by Orca Various
“Let me look in there,” she said, approaching the big desk. She pulled open the drawer and took something out. It was a passport: a Bermudian one. “I knew he had it in here somewhere. It’s my passport. He keeps it from me.”
We rushed out into the area near the front entrance, and I turned to say goodbye to her. I held out my hand. Bad Adam told me to kiss her right there, and then take her in my big, strong arms, tensing them so she could feel the muscles as I pulled her tightly to me. But I would never do something like that. Not anymore. Mostly because I would never betray Shirley, and I knew she would never betray me.
But Angel refused my extended hand.
“I’m coming with you,” she said.
SEVEN
W
Angel had another surprise for me a few moments later.
We had gently closed the front door behind us, walked down the steep driveway, climbed over the fence and headed out onto the dimly lit residential streets of Paget Parish.
“You need to get out of here,” she said, looking straight ahead. She wasn’t very big, but she seemed to have lots of energy and strength. I had to step along to keep up with her. She sounded nervous.
“Yeah, as far away from the house as possible. Let’s find a place to stay on the island. I have lots of money, enough for both of us. I’ll pay for a room for you.”
She looked at me funny, like she wondered why I had so much money. She was still wearing her gray sweats. She’d rushed into her room and come back in about thirty seconds with a small backpack. It looked to me like she’d need more clothes in a day or two. Only a guy could stretch whatever she had in her pack over more than a few days.
“No. I mean you need to get right out of here—off the island!”
“I can’t do that. I came here to find out about my grandfather and I’m not leaving until I do. You don’t understand. I have to know this!”
We were moving past pastel-colored houses, maintaining our fast pace, looking over our shoulders every few seconds.
“Adam, this is a small island. Not so small that everyone knows everyone or anything like that, but I can guarantee you that Jim and John and Mr. Know can find us fast, very fast. I’ve always thought they were capable of some pretty bad things, but I didn’t know how bad…until I saw what they were trying to do to you. You can’t mess with them. They’ll be after us the second Jim comes around, which could be anytime now.”
“But—”
“Look, I can tell you a lot about Mr. Know and what happens in that house. Maybe all you need to know.”
“You can?”
“I’ve been watching and listening to what has been going on inside those walls for a long time.”
I thought about my situation for a few seconds. “If we fly out of here, we’re coming back, and coming back soon,” I said. “I’ll give it a day for things to calm down and then I’m returning. I have to.” But I only had three or four days to solve everything. It was already the morning of December 28, about zero five hundred hours. Mom would be back from the Caribbean on the thirty-first. She and Dad were expecting me for a New Year’s Eve party. Shirley would be there, probably looking great, hopefully having really missed me. I sure knew I missed her. I had to be there—not only there, but with all my questions about Grandpa answered. If I didn’t make it, how would I explain things to Mom? Where would I tell her I’d gone? What would I tell her I’d been doing, and investigating? What would I tell her about her father? I had to know more, and I had to know it soon.
We were out on a busier road now. A few cars had passed by, and a cab was approaching.
“So,” I said, “what can you tell me about—?”
“No time for that now. You have lots of money?”
“Yes.”
“Enough for two plane tickets?”
“Two?”
“Yes.” The cab was getting closer. She raised her hand to flag it down.
“I have a pilot’s pass,” I said, eyeing the cab. “I can fly anywhere I want.”
“Really?” She smiled. “You are full of surprises, Adam McLean.”
I still hadn’t told her my real last name. Her accent was awfully nice. She’s mousy, said Bad Adam. Leave her behind.
“I have more than enough money.”
The cab stopped.
“Get into the taxi and don’t say anything—not a word—until we’re at the airport.”
Once we were in the terminal, she made me get the tickets before she’d answer any questions. There was an early-morning flight to New York, just a few hours from boarding. She doubted Know and his people would look for us at the airport—at least, not at first. She seemed very excited about getting on this flight, almost too excited. She was trembling. What was I getting into, and why did she want to leave so badly?
“I am Guy Hicks’s ward,” she said once we’d sat down. We were in this little all-night café in the terminal. I had bought her a chai latte and I was having a Coke.
“Who is he?”
“Mr. Know.”
“Okay, Angel, I’ll play along. Why does he call—?”
She had a way of anticipating what you were thinking. It was a little scary. “I’m not sure. He’s nuts, is all I know. He wants Jim and John to call him that, so they indulge him. It’s like a game or something, a sort of spy game. I’m guessing he has so much money that they just do whatever he wants, for hefty salaries.”
“But he’s not Guy Hicks.”
“He isn’t?”
“He’s my grandfather. Hicks is just an alias he’s using.”
“No, it isn’t, Adam. He’s not your grandfather.”
“Yes, he is. Do you think I wouldn’t recognize my own grandfather? And I have other proof, absolute proof.”
