[pshrynk]

A heroine arrives

Constance Munsen checked her bags as the plane came in for a landing at Havana Airport. She had her code book, her passport, her Addresses (in code), and oh, yes, her revolver. She was ready for her first big assignment. After three years stuck in the secretarial pool at Army OSI, she had finally talked the Bosses into letting her get some field experience.

She supposed that there were women out there who were not working as spies, but she couldn't think of why. She had graduated from the University of Wisconsin five years ago with a degree in Political Science. Her father, the chemistry professor, had told her that there were only three things that a woman with a political science degree could do: starve to death, be a riverboat gambler, or be a spy. He politely did not mention alternate four. After trying her hand at the first two, she was now going to give number three a whirl.

She'd been pretty good at gambling, and very good at starving. She knew in her bones that she'd do well in the spy business. She had received top marks at the Academy. Her shooting skills were better than any other candidate. She could fight her way through almost any situation. (This coming from years of riverboat gambling, rather than anything they taught her as the Academy.) So, of course, she'd been assigned a typewriter upon graduation.

She had managed to get someone to pay attention to her applications at last, and here she was. All she had to do was connect with this professor in Havana, and see to it that the OSI knew what he discovered before even he had. She looked through the portfolio. It looked like a fairly easy assignment, so she had to pull it off with style in order to move up the ladder.

The plane touched down and taxied to the gate. Grabbing her bags, she went through the terminal and hailed a cab. On the drive to the Embassy, she reviewed her contact's info. A very stable field agent who had been in the service since before the Great War. Make contact and get on with the assignment.

The cab pulled up to the front of the US Embassy and she stepped out. Glancing at her instructions, she went inside. At the reception desk, she asked for Colonel Edwards.

"Oh, dear, miss," said the receptionist.

"What do you mean, 'Oh dear'? What is wrong?"

"Well, it's just that Colonel Edwards died two months ago."

"Died?"

"Well, he was quite old."

"But how does it happen that a station agent dies and the home office doesn't know about it?"

"Well, we did send the report in..."

"Does he have a replacement?" asked Constance, deciding to just get on with it.

"Sort of..."

That boded ill to Constance. No field agent ever wanted to get a "sort of” type of answer.

"His name is Major Biggles. He's in Room 425. Oh, dear!"

Constance walked away with a feeling of dread. A "sort of" and an "Oh, dear!" in the space of one minute. She took the stairs up to the fourth floor and looked for number 425. The glass on the door was painted with "R. Edwards, Colonel, Army (ret). Underneath that someone with a scrabbled handwriting had written on a piece of paper taped to the window, "Geoffrey Biggles, Major, Army, (Active duty). She knocked.

And then knocked again. The receptionist had indicated that he was in, so she could not understand why no one answered. She slowly opened the door and peered in. A man was lying on the floor, trussed up like a Christmas goose.

"Oh, my! What happened? Did someone breach the security? Where did they go?" The windows were all intact. That meant the assailant was either in the room or had slipped out the door. Constance pulled out her revolver and covered the closet, the only hiding place in the room. "Where is he?"

"Where is whom?" asked the man on the floor in a clipped British accent.

"The man who did this to you!"

"Ah. That would be me, then."

"Beg pardon?"

"I was just practicing my knot work and sort of got myself, well tied up. Er."

"Could you tell me where I can find Major Biggles, then?" she asked as she untied the poor man on the floor.

"Well, that would be me, old girl! Major Geoffrey Biggles, at your very humble service. And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?"

The "Oh, dear" was starting to make a horrid sense. Constance shook herself and tried to get back into professional mode.

"Ah, yes. Um... Do we have any truffles in the cupboard?"

Biggles gave her a blank look. "I don't believe that we do."

"No, really, do we have any truffles in the cupboard?" Constance tried to look very earnest as she gave the sign. The counter sign was supposed to be, "If it rains on Tuesday, I shall buy a parrot." This was not starting off well.

"Well, if you would like, I shall just go and have a look." Biggles was trying to return the earnest look. He was a bit too rotund to make it work.

