The Spy House

by Matthew Dunn

  The other two men stopped, five yards away from me.

  I held the man right against my body while partially strangling him; his legs were thrashing against the ground as I slowly walked him backward. “I’ll snap his neck if you come closer.”

  They were silent, both of them big men in their thirties who didn’t look the part of desperate muggers. I glanced at the man who’d earlier grabbed me. He was lying on his back, trying to suck in air while clutching his throat. Maybe he’d live. I didn’t know and didn’t particularly care right now.

  “I will kill him.” I squeezed harder on my captive’s throat. “Then I’ll kill both of you.” It was bluster, because I’d no idea if I could take on all the men. Plus, when knives are involved in a fight, rarely do things go according to plan. “Your friend needs medical attention. Urgent attention. I’m going to leave here. You don’t follow me and no one gets hurt. You follow me—at least one of you will die. Probably more. Do we have a deal?”

  The man who I’d seen attacking the woman glanced at his friend, then looked back at me. He nodded.

  I jabbed my knee into the small of my captive’s back, releasing my grip on him at the same time. He fell to the ground, writhing in agony. I turned and ran, listening for signs that I was being pursued by the robbers. But I heard nothing as I sped through the park, reached the footpath I’d taken earlier, and followed it to the entrance.

  Minnesota Avenue SE was lit up with streetlamps, people were still on the streets, cars’ headlights added further illumination. Breathing fast, I looked around to see if I’d been followed by the attackers and to try to spot the woman who’d been assaulted. Nothing. I wondered if she’d called the police and they’d taken her to safety. But if that were the case, other police would have entered the park. Or maybe she didn’t want police involved because she had some connection to the robbers, they’d fallen out and a fight had ensued, and I turned up. But her attacker had grabbed her bag before he ran. Perhaps she wasn’t thinking clearly and just wanted to go home. It would take a callous person to do that and leave me to my fate. This didn’t make sense.

  The paranoid spy in me did have one idea that made sense. I’d been followed from my hotel. That was the only way anyone could pin me down to the location of the park. The woman was part of the team who followed me. She posed as bait, her colleague and her enacting a fake crime, and he deliberately fled, hoping I would follow him into a trap.

  That would mean the group weren’t robbers. They had another agenda. The knives were there to kill me, but also to make my death look like the result of a robbery.

  Maybe this was just me being paranoid. I walked back to central D.C.—this time conducting anti-surveillance drills in case I was being followed. My mind was now more confused than ever. But I was certain about one thing: when I got back to the Mandarin Oriental, I’d immediately gather my things, check out of the hotel, grab a cab, and ask the driver to take me to a motel outside central D.C. Somewhere no one could find me.

  NINETEEN

  His location and convenience allowing, at seven o’clock most Saturday mornings a well-groomed English gentleman in his early sixties would take a constitutional through parts of Brittany’s university city of Rennes. His route would be via the old quarter’s cobbled streets and regal eighteenth-century half-timbered architecture that surrounded the weekly market sprawling with food, flowers, and vegetables. People who worked the Marché des Lices knew him well. He was Monsieur William de Guise, a Francophile due to heritage that he’d traced back to courtiers-turned-generals who’d followed their Norman king into battle against the Anglo-Saxons almost a thousand years ago.

  Monsieur de Guise was neither tall nor short. He carried no excess fat, but neither was he skin and bones. He wore a ready smile and spoke softly, with the charming tone of someone who was concerned about his interlocutor’s well-being. Sometimes he walked with a maple cane whose handle was polished smooth from years of use. His bespectacled eyes were of different colors—one blue, the other green—but that was the only unusual feature of a refined individual who was worthy in all respects to walk amid the civility and history that oozed from the walls of Rennes.

  The fishmongers knew de Guise had a discerning palate. Tonight he’d be preparing soupe de poisson, his favorite seafood dish. The fishmongers marveled at his culinary sophistication, and after he left them, carrying his white plastic bag of newly purchased seafood, they argued with each other as to whether Monsieur de Guise should use fennel or turmeric or aniseed in his latest reinvention of a traditional French dish.

