by Orca Various
Ominous music—bass and drums—played in my mind as we followed him. I prayed that he wouldn’t turn around.
We trailed him for ten minutes or so. The water got very deep. Then he dove down and looked around, as if searching for something. After a while he found what looked like an odd pile of stones and began to pull them away, one by one. Then he took out a mini-shovel he had on his belt and began to dig. We kept our distance. Suddenly, he dropped the shovel and pumped his fist in a slow underwater motion. Then he reached down and pulled something out of the hole he had dug. He looked around, jammed the shovel into the seafloor and turned toward us!
We got out of sight as quickly as we could behind a rock formation and made sure we were behind him as he headed back toward the shore. He didn’t seem to spot us. Whatever he was carrying was heavy, and it appeared to take a great deal of effort for him to swim. We all moved slowly in the direction of the beach. He emerged onto the sand and we stayed in shallow water, our eyes barely above the surface, watching him. He was lugging something along the beach, but we couldn’t see exactly what he was doing or what was in his hands. I needed to know. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I could see what he had, everything in this mystery would become clear. The moment had arrived. I crouched up out of the water and moved onto the beach, Angel behind me, holding my hand. She was shaking. I squeezed her hand to comfort her and looked around to reassure her.
When I turned back, John was staring at us. He had dropped whatever he had, reached down and pulled something out of his bag. It was a gun. And it wasn’t a Walther PPK. This pistol was bigger and more modern. In fact, it looked really big. I soon realized he had a silencer on it. I knew he could easily pick us off, even in the moonlight and from fifty feet away. He could do it fairly quietly. There was no one around. He motioned for us to come forward. I held Angel’s hand tighter. She was really shaking now. He had us and didn’t look pleased. This was for real. As we approached, I could see what he had dropped to the sand. Two bars of gold!
He kept motioning to us until we were just seven or eight feet away, side by side. He looked even more intense up close, more serious. He meant business. He cocked the gun. I heard Angel give out a little cry. I had to do something.
“If you are going to shoot us anyway,” I said, “then tell me this. Is that old man back there in Bermuda really my grandfather? He must be. He even wears his cologne.”
John hesitated. “I…I can’t. I actually would like to, but I can’t.” It was a bizarre answer. “But I’ll tell you this. Mr. Know was used at the most delicate moments in the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“Used?” I said.
He looked like he had said too much or at least hadn’t expressed himself as he wished. “I’ll tell you something else.” He looked a little angry. “Your grandfather, Mr. Know, was a traitor.”
My heart sank. “So it is him!”
“I didn’t say that—not exactly. But he was a traitor. Although sometimes you have to do what you have to do.” That sounded like a sentence DJ had read from Grandpa’s journal back at the cottage. I wished my big cousin was here at this very moment. I needed him.
John pointed the gun at Angel’s head.
Instinctively, I stepped in front of her. “Run,” I whispered.
But she didn’t move. It was as if she was frozen to the spot, mesmerized. “You’d do this for me?” I heard her say under her breath, almost crying, speaking half to me, half to herself. It wasn’t a cry of fear. It was the cry of someone who had been left on a doorstep as a baby, someone who hadn’t been wanted, who had been unloved, someone for whom no one had ever made a sacrifice. Good Adam had acted. Bad Adam was dying.
Then Angel stepped out from behind me. Like lightning, John pointed the gun at her. But even faster than that, Angel hit the ground, rolled toward John and scissor-kicked his legs out from under him. He hit the sand with a thump. Was that a “silent killing” move? My backpack was only ten feet or so away, behind a bush. I darted toward it. The loaded Walther PPK was just inside, on top. I opened the bag in an instant and turned toward John, cocking the gun as I did. I was locked and loaded and in my James Bond pose, silencer on, barrel pointed toward him, right hand extended, right foot pointing toward my target.
Instead of fleeing once she’d dropped John, Angel had actually come at him again. She had other moves. Bad Adam wasn’t laughing at her claims anymore. She grabbed John by the arm, the one that held the gun. She looked like she was trying to bend it back, to lock him into a submission hold.
