Dress Off 09: Bust Out in Brisbane

[In Dress Off 07: Pillar of Purgatory, special agents Stacey Shackleton and Jessica Beacham of The Agency set out to rescue fellow secret agent and occasional pain-in-their-ass Tom Mitchelson from the clutches of a nefarious mind-controlling organisation based in Brisbane, Australia. Aided by junior agents Erin and Penelope, the four sexy superspies bluff their way into a secure building but now find themselves faced with the far harder task of making it out of Brisbane with their cover, clothes and self-control still intact. We pick up the story directly after the end of Dress Off 07, with Erin trying to pass herself off as a bounty hunter who "captured" Stacey, the latter of whom is actually Penelope in disguise, while a mind-controlled Tom is forced to identify his old team-mates...]

****

Erin and Penelope stood stock still as they faced down the bleary-eyed Tom, who was trying yet struggling to focus on the two women. Tom's eyes widened at the sight of the buck-naked Penelope and he momentarily seemed to regain some sense of self-control, sunken shoulders arched back slightly, before the tall man in the immaculate suit interrupted.

"Now, Tom. I asked you a simple question." He paused for effect and cast a critical and suspicious look down the full length of Penelope's body, a raised eyebrow conveying his doubt as he momentarily zeroed in on the woman's neatly trimmed patch of black hair over her crotch, which so obviously stood out in contrast to the brown wig that she wore as part of her disguise.

Tom blinked a few times and peered in closer. "I... I..." he started to mumble.

Penelope fought the urge to screw her eyes shut to try and block out the sight of the man scrutinising her, and to try to forget how she'd messed up her disguise. That's not the kind of thing a seasoned agent would do, and she needed to remain calm and ready for anything. She felt the restraints that bound her hands behind her back softly release as Erin used the cover to push Penelope towards Tom to ensure that her junior partner had at least some small chance if Erin and Penelope had to fight their way out.

"Well?" Erin barked at Tom, making her impatience obvious. "I haven't got all night. I've brought your missing woman here." She looked directly at Tom and her face was a mask of irritability and contempt "Do you recognise anyone here?". It was a gamble.

Even under the influence of whatever drugs or hypnosis they'd placed Tom under, he'd possibly be able to spot that Penelope and Stacey weren't exactly body doubles. And if he was under their control, any doubt he cast on their identities would very quickly unravel the barely-half-a-plan the agents had thrown together a little over an hour ago.

However, if there was a chance that Tom would realise that Penelope wasn't Stacey, then it was a cast-iron certainty that Tom would recognise Erin as one of his partners.

Tom slowly turned to look at Erin, seemingly having to drag his eyes off of Penelope's perky naked breasts and then leaned in to stare at Erin as she spoke. There was a flash of recognition and he started to reply. "Yeah... yeah... I recognise..."

"So you recognise the woman standing in front of you as your partner." Erin interrupted, briskly, before Tom could break their cover with an ill-timed "... you".

Tom blinked a few times and then rubbed his head with his hands as if trying to wipe away some fog that was clouding his mind. "Yeah... yes... I do..."

"Right," snapped Erin, again interrupting and hoping the men would be sufficiently distracted by Penelope's womanly assets to not notice that Tom was talking about the wrong womanly figure. "So there we have it. Your man here recognises my target here," she gave Penelope a sharp smack on her exposed bottom, which caused her junior partner to yelp, arch her back and set her breasts jiggle involuntarily, capturing the full attention of the guards, "and so I'd like my money now."

The tall businessman looked at Tom thoughtfully and then back to Erin and Penelope. Whereas his guards seemed to have been entranced by Penelope's little show, he still seemed somewhat short of being fully convinced.

He eyed Penelope's brown hair again, and Penelope prayed that she still had her wig on properly. "I wonder..." he drawled, and then cocked his head to one side with a small thin smile. He fixed Erin with an amused stare. "You don't mind, I assume, if I just do a quick physical inspection of the... merchandise?"

Erin snorted. "What's left for there to see?"

"Oh, well," the man said, spreading his arms wide, his smile spreading across his face but without any humour. "It's a man's prerogative to be curious about a woman's body."

