I, Spy? (3 page)

I nodded.

“And, Sophie?”

I looked up.

“If you tell anyone about this, I may have to kill you.”

I stared. Luke grinned, then walked away.

When I started this job, they told me the social life would be great. No one parties like airport people, they said. And there’s such a mix—people from all over the world, different ages and backgrounds and languages and races—it’s amazing. Your social life will go through the roof.

Really?

Last time I went out clubbing with the guys from work I went home, changed my clothes and went straight off to work again at four-thirty. And then I fell asleep at the desk and nearly got fired.

My usual social life consisted of watching
Buffy
videos, with or without my best friend Angel, and occasionally going to the pub. With my parents. God, I needed a life. I wonder if you can get them on Amazon?

I let myself in with a big sigh of relief. Tammy, my fluffy little baby, was mewling around her bowl, looking all tiny and helpless.

“Aw, poor baby,” I scooped her up and felt her purr against me. “Did you run out of squirrels to kill?”

Tammy gave me a dirty look and squirmed to get down. She killed anything that moved: mice, birds, squirrels, even small dogs if she got the chance, and yet she was so small I could hold her in the crook of one arm, like a baby.

A baby with teeth, and really sharp claws.

I found her some biscuits, remembering guiltily that she hadn’t been fed since lunchtime yesterday, and forked out a huge can of food.

It must have been twice her body weight, but she ate it. God, I wished I was a cat. You got to eat and eat and eat and never get fat, you had gorgeous glossy hair and fantastic cheekbones, and people were always telling you how beautiful you were. Well, they were always telling Tammy, anyway. Right now I didn’t feel very beautiful. I felt haggard.

I moaned as I remembered I had a third early tomorrow. That was the last time I swapped shifts with anyone.

The way my shifts worked was that I did two late shifts, then two earlies, then I got two days off. If you were totally insane, like Angel, you could apply to work twelve-hour shifts, four days in a row or four nights in a row, then four days off. There were all sorts of overlaps, and the part-timers sometimes worked on a three-on, three-off pattern that would drive me mad. This was how it was hard to remember who was going to be on when, because we all only got the roster sheet for the people who were on the same shift as us.

But this month they stuck Luca’s roster on the end of my sheet. Or should I say Luke?

The whole thing was insane. An undercover… what? Policeman? Government agent? Spy?

Ooh, a spy. That was quite sexy, actually.

I wondered if he’d have any other stuff to spy on? I wondered if he’d been spying on me?

Pervert.

Four in the morning and I was on my way to work again. When the alarm went off, I muttered my usual “I have
got
to get a new job,” but like I said, that was my morning mantra. I never did squat about it. I mean, everyone I trained with had moved on to supervisor level, or to dispatch, or down to the ramp. The really smart ones left. It was really only just me who was still on checkin.

Chalker, my brother, said I had a lack of direction. Well, it was fine for him. He knew when he was five what he wanted to do. “I wanna be a rock star,” he said when he saw
Back to the Future
and how cool Marty looked with his guitar.

I saw
Back to the Future
and wanted to be an inventor. Or a mechanic at the future car garage. Or a gunslinger in the Old West.

By the time I was ten, I had run through every possible career, from pearl diver to Tom Cruise’s personal assistant (that one was crushed when Chalker pointed out I was already taller than my hero). When it came time for my unutterably boring careers interview at school, I was told to play to my strengths and apply to university to study whatever I was interested in.

And thus we have the great academic drive to utterly belittle a university degree by making sure even the illiterate have one. I actually know someone who’s half qualified to be a teacher, and she can’t read words longer than five letters. They’re so desperate to send you off to university that even when Chalker stood up and said he’d no interest in taking A levels, they still tried to persuade him that studying Schubert for another two years would be really worthwhile to a future rock star.

And me? I’m so directionless that I applied to six universities on the sole premise that they were the same ones my boyfriend wanted to go to.

