"What is the purpose of your visit?" he asks in awkward English.
"Geschдft." She doesn't tell him what kind of business, but has an answer prepared, if necessary.
He picks up the phone and says something Lucy is unable to decipher, but she senses he isn't talking about her or, if he is, it is nothing. She expected her belongings to be riffled through and was ready for it. She expected to be quizzed. But the guard who reminds her of the decapitated head returns her passport.
"Danke, "she politely says as she silently labels him a trag Narr.
The world is full of lazy fools like him.
He waves her on.
She creeps forward, crossing the border into Poland, and now another guard, this one Polish, puts her through the same routine. There is no ordeal, no thorough search, not a hint of anything but sleepiness and boredom. This is too easy. Paranoia sets in. She remembers she should never trust anything that is too easy, and she imagines the Gestapo and SS soldiers, cruel specters from the past. Fear rises like body odor, a fear that is baseless and irrational. Sweat rolls down her sides, beneath her wind-breaker, as she thinks of Poles overpowered and disenfranchised from their own names and lives during a war she knows about only from history books.
It is not so different from the way Benton Wesley exists, and Lucy wonders what he would think and feel if he knew she was in Poland and why. Not a day goes by when he doesn't shadow her life.
20
HER CAREER EXPERIENCE does not show unless she intentionally displays it like a weapon.
She was still in high school when she began interning for the FBI and designed their Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, known as CAIN. When she graduated from the University of Virginia, she became an FBI special agent and was given free rein as a computer and technical expert. She learned to fly helicopters and became the first female member of the FBI Special Forces Hostage Rescue Team. Hostility, harassment and crude innuendos followed her on every deployment, raid and punishing training session. Rarely was she invited to join the men for a beer in the Academy bar called the Boardroom. They did not confide in her about raids gone wrong or their wives and children or girlfriends. But they watched her. There was talk about her in the showers.
Her career with the FBI was aborted on a dewy October morning when she and her HRT partner, Rudy Musil, were shooting live nine-millimeter rounds inside the FBI Academy's Tire House. As its name implies, the highly dangerous indoor range was filled with old tires that tactical agents could dive over, duck under, dart around and hide behind as they practiced maniacal maneuvers. Rudy was breathing hard and sweating as he crouched behind a mound of tires and smacked another magazine into his Glock, peeking around a threadbare Michelin as he looked for Lucy, his partner.
"All right. Come clean," he yelled at her through gun smoke. "What's your sexual preference?"
"To have it as often as possible.1" She reloaded and snapped back the slide while rolling between stacks of tires before firing five rounds at a pop-up target thirty feet away. The cluster of head shots was so tight, it looked like a small flower.
"Oh yeah?" Two bullets loudly clinked a pop-up thug holding a machine gun. "Me and the guys got bets on it." Rudy's voice came closer as he crawled on his belly across the filthy concrete floor.
He pounced through towers of sooty tires and grabbed an unsuspecting Lucy by her steel-reinforced Red Wing boots.
"Gotcha!" He laughed, setting his pistol on top of a tire.
"Are you fucking crazy?" Lucy cleared a round from the chamber of her pistol, the ejected cartridge bouncing off the floor. "We're using live ammo, you fucking idiot.'"
"Let me see that thing." Rudy got serious. "It doesn't sound right."
He took the pistol from her, dropped out the magazine. "Loose spring." He shook the pistol before setting it next to his gun on the tire. "Aha. Rule number one: Never lose your weapon."
He got on top of her, laughing as he wrestled with her, somehow believing this was what she had been waiting for, and that she was excited and didn't mean it when she continued screaming, "Get off of me, asshole!"
Finally, he restrained both her wrists in one of his powerful hands. He plunged the other inside her shirt and shoved his tongue inside her mouth as he pushed up her bra. "The guys only say," he panted, "you're a dyke 'cause"-he fumbled with her belt buckle-"they can't have you…"
Lucy bit through Rudy's bottom lip and knocked her forehead hard against the bridge of his nose. He spent the rest of the day in the emergency room.
FBI attorneys reminded her that litigation benefitted no one, especially since Rudy believed that she "wanted it" and had probable cause to believe it. Lucy told Rudy she wanted it "as often as possible," he reluctantly stated in the forms he was forced to complete for Internal Affairs.
"It's true," Lucy calmly agreed during a sworn statement before a panel of five lawyers, not one of whom represented her. "I said that, but I didn't say I wanted it with him or with anyone right then in the middle of live fire in the middle of the Tire House in the middle of a maneuver in the middle of my period."
"But you'd led him on in the past. You'd given Agent Musil reason to think you were attracted to him."
"What reason?" Lucy was baffled under oath. "Offering him a stick of gum now and then, helping him clean his guns, hanging with him to run the Yellow Brick Road and other obstacle courses, the worst one at the Marine Corps base, joking around, that sort of thing?"
"Quite a bit of togetherness," the lawyers agreed with one another.
"He's my partner. Partners have quite a bit of togetherness."
"Nonetheless, you seemed to devote quite a lot of your time and attention to Agent Musil, including personal attention, such as asking him about his weekends and holidays, and calling him at home when he was out sick."
"Perhaps joking around, as you put it, might have been interpreted as flirting. Some people joke around when they flirt."
The lawyers agreed once again, and what was worse, two of them were women-women in masculine skirt suits and high-heel shoes, women whose eyes reflected an identification with the aggressor, as if their irises were glued on to their eyeballs backward and were dull instead of bright, and blind to what was in front of them. The women lawyers had the dead eyes of people who kill themselves off to get what they want or to become what they fear.
"I'm sorry," Lucy said as her attention sharpened and she avoided the dead eyes. "You stepped on me. Please repeat," she muttered aviation jargon.
"I'm sorry? Who stepped on you?" Frowns.
"You interfered with my transmission to the tower. Oops, there is no tower. This is uncontrolled air space and you get to do whatever you want. Right?"
More frowns. The lawyers glanced at one another as if Lucy was very weird.
"Never mind," she added.
"You're an attractive single woman. Can you see how Agent Musil might have misinterpreted joking around, phone calls at home, et cetera, as your being sexually interested in him, Agent Farinelli?"