Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

“Again, only rumint, but enough that I’d bet he’s a shoo-in for a Trailblazer medal.”

“Stood a chance at being the first guy to win two. But he’s the one who triggered the ADM that took out Fielding, along with the Cavalry’s entire Manhattan office. So now he won’t win anything. Originally, though, the Perriman op was his idea. He founded the Cavalry, staffed it-he plucked Bellinger out of a USO show. Thanks to Drummond Clark, lunatics who might have gotten their hands on a real nuke instead blow up the equivalent of a few sticks of dynamite.”

“So why in his right mind would he blow up the Manhattan office?”

Eskridge stiffened. “He wasn’t in his right mind. A few months ago he was placed on medical leave, suffering from a voracious case of early-onset Alzheimer’s. More recently he developed acute paranoia, which led to an Appalachian-length trail of bodies, not least of whom was the national security adviser.”

“So I take it Burton Hattemer didn’t really die in a fall.”

“The media weren’t informed about the bullet that preceded the fall. The good news is that, as a result of it, the Cavalry obtained a presidential finding waiving Executive Order 11905, allowing them to neutralize Clark. As well as his son, Charlie, which probably isn’t a bad idea regardless of the Hattemer incident. In a nutshell, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but it bounced bloody far out of the orchard. The kid’s math genius got him into Brown. He dropped out, though, and wound up an inveterate gambler. He now knows and would likely trade what is perhaps our most closely guarded secret for a good tip on the third race at Hialeah. Initially we thought that Clark and Son had done the wet work for us and detonated themselves in the ‘electrical fire’ along with Fielding. To say the least, this would have simplified matters. However …”

Eskridge hit a button on what looked to be a length of garden hose running along the end of the conference table. “This is a little something the Toy Makers have been working on,” he said. Like humidifier mist, particles of light rose from a thin vent running the length of the hose. “Puts pictures on the same basic metamaterial that will soon enable us to be first to have invisibility camouflaging.” He looked around the room, in an exaggerated show of paranoia. “Unless the other team has beaten us to it.”

Taking on different hues, the particles formed a screen that stood at a right angle to the table and showed video of a young woman crossing a crowded city street at night.

“This is surveillance footage from a kabob place across Broadway from the Perriman offices,” Eskridge said. “You’re looking at former No Such Agency black ops starlet Alice Rutherford, on the night in question, going into the burning building.”

Despite the dark and grainy image, the woman was stunning. Entering the drab postwar office building, she drew a gun as calmly as if it were a cell phone.

Eskridge pressed the screen. Alice’s image slid to his right, the video fast-forwarding to a magnified, infrared-filter-enhanced view of her in the vestibule, blasting apart the inner glass wall.

“She was in deep cover on an intelligence gathering op in Martinique,” Eskridge said. “Fielding was her target. Like the rest of the world, the NSA bought into his bad-guy cover story. The problem with Miss Alice Rutherford was, when push came to shove, she couldn’t be convinced that Fielding was actually on our side, not even by the man upstairs.” He pointed to the ceiling, signifying the director, whose office was on the seventh floor. “So now we’re watching her gunning down Fielding and, at least in her mind, coming to the rescue of …”

On the display, Alice climbed through the cavity she’d created in the glass. Eskridge tapped at the scene, fast-forwarding through about two minutes of footage of empty vestibule. Then Alice reappeared from an alley next to the office building, with a young man and an older one in tow.

“Drummond and Rotten Apple Clark?” Stanley asked.

“None other.” Eskridge paused to watch the threesome disappear from the frame. “And that’s the last anyone’s seen of them: Alice has gone totally off the reservation.”

“Any idea why?”

“She maintained that Fielding was off the reservation, that he and the Cavalry zapped Burt Hattemer in order to get the presidential finding against the Clarks. She also insisted that the Cavalry did this to keep a lid on their own misdoings. Under Fielding’s direction, the Cavalry ‘went Lord of the Flies ,’ as she put it-and to some extent, she’s right. One problem with her murder theory, though, is the utter lack of any evidence. Three days ago she sent a Hushmail from points unknown to an inspector general at NSA requesting an investigation. NSA wrote her back saying basically, ‘Great, tell us more,’ but she never responded. It now appears as though she was just trying to smoke screen her real activity, which is putting one of Drummond’s old ADMs up for sale, possibly to the United Liberation Front of the Punjab, an Islamic separatist group who are violent psychopaths when they’re on their best behavior. According to our man Bellinger, their sugar daddy had his checkbook out and was waiting near Fielding’s place in Martinique the day Fielding was killed. Unfortunately, everyone who knew the device’s location died with Fielding. Everyone except Drummond Clark, that is. So if Bellinger is right about the new weapons deal, Alice and her companions stand to clear several hundred million clams. Which means one of those bombs could blow in the heart of New York or DC. And worse still …”

“The Perriman Appliances op would be blown?”

“Exactly.” Eskridge stared over the screen, his laid-back manner hardening. “If you can find them, and if we can learn what they’ve told to whom, great. But first and foremost, we need to stop them.”

The assignment was far more dangerous than Stanley had imagined. He wanted it anyway. He’d wanted an assignment like this since he first applied to the CIA.

Stanley sat in a temporary Europe division office with one of the unit’s signature Union Jack-blue doors but otherwise as charismatic as a budget motel room minus the requisite nature print. His dream job commenced with gumshoe work about as rudimentary as it gets.

He spent much of the morning investigating PM00543MH4/7, the Science and Technology search system’s designation for one of the 29,655 groups of travelers matching his criteria. This group consisted of sixty-three-year-old investor Duncan Calloway, who five nights ago had taken his Learjet 45XR from Palm Beach to Paris, along with two of his junior associates-one male, one female, both purportedly twenty-eight. Their excursion employed no small amount of subterfuge, including an 0100 departure and a layover at New York’s Kennedy Airport for twenty minutes, though such a stop was unnecessary for refueling.

The subterfuge, Stanley learned, was intended to throw off a rival investment firm that had hired a Palm Beach-based private espionage outfit to track Calloway in order to determine whether he was negotiating the purchase of a French electronics conglomerate.

Stanley anticipated sitting in the temporary office for two or three more days just to wade through the computer-generated leads.

Then PM11304ZH4/9 caught his eye.

At 6:52 A.M. on December 29, thirteen days ago, a thirty-two-year-old Manhattan hedge fund manager named Roger Norton Traynor departed Newark airport for Innsbruck, Austria, aboard another Learjet 45XR, a seven-seater owned and operated by Newark-based Absolute Air Charter, LLC. Accompanying Traynor was his wife of three days, April Gail Hellinger, twenty-eight. The honeymooners checked into Innsbruck’s five-star Hotel Europa late that night.