The Spy I Loved

by Dusty Miller

  She could feel his eyes upon her.

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Hmn?” He sounded half asleep, an impressive feat in a small boat, at night, when one is out with a perfect stranger.

  “Just relax.” She gave a yank on the starter and the little four-point-five horse-power motor burbled into life.

  Liam lifted his head in the gloom, wondering where they were going.

  She turned the bow, noting more rocking motions as Liam carefully un-stowed himself and got back up on the seat.

  Lindsey found the switch on the small control box and turned off their navigation lights. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness as a small, tree-covered island loomed up in the darkness. Liam’s first clue that there was land there, was the ragged tops of jack pines blocking out the stars down low near the horizon.

  Switching off again, the boat ghosted in, carried by its own impetus. The pale strand of the beach grew lighter and longer. It was a place, well-known, where pretty much everyone in the neighbourhood had skinny-dipped at least once. Not always at night, either. She knew the area well, and the big rocks were well off to the left…hopefully. There were grey shapes sticking up out of the water, right where they should be.

  “That’s very good navigation, Lindsey.” His voice was soft and far-away.

  Having squirmed his legs over, one at a time, he was now facing forwards with a paddle over the side to feel for bottom. He gave a couple of awkward pulls.

  Lindsey pulled out her flashlight and pointing it forwards and down, snapped it on.

  “Party Island. That’s what all the kids call it, anyways. It doesn’t have any official name.” She clambered forward to the middle seat. “Here.”

  Liam took the light from her hand and she pulled out the spare paddle. Dale didn’t chintz out with the equipment. There were no plastic department store toy paddles here. This one was a good five and half feet long with a broad, leaf-shaped blade made from laminated maple planks.

  “Hold still.” She stood up carefully, in a relaxed, knees-bent pose, legs braced wide apart and with the paddle held vertical at arm’s length, in what she had always thought of as the gondolier’s pose.

  With a few strokes on each side, she soon had them rocking nose-first just a metre off the beach. She sat down again while he got out, and then Liam pulled the bow up onto the gently sloping sand. The boat was steady now.

  Taking her hands and looking inscrutable in the moonlight, eyes just pools of darkness glistening under the pale brow, he helped Lindsey out.

  He stood there, looking off up their little beach to right and left. He’d seen the northern lights before. This was an unusual display. Standing on a deserted beach in the middle of the night with a pretty girl was just icing on the cake.

  Chapter Seven

  “Are you afraid of bears or something?”

  She wasn’t stupid. That much was certain. He couldn’t leave the gun just lying on the kitchen table. Hiding it was problematical, and he didn’t know how long they’d be gone. To hide it anywhere outside of the cabin was irresponsible, at the very least. It was as natural as breathing to slip it into his jacket pocket and zip it securely. It must have nudged her hip bone. He had let her get in a little too close, as they were stumbling around in the darkness, finding their way up from the water’s edge.

  She did have that quick mind.

  “No. Not really.”

  She nodded.

  It was his turn.

  “So. You’re studying history.”

  A log snapped in the fire, sending a trail of sparks into the treetops revealed overhead in its ruddy glare.

  “Yeah.” Lindsey sat cross-legged in front of their small blaze, kindled with the scraps of wood other people left lying, not thinking it worth bothering about.

  “And political science.”

  She blushed when she heard that one.

  “Yes.” She twirled a small stick between her fingers, not looking up. “I don’t know—reading the books, ancient times, far-off places…at least it’s something I like, something I might be good at.”

  It had always been her escape from the present world. It was a constricted little world that she saw for herself, rearing up and confronting her. Lindsey had that need for independence—for travel—to see life and not just endure it. It was like her life was all mapped out for her. The modern family needed a man to be a breadwinner, and to cut the grass and look after the car, and it needed the woman to stay home, to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen with a slew of yelling infants stumbling under her foot. All the while looking stylish and sophisticated with the help of the modern retail and advertising industry, centred on Madison Avenue. The really ambitious ones would do all of that and at the same time, hold down a job as a medical records transcriptionist or make the drive into Sudbury to work the phones for ten hours a day at the new call centre.

  A friend of Lindsey’s had gotten pregnant at fifteen. They were Catholics. The boy fessed up and they did the right thing. They got married and her friend was already into her third pregnancy. She was already blowsy and over-worked, constantly fighting with her husband. Neither of them had finished high school. Neither of them had any big plans or ambitions, or even the foggiest notion on how to tackle life…which was surely what they had set out to do when they signed zee papers.

  She told him all of this. She managed to put it in confident tones, meeting his eyes from time to time.

  She was very aware of his gaze—and the overall grubbiness of her cheap sneakers. She wore black canvas high-tops with the one broken lace which she had pulled out and retied, beginning a few eyelets higher to make it work. Lindsey really hadn’t been thinking of fashion when setting out.

  She had to admit, it was a bit impulsive, the shoe as well as everything else. But when she worked, she was tired. She had no time and few expenses, so she banked most of the money. She was rather astonished when it started to build up and everyone said it was for her education.

