by Susan Mann
She grimaced again when Nicole screeched like a pterodactyl. Even with the earbuds, James’s chuckle told her he’d heard Nicole’s enthusiastic response. At the mildly smug look on his face, she gave him a light shove on the shoulder.
“You two are so cute,” Nicole gushed. After a brief pause, she said, “Wait a second. Your answers are even shorter than usual. Why are you being so—” It was like a destructive pressure wave after a bomb detonation when she yelled, “You’re still with him now, aren’t you? Is he right there?”
“Yes.” Quinn giggled and pictured the flailing that surely accompanied the unintelligible gurgling coming from her friend. She waited patiently until they subsided and said, “Maybe I should finish my story.”
“Yes, please.”
Quinn imagined her friend literally bouncing in her seat.
“After the park, James drove me home and on the way he got a call about one of the items we’ve been researching.”
“Late on a Saturday night? That’s weird.”
Quinn scrunched her nose. It was kind of weird. Thinking fast, she said, “Apparently, this person is even worse than me when it comes to not stopping until he finds the answer to something. He probably didn’t realize what time it was when he called.” She pulled a face and held her breath as she waited for Nicole’s response.
“Yeah, that does sound worse than you. You’re a close second, though.”
Quinn silently released her breath and forged ahead. “Anyway, it’s really important we track this lead down as soon as possible. Since we need to do it in person, we stopped off at my apartment, picked up some clothes, dropped Rasputin off with Rick, and hit the road. I called not only to check in with you, but to tell you I won’t be at work at all this week.”
“The entire week? Does Virginia know?”
“Yeah. James called and left her a voice mail.”
“Tomorrow should be fun at work,” Nicole said. “Where are you going, by the way?”
“I can’t say. Client confidentiality and all that.”
Quinn knew it was a lot for Nicole to process. Even so, the silence that followed was unnerving. When it dragged on, Quinn ventured with a tentative, “Nic? You still there?”
“Quincy Ellington, I can’t believe you’d lie to me.”
Her stomach clenched. Nicole couldn’t possibly know the truth. “Wha—Um, what do you mean?”
“You two are obviously road-tripping to Vegas to get married.”
At the droll tone she heard in Nicole’s voice, she let out a hearty, relieved laugh. “Yeah, you’re on to us. We’re totally eloping.” James jerked and Quinn had to brace herself against the seat when the car swerved. “Easy there, big fella.” She chuckled and patted his arm.
He shot her a wounded albeit amused look. In his James Lockwood voice, he said loudly, “That’s not funny, Nicole.”
Nicole laughed and shouted back, “It is, too.” After Quinn passed along to him her friend’s retort, Nicole’s voice turned serious. “Look, Q, I have every reason to believe you’re on your way to track down information on some dusty old artifact. But even if you’re not and it’s just some lame-ass excuse you told Virginia so the two of you can run off and spend the week together doing God knows what, your secret’s safe with me. I’ve seen the way you two are together and I gotta say, kiddo, it’s magical. And you’re happy. I can tell.”
“I am,” Quinn answered quietly, her voice raspy from the sudden swell of emotion.
“Good. You deserve it. Have fun this week and give me a call when you get home.”
“I will. Thanks, Nic,” she said and smiled. “You’re the best.”
Turning sassy, Nicole said, “You two can thank me by naming your firstborn daughter after me.”
Quinn snorted and said, “We’ll take it under advisement. Bye, Nic.”
“Bye.” She touched the screen and tugged out her earbuds.
“We’ll take what under advisement?” James asked.
She laughed and shook her head. “You really don’t want to know.”
He alternated between studying her and keeping his eyes on the freeway. When she judiciously kept her gaze forward and stared out the windshield, he nodded and said, “Okay. I don’t want to know.” After a short pause, he asked, “Anyone else you need to talk to?”
“My parents.”
“Go for it. You did a great job with Nicole, you’ll do fine with them, too.”
“I don’t like keeping the truth from anyone, especially my parents.”
“From what you’ve told me about them, I’m sure they would understand, especially if they knew why.”
She nodded, stuffed the earphones in her ears, and placed the call. Quinn only spoke with her mom who explained her dad had unexpectedly been called to the base for a meeting. This was followed by a news report about the latest sick relative and how things were going with her work, helping spouses and families learn to cope when their loved ones were deployed. When her mom asked how she was, Quinn started at the beginning and spent the next five minutes telling her what she’d been up to with James the past week. Even when Quinn told her she’d be traveling with him, there was no commentary from her mother other than “Well, that sounds really interesting, honey.” After a few more minutes of chatting, the call ended and she removed her earbuds.
“That’s it?” James asked. “No third degree? Nicole grilled you more than your mom did.”
“My parents are always there for me, but they don’t inject themselves into my life. My dad always says, ‘You’re an adult. Falling on your keister once in a while is a good way to learn about life.’”
“Spoken like a true Marine.” He glanced at her and asked, “Are you concerned your decision to go on this mission will be a ‘fall on your keister’ kind of thing?”
