by Ted Bell
“We called him Spider Man,” Hawke said. “Or, to his face, Spider. No idea where it came from. But it fit.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Spider Payne. I knew him all right. I worked with him a couple of times in the past. Africa, mostly. A deeply troubled man. Why?”
“He might be your chap, Alex. You can draw straight lines through the late Steven Daedalus, CIA head in Dublin, to Harding Torrance in Paris, to Cam Hooker at Langley, and they all intersect in the same place. The doorstep of one Artemis Payne. He’s your man, all right. I’d bet the farm on it if I had one.”
“Apart from the CIA intersections, is there any other evidence that makes you think he’s our guy?”
Ambrose got to his feet, laced his fingers behind his back, and began pacing back and forth. A little affectation he’d picked up from his idol Sherlock Holmes, Hawke had always assumed. “Are you quite ready?” Ambrose said.
“Quite.”
“Artemis Payne, known in the press at the time of his trial as the ‘Spider Man.’ Currently wanted for kidnapping and murder by the French government. Interpol has a standing warrant for his arrest for murder. He received a thirty-year sentence in French courts and skipped. A CIA rendition op gone bad, apparently. Shortly after 9/11, a French citizen, believed to be an al-Qaeda commander, was kidnapped off a Paris street and never seen again by his wife and family. The French police went after Payne for it. Arrested and convicted. The White House disavowed his existence. So did CIA. Payne was politically inconvenient. Hung out to dry. There’s your motive, obviously. Lost everything, house, family, money, and went underground. Nobody’s seen him since.”
“Hmm.”
“Is that really all you have to say? Hmm? After the mountains of bloody intel I’ve been sifting through the past two days?”
“Oh, do sit down and relax. I know you’re wound up about all this but it’s bad for your nerves to be so excitable. And a bit donnish and sniffy, to be honest.”
“Alex, if I somehow have conveyed the illusion that I drove all the way out here to be subjected to your sarcasm and—”
Hawke looked up, his blue eyes suddenly gone dead serious as Ambrose’s grave news began to sink in. He said, “Spider is extraordinarily dangerous. In a bad way, I mean.”
“There’s a good way?”
“Yeah. People like me. Stokely. And even you. Good dangerous.”
Ambrose sat back on the planter’s chair and accepted another frosty iced tea delivered by Pelham on a silver tray.
“Will that be all, m’lord?” Pelham asked Hawke.
“Thank you, Pelham, yes. Most kind.”
“I endeavor to be of service, your lordship,” he said, and shimmered into the ether.
“Splendid chap, is he not?”
Congreve watched this formal, Downtonesque exchange with a wry smile of bemused indulgence and said, “We’ve now got about one week. We’re going to need a lot of help to find this shadowy character, Alex. No trail at all. He went from Europe to Miami to Anguilla. Then it goes cold. We’re going to need formidable manpower and sufficient time to organize logistics and then—”
“Not necessarily.”
“No? Why not? What are you thinking?”
“Did you check NSA?”
“I did not, no. Should I have?”
“No. You wouldn’t know. NSA tracks all these guys who go rogue. To the four corners of the earth. E-mails, mobile calls, obviously. Constantly updating. All I need is a number for him. Everyone has a number, no matter where they’re hiding.”
“Then what?”
“I call him up. Out of the blue. Long time, no see, Spider. What are you up to these days, little buddy? Doing well? That old demon gout still acting up now and then?”
“Alex, please. Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t think that will arouse suspicion? Payne knows you have close ties to CIA at the highest levels. He’ll be lying in wait for you.”
“I want the bastard to be suspicious. Listen. He compromised my position once. Morocco. Long time ago. I was working out of a small suite at La Mamounia, running a former al-Qaeda warlord for months, had him buying Stinger missiles at the underground arms bazaar for me. Spider, who always owed the wrong people a lot of money, got offered a tidy sum for my name and hotel address and he bloody well gave me up. Almost got me killed, that bastard. I went looking. Found him hiding in some hellish rathole or other in Tangiers. Locked myself inside with him for two days. Came close to turning out his lights. Told him if I ever saw his face again, I bloody well would kill him.”
