A Gentleman's Game (2 page)

2

London—Camden, Regent’s Park Terrace
07 August 1551 GMT

It was a peculiarity
to those in Tara Chace’s line of work, their habits and hobbies, the things they would obsess upon in lieu of family and friends.

Tom Wallace, for instance, had put his passion into cars, specifically into the Triumph, and more precisely into the Triumph Spitfire MK I, 1962 model year. Wallace had, in the years Chace had known him, acquired four of the vehicles. He had tenderly restored each, enjoying its comfort and power in his free time, then sold the previous to make room for the next. He hunted the Triumph online and in newspapers, engaged in long, enthusiast correspondence with others of the Triumph religion, and generally poured every pound and pence not vital to his day-to-day existence into the hobby.

The late Edward Kittering had shared Wallace’s lust for internal combustion, but in his case it had been motorcycles, and like Wallace, he’d been a devotee of a particular make and model, the Buell Thunderbolt. Kittering had been in the Section almost three years before his death from an apparent brain aneurysm, and in that time she’d seen him go through five bikes, and ridden two of them herself. They were, in her opinion, nothing more than two wheels ornamented with an overactive engine and a saddle, an opinion Kittering had often mocked her for voicing. He had been a far less discriminating collector than Wallace, his only criterion that the motorcycle be built prior to 1996, when the Harley-Davidson purchase of Buell had led to a redesign of the bike, and the motorcycle had “gotten all nice and proper like,” in Kittering’s words.

Chace had inherited the last of Kittering’s bikes, a black and yellow 1995 Thunderbolt S2T that made her feel like a wasp whenever she rode it. She didn’t ride it often, traffic in London being a perpetual nightmare and public transport being more than sufficient to service most of her needs. The Thunderbolt was expensive as well; on those rare occasions when she did ride it, it would invariably break down. Whereas Kittering had the patience and interest to tinker with the vehicle, Chace could hardly be bothered.

But she kept the motorcycle anyway, because it was one of her only links to Kittering, and because in the year before he died, they had been lovers. The affair had ended badly, with Chace breaking Kittering’s heart. His death had left many things unresolved, and so she kept the bike, and hoped that in doing so it would bring more closure than grief.

Nick Poole, the current Minder Two, was a passionate cook. The kitchen of his Spice Quay flat, in the shadow of Tower Bridge, had been renovated with restaurant-grade appliances. Poole invested in only the finest cookware and tried—generally in vain, due to the unreliable schedule of their work—to grow his own herbs for seasoning. He took cooking classes, read cookbooks, and was zealous in his pursuit of “the fresh.” The week after Wallace had departed the Section, leaving Chace as Minder One and Poole suddenly elevated to Minder Two, he’d invited her over for a dinner of sole paupiette with crab and smoked salmon mousseline, watching her like a hawk until she’d taken her first bite. The meal had been extraordinary, as fine as any Chace had tasted when she’d run alongside the Sloanes and their wealth, and her praise of the dinner had done more for her relationship with Poole than any interaction they’d had in the office or in the field.

As for Chris Lankford, Minder Three—Provisional, he was still too new to the Section for Chace to have discovered his particular passion, though she was certain he had one. She guessed it was something boring, perhaps philately.

Chace herself had survived the Section for a couple of years without adopting an obsession of her own, not seeing the need for one. She had been wrong and, in the wake of Kittering’s death, had reached a moment of clarity. Even as a child, her desire for self-abuse had been dangerous and acute, based less in the physical than in the emotional. She had been a rule-breaker, a discipline problem, and what past lovers had charitably described as a “wild spirit,” an appellation Chace herself detested. She smoked and drank and, upon entering university, had discovered sex, three things she had pursued with the same passion that Wallace, Kittering, and Poole directed toward their hobbies. But without the same rewards, enjoyment, or results to show for it.

It was after the breakup with Kittering that Chace had come to the conclusion that, perhaps, such self-abuse was counterproductive. Certainly, arriving in the Ops Room for a crash briefing at oh–three hundred carrying a hangover or, worse, a drunk wasn’t going to help her career prospects. And the less said about what it would do to a mission, the better. These things, combined with a warning from the Madwoman of the Second Floor—staff psychiatrist Dr. Eleanor Callard—that should such behavior continue, Chace could find herself confined to a desk if not out of a job, served as a wake-up call.

