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
Chapter 19 of
Monday 4:14 PM: Treachery
The Iranians release
Jeff and his wife, and she recognizes Nancy
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- Chris Lamela
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Author contact: Chris Lamela,
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K Street, Chapter 19
Monday
4:14 PM: Treachery
Twenty minutes later Jeff climbed out of the back of the black car
holding the door, his wife getting out standing beside him, the car screeching
away from the curb.
He standing on the exact spot he had been kidnapped from two hours
before.
Instantly there was a roar of convergence, cars racing up at all angles,
Nancy jumping out, “Jeff! What happened!” She sprinted up to them, “Are you
both okay?”
She swirled her hand in the air, Arnie appeared, “Come on guys, come
with me, we need to get you safe.”
“Where are we going? We need some rest,” Jeff complained, he held Donna
by the shoulder, his hand over her shoulder clutching the envelope with the
Bearer Bonds.
He turned to Nancy
Jeff stepped forward now standing in front of Donna, “What happened back
there, I need to explain, but I can’t right now…actually…really I’m not even
sure what happened back there.”
Jeff pulled her to him as she began to heave in tears.
Pulling her back at arm’s length Jeff trying to get eye contact with
Donna, “Are you okay? We made it, right? Just like I said. You did good,” he hugged
her again. They stood that way for a minute.
“I want to go home,” Donna said softly.
Jeff looked to Nancy who heard the words, shrugging like it was Donna’s
choice.
“She wants to go home, can you arrange special transportation?”
Jeff nodded stepping back to Donna, “Hey guess what, you get to ride in
a private jet! They’re going to take you home tonight, right now, will that
work?”
Donna stood, vacuous face, “I just want to go home.”
“Come on,” Jeff pulled Donna slowly toward the black car, “they have a
plane waiting for you at National
Airport
“Are you coming with me?”
He looked up to Nancy and Arnie who were both firmly shaking their
heads.
“No, I can’t, I need to see this through.” Donna burst out crying again,
Jeff clutched her to his chest, “I’m sorry, but I can’t, this is too
important.”
“You mean more important, more
important than me, more important than the kids.”
“No of course not. Just a different kind of important. You’ve seen how
serious this is.”
She looked up at him with a firm expression, her fists beating lightly
on his chest, “Jeff, I’m worried for you, I’m worried for…for…I’m worried for us.”
“Look, I’ll cancel Boston
She looked up to his face, smiled. He thought how it was probably her
first smile since she had seen him at his hotel door nearly twenty hours ago.
“So do you want me to go to the airport with you?”
She continued to pound softly on his chest sniffing. “No, you’ve got to
go save the world. Those guys are really mean and I don’t want them to hurt
anybody else.” She looked up into his eyes with a determined expression, “No, I
will go alone,” she glanced over at the black car that had Arnie waiting at the
open passenger door, “you go get those bastards.”
He smiled at her lovingly, “Man I sure wish I could be on that plane
with you, it’s a heck of a nice ride.”
“When were you ever on a private jet?”
“In my dreams,” they both laughed. She reached her arms around him
pulling him close with her mouth cupping his, her tongue inviting a deep
passionate kiss until she pulled back straightening her blouse looking around
her.
She turned to Nancy who had looked away while they kissed, smiled, “You
take good care of him, okay? I want him back when you’re done with him. I know
you want to keep him, Nancy
Donna swung around so fast toward Arnie that she didn’t see Nancy
A moment later the car with Donna pulled away, Jeff waved, a few seconds
later it was gone. Jeff turned to Nancy who still had not recovered from her
shock at Donna’s words.
“Come on there, girl, have I got a lot to tell you,” waving his
envelope, “and boy have I got a lot to show you.” He turned back to Nancy
Jeff turned, walking to the Mustang.
He got to the passenger-side door, turning around laughing at Nancy
standing in a trance, “Nancy Nancy
He leaned over opening her door, it bumped against her, “Are you going
to stand there all day? Come on, we have work to do!”
