by Ted Bell
“What do you think, Brick? Foul play?”
“Tell you this. The gendarmes and the Paris M.E. guys have already called it. Natural causes.”
“No sign of succinylcholine in his bloodstream? Or, that new heart attack dart?”
“I ordered my own autopsy. Nada on the drugs, so far. No denatured poisons, and no sign of a dart entry.”
“The heart dart leaves a mark? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, a tiny red dot on the skin. Easy to miss. Goes away quickly, though.”
“So? Clean?”
“Yeah, maybe. I still don’t like the timing, but yeah, I suppose he just had a heart attack brought on by excessive sexual exertion. Happens all the time. I guess.”
“You guess? You never guess. What’s wrong, Brick? Tell me what you really think.”
“Hell, I don’t know, Alex. Maybe nothing. Maybe it is what it is. But a couple of troublesome details. My guys found heart meds in his pants pocket. Little silver heart-shaped pillbox from Tiffany, monogrammed. So. This coronary was no surprise attack. Nitro pills and beta-blockers in his pocket? We checked. He’s under the care of the top cardiac specialist in Paris. He feels a heart attack coming on, first thing he does, he tells the woman to call his doctor and to go get him his damn meds, right? Like, right now?”
“Anybody ask the woman that question?”
“They will tomorrow morning. I’m having her brought back in to the Prefecture for another interview. So, anyway. Who the hell knows? That’s my latest tale of mayhem and mystery. Let’s order some dinner and you tell me yours.”
Hawke took ten minutes and told Kelly everything Ben Sparhawk had said about Cam Hooker’s death while they waited for their food.
“What are you thinking?” Hawke asked Brick after a few minutes of contemplative silence from his friend.
“Question,” Brick said.
“Go.”
“Let’s be realistic here. Could someone commit a fairly sophisticated murder here in Maine on Sunday and then pull off another one four days later in Paris? Even more elaborate?” I mean, seriously. Who the hell is good enough to pull that off?”
“Cam was a pretty tough act to follow, all right.”
Hawke waited a beat and said, “Maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Can you connect any of these dots, Brick? Between these two most recent guys and the other ones? Because I’m telling you right now that if we can’t . . . well . . . mere coincidence starts to look pretty good again.”
Brick took a bite of his steak and said, “Don’t go there yet. Stay open to it. But I hear you. I’m on the connect-the-dots issue as soon as I get back to my office tomorrow. I’ll call your Bermuda number if and when I get any positive hits. Correlations, I mean.”
CHAPTER 11
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED.
After dinner at Nebo, Hawke and Brick walked back to the Hooker place, taking the main road along the harbor. It was a full moon, hanging bright and white and big in the sky. Each man knew what the other was thinking. There was no need of talking about it.
Finally, as they turned into the long Hooker drive, Brick stopped and looked at his friend.
“What’s your gut telling you, Alex?” Brick said. “Right this minute. Don’t edit. Spit it out.”
“Okay. That the timing of all this no coincidence. That what you’ve got is a totally bad-ass rogue agent running around the planet systematically killing your own top guys.”
“Yeah. That’s where I come out, too.”
“Let me find him for you, Brick.”
“Are you kidding? It’s my problem, not yours. My agency. My people getting killed. God knows, MI6 has got enough of its own problems these days. That intel meltdown in Syria, for starters.”
“This guy, whoever he is, killed my friend Hook, Brick. That makes him my problem, too.”
“You’re serious. You want to take this on?”
“I do.”
“You even have time to do this?”
“I’ve got another two weeks before C wants me to mysteriously appear in a Damascus souk, looking to purchase some bargain-basement Sarin gas.”
Brick looked at him and they started climbing the hill.
“Two weeks isn’t a long time to find a seasoned operative who’s gone to ground without a trace. Now roaming the globe on a murder spree but not leaving any tracks. But, listen, Alex. Hell, I won’t stop you from looking. Nobody is better at this than you. Just tell me what you need.”
