As he followed Mackenzie Kilbane and Murphy down the Embassy hallway, Bliss couldn’t keep from thinking what a bad idea it had been to date Mackenzie all those lifetimes ago. He had been working for PERSCOM at the Hoffman Building in Washington and his career had had Pentagon written all over it. Then Mackenzie handed him over to her best friend, Cheryl, the Senator’s daughter, and it was the beginning of the end for his Army career.
What had made him ignore the screams of protest from his misbegotten feminine intuition and ask Mackenzie out? He had seen how her men ended up as perfectly lacquered and starched into place as her hair and the creases of her crisp white blouse and Ann Taylor suit. He had been warned, and still it hadn’t kept him from asking her out.
He watched Mackenzie slow her walk and lean toward Murphy for an intimate, feminine aside.
Close enough now for a whiff of her perfume, Bliss thought how fitting the name ‘Viper’ was for anything dabbed behind her ears. The smell awakened an old queasiness in the pit of his stomach. He slowed his steps until the scent faded, but halfway down the hall the tip-tapping of her red high heels stopped, as she and Murphy turned around to wait for him.
She was even more perfect from the front, except for the single flake of dandruff that dared to spot the padded shoulder of her black power suit.
Suddenly he remembered what had made her so irresistible. An immature need to see where the perfection ended and the woman began. It was a puzzle that had remained unsolved, and forever after he regretted letting it get personal.
Inside her office she waved at the chairs opposite the couch and coffee table. Not a short meeting then. His growling stomache began wishing he had stopped for a sandwich.
She sat primly on the edge of her couch, but before they could start her phone rang. She walked to the neat, empty desk and pressed buttons with bright pink fingernails while Murphy and Bliss sat in silence. Murphy wouldn’t test his limits with banter. Not in Mackenzie’s office.
The phone call stretched on and on. She was wasting their time.
Watch this, he signaled Murphy, and ran his fingers through his hair. In Washington, all those centuries ago, fiddling with his hair had earned him lectures on how common he was being by grooming himself in public.
Mackenzie’s mouth tightened almost imperceptibly. He winked at Murphy as Mackenzie said, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up.
“Can we get to why you hauled us in here, Mackenzie?” he said.
“A few minutes on the social graces are always well spent, Ray. Even on the phone.”
“Yeah, well a missing plutonium train in Poland and a dirty bomb in the middle of London must be getting to me.” No smile. Letting Mackenzie think you were friends didn’t pay.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get to work.” She took a folder from the coffee table. “Pawlowski is scheduled be sworn in as Environment Minister on Friday.”
“Great.” He turned to Murphy. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go get him.”
“He hasn’t resurfaced yet,” Murphy said. “He told his staff he had some personal business to take care of first. He’s late, but they aren’t particularly concerned. Apparently it’s standard operating procedure for him.”
“And let me guess, snatching him during the swearing in…”
“Too risky. We could get caught. At least he won’t be sworn in as Finance Minister,” Murphy said. “Think what a crime boss could do in banking.”
“Right. Thank God, he only wants to save the environment and not the banks.”
“Ha, ha.” Mackenzie’s shiny red stiletto tip-tapped annoyance on the linoleum. “Michael Usher tells me, we’re giving Poland $40 million in aid to clean up the environmental messes left by the Communists. That’s American money earmarked for American construction companies, and now an organized crime boss will sign off on how the contracts get awarded.”
“You’re right,” Bliss said, “Not funny.”
“How are you doing with Jordan?” she asked. “Will she help us?”
“I haven’t asked her yet.” Bliss said. “Don’t want to scare her off.”
“Losing our touch with the ladies, are we?” Mackenzie asked.
Crap. How predictable. Her jealousy was once again getting in the way of the job. He scratched his head and enjoyed her wince.
“Well?”
“Maybe I am,” he said.
“Not funny, Ray. You said it before, weapons-grade plutonium, a dirty bomb in London. We need her on the ATTF team.”
“I’m too old for this.”
“Save the excuses.” She offered Murphy a chocolate from her stash of Godiva and smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her short straight skirt, while Bliss watched.
She caught him looking and offered her chocolates as a reward. “Want some, Ray?”
He ignored the intentionally ambiguous invitation. “Tell me again, why she quit NSA.”
“Actually, she was fired. ‘Allowed to resign’ is the politically-correct phrase. We showed her the scams Pawlowski was running and allowed her to resign,” she said.
“I can’t get much further without her NSA psych evaluation.”
She slid a blue folder across the coffee table.
Inside were four heavily redacted pages. He looked up. “You’re kidding? What’s with all the black? Doesn’t NSA get that we’re on the same team?”
