Melanie stood in the shower at her new apartment with her eyes closed, imagining that she was luxuriating in a large porcelain tub with a magnum of champagne sweating nearby. She and Mark used to do that after an afternoon of lovemaking in one of the villas he liked to rent outside of Lisbon. It had been a tedious couple of days of house hunting, and she was now ready to pretend that she was “home” at last. Being quasi-homeless came with the territory of being a junior operative in the Clandestine Service. You went overseas for two to three years at a pop, came home for training and some time off, and then back out into the wide, wide world of human intelligence work at yet another grubby embassy. Some officers bought homes or condos, rented them out when they were gone, and then did a time-share routine when they came back for a few months, but if one had to bail out of station on short notice, there was always a scramble to find somewhere to live while the lease worked itself out. The Agency had solutions for this at its various installations around Washington, but most operatives wanted some separation from Biggest Brother in their daily lives when not actually on station.
She’d finally found a fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in a tower block near the Ballston Metro station, known to the locals as Randy Towers. It was filled with bachelor diplomatic staff, the occasional spook, contractors on short-term jobs, and even politicians who worked in Washington three days a week and then went home to the district. The absence of wives and families lent credence to the building’s nickname. Because she was in between duty stations, Melanie’s apartment was paid for by the Agency, and the Metro station two blocks away gave her access to everything official in Washington—except, perversely, the headquarters building at Langley.
As she rinsed the shampoo off her body with a washcloth, she thought again about weekends with Mark. She hadn’t been entirely honest with Allender about who’d come on to whom. Once she’d figured out that Mark’s marriage was mostly about having a well-trained hostess for all their diplomatic functions, she’d decided to make a run on him. He was handsome and certainly aware of her during the official times they spent together, although there’d been no exploratory asides. All that changed one late Saturday afternoon when she’d had to take an urgent cable from Washington to his residence, an apartment building in downtown Lisbon. He’d opened the door wearing only a towel around his hips. She’d presented the cable in a locked pouch and then casually checked him out while he was reading it. He’d been perspiring heavily, and she spotted a weight set out on the balcony. The veins on his upper body stood out among all the muscles.
“Like what you see?” he’d asked, while still reading the message.
She smiled when she remembered blushing just a little and then saying something truly subtle like she wouldn’t kick it out of her bed.
“I’m headed for the hot tub,” he’d said, handing her back the message. “It’s right through there.”
The bathroom had a stand-alone tub that doubled as a Jacuzzi. There was a separate shower, and another enclosure for the toilet. He’d dropped the towel and stepped into the swirling tub. She’d done her best impression of a demure striptease, and then stepped into the shower, where she’d slowly soaped off the day’s sweat and urban fug with the shower curtain fully open before getting into the tub with him, kneeling between his legs and then turning around to sit down and press her back against his chest, all with desirable results. Remembering gave her a warm feeling in her belly. She wondered how Dragon Eyes would have reacted to all that. The thought made her giggle, but the thought did not readily disappear.
Once out of the shower she put on jeans and a T-shirt and went out onto the tiny balcony to enjoy the sunset and a glass of wine. The balconies were all separated by concrete-block privacy screens, which suited her just fine. She was on the eleventh floor, with a magnificent view of the backs of two other apartment buildings and their connecting alleys. The rental agent had told her that the people in the apartment next door, a corner unit, were Southwest Asians and in diplomatic status. Based on the familial noise, the unit probably contained five times the number of people registered on the lease, and the eau de turmeric permeated that corner of the building when the breeze was right. On the other side was supposedly a Defense Department contractor whom she’d not actually seen. Just about everybody in the building was a transient, usually with a government stipend for the rent. There was a pool and gym in the basement, and a party venue up on the roof. It was as anonymous as you wanted it to be, and Melanie rather liked it. Genuine solitude was a difficult thing to achieve in the Clandestine Service, where everything you did had a controller’s strings on it.
Her dinner with young Mr. Smith had been mostly awkward. He was younger than she was, and after the first half hour of his undisguised adulation, she’d decided she was definitely an older-man kind of girl. Smith was super nice, physically quite attractive, and unabashedly trying to score. Dinner had been fine, but the table conversation had centered on what she termed millennial activities—the urgent pursuit of things to do and places to go on the weekend, almost as if the weekend wouldn’t be complete if not spent walking a piece of the Appalachian trail, attending symphony night at Lincoln Center, or taking a day trip to Antietam, all aimed at casual bragging rights on Monday morning when the coffee-station crowd inevitably asked, “How was your weekend?” She recognized some familiar symptoms; she was becoming tired of the daily grind of trying to get ahead in yet another government bureaucracy, interesting as this one was. And a lot more interesting since she had encountered Dr. Dragon Eyes, she had to admit.
