Once a Spy (21 page)

Drummond shrugged. He still seemed entirely unconcerned.

It no longer offered reassurance. “Maybe we should drive to the next town and call the number in the ad again,” Charlie said.

As the words left his lips, a black Dodge Durango roared down the driveway toward the field. The dust and glare made it impossible to see into the sport utility vehicle. Charlie looked to Drummond.

He was fast asleep.

“Looks like we’re in business,” Charlie said, rousing him.

Opening his eyes, Drummond regarded the Durango with only passing interest, if any—it was hard to tell.

Charlie expected the Durango would park near the pickup truck. But it veered away and drove to the far end of the field, pulling into the farthest possible spot.

“Could it just be someone else?” he asked.

He bet himself Drummond would shrug. He won the bet.

The Durango’s driver’s door eased open. A compact man of perhaps forty edged out. He had a dark brown flattop and wore a mossy-oak camouflage suit. His slow, deliberate movements made his circumspection obvious, even from the monument a hundred yards away. He might just be a hunter. As for his hesitation? He didn’t have a hunting permit? Or maybe he was indeed the Cavalry’s emissary, the camouflage was part of his cover, and his unease was attributable to the fact that he saw no one—the giant statue blocked Charlie and Drummond from his sight, and the lone vehicle in the lot, the rusty pickup, could well have been abandoned here years ago.

Charlie considered leaping up and waving. Intuition held him in place.

The Durango’s passenger and rear driver’s side doors sprung open. Out darted two more men in camouflage. Following Flattop, they dropped onto hands and knees and shot into the high grass.

Through gaps between stalks, Charlie glimpsed the man who’d been in the backseat. He was young, no more than twenty-five, with the slight build and serious look not of a hunter but a scholar. His pistol glinted. Charlie entertained the idea that this was some sort of intelligence analyst, pressed by exigency into field duty.

Then a gust of wind parted the grass, revealing the man who’d been in the passenger seat.

Cadaret.

Shock ran through Charlie like a sword.

“Dad, we’ve been set up,” he exclaimed. “And that’s the best-case scenario.” The worst one he could think of was that Cadaret and his men had intercepted the Cavalry.

Drummond looked up. “That’s a shame,” he said, then tried to get comfortable again against the bronze horse’s shin.

From the Durango’s end of the field came the whipcrack of a gunshot. Its low echo skittered along the top of the grass. The ravens leaped into flight. The bullet stung the bronze soldier’s left elbow, turning the hardened excrement in its crook to a puff of white. The horse’s barrel-thick left front leg shielded Drummond from all but a dusting.

Charlie pressed himself against the inside of the horse’s right front leg, some primitive survival apparatus enabling him to coil himself so he wasn’t exposed to the shooters. A second round splashed dirt onto the pedestal, pelting him like buckshot. Loath to move, he angled his eyes to Drummond.

On three occasions, peril had transformed Drummond into a superhero. He was incited now, but only in the manner of someone whose rest is being disrupted.

26

Their gambit
was plain to Charlie. From behind a mound at the far end of the field, Cadaret took a shot every few seconds. His objective wasn’t to hit Charlie or Drummond—although that would have been perfectly acceptable—but rather to hold them in place behind the statue until Flattop or Scholar flanked them. Capitalizing on the rises and dips in the field, that duo had crept to within sixty or seventy yards, still too far to fire with any accuracy. At twenty-five yards, they probably would be able to split an aspirin.

Charlie hoped someone driving along County Route 1 would call the cops. The road was barely traveled, though, and the monument was far enough away that the gunfire might not be heard over an engine. If a good Samaritan heard and came to investigate still, he would find only hunters, as common in these parts as teenagers in a suburban mall. And if he investigated further, he’d die.

Charlie tried to conceive a more proactive solution. Every avenue his mind took ended with the sober realization that outmaneuvering professional killers on a battlefield was even further from his expertise than landing a helicopter.

Then there was Drummond.

“Hear those bullets, Dad? These guys are playing your song.”

“How about we shoot back?” Drummond put forth, as if it were a novel idea.

“We have Mom’s gun.” Charlie patted the Colt in his waistband. “But I think we’re going to need more than that.”

