Precarious Situations

Last night I got a chance to visit one of my favorite hang-outs; the Albuquerque Press Club. I don't often get a chance to visit the PC, as it's a bit out of the way of my usual daily routine, but I usually will swing by if I have to hop from Vegas to New York for some reason. The Press Club's a very low-key institution, which is good for someone looking to keep a low profile, and if you pay the 15,000 dollar membership fee, you get a number of worthwhile percs, including unlimited plays on the jukebox. So I put The Best of Frank Sinatra on loop and started sipping on some rye whiskey. This chick I've never seen there before is talking to me at the bar. We end up talking about poker and this leads to Scrabble, and she pulls a board from out of nowhere and wants to play. I should have been a bit suspicious at that moment, or at least the moment when she wanted to play for $100 a point. But I was a bit drunk and had about 30 grand in my pocket and I'm not easily intimidated so I agreed. I'm sure you could see this coming, but it turns out the woman was some kind of Scrabble champion, a serious hustler. We played with a 30 second timer, which is really the only way to play Scrabble in my opinion, and the difference in points at the end of the game was multiplied by a hundred. We played 3 games and I was into her for 12 grand by the end of it. I knew I was in trouble in the first game when I spelled 'MIRE', thinking I had effectively cut off the triple word score, and she immediately comes over the top with 'QUAGMIRE'; I felt like someone had punched me in the jaw. I was fucked from that point on. Then, to add insult to injury, at the end of every game, this girl who I thought was very proper and polite would yell out "Ship it!!! Holla!!!" and flash some kind of gang sign.

At the end of the third game, we get a spectator; this very loquacious guy who's watching and commenting on our play. I strike up a conversation with him afterwards and I immediately get a feeling that this guy's in the Business as well. He mentions quite casually some trips to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan and his explanation that he works for one of the large phone companies doesn't quite ring true to me. So I start the exchange that has been used as code between unaquainted operatives for a few years now, "I used to work for a company that put me in some precarious situations." And he responds with the correct response, "Precarious situations is my middle name." [By the way, I've talked with Hyde and C about this, and the likelihood, however small, that someone actually has 'Precarious Situations' as a middle name, makes this exchange rather dangerous.] So to make things absolutely certain we have to go through the whole strip search thing in the bathroom, make sure no one's wearing a wire, which is really sexy when you and a female operative have to go through it, but just plain awkward when it's a dude.

So it turns out this guy's operating mainly in Uzbekistan, helping with the border security there, turning Uzbekistan's Special Forces into a lean fighting machine. It's a small world, I say, as I tell him I was in Uzbekistan not a month before. And it turns out we even have killed some of the same peoples. He invites me to Uzbekistan for this kind of 'coffee house' open mic night thing he's got going on in Tashkent the third Sunday of every month. I promise I'll show up and tickle the ivories, even though in my experience the Uzbeks aren't very friendly to me. But he loves partying with the Uzbeks; despite being Muslim, he points out, they interpret the Koran in a certain fashion and thus are only prohibited from consuming alcohol made from grain and grapes; when it comes to potato vodka, they have no problem. He also tells me he's got this great 'harem' of Uzbek women over there that think he's some kind of Russian prince. He's making all sorts of jokes about how he's got the Muslim's version of paradise and he didn't even have to die as a martyr. "Except none of them were virgins," he adds with kind of a chagrined look on his face.

Anyway, small world. It's always heartening when you happen to run into a fellow agent out of the blue. Makes the world feel like a much more connected place.