Not Exactly Allies

by Kathryn Judson

Not Exactly Allies (MI5 1/2, Book Three)

  By Kathryn Judson

  Copyright 2005, 2011, 2014 Kathryn Judson

  All rights reserved

  ISBN-10: 1496152204 (trade paperback)

  ISBN-13: 978-1496152206 (trade paperback)

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, agencies, places, and policies are fictitious, or used fictitiously.

  Other books in this series are Not Exactly Dead and Not Exactly Innocent.

  CHAPTER 1 – THE CALLS

  "Hallo?"

  "Durand? Is that you?"

  "Who wants to know?"

  "Sorry. Hugh here. Did you know men and women see things differently?"

  Pause.

  "Well, yes," Leandre Durand said at last, slowly, obviously not quite sure where his British friend was leading with this phone call.

  "Sorry, I didn't put that very well."

  "Perhaps not."

  "What I mean to say is that women not only put their own spin on things, they actually see differently. I've been studying it. You should see some of these studies. They put a group of girls in a room and drop hundreds of dollar bills all at once, and the girls see everything at once and rarely grab a bill. They just jump and giggle and grab thin air, mostly. You put boys in the same room, drop an equivalent flurry of bills, and they can isolate them and wind up with booty."

  "My Perrine says such experiments only show that men like to prove their prowess and women are happy just to play."

  "That's a new twist. I hadn't thought of that."

  "Or perhaps the people performing the experiment have, one hopes inadvertently, prepared the girls differently leading into the experiment. It is hard to say. Certainly boys and girls are different, but children like to please grownups who pay them the least little attention, and psychologists, alas, are prone to pet theories."

  "I'd have to say I'd noticed that. Odd theories, too, some of them."

  "But of course. You cannot make your name with a discovery of something that makes sense. Not in some circles, at least. Excuse me a little minute, if you please."

  Richard Hugh was astonished to hear gunshots and glass shattering. Being experienced, he held his tongue. Durand would get back to him when he could. If he could.

  To kill time and to feel like he was doing something, he tried to trace Durand's phone and pin it down with a satellite reading. The French, he unhappily noted, were still being obnoxious and stubborn and blocking all the ways that British intelligence services had given their field agents to use in such situations. If it were not Leandre Durand being shot at, it would probably serve the French right for insisting on going their own way, Richard thought, with a bit of peevishness.

  "All right. I am back," Durand said. "Now what is it we were talking about? Ah, yes. You were instructing me on the differences between males and females, was it not?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Oh, do not be so touchy, M. Hugh. It is Hugh this week, is it not? That is what you just said, I think. And Richard is it? Or do we have a new forename for my aged brain to try to remember?"

  "Pull your only-50-something brain into focus, will you, old sport, and tell me if that was gunshot and massive physical destruction in the background just now."

  "Such a simple question. I ask an old friend his current assigned name and-"

  "Enough already. You may call me Richard Hugh. Are you happy now?" In a more civilized tone he added, "Are you all right?"

  "Perfectly. It is nothing, really," Durand said, as something exploded and the sound of rushing water, as if from large broken pipes, nearly drowned out his voice.

  "That definitely doesn't sound like nothing," Richard said.

  "Oh, well, I hadn't anticipated that the pipes would burst. One little minute more, please. I must move I think. The severed electrical cord hanging above the water has me a tiny bit concerned."

  There was the sound of splashing footsteps, then dryer footfalls at a dead run, five more gunshots, and then Durand's voice saying, "Hah, missed me again."

  "I hate to be rude, but may I call you some backup or something?"

  "A courteous thought, mon vieux, but our vastly-superior equivalent of SWAT teams are already at work to get me out of here. Thank you all the same."

  "You're welcome. But let me see if I have this straight. You're in the middle of being rescued and you let me blather on about psychological studies?"

  "Believe me, my friend, it is the most amusing thing to happen to me in five hours. I cannot tell you how ready I was for a good laugh."

  "Glad to oblige, I'm sure."

