Stanley waved at Charlie. “He shot Hadley.” The marines appeared to believe him. “I think she’s dead.”
“He shot her,” Charlie said. “Look at the way she fell over. To his left. We were sitting across from him. Plus we didn’t have a gun at the time.”
The marines exchanged looks.
Charlie realized he’d offered nothing, really, in the way of evidence. Two marines rushed down, swept Hadley off the floor, and carried her up the stairs, leaving a trail of crimson drops.
Stanley followed.
Charlie heard the whine of the engine and the tingling of the rotor blades as the marine helicopter prepared to take off.
“Sir, we need you to surrender your weapon,” said one of the two marines remaining below deck, a stone-faced bruiser who towered over Charlie.
The other locked his rifle on Drummond.
“It’s his weapon!” Charlie said, regarding the door through which Stanley had exited. As soon as the words left his lips, he felt foolish because they didn’t prove a thing.
“Slowly set it on the floor and tap it to me.”
Charlie lowered the Glock an inch at a time. “Listen, we have proof that we’re being framed.”
He looked at Drummond, now being frisked by the other marine, probably the unit’s superior officer given his graying hair.
“Yes, that young man wanted to kill us!” Drummond said of Stanley, with so much indignation that it rang false.
The marines exchanged a dismissive glance.
“Let me just tell you guys one thing, while we have the chance,” Charlie pleaded.
The superior said, “Sir, it would help if you would refrain from speaking now. When we return to the American consulate, you’ll have a full debrief by the CIA.”
Charlie set the gun down. “You’ve got to understand, ‘debrief,’ in this case, is a euphemism for ‘execution.’ ”
The younger marine knelt and snatched the gun. “Please stand, slowly, and face the bar with your arms and legs outstretched.”
Charlie complied. “Just listen, for posterity if nothing else: The proof of everything I’ve been saying is on Korean Singles Online-dot-com.” He received a shove in the small of the back. “Go to Suki-eight-three-five’s page, magnify the left earring-”
The older marine sighed, seemingly in frustration. “Sir, we’d prefer not to have to sedate you.”
A short, chubby man in a suit and tie barreled down the stairs.
“Chief Corbitt,” both marines said by way of greeting.
Charlie looked up at him with a glimmer of hope.
Corbitt looked past them at the lower deck and gaped at the smoldering wreckage. “Holy merde,” he said.
47
Pointe Simon pulsated with a variety of music and chatter, a good deal of which was pickup lines, Stanley supposed. He stepped into the relative quiet and cool of the sort of bar no one bothered to name-it went by 107, its number on one of the little streets in the maze near the ferry docks. Neon distillery promotions cast red and purple on the frayed bar island and the establishment’s two dozen patrons, a mix of locals and travelers on a budget. Although 107 served no food, it smelled vaguely of hamburger.
He spotted an attractive brunette sipping a drink. She wore a slinky floral-printed cocktail dress, the sort sold at the tourist bazaar at the ferry docks, revealing a lithe figure. Most anyone would guess she was a young American or Euro tourist bent on a night on the edge.
Settling onto the barstool beside hers, Stanley asked, “What do you think the chances are that I’ll meet my wife here?”
“A sure thing,” she said, leaning over a salt-rimmed margarita and kissing him on the lips. Recognition code, safety code.
This was Lanier. First name or last, Stanley didn’t know. Probably pseudo anyway. Rumint had it that she’d authored the Ayacucho hit, notable not because she trekked a hundred miles alone through Peruvian jungle and snuck past two hundred Shining Path Senderistas, but because she’d put the whole op together during a half-hour taxi ride from the Lima airport.
“So how was your day, honey?” she asked.
“I’ve had better.”
She regarded the mirrored rear wall, which offered a view of the whole place. Turning back to him, she asked, “So what the fuck went down on the boat?”
“The old man kicked a Croc while I was firing and wrecked my shot. I mean, a Croc!”
“How about that?” She spread a cool, comforting hand over his. “Just another one for the list of You Never Damned Know.”
