Horse Spy

by Bonnie Bryant

  The secretary then looked at Lisa and Stevie. “These girls, I presume?”

  “You bet!” Stevie answered. She didn’t want anybody to make any mistakes about exactly who Carole’s friends were. In fact, she didn’t want to miss anything. She hurried to walk right next to Carole. Lisa walked beside Stevie.

  The group entered Max’s office and everybody took a seat. The secretary pulled a notepad out of his pocket to check something.

  “Karya will be arriving in the United States next Tuesday,” he said. “On Wednesday she will accompany her mother on a tour of the Beltway Mall.”

  Stevie stifled a giggle. The secretary glowered, looking at her over his reading glasses. “And what is so funny about that?” he asked.

  “You don’t tour a mall,” Stevie explained. “You shop at one.”

  “Yes, well, they will observe things there, and that’s a tour, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and then decided to keep her mouth shut, realizing that nice and efficient as this man might be, he’d been born without any sense of humor, so there wasn’t much point in continuing a conversation with him.

  “After that, there is a luncheon at the ADR embassy, and then there’s something in the afternoon—a reading of essays about the produce of the fertile valleys of the ADR, followed by a dinner at the home of the agriculturist whose grandfather, also an agriculturist, developed the plan for the dam that provides waters for those fertile valleys. And the following morning, Mrs. Nazeem and Karya will meet with representatives of American labor unions who want to reward Mrs. Nazeem for her support of the labor movement in the ADR, followed by a visit to an exhibit at the International Commission on Hydroponic Farming at which Mrs. Nazeem will—”

  Stevie could contain herself no longer: “Stop! Doesn’t this girl ever get a break?” she asked.

  “I was just getting to that,” said the secretary. “She is completely free to do as she pleases from two-fourteen on Thursday afternoon until three-oh-four. Can she ride here then?”

  Three young girls and a stable owner stared at the man.

  “Forty-five minutes?” Max asked.

  “That’s not enough time to go on a good ride!” Carole said.

  “And she won’t have time to muck out a stall!” Stevie protested.

  Lisa was calmer. “In order for Karya to enjoy herself, she’s going to need to spend time at the stable, meet the horses, get used to the place, tack up, and go for a nice ride. We sort of got the impression—from the article we read—that she’d like to have that kind of time.”

  “How much time do you mean?” the man asked.

  “Two to three hours,” Lisa said without batting an eye.

  The man looked at his notepad.

  Max’s phone rang and he picked it up. “Yes, this is he,” said Max. “Yes, of course I know my own Social Security number.” There was a pause. A puzzled look came over his face. “Well, you called me,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me your Social Security number.”

  The secretary looked up from his pad. “That would be the State Department,” he explained to Max and the girls.

  “Is this someone from the State Department?” Max asked. A moment of silence. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere. Yes, Mr. Nazeem’s security team is here. The secretary is in my office right now,” Max said.

  The conversation went on. It became clear to the listeners that someone from the U.S. State Department was asking Max to cooperate with the ADR security team.

  “Of course I’ll cooperate,” Max said. “I always cooperate with armed men.”

  “Are you guys armed?” Stevie asked.

  “I am not armed,” the secretary said.

  Stevie turned to her friends. “Well, that answers that. This man may not be carrying a gun, but all those other guys are.”

  “Of course they are,” Carole said. “They’re supposed to protect lives.” Because her father was in the Marines, she was a little more attuned to such matters, although her father always kept whatever arms the Marines required him to have locked up in his office at work. She’d never even seen his weapons.

  Max, in the meantime, kept listening to the State Department representative. “Yes, yes, of course. I understand. We’ll certainly cooperate in any way we can. Definitely. Oh, yes, I understand, they’ll need to check everything and everyone. Um-hmmm.”

  It went on like that for a while. Finally Max hung up the phone and turned to the secretary. “As you heard, sir, we’re here to be as helpful as possible to you and the agents and we’ll do everything we can to make sure Karya has a good time. Now, let’s negotiate the hours, because Lisa was exactly right that two hours would be the mini—” The phone rang again. He picked it up.

