Once a Spy (22 page)

“About the shootings.”

“What shootings?”

“Yours,” Drummond said, reaching up from behind Cadaret and surprising him by grabbing hold of his belt. Using Cadaret as a counterweight, Drummond rose to his feet, then threw his forehead into the killer’s temple with a resounding crack. Cadaret crumpled, unconscious, into Drummond’s arms.

Both Flattop and Scholar swiveled toward Drummond and fired. Flattop’s shot flew wide. Scholar’s was absorbed by Cadaret—now Drummond’s shield—fatally.

Drummond lifted Cadaret’s limp hand, the gun still in it, and pressed the trigger. With a blast, a bullet plunged into Flattop’s chest. Convulsing
as if he’d instead absorbed a jolt of electricity, he fell to the parking lot. Another twitch and he lay still, for good.

Drummond pivoted Cadaret’s body a few degrees and fired again. A round slammed into Scholar’s right collarbone, sending him reeling with a wake of blood.

He remained upright by grasping Charlie’s neck and holding tight. He settled directly behind Charlie, breathing heavily, his chest pressed against Charlie’s right shoulder blade—probably to staunch the flow of his blood. He used the crook of Charlie’s neck to prop his gun, to get a shot at Drummond. Charlie couldn’t so much as flinch without risk of a bullet in his own head.

Scholar’s problem was that Cadaret’s body shielded Drummond. Also Drummond was trying to shoot him. But Drummond’s only shot was directly through Charlie. Charlie had an ugly suspicion that that didn’t rule it out. A recent “interesting piece of information”: A bullet passes easily through the human diaphragm.

Stuffing the hot muzzle into Charlie’s ear, Scholar said, “Please put the gun down, Mr. Clark.”

Without hesitation, Drummond let Cadaret’s pistol fall. And without having to be asked, he tapped it with his sneaker, sending it rasping over the asphalt. It stopped inches from Scholar.

“Thank you, sir,” Scholar said.

His excessive deference was either one of those military things, Charlie thought, or just odd.

Drummond studied Scholar and said, “I know you, don’t I?”

“Possibly.” The young man seemed indisposed to chat.

Drummond persisted. “You’re the kid who speaks ten languages?”

“Only if you include English.”

“Belknapp, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be infiltrating Muslim graduate students at Cal Tech?”

“It’s holiday break. I’m in Idaho, snowboarding. As it were.”

“So, really you’re spending the holiday putting me to pasture. Why?”

“Orders from ‘Hen’ himself, sir.”

Charlie couldn’t help exclaiming, “You two work together?”

“Apparently one of us has been made redundant,” Drummond said.

“Why? Are they afraid you might talk about what went down at the office Christmas party?”

Drummond looked at Belknapp. “I wouldn’t imagine the rationale filtered down to your level?”

Belknapp glanced around, as if trying to determine the location of a microphone. In a low voice, though not without conviction, he said, “The greater good.”

“Hard to fathom,” Drummond said. “Are you sure your orders came from
Hen?”

“You’re suggesting I was false flagged?”

“That ‘Stop Duck Hunting!’ ad could have been placed by anyone with a passing knowledge of our simple letter-drop cipher.”

“Yes, sir, it was supposed to be easy for you and your son to find. The minimal code was just to make it seem like an actual covert correspondence. Had you been at the top of your game, you would have gravitated to the ad for Theodore Tepper, our fictitious divorce lawyer. And simple false subtraction of the saddle numbers in the day’s first race from the alphabet value of the letters and the digits themselves in his address would have netted you the same Manhattan telephone number.”

Drummond nodded, convinced. “Well, let’s not belabor this, then.”

Belknapp kicked Charlie’s shins out from under him. Charlie wound up on smarting knees, on the jagged asphalt. Belknapp’s muzzle bit into the base of his head.

Charlie looked up at Drummond, plaintively. “That’s it?”

“Yes,” said Drummond.

With a muffled report and a trail of gore, a bullet emerged from the lower left part of Cadaret’s belly, the area over the diaphragm. Belknapp’s head snapped backward, taking his body along. As he came to rest on the blacktop, blood arched from the socket where his right eye had been.