A bullet bored into the horse’s right shoulder and exited its left breast, buzzing directly over Drummond’s head. Drummond hunkered closer to the pedestal but otherwise appeared untroubled.

Charlie was troubled enough for them both: He’d figured the bronze statue was impenetrable. “We need to get down,” he shouted over the echoing report.

Drummond didn’t seem to follow. Rather than take time to explain, Charlie wrapped his arms around him and heaved them both off the front of the pedestal. They flopped onto the ground, putting the pedestal between them and the shooters.

The ground appeared to have received a fresh dusting of snow. In fact it was particles of raven excrement. Lovely, Charlie thought.

Some of the particles had filled the letters chiseled into the face of the pedestal.

GENERAL PIERRE GUSTAVE TOUSSAINT BEAUREGARD, 1818–1893

  A bullet chimed the horse’s right cheek, ricocheted, and struck the pickup truck, shattering a headlight.

Drummond appraised the damage with a thin smile and said, “As Churchill put it, ‘There is nothing so enjoyable as to be shot at by one’s enemy without result.’”

Charlie asked himself, How did it come down to this? “Didn’t Churchill have a drinking problem?”

“Give me the Colt, please.”

Charlie saw a glow in Drummond’s eyes. Had a mental association with Beauregard the dog triggered him?

It could have been an association with raven crap, for all Charlie cared. Electrified, he handed over the gun.

Drummond pivoted to his left and squeezed off two quick shots.

The first missed by a wide margin, judging by the puff of dirt. Still, it sent Flattop diving for the cover of high grass. The second met him there. Red spouted from his leg, and he dropped from sight.

If not for fear of breaking Drummond’s concentration, Charlie would have cheered.

Whirling to his right, Drummond trained the Colt on Scholar, now scurrying across a patch of barren ground about forty yards away, and fired. The bullet merely trimmed the high grass to Scholar’s left.

Not an ideal time for Drummond to prove human, Charlie thought.

Drummond tweaked the barrel and snapped the trigger again. The result was a feeble click. “It wasn’t fully loaded,” he told Charlie. “Give me the Walther.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Where is it?”

“The glove compartment.”

“This isn’t the time for your jokes.”

“In the car, you were rocking back and forth, obsessing with ketchup, and the gun was just kind of balancing there on the seat, so I thought it’d be for the best …”

Drummond’s eyes slitted, which Charlie read as fury.

“It might have been for the best, actually,” Drummond said.

He outlined their escape plan.

27

“The problem
with that is the huge likelihood I’ll get shot,” Charlie said.

“I’d say only fifty-fifty,” Drummond said coolly.

“Oh, okay, great.”

“What are our chances otherwise?”

“Way worse,” Charlie admitted.

A bullet gonged the horse’s throat.

“All right, I’m getting ready,” Charlie said.

He forced himself into a sprinter’s stance, which wasn’t as simple as placing a hand here and a foot there. Anxiety had the effect of doubling the force of gravity. He worried that when the time came to run from behind the pedestal, he wouldn’t be able to move, and their window of opportunity would slam shut. He clung to the hope, dim though it was, that some savior would arrive and render this brutal plan unnecessary.

Drummond crouched behind him. A bullet spat chips of granite. The bitter scent of cordite filled the air.

“What was the name of that catcher on the Mets when they won the World Series back in eighty-six?” Drummond asked.

“Gary Carter,” said Charlie, unsettled by the introduction of the topic.

“Just think about him.”

“He was pretty much the slowest runner in the majors.”

“I know.”

“So, what? You’re saying this could be worse? I could be as slow as Gary Carter?”

“No, I just hoped it might take your mind off the other business.”

It had.

Charlie looked over his shoulder to convey his gratitude. Drummond was pivoting in the opposite direction, his eyes locked on the pickup truck, his knees tensed to spring toward it. His would be by far the harder role, yet he was aglow, like he’d just stepped out of an adrenaline shower.

Awe burned away the remainder of Charlie’s anxiety.

Drummond gave the go order—“Execute!”

Charlie surged out from the pedestal, faster than he’d imagined himself capable.

A bullet cleaved the air inches in front of his eyes.

To keep going, he thought, would be insane.

