Twice a Spy (23 page)

“Excuse me, do you know if the pesto’s any good here?” asked a man pushing a cart half full of TV dinners.

His Italian was good, but he sounded American, and despite an Alpine parka over a French suit, he looked it. Like Gary Cooper, Pagliarulo thought.

“You want good pesto, you gotta go to Corrençon,” Pagliarulo said, which may or may not have been true, but it was their recognition code.

The man was Blaine Belmont, the U.S. embassy’s legal attaché—official terminology for spook. Belmont pushed his shopping cart to the end of the line five deep at the butchers’ counter, where a pair of bleary-eyed meat cutters worked in slow motion. Pulling his own cart up behind Belmont’s, Pagliarulo checked for surveillance. Belmont nodded his own assessment that they were clean.

Pagliarulo wasted no time. “I’m doing grunt work for a guy who I’ve figured out is planning to flip an ADM to the United Liberation Front of the Punjab.”

Belmont turned to face him, with no more excitement than if Pagliarulo had said it was going to snow tonight. “Yeah?”

“He’s somehow getting it from another American. I’ve only caught a glimpse of that guy, over satphone, but I could ID him from photos. The deal is, he delivers the bomb, he gets back the package we’re storing. I’m pretty sure you know her, Alice Rutherford.”

Belmont shrugged.

“I could give you enough information to get the bomb and the bad guys,” Pagliarulo added.

“If?”

Afraid the American would laugh at the price, Pagliarulo steeled himself. “One million.”

Belmont studied a tower of sausage links behind the smudgy glass. “That’s probably fair for a tip that bags a rogue WMD. Which means HQS’ll have me counter six hundred and settle at seven-fifty—if they determine it’s worth a dime. Seven-fifty about what you really figured on?”

Pagliarulo’s confidence rose. “The price is one million dollars.”

“Look, I don’t give a crap, it’s not my money. I’ll tell you what, I’ll talk to my chief of station when I get back to campus. If things go like they should, we’ll have a dollar amount tomorrow morning at the latest. Then somebody will send a text message to your cell addressed to a Hans, asking Hans if he wants to down a few at the Hofbräuhaus, something like that. Delete the message, then hightail it to the
hypermarché
in Corrençon and we’ll see if the pesto lives up to its reputation. Fallback, meet right here tomorrow, same time. How’s that for a game plan?”

Pagliarulo’s answer was forestalled by a butcher’s summons to the counter. Presumably to maintain his cover, Belmont bought a chicken.

Sure, Alice
would have preferred traipsing across an Alpine snow-scape with the man she loved. But most of her life had been spent either dodging bullets or the metaphoric equivalent. Once, in fact, she’d been hit—just a flesh wound. At times, she would happily have paid for the peace and quiet now inflicted on her.

Especially because the Shaolin liked to practice meditation before a fight.

As Alice had learned in nearly a lifetime of devotion to Shaolin kung fu, channeling her inner energy allowed her to do things that her corporeal body alone could not. But it wasn’t easy. Shaolin monks had to spend years mastering meditation before they were allowed to think about fighting, or as little as throwing a playing card. Prior to writing the book of Shaolin kung fu, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma faced a wall for nine years without uttering a word.

Alice began by clearing her mind of all destructive energy. Combat, whether in self-defense or on the attack, demands pure intent, with all emotions under complete control, which is to say turned off.

After several hours, a plan came to her. It depended on a light switch plate the size of an index card that was fastened to the wall behind the sofa, two and a half feet from where she sat. If it were slung like a throwing star—the flat, star-shaped projectile that was the Shaolin weapon of choice—the light switch plate’s speed might exceed fifty miles per hour, making its sharp corners as lethal as a dagger.

The plate was held to the wall behind the sofa by two ordinary
slot-headed screws, one above the light switch, one below, the latter a bit loose already. It would be a simple matter to undo the screws.

Well, not exactly simple.

First, Alice needed to position herself on the sofa so that the light switch was directly behind her, concealed from her captors’ view. Following each bathroom trip—they permitted her one every four hours—she inched closer. The fifth trip gained her position sufficient to execute sleight of hand, which time and again had proven the most useful component of her operations training. Sleight of hand is widely believed to work when the hand is quicker than the eye. In fact, it depends on psychology, primarily misdirection, larger actions distracting from smaller.

That her boots and socks had been confiscated presented an opportunity. When she stretched, which was only natural after so many hours on a sofa, the men’s attention went to the action of her legs and her feet. Initially, the goons appeared to pay little if any attention to “itches” she simultaneously scratched on her face or behind her ears. Soon they seemed to pay none at all. Moreover, Frank spent a lot of time surfing the Web on his phone. Walt, though he never let go of his Walther PPK, spent hours picking his cuticles. And the third man in the rotation—the Teutonic-looking helicopter pilot Alice nicknamed the Baron—as in Red—sometimes nodded off for a few minutes.

After about thirty hours, the light switch plate was ready for deployment.

And when Frank came on duty in place of Walt, Alice was primed.

The Baron took over the armchair as well as the Walther while Frank disappeared into the kitchen with a bag of groceries. Alice heard him bring a pot of water to a boil, then add a bag of pasta. Warm air, laden with buckwheat and garlic, seeped into the living room.

A few minutes later, Frank brought her a Styrofoam bowl full of steaming macaroni. He’d topped it with grated Romano cheese, very likely an act of kindness. She put his gesture out of mind.

