Madison's Avenue by Mike Brogan

Author:Mike Brogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780692006344
Publisher: Lighthouse Publishing

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Eugene P. Smith positioned his chair so the sun would be in Madison’s and Kevin’s eyes if they faced him. He tossed two more Tylenol-#4 with codeine in his mouth and washed them down with a decent Pinot Noir. His aches had nearly vanished.

Watching them through the branches of a leafy plant, Smith had just lip-read Kevin Jordan’s phone conversation with a friend about the money at Tradewinds Investments. A friend they planned to dine with at Stonewalls tonight.

Maybe you’ll dine ... maybe you won’t.

He sipped more wine and looked out the window at a group of tourists window-shopping along the street. A skinny-legged old man with baggy Bermudas and rolled-down black socks was being dragged along by an obese woman in an orange moo-moo. A young schoolboy with a blue bookbag ran past them.

Smith’s mind raced back to his blue bookbag, the one his mother bought him at Kmart. He loved the multi-pocketed bookbag, just one of many gifts his middle-class parents had given him.

He’d been fortunate that his parents were decent, loving, friendly people – but unfortunate that he didn’t inherit their nice and friendly genes.

Early on, Eugene knew he was different. For one thing, he didn’t like kids. For another, he didn’t like adults. What he did like was military games and weapons. By age fourteen, he’d hidden twelve guns and twenty-three knives under the oak floorboards of his bedroom closet.

In high school he got straight A’s, and his tall, wiry frame helped him excel in basketball and track. But he was a loner, and shunned by the in-crowd cliques. Shunning never bothered him. It was like water off a duck’s back.

But in college he began to realize that projecting a friendlier image would help him. He decided to learn how to act more sociable and outgoing. He enrolled in some drama classes and quickly realized that acting sociable worked for him. He learned how to be easygoing and friendly with people, even with people he didn’t like.

After graduating with honors, he joined the CIA, the perfect venue for expressing his pent-up militaristic, aggressive tendencies. The CIA training was intense and he soon became skilled in using all kinds of weapons, and in hand-to-hand combat. After excelling in the courses at the Agency’s Farm near Williamsburg, Virginia, he was stationed at the U.S. embassy in London.

There he established valuable contacts at many foreign embassies in London’s posh Belgravia section. For the next seven years, Smith functioned as a CIA covert operative in Europe. He handled sanctioned and non-sanctioned assassinations against terrorists. He worked his contacts, paid them well and usually got good, valuable information in return.

But sometimes he got lies. Like from Hans Bauer, one of his contacts in Vienna. Smith had paid Bauer fifty thousand Euros for some information that turned out to be a lie. The lie led to the death of an American and a valuable Austrian contact.

Smith wanted vengeance.

One night, after gambling away some of the money Smith had given him, Herr Bauer strolled through Vienna’s Volksgarten Park.

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