Black And White Ops

Slap again! This time harder. Rick put one hand to his face and pulled it back, looking at the blood on it. He licked the blood off his hand and smiled at her.

“Good,” he said. “Now you can be sure they heard it. You can tell the police I wanted to do something depraved and they won’t ask. Well they might ask, but you can come up with something. I’d say something but I don’t need you hitting me so hard I lose a tooth. Now slap me some more, princess.”

Slap! Slap! Slap! He grabbed her hands and she could feel the cold steel of his fingers in her wrists. She was breathing hard from the blows she’d just hit him with and was looking at him in rage. What she wanted to say she couldn’t because the last thing she needed right now was someone to call the manager. She was in a rage and wanted to pound him into the floor, in spite of the danger to her. And then it hit her: she was doing just what he wanted.

Monique looked at Rick and seethed. He was smiling; she was just a game piece in whatever he was playing. Monique could feel his breath on her face; his hard muscles were pushing up against her body. And she could feel his ere*tion on her leg. She was tempted to slam her leg up and send his Johnson to the hospital. Who the hell did he think he was to mess up her life in St. Petersburg? Now the only thing Monique could hope for would be to get out with the money she’d stashed for an emergency. Good luck getting another job in the United States with this on her resume. All she wanted to do was eventually open a day care center in Philadelphia for poor families. Why did Mr. Secret Agent Man have to come and mess it all up? She felt the tears start to swell in her eyes. Why did she have to be walking past that building when the bomb went off? It wasn’t fair!

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you,” he said. “I’m sorry this has had to happen to you, but you’re a small little pawn on this chess board. I’m the knight who is running interference for you so the bishop doesn’t crush us both.”

She started crying and didn’t care who heard it. Hell, he probably wanted the people in the next room to hear her cry. It was all part of some sick plan and she didn’t even know what it was. He released her wrists and Monique fell to the pillow, soaking it with her tears. She was in some mess now. In the morning her mother would be reading about her in the paper. She could see it now: “Local Teacher Implicated in Russian Spy Sting”. She sobbed away for a good five minutes while Rick laid back and sighed.

“Cry if it makes you feel better,” he told her. “I can’t reach my dead drop till tomorrow when the sun comes up anyway.”

“Dead drop?” she said turning around. Monique was drying her tears.

“It’s what you call a place to leave messages,” he explained to her. “As opposed to a live drop. I have them all over St. Petersburg. It’s how I communicate with my handlers when I’m over here. I can’t trust the Internet in and out of this country. Too many people monitoring the traffic to make that a possibility. I need to check the one near your apartment tomorrow.”

Here she was, in bed with a handsome and hunky man and all she wanted to do was get him out of her life. A few days ago she was walking on air when he gave her his business card. Now she never wanted to see him again. It would have been better if she’d never walked into that coffee shop.

“We need to get a few hours’ sleep,” he told her. “The morning traffic won’t be starting till six and I can check my dead drop. I need to make sure they took what I left for them after I hit the building.”

“I thought you were sent in to blow something up?” she pointed out. Now that the confrontation was over, Monique was starting to feel a little better. She was still scared for her life.

“Setting the bomb off in their office and destroying their database hack was priority one,” he explained. “The bonus comes with providing my employers a copy of what those bas*ards had copied. They want to know how far they got into the system.”

“You still haven’t told me what you were doing or why it was necessary to blow up an office in the middle of St. Petersburg,” she pointed out. “Isn’t the United States afraid of starting a war?”

“That’s why they use me,” he explained again. “There is no official record I exist. Something happens to me, it can be explained away as an American with Russian mob connections. The SVR catches a known CIA or NSA agent and it’s a little harder to deny.”

“Somebody got in very deep to a pentagon database from that office,” he explained. “Real deep. Like information identifying every American intelligence operative in Europe deep. They didn’t think the damage was too bad when they first found out, but when I arrived here they discovered it was much worse. They don’t know how it was done yet and no one knows who the office is connected to. The best guess is some kind of rogue Russian mafia team that wants to sell what they pulled out to the highest bidder. I was sent in to destroy the office, but they also wanted me to get a complete back-up of what they took. I was given a super flash drive that could store the information they had several times over. It didn’t take me long to unlock the door tonight and get into the office. I can’t even remember what bogus name the office was called. ‘All Russian Historical Institute’ or some other fancy name.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “it took me five minutes to boot up the computer system in there and find what I needed. My employers had given me all the pass codes. I backed it all up on the super drive, put it in my coat pocket and wired the computers to blow ten minutes after I left. You saw me as I was leaving the building. The charge went off a few minutes early. It’s what I get for using local sources for the bomb parts and instead of building my own.”