The target did also.
"If I brought you in to cover me at a series of meetings with what might turn out to be cartel but probably won't, what would you need?"
My head examined? But I answered him with requirements for guns, for body armor, for GPS units and backups, for actual hardcopy maps, for more than one bulletproof car, for the dry runs, and for the number of people I'd want on the team and how they were to have been trained. "None of the guard from here, either," I said. When he started to argue, I said, "They can be compromised. They're too close to you." Also, if he handed me a weapon, at least one of the two main guards wasn't going to walk away from the meeting.
He looked at me for a long minute, looking more like Loki than ever, and finally said, "If I armed you, gave you the weapons you're asking for in your outline, what would you do?"
That was an odd question. "I'm not sure what you mean, sir. I'd protect you, since I thought that's what the questions were about."
He waved a hand as if I had missed the point. "If I gave you a gun, who would you shoot?"
Oh. Loyalty test. "Hopefully no one," I said and saw him consider whether I was being smart or honest. He must have settled on the second, because nothing happened other than that long look.
He went back to his reports and I went back to wondering how I could get in touch and stay in regular contact with Tad. Some time later Cole rose from the table, pocketing his phone, and said, "If I gave you the rest of the day to yourself, what would you do with it?"
My heart leapt, because this didn't have the feel of a test. More that he had things to do and wanted to go do them and didn't mind if I entertained myself along the way. The idea of having an entire day to not be messed with, not be someone's property, not be used or trained or taught or be working on kicking my addiction -It was almost good enough to just luxuriate in the time.
"I haven't done any Taekwon-Do in a while," I said. "If I could get on YouTube, I could take some classes in my style." And I held my breath.
He didn't look away from his phone but paused, seeming to consider, then said, "That would be all right. You understand if I find you've been in an email or chat program I'll make you extremely sorry." And then he did look at me, and I shivered. It was an honest reaction and it seemed to please him.
"I'm not looking for email." That was true. I've always preferred text.
But Tad Charles had several YouTube channels. Among others, he did high level black belt workouts on one of them and since he worked out daily, he generally posted daily.
If I commented on his site. As Annix. And asked for a backdoor into some kind of communication about what was happening with the new gangs, it would give me a way to stay current and work on what felt more and more like a problem that was my fault and something I should be able to help solve.
I'd get a good workout in, too.
11
Annie
Galeao International Airport in Rio de Janeiro reduced its call letters to GIG. Something about that entertained me.
When we stepped into the tropical air, it was summer. I'd never traveled internationally before, which meant I'd had to get a passport. That meant I'd have had to have my birth certificate and probably my social security card and all sorts of identification that I clearly didn't go undercover with.
I didn't go into treatment for addiction with mad billionaires carrying my most basic forms of ID either.
Somehow, even when I was working on the heavy bag and sitting in Cole's enforced meditation, enduring a massage I didn't want and doing the yoga I definitely didn't want to do, I never imagined myself at a post office or federal building or anywhere else presenting my ID and walking away with a freshly minted passport. Or having one mailed. I didn't even know how that process worked and by the time we were on his private jet flying to GIG, I still didn't know.
Billionaires have a way around the system. That wasn't something I wanted to look too closely at.
Though I'd never gone out of the country and didn't have any great plans to do so when I got back to that increasingly mythological seeming "real life" of mine, getting a real passport now seemed like it might be problematic. There had to be some record of what he'd procured for me, didn't there?
I forgot about it when I stepped into the airport. It was huge, modern, and actually called something else, I discovered, with the original name being the GIG name. Gleaming modern surfaces reflected light. We landed around noon local time and the city gleamed in sunlight. We stepped out of the airport into summer.
From Southern Nevada it wasn't that big a jolt. The days there were in the mid-fifties. The days in Rio were in the mid-eighties.
We'd traveled with hired guards I'd walked Cole through screening. It was a weird hybrid experience for me because I was used to the muscle the Brotherhood would sometimes bring onboard and the screening that PD might do if a local business was hiring, maybe for a concert. PD did background checks. Brotherhood did informal tests to find out who they were working with and also did background checks. At least, it did under Jesse, who ran his drug trade like a business. A well run business, too.
From those two things I knew about, I cobbled together with Cole's head of security a way to find the right guards to take with us. It was as much fun as a session in Cole's punishment room, because the guards had anticipated going with him and now only the head of security was going and he'd just be in Rio. Most of the people traveling with Cole would be the muscle we hired.
So yeah, I was making friends in the compound right and left.
All of that fell away when I stepped out into the warm tropical air and smelled a thousand different scents that weren't home and weren’t Vegas, either. The air was soft, much higher humidity than the Nevada desert, and warm, unlike Seattle's sea air. I breathed in deep and thought just by the sense of smell alone, I'd have known I was somewhere else.
"What do you think so far?" Cole was grinning, that triangular, mischievous grin seeming here like the excited smile of a kid. He wanted to impress me with this, as though everything he did didn't impress me already.
With a start, I realized there was no way he could know that. In fact, I hadn't known it myself. But his philanthropy, his caring, his focus on rainforest-based drugs that were affordable and could help people - All of that impressed me. His pharmaceuticals all underwent the same rigorous FDA approval processes and even Cole couldn't speed that along, which was too bad, if my own results were anything to go by. The opiate addiction cure was working. Every day I felt stronger.
Where my own treatment was probably lacking and where a lot of other people would find problems, was in not having some kind of talk therapy to accompany it. There were reasons I had fallen into addiction and they weren't just that a bunch of bad shit happened all at the same time and then the drug turned up in the pocket of my jeans. That I was as low as I'd ever felt and bingo! Addiction.
There were reasons I'd used that poison in the first place. Doubtless some of those reasons were still in play since when things got difficult with Cole I still wanted it. The difference was it was a yearning for escape, not a painful physical imperative I couldn't answer.