Once a spy dc-1

by Keith Thomson

  Entering, Charlie was struck by an anxiety he couldn’t explain. He hoped it was just a reflex born of being attacked everywhere he’d set foot the last two days.

  He took in the foyer, furnished with an antique drop-leaf table, a tall pewter vase, and a series of framed ornithological watercolors. The lustrous pine floorboards were as wide as diving boards. If this room were representative of the home’s decor, interior design enthusiasts would pay admission to see the rest.

  “Whose place is this?” he asked Mort.

  “Sir, all I can tell you is he’s an oilman named MacCallum from up in Alaska.”

  “You mean that’s all you’re allowed to say?”

  “No, sir. Except for he’s a friend of Mr. Hattemer’s, it’s all I know. Mr. MacCallum’s never once set foot here.”

  Charlie suspected that he now knew at least as much about MacCallum as Mort did.

  “Why don’t y’all come on here into the den and take a load off?” Mort said, leading the way.

  The floor of the massive “den” was covered by a pair of rich Oriental carpets-probably no single Oriental carpet on Earth would have been big enough. The walls, with refined checkerboard wainscoting, boasted more art than many galleries; the glass and pewter frames mirrored the flickering within the stone fireplace, making the brass banquet lamps unnecessary. Charlie ogled a Breugel snowscape.

  Drummond remained behind in the doorway, seemingly lost.

  Mort was so hunched that he barely needed to bend in order to draw a log from the brass rack on the floor. With a sibilant grunt, he tossed the dry wood onto the andirons. The fire flared, turning the room a soft ochre and revealing what Charlie deemed the home’s most attractive feature: the pair of scallop-rimmed dinner plates, set on the bar, each with a hearty turkey and cheddar sandwich and a pile of potato chips-the upscale, kettle-cooked kind.

  “There’s your suppers,” Mort said. “Help yourselves to whatever you want to drink-the fridge behind the bar’s loaded with cold beer and pop. If you’re still hungry, y’all’re welcome to try your luck in the kitchen. Also there’s clothes and anything else a person could ever need in the mudroom. And if y’all’re okay with that, I’m gonna go on up to bed-the beasts here like to get up and eat their breakfast way too darn early. Mr. H. oughtta be here in a half hour or thereabouts.”

  Charlie understood his misgivings now.

  Suppers.

  During his ten-second phone conversation with Hattemer, Drummond hadn’t indicated Charlie was with him. Yet Mort had been instructed to prepare two suppers.

  “Hey, Mort, just one more thing?” Charlie asked.

  “Sir?”

  “Was it Mr. H. himself who called you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did he tell you how many people to expect?”

  “Four, I think.”

  “Four?”

  “Y’all plus him and Mr. Fielding.”

  “Who’s Fielding?”

  Mort turned to Drummond. “Fella you and Mr. H. work with, ain’t that right, sir?”

  “Could be,” Drummond said. “I don’t know a lot of the men in Refrigeration.”

  In a mirror, Charlie caught Mort shooting a bewildered look at Drummond. Mort didn’t know anything, Charlie concluded.

  Mort dug a sticky-pad message from a pocket and read, “Nicholas Fielding?”

  Drummond shrugged.

  “Also Mr. H. said Willie wasn’t gonna be able to make it,” Mort added.

  “Can I see that, please?” Charlie asked.

  “Yours to keep,” said Mort, handing over the piece of paper.

  “Thanks,” Charlie said. “Thanks for everything, Mort.”

  As Mort climbed the stairs, Charlie studied the handwritten message:

  5:30: MR. H + NICHOLAS FIELDING + NO WILLIE.

  No Willie was Hattemer’s safety code, meaning Nicholas Fielding, whoever he was, was no threat. As far as Hattemer knew. From the name Nicholas Fielding, however, three letters jumped up at Charlie:

  H, E, and N.

  Charlie fought to keep from gasping while Mort was in earshot. As soon as Mort was upstairs, Charlie showed Drummond the note, jabbed a finger at the pertinent characters, and said, “According to Belknapp, it was ‘HEN’ who ordered the hit at the battlefield.”

  “Which one was Belknapp again?”

  “The last one.”

