The Spy I Loved (7 page)

Navigating around the area took some skill.

A small
pond might appear on the map, with a name and everything, and yet a
much larger body of water a half a kilometre away on the other side
of a row of hills might have no name at all. At least nothing they
could discern. What the locals might call it was another thing, but
how would you ever know, unless it was properly marked? Their
reports needed to be thorough, and precise.

You
needed to know what the hell you were talking about.

Chapter Five

Emil was
cross. The drain plug might be his fault, but he wasn’t in the mood
to be fair with Conrad, (not his real name, but then neither was
Emil’s) who had laughed outright on realizing it was nothing
serious. Conrad’s first fear was one thing, an unattractive thing
to see, but his own impotent rage was something else. It did not
speak well for his self-control. It was such a tedious job. Perhaps
mistakes were inevitable.

The
trouble came when Emil leaned way over, and the plug was way down
low on the starboard side. Conrad squealed like a girl. The boat
leaned heavily in that direction. To run the motor, Emil was using
his right arm, which necessitated sitting on the left side of the
motor, facing forwards. It was disorienting to have to lean across,
hanging half upside-down, trying to ram the plug in and get the
spring-loaded rubber plug’s expander lever to snap shut. All the
while, the heaving black water was barely a foot from your face.
Trying to change seats in the surging backwash of other boats was
trying, and then he got a slap of cold water right in the face when
a bit of chop hit the transom dead-on.

Conrad
baled and baled, offering half-witted suggestions, when he couldn’t
see anything from there. Conrad must sit up front and try and keep
the boat level as water sloshed back and forth. He knew nothing and
that’s why Emil had taken charge of the boat, the vehicle, any
sophisticated operation or piece of equipment they came across on
their peregrinations. Emil was supposed to be training Conrad, but
the powers-that-be sometimes forgot that not everyone was
suitable.

The goal
of training was to produce a field agent who could and would
operate independently. They needed the proper support and direction
of course, but they must be able to do the job and complete their
mission regardless of risk or difficulty.

A field
agent’s greatest asset was his ability to listen.

He’d told
the man several times.

Conrad
was not a good listener, the mark of a proper fool.

Conrad
always nodded and agreed with him in that insolent and yet
half-absent manner, and that irritated Emil for some reason. It was
a cold and dangerous business they were engaged in. The stakes were
very high, and nothing he’d seen in his partner so far inspired any
kind of confidence.

The real problem with this job was that it was first and
foremost
exposed
—whoever thought they could establish and maintain a cover
out here were nuts—and secondly it was unbelievably
tedious.

Emil’s
instinct was that there was something there.

Englishmen, agents of this particular ilk and caliber, didn’t
just turn up for long periods of extended angling and trolling for
no reason.

They were
too valuable elsewhere. This one had been reassigned, according to
their sources, for health problems. Kimball had served for several
years at the embassy in Instanbul, that international entrepôt of
arms deals, spying and espionage…and betrayal. Not all embassy
staffers were spooks, but this one just had that look.

The
Englishman might be meeting someone, he might be looking for
someone or something.

Or, he
might just be bait. He’d left an obvious trail in that car of
his—anyone who saw it had remembered it. They didn’t have enough
information, and there were many questions to be asked. Driving all
the way from Montreal, when he could have just taken a regional
flight.

That was
a big sacrifice just to establish a little cover. It was a good
eight-hour drive, sharing the road with buses, transport trucks and
the nine-foot tall pickup trucks that were the vehicle of choice in
this northern country.

Occupied
with such thoughts, Emil paddled the boat to the nearest shore.
Conrad kept spinning the boat with his overly-enthusiastic efforts
and it was all Emil could do not to backhand him in the throat with
the paddle. It was the very same shallows and strand where Mister
Kimball had left his boat. The marks of the sharp prow were there
to prove it. The Englishman had big feet going by the
tracks.

They
leapt out, and dragged the boat higher, with water now flowing out
of the transom plug again.

“
All right. Let’s get her unloaded and see what the bloody
hell is going on.”

Looking
around at the tree-clad hillsides, they could always whittle a
wooden plug and stick it in with some spruce gum.

If he
tried telling that to Conrad, the fellow would probably just
laugh.

That
knowledge might save his life someday, and for one reason or
another, Emil decided not to tell him.

You signed on to be a martyr, my brother.

Let it be so.

***

A light
thunderstorm rumbled overhead. The rain was warm as it fell. Liam
had turned one final corner, convinced that if they were following,
they were a good long ways back. He had taken the precaution of
removing their illicit little transponder. He set it high on a
rock, sticking out of the water in a shallow cove. All he had to do
was pick it up on the way home, act innocent and no one would be
any the wiser.

If they
caught on, the opposition team would know they were blown. It was a
risk he had decided to take.

Surely
they would be, surely they must be checking that display. And yet
the smartest thing they could do would be to change the routine, to
do the unexpected. That’s what transponders were for, after all. He
cruised on for a couple of more kilometres. They wouldn’t watch the
thing for every minute of every day. Liam’s casual behaviour and
their uncertainty dictated to a certain extent how the opposition
would play it. Watch him when they could, check up on him every few
minutes, and have a continuous track of where the boat went when
not in their direct observation. That would be about it. They would
have a constant feed from the transponder, via their portable
system. The signal, or pulses of signal might be going somewhere
else, with people watching that screen constantly. Instant updates,
instant analysis, with far greater resources than a pair of field
agents normally had. That depended on who they were, who they were
working for, and how much funding they had. It was the digital age,
with all of its disruption of archaic systems and technologies. No
industry would be immune in the long run.

These
were all very interesting observations. He turned in, slowing and
looking for his spot.

