Twice a Spy dc-2

by Keith Thomson

  Stanley first drove by Jerry Hill’s house. Last summer Hill had purchased the sprawling adobe villa, which was painted a shade of yellow Stanley speculated was called canary. Its flat roof was tiled with the traditional red clay. Behind it was a swimming pool-or, possibly, a multi-tiered artwork in white ceramic that contained turquoise water whose far edge ran along the hundred-foot-high seawall. The property’s many bushes and hedges were so smooth and symmetrical, it appeared that they were maintained with a barber’s scissors and a level rather than with a hedge trimmer. The grand front lawn was as spotless as a kitchen floor; when a tiny leaf fluttered down from a lime tree, Stanley half expected a servant to come running.

  The neighboring home was nearly a twin to Hill’s, but painted a robin’s-egg blue with a flamingo pink roof-yet, somehow, all in all, quite conservative, if not stately. It had a commanding view of vast and exquisitely manicured gardens as well as much of the Mediterranean. According to a DCRI report, Abdullah, under the name Charboneau, was renting this property for more per month than Stanley paid in rent per annum.

  Stanley proceeded two miles to the staging area, a secluded elementary school whose students and faculty were on Christmas vacation. In the cafeteria, where most of the two hundred or so undersized chairs rested upside down on long tables, he conferred with his counterparts from the DCRI and the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, the international intelligence agency, who had brought along ninety-two members of the elite special ops unit they liked to call the Secret Army of Paris.

  To avoid the risk of placing the Hill family in the cross fire, Stanley decided to grab Abdullah at the Charboneau villa, despite the presence of at least five armed guards.

  Shortly after sundown, a man dressed as an Electricite de France worker cut the power to Charboneau and Hill’s entire road, enabling the special ops troops to advance under cover of darkness and establish a tight perimeter around Graceland-the code name du jour for Fat Elvis’s digs. Additional troops sealed off potential escape routes. Any noise was masked by the waves crashing against the rocky seawall.

  There was a time when Stanley would have joined the assault team. Now he watched from the safety of a comfortable leather chair inside a contractor’s van parked by an empty house eight blocks away. His DCRI and DGSE counterparts occupied identical chairs on either side of him. The three men focused on the pair of large monitors relaying Graceland through miniature cameras concealed on the special ops agents.

  As the troops began their covert advance, a bearded young man slid out of one of Graceland’s kitchen windows, apparently making a run for it. The two agents in closest proximity swapped uncertain glances, like outfielders circling underneath the same fly ball. A third agent reached a hand from behind a topiary bush, tripping the fugitive.

  Stanley wondered whether Abdullah was using the bearded man as a diversion.

  A moment later, Graceland’s grand, round-topped front door creaked inward. The frosted-glass transom and sidelights offered no clue as to who or what was within the cavernous foyer. As if drawn by a giant magnet, the Frenchmen’s rifles swung in unison toward the opening.

  Hands over his head in surrender, Abdullah stepped out. He wore only an open terry cloth robe and sweatpants. The hairy belly that drooped over his silk boxer shorts was a larger version of his bloated, scruffy face. Squinting out at the forest of rifle barrels, he said, in thick North African-accented French, “What the fuck, we forget to pay the electric bill?”

  10

  Stanley drove his rental car thirty minutes along Nice’s winding coastal road to Haut-de-Cagnes, a tiny hilltop city practically unchanged since the Middle Ages. Because of the maze of narrow and precipitously sloped streets, it would have been impossible for another car to follow him. It was challenge enough to make the tight turns without first having to back up his tiny Renault two or three times. If he’d rented a midsize Renault, he would have had to park well shy of the safe house and proceed on foot.

  He centered his thoughts on the evening’s objective: Convince Abdullah to play ball. The strategy was simple. Stanley would say, “I just want a yes or a no, Ali. Yes, and you can be a hero, plus keep your millions. No, and you’ll be neck-deep in shit for your remaining years-or days.”

