The Black Sheep and the English Rose

by Donna Kauffman

“Glad to know it’s not yours. A bit…opulent.”

  “Yes, it’s the Donald Trump school of decorating. The more gilt the better.”

  She laughed at that and started fumbling with the buttons on her dress, still lying flat on her back.

  Finn loomed over her, planting his hands on either side of her. “Scoot back,” he urged.

  “I’d love to, but I don’t think I’m able.” She raised her arms to him. “I don’t think I’m capable of anything at the moment. I don’t think I’ve ever been so bone weary.”

  “So, shower in the morning?”

  “Mmm hmm,” she said, yawning again.

  Finn slipped off her shoes, then brushed her hands away and finished unbuttoning and unzipping and untucking.

  “I feel like a sleepy child,” she said.

  “Trust me, you don’t look anything like one. And it’s a testament to how tired I am that I can’t do anything about it, either.”

  He quickly undressed and turned down the bed, then scooped her up and tucked her in, climbing in on the other side of her. She was rolling toward him and curling into him before he could even reach for her. “It’s not my bed,” he murmured, pressing his lips to her hair. “Which is where I want you. But it’s—”

  “Shh,” she said. “You’re home, and that’s all that matters.”

  And then she slept.

  And Finn didn’t. He lay awake, contemplating what she’d just said. And where home was going to be if he wanted her to remain in it.

  He was finally drifting off when the bedside phone buzzed.

  Felicity roused first and rolled over to check it out before he could lean past her. “I think I’m still asleep,” she said, looking back at him over her shoulder. “Or does this say the pool house is calling?”

  “Rafe,” Finn said, levering up and across her to get it.

  “He lives in the pool house?” she said, but he was already pushing the intercom button.

  “What’s up?”

  “I am,” Rafe said. “And now you are. Get Reese and Julia. I figured it out.”

  Chapter 24

  It was a very bleary-eyed group that reassembled in the makeshift lab. Mac entered with a young, pretty blonde who Felicity immediately assumed was Kate. He confirmed that by introducing her to the rest of them. “She can’t stand being left out of the fun,” he explained.

  “My white knight,” she said, smiling and leaning against him as he tucked her under his arm. She looked at the group. “Thank you for allowing me in. If there is any way I can contribute, I will.”

  Felicity knew she ran a school on Dalton Downs property that helped children with severe disabilities increase their aptitude to communicate, among other things, by working with horses. She understood from Finn that they had all known each other as children and that Mac had recently reentered Kate’s world when her life had been threatened. He was such a direct man, with great charisma, so it was interesting seeing how Kate softened his edges a bit. His teasing was clearly part of their natural banter and, Felicity was certain, under normal circumstances, was easily returned. “It’s a pleasure,” she told Kate. “I’m glad you could join us. Julia and I were feeling a bit outnumbered.”

  Kate shook her hand. “From what I hear, the two of you can more than hold your own. I mean that in a good way,” she added quickly. “I look forward to getting to know both of you better.”

  Rafe entered, finally, with a dark-haired woman stepping in just behind him. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Elena and don’t blame this on Rafe.” She bussed his cheek, then stepped past him and extended her hand to Felicity. “Not how I wanted to make first introductions, but I hate being left out of the fun.”

  Everyone smiled or chuckled, and she looked around and said, “What?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Kate said.

  Elena looked more shyly at Finn. “I don’t know what Rafe has told you, but—”

  Finn stepped forward and hugged her. “He’s happier than I’ve ever seen him,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”

  Elena flushed and stepped back, then seemed to notice everyone was still staring and said, “Well, now that we’ve evened up the teams, we’ll get out of your way.” She and Kate moved over beside Felicity and Finn, and Rafe motioned them over to the case, which they’d closed up again when they’d ceased their examinations earlier.

  “It occurred to me that we’d checked out every micrometer of this thing, and the case it came in, but we neglected the rest.”

  “The rest of what?” Finn asked.

  “This.” He put on the table the portfolio that had traveled with the artifact.

  “The documentation of the stone’s provenance. But it’s not that old. What does that have to do—”

  “Old enough,” Julia said. “So, that’s where he hid it.”

  Felicity was already nodding.

  “What British Intelligence was looking for is embedded in the documentation,” Rafe said. “It hit me that we never even looked at it, so I came back and took a page out to my office to run some checks before I got everybody up.” He glanced at Elena, and Felicity noted the immediate warmth that entered his gaze. “Well, the rest of everybody.”

  She smiled back at him, clearly not remotely upset to be part of his world, even if it meant getting up before dawn. More than likely, seeing as she ran the stables, she was used to it anyway.

  Felicity struggled not to look at Finn, to see if he was noticing, wondering if the two of them had the same obvious connection that the other pairs in the room shared. She knew they did, but…She shut that path down. She was tired and being foolish when she needed to be anything but. She didn’t know where things would lead, or how they’d sort through them, but first they had to resolve this case. And resolve it in a way that put her, John, and Julia in the clear.

  Rafe slid one of the sheets out and put it on a mat in the center table, then nodded to Mac, who turned out the lights.

