by Kate Johnson
See, I’m blushing now just thinking about it.
Harvey talked for ages. I spread myself out on the bed, feeling wanton, then quickly sat up, feeling stupid. I couldn’t even go and freshen up, because Harvey was in the bathroom.
After a while I started to get really bored. What was so important that he’d rather talk about it than get naked with me? Unless I was that boring. God, maybe I was boring! Certainly Luke didn’t seem to have missed me that much.
Miserably, I gathered up my shoes and pashmina and little evening bag and left the room. I had sort of lost the mood.
I got back to my room and stared at the perfectly made-up bed. My feet ached from my new shoes and all the walking I’d been doing, my head was fuzzy from the wine and I was feeling very unloved. I was so drunk I even half thought about seeing how powerful the vibrate function on my mobile was. I could ring one from the other.
I picked up my little Siemens phone. There were no messages. Nobody loved me. I picked up the Nokia. There were three texts and half a dozen voice mails, all from Luke, all demanding to know why I wasn’t answering my fucking phone.
“Jesus Christ,” he said when I called him, “why the hell didn’t you answer?”
“I forgot my phone. Phones.”
“Where were you? I thought—”
“I was at dinner,” I cut him off. “With a very charming man. I’ve just come from his room.”
Luke was silent for a few seconds. “Was it Wright?”
No, it wasn’t right at all. “No. I went in there earlier. Dressed as a concierge. I took some pictures but there was nothing interesting in his briefcase.”
“No, well, there probably wouldn’t be. I think he’s more of a puppet. This is bigger than just Wright.” He was silent again. “So who did you go to dinner with?”
Hah! He was jealous! I did a little dance, sitting there on the bed.
“Just someone I met on the flight,” I said.
“And what were you doing in his room?”
Oh, God, this is fantastic. “Investigating.”
“Investigating what?”
“Whether he’s a better kisser than you. And you know what, he is.”
“Sophie, that’s not funny.”
“Yes, it is, it’s funny because it’s true.” I stuck my tongue out at the phone.
“Are you drunk?”
“I have to be drunk to want to kiss someone else? Can’t I pursue casual sex if I’m sober?”
Christ, I was drunk.
“Look,” Luke said tightly, “just don’t do anything stupid, all right? And set your damn alarm for tomorrow. I’ve got you booked on the 0625 flight out of Ciampino. Make sure you have enough cash for the taxi. Do you still have your passport on you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That makes it a lot easier. It’s hard enough trying to explain special operations to someone who speaks your own language. I’ll see you when the plane gets in, should be around seven.”
And with that he clicked off, sounding pissed off.
Score!
The Nokia woke me up at five a.m. I pulled on my new civvies—the white shirt over the Gucci dress, which might have looked stylish on someone less hungover—found some ancient shades in the bottomless pit of my Ace bag to cover up my shadowed, bloodshot eyes and staggered down to reception.
“I need a taxi,” I whispered to the perfect woman behind the desk. “To Ciampino airport.”
She nodded, made a call, and five minutes later there was a car waiting for me.
I sat with my head back against the seat as we swung around Rome in the early morning and tried not to heave. I get carsick even when I’m dead sober. Seriously, it was like hitching a lift with Michael Schumacher.
Or Ayrton Senna.
I felt like month-old milk by the time we arrived at the airport. I checked in—having remembered to put my stun gun and things in my hold luggage—and stumbled through to the tiny airside bar.
At Stansted it’s like a little shopping mall. There are clothes shops and shoe shops and TV shops and bars and restaurants and coffee stands and all sorts. You could live there. Some people practically do.
Ciampino airport’s airside facilities consisted of a bar, which was closed, and a tiny tabaccheria. I bought a large bottle of water and some Soft Fruits and put my head on the table until it was time to board.
I slept my way through the flight, the last few days’ sleeplessness having caught up with me, not to mention last night’s wine, and dreamed of Harvey and Luke both turning me down. Bastards.
The plane was pretty much empty when I was woken by a (thankfully unfamiliar) stewardess. I grabbed my bag, trying to hide the Ace logo, and tripped off into the very cold, windy British spring.
We were off-jetbridge (stupid cheapo airline), so I had to walk across the freezing tarmac, keeping my head down so no one recognised me, and up the steps into the terminal.
Luke was waiting at the top, looking pissed off.
“Jesus,” I said, “when you said you’d see me there I thought I’d at least get to Baggage on my own.”
“You look like hell,” Luke said, and swiped his pass to get us back into the terminal.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “Where are we going?”
“Back to the office. Quicker this way.”
“I need to pick up my bag.”
He stopped and closed his eyes and looked like he was counting. “What bag?”
“I had to buy some stuff! I couldn’t walk around Rome in my uniform.”
He ran his eyes over me. “So I see.” He sighed. “Okay, let’s go.”
We went back through the normal route to the transit and baggage reclaim. I showed my passport, like a good traveller, and Luke flashed his pass. It was quite normal for staff to return from the gate through customs. It was great, like you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be, although it’s perfectly legal.