  Stanley parked near an alleyway that he might have missed without the GPS, even in daylight. At its far end sat a stone restaurant, shuttered now. The place looked at least five hundred years old. Above it was a warren of small apartments.

  Getting to the third-floor safe house required climbing such a narrow spiral stairway that Stanley wondered if the portly Abdullah would have to be brought up some other way. In which case, Stanley would be envious. Half a flight and his hip was on fire.

  He braved the remainder of the stairs, reaching the apartment at 1900 hours. For the first time since 0700, he realized he was hungry. It had been years since the events of a day made him forget to eat.

  He liked that.

  Safe houses were generally stocked with little more than instant coffee, mixed nuts, and potato chips, stale often as not. Salivating at the prospect of chips regardless, he headed directly into the sagging flat’s kitchen. Although not much larger than a closet, it had two sinks-one a ceramic bathroom model, the other a steel basin suitable for washing dishes. The room also had a corner shower stall so cramped that a person could wash only half of himself at a time.

  Before he could open the cupboard, Stanley heard a pair of staccato knocks at the front door.

  “Qui est la?” he asked with a mix of wariness and grumble befitting the late hour.

  “Thierry?” came a man’s voice.

  “Qu’est-ce que tu veux?”

  “On est la avec ton copain.”

  “Ah, bon.” Stanley opened the door, admitting two DCRI men who prodded in their captive, his hands bound at the wrists behind his back.

  Abdullah looked younger than the forty-five years he was believed to be, due perhaps to his plumpness and the sort of golden tan indigenous to yachting. Walking appeared to strain him, probably due to “accidental” run-ins with elbows and fists belonging to members of the Secret Army of Paris-kidney shots, because they didn’t leave a mark. Or maybe it was just the pain of his defeat. The Frenchmen dumped him onto the sofa and hurried back downstairs.

  The plastic cuffs prevented the arms dealer from sitting up. Regarding them, he said in English, “Please take them off?”

  Deciding to save this as a carrot, Stanley lowered himself into a creaky armchair directly across from the sofa and said tersely, “Ali, je veux simplement un ‘oui’ ou un ‘non’-”

  “Do us both a favor and skip the high school French,” Abdullah said. The fire had returned to his eyes. And the rapid English was spoken with a distinctly Midwestern accent.

  Stanley hid his astonishment. “I guess your high school taught you to speak English pretty well.”

  “Didn’t have to, ’cause it was in Cleveland. Knowing that, does the name Charboneau have any significance to you now, apart from my use of it as an alias?”

  “Is that the name of your high school?”

  “No, Marshfield. I went to Marshfield High. While I was there, Joltin’ Joe Charboneau went from being a bare-knuckle boxer down at the local railyard to starting right fielder for the Cleveland Indians. Sonofabitch not only could knock the cover off the ball; he could open a bottle of beer with his eye socket and drink it through his nose, and he did his own dental work with a pair of pliers. We would have fucking loved it if they renamed the school after him.”

  “I remember him, American League Rookie of the Year in 1979, right?” Stanley said. By it he meant, “What in the name of God is going on here?”

  “1980, actually. Listen, there’s a little matter I need your help with.” Abdullah hauled himself up, bringing his eyes even with Stanley’s. “I just got wind of the fact that an old colleague of ours, Drummond Clark, is about to sell a low-yield nuke to a Muslim separatist group.”

  11 />
  “What time is the meet-up?” Drummond asked for the third time since they had found the BMW in the Hauptstrasse parking lot.

  “One.” Charlie pulled the car into a space among the smattering of vehicles in the Zweisimmen airfield’s small lot. “Two minutes from now.”

  “Thirteen hundred, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to get in the practice of using military time.” Alzheimer’s sufferers often labored to maintain the perception that they were on top of their game. Drummond in this fuzzy state was a 5 on Charlie’s lucidity scale of 1 to 10-1 being a zombie, 10 being laser-sharp, or his old self.

  In Alice fashion, Charlie reversed in favor of another spot-one more attempt at detecting surveillance.

  Nobody, at least as far as he could tell.

