Spy Mom

by Beth McMullen

  “Have you been to the Ranch?” I ask. Pauline sits on the floor and rubs the red mark rising on her neck.

  “The where?”

  “When Simon wakes up, tell him two things. One, he has a rat, and two, you want to go to the Ranch. Trust me. It’ll be fun.”

  She looks at me skeptically. Okay, maybe fun isn’t the right word but definitely useful. If she’d been to the Ranch, I never would have gotten this far.

  “Lucy?” Pauline asks tentatively.

  “Yes?”

  “The last time, when I was babysitting Theo, when I went back to the Underground, no one there believed I’d met you. They thought I was crazy.”

  “I’m in kind of a rush here,” I said, pulling the keys from Simon’s pocket. “Gotta spring the prisoner and all.”

  “Well, before you go, can I get a quick picture of us as proof, to show the guys back in D.C.?”

  You have got to be kidding me.

  36

  As we step out into the daylight, Yoder does a solid imitation of a vampire and recoils as if he is at risk of bursting into flames. His wrists are red and raw from where the cuffs dug into his flesh. I hand him my sunglasses and a Clif Bar. Yoder murmurs a thank you.

  The Prius is right where I left it. I shove Yoder into the passenger seat and slam the door. As we make our way toward the bay, the car is silent except for the deep rattle coming from Yoder’s lungs. I find it hard to believe he contracted tuberculosis in the short time since I saw him last. More likely he has seasonal allergies or a cold. The mother in me wants to put him to bed with a dose of Tylenol and a bowl of chicken soup. The spy in me just wants to get this over with.

  I park in the small lot on the north side of the San Francisco Ferry Building. The attendant explains in detail how I should go about getting my parking ticket validated but I don’t think I’m going to have time to catch even a quick bite, and that makes me sad. There’s a place here that makes the world’s most amazing fish tacos. You can sit outside and eat them while gazing up at the wretched Bay Bridge traffic. It’s the kind of experience that makes you grateful to be where you are rather than wishing you were somewhere else. Theo and I are regular customers although he prefers to stick with the chips.

  While the Ferry Building is in fact a place where you can catch a ferry, that is really inconsequential. Its long main hallway and side corridors are a marketplace overflowing with every sort of culinary delight imaginable. From exotic mushrooms to the perfect cappuccino to avocado ice cream to Vietnamese food so good you’d sell your mother up the river for it in a heartbeat. It’s also overflowing with tourists from all corners of the globe. And that’s exactly what I want, a reliably dense crowd. Witnesses. The last time I made the mistake of setting up a meeting in the middle of nowhere. I’m not sure this time is going to actually go any better but I’m proving I can learn from my mistakes. At least some of them.

  I hold Yoder under his arm and drag him along with me. He’s anxious, his eyes darting every which way. His skin seems to jump and twitch like a cat with a bad case of fleas. I get a whiff of anticipation off him that doesn’t seem to fit the situation. If anything, he should be scanning for an opportunity to escape. As we maneuver through the tourists, my cell phone rings. It’s Will.

  “Hi,” he says. “I was just thinking about the interview this morning.”

  I can barely remember the interview. It seems to have occurred a lifetime ago.

  “I thought it went fine,” I say, scanning the crowd.

  “Where are you?”

  “Downtown,” I say. “I have a doctor’s appointment later. Theo is with your folks.”

  The silence is not to be ignored.

  “They seemed really happy,” I go on. I hold Yoder around the waist as if we’re lovers, me in the role of cradle-robber and him in the role of baby.

  “Good for you, Lucy,” he says eventually, the shock of my revelation wearing off. “I’m glad you feel like you can trust them.”

  Oh, I don’t trust them. I’m just desperate and a desperate woman will do strange things. A man approaches us. He could be a tourist or he could be part of Chemical Claude’s pack of wolves.

  “I have to go,” I say. “If I’m running late, order pizza for dinner. You know how doctor’s offices can be.”

