Jingle Jingle KILL

Excerpt

Jingle Jingle KILL
C. Quince © 2025
All Rights Reserved

Present day

Istanbul, Türkiye

 Arthur was enjoying a peaceful Tuesday morning, sipping chai from a tulip-shaped glass cup and reading the BirGün newspaper, as he sat on a terrace that overlooked the Bosphorus.

The sun was out, and the air felt surprisingly mild, considering it was December.

Arthur made sure to check the weather forecast daily for England and smugly noted that this week was cold and drizzly back in London.

He smiled to himself as he turned a page of his paper. Arthur preferred the paper to devices and the internet; a paper was more peaceful. He’d turned forty-nine earlier this year and found himself wanting to slow down more to enjoy the simple things.

Arthur picked up his cup to take a sip of chai.

A perfect morning.

Coşkun, the butler, emerged from the house, walking briskly down the neatly swept stone paving. He held the house’s cordless phone in one hand, carried at chest level which meant someone was on the line.

Arthur set his paper aside. “Coşkun,” he greeted. “Is Demir late again?”

Demir owned the house. His family was well connected in Istanbul. Arthur was an occasional house guest.

“Pardon, sir,” Coşkun said in English. “It is a woman for you.”

“Oh?” Arthur said with mild surprise. He hadn’t been expecting any calls. He extended his hand to reach for the phone.

“She said her name is Shepherd,” Coşkun added, handing over the phone.

Arthur tried to contain his wince. The boss had tracked him down once again.

“Thank you, Coşkun,” he said, as the young butler inclined his head politely, then left.

Arthur glanced at the phone, noting the Mute button was activated. This gave him a moment to inhale and bolster himself

He pressed to un-mute and put the phone to his ear.

“Hello. Arthur speaking,” he said cheerily.

“Arthur,” Valerie replied tartly. “I’ve been on hold for the last six minutes.”

No matter how long it had been between calls, the mere sound of her voice was enough to make Arthur tense.

“My deepest apologies, ma’am,” he said, laying on the charm. “It’s a rather large house here. The young man answering the phone sprinted straight to me, I assure you.”

Stony silence was his answer.

Shepherd, aka Valerie Jones from MI6, was only a couple of years younger than Arthur. They’d worked together early on in their careers, and once upon a time his charms had worked better to smooth things over.

“I trust everything is all right?” Arthur asked. A call out of the blue from the Deputy Director of British Intelligence was never a good thing.

“I still have a few weeks left on this little sightseeing trip,” Arthur hastened to add.

Sightseeing was their code word for counter-espionage. Officially, Arthur was the British cultural attaché in Istanbul. Unofficially, he also did some spying for MI6.

Valerie drew in a breath to speak, paused, then spoke with a gentleness he rarely heard from her.

“This is regarding home turf,” she explained. “Something just cropped up, and I want you here to take a look at it in person.”

“Oh, I see,” Arthur said. “Anything in particular?”

“Firefly,” she said.

Now it was Arthur’s turn to pause.

This was unexpected.

“It’s not…?” he asked, unable to say his name out loud.

Harun.

“No,” she confirmed. “It’s a new one. And I need you to bring in the original one to help us gather Intel.”

Arthur was afraid she’d say that.

“I’m not all that positive he’ll want to play ball, ma’am.”

“It’s not a request, Arthur,” Valerie said. “If you don’t want to break the news personally, I’ll send someone else to fetch him.”

“No, no,” Arthur replied. “It’ll be better coming from me, ma’am. I’ll go.”

“Good,” she said. “I’ve taken the liberty of booking you on the ten o’clock flight to Berlin. My agent will meet you there on the ground and bring you up to speed.”

Arthur would’ve preferred to do this without a babysitter, but he could always shake them off later.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said politely. “I shall leave right away.”

“See that you do,” she said. “Oh, and Arthur? Try not to balls it up this time.”

She ended the call before Arthur could gather himself enough to form a comeback.

“I’ll try not to,” he said to himself.

*

Berlin, Germany

Arthur arrived at Berlin Brandenburg Airport at noon local time. He’d noted the grey clouds forming from his window seat upon landing, but then it was straight into the terminal and air conditioning, so he had no way of gauging the weather outside.

He’d travelled with a carry-on only, too impatient to wait for luggage. He wheeled it along the hallway, his suit jacket folded neatly over the handle, and his trilby hat perched on top.

