Like them, he flattened himself against the front wall and peered out a window. The Hector look-alike and two other men lay outside, on the stretch of dirt between the building and the water. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows of their bodies, making it all the more apparent that the men were not moving and never would again. If there were more of their gang, the barren, rocky ground offered nowhere for them to hide.
“Exactly what I was hoping to see,” Bream said. “The only bad news is this rock’s now too hot for us to do the bomb-for-Alice swap. We gotta go somewhere else.”
“Where?” Charlie asked.
“There’s an uninhabited spit of land a few clicks off Saint Lucia. An associate of mine is standing by with a scientist who’ll do the nuclear physics version of kicking the ADM’s tires.” Bream started toward the giant speedboat bobbing at the dock, the washing machine visible in silhouette in the stern. “Here’s hoping the dead guys won’t mind if we take their boat.”
39
Stanley peered through binoculars. Even before he could see the cigarette boat’s javelin-like bow, he recognized the craft’s characteristic contrail wake.
“It’s them,” he said, passing the binoculars to Corbitt, who was stretched out on a lounge chair on the second highest of three decks of what was listed in the House Intelligence budget as an Escape and Evasion Craft. In fact it was a svelte, seventy-foot-long pleasure yacht, or, as Corbitt put it, “a perk.”
Setting down his scotch, Corbitt pointed the twin lenses at the tall building on the little detention island.
“Three o’clock,” Stanley said.
Corbitt panned. “The cigarette boat?”
“Aye.” There were no other boats in view for miles. There was nothing but water. “We need to get on commo and send a flash to headquarters.”
“A flash cable? What for?”
“An eye in the sky.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“Cigarette boats can go ninety miles an hour, and even faster if the folks on board don’t mind burning out the engines. The DEA in Miami finds ‘cigarette butts’ all the time.”
“But a satellite? What’s wrong with radar?”
“Practically useless against craft that fast.”
“Okay, high-speed helicopters?”
“They’re fine, but to chase anyone, they’d have to get out here, by which time …”
Corbitt sat up, still looking through the binoculars. “I can’t make out anyone on the boat,” he said. “I mean, I’m sure there is someone, but-”
Frustration cooked Stanley. “It’s. Them.”
“A gut thing, eh?” Corbitt said, no doubt itching to recite the line emblazoned on posters in Langley’s corridors since the sixties: The Agency has hundreds of brilliant analysts so that operators won’t have to rely on hunches.
“This isn’t some kind of sixth sense,” Stanley said. “Just two hours ago, after learning that the targets were at Detention Three, Carthage KO’d one of our officers and gave her backup team the slip. In any case, why would a cigarette boat be at a detention facility?”
Corbitt hoisted himself from the chaise and walked aft, struggling to maintain his balance, a landlubber if there ever was one. “Javier,” he called up to the bridge. “Radio Detention Three and see if anyone’s escaped or anything like that.”
He returned to his chair and his drink while the man at the helm punched a number into the radio set.
Stanley stared down at his own ordinary cell phone, a temporary replacement for the satphone that Drummond Clark had thrown into the Baie de Fort-de-France last night. Nothing close to a signal now, damnably.
Corbitt patted him on the shoulder. “You know the playbook, bud,” the base chief said. “I need confirmation. If it just turns out to be a drug dealer visiting an inmate, my division chief would come down on my ass like you wouldn’t believe.”
“If it is the men we’re after, and you lose them, what will your division chief do?”
“It certainly wouldn’t be my fault for going by the book. Do you have any idea what it costs to redirect a satellite? More per hour than flying a 747.”
This was why Stanley admired the Cavalry. Their operations incurred collateral damage-put bluntly, innocents fell victim to cross fire-but at least there was action.
“Nobody’s answering,” Javier called down from the bridge, mystified.
Corbitt relented, cabling the chief of the Latin America division, who flashed the satellite request to headquarters.
