“Nice. Real silver?” Nadia asked, placing a stack of lacy underwear into a drawer. “How can you tell?”
“You can hear a difference between silver and merely a metal coin in the sound it makes as it settles on a table.”
“Huh. Let me hear the difference.” Nadia smirked.
Drew suspected her “interest” was a distraction, a trick intended to derail him from a fourth-straight victory in their unpacking game. He was determined to remain undefeated.
“Don’t you go trying to slow me down.”
“Darling, you know, if I really wanted, I could find other ways to distract you,” she said, her accent sounding thicker than normal. Her sleeveless black top revealed her slim body which she kept fit through regular yoga practice. She hurried to stash the rest of her garments in the closet, and then, perhaps realizing she was still losing the race, grunted.
He brushed past her into the tiny bathroom and emptied the contents of his vanity case onto a small glass ledge above the sink. In the mirror, his hazel eyes beamed with victorious confidence, and a wide smile softened the sharpness of his pointed jaw.
“I’m done!” he shouted out to her.
“A girl has more stuff,” she said with a pout.
“I don’t want to hear the excuses.”
Nadia stuck her tongue out at him defiantly. She pulled a pair of designer jeans from her nearly emptied suitcase. “Fine, then I’m going to call my mom and check on Alexis.”
Drew picked up the medallion, balanced it on the tip of his thumb, and flicked it up. It rose, tumbling end over end, and then plummeted to the bed’s flowered comforter. “Sure.”
Her mood changed and she flashed a mischievous grin. As he sprawled on the bed, Drew wondered if sometimes she just let him win. The Russian words of Nadia’s phone call blended into the beeps and hum of the Naples traffic that drifted in from the street. A few Italian phrases rose above the monotonous, low roar.
Drew again placed the medallion on his thumb and flipped it high into the air. He saw Nadia, phone-to-ear, smiling at him impishly from across the room. Their eyes met for a moment, then she looked away to focus on her conversation.
They had met a year earlier during happy hour at a local wine bar—she, the single mother, dateless since immigrating with her daughter to the United States. He, the sober alcoholic, dragged out by unaware office mates hoping to draw him out of his shell. Even after noticing her smile, and establishing eye contact a few times, Drew had been too shy to approach her. Then, allegedly on the way to powder her nose, she stopped at his table. She had laughed at one of his stupid jokes— thank God she had laughed.
Drew prepared the medallion for another trip toward the ceiling but stopped.
Who had access to my bag?
“I woke up Mom,” Nadia said to him. “I forgot that it’s four in the morning back there.”
“I’m sure your mother will find a way to pin that one on me.”
Nadia scowled.
“How’s Alexis?” he asked. “Any bad dreams?”
“Nope, Mom said no nightmares tonight” Nadia said. “Not yet, anyway.” She pointed down at the medallion. Her brow scrunched. “So, you’re sure it’s not yours?”
When they’d arrived at Naples Capodichino Airport, their luggage had already been set aside separate from the rest. At the time, Drew assumed it was because the airline had rescheduled them on a connecting flight that had gotten them to Italy an hour earlier than their original itinerary. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
Drew curled his lips into a playful smirk, but his voice remained deadpan. “The only thing that I’m sure of is finders, keepers – losers, weepers.”
Nadia gasped and her eyes widened, but she was smiling. “This American expression I don’t understand. You gave it to me, Darling. How can you now take it back?” She reached across him toward his extended hand.
The perfumed scent of her neck lured him to surrender.
“No, no.” He stretched it farther away.
“Come on, no fair. It’s mine.” Her lower lip protruded.
Drew remained steadfast, continuing to tease. “My love,” he said, delivering a melodramatic performance, “until I ascertain the rightful owner, I shall protect it with my life.”
“Well, then, since for now it’s yours, and not yet put away…”
A grin revealed tiny, crescent-shaped dimples on her otherwise immaculate cheeks before she darted to her suitcase, lifted the remaining contents, and shoved them in the dresser drawer. “I won!”
They bantered a minute until Nadia agreed to a kiss.
