Chapter 13

Bolton

The phone call came just as I was going to bed. I recognized the caller ID and took it in my study. It was the voice I didn’t ever want to hear again, but it appeared I had no choice in the matter. They had an American diplomat who was travelling overseas on a multiple-country tour. There had been threats, so I was asked to travel as part of the contingent, inserting myself in the crowd to listen for anything suspicious. It was more than just protecting that single diplomat. It was a measure of the total anti-American sentiment. Due to my dark French coloring, I blended in particularly well, and they had no one who could natively speak as many languages as I could.

I went into the bedroom, and Lilly was already asleep, her hair fanned out over the pillow. There was a look of sublime innocence on her face, and I hoped it would never fade. I grabbed a few things quietly from the closet and slid from the room. I left her a note telling her I loved her and would be back as soon as I could.

I was instructed to rendezvous with the diplomat at LAX, and we would travel with a small contingent. I was not there as security, only as a listening device. I felt the danger was low and the intel important to the government, so I’d accepted. Not every trip—in fact, very few—were made on the government’s behalf. However, since my cover included being active in the import/export business, I had to maintain that enterprise to be believable. It was a double-edged sword, and I wanted out of it all, completely. I just had to figure out how to neatly sever those ties without drawing dangerous suspicion.

The diplomat was not the bald, studious intellectual I expected, but a breathtakingly gorgeous woman. That was unusual among the diplomatic corps, something I thought rather foolish. A beautiful woman could be far more convincing in diplomacy and flattery than a staid, older statesman.

Her name was Michele Overton, and as I sat next to her on the flight over the Pacific, we came to know a bit about one another. I let her do the talking and sensed that despite her career, flying distances over water made her a little nervous. She was divorced and the mother of a young daughter who stayed with Michele’s parents when she traveled. Although we should have been sleeping in preparation for the rigorous schedule we’d have once landing, it seemed peaceful to chat quietly in the other otherwise quiet cabin of sleeping passengers.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“No, but I do have a companion who lives with me,” I said, choosing my words carefully as I’d been trained to do.

“Ah, I see,” she nodded. I realized then that she had mistaken my vague reference to mean I was gay and my companion was another man. I let her think that—in fact it solved any ghost of a desire on my part to fall into the role of a charming, and very masculine, companion to her. I had Lilly and wasn’t interested in the least, but the women who came on to me couldn’t know that. Nothing about my private life could be divulged, no matter how safe I thought the listener might be. It was an old habit, and it had kept me alive thus far.

“What do you do when you aren’t doing…this?” she asked. I felt suspicious but understood she was nervous, and although our relationship was to be impersonal, for obvious reasons, she was feeling vulnerable. I understood that. God knew I’d felt vulnerable at points in my own life.

“I have a little side business,” I commented offhand and then changed the subject. “Don’t you think we should try to get a little sleep? You have a rugged schedule ahead of you.”

She nodded, settled a pillow beneath her head, and closed her eyes. I was stiff and uncomfortable in my coach seating. When flying on my own, I always got first class, but the government never sprang for comfort, but for utility. The first-class section landed at the same time as coach, so coach it would be.

We landed in South Korea as our first stop. I separated myself from her obvious entourage and blended in, listening to pick up on the local sentiment. I carried a small cellular device in my pocket that only sent coded transmissions, something like Morse code. The signals could be intercepted easily, but interceptors would have to break the code I used, as well as the double encryption the device added. If I heard something suspicious, I relayed that in a “level of suspicion” transmission, and those appointed to security would move in nearby and pick up as I moved on. It was a simple job.

Our next stop was Hong Kong—not normally considered dangerous but certainly a center for expensive tastes and power brokering. Michele was touring a government-owned resort reserved for the very powerful when suddenly in the crowd I heard a word being repeated from person to person. I recognized it was a signal, and as I summoned security, those involved went into action and moved forward in a herd to attack Michele.

Pushing my way through the throng, I managed to reach her ahead of security and shielded her with my body. I wasn’t carrying a weapon, but I shouted threats in the local dialect, and my unexpected presence took the attackers by surprise. Poorly organized, they fell apart quickly and disappeared into the throngs of innocent and terrified bystanders.

I hustled Michele away from the dense crowd and into a nook of the building’s external architecture, where we waited until her security arrived and took over. I didn’t see her until much later that evening when the tour had been summarily canceled and we were again aboard a flight, but this time headed to Los Angeles.

“Thank you,” she mouthed as she settled into the seat opposite me across the aisle. She was surrounded by security. I nodded and looked back at my magazine.

It was early morning by the time I arrived back at home. I walked into the bedroom and found Lilly sitting against pillows, a remote in her hand. There was a stormy look on her face.

“Is something wrong?” I asked warily.

She pointed the remote at the television. “You want to explain?” she challenged me.

I looked at the screen and saw a picture of myself, shielding Michele with my body on a static screen behind the commentator. He was reporting the incident of an American diplomat being the focus of an attack, and I was being named as a coincidental American bystander who had luckily jumped into action.

“Fuck!” I swore. My cover had been blown, and worse yet, Lilly thought she’d caught me doing something she didn’t like, and she was about to let me know just that.

“Well?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Maybe I didn’t hear you right?” She came out from under the covers, kneeling on the foot of the bed. She’d been sleeping in one of my dress shirts again—something she did often when I was out of town, I heard. “You can’t talk about it, or you won’t? Which is it, Bolt?”

My eyes were glued to her cleavage, which suddenly was very appealing. Her amethyst eyes were shooting sparks in my direction, and her breasts were heaving with emotion. In spite of my aggravation with the report, I felt myself hardening at the sight of her.

“It’s both. Lilly, whatever is going on in that beautiful head of yours is off the mark, you have my word.” I pulled out my cell phone and texted a code. Sliding it onto the nightstand, I said, “That report won’t be repeated.”