Nodding, Doxstader scribbled a note on what appeared to be a sheet of white light hovering above the table.
“The thing is, he probably would have taken into account that my father could land a plane,” Charlie said. “Also, if he really wanted to kill us, why not just shoot us beforehand on the beach?”
Doxstader said, “Sir, if I’m not mistaken, you said that, at that time, your father was suffering from extreme disorientation symptomatic of Alzheimer’s disease.” He checked his notes. “ ‘A four,’ you said.”
“Right, at the time, he couldn’t have flown a kite. But Bream knew that my father had episodes of lucidity. And my father wasn’t our only option. If Alice hadn’t called, someone at one of the control towers in the area might have given us instructions over the radio.”
Eskridge appeared to ponder this, pulling the knot of his tie to the point where it would take some effort to undo. “Mr. Clark, do you have any factual basis for your speculation that the target might be in the United States?”
“For one thing, I don’t see Bream being on the level about his employers. The Injuns, he called them. Every bit of information he volunteered was tailored to a clever cover-it was only at the very end that I saw his redneck act for what it was.”
“So he’s more intelligent than he let on.” Eskridge inspected his fingernails. “There’s a fellow here at the agency. Summa cum laude from MIT, top of his class at the Farm, National Clandestine Service fast track. He had some home trouble. Now he works in Food Service.”
Food Service gave Charlie a new line of thought. “You know, I asked Bream if he’d celebrate the sale of the ADM with a good bottle of wine-I was fishing for where he was taking the bomb. He pooh-poohed me. He’d be having Budweiser, he said, and a rack of ribs. Not exactly standard Mumbai fare.”
“Probably just playing to his cover again,” Eskridge said.
“What if it were one of the bits of truth mixed in to give foundation to the lies?”
“You’d be surprised what you can find in Mumbai,” said Doxstader. “There are now two hundred and forty-four McDonald’s in India.”
Eskridge remained intent on a thumbnail. “Alternately, if you’ve just sold a nuclear weapon to folks who have no compunction about using one, you don’t want to stick around. You want to get bloody well back on your plane. Later, you celebrate, sure. At a good ribs joint, if that’s your thing. Or a sushi bar. I don’t see how it pertains.”
With a sudden sense that he was closing in on the clue that had been eluding him, Charlie rushed his words. “Right after that, I asked him how the collateral would affect his appetite. I was hoping to bring his ego into play. He asked if my knowing he was kept up nights by thoughts of the victims made him less of a villain in my eyes. Then he said that he’d made the decision to go ahead anyway because it’s the wake-up call our country needs.”
Eskridge shook his head. “It’s more likely that, as you said earlier, he wants the mansion. Ultimately, the bad guys all want the mansion. The good guys too.”
Charlie pulled his seat closer to the table. “But if we walk back the cat-”
Eskridge turned to Doxstader to explain. “Old counterintelligence expression.”
The junior man nodded, as if impressed. Charlie suspected they were mocking him, but he forged on. “He made so many disparaging remarks about the ‘Culinary Institute of America’ and other ‘so-called’ intelligence agencies. If the best and brightest were on this case, he said, he wouldn’t have had such an easy time of it. Maybe he was one of you once. It sure seemed like he’d had the same training as my father. Maybe the intelligence community didn’t accept him, or, in his mind, judged him unfairly. And now he wants to prove he was right.”
Eskridge almost sneered. “The way horseplayers do?”
“The thrill of being right drives a lot of people to do stupid things.”
Doxstader looked up. “You know, the G-20 starts this weekend.”
“The G-20?” Charlie said.
“The Group of Twenty. Argentina, Brazil, China-”
Eskridge cut in. “And seventeen other countries, including ours, who send deputies to chat about economic issues. The reason you don’t know about it, Charlie, is the same reason terrorists wouldn’t be interested: no sex appeal. I couldn’t even tell you where they’re holding the G-20.”
“Mobile, Alabama.” Doxstader set down his stylus for the first time. “Gem of a city, precisely the sort of secondary target al-Qaeda’s been focusing on.”