“No,” she answered without hesitation. “This isn’t about me paying too much for car insurance or getting blowback for something stupid I did or said at work. This is probably the most important thing I’ll ever do. I know I made the right decision. And if something does go sideways, I’ll learn from it and move on.”
“That’s a good attitude to have, because missions like these never go the way you think they will. Take a look at last night.”
“Yeah. Last night I learned never to turn my back on my date. Especially when he’s a handsome spy wielding a tranquilizer gun.”
“I’m still really sorry about that,” James said ruefully. “Speaking of the op, since we have some time, I’d like you to examine the letter we found in the clock more closely. It’s in my briefcase in the backseat. Can you reach around and grab it?”
She twisted around and maneuvered the briefcase onto her lap. She found the envelope and from the weight of it, knew the ring was in it, too. “Handling this letter with fingers that have been eating French fries inside a moving car is probably not the greatest idea in the world,” she said as she returned the case to the backseat. She rubbed her fingers on her thighs hoping to remove any residual salt and oil.
“We don’t have much choice. I’m handing it off before we get on the plane. The agency needs to analyze it. This is our only chance to take another look at it.”
“Ooo, like a secret handoff where you bump into someone and you pass it to them without anyone noticing?”
“Something like that.”
“Cool.” She carefully slid the note from the envelope and unfolded it, doing her best to only grip the outside edges with her fingertips. She read the contents of the letter out loud again and when she finished, added, “The guy was such a slimeball.” When James looked at her side-eyed and conspicuously cleared his throat, she sighed, “And so was she.”
“Thank you,” he said and dipped his head with faux magnanimity. “What we need to do now is look at it not as a love letter, but as a coded message.”
“Like skipping words or reading every other line?”
“Mmm-hmm. If it’s a more complex code—if there’s one at all—agenc
y cryptologists will work it out. I know it’s a long shot, but it’s worth a try.”
“Agreed.” Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, she read the letter out loud over and over again. She skipped every other word, then every second word, every other line and different combinations of skipping lines and words. Nothing made sense. Quinn blew out a frustrated breath. “The only locations mentioned are London, which doesn’t narrow it down at all if we’re looking for a suitcase nuke or something like that, and this Summerfield place.” She searched Summerfield on her phone, which turned up nothing helpful.
“Summerfield might be a house name. Unless it’s a fairly large estate, it probably won’t show up on any searches. And trying to track it down without access to property records at the county level would be almost impossible.”
“That sounds like something the analysts at the agency could do,” she said.
“Or librarians with the right kind of access.”
Being an agency librarian was rapidly becoming her new dream job. She absently stared out her window and watched the scrub brush and the billboards pass by as she mulled over the letter. After a couple of minutes, she looked at James and said, “Dobrynin was Russian. What if Summerfield is a town in Russia, or maybe one of the former Soviet republics? Since you were in Moscow, I assume you speak Russian.”
“Da.”
Her insides bounced. Now she knew how he’d felt when he watched her field strip his Glock. Based on her reaction to him uttering a single Russian word, she was going to have to turn her brain-to-mouth filter up to eleven for the next few minutes. Who was she kidding? she thought with an internal eye roll. Their decision to keep their relationship purely professional over the course of the op meant her filter would have to be set to eleven for the foreseeable future.
She sipped her root beer and dragged her brain back to the problem at hand. “What’s Summerfield in Russian? Maybe that’s what we should be searching for.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t think there’s an exact word for ‘Summerfield’. But if you break the two words apart, ‘summer’ is ‘lyeh-tah’ and ‘field’ is ‘po-leh.’”
“That’s how they’re pronounced. I might need to search them in Cyrillic.” She scowled at her phone perched on her thigh. Doing the kind of research she needed to do was going to be laborious on such a limited device. And it would take hours. Still, there had to be a way.
“I know what that librarian brain of yours is thinking, Quinn. Don’t even try.”
“But—”
He held up a hand. “It’s a brilliant idea and I know you want to keep going with it, but there’s no way we’ll get to the bottom of it in the next thirty minutes. Why don’t you write down your idea on a piece of paper and put it in the envelope with the note? Let the agency analysts do the heavy lifting.”
Humming her reluctant agreement, she found a pen and a scrap of paper and scribbled out a note. She held the love letter up to the light coming through the window and scrutinized the paper. “I’m sure you considered invisible ink might have been used.”
“Yeah. That’s the main reason I snagged it instead of just taking a picture of it and leaving it at Fitzhugh’s house. It was really the first thing we found that fit what we were looking for. But it was a gamble that apparently blew up in my face.”
“Don’t say that because we don’t know what happened.” She lowered the letter and returned it and her note to the analysts to the envelope. “My guess is the gamble was worth it and this is an important clue.”
“I hope so.”
“Wait, did you say thirty minutes?” She’d been so engrossed in the note she hadn’t been paying attention to where they were. “We’ll be at the airport in thirty minutes?”
“A little less now, but yeah.”
Going to London on a CIA mission hadn’t sounded that crazy to her a few hours ago. But now, as they neared the airport, the reality of it all dropped on her like a pile of bricks. Anxiety crept up on her and the blood drained from her face. “This is all a weird dream, right? Or, some kind of elaborate practical joke and I’m gonna end up on one of those prank shows that make unsuspecting people look like idiots so other people can laugh at them. Right? That’s gotta be it. Come on. Tell me the truth.” When she heard the way her voice was rising in pitch and the panic edging into it, she grew even more agitated. “This can’t be real.”
