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AN HOMAGE TO VINCENT VEGA

 

SCENE 41:

 

THE SEARCHERS

 

Sergeant Herb Canon stared at his inbox, and wearily rubbed his eyes.  His shift had started less than half an hour earlier, and yet he would have sworn that the mountain of official forms in the metal tray had somehow miraculously doubled in size in the few seconds that his eyes had been shut.

 

Herb hated desk work.  He remembered the good old days with fondness, the days when a typewriter had been an alien object, mocking him as he hunted and pecked his way across the keyboard.

 

Now, he could type seventy words a minute.

 

Herb longed to return to the field, siren blaring, dodging the infamous Lake Street potholes as he raced to the next scene of the crime.

 

Writing tickets, chasing bad guys … damn it, police work used to be fun!

 

His phone rang.

 

“Sergeant Canon,” he answered mechanically.

 

“Chief wants to see you.”  Loretta Carlson, the Chief's long-time personal secretary, was the department's bureaucratic mistress, the gatekeeper to the hallowed halls.  Her laconic tone of voice had taken years to perfect.

 

“Would ten minutes ago work for you,” she added with just a hint of sarcasm.  Roughly translated, what Loretta was saying was …

 

Get your butt up here now!!!

 

“On my way,” Herb responded.  He straightened his tie, double checked the polish on his shoes, and headed for the elevator that would whisk him to the top floor, where the brass presided over the city's sprawling, snow covered streets.  Once, the view from the top floor had been majestic; now, in a downtown increasingly dominated by soaring glass towers … not so much.

 

“He's waiting,” Loretta offered as Herb entered the sanctum sanctorum.  She did not look up from her typewriter, which was an ominous sign in and of itself. 

 

Crossing the antechamber, Herb knocked on the heavy, ornate door, and entered on command.

 

The Chief was smoking his favorite pipe.  “Park it,” he ordered.

 

Herb retreated to the nearest chair and took a seat.

 

“Eight minutes ago,” the Chief began without preamble, “I received a call from Fart, Barf and Itch … and I'm not talking about the local crowd.  This call came from the seventh floor back in DC, specifically from the Deputy Director for Counterintelligence.    I have been politely asked to inquire about your interest in one Doctor Ian Grady, and then to instruct you to cease and desist from whatever the hell you're up to.  As of this moment, you may consider yourself so instructed.”

 

The Chief leaned back in his plush chair, and studied the Sergeant.  The two men had known one another for a long time.  “What's going on, Herb,” he asked in a relaxed tone.

 

Herb shook his head, trying to sort out where to begin.  “I haven't met Grady, who's a first year professor in a university language department, but Julia has, and your campus counterpart has assigned my daughter to be, for all intents and purposes, his bodyguard.  Julia says that there's something off about him, so she asked me to check him out.  He hasn't been here long enough to get on anyone's radar screen, so I thought the best way to handle it was to use the NCIC.  He was a graduate student in southern California; he must have been there long enough to show up in more than one file.”

 

“Go on,” the Chief encouraged.

 

“Priscilla told us a little about him.  The guy's a decorated veteran with a gift for languages who was badly wounded on his last tour.  He's incontinent, wears diapers 24/7, but he also seems to have psychological problems.  He's being treated by one of Rita Stevenson's colleagues, and get this … after his impending marriage, Grady, his wife, and his therapist are all moving in with Stevenson!”

 

“Huh?”  The Chief sat up.  “That doesn't make any sense.  I've known Rita for quite a few years, and she's as down to earth as they come.  You sure about this?”

 

“Positive.  And as we speak, Grady is helping Julia on a case.  Yesterday, he loaned her a piece of surveillance equipment that he apparently keeps in a desk drawer at his office.  Julia insists that it's state of the art, and probably military grade.  Where did it come from?  And Pris says that he's poorly paid, yet travels all over the world.  Who's buying the tickets and paying for the hotels?  Julia's right … things just don't add up … and now the Deputy Director of the FBI in charge of counterintelligence calls you within minutes of my launching an NCIC query?  You know what I think?”

 

“That your wife and daughter have ended up in bed, so to speak, with a spook?”

