Spies Like Us

OK, this freakin' scenario has been running through my head for the last few months. That's right, it's yet another prose exercise by yours truly. And there will be more, bwahahahahaha!

Kingman is New Delhi is Mombasa–pitch black nights drenched in heat, cheap motel rooms seeped with yellow flickering lights, moths and little lizards scuttling about warped wooden floors and chipped walls. The confluence of the heat and the sepia lighting made these nights amber-like. They were scenes encased in thick, languid memories. In these memories, in Port Moresby, in Caracas, in Little Rock, during these interchangeable summer nights, Lawson would be stripped down to his boxers, pencil scribbling whatever needed to be conveyed at the drop off. “The birds for the tea garden will not last. Please inform the guest that we will be having jasmine instead of Earl Gray.” “The tractor is overpriced–the gears are too old and the parts are worth more than the whole.” But now, he didn’t even have the scribbling of cryptic notes the pass the time away.
Not only was Peter Lawson a traitor, he was a seditionist and a traitor.
At least that’s what the President and his New Covenant Administration, just elected for a fourth term, believed. A rational government would spend its intelligence resources in attempting to win ongoing conflicts and to prevent additional ones. But zealots are, by definition, irrational. So the New Covenant Administration was going to expend its intelligence capabilities on tracking down every single operative who dared disagreed with administration assessments, who provided intelligence that contradicted the inner sanctum, or who just wouldn’t be bought off. This hunt was ongoing, even though the President had bogged down the country in Syria and Iran, in police actions in Venezuela and Cuba, in militarized missionary actions all throughout Africa and a newly friendly China.
Lawson still had friends, though. More importantly, Lawson still had money to keep those friends. At about thirty minutes before midnight, there was a hard knock on the door, followed by two softer knocks. Outside was the local constable, Muenda Kibaki, thickset, sweating and grinning.
“Ah, Mr. Halliday,” Muenda said, “I hope you are enjoying your vacation, though I still don’t see why you don’t stay at the Hilton. Surely, you would be more comfortable in air conditioning and fruited beverages with little paper umbrellas and plastic monkeys.”
“All right, smart ass, what’s up?” Lawson replied.
“Well, I felt you should now that there is an young American causing such a stir at the Hilton, making his feelings known about the current American administration. This is upsetting the businessmen and the missionaries. Perhaps you might want to discuss matters with him?”
“Hmmm, loud and young, you say? Probably has spiked hair, piercings, t-shirt with Che Guevara?”
“Actually, he is wearing a t-shirt with Hugo Chavez, but everything else is accurate.”
“Thanks, Muenda.”
“No problem at all.”
Lawson was about to shut the door, but stopped and asked, “So, have the Bible studies started?”
Muenda sighed. “Why yes, they have. I will tell you that I think the Spirit would be more likely to enter me if those smiling bright young men and women in the white shirts and black pants were not accompanied by marines.”
“No shit, eh.”
“No shit,” Muenda agreed.
Lawson spent the next few minutes packing getting his belongings, and even though it was a blessing to him, fuming about the incompetent Judas Goat at the Hilton. Preachers, by definition, make shitty spies. Lawson guessed it had to do with that messianic urge of preachers to spread the word, and destroy anything that didn’t fit with their interpretation. Even when they’re pretending not to be preachers, that urge to shout, to prostelytize, to call attention to themselves, still came through. And calling attention to oneself was not an option in a career that required being the background. Young New Covenant Lackey at the Hilton, though doth protesteth a bit too much. But where there was a Judas Goat, there was someone waiting at the other end of the tether. It was time to get out of dodge.
Whenever Lawson left a town, he entertained the thought about going to Zurich, getting a total make over from the molecular level upwards. Then Lawson would not be Peter Lawson, blond, blue-eyed Midwest boy who went to Ohio State with a B.A. in Poli Sci, Georgetown Masters in International Relations, and former operative of the CIA, but instead, George Halliday of Windsor, Canada, brown-eyed, sandy-haired graduated of McGill in French History and mild mannered accountant. Stem-cell research had progressed extensively since the New Covenant banned it in the United States. After Canada signed a Joint Defense pact with the Russianized EU, the Canadian CSE made it known that George Halliday would be more than welcome in their employ.
And yet every time he left a railway terminal, a shipyard, an airport, Lawson would head to the nearest cheap motel, reestablish old “friendships,” and wait. Perhaps hope springs eternal.