In two strides Owen was across the room, Derrick’s shirtfront in his fist as he pressed his friend against the wall and spoke slowly and quietly. “Let me make this perfectly clear, mate, and you can relay the whole thing to the powers that be. I’m out. Done. Finished. I will not do this job or anything else for MI6 as long as my wife is in the hands of a sadistic terrorist. My poor wife who doesn’t even know I’m an agent, and is probably so scared right now that she can’t see straight.”
Owen released Derrick and stepped back. He turned and looked at Alicia who stood silently next to the dressing table, arms folded tightly across her chest. “Do you know what Hassam does to women agents?” he asked her.
Alicia swallowed once then looked down at the floor.
“Yeah, I thought you’d seen that report. If there’s even one chance in a million that he’s got her I can’t wait, I’ve got to go after them.” With that, Owen grabbed his wallet, and for reasons he didn’t understand at the time, his guitar. Then he strode through the door of the dressing room, down the hall, and outside into the chilly Paris night.
Chapter Six
London — Three Months Ago
Owen had been seeing Eva for three months when he first went to the MI6 administration to discuss marriage. Of course the agency had already investigated Eva thoroughly, followed her for several weeks, bugged her apartment, and recorded her phone conversations. It was standard protocol if an agent with Owen’s level of security clearance became involved with anyone outside of the agency. Even after a friend or lover was cleared, the agency would often do random checks on a yearly basis, just to make sure that nothing had slipped by or developed while their agents were being chummy with individuals outside of the intelligence world.
However, in order to get married, an agent like Owen had to go through a whole battery of tests and approvals. The first step was speaking with at least two department directors in order to receive the “parked or dark” speech. Owen asked Herb, as Director of Courier Services, to sit in on his meeting, as well as the Director of Technology, Vic Davis, a tall, rangy man with longish curling dark hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion that gave away his Irish heritage. Vic and Owen had known each other since university and had even roomed together at one point.
“So, Owen,” Vic began once they were all three seated in a conference room twenty floors up in one of London’s few high-rises. “I have to say I was pretty surprised to hear you wanted a ‘park or dark’ meeting. I didn’t even realize you were seeing anyone seriously.”
There was no reproach in his voice, but Owen knew that if anyone should have been apprised personally of Eva’s existence, it was Vic. It wasn’t a matter of protocol; it was a matter of friendship. As it stood, Herb had not only heard about Eva, but had even met her once. Vic hadn’t known she existed. Guilt seeped into his awareness and he tried to shake it off like he’d shaken off similar moments of conscience so many times in the last decade. Unfortunately it didn’t seem to work as well as it used to.
“He’s not seeing her seriously,” Herb interjected. “Perhaps he’s seriously mental, but he’s not seriously seeing an interior decorator from Kansas. It just isn’t possible.”
“Piss off, Herb,” Owen said, only partially joking. “To answer you, Vic, I’ve only been seeing her for about three months, and I haven’t really talked to anyone about it. Honestly, I’ve been so taken up in the whole thing I haven’t come up for air — if you know what I mean.” Owen winked at Vic who responded with the expected smirk. “The last couple of weeks I’ve realized that I’m just not going to be happy until I can be with her permanently. You know if I’m gone all the time it just leaves the door open for some wanker to move in on my territory; it’s not that I don’t trust her, but she’s a serious catch, mate. I wouldn’t trust you within a mile of her.”
Vic chuckled quietly while Herb groaned in disgust, stood up from his seat and began pacing the small conference space.
“Needless to say, we’ve read the file on her,” Vic continued, “and there’s nothing there to make her unacceptable to the agency, but I’m kind of surprised, mate. Most agents end up with someone who’s in an affiliated career — military, police, tech security, something like that. I mean you lads and lasses don’t have that many opportunities to meet ordinary folks it seems. How’d you end up with an interior decorator from Kansas City?”
“He was trolling Portobello Road looking for some doilies to spiff up his flat.” Herb smirked.
