Dan Fesperman: The Double Game

“The only good you did was by default! You never even delivered the one item I wanted most!”

Then, oddly, disconcertingly, his face lit in triumph, which puzzled me until I turned and saw Kyle Anderson in the doorway. The big man had arrived without a sound, at least fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. His left hand was on his hip. In his right hand was a menacing-looking sidearm, pointed at my chest.

“What’s the rush?” Anderson said. “We get so few visitors that we always like them to stay awhile.”

He frisked me quickly with one hand, then gestured toward the chair. I obliged him by sitting back down.

“Hands on your head before I blow it off.”

He moved up behind me and put the barrel behind my ear lobe, chilly to the touch. Then he pressed it uncomfortably against the base of my skull.

“The funniest thing happened down at the market,” he said. “I bumped into old Ben and Abigail, and they told me they’d seen a bird-watcher up at the preserve just the other day. Damn strange for this time of year, they thought. So did I. So I hurried on back, just in case. Lucky for all of us, huh?”

He spoke to Cabot.

“If you want I can shoot him now, then take his body out in the skiff. There are enough weights in the shed to have him submerged and forgotten by morning. There will be some serious cleanup, but nothing I can’t handle.”

The hopeful, rational side of me expected Cabot to immediately veto the idea. Instead he sat there drawing shallow breaths, pondering every possibility.

“It’s not that easy,” he finally said. “If the Agency arranged for his visit, then he’s part of something larger. I won’t live long enough to pay any consequences, but you will.”

“Let me worry about that.”

Cabot shook his head.

“The whole point of this was to end up on the right side of history, to crack the case of the Great Mole Hunt, our very own Philby. I won’t get there by rubbing out the son of a diplomat.”

“This can’t be a real op,” Anderson said. “For one thing, there’s no backup.”

“You checked?”

“No. But we’d know by now. He’d be miked and somebody would have dropped me by now. But he’s clean. No mike, no weapons, no GPS beacons. Clean as a virgin and just as stupid. And if he’s the one they sent, then you know it’s off the books, meaning they won’t even bother to come ’round for the cleanup.”

There was a long and disconcerting silence as Cabot reconsidered.

“But we no longer have the material,” Cabot said. “The location might die with him, and it’s too late for that kind of setback. And you’re wrong. There will be follow-up. Someone upstairs will want to know what happened.”

“You said it yourself, this guy’s not good enough. If he’s stashed our things, we’ll find them. But no one will find him. I can finish it outside if you want, take him somewhere even safer than the pond.”

There was a sudden glimmer in Cabot’s eyes, and you could tell he was giving the idea one last hearing. Then the light dimmed, and he sighed deeply, another long rattle more forlorn than the others.

“It’s over, Kyle. Go into town. Have a beer.”

Anderson kept the barrel pressed against my head for another few seconds, then withdrew it and backed away. I exhaled, but didn’t move. Behind me, Anderson sighed wearily.

“I’ll wait out on the porch in case you-”

“ No, Kyle. Take the Jeep into town, that’s an order. I’ll be the one to finish it, and I’ll do it on my own terms.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want to hear the engine start, and I want you to call from the phone at the Mohegan Cafe. Stay put until I phone you back. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. His glumness was infuriating. He would have enjoyed killing me, and he left the room with the disappointed air of a hunter who’d failed to bag his limit.

He’d parked the Jeep farther up the drive than normal to keep me from hearing his arrival, but we heard the departure just fine-the roar of the engine, then the cracking of the shells beneath the tires as he reversed at full throttle. We saw the swing of his headlight beams through the lacy European curtains, then he was gone.

“Roll me over by the window,” Cabot said.

I did.

The sky was brilliant, a starry night.

“Fresh air, that’s what I need right now.”

Cabot didn’t have the strength to push up the sash, so I did it for him. He pulled his blanket tighter as the night air rushed in, but he seemed to relish the autumn scent of burning leaves, a hint of brine. The moon shone through a scudding cloud.

“Move closer,” he said. “Look off to the right.”

I did as he asked, and for a shaky moment I wondered if he’d given some coded order to Anderson to lie in wait across the lawn with a sniper rifle. But the only sound from outside was the sigh of the wind in the brush.

“Do you see that small rooftop maybe two hundred yards off, to the right?”

“Yes.” It was lit by a neighbor’s floodlight.

“That’s Nethercutt’s outbuilding. It’s where we found his papers. After Wils died I went over to comfort Dorothy. Then I told her I needed to go through his old belongings for the Agency.”

“She believed you?”

“She never knew how bad things really were between us, or what all the fighting was about. She gave me the keys. It was alarmed seven ways to Sunday, but she told me the code for the keypad. Even then it took quite a while to find it.”

“The floorboards?”

He frowned.

“Wils was better than that. It was in his refrigerator, behind a false wall. Cold storage.”

The pun made him wheeze with laughter, which returned the disturbing rattle to his breathing. It tired him enough that he had to pause before continuing.

The phone rang, and he sighed with impatience.

“You’ll have to fetch it. On the end table. The cord will reach.”

I handed him the phone. The volume was turned up high, and even I could hear the clink of glasses and the general roar of the tavern crowd at the Mohegan. It brought back memories of my dinner there with Dad the night of the funeral, and the way we’d first discussed this strange set of neighbors, Nethercutt and Cabot, as we carved our prime rib.

Cabot hung up. I shut the window and took the phone back to the table.

“By now I suppose you’ve seen what I found there,” Cabot said. “I was quite excited. Finally I had the leads I’d always needed to try and nail the bastard. Vladimir, if I could find him, plus a few other odds and ends. But the existence of Lothar’s book, that was the real revelation. Years ago Wils had put out the word that every copy had been destroyed, and I’d believed him. Now I knew there was still one out there. There were other leads, too, of course. But I needed an operative, a traveler. Kyle was eager to go, but none of his talent is between the ears. He never could’ve passed muster in Europe. Then I saw you and your father at the funeral, and I knew right away. And when that bastard Preston-he was Ed’s first handler, you know, the very fellow who let this happen right under his nose-when he got up in my face about letting sleeping dogs lie, well, hell, how could I do anything but go back on the hunt?

“I sat up late for six nights running, assembling the pieces. The more I went over it, the more everything came together, just like a plot line in one of Ed’s damn books. I had characters, twists, scenarios. It only took a few phone calls to set it up. I sent Kyle down to Georgetown to put some of his old tricks to work. I hired a few cameos here and there…”

“Like the girl in Georgetown.”

“With a red carnation. Your son is a sharp one. She knew he’d made her.”