K Street, Chapter 9

Jeff finds himself in Washington DC on business trying to close a big deal for his company where he meets up with Nancy again, the FBI agent he had fallen in love with in Atlanta nearly two years ago. Jeff is separated from his wife because of Nancy’s letter. Jeff continues to attract women without trying, some of them with deadly intentions. Jeff and Nancy soon find themselves in the center of intrigue with Israelis and Iranians feeling threatened by the impending deal, determined to kill the deal at any cost―even at the cost of Jeff’s life! The surprising twists will make the reader gasp, the love scenes will make the reader sigh.

Chapter 9 of K Street... Iranians want to kill the deal!

Saturday, 10:28 AM: No Idea

Jeff meets Arnie again when Jeff learns his equipment is headed for Iraq! Then he learns that there are Iranians who want to kill the deal! And all they can do is wait for somebody to make the next move!

If you enjoy this, please take time to LIKE this on Facebook!

Thanks for taking time, and enjoy!
- Chris Lamela

------------------------------------------------------------------

Author contact: Chris Lamela, chris@chrislamela.com, 707-566-8790 PST

---------------------------------------------------------------------

               K Street, Chapter 9

Saturday, 10:28 AM: No Idea

     They drove silently down K Street, merged into Washington Circle, off onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Jeff was looking out at the nice day, maybe will hit the mid-seventies he heard somewhere.

     Nancy pulled out a cell phone pushing buttons, she drove speaking into it saying they were on their way, that Jeff was with her, clicked the phone setting it on the console.

     “Cell phone, huh? I thought you guys only used radios.”

     “The coverage in all of greater DC is fantastic so we use them here.”

     Jeff reached into his inside coat pocket pulling out his five-inch by two-inch Nokia showing it to Nancy. She smiled, “No more Motorola clam phone, huh?” He shook his head. “Let’s make sure to get my numbers into your phone when we get a chance.” He nodded putting his phone back inside his coat pocket.

     “So we have Arabs and now Israelis involved in this. Why do I have a feeling that you know more than you are telling me.”

     “You don’t have a need to know.”

     Classified! Jeff had his U.S. Department of Defense security clearance, he knew the code.

     “Then you can just turn around, drop me off at my hotel, we’ll call it a day, huh?” He signaled to a corner on the street, “Or better yet, just drop me there and I’ll take a cab back.”

     Looking to him frowning, “Okay, I’ll tell you as much as I can when we get to the house.”

     Soon they turned onto Twenty Ninth Street, a few minutes later left onto Q Street. The houses had been looking about the same, large brownstones, looked to be built in the twenties, maybe. They pulled up in front of a house that looked similar in design to Nancy’s in Georgetown, only not as big, a minute later they were walking through the door to a setup similar to Atlanta, only scaled-down with only four people in the room, a similar setup to the house in Roswell with long tables filled with computers, different boxes with rows of blinking lights or small video displays.

     Nancy pointed to a door, “I need to use the head, they’re waiting in there.” There was a double-wide door with a curtain rod that had been put across it with a thick black curtain pulled to one side tied back.

     She turned toward another door, Jeff walked forward through the large doorway into a familiar scene: a large dining room turned into a conference room. He looked around the room seeing only four people seated when he heard a familiar voice, “Hey! Look who it is!”

     Jeff turned, there was Arnie who Jeff met during all the madness in Atlanta jumping up, only this time he was wearing a Washington Nationals baseball cap instead of an Atlanta Falcons cap. A plump hand was offered to Jeff, it shook his hand enthusiastically, Jeff pointing to Arnie’s cap. With eyes looking up at the hat’s bill hanging over his face Arnie smiled, “You got to go native, right? Plus this is really my home team!” Jeff laughed with the portly man with the ready his wide smile, taking his chubby hand in his shaking warmly.

     Jeff looked around the table seeing only one familiar face from Atlanta, Yvonne, the dowdy brunette with her broad black furry eyebrows like a paint stripe across her forehead with her trademark gold hair pin, this time with a nice flower inlay on a wider pin that sat nicely along the shape of her head. She looked a little more primped to Jeff than she had been in Atlanta. Like her hair had been washed at least.

