immediately the low background thrum of engines increased to a dull vibrating rumble.
“Neither is particularly difficult, but they do require something that you have and we lack,” the Kid continued as he opened the door of a cramped cabin.
“I don’t have the official minutes of our last meeting in front of me,” John said, as the Kid pulled two straight chairs away from the small dining table and over to the loveseat where Jane had dropped in near exhaustion. Leo brought a plastic chair in from the deck. “But as I recall, the consensus was that Elite Solutions and Anonymous had reached a parting of the ways due to irreconcilable differences. You have a strict policy of no weapons, no killing. Whereas weapons and killing” he raised his shoulders apologetically, “is what we do.”
“I seem to remember being called a ‘dinosaur’,” Jane remarked, stifling a yawn.
“Not that I’d mind playing Jurassic Park with a few Wall Street types” John said.
“Violence and technology,” Jen shook her head. “Still not good bedfellows. But,” she went on brightly, “turns out contrary to our original thinking, we do need old people.”
“Expertise,” the Kid corrected her hastily. “We need interpersonal expertise and gravitas, and we’d like you to consider expanding your business model to include - diplomacy and social engineering.”
“You want us to run a con?” John sat forward with his elbows on his knees.
“One con, one negotiation,” the Kid amended.
“The Sting and Dangerous Liaisons,” Jen said.
“Who and who?” Jane asked.
“Who and where,” Leo put in. He pulled a handkerchief from his front pocket, performed some mysterious hand motions, and produced his iPad, which he handed to the Kid with a flourish.
“Here is the who.” The Kid pulled up a front page story in Le Monde and passed it around. Jane did a double-take when she saw the cover photo. It was someone who had made quite an impression recently. Saki’s pal. IMF guy. She pointed at the iPad.
“OK, that’s creepy. We were just on a plane together.”
“Mon dieu!” Leo exclaimed, in perfect French. He looked around the group, who were equally taken aback. “C’est superbe!” [My God! That’s fantastic!]
“It’s so much easier to blackmail people you already know and don’t love,” Jen said. Jane and John waited for the Kid to explain.
“We need to open a dialogue with the guys at the top,” he began.
“And they are mostly guys,” Jen interjected. “Just sayin’.”
“- to let them know that the game is up and we can end this nice and easy - or we can end it nice and rough,” he finished.
“Define ‘nice and easy’,” John said.
“We all suddenly discover our inner FDR and start running the world for the common good.”
“Nice and rough?” Jane asked.
“We release every last piece of dirt available in government dossiers for just about every politician, banker, CEO, and military officer on the face of the planet. Bust their vast criminal enterprise wide open. For starters,” the Kid said.
“Yeah, I’m glad you said ‘for starters,’? Because where we come from, assassinating presidents, starting wars, and killing thousands before breakfast is just part of a day’s work. ‘Dirt’ is kinda like Purell for those guys. They wash their hands in it and move on.” John sat back with his own hands behind his head.
“Sweet talk the oligarchs, check,” Jane said. “What else?”
“We need real time access to SPIRE,” the Kid was typing on the iPad again.
“One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,” Leo quoted.
“In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie,” Jen added.
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” Jane was so tired she was getting cranky.
“No way can I get back into the Pentagon.” John put his feet up on the coffee table.
“Fortunately,” the Kid said, “the Pentagon is only one gateway. There are others. We think we’ve found the most vulnerable. We had an inside man, but we lost him last summer. You may have heard about it. He turned up inside a gym bag.” He turned the iPad around again, this time displaying first a large red hold-all in a bathtub, and then a vast green and white structure that looked as though it was made out of Legos. Instantly recognizable as a picture from the most sensational spy murder of the new millennium and a beauty shot of the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
“Oh -” John started.
“- shit,” Jane finished.
“I see you know what I’m talking about,” the Kid glanced at Leo who had picked up a stack of orange life rings and was beginning to juggle.
“Kinda hard to not to. It was in all the papers,” Jane said. “Is in all the papers.”
“Inside man was the victim of an inside job,” John asserted. “Very clean, very professional.”