 

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,” Herb shrugged.

 

“So, where exactly does Priscilla fit in?”

 

“This is where our old pal John Lessing enters the tale.”

 

“Oh, shit!”  The Chief sat up even straighter.  “Please tell me that you did not launch an NCIC query on Lessing!”

 

“Are you kidding?  I'm way too close to retirement to poke that particular bear!”

 

Both men knew that Lessing's uncanny ability to profile serial killers made him an invaluable resource for the law enforcement community in general and the FBI in particular. Lessing kept a low profile, and Fart, Barf and Itch wanted to keep it that way.

 

“Grady's been volunteering at the hospital, helping Stevenson treat vets with mental health issues.  In the process, his ability to speak languages by the score has brought him to the surface, and recruiters are coming out of the woodwork to try and peel him away from the university.  But Grady had some kind of seizure in Stevenson's office Friday morning, bad enough to scare everybody shitless.  John's the head of the department, and he's put a blanket over Grady.  He phoned your counterpart over the weekend, and now Priscilla is running interference.  She's a buffer that's been put in place to protect him against someone triggering another seizure.”

 

The Chief let out a deep, troubled sigh.  “To sum up,” he said, “we're dealing with a troubled war hero with exceptional language skills, who's  smart enough to earn a doctorate.  He should be a high flier at Harvard or Princeton, but instead he's making a pittance at a university out here in flyover country.  He has access to high end tech, and he travels all over the world on somebody else's dime.  Shit!!!”

 

“Walt, could Lessing be his controller?”

 

The Chief shook his head, uncertain how to answer.  “It would probably depend on whether he has a history of these seizures.  They're hiding him in plain sight, Herb; that's for sure.  They may have put him here because they can trust Lessing to be discreet.  What I can't figure out is how they could be using him overseas.  A guy who wears diapers?  Pees and poops himself?  Everything you've told me screams covert asset, but in what capacity?  What could a guy with his disability possibly do for them in the field?”

 

“There's one more piece to the puzzle,” Herb confessed.

 

“Oh, goodie,” the Chief shot back.  “All right, let's hear it.”

 

“Grady's teaching two language classes, and Priscilla says that both classes are overflowing with guys in their mid-twenties who show up wearing dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties.  They troop out after class and apparently head downtown.  She's assuming that they're young corporate climbers coming over from the banks and multinationals, but I'm not so sure.”

 

“Stepford husbands?”

 

“It sure sounds like they fit the profile,” Herb acknowledged.

 

“Right, here's what we're going to do.”  The Chief stood up and walked around his desk, signaling Herb that the meeting was about to end with his marching orders.  “I want you to get into your civvies and get over to one of this guy's classes.  Take a good, hard look at the students, and then report back to me … in person.  Nothing in writing, capiche?”

 

Herb nodded, and took his leave.  He and the Chief were on the same page.  If Langley was running a covert training program under their very noses, they needed to get a handle on the potential downside.  University campuses had unusually high population densities, and this one was crawling with foreign students who had received minimal vetting.  If someone screwed the pooch, the body count would make the front page of every newspaper on the planet.

 

.  .  .  .

 

“Street, you've been compromised.”  Donnie got right to it.  “Twenty minutes ago, a cop punched you into the NCIC … a Minneapolis cop named Herbert Canon.  Ring any bells?”

 

“His wife Julia is an attorney and licensed private detective.  I'm helping her solve a theft at the diaper service I use.  Their daughter Priscilla is a campus cop currently assigned to be my bodyguard.”

 

“What the hell are you doing with a bodyguard?  For God's sake, you're supposed to be off the grid, not making the national news!”

 

“Aren't we being a little dramatic?”  Ian had little patience for the Potomac two step.

 

“Street, that query triggered a Valhalla alert-- the first one in three years!  Ellison snuffed it, then made the call.  The odds are that as we speak Sergeant Canon is having a heart to heart with his chief.”

