Odyssey of an Assassin Vol I: Tiger in the Dark

By B. Peyton Chamberlain

Jason Shexnaider, a jaded, middle-aged espionage agent, specializing in political assassinations, has lost his soul to his work. Hes been ordered now to recruit a candidate for a special mission and then to become responsible for her. He recruits Flo Guzman, a ghetto bred but saucy little sexpot from Wilmington, Delaware, whos also the object of the twisted sexual fantasies of Mel Strawbridge, a coworker in the same machine shop. However, Rennie Decordova, a Honduran immigrant and, although highly educated, an exotic dancer in New Orleans, becomes the eventual candidate. Shes to be the instrument of an assassination plot devised by Colonel Quentin Horschact, director of the U. S. Department of Intelligence. Its target a Latin American terrorist chieftain so protected by layers of security as to be virtually invulnerable. He has one weakness, though. Women.
The plan, therefore, is to send in a woman with a disability, which in no way can detract from her attractiveness, but which, however, practically guarantees her to be harmless. Well, how about blind then? suggests Horschact, knowing already what the response will be.
Well, bloody blind it is then. Bully! But she will carry a surgically implanted device in her body, a remotely detonated bombt. And the signal to detonate this bomb is to be buried in a radio commercial that will saturate the airwaves until the mission is completed. However, the girl is not to turn on her implanted receiver until , either, she needs help or shes in bed with the target.
None of this does Decordova know, obviously, but Shexnaider does. He knows about a pre-planned accident that will explain the surgery. He knows that this mission, disguised as reconnaissance, is actually suicide. And Jason Shexnaider, who has always done his duty, never questioning it, finds that he has a conscience after all.
Decordova is to let them know shes penetrated the layers of this mans security as deeply as one could ever hope to. To his very bedroom, in fact. And, having done so, shes to tap out the tune of Lili Marlene on her kneecap, in which both the bomb and the receiver have been installed; whereupon the receiver will turn on and the next time some radio station plays the fatal commercial -- boom! Mission accomplished.
Phoenix Flower is the name of thr nonexistent perfume. The campaign to promote it has been bought and paid for by Horschact. The campaign itself is the brainchild of Ward Sutton, New York ad executive, who, anticipating success and a big TV campaign to follow, selects Decordova to be his Phoenix Flowergirl. Thus bringing her to the attention of Horschact, who assigns her to Shexnaider.
Its Decordovas attitude, her courageous acceptance of blindness, her stalwart willingness to serve her adopted country, albeit for the promise of a sizeable financial reward if she survives. It is these things, and above all her spirit, that convince Shexnaider shes too good to be lost this way. He talks to the department doctor, Dr. Lodi, about undoing the surgery he was ordered to perform.
Its at this point that word comes down from the office of the Secretary of Intelligence that, due to recent changes in the diplomatic climate in Latin America, no missions of any kind are to be carried out in that area. Horschact is distraught. This mission is his most brilliantly planned. Its precious to him. On the other hand, it can never become known. If it were successful it never would be known. But now simply hanging what can they do to hide it?
Enter Mel Strawbridge, whos been hiding in the wings since this drama began. When Guzman goes to Washington he follows her. And hes hanging around the safe house in which candidates for the mission are being quartered when Decordova takes over and Guzman moves out. His frustration has built to the point that hes become desperate. And, besides, this one is so much more attractive

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483654898

B. Peyton Chamberlain

Chamberlain was born in Virginia in 1930. He graduated from U. Va. with a B.A. in History and a secondary teaching certificate in Science. He has taught at both the secondary and the adult vocational school levels. Most of his working time, however, he spent in the oilfields, servicing communications equipment used by the major companies operating in and around the Gulf of Mexico. He has been married twice and is the father of two sons by his first wife who died. He is retired but still volunteers. He lives now in Texas. Chamberlain has traveled extensively in this country, western Canada and Mexico, as well as visiting overseas both the U.K. and the Iberian peninsula. He speaks Spanish fluently.

