by Ted Bell
“I want help.”
“Fuck you.”
“Really?”
“You screwed up, mister. Big-time. You jumped the shark, pal. You’re not my problem.”
“Really? You don’t think I’m your problem, Cam? Are you sure about that?”
Spider stood up and took a step closer to the helm. Cam turned his cold blue eyes on him, eyes that had cowed far tougher men than this one by a factor of ten.
“Are you threatening me, son? I see it in your eyes. You think I may be getting a little long in the tooth, don’t you, pal, but I’ll rip your beating heart out, believe me.”
“That’s your response, then. You want me to beg? I come to you on bended knee, humbly, to beseech you for help. And you say you’ll rip my heart out?”
The man was weeping.
“Listen, Spider. You’re obviously upset. You need help, yes. But not from me. You need to see someone. A specialist. I can help you do that. I’ll even pay for it. Look here. I’m going to flip her around now and head back to the dock. I’ll see that you get proper care. Uncleat that mainsheet, will you, and prepare to come about. It’s really blowing out here now, so pay attention to what you’re doing.”
They locked eyes for what seemed an eternity.
“Do what I said,” Cam told him.
Cam realized too late what Spider was going to do.
In one fluid motion the rogue agent freed the mainsail sheet to allow the boom to swing free, grabbed the helm, put her hard over to leeward and gybed. The gybe is the single most violent action you can take on board a big sailboat in a blow. You put yourself in mortal danger when you turn your bow away from the wind instead of up into it. You stick your tail up into the face of the wind and she kicks your ass. Hard and fast.
The standing rigging and sails shrieked like wounded banshees as the huge mainsail and the heavy wooden boom caught the wind from behind and came whipping across the cockpit at blinding speed.
Spider knew the boom was coming, of course, and ducked in the nick of time. Cam was not so lucky.
The boom slammed into the side of the old man’s head, pulverizing the skull, spilling his brains into the sea, and carrying him out of the cockpit and up onto the deck. Only the lifelines saved him from rolling overboard.
Spider stared down at his old mentor with mixed emotions. At one point he’d worshipped this man. But rage is a powerful thing. He’d been ruined by Cam and others like him at the highest levels of the Agency. He knew he himself was going down soon, but he was determined not to go down alone. Revenge is another powerful thing.
He knelt down beside the dead man, trying to sort out his feelings. A lock of white hair had fallen across Cam’s eyes and he gently lifted it away. He tried for remorse but couldn’t find it inside himself anymore.
It looked like someone had dropped a cantaloupe on the deck from up at the masthead. A dark red stain flowed outward from Hooker’s crushed and splintered head, soaking into the teak. What more was there to say? An unfortunate accident but it happens all the time? Tough luck, Cam, he thought to himself with a thin smile.
Another victim of bad timing.
Spider grabbed the helm, sheeted in the main, and headed up dead into the wind. When the boat’s forward motion stalled, he grabbed the binoculars hanging from the mizzen and raised them to his eyes. He did a 360-degree sweep of the horizon. Nothing, no other vessels in sight, nobody on the shore. He was about a mile and a half from the shoreline. The trees encroaching down to the rocky shorebreak would provide good cover.
He looked at his watch and went below to don his wet suit for the short swim to shore. The old ketch would drift with the currents. Once back on terra firma, he could disappear into the woods, bury the wet suit, and walk to town in his bathing suit, flip-flops, and T-shirt. Just another hippie tourist day-tripper, come to celebrate America’s independence with the Yankee Pilgrims and Puritans.
The next ferry to the mainland was at noon.
He’d checked off yet another name on his list.
Maybe it was true. That the old Spider was indeed a man without a future.
But he still had plenty of time to kill.
CHAPTER 3
TEAKETTLE COTTAGE, ON the south shore of Bermuda, is no ordinary house. For starters, it is the home of the sixth richest man in England, though you’d never guess that from the looks of the place. A small, modest house, it has survived a couple of centuries and at least a dozen hurricanes. And it also happens to be, the sanctum santorum of a very private man. Few people have ever even seen it. To do that, first you’d have to find it.
Anyone searching the Coast Road along the southern shore will find the modest limestone house hidden from view. The seaward property, roughly five acres, consists of a dense grove of banana trees. Also, ancient lignum vitae, kapok, and fragrant cedar trees. Only a narrow and rutted sandy lane gives one a clue as to Teakettle’s existence. A drive resembling a green tunnel finally arrives at the house, but only after winding through the densely planted groves.
Upon first glimpse,, you realize the cottage actually does look like a teakettle. The main portion is a rounded dome, formerly a limestone mill works. A crooked white-bricked watchtower on the far, seaward side of the house forms the teakettle’s “spout.” The whole unassuming affair stands out on a rocky promontory with waves crashing against the coral reefs some fifty feet below.
Inside the dome is an oval whitewashed living room. The floors are highly polished, well-worn Spanish red tile. Wrought iron chandeliers and sconces provide the light. The owner has furnished the main room with old planters chairs and an assortment of cast-offs and gifts donated by various residents seeking their own dream of solitude at the cottage over the last century or so.
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., one of the cinema’s first icons, had donated the massive carved monkey-wood bar after a long, liquid stay when his first wife, Joan Crawford, had thrown him out. Teakettle was a good a place to hide as any. The battered mahogany canasta table where most of the indoor meals were taken was a gift of Errol Flynn. The swashbuckling Flynn took refuge here during his stormy divorce from Lily Damita. Hemingway had left his Underwood typewriter on the guest room desk where he’d completed work on Islands in the Stream. It stands there in his honor to this day. The shortwave radio set on the bar had been used by Admiral Sir Donald Gunn during World War II to monitor the comings and goings of Nazi U-boats just offshore from the cottage.
