Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

“Where’s Alice?” Drummond asked.

Sliding one of the heavy pine chairs out from the table, Charlie sat across from him. “She was kidnapped,” he said. It came out matter-of-factly; if he weren’t so numb, he might have shrieked it.

“ Kidnapped! Are you certain?”

“I guess, technically, she was rendered. Or renditioned.”

“What happened?”

Charlie filled him in.

“Well, that certainly is a problem.” Making a steeple out of his fingers, Drummond gazed out at the dark shapes of the mountains, seemingly contemplating a solution. After a few moments, he asked, with uncharacteristic alarm, “What are we going to do about dinner?”

Charlie spent most of the night gazing at the empty space on the other side of the mattress. The closest he found to a diversion was watching the digits change on the clock radio.

At 5:14 Drummond banged on the door.

“You okay?” Charlie asked.

“I woke up this morning feeling as well as I have in quite some time. And I’m almost certain that Alice was kidnapped.”

“Well … yeah.” Last night Charlie had detailed the rendition five or six times in hopes of sparking Drummond’s memory of the ADM. To no avail.

Drummond made a beeline for the clock radio, snapping on Alpine folk music and turning up the volume. “I mean it was a straight kidnapping, as in an operation offering the safe return of the captive in exchange for something.”

That sounded pretty lucid. Charlie strained to hear over the accordions.

Seeing Charlie look at the radio, Drummond said, “In case of eavesdroppers. And in case of eavesdroppers who might have been able to filter out the music, I raised the heat-I hope you’re not uncomfortable.”

Noting the hot air whining through the registers, Charlie shook his head. “Enough about me. Do you remember all the plot points: Jesse James from the helicopter? Hidden ADM?”

Drummond sat at the foot of the bed. His eyes glowed with much more than just the moonlight spraying through the gap in the drapes.

Hallelujah, thought Charlie. Lucidity.

“If he were smart, what Jesse James told you is-”

“Lies.” Charlie had already concluded as much. “No, fifty percent lies, but you wouldn’t have any way of knowing which was which. I just need to catch up on a few things.”

“Shoot.”

“Had Alice been in touch with anyone?”

“Yes.” During the night, this had become Charlie’s leading theory as to the genesis of the rendition. “The other day she took, like, eighty-seven trains and buses to Zurich, went to a public library, and sent one of those supposedly untraceable Hushmails to the personal account of an NSA inspector general she trusts.”

“What did she write?”

“Basically, that she wasn’t dead, and that your old Cavalry pals had framed us for Hattemer’s murder in order to get the finding.” A presidential finding had waived Executive Orders 11905 and 12333 banning assassinations by U.S. government organizations, thereby enabling the Cavalry to off the Clarks with impunity. “She was hoping to open a dialogue, maybe get us off the Whack-on-Sight list. She asked the guy to reply using Hushmail.”

Drummond looked at the ceiling, pondering the matter.

Or so Charlie hoped. Drummond’s episodes of lucidity lasted forty minutes on average, but sometimes they were as brief as two minutes.

“I think the rendition is coincidence,” Drummond said.

“So you believe in coincidences too?”

“There are coincidences and there are unbelievable coincidences. It’s possible that someone ‘made’ her while she was in Zurich or en route, but given the extensive planning and practice a helicopter rendition of this nature requires, it seems more likely that the kidnappers were already well into preproduction. Also it’s possible that Alice orchestrated the kidnapping herself. She could sell the ADM for a king’s ransom-she doesn’t know it’s a fake, right?”

Charlie waved his dismissal. “I kept the secret from her not because I don’t trust her, but because there was no reason to burden her with it.”

“Jesse James leveraged your feelings for her,” Drummond said. “How could he or whoever he’s working for have known that you’d developed feelings for her?”

“Using a mosquito drone …” Charlie left it at that, averse to telling his sometime-puritanical father exactly what the miniature camera might have recorded.

Also Charlie was now wrestling with the fact that during his brief time in Spook City, everyone he’d met had either deceived him or tried to kill him. Even his own mother, who had faked her death when he was four-he’d believed she was dead until encountering her just two weeks ago, when she offered him and Drummond safe haven. Fifteen minutes later, she handed them over to Cavalry assassins before reversing course and getting herself killed.

And Alice herself was no innocent. When Charlie first met her, the day before he met his mother, Alice had posed as a social worker at the Brooklyn senior center that “rescued” his father. Her true goal had been-what else? — intel. In reality, she had no home, no money, and no family aside from her mother, who was currently serving the fifteenth year of a twenty-year sentence for murdering Alice’s father. Alice’s “rendition” might easily have been staged.

But Charlie wasn’t convinced. “No one, not even the most sociopathic spook, is as good an actor as she would have had to be,” he said.

“Probably so,” said Drummond. “The bond between you would have been obvious even to a drone. It was obvious to me, after all. We can also rule it highly unlikely that the rendition was a government operation.”

“Why?”

“They would have neutralized us. I’m a thorn in their side and too unstable to be deployed to locate a bomb, whether or not they know it’s a fake. And if they do know it’s fake, they certainly don’t want anyone else knowing, which is all the more reason to silence me. If they meant to send me bomb-hunting regardless, they would have opted for a path of lesser resistance than a highly chancy airborne op.”

“Like what?”

“They could have simply offered us immunity.”

“So we’re dealing with good, old-fashioned bad guys?”

“Bad guys with a window, however small, into the NSA or CIA. Maybe they have a confederate within one of those agencies.” Drummond sucked at his lower lip, a measure of self-restraint in Charlie’s experience.

“They’re going to kill her, whatever we do, aren’t they?” This was at the top of the list of questions that had kept Charlie up all night. “You never cooperate with kidnappers as a rule, right?”

“Actually, there’s good reason to believe they’ll let her live if we do what they want. Ninety-nine percent of kidnappers are in it just for the payout, and to get it, they have to trade their hostage.”

“Is there anyone we can go to? Her NSA friend, maybe?”

“No. Too risky for us. Too risky for Alice.”

“So then what are the options?”

“Just one: Cooperate.”

Charlie raced to prioritize his questions. Drummond might go days before another episode of lucidity. “Do you know where the ADM is hidden?”

Drummond shrugged. “I might. Let me look at the map.” He set a Swiss road atlas on the comforter and flipped it open. As Charlie was worrying about the choice of a local road atlas, Drummond whispered into his ear. “There’s a self-serve Laundromat on rue Joseph Compere in the Pointe Simon area of Fort-de-France, Martinique’s main city. As usual, the device is concealed within a Perriman Pristina model washing machine. This one is among a bunch of washers and dryers locked in the storeroom in the back. The manager is a cutout, which as you may know is a player who knows as little as possible. Her name is Odelette. She’ll have the key. There also may be a key to the storeroom in the gap behind the detergent dispenser and the wall. If all else fails, it’s not hard to detach the ventilation grate.”