Genrenauts - "The Unlikely Turncoat" (reprint) (Patreon)

Today I'm sharing a Genrenauts short story that originally appeared in the anthology Hath No Fury. It's a short adventure starring Genrenauts veteran logistician and operator, Shirin Tehrani. And it may be the favorite short story of mine so far - I was trying to cut to the bone and hit the tone of the sub-genre while exploring more of Shirin's backstory.

Enjoy!

“The Unlikely Turncoat”

a Genrenauts Story

Copenhagen’s weather was unpredictable and quick to change – two things that most spies hated. But Shirin Tehrani was not most spies. She wasn’t really a spy at all, but here, in this story world, she played the part as best as she could.

After a day and change on a boat, she was ready to get her feet on dry land again. On the boat, all she’d had to keep her company was a small dossier, her reference texts brought from HQ, and her anger.

Betrayal was the language of the Long Cold War, the story region she was visiting, but there was betrayal, and then there was betrayal. A low-level operator with ideological vulnerabilities, a recent divorcee with expensive tastes and a need to feel special again, or a deep-cover agent away from home too long – those were who you expected to turn, to flip between the USA’s allies and those of the USSR.

But this time, the betrayal had come from the very top. Rupert Amis, head of MI-6, the old warhorse himself, turning his coat for the Soviets. In exchange for what?

The sensors back at Genrenauts HQ had registered this as a massive breach, so Shirin hopped to, speed-reading the briefing before making the crossing, securing the ship in their vacant warehouse, and stepping out into the London streets, back in that timeless world eternally stuck hazily between the sixties and eighties, the height of the cold war. Her instincts guided her straight toward the nondescript office building which housed Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligenciers. 

It was still smoldering.

None of that prepared her for the sight itself, for the list of the fatalities she got from Gertrude on her hospital bed.

Amis’s secretary had been out for lunch, gone early to get pastries for the team. So instead of being inside with the explosives, she’d caught debris from the street.

Copenhagen, she’d said. He’d been there three times in the last two years, developing neutral contacts.

That one thread was enough to get her onto a chartered boat through the North Sea and around to the Danish port city, a half-way point between the warring super-powers. She’d been there with Amis before, years past. 

Everything made sense except for Amis’ betrayal. The man might as well have been swaddled in the Union Jack. World War II veteran, old money, old guard, connections in the nobility.

And yet, here she was, stepping onto neutral ground, trying to intercept a man who’d helped invent modern spycraft in this region.

Everyone at MI-6 was either dead, in traction, or too far away, deployed around the world. So it fell to Shirin, arriving “just in the nick of time” from her extended surveillance mission in Grenada.

She walked past pastel-colored houses, trollies, and dozens of bicycles, mixing and matching different decades from block to block. Here a man with a full beard and bell-bottoms, there a woman with stockings and heels, a dress straight out of 1955. Some regions had more historical consistency, some less. Cold War spy stories spanned decades, so this world was just as patchwork, the vagueness of time only underscoring the sense of eternity, of an unending stalemate just seconds away from turning hot. Which is just what it would do if she wasn’t able to stop Amis from getting to St. Petersburg. 

And luckily, she wouldn’t be the only person in town who wanted to keep the cold war from blowing up.

First, she stopped into a coffee shop to break some bills and top off on coffee. She’d been awake since five or so, the rolling of the boat upsetting her stomach. Then, coffee and change in-hand, she found a phone booth, relishing the regions which still had them, compared to the all-cellular, all-the-time modern story worlds. She flashed back to the Iran of her childhood, of standing on a friend’s shoulders to place crank calls to her house.

Holding her dossier open, she dialed a number, waiting three rings. A bored woman’s voice picked up, greeting her in Danish. Shirin’s scant Danish was rusty, but good enough to recognize the passphrase. She spoke the counter-signal, and the woman asked her to hold.

Shirin casually scanned the street, eyes flitting up to open windows and rooftops, checking for tails. No one here should know to expect her, but the KGB might be expecting someone to pick up Amis’ trail. An Iranian woman of fifty-something years, she stood out here as much as any foreigner, but age also granted a measure of invisibility, especially when she could wear a heavy coat and scarf, and shield her face from the wind with a hat.