The bartender slid Stanley a tall glass of something redolent of rum.
“What would you have done?” he asked.
“Don’t know. Spilled the milk. Maybe not spilled the milk. Either way, what we have is Hadley in brain surgery. Doesn’t look like she’ll make it, but even if she does, we’ll see to it that she doesn’t. So all is far from lost.”
“What about the other two?”
“The night, as they say, is young.”
Stanley had been trying to devise a way to get at the Clarks. “FBI’s flying down an excessive number of agents to extradite them first thing in the morning. Meanwhile they’ll be at the consulate guarded by an excessive number of marines.”
Lanier licked salt from her margarita glass. “The good news is, father and son are bound for impromptu detention rooms, in the true sense of impromptu.” All embassy and consulate holding rooms were technically improvised because neither the State Department nor the CIA had the authority to arrest or detain anyone. Nevertheless their architectural plans tended to include oversized “storage vaults” and “fallout shelters” that afforded confinement at least as secure as police holding cells. “The only reason there are bars on the windows there is to keep people from getting in.”
Stanley didn’t see where she was headed. “But we’re people.” She flashed a smile. “People with sniper training.”
48
After a three-minute drive from the Pointe Simon docks, two giant, beige Chevy Suburbans entered a quiet pocket of the city, sliding to a stop in a pitch-black cul-de-sac service alley beneath the American consulate, which occupied the lowest two levels of a nine-story contemporary glass hotel. The monolithic tower, bisected by a block of terraces lit sapphire-gray, reminded Charlie of a stainless steel refrigerator.
Two marines propelled him from the lead Suburban and toward the consulate’s service entrance. Foreboding filled him, so heavy that he strained to put one foot in front of the other. What were the odds, he thought, that the Cavalry would not drop by here tonight?
Before he could see if his father was in the second Suburban, he was prodded down a short flight of cement stairs. Punk rock, from a club in the hotel lobby overhead, shook the clammy air. The men whisked him into a back office hallway. Fluorescent tubes caused the white tile walls to shimmer a pale blue.
Halfway down Charlie spotted another marine, whose uniform said he was Private First Class Arnold. The man’s baby face clashed with his 270-pound weight-room physique. He pushed open a wooden door, revealing an empty room suitable for a copier and some office supplies. “Mr. Clark, sir, you are being placed here for the time being for your own protection,” the marine said.
Two to one the exact words lawyers had fed him.
Charlie’s eyes fell on perhaps the smallest toilet seat in the world. Standing on spindly foldout legs, it fed a disposable plastic bag. Beside the toilet lay a ham sandwich in a vending machine’s triangular container.
Hefting his massive shoulders into an apologetic shrug, Arnold said, “I’ll get you a Coke if the guys outside have got the right change.” He pulled the door shut.
Charlie heard a jangle of keys, then the raspy slide of a bolt, possibly the only detainment measure other than Arnold himself. The window was covered with a cage of bars, but so were all the others along the lower two floors of the building. Probably just to keep the locals out.
Charlie supposed he could stab the windowpane using
one of the plastic toilet legs, in which case fragments of glass would rain onto the sidewalk, snaring the attention of someone in the apartment buildings across the street. Maybe the residents would call the local cops, who in turn would call the consulate and then the marines would-what? Deny Charlie his Coca-Cola?
He leaned his full weight against the door. The wooden slab, although not thick, didn’t budge. Who exactly were the men who broke down doors, he wondered, and how did they do it? If he were to kick at this one, he suspected, he would break his foot. And still fail to budge the door.
The ceiling was an ordinary office-style ceiling, eight soundproof tiles suspended by a tic-tac-toe board of thin metal strips. At one side the strips tripled into a vent from which cool air trickled, suggesting that there was an air duct above. Charlie thought of Drummond’s tale of the prisoners who had escaped Alcatraz via the fan vent.
