Keith Thomson - Once a spy

Bullets whacked the opposite side of the cannon, kicking the ground into a brown-gray haze. But the big gun shielded him, as Drummond had said it would. A solid hit to one of the brittle wooden wheels might bring the ton of bronze crashing down on him, though. He managed to lie still, his eyes slits. Out of a corner of one of them, he spotted a blur: Drummond, running through the grass, toward the pickup truck.

Cadaret leaped up from a cluster of stalks at the far end of the field and fired three times. Drummond dove for the blacktop. Cadaret’s bullets kicked up the grass.

Drummond lunged to the safety of the passenger side of the truck. The engine block would now protect him. Theoretically.

Scholar and Flattop rammed fresh clips into their guns and joined Cadaret in firing at the truck. They made a punch card of the wobbly hood, dislodging it.

The steel slab banged down onto Drummond, sandwiching him against the asphalt. Luckily. The hood protected him when more bullets brought bits of glass raining from the windshield, and more rounds burst apart the headlight caddies, causing the lamps within them to explode.

Without letup in their fire, the three gunmen closed in. The pickup’s grille, side panels, engine, mirrors, and roof rang like a steel band, and the whole chassis staggered. With a report as loud as the sum of those preceding it, the gasoline tank exploded into a mound of fire. In a blink, the fire swelled to the size of a house, encasing Drummond along with the entire truck. Just as fast, it receded into puddles of flame and burning pieces of upholstery scattered about the parking lot.

The wind thinned the smoke, revealing the truck’s charred remains. And Drummond. The hood that shielded him had been cast aside. He lay flat on his back on the asphalt. His chest, swamped in shimmering crimson, had ceased to rise and fall.

Cadaret strode onto the blacktop, followed by Flattop and Scholar. With a twisted grin, Cadaret aligned his pistol for a game of “shoot the can” with Drummond’s head.

“Enough, enough,” Charlie cried from the ground behind the cannon. “How many times do you need to kill him?”

Cadaret whirled at him, gun leveled.

Charlie tried to stand up. Each movement made it feel like he was being shot in the leg again. “Look, our plan was shit. You win,” he said, hobbling to the blacktop, where the wide-eyed stares said he’d succeeded in playing dead. “If you’ll let me live, I’ll tell what you want to know.”

Flattop and Scholar looked curiously at Cadaret. He flexed his shoulders.

“What do we want to know?” he asked Charlie.

“About the shootings.”

“What shootings?”

“Yours,” Drummond said, reaching up from behind Cadaret and surprising him by grabbing hold of his belt. Using Cadaret as a counterweight, Drummond rose to his feet, then threw his forehead into the killer’s temple with a resounding crack. Cadaret crumpled, unconscious, into Drummond’s arms.

Both Flattop and Scholar swiveled toward Drummond and fired. Flattop’s shot flew wide. Scholar’s was absorbed by Cadaret-now Drummond’s shield-fatally.

Drummond lifted Cadaret’s limp hand, the gun still in it, and pressed the trigger. With a blast, a bullet plunged into Flattop’s chest. Convulsing as if he’d instead absorbed a jolt of electricity, he fell to the parking lot. Another twitch and he lay still, for good.

Drummond pivoted Cadaret’s body a few degrees and fired again. A round slammed into Scholar’s right collarbone, sending him reeling with a wake of blood.

He remained upright by grasping Charlie’s neck and holding tight. He settled directly behind Charlie, breathing heavily, his chest pressed against Charlie’s right shoulder blade-probably to staunch the flow of his blood. He used the crook of Charlie’s neck to prop his gun, to get a shot at Drummond. Charlie couldn’t so much as flinch without risk of a bullet in his own head.

Scholar’s problem was that Cadaret’s body shielded Drummond. Also Drummond was trying to shoot him. But Drummond’s only shot was directly through Charlie. Charlie had an ugly suspicion that that didn’t rule it out. A recent “interesting piece of information”: A bullet passes easily through the human diaphragm.

Stuffing the hot muzzle into Charlie’s ear, Scholar said, “Please put the gun down, Mr. Clark.”

Without hesitation, Drummond let Cadaret’s pistol fall. And without having to be asked, he tapped it with his sneaker, sending it rasping over the asphalt. It stopped inches from Scholar.

“Thank you, sir,” Scholar said.

His excessive deference was either one of those military things, Charlie thought, or just odd.

Drummond studied Scholar and said, “I know you, don’t I?”

“Possibly.” The young man seemed indisposed to chat.

Drummond persisted. “You’re the kid who speaks ten languages?”

“Only if you include English.”

“Belknapp, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be infiltrating Muslim graduate students at Cal Tech?”

“It’s holiday break. I’m in Idaho, snowboarding. As it were.”

“So, really you’re spending the holiday putting me to pasture. Why?”

“Orders from ‘Hen’ himself, sir.”

Charlie couldn’t help exclaiming, “You two work together?”

“Apparently one of us has been made redundant,” Drummond said.

“Why? Are they afraid you might talk about what went down at the office Christmas party?”

Drummond looked at Belknapp. “I wouldn’t imagine the rationale filtered down to your level?”

Belknapp glanced around, as if trying to determine the location of a microphone. In a low voice, though not without conviction, he said, “The greater good.”

“Hard to fathom,” Drummond said. “Are you sure your orders came from Hen?”

“You’re suggesting I was false flagged?”

“That ‘Stop Duck Hunting!’ ad could have been placed by anyone with a passing knowledge of our simple letter-drop cipher.”

“Yes, sir, it was supposed to be easy for you and your son to find. The minimal code was just to make it seem like an actual covert correspondence. Had you been at the top of your game, you would have gravitated to the ad for Theodore Tepper, our fictitious divorce lawyer. And simple false subtraction of the saddle numbers in the day’s first race from the alphabet value of the letters and the digits themselves in his address would have netted you the same Manhattan telephone number.”

Drummond nodded, convinced. “Well, let’s not belabor this, then.”

Belknapp kicked Charlie’s shins out from under him. Charlie wound up on smarting knees, on the jagged asphalt. Belknapp’s muzzle bit into the base of his head.

Charlie looked up at Drummond, plaintively. “That’s it?”

“Yes,” said Drummond.

With a muffled report and a trail of gore, a bullet emerged from the lower left part of Cadaret’s belly, the area over the diaphragm. Belknapp’s head snapped backward, taking his body along. As he came to rest on the blacktop, blood arched from the socket where his right eye had been.

“I wish I hadn’t had to do that,” Drummond said, withdrawing his Walther from the small of Cadaret’s back. “For what it’s worth, Charles, your surrender was very convincing.” Retrieving the Walther from the pickup truck-along with smearing ketchup on his chest-had been the essence of Drummond’s plan; Charlie’s role had been diversion.

Marshaling his faculties just to process the fact that the risky plan had actually worked, Charlie said, “I have lots of experience with cowardice. For what it’s worth, you play a mean dead.”

“I would have been more than just playing if not for that,” Drummond said, eyeing the dislodged hood that had protected him from the explosion. “How’s your leg?”