  “Sure,” he says. I hit End and stick the phone in my pocket with my car keys. In my other pocket is my gun and I make sure Yoder can feel it in his ribs. But he doesn’t care. He stares at the man approaching us. I guess he’s more of the wolf variety and less of the tourist.

  The man blocks our way, grinning. The other visitors flow around him to both sides as if he were a boulder in the middle of a stream.

  “You come with me,” he says.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We don’t trade in here,” he says. “We trade out there.” He points to the piers.

  “No,” I say.

  “If we bring your guy in here, we all spend the night in the slammer.”

  He has a point. Gray can’t be looking his best right now.

  “Let’s go,” I say and follow the man out of the Ferry Building.

  Moored to a pier south of where we stand is a gleaming white yacht with the name Everest painted on the side in enormous black letters. The “E” is designed to look like the mountain herself. A rubber-coated ramp runs from a floating dock to the deck above. Our guide gestures we’re to board the vessel. This is just what I was hoping to avoid.

  “Forget it,” I say. “We’re staying right here.” Next to me, Yoder hums to himself. He seems oddly happy and relaxed all of a sudden. I wonder where Blackford is and why, if he insists on meddling in my life, he can’t choose now to do it.

  The man points to a turret on the yacht. Sticking out from a window on the turret is the barrel of a gun and it’s aimed directly at me.

  “Get on the boat.”

  I have a number of choices here. The first is, I can scream for help. The second is, I can jump in the Bay and swim to Hawaii. The third is, I can do as they say and hope that everyone is still alive come dinnertime. I choose number three, cross my fingers, and board the boat.

  37

  The moment Yoder and I are on deck, the ramp comes up and the engines roar to life. The yacht backs smoothly away from the dock. I reconsider the option of swimming to Hawaii. This has all the telltale signs of a disaster in the making. And of course as soon as I think that, it gets worse.

  Standing on deck above us is Chemical Claude himself. He wears a jaunty red beret and a thick matching scarf and looks as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.

  “Welcome aboard the Everest, Sally,” he booms. “In a way, I named her for you.”

  Somehow the hat and the scarf and the name of the boat really make me want to kill him. I reach around to my pocket, pull out the Colt, and aim it at his head. Instantly, three machine gun barrels are pointing at mine.

  “So emotional,” Chemical Claude says as he slides down a set of stairs and comes to a stop right in front of me. He taps me on the head with a gloved finger. “You should think before you act. But I know you have other talents. Languages you shouldn’t know but somehow do because you’re so very curious. Remember what happened to George when he was so curious? The difference is, you don’t appear to have a man with a yellow hat to save you. Now give me the gun.”

  I hand it to him and he tosses it overboard directly into the Bay. Well, there goes that.

  Tucked into a leather shoulder holster, he carries a SIG P226 handgun. This particular gun bears a “Blackwater USA” logo on the slide.

  “It’s a nice gun,” he says. “A trophy. I won’t tell you the details of how it came to be in my possession.”

  “I didn’t ask,” I say. “Where’s Gray?” But I have lost Chemical Claude’s attention. He has turned his eyes to Yoder, and they’re hard eyes, dark little pieces of coal in a snowman head.

  “You stayed too long in Vegas,” Claude says. “You probably lost al
l your money and came home with a case of herpes from that girl. That was not part of the plan.”

  “Neither was my year with Simon Still,” Yoder spits back. He shakes with apparent fury, his thin fists balled up and ready to strike.

  “Plan?”

  “Yes,” Chemical Claude says to me. “The difference is I follow through. Richard here, he apparently likes to freelance. Lock her up until we get to the island.”

  As Chemical Claude’s henchmen drag me across the deck of the yacht, I remember something Simon once told me. The obvious answer, he said, is usually the right one. And the right one is usually the one directly in front of your face.

  “We think people are so clever, coming up with complicated schemes and lies and plans,” Simon lectured as we walked the endless corridors to Director Gray’s office. “But they’re not. For the most part, they’re hopeless, struggling to overcome the simplest complications. Imagine the harm they could do if they were thinking people. If they were smart. We owe the hopeless morons a huge debt of gratitude.”

