Laynie Portland, Spy Rising—The Prequel

by Vikki Kestell

  “You will complete a circuit of ten puzzles, brainteasers, or logic problems—ten differing types and of varying difficulty. Each puzzle has an allotted max completion time. Your proctor will start you at a station within the circuit, and you will progress through the circuit until you have completed all ten stations.

  “Your proctor will record your time-to-completion or record your failure and will make notes on the approach you took to solve the puzzle. Take your places now.”

  Laynie’s proctor led her to the fourth puzzle in the circuit. Red was several stations ahead of her; Black was behind. Laynie had never had a particular interest in puzzles. She was suddenly concerned that she might fail.

  And fail she did.

  She could not solve the Rubik’s cube and came within a few seconds of finishing a slide puzzle—both fails. After two more similar physical brainteasers, Laynie was beginning to despair.

  Then came the logic problems, similar to math problems like the train going seventy miles an hour for twenty-seven miles to reach town versus a car going fifty-six miles an hour for thirteen miles: Who reaches town first? Similar, but more insidious.

  The Game Room’s logic problems were conundrums, such as, “A mother, a father, and two children need to cross a river. They find a boat nearby, but it is small and can carry either one adult or two children at any one time. Both children are good rowers, but how can the whole family reach the other side of the river?”

  Laynie’s mind slipped into a gear similar to the one when she’d run the obstacle course. She saw the dilemma clearly—and the solution appeared as easily. She scrawled her answer: “The children row together from the near shore to the far shore; one gets out, the other returns. One adult rows to the far shore, and the child on the far shore rows the boat back to the near shore. Both kids then row across, and only one returns to the near shore. The other adult rows across and the child on the far shore rows back to the near shore. Both children then row across to the far shore.”

  She put her pencil down. “Done.”

  Her proctor clicked her stopwatch and made notes.

  Laynie moved on to five other logic problems, solving each one within the allotted time.

  Interesting.

  The language assessment after that was also enlightening.

  She read aloud in Spanish, German, Swedish, and French, then conversed with four native speakers, each a trained linguist.

  “Well, you’ll never have to worry about passing as a native French woman,” the French linguist laughed.

  “I know. My accent is horrible. In my defense, I only took two years in high school before switching to German, whereas I took four years of Spanish and then chose Spanish and German for my college minor studies.”

  “For only two years of French study, you have a strong vocabulary and a nice grasp of French syntax—just not a great accent.”

  “Thanks.”

  Her Spanish linguist was more enthusiastic. “You have a facility and an ear for Spanish that seems to go beyond a second language. Have you done immersion study in a Spanish-speaking country?”

  “No; took a month-long trip to Spain my senior year of high school, but that’s it.”

  “Hmm. Did you spend time in a Spanish-speaking country during your language acquisition stage?”

  “Um, what is that, exactly?”

  “The ages in which children form and acquire their native languages, generally, one to five years old.”

  “I don’t think so, but I was adopted at three, and I don’t know where I lived before that.”

  “I see.” The linguist made some notes that Laynie wished she could read.

  I have no memories before Mama and Dad adopted us. Except for Care.

  Another thought occurred to her. Did I randomly choose Spanish as my first foreign language? Or, because of earlier influences I don’t remember, did it choose me?

  She shrugged. Guess I’ll never know.

  She did okay in her German language session, too, but it was the Swedish session that piqued her curiosity and reminded her of what her recruiters, Angela and Bert, had asked her.

  “Laynie, is your family, by chance, of Scandinavian descent? I ask because you have classic Scandinavian features—the height, blonde hair, and blue eyes.”

  After her Swedish session, their questions seemed to take on new meaning.

  Her Swedish linguist commented after their conversation, “While your grasp of the language is not deep, you have a lovely accent and inflection.”

  “My dad’s grandparents spoke Swedish to him and his parents, and he spoke it to my brother and to me. Although I wasn’t raised around them, my dad’s accent must have rubbed off on me.”

  The linguist nodded. “Well, I am certain it will serve you well.”

  Serve me well? Is that an indication of where I might be assigned, if I’m selected?

  When the language portion of their exam was complete, the candidates were returned to the lodge, where they dropped into the chairs around the unlit fireplace.

  “Man, I feel like I’ve run a marathon,” Black admitted.

  Laynie agreed. “I’d say so!”

  Red chipped in, “More like a decathlon.”

  “And we survived it,” Black added.

  “Survived it?” Laynie snorted. “We clobbered it.”

  They looked at each other and grinned.

  DINNER THAT EVENING took on a lighter atmosphere. Black, Red, and Laynie laughed about their obstacle course adventures, and Trammel didn’t discourage the banter that had developed between them.

  Black chuckled, “Green, when you launched Red to the top of that wall? Like a javelin! I thought she was gonna fly right over.”

  Red grinned. “Ten years of gymnastics will do that for ya.”

  Laynie realized before the others did that Red had “overshared.”

  With that, and with no fanfare, their time was over.

  Trammel glared at Red and stood. “Candidates, please return to your rooms, pack, and prepare to depart.”

  Black reacted first. “I understood we fly out tomorrow?”

