Prague, 1964
It was his first time doing this, but that was no excuse, he thought savagely. It was no excuse at all.
He replayed it one more time in his mind. He'd made contact, he'd made the deal, he'd done everything right, and today, he'd picked up the information from the dead drop. It was time to go home. Success across the boards, until he happened to walk past a certain sidewalk café and everything went to hell. Not necessarily in that order.
The red-haired woman looked up from her crossword puzzle with an expression of utter boredom. Tossing a few bills on the table, she stood up, abandoned her half-finished coffee, and sashayed down the sidewalk after him. She caught up with him at the crosswalk, and put a manicured hand on his arm.
He stopped, turned towards the woman. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from a couture handbag, fashionable enough to disguise the fact that it was comparatively large, with room for any number of the sort of objects one wouldn't usually expect to find in a lady's handbag.
"I beg your pardon," she said in Czech, smiling sweetly. "But I seem to have mislaid my lighter. If I could impose…?"
"Er… of course," he said uncomfortably, in the same language, and fumbled in his pocket. This hadn't been part of the plan. "Just a moment."
"Take your time," she said, with a wink. "It's too nice a day to be in a hurry, don't you think?" Playfully, intimately, she put a cigarette between her lips and leaned in as if for a kiss.
He managed a smile, and found the lighter. As he leaned over to light the cigarette, Kay murmured in English, "You've picked up a tail."
He kept his expression casual; it wasn't easy. "Who?"
"The blond in the clichéd trench coat. Don't look."
"What now?" he muttered back.
"We run like hell," she murmured, taking his arm with a flirtatious look from under her lashes. "Can't go back to the safehouse; they're probably already there. Do you have it?"
"Yes," he said. "It's secure."
"Good. What's in that briefcase?"
"Nothing relevant. Just for show," he said under his breath.
"Perfect," she said. "Go straight to the extraction point. If I'm not there in two hours, leave without me, do you understand?"
"What are you—"
"Two hours," she repeated. Smooth as silk, she took the case from his hand, waggled her other hand with a come-up-and-see-me-sometime wink, and set off in a different direction. Numb with disbelief, he saw a tow-haired man in a trench coat hesitate, then casually walk after her.
It had all happened so quickly that for a second he just stood there, shocked, but training won out; he looked at his watch, then, like a man who'd just remembered an appointment, he turned and began walking to their designated extraction point, his mind a blur.
That had been one hour and forty-three minutes ago, and Moore still couldn't believe how quickly everything had gone wrong.
They had only met two months ago, when Stephens had ushered him into the office to meet his new teammates. He wasn't quite sure what he'd expected, but it certainly hadn't been a small knot of men playing darts at ten o'clock in the morning, or a woman standing on a desk next to the board with a small sheaf of scrap paper in her hand. She was dropping the sheets past the board, like makeshift clay pigeons. They'd apparently been at it for some time; discarded pages were lying all over the floor.
One of the men, with a shock of the reddest hair that ever came out of Ireland, flung a dart that just barely pierced the paper, pinning it to the board by one corner for a split second before it tore and the page fluttered to the ground with the rest.
"Pitiful. Just pitiful," said one of the other men, with a decided London accent and a mock-reproving head shake. "Her Majesty should ask for her money back."
The woman laughed. "I'll say. Donnelly, unless we can somehow convince all the bad guys to stand very, very still, I am hereby going on record as saying that I officially never want you backing me up, all right? If I had to depend on you in the field, I'd end up looking like a colander."
"Yes, one way or the other, I rather think you would," Donnelly said, with the air of a man considering all his possibilities. "But don't make promises you don't intend to keep."
The Londoner noticed Moore, and walked over to him. "Allo, who's this, then? New blood?"
"Yes," Stephens said. "Everyone, this is Agent Julian Moore. Do try to pretend you're civilized human beings until he's settled in a bit."
"Where's the fun in that?" asked the Londoner with a wink. "Welcome to our happy little family, Moore. I'm Jack Selden, and we're not nearly as bad as Stephens is making us out to be."
"We're not?" Donnelly said, mock-surprised.
"Well. Most of us aren't that bad," Selden corrected himself. "And we can always count on Donnelly, there, to make the rest of us look good by comparison."
"Good to know," Moore said, a bit nonplussed. "Do you… often stand about playing darts instead of working?"
"Given the choice, wouldn't you?" Selden asked. "Come on, Moore. Show us what you've got. The work will still be there when the game's done, I can almost promise you that."
Moore, who knew a hazing ritual when he thought he saw one, took the darts and walked to the throwing line. The woman, still standing on the desk, held up a sheet of paper, and grinned at him. "Hi, I'm Kay. I'll drop it on three, all right?"
