d.: Well, Cal.E. and her kittens are still out trying to catch the escaped convict, and I got caught up watching the World Cup. However, there is a silver lining. I will bring y’all an excerpt from my upcoming book “The Magruder Mysteries Murder 8; The inert Ingredient. This chapter is called “A Mundane Existence.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A MUNDANE EXISTENCE
Bogota, Columbia; December 16, 1996, 2200 hours
Charles Harvey clocked into his job as the night desk clerk at El Hotel Grande in Bogota. His brother, his closest and only known living relative, only knew him by his code name. It was the one that his mysterious frenemy knew him by as well. As a CIA agent, he couldn’t go by his real name, although Charles Harvey wasn’t the name he was given at the hospital where he was born. In fact, he didn’t know what that name was. He was given a different name than the one he’d been born with by his adoptive parents.
Charles had come to Bogota on a mission, but he needed a cover. So, he procured a job as a janitor at a fleabag hotel in the downtown area of Columbia’s capital city. Charles pretended he only spoke English, and he spoke that language within a slow, halting manner. It was the perfect cover, because the manager and owner of the hotel believed his IQ to be somewhere south of seventy.[1]
His speech patterns and his carefully practiced mannerisms convinced the manager that Charles Harvey, a special needs janitor, would be an asset to his main source of income. Miko would have been a good actor, if he’d been so inclined.
The fact that he couldn’t speak the predominant language of the country was an added bonus, as far as the hotel manager was concerned. He could conduct his real business in front of the “special needs” janitor without fear of being discovered as a liaison between cartels and drug dealers taking cargo north, to the richest nation in the western hemisphere.
Neither of these things were true, though. Although his would seem to be a mundane existence, the janitor turned night desk clerk actually had a very interesting job with the CIA. He was the best agent employed by the powerful police agency. Some even believed him to be the greatest of all time at his job, that of a clandestine agent hellbent on ridding the world of sinister beings like the one whose place he’d taken as the don of one of the two most powerful cartels in the western hemisphere.
Charles told the hotel manager he’d taken Spanish lessons and desired a more challenging job. Seeing an opportunity, the manager hired him as the night desk clerk at a much nicer hotel. It was owned by the same man, and he used the facility for the same reason he used the fleabag hotel, but with a much better clientele. The new night desk clerk, the owner reasoned, wouldn’t be intelligent enough to relay any messages to anyone about the illegal activity conducted during his shift. If he did, the manager would just laugh and say the clerk wasn’t a very smart person and didn’t understand what he’d seen.
Of course, the “special needs” janitor/desk clerk spoke five languages fluently, one of them being Spanish. Additionally, his superiors had been so impressed when he took an intelligence test that they found a way to let him out of prison. He was then obligated to do their bidding, lest he be sent back behind bars. The one thing he asked in return was that he be able to contact his one known relative once per month. He was allowed to do this, if he texted from a burner phone and destroyed it immediately afterward. The caveat was that he must not use more than four words in the text, so that it couldn’t be traced back to him and disclose his location.
He was then given the name of Charles Harvey by the CIA when he retired from the military and joined that organization as a clandestine agent. It wasn’t the name he'd used while deployed as a special forces soldier. He couldn’t reveal that name to anyone, even his closest relative. His brother only knew him now by the code name that the two men had agreed on to identify him: Miko. No last name, or perhaps, no first name. The word for three trees growing together in the Japanese language fit him perfectly, because he’d gone by three names in his life. The CIA adopted this as his codename after studying his military file. He was, they decided, as strong as a mighty tree.
Miko thought up the idea of presenting himself as a gay man in the military when he joined the US Army. This identity earned him privacy, which he craved, although it wasn’t exactly the truth. The truth was that Charles Harvey didn’t identify, sexually, as gay or straight. Nor did he think of himself as transexual or metrosexual. He had little interest in the opposite gender, and even less interest in his own gender in that matter. He merely craved his privacy.
The agent suspected that his overbearing adoptive mother, who was in her forties when he was born, may have contributed to this. She and her husband wanted a baby so badly that they spoiled their youngest child unimaginably. When Miko’s father died, his only brother was a teenager. Teenagers don’t desire to have affection poured on them by their maternal parent, especially if the teen is a boy. So, Miko’s mother poured all the love and affection she had for her entire family onto her younger child. Her husband was gone, and her older child was a distant teenager. His mother’s constant attention made the lad feel suffocated. He cherished his privacy in his adulthood because of his mother’s extreme affection.
