I, Spy? (4 page)

“Brown?” Luke said. “That’s impossible, he’s—”

“I swear it’s him,” I said. “I’m really good with faces.” If I was wrong, I would never live it down.

Sven’s passenger moved on and the line shuffled forward. Depending on whether the group in front of him were all together or not, Brown could be next to check in.

“Shit,” Luke said. “I know what this could be. Okay, I’m coming back.”

“There’s not enough time! He’s nearly at the desk!”

“Then you’ll have to keep an eye on him for me. If he checks in, excuse yourself and follow him. Try to delay him but don’t alarm him.”

“But—”

“I’ll be right there.”

Liar, I thought as the phone went dead. It took at least fifteen minutes to get back from Sat 1. Unless Luke could fly, which I was pretty sure he couldn’t.

Although really, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Sweating all over now, I watched Sven check in the group in front of Brown. Then they left. Then he checked Brown in.

I looked at the passenger list. There were no Browns listed, but of course he wouldn’t be that dumb.

The holdall was tagged and sent down the belt. Sven weighed the laptop case and waved it away as hand luggage. He gave Brown his boarding card and sent him away.

Double shit!

I got to my feet, my legs shaking, and switched the belt off as I climbed over it. A woman came rushing up to the desk.

“
Scusi, scusi
,” she bleated, waving a flight itinerary at me. I tried to ignore her but she pointed at the
flight closing
display and babbled desperately in Italian.

I threw a frantic look at Angel, who was the next one down, two desks away, next to Sven. “I have to go,” I said. “I really have to run. Can you…?”

She frowned, but nodded and beckoned to the woman, who was giving me a filthy look.

I ignored her and bolted. Brown was nearly at the bookshop on the corner now, and he didn’t look as if he was going straight to Security. He was heading away, around the other corner, and I speeded up, grateful I wasn’t wearing huge heels.

“Excuse me,” I called, not knowing what I was going to say to him, “sir…”

I’d make up that he’d left something behind or there was a problem with his ticket. Yes! The payment hadn’t been processed. That always takes forever to sort out. I’d be safe.

But he saw me, blanched and darted away.

Triple shit.

He was running back towards checkin. What was going on? Had I got it wrong? Where was he going?

He rushed up to one of the empty desks up at the end and leapt over the little gate on the baggage belt. For a second I halted, staring, disbelieving. Surely he wasn’t going to do what it looked like he was going to do?

He ducked and threw himself onto the main belt.

He must be insane! Apart from the fact that it was unbelievably illegal to even lean out over the belt (not that it stopped us, heh heh), it was really dangerous to walk on it.

Or so they always tell us.

But I couldn’t just let him go. If he really had a gun, he could pull it on the ramp guys. I had to stop him. Nobody who acts like that is innocent.

“Crap.” I stamped my foot and ran after him, tripping over the little belt and throwing myself onto the main conveyor.

Really it was just like one of those moving walkways that go on for miles and miles. Except that this one had more twists and bends, flaps and poles to make things lie flat, scanners to make sure no one was packing anything they shouldn’t. I heard a siren go off up ahead, presumably as Brown went through, and steeled myself.

I scrambled along the belt, knowing my quarry was doing the same thing ahead, and barely noticed as I passed under the scanner.

It made no noise. Apparently I was legal for airline transportation.

I could see him up ahead, climbing over the edge and dropping down into the undercroft. People were staring, some of them were running, but no one was trying to stop him. To give them the benefit of the doubt, I think they were shocked. I don’t want to think they were all such cowards.

“For fuck’s sake, stop him,” I yelled, peering over the edge then closing my eyes as I threw myself over.

I landed with a thump on my side and dragged myself to my feet. People were rushing over to the plastic flaps that led outside, and I followed them just in time to see one of the airside cars speeding away.

Fuck
.

I glanced around wildly for something to follow it in, but all I could see was a baggage dolly. Not helpful.

“Bloody stop him,” I hollered, breathless, and a couple of guys started running after the car. Good boys. But it was going too fast and they would never catch it.

Brown rammed the car over the grass verge and the wheels started spinning. Thank God they never shelled out for a decent car. I spied a wheel chock on the ground, picked it up and hurled it as hard as I could at the car.

It smashed the rear windscreen good and proper.

“Yes!” I aimed a fist at the sky and ran off after the car. The wheels were still spinning, spattering mud all over me and the three guys in their hi-vis jackets who were trying to get into the car. Brown had locked the doors and was looking at the back window as if it might be a good way to get out. But the glass was shattered all over, it’d be instant death.

