by Warren Esby
Also by Warren Esby
Doubled or Nothing
Redoubled
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.
Redoubled
Copyright © 2013 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: 978-0-9893775-3-9
Contact Warren Esby by e-mail at [email protected]
Dedication
To M, my muse, who I like to amuse
Acknowledgements
To two Ts, J, and GH for critical reading and editorial suggestions
Chapter 1
As I’ve said before, I’d rather be lucky than dead. And since I am about to start writing the second installment of my memoirs as a double agent for the CIA, my luck must still be holding out. I am back in the Cayman Islands and living under my assumed name again after approximately a year away. Anya and I have just successfully completed our first assignment for the CIA under our plan to market ourselves as a husband and wife team of paid assassins. We didn’t do it for the money. We have plenty to live on from my previous term of employment with the CIA as a double agent. They had given us assumed names and an income in excess of $3 million per year for my prior work. But after a couple of years of being rich and idle, we both felt the need to have more excitement in our lives than another round of golf or game of tennis or day at the beach or a Caribbean cruise would provide. When you once have been in kill or be killed situations, playing other games with little white balls or medium sized yellow balls is just too tame. I mean, I just celebrated my thirty-first birthday, and Anya’s only twenty-seven. We both agreed that a quick death by a bullet was preferable to a slow death by ennui. But that quick death would mean my luck had run out, which it didn’t during this last year nor did Anya’s.
And as a bonus, I’m pleased to report that thanks to our efforts, Al Qaeda in the Carolinas is no longer a threat nor is Al Qaeda in Cleveland, although there are still some areas of the United States that may not be free of their threat such as Al Qaeda in the San Francisco Peninsula. I know you didn’t know that Al Qaeda was operating in the United States because the Federal Government doesn’t want you to be alarmed, but I’ll fill you in on some of the details so you can decide for yourself if your area is affected or infected as the case may be.
Our current assignment started about a year ago after we had cruised around the Caribbean on our yacht named Bubble Gum Ice Cream, now renamed Muffy. We had lived in the Caymans as rich ex-pats for about two years and had done just about everything we wanted to do as idle rich people. We hadn’t been married yet officially, although we had been living as husband and wife, and Anya said she would agree to be my wife if we could be like the couple in an old movie she saw in which both the husband and wife were paid assassins. We had to first sort out if we should use our assumed names in our new business or the names we had killed under before. We decided that tradition would be best, and we would continue to dispatch dispassionately those who needed to be dispassionately dispatched under our real names of Alex Astrov and Anya Astrova. The fact that I had killed for the CIA and she had killed for Russia was not important. What was important was that she hadn’t killed me, although I was one of her targets, and we couldn’t have eventually got married if she had. That would have been really macabre. Getting married after I was already dead, that is. It is a little nerve wracking to be married to someone who was once trained to kill you and still might. She had originally been instructed to shoot me when someone said “kill him” twice, but so far she had only been given that command once, and the person giving that command was in turn killed by me. I have always been a little nervous that she would shoot me reflexively if someone should shout “kill him” for a second time under unforeseen circumstances, which had almost happened by mistake during our last assignment. But all in all, I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be married to, and we do love each other, and so far I’ve been lucky and she hasn’t killed me. As I’ve said before, I’d rather be lucky than dead.
Even though we have Russian-sounding names, we are both Americans with genuine unpaid Federal Government student loans and all, which we couldn’t have if we weren’t Americans. Or could we? We haven’t paid them off yet, although we can easily afford to do so, in case that should change our citizenship status. I’m not good at the requirements for being Americans except for being born in the United States which we both were. Anya’s parents had come from Russia before she was born and my parents were both born in the United States as well, although my ancestors before them undoubtedly originated in Russia. Although we were born in the United States, we live in the Cayman Islands under the names Alex and Ann Astor, and everyone thinks we are heirs to the Astor fortune because we always have plenty of money and a house on the beach and a yacht and a Porsche and an Aston Martin and all the attributes of the wealthy. We actually have all the documents to prove we are Alex and Ann Astor and were born in the United States as those people, even though we weren’t, thanks to the excellent forgery expertise within certain agencies of the U.S. Government. In other words, we were born in the United States twice each or once as two different people each. I know I confused you, but I confuse myself a lot as well, especially if I think too deeply about something.
We have all the money we could reasonably need as a result of my services to the CIA over a considerable length of time, about three months total, and now Anya is due a similar amount for the services she rendered during the last year. We are definitely in the one percent, which many people who have worked for the United States Government are, even though they don’t want to let it out. After I retired the first time, I wrote my memoirs about being a double agent because I was bored. I now find myself writing again as I wait for something else to turn up as it has a habit of doing, and if I’m lucky enough not to die from boredom in the meantime.
