His for the Holidays

by LB Gregg, Harper Fox, Z. A. Maxfield

  But Amanda was different. Even her sexuality had set her apart. Except as a colleague and a friend, she was out of bounds, out of the question.

  And if McBride thought about it, he had been out of the question for the straight female staff in the office. Not because he’d been married, although that had been the shield he’d raised when faced with the occasional attack. Because Andrew had pulled his memories of Lowrie to the surface, and McBride knew they’d never been very far down. Because he was…

  He stopped short of the word. He wasn’t even sure which one he’d have used if he’d got there. His father’s cold, clinical homosexual, when the old man had finally deigned to speak to him again? “Do you believe you are a homosexual, James?” Not by the time the pastor had finished with him, no. By then McBride hadn’t believed he was anything sexual at all. And there was a universe, a sexual revolution, between that old hill-farmer world and the brave young things of Edinburgh who proudly called themselves gay.

  McBride got up restlessly and carried his drink to the window. Across the street, in the elegant housefronts that mirrored his, lights were appearing, women and kids returning from school. Whatever word he used, how grotesquely unfair to Libby his life with her had been! How stupidly cruel to himself…

  He downed the scotch in one, unthinking. “Damn,” he whispered and poured another from the bottle on the sill. Unless Grace was visiting, there was always a selection within reach. He’d only meant to hold the first one, as a prop, an object of contemplation. He’d packed in smoking on the day he’d heard Grace’s fresh baby lungs open wide in their first newborn wail, and his hands still missed their occupation. Yes, he should have gone back to Harle Street. Taking time to think was almost always a mistake with him.

  He glanced at his watch. It wasn’t too late. He could take a graveyard shift. Sort through his paperwork, make sure the officers who’d been given Carlyle’s case had everything they needed. Briefly he imagined how it would be if he accepted Lila’s decree—dropped his undercover work, went to counselling, cleaned up his act. Libby wasn’t a hard-liner. Far from it: she wanted Grace to have a father, if McBride didn’t keep making it impossible. It could all be pretty easy, he thought, absently knocking back his second double. He’d have equal custody back in no time.

  And wouldn’t it be grand too, to round off his career with the capture of Sim Carlyle? Sure, he’d blown his cover at the Red Bottle, but Sim had plenty of other hangouts. Just standing here, watching his city’s lights begin to shine, feeling them somehow in his veins, McBride had a dozen ideas of how to go about it. A bit of disguise, a new angle…

  He refilled his glass. Excitement shot through him, hard and sweet. Lila wouldn’t like it, but why should she know? He’d trot in obediently and do his day job, but the city nights would be his own, just as they always had been. He could smell the frost in the air: feel, as if they were laid out through the streets like a pattern of veins, bright red and pulsing, the lines he could follow to find Sim. He could start straightaway—a little reconnaissance, a prowl around the edges of the night. Shrugging into his coat, forgetting his kid and his good intentions as if they had never been, McBride set off into the streets.

  Chapter Four

  The Freemason’s Hall was beautiful. McBride’s father had been admitted to the Scottish Rite, and McBride had childhood memories of being shown around the vast oak-panelled space, with its stained-glass depictions of Old Testament stories and its scent of beeswax and books. McBride wasn’t sure why the pastor had brought him here, unless it was in some vague hope his boy would absorb Masonic tendencies, the desire for social responsibility, secrecy and ritual, from the air. The visits had stopped after Lowrie.

  Yes, a lovely place. And about as unsuitable for a high-security conference as any building in Edinburgh McBride could imagine. There were a hundred windows, shadowed galleries, staircases that wound mysteriously from one set of reading niches to the next. It was practically indefensible, unless you had a small army. McBride paced the top-level gallery, assessing where on its parquet-floored length he would position the men in the tiny team he’d been assigned. All right, he had gone out on his clandestine hunt last night, but he was doing his best to take this new day job seriously too. His head ached almost as much as his injured leg. If he thought too hard, he would drop back into the rainy Livingstone wasteland where another of his snitches had shown him a pair of shallow graves. That was where Carlyle had got rid of his last Romanian girl, one who’d made the mistake of trying to break out of his sex-trade operation. Not just the girl. The second grave held her kid, the snitch had said.

