Blue with Black Dots (The Caprice Trilogy Book 2) (29 page)

“I think it’s like you said before,” said Georgia, “No one was supposed to go looking for it there.  It wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place.  Who goes looking for what doesn’t exist?”

“Someone expecting manna from heaven I suppose,” said Mark.

“Maybe that’s why she hid it in the attic,” said Georgia.

“Maybe,” said Mark.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this yesterday?” asked Georgia.

“We were going to,” said Mark, “But something came up.  I was organizing so much yesterday.  We got the photographs of the document.  We took two pictures of each page with two different cameras.  I was waiting for the film to be developed hoping we’d get a decent-looking copy.”

“Did you?” asked Georgia.

“Yes,” said Mark, “But I got a phone call at home while I was waiting for the lads to phone me back and say that they got good exposures and the prints came out.  Then I got a call saying that the negatives have to be shipped out of country to Langley.”

“What’s so big about that?” asked Georgia, “You can do all that.”

“Yes,” said Mark, “But amongst all that, I got even another phone call.  You won’t believe who it was.”

“Who?” asked Georgia.

“Deputy Director Arthur Witt,” said Mark.

“Director Witt called you yesterday?” said Georgia.

“He did,” said Mark.

“With what?” asked Georgia, “Wait, about
Step Down
?”

“No,” said Mark.

“
Full House
?” asked Georgia.  Mark nodded his head.

“What about it?” asked Georgia. 

“Well,” said Mark, “He’ll tell you himself.  We’re supposed to ring him in twenty.”  Georgia hadn’t been paying attention before but she focused on a small brown box speaker sitting at the edge of Mark’s desk.  The cord to the speaker ran down on the other side of Mark’s desk.  Mark took the phone jack out of the receiver of his desk phone and plugged it into the back of the box speaker.

“It’s a two-way receiver so you’ll be able to talk and listen here,” said Mark, “You did close the door behind you when I buzzed you in the office, no less.”

“I closed it,” said Georgia.

“Good,” said Mark.  Mark began dialing the phone.  Georgia could hear the key tones through the box speaker. 

“Hello,” said the voice through the speaker.  Georgia moved her chair next to the desk and placed the speaker between herself and Mark.

“Good Morning,” said Mark, “How are you doing Arthur?”

“Good, the weather in Virginia is hot this time of year but we’ve got a bit of wind going.  It seems this morning,” said Arthur, “Good Morning to you, as well, or I should say good afternoon.”

“Good Morning, Director,” said Georgia.

“Good Morning, Georgia,” said Arthur, “And congratulations.”

“Thank you, Sir,” said Georgia.

“Job well done,” said Arthur.

“We’re very proud of her,” said Mark.

“I’m proud as well,” said Arthur, “You know, Georgia, I was real impressed with your credentials when I picked you for
Full House
and you just keep adding to it.  I’ve been in touch with Mark on how you’re progressing over there.  And it’s just great how you anticipate and adapt in the field.  You’re everything we need you to be and then some.”

“Thank you, Sir,” said Georgia.

“You know,
Full House
was supposed to prepare you guys for so much but we couldn’t prepare you for everything,” said Arthur.

“The preparation was more than adequate, Sir,” said Georgia. 

“I’m glad you feel that way,” said Arthur, “Because that’s what I need to talk to you about.”

“I’m listening, Sir,” said Georgia.

“Well,” said Arthur, “There was a reason that we had you organize and train in pairs according to suit.  I didn’t want to tell you that reason because one, it would have affected how you viewed your partner during training and two, because you would only have to know it under extreme circumstance.”  Georgia could feel something very strange was on the horizon.  The Director seemed to be talking around his point instead of making it.

“In order to efficiently allocate company resources, the idea behind the suits was to make each suit responsible for itself,” said Arthur.

“I don’t follow you, Director,” said Georgia.

“In the event of an agent’s capture there are a lot of steps that have to be taken,” said Arthur, “The point of
Full House
was to make each person, in a pair, responsible for the other person in case an agent is captured or killed.  What that means is, if something were to happen to you, I would be on the phone with Patrick Engel right now telling him to disengage from activities as soon a practicable and go investigate your whereabouts.  But…”

“Something happened to Patrick?” asked Georgia.

“He disappeared over a week ago,” said Arthur, “And we’ve had no communication from him.  He’s
outside the oval
.”  Georgia hadn’t heard the expression in a while.  It referred to the Oval Office of the White House.  The Agency was under the chain of command of the President of the United States but much of what the Agency did, the President wasn’t directly aware of.  The President didn’t have to know, as long as activities were inside the oval, pertaining to the specific policy direction of the Presidency.  If an agent was missing and didn’t report in to any reporting station after a specified length of time, he was considered outside the oval—no longer following the Agency’s directive, on authority of the President. 

