Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.

by James Hawkins

  “Look,” he spits, “you just don’t get it, do you? You’re in America now — not some lefty, liberal, pot-smoking, pansy-loving democracy. We don’t piss around here. So shut up.”

  “Well,” says Daphne as the door closes behind him and the electronic lock clicks into place. “That’s very interesting.”

  “What?”

  “According to Spotty Dick, they were going to rub us out… pull the plug… deep-six us, or whatever he called it in their language. But I think someone’s persuaded them that it wasn’t such a clever idea.”

  “That’s good —” starts Trina, but Daphne shushes her with a finger to her lips.

  “I think the heat’s on,” she whispers, sounding more like a hoodlum than a greying spinster as she ushers Trina away from the eye of the surveillance camera and into the bathroom. “Let’s see how long it takes them to find us,” she adds, as she shuts the door and turns on the taps.

  The next ten minutes pass with the slowness of a day on death row as the two women perch on the edge of the bath waiting for Dawson or Bumface to yell, “Come out of the bathroom, ladies.” However, Daphne is less surprised than Trina when nothing happens.

  “I knew it. They’ve switched off the camera,” she says confidently, and she strolls into the bedroom to boldly confront the intrusive artefact.

  Trina is more reticent. “What if they want us to try to escape so they can mow us down and claim they had no choice?”

  “No,” says Daphne, pulling up a chair and staring straight into the lens. “They’ve had several chances to do that already. My guess is that David found my hanky and he’s kicking up a storm. He might even be at the gates with a search warrant right now.”

  Bliss isn’t at the gates, nor does he have a warrant, but he is certainly planning on visiting the monastery in the very near future. Buzzer Busby and Reggie Jones, on the other hand, aren’t going anywhere until they’ve explained the presence of a couple of confused Koreans in a concealed compartment under the fish tank in the back of their van. The attempted transportation of thirty-five thousand dollars in cash across the border is another matter they are being asked to explain.

  “That’s a crime, to start with,” says Roger Cranley, although no one in the vehicle is putting his hands up to owning the stuffed leather cash bag that had been stashed under the fish. In fact, neither of the low-level CIA men is talking, and neither are the Koreans, although an interpreter is on her way from Vancouver.

  The most perplexing issue to Cranley is the fact that the Asians have valid U.S. passports. “Our immigration people say they look legit,” says Cranley. Then he flicks through the blank pages of the recently issued documents to make a point to Phillips and Bliss. “Look, no foreign stamps,” he says. “They can’t use these to get into the States without someone wanting to know why they weren’t stamped by a foreign agency.”

  “But where have they been?” asks Bliss.

  “I bet neither of them have ever been outside of Korea before,” says Cranley knowingly. “It’s my guess that someone in the U.S. immigration office in Seoul is selling citizenships with a complete set of documents to match.”

  “That would be pricey,” mutters Phillips.

  “You bet it would,” agrees Cranley. “Of course, I may be wrong, but I’ll get the Americans to run the reference numbers through their systems. They should be able to give us an answer straight away —”

  “Wait a minute,” cuts in Phillips. “What if Busby and Jones are genuine CIA, and these documents are straight? The monastery could be some kind of bona fide government operation.”

  “Finally, Mike!” exclaims Bliss, throwing his hands in the air in the background. “I’ve been trying to tell you that for the last three days.”

  “Then why smuggle people in via Canada?”

  “Don’t ask me,” shrugs Bliss.

  “And why risk exposing it by kidnapping the women?”

  “Ditto.”

  “Okay,” says Phillips. “So, where to now?”

  The name LeBlanc means nothing to the American border officer as he checks Daisy’s passport and visitor’s visa thirty minutes later.

  “May I ask the purpose of your visit to the United States, ma’am?” asks the unsuspecting man.

  “Oui. I have to fly home from Seattle tomorrow morning,” she says, flourishing her return ticket, and within seconds she is headed south towards Seattle. Behind her, Mike Phillips keeps his head down at the wheel of Buzzer’s Ford van, and is relieved when the officer simply glances at the vehicle’s registration plate and waves him through.

