Girl Who Fell 1: Behind Blue Eyes. Offbeat Brit spy series-cum-lesbian love triangle. Killing Eve meets female James Bond meets Helen of Troy returns (HAIL THE QUEEN series)

by Raechel Sands

  Lara felt the conversation getting out of her control.

  Kitty’s son, Wil , she suddenly thought.

  ‘You talk about Kitty being dead woman walking, but you saved her long enough for her to have a son! You did save Will’s life.’

  Grinin returned the last photo of Kitty to Lara.

  ‘I suppose Wil must be 15 as wel . The dead continue in the living. But not quite. …I’ve been thinking lately about a poem by an English poet, Tennyson. It’s about Ulysses in his old age.

  An idle king, he cal s him. Have you read it?’

  Lara could only shake her head. ‘If I’m to carry out my orders, please tel me what you are going to do.’

  ‘While the hounds are busy barking, I shal simply leave. I

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  wil drive to Ireland!’

  ‘Drive? But you don’t drive!’ Lara felt the air empty out of her lungs.

  ‘I don’t drive. But I can. I have a licence. I have booked a fine Soviet-red Range Rover. An ocean voyage, wel , the Celtic Sea.

  Sea air! The Emerald Isle! Irish poetry… Galway, Limerick, the West Coast.’

  ‘The West Coast? Away from your family? You’ll drive to your death, you must know that?’

  ‘Ah, but if you’re going that way… what does Ulysses say to his men? “Come, my friends, / Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”’

  ‘I’m here to get you out. I have three dozen officers. You and your family can be in Russia by this afternoon.’

  ‘Quite out of the question. This afternoon is the B.B.C. Surely you stil monitor Radio 2 at The Center*?’

  [* KGB headquarters]

  ‘Yes, we monitor your show.’

  The fatigue made Lara’s mind spin, but she grabbed the black queen and waved it.

  ‘If you’re on your own, the black queen wil get to you and finish you off.’

  ‘ Finish me off?! Lara listen to me!’

  Grinin seemed to be staring into another world.

  ‘These are the wonderful closing words of the poem. Ulysses admits he has been, “made weak by time and fate,” but that he’s stil , “strong in wil / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”’

  Lara gaped at Grinin, speechless, while he walked to his aquarium. He opened a large tin of fish-treats, and started to playful y feed them to his fish.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘Not to yield, not to go gently. That’s the only end game I can live with.’

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  Lara, total y covered in her hijab, walked down the steps of River Heights and on to the crowded sidewalk of Victoria Embankment. She glanced at Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, swung right into Bridge Street, and turned into the entrance to Westminster Underground station.

  She was shocked to see Blanka, casual y perched on a handrail, swinging her legs back and forth.

  ‘Excuse me, Ma’am,’ Blanka said, hopping down and coming up to her cousin. ‘But I have a favour to ask.’

  She handed Lara a smal envelope.

  ‘Could you give this to Lara Starikova if you see her? It’s a card congratulating her on her promotion. I’ve been rather busy and haven’t had a chance to mail it.’

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  The Little-Black-Dress

  Next day: Tuesday.

  6:10 a.m.

  Battersea Power Station apartments .

  Bio’s bedroom.

  F elicity La Bombe, OhZone 7, butt naked—but wearing the prosthetic appliance-face of an Asian man—studied the petite figure of Bio, who was asleep.

  Outside, an overcast morning numbly declared itself, dark-ening the closed curtains of the fashionably decorated bedroom.

  Felicity glanced at the curtains with a vague uneasiness.

  On an impulse, she bit her lover’s exposed nipple.

  ‘Ow!’ said Bio, rolling away. ‘You’ve had your fun. Let me sleep.’

  Felicity returned her gaze to the curtains. Blue with a pattern of anonymous flowers. Like something Emma and Olga might draw. Innocently they would show their drawings to their father.

  What a bear of a man! Yet his twins are so fragile, such tiny angels. And his wife, so young, smothered under that huge rough old man. Shagging him must be painful.

  She grabbed Bio’s hair and jerked the head back, forcing her eyes open.

  ‘Wake up, my little girl.’

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  Bio recoiled from the face, from the words, and kicked out.

