Twice a Spy dc-2

by Keith Thomson

  “The Perriman Appliances op would be blown?”

  “Exactly.” Eskridge stared over the screen, his laid-back manner hardening. “If you can find them, and if we can learn what they’ve told to whom, great. But first and foremost, we need to stop them.”

  The assignment was far more dangerous than Stanley had imagined. He wanted it anyway. He’d wanted an assignment like this since he first applied to the CIA.

  4

  Stanley sat in a temporary Europe division office with one of the unit’s signature Union Jack-blue doors but otherwise as charismatic as a budget motel room minus the requisite nature print. His dream job commenced with gumshoe work about as rudimentary as it gets.

  He spent much of the morning investigating PM00543MH4/7, the Science and Technology search system’s designation for one of the 29,655 groups of travelers matching his criteria. This group consisted of sixty-three-year-old investor Duncan Calloway, who five nights ago had taken his Learjet 45XR from Palm Beach to Paris, along with two of his junior associates-one male, one female, both purportedly twenty-eight. Their excursion employed no small amount of subterfuge, including an 0100 departure and a layover at New York’s Kennedy Airport for twenty minutes, though such a stop was unnecessary for refueling.

  The subterfuge, Stanley learned, was intended to throw off a rival investment firm that had hired a Palm Beach-based private espionage outfit to track Calloway in order to determine whether he was negotiating the purchase of a French electronics conglomerate.

  Stanley anticipated sitting in the temporary office for two or three more days just to wade through the computer-generated leads.

  Then PM11304ZH4/9 caught his eye.

  At 6:52 A.M. on December 29, thirteen days ago, a thirty-two-year-old Manhattan hedge fund manager named Roger Norton Traynor departed Newark airport for Innsbruck, Austria, aboard another Learjet 45XR, a seven-seater owned and operated by Newark-based Absolute Air Charter, LLC. Accompanying Traynor was his wife of three days, April Gail Hellinger, twenty-eight. The honeymooners checked into Innsbruck’s five-star Hotel Europa late that night.

  Stanley telephoned the Hotel Europa, posing as one of the groom’s colleagues, needing to reach him on an urgent business matter. With even the most discreet hotels, striking the appropriate tone usually sufficed to elicit all information save the guest’s credit card number. And that, if needed, was available on Intelnet with a few clicks of a mouse.

  “He was a, how you say, a Liebling der Gotter-a lucky guy,” night reception desk attendant Heinz Albrecht said of Traynor. Albrecht remembered April as a “schone junge Frau.”

  At check-in, Albrecht recalled, Traynor paid for the entire stay in cash, which was not atypical of honeymooners, having been handed envelope after envelope of the stuff on their wedding night and eager to put it toward their hotel bill before it was lost or stolen. In the ensuing three days, Herr and Frau Traynor rarely left their mountain-view suite if at all, the Bitte Nicht Storen hanger fixed on their doorknob. Again, hardly unusual for honeymooners, according to Albrecht.

  The rest of the staff had altogether forgotten the Traynors, although only a little over a week had passed since the couple checked out.

  Stanley might have forgotten them too. But a 6:52 A.M. departure on December 29, 2009, would have allowed the Clarks and Alice Rutherford to bolt the United States shortly after blowing up much of the Cavalry and its Manhattan headquarters.

  When a thorough search yielded no record of the Traynors’ departure from Austria, Stanley felt his pulse quicken. Sure, they might be legitimate Americans on an extended honeymoon in Innsbruck. Or they might have left the city, taken a cozy room in a country bed-and-breakfast, and were now currently playing gin rummy by the fire. There were oddities, though. First, records showed that Absolute Air’s proprietor and pilot, Richard Falzone, flew back from Austria to Newark, solo, the same day he’d deposited the Traynors. His copilot, sixty-seven-year-old Alvin Landsman of Jersey City, New Jersey, had remained in Innsbruck. Which might easily be explained. Or might not. Landsman’s pilot’s license had expired. Probably because a July 2008 traffic accident had left him an institutionalized quadriplegic.