  “Yes, yes, I see.” Drummond appeared more interested in-and to have greater appreciation for the significance of-his sandwich.

  Hoping to squeeze even a drop of information from him nevertheless, Charlie blocked his path to the plate. “What are the odds that this Hen isn’t that Hen?”

  “Odds?”

  “Higher than the sky, in my professional opinion. Plenty of names have H, E, and N in that order. Howard Beckman, the detective, for one. But how many Hens do you work with?”

  Drummond put a hand on his chin to think.

  Charlie decided not to bother waiting for the results. “In either case, we can’t just drive off now,” he said. He was surprised not to be panicking. Maybe his nerves were shot. “We’d just cross paths with them between here and Hickory Road.”

  “All right then. Can we eat?”

  “As soon as one of us works up an escape route.”

  33

  As they crossed the dusky meadow behind the house, Charlie went over his idea. “So we stay and hear what Hattemer and this Nicholas Fielding have to say. Worse comes to worse, we make it look like we tried to get away in the Durango. Really, if we manage to saddle a horse, we go on horseback. What do you think?”

  “Okay,” was the extent of Drummond’s feedback, sadly.

  The barn was built of pine planks and painted the classic, rustic red. Inside, the musky scent of horses commingled wonderfully with the sweet smell of hay. It was too dark for Charlie to make out much beyond the expanse and many large shapes. Flipping on the lights might alert Mort to their presence here, so Charlie waited until his eyes adapted, then slipped in. Drummond lingered by the entryway, hungrily contemplating the green apples piled into a thick-slatted barrel.

  In the stalls, five horses slept, all standing. The first three were tall and slim, with chiseled faces on long necks: Thoroughbreds. Charlie passed them by. Thoroughbreds have two gears, Park and Locomotive. If he were to attempt to ride one, the odds said he’d be left on the ground with horseshoes permanently stamped on his face.

  In stall four was a draft horse; Charlie recognized the characteristic giant hooves and weightlifter’s shoulders. CANDICANE was engraved on the beveled-edged copper plaque on the stall door. If the Thoroughbred is a racecar, the draft horse is the family station wagon, the horse used to give grandkids and greenhorns the steadiest ride. Candicane’s swayed back and droopy lips indicated she’d held that job for years.

  In the last stall was Giovanni, a Thoroughbred who conjured a Ferrari. So Candicane was the man. Charlie hoped her name reflected her temperament. Despite all his time at the track, he’d never ridden a horse. He’d learned a few things though. Chiefly, those scenes in Westerns where a novice jumps onto a horse and rides off: complete malarkey. Just getting a saddle on would be an ordeal.

  Candicane’s eyes opened at his approach. He dangled an apple across her stall door. She bared her teeth, which brought ax blades to his mind. He willed himself to keep steady. If she detected his fear, she would whinny her displeasure, which could domino into bedlam in the barn. She sucked the apple from his palm with what felt like a kiss. He was charmed.

  “I hope we can still be friends when I saddle you,” he whispered.

  Equipment bloomed from the walls and ceiling in the adjacent tack room. Charlie unhooked a saddle and groped for bridle, brushes, and the rest of what he anticipated he would need. Returning to Candicane, he opened the stall door and entered inches at a time so as not to spook the thousand-pound beast. She stepped sideways to accommodate him.

  He’d seen grooms ready racehorses hundreds of
times. Unfortunately, his attention was usually on the conversation-as sources, grooms ranked second only to attendants in the owners’ and trainers’ parking lot. One thing he had picked up was that a small bit of dirt caught between the hide and the saddle blanket or saddle pad could do to a horse what the pea did to the princess. So he brushed Candicane, delicately. She responded like a thousand-pound kitten, snorts in place of purring.

  “Okay, Candi, now for your saddle blanket,” he said with rising confidence.

  Having witnessed this relatively simple step so many times, he thought failure was impossible. As he opened the surprisingly large blanket, he reconsidered: It would be easier to get a tarp over a building. He set the top of the pile forward of her withers, then worked out the wrinkles as he spread the rest toward her tail, the grooms’ method. The reason they did so, he realized, was that it allowed her hair to run in its natural direction. Again, Candicane snorted her contentment. Still Charlie was wary of losing his teeth as a result of poking her in a wrong spot, and he had no idea which spots those were.

