by Mae Argilan
What kind of life? My life, my life . Glenn felt herself slipping away. Her neck went limp, and her cheek came to rest on the tablecloth. A crumb of food nestled into her skin near the corner of her eye. She wondered what kind of food it was? Toast, from a meal hours ago? Breakfast? Toast and jam, bacon and eggs. English muffins with squares of butter . How long since she'd eaten? Just a little nap, and she'd be ready to set the world on fire. Fire, fire... ready, aim, FIRE!
A sound detonated her head off the table. Her focus zeroed in on a belt buckle. Raising her sights, she saw Shane’s sympathetic eyes. She looked at the vacant chair on the other side of the table, and realized that was what she'd heard. The simple sliding of chair legs on linoleum. Why did it sound like thunder? Why does everything sound like thunder? Why did she always explode out of sleep counting one Mississippi, two Mississippi, waiting for lightning to strike?
Shane picked the crumb off her face. "I'll handle the enlarging while you run them through the soup. Once we get on a roll, I figure we can keep 5 prints afloat at any given moment."
"A man with a plan," Glenn said.
"Your shots are all sharp and clear, with the same basic brightness, I trust?"
"Naturally."
"Assuming you can manage to keep your eyes open another thirty minutes. Okay, here we go. Eight-by-ten glossies?"
"After you." Glenn followed him to the darkroom.
The first photo came to life, awash in the glow of the orange safelight. Glenn’s fatigue and anxiety began to vanish. I did this. It started as a thought in my head and here it is for the entire world to see, concrete proof that I exist, that I have talent. I'm good; I'm really good. Glenn poked a photo under water with plastic tongs, swished, then lifted it out of the pan. Forty-five minutes later, she was humming, and hanging 8x10 glossies up by the corners like a Lithuanian laundress. Water ran off the RC paper in beads. Soon, all the photographs had accumulated on the end of the dry bench. Shane shuffled through them, nodding his approval of her curly-edged offspring. Then, he slipped them into a brown envelope with the negatives, and delivered them to Phil outside.
Fifteen minutes later, Philip Bleetz was on the threshold of the sixth-floor apartment as per his instructions. It was all very spy-vs-spy—which made Phil feel very important and dangerous. He knocked on the door twice, paused, then rapped twice again. He had to fight hard to contain his giddiness when the door opened.
Eric Pippin was a slender man with fine blond hair. He let Phil step only a few feet into the foyer, where he took the envelope.
"So how are things at Club Fed?" Phil asked, then looked past Pippin. "Where's your partner?"
Pippin peered into the envelope. "Wait here."
Half a minute later, Phil watched fifteen 100-dollar bills being counted into his hand. He folded them in half. "Not a bad day’s work, huh?"
"About as much as a good call girl makes a night," Pippin said.
"Hey, you’re the one pimping for Uncle Sam." Phil looked at his watch. "Actually, it's tomorrow. Couldn't you at least cough up a little O.T.? No? Hey, can't blame a guy for trying."
"You have your government's gratitude."
"I'd rather have a cushy job like yours. Have you talked to your superiors about me? I could be a real asset to your undercover operations."
"They’re taking it under advisement." Pippin reached for the doorknob.
"Okay, well. Give your partner my love." Phil looked over his shoulder, and then was on the other side of a door for the second time that night.
Eric ‘Pip’ Pippin was a genuinewunderkind —24 years old, a unique combination of nerve and insight, and the best agent Sadie Cozzoli had ever partnered with. Only one week into it Pip had justified her faith in him by profiling Singleton and Prentiss perfectly. Sadie studied him through the slats of the coat closet. Even now, nothing about his demeanor gave her away. It was almost as if he forgot she was there. His eyes flickered to the envelope, and a fine line formed across his porcelain brow.
Sadie asked, "Are you going to open the door?"
"I thought you'd rather shoot your way out."
Sadie pointed the snub barrel of her Colt 380 Mustang at the closet ceiling, and thumbed the safety back on. "That's the last time I cover your back."
"Come on out," he said, and opened the louvered door of the closet.