Shaken from a dream she turned to the car, plunking into her seat, hands
loosely on the steering wheel. “She knows. She knew me.”
She sat in silence, after a few minutes she uttered a few words so
softly that Jeff had to consider what she had said before he responded, “Yes, she
knows it’s you.” His smiled wistfully at what he had just witnessed, “Yep,
pretty sure she knows.” He put his hand on her right shoulder, “We need to go.”
Almost mechanically she started the car, a few minutes later they were headed
back up K Street Cookes Park
The car drove on just now passing the corner with the ODS building as he
looked out wistfully, “And I don’t know why, but somehow it seems okay.” He
looked out the front window, they passed Archie’s creeping by slowly on their
left. “It’s like she knows I’m in danger, that you will protect me.” He shook
his head in amazement at what had happened already today. “It’s like she
approves.”
She approves. Those words
resonated in Jeff’s brain.
What was it about women’s intuition, that mysterious force of the
universe that absolutely baffles the cosmic forces that say what goes in is what comes out? With men
the equation is simple: information goes in, finds the fastest route to get
back out. A simple little pipe. Women have a shape in their heads, like a ball,
an orb with bunches of holes in it, some holes smaller, some holes larger, some
holes placed in some order, others scattered randomly around the orb.
Information comes in and unlike a man where it finds the most efficient way
out, in the woman’s intuition orb that
information that came in, a nice tidy package delivered into this magical
container that will find all sort of ways of coming through, some through the
orderly-arranged outlets, but the most critical will find other openings―the intuition outlets.
Information will emerge from a woman’s intuition orb in any sequence it
cares to with very little influence from the lesser elements of the universe
such as logic or meaning or relevance which
have virtually no effect on the flow of information as it passes into her mind.
Silly things like order are as irrelevant and unnecessary and unconnected as
rock is to air, forces with absolutely no meaning to the other.
And how about retention of that information? With men each new thought
flushes his little information pipe and on to next thought. With women little
pieces of information and thought can get stuck in their magical intuition orb that may not get unstuck
and emerge for years. Maybe never! And
when it does finally emerge from that globe in their heads it is as fresh as hot
biscuits from the oven. Even if the information is years old!
Jeff shook his head, looked at Nancy
She jiggled her head, as though just waking, glancing at Jeff, “Yeah,
but I suppose we should hold it until the meeting, everyone will be there, plus
there’s more bad news.”
“Bad news?” He squinched his face at Nancy
“Hank Weisel was found murdered this morning.”
Jeff looked blankly through the windshield, this information was being
processed in his poor little pea brain, his tiny information pipe just filled
with a clog, turning sharply to Nancy
“Yes. Ambushed coming out of his house this morning.”
Jeff’s mind raced, suddenly all the pieces of the puzzle in this case
that he had been so carefully putting together in his mind, arranged so orderly
around the little table in his brain like little jigsaw puzzle pieces, the ones
with the flat side being arranged into the frame, the other pieces lay to the
side awaiting their placement into the picture were suddenly blown up into the
air, now raining down around him flipping onto the floor upside down, cascading
around him in every helter-skelter way.
“Oh, my god, it’s like they said!”
“Who said? What did they say?”
“The Iranians!”
“What Iranians?”
“My kidnappers. They said―”
“No, don’t tell me, wait,” just
then they pulled up to the ops house, both quickly jumped from the blue Mustang
running into the house.
A few seconds later they were in the ops room with the drape pulled
across, the room was filled. Jeff scanned the room seeing the same faces at one
end of the table in their same seats with a standing-room-only crowd of maybe
ten or more other people, men and women standing, lining the wall along the
windows.
Arnie jumped up, “Jesus Jeff, you gave us a start man, come on, sit
down,” he handed Jeff a cold can of Coke pointing to Jeff’s reserved chair.
