“I was one of them,” Stone said, “and I hope you’re right.”
“Who is this Wu fellow?” Rose asked.
“Probably the best street fighter in the world,” Lance replied, “with or without weapons. I once temporarily gave that title to another of our instructors, but Wu brought a quick end to his supremacy.”
“Where did you find him?”
“In the Army, where we find a lot of our operational people,” Lance said. “During basic training he was housed in a barrack full of racist recruits who challenged him to fights. He worked his way through them in a matter of days. His drill sergeant, who was afraid of him, called an intelligence officer to the base. After an interview, we whisked him away to Camp Peary, and we’ve never let him go.”
“So, Fife-Simpson is not the fighter he tells everybody he is?” Stone asked.
“No, but he is hardly helpless,” Lance said. “He is probably the equal of our average instructor at Camp Peary, and if you should ever be provoked into a fight with him, my advice would be to shoot him in the head immediately.”
“I think I’ll start by asking Felicity not to bring him to dinner again,” Stone said.
Felicity was halfway through her morning at work when her secretary announced Brigadier Fife-Simpson.
“Ah, Roger, back from your travels? Is that a bandage on your forehead?” She waved him to a chair.
“Nothing serious,” he said, “though it could have been.”
“Could this be the result of an encounter with a person called Wu?” she asked.
“It was,” he replied, “and I am not grateful to you for putting me in that position. I could have been badly hurt.”
“Roger,” she said reprovingly, “it is my information that you were armed with a knife, while Wu had only his bare hands to defend himself. And it is my recollection that, when training recruits at Station Two, you gave them actual knives for them to practice killing each other.”
“I did that for their own good,” he said primly.
“Then perhaps the people at Camp Peary thought you needed an attitude adjustment,” she replied.
“I, indeed?” He sniffed. “I was trundled about their headquarters like a foreign tourist, then sent down to their training establishment and humiliated.”
“Well, you were a foreign tourist, but I suppose I must apologize for them,” Felicity said, mock-soothingly.
“I think you and Lance Cabot hatched this plot between you,” he said. “I just want you to know it didn’t work.”
“May I remind you,” Felicity said, “that I am your superior at this service?”
“And I am a brigadier general of the Royal Marines,” he nearly shouted.
“Perhaps you are not aware,” Felicity said coldly, “that my position here carries the military rank of full admiral?”
“I apologize,” Fife-Simpson sputtered.
“As, indeed, you should. I expect you are also unaware that your presence in my service was pressed on me from above.”
He reddened. “Perhaps it was believed that my presence here might lend some organization and weight to this service.”
“We are quite well organized, I assure you, and we bear such sufficient weight that you might suddenly find yourself training recruits from south of Calais in how to be British officers and gentlemen. Would you enjoy that?”
“I would not,” he muttered.
“Then perhaps you could suggest a more agreeable use for your presence here?”
Fife-Simpson was suddenly at a loss for words.
“Then go back to your office, think it over, and write me a memo on the subject of how you might be more important to our purposes,” she said. “Good day.”
Fife-Simpson got up and left the room, mustering as much dignity as he could manage.
28
Later the same day, Dame Felicity presented herself at the Foreign Office and was announced to the minister. She was made to wait a half hour before being admitted to the inner sanctum, which was not alarming but customary. On entering she found the minister at his desk, reading and signing documents, ignoring her. She took a seat.
“I don’t recall asking you to sit,” Sir Oswald said, still not looking at her.
“I don’t recall being asked to stand,” Felicity replied tartly.
Now he looked up at her and put down his fountain pen. “I have, less than an hour ago, received a letter of resignation from your service of Brigadier Roger Fife-Simpson.”
“Well, the proper thing to have done would be for him to send it to me, then allow me to pass it up to you, but my relief is such that I will overlook the transgression.”
“He says you tried to have him killed,” the foreign minister said.
“Foreign minister,” Felicity said icily, “if I had tried to have him killed he would now be in a box in the churchyard at the Royal Naval College, after having been accorded full military honors.”
“I did not bring you here to joke,” he said.
“What made you think I was joking?” she asked.
Sir Oswald slammed his pen down on his desk. “Goddammit, Felicity, I will not tolerate insubordination from you!”
“Then sack me!” Felicity riposted at a similar volume. “Or leave me to stock my service with the best people, not castoff blackmailers like that horrible little man! Those are your choices, do with them as you will!”
“What do you mean, ‘blackmailer’?” Sir Oswald demanded.
“I don’t think I have to explain the term to you, Ozzie, nor to your faithful companion since your days at Eton.”
“How dare you speak to me that way!”
“I am forced to such daring,” she said, “in the circumstances. Instead of your outrage with me, you should, perhaps, devote your energies to explaining things to the prime minister after Fife-Simpson has put a flea in his ear. I’m sure, given his past, that will be his next move.”
Sir Oswald diverted his eyes and sagged a little. “All right,” he said, “let us be frank.”
“I don’t believe I have been less than frank,” Felicity replied.
He turned back toward her and made a placating motion with both hands. “All right,” he said, “what do you have on Fife-Simpson?”
“Well,” Felicity said. “Let me see.” She was quiet for a moment. “Perhaps you have been regaled, at some point, with Fife-Simpson’s story of how he killed two IRA men and harmed three others in a Belfast public house — this in his youth, of course.”
Sir Oswald sighed. “He made sure someone else told me about that occasion.”
“It never happened,” Felicity said. “At least, not the way he tells it.”
Sir Oswald leaned forward and rested his elbows on his desk. “Tell me,” he said.
So Dame Felicity apprised the foreign minister of the true events on that day and cited her sources.
“Does Tim Barnes know about this?”
“Sir Tim was his companion on that day and saved his life by summoning a team of military policemen.”
“Why were they together?”
“One of them, I’m not sure which, had expressed a keen interest in finding a pub he had heard about which catered to, shall we say, a more effete clientele than that found in your typical Belfast watering hole. They stupidly wandered into the wrong pub.”
“And you think Tim has been a victim of Fife-Simpson?”
“Yes, and I believe he remains so. Why else would he press Fife-Simpson on you and, thus, me?”
“And after Tim saved the man’s life!”
“Quite so.”
“Then he must be dealt with,” Sir Oswald said, slapping his palm on the leather top of his desk.
“Then he should be dealt with carefully,” Felicity said.