Beach of Spies

From the path along the sea wall, Benjamin Holden observed the muzzles of six sniper rifles set up at the hotel windows. Some were better hidden than others, smothered under cushions or veiled behind net curtains, but everyone in his line of work knew the signs to look for. In acknowledgement of that fact, one guest had given up all pretence of discretion. A miniature Soviet flag fluttered on the balcony.

Natalia. They’d briefed him that she was likely the Russians’ chosen representative. The idea of tangling with her again made his fingers tingle.

Benjamin turned to regard the beach. The tide was on its way out on that bright August morning. Visibility was excellent. A shot from one of those windows could take down anybody out there. Windbreaks offered scant protection from the Atlantic breeze, let alone high-powered bullets. The only hope would be to use the crowd for cover. High summer in Saint-Malo, France, La Plage de la Hoguette was buzzing with tourists sunbathing, building sandcastles and paddling in the cool ocean water.

He would take his time on this job. One wrong move would be the end of him. The Cold War had been playing out for decades, and despite the glimmers of change in these waning years of the nineteen-eighties, it seemed to Benjamin far from over.

He descended the stone steps to the beach and paced towards the water, careful to keep his distance from the line of buoys that stretched from the seawall out into the ocean, demarcating the area patrolled by the lifeguards. The information contained in one of those buoys was of paramount interest to several nations. There was little to be gained by exciting trigger-happy fingers. Not yet, anyway

It was time for a swim.

*****

Twenty minutes later, Benjamin emerged from the water and began wading through the seaweed back to the beach. From that distance, it was difficult to pick out the hotel from the cramped parade of buildings atop the sea wall, and he allowed himself a moment to appreciate the holiday vibe.

A couple of young women in summer dresses were chatting as they paddled along the tideline, waves lapping around their ankles. They didn’t appear to have noticed him, probably due to interference from the kids screaming and splashing nearby. Benjamin eased himself back into the water and emerged again a little way along the shore, right in the women’s eye line. This time, he felt their gaze on his toned body and allowed himself to proceed.

He hadn’t brought a towel with him, so he let the sun dry him as he headed back. He made sure not to venture too close to the buoys as he walked. The second one out from the sea wall, that was the target. It looked the same as the others, harried by the elements yet still bright yellow, bound to a concrete block by a heavy chain. The only difference was that this buoy contained information vital to the world’s intelligence services and had half a dozen sniper rifles trained on it. Fortunately, there were no children playing nearby, but that could only be a matter of time.

‘You’re late.’

The voice came from a woman sitting on a striped beach towel. She was wearing pink-rimmed sunglasses, a floral swimsuit and a wide hat to protect her pale skin from the sun. Her dark hair was tied behind her shoulders, and her lips were painted a striking red. Natalia. She looked every bit the femme fatale. He had witnessed her employ that persona on more than one occasion, to deadly effect.

Like Benjamin, Natalia was in her late thirties, meaning she had survived the rigours of fieldwork for years and was now of an age when most of her peers had either been knocked off in the course of duty or had graduated to desk jobs. A woman like that, why was she still in this business? The only reason Benjamin could conceive of was like his own: love of the game. That, perhaps, explained their connection.

Natalia lowered her book, a summer romance titled “Tide of Lust” (Benjamin wasn’t familiar with the author). She shuffled to the edge of the towel and patted the vacated space. Benjamin sat on the sand, far enough away to give him time to react if she were to make a move. Her beauty was a trap, just as his British mannerisms disguised the killer beneath. It was all just a show. He was no more disarmed by her appearance than she was by his.

‘I didn’t realise you were waiting for me,’ he said.

Natalia closed her book, sliding a red ribbon between the pages. ‘Not waiting so much as keeping an eye. I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to try anything silly.’

‘Those rifles are discouragement enough. Speaking of which, you know they don’t fire themselves, don’t you? Shouldn’t you be…’

Natalia sniffed. ‘It’s a pity to be stuck inside on a day like this. Besides, there are plenty of willing volunteers to keep an eye on things.’

‘Yes, Saint-Malo does seem very popular with those in our walk of life.’ Benjamin brushed the sand from the back of his legs. He wasn’t quite dry yet, so it clung to him like a second skin. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘A few days. They brought me in quickly to relieve our local agent. A bit beyond his pay grade.’

‘I didn’t think you Soviets had pay grades. Doesn’t sound very communist.’

Natalia ignored that one. ‘There are several interested parties at play here, all tipped off within a day or two of each other. You’re rather late to the game.’

‘I had to fight my way here.’

‘Excuses, excuses.’

‘I don’t imagine I’ve missed anything much, anyway,’ Benjamin said. ‘We’re all struggling with the same conundrum.’