  This time it wasn’t for him. It was for Carole. He handed the phone to her. It wasn’t the Secret Service, the State Department, or even MI-6. It was Karya Nazeem herself.

  Carole could hardly believe it. She listened for a while and then began smiling. “Yes, everybody’s here,” she said. “There are a dozen men in black suits interviewing horses and looking in hay bales for spies!”

  “Oh, they’re like that,” Karya said. “My father is always afraid for me because he has enemies and he worries that someone will try to get to him through me.”

  “You mean this stuff is for real?” Carole said. As soon as she said it, she was sorry. Nobody would send out a dozen agents just because it seemed like fun.

  “I guess so. But I don’t let it worry me. Now, what about Alek there?” Carole realized she was asking about the secretary, whose name she’d noticed when she glanced at the business card he had given her. “He proposed a forty-five-minute visit to the stable.”

  “Well, that’s enough …,” Karya said.

  Carole felt her disappointment growing until Karya continued.

  “… for me to have the complete tour you promised in your letter and for us to tack up our horses. That’ll all take about forty-five minutes, right? And then we can spend about an hour or two on the trail, and then we can get back to the stable and groom our own horses, and then, if there’s time, we can muck out some stalls. You did say something about being able to get special permission for me to use the pitchforks, right?”

  Carole grinned. Already she liked this girl enormously.

  “I think we can work something out on that. I’ll get Max’s special permission for you to have access to one of the pitchforks. Now, would you like to talk to Alek and explain that forty-five minutes is inadequate and he’s going to have to find a way to get you excused from the tour of the electrical plant that installed the gates on the dam …?”

  Now Karya giggled. “It’s that bad, isn’t it?”

  “Sounded pretty awful to me,” Carole confirmed.

  “Let me talk to him.”

  Carole handed the phone to the secretary. He spoke to Karya in a totally unfamiliar language. Carole presumed it was Arabic and only then stopped to wonder how it was that this daughter of the president of a foreign land spoke such great English.

  “We’re going to like her a lot,” Carole said to her friends and Max. It had only taken five minutes on the telephone for Carole to be sure of that, and her friends had heard enough of Carole’s end of the conversation to know she knew what she was talking about.

  Soon Karya was off the line and everything was all business again, but by then it was really just details. The girls had gotten what they most wanted, and that was a lengthy opportunity to visit with Karya, who would be at Pine Hollow the following Thursday, a week from today, arriving at the unlikely hour of 2:14 but being allowed to stay as long as she wanted. She’d convinced Alek that the diplomatic ribboncutting event could go on without her. He made large black X’s in his notebook and everybody was happy.

  Max then spent time with Alek, showing him and some of the agents, whom Stevie had immediately dubbed men in black (because most of them were, and looked as if they’d stepped off a movie set, down to their bug-eyed
reflector sunglasses), all around Pine Hollow and giving them maps of the trails on the surrounding woods.

  The Saddle Club worked with the remaining men in black, explaining who they were, giving them their names and addresses and their parents’ names and occupations.

  “And have they ever been arrested?” one of the agents asked Stevie. Once again, she couldn’t keep herself from laughing.

  “We have ways of finding out these things,” he said sternly.

  “Oh, I wish they had been,” Stevie responded. “It would be so much easier for me!”

  Her friends laughed then, too. In spite of himself, the agent cracked a smile.

  “And you two? Your parents? Have they been arrested?”

  “Not a chance,” Lisa said.

  “No way!” Carole assured him.

  It went on like that for a while. The men questioned Red and Mrs. Reg. They made an appointment to talk with Max’s wife, Deborah, and seemed concerned when they found out she was a reporter, but looked relieved when Max promised she wasn’t planning to write an article about Karya Nazeem.

