by Ted Bell
A lot of less celebrated visitors had left behind the detritus of decades, much of which had been severely edited by the new owner. He wasn’t a fussy man, but he’d pulled down all the pictures of snakes some prior inhabitant had hung in his small bedroom.
The owner of this rather eccentric dwelling, Lord Hawke, won’t tolerate the use of his title and has never used it himself. The only one who is allowed usage is his ancient friend and household retainer, Pelham Grenville, a man whom he has known since birth. Pelham refers to his employer simply as “m’lord.”
Hawke was not a man one could simply glance at and ignore. It was not just his size, his armory of biceps, musculature, rock hardness, and the vast reserves of strength these suggested.
There was a certain nobility of bearing in him; a warrior’s bearing, inherited from the knights at King Arthur’s table, as well as the proud pirate captains of the Caribbean. All by way of saying that it would have been readily apparent to even the most casual of strangers that here was a man apart. A gentle, introspective man, unless aroused sufficiently to unleash the furies of hell upon you. And yet, he was usually contrite afterward, in the event that he’d been forced to use his strength.
His blue eyes were startling and had a range from merriment and charm to profound earnestness. Cross him, and he could fire a searing flash of blue across an entire room. Hawke had a high, clear brow, and a straight, imperious nose above a well-sculpted mouth with just a hint of cruelty at the corners of a smile.
When crossed, it was a much changed Alex Hawke one encountered: at that moment, those friendly blue eyes were as cold and steady as gun barrels.
Hawke’s job (senior counterintelligence officer at Britain’s MI6) demanded that he stay fit. Though he had a weakness for Mr. Gosling’s local Bermuda rum and Morland’s English cigarettes, he watched his diet and followed his old Royal Navy fitness regime religiously. He also spent endless hours at the firing range, and regularly climbed into the boxing ring with men half his age.
Attractive, yes, but it was his What the hell? grin, a look so freighted with charm that no woman, and even few men, could resist, that made him the man he was.
As the talk in certain circles in London had it, he was a hale fellow well met, one whom men wanted to stand a drink; and whom women much preferred horizontal.
ALEX HAWKE HAD BEEN DOZING out on the coquina shell terrace that fanned out from doors and windows flung open to the sea on a blue day like this. He had nothing on for today, just supper with his dear friends, the former chief inspector of Scotland Yard, Ambrose Congreve, and his wife, Lady Diana née Mars, at their Bermuda home, Shadowlands, at seven this evening.
“Sorry to disturb you, m’lord,” Pelham Grenville said, having shimmered across the sunlit terrace unseen.
“Then don’t,” Hawke said, deliberately keeping his eyes closed against the sun.
Pelham was the octogenarian valet who’d been in service to the Hawke family in England for decades. When Hawke was but seven years old, he had witnessed his parents’ tragic murder aboard their yacht in the Caribbean. Pelham and Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve had immediately stepped in to raise the child. No one who’d survived that lengthy process would claim that it was easy, but the three men had all remained the closest of friends ever after.
“I think you might wish to take this call, sir.”
“Really? Why?”
“It’s your friend, the director, m’lord.”
“I have many friends who are directors, Pelham. Which one?”
“CIA, sir; he says it’s rather important.”
“You’re joking. Brick Kelly?”
“On the line as we speak, sir.”
Hawke gazed out at the rolling blue Atlantic, pausing a second to gather his wits about him before taking Brick’s call. There were few things in life he felt any certainty about anymore. But he knew damn well that CIA director Brick Kelly never called him with good news.
CHAPTER 9
Hawke had met CIA director Kelly a decade earlier, in prison. Patrick Brickhouse Kelly was a U.S. Army spec-ops colonel back then, a man who’d been caught red-handed trying to assassinate a Sunni warlord in his mountain village. And Hawke’s Royal Navy fighter plane had been shot down over the desert only a few miles from the Iraqi prison. Their treatment was something less than five-star; it was no mints-on-the-pillow operation.
