Keith Thomson - Once a spy

“As my luck would have it, today is probably the first day in ten years I didn’t buy it. But if I had, what would I find in the ads?”

“A number for us to call maybe.”

“Placed by this Cavalry?”

“Possibly.”

It wasn’t a lot to go on. Still, at the end of the long, dark tunnel Charlie’s life had become, a bulb flickered on.

He looked around, trying to determine which way east was. The general store was to the east-after all the driving, he had no doubt about that. They might find the Daily Racing Form there-it was sold everywhere there were gamblers, which is to say it was sold everywhere. Alternatively, they might access it online or find transportation to someplace else that sold it.

The trees partitioned the woods into narrow alleys, and those alleys formed a maze. Charlie had dreamed of camping and outdoor adventure as a boy. The closest he got was reading about it. He’d spent maybe eight weeks of his adult life outside urban environments, and most of that time was at racetracks. Still, he remembered that the sun travels west. He looked up. The treetops obscured the sun. But the shadows were shifting slightly, clockwise, enabling him to determine west.

“Dad, what do you say we take a walk?”

“Do us all a favor and let me go along with you,” Cadaret said.

“Your gang will be here soon,” Charlie said. “Probably too soon.”

“They’ll be looking for you. And they’ll find you. If I’m with you, I can vouch for the fact that you don’t know anything.”

“So? Didn’t they kill my friend for knowing only the address of the Monroeville club?”

“Ramirez?”

“Yeah.”

“That was just a math thing. He added up to better off not alive.”

Guilt and horror pummeled Charlie anew. He felt a hand on his shoulder and jumped. Drummond wanted a private word.

“Let’s not leave him like this,” Drummond whispered.

“You really think he can help us?”

“No.” Drummond retrained the gun on Cadaret.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Neutralizing him.”

“Neutralizing him? You and I would look like lasagnas now if it hadn’t been for him.”

“Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.”

“Listen, I don’t mean to diss the Big Book of Bloodshed, but what’s he going to do if he’s stuck here? I’ve got a twenty-dollar bill that says you know some good tying-guys-up knots.”

Drummond relented with a grunt.

With more wire from the helicopter, he bound Cadaret at the ankles, knees, and thighs; and in the time most people take to tie a pair of shoes, he near-mummified the assassin from waist to shoulders.

Standing by and watching, Charlie wondered why Cadaret had put forth such a specious argument on behalf of being freed. Did he really expect them to trust someone who murders people for a living?

His eyes fell to Cadaret’s five-buck wristwatch: not the sort of watch he would expect on someone who has a vacation house on St. Bart’s.

“… and the code name of the operation?” Cranch asked.

He’d been firing questions all morning. He hadn’t touched his water. He’d seldom shifted from his perch on the plastic picnic table bench. He would put most robots to shame, Alice thought.

“Lothario,” she said, her reserve diminishing.

“Is that a reference of some sort to Mr. Fielding?”

“To the best of my knowledge, it was generated at random, but, you know, sometimes the kids on the desk get frisky.”

“And the skipper?”

“Harold Archibald.” She shook off exhaustion. “Surely you have Hal on your spook scorecard?”

“Why don’t you fill me in? The complete details, please.”

“Senior officer, made a name for himself in the MI6 drug trafficking ops in the early eighties, subsequently fast-tracked with tours in Abu Dhabi, Prague, Paris, and Geneva before being given the keys to Counterproliferation back at the Firm.”

“Personal?”

“Public schoolboy-Epsom College and Magdalen College, Oxford. From a line of intelligencers. Granddad was Naval, Dad an MI5 officer in Logistics-”

Cranch snorted. “You can do better than that, Alice.”

“Do you think I could just make up ‘MI5 officer in Logistics’?”

“No, but I think you can give me something I can use. Does he drink? Does he do drugs? Does he do teenage boys?”

“All right, all right. He’s a good man. He devotes much of the little free time he has to charitable work. He’s been married for twenty-odd years to a well-liked estate agent named Mimi. They have three children who aren’t in any way brats-”

Cranch craned his neck across the table. “However?”

Alice fought an inclination to recoil. “However, an officer who worked for Hal in London was shifted to Nairobi last February. She was in her fourth month of pregnancy. It’s been said the baby boy bears quite a resemblance to him.”

If Cranch were to dial Harold Archibald, Alice knew, he would ring a telephone located at 85 Vauxhall Cross in London, the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service. If Archibald were at his desk, the forty-nine-year-old would probably answer, and, with his crisp, impeccably modulated Oxbridge accent, flatly deny everything she’d said. He would almost certainly add that he’d never heard of her. If pushed, he would purport to be a mid-level analyst whose greatest transgression in life was staying for a third pint at the tiny local down the block from the St. Alban’s commuter rail station before his two-minute drive home to the cottage he shared with his mother. And that would be the truth.

Alice wasn’t really MI6. She wasn’t even from Britain-but, as it happened, New Britain, in central Connecticut. Her actual employer was the National Security Agency of Fort Meade, Maryland. She’d absorbed enough of London during a six-month tour, however, that she could fool even actual MI6 agents. Feeding Cranch her contingency MI6 story bought a few hours, maybe the night-because of the time difference, much of England already had left the office for the night. By the time Cranch debunked her yarn, her backup team might be here. Had better be here. Cranch’s willingness to torture her suggested Fielding meant to extract whatever he could, then snuff her.

She weighed revising her fundamental guiding principle that hellish situations in the lives of her aliases beat any quiet minute in her own.

That philosophy had originated when she was eleven, a star student, actress, and athlete regarded by her parents, teachers, and hordes of friends as an indomitable firecracker. Then she tackled a murder case that was baffling local law enforcement. The victim was her father.

On a cold night, in an unlit parking lot across the street from a bustling New Britain pub, Stanley Rutherford had been shot in the head through the open driver’s side window of his car. An insurance salesman named Bud Gorman emerged as the prime suspect. Gorman’s wife was rumored to be Stanley Rutherford’s mistress, and he was at the pub for hours before and after the shooting. No one witnessed him leaving the pub, however, and an extensive search of the area yielded no gun.

Although Alice’s encounters with Gorman over the years were limited to greetings in the church parking lot and on the soccer field sideline, she had a strong sense that he was no murderer. She told her mother so. Jocelyn Rutherford had a potent mind and rectitude to match. She would have cried foul on Gorman’s behalf from the beginning, Alice thought, if not for the shock and grief.

“It’s plain as day he did it,” Jocelyn said. “It’s just a question of time until they get something on him.”