Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766)

by Caplan, Thomas

  The secretary nodded reluctantly, then, reaching beneath the central drawer of her desk, pressed a remote that unlocked the first of two heavy, sequenced doors that led to Ian’s private lair. Only once it had closed behind them was the second door released.

  “Another of your godfather’s vaults,” Ty remarked. “It reminds me of his quarters on Surpass.”

  “Same man, same concerns, same standards,” Isabella said.

  “Shall we have a look around?” Ty asked.

  “Are you asking my permission?”

  “I was taught to.”

  She laughed. “Well, of course you have it. It would help to know what we’re looking for.”

  “We’ll only know that when we find it,” he said.

  Bingo was already at the laptop that rested on a console table behind Ian’s desk. “Straight out of the box, this is funny,” he said. “Funny as in peculiar. It’s warm, so presumably Frost was just using it, but it doesn’t seem to be password-protected. Don’t you find that odd for a man with a lock fetish?”

  “Is it Ian’s or Philip’s?” Isabella asked.

  “Who’s to say, really?” Bingo told her. “No icons. No programs. Not even an ISP number. It’s been wiped.”

  “The whole room’s been wiped, it looks like,” Ty said.

  Isabella swiveled to take in the room from every angle. “I’m not sure,” she concluded. “Philip is manically tidy. That could be what gives it this feeling of . . . What am I trying to say? This feeling of having been vacated.

  “If the computer is Ian’s, why would Philip wipe it clean when he’s meant to be getting Ian’s affairs in order?” Isabella continued. “If it’s his, why would he want to lose all the information that was on it? Even if he did want to get rid of something, why wouldn’t he expunge only that and nothing else? I presume that’s possible.”

  “It would depend on what it was,” Bingo said. “If it were a document or file, he could manage that. But if it involved something he’d done on some network or where he’d been on the Internet, there would be traces of it elsewhere, on servers and routers to which he would have no access.”

  “All the more reason not to wipe it, then,” Isabella said.

  “Not really. Think about it. He’d be betting against anyone’s finding a needle in a haystack, as well as depriving whoever might be looking of a vital clue to its location.”

  Bingo removed a flash drive from the pocket of his fisherman’s vest and inserted it into the laptop’s USB.

  “What are you doing?” Ty asked.

  “Interrogating the machine,” Bingo said. “I want it to run a little operating system and in the process tell me its MAC address.”

  “It’s what?” Ty asked.

  “Its Media Access Control address,” explained Bingo. “It’s a unique identifier, a forty-eight-bit number given to every network adapter or NIC—sorry, network-interface card—by the manufacturer. It’s used in the Media Access Control protocol sublayer. Want to know more?”

  “What will it tell you?”

  “Maybe nothing, maybe a lot,” Bingo said. “Once I’ve got it, the team can hack into the various servers of service providers around here, and if Frost has been anywhere interesting, we’ll know pretty quickly when and where, if not perhaps why. Shall I include or exclude porn sites?”

  “They’re not one of his vices,” Isabella replied with a dismissive yawn. “All Philip requires in that regard is a mirror.”

  “Just joking,” Bingo told her.

  “It really is the end of privacy, isn’t it?” Ty mused.

  “What’s privacy?” Bingo said. “Only people above a certain age remember or expect it. Wait! The fish is nibbling. Yes! Just look at that screen! And here comes that MAC address now, in six beautiful groups of two hexadecimal digits.”

  A few seconds after Bingo had transferred the MAC address to his phone and e-mailed it from there to Delilah Mirador in Jerusalem, Jonty Patel in College Park, Maryland, and Nevada Smith in Berkeley, California, a landline rang. Isabella picked it up to hear the secretary in Ian’s outer office calling on the intercom. “I wanted you to know that it has now been fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “I don’t mind waiting a bit longer,” Isabella said.

  “How long do you think?”

  “Let me ask the others.” Isabella put the phone on hold, then inquired of Bingo, “How long will this take?”

  “Longer than we can stall, probably,” he said. “One thing we already know is that this isn’t one of the computers we’ve been tracking.”

  “That’s interesting,” Ty said. “Look, Bingo, why don’t you return to your office and coordinate your end of the search from there. Whatever information comes back is going to come to you, and you may be the only one who’ll understand it. It’s pretty plain from looking through the few papers that are still here that we’re unlikely to find anything else of much use. We’ll wait until Philip appears, if he appears.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Ollie and his mates have got him covered.”

  “I don’t know. I’d feel better if you came with me.”

  Ty shook his head. “No, we’re too close. At this point it’s much better to have some of us on the inside trying to figure a way out than all of us on the outside trying to figure a way in.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Bingo.

  “Has there been any word from Mr. Frost?” Isabella asked both secretaries as she saw Bingo out.

  “Not as yet,” the more severe of them replied. “I really should let him know you’re here, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Isabella said. “Go ahead, why don’t you?”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Back in Ian’s office, Isabella asked, “What do you think, Ty?”

  “I don’t really know what to think,” he told her. “I’m an actor in this mystery, not its author.”

  “That secretary is certainly frightened of getting on Philip’s wrong side, but I don’t think she has much to worry about, do you?”

