“I guessed you’d figure it out. Now how about figuring out how to get me out of this place?”
It took another twenty-four hours before the hospitalist released him, and then she wasn’t overly happy about the decision. Agnes Ann drove him to his apartment. He took a bottle of Percocet with him but he put it in the drawer of his night table. He swallowed four ibuprofen and allowed Agnes Ann to undress him. She kissed his bruises and cuts lightly. She kissed other parts of him, not so lightly, as the waxing quarter moon rose in the sky. While Tagliabue rested from her labors, she changed the bed and laid him between cool linen sheets. The next morning, he rose stiffened and pained. They drank coffee by the window overlooking the street.
“It’s so peaceful this morning. It’s hard to believe two thugs hit you with pieces of construction material just two nights ago.”
“Yeah. Nothing much ever happens here. The biggest event is old man Sharkey leaving his television on all night, and he doesn’t even turn up the sound.”
A woman in jeans came out of Patel’s with a bag of hard rolls and two containers of coffee. She strolled past Tagliabue’s apartment bobbing her head to something she heard through a pair of white buds in her ears. Agnes Ann followed her with her eyes until she strolled out of sight.
She said, “I wonder how Mr. Sharkey is making out with your new little pet.”
“I was just thinking the same thing myself. He doesn’t have Polly’s food. I can’t imagine what the poor critter’s eating.”
“Let’s get over there today.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll do it.”
As was her wont, Agnes Ann changed the topic, deciding no doubt that she’d had enough small talk and wanted answers to her many questions. “How come the detective couldn’t get into your apartment, Tony? Don’t you have a super to take care of the building?”
“Actually, I own the building.”
“The whole place?”
“Well, it’s only the three floors.”
“What’s on the other floors?”
“Let’s take a look, as long as I’m spilling my guts to you.”
She said, as she helped him stand: “You don’t have to, y’know.”
“Yes, I do. I should have come clean, as they say, a long time ago.”
They went out the front door of the apartment and took a small elevator up one floor. The door facing the lift as it opened was solid metal and painted the same pale tan color as the walls that ran from either side of it. The door was plain except for a keypad with a small plexiglass panel above it. Tagliabue punched in some numbers and placed his hand against the clear panel. The door slid into the wall soundlessly. Agnes Ann looked at everything but said nothing.
Inside, the room was undivided, lit by overhead tubes of long LED bulbs that cast the place in artless brilliance. There were no shadows anywhere. Everything was light green except for equipment; there were no wall or window treatments of any kind. Almost a third of the room was a gym with mats and weights strewn about, a heavy bag, a speed bag, and an elliptical machine. Next to it was an open shower. A corner opposite the workout area contained high-tech communications equipment in carbon pods. A large gun safe sat bolted to the floor next to the comm gear. The windows were covered from the inside with metal blinds screwed to the walls. One of the middle ones had a telescope with its objective lens pressed up against it. Tagliabue pressed a button on the wall near the scope and a circular opening whirred and appeared in front of it.
“Check out this view,” he said.
The scope was fat-barreled and long. Agnes Ann sat on a stool and trained her eye through an eyepiece set at a ninety-degree angle to the barrel.
“My word. I see why you chose this building, Tony. I can make out people’s faces on their boats and see clear past the harbor.”
“I think of it as my crow’s nest.”
She continued to peer into the telescope: “While I enjoy the view, Tony, why don’t you tell me how you came to own this weird place and all this equipment.”
It didn’t sound like a request to Tagliabue. He began to tell her how he met a mystery woman in a mysterious part of the world.
CHAPTER NINE
Images flickered among the shadows and the low-ceilinged place had about it the smell of working men exuding garlic from their pores and smoke from their mouths. They sipped tea in thin glasses as they huddled in groups of three and four and let the tiredness ooze from their bodies after a day in the souks and factories of the city. Their talk was a steady low growl throughout the room. They were dark people with flashing whites in their eyes, eyes that flashed once at a woman, not dark, who entered the bar. Giselle came in through the beaded curtain, drifting past the tables, another flickering image. She sat in front of Tagliabue, pushed the veil from her head so that it draped around her neck, and began to talk.
“We could have met at the Madinah Marriott, Mr. Tagliabue. You didn’t have to go native on your first night in Marrakesh. Are you staying at this riad?”
Rather than answering her question, he said, “This is my one night in town. I’m in and out tomorrow if my hop comes through.”
“I take it you want to get right down to business. Pour me a splash of that tea, please. I’m parched.”
The odor of mint floated to his face as he poured. She drank and sighed.
“That’s the best thing about this miserable country, I swear.”
He looked at her, his face tanned and unsmiling. She took another sip, put the glass down, and leaned in. She smelled clean, as if she’d just bathed with lilac soap. Her finely lined face was powdered and dry; her short functional hairdo seemed glued in place.
“I understand you are tired of war and all the nasty little games you have to play to survive. Most of our contract personnel burn out sooner or later. You didn’t last as long as most. They like the power of their weapons and the, uh, camaraderie with the other men. I have long suspected that you are a different breed of cat.”
