Free The Cain File by Max Tomlinson

propping the phone up on the gurgling toilet tank so she could hear it in case it rang. By the time she was toweling off, it did.
    “Did you order a pizza?” She had the receiver cradled to her neck as she pulled on undies.
    “Is your husband home?” Ed said. Safe to talk?
    “Nope.” Yes, it was .
    “How’s your trip?”
    “A few miles from home.” Still a ways. “But I’m in the neighborhood.” She was in Peru.
    “When you get there, call.” Call the embassy when you arrive. Ed hung up. He kept the call short, even though she was supposedly in the clear.
    She thought about that nagging GPS ping again. Who? Or what? Human or digital? Even if it was a bot, a program, behind every automatic crawler was a person. Ed? No. If she couldn’t trust Ed, she couldn’t trust anyone. How about any one of those creatures at that so-called party?
    She ran a brush through her wet hair and finished getting dressed. Then she put her new jacket on, hat, got her laptop in a bag, checked out, walked down to the main drag. A line of beat-up taxis waited in front of a cinema. She strolled up and down and found the friendliest face.
    “Yes, missy?” He was a wiry-looking guy with a bit of a stoop. But he had a nice, dilapidated smile.
    “Do you know the way to Lima?” Maggie said.
    “Lima? You mean the capital? That Lima?”
    “Is there another one I don’t know about?”
    “No, but it’s a good twelve hours. And that’s without stopping.”
    “Will five hundred U.S. dollars get me there in ten?” It was over a month’s salary in this country.
    He cracked a wide grin, made lopsided by a missing tooth. “Only if you wear your seatbelt, missy.” The cabbie came around with alacrity and opened the door for her. “Only if you wear your seatbelt.”

~~~
    As the sun rose next morning, the taxi whirred up Avenida Encalada, a stark wide street below the hills in Lima that resembled an office park, its only saving grace being the tall palms swaying in the median of the road. The early light flattened on the U.S. Embassy, big and blunt, the size of a factory, with small square windows and topped with cement. She was finally here. Her driver was happy to get the seemingly never-ending stream of twenty-dollar bills. As soon as Maggie got out of the cab with her shoulder bag, the tall embassy door opened and a lean man in suit and sunglasses came jogging out, talking into a Bluetooth clipped to his ear.

-6-
    “And what prompted the investigation in the first place?”
    Maggie took a deep breath and considered her response as she looked around the SCIF—Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility—a lead-lined conference room in the Agency’s San Francisco headquarters on Golden Gate Avenue. Two of the Agency higher-ups, flown in from D.C., sat at the far end of the long, polished, conference table, along with several local Agency executives. A woman with heavily sprayed hair, wearing a red polyester pantsuit that fit better ten pounds ago, typed meeting notes into a laptop. As if to complete the post mortem on the failed Quito operation, the more prominent U.S. presidents stared down impassively at Maggie from the walls in the despondency of fluorescent light.
    The man asking the question was Robert Houseman, deputy director of West Coast Operations, even though he was based in D.C. He wore a gray suit, white shirt, and dark blue striped tie, along with a severe glower. His distrust of the fledgling Forensic Accounting team Ed had forged was no secret; he saw it as a threat to his control. He brushed his thinning brown comb-over into place.
    Sitting next to Maggie was Ed, her boss, gulping from a twenty-ounce Starbucks cup. A brown splash already decorated his blue shirt, first thing in the morning. His wide yellow tie was loosened down his substantial neck and his brown-bear beard needed trimming. He looked like an unmade bed. But behind Ed’s horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes were sharp and focused.
    And he was the only one