by Terry Toler
She remembered every girl rescued. Recorded them in a journal. She had successfully rescued more than one hundred twenty girls in the three months. A remarkable achievement considering the constant danger. She was disappointed it wasn’t more.
After a while, the sex traffickers were on the lookout for a blonde, American girl infiltrating their operations and stealing their girls. The danger became too great, and she needed a break anyway. Even someone as strong as Jamie couldn’t take the stress indefinitely. She’d been ordered on a vacation and told to let her hair down and have some fun. Fun was not something that came easily for her. She’d been there for three days, and while her long, blonde hair was down, she couldn’t stop thinking about the girls.
Jamie’s cell phone unexpectedly lit up, startling her. Only four people in the world knew the number. Her best friend Emily back in Arlington, Virginia, where she lived, her handler, Brad, Curly Jones, the man who’d spent nine months training her on every aspect of special operations, and a cute guy she’d given the number to the night before at dinner.
The cute guy.
Alex had nervously sauntered up to her table and asked if he could join her. Before she could say no, he sat down and began talking. Jamie admitted to herself and to him that she’d had a good time. However, the words of Curly resonated in the back of her mind, No emotional entanglements. They will get you killed. When she shook Alex’s hand after dinner and said goodbye, she hoped that was the end of it, and that he wouldn’t call.
He did.
Jamie decided to let it go to voicemail.
“Hello, this is Jamie,” she said instead, answering the phone impulsively.
Why did I do that?
“Hey, Jamie. It’s Alex. You know from last night…Are you alone?”
“No, I’m not alone,” Jamie answered, with a slight laugh. “I’m here at the pool with about four hundred fifty other people.”
Alex’s voice stammered slightly. “What I meant to say was… if you aren’t doing anything, maybe I could come and join you for a few minutes.”
No. Absolutely not. I need to cut this off now.
“Sure. I’m not doing anything. Come on over,” she blurted out, the words coming out of her mouth before she could stop them.
“Great. I’ll see you soon.”
***
Jamie couldn’t stand it when others let emotions trump their good sense. Now, she’d done the same thing and was upset with herself. She’d let her feelings overtake her will. A weakness. Alex gave her attention, which was flattering, but she shouldn’t fall for it. With her life, how could she possibly have a boyfriend, much less get married and have kids?
Relax, Jamie. He’s not coming to ask you to marry him. He just wants to hang out.
Within two minutes, he walked her way from across the pool. That told her he was probably standing somewhere in the pool area, watching her, getting up the courage to call. How else could he have gotten all the way across the large cruise ship in two minutes? Come to think of it, he hadn’t even asked which pool she was at. The ship had three of them. He already knew. He probably waited two minutes after they hung up to not be too obvious. Jamie saw right through the ruse.
Her training kicked in as her senses were heightened. Instinctive. That’s what she did for a living. Investigations. Spying. She was highly trained to spot inconsistencies. To notice everything. It’s what made her a great operative. One of the best in the business.
Stop it! You’re not a spy on a mission. You’re a tourist trying to have fun.
I do need a break.
In the field, she was constantly on the alert for any danger. Her mind was always analyzing every situation. At dinner last night, she sat with her back against the wall. Something she was trained to do so she could see the whole room. So, no one could sneak up on her. Why was that necessary on a cruise ship? The most danger she was in was possibly getting a bad sunburn.
Try to relax.
She took a deep breath, closed her book, and put a smile on her face.
That’s better.
His name was Alex P. Keating. He had explained that his parents loved the 1980’s sitcom, Family Ties. Jamie vaguely remembered watching a few reruns of the show on TV. Even though the last name was spelled differently, Alex’s mom and dad had always wanted to name their son Alex P., so when she became pregnant and they learned they were having a boy, the hope was that he would turn out just like the character on television. The story seemed odd when he was telling it.