“I wish I hadn’t had to do that,” Drummond said, withdrawing his Walther from the small of Cadaret’s back. “For what it’s worth, Charles, your surrender was very convincing.” Retrieving the Walther from the pickup truck—along with smearing ketchup on his chest—had been the essence of Drummond’s plan; Charlie’s role had been diversion.

Marshaling his faculties just to process the fact that the risky plan had actually worked, Charlie said, “I have lots of experience with cowardice. For what it’s worth, you play a mean dead.”

“I would have been more than just playing if not for that,” Drummond said, eyeing the dislodged hood that had protected him from the explosion. “How’s your leg?”

“Okay, except it feels like it might snap if I take another step.”

Drummond knelt on the blacktop and gently rolled up Charlie’s left pants cuff, purple and soggy with blood. On its way in and out of the denim, the bullet had carved a groove on the outside of Charlie’s calf.

Drummond said, “I wouldn’t say it’s nothing, but …”

“A paper cut by the standards of your industry?”

“Best not to worry about it.” Drummond pulled a set of keys from Flattop’s pocket. “Now, if our brief helicopter ride taught us anything, it’s that you ought to be the designated driver.”

Limping after him to the Durango, Charlie tried to ignore the repeated detonations in his leg. “When in Spook City …” he exhorted himself.

29

If there’s
such a thing as a lucky gunshot wound, Charlie thought, he’d been lucky because the wound was in his left leg rather than the one used to press the pedals. He drove the Durango from County Route 1 onto a side road where it was less likely to be spotted.

Drummond sat on the floor of the spacious passenger footwell. Like Charlie, he’d replaced his bloody and torn clothing with one of the business suits that had been among the gunmen’s belongings. Charlie watched him power on the fresh-from-the-factory-case prepaid cell phone also found in the gunmen’s things.

“So who does a person typically call when his own CIA special ops group is trying to neutralize him and his son?” Charlie asked.

“There’s a reports officer at headquarters whose job is to monitor everything, down to the number of bullets expended,” Drummond said, his voice fluctuating according to the bumps and ruts in the road. “I don’t think it would be wise to call her, though. In light of the way the fellows have been posing as FBI and DIA, we can conclude that she either signed off on the operation, she was bullied into it, or she’s had a bad fall down a flight of stairs from which she won’t recover.”

Charlie started to grin, until realizing Drummond wasn’t kidding. “Wouldn’t the FBI or the DIA want to know what the
fellows
have been up to?”

“There are a number of agencies who would, and to whom we could turn. All have twenty-four-hour panic lines manned by veteran agents. The problem is those lines will be canvassed.”

The cell phone beeped its readiness.

“So what does that leave us?” Charlie asked. “Greenpeace?”

“Burt Hattemer.” Drummond clearly expected Charlie to know the name.

Charlie felt the discomfort of dinnertimes past, when his ignorance of current events, other than sports, was bared by Drummond’s choices of conversation.

“He’s the national security advisor,” Drummond said matter-of-factly, probably masking his disappointment Charlie hadn’t known. “He’s been a friend since college, and I would trust him with my life.”

“So wouldn’t it occur to the fellows that you’d call him?”

“I imagine he’s at the top of their list. We can reach him without their knowledge, though.” Peeking over the window line, Drummond pointed to a part of the shoulder shaded by particularly thick treetops. “Pull over there.”

He punched an 800 number onto the phone’s keypad. Charlie brought the Durango to a halt in time to hear ringing. A fuzzy recording of a Scandinavian-accented woman blared through the earpiece.
“God dag
, you have reached Specialties of Sweden, bakers of the world’s finest
flotevafler
—”

Drummond hit 7-6-7.

“Please hold,” said the recording. On came whiney strands of an instrument that sounded to be a cross between a sitar and a fiddle.

“Nyckelharpa,”
Drummond said fondly.

Charlie felt a familiar chill. “Wrong number, by any chance?”

Intent on the nyckelharpa, Drummond shook his head.

Charlie looked at the sky. No sign of search craft. Nothing but the setting sun, which seemed grimly metaphorical. “So you called a bakery?”

