PART ONE

“You’ll want to see this, milord,” said Bonham, dropping a printout of a Reuters news feed on the breakfast table.

Dorian looked up from his virtuous bowl of oatmeal, sans sugar. The older he got, the harder it was to resist the lure of sweets. Until he considered his still-flat stomach, and resolve tightened with the rippling muscles. Though what the hell he was saving all that beauty for still mystified him –

No wife. No lover. No possibilities of either, now.

He wondered how that poor deluded NATO Major was handling life, since their last meeting.

Thank God, he’d managed to stall the German for one night! That he hadn’t been forced to sleep with that maniac, in the line of duty. Having staked a deep-cover career on the fact that Major Klaus Heinz von dem Eberbach would never cave to a fag’s blandishments – it was unnerving when it finally happened. Really, who would believe such hidden passions, of Iron Klaus? At their last meeting, the man had been genuinely hurt.

When Dorian let it, the memory of Klaus’ betrayed look still haunted him. His mother’s face had shown the same disbelieving shock, when he’d spied on his own staged funeral at Arlington.

Dorian shuddered in relief, that it was all over. He reached for the paper Bonham slid toward him. “The latest of the basketball championship scores?” he asked.

“Not exactly, milord Gloria,” said Bonham, reminding him that it wasn’t over.

#

The case that had chained him to this perverted form of duty for nearly twenty years – was over. All the lies, pretenses, false fronts – done with, shoved into the past. He’d be ‘Dorian Red Gloria’ for only a week or so longer, until a messy fake accident would end that pretty fop’s life on a remote Scottish highway. A pity, that – he actually liked the sporty little red car the CIA was rigging for the accident.

He liked the team of British, American, and South African agents who’d been a second family to him all these years: MI5’s Bonham and Peters, James the financial wizard, Jones the hacker…not their real names, of course. He didn’t think he even knew James’ real name.

Some days, it was hard to remember that his own name was John. That he’d been born and raised American, in spite of his aristocratic British mother’s best efforts. She was long gone. The first sacrifice of his career had been letting her think that ‘John Marshall’ had died in Cambodia, in ‘76.

There had never been anything but duty, since.

#

Then he actually saw the headline, and the spoon dropped from his stunned fingers. “They let Russia into the WTO?”

“It gets worse, milord. Read down the column.”

Dorian did. “Oh. My. God. ‘Provisionary status into NATO’? Are they all mad? Whatever brought this on?”

“I believe it was Russia’s compliance during the recent little dust-ups in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said Jones, wandering by with a cinnamon roll in hand.

Dorian gave the roll a moment’s longing glance. “Balls. Putin only did it to get in good with the Americans and get money from the IMF. I can’t believe the NATO upper-crust believed this rot. They’re worse morons than Klaus said they were –” Another realization struck. “Good God. I wonder what the Major’s going to say about this?”

#

He found out, a day and a half later, after being summoned to Geneva.

“He what?” Dorian roared, forgetting his cover persona’s lack of bluster. Or maybe he’d learned some things about effective yelling, from the Major.

The first NATO representative stepped back. “He’s gone, Lord Gloria.”

The man who’d been Klaus’s slug of a Chief shook his head. “Worse than gone. He gutted my department and the Bonn department safes last night. He’s sent some very nasty viruses and worms into NATO computers all over the world, probably to hide all the other things he’s taken. Looks like he’s been planning something like this for a while – he took originals and copies of some very important and dangerous documents.”

“Like what?” Dorian’s snap of command overrode their old habits of underestimating ‘the fag’.

“Locations of safehouses and weapons caches. Details of secret treaties, scientific advancements in weapons and energy technologies, even a lot of simple blackmail material we’ve been sitting on,” said the Chief, sweating in the chilly office.

“And he took the Alphabet,” said the first man.

Dorian was getting tired of yelling “He what?”

“All twenty-six,” sighed the Chief, “I have no idea what he told them, how he threatened or lied to them – but they believed him. Herr A sent an untraceable email to his wife. In it, he said he loved her, but the fate of nations was at stake. He didn’t think he’d survive, or that she’d want him if he did – but the boy was adamant. A few other Alphabets wrote similar things to their families.”

“Where the hell are they?” Dorian asked, pacing the floor. “The Schloss – ”

“His butler hasn’t seen him since the old man’s funeral a few weeks ago,” said the Chief. “Eberbach’s flat in Bonn has been emptied out. All his accounts have been closed, and we can’t trace his other funding. We were hoping you and James – ”

“No,” said Dorian flatly. “He’s not my problem.”