He waited for a response from Eskridge, who focused on a cuff link.
Doxstader wasn’t deterred. “Sir, a number of the top French officials are attending the G-20, including the president-something having to do with Mobile’s French heritage. Also Mobile has close to a hundred miles of coast without anything near the level of security in a Miami or a Long Beach.”
“And wouldn’t the element of surprise be a selling point?” Charlie asked.
Doxstader nodded emphatically. Eskridge cleared his throat in an obvious effort to suppress his young colleague. “You probably don’t need to know this, but we have another source corroborating the India story,” Eskridge said. “A former intelligence operative, one of Alice Rutherford’s captors, tried to sell information to our people in Geneva. He said that Ms. Rutherford was to be traded for an ADM by the United Liberation Front of the Punjab. A couple of weeks ago, the very same United Liberation Front of the Punjab had sent men to Martinique to try to buy the ADM.”
“But suppose they didn’t buy it,” Charlie said.
“They didn’t.” Eskridge grumbled. “Not until yesterday.”
The implicit blame stung Charlie. “Why would Bream be foolish enough to let some hired thug in on his plans? Even I would have known to make up a cover story for Alice’s rendition.”
“This thug was a professional spy, or at least he had been,” Eskridge said. “He assumed he’d been false-flagged by Bream. Then he did some digging.”
“And found the fool’s gold Bream had left for him?” Charlie said. “Why would Bream have hired an untrustworthy ex-spy in the first place?”
Eskridge turned to Doxstader. “Share the company secret to catching bad guys.”
Doxstader nodded. “They always make mistakes.”
“The thing is, Bream knew enough to use the Indians as straw dogs,” Charlie said. Eskridge’s enthusiastic nod belied his growing impatience. “He could be trying to divert attention from Alabama, which, not incidentally, is to ribs what Switzerland is to cheese. Plus, I bet he really is a Southerner.”
“You bet?” Eskridge turned to Doxstader. “What do we know?”
“Only that the actual John Townsend Bream has been institutionalized in Mississippi for nine years.”
“That lends more credence to Southerner than if the institution were in New Hampshire,” Charlie said, but to blank faces. “And he certainly had the dialect down, and the accent-a lot better than the cast of Gone with the Wind, anyway.”
Eskridge rolled his eyes.
“You’d be amazed at the Russians’ linguistic training,” Doxstader said to Charlie.
Charlie wanted to hit something. “Why would Bream want us to think he’s a Southerner?”
“It’s an old spook trick.” Eskridge pushed back from the table. “So you don’t know who he really is.”
3
Charlie planned to spend the next couple of days in Laurel, Maryland, enjoying some R amp; R at Pimlico Race Course. Or so he told Corbitt as they returned to the airport, alleviating the base chief’s concern that Charlie would take his wild theory to the media.
In fact, Charlie drove a rented Ford Taurus 1,039 miles south. At Mobile’s city limits the sporadic shacks and farmhouses alongside the country road mushroomed into a collection of genteel antebellum homes and buildings that met his conception of the old South. Until several taller buildings appeared, and from behind them, taller buildings still. The skyline rose, like flights of stairs, to fut
uristic skyscrapers. This was certainly not the quaint Southern city that his hasty Googling had led him to envision, a few square blocks of charismatic office buildings and a “downtown” swaying to the sultry saxophones from little jazz clubs, the air scented with smoke from ramshackle yet charming ribs joints.
The country road rose into an elevated modern highway, spiraling in apparent defiance of the laws of physics over what Charlie initially took to be the Gulf of Mexico. It was the sort of construction that caused people to stop and marvel. Charlie indeed marveled at it, and he marveled even more at the body of water, which extended to the horizon, like any ocean. Except this, unless the maps and signs were mistaken, was Mobile Bay.
He exited the highway at Water Street, a four-lane road paralleling the Alabama State Docks, check-in point for vessels from abroad. He drove alongside miles and miles of blackened iron piers, mammoth warehouses, and comparable container ships. Not only did the complex dwarf the city, an entire naval fleet could cruise into it without drawing notice from shore.
