Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

“I heard about another innocent guy in a fix like this,” Charlie said, as if trying to make small talk. “A war hero. Happened to be very wealthy too.”

“From selling weapons?” Bulcao glanced sidelong at Drummond.

“I’m in appliances, actually,” Drummond said in earnest. “Perriman.”

“The guy I’m talking about made his fortune in the stock market,” Charlie said. “One of the jailers believed that he was innocent and let him ‘pick the lock.’ To show his gratitude, the guy gave the jailer five thousand dollars.” Charlie and Drummond had about half that much in their wallets, last seen at intake being dumped into the brown paper bag.

Bulcao spat an invisible seed out of the side of his mouth. “I know you’re not trying to bribe a law enforcement official, my friend.”

Charlie widened his eyes. “Huh?”

“You guys are Public Enemies number one and number two in Martinique. If you somehow escaped, even without any help from me, and without Guard Minana and Alejandro the maintenance guy looking the other way, we all would be let go, probably do some time too. Just speaking for me, say you gave me a million bucks. After I got out of the can-if I ever made it out-the cops would be watching for years to see how I’m paying my bills. Best job I could get probably’d be hacking pineapples, and if I spent more than a field hand’s pay, the Inspector General’d throw me right back in jail. If my wife goes to some fancy store in town and gets herself a dress, back to jail. If my son gets a bicycle that isn’t secondhand …”

In other words, Charlie thought, no.

Carlo Pagliarulo thought little of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, Italy’s military intelligence agency. He got the message that SISMI felt similarly about him. In 2005, after twelve years as an operative, he was demoted to deputy operations coordinator, a glorified term for gofer, hardly the job he’d hoped for when first signing on out of college. The salary was decent, though, the benefits even better, and he felt secure in his job since terminations were rare in the intelligence community-agencies were usually reluctant to have an ex-operative out and about with a grudge, and, of course, secrets to sell. Yet within a year, due to chronic lateness to work, drunkenness, and allegations of sexual harassment, Pagliarulo was let go.

It was his big break.

Foreign intelligence services scoured associations of former soldiers and law enforcement officers in the hope of securing assets with half of Pagliarulo’s skill set. Two weeks after his termination, he was making more per week than he had at SISMI just to run a pair of Geneva safe houses for MI6, a job that took no more than a couple of hours a day, leaving him plenty of time for other gigs, like the rendition in Gstaad and subsequent work as one of the captive’s babysitters. And this evening alone, while shopping for groceries, he stood to pick up enough additional cash to buy a villa in San Remo.

At an under-heated but still crowded supermarket in Moudon, an unremarkable town about an hour northwest of Geneva, he resisted a fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano, instead dumping a cardboard cylinder of factory-grated Romano into his cart. The American woman was supposed to get as few clues as possible about where she was being held.

“Excuse me, do you know if the pesto’s any good here?” asked a man pushing a cart half full of TV dinners.

His Italian was good, but he sounded American, and despite an Alpine parka over a French suit, he looked it. Like Gary Cooper, Pagliarulo thought.

“You want good pesto, you gotta go to Correncon,” Pagliarulo said, which may or may not have been true, but it was their recognition code.

The man was Blaine Belmont, the U.S. embassy’s legal attache-official terminology for spook. Belmont pushed his shopping cart to the end of the line five deep at the butchers’ counter, where a pair of bleary-eyed meat cutters worked in slow motion. Pulling his own cart up behind Belmont’s, Pagliarulo checked for surveillance. Belmont nodded his own assessment that they were clean.

Pagliarulo wasted no time. “I’m doing grunt work for a guy who I’ve figured out is planning to flip an ADM to the United Liberation Front of the Punjab.”

Belmont turned to face him, with no more excitement than if Pagliarulo had said it was going to snow tonight. “Yeah?”

“He’s somehow getting it from another American. I’ve only caught a glimpse of that guy, over satphone, but I could ID him from photos. The deal is, he delivers the bomb, he gets back the package we’re storing. I’m pretty sure you know her, Alice Rutherford.”

Belmont shrugged.

“I could give you enough information to get the bomb and the bad guys,” Pagliarulo added.

“If?”

Afraid the American would laugh at the price, Pagliarulo steeled himself. “One million.”

Belmont studied a tower of sausage links behind the smudgy glass. “That’s probably fair for a tip that bags a rogue WMD. Which means HQS’ll have me counter six hundred and settle at seven-fifty-if they determine it’s worth a dime. Seven-fifty about what you really figured on?”

Pagliarulo’s confidence rose. “The price is one million dollars.”

“Look, I don’t give a crap, it’s not my money. I’ll tell you what, I’ll talk to my chief of station when I get back to campus. If things go like they should, we’ll have a dollar amount tomorrow morning at the latest. Then somebody will send a text message to your cell addressed to a Hans, asking Hans if he wants to down a few at the Hofbrauhaus, something like that. Delete the message, then hightail it to the hypermarche in Correncon and we’ll see if the pesto lives up to its reputation. Fallback, meet right here tomorrow, same time. How’s that for a game plan?”

Pagliarulo’s answer was forestalled by a butcher’s summons to the counter. Presumably to maintain his cover, Belmont bought a chicken.

Sure, Alice would have preferred traipsing across an Alpine snow-scape with the man she loved. But most of her life had been spent either dodging bullets or the metaphoric equivalent. Once, in fact, she’d been hit-just a flesh wound. At times, she would happily have paid for the peace and quiet now inflicted on her.

Especially because the Shaolin liked to practice meditation before a fight.

As Alice had learned in nearly a lifetime of devotion to Shaolin kung fu, channeling her inner energy allowed her to do things that her corporeal body alone could not. But it wasn’t easy. Shaolin monks had to spend years mastering meditation before they were allowed to think about fighting, or as little as throwing a playing card. Prior to writing the book of Shaolin kung fu, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma faced a wall for nine years without uttering a word.

Alice began by clearing her mind of all destructive energy. Combat, whether in self-defense or on the attack, demands pure intent, with all emotions under complete control, which is to say turned off.

After several hours, a plan came to her. It depended on a light switch plate the size of an index card that was fastened to the wall behind the sofa, two and a half feet from where she sat. If it were slung like a throwing star-the flat, star-shaped projectile that was the Shaolin weapon of choice-the light switch plate’s speed might exceed fifty miles per hour, making its sharp corners as lethal as a dagger.

The plate was held to the wall behind the sofa by two ordinary slot-headed screws, one above the light switch, one below, the latter a bit loose already. It would be a simple matter to undo the screws.

Well, not exactly simple.

First, Alice needed to position herself on the sofa so that the light switch was directly behind her, concealed from her captors’ view. Following each bathroom trip-they permitted her one every four hours-she inched closer. The fifth trip gained her position sufficient to execute sleight of hand, which time and again had proven the most useful component of her operations training. Sleight of hand is widely believed to work when the hand is quicker than the eye. In fact, it depends on psychology, primarily misdirection, larger actions distracting from smaller.