“You are the only person who could get near him now,” leered the Chief. “I got to see tapes of that last interview you had with him. So he actually loved you! Very useful and informative, John Marshall. You trained for this mission, devoted two decades to smoking out my superior’s duplicity. So the mission goes on a little longer, while you catch Iron Klaus and put him behind bars for treason.”

Fuck duty, thought Dorian Red Gloria, even as he knew what his next words would be: “What else do we know?”

PART TWO

All he wanted, at the moment, was some good old American smog, a pair of comfy pants that didn’t mold to his ass, and Eberbach’s head on a pike.

Eroica breathed downtown Jakarta’s pollution at the moment, a sweltering sunset haze that obscured most of the two Petronas Towers looming overhead. He supposed his Dorian persona would have found them excitingly-phallic. In truth, they reminded him of another set of twin towers, now lost to the world. What if Eberbach, sufficiently unhinged and vengeful, traded the secrets in his possession to one of the Islamic terrorist groups?

Both Eroica’s CIA masters and his contacts in NATO stressed they didn’t know the Major’s plans. After the massive hacking-job at NATO, there hadn’t been so much as a whisper from Eberbach. So much for the blackmail theory – if he’d wanted, the Major could have extorted the startup capital for his own small country!

The man still known as ‘Eroica’ was to find him and discover those plans. Bring the Major into custody, if possible. It was far more likely that he’d have to kill Eberbach.

#

The gap between Dorian Red Gloria and John Marshall was a difficult limbo to negotiate: he still wore his hair long and curly, and sported a slightly toned-down version of Dorian’s sartorial excess. He was trolling the world as Eroica, right now, with his team of thieves. Looking for art objects and easy conquests and one elusive Major.

When dealing with Eroica’s underworld contacts, he couldn’t think of himself as Marshall. Eroica’s cover was too complete, too flawless to jeopardize for personal comfort. ‘John Marshall’ was a name he cherished bitterly in private moments, or when he was too angry to care.

Like now.

“If one more sultan of Silicon Valley East gropes me, I’m going to hurl,” he said, thinking of their noon meeting with a potential information source. The sweaty old banker had known something about Eberbach – and had offered to divulge it, for an untenable fee.

“What happened to the ‘everything for the mission’ attitude?” James teased, from his habitual place behind and to Eroica’s left.

“Some things I will not do,” said the thief, his skin prickling into goosebumps under the thin silk of his shirt. “I would rather have slept with the Major, when he crawled into my bed!”

“Was he at least a good kisser?”

“Who – the Major or that toad?”

“Eberbach. If he’s any good, that will make seducing him a little more realistic,” mused James. “And fun.”

“I am not going to -- “ Eroica yelled, drawing startled looks from a few passersby. He settled, fuming, “— to seduce him. No way!”

“No, you’re going to walk right up to him, explain yourself truthfully, and ask him to come along nicely like a good boy,” said James. “You’re right, that’ll work splendidly.”

“We’ll have to kill him, after interrogating him,” said Bonham, crackling his knuckles in a thoughtful way. “A waste.”

“Or I’ll seduce him,” James said, flipping the lustrous dark curls from wide grey-blue eyes. “They should have made me the queer Earl, instead of the money-man sidekick.”

“You don’t have the presence for the role, short stuff,” said Eroica, laughing to hide the quiet lurch he suddenly felt. “And you’re a lousy thief, once you’re away from a computer terminal.”

The thought of James seducing the Major triggered something queasy within him. Not anger at losing a target to another agent, or even general disgust. More like – shame.

James was a rat. He literally loved nothing but money. He would fuck anyone for enough of it, or for a dare, or the key to a mission. Even James admitted it, freely. What he would do to Eberbach’s heart would be far worse than what ‘Dorian’ had done. The man might deserve to have his head on a pike, but he didn’t deserve James.

“Two months,” sighed Bonham beside him. “How can he hide in plain sight for two months?”

“We’ll try Rio next,” said James, still in his own persona’s patched tweed suit. “I got a hint of a blip from there, yesterday, about some odd bartering transactions with an Argentine winery about to go belly-up – “

“Has headquarters said anything about – ” Eroica began, just as a little black sedan screamed around the corner up ahead. Other pedestrians scattered.

“Bloody hell!” Bonham snarled, reaching to drag him out of the way. James yammered something truly nasty in Malaysian slang. But Eroica stood transfixed, catching a glimpse of two familiar blond heads inside the wildly-slewing car.

The passenger leaning out of the car might pass for a delicately- pretty young woman, if Eroica didn’t know better. Agent G’s sleek white-blond hair feathered in the wind, and his teeth gritted as he raised a rifle at the three men on the sidewalk. The driver ad slightly shorter dark gold hair, and stern concentration the mirror image of Eberbach’s.

