An excerpt from
Foreign Exchange
Chapter One
Chicago, October 1970
"Freeze!"
The command reverberated off the walls of the warehouse. The double click of automatic weapons echoed across the cavernous building as a dark, human wall behind the voice broke apart and scattered like ants at a foodfest.
"FBI! Don't move!"
Andy Cole and her four companions looked up from their positions around an open crate. The three women and two men appeared like nothing more than hippie college students, except it wasn't hash they were in the process of unpacking from the crate. It was automatic assault rifles.
Andy trained her eyes on the agent in charge, a man in his thirties with a silver streak across one temple of his otherwise brown hair. His .38 was aimed at the center of her chest, the spiral pattern of her tie-dyed T-shirt an excellent target. She held the unloaded .42 in her left hand as still as possible. Her fellow Weathermen seemed no more anxious than she to provoke the mass of armed FBI troops surrounding them.
"All right, Miss, put the rifle down easy," the agent commanded.
Andy slowly lowered the weapon to the cement floor, silently damning her informant. He had said nothing about the FBI being this close in their investigation. As far as she had known, the FBI was still sifting through the rubble of the latest Weathermen bombing of a Long Island courthouse in New York.
"The rest of you move away from that crate," ordered the same agent.
Andy trained her peripheral attention on the longhaired, fully bearded man standing slightly behind her. She knew him as "Dude," and he was her only connection to the new weapons supplier.
"Down on the floor!" The FBI man motioned for his backup to move in. "I'm Agent White, and you are all about to be guests of the federal government."
"Pig!" one of the women shouted, attempting to spit into an agent's face. None too gently he shoved her to the floor and secured her wrists in handcuffs.
Dude broke left, vaulting over the crate, and smashed an empty .42 across the head of an officer in riot gear.
"Stop or I'll shoot!" Agent White commanded.
The moment White's pistol turned away from her and toward Dude's retreating back, Andy circled with a lightning quick kick to the agent's grip hand. The bullet blasted into the rafters just before the .38 arced through the air. She sprang into hot pursuit of the escaping Weathermen. Just as Dude reached the huge doors, they exploded inward. A second group of armed men poured into the dimly lit warehouse, shouting and shoving.
"CIA. Hold it right there!"
When Dude stopped abruptly, Andy leveled him headlong from behind and trapped him face down on the floor. She pinned his arms painfully to his back as she straddled his skinny ass.
"Not so fast, Dude," Andy mocked, her breathing labored. She wrestled him to defeat with a pressure point hold on his wrists, numbing his wiry arms.
CIA men filed into the warehouse and confusion reigned as the two government agencies argued over the charge of the prisoners and the weapons cache. A plainclothes CIA officer entered the building. Wearing a dark suit, trench coat, and wide-brimmed hat, his familiar figure washed a load of relief over Andy.
"What took you so long, George? And what the hell is the FBI doing here?" she questioned her superior as she concentrated on keeping control of her prisoner.
"You're a pig? You're a damned pig?" Dude spat from his ignoble position. Andy yanked back on his hair.
"No, C-I-A, not P-I-G," she informed him sarcastically. "How 'bout some cuffs, George. We need to have a long talk with this one. I'll bet he's got a lot to say." He tossed her a pair and signaled another operative to take charge of the man.
"What the hell is going on here?" Agent White demanded.
George flashed his identification. "I'm George Beckett, CIA case officer for this fiasco." He extended his hand to the annoyed agent.
White glared at the peace offering for a brief moment before relaxing his stance. Grudgingly he shook George's hand. "Agent White. But who the hell is she?"
"She belongs to me," George said in lieu of an introduction.
Andy lifted herself and her prisoner off the floor and shoved Dude into the hands of a waiting agency man. "Keep this guy on ice until he can be questioned." Ignoring Dude's glare as he was hustled away, she brushed herself off and faced the disgruntled FBI agent. He holstered his retrieved .38, then rubbed his abused hand as his small, brown eyes narrowed on her. "Andy Cole," she offered without extending a hand.
Andy noticed that George kept his craggy features resolute. "I just got word this afternoon that your team was running a parallel investigation on this contingent of Weathermen," George said.
"The FBI and CIA sure as hell aren't known for their cooperative exchanges of information, are they?" White admitted then asked, "By what jurisdiction is the CIA running a domestic investigation?"
George glanced about to make certain the warehouse had been cleared of everyone but the three of them before he continued. "We know the individuals identified with the Weathermen Underground have been targeted for your Conintelpro Operation. These four arrested tonight have long been on your index. The Central Intelligence Agency has reason to believe the Weathermen leaders have recently been in contact with foreign Communist Party leaders who may find it politically advantageous to assist Weathermen terrorist activities."