That said, she knew this Chinese thing was going to be a one-shot operation, which would either succeed or it wouldn’t. She understood that she was mostly a fancy prop, the well-dressed and well-coiffed bait in some intricate upper echelon game in the—what was the term that woman had used? Serious-shit arena. Whoopee. When the op was over, she would still be thirty-three, unmarried and alone, with no prospective relationships, and, to be honest with herself, an almost disturbing disinterest in establishing a relationship. As Allender had warned her, she might even have to leave the Agency and find other employment, especially if this thing “succeeded,” whatever that meant. The bonus would be cool, of course, but she had a clear idea of how long even a big lump sum like that would last her if she did have to leave the intel world, especially when one was a professional woman who would not be able to describe any aspects of her previous employment with the Agency. “I worked in government. Period.” She knew any sophisticated Washington employer would know what that meant in a heartbeat, but she wondered if there was much of a future in the Washington game of what one of her office friends used to describe as white-collar welfare.
She speculated about the doctor and his upscale town house near Dupont Circle. That part of town was known as a haven for wealthy gays who renovated the nineteenth-century mansions along the avenue into truly valuable properties. Except: He didn’t strike her as being that way. More like a confirmed bachelor who wasn’t above taking a look at all the pretty women but not to the extent of lighting the fuse on any kind of relationship. Some of that came with the job, she supposed. His rep in the Agency was borderline scary. And those eyes: Jesus. She wondered if that’s what kept him from getting close with a woman. And if he was some kind of mind reader, who would want to go to bed with that? A little voice in her head had an answer for that: He’d know exactly what you like.… She giggled again.
She heard her cell phone ringing. Somehow she just knew it was young David Smith.
“Call me back with the KY attached,” he said.
She hung up, went and found the attachment that turned her cell phone into an encrypted radio, and called him back.
“We’re going to do one more encounter with the general,” he said. “No actual contact beyond letting him see you and your reaction to seeing him.”
“Will I be alone?” she asked.
“No, of course not,” he replied. “You’ll be escorted by one of our deep-cover operatives. Someone who is not known to the opposition as being one of us.”
“What if Chiang makes a move?”
“We have an app for that. Basically, we want him to see you one more time, and we want you to signal your continuing interest—but only for a moment.”
“Don’t you think he’ll realize he’s being teased?” she asked. “I mean, he’s definitely a player and he sure as hell knows the signs and signals of a willing woman. At some point he’s going to review the bidding and then say—WTF.”
“We don’t think so,” David said. “He’s impetuous. He likes the sudden collision of desire, situations where an adult woman telegraphs that she’d like to bed him, and he jumps at it. And then he’s gone. Tigers mating in the night and then withdrawing to a respectful distance.”
“Interesting analogy, Mister David Smith,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “Too many books, I guess,” he said. “But that’s what we need. Ten seconds of eye-to-eye acknowledgment that you and he are going to have a go. He’ll go away wondering how and when, and we’ll go away to rehearse exactly how.”
“Rehearse?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “We’ve built a mock-up of the rooms involved, and we’re going to rehearse each move, from the point where you two decide to find someplace and get it on to the final exposure. That’s how it’s done, Melanie.”
“Wow,” she said. “When I go to the hotel, how many people are going to be involved in this thing?”
“On whose side?” he asked, and then hung up.
She detached the KY device and wondered if she was imagining that David Smith was no longer sounding like a horny young millennial and a whole lot more like a controller. Had she missed something at dinner?
* * *
The next morning she took a taxi out to the headquarters building and was escorted to a section of the building she’d never seen before. Being escorted felt strange; she was a bona fide member of the Clandestine Service with a chainful of badges to prove it, and yet Smith had instructed her to call him when she got there so that he could send an escort. The low building behind the main headquarters structure looked like it had been a basketball gym at one time, which, she later found out, it had. On the floor was a freestanding maze of rooms, hallways, doors, and stair entrances—all walls with no ceilings.
“This is a pretty close mock-up of the fifth floor in the Wingate hotel,” Smith began, after introducing Melanie to a group of ten men and women dressed casually. Melanie was wearing a suit and heels, as previously instructed by Smith. “Especially the heels,” he’d said; “we need to see how fast you can move in those things.”
“The Wingate is probably Washington’s second-most-prestigious hotel,” he said now. “You can book the Jefferson Suite for five thousand dollars a night if you feel really important. Your room costs us seven hundred dollars a night, which will dovetail with your puffed-up legend. You’re there for one night so you can attend the awards function, drink, and not have to drive to your apartment over there in Ballston.”
“I wonder if I should even mention my apartment over in Ballston,” she said. “To the general, I mean.”