  A moment later he switched on a light wand that bathed the room in an eerie blue glow. Felicity wasn’t the only one who audibly sucked in her breath when he waved the wand directly over the page. A series of letters and symbols popped up, all of it illegible to Felicity. But not to Julia.

  “An old Greek code,” she murmured. “Are you sure this was his grandfather’s and not his father’s?”

  “The stone was last passed down by Alexander’s grandfather, directly to his grandson. But that doesn’t mean that Alexander’s father didn’t have access to it while he was still at home. I haven’t been able to decode more than the top corner and a few words in the first two lines, but the dateline says London, and it was written in the late seventies.”

  “Isn’t that right around the time that Alexander’s father vanished?” Mac asked.

  “Exactly when,” Rafe said.

  Julia leaned farther over the page. “This is a message detailing…” She trailed off, but kept reading.

  “What is it?” John asked quietly, when she lifted a hand to cover her mouth.

  “It’s a list,” she said, awed, and from the sounds of it, not in a good way. “Complete with details. Explicit details.” She looked up. “Of certain illegal activities some of our agents were involved in. Very…illegal. Trading in contraband, stealing priceless antiquities…even murder.” She became silent as she kept reading.

  Felicity stepped up, but there was no hope she could make sense of anything on the page. “Does he name them?”

  Julia nodded. “You’ll recognize one of them.” She looked to John, then back to Felicity. “Thomas Wharton.”

  Felicity’s mouth dropped open. “As in, Director Wharton?”

  “Who is that?” Finn asked. “Someone in your chain of command, I assume.”

  John nodded, his expression tight. “Right at the very top of it. He runs the entire MI-8 Division. But he started out like the rest of us.”

  “How was Capellas’ father privy to this?”

  Julia was still reading. “He wa
s an agent, for his own country, but he worked in tandem with some of our guys and apparently got caught up in their black market schemes by accident, not realizing the tasks were unauthorized. When he figured it out, he wanted out. He left this detailed list while at home, but they’d threatened his family. So he took off. At the end of this…” She kept reading, then motioned to Rafe to put the next sheet down. “He says he was concerned for his own life, but couldn’t bear to think of anything happening to his beloved son, after just losing his wife.”

  Finn and Felicity naturally gravitated toward each other, and she slipped her arm around his waist, even as he was tugging her close with his arm around her shoulder. A quick glance up showed her that the other couples in the room had instinctively done much the same. So, she thought, we are a bonded pair, just like them. The confirmation gave her more comfort than it probably should have, but which she took, and refused to think beyond.

  “So…what do we do now?” she asked.

  Kate stepped forward. “I—my mother had a fairly wide range of contacts, garnered over the years, through several husbands.” Her smile was deprecating, but direct nonetheless. “She did unto herself for most of her life, and rarely unto others, unless it was poorly, but perhaps this will make up for that a bit.” She looked at Mac, then at the rest of them. “My brother still maintains contact with most of those people. I don’t know if they’ll talk to me, but I happen to know that a few of the men are currently fairly highly placed in the State Department. Hopefully they will remember me more fondly than my mother, but if I bring this to their attention, maybe they can use their leverage to—”

  “Not to cast aspersions on your government,” Julia interrupted, “but how do we know we could trust these relative strangers with information so delicate that our lives could be at stake if it fell into the wrong hands? They already are at stake. What’s here is very serious. So much so that I’m not surprised Director Wharton thought he might have to commit murder to cover it up. Which he’s already tried once. And, according to these documents, it’s a solution he’s used before, long ago.”

  “I agree,” Kate said. “What I was going to suggest was that maybe we could get them to see if they can find out what happened to Alexander’s father.” She looked at Felicity and Finn. “Maybe he’s still alive.”

  “I seriously doubt if he’s been successfully hiding all these years, he’d be willing to come forward now,” Finn said.

  “What I don’t understand is,” Mac said, “if he was so worried about his family, why leave the incriminating evidence with them?”

  “No one knew he’d even made the list,” Julia said.

  “Someone had to suspect, or they wouldn’t have started looking for the stone.”

  Finn shook his head. “I think I know what might have triggered it.” He looked up. “Me.”

  Felicity’s eyes widened. “How?”

  “When I took on the case, I made contacts of my own, trying to get Theo more highly placed help to assist in his legal battle.”

  “But how would MI-8 know any of that?”

  Finn shrugged. “It’s a pretty small world. And who knows who else is on that list that might care if it sees the light of day? Alexander’s father worked for the Greek government. Maybe this list has agents from a number of other allied countries, ours included. It’s possible they did know about it, or suspected its existence.”

  “But as long as it stayed buried in a tiny Greek village, who cared, right?” Elena said.

  “Until Theo wanted his stone back,” Mac finished.

  “And, suddenly, someone had to make sure that didn’t happen,” Felicity murmured.

  “So,” Julia went on, “they pressure Alexander, probably threaten his family—”

  “Again,” Finn put in. “But why have Reese sell it to the Russian? Why not just destroy the document?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know how he secreted it, just that he did. Maybe they couldn’t risk actually destroying the artifact without someone knowing, or questioning its destruction. If it goes to Chesnokov, who is notorious for hoarding his little collection, it stays buried.”

