Once a spy dc-1

by Keith Thomson

  Charlie’s doubt gave way to wonder. “How?”

  “A cell phone can be tracked to within a few feet by triangulating its signal strength with the three nearest cell towers.”

  The recorded woman returned. “To continue in English, dial or say ‘two,’ pour francais — ” Drummond dialed 10.

  “What language is ten?” Charlie asked.

  “There is no ten,” Drummond said. “It’s the first part of my code.”

  “To place an order, dial or say ‘zero,’” said the voice. Drummond hit 16. “To track a shipment-” Drummond hit 79. “If you know the name of the person you are trying-” Drummond entered 11. “I will now transfer you to-” Drummond added a 3 and a 5, then snapped the phone shut.

  “We ought to hear from him in a few minutes,” he said confidently.

  Charlie was convinced of the validity of the system, but not of the code. It started with 10, 16, and 79-his own date of birth. Hardly a spy-like choice. “Any significance to one oh, one six, seventy-nine?” he asked.

  “Only if you add the other four digits, one one three five, or eleven thirty-five in the morning-thirty-one minutes after you were born, or the precise time you and I first met, in the waiting room at Kings County Hospital. For a distress code, you choose a number you can’t forget.”

  Charlie laughed to himself. He judged it prudent not to explain why, but out of his mouth anyway came, “Don’t get me wrong. If Mom did anything, she showed that you deserve Espionage Parent of the Century. But you forgetting my birthday was about the closest thing we had to an annual tradition.”

  Drummond retained his composure, probably with considerable effort. “Regrettably, there were times where the goings-on at the office meant you were short shrifted.”

  “It might have helped if I’d known why.”

  “For security reasons I’m sure I don’t need to explain, children of intelligence officers are told, at most, that Mother or Dad is a functionary at the State Department. I hope it makes some difference now that you do know.”

  “Some.” Charlie felt the hurt of the eight-year-old who believed that his father cared more about a line of cheap washing machines. For the truth to make enough of a difference, he thought, somebody would need to travel back in time and have a talk with that kid.

  “Looking for a crutch?” Drummond asked. He sucked at his lower lip, which Charlie recognized as an effort at self-restraint.

  “Ever have one of those days where you find out your dad’s a spy, your dead mother’s really alive, a spy too, and then she gets her head blown off? I’m just trying to put things in perspective.”

  “You can write off your situation to circumstance or plain old bad luck. Throw up your hands, go seek solace in a bar-most people would understand. Just remember, that’s the easy way.”

  Yes, of course, the Easy Way. Drummond used to speak of the easy way, the same way fire-and-brimstone preachers do the Road to Perdition. Charlie would have recognized the words just from the cadence. As always, they sent vitriol coursing through him.

  “It’s not like I came up with the idea that a person’s upbringing has a bearing on his life,” he said.

  Drummond tightened his tie. “There’s a point of accountability for everyone. Others have been dealt far worse hands and still found a way to prevail.”

  Charlie loosened his tie. “Like you, you mean?”

  “One might make the argument.”

  “But you had Grandpa Tony.”

  “If you really want to know the truth, Tony DiStephano-”

  “Tony Clark, you mean.”

  “I do mean DiStephano. ‘Clark’ was just part of his cover. He was really an old Chicago mobster in witness protection who we used for messy jobs.”

  Charlie sagged in accordance with the feeling that air had just been let out of him. He’d always thought of his grandfather as an oversized teddy bear. “Beautiful,” he said.

  “It could have been far worse. Your actual grandparents were charming, cultured, life-of-the-party Park Avenue sophisticates-”

  “Well, thanks for shielding me from that shit.”

  “It was an act.” Drummond reddened a shade more than Charlie had ever seen. “Really they were traitors. They spied for Stalin with the Alger Hiss silver spoon flock. An American war hero spent the last four days of his life hanging from a hook in a Leningrad meat locker as a direct consequence of an encrypted postcard they sent to their handler at the Ministry of State Security. When Whittaker Chambers named names, they were blown. They fled to Moscow, leaving me alone. I was five.”

  For the first time, Charlie saw Drummond’s inner workings as an assembly of human rather than mechanized parts. He felt himself beginning to understand him now, and sympathizing. To an extent. “Then I’d think that you, of all people, wouldn’t have left your son alone all the time.”

  Drummond wiped his mouth with a sleeve, as if clearing the way for a forceful rebuttal, when the cell phone chimed.

  30

  Six minutes earlier, E. Burton Hattemer had been sitting in a conference room in the Senate Hart Office Building while a staffer enthusiastically detailed a solar-powered, robotic surveillance device that looked, flew, and perched just like the barn swallows prevalent in the Middle East. “The prototype can be done for as little as thirty million,” she told the roomful of Senate Intelligence Committee members and advisors.

  Hattemer wanted to say: Christ, that kind of cash could get us ten decent human spies and a hundred times the actionable intel.

  Six years on the Hill had taught him that it would be more effective to partition the sentiment into gentle memos in the coming months when the Appropriations Subcommittee appointed a Robot-Barn-Swallow Task Force, the task force delegated a special panel, and the special panel prepared, drafted, and redrafted its recommendation to the committee.

