Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (43 page)

Ty laughed. “It sounds like a short circuit,” he said.

“It had better be something like that,” Garland White said. “Are you having any luck with your search?”

“Yes, but it's a long story,” Ty said, “which I don't have time to go into right now if we're hoping for a happy ending.”

“Understood,” said Garland White. “And, Ty, make sure there is one. And call me the moment it happens.”

When he had hung up, Ty at once turned to Bingo. “You're going to have to press the reset button,” he said.

“If I do, if I
can,
it will turn the clock back on, you understand that. Frost will assume it was a systemwide error of some sort, in which case he will be bound to revert to his previous schedule.”

“He'll assume that anyway,” Ty said, “before very long.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the entire international banking system is in crisis, as will no doubt be reported in the news momentarily. Apparently Jonty lifted not only Frost's funds but those in all accounts in all Swiss banks.”

“Oops!” said Bingo. “How much time do you think you'll need?”

“How can I possibly answer that?” Ty asked.

“Good point,” Bingo said. “Suppose I hold off for two more hours.”

“Can you restore everyone's funds but Frost's in the meantime?”

“Can we? Of course we can. We can make Peru rich and bankrupt Switzerland, as we've just shown. But if we do that, Frost may well get wind of it, assume his will be the next account to recover, and go on about his business.”

Ty considered this. “Two hours,” he said. “I don't know how long it will take him to find out, but once he discovers where his money has landed, he'll know that what happened wasn't due to his partner's treachery. Of course, he'll probably also kill Jonty.”

“We'll have to find a way to keep him in the dark, then.”

“More likely we'll have to
put
him there,” Ty said. “Bye, Bingo, gotta go.”

Bingo shook Ty's hand. “Jonty,” he said a few seconds later, “you got a bit overzealous, didn't you?”

“Sure, it was a mistake,” Jonty demurred. “But not just mine. How was anyone supposed to know that the Swiss had recoded their damned prefixes the night before? I meant all accounts with de Novo's prefix, not Switzerland's.”

“Whatever, the result's
not
great,” Bingo scolded him sharply.

“Don't talk to me in that tone of voice, please,” Jonty protested. “I am a very, very,
very
rich man, you know.”

Chapter Fifty-three

“Are you sure you
want to do this?” Admiral Cotton asked as Ty stepped aboard a high-speed patrol boat at the dockyard. Oliver, nearby, had assumed command of an identical vessel, and there were four more, each containing twenty petty officers, a machine gun and one M79 grenade launcher. Additionally, six flat-bottomed inflatables, carrying six petty officers each, were in the process of shoving off from the harborside.

“I've done it before,” Ty told him.

“I don't mean on film.”

“Neither do I, and those were darker waters than these.”

“What's he talking about?” Giles Cotton asked Isabella, who was standing beside him.

“I have no idea,” she said.

On the telephone Oliver said, “Once the trawlers are in sight, we lie back in our respective positions, then advance at once together. The attacks have got to be simultaneous.”

“They appear to be about the same size. Which do you want?”

“It doesn't matter,” Oliver said. “We'll take the first. The important thing is to bracket them, leave them no choice, but not to fire a shot if we don't have to. We can't be sure where the cargo is.”

“Surely it must take more than a single shot to detonate that sort of weapon,” Ty said.

“You would think so, but I've never tried it.”

The eastern sky was filling with clouds that turned the sea behind them to dark topaz. Ahead, beyond the straits, where the Phoenicians had imagined the Unknown to begin, the sun still sparkled on waves and ripples, on the casual motorboats and sailing craft, the determined tankers, fishing rigs, barges and ferries that defined the life of the basin at high summer.

On Oliver's order the vessels of the task force had left port one by one then assembled a few miles out to sea. There they had formed a loose collection, soon dividing into two discrete but equal groups. The forward task force, which was Ty's, required an extra eighteen minutes to be in place behind the second trawler, and while it advanced, the three patrol boats and three inflatables under Oliver's command did their best to feign idle exercises. Both trawlers had blue hulls and white decks, but the farther of them was several meters longer, and the roof of its pilot house, while not quite a gargoyle, was a peaked rusty red cone.

As Ty began to advance from Oliver's position and the craft with Oliver gathered into a lethal fighting force, Philip stood in the center of that pilot house, his eyes fastened to his laptop. When the Slav mercenary who was captaining the trawler approached him, Philip initially waved the man away, but the captain was insistent. “What is it?” Philip asked.

“Intelligence,” the captain explained.

“Go on.”

“You asked me to see to it that we enjoyed eyes on the ground.”

“I did, just yesterday. Did you think I wouldn't remember?” Philip asked.

“No, of course not.”

