by O. L. Casper
I was taken aback. At first I refused the money.
“No, go on. Take it. It’s to show our appreciation for the sacrifices you’ve made to be with this family. And I wouldn’t want you to do without.”
I took it more out of politeness and confusion as to what the correct course of action was than any other reason. Stafford’s next act was even more bewildering than that of handing me all that cash—he sat down across from me and proceeded to make conversation. Admittedly, it was a weak attempt, but I saw a side of the man I had never imagined existed. A humble side. A human side.
“What are you reading about?” He sounded like a little boy asking his mother.
“Just the news. Some tweets.”
He took out a pair of specs and placed them over his eyes, squinting.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses.”
“Our secret,” he winked with a great smile. “They’re for reading mostly. But they help me see you up close. I’m farsighted, I’m afraid.”
“Does that apply to practical matters too?”
He grinned. “You—you,” he repeated, waving a finger in no particular direction. “I don’t know about practically. I’m one of the least practical people you’ll meet. A real buffoon on a lot of levels.” He smiled again. It was then that I got he was one of those people who could say absolutely anything and, with that smile, get away with it. It didn’t matter how dumb or outlandish, it was an intelligent looking smile. “Nope. I’m just a dreamer. What about you?”
“Well,” I cleared my throat, “I suppose I’m a bit of a dreamer too. But of a different variety.”
“Oh? Different how?”
“More middle class, I suppose.”
“Don’t let these…” he searched for the word, “…possessions…fool you. I come from nothing. Less than nothing. And I know what it’s like. I’m as hopeless as anybody else. That’s what most people don’t get—money doesn’t change that.”
I regretted ever resenting him. He was so genuine. Guileless. Perhaps this was just a ruse, but if so, it was damn convincing.
“Tell me about what you’re doing today. This routine business.”
He smirked. Looked away. “It’s nothing. Uninteresting. Routine garbage. I have to sort out someone. Find out what happened somewhere. Correct some mistakes maybe. Or be corrected. I’m not really sure yet.” I tried to imagine him being corrected.
As I watched him, as he sucked the eyes out of my head once more, I knew he was fully aware of the hold he had on me. I had never met anyone like him. Anyone I had met with money had been incomparably stuffy, snobbish, patronizing. He was engaging, confident, and appeared to care what I thought, though he had a devil may care attitude about most things with a devilishly handsome face and devilish charm. If he had asked me to sell him my soul, I would have thought about it, but in the end I probably would have signed on the dotted line. Gladly.
“I wasn’t there for your interview. Tell me about yourself. About your routine. What you like to do.”
“It’s hard to put into words. I’m a girl who’s interested in many things. Photography, computers, business, economics, international relations. I’m just coming into my own in the world, breaking away from my family. I’ve been to college, but I don’t have much experience of the world.” As I said these words, I listened to them feeling as though they were being spoken by someone else while I was quiet, studying his reaction.
Stafford appeared completely receptive, as though he was as absorbed in what I said as I was absorbed in him. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this was the beginning of a love relationship—but of course it wasn’t. I was being silly even thinking anything remotely like that. Hormones maybe. The pressure of not having sexual intercourse that involved any kind of a release in such a long time was welling up in me. And I had to be careful not to let this seep into my interactions with Stafford or anyone else I had achieved a level of intimacy with. Sex with women was different. A whole lot more casual. No expectations. A sort of side show to the main event. Why all the sexual thoughts when I conversed with Mark? After all, he talked to me as if I was practically his mother. He acted like a mere boy who needed nurturing and coddling. He was fooling the hell out of me, right?
“Ah, I love Europe,” he said after I mentioned my exchange trip to France. “How did you find Paris?”
“I’d studied all the old writers and artists—Hemingway, Pound, Matisse, Renoir, Miller, Stein. That was the Paris I had set out for. Man, was I sorely disappointed. All the parts that I had read about the artists living in, in great poverty, no longer existed. They’d become totally posh, chic neighborhoods where the film stars and politicians lived.”
