Once a Spy (8 page)

He halted when he came even with the woman. She didn’t look up. Probably didn’t dare. “Are you staying at the Nacional too, by chance?” he asked, knowing she had to be. It was analogous to running into a man on the moon: The lunar lander had to be his.

She cocked an eye toward Blackbeard, seeking permission to speak. He gave it with a shrug.

“Y-yes, as a matter of fact, I am,” she said. Her accent was British. Fielding had presumed as much from what he would affectionately come to call her bathtub-white complexion.

“It’s really dark between here and there, and possibly unsafe,” he said. “Perhaps we ought to walk back together?”

The Cubans eyed one another, apparently trying to decide whether this was amusing or galling. Stepping his big chest into Fielding’s face, Blackbeard said, “She’s with us.”

“How about I buy all of you a drink?” Fielding asked. He flashed his rum bottle.

Blackbeard grabbed a handful of Fielding’s linen lapel, imprinting it with something oily. “How about you go to your hotel now?”

Fielding recoiled. “You had fish for dinner, didn’t you?”

“That’s it,
cabrón.”
Blackbeard balled his free hand into a fist.

“Now, now, sir, please,” Fielding said. “We can settle this without resorting to violence.”

The second thug clucked his opinion that Fielding was chicken. The third called Fielding,
“Maricón.”
Fielding knew enough Spanish to understand it as an appraisal of his sexual bent.

He told the group, “Recently I took a seminar called Emotional Balances, which, if you haven’t heard, is like anger management, except it’s conceived by accredited behavioral scientists. What we learned is that people feel better when they talk about their feelings. It eases the burden of facing our fears and offers us an emotional release. So what do you say we listen to one another, give it the best of our understanding, and see where it leads?”

The woman studied him, her mouth wide open in mystification.

She had beautiful lips, he thought.

“You a fucking crazy little
pedazo de mierda
, aren’t you?” Blackbeard said to him.

Fielding turned the other cheek. “It’s not easy, talking about your feelings, I know. But let’s try, okay? Just try? One of my favorite sayings is, ‘Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.’”

He would have attributed the saying to “that great friend of Cuba, John F. Kennedy.” But Blackbeard’s fist was flying at his face.

He sidestepped it with ease.

“I tried,” he sighed.

He set his bottle of rum on the wall in time to meet the advance of Blackbeard’s confederates. He hit the first with a karate slash, causing the man to grab his wrist and cry out like an injured beast.

Fielding ducked the haymaker thrown by the second thug, then three-sixtied, gaining force, leverage, and surprise. To the man’s exposed elbow, he delivered a karate strike with perhaps a little too much squash backhand. Still, it sounded like it broke bone.

Hearing Blackbeard rushing him from behind, Fielding whirled around and seized him by the waist, bursting the wind out of the big man. In the same motion he heaved him over the seawall. No splash rose from the bay ten feet below, just a heavy smack against a slab of sea rock.

Fielding spun around again, gearing up for the others’ retaliation.

They were running away.

“The good news,” he told the woman, “is now there’s more rum for us.”

She smiled, restoring some healthy pink to her face.

2

“So who
sent you?” Fielding asked Alice.

He was fond of saying that the time they’d spent together—four weeks now—was like the mid–romantic movie montages that invariably feature the couple romping through the surf, except, despite a shared affinity for both jogging and the beach, he and Alice had yet to get around to that.

“Sent me?”
She shifted uncomfortably on the silk-upholstered Louis XV settee in his den. Behind her, the exterior wall had been opened; the starlit beach appeared to be a mural. He paced before her, beneath the great white shark jawbone he’d kept above the mantel despite the decorator’s pleas.

“Sent you, yes,” he said. “Who sent you?” For the first time in a month there was no mirth in his tone. This, as opposed to some combination of the bare arms and legs protruding from her cocktail dress, the breeze off the sea, and the bamboo ceiling fans, probably explained her shiver.

Delicately, she said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean, darling.”

“Let’s save the trouble and pretend I’ve now asked, ‘Who sent you?’ ad nauseam, and endured all your variations of ‘Sent me where?’ and ‘Why, nobody sent me anywhere, darling,’ with you looking at me all the while like I’ve spent too much time in the wine cellar, shall we?”

