To Free a Spy (3 page)

Karly Amarson winced at
the tremor in her fingers as she punched the
Washington Post
telephone number into the phone next to her bed. When the line began to ring she replaced the receiver in its cradle and laid out the jewelry she’d chosen to complement the dress she was going to wear before jumping into the shower. Thoughts of the evening, now just an hour away, raised goose bumps on her soft skin even as the steaming water drenched her body. Never in the eight years she’d entertained Atlantic City’s high-end clientele had there been so much to gain as tonight. Or so much to lose. A smile crossed her lips as something reminded her of the times as a little girl when she lured Tommy Scott who lived next door into some scheme she’d dreamed up that never turned out well for him.

Karly stepped out of the shower, pulled a body towel around her shoulders and bent closer to the mirror, focusing on the micro wrinkles around her eyes as she’d done with increasing frequency over the past few months.
What do you want, confirmation you’re getting old? That you’re doing the right thing?
She traced one of the threadlike lines with a fingernail until the water drops winding their way down her neck turned her attention to her body.
Not so bad,
she told herself, her breasts were still high, her buttocks firm, stomach hard and flat, and the attention shown her by her regulars had never waned. But twenty-nine in her line of work approached retirement age. The quality of life curve for high-end ladies of the evening nosedived after thirty. Maintaining her assets in spin classes, in the pool, on the strength machines…that all took more and more time, and inevitably at some point would quit producing the results she required. Surgery was the usual fix after botox, laser, Sculptra, and the like no longer did the trick, but even that was simply delaying the inevitable.
Go in for a remake every couple of years? Pass!
She’d invested some of her money but not nearly enough to provide the lifestyle she had become accustomed to—and intended to enjoy for the rest of her life.

Frank Gallardi had offered her a job, any job she wanted, there in his Golden Touch Casino & Hotel if she decided to get out of the business, but Atlantic City no longer excited her as it once did. No. It was time to advance to a better life. For the last year, she had dreamed of a new place away from the hotel. Away from casinos, away from Atlantic City. Maybe New York. She loved the city the times she’d been there with Jag, and if her plan she called the 401-Karly went well tonight, her dream could come true.

Karly had done okay in Atlantic City but it had not always been like that. Looking back at the beginning of her career now, she could only smile at her naivety at that time. That was, what, ten years ago? She’d dropped out of the Monahan Finishing College in Des Moines and headed straight to New Orleans. Her street-smarts were nil and the education she received there were painfully expensive. Karly landed a job her first day in the Crescent City and she grimaced now as she remembered the serpentine copper-top bar on which she danced and taunted Bourbon Street revelers with her charms. Dominick, who owned the place—the
Cajun Palace
, it was called,
a misnomer if there ever was one
—had followed through on his promise to give Karly’s poster top billing on the Bourbon Street marquee and the money was good, but soon Dominick was renting her out. She resisted at first but the other young dancers seemed okay with their lives and encouraged her.
It’s only while you’re getting started
, they’d said.

Dominick had served himself as well to her wares when he felt like it and the greasy bastard’s scent still haunted Karly’s olfactory memory. Like those professional fragrance experts she’d read about who could identify a perfume he or she had last sniffed twenty years earlier. And then there was Richard, her next encounter, who put her in the hospital twice. She shivered now as she recalled how close she’d walked to the edge, how desperately homicidal she was after that, how she’d acted on her impulse. Except for the murder detective who hated slimebags like Richard she’d be in prison now, she knew, instead of a luxurious hotel suite where she’d worked out an arrangement with Frank Gallardi, a man who represented the other end of the decency spectrum.

As Karly started her makeup now she thought of a couple of girls who’d made it big in Atlantic City, but most of them stayed with a pimp until they were too old and wound up with second-rate clients for awhile, then dancing for garter cash in one of the strip dives a block off the Boardwalk. Half of them ended up dying of violence or AIDS before they hit forty. It was an unthinkable end, but what was the next act if they had lived?

