I, Spy? (6 page)

With that he turned back to his computer, and Luke came forward to me. We went back to Alexa’s desk, I signed a million confidentiality things and then we were outside and it was hardly breakfast time.

“We’re going to take a look round the terminal,” Maria said. “You want to come with?”

I shrugged, looking at Luke. He grinned. “I think we’ve seen enough of it for now,” he said. “I rigged it with Paola that you’re off when we need you,” he went on, as Maria and Macbeth got into the 205 and disappeared. “Now it’s time for some training.”

I swallowed nervously. Precisely what kind of training did he have in mind?

He told me to drive back to the village, but to take a different route. I’d lived there most of my life, and I thought I knew every part of every road, but when we turned off on what I’d thought was a dirt track and pulled up at a big converted barn with a sign outside reading “Smith’s Guns”, I was surprised.

“How long has there been a gun shop in my village?”

Luke shrugged. “Years. Why?”

“I—I just never knew about it.”

“Mostly they sell shotguns to game shooters,” Luke said, unfastening his seat belt, “but they do a few decent extras.”

“Such as…?”

“You’ll see.”

“Do I get a gun?” I asked hopefully. Okay, so they scare me, but I’d look pretty cool with one.

“Do you have a gun licence?”

“No—”

“Then you don’t get a gun.” He flashed me a smile.

“Well, how do I get a gun?”

“Be very nice to your local constabulary. Join a gun club. Of course, to join most gun clubs you have to have a licence…”

“That’s just stupid.”

“No, that’s very clever. That’s why we don’t have a gun control problem.” He held the door open, and I went in.

The walls were covered with every kind of shotgun, and there were rifles too. All of them were locked down with alarms and things. But there were no small guns. I looked at Luke, puzzled, and he smiled and went straight over to the counter.

“Mr. Sharpe,” the man there greeted him. “Haven’t seen you in a while. How’re you getting on with your SIG?”

Luke grinned. “Perfect partners,” he said. “Got any more bullets for me?”

The man reached under the counter for a key and unlocked a door behind him. “It was the .40 Smith & Wesson rounds, right?”

“Right,” Luke nodded. “And, Joe? Need to have a look in your special cabinet.”

Joe flicked his eyes at me as he dumped a box on the counter. “This is all on the level?”

“Totally above board. She’s with me.”

Joe gave a doubtful nod. “Right, then,” he said, and disappeared into the back room. Luke beckoned for me to follow, and I walked through cautiously, right into Wonderland.

Well, maybe Macbeth’s idea of Wonderland. The room was filled with guns of every size and calibre, ammunition, knives, defence sprays, bullet-proof vests.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “Is all of this legal?”

“Depends on who you are,” Luke said thoughtfully. “Everything’s legal for me.”

“What do I get?”

He took something that looked like an electric hair tong off the rack and handed it to me. “Stun gun.”

“You are kidding me.”

“Defence spray.”

“Seriously?”

“Kevlar.”

I stared at the vest. “A bullet-proof vest? What for?”

Luke and Joe both looked at me as if I’d just landed. “Erm, to stop the bullets?” Luke said.

“What bullets?” My voice was rising, I was panicking a little. “You never said there’d be bullets.”

Luke stared. “Joe,” he said, “can you give us a minute?”

Joe left, closing the door behind him, and Luke gave me a serious look.

“I told you there’d be bullets,” he said.

“No, you did not.” Did he?

“I said it’d be dangerous! Did you think people would be coming after you with sucker-dart guns?”

Chalker has one of those. He used to fire it at Tammy. And then I used to hit him.

“Well, no,” I said, feeling foolish, “but…”

“But?”

“But if they get guns, why don’t I?”

“You need to prove to me you’re not going to shoot yourself in the foot,” Luke said dryly. “Start off with the basics. You probably won’t need them.”

I trudged out of the room with him. Only probably?

Luke paid Joe by credit card, and I took my stash out to the car. He’d added handcuffs and a couple of Velcro braces for all my stuff, but there still wasn’t any gun.

I made a face.

“What?” Luke said patiently.

“Stephanie Plum gets a gun.”

“Who?”

I shook my head. Philistine. “What now?”

Luke glanced at my feet. I was wearing my cool trainers—the pretty ones, not my muddy, dog-walking trainers that my mother keeps trying to wash.

