Where Is Your Head, Irina?
Many many thanks to Andy for doing this with me. You rock!--Maer
Wednesday, 22 Jun 2011
Off 79th and Amsterdam
Manhattan, NY
2148hrs, local time
Irina DiSanti worked on her case notes until the laptop screen made her eyes water. The past week had been hot with the temps in the high 80s and the humidity was merciless, making the sidewalks sweltering and moving about the city hellish. It didn't help Irina's general mood one bit and by Wednesday even she was ready to acknowledge that right now, life was a bitch and so was she. She glanced at her closed bedroom door with a twinge of remorse, knowing she'd been terse with her parents at dinner. They agreed to take you back in, DiSanti, but they extended that offer to their daughter, not some rabid badger with a fuckin' migraine.
Speaking of which...
She closed her eyes and rubbed them one-handed. She would have to stop soon. She could feel a migraine coming on. None of the docs she'd seen over the past three years could give her anything conclusive as to their cause. All they could offer her was palliative care when they struck. Oh, and the not-so-veiled insinuations it's all in my head and there's really nothing wrong with me. Moisture laden air and the rumble of thunder drifted in from her open window and for a second the dank scent off the streets took her all the way back to the basement where she'd had her first love, her one true career, beaten out of her.
Freezing cold and burning up from fever ... her bones shifted in her chest as she tried to dodge the fist coming for her ... the shock of the wall hitting the back of her head ... blessed blackness taking everything away...
"Morbid bitch." Irina rose and hit save on her way out. She grabbed her cap off the hook beside the front door and called to the general direction of the kitchen. "Going out to Mikey's. You need anything, Mom?"
"Yes," Nadia Rudiakova DiSanti stuck her head out into the living room, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. "I called your father, but he would just forget. Milk. Parmesan. Dolma from case. Bread. You know what kind." Irina's mother swept her with a look. "No caffeine for you. Come back in half an hour, you can catch your Father before he is out again."
Irina stifled a growl and nodded. "Milk. Parm. Leaves. Bread. Got it." She dredged up a smile for her mother and hoped it looked genuine, and then got out of there before she managed to hurt the woman more. Irina took the stairs down rather than waiting for the elevator. She was in a self-punishing mood, thudding down the treads hoping to nudge the damned migraine into manifesting. It had been hovering for days and she hated the walking on eggshells it inflicted on her. Better have it and get it over with. She gave the street door a shove and hit the sidewalk, her cap wadded in her hand. Dressed in just her slacks and a dark cotton tank top, it was the only concession she made for the inclement weather. Like the migraine, it had been threatening since Monday and the entire city felt the smothering weight of it. Heavy and wet, the air was thick with ozone and taking a sip of it, Irina could taste the incipient rain on her tongue. Just wait. I'll have that bag of groceries and the heavens will open up and soak everything. I hate soggy bread.
Sure enough, she'd ducked into Westway Foods on 78th, zipped through the aisles of the tiny grocery and had just paid for her purchases when the thunder delivered on its promise. The city disappeared under the deluge. Her parent's apartment was a block and a half away and it would be a miserable dash home.
Should have taken an umbrella, you. Suck it up.
It was coming down in sheets, hard and unforgiving. There was nothing for it but put up with getting wet. Irina jammed her cap on tight, tied the handles of her bag and took off for home. The curb at the corner was water past her ankle. Not that it mattered. She was already soaked to the bone. Keep your eyes peeled. Don’t get creamed by a taxi. A block over on Broadway she heard the crunch of metal over the roar of the rain and the whoop of a car alarm announced the collision victim to the neighborhood. Irina didn't linger but hurried on. She took the distance at a jog, her head protesting with each impact of her heels on the sidewalk. Self-punishing mood, remember? When she made it to her building she took the stairs again.
"Got it!" she called and dumped the plastic bag on the dining room table on her way to the back. The pounding behind her eyes was getting insistent. Her head was starting to throb. Advil. Shower. Bed. In that order. Ten blessed minutes under the spray beat back that migraine a notch. The Advil kicked in and dialed it a notch further back. Which had the docs convinced her problem wasn't migraines ...
