FOSTER AND TAYLOR had been dithering over whether to accept the Secret Service protective detail they’d been offered for the campaign, a privilege all major candidates were entitled to since Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. After struggling with its privacy drawbacks, the pair had only just said yes, resigned that in twenty-four hours they’d no longer have some of the freedoms they liked to enjoy on the campaign trail.
Isabel had not a second’s compunction about accepting the protection, though she hadn’t expected her detail chief’s bluntness. “Ma’am,” he’d said when he first briefed her, “I don’t want to create any false expectations. If someone’s committed to killing you, well… they’ll probably do it. My job is simply to make it as hard as possible.”
FROM under her blue baseball cap, and with her camera tote bag over her shoulder, Niki Abbott phoned up to Mitch Taylor’s room from the hotel lobby. “Ready for our breakfast shoot, Mr Vice-President?” she said provocatively. It was still weeks ahead of Election Tuesday, but she was confident he’d find it an alluring hook.
“Uhmmh?” He rolled over to squint at the clock. “It’s only… ah… six. Weren’t we scheduled at 7:30?”
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said, with a lilt calculated to intensify his memory of yesterday’s seductive wink. She’d arranged to photograph him breakfasting alone in an elegant private dining room with the morning’s papers spread out before him. It would pitch him, she said, as the contemplative man in the background, ready to step forward and serve as number one if needed. Though a Republican, Niki was fine with the scam. The shots would be huge for her, too; her agent had negotiated a five-figure pre-sale with Reuters for nationwide syndication. She loved elections.
Bobby Foster had already flown back to DC. He’d be breakfasting with congressional leaders and then had three back-to-back radio talkback interviews, all of which he’d planned for turning up the heat on Isabel over Ahmed’s ominous disappearance.
“I guess,” said Niki, her pout almost protruding out the other end of the phone, “I’ll just have to wait by my lonesome down here in the lobby till 7:30…”
Taylor’s bio described him as happily married with three children. His wasn’t as long a marriage as Bobby Foster’s but it was almost as tempestuous and, like Foster, that was mostly his own fault. Yet, Julia Taylor was always the good wife, putting up with his antics just as Foster’s wife had so far tolerated his.
“Er, Niki, why don’t we, er, do a pre-breakfast breakfast? You know, up here. Get to know each other a bit better. Then later, we can focus on the, er, shots and not the, er, small talk?”
She smiled as his voice struggled, trying not to crack like a teenager buying his first condom.
“I’ll leave the door unlatched,” he said, “while I’m, er, taking a shower. You can call up room service. I’ll leave my order on the table and you can put it through with yours. Suite 2302.”
A highly polished black brogue was holding the door to the suite open and, as she pushed inside, she heard the pelting of water in the shower—music to her ears. She picked up the shoe, looked back to check in the corridor and quietly double-locked the door.
She thought of snapping him in the nude—someone, though not Reuters, would really pay for that—but what she had planned would be better. Niki carefully put her treasured baseball cap on the hallstand and huffed her camera gear to the floor, lifted a pocket flap and pulled out two small objects and slipped them into place.
She decided not to call room service, not yet; she and Mitch didn’t need interruptions or witnesses and, having turned up the radio in the room to muffle the noise for when the shower finished, she drew her one-piece suit’s front zipper down from her collar to her crotch as she walked across to the bathroom. She smiled and paused when she caught herself in the mirror, and spread open her top to expose her breasts. She licked her thumbs and forefingers and tweaked and rubbed her dark brown nipples stimulating them into short thick shafts almost as hard as the shiny metal cylinder she’d slid over one of her teeth.
She didn’t really need to be aroused ahead of what she was about to do but persuaded herself not to waste the opportunity. She flicked her red hair forward and curled her lips into her fail-safe fuck-me pout and stood for a moment, her hands on her hips, taking in the sight. Maybe she should get out a camera for a quick self-portrait? Niki worked as hard at her body as her moves. She was as taut and springy as a silk strap uplifting a porn star’s bra, though with her mounds Niki never wore one, squeezing by with nipple-tight shirts and Ts.