Out of the blue, however, a spirit took possession of him—that’s how it felt—a spirit who saw things in greater depth and definition, and in slow motion. Both Flattop and Scholar appeared clearly in his peripheral vision, jumping from their hiding spots to capitalize on the open shot at him. In his new perception, they rose as if weighted, and the twinkle of the waning sun on their gun barrels was as slow as a turn signal. They pulled—tugged, it seemed—their triggers. He had the sensation of seeing, hearing, and feeling everything that followed: the crashes of firing pins, the jolts of explosive in the primers, the white heat gobbling the powder, the flames screaming through the flash holes, the propellant blasting, the cartridges groaning under pressure and expanding and swelling and bulging and, finally, the bullets bursting out of the barrels. He watched the plumes of flame balloon from the muzzles and the guns themselves sashay backward. He heard the booms of the projectiles as they exceeded the speed of sound, and he saw them revolving on their way toward him.

He didn’t just dive, he took off; gravity no longer seemed to have sway over him. He landed after just ten feet, behind the barrel of the cannon, because that’s what Drummond’s plan called for. Rocks cut into his palms, his forearms, and his chin. No big deal.

Whatever had lodged in his left calf, though, returned the world to its normal pace. A hatchet, it felt like. Spotting the hole in his dungarees, he realized it was a bullet. And, holy fucking bloody damned Jesus, he hadn’t imagined a bullet could hurt even a hundredth as much. The thing seemed to be setting him on fire from the inside. He wanted to
tamp it somehow and to scream in pain. He lay still, facedown, as if dead. That was part of the plan too.

Vomit, tasting of a stale convenience store hot dog, erupted from his esophagus, burning its way up his throat and into his mouth. He couldn’t very well spit it out if he were dead. So he let it seep out. It welled on the ground by his face. Each time he inhaled, bits went up his nostrils.

Bullets whacked the opposite side of the cannon, kicking the ground into a brown-gray haze. But the big gun shielded him, as Drummond had said it would. A solid hit to one of the brittle wooden wheels might bring the ton of bronze crashing down on him, though. He managed to lie still, his eyes slits. Out of a corner of one of them, he spotted a blur: Drummond, running through the grass, toward the pickup truck.

Cadaret leaped up from a cluster of stalks at the far end of the field and fired three times. Drummond dove for the blacktop. Cadaret’s bullets kicked up the grass.

Drummond lunged to the safety of the passenger side of the truck. The engine block would now protect him. Theoretically.

Scholar and Flattop rammed fresh clips into their guns and joined Cadaret in firing at the truck. They made a punch card of the wobbly hood, dislodging it.

The steel slab banged down onto Drummond, sandwiching him against the asphalt. Luckily. The hood protected him when more bullets brought bits of glass raining from the windshield, and more rounds burst apart the headlight caddies, causing the lamps within them to explode.

Without letup in their fire, the three gunmen closed in. The pickup’s grille, side panels, engine, mirrors, and roof rang like a steel band, and the whole chassis staggered. With a report as loud as the sum of those preceding it, the gasoline tank exploded into a mound of fire. In a blink, the fire swelled to the size of a house, encasing Drummond along with the entire truck. Just as fast, it receded into puddles of flame and burning pieces of upholstery scattered about the parking lot.

The wind thinned the smoke, revealing the truck’s charred remains. And Drummond. The hood that shielded him had been cast aside. He lay flat on his back on the asphalt. His chest, swamped in shimmering crimson, had ceased to rise and fall.

28

Cadaret strode
onto the blacktop, followed by Flattop and Scholar. With a twisted grin, Cadaret aligned his pistol for a game of “shoot the can” with Drummond’s head.

“Enough, enough,” Charlie cried from the ground behind the cannon. “How many times do you need to kill him?”

Cadaret whirled at him, gun leveled.

Charlie tried to stand up. Each movement made it feel like he was being shot in the leg again. “Look, our plan was shit. You win,” he said, hobbling to the blacktop, where the wide-eyed stares said he’d succeeded in playing dead. “If you’ll let me live, I’ll tell what you want to know.”

Flattop and Scholar looked curiously at Cadaret. He flexed his shoulders.

“What do we want to know?” he asked Charlie.