Golden Gate

by James Ponti

  She got up in his face and said, “Because you’re a giant chicken.” She started flapping her arms like wings. “Bawk, bawk. I can’t uncover information as well as Sydney and Kat and Brooklyn. Bawk, bawk.”

  Now everyone was laughing. “That’s war,” Paris said. “You are on and I’m calling it now: Tonight it will be cupcakes for everyone.”

  “Well, great,” said Monty. “Now that we’ve got that settled, do you all know when and where we rendezvous?”

  “Three thirty at the library,” they replied in unison.

  “Then I’ve just got one more thing to say,” she replied. “This operation is hot, and we are a go.”

  RUTLEDGE HOME, WATLINGTON

  Mother and Sydney took a taxi to Watlington and the house on Watcombe Road that Parker Rutledge called home for most of his life. Mother had visited on multiple occasions, including once for Christmas dinner. At the time, he was a member of the so-called Zoo Crew, a spy team led by Rutledge that worked for the London Zoo as their cover. During this period, Mother went by the alias Gordon Swift, which was how he introduced himself when Parker’s mother answered the door.

  “Hello, Mrs. Rutledge,” Mother said with a bright smile. “My name’s Gordon Swift. I was a colleague of Parker’s back at the London Zoo.”

  The elderly widow had only cracked the door as wide as the security chain would allow, and she eyed him suspiciously through the gap. “I don’t remember you.”

  “I was over one Christmas dinner and accidentally dropped the pudding on the kitchen floor,” he said.

  She brightened and replied, “You made a right mess, didn’t you?”

  “Dreadfully so, I’m afraid.”

  “I remember that.” She flashed a smile and undid the chain to open the door. “Gordon, was it?”

  “Yes, although your son always called me Gordo.” He motioned to Sydney. “This is my daughter, Eleanor.”

  “Ellie,” Sydney said pleasantly with a wave.

  “We came by because we were in town and I wanted to offer my condolences about Parker,” he added as he held up a bouquet of flowers he’d picked up at a florist next to the railway station. “I was heartbroken to hear he’d passed.”

  “Thank you, dear,” said Mrs. Rutledge. “Please come in. Sorry to seem so unwelcoming, but I’ve had a couple of break-ins and you can’t be too careful.”

  “No you can’t,” said Mother. “You can’t be too careful at all.”

  CLARENDON PHOTO SHOP, OXFORD CITY CENTRE

  Clarendon Photo was a quaint camera shop with a bright yellow storefront and helpful employees in matching blue polos. The cameras were arranged by manufacturer in display cases, and Kat and Brooklyn looked around until they found the same model Rutledge purchased.

  “Three thousand, five hundred pounds?” Kat gasped when she saw the price tag. “Are they serious?”

  “That can’t be right,” said Brooklyn.

  “Look for yourself.”

  Brooklyn checked and was equally stunned. “That’s unbelievable.” She checked the nearby cameras, which were far less expensive. “Why wouldn’t he buy one of these? They’re so much cheaper.”

  “That’s a great question,” said Kat.

  A saleswoman came over and asked, “Can I help you two?”

  “Yes, please,” Kat said. “We’re curious about this camera. Why’s it so expensive?”

  “It’s top of the line, the latest DSLR,” she answered, as if any of that made sense to normal people.

  “DSLR?” asked Brooklyn.

  “Digital single-lens reflex,” said the woman. “It’s a cross between a camera like the one you have on your phone and a more traditional one designed to let you swap lenses. But you two wouldn’t need anything this advanced. We have plenty of inexpensive models that take beautiful photos.”

  “Then why would someone pay this much?” asked Brooklyn. “Who would even use a camera like this?”

  “Mostly professional photographers,” she answered. “It shoots still images and video, so you can use it to shoot anything from portraits to weddings.”

  Kat picked up the camera and studied it. “Can you think of any reason why someone who’s really into bird-watching might want it?”

