Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

“Same,” said Charlie.

She smiled. “In the interim, my only request is that you don’t leave my arms so high behind my back. One of my fellow officers in Farafra developed blood clots in both shoulders after just one hour with his arms tied behind a tree.”

Grunting acquiescence, Drummond loosened the kite string, allowing her wrists to fall even with her waist.

Charlie thought of Farafra, or at least the silver screen version, with its centuries-old sandstone spires and backdrop of date palms on sparkling Egyptian sands. What he wouldn’t give to go there someday with Alice. As much as any city on earth, Farafra conjured romance and adventure and …

It was an extraneous detail.

“Dad!” he screamed.

Drummond looked up from refastening the woman’s ankles in time to dodge the glistening barb she swung like a dagger.

Charlie didn’t dare fire the speargun for fear of spearing his father. Instead he flung a family-sized bottle of sunscreen, striking her in the jaw. The container bounced harmlessly to the floor, but the diversion allowed Drummond to swat the weapon away from her.

It landed in a tall wicker basket full of flip-flops. Retrieving it, Charlie nearly sliced his fingertips on the razor-sharp edge of what had passed for the woman’s engagement ring. Pressure on the spring-loaded diamond must have caused the metal band to uncoil into a blade. She had probably cut through the twine around her wrists a while ago, then waited for the opportunity to strike.

As Drummond refastened her wrists and gagged her, Charlie heard footsteps outside. Kneeling, he peered out the ventilation grate to see two young men, but only from the neck down. He didn’t recognize the bodies, but there was no mistaking the muscular, boxy builds-ex-military contract agents were the darlings of black ops personnel directors. Both men wore polo shirts, crisp Bermuda shorts, and, probably in a nod to pragmatism over tourist cover, cross trainers rather than sandals. They strode purposefully toward the beach. In a moment, even if they found nothing suspicious, they would rush back to the lobby and lock down the resort.

“The fun never stops,” Charlie said to no one in particular.

“Finished,” Drummond said, looking up from a pile of spent kite string spools.

“Good. Unless there’s anything in here that they can use to draw attention to themselves or to escape-flashlight circuitry that could turn a tube of aloe vera into high explosive, anything like that?”

Drummond shrugged.

“What if you were them?” Charlie waved at their captives.

“I’d try to get my hands on that. ”

Charlie followed Drummond’s eyes to the telephone by the register. Seeing no need to chance it, Charlie rendered the phone inoperable by slicing the outside wire with the woman’s ring. At the same time, he thought of a way to stymie the two searchers. Unfortunately, his plan required using a phone.

During the crash course in espionage that had been his past two weeks, Charlie had learned that intelligence agencies of the United States and her allies maintained house-sized computers that continuously intercepted and analyzed billions of phone calls, e-mails, and text messages. In one instance, a captured conversation between two terrorists over a pair of children’s walkie-talkies enabled the Mossad to corral a major weapons shipment from Cyprus.

Even on the hotel’s intercom, Charlie’s intended lifeline, his voiceprint would raise the digital equivalent of a red flag, simultaneously spitting his whereabouts-to within a five-foot radius-to those agencies seeking him. Paramilitary assault teams would storm Hotel L’Imperatrice in a matter of minutes.

If things went according to plan, however, in a matter of minutes Charlie and Drummond would already be driving away from the hotel. But first Charlie needed to get to an intercom. Followed by Drummond, he slipped through the bushes behind the relocked beach supply hut. He stopped short of the paved pool deck, within reach of a fiberglass coconut mounted on a pole resembling a palm tree. Inside the coconut was a house phone.

Reaching for the handset, he glimpsed the two young men in polo shirts and Bermuda shorts, no more than thirty yards away, prowling the beach like bloodhounds. He froze. And immediately regretted it-he knew his pursuers were trained to detect unnatural motions on their peripheries. In contrast, Drummond hid behind a thick tree, never breaking stride.

Neither young man appeared to notice.

Charlie couldn’t reach far enough into the fiberglass coconut to grasp the handset without exposing his position.

As he waited for the men to continue down the beach, a cool gust off the bay made the tree limbs and bushes sway noisily. A variation on opportunity knocking, he thought. He reached slowly until his fingertips knocked the handset from its cradle and into his other hand.

The men on the beach didn’t turn to look.

Charlie extended the handset back toward the coconut until the rounded earpiece pressed the CONCIERGE button on the telephone’s keypad. As the line rang, Charlie took the handset and withdrew, in synch with a windblown palm frond, into the shadows between the bushes and the shack.

“ Concierge ,” came a chipper male voice.

“Hi, this is Mr. Glargin,” Charlie whispered. “We’re staying here at L’Imperatrice and, well, my young daughters and I were just walking on the beach where I’m afraid we saw two young men engaged in-I don’t really know how to put it-lewd behavior.”

Within seconds, hotel security guards appeared from the main lodge and discreetly headed down to the beach. Much as Charlie would have enjoyed staying to hear the contract agents’ protests, he knew that each second could make the difference between escaping or not.

The N5 to Fort-de-France wasn’t the crudely paved, single-lane road alongside sugarcane fields that Charlie expected, but a sleek and ultramodern highway with elevated ramps that wound around, across, and, occasionally, directly through mountainsides. Fortunately, Drummond had relieved the CIA man of his car keys while tying him up, because Charlie found driving the Peugeot challenge enough, particularly keeping up with the local traffic, blazing vehicles whose proportions, unlike the Peugeot’s, were suited to the snaking curves and narrow passageways between rock walls. To allow past a flaming orange Micra-an amalgam of a go-kart and a flying saucer-he swerved right, nearly shearing off Drummond’s door against a cliff that doubled as a retaining wall.

Finding Fort-de-France was also a problem. Although the highway wrapped around the western border of Fort-de-France, because of the dark night, the blinding LED billboards, and the giant outcroppings of rock that blocked the view, the precise location of the city wasn’t clear. Not until signs began popping up indicating that Charlie had already driven past it.

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” he asked Drummond.

No response.

Drummond was balled up in the cramped front footwell, his usual countersurveillance position. Somehow he’d managed to fall asleep.

Probably a good idea, Charlie thought. Although there was no correlation between rest and episodes of lucidity, rest generally sharpened Drummond’s faculties.

Anyway, how hard could it be to find a large city?

Hoping to make his way to the opposite side of the N5 and head back toward Fort-de-France, Charlie shot onto what had to be an exit ramp. It spiraled into the empty parking lot of a dark six-story supermarket. He navigated a dozen rows of parking meters before reaching a ramp he felt sure would bring him back onto the opposite side of the highway. It dead-ended inexplicably behind an unlit warehouse.