 

“Come on, Donnie, there's no real damage done.  I'm helping a team of psychiatrists at a local hospital working with troubled vets … putting my command of Vietnamese to good use for a change.  We've made some progress, and the word got out to Patient Relations administrators all over the Twin Cities.  Now, I'm up to my elbows in corporate headhunters looking for an easy score.  Priscilla is maintaining order, buying me the time I need to put the genie back in the bottle.  So, first thing: run a Marilyn Marsden of Recruitment Services International through the matrix, will you?  She's got a game plan that should get the job done, with a big increase in my paycheck for a bonus.”

 

“Marsden …,” Donnie muttered.  “Got it.  What do you want to do about the Sergeant?”

 

“I'll handle that on this end.  Priscilla and I are challenging a precinct to a drinking contest tomorrow night … Hong Kong Rules.  I'll try and drag Priscilla's dad into it, become his drinking buddy.  Then he won't be a problem.  Oh, and while we're at it, run an orderly at the hospital, a former sergeant named Amos Waring.  R&R in Hong Kong, visits to the stockade … the usual mix.  Let me know if there's anything more colorful.”

 

“Hong Kong Rules,” Donnie laughed.  “Street, you still holding your own?”

 

“You have no idea.  Next.  You free on the weekend of the twenty-second?”

 

“Wait one while I check.”  Freeman turned the pages in his desk calendar.

 

“Yep, free as a bird.  What's up?”

 

“I'm getting married on Sunday the twenty-third.  I'd like you to be my Best Man … actually meet the people you're going to be running through the system.”

 

“Will do, and congratulations.  Bride's name?” 

 

“Sarah Haikonnen.  Finnish, usual spelling.  Mother's name is Sofia, with an f.  U.P. family, probably Hancock or Houghton.  Sarah's a nurse where I volunteer, and has an apartment immediately below mine.  It sounds like her mother manages a hospital up there.”

 

“Both easy to run,” Donnie noted.  “I should be able to get back to you during your office hours.”

 

“Two more.  Sarah and I are moving in with Doctor Rita Stevenson, who is John Lessing's second in command at the hospital.  You probably have a file on her already, and likewise on Doctor Victoria Robinson, same department, who is also moving in with us.  Vickie's my therapist, but also my lover.  My relationship with Stevenson is still in flux, but there are hopeful signs.  The four of us are going to honeymoon together … probably the Caribbean.”

 

“Street, you never cease to amaze me.”  In his office, Donnie was shaking his head in wonder.  “But do me a favor will you?  Keep away from Jamaica and Trinidad.  Malcolm would have kittens if you showed up in either one.”

 

“Way ahead of you.  I'm steering them in the direction of Puerto Rico, Barbados, or Aruba.”

 

“All good choices.  After the job you did in Balikpapan, the Dutch would treat you like royalty.”

 

“That's what I'm afraid of.  Damn it, I love these women, and I don't want to lie to them, but day by day things are getting more awkward.  My passport is arousing a certain amount of curiosity; for example, Vickie wants to know what the hell I was doing in Timbuktu.  My cover was never meant to stand up to close scrutiny, Donnie, you know that.  I'm guessing that it's Julia who made me, and I've only met her once.   And while we're on the subject, having your trainees show up for class every day wearing tailored suits from a certain shop on L Street isn't helping.  Would it be too much to ask that they at least dress like students?  I'm amazed that no one on this end has figured out what we're doing.”

 

“You getting ready to retire on me, Street?”  Donnie knew that there was a clock ticking, and he dreaded Ian's answer.

 

“Is that a roundabout way of asking why I have a therapist?”

 

“Not really, but while we're on the subject: why do you have a therapist?”

 

“I'm having increasing difficulty making major decisions.  When pushed, I have flashbacks vivid enough, and bad enough, to put me on the floor.  Vickie's going on the theory that I need to get a handle on my guilt.  Kick it in the ass and the problem goes away.”

 

“Ian, if you need help, this needs to be done in-house; you know the drill.”

 

“Lessing is backstopping Vickie.  That's as in-house as we're going to get.”

 

“Fair enough.  And you haven't answered the question: are you getting ready to call it quits?  I'm asking because I need you in Poland soonest.  We've tasked Henri to fly up from Marseilles to check out a shipyard in Gdansk, but he'd just be running cover for you.  There's an activist trying to piece together a labor union in the yard, and he's making the party apparatchiks nervous.  I need you to take a look, and pass judgment.”

