VECTOR

Chapter 6 Oliver

CHAPTER 6

Oliver

Claire read Jasmines message twice in an effort to understand just what the short sentence meant. What corner had Jasmine turned? Was it a good corner or a bad corner? Perhaps, Jasmine had taken steps to rid herself of her husband. From what Claire knew, Jasmine was married to a monster. Jasmine hadn't used that tern, but Claire could read between the lines. She had learned a bit of that skill from Oliver who read people with few mistakes. His worst mistake was supposing Claire would enjoy having Pickles around. Not that Claire hated the cat, but there was just so much she was willing to do for Oliver.

Claire was halfway through her bunless burger when her phone buzzed. “

Hello, Oliver,” Claire said. “Can you tell me where you are?”

He laughed. “Home, and I’ll take Pickles off your hands if you want. How about dinner first?”

"You may certainly have your cat back. Dinner is great but only after my workout. The pub?”

“Sounds great. Seven-thirty?”

“Order me a pint.”

“On me, everything's on me. Cat sitters are hard to find.”

He signed off, and she finished her lunch. While he had not offered any endearing phrases, he was back. That was a good thing. And then, he never offered endearments over the phone. When she asked him about that, he merely smiled and took her outside. In the sidewalk of a busy street, he told her that no one should ever say anything on the phone that they didn't want someone to hear. No love coos, no curses, no threats, nothing that might come back to haunt them later. Was he paranoid? He said he had a healthy respect for the information gathering abilities of the NSA and other government groups. In the digital age, there wasn't a phone or computer on the planet that couldn't be hacked and analyzed. Claire was more than a little convinced that he had gone over the wall, but she had to admit that he followed his own advice. His calls were always short and not so sweet.

After work, Claire ran five miles. She wasn't a competitive runner, but she wanted to enter a half-marathon, and she had never run one in the past. Thirteen and a half miles wasn't something she could just do. Training was required, and she had downloaded a nifty little app that helped her train. She followed the schedule and saved her distances and times, and the app generated a probable finish for her. Of course, the app couldn't know what the weather might be that day, so the results would invariably vary, but the prediction didn't really matter. What mattered was making the milestones. Given this much input, she could expect just so much output. Best of all, the app guaranteed that if she followed the schedule, she would finish the race. She liked guarantees.

The pub wasn't really a pub. It was a corner bar, typically and forever as American as apple pie. Claire and Oliver had called it the pub because they wanted to sound British. In fact, during their first meal there, they had insisted on British accents which were decidedly awful. Their waitress had gone along with the joke, but she wasn’t fooled. A two year old wouldn't have been fooled. Of course, that they had already had more than enough to drink seemed to add to the hilarity. They hadn't forgotten, and so the bar became the pub, and they lost their fake accents. The food was passable, and the beer was much colder than what might be found in a real pub. That was good enough for them. It was only when Claire found herself a bit on the paranoid side of healthy that she wondered if Oliver had misnamed the bar on purpose.

Oliver waited in his favorite booth at the far end of the room. Claire might have preferred something a bit closer to the band stand where an occasional ragtag local band pounded out poor covers of real hits and insanely bad original work, but Oliver pointed out the obvious advantages—they could see the entire room, and the kitchen was only a few feet away. If they had to run, the rear exit would prove much more convenient.

"You look great,” Oliver said as he stood and planted a light kiss on her lips.

“You too,” Claire answered.

They slid into the booth and true to his word, a pint of beer waited for her. Diet was part of her half-marathon app, and she was pretty sure beer wasn't on the recommended list of beverages. So, she decided the solution was simply not to give the app that data point. What the app didn't know wouldn't hurt her. They toasted and sipped, and she had to admit that the beer was cold and tasty.

“Welcome back,” she said.

“Good to be back.”

“I'd ask you where you were, but I know you can't tell me. So, where were you?”

He laughed. “In general terms, I was overseas. How's that.”

"Not helpful. Do you treat everyone you know as a potential spy or just me.”

“Everyone I know. It's much easier that way.”

“I'll make you a deal,” she said. “Since I don't intend to adopt Pickles should you disappear into the maw of some distant country, how about we set a deadline.”

“Deadline?”

“Deadline. How long should I keep Pickles if I don't hear from you?”

“That's kind of hard to say.”

“Help me out here. Thirty days, sixty days? A year?”

“A year is far too long.”

“Oliver, I like you, I really do, but without a deadline, Pickles goes out the door the first time he misses the litter box. Catch my drift?”

“Since you are the sixth best friend I have—“

“Oh, thanks.”

“I'm kidding. But I'll put it this way. If you don't hear from me in sixty days, you can safely rid yourself of Pickles. I won't be coming back for him.”

“Ouch, that's rough. I was just kidding.”

He looked past her to the bar and nodded. “There's a man at the bar. Longish hair, rough, black jacket and baseball cap. What would you say if I told you he worked for the French?”

“He's a spy?”