  Feeling his cell phone vibrate, he fished it from his suit pants. The LED flashed a reminder to pick up tulips for his wife at the florist in Potomac.

  Hurrying out of the conference room, he said, “I beg everybody’s pardon. I’ve got to attend to a geriatric digestive issue.” Who here would want to know about that?

  The florist-or SOS-message appeared when the switchboard in Stockholm activated a virtually undetectable shortwave band. “Tulips” was Drummond Clark. Three years had passed since Hattemer had communicated with his old friend other than by greeting card. That he would get in touch in this fashion, now, suggested Drummond’s life was in peril and that it was an inside job.

  Executive Order 11905, signed by President Ford and bolstered by Reagan with EO 12333, banned assassinations by government organizations. Yet spies continued to die of the flu, falls from terraces, or boating accidents with far greater frequency than people in other professions, in large part because men and women at the very highest levels of government believed themselves to be above the law or turned blind eyes or deaf ears in the name of the Greater Good-a sorry euphemism, Hattemer thought, for sacrificing ideals in order to mop up inconvenient messes. And that was when there was oversight at all.

  For the sake of discretion, he took the stairs down to room SH-219. The two flights hurt like hell, or about as much as he’d anticipated. He’d been forced to abandon fieldwork when his deteriorated hips were replaced with six pounds of metal alloys, making the constant air and Jeep travel impractical. Still, it took him another two years to hang up his trench coat.

  Protected by armed guards around the clock, few places on Earth afforded more secure communication than SH-219. Essentially a windowless steel vault, it blocked electromagnetic eavesdropping and prohibited signals from escaping. Every morning it was swept for listening devices with an attention to minutiae unseen outside archaeological digs. Even the electrical current was filtered.

  Hattemer sat at the armchair at the inner prong of the giant, horseshoe-shaped table. On the olive-green wall behind him were the seals of the various intelligence agencies. Before him was a wall of high-defini
tion monitors, the face of a system the Senate Intelligence Committee members liked to refer to as “state-of-the-art.” In fact, state-of-the-art systems lacked many of its classified bells and whistles. A few keypunches could bring him into locked video conference with American intelligence officers operating anywhere from the United States to the United Arab Emirates. He could access all the classified computer networks. He could view satellite imagery of just about any place on the planet, either from vast archives or in real time. And if the pictures were inadequate, a program easier to use than text messaging, in his estimation, enabled him to dispatch reconnaissance drones.

  He elected to use a device whose listing in the Intelligence Committee budget-“sound reproduction instrument”-always rankled him. It was, in laymen’s terms, a telephone.

  Drummond opened the cell phone and raised it to his lips, but said nothing.

  A brash young woman’s voice burst through the earpiece. “Jimmy, that you?”

  “No,” Drummond said, “Willie.”

  “This ain’t two-five-two, oh-two-seven, oh-four-four-six?”

  “Sorry, ma’am, no. Good day.”

  Drummond didn’t merely hang up; he disconnected the call by tearing the battery from the back of the phone.

  Charlie was mystified. “What? Was the phone about to self-destruct?”

  “We can’t use it again,” Drummond said. “Even when it’s off, it emits a signal.”

  “Then how will we get the call from your man in Washington?”

  “That was him, with more than a little voice alteration interposed between his handset and my earpiece.”

  “I may have missed something.”

  “‘Willies’ is a proprietary shorthand for hostiles. When I said, ‘No Willie,’ it was a recognition code that signified I wasn’t under duress. His ‘ain’t’ in turn let me know that no one was holding a gun to his head. ‘Good day’ was my sign-off that his message had been received.”

  “I’m guessing you’ve left out the part about what the message was.”

  “It was the number he said he’d meant to dial.” On the cover of the killers’ road atlas, Drummond wrote “2520270446.”

  “So will we need to get another phone to call it?” Charlie asked.

  “No, we won’t need to make any more calls. We just subtract my ‘distress code’ number from it.”

  “A billion, five hundred thirteen million, four hundred seventy-nine thousand, three hundred and eleven?”

  Drummond did the math on paper. “Not bad,” he said.

  “You spend seven days a week handicapping…”

  With a look of either mock dismay or actual dismay-Charlie wasn’t sure which-Drummond again wrote out:

  2520270446 — 1016791135

  This time, he tabulated it as:

  1514589311

  “Actually, we use what’s known as false subtraction,” he said. “In this case it means you have a series of ten separate subtractions. For instance, when you subtract six from zero four numbers in, you don’t borrow from the column to the left, you just invent the ten. Or when you subtract nine from seven-you pretend the seven is a seventeen. False subtraction adds an extra layer of security and makes the math simpler, once you get used to it. The total here is a sort of alphabetical equivalent of ‘one hick.’ The number fifteen equals the letter O, fourteen equals N, etcetera. Now, ‘one hick’ doesn’t sound very encouraging, but it’s probably the closest safe house Burt had at his disposal.” He flipped through the atlas. “Ah, there’s a Hickory Road about twenty miles north.”