“How would you know that? I never met you . . .”
She stopped him with a thin hand raised between them.
“Don’t ask wearisome questions, please. Just assume I know more about you than your poor old mother, three years deceased now. At Black Opal we seem to spend as much time and energy vetting our personnel as we do deploying them. It’s the nature of the beast, if you will. People with the skills and motivation to sign on as mercenaries need to be watched constantly. I’ve been watching you. I’m glad you’re getting out.”
“That’s a relief. I thought you wanted to see me to talk me into re-upping.”
“Hardly, Mr. Tagliabue.”
“Then what do you want, Miss . . . ?”
“Please call me Giselle. That will be my contact name if you are interested in my little proposition.”
She took another dainty sort of sip and straightened in her chair. “As an adjunct to the firm that employed you for the past year or so, I employ a half dozen or so operatives, all within the borders of the USA, who do certain, uh, tasks at my behest. Some may be extralegal. All are for the good of our own country.”
“How would I know that?”
The woman smiled at him, a spare gesture with her lips together. She opened her hands to him.
“That part has been taken care of for us. Just as we spent months vetting you before proposing this meeting, we spend at least as much of our energy and resources determining if a request meets our standards. You have to develop a degree of trust in me.”
His teeth flashed white in the darkness of his face and the dimness of the room. He was tired of secrets and intrigue. The men he fought with knew nothing except their assignment, but they whispered constantly in the long waiting hours about the nature and purpose of their business at hand. It’s what fighting men do, Tagliabue knew from his time in uniform, question authority while following it. He kept his own counsel in the field, speaking only to give orders or discuss tactics. As a consequence, he had many admirers but f
ew close friends among the contract soldiers he worked with. He was an intense warrior, powerful, fast, and fearless, so he wasn’t surprised when he received a message to meet this woman in Morocco on the way home.
If she offered him independent duty in America, he had to at least listen. Black Opal Ops, the contractor who employed him until three days earlier, had been honest in its dealings with him, paid him on time, and had never asked him to do anything he found morally objectionable. He thought BOO was probably one of the straightest of the companies that sprang up to fight America’s Mideast battles when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had become politically out of favor. He did the same work as a mercenary with the company as he had been doing with the navy—at three times the salary.
“I don’t distrust you, Giselle. I don’t know you well enough for that.”
“You’ll learn to trust by the assignments I give you.”
“Not from where they originate?”
“No. You’ll never know that. We take requests from many agencies. If we accept one, it becomes ours. That’s all you need to know.”
He raised his eyebrows at that, nodded.
“Let’s get to it then,” she said. “I have a car idling outside and a nervous driver.”
“I think your man in here is a little nervous too.”
She smiled again, this time showing her teeth, but not looking behind her at the covered man in the corner. He admired her poise.
She said: “Your situational awareness is just one of the attributes that has drawn me to this discussion. Here’s the deal. When you get settled back in Maine, you take a post office box and send me a text with the number. No names or any other identifying data. Just the three-digit number of the box. I will take that message as your agreement to work with us.”
“Without knowing who you are.” It was a statement of fact, not a question.
She went on, “Every once in a while, I’ll send you a packet by certified mail. You read it, burn it, and send back the postcard if you accept the assignment. If you turn down two assignments in a row, you are no longer employed by us. If you accept an assignment, expense money will be wired to your USAA checking account and when you complete it, your pay will be wired. You’ll receive a 1099 from one of our legitimate businesses called The Clemson Project every January. Taxes are your responsibility.”
Her careful terminology meant to Tagliabue that she ran a clandestine agency housed somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon or maybe in a special building in Langley, funded under vague national security language and unaccountable for how it spent the funds. He had always assumed such agencies existed, even in a free and more or less open society, and he had no moral objections to them in theory. Actually working for one, doing the agency’s dirty work—which was surely Giselle’s intent—didn’t bother him either. He hoped the orders he received gave him enough information to determine that the assignment given could be at least partially open as to its moral value. He could always turn down a dubious assignment.
Giselle told him little else. She spoke the ten numbers of the phone he was to text. He memorized them immediately, repeating them silently until they entered his memory bank.
He pondered her proposition the next day as he rode in the back of a huge black C-17 as it roared across the ocean toward the east coast of the United States. He decided to use what he thought of as the Vatican Protocol to determine if any given assignment was worthy: if someone sees an apparition, a vision of the Blessed Mother, say, and it garners enough believers to warrant the attention of the local bishop, Rome appoints a priest or a nun to report on the apparition’s deeds, but primarily on what it teaches or espouses. If the words of the apparition are heretical or harmful, the case is immediately dropped as unworthy of the church’s approval. No further investigation is warranted.
Tagliabue agreed to consider assignments. When a package arrived from The Clemson Project he would read it carefully. If he determined that it was clean work and not harmful to any innocent person and with minimal collateral damage, he would accept it. He was anxious to learn what the company would pay.
