SAVE THE QUEEN: AN ALEX HALEE AND JAMIE AUSTEN SPY THRILLER (THE SPY STORIES Book 4)

by Terry Toler

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said, wanting to change the subject. I walked over to Jamie and took her in my arms and tried to give her a seductive kiss.

  She pushed me away which startled me.

  “Hey!”

  “You stink,” she said, lifting her arm and smelling herself. We had been out in the hot and humid London heat for most of the afternoon and then were stuck in a dank MI5 interrogation room for the better part of three hours.

  “So do I,” Jamie said. “I’m taking a shower. You can take one after me.”

  Before I knew it, she was in the bathroom and the shower was running. That gave me time to continue to think about Pok. I hated it when those nagging feelings consumed me. More often than not, they were right. If I ignored them, I usually regretted it. I had to keep reminding myself that we were on our honeymoon and not on a mission.

  More than likely, I was just being paranoid.

  Who could blame me after what I saw happen on that subway car?

  But… my job wasn’t to protect all of London from terrorist attacks. They had tens of thousands of intelligence agents, police officers, and operatives who could take on that job. Mick Weaver seemed capable. That brought a smile to my face. The man was good. He knew right away we were CIA. Denying it didn’t fool him. He might even put a tail on us tomorrow. British tails weren’t always easy to spot unless we took evasive measures. If we did, Weaver would know for sure we were operatives.

  Former operatives.

  What were we? I couldn’t get used to the fact that we were no longer with the CIA.

  It didn’t matter. Tomorrow was going to be an uneventful day. I had convinced myself that the events of the day were coincidences.

  Tomorrow, we’d go sightseeing. Get this honeymoon started.

  No! Not tomorrow. Starting tonight!

  I didn’t hear the water running. Five minutes later, Jamie walked out of the bathroom in a silky white nightgown.

  “Do you like it?” she said.

  “No,” I replied, standing from the bed and walking toward her. “I don’t like it. I love it!”

  “I bought it special. For our wedding night. It’s a surprise for you. I hope you do love it.”

  I did. When I got to her, I intended to show her how much I loved it.

  “Don’t touch me!” she said as she put her hand on my chest and pushed me away. “I just took a shower. I put on perfume just for you. Don’t ruin it.”

  She did smell good. Some kind of flowery fragrance was filling the room.

  “I won’t be long,” I said excitedly as I rushed into the bathroom.

  I saw Jamie yawn as I took one more look at her before I closed the door.

  This’ll be the fastest shower I’ve ever taken.

  ***

  It wasn’t the fastest shower I’d ever taken.

  The hot pulsating water felt too good to just get in and out. Plus, halfway through the shower, the thought hit me like a semi-truck. What if Pok somehow hacked into London's security camera system? What if he was following us on the cameras?

  My imagination began to run wild like a stallion let loose on a range in Wyoming.

  The code started appearing in my mind. Numbers and characters were forming into concise and orderly patterns. I was trying to figure out how I would hack into the London camera system.

  Is it possible?

  No!

  Why not?

  Jamie said that there were over six-hundred-thousand cameras in London. Did Jamie say that? I suddenly couldn’t remember if she said it or if I’d read it somewhere. Didn’t matter. The point was that there were cameras everywhere. If Pok was in Iran, he could coordinate these attacks with Iranian sleeper cells.

  The airport! Our plane reservation.

  Did Pok change it? If so, he’d know when we were arriving. He’d guess we were taking the tube to central London. He might even know our hotel reservation.

  How? He wouldn’t know our last name. As far as I knew, he didn’t know Jamie was my fiancé.

  And my email was secure. My firewalls were impenetrable. That was a ridiculous thought. No code made by man was foolproof. Of course, anything could be hacked into. Just because we haven’t done it, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Same with the security cameras. I’m sure London has taken extreme precautions. Still… a man like Pok might be able to penetrate them.

  I scrubbed my head with shampoo.

  Didn’t I already wash my hair?