  The light at the end of Charlie’s tunnel burst back on at high wattage. With energy to match, he threw the Durango into a U-turn.

  “So what’s the deal with this ‘Hen’ guy?” he asked.

  “From the Cavalry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “First, I need to tell you one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “What I said about Grandpa Tony?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You won’t tell him that you know, okay?”

  A shiver ran the length of Charlie. “There’s no chance whatsoever of that happening,” he said haltingly. Grandpa Tony had passed away eight years ago, and not only was there a funeral, Charlie and Drummond both were pallbearers.

  “Thank you,” said Drummond.

  “So who’s Hen?” Charlie asked.

  To no avail.

  31

  Cranch continued firing questions, and Alice volleyed with enough information to create the illusion of cooperation. Eighty percent of the information was useless, but it would be impossible for him to determine which was which.

  “What about Drummond Clark?” he asked. “How did you get him?”

  “We used a Meals on Wheels van.”

  “So that wasn’t a real Meals on Wheels van?”

  “It was, once upon a time, in Albany. One of our people got it from a junkyard. It still ran. Just needed a little work on the brakes was all.”

  “Were the Meals on Wheels volunteers your people too?”

  “Glorified cutouts, really. They believed Clark was an embezzler and that we were a special investigative unit of the IRS.”

  “What did you want with him?”

  The objective of Alice’s actual operation, code-named “Marquis” (as in de Sade, an explicit reference to Fielding), was to investigate Fielding in general and, specifically, to determine whether he’d hired Lincoln Cadaret to assassinate Roberto Mariateguia, an NSA officer who’d penetrated the Shining Path in Peru. Mariateguia was found bound to a desk chair in a Lima hotel room, having been bled to death by leeches. The gruesome scene yielded no link to Fielding, but certainly it was his directorial style. A more tangible link was that the contractor who’d built Fielding’s three-hundred-thousand-gallon swimming pool recently had installed a smaller version for Cadaret on nearby St. Bart’s, gratis. Alice had found her way onto a murky trail that led to veteran Company man Drummond Clark. NSA had intercepted numerous communications from both Mariateguia and Fielding to Perriman Appliances, where Clark nominally worked. Her hope was that Clark would shed some light on Mariateguia. Her “holiday” in Brooklyn provided only more questions, though, and the unexpected news of Prabhakar Gaznavi’s visit required she hurry back to Martinique before she could get any answers.

  “Drummond Clark works for Perriman Appliances,” she told Cranch, hoping that with only slightly expurgated truth she might elicit the true nature of Fielding’s interest in Clark. “We know Fielding worked there from ninety-one to ninety-four.”

  “Thousands of people worked for Perriman Appliances during that time period.”

  “We also know about the CIA entry Clark leaves off his resume. We wanted to learn his connection to Fielding. But as you know if you heard the audio, the closest thing to a secret I uncovered was that Clark’s son goes by Charlie, rather than Charles.”

  “One just has to know the right questions.” Cranch balled his hands as if they contained a magic key. “I expect to be getting on a private jet to go debrief Mr. Clark shortly. Maybe you’ll get to listen to some of that audio.”

  Until now, Cranch had given Alice no indication that he cared whether she lived or died. Yet here he was trying to impress her. And in so doing, she realized, he’d let slip a bit of information that might prove critical.

  32

  At Hickory Road, thick woods dissolved into a secluded pastoral valley. Charlie turned the Durango in at I HICKORY, the mile-long lane’s only sign, onto a gravel driveway that wound through hundreds of acres of serene pasture neatly fenced by weather-grayed rails. After several more miles, the driveway ended in a cobblestoned circle and a large stucco-over-stone colonial farmhouse with a commanding view of old-growth orchards and a barn that almost had to have been the basis for the Wyeth painting. Everything was copper as the sun sank into the hazy foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  As he turned off the engine, he heard only a mild breeze, the whinnying of h
orses, and the soft-shoe of a stream. Nudging Drummond from a nap, he said, “If we need to hole up somewhere while Hattemer straightens things out, this wouldn’t suck.”

  “Burt Hattemer?” Drummond asked, as if there had been discussion of several Hattemers. Clearly the nap had not recharged him.

  “Christ. Please don’t tell me he’s really one of them?”

  “Them?”

  “The people you used to work with who keep trying to kill us?”

  “Right, right, of course. No, we’re okay. Burt’s a good friend.”

  Despite the assurance, Charlie thought only of how Hattemer might prove their undoing. There was an H in Hattemer, and an E. But at least there was no N. If his name were Hatten, Charlie would have insisted they drive the hell away this instant.

  “Come on inside before y’all catch your death,” came a squawky voice.

  It belonged to the man who stood atop the marble front steps, holding open the door. Seventy if a day, he wore a parka over long underwear surely purchased in his beefier years; the bottoms hung like pantaloons until sucked into high rubber boots. In and around his assortment of puckers and pits and creases was a cheery face topped by a thicket of white hair.

  Ushering Charlie and Drummond into the vaulted foyer, he said, “I’m Mort, the caretaker, and I’m it for the staff here during winter months, so don’t be cross if your suppers are nothing fancy.”