Threat Level

by William Christie

  The girl smiled her thank you. “Nous sommes Afriques?” Troy had run into this before, in other countries. African meant AIDS, and they were gone. “Non,” he replied, matching her French. “Je suis americain.”

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, seemingly delighted and in good English, “that is so nice!”

  “Really?” said Troy.

  “Oh yes. I like Americans very much.” As a gesture of reassurance, she rested her hand on his knee.

  Which was a nice little zap of electricity that traveled right up Troy’s leg. “I’m glad to hear that. I’m Leon. And what is your name?”

  “Pai.”

  No doubt the short version of a multisyllable Thai name that, of course, was not her own. Troy gave her a big smile. “Your name is as beautiful as you are, Pai. May I buy you a drink?” He felt that at least half of American taxpayers wouldn’t disapprove of him spending his per diem in such a fashion.

  “Yes, thank you.” Rapid chatter in Thai with the bartender, and something pink and fruity came sliding over. “First visit to Bangkok, Leon?”

  “That’s right,” said Troy, deciding this was no time to be telling the truth about anything. “I just arrived tonight, but from what I’ve seen it’s a beautiful country.”

  Pai dropped her eyes demurely. “You like to dance?”

  “Baby, it’s a myth that all the brothers can dance.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Troy smiled and put a hand on the hand that was on his knee. “I’d rather talk to you.”

  The eyes dropped again.

  When Troy finally glanced at his watch, it was closing in on 2:00 AM. “Pai, I have a business meeting tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh?”

  “Perhaps you’d like to come back to my room?” He knew he really shouldn’t, but that delicate little hand kept sliding up and down his thigh. After all, the place was full of pros—it didn’t smell like a setup.

  “Oh, Leon, you a wonderful man.”

  “Maybe we could work something out.”

  The hand slid all the way up his thigh. “Oh, I be so nice to you. You gift me what you want in morning.”

  Troy was reassured by that. Because if she’d pretended she was coming for free he would have told her to forget about it. He wasn’t going for the settle-up-in-the-morning routine, though. That was an open door for two drastically different numbers and a potentially nasty dispute about someone’s relative worth as a professional. They settled on four thousand baht, just under a hundred dollars, for an all-nighter. Evidently she had some kind of arrangement with the hotel because there was no fine to pay to the bar for taking her out, as was usual in Thai clubs.

  On the way up in the elevator Troy gave her a thorough frisk, in the guise of feeling her up. Not that he didn’t feel her up too, but it seemed wise to check for weapons.

  Inside his room Pai excused herself and went to the bathroom. Troy took the opportunity to go through her purse. Regular ID; nothing out of the ordinary there. He raided the minibar to make them a drink. He wasn’t about to let her do it.

  Water was running in the bathroom. Pai came out and sashayed up to Troy, smiling. Then she twirled around, gathering up her hair to give him access to her zipper.

  Troy drew it down very slowly. Then, with the back of the dress hanging open, he started at her neck, sliding his hands down her shoulders, then her back, sweeping around the front, and down. She was making nice little pleasurable noises the whole time. Troy’s next objective was the waistband of her panty hose. Which he rolled down, methodically, inch by inch, until he reached her ankles.

  She was naked, and he still fully clothed—which he found the hottest thing so far.

  She took his clothes off, in nearly opposite fashion. Almost without touching him at all, just light whispers of touch, randomly here and there. Troy had to close his eyes and try to hang on.

  Pai took his hand and led him into the bathroom, where the tub was almost full.

  And she gave him a bath. Troy had been dick checked before, but never so elegantly. Troy washed every inch of her, and she washed every part of him except what he most wanted washed. Flicking her head back and forth, she playfully lashed him with her wet hair.

  They toweled each other dry, she still taking her time while Troy was now in much more of a rush.

  On the way to the bed Troy was diamond hard, as if he could cut glass. More teasing, more feathery touching. Trying to move things along a little faster, Troy moved the tip of his tongue over the erect tip of one nipple. His palm was pressed against her pubic bone, his fingers clasping and relaxing.