  Finally they all left. That was when the girls remembered that Polaris and Blue were still tied out in the schooling ring. It hadn’t done them any harm, but it didn’t seem fair. The good news was that Max said there had been enough excitement for everybody for that day and the girls should just put the horses away, groom and water them, and head on home. He’d see them again first thing in the morning.

  Carole’s father was late getting home that evening. She’d gotten dinner almost ready and was sitting on her bed reading her history assignment when the phone rang. It was Stevie.

  “You know, Carole, those guys are doing pretty thorough checking. They already called my parents, and they’ve been in touch with the school. Do you suppose they might find out what I did to the polliwog in the bio lab?” Carole remembered Stevie’s test with blue food coloring. “And you know it’s possible that someone might get the impression that I am the person who telephoned the seventh-grade French teacher to tell him he had a burst pipe so he’d hurry home instead of giving his class a totally un-called-for pop quiz. Do you suppose the men in black can check phone records for that sort of thing?”

  “Uh, Stevie, I don’t think they really care about that sort of stuff,” Carole began. “I think they’re more concerned with matters of state—like have you been spying for any terrorist organizations or threatening to overthrow any duly elected governments recently.”

  “Well, sure, but people can jump to conclusions about the most innocent—”

  There was a knock on Carole’s door and her father came in. He had a seriously concerned look on his face.

  “Hang on,” she said, interrupting Stevie’s next confession. “Hi, Dad,” she said.

  He acknowledged her greeting with a nod and then asked, “Carole, have you been doing any spying for a small Middle Eastern country known as ADR?”

  Clearly, the men in black had been very busy.

  “Gotta go,” Carole told Stevie, and hung up the phone.

  “Well, it’s like this, Dad …,” she began.

  FRIDAY MORNING brought good news. By the time the girls had stumbled into the stable, tacked up Blue and Polaris, and remembered who was riding and who was making notes, they were ready for good news. It was their fifth very early morning in a row and they were beginning to frazzle at the edges.

  “The girls are coming!” Max announced.

  “We’re already here,” Lisa told him, rubbing her still sleepy eyes.

  “No, I mean the owners,” he said.

  “Like, here?” Stevie asked.

  “Yes, like here,” Max said. “Ellen and Lucy will be here this afternoon for the weekend. You’re off the hook for exercising all weekend long.”

  “So we can sleep in tomorrow?” Carole asked.

  “Only if you want to miss the best part of the day!” Max declared. The girls groaned. They did not share Max’s opinion about the best part of the day, since they each generally thought the day should begin around nine o’clock, not six! But Max was teasing and they all knew it.

  “What if they don’t like the work we’ve done for them?” Carole asked.

  “Of course they’re going to like it,” Stevie said. “They got to sleep late this week!”

  “Don’t worry, girls,” Max said. “We were doing exactly what Dorothy wanted us to do, which is exactly what I would have recommended in the first place. Ellen and Lucy are going to be pleased, I’m sure. But before all this chitchat takes away the little time we have to work, let’s pay attention to this morning’s workout. What’s up first, Lisa?”

  Lisa checked the board. “Balance,” she said. And the work began.

  An hour later, while the girls were finishing up with the horses, giving them a grooming and some hay and water, they talked about what they were going to do with their sudden and unexpected free time besides sleep. They hadn’t realized that Ellen and Lucy were going to be at Pine Hollow that weekend.

  “Well, we’re going to watch them train,” Carole said.

  “Some,” Lisa said.

  “And not at seven A.M.!” Stevie declared.

  “Okay, so we can sleep a little later,” Carole agreed.

  “And that means we can have a sleepover,” said Lisa.

  “At my place,” said Stevie.

  They agreed.

  “And that should give us enough time to plan for our visit with Karya next week,” said Carole.

  “That won’t take much time to plan,” Lisa said. “First we’ll let her muck out a stall—one should be enough to remind her that she really doesn’t much like to do that anyway—and then we’ll ride to the creek and talk about everything in the world the way we usually do and then we’ll come back here again. Easy as pie.” Her friends laughed.