“Okay, but I still won’t know what you mean.”

“All right, stick with that tack. I’ll counter with a threat. But first, so you won’t think it’s an idle threat, let’s broach for the first time the topic of what I do for a living. Alice, what do I do for a living?”

“You hunt for buried pirate treasure.”

“Sometimes I do, yes. But have you ever thought about buried pirate treasure?”

“How should I think about it, Nicky?” She was playing along as though he were a seven-year-old.

He resolved to keep his emotions out of it. “Say you’re a pirate. What sense would it make for you to take your treasure, which likely came at the sacrifice of lives and limbs, and dump it into an unguarded hole in the ground on a remote island you might never be able to find again?”

“What about the treasure of San Isidro?” she asked. His well-publicized search for the legendary pirate hoard was into a seventh month.

“Actually, the treasure of San Isidro is the maritime equivalent of an urban legend.”

“How about your gold escudos, then?” He’d supposedly found the cache after weeks of searching along the Argentine coast. News photographs showed him neck deep in a hole on a beach, holding one of the coins aloft, its gleam matching the one in his eyes. A neophyte collector, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr, bought the lot for six million dollars.

“I suspect you already know this, Alice—or whatever your name really is—but in case the brief you were given glossed over it, the truth is that the authenticity of the coins was questionable at best. Al Saqr knew that and didn’t care. Because the coin deal was really a cover for … what, you tell me.”

She looked away to hide her anguish. “Of course I’ve heard the rumors.”

He stopped pacing, waited for her to look, then locked eyes with her. “Ever hear the one about Nick Fielding, illegal arms dealer?”

“Look, if that’s the case—” She was embarking, he suspected, on an explanation of how she’d made her peace with it.

“It’s the case,” he said. “Moreover, as a dealer in illegal arms, one has to be ruthless, probably to a psychotic extent, though I’m probably an exception—then again, what psychopath thinks he’s a psychopath? In any event, I had a man keelhauled recently. Know what that is?”

“I don’t think I want to.” Her eyes pooled with tears.

“Sorry, you’ve got to. ‘Keelhauled’ means dragged under a ship’s hull so you drown, if you’re lucky. Otherwise you’re shredded by barnacles
and whatnot. It would’ve been easier for me to put a bullet through the guy’s head, of course; the keelhauling was something of a public relations move.”

Weakly, she asked, “Are you going to keelhaul me?”

“Are you going to tell me who sent you?”

“Nicky, please, I—” Her voice broke into a sob.

“Then what good would keelhauling you do? You wouldn’t be able to tell me who sent you.”

“I wouldn’t be able to tell you regardless. I haven’t the first clue even why you think someone
sent
me.”

“How about the night on the Malecón, when the Blackbeard look-alike said, ‘What’s a matter,
puta
, you too good for us?’ First, the script was laughable. And how about the way he delivered the line a second time, just in case I missed it the first time because of the loud waves? Also, my dear honey trap, your hair was, and remains, red—my weakness for which is widely known. Now, before you accuse me of being vain, know I’ve done some homework. You claimed to be the only child of parents now deceased. You said you had an idyllic upbringing in Chiswick in West London, and you fled a tedious assistant solicitor’s life in Bristol to study marine biology in the Bahamas. And your story held water, as it were. Whoever sent you did a bang-up job on your legend, if that’s the right term. Probably you’re one of those spooks with the single-mindedness of a mountaintop monk; you can set your real life aside for months at a time. Still, you’re human, which means you can’t entirely extinguish your feelings for your real life. I’m willing to wager that that will be so in the case of Jane.”

Alice looked at him as though “Jane” were some strange-sounding word from the language of the indigenous Carib tribe.

She ought to have been curious which Jane he meant, though, for surely she knew several, let alone her de facto goddaughter.

“Poor play,” he said. “You’re masking your apprehension that I mean the little girl in South Yorkshire with pigtails the color of sunshine, who, on Christmas morning, opened an airmail package sent from this neck of the planet and delighted in its contents, a radio-controlled mermaid.” He was certain this detail would get a rise out of her.

She didn’t blink.

