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“If you could get out earlier, would you?”
“In a heartbeat.”
Alistair looked at me thoughtfully. “What if I could help you with that?”
I laughed. “Short of convincing my commanding officers I’m up to something illegal, and they boot me out instead of throwing me in jail, I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Well, even though they’re not in NATO, Sweden is our close partner. In my job, I have a certain amount of sway. I would almost certainly be able to get you transferred.”
I frowned. “To another branch?”
“Let’s say… to an organization that lies outside the jurisdiction of the Swedish military.”
I stared at him. “Are you being serious right now?”
“Deadly serious.”
Whatever the hell he was talking about, it sounded like the answer to my prayers.
“Let’s talk a walk,” Alistair suggested. “That is, if you’re interested.”
“I am,” I said. “Very interested.”
60
We strolled through a park called the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, though the name was severely misleading. It was basically just a gigantic, grassy field in the middle of the urban sprawl.
“Two centuries ago, this was the center of London nightlife,” Alistair explained. “Gardens everywhere… drinking, eating, and illicit assignations. The epitome of scandal and intrigue. Though I suppose we still have the intrigue, just not the scandal.”
He gestured towards a nine-story building made of cream-colored stone and dark green glass.
The headquarters for MI6.
I’d seen the building many times before, though always in the distance. Rachel never took me anywhere near it.
I wondered if there was any chance she might be gazing down at us right now. Even if she was, the building was so far away that I’d probably look small as an ant.
“I can’t tell you exactly what I do,” Alistair continued, “but you know I work in MI6.”
“Yes.”
“We have certain objectives that cannot always be achieved through… normal channels. So sometimes we have to go outside of them. Color outside the lines, as it were.”
“You’re revealing an awful lot to someone you met once in a pub,” I said with mild skepticism.
Alistair smiled as he began to recite from memory. “Oversergeant Lars Henriksson, age 24, member of the Särskilda operationsgruppen. Third year in the Special Forces and sixth in the Swedish military. You were born in Stockholm, but you moved to Gothenburg at the age of four. You enlisted at 18 without finishing high school. Your mother’s name was Annika, maiden name Ahlstrand. She passed away in a car crash along with her sister Ingrid shortly after you deployed to Afghanistan. Your father’s name is Nils Henriksson. Other than the divorce proceedings, there are no records of any interaction with him after you and your mother left Stockholm. You were an only child, and your mother never remarried. When you arrived in Gothenburg as a child, you lived briefly with your aunt. Ingrid eventually married a man named Leif Carlgren but had no children, so you have no cousins. You served a year-long stint in Afghanistan – where you met Rachel – and in two weeks, you’re slated to return for another tour of duty.”
I stared at him in shock. “You certainly did your homework.”
“It was mostly because we had to check up on Rachel – to make sure you weren’t a foreign agent.” Alistair looked concerned. “Does she know about your impending deployment to Afghanistan?”
“No. I haven’t told her yet.”
“Good. Hold off on telling her for a bit.”
“When did you start looking into me? After we met that night in the bar?”
“When you came to England the first time, yes.”
