by Jenna Payne
*****
Linda Dorgan waited until Robert-not-Bob was out of sight before moving her t-shirt back over her eyes. She had kind of hoped he would at least look back, but it seemed he really did have somewhere to go. Story of her life: Mr. Might-be-Right at the wrong place and time. Maybe she should have asked for his number back in the states. Would that have seemed desperate? What if he wanted hers, but didn’t want to look desperate himself? He definitely didn’t give off a married vibe, and good-looking single guys about her age seemed to be in short supply; and the ones who were available seemed more interested in the under-thirty crowd.
She imagined him coming back and standing over her, with that dimpled smile and sandy blond hair, those blue eyes looking her directly in the nipples as they continued their conversation. Maybe we should get a drink. Why don’t we go up to your room? Oh, gawd! Her friends wouldn’t even believe it. They thought she was crazy just for going to Cyprus—for going anywhere alone. She could have found just as much sun in Florida or Hawaii. But it wouldn’t have been the same escape; wouldn’t have drawn the same broad line of demarcation. She wouldn’t believe it herself—meeting a man while on an adventurous Mediterranean vacation and sleeping with him that night. It was a nice little fantasy, though, and Robert was the perfect leading man in her romantic mind-movie. She could almost feel him looking down at her.
And then she was looking down as she was lifted straight up by her armpits and the shirt fell from her eyes to her knees to her toes to the sand. Men on either side of her had her by her wrists and upper arms, their thumbs pressing into the bone with such force that she couldn’t muster a scream, just an airy “Ah! Ah! Ah…”
A dusky, weather-beaten woman in a blue police polo shirt and black cargo pants picked up the cotton t-shirt with the end of her baton. The toes of her black steel-toed boots reflected Linda’s own freshly-pedicured toes with their soft-colored nail polish and even softer flesh, as they struggled to maintain some useful contact with the beach.
“What was your business with Mr. Whitman?” The woman crumpled the shirt in her hand and poked the baton directly between Linda’s breasts, every eye on the beach witness to her crucifixion.
She shook off the surprise and felt her horror turn to anger. “Who the fuck is Mr. Whitman? And who sent you here...? It was my ex-husband, wasn’t it? I can’t believe you would harass an American citizen like this at the bidding of a fucking county police officer. I want to talk to the American Embassy! Now!”
The baton and the thumbs pressed harder.
“This has nothing to do with any American police officer, but thank you for offering your nationality. Now answer my question: What was your business with Mr. Whitman?”
“I don’t know any Whitman.”
“You only finished talking to him. Did you exchange something?”
“What?” Robert! What has that handsome asshole done?
“Did you exchange anything?”
“No. He was just hitting on me. I don’t know him.” Linda tried to twist her arms to put the pressure in a new spot. “Can I have my shirt, please? I haven’t done anything wrong.”
The end of the baton now pressed against the jugular notch at the top of Linda’s sternum. “It’s no use lying to us,” the policewoman said. “You looked very familiar with Mr. Whitman. We will uncover any connection you have to him.”
Looked very familiar with him? It felt very familiar with him…
Officer Baton-woman backed away and spread the hotel beach towel on the sand, then placed the t-shirt and Linda’s flip-flops on top of it before emptying her bag one item at a time: bottle of sunscreen, two bottles of water, a trashy novel, a tube of lip balm, a floppy hat, and absolutely nothing nefarious.
“See,” Linda said, “nothing funny…” She looked beyond her tormentor. “FUCK! People are taking pictures of this with their cell phones. I’m going to be all over the internet. Give me my goddam shirt!”
The policewoman turned, and a dozen cell phones suddenly turned away or disappeared. She turned back and said something that was Greek to Linda, and the men released their grip on Linda’s arms. That only doubled the pain for a minute, but not so much that she couldn’t get her shirt on when Attila the Policewoman tossed it back to her. Then the men took her again by the elbows and she was marched into the hotel barefoot, like a child being taken to meet a harsh schoolmaster with a cane. The policewoman followed with Linda’s belongings packed into her bag.
