The Spy I Loved (12 page)

His
thoughts kept turning to the girl. The odds were good that the
opposition had noticed their departure the other night. He wondered
what they might have thought of that. To show her any sort of
attention only endangered her. His cabin had not been entered in
their absence. Liam had taken a calculated risk. What exactly they
might have made of his computer, the only thing he’d left behind
that night, was a matter of guesswork. They had already had a look,
though. It was surprising they hadn’t just lifted it. That would be
an intelligence coup by any normal standards. If they could crack
into it. Ordinary thieves should have simply taken it, in which
case after a certain number of attempted entries, the system would
crash, thoroughly wiping itself in the process.

To fool
with the thing and not initiate auto-destruct took some kind of
special knowledge—or instinct.

Then
there was the whole problem of Lindsey herself.

He had no choice but to stick around for a few more days. His
cover was blown, but that didn’t mean they knew very much. However,
some things were clear. They knew he was here, and one must assume
they knew why. To think otherwise was too optimistic. The
opposition knew that a satellite had gone down from media coverage
if nothing else, and they knew approximately where to look. They
had some
minimum
of knowledge regarding EMERALD. From their point of view, to
recover the debris, hopefully the guidance system and surveillance
hardware, all of the onboard software, was extremely difficult.
They were operating,
borderline
illegally, in unfriendly territory. They would
only step over the line when it seemed worthwhile to do
so.

Why not,
if possible, keep an eye on the Canadian and allied searchers in
the hopes of snatching it out of their hands at the last
minute?

The logic
was good, and now Liam was in the hot-seat. Whatever he had found
was hot, in the radioactive sense, and heavy, in that it seemed to
be about seventy kilograms in mass. It was also buried in the muck.
It would take some digging and some lifting to get it out of there.
All the while, agents from at least one unknown entity were all
over them like a dirty shirt.

It was
when he caught a big mature rainbow trout in the middle of the lake
that he had the perfect idea. He took the opposition’s transponder
chip out of his pocket. Holding the gasping trout carefully, head
up, he stuffed the chip down its gullet. He grinned to see the
thing’s muscles contract and then it went down.

He didn’t
see where it went, but he was certain it hadn’t come back up,
taking a quick look around his feet and even checking to see if had
fallen on his shorts.

When
removing a hook from the aggressive and voracious perch of the
area, he’d been amused to see not only his own little minnow, a
universal bait, but the thing was tucked in amongst what looked
like a half a dozen more.

It was
like they were all looking out at you with the most solemn and
accusing look on their faces, mouths gaping and gills still going
in some cases.

He held
the fish over the side.

“
There you go, lad. Lead them buggers a merry chase.” The
thing would move at about the right speed and it would take them a
while to figure out the deception.

By that
time, he would be well on his way.

***

God, it
was hot in this country.

Aubrey
Herschel was a rogue CIA agent. With contacts among some of the
world’s major arms dealers, he was living in an airless stucco
villa jammed between the sea to the north, and the coast road and
the desert to the south. He had a long list of warrants and
indictments waiting for him if he should be identified in the wrong
country. He would be arrested on the spot and held for extradition
hearings. He was wanted by the U.S., the British, and the Germans
on a long series of money-laundering, espionage and arms deals. In
the last couple of years, he’d only been outside of his present
situation a couple of times. These were rather hairy expeditions,
to places like Switzerland and Liberia, attempting to negotiate
some kind of immunity in exchange for something—anything really.
U.S. officials did not come here and there were times when he had
to go to them.

This was
especially true now that Mossad had openly called for his
assassination in some influential U.S. diplomatic and intelligence
circles. The Russians, the Chinese, weren’t too happy with him
either. On balance, he was always welcome in Chile—if he could get
there, and was something of a national hero (going by the medals
and orders bestowed upon him by a grateful Supreme Commander, the
late Mister Abdullah Jones) in Togoland, on Africa’s equatorial
southwestern coast.

The trouble with taking refuge in South America was how to
get there from here. If he showed his face in London, Paris,
Lisbon, South Africa, it really didn’t matter where, in order to
get a connecting flight, they would grab him for sure. He had very
few illusions on that score. As for more indirect methods of
travel, he had a luxury car, a gift from his protector. It didn’t
have a hope in hell of crossing the thousands of miles of desert to
the south. There were unfriendly or tightly controlled borders to
east and west. Going by sea was an option. The only trouble
there
was getting a big
enough boat…enough fuel, a captain. There was the problem of
evading detection during escape and even afterwards. On the high
seas he was fair game for anyone.

His
present protector had been very good to him, by his own lights at
least. At first it had been a God-send. It tended to pall over
time. You couldn’t get any decent wine, you couldn’t get a decent
cheeseburger, and pizza was unheard-of. He was damned sick of
Sigrid by this time. She was becoming a screaming harridan, soused
with gin by noon most days, and wracked with her own fairly
rational fears. He couldn’t even send her out of the country—she
was as hot as he was, and the Mahdi would take a keen interest in
their reasons for going.

There
were no really good excuses any more.

Speck was on the line. Aubrey had a long list of cut-outs,
shell companies registered in a number of handy tax and investment
havens. Speck was listed as the director or CEO of more than one
such entity. There were holding companies within holding companies.
If he could nab EMERALD, it was a bargaining chip in more than one
sense. He could sell it elsewhere, being already
persona non grata
in all
the nice countries where he had once lived. Or, he could ransom it
back for his own freedom and the right to go home. He didn’t give a
shit who ended up with it, all he wanted was immunity—in writing,
from the federal prosecutor and the Department of
Justice.