 

“And what am I supposed to do with the half dozen SB clowns who'll be tagging along?  Come on, Donnie, my usefulness behind the Iron Curtain is down to zero.  Hell, in Budapest they planted a bug in my borscht!”

 

“True, but in fairness, you did embarrass the security team shadowing you hither and yon when you sent a bottle of wine to their table.  And it's not like you weren't already driving them nuts with all the bubblegum you were planting on park benches.”

 

“Well, it does keep them busy, and the last time I checked, that was the point.”  Ian had spent nine hours hobbling around Budapest more or less at random, his pockets filled with Bazooka.  He had left souvenir after souvenir on the bottom of park benches, knowing that Hungary's version of  Boris and Natasha would have to scrape it all off in their endless search for the microdots that he never in fact carried.

 

“And I'll bet they just love pawing through the dirty diapers that you're abandoning in public toilets everywhere you go,” Freeman laughed.

 

“Gotta change somewhere,” Ian breezily remarked.  “And you left out the wipes.  They don't get flushed, so the boys have to empty out every trashcan I visit and haul the contents back to HQ for analysis.  My diaper bag is probably the single most feared item in all of eastern Europe!”

 

“Isn't paranoia wonderful?  At bottom, you're just a tourist, but when you show up the local Gestapo is convinced that you're some kind of James Bond dropping in to overthrow their government over a long weekend.  We know for a fact that Irina has tried to set them straight, and you'd think that a Lieutenant-General in the GRU would have some pull, but these bozos just keep doing the same old, same old.  You collect fleas and ticks everywhere you go, and in the process you're making her life miserable!”

 

“Not by design,” Ian protested.  He was acutely aware of the tape recorder operating somewhere in the background.  He did not want his words to be twisted into a weapon that could be used to hurt others.

 

“The foot drop episodes are getting worse, Donnie; it really is time for me to retire.  And don't snow me, okay?  There's always a plan B; no one's indispensable.”

 

“Of course there's a plan B,” Freeman scoffed; “and a plan C and so forth.  Hell, we've got a plan to repel an intergalactic invasion!  It's what we do.  So, yeah, I can send someone else to Gdansk … but what I can't do is plug someone else into the back channels that you've opened, however inadvertently, into Soviet intelligence.”

 

“Russian intelligence,” Ian automatically corrected.  In Saigon he had crossed paths with a French planter whose family had been defending their plantation against communist insurgents for generations.  Henri Duplessis had taught him to use language to reach beyond politics to culture, and in return Ian had introduced Henri to an Agency contact.  Transplanted to Marseilles in the closing months of the war, Henri's shipyard was one of Langley's most critical assets in the western Mediterranean.

 

Ian had been urged more than once to try and persuade Irina to defect, but he had simply shaken his head in disbelief.  Irina Orlov was a senior officer in a politically and economically bankrupt state that in his estimation was on its last legs, but in her breast beat a Russian heart.  In the aftermath, she would be there to pick up the pieces and help forge a new nation.

 

“Are you going to tell her,” Freeman asked.

 

“That I'm retiring?”

 

“No … that you're getting married … again.”

 

“Donnie, how many times do I have to say it?  There has never been anything personal between us.”

 

“Then why did she warn you not to marry Emily?  She told you to your face that you weren't ready …  hadn't moved on.  But you didn't listen, and look at the result.  Well, what makes you so sure that you're ready now … that you won't drag this Sarah of yours into a similar train wreck?

 

“A lot older and at least a little wiser.”

