The Last Drink

The man lifted the glass from the counter and absent-mindedly swirled it around in its glass, looking at its contents half-heartedly.
"Thank you" he said, with a very suave gesticulation of the hand and a surreptitious nod towards the woman sat next to him at the bar.
He leaned back in a relaxed manner in a bid to look like he was adjusting himself for added comfort, when in actuality he wanted to take in the full measure of the eastern European beauty who had blessed the bar stool with her presence. Although with what they charged for drinks in the club, she was in her league and the bar stool had seen many a pretty derrière in its time.

Then again, so had he.

"You're quite velcome" she replied, wearing an accent which was almost as contrived as his tuxedo.

He supposed he should have been able to place the accent, but that was one of the days in the academy he had missed. "Missed" being a nice word for "skived" or "bunked off".

He had seen her walk into the club and had marked her as someone to watch almost immediately, the trouble was, he wasn't the best secret agent in the world, and he had made it fairly obvious that he was watching her. That had left her with little choice.

"So, you're not from around here then" he sort-of-didn't-asked.

"I moved here vhen I vas very young, but I travel around ofteen" she purred.

"Yes, you look like the type who gets around quite a lot" he said, gulping generously at his drink..

She laughed the laugh of someone who is going to kill you but is trying to make you think she likes you first to gain your trust.

He thought he was well in there.

Everyone else in the bar knew he wasn't.

"And you, you are Eenglish yes?"

"Yes, I'm a secret service agent for MI5" he said, spitting out an uneaten olive.

"MI5," she enquired "that sounds exciting".

"Yes, it is quite exciting. I'm supposed to kill a Russian contact who has been feeding misdirection to the brains back at old Albion."

(Was he really this stupid, or was this part of a plea to make her drop her guard?)

"Really? Do you know who it is?" she raised her eyebrows with interest.

"No, I haven't opened the case file yet, I came straight here after my plane landed 15 minutes ago. Hang on, I'll check"

She ordered him another drink, and as he leant down to his briefcase and rummaged through his dossier, she surreptitiously plopped a tablet into his drink.

"Here you go" he said, throwing the unopened file into her lap. He reached for the drink and started to knock it back, with all the manners and breeding of the working class at an "all you can eat" Pizza Hut lunch.

"Senor, you are supposed to let the drink sit for a few minutes, no?" she said with her unconvincing inconsistent accent.

He shrugged and carried on drinking.

"Well, that's the last drink you will ever have, you've been poisoned" she said, standing up and letting the file drop to the floor.

He stood up and smiled, showing her the tablet within his teeth. Pulling a gun from inside his tuxedo, he shot her, before spitting the tablet onto her corpse.

"No, but it's the last drink you'll ever buy," he said wryly.

"I must have swallowed the goddamned olive" he said to himself, straightening his ill-fitting suit.

And with that, the 18th worst secret service agent in the world walked out of the club, knowing another mission had been completed with all the grace of Bambi running the 110 metre hurdles in Doc Martins.

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