Twice a Spy (4 page)

Although enveloped
by toasty air, Charlie felt no comfort as he stepped into the chalet’s spacious living room. Usually on entry he savored the blond wooden beams and old-fashioned Alpine-style furniture. Before coming to Gstaad, he’d never given a thought to upholstery—probably never even uttered the word
upholstery
. But he’d been taken by the sofa and chairs here, embroidered with white dots that matched those on the lace curtains, which in turn afforded privacy without sacrificing a view of the skyrocketing mountains. Now he felt as if an avalanche were carrying the chalet away.

Drummond still sat at the farmhouse dining table. Of average height and weight, he’d always fostered a nondescript appearance, which served him well as a professional cipher. He was a young sixty-four, though two weeks ago it had been easy to see the senior citizen version of him waiting around the corner: His white hair had begun to thin, gravity was winning the battle with his spine, and wrinkles and spots massed as if readying to invade his taut skin’s otherwise healthy glow. In Gstaad, those trends had seemed to reverse somewhat. He sat ruler-straight now. He exuded vitality. His hair even seemed a healthier shade of white.

It was too soon into the course of the treatment to detect an effect on his mind, but the medication could have been responsible for his general improvement. More likely, the upturn resulted from their strenuous hikes and the invigorating Alpine air. Or possibly Drummond benefited from the comforts of the chalet: When forced to go on the lam together, the previously estranged father and son managed not only to get along,
against odds no bettor in his right mind would have accepted, but they also actually learned from each other, creating a force that exceeded the sum of its parts. As a result, they had survived. Once in Gstaad, Charlie savored the nascent affection, a nice change from his father’s serial sermon about wasting one’s life at the track.

“Where’s Alice?” Drummond asked.

Sliding one of the heavy pine chairs out from the table, Charlie sat across from him. “She was kidnapped,” he said. It came out matter-of-factly; if he weren’t so numb, he might have shrieked it.

“
Kidnapped!
Are you certain?”

“I guess, technically, she was rendered. Or renditioned.”

“What happened?”

Charlie filled him in.

“Well, that certainly is a problem.” Making a steeple out of his fingers, Drummond gazed out at the dark shapes of the mountains, seemingly contemplating a solution. After a few moments, he asked, with uncharacteristic alarm, “What are we going to do about dinner?”

Charlie spent
most of the night gazing at the empty space on the other side of the mattress. The closest he found to a diversion was watching the digits change on the clock radio.

At 5:14 Drummond banged on the door.

“You okay?” Charlie asked.

“I woke up this morning feeling as well as I have in quite some time. And I’m almost certain that Alice was kidnapped.”

“Well … yeah.” Last night Charlie had detailed the rendition five or six times in hopes of sparking Drummond’s memory of the ADM. To no avail.

Drummond made a beeline for the clock radio, snapping on Alpine folk music and turning up the volume. “I mean it was a straight kidnapping, as in an operation offering the safe return of the captive in exchange for something.”

That sounded pretty lucid. Charlie strained to hear over the accordions.

Seeing Charlie look at the radio, Drummond said, “In case of eavesdroppers. And in case of eavesdroppers who might have been able to filter out the music, I raised the heat—I hope you’re not uncomfortable.”

Noting the hot air whining through the registers, Charlie shook his head. “Enough about me. Do you remember all the plot points: Jesse James from the helicopter? Hidden ADM?”

Drummond sat at the foot of the bed. His eyes glowed with much more than just the moonlight spraying through the gap in the drapes.

Hallelujah, thought Charlie. Lucidity.

“If he were smart, what Jesse James told you is—”

“Lies.” Charlie had already concluded as much. “No, fifty percent lies, but you wouldn’t have any way of knowing which was which. I just need to catch up on a few things.”

“Shoot.”

“Had Alice been in touch with anyone?”

