Malorie had stood silently, smiling. She now laughed disarmingly, and asked in perfect French: “And my panties? Do they also look too military?’
The soldier blushed and said, “Donc, vous parlez français!”
“Of course. As every good loyalist should.”
The soldier began repacking the clothes, looking embarrassed.
After they had driven well past the roadblock, the midwife began laughing.
Malorie kept giggling for several more minutes.
It was Claire McGregor who was waiting to meet Malorie at the Hudson’s Bay Company store parking lot. Switching Malorie’s pack and dry bag between car trunks took just a minute. The midwife left with a wave.
“How was your drive, Miss LaCroix?”
“Gorgeous scenery. It was just stunning. Lots of elk, and there were bighorn sheep. I’d never seen those in person before.”
“Any problem with the internal security checks?”
She turned to Claire, put on a smile, fluttered her eyelids, and said, “Pas de problème.”
Claire laughed and replied, “Feminine wiles beat brute force every time.” They talked nonstop all the way to the ranch. Claire reminded Malorie of her aunt Helen. Very soon, Malorie knew that she would feel comfortable at Claire’s ranch house.
40
JE NE SAIS QUOI
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price [is] far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
Malorie settled in quickly at the McGregor ranch. For her privacy, she displaced Phil from his bedroom and Phil began sleeping on a folding futon on the floor of Ray’s room. Meanwhile, Malorie’s bedroom doubled as the intel analysis and translation office. A boom lamp was set up over the desk, for the days that they ran the generator. On all other days, light was provided by a pair of Aladdin mantle kerosene lamps.
On her first full day at the ranch, Malorie gave Phil a briefing on her recent intelligence analysis experience and described how she had done French technical translation.
Then Phil said, “Rather than fill you in on our operations here, first I have a mental exercise for you. I want you to watch this movie along with Ray and his parents.”
He handed her a DVD of the World War II movie Defiance with Daniel Craig, and said, “You can watch this on our laptop tonight, which we occasionally power from the McGregors’ battery bank. I want you to watch it very carefully. There will be a quiz in the morning.”
“Okay. Can I take notes?”
“No. This is a memory exercise.”
The next morning, he quizzed her in detail, for thirty-five minutes. She thought that she did fairly well in answering his questions. Then he said, “Now what I want you to do is watch the movie again—by yourself, with total concentration. This time I want you to just ignore the story, the music, and the foreground action. You are going to watch for all of the subtleties in the background: colors, shapes, sounds, vehicle types, clothing textures, type of footwear, body language, flora, fauna, cartridge casings, wear and tear on objects, architecture, temporal incongruities, et cetera—everything except what the characters are saying and doing.”
“Okay.”
Three hours later, over lunch, Phil quizzed her again. He started by asking, “How do you feel?”
“Exhausted!”
Phil grinned and said, “Good, very good. That means you did the viewing in the right frame of mind.”
Malorie exclaimed, “That was an amazing exercise!”
“I thought that you’d like that. By the way, you can do that watching any movie—even a romantic comedy. That was a trick taught me by a colleague from MI5, in England. Oh, and I should mention that two other variants of the exercise are to turn the sound down completely, or to flip the laptop screen nearly closed or dim the screen and concentrate on just the audio. I’ve watched the same movies four times using these exercises, and it is amazing what you learn to pick up, each way.”
Mal and Phil were always careful to pull out no more than three or four file folders at a time, just in case all of the “intel boxes” had to disappear into the closet in a hurry. (The plan was for both Phil and Malorie to hide in the closet in case of a search.)
Because of the huge backlog of captured documents, Malorie initially worked ten to eleven hours per day, sorting through documents and translating them. Phil was usually with her for most of the day, explaining the military jargon, acronyms, and intelligence terminology. The documents had already been roughly sorted by date, but beyond that they were a jumble. After they had been reorganized and sorted in neatly labeled manila folders, they filled four boxes. Each folder was labeled by subject and also had its tab color-coded blue, yellow, or red to designate low-, medium-, or high-intelligence-value material.
Most of the documents were not fully translated. With 90 percent of the documents she would simply staple on a “gist” summary page. Only the most important documents were translated word for word. Later, when she had more time, she worked back through a lot of the gisted documents and wrote more detailed summaries. As winter set in and the pace of work slowed, she shifted her attention to captured and pilfered technical manuals. The highest priorities were manuals for radios and small arms.
They used Phil’s laptop to write summaries of key intelligence that would be useful if broadcast. These were transferred to memory stick and then sent via the courier network to Washington, where they were read over the air by ham radio operators and relayed to the newly reemerging U.S. mass media. Intelligence on specific targets that needed to be kept secret until after a resistance strike was carried via couriers to the communities within striking distance, where resistance cells were already in place. (Another intelligence cell in Vancouver had been doing the same since the first few months of the resistance war. This was the cell that had coordinated the sinking of the MN Toucan and MN Colibri, in the single-most effective resistance action of the war. It had inspired the formation of dozens of resistance cells.)
Malorie got along well with everyone at the ranch. She and Claire were soon like a mother and daughter. Malorie enjoyed hearing the McGregors’ Canadian idioms. To the McGregors, a couch was a “Chesterfield,” a colored pencil was a “pencil crayon,” a table napkin was a “serviette,” tennis shoes were “runners,” a parking garage was a “parkade,” a fire station was a “fire hall,” and a restroom was a “washroom.”
Phil, Ray, and Stan were all immediately attracted to Malorie, for both her looks and her abilities. When Claire mentioned them staring at her, Malorie joked, “Of course they’re interested. I could be plug ugly and they’d be interested. I’m the only single female in an eight-mile radius.”
Malorie soon gravitated to Phil, but she did not make her interest clear immediately. Malorie found Phil to be a delightful coworker. Despite the stress of the heavy workload, Phil always maintained a good sense of humor. (Phil worked for eleven hours a day doing intel analysis, in addition to his ranch chores.) They shared the same faith in Christ, with an “all grace” outlook on salvation. She loved hearing his stories about Afghanistan and some of his more recent adventures with DCS Task Group Tall Oak. When the subject of his childhood came up, Phil said, “I suppose I had a very regimented upbringing, compared to most kids. It was very Russian.”