Donovan Meanwhile: Kings of Sparta

by Bierley, B. L.

  “Just do it, please,” I finally say. “Three of them. But you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  He nods and sets about making the drinks.

  Hanson and Olivia express concern over my choice.

  I tell them to relax, that the drinks are going to taste fine.

  “It’s not the taste we’re worried about,” Hanson says. “We need you to keep a clear head tonight.”

  “Have you ever even had a martini?” Olivia asks.

  “Have you?” I ask her in return. She rolls her eyes.

  Hanson frowns. “Just be careful.”

  I gave him a reassuring wink and a nod, and then lift one of the glasses the bartender places at my elbow. A little bit of liquid sloshes out onto the bar as I figure out how to balance the drink in my fingers.

  What the hell kind of design is this, anyway? Like trying to hold a birdbath on the end of a toothpick.

  I take a sip, and my mouth catches fire.

  Then my throat.

  Finally my stomach.

  When I say it was horrid, you have to understand that I mean it was utterly horrid. Like what I imagine drinking drano would feel like.

  I shouldn’t have had him shake it, obviously. Lesson learned.

  I try to hide the disgust in my face as I take another sip, with the other two watching me skeptically.

  “Drink up,” I barely manage to say.

  Crap, this is gross.

  I know what I have to do.

  Bringing the glass to my lips one more time, I tip the whole thing up and down the rest of the drink in one, long, searing gulp.

  “Phew,” I say. “Good stuff.

  I set the glass back down on the bar and gave the bartender a satisfied smile. “Thang-oo” I say, finding my mouth parts uncooperative. They’re still reeling and wrenching form the taste.

  “I get it,” Hanson says. “You’re insane. I thought the old you was insane, but I see now I was wrong.”

  I just shrug. “Just need a little something to take the edge off.”

  “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.” The thick Russian voice I hear must be Chevko’s. We all turn and see him standing at the top of the stairs with a champagne flute in his hand. He looks just like his picture, but he’s shorter than I expected.

  “Thank you all for joining me tonight. There are friends here from all over the world, from all walks of life.”

  “I seriously doubt that,” Hanson whispered in my ear.

  “But tonight, I want to recognize one person in particular, who I feel has exemplified what it means to be a true patriot. Because being a man of your country means understanding the delicate relationship between those who govern, and those who produce. The ebb and the flow of commerce and democracy. President Burke is one of those patriots.”

  Everyone claps, and my dad steps up to the top of the stairs, waving away the applause humbly. Chevko shakes his hand. I see Secret Service agents around the room tensing up, ready for action.

  “Petri, please,” Chevko says to someone down in the crowd. A man, whom I assume is named Petri, steps halfway up and hands an small box over to Chevko.

  Bellamy gasps in my ear. “There it is.”

  The purple box.

  My heart starts racing.

  “You guys,” I say quietly to whoever is listening. “Am I about to see my dad get assassinated?”

  Hanson clenches his fists. “Shit. The guards don’t even know what that thing is.”

  “Neither do we, guys,” Olivia reminds us.

  The air leaves our particular part of the room as President Burke accepts the box and opens it up.

  He reaches it and pulls out—a golden ruler.

  A ruler.

  “Forgive the bluntness of the metaphor,” Chevko says. “It is a reminder of the golden rule, that you should treat others as you would treat yourself. But it is also a symbol that the future is built one inch at a time, and that it is important to start on the right...foot.”

  He shrugs. The room erupts in applause and laughter.

  “Let us hope tonight is just such a step,” he says over the noise, and raises his glass in a toast.

  “I don’t understand,” Bellamy says. “I was sure it was a weapon or something.”

  The party has returned to to being a party.

  Olivia grabs the other martini off the bar. “Well unless that ruler has a sharp edge, I think we’re in the clear.”

  Hanson grabs the drink away from her and sets it back down on the bar. “We’ve still got a mission tonight, don’t forget.”

  I’m just amazed they both handled that drink without spilling it!

  “Right. I’m gonna go find Chevko’s daughter.”

  I start walking around the party asking if people have seen her. It doesn’t really feel like me doing the walking, honestly. It’s like I’m remembering walking around at the same time it’s actually happening.

  I must be allergic to gin, maybe.

  He really shouldn’t have shaken that martini, I think.

  Finally I feel a of pairs of hands pulling me by my waist.

  “Hello, Nadioooo,” I slur as I am spun around.

  It’s just Olivia, though. She pulls in close to me and we start slow-dancing to what sounds like Russian R-Kelly.

  “What the hell are you doing? Trying to blow the whole mission?”

  “Relass,” I say. “I’m just doin’ spy stuff. If you knew who James Bond was you’d know.”

  “Listen, you just need to cool your jets, ok? I know you’re trying to be smooth but you have to let up a little bit or you’re going to raise some suspicion.”

  “Listen to her,” Bellamy says. “You need to just relax and let Nadia find you. We have this whole night planned out, and if you start going off-script you’re going to blow it.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” I say confidently. “This is how I got Steve Lathrop to feel me up at that birthday party. Oops.”

  The song ends and we stop dancing.

