Twice a Spy (22 page)

“Mr. and Mrs. Atchison, hey.” The pilot acted pleasantly surprised. “Nice of you to drop by.”

“We’re here on United States government business,” said Stanley, glad to be spared the song and dance of why the golf-obsessed CFO and his self-absorbed wife were on the pilot’s front stoop.

Bream leaned closer, as if he hadn’t heard right. “
Government business?
”

“We should go inside and talk about it,” Hadley said.

The pilot shrugged. “So long as you don’t mind a little mess. The maid hasn’t been here, well, to be honest, ever.”

Stanley stumbled, intentionally, as he followed Hadley across the threshold. He fell against Bream, who reflexively caught him by the shoulders.

“Excuse me,” Stanley said, clinging to the pilot’s waist to remain upright while he felt for a gun hidden in the small of the man’s back.

Bream released him. “First thing on the maid’s list will be that doorstep.”

“Much obliged.” Stanley added a pat of gratitude, feeling no holster in the vicinity of Bream’s underarm, bolstering his confidence that the pilot had no weapon on him.

Still Stanley knew he needed to keep an eye out for a knife or gun produced from a hiding spot and against which his only defense would be the surveillance team in a hotel room fifty yards away. In such situations, the old joke went, the best your backup team can do is avenge you.

The condo itself wasn’t as bad as advertised. Empty Red Stripe bottles, randomly flicked bottle caps and clothing abounded, but were lost in the grandeur of the space—ten-foot ceilings with gleaming ceramic tile crown molding, lustrous hardwood floors, and slabs of granite atop every counter.

Whisking a weight-lifting belt off the back of one of the dining room chairs, Bream ushered Stanley and Hadley into two of the other three seats at the table. “I can offer you water, or water with a tea bag in it,” he said, indicating a stout Victorian teakettle on the burner.

“How about you just join us, Mr. Bream?” Hadley tapped the glass tabletop.

“Okay, then.” Bream spun around a chair and sat so that his chest was pressed against the backrest, providing himself an extra layer of
protection whether or not he consciously intended it. “So are you folks CIA or FBI or I don’t need to know?”

“You were right the first time.” Stanley leaned over the table to minimize the distance between them. “I take it you’re aware that you’ve been ferrying some fairly sought after individuals.”

“I heard about the dustup at the airport last night. You’ve gotta understand, though, I’m just a glorified courier. Those guys came to me through an American company that does lots of business here.”

“We know all about them,” Stanley said of Alice Rutherford’s NSA unit, which had operated under the cover of a Maryland-based insurance agency and obviously hadn’t placed background checks for charter pilots high on their priority list. “I want to let you in on something that the CIA has learned: John Townsend Bream is a thirty-nine-year-old resident patient at the Four Oaks mental institution in Tunica, Mississippi. Has been for nine years.”

Bream stared across the table in openmouthed wonder. “So you’re saying I’m a mental patient in Mississippi and, what, that I’m just imagining that I’m in Martinique?”

“That’s possible. It’s also possible that you assumed the identity of someone who wouldn’t be going anywhere …”

Bream scowled. “Maybe the mental patient assumed
my
identity—”

“If I were you, I’d deny everything too,” Stanley said.

“Don’t worry, we’re not here about that,” Hadley added.

“Not necessarily.” Stanley let a beat of silence underline the threat. “If you’ll help us locate your two passengers, J. T., your only involvement in this case will be collecting the ten-thousand-euro reward for their arrest.” In fact, Stanley expected Bream, or whoever he was, to wind up penniless in a federal penitentiary.

“Do you have any idea where they are?” Hadley asked.

Bream sighed wistfully. “I wish I did.”

Stanley didn’t believe him. “How about your best guess?”

“The only unusual part of the deal is they’re planning on bringing back some supersize cargo. I’m supposed to find a bird with an extra-large cargo door. But that’s okay. I once had a client who bought a statue in Athens and flew it back to Palm Be—”

Hadley cut in. “Do you have a rendezvous time or place?”

“They’re gonna call me as soon as they find whatever it is they’re looking for. They’ve got me booked for the whole week.” Bream broke free of Stanley’s stare, shifting his focus to the copper teakettle.

Hadley set her BlackBerry on the table and cupped her right knee, signaling to Stanley her belief that the pilot was dissembling. Stanley twisted his wedding ring, indicating his agreement.

The BlackBerry vibrated, rattling against the table. Hadley snatched it up.

“Well, how about that?” She relayed the text message. “Lesser and Ramirez have been captured at sea by the Royal St. Lucia Police Force and are on the way to a detention center.”

Bream grinned. “Well, it’s a good thing you came to see me, isn’t it?”

The forty-foot
Royal St. Lucia Police cutter chugged toward a remote island known as Detention III, a dismal, rocky place, apparently immune to vegetation, and so tiny that the architects had had no choice but to build up: The four-story brick prison stood at a slight incline. Painted battleship gray, it was part tenement house, part lighthouse, surrounded by two rings of twenty-foot-high electrified wire fencing and, in the event of a power outage perhaps, an outer fence topped with coils of old-school razor wire.

Drummond was handcuffed to a long bench in the police cutter’s stern. If he had a plan, he had to have dreamed it up, literally, while napping during the hour or so since their capture. Escape seemed impossible to Charlie, who was handcuffed to the other end of the bench.

“Lesser” and his young accomplice “Ramirez” might be able to buy their way out, though. Charlie had gleaned that Detention III was administered by a private maritime security firm called Starfish, contracted by Saint Lucia, Dominica, Martinique, and other islands in the area.

