UPDATE: I did some editing to the original portion that was posted and then added another section to the story. Look for additional sections over the next few weeks.
MINI-MISSION #19
1.
I couldn’t wait to see my husband. It had been a long, cold semester in this flat – really nothing more than a grad student hovel decorated in masculine minimalistic chic. But, I cleaned up for tonight and threw up some goofy Christmas lights on Hannah’s, one of my fellow rabbinical students, suggestion. I told her that I needed to get laid (“laid real good”) and tell him something, something really important. She giggled then asked if I was pregnant and if so, was it our “terribly hot” Prayer and Interpretation teacher? No, and . . . well . . ?
I’m married to the 12th Earl of Glamorgan, who came with an estate, just outside of Cardiff in Wales, that looked like something out of a Jane Austen novel. Since the marriage equality law allowed me to take a title, I’m Viscount Desmond Mac Innes-Reese or just Deetz to friends and family. And we aren’t the poor titled who either blew their fortunes gambling and whoring or those who didn’t get out of agriculture before the Great War and lost everything in the subsequent depression. The Reese men have been smart, watched the markets, invested strategically, and always stayed close to whoever was in government. Hubby was flying in our €25 million plane, the William Mason, after leaving a meeting to establish the McDonald’s of recreational marijuana in Canada, where the herb was just legalized. My hubby was a venture capitalist with a mouth that melted my knees and could convince Santa Claus that he was Jewish. It also didn’t hurt that the Glamorgan earls and their valets had been agents of the Crown since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Angus and I were just the latest version but not a unique pairing within the Glamorgan Progeny.
9:14 pm. He wasn’t late. I was anxious. I’d already made two dozen of his favourite crunchy pretzels with cheese sprinkles and had a batch of my special martini recipe. I didn’t want to put the steaks on yet – just in case he wants to relax then eat or relax, fuck, then eat. I paced the room thinking aloud, “It’s hasn’t been long since I’ve seen him.” It’d been three months, 1 week, 3 days and some hours since he’d drop me off in Philadelphia on his way to Hong Kong. We’d Facetime and such but for a couple of blokes only married three years (and two of them living apart 9 months at a time) that wasn’t enough. I decided to make tarts. As I got out the mixing bowl, I again spoke aloud, “Ah yes, the problems of the 1% of the 1%!”
He came in an hour later. It had started snowing with those fat flakes that don’t melt right away once you’re inside. He and my chocolate lab, Velvel, shook themselves off simultaneously. “Can you believe we got this covered getting out of the limousine?” I took a towel to my dog while Angus removed layers of his outerwear. Velvel licked my face then found the doggie bed. “It was a long flight. I think the poor fellow’s got jet lag!” Angus walked over and grabbed me so that we stood lip to lip. He is a tad taller than me and looks like Jim Morrison and Charlie Hunnam had a gaybie – I’m more like Wales’s answer to Bruce Lee. He grazed and nibbled at my lips, trying to get to my tongue. “Posmoh, posmoh yourself to jih, my parmaq. Jih’m vaj hungry 'ej neh tlhih will satiate jih (Open, open yourself to me, my love. I’m so hungry and only you will satiate me)!
Oh, my! Did I tell you he speaks 24 languages? I simply LOVE when he growls in Klingon! I offered my tongue which he received greedily, sucking and tugging with his lips and teeth. He tightened his arm around me, urged my pelvis against his. I resisted playfully, “Ah now, not yet Mr. Greedy! I’ve slaved over a stove and you aren’t getting out of your tea!”
“A bit late for tea,” he said letting me go and sitting on the couch near the heater. “Why won’t you get a decent flat?” He shivered and rubbed his arms briskly. “I mean really! It’s not like we can’t afford it!” He took off his shoes and put them by the fireplace, the primary heating source. I also had a small ceramic heater in the bathroom and the heated toilet seat he gave me for my birthday last year – he has a tender bum after all.
I poured him my specialty dirty martini from a chilled flask then handed it to him. “I don’t want to draw any more attention to myself beyond what my work brings.” I was a legend in my own mind back then, determined to be a religious scholar and writer, the next Rashi or Maimonides. “And, well, I kinda like the place. Reminds me of my flat in Thailand.” I went back to my efficiency kitchen to plate some pretzels. My servitude in those early days was the beginning of our years of following a BDSM lifestyle but at this moment, all I knew was that his smile was addictive and I was determined to keep it there. “You don’t like how I dressed everything up?” I asked with a sweeping wave of my palm in a feigned attempt at showing real estate.
“Oh yeah, high poverty chic is all the rage this season.”
