My Only Talent Ch. 23

Complete silence. She took a deep breath in, but then didn't let it out.

"And they are going to say it is not one of these modern 50/50 if it doesn't work out it's no big deal kind of marriages. This is a situation where a marriage that doesn't work is also to the end of my career. Then they are going to do a background check on you: a very, very thorough one. Then they will tell me I can talk to you – with them listening. Do you understand?"

He heard not a word from her, and saw no movement, not even the blink of an eye nor the dilation of a pupil.

* * * * *

Mom sent me off to shop by myself when she wanted to buy something for me, and gave me a list of what I should get for Dad and Grandma. I carried a lot of bags to the car under strict warning not to look inside them. She did give me two nice shirts early so I could take them with me this afternoon and wear them in the UK. When we got back to the house there was a package that had been delivered by courier that contained my passport – I had forgotten about it. Did an American need a passport to enter the UK? It seemed like they let anybody in these days. I flipped through it and saw some extra pages added at the back. What were those? Worry about it later: I just had time to throw some stuff in my carry on and mom took me to DFW. The tickets were waiting at the Admiral's club near gate D23, and the flight was on time, in a big and recently refurbished 747 that still had that new airplane smell. My boarding pass said seat 4B, and that sure sounded like first class to me. I made my way forward and up a level to find that my seat wasn't just a seat, it was a lay all the way back sleeping couch with pillow and blanket, plus it had a shroud around it almost like an Elizabethan collar. There was an individual power outlet, plus in flight Wi-Fi. There were about a dozen other similar seats in my section, so I began to plot my business development targets, as other people also made their way to their seats.

One obvious choice was the guy in 4A just to my left. In his mid-forties, he was wearing a dark grey pinstripe suit, dark blue shirt with white collar and cuffs, a woven black cotton tie, and some of those trendy Italian eyeglasses that have that magnetic catch where they can break apart in the middle. I was not sure how to read that outfit – gambler, gangster, or overpaid accountant? After we introduced ourselves, I decided he must be an accountant for a gangster. We then exchanged business cards, his said "Consulting Accountancy". That makes one business development target down and two to go, Barry. Given the nice seats and captive audience, I might try for a few extra.

Elizabeth Ashcroft Knowles tried to remain calm and collected, her normal mien, but she was hungry, harried, exhausted and sleep deprived. She had received this assignment with no advance notice, just after coming off another one that had lasted almost 6 days, during which she had slept only twice. She was directed to Heathrow and a typical HQ travel desk penny wise and pound foolish dirt cheap Air Canada flight in a bulkhead seat next to a woman with a screaming infant. That flight went to Frankfurt, then Toronto, and then finally took off late for DFW, arriving only 3 hours before she had to turn around and board a flight back to London to engage her target. Her only salvation might be that she was seated in first near her prey on the direct flight back to London, where there would be food and drink, and hopefully the mission parameters would not require that she stay awake for the entire flight. Placing first in Informatics at King's College hardly prepared her for the kind of travel the agency required of her, nor the paramilitary and other tradecraft training she had taken in for six very intense months after her graduation. She had certainly never imagined what her supervisor had described as her first 'critical mission' would start with being chatted up by some eighteen year old spoiled brat yank uni git on an airplane flight from Dallas.

My mid-cabin 'seatmate' in 4C soon arrived and settled in. She was in her mid-twenties, short, plain, thick black glasses, thick black hair, and underdressed in a loose navy blue suit with white blouse, and at first glance completely uninteresting. The outfit said store clerk, but if she added a red tie, a blue cap, and some makeup she might have been taken for one of the cabin attendants. It was almost as if she deliberately tried to blend in, disappear, and be unremarkable. Then she turned and looked at me and I got a load of her eyes. They weren't just sparkling or active or interesting – they were beautiful little laser light shows – so bright blue that they almost cast a shadow. They danced and scanned and focused briefly and precisely on everything and everyone, including me. My first impression of her as unremarkable was completely shattered. She made those bright eyed girls that delighted me so at the UDP pre-rush gig look like dullards. I was captivated. Was she to be the next validation of my theory that really bright girls are the best lovers? Then a clear and coherent medium strength Suzie signal waxed up out of the noise, from her, for me. It had an interesting overtone of surprise, or even embarrassment. Was that good, or bad?

