Scone Island

by Frederick Ramsay

  “Yes. Track Bernstein down, find out who did what to whom, and, by the way, take at least a week to do it.”

  “Right. I’ll stop by my office and pick up a few things and—”

  “Like hell you will. You are to leave the building immediately. You will do all your communications with the agency from outside the front door. Got it?”

  “But my ID, files…how will I manage?’

  “Files, exactly. No files. Okay now, stop your whining, Charlie. I know perfectly well you have access to any and all if you want it. Now, beat it.”

  Charlie didn’t want to get into a pissing match with the director, but he needed confirmation. “So you are using Ike as bait and you want me far, far away?”

  “Go away, Charlie, now.”

  “But that leaves Ike hanging out to dry.”

  “He’s a big boy. He made the decision to act like the Lone Ranger, right? So, he gets his wish. He’s on his own and I don’t want you playing Tonto, got it?”

  “But—”

  “Charlie, I said go. So, go.”

  Tonto—very apt. Help is on its way, Kemo Sabe.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Ruth poured herself a second drink and glowered at Ike. Clearly, he thought, this will be a long and difficult day. “So what happens now, Ike?”

  “Now? We figure out what to do. Charlie assumes, and his interaction with the director confirms, that to get the men who are knocking off my former colleagues, a trap needs to be set with the right bait.”

  “Bait? What kind of bait?”

  “The director believes the best bait would be me, I think. Something happened on one of Archie’s operations and apparently the people who are after me believe Archie and the people who worked with him saw, heard, or surmised something that someone wants buried—literally.”

  “But why now? You haven’t done any of that crap for years. What’s so important now that a bunch of people have to be erased?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Charlie was going to try and pull the files that might provide a clue. If he was successful, we will know soon enough. In the meantime we can’t stand around and do nothing. They’re coming for me irrespective of the reason. You need to pack and get a move-on.”

  “I need to pack? You mean we need to pack.”

  “Not me, you. You need to get back to Picketsville. I will call Frank and have him set up a round-the-clock watch on you.”

  “Round-the-clock…on me? Why on me? On you, you mean.”

  “No, I mean round-the-clock on you. I am afraid that whoever wants me will conclude the easiest way to get me would be through you. And they’d be right. But if you are covered, they will have to come directly at me. I don’t want you involved in this. That goes for your mother, my father, and anyone else who might be deemed a bargaining chip.”

  “And you will boldly walk the streets of Picketsville drawing their fire like…what’s his name in that movie?”

  “What what’s his name in what movie?”

  “You know that old black and white thing you made me sit through when you were explaining what made a movie a classic. They had a big shoot out, and the pretty but really dopey bride ends up killing the last bad guy.”

  “High Noon.”

  “Whatever. Is that your plan?”

  “Not even close. I will wait for them here.”

  “Here? Are you nuts? There is nothing and no one here to help you. You’d be a sitting duck.”

  “That’s what the baddies are supposed to think. But I will be neither a duck, nor sitting.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I will talk to Charlie, and we will sort it out. In the meantime, you need to pack. I will escort you ashore and drive you to Bangor where you will board the first plane south.”

  “Then you will play that movie guy on the mean streets of Scone.”

  “Hardly streets, and no, I won’t be walking about hoping to draw them out. I will be holed up in one of several spots waiting for them to come to me.”

  “How is that any different than a sitting duck?”

  “I won’t be quacking, for one thing.”

  “Very funny.” Ruth paced over to the window and stared at the pines across the gravel road to the east. “I still don’t get it. Why here and not back home or someplace where there can be all sorts of support?”

  “That is a very good question, ma’am. Okay, here’s why. Look around you. How big is this island? How does one get to it? What are the chances someone could get here unnoticed? Henry Potter sees all, knows all. It’s a closed system, Ruth. Closed and therefore, easily controlled.”

  “But couldn’t they be here already?”