  “Because you don’t think he’ll be coming back?”

  “Why would he?”

  “To explain himself to you,” Ty replied. “To blame others, conveniently dead, for what happened aboard Surpass. To persuade you to choose him over me and thus keep control of everything.”

  Isabella shook her head. “I think he’d be afraid I wouldn’t believe him, and he’d be right. He’d know I’d dig very deeply before I did, and I think he would fear what I might find out. No, knowing Philip, I’d say it would suit him far better to go off as the jilted man, sell his weapons and enjoy his money.”

  “Just because he’d vanished from your life wouldn’t mean you could no longer dig.”

  “The only thing I really yearn to know is why and by whose hand Ian died. And, sadly, Philip is probably the only one who can tell me that.”

  Softly, Ty touched Isabella’s shoulder. “How much do you know about your godfather’s will?” he asked.

  “He told me, more than once, that I was his sole heir. Just that, really. How I’ll deal with all that, I’ve no idea. I’d supposed Philip would see to it for me.”

  Ty smiled. “Do you have a will?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Until very recently I had nothing much to leave—the little bit my parents left me, a few quid I’d saved—but yes, I do have a will.”

  “Who is your heir, if I may ask?”

  “Philip,” Isabella whispered.

  “How did that happen?” Ty asked. “Isn’t it the sort of thing people ordinarily do after they get married, not before?”

  “We were headed that way.”

  “Did you suggest it, or did Philip?”

  “I did.�
�

  Ty hesitated. “Why?”

  “It was in response to his generosity, or at least that’s how it seemed to me at the time,” she said. “We were in Cambridge. We’d driven out for the day from London. Philip had wanted to attend a lecture on disarmament at Trinity, and we had dinner at the Midsummer House. Between those two events, we walked past the house where I’d grown up. Naturally, that stirred memories of childhood, which led to the fact that neither of us had parents who were still living. We were relatively young to say that. And, of course, neither of us had children of our own yet. Anyway, a few days later Philip told me he’d named me in his will. Apart from bequests to a charity or two, I was to be his only heir. It wasn’t a fortune, he said, but he’d done well enough in the City as a young man. It hardly mattered, because Philip Frost was nowhere near dying. He’d never been ill a day in his life and had the stamina of a draft horse. What touched me, though, was when he said he’d done it because I was the only person in the world he loved. At the moment I felt the same way about him. And why shouldn’t I have done? He seemed a kind, thoughtful and, God knows, a very beautiful man. Even now I’m not ashamed of having fallen for him. Eventually I went to a solicitor and responded in kind. Perhaps it was slightly premature, but it seemed preferable to dying intestate and forfeiting whatever little I had to the government. If it was a setup, it was very elegantly done, a masterpiece.”

  “Let’s hope it wasn’t,” Ty said, then felt his BlackBerry vibrate.

  The red light was still blinking. On the screen were two texts from Oliver, the first reading GHU and the second, sent less than a half a minute later, DELTA.

  Ty pressed the encryption key, followed by Oliver’s speed-dial number.

  “He’s on the move again,” Oliver said.

  “He’s probably on his way here,” Ty replied. “He’d instructed the secretary to call him when we arrived. How he knew we’d be arriving, when we didn’t, I have no idea. He played a hunch, I guess. Anyway, Isabella stalled her as long as she could, but the secretary will have called him by now.”

  “Not to insult you, but I don’t think he’s exactly headed your way.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He started on the western side of the basin, as I told you. From there he moved gradually east. Now he’s suddenly turned south.”

  “I wonder what he’s looking for,” Ty said.

  “It’s difficult to tell. He retracts the window, stares out at this vessel or that, sometimes with a pair of mini binoculars, then stays there and waits until, when you least expect it and can’t figure out why, he goes on.”

  “He hasn’t boarded any of them?”

  “He hasn’t even got out of his car,” Oliver said.

  Ty looked at Isabella. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve been had!”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Come, quickly,” he demanded.

  At the door Ty pressed the panel that should have opened it, but there was no response. He tried it again, but the inner door would not move. He pulled frantically on its enormous brass knob, but the door was sealed fast.

  “Hurry!” he shouted. Isabella fled across the massive, encapsulating office toward the long, dim gallery. Ty threw his frame on top of hers as the office exploded behind them, as the intensifying heat and fumes raced toward them, as the flames devoured everything within the cold stone walls.

  Finally he managed to raise his phone to his ear. “Oliver,” he gasped.

  “I could tell you were beginning to get bored,” Oliver said, “but were you really that starved for excitement?”

  “This is a bad time for jokes,” Ty said. “There’s a fire. It’s got us trapped. We’re going to have to come out through one of the gun-emplacement openings.”

  “You can’t go forward? At the far ends of those galleries, more often than not, there are stairs.”

  “There’s no way,” Ty said. “The flames have shot through the tunnel. We’re pinned into a little recess on pure rock beyond the wooden floor. If we weren’t, we’d be dead by now.” The ceiling was low and jagged, and he had to stoop as he maneuvered himself around a nineteenth-century cannon to assess the position of the opening. “It’s a sheer drop,” he said at last, “certainly more than five hundred feet.”