  “Ah, the power of the CIA,” muses Phillips.

  “I really have to stop travelling this way,” Bliss says ten minutes later, once the van has pulled off the highway and he has been hauled out of the hidden compartment by Phillips and Daisy. “I’ll travel with you,” he carries on, taking the Frenchwoman’s hand and leading her towards her car. “It’s our last day together.”

  “Daavid?” questions Daisy. “Don’t you mean zhat it is our first day together?”

  Bliss stops thoughtfully. “I am so sorry,” he begins as he takes her in his arms and tries to kiss her, but she backs off with a grimace.

  “Ugh, Daavid,” she cuts in, turning up her nose at his jacket. “I zhink zhat I prefer zhe bananas.”

  “Oh. Fish!” he mutters, now wishing that he had slipped across the border in the trunk of Daisy’s car as he’d originally planned. He is still trying to brush off salmon scales and slime when she hops into the rented car and locks the doors.

  “I zhink maybe you should stay in zhe van,” she laughs through a crack in the window, adding cheekily, “Unless you want me to take all of your clothes off.”

  “Now that sounds like an interesting proposition,” sniggers Phillips as they get into the van, though Bliss is less sure.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if it’ll ever happen,” he sighs dejectedly, realizing that he’s hardly been out of his clothes all week. “She goes home tomorrow morning.”

  “Let’s hope we get lucky today, then,” says Phillips as they drive off, although he still has reservations about their plan, and it certainly wasn’t an idea popular with Cranley.

  “I can’t let you do this,” the Canadian customs officer had protested with a grave face when Phillips had outlined his intention to use the CIA vehicle to smuggle Bliss into the States and gatecrash the monastery. “That vehicle is evidence in a criminal case.”

  “Don’t worry, Roger,” Philips had replied. “I’ll give you my personal guarantee that we’ll bring it back in one piece.”

  “I don’t know…” Cranley had wavered.

  “Okay,” Bliss had said, apparently giving in. “As long as you can live with the blood of two women on your hands.”

  “We could get twenty years apiece for doing this,” Phillips continues as they head south with Daisy tailing them in the rented Toyota.

  “Stop worrying, Mike. It’s an unregistered vehicle,” Bliss reminds him. “Anyway, think of the press coverage we’d get: two foreign cops riding to the rescue of a couple of defenceless women being held prisoner by the U.S. government.”

  “If they are…” says Phillips, still not completely convinced.

  While “prisoners” may correctly describe the women’s status, “defenceless” is an epithet that could get Bliss into a lot of trouble were he to repeat it in their presence. And now that they are refreshed and reunited, it is a state of affairs Daphne and Trina are working to rectify.

  “Maybe we should do an experiment,” suggests Daphne, still with her eyes on the surveillance camera, and Trina jumps in enthusiastically.

  “I know!” she says, and seconds later she has upended her bed and is making a flamboyant show of dismantling the metal frame using a table knife.

  “I thought so,” muses Daphne a few minutes later when there is no reaction from the guards. “Give me the knife,” she says, and she makes her way to the door and starts sawing throu
gh the adjacent wall. “If we can get to the door-lock control panel we should be able to create a short circuit,” she explains as she hacks away lumps of plasterboard.

  “How do you know all this stuff?” asks Trina incredulously.

  “I’ve been very lucky,” Daphne laughs. “I’ve never had a husband.” Then she turns to the younger woman. “You used to kick-box, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I still do.”

  “Okay,” says Daphne, already feeling a glow of victory as she digs deeper into the wall and strikes the electronic locking mechanism. “It’s time we took the upper hand. This time we’ll go out fighting.”

  “That’s about it, sir,” says Dawson, arriving back at the surveillance room after leading Station Chief Montague in an innocuous circle. Then the security head smiles as he adds in relief, “See, no little green men. Just like I told you.”

