Twice a Spy dc-2

by Keith Thomson

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Charlie said. They could ill afford the distraction now. He turned to the man. “Their motive was to keep him quiet.”

  “Interesting,” the man said, with a bit too much enthusiasm.

  “We’d better gag them now,” Charlie said to Drummond.

  “Check.” Drummond pressed a rolled-up T-shirt over the man’s mouth, stretched it around his ears, and knotted it behind his head. If Hattemer’s murder remained on Drummond’s mind, he gave no sign of it.

  “I wish you could trust us,” the woman said.

  “Same,” said Charlie.

  She smiled. “In the interim, my only request is that you don’t leave my arms so high behind my back. One of my fellow officers in Farafra developed blood clots in both shoulders after just one hour with his arms tied behind a tree.”

  Grunting acquiescence, Drummond loosened the kite string, allowing her wrists to fall even with her waist.

  Charlie thought of Farafra, or at least the silver screen version, with its centuries-old sandstone spires and backdrop of date palms on sparkling Egyptian sands. What he wouldn’t give to go there someday with Alice. As much as any city on earth, Farafra conjured romance and adventure and …

  It was an extraneous detail.

  “Dad!” he screamed.

  Drummond looked up from refastening the woman’s ankles in time to dodge the glistening barb she swung like a dagger.

  Charlie didn’t dare fire the speargun for fear of spearing his father. Instead he flung a family-sized bottle of sunscreen, striking her in the jaw. The container bounced harmlessly to the floor, but the diversion allowed Drummond to swat the weapon away from her.

  It landed in a tall wicker basket full of flip-flops. Retrieving it, Charlie nearly sliced his fingertips on the razor-sharp edge of what had passed for the woman’s engagement ring. Pressure on the spring-loaded diamond must have caused the metal band to uncoil into a blade. She had probably cut through the twine around her wrists a while ago, then waited for the opportunity to strike.

  As Drummond refastened her wrists and gagged her, Charlie heard footsteps outside. Kneeling, he peered out the ventilation grate to see two young men, but only from the neck down. He didn’t recognize the bodies, but there was no mistaking the muscular, boxy builds-ex-military contract agents were the darlings of black ops personnel directors. Both men wore polo shirts, crisp Bermuda shorts, and, probably in a nod to pragmatism over tourist cover, cross trainers rather than sandals. They strode purposefully toward the beach. In a moment, even if they found nothing suspicious, they would rush back to the lobby and lock down the resort.

  “The fun never stops,” Charlie said to no one in particular.

  “Finished,” Drummond said, looking up from a pile of spent kite string spools.

  “Good. Unless there’s anything in here that they can use to draw attention to themselves or to escape-flashlight circuitry that could turn a tube of aloe vera into high explosive, anything like that?”

  Drummond shrugged.

  “What if you were them?” Charlie waved at their captives.

  “I’d try to get my hands on that.”

  Charlie followed Drummond’s eyes to the telephone by the register. Seeing no need to chance it, Charlie rendered the phone inoperable by slicing the outside wire with the woman’s ring. At the same time, he thought of a way to stymie the two searchers. Unfortunately, his plan required using a phone.

  18

  During the crash course in espionage that had been his past two weeks, Charlie had learned that intelligence agencies of the United States and her allies maintained house-sized computers that continuously intercepted and analyzed billions of phone calls, e-mails, and text messages. In one instance, a captured conversation between two terrorists over a pair of children’s walkie-talkies enabled the Mossad to corral a major weapons shipment from Cyprus.

  Even on the hotel’s intercom, Charlie’s intended lifeline, his voiceprint would raise the digital equivalent of a red flag, simultaneously spitting his whereabouts-to within a five-foot radius-to those agencies seeking him. Paramilitary assault teams would storm Hotel L’Imperatrice in a matter of minutes.

  If things went according to plan, however, in a matter of minutes Charlie and Drummond would already be driving away from the hotel. But first Charlie needed to get to an intercom. Followed by Drummond, he slipped through the bushes behind the relocked beach supply hut. He stopped short of the paved pool deck, within reach of a fiberglass coconut mounted on a pole resembling a palm tree. Inside the coconut was a house phone.

