A Job For A Woman

by KP Dorsey

Cars were active in the streets in numbers similar to Pittsburgh 's Parkway North at rush hour. The throngs of Fiat taxis billowing uncatalyzed diesel exhaust and dodging across red soil berms packed with Kpelle street vendors, however, squeezed themselves into one quarter of Pittsburgh's paved surface area, one half of one planet away from the Three-Rivers confluence. From behind the wheel of her QP (quasi-personal) pool car Judy Winston wished she were driving I-70 home through Tuscarawas county, rather than inching through the daily traffic jam of Africa 's oldest English-speaking capital.

The six-story Ministry of Finance probably once looked ministerial but multiple projectile impacts had rounded off the second-floor cornices at the north end to reveal the coarse concrete beneath. Some of the lower floor's windows were boarded over, the boards themselves covered with iron bars.

She parked in an angled visitor's spot right on the street, all empty, and climbed the steps to the main entrance, head held high to the closed circuit cameras on the building's corners, whose gimbals whirred to attention at her approach.

She projected her best imitation of indifferent bureaucratic affect to the four government militiamen who all carried identical MP-5 submachine guns, blunt, black, front-grip models, standing guard on the top-most of the faux-marble steps. In unison, they all remembered to close their mouths, after taking photographic mental inventories of Judy's blonde hair, skirted figure, and exotic skin (tanned by the Sahelian sun to a rosewood she could tell they found considerably less revolting than her pale winter pigmentation), for future reference.

She made a show of keeping her hands in plain sight. She carried no purse or bag, only a GSM phone in one skirt pocket, cash in the other, and her genuine/genuine diplomatic passport, issued in fact by her native country, in her true name. In planning, everyone agreed the appearance of power was enhanced by having her carry nothing in her hands.

The guards hand-wanded her with TSA-quality metal detectors. Judged her not to be an assassin. Her host, the tiny, white-haired Brooks Brothers shaman, cabinet Secretary of Finance Asomdway, appeared from behind the Parthenon-sized doors.

"You are the designate from the economic section?" he said.

Judy made the first mental note for her after-action report: the "you" in his recognition phrase intoned both his own personal affront and honest bewilderment.

"Yes. Judy Winston. Economic affairs emailed you my photograph, earlier."

"That will be sufficient," he said to the guards.

His voice gave away nothing further.

They rode an elevator to the sixth and top-most floor. Judy wondered whether it was arrogant to be surprised at how smooth and quiet the ride was. The doors slid open before she decided, and Asomdway headed down the hall to the clearly-labeled Men's.

"My office door is open."

Judy had thrown games of boule lyonaisse on the dirt court of Bellecour square in Lyon which Asomdway's office would have accommodated with room to spare. It was decorated as a museum exhibit showcasing the history of armed conflict in Africa . A curio of dozens of wooden-stocked firearms lined the back wall. She read only the two chronological bookend display badges of the top row, the left-most ".303 caliber, Rifle, Magazine, Lee-Enfield, Boer War" and right-most "Fusil Automatique MAS Modele 1949, Algeria."'

Since he had only taken his detour to make her wait, she reclined in a black leather club chair near his desk without waiting to be invited to do so, just feet from a track-lit, glass-topped wooden museum pedestal, which housed a document its brass plaque announced as "A Hand-Written Letter From Rosabella Burke to General Robert E. Lee's Wife Mary Custis Lee," dated February 20, 1859. She could make out: When you write please let me know something about Catherine and Agnes .

"You admire my decor, Miss Winston," Asomdway said.

He had silently entered behind her and made it to his desk before she noticed. It was impossible to tell how much should be read into the fact that, seated behind the desk, Asomdway was shielded from view almost up to his shoulders. As yet he offered no sign he had noticed her disregard of protocol.

"Rosabella Burke?" she said, genuinely interested. Live your cover, they say.

"Wife of one of our first colonists, manumitted by your rebel General, who was later defeated in the opposite cause, in one of your nation's many great ironies."

The possessive could have implied simply ' America 's,' a diplomatic turn of phrase. She let the track lighting twinkle in her eyes as she smiled and said, "I'm from a border state."