Erin had to fight back the urge to throw up at that line, but she forced a look of professional irritation instead. "You know, at this stage, I'm beginning to think that you can't pay up," Erin said sharply.

The man took a step closer to Penelope and reached up a hand towards her head. They hadn't had time to secure the wig with proper glue back in the lift during the hurried switch, so if the man got his hands on Penelope's hair, the game would quickly be up.

Erin was already moving to intercept the man's hand, and the world around them began to slow down, when the tense silence that had suddenly enveloped the corridor was broken by a sharp beep from the tall man's mobile phone, still tucked into his suit pocket.

The man froze, stared at Erin for a second, and then reached for his phone. He looked at the screen for a second and then hit accept. "Yes." He said curtly. There was a pause while the voice at the other end of the line spoke, and the man's face flickered from suspicion to annoyance and then back to suspicion, before finally settling on distracted irritation.

"Stay there. I will send a pursuit team." He said coldly, and then immediately hung up without waiting for an acknowledgement. He continued to stare at Erin for a few more seconds, before finally speaking again. However, his comments were directed to the men by his side even as he maintained a steely focus on Erin. "There has been another attempted break-in. Security has chased them off." He finally broke off his staring competition with Erin and looked at one of the guards. "Take two men and pursue immediately. The target has been tagged with a tracer."

The guard saluted and wordlessly pointed at two of his colleagues to follow him into the lifts.

As the doors silently slid shut, Erin glanced at Penelope. Three guards were gone, only three to go.

The tall man glanced back at Penelope and then drew in a deep breath as if weighing up several options each of which carried some measure of risk. Finally, he seemed to settle on a course of action and nodded at two of the remaining guards.

"Take our guest into interrogation room two." He said curtly.

"And my payment?" Erin interjected.

The man gave another thin humourless smile but slowly tilted his head in acknowledgement. "Of course."

The young beauty felt Erin push her forward, again using the cover of the movement to this time re-secure the handcuffs. If the guards were going to take her, then it certainly wouldn't pay for them to find that Penelope was actually as free as she was naked.

Flanking Penelope, the guards began to march her away, and Erin tried to cover up her feelings of apprehension with some more false bravado. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could get a word out the man ushered her towards the lift. "Come, please, let me show you my office."

Erin had to physically restrain herself from rolling her eyes right back into her skull. Nevertheless, she fell in behind the man, accompanied by the last guard, and stole one last glance back as a naked Penelope was led away.

****

Special Agent Jessica Beacham rolled the can across to the middle of the ground-floor lobby, smirking as an otherwise harmless gas with a very mild irritant erupted. In her peripheral vision to the right, she could see the middle lift heading down from the eighth floor, no doubt containing the pursuit team she'd just requested. Placing a handkerchief to her mouth, conveniently hiding her features so the team wouldn't realise Jessica wasn't exactly who she was claiming to be, she made a deal of theatrically coughing as the team of three uniformed guards erupted into the wide open space.

Jessica stood behind the security desk that was to one side of the lobby, coughed, and pointed out the main glass doors to the dark Brisbane streets beyond.

"She went that way! Blonde hair. White jumpsuit." Jessica exclaimed from behind the handkerchief. "Gassed the place to stop me from following!"

The guards' eyes swivelled as one to the can, and hands flew up to their own mouths as Jessica waved at them to get out of the building.

"She left only a minute or two ago, turned left." Jessica managed between staged coughs and then tossed a small handheld device to the nearest guard. "You can follow her on this!"

The guard - a tall, heavyset male with a well-tanned complexion - looked suspiciously at the device for a moment, and Jessica's hand strayed imperceptibly to a paralyser dart gun she had secreted on her person. Mercifully, however, the guard's suspicions about why any other guard would have such a device dissipated as the gas began to make his eyes water, and his two companions began to head for outside. Shaking his head and casting one last look back at Jessica, he glanced at the device and headed off after the rest of his team, coughing as he ran across the lobby and sprinted through the now-open doors to the cool, clear moonlit air outside.