  Reaching for the handset, he glimpsed the two young men in polo shirts and Bermuda shorts, no more than thirty yards away, prowling the beach like bloodhounds. He froze. And immediately regretted it-he knew his pursuers were trained to detect unnatural motions on their peripheries. In contrast, Drummond hid behind a thick tree, never breaking stride.

  Neither young man appeared to notice.

  Charlie couldn’t reach far enough into the fiberglass coconut to grasp the handset without exposing his position.

  As he waited for the men to continue down the beach, a cool gust off the bay made the tree limbs and bushes sway noisily. A variation on opportunity knocking, he thought. He reached slowly until his fingertips knocked the handset from its cradle and into his other hand.

  The men on the beach didn’t turn to look.

  Charlie extended the handset back toward the coconut until the rounded earpiece pressed the CONCIERGE button on the telephone’s keypad. As the line rang, Charlie took the handset and withdrew, in synch with a windblown palm frond, into the shadows between the bushes and the shack.

  “Concierge,” came a chipper male voice.

  “Hi, this is Mr. Glargin,” Charlie whispered. “We’re staying here at L’Imperatrice and, well, my young daughters and I were just walking on the beach where I’m afraid we saw two young men engaged in-I don’t really know how to put it-lewd behavior.”

  Within seconds, hotel security guards appeared from the main lodge and discreetly headed down to the beach. Much as Charlie would have enjoyed staying to hear the contract agents’ protests, he knew that each second could make the difference between escaping or not.

  19

  The N5 to Fort-de-France wasn’t the crudely paved, single-lane road alongside sugarcane fields that Charlie expected, but a sleek and ultramodern highway with elevated ramps that wound around, across, and, occasionally, directly through mountainsides. Fortunately, Drummond had relieved the CIA man of his car keys while tying him up, because Charlie found driving the Peugeot challenge enough, particularly keeping up with the local traffic, blazing vehicles whose proportions, unlike the Peugeot’s, were suited to the snaking curves and narrow passageways between rock walls. To allow past a flaming orange Micra-an amalgam of a go-kart and a flying saucer-he swerved right, nearly shearing off Drummond’s door against a cliff that doubled as a retaining wall.

  Finding Fort-de-France was also a problem. Although the highway wrapped around the western border of Fort-de-France, because of the dark night, the blinding LED billboards, and the giant outcroppings of rock that blocked the view, the precise location of the city wasn’t clear. Not until signs began popping up indicating that Charlie had already driven past it.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” he asked Drummond.

  No response.

  Drummond was balled up in the cramped front footwell, his usual countersurveillance position. Somehow he’d managed to fall asleep.

  Probably a good idea, Charlie thought. Although there was no correlation between rest and episodes of lucidity, rest generally sharpened Drummond’s faculties.

  Anyway, how hard could it be to find a large city?

  Hoping to make his way to the opposite side of the N5 and head back toward Fort-de-France, Charlie shot onto what had to be an exit ramp. It spiraled into the empty parking lot of a dark six-story supermarket. He navigated a dozen rows of parking met
ers before reaching a ramp he felt sure would bring him back onto the opposite side of the highway. It dead-ended inexplicably behind an unlit warehouse.

  A few moments later, after he had backtracked and found the right way onto the N5, a gap in the retaining wall finally yielded a view of a tight grid of well-lit, three- and four-story Belle Epoque buildings. It was so stunning, Charlie nearly missed the exit.

  Descending the ramp, he spotted a road sign for Pointe Simon, the area to which Drummond had instructed him to go when they were still in Switzerland. During a series of left turns to check for surveillance, Charlie noted the street signs mounted on the walls of corner buildings. Dark blue plaques with white letters, exactly as in Paris. The streets themselves were packed with bustling boutiques, cafes, and bars. He cracked a window. The balmy air, wonderfully redolent of fresh pineapple, resonated with French banter and jazz.

