Once a spy dc-1

by Keith Thomson

  As large as the entry hall was, it was hushed. The hiss of Isadora’s rubber wheels reverberated into a shriek. “Let’s go to the tea parlor, it’s a bit cozier,” she whispered-any louder, it seemed, and the echo might loosen bits of ceiling.

  The tea parlor was indeed cozy compared to the entry hall; still it was as large a room as Charlie ever had been in that wasn’t public. Fluted columns sustained a high ceiling and framed ten bays, each adorned with hand-painted battle scenes. Friezes repeated in half-moons over the doors and over a stone fireplace almost as big as his bedroom. A waiter wheeled an antique silver trolley, laden with tea and pastries, to “club members,” as Isadora referred to the casually dressed men and women, all in their gray years. The members occupied about ten of the fifty or so tapestry-upholstered sofas and chairs. The quantity of muffled reports from the other end of the clubhouse suggested that pistols and trap shooting were much more popular at the “club” than tea.

  “Charles, I may have rushed to judge assisted-living facilities,” Drummond said. “Is this Holiday Ranch?”

  “This is the Monroeville club, Drummond,” Isadora said. “You’ve visited several times before.” He looked at her as if she were a mile away. “It’s a residence for injured and retired intelligence officers, and it serves as a medical facility in a pinch, when an injury treated at Bethesda Naval or Hopkins might make unwanted headlines or, worse, enemy intelligence.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said.

  But he appeared confused. He even walked with uncertainty, as if a misstep might trip a mine.

  “Why don’t you sit, dear?” She pointed him to a sofa.

  He let himself fall into it. At once, his head toppled to his shoulder and he began to snore lightly. She seemed relieved.

  Charlie noticed that Drummond’s fly was halfway down. “Any chance there’s a room for him here?” he asked Isadora.

  “I’m sure he’d say that this place isn’t big enough for the two of us. But hopefully he can be assigned to another club once we get to the bottom of our inquiry.” She waved Charlie into the adjacent chair and pulled up beside him. “Now, where was I?”

  “About to die.”

  “Right.” She laughed. “Officially, I was the second assistant secretary at the embassy. Really, I went to Moscow to run Nikolay Trepashkin, a Federal Assembly member notorious for chasing American skirts. The idea was he’d point me to a mole we suspected the KGB had in Washington, then I’d come home to you. But trouble arose with what should have been the simplest part. Usually when Trepashkin had a message for me, he wedged it behind the sink in the men’s room of a drab little bar off Pushkin Square.”

  “You went into the men’s room to get it?”

  “Actually, he signaled it was there by moving a flowerpot to one side of his windowsill. At that point a male cutout-that’s a messenger who knows as little as possible about the works-retrieved the document and loaded it into another dead drop, a slot behind a loose brick in a playground wall. Then another cutout took it to the desk of a busy hotel on the Donskaya and sent it to the embassy in the guise of junk mail.”

  “It wouldn’t have been easier to send it straight to you?”

  “The short answer is no; the other team was too resourceful. On my last day in Moscow, Trepashkin had a document important enough that he signaled for a face-to-face. I procured a bland Zhiguli and parked on a busy block-cars are good for meetings on short notice because the space is small, controllable, and two people in a car don’t arouse suspicion. But he didn’t conduct adequate countersurveillance, and the other team ordered a ‘discontinuation of his existence,’ as they liked to call it. Their gunmen drove by and obliterated my car while he was getting in. He died while saying, ‘Hi.’ When they doubled back to get his attache case, they took me for dead too. As you’ve probably surmised, they were wrong. The director decided to make it appear I had died, though. I was exfiltrated in a casket; the agency even dug a grave and put up a tombstone beside my parents’ in Billings. The reason is, in the time between the shooting and the gunmen’s return, I’d peeked into Trepashkin’s attache case and learned who the mole was. But the director wanted the Ivans to think we’d learned nothing, so that they would leave their man in place and we could play him. For years, we succeeded, with one enormous exception: I couldn’t see you. I did keep tabs on you, and I longed to see you. Probably that’s why, when the Social Security Administration exposed a facet of my cover that the agency had failed to take into account, I went against my better judgment and had the checks forwarded to you. My rationale was the money might come in handy, and perhaps, in some infinitesimal way, allow you to feel your mother’s love.”

