Chapter 7

Southern Florida

At 0443 the SUV had been unloaded and Clara had entered the canal. She attached the string of waterproof packs to a tether at her waist with a click of a D-ring. The Gator Gone was stowed in a pack, unused. She started swimming with a breast stroke, just under the water; it was nearly silent. Soon, she had moved her hands ahead of her, and was just undulating her body and legs -- like a dolphin. She was moving at a rate that parted the water and left a wake, like a 130-pound, fast-moving, human-shaped torpedo. In just a few kicks, she reached the northern east-west branch of the canal. She turned west and picked up her pace. To her left, the southern bank, was the west-bound Alligator Alley highway. She noticed an eight-foot alligator laying on the northern, or swamp, side. The’gator didn’t flinch at the rapid, quiet disturbance in the canal.

In four minutes and twenty seconds, Clara covered the nearly one mile of canal and arrived at the slightly higher patch of land opposite the parking lot; she wasn’t even winded. It didn’t even register on her consciousness that she’d just obliterated the world record for swimming. The best humans in the world could swim a mile in about fourteen or fifteen minutes. A dolphin in a hurry can do it in about two and a half minutes; but of course, Clara wasn’t a dolphin -- but she was in a hurry.

On reaching the parking area, she crawled out of the swamp and quietly donned the camo uniform and face paint. The mottled watch cap neatly covered her close-cropped blonde hair. The backpacks were easy to conceal in the heavy brush. It took two minutes to affix the lasers to the movement platforms, and another five to conceal the platforms with line-of-sight to the palm trees in the parking lot, across the canal. She looked around and decided to secrete the remaining lasers to some lower bushes on the less firm ground to her left.

Her preparations complete, Clara settled in to wait and she decided to have a word, later, with Georg; no provision had been made for her to empty her bladder. She decided to leave no DNA trail and that meant that she peed into the wet suit. Yuck.

That was the reaction of a classical pianist to the situation; her training in the IDF / Mossad hadn’t covered this kind of situation. She wasn’t a forensic scientist, all she knew about DNA identification came from CSI and NCIS, where they performed TV-miracles. In the real world, urine would disappear into the swamp water very quickly, but she didn’t know that.

As daylight broke over the swamp, a light blue, Chevrolet Monte Carlo pulled into the lot, backed into a parking space that had a good view of the east side, and cut its lights. It might have been an over-tired driver taking a break, but Clara didn’t think so. It was only eight miles from the entrance to the highway, and only fifteen miles or so from the populated areas of suburban Miami-Fort Lauderdale. No, she was sure that there were one, or perhaps two, people who were normally assigned to the Miami British Consulate.

It was 0658 and she had over eighteen hours to wait, with only the mosquitoes, various other swamp insects and wildlife to keep her company. And of course, there were any number of alligators to be dealt with. There were too many issues for her to think of: What caused Antonin’s disappearance? Would she be able to resume her career after this was over? What the hell was she doing out here? Where was the nearest alligator? She twitched her neck slightly to chase a mosquito or maybe it was her imagination. Could she get away with fooling MI6 into giving her the info she wanted? What if she couldn’t find Nin? What if she could? After all, it was just her conviction that had set her on this ... what was it? A quest? A wild goose chase? Suppose her contact with MI6 prompted them to scramble Nin’s whole plan? And how did Georg manage to get nearly $5 million? Not to mention: should she contact Mossad when she had information from MI6 -- if she got any information from MI6, that is.

She snuck a look at her wristwatch. 0702. Great. Four whole minutes had passed.

She went through the volumes of text in her memory to come up with something that would calm her mind at this moment.

A laugh bubbled to the top of her mind. She thought of a line from a book that was the first book in English she read; something she read because it was a sexy novel that titillated a young girl. The quote came from’Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by D.H. Lawrence: “ Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality.” In other words,” Don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow” -- sort of. She thought a bit, and came up with several hundred references to that idea ... and she didn’t even have the information database that an internet search engine had access to.

