Quote: "Born Fatale is the Femme" from THE PRAXIS CONTIUUNM (A.Glass 2018)

 

"A man in his late forties, unshaven with graying hair sits at a bar, with his left hand he lifts the beer sipping, placing the other hand, which is a prosthesis, onto the bar. He turns his head to his left, looking over his shoulder a woman walks towards him, tall, with the long black trench coat and baseball cap. He shoulder length blond hair which fall across her shoulders. She sits beside him. Looking at the bartender.

"Barbarossa Double Dark."

The bartender nods as he lift a long beer glass from behind him and pulls down the beer lever, he looks at the woman.

"Cincinnati's best German style beer."

"Ja..." The woman replies with a grin.

The bartender smiling in a serving manner places the beer down in front of the blond haired woman, unaware that she replied in German within its sardonic tone .

"It works..." She says, looking briefly at the man next to her.

He turns, lifting up his beer looking at the woman.

"Good, as expected. So, you walk around this city and not worried about CCTV...Ms Fieke Wolf."

Fieke chuckles taking off her baseball cap, placing it onto the bar counter, she smiles nodding looking at her old colleague Kurt Schneider from her days working within a clandestine German sanctioned Commandeer and Capital Allocation special forces team. Sent under strict instructions to remove antiquities from war zones to Germany for safe keeping. Under the German guidelines within covert operations, in particularly this special forces unit, was to ensure that all antiques from history been returned to those countries after the war ceases. Their last mission in two thousand and fifteen, which Fieke did not accompany, was to Syria, to assist in the Syrian government removing antiquities from Palmyra before Islamic militants could destroy them.

With both of her hands, she pushes back her long hair. Having a large sip of the beer. She lifts up a napkin, padding her lips, exhaling looking ahead at the various beer and spirit bottles with their countless brands. Fieke then looks at Schneider.

"CCTV...half the cameras in this country don't work, same with Europe. No big brother anywhere. Didn't stop the terrorist attacks last year in London or Paris. Why would they be bothered about little ole me?" Fieke says, as Schneider smiles also sipping from his beer.

"Reliant on people with cellphones...Easy to track anyone with GPS."

"Unless you take out on the signal," Fieke replies.

"Everything is retrofitted out there, a telecommunication mess." Schneider lifts his right prosthetic arm, Fieke looks at the flesh colored prosthesis.

"Lucky you weren't there, fucking Russians, supposed to have our back. Ran scared when those Islamic bandits showed up..." He turns to Fieke again. "...They're not an army, just drugged up arschlochs, who believed that they were going to paradise with loot. Brain dead. Still, they did a lot of damage."

"I heard the story about the Russian unit that were supposed to be security." She sips the beer placing it down. Schneider looks at Fieke's scarred hands and knuckles, also the four inch scar that sits runs diagonally down her right cheek bone.

"That Russian President has an army of young, scared conscripts. Badly trained. Fodder. They were supposed to have secured the perimeter, instead they sat around playing cards, drinking. Very undisciplined, the attack happened early morning, suicide bomber drove up first with the lunatics moving up from behind, except the suicide bomber blew up before he reached the compound, the Russians thought it was artillery. Then the Islamists charged on the camps position. The Russians just ran straight to their jeeps and drove off. We had to hold them off, until we could get airlift..." Schneider holds up his artificial hand. "...Sniper, bad shot...took off my hand."

"They, the Islamic mercenaries then destroyed the antiquities at Palmyra."

"Ja, real mess...They were Roman artifacts, very rare...In fact, priceless."

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"Born Fatale is the Femme" from THE PRAXIS CONTIUUNM (A.Glass 2018)