  The woman thought for a moment and said, “You know, about a year ago a bird-watcher came into the store, and I helped him pick out a camera. Come to think of it, I think this is the model he settled on.”

  “Do you remember anything about him?” asked Brooklyn.

  “It’s been a year and I sell a lot of cameras,” she said, trying to recall the memory. “What was his name? Dowd? Proud?”

  “Stroud?” suggested Kat.

  The woman smiled. “That’s it, Stroud.” Then she gave them a quizzical look. “Do you know him?”

  OXFORD UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

  There were more than seven million objects in the collection of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, but the most famous was the Oxford dodo. It was a soft-tissue specimen of a bird species that’d been extinct since 1680, and there was nothing like it in the world. As a symbol of pride, the dodo served as the logo of the museum and was the namesake of the bird-watching society that met there once a month.

  The birders gathered in a small lecture hall with heavy oak chairs and dark wood paneling. Every meeting featured a presentation by one of its members, followed by an informal discussion and snacks, usually tea sandwiches. Paris and Rio had trouble finding the room, and they walked in just as the presentation was about to begin. Despite the interruption, the eleven members in attendance seemed delighted by their arrival.

  “Are you here for the meeting?” asked the club’s leader, an older man with wispy white hair and a long thin nose.

  “That depends,” said Paris. “We got a little turned around, and I’m not sure we’re in the right place. Are you the… Dodos?”

  “Are we the Dodos?” the man said excitedly as he turned to the rest of the group and they all started making loud squawking noises.

  Paris shot Rio a side-eye that asked What have we gotten ourselves into? before saying, “I’m guessing that means yes.”

  “It sure does,” the man answered happily. “Are you budding ornithologists?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Rio, trying to sound convincing. “We’re very interested in all things birds.”

  “Well, you have excellent timing. Marni’s just about to show the pictures from her trip.”

  Paris and Rio both forced smiles and tried to sound convincing when they answered.

  “Great.”

  “Can’t wait to see them.”

  At the front of the room stood Marni Stern, mid-thirties, sporting a khaki shirt and khaki pants, her long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was a researcher with the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology and had just returned from a three-month expedition studying, as she said in her very detailed introduction, “the causes and consequences of interspecific competition between species in the Nyungwe Forest National Park.”

  “See what I mean?” the leader said to Paris. “Impeccable timing.”

  “Yes,” Paris answered. “Sounds fascinating.”

  Marni showed pictures from her trip on a monitor hooked up to a laptop. The other Dodos oohed and aahed like they were watching a fireworks display while she offered narration, using words such as “avifauna,” “endemic,” and “taxonomic.”

  Within five minutes, Rio was already struggling to keep his eyes open, and Paris could only think about the Liverpool–Chelsea match that he could’ve been watching instead.

  THE KING’S ARMS PUB

  Monty was not at all surprised to learn that Parker Rutledge had been on the faculty at Lincoln College. MI6 recruited heavily throughout Oxford but nowhere more than Lincoln. The connection to the Secret Intelligence Service was so strong that the four racing shells used by the college’s rowing club were named Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Spy in honor of the bestselling espionage n
ovel written by former MI6 agent and Lincoln alumnus John le Carré.

  She also knew that if she really wanted to find out what Rutledge had been up to during the last year of his life, her best plan of action was to bypass the students and faculty and go straight to a porter.

  The porters were the backbone of Oxford life. Their lodges were at the entrances of each college, which literally made them the gatekeepers of the school. They had a front-row seat to all the comings and goings, and their services were a mix of security, support, and sometimes even counseling.

  Monty had been so close to some of the porters when she was a student at Exeter College that she still exchanged Christmas cards with them. Luckily, Lincoln and Exeter were literally next door to each other, and the staffs knew one another well. One of Monty’s friends vouched for her with Nigel Tompkins, the senior porter in the Lincoln lodge, who agreed to meet with her during his lunch at a nearby pub called the King’s Arms.

