a better view. I felt trivial, a feminine concoction in frothy perfumed wrapper. I wanted it. I was lost. Consumed so quickly.

"According to our sources, it appears that Sato is in command of the complex where you will be working." He leaned down and kissed me on the nape of my neck. I flushed, and rose, standing to encircle his neck with my arms. "This gives us an opportunity," he stood himself, caressing my bottom with his large, warm hands.

I moaned, closing my eyes as he went on, "Our strategists project that within three years, Sato will become a larger threat than Akaguchi." I hitched up my skirt to free my legs and he lifted me up bodily. The crotch of my panties was soaked and sticky with precum from my stirring, semi-hard cock. I spread my legs and wrapped them around his waist. He turned, lowering me and roughly using my body to clear papers and objects off my desk, before placing me down on my back. My desk light clattered to the floor, casting crazy shadows from our entwined bodies on the ceiling. He leaned over me, smiling. "Masters, you are quite unbelievable".

I looked up at his cruel, handsome face. His grey eyes. The grey crew cut. The scar under his thin mouth. The cleft of his chin, stubble coming through. I smiled back up at him, passing my tongue slowly over my upper teeth.

"Shut up, sir, and kiss me." I said.

***

Later, I lay close to naked on the sofa by the office kitchen as he made us coffee. I looked at the clock above the kitchen door, which read 20:46.

Jesus.. I remember a jumble of recollections. Thinking, shit, a man's kissing me. With tongues. Mmm. Looking down at the bulge in his trousers as he unbuttoned my top, just wanting to hold it, unbelievably much. His rough thumbs tweaking my nipples. Electric, joy. Almost coming from that. Ohh. More, then his cock, and me naked except for my stockings, writhing on the table. So soft, the foreskin, like velvet. I tickle it, fingertips, then tongue.

Finally my small, very small, little hand was grasping the base and my mouth, very talented, was going up and down, up and down. Keeping the Commander under command. So full can't breathe. Then he comes. I swallow; nice. I expect I look quite depraved, lying back on the desk, my desk with my work scattered all round, naked except for laddered stockings and suspender belt. Smiling, so lovely with a string of his cum on my lips and chin and white neck. And a little cock, just there to confuse and beguile, there in the pale triangle between black lace garters... you like that, sir?

He sat by me, gave me the coffee and finished briefing me. Akaguchi had vanished and Sato was left, the heir apparent, ruling The Fist as regent from the Tsuruga house. Our sources suspected some sort of incipient coup, though Akaguchi's kids were still safe there in the house. My instructions had changed because of these developments. I still had to go for the data as planned, but there was more - find Akaguchi, or find out what had happened to him. Liquidate Sato.

I still had my license to kill, of course.

Bond left me after that. I got myself dressed, set the alarm system and left the office for good. Down Victoria Street, I looked in at the windows of the wine bar at Ashia and the others. Laughing and drinking. But somehow I didn't feel like joining in. So I went home to Jane Masters' flat, packed my cases and went to bed.

Hours later I was in the air, on my mission at last.

***

The black Mercedes had been cruising along the coast road, past kilometres of white sand beach. We were beginning to go uphill, and soon we were gliding through a set of steep switchbacks that took us deep into the forested hillside, forbidding in the bluish gloom.

"Almost there now," said Lori in her sweet voice, "I think you're gonna really love the house. It's so beautiful. And the chairman's boys are so cute. They can't wait till you finally arrive! Y'know, I think you're gonna be the first English girl there. It kinda reminds me of that movie, y'know that old one with the bald guy and his kids and the English teacher..."

She broke off, raising her perfect eyebrows in the mirror for help.

"I think you mean 'The King and I'?" I said, wishing I didn't sound so bloody posh.

"That's it. Boy, you're accent is just so..."

"So how many of us girls are up there?" I asked, changing the subject.

"Oh about thirty to forty at any one time. You'll meet some of 'em tonight in the dorm. Well, that's what we call it. They're apartments really. Real modern too. Yep, they sure do know how to look after us. Anyhoo. Here we go."

We pulled round another corner and then I saw it for the first time, at the end of a long clear path in the treeline. For a moment I was fooled. It looked tiny, then I realised that was because it was still quite a distance off. The hill road was interrupted by a pair of iron gates, beyond which was the continuation of the switchbacks, leading to the... house... It was cut into the side of the mountain and looked like a Japanese castle that had been suspended upside down by some miracle of gravity, then teleported half way into the rock face and left there. Tiny lights glimmered under its pagoda roofs and after a while I realised that these were windows. At several levels, terraces had been cut into the hillside to form grassy pastures and expanses of farmland that were big enough to contain several football pitches. One of the terraces looked to be some sort of airstrip. The view would be unbelievable. It would also be quite hard to escape - a far cry from the factory complex I had operated in before.

Lori had noted my silence. "Ain't it something?". I nodded dumbly as we pulled up to the gates, which parted smoothly to let us through. We negotiated the remaining switchbacks, the house getting bigger with every turn, until we were finally swallowed up underneath its grotesque mass...

To be continued.

Masters' infiltration of the Red Fist brings her back into contact with the villainous Commissar Sato. Will her disguise hold out..?

CHAPTER TWO contnued...

In the carport, where Lori pulled the Merc up alongside a fleet of identical vehicles, I was scanned for weapons by a guard carrying a Uzi flechette launcher. Then Lori took me through to reception, where my papers were scrutinised once again by another beautiful Caucasian woman in another revealing catsuit. I was told that I should leave my luggage, and it would be taken to my room. I knew it'd be searched so hadn't bothered locking it.

In contrast to the multi-layered grandeur outside, the interior of the House was stark and minimalist, both in layout and decor. Lori kept up a bright stream of chatter as we strolled through a series of bland, white, over-illuminated corridors until I had totally lost my bearings. I mentally stopped and checked myself. In my tiredness, I was forgetting things like basic orientation. I walked on, taking more notice of my surroundings, but my Gucci loafers were beginning to hurt and the bright fluorescents were causing my head to spin. I'd noticed this in the last few weeks - as Jane, I had less stamina than Pierce.

Eventually, we came to an airlock at the end of another white corridor. Lori waved her arm in the direction of a reader panel next to the door. With a hiss, it opened and we went in, the door sealing behind us. Interesting. I wondered how that worked. There was another reader inside, which opened a second door, letting in a waft of flower-scented air. We were in the 'dorm'.

The living area was much less harshly decorated than the area we'd come from. The lighting was low and yellowish, and the walls and floors were wooden. The part we were walking through seemed to be full of leisure amenities. I noticed food machines on many corners. Bilingual signs pointed to facilities such as "Gymnasium", "Swimming Pool", "Onsen Baths", "Game Centre" and "Viewing Platform". Every now and then, we passed groups of young, smiling Western women, who greeted us with friendly little waves. They were all dressed in the catsuits of different colours, which I supposed indicated different functional roles.

Lori led me to a bank of lifts and called one. We travelled without any sensation of movement up six floors to "Habitation Level Four" which, as I'd anticipated, looked very much like a hotel corridor. The rooms were numbered; mine being room 404. Lori let me in with another vague wave of her arm, gave me a little smile and a hug (a bit unexpected), then told me I'd be paged soon, and that I'd find full instructions (for what?) in my personal data tablet. Then she was gone, with the ubiquitous little wave.

I was alone at last.

Aware that the room was almost certainly peppered with surveillance devices, I lay down on the bed and tried to behave unsuspiciously. Eyes half-closed as if tired, I swept the room, its features, exits and obstacles, committing them to memory. Not difficult in the box-like confines of the room. I stretched, rose and walked to the bathroom, again ostensibly just to freshen up. I made sure that I made a lot of steam with the shower before stripping down, just in case there was visual surveillance in there - didn't want any unexpected anatomical details to be captured.

The shower was excellent and I felt a lot better when I stepped out of the bathroom, feeling scrubbed, fragrant and hot in my black panties and bra. I walked over to the window and slid it open, walking out onto the small balcony which overlooked a sheer drop. High up on the mountainside in the gathering gloom, the heat was less oppressive and the freshening breeze ran cool fingers over my bare skin and hair.

Looking over the treetops to the glinting sea, I was again struck by the great beauty of the Japanese countryside. Quickly, I scanned for paths and escape routes. Apart from the main switchback road along which we had ascended to the House, I could see a narrow, steep, winding path cut into the forest, which seemed to lead directly down to the ocean side. Promising. Otherwise, the thick forest seemed impenetrable.

I heard a gentle chime from the room behind me. Back inside, a purple light was pulsing softly on my desktop tablet. I went over and touched the screen to read the message.

"Please report to Commissar Sato's office in your uniform, 20:00 hrs."

I dismissed the message and sat for a while. Things were about to get interesting.

***

The first thing to be clear about over Sato is that she is physically incredible. One of the most striking women I've ever encountered, in fact. Tall, statuesque even, for a Japanese, she just outstripped me by a couple of centimetres in her spike heels. A brutal face, yes, but porcelain perfect, as always with flawless, doll-like make up - beautiful in its cruelty. She had the poise of an athlete-hunter, of a creature who lived purely by instinct and sensual response, as she walked up to me in the softly-lit corridor outside her office, coolly appraising me with no expression on her face. She was dressed in a tailored leather skirt suit, flaunting her long, rangy body; her to-die-for legs encapsulated in sheer black stockings. A mannish white shirt and black tie completed the ensemble. The starched cuffs of the white shirt projected from the leather sleeves of the jacket and were fastened with an unusual and elegant pair of carved wooden cufflinks. She noticed me looking.

"You like them? They are from my hometown in Shikoku. Renowned local carving style. Hello. I am Commissar Sato, Miss Jane. Please come in."

She swept into her office, flicking her jet-black, die straight waist length hair behind her. She sat on a sofa and beckoned me to sit next to her as she offered me tea. The last time I had seen her she had just removed the eyes of a young deserter with her thumbs and laughed at his screams for a full minute before shooting him dead through the mouth. Nevertheless I sat, smiling pleasantly. I wanted to get close to this beguiling, murderous woman so that she would divulge her secrets to me before I ended her life.

As I sipped the tea, Sato explained the security arrangements, which, it turned out were built into my uniform. The uniform catsuits, into one of which I was now squeezed, were not only extremely snug fitting, but laced with some pretty sophisticated tech, which meant that none of "us girls" could step out of permitted areas of the House without setting off some rather lethal-sounding countermeasures. As I had been forced to submit all my own clothing to the care of House security, five catsuits was all I had to wear for the foreseeable future. Ergo I had some thinking to do if Jane Masters was to investigate the complex without ending up as steak tartare.

My suit was made out of some reflective, dark red material similar in look to latex but with a skin feel closer to neoprene. I have to confess that when I opened up the wardrobe and saw five of the bloody things hanging there, I swore. Did I really feel confident enough about this body to flaunt it so extravagantly? I was finding out now (as if I had much choice).

It was a one piece that you stepped into like a leotard, very tight on the thighs and bum. Above the waist it became a very skimpy halter that left my back completely bare and didn't leave much to the imagination in the chest department either. The split in the middle of the halter plunged down way past my boobs and finished well below the navel. A little chain link belt was stitched onto the hips, finishing the look. Before I had fastened it all up, I'd made bloody well sure that I was extremely well tucked. Didn't want any unexpected bulges spoiling the smooth, shiny front down there. Also in the wardrobe I'd found a very cute pair of pink trainers with a silver Converse star on either side and two-inch block heels. I'd slipped them on and taken a look in the full-length mirror.

Wow. Well, you could tell a man must have designed these things. It was made to please men's eyes. I'd had to look away because I was getting turned on and I didn't want to have to take it all off to retuck myself. I felt proud in a confused sort of way. Proud of my curves, which were outstanding (literally) in this outfit. Confused, and a bit ashamed for thinking that too. I felt very sexy though. I could definitely have fun with Bond in this getup.

I studied Sato as she went over some of the facilities at my disposal. I have to admit that I felt extremely attracted to her as well. I knew that she was a cold-hearted and sadistic killer. But there was just something dominant and powerful about her flawless beauty that made me go all gooey below. I shook my head and tried to stay calm, sipping more tea. Jesus, my mission would go west bloody quickly if I kept going all nympho at the slightest provocation. But what could I do - they'd dressed me like some filthy Barbie doll slut.

Sato lit a cigarette and offered me one. I took it and let her light it. Again, I'd completely stopped paying attention and had to try to focus again.

"-so you will be meeting Masakazu and Koichiro, the Director's twins tomorrow morning at breakfast. I will also expect to see an initial study plan which I can pass on to Akaguchi-san at that time."

"Will I get to meet the Director? It would be interesting from a teacher's point of view to get the parent's perspective - their hopes, aspirations?"

Sato shook her head. "Regrettably, not in the near future. Director Akaguchi is very busy on overseas business at the moment. But I," she tapped her chest with the tips of her red nails, "am fully authorised to act as the parental proxy."

"In that case," I said, "may I ask you what you think the objectives for the twins' education are?"

Sato nodded and paused before resuming. "One day, the Director's sons will inherit the organisation. At that time, we will be a global brand with leverage across many races and cultures. English is a language that is, I believe, widely used." Sato smiled, showing slightly pointed teeth behind her crimson lips. "The Director's sons must be fluent in the languages of our... customers. That is your task, starting tomorrow."

I had no reply to this and simply nodded, so Sato went on. "I'm sure that you will find the task rewarding, Miss Jane. The boys are extremely conscientious and diligent pupils. They will show respect to an educator who respects them." Sato smiled, blowing a cloud of smoke.

I was more convinced now than ever that Akaguchi had been deposed, probably murdered, by Sato, who had taken his place at the head of the Red Fist of Justice. But how did the children fit in?

***

Sato wasn't wrong about the boys. As I sat and listened to them sing the alphabet song in our beautiful classroom, high above the forest, I could tell that they were special. They were spooky in the way that identical twins often were, acting almost as though they were locked telepathically, but it was more than that. They both had a stillness about them. I think that, if I was being a clichéd westerner, I'd say "Zen-like". It made you feel calm being around them, as though they were somehow charmed. I guess in conventional terms, they were unbelievably charismatic and beautiful. Big round heads and lovely long-lashed anime eyes. Unspoilt by age, uncorrupted by power, untouched by greed. It was outside my mission scope, but I felt a strong moral urge to protect them and stop them from growing up into powerful and ruthless killers, which they would surely do if left in this tainted environment.

On a more superficial level, I really enjoyed teaching them too. They were receptive, attentive, funny (as little Japanese kids often are), unbelievably bright and polite. I think they've taken to "Miss Jane" too. Yeah, we hit it off. Of the two, Koichiro, the first born was slightly the more assertive and extroverted. Masakazu tended to reflect longer and come up with more considered thoughts. They were seven years old. Eight next month.

I had been teaching them two hours a day now for a week. An hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon except Wednesdays which was my afternoon off (tough life, eh?). The rest of the time I spent putting on a convincing social front, swimming, tanning myself on the deck and exercising in the gym. For security reasons the girls were not allowed out individually, so I fell in with a group of South African and Australian women who seemed to hang out together and welcomed a "toffee-nosed pom" into their clique to use as the butt of their good humoured jokes.

We went down to the private beach at the end of the winding forest path and talked about boys, travel, home. A couple of times we drove down to the small town to look round the shops and markets and hang out. Of course, a group of loud, long-limbed, athletic Western women in a provincial Japanese town tends to attract attention in the same way that a carcass attracts hyenas. Ogled is not the word. Trish, a straightforward Aussie, who was one of the incredibly glamorous flight of all-female helicopter pilots employed at the House, put it nicely as we sashayed past a group of slack-jawed youths: "Jane, I'm contemplating the sound of one jaw dropping. And another one. And another one..." Of course Red Fist owned the town and the men of Tsuruga knew that the reprisals should they touch one of us Fist girls would be quick, decisive and terminal.

Look, but don't touch, boys. Poor things.

While in town, I noticed the boy from the train several times. He had obviously developed quite a thing for me and would smile shyly every time I made eye contact with him. I thought he was going to have a coronary the first time he saw me strut into town with my girlfriends in my red catsuit. He seemed to be one of a group of chimpira (wannabe mobsters) who'd hang around the bars in the dock area running little rackets or zooming around on scooters with the goal of trying to get noticed by Red Fist. I marked him out as a potential last resort ally if things got sticky. The other man from the train - the middle aged type who I'd had marked as an operative was nowhere to be seen. Could be I made a wrong call on him.

So the week had passed quickly. On the quiet, I was snooping round the network from the tablet in my room trying to get a feel for the sort of security in place. My hacking 'ware was well disguised as a set of commercially sold English teaching tools. To the observer I was conscientiously working on the boys' lessons while poking round the data reefs of the Red Fist of Justice. I was 100% certain that I could look round the public parts of the House network without leaving a trace, unless someone specifically knew that I was in there. Even then it would take an exceptionally good human operator to trace me back. The standard software wouldn't have a chance.

Over a couple of days, it became rapidly apparent that while non-sensitive information (laundry invoices, general personnel records, vehicle requisitions) was quite easy to acquire from my room deck, I would not be able to get near any of the good stuff from this terminal. That made my mission strategy clear:

1. Disable security countermeasures in my uniform
2. Locate and hack physical terminal within secure network
3. Acquire data, encrypt and transmit back to Vauxhall
4. Kill Sato
5. Escape alive (*tricky*)

Tough, but doable...

I finished the day's afternoon class by going though the animal flash cards with the boys as usual. They would read in turn: "Lion, Zebra, Dog, Monkey (they always giggled at that one - don't ask me why), Goldfish, Cat, Rabbit (they'd mastered the "L" and "R" sounds amazingly quickly), Bird, Elephant, Snake, Panda, Frog, Mouse, Duck."

I smiled. "Very good boys. Tomorrow, we'll start a different set of cards. Please come back in the morning with five English words that begin with "C". Okay?" Then I switched to English. "Now what do we say?"

All together we shouted "Goodbye!!" waving our hands. They stood and bowed and walked to the door as I picked up my things. At the door, Koichiro paused and said in halting English. "Miss Jane. Thank you. We like very much." He blushed furiously and ran off after his brother.

I stood in the empty classroom for a while, unsettled by Koichiro's comment but not knowing why.

To be continued.

Jane Masters gets in deeper and deeper as her investigation into the Red Fist continues. And what is the secret of Room 497...?

CHAPTER TWO contnued...

I bumped into Trish on the way back to my room. She was heading for the bar and invited me along for a game of pool. Probably because of her tomboyish nature, and my, er, boyish one, we had discovered a mutual love of the stick game.

It was 16:30 and the bar was empty. She got a can of Asahi from the vending machine and I got a small bottle of chilled Sancerre. Loud music was playing on the stereo. We played three games quickly and she beat me 2-1, on the last black. I made a joke about The Ashes and we sat down. I lit a cigarette. Trish doesn't smoke.

I got on so well with Trish because I found her unpretentious and honest. She was a great beauty, like most of the girls here. Tall, with beautiful, wavy auburn hair. Open, appealing face with pale blue eyes and a strong nose. In all, very aristocratic looking, but she carried herself as though she was on her uncle's farm in the outback in dungarees mucking about by the billabong with her brother Roy. We talked about our families for a while (I gave her the "Jane Masters Story", abridged edition). Turned out that Roy had died from an AIDS related illness in Sydney the year before. Trish had cut loose after that and gone travelling, finally ending up here where her pilot's license had come in useful.

"Can't complain, y'know mate," she said, "we live in the lap of luxury here. I get to fly every day and work on my commercial license. You can't turn a blind eye to what Red Fist does forever. I suppose. Look, I won't be here forever. Just till I get myself out of a money hole - and I guess you have to put up with the downside," she said, grimacing and twanging the strap of her navy blue catsuit's halter.

I looked down at my own shiny red attire. To be honest I was by now so used to wearing it that I'd forgotten how ridiculous it had seemed at the beginning. In fact, I was in a competition with some of the other girls to come down to breakfast looking as vampy and saucy as possible. I'd certainly had a couple of interesting hairstyles and faces on in the last couple of days.

"Yeah," I replied. "I guess so. To be honest, I don't even notice I have it on any more."

"Yeah, right," she laughed, "except at brekkie! Christ girl, what did you look like this morning? I didn't know whether to snog you or send you out onto the street to earn a living." She laughed raucously and I joined in as I recalled how I'd sauntered into the refectory with my hair curled and piled on top of my head, and the most outrageously salacious gothic makeup on my face. "I hope you wiped that muck off your face before you went in to 'educate' those poor boys," Trish went on.

"Course I did," I said, sipping my wine, "they're far too young for that horror movie." There was a lull in the conversation while the music changed tracks.

Trish leaned in conspiratorially as another loud track started thumping out of the speakers. "Course, we know that there's another reason apart from the eye-candy one as to why we have the uniforms. I heard once that a girl accidentally walked into a secure area - she was drunk and didn't see the warning signs." She shuddered.

I was suddenly interested. "What happened?"

"Laser mesh." She made a Zorro-like swooshing movement with her hands. "Diced receptionist. Apparently they were cleaning the corridor for days. Ugh." She finished her Asahi and made to get up. "Hey I'm gonna go to the steam room. Wanna come?"

I shook my head. "Got to plan my next week of lessons. Sato wants the plan on her desk tomorrow morning."

Trish made a "bitch" face, smiled and waved and was gone.

Laser mesh. Interesting. Meant that the countermeasures were not built into the clothing itself. Some sort of tracer with a personal ident? I passed my hands over the smooth, seamless contours of my costume but could feel nowhere where a smartchip might be concealed. Unless.

I unclipped the belt and looked at it. Looked perfectly normal. Too obvious, surely. A plan was beginning to form in my head.

***

Two hours later, I was walking in my robe from the solarium after spending half an hour under the sunbed. I was carrying my uniform and make up bag in the crook of my arm. I was taking a circuitous route via one of the observation decks, as I knew that it took me past one of the restricted areas.

I stopped for a moment at the entrance to the North Deck and went out to have a cigarette. Dusk was one of the most atmospheric times to be outside. The deck was deserted and I walked right to the guard-rail at the very edge. From here, the mountainside fell away quite sharply down to the sea. The drop was vertiginous. I looked down, imagining myself falling to be pulverised on the rocks jutting from the sea. That started the adrenalin flowing. I was about to do something risky and I needed to be sharp. I finished my cigarette and put it out in one of the ashtrays dotted about and walked back to the doorway stopping to bend down and loosen one of the straps on my while high-heeled slingbacks. Two girls (unknown to me) walked past me out onto the deck followed by three guards. They went to the rail and stated chatting. I rose and went inside.

I walked round the corner. At the end of this corridor was the red lit entrance to a restricted area. There was no door. Just red lighting and black and yellow warning stripes painted onto the floor where the line of demarcation was. I squinted and could now make out the fine mesh of holes in the walls and ceiling which must have been the laser countermeasure system.

As I walked up, I could feel the looseness of my right sandal. I had to calculate this precisely. Four feet away, I suddenly stumbled out of my loose shoe and fell with a small squeal, letting my uniform catsuit spill off my arm. As I hit the floor, I threw out my arm and my catsuit flew away from me into the red zone. It landed on the floor with one leg sticking out into the safe area.

Nothing happened.

I picked myself up, acting shaken, pulling the catsuit by its leg out of the red zone. By rights it should have been burnt to shreds by laser fire. I redid the strap on my sandal and turned the corner away from the restricted area back to my room, pulling the robe around me. I had some thinking to do.

***

Unless I was very much mistaken, my experiment had shown that the intrusion detection in the restricted zones was not intrinsic to the uniforms. Clearly the catsuits were a ruse. So how were the lasers triggered?

I lay on my bed, naked except for a pair of bikini briefs. The balcony door was open, letting the twilight and the cool breeze in; otherwise my room was dark. The only other explanation was that the tracer must somehow have been introduced to our bodies. But how? There had been no time when I'd been unconscious long enough for chip implantation to have occurred. Maybe it was something in the water. I smiled, then realised that maybe that wasn't such a foolish notion. After all, the reason why I was embroiled in this mess was because of nanotechnology. Perhaps there were nanites swimming round in my body right now broadcasting my identity and permission level to the intelligence that ran this grotesque building. I shuddered. In that case there was no way I could infiltrate the security systems unaided...

Coming to a decision, I quickly rose and shrugged myself into my catsuit. I looked at the clock. 19:56. Time to work on the kids' study plan, I thought. I padded over to the desk and surreptitiously reached behind the tablet, loosening the power connector slightly. Then I pressed the power stud. Nothing happened. I did it again, a couple of times.

I put the table lamp on and got on the phone to the IT desk. A man answered.

"Oh hello," I said breathlessly, "I'm Jane Masters in room 404. I'm afraid my tablet seems to have broken down.... Would you be able to send me someone? I really need to do some work for Cmr. Sato tonight.... Oh thank you.. Yes, yes, I'll be waiting."

I hung up and walked to the bathroom to beautify my hair and face and make myself smell nice. Might as well use the new tools the department had given me. Men were men, but techies were often desperate... Let me be the answer to their dreams. If it got me what I wanted.

***

I had fluffed up my newly curled hair and done an expert job of bedroom make-up. Smoky seductive eyes and deep red glossed lips; a dusting of dark blush and a spray of Cashmere Mist. I pushed my boobs up so that they were absurdly prominent and teased my nipples so that they stuck out under the restriction of the red fabric. Well, there was no point in being subtle. I had one chance to make an impression.

When the technician arrived, I immediately felt sorry for him. He was in his twenties, with thinning hair. I could have sworn his pebble-like specs steamed up when I answered the door with a breathy "Hi." He was short, about up to my chest and had bad teeth and was sweating. This was too easy.

He sidled past me and buried himself in his work. I slowly walked back into the room, my heels making pronounced clicking noises. I could see that he was aware of me even though he had his back to me. I sighed and sat on my bed, crossing my legs and pouring myself a glass of chilled Viognier. "It's such a lovely night," I said, in Japanese.

His shoulders stiffened. I sipped my wine but received no other reply.

After a while, I heard a chime and my tablet powered up. "It is power," he said in halting English, with his back still to me.

"It's OK, I speak very good Japanese," I said, "and you've fixed it. You're so clever!"

He finally turned. His face was red. "It was the power cable," he said, and giggled. "It's a technical support joke. And you did it!"

I smiled. "I'm just glad you fixed it." I indicated the bed. "I want to show my gratitude in some way. Would you like a glass of wine?"

"I shouldn't," he said, but he sat down. In a chair, not next to me on the bed. I poured him a glass and handed it to him, making sure that our fingers touched as he took it.

"My name is Jane. What's yours?"

He swigged his wine down on one go, "I know you are Miss Jane. Everyone is talking about you. That you are very good with the Director's children. My name is Takahashi."

It was obvious that he had been drinking already. I moved to pour him another and he accepted, offering to pour me one in return, the Japanese way. I let him pour a dribble into my glass. "What are they saying about me? If you don't mind me asking?"

"Oh, that you are a very good teacher. Commissar Sato has been saying good things about you. I'm sure that the Director will reward you personally. Also," he smiled mischievously, "my friends will be very envious that you called when I was on duty."

"Why's that?" I said, uncrossing and recrossing my legs. He couldn't take his eyes off that.

He downed the wine again, looking mortified. "We all think that you are the most beautiful of the women that we are fortunate to share our employment with."

That one actually penetrated my defences and I blushed. "Thank you Mr Takahashi." I said, "that is a great compliment and I'm sure you and your colleagues are being over generous to me." I'd slipped into formal Japanese - fake humility. I got back onto the point. "You know, Takahashi-san. I'd be fascinated to see where you work. As you know, we girls only get to see half of what goes on here. Do you think-?" I looked submissively up at him as I poured him another.

He immediately pulled away. "I can't allow that Miss Jane. It's strictly forbidden. If Cmr. Sato found out, she'd..." he trailed off, taking a swig of wine.

I sipped my glass. "It's just that.." I let my fingers trail down the bare flesh between my breasts, trying to hypnotise him. "I find technology so sexy... that's one of the reasons I came to work here. I'm sure I could make it-" I looked into his eyes, and reached to gently touch his arm, "you know, worth your while?" I drank the rest of my glass of wine quickly, licking my lips.

I looked down to his crotch. There was a definite bulge there. I had him.

Suddenly, his pager bleeped and he jumped. Shit, shit, shit! He looked at it and got up.

"I must go." He started moving towards the doorway. I had to make a move.

I stood and strode over to stand in his way, stopping him with a hand on his. He turned. Shit. I couldn't believe I was about to do this.

I bent down and brushed his lips with mine, closing my eyes and thinking of England.

***

Nothing happened for a couple of days. In fact it all got a bit pathetic and high school-ish. I tried to attract Takahashi's attention in the canteen and other public places. Smiling and waving, but he either blanked me if with his gang of spotty techies, or looked acutely embarrassed if alone or working. Trish thought I was insane. I tried to explain that I found ugly small men irresistible and that he was really sweet, when you got to know him.

I carried on teaching the kids and spoke a couple of times with Sato, who expressed satisfaction at my work.

Then, at 03:30 on the morning of the fourth day, there was a knock on my door. I got up from bed and opened it, rubbing my eyes. There was no one there. Then I noticed a note on the floor. I picked it up.

Meet me on the North Deck in twenty minutes - Taka

***

I quickly dressed, freshened up, put on my most glamorous shoes and tripped along to the observation deck. Takahashi was waiting for me, there. I took his hands. "Hello Mr Takahashi. You wanted me?"

