by Ryan Parker
“You’re just worried about going out of business,” I teased.
He shook his head as he popped a grape into his mouth.
“I’m kidding,” I said. “I agree with everything you said. I think we’re in the minority for people our age, though.”
“Resistance is not futile.” He sipped his drink. “It’s nice to finally be able to visualize you sitting here reading my emails.”
We ate and people-watched for several minutes.
Finn balled up the wax paper that his sandwich had been wrapped in, and put it in the box, then moved closer to me, putting his arm around my shoulders. “All these people walking around with their families, others rushing off to a meeting, seeing what looks like an innocent lunch taking place here, a seemingly innocent girl looking at her phone. All the while, nothing innocent about it.”
I let out a little laugh. “That about sums it up. But they weren’t all dirty.”
“I’ve never written anything dirty,” he said, the sarcasm heavy in his tone.
I looked at him. “Uh, right. Lots of them were filthy as hell and you know it. I loved all of them, by the way.”
“I liked the way yours were all about you by yourself.”
“Why’s that?”
“It told me you hadn’t been with a man in a long time, so I had a challenge before me. You were a mystery,” he said. “I like a little mystery. It made the chase more exciting.”
“Is the chase over?”
“Not even close,” he said.
I wanted to ask him something, but gave it a little extra thought, then just let it fly. “All the stories about other women. You said most of them weren’t true. So…why’d you do that?”
Finn took a deep breath and sighed it out. “What can I say? I have an active imagination.”
I nudged him with my elbow. “That’s putting it mildly.”
“It turned me on,” he said, “knowing it was turning you on as well. And now I no longer have to imagine what your face looks like when I’m blunt with you. I can see it for myself.”
I recalled the previous night and this morning in the bookstore, thinking about the things he’d said to me.
“Tell me your favorite,” he said.
“Favorite email?”
“Yes.”
I pretended to think about it for a moment, even murmuring sounds and words like I was giving it some thought. But I knew which one it was. An email he had sent about three months ago, one that I must have read at least a hundred times, sometimes just to read it, other times when I was touching myself.
“She sits on the edge of the bed, naked, wearing only heels. Her clothes are in a pile, pantyhose ripped from my tearing them off of her legs. I kneel in front of her, telling her to drape a leg over my shoulder. I want her to feel like she’s somewhat in control, but she’s just following what I tell her to do. I instruct her to hook her leg tighter over my shoulder, the heel of her shoe pressing into the middle of my back. I tell her to pull me closer when she wants, as hard and fast as she wants…”
It went on like that, in increasingly graphic detail, but as I sat there on the bench with him I had to stop thinking about it. “The one with the ripped pantyhose,” I said. “And she’s wearing heels…”
Finn nodded. “That was a good one.”
I looked at his face, wishing he didn’t have those sunglasses on. I even thought about reaching up and removing them before I asked him what I wanted to know, but thought better of it. I wanted to trust him to tell me the truth. “Was that a real one, or made up?”
“Made up,” he said without hesitation.
“So that’s never happ—”
“No, not like that. But I sometimes think about what it would be like. Obviously you do, too. We’ll find out soon,” Finn said, touching my cheek with the back of his hand. He picked up the box, stood, and walked to a trashcan nearby.
As he walked, I thought about how long we had talked by email, how slow the process had been—getting comfortable enough to actually meet. And now, in such a short time, we were moving fast. Not just physically, either. I was feeling myself becoming more emotionally involved with him. I kept warning myself that it could be a huge mistake, that I could very well be setting myself up for misery. But something about this man made me want to go a little further, have a little courage, a little faith.
And damn, did he look absolutely gorgeous walking back to me. There was a swagger to his walk. Nothing overdone. Certainly not forced. It was just something about the way he moved confidently, his tall, fit body striding as if he owned the ground before him.
Doomed. I was doomed. No matter how much I tried to protect myself from getting hurt, I was going to make myself vulnerable no matter how much I knew I probably shouldn’t.
I realized then what I was dealing with—a proverbial high-wire act. Finn was drawing me closer to him, whether he meant to or not, and the closer I got the more I wanted to know, but I was well aware of his insistence on privacy and the consequences of breaching those lines.
Maybe if I shared more of myself, he would lower his defenses as well. I was ready. It was worth a try.
. . . . .
When Finn suggested we walk before going back to his car, I thought it was the perfect opportunity.
“Now that I know where you work,” I said, “I’ll show you where I work.”
We walked up 9th Street, past The Smithsonian, crossed Constitution Avenue, then took a left on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Don’t tell me you’re taking me to The White House,” Finn said, an easy smile on his face, but still a lingering curiosity, as if I just might be leading us that way.
By then, we were in front of the building where I worked. I stopped. “Here’s where I am Monday through Friday.”
Finn looked up at the building, then down to the drab brown sign with plain white lettering: J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building.
“I can’t show you exactly where I work in there, but…this is it.” I turned to him.
