Brewster's Brood - Pt. 42

Part Forty-two

 Mrs. Churchill – 3/13/2017 – Tuesday – 4:28 pm

 The day had gone surprisingly well, and Max had been graciously compliant, leaving semen in no less than three different women over the last few hours, but now they were on a breather, and Mrs. Churchill was delighted to see an almost stunned and dopey look on Rose’s face, her tongue swiping at her dried-out lips. The reality television star looked well and truly fucked, and while Max seemed to be recovering relatively quickly, Rose had clearly been startled that he’d been willing to toss her around in bed, get her on all fours and just go to town on her, something no Brit boy would’ve dared to her. But Mrs. Churchill could see the look on Rose’s face, and it was a look she was seeing on more and more on women that had gotten their first or second taste of Max.

They fucking wanted him.

He wasn’t overly good looking, and while the money certainly figured into it, it wasn’t the focal point, the main reason anyone wanted to spend lots of time with Max.

Max Brewster was a likeable guy.

He was easy to talk to, he was genuinely interested in listening to people’s stories and he never seemed to be in a rush to cut people off. And, on top of all that, he was more than happy to talk about himself whenever the other person wanted. He was the perfect level of gregarious and transparent.

Mrs. Churchill was glad, because it made her feel a bit better about knowing all the money he was going to come into before he knew it. Max was going to be able to handle it and he wasn’t going to turn into some abusive asshole overnight.

At least, she felt like he wouldn’t.

It was more money that the human mind could comprehend, honestly, and she’d seen lottery winners lose their damn minds over less, go on weird spending sprees, buying additional homes to just keep their new pet monkeys in, or whatever.

But Max? Max was just as likely to open a free school to teach poor people how to cook on the cheap. Or serve free food to those in disaster areas. He was definitely going to set up some kind of fund to ensure that every kid he’d sired as a result of this mess was going to get a cut of the fortune when he passed away.

Mrs. Churchill, on the other hand, had to remind herself that if images of Rose getting plowed like a bitch in heat on all fours got out to the media, the woman would have a legit reason to legally separate her inner organs alphabetically, even as delightful as it would be to let the media run wild with that particular expression.

The uppity cunt still had it coming to her, the older woman thought, especially for how rudely she’d treated literally everyone along the way.

She liked seeing Max smiling, though, and he looked especially content, the three girls – Rose, Danielle and Gemma – sprawled all over him, arms and legs burying him all the way against the bed, giving him no room to move, no matter how much he might want to. He’d given each of the three girls a load, and now he looked like he was going to take an afternoon nap, knowing his night was going to be filled with debauchery all over again.

“Boss, I think you may want to take a look at this,” Lynne said to her. “Someone’s been deep diving into our boy’s history.”

“Sure, Lynne,” Mrs. Churchill said, walking over to the heavy woman’s terminal. “We knew that.”

“But that’s the thing. Whoever these people are, they’re good. I mean our level of good,” Lynne said calmly. “I think they may have figured out who Max is related to, but that’s only part of the puzzle, and not really the relevant part. And! And they can’t really prove it. They can speculate and try and draw parallels, but pictures of Rachel are almost non-existent, so our guy can’t prove anything for Max, but he can give him theories.”

“We know who this guy is yet?”

Lynne grinned with a wide, almost crazy smile. “I finally got’em, and mostly because of sheer dumb fucking luck,” she said. “The guy who’s doing the digging is good, very good, and he has a partner, which certainly helps, because his partner’s basically capable of NSA-level encryption and black bag shit. Her name is Larissa, although I haven’t been able to get anything more on her than that. She’s something of a notorious Bay Area hacker, but she does not have any real footprint I can follow or dig into. I don’t have a last name. I don’t have a place of work. Hell, I’m pretty sure ‘Larissa’ isn’t even her real name, but it’s what I’ve got. But they finally made a slip-up, and we got incredibly lucky when it came to their slipup. That’s how we have what we have.”

“What kind of slipup?”

“The kind literally anybody could make,” she said. “I wouldn’t have even caught it if I hadn’t noticed the additional network traffic.” She pulled up a camera shot from inside of bodega in Oakland. “Our guy keeping tabs for hits on the Brand family over the SF Chronicle said the call he got asking about any reports on Rachel Brand said it came from a burner phone that I tracked to this bodega.” On the screen before them, a fifteen-year-old kid walked up and purchased the phone in cash, then started to walk away.

