No changes to chapter 8 (yet) so finally a new chapter.
Hope you enjoy.
Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 9 – Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night
Rhonda Gilbert lost her Company tail in a fifteenth-floor custodian’s closet at Trump Tower. The custodian’s closet contained one of her many New York City caches, one of hundreds across the globe. Wherever she posted, she used a mathematical formula based on the host city’s name to determine which buildings to use, which floors to use, and what to cache there. LiquidKey – a sweet little Special Services gadget – provided access to any mechanical lock. A Special Services app provided access to electronic locks.
Each cache contained a complete makeover. In this case, the athletically thin, black suited, middle-aged woman with thick, hip length blonde hair went in and an older, matronly woman with thick glasses, a slight lisp, ruddy complexion, and dark, Mediterranean features came out, each makeover took less then sixty seconds thanks to a special Quick-Change class her Russian handlers arranged for her when she first approached them.
Rhonda enjoyed playing both sides. She enjoyed having her own island which nobody knew about. She enjoyed the Russians paying her while they figured out how they would resurrect their empire, what shape it would take and who would run it. She enjoyed going to them, not waiting for them to come to her, with bona fides of a high-level US intelligence/security weapons research group they knew nothing about.
“Don’t beat yourselves up too much. Most of the people who should know about it don’t know about it.”
Irregular meetings were set up at various hotels – dives to five-star – at odd intervals and wherever her missions took her.
Lots of the stuff she told her handlers returned a nod, a “good job,” a “just continue what you’re doing.”
But everything changed when she mentioned Shaman to them, the US’ latest and greatest attempt to determine if ESP and now labeled PSI abilities existed, and if so, how to screen for them, how to foster them, how to develop them for strategic and tactical purposes.
One or two or her handlers completely lost their composure, sat forward, and reached across the table for the files. “How far has this gotten?”
She, of course, remained calm, cool, and composed, something she learned to do in high school. Each time she revealed only what she wanted revealed, or revealed something completely opposite to her true thoughts and feelings, she remembered the repeated, ongoing, incessant, never ending insult, emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, embarrassment, she suffered at the hands of other students, teachers, administration.
And let’s not forget the unending, over arching stupidity – Stupidity! – of the same.
Somebody told her to keep her head down and low.
It didn’t matter. They’d tilt her head up just to make sure they slapped her face.
And by the middle of sophomore year, she’d learned to not show what she felt, not show what she thought, and she remembered telling her worthless priest father-confessor, “Getting no response is no fun. Even they get it’s no fun besting an idiot, and if that’s my safest game, I’ll play my safest game.”
In the middle of her junior year she took saw a matchbook with BIG MONEY and INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL on the cover. Beneath them was “look inside for details.” There she read “Draw a camel and answer these three questions Yes or No.” with a postal address at the bottom.
