Once a spy dc-1

by Keith Thomson

  Alice had broken, though without the sobbing one would have expected based upon her maudlin performance to this point. “Fine,” she said with the nerve of a different person altogether. “I’ll tell you the truth. You’re right. I was sent here by MI6.”

  “Okay, okay, good,” Fielding said, preoccupied. What had caused him to stop himself mid-threat was the winged envelope icon that popped onto the computer screen, sent by one of his fellow members of Korean Singles Online. “I just need to take five, Allie. Hector and Alberto will take you up to your room. I’ve just received some, er, news of the hunt.”

  As soon as the two hulking servants led her out, he clicked open his message from Suki835. “Howdy, Cowboy232,” the text began, then launched into the movies and music she favored.

  He scrolled to the important part, her photograph. She had a plump, round face; pleasant eyes; and an effortless smile. She couldn’t really weigh just 110, unless five four was the fib.

  He moused to her silver left earring and magnified it several hundred times over, until he could read the text on the overlaid digital dot. Decrypted, it was indeed “news of the hunt,” but not the hunt for the treasure of San Isidro as he had implied: hounds lost rabbit and rabbit, jr., at utica and fillmore in bklyn at 00:35. rabbits driving ny daily news delivery truck north on utica. will unleash addl hounds asap.

  Not good news, Fielding thought, but nothing to lose sleep over. How far could a feebleminded old man and a ne’er-do-well gambler get?

  3

  Charlie wrung another mile out of the beleaguered Hippo. When it felt like the truck was about to collapse into a pile of spent parts, he pulled into a down-market strip mall. The businesses-a supermarket, a carpet wholesaler, and five or six smaller stores-were all dark, save a few red exit signs and a display counter someone probably had forgotten to switch off.

  He nosed the truck behind Sal’s Cheesesteak Hut, a trailer painted to look like a giant hoagie. It sat on cinder blocks at the rear of the crumbling lot. Between the broken windows, graffiti, and garbage strewn all around, it appeared Sal had served his last steak years ago.

  “I think it’s closed,” Drummond said.

  “I like it anyway,” Charlie said, “because it’s big enough to hide this monster from the street, and it’s just a block from here to the subway.” He pointed to the elevated track, where a subway train was snaking toward the station. After midnight, the trains ran fifteen to twenty minutes apart. “We should hustle.”

  “Why the subway?”

  Charlie jumped out of the truck. “I’m thinking, until we can figure out our next move, we’d do well to hide in Manhattan, where there are ten million people, as opposed to here, where it’s pretty much just you and me.”

  Drummond remained in his seat. “Why don’t we drive?”

  There were too many bullet holes in the truck to count-the light streaming through them and into the cab resembled pickup sticks in mid-toss. Much of what had been the windows lay in fragments on streets between Fillmore and here. The rear tires were ribbons. Hurrying around the hood, Charlie left it at, “The truck’s hot.”

  “I meant why don’t we get a car,” Drummond said.

  “There’s about a zero chance of even seeing a taxi around here now.” His patience evaporating, Charlie yanked open Drummond’s door.

  “Our own car, I mean.”

  Charlie took Drummond by the elbow to help him from the truck. Or pull him if need be. “You really think it would be a good idea to go back to Prospect Place right now and get your Oldsmobile?”

  “No, hot-wire a car here.”

  Charlie wavered between wonder and skepticism.

  Of his own volition, Drummond slid to the pavement. “There have been weeks I changed cars more often than underwear,” he said.

  His delivery was sluggish, his eyes were overcast, and his shoulders were stooped. But if Alzheimer’s sufferers retained the finer points of driving a car, Charlie thought, why shouldn’t he remember how to steal one?

  Light towers, one at each corner of the parking lot, transformed the area into an illuminated stage to passing motorists, of whom there were two or three per minute. Charlie weighed this against a mental image of transit cops and token booth clerks in all five boroughs currently scrutinizing his photograph. “Okay, why not?” he said.