Maybe his geography was weaker than his biography. For the purpose of this meeting, simple subornation was not enough. He had to ask her to be her servant. To do otherwise would invert the controller-agent relationship before they even began, so she bore his silence, keeping her hands quiet in her lap.

Behind Asomdway's huge makoré-wood desk hung a seven-foot tall section of shattered stained glass window, supported in a meshwork of what looked like some kind of fine fishing line which held the shards suspended as though they had exploded into spider webbing. Each fragment shimmered in the faint movement of conditioned air, creating a mosaic of light made of suspended razors.

"It is from the Basilica of Yamoussoukro. You know this church?" Asomdway twisted his head to include the display in his question.

"Only from travel guides." Three agent meetings in the pews during the Easter season, last year.

"My dear friend President Houphouet-Boigny commissioned this glass, during its construction. Felix intended to display himself as the thirteenth apostle, alongside Yeshua and the Twelve."

"Are all the other figures portrayed as African, too?"

Asomdway made no acknowledgment but to continue, "The complete piece is still there, though this one was shattered in the workmen's haste to complete it before his death. The church is the largest and most expensive in Christendom. Larger than Saint Peter's in Rome . Though it seats seven thousand, it is almost empty most Sundays, and most of the city has no electricity."

Whether this was intended as an indictment of arrogant spending or as a eulogy to laudable self-aggrandizement was utterly opaque. She had no doubt, however, about the provocation. So far as she knew, Houphouet-Boigny's death had been natural.

"Each of us has friends, Mister Secretary. This is business."

Asomdway stiffened. A legal-sized document, binder-clipped, about the thickness of an annual financial report, was the only object on Asomdway's desk blotter.

"You have brought me a message, Miss Winston. Since you are nominally merely a junior economic officer in the lowest level of your diplomatic service, you may assume I am not so naïve to conclude from your appearance as the chosen messenger that you spend your evenings and weekends dreaming of the trade imbalance in tapioca."

Judy showed no surprise.

"The American problem," as her boss the Senior Officer on Station, the SO, put it—too much use of diplomatic cover owing to domestic scruples, resulting in too many fake diplomats per embassy—made "spot the spook" a parlor game even the embassy cleaning crews could master in days. In this case, "think of scripted revelation as an adaptive solution," he had said. Sooner or later, the true-flag recruit has to know for whom he works anyway. This bureaucratic necessity owes to the large quantity of illegal banking transactions his declaration of loyalty to the secret cause (which is also necessarily a pledge to commit treason against his native country), compelled. He would never believe the Swedes, for example, could have afforded him.

A lifetime of brushing off wolf whistles gave her the inscrutability with which to meet his insult: "You will not seek nomination, nor, if elected by other means, will you serve."

From beneath the desk, without visible movement of his shoulders, Asomdway produced a cigar whose inevitable phallic association Judy found ridiculous, given the contrast between its huge size and the Secretary's tiny face. She did not miss the veiled implication that he might have other less ludicrous articles stashed back there.

"Though the agreement is couched in the terms of lawyers, I may summarize it very simply," Asomdway began. Here followed an inventory of the terms of compensation her task force had hammered out over the interminable course of the previous three weeks, and which had created so much cable traffic it had overloaded the obsolete West African main trunk transatlantic telephone wires twice, prompting their ever-resentful landlords at State to plead ignorance in the daylight with the local Minister of Public Utilities, while in the dark their subordinates flamed the Chief of Station in coded emails copied to Foggy Bottom, emails whose 'cc:' fields grew throughout the whole affair to such off-screen-right-wise proportions only the desk-bound could read them with a straight face.

"That is our offer," she said, when smoke again curled from his mouth, rather than from his nose.

He challenged her with another of his grinning, Siddharthaic silences.

The SO warned her the Secretary would probably not offer explicit affirmation of the deal. Sending a woman; a white woman; a young, beautiful, white woman; to close the deal was also part of the plan. From car ignition off to car ignition on, her entire visit was designed to communicate the presence of a power so superior as to make those who wield it indifferent to the indignation of cultural offense, threat of exposure, or threat of violence, and Asomdway had, as predicted, cycled through all three.