“Arnie, I can’t sit down, I’m too wired.”
“It doesn’t matter, tell us every detail,” Arnie looked around the room motioning
toward Yvonne, “Can we get this recorded, also have you take some notes?”
Yvonne reached for the Nakamichi recorder he’d seen before, pushing a
button, the little red light blinked on.
Jeff glanced down at Nancy who looked like she had shaken off Donna’s
words, she was now back in the game.
“Okay, where to start…” Jeff described
every detail of what had occurred from his first entry into the phone booth,
his cell phone ringing, his being snatched from the corner, his ride, the
embassy building, Omar and his brother Abdul, his getting a few minutes with
his wife, then back to the two men.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” he looked down at his hand still clutching the
envelope with the Bearer Bonds. He opened the flap of the envelope sliding the
bonds onto the table. The room’s loud gasp lasted longer than the time it took
for the ten pieces of gilded paper to slide out in a perfect fan with each page
half-exposed from the other.
Suddenly white gloved hands appeared at the end of Nancy
“They are my payola for killing this deal. They made me sign something
saying I took this money from them in exchange for―what were the words―oh yeah,
certain duties, the paper called it
to make it sound really incriminating,
threatened to use it if I back out of canceling this deal. They even made me
put my thumb prints on it.”
“Wow, I guess this makes sense,” Earl the small-faced man piped up.
Instead of answering Nancy
Jeff paused, feeling excitement rising in his chest. “Yes, there is. You
guys really need to help me figure this out.”
The entire room held its breath waiting for his next words.
“First, they bugged my hotel room at the Hilton. This guy Omar was
telling me things that nobody could have known about what happened in that room.
Not even Ted knew and he was standing outside my door.”
Arnie pointed to a man at the back of the room, “Fred, go check it out,
get back ASAP, okay? The big Hilton on Connecticut
Jeff looked up to see this Fred man nearly run out of the room, the
black curtain leafing to a close behind him.
“But that’s not the important thing,” Jeff smiled cynically, “they are also
paying somebody else five million to kill this deal.”
“Yeah, I don’t remember his words, but his brother kept saying things, Omar
yelling at him to shut up. At least that’s what I assume Omar was doing, he
kept speaking in Farsi, I think, when Abdul started to tell me something.”
“So what exactly did you make of it?”
“Abdul was complaining that the other guy they were paying off to kill
this deal was doing it all wrong, that the other guy was going around killing
people―Jesus, this makes sense!”
“What, what makes sense?” Arnie almost choked.
“They paid this other guy five million dollars, but instead of trying to
finesse this deal to go away this other guy is like some lunatic running around
killing people―the congressmen―even the Iranians are getting spooked by it.
That’s why they decided to get me into the game, pay me off to make this deal
go away!”
Arnie turned to a man sitting at the very opposite end of the table that
Jeff hadn’t particularly noticed, “General?” The man nodded to Arnie, “I need
your take on this.” The man smiled, “Oh, by the way everyone, this is General
Thompson, he heads the Pentagon’s middle-eastern affairs office.”
The man, older with sparse graying hair, thin face with skin nearly as gray,
cleared his throat, “Man, but you guys sure have created a mess here,” he
chuckled, he actually chuckled! Jeff
couldn’t believe his ears!
“I am not sure what I have to add. All I know is that I came here with
instructions that we definitely have a lunatic on our hands, you guys need to
drop everything to do with this case to focus on finding him or them or whoever
these bastards are. The rest can wait.”
Arnie and Nancy fixed each other’s eyes, Nancy
“We have worse than that, Nancy
She turned to him, “What can be worse?”
“There’s just too many players.” He rubbed his eyes, turned looking
around the room with a furrowed face, “and every one is a moving piece…I just
don’t know…there’s got to be a word for this,” looking around the room for
hints.
“I know the word.” All faces turned to Jeff.
“Treachery.”
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