The Spy I Loved (10 page)

Chapter Seven

“
Are you afraid of bears or something?”

She
wasn’t stupid. That much was certain. He couldn’t leave the gun
just lying on the kitchen table. Hiding it was problematical, and
he didn’t know how long they’d be gone. To hide it anywhere outside
of the cabin was irresponsible, at the very least. It was as
natural as breathing to slip it into his jacket pocket and zip it
securely. It must have nudged her hip bone. He had let her get in a
little too close, as they were stumbling around in the darkness,
finding their way up from the water’s edge.

She did
have that quick mind.

“
No. Not really.”

She
nodded.

It was
his turn.

“
So. You’re studying history.”

A log
snapped in the fire, sending a trail of sparks into the treetops
revealed overhead in its ruddy glare.

“
Yeah.” Lindsey sat cross-legged in front of their small
blaze, kindled with the scraps of wood other people left lying, not
thinking it worth bothering about.

“
And political science.”

She
blushed when she heard that one.

“
Yes.” She twirled a small stick between her fingers, not
looking up. “I don’t know—reading the books, ancient times, far-off
places…at least it’s something I like, something I might be good
at.”

It had
always been her escape from the present world. It was a constricted
little world that she saw for herself, rearing up and confronting
her. Lindsey had that need for independence—for travel—to see life
and not just endure it. It was like her life was all mapped out for
her. The modern family needed a man to be a breadwinner, and to cut
the grass and look after the car, and it needed the woman to stay
home, to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen with a slew of
yelling infants stumbling under her foot. All the while looking
stylish and sophisticated with the help of the modern retail and
advertising industry, centred on Madison Avenue. The really
ambitious ones would do all of that and at the same time, hold down
a job as a medical records transcriptionist or make the drive into
Sudbury to work the phones for ten hours a day at the new call
centre.

A friend
of Lindsey’s had gotten pregnant at fifteen. They were Catholics.
The boy fessed up and they did the right thing. They got married
and her friend was already into her third pregnancy. She was
already blowsy and over-worked, constantly fighting with her
husband. Neither of them had finished high school. Neither of them
had any big plans or ambitions, or even the foggiest notion on how
to tackle life…which was surely what they had set out to do when
they signed zee papers.

She told
him all of this. She managed to put it in confident tones, meeting
his eyes from time to time.

She was
very aware of his gaze—and the overall grubbiness of her cheap
sneakers. She wore black canvas high-tops with the one broken lace
which she had pulled out and retied, beginning a few eyelets higher
to make it work. Lindsey really hadn’t been thinking of fashion
when setting out.

She had
to admit, it was a bit impulsive, the shoe as well as everything
else. But when she worked, she was tired. She had no time and few
expenses, so she banked most of the money. She was rather
astonished when it started to build up and everyone said it was for
her education.

That’s
when it really started to sink in.

I’m as dumb as everybody else around here.

That was
a big personal revelation, she told Liam to an abrupt
laugh.

The question was what you might
do
with it, all that education. She
had sort of thought of teaching—as long as it was some other town,
she told him. He laughed again when he heard it, not exactly an
unfamiliar story. It was similar in some respects to his own sad
and youthful departure.

Life was
so much simpler when you were a child.

She
sighed.

“
Yeah.” This one had a different inflection on the end of it
and she sat up, looking into his eyes.

What was
it that she saw there?

Knowledge?

Understanding?

Kindness?

Was it
sympathy, or compassion, or heaven forbid, pity?

You could
see anything you wanted in those eyes. She knew that—somehow, deep
down inside. She had a funny feeling he knew it too. This was the
most horrible thought.

“
I know what you’re thinking. Mister Liam Kimball.”

He
snickered quietly, looking off over the lake where the mists had
begun to rise. Their small fire, the only light visible from this
point on the lake, was a beacon of hope and warmth and humanity in
the darkness. Something, a gull or a tern or a killdeer, peeped a
couple of hundred metres off, sounding lonely and forlorn in the
infinite darkness.

He was
comfortable in the silence.

The
bottle sat between them, and he saw her looking at it. She kind of
knew it wasn’t going anywhere, and yet she wasn’t quite ready to
give it up just yet.

“
So, Liam. Why, or I suppose how, did you become a translator?
And, um…do you have a wife or anything?”

Lindsey
reached over as casually as she could, picked up the bottle and
took a good swig. She lowered the bottle, staring off over his
shoulder, as if in a kind of defiance at his thoughts—but not her
own.

Not her
own.

She may
have been blushing, it was hard to tell in the heat and the light
of the fire, but those clear blues eyes shifted slightly, gazing
straight into his. It was right about then, when Liam Kimball
recognized the wisdom in the ancient truism about this
job.

There was
more than one kind of danger in the world.

Don’t get involved…

Above all, don’t get involved.

She was
young, fresh, inviting, and vulnerable as all hell. Enough to make
a man feel old, she was.

