Undercover by Bill James

birthday?’ As well as her fondness for system, Iris knew how to play very dirty. She’d been at an expensive boarding school.
    â€˜Quite possibly I could get home for something like that,’ Tom said. ‘It would depend on how the project was going at the time. Clearly.’
    â€˜Clearly.’
    â€˜It’s nearly two months away. Difficult to forecast.’
    â€˜An important anniversary. He goes into teens.’
    â€˜Anyway, I’d make sure there was a card and a pressie. I won’t forget.’
    â€˜Long-distance daddy.’
    â€˜Work takes many dads – and mums – away for spells, doesn’t it, Iris?’
    â€˜Which name would you put on the card?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜The new bloke’s?’
    â€˜Please, Iris. “Dad” – as ever.’
    â€˜I heard that some people who go on undercover duties get sort of taken over by the new identity. It’s as if they become somebody else. There’s an all-purpose actor in a novel I picked up from the bookshop’s bargain box who’s described as “absolved for ever from being himself”. And wasn’t there a kind of doppelgänger for Field Marshall Montgomery in the war, who kept reverting to the role long after, although he wanted to escape it? Are we going to lose you that way, Tom?’
    He disliked how she phrased this. It sounded as if he was sure to be lost: it could be a toss-up between (a) death by discovery, and (b) irreversible morph – transformation of himself into a stranger, a villain stranger: that ‘
Who the fuck am I?
’ confusion. ‘I’ll still be me,’ he said. ‘Tests by shrinks on the course showed I have a strong, well-disciplined self-image, one I would always want to retain and return to after sojourns as someone else. I should be able to do impersonation all right, but that’s all it would ever be – me pretending to be someone else, and all the time aware I’m trying to be someone else, maybe a bit like an actor, as you say, but nothing permanent.’
    â€˜This is an undercover operation, yes?’ she replied.
    â€˜I spoke of a confidential side.’
    â€˜I don’t remember the word “undercover”, though.’
    â€˜So much police work is confidential. I thought it didn’t need labelling.’
    â€˜I asked if it was undercover, not if it was confidential,’ Iris said. ‘What else
can
it be, for God’s sake – the wipe-out of home and family, the absence of details, the woolly, go-nowhere replies, the daft optimism? How do I get in touch when you’re at the other end of that important distance?’
    Just
ask for Thomas Derek Parry
. But Thomas Rodney Mallen didn’t say this, of course. Iris couldn’t be given his alias name, nor any means to contact him, from the minute he moved into his new character. It would have to be one-way transmission, from him to her, when he could manage it, unobserved. He’d try to manage it often.
    â€˜That damn country place,’ she said.
    â€˜Which damn country place?’
    â€˜Where they trained and tested you.’
    â€˜They were very choosy. Only a few got picked for the course.’
    â€˜So, why couldn’t you have fucking flunked it?’
    â€˜It’s good for the career, Iris, good for the CV.’
    â€˜
Curriculum vitae
,’ she replied. ‘Translation, I believe: “Course of life.” I hope so. Life. But your life’s well on, Tom, isn’t it? I’d have thought for this kind of work they’d go for younger volunteers and without a dependent family.’
    â€˜The opposite. They prefer someone mature, steady and in a good, solid relationship. It’s like selection for space travel crews. Personal stability is crucial.’ He wanted to get off this topic. ‘The tests also showed I had most of the other basic qualities needed, some not sounding too