Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

As he climbed aboard, he jerked the cord, starting the little outboard motor on the stern. Grabbing the tiller, he set a straight course. The raft shot ahead like a dragster just as a blinding flash cleaved the fog, followed by a boom so intense that his hearing quit, replaced by sticky blood and maddening pain.

A tower of water of biblical proportions rose from the disintegrating yacht. The force of the explosion swatted a helicopter out of the sky and tipped over sailboats as far away as the eastern shore.

The Zodiac shot into the air like a kite, Charlie clinging to it until he was no longer able to stay conscious.

He awoke at the center of a flock of tiny, sylphlike particles of light. He was seeing stars. Spectacular, but probably the result of a concussion, judging by the pain.

Shaking his vision clear, he found himself on the Zodiac, the motor still bubbling away, though icy water streamed through the holes in the hull, swamping most of the bow.

Chunks of the yacht had hacked into his running suit. The two layers of long underwear notwithstanding, blood coated him. Each wave that sprayed his wounds felt like a hundred fresh cuts. Still he was alive, and the knowledge that he’d succeeded in getting the bomb far enough away from shore relegated the pain to mere discomfort. He felt himself smiling, ear to bleeding ear.

A police boat sprinted from the eastern shore toward the shaft of smoke that had been the yacht, a quarter of a mile away. Through the scattered fog, he could see two more police boats charging from the opposite side of the bay.

As his hearing began to return, he discerned from the tumult of waves the whine of a motor, spotted the motorboat, and made out a figure at its helm. A woman. Hand held as a visor against the vapor, she was scanning the area where the yacht had been.

Alice!

Even in hazy silhouette, she was beautiful.

“Where are you?” she called out.

“Here,” he croaked through a throat caked with salt and blood.

She didn’t look his way.

He swallowed, then tried again. “Alice.” It came out as a wheeze. Something was seriously wrong with one of his lungs.

She steered away from the Zodiac.

Fog was resettling over the bay, shrouding the police boats in the vicinity of the yacht’s wreckage. Charlie doubted he would be able to get to them, meaning his survival would come down to a race between Alice and hypothermia.

He thought of firing the Glock to draw her attention. Before he could reach for it, the Zodiac’s bow rose sharply. He turned and looked over his shoulder.

Bream clung to the stern.

Charlie considered that he was hallucinating.

“She’s looking for me,” Bream said weakly, but all too real. Somehow he’d made it off the yacht and then clung to the Zodiac’s stern line.

“A lot of people are going to be looking for you.” Charlie reached for the Glock.

It was gone.

“You don’t get it, Charlie Brown. She’s with me. ” Bream still hung on the stern to the right of the motor. Evidently he lacked the strength to climb aboard. “I knew you and Daddy were in Switzerland because she told me. ”

Charlie recalled Drummond wondering if Alice orchestrated the rendition herself.

“That would mean she had herself kidnapped and shot at,” Charlie said.

“Exactly.” Bream seemed to exult in the revelation. “The whole point of the rendition was to give her an alibi. For her ‘captors’ we handpicked mercenaries who had a track record of running to intelligence agencies to get cash for tips, so the CIA would establish that she’d been the victim of a rendition. That way, who the hell would ever think she was helping me?”

Charlie regarded Alice through the thickening fog. She was leaning over her motorboat’s prow, still searching the waves and calling out. He made out a gun in her right hand.

“And she just happened to phone right when the plane was going down?” Charlie asked.

“We wanted you to give the spiel about Punjabi separatists,” said Bream.

“Otherwise she would have let the plane crash?”

“Otherwise we wouldn’t have set you up in a plummeting plane in the first place.”

“So it was nothing personal? Just another day at the office in Spook City?”

Biting back a grin, Bream nodded slowly.

“You’re just telling me this to distract me, aren’t you?” Charlie said. And hoped.

“You’re learning.” Bream raised the Glock. “Just too late.”

He had difficulty steadying the barrel, what with his lower half still submerged and lashed by waves and the rest of him swaying and lurching along with the Zodiac, but at a firing distance of six feet, even with gale force winds added to the mix, he would have excellent odds of hitting Charlie.

“You need me alive,” Charlie said.

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Cheb Qatada isn’t going to pay a dime for your services. You’ll want to know where the treasure of San Isidro is hidden.”

“Why would you tell me?”

“To distract you.” Charlie kicked the tiller as hard as he could. It swung the outboard motor toward Bream. The whirring propeller blades sawed into his pelvis. Hot blood pelted Charlie’s face and stippled much of the raft.

Bream tried to scream but got a mouthful from a wave. Still he fired.

The bullet severed the handle from the rest of the tiller. Charlie rolled toward the stern, snatched the handle, and swung it, batting the Glock away from Bream. The gun took an odd bounce off the stern and splashed into the bay.

Propelling himself away from the raft despite obvious pain, Bream plunged into a dark wave and, somehow, fished out the weapon.

Charlie dove for the far end of the raft.

Bream wrestled the tide to put Charlie in his gunsights.

The tinny sputter of a motorboat grew louder, capturing their attention.

The bow sliced apart the fog, showing Charlie a washed-out image of Alice at the helm. She was squinting down the barrel of her pistol, pointed at him. The sight was more painful than the bullet would be. All he could do was brace himself as she refined her aim and fired.

The air shook with the report. The bullet drilled through the haze, missing him by a wide margin.

Bream gasped. A wave swept aside a large lock of his hair, revealing a purple cavity in the side of his head. Another wave clubbed him, driving him to the bottom of the bay.

Charlie wondered if, in reality, Alice had shot him-or if Bream had shot him-and he was now spending his last throes in reverie.

A moment later, the motorboat was close enough that he could clearly see Alice’s face. She was smiling.

“Need a lift?” she asked.

He glanced at his raft, all but underwater. “Where are you going?”

Setting down her gun, she gathered up her bowline and tossed him the end. He caught the rope with both hands, then held on tight while she pulled the remains of the Zodiac toward her. When he stepped off, grabbing the motorboat’s bow, the raft disappeared altogether beneath the waves.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said as she helped him aboard.

“What’s that?”

“I love you.”

“Same.” She stood on her toes and kissed him.

Charlie liked to say that the best thing in life was to win money at the track. And the second best thing was to lose money at the track. In the three months after Mobile, he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, not counting his bourbon tab, which wasn’t far behind.

At least the losses came at Keeneland, the historic Kentucky racecourse famous for the Blue Grass Stakes as well as for its tonic effect on horseplayers. Sitting in the august grandstand, breathing in the horses and hay and fresh-mown bluegrass, Charlie often felt as if he were drifting back in time. He sometimes turned toward the thunder of hooves half expecting to find Seabiscuit in the lead.