  McBride leaned his elbows on the polished balustrade. Blindly he looked down into the light-bannered space before him. There were two Edinburghs, he thought, and he was poised awkwardly between them. A foot in each camp, and as likely to plunge into the abyss as find his place on either side. He wanted to be good—for Libby, for Grace—but how the hell could he abandon the night? He needed to be sure about the graves before he went to Lila Stone with his evidence. He just needed more time.

  “Morning, boss.”

  McBride jumped. He had to pull himself together. If Andrew Barclay, with his big feet and lack of talent for concealment, could appear at his elbow like this, a hostile gunman would have no trouble. “Morning,” he said cautiously. He had no idea what terms he and his partner were on. If Andrew was even his partner anymore—he hadn’t been assigned to the Zvi op, as far as McBride knew. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here. Has Lila got no elite-task-force stuff for you today?”

  The instant the sarcasm was out, he was ashamed. Andrew blushed hard. “She might have done,” he said, leaning on the balustrade too. “Only I lost my rag with her a bit yesterday after you left. I didn’t have to do the things she told me, but…she didn’t have to play me like that either, the manipulative cow.”

  McBride gave a low whistle. “Is that what you told her?”

  “Not exactly. She’d be wearing my bollocks for earrings. As it was, I said enough to get myself busted down to this gig. I’m sorry, James.”

  McBride wasn’t sure what he was apologising for. Turning up here, maybe, and obliging McBride to work with him, which he couldn’t imagine doing—not the way they used to, side by side, shoulder to shoulder. Maybe it was for picking up a drunken confession of McBride’s and using it to bait his honey trap. McBride almost smiled. Although handsome as ever, Andrew this morning looked so ordinary, so…straight, McBride couldn’t imagine how for one minute he could have been deceived.

  He didn’t know if he forgave him. And there was room for forgiveness on Andrew’s part too. Uncomfortably McBride thought about all the times he’d asked—no, ordered—the lad to cover for him. The undone paperwork, the loans… He shook himself. Best to lay it aside if he could. “Forget it,” he said. “What are we gonna do about this place, then? Zvi’s gonna be like a goldfish in a barrel.”

  Andrew glanced at him, evidently relieved to have the conversation turn back to work. “Aye. I did try to tell her, but she wasn’t having any.”

  “What—Lila chose this place? What’s wrong with the International Conference Centre?”

  “Doesn’t show off her nation’s full historical glories, does it? She’s convinced this place is safe. You know, I heard…”

  “What?”

  “That she was one. A Mason, I mean.”

  McBride pressed his lips together. Surely you mean a Masonette, he wanted to say. But he was beginning to see why every female in his life, apart from a ten-year-old and a lesbian, was at odds with him. He settled for, “Wouldn’t surprise me,” in a tone as neutral as he could manage.

  “No, me neither. She has the look of a grand mufti.”

  McBride snorted helplessly. “Jesus, Andy. You’re meant to be the new breed. You’ll never get back into Stone’s Scottish SWAT with cracks like that.” He straightened. “Come on. Let’s scope out this goldfish bowl and see if we can’t keep Lila’s ambassador alive fo
r her.”

  * * *

  They did their survey efficiently, but it took longer than McBride had expected. He wound up at their start point sooner than Andrew, aware that at every stage where he had expected to see him—across the hall on the same gallery level, checking out the mirroring pattern of staircases—he had not been there. It wasn’t Andrew’s fault. Not McBride’s either, for being always a few steps ahead or behind. They just couldn’t read each other anymore.

  It didn’t take a lot, McBride knew, to destroy a partnership’s rapport. Andrew didn’t meet his eyes, coming to join him by the balustrade again, and the silence between them was heavy. “It doesn’t look too bad,” McBride offered. “I don’t have enough men really, but with you here too, and Zvi’s people…”

  The outer doors of the hallway rattled and flew open. Instinctively McBride spun in the direction of the noise. Here came the ambassador’s security cortege, as if summoned by his words, in full parade order: six of them, sweeping in pairs into the hall. McBride watched, partly in admiration, partly amusement, as they took up positions around the room, so precisely you could have measured equal distance between them from the tip of one polished leather toe to the next. They were quietly and immaculately suited. All toned, neat, dark, they looked like a band of brother princes. He wondered what they’d make of his team, his motley Celts and Vikings.

