Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1 (2 page)

You might think I objected to running a
bookstore that supported CIA operations, but I really didn’t mind.
I was given free reign to actually make it a success, and that
meant I used my creativity to stock the shelves. I was in my glory
running that business. I knew all the folks in the neighborhood. I
created a life for myself that kept me going all the times Ben took
off for overseas assignments. Whether he was gone a month or a
year, my life was consistently rosy, all up to that broken hip and
that deceitful little Mata Hari threw my world into a tailspin.

Over the twelve years I operated Marbury
Books, I managed to build a really good reputation as a shopkeeper
who welcomed book lovers of all kinds, from the snooty Washington
lawyer who loved to impress by quoting Homer to the housewife who
just wanted a racy little tumble in paperback. I furnished the
place with soft leather club chairs and installed a coffee bar that
plied readers with coffee made from some of the world’s best beans.
Authors enjoyed giving book talks in my shop because the people who
came appreciated the chance to chat with their favorite authors in
an intimate environment that felt welcoming.

Just because I operated a bookstore, that
doesn’t mean I’m one of those overly-intellectual literary types
always quoting some high brow nonsense to show how smart I am. I do
enjoy reading -- don’t get me wrong about that. It’s just that I’ll
read almost any book, from the latest offering from an Edgar
mystery to the Booker prize winner to the latest heaving bosom
novel with a bodice-ripping heroine and a hero whose trousers throb
with desire. If the story’s good, I’m happy.

The shop itself was tiny, but I did a brisk
special order business for a number of “very special clients”. That
service was actually the life blood of Marbury Books. The CIA had
its own book distribution company that supplied books to the shop
and it made sure to include coded messages in any of the thousands
of books I sold each year. It wasn’t my place to question how a
book had been altered by the time it arrived by UPS or FedEx. I
merely took the money from the customer and handed over the
tome.

It was Josh who let himself get distracted,
who handed the wrong book to the CIA operative, later captured in
Afghanistan with his colleagues and turned over to a pair of
ruthless Iranian intelligence officers. Being trained in spycraft,
the professionals realized there was a coded message in the book
and tortured those poor people, trying to extract the information.
Because the message was not the one the operatives were meant to
deliver, and they had no clue how to decode the substituted
message, they stuck to their cover stories, insisting there was
nothing important about the miniscule marks on the pages of
Love
and Longing in Bombay
, something the irate Iranians disputed.
No matter how those three tried, they could not decode that message
for the Iranians. Even a chemical debriefing couldn’t yield any
valuable information, and eventually the Iranians gave up in
frustration, choosing to hold the three intelligence operatives as
hostages.

When the CIA realized that Afarin Hesami was
a spy, there was an effort to turn her, but that was interrupted by
the FBI’s counterintelligence effort. Afarin, it turned out, had
gone to school in the United States, along about the time that
Muhammed’s Crusaders in Pakistan, nicknamed Mu’s Crew at Langley,
were planting the seeds of a sleeper network in the United States
and Great Britain, using the cover of the Islamic Scholars Group to
appear legitimate as they trolled college campuses for likely
recruits. Afarin’s father was a general in the Iranian navy, and
his job was to penetrate the international alliance that protected
the Strait of Hormuz. She was considered to be the golden goose for
American counterterrorism, a chance to hand feed disinformation and
misinformation to the Iranians. I suspect that long before it
became officially known that she was being used that way, she was
already a conduit for bad information. That would certainly explain
why she switched the Chandra books, leading Josh to hand
Love
and Longing in Bombay
to the unfortunate CIA operative.

Chapter Two --

When the FBI insisted on “buying” my
bookshop, lock, stock and barrel for their counterterrorism sting,
the “sale” was conducted under the guise of me wanting to give up
my shop for greener pastures. I was livid. There was no grass
greener on the other side of the fence. I was happy where I was. I
had a nice life. I wasn’t looking for a career change. I certainly
was not trying to keep up with the mythical Joneses, long before my
transformation into that illustrious, albeit fictional, family. But
that didn’t stop the FBI from booting me out.