He and I stared at each other through the driver’s window for a long second. Then I grabbed the chock and swung it at the window, wincing as the glass shattered. I reached in, snatched the keys out of the ignition, smashed them across his face before he’d had time to react and grabbed his gun.

I’d like to state here and now that I’ve never fired a gun before and I hardly know which end is which. But apparently I looked convincing, because Brown raised his hands in surrender.

Someone in an Ace uniform reached in and opened the door, grabbed Brown and held his arms behind his back. “The coppers are coming,” he said, looking at me. “What the hell’s going on?”

I shrugged, the gun still aimed at Brown’s head. “I’m just following instructions,” I said.

“Me too,” said the Ace guy. “Yours.”

A cop car came whistling up and out catapulted a couple of uniforms, followed by Luke.

“Sophie?” he said incredulously. “Put the bloody gun down.”

My hands were shaking. “Are you going to take him away?”

“Yes. He’s going into custody. And so are you unless you give me that gun.”

Not taking my eyes off Brown, I handed the pistol over and felt my body slump. Luke put his arm around my shoulders, holding me up. It was probably an inappropriate time to notice that his body was very warm and hard, but I noticed it anyway.

“This yours?” Luke asked Brown, passing the gun, wrapped in a handkerchief, to one of the uniforms.

Brown nodded.

“You are in so much trouble,” Luke said as the Ace guy handed Brown over to the coppers.

I wasn’t entirely sure who he was talking to.

When I got home it was dark.

I’d been at the airport police station for hours, tired and hungry, shocked and dirty. My uniform was probably beyond repair, torn and splattered with mud, but I didn’t really care. Probably they’d fine me for it. Fuck them. I’d had an unbelievable day. No one was going to fine me for anything.

Was I in trouble? I kept asking the policemen but they never really answered. They took full statements on every part of the incident and I signed billions of things without really looking at them. Probably I should have looked. I didn’t really care.

Tammy was scratching around the gate as I unfastened the latch and tripped down into the yard. Really it was supposed to be a little courtyard, but my nannan used to live here, you see, and where she came from it was a
yard
. It had one sad-looking conifer in a tub and a washing line and a metal dustbin, and that was it. Not what you’d call pretty.

The security light came on as I pushed the gate open and I didn’t see Agent Sharpe at first, sitting with his back against my door, elbows resting on his knees, changed out of his Ace uniform into jeans and a fleece.

He looked up at me. “You’re late.”

I shrugged. “Got held up.”

“Did you come straight back?”

I nodded. I’d wanted to go to Tesco’s for some ice cream but I couldn’t face walking around in the state I was in. I’d planned to get changed, walk up to Total and get five of everything that was bad for me. Then I was going to get in a hot bath and stay there until tomorrow.

“Were you waiting for me?” I asked, rather unnecessarily, but I was feeling brain-dead.

Luke nodded and got to his feet. “You okay?”

“I will be.” I pushed past him to unlock the door, and when the key stuck I felt like crying.

Luke shoved at the door and it came open easily.

“Thanks.”

“Can I come in?”

I shrugged, and he followed me in. My flat is rather small, just one room with an open-plan kitchen, then a bedroom and postage-stamp bathroom, but it was all mine.

Well, actually, it was my mother’s, because she inherited it from my nannan, but it was mostly mine. I paid rent and everything.

I dropped my bag on the floor and went through to the bedroom, picking up comfort clothes as I went and changing in the bathroom. I wasn’t sure I entirely trusted Luke not to walk in on me, so I locked the door.

“I’ve been waiting about an hour,” he said from the kitchen. I could hear the kettle being boiled. “It’s bloody freezing out there.”

Poor baby. I threw my uniform in a pile on the floor and kicked it.

“I didn’t think they’d keep you so long.”

“Yeah,” I called back, opening the airing cupboard and switching the heating on to max, “well, they did.”

“It wasn’t all necessary.”

Now he tells me.

I stomped through to the kitchen with my muddy clothes, pushed past Luke and dumped them straight in the washing machine. So the colors might run. Did I look as if I gave a crap?

“Hey,” he caught my shoulder as I turned to the kettle, “are you sure you’re all right?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Nothing a hot bath won’t cure.”

“You look like hell.”

“Thanks.” I picked up the coffee jar, then thought better of it and got the hot chocolate out instead. Then I ran some hot water in the sink, got out my first aid kit and rolled up my sleeve.

“Shit,” Luke grabbed my arm, and I winced. “What happened?”

“Nothing. Just a bit of glass. Nothing.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Those two broken windows…”

“Had to stop him somehow.”

