In Time to Love

by Gloria Martin

  “I’m recovering.” She looked at the two men who had tried to destroy the circulation in her arms. “But I’d sure as hell like to know why I had to be dangled topless in front of everybody at the beach.”

  “Yes, I heard about that, and the Cyprus Chief of Police would like to offer you a personal apology and VIP transportation for the rest of your stay. Also, we will pay your hotel bill and move you to another hotel of your choice if you longer feel comfortable there.”

  “How about express service through customs and security when I fly out?”

  “Done. You’ll go out under diplomatic status.”

  “And business class?”

  “All the way back to Dulles.”

  “So, you know my itinerary.”

  “We have that ability; mostly so we can help tourists who run into problems.”

  Like muscular problems with dimples and blue eyes. “So, tell me about this misunderstanding, Miles.”

  “The man you met on the beach is a State Department employee with a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance.”

  “And...?

  “Well, he operates very independently, and we—for reasons I can’t disclose—were concerned that he may have fallen in with some of the wrong sort of people—”

  “The kind of people who would restrain a topless woman in front of dozens of tourists carrying cameras and smart phones?”

  Miles Konrad cleared his throat. “More like the kind of people who would like to kill lots of Americans.”

  “So how do the Cyprus Police fit in all of this? Shouldn’t I have been confronted by some kind of Jason Bourne character? Can’t we police our own?”

  “We don’t have police powers in other countries, Ms. Dorgan, and we couldn’t move that many assets fast enough. That’s why we asked the Cyprus Police for help. Even if we were running the surveillance, we’d get their permission.”

  Sure you would. “One more question, then. Was Mr. Whitman working? And why would he show up at a beach in Limassol in cargo shorts and a golf shirt when he’s staying in Larnaca?”

  “I have some ideas about that, but I can’t really share them. He is on vacation, but guys like him are naturally curious about different locations that could come in handy for their work.”

  “Can’t have enough hotel beaches for lone-wolf diplomatic work, I suppose.”

  “Something like that.”

  *****

  After a day in Athens and a direct flight back to Dulles, Kirk killed two days unpacking his apartment while the rest of the team made their separate ways home. It had been six months since he moved in, but he’d slept in the place less than a dozen times. Almost none of his artwork was up, and the only room that was completely done was the second bedroom, which he had turned into a small home gym—a guy had to have his priorities, after all. The rest of the house was decorated according to what he’d found by stalking a friend’s wife on Pinterest. Kirk had seen enough of the harshness and brutality in the world. He wanted his apartment to be an escape from that.

  As he rolled up to the safe house on the third day, Kirk thought again that it was a bit silly to call the place a house. It was a unit at the end of a one-story strip of office buildings in Merrifield, VA. The sign on the window read, “R-Cal Client Solutions,” and nobody ever came around to ask what they did. As far as the property manager knew, they were some sort of collection agency. In a way, it was true. They collected images of people doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing, like passing information to terror groups or Russian foreign intelligence. Or they collected copies of laptop hard drives that unsuspecting traitors had left in their hotel rooms when they went out to dinner. Everyone on the team was a surveillance expert. A couple of them were experts in computer forensics, a couple more were breaking and entering specialists, and Kirk was a Defense Intelligence Agency liaison and emergency muscle when things went south.

  “There’s my love slave!” Nikki was the first to see him as he stepped into the conference room. “I felt those eyes on my behind. Kirk loved that bikini…didn’t you boyfriend?”

  “I can’t remember; what did it look like?”

  Nikki wagged a finger at him and shook her head. “Umm-hm! We all see what you’re trying to do, but I WILL NOT model it for you here… Don’t want to give one of these old men a heart attack.”

  Bob—named after Bob the Builder because he’d been a general contractor before he joined the team and still reported himself to the IRS as such—took fake umbrage at Nikki’s remark. “Who are you calling old men? I’m the oldest guy on this team, and I’m telling you that fifty is the new twenty-two. You could give me one of your professional lap dances right now, and the only attack I’d get would be after I told my wife about it.”

  “I don’t give lap dances to handsy guys like you, Bob…except when I want a nice assignment from the deputy.”

  Hans, the team’s deputy commander, tried to brush off the comment with a “Yeah, right,” but his schoolboy blush gave away his discomfort.

  West Virginia native, Jed: “Holy cow! Hans is overheating just thinking about it. No wonder you two travel together so much.”

  Holly, a strawberry blonde in her early forties whose nickname had something to do with a mistletoe event gone wrong, looked across the table at the deputy. “Why don’t you ever want a lap dance from me, Hans? My glutes are all high and tight now that Kirk got me started on kettlebell swings. “

  “That’s right,” said Nikki. “Kirk stands behind his girls while they do their kettlebell swings.” She affected a deep voice. “Make sure you squeeze those glutes at the top of the swing, ladies.”

  Kirk patted Nikki’s shoulder as he passed behind her chair to sit between her and Holly. “I’m just trying to get everyone caught up to you, Nikki.”

  “See,” said Nikki. “I told you that the gigantic tent in Kirk’s shorts was thanks to my teeny bikini. Can you put that picture up, Phil?”

  “Sure can.” Phil was Nikki’s frequent partner in crime and had earned his street name with a nearly perfect Dr. Phil impression. Unfortunate that he also looked like the guy. He dimmed the lights and hit a key on his laptop to bring up a presentation on the sixty inch flat screen monitor at the end of the room. The first image was a picture of Kirk standing on the beach in Limassol, except the photo had been doctored to create an obscenely large bulge in the front of his khaki shorts.

  Even Hans was laughing now. He pointed up at the screen. “Must’ve been while Nikki was twerking.”

  Then the boss walked in, and the laughing ceased. Not because she had no sense of humor, but because it was time for serious business.

  She took her seat at the end of the table opposite the monitor. “Ok, let’s get to the debrief. Let me just start by saying that it was a very successful mission. We learned that we can trust the Cyprus PD to go above and beyond for us, and our embassy there has been patting their backs nonstop for the last four days. We also collected a lot of information on their tradecraft and their surveillance personnel.”

  She paused and looked around the table before continuing. “I know you’ve been poking fun at each other this morning, and that’s fine. You can tease Kirk as much as you want for his wanton boob-gazing, but I don’t want to hear anyone making fun of that poor woman he talked to on the beach.”

  Kirk felt the blood drain from his face. What had they done to Linda?

  Mary continued. “We’re going to get that part out of the way first: When their target, Kirk, bumped an American, the Cyprus PD detained and questioned her on the beach before taking her back to her room and contacting our embassy. Unfortunately, they detained her in an aggressive manner and held her upright in just her bathing suit bottom for several minutes on a public beach while questioning her and searching through her things.

  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 p
olo 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 dessert—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.