still trust her, she had to be debriefed, and that debriefing would take place away from London, at a secure facility hidden in the Cotswolds, called the Farm.
The drive was long, and held in silence. Crocker knew better than to try to engage her in conversation, and for her part, Chace was sitting beside a man whose living guts she now hated.
When she’d fled London some ten days earlier, the boys from Box hot on her heels, she’d been a Special Operations Officer in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. She’d been the Head of the Section, in fact, code- named Minder One, with two other Minders under her command and tutelage. Along with Minder Two, Nicky Poole, and Minder Three, Chris Lankford, she had provided HMG with covert action capability, as directed and supervised by D-Ops, Paul Crocker. He was their Lord and Master, their protection against the vagaries of government and the whims of politicians who saw agents as disposable as Bic pens, as nothing more or less than small cogs in a very large machine.
Stolen documents needed retrieving in Oslo? Send a Minder to get them back and hush the whole thing up. Potential defection in progress in Hong Kong? Send a Minder to evaluate the defector’s worth, to then either facilitate the lift or boomerang the poor bastard back into the PRC as a double agent. Islamofascist terrorist assembling a dirty bomb in Damascus? Send a Minder to kill the son of a bitch before he can deliver the device to Downing Street.
Tara Chace had left London knowing that she was one of the best—if not the best—Special Operations Officers working for any intelligence service anywhere in the world today.
She had no idea what she had returned as, but a trip to the Farm made at least one thing clear.
Tara Chace was
The Farm wasn’t, really, though from a distance, if people didn’t know what they were looking at or looking for, they could perhaps take it as such. From the lane, a single road wended through a gap in the dry stone wall, disappearing beyond a wall of trees that concealed cameras and sensors designed to keep people out as much as to keep people in. After another mile came another fence, this one more serious, of metal and chain, guarded by a gatehouse and walking patrols, and past that, one could glimpse the manor house concealed beyond further trees. Into the compound, one found the dormitories, as they were euphemistically called, bungalows constructed in the early sixties that demonstrated all of the architectural grace of the period, lined up side by side along a paved walkway, surrounded by yet another chain-link fence, this one topped with razor wire.
As far as prisons went, Chace thought that this one wasn’t half bad. Her bungalow was simple and comfortable enough, and when she wasn’t being interrogated by the likes of David Kinney and his Inquisitors from Box, or being evaluated by the head SIS psychiatrist, Dr. Eleanor Callard, or submitting to yet another physical by yet another physician she’d never met before in her life, she was left alone. She could take walks with an escort, read books from the manor library, exercise in the gym. There were no clocks anywhere she could see, and she was forbidden access to television, radio, newspapers, or the internet.
The supply of scotch and cigarettes, however, was generous, and Chace availed herself of both.
She’d been at the Farm a week when Crocker returned. The Director of Operations came to her bungalow, let in by a guard, to find Chace vomiting into the toilet, and he waited until she was finished, until she had used the sink to rinse out her mouth and slop water onto her face, before saying, “It’s time to come back to work.”
Chace dried her face on a hand towel, refolded it, and replaced it on its bar, before asking, “And what if I don’t want to?”
“Of course you want to,” Crocker said. “You’re a Minder, Tara. You don’t know how to be anyone else. You can’t be anyone else.”
It was what she’d feared the most since arriving at the Farm, the question she’d taken to bed with her every night. Not wondering what would happen if they threw her out on her ear, if they discharged her dishonorably, if they sent her packing. No, that would have made it easy; they would have made the decision for her. Shunted off with a reminder of the Official Secrets Act and an admonishment to keep her nose clean, she could have left and blamed it all on them, on Crocker and Weldon and Barclay, on politicians and analysts in London and DC who felt Tara Chace was a world more trouble than she was worth.
That would have made it so easy.
Instead, her worst fear realized, manifested now by Crocker, telling her that all was forgiven.
Telling her what they both knew.
So she went with him, back to London, and back to work.
Six weeks later, she and Minder Two went to Iraq on Operation: Red Panda, to assassinate a member of the new government who had been passing defense information to the insurgency. Things got bloody.
Things got very bloody.
Perhaps bloodier than they needed to get.
When they returned to London and had been debriefed, Chace was ordered to see Dr. Callard a second time.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Some trouble sleeping, but fine.”
“Are you still drinking?”
“I eat, too.”
Callard’s mouth twitched with a smile, and she scribbled something on the pad resting on the desk in front of her. She asked Chace more questions, and Chace answered them with requisite evasion. The whole process lasted an hour, and when Chace again descended to the Pit, the basement office she shared with Lankford and Poole, she knew what the Madwoman of the Second Floor would report to D-Ops.
Chace wasn’t a fool, and she knew herself well. She was drinking too much and sleeping too little. More often than not she started her mornings by being ill into the toilet. She was sore, and plagued by bad dreams when she could sleep. She was prone to irrational anger and sudden sorrows.
Even if she hadn’t been able to read Callard’s notes upside down, even if she hadn’t seen the words
All the same, she stopped at the Boots nearest her home in Camden on her way back from work that day, just to be certain. She read the instructions on the box, followed them, waited.
And found herself staring at two pink lines, which, according to the instructions, indicated a positive.
She left her home, returned to the Boots, bought another test, and repeated the procedure, with the same result.
Two pink lines.
“Bloody fucking hell,” she said.
The hard copy of the Minder personnel files—past and present—were held by D-Ops, or more precisely, held in the secure safe in his outer office. Keys to the safe were in the possession of Crocker; the Deputy Chief of Service, Donald Weldon; and the Head of Service, C, known outside of the building as Sir Frances Barclay. Duplicates were stored on the in-house computer network, but access to those files in particular required a password that was altered every twenty-four hours, and even then, only supplied to the aforementioned holders of the keys.
Plus one other person, Kate Cooke, who manned the desk in Crocker’s outer office, serving as his personal assistant. Not only did she have access to the password, but she had her own set of keys. After worrying the