“You told me you had made a friend of the chandler.”

“That is true. He has just telephoned.”

“Saying?” inquired Philip.

“That the navy has gone to sea.”

“The navy is
always
at sea. That's precisely its point.”

“But this time, the chandler said, they put out in a manner that reminds him of task forces.”

“I see. One can never be too cautious, I suppose,” Philip said. “It does seem the least of our problems at present, but here is what I want you to do: Launch the
barco.
Make sure it is equipped with a GPS transponder. Whoever goes with it should be a strong swimmer.”

“They are all strong swimmers,” the captain replied.

“He should also be prudent, because in my experience,” Philip told him, “it's always the strong swimmers who drown. They are simply too confident and leave too much to chance.”

“I understand.”

“If necessary,
I'll
find
him,
which means he can go far afield, but not
too
far.”

“As we discussed,” the captain said.

“As we discussed,” Philip confirmed. “I will inform Andrej.”

The chandler's recognizance, Philip understood at once, was what he had most feared and labored so assiduously to avoid. As he struggled to stave off the sense of defeat and depression that now enveloped him, that he knew would destroy him if he yielded to it, he began to conjure ways to loosen and escape from the net in which he was suddenly trapped. Even now he was a realist. He would no longer be able to take for granted those profound benefits upon which he had come to rely. Rather than a model son of the establishment, he would be a hunted man, a high-value target of both intelligence agencies and their adversaries—the despots and middlemen whose funds he had skimmed—all over the world. How this had happened concerned him less than the fact that it had. He had no time for regrets or retrospection. He had to play offense. Other men in other times and other places had been hunted, he reassured himself, yet with cunning had eluded fate and survived to reinvent themselves in triumph.

Eight minutes later, over Channel 16 VHF, the emergency channel all vessels were supposed to monitor, the lieutenant who was in nominal command of the task force carrying Oliver delivered an ultimatum. “Attention,
Paradise,
” he declared, slowly and in the lustrous voice of his native Wales. “This is Royal Navy vessel
Stalwart,
off your starboard. Stop your engines! We are coming aboard.”

Ignoring this command, Andrej stared at the small book he had been reading.
Riviera,
it was called,
The Rise and Rise of the Côte d'Azur.
“Full speed ahead,” he instructed the captain.

The captain regarded him with incredulity. In the distance, uninvolved in the navy's present attempt to capture them but near enough to be co-opted if necessary, an American destroyer, doubtless on its way to rejoin its battle group, formed an ominous and moving silhouette against the southern sky and the North African coast.

“
Paradise,
stop your engines,” repeated the lieutenant.

Meanwhile a second voice, higher in octave, came over Channel 16. “
Jezebel,
this is Royal Navy vessel
Fortitude.
Stop your engines! We are coming aboard.”

Within moments both trawlers were surrounded by high-speed patrol boats and inflatables, most of which were closing in on them as inexorably as though a knot were being tightened.

Andrej remained in the pilot house.

“Paradise,
repeat: Stop your engines!” the Welsh lieutenant commanded, and when there was no response, he ordered that a shot be fired into the air.

The trawler
Paradise
moved forward, under way upon Andrej's irrational faith that the British navy and the forces allied to it could be outrun. Only when the task force had bracketed the trawler, firing just before its bow and aft of its stern, did the captain relent and, ignoring the silent disapproval of his master, extinguish the ship's engines. Gradually the mercenary sailors, including the captain, came onto the wide deck, their opened hands raised just above their shoulders.

Oliver led a crew into the hold, where he soon found one of the three warheads, still in the same inner casing it had been in upon its theft from the installation near the Strait of Kerch. Only when he returned to the pilot house did he encounter Andrej, alone with less than half a liter of Stolichnaya on the table in front of him. Next to the bottle rested his book as well as a heavily thumbed copy of
Le Petit Larousse,
which he had been studying in an effort to improve his French, and the latest glossy brochure from a property agent in Saint-Tropez. In his left hand, firmly in his grip, was his Makarov pistol. Pointing the handgun at Oliver, he said, “Drop your weapon to the floor.” He had been coughing since sometime in the night before, and his voice had grown hoarse.

Oliver evaluated him across the cabin. He was a man with a plain view of his end, the most dangerous kind. Oliver placed his own gun carefully on the floor.

“Now kick it away.”

Oliver did as instructed, then said, “You are in an impossible situation. Don't make it more painful for yourself than it needs to be.”

“You talk as if you were holding this gun.”

“If you think the men out there will allow you to leave, even with me as your hostage, you are badly mistaken. There are many of us and one of you. If we have to wait you out, we will. If we have to endure casualties, we will do that, too, but those casualties will only make things worse for you. They will not result in your freedom. Where is Philip Frost?”