“Yes.” During the night, this had become Charlie’s leading theory as to the genesis of the rendition. “The other day she took, like, eighty-seven trains and buses to Zurich, went to a public library, and sent one of those supposedly untraceable Hushmails to the personal account of an NSA inspector general she trusts.”

“What did she write?”

“Basically, that she wasn’t dead, and that your old Cavalry pals had framed us for Hattemer’s murder in order to get the finding.” A presidential finding had waived Executive Orders 11905 and 12333 banning assassinations by U.S. government organizations, thereby enabling the Cavalry to off the Clarks with impunity. “She was hoping to open a dialogue, maybe get us off the Whack-on-Sight list. She asked the guy to reply using Hushmail.”

Drummond looked at the ceiling, pondering the matter.

Or so Charlie hoped. Drummond’s episodes of lucidity lasted forty minutes on average, but sometimes they were as brief as two minutes.

“I think the rendition is coincidence,” Drummond said.

“So you believe in coincidences too?”

“There are coincidences and there are unbelievable coincidences. It’s possible that someone ‘made’ her while she was in Zurich or en route, but given the extensive planning and practice a helicopter rendition of this nature requires, it seems more likely that the kidnappers were already well into preproduction. Also it’s possible that Alice orchestrated the kidnapping herself. She could sell the ADM for a king’s ransom—she doesn’t know it’s a fake, right?”

Charlie waved his dismissal. “I kept the secret from her not because I don’t trust her, but because there was no reason to burden her with it.”

“Jesse James leveraged your feelings for her,” Drummond said. “How could he or whoever he’s working for have known that you’d developed feelings for her?”

“Using a mosquito drone …” Charlie left it at that, averse to telling his sometime-puritanical father exactly what the miniature camera might have recorded.

Also Charlie was now wrestling with the fact that during his brief time in Spook City, everyone he’d met had either deceived him or tried to kill him. Even his own mother, who had faked her death when he was four—he’d believed she was dead until encountering her just two weeks ago, when she offered him and Drummond safe haven. Fifteen minutes later, she handed them over to Cavalry assassins before reversing course and getting herself killed.

And Alice herself was no innocent. When Charlie first met her, the day before he met his mother, Alice had posed as a social worker at the Brooklyn senior center that “rescued” his father. Her true goal had been—what else?—intel. In reality, she had no home, no money, and no family aside from her mother, who was currently serving the fifteenth year of a twenty-year sentence for murdering Alice’s father. Alice’s “rendition” might easily have been staged.

But Charlie wasn’t convinced. “No one, not even the most sociopathic spook, is as good an actor as she would have had to be,” he said.

“Probably so,” said Drummond. “The bond between you would have been obvious even to a drone. It was obvious to me, after all. We can also rule it highly unlikely that the rendition was a government operation.”

“Why?”

“They would have neutralized us. I’m a thorn in their side and too unstable to be deployed to locate a bomb, whether or not they know it’s a fake. And if they do know it’s fake, they certainly don’t want anyone else knowing, which is all the more reason to silence me. If they meant to send me bomb-hunting regardless, they would have opted for a path of lesser resistance than a highly chancy airborne op.”

“Like what?”

“They could have simply offered us immunity.”

“So we’re dealing with good, old-fashioned bad guys?”

“Bad guys with a window, however small, into the NSA or CIA. Maybe they have a confederate within one of those agencies.” Drummond sucked at his lower lip, a measure of self-restraint in Charlie’s experience.

“They’re going to kill her, whatever we do, aren’t they?” This was at the top of the list of questions that had kept Charlie up all night. “You never cooperate with kidnappers as a rule, right?”

“Actually, there’s good reason to believe they’ll let her live if we do what they want. Ninety-nine percent of kidnappers are in it just for the payout, and to get it, they have to trade their hostage.”

“Is there anyone we can go to? Her NSA friend, maybe?”

“No. Too risky for us. Too risky for Alice.”

“So then what are the options?”

“Just one: Cooperate.”

