Still, under the current circumstances, seducing him wouldn’t be easy.
The door opened and he entered to clear her dinner. His eyes took their usual extended tour of her sleeveless dress.
“Hey, baby, how was the grub?” he asked.
She tried but couldn’t think of a single come-on that hadn’t been uttered or performed a zillion times in a zillion cheesy singles bars. Also the crying infant from the next room, evidently a looped recording, was hardly Barry White.
“My compliments to the sous chef,” she said finally.
God, what a flirt, she thought.
Yet he lingered, tensing his arm muscles more than was necessary to lift an empty plastic bowl. In doing nothing, she realized, she was doing all that was required.
“Hector, I’m bored,” she said.
He flashed his Romeo smile. “I’d entertain you myself, but…”
“How about bringing in a TV?”
“The doc said no TV. Sorry, baby.”
“Just for a little while? I won’t say anything.”
“I ain’t worried what you’d say, I’m worried what the boss would say. The smallest TV in this place is, like, fifty inches. How’m I gonna explain why I’m lugging that shit in here?”
“How about a portable radio, then? I’ll make it worth your while, Hector.” She visualized Rita Hayworth batting her eyelashes, then tried it herself.
Flattery tinted his beefy cheeks. “They say you’re a dangerous lady.”
“What am I gonna do with a radio?”
“I don’t know-build a bomb?”
She would put a radio to better use than a bomb. She could sling a channel selection dial at him with nearly the same lethality as a Shaolin throwing star, which wouldn’t draw the attention from the household that an explosion would.
“At least something to read?” Her real aim was a deck of cards.
“He specifically say no books, no magazines, no nothing to read.”
“Bloody hell!”
“Baby, I wish I could.”
Alice sighed. “At this point, I’d be happy just for a pack of cards.”
He shrugged, probably just averse to saying no again.
“Even in maximum security prisons, they let inmates play solitaire,” she said.
“I know, I know, but-”
“What if I play strip solitaire?”
“How do you play that?” he said with indifference. He was a poor actor.
“Each time I lose a hand, I remove an article of clothing. And I only have one article of clothing.”
“You’re probably super-crazy-good at solitaire.”
“How about if I start out with the dress off? Will that do it for you, baby?”
Hector grinned, and still was grinning when he returned with a deck of Bicycle cards in hand. A bonus: Bicycles had “air cushioning,” plastic coating intended to prevent cards from sticking to one another. To a card thrower, it was a full-metal jacket.
She rose to accept the deck. “Hector, have I ever told you that you’re my favorite person?”
He held back. “The dress,” he reminded her.
She unbuttoned the dress and let it spill down her bare breasts and hips to the carpet. Hector’s mouth fell open like a mailbox.
He dumped the cards on the picnic table, then turned away, probably to hide the protuberance at the front of his trousers. Still, he would be able to draw and fire the Beretta well before she could throw a card.
Putting on a lackadaisical air, she took up the deck and extracted a joker from the top. She pinched the center of the card with her thumb and ring finger, as firmly as she could without creasing it, and placed her index finger on the far corner. Card-throwing power is generated by the wrist, but the key to the throw is finesse: The wrist needs to be as relaxed as if propped up by a pillow. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs and stomach, then exhaled slowly. She bent her arm ninety degrees at the elbow, bringing the joker toward her abdomen. With a motion similar to that of a Frisbee toss, but much quicker, she released the card. It sliced the air, likely in excess of fifty miles per hour, toward Hector. The whipcrack alerted him. Just as a corner of the card bit into his jugular. The “crying infant” next door masked his cry.
Alice leaped at him, landing a blow to the side of his head. He sagged beneath her, out cold. She took his Beretta and cell phone, hauled him into the bathroom, used her full strength to lift him into the “water bed,” then lowered and bolted the lid. There was no water in the basin, which was fine-the idea was containment. The villa was big enough that ten minutes would pass before any of the other household staff members or security guards would miss him. If she couldn’t escape in that time, she never would.
“Don’t turn on the water,” came his muffled plea.