He was trembling in the warm night. "I couldn't get that kiss out of my mind," he said. "If I show you the technology area, will you-?"

I nodded. Giving him another quick peck on the mouth. "Let's go," he said, leading me quickly off the deck. As we walked along the corridor, he handed me a vial of colourless fluid. "Drink it," he said.

I stopped, looking at the vial. "What is it?"

He grabbed my hand and made me carry on walking, whispering, "unless you have that substance in your system you won't be able to pass the security grid. Please drink it, then give the vial back to me."

Nanites. They must be. I quickly downed the contents of the vial and handed it back to him. Tasted just like water.

We turned the corner and the red zone approached. I held my breath as we walked through, but nothing happened. I was in.

We walked down a short, darkened corridor then emerged into a dark, low-ceilinged room full of computer terminals. Sadly, just a tech support IT room with the usual clutter of parts and cabling strewn across the floor, but hopefully I could access something a bit more useful through this area. The only illumination came from the red light spilling in from the corridor and the dim glow of the computer monitors. There was another door that led on somewhere.

I had to act turned on by this, though. "Ooh, hardware!" I said, breathlessly, feeling a little absurd, "come here." He was breathing very hard as I embraced him. I could feel his little hard-on poking into my thigh.

I gently jabbed my thumb into the nerve cluster above his collarbone, and he collapsed with a soft grunt. I found some cabling and bound and gagged him. I'd have to dispose of him later. But now I had work to do.

I sat down at one of the active terminals, reaching into my hip pocket for the disk from my English teaching kit that contained the incursion software. I stuck it in the Unidrive and watched it spin up.

The 'ware began by spoofing my room terminal so that it appeared to the network and anyone monitoring activity that I was working on lesson notes in my room at 4 AM. Very conscientious, Jane. Once the cloak was up, I started investigating the local subnet for weak spots. I did this by sending out a pack of sniffers who'd scamper away disguised as normal network processes and come back having aggregated a visualisation of the security systems in the local area.

While this was happening, I took off my shoes and padded to the door at the far end of the room. A diffuse red light spilled through the circular viewhole onto the ceiling. I looked through and saw a red-lit corridor, with a single door at the far end. The number 497 was printed on the door. A gentle blue light pulsed from the viewhole of the door to Room 497.

I was about to go through to investigate when a soft chime sounded from behind me. Torn between two courses of action, I decided to go back to analyse the results of the sniffer run. I padded quietly back to the terminal, sat down and pulled up the results window.

Suddenly, I felt a prickling sensation of nerves, became aware of a feeling of being watched. I looked round, but there was no one there. I looked behind me at Takahashi, prone on the floor. But he was still out cold.

I stood up and walked over to the corridor through which we had entered. Pressing myself against the wall, I looked round the corner. But the corridor was still, empty. Perhaps I was spooking myself unnecessarily. I hadn't been under this type of mission pressure for a while now. I went back to the terminal and sat down, studying the screen.

Once again, I felt like I was being observed. I shivered. My exposed arms and back were starting to goosebump in the air-con atmosphere. I looked around again, licking my lips, which suddenly felt horribly dry. I felt an irrational desire to fix my lipstick and wished I had brought one with me. The room was empty. But was it my imagination or had the light from the door at the far end of the room brightened? I tried to concentrate on the screen, but was suddenly gripped by fear. I tried to swallow to lubricate my dry throat and mouth.

I got up, looked round and sat down again, rubbing my hands together with anxiety. Suddenly, I wished I were far away from here, in a pub in Chelsea with some mates watching the match. Dressed in jeans and sweatshirt. Not in some species of hell, halfway across the world, freezing to death in a sleazy red rubber catsuit. Shit. I began to cry.

After a while, I collected myself and looked over at the door again. Taking a breath, I rose and made my way through the mess of computer parts and diacarded Jolt Cola cans to the door. I sat down with my naked back on the door and looked up. Something had changed. Before, only the red corridor light had spilt through the viewhole from beyond. Now, I could clearly see the faint blue pulsing light mixing with the red glow thrown onto the ceiling.

Trying to slow my breathing, I rose and peeked through the viewhole. I gasped. The blue light that had been pulsing gently in Room 497 was now throbbing bright and angry, casting crazy shadows into the dark corridor. I was mesmerised, unable to rid myself of the feeling that whatever was in Room 497 was alive. What's more, that I'd woken it and it was watching me, somehow.

I watched and waited, hardly daring to breathe, and slowly, the intensity of the light from Room 497 diminished till it was back at its original level. I wondered if I should go through. I told myself that it was more important to get at the data on the network. Actually, I was terrified by the malevolent presence of Room 497; had a terrible foreboding that I was to find something utterly vile and incomprehensible in there.

So I turned and went back to the terminal, faced what I knew, rather than what I didn't want to know. I began to study the schematics of the network's security system.

Then something moved in the periphery of my vision, from the direction of the door.

I swallowed and slowly forced myself to turn my head.

One of the twins was standing there, ten feet away in the semi-darkness, just looking at me, with a frighteningly blank look on his face.

As I watched, mouth agape, he slowly raised a hand to point at me.

Once my heart had returned to its normal place in my chest, I got up and walked over to him. As I did so, he pointed behind me. I turned. The other boy was behind me, the same look on his face. His hand raised to point as well.

I knelt down, trying to calm myself. I reached out my hands and they came and took them. I tried to smile reassuringly and whispered, "you shouldn't be here, you two. It's very late." I stood. "Come on. Let's get you to bed."

But they hung back, not coming with me.

"What is it?" I whispered urgently. "We have to go. It's terribly dangerous. You might get hurt."

"Oh no," said a voice from behind me.

I whirled. From the darkness of the corner of the room stepped a tall, black-clad fighure. "I rather think it's you who might be hurt, Miss Jane," said Sato, a dangerous smile on her face

She tilted her head, slightly. "Or should that be Lieutenant Commander Pierce?"

The end of CHAPTER TWO
Jane Masters will return in CHAPTER THREE

In the clutches of the sadistic Sato, Jane Masters faces the toughest of tests. CAUTION: this segment contains explicit descriptions of mental and physical torture and bondage...

CHAPTER THREE: Tsuruga, Fukui Pref., Japan... Red Fist of Justice Complex ("The House")...

I was frozen to the spot.

Feeling my knees buckle involuntarily, I had to put my hand out to stop going over on my high heels. My mouth opened and closed noiselessly. A hundred different thoughts crowded in at once, fighting for attention, but I felt unable to organise them into any meaningful order. I guess I was, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked.

After what seemed like hours, but must have been scant seconds, Sato fired a challenging "well?" in my direction. I raised my eyes to see her stood there with her hands on her hips, a thin smile snaking across her face. She strode forward deliberately and slapped my face, hard. "You don't do a very good impression of a goldfish, do you?" Tears sprang to my eyes at the shock of the stinging pain. And she laughed, cruelly. A horribly pretty sound.

She nodded to the black-catsuited guards who had gracefully appeared at my side. They lifted me up easily by my elbows. I felt a prick as a needle penetrated my soft buttock and then felt myself being carried out of the controlled area. As a tear-blurred darkness descended over my vision, I saw the twin boys regarding me. Receding into the distance. I tried to speak, to explain, or something, but no words emerged from my m-

***

When I came to, my first thought was that it had all been a terrible dream.

That fond illusion was rapidly extinguished by the deep ache in my joints and a burning pressure from my bladder. I was literally unable to move a muscle.

I slowly opened my eyes, wincing at the bright light. Whatever they had used to knock me out had left my head feeling like the aftermath of a night of Tequila slammers with the girls from the Vauxhall office. I was in a small, featureless tiled white room with no windows and a single door. I was lying on the floor, trussed like a turkey. Above me was a shower-head. Near my feet a circular drain.

While insensible, I had been very skilfully bound (or should I say mummified) with black silken rope that had left me not an inch of free play. My catsuit had disappeared and beneath the bindings I was butt- naked. The only parts that projected visibly from the silken bundle were my face, breasts and genitalia, which had shrunk dramatically since the onset of the hormone treatment. In as much as a cock and balls could look "feminine", that was what they looked like. By shuffling around, I could see that my cock had been painted red and ominously, it seemed that a thick black marker pen had been used to draw a dotted line around my genitals. A similar marker line ran in the fold underneath each of my small boobs.

I writhed unceremoniously as I tried to ease the pressure on my bladder without shamefully relieving myself. It was impossible and I knew I'd have to wet myself soon, unless help came. I simply wasn't strong enough to break the bonds and if I struggled any further, I knew that I wouldn't be able to stop myself from peeing. It sounds pathetic, but controlling my bladder was the only shred of dignity and hope I felt I could retrieve from this hopeless situation.

As I lay and tried to stop myself from bursting into tears, the full horror of my circumstances hit slowly home. I'd been compromised. My mission was fucked. Worse, I was now in the clutches of that frightening sadist Sato, who knew (or had guessed) that I was Lt. Commander Anthony Pierce under the hormonally assisted feminine curves of Jane Masters. Could I try to outface the accusation? It seemed unlikely that I could do anything but come clean and admit the truth. Perhaps-

I didn't have long to worry as the door sprung open and Sato strode in, followed by two of her catsuited guards. She was provocatively dressed in a one-piece, skin-tight black leather catsuit with impossibly vertiginous heels. Her long, black hair was piled high on her head. She looked obscenely beautiful.

"Well, Commander Pierce, what have you got to say for yourself?" Sato casually leaned forward and flicked my exposed testicles hard with a black-gloved finger. Excruciating pain shot through my groin and I would have creased up immediately had I been able to move an inch. "Not a very impressive piece of equipment, Commander", she sneered. "A trifle sensitive is it?" She bent down and started stroking my balls, which was, if anything, even more unbearable. With a smirk, she rose and turned away.

Unbelievably, I found myself asking her to allow me to go to the toilet. She swung round, slapped me hard in the face again and brought her thigh-booted shin straight into my groin making me scream in agony. "I ask the questions round here. You are Commander Pierce, aren't you?" she whispered in my face, bending down to flick my balls again. This time, I was unable to bear the pressure any more. I let out a wracking sob and relaxed, sending a steady stream of hot, golden urine onto the floor. It began pooling around my buttocks, up my back and soaking my blonde hair.

"You disgusting little worm", Sato hissed, leaning down. I couldn't meet her eye. I had never felt so humiliated in all my life.

"If you can't control yourself," she said, wrinkling her nose, "I'm going to have to make you wear a nappy." She rose. "OK girls, turn on the shower and hose him down with cold water. I can't possibly torture him when he smells so bad." With that Sato almost sensuously ran her fingers over my shrivelled genitalia and leaned in again. "Whatever happens, this pathetic little slug-thing is gone for good. You know that, don't you? Not that that is going to make much difference to anything, as far as you're concerned." With this parting shot she strode out of the door.

The guards untied me and kicked me until I stopped struggling, giggling in their high-pitched Japanese voices. I think I felt a rib go, and a finger as I lifted my hands to fend them off, but I was past caring. When I was still, I lay on my side and watched their high-heeled feet click over to the wall. I heard a a tap being turned and a jet of ice cold water struck my bruised body and aching face. I closed my eyes.

After a while, I thought, "what the hell," and started crying. The cold water washed my tears away and I felt myself floating. Cleaner and colder than I had ever felt. I was in a cold, small, high place on the very edge of myself.

The tap was turned off and I lay, shivering, on the clean, white tile, gasping like a beached fish. The guards left the shower cell.

Some time later - it could have been minutes or hours - I heard the door open again behind me. By this time I felt as though my body was frozen in place. Footsteps approached. I smelt a strangely familiar smell - a perfume. Then felt a sharp jab in my bottom, which took me away into merciful blackness.

***

I came to trussed even more tightly than before. I was on my front, my arms stretched out behind my back and I couldn't help thinking once again that I must have looked like the family turkey ready for the Christmas meal. With all those hormones swimming inside of me, I guess it was not a bad analogy.

Suddenly through the door appeared a metal contraption that resembled a mobile clothes rail, pushed by the guards (the same ones?) They hoisted me roughly up on it and I felt an excruciating stab of pain from my right chest. They secured my arms with thick leather straps and let my bound legs dangle free. I could only just reach the floor with the tips of my toes, which meant that I was in perpetual agony from my arms, which felt as though they were being wrenched out at the shoulders. One of them forced my mouth open and gagged me with a rubber ball.

I was wheeled out along the corridor. I couldn't help but be aware of my cock, which was embarrassingly and horribly exposed. After an interminable and agonising journey through half-darkened corridors, the contraption rolled to a halt in front of the door to Sato's office. The guard rapped on the door.

It swished open and I saw Sato behind her desk, a faint smile on her face. The guards rolled me forward till I was right in front of her desk. I could not move a muscle, but could hear the guards leaving. Once again, I noticed that naggingly familiar perfume and sensed someone behind me in the corner of the room. I tried to turn my head but it was useless.

With a smile over at the person standing quietly behind me, Sato stood, leaned over her desk and reached to force my mouth open and remove the gag with a loud pop. I ran my tongue round my aching mouth marshalling my reserves. I felt as if my arms were going to pop out of my shoulder sockets any minute, and considered asking her for some relief from the standing frame, but on the whole I thought it better not to risk further scorn. I found that by stretching the tips of my toes out till they reached the floor, I could relieve the strain for short periods of time.

Sato came round and perched on the edge of the desk so the hem of her pencil skirt rode up above her knees. She pursed her lips in a playful smile. "Well, Commander Pierce," she said, patting me on my cheek, "how typically arrogant of British Intelligence that they should think that they could infiltrate Red Fist with a transvestite". I felt my face break into a red flush. I'd never have considered myself a 'transvestite' but I supposed that, to all intents and purposes, if it looks like a chicken and clucks like a chicken, then it probably is a chicken.

"There's no point in denying it - we know your whole sad story. I could have you snuffed out at an instant, but the children do like you and I'm tempted to keep you on as their tutor. What do you think Commander?" She didn't let me reply and went on, "but there is one problem, Akaguchi-san does not employ men here as you may have noticed." She glanced down, raising an eyebrow. "I am afraid that that miserable appendage is going to have to go. Fortunately we can facilitate your complete transformation into Jane Masters through the medical facilities and staff in this very complex. We'll be able to utilise your female side fully in a very short space of time. I am sure it will prove a delicious irony to have the pleasure of screwing His Majesty's Service whenever we feel like it".

"How did you know?" I said, very quietly.

"Oh, believe me, the disguise is extremely persuasive. In fact, we would probably never have detected the subterfuge." She laughed. "Fortunately, we did have very good advice." And then she nodded at the figure breathing softly behind me and when who duly came round to join Sato and I suddenly realised why I had recognised that perfume. And I also realised with a sickening feeling why I had been so easily compromised, as Dr. Mary Dwyer smiled and softly said, "hello again, Commander Pierce."

For a moment, there was silence. I realised I was expected to react. To cry or something like that. I also realised that I was not going to give them the satisfaction any more. I had given them an unacceptable advantage already by showing weakness, tears. I would not buckle again.

The two of them looked at me. My persecutor. My betrayer. My enemies. By the end of this, they would lie dead by my hand, probably alongside me. I felt clear in my head again, the pain from my shoulders and ribs cutting a razor line to my brain. I was smiling.

The two of them laughed as the guards re-entered and I was efficiently wheeled out of the office into the corridor. As I was taken back to my white cell, I realised that there was an undercurrent to my feeling of excitement. When I realised what it was, I was shocked. I was feeling a tremor at the prospect of truly being used and abused as a woman, especially by Bond. As if all of my life I had secretly envied the role of being Bond's girl. To be fucked and discarded by the most powerful, beautiful men in the world. I felt a thrill that ran down my bound body to my groin and my little cock struggled to attention. I found I had a smile on my face. How perverse.

***

"You can reach a transcendental state when being tortured. This fact, I'm sure, is drummed into you during your British Intelligence survival training."

Sato circled behind me. I was strung up on my frame, bound with wide, leather straps. The rubber ball gag was again in my mouth. She went on. "The over-zealous torturer can inflict so much pain that the subject goes into a zen-like state where they begin to chase the pain as a starving man chases food, or the addict chases his next fix." She had tied my hair back, painted my face with crude, whorish make-up and forced my legs into black, sheer hold-up stockings and six inch heels, which just failed to reach the ground. Otherwise, I was naked. I was in agony. Starving. Thirsty. Due to the elevation of my arms and my weakness, I was completely unable to move.

"You see, when the subject enters that state, the torturer has lost. That's why I do not often inflict pain on my victims unless I intend to kill them." She went on, heels clicking behind me as she walked. "Torture is a very simple thing, you see. It's not about inflicting pain. Pain is merely a tool. Torture is about deprivation. Deprivation from material necessities, food, water, sleep. Deprivation from personal freedoms. We use torture as a scalpel with which we pare away all the signs of the self. At the bottom point you will no longer have any sense of yourself left. Then you will find it easy to tell me the truth - or to accept new truths."

She looked into my face, removing the gag with her finger and thumb. I ran my swollen tongue round my parched lips, making sure I retained eye contact with her, show no weakness, though I hadn't slept for a couple of days, probably - so hard to keep a sense of time when the light was always bright and guards always came to wake you with their electric nightsticks just as you were dropping off to sleep.

Sato leaned forward and kissed me, sticking her tongue deep into my mouth. I sucked on the moisture there, not wanting to let it go. She pulled away. "Thanks for the drink," I said, in what I hoped was a strong, defiant voice. "You're right about my training though," I went on, trying to massage some feeling back into my face by talking. "It'll take more than a bit of sleep and food deprivation to make me do your bidding, I'm afraid."

Sato was standing watching me, apparently amused, her leather clad arms crossed. "Oh really," she said. "Just exactly how long do you think you have been awake in here?"

"Not long," I tried to shrug. "A couple, three days at most."

Sato smiled, leaning forward to stroke my rouged nipples with the tips of her red nails. I shuddered. "And how to you feel, my brave British agent," she purred.

"Thirsty and tired." I said. "But I'll live." I looked with defiance into her eyes.

"I'm glad to hear that," she said, straightening and walking toward the door, "I have such wonderful plans for you." At the door, she turned. "Oh, and by the way, you've actually only been awake for twenty-two hours. I'll come back again when it really has been three days and then let's talk again, shall we?"

She looked up at the hidden camera. "No sleep, no food, no water. 1.25mg scopolamine, every 12 hours." Then turned back to me with a dazzling smile. "See you later, my dear."

***

Perhaps I lasted for a couple of weeks. Perhaps only a few days. I have no idea. The drugs and the sleep deprivation were hard to resist. I tried to die, but I couldn't. Sato's visits were the only punctuation in my long unrelenting tiredness. I felt as if I was disappearing and leaving a flat, paper version of myself behind. I just wanted to sleep. If I could sleep, it would be OK. I would get up, break out and run down the corridor, killing guards on the way until I got to Sato's office. I'd break her arms, then kiss her and then-

***

The next time Sato came back, I found that I could not look at her any more because of the hallucinations. Also, my neck did not seem to be working. So I had to speak to her without looking into her face, which I found embarrassing. She told me that I had done very well to remain awake for so long and as a result she was going to let me drink a bit of water as a reward. I think I cried then, but a kind of very painful, dry crying. She put a wet sponge to my mouth and I sucked on it, but could only take a couple of drops before I felt sick. I retched but nothing came out. She asked me if I was tired and I nodded. She said that she would let me have a nice sleep soon. I smiled.

Sato carried on talking to me in a low, and very soothing voice. She told me a lot of things, which sounded confusing, but as she went on I realised how stupid I had been. All this secret agent nonsense I had been filling my head up with was so utterly far fetched. A trivial romance that I had made up to make myself feel more important. It was so clear now.

I'm Jane Masters. I'm twenty-two. I was born a boy but always felt that I should have been a girl. I grew up in Surrey but ran away from home with my sister's clothes on when I was seventeen. For a while I tried to make money as a prostitute in King's Cross to pay for my hormones, but because I was so pretty and talented by the time I was twenty-one, I was spotted by one of the agents from the Red Fist, who said that they would be able to pay me enough to pay for my operation. Lucky or what?

I'm a dancer at one of the Red Fist clubs in town now. My stage name is Jewel because I shine like a diamond. I make a lot in tips because the men love me. I'm having my boobs done this week. I'm SO excited cos I always felt that they were too small! I love dancing because I love making men happy, but soon, I'll have enough to have the whole operation done then I might go home to England, find a nice sweet man who'll love, cherish and protect me, and settle down. I'll be the happiest girl in the world!

"Well done," said Sato quietly. "Sleep now."

I slept.

***

to be continued...

Jewel the exotic dancer has a successful life in the fleshpots of northwestern Japan, but is there something important she's forgotten? CAUTION: contains explicit sexual scenes.

CHAPTER THREE continued...

"Look," says Candy coming off the stage to loud whistles and cheers, "your boyfriend's there again." I peek through the curtain. He is there. The very handsome, tall Japanese boy with the spiky hair. I get a kind of strange, jelly feeling in my knees and up there when Candy calls him my "boyfriend". I know he's a gangster - they all are round here. That's kinda exciting and dangerous...

"He's not my boyfriend," I whisper, feeling shy, giving Candy a little punch in her arm. But he's very nice looking and he always puts money in my thong, which has my name, "Jewel" in rhinestones down the front.

Then Mr Yahata announces me and the crowd roars. I'm so proud cos they always give me the best cheer. It's cos I'm blonde and tall, and since I had my new boobs done, I'm really big up there too. I love it when men look at me. It makes me so horny I feel like I'm going to cum right there. I love dancing. Soon I'm going to be a real girl, too. I'm so-o-o lucky!

I sway onto the stage to the music and begin to bump along, spinning and grinding round the pole. My inch-long jewelled nails sparkle in the spotlights. All my piercings with the rhinestones make me glitter like a diamond.

I do a couple of dips on the pole, spreading my long legs and wiggling the silver tassly bits on my nipples and the crowd goes mad. They are shouting "Jew-el! Jew-el!! JEW-EL!!" and I think I'm going to go mad too! Then I stride down the catwalk and they run to me, shoving money with their sweaty hands into the band of my thong.

At the end of the runway he is waiting for me. I feel all hot suddenly and I stop at the end to dance for him. His eyes are all over me and I can tell he is hot too. He is suddenly much, much bigger up front! I turn and walk away as the music fades. But I have to see him later. I hope he comes round the back and asks for me.

***

Later, me and Candy are having some vodka and some speed in our dressing room. I feel all giggly as I'm quite a bit drunk. My side hurts from when that punter hit me a few weeks ago but I feel really horny and I'm kind of pretending to grope her and stuff. She's my best friend. She's from Singapore. I like her.

Then one of the newer girls comes in and says something, like someone's looking for me. My heart jumps and I get all fluttery. Candy looks at me with a smile, then gets up to leave, patting me on my arm with a wink. I go over to the mirror and quickly fix my make-up. Someone knocks on my door.

"Come in." I say and then I have to cough as my voice sounds all shaky and croaky. The door opens. My face must have really fell, cos the red-haired woman who came in looks all worried. She comes over and sits down. I know who she is. I think she's called Trish and she's one of the pilots from the house. I find them scary because they're very hard.

She asks me what's happened to me, calling me "Jane" like she knows me, and I say nothing, I'm fine. Then I ask her what she wants and she tries to get me to come with her because she's worried about me dancing in this place, and I tell her that it's none of her business and I get all upset and start screaming then Mr Yahata and Candy come back in and throw her out but it's too late because I'm really upset and I'm crying and nothing's right.

***

Later on, back in my uniform catsuit, I decide to walk for a bit before getting the bus back to the house. It's very dark, but when I leave the club, I can see him standing there. He lights a ciggy and offers me one. We smoke for a bit, and while I'm smoking he starts stroking me on my bare back. He's just a little bit taller than me, which is unusual for a Japanese so I have to look up a little to let him kiss me.

"Why are you trembling?" He says in a surprisingly soft voice. I am crushed up against him and I can feel something hard and metal in his suit. A gun. "I'm scared", I whisper, in the littlest voice.

"Don't be. I won't hurt you." I think he will if he finds out my secret in my pants. But I can't help it. You see, I'm addicted to sucking cock and they pay me well for it because I'm so talented. All the men in this town know that. He kisses me again, then beckons me to his car, a big, silver Mercedes. We get in the back, and he undoes his trousers.

My jewelled nails tickle his hard cock in his pants. He moans. I pull the pants down and I stick my pretty tongue out and begin my happy meal. Meat lolly and cream. Mmmm...

He zips himself up and hands me a wad of notes. "Take me home now," I say, quietly.

***

In my bedroom high up in the house, I'm crying. I really fancied that tall spiky-haired boy but instead my muddled old head went all automatic on me and I gave him a blowjob for money instead of talking to him.

Now I'm just a cocksucker whore to him. But even if we could talk, why would a good-looking young gangster want to talk to a little airhead like me, anyway. I'm his quick bang. And I can't even do that properly because of what I have in my panties. I cry myself to sleep.

***

The next day, I see Trish again, looking at me in the canteen. But I ignore her. That night I give my young gangster head again in the backstage area. Then I dance some more to forget.

***

"Jewel-chan," he says, "I think I'd like to see more of you." And my face lights up.

We're sitting in the back of his car, two weeks later. It's parked up looking at the night-time harbour and my heart is pounding. I've just finished wiping his cum off my face and fixing my make-up. I put my hand on his thigh. "I'd like that too," I whisper.

"You bring me luck," he says, taking my hand. "Whenever you suck me off, I feel stronger and better. I figure that if you stick with me, my career's going to seriously go places."

That wasn't quite what I wanted, but-

"You know," he goes on, " I'll make sure you're comfortable and everything, but I want you to stop going with other guys and only go with me, right?"

"Of course, honey," I say quietly, smiling, but crying inside.

***

My life gets really comfortable after that. My gangster is definitely going places and I'm the top dancer in the top club in Fukui. I find I don't have to do any thinking at all any more. I just let my man take me with him on his journey. I just have to look pretty on his arm and suck him off whenever he asks. It's a simple life. I never see him unless I'm summoned, and he only summons me if he needs me to accompany him or if he needs a blowjob. He gives me an apartment on a beach and an endless supply of gorgeous clothes and things.

Most nights, I don't even go back to the Red Fist house on the hill anymore, and I see less and less of the girls. Candy was moved to another club and I never see her again.

Three months pass.

***

I'm doing some grocery shopping in the supermarket. I'm feeling kind of nervous today for some reason. I'm wearing a very brief leopard halter top that shows off my brown, trim tummy and my lovely, yummy, tanned cleavage, over which my softly permed, long, blonde curls tumble very prettily. I also have on some very short white PVC hotpants and some nice strappy stiletto sandals that my gangster bought me. They make my brown legs look ve-e-ry long. That means that men's eyes pop out when they see me and women just look annoyed. Just like I like it!

I've got this hot new frosted pink lipstick on that tastes yummy like bubble gum, and I'm just refreshing my lip gloss in the household detergents aisle when I realise why I feel nervous. I see this man watching me in the mirror of my compact.

For some reason, he looks really familiar, though I can't place him. Something about a train. My silly mind's so fuzzy. I can hardly remember anything if it happened longer than a few months ago. Gosh, I'm so dizzy! He's a kind of shabby looking middle-aged Japanese man. Nothing special. But suddenly it seems to me that he has been following me all day. Or maybe weeks. I'm really scared. But I try to behave normally and take my shopping to the till. I look around as I put my shopping in the bags but he seems to have disappeared.

Out in the car park, I see him again. He's waiting at the opposite end of the lot, smoking a cigarette. I hurry into my little car and drive off, getting my cellular phone out. I sit in the traffic in an agony of indecision. I'm not supposed to call my gangster - he's supposed to call me. But I'm really scared. I get so distracted that I almost cause an accident and I have to pull over. I switch the engine off and burst into tears.

After a while, I compose myself and decide that I'm OK. I look in the mirror but there is no sign of the man. Maybe I imagined it, or he just fancied me. Yes. That would be it.

I take a deep breath and pull out into the coastbound traffic.

***

Back at the flat, I put the aircon on and start to run myself a bubble bath to start getting ready for work tonight. I strip off my clothes (it doesn't take long) and pad around the cool flat in my sandals, with my little cock hanging out, cellphone in my hand, debating whether I should ring my gangster.

After a few minutes of agonising, I decide that I don't want to make him angry, so I put the cellphone back on its charger and go and have a nice, hot bath.

I come out of the bathroom in a robe patting my hair dry and almost jump out of my skin. The man is sitting there in my nice armchair. Next to him is that woman, Trish.

"D-d-don't kill me." I stutter, backing away to the kitchenette.

"Commander Pierce," says the man. "What is your status? Have you been compromised?"

I suddenly realise he's speaking in English. He's talking nonsense, but in English.

"Wh-wh-what? I don't understand. Please, my boyfriend is a gangster. He'll-"

"As surmised," he says to Trish, who nods. "He is brainwashed. Probable chemical component maintaining the fugue state."

"Is there something we can do for her... I mean, him?" asks Trish.

While the two mad people are having their mad conversation, I have managed to put my hands on a large fish knife in the kitchenette. Keeping it behind my back, I edge forward. "Look, I don't know what this is about, b- but you can't just come into people's houses like this."

The man looks up. "Just a minute", he says to Trish, then he raises a small gun. He pulls the trigger, and before I can scream, I feel this blow, like someone's punched me on my exposed upper chest. I look down and can't believe what I s-

***

"He's coming round." A woman's voice.

