I, Spy? (Sophie Green Mysteries, No. 1) (Sophie Green Mystery)

have dark eyes. You don’t see many blond, blue-eyed Italians.”
    It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him he wasn’t a blond, but then I realized it was probably dyed. He seemed to take this undercover thing very seriously.
    “Why Italian?”
    “I can speak it. I’ve lived there. Girls like Italians.”
    I’m afraid my lip curled. “Look,” I said, “not to be rude or anything, but why are you here? Am I under arrest or something?”
    Luke sighed heavily and took a seat beside me on the sofa. I shuffled away from him. There was a very slight possibility he was mad. Hot as hell, but mad.
    “I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “and you have to keep it a secret. I mean this, if you tell anyone—your mum, your best friend, your brother, even your bloody cat—” Tammy looked offended at that, and rightly so, “then I’m not joking, I will have to kill you.” He lifted his pullover fleece and showed me the pistol holstered at his side.
    “What happened to Brown’s gun?”
    Luke gave me a look. “You know that wasn’t his real name, right?”
    “Duh.” It hadn’t occurred to me, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
    “It wasn’t even the same guy.”
    I stared, horrified.
    Luke laughed. “It’s okay. The guy we caught yesterday has a twin brother. What we didn’t know, when he used up his one phone call, was that he was giving out some kind of code. The brother was following instructions. If you hadn’t spotted him, he might have got through.”
    “To Alicante?”
    “No. Actually he was booked on the Geneva flight, but that’s by the by. What gets me is that he was stupid enough to use the same airport and the same fucking airline.”
    “Very bright and yet so very thick.”
    “They all are.” Luke held out his hand to Tammy, who sniffed at it, then licked his fingers.
    Bloody cat. Took me weeks to earn enough trust to pick her up.
    “Was that the classified information?”
    “What?” He looked up. “No. Not really. We’ve been after the brothers for a while. What I have to tell you is who ‘we’ are.”
    I braced myself.
    “Twenty years ago the government set up a special branch of military intelligence, based at Stansted, to deal with illegal airport traffic. Everything from drugs to terrorism. They called it SO17—Special Operations Seventeen. To begin with everything was excellent, the agents did everything they should and caught dozens of bad guys. At the time it was thought Stansted was going to grow into a huge airport, bigger than Heathrow.”
    “Not if I can help it,” I said with feeling. Airport expansion was something I was pretty much against, mostly because it would involve building over my house.
    “But of course the airport didn’t get that huge, and we shot ourselves in the foot.”
    “Feet.”
    “Whatever. The problem was that we worked too well. There were no more bad guys to catch. Word had got around. So they downsized us, didn’t want to spend all this money on an operation that wasn’t doing anything. Agents retired and they weren’t replaced. SO17 got pretty much forgotten by the government.”
    I can’t say I had any sympathy. As far as I was concerned he was talking bollocks. I didn’t believe for a second that there was a special governmental intelligence agency at the airport. We had Special Branch and that was it, right?
    Right?
    “Right now SO17 consists of four people. I’m one of them. We have license to do pretty much whatever we want, hire new people, et cetera, but we don’t have the funding. When I was hired they were skimming the cream of the military. I was in the RAF, then the SAS, before they picked me for this.”
    So now he was boasting to me? Ooh, look at my military record. Does that make you horny, baby?
    Well, quite frankly, no.
    “But now we can’t afford to do that. Our director has given us orders to each find and train new agents. My old partner is currently searching for a suitable recruit. I’ve been looking around for a while.”
    He looked right at me. Tammy clambered from me to him, and I focused my attention on the cat, because I wasn’t sure what Luke was saying.
    “That’s nice,” I said uncertainly, quite aware that I sounded like a complete idiot.
    “I was impressed with you today,” he went on. “Yesterday, too. You’re not very good at following orders, but I get that, because a good agent understands artistic license.”
    “Bond never followed his orders strictly,” I said