  Scattered around the lot were eleven cars and a van. Drummond pressed his face against the driver’s window of the first car he came to, a late-model Chrysler sedan. With a dismissive nod, he left it behind. Same with the Kia coupe three spots down.

  “Something the matter with them?” Charlie asked.

  “I would need the ignition keys.”

  This disclosure coincided with the subway train’s departure from the station. Charlie’s stomach sank the same way it did when a horse he’d bet heavily fell hopelessly behind right out of the gate.

  The subway fled his thoughts at the sight of the police cruiser rounding the corner. He heaved himself behind the driver’s side of the Cherokee that Drummond had moved on to inspect. Drummond made no move to conceal himself; he remained standing by the driver’s door and watched the cruiser. Which was what an innocent man would do, Charlie realized-too late. He was in the process of tackling Drummond.

  They became a tangle of limbs on the icy asphalt. At least they were hidden from the cruiser as it zipped past.

  “Sorry, I got a little carried away,” Charlie said. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Drummond said. “This one’s no good either.” He tapped the Cherokee with the newspaper he’d brought with him from the truck, presumably to read during the ride to Manhattan.

  “You remember saying you could hot-wire a car, right?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. But if the ignition barrel is encased in the dash, as it is on the newer models, it’s much more difficult.”

  Before Charlie could ask what an ignition barrel was, Drummond was on his way to what had to be a suitable candidate, a boxy gray Buick from the days before anyone knew what “mpg” stood for.

  Trying and failing to open the doors, Drummond dropped out of sight behind the hood. “An interesting piece of information is that locks with retinal scanners make exponentially fewer errors than iris scanners,” came his voice. “There’s no technology that allows the forgery of a human retina, you see. Also, if you kill a man, you can’t use his retina, because it begins to decay immediately.”

  Charlie felt like crying. “So you’re saying the lock on this car has a retinal scanner?”

  “No, it’s just an interesting piece of information, that’s all.” Drummond reappeared, having dislodged a softball-sized chunk of cement from the crumbling tire-curb. He flattened his Daily News over the back window on the Buick’s driver’s side, and hammered it with the cement chunk. The newsprint protected him from the spray of glass and blunted the sound-allowing Charlie to hear the yelp of brakes a few blocks away.

  Had one of the cops thought twice about the unusual shadow movements he’d seen in the mall parking lot?

  Sure enough, Charlie heard the garbled chatter of a police radio. Growing louder. It curdled his blood more than the siren would have.

  “We have to go,” he said. “Now!”

  “I’m with you,” Drummond said.

  Charlie sprang toward the dark delivery alley between the supermarket and the carpet store. A trickle of streetlight at the far end promised a way out.

  Hearing only his own footfalls, Charlie spun around. Drummond still stood by the Buick. Reaching into the gap he’d created, he opened the driver’s door.

  Charlie rushed back, intent on dragging him to the alley. Drummond dove past him, into the Buick, landing prone on the front seat. He flipped onto his back, snapped off the base of the ignition barrel, plucked two reds from the tangle of wires, touched their ends together, and brought the husky engine to life.

  Scrambling into the passenger seat, he said, “Charles, we have to go, remember?”

&nbs
p; Charlie shook off his astonishment-he could do nothing about his fright-and hurried into the driver’s seat.

  He shot the Buick down the alley, and, at the far end, turned out onto the street just as the police cruiser bounded into the strip mall parking lot. Again, he only heard the cruiser.

  Driving away, he said to Drummond, “I’m impressed that you didn’t have to change your underwear every time you changed cars.”

  4

  “For now, the flooding appears to be under control-”

  Charlie switched off the car radio. A water main break in Canarsie was the night’s biggest news. No cabdriver murder story, no mention of the flight of the Clarks, nothing about traffic delays due to police blockades.