He had a feeling, like a cold coming on, that he’d greatly underestimated the amount of detective work that would be required to find Bream here.
He caught sight of a sign plastered onto the side of a warehouse-he’d seen one or two of them already, but only now did the significance register. It listed a Customs and Border Protection phone number for arriving noncommercial vessels to schedule in-harbor inspections. If Bream were checking in with Uncle Sam, he could do so from any number of harbors on the ocean-sized bay.
Charlie sat outside Mobile’s tourist information office with a map of Mobile Bay spread over his steering wheel. In the passenger seat was a pile of brochures that the zealous staffers had forced on him, including those of a charter fishing service, a children’s museum, various historical sites, and local real estate agencies-in the event that he really, really liked the contents of the other brochures.
Gusts off the bay spat bits of garbage around the parking lot. Dark sheets of rain belted the rented Ford. The horseshoe-shaped bay itself was 413 square miles, or twenty times the size of Manhattan. Its shoreline was eighty-four miles, and there were another hundred miles of beaches on either side of its mouth. He had a better chance of finding a needle hidden in New York than he did of finding Bream in Mobile.
And here was one for the annals of idiocy: He had actually thought he could row a boat across Mobile Bay, if needed, to look for Bream.
Bream had taken possession of the washing machine on Monday, three days ago. A fast yacht would take seventy hours to get here. The G-20 kicked off tomorrow evening. Presumably sometime before then, when security would be tightest, Bream would arrive with the ADM. Unless he’d taken a plane.
Charlie wondered what his father would do now.
He had no idea. That was the problem.
He called Alice, needing comfort as much as counsel. Five rings and her voice mail kicked in. She was probably in a conference room that didn’t permit incoming calls.
Just as well. He didn’t relish explaining to her how he’d charged down to Alabama on little more than a hunch.
He glimpsed a small ad on the back of a local pennysaver, placed by a private detective named Dave LeCroy, who specialized in marital infidelity. LeCroy’s black-and-white photo might have passed for one of a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln if not for the cell phone pressed to his ear. A comic strip balloon from his mouth declared, “I’ll get your man!”
4
Shafts of sunlight appeared to part the clouds when Charlie parallel parked on a low-rent stretch of Dauphin Street, Mobile’s answer to Bourbon Street according to the tourist information. The elaborate four- and five-story buildings indeed conjured those of New Orleans, but at eleven-thirty in the morning, Dauphin-pronounced Doffin by everyone here-was quiet, the bars still asleep.
Charlie entered a squat building whose ground floor tenants included a “gentlemen’s club” and a tattoo parlor. A grubby flight of stairs brought him to a door stenciled with big gold letters: Offices of David P. LeCroy, Licensed Private Investigator.
Charlie had barely knocked when the door was flung open by a voluptuous young woman.
“Hi,” she said, adding, “I’m the receptionist.” She wore a white blouse and a modest plaid skirt. Her lofty heels, the absence of hose, and the tattoo of dice on her ankle suggested that she worked at the club downstairs, and that she threw on the blouse and skirt when the detective had a prospective client. “Mr. LeCroy is expecting you.”
As Charlie followed her through the tiny anteroom, he realized that she hadn’t asked him his name. She gestured him ahead into a faux-teak paneled office, where the man from the ad shot up from his vinyl chair.
“Great to meet you,” he said, pumping Charlie’s hand.
“Same.” Charlie heard the outer door shut and heels clicking down the stairs.
In real life, the latter-day young Lincoln was pushing fifty and stood no higher than Charlie’s nose. He’d used a good retoucher for his ad-much of his face showed remnants of teenage acne. His hair was not his. And he’d put money into his mouth. Perhaps too much. Flashing a game-show host’s smile, he said, “Take a load off.” His eyes never once met Charlie’s.
Sitting down, Charlie asked, “So how’d you get into detective work?”
“I like to help people.” Leaning forward, LeCroy nested his chin on his hands, a pointedly contemplative pose. Finally his eyes found Charlie’s. “How can I help you?”
