The Spy I Loved (5 page)

Lindsey
had the impression Dale simply wasn’t capable anymore, and yet
living in a shitty little apartment in Sudbury all winter just
encouraged him to drink. They had tried that and she was sort of
grateful when he said he didn’t want to do it again. The camp was
the only real home he’d had in decades, and he saw no reason to put
down firmer roots in any town. What few friends he had were around
here. For Dale, to go to the coffee shop once a week, Sunday
mornings regular as clockwork, was a kind of social life. But even
he had reluctantly agreed that having Mark around in the winter
would be a help and it was better if Dale wasn’t left
alone.

Dale’s
first little heart attack three years ago had been a godsend. He
had woken up and realized that he really did need another man to
help run the place. There would be someone there in an emergency.
Dale knew that Lindsey must ultimately leave. She wondered if he
had even missed her, and yet he must—he must. He simply didn’t know
how to say it. To say it would be to confront that ultimate
goodbye. That would be the day when she packed her bags for good,
threw out a lot of childish stuff and then walked out of his life
for all intents and purposes. Dale probably assumed she’d just get
a job as a substitute teacher or something and stay in
Espanola.

Never.

The
guests were a distraction from all of that other world, that
private world.

There were Japanese businessmen in Cabin Four. They were
pretty easy to read. So far they had rented about half of the
rather tacky porn videos on hand, in a dingy back room with
an
Adults Only
sign above the door. When they saw her coming and going, they
would spurt Japanese back and forth. Nothing shocked her anymore.
She took their money and handed over the receipt for the DVDs and
that was all she cared.

She had
her story, and she figured everyone else did too. Some were merely
more interesting than others.

Hopefully
hers would turn out as well as any.

Don’t
expect too much—

Cabin
Eight was a trio of young married couples, and they hadn’t been
seen since check-in. It wasn’t all that different from a bunch of
undoubtedly married Japanese businessmen, away from their docile
little wives and rice-paper houses, drinking scotch with the boss
and pretending they really cared about trout and small-mouth
bass.

What you
really
want is a promotion.

A title,
and a plastic sign on the door.

Suck-holing around a bad boss was the life for
them.

No price
was too high.

They were
so bored they spent their time drinking and watching bad
porn.

She tried
to avoid obvious mental pictures of wedded bliss, the quiet and
confident companionship, exhibited in at least one friend’s
marriage,

When she
took a good look at some of her other friends’ choices, it was easy
to be contemptuous. Contemptuous for what little they had settled
for. What was terrifying was how quickly some of them had settled
down for the long haul, dishes and laundry and diapers, kids, kids,
kids, and ultimately, a long twilight followed by death. Their
menial jobs would eventually kill the men, most of whom did not
enjoy a long and golden retirement. Sometimes it seemed the whole
town was like that—the whole world as she had known it.

Toronto
had been an education in more ways than one. Toronto was a
glittering paradise, with a million desperately lonely, isolated
people. They all lived close together and in the same
place.

Most of
them at least had somebody.

Soon, two
more years, she would have no one—she’d be just starting
off.

So far she had avoided all that. Not that there weren’t
longings, even temptations. There was always that distant
purpose—to get her degree in History and get the hell out of
Dodge City
as Dale
called it.

Perhaps
there was a smidgeon of contempt there after all. Or maybe it was
jealousy. They were at least having a life. Her monthlies were
almost due and that might have had something to do with her mood.
The notion that one was responsible for one’s own thoughts and
feelings was vile in that it just added to the problem. It was a
piling-on of the guilt.

The
pain.

The
misery.

The thing
to do was to focus on the work and push the bitter, lonely thoughts
aside.

With all
of those cabins strung along their sandy road under the pines,
someone was always wanting something, someone always had a problem,
and someone always had a question. There was always someone coming
and going, always someone in the store, always someone on the dock,
either setting out if it was early or coming in if the hour was
late.

It was
only after a long and busy day that she thought of Liam
again.

***

Liam
Kimball trolled slowly from lake to lake, up and down the river,
studying what any casual observer would have thought was a fish
finder. This was clamped to the gunwale at a convenient height and
distance. What the casual observer might not see was below the
surface. With the monitor plugged into the trailing aquatic sensor
array, he could follow a pattern and survey the bottom, looking for
anomalies. But a bigger problem right now was what to do about the
opposition.

His
instinct was very strong about these two. They kept popping up, not
that some of the other guests didn’t as well. Some of those other
parties made much more noise, they were animated in a way these two
weren’t. These two didn’t even seem to like fishing. It was like
they just couldn’t act. They lacked enthusiasm in everything, even
in barbecuing and drinking beer. They sat there beside their
campfire at night, hardly speaking, and yet hyperaware of
everything he was doing. When coming and going, one of them always
stayed around to keep an eye on him. They took turns doing their
small errands.

This
spoke of duty, and an unwelcome one at that.

The pair
of males, of curiously similar features and stature, speaking an
obscure dialect of Farsi whenever anyone was in earshot, had dogged
him all over the lake the day before. They had gone past him half
an hour previously, studiously ignoring his wave and smile. This
attitude alone would have drawn attention to themselves, but they
had quickly returned to his little end of a much larger bay. He had
the rod hanging, a spinner bait out on a couple of hundred feet of
line. This was mostly for show. He didn’t much care if he caught
anything or not—he had already found a hole along the south shore,
not too far from The Pines, where he was pretty sure to pull out a
couple of fat rainbow trout whenever he needed them. He was getting
a lot more action than his observers.