“Okay. Enlighten me.”
I looked around the terminal. No one was watching us. I was reluctant to tell her any of this. What if she was working for someone who was looking for the information I was about to give her? That seemed like a crazy thought. She was an eighteen-year-old girl (I’d caught her birth date on her passport when she’d flipped it open back at the house—I was getting good at snooping), and not an overly worldly one. She was so excited about getting on a plane, I wondered if she’d ever been on one before. She seemed harmless. But that’s just what spies are like. They are not what anyone (other than actual spies) would expect. Le Carré had worked in the espionage world, and George Smiley, the character in his novels, was fat and short and old. He wore glasses and dressed in shabby clothes. He was both depressed and devious.
I looked at Angel, leaning forward with her chai latte pressed against her chin, warming herself like a little kid. What harm could it do to tell her? She had helped me escape and seemed to have some pretty serious issues with my grandfather and his thugs. She wasn’t on their side. She was on mine—probably. I had no one else to confide in. She at least knew something about all of this. She was the only one who did, the only lead in what seemed like an awfully deep mystery. She was the only one who could provide a single clue.
“I’ll tell you,” I said. She smiled.
I told her about my grandfather, what a great guy he had been (which made me so sad that I almost choked up), about my mission for him in southern France, about him being a pilot and running some sort of mysterious import/export business for years, flying all over the world, gone for days and weeks at a time. I told her about all the stuff we’d stumbled upon at the cottage in Canada, including the envelope, the angry words on it and even the black Walther PPK.
“Wow,” she said quietly. “Maybe Mr. Know is him.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Can I see the envelope?”
I hesitated for a moment, then reached down into my bag and handed it to her. She held it up to the light and examined it. As she did, I looked around, up and down the big hall of the terminal. At any second, Jim and John could show up. I wished the hands on the huge WELCOME TO BERMUDA clock above us would race forw
ard. But that clock was like something out of Victorian England, and it seemed to move at about that pace.
“You missed something,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“See this?” She leaned toward me and held the envelope up to the light so we could both look at it. Her face and mine were just inches apart. She noticed and turned to look at me, right into my eyes through her hair. She swallowed. But I looked away and up at the envelope.
“Where?” I said.
“Right there, where my finger is.”
I looked toward the tip of her right index finger. She hadn’t manicured or painted her nails. They were just plain old fingernails. This girl wasn’t what I was used to, that’s for sure. I looked closely at the spot she was indicating on the envelope. Then I saw it. It was a letter.
W.
“What do you think that means?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but it kind of scares me.”
“Scares you? Why?” It had sort of scared me too. The gate at Mr. Know’s house looked like a big W. William Stephenson—William with a W, an incredibly powerful man and big-time spy—apparently used to see my grandfather here. Why so many Ws?
“Because, I, uh,” said Angel, “I was just about to tell you something about that very letter.”
“What?”
“Well, Mr. Hicks—”
“David McLean, my grandfather.”
“Let’s agree to call him Mr. Know.”
“Okay, for now.”
“He uses the letter W a lot, especially when he thinks no one is listening.”
“Uses it?”
“I like to spy on him, so I know.”
“You spy on him?”
“Well, you see, he adopted me. Like I said, I’m sort of his ward. I know that sounds awfully old-fashioned, like something from a Charles Dickens novel or something, but that’s the word he uses. Technically, I’m Angel Hicks. He made up my first name. But he likes calling me Angel Dahl.”
“Angel Dahl?” I said, thinking out loud. “That’s good, very Bond. Ian Fleming would have loved that.”
“Whatever.” She didn’t look too pleased. Then she paused and dropped her head as she spoke. “I was left on his doorstep when I was a baby. I was abandoned.” She stopped again and sighed. “No one knows where I came from or who my parents were. Maybe they were from America or maybe the UK. At any rate, they didn’t want me so they dropped me at the gates of a nice, secluded house in Bermuda, where no one would see them doing it. You know, wipe your hands of a problem in some faraway place and then disappear back to wherever you came from.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, sure, thanks. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. But Mr. Know, nuts or not, has looked after me, or at least he’s provided me with food and shelter and a good education. Not that I get along with anyone there. You wouldn’t think someone like Guy Hicks would care about someone like me. And to be honest, I don’t think he does. I think it just makes him feel like he’s human or something, like he is at least doing something good with his useless, secretive life. Or maybe he just needs the company. I turned up at his door and he decided to not throw me out with the trash. Sometimes I wonder if he has an ulterior motive though. I used to hear him arguing about me with the guys who lived with him, still do—there’s always been a Jim and John or a Peter and Paul, always two of them, always well armed, always looking out for Mr. Know. They usually laugh behind his back when they call him that, though they don’t to strangers, like you.”