I tried to open my eyes, but the light was so bright that I had to shut them again immediately. "Oh, just a minute," said the voice, which had an Australian accent. "Shibata-san said that you'd be sensitive to bright light." I heard footsteps walking away then the sound of drapes being drawn.

Cautiously, I tried again. This time, the room was dark, the pain duller. Trish was leaning over me, smiling, with the small Japanese man behind her. Suddenly, I remembered him, from that train as I first arrived here so long ago. Then I remembered the house, my mission, Sato, the twins. I remembered room 497, being betrayed, captured, beaten and tortured. I remembered-

SHIT!

I sat up and lifted my robe aside, looking at my breasts. They were huge. I'd been a B cup, these must be a D, at least. Then images of baring them in front of leering men, glitter, rhinestones and every single cock that I'd had in my mouth over the last few months overcame me. I scrambled up and ran to the toilet, where I spewed up my guts into the bowl.

***

Trish was sitting with her arm around me as I sipped a weak camomile tea.

"It must have been the water in the club, or something," I said quietly.

Shibata nodded. "It seems likely that the drug that was maintaining your programming was being administered in that place. Fortunately, antidote is commonly available. After I tranquillised you, we were able to inject you with it." He nodded again. "As British Intelligence contact in this territory, I was naturally worried about the condition of the mission when I saw... state that you were in..." He tailed off.

Trish cut in: "I think Shibata-san made contact with me when he saw me trying to reach you. Could have knocked me off my stool with a feather when he told me you were a bloke, darlin'." She stopped and I managed a weak smile. "Still, since then Mr Shibata and I have been planning your rescue."

"It is major risk for me to break cover in this way," said Shibata, "but seemed only solution to your problem, Commander Pierce."

I nodded and took a deep breath. "Now what?" But I knew anyway.

"Mission parameters are greatly enhanced by this development, Commander," said Shibata. "Now you have opportunity to double-bluff Red Fist in new guise as dancer, "Jewel". Your objectives may now be speedily executed and mission concluded to His Majesty and world community's advantage."

I closed my eyes and nodded.

***

I couldn't believe how much I had changed in the months that I had been Jewel. Sure, I'd had a good figure before, but now I had the taut, tanned body of a high-class lap dancer. I was leaner, my tummy flatter and more defined, my navel pierced and jewelled, my ass and hips bigger in comparison to my tiny trim waist, my legs impossibly long and toned. The breasts still shocked me. The implants the Fist had given me made me big and busty, the nipples long, shapely and turned upwards just so. My long neck and my beautiful face were now framed by chest length hair, honey blonde with platinum highlights in a tumbling wave that contrasted with my rather severe straight bob of a few months back. I'd obviously spent time on the beach, as I was a deep, gold tan all over, cinammon skin, except for a triangular shape at my crotch and two lighter patches at my boobs. Fuck, a bikini tan. That always used to turn me on so much when I had been Anthony Pierce.

God, I was hot. I could see just why I was the most popular dancer at the club. Any man would pay good money to see this body dance, and more. Yet there in the closely trimmed blonde thatch at my groin was nestled the little lie. My dainty tiny morsel of a cock, all pert and lost in my ravishing femininity. It was quite literally all that remained of Lieutenant Commander Anthony Pierce. The rest was all Jewel. Cocksucking dance queen of the Kitty Club.

I tore myself from the full-length mirror, glancing for a moment at the exquisite jade butterfly tattoo in the small of my back, then pulled on my restraining G-string. Cock all gone. I didn't need a bra for the stupidly tiny green dress I pulled on. Then I sprayed some Coco on and slipped into a pair of cork-heeled wedges. A short car journey and I'd be in the club to shake and grind in front of a roomful of drunken men.

I was more frightened than before any mission.

Suddenly, I heard footsteps in the lounge. I crept to the connecting door and peered through, acutely aware that I was unarmed and I might have to fight in a micro mini and 5-inch wedge heels. I smelt smoke.

There on my sofa was the gangster, a cigarette between his sneering lips. He was looking handsome in a black fitted suit and open-necked black shirt. His shades were pushed back on top of his expertly waxed spiky quiff. I remembered first seeing him on that train, how he'd smiled at me over his sleeping girlfriend's shoulder. He'd changed since then too, grown in measure, in stature. I think I'd even back then felt a spark from this dangerous man who boasted to me about his kills.

He was here for a blowjob.

My heart was pounding but I would have to get through this somehow. I opened the door. "Hi daddy," I said in my schoolgirl voice that I knew he liked so much.

"Does daddy have a treat for Jewel?" I went on, walking over and snuggling up to him. He put one of his skinny arms around me and smiled, looking down at the erection in his Gucci trousers.

"Come on baby. I need you to do me," he said in a menacing whisper. I suppressed a shudder and bent down, breathing onto the mound in his crotch to warm him up. He began to breathe heavily. "Daddy has a meat lolly for Jewel," I simpered, and cupped my palm around it. "It's so big!"

Then I used my other hand to tease open the fly, tickling him with my jewelled nails. I was breathing hard now too, and it suddenly struck me how much I actually enjoyed doing this, being the submissive little sweet- smelling jewelled plaything of a man who had the power of life over me. That made me think of Bond, and his very tasty cock and I got even more excited. Seems that Commander Pierce had gone AWOL in more senses than just the physical.

I teased his cock free and he moaned as I breathed softly on the tip, where precum was glistening. Then I began to lick the helmet, making little delighted noises which turned him and me on even more. The salt tang of his precum was so delightful that I began to forget who I was and started sucking him in earnest, starting shallow then teasing him deep into my throat without missing a breath. Such a useful talent for a pleasure girl. Oh, how I loved to have a hot cock filling my throat! All that power at the mercy of all the little muscles in my mouth and gullet.

Very soon he was grunting and bucking, mashing my pretty face into his crotch with both hands. I was lost too, my nose buried in his musky place, oh my God he was going to-

A torrent of salty cream hit the back of my throat. I pulled back so that I could taste it all and I kept sucking and sucking until he was spent and empty, and I rolled on my back looking dreamily up at his handsome, lean face. He looked amazed.

"Jewel-chan. That was fucking fantastic," he breathed. "The best time yet. You're so hot, baby, I don't think I'll ever get tired of you."

I smiled up at him, licking the semen off my pretty lips. "Daddy, you never will."

I think it was there, lying contentedly in the lap of a killer, with his spunk still jewelling my chin, that I knew for sure that I would most likely never be a man again. Or should that be, never want to be a man again.

***

to be continued...

Her mission back on track, Jane Masters returns to The House to pursue the downfall of Red Fist. CAUTION: sexual content

CHAPTER THREE: continued

The next day, as was my right, I returned to the Red Fist house on the hill. All the dancers, all the hostesses, all the prostitutes in the town were Red Fist employees. The local economy operated in this way. The town a whore, pimped by the massive criminal brute that was the Red Fist of Justice. No questions were asked. That was how it worked. Who was I to argue? I simply had a job to do. I'd decided the plan as had danced last night, my jewelled body in the lights burning as bright as the thoughts dancing like quicksilver through my head.

I developed the plan in my mind while shaking my breasts and bum at the sweating punters to the pounding music in the small, tacky nightclub with the sticky floors. Hands reached out from the audience to grope me and thrust notes in my waistband and I drifted, working out the mechanics of how I would bring the Red Fist down. I whirled round and round the pole and strode up and down the runway in my silver stilettoes as I worked out how exactly I'd make my way back into the house, the restricted zone, get the mission information back to MI6 in Vauxhall, unlock the secret of room 497 and put an end to Sato. I knew by now that there was little likelihood of escaping alive, although I reckoned that if I managed to get back to town, I might be able to organise something through the vague notion of involving the gangster and/or Shibata. Escape was a secondary consideration to me now, though. The only drive was to complete my mission. No one said anything about getting out alive.

As I danced and polished my plan like the dazzling Jewel I'd become, I began to think that Sato had done me a favour. She was right - the process of torture had stripped away my Self. Washed my identity away like a leaf fallen into a cold, clear stream in a mountain pass. But what was left was not Jewel, airhead shemale whore, as Sato had intended, but something far harder and shinier. Jewel was the chrysalis, a transitional stage that I had inhabited while the metamorphosis initiated by my brutalisation had taken place. I had now emerged from the chrysalis the very essence of a cold, perfect, ruthless super-spy. Pierce was gone - just another identity to be worn then discarded. A mask. Jewel too, a brief pupal half-life. What is revealed when the last mask of humanity is removed? I knew the answer now. The primal, female essence of the killer that I had now become. Faceless, graceful, and quite deadly. I was ready.

The house was before me as the shuttle bus pulled up the hillside path. Alongside me were fellow catsuited young women, pawns in the Red Fist's game. The bus pulled up at the massive iron gates and a laser scanned the identity bar on the windshield. The gates creaked open. It was a hot, clear day, the sky a dazzling azure that blended to a pitiless cobalt blue as it merged with the sea far below us. No wind at all, and humid. The aircon in the bus barely compensating. The bus rumbled up the final switchbacks and I contemplated the house, taking in the layout of the grotesque building, the location of the airstrip cut into the hillside.

Soon the bus pulled into the shade of the carport and the string of girls debarked, me included, blending seamlessly among the crowd of ravishing showgirls - blondes, brunettes, redheads. What was Akaguchi up to, gathering all these Western women around him? And where was Akaguchi himself? Would I get a go at him or had Sato disposed of him already? The nanite transmitter signature in our blood passed us through the security system than we all dispersed our different ways, some giggling and happy, others seemingly thoughful. I made my way quickly up to Habitation 4 and my room.

****

From my room, I called Trish. After a few minutes, she knocked on my door and I let her in. She was wearing a stunning, yellow, off the shoulder asymmetric swimsuit, her straight red hair tied back in a perky ponytail. She grinned as she saw my admiring reaction "Day off," she said.

I sat her down on the bed and knelt down next to her, looking into her eyes. "Look," I said. "I need you to get out of here. It's going to get very dangerous very fast if things go according to plan and I don't want you getting hurt. Not after what you did for me."

Her bottom lip stuck out. "I can look after myself, sugar."

I grasped her hands in mine, looking into her blue eyes. "Please. You don't know what you're mixed up in. Just find a way to get out of here." I stood and walked over to the window, looking out at the bright blue sky. "I dunno - go down to the town - get Shibata to find you passage to the UK. But for my sake, please go. You're my friend Trish. I've lost too many in my life so far."

She looked up at me from the bed. For all her brassy attitude and model looks, she looked very vulnerable at that moment. What was it with me and redheads? First Christine, then bloody Mary Dwyer, now her.

"OK," she said presently, smiling sadly. "For your sake..."

She pursed her lips, reaching into the small blue purse around her shoulder and pulling out a smartcard. "Here," she said, handing it to me. "You might need this." I raised an inquiring eyebrow. "It's the pass key to flight deck 7. Just in case you can fly an aircraft and need to make a fast escape, Ms. Superspy," she said, grinning.

"Thanks," I said, palming the card. "Look, you'd better go."

She got up. "Will you get in touch?" she said softly, putting her hand on my arm. "Y'know, after all this?"

"Of course I will," I said. I didn't want to tell her that I probably wouldn't even survive the day.

"OK honey," she said, leaning in and pecking me on the cheek. She turned to walk away, then paused, looking back at me over her shoulder.

"Will you become a man again?" she asked in a very quiet voice. "Could you?"

I didn't speak for a very long time.

When I answered, my voice was shaking. "I... I can't answer that question... I don't..." I looked down at the ground, unable to go on. Trish walked back over to me, putting her arms around me, hugging me tight.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "It's just that I've never met anyone like you. I fancied you from the moment we first met, but I knew that there was something... different with you from the other girls." She was stroking my back now, and whispering into my ear, "all I'm saying, Jane, is don't worry about what you look like. You'll find someone who'll care for you whoever you seem to be."

I pulled back so that I could look into her face. She looked back, smiling, then leaned her face nearer. I let myself kiss her, and felt myself melting away as her lipstick mingled with mine. Trish started unzipping my catsuit as her lively tongue explored the inside of my mouth.

I stepped out of the catsuit and stood naked except for my thong and my high-heeled sandals as Trish peeled off her swimsuit to reveal her beautiful body. I bent down to unstrap the shoes and she said, "don't - you look kinda sexy like that." I could feel something stirring in my groin and reached eagerly down to pull down my panties, releasing my little cock. Trish sighed with happiness as it popped free, clapping her hands together. "Oh, you are such a treat for a girl who goes both ways!" she breathed, stepping up to me. Her warm hand crept down and started to play with me as our breasts touched. I gasped and closed my eyes as our nipples started to rub together, electric sensation, oh... and I could definitely feel something happening below...

I lay myself back on the bed and arched my back as Trish's talented mouth started to suck and nibble on my erect nipples, which had blown up to the size of jelly beans. Then she moved down and started to nuzzle my pubic area, blowing warm air over my cock, which was continuing to grow as I writhed and fondled my large breasts and teased and tweaked my amazingly sensitive nipples.

I arched my head back like a porno actress and saw us in my dresser mirror, two beautiful women, lithe, tall and big bosomed, intertwined on the bed, sweating in the midday heat, the redhead with her face buried in the blonde's groin, the blonde with her head arched back, eyes half shut, glossy mouth open in an 'O' of ecstasy. The image captivated me and I couldn't tear myself away as Trish sucked my penis deep into her moist mouth and sucked, and teased, and sucked, and nibbled and-

I turned my body around and worked my face down to Trish's warm, musky crotch as she worked my cock and happily buried my nose in the familiar smell of a wet pussy, licking and pulling at her engorged nub. We were so hot... After a very short while, Trish began to scream and buck and soon I felt a glorious warmness spreading from my breasts down to my groin. Here it comes. Here it-

***

Afterwards we lay in each other's arms for a few precious moments, and then I watched as she dressed and left, with a smile and a sad little wave.

I lay there for a while, then got up and looked at myself in the mirror. The familiar, gorgeous, naked blonde smiled back at me, as I bent down to remove my heels. They were killing my feet. I padded into the shower and went over my plan again as the hot water jetted into my pores, massaging my still sensitive nipples.

***

I emerged dripping from the shower and dried off, picking up my catsuit and sandals off the floor and stuffing them in the wardrobe. I drew the blinds and waited for my eyes to acclimatise to the gloom. Then I went over to my desk tablet and after a bit of nosing round the local network, managed to disable the lights and set off an intruder alarm for my room. Quickly, I powered down the tablet and lay down half-in, half-out of the bathroom so that it would look as though I was unconscious or dead when someone came in. I lay there with my eyes half open and breathed shallowly and evenly, waiting.

Not a minute later, I heard someone at the door. It opened and I heard a set of footsteps come in. My visitor tried the light switch with no result, then I heard the footsteps come into the room, then pause. I guess the guard had seen my naked legs projecting from the bathroom doorway.

The footsteps padded right over to me, but I waited and waited. I heard breathing, the rustle of movement. Then a gloved hand on my face.

I snapped my eyes open and exploded off the floor, hitting the guard with the braced heel of my palm to the underside of her jaw as she bent over me. She went over like a shapely sack of spuds. I leapt over her prone body as she struggled to bring her sidearm to bear and landed lightly behind her. Taking her helmeted head from behind in both arms, I twisted and heard the satisfying crack of the neck breaking. She went limp in my arms.

I dragged her over to the tablet and powered it up, pulling her sightless face to the screen. I held her eye open and logged in using her retinal scan. Then I disabled the intruder alert and logged a short error report saying (as the guard) that I had investigated and found nothing unusual.

Turning away from the computer tablet, I quickly stripped the guard of her uniform and put it on myself. Luckily she was quite tall and the neoprene stretched nicely to fit my curves. I tied my long blonde hair up in a bun and concealed it in the bulbous helmet which was loaded with a suite of sensor apparatus. The black gloves and combat boots completed the ensemble. I picked up the flechette gun and checked the load on the digital display mounted above the handgrip. It was full. Good.

A quick recce of the various belt pouches on my black shiny guard's catsuit revealed three more loads of ammo, some computer data slugs, a lipstick (Clinique Berry Buff). I also found three ampoules of clear liquid with tiny bubbles suspended in it, each with a disposable compressed air hypo head. If this was the "access all areas" nanoliquid that had given me entry to the restricted zone previously, then my plan was right on track.

But was I going to chance it? Was I fuck.

I opened the blinds and the door. Blinking in the light, I stepped onto the balcony, looking quickly around. There was quite a lot of activity around the building. Probably too risky to try and dump the guard's body over the balcony into the thick forest below right now. Never mind. I went back in and dragged the corpse under my bed. I wouldn't be around long enough for them to discover it.

Then I went back to the tablet and did a quick search of the personnel records for the location of the working quarters of a certain Irish doctor. A red-headed doctor with whom I had a few words to exchange and who would, I hoped, be the passport to the next phase of my agenda.

****

Dr Mary Dwyer came out of her office on the seventeenth floor in workout clothes, her flaming hair tied back in a loose ponytail. I followed her along the bustling main corridor. There was a small refectory opposite the gymnasium from where I could keep an eye on her. It was awkward because I couldn't, for obvious reasons, remove my helmet so I must have looked rather strange as I sat and quietly sipped some fruit juice through a straw.

She worked out for forty-five minutes then emerged, toweling sweat off her pretty, freckled face. The face I'd made the mistake of trusting. I got up and followed her again as she walked towards the bank of lifts at the end of the floor. As I walked, I got some looks from some of the throng of male technicians on their lunch-breaks. I guess I must have stood out from the other guards a little bit as I was taller and, shall we say, bigger up top than most, and my body must have looked absolutely spectacular in the form fitting black neoprene catsuit.

She got into a lift with some other women and I squeezed in next to her. I could have quite easily killed her there and then.

We alighted on floor 4 and I followed her to her room. She went in and the door clicked shut behind her. I went to the door and listened. After a few seconds, I heard the shower running. To get into the room, I needed to use the dead guard's retinal scan again. You really don't want to know how I accomplished this. It's far too revolting. Let's just say that the key to the door had been in the guard's head and was now squishing about in one of my belt pouches. I unlocked the door. Ugh.

She was in the shower with her back to the door, rinsing soap off her pale, toned body. I'd fancied her, back in that Bicester half-way house. As Anthony Pierce, I'd laid awake fantasising about having her after she'd made me back into a man. I smiled bitterly. No such luck. My train had come so far off the rails that it wasn't even remotely funny. I stepped into the bathroom as she turned the water off.

"Does my bum look big in this?" I said.

She whirled with a little scream.

I raised my gun and motioned for her to be quiet, removing my helmet with my free hand. "Hello Mary," I said, smiling. "We meet again," I went on, slipping into a corny movie villain accent, "but this time, the advantage is mine."

She stood there, covering her rather small breasts and gingery pubes as best she could. "H-how did you get in?" she asked in her Irish lilt.

I shrugged, "Let's just say that I have an eye from a beautiful woman." I gestured with the gun for her to come out into her bedroom. She looked over at her bath towel. I picked it up, but instead of passing it to her, I threw it onto the sodden floor by the shower, where it began to soak up the cooling water. She looked venomously at me then led me out of the bathroom.

I motioned that she should lie face down on the floor with her hands behind her back. I picked up the remote for the roomsystem and turned the aircon right up. "I'm rather warm," I said, "aren't you?"

A cold blast of air hit us and Mary immediately started to shiver, the drops of water on her body evaporating slowly in the icy atmosphere. Goose pimples came up on her back and her teeth started chattering. I sat on the bed next to her prone body and jammed the barrel of the flechette gun into the back of her head. She went rigid.

"This gun fires six kinds of round." I said. "At the moment, it's set to fire normal anti-personnel flechettes. If I pull the trigger, hundreds of tiny explosive darts will emerge at supersonic velocity from the pepperholes in the barrel that's pressed against your skull. Messy, but very effective in close quarters combat. I'm afraid you'd have more than a bad hair day, Mary."

"Wh-what do you want," she said in a ghost of a whisper, through clenched and chattering teeth.

"What's in Room 497?" I asked.

There was a pause.

"I don't know," she replied.

I flicked the arming switch. The gun emitted a chime and clicked and whirred as it loaded rounds into the breech mechanism. I heard her start to sob, quietly. "I hope you're not lying to me, Mary."

"I swear I don't know what's in there. No one's allowed there. I haven't even seen Sato go near there. Please. I don't want to die. I'm telling you the truth. Please, Anthony!"

I stiffened at the mention of that name. I looked down at her shivering, naked body and felt nothing. Aroused neither by the sight of her beautiful curves, nor by the power I had over her.

I felt nothing.

I shrugged and pulled the gun away. She didn't know. I turned the aircon down and opened the windows to let some of the afternoon heat into the room. "Sit up." I said.

She sat, leaning against the bed and wrapping her arms around herself. I sat down next to her. "Why, Mary?"

She sniffed, rubbing her tears away with the back of one hand. "It's very complicated," she said, voice barely above a whisper. I was silent and she took a deep shuddering breath before going on. "It's my father. He was in the Service all his life. He was pretty mixed up, I suppose. A Catholic from Derry, the Bogside. He grew up during The Troubles but married an English girl, joined Her Majesty's Service. What a mess of confusion for a boy from the bogs..."

She stopped for a while, looking out at the blue sky.

"He was one of the first into Baghdad during the first Gulf conflict back in the nineties. I was four, almost five and my mammy wouldn't tell me where my da was. But he was part of a covert cell in Saddam's fortress city sending back targeting telemetry for the cruise attacks. That was where he and his group were infected by a retrovirus. No one knew whether it was one of ours or one of theirs. But I don't think that Iraq had bioweaponry back then. He started to develop symptoms of a progressive degenerative disease ten years later. I was already working for the Service while working on my doctorate and I watched him turning into a living corpse before my eyes. Ma went off the rails. She left us. I tried to get compensation but the government wouldn't listen. Terrible thing was he was locked away in there. I could see the pain in his eyes. But the body had become a useless instrument. I was working for the government bastards that had put my father into this state and then turned their back.

"Then I started hearing about the studies that Professor Lime was doing in Cambridge. Especially the way that he was using nanite systems to create control links between the brain and prosthetic organs. How he'd enabled blind animals to "see", amputees to control limbs. NanoCybernetics. I began to think that perhaps such therapy could be designed that would unlock my father's torment. I tried to contact Lime but he'd disappeared. Defected to the Red Fist. With you. How fucking ironic...

"Soon after that I heard from The Fist. They convinced me that they had made significant advances in Lime's techniques since his defection. In return for working as their mole in the service, they'd treat my father. Give him back his dignity. Of course I agreed. Your reinsertion just happened to coincide with all this. Obviously, I had to let the Fist know about you."

She turned her head to look at me. "I'm sorry," she said softly, putting her warm hand on my thigh. I pulled away.

"What do they want with me? Why go to all this trouble?" I asked.

"I don't know, Anthony. Do you really think that they tell me anything? To be honest, I think it's just that psycho Sato getting her sadistic jollies. You're right about Room 497 though. That's where the solution is. I've thought about it a lot. But nothing makes sense."

"You can say that again," I said sarcastically.

"Do you know what the most ironic thing is?" she said, her voice trembling. More tears were coming to her green eyes. " My father died a week after I arrived in Japan. It was all for nothing. Nothing." Her head fell and she shook with the force of her tears.

I stood and watched her, feeling angry and cold. She recovered a bit and looked up at me. "I fell in love with you," she said. "Even as we were changing you into Jane Masters, as you became this smooth, unmasculine thing, I used to fantasise about us together. I fell in love with the man inside the woman. Anthony, I-"

"Shut up. Don't. Don't do this. It's not right." I didn't know what I felt now. Suddenly I realised I was crying. I raised my gun.

She looked up again. "Are you going to kill me?" she said in a very quiet voice. "I-I don't want to die. But it would be the right thing. I know. Are you going to kill me?" she repeated.

My hand was shaking. "Everyone dies today," I said softly. "But not yet."

***

to be continued

Masters' mission nears its conclusion as she penetrates the security surrounding Room 497. But Sato has a final surprise up her sleeve. Who lives and who dies...?

CHAPTER THREE: continued

As we walked the corridor towards the restricted area, Mary confirmed to me that the ampoules in my belt pouch contained the colloidal nanoliquid that allowed access to the forbidden zone. "Each dose lasts 24 hours," she said.

"You better be right about this," I replied, injecting myself in the neck. "You're going to be right with me so it's slice and dice for the both of us if you're playing games." She nodded, her face pale but set.

Soon, we were at the entrance to the restricted area. "How many will be in the control room?" I asked in a low voice. Mary shrugged. "Three, four technical staff at most. No guards usually." I nodded, drawing my gun. I peered into the red lit corridor with the door at the end leading into the control area. Where everything had come unravelled.

I indicated to Mary that she should go ahead of me and we entered the corridor. At the door, she showed her eye to the retinal scanner and it opened up.

Inside, the room looked very different. It was brightly lit and a lot of the clutter seemed to have been cleared away since the first time I'd been in here. There were several geeks in the room and they looked up and gawped at me but soon went back to their work when they saw Mary. I sat down at a console away from the others and motioned for her to sit down next to me.

Opening a text editor window, I typed, "I DON'T WANT TO KILL THESE MEN. WHAT ARE THEY DOING IN HERE?" Mary leaned over and typed in reply, "PROBABLY PLAYING SECOND LIFE OR SOMETHING. I'LL GET RID OF THEM IF YOU WANT." I looked at her quizzically as she keyed some commands into the terminal. Over on the other side of the room, I heard a pager bleep. One of the technicians got up, looking at his PDA. He said something quietly to his nearest colleague and they both left the room. I leaned over, blocking her from the keyboard. "THEY'D BETTER NOT BE GETTING HELP OR YOU'RE DEAD!!" I actually typed two exclamation marks.

Mary shrugged. "THEY'RE NOT," she typed, issuing another set of commands. This time, the pager command got rid of the remaining three techs.

I quickly got up and looked round the corner to make sure they were gone, then went back to Mary. "Do you want to be tied up or shall I stun you?" I asked. She shrugged again, her eyes blank. I couldn't read her at all. She had either given up or she was up to something. I found some lengths of networking cable and quickly and securely tied her to one of the chairs, gagging her with a piece of her clothing stuffed in her mouth.

Then I quickly stripped off the guard uniform and helmet, untying my hair. Underneath, I was wearing a very brief white Gucci bikini with gold chain links that looked sensational against my deep tan. I rummaged in the beach bag I had retrieved from my room and got a pair of gold wedge mules and slipped them on. Very quickly, I freshened and tarted up my make-up. If all went to plan, Jewel was going to be walking out of here very much alive along the winding beach path. As I liberally applied gloss to my plump lips, I caught Mary's eyes on me and looked away quickly.

When I was happy with my appearance, I sat down at the terminal and got to work. First of all, I called up the video netstation server and opened up several security camera feeds as windows on my screen. One for the corridor outside this room, one more for the three banks of lift doors on this floor. I was also curious about Sato so I managed to locate a feed from outside her office on the schematic. Finally, the front entrance of the building so I could monitor arrivals and departures. I lined the camera windows up on the top half of the screen so I could scan them quickly every now and then.

I had decided while formulating this plan (which was going to the letter so far) that I could not afford to spend a long time rooting around the network this time round. The most important thing was that Vauxhall got access to some data to analyse. What I did was this. I knew the layout of the security firewall around the Fist's core systems pretty well from my previous visits. It was actually quite simple to add a small range of machines in Vauxhall to the inside of the Red Fist firewall. It was actually eight PCs in my cryptology lab back there. Once that was done, I popped a short encrypted message onto one of my colleagues' desktops back in Vauxhall and closed the session. The message read, "I've left the window open. Don't forget to shut it when you leave."

My deputy, Needham, would pick up this message and, having traced it back to here, suddenly realize that the whole Red Fist network was available to them at the highest security level. I hoped that this would give them enough information to start to bring this organisation down. If they closed the hole quickly enough, no one would even know that the breach had occurred. I could picture Needham now, coffee in hand, cigarette in mouth, looking gobsmacked at what I'd done. Mind you, he'd be pretty surprised by how I looked as well...

I hoped he would realise that my message also meant that the MI6 network was wide open to Red Fist as well. The only difference was that the Fist didn't know it. It was a calculated risk but Needham was a good man. Thorough. He'd know what was going on. Once he'd taken a snapshot of the data, he'd close the loophole.

I got up and walked over to the connecting door to the corridor that led to Room 497. I remembered the sense of foreboding I'd felt before and my heart started to pound. Steeling myself, I looked through. The corridor was brightly lit. At the end, the door to room 497. The room itself was in darkness. No repeat of the eerie blue light spilling through the window. I realised I was holding my breath. I exhaled.

I went back to the console to check the CCTV feeds. My mouth dropped at what I saw. The spiky hair and tall frame was unmistakable. As was the trademark black suit and the shades pushed on top of the hair. My heart began to pound with a chaotic mixture of fear and excitement. My gangster was walking down the corridor towards this room, carrying a large black suitcase in his hand.

I had a split second to decide what to do. Quickly, I opened the door of a storage cupboard in the far wall and untied Mary, bundling her into it. I followed, easing the door shut behind me, making sure that she could see my gun clearly, just in case she decided to try anything. Through slats in the door, we could both see what was going on in the room outside.

A few seconds passed, then the gangster entered the room. He looked around, then locked the door behind him. My heart fluttered with excitement on seeing him, but I tried to stay calm, collecting myself by breathing evenly. Behind me, I felt Mary shift and I turned my head to shoot her a warning glare. Then I turned back.