Giving him the pretzel plate, I replied, “You’re such a snob.”
He took the plate from my hand and deposited it unceremoniously on the side table. “I’m British. We inherited white privilege from the Romans.”
“We’re Welsh.” He grabbed my wrist and pulled me atop his lap. Sexy move – how did he know I just watched The Big Sleep? Somehow though, I don’t think I landed on him as gracefully as Martha Vickers.
He ignored my comment but, as his hard-on betrayed, not me. “Miss me?” he asked just as we both felt his mobile buzz from his jeans back pocket.
I sat up a bit, so he could get to it. Even the prospect of incredibly hot sex could not deter my husband from an office call. “Constantly,” I answered, hoping whoever was on the other end of the line would have mercy on me and go away quickly.
He stared hard at the phone screen for a moment before answering it with a frown. “Hello Stone.” Stone was our MI-6 handler. Fuck! I know that Chanukah doesn’t stand up to Christmas to most folks but give a Jew a break here! I heaved a sigh and got up to start packing. I’d tell Stone where to go but my Crown patriot over there would have none of it. “CIA? You already spoke with Tom, I presume?” Tom’s my sister Ciara’s husband, a CIA agent on loan to MI-6 for housing convenience – my sister did not want to move from Morganwg, our estate, and Angus used his pull to make his brother-in-law’s temporary assignment permanent. “A Russian defector? What is this, the Cold War 2.0? Why can’t the CIA do it, I mean she did defect to the Americans.” We were part of a special intelligence section - very top secret, all quite hush, hush – the Department of Alien Affairs. Yeah, the X-Files, only we don’t believe. We debunk all types of claims in the Crown’s hope of being the first to find something, anything to prove aliens exist. Unfortunately, as far as our and our forefather’s investigations have concluded, we are alone in the universe and most alien sightings are a mixture of bad eyesight, wishful thinking, and international shenanigans. “Alright, what time are they expecting us?” Angus paused. “Tell them we will be there at 11,” he finally said before disconnecting. “Bloody hell!”
I had resigned myself. “Do you have everything you need back at the plane?”
“Yeah. We don’t have to be there until tomorrow.”
“Well, that’s something I suppose. Nessie sighted at some 8-year old’s pool party?”
“No,” he took a long sip of his drink and got off the couch to walk toward me. I was packing still. He took my tightie-whities out of my hand and dropped them somewhere. “They were going to send Tom, had the woman at the British Embassy but now she’s in D.C., where we are to pick her up and bring her to Cardiff.” He wrapped his arms around my waist and started kissing my neck.
“That’s some walkabout, eh?” there went my knees again – the man’s part vampire ‘cause he never misses that pulse point. “Did Stone say why us and not the CIA. I bet Tom’s pissed.” Quiet as it is kept, Tom is not very fond of the folks at MI-6 – the racism there I guess is worse than at the CIA. But Tom had always been a bit of a complainer, even when we dated some years back. What? you ask? It’s complicated.
Angus lifted his head just enough to answer, “I guess her story is too explosive. They want an ‘objective party’ to interrogate her. Stone says it has ‘international implications’ . . . blah, blah, blah.” He started massaging the side of my ass in that pleading sort of way he does when I’m talking too much. “I don’t think this will take up much of our time, a few days; our whole vacation won’t go to pot.” He pulled my sweatshirt off. “Ydych chi awydd cael cwtsh (Fancy a cwtch)?” he whispered in my ear in Welsh.
I decided to save my questions for after he finished ploughing my ass.
**************
2.
The next morning, we took the William Mason to Reagan National Airport then boarded a CIA courtesy car – a black sedan with an anonymous driver straight from central casting – for the drive to headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. According to the briefing memo emailed from Stone, we were to meet with Parker Cassidy, the undersecretary for the Information Operations Center (IOC), which focuses primarily on counterintelligence in the cyber world. This made this mission even more curious to us as the defector, Natasha Orlov, was the wife of a Moscow doctor – hardly espionage material but then again, the Russians were known for masking their operatives as people with ordinary lives.
“Oh yeah,” Angus said during the car ride, “I forgot to tell you. Before I took off from Hong Kong, I got a call from Rob and Mark. Everything is final on Monday.” This couple were friends of a friend of his that had become his besties. Rob and Mark had gone through legal hell trying to adopt baby Tabitha, who came to them as a foster child when her mother died of an heroin-fentanyl overdose. For a year, all of our Facetime conversations started with the play-by-play of the process and the state of the couple’s marriage. “The timing can’t be more perfect too! I’m convinced the stress of it all was at the heart of that last row they had.” My ‘I’m not gay; I just love you” husband had suddenly become the pop psychologist to the queer and overly privileged. Angus prided himself on having saved these two so many times I thought he should turn it into another one of his businesses. “They are having a baby naming ceremony and Mark asked us to be the g-dparents. Brilliant, eh? I think we could be able to manage something before you have to go back, you know. Wait ‘till you see her – she’s cute as a button!”