But John was John for good reason. He moved so fast that I couldn’t even tell what he did. Then somehow Angel was on the ground, hitting it hard, and John had trained his gun on her head, two feet away.
That’s when I shot him.
I couldn’t believe it when I did it. It was just a response, a reaction. I nailed him right in the chest. There was the slight jolt of the bullet leaving my legendary pistol, the hiss of it sucking through the air and the THWACK of it striking him in the middle of his body, heart area, dead on target. Man down! Bad Adam felt exhilaration course through his body like a jolt of electricity. Wow! Bad Adam had saved the girl and terminated the bad guy! It was a video-game triumph come to life!
But I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt horrible. I had killed a human being. I didn’t care how bad he was. I didn’t even care what he had been about to do. He lay there on the ground, not moving at all.
Angel was silent. She looked at me in disbelief. “You shot him!” she said. She didn’t seem pleased, didn’t seem happy the way a girl would be in the movies. I wasn’t her hero at that moment, and I didn’t feel that way anyway. I didn’t want to walk away now, with the bikini-clad babe wrapped in my arms, to the sound of cool music. I just wanted to hang my head.
She dropped down and put her fingers to John’s throat.
“He’s alive!” she whispered. Then she felt his chest, her fingers on the spot where the bullet had hit him. Even in the moonlight, we could see that there wasn’t any blood. Then she felt the rest of his chest.
“He’s wearing a bulletproof vest!” Even underwater, even here, John had come prepared. He was clearly an experienced spy.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and so did Angel.
“You stopped him,” she said and leaped up and hugged me. That felt pretty good. In fact, it felt great. I didn’t even have time to think of Shirley. But I also realized, even in that happy moment, that John had simply been knocked down, perhaps hitting his head as he fell, and was temporarily stunned. He might get up at any moment. In fact, we now heard him groan. Knowing John was always well prepared for any eventuality, I ripped through his backpack and found a pair of handcuffs. I pulled his hands behind his back and snapped them on. As I did that, Angel found a small coil of rope in his bag and tied his feet together. It was a pretty good knot. This was some kind of girl!
John groaned more and started coming around.
“So you were after gold,” I said to him, glancing down at the two bars. “I’ll assume there’s more of it out there.” I picked up one of them. It was heavy. I noticed some lettering on the side and the stamp of a foreign bank: Russian letters.
“What’s the deal, John?” asked Angel.
He wouldn’t say a word.
I started looking through his bag, digging down deep into it. There were knives, more rope, extra clothes, a cell phone, but nothing to tell me what I really wanted to know.
“W marked the spot. What does that mean, John?”
He said nothing. I remembered him saying that he knew nothing about the letter W, and he had seemed to mean it.
“What is W?” Angel asked him, louder. “Or who is he?”
The second she said that, it came to me like a shot from a PPK.
“It’s two words!” I told her.
“What?”
“Double You.”
NINETEEN
DOUBLE YOU
“Double You marked the spot,” said Angel, amaz
ed.
“All you heard back in Bermuda, when you secretly listened to Mr. Know, was him saying the sound double you. It wasn’t a letter. He was saying two words. And when he said it, he was looking at himself in the mirror.”
“You’re way off,” grunted John.
“I think the lady doth protest too much,” I said.
Angel laughed out loud. John looked perplexed.
I glanced down into his bag, reached in and picked up his cell phone.
“Don’t touch that!” cried John.
“Shut up!” said Angel.
I checked his list of contacts. One was Know. I sent out my call, across the waves toward Bermuda.
“Hello?” an old voice said. I’d forgotten that my grandfather was over ninety. He always seemed so much younger. But that one word—Hello—didn’t sound like him, didn’t even sound the way his voice had back there in his office in Bermuda when he sentenced me to death.
“This is Adam McLean Murphy.”
There was a long pause. I imagined him swallowing.
“Yes, Adam. It is so good to hear from you.” He sounded just like my beloved grandfather again. “Come back to Bermuda. I’ll explain everything. I wasn’t trying to kill you. I would have saved you at the last moment. I was testing you. It’s complicated. I’ll explain.”
