Let Slip the Dogs of War:
A Bard’s Bed & Breakfast Mystery
by Sara M. Barton
Published by Sara M. Barton at Smashwords
Copyright Sara M. Barton 2012
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Coming Soon -- More Bard’s Bed & Breakfast Mysteries by Sara M. Barton:
A Plague on Both Your Houses
What Fools These Mortals Be
Dance with Danger Mysteries by Sara M. Barton:
Bossa Nova with a Belligerent Bear
Foxtrot with a Furtive Fox
Mambo with a Maniacal Mako
Paso Doble with a Passionate Python
Square Dance with a Scandalous Skunk
No Hiding Behind the Potted Palms! (Anthology)
Bodacious Baby Boomer Escapades by Sara M. Barton
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Prometheus
The Deadly Secret of Dr. Arcanum Lock’s Evolutionary Spirit Project
It Will Be Our Little Secret
Practical Caregiver Capers by Sara M. Barton
Murder at the Mountain Vale Inn
Murder on the High Seas
The Inscrutable Case of the Nobbled Netsuke
The Passion Beach Psycho Strikes at Midnight
Who Snatched Aunt Marion?
Chapter One –
“It’s just for two nights.”
“No.”
“Please? Do it for me?” I hate it when Ben looks at me like that. I hate that he knows I hate it when he looks at me like that. Most of all, I hate that he knows if he looks at me that way, I will cave in and let him have what he wants.
“The last time the bastard was here, he propositioned another guest and had her pinned against the library wall when we all walked in for tea,” I reminded my husband. “They were boinking in the books. Uncle Edward’s first editions. My lovely books.”
“He still insists it was Margaret’s idea and he just went along for the ride,” Ben replied, an apologetic smile playing out on his lips. He made sure those tasty lips were barely four inches from my mouth. I hate when he does that, too.
“It’s asking for trouble.”
“Bea...Beatrice...come on, babe. I really need this.”
“The last time Philippe Grapon was here, he parked his naked arse in the backyard for some sunbathing while we were having lunch on the terrace. I thought Mrs. Wilson was going to have a stroke.”
“And that’s why we’ll put him in the Hathaway Cottage this time. It’s just for three days. It’s critical. Come on. What do you say?” He held my face in his hands as he looked deeply into my eyes. “Please?”
“The guy is a louse. No, wait. That’s an insult to lice. Philippe Grapon is the dung of a louse. He’s the....” I was just getting started when my husband nibbled on my neck, starting up by my ear and working his way down to the crook of my shoulder.
“Three days. Two nights. That’s all we need.” Ben started undoing my blouse, working his way up from the bottom mother of pearl button that he slipped out of its slot.
“How is it going to affect our current guests? Do you have a way to control the fallout from his idiocy? You’re going to be responsible for his bad behavior,” I said grudgingly. “And cut that out. I have to get back to work.”
I fastened the three buttons Ben managed to undo, tucked in my blouse, and made myself presentable.
“Mrs. Gillman and her Shih Tzu are here to visit Uncle Edward, not to dally with a bon vivant in the library. Philippe won’t do anything to the grand dame without getting a chunk taken out of his ankle by the ever-loyal Mr. Darcy. Besides, she’s older than the hills and won’t be able to hear him proposition her indecently. And he’s not interested in our male guests.”
“That we know of,” I replied. “He could be here to cause trouble. Or to avoid it. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that he needs to come here without much notice? He’s probably pissed off some husband in DC, who wants to hunt him down like the dog he is. Our luck, we’ll wind up with a catastrophe on our hands.”
“How can you say that, Bea? You have such a suspicious mind,” my husband said with great disappointment dripping upon every word he uttered. When he tries that hard to convince me I am wrong about someone, I know he’s full of donkey juice.
“Experience with Philippe Grapon demands caution,” I insisted. “You mark my words, Benedick. Before he leaves, we will have to tidy up yet another of his long string of messes.”
“Five hundred bucks says you’re wrong,” Ben challenged.
