Read I, Spy? (Sophie Green Mysteries, No. 1) (Sophie Green Mystery) for Free Online Page B

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 helpfully.
    “Of course not. In License to Kill , he was a rogue agent. He still saved the day and got the girl.”
    I ignored that. I wasn’t really interested in getting any girls. “So you want someone who’s disobedient?”
    “No, I want someone with a brain. A lot of squaddies, they’re in it because they’re good at following orders. And they’re good at following orders because they’re crap at thinking for themselves. And that’s great, because the army always needs squaddies. But we need intelligence. We need stubbornness. We need someone who’ll see the mission right through.”
    I took Tammy off him. I needed a diversion. My head was whirling.
    “I was impressed with you today,” Luke said again, reaching out and touching my hair. “I’ve been watching you since I started at Ace. You’re bright and confident and you can think on your feet.”
    This was true. When you had a hundred and fifty passengers demanding to know what compensation