The Case Officer (13 page)

“Go to Paris, Mac,” Rothmann said
in a deep, sincere voice. “Go to Paris and get me something on Huang. Find out
what the hell the Chinese are doing for the Iranians and why. Do whatever is
necessary. I’ll give you whatever support you need—money, people, anything—and
I’ll keep Burton B. Berger off your ass.
Ça va
?”

“
Ça va
, boss. I’ll leave
tonight.”

Chapter Thirty-One

9
July

Paris

T
he flight attendant in business
class gently shook MacMurphy awake as the giant 747 jumbo jet began its descent
from 37,000 feet over Ireland toward Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. Mac
shook himself awake, immediately thinking ahead to the challenge that awaited
him. Mac enjoyed the adrenaline rush that came with challenges, and he knew
this one was going to be rough.

A
t that exact moment the buzz of
the alarm clock penetrated the stillness of Rodney Yusef Jackson’s tiny Left
Bank apartment.

The man dragged his long,
athletic frame out of bed, stumbled sleepily across the room, stepping on a
stray high-heeled shoe in the process, and silenced the blaring annoyance of
the alarm with a heavy slap.

Ever since he’d begun dating
Michelle Chen, he found it more and more difficult to get out of bed in the
mornings. That was why he’d had to place the alarm clock across the room—to
force himself out of bed to turn it off.

He could not afford to be late
for work again—he was in enough trouble with the COS already—especially on
mornings like today when it was his responsibility to open the commo shack and
clear the morning cable traffic for the station. 

His head pounded, and his mouth
tasted like a little green bug had gotten sick and died in there. He felt he
could easily sleep through the rest of the day and still not be caught up.
Rubbing his eyes, he stretched his naked body mightily, trying to work the
kinks out of his knotted muscles. He felt like shit.

Too much cheap Marine House
booze, too little sleep, and an overdose of monosodium glutamate from that
little Chinese restaurant he and Michelle had eaten at the night before. The
food was delicious; he overate every time. A treat, for sure, but the
after-effects were a killer. And Michelle was no help, always suggesting that
if it was so good, he ought to have just a little more.

Michelle
, he thought,
what a number
she is. There ain’t nothin’ to compare with these Asian chicks.
LBFM’s—little brown fucking machines—that’s what they called them in Asia. He
had screwed hundreds of them over there, and now he had the best one ever. He
often bragged to his friends that this particular Chinese chick could do more
tricks on a dick than a monkey on a rope.

He took in the sight of her,
lying half exposed in the middle of last night’s rumpled playground. The
morning sun illuminated one perfect breast and a sleek, tanned leg that peeked
out at him from under the sheet.
Shee-it,
he thought,
what a lucky
motherfucker I am.

I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m really really
bad
, head
bobbing to the beat and recalling the sex play of the night before. His groin
area began to tingle and stir as he returned sleepily to the sticky, humid bed
and the lusty “LBFM” sprawled nude in the middle of it. 

One almond eye opened amidst the long, silky black hair tousled across
her face. “Ummmmm,” she purred, arching her body seductively under the sheet,
“what’s that I see?”

“Ain’t got time, sugar. Gotta get
outahere
tout de suite
de.”

She slid to the side of the bed
and reached out for him. She encircled his rapidly growing member with long,
manicured fingers, and he allowed himself to be drawn to the side of the bed
closer to her. She guided him toward her. Then she traced the length of his
ever-growing shaft with soft fingertips.

“Oh shit...don’t, Michelle,” he
moaned. “I’m gonna be late…”

“You’ve got time,” she whispered
dreamily, and she began to create unbelievable sensations with her full, wet
lips and tongue.

His hands reached down to caress
her small, perfect breasts, and his long, dark fingers gently rubbed her
hardening nipples, eliciting a sensual moan from deep within her as she worked
her magic.

She smiled up at him through
glazed dark eyes, and she moved her free hand down over her smooth, taut
stomach to the tiny tuft of silky black fur, allowing a long, red-tipped middle
finger to explore the wetness. She inhaled sharply through her teeth as the
sensation contracted the sensors of her abdomen.

Then, with both hands around his
engorged shaft, she drew him back onto the bed on top of her and raised her
hips to meet him as she brought his enormous length down into her enveloping,
humid depths.

After, they lay quietly, holding
each other, totally exhausted and slick with the sweat and juices of their
lovemaking. She drifted back off to sleep, but he fought the impulse. When her
breathing was deep and regular, he slipped out of bed and padded to the shower.

You are one lucky bastard, Rodney
Yusef Jackson,
he thought as the cool spray revived him.
One lucky bastard
....

Indeed he was lucky. Paris was a
long, long way from Cleveland, Ohio and a dead end job in an auto parts store,
like the one his father had worked in for almost twenty years. Rodney had stuck
it out in high school, graduated, attended community college and, lucky again, had
been given a scholarship in a special program at Kent State, established for
“late bloomers.”

His grades had been good in the
community college; more important, he had discovered, thanks to a gifted
teacher, that he had a talent for mathematics and logical thinking. Even though
he got bored and dropped out after two years, his partial college education had
ultimately served to get him a ticket to the communications corps of the CIA
and eventually to beautiful Paris.

Unfortunately, his cock started to
do all the thinking when he got involved with Michelle. And his resentment at
being stuck in a low-level government job, albeit in Paris, did nothing to help
him think more clearly. He was smart; but his interpersonal skills were not the
best, and self-discipline was definitely not one of his strengths.