  My mind was a jumbled mess. I had too many things going at once. The questions were hitting me faster than machine-gun fire.

  How did Pok hack into my cell phone and find out our wedding plans?

  Was he behind changing the florist? The limo?

  Did he hack into Curly’s cell phone and change the date? That seemed possible. Curly’s phone was from the dark ages.

  How did Pok hack into my phone and change the text to curly? When I looked at the thread, my text to Curly said Wednesday. I would swear on a stack of Bibles in a court of law I texted him Tuesday as the day of our wedding.

  A panic rushed through me as fast as the pulsating jets which were pounding my body.

  How did Pok hack into London’s security camera system?

  Jamie is waiting for me!

  Am I imagining the whole thing?

  How long have I been in the shower?

  Judging by my hands, which were starting to wrinkle, I’d been in the shower too long. Jamie wouldn’t be happy.

  I rinsed one last time and turned off the water. After toweling off, I brushed my teeth. Jamie didn’t like for me to wear cologne, so I didn’t put any on. The robe with the word His on it hung on a hook on the door. Jamie had obviously done that for my benefit.

  Suddenly, thoughts of Pok and hacking were a distant memory.

  Finally, I was going to get to be with my wife. I had to make sure I was in the right frame of mind. Part of me wanted to pull out my laptop and start seeing if hacking into the London camera system was even possible. The other half thought I was crazy. The most beautiful girl in the world to me was waiting on the other side of the door.

  I took a deep breath. Two of them. Suddenly, I felt nervous. My hand shook. My heart raced. I couldn’t remember ever being this nervous. I looked at myself in the mirror. You got this!

  I flipped off the bathroom light and walked into the bedroom area of our luxurious suite. What a perfect setting for our first time. The lights were dimmed. Jamie was under the covers.

  “Honey,” I said gently as I got into bed next to her.

  No response. She was sound asleep!

  10

  Day Two

  The next morning

  The first night sleeping in a bed with my new bride had not gone at all like I’d envisioned it. The next morning, I woke up about thirty seconds before Jamie did. When I opened my eyes, we were facing each other, our heads twelve to fourteen inches apart. Her being the first thing I saw that morning brought a flood of joy into my heart. I lifted my head slightly to see the time.

  8:26.

  We’d slept nearly ten hours. Much needed rest. While we still hadn’t “slept” together in the Hollywood sense, or “laid” together in the biblical sense, I still felt intimate with her. We slept together in the same bed for the first time, and it felt good to wake up next to her.

  Jamie must’ve felt the movement because she slowly opened her eyes. She smiled when she saw me.

  What happened next shouldn’t have been a surprise. How movies and television depict couples waking up in bed together were not at all realistic and bordered on the absurd. After a long night of sleep, the first thing they often did was start kissing passionately and ravaging each other with lovemaking.

  Within seconds of Jamie seeing me, both of us, at the exact same moment, put our hands over our mouths, jerked our bodies away from each other so we had our backs to each other and then bolted out of bed. The last thing I wanted was for my new bride to smell the foul odor com
ing from my mouth. A broken garbage disposal wouldn’t smell worse.

  She must’ve been thinking the same thing because she was across the room as far away as possible from me. Her hand was no longer on her mouth but was in her hair, straightening it.

  Horrified, I made a bee line for that bathroom and beat her to it. After brushing my teeth vigorously, I gargled twice with mouthwash. My hair was also mussed, and I straightened it. Grungy sleep gunk had crusted on my eyelids. I brushed them off.

  Only then did I surrender the bathroom.

  Jamie went right in after me and was in there for a good five minutes. When she came out, she looked more like herself. I came up to her to give her the first kiss of the day. She pushed me away.

  “I haven’t brushed my teeth yet. Trust me. You don’t want to kiss me.”

  “You were in there for five minutes. I figured you were brushing your teeth.”

  “I don’t like to until I’ve had my coffee.”

  The room had a coffee maker, Jamie walked over to it and was looking through the various brands.

