Twice a Spy dc-2

by Keith Thomson

  “Actually, I do have a law degree,” Eskridge said. “Yale, 1986.”

  Charlie sat facing him at one of the three schoolteacher-style desks in the tiny and otherwise unoccupied detectives’ bureau. Doxstader stood outside the door, in the lobby, feigning interest in the M amp;M’s machine, but obviously eavesdropping.

  “If I were acting as your attorney, I’d have had you out of here before my helicopter left the pad at Langley,” Eskridge continued. “But as someone whose concern is national security, I have a reservation that needs to be addressed first.”

  Charlie confessed, “I realize I haven’t exactly taken a textbook approach to things, but there’s a chance some good has come out of it.”

  Eskridge stiffened. “Do you have another tip for us?”

  “No, not a tip-”

  “Good. The Secret Service, not knowing better, believed you. They trumped up a charge to yank Mr. Clemmensen away from the marina. Then they inspected his yacht stem to stern. The closest they found to contraband was a bottle of Aqua Velva. Clemmensen himself is a speeding ticket shy of being Mother Teresa. And if he weren’t such a good old good ol’ boy, we’d have ourselves a flap now.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Good. Now-”

  “There’s one other yacht there that’s just in from the Caribbean, registered to a family named Campodonico-”

  Eskridge cut him short. “Listen, Charlie, you acted heroically in Fort-de-France. Everyone commends you; everyone is grateful. But if we were to go after anybody else without probable cause, we would be on a witch hunt, and we don’t do witch hunts, despite what you may read on blogs. The people paid to do this sort of investigating are currently in India, based on good intelligence. To conduct an investigation based on anything less is begging for a flap.” Eskridge paused to think. “Why is the name Campodonico so bloody familiar?”

  From outside, Doxstader said, “The anthropologist.”

  “Ah, yes, right.” Eskridge turned back to Charlie. “He writes coffee table books on indigenous tribal rock painting. My wife has given me several of them as Christmas gifts. So, yes, Campodonico is, in a way, a terrorist.”

  Charlie wanted to argue for an unofficial peek into the life of Tom Campodonico, but he recognized that he stood a better chance of convincing Eskridge to launch a new investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Tonight.

  “So you have a choice to make, Charlie Clark. You can stay here-the company has no power to detain you. On the other hand, Mobile’s finest may find-or be supplied with-ample excuse to prolong your stay in the drunk tank. Alternatively, you can leave the G-20 security provisions in the hands of the Secret Service agents and the more than nine hundred other specialists here from the Coast Guard, Navy, Air Force, Department of Energy, and Homeland Security. If you do, you’ll be released at once and I’ll see to it that your fake driver’s license issue will cease to be an issue. All I need is your word that you’ll leave town tonight.”

  “I promise,” said Charlie.

  Eskridge nibbled at his lower lip, seemingly unconvinced. “Where will you go?”

  “A few hours drive from here, in Mississippi, there’s a casino where I have a good relationship with a couple of slot machines.”

  “Congratulations, you’re a free man.”

  “Thank you,” Charlie said.

  He had every intention of going to Mississippi tonight.

  And returning to Alabama first thing in the morning.

  9

  Earlier that same night, Bream sat at the helm of the Campodonicos’ sixty-foot cabin cruiser, entering Mobile Bay, the sky so dark and the water so gentle that if it weren’t for the salty air, he might have believed he was chugging through outer space.

  He dreamed of sitting at a bar, his fingers wrapped around a cold bottle of Bud.

  The yacht had plenty of beer, and the plush cabin was much more comfortable than any of the seedy dockside dives that would still be open when he reached the marina. He’d been at sea for the better part of four days, though. He could have covered the distance from Saint Lucia in two days and change, but so as not to raise any eyebrows in the Coast Guard radar stations, he’d dropped anchor for one night at Saint Kitts and stayed a second night in Anguilla. Now he felt as if sea salt clogged his pores. Not much of a seaman, he longed for the “firma” sensation of terra firma.