“He’s afraid of you.”
Hawke laughed.
“Oh, I’d say so. Yes. I would say Spider is most definitely afraid of me.”
“Then follow the logic, Alex. As soon as he knows you’ve got his scent and now you’re looking for him, he’ll run. As long and fast as he can. He’ll dive deep. Or, worse, he’ll lay a trap for you out in the future.”
“I don’t think so. You don’t know him like I do. I think as soon as he believes I’m looking for him, he’ll come looking for me. That’s what any smart guy like Spider would do. You don’t sit around and wait, you don’t spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. No. You go on offense. Eliminate the threat. It’s the smart play. That’s what I’d do, too.”
“You want him to come here? To Bermuda?”
“I do. And, believe me, he will.”
“Then what?”
“I have no earthly idea.”
“What?”
“I have to make these things up as I go, Ambrose. I’m not a genius like you.”
“There is that, I suppose.”
“Right. And you have to help me because this guy is very, very good. And he’s not only smart, he’s a vicious killer, and he’s utterly ruthless. And, to make matters worse, at this point, what’s he got left to lose? Seriously, Ambrose, think it through.”
“Have you been experiencing any suicidal thoughts lately, Alex?”
“Please, Constable, don’t be ridiculous. Many people have tried to kill me over the course of my career and, more often than not, I’ve managed to show them the folly of that ambition.”
Congreve expelled one of his trademark heaving sighs of exasperation.
“All right, then. What do you need, Alex? I mean, right now?”
“You have a picture of this character?”
“Of course I do.”
“Good. Your brain’s kicking in. I’ll need people watching the airport round the clock, people who know what Spider looks like. Also, same setup over at the steamship docks in Hamilton and out at the Royal Naval Dockyard where the cruise ships land. I want to know the second the Spider Man sets foot on this enchanted isle.”
“Done. What else?”
“Your massive brain, if you’re not using all of it at the moment. We need to figure out where and how this little reunion should occur.”
Congreve said, “Do it here.”
“What?”
“Right here at Teakettle Cottage. Gives you the advantage.”
“Why?”
“Your own turf, that’s why. You cannot arrange something like this, Alex. You’ve got to sit tight and let the spider come to the fly, as it were.”
Hawke laughed at that.
“Stop being childish and pay attention. Your bloody life is at stake here. This cottage is where he will come looking for you. And this is where the damn fly should await the spider.”
“I agree, I suppose. But I don’t want dear Pelham in the house or anywhere near me until this blows over. Can he come stay with you and Diana for a few days?”
“Of course. I’ve a lovely guest room for him at Shadowlands, right on the sea. The Blue Room.”
“Perfect. Spoil him rotten, will you? The old soul deserves it, God knows.”
“We’d like nothing better. Now, what else?”
“I’d like the airport and cruise ship spotters to report to you, not me. As soon as he lands somewh
ere, they alert you. Then you keep track of his movements until he is about to arrive at my doorstep. Just call my house phone, let it ring three times and hang up. Spider’s not the type to lob a bomb down the chimney and hope it explodes. He’ll want a confrontation. He’ll want to talk. He’ll want all the drama. Show me how fearless and brilliant he is before he pulls a knife or a gun. That’s his style. One of those fellows who always thinks he’s the smartest, most dangerous man in the room. Dangerous, yes. Smartest, no.”
“You do realize, Alex, that if you’ve even slightly miscalculated, and this man does manage to kill you, that it is my rather prominent posterior that will be in a wringer with Sir David and not yours?”
“Mine will be taking a well-deserved dirt nap. Sir David will be bereft over me and extraordinarily pissed off with you. It won’t be pleasant. Please accept my abject apologies in advance for the firestorm you will incur.”
“You’ll need a gun, I daresay.”
Hawke smiled.
“You know what Stokely Jones always says whenever someone tells him he’ll need a gun?”
“What does he say?”
“I am a gun.”
CHAPTER 14
The phone rang.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Hawke waited.
