Once a Spy (29 page)

He lowered his window enough to allow the nose of the Steyr out, then took up his PVS-29. The difference between this monocular and a typical night scope was its proprietary light intensifier that amplified more electrons and thus delivered an unbelievably bright and sharp image. He’d once asked one of Langley’s “Toy Makers” exactly how many more electrons. “Thirty-eight thousand bucks worth,” the man replied.
From a hundred yards away, on this overcast and particularly dark night, an ordinary scope would have enabled Bull to distinguish only the gender of the occupants of the vehicle presently approaching, and maybe not even that much. The PVS-29 turned night into a hazy afternoon, meaning he would have little difficulty recognizing rabbits Drummond and Charlie Clark.

The vehicle was a late-model Toyota coupe. At the wheel was a young woman in her mid-twenties, fair-haired with a roundish face. Pretty enough, Bull thought, that it was peculiar she was out so late alone. Of course the rabbits might be hiding below the window line, one of them poking a gun into her hip. Also peculiar: she was speaking; she was too young and too normal-looking to be talking to herself.

When the Toyota was within seventy or eighty yards, he saw a glint of a cell phone bud in her ear. Her brow was knitted. Her lips pursed, then opened into the shape of an O, and finally snapped shut.

“‘Mom!’” he repeated to himself as the Toyota shrieked by.

A minute later came an SUV, an old one. Again he focused on the driver. A young man, also by himself, between twenty and thirty years old. At nine
P.M.
in areas such as this, where residents woke with the sun, 80 percent of vehicles were driven by lone men, and of them, 90 percent were between twenty and thirty. At a hundred yards, the driver looked like Abbott or Costello, whichever was the fat one. In other words, no resemblance to Charlie Clark, whose photo glowed on Bull’s BlackBerry. Also the fat man was singing too boisterously for someone who’d been carjacked. Bull read his lips too: “Stayin aliiiiive.” He let Abbott or Costello stay alive.

A few seconds later came an even older SUV, a late-seventies Jeep Wagoneer. In the front seat were two men. The driver was white, between twenty and thirty. Of course. He wore an old hunting cap, side flaps down. Hats of any sort ignited Bull’s suspicion, especially when worn in a heated vehicle. But the Wagoneer was old enough that the heat had probably given out years ago. Parts and labor for a new heater core would run more than the old Jeep was worth.

When the Jeep was close enough, Bull saw that the driver, unlike Charlie Clark, had a buzz cut. Maybe old Drummond had come into possession of a pair of scissors, or a hedge trimmer even, and sought to
alter the shape of his son’s head. Probably he’d learned that trick on day one of Disguise. Then there was the driver’s beard, like a billy goat’s, the sort seen on the up-there mountain folk. Whenever people see a unique feature on a person, Bull knew—and Drummond Clark certainly knew too—they fixate on the feature rather than on the person. A fingerful of elementary adhesive, chewing gum even, followed by a few hair clippings, and a man had a beard that would surely have strangers asking, “Does he know a woman who finds that attractive?” or “How does he manage to keep it out of his soup?”

Bull had mere seconds to make up his mind whether to fire. He devoted the time to the passenger, slumped in an awkward recline, as if passed out. His face was pressed against the window so that it was effectively hidden. He too wore a hat, a cowboy hat, with a wide brim that hid all except for a few dark strands of his hair. Drummond might have adhered his son’s relatively dark hair clippings over his own white hair beneath the hat line. Drummond wasn’t nearly as beefy as this redneck though.

Patrons of Miss Tabby’s, Bull reckoned.

Once the Wagoneer had passed, he texted the license plate number to Pitman and Dewart, just in case.

An hour later, Dewart received confirmation that a traffic camera at the Virginia-Maryland border photographed the same license plate. He passed the pertinent information to state troopers in the vicinity, who soon found the Wagoneer in a rest stop parking lot, empty except for the well-dressed scarecrow in the passenger seat.

43

At dawn
on weekdays, ten piers full of commercial fishing boats brought Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay to a boil. One by one they joined a bobbing traffic jam to the day’s best fishing spots. With them always was the forty-five-foot stern dragger
Sea Dog
. Every so often she bypassed the good fishing spots, and her captain ignited the pair of supplementary ten-cylinder diesel engines hidden in her belly. No one guessed it, what with the
Sea Dog’s
dented hull and ungainly array of masts and poles and tangled netting, but she could cruise at twenty knots, meaning Nova Scotia could be in sight in time for breakfast the next day.

