Avon Street
1560 Words
8
Avon Street
Avon Street Apartments, Queens, New York.
That evening, a rap at the door of Jana’s aging studio apartment caused her to startle. The Queens walk-up was tiny, microscopic even, yet clean. Jana had felt lucky to find a place she could live without a roommate. After college, she had grown tired of the inevitable clashes in personality with one roommate or another. The girls she had lived with were great, but each had her own quirks. The first had been a night owl, an innocent enough behavior, but something that kept Jana up till all hours of the night. The next was a sweetheart as well, but made too much a habit of showing up with new bunkmates, guys that Jana would find staring at her when she woke up in the morning. Then finally, there was Alene. Alene had been the best of all, but Jana had never been able to convince her the habit of constantly burning incense was giving her headaches. To Alene, the soft aroma was soothing. In Jana’s opinion, it was just a leftover practice from the hippie days of the 1970s.
Jana walked to the door and looked through the peephole. The receding hairline of Agent Stone shone back at her as he looked at the polish on his black dress shoes. She unlatched the two surface-mounted bolt locks and opened the door.
“Hope I’m not disturbing you.”
Jana shook her head. “No. Come in.”
“Nice place,” Stone said.
“It’s not, but thanks for saying.”
“Are you kidding me? My place is close to a two-hour commute from here. How did you get this so close to town?”
“I’m hesitant to say,” she said as she smiled.
“Sublease, huh? I bet it was lived in by an old lady who still pays 1950s rent due to rent control. Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to turn you in.”
“Good to know.”
“Did you think about what we talked about this afternoon?”
“It’s all I can think about. Look, Agent Stone—”
“Stone. Call me Stone.”
“Okay, Stone then. I’m sorry to have reacted the way I did. It’s just a lot to absorb all at once, you know?”
“If it makes you feel any better, I see that type of reaction from most of the people I recruit to work as material witnesses.”
Jana slumped into the only padded seat in the tiny apartment, a cloth armchair that looked as though it had been in use since the 1970s.
“A material witness. You want me to spy on my employer and then testify in open court against, what? Al-Qaeda?” Jana buried her face in her hands. “Are you out of your mind?”
Stone slid a bent metal kitchen chair with a torn vinyl seat in front of her and sat. “Jana.” He looked at her with the eyes of a father and said, “Listen to me. In 1988, during the Afghan war against the Russians, Osama bin Laden founded the terror group Al-Qaeda. Two years later when the first Gulf War began, bin Laden got pissed off that Americans were in his homeland and began to target us. He hasn’t stopped since. He went after us in ’92 when we were in Somalia to bring famine-relief supplies. In ’93 he bombed the World Trade Center. A truck bomb in our military base in Riyadh in ’95. In ’97 he bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, then the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. And then there’s 9/11. He doesn’t stop, Jana. He’s never going to stop. Not until we kill him, that is. The terrorist your boss is communicating with? Al-Jawary? He works for bin Laden, and now bin Laden is expanding his reach.”
Jana leaned back in her chair. “What has all of this got to do with Petrolsoft?”
“That’s what we need your help with. CFO Jeffrey Dima has never appeared on our watch lists before now, but once that communiqué from Al-Jawary showed up, the relationship between Al-Qaeda and an American corporation came to light and it scares us. Think about it, Jana. A global terror organization talking with an American multinational corporation. The possibilities are endless.”
“Like what?”
“Like I said, we need your help in finding out what they’re up to. I can tell you this. The communiqué we intercepted from Al-Jawary contained only one thing: a set of map coordinates. The coordinates all point to oil production facilities spread across the Middle East.”
“Well Petrolsoft doesn’t own any oil production facilities.”
Stone stood and paced the floor. “That’s right. But Petrolsoft is a software corporation that’s primary focus is software used in the oil and gas industry. And Petrolsoft also sells refining and pumping equipment.”
“Well sure, everyone knows that. We power the software that makes the oil and gas industry run. That’s not a crime.”
“Selling software and industrial equipment is not a crime, communicating with a terror organization is.”
“So you want me to what? Gather information right out from under their noses? If half of what you’re saying is true, and Petrolsoft is somehow involved with Al-Qaeda, and they catch me spying on them, what do you think they’re going to do to me? I’ll tell you what they’re going to do. After they’ve had their fun, they’d probably smash my fingers with a hammer, wouldn’t they?”
“You’ll be under twenty-four-hour surveillance. We’ll be close by at all times. Nothing like that is going to happen.” He walked closer. “If they are planning something big, we have to stop them. If you don’t help us and they pull off an attack, you’ll always blame yourself for not having stopped it. It’ll be something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”
Then it struck her, her grandpa. Stone was a much younger version of her grandpa. “You sound like my grandfather. He always told me to never do anything I’m going to regret for the rest of my life.”
“A wise man.”
“A great man,” she said with a smile.
“Work with us, Jana.”
“I’m not sure if I like you, or if I want to kill you.” She exhaled. “All right. I’m in. What do you want me to do?”
“Access. You need log-in access to the highest levels of the company intranet. We have to see what they’re up to. We know something is going on, but it will be your job to find out what, and fast.” He reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a handwritten slip of paper. “Here, this is my cell. Call or text me anytime, day or night. And don’t think you’re going to wake up Mrs. Chuck Stone because there isn’t one. She came to her senses and finally left me. Another thing, if you’re in trouble, you call that number and ask for Lincoln. You ask for Lincoln because there is no Lincoln, understand?”
“Yeah, I get it. And where will you be? When I’m at work, I mean.”
“I’ll be close. My people will be all over the place. If you get afraid someone is tailing you, you call. Likelihood is that it’s one of my guys, but call nonetheless. Send me text messages as you see fit. Anything you discover, you text me. But the moment you send the text, delete it from your phone, got it? Do you have that business jacket you were wearing today?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Grab it for me.”
Jana gave him a quizzical look but opened a bureau where her hanging clothes were kept, jammed against one another. She pulled the jacket from the hanger and handed it to him.
He put on reading glasses and inspected the jacket’s left shoulder. “Here,” he said as he peeled off the nearly invisible tracking device. “Stick this to whatever you’re wearing each day. We can track your location that way.”
“What? You’ve been tracking me? How did you get that thing on my . . .” But as the thoughts trailed forward, Jana remembered that morning. “Is that why you put your arm around me?”
“And take this,” he said as he handed her a piece of what looked like clear vellum. Attached to the reflective plastic was a flat, translucent strip about three inches long, one-quarter of an inch across, and about as thick as a piece of card stock. “It’s a microphone. Peel it off the vellum and stick it to your clothing, somewhere it won’t be noticed. We’ll be able to hear everything going on.”
“This thing is a mic?” Jana shook her head as she held the paper-thin microphone to the light. “When I headed out the door this morning, everything was so normal. Now I’m wearing a wire and walking into a pit of terrorists.”
He smiled and Jana instantly felt better, as if confidence oozing from his pores had embedded into her.
“Agent Stone—”
“Just Stone. Call me Stone.”
“How much danger do you think I’m putting myself in?”
Agent Stone walked toward the door. “I don’t bullshit, Jana. Sorry for the language. At this point, we have no idea what we’re dealing with. But if your boss is involved with Al-Jawary, you could be putting yourself in harm’s way.”
She crossed her arms and rubbed the goosebumps forming on them.
“Hey,” he said with a tiny smile, “this is important, really important. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t ask you to do this. Everything is going to be fine, Jana.” He turned the door handle and left.
Jana slumped onto the armchair. “It’s the eyes. That’s what seems so familiar about him. He’s got grandpa’s eyes.”
- Writer