“Blimey,” Owen barked, “will you stuff a sock in it?”
Herb pantomimed a key locking his lips as Owen glared at him.
“I realize Eva’s not the usual type of agency wife,” Owen told Vic, “but I walked into a Tesco and there she was. I don’t question the Fates when they throw a beautiful, witty blonde in my path, you know?”
“Yeah,” Vic said, looking wistful, elbow on the conference table, chin resting in his hand, “when it rains beautiful blondes it’s pretty tough to turn them away.” He sighed, shook himself, and sat up straighter. “I guess we’d better read you the policies then.”
Outside the windows a dreary English day unfolded, clouds scurrying across the sky as gusts of wind shimmied around the office buildings of The City, London’s financial district. Owen studied his two friends for a moment, briefly remembering times when each of these men had saved his life. When you worked for MI6 nothing lasted, not friendships, romances, homes, or journeys; they were all brief, transitory, fleeting. Yet, with Vic and Herb, Owen had lived lifetimes, endured tragedy and joy, and sometimes even felt that they actually knew one another.
Vic nudged the stack of papers he had laid in front of him on the table and picked up a pen. “So, page one is mostly just standard agency gibberish, but if you’ll look at page two … ”
“No need,” Owen interrupted suddenly. “I already know which option I’m taking.”
“Oh?” said Vic.
“I’ll keep her in the dark,” Owen said.
“Oh bloody hell!” Herb nearly shouted from where he stood next to Vic. He threw his arms up in frustration. “Are you mental? You want to drag Barbie along on missions now?”
Owen narrowed his eyes and stood up out of his seat, leaning on the table toward Herb. “I may love you like a father, but that won’t keep me from beating the crap out of you if you refer to my future wife that way again.”
“Quit being such a wanker, Herb,” Vic chastised. “And Owen, lighten up, you know he’s just jealous. He hasn’t gotten shagged in at least a decade so he’s got to take it out on someone.”
Owen sat back down in his seat, shaking his head. He rubbed his hand over his face, then ran it through his thick hair. “Herb, do you have something you want to say about this decision of mine … not that you get any say in my love life, but since we’re mates I’m willing to listen to your views … if they’re respectful.”
An obviously chagrined Herb walked over to the windows. He stuffed his hands in his front trouser pockets while he kept his back to Owen and Vic. “I guess this whole thing just doesn’t fit with who I’ve known you to be all these years,” he began, with a somewhat gravelly voice. “I mean you’re one of the least sentimental agents we’ve got. Whenever we need someone who can keep personal feelings out of a job, we look to you first. Owen Martin’s known for being a great guy at a pub, but a heartless bastard at work: someone who will get the job done no matter how nasty the business may be.”
Vic glanced up at Owen and when their eyes met Owen saw pity flash across his friend’s face. It made his stomach churn for a moment.
Herb continued, “Now you’re telling us you’re not only in love with someone who is as far from our world as she could be, but also that you want to try to incorporate her into this world secretly? You want to drag a sweet, small-town girl from the States along to cities all over the world as you go to clandestine meetings with rebel militants and foreign spies? And never tip her off? It’s just a little much to take
in, Owen.”
Guilt again washed over Owen as Herb finally turned from the windows and looked directly at him. He could hear all that Herb wasn’t saying just as clearly as what he had said. What the hell kind of love could he claim to have for Eva if he was willing to drag her into his world against her will? It was a violent, secretive, manipulative place. It was everything that Eva was not.
Vic shifted his gaze from Herb to Owen. Quietly, as if he were speaking to a tired toddler, he said, “I realize we’ve gone beyond the standard questions and answers here, but you chose the two of us to do this with because we’re your mates, not just anonymous department directors. I have no problem seeing true love when it’s in the room, but Herb’s obviously much less romantic than I am, and he’s got some good points.”
