Doubled or Nothing

by Warren Esby

  Doubled or Nothing

  The Memoirs of an Accidental CIA Double Agent

  A novel by

  Warren Esby

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business establishments, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Any reference to real people, living or dead, real business establishments, organizations or locales and the situations, incidents and dialogue in which they are found are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictitious nature of the work.

  Doubled or Nothing

  Copyright © 2012 by Warren Esby

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

  First Printing 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-0-9893775-1-5

  Contact Warren Esby by e-mail at warrenesby@gmail.com

  Dedication

  To M, my muse, who I like to amuse.

  Acknowledgements

  To two Ts for critical reading and editorial suggestions.

  Chapter 1

  So, here I am living in the Cayman Islands under an assumed name. The Caymans aren’t too bad a place to live I’ve discovered, especially if you have plenty of money to live on, which I do. More than I really need actually. Some would say I’m set for life. But this isn’t exactly where I thought I’d be at this stage of my life. I always thought I was fairly smart and others thought I was pretty smart also, especially my parents who doted on me and still do. And I have a Ph.D. from MIT which leads other people to believe I’m smart. I once would have believed that if I made it, it would be due to my intelligence, but it seems I’m now set for life because of my stupidity and my carelessness and because of events beyond my control like my last name which sounds Russian and probably is. I wish I were doing something that did use my intelligence, but I really have nothing much to do that uses my brain, so I thought I would at least write my memoirs, which is really a story of how I got into this mess in the first place. I do believe that eventually I will be able to do something else, but perhaps not until the current administration and maybe the next are gone and I’ve been forgotten. I also believe that I don’t really need to continue using the alias I’ve chosen and could resume using my real name, but I had better play the game for now. And besides, my real name has caused me so much trouble.

  It all began when I decided to relax by going down to the basement of the MIT athletic center which has a pistol range, if you can believe it, and do some target shooting after the oral defense of my Ph.D. thesis. It had been pretty stressful for me, not the defense itself which I thought went well and, as it turned out, so did the professors to whom I had presented. They told me that I should wait in the corridor next to the small conference room while they had their vote. Those things are usually a formality, and I expected them to all come out and congratulate me after a few minutes as they usually did. So I had heard from all of the other Ph.D. candidates who had passed. I had also heard that they didn’t even allow you to take the final oral defense if they didn’t expect you to pass. There had been no indication during the presentation or the questions that followed that anything was amiss. So I waited a few minutes, staring at the door expectantly and relaxed. Ten minutes went by and then twenty and I wasn’t relaxed any more. No one who passed had ever taken this long to find out. The next ten minutes were harder and I began to pace back and forth. I decided to go next to the door to see if I could hear anything. I couldn’t hear any distinct words, but the voices were louder than I expected. And then I began to sweat. After about forty five minutes, the door finally opened and they all filed out. They looked happy for shit’s sake, and there I stood shaking and sweating and all pale, looking, I’m sure, like death warmed over. My thesis professor looked at me in surprise.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You look sick. You’d better go home.”

  Then the Chairman of the Department, who was also on my committee, woke up and said, “Oh. You must be waiting for the results of the defense. Oh my God. We forgot all about the fact that you were still out here waiting. Of course you passed. We voted immediately and then started to discuss department business and forgot to come out and tell you.”

  My thesis advisor said, “Alex, I’m sorry. I guess that no one thought to come out since it was such a foregone conclusion. Good job. You should have just gone back to the lab. It was no big deal. Sorry.” And then they all walked away.

  No big deal. My whole life had passed before my eyes and it was no big deal. Of course my life would pass before my eyes on several more occasions over the next six months, but it never got easier when it did.

  So I came into the gun range just before noon and there was Ivor ‘fucking’ Federov lying in a big pool of blood with his head blown apart and what looked like throw up plastered all over the wall next to where he lay, and on the ground in front of him, not far from his outstretched hand, was the little Beretta Bobcat .25 ACP caliber automatic that he had coerced me into buying from him the week before. At least it looked like the same gun until I went over to my locker and opened it, and the one he sold me was still there. So it was a different gun, which surprised me since it really is a piece of shit, and I didn’t think he would have two of them. He had been so happy to sell me the one I now owned, even though I had only offered him twenty bucks for it since I really didn’t want it and didn’t expect him to sell it to me for that price.