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CHAPTER ONE

Monday, October 9, 1989:

New Orleans, Louisiana—

At four-thirty in the morning of October 9, Rene Angelica Decordova was preparing for bed. Her bedroom window overlooking Decatur Street stood open. Rennie hated paying for air-conditioning this late in the year but, unless a cold front reached so far south, warm Gulf air could make New Orleans pretty stifling.

She’d already brushed and flossed her perfect teeth. She sat now combing the lustrous chestnut colored hair she’d inherited from her mother. His blanca her father had called her mother, who came originally from the Argentine. Her father had been more moreno, in which Rennie tended to favor him, but in New Orleans it could pass for a tan. Rennie told everybody she was Creole anyway. In this town it was no distinction to be from a banana republic like Honduras.

It had been a long night at the club and she was tired. She’d finished her last dance number at two and then she was free but half the patrons always wanted to take her home, making it difficult sometimes to get away. She could hardly blame them. They came there to be turned on after all. And though she thought of her job as a tease, not a promise, no one demanded she do it with such relish. She was an exotic dancer but, unlike many, she enjoyed it. Still she felt under obligation to no man and, least of all, to the customers before whom she performed.

Rennie had discovered sex in her father’s orchard at the age of fifteen, the willing pupil of a swarthy gardener. Later, when she was studying literature in college in the U. S., she’d felt an identification with Lady Chatterley because the gamekeeper reminded her of her own literate but unconverted Xicaque jardinero. Eventually, although sex never lost its pleasures for her, she began to see its investment possibilities. She was no whore in her own mind but sex was her capital and she meant to build a fortune.

The number forty-seven popped suddenly into her head. She must have been counting strokes. Her mother used to do that. Her mother had been dead since Rennie was ten years old, taking Rennie’s brother with her when she died in childbirth. Rennie had matured as an only child, largely neglected by her father who could never forgive his god for depriving him of a son, nor for taking the wife from him whom he so adored. But if God seemed to ignore these allegations, resorting undoubtedly to Executive Privilege, her father might shift the blame to Rennie, implying that she must be at fault somehow. It didn’t matter how and it didn’t make for a happy relationship between them. She was alive and her brother was dead. She was twenty-four when her father too lay dead and she could find no tears to shed for him.

No one else could either evidently. Only a few old friends she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl even bothered to appear for the funeral. And not one of these would have known her, had it not been for the pew in which she sat alone or the fact that she threw the first dirt into the grave. It had been easy for her to take the small inheritance and leave Tegucigalpa. But rather than sell the house she decided to keep it. Particularly since two elderly sisters, distant relations of her father, were so willing to live in it and care for it for her. She did not ask them why, rather guessed they might themselves be in some sort of need. But, besides, who could know what a girl might need or want to do in a wholly uncharted future?

Thus what she realized from the sale of her father’s books and other possessions, augmented by her modest inheritance, she deemed enough, not only to see her to the United States but to sustain her while she acquired the perfect English she so desired.

Although she went first to San Antonio to concentrate on her English, she was graduated with honors by the University of Houston. As a place to work, however, for by now she was definitely low on funds, Houston didn’t suit her, especially without a car. So she went instead to New Orleans. But work didn’t mean nine-to-five to Rennie. She didn’t think she could cope with the boredom. So she found a gig on Bourbon Street where soon she was making good money. She had a Latin sense of rhythm and the steps and moves came easily to her. Besides, the club was a place where she might be seen by a talent scout or somebody, which would never happen in an office.

But the work did tire a girl. Rennie let her heavy arm holding the brush drop to her lap. Whatever the number of strokes, it was enough. Her body belonged in bed. Every aching fiber of it told her so. And the great luminous eyes that stared back at her over chiseled cheekbones flanking a slightly aquiline nose made the face she saw look exhausted indeed. She obeyed their plea and went to bed.

