Once a spy dc-1

by Keith Thomson

  No, Charlie decided, definitely not the same guy he’d known from 1979 until today.

  Four more guards had streamed out of the library, rifles in hand. Drummond glanced from them to the temperature gauge. Of the two, the temperature gauge appeared to trouble him more.

  “No choice now,” he grumbled.

  He snapped two more switches and wrenched the throttle. The engine responded with a roar. The blades reached full chop, raising dirt and grass all around. He jerked up the collective. With it went the nose, followed by the skids. Every part of the ship down to the lug nuts trembled.

  “Let’s get some air,” he said, punching the cyclic.

  At once it seemed like the ship was falling upward. Past the clubhouse. Past the treetops. Into a white explosion of sunlight.

  On the terrace, uniforms billowed in the helicopter’s wash as the men traced the path of the helicopter with their rifle barrels. Their muzzles lit up like flashbulbs. With white knuckles, Charlie grabbed onto the center support strut and braced for the bullets.

  They struck immediately, but without the rammed-by-an-asteroid effect he’d expected-it was more like birds pecking at the fuselage.

  After five or six such pecks, a rope of blood whipped past his eyes, splattering against his window and peppering his face with warm droplets. He looked anxiously to the pilot’s seat.

  Drummond was unscathed. “Our passenger,” Drummond explained, with a tilt of the head. “Upper thigh, apparently not serious, thankfully.”

  Charlie turned around to see Cadaret stirring, as if in the midst of a bad dream. The seat cushion beneath him had turned crimson. Beyond basic humanity, Charlie wasn’t sure why Drummond cared. He decided not to distract him with questions.

  The pecking continued. Charlie held his breath, if only because it allowed him to do something besides thinking about a midair explosion.

  The pecks dwindled as the helicopter continued skyward. When the altimeter read 1,700 feet, the guards quit altogether.

  Charlie took a deep breath of the cabin air. It was rich with the waxy aroma of aircraft hydraulic fluid people often associate with going on vacation. He admired the plush carpet of treetops below. The old yellow general store appeared quaint. The rhythmic thumping of the rotors became a song of respite.

  It was interrupted by a sickly gasp from the engine.

  Abruptly the ship yawed to Charlie’s side. The first aid box on the wall behind him popped open, raining supplies. Everything else that wasn’t tied down, including Cadaret, drummed the right wall. Charlie grabbed a strut to keep from hanging by his straps.

  Drummond maneuvered the cyclic control stick and worked the foot pedals, but he couldn’t right the ship. His eyes mirrored Charlie’s bewilderment.

  “What was the thing I was worrying about?” he asked.

  The timing was so preposterous that Charlie wondered whether Drummond’s newly debuted lighter side included practical jokes.

  That notion died as the engine fell quiet, and in its place came a loud, high-pitched horn. The row of warning lights over the instrument panel blazed red, as did the temperature gauge. The flapping of the blades began to slow, to sickening effect. And that was nothing compared to the ground racing nightmarishly upward. The air rushed past like fighter jets.

  Any panic Charlie had ever felt before was an itch compared to this.

  Fighting it, he took hold of the collective from Drummond, who slumped in his seat, stupefied. The lever felt like it had been fixed in concrete.

  So much, Charlie thought, for his familiarity with helicopter controls. He had a better chance of landing a car from a thousand feet.

  He expected scenes from his life to flash before his eyes.

  Cadaret surged from the cabin. Although woozy, the killer squeezed through the gap between the pilot and copilot seats, then dove, slamming the collective to the floor.

  “Right pedal!” he screamed to Drummond.

  “Yes, yes, thank you,” Drummond said, stomping his right foot pedal.

  With a groan, Cadaret grabbed Drummond’s knee. He manipulated Drummond’s foot as if it were a marionette, reducing pressure on the pedal.

  Although the gauges still indicated the engine was dead, the rotor blades sped up. Their rich buzz returned. The ship entered a steady glide.

  Charlie’s jubilation was tinged by disbelief. “How is this possible?”

  “Autorotation,” Drummond said, as if recalling an old friend.