The cargo plane landed at the Charleston Air Force Base and Tagliabue bought a used Jeepster in excellent condition that he found on craigslist. He drove it to Maine.
“I had plenty of money then since I’d just been paid by Black Opal Ops,” he told Agnes Ann.
She was still sitting at the telescope but staring at him instead of through the eyepiece.
“How old is Giselle?” she asked.
Tagliabue laughed. “That’s the first question you can think of? I guess on the sunny side of sixty, but just. Of course, I thought you were nineteen when I first saw you.”
Agnes Ann smiled back. She got up and retrieved a leather office chair from in front of the radio equipment and wheeled it across the hardwood floor to the telescope. He sank into it with a sigh.
“Comfy?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Then tell me what you can about your assignments from Giselle.”
They sat on either side of the matte black barrel of the scope while he told her about his first job, a snatch. The file was detailed when it arrived at his new mailbox three weeks after he’d sent a text with its number. He locked the door and windows of his rented room and read the thing through, carefully, always aware that he had to destroy it when he knew it. The subject was a former analyst at NSA now living in the Soho section of lower Manhattan. He was suspected of passing secrets and had immersed himself in a rough crowd centering around a jiggle joint called The Blue Rathskeller in the basement of a building on a dark block of Canal Street. Tagliabue’s task was to kidnap the spy and spirit him away to a safe house in the Bronx. The file gave specifics about the man but said nothing about the tactics he might use to capture him. He anticipated some violence necessary to effect the snatch; he thought he could do it without killing anyone. Tagliabue spent a week, and some of the $10,000 expense fund from The Clem-son Project, setting up a surveillance post two blocks from the Rathskeller in a rented room in a fleabag hotel, and another week watching.
After he had identified the subject, a man called Arthur Blount, and his visitation pattern, he started frequenting the bar. It was a place of shadows and dark booths lit mainly by the colored spots trained on a central raised dance floor where one or two women stripped to the sounds of recorded Dixieland. The dance floor was fronted by a bar, and that was where Tagliabue sat.
“What can I get you, sweetie?” asked a bartender, a woman with a poor complexion and a big smile.
He smiled back and ordered a bottle of Yuengling.
“You rather have a draft? We got that on tap.” She kept her voice raised to speak over the music. He could smell mint on her breath.
“No, thanks, a bottle’s fine.”
“Good thinking.”
She took his twenty when she brought the beer and left fourteen dollars in change. He drank two, from the bottle, and pushed the money left over from his twenty into the scupper in front of him. During that time two dancers performed for ten minutes total with about forty-five minutes in between sets. Neither dancer was particularly energetic. They moved as if they were listening to their own music in their heads. No one seemed to care. The dancers were both young and attractive, one an Asian, the other blonde. There wasn’t much of a tourist trade and the regulars treated the place as something of a local bar. Tagliabue kept to himself and no one bothered him. He was back at his hotel by midnight.
The next day he moved uptown a few blocks to a more respectable apartment hotel called The Carstairs. Barely visible down the busy city streets at ten P.M., The Blue Rathskeller proved to be no busier than the night previous. Tagliabue sat at the bar again and spoke to no one but Myra, the bartender. He did the same thing for a week, telling Myra when the music allowed that he was in town for a new job and looking for a permanent place to live.
“What kind of work you do, Tony?”
“I’m a chemical eng
ineer.”
“Wowie, zowie. You like your new job?”
“So far so good. You like your job?”
“Ah, you know. It’s work and I’m happy to have it. The guys here are okay. We don’t have any big problems.”
“Can I ask a dumb question?”
“It won’t be a first for me, pal.”
“How come you have these dancers here? No one seems to pay much attention to them.”
She looked around casually. Other customers were engaged in conversations or drinking single-mindedly.
“Advertising,” she said in a low voice. She looked at Tagliabue expectantly, eyebrows raised. His brain tried to process the new data but nothing rational came up. His face showed his ignorance.
“The girls, man.” Myra polished the bar and went to the well to wash a few glasses. She spoke without looking at him; he listened without looking at her. “The boss, Tomas, he runs a few women, y’know? He don’t like them sitting around smoking dope and thinking up schemes when they’re not working, so he sends them out here to advertise their wares. Make sense?”
Tagliabue shook his head, smiling. “They make any sales?”
“Enough, I guess. Lots of these guys use them. They don’t want to look like they’re interested but they are.”
The guys Myra referred to were mostly middle-aged, dressed casually but expensively. They engaged in friendly but relatively quiet camaraderie, no yelling or fighting. One of the managers who wandered around the carpeted floor of the joint, nodding to a few of the regulars but talking to none of them, looked to Tagliabue like a bouncer. It was all very low-keyed. When he came by Tagliabue at the bar, he could feel the bouncer’s eyes on him. The man said nothing to him, but he knew he was being watched. After two weeks, the attention of the bouncer seemed to wane somewhat.
“If you’re interested, let me know. I can set you up,” Myra said.
“What if I’m interested in you?”
The barmaid laughed. “Don’t jerk me around, Anthony. I’m not for sale.”
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