Trust Your
Enemies
PART ONE
By Mark Tier
Contents
PART I
“Trust Your Enemies ...”
Those whom the Gods would destroy,
they first make mad with power.
— Greek proverb
1: A Truckload of Monkeys
2: Between Heaven and Hell
3: “Vengeance Shall Be Mine ...”
4: “For A While ...”
5: The Long Arm of Paradise
6: A Woman from Mars
7: Shark Bait
8: Fallout
9: “Wish Me Luck . . .”
10: “Value Added”
11: Murphy’s Law
12: The Siren’s Song
13: Night Vision
14: The Frosty Lady
15: Tinkle, Tinkle, Little Star
16: Fairy Tales?
17: “Mum’s the Word”
18: Pillow Talk
19: Pendulum of Fear
20: Virginity Hill
21: Without Notice
22: Sly Grog
23: A Man of Influence
24: Hobson’s Choice
25: Rolling the Dice
26: The Ice Queen
27: Fingers of Fate
28: The Lion’s Den
29: Sixth Uncle
30: The Girls from Issan
31: Merchants of Death
32: Hollow Idol
33: Chains of Love
34: Hacker for Hire
35: Collision Course
Cast of Characters and Glossary of Terms
Dear Reader:
This “preview” copy of Trust Your Enemiescontains about 45% of the entire novel—almost all of Part I.
Naturally, I hope that when you get to the end you’ll by dying to read the rest!
On the other hand, maybe it won’t grab you. If it doesn’t, that’s fine (hope I’ll do better next time ). But itbeats buying the book based on a small excerpt—and then being disappointed, wouldn’t you say?
This is, of course, copyrighted material. But feel free to pass it on to anyone you think might enjoy it.
If you do want to read the rest, just visit for the various options and formats.
And if you’d like to stay in touch, receive news and further information about Trust Your Enemies and other projects, you’ll see another option on the same page.
Finally, if you have any comments, crits, or suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Happy reading!
Best regards,
MARK TIER
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Tier. All rights reserved.
Comments? Email r visit Trust Your Enemies on Facebook
PART ONE
“Trust Your
Enemies...”
“Those whom the Gods
would destroy they
first make mad
with power.”
— Greek proverb
Comments appreciated! Email or visit Trust Your Enemies on Facebook
Where to Order? Visit
Page | 1
1: A Truckload of Monkeys
S
enator Frank McKurn’s eyes roved over Alison McGuire’s body as if it were a Playboy centerfold in 3-D.
“I have a proposition for you, Alison.”
“I can’t imagine how any proposition from you, Senator,” Alison replied, her sapphire eyes cold and hard, “could possibly interest me.”
McKurn grinned, his thick, stubby fingers snapping the corner of the only item on his desk, a fat manila envelope.
“Oh, I do believe I’ll be able to change your mind.”
Alison was startled by McKurn’s tone of absolute certainty; she tucked a curl of her jet-black hair back into place to cover the slight trembling of her hand.
In her fourteen years in Parliament House, Alison had dealt with McKurn many times—but carefully avoided being alone with him.
Until now.
McKurn had insisted on this meeting and she couldn’t find a way to refuse.
A lanky, imperious six foot five, Senator Frank McKurn towered over every other Senator and Member of the House. In his mid-seventies, he wore his age well. But thanks to his crooked nose, bushy, unkempt eyebrows, leathery skin, and the pinkish cast to the whites of his eyes, even wearing an impeccably tailored suit and a $200 tie he looked like a laborer, talked like one, and was built, people whispered, like a brick shithouse: solid, tough, smelly, and slimy.
“It’s really very simple,” McKurn said with a smile—a smile that did nothing to improve the look of his face. “When Kydd stands down as Prime Minister, everyone expects Anthony Royn to step into his shoes—but I intend to make sure Cracken knocks Royn out of the ring.”
“And I, Senator, will do everything I can to make sure your little weasel loses.”
McKurn’seyes danced with merriment, as if Alison’s response had been an especially funny joke. He grinned wryly; a crooked grin that sent cold, tingling fingers of fear shooting up and down Alison’s spine.
“I think not, Alison,” McKurn said, his grin broadening, his fingers idly tapping the envelope. “I think not.”
McKurn picked up the envelope, leant back in his chair, pulled several sheets of paperhalf out, gazing at each one with obvious satisfaction for a long moment. His eyes flicked to Alison as if he was gauging her reaction...or making some kind of comparison. Alison couldn’t tell. But she could feel his eyes lingering for brief moments on her full lips, on the shape of her breasts, and following the outline of her body as it curved into her waist and then flared to her hips.
Alison found her gaze glued to the back of papers, frantic to know what was on the other side.
“You know, Alison,” McKurn said with a broad smile that made Alison’s stomach quake, “I’ve admired you from the moment I first saw you.”
“Do you expect me to take that as a compliment, Senator?”
“And I’ve always thought you had a great body,” McKurn continued, as if Alison hadn’t spoken. “Until recently, I didn’t know how stunning it really is.”