  “Not likely. Nobody knows we’re here, remember? Even Charlie had no idea where we were. The director with all the technology at his disposal couldn’t find us. Think about it. What are the chances I’d end up on the same island where Archie bought the farm, or in this case the bed-and-breakfast? They’re not here—at least not yet.”

  “Then why don’t we hunker down and wait until the director and his minions find the bastards?”

  “Hunkering won’t do. If that were the case, the director would have said to Charlie at the outset, ‘Tell Ike to hunker down until I’ve found the bastards.’ You see?”

  “No, but I take your point. So, if the CIA couldn’t locate you, how will the bad guys do it? Find you in this, the unlikeliest of all places?”

  “When I’m ready, I will tell them.”

  “You’re kidding.” Ruth studied Ike’s expression. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “Sorry, no. Once everything is in place, I will call Charlie on his open phone and have a casual conversation during which I will mention, but not actually say, where I am. They will take an hour, or a day, depending on how smart they are, to figure it out and be on their way north.”

  “So, why don’t we lay low and not bother to call Charlie?”

  “I told you, it’s a matter of sooner or later, you see? Not if, but when, and as it is my rear end on the line, I want to determine the when. And as to doing it now, as much as I’d like to retire, spending the rest of my life on Scone Island isn’t my idea of a place to grow old gracefully.”

  “But after a while—”

  “By the look of it, Ruth, these are very professional killers. If they found the others, and especially Archie, who the CIA hid in a way that should have been foolproof, they will find me eventually. And because of that, I refuse to be looking over my shoulder and wondering for whatever time it takes them to track me down. They need to be stopped, and this is the ideal place to stop them.”

  “Pour me another slug of that bad whisky, Ike, and let me think.”

  “It is very good whiskey, and you do not need to think. You need to pack. I’ll arrange for a ride to the mainland on one of the Gott brother’s boats.”

  “I’m to leave you to the mercy of God knows how many homicidal maniacs and good old Charlie, who might or might not be able to help—that’s right isn’t it —might or might not?”

  Ike shrugged. “He has assets he can bring into play.”

  “Bull. The director will send him on a mission to Katmandu. There will be no assets.”

  “As I said he has assets, and ones not necessarily controlled by the director.”

  “How’s that work?”

  “It’s the nature of his job. You are better off not knowing why.”

  “If you tell me you’ll have to kill me—isn’t that the way it goes? Come on Ike, this is serious.” She began pacing across the old-fashioned hook rug some ancestor had made or purchased many years ago. “If I drink anymore of this booze, I will lose all self-control. But you already knew that, you son of a—”

  “Tut. Be careful. I am, after all, the one holding the gun.”

  “Yeah, right.” Ruth returned to the center of the room and screwed up her face, either lost in her own world, Ike thought, or succumbing to the effects of the whiskey. Sh
e was on enough pain medication which, if it reacted with the booze, could easily have produced some kind of topical amnesia. It was neither.

  “Okay, here’s the deal, Schwartz. Listen carefully because I am not going to repeat myself. I am not going to leave you on this island alone.” Ike started to protest, but she silenced him with a scowl. “Don’t say a word. Please recall how you felt when the people with whom you used to play peek-a-boo back then killed Eloise, your first and as yet only wife. Do you want to put me through that?”

  “I…”

  “Listen, Captain America, I have thrown my lot in with you for whatever comes next. You want to know why?” Ike opened his mouth. “Shut up, I’m on a roll here. When I was lying in a comatose state, I had time to think—that is, in the occasional lucid moments given to me—and I came to understand one very important thing. You are the best offer I’m likely to get, now or ever. So, if you stay, I stay. I am not willing to go through life wondering what it would have been like if. Do you see? I’m staying. That’s it, period.”

  Ike stared at the woman who was as different from him as night is from day. What a piece of work! He shook his head. He knew better than to argue. When Ruth made up her mind there would be no changing it.