He passed by a lone Christmas tree situated against a window overlooking the concourse. One of the first signs that he was in a Christian country, not a Muslim one. This tree was either real pine or a very good replica. Metal barriers encircled it widely, preventing anyone from getting too close. No airport wanted an explosive gift left underneath their trees. A harsh reminder of the times clashing against a festive decoration that nobody streaming past it paid the slightest bit of attention to.

Arthur found it all rather sad, but maybe that was him being sentimental. He looked away from the tree and focused on where he was going. The new arrivals were all converging en masse to the immigration desks. Arthur joined them. He could’ve flashed his diplomatic credentials and slipped through the fast-track route, but he wanted to arrive incognito today.

He made it through immigration and out into the arrivals hall without a hitch. There were people around, but it wasn’t crammed like summer usually was. Enough civilians to use for cover, anyway.

At least, that’s what Arthur had hoped.

Waiting among the private-hire drivers holding up their little signs was a tall, slim, impeccably dressed Black woman, age around thirty, wearing a tan trench coat and shiny black platform heels, her finely braided hair secured in a loose bun. She had a long black umbrella hooked over one arm. With her hands in her coat pockets and feet crossed ever so neatly as she stood there, she looked more like a runway model than a civilian.

She spotted Arthur too.

The moment she smiled and made a beeline to him, he knew that Valerie had sent her.

“Arthur Romeo?” she asked, her accent crisp and British. West or North London was Arthur’s best guess.

“Hello, dear,” Arthur replied, matching her accent perfectly. “How can I help you?”

“I’m here to help you,” she told him in a no-nonsense manner. “I’m Special Agent Dinah Maikori. Everyone calls me Di. Shepherd sent me.”

“Did she now?” Arthur teased.

“I have a car waiting for us,” Dinah said, gesturing for him to follow her. “Shall we?”

Arthur had wanted to do this alone, but he’d just have to roll with the punches. He anticipated a lot of punches for this job.

They walked through the arrivals hall together, dodging passengers who wheeled cases and weren’t looking where they were going.

“You new agents look younger and younger these days,” Arthur said conversationally. “How long have you been working for our grande dame?”

“You’re not that much older than me, Mr Romeo,” Dinah replied, unfazed. “I’m not green. You’ve been stationed abroad for most of my career.”

“I see.” Arthur chuckled. “Now I do feel old.”

She led him outside to the private cars, and they found a waiting black car with tinted windows. The driver, who’d been busy chatting with another driver in German, quickly ended his conversation and hurried to open the trunk.

“Are you okay in the back with me, Mr Romeo?” Dinah asked.

“Call me Arthur, darling,” he replied.

“Arthur, darling,” she responded without missing a beat. “In you get.” She held open the back door for him.

Arthur decided he liked her.

When he got in and she shut the door, Arthur heard her tell the driver in fluent German to roll up the partition, to which he responded a curt, “Ja.” The ease of the exchange told Arthur they’d worked together before.

Dinah came around the other side and climbed in next to Arthur, while the driver started the engine. He pressed a button to roll up the partition window and smoothly drove them out of the parking bay.

Dinah set her umbrella aside and took out a set of papers from her coat pocket. “Let’s bring you up to speed, shall we?” she said, offering the papers to Arthur. “This is what we know so far. A sleeper agent we suspect to be a new firefly was apprehended infiltrating a diplomatic luncheon at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London. He posed as waitstaff.”

Arthur looked through the paper report written in neat handwriting, and the mugshots of a good-looking young man of Middle Eastern ethnicity, probably eighteen, but no more than twenty years old. His hair was dishevelled, and his dark eyes looked directly at the camera in an unfocused, thousand-mile stare kind of way.

Arthur didn’t recognise him, but this agent was a baby. The new generation.

“Any ID on him?” he asked.

“Only a fake one. It’s in there.”

Arthur leafed through the file to find photocopies of the fake driving licence, professionally made; even an expert would find it hard to tell the difference. The name listed was Arash Shirazi. Sounded Persian.

“The only matching data in our system was a British citizen far too old to be him, and bears no relation after a DNA test,” Dinah explained. “We suspect identity theft was used to create the fake ID with his photo. The perp doesn’t respond to the name during interrogation and hasn’t offered his own name.”

“Yes, that’s the tricky part,” Arthur said with a sigh. “What do you know about Operation Firefly?”

“The Millennium assassination attempt?” she said. “The file is pretty thin. Shepherd said you were brought in when the first firefly was captured?”

“Oh, no, he wasn’t captured,” Arthur corrected. “He turned himself in.”