"The reception was amazing!" Marco lifts his plastic champagne glass high in the air. "The Nordstrom and Dolce reps congratulated me on the way here. Can't wait to talk to the buyers at the after-party!"
Liza faintly hears the familiar tone of her phone emanating from her small purse. She glances at the message. Ty Ryan, her old friend and occasional fling is meeting her after the party at the Conrad. She texts back, confirming she’ll find him in the lobby bar.
The MOMA after-party is an immense success for the Morse line. Liza and her colleagues foresee job security, at least for one more fashion cycle. Liza has a unique role as a regional sales and quality control representative with the company for their accessories. It's a well-kept secret that the accessories—and even some of the upscale clothing—is made in China. The mandatory “Made in China” labels are sewn into the clothing in the most discreet locations possible, away from the splashy hang tag stating “Designed by Michael Morse, Seventh Avenue.”
An Asian-American woman, Liza is now 30 years old. Her mother and father emigrated to the United States from Beijing. She grew up in Brooklyn before her parents relocated to Arlington, Virginia, where her dad was a professor at nearby Mary Washington University and her mom ran a successful upscale nail salon. As a child she learned Mandarin, Beijing's main language, and Wu, commonly spoken in the Shanghai area, as well as Yue Cantonese. They traveled back to visit her extended family about once a year; her parents were hard-working and frugal, but reconnecting with family was a vital ritual for them.
Valedictorian of her high school class in Arlington, she was offered a scholarship at Yale, where she graduated summa cum laude and was recruited by the CIA. Speaking multiple Chinese languages at a time when keeping tabs on China was of increasing interest made her valuable to the agency. Her affinity for languages also allowed her to master Arabic while at Yale.
One of her first covert operations for the CIA was to Iraq, embedded with SEAL Team 8, when the U.S. thought it successfully marginalized the “insurgency.” History proved it to be a hollow success—much like the entire Iraq war and ill-fated occupation thereafter. During her Iraq assignment, her world collided with Ty Ryan’s. Every night the SEALs, along with Liza and their Iraqi interpreter, would engage in missions to take out terrorists and so-called insurgents. Liza didn’t take out the bad guys, that was for the SEALs to do, including Ty, she handled mission organization and logistics. They also shared a bed on several random occasions, but those unscheduled trysts were mutually satisfying, perhaps due to the uncertainty of it all.
Ryan had observed her acumen with a pistol and semi-automatic at the firing ranges between their almost nightly SEAL missions, and between their secret liaisons and nightly work, he became smitten with the way Liza carried herself. There was something about her exotic beauty that hooked him. She was different from any woman he had been involved with in his life “BL,” or “before Liza.”
In their first months together, she often shared her innermost feelings with Ty and confided that she did not think their Iraqi missions would ever win over the hearts and minds of the Sunnis and Shiites, who had a centuries-old blood feud that would not be settled by a weak government propped up by Americans, who most Iraqis distrusted. During her time in Iraq, two SEALs died, and every few days an IED would kill or maim a U.S. soldier, sending a chill through every member of the unit.
To the chagrin of her supervisors at Langley, and Ryan, she tendered her resignation at her six-year anniversary and surprised everyone by taking a position with Michael Morse, filling their need for an East Coast representative willing to travel to China and handle interaction with their overseas factories. Getting as far away as possible from intense stress was her paramount thought.
She soon discovered she could earn significantly more taking private contracts than she did with the agency, though some of the shadowy figures were downright spooky. She often didn’t know who hired her, but for the right money, usually paid in full up front, she didn’t care.
Hong Kong has long had a cottage industry of managing agents tasked with retaining confidentiality for businessmen hiding their profits offshore. Liza established a managing agent and a bank account to receive her off-the-books funds. Her HK account was in the fictitious name on her fake U.S. passport.
Some other contract ops she accepted involved honeypotting a clueless businessman, which required the use of her femininity in seductive ways. With some assignments, she assumed the sex was filmed, but her marks never once suspected she targeted them. She was careful to wear disguises and not take any repeat jobs in the same cities.
Another lucrative side business for her was a bit of contraband smuggling from China to the U.S. Never expressly apprised of what was being smuggled, her involvement was oblique—she would simply advise her contact when various samples were being shipped from one of the Chinese factories back to the Morse warehouse in Brooklyn and her contact did the rest. She presumed they were paying intermediaries at the factory and the warehouse to handle the illicit contraband. She got paid for each shipment she initiated, and the money had encouraged her to collect as many potential accessories or clothing samples as reasonably plausible.
Approaching the hotel bar to meet Ty, she wears a sheer white button-down blouse and above-the-knee black suede skirt from the Morse line, black nylons with seams running up the back of each leg, and black stilettos. Ryan stands and gives her a big hug beside the barstools. His muscular, six-foot-tall frame easily envelopes her petite, trim body.
“Good to see you.”
Liza looks him over carefully. His wavy brown hair does a few untidy flips and is slightly longer than a military cut. He has chiseled facial features, high cheekbones, and piercing blue eyes, and he wears a simple black t-shirt revealing his strong arms. She admires his faded jeans and black leather belt with silver diamond-shaped studs surrounding it.
