Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

She steadied him now.

He recalled the fundamental guiding principle of countersurveillance, which she’d taught him: See your pursuers, but don’t let them know you see them.

The spooked-up sunglasses-part mirror, and, to the uninitiated, part kaleidoscope-made it difficult to find a specific person behind him, or for that matter a specific section of grandstand. He fought the urge to peer over his shoulder. As little as a backward glance would be enough for the man in the red hat to smell blood.

“See anything?” Charlie muttered.

“Not yet.” Alice laughed as if he’d just told a joke.

They came to a white cabana tent with a peaked top. Inside, a rosy and suitably effervescent middle-aged couple popped corks and filled plastic flutes with the same champagne whose logo adorned banners all around the racecourse. Falling into place at the end of the small line enabled Charlie and Alice to, quite naturally, turn and take in their environs: Thirty or forty white-turf fans wandered among the betting windows, Port-o-Lets, and a dozen other concessions tents.

No man in the red hat.

And the corridor behind the grandstand remained vacant.

Charlie felt only the smallest measure of relief. Their tail might have passed them to another watcher. Or put cameras on them. Or fired microscopic transponders into their coats. Or God knew what.

“Sorry about this,” Charlie said.

“About what?” Alice seemed carefree. Part of which was her act. The rest was a childhood so harrowing and a career full of so many horrors that she rarely experienced fear now. If ever.

“Talking you into coming here.”

“Knock it off. It’s breathtaking.”

“To a track, I mean. It was idiotic.”

“Hermits are conspicuous. We have to get out some of the time.”

“Just not to racetracks. Of course they’d be watching racetracks.”

“Switzerland has an awful lot of racetracks, not to mention all the little grocery stores that double as offtrack betting parlors. And there’s no reason to think that anyone even knows we’re in Europe. Also this isn’t exactly a racetrack. It’s a course on a frozen lake-who knew such a thing existed?”

“ They know. They always do.”

“They” were the so-called Cavalry, the Central Intelligence Agency black ops unit pursuing Charlie and his father, Drummond Clark. Two weeks ago, after the various assassins all failed their assignments, the Cavalry framed the Clarks for the murder of U.S. national security adviser Burton Hattemer, enabling the group to request the assistance of Interpol and a multitude of other agencies. With no way to prove their innocence, the Clarks knew they wouldn’t stand a chance in court. Not that it mattered. The Cavalry would avoid the hassle of due process and “neutralize” them before a gavel was raised.

Readying a twenty-franc note for two flutes of champagne, Alice advanced in line. “Look, if they’re really that good, they’re going to get us no matter what, so better here than a yodeling hall.”

She could always be counted on for levity. It was one of the things Charlie loved about her. One of about a hundred. And he barely knew her.

He was wondering how to share the sentiment when a young blonde emerged from the corridor behind the grandstand, a Golden Age starlet throwback in a full-length mink. Breathing hard, perhaps from having raced to catch up to them. Or maybe it was the basset hound, in matching mink doggie jacket, wrenching her forward by his expensive-looking leather leash.

Clasping Charlie’s shoulder, Alice pointed to the dog. “Is he the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen or what?”

Charlie realized that pretending not to notice the dog would look odd. Acting natural was part of Countersurveillance 101. The best he could muster was “I’ve always wanted a schnauzer.”

“Why a schnauzer?” Alice asked.

All he knew about the breed was that it was a kind of dog.

The starlet looked at them, her interest apparently piqued.

“I just like the sound of schnauzer ,” Charlie said.

The woman continued past as a slovenly bald man stumbled out of a Port-o-Let, directly into her path. She smiled at him.

Women like her don’t smile at guys like that, Charlie thought. Especially with Port-o-Lets in the picture.

Alice noticed it too. She yawned. “Well, what do you say we head back to Geneva?”

Charlie knew this really meant leave for Gstaad, sixty miles from Geneva.

Fast.

As he and Alice entered the parking lot-a plowed meadow across the street from the Lac de Morat-she maintained a vivacious conversation, raving first about the white-turf races and then about a new refrigerator she had her eye on.

They approached the silver-gray BMW 330 sedan she’d rented under a Norwegian alias. The 330 was one of the ten most popular models in Switzerland and number one in Gstaad, where they were renting a chalet, or, more accurately, where the fictitious CFO of her fictitious Belgian consulting firm was renting a chalet.

They intentionally bypassed their 330 in favor of another silver-gray BMW.

“Oh, wait, that’s not us,” Alice said.

Doubling back provided the opportunity to glimpse reactions from the twenty or so other drivers returning to the parking lot. Charlie spotted a man fumbling with his keyless remote. Probably a result of the champagne in his other hand. Or the champagnes that had preceded it. Everyone else proceeded directly to their cars.

Gstaad was a forty-five-minute drive from Avenches, or could have been if not for Alice’s choice of SDR-surveillance detection route. At the first green light they came to, she sent the BMW skidding into a looping right turn. At its apex, with Charlie clutching his armrest so that centrifugal force wouldn’t dump him onto Alice, and when she ought to have tamped the brake, she crushed the accelerator, rocketing them onto a side street. She had the right combination of creativity and controlled recklessness to win a NASCAR race, he thought.

“I think we left my stomach back at the light,” he said.

Her eyes darted between the mirrors. “We’ll probably be able to go back and get it. I’m pretty sure we don’t have a tail.”

He exhaled, before she added, “But we need to be absolutely sure.”

She took a last-second left at the next intersection, cutting across a lane of oncoming traffic and entering a shopping mall. One car swerved. A van braked sharply, the driver screaming and shaking his fist. The car directly behind the man braked and skidded, narrowly missing rear-ending his van.

Alice concerned herself just with the vehicles that had been behind the BMW. All simply continued along.

“That sure would have surprised a tail,” Charlie said. “Or convinced him that you took Driving Training at the Farm.”

She laughed. “Or in Rome.”

Exiting the mall, she began taking left turns at random. The odds that anyone other than a surveillant would stay behind them for three such turns were beyond astronomical.

“You do get to see more of the sights this way,” she said blithely.

“People don’t consider the benefits of being a fugitive.”

Another quick turn and Charlie’s side mirror showed only the town of Avenches shooting aft. The chalets became specks, then disappeared altogether behind a mountain of fir trees laden with snow.

As Alice drove up the rugged Bernese Oberland, Charlie scanned the sky. The Cavalry sometimes deployed unmanned aerial vehicles-UAVs, remotely piloted, miniature aircraft equipped with cameras sharp enough for their operators to view a driver’s face from ten thousand feet up. Some UAVs carried laser-guided missiles capable of turning the road into a crater and the BMW into shiny gravel.