Twenty-one minutes later, headquarters approved a redirect. Thirty-four minutes after that, the Latin America desk had a picture. Given the analysts’ subsequent assessment that the cigarette boat had landed at one of fourteen small islands within a fifty-eight-minute radius of the detention center, that imagery came approximately three minutes too late.
40
It was hard to believe, but the nuclear weapon inspection site was idyllic, a sparkling white beach ringing a secluded clear blue lagoon. A canopy of palm fronds provided both shade and protection from eyes in the sky. While Drummond lay against a coconut palm, watching the gentle waves curl and whiten, Charlie stood on the beach alongside a slight, bespectacled man of about forty who had introduced himself as Dr. Gulmas Jinnah, nuclear physicist. They watched Bream and his brawny “associate”-whom he called Corky-haul the washing machine off the beached cigarette boat.
Jinnah certainly looked the part of a scientist-he was thin enough that Charlie would have believed he absentmindedly forgot to eat. In spite of the high temperature, the man wore a starched white long-sleeved dress shirt and a tie.
“So you are from where?” he asked.
“Brooklyn.” Charlie hadn’t anticipated that the serious man, about to inspect a nuclear weapon, would shoot the breeze.
“I so would love to go to New York City someday.”
Charlie took that to mean that New York City wasn’t the bomb’s destination.
“How about you?” he ventured. “Where are you from?”
“Lahore. Underrated city. Definitely worth a visit if it were not for the strife in the Punjab. I hope we shall see a resolution to it soon.”
According to Alice, a Muslim separatist group from the Punjab had dispatched representatives to Martinique to purchase the ADM the same day that Fielding died. Charlie now speculated that, having left Martinique empty-handed, the same group had devised the rendition plan.
Taking into account Bream’s tight timetable for the delivery of the bomb, Charlie asked, “So you figure the strife will end with the ‘special occasion’?”
“What special occasion?”
“Isn’t there a special event in India a few days from now?”
“Vasant Panchami?”
“What’s Vasant Panchami again?”
“It’s a Hindu festival celebrating Saraswati, who many believe is a goddess of music and art.”
“So the ADM will be part of the Vasant Panchami fireworks?”
Jinnah stared at Charlie as if he were speaking an alien tongue.
“I take it Vasant Panchami’s not the day you’re planning to detonate the bomb?” Charlie said.
“Detonate the bomb?”
“What else would you do with it?”
The Indian drew away. “I am here on behalf of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Trombay. Our aim is to prevent illegal arms dealers like your father from selling such weapons to parties who would not hesitate to detonate them-for instance, the terrorists in the Punjab.”
Jinnah was an excellent liar, Charlie thought, or an even better cutout.
What mattered was that Jinnah was not an excellent physicist, or at least that his arsenal of electronic gauges would fail to detect that the ADM’s uranium pit contained the enriched uranium version of fool’s gold.
After a careful examination, the Indian deemed the weapon “the real deal,” to the satisfaction of everyone but himself.
Bream placed the satellite phone
call, commencing Alice’s liberation, and video of her face flickered onto his satphone display, terribly out of focus. Still, Charlie drank it in.
The picture sharpened, revealing her to be standing outdoors, in a rural location, at nighttime. She was pale and, despite a parka and a thick woolen cap, shivering, exhaling streams of vapor that were illuminated by a streetlamp.
“Chuckles,” she exclaimed. Another of her safety codes. “How’s it going?”
“It’s a laugh a minute here,” he said, signifying all was well on his end. Relatively.
“And my other friend?”
Bream pushed a button near his mouthpiece, possibly initiating voice alteration. “Hang on,” he said. He angled the lens at Drummond, who had fallen asleep. “Captain, you have a call.”
Drummond rose wearily. He eyed the satphone’s display without recognition. “How are you?”
“Very excited about the prospect of using a ladies’ room without people watching me.”
“Oh.”
“Okay, enough chitchat.” Stuffing the satphone into a pocket, Bream waved at the washing machine. “Time for you fellas to step up to the plate.”