“Don’t worry, I will. This is obviously not an MI6 operation. You’re right. And C and the brass at MI6 will pitch a fit if they find out I’ve gone freelance. So, I need somebody attached to this op at Langley. Files on every possible disaffected agent who had ties to multiple victims, for starters. Active and inactive. Send everything to Bermuda. I’ll get Ambrose Congreve on this with me. He’s there at his home on Bermuda now, as luck would have it.”
“Your very own ‘Weapon of Mass Deduction.’. If he can’t solve this, no one can.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Brick said, never breaking his stride but taking a deep breath and staring up at the blazing moon and cold stars. “I’m really going to miss Hook, that old bastard, won’t you, Alex?”
“I sure as hell will. But I’ll feel a whole lot better when I catch the son of a bitch who bloody killed him, I can tell you that bloody much. It won’t be pretty.”
“Easy,” he said, “Easy there, old compadre.”
“Who the hell, I ask you, who the hell would ever want to murder a fine old Yankee gentleman like Hook?”
“Go find out, Alex. Whoever he is, he needs killing soon. I have a lot of justifiably nervous campers out there right now.”
“Yeah. Murder’s bad for institutional morale.”
“Ambrose will have every shred of evidence I can pull together arrive at his Bermuda address by courier within forty-eight hours.”
“Sooner the better. A couple of weeks isn’t a long time.”
CHAPTER 12
IT DIDN’T TAKE Ambrose that long.
“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” Pelham said.
“Not at all, Pelham.”
“Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve here to see you, sir,” Pelham said, wafting farther out into the sunshine-spattered terrace. “A matter of some urgency, apparently.”
It was a brilliant blue Bermuda day, but embankments of purple cloud were stacking up out over the Atlantic. Storm front moving due east. Hawke put down the book he was reading, a wonderful novel called The Sea, by John Banville. It made him want to read every word the man had ever written.
“Thank you, Pelham. Won’t you show him out?”
“Indeed, I shall, m’lord.”
“Offer him a bit of refreshment, will you, please?”
“But of course, your lordship.”
Pelham withdrew soundlessly back into the shadows of the house.
Hawke smiled as he watched the old fellow retreat.
These stilted conversational formalities had not been necessary for years. But it was something Hawke and his octogenarian friend Pelham Grenville found so amusing they continued the charade. Both men found an odd reassurance in these hoary, Victorian exchanges. It was a code they shared; and the fact that an outside observer would find them old-fashioned and ridiculous made their secret all the more enjoyable.
Moments later Ambrose Congreve walked out onto the terrace at Teakettle Cottage with a big smile on his face. He was wearing a three-piece white linen suit with a navy blue bow tie knotted at his neck and a white straw hat on his head, something Tennessee Williams might have conjured up. He was even dabbing at his forehead with a white linen handkerchief as Big Daddy might have done.
Congreve had been busy. He had spent the last two days in his home office at Shadowlands, sifting thro
ugh mobile intercepts, old dossiers, photographs, all the reams of highly classified material Brick Kelly had forwarded out from Langley. And, judging by appearances this morning, the famous criminalist had come up with the goods.
“Oh, hullo, Ambrose,” Hawke said, raising his sunglasses onto his forehead. “Why are you in such a fiendishly good mood this morning?”
“Does it show?”
“You look like you’ve been sitting in a corner eating canaries all morning.”
Congreve waved the comment away and sat down on the nearest rattan chair. He carried a lot of excess weight and was always glad of a place to sit.
“Alex, pay attention. This is serious. You don’t by any chance know someone, a former high-ranking CIA officer, by the name of Artemis Payne, do you?”
Hawke looked up.
“Who did you say?”
“Payne. Artemis Payne.”
“You’re joking.”
“I assure you that I am not, Alex, joking.”
Hawke scratched his chin, realizing he’d forgotten to shave. Bermuda did that to you.