  The names Roger Norton Traynor and April Gail Hellinger Traynor proved equally bogus.

  Stanley guessed that “Roger Traynor” had paid cash for the Hotel Europa honeymoon suite upon check-in, gone up with Alice Rutherford, and torn up the rooms so it would appear they’d enjoyed three days of romantic wildness. Then, or at least early the next morning, the couple had covertly departed the hotel. At some juncture they were joined by Drummond Clark, perhaps with a car rented under yet another alias. All three probably fled Austria after destroying their false documents, bringing Stanley’s trail to a dead end.

  Unless Richard Falzone knew something.

  Stanley could call the charter pilot and identify himself as a CIA officer. That could spook him, which might lead him to alert Alice and the Clarks. On the other hand, if Stanley phoned and said he was anything other than law enforcement, he impeded his chances of an immediate meeting. Posing as a Homeland Security agent, for example, he stood to gain access right away and, better, leverage. An offer to cut Falzone some slack in exchange for information ought to do the trick. However, it was illegal for a CIA officer to impersonate a law enforcement official. Even pretending to be a parking cop could mean the loss of his pension.

  But Stanley was permitted to pose as a Treasury official. The title encompassed coin press workers in the mint, yet carried as much clout with civilians as did Homeland Security, maybe more, as everyone who watched prime-time television knew that Treasury also encompassed the Secret Service.

  5

  Stanley thought little of the three-and-a-half-hour drive through sleet and rain. The thrill of the hunt made him feel twenty years younger. He sang along with the oldies on the radio, something he hadn’t done since they were released on LP.

  He stopped his rental car across the street from Falzone’s Teaneck, New Jersey, home, a recently constructed four-thousand-square-foot Tudor crammed into a quarter-acre suburban lot. Parked prominently in front was a candy-apple-red late-sixties Corvette that had been restored to look newer than it did the day it rolled out of the plant.

  Falzone, whose greatest recorded transgression was a 1994 citation for failure to heed a stop sign, opened the castle-style front door seconds after Stanley pressed the bell. The charter pilot was a boyish fifty-three in spite of a lineman’s body, dark bags under owlish eyes, and a gray mustache and goatee that matched his thick hair. He had on designer chinos and a crisp oxford shirt.

  “Hey,” he said, as if happy to see Stanley. “How are you?”

  “Fine. Thank you.”

  Stanley followed Falzone through the vaulted foyer to a family room that had three walls of built-in faux-teak shelves all loaded with athletic trophies and diplomas along with framed photos of the pilot, his wife, and five children, all of whom had the misfortune of inheriting his eyes.

  “Sorry my wife isn’t here,” he said. “She does a lot of volunteer stuff at our church.” Which didn’t necessarily mean she was at the church now. “Can I get you a Coke or something, single-malt Scotch maybe?”

  “I’m good, thanks,” Stanley said.

  The pilot issued an outsized smile. Calmly-maybe too calmly, given the circumstances-he lowered himself into a leather lounge chair and gestured Stanley into a seat on the matching cream-colored sofa. “So how can I be of assistance?”

  “Do you recognize this man?” Stanley handed over an eight-by-ten photograph labeled “Charles Clark.” He could have flashed half a dozen images of Charlie using his BlackBerry, but blowups, printed on thick card stock, added gravity.

  It was obvious Falzone recognized Charlie at first glance. Yet he made an appearance of studying the photo. “Yeah, I think so. He gave me a different name.”

  “That figures. He’s a federally wanted fugitive.”

  “Holy shit.” Falzone did a
poor job of acting surprised.

  Stanley saw no reason to go through the motions. “Mr. Falzone, how much extra did you get paid to list his associate as the copilot?”

