5 - Choker: Ike Schwartz Mystery 5 (14 page)

Chapter 26

By the time Ike and Ruth managed a quick dinner and the drive from Georgetown to Dewey Beach, it was nearly ten-thirty. Ruth dragged her overnight bag into the bedroom and flopped on the duvet.

“You’d better make your move quick, lover. I’m whipped and expect to be fast asleep in about ten seconds—just as soon as I can get out of this dress. What in God’s name possessed me to drive all that distance in a dress in the first place? I came straight from a faculty council meeting. I couldn’t have been that anxious to see you.”

“Admit it, I’m irresistible.”

“So is gravity, but I don’t dress up for it.”

“Personal magnetism, that’s me.”

“Bullshit. Help me out of this thing.” She reached behind her and fumbled for the zipper.

“Not so fast. Let me check for intruders.”

“Excuse me. Intruders? Like who, or is it whom? I never did figure that out. You have goblins hiding under the bed?”

“You’re close. Charlie’s higher-ups took exception to his lavishing money on me, so to find out what I was doing, put a surveillance system in here earlier. He said they took it out, but you never know.”

“Oh great. You’re off playing 007 and I’m about to star in an adult porn movie as your Bond girl.”

“Nothing adult about you, babe, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t, and resent the inference. These bugs…do they call them bugs? They do in books and things. What do real spies call them?”

“No idea. I’m not now, never have been, hope never to be one.”

“Again, bullshit. You spent your youth traipsing around the world causing trouble for innocent people and saving the world for God, country, and Big Oil. You probably killed people, too.” Her expression shifted as she realized that the remark, meant to be flippant, might have the ring of truth to it.

Ike said nothing but circled the room, peering into air ducts crevices and over the tops of furniture. He dismantled the phone and ran his hand along the dresser’s drawer bottoms, night stand, and even peered under the bed.

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Kill people? We’ve never really talked about that part of your life.”

“That was a long time ago—another life. It’s over and done with.”

“You’re sure? If some bad people burst through that door, what would you do?”

“Call 9-1-1.”

“You don’t have time. They have guns and knives and broken bottles—”

“Machetes, hand grenades, and vials of bubonic plague?”

“Okay, okay. You know what I mean. I’m serious. I need to know.”

Ike drifted into the bathroom and checked the mirrors, faucets, and shower head. “I’d do whatever I had to do to keep you and me alive.”

“You’d kill?”

Ike, his normally soft eyes turned to flint, stared at her. “I’d do whatever I had to do to keep us both alive.”

Ruth shivered and hugged herself.

“I think we’re clean. Hey, what’s wrong with being the star in a porn flick?”

“Not until I drop ten pounds.”

“I don’t think anybody would notice.”

“Your friends have no taste.”

“True, too true. I’ll have a go at that zipper now.”

“Turn off the lights…just in case.”

***

They lounged on the porch and watched the sun climb up from the ocean. Salty air carrying just the smallest hint of damp seaweed mingled with the more familiar aroma of fresh brewed coffee. Ruth stretched her arms above her head and yawned. “This is nice. We should do it more often.”

“We could retire and move to the beach. Then we could do it every day.”

She gathered her bathrobe around her and folded her arms. “Mmmm. Dream on, sweetie.”

“I could manage it…financially, I mean.”

“How? Not on your sheriff’s salary, you couldn’t.”

“I have assets. I don’t work for the money.”

“That’s the other reason you’d never do it. You’d be bored silly after three days of just sitting and watching waves.” Ruth gave him a knowing look, which he dismissed with a smile. “What assets? Are you holding out on me? How much have you stashed away?”

“Enough.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Nope.”

“Sheesh, here we go again…yep, nope. You could be a side-man in one of those old movie Westerns you collect. ‘Howdy Hopalong, you fixin’ to catch them there bank robbers?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Today?’ ‘Nope.’ Come on Ike, I’m your main squeeze, you can tell me.”

“You’re my what? Where’d you learn to talk like that? You’re a college president. Shame on you.”