     Soon Nancy walked in, they all sat down.

     “What is the security level here?” Yvonne asked.

     “Can we defer that until we have seen where this is going? We need a qualified need-to-know. I don’t think we’re there yet.” Yvonne nodded.

     “So Jeff,” Arnie turned to look at him, “I hear it was a little like old times last night.”

     “Yeah, if you mean people shooting at me,” Jeff replied with a pensive half-smile.

     “Tell us what happened.”

     Jeff told the entire story from start to end including the meeting last night in the ODS office, and the meeting again with the Israelis, Nancy interjecting about that meeting.

     “Give us the details how you are involved in this, I mean, after Atlanta this is a hell of a coincidence that you’re here again don’t you think?” Arnie shook his head.

     “Believe me, nobody’s more surprised than me!” the room chuckled, Jeff looked to Nancy shaking her head smiling.

     Jeff went on to tell about his company, how this order came about, how he had come to DC to get the deal done to take home a six million dollar check and an executed export license.

     Arnie and Nancy exchanged looks, Nancy motioned to Arnie, “Can we step out for a second?” They stood, walking out the door, a minute later coming back into the room, Arnie turned, undid the drape pulling it across the opening.

     “Yvonne, we’re moving this to a classified briefing.” She pointed to Jeff, “He has the Level 3 we need here.” Yvonne nodded reaching down to pull out a bound page-numbered notebook which Jeff recognized as what was called a Patent Notebook in the aerospace industry.

     Nancy and Arnie sat down. Nancy turned to Jeff, “We decided you have the need to know.” Heads around the room nodded. “What do you know at the Iran-Iraq war?”

     Jeff looked up in thought for a moment, “Well, wasn’t it around nineteen-eighty or so, I don’t remember, no, maybe eighty-nine?”

     “Close, eighty-eight.”

     “I remember reading about it, horribly brutal, mustard gas, all sorts of nasty stuff between the two. And nothing came out of it, just a half-million dead people, but it was a stalemate the whole time, right?”

     “Pretty much,” Nancy frowned, “but it never really ended. The tensions keep going on. It was a huge blow to Saddam’s credibility with his people which only led to his being all the more brutal.” She sorted through a small stack of papers handing Jeff one page. He took it, scanning the page.

     “That is a summary of communications that we intercepted three years ago.”

     “This is talking about the need to have advanced surveillance on Iran. Is this how I got involved in this?” A terrified expression flashed across Jeff’s face, he saw the implications. “Is my gear heading to Iraq?” He shook his head finishing the page, the room pin-drop silent. “This is illegal, my gear can’t go to Iraq!”

     Arnie put up his hands in a consoling way, “Jeff, it’s a little more complicated than that.” Arnie paused with his hand to his chin. “Have you ever heard the saying you are my friend if my enemy is your enemy?” Jeff nodded. “Well we are no buddies with Saddam, especially after Desert Storm and all, but we are certainly no buddies with the Ayatollahs in Iran either.”

     Jeff’s eyes were locked on Arnie intently trying to piece this puzzle together. Arnie continued, “Supplying non-lethal arms to Saddam was a no-brainer under Reagan and Bush, it took a while for Clinton to get on board. Saddam is an isolated iconoclast who is so bogged down murdering his relatives to hold onto power that he doesn’t have a chance of exporting anything but oil and then only to the black markets in Africa. Iran, though, has lots of time on its hands with a passion of spreading the good word of Islam along with an ounce or two of its oil-fueled influence. Now I know that you are running a business that you want to keep clean, right?” Jeff nodded. “But all you need, really, is that export permit. Do you really care where your gear ends up?”

     “Morally, yes!”

     Arnie put up his hands consolingly, “Okay, right, morally, but all you really care about is taking home your six million and your export permit, right?”

     Jeff looked out the window through the sheer white draperies but could only see fuzzy outlines of light. “Yeah, I guess.”