Sometimes the whole airport thing just totally overwhelms me. I mean, there are all these rules about where people can and cannot go, and all these hidden tunnels and doors that are only used by staff, and if you open the wrong one and let a passenger in then it’s unbelievably illegal. But if you have the right pass you can, in legal terms, wander in and out of the UK all day long.
And I swear, BAA must have acres of footage of me wandering around being totally lost in the bowels of the system.
We waited in silence for my bag, then walked out to the car park, equally quiet. Luke stopped by his Vectra, and I shook my head.
“Might as well get mine out of here as well,” I said. “I’ll see you there.”
I walked down to Ted, incredibly relieved to see him again, and sat there for a few moments, feeling surreal.
So. I’d just done another handful of things that were not totally legal and, apparently, got away with them. I’d been somewhere exotic and beautiful. I’d kissed a total stranger in an unknown place. I’d taken photographs of documents in a suspect’s room.
Was I like a great spy, or what?
Alexa wasn’t there when I walked into the office, but Luke was standing talking to One.
“Ah,” said my boss. “How was your trip?”
I looked between them cautiously. “Okay,” I said. “Unplanned and exhausting, but okay.”
“You found the shops,” Luke said. “It can’t have been that bad.”
I glared at him. One laughed.
“It was admirable of you to pursue your quarry so far,” he said. “We got your pictures. For reference, next time send them to my e-mail address—” he started looking around Alexa’s desk, “—I’ll write it down for you…”
“I’ll just put it in my phone directory?” I offered gently, and he nodded.
“Ah yes. Much more sensible. It’s [email protected].”
I blinked at him.
“1995,” he explained, “when GoldenEye came out. That’s my favourite.”
I blinked again, nodded and inputted the address. Was
there anything about this place I was ever going to understand?
I could see Luke was nearly smiling, and I avoided his gaze. “Were they useful?” I asked. “The pictures?”
“Inasmuch as they told us he wasn’t the big man in this,” One said. “David Wright is something of a pawn, I fear.”
“A pawn in what?” I asked. “What is going on here? No one—” I glared at Luke, “—ever tells me anything.”
“That’s because there’s not always a lot to tell,” One said, going into his office and motioning for me to follow. “Most of this job is pure instinct, Sophie. I’ve been watching you—” How? How had he been watching me? “—and I can see you work on instinct, too.”
Well, of course. Got to trust your instincts. Feminine intuition and all that.
“She certainly doesn’t work on logic,” murmured Luke from behind me, and I scowled. I hadn’t even realised he’d come in. So much for instinct.
One was seated at his desk. “What we have so far is this,” he said, looking up at me, and I tried to look alert and instinctive. “You’ve noticed that a lot of Ace planes have been having technical problems recently? That there have been delays, that passenger numbers haven’t been quite what they usually are?”
I shrugged. “Well, yes, things have been easier…”
“Airline profits have gone down drastically in the last few months,” One went on, looking at some figures on his desk. “The company’s losses are in millions. After September eleventh, of course, things took a bit of a dive but all the low-cost airlines rallied through.”
This was true. A lot of the larger airlines had pulled out of Stansted, leaving it to holiday carriers like Air 2000 and the likes of Ace, Ryanair and Easyjet. For some reason, people didn’t seem as afraid of terrorist attacks when they’d only paid fifty quid for their ticket.
“Ace was doing very well, making a lot of money. Now it’s a PLC, of course, anyone can have a share of that money, but recently the shares have been going down in value. All these delays, inconsistencies, a lot of complaints have hit the news and there’s been very little to counter that. David Wright has made no secret of the fact that he’s interested in Ace in a big way. He already has a lot of shares in the company, but he’s looking to buy more.”
“And with share prices dropping so suddenly you think something’s up,” I said. “You think he’s sabotaging the airline so he can get it cheaper.” Clever bastard.
“Bingo,” One said.
“But,” I said, “he’s not the one in charge of it all?”
“No. Wrightbank is owned by David Wright, but not controlled by him. Insiders have long speculated there’s someone else pulling his strings, but no one knows who. We knew he had links with the Brown twins—he served a few months inside with one of them once.”
I stared. “David Wright was in prison? What for?”
“Petty theft,” Luke said. “A long time ago. His cellmate was one Neil Wilkes—the man you followed down the baggage belt.”
“Brown Two.”
“Yes. His brother is Thomas Wilkes. They’re known counterfeiters. They can forge anything—money, credit cards, passports…”
“Hence their fake names.”
“Yes. Now they’re both safely behind bars, but neither will say a word about who they're working for.”
“They could be working alone,” I said. “Who says they have to work for someone?”
“They’ve never done it before.”
“I’ve never pretended to be an air hostess before,” I replied sharply, “but I did yesterday. First time for everything.”
One smiled. “The crew was quite disturbed. One of them filed a report when she returned. The police brought it to us.”
Aw, crap.
Luke was laughing. “She said she was never convinced you were a trainee and she was sure your warrant card was fake.”
“Which one was she?”
“Her name was Kerry something…”
Ha! Kerry was the least helpful of the lot. And the stupidest. She’d told me she’d been on the crew for “seven months, since December”.
It’s April now.
“She was just jealous of my natural ability,” I said loftily.