“Ok,” said Georgia, “Can you bring me up on what’s been done so far?”

“We went through his apartment and checked his mail and all communications,” said Arthur, “All incoming calls are recorded, as you know, so we’re going over the tapes of what he said every time he called in.  But that’s the most we can do at the moment.  But because you exercised with him, you’re in a better position than anyone to figure out what happened to him.  What he may have done and how it could have ended with his disappearance.”

“If I may, Sir,” said Georgia, “I don’t think Patrick would have abandoned his assignment.  He was a very committed and loyal person.”

“I want you to think about everything you know about him,” said Arthur, “And view it objectively.”

“I will, Sir,” said Georgia, “Is there any going theory from what little we have?”

“There is a Soviet wetworks team active in Europe,” said Arthur, “A team of three.  We know about them but we don’t track them directly.  We’ve got people studying them but we try not to leave a trail.  So we don’t have anyone in pursuit of them and they travel separately, team up when necessary.  But we suspect something.  Until we find out, we can’t target them.  So far, we can’t say they’ve killed any of our people.  We simply don’t know, so we have to investigate.  And, I’m speaking personally, like you said, I think Patrick is loyal to his charge and to his mission.  And if he’s missing, it wasn’t anything he had planned.  But that’s not how you conduct an investigation.  You have to consider everything when you’re investigating—keep an open mind.  Can you do that?”

“Yes, Sir,” said Georgia, “Director Witt, one quick question.  Where exactly am I going?”

“Paris,” said Arthur, “He was only there to deliver a message for us and he was only in the city for eleven days, before he disappeared.”

“What kind of operation was it?” asked Georgia.

“I won’t talk about that now,” said Arthur, “But we’re going to be sending you your old
Browning
blowback pistol.  The one you exercised with at Harvey Point and some other items that you’ll be able to pick up in Paris.  We’re making available one of our flats in Paris.  It’s a nice one.  You’ll like it.  You can settle in and we’ll have you briefed in a few days time, as soon as we can.  You’ll be able to just relax for a few days while we organize the information we have so we can brief you properly.  We’ll probably have you go to the embassy to be briefed but it hasn’t been decided just yet.  We’ve hired a courier service to deliver your ticket and directions to your apartment.  It should be delivered tonight at 20:00, so we need you to have a night in.  And that’s everything for the moment.”

“Thank you, Sir,” said Georgia, “Do you have anything else for me?”

“That’s it,” said Arthur, “Mark, thanks for all your assistance on this.”

“Always a pleasure, Arthur,” said Mark.

“Goodbye, Sir,” said Georgia.

“Goodbye,” said Arthur.  Georgia sat still for just a second.

“Did you know about this?” asked Georgia.

“I just knew there was something big involving an agent in Paris,” said Mark, “That’s as much as they told me.”

“You’ve been doing this much longer than me,” said Georgia, “What do you think is going on?”

“Well,” said Mark, “That would depend on what your man, what was his name, Patrick?”

“Yes,” said Georgia.

“That would all depend on what Patrick was doing,” said Mark, “Him being a fellow, I would imagine his assignment was somewhat different from yours.  That is to say, I don’t think he was in play as a Honey Trap.”

“Maybe he was,” said Georgia, “He was something of a Ladies’ Man, a southern gentleman.  At least, that’s what he played up.  And it worked for him.

“Good for him,” said Mark.

“Not if it got him killed,” said Georgia.

“You don’t know if he’s dead,” said Mark.

“I got the call about those minutes being with Karen right,” said Georgia, “What makes you think I’m wrong.”

“I’m not saying you are,” said Mark, “Just that without his dead body or photographs of it, which I can say I’ve seen a lot of both in my day, nothing’s declared.”

“I understand I’d have to do more than just listen to a phone call and jump to a conclusion,” said Georgia, “But come on.  He disappeared.  We know what that means in this business.”

“Maybe he met the girl of his dreams in France,” said Mark, “Trust me when I say I know a bit about French girls that could sway him in that direction.”

“I’ll go ahead and believe you on that, without the details,” said Georgia.

“I was your age too once,” said Mark, “Besides, it sounds silly but there is such a thing as holding out hope.  Even in this game.”

“Should I?” asked Georgia.

“Hope is a choice,” said Mark, “It’s always a choice.”