“Tell me what he does. What are his habits?”
“He doesn’t do anything, really. He’s pretty secretive—keeps to himself and disappears a lot.”
I nodded, not pleased to hear this. Like Grandpa, he was gone for days at a time. It seemed highly likely that David McLean had been living a double life. Part of it in Canada, part of it here.
“He seems pretty angry with the world. He argues a lot with John and Jim.”
“Do you think he’s a spy?”
The question didn’t seem to surprise her. “I don’t know, but he definitely has something to do with that kind of thing, somehow.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, as I said before, I don’t see him that often. He rarely even eats with me. My meals are prepared by a chef who comes by every day, and I eat with Jim or John. But I hear him talking about Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl and William Stephenson. He talks a lot about events in the sixties too, not to me but to John and Jim, and sometimes to himself or to the mirror when he doesn’t think I hear him. Highly political things, like the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Bay of Pigs, JFK, Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s as if he knows something personally about those things. The Cuban thing is a big one with him. You must have studied it in school. You know, that time in 1962 when the Soviets and Nikita Khrushchev were discovered to have placed missiles in Cuba, aimed at the United States, and President Kennedy faced him down and almost brought the world to the brink of nuclear war between the superpowers. It would have destroyed the world as we know it. Mr. Know is pretty obsessed with that. But he talks about other spies too, not just Fleming, Stephenson or Dahl. He especially likes to talk about guys who defected, double agents like Donald Maclean and—”
“McLean?” My heart almost stopped.
“Oh yeah, I never thought of that,” she said. She looked worried for a second. “Probably just a coincidence. Maclean wasn’t the biggest double agent anyway, or the one that intrigues Know the most. He’s more interested in Kim Philby.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was a British operative who had been working for the Soviet Union, feeding them information. He defected there in 1963, the year after the missile crisis, actually, right about the time Goldfinger and From Russia With Love came out.”
“Early James Bond movies,” I said, almost to myself, “starring Sean Connery.”
“Best Bond ever.”
“That would be Daniel Craig.”
“Good second choice and, I have to admit, awfully close. Fleming might have agreed with you. He wrote Bond to be more like Craig. He called him a ‘blunt instrument.’ That’s DC.”
“You seem to know a lot about spies,” I said.
“I do.”
“And about Bond, especially for a girl.” (I think Bad Adam said that.)
“I do.”
“Well, so do I.”
“Probably not as much as me.” I’d never heard a girl say something like that, and right to a guy’s face.
“Oh, really?”
“Really. I’ve read every spy novel I can get my hands on, not just Fleming’s. My favorites are the Le Carré and Greene novels. They tell the truth. Fleming was just making money. He wasn’t much of a spy either, just an assistant in Naval Intelligence. A windbag, I’d call him, a bit of a poseur and not a nice man either: a real womanizer—that’s where Bond gets that. William Stephenson, he was the real deal. And Fleming’s books suck. If Bond really existed, he’d be dead within a week. Come on, a great-looking guy who uses a gun all the time and sleeps with a lot of women? He’d be easy to compromise. He’d be a liability. He’d stick out like a sore thumb.”
“I agree. But Bond is great to watch.”
“Well, Connery sure was, and Daniel Craig too. Skyfall was amazing.”
“You’ll admit that?” I teased. “You can stomach watching him, can you?”
She smiled. “Yeah, DC’s all right.” She paused. “Can I, uh, can I see the gun?”
I looked around and then slid my bag over to her. “You can’t take it out. Just look.” I unzipped the bag and snapped open the gun case.
She looked down and gave a little intake of breath. “Can I touch it?”
“I suppose. But don’t take it out.”
She reached down and held it in her hand, under cover of the carrying bag. “Never saw one of these before.”
“Mr. Know doesn’t have one?”
She laughe
d and sat back up. “No, I’ve never seen him with a gun. They don’t seem to let him have one, which is curious. Or maybe he just doesn’t need a weapon, given that they look out for him.”
“Do you think someone is after him? Maybe that’s why my grand—Mr. Know is so secretive, why he has to do what he does. Maybe he had no choice but to eliminate me. Or maybe he was planning to let me go?”
“Maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“What about the W? You didn’t finish telling me about that. You said he uses it a lot.”
“Yeah, he really does. I’ve caught him doing it.”
“Caught him?”
“I told you I like to spy on him. I’ve learned a lot about espionage techniques from reading. Because the house I grew up in seems to be connected to spying in some way, because Mr. Stephenson probably came there—and possibly Fleming too, and certainly Roald Dahl—I always wanted to know about it. I guess I thought it would help me learn more about who I am, perhaps where I’m from. Maybe I wasn’t just left here; maybe there’s more to it. So I haven’t only read novels. I learned about the ‘art of silent killing,’ for example.”
“What’s that?”