Twice a Spy (8 page)

Charlie read a sports magazine. Or, more accurately, he held a sports magazine. He kept wondering what would become of Alice should he fail to deliver the ADM.

For the first time since takeoff, Bream glanced back from the cockpit, taking in the sleeping Drummond. “Sorry there’s no in-flight movie,” the pilot said to Charlie. “Heckuva bar, though.” He aimed a thumb at the rear of the cabin.

He seemed bored, or at least inclined to chat, which dovetailed nicely with Charlie’s hope of learning whatever he could about him.

“This is a sweet ride,” Charlie said.

“It’s just a rent-a-plane, of course.” Bream flashed a smile. “You know how it is, when you’re flying highly wanted fugitives across international borders to go fetch a nuclear bomb. It’s usually a good idea to rent, under an alias.”

“Oh.” In fact, Charlie would have bet the chalet that the Gulfstream was a rental. But he hoped that by playing the naïf, he might lower Bream’s guard. “So how does one get into flying highly wanted fugitives across international borders to fetch nuclear bombs?”

Bream laughed. “Thinking of a career move?”

“Should I?”

Nudging a lever beneath the instrument panel, Bream pivoted to face Charlie. “I can only tell you one man’s experience.”

“Okay.” Charlie glanced at Drummond. Still in dreamland.

“When I was in my twenties, I signed on with the Skunk Works,” Bream said. “Know it?”

“Vaguely.” Once upon a time, like many American boys with an aptitude for numbers and a hankering for glory, Charlie had dreamed of working at the Skunk Works, Lockheed’s legendary advanced aircraft division in Palmdale, California. The closest he ever got was Arcadia, California, an hour away, to watch the Santa Anita Derby.

“I was a test pilot on an experimental stealth fighter,” Bream said.

“Wow.” Charlie’s wariness gave way to intrigue.

“I figured I’d put in five years or so there. Then, just north of thirty, I’d be able to transition to cushy corporate jets—play that right, you can make near as much as a ballplayer and get yourself a mansion and all that. The problem was, our client was an Air Force bureaucrat in real bad need of a punch in the face. And one day I gave it to him. He saw to it that I wasn’t just shit-canned but kept from flying so much as a paper plane again for a U.S.-based outfit. Then he had me thrown to the cops.”

Charlie almost sympathized. “Did you have to do time?”

Bream chuckled. “Only if you count my marriages.”

Lately when Charlie met men close to his age and learned that they had already been divorced several times—there was no shortage of them in horseplayer circles—he felt he’d frittered away his youth, never even marrying once. But he didn’t feel that way with Bream.

Charlie suspected he had been listening to a cover story. And why would Bream tell him the truth? Charlie cursed his naïveté in thinking that, like some sort of seasoned covert operations officer, he might “elicit” here.

“I appreciate the in-flight entertainment,” he said, rising and wandering back to the bar, which held far greater appeal than it had a minute ago.

“My pleasure,” Bream said, turning back to the controls.

On a crystal decanter, Charlie caught a reflection of the pilot biting back a grin. It revealed an extra helping of ego, Charlie thought.

Now he had something to work with.

“Ever heard
of Perriman Appliances?” Eskridge asked.

“Rings a bell.” Stanley had lived in Madrid for more than a year before he noticed that his kitchenette had no oven.

“It’s basically junk that runs on electrical current. I made the mistake of buying one of their ‘affordable’ refrigerators
and
one of their dishwashers, back in the days when I, too, thought you could have a family in our trade.”

So Eskridge had read deep into Stanley’s file—or one of the division chief’s adjutants had and distilled it for him. Stanley traced the disintegration of his brief marriage to the day he left for the Farm.

“You know what they say about the third generation losing the money?” Eskridge asked, rhetorically. “In the mid-eighties, one of the agency’s geographical analysis subcommittees bought Perriman Appliances from the Perriman grandkids for practically nothing.”

“For the usual reasons that a geographical analysis subcommittee needs a second-rate appliance manufacturer?”

