Like Slipping Under Cover: Erotic Spy Fiction

by Bethany Zaiatz, ed.

  Her fingers, my fingers, I, she, we.

  I bite down on my lip and taste her blood. And she makes me come. Over and over again.

  He makes me come.

  I make me come.

  I am, we are, stripped raw, flayed naked to the bone. There is nothing at my core, only the desire to leave behind everything that I am, everything I was, and vanish.

  And when I am broken, he reshapes me. His touch adds layers of skin to a shattered frame of bone as he strokes every part of me. She gives me lips full and thin, eyes green and blue and brown flecked with gold, skin the color of burnt wood and the sun rising behind a cloud. Everyone he has ever been. Everyone she will ever be. Flickering, changing, until I am not me anymore. Never was, and never will be.

  Now do you understand?

  I nod.

  This is who you are, who you have always been.

  Yes, I answer. She answers. He answers. We answer.

  Spent and raw, bruised and bloody, content and full for a moment I seek respite. I trace the scar marking his shoulder with a languorous tongue. In the hardened ridge of flesh, I taste the blade that put it there, slashing hot and tight. I become his body in the moment of being ripped open, laid bare.

  When my fingers follow her ribs, moving down her side, I feel the bullet punching through her thigh, shattering her bone. I feel every moment of her pain, every heartbeat, and being so alive.

  In his kiss, I taste whiskey, long nights, and cigarettes smoked watching the sun stain the sky in orange and ink and gold.

  In her cooling sweat, I taste punishing jungle heat, and the swing of a machete in my calloused hand.

  And for just a moment, I think I could stay. I don't have to run. I've found what I was looking for all along--someone who knows who I am.

  Before I can speak, his fingers grip my jaw, bruising tight, turning my face to hers, forcing me to look into eyes that are every color and no color at all.

  That's not how it works.

  And when I think there is nothing left to give, she and he and I and me and we and they make me come again, breaking the last of my resistance, carrying me over the edge, vanishing me.

  Fingers sink through skin, into bone, into nothing at all. Nothing has ever hurt this much. Nothing has ever felt this good.

  I don't exist. I never did. I never will again.

  I rise from my knees in a hotel room in Cairo, Paris, London, Milan. Tanya, Lily, Karen, Sophia's face is turned away. She doesn't look at me. If she did, would she recognize me? How many people really know who they really are? How many know when they've been changed, when something fundamental has been stolen from them, or when they've given it away willingly with a simple touch?

  As I leave, she whispers a name.

  For just an instant, I can't help the breath-catch, wondering whether that name is the name. The beat skipped leaves an empty space, my heart drops, clattering against my ribs. It isn't the name. It never will be, but this name, the one Tanya, Lily, Karen, Sophia gives me will bring me one step closer, closing the distance by half.

  And half again. Every time. Space is infinitely divisible. We will never reach each other, never touch. The closest we will every come is two ghosted reflections, separated by a space of glass high above every city in the world. That is the way it will always be, always running, always chasing, reaching, but never bridging the distance in between.

  This is what happens when two spooks touch. We destroy each other. We destroy ourselves.

  I leave Paris, London, Cairo, and Milan. I leave behind a throat circled in sapphire and diamonds, circled in the ghost of future bruises the color of violets. I vanish into the sky, weightless, transitory and liminal, and touch down again in Dubai, Zurich, Hong Kong, Montreal.

  Another city, another smear of light, and I lower my lashes over a hint of fear. I welcome my death, and it's enough to bring me the man with the name that Tanya, Lily, Karen, Sophia gave me. A man with accounts scattered all across the world, filled with embezzled funds. A man who is tired of running, who recognizes a kindred soul in a woman who ran away a long time ago, and never stopped, but wants so badly to stop now.

  His name is Richard, Kevin, Benny, Jack. The shape of it falls away from my lips, already forgotten. We climb to the top of another hotel, another room overlooking another city. We drink white wine, glasses chill and sweating in our hands. I give him my past, everything I took from Tanya, Lily, Karen, Sophia, and it's exactly what he needs to hear. Falling into crisp-folded sheets, I spread my legs and take him in, take all of him in, in ways he'll never understand.

