by Blake Banner
She gave a sigh that was almost a groan and shook her head. “I sure wish I believed you. But that right there, Harry, is facetious.”
“Believe me. What else?”
“You’re being watched.”
“Who by?”
“The Agency, MI6, Ndrangheta, the Albanian Mafia, Bratva, Sinaloa, Al-Qaeda Core and over fifty other smaller Islamic terrorist groups.”
Oh…”
“There are a few others, you want me to go on?”
“No.”
“You still think it’s funny, Harry?
“I never thought it was funny, Colonel. I just don’t see the point in getting my pink frilly knickers all twisted up. I have drawn too much attention. I see that. I don’t know how I could have handled those cases any differently, with the severe deadlines we were facing, but I understand I have to be a lot more discreet in future.”
About halfway through my speech she started shaking her head. “No, Harry, that is not enough.”
I frowned. “Well what then?”
She stared me straight in the eye. “You have to die.”
Two
“The move from your house on Shore Drive has been carried out during the week that you’ve been here. You now have a beautiful brownstone at number eight, James Baldwin Place, East a hundred and twenty-eighth, in Manhattan.”
“I like my little house on Shore Drive.”
“You still own it, as Peter Metcalf, but you don’t live there anymore. Harry Bauer will die tonight, while you are flying to Barbados.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to live the rest of my life with a fake identity, Colonel. Sooner or later I am going to have to die. With a bit of luck it’ll be with a nine-millimeter round in my head. But when the time comes I promise you I won’t be hiding. It’s not going to happen.”
“More macho bullshit!”
“Is that your version of facetious?”
Her voice rose and became suddenly strident. “We cannot afford for Harry Bauer to continue alive and posing a threat to Cobra!”
I scowled and raised my own voice. “And I will not pretend to be dead and live under an assumed identity! It is not going to happen!”
“God damn it, Harry!” She stared at me for a moment with crimson cheeks. “Why do you always have to do this?”
“Because I am not some brainless grunt you recruited off the street. I will not obey blindly! You don’t like it, sack me or shoot me! Or both!”
“We will neither sack you nor shoot you, Harry! Who the hell do you think we are? Who the hell do you think you are to accuse us of that kind of behavior? You really think I am capable of that? Or the brigadier is?”
“OK! OK! Unravel your panties! I was out of line, but I was making a point!”
“It was a totally inappropriate point, and a very ugly one!”
“Fine!” I yelled it and regretted it. Then, more quietly, said, “I am sorry, I am not going to live with a false identity. I am going to be me till I die. That’s an end to it.”
She closed her eyes, pursed her lips and managed to look mad like that. “Do you know how many Harry Bauers there are in New York?”
“I have no idea. A hundred? A thousand?”
“Twenty-four… Do you think they have all been investigated by now, by the CIA and Al-Qaeda?”
“I’d figure they have, by now.”
“And now, because of your obstinacy, we have to bring a new Harry Bauer into the state—not just the state, the city!—without arousing suspicion. How easy do you think that is to do?”
I shook my head. “Not.”
“Not is right. We have to kill you, make it convincing and believable, and then bring a new Harry Bauer into town without anybody noticing.”
I shrugged. “I can resign if that makes things easier.”
“No, it doesn’t make things easier. We’ll kill Harry Bauer tonight, try, please, to keep this job low key, and when you return you go directly to your new home in Manhattan. Do you think you can manage that?”
I nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
“Let’s just hope that’s enough. Your best seems to be more than enough when you’re destroying things and killing people, but when it comes to following orders and keeping a low profile, your best seems to fall well short of the mark.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. Is there anything else?”
She nodded a few times before answering. “Yes. We have done everything we could, but we can’t guarantee that you won’t be traced or followed on this job. A lot of people are aware of you, and some of those people have the best technology available. So you are going to have to stay alert and remember, you are not allowed to kill CIA officers.”
“That always was a flaw in the law.”
