LONDON ALERT (8 page)

The
books they had brought to ease them through
awkward
moments in the bedroom proved unnecessary
,
as there was plenty of interest
to them on the television. To make it feel like a
real hotel
,
the secret service had
even
made
pay-to-view porn channels
available
for aficionados or
perhaps recruits on their own, which certainly did not apply to them.
When at last the dreaded time
for bed arrived, Celia simplified matters by indicating
Holt
should proceed first
as she wanted to have a long relaxing shower.

‘Jeremy. It
is
nice being here like this don’t
you think – even though we…shan’t be…?’

Feeling too tired to
worry about the ‘even though we shan’t be’, Holt was more than happy to go to
the bathroom first. Too much wine and brandy had made him weak at the knees.

Having changed into his
pyjamas and the bathrobe supplied by the establishment, Holt came out of the
bathroom to find Celia had divested herself of her dress. Wearing only her
petticoat, she brushed past him without a glance on her way to take that long
shower.

Climbing into the
nearest of the twin beds, he stretched out his legs and snuggled into the soft pillow.
A strange feeling had come over him. Here he was in the close company of a
woman who made him the envy of all his colleagues, yet with no prospect of
anything happening. Her intention was surely to drag out her time in the shower
in the expectation he would be out cold on her return.

If so, she failed in
that regard, for when he heard the click of the bathroom door being unlocked, he
opened his eyes to see her emerge, enveloped in a bath towel. He had always wondered
how real women ensured those towels stayed up, knowing that in the case of film
stars they might even be glued on and that, anyway, there would be plenty on
underneath.

This was certainly not
true in Celia’s case, for her contours were moulded by the towelling with no
sign of anything underneath as she brushed past close to his face. A yard
further on the towel slipped off by accident or design to reveal two pale, pert
cheeks jutting out sharply below the concave of her back. Stark naked, she
stood there, as if wondering what to do next, bent down to recover the towel
and lobbed it casually onto the back of an armchair.

In the process she had
left nothing to Holt’s imagination. He was in a state of virtual shock,
disbelief. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Was more to come?

She ambled over to her
overnight case, her left cheek and right cheek oscillating from side to side as
each foot advanced, and fumbled amongst her things, seemingly untroubled by any
thoughts that Holt might not be asleep. Having extracted a pair of knickers,
she held them up for inspection as if unsure of her choice, stretched them wide
open between her hands, and again bent down. Raising first one foot and then
the other, she pulled them on over her ankles, hauled them upwards over the
hump of her knees and then, with more difficulty, over her more ample thighs.
Once they had arrived at their ultimate destination, she eased her fingers
under the elastic to ensure they were comfortably in place. Being sensible, simple
ones, they made her even more alluring than when completely naked.

 Crikey, what kind of big
sister behaved like that? A six-year-old with nothing to show might, but surely
not a preteen or teen sister? Holt felt confused, in part because the spectacle
had left him physically unmoved.

She turned round, and
with her taut breasts in full view, came over to the foot of her bed, where she
gathered up the linen nightdress she had laid out there beforehand. Slipping it
on over her head, she wiggled her hips to allow it to slither down into place,
covering her thighs but leaving her knees just visible.

 Coming between their
two beds, she sat down on hers, crossing her legs with some difficulty because
of the confined space. According to books Holt had read as a teenager, crossed
legs when you invite a girl to dinner signalled that nothing would follow. This
sudden prim routine seemed a trifle odd, as the prudish girls he knew would not
only have been crossing their legs but surely wearing two, if not three, pairs
of knickers in similar circumstances.

‘You
are
awake, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I guess so,’
admitted Holt, trying to convey the impression that he had hardly been aware of
what had been going on.

‘
Dr
Blackwell put me up to this.
I don’t want you to get me wrong – I am not normally like that.’

‘Really?’

‘Blackwell assured me you
would get a mental block if you saw me completely naked while not allowed to do
anything. I was to act like an innocent child with no sense of shame. Above
all, I should avoid being coy, as that would only wind you up.’

‘You certainly weren’t
coy – at least, until a few seconds ago.’

‘He assured me that if I
did it right, you would no longer hanker after me.’

Had Blackwell actually said
‘hanker
’,
 
or was it a Freudian slip on
Celia’s part? Could it be that she was not the font of innocence she made
herself out to be?

Having finished her lecture,
she pulled aside the sheet and top blanket, drew up her long legs, swivelled,
and slid between the sheets, taking care to grip the hem of the nightdress to
ensure it did not ride up. Holt thought the hem-gripping precaution somewhat unnecessary
in view of the earlier display, though it might just have been out of habit or simply
to ensure she would be lying comfortably, with nothing ruffled underneath those
sensitive thighs.

 ‘Sleep tight, darling,
sweet dreams,’ she whispered.

‘I expect I shall. I can’t
move. It must be all the wine and the brandy.’

He was not only
paralysed, he didn’t even want her, which meant game, set, and match to
Blackwell. He had got his revenge and would have a good laugh when he debriefed
her.

He woke up the next
morning wondering whether it had it all been a teenager’s dream. Dream or not, he
was not even tempted to sneak a peek at Celia dressing nonchalantly in the
middle of the room. It certainly boded well for their overseas missions
together, though it left him feeling undermined as a man.

At breakfast he assured
her that, loathe as he was to admit it, Blackwell’s programming had worked so
well she had nothing fear. Rather than seeming relieved, she looked at him with
a guilty smile, which he attributed to the shame she must feel about the show
she had put on for his and Blackwell’s benefit.