  And he was close. But he still had to pass Customs and Border Protection. Along the 95,000 miles of American coastline and in 3.4 million square miles of ocean territory, CBP had to contend with 15 million registered small vessels and another 10 million unregistered. And the agency’s primary job was commercial traffic. Consequently, CBP agents boarded only about 45,000 small vessels per year, or 1 in 500. Under ordinary circumstances, Bream stood a better chance of being boarded by pirates.

  Of course, illegally ferrying a nuclear weapon hardly rated as ordinary circumstances. An added worry was that the cutout from Lahore, Dr. Jinnah, might have figured out that he’d been an unwitting part of a false trail meant to lead the CIA to the United Liberation Front of the Punjab’s door. An even greater risk was defrocked Air Force intel operative Corky Morrison, Bream’s surfer boy “associate”-a little meth money and the mercenary would spill all he knew. Accordingly, when Bream had rendezvoused with the Zodiac near Saint Lucia, he had shot both men. His only choice. Live men tell tales.

  The unbelievably resourceful Alice Rutherford had killed the remaining mercenaries-Carlo Pagliarulo, Lothar von Gentz, and Klaus Wagner-saving Bream the trouble. And in helping Charlie land the plane, she had helped perpetuate the Punjab diversion. Otherwise Morrison, monitoring the flight, would have stepped in via radio.

  And if Alice now reported what she’d learned about Bream, fine. He no longer existed, effectively.

  Nosing the yacht into his slip at the sleeping Mobile Bay Marina, he telephoned the local CBP office. “Hey, y’all, Tom Efferman here, fresh back from the beautific island of Saint Lucia,” he told the voice mail. As he’d anticipated, the office had long since closed for the day.

  Tom Efferman was a damned fine alias. In 1976, in rural Blue Ridge, Georgia, a horse bucked, throwing five-year-old Thomas Efferman to the ground. The animal’s front hooves slammed onto the boy’s head, permanently damaging his brain. He subsequently left his mother’s trailer only on Christmas, if he was able.

  Four years ago, Bream-born in 1971 in Nashville and given the name Maddox Mercer-learned of the boy when hacking the database of an organization that delivered holiday meals to the homebound. Thomas Efferman’s social security number was all Bream needed for the state of Georgia to send a copy of the boy’s birth certificate to an accommodation address he’d set up in Montgomery, Alabama. With the birth certificate in hand, obtaining an Alabama driver’s license under the name Thomas Efferman was a relatively simple matter of passing the driver’s test. The boating license was simpler still.

  Prior to meeting with Qatada, Bream-as Efferman-had offered to rent the Campodonicos’ yacht. The couple needed money, having underbudgeted their retirement and overestimated the sales of books about tribal rock paintings. In the Campodonicos’ patrician yacht club social set, renting carried a stigma. Bream had figured that out in advance of contacting them. In person, he suggested, “How about we just tell folks I’m your nephew or cousin?”

  Now he steered their yacht’s starboard side even with the dock. Technically, he couldn’t go get his Budweiser-or disembark at all-until he had either passed a CBP inspection or received the call from CBP releasing him. But the CBP folks were in bed, and the cops enforced the shipboard regulation with less frequency than they busted up penny-ante poker games.

  As he bounded onto the quiet dock, two Mobile policemen materialized out of the darkness.

  Standing unnaturally straight, Bream said, with a slight stammer, “Evening, officers, how y’all doing?” As an innocent man would.

  “ ‘Evening, sir,” both cops said as they hurried pas
t on the way to Clem Clemmensen’s boat.

  Bream guessed ol’ Clem had backed the wrong sheriff.

  10

  As the radiant Mobile skyline shrank in his rearview mirror, Charlie thought of Arcangues, a French colt named after the village in Aquitaine. Arcangues had only raced on grass in Europe before being shipped to California in 1993 to compete in the Breeders’ Cup on Santa Anita’s dirt track. Sent off at odds of 133 to 1 and under a last-minute replacement jockey, Arcangues caught up to the powerful bay Bertrando in the homestretch, beat him to the wire, and became arguably the greatest in the history of long shots.