It took him one hundred and eight seconds, by her watch, to incline his head three millimeters forward.

"We will keep the document. Somewhere in your desk you have a felt-tipped pen. Use it to wet the pad of your right thumb with ink. Then roll your inked thumb over the cover page, leaving a clear print. I'll wait while you have a designate retrieve a satchel for the document."

With this, she stood, turned her back on him, and further admired the Burke letter, as if, in the words of the SO again, Asomdway were a doorman she had just dispatched to fetch a taxi: "Think: 'I own this joint now.' Make him produce the means for concealing and carrying the document. This is the kind of menial task a boss expects of a servant."

She watched him, in the canted glass top of the display case, suppress a shudder of what could only be disgust, then stand and head toward the door.

"You may have my office. I am required on the fourth floor. I do not expect to be more than fifteen minutes."

Asomdway left her alone, certain to display funereal dignity on his way out.

She rifled through those desk drawers not locked and found a black Sharpie, as she knew she would, and indulged in a daydream about what some future archaeologist would think of a civilization with the power to make such a mundane object so globally ubiquitous, yet lacking the power to accomplish so much else.

Asomdway reappeared with an incongruous black nylon club bag. He set it on the floor, doubtless intentionally, to make her bend to get it, then rounded his desk and re-took his negotiation posture.

She thrust the marker well into the intimate zone of personal space in front of his nose and said, "Your thumbprint, Mister Secretary.'"

Asomdway removed the binder clip from the document and for a moment Judy thought he intended to stage an entire re-reading just to spite her. Then, in what she at the time concluded to be a gesture of acceptance, he took the marker with abrupt haste and with no more ceremony than if he were paying a restaurant bill, scribbled on his thumb and left her a police-quality print.

"Thank you, Mister Secretary," Judy said.

"You can find your own way out."

In an improvised and, she thought, suitably subtle return of menace, she toed the limp club bag against his desk until it covered her whole foot then kicked it up to her hands as she had seen her brothers do with their Marine training rifles. Then she unzipped its main compartment, took the document from his desk, laid it in the bottom of the bag, and closed the zipper.

Shouldering the bag, she turned her back again on her new recruit and said, blonde hair counter-swinging to her stride, "My friends will be in touch with your friends."

***

She changed her QP car for a seat in the SO's cover limo the instant she returned to the Embassy. They crossed the city in a thunderstorm, rain spray flung from the windshield by wipers set on high.

"What if the toe-kick thing had flopped?" the SO said.

She considered: "I could have kicked his eyes up into his frontal lobes, and you know it," but what she said was, "But it didn't."

Benne Sarh, the Second Undersecretary of Finance, populist choice for presidential candidate, set their meeting at the Royal Hotel. This bombastic neoclassical fortress stood colonnaded and ringed with roving searchlights bright enough to find high altitude bombers. In the overcast and rain, they made laser-like columns reaching to the clouds.

The cavernous lobby lay tiled in checkered marble, a chessboard of conspicuous consumption. Judy and the SO walked side by side, equals in the (notional) egalitarian world of international diplomacy, though he was empty handed now, and she carried Asomdway's club bag.

She recognized Benne from his file photo, a magnificent figure of a man, well over six feet, down a back hallway in front of the door to their conference room, standing in grand boubou, iridescent blue robe gleaming in the incandescent recessed spot lighting, between two equally over-scaled and muscled bodyguards, whose right hands disappeared beneath identical western-style suit lapels at Judy's approach.

She stopped six feet back and set the bag on the floor behind her feet. "Mister Undersecretary," she began, holding her hands at her sides and using her public address voice, "allow me to present Economic Minister-Counselor Hugh Searle, of US Embassy Liberia ."

Benne stepped forward, and embraced the SO in a hug of such warmth, which the SO returned with such affection, Judy would have been less surprised had they both sprouted tentacles from their heads. Later, she reported she was situationally aware enough, though, to notice both bodyguard's hands were relaxed again at their sides.

