by Orca Various
“Walk up,” the speaker said. “Leave the cab at the gate and walk up. Mr. Robb, you may be on your way. Mr. McLean, pay your man and send him off. We can see you from where we are.” I was so lame at this game, I hadn’t even noticed the camera peering down at us from the top of the gate. “You must enter alone. Come to the front door and I will await you there.” He had a Bermudian accent too, though a little more refined than Emmanuel’s.
It was a long steep walk. The lawn was well kept but not perfect. A rich guy lived here, somebody who was pretty comfortable but not a multimillionaire. Comfortable enough to have a servant or a security guy. The driveway curved in front of the house, and as I walked along beside a hedge that hid the front doors and the windows, I could see someone, a big someone, standing on the white stone steps at the entrance. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, no tie, and I thought I could see a bulge under his jacket, right where a gun holster would be. I thought of the Walther PPK in my bag and wondered if I should have brought the bullets. He had close-cropped blond hair and shades so dark that I couldn’t see his eyes move behind them.
“Mr. McLean?” he asked.
No, Daniel Craig, I thought, here to kick your ass. Bad Adam again. Who did he think I was though? He’d seen me on his surveillance camera. But he was awfully serious, and I supposed people in his line of work, whatever line that was, had to be sure of everything.
“Yes.”
“You may enter.”
How kind of you, thought Bad Adam. “Thank you,” I said.
It was very quiet inside. A clock was ticking somewhere and it sounded really loud. The house appeared to be all on one level, but large and sprawling; a series of huge picture windows lined the far end of the house. From the front door you could see a big living room and dining area with all sorts of comfortable leather sofas and chairs, expensive-looking art on the walls and sculptures on antique wooden tables. Though the walls were white, every piece of furniture was dark. There were lots of photographs, too, all black and white, of famous leaders from the past—guys like President John F. Kennedy and the famous Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and even Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union communist boss in the 1950s and ’60s. There were closed doors leading out of the open area, giving the impression that the house hid a warren of secret chambers.
We were up on a hill, so the view was amazing—the city of Hamilton in the distance with its colorful buildings and white roofs, green palm trees and the peacock-blue Atlantic Ocean beyond. In the foreground I could see a swimming pool. Lounging on one of the chairs and reading was a girl. She could have been anywhere from sixteen to twenty (it’s hard to tell girls’ ages sometimes). Bad Adam was disappointed that she was wearing baggy sweatpants and a baggy sweatshirt, gray on gray. He was trying to check her out. She had medium-length reddish-brown hair, uncombed and hanging over her face. She was wearing shades and a black New York Yankees ballcap. She peered through the window at me. In fact, she got up and looked in. But I had to pay attention to my brawny guide.
“Stay there,” he said, pointing to a spot on the floor. He seemed to like that phrase. He turned and knocked on a door. It opened and another man came out—similar build, similar suit, similar bulge in his jacket, though this guy was black. They whispered to each other and then the white guy disappeared through the door, closing it behind him, and the black guy walked into the living room.
“This way, Mr. McLean,” he said in a smooth Bermudian accent, motioning for me to sit on one of the leather sofas.
What were these guys, mobsters? I wondered what in the world I’d walked into.
Half an hour later, we were both still sitting there in silence. He never smiled, even though I gave him a few friendly looks. The magazines on the table were pretty unusual. There were a few about presentday Bermuda (and there was a local newspaper), but most of them were from the 1960s—Time and one called Newsweek. I picked up a few and leafed through them; lots of stories about long-dead people.
The girl, who I had noticed was looking at me every now and then, eventually got up, slid open one of the floor-to-ceiling glass doors and approached us, her bare feet gently slapping on the cool stone floor.
“Hello, Jim,” she said to the black guy. Her accent was pretty spectacular. A girl with those gentle Bermudian tones. Pretty cool.
“Angel,” he said in a monotone.
“Where’s John?”
“He went to get Mr. No.”
