Keith Thomson - Once a spy

Wandering their way, Fielding practically felt a breeze from all of the heads turning. It wasn’t that anyone recognized him. It was because he was wearing a suit.

Once upon a time, when entering rough-and-tumble places, he was tempted to dress down or affect a tough guy’s swagger. Experience had taught him to shun artifice whenever he could. The closer to his base of experience he could play it, the less he needed to fabricate; the less he needed to fabricate, the more convincing he could be. Here he would try to pass himself off as a Capitol Hill lawyer, a breed he knew well-too well, he lamented. Should anyone ask, he would say he dealt “Tina”-a fashionable name for meth in crystalline solid form-to subsidize his own fun. Probably they wouldn’t ask; they would just assume he was ATF or DEA.

Seventy-five cents got him into a game of eight ball, but only because that was the house rule-he may as well have set a shiny badge down on the pool table along with his three quarters, given the players’ standoffishness. He was pleased to see several of them were missing teeth, a hallmark of meth usage.

While playing, he didn’t participate in their conversation about the bowl games. He kept looking to the door. Twice he asked his partner, “Sorry, man, are we stripes or solids?” A few times he stepped away and grumbled to himself. Picking up a bottle of Heineken and a double shot of rum from the bar, he forgot to collect his fourteen dollars in change. This was obviously a man preoccupied.

When he felt the others’ curiosity peak, he tossed back the rum and stormed out of the bar.

Halfway to his car, he sensed a man approaching from behind. He whirled around, the way someone who was scared would. As he’d hoped, it was one of the pool players, the gaunt kid who’d been his partner. Twenty-five or so, he wore a Lynchburg Hillcats baseball cap with the bill low, shading his bland features and drawing attention to sideburns so chunky Fielding suspected they’d never come in contact with scissors.

“Oh, hey,” Fielding said, with fake relief.

“Hey, I was just wondering if everything’s okay with you, man?”

So he was the meth men’s scout.

Fielding kicked at the ground. “Sure, fine, whatever. Thanks.”

“You staying around here?”

“I’ve gotta get all the way back up to Georgetown tonight. Fucking breakfast meeting first thing maana.”

“Mind me asking what brung you all this way?”

Fielding looked him in the eyes. “I’m guessing you’re not a cop, right?” Sideburns would have to be in world-record deep cover: He was missing most of his upper teeth.

The kid chuckled softly. “I work construction, mostly.”

“There’s a guy, I don’t know his name,” Fielding said, his relaxed stance and tone befitting the release of catharsis. “Thin, like twenty-five or thirty, buzz cut, lot of tattoos. He works out of a trailer on the ridge north of here, sometimes he does a little business here. Know who I mean?”

“Dude, that’s, like, half the guys here,” Sideburns said with a grin.

Fielding regarded his new friend with gratitude for the bit of levity. “I started out tonight driving to his place, but, like a mile before the turnoff, around Hickory Road, I saw a government-looking car pull over and park. Two suits got out and headed into the woods. So I figured it probably wasn’t the best idea to stick around. I hoped I’d see my guy here. And, mostly, a friend of his.” He lowered his voice. “Tina.”

This elicited a knowing look. “Her, I think I’ve heard of,” Sideburns said.

“Yeah?”

“I might be able to find her for you.”

“Dude, that would be huge!”

“I just wanna know one thing. Those suits. You get a look at them?”

Fielding wasn’t fooled by Sideburn’s casual manner. The meth man’s underlying alarm was as obvious as sirens and strobe lights.

“Just a couple assholes in gray suits is all I can tell you,” Fielding said.

With a little prodding, he provided physical descriptions of Drummond and Charlie that would have been good enough for a blind man.

Sideburns hurried back in to the other pool players. Fielding followed as far as the bar, then made a call using his BlackBerry.

“Ginger, you there?” he demanded into the mouthpiece.

“You got the wrong number, amigo,” came a young man’s voice.

Fielding hung up and happily ordered another beer. His use of “Ginger” signified all had gone according to plan here. “Amigo” meant that Dewart and Pitman, who’d answered, would now start monitoring all analog and digital traffic to and from Miss Tabby’s.

In the next three minutes, Dewart and Pitman captured nine telephone calls and relayed the gist of them to Fielding’s BlackBerry. The callers included the bartender, checking that her grandson had done his Bible study, and a plumber leaving with a prostitute-he told his wife he was having car trouble. Sideburns and another pool player also made calls. Both left messages urging local familiars to call back ASAP. A third player texted someone located on the ridge a hundredth of a latitudinal degree north of Hickory Road:

DEA fux on prowl 2nite!!! get ready to play D bro!!!

Charlie was woken by a rapid crunching of hooves through snow. His sleep had been so deep, he’d lost the ability to gauge how long it had been. Still, he was exhausted, and dehydration had left him woozy. The rest of him was sore or stiff. Seeing he was alone in the tent, panic jolted him to alertness.

He looked outside to find Drummond scurrying back from the tree Candicane had been tied to.

“Where’s the horse?” Charlie asked.

“On her way home, I’d imagine,” Drummond whispered. Her bulky blanket was draped over his shoulder.

“What, were you cold?”

Drummond pointed at a looming, black hill. “Listen…”

Charlie distinguished the far-off beat of helicopter rotors from the rhythmic patter of the stream.

“They’ll have infrared,” Drummond said. “The horse was too big a target.”

“What about us?”

“Not with the horse blankets over us, if we pack snow onto them. We can appear no more anomalous than ripples on a pond.”

Charlie didn’t see the entirety of the plan. But Drummond was clearly back online, meaning the plan was almost certainly good.

Drummond spread his horse blanket flat on the ground and began packing powder on top of it. Charlie tugged the other blanket free of its makeshift tent poles and anchors.

“How long do you think we can hide here like this?” Charlie asked.

“We’ll have to move, otherwise they’ll find us. Once you’ve put about two inches of snow on top of the blanket, get underneath it. Use the Velcro straps on the underside to fasten it at your wrists and ankles and to your belt, if you can.”

“But we still don’t know which way to go.”

“East is that way.” Drummond pointed.

“How do you know? Is it that moss grows on the north side of trees?”

“It does. It also grows on the south, east, and west sides. What I did was, I took the steel clip off the fountain pen in the saddlebag, flattened it, magnetized it by rubbing it through my hair, then dangled it from a shoelace. It pointed to the nearest magnetic pole, which is, of course, north.”

“Oh, that old trick. Good, I was worried you wouldn’t find the fountain pen.”

With the snow-packed horse blanket covering him, Charlie crawled after Drummond. They moved slowly enough that the snow, for the most part, stayed in place on top of the blankets, providing extra insulation from the cold. The problem was the frozen and jagged terrain. Charlie’s suit pants offered little more protection than another sixteenth of an inch of snow would have. His bones became circuitry for shivers. Factoring in an increasingly potent wind, he considered that his body temperature might drop to thirty-two degrees on its own.