“How fit are you?” he said, leaning over and pinching my waist.

“Hey!” I recoiled in shock. Next he’d be asking how much I weighed.

“I’ll race you home,” Luke said, getting out of the car.

“No way.” It was at least a mile, and pretty much all uphill. Whoever said Essex is flat must have been in a goddamn tank.

“Yeah, come on. It’s good for you.”

I frowned reluctantly as I got out of the car and locked it.

“I’ll even give you a head start,” Luke offered.

Git.

“I’m fine,” I smiled sweetly. “I’ll see you there. Don’t get lost.”

He started running. I got back in the car and tried to run him over, but the bastard was too fast for me.

“Cheat!” he yelled, banging on the window, but I drove past, smiling serenely. Okay, I was cracking up, but let’s pretend I was serene, okay?

I arrived home, let myself in, put the kettle on and greeted Tammy, who was making a nest out of my laundry. “Hey baby,” I said, and she opened one eye at me. For a cat, that was a lot of effort. “Shall we lock nasty Luke out?”

But nasty Luke found my bedroom window open and climbed in.

“Cheat,” I said, and he shook his head.

“Seriously,” he said, “an open ground-floor window on an unsecured courtyard?”

“Oh, and I suppose you have CCTV on all your windows, and infrared alarms too?”

Luke shrugged. He probably did. He probably lived in a bunker or something, with lots of monitor screens and tripwires.

Freak.

The toaster popped and I took my bread out, spreading honey on it and then slicing a banana on top.

“What the hell are you eating?”

I looked down at my food, then up at Luke. “Lasagne,” I said. “Want some?”

He glared at me. “Don’t get smart. Is that supposed to be your breakfast?”

I looked at the clock. It was nine-thirty.

“Lunch,” I said. “I’ve been up for hours.”

Luke shook his head. “Shouldn’t lunch be… savoury? Like, a burger or something?”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

“Vege-burger.”

“Do you know how many additives there are in those things?”

Luke stared at me like I’d just grown another head. I was getting used to it.

“I suppose you don’t eat ready meals either?”

Of course I do. Everyone does. But he’d just run a mile uphill, I needed to beat him on something.

“Ice cream?”

I gave him a look. “I am still human.”

Luke made himself a sandwich and found some crisps and ate it all without asking. I got some gratification from Tammy, who tried to nick everything out of his hand.

“Your cat is just like you,” Luke commented after a while.

What, gorgeous, sinuous, almond-eyed, stealthy and deadly? I batted my eyelashes at him.

“Like a dog with a bloody bone. It’s my food, you little bugger.”

Offended, I picked Tammy up and nicked a handful of crisps for her. “I am not like a dog with a bone.”

“You were yesterday.”

“Are you even going to tell me their real names?”

“What, the Brownie twins? We’re still not sure. They have a lot of aliases.”

I mumbled something under my breath about the state of his military intelligence, but when Luke asked me to repeat it, asked brightly, “So what do we do now?”

“Go into town. Get you a phone.”

“I have a phone.” I gestured to the handset by the sofa.

“A mobile.”

“Got one of those, too,” I pulled out my little Siemens from my handbag.

“A company phone. A good one.”

“This is a good phone!”

“Can it take hi-res pictures? Video clips? Is it Bluetooth enabled? Triband? Does it have my number, Maria’s, One’s, Lexy’s and the office programmed into it?”

“It could have,” I said sulkily.

“You’re getting a new phone. Give the number out to
no one
.”

“Or what, you’ll have to kill me?”

Luke didn’t answer, but got up and put his plate in the sink. “Come on.”

Whatever he drove, it was still up at the “office”, so we got back into Ted and rumbled off into town.

“This is incredible,” Luke said, looking around the car’s sparse interior.

“Yeah,” I said fondly.

“There isn’t even a tape deck.”

I frowned. “There’s a ghetto blaster under your seat,” I said. “But the batteries are flat.”

Luke shook his head. “You’re a weird girl.”

“…thank you.”

He didn’t say anything about my parking, but I could feel him wincing as I pulled into a rather small space. And if government agents have any kind of dispensation for free parking, then Luke didn’t share it with me.