They took her through the lobby and directly up to her room, where she was ordered to open the safe and produce her passport. When that was done, they finally gave her a little space and let her sit at the desk while the policewoman went out onto the balcony and made a phone call.
As Little Miss SWAT in her combat chic came back through the sliding glass door, Linda said, “I want to talk to the American Embassy, and I want all of your names and ID Numbers.”
“Your embassy has that information. I’ve got them on the phone right now, and someone wants to talk to you, Ms. Dorgan.”
Linda took the phone. “Hello?”
“Good afternoon, Ms. Dorgan. My name is Miles Konrad. I’m the Deputy Chief of Mission here at the embassy.” He paused for a second. “I understand you may have had a somewhat traumatic encounter on the beach, and I want to offer as much of an explanation as I can. But first, are you okay?”
“I’m recovering.” She looked at the two men who had tried to destroy the circulation in her arms. “But I’d sure as hell like to know why I had to be dangled topless in front of everybody at the beach.”
“Yes, I heard about that, and the Cyprus Chief of Police would like to offer you a personal apology and VIP transportation for the rest of your stay. Also, we will pay your hotel bill and move you to another hotel of your choice if you longer feel comfortable there.”
“How about express service through customs and security when I fly out?”
“Done. You’ll go out under diplomatic status.”
“And business class?”
“All the way back to Dulles.”
“So, you know my itinerary.”
“We have that ability; mostly so we can help tourists who run into problems.”
Like muscular problems with dimples and blue eyes. “So, tell me about this misunderstanding, Miles.”
“The man you met on the beach is a State Department employee with a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance.”
“And...?
“Well, he operates very independently, and we—for reasons I can’t disclose—were concerned that he may have fallen in with some of the wrong sort of people—”
“The kind of people who would restrain a topless woman in front of dozens of tourists carrying cameras and smart phones?”
Miles Konrad cleared his throat. “More like the kind of people who would like to kill lots of Americans.”
“So how do the Cyprus Police fit in all of this? Shouldn’t I have been confronted by some kind of Jason Bourne character? Can’t we police our own?”
“We don’t have police powers in other countries, Ms. Dorgan, and we couldn’t move that many assets fast enough. That’s why we asked the Cyprus Police for help. Even if we were running the surveillance, we’d get their permission.”
Sure you would. “One more question, then. Was Mr. Whitman working? And why would he show up at a beach in Limassol in cargo shorts and a golf shirt when he’s staying in Larnaca?”
“I have some ideas about that, but I can’t really share them. He is on vacation, but guys like him are naturally curious about different locations that could come in handy for their work.”
“Can’t have enough hotel beaches for lone-wolf diplomatic work, I suppose.”
“Something like that.”
*****
After a day in Athens and a direct flight back to Dulles, Kirk killed two days unpacking his apartment while the rest of the team made their separate ways home. It had been six months since he
moved in, but he’d slept in the place less than a dozen times. Almost none of his artwork was up, and the only room that was completely done was the second bedroom, which he had turned into a small home gym—a guy had to have his priorities, after all. The rest of the house was decorated according to what he’d found by stalking a friend’s wife on Pinterest. Kirk had seen enough of the harshness and brutality in the world. He wanted his apartment to be an escape from that.
As he rolled up to the safe house on the third day, Kirk thought again that it was a bit silly to call the place a house. It was a unit at the end of a one-story strip of office buildings in Merrifield, VA. The sign on the window read, “R-Cal Client Solutions,” and nobody ever came around to ask what they did. As far as the property manager knew, they were some sort of collection agency. In a way, it was true. They collected images of people doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing, like passing information to terror groups or Russian foreign intelligence. Or they collected copies of laptop hard drives that unsuspecting traitors had left in their hotel rooms when they went out to dinner. Everyone on the team was a surveillance expert. A couple of them were experts in computer forensics, a couple more were breaking and entering specialists, and Kirk was a Defense Intelligence Agency liaison and emergency muscle when things went south.
