Once a spy dc-1

by Keith Thomson

  “Whether you’re the Mafia or the CIA, killing people is illegal,” Cadaret said. “And if you’re the CIA, your problem is it’s easier than ever to get caught. So you go ‘black’-you leave nothing to link what’s being done to the organization doing it. And if Mr. Clark here’s outfit stands to get wind of it and take you to task, you go blacker still. You make it look like an accident, if you can.”

  “His outfit?” Charlie said.

  “The Cavalry,” said Drummond. Remembering, it seemed.

  “Actually, I think they disbanded,” Charlie said.

  “It’s just a nickname.”

  “Okay?” Charlie waited for more.

  “Clandestine operations…” Drummond couldn’t summon anything else.

  “They’re a legendary special operations group,” Cadaret said. “Probably CIA, maybe SOCOM, but who knows? Whichever, you’d find them on the books, if you could find them on the books at all, as ‘Geological Analysis Subgroup Alpha’ or ‘Research and Development Project Twenty backslash Eighteen’ or something like that.”

  “Isn’t CIA already secret enough?” Charlie asked.

  “If only.” Cadaret laughed. “Bureaucracy and oversight have a way of effectively revealing the best-laid clandestine plans to their targets, let alone gumming up the works. At the end of the day, it’s best for everybody if the bureaucrats and overseers are lulled into complacency by an hour-long PowerPoint presentation on the subject of geography, allowing the spooks to get down to their real business.”

  “So other than geographical analysis, what’s the Cavalry’s business?”

  “It’s hard to say how much is apocryphal, but word is that they recruit the ballsiest of the best and the brightest, and they run covert ops that no one else can-or would dare. The one you hear the most is that, in the mid-nineties, they replaced the king of one of the less-stable Arab countries.”

  “Replaced?”

  “One day the king jumped off his yacht for a quick dip. When he climbed back aboard, he was literally a new man.”

  Things were beginning to make sense to Charlie. Turning to Drummond, he asked, “So Clara Barton High graduation day, when you had that appliance expo in Tucson you couldn’t get out of, were you really in the Red Sea in a frogman suit?”

  “What appliance expo in Tucson?” Drummond said.

  “So how do we call out the Cavalry?” Charlie asked Cadaret.

  “To me, the most astounding thing in all this is they haven’t tried to get hold of you.”

  “We’ve been trying to be hard to get hold of lately,” Charlie said.

  “We use the horses,” Drummond said.

  “I think that’s the other cavalry,” Charlie said. A fraction of a second later, it dawned on him that he’d missed the patently obvious for years. Playing the horses was about a thrill, and thrills were practically anathema to Drummond-at least the Drummond he knew. Taking him aside, Charlie asked, “Or is that why you always bought the Racing Form?”

  “Right, right, the Daily Racing Form. There was something in the ads.”

  “That could be more than just an interesting piece of information, couldn’t it?”

  Drummond brightened. “Do you have today’s Racing Form?”

  “As my luck would have it, today is probably the first day in ten years I didn’t buy it. But if I had, what would I find in the ads?”

  “A number for us to call maybe.”

  “Placed by this Cavalry?”

  “Possibly.”

  It wasn’t a lot to go on. Still, at the end of the long, dark tunnel Charlie’s life had become, a bulb flickered on.

  He looked around, trying to determine which way east was. The general store was to the east-after all the driving, he had no doubt about that. They might find the Daily Racing Form there-it was sold everywhere there were gamblers, which is to say it was sold everywhere. Alternatively, they might access it online or find transportation to someplace else that sold it.

  The trees partitioned the woods into narrow alleys, and those alleys formed a maze. Charlie had dreamed of camping and outdoor adventure as a boy. The closest he got was reading about it. He’d spent maybe eight weeks of his adult life outside urban environments, and most of that time was at racetracks. Still, he remembered that the sun travels west. He looked up. The treetops obscured the sun. But the shadows were shifting slightly, clockwise, enabling him to determine west.