“Ideally we can take the
Sea Dog
to Halifax,” Drummond said to Charlie, who was still unable to resist running his fingers through the stubble that used to be his hair. They were in a gas station minimart a few miles into Maryland, weaving around hanger racks of Baltimore Orioles souvenir T-shirts, heading to the pay phone to call the
Sea Dog’s
captain.

Every few seconds a big rig blew past on I-95, rattling the flimsy building. The only other customer was a middle-aged man focused on keeping a low profile himself; he was selecting condoms. The woman at the register appeared poised to nod off. As benign as the two seemed, Charlie no longer regarded anyone without suspicion.

“From Nova Scotia we can obfuscate our trail with a stop at Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, the French territory ten miles southwest of the Burin Peninsula,” Drummond said. “There we should have no difficulty finding cargo ship passage to Europe.” Their eventual destination was a clinic in Geneva. “And if at any time before we’re at sea, I start blathering
about the Merrimack River or for whatever reason you’re unsure of what to do, where do we go to ground …?”

On the drive from Virginia, Drummond had drilled Charlie on contingencies which, unlike a Fairview Inn, were not on the law enforcement agencies’ Fax Blast list. As if reciting a mantra now, Charlie replied, “Fleabags, flophouses, and whorehouses.”

“Correct,” Drummond said.

“Sounds like it would make a good TV show, doesn’t it?”

Amused, seemingly in spite of himself, Drummond deposited two quarters into the coin slot and dialed a Los Angeles number. Fifty cents bought three minutes of talk time to anywhere in the United States. After one fuzzy ring, a synthesized voice said, “You have reached a number that is either not working or has been disconnected. Please hang up and try your call again.”

Undaunted, Drummond remained on the line and hit 2.

Nothing happened.

He waited two seconds, then hit 2 twice more.

“Three,” came the synthesized voice again. Then the line went dead.

“Excellent,” Drummond said. Turning to Charlie, he added, “Don’t worry, it’s not contingency plan time yet. The captain of the
Sea Dog
is a former operative of the old school, which is to our benefit, because Fielding and his team are better equipped to pick up the trail when silicon chips are involved. ‘Three’ is the number for the dead drop where we’ll book our trip.”

44

The Chevy Malibu
, which Drummond acquired in Delaware, gobbled up the remaining miles to New York State. Finally, Brooklyn rose at the far end of the Williamsburg Bridge, the twinkling lights and two-in-the-morning vapor giving the city the appearance of a distant solar system. At the wheel, Charlie blinked repeatedly to keep exhaustion from locking his eyelids shut.

“A salty Coleridge?” asked Drummond from the passenger footwell.

He was doing the crossword puzzle from the Newark
Star-Ledger
. Before Charlie could even place the name
Coleridge
, Drummond had filled the boxes of 44 Across with “ancient mariner.”

“Not that a wrong answer makes a difference,” Drummond said. “Forty-four is what matters, the approximate latitude of Halifax.” He pointed to the puzzle. “This will be our message to the captain.”

Charlie suspected Drummond was in the midst of one of the rarer episodes of lucidity, several hours in length. Another thirty or forty minutes was all they would need in order to take care of business and hit the sea.

They crossed into Brooklyn, quickly nearing the dead drop site. “If we can, let’s find a spot on this block,” Drummond said, pointing to a bustling nightclub.

Charlie had assumed they would leave the car someplace out of the way, like a dark alley. This block was dicey to begin with, and it looked like Hoodlums Night at the club. “But if the Cavalry finds the car, they’ll know we’re here,” he said.

“They’ll find it, there’s no doubt about that. Our hope is that when they do, the car will be at the chop shop to which our accommodating car thief will have driven it. Most of those establishments are in New Jersey and Westchester. Make sure to leave the keys in the ignition.”

“Got you. Leave the motor running too?”

“Now you’re learning.”

Charlie clambered down the stairs into the Atlantic Avenue subway station. There was a chance, he thought, that the Baltimore Orioles fleece he had on—purchased at the minimart—could give him away. But at least it wasn’t the Yankees.