“And you probably think that’s witty.” She put her attaché case on her lap and opened it, then took out a large manila envelope. She tossed it on my lap.
“Look at the contents and familiarize yourself with them. You are David Friedman, from a liberal, left-wing upper-middle-class family. You got tired of working as a lawyer, dropped out and walked away. Now you are looking for a place to write your first novel.”
“Yeah, the brigadier told me. How did I hear about St. George?”
“‘A friend told you’ is too risky. So is, ‘I read about it in an article.’ Those things can be checked. So you surfed Google Earth for the most remote place you could find where they spoke English.”
“OK…” I examined the passport, the driving license and the credit cards. They were faultless, as they always were. “My address…”
“Your whole backstory is written out for you. Memorize it. If there is anything missing that you have to make up…”
“Make it impossible to verify. I know the drill, Colonel, better than you do.”
“You assume!”
“Yeah, I assume.”
“You will book in at the Father Joseph Hotel in San Fernando, you will find, identify and eliminate Colonel Kostas Marcović.”
“The brigadier already told me that bit.”
“You should give the impression you plan to stay indefinitely and start looking for a house to rent. The brigadier probably told you that, too. But now that you know that every major organized crime syndicate and every major terrorist organization is looking for you to play ‘this little piggy’ with your toes, maybe it makes a little more sense.”
“Yeah. Anything else?”
“Aside from that you have pretty much carte blanche, only keep it discreet, make it look like an accident, please, and try not to put the organization at risk.”
I was nodding while she spoke, looking at a ticket to Barbados. “I’m cleared to enter?”
“We’ve arranged it. We submitted the negative test results and pulled a few strings.”
“So I’m not a risk to anybody. Is that ironic or facetious?”
“Once in Barbados you go to the Ferry Port Office on Harbour View One and you buy a ticket on the first ferry to St. George Island. Do not hang around, do not check in to a hotel. If you have to, sleep rough. Do not leave an electronic trail or a paper one. Just go to St. George.”
“I get the idea, Colonel. We are worried about being followed.”
“You fly tomorrow morning.” She stood. “JFK to Bridgetown, four and a half hours. It’s in the same time zone so you get there at four thirty PM. According to my inquiries, if you get a cab straight to Harbour View, the ferry office should be open. They close at six PM.”
I was about to answer her, but she walked on stiff legs to the door, opened it and left without saying anything more. I was surprised to discover that that upset me.
* * *
I read about my own death at nine AM the next morning in no less a paper than the New York Times. They had taken time out from saving the world and educating people in what to think and how to think it, to report on the unexplained death of a man on Shore Drive. He had been shot four times in the face and once in the hear
t. The cops had deduced from that that it was an execution and a punishment killing.
Fingerprints and DNA taken from the body had shown him to be one Harry Bauer, the owner of the house where he was found. It seemed he was something of a soldier of fortune, had been several years with the British SAS and had made many enemies among the Islamic Fundamentalist community. Sources at the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that they had been observing Mr. Bauer for some time and suspected him of being involved in organized crime as a hit man for one or more organizations. Attempts were made to contact his next of kin, but without success. There didn’t seem to be any.
I smiled. You don’t pick up many next of kin in an orphanage. It was a pretty good job, believable and hard to pull off. The brigadier must have some pretty powerful strings he could pull. My suspicion was—had been for a long time—that he had a whole database of incriminating evidence on just about everybody in power anywhere in the world, and he drew on it as and when he needed. When you offer the kind of services Cobra offers, any client who comes to you is pretty much in your grasp for the rest of his life. That was partly why the Five Eyes had invited him to set it up in the first place. They figured at least that way, they had a bit of control over him. That’s what they figured.
