Smoke and Mirrors (24 page)

I took a deep breath, wondering how he’d react to my words – the ones I’d been turning over and over in my mind. More than a little terrified, I touched his face, the strong Roman cheeks and nose, that square jaw. “I think –”

I
hear with my little ear…

The muffled click of my gloved finger against the trigger. The trigger of a semi-automatic rifle to be exact. A sniper’s weapon, my weapon and
the
weapon of choice in the sanctioned assassination of HRM’s latest spy-turned-traitor.

One Agent Milton. Bradley Milton to be precise.

The stifled trigger click is like the Grim Reaper’s rap. Unyielding, earth shattering, incontestable. My empty stomach churns, and I feel the prickle of cold sweat break out along the inside of my cashmere turtleneck.

How had it come to this after all we’d been through together?

“I think –”

What I had said to him in Sardinia matters very little now. He’d left that afternoon and never returned. SIS found the burnt out shell of his rental car, driver seat saturated in his blood, at the bottom of an ocean-side cliff in Croatia. His body was never found, but we all assumed the ferocious surf had dragged it out, fodder for whatever dwelt in and around the jagged outcropping.

The frigid draft is unbearable, my nose is dripping, snowflakes are stuck to my frozen eyelashes, but I dare not take my eyes from the square below. Dare not shift my finger from the trigger of my long-range rifle.

What matters is two months have passed since the impossible flared to hideous life on a grainy video that ripped the earth from my feet when it confirmed Brad leaving a Russian government building seconds before a Semtex bomb blew it and four officials to hell.

I’d stormed out of HQ that day and downed my sorrows in Brad’s bottle of whisky. When I surfaced in the early morning hours, I’d cried myself into a state of complete exhaustion. How could he have let me think he’d been killed, dumped in the sea like a piece of trash?

Instead, he’d gone…what? Mad?

Deciding becoming an alcoholic wasn’t a great solution, I’d wracked my brain for anything that might have led to his turning coat.

Something was bothering me and I had remembered at last what it was. So I went to HQ and took out his medical records. They hadn’t been moved yet, and I flipped through them until I found the page that mentioned Brad’s birth. Information about his size, the hospital’s location, and his footprints were still there, but the page I’d remembered – the one with specifics about his mother being injected with rhoGAM – was not.

But Brad’s blood type was there, and I’d been wrong; it was B Negative.

Thinking I’d gone and lost my mind, I noted a sliver of paper left between the pages I was reading. Ever so carefully, I extracted it. A small bit of writing was left, and my mind was my own again.

“May I see the sign-out log for this file?”

The Records Officer obliged and brought me back the clipboard, where I found two very unusual entries.

Jack Kingston had taken the file out the day Nigel and Samantha died.

And C had taken it out again the day of Brad’s poisoning.

“Where do more secure documents go if they are pulled from a file?”

“It depends on the level of security they’ve been assigned.”

I pointed to Jack’s name. “What level of security was assigned to the pages he removed?”

She walked across the room and searched a computer database. A few moments later, she returned. “Top level. Eyes only. C signed both requisition forms himself.”

I had stumbled in a trance back to my flat. Why would C have wanted Brad’s file tampered with? Surely he wouldn’t have taken information that might have caused harm to Brad. But if it wasn’t that, what was it? And why had it been taken on those occasions? I thought back to the conversation I’d had with C the night Nigel had been killed. The only possible coincidence was my question regarding family members. But that made no sense.

Then I considered the day Brad was poisoned. C had been in a meeting with the PM. Alasdair had taken care of everything. SIS doctors had been the ones to help out the Italian staff. Why would C have gone down to get the file himself? Did he find out about the blood mix up? Was he covering for someone’s error?

Frustrated and heartbroken, I dragged out the box I’d brought back from Sardinia. It was filled with the meager contents of Nigel’s desk. I sifted through it only to find a book, pen, pencil sharpener and a box of paper clips.
Not a fucking clue.

I began replacing the contents, when a photo fell from the book. It was a picture taken the night the four of us had gone to The Three Tuns. Everyone was smiling. Happy.