Shutting
off the motor, he had judged it perfectly. The boat nudged its way
into the shallows. Liam hopped out, getting his old sneakers wet.
He’d brought them for just such a purpose. He dragged his boat up
on hard, smooth rocks, a veritable boulder garden, where in spring
flood the small creek passing through clefts and gaps pushed
through hardy trees and greenery. He never would have done it on
sand.

With the
motor tilted fully up and locked in place, the only real problem
was going to be getting her out again. He gave a good yank, feet
locked in position, straightening his knees and putting his back
into it.

Aluminum
grated on rocks. He pulled and the boat slid forward another two or
three feet with a lurch and a bump. Saplings whipped back up from
underneath it, and he went around behind the boat and pulled more
out from under it.

There was
a low, white bed of gravel just off her prow. To put her down in
there would be to lose her. Liam sank down on yielding weeds and
underbrush after removing his knapsack and laptop from the boat.
The mosquitoes weren’t too bad, but if he stayed long there would
be more.

Blackflies were more of a problem in the bright light of day,
and he was always swotting around the ankles. They were
surprisingly smart, coming in behind the knees, going for the backs
of the arms and also the middle part of the back where it was hard
to get at them. Sure, it was instinctive, but
how did they know
which end was the
front and which end was the back?

He would
have lunch, transfer data from sensor array to laptop, and then
from the laptop to head office as it was euphemistically called.
Good old Universal Experts was a front for something a little
darker, possibly a little more romantic. It was hard to know what
to do if the opposition didn’t turn up.

He would
have to wait and see.

When in doubt, do nothing
, didn’t
exactly apply here.

There
were outboard motors out there, as the unmistakable note of more
than one came on the breeze. There were a few others when he
concentrated, but they were all much farther off. From his
position, in the very last bay, if any boats came in he would know
it. With a bit of luck they would keep going and swing around when
they got to the end, mystified by his disappearance down a dead-end
inlet that just kept getting shallower and more weed-choked the
further one went.

This bay
was special and if the rain kept up and his luck held, Liam was
going to do a bit of diving.

Computer
simulations were based on the last known trajectory, (or
trajectories), of EMERALD and its debris. The tracking stations
were far away and thus below the horizon. The best simulation
showed the probability was high for this end of the lake. The
heavier the object, the farther it would bounce. The fact that the
payload module had been equipped with a low-level emergency system
was the only thing that had saved it from complete
annihilation.

Unfortunately, the main parachute had tangled and its
high-drag streamer effect had only slowed EMERALD, not lowered her
gently to earth as befitted such an expensive payload, a half a
billion in top-secret technology. It was concluded that the
booster’s self-destruct mechanism had malfunctioned. This should
have been disarmed upon entering orbit. The package was relatively
safe then and it had its own ability to maneuver. The mission might
still have been saved. The unexpected detonation had blown its own
payload out of the sky, damaging the emergency recovery chute when
it did.

This was
better than having a rocket spin into a major city somewhere with
most of its mass remaining and at full throttle.

There was
always a bright side.

***

Emil and
Conrad ended up suffering the ultimate humiliation. Seeing their
plight, or at least suspecting something was amiss, judging by
their loud voices and angry gesticulations, a party of anglers,
four older men in a bass boat with easily three hundred horse-power
on the back, turned around, came back and stopped to inquire what
the problem was.

Conrad in
his idiocy had suggested a tow, and before Emil could stop them,
the men on the other boat had snagged a line onto the bow. The next
thing he knew everyone was aboard. They were gunning the
throttle—and headed back to base, which was just where he didn’t
want to go. Their motor was strapped with bungee cords to the
middle seat and their feet were soaking wet. Conrad’s sleeves were
soaked from baling. Sitting in the trailing boat, feeling like a
proper fool, there was no calling out over the roar of the boat
motor ten metres ahead of them. Emil knew that, because he had
tried a couple of times before sinking back into sullen
resignation.

They had
a stick, slightly tapered, which they had jammed into the hole from
the inside of the boat. The hinged drain plug seemed to have been
both undone and then knocked askew, or possibly bent deliberately.
Leaking continuously since setting out, fifty or a hundred litres
(at a kilogram per litre) of bilge hitting the inside the plug had
been enough to spring it. When the boat slowed down, the
self-draining feature had taken in enough water to seriously affect
the way the boat felt. It was the boat’s odd handling that had
first alerted him. Emil couldn’t account for it in any other way.
He was highly trained in small boats and he was sure he had checked
it. As for the motor, if he could have gotten it started, he would
have followed Kimball further still. It was no big deal. Seeing
water rushing into the boat, with the motor not running and that
impenetrable deep, a tea-coloured water all around—and not wearing
his life-jacket, contrary to Emil’s instructions, Conrad had been a
bit spooked.

That
person on the dock had fixed the spark plug. What else might have
gone wrong? Emil pondered water in the gas…sugar in the tank, a bit
of bubble gum over some sort of carburetor bleed valve, air in the
lines. Bad fuel. It could be almost anything. If a person were
resourceful enough.

The prospect of drowning was only one of many fears, but it
was a daunting one. They were a few kilometres from the road-head
and a couple of hundred metres at least from shore. Emil had no
doubt that Conrad was good with weapons, or building a cheap bomb.
They were
all
good at it, and yet there were some huge gaps in their
training sometimes. People had been given away by bad manners, not
knowing their working environment, behaving in a
culturally-uncharacteristic way. This happened even with perfect
cover, perfect documents, and the perfect background. An
unconscious man, knocked down by a bus, lying on a hospital bed,
babbling in his native tongue…or the wrong tattoo, or someone
getting curious and asking the wrong question—and getting an
odd-ball answer, could so very easily get them all
killed.