It was a woman who spoke English with a very mild Chinese accent. Before he turned, he knew it was Danhong Guo.
When he turned, he saw she had changed remarkably quickly into a very nice flower print dress that showed off her athletic figure. He also noticed she was wearing perfume. He didn’t recognize the scent but she smelled good.
He managed to keep his surprise at seeing her off his face as he stood and said, “Of course.”
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said as she took the seat next to him. “But you have the last table with this view.” She gestured to the waves rolling into the shore.
“Not at all, I’m glad for the company.” He noted that her hands were empty. “Can I get you a drink?”
“A cosmopolitan,” she said without hesitation. He liked that. No pretense. No worry that it would seem unsophisticated. The fact was that she was dressed as a tourist, and the Cosmo fit that image.
He returned and handed her the drink. She thanked him and made surprisingly long eye contact. That was a bit unusual for a mainland Chinese woman, but she was anything but ordinary. Despite all of their political slogans about equality, the Chinese leaders were still remarkably sexist. She would have had to forgo a lot of her assigned gender role to get noticed and rise as fast as she did in the government.
“You like the ocean?” he asked.
“Yes, I grew up inland but went to school in Shanghai, and I work in Beijing,” she said. Both places, he knew, were on the shore. “School was demanding, and so is my work. To have a night free and this view. It feels like a…treat.”
“You are with the Chinese delegation?” he said.
“I am. And you are just visiting? A vacation?”
“A vacation. Really more of a sabbatical. I teach at the University of Texas. I’m taking a year to rest and write,” Conley said.
“Interesting. What do you teach?” she asked.
“Native American languages. I specialize in the Southwestern dialects,” he said. It was his cover, at least one of them. Dan Morgan often told him he looked like a college professor. And obscure languages were a safe cover since so few people spoke them.
“That is interesting. I have never met anyone with that specialty,” she said politely.
That was the point. He wasn’t exactly fluent in Sioux or any of the other related languages, but he knew enough to fake it, and certainly enough to convince most people.
Conley realized that he was staring at her. “It’s important to enjoy your work, I think,” he said.
“I agree,” she said.
“And yet, a break is always welcome,” he said.
“Yes, most welcome.”
“Would you like to dance?” he said.
She took his arm and they moved to the small dance floor. She moved gracefully to the American pop music. That was a bit of a surprise. According to her bio, this was her first trip outside of China.
Conley decided there was more to Ms. Guo than was covered in her bio—and more than he would have thought watching her interact with her colleagues.
When a slow song started she allowed him to take her hand and put the other hand on her waist. The distance between them was respectable but close enough for him to learn she didn’t just look, but felt athletic.
He decided there was indeed much more to her than he had thought, and he hoped he would have enough time to find out exactly how much more.
When the song ended she said, “Would you like to take a walk?”
A few minutes later they were walking on the beach. They chatted amiably, avoiding her work—or economics, or politics, or anything that might spoil the mood.
Too soon she said, “I should get back to my room.”
“Do you have to work tomorrow?” he asked.
“No, but I was going to see some of Manila. I’m fascinated by this place,” she said.
“Perhaps we could explore it together,” he said.
“I would like that very much,” she said.
Conley walked her to her door and decided against trying to kiss her. He would see her tomorrow. Even vacation romances had rules and he didn’t want to rush it.
Chapter 10
“You don’t have to do this, Dan,” Jenny said, seriously.
“I want to,” Morgan said.
“For a spy, you are a terrible liar.”
“No, I really want to do this. If you can learn to shoot, I can do this,” Morgan replied. “Plus, it will go faster if I help you.”
“Of course it will, dear,” she said, patting his arm.
A few minutes later they were in the Mustang and on their way.
It wasn’t just shooting that Jenny had learned. He realized that she knew quite a bit about his car business. And she’d been to her share of car shows and auctions.
Over the years Morgan had picked up some of the jargon from her interior design work. And he’d seen thousands of design drawings, paint color charts, and fabric swatches.
Today, however, would be his first vintage upholstery show. He decided it wouldn’t be too bad. And Jenny had given him a folder of vintage ads and a few swatches to try to match.
So he had an objective, of sorts. Well, he’d done worse work for bosses he liked much less than Jenny.
He broke the rows of tables and booths into a mental grid and started searching. Fifteen minutes later he had found precisely nothing on his list and Jenny showed up with half a dozen bales of fabric for him to bring to the car.
Well, fair enough, this was her world. He lugged the upholstery back to the Mustang and dropped it into the trunk. On the way back to the show, he saw a young man in a tracksuit looking at fabric on a table. The man was maybe twenty-eight, with the scruffy beginnings of a beard.
He could not have been more out of place in a show full of people of various ages wearing neat but casual summer attire. This man was wearing probably the only tracksuit in Cape Cod and he stuck out like a…black Cadillac with New York plates.