“We called him Spider-Man,” he said. “Or, to his face, just plain Spider. No idea where it came from. But it fit. A rather venomous creature to be honest.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Spider Payne. I know him all right. I worked with him a couple of times in the past. The Caribbean. But Africa, mostly. A deeply troubled man. Why?”
“He might be your chap, Alex. You can draw straight lines through the late Steven Dedalus, CIA head in Dublin, to Cam Hooker at Langley, and now Harding Torrance in Paris, and they all intersect in the same place. The doorstep of one Artemis Payne. He’s your man, all right. I’d bet the farm on it. Not the whole CIA “Farm” of course, just my own little lean-to shed down in Lynchburg.”
“Apart from the CIA intersections, is there any other evidence that makes you think Artemis is our guy?”
Ambrose got to his feet, laced his fingers behind his back and began pacing back and forth. A little affectation he’d picked up from his idol, the incandescent Sherlock Holmes, Hawke had always assumed. “Are you quite ready?” Ambrose said.
“Quite.”
“Artemis Payne, widely known in the press at the time of his trial as the Spider Man. Currently wanted for kidnapping and suspicion of murder by the French government. Interpol has a standing warrant for his arrest for murder. He received a thirty-year sentence in French courts and skipped. Disappeared completely.”
“What triggered all this?” Hawke asked.
“A CIA rendition op gone bad, apparently. Don’t forget, this was all shortly after 9/11. A French citizen, a shopkeeper believed by Payne to be an Al Qaeda commander, was kidnapped off a Paris street and never seen again by his wife and family. The French police went after Payne for it. Arrested and convicted. He appealed to Washington and the CIA for help. The White House disavowed his existence. So did CIA. Payne was politically inconvenient. Hung out to dry. There’s your motive, obviously.”
“Yes.”
“Payne lost everything in the aftermath of the trial. His reputation, his house, family, money, the lot of it. He went underground. Nobody’s seen him since.”
“Hmm.”
“Is that really all you have to say? Just ‘hmm’? After the mountains of intel I’ve been sifting through this last week?”
“Oh, do sit down and relax. I know you’re wound up about this but it’s bad for your nerves to be so excitable.”
“Alex, if you think I drove all the way out here to be—”
Hawke looked up, his blue eyes suddenly gone dead serious as the reality of Ambrose’s news sank in. He said: “Spider is extraordinarily dangerous. In a bad way, I mean.”
“There’s a good way?”
“Yeah. People like me. And even you.”
Ambrose sat back on the planters chair and accepted another frosty iced tea delivered by Pelham on a silver tray.
“Will that be all, sir?” Pelham asked Hawke.
“Thank you, Pelham, yes. Most kind.”
Congreve watched this formal exchange with a smile of bemused indulgence and said, “We’ve now got precisely one week. We’re going to need a lot of help to find this character, Alex. No trail at all. He went from Europe to Miami to Costa Rica where two paths diverge in a wood. Then it all goes stone cold. We’re going to need formidable manpower and time to track his movements and see where it all leads so—”
“Not necessarily.”
“Why not? What are you thinking?”
“NSA tracks all these guys who go rogue. Emails, texts, mobile calls, obviously. All I need is a number for him. Everyone has a number, no matter where they’re hiding.”
“Then what?”
“I call him up. Out of the blue. Long time, no see, Spider. What are you up to these days? Doing well?”
“Alex, please. Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t think that will arouse suspicion? He knows you have close ties to CIA at the highest levels. He’ll be waiting for you, poised to sting.”
“I want him to be suspicious. Listen. He compromised my position once. Morocco. Long time ago. I was working out of La Mamounia, running a former Al Qaeda warlord for months, had him buying Stinger missiles at the underground arms bazaar for me. Spider, who always owed the wrong people a lot of money, got offered a tidy sum for my name and he gave me up. Almost got me killed, that nasty bastard. I went after him with a vengeance. Found him hiding in some hellish rathole or other in Tangiers. Locked myself inside with him for two days. Came as close to turning out his lights as I could without pulling the plug, believe me. Told him if I ever saw his face again, I bloody well would kill him.”