Karly knew she still had what it takes. She’d learned she could make one of the politicians from Washington want her more than he wanted his political campaign fund. And she had lost count of the men who would pay her to undress and simply lie there while he looked at her. Somehow that, of all things, made her uncomfortable. They would talk about her milk-white skin and golden strands of hair and perfect legs and green eyes and never lay a hand on her. Some sobbed. She wasn’t about to believe all the things men said to her, but she knew she was different.

Her favorite clients were the power brokers from the nation’s capitol who came to Atlantic City on weekends. Seeing them on TV, she’d laugh at the swaggering speeches they made about drugs or honor or children, and then she’d get one of them in her bed and let her blond mane fall over his face and whisper to him. “What’ll it be, now, cowboy? Those family values you talk about, or Karly’s values?” After she had satiated them they would go back to Washington to run the government. The world, to hear them tell it.

She had experimented with some of them with a well-timed whisper. “When can you come back? I don’t wanna spend any more time than I have to with someone else,” she would say half-jokingly. “If I do, it’ll just be to pay the rent until you return.” Some actually fell for it: “How much d’you need to get by on until I can get back a couple of weeks from now?” and they’d add a few more crumpled bills to the wad in her hand. Never examine it in their presence, Karly had learned. But she’d count it the instant they were out the door and seldom was she disappointed as she showered and powdered and made herself ready for her next rendezvous.

Tonight she would put to work all the street smarts and charm she could muster.
Like a final exam
, she thought. If it worked, hard days would be over. Several of her Washington regulars had wanted to see her tonight and that had provided her the opportunity to play the supply and demand game. “Oh, I wish you’d called sooner,” she’d said, but she had no one other than Jag on her mind and he’d called that morning. Just as she knew he would.

“Oh, Jag, you’re my fave,” she’d breathed into the phone. “But you’ve called so late. I’ll have to see if I can get out of anoth—”

“Work it out!”

“I’ll try, Jag,” she’d said. He was powerful in Washington and according to her research, rich. That was the main thing. And he was hooked on her. He was the right man for her plan, and he’d taken the bait, right down to the last hour.

* * *

Frank Gallardi, the developer, owner and operator of the Golden Touch, widely considered the top casino and hotel on Atlantic City’s legendary Boardwalk, was going over the words he would deliver that evening downstairs in the Austin Quinn Ballroom, the largest and grandest of all those in the Golden Touch. He’d agreed to emcee the Quinn celebration that was to take place in the room named after Austin Quinn himself. Gallardi saw politics as an evil to be tolerated, but Quinn was due a lot of credit for the reality of casino gambling in the state. Gallardi had managed the industry side of the legalization process and fed Quinn, then a state senator, the technical knowledge he needed in his political negotiations and the eventual crafting of the legislation in Trenton. It took eight years in all. Gallardi was awarded the first casino license issued in New Jersey and Quinn’s reward was election to the United States Senate. Gallardi named the walnut-paneled ballroom after Quinn as a tribute to him by the industry and an eighteen-karat gold plaque signed by all the original casino owners on the Boardwalk adorned the entrance to the Austin Quinn Ballroom.

Gallardi expected to see a lot of his Washington regulars at the Quinn party. At least a dozen of them had called today to say hello. Some of them were rarely seen or heard, and others frequently made the Business & Finance pages of the
Wall Street Journal
, but all of them were powerful and wealthy. They liked being at his place, and Gallardi knew they wanted him to know they were there.

Even President McNabb might make an appearance at Quinn’s roast. The Secret Service was busy putting their security in place but told Gallardi that McNabb’s appearance was iffy due to a developing incident with North Korea. It was great publicity to have the president visit the Golden Touch but the last time he was there his security network caused a ripple through the casino.

The hotel was full tonight and the game rooms reserved for members of its private Trophy Club were jammed. The Precious Metal, the Tiger’s Tail and every other casino on the Boardwalk also had its own VIP club with private elevators and secluded gambling rooms for high-stakes gamblers who wanted separation from weekenders and honeymooners, even the usual run of professional gamblers, but none was as successful as Gallardi’s Trophy Club. Frank knew from the start it would take more than showgirls and glitz to attract the icons of politics and entertainment he wanted in his place. They would come for luxury-class treatment, plenty of action and the chance to leave their identity at the door for a change. No damning front-page photo in tomorrow’s paper after a night letting their hair down.