But then later, abruptly, as if she hadn’t slept at all, she found herself awake. Undressed and in bed but fully conscious. And instantly she knew what it must have been—the dream—the one in which the old Gypsy woman who looked so like her mother might have, had she lived so long, who breathed heavily as she spoke and said, "Si, si, hijita. Dame la mano. No, child, the left one. The right hand is lined with work. Give me the hand on which God has inscribed your life."

And as in the dream before, Rennie extended her hand, which the Gypsy took, stroking it as she might a kitten in her lap. The woman looked so incredibly like her mother, only old, old, the mother Rennie never had when she needed her most, and then there was her father saying, She would not have died had she carried the boy first. Had her father ever really said those words or were they only in the dream? Regardless, they were a part of it now. And then the fortune teller began to moan: "Ayii! Obscurecimiento. Ya veo la obscuridád—darkness, hijita. I see darkness. One day it will engulf you. That is here in your hand. You see? Here where the life line has this break. It goes on which means you will not die, chiquita, but you shall know a great suffering and a terrible loss. Vas a perder que te vale mas."

"Oh? What will I lose, Señora?" she asked. With these Gypsies it was always love or a loved one. She had no novio but she was a romantic girl in the dream who longed to suffer the bittersweet pangs of a broken heart.

Ah, what have you now that you value most? returned the crone.

"I do not know. My life? No será la vida, verdad? My life is the most precious thing I have right now, Señora."

"But I have said that you will not lose that, hijita."

"Then I do not know, I cannot guess, Señora. I have no novio. Would it be something I can see or touch? Is it something I can see right now?"

"Ah, si, your eyes, tus ojos." said the old woman and paused, whereupon she seemed to grow older and older as Rennie watched. "You will lose your sight then, chiquita. That will be your tragic loss and what you must suffer," she croaked, a kind of soundless mirth altering the rhythm of her noisy breathing. And there the dream always ended.

But Rennie could not bring herself to open her eyes. The old Gypsy woman had been so sure. Was Rennie prepared to open her eyes and see only the black depths inside her skull?

This crazy dream, it was a guilt thing, obviously. She told herself that there must have been a Gypsy woman at some féria or somewhere and the memory of her, mixed with the trauma of her mother’s death and her father’s apparent repudiation of her, his own daughter, combined to form the dream. She wasn’t to blame, of course, but she dared not open her eyes. This was the way she had reacted the first time she’d had this dream—she couldn’t remember when that was—and it remained the only way she could seem to deal with the thing.

Eyes closed, therefore, she felt her way through her living room to her little dining nook and kitchen. She knocked nothing over on the way. To watch her, she seemed to know where everything must be.

In the kitchen she sought and opened the fridge, felt for the milk inside and removed it. She cradled it in one arm until she found a spot on the table where she could set it down. Turning now, she extended both hands to feel for the cabinets that hung from the ceiling and when she touched one she slid her hands across the doors until she came to where the cabinets butted against the wall. From this point she counted back two doors and opened the third. Placing the tips of her fingers along the edge of the shelf, she nudged her right hand forward until her nails scraped the base of a glass, which she grasped and slid straight back off the shelf without disturbing any of the others. With her left hand she closed the door. One should never leave doors open, she was thinking. Their edges, in this case, corners, could be dangerous if bumped into unexpectedly. Finally, she shifted the glass to her left hand and retraced her steps to the table.

It was only after she had poured milk in the glass, seated herself and felt around the table for spillage that she began to relax. It was a comfort to have done things right and she drank the milk as her reward. As always, the cool liquid slipping down her throat to spread in her stomach had its soothing effect. And presently she was able to view the dream as only a dream, not a prophecy which had just come true. She could open her eyes and she would be able to see.

What Rennie saw first was the wan light of dawn, framed by a window, and then the clock on the wall of her living room. This clock represented the hours as chess pieces girding a black and white polished stone board. She had bought it in an antique shop on Royale Street, though she doubted it was really old. Almost six-thirty, it said, both hands bracketing the queen. Oh Jesus! And at noon she had a lunch date with Carol. She hoped she could get back to sleep for a little while.