His great plan was to become an accountant. I should have seen it coming from that. His name was Pete, he worked in a supermarket, he was okay in a boring sort of way, and the only thing I remember actually liking about him was that he fancied me. When I was eighteen, I was so fed up of being single I just took the first guy who came along who was a) taller than me and b) not into hard drugs. Now, of course, I know better. There are so many arseholes out there—it’s sooo much better being single. I don’t have to shave my legs or anything.

Okay, forget I said that. That’s gross.

Two months into an English Lit course (what everyone studies when they don’t know what to study, right?) I walked into his room to find him boning the tart from down the hall.

I was really insulted. If he was going to cheat on me, it could at least have been with someone really hot.

So I packed up and left. I think I intended to go to some other college at that time, but it was Chalker who made me realize that wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. He was doing what he wanted, and it made him happy, and my parents hadn’t kicked him out yet. That and my gran died, so I moved into her flat temporarily, and just never moved out.

Truth was, I didn’t know what I did want to do. That was really why I was still doing my job at the airport. I didn’t seriously hate it, despite how much I complain. I didn’t really like it, either, but I figured a lot of people actively hated their jobs, so I was a step ahead.

According to my roster, Luca was supposed to be on shift today, but I didn’t see him as I trudged up to the office and signed in. Angel was there, looking tired but excited at the prospect of going home in an hour. The unexpected bonus of working nights.

Cow.

“I’ve got you on a desk next to Sven,” she winked. “You’re checking in the Stavanger so you’ll be able to ask his advice a lot.”

I smiled gratefully. Angel understood my desperate need to be close to the beautiful people. There really weren’t a lot of hot men around here, so I had to take what I could get.

Angel, of course, could get anyone, or really anything, she liked. Her mother was a famous actress and model, her father a songwriter. Between them they generated enough royalties to keep Angel living in a very nice style. Plus she had inherited her mother’s tiny blondness, with big blue eyes and glossy curls. If I didn’t adore her so much I’d really hate her.

Sven greeted me and told me I looked tired. Chalker reckons that’s an insult but to me it’s observation. And concern. It was sweet of him to care.

I touched up my lipgloss when he wasn’t looking.

I settled into the sleepwalking routine of checking people in, wondering if any of them were counterfeiters, if Luke was secretly watching any of them. Occasionally Special Branch contacted us when we were running a Belfast or Derry flight, because they wanted to do surveillance. It never freaked me before, but then before this all I ever saw of it was people filling out embarkation cards.

Everything went normally—that is to say, chaotically—for the first couple of hours. I took a coffee break and sat stirring my drink until the plastic spoon splintered. Part of me wanted to see Luke again. We shared a secret now. I was
In On It
. But part of me was scared. Maybe I’d blow it. Maybe I’d call him Luke instead of Luca. Maybe something else would happen and I’d miss it.

Maybe that Brown guy would come back, or send one of his mates round, maybe they’d recognize me (I’m pretty easy to describe and I sound good on paper) and gun me down.

Maybe I was caffeine deprived and needed to get out more.

I trudged back to checkin and slobbed back down to the desk. Stavanger had closed, Sven had moved on, and I was checking in Roma.
Is Rome in Eenglish
. I couldn’t help comparing the Italians’ accents with the way Luca spoke. Thing was, he sounded authentic, and I’d heard him speaking Italian to Italians, and they hadn’t looked suspicious.

I guess you believe what you’re presented with until someone tells you otherwise.

We had maybe a dozen more passengers to check in when the floorwalker’s clipboard slapped down on my desk and a familiar voice purred, “Do you have an end-bag for me?”

Luca. Of course.

I looked up, and there was no hint in his face that he was anyone else. But I knew he wasn’t called Luca, wasn’t Italian, wasn’t at all who he presented himself to be.

“Sure,” I said, handing him a little case. “No offer of dinner this time?”

“But you only got me one bag,” he replied. “It’s three bags for dinner.”

Another passenger strolled up, wearing expensive sunglasses, immaculately turned out. Italian. She handed over her passport and I looked up at Luke with my most charming expression.

“Would you like to ask her the security questions?”

Without missing a beat, he rolled them off and the woman answered with a smile, obviously appreciating Luke’s dark liquid eyes and casually attractive biceps.