  “You do. However, to minimize your interactions, you will be driven this evening to separate hotels in Baltimore, then conveyed to your flights in the morning.

  “This is merely a precaution against the natural tendency to deepen your acquaintances. Please guard against that tendency. If you are selected, it is possible, although unlikely, that you will encounter each other again, but you must never, in the field or out, endanger another agent by acknowledging a prior connection. Such a gaffe could prove fatal.

  “I will also remind you of the conditions of the NDA you signed. Please review and commit to memory the verbiage we provided to you to describe both Marstead and this weekend’s activities.”

  Trammel’s mouth widened into a smile—and Laynie thought the look incongruous after seeing nothing but his stern or implacable expressions for two days.

  “You’ll receive word from us in the near future regarding the status of your candidacy.”

  IT WAS CLOSE TO NINE o’clock when Laynie put her feet up in the nondescript Days Inn room Marstead had reserved for her. Her thoughts were on the past seventy-two hours. She felt like a major shift had taken place within her—that the experience had, in a tangible way, altered her, focused her as nothing before had.

  What will I do if Marstead doesn’t choose me? She didn’t like the idea at all; in fact, it disturbed her.

  She was surprised when a knock sounded at her door. Alert and cautious, she stood, moved to the side of the door, and asked, “Who is it?”

  “Wes Trammel, Miss Green.”

  She peered through the peephole. It was, indeed, Trammel.

  She opened to him, but did not ask him inside.

  “May I come in?”

  She didn’t feel comfortable asking him into her room; she also didn’t feel she could refuse him. She stepped aside, and he entered.

  “Please shut the d
oor, and I’ll make this quick.”

  Laynie closed the door.

  “Miss Green, I’m happy to extend an offer from Marstead to continue the selection process for a position with us.”

  Something inside Laynie unwound. “Sir?”

  “Your training session will take place here and will last fourteen weeks. If you pass and advance, as I suspect you will, you’ll be issued a formal ‘job offer’ and shipped abroad for further training and immersion into the culture you’ll operate in. The session won’t start until the second week of August. Think you can keep yourself out of trouble for a couple months?”

  “Yes, sir, but . . .”

  “But?”

  “I think I’ll be bored, sir.”

  He laughed softly—again, the change in his demeanor incongruous to Laynie. “I believe it.”

  He walked to the door. “You’ll receive a letter a week or two before the start of the session with your travel details. Keep a tight watch on what you say and do until we see you again—oh, and stay fit. Think of your upcoming training as boot camp. On steroids.”

  Before he opened the door to leave, Laynie spoke. “May I ask a question, sir?”

  Trammel’s good humor vanished, replaced by his usual cool reserve. “I suppose.”

  She framed her inquiry carefully. “A great deal of our orientation and training focused on discretion—how to keep ourselves and Marstead’s unofficial business secret—and yet, Marstead does not promote every recruit to probationary agent status. Other than your threats, what’s to keep a rejected individual, someone who bears a grudge, from blowing up the Marstead organization?”

  One side of Trammel’s mouth tipped up. “Marstead is a legit business with its books and activities in perfect order, Miss Green. If our ‘front’ were somehow compromised, Marstead would persist as a successful business entity and continue to support our work financially. It is our network of trained intelligence officers that must be preserved, which is why we insist upon and enforce personal anonymity—and why it would prove difficult for a disgruntled trainee to do us real damage.

  “However, as I mentioned earlier, not every employee works directly for Marstead. If Marstead ever came under too much scrutiny, we are prepared to relocate our operatives to contingency cover organizations. The relocation process would, no doubt, prove disruptive to our work, but not catastrophic.”

  He paused, then added, “Besides which . . . although our program does not lie under Congressional oversight, one should not make the mistake of assuming we don’t have significant and powerful ‘top cover,’ cover that provides us with a high degree of safety and security. I would not, therefore, minimize the potency of our ‘threats,’ as you call them, Miss Green. I assure you: They are quite effective.”

  Staring at her, he asked, “Anything else?”

  “No, sir. Thank you for setting my mind at ease.”

  Chapter 4

  LATE THE NEXT AFTERNOON, a cab dropped Laynie in front of her parents’ home. She paced up the walkway to the front porch, suitcase in hand.

  My parents’ home. It wasn’t, she realized, her home for much longer, and it occurred to her that, in her heart and mind, she’d already spread her wings. Had already left the nest.

  She let herself in the front door. “Hello? I’m back!”

  “Laynie! Laynie-girl!” Mama rushed from the kitchen to hug her. “Missed you so much.”

  “Me, too, Mama.” Except she’d been too busy, run off her feet, to miss anyone.

  “Dad will be home from work soon, sugar. You unpack and clean up, then we’ll have a nice talk and you can tell me all about your trip.”

  “Yeah. Okay, Mama.”

  While she showered, Laynie rehearsed the boilerplate verbiage she was required to use to describe her weekend. It was, in all honesty, a pack of lies.

  I must grow accustomed to prevaricating, to doing so without conscience or scruples, even to the point of believing my own stories. I’ll be of no use if I can’t lie convincingly.