  “Yeah,” Cadaret said, pulling back on the cyclic. “Still we’re going to dig a giant hole in the ground unless we can slow the hell down.”

  The helicopter’s nose bumped up and the flight path flattened out. The vertical speed indicator dropped to 1,100 feet per minute, which sounded like a lot but didn’t feel it. Charlie suspected he’d been in faster elevators.

  “Not bad,” said Cadaret. “Now if she’ll just level off a wee bit more, cocktails are on me once we-”

  Out of nowhere a tall pine tree bit into the helicopter’s Plexiglas windshield. Green needles that felt like nails filled and darkened the cabin. Charlie shielded his eyes. There wasn’t time to think past that. The ship bouldered through branches. The main rotor was snagged by the tree trunk and snapped off. A stout bough peeled away the roof. The ground hit like a giant mallet.

  21

  A surreptitious peek into the Waynesboro Airport air traffic control database suggested the helicopter had dropped precipitiously within a thirty-mile radius of the Monroeville club. Front Royal, Virginia, the nearest town, was a likely place for Drummond to surface if he survived, and Fielding had a feeling that he had; the old man had a knack for it.

  Fielding drove down Royal Avenue, the two-lane main drag, passing non-brand-name fast food restaurants and two-story federal buildings that had been nice, once. The glory days of this little burg had come to an end fifty years ago, he estimated, based upon the chipped and fading Coca-Cola advertisement on the side of a vacant bank.

  He pulled his rented Chrysler into a parking space in front of the Rose amp; Crown. The century-old tavern exuded cheery light, warmth, and tinny Sinatra but little of the usual barroom chatter. Parked in the vicinity were just three cars, all of which looked like they belonged to old men.

  Fielding would have enjoyed going in for a rum or two and a cigar nevertheless, but he’d stopped only to see if anyone else would do the same. The pickup truck that had been behind him zoomed past.

  He backed out of the spot and circled back to the top of the block. He parked among the relative crowd of vehicles outside his actual destination, Eddie’s, a tin-sided boxcar diner. He sprung out of his car and, although he had a pocketful of change, bypassed the meter, where two hours cost a dime.

  Inside the diner, many of the old checkerboard floor tiles were missing. From behind a chrome cash register dulled by years of grease, a fossil in a chili-speckled white apron nodded a welcome. Fielding tipped an invisible hat in response. A mailman and two mechanics or plumbers sat at the lunch counter, which was equal parts Formica and cracks; the men were pontificating about the coming Bowl games. The tables were a third filled by the range of the local social spectrum. Fielding, who was only recognized in towns with glossy society magazines, drew looks from most of the patrons, but none conveying familiarity, fortunately.

  He approached a window booth, where a prematurely gray itinerant business type with a dour expression was eating alone. Eyeing his bowl, Fielding asked, “How’s the chili?” He waited for the correct response.

  “Best I’ve had in years,” the man said. “The guys at the counter told me Eddie’s arm hair is the secret ingredient.”

  “How could anyone resist after hearing that?” Fielding sank into the cushioned bench across from the onetime Green Beret who went by Bull.

  “Honored to meet you, sir,” Bull said, reaching across the table.

  Fielding shook his hand, cold and clammy from nervousness. Fielding engendered this reaction often-and after all thes
e years, he still got a kick out of it. “So let me guess,” he said. “The rent-a-drones are still only giving us nature footage?”

  The drones were five-inch-long robot reconnaissance planes the Army had in development at Virginia Tech, where the director of the Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology was hamstrung by three alimonies and two child support payments. He had been happy to “lend” the drones to a “visiting researcher” in exchange for a “donation.”

  “Just the dense canopy of treetops so far,” Bull said. “No helicopter or any sign of it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I was hoping for a picture of a five-foot-eleven man with white hair.”

  The former soldier looked away. “I’m afraid all we’ve come up with is a signal from the beacon in Cadaret’s wristwatch.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Fielding asked.

  “If the rabbit had been thinking clearly, the first thing he would have done is toss that watch out of the helicopter. Or toss Cadaret.”