  Charlie put the odds that he could securely communicate with Alice even higher. But even if he could tell her why he’d driven south and what he’d subsequently learned about Bream, neither she nor her NSA colleagues-who were busy grilling her in Geneva-could do anything about it.

  When he called her on his cell as he drove out of Mobile, he recognized that he would have to tell her a cover story.

  “Eskridge must have given you an awful lot of confidence in the agency’s efforts if you’re on a casino crawl,” she said. She spat out “casino” the way she might have said “brothel.”

  “He made a very strong case for my going to a casino.”

  “Wasn’t it you who said the best chance you have at a casino is to stay outside?”

  Although he’d braced for it, her implicit disappointment stung him. In Gstaad, she’d once called his life at the track “tragic.”

  “Haven’t I ever told you about Joseph Jaggers?” he said.

  “You said that you wanted to name a dog Jaggers, when you get a dog.”

  He’d meant when they got a dog.

  “He was a nineteenth-century British engineer who thought that even slight imbalances in a roulette wheel might result in certain outcomes. At the casino in Monte Carlo he discovered that the ball wound up more often in nine of the compartments. When he started playing, he broke the bank.”

  “Ah. So you’re headed to Mississippi to make a study of certain outcomes.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I just need some R amp; R.”

  He wished he’d simply said that he was going to hit some golf balls, or that he just wanted to lie around a pool and read sports magazines. Either would have sufficed to confuse his true target audience, the CIA personnel he believed were eavesdropping. It wasn’t Eskridge’s style to leave things to chance.

  “How about, once I’m done here, we rendezvous at Le Diamant?” Alice asked. She maintained that the beach resort at the southern tip of Martinique received five stars only because there were no six-star ratings.

  “Sounds great.”

  “Super,” she said, but with so little of her usual enthusiasm as to cast doubt on the plan.

  He hoped she would be proud of him when she knew the truth. At least the eavesdroppers now had corroboration for his three-hour drive to Choctaw, Mississippi. He wanted to give them all the help he could in tracking him to the Golden Sun Hotel and Casino.

  He and Alice talked over next steps, dependent on the completion of her meetings in Geneva. He signed off with a cheerful, “Call me when you have the green light.” He did not say that he intended to leave his cell phone at the Golden Sun when he fled.

  11

  Lake Geneva ranked as the largest body of freshwater in continental Europe. And arguably the most spectacular. On this sunny morning, the water outshone most sapphires. Alice liked Lake Geneva best for its public transit system: classic ferries that chugged between docks all around the lake.

  Having sped through her morning debrief, she hopped a ferry at the Quai du Mont-Blanc in front of the Grand Hotel Kempinski. Boats made it easy to detect surveillance, forcing tails to stay close for fear of losing their rabbit. Alice was willing to believe that Geneva’s transit system alone explained the city’s status as the world’s espionage capital. As a city, especially by European standards, it had all the excitement of a post office.

  Covertly scanning the sixty-seat single-decker, she reminded herself that she ought to be reveling in her liberty after two weeks that had been the surveillance detection equivalent of scaling Everest.

  Just take a bloody cab and be done with it.

  Then again, after nine years of deceiving and killing players on other teams, it wasn’t a terrible idea to keep an eye peeled.

  She detected only one possible tail, middle-aged tourists with two toddlers. The purported family boarded the ferry at the last moment, right after she did.

  Surveillants sometimes used children, and this mom and pop looked a bit too long in the tooth to be parents to such young kids. Then again, the couple could be young grandparents, or beneficiaries of the new wonders of reproductive endocrinology.

  But what about the big pink teddy bear the girl dragged over the damp deck? Quite the cliche, a pink teddy bear. Regardless, if you love your teddy, you don’t drag him around like a shot deer.

  When Alice got off the ferry at the next pier, the family remained aboard, squabbling, suggesting they really were a family.

  Leaving the pier, she took the train to Cointrin, Geneva’s international airport, and bought a ticket for a direct flight to Atlanta.

  The customs agent was a young American with a belly indicating a fondness for the local brauhaus. He studied her documents for an excessive amount of time, before finally asking, “So what’s taking you to Atlanta?”