Charlie suddenly thought of all the things that might have gone wrong with the bomb’s delicate inner workings after sitting in a damp cave for weeks and then bouncing around the Caribbean. “Dad, do you remember how to use this?” he asked.
“Of course,” Drummond said. “I helped write the Perriman manual.”
“This is the souped-up model.”
“Oh, right. It isn’t an ordinary washing machine, is it?”
“Right.” Charlie felt the weight of his responsibility triple.
With a yawn, Drummond stepped to the water’s edge, then smiled as the bubbly surf trickled through his Crocs’ ventilation holes. Corky traced Drummond’s movements with an Uzi. In his late twenties with long tangles of sun-bleached hair, Bream’s associate could have passed for a surfer if it weren’t for the especially grim Grim Reaper tattooed over much of his back, its outsized bloody sickle curling around his neck.
Charlie carefully opened the washing machine’s lid. Even the fool’s gold of uranium was highly volatile, and it was hot enough inside the machine to broil a chicken. Hoping to sidestep the demonstration altogether, he pointed out the steel strip on the control panel. “The code is this sequence of fifteen numbers,” he said. “Five for each of the PAL knobs inside.”
“Ah.” Jinnah squinted. “Show us, if you please.”
“Yes, if you please,” Bream repeated, without any of the cordiality.
Charlie bent into the machine. He cleared a path through the jungle of wires to the permissive action links, three big numeric dials, like those on floor safes. If he were to misdial the fifteen numbers more than twice, an anti-hacker device would render the system unable to detonate. Or worthless for today’s purposes.
He carefully clicked to the first number, 37. Sweat stung his eyes. Millimeters at a time, so as not to dial past a number, he input the remaining two-digit numbers on the first dial, then began on the second.
In a bit under five minutes, though it seemed like well over an hour, he finished. Now, even if he had correctly entered the code, who was to say that the sensitive detonation mechanism still functioned?
The readout panel duct taped to the inside of the lid was lifeless. Then it began to glow a pale green. Black characters formed against the backdrop … 20:00. And a second later, 19:59.
Charlie pumped a fist. “Your turn,” he said to Bream.
His eyes on the readout and his face a shade whiter than before, Bream snapped open the satphone. “Okay,” he said into it. “Give her her bus fare and her parting gift.”
Alice’s captors had agreed to hand over ten 100-euro notes and a loaded gun before releasing her in proximity to public transportation, presumably somewhere in Europe. She would then tell Charlie that she was safe.
Bream showed his satphone to Charlie. On the display, Alice stuffed a sheaf of bills into her parka, checked the mag in a pistol, then walked backward, keeping the barrel leveled at whoever held the satphone on her end.
“We’re good, Chuckles,” she said. “See you in St. Louis.”
By St. Louis she meant Paris. Dr. Arnaud Petitpierre, the neurologist who ran the Alzheimer’s clinic in Geneva, had a daughter studying art history at the Sorbonne. Without drawing undue attention, Petitpierre could minister to Drummond at a safe house with a view of the Ile Saint-Louis-hence the code name.
Charlie watched Alice recede down a deserted, snow-lined country road. The odds of seeing her again seemed awfully long.
His thoughts were interrupted by Bream. “Chuckles, how about you do everyone here a favor and turn off the nuclear bomb?”
Once Charlie did, Bream let out a whoop, quickly adding, “Now let’s get the hell off this rock.”
Corky dollied over a black plastic case big enough to hold a man. The ZODIAC logo gave Charlie a clue to both its contents and Bream’s plans. He knew Zodiac boats as the wobbly rubber rafts on The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.
Watching Jinnah help Corky lower the case to the sand, Charlie asked Bream, “Is that our ride home?”
Bream laughed. “No, that’s transport to the mother ship for Doc Jinnah and Corky and their passenger.” He cocked his head at the washing machine. “The Culinary Institute of America won’t think to look for a rubber raft. You, me, and Pop can take the rent-a-plane Corky and the doc came in.” He pointed to a clearing on the far side of the woods. The tail of a small airplane glistened in one of the few rays of light that pierced the ceiling of branches and leaves.