“Hello?” said a new voice, familiar, excited.

“Hello, Axel. Did you miss me?”

A beat. “Shirin? What are you doing in my neck of the woods?”

“Same as ever. Taking in the sights, meeting interesting people. You wouldn’t happen to be free to show me around?” she asked, delving into spy canter, phrases with double and triple meanings. She was on the hunt for someone, looking for information.

“I can always spare some time for an old friend. Coffee?”

“The place near the cobbler?” she asked.

“Just what I was thinking. See you soon.” And the line clicked off.

She waited another moment, scanning the street once more, then hung up and quit the phone booth.

Every genre had its dangers – some physical, some social. This region was both, often at the same time, and from a direction you never expected. She’d been working the Spy genre beat for a long time now, and coming back was like slipping into a familiar coat and stepping out into the brisk chill of late autumn. The cold bit, and there was the promise of nastier weather around the corner, but it came with thrill, the exhilaration.

The newspaper boy on the corner. The woman with a baby carriage, child concealed in blankets. The two men smoking in an alley-way, door to a kitchen open behind them. Anyone and everyone could be working for the enemy. Being here helped her feel alive, but it was also exhausting. There was a lot to be said for the straightforward dangers of Heroic Fantasy or the abstract risks of ruin and censure in the Romance world.

Focus on the task at hand, she told herself. She slid through the crowds once more, folding her presence in to disappear, to make herself a non-entity – just another silhouette, no one of note. She’d started early in tradecraft, learning from her parents. The malleability of identity was a refuge for her in her late teens. She’d known who she really was even before she started spy work, even if she hadn’t been ready to tell the world. The joy she’d felt the first time she dressed as a woman, not the boy she’d been raised as…it was so intense, she’d nearly forgotten the mission. 

Her trainers had seen Shirin’s embrace of femininity as just another part of learning the trade, a specialty to exploit. It wasn’t. On those missions, she was the most real, the most honest, the most herself she’d ever been. The spying just provided the opportunity. And when the revolution came, and the new regime declared girls like her persona non-grata, those skills helped her escape and find a new life as herself.

#

Shirin beat Axel to the coffee shop, but only by a minute. She took up a spot in the same back-corner booth – clear sightline to the door as well as a straight shot to the back entrance. Axel was about as likely to give her over to the Soviets as Shirin was to suddenly grow wings and fly to Venus, but the breach here could be spreading, could cause the expected tale types to warp and bend, spiral out of control. Which is why Shirin had to find and take care of Amis as soon as possible. The longer a breach went un-resolved, the greater the ripples, both on-world and back on Earth Prime. The last time she’d been deployed to the Spy world, Earth Prime’s G-8 talks had devolved into a name-calling match and a nuclear dis-armament agreement twelve months in the making had gone down the drain.

Geopolitics were complicated enough without interference from the multiverse.

Axel stepped in almost without notice, the same softness of step, aura of presence withheld. He spotted her right off, but beat a meandering route, using the restroom and ordering coffee before joining her.

He slid into the booth, setting his saucer and cup down opposite hers. “I didn’t figure on seeing you here for another few years, at least. What was it you said?”

Shirin smiled. “’After a hangover like that, if I never see Copenhagen again, it’ll be too soon,’ I think it was.”

“A tad dramatic, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know if your missions often involve midnight chases across rooftops and pneumatically-launched boot-spokes, but that one was quite memorable for a country girl such as myself,” Shirin demurred.

 “If you’re a country girl, then I’m the King of England.” Axel sipped his coffee. “Now, what’s brought you back to the humble streets of Denmark?”

“I reckon you already know. And if you don’t, we may be sunk.”

“We?” Axel asked, one eyebrow raised. The man was so wry, he was only ever a drop of vermouth and some bitters short of a Manhattan.

“We. I’m speaking of Amis.”

Usually Axel played it close to the chest, tiny nots and raised eyebrows. Upon hearing Amis’s name, he slumped.

“How did you hear?”

His tone was anything but comforting. She adjusted her coat, the feel of the dagger on her thigh a slight re-assurance, but only slight. 

“He was sloppy. Secretary went off-routine, survived the blast. Is he still here?”