  Charlie wanted to feel it. But her story wasn’t quite adding up. “The mole must be collecting Social Security himself by now,” he said.

  “He died four years ago. Natural causes, of all things.”

  So why, Charlie wondered, had she remained out of touch?

  As if having read his thoughts, she said, “Unfortunately my resurfacing still opens the national security equivalent of Pandora’s box. All that I’m allowed to say in that regard is, I’m working on it. When I was notified that you were here, I pleaded for the opportunity to tell you the little I’ve told you. I’m glad we had this time. Unfortunately it came at a cost.”

  She peeled the woolen blanket from her lap, revealing a pistol. She took it up by its bulky grip, aiming in the general area of Charlie and Drummond.

  Two or three of the other members looked over. They regarded the weapon no differently than if it were a teacup.

  Charlie felt as if a veneer had just been stripped away, revealing the world as dark and cold and cruel beyond his most cynical appraisals. “With parents like the two of you, it’s amazing I didn’t end up really fucked up,” he said. “Oh, wait, I did.”

  Isadora’s eyes showed nothing of her feelings now. Drummond remained contorted on the sofa. A bit of light bounced off her stainless steel barrel and hit his eyes. It had the effect of a splash of cold water. He sat up.

  “I just remembered something,” he said.

  “What?” asked both Charlie and Isadora, curiosity trumping all.

  “Izzy, I was glad when you left.”

  14

  It was a storybook sunny morning in the Caribbean, or so Alice surmised when her bedroom door opened, allowing her a glimpse of the daylight-flooded hallway. Not only had Hector and Alberto locked her in last night, they’d bolted the window shutters closed to prevent her from jumping three stories to the sea.

  Hector admitted a small man wearing a neatly pressed white lab coat. “This is Dr. Cranch,” the servant said, then returned to the hall, locking the door behind him.

  Cranch lowered himself onto one of the two plastic benches fused to a molded plastic picnic table, the bedroom’s only furnishing other than the air mattress on which Alice had slept-or was meant to have slept. Hector and Alberto had taken everything she conceivably could use as a weapon, including her sandals and underwear, leaving her only the cocktail dress she still wore.

  “I’m afraid we won’t be having much fun with you, Alice, given that you’ve already confessed,” Cranch said. He was an American, with a cherubic face and big, soft blue eyes that had surely drawn no end of coos when he was a baby but played as creepy on a wan fifty-year-old. Like his lab coat, his grooming and attire were meticulous-too meticulous. The laces on his shiny black wingtips were tied into loops so perfectly symmetrical, he might have used a ruler. “For this morning, I’d like to get through the formalities, like your real identity, your rank within MI6, the code name and details of your operation, and so forth-you know the drill.”

  “No, as it happens, I don’t know any drill,” she said. She sat down across from him and looked him in the eyes. “You need to understand: I only ‘confessed’ so Nick wouldn’t have Jane butchered further by-”

  “Mr. Fielding bet me a very expensive bottle of rum that you’d say as much,” Cranch cut
in. “I’ve lost. I expected more from you than one-oh-one-level denial.”

  He was a professional inquisitor if she’d ever known one; she’d known many in eight years in the business.

  “So obviously you’re stalling,” he said. “Why? If your backup team doesn’t receive your happy signal by such and such an hour, they chopper in an extraction team? You’d be wise to let me know. All of it.”

  Indeed, docked three miles away at Martinique’s Pointe du Bout was a yacht purported to belong to a pair of retirees from Sussex, and if Alice failed to signal them by seven tonight, via either phone or-the usual-Facebook post, her backup team would storm Fielding’s island in the guise of drug enforcement authority agents with a warrant for Alberto’s arrest. They would “happen on” her in the process.