Chapter Nine    Always a Choice

              Georgia touched down at
Charles De Gaulle Airport
at 11:35am on Tuesday, June 7
th
.  She didn’t go immediately home.  She went to a storage locker at Gare du Nord.  There was a leather 20 X 15 X 5” suitcase that was waiting in the large locker.  Georgia took the suitcase and signed it out.  The suitcase had a three-dial combination lock.  And Georgia didn’t have the combination.  She would get it later.  She took a taxi to her apartment.  The Agency treated Georgia better than she expected.  She had an idea of where her apartment was but the taxi pulled up to a polished French oak door on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris’ chic 6
th
arrondissement.  There were multiple bistros on the narrow one-way street and a fresh fruit stand was just around the corner.  Georgia didn’t take her mind off the stakes.  She could have operated out of any space but the second floor apartment was big and fully furnished.  She set the suitcase down and looked around the apartment.  She looked around and wondered if it was the same apartment where Patrick stayed.  Director Witt wasn’t clear on that point.  He said the apartment was nice.  He wasn’t wrong.  But Georgia wondered why the apartment was empty.  The Director mentioned it was one of several apartments the Agency had in Paris.  Georgia thought it must be one of the nicer ones. 
So why was it not in use
?  There was a large packet of dark roast coffee on the table.  In front of the coffee, was a small white card with the typewritten word
Enjoy
.  It meant nothing.  But the Agency worked with labels.  In fact, a codename wasn’t referred to as a codename.  It was called a label.  Georgia looked on the bottom of the coffee bag and found a small green price sticker,
119.00FR
.  She took the coffee in hand and walked back toward the door where she left the leather suitcase.  She used the combination 1-1-9.  It opened.

              Inside the suitcase, was a pair of black faux-leather high-heel boots in Georgia’s size.  There were several books, a black box-quilt jacket and a cigarette lighter. Georgia remembered the Director saying her
Browning 1955
pistol would be in the suitcase.  She didn’t see it, which meant she had to look for it.  She felt the inner lining of the suitcase and found seven bullets lined up inside the lining near the hinge.  She fished in the pockets of the jacket and found the barrel of her gun.  Other parts were hidden in the heel of her boots.  The casing was in the spine of a book.  The handgrip
was
the cigarette lighter.  The grip had no panel.  It was just a clean piece of finished metal.  Surprisingly, it made the handgrip look a lot less like a pistol and a lot more like a cigarette lighter.  Georgia assembled the
Browning
, just once, to make sure it was in working order.  It was against advice to dry-fire any service weapon.  She did it anyway to see if it would fire.  Confident, she disassembled her
Browning
and put the pieces back where she found them.  Georgia spent the next day buying groceries.  She didn’t know how long she would be in Paris, which made buying food a guessing-game.  She favored fresh items but they had to be eaten.  She didn’t know if she should stock can goods for a long season or if she’d be sent out of Paris on a moment’s notice.  She was still waiting to be briefed.  The Director hadn’t been clear as to when she would be briefed.  She understood it was all very sudden but they were professionals.  Waiting in the wind without a clear direction was unprofessional.  Georgia wasn’t satisfied with the handling of the situation because any evidence linked to Patrick’s disappearance was getting stale.  But she didn’t know what Patrick was working on or whom he was dealing with.  She left her confidence with the Director, assuming he was organizing all known information and would call her within days to tell her how to proceed.  Because she was unaware of how quickly she would have to move, Georgia bought groceries daily.  Her fridge was never full.

On her second full day in Paris, Georgia returned from grocery shopping and twisted the key expecting the mailbox to be empty.  It wasn’t.  A blue card lay on the metal floor of the mailbox.  She had a package from
The Baddington Company
.  She had never heard of it.  The package was being held at the French Post station on Boulevard Saint-Michel, ten blocks away.  She had twenty-seven minutes before the station closed.  She couldn’t run.  Running would draw attention.  It was her duty not to draw attention.  She took a taxi twelve blocks.  It was hard to tell which exchange was shorter, with the taxi driver or with the package handler.  She handed the driver a twenty French franc note, without waiting to collect her change.  She walked two blocks back toward the French Post outlet, looking for someone shadowing her.  She went in the package station handed her blue card to a man with young hair and an old face.  He didn’t move.  He just turned around.  The small package was on the back counter.  The package handler grabbed it and gave it to Georgia.

“
Firmer
,” he said, pointing to the blank space on the blue card. 
Sign
.  Georgia grabbed the package with a
merci
and left.  She stuffed the package in her purse as if it didn’t exist.  But the ten-block walk to her apartment did.  Something had happened.  That was the meaning of the package.  She had nine more blocks before she would know.  But she was trained for those nine blocks, to act like nothing was out of the ordinary.  Someone had a message and had to send it outside the usual vine.  That was huge, bigger than the small box would let on.