  Falzone lowered his head in an appearance of penitence. “Listen, man, please, if I’d’a had any idea-”

  “Would you like immunity?”

  Falzone opened his eyes altar-boy wide. “Sure, but mostly I want to do whatever I can to help.”

  Stanley swallowed a laugh. “Where are they?”

  “Far as I know, Innsbruck, Austria.” The statement was perhaps Falzone’s first devoid of artifice since Stanley’s arrival.

  “Good. How did they come to you?”

  “There’s a thousand ways I get clients. I chose ‘Absolute’ for the company’s name so I’d be at the top of the listings-that’s one of the best ways, believe it or not.”

  Falzone might still give up the name of the person who referred the Clarks and Rutherford to him, Stanley thought. If the pilot didn’t know, he would have said so to begin with.

  Stanley sighed. “Look, I’m trying to help you out here. You pocketed a few extra bucks at Christmastime for fudging a manifest. I know, I know, everybody does it. But you’re the one who stands to lose everything.” With a wave, he indicated the lavish home. “Maybe even do time.”

  Perspiration darkened Falzone’s sideburns. “If I give you a name, we’re good?”

  “It depends a lot on what name you give me.”

  “Is there a way you can work it that the person doesn’t find out I told you?”

  “Sounds exactly like the kind of person I’m looking for. And yes.”

  Falzone dug at a cuticle, saying nothing.

  “I’ve never met him,” he said finally, at a whisper. “I’d never even heard of him until he called me that night, the twenty-ninth.”

  “Good.” Stanley meant to coax him.

  “The girl, April, her company had used him in the Caribbean-Martinique, I think. He does air charter down there under the name J. T. Bream.”

  6

  “That volcano erupted, killing all of the town’s thirty thousand inhabitants but one,” Drummond said, extracting Charlie from much-needed slumber.

  “Volcano?” Charlie blinked the sleep from his eyes. He could do nothing about the whiskey-induced headache.

  The interior of the jet, like the sky, was copper in the setting sun. Drummond stabbed an index finger against Charlie’s window, pointing at what appeared to be a greenish cloud rising from the ocean.

  “You think that’s a volcano?” Charlie said.

  Drummond chewed it over. Or he was focusing intently on refastening his seat belt. Charlie couldn’t tell which. He figured the old man was a 4, tops.

  The plane dipped, revealing the green cloud to be a round-topped mountain, coated with lush jungle. Soon Charlie distinguished individual trees, standing almost as close together as carpet fibers, their leaves shimmering in the last of the day’s light.

  “Mount Pelee, yes.” Drummond seemed pleased to have recaptured his train of thought. “It virtually split in half on May 8, 1902. An interesting piece of information is that the lava traveled into the town of Saint-Pierre at two hundred and fifty miles per hour, thwarting all of the citizens’ attempts to escape it.”

  Charlie reckoned that his father might be correct about the volcano. Drummond had always had an uncanny ability to retain volumes of what he-and usually he alone-considered interesting pieces of information. Upon learning that Drummond had spent his life as a spy rather than an appliance salesman, Charlie recognized that the Interesting Pieces of Information functioned like Clark Kent’s plain business suit and thick eyeglasses, hiding the hero beneath. Sometimes the information offered Charlie critical glimpses of Drummond’s unconscious. Other times it was drivel.

  “But you said there was one survivor.”

  “Right,” said Drummond. “Cyparis was his name, as I recall, and he was protected from the thirty-six-hundred-degree Fahrenheit ash and poisonous gas because he was underground at the time, in a stonewalled cell in the town jail, awaiting hanging. After the lava cooled, he became a star attraction in P. T. Barnum’s traveling circus.”

  Charlie was given hope in his own predicament. “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change,” he said. An old track adage.

  Drummond regarded him strangely. “Where are we?”

  Make that a 3 on the lucidity scale, Charlie thought. “A guess is over whatever country has Mount Pelee in it.”