None of these drawbacks had been
career-enhancing.  But Rodney recognized none of this. In his mind, he deserved
more, and only the fact that he was black was holding him back. Racial discrimination,
pure and simple...

How he would like to stick it to
his arrogant white bosses – if only he could…

 
R
odney bounded down the three flights of his
apartment building, taking the steps two at a time, and raced outside to the
street, where he had parked his rattletrap Volvo. The engine started after two long,
grinding tries, and he slipped an old Vanilla Ice disk into the player. The rap
music blared, and he drummed the monotonous beat against the steering wheel as
he pulled out into the early morning Paris traffic.

He would be at the embassy in
less than fifteen minutes, which would make him only twenty minutes late for
work.
Never mind
, he told himself,
or as the French say,
tant
pis
.
What can they do, fire me?
Inwardly he hoped he would get to
the office before the COS and his little prick of a deputy, so his tardiness
wouldn’t be noticed. The bastards were obviously out to get him.
And why the
fuck do they have to be such workaholics anyway? Can’t they get their work done
in eight hours like everyone else? Why do they have to get in so early and stay
so late? Smug fuckers must be inefficient. Assholes....

Chapter Thirty-Two

P
aris was already hot and sticky
at this hour, promising another humid July scorcher. Traffic was light because
most Parisians had already begun their yearly exodus to “
le midi,
” the
beaches along France’s southern coast, and in the cooler mountain regions of
Provence
.

Paris was a ghost town during the
months of July and August. People who lived on top of one another in the city
all year long migrated to vacation places around Nice and St. Tropez and
Avignon during July and August, to live on top of one another in another
locale.

The wheels of government and
industry simply ground to a halt. Nothing would stand in the way of a
Frenchman’s vacation. But Rodney and a lot of others at the American embassy
liked these two months the best. They could easily find parking anywhere on the
street, drive around the city without traffic snarls, and walk into most
restaurants without a reservation, although only about half of them were open
at any one time.

Not that Rodney could afford to
go to many restaurants on his salary—communicators were among the poorest paid
employees in the embassy – on the level with secretaries. And this pissed
Rodney off to no end because he and the other CIA communicators were
responsible for operating and maintaining all of the cryptographic equipment in
the embassy.

Rodney and the other
communicators were entrusted with the most sensitive classified information in
the embassy. They saw everything, absolutely everything. There was no such
thing as a “need to know” principle when it came to communicators. Everything
passed under their eyes because it was their job to process—encrypt and decrypt
and print out—every classified word in and out of the CIA station.
Correspondence coming into the station was processed in the commo shack and
delivered to the COS’s office in clear text.

Conversely, correspondence
leaving the station was prepared and brought to the commo center to be
processed before being sent out to recipients worldwide. Communicators were,
for every intelligence service in the world, the Holy Grail of recruitment
targets.

He firmly believed that that kind
of trust deserved more recognition and more money. And he was pissed off
big-time that he was getting neither. Especially the money. It was a bitch to
make ends meet with so little, especially in a place like Paris.

Fortunately for him, his new
girlfriend, Michelle, actually preferred inexpensive Chinese restaurants and
the Marine House Bar to expensive places. And Michelle’s Chinese friends
usually picked up their restaurant tabs, and she paid most of the Marine House
bar bills anyway.

They were very generous people,
those Chinese. Boring as hell, always wanting to talk politics and that sort of
shit, but generous. So as long as they were willing to pay for everything, he
put up with them.
Strange crowd
, he thought, but he could put up with a
lot of their bullshit for that kind of quality pussy.

He increased the volume of the
rap music, hoping to blow some more cobwebs out of his brain, and almost missed
his turn onto Rue Dauphine. He careened around the corner and glanced up at the
clock on the old gray stone
Conciergerie
building. It read ten past
seven. He was already ten minutes late. Shit! He accelerated across the
magnificent
Pont Neuf
, frightening a gaggle of street sweepers puffing
on brown Bastos cigarettes, and sped down the
quai
toward the Place de
la Concorde. He tunneled the rusting Volvo into the underground parking and
jogged the remaining block back up Rue de Rivoli to the American embassy
building on Avenue Gabriel.

He was twenty minutes late for
work when he passed the pigeon-splattered statue of old Ben Franklin in the
cobblestone chancery courtyard.  He pushed through the heavy oak doors into the
main foyer of the chancery. The young Marine on duty called out to him as he
hurried toward the elevators: “Wake up, Rotten. Your eyes look like two pee
holes in a snow bank.”

“Fuck you and your Marine House
parties,” he fired back with a grin as he entered the elevator. 

He exited on the top floor and
headed down the corridor past the COS’s office, noting from the transome above
the door that the lights were already on inside.
Fuck
, he thought. He
still hoped his late arrival would go unnoticed but didn’t count on it. The
sonofabitchin’ Berger probably checked to see if the door to the comcenter was
open before going to his office.
That prick never misses a trick
. He
manipulated the combination dial on the heavy vault door and entered the commo
room. Rodney thought about what excuse he would give when the inevitable
chewing-out came later in the day.

F
orty-five minutes later, Rodney
dropped a 10-inch-high stack of precedence traffic—immediate and priority
cables—on the COS’s secretary’s desk. On top of the pile was an enveloped “EYES
ONLY—IMMEDIATE” cable from the DDO to the COS. Rodney had read the cable with
great interest as it printed out. It was straightforward enough, simply
informing Berger of MacMurphy’s arrival, outlining his instructions and
requesting the station’s support for his activities. But even Rodney caught the
significance of the message, and he knew Berger would have a conniption fit
when he read it. That made Rodney Yusef Jackson very happy.