Still, he’d always thought of these deer as his own, as much as Ruckus was his dog. Passing them off to someone else felt like a betrayal.
They reached the edge of the meadow but stayed in the trees.
Gen leaned against the trunk of a grand tree. From the size of the trunk and canopy, it must have survived the War.
She stared straight at Arthur and said, “All right. Fine. Now that only the deer can hear us, let me lay it out for you. Octavia is pressuring me to force you to settle the case or walk out on you. I don’t know what to make of the pictures in the newspapers that look like you’re committing treason. You took me with you to a bar to meet your ‘friends,’ who seem like they’re spies and that seemed like a covert operation to give them something, and it looked like you got something in return, quid pro quo. You asked me to marry you, and I don’t know whether that was just to distract me from asking about the spies we met. I need to know what the hell is going on, and I need to know everything.”
Arthur’s heart caved in on itself. Her fears were spot on, even if her interpretation of the available data was mistaken. “I’ll tell you everything.”
“Good, and you’d better damn well hurry. I’m not British, so I don’t have infinite amounts of patience and politeness. I am liable to walk off and leave your sorry butt out here with the damned deer.”
Arthur said, “Let me tell you why I’ve never had a relationship with a woman that lasted more than a month.”
She frowned. “Really? We’re going to start with your emotional baggage? I think we should start with why you betrayed your country.”
He persevered. “Women leave me because they sense that there’s a part of my life that they aren’t privy to, that I’m holding back a large part of myself, and it’s true. They think it might be other women, like you did in Paris. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been unjustly accused of infidelity, but it was safer for everyone to agree that I was cheating than to tell the truth. So, here it is. I’ll tell you. I’ll lay bare all that I am.”
“That sounds good,” she said, even though she sounded like she didn’t believe it. “So this huge part of you that you can’t talk about is that—”
He sighed. “I’m a spy.”
Gen stood up and spread her hands in anger. “No shit, Sherlock! The sneaking around. The secret room that isn’t for dirty sex games. Mysterious meetings in the middle of the night in Paris. Can’t talk because people might be listening. You drove an Aston Martin and crashed it. The only thing you need to do is drink shaken-not-stirred martinis.”
Arthur frowned. “I’m sure some spies other than me drink vodka tonics.”
“Just you, weirdo.”
He shrugged. “I like vodka better than gin.”
“So the big question is, Mr. Super Spy, whom are you spying for?” Gen was staring right at him, her brown eyes wide and direct.
Arthur’s jaw dropped. “Are you seriously asking me that?”
“The pictures in the newspaper showed you hanging out with the worst kind of dictators and terrorists, and the people we met in Paris weren’t British. What am I supposed to think?”
He gestured toward Spencer House—his home, the home of his family for generations, his family who had built Britain—that was just a few hundred yards away. “I can’t believe you would even suspect—”
“Tell me who your masters are, the ones who won’t let you go!”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me—”
“This is all deceptive!” Gen yelled at him, tears streaming from her eyes. “You taught me how to see it, and now I see it in you. Answering questions with questions or with outrage at being asked are key indicators. Tell me the goddamn truth!”
“It’s Britain!” Arthur said, his heart breaking that she had thought anything else. “It’s always been Britain. Generations of my family have served the Queen and the Empire, and I serve. I’ve given them my whole life.”
“Is it the SIS? Or MI6? Or whatever the fuck you call it?”
“Yes! That’s Britain’s secret service.”
“Are you sure that you’re working for MI6? Maybe you’ve been tricked.”
“My identification card admits me to that great, horrid SIS building at Vauxhall Cross, where I go for meetings at least once a week, so I’m going to posit that it’s the real MI6.” The building looked like enormous gears of a terrible machine, painted teal and ivory.
“Do you really have a card? Don’t you have to put your eye up to some machine that measures the inside of your eyeball?”
“Biometrics such as retinal scanners would take too long at the checkpoints. We just swipe our ID and code in our PIN. It’s very low tech. Anyone who didn’t belong there would be lost. There are no signs on the doors, just blank floor plans on the walls in case of a fire.”
“And you get in just fine.”
“I’ll wave to you from the balcony if you wish.”
Gen sighed. “Yeah, that’s probably a pretty good indication.”
“Actually, I can’t wave to you from the balcony. The whole building is sealed. If there were a chemical attack, the SIS building would be safe. Hell, the anti-tank missile that was fired at it twenty years ago didn’t even scratch it. The missile disintegrated against the wall.”
“At least you’re safe.”
He had promised to tell her everything. “MI6 is not the only agency I work for.”
Gen rolled her eyes. “Here it comes.”
“I was recruited by MI6 when I was seventeen.”
She frowned and dug her toe into the earth under the tree. “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”
“You met Elizabeth. She ran me first as an asset.”
Gen’s frown deepened. “I knew I didn’t like that woman.”
“I was already working for her my last year at Le Rosey, sending human intelligence back to Vauxhall Cross through her.”
Her eyes widened. “You were narcing on your friends?”
“More like going home with friends to visit their Russian oligarch parents at their Sochi dachas and noting which terrorists came to dinner.”
