Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

Mostly intact, the entire craft took to the air.

The stern came down onto the sand first, like a giant’s gavel. Every one of Charlie’s cells seemed to throb. Then, with a boom, the prow landed too.

The runabout sleighed forward through wet sand and puddles, the irregularities in the surface having a bumper-car effect. Sand grated away the caramel varnish, rocks abraded the hull. The inboard engines gasped, the propellers spitting a gritty brown haze in place of a wake.

Still the craft’s momentum carried it forward, fast.

Charlie hung on, white-knuckled. Drummond retained a firm grip on the wheel, his head lowered against the rush of sand and water and other bits of Bernadette Islet.

The far shore came into sight, a dune in miniature.

The Riva slid off the land, going airborne again, entering a stomach-wrenching plummet, then thumping into the Caribbean, walls of water erupting all around.

Surely the battered craft would now collapse into flotsam, Charlie thought, but the engines purred and the Riva shot forward through the waves.

Charlie was shocked just by the fact that she remained in one piece.

“Now for the real test,” Drummond said, looking at the rearview mirror until he discovered that the glass there had been broken away.

With a shrug, he throttled the runabout ahead, accelerating to an even faster speed than they’d gone before.

Charlie turned to see the police cutter within a hundred feet of Bernadette Islet. He read the horror on the machine gunner’s face as the man scrambled off the foredeck and leaped toward the wheelhouse while the pilot threw his full weight into turning the steering wheel.

Bernadette was too wide. The cutter smashed into the shoreline. Charlie momentarily lost sight of the craft behind a cloud of kicked-up bits of earth. The propellers on the giant engines hacked away like saw blades before being smothered by sand. The behemoth lurched to a stop twenty feet inland. Beached.

Although one of the inboard engines sputtered, the Riva was in the clear, save for the sea. Water sprayed onto the deck through the bullet holes and fissures-too many to count. Parts of the craft, or parts of parts, intermittently fell off. Yet Drummond managed to maintain thirty knots.

The seascape soon became cluttered with uninhabited landmasses, none of them larger than a football field. With the sun nearing its peak, the blue of the sea matched that of the horizon so that the two appeared to be one and the Riva seemed to be floating through the heavens.

Charlie might have appreciated it if he hadn’t been on the lookout for police boats. Even the colorful birds flitting about the islands gave him pause. In the Middle East, Alice’s NSA unit had deployed remotely piloted attack aircraft that could pass for barn swallows. A macaw was nothing.

Drummond slowed the engines.

“Are we there yet?” Charlie asked.

“This particular GPS is only accurate to within a latitudinal minute, or 1.15 miles. So all I can tell you is we’re within 1.15 miles.” With a sweeping gesture, Drummond indicated the eight small islets surrounding them, distinguishable only by the placement of the trees. “It could be any of these.”

Hardly simplifying matters, each islet lacked an obvious hiding place. If Fielding had buried the washer, which made sense, he wouldn’t have left the ground looking like someone had dug an enormous hole. The odds of finding the washer before the police made the scene were best not to calculate.

“Other than whipping up an astrolabe, what can we do?” Charlie asked.

Drummond brightened. “Actually, all we would need to make an astrolabe is a thick piece of paper, something to cut notches along its end, a straw or reed, some string, and a small weight, like a ring.”

Charlie wondered if his father was fading-a fade was well overdue. “Then what? Wait for the stars to come out so we can calculate latitude?”

“Planets work too.” Drummond accelerated the runabout toward the furthest of the eight islands. “But I have a feeling that that’s it.”

“Washer Island?”

“I recognize the tree on the southern shore.” He pointed to a huge oak atop a high ridge that sloped at almost a right angle to the sea. “You’ve been here?”

“It’s where I found the treasure of San Isidro-you don’t forget a thing like that.”

Charlie felt the cold draft that usually accompanied the opening of Drummond’s chest of broken memories. “Just like you don’t forget seeing your first unicorn?”

Nosing the Riva onto a shelf of golden sand, Drummond cut the engines. “You’ll see.” He hopped over the gunwale and secured the bowline to a giant root.

Charlie slid off the bow and waded after his father. The oak’s myriad roots and tendrils fanned down the ridge like a bridal train, several disappearing into the high tide. Between the roots, where Charlie would have expected sand or soil, he saw dark apertures nearly his height. Waves tumbled into these gaps, breaking with a rich echo, indicative of an enormous subterranean cavern.

“Go on in,” Drummond said.

Charlie hesitated. “How do I know this isn’t a giant squid’s lair?”

With a laugh Drummond reached into the mouth of the cavern and patted the roof until, with a rip of Velcro, he extracted a moss-green nylon sack the size of a hardcover book. He unzipped it, drew out a pair of slender black Maglites, and tossed one over his shoulder. Charlie set aside his incredulity to make the catch.

Drummond fired his Maglite’s laserlike white beam through the roots, casting spidery shadows onto mossy rock walls, then sauntered into the cavern. Charlie stuck close behind, hunching every few steps to avoid a stalactite. The air was cold and clammy. Goose flesh rose on his arms, not attributable to the temperature alone: Although he saw no movement, he had a tingling sense that the place was teeming with slithery life forms.

“Dad, you know how I used to get on you for never taking me camping?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“I take it back.”

The cavern floor rose out of the water to a platform of red clay. Within the far wall of the platform was a tunnel large enough to allow a man to wheel in a washing machine.

Charlie aimed his Maglite into the tunnel, revealing an opening fifty or sixty feet down, maybe the entry to another cavern. Shifting the beam to the right, he saw a wall coated in silt and dirt. Unlike the ceiling and floor, the wall was flat, undoubtedly man-made.

“That’s the gold,” Drummond said with no more enthusiasm than if he were showing Charlie the contents of his sock drawer.

“What’s the gold?”

“That wall.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The other wall too.”

Charlie swung his beam across the tunnel. Amidst the grime, streaks of yellow metal flashed. “Walls made of gold. How would that even be possible?”

“Fielding and I used to putter around this area, using sonar to find places like this that couldn’t be picked up by eyes in the sky. The idea was, if you’re a prospective client and you’re taken to a subterranean weapons cache on a tiny deserted island fifty miles from anywhere, you more readily believe that you’re seeing an actual nuclear device.”

“I’ll buy that. What about the fifty-foot-long slabs of gold?”

Drummond ambled into the tunnel. “Oh, that, right. Long story.”

Charlie followed him. “So you didn’t just order them from Sears and Roebuck?”

“In 1797, the Venezuelans organized a conspiracy against the Spanish regime. The Spanish colonial governor in San Isidro worried that the rebels would seize the gold that the Spanish colonists had previously seized from the natives, chiefly the golden roof of the church, which was worth two million dollars.”