Went to get him? I thought. Where was he, in Timbuktu? It seemed like forever since John had left us.
“Mr. K-N-O-W?” she sneered. “Is that what we are calling him today?”
“Angel, behave.”
“Oh, I know, play the game. Who’s this?”
She motioned toward me, sliding her shades down. A slight girl, not very tall; seventeen, I thought, maybe even eighteen. Nice eyes, thought Bad Adam. They were blue like the ocean, but she covered them up quickly. No stunner, added Bad Adam to himself as he gave her a fuller examination. Kind of mousy, but maybe with some potential.
“This is Mr. McLean,” said John.
I stood up to greet her. I believe in treating women with respect. I always open doors for Shirley. She deserves it, deserves to be thought of as someone special. Grandpa taught me that. “I’m pleased to meet you,” I said and extended my hand.
“My, aren’t we formal,” said Angel as she turned and walked away. Two steps later she tripped over a stool and looked embarrassed. But she recovered, opened the sliding door, looked at me over her shoulder and went back outside. I had noticed the book in her hand. It was The Human Factor by Graham Greene. I’d heard about him. He was considered a great writer—pretty heavy—and he sometimes wrote about spies. It wasn’t light reading. She must be smart, I thought in admiration. Oh no, just my luck, thought Bad Adam.
I glanced over at John for a reaction, but he simply looked straight back at me, shades still on. It was a little disconcerting.
An hour later, Jim appeared. My stomach had begun rumbling.
“Mr. Know is ready to receive you.”
“Receive me?” I said and then wondered why I’d said it out loud.
“Yes, Mr. McLean. Come with us.”
John walked in front of me and Jim behind. I could swear they moved their hands closer to the bulges in their suit coats. We headed through a big wooden door into what I thought was a bedroom but turned out to be a sort of office with surveillance monitors, then through another door and into another room, and then another. Each time, John would open the door, we’d all go through it, and then Jim would close the door behind us. The doors were so thick and tightly hung that when they closed, you heard absolutely no sound from beyond them, as if we were in soundproof chambers. Then we entered the last room. It was huge, also an office of some sort, but with no surveillance monitors. It had dark mahogany walls, black leather sofas and chairs, more black-and-white pictures on the walls and more sculptures. It, too, had a sense of being frozen in the 1960s. The ceiling was low, and there were no windows. A few lamps dimly lit the room. Jim and John brought me to a halt a good twenty feet from a big oak desk. It was spotless, polished to a shine. There was nothing on it except an eye, a glass eye sitting there alone like a raft on calm water. The iris in it was gold. An old man in a wheelchair sat behind the desk, his back turned to us.
“Mr. Know?” said John.
The old man slowly swung around in his chair and stared at me.
It was Grandpa.
FOUR
THE DAHL BUILDING
“I’ve waited for this moment for so long,” said Grandpa. For some reason, he didn’t sound happy. But it was him—his face, his voice, his expression. It was David McLean, my incredible grandfather!
I’ve never fainted before, but I almost did at that moment. I was immediately in tears, tears of joy, and I started feeling wobbly and weak. For a few seconds, I couldn’t move, not a single muscle. I stood there stunned, immobile as a statue.
He was
alive! I stared at him. It was impossible, absolutely, positively impossible. Hadn’t my cousins and I seen him in his coffin? But there was no doubt that he was sitting right in front of me. I knew if I went to him, I could touch him. He even held his head slightly to the left, like he always did. Still, I couldn’t believe it. Then I thought of what we had found at the cottage, all the evidence of the secrets he had kept from us, all those passports, the money, and the Walther PPK. If David McLean really was a spy, then MI6 or the CIA could have made this happen—they could make anything happen. In fact, they might do this sort of thing often. Maybe spies faked their own deaths all the time.
I rushed toward him. Two steps forward, then John and Jim seized me.
“Grandpa!” I cried. “Grandpa, how…you’re…” I sputtered, and then I blurted out, “I…I love you! I’m sorry for the way I—”
“You love me?” he sneered.
