5. Not Quite James Bond A Beginner’s Guide to Spying
CHAPTER 5
NOT QUITE JAMES BOND: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO SPYING
OLLIE
I use my badge to unlock the door to the records room and Daisy and I both slip inside before shutting the door.
“ So your friend is a spy?” Daisy asks me as she sets her insulated bag on the floor beside the door. “ Like Jason Bourne ?”
I nod. “ Except Jace is less haunted and relentless, more… suave, I guess. And kind of stylish and charismatic. I’d say he’s closer to James Bond .”
“ So ,” Daisy taps her lips, “like Connery Bond or Brosnan Bond .”
“ Exactly ,” I say as I glance around the room for a spot to place the bug. This room is much longer than it is wide. We are standing in the open space at the front, where there is a desk with a computer and an empty table to place a box on at our right and a copy machine at our left. Big metal shelves line both the side walls and go down the middle, making two aisles that go from the front to the very back of the room. And all the shelves are filled with cardboard storage boxes that hold files. “ And he said he’s an intelligence operative, not a spy. We are the ones being spies.”
Daisy suddenly looks around the room, wary. “ Do you think this room might already be bugged by the bad guys? Should we be talking in code?”
And now I’m wary, too. I have no idea. I haven’t seen that many spy movies—only a few James Bonds , one Jason Bourne , and several movie trailers. It’s not like I took notes on any of them. I didn’t think there would be a quiz. Jace just told me to go be a spy, yet I have no idea what that entails. Normally , before stepping into a situation this unfamiliar, I’d have done a lot of googling. But there wasn’t time. So now I’m left without a clue about what to expect. “ Maybe we should just to be on the safe side?”
Daisy nods. “ Okay , um… Pineapple . We need to find the pineapple’s nest.”
I blink. “ Right . The pineapple’s nest.” I think she means a place to hide the bug. I point at the first file box. “ Maybe the nest is behind the shrub?”
Daisy shakes her head. “ An elephant might amble by or a fox might come for a treat. I think it’d be safest with the eagles.” She points up.
I don’t exactly know what she means by the foxes and elephants, but she’s pointing to the vent in the ceiling, which is a good ten feet high. There’s only a chair with wheels and a table to stand on in here, and I worry that if the bug is that far away and has air whizzing by, it might not pick up voices well. “ Eagles like their nests to be in windy places so they don’t have to hear the whispers of the ants below. Maybe the squirrels can keep a better eye on it.” I’m thinking maybe at the base of one of the shelves.
I hope she gets what I’m trying to say, but judging by her raised eyebrow, I’m not entirely sure. “ Squirrels prefer the sound of feet over voices. And sometimes they get their tails stepped on. I think it’d be better to go with a monkey.”
Tails stepped on? Monkey ?
“ Oh ,” she says, pointing down the aisle toward the back of the room. “ Do you think they like traveling to the other end of the jungle?”
The phone in my pocket buzzes with a text, so I pull it out. It’s from a number I don’t have in my contacts, and all it says is Try hiding it on a shelf about shoulder height .
My eyes go wide and I glance all around the room as I tell Daisy , “ I think there are cameras in here because someone is watching. They just texted me.”
Her eyes go wide, too, and she comes over and stands close to look at my phone. Close enough that I can smell her citrus shampoo and the faint scent of coffee and cocoa. “ Is it the bad guys?”
This is Jace.
There are no cameras, but I can hear you. The bug in your hand is live.
Daisy cups her hands over her mouth as I rub a hand over my forehead. Then she drops her hands and mouths Oops !
I try to picture where Tad and his client might stand if they were having a meeting in here. My guess is they would either stand by the table and desk, each of them partially sitting on one of them. Or if they decided to get further from the door, it’d probably be most natural for them to go down the right aisle.
“ Okay ,” I say out loud as I walk toward the shelves, now knowing that Jace is going to hear me, “the framework for the shelving is round metal poles. I’m placing the bug on the backside of one that’s near both the front area and the aisle I think they’d go down if they didn’t stay at the front.” Then I peel off the backing and stick it to the metal pole. It was probably made to go on a flat surface, but it seems to stick well anyway.
I get another text.
Great work! Thank you, Ollie. You’re the best .
“ You’re welcome,” I say. It’s weird to have a conversation where he’s texting and I’m talking. I do wish I’d known I was having the conversation sooner.
I nod my head toward the door, and Daisy picks up the insulated bag she’d brought in, and we exit the room. We don’t say much as we walk down the long hall and to the elevators. We just act professionally. Like we know what we are doing as we go about a normal day.
Once we are on the elevator and the doors shut, though, both of us start laughing at the same time, like our bodies are saying that we can now relax after a shared tense situation. And it’s not a chuckle, either. It is full-on laughter. Which I think might be the byproduct of stress because we didn’t know how to be spies and then finding out that we’d made it out to be so much harder than it was. Our laughter seems to be fueling each other’s laughter because we keep laughing more.
Daisy wipes away laughter tears from her bottom eyelid. “ He heard our code! He heard me say that the pineapple would be safest with the eagles!”
“ And he heard me describe him as suave and stylish and, what was it? Not haunted?”
The elevators open to the first-floor lobby, and we try to school our faces back into that look of “ I’m just going about my day” professionalism.
As soon as we are out the front doors and headed toward the golf cart that has the Coffee Loft logo on it, Daisy shakes her head and says, “ Who hasn’t dreamt of being asked to help with a dangerous mission by an intelligence operative who looks like Daniel Craig or Tom Cruise and thought you’d be basically a pro at it. Did you ever think we’d be in that situation and then have no idea what we are supposed to do?”
“ Yeah . I definitely thought I’d be better at it.”
“ We are the worst spies ever. We thought the room might have bugs planted by the bad guys, but it didn’t occur to us that the bug that we did know about, the one that was right in your hand, might be transmitting.”
I chuckle and run a hand over my face. “ Well , at least we’ll end the day being more experienced spies than when we started the day.”
I take the insulated bag from Daisy’s shoulder and place it on the passenger’s seat as she gets in behind the wheel. “ You know,” she says, “when I woke up this morning, I was thinking about how much I wished I was more experienced at being a spy.”
“ Then it’s a good thing you came down that hallway when you did.”
She nods. “ It is. This was fun. We should do it again sometime.”
I smile big. She had fun. She wants to do it again sometime. “ We should. The next time the opportunity arises to be spies, I’ll let you know.” I pause a moment, then add, “ Thank you for encouraging me to do it and for going with me. That made a huge difference.” I can’t believe I did it. And it was so much better doing it with Daisy helping. I wish Jace had more for me to do so I could have a reason to team up with her again.
“ Anytime ,” she says.
I glance back at the building. “ My break was over ten minutes ago. I better get back to work before my boss starts looking for me.”
It isn’t until Daisy is driving away and I’m walking back into the building, congratulating myself for having a great conversation with her, that it occurs to me that when she said, “ We should do it again sometime,” it would’ve been the perfect time to say something along the lines of, “ How about tomorrow night? We could take on another secret mission. Like sneaking into the ice cream shop, ordering under a cover name, and then renaming each ice cream flavor using code words.”
If only some of Jace’s suave-ness could rub off on me.