  “A reunion.”

  “With bowls of potato salad and long-lost uncles, or the happily-ever-after kind?”

  “No potato salad or uncles. Maybe the other one, though, if things work out all right.”

  The young man looked her over. “I’m pretty sure things’ll work out.” He waved her through.

  12

  Charlie drove northwest through Alabama’s dense woodlands, the few gaps between trees filled by kudzu. The darkness was such that, if not for his headlights, he might as well have shut his eyes. He frequently changed lanes and took exits at the last possible second, but no one seemed to be following him.

  Unless his minders were disguised as Mississippi teenagers either patronizing a McDonald’s at State Line, Mississippi, or working behind the counter, he ate his Big Mac and fries unminded as well. The only person over the age of eighteen was the lanky man in a custodian’s uniform, twenty-two perhaps, wiping down the men’s room door.

  Returning to the highway, Charlie considered that he was instead being minded via aerial surveillance or simply being tracked by the signal strength of his phone between cell towers. Neither posed a problem. As long as someone was tracking him. It was integral to his plan.

  After another hour’s solitary drive, a massive structure rose from behind a hill. It looked as if the moon had slipped out of its orbit, settling on the road ahead. Drawing closer, Charlie saw that it was a freakishly large golden sphere perched in front of a proportionate building boldly wrought in tempered steel and bronze-tinted glass. He had imagined the casino in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi as a neoned-up, big box store with a motel and a few golf holes, but this glamorous and luxurious complex was the Golden Sun Hotel and Casino. Any doubt was dispelled by the letters lining each side of the road-G-O-L-D-E-N on one side, S-U-N on the other-big as buildings themselves. Charlie chided himself for having underestimated the might of gambling.

  From the parking garage he heard the distinctive rain of coins into slot machine payout trays. The dozens of other people leaving their cars-and, mostly, pickups-seemed to brighten at the sound. He wandered onto the gaming floor, a galaxy of slot machines-5,465 of them according to a billboard with the digital numbers poised to change with each addition, a new take on the HAMBURGERS SOLD sign. Seemingly all of the ten million colors visible to the human eye were on display. The whirring reels, accompanied by bells and chimes, blended into one harmonious and mesmerizing chord. It wasn’t just that the oxygen was purer in here, Charlie thought. It was like inhaling adrenaline.

  In the chrome frame of
a one-armed bandit, he caught the reflection of a curly-haired young man in a peacoat and fatigue pants. The thick-framed glasses would probably have thrown Charlie. But although the young man was playing a slot machine, he was looking at something other than the wheel, possibly a chrome band enabling him to view Charlie, and enabling Charlie to recognize him as the lanky custodian from the State Line, Mississippi, McDonald’s.

  Charlie felt as if he’d hit a jackpot.

  Turning away, he searched for the VIP credit lounge. It would have been hard not to find. Its golden letters were almost as big as those outside.

  But would they admit him? A VIP, in the gaming industry, was someone with assets. Does a person have a credit card, a debit card, even a library card that can advance cash now against overdue fees later? Then he’s a VIP.

  Charlie waltzed into the lounge, and with little effort obtained a $5,000 cash advance-it was nice to be able to draw on the family numbered account without fear that the transaction would incite an Interpol SWAT team. He also put $5,000 on the casino platinum card he’d been handed upon entry, bringing its balance to $5,020-all new arrivals began with a balance of $20. A taste.

  He needed appropriate clothes, which were readily available a few steps off the casino floor. Among other tuxes for sale at a store called Golden Man was the “High Roller” line; Charlie bought a size 42R along with a matching dress shirt, shoes, and a bow tie. He also tossed onto the counter a Golden Sun baseball cap and a windbreaker, as if on impulse. The total was $2,111. He paid in cash, hoping the lack of a paper trail in this instance would obfuscate his planned exit.

  He checked into a hotel room, opting for a Chief’s Suite at an extra fifteen dollars per night. The lofty space was furnished in an Ancient Rome theme, the walls and marble floor flecked with silver and gold. The bed was almost as big as a swimming pool. He wished Alice were here, if only to share his grin.