Standing directly beneath the vent, he could see the air shaft. It was about ten inches high and fifteen inches wide. Even if he could somehow gain access to it-springing from the windowsill or climbing from atop the spindly legged toilet, for instance-a freak-show-caliber act of contortion would be required to enter it, let alone crawl through it. If he were to crawl atop the ceiling grid, like they always do in the movies, the whole works would almost certainly collapse.
He had no better ideas. Not even any other ideas.
But his father might. Hearing the three sets of approaching footsteps in the hallway, Charlie’s hope rose.
On the other side of the door, Private First Class Arnold grunted, “Hey.” He received similar salutations from two other men.
As the new arrivals continued past the detention room, Charlie heard Drummond say: “I’m going to have to take my medicine before bedtime.”
49
They looked like the three-story flophouse’s typical guests. Ideally, that’s what they hoped the prematurely hunched woman at the reception desk would remember about the too-loud American couple who, while checking in for an estimated stay of two hours, debated which was the best of the daiquiris they’d just had at various Pointe Simon bars.
Stanley’s other reason for debating tropical drinks with Lanier was to divert the attention of the woman behind the desk from Lanier’s duffel bag. It was a good Louis Vuitton knockoff, decent camo. But the woman might think it odd that someone checking into a seedy hotel for a couple of hours would pack a bag, let alone such a big bag.
It contained a forty-four-inch-long Remington bolt-action M40A1, the M40 variant with the relatively lightweight McMillan HTG fiberglass stock. Lanier would have preferred to use a Mark 14 Mod 0 rifle with a collapsible stock, but the M40 wasn’t bad given that she’d had just over an hour to devise this op. M40s were common enough; she’d rented this one from a hunting and fishing supply store in nearby Lamentin for “target practice.”
She initially set the bag on the floor of the lobby, so that the woman would miss it from her elevated seat in the Plexiglas-encased front desk. The bag would come into view, however, as Lanier climbed the spiral stairs to the rooms.
So after Stanley got the room key, he lingered at the reception desk and smiled his appraisal of the warbled drinking song cascading down the stairwell from one of the upper floors. The woman smiled along with him.
Then he asked, “Avez-vous des cartes de Pointe-Simon?”
While she rifled through a drawer behind her for a map-the staff here probably didn’t get this request often-Lanier and her bag disappeared up the stairs.
The third-floor room was shaped like a wedge of cheese and smelled a bit like one. The furnishing included a pipe-frame twin bed that looked as if it had survived a flood, a dresser missing one drawer and all its handles, and a nightstand that belonged in a child’s room. Bolted to the top of the dresser, evidently in an effort to thwart theft, was a clock radio that emitted a mechanical grunt each time the digits flipped. It read 6:51. According to Stanley’s watch, the time was 22:13.
“All in all, not bad for forty euros a night,” he said.
Lanier flashed a smile and returned to assembling her bipod near the room’s key feature, the mullioned dormer window overlooking the Foret Communale de Montgerald parkland. She had a clear shot, save for a few palm fronds, at the American consulate.
Peering into her scope, Lanier said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I think I can make out Charlie Clark standing right by his window.”
Charlie turned away from the window when his door opened and Arnold entered with a plastic bottle of Coke. Charlie was about to say thank-you when something or someone crashed against a door down the corridor, followed by a heavy flop of a body against tile floor.
Charlie glanced beyond Arnold. Outside of the next room down the corridor stood the young stone-faced marine from the yacht-the name silk-screened onto his uniform was, fittingly, Flint.
Regarding the closed door, Flint asked, “Mr. Clark, are you all right?”
There was no response from Drummond’s room.
“Mr. Clark?” Flint again asked.
Still no answer.
Did Drummond have an escape plan? Charlie should have felt his hope surge, but he sensed something was wrong.
Sergeant King, Flint’s graying superior officer, came bounding around a corner, an assault rifle in hand. He slowed, leveling the weapon at Drummond’s door.
“Go ahead,” he told Flint.
Kneeling to the side of the door, the younger marine inserted a key, twisted the bolt free of the lock, and tried to push the door inward. When it barely moved, Flint peered through the crack between it and the jamb. “He’s just lying there, sir. Doesn’t look like he’s breathing.”