  Nor was there sign of such blockades. The practically vacant Williamsburg Bridge stood just a block down Driggs Avenue. On the other side blazed Manhattan in all of its immensity and raucousness-a sanctuary, in Charlie’s mind. Still his eyes bounced from mirror to mirror. The rest of him was as tense as rigor mortis in anticipation of police cars or, worse, a teal car.

  Slouched in the passenger seat, Drummond registered little response to the radio or much else. His eyelids appeared weighted down.

  Suddenly he cried out, “Bridge!” as if warning of an incoming missile. He plunged off the seat and bunched himself up on the rubber mat in the footwell.

  It was too late for Charlie to turn back. To brake meant a certain rear-ending. The best he could do was slow the Buick. “What about it?”

  Drummond looked over as if through thick fog. “They’ll see us.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t…” Drummond’s voice fell off.

  Charlie studied the steep on-ramp. A Volkswagen Beetle skipped across the threshold. At the ramp’s peak, a stripe of light swept over a wrecker as it thumped onto the bridge’s main span. Charlie’s eyes jumped to the source of the light, the steel box mounted on the gantry above the span. The box contained a camera intended to photograph vehicles that sped or jumped red lights. Traffic cams had been blooming on gantries all over town recently. The photos were processed later-often months later-by the Department of Transportation. In cases of clear infractions, where both the license plate and the driver’s face were captured, summonses were issued by mail.

  “Please don’t tell me that they-whoever they are-can tap into traffic cams,” Charlie said.

  “Maybe you should wear this.” Drummond offered up the soiled New York Yankees cap that had been wedged into a pocket on the passenger door.

  Charlie pulled on the cap. The bill draped his face in shadows. The cap itself compressed his pile of hair. A devout Mets fan, he’d always maintained he wouldn’t be caught dead in anything with a Yankees logo. He never imagined he actually would have to make the choice.

  The drive across the bridge and into lower Manhattan was uneventful-as far, Charlie reflected, as he knew. From Houston Street, he turned the Buick onto quiet Ludlow, intent on the quaint Italianate brownstone halfway down the block.

  It was a few minutes to one. Lenore, who tended bar at the Four Leaf Clover, a horseplayer watering hole in Hell’s Kitchen, ought to be home now, hopefully alone. He’d been to her apartment three nights ago. The visit lasted only as long as the nightcap that occasioned it. He left without much sense of whether he wanted to call her or whether she had any interest in hearing from him. They hadn’t spoken since. So his showing up now and asking to stay the night would strike her as peculiar, to say the least. That he’d brought along his father would be off the charts. On the flip side, who would think to look for him there?

  There was little activity on her block. The bodega on the near corner had no business. A middle-aged Asian man sat outside in the tent that protected the fruit and cut flowers from the elements. The portrait of boredom, he dipped a soup spoon into a small bowl. There was some movement on the other side of the blinds of the chess club on the second story. Farther down the sidewalk, a shopping cart lady had parked her cart and slept on a stoop by a heating grate. Otherwise the residential block was dormant.

  Still, as Charlie drove onto it, his pulse doubled. Probably due to exhaustion, he thought. Also his blood sugar was on Empty.

  No, it was the soup.

  Like they say at the track, believe nothing that you hear and half of what you see. He shouldn’t have been able to see the boredom on the man’s face at all. There ought to have been vapor in the way, rising from the bowl. Hell, a night this cold, there ought to be a shaft of steam. Maybe Smith or MacKenzie or whoever learned about Lenore from one of the horseplayers at the Four Leaf Clover: Most of them would sell their mothers for the price of a two-buck ticket.

  Or maybe the poor bodega guy’s soup simply had gotten cold.

  Drummond slept in the footwell. He might have a sense of whether the bodega man was something other than he appeared. But rousing Drummond risked drawing the man’s attention, and more than likely Drummond would not have a sense. So Charlie simply drove past, watching the bodega in the rearview mirror.

