What Evil Lurks in Monet's Pond: A (5 page)

“I don’t think so,” I said, as the full
impact of my situation began to filter through my dazed mind,
refusing to cooperate.

“Want to know what will happen to you if you
don’t show up so that Hezbollah can retrieve its disk? They will
get to your family in America and start killing them one by one
until you turn it over, only you won’t have it because you aren’t
playing ball with us. How are you going to find us after you leave
here?”

Even as I looked into those blue, blue eyes,
I knew he was telling me the truth. If Hassan had distracted me on
the dance floor, while one of his friends had hidden the floppy
disk in my purse, I was in way over my head. And these
coffee-drinkers were professionals, too.

Unable to sleep, tossing and turning
throughout the night, I found myself exhausted when my alarm went
off. If I went to collect the replacement disk, I was involving
myself in something that was out of my comfort zone. If I didn’t,
my family was at risk. I was between a rock and a hard place.

At the meeting the next morning, I met Serge,
the CIA’s liaison with the Israeli Embassy in London. He sat at the
next table, talking to me from behind his newspaper. He had some
documents for me to sign. They were tucked into the copy of
Le
Monde
that I found on my table when I arrived. I read them over
carefully and signed on the dotted line. I was so nervous, I never
finished my café au lait.

Serge told me I could expect someone to
contact me once I got to my hotel room in Paris. Unfortunately,
that’s not how things went. The train was crowded and there were
people standing as we pulled into the station. As I stepped off, I
felt a tug on my purse. The next thing I knew, a knife cut through
the strap and I looked up in time to see a young man dash away
across the platform, my purse tucked under his arm. Panicked at the
thought of losing my family, I screamed and carried on, desperate
to recover that disk. The conductor spoke little English and I was
too upset to make much sense in my college French, but he
understood I had been robbed. He took me to the station office and
waited with me until a gendarme arrived. He took me to the police
station and called the US embassy. Someone at the desk there
promised to send a representative. It turned out to be Serge.

By the time he dropped me off at my hotel,
Serge had explained that they knew the purse would be stolen and
they wanted my reaction to appear normal. All my kicking and
screaming gave me credibility. I needed that. Hassan’s friends were
tailing me.

Chapter Five --

Once in my hotel, I thought it was all over.
I spent a couple of days seeing the sights. I finally felt like I
could relax and get on with my trip, but I was wrong. On the day
before I left for Spain, there was another knock on my door. The
same CIA man wanted to know if I could do just one more thing.
Could I sit and sketch down at the waterfront of Barcelona for a
few hours? How could it hurt? I was headed there anyway, wasn’t
I?

Not only did the CIA need me to sit and
paint, they offered to buy the work from me for an exorbitant price
of a thousand dollars. And that’s how I wound up becoming a
spy.

Oh, I don’t carry a gun. Let me be clear
about that. In fact, if I did, I probably would have lost my life a
long time ago. I’m what they call an observer. I’m not the spy that
breaks into a hotel room and steals the briefcase with the secret
codes in it. I’m not even the type to leap off balconies and
escapes in a speeding car. I’m a watcher in the shadows, the person
you never really notice is taking copious notes. That’s because
when you see me, you see my paint brushes, my canvases, and my
easel. I’m actually a decent artist. I usually show my work at
three or four major exhibits a year, both here and abroad. I’m
represented by four galleries -- one in New York, one in Los
Angeles, one in Miami, and one in London. I’m hoping to get into
one in Madrid in March. That’s because right now there’s a lot of
action in Spain with various terror groups, so the CIA could really
use a pair of trained eyes and ears there.

How do I share my information? I paint my key
into each painting, so my handler knows where to find the file once
it’s ready for retrieval. I might add a little dog to the scene and
Langley knows the digital card is tucked inside the
battery-operated jumping pup I bought for Gesso. If there is a
glass of wine in the scene, Langley knows that I have put the tiny
piece of technology inside my battery-operated corkscrew. These are
things I take with me on the road.

