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

the hell are you eating?”
    I looked down at my food, then up at Luke. “Lasagne,” I said. “Want some?”
    He glared at me. “Don’t get smart. Is that supposed to be your breakfast?”
    I looked at the clock. It was nine-thirty.
    “Lunch,” I said. “I’ve been up for hours.”
    Luke shook his head. “Shouldn’t lunch be…savoury? Like, a burger or something?”
    “I’m a vegetarian.”
    “Vege-burger.”
    “Do you know how many additives there are in those things?”
    Luke stared at me like I’d just grown another head. I was getting used to it.
    “I suppose you don’t eat ready meals either?”
    Of course I do. Everyone does. But he’d just run a mile uphill, I needed to beat him on something.
    “Ice cream?”
    I gave him a look. “I am still human.”
    Luke made himself a sandwich and found some crisps and ate it all without asking. I got some gratification from Tammy, who tried to nick everything out of his hand.
    “Your cat is just like you,” Luke commented after a while.
    What, gorgeous, sinuous, almond-eyed, stealthy and deadly? I batted my eyelashes at him.
    “Like a dog with a bloody bone. It’s my food, you little bugger.”
    Offended, I picked Tammy up and nicked a handful of crisps for her. “I am not like a dog with a bone.”
    “You were yesterday.”
    “Are you even going to tell me their real names?”
    “What, the Brownie twins? We’re still not sure. They have a lot of aliases.”
    I mumbled something under my breath about the state of his military intelligence, but when Luke asked me to repeat it, asked brightly, “So what do we do now?”
    “Go into town. Get you a phone.”
    “I have a phone.” I gestured to the handset by the sofa.
    “A mobile.”
    “Got one of those, too,” I pulled out my little Siemens from my handbag.
    “A company phone. A good one.”
    “This is a good phone!”
    “Can it take hi-res pictures? Video clips? Is it Bluetooth enabled? Triband? Does it have my number, Maria’s, One’s, Lexy’s and the office programmed into it?”
    “It could have,” I said sulkily.
    “You’re getting a new phone. Give the number out to no one .”
    “Or what, you’ll have to kill me?”
    Luke didn’t answer, but got up and put his plate in the sink. “Come on.”
    Whatever he drove, it was still up at the “office”, so we got back into Ted and rumbled off into town.
    “This is incredible,” Luke said, looking around the car’s sparse interior.
    “Yeah,” I said fondly.
    “There isn’t even a tape deck.”
    I frowned. “There’s a ghetto blaster under your seat,” I said. “But the batteries are flat.”
    Luke shook his head. “You’re a weird girl.”
    “…thank you.”
    He didn’t say anything about my parking, but I could feel him wincing as I pulled into a rather small space. And if government agents have any kind of dispensation for free parking, then Luke didn’t share it with me.
    I was half expecting another hidden Smith’s Guns type place, and was mildly surprised when we walked into The Link and Luke picked out an expensive Nokia package. I wanted to wail that I didn’t know how to use a Nokia. They confused me, all the punctuation was in the wrong place when you wanted to send a text—but he didn’t listen, carded it and handed me the bag.
    “Do you belong to a gym?”
    I shook my head in faint horror.
    “Join one.”
    “Sir, yes, sir!”
    Luke gave me a sideways glance. “Are you on the Pill?”
    I stared. “Excuse me?”
    He handed me a slip of green prescription paper. “Present for you from Lexy. She’s a qualified doctor. This is a no-period Pill. Maria takes it. Carry them in your bag, take them religiously, and even if you’re captured and tortured, explain that they keep your heart beating or something.”
    He looked slightly flushed. Men never grow up, do they?
    “Okay.” I took the prescription. “So we’re going to Boots?”
    “Yeah. I need toothpaste anyway.”
    Just to embarrass him a little more, I made him come with me to Mark’s and Spencer’s and help me pick out a sports bra. If I was going to be tumbling down any more baggage belts, I’d need proper support, right?
    We took all my new stuff home, Luke playing with my new phone and setting some numbers into it. He called Maria. “Does Macbeth have a phone yet?”
    “Half a dozen—” I heard her say in despair, “—none of them his.”
    I smiled at that. I think I was beginning to like Macbeth.
    My answering machine