Snark

by William L. DeAndrea

  But then, saving some important BI people from embarrassment was what his trip was all about.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Just a second,” Felicity Grace said. She picked up the other gun. “You can keep the one you’ve got if you like,” she said, then led the way out to her car.

  2

  “HUNGRY?” SHE ASKED.

  “As a matter of fact, yes. But it’s too late to do anything about it, isn’t it? I was hoping there’d be vending machines in the hotel.” They’d been instructed to book him into the Kennedy Hotel near Euston Station, an American-style place with a vengeance. The idea was to blend in with the businessmen and offseason package-tourists.

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to keep your reservation.”

  “Tonight would probably be safe. Whoever sent our friends to the airport will probably wait till morning to see what happened before trying again.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said. She was watching for the turn onto the Hammersmith Bridge; wherever she was taking him was either on the south side of the Thames, or was best approached that way.

  Bellman could also tell she didn’t come this way too frequently, and had to concentrate on intersections. He didn’t want to distract her—just being on the road in Britain made him nervous enough. It wasn’t so much driving on the wrong side, and it wasn’t even the powerless feeling of being in the left front seat with no controls in front of him. It was seeing the other cars coming with no apparent drivers. It was irrational, and after a few days it didn’t bother him, but tonight it was there, and it was strong. So he was delighted to let her concentrate.

  He used the lull to study her. Not pretty, not really. Her nose was a little long and her chin was a little short, and there was something about her eyes that suggested sorrow and anger without really being either.

  Her coloring, what he could tell from streetlamps and the headlights of oncoming lorries, was something special. The sad/angry eyes were bright blue, the color of a postcard sky, and the hair under the kerchief was a smooth helmet of copper. The fringe over her forehead accentuated the forlorn look of her face—it was as though she were looking up at the world, not expecting anything especially pleasant.

  She was tall. Standing beside her at the airport, Bellman had noted that the top of her head was level with his eyes. Allow two inches for heels, and that still made her five-nine or better. She was slender, but she had what an old English associate of his father’s—Bellman’s father didn’t have friends—would have been pleased to call “a fine chest for medals.”

  She had clear, smooth skin, which was common among British women, and once, when she smiled, Bellman could see she had a set of white, even teeth, which was not.

  They were on a narrow road of houses and stores now. There was a lot of traffic, more, really, than would be allowed to travel at this speed in the States. He wondered idly where it all was going to or coming from—it was after eleven o’clock, and he knew nothing in London was open.

  “I think we can do better for you than a vending machine,” she said, the tricky maneuver successfully completed.

  “Somebody’s opened a twenty-four-hour IHOP in London?”

  “I know what that is,” she said. “International House of Pancakes. I went to university in the United States.”

  “Oh? Where?”

  “Syracuse University. I have given up trying to teach people here not to say the University of Syracuse.”

  Bellman, of course, was free to believe as much of this as he liked. Still, he played along. She had a pleasant voice, and it passed the time.

  “What did you study?” he asked.

  “Computer design.”

  “Hardware or software?”

  “Software. Electronics defeats me completely.”

  “I’m surprised they let you do fieldwork,” he said.

  He could feel the temperature drop about half a degree. Perhaps he had been Questioning Her Competence. This was the famous English Reserve sliding into place.

  Bellman could fix it easily enough—all he had to do was decide if he thought it was worth the effort. He supposed it was—before he was done he was going to stir up a lot of friction with his British colleagues, and their competence or lack thereof was the issue. No need to rush into it. Besides, she had been better than competent back at the pedway.

  Bellman kept talking. “You’re too valuable. Someday agents will be obsolete. Intelligence will be all satellites and computers.” And, Bellman thought, that day won’t come a second too soon for me.

  “Thank you,” she said. “My Section Head—acting head of the whole business at the moment, actually—keeps telling me the same thing. I prefer fieldwork.”

  “That’s Mr. Tipton, correct?”

  “Yes, he’ll be briefing you tomorrow. I’m to ask you if three o’clock will be all right.”

  “It will be fine, as long as you’re taking me someplace I can get some sleep.”

  “Well, I will, of course. I thought you were hungry.”

  “Yes. Food. Sleep. We Americans have very basic urges.”

  She laughed at that, a low, knowing laugh that made Bellman look again. The sexiest women were not always the prettiest women. Hardly ever, in fact. He filed the laugh away for further study.

  “Well, there’s an all-night restaurant in Fulham—the only one I know in London, actually, if you feel like crossing the river again...”

  “Or?”

  “Or we’ll stop at my flat, and I’ll make you some real English pancakes.”

  “Where do I sleep? On the couch?”

  “No, Mr. Bellman, you sleep in Bloomsbury in a guest flat my Section keeps vacant for just such situations as these.”

  “Ah. Does it have central heating? Television?”

  “I thought you Americans had only basic urges.”

  “I didn’t say only. Don’t tell me. A shilling meter and a tube radio.”

  “No. Heating, telly, and an American-style shower stall. All mod cons.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Good. Now Fulham, or homemade pancakes?”

  “Pancakes,” Bellman said.