“Five hundred? Why not a thousand? I could use a new arm chair in the public lounge.” It was true. I’d been lobbying for a new chair to replace the ratty old Queen Anne wing chair Uncle Edward had dragged from his previous home. There’s only so much a slipcover can do for a lumpy, poorly cushioned upholstered chair with lion paw feet that looked like they had been set upon and gnawed by killer mice.
“You’re on.”
“Since I stand to gain from your mistaken trust in the vermin, he can come,” I reluctantly agreed. I really should have known better.
“You’re the best,” he declared, with a satisfied grin, keeping his hands where they were, on my fanny.
“Well, Philippe Grapon had better behave himself this time, or I’ll be doing a lot more to him than just short-sheeting his bed!” I pushed him away, taking up the pillowcase and pillow as I went back to making the bed in the Padua Suite.
“That’s my girl. I’m heading into Burlington to pick up a few things. What can I bring you back?” After he gave me a quick, two-finger pinch on my bottom, Ben headed out the door. Typical.
“A decent clientele that sticks to normal guest activities, like stealing the towels and raiding the refrigerator at night.”
“Besides that?” he grinned. “How about some fresh trout for dinner? And I could stop at the Klingers and pick up some almond croissants for tea.”
“How about a little arsenic, to dispatch the rats that seem to infest the place?”
“Now, now,” he chided me gently. “Surely you can improve your mood before I return.”
“Surely I would not be in this foul mood if we had normal guests. Pick up six boules of farm wheat bread, in addition to the croissants. We’re having beef bourguignon for dinner.” The bakery was well-known for its artisan baking.
“Do we have enough cabernet sauvignon?”
“Check the wine cellar on your way out. A pinot noir would work just as well. Or a Gamay,” I suggested.
“I’ll surprise you, my love.” Ben bowed at the waist, sweeping an arm into the air in a dramatic farewell gesture. All he needed to complete the look was a pair of tights, pantaloons, pointy shoes, a little waistcoat, and a big hat with a feather.
“I shall wait with bated breath for your return,” I replied sardonically.
“Do,” he responded, disappearing down the hallway.
“I shall.” We have a thing about who will have the last word in any conversation. There are times we carry this to extremes. So far, I’m ahead, but Ben tries to keep up. He waited until he was on the stairs before he uttered his response low enough to almost succeed.
“As you like it.”
“Much ado about nothing,” I muttered sotto voce. I win.
In case you’re wondering, I am one of the proprietors of the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast, an old Queen Anne shingle-and-stone mansion located on Lake Champlain. With two guest rooms and three suites in the big house and a cottage that sleeps four, this is not your typical New England inn. For one thing, we don’t advertise. We don’t encourage the public to make their way to our front door. If anything, we go out of our way to discourage people from visiting, usually telling people we’re all booked up. But there is a perfectly good explanation for this. We’re actually a safe house for battered spies, a respite spot for the occasional intelligence asset in need of TLC to loosen the tongue, and a place where American intelligence officers can meet for debriefings and some decent fishing.
I didn’t start out to be an innkeeper. As a matter of fact, I started out as a college student pursuing a fine arts degree at a small New England college. I’d tell you which one, but I am not allowed to do that. You see, I have been reinvented. I am no longer the person born to my parents. I no longer have the family into which I was born. All because of the summer I went to France sixteen years ago.
How many American college students do that annual migration to Europe, backpacking with a Eurail pass? Thousands. Probably thousands of thousands. Me? I got the short stick. Instead of enjoying myself on the Rue des Rosiers in the middle of the Marais district, the historic Jewish quarter of Paris, I was snatched off the street ever so rudely by a squat, little man with a pipe and an obnoxious habit of clicking his fingers when he was trying to think. I was dumped into a battered, old Citroen and driven to a remote location, where a group of hooded men in black shouted questions at me in French for the better part of a day, all because some creep who passed me on the Rue Mahler slipped a tracking device in my backpack. That creep turned out to be a member of a terrorist organization, the tracking device had been carefully attached to his jacket as he passed through a crowd by the woman following him, and I wound up in the hands of a CIA officer, who demanded to know why I was helping the Defenders of Allah. Having never heard of DOA, or as I like to call the group, “Duh”, I didn’t have a ready answer for him.