"Fine," he said brusquely.
"Right. One… two…" she counted.
He threw the dart, pinned the paper neatly to the wall, some eighteen inches above the board, before she could finish the countdown. "You said you'd count to three," he said. "I never said anything about waiting until you did."
There was a heartbeat of utter silence, then the other agents started laughing. Selden clapped Moore on the shoulder, with a 'well done' gleam in his eye, and Moore let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. He had, it seemed, passed the test, if test it was.
"All right, Stephens," Kay said, hopping nimbly down from the desk. "This one I'd trust as my backup anytime you like."
Famous last words, he thought bitterly. A mere few months later, here he sat, counting down the last few minutes before he had to cut and run, leaving her behind. Some backup! Moore sat on the uncomfortable chair and watched his hands shaking. One hour and forty-nine minutes.
Selden was one thing; his somewhat acerbic sense of humor and his outsized confidence made sense to Moore. He liked the Londoner. Kay, on the other hand, made him very uncomfortable. Her… well, call it a 'specialized skillset' unnerved—and, yes, revolted—him, that was a big part of the problem, and he simply could not get a handle on her admittedly convoluted personality. He wasn't sure he wanted to. In short, he would have vastly preferred to be partnered with one of the other agents. Any of the other agents. Or solo; he didn't mind that either. He had told Stephens as much. Twice. Stephens had been entirely unmoved. Both times.
God, what was he going to tell Stephens? And the others? 'Sorry, chaps; turns out I didn't know what I was doing, after all, and she went and got herself captured so that I could get away. What's new with you?' Stupid, stupid, stupid…
One hour and fifty-two minutes.
This time he'd wait out every possible second, he promised himself, promised her. He would. He had to. No jumping the gun to show how clever he was. Not this time.
One hour and fifty-three minutes.
I'm sorry, Friemann. I'm sorry, and I'm grateful, and I hope you went quickly.
One hour and fifty-seven minutes.
"Oh, good. There you are," came a voice. "Ready to go?"
"Friemann?" he asked, incredulous. "You're alive? You're here?"
She frowned, taking off a pair of owlish spectacles and stowing them in her handbag. "So it would seem. I can't quite tell if you're surprised or horrified." The red wig with the saucy flip had been discarded in a convenient trash can, and she'd turned her tan coat inside out, showing the blue lining. For a disguise that had probably taken all of five seconds to assume, it was shockingly effective.
"How did you… but what about the tail? Is he still following us?"
"No. Don't worry about him. I handled it."
"You… handled it." He swallowed. "Oh, God. You killed him. Didn't you."
"Of course not," she said; this time she sounded either horrified or shocked. "No need. God, Moore—are you somehow under the impression that it's something I enjoy doing?"
"No," he lied, embarrassed. "But then… how did you get away from him?"
"Easy. I gave him what he wanted, and then I gave him the slip," she said, turning her coat right side out. "He had a choice between combing the streets for me and recovering the intel, and potentially the traitor, too. He picked Door Number Two, so here I am."
"You gave him the… Wait, you didn't have it to give!"
"Well, he didn't know that. I improvised. I was pretending to do a puzzle before you showed up, remember? I'd filled in seven very wrong answers, underlined a few random words in the clues, circled the number 11, and I wish I could be a fly on the wall while their cryptographers drive themselves mad trying to break the code. Shall we get on with fleeing the country now?"
"It could have easily gone the other way," he said with a grimace. "You saved my life."
"Eh, that's the job." She shrugged. "And, obviously, if only one of us got away, I had to make damned sure it was you."
"What? Why me?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Why you? Because I don't know your contact, I don't know your drop locations, I don't know the code you're using, I don't know what sort of information is being passed, and there's a reason I wasn't told any of those things. I'm your backup, Moore. My entire role in this particular mission is keeping you safe. That's 'why you.' Catching me wouldn't have done them any good."
"It wouldn't have done you much good, either." He managed to catch himself before going into details. She had more experience with the details than he did. Sometimes electrodes were involved.
"I know," she said softly. A wisp of hair had come loose from being confined under the wig; she smoothed it back into place before continuing, in something much closer to her usual tones. "But that's what deltas are for. Look at it this way, Moore. Next time it can be your turn to heroically almost lay down your life. Sound fair to you?"
He stared at her for a moment. "You're insane. You do realize that, don't you?"
"It's more or less a job requirement. And may I point out that you work here, too?" She grinned at him. "Now that we've settled that, what would you say to a spot of, say, fleeing for our lives? Shall we?"