  We had lots of discussions about that gun over the six months after he first bought it. I couldn’t understand why he did buy it since we both knew and often said that a .25 ACP caliber was practically worthless as a self-defense weapon unless you could throw it at someone and connect with their head. It did not even have the power of a standard .22 caliber target round that we were all used to shooting and competing with. All the studies showed that someone shot with a .25 ACP caliber was less likely to die than someone shot with any other caliber, including a .22. We both knew someone would have to be very lucky to kill someone with the little Beretta .25 ACP, or in the case of Ivor, be very unlucky to be killed by one since it was so underpowered. Ivor had bought it because it could fit in the palm of his hand and only weighed about eleven or twelve ounces and could easily be put in a pocket and go unnoticed. At least that’s what he said, although I suspected he bought it because he could buy it without registering it. Both of us were licensed by the State of Massachusetts to have a gun, but the license was only for transporting the gun between home and the place where it would be used for target practice, and it had to be transported unloaded. There was no reason to have a small gun like the Beretta for self-defense since neither of us had a concealed weapons permit. When Ivor realized that, he must have wanted to get rid of it because it represented such a poor choice on his part, and he had badgered me until I finally bought it from him. He could have easily afforded to throw it away, but I was convinced that he wanted me to have it so he wouldn’t be the only one to have owned such a piece of shit of a weapon. On the other hand, his lying there made it look like it wasn’t that bad a choice after all since it had turned out to be powerful enough to blow his brains out by whoever pulled the trigger, presumably Ivor.

  I called 9-1-1 and waited. It had been a really lousy day all around starting in the morning when I had locked myself out of my apartment for about the third time over the last six months, which confirms that I’m not as smart as people think I am. And I had to get into school for my defense, which made me anxious after I did lock myself out. I knew I would have
to climb up the fire escape to get back inside the building and my apartment window was locked. So I would have to go into old Mrs. Halloran’s window which technically, no actually, was breaking and entering, although the only thing that was broken was one of the little ceramic figurines she had lined up on her window sill.

  You would think after the first time I locked myself out, I would be more careful, and I was, but then I stopped being careful and it happened again. The entrance to the apartment is not locked. You enter into an area where the mailboxes are set in the wall and things like newspapers and flyers are left. My morning newspaper is left there, which is the problem. The second door, the one leading into the main hallway is always kept locked and always locks automatically if it is allowed to close. On all three occasions when I locked myself out, I had come down to get the morning paper without my keys. If you prop the inner door open with your foot, you can generally reach in and pick up the paper. Even if you can’t reach the paper, the area is so small you can generally push the door all the way open and go in and get the paper and get back in time to catch the door before it closes. After the first time, I started leaving my window unlocked like old Mrs. Halloran did, and then I went home for Christmas and decided to lock up when I did. I just forgot to unlock the damned window when I got back, and by the time I locked myself out again, it was too late. I had locked it again when I went away for spring break.

  Now curiously enough, climbing up the fire escape in that building is a very visible activity because the fire escape is in front of the building, not on the side or in the back. In fact it is right next to the front door. The reason for it is that the front door of the apartment doesn’t face the street. Actually it does, but you can’t see it from the street. So why is it visible if you can’t see it from the street? Because, there is a door on the street, but once you go into that door you pass through a covered passageway in the building that is on the street and come to an enclosed courtyard that is surrounded by the apartment buildings on either side and in front. The courtyard faces the back of each of them and the front of the one my apartment was in. The building in which my apartment was located backed up against an apartment building on the next street over and so the only place to put the fire escape was in the front. Such is life in the big city.

  Thank God for old Mrs. Halloran. I guess she can’t be that old since she still goes to work, but she looked old to me since I was only twenty seven. So thank God for old Mrs. Halloran and the fact that she had a job to go to. Anyway, the first time I went up the fire escape, I had no choice but to go into her apartment since her window was the only one open. I knew I was completely visible since anyone in any of the apartments surrounding the courtyard would have seen me if they looked out their back window. If they saw me they might be tempted to call the police. They must have all been at work or at school since they were all fairly young, and I never got caught the first two times. I think that old Mrs. Halloran must have been the oldest one living there since this was a section of Boston that mostly young people lived in. I looked at her window sill before I went into her apartment the first time. I knew that the window was right next to her front door. It was on the right side of the building, and my apartment’s front door was exactly opposite hers across the hallway on the left side. All I had to do was open the window, push the figurines aside enough to get through without knocking them over, step in, close the window, put the figurines back where they belonged, take one step, open the front door and close it behind me and walk across the hallway into my apartment. Her front door would automatically lock behind me. I just had to remember that looking from left to right from the outside, first came the pig, then the cow, followed by the chicken and the lamb.

  That morning I was careless because I was so anxious about my defense, so the figurines didn’t get pushed over far enough and the lamb fell over, chipping one leg. I didn’t have time to look for the chip and the lamb tilted to one side. I hoped old Mrs. Halloran wouldn’t notice, but of course she did and called the police that evening. I wasn’t home to tell her what happened and to offer to pay for a new lamb which I intended to do, because I was already at the police station giving them a run down about everything I had done that day and when I had done it and telling them everything I could remember about Ivor. Of course, my finger prints were all over the lamb and the door knob and were on file with the Boston Police Department since I had to have them taken in order to get my license to transport a gun to the shooting range.

