Once a Spy (28 page)

“Brooklyn’s so obvious that, ironically, it will provide an element of surprise. Also I have a safe house there that no one else knows about. For years, under an alias, I’ve rented one of the little offices in the back of the Desherer’s building.”

For more than a century, Desherer’s Sweet Shop on Bedford Avenue, with its iconic art deco front, was a favorite destination of every kid in Brooklyn. Every kid except Charlie, that is, and not by his choice. “So all of the times I wanted to go to Desherer’s, your litany of horrifying facts and figures about sugar …?”

“I didn’t make those up. But I did have an ulterior motive. Desherer’s is as crowded as any place in the neighborhood. If I were wary of surveillance, I could enter the candy store, then exit from the offices having changed my hat or coat or face. It wouldn’t have done to run into you there or have the people who worked there see you with me.”

As they crept down a dark slope, Charlie reflected that as he learned more of the truth, the corresponding scenes from his youth were no longer as bleak.

“I’ve always kept a flight kit there in case I ever needed to disappear,” Drummond said. “It has travel documents and enough cash to tide us over until we can draw on the Bank of Antigua account.”

Charlie sensed that another bleak scene was about to be re-rendered in Technicolor. “What Bank of Antigua account?”

“The numbered account with eight million dollars. Remember, I told you—”

“Yeah, I know, but at the time I figured you were delusional. With all due respect, you’re okay now?”

“Just a bit chilly.”

“The thing is, you said you made the money at Perriman.”

“Correct.”

“But at Perriman, you really were just an appliance salesman, right?”

“When I started there, as a loyal company man would, I elected to take my bonus in stock options, which were close to worthless in the aftermath of the
Chubut
fiasco. But my end of the business ended up
being very profitable—bombs that cost relatively little to make sold for hundreds of millions—and it was least conspicuous to keep the profits in Perriman, so the stock price increased.”

“So why didn’t you ever buy a new car? Or a new château?”

“My role was middling sales executive, not multimillionaire arms dealer. Also, there was nothing I needed. The Olds is reliable; I rarely drive it more than five thousand miles per year—”

“Well, if you want to get me a Christmas present this year …” Charlie felt giddy in spite of the enormous odds against surviving to spend a dime of the fortune.

“There is one hitch,” Drummond said.

“It’s eight million in Antiguan dollars?”

“You’ll need to leave the country, likely for an extended period of time. You’ll be able to say no good-byes, and while you’re away, you can’t have contact with anyone you know. You won’t be able to maintain connections to any aspect of your current life.”

Charlie considered shedding his current life a significant net gain. Only one negative came to mind: He would miss having that beer with Helen. Which was silly, of course. She was a spook. Probably she’d meant to poison the beer.

“I suppose I can handle it,” he said.

The tree limbs and needles began to hiss. A helicopter rose over the hillcrest.

Mimicking Drummond, Charlie stopped and became a random mound of snow on the hillside. As the helicopter thundered overhead, the only movement on the hill was that of snowflakes stirred by the rotor blades.

The ship flew on to the ridge behind Charlie and Drummond.

The racket receded into the usual babble of wind and woods.

“Get up now, both of you, nice and slow,” came the voice of a man behind them. Charlie saw the shadow of a machine gun. “Hands up high where I can see them.”

40

Charlie rose
inch by inch, so as not to spur the unseen gunslinger into precipitous use of his trigger. Charlie was confident that Drummond had had the presence of mind to take the Colt from Candicane’s saddlebag when he took the fountain pen. When Drummond stood and followed the instruction to put his hands up, however, Charlie saw no hint of the gun.

“I could stand another fifty-fifty proposition,” Drummond said. Charlie understood this to mean Drummond required a diversionary tactic, like at the battlefield.

“Zip it,” the stranger barked.

His black-lacquered machine gun was distinguishable from the night by a filament of light. Although Charlie saw him only in silhouette, it was obvious the barrel of his machine gun was shaky. Probably not coincidentally, the man was chattering furiously—oddly, without making any sound. He collected himself sufficiently to steady the barrel, point it at Charlie, and get out, “Time to say your prayers.”

An idea struck Charlie. “Sir, first, there’s one thing that, legally, I need to inform you,” he said.

