The tears were flowing at the reception desk when Jake stepped out of the elevator. Mascara streaks painted the receptionist’s cheeks, her blonde hair ruffled. Jake avoided eye contact, said “good morning,” and didn’t break pace as he blew past the emotionally charged Winthrop Enterprises employee. The receptionist was prone to outbursts, and it didn’t take much to send her fragile psyche over the edge. A bad hair day. A run in her pantyhose. Jake had quickly learned not to ask.
The somber ambiance and solemn faces of the other Winthrop Enterprises employees told him the receptionist’s tears weren’t a simple case of running out of hair gel.
Jason McDonald, financial wizard with a receding hairline, broke the news to Jake. “Did you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“Marilyn passed away this weekend.”
Jake’s posture slumped, the invisible punch to the stomach taking his breath away. “How?”
“She had an accident on the elevator stairs at the Metro. Broken neck,” Jason said, shaking his head.
Jake’s legs almost buckled and he put one hand on the corner of the desk for support. Jason McDonald quickly pulled over a chair.
“When did this happen?” Jake asked in a hushed voice.
“Friday night.”
“Good God.”
The timeframe of Marilyn’s death made Jake nauseous. His head filled with images of his mother on the sofa, each breath more shallow than the last until the one that never came. She went quietly, with a smile, her hand in Jake’s. Being the last person to see someone alive was not a prize to be cherished.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. You two seemed to have gotten close in your short time here,” Jason said, running his hand across his expanding scalp, as if plowing his fingers through an imaginary mane.
“Yeah, I guess. We had a few things in common, as it turns out.”
“Well, don’t let it get you down. The office will be closing early tomorrow. There will be a service at a funeral home in Alexandria. Then her body is going to be flown back to Milwaukee on Wednesday for burial in a family plot. Her brother is stopping by the office later to pick up some personal items. Maybe you could say a few words, offer your condolences.”
“Yeah, sure. I will.” Jake agreed, still in a daze. “Is my father in?”
“Not yet. He has been running around trying to help with arrangements. She was his secretary for twenty-five years.”
Don’t remind me, Jake thought. “Thanks again, Jason.”
“Sure thing. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.”
Jake found his office and moved his chair to stare out the window. He shed a single tear for Marilyn and wiped his face when he knew it was going to be the last.
The anti-abortionists were next on the list for the protest-of-the-week, and their numbers were growing in Franklin Park across the street. Jake stared out the window at several mothers holding posters that read “abortion is murder,” their children beneath them in their strollers holding smaller versions of similar signs. There were men and women, the religious element, and the politically charged. Jake gazed out the window and his mind wandered. The girl in Saipan. His father forcing Marilyn to get an abortion at the same time his mother was pregnant with him. Madness.
The street vendors were doing a brisk morning business feeding the anti-abortionists donuts and coffee at a three-hundred percent mark-up. A muscle bound man with a ponytail and twin boys joined the line, his children pointing at everything on the menu. Jake paused and squinted at the figure in the park. Something clicked in the back of his mind and for the second time in ten minutes his stomach dropped. “Son of a bitch,” he said to himself.
Jake peeked under the edge of the bridge before walking past Al’s neighbors who waved to the only guest their neck of the woods had seen in months. In the winter, Social Services and various help-the-homeless non-profits stopped by when the temperature fell below freezing. When it dropped to the single digits, the space under the bridge was one of the prime spots for the city workers to find a frozen body. In the summer, no one cared. Few homeless died of heat exhaustion or exposure, especially among the “river rats” who lived near the banks of the Potomac. Relief was only a bucket of water away. Nasty, undrinkable water, but still useful enough to drop a body’s core temperature a few degrees.
Jake disappeared from the sun into the damp atmosphere of Al Korgaokar’s living room. Al was sitting in his wicker chair with his feet on a milk crate, his eyes closed behind dark sunglass, one arm of a broken pair of Ray Bans clinging to his left ear.
“Al?” Jake asked, not sure if he was asleep or not.
“Jake?” Al answered without opening his eyes.
“Yeah Al, it’s me, Jake.”
Al moved his feet from the crate and placed the heels of his boots on the ground. He flipped the sunglasses to the top of his head, exposing a pair of crystal-clear blue eyes. “Have a seat,” he said, pushing the empty crate forward with his feet. The guest chair for the day.
Al turned to his right and pulled back the corner of an old tattered blue tarp he had fished out of the river since Jake’s last visit. A new piece of furniture covering for the living room.
“Marilyn is dead,” Jake said abruptly.
