Agent with a History

For the next hour I learned how to lose a tail from a professional. I thought we had lost them when a bullet pinged off a building just above our heads. We crouched down together, making our way along the lines of what available cover we had.

"I thought we lost them?" I said, slightly out of breath, as I tried to keep up with him.

"We did! This is somebody else." He replied tersely.

A man stepped out of an alcove ahead of us with an assault rifle, and instead of shooting him, Flint threw his handgun, which clocked the guy senseless. Flint retrieved his gun and tossed the man's riffle into some piles of trash.

The man started to stir and Flint kicked him viciously in the head. The man was out cold. I was seeing a different side of Flint than I had seen before, but had suspected was there. He had a savage side, but then so did I.

A radio on the man's side started crackling with foreign voices. Something similar to German I thought. Flint picked up the radio and listened. The voices ended as somebody appeared to be asking a question. There was silence and then the question was repeated. Gruffing his tone some, Flint responded in the language perfectly and then broke into a staged excited monologue that had voices coming back to him over the radio excitedly. He said something more and then dropped the radio and pulled me along after him to where the side alley opened into a busy market street.

Several white guys suddenly appeared, all running down the street past us, pushing their way through the crowd. Flint waited a moment and then pulled me along after him, in the opposite direction the men had taken. Flint must have led them off the trail, with whatever he had said.

We split across several busy streets, got honked at by cars and roundly cursed as well. It would have been quite exciting if it wasn't for the fear of a bullet with my name on it crashing into the back of my skull. We ended out on a less busy street and Flint stopped at a pay phone and started calling someone.

"Who were those guys? What were they speaking?"

"Swiss." He responded.

"Swiss!" I exclaimed. "What would they be after the treasure for?"

He gave me a look that said I wasn't having an especially bright day and I wondered what I had missed.

"I suppose you're one of those individuals who thinks that the Swiss banks, out of innocence and honest intentions, held onto vaults full of Nazi treasure, which was mostly stolen from Jews, well after World War II was over. Imagine a major banking center such as Switzerland, with its own version of Midas's touch. What kind of global control do you think they could exert?"