It did not ring again.
Game on.
He closed his eyes, sat forward, and concentrated on sensory input. He listened intently to the stillness, heard nothing amiss. He eased back and rested his chin in one hand, periodically sipping his cold coffee and staring into the pitch-black night beyond his windows. The crackling fire he’d lit provided barely enough heat to reach his bones.
The minutes crawled by. Interminable . . . he fantasized briefly about a short rum and a cigarette but forced himself to concentrate. See, hear, smell, feel . . .
The wind was up. Shrieking under the eaves and down the chimney. On the seaward side of the house, he could hear the rolling sea booming on the rocks far below and the rain lashing at the windows.
That cold front he’d seen had moved in over the island in the late afternoon; now it seemed like it had been raining all evening. The temperature had plummeted and palm fronds and banana leaves rustled and scratched against the windows. All the doors and shutters had been made fast against the approaching storm. And any random intruder.
There was only one way inside and that was through the front door.
Hawke sat forward once more. He had heard another kind of noise this time, muffled and distant. An automobile, its tyres hissing on the rain-wet tarmac ribbon of the coast road. He got up from his chair facing the front door. Inside the trees a fissure of pure white split the air, illuminating the clouds and all that lay below. He moved quickly from one to another of the northern exposure windows, all facing the solid wall of banana trees and the coast road beyond the groves.
Turn left out of his drive and visitors would eventually wind their way along the coast and reach the Royal Naval Dockyard. Turn right and they had a half hour’s drive until they reached the Bermuda airport. The car seemed to be approaching from the right.
Peering out into the darkness of the groves, he could see distant flashes, hazy arrows of light in the rain-drenched night. The flashes soon resolved into steady twin beams of yellowish light. Periodically, they would flare up and spike the blackness deep within the impenetrable groves. He could see the dense trees out there, their broad green leaves waving wet and storm tossed like the top of the sea.
He was on full alert now.
The wavering headlamp beams would disappear for a few seconds, and then reappear a few seconds closer still, meandering through his groves, stabbing through the trees as if reaching out for him.
Each time a little closer to his cottage . . .
. . . came the spider to the fly.
But the fly had no fear.
Moments like these were what Alex Hawke had lived and breathed for all his life. He was good at war. His father had once said that he was a boy born with a heart for any fate. And the fate he’d been born for was war. He felt the reassuring weight of his weapon on his right side. A big six-shot revolver, the most reliable weapon in his arsenal. A single box of ammo in the loose pocket of his pants should he have need of it.
He was wearing loose-fitting black Kunjo pants from Korea. Strapped to his right thigh was a .357 Colt Python revolver in a nylon swivel holster. It was his “Dirty Harry Special”: it had a six-inch barrel, with six magnum parabellum rounds loaded in the cylinder. He wore a black Royal Navy woolen jumper, four sizes too big. It came almost to his knees, giving him freedom of movement and concealing his weapon. He’d cut a hole in the right side pocket so he could keep his hand on his gun without it being seen.
He was barefoot despite the cold tiles beneath his feet . . .
He padded silently across the dark room, returning to the wooden armchair facing the door. He sat down and waited. He looked at the clock again. Only eight minutes had passed since Ambrose had called him with the agreed-upon signal. Time was elongated, stretching every minute into two or three . . .
A sudden flash of the headlamps across the ceiling.
Outside, he heard the automobile roll to a stop some twenty or thirty feet from the entrance.
Automobile tyres made a loud crunching sound on the crushed-shell drive leading up to Teakettle Cottage. A primitive alarm system, perhaps, but it worked. He jumped up and went to the window again, pulling back the curtain just as the headlamps were extinguished.
A black sedan, undistinguished, a cheap rental from the airport.
Hello, Spider.
Because of the car’s misty, rain-spattered windows Hawke couldn’t see inside the vehicle. Only the dark silhouette of a large man behind the wheel. He waited for the car’s interior lights to illuminate. It remained dark. There was no movement at all from the driver, and the four doors remained closed.
