Black And White Ops: A BWWM BBW Military Romance (2 page)

Rick had been
recruited right out of college by someone with the agency.
Officially, it was known as the National Agency of Inquiries, or the
NAI. But everyone connected called it simply “the agency”.
It served the purpose and got right down to the point. The agency was
one of many small government offices most people had never heard
about and fewer even cared if they did. The agency preferred to keep
a low profile. It provided the executive branch of the government
with all the information it needed to make the quick decisions. Maybe
not always the best decisions, but no one had every called the
agency’s intelligence reports into question.

And the agency had to
carry out clandestine activities on occasion too. Since keeping a
field agent active was so expensive, the agency had decided early in
its fifty-year existence that the best thing to do was use
freelancers. They didn’t suck up taxpayer money when the
mission ended and wouldn’t be adding to the expense account
with pensions. Plus, there was always the ability to use “plausible
denial” if anything did go wrong out in the field. The
occasional archaeologist might need a grand to help him or her get
through till the next paper was published. In return, they might have
the chance to go check out what was happening in the military zone
next door and let their casual employers know if the unfriendly
government was buying surface-to-air missiles from a third party.

In Rick’s
instance, he had been a foreign language whiz kid at high school with
the ability to pick up a new tongue unequaled by anyone they had ever
seen. By the time he was fifteen, Rick spoke ten major languages
fluently. He had a working knowledge of another ten and was
conversational in six more. It was a calling as far as he was
concerned. The study of languages opened up the world to him. He had
come of age in a household where every family member spoke a primary
language other than English. His mother was German, his father
Russian and his mother’s Ukrainian mother stayed with them. At
age three, the Spanish grandfather on his father’s side moved
into a spare room in the house. When he was five he asked his mother
when he was going to get his own private language.

With such ability, he
was bound to attract some kind of Foreign Service agency or
international corporation. But Rick had decided to become an airborne
ranger at eighteen after he qualified for jump school a few months
into his army career. The international situation became very hot
after he enlisted and Rick found himself flown to all kinds of remote
places. His knowledge of languages was handy to have when the platoon
found itself dropped into some area that spoke some version of a
language hardly anyone knew. Within a few days, Rick would be the man
they’d use to communicate with the elders at the village.

After he’d
mustered out of the army, Rick had looked into several jobs that
interested him, all of which had to do with international security,
but no one wanted to pay him what he felt he was worth. One day a
young woman had walked up to him at a bar in Manhattan and introduced
herself. She told him a special branch of the government had saw his
resume on line and wanted to talk to him. They had a job in mind for
him. It was temporary, but the pay would offset any long term
concerns he might have. All they wanted him to do was report to an
address which she handed him on a card. She also handed him a
brochure about the agency. Rick thanked her then went home and looked
up the agency on line.

He was impressed what
he read and, from the description about it, Rick assumed it would be
some kind of technological assessment job where he would translate
obscure journals for congress. He called the number, made an
appointment, and showed up on their front door a week later.

His first clue about
the agency’s real mission was from the field office where he
reported. It was not some bright and clean chrome office building,
but a run-down office in a strip mall in a bad area. If someone had
wanted to conceal an obscure agency of the government, they couldn’t
have picked a better place. It was completely at odds with the way
the agency had presented itself as a benign branch that assessed
foreign technological developments.

When Rick sat down
with his interviewer, he was surprised they knew so much about him.
They even knew about the Basque girl he’d dated in college
because he wanted to practice her language. Rick was one of the few
outsiders who had mastered Basque, with its words that relied on X’s
and K’s since it was not related to any other European
language. The relationship never went anywhere, but Rick continued to
look for a woman who could match his expectations. They also knew his
grandfather had fought on the Carlist side in the Spanish Civil War.
They mentioned a few other facts about his family and asked him if he
was still interested in the occasional job.

By then, Rick was
intrigued enough to find out what they wanted out of him. If these
people could find out so much, they had to have some grand job out
there which paid good money. So he continued with the interview and
found out what they were willing to pay per assignment. When they
waved the figure in front of him, Rick was sold. He could have been
sent to a desert full of scorpions for the kind of money they were
talking. He quickly agreed and filled out a stack of papers for them.
He was given a number and told to call it in another week.

The money showed in
his bank account a few days later and Rick was excited when he called
the agency when he was supposed to. They told him to come in the next
day to a completely different office where they would discuss his
first assignment. The new address was some place in the financial
district, more to his liking.

Rick made an
appearance the next day, eager for work. He gave the secretary at the
front desk his name and she sent him down the hall to a conference
room. When he opened the door, two men and a woman he’d never
seen before were waiting to greet him. They told him to be seated and
listen to them.

Before Rick could ask
any questions, a video projector was produced and a series of images
were shown on a screen at one end of the office. Rick was told about
an obscure religious leader in Turkey who might have received plans
for a biological weapon from some contacts he had inside the Syrian
rebels. They needed him to go into Turkey and try to locate the
plans. If they existed, he was to take them and destroy any thing
which might have recorded them. Since Rick spoke Turkish and Arabic,
he was ideal for the job.

They spent a few
months training him for what he was supposed to do. The agency had
connections with a number of private companies who had firing ranges
and obstacle courses where he could learn how to dodge more bullets
than he had in the army. The focus was on individuals being sent in
to do a job and get the hell out. Usually it had to do with some kind
of technology the agency wanted or didn’t want someone else to
have. Computer hackers could only do so much, every now and then
someone on the ground had to be sent in to complete the assignment.