When I couldn’t bear it any longer, I slid the photo back between the pages of the paperback Nigel must have been reading. It was a Hollywood version of
Notes on a Scandal
featuring Judi Dench and Kirstin Scott Thomas on the glossy jacket.

And my mind began to hop.

Judi Dench played ‘M’ in the James Bond movies.

C was the real life version of her character.

In
Notes on a Scandal,
Judi was blackmailing Kirstin for having an affair.

But Brad had had a lot of affairs, and C didn’t seem to care. In fact nothing Brad ever did seemed to deflate C’s opinion of him.

Until now.

When C sent me and two other agents with Alasdair to Russia. Our target was Brad. We were to take him out before he could assassinate the Russian president. Intel suggested this was what his organization was aiming for.
His
organization? Once that had meant us. Meant England.

But it turned out Brad had had another side. When he’d gone to Croatia the time before he’d ‘died’, he’d actually visited Chechnya where he and two other members of Obshchina had supposedly blown up a Russian embassy all in the name of freedom.

I didn’t believe it.

You still don’t.

Wind yanks my hair from the black skullcap, and my finger twitches.

I listen to the sound of my trigger inching softly toward my thumb. Pulling it will fire a bullet into Brad’s heart.

The menacing vibration startles my limbs and I suppress a shiver. And as if seeing the fractional movement himself, Alasdair questions my readiness, my willingness to follow orders despite the insubordination of my soul.

“Agent Board, do you copy? Agent Board, I repeat, do you –”

“Agent Board here. Go ahead.” I interrupt the calm, always calm even under pressure, voice purposefully. Childish of me, I know, but like the child-me, I feel ineffective, and being powerless has an appalling effect on my temperament.

Brad knows this.

“I’m not staying in bed.”

His dark eyes laughed, but his mouth remained tame. “Ms. Brothers, if you recall,
you
forced
me
to stay in bed and eat…chicken…soup… after I got poisoned.” The words stretch apart like taffy.

I scowled. “I don’t like taffy.”

He leaned over and kissed me. The kiss was soft, but the force behind it most definitely was not.

‘
You will do as I say’, it said, ‘not because I’m in charge, but because it’s the correct thing to do.’

So, I stayed in bed, but on my terms. Terms that demanded he stay as well.

His complaint rumbled through our connected flesh much later. “Why is it I only got chicken soup?”

“You never asked what else was on the menu.” A pillow landed on my head and all injuries and arguments were forgotten.

Static-free, acid-filled words stretch across the distance separating my ear and my Handler’s mouth. “Target will be sighted, then named by Agent Bullseye.” I grimace at his call sign, wishing instead for Agent Mile-wide. “Affirmation will be required by Agents Board and Trigger before I choose Blackhood. Copy all?”

Two voices answer in staccato succession. Mine rejoins a hairsbreadth later, for targets can be missed by such a margin.

A tickle of silence, of the hairs in my inner ear resuming their upright stance of attention, and then the unthinkable.

I spy a figure in the crowd. The milling, murmuring, monstrous crowd that has assembled on the red-tiled square beside the onion-topped Cathedral of St. Basil.

Brad should not be here.

For the people are here to listen to their president speak of changes in policy which will affect their current relations with one of the bastard children of their former Soviet Union, listen to his words when he meets and uneasily kisses the Chechen man’s cheeks.

Some will want them to fail; others will want them to succeed.

Such is freedom and democracy in Mother Russia.

And what does Brad want? Of that I’m not certain.

Such is freedom and democracy in Mother England.

I glance at the quietly refined face of my Oyster Rolex as it accurately flashes me the time and date.

14:45

The fifth of November.

Bleak, snowy and fucking cold.

Brad will be thinking the same thing. He hates the cold; Giovanni has taken over his blood stream, given command of their circulatory system to his Mediterranean lineage.

Sardinia is his home now, despite his beautifully restored houseboat on the Thames, despite my cozy flat in Henley.