He took off his sunglasses. His eyes were darting back and forth and up and down the building. “Really.”
“Yup.” I held onto his arm and whispered, “I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but I work in the basement. It’s the last stop for all incoming packages. They’re checked off-site, but they go through one more scan here.”
“Interesting.”
“Not really,” I said, looking at the building, and then back at Finn. I noticed his facial expression had changed. The muscles in his jaw clenched, making that little knot I’d noticed when he walked into the hotel lounge the first time we met. “But, hey, it’s a paycheck.”
The place never closed, of course. The FBI is a 24/7/365 operation. So as we stood there, men and women in suits came and went, in and out of the front door. I always wondered what each of them did when I saw them. And it looked to me like Finn was wondering something similar.
“How long have you worked here?” he asked.
“Going on four years.”
“Have you ever used a work computer to email me?”
I shook my head, looking up at him. “No. No way, why?”
He casually dismissed it by saying, “It’s just that we’ve been—I’ve been—pretty graphic in some of my emails. I just wouldn’t want you to get caught reading personal emails on a work computer. But,” he said, catching himself quickly, “I know you wouldn’t. I didn’t mean to imply that you were careless.”
“No, no, it’s fine.”
“All right, then. Ready to go back to your place?”
He seemed suddenly unimpressed. Maybe it was the way I told him the job wasn’t interesting and I only had it for the paycheck. I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t spend too much time worrying about it. The thought of having him in my apartment again, alone, wiped out any possibility of worrying or thinking about anything.
There was nothing in the world I wanted more.
I’d had a bit of a revelation as we were sitting on the bench. It wasn�
��t a huge epiphany. It was just a thought I couldn’t deny: I had fallen in love with Finn. Irrevocably, undeniably in love for the first time in my life.
There was one bit of doubt, though, and it was enough to keep me from telling him how I felt.
Chapter Twenty (Finn)
Christ. The fucking FBI. Nice going, Finn.
The situation was risky enough, and now I was dealing with the fact that she worked for what many people consider the world’s premier law enforcement agency. At least she didn’t work for the CIA or the NSA. And at least she worked in the mail-sorting and security department. It could have been much worse. And maybe it was. Maybe she didn’t tell me everything. That wouldn’t have been so implausible, considering the way things had gone for us from the start.
I decided I needed to check her out. So as I left early Sunday morning, with Rachel still asleep in her bed, I found her purse where it always was—on the kitchen counter. I quickly rifled through her stuff, found her wallet and got her name off of her driver’s license.
Rachel Marie Holt.
I committed it to memory, along with her birthdate.
I found a pen and a piece of paper so I could leave her a note: You looked so gorgeous sleeping, I didn’t want to wake you. I have some business to take care of before tomorrow morning. You will see me soon, maybe when you least expect it. – Finn
I wrote my cell number under my name and left.
On the drive home, I made a phone call to a guy who occasionally did a little work for me.
He answered, “At your beck and call, sir.”
“Fuck you, Justin.”
He laughed. “What do you need, Mr. Murphy?” he asked, using the fake name I’d given him.
I gave him Rachel’s name and birthdate, telling him all I needed was any information regarding her connections to the FBI or any other law enforcement or intelligence agencies. I asked him to keep it quiet.
“Don’t I always?” he asked. “You don’t need to tell me that, dude.”
“This is different. It’s personal.”
“Not for me,” he said. “My lips are sealed. Usual hundred bucks, dude.”
“You got it.” Dude.
I had been introduced to Justin by one of my associates. He was a grad student at Boston University, and apparently some kind of computer whiz who had turned down job offers from Microsoft, Apple, and various smaller tech firms right out of high school, opting instead to go to college. Smart kid. Damn brilliant, actually, and very eager to help out. For a small fee, of course.
Justin could get in and out of any computer in the world without leaving a trace. That’s what he claimed, at least. I wasn’t sure how true that was, but whenever I needed something that turned out to be deep within a highly secured computer network, Justin had been able to get it.
He knew me only as Mr. Murphy. Not Finn, no first name, no age, nothing about my employment. I suppose he could have dug around and found out more about me, but I was assured he was safe to deal with.
He had no idea what I was doing. For all he knew, I was a stalker of some kind. Or a serial killer. Either way, he didn’t seem to care.
And, oddly enough, even though he’d seen some names of people who ended up dying mysterious deaths, he never once pressed me for more information. Perhaps he had indeed looked deeper into what I was doing and approved.
As I drove home, I mentally kicked my own ass for not having done due diligence before spending this much time with Rachel. She had given me no reason to suspect that she worked for a law enforcement agency. She’d given me no reason to believe she did anything other than some boring clerical job.
I knew there was no way I’d been set up. They wouldn’t have done it like that, and Rachel wouldn’t have revealed the fact that she worked for the FBI, which she had freely done.
There was no existing threat of that nature. The only hazard at this point was whether the U.S. government discovered who I was and what I doing, and in turn implicated Rachel in all of it. There was no evidence that she was involved, of course, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be put through the interrogation wringer.
