Free Dire Straits by Mark Terry

The man paused, said, “Do you have the alternate number?”
    “Yes.”
    “Call it.”
    He did. A different voice answered, a woman this time, with an odd accent, maybe east coast, New Jersey maybe. “Where exactly are you?”
    He looked at Sally. “Where are we?”
    “Middle of the Gulf of Mexico.”
    He relayed that information. The voice wanted more specifics. He told the voice he was heading toward Galveston. The voice wanted to know how long it would take for him to get there.
    He looked at Sally, who waggled her eyebrows at him. “Depends on if you want to go fast or go slow. I vote slow.”
    Derek studied her for a moment. Into the phone he said, “At least two days.” Sally smiled. It was a smile filled with a fair amount of promise. Derek reflected that there probably wasn’t much point of being a spy if you couldn’t occasionally act like James Bond. Into the phone he said, “Maybe three.”

13
    Two-and-a-half, actually. And by the time they pulled into Galveston, Sally had found a buyer for her boat—Derek. Sally was thirty-five, had married a man twenty-five years older than her when she was thirty. The man, who she said was a nice enough guy, had several million dollars rattling around in the bank and several million more in the stock market. Then, while eating at Joe’s Stone Crab, he’d fallen right off his chair, dead before he hit the floor from a heart attack. Sally inherited the millions, a big modern house overlooking the ocean, and the boat. She decided she wanted a bigger boat and she wanted some time alone to “grieve,” so she decided to sail it to Texas where she had some family, see if she could sell the boat while she was there. Then she thought she might want to spend a few months in Europe. Did he want to come?
    It was a double entendre, and not a very subtle one. Sally was like that. Derek figured her husband must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven when they hooked up. Maybe he even knew she was screwing him for his money. Maybe he didn’t even care. But Derek politely declined, saying he had a job to get back to.
    Standing on the dock, he said, “I’ve got to fly back east.”
    She smiled and kissed him, a lingering kiss. “You never really did tell me what you were doing in Cuba.”
    “Stealing kayaks,” he said. “I told you. Big black market in Cuban kayaks. Didn’t you know?”
    “I’ll get the paperwork going on the boat. Call me.”
    “Absolutely.”
    He caught a flight from Galveston to Houston to Washington DC. He was met at the airport by a muscular man with a gray crew-cut in a dark suit that didn’t hide the fact that he pumped a lot of iron and probably used a lot of steroids. He didn’t say anything as he drove Derek to a bland office building in Maryland where Derek was ushered into a small room with two plastic chairs and a Formica table.
    A thin blond man in a gray suit and black and silver tie entered and sat opposite him. “Hello, Derek. Have a nice vacation with Mrs. Kendall?”
    “Bought her boat. I’m going to have to fly back down to Galveston to sail it back here.”
    “Yes, we’re aware of that.” The man, whose name was Richard McGee, was the man who had sent Derek to Cuba. “Just one more fuckup in a long line of them, apparently. Why don’t you start at the beginning.”
    So Derek did. The first time through, McGee didn’t ask any questions. The only time he said anything was when the subject of the Russian woman came up. McGee looked to a spot near the wall and said, “Get that.”
    Derek said, “Hidden camera?”
    McGee nodded. “Continue.”
    Derek did. Finally, once the story made it to Sally Kendall, Derek stopped. McGee said, “Oh, let’s keep going.”
    Derek shook his head. “Sorry. Nothing to tell.”
    “Plenty to tell. You’re being … debriefed. But maybe you already were.”
    “Jealous?”
    “You were forty miles from shore. You didn’t have to stay on the boat. What did you tell her?”
    “Black