Excerpt…
Arlene settled herself in the chair across from his desk. “Thanks for seeing me without an appointment.”
“Anytime, Arlene, you know that.” He smiled at her. Bad mood or not, he was always very nice to Arlene. A plump, comfortably sized blonde in jeans and blazer over a white turtleneck, she looked like someone’s youthful grandmother. In truth she was anything but. Retired from the Associated Press after a thirty-year career reporting every global conflict from Vietnam on, she was spending what was commonly referred to as her golden years as a monthly columnist for Travel & Leisure. She was unmarried, without children, made her home in a one-bedroom walkup in Georgetown, and seemed comfortable with the choices she had made in her life. She spoke French to the Parisian born and was famous for never missing three square meals a day in any war zone. It wasn’t a bad resume in the spy biz. “How’s the job?”
“They pay me to travel around the world and write about it. What’s not to like?”
He laughed. “I want to be you when I grow up.”
“So do I.”
“What brings you home, Arlene?”
She let her smile fade. “You know I was in Pattaya Beach the day of the bombing, right?”
Hugh looked at her. “Really,” he said. “I didn’t know, as it happens.”
Her mouth tightened. “I was afraid of that. I sent my report in by way of the American Embassy in Bangkok. I knew when I didn’t hear from you that you’d probably never gotten it. Diplomats.” The word was an epithet.
“Squared,” Hugh said with feeling.
“That’s why I came in when I got back.” Without hurrying Arlene unwedged an envelope from a battered leather bag on a short strap designed to hug her shoulder. Hugh had never seen her without it. He was curious enough one day to rifle through it when she was out of the room, and had excavated a reporter’s notebook, her passport, a lone Visa card, a fistful of Travel & Leisure business cards imprinted with her name, her office phone number, her cell phone number, her fax number, Marie’s phone number, Hugh’s phone number, and a Hotmail email address to which Hugh had an icon on his desktop with the password already programmed in. He had just excavated a twelve-pack of Uniball gel pens with medium points when she came back into the room.
“Where’s your computer?” he had asked, and she had laughed and told him she had accounts in cybercafes from Bakwanga, Zaire, to Galahad, Alberta. “Cheaper than trying to find a tech when your computer freezes up.”
“And a lot harder to trace,” Hugh had said. “Why so many pens?”
“Two reasons. One, you can trade pens like currency in a lot of third-world countries.”
“And?”
“And I might run out of ink.”
Dana sez–
In February 2004 I did a Bering Sea ridealong on USCGC Alex Haley. Sixteen days at sea, the first morning of which I woke up, sat up, and threw up. Yeah, baby. But it was an amazing experience, nothing at all like anything I’d ever done before, and inspired Blindfold Game. My favorite character in that thriller was Arlene Harte, and I still want to write her book someday.
I will be forever grateful to one of the most hospitable and hardest working services in the world, the United States Coast Guard. My price for the trip was to write a daily blog on my website so that friends and families of the crew could ride along with us. I have collected those blog posts in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.
Chatter blindfold game On Patrol with the US Coast Guard us coast guard