“Third-rate would be kind.” Eskridge glanced around, as if wary that, even here, someone might be watching or listening. “Geographical Analysis Subcommittee is how the Cavalry is listed on the books. I take it you’re familiar with the Cavalry.”

“Just the water cooler intel.” Stanley had a nagging feeling that there was an important cable he’d neglected. Rumint—the intelligence community’s brand of rumor—had it that the Cavalry was a special ops unit that recruited the gutsiest of the best and the brightest and pulled off
covert operations that no one else would dare. It was hard to know, though, what was apocryphal and what was true.

“At the moment, they’re an off-the-books joint project of this division, Counterproliferation, and Counterterrorism. They administer the secret side of the Perriman worldwide network, trafficking weapons. To terrorists, principally. Or any other nutjob whose check won’t bounce. The Cavalry’s best seller is a non-detonative version of a ten-kiloton Russian ADM from the seventies. The device looks like the inner workings of a washing machine, and its weight is only a pound or two greater. So the Perriman washer makes an excellent concealment. On top of that, the Cavalry created special insulation to veil the bomb’s radiation. What the buyers don’t know is that the ADM is a complete dud—even less useful than an actual Perriman washer. Once a purchase is made, the buyers are monitored by the Cavalry and taken out of play before they can use the weapon. In sum, we found that the way to beat the illegal arms dealers was to join ’em.”

For the first time in twelve hours, Stanley breathed free of the worry that he’d been hoodwinked by Ali Abdullah. He’d sent Abdullah to a covert American detention facility in Genoa, purportedly to protect him from reprisal by the French but, really, to protect the arms dealer’s secret identity.

“So Abdullah checked out?”

“There was no need. His real name’s Austin Floyd Bellinger. I was in his wedding, in Cleveland. Your decision to keep DCRI and DGSE out of the loop was spot on. A few weeks in the detention facility will bolster Bellinger’s cover. Then the special effects department will make it look like he killed some guards and escaped. Or maybe they’ll just let him buy his way out. The point is, you really did earn that stationary bike. And in so doing, you’ve earned yourself a role in the best show on the Great Dark Way.”

“What sort of role?” Stanley exhibited less detachment than he would have liked.

“Do you know anything about Nick Fielding?”

“The Ali Abdullah of the Caribbean. Is
he
Cavalry too?”

“Yes.
Was
. Died recently in an electrical fire in the New York City subway—you hear about it?”

“I don’t think so.” If it was something Stanley should have known, he could attribute the memory lapse to fatigue.

“Good. There was no electrical fire. What happened was, one of the Cavalry ADMs detonated in the sub-basement of the Perriman Manhattan offices, which happens to be close to a subway tunnel. As far as I know, the extent of the coverage was just a paragraph or two, buried deep in New York’s
Daily News
, decrying the city’s dangerously outmoded subway system.”

“I thought the ADMs were duds.”

“Their uranium components are essentially fake, but that sort of weapon also packs a hundred pounds of plastic explosive, supposedly to generate critical mass, and that part we can’t fake, though the boys in the white coats are working on it.”

“I imagine a device of that nature doesn’t go off accidentally?”

“No. In an actual deployment, it would’ve been armed by three different Ivans, each man knowing only one-third of the code, for security’s sake. In this case, one man had all the codes. Drummond Clark. Now, what do you know about him?”

“Again, only rumint, but enough that I’d bet he’s a shoo-in for a Trailblazer medal.”

“Stood a chance at being the first guy to win two. But he’s the one who triggered the ADM that took out Fielding, along with the Cavalry’s entire Manhattan office. So now he won’t win anything. Originally, though, the Perriman op was his idea. He founded the Cavalry, staffed it—he plucked Bellinger out of a USO show. Thanks to Drummond Clark, lunatics who might have gotten their hands on a real nuke instead blow up the equivalent of a few sticks of dynamite.”

“So why in his right mind would he blow up the Manhattan office?”

Eskridge stiffened. “He wasn’t in his right mind. A few months ago he was placed on medical leave, suffering from a voracious case of early-onset Alzheimer’s. More recently he developed acute paranoia, which led to an Appalachian-length trail of bodies, not least of whom was the national security adviser.”

