Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

“Alice Ann Rutherford?” Charlie repeated as if bewildered.

“If it helps, she was born in New Britain, Connecticut, on October 17, 1980, she’s currently absent without leave from the National Security Agency, and she lives with you.”

An icy gust slashed through Charlie’s sweater, stinging his chest. He resisted the urge to wrap his arms around himself, afraid the movement might spur the kidnapper to precipitous use of his trigger. “Okay, okay. So what do you want?”

“An ADM. You know what that is, right?”

Charlie knew atomic demolition munitions only too well. They were portable Soviet-made bombs with a ten-kiloton yield. Under the auspices of the CIA, his father had founded the Cavalry with the objective of putting malfunctioning ADMs into the hands of terrorists who believed they were purchasing working weapons of mass destruction. The ultra-classified operation had succeeded for the better part of three decades. When Drummond fell prey to Alzheimer’s, his own men decided it best to sacrifice him in order to maintain the secret and safeguard the identities of their operatives. Charlie had learned the secret just two weeks ago, while trying to figure out why assassins were preventing him from putting his father in a nursing home. Before that, he’d known the old man only by his cover as a stern and straitlaced appliance salesman.

“You can’t exactly get ADMs on eBay,” Charlie said.

Jesse James grinned. “So why don’t you ask your dad?”

Charlie eyed his shoe tops. “There’s a problem with that.”

“Isn’t your father Drummond Clark, Central Intelligence Agency operations officer, born in New York, New York, on July 14, 1945?”

“He was. He passed away twelve days ago.”

If Charlie’s father-who in fact was still alive-held to form this evening, he had heard the helicopter and momentarily would appear, as if out of thin air, with a gun to Jesse James’s head. Alzheimer’s had acted like a wrecking ball on Drummond Clark’s memory retrieval mechanism and had ravaged his ability to process the present. As with most people suffering from the disease, he still experienced random episodes of lucidity, however. And danger tended to jolt him into clarity. So Charlie’s plan was simply to buy time.

“Why don’t we sit in the car, where it’s not freezing?” Jesse James pointed at the passenger seat with his gun, making the question rhetorical.

As soon as they were inside, he turned on the ignition, sending hot air from the vents and a delicate piano concerto from the speakers. The BMW was certainly more pleasant than the bitter outdoors, but it would complicate Drummond’s assault. If he were to appear out of thin air now, Jesse James could just drive away. And the car’s tinted glass might veil Charlie’s execution.

“I’m sure you’d like Interpol to believe your father’s dead, but I don’t,” the cowboy said, fishing a satellite phone from inside his jumpsuit. “Not unless you can convince me that this is his twin brother.”

He punched a few keys. The phone’s display filled with a shaky, greenish-gray video of the chalet taken through one of the leaded glass windows. Drummond sat at the dining table, reading a newspaper.

“I can have the mosquito drone zoom in on the newspaper’s date if you have any doubt this is live feed, but it might take me a while,” Jesse James said.

Charlie felt a measure of relief. “So you actually do just want an ADM?”

“Yeah. Remember the to-do with the helicopter and Alice?”

Charlie could share the secret that the ADMs were duds, but Jesse James might not believe it. And even if he did, the consequences would be grave. If Cavalry customers got wind of the fact that their vaunted arsenals couldn’t blow up a balloon, the identities of countless American operatives and their foreign agents would be compromised. In any event, it was doubtful that Jesse James’s principals would just let Alice walk away.

“What makes you think my father can get an ADM?” Charlie asked.

“A few months ago he delivered one to Nick Fielding, an illegal arms dealer, in Martinique. A couple of weeks ago, my employers met with Fielding there. They negotiated the purchase of the ADM, pending an inspection at its hiding place, but the trip to the hiding place never happened because Fielding got himself killed in New York City the same night. Fortunately, your dad knows where the thing’s hidden. My employers need it, along with a working detonation code, no later than the thirteenth of January, which is four days from today.”

Jesse James, whoever he was, had excellent intelligence, except for the fact that Nick Fielding had been a Cavalry man who trafficked fake ADMs. “All things considered, I’d happily make the trade,” Charlie said. “My father probably did know where the bomb is hidden.”

The cowboy’s eyes narrowed. “ Did? ”

“Once, yeah. That’s the rub. You need to understand that when he finishes brushing his teeth at night, he has to hunt for the toothpaste cap, even though it’s always right beside the soap dish.”

Jesse James scoffed. “I do shit like that too.”

“But he has Alzheimer’s.”

“ Alzheimer’s? ”

“Midstage. We’re here because there’s a clinic with an experimental treatment-”

The cowboy’s groan cut Charlie off. “The word I got was you’d trot out some spiel like this. Let’s save ourselves some time, okay? Just last week, on at least three separate occasions, your daddy shut out the New York Yankees of death squads. The reason I’m talking to you is word had it that if I went to talk to him , it’d probably be the last conversation I ever had.”

“He has his moments.”

“Well, if you want Miss Alice to keep on being alive four days from now, he better have one more of those moments.” Jesse James tapped the steering wheel. “I’ll leave your Beemer in the Hauptstrasse train station parking lot, keys under your seat. Meet me outside the general aviation terminal at the Zweisimmen airport at thirteen hundred tomorrow. I’ll have a jet waiting to take us to the ADM. I know a professional like your father wouldn’t be stupid enough to try any tricks, like telling anyone about this, but you might. And if you do, your sweetheart gets your name written across her face with a box cutter.”

Although enveloped by toasty air, Charlie felt no comfort as he stepped into the chalet’s spacious living room. Usually on entry he savored the blond wooden beams and old-fashioned Alpine-style furniture. Before coming to Gstaad, he’d never given a thought to upholstery-probably never even uttered the word upholstery . But he’d been taken by the sofa and chairs here, embroidered with white dots that matched those on the lace curtains, which in turn afforded privacy without sacrificing a view of the skyrocketing mountains. Now he felt as if an avalanche were carrying the chalet away.

Drummond still sat at the farmhouse dining table. Of average height and weight, he’d always fostered a nondescript appearance, which served him well as a professional cipher. He was a young sixty-four, though two weeks ago it had been easy to see the senior citizen version of him waiting around the corner: His white hair had begun to thin, gravity was winning the battle with his spine, and wrinkles and spots massed as if readying to invade his taut skin’s otherwise healthy glow. In Gstaad, those trends had seemed to reverse somewhat. He sat ruler-straight now. He exuded vitality. His hair even seemed a healthier shade of white.

It was too soon into the course of the treatment to detect an effect on his mind, but the medication could have been responsible for his general improvement. More likely, the upturn resulted from their strenuous hikes and the invigorating Alpine air. Or possibly Drummond benefited from the comforts of the chalet: When forced to go on the lam together, the previously estranged father and son managed not only to get along, against odds no bettor in his right mind would have accepted, but they also actually learned from each other, creating a force that exceeded the sum of its parts. As a result, they had survived. Once in Gstaad, Charlie savored the nascent affection, a nice change from his father’s serial sermon about wasting one’s life at the track.