They planned to look at an apartment together. Carol was keener on their taking it than Rennie, however. Rennie had a greater need for privacy. Besides, how could Carol adjust to a roommate given to pretending she was blind in the middle of the night? Because the dream wasn’t going to stop with the changing of a pad. She had brought it with her from Honduras. All other ghosts of her past had remained there. Anyway, Carol was such a straight-up sort of person who liked her job as a receptionist and looked forward to week-ends and dreamed of Caribbean cruise vacations and all that crap—the kind of fixed routine that would have left Rennie feeling trapped after only the second day. All they really had in common was the fact that neither felt any desire to marry at this time in their lives. Yet, should that particular trap ever seem tempting, Rennie knew Carol would be the first to yield to it.

Wilmington, Delaware

Same day, lunch hour

Mel Strawbridge flipped through the pages of a magazine left behind by one of the younger men who had already returned to his work station. Strawbridge was in his early fifties. He’d been a machinist for thirty years. He had a round face with heavy features to match his build—big lips, a broad nose and dark little eyes under bushy brows that said back-off rather than hello to everybody. He was partially bald but what remained of his hair was metallic gray and curly, like the stuff that piled up on the floor by his lathe when he worked. Strawbridge never smiled. In fact he seemed to be permanently irritated about something.

The pages through which he flipped were in a girlie magazine, which Mel liked, except for their frequent lesbian features. He almost smiled to see the girls licking their lips while they played little finger games between their thighs. Just begging for it, he thought, no fucking perverts here, nossir—he hated perverts.

Strawbridge failed to see why the editors of these magazines allowed that unnatural lesbian crap anyway. Didn’t they know who their real readers were? No real guys wanted to see no pervert chicks getting their rocks off like that. Just didn’t have no place, not in no man’s magazine, he thought.

Putting the magazine aside, he poured the last cup of coffee from his thermos and took up his half-eaten sandwich. Let them younger guys hurry back to their machines if they want to—kiss the foreman’s ass on the way too—he wasn’t ascared of nobody. Mel Strawbridge was the best they had and they had better not forget it neither.

He took another bite of the sandwich. Christ! After all these years you’d think Estelle would know he didn’t like cheese! There just ain’t no fucking justice in the world. But he ate the sandwich anyway, washing down its clinging residue with the coffee in his cup. How come he didn’t notice it was cheese when he was eating the first half, he wondered? Must have been something on his mind. Yeah.

He glanced at his watch. Jeez! Like five minutes to one already! He’d have to hurry to reach the machine room before the foreman returned from his lunch. Guys had been fired here for less than that lately. What they had was a strict new policy about taking too long on a lunch hour. Kind of thing that always happened if a company began sweating its bids on new contracts and stuff.

He returned his empty thermos to his lunch pail. He was about to stuff in the magazine too but caught himself. Nah. Maybe that bitch Estelle might find it. He left it and turned to the stairs that led up to the machine room. Hey, wait a fucking minute here. Why should he care if some damn foreman wanted to fire him already? He was a master machinist who could get a job anywhere. Hadn’t he had enough to prove it? About which his old lady was always bitching too: Hey, Mel, it just shows what a chronic something you got that you should be having so many jobs already. I mean like a lack of maturity or something, you know. Which it’s a good thing you have got no son. Such an example you should be for the boy.

Man, that Estelle, he thought. Wouldn’t she never let up with that shit? Reading books on psychology and all that crap when she should be enjoying the benefits of marriage, know what I mean. Man! Like twenty-five years with that bitch! It was like a fucking lifetime. Shit.

Anyway, nobody was going to fire him for being five minutes late. And if they did, it wasn’t him that needed their goddamn job, it was the other way around. There wasn’t nobody in that whole fucking machine shop could do the half of what he could in twice the time, man. Take ’em that long just to get set up. Shit.