  They were driving up a wide road now, with one each of all the chain stores in Britain—Marks and Spencer, Pizzaland, Presto, McDonald’s. The neighborhood High Street. It sloped gently toward a major intersection, then the stores stopped, but the hill continued.

  Felicity Grace made a sharp right turn across four empty traffic lanes and into a driveway. “Good,” she said, “we’re here.”

  He had forgotten about English pancakes. He looked down at a plate of what appeared to be half-sautéed plastic doilies, doused them with lemon juice and sugar, and cut himself a wedge. It was good, egg-smooth and butter-rich, and it fit very nicely into the empty places in his stomach.

  “Coffee?” Felicity Grace asked.

  “No thanks. I hope to get some sleep before I see your guvnor.”

  She smiled again. He’d been hoping to see it. “My boss. You’ve been here before, I see. It isn’t in your file.”

  “Good pancakes,” he said, taking another wedge.

  “I’ll make you some tea,” she said.

  “That would be nice.”

  She put a kettle on to boil, went to the sink, and began warming a porcelain teapot decorated with blue flowers.

  “You don’t have to go to all that trouble,” Bellman told her. “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.” He tapped his fork on the plate.

  “No trouble. I want some tea as well, and I don’t like tea bags.”

  Bellman watched her as he ate. She looked so ordinary and domestic in her scarf and fringe and flat shoes (no heels—make her five-ten), spooning tea, and pouring gold-top Channel Islands milk into a creamer, all the while humming a little hum to herself like Winnie-the-Pooh, it was hard to believe that she was really in it, that she played the game professionally and full-time.

  She was even good at it. He kn
ew that not just from the way she’d saved him from their friends at the airport—there were plenty of women who could shoot straight, and some who could be relied upon to drop the hammer even when the target was meat instead of paper.

  It was that little business about his file. It was dropped so casually, and in such a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that Bellman came damned close to responding. Which would have been a mistake.

  There was no way any information about any previous trips made by “Jeffrey Bellman” (no matter who he was at the moment) should have made its way into BI files. His predecessor had been assigned, but had never had a chance to report to his hosts. And when the man eating pancakes at Felicity Grace’s woodgrain Formica kitchen table had been in England before, his name hadn’t been Jeffrey Bellman or anything like it.

  No, the file business had been an attempt at learning something about him, so simple and so blatant it had almost worked. Bellman decided he had to keep an eye on this woman.

  “One lump or two?” Felicity Grace wanted to know. She put the tray down on the table and sat opposite him. Her eyes were darker blue seen straight on.

  “Two,” Bellman said. She put them in his cup with tongs, gave herself one, and poured out.

  There was a cold mist outside softening the few lights that could be seen outside the window. Most of them surrounded a low modern rectangle of a building set back from the ridge of the road. He asked her what it was.

  “South Thames College,” she said. “Putney campus. I used to teach there sometimes.”

  Bellman raised a brow. “Pistol shooting, no doubt.”

  She shook her head. “Programming. It was a cover job, basically, but I liked the work. Some of the students—when they see what’s possible, and how big the field is going to be, it’s like the world changes for them overnight. I taught one boy whose family have been on the dole since the early nineteen-fifties. Found him a job.” She poured a little more hot tea into her cup and took a sip. “It’s not much, but it’s something.”

  “Mmm,” Bellman said. “Well, I’m glad you weren’t teaching a class tonight.”

  “No fear of that,” she said. “I have—how did we say it at university?—my priorities on straight. The teaching was just so the estate agent wouldn’t think I earn the rent money as a tart. I work for the main cover company now. It’s the Section first, last, and always, for me.”

  Bellman looked at her. That last sentence was grim enough, and sincere enough, to be true.

  “How did you come to be following me, though?” he asked. “I thought you were supposed to be meeting the plane.”

  “I was. I even came in fancy dress as a housewife to make it look good. But then I saw our two friends. Maintenance men have too strong a union to work on that sort of non-emergency repair that late at night, for a start. And they don’t show so much interest in the arriving flights announcements. After the third time one of them came out to check, I began to get an itch, if you’ll pardon me.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “There was something I remembered about a Sikh heavy from the briefing book. So I rang the Section and described them, and got back the information that they often worked together. And they weren’t particular for whom.

  “I decided to wait near the information booth, to meet you when you came to have them page the person who was supposed to meet you. I though we’d just leave another way, and not use the pedway at all.”

  “I never thought of paging you,” Bellman admitted. “I just thought there’d been a mess-up somewhere. I went for the tube.”

  “I decided eventually you must have done, and took out after you.” She leaned over the table close to him. “Have I developed any gray hairs?”

  “None visible.”

  “Surprising. Especially after the way I felt after I heard the silenced guns.”

  “So you came and delivered some gunfire of your own. And eliminated two problems for Scotland Yard.”

  “Yes,” she said, finishing her tea. “I hope they never get the chance to thank me. The bloody Provos can have all the credit.” She covered a yawn with a ladylike pat of her hand.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it. I feel the same way. Maybe you’d better take me to where I’m supposed to sleep.”