 

“Bullshit!  Ian, okay … look … I'm taking off my Deputy Director's hat.  Right now, I'm talking to you as a friend … the guy that a sniper had zeroed in, that you came out to drag to safety, eating a bullet in the process.  The Agency got diddly squat out of your officers and noncoms after you brought down the Hind, so we're left with bare facts.  First, you called in the recovery team, and the fuselage was in such good shape that it took less than two years to reverse engineer Mikhail Mali's latest toy.  Congratulations on a job well done.  Second, you captured the pilots unharmed, one Captain Sergei Federov and one Colonel Irina Olav.  Third, you refused to hand them over to your Montagnard friends to be sliced, diced and fed to their pigs.  Fourth, you refused to process them for interrogation.  And fifth, in the last, grand romantic gesture of modern warfare, you and Irina mounted Toby and rode off into the jungle, where you bid adieu to Sergei and Irina on the outskirts of a village controlled by the Pathet Lao.  Have I left anything out?”

 

“Hand over to be questioned by whom, Donnie?  You seem to forget that I wasn't in Saigon's chain of command.  Studies and Observation Group personnel reported directly to the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities at the Pentagon, and he reported directly to the President.  Should I have clapped a pair of Russian officers in irons and shipped them off to Washington?  Don't think so.  Instead,  I questioned them myself, and quickly came to the conclusion that I was wasting my time.  Then what?  I couldn't shoot them and I wasn't running a hotel, so I sent them packing and then got the hell out of Dodge!  End of Story.”

 

“Not quite,” Freeman countered.  “Three months later, you were in a hospital bed in Japan fighting for your life, and after nine months of surgeries and rehab, cane in hand you left Hawaii under your own power.  To do what?  Your next stop was the Pentagon, and a meeting that went so bad that you resigned your commission on the spot.  Then off to Viet Nam you went, a civilian entering a war zone from which we were actively withdrawing!  You made the rounds, triggering alarm bells everywhere you went.  Some of our colleagues thought that you had lost it, Ian, and the dust storm only settled because you finally decided to come clean and tell someone who could help-- to wit, me-- what the hell was going on.  You and I cut a deal on the spot, the Director gave it his blessing, and we've been at it ever since.  You carry the ball for us worldwide, but when you go behind the Iron Curtain, how often does Irina show up to hold your hand on a stroll through the streets of Prague?  Share a quiet meal with you in a quaint corner of Krakow?  It's obvious that she put you on a watch list the moment she returned to Moscow, and now she heads the GRU Directorate responsible for counterintelligence activities in the European theater.  She's your guardian angel, Ian, and if there's one person you need to talk with before you dive off the marital cliff, it's Irina.  If you're still not ready, she'll tell you straight to your face.  If you won't do it for yourself, at least do it for your bride to be.”

 

Leaning his forehead against the wall, Ian sighed deeply, not at all sure how to respond.  There was nothing casual about his meetings with Irina Orlov, nor his less frequent encounters with Sergei Federov.  On the surface, Timbuktu had been just another favor for the Agency, which had no one with Ian's security clearance capable of speaking any of the Songhai dialects.  In reality, however, Ian had accepted the assignment in order to 

speak directly with Sergei, who at the time had been completing an arms deal in neighboring Upper Volta.  A prominent figure in the shadowy universe of international arms trading, Sergei had access to sources of information beyond the reach of Donnie and Irina-- and beyond the reach of Irina's father. 

 

As far as Irina had risen, her father had risen farther.

 

Dmitri Orlov was now the Chairman of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, the spymaster in charge of Soviet intelligence operations worldwide.

 

And the three Russians all owed Street Racer dolg chesti… a debt of honor.

 

.  .  .  .

 

As soon as Vickie dashed out the door, Rita picked up the phone and dialed Manny Cepeda's direct line.  Manny had long been in the habit of starting his workday with a leisurely cup of coffee before he ventured out for a hands on inspection of the hospital's current construction and repair projects.  Relaxing in his plush swivel chair, that first cup of joe always seemed to leave Manny in a good mood.

 

“Cepeda,” he mumbled.

 

“Manny, it's Rita.  “Got time to host a 'diaper your favorite nurse' auction between now and Christmas … all proceeds going to buy presents for the neighborhood children?”

 

“Sounds like fun.  How many nurses are volunteering?”

 

“Just two … Sarah and myself.  Bidding to be restricted to female members of the staff, and there are conditions.”

 

Manny laughed gleefully.  “There will be plenty of interest!  Where are you thinking of holding the auction?”

