Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1 (8 page)

“Sensors?” That sounded serious.

“The FBI counterintelligence people found
them and figured out that this was a really big meeting, Bea.
That’s really all I can tell you. We don’t know what the endgame
is. We don’t know why Grapon is involved, or whether the French
have sanctioned it. It could be a French effort to throttle a
Russian effort to assist the Syrians.”

“Everything is so complicated. How do you
manage to keep it all straight?”

“Sometimes we can’t. But we do our best.
That’s really all we can do. We need to know who the bad guys are
and we need to neutralize them. Murder is always a last
resort.”

“Like that poor girl.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It’s quite possible that
Grapon gave her too much of a drug while he was trying to question
her or even just knock her out for a bit. He could have even
suffocated her accidentally when he thought she might give him
away. Then again, he may have killed her as part of a plot to set
us up, ‘Mr. Williams’, or even the CIA response to the crisis in
Syria. It’s hard to say without more intelligence in the form of
evidence and information.”

“And ‘Mr. Williams’ is a woman, not a
man.”

“We’ll pick her up and see what Grapon does
next. My best guess is we have eyes on us at all times. This is too
important to national security to leave it alone. If Grapon doesn’t
know people are onto him yet, he thinks he’s just going up against
me, and he probably assumes he can fool me. Hence, he posed as a
potential witness to the cabana fire.”

“Wouldn’t that suggest the girl was
deliberately murdered to set you up?” I wondered.

“Or that she died when he screwed up and
didn’t want to get caught at it. If he tried to debrief her, to
interrogate her, Bea, and she didn’t have any answers for her, he
might have killed her to thwart ‘Mr. Williams’ from uncovering the
clues to the coded message she carried in the form of tattoos. If
so, he’s likely to be waiting at the airport for her plane. Then
again, maybe he tried to seduce her just for the fun of it and she
changed her mind. Or she took something chemical to enhance her own
sexual pleasure. Or Philippe slipped her a date rape drug. We just
don’t know.”

“Never a dull moment,” I muttered, turning
back to the scenery. My mind was growing numb with all of the
shenanigans. How did one keep it all straight? It was rather like a
Shakespearean plot, with treachery and deception abounding.
Probably why Uncle Edward was such a fan of the Bard. He lived the
life centuries after Shakespeare told his tales.

Ten minutes outside of Burlington, Ben’s
smartphone buzzed and pulled over to the side of the road. I sat,
waiting, as he stepped outside and out of earshot. That’s the thing
about spies and former spies. Old habits die hard. Watching the
traffic whiz by, I wondered what we would find when we got to the
airport. Would “Mr. Williams” turn out to be a diversion, a red
herring of some kind? Someone was going to a lot of effort. That’s
really all we knew for sure. Someone was working this game hard,
but what was the name of the game? And who was sponsoring it? If
the meeting in Damascus, Virginia involved the Russians and the
Syrians, and if Philippe had gone over to the dark side, he was
working for the bad guys. If he was trying to penetrate for the
DGSE, technically Philippe was a good guy, even though his morals
and personal conduct left a lot to be desired. But what if he was
just out for himself? What if he was collecting a paycheck from
everyone?

My thoughts were interrupted when the car
door opened, Ben climbed back in beside me, and handed me his
smartphone.

“This should make you feel better, Bea.” I
looked down at the photo identification that was splashed across
the screen. There was a cheerful young woman staring boldly back at
me.

“Celia Dusquesne. Oh, she was only
twenty-four. How sad. This says she was a graduate student at the
Sorbonne.” Carefully studying the face of a once-vibrant girl, I
noticed she wasn’t classically beautiful, but certainly very
attractive. Her smile was bright, her eyes sparkling, and in live,
her skin had a rosy glow that seemed to suggest good health. Surely
she had already charmed a number of men with her attributes -- of
that I had no doubt. Celia seemed to have an abundance of
personality. I wondered if that translated to a sense of arrogance
that she was well beyond danger, and if so, had she thrown caution
to the wind while trying to out-manipulate someone like Philippe
Grapon.