“Not really, not in the movie sense. He's just a guy who goes around to military installations and tries to get information. Photos, data, he'll ply the enlisted with liquor and pump them for data. Most of the time the soldiers or sailors or whatever never know what they're giving up. Most of the time, they give up nothing. He's like a prospector. He'll sift through days and weeks of dross in order to find one nugget of gold. Even then, it's probably nothing that the French really want to know. It's more often just a pawn to play if they need to.”

“I don't get it. Is he here watching you?”

“What makes you think he's watching anyone?”

She stared a moment. “You're watching him, aren't you?”

Oliver smiled. “Aren't you the clever one.”

She laughed and sipped more beer. This was the first time Oliver had ever admitted to having anything to do with spycraft. For some reason, she had always considered him some kind of nerd analyst.

Dinner came, bar food, and as she expected, it was passable. She had a second beer she wasn’t going to admit to the app and laughed more than she had laughed in a week. Oliver had a way of making almost anything funny. Maybe that was the reason she stuck with him despite his impossible schedule.

“Whatever happened to your friend?” Oliver asked.

“What friend?”

“The one in Pakistan. Her name was Peony or something.”

“Jasmine.”

“I knew it was a flower or plant or something. Did she ever meet up with anyone?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I got a rather cryptic note from her today.”

“Cryptic how?”

“Cryptic as in I have no idea what she meant. Cryptic enough?”

He laughed. “Hey, if you can't understand it, I'm no help.”

“Well, I think she came to some sort of decision. If that includes contacting us, I can't tell.”

“Sort of like a suicide note?”

“More like I'm-getting-out-of-Dodge note. There was hope in it, and suicides don't have hope, just despair.”

“Another beer?”

She shook her head. “I have to work tomorrow even if you don't. Besides, by now, Pickles is pissed, and I want him in your car when he decides to throw a tantrum.”

Oliver laughed and paid the bill in cash. While most people used credit cards, Oliver used cash. She supposed it was just one more layer of anonymity he placed between himself and the powers that be. Pickles did indeed snarl when Claire pulled the cage out of her trunk. She supposed some people might consider putting a pet carrier in a trunk cruel and unusual, but she wasn't about to allow an angry cat to go potty inside her car. Oliver accepted the carrier, spoke a couple words of assurance, and leaned in for a good night kiss. She obliged him because she genuinely enjoyed his company—and he was taking Pickles.

“Hey, thanks for dinner,” Claire said.

“Tomorrow, movie?”

“Sure. You pick. I have to train, and my brain and muscles will be mush by movie time.”

“I'll see to it, and once again, thanks for taking care of Pickles.”

“You're almost welcome.” She glanced at the door, and the man Oliver had pointed out at the bar staggered out and started down the sidewalk. He looked far too drunk to do any sleuthing this night.

“Question,” she said.

“Answer, I hope they match.”

“The man at the bar. He doesn't really work for the French, does he?”

Oliver grinned, the grin he used when he was feeling clever. “No, I've never seen him before. I made it all up.”

She punched him in the arm, and she punched hard. “You're terrible. How am I ever going to believe anything you say?”

“I tell you a secret. You can always tell if I'm telling the truth if I end the sentence with ‘bless his heart’ or ‘ya'all’.”

“Bless his heart or ya'all?”

He nodded and turned away. “Come on, Pickles, before you're too unhappy to sleep.”

She watched him cross the parking lot to his car. “Hey,” she called. “How do I know you're telling the truth.”

“That’s up to ya'all.”

He laughed which infuriated her. She thought about saying something mean, maybe sending an angry text or tweet. That would fix him, wouldn't it?

No, she surmised. It would only prove that he had managed to get her goat yet one more time. Why did she go out with him?

Because he made her laugh.

In her apartment, Claire sniffed the air and emptied the litter box. She knew that Pickles’ scent would linger for a day or two, but that was all. The cat was free to ruin Oliver's furniture.

After slipping into PJs, Claire sat down at her computer. She liked to keep a daily journal, and she an app for that too. She wasn't the most religious journaler. She could go whole weeks without entering anything. But tonight, she had couple of items she didn't want to lose. The first was Oliver's return, his secretive return from an assignment somewhere overseas. That included only three quarters of the world. Would seem simple to pin down where he had been. She guessed Sherlock Holmes might accomplish it in less than a minute. In her case, the secret would forever remain unknown. In a way, she was glad. What if someone needed to know where Oliver had been, and that someone thought she knew. Claire was pretty certain she could never stand up to torture. Bend her fingernail, and she'd confess to traveling back in time and shooting Abraham Lincoln. She suspected she was a real coward at heart.

The other thing she wanted to chronicle was the message from Jasmine. It was just weird enough to be kept for posterity. Perhaps in a hundred years, some wag of a historian would find her journal and make some connection to Jasmine of Pakistan and the end of the world as we know it.

As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered if Oliver had been lying about the lying. Did that drunk really feed information back to Paris?