  “You are an idiot,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I’m great in bed.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Charlie Garland felt sure the director’s watchful eye and that of his aide were locked on him as he left the main building at Langley. He drove all the way to the other side of the Potomac before he retrieved the thumb drive from his pants’ cuff. It took him nearly an hour in unusually heavy traffic to find the bar where he, Ike, and Ike’s then girlfriend/fiancée, Eloise, had met years ago. How many years ago? He usually avoided thinking about it, but enough time had passed for the wounds to heal. Still, remembering what had happened to Eloise made him wince.

  He parked and slipped his iPad II from under the car seat. He’d have a look at the files he’d pirated while he waited for Ike’s call. Over the years Charlie had become a sometime regular, at least on those occasions when he was in Georgetown. The barkeep nodded a welcome and wiped the counter in front of an empty stool.

  “I’m going to need a booth today, Solly” Charlie said and moved to one farthest from the door and in deep shadow. He sat facing the entrance so that he could keep an eye on who came and went.

  “Booth it is. Say, I been meaning to ask you Mr. Garland, whatever happened to the big guy who used to come in here with you a couple of years back?”

  “What big guy?”

  “Jeez, I don’t know who he was…the big guy, you know? Oh yeah, he was going to marry that redheaded Irish dame the last time he was in here. Did he?”

  “You mean Ike. Yeah, he did. She was a blonde, by the way.”

  “Well that’s good. Him getting married, I mean. I coulda swore she was a redhead.”

  “Good they married. Yeah, it was.” And it was while it lasted. Not so good after that.

  Ike and Eloise, how many summers ago? He’d told Ike then it would be his last great crab feast of the season and Ike had allowed himself to be talked into going, not because he wanted to crack crabs, which he did, or because he felt any particular need to be in the company of other people, which he did not, but because, Charlie had guessed, he was bored and restless, and an evening alone in his apartment was low on his list of things to do on a weekend.

  Charlie had offered, and he accepted the obligatory gin and tonic. In those days, Ike only drank gin and tonic. Where others might relegate that mix as strictly a summer drink, only to be enjoyed between Memorial and Labor Day—like the wearing of white shoes—for Ike it was a year-round choice. That was Ike, safe, predictable, and careful. Especially careful. When an agency guy, from analysis or somewhere, had appeared with Eloise on his arm Ike’s world had changed forever.

  Eloise was tall, slim, and very blonde. She had inherited a set of wonderful green eyes and Ike told Charlie he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She could have been anything from a supermodel to a plain Jane, but in Ike’s eyes she was as he described her. The truth lay somewhere in between.

  Ike had instructed Eloise how to use the little wooden mallet to crack the claws to get at the meat. She’d said something like she did not mind crabmeat but she thought eating one seemed more like eating a big bug. The two of them laughed, drank beer, and piled the shells up in the center of the table, oblivious of everyone else.

  Sometime after midnight, Ike had taken her home. Charlie did not remember them leaving or how Ike managed to disengage her from whomever had brought her to the party in the first place. The next day the three of them met here in this very pub, and Ike announced they were going to be married. For the most careful man he’d ever known, Charlie thought that for Ike Schwartz to act this precipitously seemed completely out of character. Two days after that, they were married. Four days after their meeting, with some string pulling to get Eloise a passport, they were on a hastily arranged honeymoon in Europe. The first leg was London, then on to Paris, Zurich, and Rome. They’d never made it to Rome.

  “The usual, Mr. Garland?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, and can you fix me up with a corned beef on rye? Go easy on the mustard and for crying out loud, Solly, no mayo. Mayonnaise on corned beef is blasphemy.”

  “Maybe in a kosher deli it is, but not in Georgetown. In this end of town it’s called aioli and is considered required eating. So, okay I got it, no mayo.”

