Walking had always been her therapy. She’d grown up north of London on a family estate that grew smaller with each passing generation. Somewhere back in Wellington’s time, a cavalry general on her father’s side had been awarded a nice chunk of Shropshire farmland in exchange for doing some rather gallant and (she’d later learned at Cambridge) beastly things to Napoléon’s army at Waterloo. By the time Sarah was born, The Meadows, as home was called, was down to forty acres and had taken to boarding horses for urban equestriennes, whom her father described as women who liked to ride without getting any shit on their boots.
But Sarah had always preferred lone treks across the rolling countryside to the care, saddling, and endless grooming that went with riding. Slipping out of bed at dawn, she’d pull on her Wellingtons and rain slicker and disappear for hours on solitary reconnaissances of the surrounding meadows, trudging through marshes, dashing up hillocks, and navigating her way through dense woods, thick with thistle and pine. Returning at dusk, she’d sit at the table, quietly sipping her evening’s tea, resisting her mother’s and brothers’ entreaties about where she had been. “Out,” she would say with a secret smile, and savor their ignorance.
But when Daddy, home for one of his all-too-brief leaves, inquired, she would share her adventure with him from the first footstep beyond The Meadows’ immaculate white fences, and leaven her tales with nuggets of scurrilous information about their neighbors. She was first to know that Ben Bitmead was growing pot plants in the middle of his father’s corn plot. (The police found out a year later, though not from her, and Ben spent six months “on vacation,” as her Daddy told her.) She caught Ollie Robson siphoning the gas out of Mrs. McMurtry’s pickup on two occasions, and this time, she’d called Mary McMurtry to tell her, or at least her father had. On the matter of Mrs. Milligan, and why her Mini-Cooper was parked behind Father Gill’s parsonage at six in the morning three days’ running, her father had pledged her to secrecy. Every human being needs a little love in their life, he’d said. Leave it at that, kitten. And tousling her hair with his broad, calloused palm, he’d hauled her up on his shoulders and carried her to the kitchen singing, “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo,” the Royal Marines’ anthem.
Even then, Sarah had been a clandestine agent with a divided loyalty.
She’d also learned that silence often led to tragedy, and that the hardest job was not collecting intelligence, but in knowing who to tell it to, and analyzing it afterward for meaning.
She was thinking of Mr. Fenwick, the village grocer. Day after day, she’d spied him in his bedroom measuring the distance from his dresser to a rocking chair she recognized as Mrs. Fenwick’s, who’d passed away only a month before. He’d walk from the dresser to the chair, sit down, have a long stare straight ahead, then get up and set out the distance with a yardstick. Then one day, there was an ambulance parked in his drive, and Sarah found out that he’d laid a shotgun across the dresser, tied a string to the trigger, and taking a seat in his wife’s favorite rocker and making things right with the Lord, blown himself to kingdom come.
It was hardly a surprise when Sarah joined MI6, fresh out of Cambridge with her first in Oriental languages and a blue in crew. She had the brains and the brawn they were looking for, and God knew, the ambition to top her brothers, two of whom were military men, in the battle for her father’s accolades.
Already six years, she thought, stopping at a corner for a red light, and Daddy gone four of them. A melancholy breeze swept over her, and she found herself whistling “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo,” and wanting more than anything else to share this latest and most dire adventure with him. Not exactly Goose Green, but she’d cut it close just the same. She’d been blooded. “Not bad, kitten,” he’d say succinctly, but his hidden smile would give her all the satisfaction a devoted daughter could ever want.
The day had grown hot and muggy. In the space of ten city blocks, the blue sky curdled to gray. Mozart had taken five, and the only music playing in her head was the choppy, unmelodious rhythm of her own humming as she tread to keep her head above water. The giddiness was gone, vanished as quickly as it had arrived. A dark menace lurked behind her every thought. And so she hummed louder.
It was when she decided her mouth tasted funny that the panic came on full-force. It was the cyanide. She’d had a peroxide rinse to clear out the poison, but suddenly she was sure the stuff was still in her system. Hurrying to the side of the road, she broke at the waist, spitting repeatedly until her mouth was parched, her breath coming fast and her heart beating madly. Lowering herself to a knee, she struggled to calm herself down. You’re just a little in shock, she told herself in a rational voice. It’s to be expected. You’ve suffered a “traumatic event”-as if watching a man cut his throat from ear to ear and bearing witness to the pulverization of a half dozen others, all after preparing your unwashed soul to meet your maker, could be made to fit into two words.
That was how they found her: on a knee, catching her breath, the color just beginning to return to her cheeks. It was a black Chrysler from the consulate.
“Miss Churchill,” asked a clean-cut man she recognized as a junior counselor. Bill or Bob or Brian. “Are you all right?”
“Hello,” she said, waving, putting on that irrepressible grin, the one that said You know us Brits, we never give up, never complain. Cheerio, and all that bleeding crap. “Brian, isn’t it? Yes, yes, I’m fine. Must’ve eaten something dodgy.”
“Brad,” he corrected her, the smile firmly in place. “I’m afraid we’ve been asked to bring you back to the embassy.”
Straightening, she knew immediately that Brad and the local driver had been following her the entire route. Cui custodiet custodian. Who spies on the spies? Now she knew. The other spies. She just hadn’t expected them to be from her side.
“But my flight doesn’t leave till two this morning,” she said, a little unsurely.
“Change of plan, I’m afraid. There’s a plane waiting for you at the airport right now.”
“To Washington?”
“No, ma’am. To Paris. Admiral Glendenning’s orders.”
Chapter 11
“You can’t unload this position now. You’ll get killed. Do you have any idea what kinda hit you’re gonna take unloading that size block? A point at least, maybe more. A hundred grand still means something. You’re down what? Thirty percent. Hang on a little longer. Let me work the market. Better yet, wait. We’ll sell into the next rally. It’s overdue. All you need is a little patience. Patience and timing. Twenty-six years I’ve been trading. I know when we’re due, and we’re due. The market’s going to turn any day now. Too much money’s sitting on the sidelines. Fund redemptions are down. Pension plans are overfunded. All the leading indicators are up: consumer confidence, the Purchasing Managers’ Index, the Conference Board. The PPI’s flat. Inflation’s in check. Interest rates aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. This is a market that’s waiting to explode. We’re sitting on a powder keg. You hear me, a powder keg? Twelve months from now we’ll be testing new highs. Forget eleven thousand. Think twelve. Twelve five, even. This is not the time to be a spectator. You hear me? This is the time to keep both feet in the water. You cannot unload this position now.”
In his office overlooking the Eiffel Tower, Marc Gabriel distanced the phone from his ear. The problem with private bankers, he was thinking, was that they confused their own welfare with that of their clients. His broker wasn’t upset that by liquidating more than four hundred thousand shares of blue chip stock, his largest client was realizing a loss of over ten million dollars. He was scared that his own career might be in the shitter should Marc Gabriel and his company jump ship.