The Operative by Andrew Britton Read Free Book Online Page B

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    She hugged Kealey’s arm a little tighter, cherishing the prolonged contact, and quietly thanked God for the good that came with the bad. It didn’t make life easy, but they at least could actually hold each other.
    And walk away from the fish tank.
     
    The petite woman with short dark hair and Asian eyes approached room 306 of the Baltimore Hilton. There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle. She ignored it and swiped her key card, entering the large, modern room with its panoramic view of the city’s Inner Harbor.
    The harbor had come a long way since its taxpayer-paid restoration in the early eighties. Much like Times Square, prostitutes and crackheads were “relocated” or arrested, and their tainted syringes and condoms, which clung to the grates of gutters, were finally cleaned out. Warehouses, crack dens, rotting fuel tankers, and out-of-favor dog tracks were replaced by new shopping malls, fine dining, a world-class aquarium, and a new convention center. These improvements helped draw other corporate entities back into the suddenly decorous setting, bringing tourists and families back into the historic marina and closer to its famous “star-spangled” Fort McHenry. And thanks in part to hometown hero Cal Ripken, Jr.—and his just over 2,000 consecutive played games record, which was quickly sneaking up on record holder Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 games—the Baltimore Orioles got their new brick Camden Yards stadium in the early nineties, nearly completing the once-sagging city’s late twentieth-century facelift.
    But somehow, unlike Midtown Manhattan’s redo, no matter how many distractions and special events tried to cover up Baltimore’s seamy history, echoes still hummed from the still neglected canneries lining the shore, from years upon years of painfully obtained sugarcane and oysters-turned-mother-of-pearl that were toiled through and exported by gifted, poorly paid women who needed pennies for provisions and by skilled slaves who sorely needed their autonomy liberated, as is memorialized in the often sightseer-slighted Museum of Industry.
    The woman put away her key card as the door clicked shut behind her, went to the dresser, and opened the second dresser drawer from the bottom. She withdrew a black, satchel-style photographer’s bag, pulled it up by the strap, and hefted it over her shoulder. With its bulky contents, it weighed between 5 and 6 pounds, which was substantial but not heavy enough to make carrying it difficult.
    She wore a sleeveless champagne-colored blouse and black Capri pants with a damask rose printed on the right outer thigh, and had a wireless mobile headset on her right ear. She also wore trendy sixteen-button gloves. In her line of work, she thought, women had two advantages: they could get close to men of influence, and it was easy not to leave fingerprints.
    My line of work, twenty-one year-old Jasni Osman reflected bitterly.
    Three years ago, the gifted gymnast was training for the Singapore Youth Olympics. All she had ever wanted was to express herself in movement, revel in the joy of being free. Then her eldest brother, Yusuf, a journalist, was arrested for what the ruling People’s Action Party termed radical activities and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He suggested from his prison cell that she could help him by attending a meeting of Jamaah Anshorut Tauhid at a local mosque. Although she had to pray apart from the men, in keeping with strict tradition, the organization’s religious instructors fully welcomed her as a daughter of Islam, instructing her on the lies and deceit of their government’s rulers and the hateful imperialism of their masters, the United States.
    Seven months later she was arrested in a raid on a JAT camp at Aceh, Indonesia, accused of being a courier of illegal funds. Her captors were American agents, and she vividly recalled the terrible place to which she was brought in Jakarta, the suffocating torture by the CIA, the