by Harper Lin
Granny Strikes Back
A Secret Agent Granny Mystery Book 3
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 STRIKES BACK
Copyright © 2018 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
All Books by Harper Lin
A Note From Harper
About the Author
Excerpt from “Sweets and a Stabbing”
One
Getting attacked by an assassin is not my idea of the best way to prepare for a first date.
A visit to the hair salon, putting on a nice dress, and making sure my reading glasses are in my purse so I can decipher the menu? Yes, most certainly all good things to do. I remember enough about dating etiquette to know what needs to be done, even if I haven’t been on a first date for forty years.
Times have changed, of course, and I’ve changed too. The last time I had a date, Jimmy Carter was president and I could read a menu without any help. There was no Internet dating, I didn’t have gray hair back then, and I didn’t get guilty feelings every time I looked at the picture of my late husband.
But one thing I certainly do remember about dating in the 1970s was that part of the preparations certainly did not include wiping a stranger’s blood off the bathroom floor.
I’m Barbara Gold. Age: 70. 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 widow and grandmother.
Addendum to current status: Realizing just how much I need the few people left in my life.
My son and his family had flown off for a week’s holiday in the Bahamas, leaving me alone with my small circle of friends. I immediately felt lonely. Not that my friends are bad people. They’re all quite nice and pleasant. It’s just that they’re all old, some considerably older than I am, and frankly most of them are quite boring. Cheerville encourages that in its citizens. Nice, pleasant, and boring.
There was one notable exception to the boredom—Octavian Perry.
I met him at a Seniors’ Yoga class at the Cheerville Senior Center. He was by far the least senior of anyone at Senior’s Yoga. I guessed his age at about my own although he looked younger thanks to regular exercise and a healthy lifestyle. He had a lovely full head of hair (all gray, of course) and his deepest wrinkles were smile lines. Octavian smiled a lot. It was infectious.
I was smiling already as I applied my make up, examining myself in the bathroom mirror. He was due any minute to whisk me off for dinner at the Adowa Restaurant, a new Ethiopian place. He had billed it as “wonderfully exotic.”
No, Octavian, eating at a middle class immigrant’s bistro in a leafy suburb isn’t exotic. Grilling camel meat while taking mortar fire in the Sahara is exotic, but nice try.
I chuckled to myself, wondering how Octavian would react to a situation like that.
Just then Dandelion crawled up my leg, ruining the fifth pair of pantyhose that week. The little tortoiseshell kitten had surprisingly painful claws, especially when she decided I was something to climb on.
“Oh, do behave,” I scolded her, shaking her off.
She landed on the tile and looked up at me.
“Hungry?” I asked.
She only stared. I decided not to get into a staring contest with a cat. It’s like playing drinking games with a Russian. You will always lose.
“I’ll feed you before I leave, and stop turning me into a batty old lady who talks to her cat, I’m trying to recapture my youth here.”
Just then Dandelion whipped around and stared out the bathroom door, eyes going wide. She bolted out the door, stared at something towards the back of the house, and shot away in the other direction.
I paused.
That had been odd, and a lifetime of training had drilled into me that odd was bad. Odd could get you killed.
Then I felt it—the faintest breeze of night air. I had already closed all the windows in anticipation of leaving for the evening, so I shouldn’t be feeling that.
Unless someone had opened a window.
But I couldn’t hear a thing. While my sight wasn’t what it used to be and my knees were going, my hearing remained just as sharp as ever.
Whoever had just broken into my home knew how to move silently. That suggested this wasn’t some clueless teen acting rebellious or some clumsy druggie desperate to steal my TV for a fix.
I glanced around my bathroom for a weapon. I had maybe five seconds to arm myself. Safety razor? I didn’t have time to break it open and make a proper blade out of it. Soap dish? Good for a club but a bit small. Nail file? No good unless I hit an eye or shoved it up a nostril. I’ve done the nostril thing. It has an immediate and quite horrible effect on the target but requires an excellent aim and my reflexes aren’t what they used to be.
Hairspray! A nice big metal can with a hard edge on the bottom. Pretty nasty to spray into the eyes too.
I grabbed it and turned on the tap in the sink.
Then I got behind the bathroom door and closed it partway. Luckily for me the door opens inward and the sink is not visible from the hallway outside. Also, the mirror was set in such a way that you couldn’t see my reflection from the doorway. These little details are essential in a battlefield, and my bathroom was about to become one.
I stood there, gripping the hairspray bottle and trying to hear above the rush of the water. Of course I heard nothing, but the running tap would lead the intruder right into my little trap.
Even when he came through the door I didn’t hear him. He was a blur of motion rushing into the bathroom and going for the sink. All I saw was a man clad all in black, with a balaclava covering his face and tight black leather gloves on his hands.
