The Giveaway Read Online Free Page B

“You do?” he said finally.
    “Tell Grossman I’ll be at his house in two hours,” I said and hung up. Best to leave some questions unanswered.

3
    No spy wants to work with a double agent. Even if you might want to give off the impression that you’re only in the game for the money or the glory or the opportunity to visit lovely Third World nations and assassinate their leaders, even the most jaded spy probably still has a love for his country. You spend too many years training to suddenly realize you hate everyone and everything about the country you’ve been sworn to protect.
    A double agent, however, has allegiance only to himself, and thus goes through the training because he sees a way to prosper personally. This makes trusting him nearly impossible, cornering him unrealistic. The best way to get a double agent to acquiesce to your demands, or just play nice in the sandbox, is to present him with another double agent to confuse him. Two people out for only themselves causes a certain amount of friction, particularly when there’s only one of whatever they both want.
    Which is why I brought Fiona with me to meet Bruce Grossman. And why I first gave her a tour through Aventura’s hottest suburban spots. There’s something about suburbia that makes Fiona homicidal, and Aventura is one of those master-planned communities developed in the 1970s and 1980s to remind people what they thought the world was like in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, the future occupants of Aventura lived in Chicago or New York or Detroit and had an idea that the suburbs would be a good place to retire to, only to find that by the time they actually retired, the suburbs were filled with the people that now scared them.
    Shops and outdoor cafés dotted the streets, and every few feet there was a cluster of octogenarians in close conversation. In front of a retro-cool-looking joint called the Blintz there were two women who literally had blue hair, which would have been surprising if not for the other two making their way along Northeast 207th toward the Shoppes at the Waterways. Across the street was a cluster of high-rise condo complexes, and I imagined that at night the windows glowed blue, and not from all of the running televisions. Beside me in the Charger, Fiona made a clucking sound with her tongue, which she sometimes did when she was particularly sickened by something.
    “Promise me you will shoot me if I ever do that to my hair,” Fiona said.
    “I promise,” I said.
    “Mean it,” she said. “Tell me what you’d use. I want to be sure I will die.”
    “I’m going to guess a Russian GSh-18 would do the trick,” I said.
    Fiona slapped her hand against the door. “Does anyone know how to keep a secret anymore?”
    “Selling arms to Cubans doesn’t seem like a great idea.”
    “They were using them for strictly democratic aims,” Fiona said. “And they paid double.”
    “Why didn’t you ask me to cover you?”
    “Because I didn’t want you skulking in the background,” she said. “Cubans would think you were bad juju. Sam emits good juju.”
    I could only shake my head. Used to be Sam and Fiona hated each other, or, at the very least, distrusted each other immensely. Now they probably pinkie-swore on their mendacity. “Fi, you don’t know what could have happened.”
    “Michael, are you saying you were worried?”
    “No,” I said.
    “That’s very sweet,” she said. She reached over and squeezed my cheek. Hard. To the point that I had to really focus with my left eye so that I didn’t slam into the traffic in front of me. “I like that you were worried for me long after any danger had already passed.”
    “How am I supposed to know if I should be worried if you don’t even tell me what you’re doing?”
    “You’re the hero, Michael,” she said. “I’m just the damsel in distress.”
    Sometimes I want to kiss Fiona. And sometimes I have, and more. And then, sometimes, I wish I was in Abu Dhabi