I, Spy? (23 page)

I made a face and swallowed my biscuit. “So what are we allowed to do to him?”

He winked. “Things that don’t leave marks.”

I kept that happy thought in my head as I drove up to the office. I had my stun gun in my bag, fully charged, and was looking forward to seeing what I could do with it. Overnight Sven had turned from a gorgeous fantasy figure to a rather pathetic creature, and to be honest I didn’t want anything to do with him any more. I wasn’t even too bothered about torturing him.

Well, not too much.

It was still early and no one else was in the office as we made our way down to the lab. Sven was huddled in a corner of his cell, looking terrified. He stared at me for ages before finally gasping, “Sophie! What is going on here?”

“You tell me, Sven,” I said, and I was surprised to hear my voice sounding perfectly calm. I folded my arms and looked down at him. He really did look pathetic. What the hell had I ever seen in him? “What was going on last night?”

He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I don’t remember anything.”

“Do you remember putting something into my drink?”

He shook his head rapidly. “No, nothing, I swear. Sophie, what is this place? Am I in trouble?”

“Yes,” I said, “you’re in trouble. You tried to drug my drink, Sven—” to my amazement I realised I didn’t know his last name “—and knock me out.”

“I didn’t drug anything!”

“You were seen,” Luke cut in, his voice icy, and once more I was glad he was on my side. He moved to stand just behind me, and I drew an inappropriate amount of pleasure from his nearness. Hey, I was a strong confident woman, I didn’t need a man to back me up.

It was nice, though.

“We have a witness ready to state that you were seen putting a tablet into Sophie’s drink last night,” Luke went on.

“But—did you drink it?”

“No,” I said. “You did.”

Sven stared wildly around for a few seconds as if he was trying to take it all in. I turned to Luke and lowered my voice.

“Is it okay for him to see all the stuff in here?”

He shrugged. “It’s just a lab. Everything’s locked up. You need a pass to get in.”

“He has a pass…”

“A proper pass. It needs to be put through the system.” He glanced back at Sven. “You done with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Leave him stewing. We need to go and get something concrete from your friend Tom anyway.”

We left Sven crying out for help and I couldn’t help my lip curling as the lift doors slid shut.

“I see the Florence Nightingale complex passed you by,” Luke said, smiling.

“What?”

“You don’t find him remotely attractive, all helpless like that?”

I made a face. “Kittens are cute when they’re helpless. All animals are cute when they’re helpless. People…need to get a grip. That was just pathetic.”

“Remind me to never get hurt when you’re around.”

Because if he was hurt, I’d have to look after him. And unless it was minor and I ended up shagging him out of relief (he’d done it to me) then he’d probably die. I was not one of life’s nurses.

Outside in the sunlight things were starting to come to life. People were parking up outside the other little offices and workplaces, the day was starting. I yawned.

“So where does Tom live?” Luke asked, and I tried to remember.

“I don’t know the address. I know where it is… Chalker’s always getting me to pick him up from there.”

“So drive on.”

I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“Tom is not going to be awake at eight o’clock. He probably didn’t get home until about three or four and I doubt if he went straight to bed.”

“So we wake him up.”

Visions of fighting through the messy, smoky hole of Tom’s room fogged up my brain, and I shook my head to clear it. “No,” I said. “Anyway, then I’d have to explain who you are, and why we’re there… I’ll give him a call later.”

We got back into the car and I pointed it homewards, counting the seconds of silence. “So, you and Tom,” Luke began, and I burst out laughing.

“Eleven,” I said, and he looked at me like I was deranged. “Eleven seconds until you said something… Never mind.”

Luke was shaking his head. “You’re a lunatic.”

“There’s that possibility.”

“Is Tom a good friend of yours?”

I shrugged, enjoying the moment. Truth was, Tom and I had hardly spoken at school, but we got along okay where the band was concerned. Our relationship wasn’t even brother-sister, it was sort of more like distant cousins.

“Yeah,” I said, glancing at Luke, “we’re really close.”