  He lowered the saddle onto her as carefully as if it were a souffle. She cozied into it. He let the straps and stirrups cascade down her flanks, then knelt to put them in place. Even in broad daylight, it would take hours just to figure out how to lace the straps in and around the rings. And still she might be girthy, a discomfort horses remedied by kicking. His eyes wandered to her hooves. This close, they were anvils.

  He looked over the stall to Drummond, who leaned against a strut, on the verge of dozing again. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever hot-wired a horse?” Charlie whispered.

  “Not that I recall.”

  “That could still mean that your appliance dealers convention in Rochester was a cover for equestrian training so that you could pose as an Arab prince, right?”

  “I can tell you that the amount of blood in a horse’s body is generally one eighteenth of its total weight.”

  “Here’s hoping we don’t put that to a test,” Charlie said. He settled for tying things together wherever he could.

  Twenty-one minutes later, a sleek, black Lincoln seemingly materialized from the night and parked in the cobblestoned circle in front of the house. Watching from the foyer, Charlie was reminded of a vampire.

  There were three prospective outcomes now. One, the Lincoln had indeed come to the rescue. Two, it hadn’t, but he would get the answers he needed, and he and Drummond would get away. Three, they wouldn’t get away.

  The driver’s door popped open, revealing a man who, by virtue of being in his early forties, probably was Fielding. Whoever he was, he was too handsome to be Hattemer’s driver, or anybody’s driver this side of Sunset Boulevard. This was Lancelot with golden hair and a lower body-fat percentage. He didn’t just step onto the driveway, he landed, the way a superhero came onto the scene, sculpted jaw set in determination, fists clenched, and eyes burning with a zeal to set things right.

  Not your prototypical killer, Charlie thought. But who was? The late Cadaret’s neighbors on St. Bart’s probably thought he was a helluva guy.

  Lancelot blazed around the hood, plucked open the passenger door, and lent an arm to a thickset, older man. Hattemer. Charlie recognized him from somewhere, maybe the news-in which case it probably was a piece he’d seen while waiting for the sports report to come on.

  Hattemer’s full head of silver hair was combed neatly into place, his flannel suit was crisp, and his tie was dimpled with precision. None of that set him apart from all the hustlers and shysters on Capitol Hill, but there was an undeniable geniality etched between his jowls, and his sharp eyes were full of a certain reassuring gravitas. He was one of the good guys-Charlie felt it.

  Still Charlie’s circumspection remained high as he opened the front door. As he’d been reminded too many times at the track: Even when you know, you don’t know.

  Hattemer squinted through the blob of exterior lights. “Charlie, it’s good to see you,” he said with a warmth that couldn’t be artifice.

  Charlie allowed that Hattemer had just done some simple checking, then reasoned, thoughtfully, that Drummond and his son could stand some supper.

  With a wave at Lancelot, Hattemer added, “I took the liberty of bringing along Nick Fielding, who was your father’s protege and has been the acting chief of the agency’s Geographical Analysis Ecosystem Subcommittee since your father went on the disabled list.”

  While leading them into the foyer, it dawned on Charlie that he knew Nick Fielding, or rather knew the name. “Aren’t you a treasure hunter?” he asked him.

  “That’s just schtick,” Fielding said.

  Charlie was unnerved. It didn’t seem like the sort of secret Fielding would allow someone to just walk away with.

  “Gentlemen, I need to tell you something straight off,” Charlie said. “My father’s watching us through a rifle scope, and the way he’s been lately, he’s liable to plug all of us if you don’t hand over your weapons now.” Really, Drummond was stashed safely out of earshot, probably taking a post-supper nap.

  Hattemer and Fielding exchanged glances so precise that Charlie wondered whether they were explicit communications, an appraisal of his claim perhaps. These men almost certainly had been trained to spot lies via shifts of eyes or fluctuations in rate of speech, nervous movements, and more ways he couldn’t begin to guess. Thinking of the card players’ saying-“After the first few minutes, if you don’t know who the sucker at the table is, it’s you”-he cursed his gall in imagining he could fool these men.