  “Monsieur de Guise, mon beau!” the gushing flower seller, who had once stabbed her husband in the eye, called to de Guise as he walked away from the fish market.

  De Guise approached her stall, which displayed the best sunflowers. He always responded in fluent French whenever anyone spoke to him during his walk. Depending upon who he was addressing, his accent would be guttural or smooth, provincial or Parisian. With the man-killing flower seller who had been acquitted due to a technicality, he used the voice of a kind gentleman of the provinces. “My lady. As ever, beauty stands behind beauty.”

  She placed one hand over her breasts and fluttered her eyelashes. Cynics might call it a cheap gesture. Monsieur de Guise was no cynic. He purchased some flowers and moved on.

  The farmers’ wives who hawked gnarled but tasty carrots and artichokes appreciated Monsieur de Guise’s pennies though they were unreceptive to his charm, condemned as they were to a tiresome life of servitude to the soil alongside their impoverished husbands, who slept no more than four hours per night. As he purchased asparagus and root vegetables from them, he switched his character to one of bluntness and precision, because the wives lived their lives in weights and measures. But after his purchase, he still got a slight and involuntary smile from them as he lifted a melon to his nose and smelled it to see if it was ripe. He looked at them as he did so, a trace of humor and appreciation on his face. They looked back, proud, momentarily feminine.

  Men and their wives sold live and dead flesh in the covered area of the market. The women were big, the men small but wiry. They nudged each other as de Guise approached their stalls, carrying his fish and flowers. This morning de Guise wore a cravat. Forever, he was a man who wore clothes befitting a scholar—expensive, rich in color and texture, classy and apt for his age. The sellers wore immaculate whites, because that’s what good butchers do. If one speck of blood shows up, it proves a butcher to be clumsy and unclean.

  De Guise stood before the killers who transformed chicken, sheep, and cattle into poultry, lamb, and beef. Now, they gave him a live and tethered cockerel to take home, slaughter, and boil. He put the cockerel in a bag alongside the other, which contained a huge spider crab that was barely alive but still moving and had the ability to snap a finger with its pincers. Two unlikely companions who faced death. De Guise walked with them to his home, wearing an easy smile.

  Students recognized him on the cobbled street that was lined with ethnic cafés and restaurants. This quarter of Rennes was full of university students. Some were taught by Monsieur de Guise. They all knew he had a brilliant mind and was a man of taste who appreciated art but distilled it into numbers. Paintings and music, he would tell them in lectures, are mathematics. That was a callous stance, some of the more emboldened would retort. “No,” the professor would conclude while smiling at them warmly. “Mathematics is the beat of our hearts. Even Mozart couldn’t decipher the brilliance of his notes. So that is a task left to me.”

  His young scholars pointed at him while loitering outside a bar-tabac, some of them smoking in front of ruddy-faced adult men who laced their breakfast tea with rum before working for twelve hours. They whispered to each other, speculating what might be in their professor’s twitching white bags. Monsieur de Guise smiled at them and continued onward.

  He passed the grand entrance to the Jardin Botanique and entered the Thabor area of the city, a place that housed Rennes’s most
well-heeled and urbane people. Alongside colonnades, Thabor’s rich classical buildings had cream facades, wooden exterior beams, and huge walled gardens. Monsieur de Guise’s home was one of them.

  Entering the house, he placed the trussed chicken on the center of his dining room table and the other items in his kitchen. De Guise had always lived alone in the three-story house because he had long ago realized that he’d never find love comparable to that which he had for his mathematics. It also enabled him to furnish his home as he wished. The walls were crammed with art from all over Europe, each room contained Greek and Roman antiquities, and bookshelves supported obscure journals, academic papers, and leather-bound volumes about history and magic.

  Magic was his secret passion.