Of course it was true that the top brass at the Pentagon, the White House, Whitehall, Wellington Street, the Lodge or Premier House were all pretty confident they had the brigadier tied up with very little wiggle room: they had his guarantee of absolute deniability, and technically they could throw him to the wolves any day they chose. But at the same time, each one of them also knew that the brigadier was not the kind of man to take on a project like Cobra without a hell of a lot of insurance behind him. Exactly what that insurance was, only he knew.
Either way, however well they had pulled it off, I was willing to bet there would be a few men in dark suits and dark glasses at my funeral, looking at the coffin as it was committed into the flames, and wondering: Who had I worked for? And who, in the end, had killed me?
The date and place of the cremation were thoughtfully provided, and I’d have given a lot to know who was there. No doubt the brigadier would show me their photographs soon enough.
After that I ordered myself a Macallan to wish myself an easy path to Valhalla, and settled down to sleep. But before I passed out completely, I took a mental stroll down the central aisle of the plane, remembering and checking each face. Nobody stood out, nobody’s eyes looked at me and said, “I am going to kill you,” nobody smiled and said, “I know the truth, you’re not really dead, yet…”
But by that time, I was already asleep.
We touched down in Bridgetown at four thirty, on schedule. I did a lot of stretching and yawning and let everybody else get off the plane before me. I was in no hurry. St. George wasn’t going anywhere, and if there was anybody on my tail, then they’d have to hang back and wait for me, and I’d notice.
Nobody did, and when the plane was down to its dregs, I squeezed out into the aisle, pulled my rucksack from the locker above and shuffled down the steps to cross the tarmac. It was warm and still sunny, though I knew that in an hour and a half it would get suddenly dark, without warning. That’s how it is when you are this close to the Equator. Dawn and sunset are sudden.
I found a taxi rank out near the parking lot and gave a guy who was way too nervous and willing thirteen Bajan dollars to get me to the port in time for the last ferry to St. George. That’s what I asked him for, but he seemed not to hear me, because he gave me a detailed tour of the island at a speed which made it impossible to take in any of what he told me. He also laughed knowingly a lot, and said, “Eh? Eh?” every couple of sentences. I figured it was his way of being in the world.
Somehow, through some weird warping of space and time, we made it to the port in twenty minutes and he left me outside the ferry ticket office. There he gave me a really complicated handshake and screamed with pleasure when I almost got it right the third time. He pointed at me and said, “Eh? Eh?” I told him I had to go inside to buy my ticket and he drove away at a violent, reckless speed, grinning all the way.
I still have no idea what he said to me.
Once I’d bought my passage I walked the short distance to the harbor and sat and drank coffee while the sun sank toward the horizon and I waited for the ferry to come in. Some of those ferries that do the Caribbean runs from Miami look like something that just arrived from Alpha Centauri. But this one, pulling in as the sun spilled red onto the dark ocean, was not one of those. It was a flat, gray oval with a raised gunwale, that could hold about twenty cars. Halfway down the portside there was a tower with a bridge, and I could see a guy with long dreads and a captain’s hat leaning out the window smoking a cigarette.
Several people had accumulated in the café, some with suitcases, others with beaten-up rucksacks like mine; and one woman with neat, pageboy hair, a pretty blouse and an ankle-length skirt. She had two black kids with her to help her carry her stuff. They were at that age where they seem to leach hormones through their skin and their tongues get in the way of everything they try to say. They were in charge of carrying a case of rum and five cases of assorted spirits. She was in charge of telling them how to do it. She was also very attractive, not just because she had a nice, feminine face, but because she had grace and poise too, and when she spoke, she spoke quietly, but with authority.
You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out she ran a bar on the island, and it struck me that could be useful, and I was about to approach her for a chat when a large woman like a Spanish galleon in full sail descended on her.
“Helen, darling, I had no idea you were here! Why didn’t you call me? We could have done lunch and gone to that sumptuous exhibition at the Dryad, it’s quite erotic! Tell me you’re not going back to that dreadful little island now!”