Drummond, who’d put on a new ski cap as well as a canvas barn jacket he’d found by the Wagoneer, descended at a more leisurely pace, fifteen or twenty steps behind Charlie. They didn’t appear to be together—or at least, that was the idea.

Charlie made it to the vending machine first, bought a Metro Card, pushed through the turnstile, and entered a tunnel that amplified the footfalls of the few other passengers and the sporadic shrieks of far-off trains. He emerged onto a drafty D train platform. The small crowd of prospective passengers had the hollow eyes and restlessness of having been waiting too long.

In a security mirror, Charlie saw Drummond scratch his left shoulder, the “all’s clear” signal. Charlie fell into step with him to the men’s room at the far end of the platform.

“What if it’s out of order?” Charlie asked. Out of Order signs dangled from subway restroom door handles as often as not.

“We have a backup,” Drummond said, pointing to the trash can beside the men’s room door. Stout metal legs raised its base an inch above the floor. “It’s easy to leave an envelope beneath it without attracting any notice, while tying a shoelace for instance. The problem is, contrary to popular belief, the platform is cleaned regularly.”

The men’s room was open, fortunately—unless the stench were taken into account; the ventilation grate looked to have been degrimed last in
the ’70s. Assuming his appointed position at the sink, Charlie rinsed his hands and tried to breathe as seldom as possible. The spotty mirror gave him a view of an empty room in which the white tile walls and floors were grayed with filth and the ceiling tiles had greenish stalactites—of what, he didn’t want to guess.

Drummond entered, heading straight into the stall in order to place the vinyl pouch that had contained the Chevy Malibu owner’s manual and now held the crossword puzzle turned cipher.

“What if, for any of fifty reasons, this place gets shut down after we leave?” Charlie asked.

“The cutout either will have a key or some other idea,” Drummond said as he placed the pouch in a cavity behind a loose wall tile. “Speaking of things going wrong, you need to know that once the captain gets the note, he’ll have someone use the ten digits I added to the puzzle—the phone number of the Mykonos.”

“The diner on Bedford?”

“Right. If the trip’s a go, Stavros will flip a switch and light the neon waves of steam above the cup of coffee on the sign. We’ll be able to see it from Desherer’s. A help wanted flyer inside the door, on the other hand, means we need a new ride. But at the least, there will be handwritten instructions at the base of the flyer.”

That all this sounded reasonable to Charlie spoke to the way his thinking had adapted in a day. “So I guess we always had to get dinner at the Mykonos for work reasons?”

“No, we only went because Stavros was a friend of Tony’s. You didn’t like it?”

“Just not the food.”

“Sorry, I never thought about it one way or the other.”

“It’s not a big deal. It never killed me.”

“I probably wasn’t as attuned to that sort of thing as I might have been. That, at least, I can make up to you.”

“That’s okay—you don’t have to cook.” Charlie winced in recollection of the few times Drummond had tried.

“I know. I said ‘make up to you.’”

“What do you have in mind?”

Drummond exited the stall, thumbs-up—the drop was successfully loaded. “I was wondering if you would like a ski house in the Swiss Alps,” he said.

Charlie was delighted, probably as much as he ever had been. “Let’s find out.”

45

The chrome-banded
façade of Desherer’s Sweet Shop was, in Charlie’s opinion, dazzling. Tonight was the first time he’d seen the rear of the building, which was essentially a pile of soot-blackened bricks. There were nicer tombs, he thought. Roomier ones too. Trailing Drummond into the alley required stooping and turning sideways to fit into a narrow, clammy passageway. Six steep steps, carpeted with moss and pungent with mildew, brought them down to a squat steel door. Drummond extended his fingers into one of the many dark crevices alongside it.

“I’m sort of surprised an actual spy’s safe house has a hide-a-key,” Charlie whispered. Neighbors slept above, street traffic was barely audible; the loudest sound was the clicking tread of a rat in a nearby alleyway.

“A retinal scanner, like the ones at the office, might have been a bit conspicuous here,” Drummond said.

Charlie joined in the search. When his fingers struck something slimy and jiggly, he yanked out his hand. An old rubber glove flopped out after it.

Drummond caught the glove. “Good work,” he said.