“Yes! Of course I do! Let me GO!” I screamed at the two men. They were as strong as oxen.
“Well, I don’t love you, my boy.”
I froze.
“Love is unaffordable in this world, though I know I made it look as if I believed in it. I had a job to do, Adam. And I have one now. It is bigger than anything else in my world—in the world, period. Family must come second. Your mother and her sisters, you and your cousins, have their place. One must have priorities.”
It was a phrase Grandpa often used, but he’d never used it like this.
“What do you mean? Why are you talking like this? Make them let me go!” I was ashamed of my tears, yet I couldn’t stop them. But Grandpa almost seemed to enjoy my pain. He was smiling at me with exactly the same smile he’d used so many times when he talked to me in my childhood.
“There is more in this world than is dreamt of in your little mind.”
He was paraphrasing Shakespeare, another line from Hamlet. Grandpa had always loved to quote from literature.
“What do you—?”
“You cannot know that I am alive, Adam. Neither can your mother or father or your cousins. It is unacceptable. Impossible.”
“But you showed yourself to me.”
“Nevertheless”—he gave me a hard look—“now I must eliminate you.”
“Eliminate?” My stomach burned.
“Look at me.”
I looked right into his eyes, those amazing blue eyes I had never dreamed I would see again. “Take him away,” he said to his two thugs, still staring at me but with something hidden in his expression, something I couldn’t place. Was he trying to tell me something? Signal me somehow? “Take him to the Dahl building and finish him. You know how. Adam, I am sorry I have to do this, but nevertheless…I do.”
As Jim held me, John frisked me in a few quick motions, amazingly fast and professional. He felt my cell phone and ripped it out of my pocket. He flipped it to Grandpa, who opened a top drawer in his desk and set it inside, closing it immediately afterward.
“Bring me his other things. I’ll put them in here too.”
Then they pulled me screaming from the room. Grandpa watched as I was taken away. Once we’d reached the second soundproof room, they put thick tape over my mouth. I moaned and tried to wrestle free.
“Tell Angel to go to her room,” said John to Jim. I had enough Wing Chun training to take out almost anyone, I thought, even a big guy, and I had put on lots of muscle recently, but John had pipes like a blacksmith and had me in a tight grip, locking my arms and holding me down. It hurt. He seemed to really know what he was doing. Jim exited and came back a few minutes later.
“Okay, let’s move him.”
They dragged me into the area by the front door. I looked down and saw my bag still sitting there, with the Walther PPK inside. All my cash and my passport were in there too. Though I kept trying to kick and wriggle my way out of their grips, they pulled me through the house to the glass doors and then across the big backyard. I could see a small building up ahead. It was made of unpainted steel. They unlocked it, threw me in and then slammed the door and secured it. I couldn’t hear anything once I was inside. It was soundproof too. I tore off the tape, ripping out the hairs growing on my upper lip. It hurt like crazy. But I didn’t give it a second thought. I shouted at the top of my lungs. It didn’t matter. No one could hear me. I slumped down on the floor and cried. Grandpa was alive! He was alive but he was…I don’t know…someone horrible and uncompromising, and unlike the man I had known…nothing like what he had always pretended to be! Then I thought of the stories Mom had told me about him constantly being away, flying around, running his “import/export” business. It had always seemed a bit mysterious, and he’d never said much about it. If he really was a spy or at least someone with big secrets, maybe he had no choice but to hide them. Maybe he had to eliminate me; maybe it was for the greater good. I didn’t know. But why couldn’t he find a way to protect me? Protect me no matter what? I collapsed and sobbed again.
But I didn’t cry for long. The building was one very small room. You could stand in the middle and almost touch the sides. There were no lights, just long horizontal slits up high in the walls, about an inch or two wide and a foot long, where light came in through what appeared to be incredibly thick glass—soundproof too, no doubt. There was nothing in the building but a desk and a chair, some yellow writing pads, some pencils with erasers, and a few books. I was surprised to see that many of them were by Roald Dahl, the guy who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and The BFG, some of the most famous kids’ books ever written. I loved them when I was a kid, mostly because they all had an edge and also because Grandpa had read some of them to me. But why were they here in this prison he had put me in? That made no sense.
