“Watching me?” Emily didn’t know what anyone could learn by watching her. “What? Lessons in how to screw up your life?”
He stopped her a foot from the broad steps up to the lodge’s porch by the simple expedient of picking her up by the shoulders of her coat and turning her to face him before plopping her back down onto her own two feet. “Don’t try to piss me off, Emma. It doesn’t suit you.”
“No, but it does seem to suit me. I’m running so hard that I slept right through the girls crawling in bed with me. But, oh sure, I spring out of bed when duty calls.” She slapped a pocket but couldn’t find her phone. She could picture it on the nightstand beside the girls. She hoped no one else had called to wake them.
“So quit.” When she couldn’t answer, Mark nodded to himself. “Didn’t think so. You’ve still got good work to do, honey. Hold that focus and get it done. We’ll still be here.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“I wish.” His low chuckle made her feel better. “But we’ll get through it. They…” he nodded toward the barn hidden by the darkness “…will have answers soon enough if there are any to be found. Now let’s go roust the girls. I’m thinking they’ve already had too much beauty sleep.”
28
Questions.
Varied accents. Both genders.
Most were obvious voice changers, others might be AI-generated. A few felt real but she had no way to judge.
They addressed her by a variety of names. “Miss Watson” was among them, though no one was supposed to know that name. Others were names she’d used, but most weren’t—and never had been. Though she certainly knew to whom those belonged. She couldn’t decide if she should feel honored that they thought she had personally handled quite so many undercover missions. It would have meant she was an even busier woman than she had been.
The drugs still wrapped around her brain. There was no such thing as a functional truth serum, but there were disinhibitors that left one open to suggestion.
But she’d thought up her own strategy for withholding vital information during interrogation way back during that wintery edge of the Cold War of 1961. Perhaps it was the advantage of a Yale education. It had worked and she’d cultivated it over the years until it was fully automatic.
She answered every question—at length. She buried the bits of truth under a Midas-sized gold mountain of prevarications, misdirections, fibs, and outright lies. Her favorite resources were Aeschylus and Aristophanes, such a way with words. Plato’s rendering of Socrates were always too heavy-handed for her taste, but Homer’s Iliad was another favorite that served her well. Beowulf, Confucius, Lao Tzu all worked well, though she’d never been able to sufficiently unravel the Mahabharata to make it a part of the game.
They worked especially well as none of those contained concepts like Russia, CIA, modern technology, or anything else from the last several thousand years.
“You were the lover of the KGB’s Lieutenant General Sergei Kulakov from?—”
“—the time that ships set out upon the wine dark sea.” The opening image of her favorite translation of the Iliad. “There was a woman of exceeding beauty.” Her then-persona of Emmaline Trask—or had she been Erika Iliana at the time?—might not prevail in a contest with that flighty little bitch Helen of Troy, but she’d certainly garnered Sergei’s attention when it mattered.
She slid into Aramaic, which, while popular in the same era as Homeric Greek, had nothing to do with the Iliad. Nor the Odyssey if one was going to be a linguistic nitpicker. But as her interrogators were unlikely to comprehend either one, especially not with a Jamaican Patois accent, she plunged ahead.
“She be renowned, bra, crost the many states of Greece and the Middle Kingdom.” Xi Shi was of the same era as both Homer and Aramaic, sixth century BCE, just forty-five thousand stadia to the east of Athens. Or was that fifteen thousand ri to the west. She tried to remember when that would be by the Chinese calendar, but the drugs were fuzzing her mind too much. But… “It came to pass in 3161 by the Hebrew calendar that the little slut decided to spread her legs for a mere boy of a man.” Paris’ fling—which she narrated at length, embellished with the raciest bits of Danielle Steele, and translated into ancient Hebrew—had started the Trojan War. But the Greeks had launched a thousand ships and settled it once and for all, even salting the earth upon which the city had maintained its fields. Only Paris and a few of the women escaped, including the slut Helen, of course. She herself had happily spread her legs for her Russian general. He’d been everything a man and a lover should be, in addition to providing copious intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain.
“We were asking about?—”
“—why the female troops led a rebellion. Fair Lysistrata was a great leader. She did not desire sex less than her comrades in connubial abeyance, but she detested war far more.”
And as Aramaic slid once more into the foggy depths of Homeric Greek, she wept for the final madness of Cassandra of Troy—blessed with true prophetic vision yet cursed by Apollo to never be believed.
Like Cassandra, she also knew too many truths.
The questions being asked by the voices had no hint of archaic Greek syntax, but they also bore no trademarks of inverted German verbs or Russian didacticism. No gendered nouns or articles.
“Evandra.” That finally snared a segment of her slewing attention. An old Greek name. Meaning good woman. Which told her into whose hands she’d fallen.
Of all the people who could have grabbed her, of ones willing to permanently expend manpower to do so, why had it been these people?
29
“We can confirm the English have her,” Claudia started the report as they convened once more in the Tac Room. She and Mark had a lovely couple hours with the girls before the school bus arrived and even had time for a very pleasant shower together before the guilt drove her back to the crisis.
“Seriously?” Emily didn’t doubt their work. But that didn’t shift the fact from the realm of the inexplicable.
“Seriously,” Dilya confirmed. “We were able to spot the aircraft by satellite over Greenland shortly prior to sunset. That’s exactly when we’d expect it based on their departure time and direction from here. At 2300 hours, a plane fitting the description landed at RAF Brize Norton. But as it was the middle of the night there, we couldn’t fully confirm it. We only managed a glimpse under the runway lights.”