“
Oh, dear. Ah, no—there’s no one in my life…not right now,
anyways. As for translation, I don’t know. I have a gift for
languages, or so they tell me. But here’s the actual thing. It was
either that, or I would have to go out into the real world and get
a real job. And maybe, just maybe, try and live like everyone
else.” His jaw worked back and forth. “And for whatever reason, in
my particular and rather peculiar little case, that just seemed
like an awful lot to ask…”

...and so, with my particular and rather peculiar little
docket coming to the attention of certain rather peculiar
authorities, my present and peculiar employer made certain rather
peculiar offers…fairly tempting ones at that.

He
couldn’t tell her. No matter how obscurely he put it.

It really
wasn’t wise to open up to a perfect stranger, not in his line of
work, and yet why had they sent him out here? If not to heal, do
some low-level legwork and maybe, just possibly, get his shit back
together as the Yanks would say.

Three
weeks in a box and a few days under a hammer and red-hot tongs
often did that for a man.

“
So. What’s the gun for?”

Her
technique was bang-on. It was terribly hard to lie to a pair of
eyes like that.

“
I suppose…well. It’s just that the contents of my head might
be of some value to some…people somewhere. People who aren’t very
nice, not so much, anyways.” That was more than enough to tell a
young kid like that. “Not everyone in the world is as nice as you
are, Lindsey.”

It
sounded like pure bullshit, and he had already gone too
far.

Yet it wasn’t all that hard to drag it out of him either.
Maybe he really
was
all washed up—burned out, and maybe he
was
going to be the last one to
figure that out. Maybe I really am going to hell in a
hand-basket.

If she was ripping my fingernails out with a pair of
vice-grips, I never would have told her anything.

She
looked as intuitive as all hell right about then, biting her lip
and looking down at her hands.

Liam was
facing some really tough moral choices, and he tried desperately
hard not to gag on the liquor. A little must have gone down the
wrong way. The fumes stung his nose, and his eyes watered
uncontrollably.

He was
about to say something. Her eyes wavered and went to the embers of
their fire, now lessening slightly, and perhaps for the moment the
danger had passed.

He knew
enough to know that it wasn’t cured that easily.

It was
never that easy.

Suddenly
there were tears in her eyes, and Liam choked up for a moment at
something that came unbidden from deep within himself.

Tears were terribly contagious things—and he really
was
on a kind of medical
leave. For all the right reasons, it seemed to him. Psychological
reasons, but some pretty good reasons nevertheless.

Next
thing he knew, he had his arm wrapped around Lindsey, just holding
her as she cried, and then, after a while, she got a grip on
herself.

His own
eyes had dried quite quickly, on seeing her plight somehow. She was
just a kid, freshly hatched from the egg into the full blossom of
womanhood. The thought left him cold and dead inside.

The
problem was that he had a conscience.

This may
have been a good thing, even as you hated yourself for your
thoughts.

It was
the next best thing to objectivity.

Thank God
she hadn’t taken a lot of trouble, dolled herself up and thrown
herself at him. She had that much sense.

***

Monday
morning.

A
throbbing head, a sense of dread.

A moment
of sheer, unmitigated panic.

A sense
of having ventured into the unknown, into forbidden
territory.

For better or worse, she had at least let him
know.

Not that
she had actually come out and said it.

But he
knew.

He
knew.

And
somehow, it was okay.

At least
he knew.

At first,
the thought of breakfast was enough to turn her off the day
completely. She entered the kitchen, seeking only coffee. Lots and
lots of coffee. Dale had the frying pan going. It didn’t smell too
bad, what with a pound of bacon done and her uncle just cracking
eggs into the pan. There was some dull throbbing in behind her
eyes, and a stiffness to her neck that she put down to staring up
at an awkward angle half the night.

To her surprise, when he pushed a plateful of what Dale
always called
vittles
in front of her, she managed to gobble it all down quite
handily. She even went to the extent of four slices of toast when
she sometimes didn’t bother.

Anything
but think, she told herself.

Just eat,
and then get out there—get the hell out there.

Just try
and do your job and make everybody happy.

Stay out
of trouble and try not to get your heart broken.

***

Liam was
on the phone, ready to be plugged into a port on the side of the
machine. He was all set to transmit his latest data plus digital
photographs of several objects. His last dive had been the killer.
He was walking around, looking at his watch, waiting for his
control to come on. He went from curtain to curtain, peeking out
one window after another.

That was
the problem with having the enemy in such close proximity. With
modern audio-snoop technology, overhearing a conversation was dead
easy. He was pretty sure they were both in their cabin but that
meant nothing.

One had
to assume a bug. All they had to do was walk past the place and
chuck the right device into your eaves-trough. He’d made sure. It
was up there, all right. There was the one on the car, the one on
the boat…it was a good idea not to leave your boots outside the
door at night.

“
Hello?”

Ignoring
it for the moment, Liam opened up the back door and began walking.
He was ten metres from the door when he finally spoke. His mental
picture of a parabolic mic pointed through a screen window at the
back of his head was about as accurate as it ever gets.

“
Frank?”

It was an
unfamiliar voice.

“
Johan, Sebastien, Bach.” Today’s joke. “This is the Big
F.”

Liam’s
eyebrows rose.

“
Asterisk, catastrophe, treble clef. Where’s Little F,
sir?”

“
He’s effed off. What have you been up to,
Liam-my-boy?”

Liam
grinned. With modern communications, it was rare for his control,
Frank, to even leave the office.