“Predictable. I know. But I don’t take their initial offer. If I’m supposed to be your mentor, that’s my first bit of mentoring. Never accept their original plan. Too many people already know what that plan is, talk too much, and usually they’ve put less than zero thought into your personal safety. An officer in the field is an expendable officer. They can always cut you loose, and they know it. Also, I hate being made somewhere inconvenient and having a lethal weapon pointed at me by some petty terrorist’s understudy when I’ve got weekend plans with you.”
KC winced as this collision of worlds caused her to rapidly shuffle through every mental image she’d ever had of Yardley at work—sitting on the edge of a mattress in a stuffy Holiday Inn Express, for example—and replace it with her curated catalog of mental images of the Unicorn.
Sprinting away from an explosion in black leather. Clinging to a balcony to escape detection in a Lisbon flat. Stealing a tuk tuk to chase a target through the traffic-thick streets of Phnom Penh.
Yardley had done those things.
The lump in her throat felt like a boulder. KC wiped her hand over her mouth, leaving her palm sticky with a trace of lip gloss. “What do you suggest?”
“Let’s not go to Dublin. I want intel that carries us right to Flynn’s front door, not intel that leads us to someone else whomighthave intel, and so on. Maple Leaf has been too much of that. I’m over it.”
“I can keep looking for her here.” KC tapped the lid of thelaptop. “She’s bound to either pop up or run into someone who gossips about her. Could take a while, though.”
“That would require more patience than I have. I’m thinking we need a mean girl. Mean girls are incredibly efficient if you give them what they want.” Yardley turned her full attention to KC, looking her up and down with detached assessment.
“Why are you doing that?” KC crossed her arms over her chest.
“It’s nice to work with someone who literally no one has ever seen in the field. It means you can mostly be yourself, except with higher heels and less clothes.”
“You’re talking in spy. I’m tech, remember? You have to explain. Why can’t I wear clothes?”
“Because no woman wears very many clothes at Wally’s, and all the men there are mean girls. By which I mean they’re professional gossips. Powerful. Tech will have to build you a profile, but you barely need a cover story.” Yardley glanced at her wrist, checking the time on the gold watch she’d worn every day since KC gave it to her. She stood up. “Let’s go, Eliza Doolittle.”
“Who’s that?” KC asked, rising from her seat at the table. “Eliza Doolittle?” She had to jog to catch up to Yardley striding down the hall, cutting into a tunnel that opened up after they passed through the double doors’ biometric lock.
“It’s a story about a linguist who proves he can transform a flower seller from the streets of London into a lady. Eliza is Henry Higgins’s protégé. Henry’s the linguist. You’re Eliza. I’m Henry.” She stopped in the middle of the tunnel. “You know it’s a love story?”
“I graduated from high school when I was fifteen. I can’t be expected to know this kind of thing.”
But Yardley was already on the move again. Her reply drifted over her shoulder. “It’s a Greek myth originally. This sculptor makes a sculpture of a beautiful woman and falls in love with her. Then the goddess Venus brings her to life for him.” She turned and tapped a code into a door KC didn’t recognize.
“Revolting.”
Yardley flung the door open. The overhead lights illuminated a vast carpeted room filled with racks of clothes. The wall opposite the door was mirrored, creating the illusion of endless space in front of changing cubicles. Yardley walked to a rack in the middle of the room, near the front, and began flipping through the hangers. “I concede your point. But also, Henry and Eliza are from the stage version ofPygmalion. The fancy British linguistics expert who tries to teach a Cockney-speaking flower girl how to talk and act like a lady? He does it on a bet with a friend. Eliza doesn’t know about the bet. She thinks he’s a good guy who’s going to help her crawl out of poverty.”
“Class bias, power imbalance, and barefaced lies are such a good foundation for a love story,” KC said.
“They are, actually. The problem is always the ending. No one knows how to pull it off.”
Yardley gave a lot of niche-knowledge speeches like this. It was weirdly calming to listen to her deliver an impromptu lecture on an obscure subject while preparing KC for an experience she had in no way anticipated when she woke up this morning. “Explain.”
“Well, in the original ending, she doesn’t fall for Higgins. There’s a different guy.” Yardley paused, removed a hanger from the rack, and held up a red dress. “Too obvious.” She put it back and continued flipping. “But nobody likes that ending, becauseclearly they’ve got something, these two. There’s a connection, it’s kind of hot, and the audience hates being told it’s impossible and Eliza has to stick to her own kind. So when Lerner and Loewe wrote a screenplay for a musical version, which got turned into a movie later, they changed the ending. Now, every time the story’s retold, they use the love story ending where Henry and Eliza waltz off into the sunset together.”
She stopped again, slid a gold dress off its hanger, and dropped the hanger on the floor. After shoving the dress at KC, Yardley made her way to a rack of shoes, her blue eyes rapidly scanning through rows of open boxes. “I mean, obviously, the discovery of the bet is quite the third-act dark moment. But the romance of it all manages to survive. It takes some hand-waving, though.”
“Because, again, class difference, power imbalance, and lies. Tough to overcome.”
“Yep. Audrey Hepburn plays Eliza in the movie, which helps. Turns out it’s mostly a casting issue. Julia Roberts inPretty Womanis another example. Irresistible.”
“And yet I am feeling so much resistance.” KC turned the dress in her hands. “Which is the front and which is the back?”
“How adventurous are you?” Yardley’s smile was too familiar. “I’ll turn around.”
KC shucked out of her clothes and looped her body into the garment in the most likely configuration of gold straps, limbs, and areas that needed to be covered to avoid arrest. The dress exposed her underboobs, she supposed in lieu of her nonexistent cleavage, as well as her legs starting from the hipbone, and—going by the breeze—at least an inch of her ass.
Yardley handed her a pale pink bobbed wig, which KC dutifully put on. It matched her footwear. She couldn’t bring herself tocall the impractical four-inch stilettos with laces that crisscrossed up to her knees “shoes.”
When she was done dressing, a woman knocked on the door and handed Yardley something, which she gave to KC. Matte black eyeglasses packed with tech. “DC loves glasses on a beautiful woman,” Yardley said by way of explanation.