I don’t want to bore you with the details of how I married a spy. It’s a long story that will probably slip out over time. Ben says I just can’t help myself when I get wound up. I say I wouldn’t be wound up if I had normal guests who practiced some manner of decency and decorum.
In case you’re wondering, I would not have chosen to be an innkeeper. I had it thrust upon me. Ben’s Uncle Edward, the erudite Shakespearean scholar, had finally realized his dream of opening a bed and breakfast establishment in the middle of nowhere. Gracious host, dedicated historian of all things OSS, seasoned clandestine services provider who retired in 1970 to teach English lit at an ivy league college that shall remain nameless, Uncle Edward was in his glory as innkeeper. He loved his days and nights regaling guests with his well-researched tales, serving good food and better wine, and acting as laird of his almost-Shakespearean castle. That’s when tragedy befell the elderly man. His right hip failed and he couldn’t care for his guests.
I came to fill in for him while he recovered from surgery. By the time he was back on his feet and ready to cope, he was in need of a permanent partner to help run the inn, and since things turned bad at my bookstore, it was decided that I would be the lucky one to coddle and pamper the ever-changing influx of guests who came to Arden Woods with the knowledge that we were a full-service inn for carefully vetted spies in need of some R & R.
I still resent the fact that I was forced to give up Marbury Books because of the FBI’s need to trap a spy ring in DC. I still think it wouldn’t have been necessary had I remained at my job. But by the time I headed back to the stacks, after caring for Uncle Edward and his wayward hip for six weeks, there was plenty of book inventory missing, the shop’s bank account had taken a big whack, and the CIA was afraid the bookstore had been compromised, all because three of its operatives went missing in the Khyber Pass.
One of the men had come to Marbury Books and picked up Love and Longing in Bombay, a book by Indian author Vikram Chandra, who teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley. It turned out that he was given the wrong book. It should have been The Srinigar Conspiracy by Vikram A. Chandra. It all happened because Josh couldn’t say no to the little Persian tart who plied him for a part-time job. Me, personally? I never would have hired her. Washington is full of little honeybees like her, trolling constantly for information and setting honey pots up in little apartments all over town. When they’re not trying to sleep their way through Congress and its staff, they look for opportunities to get cozy with the movers and shakers in the nation’s capital.
One of the reasons I originally became the proprietor of Marbury Books was because the CIA needed a safe place to handle sensitive dead drops and brush contacts. I didn’t expect to have to turn it over just because Afarin Hesami turned out to be an Iranian spy. When that poor man was handed the wrong book, he was also handed a coded message meant for another. That’s what got those three spies into such hot water in the Khyber Pass. All Vikram Chandras are not created equally.
You might think I objected to running a bookstore that supported CIA operations, but I really didn’t mind. I was given free reign to actually make it a success, and that meant I used my creativity to stock the shelves. I was in my glory running that business. I knew all the folks in the neighborhood. I created a life for myself that kept me going all the times Ben took off for overseas assignments. Whether he was gone a month or a year, my life was consistently rosy, all up to that broken hip and that deceitful little Mata Hari threw my world into a tailspin.
Over the twelve years I operated Marbury Books, I managed to build a really good reputation as a shopkeeper who welcomed book lovers of all kinds, from the snooty Washington lawyer who loved to impress by quoting Homer to the housewife who just wanted a racy little tumble in paperback. I furnished the place with soft leather club chairs and installed a coffee bar that plied readers with coffee made from some of the world’s best beans. Authors enjoyed giving book talks in my shop because the people who came appreciated the chance to chat with their favorite authors in an intimate environment that felt welcoming.
Just because I operated a bookstore, that doesn’t mean I’m one of those overly-intellectual literary types always quoting some high brow nonsense to show how smart I am. I do enjoy reading -- don’t get me wrong about that. It’s just that I’ll read almost any book, from the latest offering from an Edgar mystery to the Booker prize winner to the latest heaving bosom novel with a bodice-ripping heroine and a hero whose trousers throb with desire. If the story’s good, I’m happy.