About eighteen months ago I had read that my previous contacts in the CIA, and the only ones I had dealt with, had been killed when their Cadillac Escalade Hybrid had gone off Pacific Coast Highway south of Big Sur and erupted in a big ball of flames at the bottom of the cliff while they were racing to the scene of a crash of a Baskin Robbins ice cream truck that had been giving out the ice cream to all comers before it melted, the ice cream that is and not the ice cream truck. Both Ben and Jerry had presumably been killed. In fact, only Jerry had been killed. Ben Franklin had been thrown clear before the final impact and had survived despite falling 500 feet down the cliff and suffering multiple broken bones, a concussion, and some internal damage. He was in the hospital for six months before he recovered. Ben and Jerry had told me they would contact me once a year, but had failed to do so since that would have been difficult for Ben, because he was in a coma at the time, and for Jerry, who was deceased. I just assumed the report I read about both being dead was accurate. That just goes to prove that you can’t always believe what you read.
Just as Anya and I were trying to decide how we would go about getting back in touch with the CIA, as luck would have it, Ben called. He was back at work and had a new partner, a female partner nam
ed Edy. It was supposed to be a routine call to catch up and tell me that he would be resuming contact, even though he had missed the last scheduled call, and to let me know why he was late checking in with me. I told him I had read about the accident and was sorry about Jerry but glad that he was still alive.
After the small talk, I mentioned that I would be interested on taking on an assignment, if he had one that was suitable for Anya and me to work on together. He was a little surprised because I didn’t have to supply any further services, but he was delighted to hear of my interest in becoming active again since he had an assignment for which I had the necessary background, and for which they were unlikely to find anyone more suitable. He said he would have brought up this assignment and would have tried to convince me to take it on and was glad I suggested it first. He explained that it was still optional since it would place me back in danger, perhaps more danger than the last assignment I had been in, the one in which I only had to kill three people to survive with the help of Anya who only had to kill two, not to mention the two others who were joint kills.
As I said before, I’d rather be lucky than dead, or bored to death, so I said I was interested. He said he would come and visit us in the Cayman Islands and introduce Anya and me to his new partner, and we could discuss what was needed. I told him we did have a Baskin Robbins in Seven Mile Beach which I knew he would want to visit when he got down here. In my previous association with Ben and Jerry, I knew they liked to spend a lot of their spare time in ice cream shops. I expected Ben and Edy to be no different. I told them to stay at the Grand Cayman Marriott Beach Resort that was near the Baskin Robbins. They said they would be down at the end of the week and would call when they arrived.
Chapter 2
We met Ben as scheduled and were introduced to his partner Edy Dreyer. Ben was middle aged, middle sized and used to be rather stout when I had last seen him 30 months before. He was much thinner because of his time in the hospital, but I knew that wouldn’t last long as he began eating a banana split. Anya and I are both thin. Neither of us likes to eat too many sweets and I have a physical aversion to them if I have too much, and I throw up. We both ordered diet drinks while Edy, who could be described as early middle aged, middle sized and pleasingly plump, matched Ben spoonful for spoonful from her banana split. I knew immediately she would be the perfect replacement for Ben’s previous partner Jerry. Ben began filling us in on the assignment that would start in Charleston, South Carolina in about two weeks after the necessary arrangements were made.
Ben and Edy told me the problem they needed help with, and it was very bizarre. It was just as bizarre as having the bubble gum flavored ice cream that I had seen Ben and Jerry eat with relish to my amazement. I didn’t mean they actually had put pickle relish on their bubble gum ice cream. That would have been even more bizarre than two adult men eating bubble gum ice cream, which they did with gusto. That’s a less confusing description, isn’t it? But I did see them do it, and it was so bizarre to me that I had to name my boat after that flavor because, as you will see as this narrative continues, I think of life in a bizarre way, mainly because my life has proceeded in a bizarre way. Now I wouldn’t have thought that Edy eating bubble gum ice cream with relish would be bizarre. I would just assume she was pregnant which she could be and I wouldn’t know it. But she didn’t order bubble gum ice cream as part of her banana split nor did Ben, so maybe the concussion had done something positive for Ben’s taste in ice cream.
Ben and Edy explained that there was a new effort on the part of Al Qaeda and their associates in Pakistan to develop a new weapon of mass destruction that was different from and more insidious than anything any enemy of the United States had ever contemplated using before. It was a biological weapon of mass destruction that made use of a normal function within everyone’s own body that causes certain cells to commit suicide. The normal process is called programmed cell death and is triggered by certain receptors on the surface of the cells in the body that act like switches that turn on a sequence of events within the cell that leads to its own death. This function is usually held in check, but apparently some Pakistani scientists were working on ways to infect Westerners in a manner that would make all the cells in their body commit suicide at once, leaving nothing inside the body but a mass of dying, rotting cells in a mass of liquid.