The guards were inhuman and merciless. These were animals, savages who laughed at the CIA and its ridiculous waterboarding, which to them was only mildly worse than having no hot water in the shower.
One night, after months of inhumanity, Kelly had been dragged away from their cell for yet another brutal beating coupled with electroshock to his genitals. Brick had looked so broken and weak that Hawke decided he’d not survive another day of malnutrition and the cruelest of tortures. The sound of his friend’s screams reverberating off the stone walls of the cell down the hall galvanized him into action.
That night, Hawke planned and managed to effect an escape, killing most of the guards and destroying half the prison in the doing of it. He carried Brick Kelly on his shoulders out into the burning desert. It was four long days before they were rescued by friendlies, both men delirious with hunger, sunstroke, and dehydration. It’s the kind of defining experience that brings men of a certain caliber together for the balance of their lives.
He and Brick Kelly had been thick as thieves ever since. Hawke was godfather to Brick’s eldest child. Brick had been standing beside him as best man at Hawke’s tragic wedding. They had learned to survive the worst with each other’s help and it had stood them in good stead.
Some of Hawke’s happiest memories had been springtime visits to Brick and his wife Jane’s glorious Virginia estate, Burning Tree Farm in McLean, Virginia. A horse farm just outside of Washington, D.C., it was a few hundred acres of rolling green hills, perfect white fences, and some of America’s most highly prized thoroughbred horses.
Hawke went inside to take the call. He moved quickly across the room to the antique black Bakelite phone sitting atop the monkey-wood bar and picked up the receiver.
“Hullo?” he said. By force of habit, he was always noncommittal when answering any phone call. Even this one.
“Hullo?” he repeated.
“Hawke? Is that you?”
“Brick?”
“Yeah. It’s a secure transmission, Alex, no worries. I know you’re lying low for a while. Well-deserved R&R and all that stuff. Listen. Sorry to even bother you but something’s happened I felt you should know about.”
“Trouble?”
“No, not exactly. Sadness is more like it. Alex, your old friend Cameron Hooker died this past weekend.”
“Hook died? Was he sick? He never said a word.”
“No. It was an accident.”
“Ah, hell, Brick. Damn it. What happened?”
“He went for a sail on Sunday morning. Up at his house on North Haven Island in Maine. Did it every Sunday of his life apparently. When he wasn’t back home by noon, and his wife couldn’t reach his cell, Gillian called the sheriff. They found the boat run aground on a small island near Stonington. Hook was in the stern, dead.”
“Heart attack? Stroke?”
“His head was bashed in.”
“Foul play?”
“No. He was alone, apparently. At least he was when he left the dock, according to a young fellow hired on for the summer.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know much about sailing, Alex. As you well know. Apparently, he attempted some kind of accidental tack in heavy wind and the big wooden boom swung round and hit him in the head.”
“A jibe,” Hawke said. “The most dangerous move you can attempt on a sailboat in a blow.”
“Right, jibe, that’s the word the boy used. It was blowing pretty good, I suppose. Certainly enough force for something that heavy to kill him. But . . .”
“But what?”
“I hate to even bring t
his up, Alex. But in the last six weeks, a number of other high-level Agency guys of his era have died. Lou Gagosian, Taylor Greene, Max Cohen, and Nicola Peruggia. And last April in Paris, Harding Torrance.”
“Suspicious deaths? Any of them?”
“No. Not on the surface, anyway. No evidence of foul play at all. It’s just the sheer number and timing that’s troublesome. And the high number may just be coincidence.”
“Or maybe not.”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Want me to look into it?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. All these poor widows and families are in mourning still. And I don’t really have any degree of certainty about my suspicions, just my usual extrasensory paranoia.”
“But.”
“Yeah. But. So, the question is this. Who is killing the great spies of Europe?”
“Look here. Hook was a good friend of mine, Brick. If someone killed him, I damn well want to find out who.”