  That’s when it really started to sink in.

  I’m as dumb as everybody else around here.

  That was a big personal revelation, she told Liam to an abrupt laugh.

  The question was what you might do with it, all that education. She had sort of thought of teaching—as long as it was some other town, she told him. He laughed again when he heard it, not exactly an unfamiliar story. It was similar in some respects to his own sad and youthful departure.

  Life was so much simpler when you were a child.

  She sighed.

  “Yeah.” This one had a different inflection on the end of it and she sat up, looking into his eyes.

  What was it that she saw there?

  Knowledge?

  Understanding?

  Kindness?

  Was it sympathy, or compassion, or heaven forbid, pity?

  You could see anything you wanted in those eyes. She knew that—somehow, deep down inside. She had a funny feeling he knew it too. This was the most horrible thought.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Mister Liam Kimball.”

  He snickered quietly, looking off over the lake where the mists had begun to rise. Their small fire, the only light visible from this point on the lake, was a beacon of hope and warmth and humanity in the darkness. Something, a gull or a tern or a killdeer, peeped a couple of hundred metres off, sounding lonely and forlorn in the infinite darkness.

  He was comfortable in the silence.

  The bottle sat between them, and he saw her looking at it. She kind of knew it wasn’t going anywhere, and yet she wasn’t quite ready to give it up just yet.

  “So, Liam. Why, or I suppose how, did you become a translator? And, um…do you have a wife or anything?”

  Lindsey reached over as casually as she could, picked up the bottle and took a good swig. She lowered the bottle, staring off over his shoulder, as if in a kind of defiance at his thoughts—but not her own.

  Not her own.

  She may have been blus
hing, it was hard to tell in the heat and the light of the fire, but those clear blues eyes shifted slightly, gazing straight into his. It was right about then, when Liam Kimball recognized the wisdom in the ancient truism about this job.

  There was more than one kind of danger in the world.

  Don’t get involved…

  Above all, don’t get involved.

  She was young, fresh, inviting, and vulnerable as all hell. Enough to make a man feel old, she was.

  “Oh, dear. Ah, no—there’s no one in my life…not right now, anyways. As for translation, I don’t know. I have a gift for languages, or so they tell me. But here’s the actual thing. It was either that, or I would have to go out into the real world and get a real job. And maybe, just maybe, try and live like everyone else.” His jaw worked back and forth. “And for whatever reason, in my particular and rather peculiar little case, that just seemed like an awful lot to ask…”

  ...and so, with my particular and rather peculiar little docket coming to the attention of certain rather peculiar authorities, my present and peculiar employer made certain rather peculiar offers…fairly tempting ones at that.

  He couldn’t tell her. No matter how obscurely he put it.

  It really wasn’t wise to open up to a perfect stranger, not in his line of work, and yet why had they sent him out here? If not to heal, do some low-level legwork and maybe, just possibly, get his shit back together as the Yanks would say.

  Three weeks in a box and a few days under a hammer and red-hot tongs often did that for a man.

  “So. What’s the gun for?”

  Her technique was bang-on. It was terribly hard to lie to a pair of eyes like that.

  “I suppose…well. It’s just that the contents of my head might be of some value to some…people somewhere. People who aren’t very nice, not so much, anyways.” That was more than enough to tell a young kid like that. “Not everyone in the world is as nice as you are, Lindsey.”

  It sounded like pure bullshit, and he had already gone too far.

  Yet it wasn’t all that hard to drag it out of him either. Maybe he really was all washed up—burned out, and maybe he was going to be the last one to figure that out. Maybe I really am going to hell in a hand-basket.

  If she was ripping my fingernails out with a pair of vice-grips, I never would have told her anything.

  She looked as intuitive as all hell right about then, biting her lip and looking down at her hands.

  Liam was facing some really tough moral choices, and he tried desperately hard not to gag on the liquor. A little must have gone down the wrong way. The fumes stung his nose, and his eyes watered uncontrollably.

  He was about to say something. Her eyes wavered and went to the embers of their fire, now lessening slightly, and perhaps for the moment the danger had passed.

  He knew enough to know that it wasn’t cured that easily.

  It was never that easy.

  Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, and Liam choked up for a moment at something that came unbidden from deep within himself.

  Tears were terribly contagious things—and he really was on a kind of medical leave. For all the right reasons, it seemed to him. Psychological reasons, but some pretty good reasons nevertheless.

  Next thing he knew, he had his arm wrapped around Lindsey, just holding her as she cried, and then, after a while, she got a grip on herself.

  His own eyes had dried quite quickly, on seeing her plight somehow. She was just a kid, freshly hatched from the egg into the full blossom of womanhood. The thought left him cold and dead inside.

  The problem was that he had a conscience.

  This may have been a good thing, even as you hated yourself for your thoughts.

  It was the next best thing to objectivity.

  Thank God she hadn’t taken a lot of trouble, dolled herself up and thrown herself at him. She had that much sense.

  ***

  Monday morning.

  A throbbing head, a sense of dread.