“What?”

Charlie looked past him, in the direction the helicopter had flown. “Our helicopter has you locked in its sights.”

The stranger peeked over his shoulder at the dark sky. “I can’t even see it anymore.”

Drummond’s bullet hit the man in the head. He fell dead long before
the brash report ceased bouncing around the ridge. Charlie was at once sickened and glad the diversion worked.

“Are you okay?” Drummond said.

“Better than him,” Charlie said numbly.

“We need to hurry.” Drummond scrambled back to his horse blanket.

“You think he might have a car around here somewhere?” Charlie asked.

Drummond packed snow into the bald spots on his blanket. “Maybe, but that shot was probably heard for miles. If there’s a road down from here, they’ll block it.”

Charlie pulled his blanket back on with all of the joy of getting into a cold bath.

“Fine diversionary tactic, by the way,” Drummond said.

“The old there’s-someone-behind-you trick? Who’d have thought it would work?”

“It wasn’t that simple. There was nothing distinctive about his appearance or dialect. Yet you deduced he wasn’t in league with the helicopter. How?”

“Oh, that,” Charlie said. “Lucky guess: I didn’t hear anything when he was chattering. I got the sense he was missing a lot of teeth.”

“Ah, symptomatic of methamphetamine usage?”

“Like a big, old red nose is to whiskey.”

“I see.” Drummond rolled onto his haunches, pulled his blanket over him, and shoved off.

“Fine diversionary tactic, by the way” was as much commendation as Charlie ever would have expected. “The young and impressionable profit more from constructive criticism than puffery,” Drummond had long maintained—an adage Charlie speculated had been originated by a childless Spartan. With a coping sigh, he resumed crawling downhill. The ground seemed particularly coarse and cold.

“You have a good nose,” Drummond said. “I was thinking of the first time I saw it. At the office, when you were ten. I let you go down to the basement. Do you remember?”

“No.” Charlie braced for a recounting of an early trip down the Easy Way.

“There was another stairwell, down to the subbasement, but we’d walled it off before we moved in; we needed to keep the existence of the subbasement secret from the legitimate employees. And none of them ever guessed a thing. But you said, ‘Dad, there’s a secret room down here!’ I asked, ‘What makes you think that?’ You just shrugged, so I dismissed it as childish fantasy. On the subway home, though, you blurted out, ‘The closet opens inward!’ Which was the key. We’d made the stairs to the subbasement accessible by what appeared to be a utility closet, which was kept locked. You’d noticed there were no hinges on the outside of the frame. You intuited that the door opened inward—which closet doors customarily do not—meaning the door led somewhere. Ten months we’d been there and no one had thought of that. I had it fixed that night.”

Drummond was fond of citing ability to frame underachievement. Charlie girded for the inevitable drop of the other shoe.

Drummond said no more.

When they’d crept another hundred yards downhill, Charlie considered that Drummond had told the story in appreciation. It kindled in Charlie a good feeling, like winning. He wouldn’t have thought such a nice moment could arise from capping a meth head, but there it was.

As they forged onward, the terrain didn’t bother him as much.

At a back table at Miss Tabby’s, Fielding read the message, forwarded to him by Pitman. Two minutes ago, a man on the ridge texted the pool player:

TEH 2 DEA FUX R HER

  “There are some who will tell you that with all of its haste and lack of punctuation, text messaging is the death of communication via the English language,” Fielding told Pitman over the phone. “This message, however, is evidence of its singularly descriptive powers.”

“‘DEA fux’ is singular,” agreed Pitman, adding a chuckle.

Obviously the kid was just sucking up.

“What I meant was the readout of the latitude and longitude of the
guy’s cell phone to three thousandths of a degree,” Fielding said. “Shakespeare couldn’t have done any better.”

“Oh, that, of course. I put the hunting pack into a lasso perimeter around the coordinates.”

“Good. Also, it occurred to me that the rabbits must be using tarps or something like that, layered with snow, to mask them from the infrared. So pass along word to the boys in the hunting pack that if they step on a mound of snow and it says ‘Ouch,’ shoot.”