Drummond pressed a palm over the mouthpiece. “In ninety-nine, Burt and I went to Stockholm under nonofficial cover, posing as venture capitalists. Specialties of Sweden was in the red without prospect of a turnaround. We bought it because it abutted the Iranian embassy. When the workers went home, we drilled through one of our exterior walls and into what the Iranians thought was a secure conference room. We planted microphones, and the Iranians never caught on, so Burt’s ‘venture capital firm’ kept the business. The number I input, seven six seven, is S-O-S, alphanumerically. In a few seconds, I’ll input a code, known
only to me. Then both numbers will be routed only to him. First, the system determines our location.”

Charlie’s doubt gave way to wonder. “How?”

“A cell phone can be tracked to within a few feet by triangulating its signal strength with the three nearest cell towers.”

The recorded woman returned. “To continue in English, dial or say ‘two,’
pour français
—” Drummond dialed 10.

“What language is ten?” Charlie asked.

“There is no ten,” Drummond said. “It’s the first part of my code.”

“To place an order, dial or say ‘zero,’” said the voice. Drummond hit 16. “To track a shipment—” Drummond hit 79. “If you know the name of the person you are trying—” Drummond entered 11. “I will now transfer you to—” Drummond added a 3 and a 5, then snapped the phone shut.

“We ought to hear from him in a few minutes,” he said confidently.

Charlie was convinced of the validity of the system, but not of the code. It started with 10, 16, and 79—his own date of birth. Hardly a spy-like choice. “Any significance to one oh, one six, seventy-nine?” he asked.

“Only if you add the other four digits, one one three five, or eleven thirty-five in the morning—thirty-one minutes after you were born, or the precise time you and I first met, in the waiting room at Kings County Hospital. For a distress code, you choose a number you can’t forget.”

Charlie laughed to himself. He judged it prudent not to explain why, but out of his mouth anyway came, “Don’t get me wrong. If Mom did anything, she showed that you deserve Espionage Parent of the Century. But you
forgetting
my birthday was about the closest thing we had to an annual tradition.”

Drummond retained his composure, probably with considerable effort. “Regrettably, there were times where the goings-on at the office meant you were short shrifted.”

“It might have helped if I’d known why.”

“For security reasons I’m sure I don’t need to explain, children of intelligence officers are told, at most, that Mother or Dad is a functionary at the State Department. I hope it makes some difference now that you do know.”

“Some.” Charlie felt the hurt of the eight-year-old who believed that
his father cared more about a line of cheap washing machines. For the truth to make enough of a difference, he thought, somebody would need to travel back in time and have a talk with that kid.

“Looking for a crutch?” Drummond asked. He sucked at his lower lip, which Charlie recognized as an effort at self-restraint.

“Ever have one of those days where you find out your dad’s a spy, your dead mother’s really alive, a spy too, and then she gets her head blown off? I’m just trying to put things in perspective.”

“You can write off your situation to circumstance or plain old bad luck. Throw up your hands, go seek solace in a bar—most people would understand. Just remember, that’s the easy way.”

Yes, of course, the Easy Way. Drummond used to speak of the easy way, the same way fire-and-brimstone preachers do the Road to Perdition. Charlie would have recognized the words just from the cadence. As always, they sent vitriol coursing through him.

“It’s not like I came up with the idea that a person’s upbringing has a bearing on his life,” he said.

Drummond tightened his tie. “There’s a point of accountability for everyone. Others have been dealt far worse hands and still found a way to prevail.”

Charlie loosened his tie. “Like you, you mean?”

“One might make the argument.”

“But you had Grandpa Tony.”

“If you really want to know the truth, Tony DiStephano—”

“Tony Clark, you mean.”

“I do mean DiStephano. ‘Clark’ was just part of his cover. He was really an old Chicago mobster in witness protection who we used for messy jobs.”

Charlie sagged in accordance with the feeling that air had just been let out of him. He’d always thought of his grandfather as an oversized teddy bear. “Beautiful,” he said.

“It could have been far worse. Your actual grandparents were charming, cultured, life-of-the-party Park Avenue sophisticates—”

“Well, thanks for shielding me from that shit.”

“It was an act.” Drummond reddened a shade more than Charlie had ever seen. “Really they were traitors. They spied for Stalin with the Alger
Hiss silver spoon flock. An American war hero spent the last four days of his life hanging from a hook in a Leningrad meat locker as a direct consequence of an encrypted postcard they sent to their handler at the Ministry of State Security. When Whittaker Chambers named names, they were blown. They fled to Moscow, leaving me alone. I was five.”