James slowed the car a little and looked at her, his face filled with worry. “Quinn, it is very real, but it’s gonna be okay.” He reached over, dropped his hand over hers, and gave it a reassuring squeeze. His touch was comforting and pulled her back from the brink. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You say the word and I’ll hand you off to our officers at the airport. They’ll keep you safe here in L.A. until it’s all over.”
In a flash, his words made her realize how much she loathed the notion of staying behind. “No.” With gritted teeth, her resolve returned. “I can do this. I want to do this.”
“Are you sure? I completely understand if you change your mind. I’m sure Meyers would, too.” He gripped her hand tighter. “You know how happy I’d be if you stayed here.”
“Yeah, I know.” She blew out a slow, cleansing breath. “I’ll be okay. I am okay.” With a wry smile, she said, “A little temporary insanity keeps you sane, right?”
“Right,” he said, sounding less than convinced. He lessened the grip on her hand, but didn’t remove it from where it rested atop hers. “If it makes you feel any better, from here on out, I won’t let you out of my sight.”
“I’m not sure how that will go over with the women in the ladies’ rooms I’ll visit, but it does help.”
“To be honest, you continue to amaze me.” He glanced at her with admiration in his eyes. “That little blip of nerves just now is nothing compared to how jumpy I was before my first op. I swear it was like I’d downed a six-pack of Red Bull. And I’d been trained and prepped up the wazoo for it.”
She missed his hand on hers when he returned it to the steering wheel. “I’ll have to tell you all about it, or at least the parts I can tell you about later though, because it’s almost go time.”
Her trepidation was replaced by excitement. She slipped her boots on, sucked down the last few swallows of her root beer, and shoved the detritus from lunch into the paper bag.
“I need to put a couple of things in my clothes bag. Can you haul it up here?”
As she had done with the briefcase, she did as asked.
James reached down with a free hand and removed the pistol and holster from his ankle. He handed it to her and said, “Clear it and stow everything in the bag.” She removed the magazine, checked the chamber, and placed the weapon on top of his still slightly damp clothes.
“You’re not bringing your weapons, even in your checked bag?”
“No. There are rules and permits needed and I don’t want to call attention to us. I’ll be rearmed soon after we land.” Next, he handed her the tranquilizer pistol.
She secured it as she’d done with the Glock. “What’ll you do with this bag?”
“It’ll get passed off before we go through security. I need you to put the letter and ring in there, too.”
She made a face at the thought of putting such a fragile and important piece of paper unprotected in a bag full of damp, dirty clothes and a couple of guns. She glanced around the interior of the car, looking for something she could use to protect the letter. Not finding anything, she checked the glove box. It was painfully devoid of anything useful. In a last-ditch effort, she rooted through her purse and chirped a quiet, “Yay!” when she found a thin plastic bag from the grocery store stuffed in a pocket.
“Why do you have a vegetable bag in your purse?”
“To make a toy for Rasputin. I tie knots in it until it’s kind of like a ball. It’s just the right size for him to carry around in his mouth and the soft plastic has some give on his teeth. Sometimes I tie a string to one and jerk it ar
ound so he can pounce on it.” She snapped the bag to unfurl it and slipped the envelope inside. “He shreds them up pretty fast, so I’m always having to make new ones.”
“Hours of fun, huh?”
“Yup, although not quite as fun as catnip.” Her voice turned conspiratorial. “We don’t talk about that. Almost had to put him in rehab. It was awful.” She put the now protected letter in James’s bag and zipped it closed.
James snickered, looked over his shoulder, and changed lanes. “You need to put your wallet and anything with your name on it in your bag that’ll get passed off, too. Can’t take the chance of going through airport security and having them find you with two sets of IDs.”
This wasn’t a surprise since he had previously informed her that for her own safety the agency would give her an alias. “You don’t know what my cover will be?” she asked as she traded his bag for hers.
“Not exactly. They’re working all of that out while we’re in transit. I’m sure they won’t do anything that will be too drastic of a change from who you already are. Most likely just a slightly different name. You’re new to all this. Making too many changes just increases the chances of slipping up.”
It seemed like overkill and completely unnecessary, but since the agency was in charge of making up all of her travel documents, she had no say in the matter. Reluctantly, she stuffed her wallet and checkbook in her bag. “If I get a charge on my credit card for one of those late-night infomercial juicers, I’m coming after you.”
“Nah, not a juicer. My money’s on a giant chocolate fondue fountain. Just in time for the agency holiday party.”
She smiled and shook her head.
His rascally smile disappeared. “You have to put your phone in there, too. You can’t have any Quinn Ellington personal contacts and photos.”
She growled at him.
“You’ll get a new one in London and the agency will forward any calls and texts to it so your friends and family won’t worry.”
She shut off her phone and stowed it in her bag. “They won’t notice any difference at their end?” She unceremoniously tossed the bag over her shoulder and onto the backseat.