LONDON ALERT

by Christopher Bartlett

  On reading the wine list, Holt had noticed two wines marked ‘Appellation Margaux Contrôlée[Ma21] ’. Both were château bottled, but the first and much more expensive one had the name of a château he had never heard of, while the cheaper one was a Château Margaux and one of the great wines, and usually very expensive. This illogical disparity in price was obviously a test to pick out the recruits who really knew something about wine. Holt naturally chose the latter and was quite surprised that Celia indicated her approval with a slightly ashamed look. Perhaps she had learnt much about wines in the course of accompanying VIPs.

  The first bottle, brought to their table with great pomp and ceremony, was obviously corked, again to test them. Holt was quite proud of having detected this on raising his glass to his nose before even taking a sip, though it was not difficult, as the bottle had obviously already been used several times to test recruits. It was pretty far gone and truly reeked of vinegar.

  The sommelier feigned an apology, to which Holt responded by saying that even the renowned La Tour d’Argent restaurant in Paris finds a third of their very oldest and expensive bottles to be corked. He added to the man’s discomfort by saying, ‘Of course, the sommelier at the Tour would have detected that by sniffing the cork even before proffering the bottle.’

  What had the poor man done wrong in his secret service career to end up playing this inglorious role?

  When a new bottle was brought and opened in their presence, Celia showed she could appreciate quality. Had recognizing a great wine featured in her training?

  He noticed how her attitude to the hotel staff was that of a demure young woman, with no trace of the schoolgirl, which seemed to be purely for his consumption. Was she having him on?

  Paying the bill was part of the test, and Holt added an extra tip in addition to the service charge. This seemed to unnerve the waiter, who said, ‘That is not necessary, Monsieur.’

  Holt nevertheless insisted, as if such petty largesse were nothing.

  Having enjoyed their great meal, they made their way through the lounge towards the terrace, with Holt allowing Celia to go on ahead while he stopped off at the cloakroom.

  On rejoining her in cool outside air, he found their coffees were already on the table, with a brandy just for him. The coffee was a disappointment; not up to the standard of the other fare but just about drinkable with the help of the velvety XO brandy. Celia seemed to be lost in thought as he sat silently in the semi-darkness, ruminating on what was or was not to follow up in the bedroom. Like the corked wine, the bitter coffee had possibly been a test. He would have to remember to note it on the guest comments form.

  Thanking the disenfranchised spooks for their truly excellent service, they made their way back through the lounge, followed by some lascivious glances unbecoming of future agents of Her Majesty. Of course, had any of those eyeing her had the good looks and panache of a Sean Connery, Celia would have felt less uncomfortable.

  Chapter 9

  The Bare Cheek

  The books they had brought to ease them through awkward moments in the bedroom proved unnecessary, as there was plenty of interest to them on the television. To make it feel like a real hotel, the secret service had even made pay-to-view porn channels available for aficionados or perhaps recruits on their own, which certainly did not apply to them. When at last the dreaded time for bed arrived, Celia simplified matters by indicating Holt should proceed first as she wanted to have a long relaxing shower.

  ‘Jeremy. It is nice being here like this don’t you think – even though we…shan’t be…?’

  Feeling too tired to worry about the ‘even though we shan’t be’, Holt was more than happy to go to the bathroom first. Too much wine and brandy had made him weak at the knees.

  Having changed into his pyjamas and the bathrobe supplied by the establishment, Holt came out of the bathroom to find Celia had divested herself of her dress. Wearing only her petticoat, she brushed past him without a glance on her way to take that long shower.

  Climbing into the nearest of the twin beds, he stretched out his legs and snuggled into the soft pillow. A strange feeling had come over him. Here he was in the close company of a woman who made him the envy of all his colleagues, yet with no prospect of anything happening. Her intention was surely to drag out her time in the shower in the expectation he would be out cold on her return.

  If so, she failed in that regard, for when he heard the click of the bathroom door being unlocked, he opened his eyes to see her emerge, enveloped in a bath towel. He had always wondered how real women ensured those towels stayed up, knowing that in the case of film stars they might even be glued on and that, anyway, there would be plenty on underneath.

  This was certainly not true in Celia’s case, for her contours were moulded by the towelling with no sign of anything underneath as she brushed past close to his face. A yard further on the towel slipped off by accident or design to reveal two pale, pert cheeks jutting out sharply below the concave of her back. Stark naked, she stood there, as if wondering what to do next, bent down to recover the towel and lobbed it casually onto the back of an armchair.

  In the process she had left nothing to Holt’s imagination. He was in a state of virtual shock, disbelief. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Was more to come?

  She ambled over to her overnight case, her left cheek and right cheek oscillating from side to side as each foot advanced, and fumbled amongst her things, seemingly untroubled by any thoughts that Holt might not be asleep. Having extracted a pair of knickers, she held them up for inspection as if unsure of her choice, stretched them wide open between her hands, and again bent down. Raising first one foot and then the other, she pulled them on over her ankles, hauled them upwards over the hump of her knees and then, with more difficulty, over her more ample thighs. Once they had arrived at their ultimate destination, she eased her fingers under the elastic to ensure they were comfortably in place. Being sensible, simple ones, they made her even more alluring than when completely naked.