  He placed a big pan of water on the stove to boil, picked up a cleaver, and approached the motionless chicken. It was standing, bug eyed, its feet and wings lashed in twine.

  His cell phone rang. A U.S. number showed on its screen. De Guise accepted the call and listened to a man telling him that they’d failed to kill Will Cochrane in Fort Dupont Park. He displayed no emotion when he said, “How very disappointing. You and your people are of no use to me now. I will use more expert resources to complete the task.”

  De Guise grabbed the chicken by the neck, walked back into the kitchen, and chopped its head off. The water in the pan was boiling. He dropped the spider crab into the bubbling liquid and ripped the feathers off the chicken.

  After washing blood off his hands, he entered his study, sat at his writing desk, and withdrew expensive stationery from a drawer. He also took out his notes from the international call he’d received yesterday—notes about Will Cochrane’s identity and alias, and details about an Israeli man and his address in Israel. Using a fountain pen, he wrote on an envelope. Then he began writing on a sheet of paper.

  Mr. Stein

  We don’t know each other, but we are in a momentary situation of overlapping mutual interest.

  No doubt you must still be grieving the loss of your brother in Beirut. My condolences. For reasons unknown, he was murdered by the CIA officer serving alongside your brother. Not knowing why he was killed must make your grief all the more unbearable.

  You should know that there are certain people in America who wish to besmirch your good brother’s name. They wish to plant blame on him by falsely proving that your brother attempted to prevent coverage of a Hamas meeting at which the terrorists were to be discussing the prior assassination of your ambassador to France. They wish to cast doubt that Israel has legitimacy to take revenge against Hamas by engaging in total war with the organization. In the process, your brother’s honor will be sacrificed.

  They have deployed an individual to investigate what happened in the intelligence complex in Beirut. His real name is Will Cochrane, though he is traveling under the name Richard Oaks. His passport number and credit card details are written on the reverse of this letter.

  Like your brother, I understand that you are a Mossad combatant. I imagine that you must be a resourceful man. I suspect you have the ability to track Mr. Cochrane and stop him from ruining your family name.

  I too have reasons of my own to stop Mr. Cochrane conducting his task. I have a man at my disposal and am deploying him to hunt Cochrane down and neutralize him. He will be traveling from the west. You have the ability to travel from the east. Whoever reaches him first should have no hesitation in doing what must be done.

  Yours sincerely

  Thales

  The guardian called out, “Safa. Dinner will be ready in one hour.”

  TWENTY

  Until it went badly wrong, fall in Virginia was a time of joy and freedom in my childhood. Every fall, my friends and I would lash ropes to oak trees and swing through their russet leaves to emerge over rivers, our bare feet skimming water; make rudimentary bows and arrows and run through forests of beach and hickory while pretending to be Cherokee Native Americans; fish for trout using corks as floats and bent pins as hooks; and camp under the stars. We could spend hours, days when we were teenagers, in the tree-covered hills and mountains, time frozen and without meaning, with a feeling that life would last forever. The light was always good, better than in summer, and especially so as the sun started to set and sent lashes of golden light over the ground, the aromas around us loamy and fresh, the screech of a red fox reaching our ears from over a mile away because the air was still and untainted.

  I was sixteen when my mother told me she’d been too trusting to let me and my friends pursue our adventures in the nearby wilderness. Between sobs, she said that I was never to go back to the woods again. The other moms were in agreement, and one in particular could no longer bear to think about the outstanding natural beauty that surrounded her rural home. Her son—my best friend, Johnny Caine—had snapped his neck when he fell from one of our tree houses deep in the forest. My three other friends and I had been with him in the tree house when it happened, daring him to crawl along a high branch and collect the prize of a bag of cookies that I’d positioned at the end of the limb. When Johnny fell, it was as if God had gripped us with his enormous hand so that all we could do was watch. It seemed like minutes before Johnny hit the ground headfirst, but it was probably closer to four seconds.

