The Tremor in the Porcelain

A retired spy's routine coffee meeting turns deadly when an old, forgotten face appears, tapping out a coded message that signals betrayal and a threat that is already in the room.

Twenty years retired, and he still mentally mapped every room he entered. Assessed threats. Calculated angles. It was exhausting. He’d tried to stop. He’d taken up watercolour painting, for God’s sake. But the old instincts were hard-wired now, etched into his nervous system like circuitry. He saw the city outside not as a place where people lived, but as a series of interconnected vulnerabilities. Rooftops for snipers, alleyways for ambushes, crowds for cover.

Linda approached his table, her expression serene. She ran this place with a quiet efficiency that he knew was part of her cover. To the world, she was a pleasant woman who made excellent scones. To him, she was ‘Jocasta’, his handler for the last thirty years, the voice on the other end of crackling long-distance calls from hellholes he’d rather forget.

“The usual, Terry?” she asked, her voice carrying just enough to be heard over the hiss of the espresso machine.

“Please, Linda. And make it a good one. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long day.”

The message was supposed to be in the latte art. A simple leaf meant all was well. A heart meant new intelligence. A swan meant the dead drop was active. He waited. Linda’s movements were fluid, economical. She was a professional. But when she placed the cup on his table, his blood ran cold. The pattern in the foam was a crude star. A five-pointed star. It wasn't in the codebook. It was a panic signal, one they hadn't used since a botched exfiltration from East Berlin in '88. It meant: *Abort. You are compromised. I cannot help you.*

He kept his face neutral, lifting the cup to his lips. The coffee was bitter. He met Linda’s eyes over the rim. Her gaze was steady, but the corners of her mouth were tight with tension. She knew. She was compromised, too.

“Anything else for you?” she asked, a little too brightly.

“No, this is perfect. Thank you,” he said, the words tasting like ash.

Then the bell chimed. And John walked in.

### The Tapping Man

Terry felt his heart seize. He hadn't seen John for three decades. He had attended his funeral, in fact. A closed-casket affair for a ‘Foreign Office cultural attaché’ who had died in a tragic yachting accident off the coast of Greece. John ‘Horus’ Casey. The best damn analyst the service had ever had. And a man Terry had personally confirmed as deceased. A ghost in a beige raincoat.

John didn't look at him. He moved to a nearby table, one of the small, two-person ones by the window, and sat down. He looked older, of course. Thinner. The sharp intelligence in his eyes had been replaced by a weary sort of resignation. He ordered a black coffee from a passing waitress, his voice a low murmur that Terry couldn't quite catch.

Terry’s mind raced. Was John a ghost? A doppelgänger? Or had the yachting accident been a lie? A defection? He watched John’s hands. The hands of an analyst, long and slender. John picked up a teaspoon and began to stir his coffee. Stir, stir, tap. Stir, tap. Stir, stir, stir, tap.

It wasn't random. It was a rhythm. A cadence. A cold dread, colder than the Berlin winter of '88, washed over Terry. It was tap code. A simple, deniable field communication method they had all been taught and were all forbidden to ever use outside of active capture. It was slow, tedious, and completely invisible to the uninitiated.

Terry focused, his own hand gripping his porcelain cup until his knuckles were white. He translated the taps, the short pauses for dots, the longer ones for dashes. His coffee, his table, the entire city outside dissolved. There was only the sound.

D-O-T. The first word was a jolt. *Dot*. John's callsign. It was him. It was really him.

B-L-O-W-N. Blown.

T-H-O-R-N. Thorn. Terry's own callsign.

N-E-T. Net. The entire network.

C-O-M-P-R-O-M-I-S-E-D.

So Linda’s star was right. But why was John here? Why was he the one to deliver the message? The tapping continued, each small metallic click a nail in his coffin.

---

John paused his stirring. He took a sip of his coffee. His eyes, for the first time, lifted and met Terry’s. They were flat. Empty. The eyes of a man following orders. Then, he began to tap again, his message now directed, personal.

I. A-M. M-O-L-E.

Terry felt the air leave his lungs. John was the source of the compromise. The traitor.

The final sequence of taps came, slow and deliberate, a death knell played out on a teaspoon.

T-I-D-Y. U-P.

John stopped tapping. He placed the spoon softly on the saucer. He looked Terry dead in the eye, a flicker of something—regret? pity?—in his gaze. He reached into the pocket of his raincoat.

“It’s a shame, Thorn,” John said, his voice loud enough to carry across the two tables, the first words he’d spoken directly to him in thirty years. “I always liked this place.” He pulled out a small, heavy object wrapped in a white paper napkin and placed it gently on the table between them.