I had to make a decision, and fast. The way I saw it, I had three options: One, break things off with her; two, tell her everything and make her aware of who she had become involved with; three, go on like we had been and not tell her anything.
I knew the right choice, but I wasn’t ready to do it.
Just as I was entering the city of Baltimore, forty minutes later, my phone rang.
“She’s clean,” Justin said. “All she does is work in the department that scans incoming parcels. Sounds boring as shit, if you ask me.”
“No other jobs with the Bureau?”
“None. And no previous law enforcement or military activity. But there is something odd.”
I pulled up to a red light. “What’s that?”
“Rachel Marie Holt didn’t exist until eight years ago.”
I was processing what he had just told me, when I heard a horn blow behind me. I looked up and saw that the light had turned green. I swung the car off the road, into the empty parking lot of a bank. “What do you mean didn’t exist?”
“I was able to get her Social Security number. It was issued eight years ago. And there’s no record of any Rachel Marie Holt with her birthdate anywhere in the United States.”
My mind was working at top speed. “Anywhere in Europe? Asia? She could have been born overseas and didn’t come to the U.S. until she was eighteen.”
My stomach turned as I thought about that possibility. If that were indeed the case, who the hell was she and why was she here?”
“That’s all I got, dude. Sorry. There’s eight years of history on her, but before that…nada.”
I told him to call me if he found anything else. He said he would definitely do some more searching because he was bored and he loved a mystery.
I usually did, too, but I didn’t like this one.
. . . . .
Rachel sent me a text when she woke up: I finally have your number.
Me: And now I have yours.
Rachel: I wish you hadn’t left but thanks for the note. It was sweet. What are you doing?
Me: Pricing some books that I need to send out this week. Speaking of that, do you have plans tomorrow night?
Rachel: No.
Me: Well, you do now. I’ll be at your place at 6 sharp.
Rachel: If you’re expecting me to cook you’re out of luck.
Me: I’ll take care of dinner. Back to work.
. . . . .
I got to the basketball court just in time to join in a pick-up game. It was the perfect way to get my mind off of the mystery of Rachel, and to relieve some of that stress before doing what I had to do that night.
At 8 o’clock I was in a pub a few miles from my house, sipping beer from a tall, frosty glass. It wasn’t crowded. Just a few tables were occupied. It was quiet, except for the television, which was tuned to ESPN for the Sunday night baseball game. The pool tables were all unoccupied. Slow night.
“Goddamit, I’m so bored. Why is it so slow in here?” That was the voice of Isabelle, bartender at the pub, standing on the other side of the bar from me. “If I sound desperate for customers, that’s because I am.” She’d grown up in Ecuador but had been in the Unites States since she was ten years old, and still had a lingering accent.
I shrugged, lifting the beer mug. “Well, it’s Sunday and it’s raining. And I’d be careful about using the word ‘desperate’ around here. You never know who will hear it and get the wrong idea.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like you? Same old Andrew,” she said, using the alias I had given her a while back when I had reached the status of a “regular” at the bar. That’s the name everyone in the place called me—the other waitresses, and the guys I shot pool with on occasion.
“Hey,” I said, “it’s just innocent flirting.”
“There’s nothing innocent about you,” she said, s
miling.
I laughed and said, “Right about that.”
. . . . .
I got home and tried to do some work. It wasn’t pricing books, as I’d told Rachel. I had been waiting on an email all day, and it finally arrived. It contained translated transcripts of phone calls that had been placed by the five guys who were in the information I’d received on Friday before meeting Rachel.
The transcripts were fairly benign, which didn’t surprise me. These guys had arrived in the United States only a month ago. The last one, though, contained some red flags—namely a discussion about fireworks, followed by some talk about the dates they were planning to go to baseball games. It appeared that they were merely plug-ins for a well-planned operation that was already underway.
I checked the Orioles schedule and found that the dates, two weeks away, matched. And with that, I had my next assignment.
I spent the next hour or so sitting on my back porch, enjoying a pint of Leffe Blond lager, relaxing in the post-rain coolness in the air. It was then that I made up my mind what I would do to resolve The Rachel Dilemma.
But first, I was going to enjoy myself with her. A good meal, great sex, a perfect evening. The tension would be heavy, as I knew I would be looking at her a little differently this time, wondering just who the hell she had been for the first eighteen years of her life.
Chapter Twenty-One (Rachel)
I missed him all day Sunday. It was the first time I could remember being thankful that I had to get up early on a Monday morning for work. Going to bed early meant less time to sit around wishing he were with me.
Tara was waiting for me in the parking lot when I drove up. She walked over to my car and started telling me about the concert the moment I stepped out onto the pavement.
“Anyway, we had an amazing time. I’m sorry you couldn’t make it.”
“Me, too,” I said, thinking nothing could be further from the truth.
“So, what did you end up doing?”