The Alex approaching her was nothing like the one on the show. He was six foot four, two-hundred-thirty pounds, movie-star handsome, athletic. The Family Ties Alex P. Keaton was five foot four, one-hundred-twenty-two pounds.
Being tall, Alex crossed the pool area in no time with large strides. He sat down at the end of her lounge chair. A mistake. Jamie didn’t like her private space invaded and started to say something but decided to give him a pass since all the chairs next to them were taken.
Alex ran his hand through his dark brown hair, and she couldn’t help but notice the muscular definition of his biceps. He had brown eyes, thin lips, with two dimples bookending them. Broad shoulders. His legs as muscular as his arms.
“You look fantastic,” Alex said, interrupting her thoughts.
She hoped he hadn’t noticed her staring and looked away, embarrassed. He was almost staring at her as well. She was tall and thin, muscular in a feminine sort of way. She was wearing an all-black one-piece, bathing suit. Sexy, but she wanted to send the message that she didn’t have to show everything in order for someone to notice her. Not that Jamie wanted to be noticed. She didn’t want to come across as trying too hard. The one piece also hid a scar on her left side from a bullet that had grazed her a few years before.
She wondered what their kids might look like.
Quit thinking about kids and marriage. You don’t have a future with this guy.
She wanted to say something quickly, to get those thoughts out of her mind. “I see you have your Superman shirt on,” she said with a grin.
Alex was in a blue swimsuit—long, stopping just below his knees— with a white tank top, a large red S on the front.
He laughed while pulling the shirt out from his chest and looking down at it. “No, that’s Stanford University. That’s where I got my undergraduate degree.”
Jamie wanted to say something else but couldn’t think of anything. An awkward silence followed. On a mission, she never had trouble getting into a role and talking to people. This seemed different. Like a date. Real life with real feelings. With her job, she didn’t have many opportunities to date. It had been a long time since she’d even been on one. What was his excuse?
He probably had girls falling all over him.
Alex finally broke the silence. “What ya reading?”
“The History of the Breakup of the Soviet Union,” Jamie said, embarrassed for the second time.
He laughed.
Belarus was another hotbed for sex trafficking, and Jamie wanted to learn all she could about the area in case she had to go there. Right as he called, she’d been reading about the Grand Duchy Charter of 1588 where women gained protections under the law. One of the facts she found fascinating about recent social norms was that women were required in most homes to set the table. It’s considered degrading for men to perform the task. Jamie felt like women still had a long way to go in Belarus.
I know. I’m on vacation. I’m not supposed to be thinking about those things.
“Just a little light reading,” Jamie said, responding to Alex’s laugh.
“That’s good. I’m reading War and Peace back in my room. I should’ve brought it so we could read together.”
He paused a moment then burst out, “I’m joking.”
Jamie didn’t laugh. She didn’t get it.
“Actually, I’m not any better,” Alex continued. “I’m studying for the law exam, and I brought some of my books. I thought it would be fun to com
e on the cruise and get a break from school, but I can’t get away from it.”
“I know what you mean.”
Another awkward silence.
Alex grabbed Jamie’s book, sat it down next to her chair, and said, “Let’s go get in the pool.”
Jamie disliked when someone touched her stuff, but she held her tongue. She was already coming across as too uptight.
Alex pulled off his college shirt, revealing his sculpted pecs and stomach. He jumped right into the pool, forming a cannonball and splashing a lot of the unsuspecting patrons lounging nearby. Several gave him dirty looks. One woman even said something rude. He couldn’t have heard it because he was underwater, but Jamie heard it clearly.
Come on people, lighten up. We’re on vacation.
And with that thought, Jamie did loosen up.
She took off the headphones, hid them and her book under a towel, and walked over to the edge of the pool. Slowly, she stuck her foot in the water, letting herself get acclimated. She was one of those who got into the pool hesitantly, first testing the waters and then easing herself in when she was ready. She was determined to do that in their relationship as well. Go slowly. She was amazed how fast it moved once she let her guard down.