“You know once those types have migrated to a neighborhood, it’s no longer a place worth setting foot in.”
“I’m surprised you agree on this.”
“Well, they go there looking for something more pure, authentic—and they are the very reason those places lose their purity and become hallmarks of corruption and falseness.”
“Here I was thinking perhaps you had political ambitions, I didn’t mean to say that about politicians. It just sort of came out.” I laughed genuinely. It had been a long time since that had happened. The first sign of infatuation.
“I like actors. I’ve met my share of film stars and a lot of ’em are decent, down to earth, genuine people. But I’ve yet to meet a political figure I admire. Nowadays they all get into it for completely the wrong reasons. Maybe it’s always been that way. But I like to think of the really pure, uncommon old souls who at one time or another got in it.”
“Like Abraham Lincoln,” I said.
“Yes, good old honest Abe. Or Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps the most brilliant figure to grace that ever darkening highest office.”
“So you have thought about it?”
“I can’t deny it. But never that seriously. How could you tell?”
“Just your interest. The way you light up at the mention of Abe Lincoln or when talking about Thomas Jefferson the Great.”
“No, I’m a fan of history and the figures in it. At one point I may have thought politics would be an interesting arena, but my interest was fickle. Fleeting. Like it is with most things these days.”
“So you’re kind of drifting now?”
“As far as interests, and finding a new hobby or something to devote myself to—yeah. I don’t know. Look at me, I barely know you and I’m spilling my soul to you. Odd. I barely talk to anyone.”
“Isabella?”
At this, he backed off. I felt ashamed, like I’d brought up something deeply inappropriate, even painful. Then he smiled to mask whatever he was thinking.
“She’s difficult to understand. Anyway, I have to go get ready for the meeting. Wonderful chat though. We’ll have to do it again sometime.” With this, Stafford looked down and showed his teeth, touching the tips of the top row to the tips of the bottom, almost like he felt he had said something wrong himself. That pain again and that fear. He was either unable to conceal it or simply didn’t want to. I watched him as he faded into the distance and thought about what a fascinating man he truly was. I’d been so deluded and judgmental. I had no idea.
Stafford had his obvious flaws, at worst a sort of childishness and naiveté. At best he was childlike and had a straightforward, pure-hearted nature. But I sensed at the same time he was immensely complex, sophisticated. Perhaps even troubled. Capable of long periods of brooding and fits of depression. How much of this was true I didn’t know, but I thought I had a pretty good read on him.
On the way back to my room I collected the binoculars and looked out the window with them. The Leica Ultravid 8 x 42 HD was a very high quality pair with an image stabilizer, 42 mm lenses, and eight times magnification. The clarity and crispness of the image was unbelievably good. I had never seen such sharpness and precision in a magnified image. I picked out a large Norwegian cruise ship with multi-colored flowers painted on the side several m
iles away. The ship appeared remarkably clear and close.
Excitedly I pocketed the glasses and went down to my room. I was happy that they were made by Leica, a smart German company that also produced a camera I had brought with me, the M4. Its lenses were the very top of the line as far as still cameras went. I had discovered Leica in my high school years when watching the film Spy Game. Brad Pitt’s character was CIA and he used a Leica in the field. Shortly after that I looked up the company’s products online, and saw the care that went into making them and the superior quality of the photographs (due to the lens quality). I was hooked. The famous photographer HCB (Henri Cartier Bresson) used only Leicas and I preferred his images to anyone else’s.
In my room I removed my robe and looked in a full length mirror. Scanning my body I thought, though nice—curvy in the right places, long and thin in the right places (according to Hollywood thinking)—could Stafford really be attracted to that? Was this a body he fantasized about—one he wished he could see as I saw it now? I smiled and picked out black jeans and a scruffy black shirt. I decided on these items because I was determined to shadow Stafford and watch his meeting at a distance, using technology to hear the contents of the conversation if I could manage it. I began to think about how I might do this as I clasped my bra and slipped my panties on.