  “Mount Pelee? That’s at the northern tip of Martinique, the eastern Caribbean island that’s an overseas department of France.”

  Charlie hadn’t imagined Martinique being so expansive but, rather, a beach-rimmed dot of an island. Like Drummond, he gazed out the window. Red adobe roofs began to show through the forest. As the jet descended, the roofs grew closer together, soon outnumbering the trees. Lights from other buildings, streetlamps, and streams of vehicles created a glowing dome. Such a vast and populous metropolis would exponentially complicate their task.

  “Fort-de-France,” said Drummond, as if encountering a long-lost friend.

  “Not the one-washer town I had in mind,” Charlie said.

  7

  “Did you know that you’re my sixth wife?” Stanley asked as their DC-8 heaved into the clouds above San Juan’s Luis Munoz Marin International Airport.

  “Fancy that, you’re my sixth too,” Hilary Hadley said. “Husband. Plus I had a wife once for an op at the Carnaval in Rio.”

  In signing off on the covert action, Eskridge had suggested Stanley “honeymoon” in Martinique for the usual reasons: A “wife” would augment Stanley’s tourist cover. In fact, any companion adds credibility-a mere nod of corroboration by a second party almost always causes the target’s trust-governing synapse to fire. In addition, women are better able to elicit information from the Breams of the world, which is to say men.

  Hadley had the sort of good looks that were accentuated by a charcoal suit, perfect for the part of a businesswoman, though Stanley sensed a free spirit beneath the Armani. He knew that some of the most gifted actors were drawn to clandestine service for the opportunity to lose themselves in roles for months at a time.

  Not everyone who could act could deceive, however.

  “So what do you know about us?” he asked.

  “My passport, driver’s license, business cards, and all of the charge cards weighing down my insanely expensive Italian handbag say I’m Eleanor Parker Atchison, forty-seven and proud to admit it, a partner at Lerner, Marks and Hopkins, the law firm about which I’ll go on ad nauseam before it occurs to me to mention that I also have been married for seven years, to you, dear, Colin Wesley Atchison, CFO of GleamCo, an industrial cleaning products conglomerate and a topic that gets your juices flowing much more readily than any aspect of your personal life, save golf. It is for your beloved pastime that we are currently en route to shop for a condo within a chip shot of Les Trois-Ilets’ Empress Josephine course, designed by the incomparable Robert Trent Jones. We already own an adorable hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old farmhouse in Litchfield, Connecticut, like every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in our Park Avenue social set, but we rarely use it because we prefer the office on Saturdays, when the phones are quiet, people don’t stick their heads through our doorways, and we can get things done.”

  Stanley was impressed with her command of her cover. Even better was her ability to act the part: During the remaining hour of the flight, as they wove additional legend to fit their operational goals, Hadley turned into Eleanor Atchison before his eyes. He particularly liked the way her speech became clipped the moment conversation shifted to their domestic life-this was a woman with more important things on her mind. Yet when it came to the circumvention of Internal Revenue property tax codes, she was effusive, as if narrating a grand adventure.

  As the DC-8 began its descent to Martinique, she argued that the quality of the material and the stitching made her handb
ag worth the extra nine hundred dollars. Although the argument was preposterous, her conviction left Stanley convinced.

  He found himself admiring the play of the silk suit pants on her long legs, like gift wrap. Glimpsing her diamond ring and her wedding band, he felt a twinge of disappointment, before realizing that, like his own gold band, it was just cover.

  8

  “Not exactly an ideal airport for fugitives,” Charlie said.

  Night had settled over Martinique as Bream dropped the Gulfstream onto the runway. Ahead blazed a seaside airport as large as those in most American cities, or about a hundred times larger than Charlie had originally expected.

  “The area for private jets is actually damn-near perfect,” Bream said, taxiing away from the main airport. “Otherwise we would’ve just hit Dominica or Saint Lucia and gotten a boat.”