“So I take it Burton Hattemer didn’t really die in a fall.”

“The media weren’t informed about the bullet that preceded the fall. The good news is that, as a result of it, the Cavalry obtained a presidential
finding waiving Executive Order 11905, allowing them to neutralize Clark. As well as his son, Charlie, which probably isn’t a bad idea regardless of the Hattemer incident. In a nutshell, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but it bounced bloody far out of the orchard. The kid’s math genius got him into Brown. He dropped out, though, and wound up an inveterate gambler. He now knows and would likely trade what is perhaps our most closely guarded secret for a good tip on the third race at Hialeah. Initially we thought that Clark and Son had done the wet work for us and detonated themselves in the ‘electrical fire’ along with Fielding. To say the least, this would have simplified matters. However …”

Eskridge hit a button on what looked to be a length of garden hose running along the end of the conference table. “This is a little something the Toy Makers have been working on,” he said. Like humidifier mist, particles of light rose from a thin vent running the length of the hose. “Puts pictures on the same basic metamaterial that will soon enable us to be first to have invisibility camouflaging.” He looked around the room, in an exaggerated show of paranoia. “Unless the other team has beaten us to it.”

Taking on different hues, the particles formed a screen that stood at a right angle to the table and showed video of a young woman crossing a crowded city street at night.

“This is surveillance footage from a kabob place across Broadway from the Perriman offices,” Eskridge said. “You’re looking at former No Such Agency black ops starlet Alice Rutherford, on the night in question, going into the burning building.”

Despite the dark and grainy image, the woman was stunning. Entering the drab postwar office building, she drew a gun as calmly as if it were a cell phone.

Eskridge pressed the screen. Alice’s image slid to his right, the video fast-forwarding to a magnified, infrared-filter-enhanced view of her in the vestibule, blasting apart the inner glass wall.

“She was in deep cover on an intelligence gathering op in Martinique,” Eskridge said. “Fielding was her target. Like the rest of the world, the NSA bought into his bad-guy cover story. The problem with Miss Alice Rutherford was, when push came to shove, she couldn’t be
convinced that Fielding was actually on our side, not even by the man upstairs.” He pointed to the ceiling, signifying the director, whose office was on the seventh floor. “So now we’re watching her gunning down Fielding and, at least in her mind, coming to the rescue of …”

On the display, Alice climbed through the cavity she’d created in the glass. Eskridge tapped at the scene, fast-forwarding through about two minutes of footage of empty vestibule. Then Alice reappeared from an alley next to the office building, with a young man and an older one in tow.

“Drummond and Rotten Apple Clark?” Stanley asked.

“None other.” Eskridge paused to watch the threesome disappear from the frame. “And that’s the last anyone’s seen of them: Alice has gone totally off the reservation.”

“Any idea why?”

“She maintained that
Fielding
was off the reservation, that he and the Cavalry zapped Burt Hattemer in order to get the presidential finding against the Clarks. She also insisted that the Cavalry did this to keep a lid on their own misdoings. Under Fielding’s direction, the Cavalry ‘went
Lord of the Flies
,’ as she put it—and to some extent, she’s right. One problem with her murder theory, though, is the utter lack of any evidence. Three days ago she sent a Hushmail from points unknown to an inspector general at NSA requesting an investigation. NSA wrote her back saying basically, ‘Great, tell us more,’ but she never responded. It now appears as though she was just trying to smoke screen her real activity, which is putting one of Drummond’s old ADMs up for sale, possibly to the United Liberation Front of the Punjab, an Islamic separatist group who are violent psychopaths when they’re on their best behavior. According to our man Bellinger, their sugar daddy had his checkbook out and was waiting near Fielding’s place in Martinique the day Fielding was killed. Unfortunately, everyone who knew the device’s location died with Fielding. Everyone except Drummond Clark, that is. So if Bellinger is right about the new weapons deal, Alice and her companions stand to clear several hundred million clams. Which means one of those bombs could blow in the heart of New York or DC. And worse still …”