“To where?”
“You want to go back to Europe, right?”
“You’ll take us there?”
“Would if I could. That plane is from Saint Lucia and it’s not good for much more than a dime tour of the area. But if we fly it back to Castries, you won’t need to go through customs-there’s no need for you to even leave the tarmac. Just play rich tourists and buy your way onto a general aviation flight. Go to some little airfield in Europe.”
It sounded like a fine plan to Charlie except for one large blemish: Bream’s clear incentive for him and Drummond to be dead. Then again, the pilot knew that if he let them live, they wouldn’t dare go to law enforcement. So, from his standpoint, giving them a lift ensured their silence as well as bullets would. Allowing them to leave safely also meant two less bodies left on his trail, and no risk of reprisal from Alice or Drummond’s former colleagues.
Charlie looked to Drummond for reassurance. His father just stood watching the Zodiac assembly like a kid at the circus. From the big case, Corky had produced bright red fiberglass boards that snap-locked together, forming a plastic deck big enough to support a Clydesdale. Jinnah meanwhile unrolled a giant rubber bladder and plugged an electric pump into a portable generator. In seconds the bladder took the shape of a hull and the men transformed metal pipes into a cargo hold and a base for seats and a control panel.
Turning back to Bream, Charlie asked, “Wouldn’t two tourists suddenly chartering a flight to Europe set off alarm bells?”
“Yeah. That’s why your pilot files a local flight plan. Once you’re out of Saint Lucia, he’ll call in a revised or emergency flight plan-he’ll know how to play it. When you land, you may have to answer a few questions …”
“But at least we’ll be out of Dodge,” Charlie said. He was generally satisfied with the plan, in no small part because it gave him one more chance to draw Bream out. And this time, he knew just how to do it.
41
The twin-engine plane climbed into clouds.
“You have to tip your hat to those Indians,” Charlie said to Drummond, across the aisle in the first of three rows. “I mean, all the intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the world couldn’t find us, but somehow they did. And now they’ve managed to score themselves the terrorists’ equivalent of the Holy Grail.”
Despite the conversation,
following the bumpiest takeoff since Kitty Hawk, Drummond nodded off.
As Charlie had hoped, Bream turned around in the cockpit. “The thing you’ve got to ask about your so-called intelligence agencies is just how bright their best and brightest really are,” the pilot said. “For one thing, why are they making less money than plumbers?”
“Or even charter pilots?”
“Some charter pilots do better than others.”
Charlie sensed Bream could be persuaded to talk. He had first noted the pilot’s surplus of pride during their flight from Switzerland, when Bream gloated over fooling Charlie with his Skunk Works story. While clothing that made a man more difficult to identify was de rigueur in Spook City, Bream dressed to accentuate his physique. When fleeing the cellblock, he’d taken precious time to detail his “lucky” marksmanship on arrival at Detention III. And he was burning now to claim his share of credit for this operation. Charlie could practically feel the heat.
“So how do you think the Indians found us?” Charlie asked.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“So they did tell you?”
“Gimme a molecule of respect here, Chuckles.”
Bull’s-eye. “I thought you’re just a glorified courier.”
Bream sat back, shifting his focus to the instruments.
Charlie feigned interest in a cloud.
Bream cleared his throat. “After Fielding bit the dust, I heard from one of his goons, a guy named Alberto.”
Drummond stirred. “Gutierrez?”
“Know him?” Bream asked.
“Alberto Gutierrez and Hector Manzanillo were practically joined at the hip,” Drummond said.
Had the mention of the criminals sparked another episode of lucidity?
“Yeah, he was working for Fielding in Martinique,” Bream said. “He offered me a piece of intel so he could raise bail and have flight money. A hundred grand. It was the best investment I ever made. The Injuns are gonna pay me so much, even you couldn’t calculate the rate of return, Charlie.”
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