Twice a Spy (13 page)

That reduced the odds of their succeeding again, come to think of it. Better not to think, he decided.

The Amphibus reached thirty kilometers per hour, according to the speedometer, slashing through the waves.

The hail of bullets dwindled to a sprinkle, then nothing. The ruckus of gunfire and sirens receded and was soon drowned out by the inboard engines’ hums. Charlie felt safe enough to emulate Drummond and climb back onto the bench.

Through what remained of his window, he glanced aft at the policemen standing at the water’s edge, their heads lowered.

“Now what?” Charlie asked.

Drummond didn’t reply, fully attuned to the French chatter from the walkie-talkie pressed to his ear. After a moment, he said, “They’re dispatching two Coast Guard cutters.”

Charlie looked to shore. The airport now appeared the size of a dollhouse. Other than the engines, he heard only the patter of waves against the hull and a faint cry of a seabird. The moonlit seascape could have been used by the Martinique Travel Bureau.

“How about we get out and let this thing keep on chugging to sea, so that when the cops get to it, there’s nobody aboard?” Charlie said. “We can use one of the life rafts to get back to the island.” He thought back to what Bream had said: Anybody who wants to sneak onto Martinique can pull up in a million places by boat.

“They’re also sending a helicopter.” Drummond indicated the walkie-talkie.

“Super. With a searchlight?”

As he sometimes did, Drummond massaged his temples, as if trying to trip the button that activated his memory. “Sorry,” he said in conclusion.

“Okay, how about a more basic survival question?” In this respect, Charlie thought, Drummond’s tradecraft was practically ingrained. “If you were now, hypothetically, a fugitive, what would you do?”

“Swim to shore.”

“But they’d still see you.”

“Not if I swam underwater.”

“It’s got to be a couple of miles at least.”

“Well, that would be my best course of action, if I were a fugitive.”

The distant cry, which Charlie had thought of as a seabird’s, grew louder, into a whine. He recognized it. Helicopter rotor.

He gripped his door handle. “Well, either way, we need to get out of here now.”

“This way,” Drummond said, unlatching the door to the cargo hold.

“What difference does it make?” Charlie asked.

Pushing open the door, Drummond pointed into the dark hold. The glow from the console outlined walls blooming with vests, masks, fins, and cylindrical tanks like the one that had flown out the rear door and onto the runway.

“I guess you’ve scuba dived off an amphibious rescue vehicle before too,” said Charlie, who had never even snorkeled.

Drummond pulled on a wet suit. “Maybe so.”

A minute later the whine of the rotor turned into a series of raucous thumps. The moonlight delineated the approaching helicopter from the night sky. Dressed like frogmen, Charlie and Drummond sat on the edge of the open cargo doorway.

“Some handicapper I am, thinking coming here would be simple,” Charlie said, effectively to himself.

With a splash, Drummond fell backward into the sea.

Charlie followed suit, sinking into water that was warm and, better, ink black.

In a
preposterously small rented Peugeot, Stanley and Hadley raced to Les Trois-Îlets, a seaside village off the coast where the Amphibus had just been found.

Undercover as the well-heeled Atchisons, they checked into the five-star Hôtel L’Impératrice, a remnant of the 1960s’ embrace of garish opulence. The lobby was dominated by a lush rain forest replete with a three-story coral cliff enshrouded by luminescent mist, the result of a booming waterfall and as many filtered spotlights as a Broadway stage. At the frothy base of the fall was an emerald lagoon, populated by fish representing every shade of neon.

Stanley thought of the hotel as the perfect venue for the espionage fantasies of his youth, in which the Ritzes of the world constituted the everyday operational locale. In reality such accommodations had been far from the norm. Even in Paris, the job took him to the sorts of hotels that offered hourly rates. His agents weren’t just people willing to sell out their own countrymen; they were willing to do it for a pittance. Not quite habitués of the posh spots.

With a Serge Gainsbourg melody in his head, he walked onto the bamboo terrace that extended from the open-air lobby and overlooked the purple-black Baie de Fort-de-France.

“Hoping to spot our rabbits swimming ashore?” asked Hadley, joining him at the rail.

The inability to do anything frustrated him. “At least we’re close to the action in the event there is some.”

She checked her BlackBerry. “The local officials have come to the
conclusion that Drummond Clark is an international money launderer and arms dealer named Marvin Lesser. Old cover, mistaken identity, or whatever, it’s working better as a pretext for a manhunt than anything we could have come up with.”

“So what can we do now?” Anything seemed preferable to sitting idly.

Hadley hesitated, then asked, “How about we get a bite?”

“I guess we can keep an eye on the bay.”

The hotel’s outdoor restaurant, Les Étoiles, was lit for the most part by candles and tiki torches, but also, as advertised, by the stars, beneath which the Baie de Fort-de-France was a mosaic, flickering from black to white. Along with a smattering of other late diners, Stanley and Hadley were serenaded by a calypso band in tuxedos the same turquoise as the pool. They both ate Colombo, Martinique’s national dish, a coconut milk curry of fish, served with spicy fried plantains, at a price probably close to the per capita income. Stanley would have happily quit after the salad course. Primed for a hunt, his body wanted no part of food.

Hadley set her BlackBerry on the table. “You ready for the latest?”

“I can make the time.” He ate a forkful of fish for appearance’s sake.