The HTC had almost no reception on this part of the island. So I wouldn’t be using it to receive the conversation from his phone. But I could run the conversation back to my computer via satellite, if his phone was picking up a signal. Otherwise, I could just put the program on his phone, via Bluetooth, and let it record the whole conversation, then fetch it in the evening when he was back. I eventually made up my mind to try both, and, if his device had no reception, I would at least be able to listen to the conversation later.
So that was it. I loaded the spyware onto the HTC from the MacBook, then I set out to find Stafford, ostensibly to say goodbye before he left.
He was in the kitchen we’d spoken in earlier having an espresso when I found him. I could tell he was on his way somewhere he considered important. I’d never noticed him give such detailed attention to his appearance in the few times I’d seen him up to now. He wore a black polo shirt, so black it must have been straight from the factory. It hugged his boxer’s build to a tee, emphasizing his robust chest and biceps. The polo was tucked nicely into dress pants. The one thing that piqued my curiosity was what were on his feet. Military style boots, made by Belleville. Why would he be wearing those? They couldn’t be for style alone, no one buys those because he thinks they’re fashionable—they’re not. The meeting that, in my mind, was already of towering importance, now took on the dimensions of ivory towers. With military boots in them.
Stafford turned to me, head cocked with a half-smile. “Alright?” he asked, almost in the tone of an Englishman.
“Yes, sir,” I said, trying hard not to blush. When I was sure I wasn’t, I stepped out of the shadows of the hallway and walked closer to him. He was standing at the counter near the espresso machine, reading from an iPad. I stood a few feet from him.
“I hope you don’t find this too forward of me, but I didn’t know if you had my phone number and thought I might give it to you in case you ever thought of anything you wanted me to do for Savannah,” I said brusquely, trying not sound too interested.
“Sure.” He took out his phone, not seeming surprised in the slightest. I suppose he is very go with the flow.
As he took out his smartphone, my mind pricked with excitement. I began the Bluetooth scan with my phone to find his phone. Within nanoseconds it was found and I locked onto it and began transmitting the spyware. I read off my digits casually as I watched the spyware load. That was done in about a minute.
“I’ll give you a missed call and you’ll have my number.”
“No need, I’ve already got it.”
“Oh, Isabella gave it to you?”
“No. Your phone just did.”
I tapped into my address book, found his number and showed it to him.
“Something new smartphones do?”
No, just the ones I bug. “An app I wrote.”
“You have a background in computers?”
“I have a Bachelors in Computer Science.”
“Any other degrees or special talents I should know about?”
“Nothing special, just a Masters in International Finance. No special talents.”
“I’ll have to talk to you later about some technological issues.”
“Where’d you go to school?” I asked in a chipper voice.
He smiled and paused. I felt like somehow I’d asked a stupid question.
Finally he said, “I went to Liberty High School in Jacksonville, dropped out my sophomore year. Basically I’m uneducated.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, it’s fine. My mother and I were so poor, I was caught up just trying to survive. Didn’t have time for school.” He looked off into another life, then back at me. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Not at all. Quite the opposite. I feel I’ve got a new friend in you.”
And with that intelligent, self-justifying smile, he turned to leave.
“Call me if you get stuck or lost. It must be, at least potentially, pretty hairy out there.” I smiled.
He turned back, confused, looking at me piercingly. I felt my heart rate quicken.
“The military boots,” I said.
“Oh right. No, not at all. A mere fashion statement.”
“About what exactly?”
He winked as if to say I was in on his secret, whatever it was, and continued on his way.
From a window on one of the upper floors I watched Stafford board one of four Escalades near a fountain where the driveway looped around. I mused on the fact that now, even when he thought his phone was turned off, it was secretly on and emitting a signal I could track by satellite. And for all intents and purposes, it should be transmitting sound from the microphone to satellites constantly as well as recording it in a hidden part of its memory, just in case the satellite transmission was ever interrupted. The cavalcade left the driveway ever so slowly and I left for my room.