  Crikey, what kind of big sister behaved like that? A six-year-old with nothing to show might, but surely not a preteen or teen sister? Holt felt confused, in part because the spectacle had left him physically unmoved.

  She turned round, and with her taut breasts in full view, came over to the foot of her bed, where she gathered up the linen nightdress she had laid out there beforehand. Slipping it on over her head, she wiggled her hips to allow it to slither down into place, covering her thighs but leaving her knees just visible.

  Coming between their two beds, she sat down on hers, crossing her legs with some difficulty because of the confined space. According to books Holt had read as a teenager, crossed legs when you invite a girl to dinner signalled that nothing would follow. This sudden prim routine seemed a trifle odd, as the prudish girls he knew would not only have been crossing their legs but surely wearing two, if not three, pairs of knickers in similar circumstances.

  ‘You are awake, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I guess so,’ admitted Holt, trying to convey the impression that he had hardly been aware of what had been going on.

  ‘Dr Blackwell put me up to this. I don’t want you to get me wrong – I am not normally like that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Blackwell assured me you would get a mental block if you saw me completely naked while not allowed to do anything. I was to act like an innocent child with no sense of shame. Above all, I should avoid being coy, as that would only wind you up.’

  ‘You certainly weren’t coy – at least, until a few seconds ago.’

  ‘He assured me that if I did it right, you would no longer hanker after me.’

  Had Blackwell actually said ‘hanker’, or was it a Freudian slip on Celia’s part? Could it be that she was not the font of innocence she made herself out to be?

  Having finished her lecture, she pulled aside the sheet and top blanket, drew up her long legs, swivelled, and slid between the sheets, taking care to grip the h
em of the nightdress to ensure it did not ride up. Holt thought the hem-gripping precaution somewhat unnecessary in view of the earlier display, though it might just have been out of habit or simply to ensure she would be lying comfortably, with nothing ruffled underneath those sensitive thighs.

  ‘Sleep tight, darling, sweet dreams,’ she whispered.

  ‘I expect I shall. I can’t move. It must be all the wine and the brandy.’

  He was not only paralysed, he didn’t even want her, which meant game, set, and match to Blackwell. He had got his revenge and would have a good laugh when he debriefed her.

  He woke up the next morning wondering whether it had it all been a teenager’s dream. Dream or not, he was not even tempted to sneak a peek at Celia dressing nonchalantly in the middle of the room. It certainly boded well for their overseas missions together, though it left him feeling undermined as a man.

  At breakfast he assured her that, loathe as he was to admit it, Blackwell’s programming had worked so well she had nothing fear. Rather than seeming relieved, she looked at him with a guilty smile, which he attributed to the shame she must feel about the show she had put on for his and Blackwell’s benefit.

  After breakfast they went for a short walk in the garden. How nice it felt walking on the velvety grass in the fresh morning air. They would have happily spent another day at the establishment but knew they would be leaving that morning. On re-entering the ‘hotel’, they took care to wipe their feet on the mat so as not to risk losing a mark for that. As they passed reception on the way up to their room, the young lady behind the counter called them into the manager’s office for a review of their sojourn.

  ‘You,’ said the manager, ‘have both passed with flying colours.’

  ‘I should think so,’ replied Celia somewhat forcefully, to Holt’s surprise.

  ‘Off the record,’ continued the manager, ‘we have just had a request from a Dr Blackwell for the overnight video of you in the bedroom, but we told him it had been routinely erased. In normal circumstances – that is, if nothing untoward happens – we erase recordings of what goes on in the bedroom immediately. I say bedroom, because we only have one fitted up with cameras for special situations.’

  ‘What do you mean by special situations – blackmail?’ asked Holt.

  ‘Could be anything. For you, it was in case the young lady claimed you had importuned her, even raped her, unlikely as it might seem. For your mutual protection.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Celia. ‘You never know.’

  ‘Videos of what happens in the public spaces are kept for just long enough to show the guests what they are doing wrong, or as evidence if they complain about the establishment or the service. If word got round that videos of what happens here in the bedrooms were being circulated to other departments, we would lose all credibility, and no one would ever come here.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ exclaimed Celia.

  The manager said he would put in his report that they had been a cut above the usual throughput, many of whom would have to come back for further training at the taxpayers’ expense.

  ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘we were a tad surprised the coffee served to you on the terrace last night was not quite up to par. We rather pride ourselves on our coffee. Maybe it got overheated by mistake, or the cup had not been properly rinsed and there were traces of detergent left on it. Anyway, sorry about that. Rest assured we will make sure it does not happen again.’

  ‘I thought it might have been to test us, like the corked wine, which was so awful no one could ever drink it,’ replied Holt.

  ‘You’re dead wrong there. The bottle you declined was shortly afterwards drunk by someone proclaiming it to be the greatest wine they had ever had, even on holiday in France.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Holt, ‘it was a great wine. Perhaps a great wine turning to vinegar still has something special about it.’