  ‘Perving freak! Take that mask off.’

  She pul ed the comforter up to cover her body.

  ‘Make the most of me,’ chanted Felicity. ‘Or I’l be gone like the mist in the morning.’

  She ripped the comforter off Bio.

  ‘Do you want me to drag you to the showers?’ she said, tossing Bio over her shoulder.

  Every time Felicity suggested dragging her to the showers, it sent a chil down Bio’s spine. Dangling naked, upside down, she struggled to think.

  It’s Tuesday, we have to work. I need to calm Felicity down.

  ‘Put me down and make love to me,’ Bio said.

  Felicity set her on her feet, and Bio reached up, put her arms around Felicity, and kissed her.

  After kissing back, and pushing her tongue deep inside Bio’s mouth, Felicity said:

  ‘Alright. But it wil stil be a little rough.’

  When they were finished, Felicity played with the older woman’s coachel a-coral-colored, powder-coated lipstick, applying dabs of it to Bio’s breasts.

  Staring at Bio with a cold detached look, Felicity took her new lip gloss, uncapped it, and rested it on Bio’s shaved mons pubis. Smiling, Felicity wrote the words La Bombe in the pink-red lipstick—across Bio’s abdomen.

  Bio read it.

  ‘La Bombe. Very good. But what’s going on inside that gorgon head of yours?’

  Felicity’s eyes were fixed on Bio’s abdomen.

  ‘I’m thinking about al the ways I can play with you. Didn’t you play with her? The Nanny?’

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  ‘I was quite proper and affectionate. Caught up in the rush of emotion.’

  ‘The rush of emotion. I like that. You must show me sometime.’

  Felicity leaned forward so her breasts were over Bio’s face. As Bio cupped one in her hands and put her mouth to the erect nipple, Felicity stopped her.

  ‘Did she like the little-black-dress?’

  Bio looked up.

  ‘Yes. She wanted to wear it today. But I told her I’d buy her dinner if she wore it tomorrow. She’s got quite an appetite for such a taut bitch. Speaking of appetite.’

  Bio grabbed Felicity’s tit and sucked hungrily.

  I’m tired of her now, Felicity said to Hebe.

  Felicity abruptly pushed Bio off her nipple, and jumped out of bed.

  Yes, she can be a little whiny, said her AI.

  ‘You woke me up,’ said Bio, displaying herself on the bed.

  ‘Whatever,’ Felicity said.

  She opened a Samsonite bag, and took out another little-black-dress, the Harrods tag still on it. She held it to the light, ran her fingers over it, let herself imagine Grinin’s large bear hands pressed against the flimsy dress; her body tight and resisting beneath the fabric.

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  The South Bank.

  The London Eye.

  Major Grigori Grinin, planning to celebrate his wedding anniversary by going on the Eye with his family, had booked a capsule for nine-thirty. Seated high in a capsule, a British Asian workman contemplated with unusual interest the far river bank through compact ℧ binoculars.

  River Heights was eight stories high; the Norman Shaw Building left of it was covered in scaffolding. Having checked his iPhone, the workman swung his binoculars onto the building to the right, the Old Cabinet Of ice Building. (It would become the newest Sco
tland Yard in 2017, but in 2015 it was largely empty.) One of Grinin’s MI5 protection detail stood under the Eye, but he hadn’t a clue that the workman above him was Felicity La Bombe.

  Frank Ryder had given her unlimited access to the building.

  Felicity had also arranged with the charge hand on the Eye (a young Latvian called Lukas) to allow her continuous turns on it. They were fuckbuddies and when they met—always away from surveil ance cameras—he gave her continuous orgasms.

  Fol owing Wonderland’s penchant for nicknames, she cal ed him Cool Hand Luke (she loved Paul Newman’s iconic prisoner and rebel in the movie). Over the course of two years she’d groomed him to be her irregular secret Intel igence assistant.

  When her internal clock read 08:59, Felicity raised her binoculars to watch Diana step out of the revolving door, holding the hands of her twins. MI5 officer Gabor and Grinin following,

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  they all crossed the road.

