Mclean, Virginia
It is late, past 10:00 PM in suburban Mclean, Virginia and CIA counterintelligence and counterterrorism director, Shane McGregor, has just settled into bed and turned out the light on the nightstand next to the bed when the ringer on the cell phone next to the lamp suddenly goes off. Shane softly curses and turns to check that his wife, lying next to him, has not been disturbed, and then answers the call.
“Yeah. This is Shane,” he says in a low, clipped voice.
“It’s Billy.”
Shane breaths a heavy sigh. “What’s up?” Already the CIA counterintelligence chief has a bad feeling, an eerie premonition foretelling trouble. In all their work together, Billy has never called him at his home before.
There was a brief pause. “Rosie just popped two more Russians in our room at the hotel.”
“Where are you?” Shane asks. “Give me the details.”
“We’re at the hotel,” Billy replies. “Earlier in the evening we were in the dining room. We had gone upstairs to our rooms and Rosie was already in bed. I was in my room, and I had just got into bed when I heard the muffled sound of shots in Rosie’s room. When I got in there, there were two dead guys on the floor. They looked like a couple of the Tsar’s goons. When I rolled them onto their backs, they each had a small, neat bullet hole in the middle of their foreheads. And one had the whole side of his jaw blown away.”
“Is Rosie, okay?” Shane asks in a concerned voice.
“Yeah, she’s okay,” Billy says. “She’s a little shaken, but she’s okay.”
“She’s getting pretty good at this,” Shane says with a little chuckle.
Billy stifles a laugh. “Yeah, and it’s a lucky thing. I told you before, Shane,” he comes back, “Rosie has a steady hand. She is as cold as ice, and a dead shot—as these Russians are finding out.”
“Maybe I should hire her?” Shane quips. “Did you look for wallets, check for IDs on the stiffs?”
“No, not yet.” Billy replies, “Look Shane, Rosie and I are leaving. At first, I thought we could just stay here together in my room. But after thinking about it, I think it is better if we leave. So, we are going to take a cab and move to the Tabard Inn, but you need to get a disposal team over here to get rid of the bodies and clean up the mess before the housekeepers come in the morning.”
“Yeah. Okay, I’ll take care of it, Billy. And I agree it’s best for you and Rosie to get out of there. Give me the room numbers, and I’ll have a team over there in an hour. How do you suppose they were able to get into her room?” the CIA man asks.”
“I don’t know,” Billy replies. “They must have bribed one of the clerks at the check-in desk to get the pass key.”
The next morning: Bridgeport, Connecticut
The new black Mercedes luxury sedan is parked along the curb about thirty feet back from the corner of the street. It is the same spot where the driver has been parking—at least once a week—for the last three years. The beautiful young black woman in the driver’s seat looks anxiously kitty-corner across the intersection to the corner on the opposite side of the street where there is a school bus stop. Waiting on the sidewalk for the bus are a prosperous looking, middle-aged, suburban woman and a nine-year-old boy.
The young black woman in the Mercedes brings a small pair of binoculars up to her eyes for a closer look. As the bus pulls to a stop alongside the curb, the middle-aged mom kneels and hugs the boy. She gives him a motherly kiss, makes sure his clothes are straight, his shirt is tucked in, and then watches as any mother would as he boards the bus. It is a scene that has been repeated every day of the week during the school year, on that same corner, for the last three years since the boy started grade school. And it is a scene that tears at the heart strings of the young black woman behind the wheel of the black Mercedes sedan. She has watched it so many times and it always breaks her heart.
The middle-aged woman who knelt on the sidewalk and affectionately kissed the boy before he boarded the bus is not the boy’s natural mother. She is the boy’s adoptive parent. The young Black woman across the street sitting in the front seat of the black Mercedes and softly crying is the boy’s birth mother. Fearful, however, of being recognized, the young woman wears a pair of sunglasses and pulls down on the visor of her baseball cap. It was a principal provision of the adoption agreement that she would never attempt to contact or visit her son after the adoption had been finalized.
Without the disguise, the attractive young black woman would almost certainly have been recognized by anyone under forty years old. Her name is Belle LaForce, a twenty-eight-year-old recently established pop icon, music diva, and political activist. She counts as one of her best friends Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx and Brooklyn political activist, who in the 2018 mid-term election was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Just a handful of years earlier Belle was a struggling young singer working as a waitress in a cafe in Brooklyn and going to college part-time at night. She had started out at eighteen singing in karaoke bars. Belle had grown up in a succession of foster homes, the last—when she was twelve—the home of a Brooklyn music teacher. It was here that she discovered her gift for music and her genius for performing.
Belle did not know the identity of her father, and neither—she suspected—did her natural mother who had been an on-again, off-again prostitute with a serious crack cocaine addiction who had—during Belle’s early childhood years—been in and out of rehab programs until she was found beaten to death in a Bronx tenement apartment. As a young girl, Belle had often wondered what her father was like; but she could only conclude that he must have been white, because—while she is African American like her mother—she is fair-skinned in complexion.
Just eighteen when she herself got pregnant—with no money, no real job, and no apparent future—Belle put her soon-to-be-born baby up for adoption. Belle wanted a future for her child that she knew she would never be able to provide. It was when she was told that the prospective parents were an affluent and well-established Bridgeport, Connecticut family, that she made—what would be for her—the most gut-wrenching decision of her young life.
Belle played the guitar, piano, and the saxophone; and her fledgling career first started taking off when she met a hustling music promoter, part-time pizza delivery guy, named Rob Mock who became her agent, manager, and boyfriend. Her music was a distinctive blend of popular rock and soul-wrenching Southern blues in the style of Janis Joplin, Bonnie Raitt, and early blues greats like Bill Withers and the folksy Woody Guthrie. But she had a signature style, an energy, and an appeal that was all her own with a power and a personal dynamism that only she could generate on stage.
Saddened as always by her visit to see her son, Belle drives back to the Bronx in New York. That afternoon she will be leaving on a luxury tour bus with her band for a six-city concert tour scheduled to open the next day in Philadelphia.