"Let's," he replied automatically. That was the last thing he said until they were nearly at the border; he had a fair amount to think about. He glanced over at her. "Friemann?" he asked.
"Hmm?"
"Thank you," he said simply. He still found her a bit unnerving. He still didn't think he had completely figured her out, (he hadn't,) and he still considered assassination morally unjustifiable. But he thought he understood, now, why Stephens had insisted on her presence. Understood… and agreed.
She smiled at him. "Any time."
*.*.*.*.*.*
London, 1969
Kay went back upstairs. The forensics team was still examining every inch of the office, not to mention every inch of Moore, apparently trying to decide if a bullet to the brain might possibly have been the cause of death. From the doorway she could see a conference room where the rest of her team was already sitting, all of them trying to look as though they weren't falling apart.
She ticked off the names and faces in her mind. Penny. Moore. Stephens. Donnelly. Griffith. Stuart. Brewer. And herself. Ten people had known about Newkirk's mission. Two of them were now dead. Two of them— Stephens' immediate superior and C—were probably above suspicion, and if they weren't then there were certainly larger problems afoot than the loss of a single agent. That left six possibilities, and the other five were in that room.
There was no going back after something like this. They weren't a team anymore; now they were nothing more than six suspects sitting in a room avoiding one another's eyes.
And two of them were dead.
Oh, God… two of them were dead.
There had been, before that morning, the remote chance that Moore had been right about there not being a leak, and the whole miserable affair being a combination of bad luck and the inevitability of fate. If that were true, he would have still been alive. He had not committed suicide. She knew that for a fact. And she doubted very much that anyone else was going to buy it, either.
If there had been a murder, that argued rather strongly for the existence of a murderer, and assuming that the murderer was also the traitor was the only thing that made any sense.
The people she had worked with, fought with, laughed with, bled with. Her partners, her brothers, her world. Two were her superiors. Five were suspects. Two were dead.
One was a traitor.
This couldn't go on much longer. This was now far bigger than one mission scuttled or one man betrayed; the entire weight of British Intelligence was about to descend on them.
Moore had been wrong about the existence of a traitor. She only hoped that he was also wrong about who was going to be the likeliest suspect.
She still thought Hogan and his crew were her best chance at unraveling the puzzle before anyone else got hurt; there was no one else she could trust at the moment. Running made you look guilty, but if Moore was right, staying wouldn't make her look much less suspicious.
She turned on her heel, and slipped out of the office, hoping she'd managed it before anyone noticed she was there.
*.*.*.*.*
Donnelly bit his lip hard, and drummed his fingers against his knee.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Brewer, who happened to be sitting next to him.
"It's probably nothing," Donnelly said.
"What is?"
"I… Well, the truth of it is that I heard Kay and Moore arguing yesterday. I didn't catch all of it, and I don't want to make any accusations," Donnelly said. "But it's been worrying me a bit."
Brewer frowned. "What did they say?"
"Well, something about General Hogan, first. I thought I heard him tell her to stop, that whatever she was doing was going to destroy the whole team. Oh, and before that, she said something about how he should remember that she's a trained killer. Like she was warning him off. Then he said that whatever she was playing at, he was going to try to save the rest of us."
Brewer swallowed. "That doesn't sound good," he said simply.
"No," said Donnelly. "It doesn't."
There was silence for a moment. Then Donnelly cleared his throat. "And there's the matter of that codebook, too."
"I didn't get a very close look at it," Brewer said. "What about it?"
"It's pathetic," Donnelly said. "This is Moore we're talking about. He used better ciphers than that in his Christmas cards."
He did, too. Moore had been one of the best cryptographers in the agency; it had been the original reason Stephens had wanted him on the team. Just for fun, each year, he devised a new code and sent Christmas cards inscribed with secret messages to his colleagues. The first to decipher the message got a prize. The last to crack the code got to buy the first round of drinks for the more talented members of the team. That had been Kay. Two years running.
"He would never have done a more professional job on a holiday game than he would on a matter of life and death. It just wasn't in his nature," Donnelly concluded. "If he had anything to do with that codebook, I'll eat my boots without salt."
Brewer took a deep breath. "Have you told the old man about any of this?"
"No," said Donnelly. "Not yet."
"You know you have to," Brewer said softly.
Donnelly set his jaw. There was no more uncertainty in his face or his voice. "Yes," he said. "I know exactly what I have to do."
He stood up and walked to where Stephens was sitting. He murmured something in a low voice that no one else could hear. Stephens, stone-faced, stood up as well, and the two of them left the room.
