Free Once a Spy by Keith Thomson Page B

real life. I’m willing to wager that that will be so in the case of Jane.”
    Alice looked at him as though “Jane” were some strange-sounding word from the language of the indigenous Carib tribe.
    She ought to have been curious which Jane he meant, though, for surely she knew several, let alone her de facto goddaughter.
    “Poor play,” he said. “You’re masking your apprehension that I mean the little girl in South Yorkshire with pigtails the color of sunshine, who, on Christmas morning, opened an airmail package sent from this neck of the planet and delighted in its contents, a radio-controlled mermaid.” He was certain this detail would get a rise out of her.
    She didn’t blink.
    Could he be wrong about her?
    “Well, then, that brings us to the evening’s threat,” he said. “Note the FedEx pouch over there on my desk. It arrived earlier from the UK, sent by a fellow limey of yours known as ‘the Knife’—trite, sure, but if anyone deserves the moniker, it’s him.”
    He strolled to his desk, automatically checking his computer screen for new e-mails. Nothing. Then he took up the sealed pouch. “This contains the pinky finger from Jane’s left hand, removed late yesterday afternoon at the Rotherham rail yard, where she was found in what was believed to be a state of shock.” Fielding disliked having had to dispatch the Knife to South Yorkshire yesterday to chloroform and butcher an innocent child, but he believed it was for the greater good. “As you may know, Jane had been warned repeatedly against playing with the feral dogs there. The dogs are currently viewed as the culprits. Now, unless you tell me who sent you, the ‘dogs’ will revisit Jane and tomorrow’s pouch will contain—” Fielding stopped himself.
    Alice had broken, though without the sobbing one would have expected based upon her maudlin performance to this point. “Fine,” she said with the nerve of a different person altogether. “I’ll tell you the truth. You’re right. I was sent here by MI6.”
    “Okay, okay, good,” Fielding said, preoccupied. What had caused him to stop himself mid-threat was the winged envelope icon that popped onto the computer screen, sent by one of his fellow members of Korean Singles Online. “I just need to take five, Allie. Hector and Alberto will take you up to your room. I’ve just received some, er, news of the hunt.”
    As soon as the two hulking servants led her out, he clicked open his message from Suki835. “Howdy, Cowboy232,” the text began, then launched into the movies and music she favored.
    He scrolled to the important part, her photograph. She had a plump, round face; pleasant eyes; and an effortless smile. She couldn’t really weigh just 110, unless five four was the fib.
    He moused to her silver left earring and magnified it several hundred times over, until he could read the text on the overlaid digital dot. Decrypted, it was indeed “news of the hunt,” but not the hunt for the treasure of San Isidro as he had implied:
hounds lost rabbit and rabbit, jr., at utica and fillmore in bklyn at 00:35. rabbits driving ny daily news delivery truck north on utica. will unleash addl hounds asap.
    Not good news, Fielding thought, but nothing to lose sleep over. How far could a feebleminded old man and a ne’er-do-well gambler get?

3
    Charlie wrung another mile out of the beleaguered Hippo. When it felt like the truck was about to collapse into a pile of spent parts, he pulled into a down-market strip mall. The businesses—a supermarket, a carpet wholesaler, and five or six smaller stores—were all dark, save a few red exit signs and a display counter someone probably had forgotten to switch off.
    He nosed the truck behind Sal’s Cheesesteak Hut, a trailer painted to look like a giant hoagie. It sat on cinder blocks at the rear of the crumbling lot. Between the broken windows, graffiti, and garbage strewn all around, it appeared Sal had served his last steak years ago.
    “I