"How was the big show?" Ryan smells the wine or champagne on her breath, recognizing she had a few drinks before catching a cab to meet him.
"Unbelievably stressful. With it being the biggest show of the year, the whole next buying season rides on it. As far as I can tell, it went very well, at least all the company reps think so. At the MOMA, everyone raved about our line, and you know Marco, my friend, he was really excited because a bunch of his designs were popular.”
"Awesome. Can I buy you a drink?”
"Of course, let’s celebrate. The show, all the glitz and glam. And why not celebrate us too?”
Deep down Liza hates the fact Ty shows up to fall into bed with her only once in a blue moon, such a completely undependable relationship, though she voices not a word of her frustration. She was trained to maintain a fierce front. She finally focuses on the small menu of specialty drinks, then sets it down on the bar, where it sticks to several drops of over-splash from the previous occupant’s drink.
“How about a Stoli martini, dry, with two olives please."
Ryan gets the bartender's attention, and the bartender whips up the cocktail and slides it in front of her.
They exchange small talk before she asks if he wants to go to the Loopy Room rooftop bar. They down their cocktails and head to the elevators. As soon as the doors close they engage, bodies pressed tight, tongues diving and caressing. When they arrive on the roof, they release each other and find their way to the railing, passing a bunch of couples on couches near a glowing fire pit. They gaze out over the Hudson toward New Jersey, observing the myriad lights of office buildings and high-rises.
Ryan breaks the silence. "Your current job seems more copacetic for you than the agency."
"It is, but some of my private contracting work has been pretty damn stressful. The good part is I know I'm not locked into anything. I can just make good money, not ask a lot of questions, and move on."
“Be careful. You haven't been eliminating targets, have you?" He’s actually curious because they've never discussed it.
"No." She turns and looks him in the
eye. “I don't have to accept every proposed job, and I don’t want that kind of guilt on my head. Who needs it? I’m not planning to die young. You?”
“Nah. I do some shady side stuff for the P.I. group, but its child’s play compared to handling international assignments like you do.”
“Not all of them have been in China.”
“I thought—”
“Wrong. Sure, I won’t work against the agency here at home. But if the job is just honeypotting…”
Ryan soaks this in, peering out across the Hudson, noticing the shimmers of various lights reflecting off the surface of the river. “I can't block out some of the things I did, particularly in Iraq. Like blowing away teenage insurgents. But I deal with it.”
“One private job haunts me," she admits cryptically.
"Mind sharing?"
"Honeypot stuff on the surface, but I have a feeling it was a lot more.”
"I’m sure that kind of work can take many different forms. I won’t push it if you don’t wanna tell.”
Ty takes a swig of his drink and stares out over the city. The same bartender returns. Ty places another order but Liza declines, she started way before he did.
“I agreed to it because I could visit my parents in Arlington before the job,” she explains. “It was in Northern Virginia. I was assigned to seduce a married guy. I honeypotted him at a bar he and his pals frequented. I needed to convince him to meet me at a hotel the next day, get him to call in sick, which I, um, accomplished."
"Yeah, I don't need the details about the seduction. But I gather that’s not all."
"Right. The next day I boarded an Amtrak Acela train at Union Station and headed back to New York City. On the way, I saw the news on my laptop about the Hemispheres jet crash. Well, my target was the electrical inspection supervisor for the Hemispheres fleet at that airport.” She looks out across the river as Ryan contemplates this bombshell for a moment.
"So, you're saying you were the reason he called in sick that day, and maybe someone sabotaged the jet?”
"Yep.”
“That’s pretty heavy.” The wheels start turning fast in Ryan’s mind. Unbelievable that Liza may have played a part in the crash without knowing it. "Who hired you?"
"I can't tell you that even if I wanted to, I don’t know who it was. They use proxies.”
“Can I ask how they paid you?"
"I have an agent who manages an account in Hong Kong. That's all I’ll say."
Ryan mulls over mentioning he's working for a lawyer who is trying to unravel a $200 million mystery about why the government paid hush money to Hemispheres, but he decides not to go there, he can’t even let her know about his confidential work. Not yet. Maybe after they head to her room he’ll try to pry enough information from her to narrow the players involved.
Chapter 17
Dirty Dozen
Fletcher, a scrawny 20-something with blond scraggly hair, now one of the teacher’s pets, is already there.
Walston, wearing round John Lennon-style wire-rim glasses and his “Trust me, I’m a Jedi” t-shirt, sits next to him.
“Did you wonder what mysterious type of animal was terminated to become part of the meatloaf today?” Fletcher asks, taking another bite of pepperoni pizza.
“Not really, but I also did not partake.” Walston looks up to see their chief coming toward them.
Ron Michaels stops at their table, a round one that seats four.
“Can I barge in on the esteemed members of my dream team?” he says, not waiting to be accepted or rejected.
"Sure. So how did you pick us? The team, I mean. Oh, and do you know what we call ourselves?" Fletcher asks.
