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Terrorism.
Of the Middle Eastern variety.
"Why would they launder money for terrorists?" I asked, looking out at their beautiful country, not the dusty, barren lands where I would prefer to be situated, not dealing with fucking bankers, but actual men with guns hellbent on spreading their beliefs to as many people as they could through brute force.
Armenia, by the large, was a Christian nation. It made no sense.
"Turns out the brother-in-law to Armen Minasian has some contacts. It's not a support-for-the-cause kind of situation."
"Just an opportunistic one," I guessed, thinking how the Middle East held well over fifty-percent of all the world's oil reserves.
There was money there.
And maybe it was dirty, blood-stained money.
But to the right kind of dirtbag, anything could be washed out.
"Alright. So, I am assuming I am not trying to turn Armen himself."
"Armen has a niece," Allen started to finally give me what I needed. "She just dropped out of Oxford."
"She's a fucking infant," I grumbled, mostly to myself, since I knew age didn't much matter to my bosses so long as they had access to what we were after.
As expected, I was ignored. "She's spending the summer here with her uncle in the hopes that working in a bank will spark her interest in finance, so she will go back to college."
Yep. Sounded like what a kid her age wanted to do. Spend her summer in a stuffy bank with her uncle.
"What makes you think she will turn on her uncle?"
"There's no real bond there. Her parents left Armenia before she was even born. From what we can tell, she has only been back three times, twice before she was likely even old enough to remember. Her parents are academics in Burford. We figure that, with her background, the idea of her family linked to any sort of terrorist organization will offend her modern sensibilities. She will want to help."
"For moral reasons," I scoffed.
"Something like that."
"It's a fool's errand."
"Well, it's your fool's errand. And if you want to keep climbing rank, getting interesting jobs, I suggest you take it seriously. And apply yourself. Get some results. Everything you need to know will be in the file left with the front desk. I'll be in touch."
With that, the call was ended.
And I was alone.
Which was nothing new. If you wanted buddies, you should join a more legitimate branch of the government. The CIA, well, they were an organization full of handlers and the people they barely ever met. Men and women like me. Who had to be loners. Who had no one else to rely on but themselves.
There was a certain freedom in that. Which was easy to forget when the shit hit the fan, and you could desperately use a little backup, but at least you knew you only ever had to rely on yourself.
Sure, it meant you had to be better - a thousand times better - than everyone else, even small armies of others. So you learned to use your considerable downtime on assignments finding ways to better yourself, learning new languages, working on new fighting techniques, staying up-to-date with world news.
You gave yourself an edge you hoped would come in handy. If not on the current job, then on the next one.
From the looks of things, I was going to have a ridiculous amount of downtime on this one. I wondered how much Armenian I could learn over the coming weeks, if there were any other contacts to be made in this country while I was stuck here.
I got the file after the shower I promised myself, finding everything from a copy of her birth certificate to a copy of a paper she had written for a psych class she had taken.
Mackenzie Minasian.
Nineteen.
Fucking nineteen.
But for some reason the most recent picture in the file was a far away from a family outing with a somewhat chubby young teen girl.
You put on a lot of different hats in my profession, played a lot of different guys.
The buddy.
The rival.
The guy with an offer you just couldn't refuse.
And then there was my least favorite.
Romeo.
Seduction wasn't just the game of female agents like the movies would like you to believe. Sure, they existed. And you could never underestimate their power. Some of the best intelligence we gathered came from honeytraps.
But the fact of the matter was, every big name, influential man in the world had women around him. Wives, girlfriends, daughters, sisters, mothers. Someone who knew more than they let on, who wielded their own sort of power that everyone underestimated.
All you had to do was hope they were unhappy, that their needs weren't being met, that they weren't too serious about any vows they may have made.
To me, it was a cheap way to get information. Using someone's body against them, abusing their trust, using nothing but your own prowess to get somewhere.
