Satan's Spy (The Steve Church saga Book 2) André Gallo (top 100 books of all time checklist TXT) 📖

strong point of the Iranian hotel industry. Everything looked old and in need of either paint or replacement. He was in the old section because there was less chance that those rooms would have been equipped with audio and visual security equipment.

He continued directly to the Thai restaurant, the agreed upon venue to make initial contact with Kella who had reservations in the same hotel. The Iranian hostess, dressed in a dark-blue chador, guided him to a table and gave him an English language menu. She was correct and professional in an absent-minded way, no smile. Kella was not there either and he ordered Tam Yam Koon, lemon grass soup. A half hour later, he read the newspaper he had brought with him. He had given up on Kella for that evening and stood to leave when, simultaneously, he saw Kella coming from the lobby toward the hostess, and the lights went out.

Not knowing whether she had seen him, he walked in her direction and bumped into her. “I’m very sorry,” he said knowing that she would recognize his voice. At the same time, he put his newspaper in her hands and went back to the lobby where he obtained matches and a couple of candles from the front desk. Their availability suggested that electrical outages were not infrequent.

The young men were laughing. In the semi-darkness, one was doing his imitation of a Dervish dance with a soda bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Steve stepped around him and went outside where the street lamps and other buildings in the neighborhood were also without lights. One of the young men, the one who had said hello, Steve thought, came out to join him.

He asked, “From England?” “No, Canada,” Steve replied.

“I can help you. What do you want? I can drive you anywhere.” “Thanks but no.”

“Exchange money? Best rate. You want whiskey? Have you been to Sweden? I was a student there–good whiskey, good girls.” He laughed loudly.

The last thing Steve wanted was to risk arrest for a minor offense, such as the ban on alcohol. He was already guilty of espionage. If he just waited a while, he could get arrested for espionage.

“You want to see Baha’i shrine? I will drive you. Tomorrow. Private tour. You will see Baha’i art treasures that tourists don’t see without special contacts.”

Steve barely listened. He was thinking of Kella. How long would it take her to discover his note in the pages of the newspaper giving her the number of his room?

He waited another five minutes and walked up the stairs to his room. On the way, the lights went back on. He opened the windows of his room, washed his face, changed his shirt, turned the TV on to a local soccer game, and waited. With the lights out, he had been able to get his message inside the newspaper to Kella in secret. The longer they were perceived to be two separate, unconnected visitors, the better.

Kella arrived about an hour later. On TV, a commentator announced the score: zero to zero.

Steve opened the door to her discreet knock and said, “Hi. Room service?

What kept you? I was about to go to bed.”

“Don’t let me stop you, Monsieur Breton,” she said mischievously as she eyed the bed. “What service is it that you wish?”

He took her in his arms and they kissed. “Thank God you’re here. I was about to call the emergency service number. Except, in this country, they might have sent me a young boy.”

In a characteristic gesture that Steve loved, she tossed her head up and laughed reminding Steve of a child’s unrestrained and guileless pleasure. As she sat on the bed and kicked off her shoes, he sat beside her, kissed her, and started unbuttoning her blouse.

She said, “Wait,” and pointed toward the walls and ceilings, her counter-intelligence instincts struggling to overcome more primal emotions.

“Yeah, I know.” He clicked off the bright overhead light and took her in his arms again, his senses hungrily reaching out to her.

Afterward, they both took a shower, which produced an intermittent jet punctuated by loud noises in the pipes and finally a steady stream of ice-cold water.

She donned one of his shirts and sat in the easy chair while, in shorts, he settled on the bed. The TV was still on, and the soccer game was drawing to an end, score one to one. Steve turned up the volume to mask their conversation. While he watched, she pulled a two by seven inch Chanel eye-shadow palette case from her handbag. She opened the case, unscrewed the brush handle clockwise, and inserted the now uncovered pin on one end of the brush into the lower right hand corner of pink-ice. The mirror on the inside of the cover flipped up; using the pin on tawny-brown allowed her to flip the color palette down. Kella now had access to a keyboard on the bottom and, on the top, to the controls that would send and receive encrypted millisecond burst signals to and from the CIA’s Icarus satellite.

“I don’t think I showed you my new toy in Washington,” Kella said. “This is a spread-spectrum frequency-hopping device. It transmits small packets of information on several frequencies at the same time, and the frequencies change in the blink of an eye. The receiver puts them all back together into a coherent message on the other end. A listener without the proper equipment and the code only hears white noise—hard to intercept, demodulate, or jam.”

“I’m impressed,” Steve admitted. I don’t need to know any more. Are you ready for me to start?”

“OK, don’t talk too fast.”

Steve began with operational comments on his initial cover activities, the overt version of which he had already emailed to his cover company Magnus Control in St. John through the hotel’s business center. He then got