“I’m sure you do. I’ll tell you what. Let’s give it a month or so. See what happens. Anything suspicious, we go full bore. Okay with you?”
“Sure. You know best. When’s the funeral? Where?”
“Up at Hook’s place, Cranberry Farm, in Maine. Family cemetery on the property. The service is next Friday afternoon at two. North Haven Island. Out in Penobscot Bay east of Camden. If you’re going to fly up from Bermuda, there’s a private airstrip at the old Watson place.”
“I’ve used it a few times, but thanks.”
“That’s right, I forgot, you’ve been out there before. Okay. I’ll see you there, then. Sorry, Alex. I know you two guys were close.”
“I’m sorry, too, Brick. Last of the old breed. He was a very, very good guy. See you there.”
CHAPTER 10
North Haven, Maine
A perfect day for a funeral.
It was raining steadily, but softly. Dripping from the leaves, dripping from the eaves of the old Maine cottage on the hill. Tendrils of misty grey fog curled up from the sea only to disappear into the steaming pine forests. Thin, ragged clouds scudded by low overhead.
Hook’s burial service was in the overgrown family plot. A hallowed patch of small worn gravestones dotting a hilltop clearing overlooked the busy harbor. There were rows and rows of folding white chairs arranged on the grass surrounding the gravesite, filled with mourners hidden beneath rows and rows of gleaming black umbrellas.
There was even a piper in full regalia standing by the freshly opened wound in the rich earth. A white-bearded fellow wearing tartans, an old friend of Hook’s who’d rowed over from Vinalhaven for the three o’clock service.
At the center of it all, a yawning grave.
Alex Hawke was seated in the very last row beside Brick Kelly. Hawke let his eyes wander where they would, taking it all in, the simple beauty of the rainy Maine day and the still and perfect sadness all around him.
Down at the dock, Hook’s black ketch was flying signal flags of muted color from stem to masthead to stern, thanks to young Ben, the good-looking college kid Cam Hooker had hired that summer. Ben was sitting with the Hooker clan’s grandchildren now, trying to keep them still. Earlier, he’d been trying to catch Hawke’s attention. Curious enough.
Now that they’d moved down to the house after the service, Hawke wanted to find out why the young man seemed so interested in talking to him.
Finally, Hawke said, “Can I help you with something?”
“You’re Lord Hawke, is that correct, sir?” They stood together, both holding plates, everyone inching forward in the buffet line circling through the living and dining rooms. Both rooms were full of musty old furniture, scrimshaw, cracked marine paintings, and frayed oriental rugs made all the more beautiful by the fade of age and deliberate lack of care.
“I am, indeed,” Hawke said, puzzled. Why should anyone here know who he was? He stood out, he supposed, in his uniform. Royal Navy Blue, No. 1 Dress, no sword. Bit of a spectacle, but nothing for it, it was regulation for service funerals.
“Ben Sparhawk, sir. I worked for Director Hooker this past summer. Helping out with Maracaya and around the dock. I wonder if we might have a word outside, sir?”
Curiosity piqued, Hawke said, “Of course. What about?”
The boy looked around and lowered his voice.
“I’d really rather not discuss it here if you don’t mind, sir.”
Hawke looked at the long line of people slowly snaking toward the buffet tables set up in the dining room. “Let’s go out onto the porch and get some air,” the Englishman said. “I’m not really hungry anyway.”
“Thank you,” the boy replied, somewhat shakily. He followed the older man outside into the damp air, misty rain blowing about under the eaves. “I really appreciate your taking the time.”
“Something’s bothering you, Ben,” Hawke said, his hands on the railing, admiring Camden Harbor across the bay and the beautiful Maine coastline visible from the hilltop. “Just relax and tell me what it is.”
“I don’t really know quite where to start and . . .”