  The party contemplated the river, breathing in the air—and an invisible killer. Generations of corrupt government had groomed the British population to be unaware of their cities’

  gold medal nitrogen dioxide pol ution—which caused miscar-riages, stunted growth and asthma in children, lung cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

  Grinin’s timing is impeccable like mine, thought Felicity, as Big Ben struck nine.

  While everybody’s attention, including Felicity’s, was on the Grinin procession, a red Range Rover pulled up at the bottom of the steps to River Heights. The rental car man handed the keys to Frank Ryder, who got into the driver’s seat. Within seconds the car had disappeared into the private garage beneath the building.

  Felicity swung her binoculars away from Grinin to focus on who was watching him. She saw Jude and the MI5 woman join the end of Grinin’s procession, which then passed Boudica’s statue and turned left on to Westminster Bridge.

  Jude was funny, and attentive in bed, but now she was AI enhanced she wondered why she’d gone for him.

  Why did I ever fol ow C’s suggestion to marry him? It was al about politics, he’d said:

  ‘You just fuck Jude. Leave the rest of the fucking to me.’

  Her mind turned to Grinin, this bear, this Rasputin.

  Fucking him is more to my taste. His wife’s only five years older than me.

  She flipped the binoculars on to the Russian woman’s face.

  He keeps her well satisfied—she has that look of nasty self-contentment.

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  She clocked that the Russians had a group of would-be tourists on Victoria Embankment as well as the black SUV further up the road.

  ‘They better not get in my bloody way,’ she said.

  OhZone had another utilities truck by a cordoned off manhole. Felicity pitied the agent assigned to help OhZone check London’s sewers. She knew from personal experience how terrible they were.

  Probably no other English woman had walked as many miles of the London sewer system as she had, she thought.

  She checked C’s Scanner, monitoring the signals from the main water company truck at the rear of River Heights—where Hans and Farringdon watched the security cameras.

  Turning her attention back to Grinin, as he approached the South Bank with his entourage, she thought about him and Diana again.

  It’s their wedding anniversary, have they bonked this morning?

  He keeps the cameras and bugs permanently disabled in his bedroom, so there’s no record of how often they have sex.

  Her iPhone beeped. She clicked on the message, from C, and winced when it read: 317885.

  10 Downing Street.

  7:00 p.m.

  After his slot on BBC Radio 2 on Monday, Grinin rang L.B.J.

  asking to meet the Prime Minister.

  Mr Corduroy was thril ed, and only 24 hours later Grinin

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  was driven to Horse Guards and sneaked into Number 10

  through a rear door. Paddington and two MI5 officers sat in an ante room, while Grinin and Mr Corduroy discussed the arts in general, and opera in particular, over Russian tea.

  ‘Do you know Charlie Marians, chief firearms officer at MI6?’ the Prime Minister asked. ‘He’s very big in amateur oper-atics. You might know him as Arms… ’

  He faltered, his eyes fal ing on Grinin’s stump.

  ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ said Grinin, quoting Shakespeare on cue.

  Blanka had primed him that the P.M. was keen for the security services to put on a production of Verdi’s opera of Macbeth. Corduroy had told one of Blanka’s friends high up in the Metropolitan Police, that he wanted:

  ‘To keep their minds focused on service rather than plotting.’

  ‘Talking of the Scottish play,’ Grinin said casual y. ‘I wonder, as we approach the centenary of my namesake’s torture, castration and murder, at the hands of MI6, whether you would now make an official apology to Russia?’

  Mr Corduroy seemed confused. ‘MI6?’ he said to one of his aides.

  The aide nodded.

  ‘Rasputin? Like your theme song? he said to Grinin.

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Grinin. ‘Grigori Rasputin. It’s been 99 years, but an apology would be nice.’

  The aide was shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t have all the facts,’ the P.M. said. ‘But I’l certainly look into it.’

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  The next day.

  Wednesday, March 18. 4:24 p.m.

  River Heights.

  By those who actual y do it, creative work is general y considered to be 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

  In MI6, however, Intelligence work was said to be 69 percent exploration, 30 percent exasperation, and one percent expiration.