  “That’s our guy?”

“No, that’s some random kid that our guy got to buy the burner phone from him,” she said, as she shifted to an outside view of a street camera. “Normally, we’d be shit out of luck, because the cameras here aren’t that great, and the kid steps over to this blindspot from the bodega’s outdoor camera…” She smirked and then flicked a switch to another shot from above, although it was a static, still image. “This shot was taken from the rooftop as they were doing some surveying, and it’s an ultra-high res shot. So look at what I got.” Mrs. Churchill was glad the woman didn’t say ‘zoom and enhance’ like some sci-fi cliché, but the image moved to focus on the young man handing the phone to an older man in the alleyway, the man’s face turned enough to get a good look at him in decent detail. “This, boss, is our main pain-in-the-ass. His name, it turns out, is Aaron Stamford. I figured that out this morning and just about twenty minutes ago, I found the connection between him and our boy Max about five minutes ago, and it explains a lot about how we missed him.”

“So who is this Stamford guy?”

“He went to high school with Max, but isn’t someone we would’ve even considered digging into, because, as far as we could tell, they haven’t touched base in, like, two dozen years? More? But I started realizing this Stamford guy, he must’ve wanted to get into intelligence early on, because the high school yearbooks were almost completely devoid of mentions or photos of this guy,” Lynne said with a certain level of admiration. “Do you have any idea how hardcore you have to be to be going through high school trying not to get noticed? Everyone else is out trying to show off and get laid, and this guy’s like ‘lemme just disappear into the background while nobody’s looking.’ As a goddamn teenager! That’s nuts!”  

            “Some people have figured out what they want out of life very early on,” Mrs. Churchill told the woman. “I can admire that level of dedication to a goal, and to be prepared so early in life, that’s impressive. What’s this Stamford guy been up to lately?”
            “That’s a great question, boss. A great question indeed.”
            “You don’t have an answer do you, Lynne?”
            “I do not, boss. This guy fucking disappeared. He’s not off the grid – he’s erased the fucking grid, and I do not know where he went, who he’s been working for, what he’s been doing or who he’s been doing it for. There are no known properties in this guy’s name. He has no bank account I can find. Trying to run his name through the government databases I have access to immediately kick up flags and warnings and I’m getting nervous if I keep digging, it’s going to realize I’m not supposed to be there anyway in the first place. Digging into this guy is making me nervous, boss, and that’s not a feeling I like or am comfortable with.”

            “Welcome to being on the other side of what we do, Lynne,” Mrs. Churchill said with a laugh. “So we’ve got an operator in the game, and someone on our level. That just means we either need to step up our game, or we need to coop theirs. Do we have any inkling whether or not their relationship is or was a good one?”

            “Aaron actually wrote a fairly long note in Max’s senior yearbook,” Lynne replied. “We didn’t know that any of that shit was going to be important, so I didn’t find it until I went back to try and find, something, anything, on this Stamford guy.”

            “His parents?”

            “Parents died in a car crash when he was 9, which was part of the reason he and Max got along so well. He was raised by his late father’s older brother.”

            “Any chance we can interview him about Aaron?”

            “Died in 2004,” Lynne said. “Lung cancer.”

            “We really have nothing on this guy?”

            “We should be thinking of things now as if Max has his own Danny in his corner,” Lynne said, “although I don’t know how much combat training this Aaron guy’s had. Might be a little; might be next to none.”

            “I’ll tell you what we need, Lynne,” Mrs. Churchill said with a sigh. “We need to find this guy and then we need to debrief him.”

            “Excuse me, boss?”

            “Look, the terms of the project let us bring people into the fold as long as it gives us assurances that they won’t bring the project itself to Max’s knowledge,” the older woman said. “So, it behooves us to make sure he knows what’s going on, and how him actively digging into all of this is only going to hurt Max and not help him.”

            “You think he’ll go for it?”

            “If we can reach him. If we can get a chance to sit down and talk to him,” Mrs. Churchill grumbled. “Look, as ridiculous as this whole thing is, we’re doing it for his benefit. Anyone who’s an actual friend of Max’s is going to want him to do this; they’re going to want us doing this for him. They just need to learn what it’s all about, and how the stupid will stipulates Max can’t find out about it until after it’s done. So maybe we can find some way for Danny to reach out to him. He’s part of the ‘don’t get seen, don’t get caught’ world. I bet he can think of some way for us to get ahold of this Aaron guy, maybe wave him off before he fucks everything up.”

