Simon Green - The Spy Who Haunted Me

We hurt it, and it probably hadn’t been hurt in centuries.

Just as well it was gone. I didn’t want to go down in history as the man who killed the famous Loch Ness monster.

I turned my back on the loch. Honey was sifting through the scattered remains of her communications console. Walker was looking at the oversized gun in his hand as though he wasn’t accustomed to using such things, and for all I knew, he wasn’t. He made the gun disappear with a casual, elegant gesture and moved over to where Peter was looking intently at his camera phone. The Blue Fairy was looking at the silver arm of Nuada, covering his arm from shoulder to fingertips. He pulled a face and sent the ancient weapon back where it came from. He looked at me, and I smiled as kindly as I could.

“It takes more than just armour, Blue. Why call on Airgedlamh? Why didn’t you use your torc?”

“Because it scares me,” said the Blue Fairy. “I don’t think I can use it and still be me.”

He marched over to join Peter and Walker. “Tell me you got the bloody thing on film!” he said loudly. “Don’t you dare say you screwed up, Peter King, or I will throw you into the loch to drag the monster back up here again!”

“I got it! I got the whole fight on film!” said Peter, grinning from ear to ear. “Proof; proof positive!”

Honey and I joined the group, and we all studied the film on the phone’s tiny screen. It looked good. It would probably look a whole lot better blown up on a decent-sized screen, but like the man said: proof positive.

“Where’s Katt?” Walker said abruptly. We all looked around, but there was no sign of her.

We found her body eventually, under the main wreckage of the communications console. She’d avoided the main impact of the monster’s head, but her neck was broken. With all her marvellous vitality gone, she looked very small and delicate. Like a thrown-away flower, or a broken doll. Peter knelt down beside her and closed her staring eyes.

“Probably never even knew what hit her,” said Walker. “Poor little thing.”

“Wish now I’d taken the time to get to know her better,” said Peter. “I think she would have been . . . fun.”

“Oh, please!” said the Blue Fairy. “She would have killed you first chance she got.”

“Like I said, fun.” Peter rose to his feet and looked away.

“That’s the spying game for you,” said Honey. “Here today; gone tomorrow. I was going to blame her for sabotaging my submersible. No real proof; just a feeling. Now . . . I don’t suppose it matters. We have the proof of the monster’s existence; time to move on to the next part of the game.”

“Just like that?” said Peter.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the spying game for you.”

In the end, we dropped Lethal Harmony of Kathmandu’s body into the loch. As good a resting place as any. Honey watched the ripples slowly settle on the dark surface.

“Scratch one submersible,” she said finally. “And several billion dollars, probably. I just know they’ll find a way to stick me with the bill.”

In the forests of the night, there are many worse things than tygers.

The teleport bracelets dropped us right into the heart of dense forest, with night falling fast. Trees stood tall and slender all around us, draped with patchy greenery and hanging vines. The ground beneath my feet was hard and dry; rough brown dirt, cracked and broken. The vegetation grew thicker off to one side, leading down to a slow-moving river with tree trunks rising right out of the muddy waters. The air was blisteringly hot and humid, harsh and heavy in my lungs after the bitter chill of Loch Ness. Sweat sprang out all over me. Off in the distance, beyond the tree line, the sun was going down in shades of orange and crimson. In less than an hour it would be dark, and this far from civilisation it would be very dark indeed. From all around came the sounds of bird and beast and the persistent buzz of insects.

“Wonderful,” the Blue Fairy said bitterly. “An environment even more unpleasant than the last one, though I would have sworn on a stack of grimoires such a thing was impossible. Bloody place is like a blast furnace . . . I can actually feel myself tanning. Are those mosquitoes?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Shit.” The Blue Fairy looked up at the darkening sky. “Why me, Lord; why me? Was I really so bad in my last incarnation? What did I do; stamp on puppies?”

“You’d find something to complain about in Paradise,” I said, amused.

He sniffed loudly. “They wouldn’t let me into that place on a bet.” He looked accusingly around him. “Well, joy; another location I am not equipped to deal with. I am not an outdoors person; if I’d wanted to rough it, I’d have paid someone else to do it for me. Does anyone have any idea where the hell we are now?”

“While you’ve been whining, I’ve been talking to Langley,” said Honey. “They tasked a spy satellite to zero in on my implant, and apparently we’re somewhere in the wilds of Arkansas, not far from the border with Texas. Miles and miles from anywhere civilised, and so far off the beaten track you can’t even see the track from here.”

“Shoot me now and get it over with,” said the Blue Fairy.

“Don’t tempt me,” I said.

“How many miles, exactly, to civilisation?” said Walker, practical as ever.

“Thirty, forty miles to the nearest small town,” said Honey. “Hard to be sure; there aren’t any accurate maps of this region.”

“Let me guess,” said Peter. “Because no one ever comes here, right?”

“Maybe a few trappers, hunters,” said Honey. “Backwoods hermits who like to keep themselves to themselves.”

“Can you hear banjo music?” said the Blue Fairy.

“Shut up,” I said.

Honey set off through the trees, and since she looked like she knew where she was going, the rest of us trailed after her, for want of anything better to do. She stripped off her heavy fur coat, dropped it carelessly on the ground, and walked away from it. The rest of us stepped carefully over and around it. Honey was an agent; there was no telling what kind of dirty tricks she might have left behind with her coat. The Blue Fairy sighed appreciatively.

“Now that’s style, that is. Just drop off a few hundred thousand dollars of coat and keep on walking.” He ripped off his wilting ruff and threw it into the trees with a dramatic gesture.

“I should lose the breastplate while you’re at it,” I said. “It must weigh half a ton, and it’ll only get worse in this heat. You don’t need it now you’ve got a torc to protect you.”

He looked down at the brass and silver breastplate scored with protective runes and shook his head stiffly. “No. I don’t think so. In the things that matter, it’s always best to stick with things you can trust.”

I glanced back to see how the others were doing. Peter King was wandering along, stumbling over the occasional raised root in the ground because his attention was clearly elsewhere. If anything, he looked more out of place in the woods of the American South than he had in the Scottish Highlands. He’d taken off his expensive jacket and slung it over one shoulder and rolled up his sleeves, and his pale bare arms had excited the surrounding insects into a feeding frenzy. Walker hadn’t even made that much of a concession to the heat; he still wore his smart city suit like a knight’s armour. Though he had loosened his old-school tie, just a little. He strolled along amiably, smiling about him and enjoying the scenery as though taking a tour of someone’s private estate.

The vegetation and the trees fell suddenly away as we came to the riverbank. Almost wide enough to qualify as a lake, the muddy waters ran calmly past us, swirling around the mottled trunks of gnarled and knotted trees. Small dark shadows shot this way and that through the waters; beavers, maybe? I’m not really up on wildlife. And I can’t think of beavers without remembering the talking ones in Narnia. I’d make a lousy trapper. We all stood close together on the riverbank for mutual comfort and support in such alien surroundings, and we looked up and down the river. Just more of the same, from one horizon to the next. It was getting darker. The Blue Fairy studied the crap brown waters with a sort of disgusted fascination.