“Absolutely not,” Smith said. “If he asks, you say that your domestic arrangements are necessarily private. Remember, he’s supposed to think you are a department head or better. But: By this time, if they have access, and we think they do, they’ll know that you’re a low-level worker bee in S and T. Now, here’s the script. I’d like you to read through it, and then you and all these folks are going to rehearse each page of it. They, by the way, will be your security and support team, and you may or may not even see some of them when it goes down. The first time we’ll walk it in slo-mo as we all absorb the details. After that, we’ll try to get to real time by the end of the day. Can I get you some coffee?”
She felt a little bit like the star in a soap opera when he handed her the thick folder. The group ended up sitting on what had been the stands while everybody looked over his or her copy of the script. For her, it was indeed a script: start positions, end positions, dialogue, movements, place marks, timing marks. She didn’t know what the others were reading. She skimmed through the entire thing while sipping some coffee, and then announced that she had a question. David Smith raised his eyebrows.
“This is amazingly detailed,” she said. “But—if I understand the game, we’re going to bump into one another, talk, get all hot and bothered, and then agree to meet somewhere where we can satisfy our mutual desires. How can that be scripted?”
“Your ‘bumping into’ one another is going to be scripted, based on where you are in the room and where he is at the appropriate time. Two of the folks here will ensure that you do in fact get physically in range. What happens after that will depend on your powers of seduction and his horns, right?”
“Okay.”
“What happens just before the earth moves also has to be scripted, too, because we have to ensure you end up in your room and not his, for instance. Or a third room set up by his people. Remember, we have to assume his security team will think this is a honey trap, no matter what the general’s little head is telling his big head. Thus the scripting.”
Melanie sighed. “Look, I’m having some doubts about all this, okay? I know we’re going to do one more show-the-bait session, but after that we’re moving to the execution phase, without the general and I ever having had more than a few minutes together. Does that read? Seriously? What important, experienced, senior intelligence officer isn’t going to realize that all this is Kabuki? He’ll have to know that I’m bait of some kind. His people will have been shouting that fact at him. Is he really this stupid?”
“Apparently so,” Smith replied. “Or perhaps ‘impetuous’ would be a better word. He’s done dumber things than what we’re setting up. He obviously gets off on the risk. He always has some cleanup crew with him when he goes into the bushes, and that’s ended badly a couple of times—for the woman involved. This will be no different, except we’re going to have some people in the building who can and will deal with any rough stuff.”
“But a script?” she asked. “Boy meets girl, they lock horns, and the only word that comes to mind is—‘urgency.’”
“Precisely, and that’s why we’re scripting this, Melanie. From the moment that you light his fire, urgency is everything. One long, deep, meaningful look into each other’s eyes and then you move—but you move the way we tell you to move. Did I mention I will be directing you through the whole thing?”
She stared at him. Directing? A magic earring, perhaps?
He stood directly in front of her now, while the others seemed to shuffle or otherwise move out of earshot. The expression on his face was no longer that of lust-smitten David Smith, almost panting with barely disguised desire at her very presence. “I am the controller in this op,” he said, in a voice she hadn’t heard before. “You will do exactly what I tell you to do if you want to live through this op. You don’t—and can’t—know everything about what’s going to happen, but it is imperative that you do exactly as you are told. That’s the real reason for the script. We know it won’t play out precisely that way, but we also know that if you—we, the team—have practiced it, whatever departures from the plan we might have to make will be easier.”
He leaned down to stare directly into her eyes, and she realized that she no longer recognized this man. “Got it?” he asked softly. “This is how it’s done, especially when the boss has declared that you are not expendable. It’s when they don’t say those words that you get a vote. So: Please read the fucking script, absorb what you can, so we can all get to work.”
“Okay” was all she could manage. The menace in Smith’s voice had been palpable. One of the other women in the “cast” gave her a welcome-to-our-world smile over Smith’s shoulder. She couldn’t believe that she’d thought this guy was just another late-twenty-something lightweight. Then she realized that her dinner “date” had probably not been the spur-of-the-moment encounter she’d assumed it was.
Allender, the puppet master. She groaned, mentally. She should have known.
They worked for the rest of the day, starting with a general walk-through of each phase, followed by a scene-by-scene practice. Smith was the director, and there was even a cameraman, because Smith wanted to watch each scene later so he could make improvements. At the end of the day, Melanie was tired but a lot more confident in the plan. The following day she found out that her confidence had been misplaced, as Smith began to throw some shit into the game and everyone, including her, fumbled badly. By the end of day two, Smith was speaking in monosyllables and the members of the cast weren’t looking at each other if they could help it.
