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the tray by the television and leaving again.
    “You take a drink first,” she said,
wanting the man to prove that the drink wasn’t drugged, worried that after a
few sips that she’d be unconscious on the floor.
    The man picked up the beer and took a
long gulp.
    “It’s not drugged,” he said.  
    Believing him, the woman took a sip
from the beer, a beer that tasted like heaven, a beer better than other beers
somehow, a taste improved by her need for it, by her thought that perhaps this
will be the last beer of her life, the last beer before these men torture her
and rape her and kill her or sell her into some kind of modern day slavery. She
pounded the pack onto her palm before opening the cellophane, pulling away the
silver liner over the cigarettes and tossing it onto the table. The woman
removed a cigarette and put it between her lips: it was like seeing a long-lost
friend, having that cigarette between her lips. The man, lighter in hand,
leaned over and lit it, and she took a couple long puffs before flicking the
ashes onto the floor.   She worked on the
beer and he sat there silently as she did so.
    “It isn’t polite to stare,” she said
to him. He had dark, nearly black hair, and olive skin, which made his blue
eyes stand out even more. Looked like one of the black Irish.  
    “Would you like another?” he asked her
when she finished her drink.
    “No,” she said as she snuffed the
cigarette out on the bottom of her shoe, sending ashes cascading onto the
carpet beneath. “But I would appreciate it if you would tell me who you are and
what I am doing here.”

 
    *
    “I am sorry that we had to get you
here in the way that we did,” he began. “Some relationships start,” he paused
to search for the word, “awkwardly.”  
    They sat for a leaden minute in
silence. Finally, she asked, “Who are you?”
    The man turned over the folder on the
table, and the woman spotted her full name, her Christian name as her mother
would have said, printed on a neat label on the tab.
    “You may call me Simeon,” the man
answered, finally.
    She told him, “I see that you know who
I am.”
    “Yes,” he said. “We know who you
are.”   Simeon opened the folder.
“Although from what I understand, you prefer to be called ‘X’.”
    She was surprised that he had that
knowledge, surprised to hear the name coming out of his mouth. Only a select
group of people had ever called her X.
    “That is a name I am referred to in
certain circumstances.”
    “Look,” he said, “we don’t need to
beat around the bush, do we?” He turned over the pages in the folder until he
arrived at a photo of her in full dominatrix costume. She had absolutely no
idea how he had gotten the photograph of her dressed so. “We know what you do
for a living.”
    X took the photo from the folder and
examined it for a moment, trying to remember the last time that she had worn
that particular ensemble. “Who is ‘we’?”
    “We,” he said, nodding his head toward
the other room behind the two-way mirror, “are the Central Intelligence
Agency.”
    X felt a sense of relief then, and a
wave of comfort came over her as she decided that the likelihood of them killing
her had just shrunken significantly.
    “Show me your badge.”
    “ CIA agents don’t carry badges. But I’ll show you the
identification I use to get into headquarters.” He pulled out a laminated I.D.
card and showed it to her. X held it up and examined the holographics .
“Suffice it to say that my name is Officer Ryan Simeon, and that I am an
Operations Officer. We are also known as Case Officers. Our work is undercover
and both official and non-official.”
    The agent flipped a few more pages in
the folder until he came to one with X’s name and bank transactions on it. A
few of them were highlighted.
    “You see, we noticed some interesting
deposits in your bank account. Most people don’t know that certain deposits
trigger specific alerts to the federal