Secret Agent Affair

The baggage he carried around only materialized when he was being himself.

“Thank you,” he replied heartily, releasing her hand with just a trace of reluctance he knew the woman would appreciate.

Carole tossed her head. Long, straight blond hair floated over her shoulder. “You start tomorrow, bright and early at seven.”

It had taken him every shred of time, morning and night, to get everything in place. He was eager to get going. “I could start today,” he told her.

The woman laughed lightly, as if he’d told a joke. “Tomorrow will be fine.” Taking a square of paper from a green dispenser on her desk, Carole wrote a room number down for him. She handed it to him before she got up from her chair. “Report to this department tomorrow. Raul will show you the ropes. He’s a little snippy in the mornings,” she warned, “but he doesn’t mean anything by it. Try not to get on his bad side—or to take anything he says before noon too personally.”

“I try not to get on anyone’s bad side,” he told her, and for the most part, that was true. Getting on someone’s bad side meant getting noticed and his goal had always been the exact opposite, no matter what the situation.

Carole rose slowly, like a model who knew that every set of eyes in the room was trained on her. In this case, there was only one set to look at her, but an audience was an audience.

“That’s a very good philosophy,” she told him brightly. And then, Carole escorted Patience Memorial’s newest employee to the door of her office and once again smiled invitingly just before he left.

He could have had her, he thought, walking away from her office. Probably right then and there on her desk if he’d turned up “Dolan’s” charm a notch. The physical coupling would have satisfied the gnawing hunger that the woman who’d bandaged him up had aroused. But again, it would have drawn too much attention his way and he couldn’t afford that now. Not if his assignment was to have a successful resolution.

He would have to put up with the damn gnawing.

The details of his assignment were nebulous and sketchy at best. Over the last three weeks, their specialists monitoring the Middle East had picked up international chatter, a lot of it, focusing on a possible terrorist threat occurring at Patience Memorial. The probable target in that case would be the Jordanian ambassador’s daughter, Yasmin. The twenty-two-year-old woman was arriving at some unspecified date in the near future to undergo a delicate operation. She had a tumor that had intricately woven itself through her brain.

Two of the country’s foremost brain surgeons were going to perform the surgery. One was flying in from the west coast, the other had been on the staff of Patience Memorial for over ten years.

Whether the threat came in the form of a kidnapping—something he highly doubted because of the ambassador’s contingent of bodyguards—or a bombing, he didn’t know. No one did. That only meant he had to be ready for anything—which also included the very real, frustrating possibility nothing would happen.

The enemy enjoyed playing their little war of nerves, enjoyed planting chatter to unnerve the opposition. They made sure to plant enough rumors so that everyone was in a hypervigilant state. There would be so many false rumors until the real one came and if the public had gotten blasé about the rumors, it would turn a deaf ear to the chatter just when it should be listening closely. Much like the old fable about the boy who cried wolf.

But all that was for the movers and the shakers to sort out and deal with. He was just a foot soldier on the front lines, determined to remain alert to any and all threats. He was there to dismantle the bomb if necessary, to defuse possible volatile situations whenever possible, regardless of the personal consequences.