“The bombs are duds, then?”
“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” Fielding stopped pacing. “Nuclear weapons technology is readily attainable from open sources, but it’s the production of the fissionable material necessary to give a bomb its bang that’s beyond the capability of our customers, not to mention most major industrial countries. Duck’s team found a way to make worthless, run-of-the-mill depleted uranium pass muster at the point of sale as the good stuff-highly enriched U two thirty-five.”
“What happens when the customers take their new washer home?”
“That was the basis for the decision to replicate the Aftscharka ADM. The Russians had built it with the uranium pit deep in place. To fiddle with the uranium requires a complex dismantlement procedure well beyond our customers’ capabilities.”
“And if the customers try to detonate their new bomb?”
“If one of our Aftscharkas is triggered, it still yields some bang. More than some bang, actually. Each packs about a hundred pounds of plastic explosive, which is standard issue to generate critical mass in uranium implosion weapons and enough to take out a small building. So, assuming our customers survive the blast, they won’t immediately know anything was wrong with their weapon. Later, when they find out that they blew up just the small building as opposed to, say, a third of Calcutta, they have no way of determining why. But hopefully it doesn’t get that far. From the moment we make a sale-if not sooner-we have eyes or ears on our customers. We try to plausibly round them up or neutralize them before they blow up anything. In the worst-case scenario, characters who might otherwise have gotten their hands on a real nuke detonate the equivalent of a few sticks of dynamite. And the thanks are due to your father.”
From his windowsill, Hattemer added, “No one outside of our circle will ever know it, but Drummond Clark is one of America’s greatest heroes.”
Charlie felt a stirring of filial pride, along with a spring of optimism:
These men weren’t just Drummond’s allies, they were staunch admirers. A peaceful resolution seemed a possibility after all.
“We should add it is our hope that no one outside of our circle will ever know about his heroics,” Fielding said. He resumed pacing at a rate that pointed toward agitation. “The problem is that a crude sketch of a washing machine to you, Charlie, could be damning evidence to a Pakistani ISI agent who, in the guise of a tourist in Prospect Park, strikes up a conversation with Duck about the hundred-fifty species of trees there. There are other guys like me who peddle Aftscharkas — one of them plays the role of a rival arms dealer, another purports to be a disgruntled Russian general, another still poses as a Senegalese pirate. I’ve never met any of them. From his perch at Perriman Appliances, where each and every bomb was manufactured and prepped, your father was the only operative who knew everybody on the roster, not to mention every name on our entire client list. In hindsight, that information should have been compartmentalized. That’s hindsight though. Now, from the standpoint of national security, he is the very last person the United States can afford to have Alzheimer’s.”
“What did he tell the Pakistani agent?” Charlie asked.
“That was just a hypothetical. To our knowledge, he hasn’t told anybody anything yet. But it’s only a matter of time until he does, or until he picks up the phone to order dinner from that little Vietnamese place on Bedford and inadvertently dials an old customer in Pyongyang and rattles off the names of our players in East Asia, or breaks the news to the man in Pyongyang that his vaunted ten-kiloton Equalizer could barely blow up a straw hut.”
Charlie felt his blood rise. “Help me put this in perspective. If one of your guys gets shitfaced and becomes a risk to blab, what do you do?”
“If one of our operatives were to get that drunk, we’d dry him out before he could fall into the wrong hands.” Fielding’s measured cordiality seemed to belie impatience. “If one of our people is subjected to as little as the gas necessary to pull a wisdom tooth, we send a babysitter along to the dentist’s office. Over the last seven weeks we’ve had a team-a top-notch team-monitoring Duck from a house up the block on Prospect Place. But it proved inadequate. On Christmas Eve, he went wandering, which had happened before. But this time, the Meals on Wheels people and the kindly social worker who took him were really MI6.”
“Helen Mayfield?” Charlie said in utter astonishment.
