Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

Charley was shamed to painfully remember his reaction to that had been thinking, What the hell is Sweaty talking about?

“Karl wants to go to the cemetery?” Otto had asked incredulously.

“He’s told me what a saint, a truly godly woman, his mother was,” Sweaty went on. “I want to be there when he asks her blessing on our marriage.”

“Karl’s mother was truly a saint,” Otto agreed.

Charley was even more ashamed to remember his reaction to that, his thinking: Jesus Christ, she’s amazing. She hasn’t been in his car thirty seconds and she’s put ol’ Otto in her pocket. Well, you don’t get to be an SVR podpolkovnik without being able to manipulate people.

Proof that Otto was in Sweaty’s pocket had come almost immediately. As soon as they got to the house—several minutes later—Otto turned from the front seat and announced, “There’s no sense in you two going into the house. I’ll have someone take care of your luggage and then Kurt can take you to the cemetery.”

The only reason, Charley remembered with chagrin, that he hadn’t congratulated Sweaty on her manipulation of Otto on the way to the cemetery was because the chauffeur would have heard him.

Sweaty looked up at Charley.

“Aren’t you going to pray?” she asked.

“I’m an Episcopalian,” he said. “We pray standing up.”

That’s bullshit and I know it is. What it is is yet another proof that I’m a shameless liar. I wasn’t praying.

And don’t try to wiggle out of the shameless liar business by saying that you’re a professional intelligence officer trained to instantly respond to a challenge by saying whatever necessary to get yourself off the hook.

Sweaty stood, took his hand, and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

“I’m glad we came here,” she said.

They started back to the car.

“What exactly did you pray for?” Charley asked.

“That’s between God, your mother, and me.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Sweaty said, obviously changing her mind. “I asked God to reward your mother for being such a good mother to you, and to give her everlasting peace now that I’ve taken over for her. And I asked your mother to pray to the Holy Virgin that I will be as good a mother to our baby as she was to you. And you?”

The reflexes of a professional intelligence officer trained to instantly respond to a challenge by saying whatever necessary to get himself off the hook kicked in automatically.

“I asked God to give my mother peace, and prayed for you and our baby,” he heard himself say.

Where the hell did that come from?

It doesn’t matter. If I didn’t actually do that, I should have.

God, if there are really no secrets from You, You know that.

And by the way, thank You for Sweaty and the baby she’s carrying.

When they got back in the car, Sweaty asked, in Russian, “Kurt, do you speak Russian?”

When it became evident that Kurt did not speak Russian, Sweaty said, in German, “I was just curious.”

Then she switched back to Russian.

“Well, what do you think is going to happen tonight? Do we get to fool around in your childhood bed, or is Otto the Pure going to put us in separate rooms at opposite ends of that factory you call a house?”

“Sweaty, I just don’t know.”