“He’s afraid of you.”
Hawke laughed.
“Oh, I’d say so. Yes. I’d say Artemis Payne is very definitely afraid of me.”
“Then follow the logic, Alex. As soon as he knows you’re looking for him, he’ll run. He’ll dive deep. Or, worse, he’ll lay a trap for you.”
“I don’t think so. You don’t know him like I do. I think as soon as he believes I’m looking for him, he’ll come looking for me. That’s what any smart guy like Spider would do. You don’t sit around and wait, you don’t spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. No. You go on offense. Eliminate the threat. It’s smart. That’s what I’d do, too.”
“You want him to come here? To Bermuda?”
“I do. And, believe me, he will.”
“Then what?”
“I have no earthly idea. I’m no bloody fortune-teller.”
“What?”
“I have to make it up, Ambrose.”
“There is that, I suppose.”
“Right. And you have to help me because this guy is good. And he’s not only smart, he’s a vicious killer, and he’s utterly ruthless. And, to make matters worse, at this point he’s got absolutely nothing left to lose.”
“I wonder. Have you been experiencing any suicidal thoughts lately, Alex?”
“Please, Constable, don’t be ridiculous. Many people have tried to kill me over the course of my career, and more often than not I’ve managed to show them the folly of that ambition.”
Congreve uttered one of his trademark sighs of exasperation.
“All right, then. What do you need, Alex? I mean, right now?”
“I’ll need people watching the airport round the clock, people who know what he looks like. Get a likeness from CIA. Also, same setup at the steamship docks in Hamilton and out at the Royal Navy Dockyards where the cruise ships land. I want to know the second the Spider man sets foot on this island.”
“Done. What else?”
“Your brain, if you’re not using it at the moment. We need to figure out every last detail of where and how this little reunion should occur.”
Cong
reve said, “Do it here.”
“What?”
“Right here at Teakettle Cottage. Gives you the advantage.”
“Why?”
“Your own turf, that’s why. You cannot arrange something like this, Alex. You’ve got to sit tight and let the fly come to the spider, as it were.”
Hawke laughed at that.
“As opposed to the spider coming to the fly. Who also happens to be a spider.”
“Don’t be rude, Alex, you know I’m only using a rough analogy. I can’t help it if his bloody name is Spider, can I? Stop kidding around and pay attention. Your bloody life is at stake here. This cottage is where he will come looking for you. And this is where you should be waiting.”
“I agree, I suppose. But I don’t want Pelham in the house or anywhere near me until this tempest in a teakettle is over. Can he stay with you and Diana for a few days? Until this blows over?”
“Of course. I’ve a lovely guest room for him at Shadowlands, top floor, right on the sea.”
“Perfect. Spoil him rotten, will you? He deserves it, God knows.”
“We’d like nothing better. Now, what else?”
“I’d like the airport and cruise ship spotters to report to you, not me. As soon as he lands, they alert you. Then you keep track of his movements until he is about to arrive at my doorstep. Just call my house phone, let it ring three times and hang up. Spider’s not the type to lob a bomb down the chimney and hope it explodes. He’ll want a confrontation. He’ll want to talk. He’ll want all the drama. Show me how fearless and brilliant he is before he pulls a knife or a gun. That’s his style. One of those fellows who always thinks he’s the smartest, most dangerous man in the room.”
“You do realize, Alex, that if we’ve even slightly miscalculated, and this man does manage to kill you, that it is my rather prominent posterior that will be in a wringer with C?”
“I’ve considered it. Sir David will be extraordinarily pissed off with you. It won’t be pleasant. Your life won’t be worth living. Please accept my abject apologies in advance.”