He set his lunch pail down on the bench where he’d been sitting and began a leisurely tour of the brick-walled lunch room, lime painted, pausing to study each vending machine as he came to it. There were hot beverages from one machine, cold from another, while yet another offered pallid looking things that might restore to near palatability in the microwave. Good thing he wasn’t hungry. Besides, the taste of cheese still lingered in his mouth. Eventually he arrived at the room’s only window, which was barred and the glass reinforced with hardware cloth. It was so grimy you couldn’t see out of it anyway. By it stood the soft drink machine and, how do you like that? They wanted a lousy four bits for a soda pop, ain’t that some shit? Lousy stuff cost that much outside the plant, he thought. Damn company had no right, ripping off its employees like that. There was just no fucking justice, know what I mean? Nevertheless, he dug in his pocket for the change and bought an orange soda, which he carried back to the bench where he’d left the girlie magazine. He’d just overstay his lunch hour now to kind of even things out, he thought, reaching in his pocket for his cigarettes and damn, the pack was empty! Now he’d have to enrich the bastards who collected from the cigarette machine.

Nearly a dollar this time of which he knew the crummy government got the largest part, which was just another way to rip somebody off because anybody knew it was your smokers who were the real backbone of this country. I mean you take like your soldiers, your sailors, your Marines and your fliers, he thought, all them guys and then your oil field guys and them dudes that drive all the cows, man, and your mill hands and your auto workers and your machinists, like me, and your miners, know what I mean—all them guys—they made this country, man, and they deserve a good smoke when they want one. And like the fucking government ain’t got no right to burden a guy for that neither.

Sipping his drink while he smoked, Strawbridge returned his attention to the magazine. Where were all those girls when it came time for a guy to get married? He’d never known anything like them himself nor seen their like married to anybody in the working class. Broads like that went for the rich guys, the fancy dressers with the yachts and private jets and all, the actors and professional athletes. No chance for a guy like himself. Not in a million years. But, Jeez, everybody was entitled to one good piece of ass in his life, man. Like why else would God make broads that looked like that? God shouldn’t mean for no guy to spend his whole life tempted, you know, without no taste of real satisfaction, man. God ain’t like the crummy government—just to screw the worker and rip him off. God’s supposed to love us, know what I mean?

Not until he finished his drink and cigarette did Strawbridge return to his machine. The building where he worked was in Wilmington, Delaware, a huge, sky-lighted shed, although banks of florescent lamps did more than the dirty windows to light it. It contained two full floors and a partial third where the accountants, managers, engineers, draftsmen and the clerical people had their desks and tiny offices, plus there were drawing rooms where the draftsmen could look through plate glass windows at their work being executed on the great shop floor.

Excluding the part of it under this abbreviated third floor, the shop made up the entire second floor. Fifty men busy at their machines, crowding right to the doors of the cubby-hole offices shared by the foremen and other middle-managers, because there was a central parts room in there also, a repository for all the pins, collets, belts, bits, brushes, motors, cutters, mandrills, reamers, et cetera that it took to keep the machines producing.

The street floor was mainly shipping and receiving—the warehouse and loading docks and the little lunchroom built as an after thought into a corner at the far end from the docks and the offices directly above them. There was no elevator. There was a freight only elevator, of course, but that was half across the warehouse floor. Thus, taking into account the stairs, it was quite a walk from the lunchroom back to Strawbridge’s machine, which stood not ten feet from Bernie Schlimmerman’s office. He was waiting for Strawbridge by the latter’s machine.

Have a good lunch, did you? You sure took your fucking time.

Shit no, it was lousy, answered Strawbridge, still wheezing. Goddamn old lady give me fucking cheese again. She knows how I hate that stuff. So I had to buy this soda just to get rid of the taste, man.