The sight of the man nearly stopped him dead in his tracks. Only his training and years of experience kept him from showing what he was feeling. He continued walking casually into the show, resisting the urge to run, grab Jenny, and get the hell out of there.
The man was Russian mob, probably out of Brighton Beach. He was too young to be ex-KGB, which meant he wasn’t very important. Still, he was there and Morgan knew that he had been following them.
That part made him angry. There were rules in this business; families were kept out of it.
Morgan didn’t trouble himself with who might be after him. There was a long list of Russian agents and criminal figures whom he had crossed over the years—though most of them were dead now.
He would figure out the who later, once he had Jenny safe. He kept the Russian in his peripheral vision. The man was constantly checking his phone, as if he were keeping in touch with someone. Of course, there would be at least two men assigned to follow him, and to do what? Kill him in the open? Bring him in?
He wasn’t in the mood for either of those options.
Morgan headed deeper into the show and then worked his way to the right. For what he was planning, he would need a bit of privacy. He picked a booth on the end of an aisle, where the seller had stepped out. He made a point of dallying over the fabrics, comparing them to the swatches and ads in his folder.
He studied a bale of fabric. It was a reddish and gold velour checker pattern with metallic threads running through the gold squares. A lurex, it was called. The label pinned to the fabric said: Herman Miller, mid-century. That was nonsense, he thought; any idiot knew that Herman Miller geometrics were almost exclusively wools.
That thought amused him. Jenny’s work had rubbed off on him.
Looking up, Morgan gave the Russian plenty to time to reach him. When he caught the man in his
peripheral vision again, Morgan moved through the back of the booth into the empty field behind it.
He brushed his hand against his Walther that sat in the holster under his loose short-sleeved shirt. Without looking he flipped the safety but didn’t draw the weapon. He’d use it if he had to, but he would rather not. A gunfight would be loud, messy, and hard to explain.
A few seconds later the Russian peeked his head from the rear of the booth to look for Morgan.
Morgan made it easy for him and stepped into the man’s line of sight. Grabbing the Russian by the tracksuit, he pulled with his left hand as he aimed a punch with his right fist squarely at the man’s nose. He made good contact and heard the nose break. The Russian’s hands went to his face.
But Morgan was already spinning him around and had him in a chokehold before he could reach his now freely bleeding nose. By the time the Russian realized that he couldn’t breathe, he was nearly unconscious. And before he could struggle much, he was out.
Morgan put the man down and relieved him of his gun, which he’d kept in the pocket of his tracksuit top. Amateurs, he thought as he pulled out the weapon.
When he saw the cheap .38 the Russian was carrying, he was genuinely disgusted. It didn’t look like it had been cleaned in…well, ever. And he strongly suspected that it had never been fired.
Then Morgan took the man’s cell phone and turned it off so it couldn’t be tracked, left the man where he lay, and waited. Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long. Another Russian in another tracksuit peeked his head through the simple black curtain that defined the back of the booth.
Less than two minutes later, a second Russian lay unconscious next to his comrade. Another .38. Clearly, these two knuckleheads shopped for their weapons and tracksuits together. They were young, poorly trained, and poorly armed. It was downright insulting.
He didn’t expect the Russian mafia to be the KGB, but this was too much. Even their muscle used to be smarter than this. He turned off the second Russian’s phone, put it with the other one, and placed the two guns inside his folder of swatches.
Then he rushed to find Jenny. It took him nearly three long minutes to catch sight of her and another minute to reach her. He called out to her, keeping his voice casual.
Even so, her head shot up and her eyes trained on the blood on his right arm.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Not my blood,” he replied. Then he saw that he would have to offer her some sort of explanation. “A guy had a bloody nose.”
He gently but firmly took her elbow. “Something has come up, dear; we need to leave right now.”
Jenny fell into step and the two walked with purpose toward the exit. The men would be out for anywhere from ten to thirty minutes. When they woke it would take them a few minutes to sort themselves out and start moving again. Morgan wanted himself and Jenny to be well on their way when that happened.
“I ran into some men. I’ll explain when we get to the car,” Morgan said.
He made one extra stop in the parking lot first. It didn’t take long to find the black Cadillac with New York plates. He pulled his ankle knife and jabbed it into the sidewalls of each of the four tires. Even if the two Russians did wake up soon, they wouldn’t be going anywhere in that car, at least for a couple of hours.
He felt better when they were in the Mustang and it roared to life. He pulled out and onto the street, keeping to the speed limit but watching all around him. There was no sign that anyone was following them. And his senses were mission-sharp, so that meant that, for the moment at least, no one was following them.
“I ran into some low-level Russian mobsters. They were tailing me at the show and they have been following us for two days,” Morgan said.
“Do you know why?” Jenny asked.
“No idea. And I have no idea who they are or who they work for,” he said.
“Are we safe?”
“For now, but I don’t think we should go back to the cottage. I think we should head for Zeta headquarters until we know more.”