  ‘Anyway, all the best, whatever your mission. Hope it’s not too dangerous and that your cover does not get blown as mine was. That’s how I ended up here. Better than being dead, I suppose. But not much, after being active in the field in sunnier climes.’

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ said Holt. ‘We’ve been wondering why you call this place The Loughty.’

  ‘Simple really. Quite a number of pretentious UK hostelries think having the letters o-u-g-h in their names makes them high class. We just added the letters l and ty as a joke, as our mission statement seemed to infer we turn louts into gentlemen. I would rather you kept that to yourselves, safe in the knowledge that it did not apply in your case and that by revealing it, you would make louts of yourselves.’

  ‘Point taken. We won’t tell anyone, will we, Celia?’

  ‘Of course not, Jeremy. Would be nice, though, to find an excuse to come again.’

  ‘I would love to see you again,’ said the manager, looking at Celia. Had he seen her prancing around in her birthday suit? So what. She had been acting – it had not really been her.

  With smiles all round, they bade him farewell, and after a twenty-minute wait boarded a minibus with other departing ‘guests’ to be taken to catch the mid-morning train back to London. With most of them looking like spotty schoolboys, they were glad they had been ordered not to fraternise on the train.

  The following few days included yet more briefings, but nothing of note apart from having to go over the river to MI6 to collect their equipment from a Q (technical officer), just like James Bond. But unlike 007, they would not be issued with rocket-firing cigars and an Aston Martin – or nowadays, a BMW. Instead, they were only to be provided with a simple tourist-grade camera, a laptop with special communications software, and, to their incredulity, a ‘honeymoon kit’ with instructions as to the use thereof.

  On their way to MI6’s fort-like headquarters overlooking the Thames at Vauxhall, Holt and Celia discussed what might be in that honeymoon kit and concluded it must be party items, like confetti, to give the impression they were just married. Holt wondered whether it would include atropine to dilate the bride’s pupils and make her look ‘up for it’, as well as serve as an antidote in the event of another nerve gas attack in Tokyo.

  On arriving at MI6 and declaring the purpose of their visit, they were issued with their visitor badges with no name but apparently with an embedded chip. Q collected them at reception. Looking too young to explain the use of sophisticated equipment such as rocket-firing cigars, he was probably a junior in the dirty devices department. He looked somewhat immature to be explaining honeymoon equipment.

  The first item was their camera, a Canon Power Shot S110, an inconspicuous camera able to take high-quality photos even in poor light, without using its flash. Junior Q hardly needed to remind them to take many innocent photos so the ones in which they were really interested would not be obvious.

  The only special feature of the laptop computer was the encryption software enabling them to communicate securely. This would only be used in exceptional circumstances, say in the event of their being required to do something special. Otherwise, communication would be by phone between Celia and an ostensible woman friend in London, with innocuous-sounding code words used to convey instructions very much as al-Qaeda was wont to use. For example, mention of a death in the family was the signal that they should cut short their trip and return immediately. With neither of them being front-line field agents, this was most unlikely.

  The boyish officer at last came to the item that had been occupying their thoughts, the honeymoon kit, which had been sitting on his desk in a small wooden box marked ‘MI6 Honeymoon Kit’ in bright pink letters.

  As if he were the original Q in the James Bond films demonstrating some clever but lethal device, the officer extracted a tiny tube with a flourish.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ he said, his face lighting up, ‘don’t use too much of this!’

  ‘Why’s that?’ they asked in unison, just as Bond would have done.

  ‘I’ll tell you why,’ said the o
fficer, pausing for effect.

  ‘When we first developed it, one of our female agents was having a one-night stand in a foreign country with a diplomat and, having extracted the desired info in the course of pillow talk with the bait of the action to follow, could not resist subsequently deploying her new kit, smearing the dye from this red phial everywhere, even on the pillow. Early the following morning she left the hotel without waking her partner for the night.’

  After pausing again to allow them to imagine the situation, he continued on.

  ‘In his rush to get back to his embassy in time for work, the diplomat failed to noticed anything untoward, or if he did was congratulating himself on having deflowered a virgin. When the room maid came to do the room, the great amount of blood in unlikely places convinced her someone had been murdered, or at the very least badly injured, and she immediately alerted hotel security. They in turn called the police, who naturally went to question the embarrassed diplomat at his embassy. In the presence of the ambassador, he denied harming the woman but nevertheless claimed diplomatic immunity, which eventually proved unnecessary, as on analysis our blood proved to be fake.’

  ‘He must have felt a fool,’ interjected Holt.

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the end of the story, for his embassy concluded – wrongly as it happened – that he was the major leak they had long suspected. He was immediately recalled and shot, poor guy.’

  ‘All that for a moment of pleasure,’ remarked Celia.

  ‘I cannot envisage a situation where we would need to use it,’ added Holt. ‘Using fake blood would make us look ridiculous. Celia would be like Fanny Hill keeping pig’s blood hidden in the bedpost.’

  ‘Quite the contrary. In some countries the use of such artifices increases the credibility of the honeymoon in the eyes of the authorities.’