Twice a Spy (27 page)

The multimillion-dollar question was: Where?

“So have you got your mansion picked out?” Charlie asked.

“Haven’t been mansion-hunting yet. I’ll be sure and send you a postcard, though.”

Charlie played wistful. “I’m sure you’ve at least thought of how you’ll celebrate your successful delivery of the ADM.”

“Not really. I play ’em one at a time, and this ballgame ain’t over.”

“If it were me, as soon as I got paid I’d head straight to the best restaurant in town, order a bottle of 1954 Louis Latour and a lobster the size of a tricycle.”

Bream scoffed. “It’ll be 2010 Budweiser, thank you, and, if you must know, a rack of ribs.”

“The collateral won’t affect your appetite?”

Bream reddened. “
Collateral?
You’ve been hanging out with too many ‘governmentals.’ You mean ‘innocent folks turned to red mist’?”

“I suppose so.”

“If I told you it keeps me up just about every night, would that make me less of a villain in your eyes?”

“Should it?”

“Yeah. It’s not an easy decision to make. But our country needs the wake-up call. If the best and brightest were really on this case, it wouldn’t be so easy to pull off.”

That was the last thing Charlie heard.

Until the air, rushing like a freight train into the cabin, woke him.

The cabin door dangled out of the plane.

Bream was gone.

Maybe he was beneath the chute that bloomed behind the plane, framed by a violet sunset.

Charlie was back in his seat, buckled in. The sky was really beautiful, he thought.

For some reason, he wasn’t worried. Plus Drummond was still asleep. If this were any big deal, he’d be up, right?

If not, there was a long way to go before they splashed into a sea so mild that it probably wouldn’t hurt. Warm probably. Beautiful too. Molten bronze in the waning light.

“Hypoxia,” Drummond shouted over the gale. He rubbed sleep from his eyes.

“Is that what this is? That’s not good, is it?”

“Correct.”

The incoming air chilled the cabin. Charlie’s thoughts began to clear.

“Why not?”

“It affects people differently, but in all cases it’s brought about by a reduction in oxygen.” Drummond unfastened his seat belt. “Either the cabin needs to be properly pressurized or we need supplemental oxygen.”

Charlie looked out a porthole. No longer any sign of Bream.

Wobbly, Drummond started into the cockpit, reaching for the W-shaped yoke in front of the empty pilot’s seat. He toppled, his forehead cracking into the yoke. He fell sideways, landing on the other seat, and lay motionless.

The plane started to dive.

“Dad!”

No response.

“Come on!”

Nothing, not even as the buzz of sky rushing past built to a holler. Charlie wanted to get up and rouse Drummond, but he remained seated. His limbs wouldn’t respond to his will.

Adrenaline rocketed through him.

Still, he couldn’t move.

Bullets bit
into Alice’s parka, creating a cloud of ice, fabric, and goose feathers. When the cloud dissipated, it appeared as if she’d been replaced on the dimly lit bus shelter bench by a rag doll, her head hanging grotesquely in one direction while her body slumped the other way, flattening against the sidewall housing a Christmas movie poster.

Having pretended to let her go, Walt and Frank emerged from behind the snowy woods across the otherwise deserted rural road, intent on confirming the kill and reclaiming the Glock, as well as the cash.

Halfway across the street, they realized they had not shot Alice but a mannequin made of packed snow, and adorned with her parka, jeans, and hat.

“I’ll let you live,” she called out to them from the thick woods behind the bus shelter. “You’re just going to have to put down your weapons and then slide them to me along the pavement.”

Walt flipped the selector on his silenced gun to an automatic setting and sent a torrent of bullets in the direction of her voice. Brass casings shimmered in the scant light as they arched over his shoulder and tapped onto the icy asphalt.

For this reason, when Alice had called to them, she’d pressed her tongue flat against the base of her mouth and pushed the sound from her abdomen through her larynx in the direction of her palate. This manner of throwing one’s voice tricks listeners into believing the voice is emanating from a greater height than it actually is.

She fired back, once.

Walt lay dead on the street long before the report had finished resounding through the bare woods.

The muzzle flash having revealed her position, Frank whirled, firing.

She dove headlong toward the bus shelter. The metal sidewall offered a measure of protection. One of Frank’s bullets sparked against it, cracking the glass over the movie poster so that it appeared to be a jigsaw puzzle of Santa Claus.

Alice returned fire. Her bullet struck Frank’s right wrist. His gun clattered against the ice, bouncing toward her.

“Good job, Frank,” she said, springing to her feet. She stepped out from behind the bus shelter. “Now, what I really want is your coat.” She had only her T-shirt and underwear to counter the well-below-freezing night. “Unbutton it, shake off one sleeve at a time, then toss it to me.”

Gritting his teeth against the pain of his wound, the hulking Italian complied.

Before daring to pluck the overcoat off the road, she wedged her gun against Frank’s kidney. With her free hand, she patted him down, turning up his switchblade as well as a satphone and, an unexpected bonus, Mercedes keys. She pocketed the lot, saying, “As if the bus driver was going to have change for a hundred-euro bill.”

The big man gripped his injured wrist and moaned.

“That’s what you get for trying to kill me.”

She prodded him into the woods until they were out of sight of any passing motorists. About twenty yards in, she kicked his knees out from under him. Toppling forward, he attempted to break his fall with his bad arm. He came to rest on his side in a pile of snow, sticks, and dry leaves.