  “What do you see from there?”

  “A runway,” Ty said.

  “Hold on. We’re coming now.”

  “What about Frost?”

  “We’ll mind him. The Royal Navy can still do two things at the same time.”

  The old cannon wagon was fixed to the gallery walls on either side with decorative ropes of black chain. Ty leaned forward and tried to undo the last link of the chain from the large iron hoop on the left side of the wagon, but it was welded in. The chain on the right, which coiled out into the path of the fire, was inaccessible and would be too hot to touch even if it weren’t. So he retreated to the emplacement opening and, using only his butterfly knife, began to dislodge its fitted double-glazed window. When he had finished, the new air that suddenly flooded inward brought them a moment of relief from the acrid fumes and thickening smoke but, even as it did, added fuel to the rampaging inferno. Hanging as a curtain before the emplacement were a series of ropes, two of which Ty now spared while cutting the others, then tying them into strands long enough to reach through and several feet below the opening. With bowlines he tied one strand onto each of the ropes he had left dangling.

  “Were you a Boy Scout?” Isabella asked as she scrutinized the one Ty gave her, then, with a mixture of gratitude and reluctance, gripped it.

  “Yes, and worse,” Ty said. “Go on,” he urged her. “Wrap it around your wrist a couple of times, like this”—he demonstrated—“to make sure you’ve got hold of it.”

  Isabella was quiet and attentive. When she had the rope firmly in her grip, she said, “After you, Captain.”

  Ty started. “What did you say?” he asked, urging her forward.

  “That’s your rank, isn’t it?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “No one told me anything, but I’ve read about you. Who hasn’t?”

  “Never believe what you read. I don’t hold any rank anymore.”

  “Maybe not officially,” she said as she lowered herself against the mountain’s flank, “but you’re still a soldier.”

  “Stop talking and concentrate,” he said, settling beside her a few feet away.

  “I can’t,” Isabella said. “If I do, I might look down.”

  Chapter Forty-eight

  When Philip Frost, feeling unnatural in the ill-fitting outfit of a middle-class tourist, exited the Great Siege Tunnels, the sunlight startled him. He had been within the mountain for hours, traversing long galleries, navigating the uneven rises of hundreds and hundreds of stone steps in darkness. Near the old cementerio, exactly where Andrej had promised it, Philip found the four-year-old Subaru Outback that Andrej had bought secondhand under an assumed name in Cádiz. The car was covered with just enough of summer’s dust to render it invisible, a nuance Philip appreciated. He loaded his twin duffel bags into the car’s hatch, stretched and got in behind the wheel. Careful to maintain a moderate speed, he drove west on the Devils Tower Road, but at its intersection with Winston Churchill Avenue found himself blocked by traffic. Once the traffic cleared, he proceeded across Winston Churchill Avenue to Ocean Village and the Gibraltar Marina, where he had no difficulty locating the thirty-one-foot Contender in its assigned slip. Parking in the public lot as near to the quay as he could, he unloaded the two duffels. Only after he had ensconced himself in the forward cabin, however, did he remove the three gem-laden attaché cases and, with tremendous care, place their contents into a small red chest that had been designed both to float and to accommodate containers of cold drinks. Atop the jewel
ry he spread a white kitchen towel and atop that a folded plastic bag. He placed a few bottles of water on top of the plastic bag, then returned to the cockpit. The Contender’s twin F350 outboards started at the first turn of his key in the ignition. Confirming that his tank was full, Philip set off, without a wake until he’d cleared the marina harbor, across the Bay of Algeciras.

  By the time he reached Gibraltar Canyon, he had opened the throttles and was doing thirty knots. Dolphins followed him to port, and closer to shore water-skiers and Jet Skiers sped in high, wide, graceful arcs whose wakes rocked the Contender and demanded his attention. Once he reached his destination, he slowed, turned off his boat’s engines and quickly dropped anchor. Nearby, a cobalt blue hulled barco with butterscotch decks sat easily in the sea, almost dissolving in his sight as he observed it. None of the expensive and cumbersome fiberglass and steel toys that surrounded it could do that, Philip thought, although the barco seemed less a fully independent craft than an elaborate skiff. For almost twenty minutes, he stretched himself across the Contender’s rear bench seat, remaining still as he absorbed the June sun’s perfect warmth and kept watch on the nearby craft.

  Still, he was caught unawares when its sole occupant suddenly dove from it into the sea. He heard the loud splash first. Seconds later he spotted the powerful young swimmer surface, then begin an impressive Australian crawl. Philip waited several minutes, until the swimmer had given up doing laps and begun to tread water, before diving into the beckoning Med. Keeping his distance, he commenced several laps of his own. When he had completed the last of these, the other man greeted him, as if on impulse. “Isn’t it a glorious day?” he said.

  “More glorious than I could have imagined,” Philip replied. Gradually they moved closer in the clear blue water, in the manner of strangers who had just met.

  When it was obvious that no one was near enough to overhear them, Philip said, “You are Franz?”

  “Of course,” the young man replied. In the sea, with their wet hair, they might have appeared twins; out of the sea, even more so as, by design, they were wearing identical swim trunks.