     “So here’s the deal. The only way that we could possibly get the export license for your gear was to have it shipped labeled as spares. The same is true for the UAV aircraft from General Avatonics.”

     “But it takes skill to outfit a UAV plane with our gear. It’s not something just anybody can do.”

     “Right, but that’s not your problem, is it? I mean General Avatonics does the integration, right? And they could do it anywhere, right?”

     “Okay, but why the Israelis and why are people shooting at me?”

     Nancy leaned forward, “Look Jeff, that was a mistake. You heard Yitzak this morning apologize for his over-enthusiastic man.”

     Arnie looked at Yvonne who was scratching notes, “Yvonne, level four, please.” She made a note.

     Yvonne motioned to Jeff, “Cleared?”

     Arnie nodded, “Yes, cleared.” He turned to Jeff. “Look the Israelis just want to make sure that whatever we are selling Sadam doesn’t have the range to reach the Holy Land. But trust me, those are the last people we have to worry about.”

     Jeff’s face crinkled in stern expression to Arnie, “Who then?”

     “The Iranians.”

     Jeff pushed his chair back, “Oh Christ, please tell me that we don’t have a bunch of mad Iranians running around DC all involved in this! Those mothers are serious! They shoot first, don’t even bother to ask questions later!”

     The room’s silence slowly percolated into Jeff’s brain that there were mad Iranians running around DC trying to figure out how to stop this. Or at least to learn everything they can about what is being shipped. He felt ice-water blood draining from the top of his cranium flowing down past his ears, down his throat washing over his heart, landing in his toes.

     “What about back in Seattle. Is there any danger there?” He thought of his staff, the other employees at Versatec.

     “The biggest problem,” Nancy perused the room, turned back to Jeff, “is that the Iranians are like a clown show. Their agents are so unpredictable, but also they are not very smart. We are pretty certain that it would not occur to them to go to the source, but instead cut it off at the head. Why do you think the ODS offices are so secure?”

     Jeff leaned back still confused, taking a couple minutes in silence, the room looked on. “So let me see if I can get this straight. ODS has some kind of crooked connections through congressman who are getting paid to facilitate questionable export permits.” Nods around the room. “They believe that they have managed to secure export permits for Versatec’s gear and six UAV aircraft from General Avatonics which is being drop-shipped to the Saudis. It must be General Avatonics who is doing the avionics integration, nobody else knows how to do that.” More nods. “In the meantime the Israelis are worried about the capabilities of these systems enough to kidnap Saudi government officials―“

     “They are not actually official officials,” Arnie interjected.

     “Okay, Saudi representatives,” Jeff continued, “right out in the middle of public in the middle of Washington DC. And we think we have a bunch of crazed Iranians running around trying to stop all this?”

     “I wish it was just a few crazy Iranians,” Arnie frowned shaking his head. “But we are talking really crazy Iranians.”

     “Really crazy! You know who they are?”

     “We know some of the things they’ve done. That’s how we know they’re crazy and stupid.”

     “Is that all you know about them?”

     “No, we also know their DNA.”

     “Know their DNA, so that’s good right? I mean you guys must have all sorts of advanced technology in that space, right? So that’s good, right?”

     “Yeah, I guess it would be.”

     “Guess it would be?”

     “Their DNA helps if you know what they look like.”

     “And?”

     “We have no clue what these guys look like, who belongs to the DNA.”

     The room was washed in silence from these words: We have no clue what these guys look like, who belongs to the DNA.

     “So what next, what’s the action plan?” Jeff looked expectantly around the room like someone was ready to pop up with a plan.

     Arnie shook his head bowed down, looking up at Nancy.

     “We wait,” Nancy replied.

     “Wait? Wait for what?” Jeff could feel mild panic rising in his chest.

     “Wait for someone to make a move.”

 

-----------------------------------------------

NOW READ THE NEXT CHAPTER IN

K STREET!

Access Chapter 10 at:

http://chrislamela.blogspot.com/2012/08/k-street-chapter-10.html

 

 

Also, if you enjoyed this, please give me a LIKE on Facebook to help spread the word! And thank you!