I was half expecting another hidden Smith’s Guns type place, and was mildly surprised when we walked into The Link and Luke picked out an expensive Nokia package. I wanted to wail that I didn’t know how to use a Nokia. They confused me, all the punctuation was in the wrong place when you wanted to send a text—but he didn’t listen, carded it and handed me the bag.

“Do you belong to a gym?”

I shook my head in faint horror.

“Join one.”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

Luke gave me a sideways glance. “Are you on the Pill?”

I stared. “Excuse me?”

He handed me a slip of green prescription paper. “Present for you from Lexy. She’s a qualified doctor. This is a no-period Pill. Maria takes it. Carry them in your bag, take them religiously, and even if you’re captured and tortured, explain that they keep your heart beating or something.”

He looked slightly flushed. Men never grow up, do they?

“Okay.” I took the prescription. “So we’re going to Boots?”

“Yeah. I need toothpaste anyway.”

Just to embarrass him a little more, I made him come with me to Marks and Spencers and help me pick out a sports bra. If I was going to be tumbling down any more baggage belts, I’d need proper support, right?

We took all my new stuff home, Luke playing with my new phone and setting some numbers into it. He called Maria. “Does Macbeth have a phone yet?”

“Half a dozen,” I heard her say in despair, “none of them his.”

I smiled at that. I think I was beginning to like Macbeth.

My answering machine was flashing when we got in, and I listened to a message from Chalker. “Don’t you ever answer your bloody mobile?”

I took it out.
Network Search
. Crap. I hoped the Nokia had a better network.

The second was from my mother. “Are you coming home for tea? We’re having lasagne. Charlie’s bringing someone to eat with us,” she added with faint despair.

My mother is the only person in the world who calls my brother Charlie (no one in the entire universe has ever called him Charles). He’s been Chalker ever since we were at school and he used to have to chalk out lines all over the blackboard every lunchtime for some new misdemeanour.

Luke’s mobile rang as I was listening to my mother’s message, and he went into the bedroom to answer it. I called my brother back.

“Vegetable lasagne?” I asked. “Or vegemince?”

“Vegemince,” he said. “And garlic bread.”

“The nice kind?”

“We have dough balls…”

“I’m there.”

Luke came back in and abruptly took the phone from my hand and put it down.

“Hey! I was talking to my brother—”

“Don’t care.” He handed me my bag, his face stony. “Something’s come up. Get your pass.”

I picked up my airport pass and followed him, confused. We drove in silence up to the airport, Luke tense and still in the passenger seat. We dropped the car outside the terminal, and when one of the traffic wardens started yelling, Luke showed him his warrant card and pulled me after him.

“What is going on?” I asked as I was tugged into the terminal.

“You’ll see,” Luke said, dragging me past the Ace desks as I tried to cover my face. Wasn’t I supposed to be off sick today?

He pulled me up to VP9, one of the Validation Points where staff go through to airside, and I went towards the scanner, dumping my bag on the belt in a reflex action.

Luke picked it back up again, showed his red pass to the BAA woman and pulled me through the gate without getting me scanned.

I remembered the handcuffs in my pocket and was pretty glad he had.

As we approached the lifts an announcement rang out, “We would like to apologise for the delay in baggage handling services. This is due to a technical problem. Thank you for your patience.”

Was that why we were going down there? A baggage belt failure? Oh, crap.
Don’t tell me it’s
my
fault
.

Usually whenever the main belt stops, it’s because something’s got stuck—a bag that was too big or something with too many trailing straps. We were supposed to spot things like this and sort them out before we sent the bags on their way, but sometimes there just wasn’t enough time to tie up every single strap on every single rucksack. I really hated rucksacks. So I sometimes, er, sent them down as they were. And they sometimes got stuck.

Sometimes quite often, actually.

So you can see why, if a rucksack would stop the belt, a person might sort of break it. Ahem.

We went down to the undercroft in the noisiest lift on earth. I swear there was a small rodent in the mechanism getting the crap tortured out of it. It screeched and moaned and shuddered, and by the time we got to the bottom, I was traumatised. I never used that lift if I could help it. It sounded like it was dying.

The undercroft was eerily silent, like it is late at night or early on a Sunday. We rounded the corner, past a still, silent baggage chute, and my skin burned as I remembered leaping out over it yesterday.