“There is one possibility we failed to take
into account,” Ben said, as he swung back out into traffic. “Celia
may have been working with Philippe as his accomplice.”

“Stop,” I said, putting a hand to my temple.
“You’re making my head hurt with all the possibilities. The trouble
is we don’t know what she was doing at the Bard’s Bed &
Breakfast or why she was there. All we really know is that she was
dead under the bed in the Ephesus Suite. We don’t know who killed
her, what killed her, or where she was killed.”

“All true. But we do know that Grapon was
involved in some way, good or bad, and that he was working in
concert with the man who stole Celia’s body.”

“And we didn’t really see his face, did we?
Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” I wondered,
smoothing out an invisible wrinkle on my lap.

“Why?”

“Because we’ll be on alert for Philippe at
the airport, won’t we? What if Mr. X takes advantage of the
situation? What if he kills ‘Mr. Williams’ while we’re busy with
the French philanderer?”

“The next time you wonder why I married you,
remember this moment,” said my husband, patting my knee with great
affection.

“I don’t understand.”

“You have an innate sense of the spy game,
darling, but also a great disdain for it. You don’t take any crap
from me, but I also know you live by your own moral code, so I
don’t have to worry about you plotting and planning behind my back.
That’s not your way. I always knew when I came back to you, you
would be who you are,” he smiled. “One professional spy in the
family is more than enough.”

“Only I am not who I was, and there are at
least two professional spies in the family if you count Uncle
Edward. Technically, I’m more than just a private citizen, not of
my own volution, and far too involved in the murky world of
espionage for my liking.”

“And yet, you chose to love a man like
me.”

“Chose? Hardly. How was having you in my life
a choice?” I demanded. “You were thrust at me like a Christmas
puppy, and no one told me you would foul the carpet or that you
needed housetraining!”

“Housetraining? I needed housetraining?” Ben
was appalled. “How can you even hint that I was in anyway
uncivilized?”

“Easy,” I retorted. “If you recall the first
time we met, it’s not as if you were well-behaved.”

“That wasn’t
my
fault!”

“Not your fault that you were stark naked in
the street?

“She stole my clothes while I was
asleep!”

“And if you hadn’t been sleeping with her, do
you think you might have remained decently clothed?”

“I was doing my job! I was distracting a
female intelligence operative, so she couldn’t help her friends
blow up a United States embassy in Africa!”

“By using sex!” I replied with great disgust.
“You couldn’t play a few hands of rummy? You couldn’t take her to
dinner and regale her with tales of your college days, or just
knock her out and be done with it? Good Lord, what in heaven’s name
would you do without me to keep you honest?”

“Is that how you see your role in our
marriage? You are the moral compass?”

“Someone has to be.”

“So, I am a charity case to you? A bastard
who needs a good scrubbing before the lady of the house will allow
him to enter through the cellar door? ‘Wipe your feet!’” Ben sent
his voice into a falsetto on that last bit, pretending to be
me.

“You have a problem with wiping your feet on
the doormat?”

“That presumes my feet are filthy when I come
home from an assignment.”

“Better to wipe them on the mat than to get
that filth all over me, buster!”

“That assumes that I’m a bad guy and I go
around doing dirty deeds all over the world, like some twisted
James Bond!” he hissed at me.

“Well, if the boot fits....”

“I do what I do, Bea, so that people like you
can sleep at night! My life is not all murder and intrigue because
I can’t live without the excitement of the chase!”

“Oh, you mean you’re not an action junkie?
You think now in your retirement from the CIA, you will be
satisfied to live the life of a country gent who happens to own a
bed and breakfast? That’s why we are now on our way to the airport
to pick up a woman claiming to be a man? What’s wrong with having a
nice establishment with classy guests and no dead bodies under the
bed?” I demanded.

“Do you want to know why Uncle Edward opened
the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast? Do you?”