  “Well, that’s decided, so we’ll have to talk about something else tonight,” Stevie said.

  “Horses?” Carole suggested.

  “Works for me,” Lisa agreed.

  “Okay, then. Meet you here this afternoon so we can give these big guys a final grooming before Ellen and Lucy arrive.”

  They changed their clothes, grabbed their book bags, and accepted the lift that Deborah offered them to get to their schools.

  Even though it was a Friday and even though that meant that Stevie had a French vocabulary test, Lisa had double-period chemistry lab, and Carole had to sit through Joe Novick’s report on armor in the Middle Ages plus an assembly on fire drills, the day seemed to fly by. At four o’clock, the girls met on their way back to Pine Hollow.

  “ ‘Dormitory!’ ” Stevie grumbled. “Who needs to know how to say ‘dormitory’ in French? I’m never going to live in one—at least not in France!”

  “I take it the vocabulary test didn’t go well?” Lisa asked.

  “No, it went fine,” Stevie said. “I just missed the one word.”

  “What is it?” Carole asked, though she wasn’t sure why. She was taking Spanish.

  “Dortoir,” Stevie said.

  “And you’ll never forget it now, will you?” asked Lisa.

  “No, but I’m going to have trouble working it into conversations, and I’m not sure how I feel about my best friend pointing out important life lessons like learning from my mistakes.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” Lisa said.

  “Hey! They’re here!” Carole said, interrupting the life lesson. Lisa and Stevie looked where Carole was pointing.

  Max was in the schooling ring with two very familiar horses and two unfamiliar riders. They could only be Ellen Walker riding Blue and Lucy Hatfield on Polaris.

  The girls paused where they were standing to watch. It was a pleasure. The girls and their mounts moved together in the wonderful liquid manner of the finest pairings of horse and rider, the animals responding to every slight signal from the girls, all the while looking as though it took no effort at all.

  “Wow,” said Stevie, unable to conta
in her admiration—or to express it any better than that, though that seemed to be enough for Lisa and Carole as well.

  After a few minutes, the girls walked on toward the ring. They put down their books and climbed up onto the fence so they could watch.

  Max was so focused on his work that he didn’t even acknowledge their arrival until he completed the suppling exercise routine that was now so familiar to The Saddle Club—and was equally familiar to Ellen and Lucy.

  And when it was completed, Stevie, Carole, and Lisa all applauded. “That was great!” Lisa said.

  The riders noticed them for the first time then. “Girls, I’d like you to meet your stand-ins,” Max said. The Saddle Club hopped down from the fence for the introductions. Of course, they already knew one another from the phone calls, but they’d never seen one another, so it took a few minutes to straighten out who was who.

  “Polaris is wonderful to ride!” Lisa said to Lucy, patting the horse enthusiastically. Lucy agreed and thanked Lisa for her help.

  Ellen and Stevie were chatting about Blue’s flying changes, and Carole joined in on all the conversations. Not surprisingly, the girls found a lot of common ground.

  “Ahem,” said Max. “I think we have more work to do here.…”

  While Max got back to work with Lucy and Ellen, The Saddle Club returned to their positions on the top rail of the schooling ring fence and resumed their silence except for an occasional whisper like “Oh, that’s how that’s supposed to be done!”

  When the lesson was over, Stevie, Lisa, and Carole all jumped down off the fence again and picked up their conversations where Max had stopped them.

  “Polaris always wants to turn left when we get to the fence at the far end of the ring,” Lisa told Lucy.

  “I know. He does that with me, too. I try to let him know I’m in charge of direction about four steps before he gets to make up his mind.”

  “That’s just what I did!” said Lisa.

  “It works, too.”

  “Most of the time,” said Lisa. The girls laughed.

  “And that’s nothing compared to how Blue starts acting up when she thinks it’s time for the lesson to be over!” said Stevie.