Greg Rucka: The last run

Chace stretched, feeling her left knee pop with an almost-pleasant pain as her leg extended, then got to her feet. "Don't be stupid, Chris, all right? It may be a base, but it's a base in Iraq, and there are a hell of a lot of guns about."

"No fear," Lankford said.

"Yes, fear-it'll keep you alive. Stop by the Pit when you're finished, all right?"

"Yes'm."

Chace started for the door, saw that Alexis, still wearing her coms headset, leads gathered in one hand, was in consultation with Ronald Hodgson at Duty Ops, standing on her tiptoes to reach the top of the raised desk. Ron had a signals sheet in his hand, reading it with a bemused expression.

"Nah, it's a mistake," he was saying.

"Barnett's asking for a confirmation," Alexis told him. "I've run it twice, it's gibberish."

Ron saw Chace, motioned for her to join them, saying, "Falcon's in Jakarta, I think. There's no one running in Iran under that name. Tara, take a look at this."

He handed down the note for Chace to read.

"Lee Barnett sent it Saturday night, as a routine inquiry," Alexis said, by way of explanation. "He says the first part is a book code and queried if we knew what it meant. The second part he maintains is a substitution code, but they don't have the key. He's asking for instructions how to proceed. I've spent the last hour trying to decipher it, but the computer keeps spitting out 'no known code' for the lot."

"Barnett's Tehran?" Chace asked. "How'd he come by this?"

"He didn't say."

Chace read the message again. The grapes are in the water. Falcon. "The substitution, it's a number sequence."

"Agreed."

"You've contacted Jakarta?"

Ron shook his head. "I was about to send it up to D-Ops, see if he knew what it meant."

"I'm on my way up there now, I'll give it to him. Meantime, signal Jakarta, query Falcon's whereabouts. And Lex-send back to Tehran. Ask for details on the message, how they came by it."

Alexis nodded, hopped down off the platform, and headed back to her workstation.

"You have any idea what it means?" Ron asked.

"None," Chace said. "But it certainly doesn't bode well for the grapes." The door to the inner office was closed. Kate Cooke, Paul Crocker's long-suffering personal assistant, was seated at her desk in the outer, her fingers flying over her keyboard. She paused midkey-stroke when Chace entered.

"Minder Three?" Kate asked.

"Still briefing. Operation: Bagboy."

"Bagboy," Kate repeated. "When's he due back?"

"Kate, he hasn't left yet. Should be back Sunday, all goes well."

"It's Iraq."

"He's on-base the entire time."

Kate nodded, then resumed her typing. She and Lankford had been on-again, off-again for the last few years, and from the change in her manner, Chace guessed they were on-again once more. Not that Kate would have cared any less about his well-being if they weren't, but Chace knew that she'd never have dared ask for details otherwise.

For a second, Chace thought about saying something to her about discretion, and that perhaps Kate might want to be more circumspect. But the fact was, Chace knew Kate would never have asked the questions of Crocker or Poole. Even if she disapproved of the relationship-and she wasn't certain that she did-the fact was, Chace didn't have a leg to stand on, and Kate knew that better perhaps than most.

Chace moved to refill the mug she'd brought with her from the Ops Room. "Can I see him?"

"He's on with Seale right now," Kate said. "Should be done in another minute."

"What's the CIA want now?"

Kate managed the rather impressive feat of shrugging without missing a keystroke. Chace tilted her head, trying to listen for Crocker's voice over the sound of the keys and through his closed door and, not hearing anything, concluded that whatever it was Julian Seale wanted, it wasn't worth the raising of a voice. She wasn't particularly fond of the CIA Chief of Station in London, though Crocker seemed to get on with him just fine, certainly maintaining the time-honored "Special Relationship" between the two services. But Chace had found the American to be more political than his predecessors, and she didn't trust him. She wasn't naive; she understood that the intelligence service of any country would always be embroiled in the politics of the same. But she felt, strongly, that agencies like SIS and the CIA should walk a fine line, serving what she admitted was often an ill-defined and long-term "national interest" rather than an administration's politics and polling results of the moment. Seale made her uneasy.

Chace slipped back out from behind Kate's desk, sipping at her refreshed coffee, which was infinitely better than what she'd sampled earlier in the Ops Room but had the detriment of being decaf. Yet another change since Chace had come to work for the Firm; in the beginning, it had seemed that all intelligence work was fueled by caffeine and nicotine, in roughly equal proportions. Chace had given up smoking while pregnant with Tamsin, then again some two years ago, and thus far had managed with only a few stumbles. Crocker, for his part-at least as far as she knew-had gone without a smoke for over a year, quitting at roughly the same time his coffee had become decaffeinated.

The heart attack, when it came, hadn't surprised anyone who knew Paul Crocker; the only shock was that it had taken so long to finally happen. And the irony was that, while the job certainly was a contributing factor, it hadn't been the job, specifically, that had caused it. Crocker, his wife, and their younger daughter had taken a weekend trip to visit his older daughter, who was attending university in York. They'd spent a November Saturday together, retired to their hotel for the night, and, as Crocker told it, an invisible elephant had leapt onto his chest and refused to move.

Technically, Chace thought, D-Ops had actually died. Crocker's heart had stopped beating, and for seven minutes before the paramedics arrived, he survived on his wife's breath, on her repeated compressions of his heart. The medics managed to restart a rhythm before rushing him off to the hospital, and by Sunday noon, Paul Crocker had two stents and a new lease on life, one that the doctors told him he was damn lucky to have at all, and if he wanted to preserve it, some lifestyle changes were in order. No more fags, no more red meat, easy on the caffeine, and-this was a laugh to everyone who heard it-less stress.

Between recovery and rehab, Crocker was out of the office for just over nine weeks, through the holidays and into early February, during which time Chace was named Acting Director of Operations, Poole advanced to Head of Section, Minder One, and Lankford to Minder Two. It wasn't the first time Chace had found herself named Acting Director; on three separate occasions since becoming Minder One, Crocker had been forced out of the office, almost always on official business, and she'd been obliged to step into his place, though never for longer than five days.

This time it was different, and markedly so. The question of whether or not Paul Crocker would actually return to the Firm at all hovered, unasked, throughout the building. There were many who felt he had long since passed his sell-by date, that it was more than time for him to go. His list of allies, both within Vauxhall Cross and over the Thames, in Whitehall, had grown perilously short over the years, while the list of those he'd double-crossed, ignored, abused, or enraged had just as significantly lengthened. In certain quarters, Chace was sure the news of his heart attack had led to celebration.

But if those same people had thought that Tara Chace, as Acting D-Ops, would be easier to manage than her absent predecessor, they had clearly forgotten both her loyalty to Crocker and the fact that everything she knew of the job she'd learned from him. While she was less prone to shouting than Crocker, and perhaps a little more liberal with honey than with vinegar, she was no less fierce in pursuit of the D-Ops mandate. She'd handled the day-to-day bureaucratic chores of running the Operations Directorate with skill born of nearly a decade in SIS, but that had been expected. The real test of a D-Ops, everyone knew, was how they reacted in a crisis. Prior to Crocker's prolonged absence, there'd never been an opportunity to see Chace in action in that role.