            “Danny’s clever, Mrs. C,” Lynne said. “I’m sure he can think of some way to reach out to this guy without him tipping off Max.”

            “Okay, Lynne. Have him set something up. If it needs to include a meeting with me, so be it. Get it on the books, but get it happening as quick as we can,” Mrs. Churchill sighed. “The last thing I want is for this guy to fuck everything up accidentally and for us to have put Max through all this for nothing.”

            “Got it, boss. I’ll send Danny a message to call and check in, then explain things to him. Oh, and Jacinda had something for you she wanted to talk to you about, so you should touch base with her as well, ASAP.”

            Mrs. Churchill wandered over to her right-hand woman. “I understand you got something for me?”

            “Well, it’s not confirmed yet, but…”

            “Hey, even speculation can be fun to hear from time to time. Lay it on me.”

            “Zoe thinks she’s pregnant.”

            “It’s too early to test, isn’t it?”

            “No reliable tests until ten days out, but Zoe says she’s ‘got a feeling’ that she is, and that she’s ‘never wrong’ so we should trust her.”

            “I’m not handing out checks until we can see a kid, Jacinda,” Mrs. Churchill laughed. “And there’s no special prize for coming in first. If she wants to stop getting into rotations with Max, hey, that’s her business, and we’re not going to tell her no, but if it were me, I’d be making damn sure of that before I decided to take a break.”

            “She thinks she’s got it, so she said she’s just going to sit back and watch for a week or two, in case she’s right.”

            “That’s her call to make, I guess.”

            “She mostly just didn’t want us worrying when we didn’t see her circling around for a bit.”

            Mrs. Churchill just laughed again and shook her head. “We’ve got over a hundred girls in this guy’s orbit, and you think I have the time and energy to focus on a single one of them? Ha!”

Max Brewster – 3/13/2017 – Tuesday – 6:45 pm

            Max felt like he was finally starting to get ahead of all of this, for the first time in over a week. He’d finally gotten his feet down on the ground, and over the course of the last few hours, the simple and inescapable truth had finally presented itself to him.

            He was the first test subject in a top-secret government program to breed a race of master chefs.

            What else made sense?

            He wasn’t sure what benefit they gained from not telling him, other than maybe they were doing their best effort to maintain a blind study, and they didn’t want him preferring one type of woman, so they were exposing him to as many different kinds as they could.

            Max knew himself well enough to admit that he wouldn’t necessarily be any woman’s first choice, but if raw cooking talent was the only thing a selective breeding experiment cared about, he had to admit, he would be an excellent choice, especially given his diversity of knowledge on types of cuisine and how to incorporate them together.

            Sure, if the government wanted someone who was strictly a cook of, say, Thai food, or sushi, he would be a terrible choice, but if they needed someone who was adventurous and cross-discipline? Or someone who was used to working with an odd assortment of ingredients? There weren’t many people better than he was.

            But surely cooking talent wasn’t hereditary… was it?

            Yes, there might be aspects of it that could be passed down between, say, a mother and child, but the skill itself? And in his case, it would’ve had to have been from his mother’s side, as his father could’ve burned iced tea back in the day.

            Was he the secret long lost love child of Julia Child, or something?

            Were the cooking genes running through his body so powerful as to supersede and transcend what he thought he knew about nature versus nurture? Probably not. But if not that, then what?

            He was fairly certain he was expected to be knocking up as many women as possible. As much as they were keeping him distracted, he wasn’t so dense that he’d missed that particular point. He’d never met so many women in all his life who were so utterly flippant about a lack of birth control or sexual security, which meant that he’d clearly been tested somewhere along the way, and that all the women at or even tied to the Ironwood Estates were clean of sexually transmitted diseases.

            And then there was trying to explain Danny. Was the man his tour guide through this weird world? His handler? His bodyguard? Certainly, that last one had to be ridiculous, but then again, who could tell what was going on, since it seemed like every day there was at least half a dozen new beauties, vying for his attention on that day.

            That meant he was trapped in a sort of endless sexual buffet line, where he was being encouraged to sample as many women as he could, as often as he could, with the hopes of, what, breeding the Greatest Chefs The World Had Ever Seen?

