Last Things Last A. Scott Glancy (based on an idea by Brett Kramer) In the darkness, a cell phone is ringing. It squawks out “Hooray for Captain Spalding,” Groucho Marx’s theme music from
You Bet Your Life. Agent Winifred struggles under her comforter to find the ringing cell phone. She brushes her own silent cell aside and digs for the burner her Cell leader gave her. That phone has never rung before, and after tonight’s opera she’ll drops it down a sewer drain and it will never ring again. When she finally finds her Cell’s cell phone, she checks the caller I.D. It reads “ALPHONSE.” She immediately answers.
“This is Winifred.”
The computer-generated voice on the other end sounds as warm and avuncular as Stephen Hawking.
“Agent Winifred, execute identity protocol Kappa. Forty-six, left, thirty-two, three.”
Winfred jumps out of bed and goes to a bookcase across her bedroom, withdraws two old volumes. She opens the first titled
Selected Prose and Poetry of Rudyard Kipling. She opens the book to page 46, checking the left column she counts down to line thirty-two. The passage reads—
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, an’ go to your Gawd like a soldier. She reads the third word of the thirty-second line. “Wounded.”
“Confirmed,” answers the phone.
Winifred opens the second book, Dashiell Hammet’s
The Maltese Falcon.
“Protocol Theta. One eighty-five, four, five.”
The anonymous voice squawks “Sap.” Winifred checks the text. It reads—
I won’t play the sap for you. “Confirmed. You are go for mission details.”
. . .