Sadie was an attractive brunette, medium height, medium build, and clear brown eyes. She had her hair pulled into a tight ponytail, accentuating her heart-shaped face. She returned the weapon to the black leather triangle sitting on her left hip.
"That should be our last visitor for the night." She put her hand out.
Pip gave her the pictures, and watched her move into the adjoining room. A funnel-shaped telescope was slung on a tripod. An oval dining table held electronic equipment: computer, laser printer, audio headsets, and portable crosscut shredder. Sadie placed the envelope on the table, and began sorting through the photographs.
"We'll go with these." She pulled her chair up to the table, and attacked the computer keyboard. "We'll have the lab digitize them, but for now we can manipulate them graphically. These are very nice. Prentiss does good work." Sadie entered a password into the computer.
"Bleetz was even more predictable than I’d hoped," Pip said. "He’s so narcissistic. We dangle the carrot in front of the hoop and he leaps right through it."
"Love those carrots. Money, power," Sadie said.
"A date with a pretty CIA agent," Pip said.
"Who he thinks is FBI." Sadie laughed. "From Mata Hari, right on through 007. Absolute hiney, corrupts absolutely."
"Did you see the way he was sniffing around here?" Pip asked.
"Like you said, predictable. I was safe in my little closet with my big gun. I'm always prepared."
"To protect me, or your honor?" he asked.
"Simply following procedure. I have no honor." Sadie ran her finger across a crescent-shaped scar on her chin. "Grab those files. Once more around the block. Don’t want to get sloppy now."
Pip pulled up a chair, planted his elbows on the table, and stared into a manila folder. "There's an element in Bleetz, beyond materialism. Lasciviousness? Like this pornography thing. He has a recklessness. He crosses back and forth across the line. And, now he's got a hose siphoning cash directly from the U.S. Treasury."
"That’s how we control him, the pornography thing," Sadie said. "We know he trades in it. All we have to do is let him know we know. If it comes to that, which it won't, because of the overriding sense of his own importance. He feels superior, that he knows something other people don't."
"But, what's he going to do when you reject him—because that's how he's going to view it. Look at to what he’s done to Glenn Prentiss for something that happened three years ago. The way I see it his overriding passion is vengeance."
"You want something to worry about, worry about Prentiss. She's the wild card."
"I still don't get that. She's not particularly patriotic, has no family to exploit, no real ties. She has ambition, but it's tempered by a certain integrity. You can't get a fix on her values, so you can't predict how far she'll go."
Sadie nodded. "It's risky."
"I'm surprised you got her cooperation at all." Pip opened Glenn's file, and leafed through it.
"Oldest trick in the book," Sadie said.
"Sex?"
"Guilt. The roots to this go way back, even before the war in the Persian Gulf. Everyone was flexing, but there wasn't any act big enough to light the fuse."
"So, one had to be manufactured," Pip said. "You explained that to me before."
"Our objective was to break the back of OPEC, and the alliance of the United Arab States. Saddam Hussein was crazy as a bedbug. Anyone could see he was about to do a swan dive into the deep end. But, our government was married to him. We'd made all kinds of promises to get help with the Iran problem in the 80's. Did you ever wonder what made him wake up one morning, and decide to invade Kuwait?"
<
br /> Pip stood up, slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, and paced away from the table. "That was before my time, but I would imagine it would require a little abracadabra."
"We whispered in his ear, gave him the impression it was cool with us. When a person wants something badly enough, he can be very selective about what he believes. Iraq was on the brink of nuclear enlightenment. We had to split him before he split the atom. But, the Arab world would have risen up against us ifwe had started the war."
"Instead, we provoked him to be the aggressor, to attack an Arab nation, so we could step in with a big stick, and swat him," Pip said.
"And, liberate a wealthy nation from the big bully. Kuwait was a deliberate choice. I don’t know if you remember, but we’d been negotiating with Kuwait for 8 years to let us set up a defensive base like in Saudi Arabia. They were afraid of how it would appear to their Arab brothers. So, the invasion was our way of saying, ‘I told you so’. No proof of this exists, of course. What do you know about double exposures? Like if you put Woody Allen's head on Schwarzenegger's body."