Once within their reserved meeting room, one of Benne's bodyguards closed the door behind them and stood in front of it so rigidly he seemed to merge into the furniture. The other presumably mirrored him just outside. The three conferees sat together, somewhat conspicuously grouped at the end of a board-of-directors-quality conference table that sat twenty.

"I have taken the liberty of ordering coffee and bûchette charcutière," Benne said in perfect English and French, his voice disorienting with its quiet, booming timbre. "I am aware that you have only recently arrived in our country, Miss Winston."

"Many thanks, undersecretary." Since they were still in the courting phase of this recruitment, and since Benne's usefulness required long-term handling in-place, as opposed to Asomdway who only had to do one thing once, the charm, smiles and phrases of friendship glowed from their faces like beams from happy lighthouses, though Judy held no illusions about the forensic level of detail she would be expected to remember for her report later.

"Please. Call me Benne. The bacon is frozen, but the goat cheese is local. Not to your standard, I think, but quite passable, for our humble little country."

"I'm sure Faugeron would approve, Benne," she said, and actually found herself winking at him.

"Benne," the SO began, lifting the club bag and setting it on the table, "we have secured your boss' abdication. In this bag, we have the final—"

But here, a waiter entered pushing a cart loaded with much more china than food, let in through the door by the exterior bodyguard. The interior bodyguard came to life as though an 'on' switch had been thrown, frisked him without a word, then sampled what Judy thought was a remarkably dainty taste of each plate and pitcher. The waiter, already rumpled, appeared unperturbed by what Judy surmised was his second pat-down, and as he went to set saucers, cups, plates, linen napkins, and silver, Benne lifted the club bag off the table and held it in his lap. The waiter cleared the contents of the cart to their table, poured coffee, cream and honey to order, and was gone as smoothly as any Apicius serveur. The coffee was hot, black, strong.

Benne offered his coffee cup toward Judy in a gesture like a toast as the SO continued.

"The only copy of the agreement is in that bag…," he was saying.

Judy returned Benne's toast. She decided she would never report it, but rigging foreign elections to serve US foreign policy interests was turning out to be much more fun than she had been led to believe.

"…and we will keep it in a safe in Washington until long after the last one of us is dead."

Benne folded his hands and lowered his head slightly at this cynical, distinctly American invocation of mortality. This was when he unzipped the main compartment and lifted the loose pages.

As Benne read the first paragraph below the title page, Judy thought, and later reported, she smelled pine cleaner, but dismissed it as the result of an overzealous government laundry service.

"Mister Searle," Benne gestured over the pages with his free hand like a man well habituated to restraining his long limbs, "this is a great achievement by itself. To rid my country of Asomdway's corrupting influence, for this, I thank you. Yet," and here the SO raised an eyebrow at Judy, "there appears little assurance of my electoral victory."

Judy began, "Asomdway's deal required extraordinary bureaucratic involvement, Benne. We captured it in writing for two reasons. We must retain evidence for our own purposes,"

"The curse of bureaucrats. This I understand. It is true over the whole world," Benne added.

"Yes," she gave him her winning smile, the one the SO brought her here to deliver, "and second, we wanted you to see his own thumbprint as evidence of our intentions. As a token of trust between the three of us."

"Mister Searle, my old friend, you are a clever and crafty man, to bring this most intoxicating assistant as the bearer of the news. Let me finish, to unburden your fears of my mistrust. You cannot guarantee…" Benne paused. He seemed to suppress a hiccough.

"Yes, Benne?" The SO sniffed now, too.

Benne glared over the SO's left shoulder, as at something offensive flung against the wall.

Judy turned to look but saw only a modernistic steel and bronze relief sculpture. Benne raised his hand to his mouth and coughed mildly. Judy thought he might be choking, but they hadn't eaten yet. She reached a helpful hand forward. "Benne?"

Then Benne collapsed forward, sending a plate of bacon-wrapped goat cheese clattering to the floor.