Andrej replied as though Oliver's question had not been asked. “I would prefer to be in a British rather than an American prison.”

“That is not for me to decide. Is he aboard the other trawler?”

“He might be,” Andrej said. “What does it matter? Will I be taken to Guantánamo?”

Oliver continued to study the plaintive Russian. “I do not see why you would be, but again it's a question I can't answer.”

“I fear Guantánamo,” Andrej said, as though his thoughts were becoming dissociated. “I fear all secret prisons.”

“Then put down your gun and cooperate with us, help us understand—”

“Understand?” Andrej echoed. “What? That we almost made it?”

Oliver offered him the start of a smile. He said, “I will do what I can to help you. I promise you that if—”

Outside the pilot house, sailors had taken up protected positions. Andrej wondered how many sharpshooters' firearms were trained upon him. “This is no way to die,” he told Oliver.

“No,” Oliver said, “it isn't.”

“Would you like some vodka?” Andrej asked.

“Thank you,” Oliver replied, playing along as his training had taught him to do, striving, most of all, for time. “That would be very nice right now.”

“Here, help yourself,” Andrej told him, nudging the Stolichnaya toward Oliver with his right palm. “I've never enjoyed drinking alone.” With his left hand, as he spoke, Andrej turned the Makarov abruptly toward himself, inserting its barrel between his chapped lips until he could feel the chill and pressure of gunmetal against the parched roof of his mouth. It was the smile of a man who could salvage only irony from failure that exploded across his face.

Aboard
Fortitude
as it approached the trawler
Jezebel,
Ty Hunter donned a muslin hangman's mask the color of flesh. In an effort to further confuse identities, several of the petty officers joined him, deploying the same effective cloak of anonymity.

Unlike the captain of the
Paradise,
however, the
Jezebel
's
was not inclined to surrender. He had halted the ship's engines and immediately led his crew to quarters below. The forsaken stillness the boarding party encountered upon seizing
Jezebel
not only surprised but disoriented them. That the crew would retreat into the bowels of the ship suggested to Ty that they believed it was the strongest corner from which they could fight, but why? What was there?

Commando style, he advanced in silence with his squad, rounding each corner with his back arched against the steel walls. In the shadows of intersecting corridors, they stopped short of every door, testing each handle and lock with the delicate touches of safecrackers before kicking them in from the side, then resuming safe positions. The galley was empty. The next cabin, an expanded cupboard with two shallow bunks on each side, had been deserted, as had the one beyond that. The head, too, was uninhabited.

He raised his hand, motioned the men behind him toward the entry that led, via an exposed spiral staircase, to the hold below. Just before it Ty noticed, flush with the wall, a panel too small for a man to fit through. Although securable by a dual key and combination lock and fitted with an alarm, these had been left undone. Inside the recess he found an armory, fitted for twenty rifles and as many pistols, for knives of various lengths and grenades and masks. All were missing.

At once he stopped his men. “It's a trap,” he said, mouthing rather than speaking his words. He gestured to one of his team that he required a pencil and paper. The petty officer scurried, and both were quickly found in the pilot house, then handed down to him, whereupon he sketched his plan.

To start with he had to answer the question upon which all else depended: Was Philip Frost still aboard or had he somehow managed to flee
Jezebel
? If he was aboard and cornered, who knew what he might do? If not, could the crew be lured into thinking he had returned? An invasion of the hold could not even be considered. His men would be picked off on the stairs. The other obvious possibility, of using gas to subdue their adversaries, posed too many complications. Would the missing masks defeat any such attempt? Would the tactic even work if the hatches of the hold were opened and the resulting ventilation proved sufficient to disperse the fumes? Ty had no idea, but he was less worried about these constraints than about the possibility of a gunfight with explosives going off or, even worse, a direct assault on the warheads. Caged men faced with futility would resort to anything, and though he did not believe that nuclear warheads could be so nimbly detonated, like Oliver he did not wish to put his supposition to a test.

He touched his forefinger to his lips, signaling utter silence. On his pad he drew instructions for the deployment of the other sailors in the force. How odd life was, he thought, that it might be his acting talent he would have to rely upon in this most real of adventures. Closing his eyes, Ty let his mind drift back to the challenging and exhausting classes in dialect he'd taken before shooting his second film, then to the glissando-like conversation of Ian's guests, settling finally, he was not sure why, on the mysterious Al-Dosari twins.

When he spoke, it was in Arabic, then in English tinged with the accent of Arabia, the accent he had acquired as a boy. “Philip!” he called sharply, more as a command than a request, for at the bullfight in Seville he had noted Philip's deference to both Al-Dosaris. “Philip!”