Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

At the lower landing, Bream sidestepped the crimson pool surrounding Minana. “I got this guy and Ricky-Ricardo-on-Steroids on their way down from the cellblock. The other guard was dead on my arrival. Who else have y’all seen since you’ve been here?”

“We heard there was a maintenance man.” Charlie tried to avoid looking at the dead man.

“Yeah. Overalls. Him and a ponytailed version of Ricky Ricardo and another thug were loading the washing machine onto a cig boat when I puttered up. They dropped what they were doing and started shooting at me. I had to fire blind.” Bream pantomimed ducking beneath his boat’s gunwale and firing without looking. “I got lucky,” he concluded with false modesty.

Sticking his gun out ahead of him, he hugged the doorframe, then darted out of the stairwell.

“We’re good for now,” he called back.

Drummond exited with catlike movements similar to Bream’s. Charlie brought up the rear, clumsily, slipping off the short step down from the landing to the intake desk, almost falling onto the bribe-proof Bulcao. The guard sat at his computer terminal as if still typing, except his neck was at an impossible angle and there was a dark cavity where his left eye had been.

“Don’t forget your personal items,” Bream said with a wave at the brown paper bag now labeled LESSER/RAMIREZ. “Also it might be slightly less conspicuous if you two changed out of those fire-colored jumpsuits.”

Charlie snatched the paper bag. Nauseated by Bulcao’s body, he raced to check the contents of the bag-everything was there-then rejoined Bream and Drummond.

Like them, he flattened himself against the front wall and peered out a window. The Hector look-alike and two other men lay outside, on the stretch of dirt between the building and the water. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows of their bodies, making it all the more apparent that the men were not moving and never would again. If there were more of their gang, the barren, rocky ground offered nowhere for them to hide.

“Exactly what I was hoping to see,” Bream said. “The only bad news is this rock’s now too hot for us to do the bomb-for-Alice swap. We gotta go somewhere else.”

“Where?” Charlie asked.

“There’s an uninhabited spit of land a few clicks off Saint Lucia. An associate of mine is standing by with a scientist who’ll do the nuclear physics version of kicking the ADM’s tires.” Bream started toward the giant speedboat bobbing at the dock, the washing machine visible in silhouette in the stern. “Here’s hoping the dead guys won’t mind if we take their boat.”

Stanley peered through binoculars. Even before he could see the cigarette boat’s javelin-like bow, he recognized the craft’s characteristic contrail wake.

“It’s them,” he said, passing the binoculars to Corbitt, who was stretched out on a lounge chair on the second highest of three decks of what was listed in the House Intelligence budget as an Escape and Evasion Craft. In fact it was a svelte, seventy-foot-long pleasure yacht, or, as Corbitt put it, “a perk.”

Setting down his scotch, Corbitt pointed the twin lenses at the tall building on the little detention island.

“Three o’clock,” Stanley said.

Corbitt panned. “The cigarette boat?”

“Aye.” There were no other boats in view for miles. There was nothing but water. “We need to get on commo and send a flash to headquarters.”

“A flash cable? What for?”

“An eye in the sky.”

“You’re not kidding, are you?”

“Cigarette boats can go ninety miles an hour, and even faster if the folks on board don’t mind burning out the engines. The DEA in Miami finds ‘cigarette butts’ all the time.”

“But a satellite ? What’s wrong with radar?”

“Practically useless against craft that fast.”

“Okay, high-speed helicopters?”

“They’re fine, but to chase anyone, they’d have to get out here, by which time …”

Corbitt sat up, still looking through the binoculars. “I can’t make out anyone on the boat,” he said. “I mean, I’m sure there is someone, but-”

Frustration cooked Stanley. “It’s. Them.”

“A gut thing, eh?” Corbitt said, no doubt itching to recite the line emblazoned on posters in Langley’s corridors since the sixties: The Agency has hundreds of brilliant analysts so that operators won’t have to rely on hunches .

“This isn’t some kind of sixth sense,” Stanley said. “Just two hours ago, after learning that the targets were at Detention Three, Carthage KO’d one of our officers and gave her backup team the slip. In any case, why would a cigarette boat be at a detention facility?”

Corbitt hoisted himself from the chaise and walked aft, struggling to maintain his balance, a landlubber if there ever was one. “Javier,” he called up to the bridge. “Radio Detention Three and see if anyone’s escaped or anything like that.”

He returned to his chair and his drink while the man at the helm punched a number into the radio set.

Stanley stared down at his own ordinary cell phone, a temporary replacement for the satphone that Drummond Clark had thrown into the Baie de Fort-de-France last night. Nothing close to a signal now, damnably.

Corbitt patted him on the shoulder. “You know the playbook, bud,” the base chief said. “I need confirmation. If it just turns out to be a drug dealer visiting an inmate, my division chief would come down on my ass like you wouldn’t believe.”

“If it is the men we’re after, and you lose them, what will your division chief do?”

“It certainly wouldn’t be my fault for going by the book. Do you have any idea what it costs to redirect a satellite? More per hour than flying a 747.”

This was why Stanley admired the Cavalry. Their operations incurred collateral damage-put bluntly, innocents fell victim to cross fire-but at least there was action.

“Nobody’s answering,” Javier called down from the bridge, mystified.

Corbitt relented, cabling the chief of the Latin America division, who flashed the satellite request to headquarters.

Twenty-one minutes later, headquarters approved a redirect. Thirty-four minutes after that, the Latin America desk had a picture. Given the analysts’ subsequent assessment that the cigarette boat had landed at one of fourteen small islands within a fifty-eight-minute radius of the detention center, that imagery came approximately three minutes too late.

It was hard to believe, but the nuclear weapon inspection site was idyllic, a sparkling white beach ringing a secluded clear blue lagoon. A canopy of palm fronds provided both shade and protection from eyes in the sky. While Drummond lay against a coconut palm, watching the gentle waves curl and whiten, Charlie stood on the beach alongside a slight, bespectacled man of about forty who had introduced himself as Dr. Gulmas Jinnah, nuclear physicist. They watched Bream and his brawny “associate”-whom he called Corky-haul the washing machine off the beached cigarette boat.

Jinnah certainly looked the part of a scientist-he was thin enough that Charlie would have believed he absentmindedly forgot to eat. In spite of the high temperature, the man wore a starched white long-sleeved dress shirt and a tie.

“So you are from where?” he asked.

“Brooklyn.” Charlie hadn’t anticipated that the serious man, about to inspect a nuclear weapon, would shoot the breeze.

“I so would love to go to New York City someday.”

Charlie took that to mean that New York City wasn’t the bomb’s destination.

“How about you?” he ventured. “Where are you from?”

“Lahore. Underrated city. Definitely worth a visit if it were not for the strife in the Punjab. I hope we shall see a resolution to it soon.”