  There was no way. She was in the driver’s seat, and he was the one whose head was about to blow off. Troy wondered whether there was some kind of advanced degree program they sent these girls to.

  Finally Pai pushed him back on the bed with two palms against his chest. She rolled on the condom the same way he’d rolled down her hose. Rising up on her knees, she lowered herself very slowly down on top of him. Troy groaned loudly. Finally.

  But she didn’t move. Troy started to move his hips, but she held him down.

  Then Troy felt himself gripped. And squeezed. And . . . milked was the only word to describe it. And Pai still wasn’t moving. Only her stomach muscles. She was smiling down at him.

  “Jesus Christ,” Troy said loudly. It came out not quite like a prayer.

  Up and down. Side to side. He was pulled and squeezed and twisted, in a rhythm that kept increasing. Troy’s face was all clenched up; he was making a series of panting, almost squeaking sounds that would have thoroughly embarrassed him if he’d only known he was doing it. And then a loud, groaning “aaaagh,” muscles locked, almost levitating off the bed.

  Both of them still, she still on top of him. Troy had to blink several times to clear up the spots in his vision field. His breathing was just steadying. “Holy shit, baby.”

  “You want me to go?” she asked, almost unbelievably coquettish considering her position.

  “Hell no,” Troy replied.

  It was at the end of round two. Troy was on his stomach and Pai was rubbing his neck. And he was as relaxed as possibly he’d ever been in his life. And she handed him his drink. And Lee Troy took a big gulp.

  “I wake up and I’m alone,” he was saying to Ed Storey. “That’s when I know I fucked up. I look around and my cash is still there. I’m four thousand baht light, but the rest of the cash is still there. That’s when I know I really fucked up. No working girl is going to slip me a mickey and leave a nickel behind. So I figure, if I haven’t been clipped, then all my shit’s been searched and each piece of electronic gear has at least two new chips in it. I might even have a transponder up my ass.”

  Storey took the news with his usual calm. “So what did you do?” Not upset, just curious.

  “Well, first thing, I leave all my shit exactly where it is. Outside the hotel I’m so fucking paranoid I think I’ve got GPS chips in my suit buttons. I even stop off, buy new clothes, and throw my old ones, shoes included, in a trash can.

  “Now I’m in and out of cabs, in and out of buildings. I’ve got a different change of clothes in a shopping bag. I change again, go out a restaurant back door. I’m done fucking up—I am not bringing a tail here.”

  There were in an apartment just south of the Chinatown district, on the east bank of the Chao Phraya River. A safe house maintained by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  Storey had been waiting patiently until Troy was done. “You made a mistake but you didn’t fuck up. The only way you could have fucked up is if you kept all this to yourself, trying to cover your ass. That’s how people get themselves in trouble in this business. Besides, it doesn’t seem like you did the right thing, but you really did.”

  “Now you’re shitting me. I’m lucky I didn’t get my throat cut. How did I even remotely do the right thing?”

  “What’s my second rule?”

  “Always live your cover.”

  “Correct,” said S
torey. “You’re a twenty-seven-year-old American businessman in Thailand for the first time. Do you stay in your hotel room your first night in Bangkok, watching TV? I think not. You at least go down to the bar for a drink—your hotel bar because you’re the typical timid American in the exotic east. A beautiful Thai girl wants to come to your room—do you say no? I think not, at least if your cover is you’re not gay. So you lived your cover. You got rolled. And now you just keep playing the game. If we want you to be followed, you take along your phone and your PDA. Otherwise you leave them in your room. And when we leave the country you wipe your PDA drive clean and leave everything behind. We’ll buy you new gear. Okay?”

  “Not anywhere near okay. I walked right into a honey trap, face-first.”

  “More like dick-first,” Storey observed.

  “Thanks for trying to make me feel better.”

  “Hey, it’s a good lesson learned. In this business more guys get killed by their dicks than anything else.”

