Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

In the distance, through
the transparent wall as he approached it, Ty made out Philip Frost. And when he entered the pavilion of Pond House in which dinner would be served, it was Philip who greeted him, with a strong grip and a warm manner.

“First things first: What can I get you to drink?” Philip asked.

“That's a good question,” Ty said. “My usual's a martini, very dry with a twist.”

“Same as mine,” Philip said.

“But tonight I was thinking of something more summery and . . . well, more Spanish,” Ty said.

“Such as what?”

“Perhaps a Mojito?”

“Have a martini. Crispin makes the best in the world,” Philip said, gesturing toward a tall black man in a tartan kilt who was already busy serving drinks to Ian's guests. “He swirls an ice cold crystal glass with Lillet blanc, then mixes Plymouth gin with a glance in the direction of France and a lemon peel twisted as only he can twist it.”

“You've convinced me,” Ty said.

“Two martinis up, please, Crispin,” Philip said.

Crispin Pleasant smiled. “They're on their way,” he replied, his diction still that of Barbados, where Ian had found him.

“So,” Philip said, “it seems you've returned sooner than you expected.”

“Once upon a time, I controlled my own life,” Ty said with a wry smile, but keeping his eye sharply on Philip, “no longer.”

“It happens to the best of us,” Philip said. “I myself have just taken a new job and so am in the process of getting used to new masters. So far, so good, but it's always tricky, isn't it?”

“Actually,” exclaimed Isabella, making a sudden entrance, “there's nothing tricky about it! Philip positively adores being based in Geneva. He was there at school, and we all know how some boys can never bear to grow up.” At this she smiled ruefully, leaned up and kissed him. “Hello, darling,” she added.

“Darling,” Philip echoed, then, to Ty, said, “The fact of the matter is that for the moment I've been seconded to my firm's Gibraltar office. My commute is only as far as the Rock.”

“He does it on his motorbike,” Isabella added.

“It's the fastest way, especially at the frontier.”

“Cool and dangerous,” Isabella said, then, turning to Ty, offered him successive cheeks. “Hello there. I'm so glad we could get you.”

“Your competition was room service,” Ty told her.

“I don't believe that for a minute. Anyway, your timing couldn't be better. Tonight we're a party of twelve, including one of Gibraltar's leading politicians and the British admiral who commands the NATO base there.”

“It sounds interesting. I've never been to Gibraltar,” Ty said.

“Really? Then you shouldn't miss it,” Isabella told him. “It's a fascinating place.”

“Much like Zurich, with better weather,” Philip said.

“And apes,” Isabella added with a laugh.

“You're kidding,” Ty replied.

“They're all over the mountain. They'll steal your handbag or your camera. They're playful, but you have to be careful,” Isabella said. “And that's just on the surface of the mountain. Inside it there are all sorts of labyrinthine tunnels left over from its days as a fort.”

“
Are
they over?” Philip inquired. “I'm not so sure. Admiral Cotton, for example, commands his staff and forces from a very sleek headquarters that was once one of the largest tunnels. How they hollowed it out one can only imagine, but it surveys the straits between Gibraltar and Jebel Musa fourteen miles away.”

“Jebel Musa?” Ty inquired.

“It and Gibraltar were once one mountain,” Ian interrupted, advancing toward them, “until the tectonic plates shifted, dividing not only them but Europe from Africa. If you studied Greek mythology, you know them as the Pillars of Hercules. Plato believed that the lost continent of Atlantis lay beneath them and that they marked the end of Hercules' travels as he performed his Twelve Labors. The Romans believed he smashed through the mountain on his way to the western edge of the known world.”

“How fascinating,” Ty said. “When did the plates actually shift?”

