Стюарт Вудс - Stealth

“Good thinking.”

The table was set, and they were called to lunch. “Where are Dino and Viv?” Rose asked.

“They went riding and took a picnic lunch with them.”

“Good. I have you all to myself.”

“Entirely.”

“Any other questions?”

“How does MI-6 list your name in their records?”

Rose sighed. “I suppose they would have listed it somewhere as Balfour. I was a student at the time. Mind you, if they knew you knew that, they’d take you out and shoot you.”

“That’s what they’d like you to think,” Stone said. “What did you do for them as a student?”

“Watched out for communists, of course. They still haven’t recovered from that nest of spies at Oxford and Cambridge. Kim Philby is a name that still raises temperatures at MI-6.”

“Did you report any communists?”

“Only two, and they were both well-known to be members of the Young Communist League, so I wasn’t really giving anything away.”

“Did they ever call on you for other services?”

“They keep a list of medical types that they believe to be reliable. Once, at their request, I removed a bullet from a young man’s arse.”

“One of theirs or one of yours?”

“I never asked, and they never told me. As soon as I had stitched him up and given him a dose of antibiotics, they spirited him away. I never saw his face, since I was working at the other end.”

“How did you fall into the clutches of Roger Fife-Simpson?”

“I met him at Station Two a week before I met you. The service asked me to go up there and give some basic wound-repair instruction to a small group of spies-in-training — applying tourniquets, setting broken limbs, stitching up oranges, that sort of thing — nothing an Eagle Scout couldn’t handle.”

“What do you think of the man?”

“I think of him very little. I don’t suppose I spoke to him or was spoken to more than three or four times, including dinner here.”

“Felicity thinks you are his creature,” Stone said.

“Hardly. He’s not the sort I’d like to be the creature of. There was talk about him in the mess. He’s apparently a very efficient killer with almost any sort of weapon. There was a story about him dealing with some IRA types in Belfast.”

“I heard that story. Impressive, if true. Do you know what he did before landing at MI-6?”

“Not a clue. I had the impression at dinner that the landing wasn’t Felicity’s idea.”

“I have that impression, too.”

“He must have some connections in the government, though — probably the Foreign Office, since someone there foisted him upon Felicity.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I didn’t. I just figured it out. Perhaps I’m wrong.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Do you see Dame Felicity often?”

“When we’re both in residence down here.”

Rose leaned forward on her elbows. “Is she very good in bed?”

Stone was saved from that question by Dino and Viv, returned from their picnic, joining them for coffee.

Lance Cabot was in a meeting with an operations team about to embark on a mission when he was handed a note. A Brigadier Fife-Simpson to see you , it read.

“Tell him to wait,” he said, then continued with his meeting.

Forty minutes later the meeting broke up, and he buzzed his secretary. “Send in the brigadier,” he said.

A moment later they were shaking hands. Fife-Simpson was dressing a lot better than the last time he had seen him, Lance thought.

“Lance, how are you?”

“Very well, Roger,” Lance replied, waving him to a seat. “Coffee?”

“I had some while I was waiting,” Roger replied.

“Yes, sorry about that. I was sending a couple of young men off to their deaths.”

“I don’t suppose you could tell me about their mission.”

“You ‘don’t suppose’ correctly,” Lance said. “First, we’d have to clear you from your birth to this date, and you know how long that sort of thing takes.”

“Well, yes, I suppose I do,” Roger replied.

“Tell me, how long did it take to clear you at MI-6, after Admiral Sir Timothy Barnes shoved you down their throats?”

“Well, I don’t think it was quite like that,” Roger replied uncomfortably.

“Of course it was, Roger,” Lance replied. “You don’t actually think Dame Felicity was glad to see you, do you?”

“Dame Felicity has been very cordial,” Roger said stiffly.

“You and Sir Tim were at some school or other at the same time, weren’t you?”

“Yes, we were midshipmen at Dartmouth. He chose the Royal Navy, I chose the Royal Marines.”

“And now he’s First Sea Lord, I believe?”

“That is correct.”

“In a perfect position to throw a bone to an old midshipman chum.”

“I suppose you could put it that way.”

“The way I heard it was that you were about to be passed over for promotion for the second time, which would have necessitated retirement, when Sir Tim saved your ass, pulled you back from the brink. Did you once save his life, or something?”

“Something like that,” Roger replied.

“No, no, not his life, his career, wasn’t it? Sort of the same thing, I guess.”

“I’d rather not go into that.”

“Why not? Being queer isn’t a crime in Britain anymore — though it is, perhaps, a no-no for a high-ranking military member of the government. Whose arm did old Tim twist? The foreign minister’s, perhaps? After all, MI-6 comes under his purview.”

“Lance, I don’t think you should bandy about notions of that sort,” the brigadier said. “They might come back to bite you on the arse.”

“Of course, you’re right, Roger, and I try to keep my ass out of the way of people like Sir Timothy.”

“Good. I’m looking forward to seeing a bit of your shop,” Fife-Simpson said, desperately trying to change the subject.

Lance scratched his head. “There was another incident in which you and Sir Tim participated, I believe. Let’s see, what was it?”

Lance’s phone buzzed, and he picked it up. “Send her in, please.” He hung up and turned to Fife-Simpson. “One of our brilliant young ladies is going to be your shepherd in our meadow.”

Fife-Simpson was vastly relieved that Lance had been interrupted.

There was a rap on the door, and a middle-aged woman with a cropped haircut and dressed in a baggy tweed suit entered the room.

“Ah, here we are,” Lance said. “Meg Tillman, this is Brigadier Sir... Excuse me, I’m getting ahead of myself... Brigadier Roger Fife-Simpson, the shiny new deputy director of MI-6, an organization that has never had a deputy director until the brigadier came along and impressed everybody. Roger, Meg is known around our shop as one of our brightest minds, and she is an expert on our history and mission. She’s going to give you the two-and-a-half-dollar tour of both Langley and Camp Peary, our training facility, and answer all your questions.”

Lance stood up. “Oh, I remember the other thing now. You and Sir Tim served in Belfast together, didn’t you?”

“We did. We were both young lieutenants at the time.” He made to move toward his guide, but Lance held him back.

“Let’s see, as legend has it, you two young fellows were in search of — how shall I put it? — just the right sort of bar... weren’t you? And you somehow got it wrong and ended up in a nest of IRA vipers and were set upon. You managed to occupy their attention long enough for Lieutenant Tim to fetch a squad of British military policemen, and they got to you in the nick of time, just before the Irish would have cut your balls off.”

“That’s not quite the way it happened,” Roger said, blushing.