“Our pilot friend went straight home to his apartment in Anse Mitan, about five miles from here. He microwaved a burrito for dinner, and had”—she glanced at the BlackBerry’s display—“five
red stripes:
I’m going to have to check my codebook.”

“You’ll do better with this.” Stanley tapped the leather-bound drinks menu propped between a candleholder and the pepper mill. “Red Stripe is a beer brewed in Jamaica. If our boy’s had five, he’s probably not planning to drive. Under any other circumstances, I’d say: ‘I hope not.’ ”

“Currently he’s surfing the Web. No calls, no new e-mails, two text messages, one sent to a local woman asking her if she’d be at Le Squash for happy hour tomorrow, one from a Dutch woman who tends bar at a nightclub in Fort-de-France inquiring about his plans later tonight.”

“She looking to book a ‘flight’ with him?”

“It would seem so. He didn’t reply.”

“Maybe he’s waiting to hear from two men.”

With a groan, Hadley kicked Stanley’s shin, as she would have if she knew him well. “Those men would know that contacting him by telephone or text would effectively be contacting us.”

“Unless it’s encrypted text.”

“Good point.” Hadley began typing a cable.

“How about this?” Stanley asked. “Do we know where on the Web he’s surfing?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. EBay—auto parts.”

“We’re capturing it?”

“Are you in the market for auto parts too?” Hadley resumed eating.

“When I was in Algiers, an MI6 tech intercepted bad guys’ messages embedded in online classified ads for used bathroom fixtures. They were using an encryption algorithm to mix the secret text into the pixels of the photos in a way that didn’t distort the pictures.”

She paused, fork midway to her mouth. “
Used bathroom fixtures?
”

“Would you ever look at classified ads for used bathroom fixtures, let alone buy a used bathroom fixture over the Internet?”

She smiled. He sat back and admired her. No acting required.

Throughout the rest of their meal, thoughts of covert operations receded.

The black
water lightened to violet. Landfall. Charlie wasn’t sure whether he was happier about that or the fact that he hadn’t needed to use his speargun en route.

He and Drummond surfaced about fifty yards short of a secluded beach that shone silver in the moonlight. On the dark and densely wooded hills, thousands of lights glowed like embers. A gentle breeze whistled through palm fronds. Charlie thought of his surroundings in terms of obstacles to circumventing the local authorities—who were undoubtedly scouring the island—and getting to the Laundromat. Contacting Bream was out. The BirdBook had been left in the overnight bag last seen in the customs office. They had fled the airport with only what they had on them, wallets and the pill bottle Drummond always kept close at hand.

Charlie spat out his clammy mouthpiece. “It’s been over an hour since you hot-wired a vehicle. What do you say we find another one?”

Drummond held his mouthpiece close to his lips, as if ready to resubmerge. “Okay.”

A hundred yards up the beach stood a mass of stacked wooden lounge chairs. “Looks like a hotel there,” Charlie said. “What do you think?”

“It does.”

“What do you think we should do? Head toward it? Or away?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about this? Say you were a fugitive looking to shed your scuba gear and steal a car in order to get to a Laundromat in Fort-de-France.
Would you be wary of a big hotel, where the security might be watching out for us, or would you be psyched about a crowded place where there are probably a lot of other people with our skin color, many of them on their fourth or fifth umbrella drink by now?”

“Ah. In that case, the relative ease of obtaining clothing and a vehicle would outweigh the cons, which would largely consist of a faxed alert that the graveyard-shift guards and receptionists may not even have seen.”

Unbelievable, Charlie thought.

They swam closer to the beach, then walked along the sandy sea bottom in their flippers. Gas-fed torches showed the way to landscaped gardens fronting a large resort hotel. As they drew closer still, the dark forms of guests came into view.

Drummond slowed a few yards from shore, body low in the surf, apparently casing the surroundings. When no one was in sight, he ambled onto the beach, his flippers and speargun bunched under one arm.

Charlie followed. The sand ended at a wall of bamboo stalks twenty to thirty feet high, red at their bases before morphing into a brilliant green. Drummond deposited all of his gear but his wet suit into their midst. Which made sense to Charlie. The lightweight neoprene suits had short sleeves and pant legs, not entirely out of place on guests strolling along the beach.

Without the wigs they’d worn at the airport, they looked less like the two men sought by local authorities. On the other hand, they looked more like the two men sought by the rest of the world’s authorities. But Drummond’s intuition seemed to be firing. So Charlie didn’t hesitate to replicate his father’s every move while trailing him up the beach and toward the hotel.

They crossed paths with a handsome middle-aged couple, apparently walking off dinner, arm in arm, their wedding rings and her diamond aglow. Flush from a bottle of wine or just the warm air, they both smiled, the wife offering a warm “Good evening.” Awaiting a reaction to the dripping scuba suits, Charlie could only muster a nod in greeting, but Drummond said, “How’re you doing?” as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

The man and woman appeared to care just as little, intoxicated with each other. As they passed, a wave sizzled up the sand, lapping their
shins. “God, why didn’t we change into our swimsuits?” she said. “I’m dying for a dip.”

Charlie spotted a bamboo hut fifty yards ahead, between the beach and the hotel’s swimming pool. Nailed to the hut’s grass roof, at a slant, was a sign that read
SANDY’S
, hand-painted, intentionally slapdash. Probably a shop that sold suntan oils and lotions at three times the price guests would pay in town. Pointing it out to Drummond, Charlie said, “That place ought to have shirts and stuff.”