  “Steve Lathrop?” Olivia looks at me with raised eyebrows.

  “You dint lemme finish. Steve Lathrop...’s sister. His hot sister.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He may need to sit down,” Bellamy says.

  “Agreed.” Olivia carefully walks me over to an empty table and pours me into a seat.

  “I need another drink, that first’n’s wearin’ off.”

  “That is definitely not true,” Olivia says. “Wait here. I’m going to go find you some coffee and maybe a bucket.”

  She disappears.

  The room begins to spin.

  Possibly. I can’t quite be sure.

  It might be me who’s spinning.

  Or the table.

  Or planet Earth.

  Or: all of the above?

  I suddenly remember the SpyFly in my inside jacket pocket!

  Bellamy had shown me the schematic of the house and where I should send the drone into the air vents. I’m pretty close to that spot right now. I can see the hallway nearby.

  Olivia’s nowhere to be seen.

  Figuring I have time, I pull myself off the stool and walk to the hallway. The drone was tiny, but I fiddle around in my pocket until I feel it against my fingertips. Looking around, making sure I wasn’t being watched too closely by anyone, I kneel down as if I were tying my shoe.

  So. Brilliant.

  I deftly slip the SpyFly through the grate at the base of the wall.

  Then it’s just a matter of turning it on from my watch—which I can do at any time during the night—and then flying it through the vents to Chevko’s office.

  Bam.

  “Donovan,” Bellamy says into my ear. “Did you just drop the SpyFly into that vent?”

  “Yep. Jus’ like we talked bout.”

  “No, actually. We talked about putting it in the air vent. That’s the furnace. You just incinerated a three million dollar piece of equipment.”

  “Three million dollars?” I shout.<
br />
  “When this is all said and done, Agent Burke, we’re going to have some serious words. I’m going to recommend to command that we find a new point man for this operation.”

  “I’m sorry. It was an honest mistake.”

  “The only mistake was putting you at the center of this mission. You have probably blown the whole thing by this point. We’re going to have to find a new approach.”

  I sense someone standing above me. “Excuse me.” It’s a woman’s voice. “Are you quite finished down there?”

  I look up and see Nadia Chevko wearing a shiny emerald green cocktail dress and a devilish grin to go with it.

  “Heard you were looking for me, handsome.”

  By the time Olivia comes back with the coffee, Nadia and I have already left the party.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ok, listen, there’s one thing you should know about me right now and that’s the fact that I’m a pretty damn good bowler.

  I’m not even bragging. It’s a fact. Measurably, objectively true.

  I’m not saying I’m a good bowler like I go out with my buddies on Saturday night and knock a few pins down in glow in the dark lights.

  I don’t have buddies.

  I have bowling trophies.

  I’m saying I’m good like I was in a league in middle school and took us to the championships three years in a row. Good like I have a 285 average. Good like I don’t really have anything to worry about when someone challenges me to a match.

  Even, believe it or not, when I’m drunk.

  Turns out Chevko owns a full-size bowling alley on the floor beneath the penthouse. Not just, like, a couple of lanes. Seriously, a whole bowling alley. Wall-to-wall lanes. Why does one person even need that many lanes?

  I guess when you have everything, what’s a little bit more? Where does it become excess, exactly, when your home already has a helicopter landing pad and it’s own satellite in orbit?

  I’m getting off track here, though.

  The point is that Nadia, competitive as she is, challenged me to bowl against her in her dad’s basement alley. It wasn’t like she asked right off the bat. Admittedly, I’m skipping a head a bit here.

  First, there was that introduction:

  “I heard you were looking for me,” she had said as she peered down at me. I had felt like a mouse who’d just been spotted by a cat.

  I had stood up, brushed myself off, did my best Sean Connery impression to try and muster up some kind of alluring qualities, and introduced myself. I had told her that I was aware of her through her social media presence and had always dreamed of meeting her.

  The booze flowing through my veins was doing its magic, loosening my lips and removing my inhibitions and allowing me to talk very candidly with Nadia Chevko. I could hear Bellamy whispering in my ear different points of discussion to either steer towards or away from, but honestly I didn’t really pay much attention. I was already feeling rather buzzed, and it was taking all the effort I had just to stay focused on what Nadia was saying.

  She put an arm on my forearm as she laughed at some joke I had made, and that’s when I realized we were flirting.

  And it was time to engage phase two of the plan:

  I mentioned that “my girlfriend” was taking an important phone call outside.

  Nadia took the bait and invited me to come with her, and that brings us to the bowling alley.

  The sense of relief I felt when she opened that door and it wasn’t a dimly-lit bedroom with shag carpeting and a rotating bed was like getting ready for school in the morning and then finding out it was a snow day.

  Far from being unprepared, ladies and gentlemen, I now knew I was in.

  An old trick I learned from watching The Color of Money was to never let the know how good you really are, so when she asks me if I bowl I say, “I haven’t in a while. Surely you don’t,” and I give her a once-over, trying my best to project the image of a horny, straight man. “You’re so...delicate.”

  She merely cocks an eyebrow at me, unfazed by my advances. I can’t really blame her.