“Oh.”
“But that’s not all I do. I split my time between MI6 and the Government Communications Headquarters.”
Gen leaned back against the tree again, her hands tucked behind her. She looked lost. “I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s like your NSA. The GCHQ is tasked with cryptography and computer intelligence. I take the plane out to Benhall in Gloucestershire a few times a month for meetings,” which he would no longer be able to do after Wednesday because the plane belonged to the estate, “but mostly I work from the locked office in my flat, the one that is not a sex dungeon.”
“Dammit,” Gen said. “I had really been hoping it was a sex dungeon.”
“We’ve got other rooms. We’ll set up a sex dungeon,” he joked.
But in a few days, he wouldn’t own that London apartment, either.
He continued, “Elizabeth wanted me to read modern languages at Oxford, and I did. However, from the time that I was in upper school, I found that I had a small talent for computers, and I was overly fond of the types of skills that are not taught in word processing classes.”
Gen was still so angry that she was squirming against the tree. “Again, in English this time. I mean, in American.”
Arthur enunciated very clearly, “I’m a hacker.”
Gen’s jaw dropped. “Seriously?”
“I’m one of Her Majesty’s tame hackers. I analyze software-based weapons, essentially militarized computer viruses.”
“Do you write malware?” she asked.
“Only for intelligence and military uses, not to wipe civilian hard drives.”
“But you do.”
“Yes.”
“That’s horrifying.”
“It’s to keep Britain free and a democracy and to keep the world from plunging into chaos. We’re fighting World War Three, right now.
”
Gen glanced at the deer, which were gamboling out in the sun-drenched meadow. Ruckus jumped out of the grass like a breaching fish, chasing them. “Doesn’t look like World War Three.”
“People always prepare for the last war, not the next one. When I see people digging trenches or building bomb shelters, it infuriates me. I can’t even discuss it. You don’t need to stock your basement with canned goods. You need to put a password on your damned programmable thermostat and internet-connected baby monitor so foreign services can’t use them against us in an enormous distributed denial of service attack to disguise the fact that they’re hacking election machines to switch enough votes to change an election’s outcome.” He looked at Gen, who was leaning against the tree and watching him with wide eyes. “I’m ranting. I’m sorry. It’s a sore spot.”
She shrugged. “That’s okay, man. You should hear me when I get going about tort reform.”
“It angers me because this war is being fought with computers all over the world, with subtle incursions and stealing data. They influence other countries’ citizens to vote for politicians or for initiatives that are not in their best interests. They destroy or disable weapons facilities.”
Gen nodded, but she still looked grim. “My dad’s family in Texas looks like they were preparing for World War Three. My uncle has a wall in the back room covered with guns like a sword display in a museum.”
Arthur shook his head. “That was the last war, World War Two and the proxy wars. The next war, this war, will not be fought with guns, hiding in the forest and eating mushrooms and grubs as the Red Army invades. It is being fought in dark rooms from behind computers while drinking truly dangerous amounts of coffee.”
Gen shook her head. “I just never would have pegged you for a hacker. You have good skin and aren’t chubby.”
Arthur let himself smile. “I split my time. When I’m schmoozing Middle Eastern terrorists and South American dictators, I can’t look disreputable.”
“So that’s what the pictures were,” Gen said, “when you were gathering information about who had dinner with whom.”
“And planting listening devices, and infiltrating their wifi networks in their houses from my phone while in the bathroom and leaving behind surveillance software, and scanning their networks to see which other intelligence agencies have their software on there, and more.”
“And you didn’t tell me this,” she said.
“I haven’t told anyone this.”
“But all I have is your actions and the pictures. I don’t know what’s the truth.”
“You have my word.”
“Exactly what did we give to those guys in Paris?”
“Variations on malware that were found in various computers in the world, malware like Stuxnet, Gauss, and Flame, and my notes on what the code is doing at various steps. We’re trying to figure out who’s releasing them and why.”
“Those names sound stupid. Stuxnet. It sounds like a venereal disease.”
“Stuxnet was the first widely known weaponized malware. No one has taken responsibility for it, but most people think it was a collaboration between the NSA or CIA, us at the GCHQ, and the Israeli Mossad. It was completely harmless to most computers, unless those computers were connected to nuclear centrifuges with serial numbers that matched some centrifuges in Iran. Then, it caused those centrifuges to spin a little faster and then hid that from the monitoring systems. The nuclear centrifuges burned themselves out and set the Iranian nuclear program back five years. It was brilliant and utterly malevolent. Malware since then has been more prolific and less subtle.”
“Did you make it?”
“Before my time.”
“Was GCHQ involved?”
“Not to speak of.”
“Which means yes. That’s what we gave to those guys?”
“Variations of it that were found in other places, doing other things. The original Stuxnet did its job, curled up, and died. All the best malware does. When it works, you can’t find any trace of it afterward.”
“Why didn’t you just email them to those guys?” She rolled her huge, dark eyes. “Nevermind. That didn’t sound stupid when it was inside my head. But essentially, that’s treason, right? You gave computer viruses to non-British people?”