Whoever is sent by the CIA is led to believe
I’m just a tourist who got used as an unwitting courier by Langley
while traveling abroad. I might be having lunch in a restaurant or
shopping for clothes in some trendy little boutique. With a slight
of hand, the digital file is replaced in my bag by an exact
duplicate by the CIA officer. Usually they send a fairly new
trainee, someone who assumes contains the material the CIA wants
passed to the next person down the CIA route. That’s the benefit of
not being trained as a spy. I don’t walk like a duck, I don’t quack
like a duck, so I’m not a duck.

You’d be amazed at how sensible this whole
procedure really is. Having never been trained as a gun-toting,
ass-kicking Mata Hari, I look so harmless and I blend into the
background of any scene so well, people often forget I’m there. And
even those people who want to watch me paint are more than welcome
to do that. If people want to buy one of my paintings, I usually
let them. Why not? It’s more cover for me. Besides, I don’t
normally paint on the key to the code until I am ready to pass it
to the CIA.

Now do you understand why my cousin Alberta
gets so far under my skin? I’ve sacrificed so much for this job.
Love. Children. Even the chance to find a husband who comes home at
six every night for dinner, the way that Marty does -- although, I
will confess that if I was married to a guy like that, I’d probably
be grateful he didn’t come home on time.

I blame that on Roswell Oakley. It’s really
all his fault we fell in love. I was minding my own business, doing
what I was supposed to do. I was painting the waterfront in Miami.
When I’m in the United States, I just focus on my art. There’s no
spying involved. Instead, that’s the time when I meet with my
handlers and get prepped for the next overseas assignment. In this
case, Ross showed up and spent the afternoon on the bench about a
hundred yards from me. And when he finally came over to observe my
work, he slipped me an untraceable cell phone. When I called the
only number in the contact list, he answered. It signaled the start
of something that was both wonderful and frustrating at the same
time.

That’s a big part of why my cousin irritates
the hell out of me. I love Ross and I can’t have him. I can’t even
pretend to have him. He went and got himself a desk job at Langley,
a big stinking promotion that means he’s on every spy’s radar. I
still work behind the scenes. If we go public now and all those
terrorists I’ve monitored all these years figure it out, that not
only puts me in danger, it puts the other watchers in jeopardy, not
to mention the genuine tourists. The spy business can be ugly. Bad
people do terrible things to achieve their goals, and sometimes
good people have to do unsavory things just to keep up.

In that mean-spirited little display of
feigned support for my supposed plight in life, Alberta proved to
my family once and for all that the years of gossiping were all for
naught. Not only was I not gay, she “outed” herself as the source
of all the rumors over the years. Now I understood all those family
reunions, when folks were too embarrassed to ask about the plain
gold band on my finger, Alberta was a busy girl, dishing the
dirt.

That wedding band was something I was forced
to wear as cover and I was rarely without it. I wasn’t happy about
having to keep it on my hand, but there was concern that I was a
target for a raven attack. That’s when the bad guys throw an
attractive male into the honey pot in the hopes of luring the
target into a sexual tryst. Better the bad guys believed I was
suffering from a romance that had no future. Let them believe the
guy (or the girl) was unavailable. Let them believe I was too in
love to swallow the bait on the hook they dangled in front of me.
That’s how the spy game goes. But I wasn’t about to explain that to
the big mouth in the family.

Gesso was softly snoring when I finally
turned off the Christmas lights in the living room a little after
midnight. I gently picked up the sleeping Yorkie and carried her up
to the tower. Climbing into bed, I tried to settle myself down. Why
couldn’t I get along with my cousin? It wasn’t that I didn’t want
to make nice-nice. It was that she had a knack for saying things
that set my teeth on edge. As a good Christian, I decided I had an
obligation to find the positive in her, but as an independent woman
with a whole lot of experience in dealing with really bad people, I
had to fight the urge to kick her in the proverbial fanny. We came
from two different worlds -- in hers, there was plenty of time to
sit around and criticize the rest of the human population; in mine,
I was too busy trying to survive.

Maisie, are you really mad at Alberta because
she thinks you’re gay and you don’t want to come out of the closet,
or are you really mad because you think that if Ross really loved
you, he’d find a way for the two of you to be together?

