Her name is Ivana Fokolotaya and she was in the same business as I was; trying to stop the international trade in weapons of mass destruction. This had nothing to do with Dubya's war on terror; it was concerned with the supply of weapons to the drug cartels in Mexico and warlords in Africa. Apart from the bloodshed caused by these weapons the intelligence community was concerned with the use of drugs and conflict diamonds to buy the weapons.
When I first heard of her and her reputation my mind went back to the James Bond film 'Golden Eye' and I expected her to look like Xenia Onatopp but was pleasantly surprised to find her appearance had a closer affinity to Natalya Simonova. I was later to find that looks can be deceiving and her skills were very close to those of Xenia. Something else that reminded me of Xenia was that, until I actually met her, I pronounced her name Ivana Fok-l-taya she pronounced the 'v' as a 'w' and her surname as 'fuck-a-lot-a-ya'.
It was inevitable that our paths should cross, I was following the money trail from Mexico to the arms dealer while she followed the arms trail from the manufacturer to the same arms dealer. I was on top of a building overlooking the boat harbor at Monaco and to the casual observer I looked for all the world like a sniper. His 'geekness', the gadget guy, had come up with a directional microphone that looked for remarkably like a high powered sniper's rifle complete with telescopic sight. I was concentrating hard, I had him in the cross-hairs of the scope and was getting a clear signal even at a distance of 500 metres, when I felt the cold steel of a weapon pressed against my C4 vertebra. I was dead meat and I knew it. "Not fair Patrick, I heard that you were a gentleman and always allowed the lady to go first."
I turned and recognized her from the rather bulky dossier we had on her. Her weapon of choice looked very much like a genuine sniper's rifle. "Ivana Fok'l'taya, we meet at last."
"My illusions are shattered, you aren't perfect because if you were you would have pronounced my name 'Iwanna Fuckalotya'." She had little of her native Russian in her accent, possibly due to the fact that she wasn't raised in Russia even though her father was one of the most feared KGB operatives in his time. She was the result of a casual affair with an American CIA agent who was on assignment in Europe. Following his death the money that he had accumulated from his side line of an assassin for hire was more than enough to pay for her Harvard education. Following her graduation in political science she headed for Europe hoping to find more about her mysterious father but instead found herself enmeshed in the world of corporate espionage.
Like me she was a freelance operative hired by various government agencies, in her case the Russians, and in my case the Americans, we both went where the money was and for her that meant working much of her time for Vladimir in his fight to control the Russian Mafia whose primary source of income, apart from oil, was selling weapons 'borrowed' from the military to the highest bidder. My current assignment was with the US government against the Mexican drug cartels who were always on the lookout for bigger and better weapons in their war against each other. The man in my sights was here to buy a large quantity of assault rifles and ammunition.
"Despite what this looks like, I'm not here to kill your friend down there, I just want the evidence of the transaction to take back to my employer, what he does with it is up to him."
"And I'm here to recover the weapons that he's trying to sell to your man, weapons that just happened to disappear from a warehouse where they were waiting to be shipped to a so called legitimate client, in this case a civilian militia trying to overthrow the government of a Middle Eastern dictator."
"So we're both on fool's errands. The evidence that I obtain will probably never see the light of day because both the US and Mexican governments are powerless to stop the drug trade, or else they want the drug trade to flourish because that will keep those who would oppose them a constant state of ambivalence. You client on the other hand doesn't want the popular uprising to succeed because they need the oil. Wait a minute, we've a new player in the mix."
"Let me see." I handed her the microphone and its earpiece and she leaned against the parapet wall and focused it. "Looks like the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) wants more weapons, he's just placed a large quantity of conflict diamonds on the table."
"This is developing into an auction, look another launch is heading for the yacht." Ivana turned and followed my pointing finger, focusing on the passenger. "Holy Crap! Guess who it is." She handed me the scope. It was my turn for the expletives; "Fucking hell, Securicorp. Why would they want to buy arms on the black market, surely he can get them through the proper sources?" The man on the launch was the chief arms buyer for the largest private security company in the US, the one with all the government contracts.
"What our dealer is offering is not the kind of weapon that the US government would like to see in the hands of private enterprise, these are serious guns that we're talking about and definitely not the kind of thing that you'd let some macho security guard use for crowd control. We seriously have to stop this sale from going ahead."
"And how do we propose to do that?" I had noticed that she used 'we' and not 'you' or 'I'.
"I don't know, the best that I can think of right now is to somehow get into the warehouse where he's got them stored and steal them." It was obvious from the hesitance in her voice that even she doubted whether that plan had any hope of succeeding.
"It'd probably be easier for us to break into Fort Knox and steal enough gold that we could make him an offer that even he couldn't refuse." I was trying to lighten the mood here because I found that the harder I thought on a problem the less likely it was that I'd reach a satisfactory solution. I needed time to relax and get my thought processes ticking along without any time pressures. "I remembered one of my early bosses telling me that I should ask myself, 'Will the world come to a screeching halt if you're a little late in completing that task.' What I think he was getting at was, that if I rushed into the task I was more likely to stuff it up than if I thought my way through it before I started."
"Just what did you have in mind?"
"Well there are two ways that I can think of to take my mind off this and let me think, one is to get pissed and numb the brain for a time and the other is to find an attractive woman and make mad passionate love to her, a much more pleasant proposition."
"And where do you hope to find an obliging woman on short notice, unless you're like the famous James Bond who only has to look at a girl and say to her, 'The name's Bond, James Bond.' And she falls into his arms and his bed. Somehow you don't strike me as the Bond type."
"You're right there, for starters I don't have my own private harem at hand and the other is that I don't fall into bed with just any girl, I have to get to know her and at least like her. Hm, now where could I find someone like that up here on this roof-top?" I looked into her eyes.
"So you think that I'm going to fall for that corny line do you?" At least she was smiling. Then she put her arms around me and kissed me. "I don't jump into the bed of the first handsome man who looks at me like you're doing right now, I have to get to know them a little before I submit to his charms. I know a lot about you from the dossier we have on you and I find you half-way acceptable in the flesh, damn it that's enough foreplay, let's fuck!" She just about ripped my clothes off me, so I did my best to destroy hers. Our clothes provided a mattress of sorts for what was to follow.