So now you got fifty of them shafts to turn down by five o’clock or I’m gonna report your ass to the super, Strawbridge. You know we got this rule about lunch breaks. So you better start living by it, if you get what I mean. He turned and went through the door leading to the offices grouped around the tool room.

Strawbridge made a motion of screwing his middle finger violently into the air. But for the next two hours he stood to his machine. Think that sonofabitch would notice he’d let a break go by this morning? Naw, not that Schlimmerman. Those guys were all the same—either on top or getting there—they had it in for the poor slobs who paid their salaries. Schlimmerman was still hourly but Strawbridge included him anyway. It was the fifty guys out here that produced and all the others were just dead weight. And Strawbridge could get pissed thinking how life seemed to shower those parasites with all the perks and blessings too. It was them in their fucking ties and neat little suits, man, who got the chicks in the magazine. You think it was ever any grimy mechanic or a truck driver? Shit! Always some good looking dude in his classy clothes, know what I mean?

Strawbridge hadn’t had a really good piece of ass in his entire life, he thought. You couldn’t hardly count Emmaline Fergusohn, which that was over thirty years ago, and, anyway, everybody’d had a piece of her. More by accident than by intention he’d ceased to be a virgin by the time she got to him. Still her accumulated experience had been largely wasted on him. And then, not being very popular, he’d gone without until he married the butcher’s daughter, his mother’s choice for him, such a lovely girl and so refined.

Hans Dietrich Kreugermann and his daughter was named Estelle. Large but pretty enough twenty-five years ago, she was very overweight now and the Devil would blush at some of the things he’d called her, although never anything but dear in her presence, not on his life. Twenty-five years and no sooner had she decided their union was to be childless but she’d wanted her own room to sleep in and got stingier and stingier with what she called like the obligations of your marriage, you know, until poor Mel, who had a horror of masturbating as being an unmanly act and whose pride would never let him pay good money to a whore, had turned to begging her and that had become the basis on which he’d gotten any during the last decade and a half. Was it any wonder he might drool a little over a girlie magazine?

Mel was a little overweight himself but, being a machinist and accustomed to lifting heavy things, he had the robust arms and great chest that overshadowed his spreading middle. It was as much distension as fat anyway—the result of too many beers after supper while he turned up the TV to block out the constant nagging of his wife. Though he despised her, this very hatred formed a bond he couldn’t seem to break. He thought he might have despised her when he married her even, or before that when they were in school in Philadelphia and he knew he despised her fat father who regularly shorted poor women like his mother in his fancy shop in order to have more meat for his best customers, which, may she rest in peace, his ma had never guessed and always wanted him to marry that nice Mr. Kreugermann’s daughter someday. Mel had never known his father and felt responsible for his mother, whom his father had deserted and left pregnant, and Estelle was always very polite to his mother too, for which Mel felt grateful, on top of which Estelle’s father seemed to want his daughter married, or maybe he thought Mel’s poor mother was genteel—he never knew—but anyway, to please his mother, he did as she wished and a year later both his mother and Estelle’s father were dead and Mel began to perceive the true nature of the bargain into which he’d entered.

Always fearful of Estelle and sure of his own unattractiveness, Strawbridge lusted but never summoned the courage to consummate an affair. His romances became limited to two dimensional pictures. In fantasies he would slip between their thighs, crevices no more threatening to him than the creases of the magazines in which they appeared. But if Mel Strawbridge was ever to have a broad like one of them for real, he’d have to buy her or rape her, he knew, no other way, and, ugly and boorish which he felt himself to be, he was still too proud, too virile to pay a whore, no matter how invitingly she might offer herself. Rape then. Someday he would get one and he would rape her.

But deep inside Strawbridge knew he was afraid to rape a girl. Quite apart from his fear of law breaking generally, he had a horror of being identified, of Estelle finding out and accusing him. Highly unlikely that such a thing would ever happen, to be sure, but, meanwhile, the desire continued to burn in him like an inextinguishable coal, fanned to renewed brilliance by each new issue of the girlie mags.