Charlie raced to prioritize his questions. Drummond might go days before another episode of lucidity. “Do you know where the ADM is hidden?”

Drummond shrugged. “I might. Let me look at the map.” He set a Swiss road atlas on the comforter and flipped it open. As Charlie was worrying about the choice of a local road atlas, Drummond whispered into his ear. “There’s a self-serve Laundromat on rue Joseph Compère in the Pointe Simon area of Fort-de-France, Martinique’s main city. As usual, the device is concealed within a Perriman Pristina model washing machine. This one is among a bunch of washers and dryers locked in the storeroom in the back. The manager is a cutout, which as you may know is a player who knows as little as possible. Her name is Odelette. She’ll have the key. There also may be a key to the storeroom in the gap behind the detergent dispenser and the wall. If all else fails, it’s not hard to detach the ventilation grate.”

If not for the possibility that they were under surveillance, Charlie would have pumped a fist. “What about the code? Like last time?”

Twelve days ago in Manhattan, to escape confinement and make it appear that the two of them had died in the process, Drummond had detonated another ADM-bearing Pristina packed with a hundred pounds of plastic explosive—standard in real uranium implosion weapons in order to generate critical mass. Without critical mass, it was still enough to take out the vast underground complex serving as Cavalry headquarters. Arming the device had been a matter of entering the washing machine’s serial number onto permissive action links, a trio of numeric dials like those on safes.

As long as the ADM in the Laundromat worked the same way, Charlie was looking at a relatively simple trade.

“Yes, and just like the one in New York, dialing the numbers in reverse disarms it,” Drummond said, rising. He began to pace alongside the bed, as if the motion spurred his thinking. “Of course, Jesse James can’t be told any of these specifics. It’s the paid cutouts in a rendition who are the least predictable. They’re usually the sort you’d call to murder your wife. What we need to do is to go to Martinique, find the washer, then turn it over. We’ll demonstrate the validity of the ADM code at the same time Alice is released, everything synchronized, the classic hostage exchange. They’re probably expecting us to go to the Caribbean and to play it out just like that. Otherwise they wouldn’t have suggested that we rendezvous at an airfield.”

The mentions of “we” didn’t sit right with Charlie. “I can go to Martinique myself,” he said. “These days I could teach a course on fake travel documents and disguise. And once I’m there, it’s a simple trade. I can handle this myself.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Drummond’s smile belied his doubt. “I wouldn’t mind coming along anyway.”

“I don’t know, Dad. You’ve spent millions and risked your life more times than I can count just to get here and try the treatment. Also this is just the first time you’ve flickered on since we’ve been in Europe.”

“There you go. I need you to look out for me. And to remind me to take the pills.”

“You could stay at the clinic. The fee of twenty thousand euros a month includes a private room that you haven’t set foot in.”

“I want to go to Martinique with you because …” Drummond’s voice trailed off. He shifted his focus to the window. Outside, a silver streak of moonlight delineated the neighboring peak from the still-dark sky. He seemed to be searching for the right words. “I want to go for your son.”

Charlie felt the chill that accompanied lucidity’s departure. “I don’t have a son.”

“You ought to. Best thing you’ll ever do, trust me. That’s exactly what was on my mind when I woke up this morning, feeling so well.”

Moved, Charlie placed his hands on his father’s shoulders and drew
him close. Although Drummond offered no resistance, he angled his head away. Charlie found himself doing the same. The boisterous music from the radio underscored their woodenness. Both broke free after maybe three seconds. They lacked practical experience in displays of affection, Charlie reflected. It didn’t mitigate the underlying sentiment, though. No way would he needlessly place his father in harm’s way.

“It’s just a matter of turning three dials, right?”

“Yes, arming the device is simple.” Drummond leaned against the doorframe, perhaps subconsciously blocking Charlie from going to the airfield without him. “The hard parts will be learning who these people really are, then preventing them from deploying the bomb.”