  Simon didn’t care if I answered. My job on that day was to walk with him so he didn’t end up talking to himself all the way to Gray’s office, thus appearing totally batshit. Once we arrived at the office, I would turn around and trudge back to the Underground. I was merely the inbound entertainment.

  “So if all the evidence points to party A having just purchased a pile of nuclear componentry then …” He turned to me to fill in the rest of the sentence.

  “Then they’re probably going to build a weapon?”

  “Yes! You’re a genius, Sally. You’ll go far.” These exchanges always served to remind me that I wasn’t necessarily one of the morons Simon was talking about but I was damn close. Yet every once in a while, Simon had a point.

  “Oh, no,” I say. My wrists are bound and I’m locked in a cabin down below deck. It’s so obvious it’s almost impossible to believe. “How could I have missed this? What was I doing?” The answer is easy. I was busy playing LEGOs.

  It’s the code, stupid. Chemical Claude is after me.

  Setting up Yoder to be taken in by the Americans, kidnapping Gray, forcing me to show myself in order to get him back, it’s all part of a much more complicated plan that has been in the works for some time now, probably since the Louvre, when Claude found out I was still alive and pretending to be a civilian. It makes me shudder to imagine what he went through in an attempt to find me after that, my only protection being that the United States hides people better than anyone. In retrospect, I should have drowned that Frenchwoman in the toilet and enjoyed the Degas.

  Blackford’s revelation that Director Gray could be used to motivate me was the last piece of the puzzle. Chemical Claude finally had a way to flush me from my hiding place.

  Chemical Claude’s goal is simple. He wants me to translate the code in his little black book. I am his Rosetta stone.

  38

  Through the tiny porthole, Angel Island looms off our bow, shrouded in wispy fog. The largest of the Bay Area islands, on a cold and windy day such as today, Angel Island is likely to be an empty and isolated 740 acres in the middle of a metropolitan region with seven million people. At this hour of the day, with the last ferry already departed, it’ll be me and the lunatics. Why does this keep happening to me? Am I being punished for being a warlord or an independent voter in a former life?

  As the yacht swings around, I catch a glimpse of what’s most certainly our destination. Right on the shore of the island sits a three-story, faded red warehouse. The water laps practically to its door. A partially collapsed wooden pier looms in the shadows directly in front of it. All the windows are boarded up. What a perfect place to perpetrate a crime. I hear an anchor splash down.

  The door to my cabin pushes open and the barrel of a gun attached to a very large man pokes through. There’s a grunt I interpret to mean “Please follow me topside. Thank you.”

  Seated in a rubber raft bobbing next to the Everest is Chemical Claude. He has a fleece blanket draped over his shoulders and an odd grin on his face. Next to him sits Yoder, looking peevish.

  “I BASE jump the KL Tower in Kuala Lumpur each year,” Claude says as I climb down into the raft. Yoder rolls his eyes.

  “Not this story again,” he says.

  “You shut up,” Chemical Claude says to him, turning to me. “It’s a thrill to jump, the rush of the wind in your ears, the cold on your face. Such bodily freedom seems almost divine.”

  “That’s nice,” I say.

  “I want you to know that it’s awesome. But I anticipate I’m going to enjoy this, too.”

  Why is it these villain types can’t seek out reasonable entertainment like the rest of us? See a movie, have dinner at a fancy restaurant, go fishing? Why do they act as if we’re all still living in ancient Rome?

  We’re completely enveloped in the fog. A few seagulls bob in the water beside us. All sound is muffled.

  “I can’t believe I thought you deserved a second chance,” I say to Yoder. “I even took you to a play-off game and bought you popcorn.” He keeps his eyes forward but I see a tremor at the corner of his mouth.

  Chemical Claude gazes across the water at the lonely warehouse. A person stands on the narrow stretch of beach out front, legs planted firmly. Her pants are rolled up to her ankles and her dark hair blows in the wind. She’s been waiting on our arrival. The little raft bounces through the waves and gradually evens out as we enter the protective zone of shore.