I accosted the guy in 3A as he went by, an older gentleman who looked like one of those professors that are 'emeritus enough' to only teach one class every other semester. Sure enough, after the exchange his card said he was a math professor from the University of Connecticut, and an ASA, whatever that was. I just needed to bag one more card, and I figured bright eyes in 4C would be available for a while. I focused on the woman in 5B just behind me. She looked like one of my mom's friends, in her late forties, and very well dressed and made up, like she was just about to have her picture taken. Her card said she was a Mary Kay cosmetics 'consultant', which piqued my interest. My dad, ever the student of selling and sales forces, had studied their methods, and said that there were hundreds of thousands of them out there, and not only did the top 20% percent of them sell 80% of the volume, like most such organizations, but that most of them struggled and sold very little, and only about 100 of them each year made really big dough. Just like realtors. If her jewelry was any indication, she was one of the ones that did very well.

They made the announcements for takeoff and people settled in. There were two cabin attendants for our little section, so the service was very attentive. They started off by serving us hot nuts, which made me think of Peggy – hot, salty, tasty, and effective at whetting my appetite for more. Some almost fresh orange juice quieted my already growling stomach for a moment, but the look I got from bright eyes told me she had noticed the sounds of my struggling digestive system. She declined her nuts and offered them to me, and I ate them, for the protein of course. I thanked her. I decided that I might be willing to offer my nuts to her, later. By the time we were in the air, they were serving wine and veggies with ranch dip. 4C and I were the only ones to decline the wine, and she noticed.

"Teetotaler, are we?" She had a surprisingly thick British lowbrow accent, so much so that I thought she must have been deliberately exaggerating it. It was thick yet fast, in stark contrast to Nora's educated style. It sounded far worse than the junior college player's production of Pygmalion that I had endured three times in one week late last summer with my mother in support of one of her students.

"Are you from Hoxton?" I said. Her flashing eyes told me she got the reference to the play, and she was startled that I had made it. Her Suzie signal moved up a notch and I smiled openly at her and continued. "I do abstain from booze, tobacco, and dope. It all just puts me to sleep, anyway."

She smiled in response. "Dallas, eh?" She suddenly sounded a lot more like Nora Upman, or a newsreader on BBC America.

"Originally, yes, but now attending school in Austin. I gave her my card, and took hers. It read 'Elizabeth Ashcroft Knowles, Systems Analyst, Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.' I smiled "What happened to the Ministry of Agriculture?"

She smiled a tired smile, apparently having had to handle this one before. "It was DEFRA-tized."

I couldn't resist, and gave her a friendly, good natured leer. "I do hope your specialty is rural affairs. Do I qualify as a country boy?"

She smiled a moment, and then put on a sterner face. "Trade, actually, using information systems to encourage our farmers and growers to buy and sell properly in the world markets. What brings you to London?"

"Mostly business and perhaps I'll have a chance to meet a friend here if our schedules mesh. Is London your home?"

"No. I'm a Gloucestershire girl from Cheltanham, bred and borne, and I visit there often, but my office is in Cornwall. I do travel a lot, both around the country and internationally."

"I am scheduled almost every minute on this trip until Christmas eve when I fly back, but perhaps on another trip, or if you come to Texas...."

She showed a faint smile, but then said only "Perhaps." The cabin attendant took our veggie with dip dishes and refilled everyone else's wine glass generously. This was a far cry from the peanuts on the more familiar Southwest Flight 213, and my stomach liked this one a lot better. The next course was salad. Not quite as tasty as Strelsa served up last Sunday night, and I was sure the after dinner show would not be nearly as good.

