Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (44 page)

Ty waited. When no response came from below, he said, in rapid Arabic, as if one twin were addressing the other, “Where could he be?”

“I've absolutely no idea,” he replied to himself, in the same language and yet a slightly differentiated voice.

“Philip!” he called again. “Show yourself, please! You don't understand what's transpired. We've reached an accommodation.”

Again Ty hesitated, his eye on the stairs, his Glock aimed at the entry leading to them. “They are being entirely reasonable,” he said, resuming his original Arabian-English diction. “We've been granted safe passage in return for our cooperation.”

The instant he concluded, the silence returned. On the pad, hurriedly, he wrote,
“Captain's name?”
then tore the page at once from its binding and handed it off to a nearby sailor. The sailor moved stealthily, first backward through the cabins, then to the pilothouse above.

“He must be on the other trawler. Pity,” Ty said with resignation, still in character.

When the sailor returned, he handed Ty a wrinkled receipt from a chandlery in Palma. Although the last name had been smudged, the first, Roman, was plainly legible. Ty shot the sailor a smile. The time had come, he realized, to go for broke. He entwined the fingers of both hands, at which point a sailor opposite him crossed himself.

“Ah, there you are, Philip!” Ty exclaimed, still an Arab at home in English. “Where on earth were you?”

Summoning his best impersonation of a caustic Philip, Ty replied, “Where did you think I'd gone? For a swim?” He hoped it would suffice for the Slavs who were his audience.

“It's not as big a problem as you think,” the imaginary Arab continued.

“I am glad to hear it.”

“As a matter of fact, the hounds have been called off.”

“Interesting,” said Ty's Philip.

“Isn't it just?” intoned the Arab, whose voice was of deeper register. “Where are your captain and his crew? We should be under way.”

“I don't know, probably hiding. Wouldn't you be?”

“What's the captain's name?”

“Roman.”

“Call him, then, won't you? The sooner this business is done, the better.”

“Roman!” Philip shouted into the hold.

“Roman!” echoed one of the Arabs.

But the uneasy quiet immediately returned. Ty listened. Hearing only his heartbeat, he began to count, in his head, slowly down from ten. On three he thought he could hear shuffling; on a long-delayed two, the response that rose from the hold was unambiguous.

“Mr. Frost,” the captain inquired, in a deep voice rendered tentative by fear.

“Get up here, will you?” Philip said. “We're losing valuable time.”

“Mr. Frost,” repeated the captain.

“Roman,” Ty's Philip snapped, with pitch-perfect admonishment. “I will explain everything you need to know when you get up here. But I can't keep shouting.”

Then, hearing footsteps strain the iron staircase, Ty settled beside the entry. The steps grew louder. As the captain emerged into the corridor, Ty forced him back with a fierce and sudden choke hold, then pressed his Glock 23 into the man's thick, sunburned neck. Before the captain's eyes, Ty now held a sheet of paper.
“Tell them to come up,”
it read.
“Tell them that everything is all right. No tricks.
”
The last, which translated as “We speak Russian,” constituted, along with the words for “hello,” “good-bye,” and “thank you,” all the Russian Ty knew. He prayed the captain would not see through his bluff.

The captain attempted to nod. Ty tightened his grip then loosened it sufficiently for the captain to breathe more easily. Even as he did so, Ty ground the gun deeper against the Slav's skin. Once the captain had spoken, Ty gagged him with a wet bandanna. Withdrawing his pistol and stepping slightly back, Ty shot out his hand to deliver a swift knife edge blow, or
shuto uchi,
to the side of the man's neck, a blow not often as disabling as it appeared to be on the screen, yet in this instance sufficient to disable the captain long enough for him to be taken into custody.

Now, one by one, the Slavs ventured forth from the hold, and one by one, off balance after their climb and afraid to arrive with a weapon pointed at Philip Frost himself, they were seized from behind, subdued, disarmed and bound.

In the hold the two at-large warheads, like the one aboard
Paradise
still disguised as turbines, were immediately surrounded by sailors, Special Boat Service boys who had trained for such work. These sailors would guard the weapons until they'd been safely returned to their makers, after which they would be disarmed and decommissioned.

Ty exhaled a deep breath. Exhausted, he let his frame collapse against the wall, his legs stretch prone across the corridor as the trawler's engines started and the old ship turned back from what had once been the edge of the world.