“Maybe he is. It’s none of my business, nor Denmark’s. Even after what you did last time, my hands are tied.”

“There’s tied, and then there’s tied. What can you give me?”

“He’s still here. But that’s all I can say.”

“Amis goes over, the intel he has off the top of his head will take MI-6 completely out of the game. Where does that leave Denmark, after the Soviets get their fingers into Western Europe, the sub-continent, and beyond? You and I both know the Americans can’t handle it on their own. Brash, flashy, self-important. Balance keeps Denmark safe, keeps civilians from dying. Only way we see the next New Year without open warfare is if Amis never makes it out of Copenhagen.”

Axel shifted in his sight, eyes locked on his coffee, like it was an Oracle. The coffee here was uniform, mahogany brown. Tea was better for divination. 

“I don’t care if he comes back to England,” Shirin said. “I’m not doing this for them, I’m doing it for the world. Keep him here for all you want. Her Majesty will come looking, but as long as he doesn’t tip the balance, I’m satisfied. Or, you help me bring him in, and England owes you a favor. Not Denmark, but you.”

Axel crossed his arms. “I didn’t get into this business for the fame or the power. I want peace. I want a world my children can grow up in without looking over their shoulder like I do every day.”

“And you think the Kremlin is going to craft a world like that when they bring down the Brits and the Americans?”

Axel was clearly struggling against his limitations, against orders, against his country’s avowed neutrality, the same neutrality that had kept them relatively safe over the years.

She re-framed. If pushing wouldn’t help, then perhaps pulling. “I just need to know where he is. Now, or where he’ll be leaving. I take care of it, you don’t have to get your hands dirty.”

Axel relented. “Pier 7. Midnight. That’s all I know. I don’t know how many men he has, what the ship is. There could be a dozen of them, for all I know. And you’re going to go there alone?”

“I’ll do what has to be done. Any chance of getting me an introduction to your current fixer? As you said, it’s been ages since I’ve been here.”

And there was Axel’s put-upon look. Far different from the “my hands are tied” look, this was far more amused, the same kind of look she wore when her kids asked for drive-thru for the second time in a week. She could relent and satisfy them, and if she stayed strong, it’d be whining and whinging for hours.

Shirin didn’t even have to whinge.

#

It cost her nearly her entire stash of Krone, but Shirin walked away from Axel’s fixer with a tranquilizer gun, six darts, a pair of binoculars, a balaclava, and some entirely off-the-book homemade explosives, plus remote detonator. She had her hold-out pistol for if things got really bad. It would have to be enough. She’d asked for a rifle, for some smoke bombs, but Axel put the nix on those. “Be grateful I let her give you the explosive. That I can cover up. A rifle assassination on the docks? A military-style extraction with grenades? Far too much heat.”

She grabbed herself some dinner, a whiskey to calm her nerves, and then set out for the dock district two hours early. Gun and darts stowed in her coat, she looked like just another traveler with groceries, headed back to her rental flat.

First, she scoured the warehouse back alleys, finding doors she could pick. The first was filled with shipping crates, the second was not actually abandoned, prompting her to beat a quick retreat before the guard could notice her.

But the third was actually, blissfully empty. She set the charge and checked the wiring on the remote. 

“Range of two hundred meters. No more,” said Axel’s fixer, an aging South African woman. “Try not to blow yourself up, okay?” Shirin didn’t have Roman’s experience with explosives, but she knew her tradecraft. This was her wild card. Best case, she didn’t need it, came back and removed the explosive after, and no one would notice.

Watching from shaded alleys and roofs, Shirin pegged no fewer than three KGB agents on the boat, a forty-foot craft that had seen better days, just like most everything else from the Soviet Union. The Yanks impressed with shiny and new, but it was obvious. The British tried to conceal the best under a modest patina. The Soviets used whatever they could get their hands on.

Four she could do. There’d be another one or two below decks with Amis, plus a pilot if they didn’t have one among their number. She bet on the one at the wheel as the pilot, but profiling too hard could get you into trouble.

The minutes ticked by toward midnight. She needed to wait long enough for Amis to arrive, but move before the ship disembarked. Timing was everything.