“I’m sure you can,” I said. Then I played my card. It was a bit of a stretcher, but sometimes that’s what you have to do. “We have your boy John here, and he’s explained everything,” I said without emotion, turning my back on our captive so any sound he made couldn’t be heard at the other end of the phone.
“I doubt that.”
He’d played his card well too. John grinned up at me, noting that I’d paused, knowing that his boss was a tough nut to crack. I had to try a different approach. I wasn’t even going to bother telling him that we had caught John red-handed with two bricks of vintage Soviet Union gold.
“Grandpa,” I said, “why did you do that to me, even for a moment? I was very scared.”
“I’m sorry, Adam. Come back here and I’ll make things right.”
I tried to sound sad. “When I was little, you always comforted me when I was upset.”
“Yes.”
“I often think about how you read to me to help me sleep. I always remember the line you emphasized in one of the stories. It went: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. Remember that?”
“Of course.”
“It was from a Roald Dahl book, but I can’t recall which one. Can you?”
There was a hesitation on the other end of the line, as if he had swallowed.
“No,” he said.
I had him.
“It’s not from Roald Dahl, you pig,” I said. “It’s from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, your favorite book. Let me correct that: my grandfather’s favorite book!”
There was another pause, probably a couple of swallows.
“I…I’d forgotten that.”
“No, you hadn’t.”
“Yes, I—”
“No, you hadn’t.” I let it sink in. “What’s the deal, Stanley?”
There was an even longer pause. When the voice came back on the phone, it sounded nothing like Grandpa’s.
“Dave McLean was a traitor!” he shouted.
“Like you?” I asked. “Like John here? You wrote that letter, didn’t you? The one that said he deserved to die!”
“He did!”
“Why?”
There was another long pause. Even a secret agent, even a double agent, knows when he is cornered. Stanley Shick, code name Guy Hicks, had nothing to gain anymore. The truth, as obscure as it was in this case, as obscure as it often is, had to come out.
“I’ll tell you, you snotty punk, ” he snarled. “He betrayed me!” He sounded like a madman, which was likely close to the truth.
“Yes, I was a double agent. But many were. I had to gain something in life. Both sides were bad anyway.”
“That’s a convenient way to look at it. Got some gold for yourself, did you?”
“The Soviets paid me for information. Fleming often had us down to his place in Jamaica, so I hid my stash at Goldeneye one night, way out in the water where no one could find it. I planned to come back and get it someday. But in the spring of 1962, they caught me. Your grandfather played a big role; typical of him to turn on his friends. We were friends.”
“But you betrayed your country. Grandpa wouldn’t have liked that.”
“He betrayed me!” he shouted into the phone. Madman. “And then he did even worse.”
“Worse?”
“Listen to this and imagine the depravity. Stephenson, that fool, had his hand on everything. He was behind my capture, he and McLean. They had me under house arrest in Bermuda. I was scheduled to be tried secretly and executed. Bill would have made that happen fast. He could make anything happen. He was Canadian; he had his own rules.”
I smiled a big smile at my end of the phone. I was thinking of my six amazing cousins from the Great White North.
“That was long before the missile crisis broke out, months before. But Stephenson knew what was going on in Cuba. He knew everything. He knew the missiles were there even before the U2 spy planes photographed them for the CIA. He knew it would all hit the fan soon. McLean was negotiating with the Soviets about it behind the scenes. Stephenson hadn’t even told the president that McLean was kicking tires for him. He used the code name Adam.”
I felt a lump in my throat.
“But then what McLean was doing got really dangerous. We had word through a double agent that the next time Dave came to Moscow he was going to meet with an unfortunate accident. It was a lead-pipe cinch. But the meeting had to happen. It was vital. Stephenson knew he had to send McLean in, send him to his death. So, in order to save his skin, they made me a proposition, the useless excuses for human beings!”
Madman.
“They offered me a deal. I was the same size as your grandfather. We had the same color eyes and hair, same build. We used to tease each other about being brothers from another mother…in the old days.”
He actually sounded sad for a second.