  She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. She’d known from day one of rehearsal that Fielding subjected everyone in his close circle to these trials, often taking pages from Torquemada’s book. She was prepared. Unless Fielding or Cranch had a source within her group (highly unlikely, given the paucity of evidence against her), she could maintain her innocence, then resume her investigation of Fielding with relative impunity.

  “This is a nightmare,” she said, dabbing tears. “What can I do to convince you?”

  “There is one way,” Cranch said. “Did you happen to notice the coffinlike device Hector and Alberto wheeled into your bathroom?”

  “It would have been hard not to.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  She allowed her jaw to tighten, as if to counter a chatter. “No.”

  “It’s like a polygraph machine, just simpler and more effective.”

  Really she knew all about the “water bed,” including a bullet-points bio of the KGB Mengele-wannabe who’d devised it. The tank’s twenty-five-centimeter-deep basin was filled with enough tepid water that an interrogation subject, stripped naked and forced to lie inside, had a mere two centimeters of clammy air to breathe once the casket-style lid was closed. After just an hour, it was common for subjects to fall into a semipsychotic state. Their subsequent interest in responding truthfully to interrogators’ questions was like a drowning man’s desire for a life ring. Alice had been subjected to the water bed for two hours during her training. As it happened, it stirred fond memories of the sensory deprivation tank she’d enjoyed at a California spa a few years earlier. The KGB’s black-out goggles and earmuffs enhanced the experience, she’d thought.

  Regardless, if it came to torture, Cranch might extract the truth from her. No one could withstand every instrument of torture, and surely this character had more where the water bed came from.

  “So the thug on the Malecon spoke like a cliche thug,” she ventured. “Isn’t it common knowledge that they all get their lingo from the same television programs?”

  “I seem to recall reading something along those lines,” Cranch said. “And I imagine that Mr. Fielding would grant you that. Actually, it occurred to him that the Malecon episode was staged only after he’d already learned-by a fluke-that you were a spy. What happened was, while you were supposedly spending Christmas with your friends in Connecticut, he came into possession of an audio file with a voice that sounded like yours, except with an American accent. He had it checked. The voiceprint matched. Lo and behold, you spent your holiday in Brooklyn posing as a social worker named Helen Mayfield.”

  Shock made Alice feel like she was about to implode. She hid it, but it didn’t matter. She’d been caught climbing into the cookie jar.

  15

  The pool was a conundrum. Fielding called it a pool for lack of a better term. There were probably smaller lakes. Through a physics-defying feat of engineering, two of its five sides extended over a high cliff, giving swimmers the sensation of being at the edge of a flat Earth. Its installation had run him more than four million dollars, not including the bribes and headache remedies attendant to half the population of Martinique protesting the bulldozing of a thousand-year-old Carib burial ground. He wondered whether it was worth it. He was, after all, a beach man.

  His doubt was dispelled this morning, when the sight of the pool knocked his prospective customer’s breath away.

  The thing could pay for itself today, Fielding thought, several times over.

  His prospect, Prabhakar Gaznavi, an Indian real estate billionaire, sat across the antique crystal table in the middle of the pool, atop a level, ninety-five-square-foot coral reef, accessible by the gangway from Captain Kidd’s Adventure Galley. Word was the portly Gaznavi’s stomach was the way to his wallet, so the breakfast buffet included twin eggs Benedict (a specialty of the sous chef, with eggs from a native hen and those of a beluga sturgeon), Swiss chocolate waffles with raspberries picked and put on a plane in the Willamette Valley hours ago, and four enormous platters of fresh local fish and a fifth with a nearly-as-fresh salmon from Nova Scotia. Also there were a raw bar; a pile of langoustine tails; an entire roasted rib eye; nine giant silver shell bowls, each with a different tropical fruit, and a tenth with the fruits in a medley; and the usual pastries, along with Gaznavi’s reputed favorite, cinnamon rolls, their trails of steam still pointing the way to the oven.