The problem, DiSanti, is you.
Her laptop screen was still glowing when she made it back to her room again. Her task bar showed she had a message while she was out. Looking a little closer, she saw it was from her business account. Intrigued, she sat down and clicked on the icon. The window came up and she opened the message, toweling her hair dry as she began to read.
To the attention of Irina DiSanti:
My name is Ray Walker and I represent a group known as the Franklin Agency. This group specializes in helping the people who need helping and can't afford it. The agency is in need of someone to serve as a frontline agent of sorts. It's a bit of a weird situation and not something that I feel either comfortable or even capable of discussing over email. So I'd like to invite you to Natchez, Mississippi for a job interview. We pay exceptionally well (see the information below), but even beyond that, I think, from what I've been able to gather, that it is the kind of challenging job you would thrive at. And really, if I'm being honest, the kind of job you need like other people might need food or water. I'm a Marine, out of the service, but even when you're out, you're always a Marine and I imagine that it is the same with you. You may not be a Marine (few can be) but you've got an edge of your own that needs to stay sharp. Are you being used to the best of your abilities right now? If you are, then throw this email into the trash...
...But if you're at all intrigued, there is a first class open ended roundtrip ticket in your name for this Friday, 5pm waiting at LaGuardia. Pack for a couple days stay, come interview with us on our dime. If we can't sell you on this, then you fly home, nothing changes. But I think we can sell you on this. There are several candidates that we're looking at, but in my opinion, you're the best. And I'll be honest. Turn this job down, and I think you'll regret it for the rest of your life.
Ray Walker, VP of Security, The Franklin Agency
(salary information and flight details listed below)
Thus the gauntlet was thrown. It made quite a racket hitting the floor. Try as she might to resist the idea, Irina knew in an instant that this—like the storm breaking around the city of her birth—was the relief she'd been waiting for. The sharp shock to the system that would break the malaise that had gripped her upon crawling home to her parents in defeat.
Was it really three years ago?
She’d been taken and beaten over a period of several days, and then rescued before it killed her. Suffering from broken bones, internal injuries, and a fractured skull, she lay comatose for several weeks before coming to in the ICU ward.
She tried to make it work after she’d been taken out of that basement. She’d rallied and spent three months in recovery before she’d had enough of it. She signed the necessary waivers for an early discharge, moved back in with her parents at their insistence, and went back to work. It was her first real stint away from her job as a homicide detective and she resented every minute of it. Crime in NYC waited for no one and Irina refused to fall any further behind. Her Lieutenant assigned her a partner until she got all the way back on her feet and they got along well enough, but nothing could give her back her lost time. Or her former good health, apparently. The first migraine struck her two weeks after returning to work. She was behind the wheel on the way to a crime scene and had her partner not grabbed it from her, she would have driven right into a storefront.
Her downward slide progressed quickly after that until she was going through ibuprofen and acetaminophen at an alarming rate and even the inevitable paperwork that chained cops to their desks had become too much to handle. Involuntary retirement caught up with her when her migraines could no longer be denied, or covered up with painkillers, or bulled through. She'd read it in her Lieutenant’s eyes the second he stepped up to tell her the news. That was the moment it all came down, all the painstaking work getting back to fighting strength, of maintaining her standing as a valuable asset, of doing the best damned work she was capable of even when it squeezed her brain out of her ears. Down the tubes. Cut loose at a time when everyone else was finally flexing muscle gained by seniority and experience. And in her heart of hearts, Irina knew it would only be a matter of time before a migraine caused her to screw up a case or get herself or someone else hurt … or worse.
The package had been generous. Irina suspected that her Lieutenant had pulled some strings and called in some departmental favors on that one. He'd even managed to leave the door open for her to come back as a consultant from time to time, but no matter what he tried he couldn't justify keeping her on any longer.