He went back to his chair, sat, and waited in the dark for a knock on the heavy cedar door.
It didn’t come.
The storm had suddenly died down. The cottage was stone silent save the ticking of the clock above the bar. No noise or movement inside, nor any noise or movement outside. He tried to imagine what Spider might be doing out there. Just sitting in his car, trying to spook his prey? Trying, somewhat successfully, he had to admit, to psyche his opponent out?
Enough of this, Hawke thought, reaching for his weapon. He’d go outside and confront the man there.
He was about to get out of his chair when his thick wooden door suddenly blew inward and off its hinges. A thunderous explosion, a blast of sound and light sufficiently powerful to blind him momentarily and disorient him. His chair was knocked arse over teakettle and he hit the floor hard after upending a very solid oak table.
He was just vaguely aware that his heavy front door was hurtling through space directly toward him when it crashed against the wall behind him, a few feet above his head, and splintered into vicious flying daggers of wood.
Alex got to his feet, shaking his head to clear the circuits. He was shaken, perhaps, but seemingly unscathed. The room was full of smoke and whirling debris, and javelin-sharp splinters of wood littered the floor.
“Hello, Lord Hawke,” a rumbling voice said.
The voice of Spider Payne.
THE MAN WAS SUDDENLY STANDING in the doorway. Hawke would know that voice anywhere. Gravelly, edgy, and deep, meant to intimidate. Hawke looked down at his clothes, casually dusting himself off with the back of his hand.
“Next time, try knocking, Spider,” Hawke said with a thin smile.
“Right. I’ll try to remember that.”
All in black Nomex, Artemis Payne was wearing full night-combat fatigues, even a helmet with night-vision goggles. He had an M4A1 assault rifle slung from his shoulder and what looked like a SIG Sauer 9mm sidearm hung from each hip. Clearly he had connections on this island and they had access to the good stuff. They’d provided the assassin with full-bore
weapons and gear.
“But then again,” Spider added, “there won’t be any next time for you and me, old buddy.” He took a few steps forward into the room.
“No, I don’t suppose that there will be,” Hawke said, getting to his feet and righting his chair. “I’d invite you in, but you’re already in.”
“Fuck off, Hawke.”
“Spider, I don’t mean to be rude, but have you put on a little weight?”
Hawke realized his voice showed a lot more confidence than he was feeling. He was seriously disadvantaged here, clearly having made the old mistake of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Definitely outgunned here, the big Python suddenly feeling more like a peashooter. His mind went into overdrive. He needed a new plan. Somehow, he had to remove himself from this confrontation and hit the reset button. Had to keep Payne talking. Right now Hawke was in mortal danger and both men knew it.
“Sorry about your old buddy Hook,” Payne said. “I figured I might hear from you when you heard about the old bastard’s accident.”
“The accident.”
“Yeah, well. Shit happens, y’know.”
“So you came here to kill me, too. You think I threw you under the bus for that joint op fiasco in Paris? Nothing to do with it, Spider. Some people think you got a raw deal. Maybe you did.”
“Save it, Alex. I was on North Haven. I went back for the funeral just to see what I could see. What I saw is you and your bosom buddy Brick Kelly huddled up at a back table at the Nebo Lodge. Didn’t take much to figure out what you were talking about. Then I get a phone call from you out of the blue. That’s why I’m here, Lord Hawke. Preemptive strike. You know the drill.”
“Really? Going to be tough to make this one look like natural causes, Spider, my bloody door blown off the hinges and just imagine all the blood . . .” Hawke had both hands in his pockets under his sweater. He moved his right hand to the Colt Python’s grips and swiveled the holster upward . . . easing the hammer back to the cocked position . . . finger applying light pressure to the trigger . . .
“I don’t give a shit anymore, Alex. Kelly will have the whole fuckin’ CIA on my ass now. My plan was to stay alive as long as I can. And take as many of those Agency assholes with me as I can. You understand that kind of thinking, right? Hell, I can see you doing the same damn thing if you got screwed by MI6 the way I did by CIA. Tell me you wouldn’t because I know—”