  “Or…Chesnokov was on the list, too,” John said. “He’s in the right age range. A bit on the upper end, but…”

  “So, maybe he set the fire,” Felicity said.

  “Possible.”

  She leaned more heavily into Finn’s strength and warmth. “Then who knows how high this reaches? And how far reaching it goes?” She looked to John and Julia. “What do we do with it?”

  “We decode all of it,” Rafe said decisively. “Or Julia does. We have to know who we’re dealing with. We’ll go through the names, do research, find out who’s who.”

  “Then we go public,” Finn said abruptly.

  Everyone turned to him.

  “You’re smiling. Why are you smiling?” Mac asked warily. “He gets crazy ideas when he smiles like that.”

  “We make the smallness of the modern day world and the new age of technology work for us.” He hugged Felicity closer. “We do what any self-respecting spy coming in from the cold does. We hold a press conference.”

  Chapter 25

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Finn stood to the side of the helipad and watched the skies for the incoming chopper. He glanced down at Felicity. “No, but it’s the best one we had. And it’s kind of too late now. Besides, it will be up to them how they handle it. They deserve the chance to find out.”

  She nodded, and tightened her arm around his waist. “I just hope they remain open-minded about everything.”

  “Me, too. The fact that they all agreed to come here seems to be a good start.”

  They both looked back down the hill, over to the house and beyond, at the sea of media trucks and news vans crowding the road into the farm, the yard, and every other available space they could inhabit.

  “I’m surprised they’re not in the trees,” he muttered, but was happy to see them as it meant his idea held merit. Everyone wanted to hear the news when the news was dirty laundry.

  “I can’t believe we put this together so quickly.”

  It had been only seventy-two hours since Rafe had started to put the pieces together. But time was critical. The messages had stopped coming in to the agents’ cell phones over thirty hours ago. Which meant they’d given up the diplomatic route. And who the hell knew what other means they might be willing to try. He didn’t doubt they’d put together Finn’s little press conference with their supposedly undercover case. Officials from his own government hadn’t shown up, making any kind of noise about protecting national security, so he took that as a good sign.

  Not that he’d asked anyone’s permission in the first place.

  As it turned out, the list Julia ended up with had included more than one highly placed official, both in and out of the spotlight. They’d thought about alerting the various government bodies affected by the coming fallout so they could be prepared, but none of them was willing to risk just what their version of “preparing” might entail. They had no way of knowing how complete a list Alexander’s father had compiled, and who else might come out of the woodwork if word got out privately, before it got out ever-so-publicly.

  The sound of helicopter blades drew his attention back to the skies. Once it had touched down, Finn and Felicity ducked and moved closer. A familiar-looking young man got out of the pilot’s seat and sketched a quick salute to Finn.

  “Thanks for helping us out, Sean.”

  “Glad to be on board,” he responded, then opened the other door to allow his passengers out.

  An older Greek man and an even older Greek woman debarked. The woman looked quite pale and uneasy. She made the sign of the cross on her chest, then turned to face Felicity and Finn.

  “Greetings, Mrs. Capellas,” Finn said, taking her hand, then shaking Alexander’s. “Thank you for coming all this way.”

  “You are putting my family back together,” he said in very br
oken English. “For this, I would travel to the moon and back.”

  “Sean, can you take them down to the house? Mac is there.”

  He nodded, and the trio made slow progress toward the house.

  “I hope the translator has gotten here,” Finn said. “I want them to feel as comfortable as possible, which is close to impossible in this circus. She’s never even been out of her country before; this has to be bewildering to her.”

  “She’s stronger than she looks,” Felicity said, watching them leave. “It was her decision to accompany her grandson here. She’ll be okay.”

  Finn nodded, then looked back to the sky. “Come on, come on. One more to go.”

  “When is Theo getting here?”

  “He said he’d call from the airport. He wanted to drive in. I offered to send Sean, but—”

  “How is it our limo driver knows how to fly helicopters, anyway?” Felicity asked, clearly bemused.

  “Apparently he has all kinds of…specialized skills.”

  “It was great of him to come out here.”

  “I knew I could trust him.”

  “He’s agreed to stay on?”

  Finn pulled her into his arms and kissed her on the forehead. “Yes. You can’t have him.” He kissed the tip of her nose, then tipped up her chin. “Well, you can share. But there are conditions…”

  “Conditions, hmm,” she said, pretending to mull that over.

  They’d had precious few moments of complete privacy, and Finn was wondering if they ever would, or if they were simply doomed to live forever in the center of chaos.

  The sound of another helicopter had them moving over to the second pad. “God, I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

  Felicity hugged him. “They need to have the chance. You’re right. What they do with it is up to them.”

  The larger helicopter landed, and out of it stepped the Greek ambassador to the United States, the U.S. ambassadors to both Greece and the U.K…. and a very tired, very nervous looking Dmitri Capellas. Alexander’s father.

  Introductions were made, and Finn did his best to reassure the older man that he would be safe.