“Find a hobby,” Callard had urged her, “preferably one where you don’t punish yourself for sins you haven’t committed.”

“May I still punish myself for the ones that I have?” Chace had asked sweetly.

“By all means.”

It had taken Chace a while to find something that would engage her. As a girl, her mother had taken great pains to see her educated in a “proper” fashion, including piano lessons, ballet lessons, and riding lessons. Chace had loathed it all when she was six, and now at thirty-one, she discovered that nothing had occurred in the intervening time to alter that assessment. Unlike Poole, she had no interest in cooking, and her kitchen was merely the room where take-away was moved from a paper sack onto a porcelain plate, and even then it was most likely to be eaten straight from the container while she stood over the sink. Unlike Wallace, her interest in automobiles was entirely professional. She knew enough to break into them, to hot-wire them, to drive them much too fast, to use them to kill people without getting herself killed in the process, and, sometimes, should the situation warrant it, to travel in them from Point A to Point B.

It ended there.

Finally, she’d decided to try painting, resurrecting a dim memory from her boarding-school days at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Not with oils or watercolors and palettes and easels, as she had learned, but with great sections of canvas spread on the floor or tacked to the wall, and pails of paint to spatter, drip, drizzle, and smear. She had no aspirations to be Jackson Pollock and at best considered her work to be more Modern Accident than Modern Expressionism. She had no idea if she had any talent for painting at all, in fact, but she discovered that she did, indeed, enjoy it, to a degree that truly surprised her. It was the main reason she had moved to Camden, to have more space in which to paint. The sensuality of it, in particular, appealed to her, the indulgence of the paint on her hands and its scent clinging to the back of her throat, the feel of the canvas as it drew color away from her fingers. She could lose herself in the activity for hours, and her mind could relax as her body worked, her clothes peppered with splatters, her trainers caked with paint.

And this is why Tara Chace was up to her elbows in grasshopper green when she learned that terrorists had attacked London.

•

“Chace.”

“Duty Ops Officer. Minders to the Ops Room, black, I repeat, black.”

Chace adjusted the handset between her ear and shoulder, hastily swiping her hands down the front of her shirt, trying to clean the paint from them. The thought that this was a drill flickered through her mind, but it was gone before she could even entertain it, defeated in the subconscious acquisition of detail. One, there was strain in Ron’s voice, and not once in four years while Ronald Hodgson had worked the Duty Operations Desk had Chace ever heard that before; two, the background noise was not the usual low murmur of voices in the Ops Room but the frantic sound of motion, of voices calling for attention, information, assistance.

And three, black meant bad. Black meant about as bad as it could get, on the scale of “we’re at war” or “a royal has been kidnapped” or “we’ve lost a nuke” bad.

“Confirmed, twenty minutes,” Chace said.

“Twenty minutes,” Ron echoed, and he cut the connection, but Chace had already reseated the phone in its cradle and was halfway to the remote control. She flicked the television on with one hand, raising the volume so the sound could follow her as she pivoted back to the bedroom, already stripping off her shirt and tossing it aside. She pulled a new one from the pile of dirty laundry at the foot of the bed, struggling into it as she searched her unmentionables drawer for the keys to Kittering’s bike.

She was out the door sixteen seconds later, still tucking the shirt in, and had unlocked the Thunderbolt and brought the engine to life before her mind fully processed the voices of the reporters and the coverage she had overheard. She didn’t know the details, but she’d caught enough to know it was most likely terrorism, and it was London, and it was bad.

She drove with those things in mind, grateful for once that Kittering had left a motorcycle and not a dog, using the bike to snake through snarled traffic, to quick-turn from roadblocked streets, and twice to drive on the pavement.

Even with all that, it took her almost an hour exactly to reach the Ops Room.

•

Chace entered thinking that enough time had passed, surely the chaos she’d heard over Ron’s call would have abated. It hadn’t.

