“I’m telling you,” Devon says, upper lip firmly stiffened, “I’m fine.”
Aiko stands across the small living room, staring at Kayla. “But,” she says, “you said no. You said you wouldn’t help.”
Aiko, Malcolm, and Jasmine arrived two minutes ago and chaos is still busy reigning.
“I said you didn’t want my help.” Kayla is as gruff as can be anticipated. “Didn’t say I wouldn’t give it.”
“Oh, Kayla,” Devon says from the couch, “of course they’re surprised. It’s not like you overwhelmed us with your enthusiasm.”
Kayla looks away, her face guarded. For a moment I think that’s going to be the full extent of her response. Then she shrugs. “You said I didn’t save my daughter.”
“I said you could save the world.”
“I don’t give a feck about the world.” Kayla spits onto Coleman’s carpet.
“You sure he’s going to stay out?” Malcolm pulls his head back from the doorway to the bedroom where we laid Coleman’s unconscious body.
“He’ll stay out.” There’s an element of professional pride in Kayla’s tone.
And Coleman, and the fact that he did something to make Kayla attack him, brings me back to the beginning of this conversation. “You’re sure you’re OK?” I ask Devon again.
Devon’s smile is still shaky but she waves a hand as Jasmine and Aiko advance in step. “I’m fine.”
“You want to talk about it?”
Devon looks around the small room. For some reason we’ve not turned the lights up fully yet, and everything feels too close and overcrowded. She grimaces. “It was…” She looks up at Kayla.
Kayla lets her gaze drift away from Devon’s. It comes to rest on me. “Followed you after the park,” she says with another shrug. “After what Devon said. About my daughter.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. Not that I’m objecting to Kayla’s presence. It’s just it would be nice if something actually did make sense for once.
“Never feckin’ do.” Kayla grimaces. “It was what hit home. Someone else I care about going off with you. And I thought, well, maybe some things are worth fighting for.”
Well, at least Kayla’s low opinion of me is good for something…
“Plus,” Kayla says, “Coleman’s a prick.”
Devon shifts on the couch. “He didn’t touch me,” she says. “I don’t want you to think that. He’d just been… Just been talking and pacing and drinking for over an hour. And drinking blended malts. My father would have beaten a man for having blended malts. That said, my father didn’t take his lithium very often. But then he… Well, I was on edge. And someone should really talk to that man about personal space issues. And I think at one point he might have sniffed my hair, which I don’t care what Hollywood tells you, is always creepy. I mean, it’s hair. It’s hardly an erotic bloody tool. It sits on top of your head and gets greasy if you don’t wash it.
“So, yes, I was not at all comfortable, and then… well, he offered me the whiskey, you see. And it was a blended malt. I said that. And you have to understand, in a way, how profoundly wrong that is. And, well, it was probably silly of me to scream about it. But I did scream. And then the door crashed open. And then there was Kayla. And then it was all over.”
There’s a satisfied smile on Kayla’s lips. “Good enough excuse,” she says.
“He offered you whiskey?” I ask, just to clarify exactly why we have broken and entered this house.
“A blended malt, Arthur,” Devon implores. “That’s just not right.”
I stare at the others. Aiko is still looking confused. “But how did you get his ID in under five minutes?”
“Oh,” Devon gives us a small smile, “apparently Coleman prefers silk pajamas in the comfort of his own home. Left his other pants on the bathroom floor.”
The sight of Coleman, unconscious or no, in maroon silk pajamas will haunt me until the day I die.
“Now,” Devon reaches a hand out to me, “could you just give me the files. That’s what this was all about anyway.”
It’s a quick, efficient way to force the room’s attention onto me.
“Shit, yes,” Aiko says, flicking her eyes my way. “How did it go? You get everything?”
I pull the stack of papers from under my shirt where they’ve been nestled between my skin and my paunch of Malcolm’s socks.
“Any problems?”
And how exactly do I describe my exchange with Felicity to Aiko of all people? I don’t even know how to describe it to myself.
“Nothing significant,” I say. Saving the world before personal crap. Plus now it’s almost past one in the morning and I’d rather skip any extraneous matters and get down to business.
“So,” I say, “Devon looks at the papers, we find the bastards, and make plans about how best to hit them very hard in a place that hurts.”
“That’s your plan?” Kayla looks at me as if I’m a half-wit.