  The sleepy Zweisimmen airfield consisted of a few planes and a tiny air traffic control tower atop a proportionate general aviation building constructed of logs and painted mustard yellow; it looked more like a ski lodge.

  Drummond’s eyes darted about. In the throes of dementia, Alzheimer’s sufferers retained the ability to bake a cake or drive a car, even create a Web site. After four decades of clandestine operations, Drummond’s faculty for circumventing danger was hardwired.

  “Everything okay?” Charlie asked.

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  Unfortunately, taking advantage of Drummond’s intuition was often like straining to hear a radio with patchy reception. “I mean, are we safe here?”

  “What about our escape route?” Drummond asked.

  “You said that if we were going to be in a situation where we required one, it would either be at the chalet, during our walk down to the Hauptstrasse, or when I turned the car on and it started to explode.”

  “Oh, right.” Drummond acted as if he remembered. “And just so we’re on the same page: Objective?”

  “Find out if Alice is okay.”

  “Yes, good. And then-and only then-do we get on the plane to Mexico.”

  Seeing no point in correcting him, Charlie turned off the engine and popped his safety belt. Drummond made no move to exit the car.

  “Everything okay?” Charlie asked again.

  “What time is the meet-up?”

  The parking lot swirled with bitter gusts of sleet and the waxy fumes of aircraft hydraulic fluid. As the Clarks made their way to the general aviation building, Drummond reminisced-apropos of nothing, Charlie hoped-about a stealth fighter plane that had crashed in the Nevada desert during a 1979 test flight.

  Jesse James bounded from the cabin of a small jet and intercepted them. Elevated to perhaps six-four by cowboy boots, he cut an imposing figure, his blue jeans and even his ski jacket conforming to muscles that were rocks. He walked with a rolling gait, arms swinging and beefy hands half open, as if poised to toss aside anyone who got in his way.

  “Mr. McDonough, great to see you again,” he said to Charlie, and before Charlie could respond, he reached out to Drummond. “I’m J. T. Bream. And pleased to meet you.”

  Drummond shook Bream’s hand. “Likewise,” he said with too much affection. “What’s your role in this?”

  “Just a glorified courier.”

  “Well, very nice to meet you, sir.”

  Bream pivoted so that his back was to the terminal, his smile fading. “Now, I need you boys to follow me over to the jet and act like you’re looking the thing over. We want Jacques and Pierre inside to believe that you’re a couple of suits deciding on whether or not to hire me to give you a lift to Zurich.”

  Charlie looked to Drummond for reassurance.

  He caught his father bounding toward the jet with the zeal of a child about to take his first flight.

  “So you weren’t kidding about him, were you?” Bream said to Charlie.

  “Wish I had been. Please don’t tell me he needs to fly the plane.”

  “I’ve got that. Please tell me he knows where the thing is hidden.”

  “We can talk about that when we have proof Alice is okay.”

  “Relax, Chuck. We want the same thing here. I don’t see a dime until my people get their device.” Bream unpocketed his satellite phone and clicked a button at the base of its oversized display panel. A video of a small room popped up. It had pale blue walls but otherwise was so featureless that it could be in a motel on the Jersey Turnpike or a budget flat in Bangkok. Alice sat on the only piece of furniture in sight, a plain sofa that possibly doubled as her bed. She was reading a magazine.

  Charlie felt a swirl of joy tempered by fear that this was old video.

  “Can I talk to her?” he asked.

  “You are,” Bream said.

  As if alerted to a new entry to the room, Alice turned, then rose and hurried toward the camera, beaming, apparently, at an image of Charlie.

  A potent mix of joy and guilt left him speechless. He managed, “Are you okay?”

  “Wonderful,” she said, “with a bow on top”-one of her codes signifying that the “wonderful” had in no way been coerced.

  Charlie tried to sort through his jumble of thoughts, not least of which was their predicament. “I forget what my there’s-no-gun-to-my-head code is,” he said. “But there’s no gun being held to anybody’s head on this end. Where are you?”