And so, as with a half-dozen missions before, Shirin waited. She moved just enough to keep her blood flowing, thankful for the coat and layered clothes that she’d packed, and wishing momentarily for backup. But two operators at the same time were four times as easy to make. The genre called for solo work, maybe with support staff in a nearby building. But she didn’t have time to call in help – the Genrenauts didn’t have a landing zone in Copenhagen in this region – the London spot she’d used was as close as they got. And besides that, Roman, Mallery, and King were off on another mission, the breaches coming faster than normal this year. And bigger. From the situation with Amis here to the fracas another team had stepped into with Horror-land, it was almost too much to handle all at once.

Focus on the moment, she reminded herself. Just because stakeouts were boring without company didn’t mean she could let her mind wander.

And there was Amis. The former head of MI-6 stepped out of a car, fedora pulled tight around his silver hair. But she knew that profile, that gait, from half a mile away. And on top of that, his figure was slightly out of focus, the vulgar breach making him pop out to Shirin’s finely-tuned sense for stories. It’d taken her years to refine the senses, and some breaches were easier to peg than others. But something this size was obvious.

Her quarry in sight, she triple-checked her gear. Still enough darts, leaving the pistol as backup.

Shirin made her way down to sea level, picking out a water-way that ran under the street. The light was out, so one of the KGB agents stood at the far end of the tunnel, guarding the approach. But his flashlight was weak, barely reaching the mid-point of the tunnel.

She’d start there.

Hustling down, she counted in her mind, pacing out Amis’ approach to the boat. Amis would go to lengths to be absolutely sure he could count on the Soviets to bring him in and not just dump him into the sea, and that would take time, even after months of set-up. He was, after all, old-school. And for men like him, so much came down to relationships, to gut instincts.

She walked into the tunnel, footfalls next to silent. They’d echo in the tunnel, but not that far. The KGB tough didn’t know she was coming, and definitely wasn’t counting on someone with her experience. She took her time lining up the shot, watching the way the flashlight bobbed in the air, wavered back and forth as the Soviet kept his limbs warm in windy Copenhagen night. 

The tough stepped into the tunnel once more, the way he’d done every ten minutes while she watched, and she took her shot, exhaling as she pulled the trigger.

The man grunted in a low voice, and slumped to the ground, flashlight landing on his leg instead of clattering on the stone floor.

Shirin reloaded and sped-walked through the tunnel. One hand along the wall, the other holding the dart gun.

Peeking out from the tunnel, she watched Amis disappear below-decks. Which meant she had maybe ten minutes before they disembarked. And maybe one minute before the tough at the tunnel was missed. The second tough was too far away for her to be confident of the tranq gun. She’d need to pull him, and quick.

Shirin dropped her voice into her lowest register, the pitches she’d set aside when she found her real voice, and asked for help in Russian. She hoped the echo and distortion from the tunnel and water would let her trick the tough just long enough to get him out of the others’ sightline.

Almost time to throw caution into the air. Not quite to the wind. But there was a point in every spy story where you just had to throw yourself bodily at the situation. Adrenaline filled her veins, ready to explode. It didn’t get her as far as it used to, when she was still young and more spry, but she’d take what she could get. 

The second tough stepped down to check on his compatriot and Shirin fired as his face came into view. His mouth stretched open to speak, then yawned as he fell to the ground. Shirin reloaded as fast as she could, climbing the steps to cover the distance before the driver could raise the alarm. 

The driver stepped away from the wheel, drawing a gun as he started to shout, and Shirin caught him in the throat with the tranq dart, grateful for the tutoring she’d gotten from her father as the child of a diplomat. She’d been aiming for center of mass, but it worked.

Shirin breathed a prayer for her father’s soul as she dashed for the boat. With the guards down, it was time for the endgame. To take Amis alive, she needed to catch him unaware. And that window was narrowing rapidly.

She stepped onto the boat, checking that the pilot was in fact out. He stirred, moaning toward her, and she put a dart in his back. That did it.

Reloading again, Shirin switched hands and drew the holdout pistol. She wasn’t as good with her left, so she took the tranq in her left, holdout in her right. She could afford to miss a vital organ with the tranq, but not with the tiny .22. She checked the remote in her coat, ready for quick activation.