Once inside, I cracked the MacBook and flicked it on. I opened the tracking/audio transmitting program I’d written and named Minerva, clicking on the gray owl icon on my desktop. I entered the alphanumeric password required on opening it and the program displayed a control panel with a 3-D map of the globe and several timelines below it with various tool boxes on either side and above. This is one of the best programs I’ve designed and also one of the most recent. I plugged the HTC smartphone into the computer via USB. Immediately, a dialogue box gave me the option to allow the program to talk to its counterpart on the smartphone. I clicked OK. A box illustrating the communication between the computer and the phone appeared and quickly disappeared, replaced by a dialogue box asking whether Mark Stafford’s phone was the one I wanted to track. Of course my MacBook was not suddenly miraculously intelligent with the ability to read minds. (If only.) Stafford’s number was simply the last one I had scanned into the Minerva app on the HTC. I confirmed that Stafford’s was the phone I wanted to track. A box appeared with an image of two lightning bolts, one passing between a MacBook and a satellite, and the other between the satellite and a cell phone.
I prayed silently for a connection, for it to find the phone. For a good twenty to thirty seconds it didn’t find anything and I began to think it a lost cause. Then suddenly, it connected. “Device detected,” read a fresh dialogue box. “Establishing connection—standby.” The 3-D globe began to shift and rotate, the point of vantage flying in. I recognized the Google Earth image of Eleuthera Island as the camera moved in further at an increasing velocity. Finally, it slowed to a halt several kilometers above the north end of the island. This part of the island was, roughly speaking, triangular with Spanish Wells at the northern
tip, the Bluff on the west side extending down to Current Island at a southwestern point, and Dunmore Town to the east.
A pulsating blue dot moved west along Queen’s Highway, the road we had come in on. A wave of excitement swept over me and I leaned back on the bed and cupped my mouth with both hands before lifting them over my head in obeisance to the goddess Minerva, the ancient Roman goddess of wisdom, weaving, crafts, and magic—and, I think, of poetry too.
Then the live audio began to stream. I plugged in earbuds. The sound was muffled. I think it was mostly music from a stereo in the Escalade. A Bob Dylan song I could barely make out. There was the occasional ruffling sound as Stafford shifted in his seat. This is insane, I thought. I knew this program should work in theory, but now actually using it and seeing it work bordered on the sublime. There were few feelings as ecstatic as successfully developing your own unique technology for your own unique purposes. And to do it for spying. In the conceit of the moment, I convinced a part of myself that it was my missed calling in life—espionage. But in reality, my interest in anything was so fleeting I didn’t believe I had a calling in life. Perhaps the main thing I was interested in over a long period was the idea of having a baby or two. My own family. That was all.
Curiously I watched the blue dot take a right and travel north along what was designated on the map quite creatively as “Public Hwy.” After another five minutes they turned left off the road and drove to a parking spot in the sand, near a small cove. I zoomed in manually on the map. The place was densely forested, an unusual landscape I had not really seen anything like except perhaps in my wildest dreams as a kid when I imagined what a paradise island might look like. In fact, it was so much like something I thought I had imagined as a small child that I half-believed I must have designed the thing in my mind and translated it into reality out of the sheer intensity of thought. Stranger things have happened. I chuckled to myself at the absurdity of the idea.
Now that I had seen where the meeting was to take place, I wished I had access to one of the spy satellites the NRO uses so I could observe from space the meeting unfolding up close in high definition. That was something that was never going to happen in this life. My only option, if I wanted to see it, was to go there. HUMINT or Human Intelligence as it’s called in the silly lexicon of the intelligence community. Anna had relayed Isabella’s message to take the day to possibly explore the island. I wondered if that meant I could take a car. However, if I went to see the meeting take place I would not be able to hear it as it unfolded, but would have to come back and listen to it later, and I may then not be able to make out everything anyway. If I stayed in my room, I might not understand anything at all, especially if the mic on Stafford’s phone was muffled or there was wind or any other number of factors that might come into play. I decided I would have to go, one way or another.