Snowjob
CHAPTER 1
“That’s it, baby…that’s it…cum for me, baby.”
Eddie Snowjob wiped the sweat off his forehead and glanced nervously around the office. Still no one else in the building. It would be at least another hour before the other FDA workers and contractors began filing in. He’d specifically chosen six in the morning on a Monday to make his move, because it seemed less suspicious than doing the deed in the middle of the night.
He turned his attention back to the progress bar, watching its slow crawl across his screen. “C’mon, baby,” he muttered under his breath, though he knew that no amount of sweet talk would make the data transfer any faster: an aging laptop transferring files to a thumb drive over an outdated USB 1.0 protocol would finish when it damn well wanted to. But he had little choice. If he left the drive unattended and was found out by a passing coworker, all his months of planning would be for naught. He opened his browser to surf the net and kill the time, temporarily covering the transfer progress bar.
“I never figured you for an early riser.”
His eyes darted from the screen to the petite woman hanging on the edge of his cubicle partition. “Glinda,” Snowjob said. “I thought I’d get an early jump on the week. Lot of work.”
“It’s like the post office,” Glinda said. “You can’t get a break, because people keep sending mail. Look at the bright side, though: as long as people keep making phone calls and sending e-mails, we’ll always have a job.”
“That’s reassuring,” Snowjob said.
There was an awkward pause in their conversation. Snowjob smiled, trying to put an end to his coworker’s inquiries without appearing too out of the ordinary, as the file transfer continued to lurch on the laptop.
“Why are you smiling like that?” Glinda asked.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to get rid of me.”
Snowjob gulped loudly. “That’s absurd.”
“You didn’t come in early to work,” Glinda said, peering at his open laptop. “You came in early to play around with GISM.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Snowjob said.
“Oh, please,” Glinda said. “GISM stores a record of every food and drug ever ingested by Americans. You feel powerful when you fire it up and just browse through people’s personal lives — and power is the greatest aphrodisiac known to man. Admit it: you were planning to take the six AM to Spanktown.”
“You think I was…masturbating? To Americans’ private information? That violates just about every ethical guideline imaginable.” He paused. “Of course that’s what I was doing.”
Now it was Glinda’s turn to smile. “I knew you were into some freaky shit, Snowjob. Behind those cute little glasses and hazel eyes, I knew there was a dark side to you.”
“Yep, you’ve found me out,” he said.
“But you don’t need to jack off, you know,” Glinda said. “At least not by yourself. That’s what the ten AM meetings are for. A great big FDA circle jerk. We draw the shades, project a real-time map of Americans’ private eating habits up on the screen, drop our pants, and start jerking off. We hadn’t invited you because we didn’t know if you could be trusted.”
“I can’t wait,” Snowjob said. I can’t wait to get the hell out of this madhouse.
“Why wait?” Glinda said, entering Snowjob’s cubicle and standing between his spread legs.
“Um,” was all Snowjob could say.
Glinda bent down, running his hands over his chest. She rested on her knees between his spread legs.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Glinda said, staring up at him with big green eyes as she snapped the button on his jeans.
“What if someone sees us?”
Glinda laughed. “You work for a government agency, and you’re worried about someone watching? Someone is always watching.”
“No, I mean, what if someone catches us. Shouldn’t we go somewhere…private?”
“Privacy is an illusion,” she said. “Besides, I’m the first one in the office at seven every morning. Trust me when I say that no one arrives until quarter til eight.”
Glinda winked at him and began unzipping him slowly. They had at least an hour to themselves, apparently. As her fingers brushed against his cock, Snowjob felt himself get hard in spite of his misgivings. His hardon begged to be let loose. What choice did he have? If he rebuffed Glinda’s advances, there was a chance she could turn his attention back to the laptop on the desk — and the thumb drive sticking out the side. Also, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do. What better way to pass the time than with getting his whistle blown?
“Let me help you out,” Snowjob said, wriggling out of his jeans just enough to give Glinda better access to his burgeoning manhood.
Glinda toyed with his cock through his briefs. “I see someone’s an early riser after all.”
“I guess so,” he said, lifting his ass off the chair and letting Glinda peel his briefs down. His erection sprang free like a labrador puppy let off its leash in a dog park. As his coworker took him inside her mouth, Snowjob leaned back. A wave of relaxation overcame him as he thought about finally blowing the whistle on the FDA’s massive GISM surveillance program. Once Americans saw that everything they put in their mouths was being tracked, things would change. He was sure of it. They would have to, because now he was literally putting his dick on the line for the country he so dearly loved.