And what started as an idle fantasy became an obsession over the years. Over the years with Estelle and her blaming him for every little thing, including the fact that they slept in separate rooms. She just wouldn’t leave him alone, the bitch. So that gradually this vision of having in bed with him one of those divine beauties—even if it took force to get her there—became as much a part of him as his shadow by day and the dark fabric of his dreams when he slept. It grew to make him irritable. It caused his hand to tremble. It intruded itself to blur his figures and make his calculations go awry. It cost him jobs probably and, were it not for his long experience, it certainly would have cost him more. In the past ten years he hadn’t remained anywhere more than twenty-four months, which, naturally, Estelle laid to his laziness and lack of initiative, damn her.

The trouble with you, Mel, she was so fond of saying, the trouble with you is you got this chronic lack of ambition, see, which how anybody’s going to get anywhere if all he does is drink that beer and watch that dumb TV all the time. And once started she might besiege him for an hour but her final sally was always the same: You should be studying, Mel. You should be studying nights and become an engineer or something so we can have some future, you know what I mean.

What she wanted him to study was mechanical engineering—night school, a regular degree, move up to management and wear a tie—despite his insistence that he was a machinist, not a frustrated engineer. Half the time their damn drawings were wrong anyway, he told her. In his head he could see how one piece of machined steel should mate with another to perform a given task. He didn’t need no goddamn blueprint neither—just a clear idea of what they were to do, the pieces. Sure, there was a place for detailed drawings, on real fine work where the tolerances were close, but those damn engineers just loved to complicate even simple things with extra cams and odd-ball eccentrics and God knew what all, where any bright kid with only string and some rubber bands, plus a bunch of old thread spools to work with, could have told them half their shit was useless in the first place.

Strawbridge hated engineers. Bastards ought to send down their drawings and never show their sorry faces on the shop floor, man, like leave the good machinists to get their damn shit working instead of always meddling like they do, know what I mean?

At three o’clock every afternoon, Florence Guzman, the one secretary/receptionist/girl-Friday, shared by all the foremen and supervisors where Strawbridge worked, sallied forth from her second floor enclave, her object to get a Coke but, since the only drink machine was in the lunchroom, she was obliged to cross the entire shop floor to get there. And such were Guzman’s natural endowments that this became an event anticipated by every one of the fifty men who worked on that floor. Work simply ground to a halt. No one wanted to miss a single detail as she passed. In fact, beginning while she was downstairs buying her Coke and continuing afterwards when she was back in the offices and out of their sight from them, small groups could be found discussing her walk and what she chose to wear each day. It was a thing into which they’d all become locked, like the time clock itself, and Guzman seemed as helpless or unwilling to break the cycle as the men were.

Guzman was aware of having to steel herself to walk past so many eyes whose hot stares seemed to burn her clothes off but she wouldn’t have missed one of those walks for the world. And she wasn’t remiss in preparing for them either.

Each night before retiring she’d lay out the next day’s clothes, which gave her more time in the morning for make-up. Guzman wasn’t rich—not on her salary—but she had a natural sense about things to wear and how to wear them. In a person more educated this might have been called taste. Thus, while her limited number of outfits tended to be revealing and some might have said they were a size too small, they all looked good on her and she made up for their lack of number by the wonders she could work with jewelry, a belt or a scarf. If not individually expensive, at least her outfits were of the best quality she could afford. It made her feel good to buy clothes in the better shops. Not alone in his opinion, Strawbridge thought she was just about the best dressed, most terrific looking thing he’d ever seen, outside a girlie magazine, in practically a decade.

