Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

If not for the possibility that they were under surveillance, Charlie would have pumped a fist. “What about the code? Like last time?”

Twelve days ago in Manhattan, to escape confinement and make it appear that the two of them had died in the process, Drummond had detonated another ADM-bearing Pristina packed with a hundred pounds of plastic explosive-standard in real uranium implosion weapons in order to generate critical mass. Without critical mass, it was still enough to take out the vast underground complex serving as Cavalry headquarters. Arming the device had been a matter of entering the washing machine’s serial number onto permissive action links, a trio of numeric dials like those on safes.

As long as the ADM in the Laundromat worked the same way, Charlie was looking at a relatively simple trade.

“Yes, and just like the one in New York, dialing the numbers in reverse disarms it,” Drummond said, rising. He began to pace alongside the bed, as if the motion spurred his thinking. “Of course, Jesse James can’t be told any of these specifics. It’s the paid cutouts in a rendition who are the least predictable. They’re usually the sort you’d call to murder your wife. What we need to do is to go to Martinique, find the washer, then turn it over. We’ll demonstrate the validity of the ADM code at the same time Alice is released, everything synchronized, the classic hostage exchange. They’re probably expecting us to go to the Caribbean and to play it out just like that. Otherwise they wouldn’t have suggested that we rendezvous at an airfield.”

The mentions of “we” didn’t sit right with Charlie. “I can go to Martinique myself,” he said. “These days I could teach a course on fake travel documents and disguise. And once I’m there, it’s a simple trade. I can handle this myself.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Drummond’s smile belied his doubt. “I wouldn’t mind coming along anyway.”

“I don’t know, Dad. You’ve spent millions and risked your life more times than I can count just to get here and try the treatment. Also this is just the first time you’ve flickered on since we’ve been in Europe.”

“There you go. I need you to look out for me. And to remind me to take the pills.”

“You could stay at the clinic. The fee of twenty thousand euros a month includes a private room that you haven’t set foot in.”

“I want to go to Martinique with you because …” Drummond’s voice trailed off. He shifted his focus to the window. Outside, a silver streak of moonlight delineated the neighboring peak from the still-dark sky. He seemed to be searching for the right words. “I want to go for your son.”

Charlie felt the chill that accompanied lucidity’s departure. “I don’t have a son.”

“You ought to. Best thing you’ll ever do, trust me. That’s exactly what was on my mind when I woke up this morning, feeling so well.”

Moved, Charlie placed his hands on his father’s shoulders and drew him close. Although Drummond offered no resistance, he angled his head away. Charlie found himself doing the same. The boisterous music from the radio underscored their woodenness. Both broke free after maybe three seconds. They lacked practical experience in displays of affection, Charlie reflected. It didn’t mitigate the underlying sentiment, though. No way would he needlessly place his father in harm’s way.

“It’s just a matter of turning three dials, right?”

“Yes, arming the device is simple.” Drummond leaned against the doorframe, perhaps subconsciously blocking Charlie from going to the airfield without him. “The hard parts will be learning who these people really are, then preventing them from deploying the bomb.”

“Because once they have the ADM, a hundred pounds of plastic explosive is sure to follow?”

“Ninety-seven point eight pounds of penthrite and trinitrotoluene, to be precise. If they detonate that in the heart of Fort-de-France, they could kill ten thousand people. But I would think Jesse James’s people have a bigger target in mind than Martinique. The Cavalry’s worst-case scenario has always been that if customers use a device, better the collateral be a few thousand people than an entire city. But in every case, the CIA or its liaison counterparts have been able to neutralize the customers before anything blew up. In this case, the customers will be shrouded in cover. Peeling it away will be similar to determining, say, why a promising horse is racing at odds much higher than you’d expect. How would you go about determining that?”

Drummond liked to use the horses to simplify matters for Charlie. Occasionally he did it gratuitously, in Charlie’s opinion, venting dismay that his gifted son had buried himself at the track.

Charlie hesitated, wishing Drummond had chosen a baseball analogy instead. “They call a horse like that a ‘lobster on the board,’ meaning the tote board. Being wary of a free lobster, I’d study the horse’s past races, then nose around the track to learn about his recent workouts. Maybe he’s sick or injured or-”

“Good,” Drummond said without a smile. “The job here will be similar, but more perilous. It’s a matter of finding tracks and then following them through the jungle, back to the tiger’s lair. The counterintelligence folks call that ‘walking back the cat.’ ”

The more Charlie contemplated the “simple trade,” the more foolish he felt for having imagined he could simply waltz in and out of Spook City, a place where everyone lied for a living and thought no more of hiring an assassin than people elsewhere did of calling a plumber. A place where no horseplayer with a half-decent grasp of the odds would dare set foot. At least not by himself.

They called him Fat Elvis because there had been so many unsubstantiated sightings of him. And because he was overweight, or at least believed to be. He was also thought to be Algerian, and to have done a brisk illegal munitions trade in France during the past year. As far as anyone in the CIA Paris station knew, his name was Ali Abdullah. The closest any of them had come to seeing him was the soft-focus headshot on the most wanted lists.

Yet terrorists had no trouble finding him. According to numerous accounts, he’d sold a group of Moroccan agitators the mass of penthrite they used to turn a waiter and a family of five into ashes at a Parisian bistro last summer.

“He’s schtupping our nanny,” Jerry Hill said. They were in the small, bulletproof conference room at the U.S. Embassy in Paris that the CIA used to interview walk-ins.

“That would be great,” said Bill Stanley, favoring his prematurely arthritic right hip as he lowered himself into a chair on the other side of the table. “I’m speaking from the point of view of national security, of course, not your nanny.”

“Hey, if she’s collateral in terminating that prick, it’d be no huge loss.”

If Stanley had first heard Hill over the phone, he would have taken the voice for that of an elderly woman. In fact the walk-in was a fifty-five-year-old Californian with the hollow eyes and gaunt frame of a refugee camper. He wore a linen blazer over a tennis shirt and a pair of sweatpants. His hair, too blond for a man of fifty-or a boy of fifteen, for that matter-stood on end as if he’d just stuck one of his fingers into an electrical socket.

Ninety-eight percent of walk-ins were either nutjobs or knew nothing of value to the agency. Based on Hill’s appearance, the marines stationed at the embassy’s Avenue Gabriel entrance would have ordinarily bet their paychecks that he belonged in both categories. His physique was attributable to a rigorous Pilates regime, however, and his blond hair stood on end thanks to a stylist and a hair products conglomerate in which he owned a controlling interest. And the marines knew this not from any database but from Entertainment Tonight . Who hadn’t watched either the live television broadcast or the subsequent viral YouTube footage of Hill stabbing the air with his Best Director Oscar while delivering his expletive-laden I-told-you-so speech to a list of detractors dating back to junior high?