41

Still shrouded
by the snow-packed horse blanket, and on hands and knees that felt frozen solid, Charlie followed Drummond to the edge of a cliff. As the branches overhead thinned, he braced for a sky full of search craft.

Other than a few unhurried snowflakes, he saw only blackness. Below was farmland, miles of it, dormant aside from an old truck meandering along a narrow road, headlights every so often revealing a dark house or outbuilding.

“I like that one,” said Drummond, pointing to an enormous dwelling, with three parallel gambrel roofs intersected at right angles by a pair of A-frames. It appeared as if five different houses had been roped together.

Someone had gotten carried away with their Design Your Own Country Mansion software, Charlie thought. He understood that Drummond’s appraisal wasn’t based on aesthetics, though. No lights burned in or around the house. The long driveway wasn’t plowed. There might be a vehicle they could use, a weekend station wagon perhaps.

Reaching the house would require a simple two-hundred-foot downhill crawl—simple, providing no sniper lay in wait.

That threat made the relatively slow descent feel like a prolonged freefall. Charlie began perspiring for the first time tonight. Halfway down, his shirt was soaked through. The wind, no longer impeded by woods, threatened to freeze him in place.

They made it to the cornfield at the base of the slope. Here a sniper would have seen the field, in Grimm brothers fashion, sprout two grown men. Drummond let his frosty camouflage fall so that it conformed to
the ground, taking on the appearance of just another patch of snowy field.

While shedding his blanket in the same fashion, Charlie picked up, on his periphery, the silhouette of a stout man with a rifle. His heart leaped, and the rest of him followed.

Drummond simultaneously drew the Colt and whirled around.

At what proved to be a scarecrow—a good one, replete with dungaree overalls, plaid shirt, worn cowboy hat, and a hoe that, in the dark, at a certain angle, could be mistaken for a rifle.

“If I were a crow, I would have been scared to death,” Charlie said. Embarrassment burned sensation back into his cheeks.

With a brief smile, Drummond stole toward the house, choosing a route through the darkest shadows. Still shaken, Charlie tramped after him. Halfway, without explanation, Drummond veered toward the barn, an archetypal, apple-red two-story with a gable-roofed hayloft.

The sliding door was unlocked. Drummond raised the latch and threw his weight into the handle, grinding the wheels through a season’s worth of decaying leaves. The building released a shaft of stale air tinged not with the hay Charlie had anticipated but gasoline. The source was a vintage Jeep Wagoneer. With its wooden side panels, the old sport utility vehicle fit the classic barn the way a round-back sleigh went with an Alpine chalet.

“I should be able to start it, provided it starts at all,” said Drummond. He felt his way through the darkness and opened the driver’s door.

“Let me get this one?” Charlie said. He jangled the keys suspended from a hook on the inside wall.

The Wagoneer’s dome light showed a lopsided grin crease Drummond’s face. “Maybe I ought to learn more about the Easy Way,” he said.

And so it was that—shivering, windburned, cut, aching, and painfully aware a Hellfire missile might at any moment turn the barn to splinters—Charlie, for the first time he could recall, shared a laugh with his father.

42

If any
among the handful of drivers on the Stonewall Jackson Memorial highway—a narrow, winding country road—were to look into the four-door GMC pickup, they would have seen a heavyset, prematurely gray-haired man at the wheel. Wearing an insulated red flannel shirt and a scuffed Hillcats baseball cap, Benjamin Stuart Mallory, known to colleagues as “Bull,” hoped to pass for a worker on his way home from the late shift at one of the area mills.

On the seat beside him, hidden beneath his coat, was a glossy black Steyr Tactical Machine Pistol, the weapon of preference in testosterone-fueled crowds. The shooting he was planning would be passed off as crossfire in a meth dealer turf war. He liked that the Steyr was light and small enough to be held in one hand, yet capable of delivering the same firepower as a submachine gun. Its primary disadvantage was accuracy, but even if 90 percent of his rounds went awry, he could still do the job several times over.

He turned off the road at the position Pitman had texted him, a driveway leading to a darkened, tin-roofed farmhouse, a half mile below the ridge where the slain meth cook had been found. Bull parked in such a way that a passerby might think he’d stopped to collect his mail.