He had
offered his testimony in any number of cases—one of the reasons why
requests for meetings on neutral territory with certain officials
in the State and Justice departments had been granted.

At this
point in time, he would be prepared to testify to all sorts of
things. He was an embarrassment to all of his former friends. He
was a gift to his enemies. His former colleagues were all retired
and writing their sanitized memoirs.

He was
the scapegoat in more than one book.

It was
him they wanted more than anything.

He could
never go home. That was the reality. Not as things presently
stood—and so the urgent need for EMERALD. The trouble was the
change in administration. The new president was a liberal and a
cost-cutter when it came to military expenditures. This included
the intelligence community. A new broom swept clean, and Aubrey’s
old cronies were on the outs. Their replacements were responsible
for some kind of a budget, no matter how much of it was secret and
off the books. Someone had started asking questions at Langley and
from there it spread outwards. He was a big liability. He had been
created by them, and he had made them rich, helped them accomplish
their goals in a dozen shit-ass little countries. That’s gratitude
for you.

He loved
the work.

Aubrey
had his own agenda, fighting the enemies of America. He had sucked
them in ever deeper, and now they would destroy him to cover their
own asses. The truth was that he had gotten a little too big for
his own britches, a little too pushy, a little too rich now come to
think of it…

And now
he was near enough to going broke that he had, feigning reluctance
all the way, accepted an allowance from the Mahdi.

Stuck in
this godforsaken country as he was, he needed something to
sell.

The fact
that he was destabilizing the West kept him in good graces with his
protector. His protector also had him under heavy, full-time
surveillance. This much was a given. While he treated all of the
household staff members with the utmost civility, even liked one or
two of them, the fact was that they owed their loyalty to someone
else.

Someone
who would kill them and all of their family members if they screwed
up in the slightest. Their bodies would hang in the marketplace for
all to see.

The bulk
of his U.S., U.K. and other suppliers had dried up, just as
abruptly as they had clammed up, when sufficient legal pressure was
applied or threatened behind closed doors. The Mahdi was also
becoming more difficult to appease. If Aubrey couldn’t come up with
a handful of light assault choppers, and if their ancillary
chain-guns and TOW wire-guided missiles didn’t materialize soon,
Aubrey might be lucky to get out of the country at all. To say
there was a lot riding on EMERALD was an understatement. He had
other irons in the fire, but none of them looked as promising or
carried the sort of weight EMERALD did.

“
Speck. My man. What’s shakin’?” Aubrey thought he was cool
when he was merely insufferable sometimes.

“
Things may be heating up in regards to the Dominion stocks.”
This was how they always referred to EMERALD. “The future looks
very bright.”

“
And?”

“
I’ve reassigned a couple of our people to another
division.”

“
Ah.” Aubrey thought it through. “So what
happened?”

“
A hotshot trader, some new young guy. Made them look
silly.”

“
Hmn.” Aubrey puffed an indifferent cigar and watched the fan
blades lazily circling overhead, feet up on the end of his desk and
a wrinkle or two of irritation ruffling his high, patrician brow.
“And might I hazard a guess as to who this new young guy
is?”

“
It’s Kimball.”

Aubrey
thought long and hard. Kimball. They said he was good. They also
said he was washed-up. They’d put him out to pasture. The thing was
to trust your people on the ground and not try to micromanage from
the top.

“
Well, we can’t have that now, can we?”

“
Ah, no.” Speck chuckled.

If Speck
could deliver, he stood to make a handsome commission. As for the
people on the ground, how they handled their assignments was their
business and he had always allowed them a certain amount of leeway.
Speck was a businessman, a consultant of sorts. He looked up to
Aubrey Herschel, the man who had raised him from the muck and the
mire, taught him to abhor blood and violence for its own sake, for
this would ultimately be unprofitable. That’s not to say it might
not be useful from time to time, for surely it was.

It was
very useful. Mister Herschel would get what he asked for if Speck
had any say in the matter. However, it was better not to bother the
boss with too many details.

Aubrey
had to be kept in the loop, as he was financing all of
this.

How
everything was actually supposed to be accomplished, seemed below
his notice at times. What mattered to Aubrey Herschel was results.
Speck reported in greater length, and then the two rang off, each
convinced the other was a brilliant man but also a fool, useful
enough for the time being.

***

Lindsey
was at the front desk, still flustered by the angry attitude of
Mister Borz and Mister Lom.

It
wasn’t just the boat incident, or the fact that Dale had wanted to
charge them for the repair until Mark talked him out of it. He said
he’d seen it before. It could happen to anyone. It could happen if
they went over a board or a log, without even noticing it. As it
went past the transom, it could kick up and rotate and take out the
drain plug, which was normally expanded in place and held there at
low speeds by the outside water pressure itself. At high speed, the
boat was supposed to be self-baling, hence the name.

Then
there was last night.

Last
night was the kicker. She’d seen quite a different side of Mister
Kimball.

It might
have had something to do with quite a number of errant
bottle-rockets, coming from the front porch of a surprisingly-drunk
Liam Kimball. She might have been wrong about Liam—he might be
capable of losing it as well as anyone, and he had said more than
once that he was sick leave. When she asked him to stop, he just
laughed and did it again, which made her look stupid and
ineffectual. He reeked of booze and seemed playful rather than
vindictive. When she finally got him to stop, he’d gone over and
apologized profusely, the two dark little men taking it not very
well. That might account for their going off in a huff, though. It
was just one more thing, although she was sure there was more to it
than that.