Alison’s long fingers stiffened, her fingertips turning white as stone, gripping the edge of the desk for support. She struggled to speak, but felt as though the muscles of her throat and neck were no longer connected to the rest of her body. “Wh-what do you mean?”
“Very simple.” McKurn tossed a single sheet from the envelope onto the desk in front of Alison.
Not a document but a full-color printout. Of her. Naked.
A scream welled up from deep inside her, but she found she could hardly breathe. She was looking at her own face, consumed with ecstasy, framed by her black hair spilling in all directions over a downy pillow. Her pale skin,which the sun reddened but never tanned,was flushed, her deep blue eyes glowed, her nipples were taut, a man’s hand on one full breast. A hand she recognized.
Her face turned to ice as she glared at McKurn, half-rising from the chair as words struggled with each other to spill out. After a moment, her mouth opened in the beginning of a yell, but instead she growled: “You—youbastard.”
“Sit down. And shut up.” McKurn’s face was hard, his lips tight. He leant forward, his eyes narrowed into pinpoints. He was breathing heavily; Alison flinched as the faint but sour taste of his breath floated towards her. Against her will, she felt herself transfixed as she sank back into the chair, avoiding his eyes by focusing on the broken lines of the bulbous, crooked nose jutting from his craggy face.
Alison shuddered. Long ago, McKurn’s nose was broken in a street brawl and hadn’t been set properly afterwards. When people remarked on it McKurn would comment, with a malicious laugh, “You shoulda seen the other guy.”
The “other guy” had died in hospital.
“No one talks to me like that.” McKurn didn’t raised his voice, but he spat his words through narrowed lips. “No one, you understand?”
Alison clamped her mouth tightly shut. I won’t give him the satisfaction of a reply, she thought.
McKurn shrugged faintly and threw another picture on the table, then another.
“They leave nothing to the imagination, do they?”
She held her lips tight, but couldn’t prevent her eyes from widening as each picture showed a different part of her naked body.
“I must apologize for the quality,” McKurn said matter-of-factly. “They were printed off a video.”
“A what?”
“A video. Complete, I might add, with sound effects.”
Alison’s eyes flew wildly around the room. Was she really in Parliament House? Was she listening to the president of the Senate—in his ownoffice? To the most powerful politician in Australia after the prime minister? For a moment, she felt as though she were looking down on herself from somewhere near the ceiling, observing but coldly ignoring the undisguised terror and disgust surging through her body. And she could hear a voice, an ageless voice, responding to her questions: Yes, Alison.And you’re seeing how he became so powerful.
Holy Mother of God,I’m having hallucinations. As that thought came, the strange vision disappeared.
McKurn tossed the last one on the desk. Alison saw a grainy blow-up of herself passionately kissing Derek Olsson.
“Convinced yet?” McKurn asked, now watching her with satisfaction and undisguised lust.
Alison became aware of how she was hunched down in the chair like a frightened rabbit. She began to straighten up—but recalled a lesson from Machiavelli.Keep your enemies continually off guard: Make sure they always underestimate you.
So she didn’t move. Let him think I’m beaten, she decided, and just making futile protests.
“Convinced,” she said slowly, straining with the effort to effect a normal tone of voice, “of precisely what?”
“Alison,” McKurn said with a sigh, “I’ve always thought your intelligence matched, if not exceeded, your beauty. Don’t disappoint me now.”
“Why should I give a damn whether I disappoint you or not?” Alison replied, her teeth clenched.
McKurn shook his head like a teacher whose favorite student had just let him down. His fingers tapped loudly on the pictures strewn across his desk as he watched Alison, waiting.
Alison tried to move her gaze away from the pictures, to look anywhere else, even at McKurn. But she felt as though she no longer had any control over all the little muscles around her eyes.
“Just think,” said McKurn. “I can make you famous. All I have to do is post this video on the internet, and you’ll be a worldwide sensation. The latest sex bomb, the newest femme fatale. The world’s paparazzi will follow your every move. There’ll be pictures of you everywhere—and double-page spreads of the juiciest ones in the sleazier tabloids.”
Leering at her, McKurn picked up the phone. “One phone call, Alison. That’s all it will take.”
Alison’s skin crawled at the thought of people everywhere drooling at the most private parts of her body—at the most private parts of her self. Just walking down the street...I’d feel violated again...and again...knowing that every man would have seen me.I’d have to move to the middle of the Sahara. Or join a nunnery. I’ll never be able to show myself in Parliament House again.
And her mother.Just knowing that her only daughter’s naked body was cavorting in pornographic Technicolor for anyone and everyone to see would give Mum a heart attack.
“NO!” Alison said angrily, glaring at McKurn. “You can’t.”
“Really?” McKurn laughed. Not a laugh that invited her to join him. “Why on earth not?”
Somewhere in the background she heard that strange yet familiar voice: Take note, Alison. This is how he operates. This is a lesson in power you’ll never get from Royn—or even Kydd.
Though her heart seemed to be hammering in her ears, and her stomach churned with rising panic, she forced herself to speak.