Surely his girlfriend would understand.
CHAPTER 2
For some reason, his girlfriend did not understand.
Was it his unique brand of patriotism, Snowjob wondered? Or was she pissed about the whole blowjob thing?
Either way, it wouldn't affect his plans. He had the USB drive in his pocket and a month's supply of gray oxfords in his suitcase. It was time to flee the United States for a less repressive regime. Next stop: The People's Republic of China.
CHAPTER 3
While packing his bags, he’d seen two missed calls show up on his phone, both with Maryland area codes. One voicemail. Possibly Glinda, wondering where the hell he’d gone off to. He’d told her he was going to the men’s room to freshen his balls up after their little tryst, and slipped out the front door with the thumb drive in his pocket. One of the calls might have been from his boss. In the car outside the FDA headquarters, he’d called in to his boss’s desk phone and left a voicemail that he was sick with the flu and wouldn’t be in the rest of the day. Maybe the rest of the week, if it turned out to be avian flu.
How long would it be before his coworkers and boss started to piece together the puzzle? How long before they became suspicious of him? He dropped his phone in the toilet to kill it, then unzipped his fly and started peeing on it for good measure.
That’s when it started buzzing. His mother was calling.
Shit, he thought, pinching off his hot stream. He thrust a hand underwater and retrieved his phone, then shook it off before putting it up to his ear. “Hello?”
“How’s my baby boy?” his mother asked. By some miracle, the phone was still working — for now.
“Fine, Mom. Why do you ask?”
“I heard you weren’t feeling well.”
“Who told you that?” Snowjob asked, though he knew the answer.
“Your stepfather,” she said. “Who else?”
Snowjob sighed. Of course word would have gotten around sooner or later to his stepfather — the man was the Deputy Commisioner for Operations, after all. Snowjob also knew how the information he was going to leak would probably cost his stepfather his job. If that was the case, however, so be it. The man knew about the GISM surveillance program and had done nothing. Snowjob had brought his concerns about the system to his stepfather’s attention, and was told he didn’t know how the world operated. That he was only twenty-four-years-old and had a lot to learn.
Well, fuck that.
Snowjob was glad to be young — and not old and jaded. He’d never liked his stepfather. The only thing the man had ever done for him was get him a low-level technical job working on the FDA’s mainframe. It was more than his own father had ever done for him, wherever the bastard was now. But still. When Snowjob was ever revealed to be the leak, it would tear their family apart. As if the rift between them could grow any wider.
“Are you there?” his mother asked.
“I’m here,” Snowjob said, doing a little dance with his pants around his ankles as he tried to hold his piss in.
“So are you running a temperature? Do you need me to bring something over, like an elderberry and yarrow tea?”
“I’m….” He couldn’t say fine again, but he needed to assuage her fears somehow. The last thing he needed was his mother, a can of chicken soup in hand, pounding on his door as he was packing his bags and preparing to go on the lam. He knew he should have moved further away from home — having family in the same city was a bit burdensome at times, like when you’re trying to fake an illness and flee the country.
“I don’t have a fever. I think I ate something bad yesterday. I was up all night throwing up, but I’m starting to turn the corner. I promise.”
“You weren’t drinking again, were you?”
“No,” he said. “Not last night.”
“But you still drink? You know you shouldn’t, with your father’s genes.”
“I know, I know. I only drink craft beer, for what it's worth.”
"How is that any better?"
He rolled his eyes. "Dad drank his Miller Light so fast that he couldn't taste it — not that you can taste that shit anyway. I take my time when I drink."
"But you drink to get intoxicated, right?"
"There's more to drinking beer than getting drunk." He tried to think of what else there was, but drew a blank. It would come to him.
There was silence on the other end of the line, and for a moment he thought the water had finally short-circuited the phone. Then he heard his mother let out a deep sigh, heavy with judgment. Talking to her was like going to confession — only she was the one that ended up doing his penance for him.
“I gotta go, Mom. Like, I gotta go.”
“You should call more often. Or stop by once in a while. It wouldn’t hurt you, you know. And Chuck would love to see you.”