  “We understand,” Hattemer said.

  “We regret it’s come to this,” added Fielding.

  Charlie’s self-assurance rebounded. “I’ll need you to step against the wall and shrug off your coats, one sleeve at a time,” he said. This was the technique the lieutenant at the Monroeville club had used.

  Fielding and Hattemer wriggled out of their suit coats, tossing them forward onto the floor before Charlie remembered to ask. The closest thing to a weapon the coats contained was Fielding’s cigar case. But removing the coats brought into plain sight the rugged gray pistol tucked into Fielding’s waistband. If Hattemer carried a firearm, it was disguised as a fountain pen in his breast pocket.

  Charlie had heard of pens capable of discharging a single. 22 caliber bullet. Better to appear the fool than be shot to death by a pen, he thought. “Please put the pen and the gun on the floor,” he said.

  They did, and he knelt and gathered up what appeared to be an ordinary fountain pen and a SIG Sauer. Rising, he executed a rendition of the Monroeville pat down, turning up a thin billfold on Hattemer and, in Fielding’s pockets, some change and the Lincoln’s keyless remote. He weighed taking the lot, but decided against it; his disinclination to appear foolish was compounded by a sense of futility. If it came down to a fight, he thought, himself armed with the SIG Sauer and everything else, versus Fielding armed with nothing, the smart money was on Fielding.

  “Charlie, know that we’re here to help,” Hattemer said.

  “So let’s put our cards on the table,” Fielding said. “As you’ve probably anticipated, in one minute, we can have a backup team here with enough pop to take over certain small countries. In addition, we’re painfully aware that Duck is not watching us through a rifle scope. He’d never play it like that. My guess is he’s resting somewhere.”

  Charlie’s stomach fell so violently that Hattemer and Fielding must have heard it. The team a minute away probably heard it.

  “We also know he sketched you a schematic,” Fielding said.

  “A schematic, what schematic?”

  “Of the Device, of course.” Fielding spoke as if Charlie were a child.

  “Actually, I have no idea what device you mean.”

  “Please, I had people watching when he showed it to you.”

  “Is this something that happened when I was, like, ten?”

  “No, twenty-seven past two yesterday afternoon.”

  “The washing machine he
drew on his hot dog wrapper?”

  “You know that that wasn’t just a washing machine.”

  “Then what was it? Or am I better off not knowing?”

  “You’re absolutely better off not knowing,” Hattemer interjected.

  “Nick, he doesn’t know.”

  Seeming to have reached the same conclusion, Fielding softened. “Then, ironically, he needs to learn now, if he’s going to help us.”

  34

  Fielding paced in front of the mantel, the sputtering fire transforming him into a kinetoscope leading man. “In the late sixties our Special Forces left crates of ammunition on the Ho Chi Minh trail for the Vietcong,” he said.

  Hattemer perched on the sill of one of the bay windows, his attention wavering-clearly he’d heard this before. Charlie sat on the sofa, rapt. “Wait, I thought the Vietcong were the bad guys,” he said.

  “The ammo was doctored so it would misfire,” Fielding said. “That’s where your father first got the idea for the operation that was later code-named ‘Placebo.’ He began it in the seventies as an off-the-books joint project of the agency’s counterproliferation division and counterintelligence. A few years later, when he and his team had perfected the technology, they used some Saudi spare change funneled through a Swiss venture capital shell and bought a failing Argentine appliance manufacturer.”

  “Perriman?”

  “Of course you know all about Perriman, including that it has offices worldwide. What you probably don’t know is that those offices serve as bases for our people, under cover as Perriman employees, to sell specially modified appliances.”

  “Are we talking washers with a ‘detonation’ setting?” Charlie asked. He noticed Hattemer smile. Fielding did too, but it appeared forced.

  “Sort of,” Fielding said. “The atomic demolition munition we work with looks like the innards of a washing machine, and the weights of the two are about the same. So washing machine housings make excellent concealments, and Perriman’s network allows for ease of trafficking. What we do is simple: We sell the bombs to terrorists, rogue nations, third world potentates, and any other lunatic with the means and inclination to detonate a nuclear weapon.”