  More wonderful, no one was following them. At least not by car.

  At rue Joseph Compere, the supposed location of the Laundromat, the city grew darker and quieter, the chic boutiques yielding to simple fish stores and produce markets with hand-painted signs. The urban thrum dwindled to a lone sax playing the blues, with traffic declining to one or two cars per block. Pedestrians included a handful of adventurous tourists and, mostly, locals returning home.

  The odd television screen shimmered through lace curtains as well as holes in regular curtains. The dwellings themselves, almost all three-story apartment buildings, were either old and dilapidated or new constructions done on the cheap, with views not of the sparkling Baie des Flamands, a block away, but of a four-story, graffiti-covered municipal parking garage. In short, they were apartments where residents would depend on a self-serve Laundromat. The closest thing to a Laundromat Charlie saw, however, was a hairdresser.

  He reached down and nudged his father awake. “Sorry, I need you to take a look.”

  Drummond tried to shake away his sleepiness.

  “Does this look familiar?” Charlie asked.

  Drummond rose the fraction of an inch necessary to peer out his window. He smiled, as if in reminiscence.

  “Familiar?” Charlie asked, meaning the question to be rhetorical.

  “No. Should it be?”

  “If for no other reason than we flew four thousand miles to go to a Laundromat here.”

  “What Laundromat?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How about this, Dad? What if you were, say, a CIA operations officer working under nonofficial cover and you had a fake ten-kiloton atomic demolition munition concealed within a washing machine and you needed to hide it in an urban residential area. Where would you put it?”

  “Plain sight.” Drummond’s mouth tightened, as if he were annoyed that Charlie would ask such a stupid question.

  “Like where?”

  “Is that why you were asking about a Laundromat?”

  “Right.”

  “For an operation of that magnitude, I might buy an existing Laundromat to use as a front, or open my own.”

  “Where, ideally, would you locate it?”

  “Easy. A place with access for a delivery truck.”

  “Close to a parking garage?”

  “Exactly.”

  Charlie sped to the end of the one-way street, turned left on Boulevard Alfassa, took another left onto rue Francois Arago, then doubled back to the top of rue Joseph Compere, bringing the car to a stop at the municipal garage he’d noticed earlier.

  Still no Laundromats in sight. Just a quartet of three-story apartment buildings painted in repeating pastel squares and adorned with enough architectural flourishes to prevent the residents from realizing that they lived in concrete boxes. The buildings were new, evidenced by the freshness of the paint and the clean stretch of cement fronting them-without any of the stains or ruts on the sidewalks that were everywhere else on rue Joseph Compere.

  Charlie indicated the apartments with a sweeping gesture. “How much do you want to bet that the Laundromat used to be there?”

  Drummond reacted as if he’d just swallowed vinegar.

  Charlie spun in his seat. “What’s wrong?”

  “Always with the betting,” Drummond grumbled, taking Charlie back to the years when the two of them still got together on major holidays, always at restaurants where they could eat in less than an hour, ideally with televised bowl games to minimize the time Drummond lectured on squandering one’s life on the horses.

  A truck shaped like a baby’s shoe-and not much larger-whizzed past, snapping Charlie back to rue Joseph Compere.

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know that I now wish I’d become an engineer at the Skunk Works,” he told Drummond. “If only because I’d be in Palmdale, California, instead of on this wild Laundromat chase, unsure if I’m going to live through the night.”

  Drummond regarded him as if through a fog.

  The bluesy saxophone drifting down the block offered a fitting sound track. The music emanated from a slender two-story hole-in-the-wall. Hand-painted on one of the smoky windows, in a feathery silver cursive, was “Chez Odelette.”

  The hair rose on the back of Charlie’s neck. “Your cutout, wasn’t she named Odelette?”

  “Nice girl,” Drummond said.

  20

  Charlie drove the Peugeot into the parking garage, where the vehicle was less likely to be spotted than at the curb outside Chez Odelette’s. He found a space hidden from the street by a delivery van. Keeping himself and Drummond from detection posed a greater challenge.