 

“How about with each of us climbing up on a table in the center of the cafeteria?”

 

“Pancho Villa, hold my phone calls!  Kid, you've got spunk,” Manny hooted.

 

“Here's the fine print.  The diapering is to take place between ten and eleven on nights of our choice, in room eleven of the psych ward.  The winner will have to come back in the morning, probably at seven, to release us from our cribs, clean us up, and put us in nice, clean diapers.  There is patient involvement, and I have yet to raise the matter with Major Grady.  I thought I'd run it by you before pitching it to him.”

 

“Think Street Racer will be okay with it?”

 

“Positive.  He has a weakness for good causes.”

 

“Dates?”

 

“Flexible, but not later than the nineteenth and twentieth.  It has to be before the wedding, and we don't want to compete with the usual run of Christmas parties.”

 

“I can make it work … no problem.  Get the Major to sign on the dotted line, and we'll sort out the details afterwards.  Any chance that Vickie would like to join the fun?”

 

“Manny, it wouldn't surprise me if she joined the bidding!  Right now, Sarah and Vickie are hammering out the details of our living arrangements, and I choose the term 'hammering' advisedly.”

 

“Makes sense,” Manny nodded.  “It probably wouldn't be a good idea for the three of you to sit back and take things as they come.  After all, somebody's got to wash the dishes!”

 

“Hearing you loud and clear,” Rita laughed in turn.

 

“You doing okay?”  They both knew that Manny was referring to Rita's visit to the lab late on Monday afternoon.

 

“I'm fine, Manny; in fact I'm more than fine, and thank you for asking.  Ian and I are going to sit down on Thursday for a heart to heart conversation.  I'm debating how to broach the obvious question.”

 

“Wish I could help you there, but alas, if there's a magic bullet, no one's ever found it.  Best I can offer is for you to be honest about your own feelings.  I can't see him lying to you if you're open and up front about it; what guys resent is a nasty surprise.”

 

“I'll get back to you on Friday.  Bye Manny; have a good one.”

 

Rita hung up, still not at all sure how to bare her soul without leaving Ian feeling trapped

inside the raging storm of her own needs and desires.

 

.  .  .  .

 

Still trying not to draw attention to herself, Vickie crossed the foyer and headed directly to the staff locker room.  Pausing only to grab the bag on the top shelf of her locker, she continued on to the restroom.  To her infinite relief, it was vacant.  Since the toilet was in an enclosed stall and other staff might have need of the sink, she reluctantly decided to leave the door unlocked.

 

Removing her blouse and bra, Vickie lowered her pants around her ankles, and sat down on the toilet seat.  Unzipping the bag and leaving it at her feet, she leaned back against the cold toilet tank, closed her eyes, and began to massage her nipples.  Thinking about Ian … fantasizing about the two of them finally freed from their diaper bondage …

 

His mouth sucking on her breasts … his tongue working its magic on her clit ...

 

Vickie moaned softly as her nipples hardened.

 

Mounting him and taking them both to a furious climax …

 

God!!

 

Reaching into the bag, Vickie pulled out a set of nipple clamps and attached them, her movements smooth and sure, born of long practice.

 

She moaned again, more loudly, the fiery pain exquisite in its promise of the pleasure to come.

 

Eyes still closed, her hand slid inside the bag to grab the wand, which she activated even as she climbed to her feet.  She used it first on her breasts, then on the inside of her thighs.  Thinking of Sarah forcing her over her knee, spanking her hard …

 

Ian beneath her simultaneously sucking on her rock hard nipples while Sarah's hand rose and fell …

 

Vickie turned the wand on full, and attacked her thick diaper cover, praying that the thin diaper she was wearing underneath would not absorb the vibration.

 

It didn't.

 

It began as a gentle tickling, but the sensation soon began to build, the blood engorging her clit.

 

Her breathing became more shallow and more and more rapid, the effort to keep her eyes tightly shut more and more demanding, but she would allow nothing to interfere with the waves of pleasure that were flowing through her body, building to a thunderous crescendo.

 

Turning blindly to lean against the wall, her hand frantically pressing the wand hard into her diaper, her mouth gaping open in the struggle to breathe, Vickie climaxed.