This young yank was much more interesting than she had any right to expect, and he was treating her the way she had seen men treat beautiful women: attentive, interested in what she said, smiling at her, making eye contact. She was surprised at her own attraction to him. He was young and obviously fit, but no movie star in the looks department himself. She had been disappointed so many times before that she thought she had purged any tendency to take a shine to any male that approached her. But his interest in her felt good, surprisingly good, and seemed genuine, too. But her job was to get more data on why he was here and what he was up to. She wasn't read in on why he had been flagged for investigation in the first place, but most likely metadata had connected him to some interesting parties or unidentifiable phone numbers. Perhaps she would get an update of his recent data to guide her in following up. He certainly had a healthy appetite to go with his growling stomach, and was devouring everything the cabin attendant could bring him. She wondered wistfully about what other appetites he might have, and whether she would ever have occasion to give him her real name. As they brought the main course his arousal was obvious, and she felt flattered and flustered at the same time. Why did that feel so damn good?

On one of her early assignments, posing as an accountancy temp in a company that HQ wanted to investigate, one of the male supervisors had lectured her about the fact that she was expected to spend some time on her knees at his desk at night to keep her weekly hire renewed, remarking with a laugh that a girl as plain as she had best learn how to please a man with her mouth and not with her looks. She had managed to put him off until the end of the week, and arranged things so that when the local constabulary burst in to make the arrests for the restricted technology sales the company was making to certain organizations in the middle east, they found him sitting on the front his desk with his trousers and underpants around his ankles, and a stash of kiddie porn on his office computer. He told them the porn wasn't his, but they said the password certainly was. He insisted that he had been waiting for one of the adult female temps that he was shagging to return from the loo, but the temp worker he named didn't show up on any of the payroll sheets. The supervisor's name was noe prominently featured on the kidshield.eu site these days, though.

Remembering Strelsa and Suzanne's little Sunday show on the couch had stimulated me, and I had to turn my body to avoid making it too obvious to Bright Eyes when they brought my steak. I arranged the tray for maximum concealment and began to work on the food. Steak, potatoes, and green beans almandine was doing the job for me, and with a little dessert, I could make it all the way to London without needing one of Bob the Knob's sugar and electrolyte jelly envelopes to revive me. I guess I should carry some of those with me just in case. I felt sure I would be able get some toast for breakfast on this flight. Dessert for the evening proved to be a chocolate sundae, with some more of those roasted nuts on top, and I got goofily philosophical about the circle of life and all that jazz. I was probably just a little high from having normal blood sugar levels for a change. Feeling all warm and fuzzy and sleepy reminded me of reading Nora's Suzie signal black box sexual event data recorder in the back of Alley's Suburban, and suddenly I wanted to do a little Suzie sonar snooping of my own on Bright Eyes. I steeled myself to stay awake long enough to listen in on her. But she was casually leafing through the in flight magazine, watching me out of the corner of an eye, as if she wouldn't go to sleep until I did. The cabin attendant conspired against me too, bringing another little pillow and a blanket, and turning down the overhead lights.

The next thing I knew they were turning up the cabin lights and offering coffee and breakfast, with about 90 minutes to go until we landed. I felt wonderful, and if my time zone arithmetic was right, I had managed to get at least six or seven hours of sleep under my belt. Amazingly, Little Miss Cheltanham in 4C was still asleep. I tuned for her Suzie signal but she woke up and smiled at me before I could read a thing.

"Good morning, Bright Eyes."

"I beg your pardon? What did you call me?"

I smiled and kept my own council for a while, digging into breakfast like I hadn't eaten in a week. The attendant noticed and brought me seconds, including more toast. Bright Eyes was also very industrious about putting away a good breakfast, although I noticed, like me, she did not drink any coffee. She did feel conversational, though, and took me through what almost sounded like a script – on my studies, my major at the university, my family, my schedule for this trip and where I was going in the UK. She got three or four facts from me for every one she gave up, too, her wonderful eyes flashing and zapping at me. I was sad to see us approaching the airport, but automatically gathered up my stuff and prepared to deplane.

"May I call you at the number on your card when I return after Christmas?"