It was a bitter blow. She accepted the defeat with as much dignity as she could manage and once she’d turned in her service pistol and her badge, she walked out the door and refused to look back. She made it home and managed to explain it to her parents before she locked herself in her room, where she indulged in a 24-hour binge of rage and tears, punctuated with alcohol and when she dared, analgesics. After that, she cleaned up and examined her options. The severance pay had bought her time, she realized. A financial cushion to squirrel away while she remade her life into something she could manage, something she could bear. There was no going back to the Job. Her current health problem would disqualify her. She was unhireable, but it didn't preclude going into business for herself.
Getting her PI license took her two years. It was the closest approximation she could manage of the Job and the schedule she set herself was brutal. She needed to keep herself busy, to stay occupied, to reinvent her life, lest she give in and let despair take her. Even so, the achievement rang hollow. It was a shadow of her previous career and a poor substitute. It paid the bills. It filled her days. It did nothing to keep the bad nights at bay, when she couldn’t escape the sound of her heart or the pain of her memories. Of thinking what could have been. She’d lie awake on those nights, sleep impossible to achieve, and get up when morning arrived and push on.
There were days when the migraines precluded getting out of bed. There were other days when she felt almost like her old self again. By degrees, the good days began to equal the bad... and then overtake them. When a month passed without a migraine, she marked it on her calendar and celebrated with caffeinated tea. She paid for it, but not as badly as she'd feared. She whiteknuckled it through and kept going.
When she finally earned her license she'd had a three month run without a single episode and had run her bank account into the ground. The severance pay still waited in savings ... but she held on to it, refusing to dip into it. The migraines were still with her too, but were increasingly less frequent, less debilitating when they manifested, and today ... It threatened, it arrived, and then it left without much of a fight. A sign, perhaps, that her fortunes were finally turning around.
Walker’s email. Something unlooked for. Serendipitous.
Irina blinked at her laptop screen and considered what she had in front of her. Her license was barely a year old, good only for the state of New York and here she was, seriously contemplating flying down to Mississippi on an invitation from someone she didn't even know.
That's it, DiSanti, you have finally gone insane.
And yet ...
Putting aside her personal problems for a moment, she clicked on the details link and viewed the message header, stared at the email address that originated the message. She wrote it down and opening up a new tab, she did what every 21st century person looking for information did: she Googled The Franklin Agency. Opening several more tabs without waiting for the results, she Googled the name Ray Walker, VP of Security of The Franklin Agency; pulled up an online background check site ... all the workhorse browsers of her investigatory trade. Gleaning more information from the search results, she dug a little deeper. After half an hour, she had proof enough that The Franklin Agency was indeed a real entity and that Ray Walker did indeed exist as their VP of Security. She even managed to find a service photo of him from his time in the armed services. She stared at his photo, memorizing it, before right clicking it for her growing file on the man and the company he worked for.
Going over the notes she’d typed in, there were a couple of details that niggled at her. The Franklin Agency in Natchez, Mississippi, wasn’t very old, having come into existence only recently. Open source records on it were shallow. Looking at the financial side of things, however, was going to be a challenge. It was a privately held company. No convenient NASDAQ figures from the end of the day to look up. No telling how deep the money went. Turning to its publicly listed officers, Irina had to wonder if they would be shallow or deep as well. There were only four. There was Walker as VP of Security. Also a CEO, a CFO, and a frustratingly vague appellation of Senior Executive. The name Franklin was attached but nothing else. Given the private nature of the company, there weren’t any easily accessible financials she could get into. Pro bono law practice? A charity? Money laundering? How many people are behind that privately-held shield, anyway?
It was a rabbit hole she could feel coming on, tempting to fall into. If she gave in to it, it would be hours before she climbed back out, seduced by the hunt for intel, egged on by the need to find out if her hunch was right. It was that old feeling from the Job and for once, it didn’t hurt to feel it. And it’s telling me that there’s more to this but what? He says he helps people who can’t get help. Public officers. Privately held. There’s something here. Something I’m missing … Walker seems on the level, but …
But the email still waited for her reply.
