style="font-size:15px;"> “Well, what about me? What am I, chopped liver?” She grinned at her word. “I love these American expressions.”
“It appears that, although my name was in the paper, the Iranians never got yours.”
“It looks like an act of desperation, planning an attack in Washington in plain daylight. What is the FBI going to do with him?”
“Guantánamo, I guess. Unless the attorney general thinks an attempt on my life is the equivalent of a 7-Eleven robbery and lawyers him up.”
“By the way, I called my grand-père today, and he’s going to make an apartment available to us. He usually rents it out but is going to keep it free for the next month or so.”
“That’s great. Where is it?”
Kella handed him a slice of baguette slathered with French pâté and said, “It’s in the 16th arrondissement, an upscale neighborhood of Paris.”
She handed him red wine in a paper cup. “It’s a St. Emilion, your father’s favorite, a Burgundy. I hope you like it.” She knew he would have chosen a cold beer, but she was trying to get him used to French wines. “It’s a part of growing up,” she would tell him, half-jokingly.
“That’s very generous of him,” Steve said. “But if he’s going to go all the way, maybe he could lend us his chauffeur. Did he keep Leon after he retired from the DGSE? After all, is anything too good for his granddaughter’s honeymoon?” He put out his hand and asked, “Do you have any more of that terrible French stuff?”
As they talked and enjoyed the wine and bread, parents shepherding running and laughing children, and couples holding hands, walked by their bench. A little girl approached Kella and just stared at her and then at the food with wide eyes. Glancing at the girl’s mother for approval, Kella gave her a garnished piece of baguette. The child took it and, also glancing at her mother, wolfed it down.
“You know, there does not have to be an after-Paris,” Kella said hopefully. “We could just stay there. In any case, I’m tired of these quick trips to Kabul, Islamabad, and Sinaia. You work all day, I’m on the road, and we’re hardly ever together. I hate it that we haven’t even had time to furnish our apartment.”
“I’ve said it already,” Steve replied. “I’m not in love with this White House job, either. But I can’t imagine how we’re going to survive in Paris financially.”
“You could write a book. In France, that would give you more prestige than a White House job,” Kella smiled, taking a sip of her wine. “By the way, I did not much like that Dalton person. What’s her problem?”
“Her problem is she’s a loyal-to-the-president apparatchik. She has an interesting background. I heard she was born in India of an Indian mother and an American father,. Her father apparently was trying to set up a factory for General Tire and the family was reassigned to France for a couple of years. The father’s originally from Chicago, which is where she went to high school. That’s all according to my father.” He took his cup of wine and pretended to clink glasses with her. “Oh, one more thing: She served a term in Congress before President Tremaine recruited her for his personal staff. Did you know elected officials like congressmen received security clearances without the indignity of a background check?”
They remained silent for a few moments, enjoying the setting and their picnic, when Steve said, “Okay, change of gears. I think while I get the team ready for Brussels, you should go to Romania and make sure the base is ready for prime time.”
“Ah, Romania, an island of Latins in a sea of Slavs,” Kella replied, lifting her nose up. “Some famous person must have said that.”
8. Larnaca, Cyprus
Um had never been on the island of Cyprus before; nevertheless, she felt at home. The people were a mixture of just about every ethnic group in the Mediterranean. Some of the women dressed in Muslim garb, but most preferred European fashions. Many of the men, whether Greeks, Turks, or Lebanese, were bronze-skinned and liked to hide behind huge black mustaches. She no longer felt self-conscious about her nose.
While she glanced at the passing landscape from Larnaca Airport to her hotel, Um nervously reviewed her instructions. Ahmed had said he would meet her in the lobby of the hotel and introduce her to an important person, someone who would explain exactly what he needed from her as a translator with the CIA. Bob, her case officer, had told her to “act naturally” and not to ask too many questions—to find out, basically, this new player’s life history: his date of birth, schools attended, sexual preferences, permanent address and phone number, the name of his superior, and anything else she could “without raising suspicions.” She did not know whether to laugh or cry at the impossibility of such guidance.
As Um stepped out of the taxi, two porters from the Livadhiotis City Hotel rushed to help with her bags. She understood her attraction. She was not only a woman and her clothes easily identified her as an American, and she most likely would tip them generously.
She felt apprehensive at the range of circumstances that could befall her in her new role as an international spy like the first time she swam past the point where her feet could touch the bottom. She scanned her vicinity, almost expecting the worst. Was the local police onto her? Was the Mossad about to kidnap and interrogate her? But the scenery was benign; palm trees framed the horseshoe driveway leading to the front entrance, a couple of taxis awaited American or European tourists, hoping to book them for the day, and she saw no threatening figures with submachine guns lurking in the bushes. She took a breath and followed her luggage to the reception area defined by majestic ferns in tall stone pots. Before she could start the check-in process, however, Ahmed appeared behind her, greeted her curtly and led her toward two athletic-looking young men in Arab dress and Reeboks.
“They will take us to El Khoury,” Ahmed told her, “a Hizballah military leader who wants to talk to you. Leave your luggage at the front desk. You will get it later.”
The three men hustled her to a side parking lot and into an aging Toyota Land Cruiser. Before she knew it, they had covered her eyes with a black scarf and pushed her down to the floor in the back seat.
“Ahmed, what are they doing? What’s going on?” she called out.
“It is all right, it is all right,” he replied. She felt another body that had been pushed down next to her. She realized it was Ahmed and she began to hate him for placing her in this situation.
Although she tried to keep track of elapsed time in left and right turns, she quickly gave up. Instead, she began replaying the events that had brought her blindfolded and confined to the floor of an SUV in the middle of the Mediterranean. And she hated Ahmed even more. She was being treated more as an enemy than an ally. Was she in the hands of a competing organization? Was she being kidnapped for ransom? Was she about to be tortured?
The car stopped after what she estimated to be an hour but probably was shorter. Her captors helped her out of the Toyota and led her by the hand across a rocky driveway and up several steps before crossing a threshold onto a rug or carpet. Someone removed her blindfold, and she saw two new people. One was a bearded man, perhaps in his fifties, wearing a djellaba and scuffed black shoes. He eyed her speculatively from his easy chair, as he fingered a string of beads. The other was a woman about 10 years younger. She stood next to him and also looked Um up and down.
“Salaam alaikum, my children,” the man said. “You have come a long way. I am told that Allah, may
