19
Scotch Thoughts
Three Little Spies
He had the windows rolled down and his elbow resting on the door. The cooler night air was beginning to warm, he could sense spring on the breezes and he knew that very soon the boat basin around the Jefferson Memorial was going to come alive with cherry blossoms. Maybe he and Amanda could take a leisurely walk there some day for a lunch break? Wasn't that where it had all began almost three years ago when he had tried to shake her off so unsuccessfully? God, he was glad that she had stuck to that case like she had! The broad smile that was taking over his face at the moment was becoming a bit more familiar to him now. He hadn't been able to wipe it off for the past 24 hours, ever since he and Amanda and the other four members of that international team had landed at Dulles.
Had it only been a week ago that he was in knots about how to incorporate all of the new realities that Amanda had brought into his life? And then to add to that turmoil he had been assigned to what he was sure was going to be an impossible international case with those jackals, Isaac Petrovich and Chien Chang. And then Billy and Francine had thought it would be a brilliant idea to throw Amanda in on it too. He still hadn't figured out how to reconcile all that was going on inside of him, and now he had to be holed up on a plane with his worst enemies and the woman he was falling in love with all the while trying to protect her and his nation's secrets. It was too much, he was sure of it…. And yet, now he had realized, it was exactly what he had needed, personally and professionally.
Maybe the whole world was changing. Maybe the cold war that he had been so used to was thawing out, and maybe it was even safe to let his own isolationism melt away as well. Maybe he wasn't the only person in the world trying to navigate some sort of peace and harmony in their life? The whole couple of days had been an eye opening experience. What he had realized standing there drinking vodka was that people were people, just like Amanda had always been trying to show him. All of them were the same, they were all human. It didn't matter if they lived behind the iron curtain or behind some wall of their own making. They were all the same. They needed each other. He had needed Petrovich and Chang and they him. He had needed Amanda and he had discovered that he wasn't the only man who needed a partner – personally as well as professionally. Those two hardball enemy agents had been relying on the women in their lives. He had seen interdependence at its best being showcased during that case.
He had been trained to play the game. There were bad guys and good guys, and he had picked his side and had trained all his life to play this espionage game. He had never really seen the world full of people with emotions and needs except for power and conquest. Ever since his parents had been torn from him, he had thought of life as one long struggle between the hunter and the hunted, and any weakness, whether emotional or otherwise, was a deficit. All of that had only been enforced by his uncle and his childhood spent on military bases.
All of that structure that had been built around him had begun to crumble as Amanda had gotten further and further involved in his life. Yet she had never been a part of his international gigs, not like this. She had been an accessory in allied parts of Europe a few times, but working so closely like this with such adversarial agents, who would think it heroic to turn on each other was one of the biggest cases of his career – of any agent's career! At first he had been very hesitant to have her along. His gut was instantly tying itself back into the knots of the other week as he heard Billy and Francine proposing that Amanda assist him. But thank God the lessons he had learned about himself and Amanda during the Towne case were so fresh to him. If Billy thought that Amanda was the one for the job then he would ignore those knots. Hell, he had enough trouble overriding his own training so that he could make this crazy international coalition work.
Now he was thanking God that Billy had insisted on Amanda's presence. He wasn't sure how he would have done it without her. In fact, that was what he was aware of right now more than anything. Amanda's presence in every part of his life was becoming very necessary. It wasn't as if he was dependent on her, no, it was just that he was becoming pretty convinced that he was better at everything with her by his side. That was what had become so clear to him as he sat there next to her on the couch in the plane. He had heard Billy's remark to Amanda about keeping him on an even keel – and it didn't matter because he had been right. Amanda knew him better than any of them and having her friendly face there had made all the difference. And it wasn't just that he had a friendly face, it was because it was Amanda's. Her face was the one most dear to him. Heck, he had been drawn to her for what seemed like forever now. It hadn't been that long ago that he had been sneaking looks at her while they were sitting there in the Cumberland hiding from King Cobra. He had tried then to tell her how much she meant to him. He had been left with the hope that she had understood that having her as his partner was the part that he liked so much about his job. Yes, he had been struggling to put all of the parts together since then, and he knew he had made a mess during the Towne case. But now he knew that embracing her presence in this international coalition had been his first step in making the mission work. He couldn't imagine what would have happened if Amanda hadn't been there. He hadn't really even had an internal rebuttal to Col. Sung's assumption that Amanda was his superior. Maybe she was superior to him in some things. But he did not agree with Amanda when she insisted that she was "no agent." She most certainly was - he was beginning to think of her as one. And he'd had no problem letting her take on the task of infiltrating Food for Thought. It had made him proud that the others had agreed. It had been the first thing they had all agreed upon! And that was when they had begun to form some sort of loosely cohesive coalition.
Apparently he wasn't the only world class spy to have realized that they were better agents and men with a special woman by their side. This pain in the ass assignment had not only saved the world from nuclear destruction, but it had also shown him a way out of his own personal stalemate about what to do with his feelings for Amanda. Just a few days ago his life had seemed impossibly complicated, but now, after this mission to save détente, not only was the world still at peace, his life also was making some more sense. He had seen it so clearly as he watched Petrovich and Chang. He was a man, maybe more of a normal man than he had ever known, just like they were. He had something right there in front of him that he had better not let get away while he deliberated with himself how to maneuver. The Russian and the Chinese men hadn't. He had that beautiful friendly face right there. He was falling in love with a wonderful woman, one who made him a better agent and a better man. One who had a cute nose, a wonderful smile and beautiful eyes. A woman who could put bull headed spies in their place with the same grace that she did her teenage sons. One who somehow managed to save détente as well as make normal look particularly inviting. He could be an agent and a man. Was normal something he could have? Was it something that he wanted?
So leaning there on the bar in the lounge of the Agency's 747, he had finally allowed himself to leisurely gaze at Amanda's familiar, beautiful face. He had quieted all of the voices that had told him that he couldn't know her or be known by her, and he had timidly begun. For all of the times that he had felt adolescent around her in all of his faltering attempts to communicate to her how she had affected his life and his heart, this time had been possibly the most awkward. But even as Petrovich and Chang had challenged him in the field of international espionage, somehow having them there had kept him on this task as well.
He loved thinking about the way she had felt his gaze and had turned to face him, how out of their good friendship she had been insistent and asked her final testy , "What?"
And then he had told her she had a cute nose? Oh, Stetson you are so smooth! Really! But he had saved it. He wasn't going to stop at her nose. He told her how glad he was that her eyes could communicate volumes to him during a case without her even speaking and how important reading them had become to him. He told her how her smile always lit up a room and how he loved the way one smile from her could disarm the most hostile agent. And there he had to stop before he got too carried away. He asked her if she was available for dinner that night, and he hadn't been too surprised that she had promised to spend the evening with her family. It hadn't upset him at all because that was Amanda. She could cut to the chase with the world's top spies, and yet, she valued her family above anything else.
So they had made plans for tonight. It was time to begin. He was going to go slowly in this relationship, but this time his caution wasn't because he didn't know where he wanted a relationship with her to go, or even because he was confused about how. He knew what he was building towards, but he was going to build slowly out of respect, no, it felt more like reverence. He didn't just want this relationship to be about what he wanted. He respected Amanda so much that he wanted to honor every nuance of who she was. He wanted to take the time to know every detail of her. He was done feeling around testing the waters with Amanda. This was a date! This was the beginning of the rest of his life – of their lives he hoped. And he fiddled around to find just the right station for background music.
