Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766)

by Caplan, Thomas

  “That would be more difficult for you than most.”

  “Very funny! Here, she’ll tell you herself,” Ty said, about to hand his BlackBerry to Isabella. “She didn’t ask for this, Ollie. That’s what you have to remember.”

  “Hi, Oliver,” Isabella said calmly.

  “Hello, Isabella,” Oliver said.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re asking me to go back to a man you believe—and I’m not saying I agree with you—killed my godfather and may be instrumental in killing how many more people? Why?”

  “Because he’ll expect you,” Oliver answered. “Surpass is yours now. Where else would you be? We can’t afford to have Frost panic and change his plans at the last minute. At this point he’s our only lead and you our only means of keeping him in sight. Ask Ty if you don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Isabella said.

  Intuiting Oliver’s end of the conversation, Ty said, “The man has a point. Philip may be willing to see a large part of the world go up in flames, but I doubt he sees himself burning with it. We’ll be safe for the time being.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Isabella told him.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Ty said.

  “Yes I do, and you both know it. I slipped on a banana peel, and fate caught me.”

  “Happens all the time,” he said.

  “In your minds this really is Waterloo, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Ty told her, “and we had better be cast as Wellington.”

  In a windowless anteroom off Admiral Cotton’s office in the NATO command post, Oliver regarded Bingo Chen with approval. Chen’s uniform of jeans, sandals and baggy palm-leaf cotton shirt worn with its tail exposed was typical of his profession. He was a hacker. With his aviators nesting in his gelled hair, an open can of Coke Zero on the coaster beside him, Bingo studied the Asus computer screen in front of him. “Say hi to the guys,” he told Oliver as images of three young people around twenty years of age appeared side by side. “Left to right, Delilah Mirador, alpha geek from Shaker Heights, Ohio, now at Hebrew University by way of Caltech; Jonty Patel, first from Mumbai and now the University of Maryland, ostensibly; and Nevada Smith, from Laguna Beach, Harvard and Berkeley.”

  Oliver smiled quickly into the webcam, then studied the hackers. The first two, especially the fetchingly zaftig Delilah, seemed to fit the intense and untidy profile he expected, but Nevada Smith would have settled more naturally into a Ralph Lauren advert.

  Observing Oliver’s surprise, Bingo said, “Nevada’s our outlier. He’s a descendant of Isaac Newton, or that’s his story anyway, and he’s sticking to it. No question he has the best abs, the best style on a surfboard and by far the prettiest face in geekdom.”

  “Can you tell us what you’re looking for, Commander?” Delilah Mirador asked. “It would save us time if you could.”

  “I wish I knew,” Oliver said. “Our man is way too neat to leave traces of much on his iPhone. My guess is we’re looking at tangents, where one thing touches another, maybe all very innocently, and that thing touches something else, and so on and so on until the contact becomes less innocent and more interesting. But it’s only a guess.”

  “You used the word ‘neat,’” Bingo said. “Are you aware what that means in our world?”

  “I’m not,” Oliver said.

  “‘Neats’ design programs to resemble human reasoning and logic. ‘Scruffies’ take a less theoretical, more empirical approach. In this case, guys, I think we go at it both ways at once.”

  “Sounds right to me,” said Jonty Patel.

  “I can’t help but wish we had the phone itself,” Delilah said.

  “Too risky,” Oliver said.

  “I don’t know why,” she said. “We might have found something under electron microscopy.”

  “The odds are slim,” Bingo said. “I might win the lottery next Friday. The beautiful creature behind the counter in the café down the road might slip into my bed at three o’clock in the morning. It’s nice to dream, but we go with what we have.”

  “Fair enough,” said Nevada. “If for some reason you ever want him to think he’s got his phone back, there’s no way you’d fool him with a substitute. It could be the same model, but the scratch marks would be different. It wouldn’t feel the same, like a dog of the same breed that wasn’t your pet. I’d know in a second and be on my guard from then on. Also, you’d have to jigger the SIM card and the whole e-mail setup. The very idea is pathological.”