Fortunately, the gangster had put his case down away from the console I'd been using. I couldn't remember if I'd shut things down properly. What was he up to? He had opened the case up and was rummaging in it. Then he began to undress, hanging his suit neatly on a hanger that he got out of the suitcase. He then unbuttoned his black silk shirt, removed his sunglasses from his head, and finally removed his socks and boxers, fully revealing his beautiful, toned butt. Turn around... I thought to myself, becoming aroused despite myself, that familiar, lovely warm feeling coursing through my groin and breasts at the thought of that luscious cock between my velvety lips. I squirmed, trying to put the thoughts out of my head.

He folded all his clothes neatly and then sat down. I got a good glimpse of his cock from the side then, and smiled.

Now I could see not that the inside of the lid of the case was a mirror, with lights around it. Like a make-up mirror. And he was starting to put foundation on his face, with deft, practised strokes. What the...?

Then I started to notice other strange things. How hairless his legs were. And not just his legs - the armpits too and the rest of his muscular, lean body. He had no body hair at all, except above his semi-erect penis. And that was neatly shaved into a small, feminine triangle. And his toenails were painted a bright red. I was standing there mouth agape and almost let the door to my hiding place creak open, I was utterly stunned. He was a transvestite.

Like me, I thought, ruefully as I watched him finish applying his foundation. He then reached into the suitcase and got out a pair of flesh coloured breastforms, which he glued onto his chest and held there for several seconds. He then started to blend some thick-looking make-up around the edges of the breasts and over his upper torso and neck, blending the tone in with the foundation on his face. Soon, there was very little to show that the breasts were not part of his natural anatomy. He admired them in the mirror, striking glamour girl poses. Jesus, he was really getting off on this. His cock was now fully erect. I was getting pretty hot too, watching him, as he got a beautiful black, boned silk bustier out of his case and slipped himself sensuously into it. The wired lace cups pushed the false breasts up and together, giving him a spectacular cleavage. He looked in total ecstasy as he adjusted the cups and fondled himself. My God. This reverse striptease was turning me on totally. I felt like I was going to burst!

The bustier had six suspender straps hanging down, and next he got a pair of sheer, black, seamed stockings out of the case and rolled them up his lovely, smooth, toned legs till they were encased in black gossamer, fastening the clips deftly. He then set to applying the rest of his makeup. First the eyes, dusky, black and dramatic, in stark contrast to the porcelain paleness of his flawless skin. Just a hint of blusher on the cheeks, then the lips, full, red and glossy, set in a familiar, loathed permanent half-smile...

Oh, now I know you...

As he set to gluing the long, clear false nails on his hand and painting them a matching red, I felt a tremendous mixture of desire, anger, confusion and anxiety well up inside me. This beguiling creature with the spiky, punky hair and the angelic face set on the long, athletic body had ensnared me, tortured me, seduced and enslaved me. First as a woman, then as a man. Finally as this half man, half woman chimera.

Sato stood and stretched, luxuriating in his divine, his devilish beauty.

"Turn around," I said in a shaky, small voice, gun raised, emerging from my closet.

Sato raised his head, then turned slowly, letting his long, black wig drop >from his hands. "Well, well," he purred in his low, male gangster's voice. I shuddered, hearing that voice come from those luscious red lips. "If it isn't Little Red Riding Hood..." The cruel smile was there again after the momentary surprise that had crossed his face. He had now slipped on a pair of spike-heeled black leather ankle boots and had a black leather catsuit in his hands as he advanced towards me.

"S-stay there," I said, unable to keep my hands from shaking on the barrel of the gun, or my eyes from wandering down to that erect cock nestling shockingly amidst all the alluring female signs of his costume.

"What's the matter, my little Jewel?" he went on. "Not so keen on another man muscling in on your territory? You're not the only one who can play girls' games." But he stayed still, keeping one eye on my gun. I was careful to keep my distance. "How about one for old times?" he whispered, nodding down at his cock. "Come on, Jewel-chan. Daddy wants some pleasure..." The words sounded obscene coming from his pretty red lips.

"Shut up." I said, cocking the gun, which emitted its beep and whine. Indicators lit up along the barrel indicating it was fully primed. "I ought to kill you now."

"Yes," said Sato, sneering as he slipped into the black bodysuit, which squeaked and stretched tofit his form perfectly, except for that incongruous bump in his groin. "You ought to. But you've become a weak woman, Commander Pierce. Look at you, in your little white fuck me swimsuit and your fuck me sandals with your fuck me tan and your fuck me blonde bimbo curls. All you're good for is sucking cock and being punished. I'm a survivor. Don't forget that. I survive and escape, just like I escaped from the Aum-Shinri-Kyo dressed as a girl when the police raided us fifteen years ago. A survivor. Not like you, you little victim. I bet Bond likes having you around as his doormat. Does he tell you that you're good? He says that to all his bitches. But they never stick around somehow. Tomorrow, when he finds out about your death, you'll be just another notch in that Aston Martin gearstick. Used, discarded, forgotten. A pathetic shemale whore impaled on His Majesty's S-"

"SHUT UP!!" I said again. In a red mist, I began to squeeze the trigger.

Suddenly, I noticed movement behind me. Mary had emerged from the closet and was leaning over a computer console stabbing commands into the keyboard. I whirled the gun and she looked up. She still had her gag in her mouth. For a moment her eyes locked on mine, wide in mute fear, then in resignation.

I pulled the trigger.

There was a hissing report as a payload of flechettes left the barrel, then Mary's head exploded, projecting its own red, sticky payload over the wall and computer console. I watched as her headless body crumpled, ever so slowly, and collapsed to the floor.

I heard Sato's voice say, "Oh well done," right behind me and I turned instinctively to block his fist with my wrist. My gun went clattering off somewhere behind. Sato pressed his attack, fists flying. His karate style was Shotokan, pure - deadly but possible to predict - if you were fast enough. I blocked and blocked but could gain no advantage and was soon pressed back against the row of consoles. Sato leapt gracefully up above me onto the bank of desks and brought his right foot up in a high, straight-leg kick, the arms wide in the winter crane form. I anticipated and let my body go soft as the kick connected with my chin, using the momentum to flip myself back and up to join Sato on the desking.

For a second, we faced each other. Then I noticed him lose focus slightly and realised he was looking to the connecting door. At that moment I attacked, pushing him back with a fierce series of punches and kicks until he was teetering on the edge of the table, blocking me whist maintaining balance with the soles of his spike heels, which projected over the edge. Incredible strength and balance.

Finally, a side-foot trip overbalanced him and he fell, cursing, to the floor, a lithe creature of leather and spikes brought down. Without waiting, I leapt sideways over the bank of computers to where my gun had fallen, landing and scooping the weapon up, snapping it up and about only to see Sato disappearing down the corridor that led to room 497. Gasping with rage and excitement, I gave chase, wrenching the door open and launching a volley of shots after him. He dropped to the floor, phenomenal reactions, and they detonated noisily on the door to room 497. Suddenly I felt a wrench in my head and saw that the blue light was back, pulsing quietly in the window.

Sato scrambled to his feet and reached the door, opening it by punching a command sequence on the security panel. He went through and the door started to close. With a yell, I sprinted down the corridor, dropping the gun as I scrambled through the dwindling gap.

I smelt the zing of ozone and was enveloped in the tranquil pulse of the blue light.

"AH, MISS JANE!" boomed a voice that seemed to resonate from all about me, "WE WERE WONDERING WHEN THE NEXT LESSON WOULD BE." I looked up and around. I was in room 497. And I knew then that the world was insane and it was beyond saving.

The end of CHAPTER THREE
Jane Masters will return in CHAPTER FOUR

"Within the hillside, The Red Fist of Justice had created something..." The plot is finally revealed as Jane learns the hideous secret of Room 497.

CHAPTER 4: Tsuruga, Fukui Pref., Japan... Red Fist of Justice Complex ("The House")... and Kamchatka, Eastern Siberia

"THE PROBLEM IS," said the voice, "YOU HAVE NO FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR THIS EXPERIENCE, DO YOU?"

"No," I replied. "It's just that this is so insane that I can't fucking believe any of it."

***

I was still sitting on the floor.

I was sitting on the floor of an enormous, natural cavern, within the hillside.

Within the hillside, The Red Fist of Justice had created something.

***

The fabric of the rock surrounding me had been interlaced with circuitry. The cavern had been converted into a huge computer. It was, to borrow a cliche, as if the circuitry in the walls had somehow been "grown" rather than built. But that was impossible, surely?

I'd been in Westminster Abbey a couple of times. This space felt as big as that. All over the rock walls was a delicate tracery of integrated circuitry. In certain areas, the filigree was concentrated into nodes of greater complexity, like ganglia, which glowed a brighter blue. The circuitry disappeared into the distance and into the vaulted ceiling above me. It pulsed softly in the floor beneath me. The gentle, blue light made me feel sick, powerless. It was as though it was inside my head. I remembered the first time I had experienced the blue glow and trembled.

I'd learnt during my degree that it was theoretically possible to build an AI large enough to simulate all the synaptic junctions of the human brain. That in the end, we were after all reducible to the level of machinery.

I'd believed then that it would be insane to even attempt such an enterprise.

I looked down at my hands, on which I leant my weight. I noticed that one of my prettily buffed and painted nails was broken. The gentle blue pulse of the integrated circuitry surged around my fingers. The cavern was alive with the pulse of intelligence. I looked up. I was terribly afraid.

The weirdest thing was that my gun had fallen right by my hand, but I found it impossible to bring myself to grab it or do anything except just look dumbly at it lying on the floor. Something had my mind in a vice like grip. I realised that every time I'd been near this part of the House, my thoughts hadn't entirely been mine. Perhaps that explained my inability to act decisively earlier as Sato had first revealed himself in the anteroom.

Sato was standing to my right, that hateful smile on his pretty face. I looked past his leather-clad legs to where the blue light was most concentrated.

In the haze, I could make out two small figures. The twins. They moved out of the miasma towards me and my heart jolted as I recalled my desire to take them away from here. I knew too well now how false those wishes had been.

I felt an uncomfortable itch in the back of my head as the boys opened their mouths to speak. The voice, with its curious multiple timbre, made my teeth jar as the boys walked forward. Inexplicably, my mouth filled with the sharp tang of battery acid.

The boys said, "HELLO, COMMANDER PIERCE. WE ARE AKAGUCHI. WE ARE THE RED FIST OF JUSTICE." Smiling, they put their small arms under my shoulders, raised me up. Together, we walked forward into the light.

***

The blue glow enveloped me.

As my eyes acclimatised, I could see that we were in an alcove in the cavern wall, about the size of my bedroom in the House. The blue glow was so intense that I could hardly keep my eyes open. An intense electrical buzz filled the inside of my brain in time with the pulsing of the blue light. I felt sick. Dizzy.

The boys stepped away.

I looked up. In front of me was a shape. I squinted to try and cut out the blue glare that was emanating from it.

It was a large, cylindrical tank, about twice my height and the width of two telephone boxes. It was filled with a viscous blue liquid. The whole thing was so blue that I felt my mind caving in from the intensity of the colour.

In the middle of the blue tank floated a figure. A slight, nondescript looking, Japanese man with a wispy beard and long hair, which floated around his serene face like a halo. He was totally naked. His body was impaled by electrical cables, which penetrated all parts of his body and face. His eyes were open, but unseeing. Pale, faintly luminous globes. Frightening in their blankness. The boys were standing to either side of the tank, looking expectantly up at me.

"Akaguchi," I breathed.

The boys smiled, in unison. They spoke, but I knew that the voice really came from the figure in the tank.

"YES. WE ARE AKAGUCHI."

Suddenly, I felt absurd, standing in my skimpy bikini. I wrapped my arms around my chest.

How ironic. In the kind of superspy moment that hardly ever happens, I was playing the wrong part. The dolly bird. I turned and saw Sato behind me, that faint smile on his face, as ever. I wanted to hit him, but I couldn't move a muscle. Everything was screwed up.

I swallowed and tried to focus my thoughts.

"This AI..." I said slowly. "You've dispersed your consciousness into a computer."

The boys nodded.

"Why?" I whispered.

The hollow chorus of a voice rang out again, shaking me to my bones.

"WE WERE DYING. CANCERS CAUSED BY MUTAGENS RELEASED BY CIA IRREGULARS DURING THE KOREAN 3-DAY CONFLICT OF 2010. 1KM AIRBURST OVER THE VILLAGE IN WHICH WE HAD SETTLED OUR JRA CELL..."

The voice paused. Sato had come to stand beside me as the Akaguchi went on.

"WE RETURNED TO JAPAN AND FOUNDED THIS ENCLAVE WITH OUR LOVER, BEAUTIFUL SATO. ALL WAS WONDERFUL... WE BROUGHT THE POWER AND PRINCIPLE OF ANARCHY TO A LAWLESS PART OF JAPAN. WE MADE OUR PLANS. WE PREPARED TO DIE, TO BEQUEATH OUR LEGACY TO SATO. OUR CANCER WAS UNTREATABLE. MULTIPLE METASTATIC SECONDARIES. SATO HELPED US CLONE THE TWINS. HIS IDEA, TO PERPETUATE US. BUT THE TRANSFERAL OF OUR CONSCIOUSNESS WAS NOT PLANNED. NOT THEN..."

Again, Akaguchi paused. Sato had moved to the tank, and had taken the boys' hands. He was looking at the wasted figure of his lover with the tenderest expression I'd seen on his cruel face. The lights flared again and I winced.

"THEN, WE HEARD ABOUT YOUR SCIENTIST, LIME. WE HYPOTHESISED A WAY IN WHICH WE COULD PERPETUATE NOT JUST OUR PHYSICAL BUT OUR SPIRITUAL SELF, USING HIS KNOWLEDGE OF MOLECULAR MECHANICS AND BIOMACHINERY. ACQUISITION OF LIME AND HIS KNOWLEDGE BECAME OVERRIDING PRIORITY. YOU DELIVERED HIM TO US. OUR THANKS, PRETTY AGENT PIERCE."

"AFTER YOUR ESCAPE, LIME WAS ABLE TO ASSIST US. HIS NANOMACHINES BUILT THIS COMPUTER. THE NANITES MAINTAIN A MOLECULAR LEVEL PSEUDO-PSIONIC LINK BETWEEN OUR BRAIN AND THE CIRCUITRY. WITH OUR CLONE BODIES TOO."

The boys gestured to themselves.

"SOON WE WILL BE ABLE TO VACATE DYING BODY AND ENTER NEW VESSELS. ALL THE FEMALE RECRUITS TO THE FIST, INCLUDING YOURSELF, ARE NOW INFECTED WITH THE PSEUDO-PSI LINKS IN THE FORM OF A SEXUALLY TRANSMISSIBLE VIRUS, WHICH WILL ENABLE US TO EXCERSISE TOTAL CONTROL OVER YOU. ALL MEN YOU SLEEP WITH, ALL THEIR LOVERS, SOON, ALL HUMANITY, WILL BE OURS TO CONTROL."

"I don't believe it." I whispered.

I heard Sato at my side. "Why do you think this room hurts your brain so much? The nanite virus is already converting your mind into a remote node for the master to manipulate. Soon, you'll have no free will left. The same with all the men and women who work here."

Sato put his hand on my arm. I flinched. "Why," he went on, do you think we hired the most beautiful women in the world to work here? When they go out to spread our seed in the world, no one will resist. Our projections suggest that we'll have control of the whole world within three months."

"THREE MONTHS," said the voice of Akaguchi, from the mouths of the twins, and from all round me. I felt the loss of self starting from deep within my mind, and bit my lip.

"WE ARE BECOMING THE FUTURE OF THE EARTH. EVERY HUMAN WILL BE AKAGUCHI."

"What you say is impossible," I said. "It's insane. I don't believe it."

"NO," said Akaguchi, chuckling softly. The sound was like ice crystals shattering in my mind. "WE ARE INSANE. BUT THE PLAN IS NOT INSANE."

"I don't believe it," I repeated.

"Believe it," said a quiet, ragged, weary voice from my right. I turned slowly.

Someone I hadn't noticed before was watching me from the darkened part of the wall on my right. The gaunt face and shaved skull didn't prevent me from recognizing the wasted figure of Professor Adrian Lime.

***

Apart from his face, Lime was barely recognizable. His torso and head projected from the mass of circuitry embedded in the wall. It was difficult to see whether the rest of his body still existed or not. His shaven head was studded with cables and tubing through which pinkly glowing liquids and electrical signals pulsed and throbbed.

His arms disappeared into a mass of tangled circuits, which seemed to grow straight from the bone and muscle.

Most horrifying, a row of four pairs of small breasts had grown on his chest, with engorged nipples upon which suction cups and tubes were attached. Glowing colourless fluid leached constantly from his new mammaries into the tubes, to be collected out of sight in the walls.

"Oh, Lime..." I whispered.

Incredibly, he smiled. "The cash cow," he whispered, before wincing in pain.

"LIME IS OUR SANTA CLAUS MACHINE," said Akaguchi.

I blinked. "What?"

"What he means," whispered Lime through gritted teeth, "is that... I can bring him anything he asks for. When he captured me, he did a very clever thing... Instead... of going to the effort of having me constantly work on solutions for him under duress, he made me do one thing only... develop a nanite serum that would turn me... into a nanite factory. A molecular machine that could produce any nano-solution he wanted..."

"From there to here," he looked around the cavern, "was a short step. It's quite brilliant. In less than a year... I've become... the mother and father of a whole family of new technologies. And the means of production..." his quiet voice and patient eyes were suffused with an unknowable pain.

I found that I was sitting down again. It was brilliant. Akaguchi had won...

Or had he?

"So," I said quietly, "Lime can produce any nanite serum to order?"

"YES."

"Even to make me into a man again?"

"OF COURSE. IS THAT WHAT YOU DESIRE, LITTLE JEWEL?"

"It'll hurt," said Lime.

"It's what I want. You've beaten me, Akaguchi. Please let me lose the battle as Anthony Pierce. Not as," I gestured at my bikini-clad body, "this."

There was a pause. I was conscious of Sato's eyes on me. But he made no move to intervene.

"VERY WELL."

Lime looked up at me, pain in his eyes. "The top left nipple", he whispered, grimacing.

I stepped forward till I was a few inches from Lime's face. His blue eyes were fixed on mine. The blue itch in my mind was almost unbearable. It was almost like a voice. I reached up to pull the tube from the swollen nipple. It came away with a quiet pop. A few drops of colourless liquid collected at the tip of the erect nipple.

Then I realised that there was a very faint voice in my head, like the whisper of a dying man lying at the bottom of a deep well...

"Not... man...... change... serum... sorry." Lime's eyes pleaded with mine. It was his voice, in my head. "Aka... guchi.... virus.... antidote... get back... to west... inoculate...." he tailed off.

I nodded, then glanced up at the cables and nutrient pipes in his body. I raised an eyebrow. Imperceptibly, Lime nodded. "do.... it...." his voice scratched in my head, "so... tired..."

I bent to suck at Lime's engorged nipple. Lime gasped. As I swallowed the tasteless fluid, I felt the blue light fade from my mind. I could move and think, quite clearly.

I reached up and grasped a handful of cables from Lime and wrenched them out. Sparks flew across the cavern wall as microcircuitry fused and shorted.

Lime gave a deep sigh and closed his eyes.

"WHAT IS HAPPENING?? STOP NOW!!!" screamed Akaguchi.

A bank of circuitry next to his tank blew and knocked Sato to the floor. Before he could rise, I turned and kicked him in the ribs and ran out of the alcove.

The gun was still on the floor where I had left it. I rolled and scooped it up, before turning and firing a volley at the tank.

A row of holes appeared in the glass.

The twins screamed. Their own, shrill voices.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the twins dropped to the floor, lifeless, like a couple of puppets whose strings had been severed.

A hideous moaning filled the air. Akaguchi was screaming now too, as a tracery of fine cracks appeared in the walls of his tank.

The glass bowed outwards, as if in slow motion.

Then with an explosive crack, it shattered.

The blue suspension fluid flooded into the cavern. There was a shower of sparks and all of the lights went out.

The moaning stopped, abruptly.

Illuminated by the flickering orange light from the burning circuitry, I could just see the still body of Akaguchi, bloody in the debris of his tank, the small shapes of the twins, his future vessels, lying next to him.

I don't know why, but I pointed the gun at him. I was weeping, uncontrollably. I could feel the dull thump of explosions going off in the rest of the complex as the House's control systems gave in without the moderating influence of Akaguchi in his cavern. I went to check the little bodies of the two boys for a pulse. They were quite dead.

Then suddenly I heard running footsteps and saw the door to the far end of the cavern slamming shut.

Sato.

***

I ran out of Room 497 to see Sato disappearing around the corner.

Out in the main corridor, there were frightened figures milling about as the complex began to shake itself to pieces. Sato was agonizingly out of reach and I didn't want to shoot as I would have killed a lot of people in the busy passageway.

I chased him up two flights of emergency stairs and almost stopped him as a deep rumble shook the stairwell and he staggered back on his heels. With a snarl, he lashed out with his booted foot and almost connected as I swayed back to avoid him. I half lost my footing and he got away again and I saw his lithe, catsuited form disappearing into the connecting door to the main Level 7 corridor.

I sprinted up the remaining stairs and yanked open the door, looking to either side to try and locate my quarry in the press of white coats and catsuits. No sign. Stay calm. Think.

Level 7.

Airstrip.

Feeling in my bikini cup to retrieve the smartcard that Trish had given me, I sprinted down the passage towards the hangar deck, shoving bodies aside.

***

At the door to the flight deck, I paused to check my gun. I was again acutely aware that I was dressed in a skimpy Gucci swimsuit and tarty make-up and nothing else.

Taking a breath, I swiped the card in the doorsystem and pushed it open. I passed though a deserted anteroom with changing facilities and a row of flight suits hanging on hooks on the wall. No sign of Sato. I pushed open the connecting door to the main hangar.

I saw him immediately. He was taxiing one of two variable geometry DornierSystem jump jets towards the open hangar doors. His canopy was still open and he was about to put his flight helmet over his spiky black hair. His cockpit canopy started to fold shut as the jet taxied towards the exit, its airfoils sliding into STOL configuration.

"SATO!!!!" I shouted, unleashing a volley of flechettes. He turned just as the canopy closed. The darts detonated against the bulletproof glass and I caught a faint smile tracing across his lipsticked mouth.

"SHIT!" My shout echoed across the deserted flight deck. I turned and legged it back to the locker room and yanked down a flight suit, pulling myself into it. Behind me, I heard a roar as Sato's jet took off. I turned round to see it disappearing into the early evening sky.

Grabbing a helmet, I ran back into the hangar towards the second jump jet. All the other aircraft had evac'd the hangar already. There was a shout to my left and I turned to see another pilot coming out of the men's toilet and running towards me.

"Fuck off!" I yelled, pointing my gun at him. He ducked back into the toilet.

The canopy of the jet was invitingly open, I leapt up the recessed footholds in the black hull and sat myself back in the crash harness, snapping the webbing shut over my snug fitting bodysuit. Luckily, the pilot must have been caught short after performing his preflight checks, so I was able to taxi out and start the launch sequence immediately. I must have been barely thirty seconds behind Sato.

The thrusters fired and I was creamed back into the G-harness as my canopy snapped shut over my head.

The small, black, bug-like jump-jet leapt out of the hangar onto the short airstrip ramp and shot into the orange sky. I activated the pursuit guidance system and picked up Sato's trajectory. I punched a sequence into the computer. The air around the jet gave way with a crack as I thumbed the burners and left the exploding Red Fist House far behind me.

to be concluded...

CONCLUDING INSTALMENT: A final confrontation between Masters and Sato at the top of the world. This is how it ends...

CHAPTER FOUR continued...

I managed to plot a direct course that cut off the wide loop he was performing and made visual contact with his craft after a minute or so flight time.

Our course was taking us out over the Sea of Japan. He'd be heading for one of the Red Fist strongholds in Siberia, but the course would take us through the neutral Aleutian Free State. I had to try and bring him down there. I did a quick check on the weapons manifest and confirmed that the jet had no weapons on board. I guessed that Sato's craft was unarmed too or he would have engaged me by now. We were pulling over Mach 2 in ground effect mode - bouncing about at twice the speed of sound practically on top of the waves - and I was calculating that we'd be making landfall over Kamchatka in a few minutes. I started planning a shutdown sequence, programming it into the avionics computer while maintaining pursuit distance.

Soon, I saw approaching land. Pulling back incrementally on the stick to try and gain altitude without alerting Sato, I adjusted the variable geometry of the airframe to increase lift. I felt the plane's flexible panels shift around me as it assumed its new shape and it leapt 500 metres into the air. I noticed Sato gaining height to try and match my altitude - perhaps he suspected something. Then I triggered the shutdown sequence. All the major systems went down one by one and the plane started dropping again into a controlled glide pattern. The final command in the sequence initiated a massive undirected electromagnetic pulse. I was struggling to keep her under control but could still see various electrics on Sato's plane below me sparking as they gave up under the effects of the EMP. His running lights went out and, still in high velocity configuration, Sato's aircraft dropped beneath me like a stone into a still pond.

I watched it for a while but had more worries of my own. If I didn't manage to power my jet up soon, I'd be smeared all over the ground alongside him. I wrestled with the stick to try and keep her level while I reactivated the systems one by one. With a hum of power the avionics came back on-line and they in turn reinitiated the engines. The aircraft kicked forward and started gaining height. I allowed myself a small smile.

I returned to level flight then turned to trace Sato's descent trajectory, which the computer told me had been taking him towards the icy Arctic north of the archipelago. I found the plane fairly quickly. It was beached at the end of a huge scythe of ploughed snow at the sea's edge of an icebound coastal plain. Amazing. He'd been lucky, or a genius flyer (or both). The plane looked intact. Seemed that Sato had managed to crash-land it. I did a quick circuit of the crash site then executed a swift VTOL descent a hundred yards from the downed jet, powering down the systems and unhooking myself from the crash webbing.

The environment systems in my flight suit detected the extreme cold when I opened the canopy and kicked in, pumping heated liquid through itself. I raised my handgun and was about to exit the jump jet when a thought occurred to me and I punched a series of instructions into the flight computer. I jumped down beside the cooling airframe and paused to look around the bleak landscape.

It was snowing lightly. The featureless white beach stretched inland for miles before blending into a distant and jagged ridge of mountains to the west. A dead-looking orange sun was low over the tombstone peaks. The icy slate grey sea lapped at the rocky fringe of the beach two hundred yards to my right. Even inside the environment suit, it was blisteringly cold. Up the bay was Sato's aircraft.

I had to make sure that he was dead.

I exhaled a plume of white breath and set off up the beach. As I approached the plane, I could see it was hardly damaged. The cockpit canopy was burst open and I could see footsteps in the snow leading away from the fuselage. They ended about fifty yards away in a snow-covered bundle. A gloved hand poked from the snow and I could see the tatters of a flight suit in there as I walked towards it, gun raised.

I reached down and brushed the snow away from the body. Suddenly, I realized that something was wrong. The environment suit was empty, just draped over a roughly body-shaped heap of snow and rock. I began to turn my head-

Suddenly the side of my chest exploded in agony as a boot connected with my still tender ribs. I fell awkwardly on the pile of rock and my weapon flew out of my hand, clattering down five yards away. I twisted and rose quickly to face Sato. Having discarded his environment suit, he was dressed only in his leather catsuit, which was torn across his chest and torso revealing the shreds of his silk bustier. One of his false breasts had come unglued and was flapping by his side. His spiky black hair was disheveled but save for a bloody bruise on his left cheek, his make-up was still perfect. Damn, how did he manage that? He must have been freezing, but he still had that faint, cruel smile playing on his pretty red lips. "Never turn your back," he said quietly, dropping into a fighting stance.

His eyes glanced down at my gun to his left and I used that moment to attack, turning my forward momentum into a series of punches and kicks. Sato blocked them easily and riposted with a series of flying fist attacks, which I struggled to master. I noticed again his pure Shotokan style, which contrasted with my rather uglier hybrid style. I gained the upper hand again when a rabbit punch connected with his side and I pressed, trying to drive us towards the weapon. He did an outrageous sideways flip and wound up on top of the mound of rocks to evade me, breathing heavily. We paused for a second, then engaged again. I was getting nearer the gun and this time I allowed Sato to drive me backwards with a series of balletic kicks till I could sense that I was a yard off it.

All this time, we had been maintaining eye contact and I could see the pure desire to kill burning in his insane eyes as he flew into the air hurling punches and kicks at me. The fury was unbelievable, the rage in our combat sexual. The icy sky was rent with our cries as punch after kick connected with blocking muscle and bone. Transvestite killers battling for supremacy at the top of the world.

The gun would be a yard behind me and to the right. If I could just bend down I'd be able to pick it up. Then I made a mistake. Despite every cell in my brain screaming out to me not to look down, I still broke eye contact and glanced sideways. Immediately, Sato leapt into the air and brought his boot round in a beautiful aerial roundhouse, which connected with the side of my head. My head snapped sideways and my body followed. I landed with a jarring impact on the icy ground. I tried to rise but he was on me, jamming his knee into my armpit and savagely twisting my wrist and upper arm.

My shoulder dislocated. I screamed.

Then he was standing, quite casually, pointing my gun at my head. He was no fool, standing far enough away to ensure that I couldn't attack him in any way. The gun was booted and ready to fire its payload of tiny explosive darts into my head. Sato smiled, his finger tightening on the trigger. I closed my eyes.