  “Decaf!” she said with disgust. “I’m not having that. I need caffeine.” She found what she was looking for and put it in the coffee maker.

  “How come you don’t want to brush your teeth before you have coffee?” I asked.

  “The mint in the toothpaste ruins the taste.”

  Something I didn’t know about her. I suddenly realized my fantasy of a lifetime of morning sex was dashed on the first day. It also didn’t take long to realize Jamie was also not a morning person. I knew that, but not to this extent. When I woke up, I was raring to go. Jamie was groggy. Almost punch drunk. She got back into bed, laid her head down on the pillow and closed her eyes.

  Not until the beep of the coffeemaker, did I see signs of life in her again. With each sip, her eyes opened a little wider, and her speech got a little more coherent. By the end of the first cup, she was almost back to her old self. After a second cup, she was ready to take on the world.

  “I’m famished!” she said.

  I suddenly felt it too. My stomach growled. We hadn’t eaten since afternoon tea at Kensington Palace.

  Jamie disappeared into the bathroom again. This time when she came out, she was dressed for breakfast. Her teeth were brushed, and she laid a big kiss on me, sending a wave of desire through my body like I’d been hit by a lightning bolt. I kissed her harder.

  “I’m so sorry I fell asleep on you last night,” she said. “I feel really bad. It was supposed to be our wedding night.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “The day certainly didn’t go like we’d planned.

  “Let’s go have some breakfast,” she said excitedly. “Then we can come back to the room. It’ll be fun.” She winked at me as she said it.

  “I thought you wanted our first time to be at night.”

  “It’s nighttime somewhere.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with that logic.

  ***

  The breakfast buffet at the Palace Hotel was spectacular. The hostess explained the intricacies of it.

  “A full English breakfast is called a ‘fry-up,’ she explained. “In Ireland it’s sometimes called a chub.”

  Jamie and I looked at each other with the same fascination.

  “We have a hot and a cold breakfast. Hot includes eggs and meats. We have baked beans, bubble and squeaks.”

  She must’ve seen the look of confusion on our faces because she said, “potatoes and cabbage.”

  Then it became like a game to her as she clearly found amusement in throwing out names we didn’t know.

  Black pudding was sausage. Sausage could also be called bangers or hog’s pudding.

  Tattie scones were potatoes. Haggis and oatcakes were also on the menu. Soda bread. An Irish bread, she explained.

  We learned that a traditional English breakfast consisted of more than forty interchangeable items. Eggy bread, crumpets, jolly boys, which she explained were pancakes. Crempog—Welsh pancakes. Every kind of imaginable bread was included.

  “Do you have English muffins?” I asked jokingly in my fake British accent, much to Jamie’s chagrin based on the groan she let out. The waitress didn’t seem to mind.

  “Of course,” she said. “Complete with every possible compliment.”

  I assumed compliments were jams, jellies, butter, and cream cheese. Among other things.

  “The buffet also had a variety of fish dishes,” the lady continued. “Including kippers, which are herring, arbroath smokies or smoked haddock, kedgeree, a curried fish dish, and deviled kidneys.”

  I didn’t ask what deviled kidneys were, and didn’t want to know, since I planned on avoiding all of the fish dishes. “Everything sounds good and all, but just give me a plateful of eggs, sausage, and hash browns.”

  “You’re such a man,” Jamie said. “I want to try one of everything.”

  Before I knew it, she was at the huge presentation, going from each section to look at all of the delicacies.

  “Look, they have caviar! And champagne! I’m going to need more than one plate.”

  “Pace yourself,” I said. “You can always come back for more.”

  They had more different things on the buffet than I could eat in a week. I remembered thinking that it was a good thing we were going to be there for five days. The breakfast buffet might be one of the memorable highlights of our trip.

  How were we going to make love for the first time after stuffing ourselves with so much food? What we’d really need to do was go for a five-mile run to burn it off.

  When I was halfway through my third plateful, I saw them.

