Keith Thomson - Once a spy

Charlie felt as if a veneer had just been stripped away, revealing the world as dark and cold and cruel beyond his most cynical appraisals. “With parents like the two of you, it’s amazing I didn’t end up really fucked up,” he said. “Oh, wait, I did.”

Isadora’s eyes showed nothing of her feelings now. Drummond remained contorted on the sofa. A bit of light bounced off her stainless steel barrel and hit his eyes. It had the effect of a splash of cold water. He sat up.

“I just remembered something,” he said.

“What?” asked both Charlie and Isadora, curiosity trumping all.

“Izzy, I was glad when you left.”

It was a storybook sunny morning in the Caribbean, or so Alice surmised when her bedroom door opened, allowing her a glimpse of the daylight-flooded hallway. Not only had Hector and Alberto locked her in last night, they’d bolted the window shutters closed to prevent her from jumping three stories to the sea.

Hector admitted a small man wearing a neatly pressed white lab coat. “This is Dr. Cranch,” the servant said, then returned to the hall, locking the door behind him.

Cranch lowered himself onto one of the two plastic benches fused to a molded plastic picnic table, the bedroom’s only furnishing other than the air mattress on which Alice had slept-or was meant to have slept. Hector and Alberto had taken everything she conceivably could use as a weapon, including her sandals and underwear, leaving her only the cocktail dress she still wore.

“I’m afraid we won’t be having much fun with you, Alice, given that you’ve already confessed,” Cranch said. He was an American, with a cherubic face and big, soft blue eyes that had surely drawn no end of coos when he was a baby but played as creepy on a wan fifty-year-old. Like his lab coat, his grooming and attire were meticulous-too meticulous. The laces on his shiny black wingtips were tied into loops so perfectly symmetrical, he might have used a ruler. “For this morning, I’d like to get through the formalities, like your real identity, your rank within MI6, the code name and details of your operation, and so forth-you know the drill.”

“No, as it happens, I don’t know any drill,” she said. She sat down across from him and looked him in the eyes. “You need to understand: I only ‘confessed’ so Nick wouldn’t have Jane butchered further by-”

“Mr. Fielding bet me a very expensive bottle of rum that you’d say as much,” Cranch cut in. “I’ve lost. I expected more from you than one-oh-one-level denial.”

He was a professional inquisitor if she’d ever known one; she’d known many in eight years in the business.

“So obviously you’re stalling,” he said. “Why? If your backup team doesn’t receive your happy signal by such and such an hour, they chopper in an extraction team? You’d be wise to let me know. All of it.”

Indeed, docked three miles away at Martinique’s Pointe du Bout was a yacht purported to belong to a pair of retirees from Sussex, and if Alice failed to signal them by seven tonight, via either phone or-the usual-Facebook post, her backup team would storm Fielding’s island in the guise of drug enforcement authority agents with a warrant for Alberto’s arrest. They would “happen on” her in the process.

She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. She’d known from day one of rehearsal that Fielding subjected everyone in his close circle to these trials, often taking pages from Torquemada’s book. She was prepared. Unless Fielding or Cranch had a source within her group (highly unlikely, given the paucity of evidence against her), she could maintain her innocence, then resume her investigation of Fielding with relative impunity.

“This is a nightmare,” she said, dabbing tears. “What can I do to convince you?”

“There is one way,” Cranch said. “Did you happen to notice the coffinlike device Hector and Alberto wheeled into your bathroom?”

“It would have been hard not to.”

“Do you know what it is?”

She allowed her jaw to tighten, as if to counter a chatter. “No.”

“It’s like a polygraph machine, just simpler and more effective.”

Really she knew all about the “water bed,” including a bullet-points bio of the KGB Mengele-wannabe who’d devised it. The tank’s twenty-five-centimeter-deep basin was filled with enough tepid water that an interrogation subject, stripped naked and forced to lie inside, had a mere two centimeters of clammy air to breathe once the casket-style lid was closed. After just an hour, it was common for subjects to fall into a semipsychotic state. Their subsequent interest in responding truthfully to interrogators’ questions was like a drowning man’s desire for a life ring. Alice had been subjected to the water bed for two hours during her training. As it happened, it stirred fond memories of the sensory deprivation tank she’d enjoyed at a California spa a few years earlier. The KGB’s black-out goggles and earmuffs enhanced the experience, she’d thought.

Regardless, if it came to torture, Cranch might extract the truth from her. No one could withstand every instrument of torture, and surely this character had more where the water bed came from.

“So the thug on the Malecon spoke like a cliche thug,” she ventured. “Isn’t it common knowledge that they all get their lingo from the same television programs?”

“I seem to recall reading something along those lines,” Cranch said. “And I imagine that Mr. Fielding would grant you that. Actually, it occurred to him that the Malecon episode was staged only after he’d already learned-by a fluke-that you were a spy. What happened was, while you were supposedly spending Christmas with your friends in Connecticut, he came into possession of an audio file with a voice that sounded like yours, except with an American accent. He had it checked. The voiceprint matched. Lo and behold, you spent your holiday in Brooklyn posing as a social worker named Helen Mayfield.”

Shock made Alice feel like she was about to implode. She hid it, but it didn’t matter. She’d been caught climbing into the cookie jar.

The pool was a conundrum. Fielding called it a pool for lack of a better term. There were probably smaller lakes. Through a physics-defying feat of engineering, two of its five sides extended over a high cliff, giving swimmers the sensation of being at the edge of a flat Earth. Its installation had run him more than four million dollars, not including the bribes and headache remedies attendant to half the population of Martinique protesting the bulldozing of a thousand-year-old Carib burial ground. He wondered whether it was worth it. He was, after all, a beach man.

His doubt was dispelled this morning, when the sight of the pool knocked his prospective customer’s breath away.

The thing could pay for itself today, Fielding thought, several times over.

His prospect, Prabhakar Gaznavi, an Indian real estate billionaire, sat across the antique crystal table in the middle of the pool, atop a level, ninety-five-square-foot coral reef, accessible by the gangway from Captain Kidd’s Adventure Galley. Word was the portly Gaznavi’s stomach was the way to his wallet, so the breakfast buffet included twin eggs Benedict (a specialty of the sous chef, with eggs from a native hen and those of a beluga sturgeon), Swiss chocolate waffles with raspberries picked and put on a plane in the Willamette Valley hours ago, and four enormous platters of fresh local fish and a fifth with a nearly-as-fresh salmon from Nova Scotia. Also there were a raw bar; a pile of langoustine tails; an entire roasted rib eye; nine giant silver shell bowls, each with a different tropical fruit, and a tenth with the fruits in a medley; and the usual pastries, along with Gaznavi’s reputed favorite, cinnamon rolls, their trails of steam still pointing the way to the oven.