"This cache of weapons goes beyond the usual homemade bombs and sniper fire the new left terrorist groups use," Andy added. "This is the first real evidence we've seen that would give the Weathermen the power to wage the war they declared in their three-page statement to the press in May."
"Hoover's already labeled the group a serious threat to domestic stability," White agreed.
"When it's known that the Weathermen are in the process of trading their baseball bats for automatic rifles, even congress will have to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation," Andy interjected.
"But where did these weapons come from? My informant had your girl here pegged as the supplier," White said, exasperation evident in his gruff voice.
"Not by a long shot," Andy quipped, narrowing her eyes at his sexist terminology. "I got close enough to the deal to learn that Dude was the courier and this is the only shipment that made it to the States."
"We'll have to find out where the arms came from and what money changed hands," George said. "I assure you, White, both our teams will receive a complete debriefing."
Andy ran a dirty hand through her oily hair and wrinkled her nose at her own dissolute appearance and smell. "God, I can't wait to take a bath."
"I'll bet you can't," George agreed, then commented as the three turned toward the exit of the warehouse, "What I don't understand is why these so-called revolutionaries insist on refusing to bathe or keep a decent hair cut."
"It's a hippie thing," White surmised. "But why it's so fashionable is probably a subject for another investigation."
At White's wry smile, George added with a laugh, "One for the FBI, I hope."
At four a.m., two days later, Andy stumbled into her breadbox apartment in Georgetown. She still wore the same filthy clothes she'd had on at the time of the bust. When Dude finally broke in interrogation, George had told her to go home.
She knew she was one of the best female operatives the CIA had to draw from. She had wanted this since her brother died in an agency operation ten years ago when she was only seventeen. She believed in the government he'd given his life for, and she had sworn to uphold it in his stead. Though she had always burned to keep that oath, she knew the agency was still a man's game and the difference she hoped to make was often thwarted because of her sex.
Maybe now things would change. After five months undercover in a hippie commune gathering information on Weathermen leaders, and after Dude finished singing about the terrorists' arms contact, the agency would have to take notice of her and consider her for big-league cases she'd trained for.
She hoped.
Moving like an automaton, Andy found her way into the white tiled bathroom. She flipped on the light and looked around, thinking how neat it looked--stark, sterile, clean. The towels and toiletries were just where she'd left them. She opened a drawer to find her brush and comb, not a hair left on either. She had to stop being so fanatically neat.
With tired, jerky movements she stripped, letting the rags she'd been wearing fall to the floor. She turned on the water as hot as she could stand it and climbed under the showerhead.
Ah, this was heaven. It felt so good, like a man's caress. A man who didn't have a hidden agenda, a man from whom she wasn't trying to extract information without surrendering her dignity or her body. That was something she would never do. She wasn't a prostitute. She was a female operative, though many men in the agency didn't see the difference.
After scrubbing herself from head to toe several times, Andy left the shower and wrapped a large white towel around her, too tired to even bother drying off. She leaned over the sink and swiped a hand across the steam-covered mirror. The image revealed in the glass shocked her.
The features an admirer had once termed as "pixie" now seemed lean and hard. Some decent food would fix that and fill out her normally trim figure, and the hollows under her eyes would fade with some uninterrupted sleep. Her shoulder-length strawberry-blonde hair was as vibrant as ever, now that it was clean, but the sight of her own eyes bothered her. The sky-blue her mother had always spoken of with fondness now seemed icy, as if some innate human warmth inside her was dying.
Pushing away from the sink, Andy moved into the bedroom, switching on the light just inside the room. She walked over to the twin bed and fell face down on the quilted bedspread like a doe collapsing under a hunter's bullet. With her feet dangling over the footboard, she tried to remember the sound of her mother's voice and the personalized lullaby she'd always sung to Andy when she was a little girl.
"Eyes sky-blue, a love so true," Andy whispered in a singsong voice. "Fire spun hair, a love so rare. Bring to my dear, a love so clear. A heart's true token, never be broken."
Andy flopped onto her back, folding her arms over her eyes to block out the overhead light, wishing she could as easily block out the empty feeling excavating her insides.
"Love. What about it?"
There was no time in her life for love. After all the double crossing, greed and mayhem she'd seen over the past few years, she wasn't even sure if such a thing as love existed.
It didn't matter anyway. She had a job to do. Best to keep focused on that, Andy thought, feeling herself drift off to sleep, wondering in that last bit of consciousness if her work was all life would ever have to offer her.
Top
Back to the Books Page
|