She dithered a moment, then pulled up the various flight schedules out of LaGuardia for Mississippi. Flights in all their permutations could have her out there in 24 hours if she wished it. She checked Walker's email again. The salary was more than generous for someone still relatively untried. Why her? Analyzing the language of the message, Irina got the very real sense that Mr. Ray Walker didn't pick her name out of the NYC phonebook at random. He even hinted he knew of her past career. How? It wasn't as if she blabbed it to all comers via Facebook or Twitter or Blogger. The idea that she might have been under surveillance didn't bother her ... much. The man was VP of Security, after all, and if he was vetting new employees, it would be a very poor VP of Security who didn't run at least a background check before sending that email.
You're stalling. Second guessing. Cut it out. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. You've got your fall back right here. If it works ...
Irina clicked reply and typed:
Mr. Walker,
All right. I'm intrigued. I can be in Natchez Friday, 24 Jun 2011. Will that suit?
Irina DiSanti
She resolutely hit send. Ten minutes after Irina's email went out, a response was waiting in her inbox:
Great!
I'll be waiting for you at the airport with a car. The plan is to take you to your hotel and the interview will be the next night over dinner, with our CEO, Marcus Stone. Marcus is a good guy and one of the main reasons I took this job.
During the day on Saturday, we'd like you to take the car we'll provide and drive around Natchez. The Agency (and I agree with this) believes it is best not to give polished guided tours, but to let you explore your own way, making sure you don't feel pushed or influenced in any way. That's how it worked with my job interview.
Interview on Saturday and then a flight back on Sunday. Should be smooth sailing.
Looking forward to meeting you,
Ray
She wasn't exactly waiting in her chair for the response, but Irina couldn't deny she stayed close. She dried her hair. She hung up the towel and grabbed a decaf tea from the kitchen, giving her mother a hug on her way back. She flopped belly down on her bed with a book only to stare at the pages without reading them. Would he reply back tonight? Or will I have to put up with the suspense til tomorrow? Or God, what if he never answers back? Christ, DiSanti, you're not in high school waiting for your boyfriend to ask you to the prom. Chill.
She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. She'd had plenty of opportunity to stare at it in the past year and she knew every bump and dimple of its topography. Occasionally it had held answers to her problems when working a case, trying to piece the evidence together. Is this what this is? A case? A case in what? She shoved for the foot of her bed, the better to hang her head over the edge to eyeball her monitor. The email icon was blinking. Twisting upright she got over there and parked herself at her laptop and opened the message. Read it. Looked askance.
Huh.
Down the hall, she heard the front door open and close, caught the distinctive jingle of her father's keys and their silence a second later when he pocketed them. It was a routine she'd mapped with her ears for years, first as a girl waiting for her father to come home so she could pounce on him before he hit the sofa and took a load off, then later as a teen, already fixed on following his footsteps into the force. As he'd once done with her, sharing aspects of his cases over the kitchen table, so she had done after she'd moved back in. She twitched in her chair, almost rising to tell him all about this latest development before her gut told her to stay silent.
Not yet.
She reread the email and parsed it carefully. She pulled up the initial email and parsed it again, then put the two side by side, scanning for inconsistencies. If it was a scam, it was tightly constructed. Primarily because it hasn't given too much away yet. Liars generally gild the lily and tip their hand that way.
She leaned back in her chair and regarded the ceiling again. You know you're already on that plane, DiSanti. And you're going to treat this as a case til it says different. She closed her eyes and the last of her resistance melted away, as did the last lingering tendrils of her not-quite-migraine. Pack for three days. Something nice for the interview. Casual for the rest. It's going to be hot in Natchez.
A quick check on a weather website for the area confirmed her suspicions. A check of her calendar showed her what she already knew. She had no cases pending. No roadblocks to going south. No reason not to go. All she had to do was pack. Irina typed a quick message and sent it:
Likewise.
I'll be there. Looking forward to sailing.
Irina
She shut her laptop and left her room, to refill her tea and to tell her parents she would be out for the weekend.
Friday, 24 Jun 2011
England Airpark
Alexandria, Louisiana
2143hrs, local time
Natchez did not, in fact, have an airport of its own. The closest airport to that fair city was sixty-nine miles across the river into Louisiana. Mississippi or Louisiana, it’s going to be sticky, Irina thought, rising from her seat and marveling again being able to do so without bumping into anything. Traveling First Class definitely had its upside. At five-foot-nine, Irina appreciated the room. One of the flight attendants had already retrieved her luggage—a single carryon—and Irina smiled her thanks at the woman.