“Z!” Eroica screamed. “Stop! We’re here to – ”

He didn’t hear the gun fire; it was an air rifle, or silenced. Bonham grunted and folded neatly to the ground. The car was twenty feet away, when Eroica sensed James turn beside him. A knife’s glitter in the gaudy neon twilight made Eroica dodge instinctively, and James’ stroke caught only the edge of his embroidered silk collar.

“James,” Eroica said, stunned at the smaller man’s cold fury.

“Ops was right – you’ll fuck it up!” James hissed, then jerked backward as if slapped away by a giant. Then the giant’s hand caught Eroica, in a glancing sting in his shoulder, and night came down hard all around him.

* * *

Part Three

The world was moving. This was a bad thing to wake up to. Agents were supposed to wake quickly, quietly, assessing their situation instantly. He struggled out of a grey cotton fog into

darkness, waves of nausea, and a pounding headache. Moaned loudly. A German curse answered him. Someone hauled his upper body over something wooden and rough, pointed his face in the right direction, and said in English: “Puke now.”

He forgot every bit of Eroica’s studied elegance in that moment.

At least they held his hair back, so it didn’t get fouled. There was warm water at the end of it, to wash his mouth out, and a crumb of dry cracker to settle his empty stomach.

Hauled back onto something softer than the wood, Eroica rested on his right side. He at last figured out that he couldn’t see anything because he was blindfolded. His hands were tied in front of him, by something that clung too much for him to wriggle free. The same with his ankles. As for the rest of it:

The wooden ridge that had scraped at him was the gunwale of a boat, skipping smoothly along water. Seawater, his nose said, full of a fishy salt smell and the reek of diesel. The background horn-blasts and traffic noises of a busy harbour were absent. He didn’t hear any birds, just an endless splash and hiss of water under the bow, and the steady roar of the engine. It was a mid sized boat, judging by the distance between him and that engine.

“Any chance of –” he began.

“Nein,” said a low voice right in his ear. “You stay blinded and tied, Herr Dieb. If it had been my decision, I would have thrown you overboard like this. Or left you with your friends, in the street.”

He fixed on that last bright memory, of Bonham and James stumbling, falling. All right, so James had been ready to slit his throat, for some Jamesian reason. But Bonham? “Are they dead?”

“They were not when we departed. Though not in such comfortable surroundings as yourself,” the man chuckled. “They may wake with all their clothes, weapons, and money.”

This was one of the Alphabets, Eroica guessed. He couldn’t tell which one. Not petite G; this voice had a baritone growl that came from a bigger chest. Odd, to think of any Alphabet with the backbone to growl. They had survived the command of Major von dem Eberbach, Eroica reminded himself. And they’d shown the backbone to abscond with Iron Klaus, when he asked them.

“Where – ”

“You have been looking for Eberbach, no? You will see him, soon. He has questions for you.”

Eroica’s whole body shrank from that tone. ‘Questions’. Well, he’d survived interrogations before, and kept his double identities intact.

A hand gripped his left shoulder. “We are not torturers! There will only be questions. Then you will be drugged again, and restored to your friends.” The voice lost part of its brave control, and Eroica read some overpowering emotion in it: “Do not trade on any friendship you might have had with us. We all know what you are now, and we will be wary. Do not fling yourself at him; you hurt him greatly, but Klaus is wiser now for it. Still, I cannot say what his temper will be, if you behave foolishly.”

Eroica had a name to match the voice now. “Z?”

“We are not in NATO anymore, Herr Dieb. We answer to our own names, now.”

Apparently, he was not on the A-list for learning those names. He counted three separate individuals besides himself in the boat. No one but Z every said anything aloud, where he could hear it. Over the next few hours, he lay quietly where Z had left him, trying to judge where he was. No warmth of sun on his skin, so he was either shaded or traveling at night. There was a lot of open sea in this part of the world, and thousands of tiny islands available to renegades. His direction sense thought they were traveling eastward.

Eroica surfaced from an uneasy doze when the engine slowed. He sensed the boat turning in a tight place, threading between surfaces that threw back echoes, then nudging up against a stable surface.

“Dieb, I am sorry,” said Z, and held a damp cloth against his mouth and nose. “We can’t trust you.”

Not again, Eroica thought, as the grey fog dragged him down again.

#

At least this time, he didn’t wake up puking-sick. Cool air flowed around him, carrying a smell of wood-smoke and good cookery. The world wasn’t moving any more than it should, and the cloth under his skin was soft and clean.

He realized the reason for the cool air, suddenly. He was naked, though his wrists and ankles were still bound.

