“How can you help us get into the NSA lab? Once we’re in, what do you want for your trouble?” Anka was all business.
“Ah yes, I can help you get in. My friends in China have toys that will let me hack into the NSA’s system. We can disable the security and even use some of it against them.”
“That’s great, but you can’t hack all the agents that we’ll be facing. How do you propose getting past the people?”
“Yes, that is a good point. But, if there are no people, we will get past them easily. An evacuation will work nicely for us.”
“Okay, then what do you want in exchange?”
“I want the man who betrayed me.”
“Director Stephenson.”
“Yes.”
Anka thought about it for a long time. I could see her loyalty fighting with her sense of justice. She chewed on a tot until it must have dissolved completely. Then she kept staring at Gutierrez for several more moments. Finally she got up, threw down some cash and muttered over her shoulder as she stalked away from the table. She really likes throwing cash. I wonder if that’s an elective in super-secret spy school.
“I guess we don’t have any choice.”
I rose to follow her, but made apologies to Gutierrez on the way out.
“Sorry about that. Do you have a place to stay?” he nodded, “Good. We’ll see you in the morning. Do you want to meet here?” he shook his head, “No, okay, at your hotel?” he shook his head again, “Where then?”
“I’ll be at your place at seven AM.”
“Okay, we’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hurried to catch up with Anka. She was already sitting in the Suburban flicking the wires under the steering column to get it started. I jumped in next to her and groped for something to say.
“Hey, at least we have a plan, right?”
She said nothing and drove out of the parking lot. It was only a few minutes back to the motel, but it felt much longer. She glared through the window at every car, light and pedestrian in our path. I hoped to avoid that wrath, if possible.
“That was a good burger, though. I can’t believe you’ve never had McMenamin’s food before.”
The tires squealed as she turned hard into the motel parking lot. She pulled into the space, turned off the SUV and sat there gripping the wheel fiercely. I looked over at her and detected just a hint of humanity in her robotic facade.
“Hey, Anka, I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through, but I know it’s rough. We have a lot ahead of us so it’s probably best to get it all out of the way now. You know?”
She kept staring ahead, but her knuckles were getting some color back instead of being pure white.
“I need you. Without your help, I’m going to die in five days.”
Her hands dropped into her lap, but she still stared straight ahead. I thought about what she must be feeling right now.
“I can’t imagine how tough it must be to train so hard and give your life to something only to be betrayed.”
She turned to look at me with a face that demanded answers but was terrified to receive them.
“I don’t know anything about the NSA, but I have to believe that it’s just this Stephenson who’s betrayed you. It’s not the whole organization, just one man.”
Something broke inside her and she started crying again.
“Hey, it’s okay.” I almost busted out with “there-there.”
“But, Corey, I killed someone. I don’t know if Jones knew that Stephenson was bad. He may have just been doing his job and I shot him. He’s dead. What do I do?”
I had nothing to say in response to that. What could I say? My biggest dilemmas prior to this had involved the selection of frozen burritos and which old sci-fi series to watch online. I looked over at her and then slid across the bench seat to wrap my arms around her. She snuggled into my embrace and kept crying. This seemed to be a pattern. I wondered if this was how mature relationships went, with the hugging and crying on a twice-daily basis. I hoped not, but something about having Anka in my arms made even that scenario palatable.
After she’d stopped crying I waited for a few minutes before leaning back to look at her. She’d fallen asleep against me. I wished there was a way to keep her there, but logic told me that we both needed to sleep well. Plus, we needed to check on the doctor.
I leaned down and kissed her on the top of the head. She smiled in her sleep. I kissed her again, and then moved my lips lower to her forehead and then down to her cheek. Finally my lips found hers. She responded to my kiss and pulled me tightly against her. Soon we were making out like teenagers in a borrowed SUV, except we were older and the Suburban was stolen.
The pent-up tension of running for my life mixed with the distinct possibility of my eminent demise if I failed to run released into a desperate need to feel alive. My heart started beating faster, Anka had that effect on me from the first moment I saw her, but this time it was different. This time the pounding in my chest came from an overflow of emotion rather than a physiological manifestation of lust. She was sad and I wanted to make her happy. I was scared and I wanted her to comfort me. All that happened as we kissed in the front seat.
I took her face in my hands and then slid my arms around her. She embraced me and we sought to be as close as possible. Soon her seatbelt got in the way, so we fumbled to remove it. Then her hands found the bottom of my shirt and pulled it up over my head. I reached under her skirt to caress her thigh, and regions north.
In a moment of lucidity amidst the fog of passion I remembered that we were in the front seat of a stolen vehicle in the parking lot of a motel that we knew had been watched by at least one Cuban secret policeman. I, regretfully, pulled back for a moment, though my hand didn’t leave its warm retreat.
“We should go inside,” I breathed from my mouth to hers, “We might be watched out here.”
Anka nodded while biting her lower lip and breathing shakily. I struggled back into my shirt and we slipped out of the Suburban. We kept touching and holding each other as we walked up the stairs to our room. Anka fumbled for the key while I kissed her neck and pressed myself against her from behind. She unlocked the door but stopped there for a moment making small moaning sounds and rocking her hips back against me. I gasped in pleasure and anticipation.
She pushed the door open to the darkened room where we’d left the doctor sleeping. I edged the door closed as quietly as possible to avoid waking Grosskopf and then turned back to Anka. In a moment my hands were under her shirt feeling the hot tension of her skin under her sweater. I felt her hands against my belt when a sound came from the bed where the doctor was laying.