“I see him at work, in the hallways sometimes. Well, one time,” Snowjob said. “So now he’s interested in being my buddy? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That man raised you, Eddie, since the time you were—”
“Since the time I was nine, Mom,” Snowjob said. “He barely acknowledged my presence in the house.”
“He was very busy with his job. He kept the roof over our heads.”
“It takes more than that to be a father. I raised myself.”
“And what a fine job you did of that,” his mother said acridly.
“Listen, I’d love to keep arguing," he said, "but I need to go."
“Your stomach?”
“Bladder.”
"Do you need me to bring you some saw palmetto? If you're having urinary problems related to your prostate —"
"No," he said, cutting her off. "I just have to take a piss."
“No reason to use foul language,” his mother said. “I love you anyway.”
“Love you too,” he said reflexively. He ended the call and stared at the phone in his hand. Would he ever talk to his mother again? He hadn’t counted on telling her goodbye, because until today the risks had never felt real. He knew now that he might never set foot on US soil again. Might never hug his mother again. Might not ever talk to her again. He realized he should have felt something, but instead his heart was empty. Blowing the whistle on the FDA’s surveillance program was bigger than his small life. He had hardened himself to the consequences, because he was doing this so that other Americans could hug their parents. So that other Americans could fly their American flags and sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” with pride, not shame.
He also realized that the phone in his hand was still dripping wet. Snowjob dropped the phone back in the toilet and finished the job he’d began earlier. A wave of relief flowed over him — or rather, out of him.
CHAPTER 4
Snowjob shook his head at the sad little red package of "cookies" in disgust. He knew that the attendants would be serving a full meal later, since the flight was something like sixteen hours long. He'd planned months in advance for his escape, and everything was going according to planned (except for the part about his girlfriend leaving him). No matter. He was on the plane, en route to meet the journalist he'd pre-arranged a meeting with in Hong Kong...but one question dominated his mind at the moment.
“What happened to the bags of peanuts?”
The attendant shrugged her shoulders as she poured a Coke out for the man in the seat next to him. Snowjob got a good look down her shirt at her pillowy bosom. Pretty decent rack for a woman his mother's age. Something for the spank bank later.
“Some people are allergic to peanuts," she said.
“Then tell them not to eat peanuts,” Snowjob said.
“Just opening a bag of peanuts releases a cloud of microscopic peanut dust,” she said. “Imagine a hundred bags being opened at once. It’s enough to turn the cabin into a gas chamber for some people.”
“Unbelievable,” he muttered.
“Believe what you want,” she said.
Snowjob opened the package and pulled the cookie out. Actually, to call it a “cookie” was disingenuous. It was more of a biscuit or a wafer, something that might only be called a “cookie” in Europe. He briefly wondered if he was allergic to biscuits. That would be something, wouldn't it? For him to choke to death on biscuit dust, with a thumbdrive hidden on his body filled with enough FDA secrets to tear the US government down.
“Sir?” the flight attendant said. He looked back up at her. “What would you like to drink, sir?”
“Orange juice,” he said. “Are you allowed to serve that?”
She moved silently, pouring part of a Minute Maid juice box into an impossibly small Dixie cup and handing it to him.
“Sorry about ranting about peanuts,” Snowjob said. "I'm sure they're no joke to people with allergies."
“You’re not the first to bring it up. Not much we can do about it.”
“It’s just that this is my first time on an airplane. Maybe I've just watched too many stupid standup specials about airplanes on Comedy Central, but I was kind of hoping to get the full experience.”
“A bag of peanuts is pretty low on the list of air-travel related experiences I’d want to try out if I was a...virgin traveler,” she said with a flirtatious bat of her eyelashes.
Snowjob downed the orange juice quickly, like it was a shot of hard whiskey. He tossed the empty Dixie cup into a plastic trash bag mounted on the side of the beverage cart.
“Done already?” she asked him, popping a Coke can open for another passenger.
“I’m fast."
“Oh really."
Later on, he showed her just how fast he was in the coach restroom as he balled her on top of the toilet.
"First one to cum wins," he told her, sliding his wrapped dog inside her slick folds. He unbuttoned the top few buttons of her shirt so he could palm her breasts. She snapped his shirt open, sending a button flying into the sink. She ran a tongue across the moles on his chest and neck. Kinky.
Less than two minutes into the act, she bit into his bare shoulder to muffle a scream and abruptly pushed him away.
"I win," she said, standing and buttoning her shirt.