“So?” she said, still unable to look up. “I had a romantic weekend with Derek Olsson. So what? Who gives a damn?”
“You didn’t go to bed with just anybody, Alison. You had a dirty weekend with Derek Olsson, who’s now in jail and about to be convicted of a brutal drug murder.”
“Derek is no murderer.” He just can’t be.
“Really?” McKurn chuckled, a thick eyebrow rising in a question mark. “You must be the only person in the whole country who thinks that.”
“I know,” Alison said under her breath, her eyes dropping to focus on the edge of the desk.
McKurn shrugged, and waved a picture of Olsson’s face under her eyes. “And he’s obviously up to his eyeballs in the rackets.”
“That’s completelyridiculous.”
“Get real, Alison. Whether he’s a racketeer or not doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter if he’s innocent of the murder he’s charged with. This is politics, Alison. What has truth, or right and wrong, got to do with it? Absolutely nothing. Most people will believe whatever the media tells them to believe. As far as the press is concerned, the famous Derek Olsson, the business sensation they once drooled over, is nothing but a gangster and a hoodlum.”
When Alison said nothing, McKurn added in a quiet, hissing voice, “And you, Alison, will be nothing but a gangster’s moll.”
He’s turned the tables on me, she realized.
Three months ago when her boss, Anthony Royn, asked her to “Get the goods on McKurn,” she’d leapt at the assignment. Now he’s “got the goods” on me instead.
She lifted her head stiffly against the strain of the locked muscles of her neck, forcing herself to look McKurn straight in the eye. But the room was spinning. The vision that had driven her since she was sixteen flashed into her mind: Alison McGuire striding through the corridors of power, dispensing justice and righting wrongs—a crusading Joan of Arc. As McKurn’s face came into focus, her vision seemed to shatter in front of her eyes, like a fragile crystal being smashed into a thousand pieces.
“No!” she cried, involuntarily.
“Yes, Alison.”
McKurn’sface morphed into the image of the Devil IncarnateFather Ryan painted in one Sunday morningsermon when she was a mere six years old. An image which gave her nightmares for weeks afterward.
With an effort, she forced herself to look deep into the pinkish pinpoints that were McKurn’s eyes...and decided that Father Ryan had never experienced and knew nothing of the depth of evil he’d been trying to portray.
“So this is how a slimeball like you,” she hissed, “gets people to do your bidding.”
“Wake up, Alison,” McKurn’s voice boomed across the room. He stood halfway out of his chair, leaning across his desk,his face looming over her. “From now on, when I tell you to jump through hoops, you ask ‘how many?’”
Alison tensed her muscles against McKurn’s onslaught—but felt herself cringing back in her chair. I should walk out of here, she thought to herself. But her shaking legs refused to move.
“That’s better,” McKurn said as he lowered himself back into his chair, his eyes glinting with satisfaction.
“I see,” Alison sighed thoughtfully, as if to herself. Straightening her body, she forced herself to look directly into McKurn’s eyes. “So,” she shrugged, “you can run me out of politics. What good does that do you?”
McKurn seemed amused. “Really, Alison. If that’s all I achieved.... What do they call you in the Press Gallery? Oh yes, The Power Behind the Throne. Knocking you out would kick away Royn’s main prop. He’d be easy game.”
Alison shook her head. “I’m not indispensable. Royn’s still Kydd’s favorite. You can’t get around it.”
“You’re not thinking clearly. As former ‘Drug Czar,’ Anthony Royn has built his political career around a take-no-hostages anti-drug program.” McKurn picked up the picture of her and Olsson kissing passionately and waved it under her nose. “But it turns out that all along his chief political adviser, the much-vaunted Alison McGuire, was really a gangster’s deceitful moll who gave Olsson the inside dope on every move the great ‘Anti-Drug Crusader’ was about to make.” McKurn chuckled. “Royn will be seen as the witless dupe he really is, whose every move was orchestrated by the gangster’s strumpet. Who’s going to believe Royn has the balls to occupy the highest office in the land then? He’ll be laughed out of politics. Not even Kydd would stand up for him.”
“You make it sound very plausible.” Alison spoke with a coolness she did not feel. “But Royn could easily surprise you.”
“I don’t want any surprises,” McKurn said. “That’s whyyou’re going to help me make Cracken, notRoyn, the next prime minister.”
“What? You mean.... You want me to be yourspy in Royn’s office? Is that what you’re proposing? You must be out of your mind, Senator.”
“Am I?” McKurn laughed, fingering the pictures.
“So, let me get this clear,” she said slowly. “You want me to give up everything I’ve worked for, betray my principles, deceive everyone who trusts me and pimp on them just so you can put that little weasel Paul Cracken into power?”
“It seems we understand each other.”
“And what am I supposed to get out of this?”
“Why, Alison, you’ll be on the winning team of course.”
“That’s hardly something to look forward to—if it’s your team.”
“And, of course, I won’t post that video.”
“You think that’s enough incentive for me to do what you want me to do?”