I actually heard the electronic beep as he pressed the trigger, then a loud explosion followed by a ragged scream. I opened my eyes to see Sato on his knees, holding the bloody stump of his right hand. The flechette gun had exploded. It must have been the cold in the mechanism.

Sato looked up. "You fucking bitch!" he shrieked, "I had you! Admit I had you! I had your blonde ass cold. You're dead! You're DEAD!!" He got up, cradling the wreck of his hand and, making a decision, set off in a shambling run towards my plane.

I was drifting into unconsciousness and I watched with a curious sense of detachment as he struggled into the cockpit and initiated the powerup sequence with his one good hand.

Soon afterwards the cockpit closed and the vectored thrusters lifted the jump jet smoothly into the air. I hoped that he hadn't noticed that I had set the password protected self-destruct mechanism just before I'd left the plane. He'd find out soon enough. He activated the forward thrusters and the jet leapt into the air, roaring away over the ocean until it was a distant dot on the darkening horizon.

Then it blew up.

I regarded the fireball with a sense of finality. Even if he'd spotted the self-destruct and managed to eject in time, he would be down in the middle of the Arctic Ocean without an environment suit. It was over. Sato was dead.

***

So was I, unless I managed to do something, quickly. It struck me that with his plane in such good condition, some systems might yet be salvageable. First I had to do something about my arm.

I picked myself up. My nose was bleeding from the impact of Sato's kick. I supposed that without the flight helmet, I would have been concussed. Supporting my dislocated arm with my other hand, I walked slowly over to Sato's jump-jet.

Leaning my shoulder against the fuselage and using my good arm as a brace, I took a deep breath and pushed sharply with the full weight of my body. With a loud pop, my shoulder slipped back into the socket.

I screamed.

***

Soon, the pain had subsided to a dull ache. I hoisted myself up into the cockpit, plugging my environment suit into the reserve battery to conserve power. If the suit expired, I was finished.

I keyed the bootup sequence on the flight computer. Nothing. I suppose that wasn't surprising. The EMP would have fried the delicate microcircuitry in an instant. I reached up with my good arm and drew the canopy shut with a click. As I reached, a sharp wave of pain hit me from my shoulder and ribs. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Don't lose consciousness. Not now...

I looked down at the dead circuitry. My eyes picked out the emergency analogue radio transceiver. Flicking the power switch, I was relieved to see the operating lights flicker on and burn steadily. I pulled the connector cable from its recess and plugged it into the multijack on the side of my flight helmet. Crackling static filled my ears.

I reached down to locate the SIG emergency carrier frequency on the tuning dial. I punched a manual scrambler code into the unit and spoke into my helmet microphone bead.

"Agent down. Request extraction. Immediate. Repeat. Immediate. Here is my field ID and approximate co-ordinates..."

***

I must have nodded off after a while. I had been repeating the message every minute or so, hoping that one of the monitoring stations dotted about the globe would pick up my mayday.

I stretched myself in the cramped cockpit. My arm felt better and the pain from the kick in the ribs was almost gone. I looked up through the clear glass of the canopy at the stars twinkling in the clear night sky above me. Different to the sky I was used to back in Britain. So much clearer and brighter, like I was somehow nearer the stars here at the top of the world.

Unexpectedly, tears again clouded my eyes. I felt the new contours of my body through the warm fabric of the flight suit. If I got out of here and back to Britain, a new life was waiting for me all right. There would be no miracle rebirth for Lieutenant Commander Anthony Pierce. Would it be possible for me to reintroduce myself to my parents? I didn't think so. Security issues aside, it would be too painful for all of us.

Better to leave it all behind then, to accept the identity of Jane Masters and the fresh challenges that would bring. I wondered if Trish had got out of the House. I knew that if she had, she would come for me in London. If I got back to London.

The stars were beautiful.

I had to get back. The antidote to the Akaguchi virus was swimming in my veins - it would be important to get that back to 'Q' branch at the very least. But there was more than that. I had to get back because my life was full of promise. In a sense I'd just been born. I wasn't going to let it end now. I switched on the transceiver again.

"Agent down. Request extraction. Immediate. Repeat. Immediate. Here is my field ID and approximate co-ordinates..."

***

I woke with a start. There was a face pressed against the canopy above my head. I sat up. Flat, Asian features, distinctive ruddy complexion. Aleut.

I sat up and looked round. A group of what looked like Aleutian fishermen in sealskins were gathered round the aircraft. The sun was high in the piercingly blue sky. I raised my hand and unclipped the canopy. I felt strong. Good.

The Aleutian jumped down to allow me out of the aircraft. I stepped onto the hard ground and pulled off my helmet, shaking my blonde curls free. As expected, the five men just stood and gawped. I tried to put an unthreatening expression on my face, and opened my arms in a gesture of appeal. The Aleuts were a free state without affiliations since Alaska and North Eastern Siberia had seceded from the US and Russia respectively in the year of the Domino. Hopeful that I could gain their trust, I said slowly, "I need help. Does any of you speak English?"

The lead man smiled, showing gappy teeth, and reached into his skins.

He pulled out a large Glock automatic, pointing it at me. The other men withdrew a motley assortment of weapons. They too smiled. The leader gestured me towards a trio of large snowcats parked nearby.

I sighed, raising my hands and walking off ahead of them.

***

The leader bundled me into the back of one of the vehicles and got one of his men to cover me. He did so zealously, leering down at the bulge of my breasts in the figure hugging environment suit. I smiled at him, fluttering my lashes and parting my lips, looking to use my allure to exercise some sort of advantage for later.

I looked around the vehicle. Nothing except a spare petrol can and some more skins.

The convoy turned north, up the coast and we travelled through sparse woodland for a couple of hours. I tried to get comfortable in the cramped rear of the snowcat, and my wriggling seemed to excite my guard further, so I kept flashing him the occasional smile.

I wondered where we were headed and what was in store for me. I guessed that we would be arriving at some sort of trading post where I would be bartered for something. The thought of being sexually violated crossed my mind too, but these boys were in for something of a surprise were they to pursue that line of reasoning further.

At any rate, it made sense to wait till our destination before I made any sort of move. Cutting loose here would leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere. I leaned back and flashed another pout at my heroic captor.

***

Another hour passed and we found ourselves pulling into a settlement built around a wide bay. This was clearly a major trading post. A rag-tag flotilla of ships was harboured at the docks. Trawlers, freighters, a few military cast-offs, and even one dilapidated tanker.

A ramshackle shanty town had sprung up around the bay, with a higgledy-piggledy collection of brothels, bars and gambling dens jostling for space on the bustling waterfront. There was an unbelievable mass of people. Predominantly Aleut and Inuit, but I also saw Russian uniforms, and a smattering of Caucasians and Oriental faces too. This was the sort of lawless frontier town where you could barter anything for anything. Boys, girls, Class A, animals, arms, whatever.

We dismounted at the quayside and my captors tied my arms behind me, using the dangling rope to pull me along behind them. Smells of cooking meat assaulted me from all directions as we walked through the crowds on the teeming waterfront and I found myself salivating from hunger. Attracted by my looks, we quickly gathered a throng of hangers on, who did not refrain from groping me or passing lewd comment in many languages, I was spanked, my hair was pulled and felt up by many pairs of hands. I felt my flight suit tearing in various places.

It was utterly humiliating.

I looked up grimly and saw that we were approaching a boat. A gleaming white yacht, it stood out like a sore thumb among the rusting hulks that surrounded it. The Kitsune Maru, registered out of Yokohama.

Three of the Aleut traders stood aside and let the leader and my guard drag me up the gangway. As the crowd got a clear view of me and my ripped flight suit, a loud cheer went up, accompanied by wolf whistles and ape hoots.

On deck, I looked round, but there was no indication of who the yacht's occupiers were. But clearly a transaction had already taken place. I had been sold to whoever had chartered this luxury craft and had the gall to sail it into these lawless waters.

As we walked up the deck towards the stern, I tried to get a mental picture of the boat's layout but was hurried along by my guard with painful tugs on my rope. We went below through a wooden door amidships and down a steep flight of stairs. I was ushered through a door into a luxurious stateroom, where the guard pushed me onto a satin-sheeted bed.

The leader smiled crookedly at me and left me with the guard, who let go of my leash, but continued to cover me with his gun. I heard the leader's footsteps receding down the gangway. I looked around. The room was decked out in dark wood panelling. Sumptuous furnishings and fur rugs. The double bed was covered in chocolate coloured satin sheets. A bar and fridge on the far wall completed the fittings.

I let my body slump sideways onto the bed. For a while I closed my eyes, luxuriating in the softness of the sheets on my face.

I opened my eyes and saw the guard looking at me. I smiled. He smiled back. I parted my lips and ran the tip of my tongue over my front teeth. His eyes widened. I wriggled upright, arching my back and pointing my boobs at him. I looked down at the rope, then back up at him, pouting and raising an eyebrow.

He nodded, ambling forwards, putting his gun down on the sideboard. He bent down and picked up the trailing end of the rope. He indicated with a grunt that I should turn round so my tied hands were facing him. I complied, holding my wrists out and looking seductively over my shoulder.

Instead of untying me, He shoved me in the small of my back so I tipped forward onto the bed. He then quickly tied my ankles with the remaining length of rope. I couldn't move. I was trussed up with my hands and legs tied behind me and my round ass sticking into the air.

I couldn't believe it.

Behind me, I heard the guard sigh, pick up his gun from the sideboard, and leave the room quietly. I heard his footsteps move away.

Well, what a situation. This was ridiculous.

For a while, I just lay there, seeing whether there was any give in my bonds. But my guard obviously knew his knots. They were locked into place like steel manacles.

I heard the door again, and footsteps approaching me from behind. I was unable to turn my head to see who it was. Completely vulnerable. It was quite thrilling.

A hand planted itself onto my rump, with a sharp "slap!". I gasped. Then the hand started to stroke me gently on my behind. I let out an involuntary, "oooh..." Another hand quickly came round the front and started massaging me softly on my left breast. I began to melt, a moaning sigh escaping my parted lips.

I felt the rumble of the yacht's engines starting up beneath me. The room jolted slightly as the boat started to move. But I was moving already. Firm hands picked me up and turned me over and I found myself looking into the smiling face of Commander James Bond.

"I would have come sooner," he purred, "but I heard you were all tied up." He produced a vicious looking fish knife from behind his back.

"Oh James," I breathed as he cut my shredded flight suit away to reveal my beautiful new body in its white bikini. "Take me on a trip around the world..."

He encircled my bound body in his strong arms and we melted into the greatest kiss.

Welcome to your new life Jane, I thought, as I entwined tongues with my Controller. It's going to be a ride. Oh yeah.

***

Epilogue: Dunham Village, Buckinghamshire, England

In the cloudless winter sky, I saw a jet plane flying high above, condensation trails dispersing slowly in the cold air.

The small churchyard was quiet. Breath frosting in front of me, I weaved my way through the headstones. Surrounded by the skeletons of trees, bare fields glittering with hoar frost. Spring would be here soon, I knew. The late January wind snapped at my bare stockinged calves.

I had a bunch of flowers in my leather-gloved hand as I clicked through the country churchyard on my black regulation heels. My woolen uniform coat flapped around my legs. There it was, in the far corner away from the church. A small hedge separated the grave from a field, which stretched away into the haze of the middle distance.

I looked down at the new looking stone, removing my uniform cap. Bending down, I brushed some dirt off it then knelt to place the irises at the foot of the headstone.

ANTHONY STEPHEN PIERCE 1983-2014
He Gave His Life For King and Country

"Did you know him well?"

I jumped and turned. For a moment, I couldn't speak, standing there with my mouth open, staring at the new arrival.

Christine. My former girlfriend. She stood there looking at me in my Royal Navy dress uniform coat and skirt. She looked different. Something in the way that she had done her hair. She was still tall and beautiful, the sunlight in her red hair brought things back, uncomfortable. She smiled, extending her hand. "I'm Christine," she said. "Anthony and I were... engaged."

I removed my glove and shook her cold hand. "My name's Jane," I said. "I... worked with Anthony. I've been away... first time I could visit the grave." I tailed off.

Christine looked down, and then up at the bell tower of the old church. She took a breath. "It's funny. Sometimes I think I see him more now that he's...." she tailed off, glancing down at the grave. "The problem with his..." she looked up at me. "With your line of work, is that there really can't be anything else, can there?" She paused again. "I like to come out here every now and then. It's not far from where I live in Maidenhead."

I could say nothing so I looked down at the headstone. There was a minute of utter silence. Somewhere in the distance, a bird began singing. Further away, the low drone of cars on the M4.

I drew a breath. "I'd better go," I whispered, making to turn. Christine stopped me with a hand on my sleeve.

"Tell me. You knew him. Was he good? At his job? He could never talk to me about it. I just need to know that it was all worthwhile. All this."

"Christine," I said, "in my memories, Anthony Pierce was a credit to his country. He did his duty till the end. I hope I can carry on his legacy." I looked fixedly into her eyes, searching for any sign that she recognised me.

Christine let go of my arm. "Thank you, Jane." she said quietly.

I turned and walked quickly towards the gate, wiping the tears from my cheeks. At the gate, I looked back. Christine was still standing there, in the quiet corner of the churchyard, head slightly bowed, looking down at my grave.

"Goodbye," I whispered.

***

I shrugged off my overcoat and slid into my green Beetle, which was parked up the lane from the village church. I started the engine and pulled away. Soon I was cruising up the frosty country lanes.

My cellphone chirped on the passenger seat. I picked it up, pressing the answer button. I shifted up into fifth. "Jane Masters," I said.

"Miss Masters," said Bond, "you're needed."

I smiled, the excitement rising up through my body like a promise.

"On my way James," I said. "On my way."

I sped off towards my new mission.

THE END
of For King and Country
Jane Masters will return...

For King & Country: Colourful But Ordinary... a Jane Masters adventure by Miss K A short, complete adventure for Jane Masters, 004. A coda to her first story and a prelude to her next. Masters and Bond break off a sexy encounter in the Swiss Alps to investigate shady goings on with the Russian Mafia. Contains EXPLICIT depictions of oral sex at the end.

"How utterly perverse", mused Jane Masters, formerly Lieutenant Commander Anthony Pierce, still agent 004 On His Majesty's Secret Service. She was nestled into the crook of her superior officer's shoulder, feeling the rise and fall of James Bond's chest exhaling, in perfectly diminishing circles, the smoke from his fifteenth Cartier of the day.

A feeling of rare contentment permeated every layer of Masters' body and mind as she looked up at the orange sun setting over the high Alps across the valley from their vantage point. She wriggled her legs so as to cause the torn black and almost non-existently sheer nylon stockings on her thighs to rub together; a covert act of auto-frottage which only served to flutter the warmth rushing through her still new, very pretty, female body. "Young, blonde and ripe", Bond had called her earlier that day. That compliment had given her a jolt of pleasure.

It seemed that Bond shared her strong feelings on the matter of good musical taste. Still, it was only to be expected, thought Masters. Second only to Bond's devotion to maintaining the independence and sovereignty of Britain in all of its ramshackle post-millennial glory was his ruthless pursuit of the very finest things to be found and experienced in life. Masters was happy to have been included as a trophy in this pantheon of the famous spy's fetishistic pleasures, along with the inevitable Mont Blanc pen, the 30-year old single malt and of course, the Aston Martin. Now the beautiful blonde lover with something extra.

So it was that the crystalline clarity of Miles Davis' 'Kind Of Blue' echoed like a ghost around the small plateau on which the discreetly grey 2012 marque DBX was parked.

The dank overhanging cloud of the past few days had largely evaporated as evening closed in. The warmth of the broad torsos of the surrounding mountains had gathered a wreath of mist along their edges, looking for all the world like a ballerina's tutu raised in mid-leap. Tombstone-like basalt fingers pointed up through the cloud as if to warn of the ever-present danger of complacency in the face of a bewildering number of dangers to the New World Order of which the UK was a proud and prominent member.

Suddenly Bond rose, pulling his white Gieves and Hawkes shirt around his broad shoulders. He ran a hand through his grey crew cut and narrowed his eyes. "Over there, look. Can you see it?" he whispered excitedly as he reached for his Carl Zeiss binoculars. Typical man, thought Jane, sleepily; ironic, remembering her past male existence which, though recent, right now seemed a lifetime away, dressed as she was in the torn remnants of a black lace La Perla bra and panties which did little to conceal her burgeoning female curves. Within minutes of a shuddering climax, Bond was right back in full ops mode. Oh well, at least he hadn't rolled over and fallen asleep.

What Bond had noticed was the glint of a reflecton off glass in the low sun that sprayed across the valley.

****

Tristram Horner had good reason to feel equally, if differently, contented as he unscrewed the long telephoto lens of his trusty Nikon F3. He connected the camera's digital back to his iPhone and fired up the satellite uplink, as he began to upload the sensational pictures to his unidentified and wildly generous clients.

It had been worth the dreary wait in the previously foul weather for the chance to photograph this gem of a commission. Tristram made sure that he'd saved a personal copy of the images on his phone for in truth he had been very turned on by what he had seen. He thought briefly of posting them on his private and exclusive server for fellow connoisseurs of a particular form of flesh, but realised he just didn't know his mystery clients quite well enough to warrant taking such a risk.

The sight of Bond making love to that beautiful blonde pre-op transsexual (as he had realised with happy astonishment half way through photographing the act) had stimulated Tristram no end, and he had toyed with the idea of caressing his own satin panty-filled trousers himself, but Bond's reputation travelled before him.

He knew that His Majesty's man was unlikely to welcome the attentions of a paparazzo photographer whilst screwing a shemale in a variety of increasingly gymnastic positions on the bonnet of his Aston Martin in the gorgeous dying of a Tyrolean summer afternoon.

****

In one fluid motion, Bond cast aside the Zeiss's, fired up the V10 engine, found first, dropped the clutch and shot the Aston forward like a cannonball out of the secluded roadside verge, leaving Masters a dishevelled mess half in, half out of the cream leather bucket seat.

"Buckle up, Lieutenant. The Service wouldn't want you to have an accident with that gearstick. Could make for rather embarrassing paperwork," Bond joked, glancing aside with a smile on his cruel, handsome mouth.

"What's going on, James? You could at least have warned me," pouted a flustered Masters, struggling upright and reaching between her legs for the very brief Chloe mini dress that Bond had ripped off her back some time ago.

The car sped along the switchbacks, threatening to hurl itself off into the valley below at every turn; but Bond was calm as he turned to Masters and said "I hope you're not feeling shy - someone's been photographing us for the last thirty minutes and I think it's time we had a word with them about the usage rights".

Masters felt a tide of burning crimson wash over her face. Supposing her family was to see those photographs of her wild sexual abandon. But she knew that her mother, father, sister and brother would never recognise "him" now. Would they?

She felt Bond's cold semen trickle down the inside of her thighs and smiled, knowing that she wouldn't have missed this afternoon for anything in the whole world, even if it was the last thing that a few months ago she would have expected to enjoy. The surgical feminisation and hormonal treatment that the fomer Lieutenant Pierce had undergone in order to prepare for his mission into the stronghold of the Red Fist had been one thing; his treatment at the hands of the Fist had been quite another - the torture and conditioning he had suffered had had a profound impact on his entire psyche. Not since his teenage years had he felt any real attraction for the same sex. He had celebrated his rite of passage with the usual braggadaccio of sexual conquests without making any longer term commitments, in the heartless manner of brash young men all over the world. Anthony Pierce had been was what is known as 'one of the lads'. The irony of the fact that he had become just exactly like one of those posh, blonde, sweetly pretty Chelsea girls that he had used to chase after was not lost on him now.

Not that 'she' felt entirely female, even now. Sometimes she felt other voices in her head resisting the lure of her new life; felt that all she had become was a mannequin upon which different masks could quite easily be hung.

No. But Jane Masters understood that that old life was behind her. Feeling herself fall hopelessly in lust with Bond had changed the parameters of the game forever. On the slow boat back from the mission in the Far East, Bond had been everything and more that Masters had fantasised about since she had first given him sweet head months earlier in this same car. Masters already knew what a beautifully proportioned uncut cock Bond had. What had really taken her aback was how sensitive and gentle Bond could be in bed; and overwhelmingly violent, cruel, strong and passionate at the same time.

In that cabin in the swaying luxury yacht, Jane Masters had willingly and noisily surrendered her anal cherry (and any remaining vestigial thoughts of reclaiming her masculinity) to her commanding officer. How good it had been, she smiled dreamily as the Aston screeched around another bend.

Today had been the first time she'd seen Bond since that boat trip, three and a half months ago. She'd fully expected to have become another in the long line of Bond's conquests. Bond's reputation as a wilful Lothario remained with him even in advanced middle age. Masters had scarcely believed her eyes when the legendary agent had turned up at the Zurich field office with a bottle of Cristal on ice, a glint of mischief in his cold, grey eyes and the promise of a mountain fling in the dying embers of the summer. Bond was off on assignment to North Russia that night. One had to grasp life's pleasures when they arose in this job - fleeting as they were, and all the sweeter for it.

****

Tristram had noticed the Aston's sudden departure and beads of sweat formed expectantly as he tried to coax the big Land Rover Discovery into a performance for which it had never been designed.

He realised that it would be only a matter of time before the Aston intercepted him. He looked across the narrow valley to see the sleek grey car hurtling down the last switchback. His vehicle meanwhile roared stolidly up the other side of the valley. Horner fumbled across to the passenger seat and picked up his iPhone. Time to destroy the evidence. Now resigned to being caught, he pulled over into a layby and thumbed a sequence into the device which uploaded the image files to his own secure server. Then he used the digital shredder to completely destroy any trace of the images. He sighed. He could always download them again in the privacy of his hotel room.

He started to get excited again at the thought. He pulled out and drove steadily up the side of the mountain.

****

"Look at this," muttered Bond. "He's driving along as though nothing's happened." They were closing on the Land Rover now as it meandered at a deliberately leisurely pace up towards the pass.

Masters glanced up at the mirror, straightening her hair and make-up. She'd discarded her torn stockings and had put on a pale tan leather trenchcoat, Missoni, over the short dress. Bond thought she looked utterly ravishing. Hard to believe this had been that young male agent just over a year ago.

Masters looked over at him, giving him a quick smile. "Let me handle this, James. You stay in the car and look hard." Bond glanced down at his crotch, raising a practiced brow. "Look hard?" he quipped. Masters looked over and grinned again.

Bond pulled alongside the cruising Land Rover, pointing down at the wheels as if to say "flat tyre". The driver was a shabby looking dark-haired man dressed in tweeds. Possibly in his mid thirties, or a bit younger, slightly chubby. He affected to not understand, smiling and waving. Bond smiled back, then quickly sped ahead, twisting the wheel savagely to force the nose of the Aston in front of the Land Rover's bonnet.

With a squeal of brakes and a cloud of dust, the Land Rover pulled into the roadside. Bond stopped the Aston twenty yards up the verge. He looked into the rear view at the stalled Land Rover. The driver had put his hazards on and was sitting behind the wheel, looking shaken.

****

Tristram Horner sat, rehearsing what to say. Outrage, he thought, would be best: What on Earth do you think you're up to? You could have killed us all! I've half a mind to report you to-

He looked up as the passenger side door of the Aston flew open and a shapely pair of legs swung smoothly out, encased in knee high tan leather boots with steel spike heels. His heart started to pound as the angel from the plateau rose from the sports car and walked down the road towards him.

My God, she was stunning. Tall, with the athletic looks of a model. Honey blonde hair right down to the small of her back; golden skin, a cinnamon tan. Dressed in buff-coloured leather. A fitted coat that left nothing to the imagination - it looked like she had nothing on underneath - and matching tight leather gloves. She walked - no, strode - like she was coming down the catwalk. He almost reached for the camera, he was so excited. This was a man? Unbelievable. No wonder Bond had been fucking the living daylights out of her. No angel. A Goddess.

Oh my God, here she was. She smiled at him and he smiled stupidly back. Then he realised she was pointing at the door, making a circular motion with her finger. "Open up," she was mouthing. Horner wound down the window. He tried to remember what he had wanted to say, but the words had dried up. She looked at the camera gear on the passenger seat.

"Birdwatching?" she said. A gorgeous, husky voice, half-broken. A shemale voice, aristocratic, English. Horner almost swooned. It sounded like coffee and burnt brown sugar.

"P-pardon?" he replied.

"Been doing a spot of ornithology, have we? Can I see what pictures you've got in your camera?" She leaned over, giving him a startling flash of lace wired cleavage. Horner gulped.

"Er, no. I... there weren't really any good shots today..." he trailed off.

She smiled, dazzling him. "Oh, but I don't think that's true. You see, my friend and I," she indicated Bond's car, "were convinced that we saw you taking some 'good shots' earlier. I love photography. The 'decisive moment', wasn't it?" Horner was astonished that this vision, surely some sort of high-class transsexual hooker, was suddenly quoting Cartier-Bresson to him.

He was even more astonished when she pulled a Glock G36 on him. Where had she been keeping that? "You see, I insist," she smiled, cruelly. "Get out of your car and put your hands on the roof." Shaking, Horner complied. He felt her hands frisking him expertly and felt a small, entirely inappropriate frisson of excitement. He felt his cock stirring to attention in its satin and lace prison.

Then she reached around and undid his belt. What was she-? "Hands behind your back," she said. Horner did so, and she expertly and painfully tied his wrists together with the belt. He felt her hand reaching round again. She unbuttoned his chinos and they fell round his ankles. A hand shoved him in the small of the back and he fell onto the dusty ground, arms tied, legs all tangled, unable to move, his pink satin clad bottom stuck up into the cooling air.

"Well, well," he heard her laugh, "we are full of surprises aren't we?" A hand spanked him hard on the bottom. "Don't go anywhere, will you," she said. Then he heard her rummaging in the car. The camera back pinged. She was checking for images. Then he heard the phone power back up from sleep mode with its familiar Apple chime.

After a while, Tristram heard her walk round to his front and then she flipped him roughly over so he was looking up at her. Suddenly he was frightened. The gun was pointed straight at his head. Something in her green eyes told him that she had used weapons of lethal force often, and well. Embarrassingly he still had a hard on in his panties, and he could see from the way she looked down that this fact had not escaped her attention. She was shaking her head, as if in disappointment.

"Almost, Mr Horner, almost. You deleted the files on the camera, you deleted and even shredded the images on your phone's flash disk. But you see, your remote access log shows two identical uploads of a series of image files, one twelve minutes ago and one four minutes ago. And you forgot to wipe your upload cache." She tutted, turning the tablet screen to face him. There were the thumbnails of all the images he thought he had deleted. The colour drained from his face.

Her boots crunched up the gravel till they were inches from his face. He could smell the leather, the fresh polish. She knelt on her haunches and tilted his chin up with the barrel of her gun. He looked into her beguiling green eyes. Again, that hint of hardness, the cruel glint. "Mr Horner, I traced the transactions back to their sources. The second upload's to some piss-poor commercial webspace. I suppose it's where you hoard all that transsexual smut you're obviously so into."

"The other upload though, the first one, I ran into some serious security countermeasures. Really serious shit." The word sounded strange coming from her sweet mouth.

She paused.

"To whom did you sell our pictures, Mr. Horner?"

Horner decided to remain silent. His life wouldn't be worth spit if he told British Intelligence about his deal. He somehow guessed that his anonymous client was not the sort to take such disclosure with equanimity

"Mr. Horner, I'm only going to ask you nicely once again, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to call my boyfriend over." She paused, smiling again. "He's really angry..."

****

"It's Paternoster, James," Masters was saying into her cellphone as she threw the big Land Rover expertly around the steep switchbacks following the tail-lights of Bond's speeding Aston in the lowering gloom.

Paternoster. Tristram Horner shivered, trussed up in the passenger seat. The vicious criminal organisation run out of St. Petersburg by the Rodchenko family. They controlled the drug lines into the whole of Northern Europe. What had he got mixed up in? He was just a low level fixer for the European organisations. Photography, surveillance, forgery, to supplement his legitimate Private Investigation business.

Earlier, on the roadside, Bond had only had to break one of his fingers before Horner had broken down himself, soiling his panties into the bargain; they'd believed him when he told them he knew nothing about the mystery clients. Squealing with pain, he'd quickly given the Masters woman all the access passwords to the Korean-based server he'd uploaded the material to. After confirming that the files hadn't been downloaded yet by his clients, she'd wiped them, leaving what she'd called "a little calling card" in their place. Horner had moaned a little then. It wasn't the fact that his finger was in agony, or even the fact that from his prone position he had a clear view up her obscenely short skirt, at that little telltale bulge tucked into the underside of those expensive looking panties. No, it was the realisation sinking in that he was going to die soon, either by these agents' hands ("Licensed to Kill", as they were) or by those of the client he had betrayed.

Bond and the goddess had had a little conversation there and then. "We'd better keep hold of our friend," she'd said, nodding in Tristram's direction. "It's getting dark and we don't want him getting lost." Bond concurred and added, "you take him in the Land Rover. We'll go back to Zurich. I've got a plane to catch, but I'm sure you and he have a lot of..." he'd smiled, and Horner had shuddered, "things to discuss. Can you trace the intended recipients?" She'd nodded, "maybe. Depends how careless they've been." She'd hunched over his iPhone, punching a series of instructions into it. "I've started a cloaked reverse trace from the Korean machine. Might work. Take a while though. Let's go, James. I'll let you know." He'd leaned over and kissed her hard on the lips before striding back to the Aston.