As she fixed her hair in the mirror, Snowjob looked forlornly down at his penis. He'd been seconds away from unloading inside her, and now his erection was fading.
"I'll leave you two alone," she said, glancing at his drooping cock.
After she exited, Snowjob pulled the condom off and got to work on finishing the job at hand. The only thing more uncomfortable than flying internationally in coach was flying internationally in coach with blue balls.
CHAPTER 5
Just three steps into his hotel room, Snowjob stopped, his knees butting up against the twin-size bed. He tossed his suitcase down on the comforter, as there was no room on the floor to drop it. The room was smaller than the backseat of his old Mini Cooper.
He carefully shuffled around the bed and threw open the curtains, and found himself face-to-face with an elderly Chinese woman hanging her laundry out a window not more than six feet away from him, in the next building. She stared at him, expressionless.
He snapped the curtains shut. Any other time, he might have begun disrobing in front of the woman and see if she would respond in kind. But not now. It was ten in the morning local time, and he'd slept only sporadically on the flight. Even after balling the flight attendant, he'd been too anxious to sleep. Not only was he traveling with a thumb drive of documents that could damage the reputation of the U.S. government, but he was doing so under an alias.
The closer the plane got to its destination, the more doubt that crept into his mind. His papers had passed TSA scrutiny back home, but they weren't too concerned about outgoing threats. Would the fake British citizenship papers he'd paid a five-thousand dollars for be worth their weight in gold? All the worry had been for naught, as customs stamped his falsified passport.
"Welcome to Hong Kong, Mr. Bandersnatch," the official had said with a wink. With her pigtails, she didn't look a day older than eighteen.
"Thank you, love," he said, using the British accent he'd perfected watching Downton Abbey.
"Anytime," she said.
He rolled his suitcase into the nearest restroom, entered a stall, dropped his pants, and fucked his hand while thinking of the customs official. Anytime….
When he finished, his heart rate finally returned to normal.
Now he was safely checked into his hotel and ready to pass out for the rest of the day. Before that, however, there was business to attend to.
He opened the used Dell he'd picked up from a pawn shop back in the States. His old laptop was sleeping at the bottom of the Alleghany River. He plugged his computer into the wall's outlet using an adapter and booted it up, and then connected to the Internet over the hotel’s in-room free Wi-Fi. After masking his IP address with a VPN client, he logged on to one of his multiple Skype accounts.
Snowjob had known that the journalist who he leaked the data to would be as important as the data itself, so he’d taken great care in choosing a journalist with an impeccable reputation. He’d started off at the top of his list with an anonymous missive to investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, but the Guardian writer never responded to his e-mails. And neither did the next two dozen print media journalists.
Finally, he not only received a response, but he struck gold by finding someone the American people trusted. A journalist beyond reproach: Gerard Riviera.
GerardRiviera821: You’re in Hong Kong?
TheGrandHooha: I've been here since Sunday, just like you instructed. You here now?
GerardRiviera821: I’m here.
TheGrandHooha: Can you meet tomorrow at 10am? Need to get some rest.
GerardRiviera821: Okay. Your hotel?
TheGrandHooha: Too risky.
GerardRiviera821: You don’t trust me?
TheGrandHooha: After what I’ve seen, I don’t trust anyone. No offense.
GerardRiviera821: None taken. Name the place.
TheGrandHooha: Hong Kong Disneyland. Buy a ticket. I’ll meet you at the entrance to the Pirates on the Carribbean ride.
GerardRiviera821: How will I find you? I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know your name, or what you look like.
TheGrandHooha: I’ll find you. You still have the mustache, right?
GerardRiviera821: No, I shaved that off like 10 yrs ago.
TheGrandHooha: Grow a new one. See you in 24 hrs.
Snowjob signed off before Riviera could respond. It was enough of a risk signing in to a Skype account — he didn’t want to push things by logging in long enough for any eavesdroppers to reverse-track him through the masking he’d set up, however unlikely the possibility was. He was no hacker, but he knew enough to know that anything was possible. He wasn’t even sure if he could trust the TV journalist he was going to meet with, but he would find out soon enough.
Snowjob closed his laptop. How long did he have before the FDA was onto him? A week? A few days? When would his boss figure out he was never returning to work? He’d told her he had the avian flu. Now that he was in the land of the bird flu, Snowjob crossed his fingers that he wouldn’t actually be getting the disease for realsies. He wanted to spill his guts to Riviera, not on Riviera.
