Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.

Stemwinder 1

She was sitting in a meeting that shouldn't be happening at all, really. It was a lot of big talk about war games and simulations and strategy. A lot of big talk that seemed to have started in the middle of the story and completely left out one of the salient points.

"So where does the agency fit into this?" she asked, at the first lull. "I mean, war games are not exactly our forte."

There was a long answer, one that didn't really answer the question she had asked: why is this our baby when it's clearly yours instead. The long and the short of it was that the agency was part of it because the agency was part of it, and that was that. No room for complaint or protest.

They were supposed to offer a window for the Russians to peer through — some radio frequencies to allow the Russians to get a carefully curated sneak peek at the US defenses. It was the agency's job to let only a little bit slip, with several agents assigned to a known Russian operative. If an opportunity presented itself, they might leak the frequencies — carefully; not too little, not too much.

She got Rostov. As targets went, he was out of her comfort range. She specialized in wealthy men between thirty and forty; he was sixty-five if he was a day, and crotchety to boot. But behind the KGB instinct lay a more kindly soul than was usual in the average Soviet operative, and a not insignificant part of her was glad she had gotten him.

Neiman got "Ivan the Terrible", a suave and dimpled assassin with piercingly blue eyes. Despite him falling directly into her target demographic, she was relieved she didn't have to shadow him. He had always given her the creeps. He killed without mercy and yet had managed to evade justice both in the Soviet Union and here in the States.

Lee got Sonja Chenko. New kid on the block, Billy said. "We'll do a peacock dance with her. Mrs. King has had enough training to help."

"Thank you, sir," Amanda beamed. Oh, boy. She did not know what she was getting into here.

A peacock dance, really? At this stage of the game? With a girl in her early twenties? Lee might have been the best peacock dancer the agency had ever seen, but sometimes Francine thought that the powers that be had forgotten that Lee wasn't as young as he used to be.

For his part, Lee looked like he had been told that he needed an emergency root canal without anesthesia, and that they would be going through his nose for it. The pained smile he turned on Amanda would have made anyone think twice about it.

How she wished she could have stayed behind to hear the conversation Lee had with Billy! It promised to be quite the argument: he started it out with the words, "You better give this to somebody else."

Clearly he had also realized that a peacock dance was nothing but trouble this time.

She watched Amanda's face instead of Lee's while they listened to the tape of Lee sweet-talking Sonja. It was one of the things she hated most about agent work: listening to Lee lay on the charm so thick that it oozed all over like asphalt in the Texas sun. Amanda's second-hand embarrassment was almost painful to watch, but it was more endurable than having to watch Lee's reaction. He scratched his head, probably until it was bleeding in places. He shifted his weight in the chair. He glanced at Amanda, who sat ramrod straight and did not look at him. And he radiated discomfort.

Billy seemed pleased with the result. "I think we've got ourselves a carrier pigeon," he said, standing up and beginning to pace.

"Yeah, maybe," said Lee, and his voice cracked. She could hear the desperate unhappiness, even if Billy couldn't, and it made her strangely uneasy. "There's something about this Sonja," he went on, still sounding as if his throat were made of gravel, and Amanda stiffened visibly. "It's just an itch. I'm going to see if TP Aquinas can scratch it."

"Well, keep me posted," Billy said. "In the meanwhile, I'll phone Dart and see if I can arrange to get you those radio frequencies ASAP." He turned to Amanda, handing her the tape of Lee's agency-mandated dalliance as he did so. "Excellent, excellent work, Amanda."

"Thank you, sir," she said, speaking for the first time.

"A successful Lisbon variation depends on teamwork," he added, opening the door in a clear sign that they were dismissed.

"Yes, sir," she said, shooting out of her seat as if ejected from it. "Lee did all the dancing." The last word was almost lost, as she sped through the door. She left Lee behind, going out of her way to remove even the slightest possibility that he would shepherd her gently out the door as he usually did, one hand resting against the small of her back.

She had tailed Rostov everywhere since she had been assigned to him, taking pictures with her compact camera. She followed him to the Moscovy Tea Room and the Rose Garden Café. When he visited the Smithsonian National Zoo, Francine did too. When he went to the Kennedy Center to bask in the wonderment that was Mozart's Il Seraglio, Francine sat two rows behind him and tried very hard to be invested in opera. When he got into a Soviet Embassy limousine and headed off to Emelio's restaurant, she got into the taxi behind him.

She was expecting the Emelio excursion to be more of the same — nothing terribly interesting. But instead she got a photo of him talking with Lee and Amanda, who seemed awfully cozy. Things seemed to be going from bad to worse.

And then, hours later, her phone rang, and she realized that things had gone from worse to worst.

Phillip Dart had been killed.

She got to Dart's office as soon as she could, checking the log of visitors. Her heart sank into her toes when she realized that Lee and Amanda were the last visitors.

Lee's fingerprints were on the safe.

And now Lee was missing.

A few hours later, things went from worst to rock bottom.

Stemwinder was a disaster. The Soviets had all the frequencies, not just the ones that Dart had given Lee.

Lee's status went from missing to AWOL.

A steady refrain began to beat in her mind: I want answers. I want to be the one who catches him.

"She is not his lover!"

The words burst from Amanda: tortured words that had been wrung from a terrified and broken heart, and in that moment Francine knew with certainty something she had suspected for a while.

Amanda really had fallen for Lee.

That idea came with its own considerable set of heartaches and headaches.

Had Lee faked falling for Amanda all these years? If her best friend in the whole world could be working with the Soviets all this time, what were the odds that Amanda's heart was just a pawn in a lousy international chess game? And now, when it seemed more and more inevitable that this was exactly what was happening, Amanda herself seemed not to realize how badly she had been used.

Maybe she did. Maybe her voice broke so badly because the reality of the situation had finally dawned so fully on her.

Either way, behind her look of pained horror and stifled sympathy, Francine's already devastated heart broke all over again. And now a new refrain added itself to the other one that had been pounding in her ears: If he's hurt Amanda too, I want to be the one who kills him.

It was one thing to do a peacock dance. It was another to use Amanda as an excuse to sneak around and meet Rostov on the sly. And now she wondered if she had allowed herself to be taken in, too, by the power of a wish for Lee to be something better than what he was.

An even more horrible thought came to her later — much later, after Lee and Amanda had both disappeared after leading the agency in circles — an addendum to a dreary litany of other horrible thoughts. What if Amanda was part of it all along, too?

She couldn't help but laugh bitterly at the irony of it all. Why was it that now, just when she had finally gotten used to Amanda's cloying goodness, it all had to unravel? She had put years into forcing herself to search for even the slightest things about Amanda that she could find palatable — and she had found them! She might roll her eyes and snip and snap, but underneath it all she was actually quite fond of the little woman. To find that it was all a farce — well, that stuck in her craw more than she had anticipated.

Being vindicated did not feel too good.