A series of photographs appeared on the screen of Linda Dorgan. In the pictures, she was held almost completely in the air by two burly cops in cargo pants and matching polo shirts while a woman in a SWAT uniform poked at her with a police baton. Kirk was glad to see some anger in Linda’s eyes as the shots progressed. It would have been a lot worse for her—and for Kirk—if she had crumpled in fear. Still, it wasn’t good.
The rest of the presentation was boring in comparison. Helen was definitely a member of the Cyprus surveillance team at the hotel; they had used an airplane on the second day; and there was a beacon on the rental car an entire day in advance of the operation. The Cyprus PD had a list of every item Kirk had bought. They reported everything that happened in his room down to the number of times he’d flushed the toilet. The CIA team now had digital and print photographs of over thirty member of the Cyprus PD’s surveillance team and knew where a dozen of them lived. All-in-all, it was a pretty successful mission.
Once Mary had left, Nikki turned to Kirk. “I think your girlfriend is going to be pissed the next time she sees you.”
“Yeah, I probably owe her one free swing with a baseball bat. She seemed like a pretty nice person; we had a nice little conversation.”
“That’s not what we heard.” Nikki said. “We heard that the police asked what you had said to her, and she told them that you just kept saying ‘Boobs!’”
“And that you drooled a lot,” Jed added, “and kept making little squeezy motions with your hands.”
“Nothing your sister hasn’t seen from you, Jed.”
“Unlucky for me, she still runs faster than I do.”
Kirk had to laugh. “How did I ever get teamed with such a bunch of perverts?”
Nikki reached over and squeezed his knee. “Birds of a feather, Lover.”
*****
It was an unseasonably cool evening for early June in Northern Virginia; perfect for relaxing in one of the apartment complex’s two in-ground hot tubs, and Maureen was the perfect audience for the story of Linda’s adventure in Cyprus. Some friends would have been too quick to commiserate and pity her, but Maureen found the humor in things, and she had a contagious laugh. The chilled pinot noir in their plastic cups probably didn’t hurt either.
“Holy shit! I can’t believe they paid for all of that.” Maureen took another gulp of wine. “And all you had to do was pose topless with a couple of the locals. I need a vacation in Cyprus. Gary can stay home and watch the kids for a week while mama takes a break.”
“Believe me, Maureen: It wasn’t so funny at the time. I didn’t eat all the next day or on the flight home. You know how I feel about cops…”
“Oh, you poor dear. How much weight did you lose on this vacation? Fifteen pounds? I would hate to have something like that happen to me.” Maureen put the back of her hand to her forehead and put on a pitiful voice “Woe is me! I just can’t eat. My clothes are all going to be too big. Whatever will I do?” She put her thumbs under the straps of her one-piece and adjusted the wet fabric over her breasts. “Yep, gotta get the girls out in the sun. Can you imagine? They’d be squinting their little booby eyes like gremlins.” Maureen turned her voice to a squeak: “Bright light! Bright light!” Her voice descended back to normal. “Gary would be so all over me if I came home and popped out a pair of suntanned hooters; the kids would probably starve before we made it out of the bedroom.”
“How would he feel if anyone could see them on the internet?” Linda had done a little searching on the internet using keywords like Cyprus, police, beach, and topless; but had thankfully come up empty after a few pages of the half a million search results.
“Well, I’m sure Gary has never seen boobs on the internet, but I think he’d be okay with it.”
“Really?”
“Heck yeah! He’d be burying his head in celebrity boobs, dreaming about walking down the red carpet with them. He would probably pour some fresh concrete in our front walk so we could press them into our own little walk of fame.”
Linda laughed. “You know; you’re making me feel like I should wear a baggy turtleneck any time I’m going to be around your husband.”
“Oh, no! With you it’s always the ass. I catch him all the time—give him the evil eye—and he tries to play it off like he was looking at a spot on the carpet.”
Linda wished she hadn’t had a mouthful of wine for that disclosure. It nearly went out her nose before she gained enough composure to swallow.
“How about your mysterious boyfriend in Cyprus?” Maureen asked. “Did you lure him in with the milkshake or the mud flaps?”
“You know, he was working hard to look me in the eye, so I’d have to say it was my sparkling personality.”
“I wonder where it was sparkling from as you walked to your chair… Speaking of sparkling, check out the abs on your lap-swimming neighbor.”
Linda looked, but by then the man was facing away and toweling off with his back to them, muscles rippling under taut skin as he dried himself from head to foot.
“Look at that backside, “Maureen said as the man began to turn toward them. “I’d like to hook my heels under those!”
“Oh my god, Maureen…”
“What?”
“That’s him!”
*****
Kirk had just thrown his towel over his shoulder and stepped into his sandals when a female voice froze him in his tracks.
“Robert Whitman!” She stepped out of the hot tub about a dozen yards away, water dripping from her suit and running down her suntanned skin, and he recognized her immediately.
Linda Dorgan left a splash of water and then wet footprints on the concrete as she strode toward him. Another woman with her dirty-blonde hair in a bun and her ample chest stuffed into a dark one-piece bathing suit remained in the spa, a plastic cup in one hand, her mouth agape.
