Free Choppy Water by Stuart Woods

has been properly treated. He’s going to experience some pain when he wakes up, but that will be good for him. Up until today, he was a raw recruit, but tonight, he was blooded.” He took a sip of his brandy. “Now,” he said. “I want a proper report.”
    One of the men leaned forward in his chair. “Bess drove us to within a block of the house. We took a turn around the place and found it mostly dark, with a lamp on here and there. We found a window with no alarm module on it and broke a pane. The boy was halfway through when I heard the shot from inside and saw the flash. The boy fell into my arms, and I fired two rounds to keep the on-duty man away from the window. Bess was there in a hurry, and we beat it out of there. We drove back to where we had left the van, and Bess got a combat bandage on the boy’s arm, while I wiped down the pickup, then we got the hell out of there.”
    “Sounds like Bess is the only one of you with any brains,” the colonel said.
    His man flushed and sat back in his chair, silent now.
    “It’s obvious now that Ms. Barker was not in residence,” Bess said. “She must have got out Sunday or Monday,probably after dark. A New York City newspaper put her at Bloomingdale’s yesterday morning. We need better intelligence than this, Colonel. We shouldn’t be reading about it in the New York Post. ”
    Sykes took that as a rebuke and glowered a bit. “We’re working on it.”
    “Best thing would be a Secret Service agent, maybe one who’s recently retired or fired; somebody with an axe to grind,” Bess said. “Just knowing their procedures better would be a big help.”
    “Don’t you think I know that?” Sykes shot back.
    “I don’t see much evidence that you do,” she said coolly. “After the cockup in Maine, we need people who can, at the very least, read a map.”
    “We’re working on a retired agent,” Sykes said.
    “What are his particulars?”
    “Been with the Service for twenty-two years, the last three or four becoming progressively marginalized. His wife died—a woman he hated, by all accounts—but it still threw him. I’ve got a man drinking with him two or three nights a week at his local pub. He’s finding it hard to stretch his pension to cover his expenses.”
    “He sounds ideal,” Bess said. “Do you want me to see him and observe?”
    “Maybe,” the colonel replied. “Maybe soon. I could use another opinion.”
    “Wire up your man, and I can nurse a drink at another table and hear their conversation. I’d like to question him, but I suppose it’s too soon for that.”
    “Maybe not,” Sykes said. “We’ll see.”
----
    —
    They finished their brandy and departed the house for bed, except for Bess, who had a guest room upstairs, to keep the men away from her, or, perhaps, vice versa.
    Sykes performed his bedtime ablutions, then got into the pajamas under his pillow and had his nighttime think.
    Bess was on the cheeky side, but he put up with it because she was the smartest member of his group, and he did not necessarily exclude himself from that assessment. He had met her on a firing range in D.C., where she worked as a personal assistant to somebody important at Justice, and thus had had a proper vetting, which cut down on the work he otherwise would have had to pay for.
    After they put away their weapons, Sykes had approached her in the small coffee bar. “Can I get you something?” he had asked.
    “Thank you, a double espresso.”
    “No sweetener?”
    “No.”
    He got one for each of them. “May I join you?”
    “Sure.”
    She was fairly good-looking: slim, with nice breasts—he liked that. She looked as though she would clean up nice, so she might be a good candidate to accompany him to one of those dinner parties he kept getting invited to since his wife had left him four years ago, a year before she died. He had not been broken up about that, since he had contrived forher benefits from the divorce to die with her, keeping him