  The man shifted his position. He was watching the Buick.

  But did that necessarily mean he was up to no good? What else did he have to do? He was bored-so bored, he probably had nodded off, allowing his soup to cool.

  There was an empty parking space by Lenore’s building. Charlie tapped the brake pedal.

  The red taillights set aglow a circle, the size of a quarter, at the end of something the bodega man held to his right eye.

  He was watching through some sort of night scope!

  Shock nearly turned Charlie to stone. He fought an impulse to heave his foot at the gas pedal; he maintained the car’s moderate pace. As he drove the remainder of the block, to his surprise, no bullets smashed into the Buick.

  At the end of the block, he turned onto Delancey. The bodega man shifted his scope to the shopping cart lady.

  While driving west on Delancey, Charlie felt regular sensation return to his body, but any sense of relief was negated by fear of what lay ahead, as well as uncertainty over which way “ahead” was. The fact that Smith, MacKenzie amp; Whoever knew about Lenore’s apartment turned Manhattan into an awfully tiny island.

  And they were everywhere Charlie looked. Like the squeegee man on the corner. Didn’t the city get rid of squeegee men last century? Or the electric company repair crew on the other side of Delancey, a common enough sight anytime. But how about the broad-shouldered guy sitting idly by the pneumatic drill while his coworkers were neck-deep in the manhole? Wouldn’t he catch hell for gunning that monster in the middle of the night? Was it one disguise element too many?

  Charlie turned uptown at the Bowery, only because he had no reason to, so theoretically there was no reason for anyone to suspect he would.

  Hoping the ten minutes of rest made a difference, he roused Drummond. “Dad, I need some help,” he said.

  “My pleasure,” Drummond said. In no way on the ball.

  “Have you remembered, by any chance, who you work for?”

  “Perriman Appliances-you know that.”

  Perriman was a perpetually debt-ridden Argentine manufacturer of third-rate washing machines, dryers, and refrigerators. Its early-’70s venture into automotives, a sedan named the Chubut for the southern Argentine province that was home to the factory, was greeted with wild enthusiasm and national pride. But reports of poor quality control-some Chubuts left the line missing parts-resulted in the nickname Chupar (Spanish for “to suck”), total sales of just 366 cars, and debt that nearly suffocated the company.

  Perriman had had to move its midtown Manhattan office, where Drummond supposedly worked, to Morningside Heights, inconvenient to clients and prospective clients. But space there was ten to fifteen dollars per square foot cheaper than midtown. Charlie had always thought that Drummond had the brains for better; his issue was people skills.

  “Tell me again what it is you do there?” Charlie said.

  “You know: I demonstrate the appliances in the showroom, then
go on-site with building owners and property managers to ensure that their specifications and measurements are met.”

  “Right, but that’s just your cover, right?”

  “Cover?”

  Charlie exhaled in an effort to dispel his exasperation. It didn’t work.

  “How about this? When you’re on all your sales trips, do you ever do any work on the side for, like, the CIA?”

  “Not that I’m aware.”

  Which didn’t rule it out.

  “The NSA?”

  “Not that I’m aware.”

  “I could get a list and call every place in Washington with a clandestine operations division, but if what we’ve seen so far is any indication about the resources of who or whatever’s after us, odds are it’d probably be a case of the mouse calling the cat. So it would be really swell if you could remember anything.”

  Drummond sat up. “I think there is something about Washington.”

  In his excitement Charlie found himself mirroring his father’s posture. “Yeah?”

  Drummond massaged his temples, trying, it seemed, to stimulate the works within. “Something.”

  “You did go there on an awful lot of sales trips.”

  “A good percentage of North Atlantic Division’s building owners and property managers are there. I go on-site to ensure that their specifications and measurements-”

  “Oh, right, of course,” Charlie said. But he was willing to bet that building owners and property managers had nothing to do with Drummond’s trips.