Ben says that’s the way the CIA cookie
crumbles, which makes me wonder if that’s code for the FBI and the
CIA sucked in those Iranians as part of a penetration effort. My
only consolation was that those three intelligence operatives
escaped when their guards took a snooze one night while on guard
duty. In CIA parlance, that’s called an unofficial rescue. The CIA
took seven months to recruit an asset at the Iranian prison. After
careful study, they found a man who was interested in reforming the
Iranian government and they promised him help for the movement if
he got the three men out of prison. The only reason the truth came
out was because the helper, Reza Farhadi, was later captured near
the Eslam Ghalah crossing, where he was supposed to meet with his
new CIA handler. The CIA realized to its horror that the FBI had a
mole somewhere inside its counterterrorism cadre, one of those
American Muslim students recruited by the Islamic Scholars Group,
when the operation was blown. There was also another mole flushed
out on Capitol Hill, working on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee for a liberal member who had earned a reputation over the
years of being clueless about national security. Senator Gladall
often touted her experience in foreign affairs, but that consisted
of boudoir diplomacy learned in the “slap and tickle” school she
attended. That never stopped her from shooting her mouth off in
live shots, touting herself as a champion of civil rights, a
powerful voice that stood firm and decried any effort to
discriminate against anyone, even bad guys. She once told a
journalist from the Washington Dispatch that Sheik Mohammed el
Kabani, the founder of the Muslim Alliance, a group that planned
the attacks in Djibouti that killed more than one hundred in a
crowded market place, was a misunderstood leader who only embraced
terrorism because he had no other options. Even after the Sheik
dispatched a team of assassins to Washington, to target her office,
she expressed her sympathy. She had no clue that the Sheik was
insulted by her public support for him as a man, especially since
she kept denouncing the violence he so favored. Is it any wonder
her office was a magnet for hostile intelligence services, given
her welcoming arms?

Between the three Iranian spies successfully
placed in America, Afarin and her two colleagues had enough access
to sensitive intelligence to jam up the CIA on behalf of the
Iranians. By the time the FBI finally took the security breach
seriously, tremendous damage was already done. That’s the problem
with a law enforcement agency so cozy with politicians who hold the
purse strings for its annual operations budget -- its people throw
themselves into bed and get naked before asking who’s joining them
in the sack and they always forget to use the figurative condom to
protect themselves from sexually transmitted stupidity.

At any rate, the point is now moot, because
I’m stuck in the middle of Arden Woods, on the banks of Lake
Champlain, helping Uncle Edward run the establishment he fondly
named the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast.

In case you’re wondering, Beatrice is
definitely not my birth name. It was given to me by Uncle Edward
when I arrived, as part of my cover. The same is true of Ben. And
Uncle Edward really isn’t his relative at all. He mentored Ben’s
father at the CIA. took him under his wing and brought him up
through the ranks of the clandestine service back in the sixties,
before leaving for academia in 1970. When Ben joined the CIA in
1998, he was unofficially schooled in spycraft by a real master,
but he was also schooled in ethics by a man who prided himself on
being a gentleman who did not indiscriminately use violence for the
pleasure of causing pain. Uncle Edward is the thinking man’s spy,
the antithesis of the more common garden variety of spies in the
mode of James Bond and Jason Bourne, far more adept at getting
answers to perplexing questions by using his intellect than a
weapon. In other words, he’s a wily, old fox who can beat the pants
off of anyone in chess. If it weren’t for the need for cover, he
probably would have been a world champion. Unfortunately for him, I
stink at the game, and he is forced to turn to the Internet for an
ever-more challenging field of opponents, although I will admit
that on occasion, Ben has risen to an adequate level of play that
forced Uncle Edward to kvetch before he finally was able to utter
“checkmate”.

