Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

Before he could see if his father was in the second Suburban, he was prodded down a short flight of cement stairs. Punk rock, from a club in the hotel lobby overhead, shook the clammy air. The men whisked him into a back office hallway. Fluorescent tubes caused the white tile walls to shimmer a pale blue.

Halfway down Charlie spotted another marine, whose uniform said he was Private First Class Arnold. The man’s baby face clashed with his 270-pound weight-room physique. He pushed open a wooden door, revealing an empty room suitable for a copier and some office supplies. “Mr. Clark, sir, you are being placed here for the time being for your own protection,” the marine said.

Two to one the exact words lawyers had fed him.

Charlie’s eyes fell on perhaps the smallest toilet seat in the world. Standing on spindly foldout legs, it fed a disposable plastic bag. Beside the toilet lay a ham sandwich in a vending machine’s triangular container.

Hefting his massive shoulders into an apologetic shrug, Arnold said, “I’ll get you a Coke if the guys outside have got the right change.” He pulled the door shut.

Charlie heard a jangle of keys, then the raspy slide of a bolt, possibly the only detainment measure other than Arnold himself. The window was covered with a cage of bars, but so were all the others along the lower two floors of the building. Probably just to keep the locals out.

Charlie supposed he could stab the windowpane using one of the plastic toilet legs, in which case fragments of glass would rain onto the sidewalk, snaring the attention of someone in the apartment buildings across the street. Maybe the residents would call the local cops, who in turn would call the consulate and then the marines would-what? Deny Charlie his Coca-Cola?

He leaned his full weight against the door. The wooden slab, although not thick, didn’t budge. Who exactly were the men who broke down doors, he wondered, and how did they do it? If he were to kick at this one, he suspected, he would break his foot. And still fail to budge the door.

The ceiling was an ordinary office-style ceiling, eight soundproof tiles suspended by a tic-tac-toe board of thin metal strips. At one side the strips tripled into a vent from which cool air trickled, suggesting that there was an air duct above. Charlie thought of Drummond’s tale of the prisoners who had escaped Alcatraz via the fan vent.

Standing directly beneath the vent, he could see the air shaft. It was about ten inches high and fifteen inches wide. Even if he could somehow gain access to it-springing from the windowsill or climbing from atop the spindly legged toilet, for instance-a freak-show-caliber act of contortion would be required to enter it, let alone crawl through it. If he were to crawl atop the ceiling grid, like they always do in the movies, the whole works would almost certainly collapse.

He had no better ideas. Not even any other ideas.

But his father might. Hearing the three sets of approaching footsteps in the hallway, Charlie’s hope rose.

On the other side of the door, Private First Class Arnold grunted, “Hey.” He received similar salutations from two other men.

As the new arrivals continued past the detention room, Charlie heard Drummond say: “I’m going to have to take my medicine before bedtime.”

They looked like the three-story flophouse’s typical guests. Ideally, that’s what they hoped the prematurely hunched woman at the reception desk would remember about the too-loud American couple who, while checking in for an estimated stay of two hours, debated which was the best of the daiquiris they’d just had at various Pointe Simon bars.

Stanley’s other reason for debating tropical drinks with Lanier was to divert the attention of the woman behind the desk from Lanier’s duffel bag. It was a good Louis Vuitton knockoff, decent camo. But the woman might think it odd that someone checking into a seedy hotel for a couple of hours would pack a bag, let alone such a big bag.

It contained a forty-four-inch-long Remington bolt-action M40A1, the M40 variant with the relatively lightweight McMillan HTG fiberglass stock. Lanier would have preferred to use a Mark 14 Mod 0 rifle with a collapsible stock, but the M40 wasn’t bad given that she’d had just over an hour to devise this op. M40s were common enough; she’d rented this one from a hunting and fishing supply store in nearby Lamentin for “target practice.”

She initially set the bag on the floor of the lobby, so that the woman would miss it from her elevated seat in the Plexiglas-encased front desk. The bag would come into view, however, as Lanier climbed the spiral stairs to the rooms.

So after Stanley got the room key, he lingered at the reception desk and smiled his appraisal of the warbled drinking song cascading down the stairwell from one of the upper floors. The woman smiled along with him.

Then he asked, “ Avez-vous des cartes de Pointe-Simon? ”

While she rifled through a drawer behind her for a map-the staff here probably didn’t get this request often-Lanier and her bag disappeared up the stairs.

The third-floor room was shaped like a wedge of cheese and smelled a bit like one. The furnishing included a pipe-frame twin bed that looked as if it had survived a flood, a dresser missing one drawer and all its handles, and a nightstand that belonged in a child’s room. Bolted to the top of the dresser, evidently in an effort to thwart theft, was a clock radio that emitted a mechanical grunt each time the digits flipped. It read 6:51. According to Stanley’s watch, the time was 22:13.

“All in all, not bad for forty euros a night,” he said.

Lanier flashed a smile and returned to assembling her bipod near the room’s key feature, the mullioned dormer window overlooking the Foret Communale de Montgerald parkland. She had a clear shot, save for a few palm fronds, at the American consulate.

Peering into her scope, Lanier said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I think I can make out Charlie Clark standing right by his window.”

Charlie turned away from the window when his door opened and Arnold entered with a plastic bottle of Coke. Charlie was about to say thank-you when something or someone crashed against a door down the corridor, followed by a heavy flop of a body against tile floor.

Charlie glanced beyond Arnold. Outside of the next room down the corridor stood the young stone-faced marine from the yacht-the name silk-screened onto his uniform was, fittingly, Flint.

Regarding the closed door, Flint asked, “Mr. Clark, are you all right?”

There was no response from Drummond’s room.

“Mr. Clark?” Flint again asked.

Still no answer.

Did Drummond have an escape plan? Charlie should have felt his hope surge, but he sensed something was wrong.

Sergeant King, Flint’s graying superior officer, came bounding around a corner, an assault rifle in hand. He slowed, leveling the weapon at Drummond’s door.

“Go ahead,” he told Flint.

Kneeling to the side of the door, the younger marine inserted a key, twisted the bolt free of the lock, and tried to push the door inward. When it barely moved, Flint peered through the crack between it and the jamb. “He’s just lying there, sir. Doesn’t look like he’s breathing.”

Charlie held his breath. A cold perspiration coated him. Protocol surely dictated that Private Arnold shut the door to his room, but deferring to basic humanity, perhaps, the marine allowed Charlie to remain in the doorway.

They both watched King move closer to Drummond’s room and Flint throw a shoulder at the door, grab an edge with his free hand, and drive Drummond’s body back. An orange Croc rolled from the room and into the corridor, coming to rest upside down.