“Fortunately Helen-or Alice or whatever her real name is-is relatively benign,” Fielding said. “She’d been investigating my alter ego, Trader Nick, who’s essentially a red herring, and she learned nothing of consequence from Duck. The issue is, whoever gets hold of him next time won’t be benign, and he’ll be broken like a piata.”
Charlie tried to set aside the Helen bombshell. “So, in cases like this, you’re just taking the candy out of the piata before the bad guys can?”
“I wouldn’t know. There aren’t cases like this. Usually, with older operatives, keeping secrets is practically ingrained. You also have to take into account the relative sensitivity of their secrets: Generally, when these men and women leave the field, they spend years consulting for us or for outside firms. During that time, classified technology advances at a head-spinning rate, and decades have passed by the time they begin to fail, at which point they could dictate their memoirs to an ISI agent and it would cause little damage, if any. This simply hasn’t been an issue. Until now.”
Charlie wondered whether, in his zeal to remedy the matter with bullets, Fielding had missed the obvious alternative. “Has anyone just taken my father to a doctor?”
“He saw specialist after specialist at CIA Medical Services.” Fielding leaned against the wainscoting’s chair rail, as if wearied by the recollection. “He was prescribed rivastigmine, galantamine, memantine, and everything else with even a snowman’s chance in hell of slowing cognitive decline. All, sadly, to no avail.”
“What about the new experimental treatments in the news? Wouldn’t the CIA have the resources to get him in on any of that action?”
“We could pull strings, sure. In Japan they’ve had nice results using histone deacetylase inhibitors, but only at the early laboratory animal testing stage. The Swiss have had some success boosting HSF1 levels. In worms. It will be three to five years before they can say the same for humans, if things proceed without a hitch.”
Charlie suspected Drummond had information pertaining to medical advances in Geneva, Switzerland, that Fielding did not. But by saying so, Charlie sensed, he would terminate Drummond’s prospects of getting there. Instead he asked, “So why not just put him in one of your secret agent nursing homes for three to five years, or however long?”
“As you and he have demonstrated, they’re not all that secure,” Fielding said.
“The Monroeville Hunt and Fish Club’s the gold standard?”
“Even Langley has trouble with leaks, and that’s with a thousand times the security. Duck would be a lightning rod in the best of those places. And we can’t take risks with Placebo. It’s not just any secret. It’s the kind you die to keep.” Fielding looked to Hattemer. “Were Duck in his right mind, he would take the L without hesitation.”
Hattemer’s eyes fell precipitously, as if the subject repelled him.
Charlie said, “I’m guessing you don’t mean the train.”
“L, as in lethal pill,” Fielding said.
“My father has one of those?”
“As do I, in a ceramic bridge over the farthest two upper molars, with a spring-loaded release activated by the tongue. The capsule itself dissolves in saliva, releasing saxitoxin, which acts in fifteen to twenty seconds.”
“Oh.” Charlie had learned all that he’d hoped to. He burned to stay and put forth an argument on behalf of Drummond’s preservation, but he suspected he stood a better chance arguing on behalf of Marxism here. It was time to get galloping.
The discomfort with which Hattemer shifted kept Charlie rooted, however. The case was a
bout to move to a higher court, Charlie felt. One with a soul.
35
Hattemer descended heavily from the bay window and strode between Charlie and Fielding. Pivoting to face Fielding, Hattemer asked, “How hard is it to imagine that when Drummond was standing at the brink, lucid or otherwise, he wasn’t keen on the abyss?”
Fielding’s golden brows nearly crisscrossed. “It’s possible in the way anything is possible,” he said.