“It’s a little more nuanced than that.”
“Better be.” Kayla looks over the Weekenders with an appraising eye. “You’re outnumbered, out-trained, and outgunned.”
“I know,” I say, ignoring Malcolm’s sour face. “We need MI37 too.”
“You say.” Malcolm can’t quite hold in the bitterness.
“Hush.” Jasmine taps his arm.
“You realize,” Kayla says, “Shaw’s probably going to feckin’ shoot you on sight?”
And God, I do now. “It’s a risk,” I concede. But we have to try. The Russians are just too powerful for us to go up against them alone. “We just have to convince them of the truth.”
“Because that’s gone so feckin’ well for you so far.”
And she does have a point. But… “Every time we’ve encountered the Russians,” I counter, “it’s been on their terms. We’ve seen what they want us to see. They’ve been prepared. This time we draw them out. We catch them off guard. We get them to show us what they don’t want us to see.”
It’s hardly Sun Tzu. But it’s my plan, and I have a certain amount of pride in it.
Malcolm steps up. “A controlled first contact operation with both the Russians and MI37,” he says. Which I think is what I said.
“So you define the second engagement.” Kayla nods.
Malcolm nods.
“A controlled environment,” Kayla says. Something in her body language has changed. Less confrontational. And she and Malcolm seem to have found a common language. They move closer, speak lower, sit down on the couch, fire suggestions back and forth with increasing rapidity. Jargon and acronyms I can’t follow. Next to them, Devon sits, head buried in the papers I printed out. Jasmine balances on the couch arm next to her. I glance at my watch. Less than seventeen hours until the Russians make their move.
“We’re running out of time, aren’t we?” Aiko has slipped up next to me.
“Yes,” I say. I can’t see the point in denying it.
“You think there’s time for this?” She nods at Kayla and Malcolm.
“I think we have to make time.”
She looks at me. “This is the bit where we consider having to live this day as our last.” She puts a hand on my arm. “Carpe diem, Agent Arthur.”
We will take him down.
“Well this is interesting.”
Devon’s boom seizes the attention of the room. And, seriously, can I not catch five minutes to think about this one?
Aiko takes a quick step away from me. Jasmine is looking at us.
“What’s interesting?” I ask quickly.
“Oh,” Devon says, looking up and remembering she’s in a room full of people. “Well, I was just thinking that maybe this might be useful.” She holds aloft a sheaf of paper. “Old protocols on how the Russians used to contact each other. They really did drop personal ads into newspapers. I just assumed that was your standard Hollywood tomfoolery. Always had these images of spies accidentally turning up to first dates when they expected nuclear plans or some such. But no, the codes are all here. ‘Single white female’ is one sort of meeting. ‘Desperately seeking’ is request for a mission status update. That sort of thing. Different papers even mean different things too. All divided up by geographical location and everything. It’s all very Machiavellian. Which I suppose shouldn’t be unexpected. Spies after all. It’s not like they’re going to send each other instructions in Hallmark cards with love and kisses.”
Suddenly Aiko is not the only woman in the room I am considering kissing.
“But there are hundreds of newspapers in London,” Aiko says. “It’s bloody huge.”
“Oh yes.” Devon nods. “They’ve subdivided London a lot.”
“So how do we know which papers to use?” I ask.
Jasmine looks up from a piece of paper she’s been staring at. “Would, like, this list of safe houses be helpful?”
This place is threatening to become a regular smooch-fest.
There is much calloo-ing and callay-ing at this. Spirits rise slightly. Even Kayla seems like a functional member of a team again. I should fail to defend her friends from lecherous old men more often.
In the end, the list narrows it down to six locations. “The East London Advertiser should cover us,” Devon concludes.
Suddenly it feels as if we have momentum, as if this might actually be achievable. “Can we make the morning edition?” I check.
Jasmine taps at a smartphone. “Yeah,” she says after a while. “Might, like, cost a bit extra, but there’s a nine a.m. edition we can probably get in, if we submit something in the next few hours.”
I turn to Kayla and Malcolm. “And you. This plan. You can work something out within the next few hours?”
“Feck you,” Kayla says.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
They sit down, get to work. Jasmine and Devon go back to their papers, searching for extra clues. I stand at the center of the room.
Aiko is looking at me. It takes me a moment to recognize the look in her eyes. And then I realize what it is. Admiration.