Just as he stopped, realizing he’d been had, I clonked him right behind the ear with the hairspray. I brought the hard edge of the bottom of the can precisely down on a pressure point.
Even at my age I’m up for one good hit, and I sure gave it to him. Any normal adult male would be laid out on the floor unconscious.
This was not a normal adult male, and he didn’t take his cue to drop out of the fight. Very discourteous.
I did have the satisfaction to see him stagger forward and grab hold of the sink with his free hand to steady himself. His other hand gripped a Bowie knife with a serrated edge.
Yes, serrated, like I was a steak or something.
When I was younger I always found being looked at by men like I was some piece of meat to be very insulting. I still didn’t like it, although now it wasn’t so much insulting as downright frightening.
The intruder spun around and took a swipe at me with that serrated edge. Luckily I’d stunned him enough that his aim was off and he missed me by an inch.
I didn’t give him time to improve his aim
. I sprayed him full in the eyes with the hairspray.
He grunted and took a step back, allowing me to exit the door first. What a gentleman!
I ran, or what passed for running these days, to my bedroom where I had something infinitely better than a can of hairspray—a 9mm automatic pistol that I kept in a drawer in the bedside table.
Within a moment I heard his heavy footsteps coming after me, running much faster than I could and no longer caring about silence. I sprayed behind my shoulder without looking as I hurried down the short hallway to my bedroom, then tossed the can behind me. It hit him in the face with a satisfying clonk but didn’t slow him down.
The bedroom door slamming in his face was much more effective. The door and the entire doorframe shook from the impact. It brought up memories of Cliff. Cliff had been a fellow operative. Once we shared a hotel room while on assignment in Nicaragua, posing as husband and wife. Cliff decided that we should method act, so I kicked him out and told him to sleep in the hallway. When he tried to bluster back inside “his” room, I slammed the door right in his face.
Cliff had gotten the message. This guy would not.
I clicked the ridiculously weak lock shut and hurried for my gun. Just as I thought, a second later my assailant gave the door a good swift kick and it crashed open. The average American door is ridiculously weak, a downside of living in the stable country.
He strode into the bedroom, knife held high …
… and bolted out again as I pulled out my gun.
Me being a responsible gun owner saved his life. Some paranoid people leave the safety off so they can draw and fire a half second quicker. That’s such an obviously stupid practice that I won’t even bother explaining why one shouldn’t do that.
Leveling the gun, flicking off the safety, and aiming gave him just enough time to leap back into the hallway and duck around the corner.
I was already squeezing the trigger.
The bullet punched a hole in the door to the linen closet at the other end of the hallway and not in the intruder’s skull as intended.
Oh well, it was an eleven-round clip.
I moved down the hall, leading with the gun and coming around the bend fast and well away from the corner in case he wanted to grab at my weapon.
The dining room was empty. A soft sound from the kitchen to my left told me where to go next. I edged around the doorway to the kitchen, ready for a gunfight.
I didn’t get one.
He was gone, out the window he had climbed in. I flicked off the light so I wouldn’t make a good target and kept low as I moved to the window. Peering out, I didn’t see a thing in the yard.
He’d fled. Whoever he was, he’d come carrying only a knife. Obviously he wanted to kill me quietly, and I’d upset that little plan.
I closed and locked the window and checked every other lock in the house. Not that it would do much good. This guy had moved like a professional.
A professional assassin, going after little old me?
Just then the doorbell rang.
Octavian, no doubt.
What is it with men and their timing?
Two
“Hello, lovely lady!”
There he stood, all done up in a nice white suit, red tie, a red handkerchief in the breast pocket, and holding a bouquet of roses. A full dozen. So much more gentlemanly than my previous suitor, although I must admit my masked man had certainly gotten my pulse racing.
Octavian flashed me a grin. He was obviously proud of his teeth, which were straight and even with just enough imperfections to show they were real. Real teeth had become something of a rarity in my social circle. I certainly wouldn’t slam a bedroom door in Octavian’s face. I wouldn’t want to wreck that smile.
I looked past him, glancing up and down the street. No unfamiliar cars. No laser gun sights training in on me. No knife-wielding killers hiding in the bushes as far as I could see. It looked like my visitor really had left.
For now.
“Expecting someone else?” Octavian asked.
“Um, no. I thought I heard a loud bang a minute ago.”
“Probably someone who doesn’t know how to park hit another car or something,” Octavian said, sounding uninterested.
Suddenly I remembered myself. “Oh, what beautiful flowers! Thank you!”
“Not as beautiful as you.”