“Ace also had a record number of complaints about you from passengers,” Luke said, grinning.
“Oh, well, passengers,” I dismissed. But hey, at least they’d noticed me.
“Anyway,” One said. “David Wright is booked on the afternoon flight back from Rome. He should be landing at 1745. Luke, will you see him off the plane?” Luke nodded. “And Sophie?”
I looked up helpfully.
“Go home and get some sleep. You look wretched.”
Cheers.
Luke followed me out. “Guess you must be tired,” he said, “all that travelling and shopping and socialising.”
“I wasn’t socialising.”
“So you went back to your passenger’s room on business?”
I couldn’t help a smile. I wondered what Harvey had thought when he came back out and I wasn’t there. Or if he’d noticed. Or if he was still on his bloody “cell phone”.
“No, that was personal.”
Luke scowled at me, and I turned away, grinning. I was just getting out my keys when another car pulled up, one of those special disabled cars, and Alexa opened her door.
“Hey, the traveller returns.” She smiled. “Nice trip?”
“Not bad.” I shot a look at Luke, who was still scowling. “You want a hand with that?” I gestured to the wheelchair she was reaching for.
“No, I’m good.” I watched in amazement as she lifted the wheelchair over from a well where the passenger seat should be, set it on the ground by her door and opened it up. Then she moved a lever that rotated her seat outside of the car and tipped herself into the wheelchair.
“Very impressive,” I said.
“Had a lot of practice.” She grabbed her handbag from the footwell and pushed the seat back inside, locked the door and started wheeling herself up the ramp into the office. I marvelled at her upper arm strength.
As she disappeared inside, One appeared in the doorway. “Luke, Sophie,” he said. “I’m glad you’re still here. I just took a look at those photos you sent.” He nodded at me. “You got one of his diary. I’m glad to see someone else uses a good old fashioned paper diary and not a bloody PalmPilot.”
I had to hide a smile. He sounded like my dad, the world’s biggest technophobe. He wills his laptop to break down all the time so he can complain about how unreliable it is.
“He has the Buckman Ball written in for tonight,” One went on.
Luke sighed.
“So you two are going to go. I’ll get you some tickets and e-mail you the aliases.”
Luke nodded and they both looked at me.
“What is the Buckman Ball?” I asked meekly.
“In London,” Luke said. “A charity ball. Big celeb presence. Very boring. So far I’ve been every year for the last three years tailing someone. Why do they all go to the Buckman Ball?”
One did a palms-up. “Beats me. But you two are going. Get your tux out. Get—” he looked at me, “—your ballgown out. Luke, wear a wire. Sophie, this way.”
Luke got in his car and drove off. I followed One back through into his office where he opened a filing cabinet and took out a collection of small, high-tech things.
“This has a long-range radio frequency so we’ll be able to pick up what’s going on from here,” he said. “But you’ll need to hide this away somewhereM” he held up a bulky transmitter, “Mso may I suggest nothing too clingy? This here—” he handed me a tiny grommet, “—goes in your ear so you can hear Luke, and he can hear you. We can also break into the loop from here if we need to talk to you.”
I gulped and took the device. “Exactly how posh is this thing?”
“The Buckman Ball? Gets coverage in Tatler. Madonna’s on the guest list.”
Jesus.
&nb
sp; I drove home with my head whirling. I owned nothing suitable. Nothing at all. For the last charity bash Chalker’s band had played at I’d worn my Monsoon standby, but it was both dated and clingy, not to mention far too obviously inexpensive for such an occasion. I knew my mother would have nothing suitable. Her idea of designer was the Marks and Spencer “Per Una” range.
Angel, I knew, would have lots of stunning things which she’d lend me in a second, but I’d hardly be able to get my left leg into any of her dresses. It was a shame, because her mother used to have some fabulous stuff, and it would be very cool to turn up in something IC Winter wore thirty years ago. Vintage, yah?
I got home and stared at my wardrobe in misery. Then I got out my phone and called Angel, just to see if she had put on a few stones in weight and gained several inches in height and felt the need to go on a shopping spree.
“I need a ballgown by tonight,” I said. “A real, proper Oscar frock, and I have nothing. I don’t suppose you have any cousins my size?”
“Sorry, honey,” Angel said with real regret, because she totally lived up to her name, “I don’t have any cousins at all. I could give my friend Livvy a ring if you like? She’s quite tall.”
I’d met Angel’s old boarding school pal Livvy, who’s actually Lady Olivia Something-Toff. She was my height, yes, but she was also a size eight. She had a sort of permanent stretched look to her.
“No,” I said dejectedly. “It’ll never work.”
“I could lend you some jewellery, though,” she offered. “So long as you tell me where and why you’re going and who with?”
I couldn’t lie to Angel. Well, not a lot.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “I’m really sorry, but I can’t.”
“Why? Is he married or something?”
Bingo.
“Erm, yes. So you can’t tell anyone, either.”
“Oh my God, Sophie! You bad girl!” Angel said, but she said it admiringly.
I think.
I put down the phone and my Nokia rang. Luke.
“Did One give you the wire?”
“Yes, although I don’t know how to work it.”
“I’ll show you. You want me to come over?”