“I learned it from a book, I think, maybe a TV show. It means I’m the honey in your Honey Bunches of Oats
,
so how much?”

“You’ll know the day you—”

“No fair. I have too much on my plate right now. You know that, and besides we had a deal.”

“Speaking of your plate, are you hungry? I could fry us an egg or something…toast, marmalade, bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats?”

“Had enough of them last night. Well, maybe not enough, but sufficient. If your friends were still tuned in they may not have seen anything but they sure got an earful. By the way, when did you become a top gun?”

“Excuse me, a what?”

“You never told me you could fly an airplane.”

“Never seemed important.”

“Listen, hotshot, if you and I are going to continue in our roles as the scandal of Picketsville, you’d better level with me. What other secrets are you keeping under your hat?”

“Don’t wear hats, as you surely know. Well, except when I have to put on that ridiculous ‘Smokey the Bear’ uniform hat.”

“I like your Smokey hat. You should wear it more often. It’s very fetching.”

“I’ll wear it to bed tonight.”

“Never mind. You haven’t answered my question. What other secrets?”

“I once won a gold medal in the Olympics.”

“Ike—”

“Checkers. I am an Olympic-level checker player. Never lost. Won the freestyle, alternating jump, and total kingings, all in the same year.”

“I give up. But understand this, you will tell me someday soon, or else. Now, tell me about what you’re up to with Garland.”

“I told you about the plane and his niece’s fiancé. Here’s the problem. He went off the air leaving a message for Charlie—not his intended, not the cops, or the Coast Guard, and not the usual places you’d call in an emergency. There was no call for help on the plane’s radio. That would be the logical and easiest thing to do if he were in trouble. Why fool with a phone when he could simply toggle his radio on and ask for help, you see?”

“I guess. Would it mean he’d seen or heard something that he thought the CIA needed to hear?”

“Probably, and the call didn’t sound like a man who thought he was in trouble.”

“So, why didn’t the authorities figure this out?”

Ike shrugged. “We think we know why they never found the wreck.”

Ike filled her in on his week, the flying, the boat, Bunky Crispins, and the suspicious blips on the depth finder. Since he couldn’t see the significance of it, he left out the missing channel and the sudden and mysterious appearance of a duck blind.

“But with all that, it still could be the…whatchamacallit, death thing.”

“Yes, it could be. Unless the Company connects the disappearance to whatever is turning their wine into vinegar, we may never know.”

“The CIA is worried about this? Oh, yeah, that’s right, they’re bugging our love nest. Do you think we might be blackmailed into giving up government secrets? That’s what they do in the movies, don’t they?”

“Not in the good ones they don’t. Besides we had the lights off.”

“They could have those night vision goggley gizmos on the camera. Remind me to lose the ten pounds. My coffee’s gone cold.” She placed the mug on the porch railing and cinched her robe more tightly around her waist. “What could he have seen that would warrant a call to his only CIA contact?”

“No idea. Possibly people in a boat without papers, something scary, who knows?”

“So what do you do now?”

“Either the CIA decides there’s a connection, or I return to contemplating sunrises every morning.”

“You don’t believe that, do you?”

“No, I guess not. Charlie and I will find a way to at least finish what we started—find the plane, maybe retrieve the body.”

“You know something, Schwartz, you’re just a superannuated Boy Scout.”

“With assets. Don’t forget the assets.”

“We’re back to that. You’re referring to some dollars you have squirreled away in offshore bank accounts, I assume.”

“Actually, I was thinking about my personal magnetism.”

“Forget it. You’re a hunk, but Hollywood is not on your radar screen.”

“Breakfast. Get dressed. We’re going to Rehoboth, and after that I want to show you a little park up in the dunes—a well preserved wetland—and then we can go to Lewes for lunch.”

“What’s Lewes?”

“Cute little town on the Delaware River. You need to see it. We may retire there in umpty-ump years.”

“Woo-hoo, sounds exciting. You sure you don’t want to put in a little adult porn time first?”