Natalia nodded, glancing across to the second buoy out from the sea wall. ‘How do we get to the bloody thing without getting shot?’

Benjamin smiled to himself. He loved it when Natalia tried her hand at British swear words. Her Russian accent was barely discernible most of the time, but it came out when she cursed, creating a strange juxtaposition of the foreign and everyday, working-class profanity.

‘How many of us are there?’ he said.

Natalia lowered her sunglasses to look at him directly. ‘Is that a formal request for information sharing between our two countries?’

‘You do realise we’re from opposite sides of the Curtain?’

‘Like Romeo and Juliet, da?’ She exaggerated her accent intentionally for that one. It was, for Benjamin, a sign of how much she liked playing with him.

‘You know I can’t give you anything.’

‘And yet, you’re content to try to pump me for information.’

‘Believe me, any pumping I do is purely off duty.’

Natalia rolled her eyes. ‘Where you British get your reputation from for elegant wordplay, I’ll never know.’ She gazed along the beach. ‘I’ll give you a freebie, though.’

Not far from the seawall, a Chinese tourist was taking photographs of a patch of rocks. He wore dark glasses, a striped black-and-white T-shirt from a souvenir shop, and he had a large camera slung around his neck. He seemed engrossed in the contents of the rockpools, but he glanced towards Benjamin and Natalia every now and then.

‘Who’s he trying to fool?’ Benjamin said.

‘He’s already taken three pictures of us together,’ Natalia said. ‘They’ll identify us within the hour. And the others in our hotel, well, he’s probably snapped them, too.’

‘A rogue’s gallery.’

‘Everyone who’s anyone is here.’ Natalia fixed Benjamin with her stare again. ‘This one promises to turn nasty very quickly. If I were you, I wouldn’t be here when that happens.’

Benjamin grinned. ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’

‘Then you’re more foolish than I thought. My country requires me to be here. I have no choice but to obey orders. Don’t stand in my way. I have a mission to perform at any cost. For both our sakes, don’t let that cost be you.’

She sprang to her feet at that, with a suddenness that caused Benjamin to tense. He relaxed when she folded her parasol and began shaking the sand from her beach towel, but he didn’t offer to help. Many others before him had tried playing the gentleman with her, and it had spelt their doom.

He got up too, and with a polite nod, they went their separate ways, he to the hotel and she to a less busy spot away from the rock pools.

Benjamin had survived his first encounter on the beach of spies.

*****

Benjamin’s road to Saint-Malo had not been without incident. Two days earlier, he had picked up the trail from Walker, an agent stationed at the International School of Wandsworth (an area not renowned for its expat community, but that was exactly the attraction for parents who wanted their children schooled somewhere exclusive, without the usual riffraff).

‘Things have got too hot around here,’ Walker said.

Benjamin drummed his fingers on the plasticised surface of a school desk. His legs were wedged beneath it, as were those of all the other fathers (real or pretend) in the school sports hall. Walker had chosen parents’ evening for their meeting, and Benjamin could see why. The tables were spaced a few metres apart, and the background noise was more than enough to ensure they didn’t need to worry about being overheard. At the nearest table, a grey, solid-looking man regarded a portfolio of his child’s work with only vague interest, while his partner exchanged hurried words with the teacher. When Benjamin made eye contact, the man shifted uncomfortably, and the woman leaned in closer, covering her mouth to avoid her lips being read.

This was a parents’ evening like no other. He could only imagine how many of the guarded conversations taking place were about something other than a child’s grades. Just like his and Walker’s.

‘If it’s too hot for you, then hand it over,’ Benjamin said. ‘I’ll be gone before you know it, and you can get on with your little life.’

Walker leaned forward to whisper. He was a nervous-looking thing, in his frayed suit and with a hairline that appeared to be receding further by the second. ‘They called our bluff. “A school for ambassadors’ children,” they told me. “A perfect venue for international exchange.” But I ask you, how many Soviet ambassadors are there, really? Enough to fill a class with their offspring, all by themselves? And, I tell you, those kids are the best students. Always listening, always ready to learn. Taking down everything in those little notepads of theirs, to send home to Mama and Papa.’

Benjamin had limited sympathy. The school was known as a hotbed of international and multicultural exchange (i.e. a training ground for the next generation of agents). That was why Walker was stationed there in the first place – to spy on the spies in formation.

‘Then find a reason to exclude them,’ he said. ‘Or shut the whole place down. I don’t care.’

‘But what about the children? It would be disruptive to their education. And with exam season just around the corner!’

