Agent for a Cause (The Agents for Good), page 10
“One moment please.”
There was a brief pause before Todd came on the line, “Good afternoon Mister Benning. What can I do for you?”
“Have you noticed any odd occurrences on my floor today? Any strangers?”
“Not that I’m aware of, Sir. We did have the halls painted about midmorning, but you received word of that last week. The painters will be back tomorrow to finish the trim work.”
“I need you to do me a favor Todd.”
“Anything for you Mister Benning! You know that.”
“I need you to take those two keys I gave you an open apartment 703 and 705. Open 703 first. Now this is very important Todd! Do not step into the room, but instead look down at the doorjamb about knee-high just below the lock. There will be a light there. I want you to tell me whether it’s red or green.”
There was a slight pause, “I’m on my way Mister Benning.”
“Just leave the phone on Todd.”
I could hear the jumbling of his movement and sometimes his breathing. I heard the jumbling of keys and then the sound of a door opening.
“The light is green Mister Benning.”
“Okay try the other door.”
I heard the noise of the key slide into the lock. An automated voice sounded out in Spanish and I cringed inwardly at the words.
“Go back to hell death angel!”
I didn’t even have time to yell to tell Todd to run. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I watched every window on the seventh floor explode outward as balls of flame erupted through them. They must have mixed some explosive compound like thermoplasm in with the paint.
Following the initial flash of flame, eruptions sounded out and the bistro shook hard, and several glasses behind the bar fell and shattered on the floor. Bombs left in paint cans no doubt.
People were running and screaming everywhere, while others just stood still in fascinated horror, as they watch the top three floors of the building start to implode down onto the gutted out seventh floor. It was quiet inside me and I heard the storm around me as if it was a dim murmur in the background.
How had they found me? I covered and recovered my tracks so well! The simple truth of it was I had stayed in one place too long. I never did that, but I had kept coming back to Philadelphia, because of Anna.
Anna!
They couldn’t know about her yet. If they had they would have grabbed her and tortured her and made sure to let me know about it somehow. They were like that. Monsters like them always targeted and abused the things and people a person loved most.
They hadn’t thought I loved anything. So they had tried to kill me remotely instead of up close and brutally personal. I stared at the burning building before me as fire trucks began to screech to a halt outside their sirens blaring. All those innocent people dead and more of them injured just to kill me.
Had I saved even half as many people from addictive lifestyles of misery as they had just killed? Was there any point to anything I had tried to do in my private war? If this was my legacy than what point was there in continuing if I was only going to reap more destruction to innocent lives?
I killed some they killed many. I pushed back a little and they shoved back hard. What point was there to fighting this war if this was the result of doing the right thing? Why not let evil desires reign. Let the drugs pour in and wreck more lives. Perhaps fewer lives would have been lost that way. But it wouldn’t stop there and I knew that.
Evil men with great ambitions didn’t depend on a single item to be the people that they were. They existed because they made choices to be as they were regardless of whatever item they were peddling at the time.
People make choices and some of those choices are wrong and those wrong choices hurt both them and others. As long as people desired items or feelings that while alluring, but in the end were harmful, there would be those who would sell it to them. In the 20’s it was alcohol. Now it was drugs. Soon it would cycle back to slavery and in fact it already was. In a hundred years the fighting could be over something as inconsequential as strawberry flavored water or as bad as someone with the money to pay that decided the taste of a newborn human baby was a delicacy worth paying for.
You had to fight darkness wherever you found it regardless of the cost. If one gave up the fight everything of value would be taken away. If one fought, that might still happen, but as long as the fight lasted there was hope of something better. So I would fight on, but what a cost to bear. Anna was tugging on me and I looked over to her.
“I thought you said I was safe?”
From the level of misery in her eyes I could tell that she saw herself to blame for the destruction of so many taking place before us.
“They’re not after you! It’s me they want!” I glanced back at the building wreathed in flames.
Anna safe? Anna wasn’t safe!
Anna wouldn’t ever be safe as long as she was with me! I turned back to her and her eyes reflected the tears she felt for the devastation taking place outside.
“What?” She asked uncertainly as she gazed into my face.
I grasped her head and kissed her with all the impassioned bitterness and heart sickness I felt in this moment.
I let go and whispered, “I love you, but I have to go!”
I ran back towards the bistro’s kitchen avoiding her wild attempt to grab a hold of me.
Anna tugged Kevin along behind her and hit the back door of the bistro hard with the side of her body. The rusty door clanged open so hard it hit against the brick siding with a loud bang. Anna stood panting in the alleyway with Kevin, who was about to have a fit. No one was in the alley!
“Tyre!” She screamed out at the top of her lungs.
Her fist came up to her mouth and she half bit it in the anxiety of the moment.
“No!” She screamed looking down the alleyway again.
Kevin started to become uncontrolled and she sank to her knees on the dirty pavement wrapping her arms tightly around him.