Chapter 27

Ike watched the tail lights of Ruth’s car as she drove away. She’d intended to leave that afternoon. But they had lingered. It had been a while since they’d had a chance to be together without either townspeople or university faculty serving as omnipresent chaperones. So, time had slipped by, and they, reluctant to end their moments together, had put off her departure. Two hours after dinner, Ruth finally packed and pulled away. Next time, he’d suggested, he’d rent a plane and fly her up from Roanoke. She just gave him a look. As she turned the corner onto the Ocean Highway, his cell phone vibrated.

Charlie talked a blue streak. Ike listened. Finally, after what seemed like ten minutes but was probably no more than two, he managed to wedge his way into Charlie’s rapid-fire monologue.

“Sorry, Charlie, but no dice. I am done with you and yours, professionally or otherwise. I said I’d help you look for an airplane. That’s it. International intrigue, snooping, guns and glory and all the crap that goes with it are not on my dance card any more. I am currently the sheriff of a small town in a remote part of the planet. I aim to stay there and prosper, and incidentally, stay alive. Also, I am on vacation. I said I’d help you find out what happened to your would-be nephew. I said three and a half weeks. I didn’t sign on for anything more and certainly not another hitch in the spook brigade or, worse, contract work for Uncle Sammy. That’s it—period.”

“Ike, you may not have a choice in the matter.”

“Excuse me? You’re planning to conscript me?”

“If we have to, yes. Ike, please listen to me. It’s a matter of National Securi—”

“Security? Don’t even say it, Charlie. Too much political dissembling and chicanery prowls behind that door. I don’t want to hear it. You have assets galore up there on the farm. You don’t need me. Send down a team and I’ll brief them. Then I’ll go back to the beach, to drinking coffee on my porch in the morning, contemplating early retirement, and watching the dolphins. They frolic by almost every morning, heading south along the coast toward Ocean City. You should join me.”

“They’re porpoises, not dolphins. Ike, the problem is if we do as you suggest, it’d be a domestic operation and a violation of our charter. Theoretically, our hands are tied.”

“I’m glad you had the decency to say ‘theoretically.’ I know you guys and I know that launching a domestic operation never bothered you all before—that is, as long as you weren’t caught. Besides, what’s the problem with turning this over to the FBI?”

Silence.

“Look, you guys are going to have to learn to live together. They’re nice people.”

“Yeah, yeah. But interagency rivalry is only a small part of this, Ike.”

“What’s the big part?”

“They won’t give a rip about Nick or the airplane. They will barge in like a SWAT team and we’ll lose all the intel that got us this far.”

“You have sources that you can’t compromise. Is that it?”

“In a nut shell.”

“Tell Fugarelli to call me, and if he can convince me that only Ike Schwartz, dashing sheriff and raconteur, can prevent the ‘end of civilization as we know it,’ I might reconsider. And they are dolphins—I looked it up.’”

“This is serious, Ike, and being facetious isn’t making it any easier. The truth is—it’s quite possible that the fate of the world et cetera…is at risk.”

“Time for a little truth in advertising here. What’s this really all about, Charlie?”

Ike stared at the phone and waited for what Charlie might say or, more accurately, might not say.

“As God is my witness, Ike, it really could be a matter of National Security—the real stuff…Ike?”

“I’m still not with you, Charlie, but we go back, so, okay, what do you want me to do?”

“Find that airplane, maybe find out what Nick saw and come in. The Agency is sufficiently persuaded that Nick’s disappearance and our latest intel crisis could be connected to give us a green light.”

Ike stared out the window at the surf breaking on the beach. Contemplating the ocean and the waves should have been relaxing. But he knew the ocean could be as fickle as international politics and, like international politics, could turn dangerous in an instant. One day the breeze blew in zephyr-like. The next, hurricane-force winds would roar across the ocean, destroy the beach and everything near it. One zealous fanatic with the wrong materiel could destroy a civilization. Unlike some of his higher-ups, Charlie had never been guilty of overstating the seriousness of anything. If he said it was serious, it was serious.