  During this exchange, Solly had blocked his view of the door and Charlie nearly missed the man wearing dark aviator sunglasses and a black suit enter. Nice move on the guy’s part, he thought. It had almost worked. He wondered if everybody could spot a tail from the agency as quickly as he could. If so, Langley was screwed. Someone should tell the young man that wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and conspicuous sunglasses do not do much if your aim is to blend in. Then again, perhaps that was the point. The director might have sent this obvious operative precisely to make sure Charlie knew the agency had him in their sights. So, okay.

  He placed his folded newspaper in front of his iPad. Unless sunglasses sat next to him, he’d assume Charlie was eating corned beef, drinking a beer, and reading the sports pages. That is, he would unless he happened to know that Charlie never read the sports pages—couldn’t tell you the difference between a squeeze play, a slam dunk, and a hail Mary. With the thumb drive plugged in, he began reading through the files. His sandwich arrived with his beer. The pub began to fill with lunchtime customers, at least half of whom ordered and then turned their attention to their smart phones. The pub soon filled with the tick-tick of texting, the murmur of one-sided conversations. Some silently browsed the Internet, burning off minutes and gray cells on one of the myriad mindless activities provided by an endless supply of apps designed to promote time-wasting to an art form. Good. Charlie had counted on that.

  ***

  Eden Saint Clare happened to glance over at the precise moment the man’s phone buzzed. She didn’t really believe she’d heard the buzz all the way across the room, and it startled her. Coincidence surely—a common occurrence in her experience. Frequently, she’d have a thought and within minutes someone, usually her daughter, would say or have same thought. She and Ruth seemed to have been connected that way since her childhood. She’d seem to know what Ruth was up to, and, frequently, when it might end badly. But intuiting this man and his phone? Not likely. Still…if that call had something to do with Ruth, what then? Would that count? A ridiculous thought—how could it? She scrutinized him over the top of her luncheon menu. He’d turned away but not before she realized she’d seen that profile before—several times. That in itself didn’t strike her as unusual. People who stayed in the same hotel were bound to run across each other often. But as she thought about it, every time they’d met he’d averted his eyes. She had a thing about people who refused to make eye contact—didn’t trust them. Also, it seemed like th
is man turned up everywhere she went, the restaurant, Marshall-Fields…not Marshall-Fields, Macy’s now. Why would anyone want to change an iconic Chicago department store name for an iconic New York one? No wonder they called Chicago the Second City—stupid New Yorkers! She hoped Macy’s declared chapter eleven…or was it seven? She could never remember which was which. So, what was this bird up to? As much as she disliked doing it, she guessed she needed to call Charlie Garland and find out. Without any compelling reason to believe it, she assumed he would know.

  ***

  Charlie’s sandwich had been reduced to crusts and crumbs and his second beer gone flat before he found what he’d been looking for. He’d read three of the files through twice and found nothing of interest. He had plowed his way well into the fourth when he realized that the visuals, the pictures, maps and so forth, were not displayed. He had to click on each title separately to bring them up. Once he discovered that, he started over. Not surprisingly he found images in all the files—too many, actually. How to sort through them all? There were the expected pictures of Jackson, Bernstein, Whitlock and a younger, gaunter Ike. And there were other faces. Dangerous Semitic faces shaded by keffiyehs in the Libyan Desert and broad Slavic ones from Bosnia. Some exhausted Navy SEALS and the four apparently bored agents in Puerto Rico on a training mission of some sort.

  Something, or more accurately someone, in the Bosnia set drew him back. Another familiar figure stood off to one side, slightly out of focus but identifiable nonetheless—a United States Army colonel, ostensibly the military liaison to Archie’s Bosnia operation, his face partially in the shadows cast by a fir tree. A face that blurred as it turned toward the camera the instant the shutter closed. Years had passed since the picture had been deposited into the file, but Charlie would recognize the director of the CIA anywhere. Another wrinkle added to the heavily creased conspiratorial fabric. The director had been involved in one of Archie’s capers. Why hadn’t he mentioned it? Charlie would have to mull over that. There had to be a reason the chief did not want these files in his possession. Now, he believed he knew.