  “It’s not the green ones I’m worried about, John,” says Montague, refusing to be humoured, and he takes another thoughtful look at the patients on the surveillance monitors, wondering why he’d not bumped into any during his tour. “Just how many inmates do you have here, precisely?”

  “You make them sound like prisoners,” laughs Dawson. “Look at them,” he adds, tapping a screen where the happy-faced mah-jongg players are bantering over their play. “They’re all very willing volunteers.”

  “Then why all the razor wire and armed goons?”

  “The place is like a concentration camp,” Bliss warns his Canadian counterpart as they turn off the highway and drive the forested road into the foothills.

  “Another reason why I still think we should ask the locals for help,” answers Phillips.

  “Mike!” exclaims Bliss in exasperation. “I already tried that — remember? — and all I got was the bum’s rush. Anyway, now that we’ve nicked a CIA motor, Prudenski and his mob wouldn’t need an excuse to bang us up.”

  “We’ve only borrowed it, Dave,” Phillips reminds him. “But I still don’t see how we’re going to get in.”

  “We’ll just have to keep our heads down,” replies Bliss. However, he’s praying that the transponder stuck to the windshield will open the gates and clear a path through the minefield of tire shredders and armed guards, although he does have an insurance policy. “Pull over there,” he says to Phillips as he spots the bar where he’d met the amused woodsman the night the Kidneymobile disappeared.

  “Give us exactly two hours,” he tells Daisy as he settles her in the saloon with a coffee and he hands her a list of phone numbers headed by those of CNN, the CBC and the BBC that he’d had Phillips draw up before leaving the border. “If we’re not back, call Roger Cranley and the television people first,” he tells her. “Then call the British and Canadian embassies in Washington.”

  “Daavid,” she says worriedly. “Please be careful.”

  “I will…” he starts, but she grabs his shirt and hauls him to her lips.

  “Daavid,” she whispers, barely breaking her kiss.

  “Yes…” he sighs as he drinks in the sweet warmth of her breath.

  “Please throw zhat jacket away.”

  Martin Montague is on his way out through the front doors, although he’s still uneasy with the spotty information he’s received and the fact that, despite his desire to talk to patients and staff, Dawson has managed to head him off with darkly worded admonitions about the need for secrecy.

  “I hope for your sake that this place is on the level,” Montague says in a final warning as Dawson begins to close the door on him. But then the visitor stops and peers downs a lengthy corridor lined with closed doors. “What’s down there?” he questions. “You didn’t take me down there.”

  “It’s just patients’ rooms,” shrugs Dawson. “You saw them on the monitors.”

  “Show me,” insists Montague, turning down the hallway.

  “Sorry — I can’t,” explains Dawson, pointing to the security keypad by the side of each door. “I don’t have the codes. And we could jeopardize an entire program if we introduced a virus.”

  “Yeah, right,” says Montague, but he keeps walking anyway.

  The true extent of Daphne Lovelace’s electrical engineering experience may be the replacement of a blown fuse in the cupboard under the stairs of her tidy house in Westchester, but she is undaunted as she beavers away at the wallboard until she has exposed all of the wires.

  “Now what?” whispers Tina as she leans over the elderly saboteur’s shoulder and peers at the myriad of coloured strands snaking to and from the control unit to various locks and sensors.

  “It’s very interesting,” says Daphne, as if she knows exactly what she’s looking at and merely needs a moment to decide what action will best achieve the desired outcome.

  “You do know about these things?” questions Trina, with a touch of concern.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” lies Daphne, then she confidently wriggles a bunch of the wires, adding, “I learnt how to defuse land mines and make fertilizer bombs during the war, you know.”

  “Wow!” says Trina, taking a step backwards as if expecting the panel to explode.

  However, the computer-controlled electronic sensing and locking mechanism is a world away from the primitive devices Daphne had worked on during her training as a resistance fighter in 1942, and even with an instruction manual she would have difficulty sorting out the multitude of wires.

  “When in doubt…” she muses to herself, then firmly grasps half a dozen wires and calls to Trina, “Are you ready?”

  “I think so,” says the other woman, as she limbers up with a few high kicks.