CHAPTER 6
Anya Chapstick threw back the shot. She slammed the glass upside down on the bar as the vodka burned its way down her throat, and then grunted her dissatisfaction. The bartender, with his long blonde locks and smoldering eyes, snatched up the glass and wiped down the bar. “Too strong?” he asked in a thick Australian accent.
She scoffed. “In Russia, we have water with higher alcohol content than this.”
“Hold on,” he said, examining the bottles lined up against the mirrored wall. He picked one out — the bottle was entirely printed with Chinese characters, which she couldn’t quite make out in the dim light — and poured a fresh shot. “On the house. Fair warning, though: This might put hair on your chest.”
She eyed him suspiciously, and sniffed the drink. It smelled like paint thinner. A good sign. She didn’t need any more body hair — her waxing bills were high enough as it was — but what the hell. She had a job to do, a job that she couldn’t do without getting hammered. Anya slammed the shot back and convulsed as it worked its way down her throat, a slow, agonizing chemical burn that reminded her of the time she’d been captured and tortured in Afghanistan.
“Better?” the Aussie asked.
“It’ll do,” she said, sliding a cartoonishly large amount of Hong Kong currency across the bar. “Give me the bottle and two glasses.”
“You got it, mate,” he said.
Anya took the half-empty bottle and glasses and glanced around the hotel bar. It was all but deserted except for a trio of raucous Chinese businessmen taking turns singing Bing Crosby Christmas karaoke…and a reedy American in a grey button-down shirt and wire-framed glasses. She made a bee-line for the American, who had taken a seat by himself in a darkened corner of the bar.
She caught his attention — of course she did. She knew how to fucking walk. She’d had plenty of practice strutting her stuff as a teenage model back in Moscow. So was so good at it that she’d been recruited at the age of fourteen to work for Putin’s secret police force, seducing his political rivals in order to blackmail them. She’d sucked more wrinkled, liver-spotted cock than most whores three times her age, and she’d done it for Mother Russia. Now she was twenty-one. She still had her looks, and if those failed her she had blunter instruments…like the Glock in her purse.
“Would you like some company?” she asked her mark, sliding into the plush leather booth next to him before he could answer. She set the glasses on the table and began pouring out shots.
He was taken aback at first, but quickly regained his composure. “If you want to sit here, that’s fine by me,” he said, his words directed more to her boobs than to her face.
She handed him a shot. “Where is your girlfriend?”
“She left me.”
“Sounds like you need a new girlfriend. Would you like me to be your girlfriend tonight?” Some men were wary of attractive women showing interest, so playing the part of a hooker made things more believable.
“Oh, shit. Are you a…”
“Prostitute?”
“Yeah,” he said sheepishly.
“I am a business woman,” she said. She made no effort to conceal her thick Russian accent. Throughout Asian countries, Russian hookers were a dime a dozen. Sometimes literally.
“Not interested,” he said. “Not to brag, but I get laid plenty without paying for it.”
“A handsome American boy like you, of course you do.” She ran a finger through his short blonde hair, and felt him shudder at her touch. “But there’s a difference between driving an economy car and cruising the freeway in a Porsche.”
“I’ve driven some decent cars before.” He downed his shot and winced as if he’d been suckerpunched.
“Maybe you take this one for a test drive first, okay?” Anya asked.
He squinted at her through his contorted face. “It is, like, legal?”
“The vodka? Of course.”
“I meant the other thing. The sex thing.”
She winked at him. “I take care of the police, they no bother us. Are you staying here? We’ll go to your room.”
His eyes focused on the hint of cleavage peeking out from the low neckline of her tight T-shirt. “Sure thing,” he said, unaware of the Rohypnol capsules tucked into her bra….
UPDATE DECEMBER 2013: Snowjob is currently on an extended hiatus. I wrote about 20,000 total words—most of which remain unpublished—but decided to go back to the beginning and rework the entire story. Who knows how long this will take? Thanks for reading, and hopefully the full story will come out in some form or another eventually!
Welcome to Snowjob, the ongoing, serialized Edward Snowden fanfic that no one asked for!
In Andrew Shaffer's new satire, technical contractor Eddie Snowjob leaks top-secret details of the FDA’s massive surveillance infrastructure — codename: GISM — and becomes the target of a global manhunt. He also totally gets laid.