Sardinia is – was –our home away from home. Our life away from life. The place where the power of a drug lord and his doctor/mistress reigned supreme.

But that was fiction, and unfortunately, this is reality.

Brad has become a liability and a traitor. Has become the spy who refused to ‘come in from the cold’ and will now pay the ultimate price.

My job is to locate and relay our target’s position.

So why the hell haven’t I done so?

Scanning the crowd, the carefully watched crowd –for we are not the only eyes and scopes out here today, there will be Russians, Chechens and those nameless representatives of factions slippery as warmth on a day such as this – I look for something else.

Someone else. Scandal. Affair. Russia.

Fur hats. Babies dressed against the weather with round faces and red cheeks protruding. Stoic faces. Shoulder against shoulder for warmth. Faces in windows; lucky faces those. And then back to the broad-backed figure of that someone I used to know.

A man with principle. Integrity. Loyalty.

I bite my lip and draw blood.

Why in God’s name hasn’t anyone else spotted him?
I wonder, wishing like hell I could be down there. Down in the chaotic crowd where I could talk to him. Talk to him and ask him one question.

Why?

“Agent Board?” The voice of Agent Bullseye is coming through, causing my bloody lip to curl into a snarl, for I don’t like him. Never have. Too smug. Too self-assured in this very tricky, very uncertain business.

“Copy.”

Cold voice, for he carries no affection for me either; I helped bring down his friend. Helped get Jack killed.

“Anything on your end?”

Yes.

“No,” I lie.

A snowflake drifts down, lands on my sight and causes me to shiver. Lacy companions of the frozen crystal swirl from here to there, and my shiver seems to catch, undulating through the crowd like an aftershock.

Missing one.

Missing one!

My mind is screaming now. Brad didn’t shiver. Doesn’t even seem cold. I squint and discern gloveless hands and an unfastened top button.

People switch allegiances. Bodies aren’t as traitorous.

Switching off my mic while leaving the earpiece on, I whisper a prayer of sorts, “You can take the boy out of Sardinia, but you can’t take Sardinia out of the boy.” I slither upright – difficult after hours on my belly. No one has noticed. Backing myself to the wall, I crawl back into the shadows and through the portal into the building atop which I’ve been stationed.

Dropping the rifle in favor of my semi-automatic, I cat-walk down the stairs and make my way out into the crowd. The real Brad won’t be visible. He’s too good even for me to find. But he is somewhere close by; I feel it now. Feel him.

Several passes through numbed onlookers leave me with a new hat, new gloves and a scarf. Switching mine with theirs was child’s play. Getting to ‘him’ without being seen, well that’ll be different. I pick my route carefully, not wishing to be seen as the drone bringing honey back to the Queen. Easy to follow in a hive, easy to follow in a crowd.

After some minutes, I’m close enough to see the bystander’s eyes. Eyes not seen on the video. And they’re dark, amazingly dark, like Brad’s. But they are
not
his. One can’t share one’s soul with another and miss the inner light that shines through eyes.

But, holy shit, they are so similar. Could be poured from the same deep chocolate.

The ground shifts beneath me once more.
That’s it
. Brad’s father was sent as a professor/spy to Moscow during the Cold War. His work on cryptology helped England until he was captured. Tortured. Shot.

Brad was only seven when he’d been left completely alone.

“My grandmother was a dangler, a spy recruited by my grandfather to pass erroneous information along to her father, a known Mussolini supporter. They married in secret and were shot shortly before the war ended.”

His voice grew almost indiscernible. “My father, their only child, was smuggled out of Italy, taken to live with my grandfather’s staff at his estate in Devonshire. He was told his parents had been killed in a car accident while visiting Italy. It wasn’t until he graduated University and applied for work with SIS that he discovered their real fate.

“He went on to become a linguist/cryptologist for The Firm, translating codes, designing ciphers, anything that didn’t entail fieldwork. He wasn’t a coward, mind you, just a man who couldn’t bring himself to put his wife in harm’s way. My mother was everything to him. They had fallen in love at University, married shortly before graduation and were expecting me about the same time he was accepted into SIS.