The shop itself was tiny, but I did a brisk special order business for a number of “very special clients”. That service was actually the life blood of Marbury Books. The CIA had its own book distribution company that supplied books to the shop and it made sure to include coded messages in any of the thousands of books I sold each year. It wasn’t my place to question how a book had been altered by the time it arrived by UPS or FedEx. I merely took the money from the customer and handed over the tome.
It was Josh who let himself get distracted, who handed the wrong book to the CIA operative, later captured in Afghanistan with his colleagues and turned over to a pair of ruthless Iranian intelligence officers. Being trained in spycraft, the professionals realized there was a coded message in the book and tortured those poor people, trying to extract the information. Because the message was not the one the operatives were meant to deliver, and they had no clue how to decode the substituted message, they stuck to their cover stories, insisting there was nothing important about the miniscule marks on the pages of Love and Longing in Bombay, something the irate Iranians disputed. No matter how those three tried, they could not decode that message for the Iranians. Even a chemical debriefing couldn’t yield any valuable information, and eventually the Ir
anians gave up in frustration, choosing to hold the three intelligence operatives as hostages.
When the CIA realized that Afarin Hesami was a spy, there was an effort to turn her, but that was interrupted by the FBI’s counterintelligence effort. Afarin, it turned out, had gone to school in the United States, along about the time that Muhammed’s Crusaders in Pakistan, nicknamed Mu’s Crew at Langley, were planting the seeds of a sleeper network in the United States and Great Britain, using the cover of the Islamic Scholars Group to appear legitimate as they trolled college campuses for likely recruits. Afarin’s father was a general in the Iranian navy, and his job was to penetrate the international alliance that protected the Strait of Hormuz. She was considered to be the golden goose for American counterterrorism, a chance to hand feed disinformation and misinformation to the Iranians. I suspect that long before it became officially known that she was being used that way, she was already a conduit for bad information. That would certainly explain why she switched the Chandra books, leading Josh to hand Love and Longing in Bombay to the unfortunate CIA operative.
Chapter Two --
When the FBI insisted on “buying” my bookshop, lock, stock and barrel for their counterterrorism sting, the “sale” was conducted under the guise of me wanting to give up my shop for greener pastures. I was livid. There was no grass greener on the other side of the fence. I was happy where I was. I had a nice life. I wasn’t looking for a career change. I certainly was not trying to keep up with the mythical Joneses, long before my transformation into that illustrious, albeit fictional, family. But that didn’t stop the FBI from booting me out.
Ben says that’s the way the CIA cookie crumbles, which makes me wonder if that’s code for the FBI and the CIA sucked in those Iranians as part of a penetration effort. My only consolation was that those three intelligence operatives escaped when their guards took a snooze one night while on guard duty. In CIA parlance, that’s called an unofficial rescue. The CIA took seven months to recruit an asset at the Iranian prison. After careful study, they found a man who was interested in reforming the Iranian government and they promised him help for the movement if he got the three men out of prison. The only reason the truth came out was because the helper, Reza Farhadi, was later captured near the Eslam Ghalah crossing, where he was supposed to meet with his new CIA handler. The CIA realized to its horror that the FBI had a mole somewhere inside its counterterrorism cadre, one of those American Muslim students recruited by the Islamic Scholars Group, when the operation was blown. There was also another mole flushed out on Capitol Hill, working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a liberal member who had earned a reputation over the years of being clueless about national security. Senator Gladall often touted her experience in foreign affairs, but that consisted of boudoir diplomacy learned in the “slap and tickle” school she attended. That never stopped her from shooting her mouth off in live shots, touting herself as a champion of civil rights, a powerful voice that stood firm and decried any effort to discriminate against anyone, even bad guys. She once told a journalist from the Washington Dispatch that Sheik Mohammed el Kabani, the founder of the Muslim Alliance, a group that planned the attacks in Djibouti that killed more than one hundred in a crowded market place, was a misunderstood leader who only embraced terrorism because he had no other options. Even after the Sheik dispatched a team of assassins to Washington, to target her office, she expressed her sympathy. She had no clue that the Sheik was insulted by her public support for him as a man, especially since she kept denouncing the violence he so favored. Is it any wonder her office was a magnet for hostile intelligence services, given her welcoming arms?
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