 

And she moaned.

 

Loudly.

 

Had anyone heard?  Truth be told, she didn't care.

 

Vickie released her bladder, and let pee stream into the thirsty material locked around her waist.  That's what it was there for, she reasoned, and besides, it would be fun to stroll into Sarah's office and demand a diaper change.  Would she be able to smell the juices that had flowed out of her vagina, or would the heavy urine smell mask the telltale odor of a woman in heat?

 

Only one way to find out, and my first session is still twenty minutes away ...  

 

Later, looking back on the experience clinically, she would grade the orgasm one of the most intense that she had ever experienced.  Her one regret was that it had taken her so long to discover just how much pleasure a girl could get from wearing a diaper that she couldn't remove.

 

.  .  .  .

 

“I'll talk to her, Donnie, but I can't exactly call the switchboard at GRU headquarters, and calling her at home is out of the question.”

 

“You have her home telephone number,” Donnie gulped.  The Deputy Director was stunned.  There were only four men in the whole government who could break the seals on a 34 Alpha file, which is where the reports of Ian's activities, both military and civilian, were buried.  Granted, he hadn't actually just said that he had her number, but it was hard to miss the implication.  The idea that Street Racer could simply pick up the phone and casually call one of the highest authorities in Soviet intelligence was scary as hell.

 

“It would be best if she called my office at three on the dot,” Ian replied, carefully sidestepping the question that he knew Freeman desperately wanted him to answer.  He was equally careful not to suggest what he already knew-- that the Deputy Director could contact anyone in the highest reaches of the Soviet intelligence services at will.

 

“I'll see what I can arrange, but it would be better if you talked with her face to face.”

 

Glancing at his watch, Ian winced.  Damage control would have to start with Priscilla, and the precious minutes that he needed to figure out what he could and could not tell her were slipping away.  He needed to put an end to this conversation.

 

“Donnie, I'm running out of time here.”

 

“You're preaching to the choir, Street.  Every time we turn over a rock, we look underneath, but it's like trying to find two grains of sand on a beach a mile long and a half mile wide.  Worse yet, the tide ebbs and flows, constantly rearranging the landscape.  We don't have a lot to work with.”

 

The Deputy Director had completely misunderstood Ian's frame of reference-- or had he?  Their relationship was complicated, and Ian well understood that Donnie was more than capable of sending him a message inside a message.

 

“She'll be ten on her next birthday, which is fast approaching,” he commented in response.  “And my goddaughter will be …”

 

Ian bit down hard on the rage boiling up inside him.  He was fifteen and just starting his junior year in high school when he could no longer ignore the obvious.  Miss Khasigian had been there in the tenth grade to tutor him in Russian, and the next year she was gone.  Miss Anagnos had taught him modern Greek and French in the ninth grade, then disappeared.  In the eighth grade it had been Miss Manice who artfully passed him her personal copies of Homer and Virgil, then stayed on after school to coach him in classical Greek and Latin once he showed an interest in reading them in the original.

 

She was not there when he moved on to the ninth grade-- the first of the ghosts that were now passing through a child's life with disturbing regularity.

 

Ian reckoned that it had started innocently enough, when he was eleven.  It was the summer vacation that separated sixth from seventh grade, and he had been prowling the stacks of the vast downtown library when he stumbled upon the thin volume of poetry.  Opening it and beginning to read at random, he quickly realized that he understood the words but not their meaning.  Then, looking more closely, he discovered that he was reading a translation of Japanese haiku.  Perhaps, he reasoned, the poetry would make more sense if he read it in Japanese.  And so he had made the fateful decision to ask the reference librarian to help him learn the language.  Since he could already converse in Spanish and German, learning still another tongue didn't strike him as much of a challenge.

 

It wasn't.

 

Mrs. Randolph had humored him, loading him up with books and records, showing him where the Japanese newspapers flown in daily from Tokyo were housed.  Then she had left him to it, presuming that he would quickly lose interest and move on to something more fitting for a child.

 

It took him five weeks.

