✏️ The Littlest Spy

11. The Teacher

Isadora sat at the kitchen table, her brow furrowed as she flipped through the pages of Bernard and Estelle Klein's background files for what felt like the hundredth time. Brock was washing the breakfast dishes this morning, having already done the cooking, but she felt that he still had the easy job. She had been quizzing him on the details of their cover stories while he worked, and she just couldn't believe how little he seemed to care about such a crucial stage of getting into character.

"Okay," she said. "The mascot for your high school football team."

"I don't know," he said with a shrug. "I was never into the whole sports thing. I mean, yeah, I was on the team for like half a season, but that was only because Mandy DD was on the cheer squad, and I spent half the practices in the locker room with her. Never actually made it off the bench."

Isadora sighed. That was exactly the kind of response she might have expected from Brock, and she was starting to wonder if her earlier thoughts about his professionalism had been misplaced. She'd been asking him questions like this for a couple of weeks now, and he gave no impression of caring about Bernard's background, or Estelle's.

"Leopold the Tiger," she said with a sigh. "Surely you could remember that? Just visualise Mandy with a tiger tail, or something." She gritted her teeth, and tried to understand how a man could ever gain the role of Operative without being able to memorise even the basics about his cover identity. Glancing down at the fake yearbook page in front of her and seeing that the school did indeed have a cheerleader called Mandy "Deedee" Dyson didn't do much to reassure her. If he could only remember the name of a well-endowed cheerleader from the photos, it gave a clear impression of what he'd been thinking about when he looked through those pages.

"Okay," she asked, her tone sharp. If she could get at least one right answer out of him, it would be a good start. "What's the street I grew up on?"

Brock shrugged, and took a long sip on his coffee. "Something with a tree in it?" he guessed. "Maple... Avenue? Maple Crescent?"

Isadora sighed, setting the papers down with a little more force than necessary. "Maple Grove. Come on, Brock, this is basic stuff. How are we supposed to convince anyone we're a real couple if you can't even remember where your wife grew up?"

"I never..." Brock mumbled, leaning back. "I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't remember my wife's home town unless I met her there. It's not a part of my relationship with her."

"Okay," Isadora conceded. "Maybe that's true. That's a detail that I should know, rather than us. But what about... We've recently come back from a honeymoon. Where did we stay?"

"Rome," he said. "The hotel was odd, looked so ancient on the outside, like it goes all the way back to the romans, but as soon as you step inside it's all cool AC and automatic doors. And a neat little minibar that raises up when you open it."

"I mean where was it?" she pressed. "What part of Rome?"

"They said it was central," he said, leaning back and racking his brains. "Three streets over from the Trevi Fountain. Maybe it was, but every time I went out of the place I got lost in a maze of back streets and it took me twenty minutes just to find signs in English."

Isadora had to laugh at that. The gesture of humility, admitting that he wasn't good at geography, made it easy to like Brock. But she couldn't look past the fact that he was just using this to cover up his lack of knowledge about the facts. And when he was talking to the bandits, they might not be so willing to let him get away without answering. He needed to know their background. She turned to the next page, and tried to pick a question that he might actually know the answer to.