  They took a table in the back along the windows and away from the televisions, where most of the patrons were watching the Chelsea–Liverpool football match that the group was supposedly attending. Nigel had a steak pie along with a pint of Guinness, while Monty had a basket of triple cheesy chips and a ginger ale.

  “I got hooked on these my first year at uni and I have to have them whenever I come back,” she said. “This was the comfort food that got me through exams.”

  “They must’ve worked,” he replied. “Thomas said you were an exceptional student, even by Oxford standards. He also said you had questions about one of our professors.”

  “Yes,” she said. “A late professor, sadly. His name was Parker Rutledge.”

  The porter paused for a moment as he dipped a forkful of steak in its sauce. Then he looked up at her and asked, “What would you like to know about him?”

  “Anything you could tell me, really,” she said, leaving the door open for him to share as much as possible.

  He answered just before he took a bite, “Well, I know he was a spy.”

  Monty was so surprised by this that she choked a little bit on a chip. “What makes you say that?”

  “Twenty-plus years of collecting his mail, watching him come and go, observing some rather peculiar habits,” he replied. “It’s not much of a leap, really.”

  He took another bite and added, “Besides, you’re not the first one to come asking about him. There’ve been two others, and they couldn’t have been more obvious if they played the double-oh-seven theme when they walked in the room.”

  Monty wasn’t sure if this meant he assumed she was a spy too, but she just skipped over that and asked, “Two others? Can you tell me about them?”

  “The first one came a week after Parker passed,” he said. “I didn’t care for him at all. He was big and burly with black hair and dark sunglasses. Walked like a boxer. He said he was a nephew and had come to collect some of Parker’s books.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that Parker Rutledge had two nephews and that I knew both personally because they’d been students at Lincoln. That kind of put an end to that conversation.”

  “Lucky break that you knew them,” said Monty.

  “I didn’t know them.” He smiled slyly. “I made that part up. But Mr. Sunglasses didn’t know that.”

  Monty chuckled. “What about the other one?”

  “A woman,” he said. “At least she was clever. You could tell. She told me that she was an ornithologist and had worked with Parker in the field.”

  “Did she mention anything about a book?”

  He nodded. “She said she wanted to look at his journal so that she could check some of the notes he took when they were on an expedition together. I told her that all his personal belongings had been returned to his family.”

  “And you feel certain both of them were with the Secret Intelligence Service?”

  He shrugged. “I feel certain both of them were spies. Whether they were MI6 or not, I guess I don’t know. The man had a hint of a Scandinavian accent, so that doesn’t fit so well.”

  “Could you describe the woman for me?”

  “Average height, physically fit, blond, but it could’ve been a wig.”

  “Did she ask for anything else?”

  “No. Just the journal.”

  RUTLEDGE HOME

  Unlike the porter at Lincoln College, Parker Rutledge’s mother gave no indication that she knew her son was anything other than a college professor and avid birder. As they sat around the kitchen table, she told Mother and Sydney long, rambling stories about him and his travels. Mother didn’t interrupt at all. He knew she missed him, and he wanted her to be able to bring him back, even if only in conversation. When one story came to an end, he said, “You mentioned something about break-ins. What happened?”

  “There were two of them,” she answered. “One climbed in through the window in Parker’s bedroom and the other broke in through the back door.”

  “Were you home when they happened?”

  “Thankfully no. I was shopping the first time and visiting my sister the second.”

  “What did they take?” asked Mother.

  “Well, that’s the strange part,” she answered. “They didn’t take anything. Not even my rings, and they’re quite nice.”

  “Are you certain? Maybe they took something of Parker’s.”

  “They couldn’t have,” she said. “I’d donated everything.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Mother.

  “Parker was a man of few possessions,” she explained. “Once he passed, I took his clothes to the homeless shelter. They were nice and well kept.”

  “Of course,” said Mother.

