Keith Thomson - Twice a Spy

In Alice fashion, Charlie reversed in favor of another spot-one more attempt at detecting surveillance.

Nobody, at least as far as he could tell.

The sleepy Zweisimmen airfield consisted of a few planes and a tiny air traffic control tower atop a proportionate general aviation building constructed of logs and painted mustard yellow; it looked more like a ski lodge.

Drummond’s eyes darted about. In the throes of dementia, Alzheimer’s sufferers retained the ability to bake a cake or drive a car, even create a Web site. After four decades of clandestine operations, Drummond’s faculty for circumventing danger was hardwired.

“Everything okay?” Charlie asked.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

Unfortunately, taking advantage of Drummond’s intuition was often like straining to hear a radio with patchy reception. “I mean, are we safe here?”

“What about our escape route?” Drummond asked.

“You said that if we were going to be in a situation where we required one, it would either be at the chalet, during our walk down to the Hauptstrasse, or when I turned the car on and it started to explode.”

“Oh, right.” Drummond acted as if he remembered. “And just so we’re on the same page: Objective?”

“Find out if Alice is okay.”

“Yes, good. And then-and only then-do we get on the plane to Mexico.”

Seeing no point in correcting him, Charlie turned off the engine and popped his safety belt. Drummond made no move to exit the car.

“Everything okay?” Charlie asked again.

“What time is the meet-up?”

The parking lot swirled with bitter gusts of sleet and the waxy fumes of aircraft hydraulic fluid. As the Clarks made their way to the general aviation building, Drummond reminisced-apropos of nothing, Charlie hoped-about a stealth fighter plane that had crashed in the Nevada desert during a 1979 test flight.

Jesse James bounded from the cabin of a small jet and intercepted them. Elevated to perhaps six-four by cowboy boots, he cut an imposing figure, his blue jeans and even his ski jacket conforming to muscles that were rocks. He walked with a rolling gait, arms swinging and beefy hands half open, as if poised to toss aside anyone who got in his way.

“Mr. McDonough, great to see you again,” he said to Charlie, and before Charlie could respond, he reached out to Drummond. “I’m J. T. Bream. And pleased to meet you.”

Drummond shook Bream’s hand. “Likewise,” he said with too much affection. “What’s your role in this?”

“Just a glorified courier.”

“Well, very nice to meet you, sir.”

Bream pivoted so that his back was to the terminal, his smile fading. “Now, I need you boys to follow me over to the jet and act like you’re looking the thing over. We want Jacques and Pierre inside to believe that you’re a couple of suits deciding on whether or not to hire me to give you a lift to Zurich.”

Charlie looked to Drummond for reassurance.

He caught his father bounding toward the jet with the zeal of a child about to take his first flight.

“So you weren’t kidding about him, were you?” Bream said to Charlie.

“Wish I had been. Please don’t tell me he needs to fly the plane.”

“I’ve got that. Please tell me he knows where the thing is hidden.”

“We can talk about that when we have proof Alice is okay.”

“Relax, Chuck. We want the same thing here. I don’t see a dime until my people get their device.” Bream unpocketed his satellite phone and clicked a button at the base of its oversized display panel. A video of a small room popped up. It had pale blue walls but otherwise was so featureless that it could be in a motel on the Jersey Turnpike or a budget flat in Bangkok. Alice sat on the only piece of furniture in sight, a plain sofa that possibly doubled as her bed. She was reading a magazine.

Charlie felt a swirl of joy tempered by fear that this was old video.

“Can I talk to her?” he asked.

“You are,” Bream said.

As if alerted to a new entry to the room, Alice turned, then rose and hurried toward the camera, beaming, apparently, at an image of Charlie.

A potent mix of joy and guilt left him speechless. He managed, “Are you okay?”

“Wonderful,” she said, “with a bow on top”-one of her codes signifying that the “wonderful” had in no way been coerced.

Charlie tried to sort through his jumble of thoughts, not least of which was their predicament. “I forget what my there’s-no-gun-to-my-head code is,” he said. “But there’s no gun being held to anybody’s head on this end. Where are you?”

“For some reason they won’t tell me-”

Bream pressed a button on his phone. The display went black. “Okay, obviously, she’s fine. For now. So where to?”

Charlie needed to be cautious. “Martinique.”

“I already knew that. Can we be any more specific?”

“Dad said the city of Fort-de-France. The way it usually works is, once he gets to a place, things become familiar to him. Don’t worry, we’ll find the thing.”

Wariness slitted Bream’s eyes. “Wonderful.”

Now that the satphone call was over, Alice expected that her captors would again secure her wrists and ankles and duct tape shut her mouth. The tape came off only when they fed her pieces of nutrition bar or let her sip water through a long rubber tube-a precautionary measure, she thought, which they were wise to use.

Her mastery of Shaolin kung fu included the ability to sling objects with extraordinary speed and accuracy. She could toss a playing card at forty miles per hour, creating force sufficient to stab an adversary and even, if she struck certain minute pressure points, put him into a coma. If she could get her hands on the satphone, she could throw it at the man she thought of as Frank-he had the Frankenstein monster’s broad shoulders and lumbering gait. His face was hidden by a novelty-store black cotton mask with reflective bulbs over the eyes. He’d yet to say anything within her earshot.

She knew less about her other captor. She called him Walt for his gleaming blowback-operated semiautomatic Walther PPK. By waving the pistol one way or another, he indicated Get up from the sofa or Sit back down on the sofa and let Frank tie you up again .

Once she took out the two of them, she would take her chances with the helicopter pilot, who in all likelihood was spending his break time in an adjacent room. Since being chloroformed in Gstaad, she could remember only this room, which might well be a cell in an upscale gulag. A better guess was an apartment in Geneva, rented under an alias. Or an isolated Swiss country house, in which case the duct tape over her mouth was a small bit of deception: She could scream her lungs out here and no one would hear. The blacked-out windows, unrelenting Muzak from unseen speakers, and an electric air freshener that sprayed a sickly sweet vanilla scent were all intended to keep her from picking up clues.

Still, she had some hints. Her old NSA-sponsored black ops unit had developed something of a niche in renditions. For discretion’s sake, the number of captors was usually kept to three, all mercenaries with allegiance only to their numbered offshore bank accounts. They were fed a cover story regarding the operation. The duct tape over their captive’s mouth was meant to keep the captors from hearing the truth.

Alice hungrily eyed the satphone. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you’ll let me check my e-mail?” she said to Frank.

He shook his head.

So he understood English.

“How about just letting me know the score of the Patriots game?” she tried.

If he were to check the Web, she might snare the phone and launch it toward Walt.