“Shhh! It’s okay!” She whispered in the calming platitudes known especially by mothers.
Her words were lies though. Everything was not okay! Her dreams were shattering one by one, but for the sake of her son she fought to keep the grief she felt from coming out.
It took her three days of crying and watching the news coverage of the incident to come to a consensus of what to do. The reporters were covering it as an extreme accident caused by a heavy concentration of paint fumes, which had combusted and ignited gas lines that had caused the loud explosions.
They may have been fooling the public at large, but she doubted any investigator on the case would buy that theory. There had been fifty seven casualties and over a hundred others had been injured in and around the building as well as with the rescue operation. Anna knew why Tyre had run and she even understood his reasoning for doing so, but even then it still didn’t make it right.
She was heartbroken and angry all at the same time. When she found him she intended on giving him a real piece of her mind! After that she would never let him out of her sight again. But how was she to find someone like him? She didn’t know how to tread water in the underground of the world’s theater of intrigue. She didn’t even know if he was still in the country. Somehow she doubted it.
When it came to the man she loved and had married she knew practically nothing in terms of his history or where he might go. He was native born Russian, but Russia was a big place and she had Kevin to consider. The awful thought beckoned in her mind again to torment her, ‘She may never find him’!
She had to have more faith than that or…? Or she would really fall apart! She determined what her first step would be. She glanced down at the card in her hand. It had the contact info for the man named Flint. Tyre had said to contact this man if she was ever in need and he wasn’t available. Maybe this Flint would know where Tyre was or be able to help her find out where anyway.
She had debated calling the number several times over the past several days, but what she needed to do was better done in person. That meant she was going to Italy, which was scary for her. She’d never been in Canada or Mexico before let alone overseas, but if that was what it took than that was what she would do.
She wasn’t ready to give up on the rest of her life just yet. Yes, she had the money she needed to raise Kevin, but living life was more than just having the necessities needed for existence. In order to truly live you had to be alive inside too. Since Tyre had left it had felt like a piece of her was gone and the only solution to loving life again was to get him back.
A month went by, which was how long it took for her to get passports for her and Kevin. They’d been held over in the air waiting for the runway to clear for over an hour now and Anna was beginning to panic.
What if they ran out of fuel? Just then the plane began a gradual descent and the intercom announced they would be landing shortly, which ushered in a whole new array of panic inducing possibilities.
She was really going to give Tyre a piece of her mind after suffering through all this! It got choppy and then the tires hit pavement. When the plane came to a complete stop Anna breathed freely again for the first time in what felt like several minutes. She mopped the sweat off of her forehead and glanced at Kevin. He’d been a real trooper and hadn’t seemed to be fazed by anything, which was a miracle straight from God she firmly believed. He was looking at her in his usual way and if he could have had an expression she thought it would probably say something along the lines of ‘What’s wrong with you?’”
She smiled shakily, “We’re here honey.”
Now it was time to face yet another fear of hers, which was to find her way, alone, around in a foreign country with an autistic child that liked to wonder off. She’d watched far too many horror movies as a teen and now every half-baked corny movie plot was rising up to haunt her.
“Please God let them speak English!”
She whispered to herself as she undid her seatbelt.
The Italians she came in contact with were particularly unhelpful and even rude. To them she was just another American tourist. Finally she found someone who could speak English and would work with her. From him she found out were to rent a car and exchange money.
Anna sat in the seat of the little car clutching the wheel hard. She glanced in the rear view mirror at Kevin buckled up in the back.
Oh God don’t let me kill him or anyone else! She pushed the clutch in and turned the key. She’d had to drive a friend’s Jeep that was a standard for a while, but it hadn’t been a good experience. The experience had abruptly ended with the Jeep wrapped around a telephone pole. She’d sworn that day to never drive another standard. Apparently some promises were made to be broken.
She put it in gear and in an effort to not ride the clutch she let it out too fast. The car gave a weak attempt at movement and then died roughly. She gritted her teeth together. Hatred couldn’t even describe the level of apathy that she already felt for this little box on wheels. She started the car up again and this time she gave it more gas. The little car took off with an uncomfortable lurch that was repeated moments later as she shifted into second gear.
Five hundred feet further she had to stop for traffic, which necessitated starting the painful process of driving a standard all over again from a dead stop. The navigation device had far too many hours listed until destination reached. What did they do to tourists guilty of vehicular manslaughter in Italy?
It wasn’t so bad when she got out into the country and didn’t have to stop often. That is the views weren’t so bad. She couldn’t say she’d ever been on more curvy narrow roads before then she was now, but at least there wasn’t much traffic.
She was pretty sure that she was lost. The navigation had her going on and on and it only seemed to become more rural with every passing moment. She entered a private drive that seemed to drag on and she was just about to despair of an ending when the villa appeared.