  “And I took all his papers and books to the Bodleian.”

  “The library?”

  “Yes,” she said. “My late husband’s work was already there, so I donated Parker’s as well. They’re for future ornithologists.”

  Mother smiled. “How very generous of you.”

  CLARENDON PHOTO

  Kat and Brooklyn told the saleswoman that they didn’t really know Stroud, but that he’d given a lecture at their school.

  “We were doing a unit on birds in our science class,” Brooklyn said. “And he came in and showed us a bunch of pictures.”

  “If he took them with a camera like this, I bet they were beautiful,” said the saleswoman.

  “Amazing,” said Kat.

  “He told me that he’d done his research and called this model the bird-watcher deluxe,” the woman continued. “For example, he liked the fact that it was mirrorless, because that meant it didn’t make any shutter noise, which tended to scare birds away. He also liked that it shot HD video, even in low light. He said he often shot video of birds in flight early in the morning and at dusk when it was dark.”

  Kat and Brooklyn both quickly recognized that in addition to bird-watching, a silent camera that shot high-quality video in poor lighting would be ideal for a spy.

  “And then there was the Bluetooth,” the saleswoman said. “That was an essential feature for him.”

  “I know what Bluetooth is,” said Kat. “But you think of it for earbuds or your phone. How is it useful for a camera?”

  “This camera can load pictures directly to the cloud,” she answered. “Normally, you have to wait until you download the images onto your laptop, but these go straight up. He wanted that. Said it was vital.”

  OXFORD UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

  Paris checked his watch. They were forty-five minutes into the presentation, and Marni Stern had given no indication that she was nearing the end. She pressed a button on her clicker, and the image changed to one of a small red-and-brown bird sitting on a branch.

  “This is a red-collared mountain babbler,” she said. “Very sociable and noisy. Notice the rufous neck, breast, and rump. Now, an interesting tidbit about this species is that it was moved from genus Kupeornis to genus Turdoides in 2018.”

&nb
sp; “And why was that?” asked one of the Dodos.

  “That was the determination of a molecular phylogenetic study,” explained Stern.

  “Yes, yes,” said the man. “Very interesting.”

  Rio swallowed a snore halfway and leaned over to Paris. “Are they still speaking English? Because I have no idea what they’re talking about.”

  “Shh,” said Paris, trying to decipher it. Despite the fact that much of the terminology was alien to him, he found himself surprisingly interested in the presentation. “Ms. Stern,” he said, raising his hand.

  “Please, call me Marni,” she replied. “The Dodos are all on a first-name basis.”

  “Why is the number three hundred seventy-four marked in the upper right corner of the picture? Does it have something to do with its location?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s part of my life list. The red-collared mountain babbler is the three hundred and seventy-fourth species I’ve seen in the field.”

  “And how do you get the number on the picture?” he asked.

  “It helps to have a professor of quantum information science in the club,” she said, motioning to the man with the wispy mustache who’d welcomed them earlier. “Simon designed a wonderful program that tracks numbers for all of us.”

  “It’s actually much simpler than it sounds,” Simon said modestly. “It’s a basic computation logarithm. We upload images directly into our cloud account and mark which ones are new, and the program automatically adds the number.”

  KING’S ARMS PUB

  The meal was wrapping up, and Monty felt she had gleaned a good surface knowledge of Parker Rutledge. Nothing helpful in the particular situation, but all useful in a general way of understanding him.

  Nigel Tompkins studied her for a moment, sizing her up in a way. He considered something before asking, “Do you know who Kim Philby was?”

  “Of course,” said Monty. “He was the treacherous double agent who sold out MI6.”

  “And do you know where he went to university?”

  This made Monty smile. “Cambridge.”

  “That’s right,” Tompkins said disdainfully. “His whole gang were Cambridge men. Although, you know, he tried to recruit here at Oxford. In fact, he tried to recruit John le Carré at that table right over there.”