Twice a Spy (31 page)

She parked the Mercedes on a sleepy residential side street three blocks away, then walked. Her route, with the usual strategic left turns, added four blocks.

Tonight L’Alhambar featured a brass quartet with a predilection for volume. Among its throng of early-twentysomethings, she spotted the slight, fair-haired forger, in a Red Sox T-shirt. He stood by the curlicue bar, part of a small crowd vying to order drinks.

“I need one too,” Alice said, sidling up to him. “Big-time.”

At twenty-five, Russ Augenblick could pass for a choirboy, his wispy attempts at a mustache and beard, paradoxically, highlighting his youthfulness. He regarded Alice as if she were insane. “Dude, you’re hotter than Satan.”

“Oh, you like my new jacket?” Frank’s gray overcoat gave her the form of a traffic cone. “Thanks.”

“I mean, showing up here. This place has more cameras than a camera store. What kind of super-crazy-desperate trouble are you in?”

“The usual kind. I need your ‘full suite,’
tout de suite.
”

He looked down at his sneakers. “I can’t. Not now. Sorry, man.”

“By all means, go ahead and have your beer. My treat, in fact—if the bartender can break a hundred-euro bill …”

“I can’t take you to the workshop while you’re listed as shoot-on-sight. Not even you would take that risk.”

“Yes you can, Stew.”

Despite himself, he blanched. Russ Augenblick was an alias.

“I know about California,” she continued. “But there’s no reason to tell tales out of school, is there?”

While at the NSA, Alice had learned the truth about “Russ,” but she allowed him to continue operating in case he might be of use at some point. Like now. She was prepared to tell what she knew of Stewart Fleishman’s freshman year at Berkeley, where making the scene at off-campus bars was mandatory, the drinking age was twenty-one, and his Massachusetts driver’s license showed his true age. The fake California license he’d bought proved useless because the bouncers ran licenses through magnetic strip scanners—a flashing red light resulted in a long and expensive night with Berkeley’s finest. Fleishman chose to replicate a Delaware license because of its simplicity and relative obscurity. A quick trip to San Francisco netted him a sheet of the same PVC the Delaware Department of Motor Vehicles used, plus a magnetic strip that he programmed so the scanners informed the bouncers that this fair-haired young man was a twenty-one-year-old from Wilmington. His classmates wanted Delaware driver’s licenses of their own. He went into business, and business had boomed, enough that a college degree in economics was redundant. Because it was illegal in the United States to possess, produce, or distribute falsified government documents, he set up shop in Thailand, where counterfeiting was something of a national pastime. He now sold $500,000 worth of fake U.S. driver’s licenses over the Internet per year. Passports, much easier to forge, netted him ten times as much money.

If Alice were to spend three minutes on the Homeland Security tips site now, Stewart Fleishman aka Russ Augenblick would face extradition, at the least.

“I need you to hack into the customs database,” she told him. “I want you to make me a passport with the information of an American, Canadian, or Brit actually traveling in Switzerland right now.” With such a passport she could waltz out of the country.

He grumbled. “Buy me a mescal shot too and I’ll try. A double.”

After their drinks, she followed him through the back exit and down a windy but otherwise quiet side street to his vintage VW love bus.

Demonstrating surprising courtliness, the forger trudged through slush to open the front passenger door for her. The entire van, apparently restored without regard to cost, smelled new.

With a hint of fresh male perspiration.

Alice knew without looking, but turned anyway. Four men in black jumpsuits and matching body armor sat in the back of the van, each gripping a Sig, the silenced barrels pointed at her.

By way of greeting, the man closest to her said, “
Dienst für Analyse und Prävention
,” German for “Service for Analysis and Prevention,” the Swiss domestic intelligence agency, which, evidently, had a working relationship with a certain forger.

Despite the
antiseptic scent unique to medical facilities, along with walls, cabinets, and a sparkling tile floor that matched the hospital white of a medic’s lab coat, the lack of windows suggested that the infirmary originally had been a locker room or showers.

Sergeant King said, between gasps, “He’s not breathing, Ginny.” The medic’s badge read
GENEVIÈVE
in big block letters.

“I don’t think he’s got a pulse either,” said Corporal Flint, angling Drummond’s feet toward the examination table.

“Set him down and we will see if we can fix that,” Geneviève said.

Although barely into her twenties, she had the composure of a battle-hardened veteran. She whipped a fresh sheet from the roll of paper at the foot of the table, clamping it into place just as Drummond’s head hit the headrest. Lifting his chin upward with one hand and pressing back on his forehead with the other, she tilted back his face. She opened his mouth and checked for obstructions, finding none. No breathing either.

Pinching his nostrils shut, she fit her mouth over and around his, then commenced breathing for him, inhaling and exhaling slowly into his mouth. His chest rose and fell, again signifying no obstruction. She provided two more breaths, each about a second long, then pressed two fingers to the side of his throat.

“No carotid pulse, as far as I can tell,” she sighed, not so much a lament as a prognosis.

“What can we do?” asked King.

“Call for an ambulance. Say the casualty is having a cardiac arrest.”

King said, “Corporal?”

Nodding, Flint ran out.

Pointing to a white blanket, Geneviève said to King, “Sergeant, if you could roll that up and use it to elevate his feet by about fifteen inches …”

He did, offering better blood flow to Drummond’s heart, which Geneviève prepared to resuscitate by placing the heel of her right hand two or three inches above the tip of his sternum. She lay her left hand on top of her right and interlaced her fingers.

“It was probably his damned pills,” King said.

“What pills?” Geneviève locked her elbows and moved herself directly above Drummond, so that she could use the weight of her body, rather than her muscles, to perform the compressions, minimizing fatigue.

“Some kind of Alzheimer meds. Could that have anything to do with this?”

She nodded. “Do you have them?”