Eroica thrust away panic for a moment. He listened for Z. Heard birdsong and insect-noises, echoing out into a far distance. A ceiling fan whirred overhead. Someone breathed soft and even, about five feet away to his right. From that same area came a series of soft clicks, hushed rasping noises, and metallic whispers. It sounded familiar and comfortable, a sound he could sleep to. Had slept to, on several missions.

Klaus Heinz von dem Eberbach was cleaning his gun.

“You didn’t have to kidnap me,” Eroica said. “I would have – ”

“You didn’t cut your hair,” said Klaus.

“Beg pardon?”

“After – after your mission was over, you did not cut your hair, or get rid of the silly clothes,” the German explained, almost accusingly. “Why not?”

“I had not been formally debriefed yet,” Eroica took comfort in his own business-like tone. They were both agents, they understood these things. “I could not assume John Marshall’s identity until Dorian Red Gloria – “

“ – Was out of the way. Yes, I know. It was to occur in an accident, with a red Maserati on a lonely road not far from your estate.”

“You know?”

A quiet laugh, about as reassuring as the Major’s trademark smile. “I know much, much more about you now than I ever did in NATO, Herr Marshall. I know that John Marshall was not supposed to come back to America.”

“Er?”

“That accident. Who was supposed to be in the car? Even if the explosion disintegrated the body, there would be enough left for dental identification, or possibly DNA testing. Who were you going to leave in the car? You could not use the real Dorian Red Gloria. Though you and he looked superficially alike, he died of a heroin overdose in a nightclub, in 1976. But then you knew that – you were the one who gave him the needle. So you are not only a spy, but a murderer.”

“I didn’t know! I was told it would leave him comatose for a while, so we could keep him in a sanitarium during my mission. We didn’t mean to –”

“You killed an innocent civilian, then covered up the death with MI5’s help. Eroica the Master-Thief was much more useful than a drugged-out young Earl who’d spend his paltry inheritance in less than a year. Even so, you impersonated a member of the Peerage, all these years – did you think the British Government would let that go unpunished? Whose body was going to be in the car?”

“Bonham was going to handle it.”

“The same way James was going to handle it, in Jakarta?” Eberbach sounded amused. “It would have been your body, Herr Marshall. Did you truly not guess?”

Eroica sighed, years of self-deception lifting, a heavier weight settling in their place. “I knew,” he whispered.

“You knew.” A clatter, as the reassembled Magnum was laid aside.

“What do I have to go back for?” Eroica allowed himself to vent the bitterness he’d held inside for at least ten years. “My wife sent divorce papers in ‘81. My mother is long dead, I have no family in the States, no family anywhere. I never needed money that wasn’t Eroica’s, so I don’t have any. I’d thought that Eroica would be allowed to ‘retire’ gracefully – the whole ‘playboy turned hermit’ thing, so I could go back to school, start a real business, whatever I wanted. But after the NATO mission was over, I – began to see that my men, my agents, were there to watch me. I knew, then. When NATO asked me to find you, I jumped at the chance. One last free ride before the end, eh?”

“It confirms what I suspected,” said Eberbach. “Our governments are run by fools. You represent a massive investment in training and placement, Herr Marshall. To simply kill you off is wasteful. To successfully indoctrinate you into going along with it – is criminal. Do you wish to die?”

Once, the man called John Marshall would have instantly answered, “Yes, if my country demands it of me.” But too many years of freelancing, of Eroica’s lawless devotion to art and beauty and the thrill of the chase – they’d eroded the older code. He didn’t have a country anymore. He didn’t even have to think, before whispering “No.”

“There is hope for you, then.” Eberbach stood up, papers rustling as he moved. “I have other matters to attend to. We will speak later.”

“Hey! What about this, and my clothes?” Eroica pulled at his restraints. “You’ve taken great care that I don’t know where I am –”

The minute-long silence crawled with meanings that Eroica didn’t want to decipher. He sensed that Klaus was looking at him, but not why. The queer had just come out of the closet recently, with all those embarrassing declarations of hidden love. If the man had ever had fantasies of raping Eroica, now would be the time –

On the other hand, maybe he could stack the deck in his favour. Klaus was the master here. A place close to him could be worth its physical costs. Eroica shifted against the sheets, turning away from Klaus. Hiding the front of his body and exposing his long pale flanks, in a barely suggestive movement of grace and vulnerability.

“Nein, Eroica. Save it. You were not, and will not ever be, touched with that intent -- by one of us,” said the glacially-cold voice. “Your thieving skills might be useful to us. Your body is not.”

“But – ”

“We had to do a full examination and scan on you, to be certain there were no tracking devices planted. Your clothes were destroyed. They will be replaced. Be patient, Herr Marshall. We are busy men.”

Then Klaus left him alone with the cool air, the echoing birdsongs, and the knowledge that his world had changed forever.