  "And, to clarify, I am not exactly being rescued. I am sure that I could eventually extract myself. But the higher-ups, they want such things handled their way, and what is a mere foot soldier such as myself to do?"

  "You're such a modest fellow," Richard said. He wasn't sure his friend heard him, over the sudden roars, crashes, thuds and snaps of what sounded like a building coming down.

  Durand coughed, sputtered a few angry words, and gasped. This didn't seem like a good sequence of sounds. But again, it seemed a very bad time to insert himself into the situation, and so Richard sat tight, his nerves protesting the restraint.

  "I do not believe it," Durand said, sounding awestruck.

  That was too much. Durand was almost never awestruck. Richard's curiosity got the better of his caution. "What don't you believe?" he whispered, a notebook at the ready to jot down whatever might be useful, should something horrible happen to Durand and an investigation be necessary.

  "My supervisor himself! He is leading the men into the building. Or, more precisely, what is left of the building. Can you believe it? The man himself," Durand said.

  Richard barely resisted the urge to throw his notebook wildly skyward in frustration. Here he was expecting almost anything short of space aliens using death rays, and it was only one standard-issue spy chief. Keeping his tone as level as he could manage, he said, "From what you told me about Blondet-"

  "Bah. Blondet is dead. He killed himself. This is my new supervisor, Castelneau. He is worse than Wilmot, even. He never leaves his desk, this Castelneau."

  "Obviously not."

  "Excuse?"

  "Unless he has the bloody thing strapped to him, if it is Newcastle, he has left his desk."

  "Do not translate names to English. It ruins them."

  "Did I get it right? Castelneau, Castle New, Newcastle? Ja?" Richard said, throwing in a third language just to be obnoxious.

  "Do not distract me just now. I am sure I need my wits about me," Durand said. He sounded deadly serious.

  Richard collapsed into laughter.

  "Do I wish to know what is so funny?" Durand asked icily.

  "Probably not. Call me back and tell me how it goes," Richard said, ringing off.

  "What's so funny?" his wife asked him.

  "Oh, Emma, my love," Richard said, grabbing her into a hug, "Our friend Leandre Durand is so funny. He can handle gunmen and explosions and having buildings being demolished around him, as far as I can tell. But get him within eyeshot of a supervisor on the prowl, and suddenly he feels an overwhelming need to have all his wits about him."

  "I've had supervisors like that."

  Richard started to say something, but checked himself.
To be honest, he'd had supervisors like that, too.

  "You're shaking, lover," Emma said.

  "Oh, am I?"

  Emma took a step back, held up one of his hands, and displayed it. It was shaking. She cocked her head, looking up at his face.

  "Durand is okay, isn't he?" she asked.

  "I think so."

  "But you're not sure?"

  "The ruddy man never says when he's in trouble, does he?" Richard groused.

  It was a patently ridiculous statement. She chose to ignore it. "So is this worried shaking, or shaking from relief?" she asked.

  "Darned if I know," he said. He pulled her tight, kissed the top of her head, and searched his brain for a way to change the subject. Shaking was bad enough without study and analysis.

  "HQ called while you were on the phone," Emma said, changing the subject for him. "That would be on our landline, which we are duty bound to answer while we're here, as opposed to my mobile, which I'm duty bound to answer 24 hours a day," she added, with just a touch of resentment.

  "I don't know what to do about having too many phones, luv," Richard said.

  They were both of an age (nearly 50) that they could remember less-sophisticated networking, not to mention months on end with no contact with the home office that wasn't initiated by the agent. These days, the technology was so much better that it practically demanded to be used, whether it made sense or not to bother with it. In retrospect (and in relative safety) the old ways seemed much better.

  "Stolemaker wants both of us there, his office, eleven-thirty tomorrow morning. That's all Dourlein would say," Emma said.

  Richard got a gleam in his eye.

  "Correction," Emma said, her eyes twinkling. "She also said that it was no use you calling her up and calling her gorgeous and trying to wheedle advance information out of her, because she hasn't any."