The sergeant whisked his hands over Drummond’s pockets without finding the bottle. “I’ll be right back.” He tore out of the infirmary.

Geneviève compressed Drummond’s chest wall by about three inches, or enough to break a rib, the desired amount. Compressions any weaker were ineffective. The point of squeezing the rib cage, after all, was to pump the heart.

She had repeated the process fifteen times, at a rate of approximately one hundred compressions per minute, when Drummond decided that it was time to end the cardiac arrest act he’d initiated by swallowing eight of his ten remaining pills. The experimental drug’s beta-blocker components—atenolol and metoprolol—had weakened his pulse to the point that it was undetectable, at least by harried marine guards and a medic in an under-equipped infirmary. He’d augmented the effect with a ploy as old as predators and prey, holding his breath.

He may have done the job too well, he thought, as he tried to get up from the examination table: A chill crept over his body, leaving him cold, clammy, and feeling weighted down, as if he were at the bottom of a deep sea. His extremities stung and the pressure neared skull-crushing. Everything around him blurred. The hiss of the overhead lamps, Geneviève’s breathing, and the rustling of her lab coat had the effect of trains blowing past. And both vomit and diarrhea burned within him.

Had he miscalculated the dosage?

Highly likely. His faculty for making calculations lately had been like an old television set that gets reception only at certain angles. Still, getting reception at all had been fortuitous. His son was locked in a detention room. And any moment might bring the return of the Cavalry agent who had tried to kill them—what was his name?

Steve?

Stanley?

Sandy?

Like the beach.

Saint Lucia’s beaches were as white as sugar.

Until he’d seen them for himself, he’d thought “sugar sand” was just the hyperbolical concoction of an advertising copywriter.

Drummond felt his thinking careening off the rails.

What matters, he told himself, is that Steve or Stanley or whoever
will return
, almost certainly with backup from the misguided Cavalry. And the marine guards here would prove no more potent than scarecrows in defense.

The world seemed to revert to its normal pace.

Drummond exhaled, with a cough, for effect.

Geneviève jumped, pleasantly surprised.

He tried to raise himself on his elbows and fell flat.

“Easy,” she said.

“I accidentally swallowed some …” he said just above a whisper before letting his voice trail off.

She leaned closer to hear. “Yes?”

He shot up his left arm, encircling her neck, clamping the crook of his elbow at her trachea.

She tried to cry out.

With his left hand he grasped his right bicep, placing his right hand behind her head, then brought his elbows together, applying as much pressure as he could generate to both sides of her neck, restricting the blood flow to her brain.

Unconscious, she sagged against him. He slid off the examination table, keeping a grip on her so that she wouldn’t fall. His knees buckled, but by force of will he remained standing.

He hoisted her onto the table. She would regain consciousness in seconds. The marines who had brought him here would return sooner.

There was simply no time for infirmity.

He took the white blanket from the foot of the examination table and cast it over her. The marines would mistake her for him, at least for a few seconds.

He crouched behind the crash cart, the portable trolley with the dimensions of a floor safe. It contained all equipment and medication required for cardiopulmonary emergencies, and he would need one of the meds momentarily. In the shorter term, the cart would hide him. He rotated it so that its drawers faced him.

Sergeant King entered at a jog. On seeing the fully covered body on the examination table, he froze. “Damn it,” he said to himself.

Hidden by the portion of the blanket hanging from the examination table, Drummond slowly opened the crash cart’s drawers fractions of an inch at a time, searching for succinylcholine, the swift-acting neuromuscular blocker used to facilitate endotracheal intubation. Drummond intended to use a small dose of the drug to temporarily paralyze King.

The sergeant wandered toward the table. “Ginny?” he asked at a whisper, as if worried about disturbing the corpse. “Where’d you go?”

Drummond found three pencil-sized preloaded succinylcholine syringes, each packing an eighteen-gauge needle.

Warily, King peeled the blanket from the head of the examination table. He recoiled, drawing his gun and shouting, “Flint!”

Drummond reached beneath the table and slung the needle sidearm into King’s calf. The sergeant looked down in mystification—he probably felt no more pain than if he’d been stung by an insect. Drummond sprang, hitting the floor on a roll, then reached and tapped the plunger, driving succinylcholine into King’s muscle.

King twisted away with such force that the needle jerked free and flew across the infirmary. It struck a cabinet on the far wall, lodging there like a dart.

Flint ran in, gun drawn. King pointed, superfluously, to Drummond, then crumpled to the floor, where he lay, unmoving.

Glad of the diversion, Drummond dove back behind the crash cart.

Flint pivoted on his heels, firing. Strips of linoleum slapped Drummond. The air clouded with sawdust that had been a chunk of the examination table.

From his knees, Drummond shoved the red cart at Flint.

The marine spun, shooting and ringing the face of it. The bullet exited through the uppermost drawer, whistling past Drummond’s ear, followed by a spray of glass and a milky white substance that smelled of alcohol.

Pushing the cart ahead of himself, Drummond picked up the gun King had dropped.

Another bullet pounded into the cart.

Drummond said, “I have a clean shot at you, son. Neither of us wants me to take it. So, slowly, set your sidearm down on the floor and kick it toward me.”

“Mr. Clark, sir, there is no chance whatsoever that you can get out of here, so—”

Drummond fired, aiming to Flint’s right. The wall a few inches from Flint’s right ear exploded into plaster dust. The man dropped to the floor.

Drummond tracked him through the gunsight. “We’re making progress. Now, all you have to do is surrender your weapon.”

Ashen, independent of the haze of plaster dust, the marine complied.

As Drummond reached for the weapon, something hard slammed into the back of his head. He fell against the crash cart, toppling it. As he hit the floor, he saw the metal bed rail swung like a cricket bat by Geneviève.