"Yes, and I'll get the message even if I don't pick up immediately. And if your schedule fails to 'mesh' with your friend on this trip, perhaps we can talk some more?" She flashed me a wonderful smile, her eyes sparkling with an even greater intensity than I had seen before, and then looked nervously at her phone and immediately wove her way through the aisles like a roller derby jammer, and was almost certainly the first to emerge from the plane.

The accountant in 4A spoke up. "Working pretty hard for a low return there, aren't you sport?" I looked him a question with my eyes. "I mean, she is young and fit, but she is not much to look at, is she?"

I was amazed. "Did you see her eyes?"

"Yeah, no big deal: blue, but sort of a dull and unremarkable. I am sure she was very flattered that you took such an interest. Your good deed for the day, perhaps?" I just stared at the back of his head as he preceded me out and down to the door. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

I turned my phone on and found a text from Barry Fermy. It had a fake traveler's name for a sign to be held by a limo driver outside that would take me to the hotel, and he said to relax and synchronize my clock until 7 PM when the same driver would pick me up again and take me to dinner with the group. I knew just who I wanted to relax with! Peggy responded to my text almost immediately. She said she had arranged to play 'nooky hooky' from her museum job for the rest of the day, and was on her way to the hotel, and she was bringing 'urges'. Hallelujah!

Elizabeth Ashcroft Knowles had to get moving and fast. The text waiting on her phone had the lad's hotel information and some recent phone hits that HQ's Bayesian inference bots made some interesting connections with. She had to get to the hotel first and liaise with the surveillance team. When she first started working for HQ, she was amazed that so much of her job involved watching and listening to people being bored in their hotel rooms. She usually hated watching men or women pleasure themselves to release, but she might not mind seeing Robbie do that. She was curious as to how he got onto her radar in the first place, and she put in a request for the 'complete file' which would probably be denied on compartmentalization grounds, but she might get more data of some kind. He was much more interesting than one would expect from a university freshman, especially an engineer. He was staying at Horseguards, a kind of pricey spot, but in a great location. She would check how the room was being paid for. Its major drawback was the number of insufferable MI6 twits and would be droogies that seemed hell bent on conspicuously abusing their expense accounts there. Officially speaking, MI6 was in charge of counter intelligence, which was sort of a 'moronoxy', as everything they did seemed to her to be counter to any concept of intelligence. Some of her more lowly ranked classmates had gone to work for MI6, and were now smugly condescending towards her, believing that she must not have interviewed well, and that she actually worked for DEFRA now.

I followed the driver with the proper sign to a limo that was some sort of big black sedan that had never seen the streets of the United States, but it worked well enough. The driver was a not the expected movie cliché turbaned Sikh, but a taciturn Brit about my grandmother's age. We went almost all the way around the airport once and then merged into the M4 from the left, which made me nervous, as we were clearly driving on the wrong side of the road. I had heard many horror stories of London traffic, and this was essentially the late morning rush hour, but it did not take that long to reach the hotel. It overlooked the Thames, looking like something out of a Disney movie portraying the late 1800's, and I expected Mary Poppins to sing and fly her umbrella by at any moment. I had done my homework on appropriate tipping, and suffered through a bellman's rehearsed speech about the room and the hotel's services, before giving him a tip that would have bought at least two nice meals back in Austin.

I hung up my clothes and put my stuff in the bathroom, and had a quick shower and a shave.

Elizabeth was setup in a transit van outside by the time young Mr. Roberts got to the hotel. She was stuffed into the little truck with three older male techies that placed the bugs, setup the taps on the hotel systems, maintained them, and recorded the 'take'. One often heard calls for the government to do things the "Chinese way" and that would have certainly made their job easier. In the PRC, certain members of the staff of almost any hotel that catered to foreigners were actually employees of the Ministry of State Security, or People's Armed Police, or PLA, or sometimes all three. The newer hotels had dedicated equipment cabinets for permanently installed surveillance gear that could be monitored remotely. Remember to smile when you shave or use the loo, world traveler.