With the Baron’s gun fixed on her, Frank undid the cords around her wrists, enabling her to take the bowl from the floor and use the plastic spoon in it to eat.

When she finished, she set the bowl on the carpet, and Frank kicked it away. The Baron gestured for her to extend her hands. Frank started to
reapply the cords to her wrists, staying as far from her as he could, wary of a head butt or a bite. Which was exactly what Alice had been counting on. When he attempted to tie the first knot, she surreptitiously rotated her left forearm in such a way that the cord merely formed a loop. This was the key step in Houdini’s famous rope-escape trick.

Finished, Frank retreated to a chair. Pretending to settle back onto the sofa, Alice worked her left hand free of the loop. It took her about thirty seconds, or about twenty-seven more than Houdini.

When Frank dug his phone from his pants, she swiped at the light switch plate with her freed left hand, dislodging the fixture from the wall. She caught it with her right.

Frank dropped the phone and drew a switchblade, snapping it open, as the Baron leaped up, aiming his gun.

Alice bent her arm ninety degrees at the elbow, drawing the makeshift weapon toward her abdomen. With a motion similar to that of a Frisbee toss, she sent the plate slicing through the air, so fast that it gave off a metallic whip-crack.

As the Baron leveled the gun at her, a corner of the plate sank into his neck as if his muscles were butter.

He plucked it free, but blood poured from his jugular. Eyes white, he collapsed over the armchair. His Walther dropped to the carpet, the powder blue fibers rapidly turning purple from the vital fluid streaming from his sleeve.

Alice needed to get to the Walther before Frank, who no doubt had a few combat tricks of his own. Plus he had a knife. She expected to sustain injuries, but never contemplated any outcome other than success.
To doubt is to be defeated before the enemy has thrown a single punch
.

She dove headlong for the Walther. Frank slipped on his phone and lost balance.

If not for the cords still restricting her legs, Alice would have fielded the gun, rolled into a kneeling position, and shot him. As it was, she landed on the carpet, her fingers within inches of the gun, as the Baron snatched the weapon off the sticky floor. With what seemed his last gasp, he tossed it over her head, to Frank.

The Baron thumped down from the chair, dead, momentarily pinning Alice to the floor and enabling Frank to get a firm grip on the gun.

“You are lucky we are not allowed to kill you,” he said in a thick Italian accent.

“You have no such luck,” Alice said.

But that was just adrenaline talking. She knew she would be in chains from here on in. At best.

Mountain peaks
speared the feathery clouds above Saint Lucia. Through the window by his seat in the DC-3, Stanley could see the entire island, which was about half the size of Martinique. He watched the plane’s shadow pass over verdant mountains and meadows with galaxies of vibrant tropical flowers. He’d thought all Caribbean islands looked alike, but this was Eden with typing-paper-white beaches.

Leaving Hadley to finish questioning Bream, he had initially procured a de Havilland Twin Otter seaplane to fly directly from Martinique to Detention III. He made the mistake of cabling the plan to headquarters. Saint Lucia’s CIA base chief, a man named Corbitt, requested—demanded, really—that Stanley first come to Castries, the tiny capital city of Saint Lucia, to be debriefed. This was the base chief’s right, to an extent. Headquarters needed Corbitt to exert his influence so that the Starfish people would hand the Clarks to the CIA rather than to their primary employer, Martinique’s police department.

Stanley deliberated cabling Eskridge to request that the Europe division chief tell the Latin America division chief to order Corbitt to stand the hell down. Jesus Christ, a base chief on an island with the population of New Haven? His job was to make life
easier
for operations officers. Ultimately, Stanley decided that he could chat with Corbitt in less time than he would spend waiting for the succession of cables.

At George F. L. Charles Airport, before Stanley was halfway down the plane’s stairs, someone thrust out a right hand. It was connected to a short and doughy fifty-year-old in a just-pressed suit, starched shirt, and
gleaming golden 1990s power tie. “Clyde Corbitt,” the man said, the words accompanied by a gust of wintergreen-minty breath.

Although Stanley had read nothing about Corbitt, not even his first name, he suspected he knew everything pertinent. Low rank, to begin with. GS-12, maybe. The “base” of which he was chief consisted of a nothing-special office. Either he was a one-man shop or he was aided only by an operations support assistant—government-speak for “secretary”—almost certainly a local, whose most dramatic clandestine operation would be using the special telephone with the encryption device. And, as sure as the sky was up, this was Corbitt’s first command, bestowed upon the career desk jockey either as a reward for twentysomething years of service or because Langley simply needed a body in Castries. Probably when he received the cable—C/O IN MARTINIQUE ON COVERT OP. GIVE HIM ALL ASSISTANCE HE DESIRES—Corbitt had an inkling that he was about to embark on the most exciting chapter of his tour.

Shaking the base chief’s moist hand, Stanley said, “Great to meet you.”

Corbitt had arranged for a driver and a stretch Town Car with tinted bulletproof windows. He helped Stanley into a cavernous backseat. The air was set to Arctic. Clad only in a polo shirt and chinos, like every other white-collar type in the islands except Corbitt, Stanley labored not to shiver. At least there was no need to worry that the ice in the minibar would melt during the trip to the American consulate, which the driver speculated would be half an hour on unusually congested roads.

Corbitt sat on the opposite leather bench, his back to the Plexiglas divider separating them from the driver. “I took the liberty of scheduling us a lunch.”