It occurred to Hawke that he’d always loved this part of the world. That someday he would very much like to own an old house up here. The fresh summer air full of white clouds and diving white seabirds, the endlessly waving tops of green forests, the deep rolling swells of the blue sea. Bermuda was lovely, but it wasn’t this. For the first time he understood viscerally what his old friend Hook had known and cherished all his life. Down East Maine was closer to heaven than most places you could name. And you probably couldn’t even name one.
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know the proper form of address I should use. Is it ‘Your lordship’?”
“It’s Alex, Ben. Just plain old Alex.”
The handsome young man smiled. “First of all, I haven’t said a word to anyone. About what I’m going to tell you, I mean. But I know who you are and I figured you’d be someone who’d listen. Mr. Hooker talked about you a lot, all the sailing you two had done up here over the years. Northeast Harbor, Nova Scotia, Trans-Atlantic.”
“We had some good times,” Hawke said, wistful for those fleeting moments, sadly missing his old friend.
“So he often said. Hook always said you were the finest blue water sailor he’d ever known, sir, and one of his closest friends. But he was a good sailor, too, wouldn’t you say? I was only aboard with him a couple of times out in the bay. But you can tell, right?”
“Absolutely. Hook was a lifelong salt if ever there was one. Still competitive in the Bermuda Race until a few years ago. Why? What is troubling you?”
“Okay. Here goes. There is just no way on earth I can see what happened out there on the water as accidental. None.”
“Why?”
“Here’s the thing, sir. On the day it happened? Well, it was blowing pretty good out there, all right. Steady at fifteen, gusting to twenty-five, thirty knots. But nothing Cam Hooker couldn’t handle. Had I thought otherwise, I’d have volunteered to go with him. Not that he would have let me, but still.”
“Go on.”
“I know accidents happen at sea all the time, sir. Hell, I’ve had my share. But what I cannot understand, what I do not understand is why on earth Cam Hooker would jibe that big boat, out there all alone, blowing like stink. I’m sure you’d agree that it’s the last thing he would do! It’s the dead last thing anyone would do in a blow. Especially someone sailing alone.”
“I agree. Why in the hell would he do that? . . . But what makes you think that’s what happened?”
“Okay, here’s what I know. I had a few beers down at Nebo’s the other night with Jimmy Brown. He’s the chief of police here on the island. And he told me that when they found Maracaya, she’d drifted awhile and finally run aground on the rocks, out there on Horse Neck Island. The main sheet, which Cam would have obviously kept cleated, was free. Why? Also, from where Cam was found, the position of the body near the gunwale, it was clear the boom must have knocked him co
mpletely out of the cockpit. And he was not a small man, sir.”
Hawke nodded his head, seeing it happen.
“That much force could only have resulted from an accidental jibe.”
“Yes, sir. And it was no glancing blow, either. His skull, sir, it was . . . almost completely disintegrated.”
Ben Sparhawk looked away, his eyes filling up.
“Damn it, sir. I’m sorry. I just . . . I just don’t buy it. Accident, human error, Cam’s old age, dementia, all that police bullcrap. What they’re saying in town . . .”
“What do you think really happened, Ben?”
“Maybe I’m crazy, I dunno. But—”
“But what, Ben. Tell me.”
“Murder. To tell you the God’s honest truth, sir, it was murder. I think someone murdered him.”
CHAPTER 11
Murder’s a strong word, Ben.”
“I know, I know. No idea how it happened. No idea why. But you asked me what I think and now you know.”
“Take me through it, Ben. Step by step. I’ll ask a few questions. Any information you think I need to have, give it to me. Can you do that?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“First. He was alone on board when he left the dock? Is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And he sailed out of your sight alone?”
“He did.”
“But, once around the point down there, he could have seen a friend on the town docks, or someone on another boat in the harbor could have hailed him over. He could have stopped to let them aboard. A friend along for the ride or something.”
“He could have. But—”
“But what?”
“But he just never would have done it. Sunday was his day. He treasured every second he got to spend alone aboard that old boat. He didn’t go to church, you know. That boat was his church. His place of refuge. You know what he said to me early on in the summer?”