She felt soft in his arms—her perfume, a mix of lilacs and blueberries.
“So? Should we consummate our vacation?” Drew glanced at the bed.
Nadia grinned. “Later. We can’t sleep too soon or else our sleep schedules will get thrown off.”
“So then, what do we do?”
“Coffee. Buy me some Italian coffee.”
*****
Drew and Nadia dropped off their key at the front desk and strolled to a cozy café where the aroma of coffee beans overwhelmed the diesel smell of the Naples street. An unassuming teen with blond hair and blue eyes and who looked more French or German than Italian, rang up their cappuccinos and then gestured toward the yellow-topped metal tables indicating that he would serve them.
“Baby, let’s sit out there and watch the people,” Nadia said pointing to the sidewalk patio, her voice brimming with excitement.
In front of the café, plastic chairs surrounded a few rickety tables. Large white umbrellas shielded them from the sun’s unrelenting rays. Drew pulled out a chair for her as if they were preparing to dine at an elegant restaurant. They sat and observed the parade of dark-featured people streaming by. Most headed east into the city, but occasionally a pedestrian would fight through, against the flow, proceeding westward toward the Bay of Naples. Many of the male passersby leered at Nadia quite a bit longer than Drew liked.
The blond youth brought their cappuccinos, topped with heart-shaped designs of powdered chocolate.
“Ooh, aren’t these terrific?” Nadia asked after taking a taste.
Drew stirred his drink with a small spoon, sipped, and made noises that indicated his agreement. Before he could return his cup to the saucer, a huge man lumbering by glanced at them, did a double take, and then stared directly at Drew. The man’s face was terribly scarred, and he looked Greek or possibly Turkish. He didn’t stop, but maintained eye contact before continuing past them.
Gulping down the rest of his still-hot cappuccino did nothing to prevent an icicle from forming against Drew’s spine.
“I’m ready. Are you?” he asked, standing up.
“Well, all right, Mister in-a-hurry.” Nadia quickly drank the remainder of her drink.
Caffeine-powered, they set out, arm-in-arm, to tour the southern Italian metropolis. Nadia wanted to ride a funicolare, the elevated contraption that took passengers from lower parts of Naples to dazzling vistas of the coastal city. There were piazzas to discover, museums to explore, and art to admire.
Perhaps it was just foreign-land paranoia, but dampening Drew’s enthusiasm was the unrelenting feeling that they were being followed.
- Chapter Seven -
Present Day – Oceanside, California
Hector Lopez had returned from another rescue mission in the Spatium Quartus unscathed.
The condo served as both work place and living space. Cheap prints of Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and other jazz greats adorned the walls. Other than the surveillance equipment, the three-bedroom condo wasn’t exactly writing-home material, but it kept him and his partner, Kat, near Stanley, the man they needed to watch.
A cup of coffee later, Lopez was back to work. His fingers clicking on the computer keyboard made him realize how much his hands hurt. He wrung them out, shaking away imaginary drops of water. He stretched to get blood flowing to the muscles in his arms, legs, and back. His joints cracked and popped.
The energy expended on rescue missions took its toll on him more and more as he progressed through his fifties. The last one pushed the total to twenty-three trips to the Spatium Quartus over the past week, the most ever in a seven day period. He’d never tell Kat that he’d done that many, and if he wasn’t careful, the effects from the drugs necessary to get to the Spatium Quartus through NOCTURN would catch up to him again.
Report done, he reached for a lighter and a pack of his filthy habit. He fired up a Marlboro Red and watched as the smoke spiraled upwards in little white circles. He’d never smoked a cigarette until he was twenty-nine. Not one. Not until after—
Tonight’s the anniversary.
Kat breezed into the condo.
“Yo, Lopez. You look like shit, dude.” She flicked her dirty-blonde, shoulder-length hair behind her ear.
Kat was attractive. If they didn’t work together, if he hadn’t known her since before she was in grade school, he’d probably even call her hot. She wore casual workout clothes on her thin, toned frame.
“Did you go in again?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Are the beasts still talking about the ‘Night of Nights’?”