Charlie held his breath. A cold perspiration coated him. Protocol surely dictated that Private Arnold shut the door to his room, but deferring to basic humanity, perhaps, the marine allowed Charlie to remain in the doorway.
They both watched King move closer to Drummond’s room and Flint throw a shoulder at the door, grab an edge with his free hand, and drive Drummond’s body back. An orange Croc rolled from the room and into the corridor, coming to rest upside down.
With King covering him, Flint ducked into the room.
“I don’t feel a pulse,” he called out.
“Roger that,” the sergeant said. He squatted, disappearing into the room. “Let’s get him to the infirmary.”
The two men picked up Drummond then backed into the corridor, King holding him by the shoulders, Flint by legs that were now white to the point of translucence.
Charlie launched himself toward his father until the barrel of Arnold’s gun lowered like a gate arm.
“Sorry,” the marine said, backing Charlie into the small room and jerking the door shut.
Charlie was pummeled by horror and sorrow, and, at a hundred times the intensity, anger that a hero like Drummond Clark could come to such an inglorious end with proof of his innocence just a few computer keystrokes away.
50
Alice reached Geneva by midnight. To get travel documents, she had to pay a visit to Russ Augenblick, the forger, who did a lot of his business out of a nightclub on the rue de la Rotisserie, L’Alhambar, known for jazz.
She parked the Mercedes on a sleepy residential side street three blocks away, then walked. Her route, with the usual strategic left turns, added four blocks.
Tonight L’Alhambar featured a brass quartet with a predilection for volume. Among its throng of early-twentysomethings, she spotted the slight, fair-haired forger, in a Red Sox T-shirt. He stood by the curlicue bar, part of a small crowd vying to order drinks.
“I need one too,” Alice said, sidling up to him. “Big-time.”
At twenty-five, Russ Augenblick could pass for a choirboy, his wispy attempts at a mustache and beard, paradoxically, highlighting his youthfulness. He regarded Alice as if she were insane. “Dude, you’re hotter than Satan.”
“Oh, you like my new jacket?” Frank’s gray overcoat gave her the form of a traffic
cone. “Thanks.”
“I mean, showing up here. This place has more cameras than a camera store. What kind of super-crazy-desperate trouble are you in?”
“The usual kind. I need your ‘full suite,’ tout de suite.”
He looked down at his sneakers. “I can’t. Not now. Sorry, man.”
“By all means, go ahead and have your beer. My treat, in fact-if the bartender can break a hundred-euro bill …”
“I can’t take you to the workshop while you’re listed as shoot-on-sight. Not even you would take that risk.”
“Yes you can, Stew.”
Despite himself, he blanched. Russ Augenblick was an alias.
“I know about California,” she continued. “But there’s no reason to tell tales out of school, is there?”
While at the NSA, Alice had learned the truth about “Russ,” but she allowed him to continue operating in case he might be of use at some point. Like now. She was prepared to tell what she knew of Stewart Fleishman’s freshman year at Berkeley, where making the scene at off-campus bars was mandatory, the drinking age was twenty-one, and his Massachusetts driver’s license showed his true age. The fake California license he’d bought proved useless because the bouncers ran licenses through magnetic strip scanners-a flashing red light resulted in a long and expensive night with Berkeley’s finest. Fleishman chose to replicate a Delaware license because of its simplicity and relative obscurity. A quick trip to San Francisco netted him a sheet of the same PVC the Delaware Department of Motor Vehicles used, plus a magnetic strip that he programmed so the scanners informed the bouncers that this fair-haired young man was a twenty-one-year-old from Wilmington. His classmates wanted Delaware driver’s licenses of their own. He went into business, and business had boomed, enough that a college degree in economics was redundant. Because it was illegal in the United States to possess, produce, or distribute falsified government documents, he set up shop in Thailand, where counterfeiting was something of a national pastime. He now sold $500,000 worth of fake U.S. driver’s licenses over the Internet per year. Passports, much easier to forge, netted him ten times as much money.
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