Could he be wrong about her?

“Well, then, that brings us to the evening’s threat,” he said. “Note the FedEx pouch over there on my desk. It arrived earlier from the UK, sent by a fellow limey of yours known as ‘the Knife’—trite, sure, but if anyone deserves the moniker, it’s him.”

He strolled to his desk, automatically checking his computer screen for new e-mails. Nothing. Then he took up the sealed pouch. “This contains the pinky finger from Jane’s left hand, removed late yesterday afternoon at the Rotherham rail yard, where she was found in what was believed to be a state of shock.” Fielding disliked having had to dispatch the Knife to South Yorkshire yesterday to chloroform and butcher an innocent child, but he believed it was for the greater good. “As you may know, Jane had been warned repeatedly against playing with the feral dogs there. The dogs are currently viewed as the culprits. Now, unless you tell me who sent you, the ‘dogs’ will revisit Jane and tomorrow’s pouch will contain—” Fielding stopped himself.

Alice had broken, though without the sobbing one would have expected based upon her maudlin performance to this point. “Fine,” she said with the nerve of a different person altogether. “I’ll tell you the truth. You’re right. I was sent here by MI6.”

“Okay, okay, good,” Fielding said, preoccupied. What had caused him to stop himself mid-threat was the winged envelope icon that popped onto the computer screen, sent by one of his fellow members of Korean Singles Online. “I just need to take five, Allie. Hector and Alberto will take you up to your room. I’ve just received some, er, news of the hunt.”

As soon as the two hulking servants led her out, he clicked open his message from Suki835. “Howdy, Cowboy232,” the text began, then launched into the movies and music she favored.

He scrolled to the important part, her photograph. She had a plump, round face; pleasant eyes; and an effortless smile. She couldn’t really weigh just 110, unless five four was the fib.

He moused to her silver left earring and magnified it several hundred times over, until he could read the text on the overlaid digital dot. Decrypted, it was indeed “news of the hunt,” but not the hunt for the treasure of San Isidro as he had implied:

hounds lost rabbit and rabbit, jr., at utica and fillmore in bklyn at 00:35. rabbits driving ny daily news delivery truck north on utica. will unleash addl hounds asap.

Not good news, Fielding thought, but nothing to lose sleep over. How far could a feebleminded old man and a ne’er-do-well gambler get?

3

Charlie wrung
another mile out of the beleaguered Hippo. When it felt like the truck was about to collapse into a pile of spent parts, he pulled into a down-market strip mall. The businesses—a supermarket, a carpet wholesaler, and five or six smaller stores—were all dark, save a few red exit signs and a display counter someone probably had forgotten to switch off.

He nosed the truck behind Sal’s Cheesesteak Hut, a trailer painted to look like a giant hoagie. It sat on cinder blocks at the rear of the crumbling lot. Between the broken windows, graffiti, and garbage strewn all around, it appeared Sal had served his last steak years ago.

“I think it’s closed,” Drummond said.

“I like it anyway,” Charlie said, “because it’s big enough to hide this monster from the street, and it’s just a block from here to the subway.” He pointed to the elevated track, where a subway train was snaking toward the station. After midnight, the trains ran fifteen to twenty minutes apart. “We should hustle.”

“Why the subway?”

Charlie jumped out of the truck. “I’m thinking, until we can figure out our next move, we’d do well to hide in Manhattan, where there are ten million people, as opposed to here, where it’s pretty much just you and me.”

Drummond remained in his seat. “Why don’t we drive?”

There were too many bullet holes in the truck to count—the light streaming through them and into the cab resembled pickup sticks in mid-toss. Much of what had been the windows lay in fragments on
streets between Fillmore and here. The rear tires were ribbons. Hurrying around the hood, Charlie left it at, “The truck’s hot.”

“I meant why don’t we get a car,” Drummond said.

“There’s about a zero chance of even seeing a taxi around here now.” His patience evaporating, Charlie yanked open Drummond’s door.

“Our own car, I mean.”

Charlie took Drummond by the elbow to help him from the truck. Or pull him if need be. “You really think it would be a good idea to go back to Prospect Place right now and get your Oldsmobile?”

“No, hot-wire a car here.”