“Did you really smash them with a wheel chock?”

I gave him a sullen look and reached for the cotton wool to wipe away some of the crusted blood. It was just a few cuts on my elbow and lower arm, but they’d been stinging all day. I kept thinking longingly about that hot bath and wished Luke would go away so I could get some sleep.

“You’re a menace,” Luke said, pouring out water for my chocolate and his coffee. I didn’t remember him asking if he could drink my coffee.

It was good coffee, too.

Even Tammy, the little traitor, was happily weaving around his ankles as if he was a great friend. So much for cats being good judges of character.

“Just doing my job,” I said tiredly, dabbing Dettol on the cuts and trying not to let him see my eyes watering.

“No, you were doing my job. Why didn’t you wait?”

I stared at him. “You said to follow him! He had a gun. I wasn’t about to let him try to board with it.”

“They’d have picked that up at Security.”

“Not if he didn’t go through Security.”

Luke shook his head. “Even the staff Validation Points have scanners. Nothing gets through. It’s tight. I’ve checked them all.”

I sighed. Probably this wasn’t the best time to bring this up but…

“There is a way,” I said.

He stared at me. Great, now he thought I was a terrorist. It was just an idle thought I’d had once, in between ranting about bloody cyclists taking their bikes with them on holidays. So they don’t have bikes in France? Yeah, right.

“When someone wants to travel with a bike, what do we do?”

“Tag it and send it to Outsize,” Luke said promptly, like a proper newbie.

“What if it’s unpackaged?”

“We escort it to the undercroft. It gets scanned there.”

“Yes, but only after it’s been down in the lift. With an agent. All alone.”

He gave me a hard look. “What are you getting at?”

I peeled the backing off a huge plaster. “Okay. You’re a terrorist or a counterfeiter or whatever, and you want to take a gun through undetected. All you need is an airline uniform, a pass and a bike. Everyone knows the picture on your pass looks nothing like you. It’s like a passport photo. Did you search Brown?”

Luke looked mulish. “He had a pass. Forged. Ryanair.”

“Right,” I said. “And he was wearing a white shirt, yes? Lots of people don’t have full uniform. Security aren’t going to pull you up on that. All he had to do was get a bike, put his gun in a saddlebag or something and go through VP9 with it. He gets scanned, he’s clean. The bike goes through the gate to be scanned later. While he’s in the lift, he takes out the gun, puts it in his pocket, leaves the bike in the undercroft and wanders off airside.”

I stirred my hot chocolate and looked up at Luke. He looked dumbstruck.

Ha.

“Jesus,” he said eventually.

“I know.”

“How do you know all this?”

I shrugged. “Figured it out one day. I was bored, okay? It was even easier when we did the foot-and-mouth spraying. Even packaged bikes had to be taken down there. You could hide shedloads in one of those bike bags, then stash it under your coat, in the lift. Those Ace coats are bloody huge.” They were fat parkas, and I looked like the Michelin man in mine.

Luke was still staring at me. “Shit,” he said. “So anyone could have taken anything through?”

“If they were smart enough. If they knew how to work the system.”

Luke shook his head. “Does anyone else know about this? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

I raised my palms. “Didn’t think anyone’d ever try it. You’ve got to be clever to work it out and pretty dumb to try it.”

“A common criminal combination,” Luke said. He pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his fingers into the corners of his eyes. “Can I use your bathroom?”

“Sure.”

Off he went, and I flumped down on the sofa. Tammy leapt up and settled on my lap. Apart from the grazes on my arm, I had bruises all over from being bashed about on the baggage belt. BAA had been really mad at me for that, but I pointed out that I’d been doing what no one else had done. I caught the criminal.

I figured there’d be hearings and fines. I figured I might lose my job. I didn’t really care. I think I was in shock.

Luke came back out, jiggling a small case in his hand. A contact lens case.

I looked up at him. “You wear contacts?”

He grinned. “Only for show.” He fluttered his eyelashes, and I realized in shock that his liquid brown eyes were now pale blue. And rather lovely.

“Jesus,” I said.

“I figured Luca would have dark eyes. You don’t see many blond, blue-eyed Italians.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him he wasn’t a blond, but then I realized it was probably dyed. He seemed to take this undercover thing very seriously.

“Why Italian?”

“I can speak it. I’ve lived there. Girls like Italians.”

I’m afraid my lip curled. “Look,” I said, “not to be rude or anything, but why are you here? Am I under arrest or something?”

Luke sighed heavily and took a seat beside me on the sofa. I shuffled away from him. There was a very slight possibility he was mad. Hot as hell, but mad.