This setup bored Benjamin. He had assumed many guises over the years, from college professor to airline pilot to drug-addled revolutionary. The role of an involved father was amongst the least interesting. But it was more than that: he had a chip on his shoulder dating back to his schooldays. It was the teachers, partly, their fixation with producing educated children (or “grades” as they were more commonly known to the management) off a conveyor belt. He was incredulous that even now, deep into the 1980’s, they hadn’t come up with a better way to teach. Even pretending to be a parent felt like the tacit acceptance of the approach.

Even back then, Benjamin had known he hadn’t belonged in a comprehensive school. The other kids had known this, too, and they made him suffer for it. Was his intelligence the issue, or the sheer single-mindedness of his approach to life? Could it have been his self-centredness, which was pronounced even for a teenager? Or was it that no one could quite pin down his personality, which seemed to change depending on who he was with? Some would call him impressionable, but the more perceptive could tell that he was a chameleon, able to integrate with any group and assume their mannerisms. Oddly, it was this, above all, that people found most disconcerting.

If one thing was true about school kids in the UK, it was that they were afraid of difference. Once, after he’d excelled in a class test, a group of youths had turned on him, pinning him to his locker, the air quivering with menace. They hadn’t hit him, perhaps afraid of what they would unleash if they did so. Words had failed them, too, so dumbfounded had they been by this enigma of a person. They’d just held him there, frozen on the edge of violence, until the bell rang. Then, they’d let him drop to the floor. The crowd had dispersed, leaving him shivering in an empty corridor.

This all came back to Benjamin now. He’d buried it for years, and now he realised that it had been a turning point. After that, he’d resolved to disguise himself better, to refine his knack for becoming exactly who people expected to see. He had this experience to thank for the path he had chosen in life. Spies aren’t born; they’re created.

So, Benjamin had some respect for Walker. There was nothing about him that would make an observer think he was anything but a harassed teacher. But he had been undercover too long. He was a secondary school teacher now, freezing up at the first scent of trouble. When the capsule had appeared on his desk, with a Post-it note bearing only one word, “MI6”, it had proven too much for him to handle.

Benjamin pushed himself away in exasperation. His seat creaked as he leaned backwards. ‘I don’t have time for this. Hand it over.’

‘I don’t have it on me. I’m not insane!’

‘Where is it, then?’

‘I’ve made arrangements for you to deliver the first aid training tomorrow.’

‘First aid?’

‘CPR, to be precise. Essential for every student before setting out in the world. You’ll be very interested in what’s in one mannequin’s airway.’

Benjamin realised that he had already used up his stock of exasperated expressions. He had nowhere to go from there but incredulity. ‘Seriously?’

‘It was the safest place. They’ve ransacked my classroom looking for it already, and I’m being followed. I’m surprised they didn’t intercept me on my way here. Tomorrow morning, after assembly. The mannequins will be locked away until then in the headmaster’s office. It was the safest place. He keeps it very secure. Alarmed. Don’t even think about breaking in.’

Benjamin considered this for a moment. Long gone were the days when he feared the wrath of a headmaster. But, though Walker may have strayed from his core mission, Benjamin had no doubt that he still knew his stuff. If he judged that was the best way to protect the information, it probably was.

So, the next morning, Benjamin found himself back in the school sports hall. There were fifty teenagers lined up on benches in front of him. They appeared in various cases bored, pubescent, and pustulant (often all three at once). None looked like agents in training, but that, if anything, was a sure sign that they were.

He glanced down at the mannequin. This was the first time he had been called upon to deliver a first aid course in the line of duty. It looked like it was going to be a tough crowd, too. Baptism by fire.

He knelt and put his ear to the mannequin’s mouth. ‘First, confirm whether the casualty is breathing. I can hear and feel whether there’s breath against my ear and look down across the chest to see if it’s moving. In this case, I’m sorry to report that the subject is displaying zero life signs.’

He knew better than to expect a laugh from the teenagers, but as he glanced up, he noticed a flicker of movement in one of the doorways. He looked across to the other, at the far end of the hall. A shadow lingered there, too. Walker had been right: there were other interested parties in play.

‘Can any of you tell me what I’ve done wrong?’ he asked the class. ‘I’ve missed something vital.’

A hand shot up. One of the conscientious students, probably Russian, squeaked, ‘You didn’t secure the area.’

‘Exactly. Before you do anything, make sure it’s safe. You’re not going to help anyone if you get hit by the same thing that got them.’

They must have intercepted Walker that morning. Benjamin had thought it odd when he hadn’t been there to greet him, but had assumed he’d been busy marking homework or preparing lesson plans. He’d found the mannequins laid out already in the hall and now wished he’d got there earlier to intercept them en route. That way, this whole scene could have been avoided.

It mustn’t have taken them long to torture the capsule’s location out of Walker. With him disposed of, Benjamin was their next target.