  I’m really not a squeamish person. I’m used to seeing a lot of blood and guts like what was all over the floor and wall of the gun range because I had done a lot of killing myself over the last few years, although all that killing consisted of mainly laboratory rats with the occasional guinea pig and rabbit thrown in for good measure. I was a little surprised seeing Ivor lying there and not feeling sick or nauseous or even feeling sympathy or anything. I was looking at the scene dispassionately trying to figure out if Ivor had really done that and why when the police arrived. I didn’t really know Ivor that well. I never did anything with him and only saw him at the range at MIT and once at an outdoor range where he had taken me to shoot higher caliber guns than the ones we could shoot at the MIT range, so I knew almost nothing about his private life, only that he was in electrical engineering. All we talked about was guns.

  The Cambridge Police asked me all sorts of questions at the range, right in front of the body the whole time at first, and again in the range office so they could arrange the crime scene or suicide scene. Since MIT has a high rate of suicide as far as universities are concerned, this was surely going to be put into that category, except, as it turns out, in the case of first generation American citizens whose parents had come to the U.S. as Russian nationals. They did ask me about the little Beretta that was lying on the floor, but I told them I hadn’t seen it before, which I hadn’t since the only one I had ever seen was the one currently sitting in my locker. I didn’t tell them about that one because I didn’t want to complicate my life any further. I hoped that wasn’t another indication of how stupid I can be sometimes. I did have to go to the police station with them for repeat questioning and to sign a statement they drew up about what I had found when I had arrived at the range. They had offered to drive me home and I asked them to drop me off at a fast food restaurant near where I lived so I could get something to eat before facing old Mrs. Halloran.

  When I got home and rang her doorbell, she recognized me and I quickly told her what I had done and why. She was relieved because she was worried that she wasn’t safe in that apartment, especially with her habit of keeping the windows unlocked, being on the third floor. We decided to call the police who came immediately. Then old Mrs. Halloran admitted, while we were waiting, that when the police asked her if anything was missing, she had told them two hundred dollars from her desk drawer. I thought for a moment and told her since I had caused her so much trouble, if she would tell the police she found the two hundred dollars she thought was taken, I would give her the two hundred dollars and buy her a new lamb or a whole new set of figurines. She agreed.

  So it was back to being questioned by police, this time the Boston Police, and I had to take another trip back to a police station to sign a statement, and old Mrs. Halloran, true to her word, said she found the missing money and didn’t want to press charges since I had agreed to replace her set of figurines. I breathed a sigh of relief when she did even though it was going to cost me money I really couldn’t afford. This time the police didn’t offer to drive me back home, and I didn’t get home until well after midnight and was exhausted and went immediately to bed. I hoped that was the end of my ordeals that began that morning except for having to pay old Mrs. Halloran, but of course it wasn’t, although the final outcome would not take place until months later.

  Chapter 2

  I had a problem now. The Cambridge Police had told me not to leave town for at least thirty days because I had been the one to find the body and
knew Ivor. Not too many other people knew him or at least admitted to knowing him. The police wanted to do ballistics on the gun and complete their investigation as to time of death and all that even though it was obviously a suicide. Of course that obvious knowledge would once again prove not to be correct and make me realize how stupid I was no matter what my parents thought. And the Boston Police in the breaking and entering case wanted me around to make sure old Mrs. Halloran was satisfied that I had paid her for the figurines that she had ordered and that I was supposed to pay for. The next thirty days was not uneventful and I ended having another moment when my life passed before my eyes. And I got a further education that had nothing to do with my field of biology.

  For starters, I learned that all china is not made in China. You would think that if it says china it is made there, right? Wrong. It turns out that the figurine I broke was part of a set that was no longer made. The closest thing old Mrs. Halloran could find to a matching set, and she did insist on a matching set, was made in England by a firm called Beswick, and it was not cheap. And she said the set not only included the lamb, the pig, the cow and the chicken, but also the horse and a swan. Imagine a set of china made in England. She told me to calm down, it could have been worse. It could have been really expensive china from LLadro, but they didn’t make the figurines she wanted any more. I told her Lladro doesn’t sound Chinese either, and she said that was because LLadro was a Spanish firm. Now I was really confused. Not only does it seem that china isn’t made in China, but the china she wanted was made in England or Spain. And it was expensive. Now I was sure that when I had picked up the lamb with the broken foot, it had said ‘Made in China’ on the underside. But I wasn’t about to argue with old Mrs. Halloran. I could see by the look on her face that she was determined to get her English (I refused to call them China) animals or have me end up in jail. The only thing left to do was pay for them and help her decide if the swan and the chicken should be displayed side by side or separated since they were the only two birds. I also did learn that she wasn’t old Mrs. Halloran, but old Ms. Halloran. She had never been married which figured because I’m sure no man could have pronounced her name, Siobhán, to her satisfaction. I know I couldn’t even after she insisted we be on first name basis after I had convinced her to put each of the birds on the outside of the line up on the window sill.