  A couple.

  American.

  Walking into the restaurant.

  The spitting image of us.

  He was tall, muscular, with sandy blond hair. Clearly a football player either now or in his college days. Looked like a California beach dude. She was drop-dead-model gorgeous. Tall as well. Thin. Perfect features. Blondish hair. When she walked, she glided across the room like a swan moving effortless across a pond.

  Since I’d known Jamie, there were only a handful of times when she wasn’t the prettiest girl in the room. This was one of those times, although I wouldn’t say that to her face.

  “Look over toward the door,” I said to Jamie. “Discreetly.”

  She turned her head slightly. We were trained how to notice things without being noticed. She must’ve been thinking the same thing because she let out a wow.

  “That couple looks familiar,” I said.

  “She’s a famous model. What’s her name? I know it. It’s not a name. It’s an initial. Q. W. T. Oh! It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  Everyone in the entire restaurant was staring at the woman, so I didn’t feel out of place doing the same. A couple of young girls, maybe ten or eleven years old. went up to the lady and asked for her autograph. She graciously provided them one. Then a selfie. A small crowd gathered around her. She greeted every one of them and gave an autograph until the last person left satisfied.

  Her smile was mesmerizing. Not the least bit pretentious. The man stood dutifully to the side. Like he was used to it.

  They went through the buffet. As they entered the eating area with the tables, they walked straight toward ours. That startled me for a moment. If the man hadn’t had a huge grin on his face, I might’ve wondered if something was up. Out of habit, we were sitting at a table with our backs against the wall. Typical CIA protocol.

  “Is your name Alex Halee?” he asked.

  How did he know my name? We were traveling under the names Alex and Jamie Steele.

  Before I could answer he said, “My name is Tad Gentry.” He sat his plate down on the table and extended his hand. I wiped mine on a napkin and then shook it.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “I played football at UCLA. You were starting quarterback for Stanford. I played against you. Well, not really. I was a freshman. You were a senior. I got in fo
r a few plays.”

  “Okay,” I said hesitantly but in a more friendly manner. With everything that had happened, my threat radar was on ten. It didn’t take long to realize he was probably who he said he was. A tourist on vacation. Jamie confirmed it even more in my mind when she confirmed the identity of the girl.

  “You’re a famous model,” Jamie said. “I’ve seen you on the cover of magazines.”

  “My name's Gina Garth,” she said humbly and meekly. “Well, Gina Garth Gentry, now.”

  “G! That’s the initial.” Jamie smacked the palm of her hand on her forehead. “I was trying to remember your name.”

  “That’s right. But my friends call me Gigi.”

  “Would you like to join us?” Jamie asked.

  That sent a groan through my head. I wished she’d asked me first. The plan had been to finish breakfast and go back to the room. My heartbeat slowed down considerably when they sat down.

  “What brings you to London?” Jamie asked.

  Gigi flashed her humongous wedding ring. “Honeymoon. We’re newlyweds. Can you tell? We just got married.” She snuggled up next to him with a hug then started to move food around on her plate. The contrast was startling. His plate was piled with food like mine. Hers was barely covered with only a few items. Unlike Jamie’s plate which was more like mine and Tad’s. Filled to overflowing.

  “When did you get into town?” Jamie asked.

  My bride was outgoing and friendly when she wanted to be. She could carry the conversation if she had to. If I didn’t curb it at some point, she’d spend two hours or more talking to them. People fascinated Jamie. She loved meeting new people. I had to admit that these two were more interesting than most.

  “We’ve been here for two days,” Gigi said in a sweet and silky voice that matched her pleasant smile. She really was stunning.

  “Have you seen any good sights that you would recommend?” I asked.

  Gigi looked at Tad with an embarrassed look. His was more of a satisfied smile. Almost a mischievous grin as his lips contorted and his eyes shifted back and forth.

  “We haven’t really left our room much,” Tad said almost embarrassingly. “If you know what I mean.”