“Thank you for flying with us tonight, Ms. DiSanti. We look forward to seeing you again soon.”
Irina shook hands with the pilot and stepped off the plane. The jetway was tight against the fuselage but the air from the outside made it a humid and stifling walk to the boarding gate. The AC managed to greet her on the last third of the way down and by then her sleeveless silk shirt was sticking to her skin. The sudden chill made her shiver, her bare arms clothed in gooseflesh. Irina put up with the inevitable physical consequences and strode for the main concourse and the escalator to the street level. As airport terminals went, it was a modest one. Sporting only four gates, the distance between planes was short. Everything was spacious, brightly lit, and well laid out. Irina eyed the broad windows and the skylight overhead. In daylight the terminal would be positively dazzling. At well after nine in the evening, it glowed like a jewel box and the reflections against the night outside shone on the glass. Gripping her soft leather briefcase in one hand and flipping her linen jacket over her shoulder, Irina scanned the lobby below as she descended, looking for her ride.
Ray spotted her immediately, her briefcase and professional attire setting her apart from the rest of the casual tourists getting off the plane. "He liked her on first glance. She strode with purpose and with focus, and those were two things Ray looked for in someone he planned to work with." As always, Ray's voice was not loud as he spoke, audible to someone close or someone paying attention, but at this time of night, very few people were playing attention to anything but leaving. He held up his sign saying "DiSanti" and waited for her to approach.
Irina swept the lobby with a practiced eye, spotting the sign and the man holding it. He was tall, sandy-haired, and fit, if a bit pale. There was a tautness to him that betrayed energy held in check, making her think of a Doberman leaning into its leash. She automatically noted the details. Six-two, blonde on blue, military cut on the hair, no glasses, 220 easy. Wearing a light polo shirt, loose shorts, and leather topsiders, he was dressed for the weather and unlike her own clothing, his were dry. She caught the shine of an expensive watch on his wrist, a heavy gold ring on his right finger and a plain silver band on his left. Then their eyes met and Irina dialed back her scrutiny. She closed the distance, shifted her jacket to her other arm, and stuck out her hand with a nod.
“Ray Walker, I presume?”
"Yes, ma'am. It's a pleasure." And his voice shifted into narrative tone. "As much as he wished he could keep it secret, Ray knew his odd quirk needed to be brought into the open now and dealt with. There wasn't any other way to do business."
He looked at her straight in the eyes and said matter-of-factly, "Brain injury. It's a compulsion that I can't control - I feel an unstoppable need to explain my inner reasoning. Thank the good Lord I'm a straightforward man, because I would have a hard time telling a lie." He motioned with his head towards the ticket counter. "I wouldn't blame you if you turned around and left."
"But he really hoped she wouldn't."
Irina flicked a glance down as they shook hands and the mental notetaking continued. Marine Corps Ring. Firm grip. Dry. Nothing to prove. An officer and a gentleman. And then her ears caught up with the oddity. Brain injury? Suppressing a double take, she released his hand, kept her face pleasantly neutral and listened closer. The fact he explained himself and immediately followed it with an offered escape told her a few things about him. She decided to repay the favor.
“And the Lord has sent you a straightforward woman who hates being lied to.” Irina nodded back, pointedly ignoring the ticket counter. “I prefer the truth and return it when it’s given. I can see we’ll get along well.” She made sure her jacket would stay in the crook of her arm, despite the bag she carried, and flicked a glance at the night outside. “Since that’s not Natchez, I can only assume we’ve a ride ahead of us?”
And she hoped it would take her to Natchez. Ray Walker seemed legit, but even she had to admit she was a woman traveling alone and she’d left her gun back home in New York. If it came down to a fight, Ray’s brain injury notwithstanding, she’d maybe last ten seconds. Long enough to scream, not long enough for anyone to get to her in time. She kept her thoughts from her face, however, and gave him an inquiring smile.
“Shall we?”
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