The bodyguard leapt forward, eyes almost strabismic with shock. He lifted the enormous head. Phlegmatic, aspirated blood dripped from the mouth. The eyes rolled up. The bodyguard placed the undersecretary's face back in the sticky impression, as gently as if handling explosives, and ran out the door.

The SO stood, pointed after the bodyguard, and, as if bringing a staff meeting to order, said, "Stop him. Verbalize them both back in here. Quietly."

Judy walked out no faster than if she were concealing an urgent need for the ladies' room. She found the two bodyguards arguing between themselves at the main lobby desk.

"Men. You are urgently requested to receive new orders in the James Monroe conference room." Then, before they could ask her to repeat what she just said over their shouting at each other, she spun and marched back the way she came.

When she returned with the bodyguards in pursuit, she found the SO shaking his head and pressing a napkin against Benne's neck as if staunching blood from a wound. This, and the now unmistakable aroma of hospital pine told Judy all she needed to know: The SO was checking for a pulse he would never find and if they stayed in this room much longer, they would be dead too.

The SO doubled the napkin over, then doubled it again, then doused it in coffee, and used it to pinch up the pages of the document, some of which had spilled on the floor, and put them back in the club bag. When he had them all, he zipped the bag closed, pinching the zipper tab with the napkin again, then wrapped the napkin around the handle strap and clutched it touching no part of the bag.

He said to the bodyguards, "Call an ambulance, a civilian ambulance, to meet us at the southwest fire exit in five minutes then return here."

The bodyguards, grateful to be relieved of the burden of critical analysis, lurched off immediately.

"Go wait for me outside that fire door. Rig it if it's alarmed. Verbalize any bystanders. We were never here. This body count stops at one."

Judy checked her facial expression in the first shiny object she found in the hallway to make certain she wasn't twitching, flexing, or giving away any other obvious involuntary distress signals. She found the fire door unalarmed, but locked from the outside. Before she was forced to improvise, the first of the two bodyguards rounded the hall corner.

"Break this door open," she said, looking straight at him and imagining herself ten inches taller.

But she could have been four feet tall for all it mattered; these guards were loyal to a cause rather than a man, had already solved the calculus of betrayal, and knew upon whom their future heartbeats depended. He reeled back and thrust one foot against the center post so hard both doors flew away from their hydraulic dampers.

"Now wait with me outside. If anyone should wander by, I'm a drunk VIP and you are shielding my pride while I vomit in this discreet corner."

From outside, she pushed the fire doors, dangling dead metal arms from their tops, as far to as they would stay, and crouched into the spandrel of concrete formed by the recessed outer doorway. She wished her instructions to the bodyguard had been a clever improvisation, but she already stood in at least one street pizza, smelling relatively fresh, in the doorway recess.

The bodyguard assumed a convincingly relaxed parade rest in front of her.

During the two minutes they waited, mercy befell in the form of no bystanders challenging her to live this specific act of her cover. The SO and the other bodyguard arrived with Benne, though at first she thought the SO had something much more elaborate planned.

"What is this luggage cart for?" she said, emerging from her revetment.

The SO pushed a bellhop's cart, complete with brass hanger arches, hung with what Judy took for men's and women's overcoats in garment bags.

He looked her up and down as though searching for a gun shot wound. "To conceal Benne," he said.

Before she asked how he planned to do that, she saw it. He must have thought she was going loopy from exposure not to have noticed. Benne was folded over in half at the waist, shrouded beneath a tablecloth, and shielded from casual scrutiny on four sides by the cage of hanging garment bags.

He said to her, "There's going to be a cabal of angry Chemical Abstracts Conference scientists wondering what happened to their rain coats in about ten minutes." Then to the bodyguard, "Ambulance?"

"Yes," the one who had been in the room with them said.

It arrived just then, on the sound of nothing but squelching tires, to Judy's third great surprise of the evening. The SO charged the driver's door immediately, followed by the lead bodyguard. Soft words sounded out of Judy's sight and discernment. The rear doors of the ambulance swung open, and in forty-two more seconds, the body of the would-be next president, his retinue, and two US intelligence officers who did not exist all disappeared.