Al shot upright in his chair and his sunglasses fell off his head. “When?”
“Friday night. It was in Sunday’s paper.”
“What happened?” Al asked. He reached for his stack of newspapers from the weekend, not believing he missed any piece of published news.
“She fell down the escalator at the McPherson Square Metro station. That’s the report anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Al asked, pulling out Sunday’s Metro section.
“I was with her on Friday. And I’m not really sure, but I think we were being watched. Followed. I don’t know.”
Al’s eyes watered as he stared off into the distance. “Tell me exactly what happened. Details count.”
“We went out for drinks after work and went our separate ways near the station. As I was getting into a taxi, I think someone was watching me. An Asian guy.”
“That’s it?”
Jake told Al about Marilyn crying in the office and the morning conversation that had ruined his appetite for the day and his taste for waffles for life. “There is a service for Marilyn tomorrow evening,” Jake said with compassion. “I thought you might want to know.”
“Thanks.” Al rubbed the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. There was something there, something below the surface that Marilyn’s death had stirred up.
“Did you go to the police?” Al asked.
“Not yet. I wasn’t sure if I should. Like I said, I don’t know if it was anything. I don’t know if it was a coincidence, or if the guy was just zoned out on crack. But he was definitely looking at me. Gave me goose bumps.”
Al thought in silence before speaking. “It was probably nothing. I know a lot of homeless guys who will stare you down for no reason.”
“I guess that’s the truth.”
“You know that girl you are looking for?”
“Did you learn something?”
“She works for Chang Industries, but I think you already knew that.”
“Yeah, I knew where she worked. I wanted to know if you could find out where she worked.”
“Thanks for the show of confidence. Let me see if I can tell you something you didn’t know. Chang Industries is a sweatshop for which Winthrop Enterprises serves as the middleman. A guy named Lee Chang runs the sweatshop. Call it whatever you want, but Chang Industries, as benign as the name sounds, is not a nice place.”
“I haven’t heard anything about either Lee Chang or Chang Industries at work.”
Al thought it over. “What do you know about your father?”
“Not much, really. Why? Do you think Winthrop Enterprises has something to do with this?”
“Probably not. Your father is just a middleman. A very good one. Very savvy. He knows a lot of people.”
“I’m not following you.”
“All right. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you have a product you need to have manufactured. You go to someone like your father, and he arranges for you to see different factories and facilities. You name the location.”
“So he just sets up meetings and acts as the intermediary.”
“Yes. And, depending on the deal, he gets a cut of the profits. He could even finance some of the deal for a bigger cut of the profits.”
Al was still thinking about Marilyn, trying to put the seemingly unrelated pieces together while carrying on his current conversation.
“So what’s the story with the Wei Ling girl?”
“She’s in Saipan on a work visa. It was renewed this June. Good for a year. She’s still in Saipan. No record of her leaving the island. On a personal note, she is twenty-three, five-foot-three, one hundred and ten pounds. She is from a small town in the Guangzhou province. No siblings, not surprising as China has a one-child policy unless you are wealthy enough to pay a steep fine for additional children. Blood type O.”
“Now how do you know what blood type she has?”
“A magician never reveals his secrets.”
“You said she hasn’t left the island?”
“No. She is still there. Why do you ask?”
“My father said she went back to China.”
“So your father is hiding something.”
“Hiding a few things I imagine,” Jake said. “Speaking of hiding, you said you would tell me about my father working as a spy for the CIA.”
“A spy? Hell no, Jake. He wasn’t employed by the CIA—he provided information to the CIA, via yours truly.”
“You were a spy?”
“An Official Cover Operative.”
“What the hell is an Official Cover Operative?”
“A CIA employee working under the safe umbrella and diplomatic immunity of the State Department. A perfectly legitimate spy, if there is such a thing.”
“A spy who spends his whole life telling everyone that he works for the State Department.”
“Not just telling everyone, actually working in the State Department, with State Department personnel. The only difference was that my boss was located at Langley.”
“So if my father wasn’t a spy…”
“He didn’t work for the CIA, but he fed the CIA information, for money. A very subtle difference.”
“I don’t think my father needs the money.”
“Jake the snake, when you’re right, you’re right. It wasn’t a matter of money with your father.”
“Then why did he do it?”
“For the chance to be a big shot. We are talking twenty some years ago. Your father had started Winthrop Enterprises and was traveling the globe making connections, signing deals and hobnobbing with the international elite.”
“That’s what he’s doing now.”