  Oliver listened with amusement. “How much time do you think we’re talking about?”

  “Impossible to say,” replied Bingo. “We don’t know our destination. How can we give you an estimated time of arrival?”

  “Commander,” implored Delilah, “you’re telling us we don’t have much time, aren’t you?”

  “We’re in a race against the clock.”

  “And if the clock wins?”

  “It won’t be pretty.”

  “But we’ll still be alive?” Jonty inquired, cued by Oliver’s somberness into a newly solemn tone of his own.

  Oliver shook his head. “What makes you so sure?”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Shortly before four, by the pool on bridge deck, with the midsummer sun angled in the western sky, Isabella looked at Ty and asked, “Oliver isn’t married, is he?”

  “Why do you ask? Are you interested?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “He wouldn’t be easy to be married to,” Ty reflected.

  “What man would be?”

  “On the other hand, he’d be away a lot of the time. And for a girl seeking thrills . . .”

  “Sorry I asked,” Isabella said.

  “He’s not dead yet,” Ty said. “He still has lots of time.”

  “Because you two are about the same age?”

  “Sounds like a good enough reason to me.”

  “My parents got married when my father was twenty-one and my mother twenty.”

  “Mine were both twenty-two, I think.”

  “What happened to us, our generation? Spoilt for choice?”

  “Speak for yourself,” Ty said.

  “Now you are being disingenuous.”

  “Ah, but you flatter me,” Ty said as Jean-François appeared from the dining room.

  “Excuse me, Miss Cavill,” Jean-François said, “but the Tangier police have been in touch with the captain. And he wanted you to know that the commissaire divisionnaire de police is on his way here.”

  Isabella kept a blank face. “I wonder what he expects to learn.”

  “Nothing,” Ty said. “I’m sure it’s routine.”

  “They could have questioned us at dockside.”

  “True, but it’s his big chance to come aboard.”

  Jean-François could not conceal his smile.

  “Even more likely, it’s you he wants to see,” Isabella suggested.

  “I hope not,” Ty said. “I’m not inclined in that direction.”

  “Do you always think the worst of people?”

  “I never did, but lately it’s seemed like the way to bet.”

  By the time the commissaire arrived, they had accidentally changed into almost-matching casual clothes: tan linen slacks and pale blue polo shirts, Ty’s knit, Isabella’s piqué. The commissaire, a lean and elegant Moroccan man of extraordinary height, was accompanied by his adjutant, a more solidly built, much shorter and younger man with pudgy features and a one-step-behind deferential bearing that Isabella thought made him appear almost as though he were his superior’s pet.

  “It’s very kind of you to see me on such short notice,” the commissaire told them.

  “Of course, we’re happy to see you. As you
might well imagine, we’re eager to do anything we can. . . .”

  “Mostly it’s a matter of tying up loose ends. We wanted to see for ourselves where Mr. Santal began his day and where he was bound at the time of his tragic accident.”

  Isabella nodded. “You use the word ‘accident.’ Do you believe that’s what it was?”

  The commissaire hesitated. “At this point it is difficult to say.”

  “I suppose what I’m really asking is, will we ever have an answer to that question?”

  “May I?” asked the commissaire, gesturing to a chair.

  “Please, do sit down,” Isabella said. “I’m sorry. Forgive my manners. I’ve been rather overwhelmed by all that’s happened.”

  “Thank you. My long legs tire more and more easily these days,” the commissaire mused, lowering his frame into a leather chair. “Can you think of anyone who might have wished to harm your uncle?”

  “No, and I’ve tried. Ian, by the way, wasn’t my uncle. He was my godfather.”

  “Sorry,” the commissaire told her. “Correct that, will you?” he instructed his adjutant, who had assumed a similar chair and was taking notes.

