Bad, Bad Seymour Brown by Susan Isaacs

Author:Susan Isaacs [Isaacs, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-18T13:56:53+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

There’s no more delicious way to be a detective than to drive to the town dock, climb down to the water’s edge, sit on a rock, and call your old boyfriend about your current case.

That old boyfriend with whom you will forever, sort of, remain in love. Not that either of you ever owned up to the “forever” part. But even after all these years, you suspect he feels the same about you.

Not that it mattered. Sami and I were far too temperamentally unsuited to sustain permanent coupling. If he went two weeks without slipping into a developing country to infiltrate a terrorist organization, he would start to get antsy. And I wanted to put down roots.

Sami Bashir and I. Muslim and Jew. While that barrier was not insurmountable, it was problematic. Neither of us was a Holy Roller, but we believed enough so we could never disavow.

We both worked for the Department of Justice. Not exactly a meet cute: he was an agent with the DEA, I with the FBI, and we were thrown together as members of New York’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. That gave us lots of chances to exchange snide remarks about each other’s agencies and also to spend a great deal of time together.

Sami went undercover throughout the Western Hemisphere. He played a drug dealer, drug buyer, terrorist, arms dealer, corrupt banker. He could play anything, except maybe a DEA agent, because no matter whether he was clean-shaven or bearded, buzz cut, in a kufi skullcap, ponytailed, or shiny-headed, no one could look at him and think Drug Enforcement Agency. An adjective like “disreputable” would flash through their mind, and that would be the most positive view. When Sami was in his role, he came across as more reprehensible than some of the thugs and fanatics he worked to vanquish.

For once, the early-morning wind was blowing my hair off my face, not into my mouth. But I could tell by the length of the wait until we were connected that there would be no video. It wasn’t crappy internet service; the call passed through a series of security checks. Sami was out of the country in a place that even a person with my level of security clearance shouldn’t know about. So my pale beige foundation and dark brown mascara and peach lip balm to produce a natural self who glowed (as if from sunbeams shooting up from the bay) was wasted effort.

“Been a long time,” he said in Spanish, so I knew he was probably in Paraguay or Argentina. If he were in his native country, Brazil, he’d greet me in Portuguese and then, when I said Bom dia, he’d switch to Spanish and tell me, That’s right, you only have those two words of Portuguese.

If he’d answered my call in Arabic, I’d have assumed he was undercover and not visiting his Uncle Lateef. The tri-border region in South America had some Muslim communities, and among them were Muslim radicals who sold drugs to finance their ops in the Americas.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.