And now Horner was listening to their cellphone conversation and wondering how to get himself out of this mess. Just his luck to wind up pissing off the only shemale in the world who knew how to hack into black systems as easily as she might pick out an outfit to wear.

"Paternoster. James, Ymir Rodchenko - that's who the trace fingered. Isn't that what you're going to the Baltic to investigate? Perhaps-" Bond interrupted her and she nodded. "Yes, All right. Yes,' she smiled, "I'm sure I'll come up with something." She glanced down at Tristram, still smiling. "All right James, bye."

Somehow, he didn't find her smile at all reassuring.

****

She'd refused the valet service at the Park Hyatt in Zurich, preferring that Tristram parked the car himself. She'd untied him in the outskirts of the city and switched seats with him, instructing him to drive to his hotel. He was very aware of the automatic pistol trained discreetly on him from the passenger seat.

Now they were in the underground car park of the hotel. Waiting. She'd got him to park right underneath one of the surveillance cameras and was keeping an eye fixed on it. Tristram was considerably more frightened than he'd ever been before in his life. She'd explained softly to him that they would have been seen arriving back at the hotel. They were now waiting for something to happen. He watched the security camera with her.

Suddenly, the red power indicator under it flickered out.

"They're on their way," she whispered. He felt her lithe body tense up next to his.

He heard squealing tyres on the in ramp and a black Mercedes swung into the garage, coming to a halt at the far end. The engine purred to a halt.

"Stay here," she said. "If you do anything stupid, we're both dead. Do exactly as I say and you stand a chance of living." He nodded.

She opened the door and swung her long legs out of the Land Rover. He heard her heels clicking away on the polished asphalt floor of the underground garage.

"Turn out your lights," he heard her shout, "I'm going to eject the magazine from my gun." He heard a mechanical noise as she did just that. Jesus. What was she up to??

The Mercedes' lights were suddenly extinguished and Horner was pitched into semi-blackness. For a moment all he could hear was the pounding of his heart. Any moment now, he expected to hear the sound of gunfire as the life of that beautiful, brave shemale was extinguished too. He waited, eyes closed.

There was a series of dull clicks. He realised that it was the Mercedes' doors opening. Several shadowy figures emerged. A muttered conversation ensued between Masters and his clients' representatives that lasted for what seemed like an eternity.

Slowly, the conversation died. Then he heard footsteps again. Not hers. Then the click-thump of the Mercedes' doors closing. The engine roared back into life. Without turning their lights back on, they glided past the back of the Land Rover, and up the exit ramp. He heard the tyres squealing away until they were lost in the background noise.

He realised he'd been holding his breath. He let it all out in one shuddering motion. He was alive. But what about-

He heard the sound of the magazine being replaced in the gun. Then her footsteps coming back, clicking on the hard floor. He looked around as she opened the door and slid into the passenger seat next to him. She looked tired, but gave him a small smile.

"Good news, Tristram," she said. "They're going to let you live. In fact," she glanced up as the surveillance camera light came back on, "they're even going to let you keep all the money they paid you in advance. Aren't you going to say 'thank you'?"

Somehow, though, he didn't really think that thanks were in order.

****

Months later, Tristram thought back to that night, and the exchange in the car park where his future had been decided. Masters had left him soon afterwards and he'd never seen her again. Where was she now, he wondered, as he stood on the corner of Komsomol Street, looking around himself. Probably in some glamorous location far away from a shabby street corner in the meat-packing district of St. Petersburg.

He took another puff of his black-market Marlboro Light. Still couldn't get used to those cheap Russian cigarettes so he frittered his earnings on American smokes. He looked at the cigarette and his hand, holding it. The long nails, almost half an inch now, painted a lurid purple today. Be hard to even hold a camera with these talons. He pulled his pink fake fur coat closer about him and shivered, wishing a punter would pull up so he could get his poor, scantily-clad body out of the cold.

Along the street, he saw Mascha. They'd got quite close recently. Many of the other travesti whores along the strip didn't like him at all. They didn't trust foreign girls, especially if they were blonde and tall like him and attracted the punters. Most of them were Azeri or Armenian, a couple of stray Turks. Sucked into the Paternoster operation like he'd been. Most wouldn't ever get out again.

They'd come for him later on the night of Masters' meeting in the car park. They'd grabbed him in the men's toilet of Klosten Airport as he waited for his hastily booked flight back to Birmingham. He'd been bundled in a daze into a waiting cargo van that took him around the airfield to a different flight altogether. All his belongings left behind.

In the cold cargo plane hold, they'd stripped him down to his still stained panties - he hadn't even thought of removing them as he'd hurriedly packed for his flight. They'd laughed at that and let him keep them on, making coarse sounding comments in Russian.

They'd let him shiver for a while, then thrown him the pink coat. He'd gratefully accepted it. He got the first hormone injection in the butt on that flight too. It was the beginning of a strange journey. One that had brought him to this street corner. Just another transsexual hooker looking for a john.

Masters had cut a deal. What a deal. The kind of honourable and twisted agreement that criminal organisations can't seem to help but agree to.

Obviously, he'd screwed up. The British Government didn't want to be seen to be involved in such a sordid affair, so she'd been prepared to hand him over on the condition that he was spared and put to work for the Paternoster organisation to pay off his considerable debt.

He was to be accorded a singular honour. To be pimped by one of the Rodchenko family himself. Andriy would feed and house him, protect and procure for him and Tristram would in turn pay him from his earnings until his debt was paid off. He became a very good whore for Andriy, who would show Tristram he cared with regular beatings and rapes. He made lots of money on Komsomol and the surrounding travesti district streets though. After Andriy's 90% cut and the rent and board and the money for the hormones taken out, he reckoned he'd be able to pay off the debt to the organisation in one hundred and sixty-eight years. That's if he kept his looks.

What a deal. Masters had one sick head on those pretty shoulders. As she'd left the Land Rover, she'd whispered in his ear, "take it from someone who knows, Tristram, not many people get a second chance at life. Enjoy it while you can." And it was true. She'd been true to her word. He was alive, and it was some kind of life at least. In the White Nights of summer, when the sun never sets on the canals of St. Petersburg, Tristram, now called Koshka (or "Kitten"), had stood on the street corners in a basque and glittery hotpants, smiling at the passing cars and sucking seductively on a lollipop. Compared to the misery of the long nights of winter, those days had been good. He'd almost started enjoying himself in the brief warmth of the summer.

Now it was bitter February and he was still here, in the dark, waiting for the man.

Oh look, there was a punter. He could tell by the way the car slowed down. Kitten unfolded his arms, threw his mane of blonde curls back, stuck out his voluptuous chest and started to put it about.

****

High up in a rented office building, across from an alley just off Komsomol, Jane Masters smiled, adjusting the focus on the telephoto lens to look more closely at the face of Tristram Horner, head thrown back as he was impaled onto the bonnet of a silver BMW by a huge man dressed in black leather.

Horner's long-lashed eyes were slitted and fluttering, his glossy pink lips parted in ecstasy, purple claws grasping his own firm boobs, thigh- booted legs wrapped around his punter's back as he was reamed repeatedly in his backside on the shiny bonnet of the car, his tiny, useless cock flapping limply in the cold Baltic breeze. Jane pressed the shutter, preserving the picture forever. The sight was making her own manhood flutter with life. She'd never really enjoyed watching people get it on when she'd been a man, but seeing another transsexual get well and truly fucked was definitely doing something for her, not least because she'd been responsible for the little slut's present circumstances in the first place. Ah, power. It corrupts us all, she thought as she watched on.

Well, she'd told him to try and enjoy his new life. Looked like Horner was taking her words to heart. Actually, he looked good, in a cheap, porno way. Some of Horner's original plumpness had stayed on this new body, giving him a curvy voluptuousness that was pretty hot. Masters took another shot as Horner opened his mouth in a silent scream.

A firm hand suddenly planted itself on her nude backside. Jane squirmed, trying to keep her mind on the task. The hand travelled up her pliant spine and round the front to caress her erect nipples. Jane Masters found herself quite unable to concentrate. Bond sat down next to her on the satin-sheeted bed.

Jane, buck naked, flipped over on the slippery sheets and wrapped her slim arms around Bond's neck, pulling him down into a deep kiss.

The two of them began a sensual exploration of each other's bodies, the surveillance quite forgotten. Jane's cock was still semi hard, even in its shrunken state. But Bond wasn't interested in Jane's remaining vestige of masculinity. His hand slid up her legs, caressing her soft supple skin, reaching her exquisite buttocks and squeezing them hard. Jane yelped with pain, but pain tinged with pleasure.

Jane pushed herself away from Bond's body, breaking the kiss, and slowly slid downwards. Bond had maintained his perfect physical form and the sight and feel of it kept her on the very edge of sexual anticipation. Planting little kisses, she worked her away down his Commander's torso.

Bond lay as still as he could as she licked and kissed him. He knew what was coming and he smiled with anticipation.

Jane had reached her target and, like a good marksman, was taking her time as she set up her shot. She gently kissed the tip of Bond's cock, taking it firmly in her feminine hands, and pulled the foreskin sharply down. Bond exhaled as Jane then pushed the tip of her tongue into the slit at the top of his cock. Tasting the precum, Jane smiled with delight. This was a taste she'd come to love and now she wanted more.

She slipped her lips over Bond's cock, taking almost half of it in one fluid motion. With her hand she gently wanked the base and bobbed up and down, sliding as much of the meat into her mouth as she could take, then back out again. In and out, up and down. Jane needed Bond to cum. She desired to taste Bond again. Greedily she sucked and slurped, working her hand faster and faster.

Bond wanted Jane to stop. He wanted to fuck this girl, but she was having none of it. He knew she wanted a gob full of cum, so he let her have it. He felt his balls fill up and then it was exploding, shooting from his tip deep into Jane's willing and open mouth. Jane had once more expertly worked him up into a massive explosion. He grunted with delight as wave upon wave of pleasure suffused him and gobs of cum streaked from his cock into her willing, waiting mouth.

Jane swallowed her prize with the utmost pleasure. This was what she now looked forward to; pleasing her man to the degree that he would come like an explosion in a dairy. Sure she loved her job, and yes, she was proud of what she did for King and Country, but since the "change", what she enjoyed more than anything was the sex. As a beautiful transsexual, the sex was just so much more that the traditional sex she'd experienced as a man. And with James it was a sexual nirvana.

Taking a last look at the spent cock, Jane sat up, licked her lips and smiled down at Bond. She knew it would be a few minutes before even this superman would be able to finish the job, but Jane knew that that was what would happen. A flush of pleasure passed over her at the thought. She put her eye again to the viewfinder of the camera.

"Anything worth writing home about?" Bond whispered, rising to nuzzle Jane in the neck.

004 smiled and pouted her bruised lips. "Just the local birdlife, James. Colourful, but ordinary."

THE END of King & Country: Colourful but Ordinary...
Jane Masters will return... if you want her to...

TRANSFORMER Part one by Miss K

"TRY GROWING A DICK FIRST, ARSEHOLE!!"

Mocha was drunk again.

It was becoming a bit of a problem really and practically every week I would have to take her home. I mean it's not like I was stone cold sober either, but unlike Mocha, I'd not been downing every double dark rum and coke that the blokes at the club had been buying for me, smiling sweetly, and breathing, "mmm, that was nice. Can I have another one?"

Mocha was so pretty that she never had any trouble having drinks bought for her. In fact, that was our job, really. The club paid us both a bit of money every week to loll about looking tall and leggy, smiling at the guys and making them part with their cash at the bar. We were there to be beautiful, and to enhance the "class" of what was basically a fairly ordinary tranny club in the City, but it just meant we got pissed for free. Mocha quite a bit pissed...

And as usual, Mocha's beautiful night had turned a bit ugly as she drunkenly tried to beat off the imagined advances of some timid looking mouse of a bloke by the back bar. Perhaps he'd accidentally brushed her sequinned bottom as he tried to order himself a pint. It didn't take a lot to ignite her ire when she was like this. He certainly didn't look like the harassing type as he stood bewildered and blinking in the torrent of abuse, clearly audible above the pounding pop on the PA, that flowed from Mocha's perfectly made up lips. A crowd of gawpers, girls and boys, were gathering. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I looked up at Mel, the club's matronly promoter and nodded. Time to go. Together, we marched up to Mocha and, with much "c'mon love,"s and general pacifying cooing, managed to extricate her from her one lady melee. Mel stayed to buy the baffled admirer a drink while I scooped up Mocha's left slingback, which had slipped off during the scuffle and manhandled her up the leopard carpeted stairwell that led up to the street from the dingy basement bar that housed the club. As we neared the top, I heard heavy footsteps clomping up the steps behind us.

"She can forget about coming back next week and all!" shouted Mel as she intercepted us. "I've had it with her! Up to here! All right?" Mocha was whispering something under her breath while grinning rather evilly at Mel's flushed and over made-up face. It was probably a good thing she was whispering, whatever she was saying. She reeked of the booze she'd spilt down her short dress and one of her fishnet stockings had ripped down the inner thigh.

"I'll have a word with her, Mel," I said, holding out my hand. She huffed and pressed five rolled up twenty pound notes into my palm. I smiled sweetly and said, "I'll call you about next week", pecked her on her sweaty cheek and hauled Mocha out into the relief of the cool street outside.

As usual there was a gathering of cab drivers outside and I managed to get Mocha back to her flat quite quickly. The driver waited while I dragged her inside, up the piss soaked stairwell and along the landing as she fumbled inside her little clutch purse for keys, still muttering to herself.

Once inside, I laid her out on the sofa in the living room, helped myself to a glass of water from the kitchenette, then left her snoring quietly in the gloom.

***

"Long night?" the cab driver enquired as I let out another massive yawn in the back seat. I nodded as I got my Silk Cut out of my bag.

I held them up so he could see them in the rear view. "Is it all right?" He nodded and I lit one up. There was bhangra or something playing softly on the stereo as we cruised up New North Road. We passed pockets of people staggering down, on their way home or to the next club. I got my mobile out. It was 4.20 in the morning. Two texts had popped in unnoticed. Both from Mel. I put the pink, flat phone away without reading them.

Winding the window down, I tipped out some ash, enjoying the breeze. At the red lights crossing Essex Road, a black cab full of boozed up young city types pulled up next to us. The blond boy in the window nearest me looked up and we made eye contact. I gave him my best smouldering look. Slowly the other three noticed me and soon I had their entire attention. I let a strap of my black dress fall off my shoulder and a lick of my straight jet black hair fall across my eyes as I exhaled smoke from my parted red lips.

The lights changed. As their cab turned up towards Canonbury, I stuck my tongue out and flicked them the V-sign, chucking out the spent fagbutt in their direction.

The minicab driver was looking at me with an amused look in his eyes. Suddenly self conscious, I pulled the dress strap up again and smiled back at him.

"They're fascinated because you're so beautiful," the driver suddenly said, "but they can't quite work out what's exactly wrong with the picture they're seeing."

"Yeah? Well, they should get a new telly then," I replied. I'm not quite sure what that meant, but he seemed satisfied. We drove up the Holloway Road in silence.

Some shops were open, most were closed.

***

I paid him with one of Mocha's twenties from the club. She'd be like "where's me fucking money" sometime over the weekend, but hey, "who got you home?" would be my retort.

The driver was rather cute. I'd only really noticed his big brown eyes in the rearview and spied his longish, straight black hair from the back seat, but as I paid him, I took a longer look.

Asian, in his mid twenties, probably, tall and lean, with a slightly hooked nose and slender hands. He was dressed in a black shirt, buttoned low, showing a taut, lightly haired chest, and dark jeans. Beautiful eyes and a full, amused looking mouth surrounded by some great stubble. He noticed me looking and smiled as he wrote me a receipt.

I brushed his hand lightly with my fingertips as he handed me the card receipt and I got out of the cab. As I walked up the steps, he shouted, "hey!"

I stopped and turned slowly. He was leaning out of the driver window, lighting a cigarette. "My name's J," he said, before smiling lopsidedly, starting the car and driving away.

***

Throughout my life I've suffered from various parasomnias. I just don't sleep well and haven't since my teens back in the country. But I'm not just a run of the mill insomniac. Back then it was active stuff - sleepwalking, tooth grinding and violent shakes and twitches that would hurl me awake.

Where I grew up was hideously dark and quiet at night. Well into secondary school, I used to prefer to sleep with a nightlight on but I'd still find the silence unsettling, probably because I was born and spent my early years in a very bright and noisy city.

My nightbird habits probably stemmed from back then. I'd often stay awake at night in my teens long after my parents were asleep, experimenting with make-up, reading or writing.

My sleep disorders took a turn for the bizarre when I moved up to London to go to college. I stopped sleepwalking but became a regular sufferer of sleep paralysis.

When it first happened, it was the most terrifying experience I'd ever had. Interestingly, it was the only episode I ever suffered while still at my parents' house and it happened about a week before I moved up to London, almost as though prefiguring the change I was about to undergo.

My parents were away for the weekend and I'd taken the opportunity to dress up and go for one of my dead of night wanders around the village, the little park by the station, or breaking into the grounds of the deserted sanatorium with a bottle of whisky or whatever. Silly stuff.

After I got back in, I must have fallen asleep with the little night light on. Sometime later I remember waking up. But as I came to, I began to have this vague realisation that things were not quite right in my bedroom.

For a start it was far too gloomy. The little nightlight usually lit the walls with a cheery yellowish light, but now it seemed frightened to cast its glow too far, and it flickered dimly in the corner, unable to help me as I lay, terrified, realising I was unable to move a muscle.

The rest of the room was swathed in a thick, greenish darkness. If I had been able to move my arms, I felt sure that the darkness would be tangible, like a thick mist, or like webs of dark green sticky silk.

I was terribly cold, though it was the height of a very warm summer.

Then the footsteps started.

Footsteps is probably a bit of a misnomer. These were muffled, dragging sounds, like someone with a limp was pulling a very heavy, damp canvas sack full of bricks up the landing towards my bedroom. Still frozen to the spot and only able to move my eyeballs, I waited in utter terror as the dragging footfalls got nearer to my door, which was slightly ajar.

As the shambling sounds reached the other side of the door, I started to feel a dead pressure on my chest, as though someone had put a pile of heavy leatherbound books on me. I was struggling to breathe. I thought I was dying. At the same time, I heard a ragged breathing on the other side of my door. Whoever was there was taking my breath away for themselves.

The breathing got louder as the green darkness coalesced into a thick curtain of mist by the door, which began to glow from inside; a dead, green glow. And a figure began to appear inside the glow. As I watched, the tall, gaunt shape of a man appeared, dressed in a spidery frock coat and spindly pinstripe trousers, a bowler hat jammed on his wispy, long white hair. Burning eyes, bloodshot, green and alien, gazed without blinking at me and a hideous rictus grin revealed broken, yellowing teeth.

Slowly, the figure raised its left arm to point at me. The weight on my chest became unbearable and I was pushed slowly down into a pitch black, dreamless sleep.

I woke with a start. It was bright daylight and the birds were singing in the bushes outside my window. I sat up and felt my chest, and looked over to my door. There was no sign that it had been anything more than a dream, yet I knew I'd been awake.

After I moved to London, I suffered occasional bouts of the sleep paralysis; the hallucinations are never as potent or as terrifying as the first, but nevertheless, they've always been deeply unsettling.

***

After I got in, I spent a while getting my outfit and make up off, then drank a couple of glasses of water and took some Valerian tablets. I unfolded my sofa bed and climbed in, turning out the light. The sun was making its way up, but I never have any trouble sleeping during the daytime.

I lay a while thinking about Mocha and Mel. Mel would have Mocha back next week, I knew it and she knew it too. Mocha was the reason a lot of men came to the club. And I certainly wasn't going to the club without Mocha. She'd introduced me to the whole scene and I felt loyal to her, fucked up alky though she was. I loved being with her as we arrived and sashayed down the stairs of the place. Eyes would light on us like laser sights. I'd grown in confidence over my looks since first stepping timidly into the bar - Mel wouldn't after all pay me to decorate her place unless I was very pretty - but Mocha was stunningly beautiful. Tall, Amazonesque, with flawless, dark milky coffee skin and the face of an angel and the most astonishing set of legs. Yeah, and a filthy mouth. Men loved that. Mel would have her back.

I drifted gently off, thinking about that gentle touch of J's fingers, that cheeky grin as he drove off. Fucking hell, I fancied a mini cab driver.

And I was asleep.

***

to be continued...

Part of a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories originally published on my weblog. More to follow

TRANSFORMER Part two by Miss K

So I started seeing J a few weeks after he first drove me home that night.

***

The week after he'd first driven us home, I saw him among the gaggle of drivers outside the club again, but pointedly steered a protesting Mocha away from his car and into another. I mean, a fucking cab driver! It didn't bear thinking about. As our car pulled away, I saw him glance over at us and we made eye contact; that lopsided grin I remembered from the week before lurched my heart again. He broke eye contact and I saw him laughing with a couple of other Asian drivers as we turned off up past Aldgate station.

The following week, he wasn't there when I left the club alone, and then the week after, a friend offered Mocha and I a lift, so it wasn't until the fourth week, that I found myself in J's car again.

It had been a testing evening. Fucking Mocha had disappeared into the bog with Smiles, our dealer, at about eleven, and not reappeared. I later found out she'd got off with one of his friends in a cubicle and they'd left to go to some party in Marylebone while I was chatting to some ferrety bloke about Big Brother at the bar.

I left the club at chucking out time in a furious mood. It had been talent night and one of the acts, some fucking god awful noise of a tranny rock band managed to nick the one cab that was waiting. I lit a ciggy and stood there fuming, watching the dark blue of the summer night lightening into dawn over the city.

Mel and Pierre, one of the bouncers, came up the stairs behind me and started locking up. After a while, Mel came and stood next to me, lighting one of her long cigarettes.

"S'going to be a nice day today," she said. I nodded. We looked up at the pinkening sky together in silence for a while. Pierre was on his mobile talking in French to someone. He hung up then asked, "you two OK?"

We nodded. He smiled and strode off down the street. I watched his huge black frame recede into the distance.

"Well, I better be off too luv," said Mel. She parked her Mondeo round the corner, usually. But she never offered me a lift. Which is good, really, as I know that a ride with her would involve uncomfortable silences and awkward rejoinders. She lived down in Kent somewhere anyway. completely the opposite direction.

"Will you be OK?" she asked as she turned to walk off, noticing a noisy, boozed up bunch of blokes crossing the street a hundred yards up the road in the blue and orange light.

"Yeah. I'll be fine, I'll start walking and get a black cab when it comes."

She nodded and I watched her scurry off round the corner.

I took a last couple of puffs of my fag, looking up the road to make sure the drunk young men were safely gone, then started off, fumbling in my gold ho bag for my iPod and my phone. I stuck the buds in my ears and scrolled up the Klaxons album. I quickly checked my phone for any texts or voicemails but there were none.

It was only after about two hundred yards that I noticed J's car keeping pace with me, the music was so loud. I stopped the music and pulled out the earbuds. He was grinning, leaning out of the window in an open-necked burgundy shirt and mirrored aviators.

"Hi," he said.

I folded my arms across my fake chest. "Don't you know it's illegal to pick up fares in the street?" I asked, deliberately not making eye contact. Not that I could, through his shades.

"Ah," he said, "but i'm not picking up a fare." He had one of those nice rounded Asian accents. Quite posh. Pakistani, I think.

"What exactly are you doing if you're not picking up a fare then?" I rebuffed, making to move on.

He smiled that melty smile again. I saw my reflection in his glasses and hated myself for the meltyness.

"i was actually just going to ask if you wanted a lift home." He tipped his glasses down his nose and looked up at me, adding, "don't worry. I'm not going going to try anything unsavoury."

***

He kept glancing at me in the rearview as we drove home.

"What?" I said after a while.

"Nothing. You're very beautiful. I can't help looking. Sorry." He looked away.

We drove on in silence for a while.

"Do you mind me asking what you do apart from work at that club," he suddenly asked.

I lit a fag. "I'm an art student," i replied, winding down the window. The streets were still quite empty, the orange streetlights still lit, but not really needed any more.

"Oh really," he said. "What sort of stuff do you make?"

I looked at him in the rear view mirror. He was looking back at me. He was right. Nothing unsavoury. He seemed genuinely interested.

I shrugged. "Video art, mainly. Performance, installation too." My mobile pinged. Low battery. "Mainly video art though-"

We pulled into my street. "Sorry - I forget," he cut in," which is your house again?"

"A little bit further", I said, leaning forward, "about here is fine, by the yellow van." He pulled into the gap by the Transit van and I got out.

"Thank you," I said smiling at him as I turned and walked up the steps to my door.

I realised my heart was pounding as I fumbled for my keys. I turned and looked back. He was still sitting there in his car, the engine idling, looking at me with his lovely lopsided smile and his eyes. In the trees, birds were singing.

"Oh for fuck's sake," I muttered under my breath, rolling my eyes, as I found myself supermodelling back down the steps towards him.

I got in the passenger seat next to him and said, in a shaky voice, "if you go a little bit up the street and turn right, there's a sports ground car park. It'll be deserted now..." I touched his bare arm. "Let's go up there and park for a bit."

He nodded, looking suddenly serious, which made me regret what I was doing. Just for a moment. Then I saw his eyes again, and nose and lips and chest. And it was OK. We drove up the empty road in silence and he swung right into the car park opposite the little parade of shops. The newsagent would be opening soon. i could see lights on inside already.

He parked in the corner nearest one of the goals of the football pitch and switched off the engine.

He turned again, and just looked at me.

He wasn't about to say anything, but I said, "shut up", anyway and pushed him back with the soft palm of my hand on his chest. Then I leaned over and kissed him.

It was like his looking was like a loud voice in my head, and I had to stop the voice talking so loud. It was a good kiss. He closed his eyes, and after a while, so did I, and we kissed.

He was caressing the back of my head with one of his hands, his fingers twining in my long black hair. I slid one of my hands down his chest onto his lap, fiddling with his belt and fly, trying to unzip him while keeping his lips and his eyes locked shut.

I freed his cock and broke off the kiss, giving him one last nibble on the lower lip as I moved down, tucking my hair behind my ears, and took him in my mouth, wetting him and angling my head slowly up and down, making those yummy sounding noises that I know men like.

He was moaning too now as I looked up, his eyes tight closed, one hand clamping the back of my head, one hand gripping the handle tight above the driver side door.

It didn't take long. To be honest it wasn't the best blowjob in the world. But it was just that - a job. We needed to get it out of the way.

After I redid my lipstick, I turned to him and smiled.

"Take me home now please, J."

***

After that J and I started seeing each other. He'd drive over and pick me up from college sometimes. He didn't seem to mind if I was dressed up or not, which was nice. We went out to bars around Bethnal Green where he lived, or around Archway where I came from and he'd treat me the same if I looked like a scruffy gay art fag or a dolled up trash goddess. Gigs and plays, comedy and clubs in Shoreditch, art openings of course. We fucked an awful lot.

Of course he was mad.

He sold Mosque clocks from his flat just off Bethnal Green Road. He had a website and apparently he made quite a tidy sum every month from selling the funny Mosque shaped clocks he imported from Pakistan.

"I'm a lapsed Muslim," he'd say (which explained his freeness to booze), enigmatically adding that he lost his faith after reading The Day of the Triffids as a child, "but the Mosque clock is a sound business venture in this area. And the website is very secure." And that grin. He made me laugh a lot. He was a nutter. I cared for him very much, his physical beauty and his bizarre imagination and skewed outlook.

That summer I was very happy.

I saw less of Mocha and more of J, whom Mocha loathed with an unspecific and childlike hatred and jealousy.

We drove to Norfolk and watched birds. Another of his interests. Yes, I felt that strongly about him.

When he did nights, I'd fall securely asleep in his bed dressed in my most beautiful lingerie and he'd delight in coming in and waking me up in the morning with a kiss and a firm hand on my crotch. He said my cock in black lace panties was one of the finest sights he could imagine.

Of course in hindsight I realise now that I become too dependent on people. My relationships end up being clingy, not to say obsessive, and it did of course all end very badly with me and J when it all fell apart so spectacularly.

But for a few short months it was good.

***

Even my sleep problems abated for a while.

For the June and July that I started seeing J, I didn't have a single episode of insomnia, sleep paralysis or anything. I'd entered a state of serenity that I'd hardly experienced before, and with a minicab driver, no less.

Then towards the middle of August I had another bad episode.

J was away on a "business trip" to France. I'd been on a 48 hour gigs and clubs bender with a couple of girlfriends from college. The amount of coke and cheap vodka sloshing around my system, I guess it's no wonder that my sleep would be a little bit disturbed, but this was a humdinger. Probably the worst I'd had since the one just before I left my parents' house to come to London.

I was at home. It was probably about four in the morning when I awoke. I was lying naked in bed, having thrown off my duvet when I woke up. My eyelids were gummed together with mascara and my mouth tasted horribly and predictably awful. I reached for the pint glass of water that I always kept by my bedside.

Or rather I tried. As I realised with dread that my limbs were once again not obeying my brain's commands, I began to hear the footsteps in the landing outside.

Footsteps is perhaps the wrong word. These were more like soft, muffled thumps, as though something heavy and covered in cloth were being repeatedly dropped onto the carpeted floor of the landing from about two feet in the air.

The thumps came nearer the open door. Through the corner of my eye I could see a misshapen shadow approaching the threshold of my bedroom.