“I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “and you have to keep it a secret. I mean this, if you tell anyone—your mum, your best friend, your brother, even your bloody cat—” Tammy looked offended at that, and rightly so, “then I’m not joking, I will have to kill you.” He lifted his pullover fleece and showed me the pistol holstered at his side.

“What happened to Brown’s gun?”

Luke gave me a look. “You know that wasn’t his real name, right?”

“Duh.” It hadn’t occurred to me, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.

“It wasn’t even the same guy.”

I stared, horrified.

Luke laughed. “It’s okay. The guy we caught yesterday has a twin brother. What we didn’t know, when he used up his one phone call, was that he was giving out some kind of code. The brother was following instructions. If you hadn’t spotted him, he might have got through.”

“To Alicante?”

“No. Actually he was booked on the Geneva flight, but that’s by the by. What gets me is that he was stupid enough to use the same airport and the same fucking airline.”

“Very bright and yet so very thick.”

“They all are.” Luke held out his hand to Tammy, who sniffed at it, then licked his fingers.

Bloody cat. Took me weeks to earn enough trust to pick her up.

“Was that the classified information?”

“What?” He looked up. “No. Not really. We’ve been after the brothers for a while. What I have to tell you is who ‘we’ are.”

I braced myself.

“Twenty years ago the government set up a special branch of military intelligence, based at Stansted, to deal with illegal airport traffic. Everything from drugs to terrorism. They called it SO17—Special Operations Seventeen. To begin with everything was excellent, the agents did everything they should and caught dozens of bad guys. At the time it was thought Stansted was going to grow into a huge airport, bigger than Heathrow.”

“Not if I can help it,” I said with feeling. Airport expansion was something I was pretty much against, mostly because it would involve building over my house.

“But of course the airport didn’t get that huge, and we shot ourselves in the foot.”

“Feet.”

“Whatever. The problem was that we worked too well. There were no more bad guys to catch. Word had got around. So they downsized us, didn’t want to spend all this money on an operation that wasn’t doing anything. Agents retired and they weren’t replaced. SO17 got pretty much forgotten by the government.”

I can’t say I had any sympathy. As far as I was concerned he was talking bollocks. I didn’t believe for a second that there was a special governmental intelligence agency at the airport. We had Special Branch and that was it, right?

Right?

“Right now SO17 consists of four people. I’m one of them. We have license to do pretty much whatever we want, hire new people, et cetera, but we don’t have the funding. When I was hired they were skimming the cream of the military. I was in the RAF, then the SAS, before they picked me for this.”

So now he was boasting to me? Ooh, look at my military record. Does that make you horny, baby?

Well, quite frankly, no.

“But now we can’t afford to do that. Our director has given us orders to each find and train new agents. My old partner is currently searching for a suitable recruit. I’ve been looking around for a while.”

He looked right at me. Tammy clambered from me to him, and I focused my attention on the cat, because I wasn’t sure what Luke was saying.

“That’s nice,” I said uncertainly, quite aware that I sounded like a complete idiot.

“I was impressed with you today,” he went on. “Yesterday, too. You’re not very good at following orders, but I get that, because a good agent understands artistic license.”

“Bond never followed his orders strictly,” I said helpfully.

“Of course not. In
Licence to Kill
, he was a rogue agent. He still saved the day and got the girl.”

I ignored that. I wasn’t really interested in getting any girls. “So you want someone who’s disobedient?”

“No, I want someone with a brain. A lot of squaddies, they’re in it because they’re good at following orders. And they’re good at following orders because they’re crap at thinking for themselves. And that’s great, because the army always needs squaddies. But we need intelligence. We need stubbornness. We need someone who’ll see the mission right through.”

I took Tammy off him. I needed a diversion. My head was whirling.

“I was impressed with you today,” Luke said again, reaching out and touching my hair. “I’ve been watching you since I started at Ace. You’re bright and confident and you can think on your feet.”

This was true. When you had a hundred and fifty passengers demanding to know what compensation they were going to get for a two hour delay (none) and threatening you with legal action, you learned to spout comforting drivel.

“Plus,” Luke added with a smile, “you’re like a bulldog with a rag. Tell me, if the twin had driven away in that car, what would you have done?”

I shrugged. “Got in one of the tugs and gone after him.”

“You think a tug can keep up with a Corolla?”

“I think Tammy could keep up with a Corolla.”

He smiled properly. “And what would you have done when you caught him?”

I blinked. “What I did today.”

“Did you plan that?”

“No. How could I?”