“Sorry.”
“How can I figure out what makes her tick with 80% of this blacked out?”
“I’ve spoken to Michael Usher, who was an acting NSA director back then about it. He’ll try to dig it up in Washington next week, but he thinks the original may have been lost.”
Bliss quirked an eyebrow at her.
“Look, I know you don’t like Usher, but…”
“Don’t like? That’s got nothing to do with it. I don’t want to marry the guy. I just want the straight dope. Answers. Every time I ask him something, I get the feeling he’s holding out.
“For starters, I can’t believe that NSA just let her walk. Usually they pressure top mathematicians to stay. Make them offers they can’t refuse.”
“Maybe she wasn’t that good.”
“After what you told us about Mojo? So she had a loser boyfriend, if she so brilliant, and Mojo was so important… I don’t believe they would just fire her.”
He leafed through the papers again. “At least this explains the switch to history. She signed a termination agreement. No mathematics for ten years. No computers for two.”
“Which she is abiding by, even though we have no way of enforcing it here in Europe.”
“She’s a good kid. But I still need to know what makes her tick.”
Mackenzie reached for another chocolate. “Perhaps you should let us in on the particulars, Ray. Laura and I are women. We might spot something you’re missing.”
Yeah, right. On the scale of feminine wiles, Fritzi was Mackenzie’s polar opposite, but he wasn’t about to pull an Usher.
“Okay.” He took his time finding the words. “I’ve recruited a lot of agents. You get a sixth sense about when they’re ready. That all you have to do is ask them to dance. But not this kid. I think she thinks of me as a friend, but NSA and Pawlowski have her spooked. I really do need an unredacted version of her psych evaluation, Mackenzie.”
“Any sign of pent-up anger? Getting fired these days…what with the read out and the security guards watching you clear out your desk, it can’t be easy.”
Bliss shook his head. “Not her style. She turned what happened in Washington into a bad dream; stored it away where it can’t hurt her.” He put the folder back on the coffee table. “The only reason the kid talks to me at all, is that she is lonely and homesick.”
Pink-tipped fingernails tapped the blue folder. “Thirty two is hardly a kid, Ray.”
“Her naïveté is a real concern as well,” he said.
“I have to agree with Ray there,” Murphy said. “Pawlowski used that to get close.”
Mac
kenzie picked through her chocolates while Bliss poured a glass of mineral water.
“She’s a nice kid, Mackenzie. I mean, nice thirty-two-year-old, but I don’t see her as agent material. We should find someone else.”
“Laura?” Mackenzie asked.
Murphy shook her red curls. “Sorry, Bliss. We have no choice.”
“Pawlowski’s file just keeps growing,” Mackenzie said. “Our latest report says that he got the money to study in America by whacking emergency room patients in Łódź, so his buddies in the funeral trade could expand their business. It just gets worse and worse. Thinking of the plutonium train in his hands…”
Murphy turned to Bliss. “Jordan did wise up. Too late for our national security comfort level, of course, but in the end she did give him the boot. Appeal to her sense of patriotism.”
“Ask her to ‘dance’, Bliss,” Mackenzie said. “We can’t get close without her.”
She turned to Murphy. “What’s the latest on the train?”
“The best satellites money can buy, not to mention all of NATO, aren’t finding it.”
“How can something as big as a castor train just disappear?” Mackenzie asked.
“Polish authorities think it may be inside somewhere. Their army is searching abandoned coal mines, but there are hundreds of them.”
“Which makes dangling Jordan in front of Pawlowski even more urgent.” Mackenzie opened another folder. “So we have our cast of characters. Let me tell you about the setting for our play.
“Commercial Service has scheduled a conference on entrepreneurial strategies for Eastern Europe a week from now in Katowice, Poland. Routine stuff, creating industrial parks and free trade zones, explaining high tech business incubators, financing how-to’s with lawyers and bankers, and so on.
“Michael Usher has arranged for Fritzi to lead a workshop on industrial recycling in their environmental programming track.”
“An old friend of the Environment Minister holding an environmental workshop on his turf. If that doesn’t lure him in, nothing will,” Murphy said.
“It’s up to you now, Ray. Get her on board.”
“I’ll try.”
“Try?” Her eyebrow arched.
Mackenzie was right. Negativity didn’t help. Fritzi was bright. She would learn operational procedure quickly, and he knew he could talk her into it. He just didn’t like doing it. “What if Pawlowski suspects she’s working for us?”
“Then he’ll be even more interested. He’ll want to know what we know. You’ve got until the end of the day,” she said, handing him a folder with promotional materials. “Get her to sign, or we’ll find someone else to run her.”
11 Berlin