To her ear it was serendipity. “But, Hector, that would be like a cone without any ice cream.”
“Please.” His deep breathing was an unmistakable precursor to anxiety-induced hyperventilation. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“What do I want to know?”
“Seor Fielding’s really CIA.”
“CIA what?”
“The real deal: spy, covert ops man-whatever you call it.”
Two days ago Alice more readily would have accepted this-the Drummond Clark connection begged the question. Now she was inclined to dismiss Hector’s information as preposterous. And she hoped it was. What CIA officer would sic the likes of the Knife on an innocent little girl? Hector certainly sounded like he believed what he’d said, though. A CIA link also might explain Fielding’s willingness to subject her to torture. Most criminals feared backlash from intelligence agencies, who famously took care of their own-often, on learning their captive was such an agent, the thugs released him at once and gave him a first-class ticket to wherever he wanted.
“Hector, the way this will work best is if you tell me something I don’t already know,” Alice said, twisting the knob on the face of the tank. Water swelled the hose running from the showerhead into the basin, splashing Hector.
“Okay, okay, okay.” He began to sob.
She turned the water off. “Off for now,” she specified.
“You know about the old CIA guy you talked to up in Brooklyn?” he asked. “Seor Clark?”
“I know a lot about him. Do you know something I don’t?”
“You know Fielding’s gonna snuff him?”
“Why?”
“Something he knows, I guess.”
She scoffed. “CIA men don’t usually snuff one another.” But of course she was here in the first place because Fielding allegedly had Lincoln Cadaret snuff an NSA man, Mariateguia-probably because of something Mariateguia knew.
“He’s not doing it himself.”
“He contracted Cadaret?”
“The St. Bart’s guy, yeah, I think so. And a bunch of other heavy-duty guys.”
So Fielding was a spook who played the role of villain with too much verite. Which happened: When the CIA let the kids play without supervision, things had a way of going Lord of the Flies. Fortunately there were other organizations providing checks and balances, the NSA in this case. Fielding would be brought to justice. Case closed.
Except for the immediate matter of Seor Clark’s continued existence.
“Is Clark still in Brooklyn?” she asked.
“Who knows? His kid’s got the hit teams running all over the map.”
“Charlie?” Alice liked Charlie-she genuinely had been looking forward to drinks with him. She had assumed, however, that he lacked the capacity to care for his father in the best of circumstances.
“He’s giving them fits, that dude.”
Alice intended to marvel at this later. Now, she had a phone call to make. “Hector, I need to go now,” she said, patting the lid. “If you just let yourself relax, it can be quite tranquil in there.”
Hurrying into the bedroom, she heard his screamed protests. Wonderfully muted. He could shout his lung
s out, and no one outside the bedroom would hear him.
She rushed back into her dress and crept into the hall as far as an empty guest room. Once inside, she grabbed the plastic liner from the trash can and wrapped it around Hector’s gun and phone so they would stay dry. She loosed two thick cords from the curtains, knotted them together, and tied one end to the frame of the elephantine mahogany bed; then, gripping the free end, she lowered herself out the window, down three stories of the villa’s shadowy exterior, and into the warm, starlit Caribbean.
The throaty gurgle of a motorboat froze her.
So much for her plan of swimming to the dock and borrowing Fielding’s vintage Chris-Craft.
Taking a deep breath, she let herself sink underwater. The Chris-Craft passed overhead, propellers on each side of the stern churning ropes of bubbles. In seconds, the launch was far enough past that she felt confident in resurfacing.
She made out Alberto standing at the helm and Cranch perched on a bench in the stern, clutching an overnight bag. This was more good luck. When Cranch had said he expected to be getting on a private jet to debrief Drummond, she’d focused only on the security lull that might result. Now she might be able to tail him.
Treading water, she unwrapped and flipped open Hector’s cell phone. She dialed the office of a supposed Potomac, Maryland, insurance agency, ringing a phone on a yacht docked in Martinique’s Pointe du Bout. Her chief answered with a chipper, “Good evening,” the optimal greeting.
