From her vantage, many people were clustered around the café. She turned, hunting for a small pizzeria. When she was in Italy, she always tried to find new places to eat. She had to admit, she was a foodie snob. She found such a place and walked in. The smell of it made her mouth water. It was one of the best perks of her job. Travel and food. A little old woman greeted her. Imani spoke fluent Italian, and so was presumed a local, if not from possibly Naples.
She’d spent several years in Naples as a child. Her parents had been in the military, and so she’d learned the language from a Neapolitan. Like most places, there are regional differences in language. She had an eidetic memory, and one of her hobbies was picking up languages and mastering them.
Taking a seat, she ordered the house wine and she ordered the fried zucchini blossoms as an appetizer and a small pinsere, a slightly thicker pizza. She sat back and watched the small room around her. There weren’t many people here, it was too early.
She’d lived in many countries, absorbing their cultures and their languages. Being an only child, her father’s Greek ancestry mixed with her mother’s Irish, produced a daughter of the world. Imani was given greater latitude to peruse different interests. She’d been born in Seoul Korea, where she’d been taught her first language. She had a Korean nanny. Her parents had next ended up in Atsugi Japan, where she’d picked up Japanese from her Japanese nanny.
She’d also been old enough to start martial arts. She’d started very young in Tae Kwon Do. She’d been four years old and then when she was ten, she’d become interested in Hapkido, which is also a Korean martial art. Through these arts, she learned discipline, control and flexibility. By the time she went into the navy after high school, she’d earned third degree blackbelts from each philosophy.
Both her parents worked long hours and sometimes one parent would be deployed. She’d been encouraged to keep busy and follow her passions. Cathy and Nickolas Zakarian loved their daughter enough to let her explore her world. And she did.
Her family had then transferred to Naples, Italy and then on to Rota, Spain, and still on after that to the Azores, Portugal. And so, her life had been lived shifting, in flux and never settled. She’d been given a free hand at learning. When she’d been about thirteen, her parents had gotten her, her very first computer. She laughed now, the computer had been a big clunky thing.
She sat back as the old woman brought her a glass of wine and a plate of the blossoms. She inhaled beatifically, nodded and smiled at the old woman, who smiled back and left her to her food. Her head itched, but she ignored it. She was never without a wig. It was rare for anyone to see her in her natural state. She had short hair beneath, a mousy brown and uninspiring. She kept it short, because there were times when she dressed as a young man.
Either fortunate or unfortunate, Imani had an androgynous face. When she was younger, it was not unusual to be called a plain Jane by her teachers, though they thought, out of her hearing. But it worked in her favor now in her chosen vocation. When she wanted to look feminine, she simply applied makeup, becoming hyperfeminine. When she wanted to look male, she left off the make up and wore men’s clothing and sported a thin mustache. She looked like a young male, perhaps a recent departure from his teens.
Imani was tall, at least for a woman and slender, with long legs. She had small breasts and this helped her look like a man if she wore bulkier shirts or sweaters. She felt her phone vibrate and pulled it from her pocket. She looked at it and then looked around, ensuring that no one was near. She never spoke, only texted. No one had ever heard her real voice. It was safer that way. She was a fabrication, an avatar and there wasn’t a person alive that knew her true face nor her true name except Nobu Grullon, her partner in crime.
“Is it complete?” Nobu texted.
“Of course. I’m eating some dinner now.” She typed.
“Bring me some back.” He typed, which made her laugh. She should, it would serve him right.
“See you soon.” She typed.
She hung up, the conversation instantly deleted. She didn’t need to call the bank, she received her pay up front. Nobu had set up her accounts. Most of her hits ran $50,000. Her highest earning had been a double hit, $150,000. That had been difficult and hairy. It was not always so, but over the years, she’d built up a reputation under several sites. Nobu, had been responsible for that as well. Her phone was encrypted. She had Nobu ensure that her phones and computers were all encrypted. One didn’t go on the darknet without it. You did not enter into that world without an extensive knowledge of how to protect yourself.
You didn’t need someone piggybacking off your signal and locating you, nor jumping into accounts and stealing money. The biometric login, her thumb print and a twelve-character password would open the phone, and if anyone tried to hack it, all info would be destroyed, including the phone’s microcircuits. Nobu was a mastermind.
She and Nobu had met when she’d joined the navy when she’d graduated from high school. Her first duty station out of corpsman school was Misawa Japan. She’d only been in the navy a year, before she realized it was not for her. She’d always been an independent girl and now woman and she found the homogenized sameness stifling. She found herself fighting it at every turn, which found her in trouble many times.
“Girl, you need