Jane nodded. “And whoever did it had a warped sense of humor. Your friend was sports mad and ended up in a sports bag.”
“Kind of like Turing, who saw ‘Snow White’ a hundred times and died of a poison apple,” Jen said. Everybody was watching Leo flip and spin the orange rings.
“At any rate, it was a big loss for us. Huge. Because he wasn’t some file clerk; SPIRE was his baby. He created it to spy on foreigners; terrorist types in the Middle East and Asia, or so he was told. When he found out it was being turned on you, me, and everyone we know, he came to us. Had he lived just one day longer we probably would not be having this conversation.”
“You want us to break into MI6?” John chuckled as Jane took her eyes off Leo long enough to roll them.
“It’s all set up, a dead hand job, you won’t believe how easy,” the Kid insisted. Jen stood up and clapped her hands and Leo tossed her a life ring, which she tossed back. Leo kept juggling without skipping a beat.
“A dead hand job for two dead spooks.” John couldn’t help himself. “Not that we’d have the ghost of a chance.”
“Snowball in hell,” Jane agreed. “And they don’t just shoot you over there. Old world decadence and the ancien régime are alive and well in the New World Order.”
“So you’ll think about it then?” the Kid urged. Jen and Leo were now team juggling, tossing the rings to and fro over the Kid’s head like marines exchanging rifles during silent drill.
“Sleep on it,” Jane temporized, getting up stiffly and stretching like a big Persian cat. “Ten hours to New York, right? I’m going to need all of them.” Leo and Jen chucked the life preservers to John, who caught them neatly, and followed the Kid out, presumably to other sleeping quarters. John locked the door behind them and turned to find Jane already prostrate on the single berth.
“Big ship, little bed,” he said. Jane had not bothered to undress or pull back the white comforter.
“Half as much mattress as the Casablanca,” he noted aloud, thinking with a pang about Jane’s sloop, moored in Piraeus Harbor, and better days. A shudder ran through the freighter and out the window the lights of a tugboat streamed slowly by. They were getting under way.
“Probably not enough room for two,” he hazarded. He thought he might be talking to himself. That she was ignoring him or sunk already in dreamless sleep. He sighed and decided he could probably make do with the loveseat and the coffee table though his back would give him hell in the morning. Jane mumbled something and he pricked up his ears.
“Sorry,” he leaned forward. “I missed that. Say again?”
“La senora es muy bonita,” Jane said, quoting a certain Cuban bus driver. “Y son ustedes casados, no?” [“The lady is very pretty. And you are married, right?”]
He was out of his shirt in less than a heartbeat. Her boots took a little longer.
17 You Can Leave Your Hat On
The view was stunning, especially at night. Look left and ther
e was the East River. Straight ahead the UN. The Empire State building and the rest of midtown Manhattan stretched away to the right. Everything all lit up like Christmas. But Jane did not waste time admiring the scenery. She sat in the high-backed executive chair, beneath a single recessed spotlight with her back to the door, and read as fast as she could the hand-written pages of plain-spoken French.
“Il ya quelques milliers d'années, Aristote écrit que ‘le meilleur partenariat dans un état est celui qui fonctionne à travers les gens milieu ... les Etats où l'élément central est grande ... ont toutes les chances d'avoir une constitution bien géré’.”
“Cela était vrai à l'époque d'Aristote, il est vrai au temps de Keynes, et il est vrai aujourd'hui. Stabilité dépend d'une classe moyenne forte qui peut propulser la demande. Nous ne verrons pas ce que la croissance ne conduit pas à des emplois décents, ou si les récompenses de croissance de la poignée de privilégiés sur le nombre marginalisés.”
“En fin de compte, l'emploi et l'équité sont des éléments constitutifs de la stabilité économique et la prospérité, de la stabilité politique et la paix. Cela va au cœur du mandat du FMI. Il doit être placé au cœur de l'agenda politique.” - La crise mondiale de l'emploi, discours du FMI 13/04/2011
[“A few thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote that ‘The best partnership in a state is the one which operates through the middle people…those states in which the middle element is large… have every chance of having a well-run constitution’.”]
[“This was true