Tyre’s friend must be as fabulously wealthy as Tyre seemed to be, if not more! She pulled up short of the giant columned carport. Somehow it seemed silly to park so mundane of a little bucket of bolts in so prestigious of a spot. Shaking in apprehension with what was left of her already frayed nerves she got out and unbuckled Kevin, who had been blessedly asleep for hours. He had been so good and she felt an upsurge of pride over how her son was handling this new experience.
She stepped up to the inlaid old wooden doors of the villa and reached up to hammer the knocker down a few times. She stood waiting with her hands on Kevin’s shoulders. She heard voices and then steps and then one of the big doors opened. The figure she saw was not what she had been expecting.
Her expectation had been of some short rotund Italian guy, who would give her the eye over and then ask her if she knew or was part of the ‘Family’. Instead she found herself looking upward to meet the piercing eyes of perhaps one of the most strikingly beautiful women that she had ever seen in life.
“Can I help you?” The beautiful woman asked with guarded curiosity.
Anna stuttered to say what she had been rehearsing the entire trip here, but failed to get out a single word of her speech.
Something in her failure to perform must’ve convinced the woman that she was no threat because she opened the door wider and stepped gracefully off to the side and gestured for them to come in, “Won’t you come in please.”
She asked courteously.
Kevin actually moved first, which gave Anna the impetus to follow. The big door closed and Anna half turned to keep an eye on her capable looking hostess, which is when she saw the gun.
Anna’s eyes grew big and she clutched onto Kevin tighter unsure of how she could protect him in this situation from such a potential foe. Her tall hostess gave her an apologetic smile as she slipped the handgun into a drawer of an ornate table near the doors.
“We don’t get many visitors and it pays to be careful.”
The tall woman walked closer and it was hard not to step back from her approach. She made Anna feel even more acutely aware of her somewhat diminutive size. Anna met her eyes through an act of will and was relieved once again to see no malice there for her.
“What is your name?”
“Anna and this is Kevin.” Anna finished quickly in response.
The woman’s smile was genuine as she took them both in visually. “My name is Lisa. Won’t you have a seat?” She said gesturing towards a sitting room off to one side of the massive foyer and Anna directed Kevin towards it.
Everyone sat down and an awkward silence ensued. Lisa smiled at someone behind Anna and Anna turned to see who it was. A toddler that couldn’t be much older than a year had stumbled into the room rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“All done with your nap Taleah?”
The little girl saw her mother and gave a gap toothed gurgle of joy and took off for her at high speed. Anna smiled taken in by the sight of the mother with her child.
She felt herself relax a little more around her hostess. It became readily apparent what the little girl was after and with a soft laugh Lisa through a small blanket over the toddler and began to nurse her discreetly.
The sight of the nursing child didn’t bother Anna, but instead it sent a pang of longing through her to experience doing the same with a child of her own again. She had loved nursing Kevin, but with all the stress of working two jobs and sometimes three to make ends meet she had lost her milk after only a couple of months. She had always felt like she’d cheated Kevin out of something good by losing her milk supply so early. She looked up from the outline of the baby under the blanket to see Lisa watching her.
“You’re safe here Anna. It’s okay to let your guard down a little. No one here would ever hurt you or your son I promise!”
Anna nodded as tears slid down her face and she relaxed her tight grip on Kevin. The woman was genuine and Anna knew it was okay. Tyre had been right to tell her that this was a safe place to come to.
“I’m so out of my league! I’m not good at any of this…… stuff!” Anna breathed out in a rush, already trusting the other woman.
“I know just where you’re coming from honey!” Lisa responded with emphasis.
Anna twisted her hands in her lap together, “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve dropped in on you so unannounced?”
Lisa smiled, “Now that you mention it I am rather curious as to your appearance here. Why have you come Anna?”
Anna looked down, “A man….” She stopped.
She looked up and met Lisa’s eyes squarely, “The man that I love told me that if I was ever in need of help that I should come here. In specific he told me that I could find a man named Flint here who would help me.”
Lisa’s eyebrows rose slightly and then she glanced off to the side, “It would appear you have a visitor darling.”
A man stepped into the room smoothly from a place beyond it where he had been evidently listening from. Anna swallowed hard; this man very much looked like he could take care of trouble both big and small. The question was would he help her?
“Anna this is my husband James a.k.a. Flint. James this is Anna and her son Kevin.” Lisa looked at Anna directly, “Do you need privacy?”
Anna raised her hand quickly, “Oh no please don’t move on my account! It’s nothing secretive that I’ve come here about.”
James sat down beside his wife his eyes reflecting his wife’s curiosity as to their strange visitor. “So Miss Anna what is it you need help with?” James asked inquisitively.
“It’s not Miss, its Mrs. Nikolai Gravitausky.” Anna said softly, as she intently watched his face for a reaction to her words.
Her words brought a shocked expression to James features that had his wife looking now at him with genuine curiosity. “While I’ll be!” James breathed out under his breath.
“What?” Lisa asked of her husband, as her look of curiosity started turning partially to concern.
