Twice a Spy (37 page)

“Trade secret. Two twenty-five a day, plus expenses.”

“How about two hundred, if you give me a for instance?”

“Fine. Between us: harbormasters. They make it their business to know which fish are in their harbors, let alone which boats.”

“Aren’t they supposed to be discreet?”

“Yeah, but they’re also supposed to not accept donations for their kids’ new video game console funds, if you get my drift.”

“I think so,” Charlie said. He liked the harbormaster strategy, but odds were LeCroy would offer bribes that Bream would smell a state away.

LeCroy flipped through his desk calendar. “I got spouse cases today and tomorrow, meaning I’m stuck in a car with a camera in a motel parking lot. After that, I’m yours. What do you say you call me then?”

“That fits my schedule perfectly,” said Charlie, who intended to go visit the harbormasters now.

The posh
Mobile Bay Marina sat a quarter of a mile up the beach from the Grand Hotel. The information Charlie needed was strictly proprietary. Finally, a task suited to a horseplayer.

At the track, a fortune could be made with the knowledge that a favorite was running just because “he needs a race,” meaning he’s not fit to win, so the jockey will “school” him—just let him experience competition. Much of Charlie’s “job” had been wheedling such intel from grooms. The attendant in the Meadowlands owners and trainers parking lot often proved an oracle—just not often enough. At Aqueduct, the refreshment stand workers were Charlie’s best sources. Amazing what an owner would let slip while waiting for his seventh Big-A Big-B—thirty-two-ounce beer—of the day.

In the waterside village catering to the Mobile Bay Marina, the Grand Hotel, and a cluster of golf and beach developments, Charlie posed as a tourist. He was interested in chartering a yacht, he told the eager-to-serve proprietors in three of the quaint art galleries and boutiques crammed onto the short main street. He learned that the marina’s veteran harbormaster, known to all as Captain Glenny, viewed her job as part sheriff and part priest. Refueling a cabin cruiser took in excess of an hour, during which time returning yachtsmen regaled her with their adventures. In twenty years on the job, she had become their friend and confidante.

Charlie sensed such a woman would look upon any bribe with indignation. Were Bream among her charges, she would alert him within moments.

Charlie took a page from the
Post
and
Daily News
beat reporters at the track. Their jobs, consisting of little more than reporting the order of finish and adding a dash of commentary, placed them at journalism’s lowest rung. Nevertheless, their status as members of the media induced complete strangers to speak with the sort of candor psychiatrists rarely attain from their patients. The limelight acted as a powerful stimulant, even the few particles of limelight emanating from a department whose existence newspapers didn’t like to acknowledge.

Charlie’s cover began with a stop at a nearby Sears. He bought a baggy pair of khakis, an oxford shirt, Hush Puppy knockoffs, and an extra-large synthetic wool parka. The idea was to look like a journalist as well as hide his identity from Bream.

In the same mall, Charlie hit Cheapo’s, an office supply store. For $4.99 he printed himself business cards using the same name that appeared on his forged New York driver’s license, John Parker, and billing him as Editor at Large for
South
, a new lifestyles magazine based in Tampa. He chose Tampa because it was far enough away from Mobile to preclude
Do you know?
questions. Also Tampa was the only place in the South where Charlie had actually spent time—albeit all of it at Tampa Bay Downs.

The Mobile Bay Marina stayed open twenty-four hours. It was probably never more inviting than when Charlie arrived, the bay a pastiche of blues and silver, the sun having brought the air to the precise temperature at which being outdoors felt most invigorating. Rustic docks and gleaming hulls and spars swayed with the mild current. From the parking lot, he saw no one about, though there might be yachtsmen below deck. He wasn’t sure how to pass through the big entry gate without drawing their attention. Then he spotted the
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
sign.

It felt like a gift.

The instant he set foot on the pier, a middle-aged woman burst out of the harbormaster’s office. She was stout and might have been pretty if she hadn’t appeared poised to bark at him. Her spiky hair was cut short, exposing a sizable collection of gold earrings, worn only on her left ear.

“How can I help you?” she asked with a none-too-subtle undertone of “You are obviously not a wealthy yachtsman or someone a wealthy yachtsman would want to see, so what the heck are you doing here?”

“I’m a reporter,” Charlie said.

She looked him over. “Doing something on the G-20?”

“Actually I write for
South Magazine.
”

“Uh-huh. Don’t know it.”

So much for the Limelight Effect.

“Lead times what they are, my story won’t run until the spring issue. We’re doing a piece on the prettiest harbors in the South, and so far this one gets my vote. Could you by any chance direct me to the harbormaster, Glenny Gorgas?”

“I’m Glenny.” She took in Charlie’s mock surprise. “Short for Glendolyn.”

“Pretty name.”

She warmed, but only by a degree. “So how can I help you?” He needed to find out which yachts had arrived in the last day or two. This time of year, the number wouldn’t be high.

“Do you, by any chance, have time to give me the dime tour?”

They walked the docks for twenty minutes, Glenny paying no attention to the sprawling golf course or the tennis courts, or the resort hotel itself, a town’s worth of pert three-story brown clapboard buildings, many of which loomed over the marina. Her focus was on the two hundred or so yachts, which she referred to as if they were their owners. Passing a sleek and towering catamaran, she said, with pride, “
He
made a hole in one last weekend.”