“It’s Desdemona with a bow on top,” Alice said. “I need you to get the quick maneuvers gang to wrangle the fastest jet possible at Aime Cesaire Airport in Martinique and have it ready in twenty minutes tops for a game of follow that plane.”
3
Charlie’s plan of attack called for experienced soldiers. To recruit them, he descended from the rickety elevated subway station in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa. Had he not been to Little Odessa before, he might have believed he’d arrived at the neighborhood’s namesake in Russia. Cabbage, onions, and potatoes boiled in pots at sidewalk kiosks. Caviar vendors were as prevalent as Starbucks were in other parts of town. The street signs, the restaurant names and menus, and even the listings on the theater marquees were in Cyrillic. The impassioned chatter on the sidewalks was in Russian. There were bearded old men in Cossack hats and wrinkled women in babushkas out of the pages of Tolstoy.
To blend in, Charlie bought a fake fur Cossack hat from a street vendor. Then he waited in a dark doorway down the block from Pozharsky, the celebrated blintz joint named after a seventeenth-century Rurikid prince-the place was so old and run-down, though, the joke was the prince had been named after it. Pozharsky’s kitchen ran at full steam until four in the morning, catering to two distinct groups, Kingsborough Community College students requiring second dinners and Russian gangsters kicking back after a night’s work.
Charlie’s vigil was rewarded when a red Cadillac Eldorado bombed into a handicapped parking space in front of Pozharsky and six men poured out. Leading the way was the menacing Karpenko, Grudzev’s muscle. The way things had been the past two days, Charlie now thought of Karpenko’s as a friendly face.
Behind Karpenko, Grudzev and four other Russians bobbed into the eatery. Sticking to shadows and lagging far enough behind to avoid notice, Charlie followed.
The thugs converged on a big, wooden corner table covered with decades worth of knife and fork carvings. The eight undergrads seated there had just been served steaming blintzes and pierogi. At the sight of the new arrivals, they grabbed their plates and vacated, going to the end of the line to wait for another table.
Paying the students no notice, Grudzev and his cronies heaved themselves onto the chairs. Grudzev corralled a plate left behind by a panicked coed and took up a gooey cheese blintz as if it were a candy bar. To the waitress, something of a Ukrainian Dolly Parton, he said, “Tatiana, I want your melons.”
“The restaurant have no fruit, Leo,” she replied in earnest.
Karpenko laughed, pounding the tabletop with such force that a water glass flew off and shattered against the faded harlequin floor tiles. He didn’t stop laughing until Charlie slid into the vacant seat beside him.
The Russians all glared at Charlie. Activity and conversation at surrounding tables lulled. Charlie saw a young couple drop a twenty on their table and hurry off, their egg creams not even half finished.
“You here to pay up or you fucking suicidal?” Karpenko asked. His English was slightly better and less accented than Grudzev’s.
“Yes to the first part, maybe to the second part,” Charlie said.
Karpenko’s hand dipped under the table, to a gun tucked into his shiny tracksuit pants no doubt. Two days ago, fear would have frozen Charlie. He still felt fear, but it was relegated to the background by his sense of mission.
Looking past Karpenko, he said to Grudzev, “I have your money. I also have a business proposition for you.”
4
Holding his breath against the wake of musky cologne and garlic, Charlie followed Grudzev up a narrow flight of stairs to an empty private functions room. Charlie smarted in nine or ten places from the “pat down” Karpenko had administered in search of a wire, resulting in the temporary confiscation of his new cell phone.
They sat at a table and Grudzev opened the shopping bag from Yuri’s, the convenience store up the block, where Charlie had bought the prepaid cell phone. The Russian dumped out the stack of hundreds and flicked through it with the practiced dexterity of a bank teller. An hour ago the money had been in a Chinese take-out container. He grunted his approval.
“And now, how about a way to make that seem like chump change?” Charlie asked.
“This better no be a fucking horse.”