"I think Conan the Republican would reject that transplant," Pip said.
"Okay, Nixon's head. You can do amazing things with computers. But, you start out with a real photograph to preserve the integrity of the illusion. So, this civilian takes pictures, and we use them to invent an alternate reality." Sadie exchanged a putty-colored disc for a round, gold one and injected it into the exterior drive. "I access a picture. By changing the background, I put him in front of the Eiffel Tower, or the Taj Mahal."
"Even my untrained eye can tell that's manufactured," Pip said.
"Not if the subjects are interactive. I'll remove the man...replace him with Atlas...position him around until he's...there. Atlas is holding the moon on his shoulders. Change the expression on his face, and you can make him appear to be straining under the weight."
"That photograph in the Prentiss file, is it one she took, or one you manufactured?"
He dug out two 8x10 black-and-whites. One was a picture of Glenn Prentiss squinting past the border of the print at his left thumb. The other was a U. S. Marine, standing over the body of an Arab with his weapon trained on an elderly woman.
"That one is courtesy of Bleetz. If you look closely, you can tell the soldier is superimposed, because the lighting differs slightly. See the shadows? Prentiss took two photos, several days apart. Bleetz lifted the Marine from his platoon, and pasted him here in this scene. It's good, don't you think?"
"Incendiary," Pip said. "Is this responsible for their deaths?"
"No. That was a genuine tragedy. It never should have happened, but once it did, the Investigative Branch of the Armed Forces got involved."
"The AFIB started this?"
"Prentiss was there, an eye witness. The AFIB picked her up, and that should have been the end of it. For some reason they re-opened the investigation, and we figured it was in our best interest to find out why. The CIA has taken a lot of abuse lately about the holes in our intelligence gathering. Just what we needed, the military coming up with another excuse to make us look bad. So, we posed as AFIB to question her first, but she was reluctant to cooperate. So, we flashed that picture of Robert Duncan, and convinced her it was the cause of the terrorist attack on the servicemen in that café. Even though she wasn't responsible for the double exposure, she was the one who took the originals. After that, it was simple to convince her to plant surveillance in the Duncan home. She thinks a band of Moslem extremist are trying to finish what they started by annihilating his family."
"Brilliant. Straight out of the 1960’s edition of the KGB handbook. And, not all that far-fetched. To imagine there are religious fanatics in the United States? Sounds like you played her right."
Sadie smiled and shrugged. "Still. She believes she was an accessory in the deaths. She's atoning for that. The violence of the shooting is etched like acid in her memory. She can't bear to think of that happening again. But, I don't like using external motivation. It's too iffy. If something happens to the motivation, there goes the girl. She has an unusual stubbornness. Since I've been watching her, I've learned to have a wary respect for her."
"She's no match for you. You make such meticulous plans," Pip said.
"She does remind me of myself. I like her, but I’m keeping my options open. If it all goes south, we can eliminate her without anyone batting an eye."
"Except maybe the AFIB. They don't approve of our methods."
Sadie shrugged. "Accidents happen. I heard about an uncooperative clerical worker in the House, who was on her way home when she found herself raped, robbed, and beaten within an inch of her life not more than two blocks from the Capitol."
"D.C. stands for Dangerous City, especially after dark."
"You're telling me. Car-jackings, drive-bys, random violence of every kind. These are dangerous times we live in, Pip." She shook her head.
"Remind me never to get on your bad side." He looked at her with grudging admiration. "There's a bit of Lady Macbeth in you, isn't there?"
"Not really," she said, deleting Atlas from her screen. "Lady M never did acquire her target."
5
Glenn sprang for a cab ride home from Bethesda. The cabby was thin and pale, and had a faded cap clamped over spikes of hair. If his nose were a painted triangle he'd make a perfect scarecrow. He made no attempt to engage her in conversation. She was able to settle back and watch the landmarks march past. Off Old Georgetown Road was the National Institute of Health. The sight pleased her in a vague humanistic way.
A bastion of medical research, a symbol of hope, a Statue of Liberty for the suffering masses yearning to breathe free. There’s a photographic essay in it somewhere, a collage of Washington's famous monuments with NIH as the hub... or a spoke... the whites stark, marbleized, and the shadows prominent and brooding.