“All right,” Owen began, looking first at Vic, then at Herb, who had resumed his seat at the table. “What you say is true. I have been a heartless bastard … for nearly a decade now, and I’ve been fine with that. I mean, my parents are dead, my only sibling lives hours away, has her own family, and was never all that interested in me anyway. It wasn’t hard to be heartless.”
He ran his hand through his hair again absentmindedly, and then clenched his hands together atop the table in an effort to control his body, if not his emotions. “Yeah, it was always easy to be heartless. I worked, I partied; it was simple. There was always plenty of excitement, plenty of women, and plenty of money, and I figured nothing else mattered.”
He stood up, nearly overturning his chair. Steadying it quickly, he grabbed his water bottle, sipping periodically as he walked the perimeter of the room. “You know, the real killer of the whole thing has always been that the agency likes me that way. I figured as long as I was getting rewarded for it, what could be so wrong?”
Owen returned to his seat and folded his long legs under the table as he sat.
“But,” Vic said, “then you met Eva.”
“But then I met Eva,” Owen echoed, “and I realized that I was starting to lose my humanity.”
Herb rolled his eyes and Vic did something under the table that sounded suspiciously like a shoe hitting a shinbone. Herb winced, and glared at Vic, before smoothing out his face and looking at Owen in a way that seemed to be an attempt at appearing encouraging.
Owen looked between the two men across the table from him. “Are you done?” They both nodded. “Well, as I was trying to say, there was this part of me that I’d been ignoring for the last ten years, the part that remembers I had a family once upon a time. I had a mum and a dad who loved me, friends who played football with me, girlfriends who weren’t trying to get money or information out of me. There were people I cared about and who cared about me. When I heard Eva talk about her family, or watched her pick up some little gift for a friend back home, I thought about what I’d been missing all these years.”
At this point, even Herb listened quietly, and if someone had looked closely at Vic they might have seen a tiny bit of extra moisture in his left eye.
Owen continued. “Something about Eva’s world is so ‘ordinary’ if you will, that she’s really special. She reminds me that the world isn’t all deceit and using people and living like a nomad. When I’m with her I feel like I have a home for the first time since my mum and dad died, and I like it. I don’t want to be without a home again. I lived like that for too long.”
“Christ,” Herb muttered. “What a bunch of girlie crap. Just give me the paperwork and tell me where to sign.”
“Thanks, mate,” Owen said. “I’m just not sure that she’d stick around if she learned the truth. I need to do it this way. I can’t risk losing her.”
Vic sniffed and cleared his throat then he and Owen both broke out laughing. The forms were signed, and as the three men stood up, Owen looked at them both fondly. He didn’t see them often, and they weren’t the usual kind of mates, but then he wasn’t the usual kind of chap.
“The White Stag?” he asked, and they both answered “Yeah.”
They slouched down the hallways of Britain’s most top-secret offices, past rooms filled with information that could start nuclear wars, and people trained to kill with nothing more than a nail file. Then they all went to the pub down the block, where they drank enough to prove to themselves that they were still tough blokes, even if one of them had fallen madly in love with a sweet blonde from Kansas City.
Chapter Seven
Paris — 1:15 9 September
When Eva awoke she was lying on a hard floor, with something dripping in her eyes. She blinked then shook her head slightly, feeling woozy as she did so. She started to sit up but quickly realized she was tethered to the floor. She heard the low rumble of men talking nearby and turned her head again, more carefully this time, to see who was in the room with her. When she did, she realized that she was not in a typical room, but rather a space that must be underground.
There was no natural light, and the air was strangely cool and musty. Above her she could hear a distant and constant rumble. The sound reminded her of the noise of cars driving over the bridge she had sat under in the backseat of Jimmy O’Donnell’s Honda Accord one night her senior year in high school. She’d always remembered that sound because it had accompanied her first orgasm.
The space she was lying in was walled and floored in bricks and stone, but with an arched ceiling that dripped water and a river of sorts that ran parallel to her about twenty feet away. She was immediately reminded of the guidebook descriptions she had read about the catacombs under Paris, vast networks of tunnels that had sat under the city for centuries, portions of which were still open as a tourist attraction.