***

The SO's routine facial expression resembled Teddy Roosevelt's grimace from Mount Rushmore , strengthened with flares of Patton's war face. At the initial AAR , he was all Patton, just after Ike fired him. "Methylphosphoryldifluoride in binary with pinacolylalcohol. Skin permeable titration, all over the inside of the bag. Did Asomdway do anything to the document while you were with him?"

"He removed the binder clip, then shuffled the top two pages. I thought he was going to re-read the whole document, out of spite."

"He was aerating the methyl coating. Scratch and sniff assassination. The next person who touched that document after it had been zipped up for more than thirty minutes was dead."

"What made him think it wouldn't kill me, too? Or you, for that matter, or some random clerk?"

"Judith, I'm afraid he just didn't care. That he succeeded in killing our preferred rival, and used us to do it, carrying a weapon whose accuracy could best be described as haphazard, should also tell you one more thing."

"He knew we were going straight from him to that meeting with Benne."

"Which in turn means?"

Judy's head tilted to one side, as if a puppeteer dropped the string holding her face level. "Security breach."

"Call your man at the paper."

***

Judy planted a story the next day to the effect that Asomdway had been colluding for years separately with French, Slavic, and various Arab intelligence services to advance his career at the expense of the national economy, and probably at the expense of lengthening the recent civil war. The verifiable details had cost her hours of headache-inducing screen time browsing the SECRET/NOFORN/NODISSEM archives.

His wife found his body two days later in his bathtub at home and no forensic scientist in the world would be able to prove he died of anything other than a blow to the head from falling against his soap dish.

That same morning, Marine guards apprehended three foreign nationals who mopped embassy floors in the act of piercing the blue plastic shielding of the station's secret and top secret computer network cables in the basement with alligator clips wired into Toughbook laptops loaded with pirated Czech software. Neither Judy, who didn't want to know, nor the press, who had no need to know, ever got wind of their case, its outcome, or their fate.

The SO, Judy, her cross-training shadow Darren, and the Chief of Station attended the last debriefing, whose sanitized minutes would constitute the final report to DC on the whole operation.

"The two sudden vacancies in the Finance Ministry leave a critical skills gap in the national cabinet," Judy said. "Current all-source reporting suggests the most likely replacement candidates are a woman named Sirleaf hyphen Johnson, educated in the US, formerly of the World Bank," this got a frown, but no comment, from the Chief, "or, more likely, a career bureaucrat from their foreign office known for years to be loyal to the Asomdway faction."

Darren had kept her up most of the previous night retelling the details of her two recruitment pitches. Ostensibly, contingency planning sanctioned his interest, but he made no show of pretending not to be both awed and more than a little envious of the action and its attendant career-enhancing halo. Such events happened maybe once in a dozen two year tours, and it is a rare officer who gets associated, internally, with their successful concealment. "Rewind four days and I'd be glad to let you go instead," she told him, clutching a bottled water in both hands so tight its sides collapsed and squirted water on her lap. Darren, offering his handkerchief across their facing desks said, "No. You wouldn't. But thanks for the gesture. There's plenty to do to go around. " She blotted at her lap, saying, "Yes, I would. Right now, it's all operational necessity and suppressed shock. Someday I'm going to be sitting on some airplane, or filling out notional paperwork on some dull afternoon, and Benne's dead mouth will speak Gola to me from the bottom of the dirt hole I helped bury him in. It's not a kindness to say I'd be glad to let you have the whole experience." She could tell when she looked up he didn't believe her. For men, her appearance made venom feel pleasant. It had always been so.

"It's too late to restart with a new candidate. These events have intensified the public phase of the election cycle," the SO said.

The Chief of Station, a career desk man rotating through, ten years younger than the SO, rose to speak. "What we have is not nothing. Write it up as half of a success. Stress we were not flapped. Note the savings, compared to what that damn agreement would have cost. And get me what we have in the file about the two possible replacements. I know researching this Sirleaf-Johnson woman is almost certainly a waste of time but under the circumstances we can't be accused of not being thorough."

Yes, sir," Judy said, expressionless and distracted, as she headed back to her desk to type up the report.