She wrote captions in her head while they traveled along Route 1. It was hard keeping her eyes open along that stretch, even harder as they reached College Park. At least with Phil there was never a danger of dozing, not with that laugh of his, not with him shooting off his big mouth. It was like navigating through a minefield when Phil Bleetz was in the driver's seat.
Glenn arrived home, dug the money out of her pocket, and tipped the cabby two dollars she couldn’t afford. At the end of the main corridor inside her building she swung left, and stopped at the first door on the right. The hall light was ‘non-functioning’, making it necessary for her to screw her eyeball to the front lock to insert her key. She was bending over when she heard the footsteps loping out of the darkness, but she couldn't react fast enough to save her life.
"Jacqmel King! You scared me to death. I thought you were a mugger."
"Good thing I'm not," Mel said. His grin was the only thing she could see. "If I was, you'd be deader than dirt. Gimme your key. I'll open it for you."
"Thanks."
"My eyes are useder to the dark than yours. I been here longer."
Mel squeezed in beside Glenn, and took the key. She put her hand on his arm to convince herself she was among friends. He jiggled the lock, then smiled down at her. "Ta da!"
"How long've you been waiting?" She asked, picking up her gear.
"Seems like a year. Where you been?"
"Out of town, mostly."
Mel pushed open the front door. Glenn stumbled inside, and snapped on the light. Mel closed the door and fastened the chain as Glenn fell on the tattered sofa.
Jacqmel King was fifteen, tall and lean, with handsome features, and green eyes. His coloring, which appeared so dark in the hallway, was a coffee tone. His black hair was sculpted into a flattop.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"Coming up on 3:00 AM, I guess. Was I expecting you?"
"Mama got called into work last minute."
"That is the workingest woman I ever met in my life," Glenn said.
"Tell me about it. She goes into work, and I get left on your doorstep like some orphan ba
by. I don't know when she's gonna figure out I can take care o' myself."
"Sure you can. You know she trusts you. She just doesn’t want you to accidentally become a statistic of juvenile violence due to some of the other fine citizens we have for neighbors. Besides, if you didn't come over, who'd take care o' me?"
Mel laughed. "That's a fact. Well, I gotta get some sleep."
"Take the bedroom," Glenn said. "I got the couch. Hey, what day is it? Is this a school night?"
"I ain't goin'."
"Like hell you're not. Go park yourself in that bedroom, and set the alarm for whatever time you get up," she said.
"But they ain't doin' nothin' important tomorrow. It's just games, and parties for Christmas and all."
"All the more reason. I keep you home, and your mama's gonna come over here and commit Glenda-cide, and you know that's a fact. She holds down two and a half jobs, all she asks is for you to get educated. That's not too much to ask, is it?"
"Damn!" He stomped his foot on the floor.
"Hey, hey! Watch your language. Now come here, and give Auntie Glenn a hug or there won’t be nothing left of you but an oily stain where you used to be." Glenn kissed him on the cheek. "Sorry I got home so late."
"Night."
"Night. And, remember not to wake me up when you get yourself off to school."
"I'll tiptoe."
"I think there's some cereal in the cupboard, but I wouldn't take bets on the milk not being rotten."
"That's okay. I'll pickpocket you, and buy me a muffin at Mickey D's."
"Wonderful, I just knew I was gonna wind up getting mugged tonight. Oh, and throw my nightshirt out here to me, will ya? It's on the bed."
He was back with it a moment later, and with a pillow and blanket. As soon as the sofa was under her back, Glenn started dreaming. And, no sooner had the dream begun, than she sprang out of it breathing hard, and staring into the shifting shadows of her living room. She threw the covers off, and scampered across the kitchen floor. The cold was so intense her feet ached, but she stood her ground long enough to fill a tumbler with wine that had the taste of cherry Kool-Aid and the kick of White Lightning. She toe-danced back to the couch where she drank it, belched, and huddled once again under the blanket. This time she grabbed sleep in her arms, and wrestled it into submission, until a sound pounded it out of her grasp again.