He glared at the road, and I bit my tongue in self-flagellation. I shouldn’t be encouraging Luke. Hadn’t I already decided that it would be an extremely bad idea to fall for him? As a working partner, as maybe a friend, he was okay. I didn’t need a complicated relationship with him. I especially didn’t need him to fuck me over and tell me his work was more important than our relationship. I could get there before him. The work
was
more important.

Hell, I was doing important work! That’d
never
happened before.

“I had a thought,” I said as we pulled up at my flat, and ignored Luke’s snort of surprise. “About Harvey. I know we tried Googling him but maybe we could try one of those alumni websites. Like a Friends Reunited thing. If James Harvard and Harvey are the same person, it might be on there.”

Luke blinked. “That’s a very good idea,” he said, and there was wonder in his voice.

“Yes, well, I do have them occasionally,” I sniffed.

He grinned. “I checked all the people search engines. We have a couple of accounts online…”

“Do I get access to them?” I asked, wondering if an American search engine was really the height of sophistication in the modern spy world.

“Sure. I’ll come in with you and log you on, then the cookies will be on your PC.”

He then proceeded to complain about everything to do with my computer, from how clicky the keyboard was to how slow the dial-up connection was. “Don’t you have Broadband?”

“I can’t afford it. Not with all the spending I seem to be doing recently.”

“No one made you stay in a nice hotel in Rome.”

“No, but they did make me go out and buy something to sneak around in.” I scrolled through the results the American engine had brought up for James Harvard. There was an alumni website that had a picture of him on graduation day. If you looked really hard and used a lot of imagination, then it could just about have been Harvey.

But then it could have been Tammy, too.

I rolled my eyes at Luke and searched for a database of old school friends. I found one that was free, logged on and searched for James Harvard. There were dozens, and I started reading through them.

Hi everybody at Jefferson High! I’m at UCLA studying Marine Biology and surfing loads…

Greetings and salutations. Since leaving Martin Van Buren High three years ago…

I’ve been working for the Third Bank of Kyoto for ten years and have not left Japan in that time…

“This is insane,” Luke muttered over my shoulder.

“I know. Is there a single high school in America that’s not named after a former president?”

“There was a president called Martin Van Buren?”

Hah! I found something he didn’t know!

Oh, wait. Was Van Buren a president or just a congressman? Couldn’t remember my A levels.

“Sure,” I said. “Really famous president.” I clicked on the next James Harvard.

‘In the twenty years since I left George Washington Prep…”

“How old do you think Harvey is?” I asked Luke.

“Not old enough.”

“No. Well, I didn’t think he’d have been to a prep school.”

“And what’s wrong with prep school?”

I turned to look at him. “
You
went to prep school?”

Luke looked defensive. “Didn’t you?”

“No! I went to the same school as everyone else around here. Which you should know as you’ve been checking up on my personal record.”

“I thought it was a grammar school.”

“Not for about thirty years. They just keep that in the title to fool people.” I clicked on the next James Harvard. “So what, were you a public school boy?”

Luke mumbled something that I didn’t quite catch.

“Did you say Eton?”

“Mmm.”

“You went to Eton?” Did they allow anyone as sexy as Luke at Eton? “Don’t tell me, you were head boy.”

Glaring at me, he mumbled, “Prefect.”

Jesus. I never even considered applying for prefect at my school. As far as I could see all it meant was reduced lunchtimes as you policed the dinner queue while the dinner ladies gossiped. My form tutor told me to apply and I remember asking her to tell me why without using the letters C and V. She shut up.

“Eton prefect.” I was still shaking my head. “RAF, SAS, you must think I’m such a pleb.”

“No, I don’t.”

“So, what, are your parents mega rich? Titled?” Hey, that would be cool.

“No,” Luke said sharply. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

I shrugged. That was a back-off tone. “Okay.” I looked back at the screen and started reading aloud to fill the silence. “‘Hey to all in Temperance. I’ve hardly been back since I joined the army. I spent three years as a Ranger before leaving to work for a communications company. I now travel all over the world and hardly get back to America, let alone Ohio, although I sometimes see my brother in New York. But I have e-mail connections and would love to hear from anyone in Temperance, especially those who went to Temperance High with me. Harvey.’”