At its worst, she’d never seen the Operations Room looking like this. The monitor wall, plasma screens with a glowing map of the world that normally presented an up-to-the-minute accounting of all active SIS operations everywhere on the planet, was in schizophrenic disorder. Patches of BBC and Sky News and CNN jumped on the wall, voices from professionally calm to practically shrill seeped from the speakers, mixed in the din of radio reports and the calls of the Ops Room staff, runners crisscrossing the room, papers or maps or telephones in their hands, trying to track it all. Only the U.K. remained uncovered on the map, a bright red halo tracing the country, a gold dot pulsing on London.

At Duty Operations, Ron was juggling three phones at once, his coms headset bouncing against his chest, dangling from the wire clipped to his shirt. Sweat had soaked his collar, wilting it around his neck, and when he caught sight of Chace, he used his left elbow to indicate the map table at the far side of the room, still balancing his multiple conversations.

Helmet still in hand, Chace plunged into the room, making for the map table where Poole and Lankford already waited. She glanced back toward the plasma wall, saw Alexis at Main Communications, where she was matching Ron move for move with her own phones, then swept her gaze around farther until she realized she was looking for Tom Wallace, and that she wouldn’t be finding him.

Tom wasn’t Minder One. She was.

“What the fucking hell happened?” she demanded of Poole as she reached the table, dropping her helmet into the nearest empty chair.

“We’ve been hit,” Lankford said.

“I bloody know we’ve been hit, I figured out we’ve been hit, I’m asking what the fucking hell happened?”

“It’s still coming in,” Poole told her, indicating the plasma wall. “Best anyone’s made out, we had three terrorist strikes within minutes of each other, started roughly fifteen-thirty, all of them on the Underground. Central, Northern, and Bakerloo, Oxford, Piccadilly, and King’s Cross, respectively.”

“Nerve agent?”

“No, it’s not a Tokyo scenario,” Lankford said.

“They bomb them, what?”

“Fire,” Poole said. “In the tunnels, at the stations. Hard to tell just how bad, but there’re reports of people being trampled at the stations, asphyxiating on the tracks.”

Chace nodded, fixating on the wall, trying to see everything at once. Images of bodies being carried from station entrances, soot- and smoke-stained passengers with oxygen masks pressed to their tear-streaked faces, of dead firefighters and rescue workers laid out in lines on the pavement, being covered with opaque plastic sheets. Men and women, young and old, and children, in all of London’s colors and diversity. Curling clouds of black smoke, so thick she thought she could see the oil in it, billowing from tube vents, rising over Oxford Circus.

A sudden perversity struck her, watching the multiple television images of the disaster, that this was happening just minutes away. She’d been on Oxford Street the night before, Selfridges and the Marks & Spencer, before heading home.

By tube, of course.

“Who’s claiming it?” Chace asked.

“No one,” said Poole. He looked at her with a grim smile. “Yet.”

She nodded slightly, scanning the wall, searching for any new facts to absorb. There were none, and she realized that both Poole and Lankford were watching her, waiting for the next move, the next step.

“We won’t have marching orders until Crocker’s done with C,” she told them. “And probably not even then. Crisis call, they brought us in while waiting for another shoe to drop.”

“Follow-up strikes?” Lankford asked.

“Well, that’s one possibility, isn’t it, Chris?” she said. “Three in one go, there could be more waiting in the wings.”

“Immediate panic dies down, then everyone holds their breath waiting for the next one,” Poole agreed. “Could be tomorrow, next week, who knows.”

“If there’s more coming at all.”

Lankford scowled at Chace, then Poole, then at the plasma wall. “So what do we do in the meantime?”

“Nothing,” Chace said.

“Nothing?”

Lankford stared at her, and Chace wasn’t certain if it was outrage or simple impatience she was seeing in his expression. She wasn’t certain she cared, either. All of twenty-six, an inch or so taller than Chace’s five foot ten, black hair and blue eyes that combined with a lack of distinctive features to make him a perfect “gray man,” as they were called in the trade. Nothing about Chris Lankford leaped out upon first impression, or upon fifth, for that matter. But he had the energy about him, not of youth, but rather of inexperience. It charged him, made his engine race, made him want to leap into the breach, and might, Chace mused, get him killed sooner rather than later.