Granny Goes Rogue
A Secret Agent Granny Mystery Book 8
Harper Lin
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GRANNY GOES ROGUE
Copyright © 2019 by Harper Lin.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
www.harperlin.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
About the Author
A Note From Harper
Excerpt from “Love and Murder in Savannah”
One
When you’re young, you never think about growing old. It’s only when you reach middle age—say, forty or fifty—that reality sets in. Wrinkles appear. Your knees begin to hurt in damp weather. You get embarrassing and unprintable medical conditions. And as you pass through middle age and begin to approach retirement, you realize that aging is irreversible and it’s your turn to go over that proverbial hill.
Well, sort of. If you’ve spent your entire youth (and a large part of your middle years) hunting down terrorists, toppling drug lords, and causing mayhem among every group of bad guys from Beirut to Bogotá, you don’t really think about growing older. Aging is something that happens to other people. You’re too relieved to make it through another day in one piece to worry about how each individual part is working.
Until you suddenly find yourself living with a cat in a cute little cottage in a sleepy bedroom district called Cheerville.
Then you know you’re old, and I have to say it can be pretty darn annoying. Sure, I could still hit the bull’s-eye at fifty yards with my 9mm automatic, but I had to wear my reading glasses to see the gunsights. I could still use a variety of martial arts to lay low a man half my age and twice my size, but I’d need several nights of hot baths before my joints and muscles stop screaming at me in protest.
It was a bit of a rip-off, if I must say. I’d been a specimen of physical perfection for nearly half a century until all those forced marches, battles, and jungle campsites began to catch up with me.
And now I had a bad case of lower back pain just when my family was about to celebrate my grandson’s fourteenth birthday. I never used to get lower back pain. Joint pain from too many years firing guns and lifting heavy objects, sure. Occasional cricks in the neck from that time my head snapped back as my Kevlar helmet took a .303 round, oh yes indeed. But lower back pain? I didn’t know where that came from. I couldn’t recall ever being injured or straining my lower back.
That was frightening, because this new pain might be due to simple aging rather than my hyperactive lifestyle.
I’m Barbara Gold. Age: barely 71. Height: 5’5”. Eyes: blue. Hair: gray. Weight: none of your business. Specialties: undercover surveillance, small arms, chemical weapons, Middle Eastern and Latin American politics. Current status: retired CIA agent, widow, and grandmother.
Addendum to current status: Fully aware of the fact that I was probably going to get the wrong gift for my grandson’s fourteenth birthday because I was hopelessly out of touch with teen culture, and the one possible gift I had found had been crushed by a dead body landing in my shopping cart. I knew the man was dead because there was a large kitchen knife driven up to the hilt in the left ear, and the point was sticking out the right ear.
Perhaps I should back up.
I had been minding my own business, pushing a shopping cart around SerMart, a high-tech big-box store on the edge of town that sells everything from condiments to craft supplies in bulk. I’d already seen customers leave with thirty boxes of cereal and fifty pounds of toilet paper.
Huge shelves towered on either side of me as I walked down the jewelry section. Bracelets of every description were lined up on the shelves—from little silver friendship bracelets to hunky gold things that probably helped you work out your biceps and triceps merely by wearing them.
The bracelets came in boxes of four, six, ten, or twelve. The idea was that if you bought them in bulk, you would get a discount.
The shopping carts were equally oversized. I had taken the smallest-sized shopping cart available, and I had to practically do chin-ups to see over the top of the thing.
It wasn’t helping with that back pain I mentioned, I can tell you.
So why was I in here, you might ask? I was asking myself the same question. Curiosity, more than anything else. I may be what many people consider old, but I try to keep up with the times. That can be useful, especially in my former line of work, and that training never goes away.
And SerMart certainly was part of the times. It had just opened to international press coverage because it was an experiment by the massive international online vendor Serengeti, which had become famous for its rapid delivery and cut-rate prices. Retail was something new for them, and I must say they still had some bugs to iron out.
Like not having any human beings anywhere in this labyrinth except at the cash registers.
They had talking drones instead, complete with facial and voice recognition software.
One floated down from the lofty reaches of the warehouse and hovered in front of me. I stopped.
“Hello,” it said in a neutral female voice with not a trace of an accent. A little screen on the front showed a cartoon smiley face. “Are you having a good shopping experience?”
“Yes,” I replied. Actually, I wasn’t. I found this whole place depressing, but I was raised to have proper manners, even to flying robots.
“I noticed you have moved from the charms section to the