As the doors began to slide close, Jessica heard one guard call out and, with a gesture down the street in the direction Jessica had indicated, the three of them disappeared into the Brisbane night.

Jessica waited ten seconds and then retreated back into the security office.

Settling into a comfortable leather chair in front of a bank of security camera displays, Jessica tapped away on the keyboard and brought up the feed from the eighth floor. Her eyes narrowed as she saw a very naked Penelope Proudchest being led away alongside Tom Mitchelson and flanked by two more guards. Tom in particular looked practically zombie-like. While Jessica had only ever personally met the man once, and that was some years back, she was pretty confident the way he was acting was well out of character, and her mind flashed back to what had happened to Penelope out in the crowded streets days earlier.

A second camera revealed that Erin was being led away by a tall, thin man in a sharp suit, with another guard following closely behind. Looked like their ruse had held up, Jessica thought. Sparing Erin a moment's thought to wish her good luck, the blonde beauty switched her attention back to Penelope and Tom and began to follow them on the monitors. Fishing in the bag of goodies that lay at her side, Jessica extracted a small remote control and placed it in front of her. Then, she settled back in and waited.

****

The lift doors opened slowly and stopped halfway, revealing an empty shaft with a host of cables running vertically through the middle, to where a lift car waited at some indeterminate level beneath.

There was no chime of arrival and, thankfully for the brunette woman who climbed out of the shaft and onto the light blue carpet of the seventeenth floor, no one waiting for a lift either.

Stacey Shackleton permitted herself a sigh of relief. There was no audible sound of an alarm blaring away either, although Stacey knew better than to rely on the building occupants being so considerate as to let intruders know when they'd been detected.

Not wasting time, she pressed the down button on the lift panel, guessing that while she would have needed a swipe card to get to this floor via the lift car, there would be no such barrier to someone wanting to leave this floor by the lift car. With luck, that wouldn't trigger the suspicions of anyone monitoring access requests from a central security office. She was rewarded by the sight of the lift doors sliding shut as they reset waiting for the car to arrive, and she silently dashed off across the foyer to a large frosted glass wall where an access panel was set in a recess on the left-hand side of a similarly frosted glass door. While naturally there would be security cameras dotted around the place, with luck, much of security's attention was now glued on a very naked and seemingly helpless Penelope several floors below her.

Stacey had discovered this floor existed on her last trip to this building with Tom. While they'd been digging around in their computers, the presence of a secret lab directly above the server room had become apparent, even if they hadn't been in a position to take advantage of that there and then.

Now though, while Erin, Penelope and Jessica rescued Tom, she was determined to find out more about how exactly whatever was happening was actually happening.

The security guards' credentials were no help in getting access to the floor, which appeared to be forbidden to all but a select few employees. That was both a curse, having necessitated a hard climb up the interior of the lift shaft and risking that the doors being manually opened wouldn't trigger a silent alarm, and a boon, as it meant that having reached here, Stacey would only have a small handful of researchers, if indeed anyone at this hour, to contend with.

There was the small obstacle of the frosted glass door to contend with of course. Stacey looked at it for a few seconds and weighed up her options of being able to hack her way through the system. It only took those few seconds for her to discard that option entirely and with a mix of resignation and determination, she retrieved a cylindrical metal bin from the corner of the foyer, knocked on the glass door and waited. She'd give someone inside fifteen seconds to respond before the bin was thrown through the frosted glass door. Stacey tried to push visions out of her treacherous mind of the bin bouncing off the reinforced glass and smacking her in the face.

She need not have worried. Within moments, the blurry shape of an approaching woman appeared at the door and peered suspiciously at Stacey.

Stacey held up a lanyard she'd pilfered from one of the guards knocked out in the lift moments earlier, and opened her mouth, pretending to speak and urgently pointing at the lifts.

The woman on the other side shook her head in the confusion. "I can't hear you."

Stacey sighed theatrically and let her shoulders hunch in exasperation. Redoubling her pointing at the lifts, she continued to mime urgency, and waved the lanyard at the woman in a way that guaranteed it would grab her attention while simultaneously being impossible to read.

"I still can't hear you!" The other woman said and then made the rookie mistake of opening the door a crack.