  Troy looked down at his crotch. “You hear that?” He shook his head. “I hear you, but I don’t know about Big Lee. You can’t talk any sense to him.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to get in the middle of any issues you and Big Lee might be having.” Storey paused. “She really muscle-fucked you, huh?”

  “She sure did.”

  Storey was wearing a faraway expression. “I was a young trooper. First time I got muscle-fucked, I almost married the girl right then and there. Trying to figure out how to ship her home in my duffel bag.” He shook his head at the memory. “She had an act. Slipped a banana right into her pussy and it came out sliced. Sliced! I can’t remember how many shows a night she did.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t marry her,” said Troy.

  “I remember getting this mental image of her squatting over my cereal bowl every morning. Kind of ruined it for me.”

  Troy was grinning at him. “Thanks for sharing that.”

  “You’re the one who got laid last night. Don’t thank me.”

  “I won’t,” said Troy. “How do you think they got on to me?”

  “CIA gave you up to Thai security. That’s pretty definite.”

  “Then why didn’t they just grab me and throw me out of the country?”

  “That wouldn’t be good counterintelligence. Once they’ve made you, they follow you around to try and acquire the rest of any network we might have. The Thais can get muscular if they need to, but they’re also subtle.”

  “If they’re subtle, then why did they tip their hand by leaving my cash?”

  “They had no choice. Think about it. If they took all your cash, you’d be wondering why they left your phone and PDA, the answer being so they could bug your phone and PDA. Either way they take the chance of tipping their hand. They were probably hoping you’d think you just fell asleep, and couldn’t remember if you paid her or not.”

  “Now I get it,” said Troy. Old Storey didn’t miss much.

  “The girl was still the best way to get to you.”

  “Maybe I should send them a thank-you note,” said Troy. “She was the best I ever had.” Then something occurred to him. “Why didn’t they tumble onto you?”

  Storey shrugged. “Probably because there’s a lot fewer twenty-seven-year-old black American businessmen arriving in Bangkok on any given day than thirty-four-year-old white American businessmen.” He cracked a little smile. “Looks like racial profiling to me.”

  “Yeah, wouldn’t be the first time that happened. First driving while black, now it’s flying while black.”

  “Getting back to business,” said Storey, “the surveillance team from support had a chance to look around. CIA and the Thais are on our metal dealer’s business and house like a blanket. Team leader told me they were worried about getting made, and they never got closer than a quarter of a mile to the target.”

  “So that’s it. We can scrub this bullshit op and quit playing these stupid games.”

  “The people we work for,” said Storey, “these are the games they play. And they still want us here.”

  “So what do we do, sit around and jerk off?”

  “Not you, that’s for sure. I’ll give you a choice. We can hang by the pool, and you can keep getting laid, or we can do something useful.”

  “Do what? Just because we’re in town, if anything happens—the target makes the surveillance or gets away, you know the CIA’s going to blame us. That’s how those fuckers operate.”

  “I know. But they’ll blame us even if we’re sitting beside the pool. Hear me out, now. Since they couldn’t get close, our surveillance team got up high and broke out their four-thousand-millimeter camera lens to watch everyone coming and going—”

  “You ever carry one of those fuckers, and the footlocker they come in, up a flight of stairs?” Troy interrupted.

  “Yeah, a hundred-and-fifty-pound pack is easier to hump around. But you can pick out a zit on someone’s nose from a mile away. Surveillance also picked up some cell phone calls. Just hit and miss, nothing like they’d get if they were closer. And something they noticed gave me an idea. Who knows everything that goes on inside a SEAL Team?”

  “Command master chief,” Troy said instantly.

  “Okay, you’ve got everything the officers do, and everything the enlisted do. Who knows both? Who knows everything? Someone so insignificant no one ever thinks about them.”

  Now Troy gave it much more thought. “I got it. The admin clerk. Fuckers see every piece of paper, suck up to the officers, gossip all day.”

  “You’re close,” said Storey. “You’re very close. As a matter of fact, you’re right. But there’s one other guy I’m thinking about.”