After breakfast they
went for a short walk in the garden. How nice it felt walking on the velvety
grass in the fresh morning air. They would have happily spent another day at
the establishment but knew they would be leaving that morning. On re-entering
the ‘
hotel’,
they took care to wipe
their feet on the mat so as not to risk losing a mark for that. As they passed
reception on the way up to their room, the young lady behind the counter called
them into the manager’s office for a review of their sojourn.

‘You,’ said the
manager, ‘have both passed with flying colours.’

‘I should think so,’
replied Celia somewhat forcefully, to Holt’s surprise.

‘Off the record,’
continued the manager, ‘we have just had a request from a
Dr
Blackwell for the overnight
video of you in the bedroom, but we told him it had been routinely erased. In
normal circumstances – that is, if nothing untoward happens – we erase recordings
of what goes on in the bedroom immediately. I say bedroom, because we only have
one fitted up with cameras for special situations.’

‘What do you mean by
special situations – blackmail?’ asked Holt.

 ‘Could be anything.
For you, it was in case the young lady claimed you had importuned her, even
raped her, unlikely as it might seem. For your mutual protection.’

‘Good idea,’ said
Celia. ‘You never know.’

‘Videos of what happens
in the public spaces are kept for just long enough to show the guests what they
are doing wrong, or as evidence if they complain about the establishment or the
service. If word got round that videos of what happens here in the bedrooms
were being circulated to other departments, we would lose all credibility, and
no one would ever come here.’

‘Thank God for that,’
exclaimed Celia.

 The manager said he would
put in his report that they had been a cut above the usual throughput, many of
whom would have to come back for further training at the taxpayers’ expense.

‘By the way,’ he added,
‘we were a tad surprised the coffee served to you on the terrace last night was
not quite up to par. We rather pride ourselves on our coffee. Maybe it got
overheated by mistake, or the cup had not been properly rinsed and there were
traces of detergent left on it. Anyway, sorry about that. Rest assured we will make
sure it does not happen again.’

‘I thought it might have
been to test us, like the corked wine, which was so awful no one could ever drink
it,’ replied Holt.

‘You’re dead wrong
there. The bottle you declined was shortly afterwards drunk by someone proclaiming
it to be the greatest wine they had ever had, even on holiday in France.’

‘Actually,’ said Holt, ‘it
was a great wine. Perhaps a great wine turning to vinegar still has something
special about it.’

‘Anyway, all the best,
whatever your mission. Hope it’s not too dangerous and that your cover does not
get blown as mine was. That’s how I ended up here. Better than being dead, I suppose.
But not much, after being active in the field in sunnier climes.’

‘There’s just one
thing,’ said Holt. ‘We’ve been wondering why you call this place The Loughty.’

‘Simple really. Quite a
number of pretentious UK hostelries think having the letters
o-u-g-h
in
their names makes them high class. We just added the letters
l
and
ty
as a joke, as our mission statement
seemed to infer we turn louts into gentlemen. I would rather you kept that to
yourselves, safe in the knowledge that it did not apply in your case and that by
revealing it, you would make louts of yourselves.’

‘Point taken. We won’t
tell anyone, will we, Celia?’

‘Of course not, Jeremy.
Would be nice, though, to find an excuse to come again.’

‘I would love to see
you again,’ said the manager, looking at Celia. Had he seen her prancing around
in her birthday suit? So what. She had been acting – it had not really been
her.

With smiles all round,
they bade him farewell, and after a twenty-minute wait boarded a minibus with other
departing ‘guests’ to be taken to catch the mid-morning train back to London. With
most of them looking like spotty schoolboys, they were glad they had been
ordered not to fraternise on the train.

The following few days
included yet more briefings, but nothing of note apart from having to go over the
river to MI6 to collect their equipment from a Q (technical officer), just like
James Bond. But unlike 007, they would not be issued with rocket-firing cigars
and an Aston Martin – or nowadays, a BMW. Instead, they were only to be
provided with a simple tourist-grade camera, a laptop with special
communications software, and, to their incredulity, a ‘honeymoon kit’ with
instructions as to the use thereof.

On their way to MI6’s fort-like
headquarters overlooking the Thames at Vauxhall, Holt and Celia discussed what
might be in that honeymoon kit and concluded it must be party items, like
confetti, to give the impression they were just married. Holt wondered whether
it would include atropine to dilate the bride’s pupils and make her look ‘up
for it
’,
 
as well as serve as an
antidote in the event of another nerve gas attack in Tokyo.

On arriving at MI6 and declaring
the purpose of their visit, they were issued with their visitor badges with no
name but apparently with an embedded chip. Q collected them at reception. Looking
too young to explain the use of sophisticated equipment such as rocket-firing
cigars, he was probably a junior in the dirty devices department. He looked somewhat
immature to be explaining honeymoon equipment.

The first item was
their camera, a Canon Power Shot S110, an inconspicuous camera able to take high-quality
photos even in poor light, without using its flash. Junior Q hardly needed to remind
them to take many innocent photos so the ones in which they were really
interested would not be obvious.

The only special
feature of the laptop computer was the encryption software enabling them to
communicate securely. This would only be used in exceptional circumstances, say
in the event of their being required to do something special. Otherwise,
communication would be by phone between Celia and an ostensible woman friend in
London, with innocuous-sounding code words used to convey instructions very
much as al-Qaeda was wont to use. For example, mention of a death in the family
was the signal that they should cut short their trip and return immediately. With
neither of them being front-line field agents, this was most unlikely.

The boyish officer at
last came to the item that had been occupying their thoughts, the honeymoon kit,
which had been sitting on his desk in a small wooden box marked ‘MI6 Honeymoon
Kit’ in bright pink letters.

As if he were the
original Q in the James Bond films demonstrating some clever but lethal device,
the officer extracted a tiny tube with a flourish.