  “She has a son,” Yoder says, out of the blue. Chemical Claude sits up straighter and actually looks surprised. His eyebrows shoot directly up toward his hairline before he can regain control of them. I wait to see what will happen next.

  “Didn’t know, did you?” Yoder continues, sticking the needle in a little deeper and wiggling it around just for fun. “Your pal Blackford knew but he didn’t tell you. That’s gotta chafe. The kid is actually kind of cute, if a little bit spoiled.”

  My eyelid twitches furiously. Is it because Yoder just outed me as a mom or because he obviously thinks I lack discipline as a parent? Whatever the reason, I have lost control of the eyelid. I rest a finger on it to calm the madness, keenly aware of the shotgun pointed at my chest. Chemical Claude’s lips form a tight little line.

  “You paid Blackford all that money for information and he held out on you,” Yoder says. “I told you, you can’t trust a man like that, but do you listen to me? No. She knows the code. If she won’t do it, just snatch the kid.” I want to leap across the boat and squeeze the life out of Yoder with my hands but before I can get too far along in that fantasy, the raft runs aground on the beach. Chemical Claude and Yoder each grab an arm and toss me out of the boat and onto the sand where I land, face first, right at the feet of Ayushi, all grown up.

  For a moment, I think I might be dreaming, that maybe the stress has finally overwhelmed my resources and all the circuits in my brain have gone haywire, leaving me to live out my life as a blithering idiot. As a blithering idiot, I would certainly not have to contemplate how it is I came to be here, facedown in the sand on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, looking up at Ayushi, whom I’d assumed died at the hands of Chemical Claude many years ago.

  Chemical Claude watches me closely, curious about the effect seeing her will have. With an air of ownership, he slides an arm around Ayushi’s waist and pulls her toward him. He kisses her long and hard and from my position on the ground I cannot tell if this makes her happy or not. What it does to me defies description.

  Ayushi is tall and willowy with miles of dark hair blowing in a tornado around her lovely face. The little girl who saved my life in Nepal is no longer.

  “Ayushi,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said her name out loud since I fell in the river and was swept away from her. It comes out as a grateful prayer. Ayushi stares down at me with a curious expression, the same one she wore while sitting on my bed in the Hotel Kathmandu.

  “She has worked out very well
for me and I have you to thank for that,” Chemical Claude says, pulling me to my feet by the back of my jacket. “Now, let’s go and see your father, shall we?”

  The building is old and concrete, a relic from the days when this was a military fort guarding San Francisco from Confederate invaders. There’s no glass in the windows and an icy wind blows through with impunity. There are several folding chairs scattered across the vast open space but little else. In a far corner, guarded by two husky men with guns, sits Director Gray, loosely tied to a chair with nylon rope. His chin rests on his chest, which rises and falls ever so slightly. He wears a torn button-down shirt that was once white but is now stained with streaks of blood, dried to the color of rust. His ripped suit trousers expose a deep wound on his right thigh that will make it difficult for him to walk. His feet are bare. From across the great empty room, he’s nothing more than a beaten old man, and if he was ever a master of the free world, those days are now just a memory. I feel something break off inside of me and float freely in my bloodstream. It’s a stripped-down version of what I feel for Theo but with jagged, unfinished edges.

  “Don’t do it, Sally,” Gray says, without raising his head. “No matter what happens.”

  That’s easy enough for him to say, but they kind of have me over a barrel here. I don’t translate for them and they kill Gray. I don’t translate for them and they kill Theo. I don’t translate for them and they kill me. The order in which they choose to proceed doesn’t matter, as the results will be the same. Dead, dead, and dead.

  “This sucks,” I say.

  “Sit,” Chemical Claude commands, pulling the small black notebook that has caused all these problems from his inside pocket and shoving me onto a metal folding chair. “You translate and everyone walks away. I’m a man of my word.”

  “No, you’re not,” I say.

  “Well, I could be if I choose to,” he says with a sniff.