He shook his head. “Another friend passed it to me in Paris. It’s my network. My masters understand that one must feed one’s network.”
“How do you know that they aren’t Russian spies?”
“I’ve known these people since we were six years old. No one is secretly a Russian mole. Besides, I work for MI6. I checked them through my channels. I’m sure they’ve done the same.”
“You said you went home with people to dachas in Sochi. That’s in Russia.”
“Those were the Butorins. Everyone knew what the Butorins were. That’s why I was gathering intelligence on them, but the people we met in Paris were not associated with the Butorins. Vlogger One is from California. Her father is a Silicon Valley CEO. She was shipped off to Le Rosey because no one had time for her, much like the rest of us.”
Gen looked at her feet. “That’s heart-breaking, Arthur.”
He shoved his hands in his trouser pockets. “There are many reasons why people ended up at that particular boarding school, but that was among the most common.”
“But your parents, um, passed away.”
“I had already been there for three years at that point.”
“Oh.” Her shoulders slumped. The anger was diffusing out of her.
Good.
“It gives one an odd mindset, growing up like that,” Arthur said, musing as he looked into the darkness between the trees back in the forest. He stepped toward her. “I don’t believe in anything except that, ultimately, we’re all alone, every one of us, and that’s terrifying.”
Gen nodded. Her eyebrows twitched together as she thought. “Yeah, we are.”
“In the end, you’re just a soul riding a meat-covered skeleton, clinging to a rock that is hurtling through space.”
“Jesus Christ, Arthur. The things that go on in your head.”
He stepped toward her and trailed his fingers over her upper arm. The thin fabric of her tee shirt dragged against his fingertips. “We can’t really touch each other. We can’t really feel each other. It’s a press against the skin, and the neurons in your skin send signals to the brain, which interprets the sparks. It’s like being a computer with an arm in another room, connected by wires.”
“I can feel you touching me,” she said.
He nodded and wrapped his fingers around her upper arm. “We talk, and we make vibrations in the air that the other person strives to interpret into something meaningful. Maybe it happens, sometimes.”
“That’s so nihilistic. It sounds like you think nothing is worth anything.”
He shook his head. “In the end, if people are a little more free, if people have a few more choices in their lives, and if dictators and evil people have a little less power, that’s good. That’s a good life. It’s a good reason to keep living. I try to make the world a little more free. And to do that, I work for Her Majesty’s government, and I’m a spy.” He chuckled. “I’ve never said that out loud before. It’s pretentious, don’t you think?”
She nodded, but her eyes were still frightened and haunted. “So, when you asked me to marry you, that was just to distract me that night, right? I asked you what was going on, and suddenly you were different. You were all, ‘I love you,’ and then proposed. That was just part of being a spy, right? To throw me off the scent?” She sighed. “I’m a big girl. I can take it.”
If he was nothing else, Arthur was British. Even though he was indeed a hugger when the situation called for it, he could take a gut-punch like that one without flinching.
But it was a brutal blow.
When Arthur had seen those pictures of himself with those dictators distributed all over the internet, he had known that his life as Lord Arthur Finch-
Hatten, the Earl of Severn, was over. His extraction and resettlement were days or hours away, assuming that Elizabeth wasn’t planning to throw him to Scotland Yard as a token offering.
But he’d known that he must disappear.
Since then, Arthur had deliberated: Should he tell Gen the truth, or should he tell her that he had been manipulating her, using her, so that she would first be angry with him and then go on with her life, believing the worst of him?
Ultimately, which would be more kind?
Arthur took her into his arms and held her against his chest. He needed strength for the truth, and Gen was his strength now. “I love you with every fiber of my being and every breath in my body. I want to marry you and live with you forever, have children and grow old with you in Spencer House, but I can’t. Wednesday, after the hearing at Westminster, I’ll disappear.”
In his arms, he felt Gen’s breath jump inside her. “Are they going to kill you?”
It was a fair question, and he was somewhat confident that he was telling her the truth when he said, “I’ll be safe. It’s called resettlement.”
“Like the Witness Protection Program in America.”
“That’s accurate.”
“Can I come with you?” she asked.
“You could, if you wanted, but you wouldn’t be able to practice as a barrister, and you wouldn’t be able to visit your mother.”
Her body tightened with grief. “I can’t.”
And he wouldn’t have let her, especially before he was absolutely sure about whether or not Elizabeth was going to hand him to Scotland Yard as a body floating in the Thames. “I know. I wouldn’t ask you to give up everything you’ve worked for.”
She shoved her face into his shoulder. Warm dampness seeped through his shirt. She mumbled, “I’m sorry. I’m not being British.”
He tightened his arms around her. He wanted to tell her not to cry, but dammit. Repressing heartache was hard enough for him. “Don’t be British. You’re an American, and you’re brilliant just the way you are. I was mistaken, trying to British you up. Don’t let me or anyone twist you into something you’re not. Be Genevieve Ward. Be your beautiful, brilliant, vivacious Texan self.”
Hard Liquor: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #2 Page 16