“Stephenson came to me and said that if I took on a very dangerous mission inside the Soviet Union, they’d let me live. I would have to spend the rest of my life in Bermuda, under house arrest. But they’d let me have what I wanted there. They even, later, let me have the girl as my ward. I thought I might use her somehow to get away. But it never worked out.”
I didn’t say a word to Angel.
“But there was a catch, of course. I had to undergo plastic surgery, make my face look exactly like McLean’s ugly mug. The instant I was healed enough, they’d insert me into the Soviet Union so I could undertake the very secret meetings in place of your grandfather. They told me they were doing this because it was awfully dangerous. BUT THEY DIDN’T SAY IT WAS LETHAL!!”
Madman.
“They were setting me up for death. It was an execution, an elimination, orchestrated by Stephenson and your beloved grandfather! I had zero chance of survival. But I didn’t know that, and I had no choice anyway. I was to do this, undergo the painful surgery and live with looking like someone else for the rest of my life and be allowed to live, or simply be executed for my past crimes (as they saw them). So, I did it. And I survived!”
He sounded triumphant.
“I fooled them all! Oh, the commie thugs came for me, all right. Six of them on a dark rainy night in an alley in Moscow. That’s what your grandfather knew would happen! And they smashed me up pretty badly, left me for dead. But I lived! I remember the look on Stephenson’s face when I got home, after they’d gotten me out.”
“They got you out? But—”
“With my lifelong injuries, my crippled face, my incarceration in Bermuda and my gold far away where I couldn’t get my hands on it!”
“I saw your jail, Stanley. It d
idn’t seem too shabby.”
“I couldn’t leave. Stephenson always kept two goons on me. Even after he died, he left them with me, in perpetuity, until the day I die! I was surprised they let me have the girl, but they watched out for her, kept her safe, I suppose, though I wouldn’t have harmed her.”
“But then there was John.”
“I tried to get one of them to switch sides, but I never succeeded until John. I had been softening him up for a while. Then you came along. Oh, when I heard you were at my very doorstep…Dave McLean’s grandson! You can’t imagine how that felt! I had followed McLean on the Internet, knew what he was up to, about his daughters, his grandsons, even his death—which didn’t cheer me up too much, since I wasn’t the cause of it. All I’d been able to do over the years was get one single letter off to him. I didn’t even know that he received it.”
“He did. He kept it. He was a decent man. Maybe he felt badly, even though you were a traitor to your country.”
“HE’S THE TRAITOR! I used to stand at the mirror at night and imagine killing him. I used to say out loud what I had become, what I hated. He was in that mirror looking back at me. I wanted to murder him. I said who I was, that despised thing.”
“Double You.”
That’s what he calls himself now, I thought. It’s like a code name. Double You marked the spot!
“Yes. But then you came to my very door, dropped right into my lap! I had the boys keep you outside for a while, while I did myself up, made myself look exactly like McLean. I remembered his voice—aged it a bit. I couldn’t get at him, couldn’t get my revenge, but out of the blue, I could kill his very grandson! Not only that, I could do it and make you think that he had done it to you! I remember the fear in your eyes! I remember the disbelief! You would die thinking that he had murdered you! You even looked like him! WHAT REVENGE!”
Madman.
“I got John and Jim to go along with the first part, not saying, of course, that I intended to actually eliminate you. But then I told John the truth, just him. I asked him into my office right before you were brought in and gave him the whole plan. I felt he was ready. I told him about the gold and where it was at Goldeneye. I told him that if he helped me, he could have it! ALL of it! I just wanted my revenge. I knew he’d do it for the gold. Jim didn’t know that the Dahl building was rigged. It was something I’d done on the sly over the years. I don’t know why; maybe I thought I could catch one of them in it and get away. I was, in my day, a mechanical genius. They thought I was just making repairs, being nostalgic about the time when Dahl was there. We told Jim that I was just testing you about something and we’d let you out after midnight. John was going to dispose of what was left of your body so there would be no trace of you by morning. But you got out! That bloody girl helped you! I never should have kept her! It was a soft moment.”