Guzman had joined the company over three months ago, or right after the Fourth of July holiday, and already she’d become an institution. And Strawbridge had yearned to meet her since first laying eyes on her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her when she was around. Her combination of raven hair, which she sometimes held in place with a net, and a lean, vigorous torso and a firm little ass astride a pair of long, full hips, not to mention her cute, pouting lips and the penciled lift she gave her brows, to accentuate no doubt the alluring depths of her painted eyes. Not that all this make-up was badly applied either. It wasn’t. Nor did he know that she wore violet contacts for her myopic condition. But mainly there were her moves. When Flo sashayed past all those guys at their machines, if there was any new sound to be heard, it was the click of chins dropping to hit the floor.

But in three months Strawbridge had never been closer than ten feet to Flo Guzman. He simply dreamed of what he might say to her to turn her on to him, working up to proposing an affair with the girl. He supposed this might get expensive but he could handle that. Every bonus he’d ever gotten, for solving difficult problems or for getting work out ahead of time—and there had been many, as many companies as Strawbridge had worked for over the years—he’d stowed in a special account still unknown to his wife. There must be fifteen grand in there by now, his love account. All he wanted was just one good piece of ass, man, which was his right, shit. Even God shouldn’t deny a guy that, know what I mean?

CHAPTER TWO

Monday, October 9

Longley, Virginia

Late afternoon

So we’re agreed then. It must be a girl, said Colonel Horschact. And three of the four men in his office nodded. The fourth, Shexnaider, appeared to be asleep.

Wake him up, said Horschact. I want to know what he thinks.

Tom Evenender reached to nudge the man nearest him, a man Tom knew to be fifty but whose soft receding hair showed no gray, who even slumped in his fresh, unpadded tweed jacket revealed a lean, athletic body.

How does he do it, the son of a bitch. I know what he drinks, thought Tom.

Wake up, Shexnaider, he said. The Colonel wants to know what you think.

Shexnaider opened his eyes, which were gray, flecked with brown and green. He hadn’t been asleep. He did not sit up, nor did he shift his eyes, after checking the cigarette still burning between his fingers. He simply stared ahead, unfocussed, his eyes like bright glass.

Shexnaider had a longish face. But except for that and a high forehead, plus the fact that his eyebrows grew together, one might have associated him with the Indian on one side of old American nickels. It was his nose and his cheekbones and the set of his mouth. There were lines in his face too but they seemed to owe as much to a dour disposition as to any effects of time and the elements.

I heard, Colonel, he said, stirring only to draw on the cigarette, But how I should know, me? You say we need a girl? If you say so, I reckon we do.

Quite, returned the Colonel, a gray man, smaller and more spindly than Shexnaider but with a large, grizzled head, who wore gray suits habitually and had bushy brows and sharp gray eyes peering out from under them that made one think of a predatory animal hiding in some winter thicket. He did not smoke but had a way of drumming with his fingers while others did and what he drummed most was Lili Marlene, the World War Two favorite of German soldiers.

That was decided at a previous meeting, Shexnaider, he continued, one which you unfortunately were unable to attend.

Unable or uninvited, Colonel? Hell, it don’t make me no difference. You all just go right ahead. I’ll listen. I reckon soon enough you’ll told me, why I got this invite here today.

And Shexnaider settled again in his chair, his eyes nearly as closed as they had been before.

Horschact’s office was on the third floor, Horschact’s floor, a gathering place for the least expendable people in the department. Movers and shakers, planners and coordinators, they had their offices up here in the north wing of the Department of Intelligence building. The Secretary had an office up here too but, being a cabinet member, he preferred to stick closer to the President. Thus he maintained another office in nearby Washington. Shexnaider was the exception among these men. He had no office. He still worked in the field.

Horschact had joined the espionage game when the OSS was formed. He’d been a favorite of Wild Bill Donovan himself. In fact, VE Day had dawned to find him the youngest light colonel in the general’s command. And then when the post-war Department of Intelligence became a reality, although without Donovan, Horschact had sought a place in it. Now there was no place higher, except that of Secretary, to which he might aspire.

Two of the four men seated around Horschact’s conference table were young. One of these, a blonde, looked almost like a caricature of a tennis player, even to the freckles he probably wished he