“There’s my love slave!” Nikki was the first to see him as he stepped into the conference room. “I felt those eyes on my behind. Kirk loved that bikini…didn’t you boyfriend?”
“I can’t remember; what did it look like?”
Nikki wagged a finger at him and shook her head. “Umm-hm! We all see what you’re trying to do, but I WILL NOT model it for you here… Don’t want to give one of these old men a heart attack.”
Bob—named after Bob the Builder because he’d been a general contractor before he joined the team and still reported himself to the IRS as such—took fake umbrage at Nikki’s remark. “Who are you calling old men? I’m the oldest guy on this team, and I’m telling you that fifty is the new twenty-two. You could give me one of your professional lap dances right now, and the only attack I’d get would be after I told my wife about it.”
“I don’t give lap dances to handsy guys like you, Bob…except when I want a nice assignment from the deputy.”
Hans, the team’s deputy commander, tried to brush off the comment with a “Yeah, right,” but his schoolboy blush gave away his discomfort.
West Virginia native, Jed: “Holy cow! Hans is overheating just thinking about it. No wonder you two travel together so much.”
Holly, a strawberry blonde in her early forties whose nickname had something to do with a mistletoe event gone wrong, looked across the table at the deputy. “Why don’t you ever want a lap dance from me, Hans? My glutes are all high and tight now that Kirk got me started on kettlebell swings. “
“That’s right,” said Nikki. “Kirk stands behind his girls while they do their kettlebell swings.” She affected a deep voice. “Make sure you squeeze those glutes at the top of the swing, ladies.”
Kirk patted Nikki’s shoulder as he passed behind her chair to sit between her and Holly. “I’m just trying to get everyone caught up to you, Nikki.”
“See,” said Nikki. “I told you that the gigantic tent in Kirk’s shorts was thanks to my teeny bikini. Can you put that picture up, Phil?”
“Sure can.” Phil was Nikki’s frequent partner in crime and had earned his street name with a nearly perfect Dr. Phil impression. Unfortunate that he also looked like the guy. He dimmed the lights and hit a key on his laptop to bring up a presentation on the sixty inch flat screen monitor at the end of the room. The first image was a picture of Kirk standing on the beach in Limassol, except the photo had been doctored to create an obscenely large bulge in the front of his khaki shorts.
Even Hans was laughing now. He pointed up at the screen. “Must’ve been while Nikki was twerking.”
Then the boss walked in, and the laughing ceased. Not because she had no sense of humor, but because it was time for serious business.
She took her seat at the end of the table opposite the monitor. “Ok, let’s get to the debrief. Let me just start by saying that it was a very successful mission. We learned that we can trust the Cyprus PD to go above and beyond for us, and our embassy there has been patting their backs nonstop for the last four days. We also collected a lot of information on their tradecraft and their surveillance personnel.”
She paused and looked around the table before continuing. “I know you’ve been poking fun at each other this morning, and that’s fine. You can tease Kirk as much as you want for his wanton boob-gazing, but I don’t want to hear anyone making fun of that poor woman he talked to on the beach.”
Kirk felt the blood drain from his face. What had they done to Linda?
Mary continued. “We’re going to get that part out of the way first: When their target, Kirk, bumped an American, the Cyprus PD detained and questioned her on the beach before taking her back to her room and contacting our embassy. Unfortunately, they detained her in an aggressive manner and held her upright in just her bathing suit bottom for several minutes on a public beach while questioning her and searching through her things.
A series of photographs appeared on the screen of Linda Dorgan. In the pictures, she was held almost completely in the air by two burly cops in cargo pants and matching polo shirts while a woman in a SWAT uniform poked at her with a police baton. Kirk was glad to see some anger in Linda’s eyes as the shots progressed. It would have been a lot worse for her—and for Kirk—if she had crumpled in fear. Still, it wasn’t good.
