Ops’ outer office, two blue internal distribution folders in her hand, joking with Kate Cooke and waiting for Crocker to see her for the morning brief.
“It’s a new perfume,” Chace said. “There’s a boy.”
“There is not a boy,” Kate responded, indignant, offering her a cup of coffee.
Chace took the cup, sipped at it, grinning. “It’s Lankford, isn’t it? You’ve got a thing for my Minder Three.”
Color crept into Kate’s cheeks, and she settled at her desk, putting her attention on the files she’d been sorting before Chace had entered. It seemed to Chace that she was trying very hard to avoid eye contact.
“I do not.”
“Well, it’s not Poole, and it’s not me, and I can’t much figure who else comes through this office that you’d try to capture with a new scent. So I’m thinking Lankford.”
“It’s not Chris.”
“Oooh, Chris, is it?” Chace moved toward the desk, reaching for the internal phone. “I’ll call down to the Pit, shall I, see what he thinks of that?”
Kate swatted at Chace’s hand. “Don’t you dare.”
Chace stopped, looked closer at Kate, who held the stare for a fraction before again turning her attention back to her work. The younger woman’s expression had tightened, the joke taken too far, and Chace realized three things in quick succession. First, Kate wasn’t trying to catch Lankford; she’d already caught him. Second, Kate Cooke had been in this office long enough to know the directorate’s opinion of staff/Minder fraternization. Relationships weren’t forbidden between most SIS staff, but between SIS staff and members of Special Section was a different story. One thing to tandem-couple with the new lad on the Argentine Desk, another thing entirely to tandem with an agent who might be asked to kidnap a general from his home in Tehran, a job he or she might not come back from, ever.
Third, Chace realized that she was living in her own glass house, that there was nothing she could say to dissuade either Lankford or Kate. Even if her affair with Wallace didn’t strictly fall into the same category—Wallace had left the Section at the time, to teach at the Field School—she’d done the same herself with Minder Three Edward Kittering when she’d been Minder Two. In the rankings of sin, Chace was the winner, and both of them knew it.
“Just keep it quiet,” Chace told Kate. “You don’t want D-Ops getting wind of it.”
Kate’s expression was a mixture of gratitude and hope.
“Don’t look at me like that. I don’t approve, but I won’t obstruct.”
“You did it.”
“Yes, I did.” Chace finished her coffee, moved around to the pot for a refill. “I was astonishingly stupid.”
Kate started to respond, but the door from the inner office opened, and Simon Rayburn emerged, bearing a folder of his own, this one red. He smiled at Chace.
“Tara.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“All well?”
“For the moment at least, yes, sir.”
“Very good.” Rayburn made for the exit, back onto the hall. “You can go on in, I think.”
“Thank you, sir,” Chace said, and went through to the inner office, to find Crocker seated behind his desk, as ever he seemed to be, scribbling his signature at the bottom of the memorandum he was reviewing. Chace stood, waiting while he shuffled the memo back into the stack, and when he looked up, she held out the folders she was carrying.
“Report to the FCO on the viability of recruitment in Guangdong Province as prepared per your request with input from the China Desk, with notes. And request for operational oversight regarding travel and incidental expenses to operational theater, prepared for submission to the Finance Committee. I almost handed it to the Deputy Chief on his way out, but thought it’d be better coming from you.”
She dropped the second folder on the first, and Crocker reached for it, flipping it open. “Sit.”
Chace barked, once, sounding less like a dog than like a woman trying to sound like one, then pulled up the chair. She leaned forward and lifted his pack of Silk Cut, freed a cigarette, and Crocker slid his lighter across the desktop absently, without looking away from his reading. Chace lit, exhaled, and sat back, waiting for his verdict.
Crocker closed the folder, then reached for his pack and lighter, sitting back himself. “You were diplomatic.”
“I thought honey rather than vinegar.”
“Probably wise. All right, I’ll send it up to C. If she approves it, she’ll have Rayburn present at the meeting.”
“He’ll sell it? We need more money.”
“We always need more money, Tara.”
“On Operation: Lanyard, Mission Planning couldn’t secure seats for Poole and me on the same flight, sir. We ended up flying into Hanoi sixteen hours apart, and that put me sixteen hours in theater without backup. The last time Lankford went out, he flew economy because Budget wouldn’t authorize a first-class ticket.”
“He did all right.”
“He did, but that’s hardly the point.”
Crocker lit his own cigarette. “C will give it to Rayburn, and Rayburn will bring it to Finance. It’ll be taken care of.”
“Nice to have a Deputy Chief we can trust.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Crocker told her. While he didn’t actually grin, he came close.
Tara laughed, then reached into her jacket pocket and removed the printout she’d been carrying there, folded widthwise. “You see this?”
“I’m still working through the ‘Urgents,’ so unless it was graded ‘Immediate,’ no, I haven’t. What is it?”
“It’s about Tashkent.”
“Will it make me happy?”
“It’s not about the last Starstreak, if that’s what you’re asking, no.”
Crocker took the next paper waiting for him at the top of his stack, readying his pen. “You’re still certain they only used three of them?”
“Technically, they used two of them, I used one,” Chace clarified. “And yes, I am certain, as certain as I can be considering that I was unconscious for a time.”
“I don’t like loose ends.”
Chace grunted agreement. In the past sixth months, there’d been no sign nor whisper of the fourth of Barclay’s four missiles, and try as Tashkent Station might, they’d heard nary a whisper of its whereabouts. If it was still in Uzbekistan, in Ahtam Zahidov’s possession, perhaps, there was no proof of the fact. If it wasn’t in Zahidov’s possession, then God only knew who had it, and what they were planning to do with it. Neither Chace nor Crocker nor the DC nor C doubted it would come back to haunt them. Where and when were the only questions.
Chace handed the sheet over, watched as Crocker unfolded it. It was a simple printout out of a news piece Chace had pulled from online earlier that morning, a Reuters story carried on the wire, with a photo. The printer in the Pit was a cranky old laserjet, and incapable of color, though it had tried its best to reproduce the graphic. The photo had been taken in Tashkent the previous week, outside the Bakhor Concert Hall in Tashkent, and showed President Sevara Malikov-Ganiev speaking to the American Ambassador, a man named Michael Norton.
Crocker skimmed the article, examined the photo, then sent it back to her across the desk. “I do not see the missing Starstreak.”
“As I said, this isn’t about the missing Starstreak.”
“Then please explain the operational significance of this photograph.”
Chace pushed it back toward him, this time tapping an index finger on the photograph. “There.”
Crocker looked again, and either didn’t like what he saw or didn’t like where he suspected Chace was going with this. “That’s the boy?”
“Stepan, yes.” Chace took the paper back. In the photo, Stepan was in the background, in the cluster of bodyguards behind Sevara. The boy had been dressed up, wearing what passed for formal clothing for a two-and-