Taking a breath, she headed into the belly of the beast, to bring this rotten story to a quick ending.

#

She found Amis in the captain’s cabin, of course. Though barely twelve by ten, it was well-appointed with a bed and a desk, walls covered by a pin-filled map and books on the shelves, interrupted by a porthole.

Amis stood behind the desk, waiting for her with a gun. A modest, very British gun, unassuming but more than deadly enough to match her pair of weapons.

He knew someone was coming for him. But he hadn’t expected it would be her.

“Shirin? Now that’s a surprise. I was told you’d be in Grenada until the new year.”

Amis had a grandfatherly manner about him, two parts patronizing to one part indulgent. He gave his people leeway, independence enough to try to impress him. Which they never did, but they never stopped trying. Including poor Reginald and sweet Ableworth. She’d bled alongside men and women that looked up to Amis. He was supposed to be a fixed point in space, their North Star. Not a traitor skulking aboard a tiny boat, waiting to spill his beans to the Kremlin.

Some breaches hurt. This one was personal.

“Ta-da,” she said. “The Reds are down, and you’re coming home with me.”

“From where I’m standing, it looks like I out-gun and out-mass you, my dear. I’ve taken my share of bullets in the service, from deadlier hands than you.”

And so begins the positional jockeying, the conversational combat chess.

“And yet, I’m the one covering the only exit. Plus the men Davidsen has coming to bring you in.”

“Poppycock. Davidsen hasn’t the spine to make a move like that.”

“True. It’s as unlikely as the celebrated head of MI-6 turning his back on Queen and country. Why, Amis?”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” he said. But he would. Genre demanded it. For him to be the villain, he’d have to monologue.

And so Amis continued. “I’ve been playing the game for decades. A game of centimeters, feint and counter-feint. In the war, you could make real moves, take ground and hold it. The spy game is all shadows and proxies, it’s not real, not lasting. I grew tired of the game, so I found a way to win it. The general will give me a country estate, a hundred servants, and enough money to retire in peace, comfortable knowing that I’d beaten them all. The self-important lords, the red-tape bureaucrats, the upstarts always looking for the next promotion. I, Rupert Amis, have won the game. Britain and America will burn under a rain of nuclear fire, and I will live out my days in luxury.

“And in doing so, you killed everyone who got you here. Those people looked to you for guidance. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep knowing your homeland has become a blasted wasteland? Knocking over the chess board and declaring yourself the winner isn’t skill, it’s petulance.”

Amis’s face went cross. This was a man unused to being called out on his crap. And certainly not by a woman, and a Mohammedan at that (as he’d so charmingly called her on their first meeting).

“So what’ll it be, Amis? Go out in a blaze, or come back and repent?”

“Nothing but hot air. Make your move, or get out of my way. Don’t be a coward.”

“Coward? I never knew you for a comedian. Give them everything about your Soviet contacts here and in London. You can be remembered as a tragic figure rather than an anathema. But the one thing you can’t do is get away. That door is closed.”

Amis’s eyes hardened. Time slowed. She recognized Amis’s resolution to fire, so as she finished saying ‘closed,’ she threw one leg out to dive to the side, slapped her wrist on the detonator, and fired the holdout pistol at Amis’s throat. 

The shockwave of the detonation hit the boat as Amis fired, throwing him off just enough. His bullet shredded through her coat, punching through her arm, but not her ribcage. And Shirin’s bullet struck true, dropping the Brit onto the desk, staining the polished wood.

She held the gun on him as she regained her feet. The blood continued to flow, but Amis lay still, the once-great spy now slumped over a decades-old shelf, voiding his bowels.

“I’m sorry, Amis. I wish you’d come in.” 

She patched up her wound, then returned to the KGB agents on the docks. She checked and disarmed each one and left them wrapped up as a present for Axel with a note.

“Until next time. -S”

The toughs taken care of, she checked the systems on the rickety ship and prepared for the long journey back to England, pulling the boat out into the bay.

She’d held a sliver of hope that Amis would come back. Not for his sake, but for Gertrude’s, for the others. MI-6 would be in tatters. Operations would have to be scrubbed all over the world, agents recalled to account for their director’s treason and to find a way forward.

And so, the Long War went on.