The men were the same three giants she’d seen at the theater. They were joined by a tall thin man dressed in black and holding an oar. A mixture of panic and rage coursed through her, and without pausing to think, Eva cleared her throat and started screaming.
The sound of her shrill tones bounced from wall to wall, ceiling to floor, reverberating until even she thought her ears might burst open. One of the men was so startled when she started shrieking that he clutched at his chest, stumbled backwards, and fell straight into the river. While he splashed, frantically yelling in a foreign language, the other two giants fell to their knees, covering their ears and scrunching their eyes shut. However, the tall, thin man strode over to Eva, yelling as he came closer, “By all that is holy, muzzle that infernal woman!”
By the time he reached her, Eva was forced to take a breath, her last scream still echoing off the hard surfaces surrounding her. As the thin man stood above her, Eva opened up her mouth, taking a huge breath in preparation for her next vocal purging.
The man pointed a finger down at her and growled, “Not. Another. Sound. So help me, I will throw you in the river with the sticks and the garbage and the rats! Did you know rats can swim? And eat things while they swim … like flesh.”
Eva’s impending scream vanished into a squeak and she laid there, her eyes wide, lips clamped shut, waiting for his next proclamation.
Across the room splashing and groaning could be heard as the wet giant dragged himself out of the river water. He spat several times and then started yelling at the other two men in what Eva now suspected from the sound of it, was Arabic.
Eva looked up at the thin man as he glared down at her and barked out, “Now, if you keep your trap shut, I’ll let you stand up.”
When Eva nodded, he bent to release the straps holding her to the floor. He used the cuffs on her wrists to yank her to her feet.
“I’m Charles, you’ll be coming with me. We’re going in the boat over there. Just enjoy the ride and keep your mouth shut; remember the rats.”
Charles took her arm and none too gently pulled her over to the edge of the water. The three giants leered at her, and the one who had fallen in the river bared his teeth and snarled. Eva narrowed her eyes at him and then stuck out her tongue in response. The giant’s mouth dropped open and his eyes widened in shock. Before he could make a m
ove however, Charles shoved her into the boat and took the seat facing her. He began rowing with the large oar, paddling first on one side of the boat then the other, his pasty face never hinting at anything other than boredom.
Eva watched the three giants draw farther away, shouting at her all the while. As the cavern around them grew darker, Eva had a thought that she should remember what she could about her surroundings in case she got a chance to escape, but within a few minutes it was so black she couldn’t see Charles three feet away, much less anything else.
The quiet lapping of the water against the oars was the only sound she heard after the giants’ voices faded. The damp air was cold, and she believed Charles when he said the river was full of garbage, because the odor was strong and putrid.
Eva remained quiet, as the idea of ending up in the river of foulness didn’t appeal to her at all, but she was pissed; how dare these people imprison her like this? She couldn’t imagine why they’d taken her. It obviously wasn’t any kind of ordinary abduction. They could have raped her or killed her by now if that’s what they wanted to do. Were they some sort of sadists who were planning to torture her? Somehow she didn’t think so. Not that she thought they’d have any opposition to torturing her; she just didn’t think that was the reason they’d grabbed her.
So, why would anyone kidnap her? Maybe they thought that since Owen was an entertainer he was also wealthy? Or could it be as simple as her American citizenship? She knew there were lots of groups around the world who would snatch an American as a political statement if they had the chance. Just who the hell were these men and what did they want with her?
Then she thought of Owen. What must he be going through right now having found her missing? It made her heart ache. But, he would be looking for her, and he would get help. Since the first time they’d made love, Eva had known deep in her heart that Owen was the one man in this world who would always take care of her. He was loving and loyal; he always did what he said he would, and she trusted him completely. She had to believe that she would be with him again soon.
Love, Lies, and British Spies Page 5