  A seventh man entered. Unlike the rest, his head was down. He crossed the floor slowly, as if lost in thought. Roughly in the centre of the hall, where the stained glass turned the light sapphire, he stopped and looked up.

  His gaze locked to McBride’s. There was no drama in the moment. In fact it felt quite ordinary. As if he had got up that morning, come to the Freemason’s Hall and carried out his duties, purely for the purpose of ending up in this gallery in time to meet a pair of brown eyes.

  They were warm and full of questions. McBride felt his lips part as if he would answer—his heart, which despite his abuses normally thudded along stolidly about its business, lurch to a faster tempo. His palms dampened on the gallery rail. And still it didn’t feel awkward to be staring at a stranger. He said softly to Andrew, “Who the hell’s that?”

  It took Andrew a moment to answer, as if somehow he could be unsure who McBride meant or had somehow failed to notice him. “Who, the guy on his own there? That’s Zvi’s security chief. Leitner, I think he’s called. He’s Mossad.”

  “Mossad?” McBride echoed. The man in the hall had pushed his hands into his pockets, tipped his head to one side. The blue light falling on his aristocratic face brought out his skin’s warm olive tone. His hair and his eyelashes caught and split the weird radiance, black as raven’s feathers blowing in the wind on Holyrood’s hills. McBride drew a deep breath. He had no idea what was making his head spin. Carefully he smoothed a tremor from his voice. “What’s a Mossad agent doing on a milk run like this?”

  Andrew had come to lean close beside him. McBride felt him shrug and suppressed a flinch. He didn’t want to be touched or distracted. “Maybe the same thing we are,” Andrew said. “I heard he was involved in some god-awful fuckup in the West Bank. Some kind of hostage rescue that backfired. His partner was killed.”

  “What—so he got busted down to a gig like this, as you’d put it?”

  “Aye, maybe. I heard they wanted him out of the way for a bit while the investigation went on.”

  McBride stopped listening. The Mossad agent—Leitner, McBride said to himself, his mind trying out the delicate, exotic name—had begun to smile. It was very faint, but undeniable. McBride’s pulse geared up another notch. A strange heat sprang up in him, beginning in his gut, an inch or so under his navel, spreading to his solar plexus and a point behind his breastbone. His throat. Oh God, a sweet spot just up and back from his balls, halfway to his…

  “James? Are you all right?”

  “What? Yeah.” McBride drew a deep breath and glanced at Andrew. When he looked down again, Leitner had turned away. Just as well. He would have to stay here, pressed safely against the balustrade, until he was sure this stranger’s bizarre effect on him hadn’t culminated in a noticeable erection. “I’m fine.”

  “Doesn’t look like he’s any happier with this place than we are.”

  McBride watched Leitner make his way back towards the door. Now their eye contact was broken, McBride was at a loss to know what had seemed so extraordinary about him. He was tall and broad shouldered and his suit had probably cost more than McBride’s flat, but he was just a man. A tired one, from the look of him, and anxious. McBride listened while he gathered his men around him. Snatches of what he assumed was Hebrew drifted up to him. He didn’t need to understand it to know what was bothering Leitner. He nodded in amusement as the agent gestured to the exact same places from which McBride was afraid an attack could come.

  “Aye. For the right reasons. Will we get the chance to brief with them?”

  “Lila wants us here two hours before kickoff tonight. They’ll be here as well. Oh, er, James—one more thing…”

  McBride straightened. He looked at Andrew in suspicion. “What?”

  “Plain clothes tonight is…traditional. She wants us to blend in with the hall’s hospitality staff.”

  “Andrew, the staff here wear—”

  “Full kilt and shoulder cloak. Yes.”

  “Oh, you are fucking kidding me.”

