Family affairs
Don't fall in love with me. DREADFUL PENNY Ep. 3
From Episode 2: Penny, back at the Chamoun compound, questions her loyalties.
“You are an amazing human being,” Fuad said. “No agent of ours has gotten as far as you.”
“You mean survived.”
“Perhaps tonight’s dinner invitation was a mistake.”
She was about to agree when the door from the kitchen swung open and the cousins began covering every square inch of the table with dessert plates, the clanking of china putting an end to the conversation. Etienne mumbled excuse me and shuffled into the kitchen. Fuad looked at her as though to dare her to taunt his younger brother some more.
Another emotion gathered itself into a wave. Not grief, as memories of her father might trigger. She felt a powerful awareness that this would be her final assignment for the Chamouns.
She wasn’t hungry and just pushed things around with a fork while the men tucked in and Jamal filled everyone’s glasses with more arak.
“Penny, you’re not eating,” Fuad said. “Try the mamaal.”
“A minute ago, you were accusing me of getting fat.”
“Ya lahwy,” Fuad sighed.
Jamal and Isa began to clear the table. She got up before she said something she’d regret, and took an empty plate into the kitchen. Fuad could afford an army of servants, but the family compound was off limits to most people, and the men liked doing the chores together, as if they were just a normal family. Etienne had his hands in the sink, suds up his arms. She put a plate in the water. The cousins headed out to retrieve more from the table but she heard Fuad tell them to see to the dogs.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” she said in French.
He sponged a plate methodically, but she could sense his tremors.
“I’m…I’m working on a new one. German. Very difficult.”
She sighed. “I don’t need another passport.”
“It should be done by the end of the year.”
“Etienne, you need to stop. Fuad’s right.”
There was dignity in his glance, though. “You never know.”
“The Japanese one cost how much? Two hundred thousand dollars?”
“Can’t you see, it’s a work of art?”
“And I’m your muse.”
“I don’t care what my brother says.”
She took a kitchen towel to one of his cleaned plates. “Etienne, I’m never going to use all of these identities. It’s a waste. Not to mention a security risk.”
He ran the water. “You might, one day, you might…”
“What?”
“Want to run away and never be found. By anybody.”
“What about you, Etienne?”
He froze. “What about me?”
“Could you still find me? You could, couldn’t you? Trace the credit cards, track the phones’ digital footprints. Your creations, your secrets.”
“Fuad couldn’t. Nor Daliyah. Nor the targets out there, all the people you’ve burned.” For the first time that night, he looked her in the eye. “Only me.”
“You shouldn’t fall in love with me, Etienne. You’ve seen what happens.”
“Am I one of your assignments?”
“No. Never. But…I…wouldn’t know what to do with someone who wasn’t.”
Back to washing. “The German encryption is really very difficult.”
She returned to the dining room where Fuad spooned his empty espresso cup. “Go outside,” he said in a tone that suggested he had been weighing his resentments.
He didn’t get up, so she took this as an instruction, not a suggestion. She walked alone through the hallway to the front door and out to the compound’s walled enclosure. The air was sweet and crisp with fir and cone. The two rottweilers immediately accosted her, nearly toppling her over. They were trained to snap and tear, but right now they just wanted licks and kisses.
“Down,” barked a command in gravelly Arabic. Penny made out the woman’s silhouette in the dimness of the night, the soft lights along the wall illuminating her strong-willed hair and her tall, mannish body swathed in fine Oxford Street pinstripes. Her cigarette glowed.
Daliyah Chamoun spun the webs for the network’s small army of hustlers, hackers and honey pots. She caught them, trained them, ran them, cocooned them, and ate.
“Etienne is brilliant, but weak.”
“Spying on your own family now, Daliyah?”
“You’re not my family. No matter what my brother says.” Penny followed her in a slow walk across the compound, the dogs dancing around them. “It’s time. Get Buribaev in your bed and make sure you’re so good he takes you with him to Dubai.”
“I understand.”
“He will be vulnerable alone with you in Dubai. Sedate him. Use his body to access his laptop. Contact Stack and follow his directions for the decryption.”
“How do I get out?”
“Find a way to the safehouse in Deira for exfil. We’re looking at exit routes by sea.”
Exit routes, still looking. Since the horror in London, she had been all about who and why, this new Penny hatching from a chrysalis of numbness into a cold wokeness. Tonight, though, she wanted to know what and when. “What do I need to do?”
“Place his thumbprint on his laptop. Hold open his eyelid and make sure the scan succeeds. Stack will be two floors below you, with a new programmer.”
“A new one?”
Daliyah ignored her lament. “Buribaev’s laptop is protected against Internet hacking. You will install a keylogger, allowing Stack and Lev to capture his encryption key. They will then be able to unlock the disk drive. It won’t take long. Thirty minutes.”
“Nobody leaves Timur alone for thirty seconds.”
“They’ll leave him alone if he’s in bed with you.”
“What do I sedate him with?”
“We’ve prepared a midozolam gel. It will look like a contact lens. Don’t stick it in your eye, it’ll kill you.”
“Midozolam—can’t we just spike his drink?”
“The stomach absorbs too much, especially when it’s diluted in a liquid. A big man like Buribaev, he might not even notice. Max didn’t.” She smiled as the rottweilers tussled over a big fallen tree branch.
“Max? Your dog?”
“He weighs 130 pounds, that one. I gave him half the dose we’d give Buribaev. Nothing happened.”
“So use something stronger.”
“We need his pupils to look normal. For the scan to access the keylogger.”
“I can’t bring a syringe with me. My cover doesn’t make me a diabetic. Even if it did, his security guys wouldn’t allow it. Kaysm Shokay goes through my stuff all the time.”
“No syringes. No capsules to empty into his drink. The most effective administration of midozolam, other than sticking a needle in his rectum, is buccal.”
“Buccal—what does that mean? Bucco, mouth?”
“Cheek.”
“Cheek,” Penny repeated.
“The drug must be on something that he will put in his mouth and suck on. Vigorously, so the capillaries inside his cheeks absorb it. You understand?”
“Okay,” Penny said, “he has to suck on something. What, I give him a lollipop?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
She thought it over. She could put it on her finger, but how to get him to suck on that? Then she realized what Daliyah intended. “My breast.”
“It seems the most likely instrument.”
She wondered how long Daliyah had spent concocting this one, and if she had gotten a rise out of it. Probably.
“But if I smear that stuff on my nipple, it’ll knock me out—or worse.”
“If untreated, you would be paralyzed, catatonic, and maybe dead.”
“You could say it with a little less enthusiasm.”