The rest of the presentation was boring in comparison. Helen was definitely a member of the Cyprus surveillance team at the hotel; they had used an airplane on the second day; and there was a beacon on the rental car an entire day in advance of the operation. The Cyprus PD had a list of every item Kirk had bought. They reported everything that happened in his room down to the number of times he’d flushed the toilet. The CIA team now had digital and print photographs of over thirty member of the Cyprus PD’s surveillance team and knew where a dozen of them lived. All-in-all, it was a pretty successful mission.
Once Mary had left, Nikki turned to Kirk. “I think your girlfriend is going to be pissed the next time she sees you.”
“Yeah, I probably owe her one free swing with a baseball bat. She seemed like a pretty nice person; we had a nice little conversation.”
“That’s not what we heard.” Nikki said. “We heard that the police asked what you had said to her, and she told them that you just kept saying ‘Boobs!’”
“And that you drooled a lot,” Jed added, “and kept making little squeezy motions with your hands.”
“Nothing your sister hasn’t seen from you, Jed.”
“Unlucky for me, she still runs faster than I do.”
Kirk had to laugh. “How did I ever get teamed with such a bunch of perverts?”
Nikki reached over and squeezed his knee. “Birds of a feather, Lover.”
*****
It was an unseasonably cool evening for early June in Northern Virginia; perfect for relaxing in one of the apartment complex’s two in-ground hot tubs, and Maureen was the perfect audience for the story of Linda’s adventure in Cyprus. Some friends would have been too quick to commiserate and pity her, but Maureen found the humor in things, and she had a contagious laugh. The chilled pinot noir in their plastic cups probably didn’t hurt either.
“Holy shit! I can’t believe they paid for all of that.” Maureen took another gulp of wine. “And all you had to do was pose topless with a couple of the locals. I need a vacation in Cyprus. Gary can stay home and watch the kids for a week while mama takes a break.”
“Believe me, Maureen: It wasn’t so funny at the time. I didn’t eat all the next day or on the flight home. You know how I feel about cops…”
“Oh, you poor dear. How much weight did you lose on this vacation? Fifteen pounds? I would hate to have somethin
g like that happen to me.” Maureen put the back of her hand to her forehead and put on a pitiful voice “Woe is me! I just can’t eat. My clothes are all going to be too big. Whatever will I do?” She put her thumbs under the straps of her one-piece and adjusted the wet fabric over her breasts. “Yep, gotta get the girls out in the sun. Can you imagine? They’d be squinting their little booby eyes like gremlins.” Maureen turned her voice to a squeak: “Bright light! Bright light!” Her voice descended back to normal. “Gary would be so all over me if I came home and popped out a pair of suntanned hooters; the kids would probably starve before we made it out of the bedroom.”
“How would he feel if anyone could see them on the internet?” Linda had done a little searching on the internet using keywords like Cyprus, police, beach, and topless; but had thankfully come up empty after a few pages of the half a million search results.
“Well, I’m sure Gary has never seen boobs on the internet, but I think he’d be okay with it.”
“Really?”
“Heck yeah! He’d be burying his head in celebrity boobs, dreaming about walking down the red carpet with them. He would probably pour some fresh concrete in our front walk so we could press them into our own little walk of fame.”
Linda laughed. “You know; you’re making me feel like I should wear a baggy turtleneck any time I’m going to be around your husband.”
“Oh, no! With you it’s always the ass. I catch him all the time—give him the evil eye—and he tries to play it off like he was looking at a spot on the carpet.”
Linda wished she hadn’t had a mouthful of wine for that disclosure. It nearly went out her nose before she gained enough composure to swallow.
“How about your mysterious boyfriend in Cyprus?” Maureen asked. “Did you lure him in with the milkshake or the mud flaps?”
“You know, he was working hard to look me in the eye, so I’d have to say it was my sparkling personality.”