  When God released me, time sped up and tears ran down my face as I clambered to the ground. Johnny was dead, I knew that; his neck was at the wrong angle and his frozen expression was one of surprise. My friends and I panicked because this was something that belonged to the grown-up world, not our world. I cried the whole time as I carried him in my arms for two miles. My arms throbbed. I was scared, we were all scared, and Johnny’s head kept hitting my shoulder.

  My arms were about to give up when we reached his parents’ home. I laid him on the porch and wanted the world to end as I rang the doorbell. His dad opened the door, a decent man who ran the local library but had recently seen his fair share of death in the first Gulf War. He was silent as he looked at his son, then us. He shut the door behind him, almost certainly because Johnny’s mom was inside, and walked to us. I expected him to strike me down. Instead, he placed a hand on my shoulder and whispered, “I need to know details, son. But I also need you to know that you did a good thing bringing him home. I’ll take over now.” He staggered a bit, muttered to himself, “God damn it, not yet,” and lifted his boy. His grief lasted his lifetime, but at that moment he was in battle-torn Kuwait, holding a dead comrade, keeping it together, or at least trying to, under enemy fire.

  Now, once again I was in the Virginia countryside, driving my rental car along a road that wound around a mountainside covered with poplar. I drove another mile before recognizing the driveway that I’d driven down before and the name of my destination.

  The Traveler’s Rest.

  Previously, seeing the name of the property had always put a smile on my face because the woman of the house had chosen the name. It was her heartfelt message to her husband when he returned from overseas. But seeing the sign today made me want to vomit.

  At the end of the driveway was an isolated house. I parked in front of it, making no effort to be quiet as I got out of the vehicle. I was in a suit: neat, formal, neutral, chosen with care. I rang the bell and it reminded me of when I’d done the same after bringing broken Johnny to his home. This place was similar—no other houses for miles, forest and undulating hills all around. The difference being, the home was in the midst of being repainted.

  A woman answered. She was in her late forties, but looked older than when I’d last seen her because no doubt she’d been crying a lot of late. Her face was drawn, and I could tell she hadn’t been eating properly. She was wearing track pants and sneakers; probably she was trying to kid herself she was healthy when in truth she was anything but.

  Roger Koenig’s wife let out an involuntary gasp, ran to me, burst into tears, and gripped me tight as she sobbed on my shoulder. Katy said, “It’s so good to see you, Will. I didn’t know if you’d be able to come.�
��

  “I had to.”

  We held each other for a few minutes before she led me into her living room.

  It was just as I remembered it from my last visit. Walls were crammed with family photos, pictures of Roger smiling in his full-dress naval uniform while standing next to Katy in her wedding dress, other various shots of Roger in SEAL combat attire alongside gun-toting colleagues, framed school certificates belonging to their twin boys, a big old map of the world that took pride of place over the fireplace, and next to it a much smaller silk map that on one side had a detailed image of Iraq and on the reverse a message in Arabic saying that if anyone helped the owner of the map they would be rewarded in gold. Roger had worn that map under his vest while behind enemy lines.

  The tastefully furnished room was usually immaculate, with only a few telltale signs that two eight-year-old boys lived in the house. But today it was cluttered, with used plates and cups on side tables.

  Katy was clearly embarrassed. “If I’d known you were coming I’d have cleaned up.”

  “And if you’d done so I’d have been offended.” I meant what I said. “This is your family home. You can make as much mess as you like. Where are the boys?”

  “Playing in the backyard.”

  Looking out of a window, I could now see the twins. They weren’t playing. Instead, they were staring at nothing while sitting side by side on swings. “How are they doing?”

  “They’re very quiet during the day. When they’re in bed, I hear them talking to each other for a while. Then their tears start. I go to them each time it happens. Breaks my heart. Every night they ask me different questions. Was Daddy a hero? Why did the men from his job come here and search the house? Why did they look angry? Why did Daddy go away when he knew it was our birthdays next month?” Katy slumped into a chair. “Last night they asked me if their daddy had done something very bad.”