The body is mostly water and if you take that away, there is very little left. I don’t want to insult religious people, but the Bible would have been more correct to say liquid to liquid and vapor to vapor rather than ashes to ashes and dust to dust when describing death. Now the cells undergoing this process are usually gobbled up by other cells whose job it is to do just that, to act like vacuum cleaners. But if someone could figure out a way to have all the cells enjoying that narcissistic program of cell death at the same time, then there is no turning back the body’s journey to water world and not enough vacuum cleaner cells to clean up because they are committing suicide with all the other lemming cells. As you can imagine, the result of this process of programmed cell death would be that the person in which it was occurring would turn into something resembling a giant water balloon that, once ruptured, would spill the liquid remains of that person all over the place.
Apparently some Pakistani scientists got the idea for this watery weapon of mass liquefaction when they spilled some of their lunch into a cell culture and all the cells dissolved. They claimed that it was certain Indian spices that did that. Now the Indians and Pakistanis both use the same spices, but the Pakistanis decided that using a spice and calling it an Indian spice would add flavor to their discovery and give the Indians a bad name in the process, which they loved to do. Moreover, they thought that Westerners would be even more susceptible than most to the effects of this spice because it is generally true that what Indians and Pakistani think is just right with the spiciness of their cuisine, people like me think is a way to permanently destroy their digestive tract. I found that out the first time I ate food made by Indians for other Indians to eat. I couldn’t eat for a week afterwards because I had no stomach left. Everything that went down came back up.
From what the CIA had been able to learn from their sources, further experimentation and analysis of the spice in question had led to the synthesis of alternative versions that had an ability to trigger cell death in a much wider variety of cells, and Al Qaeda was making plans to disseminate these compounds to their enemies as soon as they could find the right vehicle to infect people with. In the meantime they were using another program of self-destruction to do further work on their weapon. They were using National Institutes of Health research grants to study the process of cell death, in effect having the United States Government devote resources to do research that would be used to kill Americans. This was in keeping with other Federal Government programs like supplying weapons to Afghanis and Iraqis and training them so they could use those weapons effectively to kill American soldiers. In some ways the United States Government, like the human body, is filled with programs of mass self-destruction.
I should mention that there were legitimate reasons to study this process, mainly for the treatment of cancer which some believe is a cell that has lost its ability to self-destruct when it goes bad. So if one can reprogram a cancer cell to self-destruct again, then one can perhaps develop a new treatment for cancer. Perhaps just eating a lot of Indian food would be enough, but I don’t know if anyone has looked at that yet. And some of us might prefer death by cancer rather than death by a surfeit of Indian cuisine.
Now something strange began happening in many U.S. medical research facilities at the same time that the CIA had intercepted news about the possibility of a new spice war. Animals began showing up in experiments of all sorts, not just cancer research experiments, and they had all the characteristics of water balloons. So far they had found rat balloons, rabbit balloons, guinea pig balloons and itsy bitsy mouse balloons. They wanted to have me investigate because of my background and the professio
n I was in before becoming a double agent.
It may seem implausible, but I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry from MIT and my field of expertise, very limited expertise I should say, is animal models of human disease. Now that is a dubious skill because studying animal models of human disease is of dubious value. People create diseases in animals that resemble human diseases and try to cure the disease the animal is given. If successful, they try to treat humans in the same way. And sometimes they find something useful, but I think that is more from luck than anything else. I mean, what good is finding a cure for a mouse cancer because people don’t get mouse cancer no matter how mousy they may be. They have been curing cancer in mice for years, and unless they can figure out a way to give people mouse cancer, they aren’t going to sell too many mouse cancer cures because mice can’t afford them anyway. Now there is some controversy about swine flu and bird flu infecting humans even though I don’t know if either birds or pigs get human flu. However I don’t believe anyone has documented humans coming down with rat flu or mouse flu or rabbit flu or guinea pig flu, the usual animals used for animal models of human disease.
Regardless of my limited expertise, I had a legitimate value to the CIA because they could slot me into a lot of research facilities that had animal balloons in them and could have me investigate who was making those animal balloons. Ben and Edy, as a condition of my accepting the assignment, agreed to get Anya into a research administration position at the same location, and I hoped she could be of help and at least cover my back which she was very good at doing. She would have been more useful working as a laboratory technician, but she didn’t have the background. She had graduated from Boston University in International Relations. It’s a good thing they don’t qualify whether a degree in International Relations is in good international relations or bad international relations, because all of her international relations after graduation had been bad international relations consisting of killing nationals from other countries such as Russia and Mexico. Killing pigs had come before graduation and they were American pigs anyway.