“I have a friend who arrived or will be arriving here from overseas this week in a private yacht, but I don’t have a way of reaching him. He’s not big on turning on his phone or checking e-mail on vacation. I was hoping that, as a licensed PI, you’d be able to access the port’s entry database.”
The screen saver on LeCroy’s computer was a low-resolution photo of a naked blonde in the same chair Charlie occupied now. The detective clicked his mouse and she dissolved into a jumble of file icons. “Know the name of the boat?” he asked.
“No.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
All Charlie knew was that the name wouldn’t be Bream. “Is there any way I could see a list of all the people who’ve arrived?”
LeCroy’s eyes filled with understanding. “Let me guess: Your old lady took a cruise for two with a yacht owner you’ve never met and know nothing about, but would very much like to sock in the nose?”
“That sums it up well enough.”
LeCroy smiled. “I have more cases like this than you’d believe.”
“Then I have come to the right place.” Charlie decided that the private eye was probably better suited to this job than the CIA was.
“I can execute this search now.” LeCroy tapped his keyboard. “It usually runs ninety-nine ninety-five. How does that suit you?”
“How does cash suit you?”
“Goes well with my leather billfold.”
It took Charlie a moment to figure out in which of his new cargo pants pockets he’d placed his wallet. He dug it out and produced a hundred-dollar bill. Directed by a bob of LeCroy’s head, he dropped it into the in-box.
“Okay then.” The private investigator interlaced and stretched his fingers, the way pianists limber up. “So where’d the bastard take her?”
“Saint Lucia or the vicinity.” Bream would have covered his tracks, Charlie thought, though it made sense to start there.
LeCroy clicked away at the keys. “Bingo!”
Charlie felt a shiver of excitement.
“Ronald Feldman and Annabelle Kammeyer, ages sixty-one and thirty-one, of Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Arrived here in Mobile from Saint Lucia on Tuesday the twelfth, two days ago.”
Charlie’s excitement dissipated. “Couldn’t be my ‘friend.’ He was still in the Caribbean Monday the eleventh. I don’t think he could’ve gotten up here that fast.”
LeCroy reapplied himself to the keyboard. “I’m gonna check a bunch of ports. It’s possible the guy cleared custo
ms in Florida or in Gulfport, Mississippi. Also a lot of folks get it out of the way in San Juan.”
The Florida Panhandle and Mississippi were both thirty miles away. The residents of Mississippi would offer a strong argument that their barbecue beat Alabama’s. Charlie could practically hear his prospects deflating.
The bulky dot-matrix printer behind LeCroy grunted out three sheets of paper. The detective snapped them up and perused. “Okeydoke, in the past forty-eight hours ending yesterday at four-fifty-eight P.M.-that’s about as late as CBP stays open-we’ve got eighty-three private vessels that checked in one way or another and either passed inspection or were cleared without inspection.”
“Can you tell me how many had a guy aboard between, say, thirty and forty?”
LeCroy ran his finger down the top page, counting to himself. “Thirteen so far. Plus a boat with a Jean aboard, age of thirty-one. Probably a broad, but could be a French guy, right?”
Charlie tried not to appear forlorn.
“Cheer up, kiddo. The game’s just begun,” LeCroy said. “Now’s when I put the gum to the pavement.”
“And do what?”
“Trade secret. Two twenty-five a day, plus expenses.”
“How about two hundred, if you give me a for instance?”
“Fine. Between us: harbormasters. They make it their business to know which fish are in their harbors, let alone which boats.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be discreet?”
“Yeah, but they’re also supposed to not accept donations for their kids’ new video game console funds, if you get my drift.”
“I think so,” Charlie said. He liked the harbormaster strategy, but odds were LeCroy would offer bribes that Bream would smell a state away.
LeCroy flipped through his desk calendar. “I got spouse cases today and tomorrow, meaning I’m stuck in a car with a camera in a motel parking lot. After that, I’m yours. What do you say you call me then?”
“That fits my schedule perfectly,” said Charlie, who intended to go visit the harbormasters now.
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