“Chet,” Jenny says.
“Chuck,” Shayda corrects. “Creep cupped my butt the other day when I was restocking napkins.”
A claret tongue splits the lips of the Amazon driver, and he waggles it at them lewdly.
Something in Jenny snaps. She reaches down and picks up the first thing she can find: a stale scone sopping with milk so spoiled she nearly retches as she reels back and throws through the van’s window a perfect spitball strike that hits Chuck on the side of his head and breaks into pieces that will be hard to clean out. He howls. Jams on the brakes. Throws open his door.
“Fuck fuck fuck.”
Shayda says, “Oh Jesus,” turns, and runs back inside.
Out of his vehicle, spitting, coughing, one eye clotted with viscous scone bits and half-shut, Chuck is holding one of those steering wheel lock bars, with which Jenny assumes he’s going to try to clobber her.
“The fuck are you doing?” he’s shouting, doing a stagger-walk around his van, clawing fetid crumbs from his collar. “The fuck do you think you fucking are?”
What Jenny thinks is she needs another weapon, and there’s an awkward length of rebar under the trash bin that, once she’s yanked it free, is way too long to be practical, but for one brief breath she imagines herself lifting it and running Chuck through, like a warrior princess would.
“I’m your worst nightmare,” Jenny barks at him, because she remembers it from a movie. “I’m Chuck the Creep’s hell on earth, a bitch with balls.”
“What’s going on here?” Dimitri, her manager, has stepped down from the back door.
“I’m pressing charges,” Chuck whines, letting the wheel lock fall to his side and starting to dig in his jacket for his phone. “Assault.” Now that she can compare Chuck to a normal-size man—in this case Dimitri, but could be anyone, really—Jenny confirms what she suspected all along: Chuck’s smallish. His saggy chinos, rolled up, still manage to pool over his trainers.
“I threw a scone at him,” Jenny confesses. “He’s the serial dick I told you about, D. He grabs ass when we come out from behind the bar.”
“She assaulted me with a biomuffin.”
“Stop embarrassing yourself, man.” Dimitri has only two interests: handpicked mycotoxin-free fair trade certified-organic Nicaraguan beans and cross-training. His forearms are bigger than Chuck’s legs. The manager may be an asshole, but he’s her asshole for once.
“Get out of here,” Dimitri tells the Amazon driver. “You buy your coffee beverages somewhere else from now on.”
After one defiant, disgusted sideways spit, Chuck turns and swaggers with all the dignity he seems able to muster back to his van, and they watch him climb in and drive away. Could be Jenny’s imagination, but she would swear she hears Chuck screaming as he pulls into traffic.
“You smoking out here, Jennifer?”
“No, sir.”
“Good.” This is the longest conversation she’s had with Dimitri since he hired her.
“Thanks,” Jenny says and means it.
“Shayda thought you needed help.” He glances at the rebar she’s still clutching, then spies the mess at the bin. “Put your sword away, and clean that shit up.”
CHAPTER SIX
A baker’s dozen of Sentro’s colleagues, the usual bridge mix of retired military in work-casual civilian clothes and exiled government bureaucrats in everyday suits, have gathered in the big pleather chairs around the conference table to browse her written report on the Nicosia exfiltration, which all were supposed to have read by now.
A senior man, his coiffed silver hair a Beltway cliché, starts in, “This was supposed to be a simple acquisition,” before Sentro can even sit down. Another lost name. Shit. Valdez? Falcone? Why does she forget some things while other stray memories crash in uninvited?
“I know.” The debrief has evidently started.
The senior man’s eyes tic-twitch when he looks up at her. Hector something. His eye situation is the unfortunate consequence of a nerve gas snafu in Tripoli when he was with the DIA. She remembers that. The Russian GRU was trying to kill another one of their own peripatetic ex-spies, and senior man got caught in the middle. His last name another anxious mental blank.
Was she ever good with names?
“I mean, jeez Louise, Aubrey, we’re trying to move in the direction of risk reduction and cost containment, and it’s like you’re out there, mountains to molehills, throwing money off the back of a train.”
How many metaphors can a man mix? “I know. I know.”
And she does know. All of it. It cascades back in harrowing detail: the dark hallway; the switchback no one had mapped; the stench of garlic, mold, and dry rot; the way she’d blanked on the suite number at the door.
“A number of complications arose,” she says. “Variables out of anyone’s control.”
The client was a multinational cloud-storage provider whose encryption-code team supervisor had traveled to Greece for a conference and disappeared from the hotel bar late one night. The ransom demand had been made through intermediaries; Solomon’s online investigation unit had identified the source as a Turkish terrorist organization that was, no doubt, engaged in another round of typically violent and aggressive seasonal fundraising.
This was the crisis. Solomon’s job was to manage and resolve it. Once the asset was located, she took a team to the island to facilitate a rescue and exfiltration.
Listening to the operation audio feed over the conference room’s sound system, Sentro hears what her communications earpiece picked up of her own steady breathing while the remote audio-control op rustled papers with irritation while he looked to provide suite-number confirmation; a short delay, then the sound of a door opening to reveal the middle-aged Chinese American asset she’d been sent to retrieve, followed by the question he’d asked of her.
Can I help you?
For the big mission-review flat-screen in the Solomon Systems conference room, someone in support has prepared a PowerPoint of the Nicosia hotel-hallway confrontation. On an adjacent whiteboard are diagrams of the hallway’s events as they unfolded, positions of the principals, timeline, photographs: bodies on the ground, walls chewed up by high-caliber bullets.
The audio becomes badly distorted with all the hell that broke loose.
A studio publicity portrait reveals the asset fully clothed, from his firm’s corporate annual. Buttoned down and smiling. “Scott Chang,” Sentro narrates. “Forty-one. Father of three from Minnetonka. His wife is an Amway Silver Producer. He was in Cyprus to negotiate a cloud-sharing software license for the client, met some hot-girl honey trap in a bar, and confused a blue-ribbon blow job with true love. Lost three days in a GHB daze and didn’t, in fact, even understand he’d been kidnapped and ransomed by the Bozkurtlar Grey Wolves.”
The audio maxes out when the flash bang explodes.
“All I could do was embrace the suck,” she admits and looks around the table, hoping that those present, partners and peers, will understand, from their own experiences in the field or elsewhere, what she’s talking about and let her little memory glitch at the doorway slide.
“Happy ending, of course,” Sentro tells them. “Our client got its valued employee back. Amway wife still has a husband. And three little girls in Minnesota will grow up with a wiser, repentant dad.”