  “Dad, what do you say we take a walk?”

  “Do us all a favor and let me go along with you,” Cadaret said.

  “Your gang will be here soon,” Charlie said. “Probably too soon.”

  “They’ll be looking for you. And they’ll find you. If I’m with you, I can vouch for the fact that you don’t know anything.”

  “So? Didn’t they kill my friend for knowing only the address of the Monroeville club?”

  “Ramirez?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was just a math thing. He added up to better off not alive.”

  Guilt and horror pummeled Charlie anew. He felt a hand on his shoulder and jumped. Drummond wanted a private word.

  “Let’s not leave him like this,” Drummond whispered.

  “You really think he can help us?”

  “No.” Drummond retrained the gun on Cadaret.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Neutralizing him.”

  “Neutralizing him? You and I would look like lasagnas now if it hadn’t been for him.”

  “Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.”

  “Listen, I don’t mean to diss the Big Book of Bloodshed, but what’s he going to do if he’s stuck here? I’ve got a twenty-dollar bill that says you know some good tying-guys-up knots.”

  Drummond relented with a grunt.

  With more wire from the helicopter, he bound Cadaret at the ankles, knees, and thighs; and in the time most people take to tie a pair of shoes, he near-mummified the assassin from waist to shoulders.

  Standing by and watching, Charlie wondered why Cadaret had put forth such a specious argument on behalf of being freed. Did he really expect them to trust someone who murders people for a living?

  His eyes fell to Cadaret’s five-buck wristwatch: not the sort of watch he would expect on someone who has a vacation house on St. Bart’s.

  23

  “… and the code name of the operation?” Cranch asked.

  He’d been firing questions all morning. He hadn’t touched his water. He’d seldom shifted from his perch on the plastic picnic table bench. He would put most robots to shame, Alice thought.

  “Lothario,” she said, her reserve diminishing.

  “Is that a reference of some sort to Mr. Fielding?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, it was generated at random, but, you know, sometimes the kids on the desk get frisky.”

  “And the skipper?”

  “Harold Archibald.” She shook off exhaustion. “Surely you have Hal on your spook scorecard?”

  “Why don’t you fill me in? The complete details, please.”

  “Senior officer, made a name for himself in the MI6 drug trafficking ops in the early eighties, subsequently fast-tracked with tours in Abu Dhabi, Prague, Paris, and Geneva before being given the keys to Counterproliferation back at the Firm.”

  “Personal?”

  “Public schoolboy-Epsom College and Magdalen College, Oxford. From a line of intelligencers. Granddad was Naval, Dad an MI5 officer in Logistics-”

  Cranch snorted. “You can do better than that, Alice.”

  “Do you think I could just make up ‘MI5 officer in Logistics’?”

  “No, but I think you can give me something I can use. Does he drink? Does he do drugs? Does he do teenage boys?”

  “All right, all right. He’s a good man. He devotes much of the little free time he has to charitable work. He’s been married for twenty-odd years to a well-liked
estate agent named Mimi. They have three children who aren’t in any way brats-”

  Cranch craned his neck across the table. “However?”

  Alice fought an inclination to recoil. “However, an officer who worked for Hal in London was shifted to Nairobi last February. She was in her fourth month of pregnancy. It’s been said the baby boy bears quite a resemblance to him.”

  If Cranch were to dial Harold Archibald, Alice knew, he would ring a telephone located at 85 Vauxhall Cross in London, the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service. If Archibald were at his desk, the forty-nine-year-old would probably answer, and, with his crisp, impeccably modulated Oxbridge accent, flatly deny everything she’d said. He would almost certainly add that he’d never heard of her. If pushed, he would purport to be a mid-level analyst whose greatest transgression in life was staying for a third pint at the tiny local down the block from the St. Alban’s commuter rail station before his two-minute drive home to the cottage he shared with his mother. And that would be the truth.