  Troy kept thinking. Then he broke into a smile. “The commanding officer’s driver. If he’s not sitting there while the officers shoot the shit, he’s hanging around the office. And if he’s not doing that, he’s back at the barracks with the troops.”

  “Correct. Always look for the weak link, the vulnerability. The man in charge isn’t it. He’s always worried about his security, about getting arrested. About getting snatched. He’s got bodyguards. The guy who drives him around—he just lives in an apartment out in town.”

  “You think we should pay him a visit?”

  “That’s my idea. I’ve already taken the surveillance team off the big guy and put them on the driver. They’re assembling a target folder on him right now. But after what happened in Pakistan, I’m not telling you. I’m asking you.”

  “Hell,” said Troy. “I can get laid any time.”

  12

  People joined the FBI to arrest criminals. But at least half an agent’s career was spent sitting in cars and vans and apartments, watching something—usually nothing. And another quarter was spent writing reports about it.

  So it was for Beth Royale and Paul Moody in a surveillance van belonging to the Organized Crime Unit of the Detroit field office. The van was painted to resemble an oil heater repair company, something that could sit on a residential Dearborn, Michigan, street all day without attracting attention.

  Beth had binoculars to her eyes, looking through the tinted window. “And the car hasn’t moved for two days?” she asked.

  Neither of the Detroit special agents in the car answered her.

  Beth lowered the binoculars, turned so she could face them, and repeated, “The car hasn’t moved for two days?”

  The older of the two, a crusty white male warhorse in his early fifties, continued to ignore her. But she locked eyes with the younger of the two, this one a new guy in his late twenties, until he said, “No, it hasn’t moved.”

  “Thanks,” Beth replied. “I guess you don’t have to watch too many empty houses with the Mafia.”

  Muhammad al-Sharif owned only one car, and there it sat in front of his house. But there had been no signs of life in the house for the last two days except lights going on at dusk and off in the morning, evidence more of a timer than human occupancy. Al-Shar
if had not opened his auto repair business either.

  The older agent finally spoke. “It’s easy to make cases when you get first crack at the national intelligence.”

  “We like to make cases, then make arrests,” Beth fired back instantly. “Not make arrests hoping to make a case.”

  A stinging shot at the Detroit office’s only antiterrorism case so far. Four Middle Eastern immigrants arrested as a “sleeper operational combat cell,” or so the prosecutors had called it. Arrests had been made in the so-far-vain hope someone would confess and roll over, and it was looking like a major disaster if it ever went to court.

  The van was parked near a corner, a blind spot so anyone entering or leaving from one side door could not be observed from the house they were watching. Beth slid over and opened the door. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Bring back some coffee,” said the older agent. It did not come out like a request.

  Beth’s eyes flicked over to Moody. He imperceptibly shook his head. “I don’t drink coffee,” she said, slamming the door.

  “Bitch,” the older agent said. “We ought to drive around the block. Let her come back and find us gone.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Moody.

  “There won’t be a gap in the surveillance. Or are you worried about her?”

  “No, I’m worried about you,” said Moody.

  “What, she’s going to be on the phone crying to the bosses? So what?”

  “You do what you want,” said Moody. “I’ll just tell you a story I heard. Her first assignment was New York, and they really gave her the business. Froze her out, messed with her desk, new centerfold pinned up every day.”

  “And she filed a complaint with O.P.R.,” the older agent said assuredly. The Office of Professional Responsibility was the FBI’s version of an internal affairs department, in charge of disciplining agents.

  Moody shook his head. “One morning everyone came to work and opened up their e-mail. And all the guys who were giving her the business had something from Beth in the in-box. No message, just a photo. A guy on all fours, naked, and a dominatrix fucking him in the ass with a dildo. She’d taken every guy’s picture and Photoshopped it onto the body of the guy getting corn-holed. Really convincing, or so I was told. The guys were pissed; then they noticed that she’d copied the photo to each of their home e-mail addresses.”