pick things up?
Anatoli nodded. Mimi went down to her hands and knees, a flurry of bare arms and legs, and disappeared headfirst under the table to retrieve the coins and conduct her larger bit of business.
She crawled around between four bare female legs and two male legs in jeans. Working quickly, she picked up coin after coin. She got Anatoli and his two female friends quickly conditioned to feeling her movements, brushing against them, reaching past their shoes and boots. Anatoli was predictably amused and fresh, giving Mimi a solid pinch on her butt. She gave his hand a playful slap, which only encouraged him more. Then his hand came to rest on her butt and gave it a squeeze.
Perfect timing, just what she wanted. It gave her the opportunity to “retaliate” by holding his foot. At exactly the same moment he was examining her backside, she withdrew the little homing device from her waist and shoved it firmly into the heel of his boot. Then she wriggled free and emerged with a laugh from beneath the table.
The two women with Anatoli glared at her. But he was all hearts and flowers.
“
“
“
She turned and sauntered back to Enrico, feeling Anatoli’s eyes on her backside as she left. She slid into the seat next to Enrico.
“Got him,” she said. She wasn’t nervous at all. Inside, she felt remarkably cool. “We can get out of here,” she said.
“No, no,” Enrico answered. “We wait a few minutes. No reason to make him suspicious if he sees you leave right away.”
“Then I’ll have another scotch,” she said.
In fact, she had two of them. Both doubles.
Thirty minutes later, they were back out on the street. They walked a block. There they found Rizzo in a car, waiting. He was just putting down a cell phone when they approached.
“Perfect,” he said. “The signal is strong.”
“It’s in the heel of his right boot,” she said.
“I won’t ask how you did that,” Rizzo said.
“Use your imagination.”
“Mimi, you’re a genius. And I love your outfit.”
He handed her an envelope. Impetuously, she opened it. There were five hundred Euros in it in cash, ten bills of fifty Euros each.
“Anytime,” she said. This was the easiest money she’d ever made.
“I’m off duty now?” Enrico asked Rizzo.
He gave the handsome young man a nod. “Just see that Mimi gets home safely,” he said. “Eventually.”
“Eventually,” Mimi said, hanging on Enrico’s arm now.
They all laughed.
Rizzo pulled away from the curb. Enrico took Mimi under his arm, and, mission accomplished, they went their own way for the rest of the night.
SIXTY
The formal way for the US government to persuade a foreign government to do something is through a
It can be done at any level, up to and including “calling in” the foreign country’s ambassador for a senior state official to deliver the request or having the US ambassador approach the host country foreign minister or even prime minister.
In the case of the American couple who had been shot to death on a cold evening in January, the American government needed to be coy in its handling of the case. The Italians were already fuming over American handling of several intelligence issues, and there were still warrants out for several CIA agents concerning “renditions” carried out in Italy. Worse, the Italians knew that the CIA had embedded some excellent contacts in Rome right under their noses within the various Italian police agencies.
Hence, a prickly problem it was. The CIA station chief in Rome informally approached his contacts in Italian intelligence and began to exert whatever informal influence could be brought to bear upon the Roman police. The scandals about CIA flights with disappeared persons transiting Italian airspace did not make this any easier. Similar contacts were made in Washington through the Italian ambassador.
An additional complication was that the Italian government was, as always, a delicate coalition. Such requests reaching the public, or at least certain members of parliament, could actually blow apart the ruling coalition.
Nonetheless, the matter of Lt. Rizzo’s investigation went through the usual back channels. Rizzo felt he had made highly praiseworthy progress on the case. So when he found himself summoned to the office of the minister of the interior, he should have beamed with pride, expecting to be congratulated upon his fine work. But one never knew which way these meetings with bosses would go. Nor, in any way, could he expect to know where his investigation would be headed next.
SIXTY-ONE
Monday morning. Alex stood in the security line at JFK in New York, waiting to check in for her flight.
Time for everyone to be searched. She read all the signs. Every bag to be X-rayed. Take off your jacket. Take off your socks and shoes. High risk of terrorist attack. Drop your slightly used undergarments in a one-pint ziplock and turn them over to the baggage handlers.
Hey, got a steel pin in your hip? Take it out so we can check it.
What nonsense. Okay, okay. She knew she was anxious over this new trip, and she tried to cool it. But what was her country coming to? Give me your tired, your poor, your teeming masses, your fingerprints.
Signs, signs. Everywhere there were signs, as the old pop song went. Messing up the view. Messing up everyone’s mind. No cigarette lighters on the aircraft. No scissors. No knives. No booze. How about a numchuck or a Tai Chi sword?
Yeah. Long-haired freaky people didn’t need to apply, but they were actually going though the security line just fine. A woman who looked like someone’s great grandmother was being searched, however. A security person was examining her roll of lipstick. Alex sipped from a fresh bottle of cold water that she knew she was going to have to relinquish.
The fear had taken root all over America by now, planted by excessively reckless people in the government. Having been in Ukraine on the day of the RPG attacks, having had to fire lethal weapons at other human beings and shoot her way out, she knew what real fear was. She knew what it was like to be scared, to understand what a true threat feels like, to be a moment away from a painful death or perhaps permanent disfigurement if she acted wrong or was just plain unlucky. She knew what it was like to lose someone she loved in an attack that made no sense.
But on American soil, she didn’t want to live in constant fear. She resented the signs. Who the heck was going to make a bomb out of Scope and Pepsodent, anyway?
Alex took off her shoes, belt, and jacket and put them in one bin. Her computer came out of her backpack and went into another while the backpack itself went into a third. Then she dumped her wallet, change, keys, passport, and boarding pass into a fourth. Then she graduated to the hallowed grounds of a “five binner” as she dropped the