Georgia handled the eleven blocks in style.  She lit a
Pall Mall
at eight blocks and discarded it at three blocks.  With three blocks left, her pace quickened.  Without the cigarette to focus on she focused on the non-existent box in her purse.  She entered her apartment at a relaxed pace.  The second floor wasn’t far, just two floors up.  She made it up the stairs to her apartment door in under a minute.  The door was open and she was in her apartment closing the door behind her.  She sat her purse down on her kitchen table and pulled the window shut.  She cranked the shutters down to cover the view from outside.  Georgia walked over to the sink and found a serrated knife laying in the sink.  She sat at her kitchen table and used the knife to cut through box tape.  She opened the box to find it full of balled up newspaper.  Georgia waded through the newspaper balls to find a newly minted box of playing cards.  She opened the box and shuffled through the cards.  All cards were face down.  She kept shuffling until the third to last card.  All cards were face down.  The third to last card was face up.  Without any training, she wouldn’t have believed it was an accident.  The card had a face and a name, the King of Diamonds.  Above the king’s head on both ends of the card were numbers—40* 29’ 24”N, was written on one end.  0* 06’ 0”E was written on the other.  Georgia went to her bedroom and found what she was looking for under a stack of magazines.  She took the world map back to her kitchen table.  Unfolding the map she put the card over the Atlantic Ocean.  She matched the latitude with her left index finger and matched the longitude with her right.  Both her fingers pointed to a dot on the northern coast of France, Le Havre. 

The message was clear but she only had half of it.  The King of Diamonds was Hagan.  He wanted Georgia to go to Le Havre.  That much she knew, when and why were left hanging in the air.  With a deck of cards in front of her, she decided to gamble.  Georgia thought the second part of the message would be found on her card, the Queen of Spades.  She was right.  The date 6/10/77 was written above the queen’s head and the word
Le Simple
was written above the queens head on the other end.  Three words were written on the side of the card in all caps:  FIND THE OTHERS.  It took Georgia a moment before she realized Hagan was talking about the other Peers.  She found the other kings and queens in the deck.  They weren’t together.  Georgia laid out all face cards representing the king and queen of each suit.  There was something noticeably different about all of the other cards.  Xs were drawn over the eyes of all the others.  They only ones without Xs were the first two cards Georgia drew from the deck, the King of Diamonds and the Queen of Spades.  The message was covert but couldn’t have been more emphatic.  To read the words,
the others are dead
, would have carried its own shock.  But seeing the pictures of faces made the message echo.  It echoed in the form of the Director’s words.  He said their training graduation would be the last time they would all be together.  The cards with X-out eyes proved he couldn’t have been more right.

Georgia needed a break from the cloak and dagger.  She left the cards and map on the table and retreated to her bedroom.  She sat on her bed.  She didn’t cry.  She wasn’t the type.  But she forgot her posture.  That was why she needed the bed.  She needed to slouch.  It wasn’t the moment where she could maintain her form and think about what the truth meant.  She had to bend her body to free her mind.  It took a lot of energy to come to the realization that six specific people were gone.  It took less energy to realize it wasn’t a coincidence.  She knew she had to meet Hagan in Le Havre but she already knew what he was going to tell her.  The Peers were being targeted.  All but two suits had been eliminated, Diamonds and Spades.  Georgia was still living and so was Hagan.  The situation forced Georgia to reevaluate her next step and the step after that.  She saw the danger in meeting Hagan.  If the Peers were being hunted, the best place for the assassin to be was Le Havre, on the next day.  The last two targets would be ducks in a row.  The death of the other Peers jaded her almost instantly.  She began entertaining a thought hard to believe under any other circumstances,
Hagan could be the assassin
.  Being one of two left meant she would have to draw that conclusion at some point.  The shock was it came so quick.  It wasn’t even an hour after she opened the deck of cards.  If she had to travel, she didn’t want to look like Georgia Standing.  She made use of the auburn hair dye that she bought in London.  She bought the hair dye kit to have plastic gloves to search Owen Spice’s flat.  Now, the hair dye itself was more useful than the gloves.  Her new auburn look calmed her down.  She even cut her hair an inch and a half.  If she was being hunted, she didn’t want to look like herself.  She decided to wear only clothing she hadn’t worn so far in Paris.

Without training, her instinct told her not to go to Le Havre.  It made more sense to stay in Paris.  Paris was safer.  But the point of training was to counteract instinct.  Instinct was restrictive, a limit.  But she had overcome so many limits while training.  She knew safety was in Paris, but answers were in Le Havre.  She was going to Le Havre for answers.  But she had a different name for answers, intelligence.