“It's a constant process, as I am sure you know,” Ian said, donning a professorial mask that was new to Ty, although he suspected the older man had a mask ready for every audience and situation, “one that plays out over hundreds of millions of years in what are called Wilson cycles, after the Canadian geologist who originally described them. Continents form, break up, disperse, then reassemble. Nothing is as permanent as it appears to a human within his life span. By about six million years ago, Spain and Africa had collided, enclosing the western edge of the Mediterranean. Four million or so years before that, other collisions had sealed off its eastern edge. Thus constricted, the inflows of its rivers proved insufficient to maintain its sea level, so the Mediterranean dried out. Those rivers, however, were relentless. They kept pushing forward, far beneath the level of the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually one managed to cut through sufficiently to allow the waters of the Atlantic to begin to flow back in. It is likely that this flow, not Hercules, cut the Strait of Gibraltar. Of course, whether those mountains mark the entrance to the Mediterranean or the exit from it to the larger world beyond depends upon one's perspective.”

“Well, I've learned something,” Ty said. “I can't wait to see it.”

“I can't wait to show it to you,” Ian said, “if only by way of thanking you for having added such a note of glamour to our little party.”

Ty shrugged. “I think the last thing any party of yours requires is more glamour—not that I bring any.”

“Oh, but you do,” Ian insisted. “It's not every day we have a film star, especially one of your magnitude and who's come to us directly—well, almost—from Buck House.”

“I've never been to Buckingham Palace, if that's what you mean. The premiere was in a theater.”

“Just slang,” Ian said. “It was Buckingham House before it was Buckingham Palace, you see.”

Very deftly, Ian maneuvered Ty toward his guests, beginning with his elegant lawyer, Riccardo Haslett, and his wife, Olivia, who lived in nearby Sotogrande, as well as Olivia's sister, Elvira, a twice-divorced, immaculately turned-out equestrienne then, as often during the polo season, visiting from Gloucestershire. Beyond them were Sir Timothy Foo and Lady Foo Fan Dang, an almost legendary couple from Singapore whose daughter, Catherine, had both begun and concluded her merchant banking career on the trading floor of Ian's old firm.

Tim Foo began their conversation, pointing to Ian. “Do you have any idea how long I've known this man?” he asked Ty. “Since he was a don and I a fellow of his Cambridge college. Where
did
the time go?”

“They say every day passes more quickly than the one before because it represents a diminishing percentage of your life,” Ty said, “but I'm not so sure.”

“Aren't you? And why is that?”

“Because I've spent days on certain sets that felt like they would never end.”

“How true,” exclaimed Lady Foo.

“My wife Celia was an actress,” Tim Foo explained as Ian departed.

Lady Foo smiled. “‘That was long, long ago,'” she said, “‘and in a universe far, far away.'”

“Am I missing something?” Tim Foo asked. “I didn't realize Ian was in the film business.”

“Is he?” Ty asked.

“If not, I must tell you I'm surprised. Ian seldom has people to Pond House or aboard
Surpass
to whom he has merely a social connection, although I suppose, being who you are, you're the exception that proves the rule.”

Ty shrugged. “I take it, then, that you and Ian are more than old friends.”

“Indeed we are old friends, and yes, I've also invested in some of his projects, as has he in my funds.”

In rapid Mandarin, in order to disguise her words from Ty, a frowning Celia Foo said, “The way you say that, you would think he hadn't gone on to bigger and better.”

Ty immediately looked away, suggesting that her foreign words meant nothing to him.

“Now, don't be unkind,” Tim Foo told his wife, nodding to Ty with an expression that both begged his indulgence and implied that the matter suddenly under discussion was of some urgency. “Family crisis,” he whispered in English.

“Three times we've asked him to our parties—in Singapore, Shanghai and London—and three times he has had better things to do,” Celia noted grudgingly, still in Mandarin.

“Obviously he's got a lot on his plate,” her husband told her.

“There was a time when you would have known exactly what that was.”

Tim hesitated. “Perhaps that's true,” he said. “Anyway, we're here.”

Celia nodded reluctantly. “And I can't help wondering why.”

“Life is relationships,” Tim said calmly. “We nurture them or we don't.”

“Ah, but relationships with whom?” Celia inquired. “Who exactly are all the new people in our friend Ian's life, so many of whom, from what I gather, seem to be from the Middle East? What roles do they play in the grand mise-en-scène he takes such joy in creating around himself everywhere he goes? We'll never know is my guess, because the great man is so jealous of his little secrets.” Abruptly resuming in English, she turned to Ty and said, “Sorry, very rude of me to slip into another tongue.”