0705. Great. Another three minutes had passed. That only left several hundred three-minutes intervals to go.

She looked over at the Monte Carlo, and concentrated. She wanted to see into the interior of the car. Really wanted to. Suddenly she had a blazing headache behind her eyes, but she caught a glimpse of a man reading an electronic book. He was youngish -- twenties or early thirties perhaps -- in a blue shirt, open at the collar. She could even tell the color of his hair -- sandy -- and his eyes -- medium blue. He looked up just when her’vision’ of him coalesced, then looked back at his e-book. She blinked in surprise, and her vision returned to normal: the light blue car some hundreds of feet away. The headache was gone.

Without moving her head, she glanced right then left. To the left, she caught some movement near the canal; the bushes were rustling slowly. Then she saw the’gator. He was a big one: 10 or 12 feet long.’Thank goodness I’m not afraid,’ she lied to herself, knowing that it was a lie even as she thought it. She remained motionless, even as her mind was going a thousand miles an hour. She watched the’gator -- even named him: Slater the Gator. She was sure -- with no particular reason -- it was a’him.’ Slater moved so slowly that you could hardly see him move. He’d lift a foot, move it glacially to the next point on his path, and put it down. Then he’d do it again with another limb. Eventually, even a glacier gets to the sea, and eventually Slater the Gator got to the edge of the canal. He slid into the murky water with a leap -- there was no other word for it -- so sudden that Clara couldn’t imagine the’before’ of this picture any more. There was only a large ripple on the surface of that water.

She stared at the ripple until it wasn’t any more. She blinked and looked at her watch again. 1005. More than three hours had passed. She looked at the car again. It was still there.

Clara decided to put her mind to developing a mosquito repelling aura. It wasn’t a very hot day here in the Everglades swamp. She eventually got past the humidity -- her estimate was that it was about 225% humidity. She wondered if that meant she was underwater, sitting there in near immobility. She decided that no, it was less comfortable than actually being in the water. She kept looking out for Slater the Gator, but he had gone further down the canal. A small deer bounded from over her shoulder and headed down to the canal for a drink. Clara had noticed the lack of genitalia on the Great Dane sized, dun colored deer and jumped to the obvious conclusion. It was a’she.’ She lowered her head to the water and drank. Then suddenly the deer lifted her head and twitched her ears. She jumped four feet in the air, just as a’gator’s open mouth closed on the now-empty spot on the canal bank. The deer, of course, came down, about three feet to the side, and without even looking at the alligator who wanted to have an afternoon snack, she leaped into the stand of trees that was slightly to Clara’s right. And then she was gone. The’gator, too, had disappeared back into the water.

Without even a glance, Clara knew that some of the laser platforms had been jostled out of position. She’d have to readjust all of them. The range of movement on each of the small platforms was limited, they needed to be pre-targeted to some degree. She thought about getting up; then she looked at the Monte Carlo again. She watched for half an hour, concentrating as she’d done before, but nothing happened. Her vision zoomed in when the door opened and he stepped out. He looked around nervously, as he moved closer to the open door. She smiled to herself as her enhanced vision detected a stream of golden liquid hit the ground. He fiddled with his zipper for a moment and then got back into the car. She watched as he got back into the sedan and chuckled again as he ‘adjusted’ himself in his pants and put a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the bank where Clara was hiding, among the bushes. She peed into her wet suit again.

She decided to wait until darkness to make the readjustments to the platforms. Clara wondered for perhaps the thousandth time if he had an infrared setting on his binocs. What if the Brits could figure out that they were dealing with ‘just’ a single, solitary woman? She made a decision that wasn’t in the plan. She decided to be an alligator. She would do her negotiating with MI6 from a prone position. A lower profile to an infrared would make her profile easier to hide, the water would partially hide her heat profile. Slowly, hiding her movements to times when the watcher wasn’t looking, she dug a shallow ditch behind her. Naturally, the water level being what it was, the bottom of the little ditch filled with water.’Oh well,’ she thought,’mosquitoes don’t go under water.’