I sat there for hours, it seemed, many hours. No one brought food, nothing happened. It got darker, then completely black. I could barely see the nose on my face.
Then the walls began to move.
FIVE
CRUSHED
Two of the walls were moving inward.
It was barely detectable at first. They rumbled slowly toward me. Within minutes I would be crushed to death. This was how I was to be eliminated! There would be almost nothing left of me. They had a perfect plan.
At first, I just screamed. But I was screaming into a void. By great strength of will, I stopped and forced myself to think. Maybe this was a dream. I pinched myself—hard. It hurt. I slapped myself across the face. Really hurt. I was still in the little building, and the walls were still coming at me. I tried to keep from panicking.
“What would Grandpa do?” I asked out loud. It seemed like such a stupid question at first. Why would I want to do anything Grandpa did anymore? How could I look up to a single thing about him, anything he had ever said or done? But he had always been the guy with the ideas in our family, the one we’d all leaned on in a crisis.
So, I told myself, maybe I should think about what he’d do. Maybe my new lethal and dedicated grandfather was actually a good role model in this desperate situation. Evil or good, he got the job done. Grandpa had survived a lot: the Spanish Civil War, a plane crash in Iceland, the Nazis in occupied southern France, dangerous adventures in Africa. And those were just the things I knew about. He had likely remained cool through it all. Mom was like that too—calm under fire. Also, it was apparent now that Grandpa had lived a life of deception. He was like a guy in a John Le Carré novel. What would he do? Time was running out.
“I need to remain cool too,” I said out loud as calmly as I could. “I need to think clearly.”
I tried to find something or someone to calm me, but I didn’t think of Shirley. Her kind face, more beautiful to me than anyone else’s, wouldn’t comfort me now; it would upset me, because I wanted to be with her and hold her in my arms. I thought instead of Leon Worth.
The walls kept closing in on me, terrifying me. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to die this way, to be crushed to death. My ribs would break, my inner organs would—
>
“Help me, Leon!” I shouted. “How do I get out of here?”
Leon Worth is the smartest person I know. He’s about four feet tall, and all of his limbs are pretty useless. He has a muscle disease called inclusion body myositis. It is slowly killing him. I wish somebody would find a cure for it. I’ve been helping him out for a few years. He’s in a wheelchair, but he stands tall in my mind, as tall as anyone I’ve ever known. Shirley just adores him. Lots of girls do. And why not? He’s a brave and amazing guy.
So as the walls kept grinding toward me, I thought of Leon. I called out to him again. “Help me!” He always has ideas; he can solve any problem. If I could just concentrate on some of the things we’d done together, some of the ways he’d dealt with difficulties, something would come to me. But time was running out.
“You know, you’re a chick magnet,” I remembered telling him just last week.
“James Bond on wheels,” he responded. That had cracked me up.
Most people have a hard time understanding him. His voice is high-pitched and kind of wrecked, but I always know what he is saying. It bonds us.
He went with Shirley and me the second time we saw Skyfall. “I should be Q, you know,” he told me afterward.
“Q!” I shouted now, petrified as the walls moved in on me. Q, the problem solver. I had to channel him. Think!
“And I should be Moneypenny and fall in love with you instead of Bond,” Shirley had said to him. She was wearing the glistening gold earrings I’d got her for her seventeenth birthday, the ones that really make her dark eyes and short dark hair look great. She can really smile with her eyes. I love that about her. She was smiling at Leon.
“Chick magnet,” I’d mouthed to him behind her back.
“Stud on wheels, a seated Daniel Craig,” he said.
“What was that?” she asked. Anytime she heard the words Daniel and Craig together, she perked up.