Jesus.

“Bingo,” Luke said.

“He was a Ranger?”

“He could have made that up.”

“He could have made all of it up! Harvey’s got to be a pretty common nickname for someone with a name like Harvard, don’t you think?”

I looked up hopefully. Luke was shaking his head. “That’s him. He even told them the same story he told you, he’s in communications. That’s his excuse for travelling all over the world.”

I stared at the screen. “It doesn’t say anything about college,” I said triumphantly.

“So?”

“If you went to—” I opened up the window with the alumni page on it “—Princeton, God, you’d tell people about it.”

Luke frowned. “You ever been to Ohio?”

“No.” All I knew about Ohio was that it was where Christian Slater killed people in
Heathers
, and Jennifer Crusie set her books. “You?”

“Yeah. Full of small towns.” He grabbed my old school atlas off the bookshelf and flipped through it to North America. “Do you see Temperance, Ohio, on there anywhere?”

I made a face.

“If you went off to Oxford or Cambridge, wouldn’t everyone in the village know about it?”

“No.”

“Well, no maybe not, because this village is full of commuters who only step outside their front doors to go to work, but in a regular small town, like Ohio is full of, everybody knows everybody. Everybody would know that James Harvard went to Princeton. His mom would have told everybody. He wouldn’t need to put it on the website.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I still think it’s not him.”

“Well, I think it is him. And I think we need to go and check out his hotel room at the Hilton.”

“Why?”

“Erm, because he might be Wright’s partner?”

Oh, right. Wright. With all the stuff that had been going on I’d almost forgotten.

“Okay,” Luke said, going into my bedroom and opening my wardrobe doors. “Harvey got distracted by you at the Buckman Ball, so maybe you can distract him downstairs in the bar while I search his room.”

“Luke—”

“Come on. Pursuit of justice and all that.”

“What about Chris Mansfield? Aren’t we pursuing justice for him?”

Luke came out of my bedroom holding the Gucci dress. “Chris was killed because of his involvement with the Wilkes takedown. And that’s also probably why you’ve been targeted.”

Targeted. When he put it like that, I felt so much
un
safer.

“And the Wilkeses may or may not be involved with Wright…”

“Possibly as saboteurs. Or smugglers. Or maybe just as associates who were in the wrong place. The point is, we find Wright’s partner, we might just find Chris’s killer.” He held the dress against me. “Does this fit?”

“I don’t think it’s your colour.”

He made a face. “You’re funny. You need to wear something that will make Harvard stay in the hotel bar.”

“It’s lunchtime!”

“So?”

“One, he’s not going to spend that much time in the bar, and two, he could be out.”

“So much the better.”

“And three, he’s already seen that dress.”

Luke blinked. “You just happened to have it with you in Rome?”

“I bought it in Rome.”

He stared at me.

“I needed something to wear—”

“A Gucci cocktail dress?”

“—and it was on sale… Come on. It was really good value. And it looked really good on me.”

“I’ll bet. Look, Harvard won’t remember what you were wearing. A black dress is a black dress—”

“Not when it’s designer.”

“It is to a bloke.”

“It’s too short for daytime. And it’ll show off all my bruises,” I pointed to my shoulder.

“Okay, fine. You pick something out. Something sexy. Tight. Heels and cleavage.”

Why is it that women have to show as much flesh as possible to be noticed by a man? You want to keep a guy’s attention, all you have to do is flash a boob and he’s yours. But men can get away with being totally covered all the time and still be considered sexy. If I covered every inch of my skin, I’d look like a nun.

“Look,” I said, staring at my wardrobe while Luke picked apart my CD collection, “he thinks I’m a stewardess. Can’t I wear my Ace uniform?”

“Not sexy enough.”

I was feeling belligerent. “You think I don’t look sexy in my uniform?”

He appeared in the doorway and gave me a very slow once-over. I felt my insides start to heat up.

“Yes,” he said softly, “but I think you look sexier out of it.” I threw a jumper at him and he ducked, laughing. “Oh, come on. That was a compliment.”