“Not after I got done with them. So, what was your boyfriend up to this morning?”
Lopez had taken to calling their mark her boyfriend to tease her. Picturing her and Stanley together made him laugh.
“He just went to the store, not the airport.”
“Well, keep a close eye on him,” Lopez said. “Hopefully we can snag a medallion from him soon. We’re out of spares.”
“Dude, you know I always keep a close watch on Stanley.” She was staring at him. “You doing okay today?” she asked.
The concern, evident in her voice and on display in her gray-blue eyes, made him uncomfortable. He worked not to show it.
“Yeah, yeah. Yeah.” Lopez waved his hand and refused to make eye contact. Then he switched gears. “You know, Jose’s team plays later tonight?”
A smile spread across her angular face. “I wondered how long that would take to come up. Do ya think they’re gonna win?”
He scowled. “Come on, Kat, you know they’re undefeated since my boy took over as point guard.”
“Go Joe Lopez!” she shouted, throwing her arms out and up like a cheerleader. She held the pose. Her face, vibrant and absent wrinkles, resembled more a high school senior than a woman whose twenties were behind her. Without a doubt, Kat’s contributions would still have been welcomed by the Carlsbad Lancers’ Junior Varsity squad.
“So, you’re really all right today?” she asked.
She knows it’s the anniversary.
“Yeah.”
She’d merely rephrased her earlier question. He’d trained her well; now, during times like these, it came back to haunt him. He could practically feel her eyes on his pulse points, suspecting that the abrupt answer had not been honest. He was relieved when, likely out of mere respect, she left him alone.
*****
Hector Lopez parked his white van on Pacific Street, just south of Seagaze Avenue. He slipped on a navy hoodie and then, taking in the crisp ocean air, he walked along a chain-link fence that separated the sidewalk from the boarded-up, Victorian-style house used in 1985 for the filming of Top Gun. Back then, Tom Cruise had merely been known as “that kid from Risky Business.”
Since then, a lot of shit had changed.
Lopez crossed the street, and made his way north towards the pier. Rebuilt and opened in 1987, it was Oceanside’s sixth. At 1,942 feet in length, it stretched into the Pacific Ocean as far as any other pier on the west coast.
He’d never taken one step on it.
Back in 1982, a day after the murders of the other OIA agents, Agent Martin had washed ashore in nearby Encinitas. The Joint Operations Special Command (JSOC) investigated the ambush and hunted for Moats. The whole charade was pointless. Moats’s training provided him skills that, if alive, would allow him to virtually disappear. If he had fallen into the hands of Luzveyn Dred, the possibilities of his fate were not only endless, but horrific.
In either case, Senior Agent Moats was never found.
The CIA did not appreciate an operation team being murdered under mysterious circumstances in the public eye. As opposed to film depictions, espionage programs are not sunk with fist-pounding and explosive detonations; they languidly capsize in the wake of hiring freezes and funding cuts. Such was the case with OIA; besides, all the agents, save Lopez, were missing or dead. After the massacre, to advocate recruiting new agents would have been bureaucratic suicide. So, the Oneirology Institute of America was unceremoniously abolished.
As for Luzveyn Dred, the way one senior official had put it to Dr. Hyde in 1982, “Considering the Middle East’s instability, Russia’s escalating military aggression, and Communism’s spread in South America, the CIA has bigger fish to fry than to hunt for the bogeyman.”
The sun dipped toward the horizon almost due west from where Lopez stood. The rays obscured his view of the pier’s end, but in his mind’s eye he saw Luzveyn Dred waiting for him, but as he’d told himself countless times, that pier was not this pier.
Lopez passed Mission Avenue which led east, past the new, massive movie theaters, into downtown Oceanside. Several recently constructed loft condominiums and a refurbished train station helped give the city once overrun by hookers, drug dealers, and gang members, a fresh face. Just ahead, a new timeshare hotel had been built on the site that had previously been used for 4th of July carnival and festivities, but fireworks set off a mile off the coast, still highlighted every Independence Day.