Helen darling smiled at the woman patiently while she talked herself out and then said in that nice, clean lack of accent the Brits call cut-glass, “It was a flying visit, Marjory. Just to pick up some supplies for the bar. When are you going to come and visit us?”
“Oh, you are so naughty! You know me, I hardly ever move away from my little cozy zone. How is darling Maria? It’s an eternity since I last saw her.”
The sun sank beneath the water and almost immediately the lights came on in the café, washing her face with amber. She must have caught me staring because she turned to glance at me. “Well,” she said, turning back to Marjory, “she works hard, like all of us, I suppose.”
“No sign of a husband yet, I suppose?”
Helen Darling ignored the question and smiled sweetly. “She asks after you. I tell her that one of these days you’ll come and surprise us all.”
Marjory sighed heavily and turned to gaze at the last of the cars that were being offloaded onto the port. “Darling Maria,” she said, and then again, “Sweet, darling Maria.”
Helen stood and called to her two assistants, who started heaving the heavy cartons toward the small dock. She placed a hand on Marjory’s shoulder and said, “We can’t kiss yet, Marjory, and I refuse to do that stupid elbow thing, but do try and come over and see us soon.”
Marjory was shaking her head and repeating everything twice: “I know, I know, I must, I must, I will, I will, I promise, darling I do promise…”
Marjory kissed the air twice, making noisy “muah!” sounds, and hurried away toward a dark BMW that was double-parked with its lights flashing, and Helen followed her two boys toward the ferry. I slowly hoisted my rucksack on my shoulder and followed Helen, at a prudent distance.
Three
Three and a half hours on the ferry gave me plenty of time to start looking for a hotel, and for a house to rent. I guess I could have used Google, but it seemed to me there might be a more interesting way of going about the task. I used the excuse that I had no coverage on my phone and approached Helen instead. She wasn’t exactly receptive, but she didn’t give me the brush-off either. Holding
walls and tables to steady myself against the swell, I staggered over to where she was sitting, at a Formica table by the window.
“Forgive me for intruding,” I said, propping my fingertips on the bench opposite her. “I wouldn’t have, only night came on so suddenly, I had little choice.”
Her smile was cautiously amused, her eyebrows were high and skeptical. “Well, you get ten points for originality. I had certainly never heard that one before.”
I laughed. “Maybe it’s original because it’s true. I didn’t realize night came on so quick. I mean the sun hit the water and wham. It was nighttime.”
“That’s the Equator, I’m afraid. But there isn’t much I can do about it. Unless it’s your feeding time and you need a pint of blood, in which case I can’t help you either.”
I covered my face in mock shame. “Man, you are killing me. No, nothing that exotic, besides, vampires are all fifteen these days. I am much too old. All I wanted to ask you…,” I gestured back toward the receding port, “I couldn’t help overhearing that you run a bar or some kind of…” I faltered, wondering why I was talking like a moron, and wanting to kick myself for not being able to think of anything that was like a bar. She blinked a few times and smiled kindly. “Bar,” she said helpfully. “It’s a bar.”
“Bar,” I said and spread my hands. “That simple. So, like I say, one thing and another. I am arriving later than I expected and in the dark so…”
“Long story short,” she said, still kindly.
“I am so sorry.”
“Please, don’t be, but do tell me the short version. What is it you want, Mr.…”
“Oh, um, sorry, I should have introduced myself. I am David Friedman, of New York.”
“Helen Wilberforce.”
I nodded a little too much. “Oh, right, hi, how do you do? OK, so, like I said, I was wondering if your bar happens to be attached to a hotel, or if you know of a hotel nearby…”
She still had that smile on her face which was beginning to irritate me. “See? That wasn’t so hard. There was me thinking you wanted to exsanguinate me, and all you really wanted was a room at the inn. There are any number of inns all over the island. Kick any palm tree and a dozen innkeepers drop out.” I was about to give it up as a failed job. But she blinked her big blue eyes a couple of times and suddenly her smile was something I was really happy to look at.