“Ruth is going to kill me when she finds out. Okay, you win. I’ll make the list. I’ll need divers. I’ll need equipment. I’ll need access to your satellite photo techs. They can start right now and see what they can turn up in Eastern Bay for the last year—every day and as often each day as they can. There has to be a connection with the bay and whatever happened on the Fourth of July. I don’t know what that is, but there has to be. Tell them to study ship movements. Maybe there’s something there. Hell, I don’t know. I haven’t done this for years. Focus in on the piece of land near that duck blind. By the way, you were supposed to run some G2 on duck blinds. What did you learn?”

“Duck blinds? Oh, yeah, not much. You need either a license or permission to hunt from them. It varies from county to county. In the case of the one you charted, you could only use it if the property owner said you could. That any help?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps there’s a connection. I’d planned to go on the water again tomorrow. If you can dig up that metal detector I asked for, with any luck I’ll have the precise location where the plane went down. It will take you that much time to get your game plan together. We’ll start Tuesday or Wednesday in earnest. We can send the divers down and maybe we’ll have some hard facts for you. I gather you will be out of sight on this one—providing backup and muscle if I need it.”

“You know it has to look civilian for as long as possible. If we need a raid, we’ll call the FBI. But you’re the point on this, Buddy.”

“Is your boy Fugarelli okay on this?”

“He doesn’t get a choice.”

“Wonderful. Get me divers.”

“You have a suggestion on that? Divers-Я-Us is not in my Rolodex.”

“Try Little Creek, Virginia. It’s the Navy SEAL base for the even numbered teams. The SEALs are used to working with you people. See what you can do. I’ll try to get a name and number.”

“Not you, Ike, us.”

“Three weeks, Charlie. No more, and get whatever is left of that surveillance junk out of my bedroom.”

“It’s all gone, I promise.”

Ike hung up and called Frank Sutherlin.

“Frank, your brother, Danny, is a Navy SEAL, right?”

“Last I heard, yep. You need to talk to him?”

“What team?”

“Four. But I never know if he’s there or not. Those guys come and go, you know. Danny said he’d report some days for duty in the morning like nothing was going on, and the next thing you know he’d be in Afghanistan or Somalia or some other not-so-nice place.”

“I need to contact him about a small job.”

“You want to contact the Navy SEALs about a small job? With respect, you know, Ike, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s like getting out your shotgun to solve a small problem with a pesky fly.”

“I can’t talk about it, Frank, but it’s pretty important.”

“You say so, it’s so. I’ll get the number.”

Ike wrote down the headquarters number and left it on Charlie’s voice mail, with a reminder to ship him the metal detector. Then he called Bunky Crispins and arranged for a week’s charter.

***

Tony Fugarelli did not look happy. Against his advice, the director had ordered him to take Charlie Garland’s lead on the missing airplane. It wasn’t as if he begrudged the expenditures. It just galled him to divert assets on a wild goose chase using a burned-out ex-agent. It seemed a colossal waste. Garland was on the phone, his secretary said. With a small groan, he picked up.

“What?”

“Schwartz is on board and will be at the wreck site tomorrow.”

“You mean the presumed site. He doesn’t know for sure where that plane went down, and even if he finds it, what the hell do we do with it?”

“You need to relax, Fugarelli. Listen, if it will make your day easier, I will be more than happy to assume the operation’s overall direction. I’m in the book. You can check.”

Fugarelli already knew that Garland, the putative PR flak, was, in fact, authorized to run an operation. How and why, eluded him, but in his years with the Agency he’d learned not to be surprised at anything.

“My ass in the sling on this one, Garland. You screw up and it’s my pension.”

“I can have that changed.”

“How can you do that? Never mind, I don’t want to know. You put it in writing, and the business is yours and yours alone.” He slammed the phone down and opened the second file on his desk—the one describing his retirement benefits. He only had to survive one more year.