  “For some reason they won’t tell me-”

  Bream pressed a button on his phone. The display went black. “Okay, obviously, she’s fine. For now. So where to?”

  Charlie needed to be cautious. “Martinique.”

  “I already knew that. Can we be any more specific?”

  “Dad said the city of Fort-de-France. The way it usually works is, once he gets to a place, things become familiar to him. Don’t worry, we’ll find the thing.”

  Wariness slitted Bream’s eyes. “Wonderful.”

  12

  Now that the satphone call was over, Alice expected that her captors would again secure her wrists and ankles and duct tape shut her mouth. The tape came off only when they fed her pieces of nutrition bar or let her sip water through a long rubber tube-a precautionary measure, she thought, which they were wise to use.

  Her mastery of Shaolin kung fu included the ability to sling objects with extraordinary speed and accuracy. She could toss a playing card at forty miles per hour, creating force sufficient to stab an adversary and even, if she struck certain minute pressure points, put him into a coma. If she could get her hands on the satphone, she could throw it at the man she thought of as Frank-he had the Frankenstein monster’s broad shoulders and lumbering gait. His face was hidden by a novelty-store black cotton mask with reflective bulbs over the eyes. He’d yet to say anything within her earshot.

  She knew less about her other captor. She called him Walt for his gleaming blowback-operated semiautomatic Walther PPK. By waving the pistol one way or another, he indicated Get up from the sofa or Sit back down on the sofa and let Frank tie you up again.

  Once she took out the two of them, she would take her chances with the helicopter pilot, who in all likelihood was spending his break time in an adjacent room. Since being chloroformed in Gstaad, she could remember only this room, which might well be a cell in an upscale gulag. A better guess was an apartment in Geneva, rented under an alias. Or an isolated Swiss country house, in which case the duct tape over her mouth was a small bit of deception: She could scream her lungs out here and no one would hear. The blacked-out windows, unrelenting Muzak from unseen speakers, and an electric air freshener that sprayed a sickly sweet vanilla scent were all intended to keep her from picking up clues.

  Still, she had some hints. Her old NSA-sponsored black ops unit had developed something of a niche in renditions. For discretion’s sake, the number of captors was usually kept to three, all mercenaries with allegiance only to their numbered offshore bank accounts. They were fed a cover story regarding the operation. The duct tape over their captive’s mouth was meant to keep the captors from hearing the truth.

  Alice hungrily
eyed the satphone. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you’ll let me check my e-mail?” she said to Frank.

  He shook his head.

  So he understood English.

  “How about just letting me know the score of the Patriots game?” she tried.

  If he were to check the Web, she might snare the phone and launch it toward Walt.

  Frank stayed mum.

  Walt made one of his usual series of gestures: Sit back down on the sofa. Let Frank tie you up again. Let him reapply the duct tape. He punctuated each with a shake of the Walther as if to add, Or you know what.

  She complied.

  For now.

  PART TWO

  Trade school

  1

  What the hell have you stepped in? Stanley asked himself again and again during the nightlong flight from Nice to Washington. The cable he’d received, minutes after spiriting Ali Abdullah over the border to Italy, said little more than REPORT TO HQS ASAP.

  The sun had yet to appear over McLean, Virginia, when Stanley swung his rental car off a still-quiet George Washington Memorial Parkway onto the heavily tree-lined Route 123. In the darkness he nearly mistook the agency’s driveway for the look-alike service road. A sign that was not obscured by a low-hanging bough might have helped. The location of the Central Intelligence Agency wasn’t secret after all; tour bus guides pointed the place out. In many ways, he thought, this was a metaphor for the system. A second cup of coffee and he might stand a chance of puzzling out how exactly. But for now, exhaustion made it feel as if poured cement were hardening in his eye sockets.

  When he had stepped into the headquarters building as a rookie, he was dazzled by the grand, white marble lobby with its famous eagle seal spanning the floor. He was stirred by the stars, carved into the marble wall on the right, anonymously commemorating the men and women who’d given their lives in the service of the agency. As he proceeded from the security portals to the elevators, there was a bit of march in his gait.