"Fire! You have to evacuate!" Stacey shouted.

The shocked woman only let her grip on the door loosen for a split second but that was all the invitation Stacey needed to kick the door in and knock her off her feet. Sweeping in, she quickly closed the door behind her and turned around to see that her new friend was an early-forties woman in a heavy white lab coat, with mousy brown hair and glasses. From her position on the floor, the lab researcher looked up in surprise and barely put up a fight as Stacey reached down, grabbed her by the coat, and hauled her to her feet.

"Fire?!"

Stacey ignored her and quickly did a visual sweep of the large open-plan research lab that she found herself in. Just her, the lady she'd just knocked off her feet, and a sea of gadgets strewn across long white work benches. Which was another stroke of good fortune. Well, good fortune for Stacey at least.

"Working early or working late?" Stacey asked the woman, holding on tight to the researcher's arm as the woman began to protest and struggle.

"Who are you and where is the fire?"

Stacey sighed and simply guided the woman back to a large wide table where she'd evidently been working before Stacey had knocked.

"I demand to know who you are!" the woman screamed.

Stacey pushed her into a high-backed office chair and placed one finger on her lips. When the researcher went to get up, Stacey gave her a stern look, and she sunk back into the chair meekly, fear suddenly evident.

"You're researching mind control for some pretty nasty people." Stacey's matter-of-fact tone brooked no argument, so when the woman started to feebly protest, her claims of being unable to either confirm or deny trailed off into silence mid-sentence.

"And you're going to tell me everything you know about the weaknesses of your system."

"I... I can't..." the researcher whispered, white-faced.

"Well, the good news is," Stacey replied, smiling grimly, "I'm an excellent listener and motivator, all wrapped up into one."

****

Two minutes later, Stacey's idea of motivation was in full swing. Tied to her chair, hands secured behind her back, the now naked researcher sat with her legs bound wide open. Her forty-something body was neither obese nor could it ever be mistaken for that of a cheerleader, and the woman squirmed and squealed in clear embarrassment at her current unexpected predicament. Modestly sized breasts hung loosely from her chest, and her legs struggled unsuccessfully to close so as to hide her unshaven brown-haired crotch. The woman shook her head from side to side and brown hair obscured her face while she thrashed, only for Stacey to brush it aside so the woman's face was clearly visible.

Worse still, Stacey was holding up her phone and had made a big show of pressing the record button.

"You see, my motivation technique is pretty simple," Stacey said in a friendly, conversational tone.

"We're going to chat, and I'm going to record everything you say."

"But I can't..." the researcher wailed.

"I'm going to record everything you say," Stacey continued, talking over the other woman's pleading, "and if I like what you say, then the only people I'll be sharing the video with are my close friends and work colleagues. All people of great discretion"

The other woman suddenly stopped moving and stared at Stacey and the camera in horror. "What..." she whispered, almost choking over the words, "what if you don't like our talk?"

"Well then, in that case, I've got no reason to share the video with my friends, do I?"

The woman shook her head in agreement, a wild hope suddenly appearing in her eyes even though confusion reigned on her face.

"However," Stacey continued, idly picking up a pen from the desk and glancing at the woman's security lanyard, "I would have every reason to share this video with the entire rest of the world. Are videos of naked women popular on the internet, do you think?" Stacey asked, feigning ignorance.

"No. No! God no, please!"

Stacey smiled, and then leaned forward, while the helpless woman could only look down as Stacey wrote the full name from the security lanyard prominently across the woman's breasts and stomach. The bound researcher nearly fainted as she realised what Stacey intended to do, and only a sharp slap across the face brought her back to the fresh hell she was now well and truly stuck in.

Settling back in and making sure the camera was properly framing the exposed naked body in front of her, Stacey leaned back in her own chair and smiled.

"Now. I know scientists just love to talk about their work. So how about you tell your new girlfriend everything you know about these gadgets you've been so busy with? Then, if you're a good girl, you get to go home and rethink your career choices and the kinds of assholes you've elected to work for. Don't worry, I'm good at keeping secrets. Well," Stacey nodded at the camera suggestively, "sometimes at least!"