  She looked at her watch. It was a man’s watch, but the strap was shiny leather, blue with red and white trim. “Yes, we’d better, if you’re the type who needs it dark outside when he goes to sleep.”

  She brought him to a white row house on a small square in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum. He had the whole top floor. It was all she had promised, and more—all mod cons plus a huge remote-controlled color TV and a video cassette recorder, identical, in fact, to the kind of equipment Felicity Grace had crowding the sitting room of her flat in Putney. The only thing she had that his hosts hadn’t provided him had been an Apple III personal computer.

  It also had three hidden microphones and two hidden cameras, but that was to be expected. Another test. Bellman found them all within twelve minutes of his chauffeur’s leaving.

  “What time shall I knock you up?” she’d asked.

  Bellman forebore to make the obvious (to an American) joke. “About two?” he suggested.

  “Let’s make it two-thirty,” Felicity Grace said. “The Acting Director likes a long lunch.”

  “Even better,” Bellman said. They shook hands (hers was very warm), she left. He found the mikes and the cameras, said hello into each of them, took a shower, went to bed. He spent thirty seconds fighting off a sudden wave of why-am-I-doing-this panic before, with an exercise of will, he cleared his mind and went to sleep.

  3

  “QUITE A SINGLE-MINDED YOUNG man then,” the Acting Section Chief said.

  “I certainly wasn’t able to distract him,” Felicity Grace said. “I gave him every opportunity short of stripping off or grabbing him by the w—”

  “Don’t be vulgar,” the ASC said, but he smiled all the same. His name (at least within these walls) was Robert Tipton. He was a medium-sized man, with a large wave of gray hair splashing over a smooth brow. He always wore a dark pinstripe suit and a flower in his buttonhole. He talked posh; no one knew whether that was natural or acquired. The Americans, particularly the Congressman, the boss of the young man who was waiting to be shown in, considered him tough, competent, and, more important—most important—trustable. The Congressman’s word, that. Trustable. Not trustworthy.

  “Hell,” the American chief had drawled over the scrambled phone last week. “My cleaning lady is trustworthy. She’s worthy of it, but would she know what to do with it, that’s the question, ain’t it?”

  The implication being, of course, that this Section (and this Section alone, for all Tipton knew), and by extension Tipton himself, and his missing predecessor, did know what to do with it.

  It bothered Tipton enormously that he should be flattered by all that.

  Flattered, perhaps, but not happy. Because there was a balls-up in progress, a colossal one, and the Americans had deigned to send someone to put things to rights. Which, of course, he might well be able to do. Tipton had his doubts. There was a factor involved that the Americans didn’t know about. And never would know about, if Tipton had his way.

  It was galling. During the ’39-’45 war, British Intelligence had been the wonder workers, the can-do men of the hour. They had broken Enigma. They had conceived and executed the Man-Who-Never-Was gambit. But since. Philby. MacLean. Burgess. Blount. The others. The young fool who’d walked to the door of the Russian Embassy just a short time ago, offering himself to the Russians, hurt because they hadn’t approached him yet.

  And now the labor problems. Problems for the whole Kingdom, of course, but special problems for the Section. The need for permission from the Americans before they could lower their zips to piss. The imposition of a single-minded young American wet nurse for them.

  “Felicity,” Ro
bert Tipton said. He looked carefully at her face for the flicker of resentment that used to cross it whenever he called her by that ridiculous name. It was no longer there—the flicker, that is, not the resentment. Tipton was sure she still hadn’t forgiven him for welcoming her back to the Section by christening her with a name from a yellowback thriller. But it had been important, considering her departure, and the reason for her return two years later, to test her discipline, quickly and continuously.

  Besides, Tipton thought, he was tired of an entire agency peopled with individuals named James Hampstead, or Emma Lewis, or Robert Tipton, for that matter. When it fell to him to assign new names, he decided to let his spies sound like spies.

  It was whimsical, yes. He’d been warned against it, but had argued successfully that it was a potent psychological defense. A Russian would not believe a British agent would have a name like Felicity Grace, and would hesitate to accept indications to the contrary. He did promise not to name anyone Sexton Blake.

  “Yes, sir?” Felicity said.

  Tipton looked over pictures of the young American. Bellman yawning. Bellman stepping into the shower. Bellman sleeping. Bellman giving the camera a rude, one-finger salute upon arriving.

  “He’s quite tasty, isn’t he?” the director inquired.

  “If you like the type,” Felicity said.

  Tipton smiled. He did indeed like the type, that was no secret. After university, when he’d joined this section, he had taken measures, many of them unsettling and some of them positively humiliating, to see to it no one learned of his homosexuality. It affected his work—no one can function efficiently alternating between fear and resentment.

  So young Mr. Tipton had come to terms with himself. Being a spy was not as important as being himself. He would take no extraordinary steps to hide his “shame.” At the same time, he would do nothing to endanger his country’s interests. He was not, after all, a fool. He was not promiscuous, wasn’t hopping into bed with some blond thing off an East German freighter at any opportunity. He had a small circle of friends who thought he worked for a publisher of art and photography books. His sexual partners came from that circle.