Keith Thomson - Once a spy

Next Drummond snatched the handset from the wall-mounted intercom and dialed 9. When it was answered, he exclaimed, “This is Rivington in the OR. We have a code green!” Then he tore the intercom from the wall.

The “surgical team” hurried up the ramp to the lobby. Drummond brought up the rear, his gun trained on the real doctors and nurses from beneath his surgical gown. Charlie was glad Drummond had assigned him, along with the scrub nurse, to push the gurney. The solid side handles enabled him to appear steady.

At the top of the ramp, the clubhouse resounded with taproom chatter and the occasional ring of silver against china-none of the hurried tread of guards’ jackboots or the rattle of rifles he’d been bracing for. He considered that the club members, accustomed to the sounds of gunfire from the various ranges, had been given no reason to think anything was out of the ordinary-and ordinary encompassed a lot at this place.

As they turned onto the marble hallway, the scrub nurse narrowly avoided ramming her side of the gurney into a member-one of the tennis players Charlie and Drummond had been marched past in the portico on arrival. He wore a madras sport coat now and was drinking scotch from a tall glass. Given their surgical caps and masks and gowns, Charlie put the odds of the man recognizing them now at astronomical. The problem was that the fright in the scrub nurse’s eyes was like an alarm beacon.

The tennis player hopped out of her way. “Code Green?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said tremulously. It came off as urgency.

“Godspeed,” he said, raising his glass to exhort the team.

Only at the Monroeville Hunt and Fish Club, Charlie thought.

“This way,” said Drummond, pointing to the door across the hall-the library, according to the letters chiseled into its marble archway. Because going to a library made no sense, Charlie expected the big oak door to veil something else, hopefully the armory.

The door indeed opened to a library, a lofty room with leather-bound books crammed into creamy pine shelves so high that three tiers of balconies were necessary to access them. Inside, two octogenarians sat hunched over a backgammon board the size of a suitcase. They nodded to the team in polite greeting and returned to their game. In their time here, Charlie thought, they probably had seen so many surgical teams rushing past that the sight rated as less compelling than double twos.

Within the bookshelves on the far wall was a round-topped door leading to the terrace. The frosted glass transom and side lights offered no clue whether club guards-or the National Guard-waited outside.

Drummond gingerly drew the bronze handle, the door opened inward with a lengthy creak, and he peered out.

“Okay,” he said, beckoning the team.

Charlie was last onto the empty terrace.

“Now to the tennis courts,” Drummond said, starting toward the path. The “news radio” helicopter sat quietly on the far court.

“Can you hot-wire a helicopter?” Charlie asked, curious as much as anything. He took it for granted Drummond could pilot one.

“Most helicopters don’t require keys,” Drummond said. “There’s nothing to-” He was interrupted by a loud and spine-chilling rifle bolt lock-and-load.

Charlie turned around slowly, as did Drummond and the doctors and nurses. The older of the two backgammon players stood in the library doorway, eyeing them down the barrel of an enormous rifle-quite possibly the one used to bag the elephant in the entry hall. He said, “Those of you who would rather not be on the receiving end of an eleven-millimeter round, place your hands in the air.”

Isadora’s Colt was tucked into Charlie’s waistband, beneath his gown. He raised his gloved hands because, like the doctors and nurses, Drummond was raising his.

Swinging the rifle toward Drummond, the backgammon player asked, “Are you pretending not to remember me, Drummond?”

“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else, sir,” Drummond said, his voice raspier and a half-octave lower than usual.

Not a bad play, Charlie thought. In all the surgical garb, Drummond could be almost anyone.

“It’s Carlton Otto, old man,” the backgammon player said. “I was on the plane that got you out of Ulaanbaatar!” He called into the library, “Archie, where in the blazes is security?”

This was the kind of luck that caused veteran gamblers to leave the profession, Charlie thought, when the palm of Drummond’s right glove exploded into rubber scraps. A bullet-somehow he’d maneuvered the barrel of his gun into the glove-flew high, smashing apart the transom. Glittery shards rained onto Otto, sending him sprawling back into the library.

Charlie looked on in wonder. At the same time, like the doctors and nurses, he dropped to the flagstones in fear of return fire from Otto’s veritable cannon. Another shot by Drummond kept Otto inside.

But the escape plan was in critical condition: From the clubhouse roof came a siren-a fusion of whine and honk so shrill that Charlie wasn’t sure whether it was an alarm or a weapon. Inquisitive members appeared at windows overlooking the terrace.

Drummond scooped Charlie up from a flagstone by the nape of his gown. “Push the gurney to the helicopter,” he shouted over the siren. “I’ll cover you.”

The heavy gurney would turn what might be a ten-second dash down the winding path into a gravel-ridden ordeal. “But the doctor game’s up,” Charlie reminded him, hoping he didn’t require the reminder.

“We need him,” Drummond said of Cadaret.

Charlie couldn’t imagine why. But on account of all the other things he’d experienced today that he would have thought unimaginable, he demurred.

While sliding Cadaret’s bulk from the gurney and onto the cabin’s bench seat, Charlie watched Drummond free the rotor blades from their restraints, leap through the right cockpit door, and strap himself into the pilot’s seat without glancing at the complex seat belt. Instead he swatted switches on the overhead console, illuminating the instrument panel.

Charlie took a moment to marvel: Just yesterday, he’d thought parallel parking was his father’s greatest skill.

Turning his attention to the instrument panel, Drummond became a flurry of switch throwing. With one instrument came a loud, harsh drilling noise. He pulled one of the headsets from the overhead center post and popped the cups over his ears.

Worming his way from the cabin into the cockpit, Charlie didn’t need to be instructed to do the same. The headset reduced the remaining second or two of drilling to a mild drone. He heard clearly as Drummond explained, into his pipe-cleaner microphone, “That was the fuel valve, a dead giveaway someone’s about to take off in your helicopter.” With a wispy grin he indicated the clubhouse. “Unless you can’t hear it over your rooftop alarm sirens.”

Charlie smiled-the revelation that his father had a lighter side was almost as startling as the revelation that he was a spy. Fastening himself into the copilot’s seat, Charlie had the sensation of sitting beside someone he’d just met for the first time.

Although this was Charlie’s first time aboard a real helicopter, PlayStation’s version had familiarized him with some of the controls, including the cyclic, the stick that tilts the rotor blades in order to direct the ship, as well as the collective, the big lever between the pilot and copilot seats that governs ascent. Drummond rolled the motorcycle-handle-style throttle atop the collective, then placed a finger on the starter button. Charlie assumed Drummond would now press the button, the engine would bellow, the ship would throb, and they’d bound into the sky.