Constance tried the alternate sign, "When do the trucks arrive from Miami?" The countersign was supposed to be, "It is a holiday in Lodz."

Instead she got a blank look and, "I'm not really in charge of transportation, young lady. You need to check in with Scott on the ground floor."

Constance was beginning to get annoyed. "Look, are you the Station Agent for the Army OSI, or not?"

"Oh, yes, indeed! Just took up residence in the old coop, so to speak. Fitting right in, if I may say so myself."

"You might have to since you'd be the only one to think so," muttered Constance under her breath. Out loud, she said, "Don't you have the sign and countersigns memorized for field agents checking in?"

"Pardon?" Biggles looked about as puzzled as a preacher's wife who had stumbled into Mrs. Crenshaw's boarding house for willing girls.

"Your job is to check in and support field agents! How could you not know that?"

Biggles glanced nervously at a foot thick pile of papers in the In Box. "I was meaning to get to that..."

Rolling her eye, Constance reached out to find the appropriate sealed envelope. This was not starting well.

* * *

They were about half way through the pile. Constance reckoned that the years in the secretarial pool were finally paying off. At least she knew how to plow through red tape with the best of them.

"Is this what we are looking for?"

"No," she said, "That's the roster update report that should have been filed... two weeks ago. What have you been doing since getting here?"

"Reconnoitering. Making local contacts. Finding the location of the other embassies. You know, the stuff that intelligence is made of, old bean."

"So, the local field agents haven't been doing that?"

"I have local field agents?"

Constance's eyes were getting fatigued from the workout. "This document here says that you have five active agents and two sleepers in country." Please don't let him figure out that I'm not supposed to see this stuff, she thought.

"Fascinating! I suppose I should call them all in to give a little pep talk, then! My men in my unit were all very pleased whenever I did that! They even had a nickname for me, the 'Right Wanker,' they called me. It means a precise and exemplary leader. My batsman told me that."

"Did he?" Constance briefly went over the idea of calling in five people who were supposed to be completely unaware of one another for a "pep talk." Fortunately they would all be armed, so maybe someone would get a lucky shot in on the Station Agent.

"You had a unit?"

"Quite! Four Hundredth Logistical Support Regiment, Company F. The Fighting Foxtrots, we called ourselves. Well, mostly I called us that. Er. The lads called themselves the 4F's"

"I just imagine they did."

Constance picked up an envelope marked "Top Secret, Eyes Only" addressed to one Major G. Biggles. She handed it over and said, "Why don't you read this and then we'll start over?"

She watched as Biggles read through the letter, lips moving all the while. Finally his eyebrows shot up and he said, "Oh! I see! Shall we proceed, then?"

"Do we have any truffles in the cupboard?"

"I shall have to have a look, then."

Constance briefly considered pulling out her revolver, again.

* * *

Biggles stared in horror at the woman standing at his door. Blonde, green eyed, achingly beautiful. Everything that was distilled down into his bones as being "Unattainable." And she was working for him. Vaguely, he knew that other men might take advantage of this situation, but Geoffrey Biggles was not other men. He wasn't even that sure he was this man. Beautiful women made him nervous. It came from being the son of a wealthy, sophisticated and, yes beautiful socialite from Boston. And also of being Biggles, the perpetually inadequate son of same.

"Well, then!" he said. He had found in his career that if you puffed long enough, most situations just went away on their own. "I certainly can see that you are a busy woman, so I shan't detain you!"

He looked at the door hopefully.

"Right. I am here to check in and get your stamp on my orders." she said, slowly, pronouncing every word carefully.

"Jolly good! I'm sure I have that stamp in here somewhere..."

"Major, 'getting your stamp' means that you sign off on them and tell me that the current situation continues to match what was decided in Washington when I left." Biggles really wished that she would quit rolling her eyes so much.

"Good work, that agent! Got it in one." Biggles had read somewhere that getting your opponent to think that you had just been testing them was a way of getting back into the conversation on an equal footing. The woman's eye rolling was starting to make him twitch.