Since his identity as a gay man had worked well for him in the army, Charles decided to keep that identity when he joined the CIA. If anyone recognized him from his Army Ranger days, he or she would assume Miko to be gay. That protected his privacy, since he would pretend that no man would ever be good enough to earn his affection. He was better able to protect those who were under his watch by doing this.
Miko had his reasons for asking a young American to move into his clandestine abode. One reason was that he was sure the American youth wouldn’t turn to a same-sex relationship.
The American had followed a woman all the way from New Jersey to Bogota. He was most assuredly not gay. He also had elite computer skills, skills that identified him, according to Miko’s facial recognition software on his computer, as the best computer hacker in the world. These were skills that Miko could use to his advantage. Miko also needed a “beard” [2] to make his story of being a gay man more believable. The young American fit the bill as his “beard.”
That was why Miko pretended to make a play for the distraught American when he saw the young man at the restaurant/bar at El Hotel Grande, where Miko was employed as the desk clerk. He went into the bar and sought out the American after he observed the man enter the hotel. His phone buzzed, informing him that this young man was Jacob Johnson, number three on the CIA’s Most Wanted list.
When Miko read the information on his computer, though, he had an idea: the world’s most proficient computer hacker could be of use to him in his real job with the CIA.
In addition to pursuing his classmate, it was also a convenient time for the computer hacker to leave the country; since he’d just hacked into the White House’s personal computers to write his dissertation on the habits of the first couple. He earned an “A” on the project, but the FBI and CIA were both concerned that he’d gathered information that shouldn’t be shared with the public, so it was a convenient time to leave his home country.
Jacob had followed his classmate to Colombia, he told Miko. He was struck by her beauty and unusual sense of humor, as well as her intelligence. When he arrived in his new country, he purchased an engagement ring for her at the pawnshop where he held a job to pay for rent and food while he was writing his doctoral dissertation on foreign cultures. He couldn’t risk being inside the confines of his former home nation, once his paper was revealed to have been written with stolen information.
Princeton’s professor refused to remand Jacob’s grade, proclaiming the young man had used his cunning and skill to gather information that no one else was able to get. His grade and his degree remained intact. That allowed him to continue his education, but only outside the country and under an assumed name.
The object of Jacob’s affection, however, rejected his offer of betrothal when asked. She informed him that she was from a wealthy family that would only allow her to wed another wealthy countryman, not a foreigner who had to purchase a ring from a pawnshop. Their clandestine affair while the two were in graduate school, the young lady offered, must be forgotten by both parties. It would be best for all concerned, Juanita Juarez warned.
The young man was beside himself with grief when he came to the restaurant/bar at El Hotel Grande to drink his troubles away.It was the only way he could forget the most interesting woman he had ever known, he believed. Miko saw his chance to have someone with elite computer skills be in his debt if he offered the American a place to stay—rent free—and an ear to chew on if he chose to do so. He also offered the young man a reprieve from his troubled romantic life.
It seemed strange to those who knew as much about the desk clerk as anyone—which wasn’t much—that he would invite another man to live in his house, apartment, or duplex. No one was exactly sure where he lived. Miko liked it that way.
However, Miko recognized the signs of a heartbroken young man. As he entered the bar/restaurant, he sought out the American and offered a sympathetic ear. He then offered to let the American stay with him until he’d recovered from the heartbreaking story Jacob told.
Miko implied that Jacob may be “playing for the wrong team” when it came to romance. The distraught American was depressed enough to take Miko up on his offer of moving into the agent’s clandestine abode, even though the two men had just met. Miko made it clear, though, that nothing would happen until Jacob was ready. It would be the American’s decision if anything romantic did happen between the two men. Miko hoped that day would never come. So far, it hadn’t.
However, Jacob turned the tables and used Miko’s information to his advantage. The young man must be dealt with, Miko decided. But Jacob fled to Texas when he hacked Miko’s computer and learned of his plan. Miko had a more immediate threat now, though. He must first deal with the threat of one man bent on world domination who had just, by chance, landed in his territory. Little did he know that he would be the liaison that would bring these two men together.
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