  “Okay,” says Daphne with her eyes closed and her grip tightening. “Get ready.”

  The sound of a lock clicking open spins Montague towards the women’s door. He turns just as the door flies open, and Trina lets out a scream as she kick-boxes her way into the corridor.

  “What the —” starts Montague, but he is totally off-guard as Trina leaps into the air and slams a foot into his face.

  “Oh, Christ,” mutters Dawson as he bends to help his falling comrade, but Daphne is also in fighting mode. She rushes out of the room and slams him over the head with a chair.

  “Run, Trina!” yells Daphne, but Montague’s beefy henchman acts as a backstop and, with the element of surprise gone, the two women are powerless.

  “Okay… So, shall we start again, Mr. Dawson?” says Montague with twists of blood-soaked Kleenex stopping up his nose.

  Resigned, Dawson deflates into his chair in the surveillance room. “Yes. All right.”

  “What the hell were you planning on doing with them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?!” screeches Montague.

  “All right — we were going to liquidate them,” admits Dawson.

  “Brilliant strategy,” scoffs Montague. “No wonder half the world thinks we’re a bunch of cowboys.”

  “Look, sir. We screwed up, okay? But we had it under control until that English cop slipped his leash and started mouthing off to the press.”

  “Anything can happen when an agent goes rogue,” agrees Montague, though he has his eyes on Dawson, not Bliss.

  “Maybe we could do a deal with them — get them to sign something and let them go,” suggests Dawson, brightening.

  “You might have been able to in the first few hours. You should have just put them in a car and driven them to a hotel.”

  “I know that now,” cries Dawson. “The trouble was that the old bird caught on right away.”

  The shrill ringing of the hotline from the gatehouse alerts Dawson to the possibility of more bad news, and he is tempted to let it go, but Montague picks up the phone and hands it to him, then watches the junior man’s reaction.

  “Well?” asks Montague when Dawson has taken the brief call.

  “It’s nothing, sir,” he says, controlling his face.

  “Just one of our delivery drivers hasn’t reported in on schedule, that’s all. Hi
s van’s probably broken down.”

  Buzzer’s van appears to be working perfectly, though Bliss and Phillips are unaware of the radio protocol that the CIA operative would have followed had he still been with his vehicle.

  “It’s only about a mile from here,” says Bliss as he pulls off the road into a clearing from whence they can finalize their assault. “I just hope that Daisy doesn’t jump the gun.”

  “She seems pretty sensible,” says Phillips, trying to ease the tension.

  “The best I’ve ever met,” admits Bliss. “And if I get out of this mess in one piece — well, who knows.”

  “So. How do we get out?” questions Phillips, hoping Bliss has a plan, but beyond slipping through the gates in Buzzer’s guise, Bliss is as much in the dark as his colleague.

  “We’ll just have to play it by ear,” he replies. “I’m just hoping that they rely on the perimeter defences for security. Once we’re inside, we should be safe.”

  “Until we try to get out,” adds Phillips ominously.

  “Oh, well. Here goes,” says Bliss, turning the key. But nothing happens.

  “Shit!” he mutters, and both men immediately know the problem.

  “It’s got an ignition cut-out switch,” suggests Phillips, and he’s not at all surprised when, milliseconds later, a piercing security alarm sends a murder of raucous crows into the air above the surrounding forest.

  Half an hour later the two detectives are still tinkering under the hood of the van, while, not far away, Daphne and Trina have been elevated to a new world. Dawson has squeezed a gathering of surgeons out of their private lounge, and, while Montague’s right-hand man might be standing sentinel at the door, the station chief is, in his own words to the women, “determined to establish who is responsible for this unfortunate situation, and taking every possible step to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion as soon as circumstances permit.”

  “That was a mouthful,” Daphne had muttered under her breath as Montague left.

  “I wish I hadn’t kicked him so hard now,” says Trina as she tucks into a plate of smoked-salmon sandwiches. “He looked kind’a pathetic with that tissue stuck up his nose.”