"Researchers?" Ron answers, without missing a beat. He doesn’t mind Fletcher’s sarcastic and cynical attitude, and they have enjoyed many in-depth talks regarding worldly matters, often with a biological twist.
“No. The Dirty Dozen."
Walston laughs and Ron smirks. "I like that. And to answer your first question, I wanted to gather 12 thinkers from different disciplines to rival the innovations that happened in the late 1800s. Why were there so many amazing inventions then?"
“Cuz it was the Industrial Revolution. Duh.” Walston blurts out, but immediately knows he’s wrong based on Ron’s expression.
"Nope. Everyone was hanging out in the bars and taverns, and then the first coffee shops opened. People started drinking coffee and tea, both stimulants, and instead of being dulled down with alcohol, they were all hyper. It wasn’t only the caffeine, it was the combination of people from all different backgrounds and walks of life gathering in the coffee shops. Alchemy.”
“Sorry, that still doesn’t explain why you put Kabo the chicken sexer on our team. He’s got no grad school degree or biological training."
“That may be true, but what did he do day in and day out for a couple of years?"
"Lifted the rear ends of chickens on an assembly line to determine if they were male or female, which no normal person can do because a chicken’s gender is virtually undetectable,” Fletcher says.
"Precisely. Kabo’s discerning eye is going to help us solve a problem. I’m not sure which one yet, but he will. We need to analyze DNA sequences, we are basically code breakers. I bet my bottom dollar Kabo will help us. It’ll happen.”
"Then I’m guessing you picked Forman for his memory since he’s lacking any relevant schooling or experience,” Walston ventures.
"Yep, he was the first American to win both the American and European Memory Championships. Has he shown you any of his tricks?"
Fletcher rolls his eyes. "He put two decks of cards on the table, looked at each card in both decks for less than two minutes, and then told us what every card in each deck was, in sequence, before we turned it over. There must be some kind of marks on the backs of the cards. We didn’t fall for that B.S.”
"It’s no parlor trick, Fletcher. He's a memory athlete with intense training. You can google it. He creates vast memory palaces in his mind to accomplish these feats, and we need researchers like that."
"A memory palace, what the hell?"
“In his mind, he places items in various rooms in familiar buildings, like a home he grew up in. He links each number, like card 1, to a memorable palace room. When he needs to remember something, he walks through these rooms, mentally speaking, and “finds” each number in the sequence by assigning some sticky characteristic to each item. For example, for the 10 card in the sequence, lets say its the queen of hearts, he might imagine the queen melting on top of a piano that was in the living room with a picture of a huffing heart hanging on the wall. Then he’ll place the other cards in each room, assigning an unusual action to each item to make it sticky, so its memorable. A simple mental stroll through this familiar territory allows him to correctly recall every card in numerical sequence. With lots of practice, of course.
“His ability to masterfully use the existing system of folders and subfolders inside his brain could prove very useful in our research. He may observe a sequence of biological compounds that you, Kabo, or Masterson would never notice. He has trained his brain to remember, instead of using the notes app on his phone to act as his external brain. Don’t you see, the modern world is all about using external memory to offload our memory so we don’t have to use our own. No one wants us to train their own brain anymore.” Ron points to his skull. He eats a few bites of the green beans on his plate and swallows before getting back to the external hard drive discussion.
"The first serial strip movies—this is going way back, well before any of us were born—had lines of images, and the projector sequentially showed each image, one after the other. With slight changes as each strip moved, it seemed like continuous movement. Our DNA is like that, with our chromosomes lined up one after the next along the double helix. Our job is to figure out what sequence, what small changes to our chromosomal codes, will allow our telomeres to divide more times without suffering damage, making each cell last l
onger. Having all my researchers thinking in different ways, seeing things normal researchers don’t, that's how we're going to make our breakthroughs. Don’t worry about your team members’ credentials, think about how we can work together to deliver the solution.”
Later that afternoon in the lab, Ron walks by Fletcher, who is peering through a microscope with his ever-present earbuds in his ears.
"Hey Fletch, what's on your playlist?”
"A Mark Ronson mashup."
"Never heard of him."
"He's a brilliant rock producer, worked with Bruno Mars, Amy Winehouse. Got his start working as a DJ in New York, even though he was born in Great Britain where I think he lives. Anyway, he says nothing new exists, everything is remixed. I listened to a TED talk he gave, where he talked about putting together some of his best music.”
"So, kind of like what we do as scientists. We build with a little from this and a little from that, drawing on natural combinations and sequences,” Ron muses, then pats him on the shoulder and walks away, thinking about the mashup he’s trying to create.
Ron doesn't spend all his days in the lab, he also devotes a number of hours to searching the internet, reading every article he can about topics remotely tangential to those involved in his current telomere research. Maybe by lifting something from here, merging it with something from there…one never knows.
He looks at his watch and decides to head to the nursery for a quick visit with Justin.
Chapter 18
Inbox
The email arrives through Solarez’ personal Gmail account.
Targeting the Telomeres, A Thriller Page 6