            It was absurd…

            …

            …wasn’t it?

            The one thing he definitely wasn’t going to do was to ask about it. Every time he’d gotten too much in detail about anything – the club, the girls’ proclivities, their tastes, the lack of other dudes hanging around Ironwood – it had become clear that asking questions made them all very nervous, so each time, he’d done what he could to back off and let them get back to just their sexual frolicking.

            He wasn’t sure if they thought he didn’t suspect anything, was just playing along with them or if they thought he really was just dumb as a post.

            He hoped it wasn’t the last one, because the hardest part about all of this was that he was starting to really like some of these girls. If he was told he had to choose one and only one, he wasn’t sure he knew exactly how he’d react, especially since many of the girls seemed to get along very well with many of the other girl (although he’d also spotted some rivalries here and there).

            There was a brief pit in his stomach when Max considered what would happen if thirty or forty women all came at him at once demanding child support, there would be no way in hell he could pay it all, but also, he couldn’t even imagine how any of this would make sense to a judge, a court or even the press. This kind of story would be too bizarre even for Court TV.

            In his head, he tried to imagine the opening to the story: “The man you are about to see, Max Brewster, is allegedly the most prolific procreator in modern history, with a child count allegedly larger than most major sports teams. Why is this man this generation’s Genghis Khan, and how does he feel about spawning his own minor metropolitan area?”

            That made him laugh – he couldn’t help it.

            It was so beyond the pale.

            But as he worked in the kitchen of Ironwood Estates, preparing a family style dinner for the thirty or so beautiful women who were just hanging around the place, he really couldn’t think of any other possible options that made sense.

            The three he’d slept with earlier today had already taken off, but Rose had joked that there were ‘always new ladies, just around the corner,’ and while he hadn’t seen any new faces, he also wasn’t entirely sure that was true. There were so many beautiful women that he couldn’t keep track of them all, and he was starting to feel bad about their names dropping from his head, even many of those he’d actually fucked.

            (Damn, was that embarrassing…)

            Still, he didn’t feel like he was letting anyone down. When he’d forgotten someone’s name, nobody took offense to it, and they just seemed to be happy to be in his presence. What was even crazier was, he felt like he was starting to hold impromptu cooking lessons in the kitchen area of Ironwood, and that it was turning into some kind of strange cooking show. It wasn’t something he’d ever really considered himself doing, and yet, he also seemed to be pretty good at it.

            It wasn’t just the women humoring him – they were all very engaged, asking questions, making suggestions, asking to help or just trying to understand from a fundamental point of view just what he was doing. They were taking notes on their phones, making laundry lists for themselves, planning meals out and even asking if he could help them try and understand their weekly diets better.

            He’d finally gotten through the lesson for the day, and everyone was already asking if he could do one every night he was there, and if he could be there as often as he could. If he were more cynical, he might’ve thought it was yet another method they were using to try and keep him around Ironwood, but really, he’d been asked to slow or repeat things a few times so that women could get their notes together and it became clear… they were genuinely enjoying learning about cooking from him.

            He wondered if maybe once he was on the other side of the government-induced top secret chef breeding program (he’d named it Operation: Max Delicacy in his head) that maybe he could supplement the food truck’s income by offering cooking lessons one or two days a week.

            After all of this, it certainly wasn’t the most insane idea he was looking at.

            There were definitely a few faces he was, say, seventy to eighty percent certain were new in the crowd. One was a very muscular and fit woman whose face had more than a couple of scars to it, but that gave her a sort of weird, rugged beauty. Another was a face he was nearly sure he saw in some web article talking about true crime podcasters, but again, didn’t want to be so impolite to ask.

            As he was starting to clean up and wrap up, however, a singular face came stepping out of the crowd with a big smile on her face. “Hey Trouble, how you been?” a familiar voice said.

            “Louisa!” he said with a laugh, rushing over to hug her. “How the hell have you been? It’s been, what, almost two decades?”

Jacinda Acosta – 3/13/2017 – Tuesday – 6:54 pm

            Jacinda’s hand couldn’t hit the alarm button fast enough, and she saw a bunch of people jolt upright suddenly. “RED ALERT!” the woman yelled. “We fucking missed something! One of the subjects knows our boy!”