I’d heard that sound before; it was the sound of a bullet being loaded into the chamber of a semi-automatic pistol. We froze.
“I’ll kill you if you try anything, just get out and you don’t have to die,” Grosskopf threatened us.
“Doctor, it’s us,” Anka said.
“Yeah, Grosskopf, don’t shoot. It’s just us.”
“Oh.”
He flicked on the light and I quickly pulled my hands out from under Anka’s sweater. She pushed me away slightly and we both blushed.
“OH! That’s what was going on,” the doctor said, “I thought you were waiting at the door to see if I was asleep so you could kill me. You took so long to come in that I suspected the worst. I didn’t know that you two were humping like rabbits.”
My face turned even redder at his crude description. I risked a glance at Anka and noticed her staring at the floor.
“We met the Cuban, Gutierrez, he’s going to help us get into the NSA. He’ll join us here tomorrow morning at seven. We should get some sleep.”
With that, Anka walked into the bathroom and closed the door. I contemplated shooting Grosskopf again. I figured I would wait for Grosskopf to fall asleep and Anka to come out of the bathroom so we could resume our activities. I crawled into the second bed and, after a while, the doctor reached over and turned off the light. The next thing I knew it was morning and Anka was shaking me awake. I found her prodding me from sleep with her head on my chest and my arm around her shoulders. I never wanted to move from that spot with her warm and snuggly against me. But she insisted. With a playful kiss and a squeeze of my side she launched me out of the bed.
I groggily rubbed my eyes and reached down to put on my clothes that were piled by the bed. I looked back when Anka flipped on the light in the bathroom and I just caught a glimpse of her in her bra and panties before she closed the door. That image drove everything else from my mind for several minutes as I struggled to figure out how my shoelaces were supposed to work.
Across from me, Grosskopf snored loudly. I contemplated waking him, but I didn’t see much point right now. It’s not as if he could do much to get ready and the extra sleep would help him heal faster. I glanced at the clichéd red LED alarm clock on the nightstand to see that it was six-thirty.
Fund Raising
Gutierrez showed up precisely at seven. Anka was showered and looked like nothing had happened. I managed to pull myself into some semblance of normalcy. Grosskopf was a pale, unshaven, rumpled manatee. I tried to determine if it was a step down or up from his usual appearance.
“Well,”
El Tigre
began, “first we must get some money. I speak with my Chinese friends and they sell me a drone machine that will help us, but it won’t come cheap. All of my money is in Cuba and I can’t get to it. Do you have any way to help?”
Slowly Grosskopf looked at me and then Anka. I could see his dejection when he realized that neither of us had any money.
“Yeah, I’ve got some money stashed away. It’s in some offshore accounts. But I don’t have the numbers on me.”
I pulled out my phone and found the picture of his spreadsheet.
“Will this help?”
He glared at me.
“Yeah, that’s them. I see you broke in to my office.”
“Um, you zapped my brain with a treatment that could kill me and you didn’t ask permission or tell me what you were doing.”
“Touché. I did give you fifty bucks though.”
“Yeah, thanks for that. I didn’t know what my life was worth before. It’s comforting to be able to put a price on my existence.”
“Shut up.”
“So, how do we get the money? Do we have some sort of briefcase exchange in the park with the Chinese agents?”
Anka, Gutierrez and Grosskopf all looked at me like I was an ill behaved child asking questions about the sexual practices of Galapagos turtles humping slowly and noisily at the zoo.
“No,” Gutierrez said, “We transfer the money and they send us the codes to the storage locker where the drone machine is. I can email them now if you want.”
“Great, let’s do it.” Anka was ready to head out the door.
“How much do they want?” Grosskopf asked.
“Five hundred thousand.”
“Damn you all.”
“So, fifty dollars is okay, but five-large is more than my life is worth to you? Thanks man, I’m touched.”
The doctor just glared at me while he said, “Where do I send the money?”
“Let me email them and find out the details.”
Antonio pulled out his phone and tapped out a brief message. Within a few minutes he had a reply back with the instructions. Grosskopf sent off the money and we got the address and code for a storage facility in Tacoma.
“Are you riding with us or are we riding with you?” I asked Gutierrez.
“You have that Suburban out there? I have an Escalade. Which would you rather ride in?”
“Alright, thanks for the lift
El Tigre
.”
I clapped my hands as I got up and headed toward the door. Everyone else fell into line and we left the hotel on the lake in Centralia. We piled in to Gutierrez’s Cadillac with Anka and I in the back, Antonio driving and Grosskopf riding shotgun. I was tempted to see if we could make use of the back seat, but Anka didn’t seem open to the idea. I was contented with holding her hand for the hour and a half drive up to Tacoma. She has quite nice hands, especially for holding.
We pulled off the freeway at South Tacoma Way and headed in to one of the myriad self-storage facilities in the neighborhood. This one had orange garage doors instead of green like the one down the street. Gutierrez keyed in the code to get us in to the facility and then found the unit from the emailed directions. There he entered the combination given, popped open the padlock and rolled up the door. I was wholly unprepared for what I saw inside.
It was like the forklift exoskeleton from
Aliens
mixed with an X-wing from
Star Wars.
I just stared at it while Gutierrez walked in to the storage unit. He chuckled at my gaping mouth and walked over to a small chest in the corner.
“You couldn’t afford it, even if you knew what it was.”
I desperately wanted to get into the cockpit of the thing, wherever that was, and figure out how to make it work, whatever it did. It has so many buttons that I just wanted to press. In a few minutes,
El Tigre
found a shiny metal box in the chest. He locked up the chest, shooed us out of the storage unit and then locked up the unit.