  As the sun sank in the west and street lights came on, the sight of a Royal Navy gunboat chugging up to the river landing was a welcome relief to those guarding and watching Grinin. It was above suspicion but it still gave Jude and the MI5 officers something to do.

  While they checked, Officer Gabor watched Grinin’s Nanny, in black leather jacket and little-black-dress, leave through the River Heights revolving door.

  Not on the schedule, she thought. But that makes one person less to watch.

  The Nanny looked pale, but she nodded to her as she descended the steps. Safely on the sidewalk, she grabbed a paper bag from her purse and threw up in it as discreetly as she could. Taking deep breaths and dabbing her mouth with a handkerchief, she paused to reorient herself. Then, with determination, she walked toward Big Ben, dropped the bag into a litter bin and, holding tight to the handrail, descended into Westminster Underground station.

  The second MI5 woman, across the road, radioed Mick the

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  Mick in the penthouse.

  ‘Nanny’s in the Underground, heading home I presume.’

  ‘Yeah, she’s feeling a bit sick,’ came Mick’s voice over her radio.

  ‘More than a bit,’ the MI5 woman said.

  In the blacked out BMW, the KGB Sergeant scanning the radio transmissions lifted his headphones momentarily and reported to Lara.

  ‘The Nanny’s gone home.’

  Lara nodded, and yawned.

  This is going to be a long stake out, she thought. I wonder what time he’s going to leave tomorrow? He’s booked on the largest car ferry in the world, MV Ulysses. So appropriate.

  She smiled as she imagined him shaving off his beard, and donning the impenetrable face mask he had shown her. Does he want my help not to go gently?’

  She was certain of one thing: hers was the only agency with knowledge of his plan. She had a fast car on standby at the Welsh port of Holyhead, Irish plates on it. What would happen when the Ulysses reached Dublin? The Irish G2 were outside the cozy Five Eyes Intelligence of the other English-speaking nations.

  Would they help her
guard him on his odyssey?

  Behind River Heights, Crusoe climbed in the back of the water company truck to relieve Krishna.

  ‘G’day, mate. Anything new?’

  ‘Diana had the morning off but is working the evening at the zoo,’ said Krishna, putting on his coat. ‘Grinin’s been blasting out Tchaikovsky and Russian disco groove. The Nanny’s sick; the decibels couldn’t have helped, she’s gone home early. Blanka’s kidney’s acting up—she’s got hospital tests tomorrow.’

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  ‘That’s not good,’ said Crusoe. ‘Where’s Farringdon?’

  ‘Being sick behind the bushes,’ answered Krishna. ‘Hans is down with it too. He’d better be okay by Friday, he’s off to rein-force the depleted ranks of you OhZones.’

  ‘It’s been postponed a week,’ Crusoe said. ‘He’s staying on the Op.’‘Good. Have fun,’ said Krishna as he disappeared out the door.

  Several minutes later, against the flow of rush hour pedestrians, the Nanny re-emerged from the underground station.

  She blinked, put the bag over the shoulder of her leather jacket, and walked, steady now, back towards River Heights.

  Crusoe watched her on the monitors. As Farringdon climbed unsteadily into the back of the truck, Crusoe said:

  ‘Feel better, mate? The Nanny’s back, walking tal . Could so fuck her.’

  ‘You bet,’ Farringdon replied. ‘Musta forgot something.’

  He spoke into the Scanner, ‘Nanny’s back.’

  ‘Copy that,’ came Nearby’s voice from the CIA-Blue control.

  At the same time, the MI5 Woman radioed Mick and Officer Gabor.

  ‘The Nanny’s back.’

  ‘Rapid recovery,’ said Mick.

  ‘Here she is,’ said Gabor, into her earpiece mic.

  The Nanny walked up the steps to River Heights, nodding again to Gabor, as Big Ben started its eight chimes for the half hour.

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  Inside the lounge of the penthouse, a Deutsche Grammophon

  vinyl record, Pictures at the Exhibition, spun on the tran-scription turntable.

  At his desk, Grinin sipped Russian Caravan tea and moved his head to the sound of the Berlin Philharmonic. He put the cup on the saucer, picked up his fountain pen with his left hand and read a single sheet of blue paper, before signing it: All my love, Grigori.