  Richard blushed. It would be nice, once a man got married, if secretaries might at least pretend he never said anything playful. It's not like a man could break himself entirely of a lifetime of low-level flirting with levelheaded colleagues who knew better than to read anything into it. Could he?

  "I lied," Emma said. "She didn't say not to call her, and I made it up about the nickname. Personally, I think she adores being called Gorgeous. I know I adore it when you leave smiling women in your wake. Especially when they get a little jealous of me afterward. It gives me a chance to pointedly ignore them, and makes them wonder what I've got that they don't have."

  Richard studied his wife. For the life of him, he couldn't tell if she meant to be funny, or reassuring, was making fun of herself, or if she was telling him he'd been a cad. "I give up," he said. "Am I in trouble?"

  Emma shook her head and hugged him.

  Richard decided that if she had been angry, she was over it already. But women were confoundedly hard to read. Especially wives. It was annoyingly obvious now and then that he didn't have her figured out yet. Not that he'd expected that the marriage ceremony would magically make it possible for him to read her mind, but still, this many months on he expected fewer bouts of cluelessness.

  Richard's phone rang. The display said it was Durand's phone. "British Adamant Asset Management, London," Richard answered, on a hunch.

  "Oh, I am not sure I have the right number," a French-accented male voice said, as if being connected to British Adamant was unexpected, but meaningful. That could mean anything, though, as BAAM was a perfectly legitimate business, on the front end of it anyway, the best front company 'MI5 1/2' had, in Richard's opinion. (That he helped run it had nothing to do with that humble assessment, of course.)

  "Castelneau is it?" Richard said, playing another hunch.

  The other man said nothing.

  "We're just getting preliminary reports, of course," Richard said, "but it sounds a fine job you've done today. Do let us know if we can be of service."

  "Eh, em, well of course we appreciate the offer," the man said.

  "Awfully glad to have you as an ally, sir. Anything else?" Richard said, piling it on.

  "Eh, no... No."

  "Oh, if I may, sir? Just a trifle? No, on second thought, I could have your secretary clear this up for us." Richard let his voice imply that it would be a shame to resort to a mere secretary.

  "No, no, I am at your service."

  "We seem to have – I hate to admit this – we seem to have your name spelt two ways. C-a-s-t-e-l-n-a-u for one, and n-e-a-u for another."

  "N-e-a-u," the man confirmed, doing quite well with the English pronunciations of the letters.

  "Thanks awfully. It's so embarrassing to have clerical errors. Carry on then," Richard said, and rang off. He grinned at Emma, raising his eyebrows playfully, as if to say: hunch obeyed, game won, points to the British side.

  "Now you're in trouble," Emma said. She wasn't joking.

  "What? I was just having a bit of fun with a stuffed shirt. Do him good, I should say. Besides, what's the harm in buttering up Durand's chief for him?"

  "Stolemaker is unhappy with Durand's new chief. Doesn't want to have anything more to do with him than absolutely necessary. I haven't figured out why yet."

  "Oh. Sorry. I should have stopped mid-conversation to ask why you were shaking your head. I assumed you just thought I was being too silly. My mistake."

  "Perhaps you'd like to call Stolemaker's office. It could get a little embarrassing if Castelneau takes your kind opening, and they don't know what he's talking about. If you'd like to try to save the situation by throwing yourself at the boss's feet in the morning, that's your business, but if I were in your shoes, I'd give the chief fair warning of what's gone down, to avoid the need to throw myself at his mercy later."

  "Perhaps you're right."

  "And maybe I'm not. You know him better than I do. And you've worked with British intelligence longer than I have. Maybe Dourlein would be kind enough to help soften things, if you asked her nicely."

  Richard hemmed and hawed. Mostly he had to overcome minor resentment that his wife thought he could use Darlene Dourlein's kind assistance, even if she was world-class at dealing with this sort of kerfuffle.

  Emma kindly left the room so he wouldn't have an audience to his indecision.

  He decided to call, mostly because the mental picture of throwing himself at Stolemaker's feet in the morning had planted itself in his mind and he didn't like it.

