Laura McNallen was headed off to make the deal of a lifetime. She had inherited a family company that was one of thousands of beltway bandit concerns peddling tech of one degree of usefulness or another to US defense and clandestine branches. Being part of the constant graft as business, lobbiest as weapons crowd cost Laura any illusions about how her nation worked, and convinced her that nothing of long term worth could be built in that sector. When she began exploring the civilian applications of the same technologies, whole new worlds of profit began to open up and her company stock prices began to skyrocket at the same time her clash with her father came to crissis. The result, she was now CEO/CFO with control of the company, and he was chairman of a board that understood its dividends came from her choices, not her father's.
Daddy's little girl had come out of Brown University with a MBA to go with her Remote Image Sensing BSc and Geographic Informations Systems MSc. Losers fought for the right to sell information systems to fight wars; the wars we wanted to fight required little, and the ones we dared not fight required more than anyone was willing to spend for. The real money was for those who dared to use the same systems to look for wealth that tomorrow's technology would reveal to those who got their first. Untapped billions in minerals, and oil awaited those who learned how to use the technology of the space and arms race to look down upon the earth with technology that could, for the right software and analyst, whisper where lay treasures that would make the dwarf kings of legend weep tears of gold, and change the balance of world economic power. Laura had the science she needed the funding. CCCC China Communications Construction Company had been the group that far too many of her stockholders had turned out to be fronts for . Peoples Republic of China's state run construction and communications giant could not be allowed to control the technology that would make its owners the masters of the worlds economy for the next millennium. She had completed a deal with the Saudi's to give her enough funding to buy back enough stock to get personal control of the board; the Saudi's had too much invested in the status quo to risk new discoveries threatening their market stranglehold. Before she went on to Beijing to pry the secret fingers China had got on tomorrows wealth, she promised herself a little vacation in Bahrain. Saudi's lived in a culture where almost everything was forbidden, so of course they needed Las Vegas far more than the US did. What they got was Bahrain; what happened in Bahrain Allah didn't know about; it was better than Vegas. No rules of morality or consequences of behavior existed for the elite of the world when they came to Bahrain.
Laura had been the tough business woman, the cold scientist, the ball busting executive with almost inhuman brilliance and without a shred of human weakness for so long that her soul was almost dead from the strain. She was young, beautiful, and female, three strikes against her in the business world ruled by old white men to whom her gender, age, and beauty made her a commodity to be traded, not a person to be listened to, and god forbid, superior to be obeyed. No hint of vice or even of humanity could be seen, or she would be dismissed and her vision of the company would never be. Instead of inheriting the world, her company would continue to scramble for table scraps selling million dollar toys to blow up mud huts in countries no one could find on an unlabeled map.
Here in Bahrain, she could let her hair down and have a little fun. As Laura sipped her gin and tonic in the Four Seasons Bahrain Bay, she stared at the gaggle of young stewardesses who had descended on the bar like so many forest nymphs to a grove of Satyrs. The dark Arab and Asian business men, the idle rich, each with fortunes greater than some countries budgets collected around the blond, brunette and redheaded flight attendants like guests at a buffet and the eternal dance of seduction began. Laura sighed. The men were darkly seductive, hungry powerful men with powerful appetites. They desired, hungered, and indulged themselves in every form of pleasure their smallest whim could conceive, and with their pale prizes felt no shame in indulging appetites they could never admit to possessing with their wives. For themselves the girls looked like they intended to lead their suitors on a merry chase, then surrender themselves with the wild shamelessness of the maenads, for nothing they did here would ever be whispered to parents, or future husbands. They were the prizes to be taken, and they hungered to be taken again and again with a shamelessness Laura envied to the point of hatred. Feminism was as much a trap as chauvanism; for to be accepted as a business woman she had to pretend not to be a woman at all.
Turning from the laughing girls Laura found herself staring into the eyes of a tiger. Frozen, she grew aware of the salt and pepper hair, the golden face, dark furrowed brow and hard line of mouth beneath, but the tiger eyes held her fast like a captive deer. His voice, heavy with Mandarin stresses pronounced his English with perfect diction yet his mother tongue dripped from every syllable.
"It is unworthy to envy them. You are a guest here, that means you could buy the plane they crew with a wave of your credit card. Your signature on a single paper commands more money than all of them together will see in their entire lives. It is unworthy to envy them. They come here to be treated as the most prized hetairai, courtesans, by the richest and most powerful men in the world. It is not about the money. They are being treated as objects of pleasure, as animals to be hunted, but such animals, like prize Arabians to be broken to the saddle. They know they will be loved with such passion, with such fury and absolute debauchery that every last whimper and sigh will be wrung from their body, until there is nothing left of them but a mindless quivering slave. They will feel no shame, because a hetairai, courtesan or whore cannot be shamed for it is hot her choice, she is the vessel of her master's lust of her master's will. There is no shame possible for a slave, for such a creature can never be blamed for they do not choose. They will never offer such delights to their husbands, the fathers of their future children, nor would such men ever dare show their wives that side of themselves. This is a shared dream, a shared dance that will burn bright in their memory until they die, but will be deniable before dawn even comes."
Laura was caught up in the visions his words brought out, and lashed by the power of those darkly burning tiger eyes, so the answer slipped forth like blood from an unbound wound. "For them" She whispered "but not me"
Raising a hand, he snapped his fingers. Two smiling aids, very well dressed young executives who probably had staffs of dozens on their own danced attendance on this tiger in business casual as naturally as courtiers to any king. He muttered something to the men, who nodded, and took out cell phones and began walking away, issuing stern commands with the natural assumption than anyone hearing their voice would neither need to be told who they were, nor dare do anything but obey.
The Tiger smiled softly as he turned back to Laura. He sipped his drink and his eyes crinkled at the corner and sunlight infused his words with a heat that caressed Laura's skin like when she dared to sun herself naked on her private patio. "It could be that if you finished your drink and returned to your room, a KLM Stewardess uniform tailored to your exact size will be laid out upon the bed. It is well known the Dutch stewardesses are particularly shameless, and indulge in the wildest and most uninhibited public displays. This hotel is widely criticized throughout the Gulf states for tolerating excesses in its public spaces that would be forbidden even in Amsterdam's Red Light district. Perhaps you might choose to don such an outfit, and such a persona. No one knows you here, you can be whomever you chose. You can decide what you will be. Do you wear your own name, and your own life, or do you choose to be,...Speelbal, for the evening."
Laura sipped her drink and looked at the Tiger as he stood, and straighted his suit. He was an older man, still vital, but carrying comfortable extra weight. He moved with an odd smoothness, like every gesture had been carefully crafted and rehearsed until it flowed with an efficiency that showed only and exactly what its master intended, and never anything more. A desire to see his control break, to see desire and need flame in those tiger eyes rose in her as hot as ambition had ever burned in her, or hotter, and she raised her chin and met his eyes as she replied.