At dinner Ty was seated between Isabella and Eloise Cotton, the admiral's longtime, formidably constructed wife.

“When you go to Gibraltar,” Eloise Cotton said, “you must be sure to see Ian's office. It's on the opposite side of the mountain from Giles's, looking landward over the airport and harbor.”

“So I've heard. I would love to.”

“I'm afraid that Giles's office is off-limits,” Eloise continued, “even to me.”

“Except on certain occasions,” Giles Cotton interjected from across the polished round table. He was a big, genial man whom Ty had already overheard telling one rambling story after another without ever reaching a punch line.

“Oh,
that,
” Eloise remarked disdainfully, turning to Ty. “They have a reception one day every year, for the local VIPs—V
S
IPs, I call them: very
self
-important people—and even then most parts of the place are cordoned off.”

“Nothing so secret in my little shop,” Ian said. “Acres of files and bills of lading, HM's customs forms, et cetera, everywhere one turns. Boring, boring, boring they are, too!”

“You're being modest,” Isabella said. “It's like Aladdin's cave. It cries out mystery.”

“To you,” Ian said, “perhaps it does, because you are an artist at heart, my darling, and because you don't work there. If you did, I've no doubt you'd find the boredom suffocating.”

“Mr. Hunter doesn't work there either, so he may well agree with me. Anyway, we're not going to settle this now.”

“How long will you be with us?” Eloise Cotton asked Ty.

“That's a hard one to answer,” he said. “Not long, in all likelihood. This whole trip pretty much came up out of the blue.”

“The last time we met,” Isabella said, “you were so eager to get back to your new house and all the work being done and contemplated there.”

“What an impressive memory,” Ty observed. “When I did get back to La
Encantada, I quickly discovered that the house is undergoing the kind of renovation you can't live around for too long.”

Isabella suppressed a smile. “Tomorrow we go to the bullfight,” she said.

“Indeed we do,” Ian said, then, after catching Isabella's eye, added, “You should come, Mr. Hunter. And anyone else who would like to is more than welcome.”

“Enough of this ‘Mr. Hunter,' please,” Ty said. “I thought we'd straightened that out aboard your boat.”

Ian nodded.

“Do come, Ty,” Isabella said. “You'll enjoy it. Have you ever been to a bullfight?”

“Never.”

“All the more reason, then! At the very least, you'll add to your inventory of experience, which has to be a good thing for an actor.”

“You can stay overnight in one of the guest rooms,” Ian offered. “The Marbella Club is too far to drive anyway, especially after drink and with the Guardia Civil in the mood they're in lately. So it's settled?”

“I suppose it is,” Ty agreed, after what he judged an appropriate pause.

“You and Philip are about the same size,” Isabella said.

Philip, plastering a smile to his face, said, “I'm sure I can find something suitable for you to wear.”

“Thank you very much,” Ty told him.

“Pleasure,” Philip replied.

After he turned out the light but before he went to sleep, Ty picked up the BlackBerry Oliver had given him. It was nearly midnight—considering the time difference, a credible time for him to call his house, his production company at the studio or his agent. He pressed the pad at its center, thought about holding down the
E
character until the light behind the numbers blinked, but decided that it would risk provoking suspicion to encrypt a conversation one end of which could easily be overheard by other means. Instead he pressed then held the capital
N
in order to make the conversation seem subject to interference and thus unintelligible to any intruder. From his list of contacts, he highlighted his agent, Netty Fleiderfleiss, then pressed the green call button. Seconds later he heard the single-spaced rings of an American telephone.

The intercepted call was answered before the third ring had been completed. “Hello,” Oliver said.

“Hi, Netty,” Ty replied. “Do you have a cold? It sure sounds like it.”

“The usual summer drip,” Oliver responded, playing along. Trusting as little as necessary to chance, they spoke in an impromptu code even beneath the protective layer of technology.