He’d been
parachuted in to Turkey with the knowledge of the Turkish military
who didn’t like a whiny little sheik stirring up trouble in the
southern part of the country. Rick had located the plans when he
broke into the sheik’s office in the middle of the night, then
torched the computers where they would have hidden copies of the
plans. He couldn’t be sure all of them were gone, it didn’t
matter; the agency had sent the sheik a warning by breaking into his
office and burning up some valuable office equipment. It would be a
long time before he thought about trying something so stupid again.

It was the first of
many assignments the agency gave him. He’d been to Indonesia,
France and China. And right now he was sitting in a coffee shop in
St. Petersburg talking to a very fine looking black American woman.
Too bad the assignment had to come first. If everything went
according to plan, he’d be out of this country in another
forty-eight hours with a big fat bonus waiting for him once he got
back to American soil. All he had to do was find out if a certain
office building was being used by the Russian mob to hack an
important security database inside the pentagon. The hackers had
stolen a lot of valuable data. The pentagon’s computer security
people had recognized the attempts at intrusion a few weeks ago and
traced it back to St. Petersburg. The location was narrowed down to a
cluster of office buildings. Now all Rick had to do was find out
which building was being used to hack the database. The pentagon
security people had already prepared a honey trap for the hackers who
thought they were getting valuable data. In reality, it was
controlled data. And when they tried to make use of it, the hackers
were going to find out what that data could do in ways they’d
never thought possible.

The card was heavy in
Monique’s hand as she walked back to her small apartment on the
prospect near the school where she taught. She’d just met a
handsome and hunky fellow American who wanted to go out with her the
next time he was in St. Petersburg. It was cold that evening, about
what you might expect for a city located so far to the North. Monique
made sure the gloves were taught over her hands because the weather
wasn’t going to get any warmer for the next few months.

She stopped and
watched the river flow in the distance. Monique loved the city where
she worked. She loved the statues, the museums and the streets. Tsar
Peter had picked the ideal location for a city when he’d
founded it hundreds of years ago. She could imagine him in the
distance of time looking at the plans for his creation, wondering how
long it would take the damn serfs to finish the job. He had built the
city on the conscript labor of thousands of his subjects, but the
result had been such beauty. Funny how he was revered everywhere with
all kinds of statues to him in the city.

She stopped by a
small chapel and gave thanks to God for having sent this man to her.
Monique’s mother wasn’t all that religious and when she
did go to church it was one of the Catholic ones on the West side of
Philadelphia. She remembered the quiet service on Sunday mornings and
the holidays. Monique had loved Easter the best because she always
was given some new clothes. It was a time to get together with her
relatives from other parts of the country. For some reason they
didn’t talk much to her, but she enjoyed being around her aunts
and uncles.

She wondered whatever
happened to the last guy she dated before leaving for Russia. He was
a medical student who had a bright future in front of him. But he
didn’t see Monique as having a career of her own. The way he
viewed any future wife was to be the mother of his children and stay
home managing the household. Monique was having none of his June
Cleaver future. She intended on going places and seeing the world.
Her mother hardly ever left Philadelphia and she wanted more than
clubbing on South Street on Saturday nights. She’d broken off
the relationship with her medical school boyfriend the day she
accepted the job to travel to St. Petersburg. She had no idea what he
was doing presently, but it no doubt involved some fancy place in the
suburbs. He was the kind of man who would be successful at anything
he wanted to do and she had no desire to be a trophy on his shelf.
There were too many opportunities to consider junking the career she
had prepared herself for since entering college. Her mother would
have been very disappointed if she had learned Monique was doing
nothing with her degree.

And who was this Rick
Wilson character anyway? He had given her a business card and the
invitation to call him sometime. He claimed he was only in St.
Petersburg for the next two days, but the whole thing seemed like
some sort of scam. She had run into so many import-export people in
the city who claimed to have “connections”. Monique would
roll her eyes every time someone tried to impress her with a title.
Everyone was a vice president of something or other. No one was a
mere salesman or front line soldier. Did some of these companies
consist of nothing but vice presidents? Were they indeed presidents
of vice? She no longer cared. Five years in Russia had turned her
into the worst cynic imaginable.

Two days later she
had just finished locking up her room and was heading home. Some of
the older residents claimed they didn’t have to lock their
doors twenty years ago, but that was before they started showing up.
By they the residents of the city meant the Armenians, Chechens and
Turks. There was always someone more wretched than you to blame your
troubles upon. It had been a long day struggling with unruly Russian
kids and trying to get them to understand the variances in English.
The kids would always stare at her dumbfounded when she tried to
explain to them that “odor” and “smell” had
the same essential meaning, but the origin of the words had much to
do with the influences on the English language. She nearly had a
heart attack when one of the kids messed up a sentence using
“President Obama” and “black”. The poor kid
had to be reminded of what kinds of comparisons are inappropriate.

She had her lesson
plans gathered in one arm and was walking past the building next to
the international school where she taught. Monique was wrapped up in
a sheepskin jacket she’d bought in the open market the year
before. She’d been told by the locals where you could get the
best deal on winter clothing and managed to buy what she needed early
this year. The man she bought it from, an older Kazak, was flattered
she wanted his business. He was so flattered he reduced the price
down to what he charged the customer before her. Although he’d
conducted his business with her in English, he’d done the
transaction before in Russian which he assumed she didn’t know.
When Monique thanked him very much in Russian and told him to have a
pleasant day, he nearly fell over his booth.