JCRM

Adrienne

A heat wave. Unbelievable. I could feel the sweat dripping down, collecting in the hollow of my back. The temperature had reached one hundred three degrees today when it was normally in the low eighties. It was still in the nineties at almost 19:00.

I looked at my watch and did a mental calculation, adjusting for the different time zones. Another fifteen minutes would make it 16:05 in England. I’d call then. We were having lunch tomorrow and hadn’t finalised our plans before I’d been called out of town unexpectedly.

“Wolf!”

“Yeah,” I responded to the shout. “Over here.”

Hell came around the corner. “Just received word the transport is delayed until 23:00.”

“Damn it.”

Unwelcome news. We’d just arrived back at Incirlik Air Base from a camp outside of Kavalcık in Turkey, as close to the Syrian border as one could get without actually crossing over. The transport’s late arrival meant we wouldn’t get back to England until very early Tuesday morning. With the drive back to London from Brize Norton and appointments starting at 9:00 am, I was assured of no sleep until tomorrow night.

“You know how it is,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I am going to grab something to eat. You?”

I’d taken a seat on a crate in the shade and was about as comfortable as I was going to get while still having some privacy. “Nah, thanks, Hell. I’ll wait a while. Got a call to make. Come get me when you’re done.”

“Will do,” she acknowledged then turned and walked off.

‘Hell’ is my nickname for her. Halleli Yael Peretz is her actual name. A little over 5’ 8”. Short chestnut hair. A whipcord with not an ounce of fat on her. She has the most fantastic eyebrows I’ve ever seen. Thick, with a natural arch framing her piercing brown eyes perfectly. Israeli accent. Doesn’t use many contractions like most native English speakers do. At times, her speech sounds very formal, almost awkward. Confident. Intense. Competitive. A bit of a temper on occasion. Has a fondness for dive bars, fast vehicles of any type on land, sea or air, and all sorts of weapons. Sleeps with whoever she’s in the mood to sleep with. Fucking crazy with a capital ‘c’. And probably a capital ‘f’. One of my best friends. One of the people I trust with my life.

We’d met years ago, seven to be exact, when I’d liaised with Mossad. We built up a lot of history that year. There were things only someone you’d shared them with could understand. That no matter what words you used, you could never quite relate them to someone who hadn’t experienced them. We didn’t need a lot of words. We knew.

I suppose our natures also suited our friendship. We were both naturally taciturn. Self-contained. Used to keeping secrets for a living. You do that long enough and sharing what you had for breakfast with anyone was an issue.

Of course, Alistair Taylor, my other best friend and self-appointed guardian of my ‘issues’, would insist childhood events governed my choice of careers so that keeping secrets, from those classified by a government to ones covered by non-disclosure agreements or attorney-client privilege, is my raison d’être. Well, keeping secrets and the hunt.

In any case, neither Halleli nor I pried into each other’s lives. I trusted she’d talk to me when she needed to. That she’d tell me what I needed to know. And she did the same.

When I’d finally left the CIA three and a half years ago and opened up my own shop, I’d asked her to come work for me. She’d accepted and moved to London. Hell liked to say I was the brains and she was the brawn. Pretty accurate, though I was fairly respectable in the brawn category and she was more than respectable in the brains category.

I checked my watch again and switched my thoughts to the recipient of my upcoming call, one Doctor Jillian Conover Ryder Marsden. About 5’ 3”. Eyes the colour of blue ice, tending to shade grey when she was unhappy or angry. Straight ash blond hair, falling a few inches below her shoulders. Wore it up in a knot most of the time. Absolutely beautiful neckline. Trim, shapely figure. Fair complexion. Has a fondness for pearls of any colour, size, and shape.

Always dressed impeccably, black was her colour of choice for business outfits, followed by ink blue, navy, then slate grey, but always, always with one quirk you wouldn’t expect — a playful piece of jewellery, the pattern on a scarf, just one thing that wasn’t strictly corporate. It was never anything very obvious. One needed to pay attention to see her very dignified ‘fuck you’ to a world that tried to put her in a box.