Hattemer looked at Charlie. “Nick here has never been keen on trusting sensitive matters to oversight, and I don’t fault him for that to a certain extent. You find yourself with a sinking ship, you want to do something besides twiddle your thumbs while a bunch of bureaucrats in a conference room a thousand miles away have their general counsel draft memos to all the appropriate committees so that a vote can be taken on whether to get a ‘finding.’ And meanwhile someone, or someone’s aide, may leak the story to the Washington Post. So when whoever Nick had keeping tabs on me found out that I was going home sick this afternoon, he deduced that those of us whose job it is to provide oversight were now aware of his ‘situation’ and, accordingly, the dreaded wheels of bureaucracy were about to start grinding. With no choice but to play by the official rule book, he asked for the chance to aid me in my determination of whether there were sufficient grounds for the National Security Council to consider a waiver to the Executive Orders prohibiting assassination. There are some folks on the council who’ll say that the secret takes precedence, and that this, sadly, is one of those cases where ideal ends come at the cost of morally dubious or dangerous means.” He turned back to Fielding. “I, however, believe it’s our obligation to take care of Drummond. I don’t care if it means putting a hospital bed in Fort Knox.”
Charlie wanted to leap up and applaud. The prevailing seriousness limited him to a negligible smile, and perhaps even that was too garish: Fielding seemed to take a measure of him and dismiss him as nothing, all in a glance.
“We’ve had enough trouble in the past two days,” Fielding told Hattemer. “Any more and we risk word spreading to what extent our ordinary appliance salesman is no ordinary appliance salesman. The entire operation could be blown. He made a decision in his choice of career to place the service of his country before his own life.”
“The ‘L’ is taken when in enemy hands,” Hattemer said. “I was under the impression we’re on the same side he is. On our side, when our people are in trouble, the fundamental guiding principal is We Take Care of Our Own, even if that means moving a mountain.”
“We are taking care of our own, the hundreds of our operatives and the millions of innocent citizens whose lives are in the balance as long as he keeps getting up in the morning.”
Hattemer nodded. “Some of them might die. Or they might not. Either way, we don’t set aside our ideals whenever it’s convenient.”
“Sometimes in this business, taking care of our own means taking care of them.” Fielding pantomimed shooting a gun. “We may not like it, but we do it-you know that.”
“Well, we can’t do it, under any circumstance.” Hattemer’s face reddened. It seemed Fielding had stepped on an especially sore spot. “Think about what Ryszard Kuklinski said when he fled the Soviets: ‘America is the only country in the world which does not abandon its people.’ If our people ever worry about being burned by their own, they’ll be less willing to take risks. Then we’ll be trounced, because the bad guys like risk too much, and because we’ll have ceded the high ground. The high ground isn’t just the most secure place to be, it’s what makes us the good guys.”
Again Charlie felt like clapping. Fielding did clap. It looked and sounded so. But afterward a wisp of bluish smoke rose from his hands, from an aperture in what Charlie initially had taken to be the Lincoln’s keyless remote.
Hattemer hit the floor like a felled oak, blood springing from his chest. While struggling to staunch the flow, he died.
Shock pinned Charlie to the couch.
“He left me with no choice,” Fielding said, as if seeking absolution. “The ship is indeed sinking, and he was the proverbial fifth man in the lifeboat. You’re familiar with that proverbial lifeboat, yes?”
“Don’t know that one,” Charlie could only mumble.
“If there are five men in a lifeboat that holds only four, you have to toss one man overboard. If you keep all five, you see, the boat sinks and everyone drowns.”
Charlie felt like saying, “I give that a three, on a scale of one to ten for Justifications for Playing God.” But the ideological mania-or possibly just plain mania-burning within Fielding would not be doused by any sort of reasoning. “Got it,” Charlie said instead, as if he meant it.
Fielding seemed mollified. He pushed a thin, metal-jacketed projectile into the “keyless remote,” then aimed the weapon at Charlie.
“Now, where is he?” Fielding asked.
Charlie looked away and considered his options. He watched the last log in the fireplace roll over, smothering the flame.
With resignation, he said, “Upstairs resting.”
36
With the keyless remote aimed at him, Charlie was forced to return the SIG Sauer, surrender the Walther he’d wedged into the back of his waistband, then silently precede Fielding up the stairs.
They came to a wide, dimly lit hallway lined with pastorals in oil and seven tall doors. Fielding turned with shoulders raised. Charlie pointed to the farthest door.
Fielding trod the creaky planks as gingerly as a cat. Charlie followed, just as careful to be quiet. Cooperating now was his only chance of survival.