  Beneath the weary taste of his sweat, gathered from the hollow between his neck and his collarbone as he moves inside me, I taste hope.

  Because he is there. She is there. I am there. The imprint of fingers that have been here before me and left traces on this man's skin.

  This is the way it's always been. She is always vanishing, one step ahead of me. I'm always a moment too slow to catch him.

  And so it goes.

  I get paid. I turn Richard, Kevin, Benny, Jack over to the people who wanted him so badly, to take back what he stole. And I lift off again, falling through the sky toward Venice, Stockholm, Mexico City, and an international drug ring, a turn-coat, triple-cross ex-spy, a madman bent on taking over the world by blowing up the moon with a rocket made of pure gold.

  It doesn't matter where I'm going. I'm always chasing the same thing--a ghost who sunk fingers deep into my skin, took the core of me, and made me what I am.

  The only person who really knows me.

  I never got to thank her. I never got to pay him back for what he gave me, for teaching me everything I know.

  But I will one day.

  Nothing can stop me. I can go anywhere. Become anyone. I am a master of disguise. I can bend anyone to my will. I can disappear in plain sight.

  This is what I am--a spook, a ghost, a spy. I don't exist. This is what I have always been.

  Now do you understand?

  Not Exactly Dead

  Chris Amies

  At the foot of the brick warehouse wall a solitary figure wandered along, bumped into a wastepaper bin, and walked on. Will had seen a lot of them about. In the early mornings, figures in the remnants of business clothes, walking to the railway station for trains they never caught; in the afternoons and evenings shabby individuals making their way to the pubs and betting shops only to be turned back when they got there. Creatures who remembered only their habits.

  Will couldn't remember the official term but he'd heard people call them Neds. NED: Not Exactly Dead. He turned away to face the other occupant of the room.

  * * * *

  The woman in the white T-shirt and grey leggings paced to and fro. The bar, its walls peeling with damp, seemed too small to contain her, and beyond the window the snarl of daytime traffic was muted. She brushed a strand of reddish hair away from her face as the man looked at her.

  "I need to be doing something," she said. "Why doesn't he call us? Tuesday?"

  It took the man a second or two to remember that Tuesday was a person, not a day--at least if she hadn't meant "why doesn't he call us on Tuesday?"

  "He said he'd call when he'd done it," Will said. "Don't worry, Emma."

  "Easy for you to say," she said.

  Will Bruce supposed it was. He'd forgotten about Gerald 'Tuesday' Tuesfield when he woke up this morning, blinking in the poor light of an early dawn, rolling over in the little bed in what had once been a staff bedroom. The pub was still nominally open and Will and Emma nominally worked there, as cover, but nobody came in apart from a few drunks who were either too persistent to give up or too far gone to be sensitive to atmosphere; NEDs who came into the pub and drifted around, sipped at pints of lager, went away.

  The night before, Will asked one of them,

  "What is it you want?"

  "Want?" the man asked, grey-faced. "I don't want anything."

  Tuesday was always off about, in between stomp
ing around the upper room complaining that he was the only one who was angry, while the others--Will and Emma and the now-absent rest--were 'sort of slightly annoyed.'

  "He won't even say what he was doing," Emma complained.

  "No," Will Bruce said, "he won't. Surely that's better?

  Will, passing himself off as someone with a knowledge of electrics, had swept the room for bugs but they still had to keep discipline. Of course he'd added a bug or two, up-to-the minute stuff he'd sourced from Taiwan, and if those were found then he was dealing with pros.

  Personally Will doubted it. He didn't think this lot were up to much, threat-wise. Emma Kessler was a nice little rich girl--if a bit of a lost soul--and although Gerald Tuesfield was a loose cannon he was too shapeless to do any real harm; although you never knew. Perhaps he just wouldn't care, storm in guns blazing--perhaps literally--and never mind what hits he took.

  "What about the other members?" he asked. "Your, er, comrades?"

  The young woman shrugged, a sinuous movement that reminded Will of a former girlfriend taking off her clothes. He was surprised at the moment of clarity; or was it his imagined life that came from, the lot of the angry working man he claimed to be?