“I’m totally over that action.” Charlie paused to look around the room, as if wary of snoops himself. “Here’s the story: My father, who has Alzheimer’s, gets out of bed at four yesterday morning. He forgets he’s on sick leave and goes to the office. Perriman Appliances.”
“Cheap crap.”
“I know. That’s why they’re way the hell up in Morningside Heights. So, anyway, nobody’s in yet when Dad shows up. He’s sort of in a daze, and he goes down the stairs to the basement and opens a closet that’s supposed to be locked. It leads to another flight of stairs, then into a tunnel and, next thing he knows, he’s in the old Manhattan Project complex. I don’t know if you know, but during World War Two-”
“Yeah, yeah, I saw thing on History Channel.” Grudzev slid his chair closer to the table. “I thought that place was sealed off.”
“It’s supposed to be. But some Columbia scientist types have gotten in. Evidently they’re planning to moonlight as arms dealers. My dad’s an old physicist. He could tell that they’d put together a ten-kiloton atomic demolition munition. You know what an atomic demolition munition is?”
“Of course, ADM.” Grudzev’s flat nose twisted as if he smelled a rat. “Why you telling me this?”
“You deal weapons. You could retire on this, right?”
“Or get killed before I can spend this.” Grudzev patted the sweatpants pocket that contained his new stack of hundreds. “What’s in it for you?”
“Dad wandered out and went home a little while later, before anyone saw him. But they snatched him back tonight-to sweat him would be my bet. When he talks, he’ll be in real trouble. And so will I.”
“So why you come to me instead of cops?”
“I didn’t think the cops would give me a twenty percent finder’s fee.”
Grudzev flicked a dismissive hand. “Craziness,” he said, as if announcing a verdict.
Charlie had anticipated the Russian would be drooling by now. What had gone wrong? Poor acting? Was the tale just too preposterous? Despite Karpenko’s frisk, did Grudzev suspect a sting? Perspiration sprung from Charlie’s scalp.
Grudzev said, “ Ten points, maybe.”
“Twenty is fair,” said Charlie, hiding his delight at being back in the gam
e. “You’d never figure out how to get into the place without me. Also, I could take the deal to Bernie Solntsevskaya.”
Grudzev was impassive at the mention of his rival. “Thing is, if I am these Columbia guys, I worry you out blabbing now, so I close up shop, like, now.”
Charlie placed his chin between thumb and forefinger, striving for the appearance of the pupil contemplating the wisdom of the master.
“If I can get men and guns- if,” Grudzev said, “I give eleven points.”
For reality’s sake, Charlie argued for fifteen and caved on twelve.
5
Things were going too smoothly, Alice thought.
Within ten minutes of her call, the backup unit had fished her out of the Caribbean. On the yacht ride to Martinique, she used a Birdbook encrypted communication system to cable HQ the lowdown on Fielding, then she took a hot shower, ate a sandwich, and changed into a fresh linen suit. An NSA agent, meanwhile, having paid off a Martinican air traffic controller, learned Cranch’s flight plan-Newark, New Jersey. And one of the Caribbean desk jockeys at HQ tapped into the FAA radar system in case of deviation.
Just ahead of her now stood a Cessna Citation X, its navigation lights giving the medium-sized jet the appearance of a constellation on the dark airport tarmac. The aircraft could cruise at Mach 0.92, reach an altitude of 50,000 feet, and cover 3,500 miles. Equally nice, Alice thought, was the chardonnay in the onboard bar.
She ascended the fold-out stairs and entered the twenty-five-foot cabin, which consisted of six leather seats-each dwarfing most recliners-a kitchen, a bar, and a bathroom complete with a shower. Setting her briefcase on the floor by the foremost of the six seats, she caught sight of Alberto outside, hurrying from the runway where Cranch’s plane had just lifted off. Ordinarily Fielding’s man stood every inch of his six four. The way he hunched now, eyes locked on the tarmac, suggested he’d seen her and was pretending he hadn’t. This wasn’t so much bad luck, she thought, as proof of Murphy’s Law.
She jumped down the stairs and ran after him. “Alberto, wait!”
Once a spy dc-1 Page 25