  Alice wasn’t really MI6. She wasn’t even from Britain-but, as it happened, New Britain, in central Connecticut. Her actual employer was the National Security Agency of Fort Meade, Maryland. She’d absorbed enough of London during a six-month tour, however, that she could fool even actual MI6 agents. Feeding Cranch her contingency MI6 story bought a few hours, maybe the night-because of the time difference, much of England already had left the office for the night. By the time Cranch debunked her yarn, her backup team might be here. Had better be here. Cranch’s willingness to torture her suggested Fielding meant to extract whatever he could, then snuff her.

  She weighed revising her fundamental guiding principle that hellish situations in the lives of her aliases beat any quiet minute in her own.

  That philosophy had originated when she was eleven, a star student, actress, and athlete regarded by her parents, teachers, and hordes of friends as an indomitable firecracker. Then she tackled a murder case that was baffling local law enforcement. The victim was her father.

  On a cold night, in an unlit parking lot across the street from a bustling New Britain pub, Stanley Rutherford had been shot in the head through the open driver’s side window of his car. An insurance salesman named Bud Gorman emerged as the prime suspect. Gorman’s wife was rumored to be Stanley Rutherford’s mistress, and he was at the pub for hours before and after the shooting. No one witnessed him leaving the pub, however, and an extensive search of the area yielded no gun.

  Although Alice’s encounters with Gorman over the years were limited to greetings in the church parking lot and on the soccer field sideline, she had a strong sense that he was no murderer. She told her mother so. Jocelyn Rutherford had a potent mind and rectitude to match. She would have cried foul on Gorman’s behalf from the beginning, Alice thought, if not for the shock and grief.

  “It’s plain as day he did it,” Jocelyn said. “It’s just a question of time until they get something on him.”

  “But how could he have hidden the gun?” Alice asked. “The police even searched the sewers.”

  “There are any number of good explanations. For one, he could have hidden it in his own car, then dumped it on his way home-into the lake, maybe, or buried it in the woods behind his house where it would be impossible to find.”

  Alice thought it odd that her mother, shrewd as she was, would imagine that a man with the eyes of suspicious neighbors and law enforcement agents hot upon him would go into his woods and bury anything.

  After school the next day, Alice begged out of soccer practice and rode her three-speed to Gorman’s street, snuck into the woods behind his house, and searched until it was too dark to continue. She found nothing. She searched there each weekday afternoon over the next week to the same result. She quit the soccer team and, later, the school production of Jesus Christ Superstar so she could continue searching. On her twenty-second afternoon, she spotted a pile of leaves and sticks arranged just so. The gun was buried beneath it.

  She rode home and confronted her mother, who tried to strangle her. Alice fended her off with the steak knife she had at the ready. Her bicycle stood at the ready too, outside the kitchen door. She jumped on and pedaled to the police station. Both Jocelyn Rutherford and her lover, Gorman’s wife, Martha, were sent to prison for twenty years.

  Alice was left desolate-on good days. She spent her free time alone at the library, where she became captivated by Jingde legends, particularly the story of the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, who fell out of favor and had to flee the court of the Liang emperor Wu in 527. Bodhidharma sought refuge at the Shaolin Monastery, where he faced a wall for nine years without uttering a single word. Afterward he wrote the book of Shaolin kung fu.

  Letting schoolwork and friendships fall by the wayside, Alice immersed herself in the relatively solitary martial art, working on card-throwing more than anything. After hundreds of attempts, she acquired the ability to sling an ordinary playing card across her foster family’s garage with enough force that a corner would lodge in the cork dart-board. With thousands of repetitions, she could deliver the card to the target at approximately thirty miles an hour, so fast it cracked like a whip. About one-third of the time it landed in the bull’s-eye. Throwing at slightly higher speeds and with greater accuracy, Shaolin masters actually could stab an adversary with a card or even-by striking certain minute pressure points-put him into a coma.

  Alice failed to find refuge with the Shaolin. A decade later, she finally found a measure of sanctuary: the job of covert operations officer. Deep cover roles allowed her a departure from her life of weeks at a time, sometimes as long as a year.