  "Who knows?" she said. "They're out there somewhere."

  "Tell me about the band," he said.

  She sighed, walked over to sit by him.

  "It was fun while it lasted," she said. "but I don't know if we'll ever play again." She smiled. "The band lasted for five years and a bit, Josh and Kathy and Tim and me. Trouble was, some of them got into the family thing, and others saw rehearsals as an excuse for a piss-up. By the end nobody cared."

  She put an arm along the back of the sofa. Will could feel her warmth, and smell a strange, somehow nostalgic perfume. He was sure that someone in his past had used something like that.

  "And you played--"

  "Bass," she said. "The female bass player as cliché... not. Sounds Magazine thought we were fab, Click said we sounded like we'd heard about rock music without having heard any--and that was a good thing." She shifted round, reached out a finger to touch the front of his black polo shirt.

  "Now tell me about you," she said.

  "The usual stuff," he said. "Went into the Army, hated it but learnt a trade, came out, worked to pay the mortgage and all that, got a now-ex-wife who hates me, no kids, got pissed off with this government and decided it was time for a change."

  Much of that was true; even the ex-wife, Samantha, though he could not remember her apart from a cloud of black hair around a round face, like she was two circles off-centre. He was sure that at one stage this distancing had mattered to him, but now it seemed not to. The easy if bitter life of the divorced electrician with a grudge seemed simpler; go to the pub with his mates, watch the football, and so on. And then somehow he'd--perhaps because his wife had kept the house, left him drifting from flat to lodging to flat--fetched up in this half-derelict pub as part of a shapeless mob of wannabe anarchists who might, just might, be planning something for real.

  "I once said she was like a toy robot that kept on going, on and on. She thought I meant it positively. I didn't. Best off without her."

  Her finger was still there, pressing. He looked at the mouth in that sharp, blue-eyed face and very much wanted to kiss it, to lick her lips from the inside...

  For a moment he thought she was up for just that, but instead she took her hand away and rummaged in her bag, rolled a cigarette.

  "Why doesn't he call?" she muttered. "Maybe something's happened."

  "Then what happened?" Will asked. "After you left the band."

  She looked at him bleakly. She had blue eyes in a face framed by unruly reddish-brown hair. Twenty-nine years old (how, he wondered, did he know that? He was sure she'd never told him)...

  "I shagged the Home Secretary," she said.

  Will Bruce blinked. It was as though he half knew that already, but it was also somehow news to him.

  "Yes, I did," Emma said. "I met the Home Secretary--Brian Pavey, responsible for law 'n' order within the borders of the UK and all that--at the BRIT awards. His wife was away at their house in Spain. He plied me with white wine and made me laugh--though I'm not sure he knew why I was laughing. It was just all so obvious.

  "And the next day he called me up, took me for dinner at the Dorchester, and slept with me in a suite upstairs. Suite dreams are made of this, he said. Who was I to disagree?

  "And y'see," Emma said, "some people would now ask me if he was any good. Why don't you?"

  "All right," said Will, "was he any good?"

  "Cracking," Emma said, with a grin. "We met again and again." She sat back on the settee, the cigarette unlit as she played with it between her fingers. "He wanted me to go on the payroll as a researcher. I told him I was aware that a lot of researchers do most of their research in the horizontal position--"

  "Allegedly," Will said.

  "Allegedly," Emma said, grinning at them being on each other's wavelength. She put a hand on his thigh but made no other move towards him. "But I didn't fancy being a Party apparatchik. I came here instead."

  "Besides," she said, "I didn't want to be in the papers as 'Home Secretary's Lover.' I never loved him."

  "No?"

  "No. He had his wife for that." She looked straight ahead. The hand was still there and Will covered it with his own. "He did once say 'I love you!' when he came but I told him never to say that."

  But Will could imagine the rather puritanical Home Secretary, a man fond of demanding that there be jail time for all sorts of random offences, loving this woman so unlike him.

  "And," he asked, "do you still see him?"

  "No," she said. She looked at Will, put her other arm round his neck, slid against him. "I'm all right, aren't I?"