Morgan put his phone on speaker and called Diana Bloch’s direct line.
“Bloch. What is it, Morgan?” she said.
“I had just an issue with two Russian freelancers. I was their target but I don’t know why or anything about their affiliation.”
“Is Jenny with you?”
“Yes, we’re on the road.”
“I can direct you to a safe house in the area until we can get a Tach team out to pick you up,” Bloch said.
“Not necessary. The freelancers won’t be following me and there’s no sign of pursuit. I’d just as soon come into Zeta. I have their phones for Shepard to play with.”
“Your call. Will we need a cleanup crew?” Bloch asked.
Her tone was matter-of-fact, but in their business, cleanup crews were real multi-taskers. They would literally clean up the scene of an incident, remove bodies, and smooth things over with local authorities as needed.
“Not necessary. They’ll each wake up with a headache and take care of themselves.”
“I’d still feel better if we had you both somewhere safe,” Bloch said.
Morgan turned the Mustang onto the highway. He decided that he wouldn’t worry too much about the speed limit. For one thing, they were in a rush. And secondly, thanks to Shepard, no radar gun in the world would be able to get an accurate reading of this car at any speed.
“We are. Shepard has really outdone himself with this car. If find any trouble, I’m sure we can outrun it.”
* * * *
“How are you settling in?” said a voice behind Alex as she entered her dorm room.
She turned to see a tall, neatly dressed student standing in the hallway.
“Um, fine,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I’m Jason, Jason Fitzpatrick. I’m the RA on this floor, which means you have me to thank for the name tag on your door,” he said, extending his hand.
Alex shook it and examined the tag. It looked like an old-fashioned hardcover book with her name on the cover.
“Nice work, better than the Hello Kitty ones downstairs,” she said.
“Well, we are the third floor, I like to think we hold ourselves to a higher standard,” he said, flashing her a quick smile.
He peeked into her room. She had decorated it fairly simply. Photos of her parents, a collage of pictures of her friends from high school, an interesting poster of a double helix, and a fairly large yellow sign with a hazardous waste symbol on it that read: Warning, Biochemistry Major.
“Bio-chem, that’s serious,” he said.
“We live in serious times,” she said.
“You’re a transfer right? How are you settling in? I am the RA so if you need anything or have any issues you want to discuss, my room is in the middle of the hall: it’s 312.”
“I’m fine, just trying to process…”
“Say no more, I know today was the last day of orientation for new students. How was it for you?” he asked, looking at her earnestly.
Alex wasn’t sure how to answer that. The last few days had been unusual. However, she imagined that it would have been more normal to the Alex Morgan character who was her cover. On the other hand, that Alex was a bio-chem major and—as Jason had pointed out—that was pretty serious.
“Today was gender,” she said.
“When I had orientation two years ago gender was just a single workshop. Now it’s a whole day,” he said.
“Well, apparently it’s gotten complicated. And at the end there was a lively discussion about how many genders there are,” she said.
He nodded knowingly. “An age-old question. Did you pick one? There’s no rush you know, you just got here.”
“I think I’m going to stick with ‘girl’. It’s worked out for me so far; I figure, why change now?”
Jason let out an involuntary chuckle. Then he gave her a quick glance and said, “Well, you picked a good one. It definitely suits you.”
Before she could react, his face shifted and he actually blushed. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I said that. That was inappropriate—and I’m the RA.”
To that, Alex let out her own involuntary laugh. “Not a problem, I’m pretty hard to offend.”
Of course, she understood why he had seemed genuinely worried. Yesterday’s “seminars” were on microaggressions and harassment.
The good humor returned to his face. “I’m glad. Just as well though, because if anyone gives you any trouble you’re supposed to report the incident to your RA.”
“I will remember that if someone manages to offend me,” she said.
“Look, just a reminder that we’re having a floor meeting in the lounge tonight. I hope you can make it.”
“What time? I have another meeting at eight,” she said.
“Nine, and for a half-hour tops. Just going over a few rules, procedures, and some activities for the floor.”
“I’ll definitely be there,” she said as she turned into her room. Before she could close the door, she saw Karen O’Neal walking down the hallway. “Hi, Karen,” she said.
Then she turned to Jason. “This is Jason. Jason, this is my friend Karen, she’s also bio-chem. She’s actually a grad student, a TA in the department.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jason said to Karen. Alex noticed that he didn’t shake her hand. “How do you know our Alex?” he asked.
“We are old friends from home,” Karen said evenly.
“You could say that Karen is one of the reasons I’m here,” Alex said.
Jason turned his attention back to Alex, as if Karen wasn’t there. “So we’ll see you at nine?” he asked.
“See you then,” she said, ushering Karen into her room.
Chapter 11
“Ms. Guo,” Conley said when she showed up in the lobby promptly at eight.
“Mr. Conley,” she said, nodding, a Western adaptation of the traditional Chinese bow.
Threat Level Alpha Page 9