“I thought you’d be happier to see me, Robert.” She had closed to within a foot, directly in front of him.
Kirk read a touch of disappointment in her face, and it stabbed at his gut. “No, I am happy. Really happy—and stunned; you’re like something that just walked out of my dreams.”
The disappointment was gone from her face, and the playfulness he remembered was back in her eyes. Now Kirk had to figure out how to navigate the mine-laden waters of alias vs. true name with someone he wanted to get to know better.
“Well, you look like something that walked me into a nightmare. Why don’t you come to the hot tub to meet my friend? I’ll tell you all about it.” She took his hand and pulled him toward the spa, where the other woman sunk down into the water until it touched her chin, reminding her to close her mouth.
As they reached the edge of the hot tub, Linda said “Maureen, this is Robert—the guy who got me assaulted on the beach.” She stepped into the water and sat by her very quiet friend; a bottle of wine angled out of a bucket behind them. “Did your friend Miles tell you about that, Robert? How those Cypriot ogres man-handled your half-naked fair maiden in distress? Where-o-where was my knight in shining armor?”
She seemed to have recovered well. She was definitely playing with him now, but there was a legitimate question he had to answer. “Yes, I’ve been debriefed. I heard how horrible they were to you, and I feel terrible that it happened. But I don’t regret talking to you.”
Maureen, suddenly perked up. “I think Linda deserves to be debriefed. You should debrief her as soon as possible, shouldn’t he, Lin? This situation calls for an immediate debriefing. I might need to be debriefed, too, just to be safe.”
Linda shot a glare at her friend, and Maureen caught her next comment between pursed lips. “I think you owe me some sort of debt,” Linda said, “how about a nice dinner sometime?”
“How about tonight? I was thinking about going out anyway. I finally have my apartment put together, but my pantry is a bit barren, and I could use some company.”
Maureen rose up out of the water a bit more. “She accepts! Dinner, and desser
t—hot gooey desert, maybe with some ice cream on the side, and then a massage. That thing on the beach was so stressful; Linda needs a good, thorough massage. It’s been ages since she’s had—” Linda gave her another look, and her voice trailed off, “—a massage.”
Kirk smiled. It seemed the quiet friend was actually the friend with no filter. “If that’s good with you, Linda, we could meet over by the mail boxes in two hours and take my trusty steed to a nice restaurant.”
“I’ll see you then, Robert,” Linda said. She turned her eyes to Maureen, probably to stop her from making any more comments.
Kirk said his goodbyes and walked away in a mixed mood of happy anticipation and nervous dread. The Robert Whitman alias would definitely have to die. There was only one way to keep Linda from learning that he’d been traveling in Cyprus under an alias, and that wasn’t an option. He’d sacrificed enough already.
*****
Linda could see the mailboxes from her apartment, so she conducted her own surveillance once she was scrubbed, plucked, and painted to her satisfaction. She wore a daisy-print sleeveless dress the store described as “flirty,” but the important thing was that she knew it was flattering. It was one of those cheap finds that fit surprisingly well, like it had been made especially for her. She paced back and forth in her wedge sandals and peeked out the curtains every thirty seconds—or five. It was hard to tell. When she finally saw him walking toward the meeting place, her heart raced and she had to take a few deep breaths to calm herself.
Stop acting like an idiot and calm down, she told herself. It’s just a date.
She decided to let him wait a minute or two, but immediately reconsidered and hustled out the door and down the walk. She arrived to find him looking relaxed but sharp in a pair of chinos and a dark blue collared shirt that hung over his waistband.
“Wow! You really are a fair maiden.” He offered his arm and she took it for the walk to his car. Once he’d opened the door for her and ushered her into the leather bucket seat, she missed the closeness of their walk.
His Mustang was muscular, like its owner, but he drove it in a way that was relaxed, like his demeanor. She asked him if there were beaches he liked better than the one where they had met in Cyprus, and he said “Not anymore,” before rattling off half a dozen of his favorites around the world and what was special about each one.
He asked her what she did when she wasn’t sunning herself on exotic beaches, and she told him about what it was like to teach chemistry and physics to spoiled teenagers in an expensive private school, and about her summer job editing college science curricula for a local university. That flowed into a discussion of her sister’s doctoral research at Stanford and her college professor parents in Madison. By the time they parked at the restaurant, he knew about every significant player in her life except one, and she wasn’t quite ready to go there yet.
Instead, she turned the topic back on him. “How about you, Robert? Where’s the rest of the Whitman family?”
He took a deep breath, and she found herself holding hers. “There is no Whitman family; at least not that I’m related to. Technically, it’s illegal for me to tell you this: Robert Whitman is an alias assigned to me. If you pull the registration out of my glovebox, you’ll see that my true name is Kirk Blackwell.”
His confession hung in the air for a while, and Linda felt like there were so many questions to ask that she couldn’t possibly find the right one. He finally broke the silence. “I’m telling you this now because I don’t want to do what the people I work for would want me to do—move out of my apartment and never see you again. You would go on thinking that I was some jerk named Robert who took you to dinner one night and then disappeared.”
