Twice a Spy (29 page)

“The best possible thing would have been if we’d gotten to you before you sold the bomb,” Stanley said.

“Who was the buyer?” asked Hadley. She sat to Stanley’s left on the camelback sofa, facing the fugitives—her thousand-euro heli-taxi ride from Martinique would probably be overlooked by headquarters in light of their having coralled the Clarks.

She aimed a Glock at them. After her experience with Bream, Eskridge had finally granted her permission to carry. The teakettle’s purple imprint was visible on her forehead. The gun was unnecessary, though.
Shortly after Charlie’s Mayday calls had enabled Echelon to pinpoint his whereabouts, a second helicopter had landed on Corbitt’s yacht, depositing four marines with enough weaponry to stage a coup on some of the area islands. The yacht resounded now with the dull thuds of their combat boots. The opportunity to stay on deck and “command them”—Corbitt’s words—ended his protest over his exclusion from the debriefing.

“When we last saw the device, Bream’s men were loading the washer into a Zodiac,” Charlie said. “We have reason to believe they’re planning to ship the bomb to India. So you ought to have plenty of time to intercept them.”

Hadley looked to Stanley. “What do you think?”

“Nothing to lose by checking it out.”

She dropped the Glock into her shoulder bag and withdrew her new BlackBerry. She began tapping out a cable to Eskridge, at the same time saying to Charlie, “The thing that puzzles me now is how you could sell a weapon of mass destruction in the first place.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Stanley said. His concerns actually ran much deeper.

“It wasn’t a sale,” Charlie said. “It was ransom.”

He was polite, Stanley reflected, not petulant, or acting in any way that pointed to dissembling. “Why didn’t you go to the authorities?”

“The bad guys would have killed Alice. And the authorities would have tried to kill us. Like last night.” Charlie indicated Hadley with a tilt of his head. “But things are different now. Now we have proof of everything I told you. The Cavalry’s plot is all right there on the Web. A few minutes online and you’ll be able to see exactly how we were set up, plus how Bream was able to learn about the existence of the bomb.”

Her cable dispatched, Hadley placed the BlackBerry back into her shoulder bag. “This story sounds familiar,” she said to Charlie. “Don’t tell me: Bream revealed the whole plot to you as he was leaving you to die in a plummeting airplane instead of simply shooting you?”

“I wondered about that too,” Charlie said. “Whoever he really is, he’s got more than his share of ego. He was proud of his plan and wanted to brag about having outsmarted the best and the brightest. But he’s nobody’s fool. Maybe he wanted our deaths to look accidental. Why add the murder of a CIA Trailblazer to the list of reasons you have to hunt
him? In any case, to verify my story, all you have to do is flip on the Internet, go to Korean Singles Online-dot-com, and throw some decryption software at Fielding’s hidden text. His mistake was not living long enough to delete it.”

“Well, I’d be shocked if Corbitt doesn’t have this brig equipped with high-speed satellite Internet access.” Hadley started to rise, presumably to go up on deck and ask the base chief.

“Hold on just a second,” said Stanley, turning to Charlie. “If what you’re saying is true, why wouldn’t Alice Rutherford or her NSA colleagues have taken action?”

“I was too busy landing the plane to mention Korean Singles Online-dot-com to her. And once we hit the water, I lost the phone—not that she’d have been able to stay on long. Odds are the same people who wanted us have sent a hit team after her too, right?”

“Probably so,” Stanley said. “We need to ensure that no one ever sees that Web content.”

“But it could exonerate these men, Bill.” Hadley searched his eyes for a clue to his thinking.

“It would be the death knell for the Cavalry.” Stanley lifted the Glock and its silencer from her shoulder bag.

Charlie froze. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

Even Drummond sat up.

Hadley looked to Stanley, eyes wide.

“I’m sorry, Hilary.” Twisting on the silencer, he aimed the gun at her.

The other night in the Haut-de-Cagnes safe house, Ali Abdullah—aka Austin Bellinger—had tried to make the case that his Cavalry was made up of bright and gallant patriots who gave no thought to flaps and didn’t waste time on the chains of cables seeking permission for action. They just went ahead and acted. Their actions often brought them into legal gray areas. Sometimes they simply broke laws. But always for the greater good.

Stanley left the safe house convinced that the Cavalry was the clandestine service he had dreamed of joining as a young man. He believed that exposure of the unit’s efforts to stop the Clarks, particularly the truth about the unfortunate Hattemer episode, would force soft and cowardly bureaucrats like Eskridge to roll up the operation. Stanley
wanted to help prevent that. So when he was assigned to the Clark case the next day by Eskridge—it turned out that Bellinger had planted the seed in the head of his onetime groomsman—Stanley felt that he had found his calling, at long last.

Now he found himself hesitant to extinguish the lives of Hadley and the Clarks.

Unfortunate but vital to national security, he concluded.

Frozen in astonishment on the sofa, Hadley was an easy target. With the space between her eyes centered in the Glock’s sight, Stanley pulled the trigger.

As Stanley
pressed the trigger, there was a bright orange blur on the edge of Charlie’s peripheral vision.

Drummond’s Croc bounced off Stanley’s gun barrel.

The report was muted, probably sounding like an ordinary cough to someone on deck, assuming it was heard at all over the big yacht’s engines. Hadley’s head snapped sideways. A red circle appeared in her hair just above her right ear. She collapsed, falling to her left, with enough force that the massive camelback sofa toppled with her, the pedestal snapping free of its moorings. The sofa landed directly over her, shielding her from another round, or at least from Stanley’s sight.

Stanley knelt, shifting his gun to the armchair in which Drummond had been sitting. Drummond was in midair now, diving headlong at Stanley.