  "You are," Will Bruce said, and this time did kiss her. Her lips were soft and warm. He put his hand out to her T-shirt, felt one firm, braless breast under the cloth, felt the nipple hardening under his fingers. This time it was her turn to put her hand over his. His other arm went round her waist and he pulled her onto him. With a movement of those long, long legs she was on his lap, pushing against him and he felt his cock harden in his jeans as she rode back and forth on it.

  They kissed again, a collision of mouths, tongues flickering over one another's. He tried to move away from her mouth and kiss her face, but she brought him back to centre. Then she disengaged from him, took her T-shirt hem in her hands and pulled the shirt off over her head. Her pale-skinned body, firm high breasts bare, came so well to his arms.

  "Let's have sex," she said.

  "Now," Will said, "you put it like that..."

  Emma Kessler laughed and tugged at Will's shirt. He got the clue and took it off. Standing up, Emma removed the leggings and her lacy, peach-coloured knickers, placing them on a side-table. Her pale body seemed too fragile for this place with its musty curtains and peeling walls. She led him by the hand, a naked nymph at her play, to her bedroom. White curtains at the windows, a low double bed.

  She stopped, turned to him. He undid his belt, took off his jeans, eased his underpants over his proud erection. Then he went to his knees on the thin blue carpet. She stepped forward.

  "You've done this before," she said in a while, her hands caressing his head, fingers in his hair.

  He couldn't answer, tongue otherwise engaged.

  Finally, she moved his head away and pulled him onto the bed. She reached into the bedside locker and then rolled back to him as he knelt there. She put the condom on him with a deft, swift movement and pulled him down. He gazed down at her, lovingly, reached down to guide himself into her. She grunted.

  Her legs wrapped round his waist and he thrust harder.

  "Fuck me, damn you," she said. "Fuck me." Maybe her eyes were closed at this point--he couldn't tell, as his were. Somewhere below him she cried out. Her fingers dug into his back and he felt the familiar sensation cresting. He held off for what seemed like an age and then let
himself come. How long had it been? Long enough that his orgasm went on and on for what, also, seemed like aeons, shuddering as though a world died in pain.

  "Oh fuck," she said.

  * * * *

  "Who are you?" she asked, as they lay side by side on the bed, half-propped up on the pillows, touching each other, fingers exploring lazily.

  "I told you," Will said. "An angry electrician with an ex-wife who hates him."

  She looked at him.

  "God, you're beautiful," he said.

  "Why do men always say that?" she asked, smiling.

  "They don't," he said. "It's just that they always say it to you."

  "Thanks," she said, running a hand down his body to his now flaccid cock. A moving hand had little effect.

  "But you didn't answer the question," she said.

  "What's your name?" he asked.

  Misunderstanding, she laughed, thinking he'd suggested that was the question. But he had forgotten for a second. Emma, he thought. Not Emily, not Gemma; he'd tried both, held them up to the light to see if they fit. Her hand was still moving but--

  "You can tell me," she said, leaning against him, one long arm now draped round his shoulders, pulling him close. He nuzzled into her hair and examined the tiny freckles that dotted her temples.

  "Did you," he asked, a thought not so much striking him as running an unwelcome hand across his person, "tell Tuesday about..."

  "Brian?" she asked. "This and that. Not much."

  "Oh," he said. The thought was at very least pushing him about now; actual striking was bound to occur very soon.

  He got up, feeling her hands slide off his shoulders, her moving away disappointed.

  "Why don't you come back to bed," she said, parting her legs and pointing her sex at him. But Will Bruce was rummaging in the pile of discarded clothes.

  "He's the target," Will said. "Tuesday's going to kill the Home Secretary..."

  "He'd never," Emma said. "He hasn't the guts. None of them do. The sort of pranks they're up to involve vandalising National Trust properties, or throwing green paint over Churchill's statue in the name of the working class. A lot of the working class like old houses and revere Churchill so what good does that do? Painting graffiti along tube lines, which might have been cool in the 'sixties but now it gets covered in tags within days. He might chuck a pie into Mr Pavey's face, but that's about it. Mind you even flanning can get you into deep doodoo these days."