  "Eh, hello there, Gorgeous. Hugh here," he said. He faltered. He wasn't sure how to admit he'd probably blundered, all the more so because he wasn't sure if he had.

  "Ah, Triple-O Five. Let me guess. You're the fellow who impersonated someone representing this office and made nice with French intelligence, right in the middle of a make-mean-with-French-intelligence campaign?"

  "I didn't know about the make-mean campaign. Honest. You can't tell me Castelneau called already? I've just barely rung off."

  "The man was desperate for a kind word, apparently. Couldn't offer his cooperation on future projects fast enough, from what I understand. The chief's on the phone with him now. No. The connection's just off. Hang on, he's ringing."

  Stolemaker asked her to call Triple-O Five.

  "He's standing by, sir," she said.

  She put the men on the same connection.

  "We've just had an odd call from your friend Leandre Durand's boss. I wonder if, by any wild chance, you have any idea what in the world prompted Castelneau to suddenly declare himself cooperative?" Stolemaker asked Richard.

  "Would you like my resignation now or later?"

  "So you do know?"

  "Call it a bit of a joke that may have backfired. To be honest, I not only didn't know there was trouble with Castelneau, I didn't know the man existed until a few minutes ago. I thought Durand was still answering to Blondet."

  "Give yourself some slack, will you? You and I both know you've just come out of a maelstrom of a case that required your full concentration. Just tell me what just went down, will you, so I know where the man is
working from."

  "Synopsis, or taking a stab at verbatim?"

  "Synopsis, please. I'm swamped today."

  Richard got dutiful, and gave his chief an unembellished brief.

  -

  Durand, meanwhile, was largely left guessing.

  His chief had seen him talking on the phone, and asked who was on the other end.

  Durand had tried tossing out the short, honest, and uninformative "The other party called me, sir. It didn't sound important."

  Castelneau had grabbed the phone and hit the callback button. After ringing off from that conversation, Castelneau had triumphantly whisked through seven layers of security on his ultra-sophisticated pocket computer/phone to come up with his own super-confidential number for Chief Stolemaker of one of the United Kingdom's unacknowledged little gnarled branches of secret service, one that bridged the usual divide between foreign and domestic investigations (hence its nickname of MI5 1/2, a joking reference that it was neither MI5 nor MI6, nor really quite substantial enough for its own number). Castelneau had then proceeded to give his regards to the top man himself, puffing and strutting as he did so.

  During Castelneau's astonishing display of ego, Durand and members of the special forces team had managed to steer him out of the shattered building and away from stray boards and bricks that were falling here and there, but that's as much as they'd been able to accomplish, as far as Durand could see.

  He bit back a surge of annoyance. Beyond his outrage over the phone theft and the callback button trespass, there was the minor fact that he'd been outnumbered, pinned down, and shot at for hours. He'd had a building bulldozed around him, for all intents and purposes. Surely his supervisor might have had the decency to take two or three seconds to ask if he was injured or otherwise in need of anything. Not that he would necessarily admit it if he were. But it would be nice to be asked.

  It would also be nice to go get something to eat, and a bit of wine. It's not like he'd been able to eat or drink all these long hours of his ordeal.

  It was just like a desk warrior to not think about details like that. The man, obviously, lived in a world where refrigerators were down the hall and doting female secretaries brought you snacks when you were even just barely hungry.

  A member of the rescue squad handed him some candy. It was somewhat squished from being in the man's jacket pocket during a flying leap onto his belly, but it was nourishment of a sort, and it was offered unbidden.

  Now, that was a true comrade in arms, Durand thought, as he accepted the gift.

  He glanced at the young man's name pin. Nason, the tag said. So this was the new man the other men called The Nose. Probably it was just a juvenile attempt at humor, based on the young man's facial features and his surname, but Durand had a hunch that it implied more than that. This man, to be sure, was more than usually aware of his surroundings. It wasn't obvious. He wasn't one of those hyper-diligent sorts. But still, if you watched, quietly and carefully, you could tell he didn't miss much.

  Almost instinctively, Durand flattened his emotions and tried to come across as just dull and bland enough to not be worth anyone's bother.