  OVER DINNER, LAYNIE told Polly, Gene, and Sammie about meeting other sales candidates Marstead was considering, regaled them with tales of Marstead’s U.S. offices in Baltimore, of long briefings that covered all fifteen international offices, the company’s hierarchy, and the different technology product branches.

  Gene and Polly were politely attentive; Sammie seemed . . . mystified.

  “What comes next, Laynie?” her dad asked.

  “Well, they have invited me back for training.”

  “What kind of training?”

  “Overall training in the company’s technology branches—aeronautics, robotics, integrated circuitry manufacturing, telecommunications, information technology, R&D, application development, tech transfer protocols, science policy, and governmental policy—then specialized training within the branch I would be representing. The list of possibilities is pretty long, and if I do well on the training, Marstead has promised me a job. I can apply for my preferred branch, but they have the final say.”

  “And this is what you want to do, sugar?” Polly asked, confused by the many lofty and foreign terms Laynie had thrown out. “All this-here technology business?”

  “I think it is, Mama.”

  Sammie’s brow crinkled; he shook his head minutely, then slowly swiveled a penetrating gaze to confront his sister.

  He isn’t buying it.

  Laynie dropped a veil over her expression. “Say, I’m hoping we can still take that ocean sailing class this summer like we planned, Sam.”

  In hopes that Marstead would invite her to their training program but not knowing when the training would start, Laynie had applied for and been hired as a substitute lifeguard with the city before the exam weekend. It was a flexible, part-time position, four or five hours an afternoon filling in at public pools wherever a full-time guard was out due to illness or other reasons. Lifeguards were in high demand, and she’d worked as a lifeguard for the city through previous summers. The city’s hiring department was happy to get her back, even in a limited capacity.

  Sammie, following in Laynie’s footsteps, had taken a full-time summer job as a lifeguard. He had arranged his weekly schedule to have Fridays off so that they could take the sailing class she’d referred to.

  They had both belonged to their high school’s sailing club, learning sailing basics on the many inland waterways and lakes dotting the area around Seattle, then crewing on larger crafts on Lake Union. They wanted to grow their skills until they could expertly pilot a two-man boat out on Puget Sound. Sammie, in particular, nurtured the dream of owning a boat of his own.

  “I’m still up for it . . . if you are.”

  “Sure I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” Laynie had the sense that the moment they were alone, Sammie would start digging at her story, trying to pick apart the load of baloney she’d fed him and their parents—particularly because of the stultifying mumbo-jumbo she’d described. She needed to be ready to diffuse his suspicions.

  LAYNIE WENT TO WORK the next day, filling in as a relief lifeguard at a nearby pool. She worked Wednesday and Thursday, too, going wherever they needed a substitute, which had her hopping from one area of Seattle to another. In the mornings, before she left for work, she took Trammel’s words on fitness seriously: She ran two miles at sunup and arrived at the pool to swim laps before it opened to the public.

  On Friday, she and Sammie drove together to start the ocean sailing course at a marina on Lake Union. They hadn’t been in the car five minutes before, as Laynie suspected he would, Sammie started in.

  “How’d you scrape your arm, Laynie?”

  “Hmm? What?”

  “When you came home Monday, you had that scrape on your elbow and forearm. Didn’t get that in a briefing on ‘governmental policy,’ did you?”

  “Of course not. Marstead put on a picnic Sunday afternoon—one of those ‘welcome to the Marstead family’ things. Part of it was a team-building exercise, this sort of an obstacle course w
e all had to run. Guess I’m sort of a klutz, ’cause I scraped my arm going over one of the walls.”

  Laynie was fabricating, going off script, but convincingly so.

  She hoped.

  Sammie, in the passenger seat, turned toward her. “Okay. It’s just that . . . this new fascination with Marstead seems, I dunno, out of character for you.”

  Laynie had to reply with just the right amount of firmness. “In what way?”

  “I guess I can’t see you as a geek?”

  She came on a littler stronger, a smidge indignant. “Is that how you see me? As a geek?”

  “No, that’s exactly how I don’t see you. You’re too active and too smart—I don’t mean brainiac smart, but insightful smart. And politically smart. I mean, what are you doing with a tech firm when you have a poli-sci degree?”

  “Believe it or not, little brother, I’m really jazzed by how technology can affect the political climate in the world.” She threw in a huffy breath for good measure.

  He nodded and didn’t answer until, minutes later, in a gruff voice, he pronounced, “Yeah, well, you’ve never been a klutz in your life.”

  Chapter 5

  ON MONDAY, THE FIRST of August, Laynie received her letter from Marstead containing the instructions regarding her training. She read it, memorized it, then shredded it by hand and flushed the dissolvable paper down the toilet—not that the contents of the letter would have meant much to the uninitiated reader. She gave her notice to the city the following morning.

  Sunday afternoon, she again flew into BWI. Her instructions this time required that she locate a Trailways bus outside the Arrivals area, a bus bearing the markings “Dunlop Travel” on the sides. Laynie found the bus—it wasn’t difficult—and noted that the bus’s windows were darkened so that no one could see inside.

  She presented herself at the bus door to the official wearing a Dunlop Travel uniform.

  “Name?”

  “Pitcher. Molly.”