Jackpot

69

Teddy was standing outside of the safe house when he saw the ugliest vintage limousine coming down the drive and he knew Millie and Li Feng had arrived. Millie quickly ushered Li Feng into the safe house and the car drove away. Teddy had all of his luggage open and ready to go with makeup, hair, and costume.

Teddy gave directions to Millie on how to get started with the physical props while he handled the most complicated part. He opened an app on his phone that he’d designed and had Li Feng put each of her fingerprints onto the scanner one at a time, and then he used a special camera filter to take pictures of her face front on and at various angles around the side and even the top of her head. The last two pictures were close-ups of her eyes.

As he waited for the photos to upload to his server, he watched Millie in her element getting Li Feng into her new identity. Teddy was never one for the mentor protégé relationship, but he’d also never met anyone as talented and stubborn as Millie Martindale. Even more than the spy stuff, she seemed to have a genuine gift for the makeup and costume aspect of the job. With her more engaging personality she could move freely between a job in the CIA and the movie industry if that was something that interested her.

“I know you like the field work and adventure of your current job,” Teddy said, when Millie came over to ask him a question about a piece of Li Feng’s makeup she was struggling with, “but do you have any interest in working in the movies?”

“You mean like as a consultant or something? I think the Agency has a policy against that until you retire, and I’m not ready to retire yet.”

“Part of it would be as a consultant, sure,” Teddy said, “but I’m thinking something more off the books.”

Millie froze what she was doing and turned back slowly to look at Teddy.

“You have my interest,” she said.

“I haven’t put too much thought into this yet, but we’d have to start with some kind of accident that would get you kicked out of the Agency officially, then you’d go off the books to work on stuff with me both on set and in the field.”

“Could I get a new name, too? I want to be a stuntwoman, too, and maybe one of those people who blow things up on movie sets. How many identities do you have exactly?”

“Maybe this was a mistake,” Teddy said. “Let’s just finish up here and get our friend out of here safely.”

“You can’t just get me all excited for something and then take it away. Isn’t that what got Li Feng all pissed at Sonny Ma? Right? Girl? Help me out here.”

Li Feng avoided eye contact and Millie seemed to get the hint and went back to work.

“I’ll take over here. My phone is plugged into the computer over there and all it needs is an official CIA login to get her new identity into the system.”

“You’re sure this will work?” Li Feng asked.

“The new set of papers waiting for you in the U.S. will match your regular appearance. This current look is designed to keep you from being identified by facial recognition software in the Macau airport and triggering you being held,” Teddy said.

“One last thing,” Millie said, handing Li Feng a notebook. “I need your written statement about Arrow bribing you to lie to Congress and any other of his crimes you may have been witness to.”

Li Feng took the notepad and began writing. Millie typed in the information she needed to access the secure system for the CIA and then she and Teddy swapped places again so he could finish what he needed to do. When he was done, he did a once over of Millie’s costume work, which was exceptional, and said it was time to go.

“Have you done this sort of thing before?” Teddy asked Millie on the way out to a car he’d called for them.

“You mean dress up? It’s all I did growing up.”

“This is more than just dress up. This is... something else.”

“I’m detail oriented. That’s all it really is, right? You can’t completely create a new person out of thin air, so you find the most common points on a person’s face and body that form the rest of the identity and you disguise those.”

“I can’t wait to talk more with you about this,” Teddy said. “And I have never said that to anyone ever that I can recall.”

Li Feng handed the notepad back to Millie, who read the statement with her jaw on the floor.

“He did all of this?” Millie asked.

“That’s how we met. He sent his people to tell me that QuiTel employees with high gambling debts at his casino were a security risk. So I put the company investigators on it and this is what I found. I kept all the documentation as a backup, in case he betrayed me.”

“And you can prove all of this?”

She nodded and wrote something at the end of the statement.

“That’s a secure website where I uploaded all of the documents. User name and password is there as well.”

The car dropped Li Feng off at the airport and then took Millie and Teddy to the Macau Business Aviation Center.

“I hope you don’t mind if I hitch a ride on your chartered flight,” Teddy said.

“Why didn’t we wait to find out if our plan worked?”

“I wouldn’t have sent her in if I wasn’t confident it would work.”