He gave me a smug smile and leaned against the desk next to me. I glared at him and ripped the boarding card out of the machine.

“
Ecco la porta
,” I ringed the gate number, “
e l’ora d’imbarco.
Grazie.
”

Don’t get all impressed. That’s pretty much all I can say in Italian. That and I can ask for directions to the post office, but if someone answered I’d never understand.

Luke raised his eyebrows. “You look tired,” he observed as the passenger sashayed away.

“Will people stop saying that? It’s seven-thirty and I’ve been awake for four hours. Of course I’m bloody tired.”

“Did you have sex last night?”

I stared, cheeks flushing. “Excuse me?”

“You look like you had sex last night. Tired and…” He waved his hand. “Happy.”

I was pretty sure I didn’t look happy. He was just trying to rile me. And I hadn’t had sex in… Well, I stopped counting when the months got into double figures.

“Don’t you have anything better to do than stand here and harass me?”

He shrugged. “I’m going to the gate in ten minutes. Not really anything better to do.”

“Can’t you go early?” I muttered peevishly.

Luke grinned. “You want to get rid of me?” He swung my monitor round to face him and tapped a few things on the keyboard. “Only two people checked in on my flight.”

“Milan?”

“
Si.
”

“And drop the bloody accent,” I hissed.

Luke regarded me with his head on one side. “You want to get rid of me?” he repeated.

Now I felt rotten. He was only behaving the way he always had, flirting outrageously with me. I used to find it flattering. Now it unnerved me.

“Keep an eye on things for me,” he muttered, accent gone, and chucked me under the chin.

Then he was gone, taking his dark eyes, his rolling accent and his fine arse with him.

Get a grip, Sophie. Don’t start lusting after a man with a fake ID.

It happened when I got up to change the LED display to read
flight closing
. I happened to glance down the line of desks, checking out Sven’s profile, and then I gazed out over the queue of passengers in front of him.

Then I did a marvellous double take.

John Brown was standing about twenty feet away.

I swear I nearly rubbed my eyes in disbelief. The same man Luke had grabbed yesterday was standing in the checkin queue for Alicante.

I moved fast. Luke was boarding the Milan flight, so I opened that up in the system and got the gate number. They hadn’t started boarding the passengers in the system, but that wasn’t to say they were all already on the plane and the gate agent just hadn’t put the information in the system yet.

I got out my little black book of useful airport information (sadly, not Sven’s number), grabbed the phone and dialled the number for the Milan gate.

It rang out.

Shit.

I glanced up at Brown again. He had a laptop case and was gripping a holdall tightly against him, and I just knew it was all full of counterfeit money.

Palms sweaty, I rang the airport police. This had never freaked me before, because usually I called them with an enquiry or to get them to check firearms documents. Never because I thought there was a criminal standing very close.

He shifted his grip on the holdall and all the hairs on my arms stood up, because if he wasn’t carrying a gun under his jacket then he had a thing for replicas. They were illegal on flights—understandably, they scared the hell out of people—so whatever he was doing, he was in trouble.

And so was I.

The dial tone droned on against my ear and my foot tapped in impatience.
Come on, answer it, you’re the damn police
! Maybe I should have called the emergency services. Maybe I’d still be there next year waiting for someone to answer.

Eventually a woman came on.

“I need to get hold of Luke,” I babbled. “Luke Sharpe.”

That had to be a made-up name.

“Excuse me, who is this?” the WPC asked.

“Sophie Green, from Ace. He’s working undercover for Ace and I need to get hold of him because there’s—I think there’s a situation he needs to deal with here.”

There was a long pause, and it occurred to me that maybe even the police didn’t know about Luke. Maybe Luke had lied to me. Maybe none of it was true.

Then, “I’ll give him the message,” she said, and my heart started beating again. “What number are you on?”

Seconds later the phone rang and without any preamble, Luke said, “What’s going on? Sophie, you can’t just call—”

“Brown,” I interrupted, and Luke shut up. “John Brown, from yesterday? He’s standing right in front of me. Three desks down. He’s about to check in for Alicante.”