I hate it when my conscience kicks in, mostly
because Alberta really is a jerk. How do you find the good where it
doesn’t exist? The funny thing is that if my cousin ever put her
mind to doing something important, she’d probably be good at it.
Maybe that’s where the real frustration came from -- the
realization that Alberta was wasting her life on petty issues when
the world was in such dire need of decent people. I supposed I
could make more of an effort.

But that still left the issue of Ross. How
many times had I seen him in the last year? Every year, it seemed
like we spent less and less time together. Pretty soon, we’d be
waving to each other as we passed on the Metro. Kind of like
“Charlie on the MTA”, forever doomed to stay on the subway for want
of a nickel.

What if I gave up the world tours? What if I
retired and found myself a quiet little flat in a quiet little
neighborhood? What if I got myself a new identity? Would Ross be
able to be with me? Was I willing to find out, even if it meant
saying that final goodbye?

The dawn slipped into the Robbie Burns room
like a furtive friend. I threw on my sweats and sneakers, zipped up
my fleece jacket, and took Gesso out for her early morning walk. As
we tiptoed down the massive stone staircase, the house was quiet.
No one else was up.

There was a fresh layer of snow on the ground
when we stepped outside. Gessie, her nose in the snow, scampered
along, having fun. I gave her plenty of lead. I was still
disconcerted by the holiday heartache. What I needed was a good,
long walk, to clear my head and shake off all that tension.

We traveled across the lawn and hit the trail
through the woods that goes up to the pond. I skidded here and
there as the path iced up, my sneakers lacking the right treads for
the job. Gesso race ahead of me, her nose to the ground. Her
excited energy was getting the better of her, as she increased her
speed to a mad dash. When Gess picks up a scent, she rarely lets it
go. She’s a stubborn seven-pound hairball. Yorkies are notorious
ratters, sniffing out the odd mouse in the snow or the occasional
chipmunk. They’ll try to tunnel their way to the darkest of hiding
places, in search of their prey.

“What’s up, Gess?” I began to retract the dog
lead, not comfortable with letting her get so far ahead. In some
forests, she was a tasty little tidbit for any of a number of
predators, everything from fisher cats to coyotes. I once even had
a hawk lie in wait for her along a trail. That’s really why I kept
her leashed, on the odd chance I had to suddenly reel her in. But
even as I pulled harder, the little dog fought the command. Coming
around the corner, I suddenly understood why. There, across the
snowy trail, lay a stiff body.

I’ll be honest -- it wasn’t my first. Once,
in Tangiers, I came back to my hotel room to find a stranger laid
out on my bed, a fistful of flowers in his hands, a rather large
knife in his silenced diaphragm. I took one look at the cadaver and
screamed my head off. When the hotel staff came running, I made
sure they knew just how upset I was with their turn-down service. I
really do prefer a mint on the pillow to a corpse on the covers. I
found out later at a briefing in Alexandria that the dead man had
been a CIA informant. The killer had arranged for me to get the
shock of my life in order to find out if I was, indeed, a spy. His
theory had been that if I was, I would pack up my belongings and
jump on the fastest boat out of the country. By carrying on as I
did, I actually strengthened my cover as a professional artist. The
hotel, known to cater to Westerners, went out of its way to make
the rest of my stay uneventful. They moved me to another room at my
request and frequently checked to make sure everything was
satisfactory. After all, is there anything more dangerous to a
hotel’s reputation than a hotel guest with an unpleasant
experience? Imagine the Tweet on that.
Unique boutique Hotel
Golden Tangiers -- every room comes with flowers and “dead guy”
vase. #@saveme.

Looking down now, I could see this was an
older man, maybe in his mid-fifties. He was wearing a dark navy
parka, brown corduroy slacks, and a tweed fedora on his head. Or
rather, had been wearing the wool hat. It was currently askew on
the ground, as were his black-framed glasses. Judging from the
blueish tint to his skin, he looked like he had been dead quite a
while. I had plenty of questions and no real answers as I stood
there shivering. Pulling out my cell phone, I placed a 911 call,
and whistled to Gesso. When she bounded over to me, I gathered her
up and waited for the voice at the other end.