Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry

this happen. You were very brave.”
    “I’m trying to hold on to my sanity,” she said quietly. “Michael, I can’t even believe this is happening, has happened—no, it’s still happening, isn’t it? I’m afraid, and I want to know if I’m just being weak, or if I’m right to be afraid because in a minute they’re going to stop the train, drag us off and …” She stopped, and he could see her making a conscious effort to beat down the terrors that were spontaneously taking on specific shapes with hard, defined lines. She failed, but he could see she was holding them on one side of a line for the moment. “Or will I always have to be afraid because it’s never going to be over?”
    Schaeffer searched for something that would make sense to her. “Sometimes in the newspapers you read that somebody in Parliament made a speech demanding that the warmonger Americans get out. Well, I guess I’m one of the ones they mean.”
    It gave him a morbid fascination to watch her mind grab for this little bit of comprehensible nonsense and clutch it to her. “I should have known it,” she said. “I even thought about it, but I told myself there really weren’t any such people, or anyway that I’d never see them. CIA. What could you be but one of them? You move into a big old house all by yourself and never talk about anything that could even begin to give anybody an idea of who you are or what you did before.”
    In her mind’s rush to gather evidence to support the lie, she had begun to forget that there were other people on the train. He put his hand on her forearm and moved his eyes toward the three boys at the front of the car. “To answer your question, I think the bad part is over now,” he whispered. “We just have to be sure we aren’t followed.”
    “Where are we going? MI5? Your embassy?”
    He shook his head. “All of the obvious places will be under surveillance. We’re on our own.” He tried to remember which it was: “in the cold,” or “out of the cold.” “We’re going to have to stay out in the cold for a while.” Then he remembered that he would have to prepare her for the future. “Or I am, anyway.”
    “One more thing, and I won’t ask for any more secrets,” she said. “Those men weren’t English, except maybe the last one. They looked like Italians. What has Italy got against you?”
    He had to block that avenue of thought. “They were Bulgarians. They probably came in from Yugoslavia across the Adriatic into Italy; that’s the way they usually do it. They look the same, and lots of them speak the language. It’s only a few miles.” He was quoting a travel brochure he had seen once: “An hour or so by boat on a calm, sunlit sea.” Or was that Coleridge: “Down to a sunless sea”? He had been reading some of the books in the library of his house again, and it sounded familiar. He felt a small prickle of alarm. Books were a trap. If he accidentally quoted from one of them, she would recognize it.
    Her face retained its look of intense concentration. “But why were they after us—after you? You were in Brighton only for the day, and even I didn’t know we’d be there before this morning.”
    He looked as puzzled as he could. “That’s something I’ve got to find out. I came to England ten years ago, and since then I’ve been in the deepest cover. Even the chief of station in London doesn’t know. I’d say our troubles must have started in the United States.”
    “A mole?” she said. “A Bulgarian mole inside the CIA?”
    He let his puzzlement turn to frustration. “That’s the hard part. There’s no telling the nationality in a case like this. The information could have come to the KGB, and they may have passed it on to Bulgarians in this area.”
    She looked very sad. “Poor Peter and Jimmy. They weren’t up to this sort of thing at all.”
    He stared out the window at the flat green countryside sweeping past, and strained for something to give her,