  She picks up a ten pound ball, strides over to the nearest lane in her heels and dress, and lets it go.

  A beautiful, cascading strike.

  I give an impressed frown. It was a sincere reaction, actually.

  “Nice form.”

  “I’ve been told that,” she says with a wink.

  Never mind the fact that she spot bowled, meaning she rolled the ball perfectly straight but right down the center of the lane, hitting the pack between the one and three pins. It’s called “spot” bowling because you use the spots on the lane as targets instead of looking at the pins themselves.

  It’s not a bad technique, when it works, but it’s not the way pros do it.

  Of course, I was pretending not to be a pro, so when we actually get a game set up, with our names on the scoreboard and everything, and I go up to take my first roll, I roll it straight as an arrow, too—except down the right-hand side. The ball teeters over the gutter the whole way down until it knocks off the twelve pin and socks into the pit.

  I turn to her and shrug. “I just need to warm up.” She gives a skeptical nod.

  As the game progresses, I do “warm up,” to the point that I’m rolling off-center with a slight curve—not enough to show my true skill, but enough that it looked like I was really trying, at least.

  She wins the first game, and I pretend to be really disappointed. “Best two out of three,” I demand. She’s having too much fun to say no, so we go again.

  I win the second game.

  And the third.

  And the fourth.

  Much to my surprise, and delight, Nadia seems to have bottomless energy, and no intention of giving up the ghost. I’m happy. I can bowl all night.

  By game five I’m just hitting my stride.

  “Best six out of ten,” she says after my latest win, completely serious.

  But the other reason she wants to keep going, I think, is because along the way we started talking. Naturally, we were talking all along, but somewhere around the middle of the second game she actually mentioned a guy to me. A guy she had been talking to online who seemed to really like her, but she was having trouble telling for sure.

  I’m pretty sure she only brought him up to make me jealous (she does have that competitive streak, after all), but I think it took her by surprise when I acted genuinely interested. I certainly wasn’t interested in her sexually, and if helping her bag some guy who really could please her meant we had a bond, then all the better. That’s what the mission was, anyway, right?

  “So how often does he message you?” I ask. “And what time, usually?”

  “Why does it matter what time?” she says as she waits at the ball return for her attempt on a baby split.

  “If he’s messaging you at like ten a.m., that’s good. Great, even. It means you’re the first thing he thinks about. It means he wants to message you even earlier but doesn’t want to come off as desperate. Ten at night, though? Not so good. That pretty much definitely means he’s run out of other stuff to do and figures a late night booty call might be just the thing.”

  She laughs. “Booty call?”

  I wonder how easy it would be for me to become a pop culture icon in this dimension.

  “Usually around 9 a.m.,” she says with a smile, and makes her approach. A valiant attempt, and she would’ve had it except there’s a sleeper behind the three and it’s still standing when the sweeper comes down.

  “That’s amazing!”

  “Don’t be sarcastic.” She punches me in the arm on the way back to her chair. I step up and ready my own ball.

  “I’m talking about what you said. Messaging you that early is a really, really good sign.”

  She doesn’t seem convinced. I roll another strike. A six-pack.

  “Didn’t you say he’d message at 10 a.m. to try to not seem desperate?”

  “Yes.” Tenth frame. I’m up again. I�
�m waiting by the ball return.

  “So then doesn’t that mean if he messages earlier, he really is desperate?”

  The return spits out my ball and it strikes hers with a loud clack. “Damn. That’s a really good point.”

  I pull off a punch-out, ending the game with consecutive strikes. Nadia doesn’t make a move to reset the scores, so I figure we were done with the bowling.

  “Do you want to go again?” I ask. She seems lost in thought. “I’m sorry. Don’t fret too much about this guy. Even if he’s desperate, that doesn’t mean you’re not a great catch. Maybe he’s got it going on, too.”

  She narrows her eyes at me suddenly. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  She’s up and off in a heartbeat, disappearing out the door way came in and leaving me by myself in the empty, echoing bowling alley.

  “Should I leave my shoes on?” I ask, hearing only the echoing response of my own voice.

  I decide to leave them on in case she was just going pee and still wanted to bowl more when she got back.

  Turns out that was a mistake.

  When Nadia walks back in, hands behind her back, beaming a smile at me, I know something was up. Also she’s not wearing her bowling shoes anymore.

  She steps right up next to me.

  Then pulls out a slick-looking, oversized handgun and aims it straight at my head.

  I jump to my feet and stagger backward a few steps. My hands are already in the air over my head.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was good at bowling!”

  She doesn’t crack a smile, didn’t move a muscle in her cold, emotionless face.

  She reaches out her other hand and she’s holding an identical gun to the one pointed at me.

  “Here,” she says. “Take it. I’ll give you to the count of twenty.”

  I look at the gun being offered, and back at her. Was this some kind of joke?

  “One,” she says.

  Oh, god.

  “Two,” she continues.

  This is her next challenge for me.

  “Three.”

  I grab the gun from her and take off running the opposite direction, my feet slipping every few steps. I look over my shoulder and she’s still standing there pointing the weapon at me.

  When she reaches ten I’m still directly in her line of fire, and facing a wall.