Count the present days until today arrives (TEREZA)

 

(Natasha warned me: "Bard is almost impossible to track, but only until he starts drinking" --- in fact, food, drink, and fornication; only today are naive critics in the United States beginning to realize how faithful Norman Mailler was in his vicious and dirty description of the CIA in The Whore's Ghost (most of the agents suffer from mental illness) --- in my last assignment here in Salvador, Bard's abrupt choice as the Antonina dossier's patriation agent in America was, for me, a bland postcard with a tidal wave forming in the background --- only he could disembark at La Guardia Airport without being taken to the Secret Service's "back room," completely plausible given his current fame, as well as reeking of old, abandoned formulas for genocidal rocketry, early warning systems for defense, killer drones navigating their own aerial invisibility, and a willingness to steal state secrets cold; a bag of bad literary ideas combined with empty appetites for success and justice, plus a slight inclination towards the melodramatic ''xingón'', typically Spanish --- According to K's final instructions, for a good, safe, and engaging approach, I should constantly play on Bard's perplexity, his anxiety at the moment, and his fear of a new frustration in life: Natasha had been co-opted almost the same night as the event with Morell, on the other side of the ocean, to which the fact that she was Russian and quickly convinced herself that she was being drawn into a patriotic and bloodless battle against a set of very perverse political, economic, and military forces contributed greatly, something K could only talk about with a laugh, as always. --- A cup of strong coffee and a vodka drink that morning, as an essential prerequisite for putting our grand plan into action. --- From the pool at the Wish, we received updated news of Bard's movements along the Salvador waterfront. --- Toby: "No doubt, at the moment, there's some kind of chaotic free will commanding the atoms of his body: third beer in twenty minutes: bar below the Oceania building, across from the Lighthouse." ------ K: "Enough war talk under the sun. I'm not the evil guy who orchestrated all this. Nor are we a gang of cheap mercenaries trying to outwit Langley and a portion of our own Special Forces. This is just an unforeseen opportunity to create a beautiful cover, a fortuitous occurrence, which makes everything easier if we can act quickly. We've left behind a trail of failed operational screw-ups by the enemy, and they're probably stuck in a hotel room discussing bonuses, pensions, and fantasies about their own performance with their resentful superiors. Facilitators? Players? The buzz stratifies horribly until it reaches the ears of someone in the Government or the Senate, and perhaps a smidgen of it appears in a confusing and cramped paragraph in the article by some crazy journalist who has captured more than he can process. The less accurate information, the greater the amount of wounded pride on the scene." Over (laughs) '' --- For operational reasons, I didn't even know where K and Natasha were, and I was feeling sick about maybe having to have sex again less than twenty-four hours after the night at the campsite with K, the damn ''operational'' sex with one of those men strong for alcohol --- --- I think that's why I started drinking early too, so as not to make the mistake of playing the Argentine blonde who shits nicely; from the beginning, I had entered the business for the adventure and some easy money without having to study, as an improvised extension of a series of operations by the Russian embassy in my own country. I didn't consider myself a heroine or a psychopath. However, after four months "located" in that campsite of surfers and potheads, I was thinking about death more than usual: COFFEE!, and dirty, disconnected memories of sex, when I drank, travels around the world and arranged meetings with non-governmental interveners from the financial market, industry and commerce, all thirsty for classified information denied to the CIA and MI6 due to "transnational greed" and a lack of patriotism --- Basic intelligence, in all countries, had become a soft talk, capable of spending ten years financing cover-ups that still only existed due to administrative negligence and incompetence ---