“Why would they want that? Is it so bad that you were on vacation under an assumed name?”
“That’s information they wouldn’t want a foreign government to know, because no one really vacations under an alias.” His eyes searched hers out as she connected the dots.
“You were working when we met… Did you know that you were being followed?”
“Yes, and I knew that you might be questioned after I talked to you, though I never suspected anything like the treatment you endured. That surprised everybody.”
Linda felt a sudden weight on her chest, “Everybody? Who the hell is everybody?”
“I really, really can’t tell you that—at least not yet.” He took her hand while anger and desire and need wrestled inside her. Half of her wanted to slap him and tell him to take her home, and the other half wanted to crawl on top of him and tell him to shut up because it didn’t matter.
“I can tell you this,” he continued. “Of all the hard and calloused things I’ve had to do in my career, walking away from you on that beach was one of the hardest. Twenty seconds into our conversation, I wanted the mission to go away so I could stay with you, get to know you better.”
She squeezed his hand. “The food here had better be the best I’ve ever had, and the most expensive.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I picked this place with my penance in mind…and because they have a massage table in the back, since you are in such great need of a rub-down.”
“Don’t push your luck, mister.”
The restaurant was at the edge of the Potomac, just south of Mount Vernon. It had the feel of a colonial dining room, but with cushioned dining chairs, a vanilla and mauve color scheme, and an expensive menu. Linda and Kirk were seated at a small table in a windowed corner overlooking the water. Between her spinach salad and the main course, he told her about growing up in Nebraska with a brother two years behind him and a baby sister who came along after that. He was very close to his sister, even though he left home to join the Navy when she was only six.
“You were in the Navy? What did you do?”
“I’m still in the Navy. I’m a special warfare officer, but I’m working with a mixed team outside of DoD.”
“Special warfare, is that like the SEALs?
“That’s exactly what it is.”
“And you’ve been doing that since high school?”
“With a detour through the Naval Academy, where I majored in chemistry, by the way; so we do have at least one thing in common.”
“Oh, so you’re just a fellow science nerd who occasionally kills people—or gets them accosted on the beach.” He smiled at that, but it seemed he was always on the edge of a smile, like he found most of life humorous in some way, like there was nothing to worry about. She wanted to live in that world, keep that smile nearby.
“And you’re a fellow science nerd who bares her breasts on the first date. I can’t wait to see how you top that on the second—”
“That was not the first date!” She gave his shin a kick and then let the top of her foot rest against his ankle. “THIS is the first date, and there will be no sightseeing involved. You can put all that creepy beach-peeping out of mind.”
“Creepy? I was a total gentleman on that beach. I barely even noticed your perfect, suntanned breasts. Haven’t even thought about them more than once or twice or maybe five times a day since then.”
She gave him another kick, more of a tap on the ankle, really. “You better hope you can keep that in your memory, bud, because a lady like me is unlikely to grant you a refresher.”
“Not even after an expensive dessert? I think your friend Maureen would recommend the chocolate lava cake. It comes with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.”
The lava cake was delicious, and the drive home was quiet, but in a contented way. They talked of baton-wielding policewomen, of European tourists who felt completely comfortable showing all of their sags and bulges, and of the perks of flying business class. He gave a funny description of a nervous sailor who had exactly one date with his sister when she came to visit him the summer after she graduated from high school, and she told him of a bungling chemistry student who turned on the gas for his Bunsen burner only to discover that he’d hooked it to the water supply.
He handed her his cell phone and she called her own number, then added both apartment numbers and saved the contacts in each phone. There would definitely be a second date. As they pulled into the lot, she imagined the goodnight kiss they would share at her apartment door and how she’d think about it until the next time she saw him. That was a good reason to fight off the urge to invite him in—she wouldn’t get to experience the memory of that first kiss and the longing for more. A girl needed a little longing for more, a little something to look forward to, a little of the delicious tension between two people just discovering each other and wondering where this thing would go.
He opened her car door and offered his hand, and she accepted it and stepped out, keeping a hold on his hand as he closed the door and clicked the lock button on the key fob. Then he turned toward her with those smiling eyes.
“My little sister would never forgive me if I didn’t tell you how fantastic you look in that dress.”
“Thank you. Your sister is an excellent dating coach.” She stepped up and kissed his cheek, meaning to leave it at that for now, but her face lingered near his, and he kissed her lips. It was a sweet kiss, soft and fun and way too good to stop there. She relaxed her lips more, pulled at his waist and tilted her head; and he responded in a way that betrayed his hunger. They made out under the streetlights like a couple of teenagers, tongues entwined, lungs sharing the same air, bodies melting into each other. Finally, they mustered enough composure to start toward her apartment, his arm around her shoulders and hers around his waist.
The walk was too short for her taste; the goodbye too imminent. They arrived at her door and were immediately in each other’s arms.
“I just want you to know that it’s okay if you want to give me a goodnight kiss,” she said.
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