  “But the rabbit isn’t thinking clearly.”

  Bull lowered his voice. “Sir, he took out five professionals, escaped from the Monroeville club, and stole a helicopter.”

  “That stuff is second nature to him,” Fielding said. “If he’d been thinking clearly, he would have taken out the five professionals then simply picked up the phone and dialed Burt Hattemer.”

  Bull input a hasty message on his BlackBerry. If any of the diners saw, they would take the display for an online simulcast of a hockey game with digital stick figures representing the players. A few keystrokes and clicks later, he told Fielding, “Okay, two of the hounds are on their way to the wristwatch.”

  22

  When Charlie awoke, he felt like he was floating in the air with thousands of diaphanous bits of light in orbit around him. He’d previously thought seeing stars was just the stuff of cartoons. It was the most magnificent and glorious experience imaginable, he decided, when- WHAM — he found himself prone on the cold forest floor.

  The stars were gone, replaced by trees as far as he could see, and it felt like his head had absorbed the majority of the helicopter’s impact with the ground.

  He tolerated the pain to take inventory of himself. His mouth tasted of dirt. His nostrils were caked with it. His skin was burned and scraped in multiple patches. The rest of him stung. Although slick with blood, his appendages remained attached. Incredibly, everything seemed in working order.

  Fifty or sixty feet away, Drummond was pacing by what remained of the helicopter. The crumpled fuselage lay on its side, looking like it originally had been constructed of papier-mache. Drummond appeared to have suffered only scrapes. Of course, if half his ribs were broken, would he show it?

  His gun was trained on Cadaret, who sat in the dirt, arms behind him, wrapped around the trunk of a tree and bound at the wrists by wire-probably from the helicopter. Blood trickled from his mouth, welling at his collar.

  “Who hired you?” Drummond asked. His eyes were still sleepy, and he spoke clumsily, hunting for words as if English were foreign to him.

  “It’s need to know and a day player like me doesn’t need to,” Cadaret said. He was oddly chipper.

  Drummond took a running step and kicked him in the jaw. The killer’s head snapped back. His mouth went slack and reddish vomit spilled out.

  “Again, who hired you?” Drummond said.

  “How about I tell you what I do know?” Cadaret said, his congeniality intact.

  Either he’d learned to disregard pain, Charlie thought, or he liked it.

  “Fine, fine,” said Drummond.

  “They call my office voice mail. The caller poses as a buddy wondering what I’m up to over the weekend. If he mentions the Jersey Shore, I check my Hotmail for instructions-the details of the op will be imbedded in a piece of spam hawking diet pills. If he says Hamptons, I service a dead drop.”

  “And?”

  “And I do the job, my bank balance goes up, I fly down to my vacation house on St. Bart’s, and spend all my time hunting for carpenters and roofers and painters to undo whatever the hell the latest hurricane’s done.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “That’s nothing.” Drummond toed the dirt, preparing for another field goal attempt with Cadaret’s head.

  Cadaret appeared no more alarmed than if Drummond were preparing dessert. Probably he would act the same way before a firing squad, Charlie thought. But whether or not another blow to the head bothered him, it could leave him unconscious. Or worse.

  “Dad, don’t!” Charlie called out. He tried to stand. Pain grabbed every part of him that flexed. The ground seesawed.

  Keeping the gun fixed on Cadaret, Drummond stomped over. His look of annoyance was that of someone interrupted during study. He declared, “This is war, and only one thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war can understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”

  Charlie recognized this as a ragged version of the wisdom of Sun Tzu, the centuries-dead general whose wisdom Drummond used to recite impeccably, apropos of everything from current events to why a boy needed to make his bed every morning.

  “I’m not thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war,” Charlie allowed, “but he’s useful only if he can speak, so how profitable can it be to knock him senseless?”

  “Good point,” Drummond said. “Thank you.”

  He trotted back to Cadaret with a benevolent air. Then swung the gun by the barrel. The heavy grip cracked the bridge of Cadaret’s nose, creating a spring of scarlet and leaving his head bobbing.