I watched as the vein on Ben’s neck grew
thick, and I knew he was upset with me. But frankly, it was my plan
to get the spies out of my establishment. There was no reason we
had to have them mucking up the waters of Lake Champlain, was
there?

“Fine. Why did Uncle Edward open the Bard’s
Bed & Breakfast? I am awaiting your answer with bated
breath.”

I watched Ben struggle to regain his
composure, gripping the steering wheel hard, and I knew it didn’t
come easy to him.

“He was supposed to meet his wife, his
beloved wife, at a little inn on the shores of Lake Louise in
Canada. He was returning from an assignment to Hungary in 1952. She
took the train by herself from Boston to Alberta. She checked in,
spent two days there while she waited for Edward, and then she
disappeared. No one could tell him where his wife was when he
arrived. All they knew was that she disappeared after spending two
days there. It was the Soviets’ way of punishing him for assisting
the Hungarian dissidents. They held onto her for two years, Bea,
and when he went back for a second stint as station chief, they
gave him a choice between helping the dissidents or saving his
wife. They tied her to the train tracks, forcing him to free her or
watch her die a painful, horrific death. He couldn’t have both his
wife and his work for the CIA.”

“What did he choose?” I asked, my throat
tight, hoping he made the right choice.

“He did what was right, Bea,” Ben replied.
“He saved Hortense, and then he killed the bastards who took her.
He used his freedom fighters to get it done.”

“Meaning he didn’t choose between his wife
and his work?”

“His wife was his life. His work was his
duty. A man should never let himself be put in the position of
having to choose. Uncle Edward knew what the Soviets had planned
for him, because he recruited within their ranks. He killed two
birds with one stone.”

“So it all worked out in the end? Uncle
Edward saved the day?” Why did I think there was more to the story
than that?

“And paid the price. He had to send Hortense
away because the Soviets wanted revenge for their people.”

“What does that mean?” I wondered as Ben took
a right and exited on the ramp to the airport. We wound our way in
and out of the lanes, finally pulling into the short-term parking
lot. Ben found a space across from the entrance. He turned off the
engine, but held onto the steering wheel, looking off into the
faraway past.

“The Soviets weren’t going to leave her
alone. It was very believable, given what they had done to her in
those two years she was missing. They had tried to recruit her,
using psychological and physical coercion, and she learned to play
along with it, in order to avoid their harsher tactics. When she
told her husband the details of what they had done to her, he
figured out that the only way to save her was to kill her off, so
Uncle Edward staged a suicide for his wife. He wanted Colonel
Demitrov to think he had discovered they were using Hortense
against him and that he took her out because she turned on him.
That was so they wouldn’t think he staged it because he was just
trying to protect her.”

“So?” I leaned closer, wanting to know the
outcome. As long as I had known Uncle Edward, he had never told me
about a wife. I had always assumed he was a committed bachelor.

“So what?” Ben opened the car door and
climbed out.

“What happened to Hortense?”

“She was relocated to an undisclosed
location, where she was set up in a new life, with a new
identity.”

“They were never together again?”

“Oh, they finally got back together in 1978,
when he was a professor. She died in 1990.”

How sad to think that Uncle Edward and his
wife split apart by the Cold War, that their love was disrupted for
years by the need to hide her from the Soviets. The thought made me
shiver. As much as Ben and I argued and bickered, I couldn’t
imagine life without him. I would follow him, hell or high water,
because it was where I belonged.

Did I tell him that? Did I share my deepest
and darkest fears with the man I married? Heavens, no. We’re not
talking about a so-called normal husband, who takes out the trash
regularly, mows the lawn and cleans out the gutters on weekends,
and comes home from work every day, briefcase in hand, to greet me
with a cheerful hi-dee-do. We’re talking about a retired spy, a man
who spent his entire adult life deceiving, duping, and disrupting
the lives of some really bad people. You always have to exercise a
little caution in the handling of spouses who have embraced
espionage, either willingly or unwillingly. They become creatures
of habit, pulling the covers over themselves even when the sun is
shining brightly and the temperatures hover above ninety degrees
Fahrenheit.