I, Spy? by Kate Johnson Page B

shock. Next he’d be asking how much I weighed.
    “I’ll race you home,” Luke said, getting out of the car.
    “No way.” It was at least a mile, and pretty much all uphill. Whoever said Essex is flat must have been in a goddamn tank.
    “Yeah, come on. It’s good for you.”
    I frowned reluctantly as I got out of the car and locked it.
    “I’ll even give you a head start,” Luke offered.
    Git.
    “I’m fine,” I smiled sweetly. “I’ll see you there. Don’t get lost.”
    He started running. I got back in the car and tried to run him over, but the bastard was too fast for me.
    “Cheat!” he yelled, banging on the window, but I drove past, smiling serenely. Okay, I was cracking up, but let’s pretend I was serene, okay?
    I arrived home, let myself in, put the kettle on and greeted Tammy, who was making a nest out of my laundry. “Hey baby,” I said, and she opened one eye at me. For a cat, that was a lot of effort. “Shall we lock nasty Luke out?”
    But nasty Luke found my bedroom window open and climbed in.
    “Cheat,” I said, and he shook his head.
    “Seriously,” he said, “an open ground-floor window on an unsecured courtyard?”
    “Oh, and I suppose you have CCTV on all your windows, and infrared alarms too?”
    Luke shrugged. He probably did. He probably lived in a bunker or something, with lots of monitor screens and tripwires.
    Freak.
    The toaster popped and I took my bread out, spreading honey on it and then slicing a banana on top.
    “What the hell are you eating?”
    I looked down at my food, then up at Luke. “Lasagne,” I said. “Want some?”
    He glared at me. “Don’t get smart. Is that supposed to be your breakfast?”
    I looked at the clock. It was nine-thirty.
    “Lunch,” I said. “I’ve been up for hours.”
    Luke shook his head. “Shouldn’t lunch be… savoury? Like, a burger or something?”
    “I’m a vegetarian.”
    “Vege-burger.”
    “Do you know how many additives there are in those things?”
    Luke stared at me like I’d just grown another head. I was getting used to it.
    “I suppose you don’t eat ready meals either?”
    Of course I do. Everyone does. But he’d just run a mile uphill, I needed to beat him on something.
    “Ice cream?”
    I gave him a look. “I am still human.”
    Luke made himself a sandwich and found some crisps and ate it all without asking. I got some gratification from Tammy, who tried to nick everything out of his hand.
    “Your cat is just like you,” Luke commented after a while.
    What, gorgeous, sinuous, almond-eyed, stealthy and deadly? I batted my eyelashes at him.
    “Like a dog with a bloody bone. It’s my food, you little bugger.”
    Offended, I picked Tammy up and nicked a handful of crisps for her. “I am not like a dog with a bone.”
    “You were yesterday.”
    “Are you even going to tell me their real names?”
    “What, the Brownie twins? We’re still not sure. They have a lot of aliases.”
    I mumbled something under my breath about the state of his military intelligence, but when Luke asked me to repeat it, asked brightly, “So what do we do now?”
    “Go into town. Get you a phone.”
    “I have a phone.” I gestured to the handset by the sofa.
    “A mobile.”
    “Got one of those, too,” I pulled out my little Siemens from my handbag.
    “A company phone. A good one.”
    “This is a good phone!”
    “Can it take hi-res pictures? Video clips? Is it Bluetooth enabled? Triband? Does it have my number, Maria’s, One’s, Lexy’s and the office programmed into it?”
    “It could have,” I said sulkily.
    “You’re getting a new phone. Give the number out to no one .”
    “Or what, you’ll have to kill me?”
    Luke didn’t answer, but got up and put his plate in the sink. “Come on.”
    Whatever he drove, it was still up at the “office”, so we got back into Ted and rumbled off into town.
    “This is incredible,” Luke said, looking around the car’s sparse interior.
    “Yeah,” I said