  A moment of sheer, unmitigated panic.

  A sense of having ventured into the unknown, into forbidden territory.

  For better or worse, she had at least let him know.

  Not that she had actually come out and said it.

  But he knew.

  He knew.

  And somehow, it was okay.

  At least he knew.

  At first, the thought of breakfast was enough to turn her off the day completely. She entered the kitchen, seeking only coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. Dale had the frying pan going. It didn’t smell too bad, what with a pound of bacon done and her uncle just cracking eggs into the pan. There was some dull throbbing in behind her eyes, and a stiffness to her neck that she put down to staring up at an awkward angle half the night.

  To her surprise, when he pushed a plateful of what Dale always called vittles in front of her, she managed to gobble it all down quite handily. She even went to the extent of four slices of toast when she sometimes didn’t bother.

  Anything but think, she told herself.

  Just eat, and then get out there—get the hell out there.

  Just try and do your job and make everybody happy.

  Stay out of trouble and try not to get your heart broken.

  ***

  Liam was on the phone, ready to be plugged into a port on the side of the machine. He was all set to transmit his latest data plus digital photographs of several objects. His last dive had been the killer. He was walking around, looking at his watch, waiting for his control to come on. He went from curtain to curtain, peeking out one window after another.

  That was the problem with having the enemy in such close proximity. With modern audio-snoop technology, overhearing a conversation was dead easy. He was pretty sure they were both in their cabin but that meant nothing.

  One had to assume a bug. All they had to do was walk past the place and chuck the right device into your eaves-trough. He’d made sure. It was up there, all right. There was the one on the car, the one on the boat…it was a good idea not to leave your boots outside the door at night.

  “Hello?”

  Ignoring it for the moment, Liam opened up the back door and began walking. He was ten metres from the door when he finally spoke. His mental picture of a parabolic mic pointed through a screen window at the back of his head was about as accurate as it ever gets.

  “Frank?”

  It was an unfamiliar voice.

  “Johan, Sebastien, Bach.” Today’s joke. “This is the Big F.”

  Liam’s eyebrows rose.

  “Asterisk, catastrophe, treble clef. Where’s Little F, sir?”

  “He’s effed off. What have you been up to, Liam-my-boy?”

  Liam grinned. With modern communications, it was rare for his control, Frank, to even leave the office.

  The old boy, ‘Big F’, was a bit eccentric at times. The brain was still good and that was all that mattered—he knew his work, he knew his environment, and he knew his people. He also knew the enemy’s people, for the most part, and that helped immensely.

  “Sir. I’m about ready to upload data.” He turned, standing on the beach, back to the boat launch and dock areas.

  He could clearly see his back door, and the front porch area of Cabin Seven. He could see the gap on the far side of their cabin. The odds of someone coming in the far window in two or three minutes were exceedingly small in broad daylight, although it had happened. They would almost inevitably draw attention to themselves, something he was assuming they weren’t ready to do just yet. He turned and faced the open, empty lake again.

  “I’ve found something. I’m sending pictures. I can recover it alone, but that’s not very smart. Get back to me, sir, and advise. Basically, I want some backup. More backup, and by that I mean professionals.”

  “Ah, yes, absolutely.” Was that the edge of excitement in Big F’s voice?

  Would wonders never cease?

  Liam Kimball, for all intents and purposes
, was just out stretching his legs a bit while speaking on the phone. This was not an uncommon sight these days. He ambled back up the slope to Cabin Seven.

  It was a pain in the ass to have to act naturally all the time.

  “Okay, I’ll ring off now and send you that email.”

  “Thank you. I’ll let Frank know you called. Don’t forget to read the briefing packet.”

  “Ah. Very well, sir. Goodbye.”

  Liam plugged into the laptop, verified his identity, and then sent the data. Next came the pictures. His own daily briefing packet was more extensive today.

  He sat at the kitchen table and had a quick read. Some of it was general and some of it was specific to EMERALD.

  Sightings of various opposition members had declined in the centres of power—mostly Ottawa, but in London, Paris and Berlin; Washington, Moscow and Beijing as well. It was always interesting when known personalities disappeared. It drew a lot of attention as the security services in a hundred countries scrambled to play catch-up and locate them again.

  Sightings of certain and particular individuals, and one or two unknown but possible players, had increased in a gradually tightening radius. They were converging on his area of operations. So far none of them had done anything exactly illegal. They were being watched insofar as that was possible without blowing covers…

  It was old stuff, a rehash of previous briefings.

  If you don’t have anything, why don’t you just say so?

  It was morning now and he’d better get going. Today his job was to be innocent—he would fish every-which-where, piddle around, and hopefully, come home with what the locals called a shit-load.

  As for a bunch of new arrivals in-country, it was nothing they hadn’t anticipated. With the summer season upon them, an influx of tourists was only to be expected.

  As to whether it was anything more than that, only time would tell.

  The names, considering the calling of those wearing them, didn’t mean much. They all checked out clean. All identities were fully sanitized. Backgrounds were extensive and convincing, in fact highly detailed.