Keith Thomson - Once a spy

“But how could he have hidden the gun?” Alice asked. “The police even searched the sewers.”

“There are any number of good explanations. For one, he could have hidden it in his own car, then dumped it on his way home-into the lake, maybe, or buried it in the woods behind his house where it would be impossible to find.”

Alice thought it odd that her mother, shrewd as she was, would imagine that a man with the eyes of suspicious neighbors and law enforcement agents hot upon him would go into his woods and bury anything.

After school the next day, Alice begged out of soccer practice and rode her three-speed to Gorman’s street, snuck into the woods behind his house, and searched until it was too dark to continue. She found nothing. She searched there each weekday afternoon over the next week to the same result. She quit the soccer team and, later, the school production of Jesus Christ Superstar so she could continue searching. On her twenty-second afternoon, she spotted a pile of leaves and sticks arranged just so. The gun was buried beneath it.

She rode home and confronted her mother, who tried to strangle her. Alice fended her off with the steak knife she had at the ready. Her bicycle stood at the ready too, outside the kitchen door. She jumped on and pedaled to the police station. Both Jocelyn Rutherford and her lover, Gorman’s wife, Martha, were sent to prison for twenty years.

Alice was left desolate-on good days. She spent her free time alone at the library, where she became captivated by Jingde legends, particularly the story of the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, who fell out of favor and had to flee the court of the Liang emperor Wu in 527. Bodhidharma sought refuge at the Shaolin Monastery, where he faced a wall for nine years without uttering a single word. Afterward he wrote the book of Shaolin kung fu.

Letting schoolwork and friendships fall by the wayside, Alice immersed herself in the relatively solitary martial art, working on card-throwing more than anything. After hundreds of attempts, she acquired the ability to sling an ordinary playing card across her foster family’s garage with enough force that a corner would lodge in the cork dart-board. With thousands of repetitions, she could deliver the card to the target at approximately thirty miles an hour, so fast it cracked like a whip. About one-third of the time it landed in the bull’s-eye. Throwing at slightly higher speeds and with greater accuracy, Shaolin masters actually could stab an adversary with a card or even-by striking certain minute pressure points-put him into a coma.

Alice failed to find refuge with the Shaolin. A decade later, she finally found a measure of sanctuary: the job of covert operations officer. Deep cover roles allowed her a departure from her life of weeks at a time, sometimes as long as a year.

Now, thanks to Fielding, she stood to depart her life permanently.

Too much of a good thing, she thought.

Charlie was famished, dehydrated, and otherwise spent. Worse, his sweat had seeped into his wounds, along with sap, turning each step into its own ordeal. They had negotiated underbrush and low-hanging branches for miles. Even Drummond was breathing hard.

Finally the woods thinned, providing a glimpse of the general store’s yellow clapboarding. It felt like coming upon an oasis.

Charlie stopped behind a bush to study the area. The only vehicle in sight was the rusty Chevy pickup, in the same spot as this morning. The dirt lot and vast, colorless fields surrounding it offered hiding places. Although Drummond had been mostly cloudy throughout their trek, often humming discordantly, Charlie looked to him now to devise a tactic for approaching the store.

He found Drummond ambling out of the woods.

Praying this meant his countersurveillance software was firing, Charlie caught up to him.

“What are they called again?” Drummond asked.

“Who?”

“Those birds.”

“What birds?”

“Woodland birds with brown camouflaged plumage. Known for their degree of challenge as game…”

“I hope you don’t mean snipes?”

“That’s it, snipes, thank you.”

Charlie’s heart turned into a jackhammer.

“They search for invertebrates by stabbing at the mud with their bills with a sewing-machine motion,” Drummond went on.

“What made you think of snipes?”

“The woods, I guess. An interesting piece of information is the first sewing machine was invented by a French tailor in 1830. He nearly died when a group of his fellow tailors, fearing unemployment as a result of the invention, burned down his factory.”

Crossing the field, Charlie couldn’t shake the mental image of himself and Drummond seen through crosshairs.

As Drummond ushered him into the store, there was a gunshotlike crack.

Just the door-Drummond had let it fall too fast into the frame in his rush to inspect the snack aisle.

Charlie’s relief lasted maybe a second. The store itself, with five tall aisles and a crowd of large, free-standing racks, had a dark-alley feel. The reedy teenager behind the counter seemed to be the only person present. TUCKER was stitched onto his gas station attendant uniform shirt. Tobacco ballooned one of his cheeks. His sleeves were rolled up past his biceps, revealing a tattooed likeness of racecar driver Dale Earnhardt and a second tattoo of a dagger dripping blood.

After the bodega on Ludlow Street, Charlie couldn’t help wondering whether Tucker was a plant. He quickly dismissed the notion. Vaudeville would do a Tucker with greater subtlety.

When his index finger reached the end of a paragraph in the sports section, Tucker looked up, spat a string of tobacco juice into an oilcan, then took in Charlie and Drummond. Most of their scrapes and bruises, along with the tears in their clothing, had been impossible to cover up.

“How y’all doin’?” he asked warily.

“Better, now that the hunting trip from hell is over,” Charlie said.

“Been there,” Tucker said with understanding. “So whatchy’all be needing?”

“For starters, do you sell any clothes?”

“Yes sir, there’s tons down there.” Tucker waved at the central aisle.

Like the other aisles, it was crammed floor to ceiling with all manner of provisions. This was the sort of store where it’s a challenge to find something they don’t carry, and where there almost always was a Racing Form.

“And magazines?” Charlie asked.

With his newsprint-blackened finger, the kid pointed to the far wall, where a magazine rack ran the length of the store.

Following Charlie to it, Drummond asked, “We were on a hunting trip?”

Thankfully Tucker was engrossed again in his newspaper.

“If being the prey counts,” Charlie replied.

The magazine rack was packed with hundreds of publications. Few weren’t pornography. The Daily Racing Form’s iconic bright red masthead shone like a beacon. While pleased to get it in hand, Charlie felt a trickle of depression that the publication central to his existence was used by clever and righteous men to transmit messages without fear that anyone of consequence would see them.

The masthead appeared to perk up Drummond. He pulled a copy from the rack and flipped as if by habit to the classifieds, which ranged from offerings of services to personals and want ads.

“So I’m guessing it won’t be as simple as ‘Wanted: spy to come in from cold ’?” Charlie said.

“It would be encrypted.”

“Any idea how?”

“Bank code, maybe?”

“What’s bank code?”

Drummond shook his head as if to align his thoughts. “I mean book code.”

“Okay, what’s book code?”

“Take this here.” Drummond pointed to the ad placed by Theodore J. Tepper, a lawyer specializing in quickie divorces. “The numbers in his address or phone number might really be page numbers.”