For
surely that’s what they were. The one on the rear seat sat there
glowering at him, and the other one couldn’t help but turn and look
at Liam from time to time. The action was visible five hundred or a
thousand metres away to his keen eyes. It was interesting to look
through binoculars, and see a man staring right back at you, also
through binoculars. As things stood now, they were less than two
hundred metres off. The problem was that Liam had gotten a
hit.

There was
something down below, just a few metres below the surface. Getting
a look at it with them there was going to be a bit of a problem. It
was now plotted on the map, for better or worse. On impulse, he
turned the prow and opened up the throttle. Cutting back to the
east, heading farther up the river and lake complex that was the
Spanish River system, his line circled back around and under the
boat. For whatever the reason, the silver sides of a big fish broke
the surface. It came down sideways, head and gills clearly visible
from the belly side, and it seemed like he had another one on the
line.

He
throttled back.

First,
pull in the fish, second, head up the lake…wait a while and
possibly come back.

He was
only going to put up with so much of their interference.

Chapter Four

Liam’s
search pattern wasn’t as random as it might first appear, only
enough to keep any opposition guessing. He doubted if they even
knew why they were there—only having orders to keep an eye on the
tall Englishman and report any suspicious activities. All overseas
stations had such low-level operatives. They were often naturalized
citizens, stringers called in on odd jobs, where known embassy
staff would stick out like a sore thumb. They watch us, and sooner
or later reveal themselves, and then we watch them.

Sooner or
later we catch one. If they’re small fry, we throw them back and
see where they go.

Bigger
fish get squeezed, for information. For cooperation—for going
double.

Bigger
fish ended up in the hot seat. He knew that from
experience.

The bigger the fish, the bigger the prize.

By
fishing in one bay, then putt-putting along the shore, trying out
not the next inlet, nor the one after that, but random inlets,
creek mouths and the like, he was eliminating some of the
possibilities.

The
object, (or objects) as he was referring to it, would light up his
display like a Christmas tree when he found it. Theoretically. What
was interesting was the vast debris field, mostly mapped now, over
hundreds and thousands of man-hours. That debris field covered tens
of thousands of square kilometres. This was the heart of its
densest area, but that wasn’t saying much. There were three
superimposed fields, in an elongated, sort of oval pattern. It was
like looking for meteorites, the odds not much better. His own
station had low-level field hands as well, but the object (or
objects) had eluded them as of last autumn, when the search was
reluctantly called off. If they didn’t find it soon, the odds were
they would be overtaken by events. What this meant was that EMERALD
could be superseded by a newer invention, process or technique.
Sooner or later it must happen.

What
sometimes happened was that they found out through other channels
that somebody already had it somewhere and that they were too late
to do anything about it.

So far,
all indications were that this was not the case, but the
intelligence and anti-terrorism game was nothing if not
meticulous—at its best. If the enemy did get hold of it, they would
be sure not to advertise it. Not at first. Only when they were
assured that it worked and they had their own in place would they
let it be known, defying other powers to do their worst. A terror
organization might never be able to use EMERALD. They would simply
sell it to fund further efforts elsewhere.

At its
best, it was a job, a fairly easy one with significant
perks.

At its
worst, it could be wet work indeed…hopefully that shouldn’t happen
here.

The
trouble was that one never really knew.

Even now,
men and women in ones and twos tramped up and down innumerable
logging roads, portages and what was a rarity in these parts, an
actual township road, laden with backpacks. They all had similar
electronic arrays. Their activities were hidden as well as
possible. The whole man-portable version of the array weighed six
pounds. There were only a limited number of them. The land-based
arrays were mostly gas-sniffers, but the principles were the same.
Their covers varied from ornithologists doing field work, to
geologists working on a book, to college students on their summer
jobs, which involved seismic testing. They drilled holes in the
ground, set off small charges and read things off on a screen. They
were looking for non-existent gas and oil, but only if someone
asked, which people so rarely did. In summer the population was ten
times what it was in winter. This made a difference. When everyone
was a stranger, nothing really stood out as remarkable.

Slowing,
Liam turned into a slow approach to the narrows. The bottom was
very yellow and sandy, and yet the swell, returning from two angled
shorelines, heaved and crested in sharp pyramids of crystalline
water that unfortunately did much to obscure what might lie a metre
or half a metre down…hopefully.

There
were three pairs of rather informal buoys, plastic jugs lining a
channel that couldn’t be over two and a half feet, three at best.
Boats of a certain size simply couldn’t make it in or out of this
little arm. Rocks were obvious threats, but the weedy growths could
snap a shear-pin pretty quickly if it wound up around the
prop.

There
were two narrow points of land, coming down from the hills above on
his left and right. The noise of his motor reflected back off rocks
and flat stone faces, and then the water turned green ahead. Liam
opened the throttle and was quickly lost to sight around the first
big bend.

He had a
funny feeling that they would follow.

It wouldn’t be enough to just sit there and wait for him to
go past them on the way home. They wanted to know what he
was
doing.

There was
one big bay, a sandbar and then a swamp down at the far end. The
prospect of what might be there had been kind of eating at him. The
sun stood high in the sky, and he reached for his water bottle.
Life would get complicated it they found anything really
interesting.