Thorns Wear Roses
3
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
It is a town without a reputation.
Ordinances require a name to be bestowed, regardless of whether the plot between a tiny airport and a tinier diner merits a moniker. Hill Vista is possessed of neither hill nor vista, a place the economy has not troubled, has never entered. A place beholden not to progress or prospects. The sole evidence of life on this single, unlined, unlit strip of road is a wooden sign hanging between two rotting posts. The painted letters announce a motel. A motel of the sort that bodes merely by being. Of the sort that no one had bothered to christen.
Into a spiral notebook, the clerk registers the two strangers who arrive with the late blooming stars. They are of a suspicious nature, his darting eye informs. And that is better tolerated with tips. Elderly and likely the owner, the man's boxlike face suggests an escape from a punishingly square birth canal. The spine is meant for sitting while his odor stands apart. The presumed unwed couple is shown to the first room on the left, twin beds pushed near enough for suggestion while maintaining a fifties' sitcom propriety.
They decline.
"I must have an east-facing window," the foreign woman says.
Religion is inconsequential to the clerk, but the inconvenience appears grave. Still, eyes dulled with years and boredom travel to the man's hip, anticipating what the leather coat hides. There is a surplus of silence during which a decision is reached, recalculated and settled once more.
Into the darkened corridor stiff legs limp, shoving open a different door, offering no apology for the lack of sheets. If the new room is insufficient, they can whisper cruelties to their pagan gods on bare mattresses.
Walls give the impression of a distant association with ivory paint. A block of bland unornamented and, in fairness, unnoticed. Critiques are carefully folded into sighs, a conservation of energy. There is activity once the clerk departs, a haste tempered by careful fingers. What is shifted out of place, inspected and cataloged is returned to place.
"No bugs," one verifies.
"No surveillance," the other confirms.
There is nearly a sound as the immediacy is relaxed. Outside the double window, stars rescind their earlier aid and tuck away behind cloud cover. A sense that the world is finished for the night.
Ziva hunts for a thermostat, presently set to tropical elsewhere. There is no unit here, nor a clock, nor a lightbulb on her overhead lamp. Groans will note the quality of the mattress, the man regretting his gravity-assisted drop onto the surface of the bed nearest the door without prior assessment.
"Serta," Tony grumbles, "manufactured by masochists."
Ziva's dark head disappears into the bathroom. "Shower's designed by sadists."
Her small frame will test the dimensions of the altered broom closet. The drains prove inadequate as her shower approaches a bath within minutes. There is no dirt clinging to her skin, but knuckles will scrub off the last three states as though their dust had hitchhiked. Under the glaring sun and beneath crippling dark, she has endured confinement that will not rinse away. The company had been tense, a condition inflicting them both. Not unpleasant, but concern had killed conversation.
Her partner's eyes are not available to take in her rose-rubbed flesh. Ziva straightens the loose clothes puckering along damp joints. Her bed is closest to the window, promising a risen sun in hours. A dark backpack waits on her nightstand. Tony's own pack is close to tumbling off the lumpy rectangle straining to qualify as a pillow. Reaching inside his bag, her fingers scan a small compartment, empty of the lockpicks and modified bug detector.
Before the soothing act of gun maintenance can be completed, someone drums fingers on the motel door twice. Warning and assuring. The door swings open, Tony enters and puts the gear to bed. A second ill-advised flop and his eyelids preserve his vision from contemplating the unframed print taped to the wall.
Sweeping the first room had been assuaging curiosity, but experience ingrains thoroughness. Ziva shakes out her hair, letting the remaining droplets provide the sole contact with cleanliness this mattress will know. More water is deposited as they both turn to the ringing phone. The sticky surface is held to her ear and after a sharp hello, she waits. As before, there is no response on the other end.
Earlier, the car's engine had muffled the background sounds but now a trained ear detects a breath. Barely that. Then a dial tone erupts.
"Another test."
Their availability is not in question. Undoubtedly tracked from a distance, someone is ensuring they have followed the envelope's address, verifying their arrival at the location. In a wrongly-named town at a no-name motel with a clerk on the take. This employer selects federal agents to perform, to play. Therefore he must come to this scheme prepared.
They had rejected a south-facing and entirely wired room.
A moment later, a text message arrives. A stated purpose. An ideal.
Crime is an industry. Welcome.