  “Ian Santal, as I am sure you know, was a very successful and, in certain circles, even famous man.”

  “‘Legendary’ would not be too strong a word,” the police chief added.

  Isabella thanked him with a gracious smile. “There are always people who begrudge others those particular qualities, but in his case I honestly have no idea who they could be. He knew an enormous number of people, from every walk of life, high and low and in between. Not all his friends were rich or celebrated, although many of course were. All through his life, he thrived on people. That’s one reason he became a writer—”

  “Ah, yes, I read Train Travel,” the commissaire interrupted. “Did he write other things as well?”

  “Mostly science fiction,” Isabella explained. “Writing was his first ambition, but it didn’t take him long to find that the work was too solitary. Ironically, it was science fiction that led him into science. The academy, finance in the City, his fantastic career as an entrepreneur—all that came later, as he found his medium, which wasn’t words on a page or numbers, but people. Ian put them together, endlessly recombining them and their interests until out of nothing something great and usually unexpected had been created.”

  “This is very interesting to me,” said the commissaire.

  “Who would have wished to harm him, I cannot imagine. Perhaps it was someone he won out over. He was a competitor at heart and not above winning.” Isabella laughed.

  “He would seem to have done it very well.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” she said, then, noticing Crispin’s quiet approach, added, “Would you like something to drink?”

  “Would an iced coffee be possible?” the commissaire inquired.

  “Very possible, sir,” Crispin replied.

  “I’ll have the same, please,” said the adjutant.

  “I had the pleasure of greeting your godfather upon his arrival in Tangier yesterday. A Mr. Frost was with him.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And Mr. Frost is . . . ?”

  “A very close friend of mine,” Isabella replied.

  “Then you may know that he came to see me earlier today.”

  “I knew he was going to meet with the authorities.”

  “He was very helpful.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “If I may ask, what was the relationship between Philip Frost and Ian Santal?”

  “I’m not sure I understand your question.”

  “Forgive me. What I meant was, was it a business relationship or a social one? Was it that of a mentor and his protégé, for example, or more similar to that of a father and son?”

  “Somewhere between the two,” Isabella conjectured after a few seconds’ thought.

  “When they disembarked at the yacht club, I happened to notice that neither was carrying anything. They both had jackets on, but neither had anything in his hands. For instance, neither was carrying a briefcase.”

  “Why should that have surprised you?”

  “They are businessmen.” The commissaire chuckled at the simplicity of his own analysis.

  “Yes, but what business they were involved in yesterday is beyond me. You’ll have to ask Philip about that. They left in a hurry, I remember, and you’re right: They didn’t take anything with them.”

  “The tender was watched by the dock agent, by the mate running it, presumably, and by the yacht-club staff. Anyone coming aboard or going ashore from it would surely have been spotted by one or more of them. The police and officials of both Moroccan immigration and customs were also nearby the whole time the tender was berthed. Is it too much to assume they would have witnessed if not actually deterred anything untoward? I think not.”

  “Then you believe that it was an accident,” Ty said.

  “I have reached no conclusion. The boat could well have had a fault in one of its systems. Cigarette boats of that type carry massive stores of fuel, which, if sparked . . . Alas, the point is, we may never know with certainty whether there was indeed such a fault. There is no black box, so to speak. If we’re to do our jobs properly, therefore, we must eliminate, as best we can, every other possibility, including, regretfully, that of sabotage.”

  “In the tried-and-true manner of Sherlock Holmes,” Ty interjected lightly.

  The commissaire smiled. “Are you a fan, Mr. Hunter? Or perhaps you’ve played Holmes. If so, it must have been onstage, or else in a film I don’t know. I thought I’d seen all of yours.”

  Isabella glanced at Ty and smiled.

  “You’re safe. I’ve never played him,” Ty told the police chief, “but my dad was a great fan, and that was contagious. I read all the stories growing up.”