  “Afraid not. She’s very keen. Hired the very best from McCalls. Done her research too—got you your McBride green-and-blue, from the Clanranald—”

  “Thank you. I know what my clan tartan is.” It was a decent idea to have him and his lads looking like harmless prats instead of plainclothes coppers, but he couldn’t help but wonder if Lila had come up with it as a subtle form of punishment. He’d worn his tartans twice in his life before—once at his wedding and once when some of the Harle Street police had been asked to march with the Tattoo. Both occasions had been torture. “Where am I supposed to hang my bloody gun?”

  Andrew chuckled. “Well, that’s up to you. But I gather she’s ordering weskits and jackets long enough to hide a shoulder harness.”

  McBride sank his face into his hands. “Brilliant. The woman’s thought of everything.”

  * * *

  The changing rooms were crowded. McBride supposed he should be grateful they’d been assigned facilities separate from those of the staff, the horde of little cocktail shakers heading off about their duties in full fake ceremonial, a uniform tartan never dreamed of by the Highland chiefs. If Lila was making some kind of point to him about becoming part of a team again, she couldn’t have chosen a more direct way to do it. From his position on the bench, struggling with his shoelaces, McBride could see parts of his colleagues seldom exposed in cultures that did not include a skirt in their national dress. He repressed a smile. It was enough to put a man off. And that would be grand, wouldn’t it—cure him, straighten him out and send him home to Libby with a hard-on.

  At least his gear was authentic. Standing, McBride adjusted the heavy, groin-shielding sporran to its proper place and settled the hang of the cloak over his shoulder. All that was missing was the sgian dubh in his sock. Unlike Lila Stone, he had a real one, a gift from his grandfather, which looked like it might still have Sassenach blood on its blade. But these were meant to be peace talks, and all parties were forbidden the display of conspicuous weaponry. Ironic, McBride thought, since he was carrying a Walther P99 in his holster. Ironic, that the few times he’d ever had to carry a weapon on duty were at peace talks.

  “Boss?” McBride looked up. There was Andrew, who’d fought his way to the full-length mirror and was struggling with his cloak brooch. He’d already spiked himself in the thumb, from the look of things. “Are you any hand at fastening these wee bastards?”

  McBride was, but more from dealing with Grace’s nappy pins and little frocks over the years. He slid Andrew’s pin home with the absentminded tenderness he’d brought to those tasks, then tidied the ruffles o
f his shirt and stepped back, patting him once on the shoulders. Andrew looked the real deal, of course. Resplendent in his Barclay yellow and black. Poster boy for the Lothians tourist board…

  Tears in his eyes. McBride frowned. “What the devil is wrong with you?”

  “I’ve been thinking, James. What I did—it was terrible.”

  “Ssh.” McBride glanced over his shoulder. “I told you, forget about it. And don’t get blood on that shirt, for God’s sake, or Lila will lose her deposit.” He watched while Andrew sucked his thumb in a gesture he would once have found distracting and which now left him cold. Christ, maybe I am cured. “Here, shift over. Let’s have a look at these two fine Highland warriors.”

  And that was no good. The mirror, his reflection in it with Andrew’s, recalled straightaway the Harle Street locker room on the night of the party. He saw Andrew redden and was glad he was too tired to manage a blush for himself. “It wasn’t all fake,” Andrew whispered. “I…I did like it, James. If you want to go on…”

  McBride tried to imagine it. He couldn’t. And when he tried to recall it, all he could see in his mind’s eye was Agent Leitner. He blinked in surprise. Had he even been thinking of him? “Don’t be so bloody stupid,” he growled. “You’re a lot of things, Andrew, but queer isn’t one of them. Now, we’ve got bigger fish to fry than our own tonight, so pull yourself together. How’s Janice?”

  Clouds lifted from Andrew’s brow. McBride let himself cease paying attention while the boy detailed Sergeant Janice Dee’s perfections. There was just a chance that one day he and Andrew might find their way back to normality, to balance. Distractedly he checked the draw on his weapon, that the edge of the cloak wouldn’t hinder it. Best warn the others about that too. Best give them the team talk, even though it had been so long he could barely remember what to say.