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. He didn’t mind disorder as long as it was his disorder.
The owner of this rather eccentric dwelling is Lord Alexander Hawke. Hawke won’t tolerate your use of his title and has never used it himself. The only one who is allowed to do so is his ancient friend and household retainer, Pelham Grenville, a man whom he has known since birth and is, with the exception of his young son, Alexei, the closest approximation to family he can claim.
Hawke was now a man in his early thirties, a noticeable man, well north of six feet with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and a heroic head of unruly jet black hair. A thick black comma of hair fell across his forehead despite his best efforts to keep it in check.
His glacial blue eyes (a female friend had once decided they looked like “pools of frozen rain”) were startling. His eyes had a flashing 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.
His job (senior counterintelligence officer at Britain’s MI6) demanded that he stay fit. Though he had a weakness for Mr. Gosling’s local rum and
Morland’s custom blend cigarettes, he watched his diet and followed his old Royal Navy fitness regime religiously. He also swam six miles a day in open ocean. Every day.
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:
A hale fellow well met, whom men wanted to stand a drink; and whom women much preferred horizontal.
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 fiancée, Lady Diana Mars, at their Bermuda home, Shadowlands, at seven that 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 fierce 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 by modern day drug pirates aboard their yacht in the Caribbean. Pelham and Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve had immediately stepped in to raise the devastated 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. Inseparable and insufferable, as they liked to think of themselves these days.
“I think you might wish to take this call, sir,” Pelham said.
“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.”
“Thank you, please tell him I shall be right there.”
Hawke had met CIA Director Kelly in an Iraqi prison. 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 less than five-star; it was no mints on the pillow operation. The guards were inhuman, sadistic, and merciless.
One night, Kelly had been dragged away from their cell. He had looked so broken and weak that Hawke decided he’d not survive another day of malnutrition and torture.
That very 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 had been thick as thieves ever since.
Hawke went inside and over to the antique black Bakelite phone sitting atop the far end of the monkey bar. He picked up the receiver.
“Hullo?” he said. By force of habit, he was always noncommittal when answering a phone call.
“Hawke?”
“Brick?”
“It’s a secure line, Alex, no worries. I know you’re laying low for a while. Well deserved R&R. I called your house number in London to get this one. 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 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 aboard, 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 gybe.”
“Right, 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 this 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.”
“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.”
“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 crops up, 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 Tom 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 4
MOST AFTERNOONS, Harding Torrance walked home from work. His cardiac guy had told him walking was the best thing for his heart. He liked walking. Also, he liked walking in Paris. The women, you know? Paris had the world’s most beautiful women, full stop, hands down. Plus, his eight-room apartment was on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. A famous street in one of the fancier arrondisements on the Right Bank.
He’d lived here over twenty years and still didn’t know which arrondisement was which. He had learned an expression in French early on and it always served him well in life: “Je ne sais quoi.”
I don’t know.
His homeward route from the office took him past the Ritz Hotel, Sotheby’s, Hermès, Cartier, et cetera, et cetera. You get the picture. Ritzy real estate.
Very ritzy.
Oddly enough, the ritziest hotel on the whole rue was not the one called the Ritz. It was the one called Hotel Le Bristol. What he liked about the Bristol, mainly, was the bar. At the end of the day, good or bad, he liked a quiet cocktail or two in a quiet bar before he went home to his wife. That’s all there was to it, been doing it all his life. His personal happy hour.
The Bristol’s bar was dimly lit, church quiet, and hidden away off the beaten pa
th. It was basically a nook in a far corner of the lobby where only the cognoscenti, as they say, held sway. Torrance held sway there because he was a big, good-looking guy, always impeccably dressed in Savile Row threads and Charvet shirts of pale pink or blue. He was a big tipper, a friendly guy. Knew the bar staff’s names by heart and discreetly handed out envelopes every Christmas.
Sartorial appearances to the contrary, Harding Torrance was one hundred percent red-blooded American. He even worked for the government, had mostly all his life. And he’d done very, very well, thank you. He’d come up the hard way, but he’d come up, all right. His job, though he’d damn well have to kill you if he told you, was Station Chief, CIA, Paris. In other words, Harding was a very big damn deal in anybody’s language.
He’d been in Paris since right after 9/11. His buddy from Houston, the new President, had posted him here because the huge Muslim population in Paris presented a lot of high value intel opportunities in one concentrated location. His mandate was to identify the Al Qaeda leadership in France, whisk them away to somewhere nice and quiet for a little enhanced interrogation.
He was good at it, he stuck with it, he got results, and he got promoted, boom, boom, boom. The President even singled him out for recognition in a State of the Union address, had specifically said that he and his team were responsible for saving countless lives on the European continent and in the U.K.
Harding had gone into the family oil business after West Point and a stint with the Rangers out of Fort Bragg. Spec ops duty, two combat tours in Iraq. Next, working for Torrance Oil, he was all over Saudi and Yemen and Oman, running his daddy’s fields in the Middle East. But he was no silver spoon boy, far from it. He had started on the rigs right at the bottom rung, working as a ginzel (lower than the lowest worm), working his way up to a floor hand on the kelly driver, and then a bona fide driller in one year.
Oilfields were his introduction to the real world of Islam.
Long story short?
He knew the Muslim mind-set, their language, their body language, their brains, even, knew the whole culture, the warlords, where all the bodies were buried, the whole enchilada. And so, when his pal W needed someone uniquely qualified to transform the CIA’s Paris station into a first rate intelligence clearinghouse for all of Europe? Well. Who was he to say? Let history tell the tale.