Nina Miller
In the spy business, only the very sexy or the extremely invisible can get prized intel.
Ask me how I know.
Being a woman of a certain age has its perks in the spy industry. Guards, hugging their Uzis, gave my gray-flecked hair nary a glance as I entered. Dressed as a Hotel Conway maid, I walked blithely through Marco Gallo’s suite, noting cigar butts and flimsy thongs floating in the fountain. Finally, I eyed the man himself draped over several nubile young women on the shag carpet of the sunken living room. Seeing him occupied, I made my way towards the bedrooms.
Brandi, a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old and my partner of five years, didn’t meet at our rendezvous point last night. I was sent to recover her and the intel. Embedded in a molar, her GPS tracker pinged her in the master bath.
I parked my cart outside the doorway and knocked. “Housekeeping!” When no one answered, I entered.
The room was dead silent. The bed was made, and a small table with dinner for two untouched. Oh, Brandi!
My heartbeat quickened. Losing people was part of the job, one I never got used to. Attaching my listening device to the bathroom door, I heard ragged breaths and sounds of struggling.
I busted the door open to find Brandi bound and gagged in the bathtub. Only then did I notice Dante Gallo in the corner, staring at me down the barrel of a Beretta. I raised my feather duster towards him. Fuck!
“Dante! Back from Ibiza so soon? I thought Marco was head of the family now.” I flashed him my disarming smile.
Brandi was supposed to seduce Marco, his idiot son, and get information on the terror cells his father was funding on American soil. We could follow the flow of guns traveling in and out of warehouses, but we couldn’t pin them on the Gallo family. Now that our cover was blown, we were both goners. It was up to me to clean up this mess.
“Roxy, I knew you’d come. Looking gorgeous as ever in custodial couture,” said Dante with an arrogant smirk. I wanted to roundhouse kick that smile off his face. “Remember when I had you tied up like this? Where was it, Madagascar?”
“No, a VW van you tricked out with bulletproof windows. Not a five-star hotel suite.” I considered shooting out the window. Brandi and I could jump into the pool below.
“These windows are bulletproof, too,” he said seductively, inadvertently answering my mental query. I lowered my duster as he lowered his Beretta. We looked into each other’s eyes, contemplating the passage of time. Once, I was a rookie, and he was a petty criminal. Back then, words like Glock and zip ties would have us all over each other like avocado on toast. Now, he was just a killer. Time to change tactics.
“That meal for me?” I asked.
“I had them resend it. I remember you liked it… hot.”
I bit my lip. Sure, I did things I’m not entirely ashamed of to keep our borders safe. But it had been a long time since the agency had given me roles that didn’t come with frying pans or knitting needles. I felt a fire burning inside me, one I’d thought long dormant.
Dante rose, and I backed out of the bathroom, holding my duster in front of me. “Stay back. I’m armed.”
“You going to dust the floor with me, Roxy? I know you better than that.” He holstered his gun and pulled off his shirt. For a man nearing sixty, he still had a fine body, and I couldn’t help but stare.
I backed into the table, the glasses clinking. Dante reached around me, and I gasped, but all he did was lift the cloche as the strong smell of well-cooked steak hit my nostrils.
“Meat still your love language?” he asked suggestively. I could see the roots of his dye job, the areas where the spray tan didn’t entirely fill in, and I recognized that vanity was his Achilles heel. I bet a hot young son did little to bolster his confidence. That was where I excelled.
“Only yours,” I said, drawing closer. As Dante fumbled with his belt, I jabbed him with a hypodermic hidden within the duster. His eyes registered a moment of shock before he fell backward onto the California King. I grabbed the gun from his sedated body and ran to the bathroom to get Brandi.
“Guards entering suite,” said the handler through my earpiece. There was no time to cut her bindings, so I hoisted her over my shoulders, shoved her into my cart, and covered her with towels. I looked at the snoring villain, but my only regret was missing out on that meal.
Pushing her down the hall, with nothing but a small cart squeak to mark the weight change, I ran headlong into Marco, flanked by bodyguards. Shit. I had the Beretta wrapped in towels as a makeshift silencer. My hand steadied above the trigger.
“I need… towels… ice… You have aspirin?”
“Of course, sir,” I said, handing him a packet of aspirin laced with sodium pentothal from my pocket. I’d been told he’d wake up hungover and horny, just like his dad.
His goons tried to muscle past me, but I stopped them with a quick wink. “He said, ‘Do not disturb.’” They smiled knowingly and headed back to their post.
***
Brandi was deposited safely with our handler. Thanks to the drugs, Marco was very chatty when I returned with the towels. He handed me his father’s laptop with the locations of the terror cells and the bank accounts that funded them. He may or may not have called me “the Mom he never had” a few times and hugged me awkwardly. But that’s the price you pay for being an international spy.
I walked past the guards discussing last night’s party and the “talent” that came and went. That’s the problem of being a spy of a certain age. People don’t recognize true talent when they see it.
Nina Miller is an Indian-American physician, epee fencer, and creative who made the Wigleaf Top 50 for 2024. She loves writing competitions and drinking chai. Find her flash and thoughts on writing within Flash Fusion Anthology. Find her work within or forthcoming at Hungry Shadows Press, Apex, Raw Lit, JAKE, Bright Flash, SciFi Shorts, Five South, Roi Fainéant, Five Minutes, and more. Website: www.ninamillerwrites.com. X (formerly Twitter): @NinaMD1 Instagram: @ninamillerwrites
Featured photo by cottonbro studio (Pexels)