Jill was a hard read. Reserved. Very focused. Serious. Not quick to smile at all. A polite smile? Sure, but a real smile? Not so much. Didn’t engage in chit chat. Exuded power and confidence. Was incredibly charming and gracious when she needed to be. Walked with a purpose.

So very, very British. So very, very proper. Well, mostly. On the rare occasion, her Northern working class upbringing burst to the forefront when she had enough and the gloves came off. Then she turned into a bare-knuckled pit fighter. An impeccably dressed one in heels, but a pit fighter nonetheless. Very reminiscent of her accent — a combination of BBC English and the South East with a hint of Mancunian.

Oh, and, lest I forget, she was Landers’ golden girl. Landers was Landers Pharmaceuticals Corporation, a Global 500 company and Jill’s employer. A scientist by training, Jill had a masters in physiology and a PhD in neuropharmacology. She worked out of Landers’ research and development facility in Folkestone, first as a scientist working on the discovery of new medicines then rising through the ranks to her current position as Landers’ director of scientific policy and affairs in Europe.

I called her Landers’ guided missile, the weapon they used to implement their agenda. Tell Jill what the goal was then stay out of her way. A dog with a bone pales in comparison to Jill’s single-minded focus in pursuit of a goal. I understood that mindset all too well.

At the age of forty-eight, Jill breathed rarefied air. The favourite of Henry Forsham, Landers’ President and Chief Executive Officer, she negotiated the mine fields that were the corridors of power in government. Had the expertise and gravitas to wield her power and influence on committees and behind closed doors. Sat on several charity boards. Worked with the World Health Organisation. Was the brilliant, attractive scientist put in front of the cameras when Landers needed someone put in front of them.

She’d been in front of cameras and doing interviews in the press a lot lately. The last medicine she’d worked on before moving into an executive role was anacalderol, currently in phase III clinical trials and poised to become the next blockbuster drug for Landers, worth billions in revenue to the company. A miracle drug, some said, which treated hyposexual desire disorders, or HSDD, in both men and women. And who better to be the poster girl for a drug that improved your sex life than the very attractive, sexy scientist who created it?

She’ll tell you she didn’t create it. That it was the collaborative work of hundreds, if not a thousand or more, of her colleagues over the course of eight years which resulted in the new medicine. But that’s not the message Landers wanted to send. You don’t create demand and sell sex with a picture of a thousand people in lab coats. You do it with one sexy, smart scientist. Marketing 101. She understood that. Played the game.

She was married to a man named Paul. Had been for twenty years. No children. Lived in Sandgate, just outside Folkestone, about an hour and a half south east of London. Spent quite a bit of time travelling, commuting between Folkestone and London, where she stayed at Landers’ corporate flat in Mayfair, as well as all parts Europe — Brussels, Paris, and Geneva mostly — with the occasional trip to New York where Landers corporate headquarters was located.

In short, Jill is an incredibly intriguing puzzle I’ve been mulling over for almost a year. I don’t know if I’ll ever get enough of the pieces to solve it. I keep trying, though. We have the strangest…I don’t even know what it is. A friendship for lack of a better word, I suppose, but less and more at the same time. If pressed, I’d describe it as an incredibly slow, almost dating but not, exploration and discovery of certain aspects of each other on some weekdays, where we acknowledge some things but avoid others like the plague, going on for the past year that in all likelihood wasn’t ever going to develop into anything else for a number of reasons.

Unfortunate, as it was the single most satisfying…whatever…I’d ever experienced. Unlooked for. Nourishing to my brain and to my soul, though I don’t view a soul as some immortal, ethereal construct magically separating from my body on death to join the billions upon billions of other souls that had already met death. My soul was the core of me, those places and things deep inside me science hadn’t discovered and named yet. But Jill had discovered them and written her name all over them.

I’d no clue what we were doing, really. Whatever it is, it apparently serves both our purposes because we persist. I pulled my mobile out of my pocket, found her name under favourites and initiated the call.