Alex and Jamie swam around like kids, splashing each other. They grabbed a volleyball and hit it back and forth. With each laugh, Jamie could feel the tension leaving her body. The physical exertion wasn’t with purpose like when she was working out. This was fun, exhilarating, and exciting.
Things were going well until Alex came up from behind and tried to dunk her. She instinctively turned toward him with her fist closed, stopping herself before she smashed it below the bridge of his nose.
He looked shocked and quickly backed off and said, “I’m sorry.”
Jamie composed herself and said, “No. It was my fault. I’m sorry. I don’t like being snuck up on.” She splashed him in the face to ease the tension.
He splashed her back.
She swam over to him, jumped out of the water, and put her hands on his head, easily dunking him. When he came up, they were both laughing. He put his arms around her, and she let him dunk her as well. She came out of the water and pushed her hair out of her face.
They were close to each other. For a moment, they were about to kiss, but Jamie turned away.
After several more minutes, they went back to the lounge chairs, dried off, and gathered their things. They went inside to find a quiet place to talk and discovered a lobby just off the pool that was fairly private with four chairs surrounding a wooden coffee table.
Alex asked the question Jamie knew was coming but dreaded.
“What do you do for a living?” he asked.
So, let the lies begin.
3
“I work in women’s healthcare,” Jamie responded to Alex with a lie.
Lying was second nature to her. Every mission was a big lie from start to finish. Called a cover story, her cover was always different. Sometimes she was a computer programmer. One time she was an accountant. Other times, a college student. Once she had to play a married couple with another operative. She always saw it as playing a role, like an actress in a movie. It never bothered her, until now. This wasn’t a movie. Or a mission. This was real life, and she liked Alex. She hated having to lie to him.
Curly always said that when she lied, she should try to keep it as close to the truth as possible. Women’s healthcare was all she could think of on the spot. She was in women’s healthcare. Sort of.
“Are you, like, a doctor?” Alex asked with an inquisitive look.
“No. I’m a consultant.” Jamie nervously changed positions in the chair.
A consultant in women’s healthcare was sort of the truth she rationalized to herself, trying to make it sound believable. A lie discovered in the field could mean death. What was happening with Alex was important to her. Deep down, she didn’t feel good about this conversation.
“How did you get into that line of work?” Alex had sat across from her with his feet up on the wooden table.
“I was recruited right out of college,” Jamie said. “A booth was set up at a job fair at my school. I signed up on the spot. A US Senator, a friend of my dad’s helped me get the job.”
The truth.
“Where do you work?” he asked.
What’s with the interrogation? “I work overseas a lot,” Jamie said, a fake company name not coming to mind.
A good answer in case they did start dating. She’d be out of touch for weeks or months at a time. Easily explained by her job that took her out of the country. Jamie already had some excuses ready in case this developed into a relationship.
There’s no cell phone service here.
We’re in a different time zone.
I got delayed.
I won’t be back in the states for three months.
Why was she thinking about a relationship? She couldn’t let this go beyond the cruise. While the CIA didn’t forbid romantic relationships or marriage, it wasn’t encouraged. Curly downright told her she’d be a fool for ever getting involved with someone. His words echoed in her head.
If you want a two-story house with a white picket fence and a bunch of freaking rug rats running around, choose a different profession.
Curly was not a subtle guy. He didn’t mince words. In fact, many of his words were very colorful. Of the four-letter variety. Jamie filtered those words from the remembered conversations. She looked around the lobby, wondering if she could come up with an excuse to leave but something else Curly had said was thundering around in her head causing her to pause.
Have all the sex you want; just make sure it doesn’t mean anything.
Jamie looked away so Alex wouldn’t see her blushing. She definitely wasn’t going to have sex with him. Hopefully, that wasn’t his intention. She was saving herself for marriage and would not compromise those values. However, she couldn’t make herself leave.