Then the... thing came into my room. I couldn't scream, I couldn't move a single muscle. A great deadness had fallen over my body, like a heavy, dull sack of potatoes, peeled and greying from age.

I realised that whatever it was that was poking into my room was a "head".

It was perfectly spherical, about the size of a beachball. Pale blue like cornflowers, and covered with a soft, undulating fur about half an inch in length, that looked like it would be givingly soft to the touch. It glowed softly from the inside, and the glow undulated with the fur, casting an aquarium ripple on my bedroom walls.

About half way down what I took to be its front - though the sphere was otherwise completely featureless - was a small mouth, with blue, cherubic lips fringed by slightly longer fur that rippled slowly in the direction of the mouth, like the fronds of an anemone. The lips had a pronounced underbite, so that a set of pointy, conical white teeth jutted out in front.

The mouth looked horribly wet and was working soundlessly, the lips forming bizarre shapes as though it was trying to speak.

There were no eyes. No other features.

As the "head" poked further into the room, it was followed by what looked initially like a strange collection of jointed sticks covered roughly in a misshapen piece of tarpaulin. I soon realised this was the creature's "body".

It was hard to make out, as the organisation seemed chaotic, but there seemed to be seven dry-looking sticks, or "legs", about six inches in diameter and six feet long, that reminded me queasily of stick insects from school Biology lab. Each leg terminated in a soft, pompom shaped clump of brown fur that caused the soft thumping noise on the carpeted floor.

The legs disappeared under a loose, leathery sheet of green, tarpaulin looking material that appeared to contain no other organs or material inside, except whatever mechanism the legs attached to and articulated with. It looked almost like a walking tent. With a furry beachball head on top.

Once the "creature" had fully entered the room. It stopped for a while by the door, casting its silent rippling blue light over me. I suddenly realised that the light was how it "saw".

Gradually, the blue light passed over me, then passed back to focus on my face. It was looking straight at me.

The thumping started again as it gathered up its loose tent of a body and flowed slowly towards me. I couldn't even close my eyes.

The tent engulfed my bed and body, and the last thing I remember is the furry face looming right up to mine, inspecting me with a teriifying curiosity, the mouth working inarticulately on the verge of vocalisation.

Far away, I could hear my mobile phone ringing as I once again lost consciousness.

***

I woke up. It was bright daylight outside. Hot again.

I felt sick, and I managed to gulp down a few mouthfuls of tepid water from my bedside glass before running to the bathroom and puking up my guts into the toilet bowl.

I stayed knelt on the floor of the bathroom for a while, just trying to breathe, before having a perfunctory wash and trudging back to my room.

On my bedside, the mobile beeped. There was a message. I picked it up and looked at the time. It was gone 11am.

The missed call was from a withheld number. I dialled my voicemail:

"You have one new message, received at 4am on Thursday 16th August. Press '1' to listen to your message"

I pressed the key on my handset.

There was a pause, then a rush of static in my ear which resolved into a hollow, distant echoing noise punctuated by loud clicks, as though someone was turning a light on and off in a huge, empty warehouse.

Then I heard J's voice, faint and disconnected, as though it was being played on an old tape machine in the same warehouse. The clicking intensified, seeminly coming after each hesitant word that J spoke, rendering his voice weird and mechanical.

"I *CLICK* need *CLICK* to *CLICK* need *CLICK* to *CLICK* see *CLICK* you *CLICK* straight *CLICK* away *CLICK* the *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* it's *CLICK* started *CLICK* it's *CLICK* started *CLICK* I *CLICK* need *CLICK* I *CLICK* need *CLICK* I *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK*..."

***

to be continued...

Part of a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories originally published on my weblog. More to follow

TRANSFORMER Part three by Miss K

The midday, midsummer heat envelops me in a suffocating embrace as I walk the few steps to the street exit of the sleepy provincial station. The small, white-shirted inspector looks askance at me as I hand him the stub of my one-way ticket. Probably my height (just shy of five foot eleven) was rather unusual for a Japanese woman, as I'd noticed several similarly curious glances cast my way during the two hour journey from Osaka via Saidaiji where I'd changed onto the two carriage Kintetsu line local train.

I stop outside the station among the messily parked bicycles to buy a Pocari Sweat from the row of gleaming vending machines there. There's not much to it - a few shabby looking shops, one stand up red lantern diner serving udon and curry rice and yakitori, one narrow road leading east to the town centre, and one north to the countryside, the two roads intersecting at a small and run down-looking bus station at the corner of the parade of shops.

I need desperately to change out of my skinny black jeans into a skirt. It's so hot that my body's already soaking wet from sweat. I look around and find the sign for the station's ladies room and slip inside, emerging soon afterwards in a more practical short yellow skirt that I'd bought from American Apparel in Tokyo a week or so before. I bend down to tie a loose lace on one of my Converse (and to retrieve an errant sneaker sock that had been sucked down into the shoe to bunch painfully under my left arch), shoulder my bright turquoise canvas bag and head for the bus stop at the north end of the station parade.

As I walk along the baked dry pavement slurping my icy canned drink, I have a sudden atavistic recall of the perpetual dustiness of the hot summer roads of this, my childhood home town, a far cry from the mucky damp streets of Archway where I now live. I put The Royal Society by 80's Matchbox B-Line Disaster on my iPod and sit down on the peeling green bench next to a middle-aged man with a pochi dog who's chainsmoking Mild Sevens (the man, not the dog).

And so I wait patiently for the hourly bus to the local Shinto shrine.

I'm not at all keen to reacquaint myself with my family or their friends, some of whom I know still live in this quiet little backwater, looking as I do now: like some skinny, trendy girl from America Town, and with the mounds of my newish, small breasts visible under my boat neck top's low chest. That would be too hard to explain for those expecting the too-tall-for-his-skin awkward, slightly overweight boy of their past. So I keep my big sunglasses on and hide my face under a huge, orange sun hat and my bush of curly bottle blonde hair. I get plenty of stares (I look understandably rather too exotic and ponyish for such a small, unchanging town) but no recognition.

I notice that the trees that line the road leading north of the bus stop have grown as I gulp down the rest of my slightly salty sports drink. During my youth, they'd been a distinct and pretty avenue of foliage leading off into the middle distance (well, to the county town, eventually, actually) but these had now grown and intertwined above to become a long and shady green tunnel, impossibly inviting in the heat.

I look down the tunnel of trees, squinting, expecting to see an approaching car, or a girl on a bicycle, or a bus returning from the shrine but nothing comes. The tunnel just stretches off into a peaceful green darkness. I turn away, then back again, drawn by the promise of the cool, peaceful green.

My mobile rings, startling me from my reverie.

I retrieve it from the interior pocket of my bag and look at the display. It reads "MOCHA". Stupid cow! I feel a powerful and quiet fury that my so called 'best friend' from London seems already to have forgotten that I'm abroad and I told her not to call me for any reason. I thumb the busy tone button and replace my phone in my holdall. She probably just wants to discuss sharing cabs to the club on Saturday or some such. As I'm fuming, a bus pulls into the rotunda that houses the bus stop with a diesel rumble. I look up in anticipation, but it's just the town centre shuttle. The five or so passengers waiting with me all mount the bus, my companion on the bench stubbing out the latest of his cigarettes and ascending the step last. His dog follows him aboard, looking back at me with mournful eyes and a slight whine. The double cantilevered doors hiss shut and the bus pulls away leaving a cloud of the omnipresent dust. I watch it go as the cloud settles. I'm now quite alone.

I turn back again to the tunnel of trees. It might be an illusion but the far end seems even more distant now, swallowed up in unfathomable darkness. I fight a strong urge to get up and walk off into the darkness and instead retrieve my phone again to check the time just as it shudders to alert me that a message has arrived.

I flip the little pink thing open. It's from Mocha:

"Call me when u get 2 shrine urgent"

I close the message then open it again, read it again.

Mocha neither knows I'm in my home town going to visit the shrine, nor has any inkling of just how urgent any of this is.

I'm trying to work this one out when I notice that the shadows are lengthening around me. I must have been sitting waiting longer than I realised as it's now early evening. I look around to see if there's anyone I can ask about the bus. But the station and the shops around it are all deserted.

I shake my head. I feel as though I've been asleep. I feel a powerful sense of drowsiness. But I've been awake since I got here. The town centre bus only just left. I'm sure of it. Yet it feels simultaneously like hours have passed.

I look again to the tree-lined road that leads to the shrine. My phone rattles again in my palm.

1 new text message from: MOCHA

"We r waiting pls hurry!!!!"

I close my phone and put it away, shouldering my bag. I look again at the dim extent of the green tunnel of trees. I can almost imagine that there are shapes moving at the far end. Dusk is falling far quicker than I'm used to back home in London and I'm aware that, somehow, somewhere time is running out for me, or for J, so I get up and abandon my wait for the bus. I'll deal with Mocha's baffling texts later.

I slip into the tunnel of trees and walk onwards into the gathering darkness.

***

As little as fifty steps into the cool darkness of the tunnel of trees, I feel as though I'm a million miles away from the railway station at its entrance. The trees up above have closed into a vertiginous, tangled canopy that lets only a murky, seabed light through. Shivering in the sudden damp chill, I pull a stripy cardigan from my big bag and shrug it on.

Looking back, I notice that the dusk of the town that I left behind has dwindled to a distant, indistinct smudge of orangish light that is soon swallowed up by the pervasive gloom. I glance back a couple more times, but have the uneasy feeling that I shouldn't look back any more so I fix my eyes ahead and continue.

At intervals on the eastern verge of the silent road (to my right) sit small, moss-covered Jizo statues, looking impassively at me from the gloom with their eroded eyes. Remains of ancient offerings sit decaying at their feet, but it's clear that no fresh flowers or pieces of food have been placed for these tiny stone spirits for many months, even years. Nothing sits on the overgrown western verge of the road. Instinctively I keep to the right, closer to the statues. It feels safer,

The road is impossibly quiet now. Even my footsteps sound muffled. Ahead is impenetrable darkness but I know I have to carry on. So I do.

***

I'm not sure when I first notice it. I suppose that it's just a sensation of being observed to begin with.

By now the darkness is so suffocating that all I'm aware of is the movement of my joints as I walk, the tug of my bag on my shoulder. Sight, sound, even smell have long since been lost to me. I can feel hardly any sensation save a vague sense of forwards-ness.

Anyway, I start to have a slightly uneasy feeling that there are others watching me in the dark, At first I think it might be because of the little stone spirits on the road verge. I know they're there so I must subconsciously be projecting an observational role on them.

But slowly, I begin to realise there are others walking in the dark with me. At first it's just a faint sound of a scuffed footfall in the darkness to my left. Then something brushes my right arm and I hear faint breaths of exertion behind me. Somewhere ahead is a faint light as someone lights a cigarette and I smell the smoke as it drifts back to me on the faint air current.

Gradually I become aware that I'm surrounded by a dense crowd of shuffling figures, all treading the tarmac as I do, all heading in the same direction. Forwards...

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. The mass of humanity shuffling like automata around me reminds me of the mental image that quotation always puts in my head, of a throng of faceless people pushing forwards in an absurd impulse to get somewhere, somehow, not knowing why, where or how it will help.

By degrees, I realise that I'm beginning to be able to see. There's a milky, rippling, bluish light that's beginning to suffuse the road from ahead. I begin to see the figures around me, hunched over, formless, shuffling forwards. There must be hundreds of us on the suddenly much wider road, all about two or three feet apart. Strangely, each individual figure seems strangely shapeless until I look directly at them, at which point they resolve into sharp reality. I know them all, in some vague way. I focus on two friends from college a few feet away, walking together in the blue light, Hugo and Sasha. I make to go over to them, but suddenly realise they're kissing and hang back. Damn. I thought they were over each other.

Twenty feet ahead, my focusing gaze brings another group of people into relief. Mocha! And a few others from the club. What the hell are they doing here? I shout out her name, but she doesn't hear me.

Or rather she can't hear me. My voice makes no sound in the strange, attenuated vacuum that surrounds us. I pick up my pace, trying to work my way through the crowd to them, pushing the other people aside in my haste.

As I pass others in the shuffling crowd I realise that they're fading away. I'm reasonably certain that any of those that I've already pushed behind me no longer exist, as though only my attention is keeping them anchored to the reality of the path. As I move forward I'm erasing the people who fall behind me out of my line of sight.

But I don't care because I've just seen who's at the front of the crowd making his way along the road in the uncanny blue, rippling light ahead.

I'd recognise that outline, that tilt of the head, that long black hair, anywhere. J!!

I redouble my pace and barge my way through the crowd, past Mocha and Mel and Pierre who fade noiselessly as I push past. Past hundreds more insubstantial ghosts, erasing them even as I brush past and ignore them. I only want to get to J, to hold him and kiss him, to talk, to laugh and eat and drink and just to be with him to banish this permadusk that I've endured since he disappeared.

But J is still leaving me behind. The faster I try to advance the more I feel stuck. Invisible hands hold me back and J is disappearing into the distance. I've struggled to a complete halt. The mass of the ignored won't let me have him if I won't acknowledge them. Insubstantial though they are they hold me imprisoned in the gloom. I'm running but I'm perfectly still. Shouting myself hoarse but unable to hear myself or be heard.

Ahead, J stops. Cocking his head as though he's heard something, he looks around. I jerk my neck trying to push aside the invisible, cold hand of one of the ignored that's covering my mouth and manage to utter one, desperate shout: "PLEASE!!!!"

J turns.

The blue light is coming from him and grows to envelop me as he steps slowly back towards me, a sad little smile on his face.

Tears are pouring down my face. I want to reach up and hug him but I'm still completely unable to move.

J reaches out a glowing blue hand and touches my tear-wet cheek.

Then he shrinks into a tiny blue point of light which vanishes off into the distance of the still forest.

As he goes, the darkness falls down on me like a shroud. I lie utterly immobile, entombed in icy stillness.

I no longer exist. I've become one of the ignored.

***

I woke up with a huge, tearing cry. My pillow was soaking wet with sweat and tears.

I looked at my phone. It was five am on Saturday morning.

***

J had been missing exactly five weeks now and I missed him more every day. The only contact I'd had since he'd gone to Paris had been that weird click-ridden and impossibly distant-sounding phone message. I counted that as when he went missing, though technically you could say that he wasn't really missing as he'd been able to call me. I just don't think whoever or whatever rang me that night was actually J.

He's been due back the third week of August but it was now September 15th, the leaves were beginning to turn, and his flat lay empty. I'd asked the cab drivers at the club every Saturday but they said he wasn't back yet, that they hadn't seen him. Now they just shrugged.

No-one really knew J, it seemed. He didn't seem to have family. No one missed him. Except me. I missed him fiercely. I missed his funny askew smile, his big soulful eyes and the fine curls of black hair that adorned his flat brown chest.

I reported him missing at Shoreditch police station. I tried his mobile once in a while, left voicemail, sent him email, filled out the contact form on his Mosque clock site and left messages on his Facebook.

The man I had been appalled to realise I loved was slowly fading from my life.

Meanwhile, my sleep problems had got worse. Since that phone message, I'd barely been able to sleep more than an hour or so at night. Every few days I'd be gripped by sleep paralysis and I'd become so terrified of a repeat of my nocturnal visitor that I actually set up a camcorder on Long Play record and night mode at the end of my bed and recorded, Britain's Most Haunted style, my sleeping self every night.

But I didn't receive any more visitations, though sometimes I'd lie awake imagining that I could sense the strange blue glow of that ball-headed entity approaching my bedroom up the stairs. The green, grainy camcorder footage revealed just what the tape captured night upon night. A strung-out looking tranny on the constant edge of a cliff of sleep.

I sat up in bed smoking, thinking about the vivid dream I'd just had. Dawn was starting to creep over the Archway skyline. I'd fallen asleep in my makeup and lingerie from the night before and I looked an absolute fright in the mirror next to my bed.

The more I contemplated that dream, the more I became convinced that J had been trying to contact me through it. It was as though he'd taken me to a familiar place from my childhood then was trying to draw me into some nether place where he was trapped.

Trapped. Why else would his message sound so desperate? He had to be lost, or marooned, or imprisoned somewhere. It was exactly five weeks since that weird phone call. I didn't dare think about terrorism, because it was clearly so absurd a notion.

Besides, I felt a sensation akin to a conviction that whatever J was mixed up in was a lot weirder than that.

Stubbing out my cigarette, I picked up my phone and dialled J's mobile. No answer. Not that I'd been expecting any. The phone had gone straight to voicemail every time since.

***

The girl had a small bead of blood glistening on her pale earlobe.

Well, that's what it looked like. The cheap resin earring that studded her earlobe was glinting wetly in the bright early morning sunlight in front of me and I couldn't keep my eyes off it in my fuddled condition.

I was on the top deck of the 271 bus travelling south towards Shoreditch.

Since waking up from the dream of J leaving me in the tunnel, I'd become obsessed with the idea that something was about to happen, so I'd quickly thrown on some jeans and just about the only clean top I could find, touched up my lippy and my puffy eyes, stuffed my purse, makeup, a bottle of water and a cardy into my turquoise bag and pelted out of the house. I reckoned his flat in Bethnal Green was a good place to start so I'd grabbed a doughnut and a coffee at McDonalds by the Whittington Hospital and hopped onto this bus.

Now I was bumping down New North Road. It was a beautiful morning, clear and warm. But all I could do was stare at this woman's cheap earring. I was about to reach out and pull it out of her ear, or ask her where she'd got it, or do something equally foolish, when my mobile rang.

It was Mocha. I tucked my newly blonde hair behind my ear and pressed the answer button.

"What you wearing tonight, LADY?" she said. She sounded drunk.

I'd completely forgotten it was Saturday. I was working tonight. "Mocha, it's seven fucking am. What are you doing up this early?"

There was a confused pause at the other end. I could hear keys being dropped and picked up; then rattling in a lock.

"Ohhhh, I just got IN girl! You'll never guess who I was OUT with. You'll just DIE!! Anyway what you WEARIN', lady? Cos I thought we could go like MEGA-80s? You know that new pink BAT THING you got down at Utopia in Chapel Market? I got a black and GOLD one that matches it. We'll be AMAZIN' whadyafink BIA-TCH??"

The bus was pulling up at the Old Street stop. Earring girl was getting off and I had to too. I shouldered my bag and followed her downstairs, cradling my mobile with my chin and shoulder. "Yeah, sounds good love, but listen, I have to go right now. Sorry. In the middle of something sticky. Call you later. Mwah!" I hung up before I could hear any of Mocha's protests. She rang once again but I ignored it. That was quickly followed by a text that simply said "BIATCH XX".

I walked up Old Street and around the corner onto Shoreditch High Street to wait for an 8 to Bethnal Green, wondering who Mocha'd been out with. Probably one of those microcelebs that she liked to pretend were actually famous.

To my slight surprise, 'Earrings' was sat on the red plastic bench at the bus stop, reading a folded over copy of Time Out. I sat down next to her and smoked a fag squinting up at the sun glinting off the windows at the front of the Tea Building. I studied her askance. She was small, birdlike and pretty, in a tweedy green peacoat and bright yellow tights, purple Mary Janes on her feet that I'd seen in Office shoes. Her brown bob was tucked into a red beret. She wore delicate, red-framed glasses that matched the earrings and moved her lips slightly as she read.

She glanced up at me and I pretended to be surreptitiously reading her magazine. She smiled faintly and I smiled back. She started to rise and I realised that my bus was pulling up to the stop. I hopped on after her and sat down by the baby-carriage bit. She went upstairs.

***

As the bus trundled along Bethnal Green Road towards J's Peabody Housing block, my face was bathed in the early autumn sunlight. I drifted up into my thoughts like a cloud in the blue sky above.

The corners of the drab buildings idled past my grubby bus window. Halal meat shops, convenience stores, video rental places, kebab and fish and chip shops, curry restaurants, internet cafes, money transfer, dry cleaning, the odd letting agent and dilapidated pub; behind them the ever looming grey and red-brick tenement blocks and estates. All the services the city needs to keep ticking over. The bottom rung of the urban hierarchy of needs; a far remove from the luxury that one might find just a few miles west. The mass of men, women and the undecided, living their lives of quiet desperation, one day at a time, hoping for the phone call, the letter, the email, the chance encounter that would let light into their twilight of the ignored.

J had been that light for me. I harboured hopes and fears like anyone else in this massive, cruel city. It had been a happy release from the day to day tedium of urban life to have been able to share my life, however briefly, with the man who'd driven me home that night. I was under no illusions that being the person I was, I'd find it harder to find companionship of a genuine nature. I'd had plenty of one-or-more night stands, but many of my so-called boyfriends fetishised me rather than truly saw me as a partner in time. It gets fucking painful standing up on that pedestal in stillettoes, believe me.

Not J. He and I genuinely had something indescribable. Shit... We did... I brushed some moistness from my eyes with a MacDonalds napkin and blew my nose. Shit.

The bell to stop the bus rang as I was reaching for it. I head footsteps descending the steps from the top deck and smiled as Earring Girl emerged from the stairwell. It seemed like our journeys were inextricable. I got up and joined her at the exit door as the bus pulled up at the stop for J's street.

I paused at the bus stop to rummage in my bag for my cigarettes, and lit one, removing my cardigan in the increasing warmth and stuffing it in the turquoise bag's roomy canvas confines. I noticed that Earrings was heading up the side street towards J's block of flats. I suddenly felt a bit self conscious, like I was stalking her. God knows why, but I tried to keep a surreptitious distance as I followed her up the familiar street lined with London Planes. She was probably just heading home after a night out or something. She turned right and left. Bemused, I followed. She was heading straight towards J's Peabody block.

I came to a halt by the street corner greasy spoon cafe on J's street as I realised she was actually going into the street door that led to J's flat.

There were only five flats to every entrance. Surely coincidence couldn't stretch that far. Had she been following me somehow? Was she mixed up in whatever scheme had wrenched my lover from me? No. It didn't make sense. I'd been following her. No. I mean, she'd been ahead of me, so she couldn't have been following me, unless she was somehow following me from in front of me... wait, no, wait...

No. Stupid. It was just a stupid coincidence. I was tired and upset and was seeing menace where there was none. Crossing the street, I walked up to the door and tried J's doorbell.

Silence.

Of course there would be no reply. Why on Earth would there be? I'd tried often enough the last five weeks. Why would he be back now?

The intercom crackled. "Hello?"

After I'd poured myself back into my skin and got my thudding heart back on a regular beat again, I leaned into the microphone grille. "Ummm.... hi. I'm looking for J, the Asian guy who lives here... I'm a friend of his?"

There was a pause.

"Oh..." said a woman's voice from the intercom. There was another pause.

"You'd better come up."

The entry buzzer sounded. I pushed the door open and went inside.

***

to be continued

Part of a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories some of which were originally published on my weblog. This and subsequent installments are entirely new however and are being premiered here.

TRANSFORMER Part four by Miss K

“Oh thank goodness. I thought you were following me!” earring girl said with a sigh of relief, in a broad South Wales accent. Then she frowned at me through the crack afforded by the chain that was holding J's door half open. “Wait a minute. Maybe you are following me. Who are you anyway?”

“Never mind that,” I said, “who are you? And what are you doing in my boyfriend's flat?”

“That's what I been trying to tell you. He doesn't live here anymore. This flat became available a couple of days ago. I been on the list ages, see? I came down and saw it yesterday and took it straight away. Well, you know how hard it is to find a good cheap one bedroom flat—”

“Please,” I interrupted quietly, insistently, “let me in. I just need to see.” She looked for a moment into my red rimmed eyes, then looked down, nodding. She pushed the door to and I heard the chain rattling as she unfastened it. The door swung open and she stepped aside to allow me through.

J had been a bit of a hoarder. The flat had been cluttered, bordering on the messy; piles of books, magazines, newspaper supplements, comic books, DVDs, CDs and LPs, clothes and shoes scattered about and of course, stacks of boxes of the ubiquitous mosque clocks which he sold from his website. I once complained that sleeping with him was an occupational hazard, prone as we were to being crushed under the piles of media and stock looming over us that might become dislodged by our urgent fucking. He'd laughed his small laugh then and said he'd sign any release or waiver that I'd put in front of him.

I was shocked at how empty the flat felt now in comparison. All the junk that marked J's existence had been spirited away, leaving only the drab yellow and green curtains, the three-seater sofa with the frayed cushions and the collapsed springs on one side, a dying spider plant that no one clearly had felt solicitous enough to remove or revive. The shelves, once groaning with information and stuff, were bare.

I stood in the middle of the empty room and started to cry.

***

“Here you are,” said earring girl, whose name was Amy, handing me a polystyrene cup of black coffee with a gentle hand on my shoulder.

I nodded my thanks and took a sip through the hole in the lid. I was sat at the good end of J's sofa in the empty room. Amy had kindly gone out to the cafe opposite and got me a coffee when I'd broken down. She leant on the window sill and quietly watched me drink, her face in shadow. She was looking me up and down. I knew that look. Trying to work out what exactly I was. She still had her coat on.

After while, she gently said, “so he never told you anything about moving on?”

I shook my head, taking another sip.

She tutted. “I'm so sorry. According to the Trust who manage this property, he paid up the balance of two months' rent last week and had people in to clean up and move stuff out the day before yesterday. It was all very sudden apparently.”

I sat quietly, not knowing what to say. I put the coffee down on the bare boards and looked at my hands. Outside, two police cars sped past, sirens blaring, casting a rippling blue light into the bare room where we sat quietly.

I took a breath and got up, picking up my coffee and shouldering my bag. “Thank you, and sorry for disturbing you like this so early.” She smiled wanly and shrugged, as if to say it's OK.

I walked to the door with a briskness I didn't feel inside and turned. “Oh. I don't suppose he left a forwarding address or anything?”

She shook her head. “The people at the Peabody Trust might be able to help you though. Do you want me to get the number for you? They're ever so helpful.” I nodded my thanks and she went into the kitchen. I heard her rummaging in her bag.

Another police car approached, siren wailing, and stopped momentarily outside, perhaps obstructed by traffic. Shimmering blue light once again suffused the room. I closed my eyes and yawned. I was so tired that I felt I could lie down and sleep forever, right here in J's... no... in Amy's front room.

The blue light flicked across my closed eyelids as the siren momentarily cut out then restarted.

Suddenly something registered with me. I opened my eyes, straining to catch sight again of something I'd glimpsed in the rippling blue before the great weariness had closed my eyes. The light faded as the police car sped away but I'd already spied the small, bright spot of colour.

I walked quickly to the crack in the wall by the badly sprung end of the sofa and scrabbled to reach the small, bright pink object nestled inside.

It was a folded up piece of card. The lurid pink cover of a matchbook from the club where Mocha and I worked, and where J and I had first met. I unfolded it with shaking hands.

On the reverse of the blue on pink print of a pair of fishnet clad legs that was the club's logo was a sequence of numbers scrawled in scratchy blue ballpoint, followed by a single letter:

150908-2359 J.

The spidery writing was unmistakably his.

And the message was, to me at least, unmistakable too: One minute before midnight, tonight, the 15th of September. J.

My heart was thudding with excitement and pent up joy. I had to go. Try and rest and get myself ready and beautiful for him.

Amy emerged from the kitchenette shaking her head. “I'm really sorry, I thought I had the Peabody Trust card with me. You'll be able to find the details on the web tho—“

I was already making for the door. “Never mind,” I said quickly, “and thanks for your help.” I gave the surprised Amy an abrupt hug and left the flat, hurrying out into the bright and sunny morning that suddenly seemed a whole lot brighter and sunnier than it had been ten minutes earlier.

***

Big knickers are the key.

I have several pairs from M&S with a reinforced girdly panel at the front that are excellent at both holding your tummy in check and making sure that your willy and balls stay tucked away for that all important "flat front bottom" effect. Honestly, a 500 pound mountain gorilla couldn't break through these superpants. Unless I let him...

I squeezed myself into a pair of powdery blue high-waisted skinny stretch jeans and checked my front in the mirror. Not a bulge in sight. The final touch was a pair of electric blue kitten heeled pumps. With my side flipped blonde hair and off the shoulder batwingy top, I was 80s electro trash incarnate.

It all starts with the big knickers though. Without them everything else would fall apart. And that just wouldn't do. Not on a night like this. Everything was precariously poised as it was.

I checked myself in the mirror, made sure I had all I needed in my turquoise bag and left the flat. In the warm evening outside, Mocha was waiting for me in a minicab that would take us to the club where, later on my most fervent hope, the one I'd been guarding jealously against the odds these last five weeks, would surely some to pass.

***

The club was heavy with people, sweat and desire, and by 11pm I was getting thoroughly sick of the constant groping and leering but I put a brave face on things and let the action wash over me.

I nursed the drinks that were bought for me and watched Mocha, dressed like my photographic, pornographic negative, deteriorate in her all too predictable fashion. Mel wandered by occasionally, tutting and rolling her eyes as she took in Mocha's condition. I popped upstairs a couple of times to have a smoke and a flirt with big Pierre, the jovial Senegalese security man. Meanwhile the music pounded on and I was dragged now and then by faceless suitors of all gender configurations to grind and gyrate on the dancefloor.

But of course my mind was elsewhere, away from the pulse of lights and the thudding of the beat. Every now and then, I retrieved the precious matchbook cover from my purse and looked at the scrawl on the reverse. It had to be a message from him, somehow; perhaps left at the flat while the removers were in. I was dying to know what had been going on. I wondered why I wasn't angry at him, but really the possibility of seeing him again filled me with such relief and happiness that angry thoughts didn't even begin to contemplate crossing my mind. I guess there would be time for that later. After all the fucking and talking and everything...