It went like that for the eight days leading up to the awards dinner, but by then the team had clicked into place and were able to deal with contingencies with a minimum of disruption. The intervening visual opportunity had been a nonevent, except for the way General Chiang had stared at her when she glanced at him over someone’s shoulder, saw him looking, and wet her lips for just a fraction of a second before turning away. She’d been wearing a clingy, white skirt that draped over her curves like lingerie, and she’d followed up the lip-tease with a casual fake wedgie adjustment with her left hand when she had her back turned toward him. Smith had later shown her a picture of the expression on the general’s face, and it was not the face of a man who was disinterested.
Smith was now satisfied with both her performance and the general’s obvious desire. They had three days to go to showtime. He told her to take two days off, go see the sights in Washington, and then return to Langley the day before the Wingate gala for final preps. He, in the meantime, needed to spend some time at the hotel getting his people in place and integrated into the hotel’s operations.
“How do you do that?” she’d asked.
“We have an arrangement” was all he would say.
* * *
She did exactly what Smith had recommended for the next two days. She toured the monuments district of Washington: the Mall, the Lincoln, the Jefferson, three of the Smithsonian museums, and the Hirshhorn modern art gallery. She even took a bus out to Dulles to see the big-boy toys at the Air and Space Museum annex. On the second day, she rested her aching feet until the evening, when she took a Potomac River scenic dinner cruise that launched out of the Maine Avenue wharf. The boat docked at just after nine. Having had a bit too much to drink and eat, she decided to walk straight up Twelfth Street back to the Mall before finding a Metro and calling it a day.
The evening was cool and clear. She wore comfortable walking shoes, jeans, and a light sweater, and carried a nine-millimeter in her handbag in case some night people decided to make a move on her. As it was, there was absolutely zero drama. Typical of many people who actually worked in Washington, she’d never “done” the sights, and she resolved to do this again. There was far too much to see in just two days. The dinner cruise had been relaxing, except for having to fend off a couple of middle-aged Lotharios. They had produced some Bombay gin, which was the reason she now needed to walk. There weren’t many people about, but it was clear that the closer she got to the White House, the more security there was on the streets.
She turned left and walked down the Mall to the World War II Memorial, with its plashing fountains and Stonehenge-like circle of columns whose names revealed the scope of that tragic conflict. She sat down by the main pool to rest her feet and just chill out. Two Park Police on foot patrol were sitting across the pool, having a cigarette. They’d given her the once-over but then ignored her. She thought they’d probably decided that she was too old to be a prostitute. That thought resurrected the op, which she’d been putting out of her mind these past two days. There was still the question of what Allender and Smith had planned and whether or not it involved actually doing it with Chiang. She knew she could if she had to, especially given the bonus. Maybe she was a prossie after all. Then she saw Allender approaching from the direction of the Lincoln.
It has to be him, she thought. Nobody walks like that. All he needed was a deerstalker hat and a cape to complete the picture. She saw the two cops watching him as he came up the gravel path that ran alongside the reflecting pool and stepped up the marble stairs to the memorial fountain area. She saw them both straighten up when he walked under one of the faux gas lamps, which made his amber eyes flash for the briefest second under that antique hat. He walked around the fountain and then joined her on the bench. He didn’t say anything, just sat down and stretched his legs out in front of him, the stick resting across his lap. She was about to greet him when the two cops materialized beside them. Allender showed them his credentials and they backed off, trying not to stare at his face.
“Cold feet?” he asked once they’d walked away.
“Hot feet,” she said. “I just walked up from the riverfront.”
“I know,” he said.
She turned to look at him. “Eyes on me?”
“So close to your command performance? You bet.”
“Chinese eyes, too?” she asked. She looked out into the semidarkness, but didn’t see any obvious watchers. She remembered he’d told her that he liked to walk the Mall at night to keep fit. A small breeze blew a mist of spray from the fountains over them.
“It’s possible,” he said. “But that wouldn’t hurt the legend. In fact, Chiang might like the idea of poaching my woman.” He spoke the words “my woman” in a faked deep voice.
Melanie snorted. “So I’m your woman now?”
He smiled, and she was surprised to see the light in his eyes become subdued. “I suppose it would be possible. In another life. But back to my question: You still okay with this op? We’re asking a lot.”
“A little hesitation,” she said. “I was just thinking of that old joke about the guy propositioning a woman at a party.”
“The one where he offers a million dollars?”
“Yeah, that one.”
He was silent for a moment. “I feel your pain,” he declared, finally, with a completely straight face.
She turned to stare at him and then saw his shoulders shaking. OMG, she thought. Dragon Eyes is laughing! She elbowed him in the ribs but then smiled herself.
“C’mon,” he said, getting up. “I’ll walk you to Smithsonian Station. It’s the least I can do.”
As they walked up the Mall, she put her arm in his. She could feel the tension in his arm, but after a while she felt him relax a little.
Better. Much better.