"Constance Munsen. Field Agent Level Three. Reporting as ordered. Now you say, welcome, Field Agent Munsen."

Biggles stared at her until she nodded encouragingly at him. "Right! Welcome Field Agent Munsen!"

"This is the packet with my orders, sir. If you would just review them and brief me on the ground situation? Now you say, Of course. Then you take the packet and pretend to read it. After that, you pull out that Int Rep over there, not the one on the top of the sagging pile that I pointed out to you, oh here, this one! Then you pretend to read that and tell me Jolly good, or some such thing."

Biggles fumbled with the envelope thrust into his hands, opened it up and stared at it blankly for a moment and said, "Jolly good!"

"Are there any changes in my orders, sir? Now you say that my primary contact has arrived in Havana and frequents Sam's Authentic Cuban Bar."

"That's a lovely place! I had dinner there my first..." Biggles trailed off as the look of sudden death flashed in Constance's eyes. "Er. Your primary contact has arrived in Havana and frequents Sam's Authentic Cuban Bar. Er."

"Good. I'll go on over there and work on picking him up. Now you say, Carry on, Field Agent and then go back to whatever it was that you were doing to avoid actual work before I came in... Carry on..."

"Carry on..."

"Field Agent..."

"Field Agent."

"Thank you sir. I will send reports as I get a chance."

The horrible woman stepped forward until she was scant inches from Biggles' face. "My reports will have a large red stripe at the end of the envelope. You will open them and then follow the instructions to the letter. Am. I. Clear?"

Nervously, Biggles nodded yes. She turned and walked out. He slumped into his desk chair and pulled out his emergency cognac bottle from its drawer.

"Good Lord! Mother has reincarnated!"

* * *

As she paid the cabby who had brought her to Sam's Authentic Cuban Bar, Constance had two thought in her head. First was how could a bar with the name of "Sam's" be an authentic Cuban bar? Overriding that thought was the one that involved boiling acid and her Station Agent. Straightening up, she saw a Marine fly through the doorway, landing face down in the street. Ah, one of those types of bars.

A sailor was reeling against the door when she walked in. Shoving him to one side, she quickly looked around for a man wearing a white suit and Panama hat. That was the trademark dress of Professor Augustus Keaneer Slopeton, PhD, her quarry. Idly, she wondered why it was that archeologists always wore white suits. Really, she thought, their job consists entirely of digging. She blocked a swung fist and dug her knuckles into the sailor's solar plexus.

She felt an odd tingling in the back of her head. Her sister had told her about this when her Knack had shown itself to be the ability to make budgerigars speak Italian. A tingly, mellow sort of feeling, she had described it. Constance had never had her Knack show up. Some people never did. This could not possibly be a Knack, anyway. It was tingly in a mauve sort of way. She gasped, looking around. No budgerigars, thank God. Across the room a man wearing a floppy flight cap was staring at her in an odd way. A Marine walloped him hard and he went down. The tingling stopped.

Wincing, she avoided the flying bodies of two combatants grappling their way to the front door. Getting there, they broke free and rushed out the door. Huh, some people would do anything to avoid paying their tab. She spied a table that was still upright and navigated there. She was going to just sit out the rest of this fight and then she would make her contact. A small grey dog ran across the room and started drinking beer that was on an abandoned table.

She supposed that it was probably too much to ask for a waiter to bring her a Cosmopolitan at this stage. Once, she had thought her knack to be the ability to always have the makings of a Cosmopolitan available wherever she went. But it had turned out just to be dogged perseverance. If you expected there to be cranberry juice, vodka, lemon peels, and triple sec available, eventually the bartender would give in and make it. It may have had something to do with standing and staring at the bartender until they started to sweat, also.

She sat quietly at her table and awaited a break in the action. Looking over at the door, she noticed a man walking in. He looked familiar. Dark suit, black shirt and clerical collar. Almost white blonde hair in a severely short cut. Round wire rimmed spectacles. He was one of the faces she had run across in the avalanche of papers in Biggles' office. She couldn't quite place him...

The man was struck by a fighter and fell down on top of the small grey dog as the table collapsed.