I giggled. Actually giggled. And I’m not the giggling sort. I must admit that he pushed all my buttons. Being a seventy-year-old widow with few friends, this kind of attention is most welcome, especially from a charmer like Octavian.
I invited him in, even though the place showed signs of a recent life and death struggle.
“Sit down, I just need to finish getting ready.”
I gave him back the flowers and hurried to the bathroom, leaving him sitting in a rather bewildered state on the couch.
Closing the door behind me, I took a quick look around. The floor near the sink was spattered with blood. Good. That might make my unwanted visitor think twice about coming back.
Or not. More likely he’d come back with a firearm.
I grabbed some toilet paper and wiped it up, tucking away some of the bloodstained paper in a cabinet in case I needed DNA evidence later. Then I went back to the hall, picked up the dented can of hairspray, and took a look at my bedroom door. There was no way to hide the splintered doorframe or the foot-shaped crack in the door itself. Then there was the bullet hole in the linen closet.
Hopefully Octavian wouldn’t ask to use the bathroom, otherwise I’d have some awkward explaining to do. At his age many men had to run off to the restroom fairly frequently. I was banking on Octavian’s prostate being in as good condition as his teeth.
Now that my commode looked a little less like an attempted murder scene, I rejoined Octavian in the living room. He hadn’t moved an inch. I took the flowers, rewarded him with a peck on the cheek (that’s all you get on a first date with me), and fetched a vase to put them in.
“Aren’t you going to turn the light on?” Octavian asked when I went to the kitchen sink in the dark.
“No, I don’t want to make myself a target for snipers,” I replied as I filled the vase with water.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Carrots. I eat lots of carrots to help my night vision. And moving around in the dark is a good exercise for the eyes. It helps the carrots do their job.”
I knew I sounded like a nutcase, but I had just survived an attack and had kissed someone for the first time since James passed. My thirteen-year-old nephew Martin didn’t count. Any time I kissed the boy he made pukey noises and rubbed the kiss off with his sleeve. And just two years ago he used to kiss me.
I returned to the living room, still giddy, just in time to see Octavian notice the photo of James on the mantelpiece.
To his immense credit, he did not pretend not to see it. Instead, he walked right over to it.
“So is this the luckiest man in the world?” he asked. Octavian has a way with words.
“Yes, that’s James.”
“I see he was a hunter. I never did much of that myself.”
James and I had worked on various missions together, and I wanted to photo in my living room to remind me of that but maintain the secrecy we had sworn to uphold. So I had chosen a photo of him in simple camo without any noticeable military gear while holding a high powered rifle with a scope. He sat on a rock in a cedar forest, looking as handsome and tough as he always had. He did, indeed, look like he was on a hunting trip.
Except that he had been hunting terrorists in the Lebanon Mountains. No need to mention that to dear old Octavian.
Looking at all those the trees in that photo, Octavian probably wouldn’t have believed me anyway. Most people who haven’t been to the Middle East think it’s all sand dunes and pyramids. There are actually green places in some parts, and the mountains and valleys between Lebanon and Syria look more like the southwest of France than something out of the 1001 N
ights. Even Saudi Arabia has some green mountains. The highest even have ski resorts. No, I’m not joking, actual ski resorts with real snow and real skiers. Of course the law requires that men go down one side of the mountain and the women, fully veiled and clad head to toe in black robes, swoosh down the other side. They look like inkblots rolling down a giant sheet of paper. Oh, the things you see in government service!
“What did he hunt?” Octavian asked.
“Big game.”
Like the chief bomb maker for Hezbollah.
“I shot a couple of deer when I was younger,” he looked at me askance, then added quickly. “To please my uncle. He was a big outdoorsman.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Deer are cute, but they’re tasty too.”
Octavian laughed. “I can see why a big game hunter wanted to marry you. I’m surprised you don’t have any of his trophies on the wall.”
“They wouldn’t match the decor.”
Besides, Suleiman al-Hosni had been a very ugly man, and there hadn’t been much left after we finished with him.
“Shall we go?” Octavian asked.
“Certainly.”
Octavian bowed to the photo. “I’ll have her home at a decent hour, sir.”
I smiled. I still felt a bit of guilt about doing this, even though James and I had had many conversations about the need to continue with our lives if one of us didn’t come back from a mission. Except we always did come back. Who would have thought that he would die of a heart attack in bed just three years into retirement? Still, I did feel a bit odd going on a date only a couple of years later.
You might think that I’d be more worried about the assassin who had broken into my house than the eleventh-hour rebirth of my love life. But I felt pretty sure I had scared him off for the moment, and if he did decide to come back it would be best to be gone. I fully intended on calling the police as well as my contacts in the CIA, but I needed to think this through first, figure out who might have done this. James and I had a long list of enemies.