Squatting beside him, Alice pressed the muzzle of her gun against the base of his skull. “I don’t want to shoot you again,” she said. “And I won’t if you tell me who hired you—”

He rolled to his left, at the same time launching his steel-toed boot at her face.

She ducked, slashing his ankle with the side of her hand, breaking bone.

With a scream, he leaped to his good foot and threw a roundhouse that eluded her parry, hitting her jaw like a truck.

The world flickered. She dropped against frozen ground.

He sat astride her stomach, trying to wrest the gun free of her grip, leaving her no choice but to pull the trigger.

The shot snapped his head backward. Hot blood lashed her. He thumped into the snow and lay still, the angle of his head oddly similar to that of the mannequin in the bus shelter.

Admittedly not one of the six billion most patient people in the world, CIA case officer Blaine Belmont had paced perhaps five miles in his office at the American embassy in Geneva until, finally, a cable from a deputy director of operations authorized payment of $1,000,000 to Carlo Pagliarulo. As soon as the Italian gave up the goods, the funds would be wired to him.

But now Belmont was unable to reach him. Fighting to keep the exasperation out of his voice, he instructed the techs to triangulate Pagliarulo’s cell phone.

Two hours later, the CIA officer stood over the Italian’s corpse about fifty feet into a wooded area on the road to La Vernaz, an hour east of Geneva.

“Not the end of the proverbial road,” Belmont told his team, if only to boost his own spirits. The snow mannequin in the bus shelter and the pair of bodies were almost as good as videotape of what had taken place there. Unfortunately, Rutherford could be anywhere by now.

Within twenty minutes, things were looking up. Belmont flipped open his phone to watch two-day-old National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency KH-13 satellite overpass footage of Pagliarulo hauling an unconscious young woman from a black SUV to the small La Vernaz farmhouse that had been rented a week beforehand by a man named Hans Baehler.

The landlord, whom Belmont’s people woke as they raced by car to the farmhouse, said that Baehler had paid cash and seemed like a nice person in his e-mails, which turned out to be untraceable. Belmont would have been surprised to hear anything different.

At the isolated farmhouse, the CIA team found ample traces of both Rutherford and Pagliarulo, along with the body of helicopter pilot and
all-around German thug Lothar von Gentz, apparently stabbed to death with a light switch wall plate.

There were no signs of current life in the farmhouse, though. Nor would there be, in all probability, until the landlord found a new tenant.

This
was the end of the proverbial road.

“Shit,” Belmont said.

He spent much of the night back at his office putting all but the expletive into his report.

The cold
air screaming into the cabin helped Charlie regain control of his muscles. His panic abated, or at least moved aside, allowing him to wonder how his father was doing and hope that, if he was okay, he would know what the hell to do now.

Drummond was crumpled on the copilot’s seat, breathing, but not much more.

Charlie jumped up from his seat in the cabin, but the rush of air swept him off his feet, sucking him like a dust ball toward the aperture where the cabin door used to be.

He grabbed for the bulkhead. Gritting his teeth, he pulled himself around it and into the cockpit. As he noticed the Caribbean leaping toward him, his stomach jumped into his throat.

He glanced at the instrument panels. There were a hundred times as many dials, knobs, buttons, gauges, and other glass bubbles as there were controls in the PlayStation aerial dogfight game that constituted his aviation experience. Save the pair of yokes, one in front of each seat. A yoke acted like a steering wheel. It also moved the nose of the plane up and down. At least on PlayStation.

He grasped the yoke in front of the vacated pilot’s seat and pulled it toward him.

The nose of the plane turned up. Too much—the sensation was just like that on a roller coaster when the car transitions from plummet to climb. Gravity thrust Charlie backward. He grabbed the seat in time to avoid being thrown back into the cabin.

PlayStation didn’t do this.

He reached forward and ever so gently nudged the yoke forward.

The plane fell into a nosedive.

Stomach imploding, Charlie gripped the seat so tightly that he tore the leather at a seam. He tried the yoke again.

The nose turned up, and—incredible—the plane settled. But for how long?

Out of tricks, he knelt by Drummond, shaking him. Drummond rolled the other way.

“Dad, please?”

Drummond struggled to open his eyes. “Where are we?”

“Airplane. Sky. Caribbean somewhere. You with me by any chance?”

“Check.” Sitting up, Drummond glanced out the cockpit windows. He exhibited no alarm. Possibly a good sign. “Are you okay?”

“I am if you know how to fly,” Charlie said.

“You mean a plane?”

Charlie battled terror to think of a way to communicate the exigency in a way that might spark his father’s memory. “Bream’s trying to make it look like we died in a plane crash.”

“What kind of plane?” Drummond asked.

“This kind.”

Struggling to sit up, Drummond took inventory of the cockpit. “Use the autopilot,” he said. His speech was sluggish. He tried to reach forward, toward the instrument panel. His arm seemed leaden. He teetered.

Charlie propped him up. “Hang in there, Dad,” he said.

As Drummond tried to recompose himself, Charlie searched for the autopilot. The search could take half an hour. If there even was an autopilot.

He looked back at Drummond, who appeared transfixed by the passing clouds.

“Where is the autopilot?”

“Oh, that, yes, right.” Drummond seemed grateful for the reminder. “Sorry, we need to find someone to help.”

“Say you were the only person on the plane?”