  “Great,” Charlie said, putting it at fifty to one that Cadaret clung to consciousness.

  But there he was, sitting upright and vigorous as ever. Wipe the blood and the pine sap off, comb his hair, tighten his tie, and he could be delivering a sales presentation.

  Drummond pointed the gun’s muzzle at the inside of Cadaret’s knee. “Who hired you?” he asked again.

  There was every reason to believe that Drummond would pull the trigger. Still, no trace of panic in Cadaret. Maybe he thought of losing the kneecap as a cost of doing business; he could get a replacement, maybe a bonus along with it. He said, “Sir, basic as that information is, I do not have it, the reason probably being that I might fall into a situation exactly like this one.”

  Drummond nodded. “Fine, fine. Who hired you?” He seemed entirely unaware that he’d just posed the question.

  Cadaret’s eyes widened with-of all things-trepidation.

  Charlie followed Cadaret’s stare to Drummond’s trembling gun hand. Drummond added his left hand to steady the gun. He could have used another hand still. No wonder Cadaret was afraid: Normally Drummond could shoot the head off a pin at this distance. Now, it was three to one that he would miss the kneecap and hit something irreparable. And even money that he would create a wound that didn’t conform to Spook Interrogation Standards-and one from which the flow of blood couldn’t be staunched in time to preserve Cadaret’s life.

  “Dad, please, put the gun down, just for a second?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I think your subject just remembered some more.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Cadaret exclaimed.

  Drummond lowered the gun.

  Cadaret looked to Charlie with unmistakable gratitude. “I was in Atlantic City last night, I got a text message with an encrypted number, and I called it from a secure line,” he said. “A middle-aged woman with a Midwestern accent told me to fly immediately to the Red Hook Heliport in Brooklyn, where I’d be met by a young guy called Mortimer. He would ask me if I was with Morgan Stanley and I was supposed to reply, ‘Regrettably, yes,’ and then we’d grumble about the stock market. So I flew, we met, we grumbled, then we headed for a precinct house near Prospect Park. On the way, we got word to intercept a Daily News truck. You know the rest.”

  “Do you know who the woman with the Midwestern accen
t works for?” Charlie asked.

  “Nope. Probably she doesn’t either; probably she’s just a cutout. But an educated guess would be a government-or someone able to buy into a government. Pitman and Dewart-the kids who tried to take you out on your block-used Echelon to track you here.” Cadaret stressed “Echelon” as if it proved his case.

  “Does Echelon mean anything to you?” Charlie asked Drummond.

  “Just tell me what I want to know,” Drummond told Cadaret, punctuating the demand with a wave of his gun.

  “You got it, sir,” Cadaret said. “It’s a bunch of drab office complexes around the world that everyone takes for call centers or whatnot. Really it’s a network of listening posts code-named Project Echelon, sponsored by the United States and some allies.”

  “Oh, that, right, right,” Drummond said, though clearly he had little idea, if any, what Cadaret was talking about.

  Charlie gestured for Cadaret to continue.

  “It records billions of domestic and international phone calls from homes, offices, pay phones, cells, sometimes even walkie-talkies,” Cadaret said. “Once sound is captured, a word like uranium or Osama raises a red flag. Voiceprints can raise flags too. Somehow Pitman got your voiceprints added to Echelon’s hit list early this morning. A few hours later, when you called Aqueduct Racetrack from a pay phone, he tapped into your conversation real-time, so of course he knew where you were. He texted Mortimer saying you were probably on your way to do some ‘hunting and fishing.’”

  “And since the average joe can’t just surf on over to the Echelon Web site, you think these guys are government?” Charlie asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Foreign?”

  Cadaret spat a piece of hardened blood as if it were a sunflower seed. “Or American and, for the usual reasons, keeping it black.”

  “Black for the usual reasons.” Charlie looked off, pretending to chew this over. He was reluctant to expose his ignorance. Fuck it, he thought, that toothpaste was out of the tube. “Let me just clarify two things: What are ‘the usual reasons,’ and what do you mean by ‘keeping it black’?”