With both hands around the handle of his gun, Stanley tracked his flight. With a click of the trigger and another muted blast, a bullet sliced a channel along the right side of Drummond’s collar, cleaving the air by Charlie’s left shoulder before particling a glass porthole.

Slamming into Stanley’s abdomen, Drummond tried to wrap his arms around the spook’s waist. Stanley twisted free, dropping his elbow onto the base of Drummond’s skull.

On his hands and knees, Drummond sought the cover of the copper-faced bar. As he pulled himself around the corner, Stanley fired. The bullet clanged into the copper plating as Drummond disappeared from sight, save one Croc.

Stanley fired instead at the face of the bar, repeatedly, the bullet holes
tracing Drummond’s probable path behind it. Glass exploded and scotch jetted into the air, spraying Stanley and raining onto the fancy carpet.

Charlie noted that the pilot light in the fireplace was on. The handle to turn on the gas was open as well. So he flung himself at the button for the burner, pounding it as hard as he could. Gas hissed through the pipe and created an instant blaze. He redirected the pipe at the spilled liquor, which burst into flames that streamed along the carpet toward Stanley.

The spook sidestepped the fire. Still one of his pant cuffs ignited, and, in a blink, flames coated the liquor-soaked front of his khakis. In obvious pain, he tried to beat the fire out. He was nearly successful, when Drummond popped up from behind the bar and hurled a stout highball glass.

Stanley ducked and the glass disintegrated the crystal sconce on the far wall.

Drummond threw another, this time striking Stanley’s gun hand, forcing him to drop the Glock.

Charlie lunged for it. Stanley kicked at Charlie’s head. Charlie rolled, averting the spook’s toe, but the heel caught his ear—slashing it so sharply he was surprised it remained attached. Stanley wound back again, like a field goal kicker. Charlie sat up, getting a solid grip on the gun and leveling it at the spook, freezing him.

Suddenly the door to the cabin was smashed inward. A crowd of marines in gray-green body armor, guns drawn, filled the small aperture.

Stanley waved at Charlie. “He shot Hadley.” The marines appeared to believe him. “I think she’s dead.”

“
He
shot her,” Charlie said. “Look at the way she fell over. To his left. We were sitting
across
from him. Plus we didn’t have a gun at the time.”

The marines exchanged looks.

Charlie realized he’d offered nothing, really, in the way of evidence. Two marines rushed down, swept Hadley off the floor, and carried her up the stairs, leaving a trail of crimson drops.

Stanley followed.

Charlie heard the whine of the engine and the tingling of the rotor blades as the marine helicopter prepared to take off.

“Sir, we need you to surrender your weapon,” said one of the two marines remaining below deck, a stone-faced bruiser who towered over Charlie.

The other locked his rifle on Drummond.

“It’s
his
weapon!” Charlie said, regarding the door through which Stanley had exited. As soon as the words left his lips, he felt foolish because they didn’t prove a thing.

“Slowly set it on the floor and tap it to me.”

Charlie lowered the Glock an inch at a time. “Listen, we have proof that we’re being framed.”

He looked at Drummond, now being frisked by the other marine, probably the unit’s superior officer given his graying hair.

“Yes, that young man wanted to kill us!” Drummond said of Stanley, with so much indignation that it rang false.

The marines exchanged a dismissive glance.

“Let me just tell you guys one thing, while we have the chance,” Charlie pleaded.

The superior said, “Sir, it would help if you would refrain from speaking now. When we return to the American consulate, you’ll have a full debrief by the CIA.”

Charlie set the gun down. “You’ve got to understand, ‘debrief,’ in this case, is a euphemism for ‘execution.’ ”

The younger marine knelt and snatched the gun. “Please stand, slowly, and face the bar with your arms and legs outstretched.”

Charlie complied. “Just listen, for posterity if nothing else: The proof of everything I’ve been saying is on Korean Singles Online-dot-com.” He received a shove in the small of the back. “Go to Suki-eight-three-five’s page, magnify the left earring—”

The older marine sighed, seemingly in frustration. “Sir, we’d prefer not to have to sedate you.”

A short, chubby man in a suit and tie barreled down the stairs.

“Chief Corbitt,” both marines said by way of greeting.

Charlie looked up at him with a glimmer of hope.

Corbitt looked past them at the lower deck and gaped at the smoldering wreckage. “Holy
merde
,” he said.

Pointe Simon
pulsated with a variety of music and chatter, a good deal of which was pickup lines, Stanley supposed. He stepped into the relative quiet and cool of the sort of bar no one bothered to name—it went by 107, its number on one of the little streets in the maze near the ferry docks. Neon distillery promotions cast red and purple on the frayed bar island and the establishment’s two dozen patrons, a mix of locals and travelers on a budget. Although 107 served no food, it smelled vaguely of hamburger.

He spotted an attractive brunette sipping a drink. She wore a slinky floral-printed cocktail dress, the sort sold at the tourist bazaar at the ferry docks, revealing a lithe figure. Most anyone would guess she was a young American or Euro tourist bent on a night on the edge.

Settling onto the barstool beside hers, Stanley asked, “What do you think the chances are that I’ll meet my wife here?”

“A sure thing,” she said, leaning over a salt-rimmed margarita and kissing him on the lips. Recognition code, safety code.

This was Lanier. First name or last, Stanley didn’t know. Probably pseudo anyway. Rumint had it that she’d authored the Ayacucho hit, notable not because she trekked a hundred miles alone through Peruvian jungle and snuck past two hundred Shining Path Senderistas, but because she’d put the whole op together during a half-hour taxi ride from the Lima airport.