Dr. Hyde had stayed with the CIA, but was given a de facto demotion. He oversaw Star Gate, a small program in which agents attempted to learn state secrets utilizing psychic phenomenon they called “remote visualizations.” Hyde transferred Lopez into Star Gate with the sole intention of allowing him to focus on bringing to justice those who murdered their men. He even allowed Lopez to secretly use NOCTURN, but solving the crimes was a mission at which Lopez failed. Emilia Libera and her Luzveyn-Dred-helping cronies had disappeared faster than one could say “Senior Agent Moats.” The attack on his men left Lopez riddled with survivor’s guilt.
Many of OIA’s lower-level scientists, including Tabatha Wellington, were transferred to other programs at Langley. Over the years, some met with unnatural deaths of mysterious nature. Tabatha escaped that fate and remained married, so to speak, to her career. When Lopez stumbled across a way into the Spatium Quartus during a dream-link mission underground, she discovered a wavelength emanating from the earth that was similar to a dream-print. She refined and streamlined the NOCTURN system so that he could connect directly to the Spatium Quartus in order to conduct rescue missions.
She continued to study the effects of dream linking, and helped Lopez understand some of the scientific aspects of what happened to the brains of those affected by Luzveyn Dred. Lopez stayed in contact with Tabatha for a time, but eventually they had drifted apart. The last he’d heard, she had left the CIA to complete her post-graduate studies.
Lopez arrived at the street entry to the pier. The descending ramp, supported by concrete beams, bridged the street to the pier proper. Below, a row of palm trees lined the beach. At eye level to the street, fronds provided a lush foreground to the calm sea.
He proceeded toward the wood planks. In 1987, when they’d torn down the old pier and built this one, Lopez never suspected it would have taken this long to overcome his fears and walk out over the ocean, but he knew it was something he needed to do.
Lopez sucked air into his lungs, exhaled, and took his first step onto the pier.
After the birth of his son, Lopez’s paranoia had reached dangerous levels. In an attempt to keep Jose and Bonnie hidden from the agents of Luzveyn Dred, he moved them from one out-of-the-way location to the next. He battled depression, chain smoked, and frequently worked all night. The drugs he needed to take in order to dream link,
or go to the Spatium Quartus, began to take their toll. By 1994, his marriage in ruins, Bonnie left him.
Star Gate shut down in 1996. The CIA shuffled Hyde from one meaningless program to another. Apparently unable to carry a depressed, drug-riddled, renegade any longer, Hyde was forced to cut Lopez loose. Lopez wished to blot out any memory of the darkness that had enveloped his life between 1996 and 2002.
He clutched the wood railing and leaned over it as if looking forty feet down into the water would actually assist his breathing. He attempted to appear cool, as though merely watching the surfers hop on and ride the exhilarating waves to the shore.
Next to him, an unshaven codger with a fishing line in the sea lectured to a pair of young hopefuls. ““Back in the thirties, ya needed ta bring two gunnysacks with ya when ya came to the O’side pier,” he said in a high-pitched squeaky voice.
The boys grimaced, but nodded politely.
“’Cuz of the barracuda,” he continued, to the apparent chagrin of his reluctant audience.
“Yep, back then we call’em logs, you know, big fish, ten ‘er twelve pounds each. Ya could only git ‘bout five in a sack lengthwise.”
When the storyteller paused to check his line, the two boys took advantage of the silence, and slinked away. He glanced from one side to the next, and picked right up, as though he’d been talking to Lopez the whole time.
“Ya fished ‘til ya wuz able ta load a couple sacks, then ya stopped, no sense in overdoing it.”
Lopez didn’t need CIA training to ascertain that the man was a liar. With a sigh and a grunt, he pushed himself off the railing and headed toward the center point of the walkway.
The storyteller’s voice rose for one last hurrah before he was left talking to no one. “Course, back then, ya might need a little help carrying the sacks off the pier.”
Just ahead, a lifeguard tower stood on the left side of the walkway, its darkened windows twenty feet above the pedestrians. A similar watchtower on the right of the walkway provided an open-air view of the ocean. Below it, a bait shop sold hope to those wishing to catch their dinner.
Dream War Page 7