Dork

Somewhere In A Bar In San Diego

My role is now more defined since I received a second-hand briefing from the FBI. I got the instructions for a meeting and went to a well-known bar near part of the Navy Base. I dressed like a dirtbag for the occasion, thinking my date might be matchy-matchy. I'm where I am supposed to be, and in walks a member of a church choir with a tie and ​combed hair. He walked in looking befuddled and lost just being in a bar, and you know what? He was.

If Russians, Chinese, Hells Angels, or Velma Dinkley were following me, this contact could not scream Fed any louder. It was embarrassing. 

I had an exit strategy. I would punch this guy and walk out of the bar to create a little separation, just in case anyone watched me.

We moved to a small table, and two more people joined us. How do you like that? I was so angry about amateurism that I never saw the show's second half arrive.

These two were a little more dirt-baggy. The woman who was now sitting next to me outright stunk. All three of them were draft-drinking friends, and now so was I. The guy she was with did not look Fed, but you could tell he was the party's muscle. He never stopped cooly appraising the crowd. Charles, the first guy in introduced me to Jaqueline and Jasper.

Jaqueline said to me as she poured a pitcher of cheap, cold domestic beer into another glass, "Wally says hi."  

"He wanted me to give you the next set of directives now that you have infiltrated." Charles laughed and pointed to a large TV showing, "Judge, what's her face?" We all laughed and toasted the TV.

I'm starting to give them style points.

Jaqueline continued. 'You should be learning as much as possible about how the organization is structured in TJ and the rest of the world. This is all fact-finding so we can reassess the organization now that Agapov is assumed to be dead."

We put a package in your apartment, and Wally assured me you would know how to find it.

"Now you have your objective. Let's have about a half hour of fun. I just returned from a 10-mile fun run with a bunch of Marines and Sailors."

"Hoorah," I said.

We stayed about 45 more minutes, and ultimately, I liked all three. I won't be punching tonight; I don't feel like tangling with Jasper. He is a skull crusher.

An Office on Tverskaya Street, Moscow

The chairman is sending over one of his attack poodles for the second time in three weeks. Belyakov (Not his real name) was given the Agapov organization to run on behalf of the chairman. This was Belyakov's third takeover in nine years, and The Agapov Organization had proved hard to run.

It seems someone misjudged all the subtleties and overt costs involved in swindling millions of dollars from Westerners and Western companies. Since the wall's fall in East Germany, Russia has struggled with the concept that " you have to spend money to make money." They have also struggled with patience, not using a heavy hand to get results, and why it's wrong to drink on the job.

Belyakov laughed about his constant struggle to get his overseers to understand.

They saw only Agapov's mega yacht and his purported billions of dollars in revenue yearly. They never thought a second about how Agapov derived that money.

To be clear, Agapov was an organizational genius, and unifying his world-class organization was no easy task, but he had done it. He paid the right people and knew how to keep his machine running, even with the occasional clanks and grinds. 

Enter the new owners, who came in and squeezed the lemons of every mid-level manager and then their bosses after they quit. Less than two months after Agapov signed his life's work away, the organization was sputtering and not producing anywhere what it used to.

Something was wrong and now Belyakov was about to get his lemons squeezed again.

Belyakov was young when they changed the name of Gorky Street to Tverskaya. 

He was educated in the west, at Colby College and Then The Wharton School in Pennsylvania. His ten years in America gave him a better perspective of the West. 

His friendship with the President had been strained since the Ukraine incursion, but the President was always a cautious man since he knew all about assassinations and gifts for Westerners laden with polonium. 

Belakov only worried whether his true feelings about how the Agapov Organization should be run were reaching the President.

When the attack poodle arrives, he plans to turn a few things with the Agapov Organization.

Belakov was looking forward to a few weeks in Barcelona and hoped to reach an agreement on his proposal.

Home of Ben Mason and Lisa Tanaka - Cambridge, MA

Lisa and Ben were laughing hard and playing strip scrabble on their balcony overlooking the Charles River on the Cambridge side. The sun was just going down, and Lisa was down to her bra and holster as she swatted a mosquito. 

This was pure Tanaka.

She did not care that someone was possibly watching her with Binoculars from the Boston side of the river. 

"I got a card from Mom and Dad today" "They loved you even though you are Gaijin."

Ben thought about this and asked "If I remember Gaijin is foreigner, not Japanaese?"

The word has a little "pepper sauce" on it, she said. "There are not much subtleties about it." "It is sort of the N-word for anyone who is not Japanese."

With that, she laid down D-O-R-K across a triple word score and then used the word in a sentence, "Mason is a Gaijin Dork."

They laughed as Lisa tallied up 27 points, and Mason took off his tee shirt.

They clinked wine glasses.