This was the opening Charlie had been waiting for. “Here in Mobile?”

“Mr. Chandler has a condo on the course at the Grand.” She smiled. “Sailing for him is an excuse to play golf.”

“Do a lot of the boat owners have homes here?”

“A few have condos here, but most live close enough, up in Montgomery or Birmingham. A handful in Tennessee.”

“How many people do you see during the winter?”

She sighed. “Winter’s a lonely time to be a harbormaster.”

He stopped, pointedly looking around. There was no sign of anyone, just the groans of ropes holding yachts to docks. “Is
anyone
here now?”

The harbormaster brightened. “Actually, I had two parties in yesterday, and one the night before that. January and February I get the occasional excursion to the Caribbean or Mexico.”

With manufactured fascination, Charlie scribbled each in his notebook. “It must be fun, when the people come back, to hear about their adventures?”

Glenny’s step added a skip. “Best part of the job.”

“Heard any good stories lately?”

“I’m expecting a really good one any time now, actually.” She pointed to an empty slip at the end of the far dock. “Anthony and Vera Campodonico, retired couple, spent their whole careers at Auburn—he used to be a dean. Now they go down to the Caribbean and South America looking for lost civilizations and stuff like that. He actually writes books about it.”

Probably not Bream, Charlie thought, given the Campodonicos’ ages.

Glenny strode ahead. “And of course there’s Mr. Clemmensen—Clem Clemmensen. Great guy. He just got in from Martinique.” She smiled at a relatively plain cabin cruiser. “Even when he goes on fishing trips ‘just to do some thinkin’,’ as he says, he comes back with yarns that involve either a girl or a barroom brawl, or a barroom brawl over a girl. Lately he’s been cruising around trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. He made a bundle in flight simulator software and basically retired last year at forty. Not bad, huh?”

“Sounds like a good story,” Charlie said, struggling to keep a lid on the high-voltage conviction surging through him that flight simulator software was a chapter in a cover story: Clemmensen was Bream.

Motion on the pier behind them seized their attention. Heading their way were two men in dark suits and sunglasses, one white and the other black, both athletic, clean-cut, and in their late twenties. Their stride was all business.

Once within hailing distance, the black man asked, “Charles Clark?”

Charlie tried to appear relaxed.

The men shared a nod. He’d failed.

“We’re Secret Service,” the white man said. “We were hoping to talk to you privately, sir.” For Glenny’s benefit, he added, “We have to interview everyone in the vicinity with out-of-state tags. Standard operating procedure.”

The Cavalry’s
not as dead as they’re supposed to be, Charlie thought.

Because his hands were bound in front of him by plastic cuffs, each turn slammed him into the door or the window as the SUV sped away from the marina.

The black man drove. Washington, according to his ID. The Secret Service badge the white guy had flashed identified him as Madison. Either the names were flagrantly fake or a simple instance of truth being stranger than fiction.

As the sun fell into the woods lining the two-lane country road to the local police station, their purported destination, their SUV approached an identical black vehicle, which slowed as it drew near. Washington stopped so that he was even with the other driver. Both drivers’ windows glided down. In the burgeoning darkness, Charlie could make out only a thickset man in the other car.

“How’s it going, Wash?” the man asked.

“Can’t complain—no one would listen. You?”

“Another day, another advance team packed off to Dauphin Street. You heavy?”

Washington glanced at Charlie in the rearview. “A Class Three.”

The thickset man yawned. “You boys hitting happy hour?”

Leaning across the seat, Madison said, “We sure hope so.”

“I’ll be waiting. Wash here’s been ducking me at Miss Pac Man.”

With a round of
Later
’s, they were off.

Charlie was almost convinced that Washington and Madison were
indeed who they said they were. The laptop computer, bracketed to the console between the front seats, had a Secret Service gold star as its screen saver. The muted chatter from the police radio continued to include “Grand Hotel” and “protectees.” And if these guys were Cavalry, he would either have been dead by now or on a waterboard.

But why would the Secret Service want him? Aside from the fact that he’d been exonerated—although it wouldn’t be the first time in government annals that paperwork was slow to be processed—how did they even know where to find him?

Bream might have told them. He could have seen Charlie through a porthole.

“So what are we supposed to talk about?” Charlie asked the agents.

Madison turned around in the passenger seat, no trace remaining of his happy-hour banter. “Mr. Clark, for a heads of state event prep, the Secret Service is required to conduct advance interviews of all Class Threes in a two-hundred-fifty-mile vicinity.”

“I’m guessing Class Three doesn’t mean VIP,” said Charlie.

“It’s an individual in our database who—”

Washington cut in. “Who, we hope, won’t give cause for concern.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“We received a tip from a civilian who has a working relationship with law enforcement.”

“Not the private eye, LeCroy?”

Madison looked to Washington.

“We don’t disclose the identities of paid informants,” Washington told Charlie.

LeCroy must have snapped a photograph of Charlie with the Webcam he had used to produce his screen saver of the naked blonde, then sent the picture to his law enforcement “colleagues” in hope of collecting a reward for a tip leading to an arrest. Irksome, but better a betrayal by a two-bit PI than a setup by Bream.

“My record was cleared though,” Charlie said. “It’s supposed to be in the same classification now as driven snow.”