  Now, thanks to Fielding, she stood to depart her life permanently.

  Too much of a good thing, she thought.

  24

  Charlie was famished, dehydrated, and otherwise spent. Worse, his sweat had seeped into his wounds, along with sap, turning each step into its own ordeal. They had negotiated underbrush and low-hanging branches for miles. Even Drummond was breathing hard.

  Finally the woods thinned, providing a glimpse of the general store’s yellow clapboarding. It felt like coming upon an oasis.

  Charlie stopped behind a bush to study the area. The only vehicle in sight was the rusty Chevy pickup, in the same spot as this morning. The dirt lot and vast, colorless fields surrounding it offered hiding places. Although Drummond had been mostly cloudy throughout their trek, often humming discordantly, Charlie looked to him now to devise a tactic for approaching the store.

  He found Drummond ambling out of the woods.

  Praying this meant his countersurveillance software was firing, Charlie caught up to him.

  “What are they called again?” Drummond asked.

  “Who?”

  “Those birds.”

  “What birds?”

  “Woodland birds with brown camouflaged plumage. Known for their degree of challenge as game…”

  “I hope you don’t mean snipes?”

  “That’s it, snipes, thank you.”

  Charlie’s heart turned into a jackhammer.

  “They search for invertebrates by stabbing at the mud with their bills with a sewing-machine motion,” Drummond went on.

  “What made you think of snipes?”

  “The woods, I guess. An interesting piece of information is the first sewing machine was invented by a French tailor in 1830. He nearly died when a group of his fellow tailors, fearing unemployment as a result of the invention, burned down his factory.”

  Crossing the field, Charlie couldn’t shake the mental image of himself and Drummond seen through crosshairs.

  As Drummond ushered him into the store, there was a gunshotlike crack.

  Just the door-Drummond had let it fall too fast into the frame in his rush to inspect the snack aisle.

  Charlie’s relief lasted maybe a second. The store itself, with five tall aisles and a crowd of large, free-standing racks, had a dark-alley feel. The reedy teenager behind the counter
seemed to be the only person present. TUCKER was stitched onto his gas station attendant uniform shirt. Tobacco ballooned one of his cheeks. His sleeves were rolled up past his biceps, revealing a tattooed likeness of racecar driver Dale Earnhardt and a second tattoo of a dagger dripping blood.

  After the bodega on Ludlow Street, Charlie couldn’t help wondering whether Tucker was a plant. He quickly dismissed the notion. Vaudeville would do a Tucker with greater subtlety.

  When his index finger reached the end of a paragraph in the sports section, Tucker looked up, spat a string of tobacco juice into an oilcan, then took in Charlie and Drummond. Most of their scrapes and bruises, along with the tears in their clothing, had been impossible to cover up.

  “How y’all doin’?” he asked warily.

  “Better, now that the hunting trip from hell is over,” Charlie said.

  “Been there,” Tucker said with understanding. “So whatchy’all be needing?”

  “For starters, do you sell any clothes?”

  “Yes sir, there’s tons down there.” Tucker waved at the central aisle.

  Like the other aisles, it was crammed floor to ceiling with all manner of provisions. This was the sort of store where it’s a challenge to find something they don’t carry, and where there almost always was a Racing Form.

  “And magazines?” Charlie asked.

  With his newsprint-blackened finger, the kid pointed to the far wall, where a magazine rack ran the length of the store.

  Following Charlie to it, Drummond asked, “We were on a hunting trip?”

  Thankfully Tucker was engrossed again in his newspaper.

  “If being the prey counts,” Charlie replied.

  The magazine rack was packed with hundreds of publications. Few weren’t pornography. The Daily Racing Form’s iconic bright red masthead shone like a beacon. While pleased to get it in hand, Charlie felt a trickle of depression that the publication central to his existence was used by clever and righteous men to transmit messages without fear that anyone of consequence would see them.