  “We need to blend in with the other tourists around here,” Charlie said, slipping on the fake-tortoiseshell reading glasses he’d taken from the counter at Sandy’s beach supply shack.

  Eyeing Charlie’s image in the rearview mirror, Drummond said, “Since when do you wear glasses?”

  “Since they make me look less like the guy on the wanted posters.”

  Drummond nodded. “Interesting.”

  Charlie had learned almost all he knew about impromptu disguise from Drummond. Foremost among the old man’s dictates was that bulky clothing veiled stature. Second was that individuals attempting to avoid notice should wear different styles and colors than when they were last seen. Accordingly, from his new Sandy’s tote bag, Charlie drew two cotton polo shirts, two baggy floral-print board shorts, two pairs of rubber flip-flops, and two baseball caps.

  Hats draped faces in shadows and compressed hair, altering the shape of the head, but Drummond avoided them as a rule because they aroused surveillants’ suspicions. In the Caribbean, however, young men wore baseball caps as often as not, and Charlie believed that the old man could pass for a young man. Drummond was in better shape than most men half his age, present company included. Charlie hoped the two of them would appear to the occupants of a passing patrol car as just another couple of young guys in a neighborhood catering to that demographic, as opposed to the young guy/senior citizen duo for whom the authorities had their eyes peeled.

  Wandering from the parking lot onto the sidewalk, Drummond indeed appeared much younger. His slight hunch vanished, his shoulders squared, and his chest appeared to inflate. His stride went from sluggish to a strut.

  Finding himself standing and marveling, Charlie had to jog to catch up.

  Chez Odelette’s front windows afforded a view of the saxophonist, a spindly native with a white beard. He stood on a pillbox platform, spotlit in a sultry blue whose wash illuminated the face of the bartender, a brown-skinned woman of about thirty with attractive, strong features.

  “Is that her?” Charlie asked.

  “Who?” said Drummond.

  “Odelette.”

  “How would I know?”

  Jesus, Charlie thought. “She’s the only person working there, other than the sax player.”

  “Probably it’s her.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. What do you say we go find out?”

  Hearing no reply from Drummo
nd, Charlie turned to him. Drummond was no longer beside him. Or anywhere in sight.

  How the-?

  A pair of big brown hands fastened around Charlie’s collar and yanked him backward into a pitch-black alley.

  21

  The alley wasn’t much wider than Charlie. Halfway down it, the unseen man propelling him whistled like a parakeet. As if in response, hinges groaned and a diagonal shaft of white light illuminated the crumbling bricks. It came from the bottom of a flight of stairs, where a doorway led to the basement of an automotive shop.

  The man prodded Charlie down the stairway with such strength that resisting was pointless, at best.

  A woman inside whispered: “You can come in.”

  As if Charlie had a choice.

  He was practically carried into a hot and stagnant basement that smelled of motor oil. The dim light from a pair of sputtering fluorescent tubes revealed a grimy cinder block room full of salvaged parts-shock absorbers, belts, hoses, steering wheels, hubcaps, entire bumpers-either in the cityscape of piles or jammed into the floor-to-ceiling rusty shelves lining the walls. In a minimal clearing at the room’s center, Drummond sat slumped in a wooden office chair. He nodded hello to Charlie, exhibiting no awareness that anything out of the ordinary had transpired. Across a small desk from him sat the pretty bartender. She stared at Charlie with steely hazel eyes.

  “You’re Ramirez, yes?” she asked him.

  At check-in to a motel on the New Jersey Turnpike while on the run a couple of weeks ago, he had given the name Ramirez. Seeking to keep a lid on the story that the Clarks were in Martinique, the CIA might have fed that name to the local authorities.

  “McDonough, actually.” He had a passport, driver’s license, and a walletful of other cards to back him up. “Brad McDonough.”

  The woman waved at Drummond. “That’s what he said.” She spoke with a blend of Parisian French, strong Creole patois, and an even stronger skepticism.