Ben trusts his unofficially adopted uncle
with his life. In fact, on many occasions, he relied on the older
man to extract him from some pretty hairy situations, so there’s a
bond there that’s even stronger than blood relatives share. A close
brush with death often drives us into waiting, willing arms, and if
those arms protect us from harm, the heart is forever grateful. But
Ben was fairly discombobulated by his sudden reassignment to the
wilds of Vermont. After all, how much business can the CIA have in
the Green Mountains? For a man used to moving about the capitals of
Europe and Africa with a team of operatives to do his bidding, his
arrival at the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast was met with utter
disbelief and not much amusement. After three weeks of scrubbing
toilets at my side, the CIA finally sent a representative to give
Ben his new assignment. He was charged with going through the last
fifty years of CIA files to find a spy network that was put in
place in 1962.

By that time, it became obvious why we had
been sent to assist Uncle Edward. His retirement in 1970 was the
first leg of that investigation, and his role as college professor
allowed him unfettered access to valuable research and to a team of
research assistants, actually CIA officers.

This may sound really mean, but I took
comfort in Ben’s discomfort. After all, I had lost my beloved book
shop and misery does love company. If I was going to spend the next
several years kicking up cow pies in the bucolic pastures, it was
only fair that I should have pleasurable company in the form of my
husband.

It was up to the Shakespearean scholar to
provide us with our new covers and after much thought on his part,
we were named Beatrice and Benedick Jones. Uncle Edward said that
Ben and I reminded him of the characters from
Much Ado About
Nothing
. We do tend to bicker. Some people would call that
sexual chemistry. I usually just call it annoying behavior on the
part of my husband. Ben and I have been together long enough that
our commitment to each other is rock solid. But that doesn’t mean I
don’t want to throttle him on occasion or tell him to go jump in
Lake Champlain. I suppose it’s apt enough as far as covers go. I
was conned into falling for Ben, and he for me. In many ways, our
life together echoes many of the plots straight out of
Shakespeare’s plays.

Uncle Edward has had a lifetime affair with
the Bard. He makes an annual pilgrimage to Stratford-Upon-Avon for
the annual festival even now. He saw Laurence Olivier and John
Gielgud play a number of Shakespearean roles on stage, as well as
other famous performers, and if you give him too much mead, he will
regale you with stories of backstage scenes not known by the
public. That’s because he was, at one point, a dresser in the
theater. It happened as the result of a really bad op creating a
lot of blowback. Uncle Edward needed to lie low for a while, so he
chose to do it in England.

But I digress. I had continued my
preparations and was in the middle of making up the Ephesus Suite
for the incoming guest, Mr. Williams when things went south.

“Oh, Puck!” I groaned. “Puck!”

Uncle Edward’s rambunctious rascal of a
poodle had managed to not only jump on the bed I had just finished
making up, he threw himself at the pillows, sending them onto the
antique Persian carpet below. With an agile leap down to the floor,
he proceeded to attack them as intruders. Mr. Darcy popped his head
in and joined the pillow fight. The two of them dashed around the
room, leaping over each other like little pups.

“Out of my way, you little beasts!” I shooed
them away, bending down to pick those pillows up and replace them
on the bed. Puck shot past me, suddenly distracted by something
that held his canine interest. He barked his little agitated bark,
signalling a warning, which I ignored. He even brushed against my
leg, trying to get me to pay attention to him. I continued to
ignore him. But when my hand felt something cold, ice cold, under
one of my beautiful down pillows, I did the only thing I could
think to do. I dropped to the floor to get a better look.

“Holy crap!” I was on my hands and knees.
Puck hid behind me, Mr. Darcy behind him. “Good God in Heaven, what
the....”

There, snaking out from under the antique
French bed, was a long, not-so-lithe arm with a very lifeless hand
attached to it. There was no pulse and, judging from the stiffness
of the limb, rigor mortis had begun to set in. I presumed the rest
of the body was equally as dead.

“Aw, nuts! This is not anything I had on my
to-do list,” I groaned. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed Ben.
“Hey, did you leave yet?”