  Gaznavi helped himself to just a single cinnamon roll. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m on a diet.” Fielding had known that ahead of time too, otherwise he would have had the head chef recalled from vacation so the kitchen could ready the A menu.

  “How’s your appetite for treasure?” Fielding asked.

  “Much stronger,” Gaznavi said.

  In the world of treasure hunting, as little as an anchor from a lesser-known shipwreck could net six figures and land the diver on magazine covers. Fielding’s in-box brimmed with fat checks written by complete strangers more interested in a share of the glory than investment. They never asked where the money went. There were no regulations beyond taxes, and Fielding paid his taxes in full and without fail. Nowhere in his filings, though, did he mention the gifts certain investors received: illegal munitions.

  “The gift that I hope will persuade you to invest in the Treasure of San Isidro Expedition, LLC,” he told Gaznavi, “is a Soviet-made atomic demolition munition.”

  “I’m interested,” said the Indian, who was the chief benefactor of the United Liberation Front of the Punjab, a violent Islamic separatist group. But he seemed no more interested than he was in his cinnamon roll-he’d taken only a token nibble. His droopy eyes and sagging cheeks were set so that, even when jolly, he appeared sullen.

  This guy must clean up at poker, Fielding thought.

  Fielding snapped into salesman mode. Smiling to warm the table a degree or two, he said, “It has a ten-kiloton yield and it’s portable. During the Cold War, the Soviets’ invasion plan for Europe called for deployment of these babies at bridges and dams, to keep defending armies at bay-that sort of thing. And if the West came East, the Russkies had ADMs waiting in underground chambers-think nuclear land mines.”

  Squinting through shimmering bands of light projected by the pool, Gaznavi asked, “Is it one of the Karimovs?” He was referring to the two bombs Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov admitted had gone missing during the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

  Fielding saw an opportunity to impress with his expertise and, at the same time, discredit his competitors. “Actually, there are no Karimovs,” he said.

  Gaznavi flicked a speck of frosting off his lapel. “I saw the speech myself.”

  “President Karimov’s speech?”

  “It was on CNN.”

  “I saw it too. He said a couple of nukes had been misplaced.”

  “I’m confused, Mr. Fielding.”

  “Call me Nick. If I had friends, they would.”

  “Nick, if you heard him say nukes had been misplaced…?”

  “If a politician in that part of the world says something on the record, that proves it’s untrue,” Fielding said.

  Gaznavi emitted a phlegmy chuckle.

  Pleased, Fielding added
, “There’s no way that a nuclear weapon could be misplaced, if you think about it.”

  “I don’t know. Hundreds upon hundreds were transported from the outlying republics on ancient coal-powered trains and Russian trucks that stall every other kilometer. For all to have made it home safe and sound would be an unprecedented logistical feat-and the Russians are famous for tripping over their own red tape.”

  “Except when it comes to a nuclear warhead. Losing one would be tantamount to NASA forgetting where it parked one of the space shuttles.”

  “What about the three suitcases?” Gaznavi said. He meant the three suitcase-sized nuclear bombs reportedly pilfered from an undermanned Eastern European storage facility in the late 1990s by members of a Russian organized crime family, then sold in the Middle East.

  “A fairy tale, Mr. Gaznavi. What chance is there that over ten years, as little as a firecracker would go undetonated in the Middle East?”

  “Please call me Prabhakar,” Gaznavi said, tearing into his cinnamon roll. “Now tell me this, Nick: You make it sound impossible to obtain a Russian nuclear weapon. So how’d you obtain one?”

  “A little while back, a Moscow military insider sold me AK-seventy-four bullets from the Ukrainian stockpiles for ten cents each. He put them on the books as ‘vended to a private party at eight cents apiece’ and pocketed the difference, which added up to a hundred million rubles. Then he tried to buy himself a summer place in Yevpatoriya and found that, real estate exploding like everything else there, a hundred-million rubles could no longer buy much more than a peasant’s izba.”