He sent that promise along with complimentary Trophy Club membership to every man and woman in the U.S. House and Senate, to all the president’s cabinet members and to U.S. ambassadors to fifty countries. To the governor of every state, field-grade officers in the military, and to appointed top officials in all three branches of government. To well-known high-stakes gamblers, and even the heads of all the other Boardwalk casinos. To his friends in the business world and hundreds in the entertainment field. The promotion alone cost five million dollars up front but now the Trophy Club’s game rooms and other reserved areas bustled with the people Gallardi wanted in them. Most of the casinos on the Boardwalk were owned by large corporations with unlimited budgets and were twice the size of the Golden Touch, but Gallardi didn’t care about size. He’d built the Golden Touch for close to a billion dollars and by now had paid off his loans and owned it outright, and the Trophy Club’s success had earned him the respect—and envy—of the other casino owners.

* * *

On the twelfth floor, the man Karly Amarson called
Jag
stood at his window overlooking the Atlantic in what could pass for reverence for the power of the sea as wave after wave slammed against the shore. The cold December rain had stopped for now and the few who ventured out onto the Boardwalk, perhaps to seek better fortune at another casino, were shapeless figures, changing from dim to dimmer and back to dim in the sea mist as they passed from one lamppost to the next. Hostile ocean waves like the ones below had always held a strange appeal for Jag. Despite their might, or maybe because of it, he felt in control. He could taunt them with his closeness, yet with all their fury they could do him no harm.

He nodded unnoticeably at the thought of seeing Karly tonight, and wondered, as he’d done since meeting her three years earlier, what was so different about her. Women before her had been plentiful but his interest in them was usually measured in hours. Karly was mysterious. Smart. Not too available. Never to be taken for granted. In a dream one night, he could never get a clear look at her because of a whorl of smoke between them. He could see her tempting smile, the suggestion of her perfect body through a sheer covering, and hear her call out to him, but when he tried to approach her she turned her face to him and flashed her long eyelashes tauntingly as she disappeared into the mist.

Karly had known he’d be in town tonight but told him on the phone this morning she was busy. She would try to work it out. He tolerated her bullshit games, but the other side of the coin was that she demanded nothing of him. No visits to the boutiques or restaurants downstairs and no guilt-trip lectures even if he didn’t call or show up for weeks. Just the wad of hundreds he put into her hand when he would leave her, which he could afford. And liked. It was a small price for the freedom to appear and to leave when he wanted to, to not be expected to account for his whereabouts. For anything. A mutually-rewarding relationship that existed on weekends, when he’d leave the government and his wife and head for Atlantic City. There he could dismiss his personal armor whose week-long job it had been to defend against all the official intrusions on his limited time and allow his hormones that had been pushed aside all week to take their inalienable role. That’s when he would become
Jag
, as Karly had branded him the first time they met. But that tag was between them and he intended for it to stay that way.

He downed his second Glenfiddich 18 and checked to be sure he had all the parts to his tux. He’d bought a red bow tie with gold stripes to wear this time. There needed to be some distinction between the servers and the served. As he shaved, he thought about the party. He still had time to see Karly before it started if she called, but if not he’d see her afterwards and spend the night in her suite upstairs, as usual when he was in Atlantic City.

The phone rang as he was about to hit the shower. He couldn’t deny his thin smile as she breathed how she had managed to get free for the evening. “All for you, Jag.” Did she think he fell for her obvious manipulations, he wondered, but it didn’t matter. The party downstairs did matter. He was a politician and seeing and being seen by the right people was life blood. But as he showered, his thoughts were on Karly—her scent, her smoothness, the silky hair, her voice rasping her
where-the-hell’ve-you-been- I’ve-needed-you
fodder, her sculpted calves and thighs that would wrap him in a prison of soft yarn…and those green eyes. He knew the thinness of her adoration and figured she knew that he knew. Just part of the charade they would continue this weekend.