  “Naturally, I’d like to talk to the crew, have a look at the tender’s berth, where it would have been before Messrs. Santal and Frost took it in to Tangier. Also, it would be useful, I think, to see Mr. Santal’s quarters as well as Mr. Frost’s.”

  “We’ll give you the grand tour,” Isabella told him.

  “Thank you. By the way, did Mr. Frost mention anything about a box to you?”

  “No,” she answered, and in a flicker caught Ty’s eye.

  “What sort of box?” Ty asked.

  “How to describe it?” the commissaire said. “A jewelry box or a box for odds and ends, lightweight and made of wood. Mr. Frost said he had bought it in the souk for Miss Cavill and then, when Mr. Santal suddenly asked him to stay behind in Tangier through lunch, that he had asked Mr. Santal in turn to take it with him back to this yacht. That would account for the carrier bag.”

  “What carrier bag would that be?” Ty inquired.

  “A bright green plastic one, I believe, with yellow, or maybe it was gold, printing. Several witnesses noticed it swinging from Mr. Santal’s right wrist as he departed.”

  “Surely,” Ty said, “if it were some sort of improvised explosive device, he wouldn’t have been able to swing it.”

  “That is my assumption, too,” said the police chief, “although I don’t know.”

  “Did Philip say anything about the business they were conducting?” Isabella asked.

  “Only that it had to do with a fund. Doesn’t everything these days? Businesses, it seems, no longer make products, only money.”

  “Even so, that would appear to me the logical place to start. Whoever he was dealing with would have known both when and exactly where he would be in Tangier. Find out who was there, then find a motive amongst them and you’ll be well on your way to an answer, if there is one.”

  “Would you like a job with the Tangier police, Miss Cavill?”

  “Than
k you very much, but I am already employed. Anyway, you have to admit that my theory is rather less far-fetched than yours.”

  “You misunderstood me. I have no theory. The notion of a bomb in a carrier bag is not a theory, merely a possibility, albeit a remote one. One is forced to deal with facts, and the bag is a fact of this case, but apparently it bore a gift for you, and as far as we can tell Mr. Frost bore no malice toward Mr. Santal. Why should he have, when it was Mr. Santal who had enabled his rapid rise? No, he had everything to lose and nothing to gain by Mr. Santal’s death. In fact, the only person who stood to gain was you, but one does not have to look for very long into your eyes to see that as profound a gain as that may be, your loss is incalculably greater.”

  After a comprehensive tour of the yacht, including a prolonged and fruitless search of the large tender’s bay, the commissaire and his aide departed. Isabella and Ty were still waving good-bye as the police skiff veered toward shore. Then Isabella turned to Ty. “Why did you look at me the way you did when he asked about the box?”

  “I could ask you the same question,” Ty said.

  “I wasn’t sure what you wanted me to do.”

  “You handled it perfectly.”

  “Well, I didn’t lie. He asked if Philip had mentioned the box, and he hadn’t. I kept waiting for him to tell us not to leave Tangier without permission. I’ve seen too many television programs, I suppose.”

  “You were right not to say any more. For the time being, the police don’t need to know what we know.”

  “You think Ian’s death is connected to those warheads, don’t you?”

  Ty nodded. “I do. They rearrange the incentives.”

  “Then maybe we should set sail. I’d hate to find myself holed up in some Moroccan prison.”

  “There’s nowhere to go. We have to see this through. Watch Philip! Let him play his cards until we can get a glimpse of his hand!”

  “I’m not sure,” Isabella said. “The commissaire practically told me I was a suspect, though he was as cryptic as he was solicitous.”

  “He was probing,” Ty said. “That’s his job. If we suddenly pull up anchor and move on, he’ll see it as reason to probe harder. Then, even if you aren’t charged, you may never be able to clear yourself of suspicion in the public mind. You know how people are. The conclusion would be too delicious to abandon. And who knows how leaving would affect what happens with the warheads?”