Of course it was possible I'd completely misread that clue on the matchbook cover, but if J didn't show up tonight, there was always the Peabody Trust, not to mention the police to contact on Monday. After all, someone had made arrangements to have his stuff moved out. That was a lead, surely.

But first things first... I glanced anxiously at my phone. 11.35pm. Almost time. I brushed off the pawing attentions of an admirer with a flash of a smile and swayed to the ladies' to tidy myself up.

***

Three hours later, I think I'd finally given up hope. I no longer looked hopefully towards the stairs to the street every time the shadow of a figure appeared at the doorway. I no longer bothered to sneak upstairs for a cigarette to scan the road anxiously for his approaching car, or the familiar long-haired figure sauntering up the road from Aldgate. No more. I was sitting at the bar finishing a dark rum and coke as the dregs of the night were kicking out. Usually they'd have a bit of a lock-in after all the punters had left and sometimes Mocha and I would stay for a few whiskys, but I really didn't feel like it. I'd finish this drink and make a move. Mocha was slumped on the bar next to me, her elegant arms cradling her head in a puddle of something alcoholic.

Unsteadily, I rose, tipping back my head to drain my drink, crunching ice in my mouth. So that was that then. Mocha stirred, glancing up at me through slitted eyes. Whether in sympathy or through some other fuddled impulse, she made a cartoon sorry face at me, lips downturned, and patted me on the arm with her booze-damp hand before slumping back onto the bar. She started snoring, gently.

I shook my head in wonder at the imperviousness of the species known as trannyus alcoholicus and wondered what it would be like to truly be able to lose myself like that. Mocha seemed to have a decidedly good time whatever she was doing. Me, I never seemed to be able to abandon myself like her; doubts, thoughts and ugly self-consciousness always got in the way. I looked down at her beautiful insensible face on the counter top. A small bubble of dribble was pooling at the corner of her mouth but somehow she still looked fabulous. I loved and admired Mocha still, I realised, despite her many flaws, her unstable temper, her boozing, her unpredictability. No, actually because of those flaws. Because despite her foibles, she was fiercely loyal, a true friend who'd stand by me till the end. It was like finding a diamond in the sewer. She was special. I slipped to the cloakroom and fetched her fake fur jacket and draped it over her slim shoulders, kissing her gently on the forehead. She muttered and stirred in her doze. I'd go to the ladies to freshen up then come back to take her home.

***

I emerged from the cubicle and looked at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands. In the flickering fluorescent lights that they never seemed to bother to replace, I looked quite ghastly. My jeans had slipped down off my hips and everything looked a little bit messy down there. No need to let standards slip. I made sure no punter was about to barge in and unzipped the jeans and rearranged my willy, tucking my balls back up inside me and pulling my big, tight knickers up to smooth everything out. Rezipping the jeans, I had another look.

Much better. I quickly began touching up my makeup, repairing my sweaty face with practised skill.

Outside, the music seemed to have stopped, and thankfully, the fluorescent light seemed to have recovered, no longer flickering spastically.

In fact, everything seemed to have stopped...

The club was silent. The extractor fan in the ladies where I was touching up my face no longer whined its whine. Even the distant rumble of traffic, the noises of the city slipping into the deepest cycle of its slumber as the clocks approached 3am, had dwindled to nothing. I was surrounded by an utter, subterranean hush.

I began to feel a sensation in my stomach that I remembered from the attacks of sleep paralysis I'd suffered of late. I screwed the top back onto my lipgloss and put it carefully away. In front of my incredulous eyes, I could see a small fly, suspended in mid air. Almost imperceptibly, the fluorescents above me and the pearlescent tungsten globes around the washroom mirrors began to dim. It wasn't like they were being somehow dimmed electrically. It was like a series of increasingly opaque filters were being slid slowly into position over my mental viewport into the world of people. The light in the washroom changed state, becoming thick, green and viscous like oil. A heavy dead weight began to overtake my limbs as the familiar dread began to press in on my head.

Something thumped softly in one of the cubicles behind me, and the soft noise was accompanied by the emission of four rapid, soundless flashes of blue light from behind the closed door of a cubicle like a row of old-fashioned flashbulbs going off. My muscles had died. All I could do was stand there and look into the mirror. The thumping sounded again and the blue light flashed repeatedly again, this time staying illuminated, a shimmering blue ripple that I remembered so well, The blue light began to pierce the wooden door behind me, spilling out across the ceiling and floor like a gravity-defying pool of mercury, inching towards me.

I was still mired in the green murk but the blue shimmer began to push through the oily green darkness. I remember thinking, this is how it sees. As I watched, the cubicle door behind me began to warp and flutter like the surface of a still pond under a light breeze as something started to push its way through, transforming the brittle wood into a substance akin to toffee as it did so.

The warped wooden surface began to resolve into a humanoid shape. A tallish, skinny male frame, naked, with big eyes, crooked nose and long hair. I couldn't believe my eyes. J was pushing himself through the toilet door towards me, in a halo of blueish, rippling light that seemed to frame him from behind. His arms were outstretched and his mouth open in a silent shout.

With a judder, he managed to push completely through and the blue light gathered around him, forming fine tendrils. Something was trying to follow him through the door. J was shouting noiselessly at me, while holding back the bulk of the creature behind him, back braced against the increasingly liquid doorway. He fixed me with a look from his eyes and inclined his head upwards urgently. Get upstairs, he seemed to be saying.

He concentrated again and began to push back through the door. The glow began to fade as J began to press the entity back where it was coming from. He started to disappear back through the door. Once again he made desperate eye contact. GET! UPSTAIRS!!!

With a wobble like a piece of sheet metal being shaken, the door reformed fully. J was gone. the blue light slowly faded and I began to be able to move through the green gloom that still surrounded me. My first impulse was to go to the cubicle, to try and retrieve J but then I remembered the pleading look in his eye and I turned on my heel and left the ladies' room.

Outside, an eerie hush still reigned. Figures were frozen where they stood. The bar staff cashing up, notes crisp and still in their immobile hands. Mel was caught in the act of sweeping up. Pierre's big frame was frozen half way down the stairs, his braided locks suspended in mid bounce, making towards a couple of guests in the corner who were obviously outstaying their welcome. Mocha was the only one who looked the same, slumped serenely at the bar.

I sidled quietly past the frozen tableau of the dregs of the night and made for the stairs, scrabbling for a cigarette.

Outside, the air was dead and still. The silence was utter. The same, eerie green fog seemed to be settling low on the streets of London. Cars were stopped in mid turn, a few stragglers frozen making their way to night bus stops. The orange streetlamps struggled to be seen through the murk. Nothing was moving. Time had stopped. Not a breath of air on my skin, not a flicker from the fluorescent lights, the neon, the streetlights, no honking of car horns or the subterranean rumble of tube trains returning beneath us to depot, no birdsong. None of the quiet signs of a living world.

Being an art student who pays attention in lectures, I had the sensation of having fallen into a photograph by Gregory Crewdson.

It's like this: it felt like my world was being eclipsed or perhaps, overlaid by another world, visually identical to ours but devoid of the joys and the pains of existence. Not dead, neither alive.

How dull would that be? I had to stop it. But how? I lit a cigarette with a shaky hand. At least my lighter afforded some welcome light and animation to my local environment. I waved the lighter around, trying to banish the green shadow that enveloped me, but it just closed in again when I turned it off.

I was cold. The green murk was cold. I ignited my lighter again and gathered some flyers that had fallen to the ground by the doorway. I started scrunching them up to make a fire. Perhaps I could keep the other world at bay for a while using a small bonfire made from the rubbish of my world.

The flyers went up easily but wouldn't stay alight. As soon as I removed my attention from lighting them, the green dusk would close in and the flame would gutter and die. Perhaps if I got some vodka from the bar to act as an accelerant.

I stepped into the club's stairwell and recoiled in shock. The greenish dark was now so thick in there that I could hardly see two feet in front of myself.

I instinctively felt that if I went down there again, I would never come back. I stepped back out into the relative relief of the street. I lit my lighter again. The flame seemed to struggle to stay alight now. I watched it chase itself back down into the gas nozzle. It sputtered and died. I flicked the mechanism again. The flint sparked fitfully in the gathering gloom but no flame came. Soon, all I could see was the burning coals at the end of my cigarette as I slowly smoked it down. I sat down on the street. It was over.

I felt hollow. I should be wondering whether I'd somehow fallen asleep and was dreaming. Or I'd had a brain haemorrhage and was lying unconscious in the toilet. Or that I'd been hit by a car and was dying in the street. But I didn't ask myself those questions. This was happening. There was no logic to any of this. That's why it had to be happening. Because the universe was a massive and senseless place where anything might happen. There was no meaning. No truth. Just observation and interpretation.

And when we stop observing and interpreting, and something of an entirely different order of intelligence starts to observe and interpret the material universe, the laws of physics might cease to be, or be changed irrevocably.

“Boltzmann brains,” said a quiet voice behind me. I became aware that the familiar blue light was shimmering onto me from behind. I didn't dare turn my head, but could hear footsteps approaching. The blue light helped me to see. It pushed away the confines of the green darkness as it rippled to envelop me. I began to see my feet, then the kerb on which I sat, the double yellow lines on the tarmac, the other side of the street. How it sees. Well, it was now how I saw.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and J came to sit next to me. “What you're thinking of is an esoteric cosmological conundrum called the Boltzmann brain paradox.” His voice sounded simultaneously like it was very close and a very long way away.

I looked at him. He was the source of the blue light. His skin was glowing, his eyes pale and luminous. Even his hair was fluorescing and sparking, rippling like the fur of the ball-headed creature I'd been visited by. He put his arms around me, surrounded me with his glow.

“I missed you so much,” he whispered quietly into my ear, “I'm so sorry. Do you forgive me?”

I kissed him on the mouth, closing my eyes to stop the tears from coming too fast. “Stupid,” I said. “Course I do.”

As we kissed, the world slipped gradually back into focus. I felt the whisper of a breeze on my cheek and heard the wail of a police siren in the distance. Music started to drift up from the club's stairwell. I heard drunken shouting from a few blocks away.

I wanted to look, but we just carried on kissing anyway.

After a while he broke off. I opened my eyes. His big brown eyes were staring sadly into mine. His black hair ruffled by the warm breeze. “We have to stop them coming through for good,” he said, taking my hand.

I held him back, with a sly smile on my face. “Maybe they can wait a few minutes,” I said softly, getting up and pulling him into the alley by the side of the club. He smiled too as I pushed him against the brick wall and started to undo his trousers.

***

We left London behind in the orange lit hours before dawn, driving West past dormitory suburbs and into open country as the sun began to take over the duty of illuminating the fragile world of men and women.

We didn't talk much. There was little to say. He was a good driver and I just watched him drive on, one arm on the window sill, one relaxed on the wheel. Now and then he'd glance over with a faint smile and I felt fulfilled. It was a beautiful day.

Somewhere in Wiltshire, we left the motorway and main roads behind, heading deeper into a countryside of rolling fields, with corn yellowing under the blue sky. I was starting to doze off, when I noticed a great chalk horse inscribed on a hill in the distance. I pointed it out to J who nodded.

By degrees, sleep began to overwhelm me as we wound along country lanes. J knew where to go. I slept a dreamless sleep.

***

I was jolted awake by J taking a corner too fast. He was driving fast along a winding back-road next to a cornfield. There seemed to be no sign of habitation for miles.

He glanced in my direction, smiling.

“Almost there.”

Then, a dark shape detached itself from a hedge ahead of the car and scuttled onto the road. J spun the wheel and the car swerved.

I screamed.

The car turned over, punching its way through the verge, a hedge and into the field beyond. A group of crows clapped into the air in fright.

The car had come to a halt about twenty yards into the field. It was still on its roof.

I couldn't move. My hands seemed to be trapped and I couldn't reach to undo my seat belt. I became aware of a strong smell of petrol all around me. The blood had run to my head, upside down as I was, and I began to feel sick.

J stirred next to me. I tried to look over but I found it painful to move my head. Something wet and warm was dripping onto my chin from above.

I heard him scrabbling in the glove compartment for something, then I heard him undo his seatbelt.

He dropped onto the floor. I mean the roof. You know what I mean. I heard him crawling out of the open window.

After a while he came round to my side of the car. After a struggle, he managed to open my door. He seemed completely unhurt. I smiled. Thank God.

I was starting to hurt quite a lot now and I realised that I probably hadn't come out of the accident quite as well as J.

“I think one of your legs might be broken,” he said quietly. “There's quite a lot of blood.”

There was a slight pause. “Oh god.”

He'd gone quite white.

“What's the matter?” I asked light-headedly. But it just came out like a gurgle.

And then I died.

***

to be concluded...

Part of a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories.

TRANSFORMER Part five (of five) by Miss K

I woke up and, as usual, glanced to my right to check the time on my DVD player. But it was covered by some discarded item of clothing so I couldn't read it. Outside, the street was quiet, only the noises of a few cars and the occasional footstep. Birds were singing. It must have been quite early, though the sunshine looked bright already. Weekend, of course, so always a bit quieter.

Some rays spilled through the gaps at the top of my curtain rails, casting flickering shadows of the trees outside onto my white ceiling. I just lay there looking up at the play of light and dark. I felt no compulsion to move. No urgency to pee or eat. I just lay there quietly, looking at the patterns moving gently on the white plaster, feeling peace and restedness suffusing my body.

More and more, my history of disturbed sleep, the paralysis and visits and terrors that I'd suffered since I was a child seemed, themselves, to have become like fading dreams, dissolving in the brightening sunlight of a summer Saturday morning. Magically, my recurrent sleep problems had disappeared over the long summer. For a while it had seemed like a precariously grasped peace - the gap between bouts of a chronic attack of hiccups. But more and more, I was sure that something had changed. I'd somehow entered a new phase of my life over the summer holidays.

I hardly even dreamt any more.

I stretched, luxuriating in the sensation of my muscles and bones meshing and sliding under my skin. I scratched an itch under my right nipple then let my arm fall to my side, palm up and fingers slightly curled. I lay breathing shallowly, losing myself in the shadowplay above, making out forms and shapes, conflicts and struggles in the rippling shapes on my ceiling, like a hidden story being played out just beyond the boundaries of this world, only grasped in fleeting shadows, out of the corners of your eyes, or in the depths of sleep.

Gently, I drifted off and back into that place, which I could now visit and return from without harm.

***

I woke an hour or so later and rose. I felt utterly refreshed. A light breeze was blowing through the kitchen of my flat. My housemates Lorna and James seemed to have gone out already so I was alone as I padded semi-naked through the empty flat, wiping surfaces, straightening piles of magazines, eating crumbly toast with damson preserve and drinking lotus green tea. My mobile rang once: Mocha, no doubt wanting to know about how we were getting to the club tonight. I let it go to voicemail. Later for all that. James' tacky pink mosque-shaped clock on the mantelpiece read 9:48. He'd bought it on Brick Lane last year just after we'd moved in for the new term at college.

I watched a blackbird perched in a tree outside the kitchen window. He seemed to be looking back at me with his beady eyes. Soon it became a question of who would blink first. I sipped my citrus scented tea, not wanting to be the first to weaken. We stared into each others' eyes for what must have been a minute. Then he broke off. I felt an absurd feeling of triumph. He turned on his branch, lifted his tail and let out a small poo that dropped quickly out of sight, glanced back at me, then flew off, quicker than I could see.

Well.

That told me.

I finished my tea, took the mug and my plate to the sink and went to have a shower.

***

As I patted my long, bleached blonde hair dry, I looked at myself in the large mirror in the bathroom, critically analysing the figure looking palely back at me through the steam and condensation.

Skinny, tall, undoubtedly boyish, made doubly (and paradoxically) so by the hairlessness that I maintained carefully, shaving on average every other day, all over, even down there. It's a full time job, this. But why? What difference was I making to anything?

Would the world care that here was another tranny working hard to evoke the lost girl, my shadow twin? Born together in the darkness, one (me), expressed outside, the other, her (also me), hidden inside and pushing gently outwards to fill the cavities that my body didn't manage to inhabit on its own.

I raised my skinny arms, examining my hands critically in the mirror. You could imagine these were a girl's forearms, certainly. There was no masculine heft to the musculature. The wrists slender and bony, like those of my cousin Akiko whose brown, slim upper arms I remember feeling a pang of jealousy for when visiting home one long ago Japanese summer. She'd used to cycle over from her house to play. She was a tomboy, always covered in scuffs and mud, more boisterous than me; slightly older too and starting to show signs of puberty.

I was doubly trapped even then, between girl need and boy reality, between West and East, uncomfortable with the Japanese language I'd only learnt sketchily before moving to England, uncomfortable in my skin and body which was slowly and surely developing away from the girlish ideal held close to the other body inside my head. I found Akiko's games rough and I cringed when she laughed at my clumsy Japanese, but I idolised her. She looked like me. A girl me, close enough to see how I might be if I found the girl inside. Akiko was dead now. She'd developed a severe psychotic mental illness in her early twenties and hung herself in the mental hospital to which she'd been committed.

I lowered my slender arms with the painted nails (Rocker by MAC). Yes, they'd do. But what about the rest? Well, I guess the face was fine. We Oriental types do seem to have a bit of a genetic advantage when it comes to trannying. Looked at from most angles, my face and head, though on the large side, could easily pass for either gender. Brush a little rose on my high cheekbones, dab a shade of metal and paint some lines of definition on my almond eyes under my thinly arched brows and wipe an artful moistness onto my rather plump lips, angle the chin just so, throw back the shoulders, and ah, there she was again. Hello you. The lost girl.

But look down now and you'd see the fakeness of the illusion. Oh, the legs were fine. A little too bony, and knobbly on the knee maybe, but slender and long and lustrous under a short skirt with a little sweet smelling baby lotion rubbed in to make them glow. But the skinny, long torso of a young man was what spoiled things. The too-long ribcage that contained the small heart of the girl-me that I had slowly killed as I'd grown into manhood, the incriminating flatness of my chest, the small, hairless cock which I could hide and tuck and eliminate, like a Stalinist photo-retouching purge on my anatomy. But the incriminating negatives were always filed away between my thighs and ready to be released.

I wondered what it would be like to have the light heft of budding flesh pulling on my chest. I tucked my balls and cock away and squinted and posed, just imagining seeing the change happen in the mirror I faced; imagining I'd see my body shrink and grow and bud and swell like the oceans shaped by the moon's tidal pull. Mutable. In flux. Inchoate. Fearful but resolute.

It was almost too late to change.

No.

It was never too late.

***

The BBC News channel was full of the usual humdrum quarter hour cycle of modern life (is rubbish). Credit crunch, celebrity big-hair drunkenness, fatalities home and abroad, comings and goings in the football transfer market, fuel panic, the obligatory weekend animal story.

I was sitting half dressed and smoking, waiting for my friend Amy to call - we were supposed to be meeting up for brunch. I couldn't decide whether to be a boy or a girl and so I was hedging my bets in my skinny jeans which worked both ways. A curious story began to unfold as I watched disinterestedly. The blonde news anchorwoman, all concerned eyes and serious mouth, overlaid with the headline "MYSTERY DEATH IN WILTSHIRE". We now hand over to our reporter on the scene.

Cue professionally windswept looking man in a light grey jacket and blue shirt who was standing in a field somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Behind him a bustle of activity, striped tape demarking crime scenes and police lines, white suited figures and fingertip searches, the visual fetishes of the media's idea of violent death. He was explaining how a farmer had discovered a dead body in a new corn circle that had appeared the night before in the middle of one of his fields. A young Asian man. No sign of a struggle, no apparent cause of death. To all intents and purposes, it seemed he'd laid down in the middle of the field early that morning and just died of natural causes.

The weirdest thing, explained the reporter, was that it looked like the corn circle had formed around the dead body, somehow. Apparently there was something in the way the plants around him had been crushed that showed that the elaborate pattern could only have formed after the body had found its final resting place.

The irate farmer being interviewed didn't care about the death of a dark-skinned man on his land of course. His interview was full of glowering resentment against the supposed pranksters who'd finally arrived on his property after years of despoiling other farmers' crops with their impossible, intricate geometric earthworks.

My phone bleeped and I broke away. It was a text from Amy about where and when to meet. I got up and continued to dress, leaving the rolling news to roll ever onwards in the background.

***

"People can't take their eyes off your nails," Amy said, forking a mouthful of huevos rancheros into her mouth, "can they?"

We were sitting at the tables outside a cafe in Highgate Village. Amy had come up from her new flat in Bethnal Green and we were to go for a walk in Kenwood afterwards.

i laughed, fluttering my carmine claws round in mock menace. "I guess they expect a boy to have black nails if they're painted at all," she observed.

It was true. Waitresses, passers by, young diners on nearby tables; people seemed mesmerised and confused by my nails in particular. Not by my faint eye makeup, or the eyebrows. It was the nails that sent the duplicate signals, got the mystified looks. I'd decided to go "boy" but hadn't been arsed to remove the nail polish. Besides, I enjoyed the visual terrorism, which was never that dangerous to indulge in during daytime.

I listened as Amy burbled on in her pretty South Welsh lilt about all and sundry. I was a good listener, not too voluble myself and I was attracted to those who could dominate a conversation with half a person like me. Mocha too. She was a talker. Fuck yes.

I wondered one day if I'd find someone with whom to share conversations like that. You know, someone permanent. A nice boy who's love someone like me.

I'd never been that successful in matters of love.

I guess I attracted people with fevered desires, rather than people who'd desire me for who I was.

It was worst at the club of course, the admirers who came to leer and paw. We had a weird symbiosis with them, girls like us. Not quite dependent, not quite contemptuous. Members of different species who's somehow become intertwined in the food chain without realising it. The bottom feeders and the open swimmers, joined by a subtle web of want. Even the cab drivers who took us there and back. You could tell that some of them were in it for that - a quick blow job for the fare. We were often hard up, or after a thrill, or, after all, just wanted some human company, however brief.

I remembered that one mini cab driver, from a few months ago. He'd told me his name as I'd left his car, leaning out with a lopsided smile. I couldn't remember now what it had been, but I remembered that smile, and his nice hair. Part of me wished I'd done something with him, but I guess that there's so much danger there. It's just not worth the thrill. Is it?

But what if he'd been the 'one', that cute, tall, Asian boy? Too late now. I'd seen him a couple of times after that but then he'd stopped coming to get fares at the club, with his long hair and his big eyes. So I guess he wasn't the one. Pfft. A mini cab driver. Thank god. Can you imagine?

"Oh my god did you see this?" interjected Amy, oblivious to my reverie, pointing out a story in the paper in front of her. I took another sip of coffee and munched on my blueberry pancake, craning my neck to make out the story in The Guardian that she was reading. "It's sooo spooky, like."

"Oh yes," I said. "I was watching a report about that on the news when you texted me, actually."

"Says here that his car was found three fields away from where his body was, upside down, it was like it had crashed through a hedge. Except that the field was miles away from any road! It's gotta be a prank. But he's dead!" She shivered. "That's so sick!"

I nodded. "It does sound like a bad joke somehow." I looked up suddenly as a screaming child ran randomly by us, heading down Highgate Hill, chased by an irate looking adult. Amy and I smiled at each other.

She read on, in a dramatic voice: "More mysterious still are the indications that someone else had been severely injured in the apparent crash of the abandoned car. Large quantities of reportedly human blood were found on the passenger side and a seat belt seems to have been hastily cut on that side as if to release an injured passenger. However no traces of injury or struggle have otherwise been found and there is no sign of a body. There have been no admissions to local hospitals or mortuaries that seem consistent with the gruesome discoveries, and of course, the body of the unidentified Asian man in the field itself is completely injury free. Police are urging anyone who might have further information to contact the incident room at Devizes. The Asian man's body was removed earlier and a post mortem is expected later today."

Amy's favourite blood dot earrings glinted in the sunlight as she leaned over, with a mischievous smile on her pixy face, "do you think it's aliens?" She got a cigarette out and started rummaging around in her bag.

"I'm sure it's got absolutely nothing to do with immigration," I joked, watching her light her fag with a lurid pink matchbook from the club. "Hey, where did you get that?" I asked suddenly. "You've never been down to the club have you?"

She shook her head, smiling up as our rather dishy waiter cleared our plates and left the bill. "You must have left it at my flat," she explained. "I found it by the side of the sofa."

She looked at the logo on the front of the matchbook, which showed a pair of open, fishnet clad legs, with the club's name printed vertically in-between. "Well classy, it looks like," she said, giggling, "your workplace."

I laughed. "Only the highest class establishments for me," I said, putting a ten pound note down on top of hers.

***

We had a wonderful walk in Kenwood's grounds and on the Heath. It was a precariously beautiful autumn day. The kind that masquerades as summer, still, with the hint of a fresher breeze, dry, on the cusp of too hot. Amy said it was the sort of day that was made for walking in the country. Even this deep into September, there were people swimming in the ponds.

Back home, I had a whole afternoon and evening to kill before I had to worry about Mocha picking me up in the cab for work. I was freshly shaved everywhere so all I'd have to do was get made up and dressed.

I sat down on the sofa and put the telly on. Within five minutes I'd drifted off to sleep.

I'm not sure if I dreamt. If I did, I didn't remember it.

***

Much, much later, I was alone in the back of a minicab on the way home from the club, making our way up the deserted orange-lit hinterland of the Holloway Road, like I did almost every Sunday morning.

I'd just poured Mocha back into her flat. I'd been quiet all night. Ever since getting up this morning I'd felt a sense of calm very different from the agitation I'd been used to all my life, and which worked against me in the high energy environment of the club. Mocha had tutted as I'd sat silently at the bar, smiling faintly, after we'd arrived, sipping my Margarita. "What's the matter with you LADY?" she'd huffed, striding off towards the dancefloor towards a group of admirers watching, tongues-out, chins on the floor.

She'd turned and looked back at me, as if beckoning, but I hadn't joined her. She didn't talk to me all night after that. But I still took her home. She was my friend.

Now I sat quietly in the back seat of the minicab, looking out at the quiet, dark street as it went past.

The driver, a middle aged black man with an African accent I couldn't identify, watched me in the mirror. I smiled and he looked away.

Then my eye was caught by an ornament hanging down on a piece of string from his rearview mirror. It was the strangest thing. I could barely make it out, let alone work out what it was meant to be.

Attached to the string was a fuzzy pom-pom, pale blue, the sort you learn to make when you're little using two discs of card and lots of wool. Hanging down from one side of the pompom was a square of rough looking fabric, like hessian, from beneath which projected what looked like a bunch of black pipe cleaners. It seemed so chaotic a thing that I couldn't believe someone has made it or put it there intentionally. And yet somewhere within myself, I had the strangest feeling that it was something vitally important. I couldn't take my eyes off it.

After a while the driver noticed me looking. I looked into his eyes again. "What is it? Do you mind me asking?" indicating the strange thing under the rearview. "A spider?"

He smiled at that. "Ah, my grand-daughter make it. In school." He poked it with his finger and it swung gently under the mirror. "I have no idea what it is, in truth," he went on, "but my wife say I should keep it in here." He chuckled, "for luck."

I was filled with foreboding, watching the thing swing in the semi-dark.

"That thing's not lucky." I said, shivering though it wasn't cold at all. "Not for me, anyway."

***

I became slowly aware that someone was sitting on the end of my bed. The glowing turquoise digits on my DVD player read 04:21.

I struggled to keep my eyes open, grasped by a huge weight of lethargy. For a while I couldn't focus. There seemed to be a slight mist down there by my feet, concealing a shadowy figure.

"You look beautiful, I just wanted you to know that," said a soft voice that emanated form the dark figure's head.

"You don't know me any more," the voice continued, filled with sadness. "No..." it said, as though correcting itself. "You never did... know me, did you?" The voice was so soft that it was almost a whisper. I struggled to take it in.

The figure raised a faint blur of darkness in front of itself. It's arm. No, his arm. From the fingers hung the ornament from the taxi. The pom-pom head emanated a weak blue glow and its pipe cleaner legs waggled feebly in the gloom under its canvas body. I sensed that, whatever it was, it was dying. It had lived long, seen so much in its time, but these were its final moments.

The shadowy man continued. "You defeated them... Stopped them coming through you into the... the world of men... I wanted you to know that-" He paused, as though it was a tremendous effort to get the faint words out. "You won't remember. But I just wanted you to know, my love, before I'm gone for good... Back to their world..." His voice was becoming so faint that I could no longer hear it, except like an itch in some part of my brain. I realised then that tears were streaming down my face.

I wanted to say something to this strange man on my bed. I tried to move my mouth and the words eventually came, just a vague croak, but just about intelligible. I had to tell him, it was vital that he knew, for some reason, that I'd made the most important decision I'd ever make, just today:

"I.. I.. decided... I'm going to become a woman..." I said slowly and hesitantly, "I decided... today.. to stop... messing about... to become.. who... I really am..." I tailed off, exhausted by the effort of expressing this idea to my visitor, crying silently.

The figure at the end of my bed whispered in my head as I drifted gently back into a deeper slumber. He leaned forward but I was almost oblivious as he kissed me softly on my mouth. "I know, love. I know," he whispered as he departed, voice fading like a drift of snow melting into the spring, "and... you'll be... magnificent..."

But I was already asleep, stepping silently into my future, which would start tomorrow and lead into all the other tomorrows that would follow, and follow, as tomorrows do.

THE END