In the rest of Charlie’s scenarios, Detention III would effectively be a CIA detention center for him and Drummond. And the grave for Alice.

The washer sat on the prow, still strapped to its pallet. If the Saint Lucia policemen didn’t already know what the Pristina held, they would soon, when one of them peered under the lid—which someone would do eventually, out of boredom if not simple curiosity. They would then place urgent calls to the bomb squad. Enter the Cavalry.

While tidier than the exterior had led Charlie to expect, Detention III’s plain tile interior smelled like it was hosed down with seawater in lieu of proper cleaning. At the intake desk, three of the Saint Lucia cops uncuffed Charlie and Drummond and handed them over to two Starfish jailers, men who wore generic navy-blue fatigues with badges identifying them as Guard L. Miñana and Guard E. Bulcão. Both West Indians, Miñana and Bulcão spoke English with the sharp Hispanic accent familiar to Charlie from Brooklyn.

Miñana, with his slight build, quiet demeanor, and round spectacles, could have passed for an actuary if it weren’t for the worn wooden cudgel, which he gripped as if it were a cutlass. As the trio of Saint Lucia policemen prepared to depart, he slipped them a small stack of greenbacks. On the way out, one of the cops drummed the lid of the washing machine. Miñana smiled, seemingly pleased with his new purchase.

The heavyset Guard Bulcão meanwhile frog-marched Charlie to the wall next to the intake desk. “Face the wall, arms and hands apart,” the guard barked, then proceeded to pat Charlie down.

Miñana gave the same treatment to Drummond, who, although awake, didn’t seem that much more alert than when he was asleep.

“Now the both of you turn around real slow and take off all your clothing, drop it to the floor, then say ‘Ah.’ ” Miñana demonstrated by sticking out his own birdlike tongue.

The guards probed Charlie and Drummond’s mouths as well as every other body part where a weapon might be hidden.

Bulcão scooped their clothing and possessions from the floor, stuffing the lot of it into a large brown paper bag. “You guys can get this stuff back when the Martinique Police take you into custody in the morning,” he said, sitting down at the desk and filling out the intake form on the computer, at four words per minute.

L … E … S … S … E … R …

To Charlie, anything other than C-L-A-R-K spelled hope.

The rough orange prison jumpsuit chafed Charlie’s underarms and inner thighs as he mounted the three flights of stairs to the cellblock. Drummond followed close behind, trailed by Bulcão, who prodded
them now and again for no apparent reason. Their footsteps in the cramped stairwell were amplified by the moisture on the moss-spotted walls, making it sound like a racquetball game was taking place.

“I heard about another innocent guy in a fix like this,” Charlie said, as if trying to make small talk. “A war hero. Happened to be very wealthy too.”

“From selling weapons?” Bulcão glanced sidelong at Drummond.

“I’m in appliances, actually,” Drummond said in earnest. “Perriman.”

“The guy I’m talking about made his fortune in the stock market,” Charlie said. “One of the jailers believed that he was innocent and let him ‘pick the lock.’ To show his gratitude, the guy gave the jailer five thousand dollars.” Charlie and Drummond had about half that much in their wallets, last seen at intake being dumped into the brown paper bag.

Bulcão spat an invisible seed out of the side of his mouth. “I know you’re not trying to bribe a law enforcement official, my friend.”

Charlie widened his eyes. “Huh?”

“You guys are Public Enemies number one and number two in Martinique. If you somehow escaped, even without any help from me, and without Guard Miñana and Alejandro the maintenance guy looking the other way, we all would be let go, probably do some time too. Just speaking for me, say you gave me a million bucks. After I got out of the can—if I ever made it out—the cops would be watching for years to see how I’m paying my bills. Best job I could get probably’d be hacking pineapples, and if I spent more than a field hand’s pay, the Inspector General’d throw me right back in jail. If my wife goes to some fancy store in town and gets herself a dress, back to jail. If my son gets a bicycle that isn’t secondhand …”

In other words, Charlie thought, no.

Carlo Pagliarulo
thought little of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, Italy’s military intelligence agency. He got the message that SISMI felt similarly about him. In 2005, after twelve years as an operative, he was demoted to deputy operations coordinator, a glorified term for gofer, hardly the job he’d hoped for when first signing on out of college. The salary was decent, though, the benefits even better, and he felt secure in his job since terminations were rare in the intelligence community—agencies were usually reluctant to have an ex-operative out and about with a grudge, and, of course, secrets to sell. Yet within a year, due to chronic lateness to work, drunkenness, and allegations of sexual harassment, Pagliarulo was let go.

It was his big break.

Foreign intelligence services scoured associations of former soldiers and law enforcement officers in the hope of securing assets with half of Pagliarulo’s skill set. Two weeks after his termination, he was making more per week than he had at SISMI just to run a pair of Geneva safe houses for MI6, a job that took no more than a couple of hours a day, leaving him plenty of time for other gigs, like the rendition in Gstaad and subsequent work as one of the captive’s babysitters. And this evening alone, while shopping for groceries, he stood to pick up enough additional cash to buy a villa in San Remo.

At an under-heated but still crowded supermarket in Moudon, an unremarkable town about an hour northwest of Geneva, he resisted a fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano, instead dumping a cardboard cylinder of
factory-grated Romano into his cart. The American woman was supposed to get as few clues as possible about where she was being held.