 

As it turned out, the public library did not have a copy of the Japanese original, but the chairman of the Asian Languages department at the nearby university did.  Ian's mom took a day off from work to drive her son to campus, where the three of them shared lunch in the faculty club.  Afterwards, the chairman sat there in utter shock as he listened to the little boy read the poetry out loud, his accent not only flawless but also polished, his delivery confident.

 

Ian began to spend more and more time at the university.  He learned that Korea had its own version of the Alamo, and so the following summer he mastered its language in order to read the Samguk Yusa.  The epic tale of the siege of Buy-eo and the tragedy of the falling flowers enthralled him, and he vowed one day to stand upon the cliffs from which the maidens had flung themselves onto the rocks below.

 

He had gone five years earlier, stealing time from yet another Agency assignment.

 

At age fifteen, he was completely fluent in ten languages.  He had skipped the fourth grade, and only his mother's stubborn opposition had kept him from skipping the seventh as well.  She was worried that he would become a social outcast if his classmates were all two years older in high school.  The school authorities had relented, but only in the face of her threat to resort to home schooling.

 

The eleventh and twelfth grades were his years of alienation.  The subjects in which he excelled came easily, but he had no interest in math and science, and his grades were average at best.  Surfing and street racing were his twin passions; girls, at least the ones in his classes, were a year older and out of reach.  When a guidance counselor asked him at the start of his senior year about his career options, his first choice was to become a mechanic.  Cursed with a singular lack of self awareness, he had no sense of the extraordinary gift that had been bestowed upon him, but others noted how easily he picked up Italian as a Senior, and they were stunned when he went home one Friday afternoon not knowing a word of Romanian, and came back to school on Monday morning speaking it like a native.

 

At age seventeen, he was completely fluent in twelve languages.  Although his grades did not warrant admission, the university doors were flung wide open, and scholarships for which he was encouraged to apply made him both financially comfortable and independent.  Required courses were waived, his time now devoted exclusively to language, history, and international relations.  Graduating a semester early and near the top of his class, with five more languages under his belt, Ian was barely twenty-one years of age when he sought out an army recruiter with an eye to putting his mastery of Vietnamese to good use.

 

It was payback for ten long years of dancing like a marionette, his strings being pulled by an unseen agent hiding behind the curtain.  And he strongly suspected that this same agent had murdered his parents, leaving him alone and vulnerable at age nineteen, a continent away from his extended family.

 

They had died, he was told, in a head on collision with a drunk driver.  But someone had forgot to forge an obituary notice to support the news headlines.  He had checked.

 

And Donald James Freeman, the Deputy Director in charge of covert operations worldwide, was now the voice of the Agency, the voice whispering into his ear.

 

“My niece,” he corrected, just turned eleven.  The closer they get to puberty ...”

 

“On it, Street; in fact, we're all over it.  And I'm going to be brutally honest with you.  Sentimentality has nothing to do with it.  We have to know whether your daughter has inherited your gift.  If she has, we are prepared to take extreme measures to prevent her falling into the wrong hands.”

 

“Then I do need to speak with Irina.  Dolg chesti.”

 

“Yeah,” Freeman agreed, “a debt of honor.  You not only saved Irina's life, you shielded her from the worst form of degradation that a woman can suffer.  Ian, the only way that Dmitri can balance the scales is to find Linh and bring her home … Linh and  Thu both.

And so we search.  Admittedly for different reasons, but I promise you this: the file won't close until the day you are holding them in your arms.”

 

Hanging up the phone, Ian pushed a tiny button on the side of his watch.  With its fancy digital interface and crimson numerals, the Pulsar was well beyond the reach of his pocketbook, but it was just one of the many toys with which the Agency had equipped him.

 

07:37

 

It was Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of November, in the year nineteen hundred and seventy nine.  In less than a month, Ian was supposed to wed, but walking back to his office, the pain in his right hip beginning to flare, he was consumed with doubt.

 

Would he lose Sarah when she found out what a mess he had made of his life, and how much baggage he would be bringing to their marriage?

 

Would he end up losing all three of the women he loved?

 

.  .  .  . 

 

This concludes season one of An Homage to Vincent Vega

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