“Yes, but aaaaah, the world was a lot smaller twenty-five years ago. There weren’t a lot of westerners running around Tokyo and Beijing. Your father stood out. A young, successful, globetrotting American businessman.”
“I still don’t see the connection with the CIA.”
“Connection. Good choice of words. Your father was a connection.”
“How?”
“We paid your father to report on what he saw in Tokyo and Beijing. Who was talking to whom about what business. Deals in the works, activities of interests. Protests, if there were any. Incidents of bribing. Whatever he could tell us.”
“Wouldn’t the CIA know all of this?
“Sure, well, some of it anyway. But it cost a lot of money to get intelligence through formal channels. Renting real estate, setting up front companies, implementing electronic surveillance, these things aren’t free and believe it or not the CIA does have a budget. Paying American citizens to tell us what they know is cheap.”
“So what did he tell you?”
“Your father was a good source of intelligence for a few years. He tipped us off to the sale of certain illegal hi-tech goods in Asia that we weren’t aware of. Some technology that ended up in a North Korean sub that washed ashore in South Korea years later. You can learn a lot from drunken businessmen in Roppongi. Hell, you can even get their business cards.”
“Okay,” Jake said, stretching out the second syllable.
“But after a few years we suspected your father of fabrication. We compared a lot of the intelligence from your father, and people like him, with our own intelligence. It is a good checks-and-balances measure. We started to see large discrepancies in the information from your father and the intelligence generated by the CIA through other means.”
“Are you saying my father was lying to the CIA? I find that hard to believe.”
“Not lying…exaggerating. But we couldn’t really prove it either. And even if we did, there was nothing the CIA could do. The CIA is not a law enforcement organization. We are actually an organization designed for the sole purpose of breaking the law, just not American law. Your father is an American, he wasn’t selling U.S. secrets to anyone, he wasn’t in the military or in a position to have sensitive military information, and he was gathering intelligence for us. It wasn’t a matter of national security.”
“What happened?”
“We told him his services were no longer needed and that we suspected some of the information he gave us had been inaccurate. We turned his name over to the FBI, to have his information added to a watchlist, and that was the end of my involvement with him. There was nothing else we could do.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“So you know my father?”
“I worked in Asia during the same period that your father supplied us information. I was the one who discovered the discrepancies. I was the one who arranged for him to be recruited.”
“Recruited?”
“Yes. The recruitment was finalized in a sauna in Tokyo, after several less-than-chance meetings I had arranged.”
“The sauna?”
“A great place to recruit. Everyone is naked and the temperature is hundred and thirty degrees Celsius. No one is going to be eavesdropping. No one is going to be wearing a wire. And although I have no concrete scientific evidence to back me up, I think the heat makes people more susceptible to influence.”
“How much did you pay him?”
“Oh I don’t remember exactly, and if I did I couldn’t tell you. Off the record, we probably paid him a couple of thousand a month. He was usually debriefed in D.C. when he got back in the U.S. That’s how I met Marilyn. She was always by his side. Always very pleasant.”
“If my father no longer fed you information, why did you keep in touch with her?”
“Marilyn? Pure coincidence, really. After my family passed, I moved into Potomac Falls Condominiums. Marilyn was my neighbor.”
The mystery around the great Peter Winthrop just got deeper. For Jake, life as an English teacher was looking more appealing every second. “What’s our next move?” Jake asked, half-afraid of the answer.
“Jake, why do you want to help this Wei Ling?”
“Because it is the right thing to do.”
Al, homeless cover operative, stuck out his dirty paw. Jake looked at Al’s hand and then extended his own.
“Then you and I are going to be pals, Jake. Spike Lee hit the nail on the head. Do the right thing.”
“So what do we do?”
“You need to decide what you want to do, Jake. I just agreed to get you the information.”
“You’re not going to help?”
“I didn’t say that. But you’re leading this expedition.” Al thought about Jake and the slim chance that someone was after his newest friend. “Let me give you my number,” Al said, looking for a pen. “If you see anything strange, duck first, then give me a call and leave a message.”
“And in the meantime?”
“What?” Al asked.
“What’s our plan?”
“Jesus, Jake. Life doesn’t just map itself out for you. Talk to your father again. See if he can’t straighten it out. Tell him you know he is lying and force him to give you some evidence that will rest your soul. Tell him you know the girl is still on Saipan. Rattle his cage a little. Write your letter to whomever.”
“So that’s it?”
“For now, that’s it. Feel free to come back anytime to visit. I’m usually around the Mall somewhere.”