Fortunately, Alex’s next question was the jolt she needed to get rid of those thoughts. “What led you to want to work in women’s healthcare?”
The truth. I killed a man. Stole his sex slave right out from under him and was immediately hooked. She bit her tongue to stop herself from saying the reason why she had volunteered to help in the sex trafficking division of the CIA.
Jamie was sent to Columbia to take out a drug lord who’d been smuggling cocaine into the United States. She had to sneak into his home, past a dozen men with machine guns, find his bedroom, gather intelligence, kill him if necessary, and then get out undetected. Things were going smoothly. The drug lord was dead, and Jamie was about to leave when she heard a noise in the other room. The noise was coming from a seventeen-year-old girl, half-naked and beaten because she hadn’t performed up to the man’s expectations. She’d been made his sex slave, and Jamie couldn’t just leave her there. Jamie had a difficult enough time to get out of there by herself. More complicated with the girl.
They got out, but not without a gun fight. Jamie was grazed by a bullet on the left side under her arm. The reason for the scar. They both barely escaped alive. From that moment on, she knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life helping girls like her get out of the sex trade.
“I went to George Mason and got a degree in kinesiology,” Jamie said, truthfully. “I didn’t want to be a doctor. Kinesiology is the study of motion.”
Alex nodded as if he already knew that fact. The look on his face told Jamie he was genuinely interested and listening intently.
“I’ve always loved motion and adventure,” she continued with more excitement in her voice. “Bungee jumping. Racing bikes. Paragliding. I’ve always been a risk taker. Used to drive my mom crazy.”
That was the truth. Jamie got excited talking about something really important to her. She was giving him insight into her soul, and it felt good. She didn’t directly answer the question he asked, but she kept the conversation moving, giving him only the information she wanted him t
o know.
He didn’t ask another question right away, so she used the pause to turn the questioning to him. “How about you? What did you study at Stanford? I’m assuming law of some kind.”
“Criminal justice. My dad’s a lawyer. He’s always wanted me to take over his firm when he retires. I’m not sure that’s what I want to do with my life.” Alex spent the next ten minutes telling her all about his childhood, school, and now graduate school.
Jamie suddenly hated her secret life. Not the work but the secrecy. Alex was sharing the details of his life, and all she could do was tell him a made-up version of her life. She felt like a fraud.
“Do you like what you do?” he asked, turning the focus back on her.
A ping pong match of questioning had broken out between them. Maybe this was how all relationships started. She didn’t know.
“I love it,” she said emphatically. The most truthful thing she’d said since the conversation began. She loved what she did for the girls. Even loved the risk. The thrill. The danger.
After the situation in Columbia, she volunteered and transferred to a section of the CIA that focused on sex trafficking—one of the most dangerous assignments in all the CIA for a female operative. In order to be successful she had to infiltrate some of the seediest of all the underworld. The girls were their capital, and the traffickers protected their investments with whatever means were necessary.
The biggest challenge was getting on the inside of those groups. Standard procedures for an undercover officer in the CIA was to infiltrate a group, earn their trust, and become part of the inner circle. That strategy wasn’t an option in the area of sex trafficking. A female operative couldn’t become a part of the group because she would have to become a sex slave and endure everything the girls went through. That was against CIA policy. They had strict rules of engagement. Women weren’t allowed to work as prostitutes, and men weren’t allowed to have sex with the trafficked women, even if it did allow them into the inner circle.
They had to look at more creative ways to infiltrate the groups. They had to get the girls out by essentially kidnapping them or making contact somehow and convincing them to leave voluntarily. Women were more effective than men for obvious reasons, and Jamie was more effective than anyone else had ever been. Her unique skills allowed her to go into the depths of these operations undetected where no one else could go and get the girls out without being spotted or captured, and successfully fight her way out if she was. She wanted to explain her job to Alex but couldn’t. Telling him everything was not an option.