“Yeah, that sounds nice” was about as much enthusiasm as I could muster. His baby-on-the-brain was irritating me. Angus was like a 40-year old Evangelical Christian woman, her biological clock clanging in her ear. He didn’t notice my nonplussed attitude because he was too busy locating the picture of the baby on his mobile to show me. I glanced at it and wondered how they were going to explain to the child why her skin was a different colour than theirs. “Sure, we’ll see.”
Once you got past the 15 layers of security, the interior of CIA HQ was unsurprisingly relaxed – if you could look past hundreds, maybe thousands, of CCTV devices hidden throughout the facility. I wondered if there was something inside the visitor badges tuned to my brain waves to capture my thoughts. I avoided touching too many objects to avoid the random, disconnected thoughts of thousands of worker bees who haunted the hallways. Not likely to get any juicy intelligence anyways as, just like us, the spies rarely came in from the cold and probably couldn’t find this building using MapQuest. Cassidy’s office was ultra-modern but barren, reflecting the likelihood that he was nothing more than another condom in the bureaucratic org chart. He didn’t do work but spent his day making sure other people did it, as the large console phone on the desk would testify at his HR hearing.
“Gentlemen!” he started after shaking our hands as if he could be contaminated by our gayness. I wanted to say, it’s okay, Angus isn’t gay, and neither am I but instead let him continue, hoping that he wasn’t going to be too passive-aggressive. “Thank you for coming on such short notice.”
Angus took the lead. He’s better at talking to government officials as my first inclination is to punch them in the mouth, reckoning that if they’re talking, their lying. “Not a problem but our government was a bit thin on information. Are we hear for anything other than transport? ‘Cause if that is so, I don’t recall putting a Lyft logo on my private plane.”
Cassidy was a rotund 50ish man whose family pictures dotted shelving just far enough away from his desk to make it easier for him to avoid the faces of his smiling children and frowning wife. “I apologize for the inconvenience gentlemen, but this is something of a hot potato.” He squirmed in his seat, apparently surprised by Angus’s assertive approach. Obviously, the American’s intelligence on us was not only biphobic but sexist and inaccurate as well. “If what she says is true, and at this point, we aren’t sure, it could cause a constitutional crisis. The director believes, in our country’s current state of political disarray, if this comes from us, it will look like some QAnon conspiracy.”
“How? What is she saying?” Angus asked.
Cassidy looked around as if he feared secret police storming into his office at any moment. “She says the president isn’t what we think he is.”
“A born-again ignoramus?” I posted.
“No,” he replied, his voice nearly a whisper, “she says he isn’t human. She says the president is an alien.”
“Blimey, that would explain a lot.”
“Hold on,” I interjected, “you mean like in John Carpenter’s, They Live?”
“Huh?” Obviously, the CIA guy doesn’t watch much late 20th century sci-fi.
“Did she mean alien, like from another planet or an altered human?” I asked.
“She wasn’t clear. Her English isn’t very good, and our Russian translator is on vacation.”
Angus said, “You only have one translator? That’s insane!”
The bureaucrat was back to shame-based whispering, “I know! We know THAT down here. Everyone’s been pulled to the election tampering investigation. Plus, we have six sub-department head positions that have gone unfiled for nearly a year. One of those positions hires translators – union says we can’t hire until that job is filled.” He took a towel from his desk drawer and dapped his face, succeeding to smear sweat from one side of his face to another. “Listen fellas, my superiors don’t even know about this yet. If it’s nothing but some grieving widow thinking she has some ticket out of Drearyland, fine. But if she’s got something – well, man, that’s my career. The President’s vindictiveness puts Lady Macbeth to shame!”
I found myself wondering how much it must grate him to have to ask help from two blokes he felt were beneath him? Or did he think dumping this lady with us was like putting out the trash? No sense continuing conversating with this man. “Where is she now?” I asked.
“In our interrogation section, a few floors down. I’ll take you to her,” he said standing eagerly. But he paused a moment as he came around his desk to add, “But there is one thing. She has her son with her, a 3-year old.”
While I rolled my eyes, Angus stood up heading to the door and replied, “He will have a fun first trip to Wales.”
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR PART THREE
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