Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

Charlie spat out his clammy mouthpiece. “It’s been over an hour since you hot-wired a vehicle. What do you say we find another one?”

Drummond held his mouthpiece close to his lips, as if ready to resubmerge. “Okay.”

A hundred yards up the beach stood a mass of stacked wooden lounge chairs. “Looks like a hotel there,” Charlie said. “What do you think?”

“It does.”

“What do you think we should do? Head toward it? Or away?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about this? Say you were a fugitive looking to shed your scuba gear and steal a car in order to get to a Laundromat in Fort-de-France. Would you be wary of a big hotel, where the security might be watching out for us, or would you be psyched about a crowded place where there are probably a lot of other people with our skin color, many of them on their fourth or fifth umbrella drink by now?”

“Ah. In that case, the relative ease of obtaining clothing and a vehicle would outweigh the cons, which would largely consist of a faxed alert that the graveyard-shift guards and receptionists may not even have seen.”

Unbelievable, Charlie thought.

They swam closer to the beach, then walked along the sandy sea bottom in their flippers. Gas-fed torches showed the way to landscaped gardens fronting a large resort hotel. As they drew closer still, the dark forms of guests came into view.

Drummond slowed a few yards from shore, body low in the surf, apparently casing the surroundings. When no one was in sight, he ambled onto the beach, his flippers and speargun bunched under one arm.

Charlie followed. The sand ended at a wall of bamboo stalks twenty to thirty feet high, red at their bases before morphing into a brilliant green. Drummond deposited all of his gear but his wet suit into their midst. Which made sense to Charlie. The lightweight neoprene suits had short sleeves and pant legs, not entirely out of place on guests strolling along the beach.

Without the wigs they’d worn at the airport, they looked less like the two men sought by local authorities. On the other hand, they looked more like the two men sought by the rest of the world’s authorities. But Drummond’s intuition seemed to be firing. So Charlie didn’t hesitate to replicate his father’s every move while trailing him up the beach and toward the hotel.

They crossed paths with a handsome middle-aged couple, apparently walking off dinner, arm in arm, their wedding rings and her diamond aglow. Flush from a bottle of wine or just the warm air, they both smiled, the wife offering a warm “Good evening.” Awaiting a reaction to the dripping scuba suits, Charlie could only muster a nod in greeting, but Drummond said, “How’re you doing?” as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

The man and woman appeared to care just as little, intoxicated with each other. As they passed, a wave sizzled up the sand, lapping their shins. “God, why didn’t we change into our swimsuits?” she said. “I’m dying for a dip.”

Charlie spotted a bamboo hut fifty yards ahead, between the beach and the hotel’s swimming pool. Nailed to the hut’s grass roof, at a slant, was a sign that read SANDY’S, hand-painted, intentionally slapdash. Probably a shop that sold suntan oils and lotions at three times the price guests would pay in town. Pointing it out to Drummond, Charlie said, “That place ought to have shirts and stuff.”

“It’s closed,” Drummond said.

“I know, but I was thinking that someone who can hot-wire an amphibious vehicle might be able to open a hut.”

The hut proved to be nearly as secure as a vault, an industrial version of the prefabricated metal storage sheds sold at home improvement stores-the bamboo facade was hot-glued to the exterior walls, synthetic grass was stapled to the roof. Its door and window were fastened by combination locks.

“An interesting piece of information about combination locks is that many have small keyholes on the back,” Drummond said.

Charlie eagerly flipped the lock over and spotted a tiny round keyhole in the upper right corner. “Excellent piece, Dad!”

“Did you know that many people use the same combination lock for years without ever noticing the keyhole, until a thief defeats it.”

“How does the thief defeat it?”

Drummond gazed down the beach, as if regarding a beautiful painting. “How would I know?”

“Say you were a onetime CIA operations officer, who took a five-day course in lock-picking when you were at the Farm …”

The shock of actually finding the Clarks might have bowled Stanley over if Hadley hadn’t seized his hand and steered him behind a grassy rise in the sand, out of the fugitives’ sight.

“Good choice of hotel,” he said under his breath.

“Next time we decide to take a ‘romantic stroll along the beach,’ remind me to request permission to bring a sidearm.”

Stanley had an AK-47 and three handguns in his apartment in Paris, but rarely took them to work, although, like now, they often would have come in handy. As opposed to FBI agents, CIA officers didn’t carry firearms-the bureaucrats usually withheld permission for fear of their operatives being exposed as CIA officers and of the resulting flaps.

Antibureaucratic vitriol sharpened Stanley’s senses. He regarded the stretch of beach where the Clarks had disappeared. “We ought to go after them.”

Hadley opened her purse and drew out her BlackBerry. “And take them ourselves, with no weapons?”

“Just tail them. In a minute or two, they’ll have a whole new wardrobe from that beach supply shack or the shops in the lobby. Another ninety seconds and they’ll have helped themselves to a car in the guest parking lot that no one will realize is gone until morning at the soonest. By the time our backup mobilizes, the rabbits will have blended into the half a million people on this four-hundred-square-mile jungle.”

“They’ll know we’re tailing them, though.”

“I can live with that. If we can stall them for as little as two minutes, we’ll have half a dozen police cars and a helicopter in play.”

By way of agreement, she started back to the hotel, scrolling down her phone menu. “I’ll call the dry cleaners.” She meant their backup unit.

Stanley looked past her, toward an odd rustling in the bamboo.

Drummond and Charlie emerged from the stalks just a few feet away, crisp new Hotel L’Imperatrice T-shirts over their wet suits. They brandished pistols of sorts with four-foot barrels and spearheads protruding from the muzzles.

Stanley was hit with a one-two punch of surprise, then fury. Why hadn’t he heeded his instincts and rushed the criminals the first moment he saw them?

“Fort-de-France Dry Cleaning,” came the Yankee-accented voice of the backup unit’s chief over the BlackBerry.

Holding a finger to his lips, Charlie held forth a thick sheet of hotel stationery. With the point of his speargun, Drummond directed Stanley and Hadley to the big block letters on the stationery, although Charlie’s intent had been obvious.

By the light of Hadley’s BlackBerry, Stanley read: FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL SHOOT YOU:

RAISE YOUR HANDS.

ONE OF YOU, SAY, ENTHUSIASTICALLY: “LET’S GO FOR A DIP ANYWAY!”

SAY NOTHING ELSE.

Raising his hands, Stanley glanced at Hadley in hope that she had a better plan. Her hands were already in the air, and though the night made it hard to tell, she was pale.

“Let’s go for a dip anyway,” she said with enthusiasm so convincing that Stanley wondered if she weren’t in fact happy to enter the water.

As Drummond frisked him, Stanley waited for an opportunity to launch a knee into the old spy’s groin. The spear pressed into his own inner thigh made him think better of it.