At the door, Fielding waved Charlie ahead. Charlie gripped the crystal doorknob, twisted it without a sound, then tapped open the door. With the curtains shut, the room was nearly black, but the spill from the hallway sconces was enough to reveal, in silhouette, the man beneath the comforter on the four-poster bed, a halo of white hair against a pillow. Fielding inched past Charlie and into the room.
Charlie believed his greatest advantage was that Fielding wasn’t expecting him to try anything. Elbowing his fear aside, Charlie backed into the hall and took a silent step toward the stairs.
He heard the snap of the light switch in the wall plate back in the bedroom. No light came on. Of course. He’d yanked the fuse twenty minutes ago. Still, in a second or two, Fielding would know he had captured not Drummond but Mort.
Charlie ran for all he was worth. To the landing. Fourteen stairs in four bounds. Then into the bathroom beside the den. He jumped onto the toilet seat-he’d closed it ahead of time. He dove through the already-raised window, landing in a prickly hedge behind the house.
Bouncing to his feet, he raced to the toolshed. The open Durango sat on the structure’s far side, driver’s door open, engine idling softly, dashboard dimmed to nothing, and headlights off. Charlie flew in.
Now, conspicuous was desirable. He popped on the high beams, slammed the accelerator for maximum tire squeal, then tore into the gravel driveway.
Once the hilly driveway dipped to a point that the Durango was out of sight of the house, he swatted off the headlights and slowed to as close to a crawl as first gear would allow. He turned onto a pasture, then bobbed for about a hundred yards to a onetime hay barn, parking on the side that faced away from the house.
He opened the driver’s door, in slow motion, for fear that the sound would carry over the open fields, slipped out, then closed the door just as gingerly. With an armful of winter clothing and other provisions found in the mudroom, he stole to the barn’s side door and ducked inside.
Candicane was waiting. Drummond was dozing between a pair of horse blankets in the hayloft.
37
Charlie led Drummond and Candicane out of the hay barn. “Where were you?” Drummond asked at normal conversational volume. The fallow fields between them and the house had the acoustics of an amphitheater. In addition, the night was extraordinarily quiet; snow had begun to fall, and the flakes could be heard tapping down i
ndividually.
“I was doing what I said I was going to do,” Charlie whispered.
“Oh.”
Charlie helped him onto the saddle, then pressed his own shoe onto one of the stirrups and winched himself aboard. Squeezing in ahead of Drummond, he draped the horse blankets over their legs for warmth, then gave a rendition of that fusion of cluck and kiss with which jockeys started racehorses.
And they were off!
The ride was bumpy at first. It smoothed out as Candicane picked up the pace. At top speed, perhaps fifteen miles per hour, though she began to breathe hard-nostrils venting shafts of steam-Charlie felt like he was aboard a hovercraft. The house on Hickory Road shot aft. Quickly it was a flicker on the horizon, then it was swallowed by the night.
Charlie directed the horse to the trailhead at the base of the ridge. A hand-painted trail marker pointed to Bentonville, a dot of civilization two miles due east over the Massanutten Mountain, according to the atlas he’d used in formulating his plan, though possibly much longer along a windy, wooded trail. The hope was to obtain a vehicle in Bentonville.
Innumerable bends and inclines slowed Candicane to little more than a trot, but the trail seemed as familiar to her as her bit. Woods enveloped them. Charlie hadn’t known that darkness could be so black. Or silent. Peace and quiet, he reflected, is an oxymoron to city dwellers accustomed to the soothing drone that’s the sum of the subway, thousands of motor vehicles, and millions of people. He took in a deep breath of pine and felt flush with satisfaction at his escape. At all times, he kept a hand within reach of the saddlebag. When readying Candicane, he’d packed his mother’s Colt, reloaded by Drummond with some of the armory’s worth of bullets found in the Durango.
Candicane’s mane now glistened with snow. Flakes turned to steam on impact with exposed parts of her hide. She slowed when a small stream came into view. Her breath was ragged.
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