Lost in the view from the trawler's stern as it gained speed and distance, painted out by the shadows of gathering clouds, was the ascent of a solitary diver on the far side of one of hundreds of local fishing boats. Clutching the
barco
's wooden hull with relief, the diver handed up the underwater jet that had brought him so far so rapidly. The man in the
barco
accepted it willingly. Searching the horizon before removing his mask, the diver drew himself up and flung his legs over the narrow washboard. As soon as he removed his mask, Philip wiped his face with a proffered towel, keeping himself close to the boat's floor, too low to be spotted from shore or other craft. From within his wet suit, he removed a soft waterproof kit and from that a telephone. When he had scrolled to the number he sought, he immediately pressed
CALL
. “Hello, is this Franz?” he asked.

“I hadn't expected to hear from you so soon.”

“No, well, it's because I've had a sudden change of plan,” Philip told him, with almost ethereal calm. “I would like you to meet me at the eastern extreme of Tarifa Harbor in one hour. Would that be possible?”

Franz hesitated. “With the same boat?” he inquired.

“You haven't sold it yet, have you?”

“No,” Franz assured him, “of course not.”

“I will also be in the same boat,” Philip said. “When you spot us, keep a distance of fifty yards.
I
will swim to
you.
”

“As you wish,” Franz conceded.

In fact, it was exactly one hour later when Philip spotted Franz slowing the
Contender
far from the bustling ferry lanes of Tarifa. “We'll anchor here,” he told the mate who was now captaining the
barco,
then checked his tanks and underwater jet. “You'll want to lose yourself for a time. That will be something more easily accomplished in Morocco or elsewhere in the Middle East than in Spain right now.”

The mate returned his unforgiving scrutiny.

“This should both erase your memory and help,” Philip said, unfolding his left hand to reveal two Golconda D-Flawless Type IIa brilliant-cut diamonds he had removed from the waterproof kit along with his mobile and a single silicon chip. He could not be sure of the diamonds' exact worth but guessed that even in a distressed market where no questions would be asked they would be likely to fetch a quarter of a million euros. “I may require your services in the future,” he told the mate. “Have you an e-mail address that will not change?”

The mate grinned, then slowly spoke his address, repeating it a second time, just in case. “Are you certain you'll remember it?” he asked.

“Yes,” Philip said. “I don't forget.” For a few seconds, he hesitated, studying the shiny microchip that contained the algorithmic codes to the suddenly and forever lost warheads.

“What's that?” asked the mate.

“Nothing,” Philip replied, his voice wistful and resigned as he let the chip go in the evening wind to skim, settle upon and drown in the unforgiving Mediterranean. “Absolutely nothing but useless information, the curse of the world we live in.”

All at once he lowered himself over the
barco
's
side and, without a splash, descended beneath the surface of the ancient indigo sea.

Chapter Fifty-four

“What are we are
doing on this plane?” Isabella asked.

“I told you,” Ty said. “We're going for a ride.” Ever since they had arrived back at the Gibraltar dockyard, Oliver had shepherded Ty, first to a clandestine rendezvous with Isabella in an overcooled holding room at the Royal Air Force terminal, then, almost immediately and with her once more in tow, aloft.

“I've had enough adventure for one day, thank you very much” Isabella shot back, glancing about the burled-wood and glove-leather cabin. “What kind of plane is this? I'm not sure I've ever seen one quite like it.”

“Very few people have,” explained Oliver. “Actually, it's a prototype for the new QSST.”

“QSST?” inquired Ty.

“Quiet Supersonic Transport,” Oliver said.

“Of course,” Ty said, “how dim of me!”

“I thought you might have guessed as much from its sleek beak and aft wings.”

“Whose is it?” Isabella asked.

“It belongs to a friend of a friend,” Oliver said.

“Where exactly are we going?” Ty asked.

“What a good question,” Isabella added.

“
You
are going home,” Oliver said, “in time, in fact, for dinner out.”

Ty looked at Isabella in a way he hoped would project his own astonishment. “And Isabella, where is she going?”

“That's entirely up to her.”

Isabella immediately grimaced—in a way, Ty now realized, of which he had become more than fond. “But I can't go anywhere,” she said. “I don't even have my passport.”

“You won't need it tonight, and you'll have it by tomorrow,” Oliver said, “along with whatever else you want from
Surpass.
Have you been to La-La Land before?”

“No,” Isabella admitted, “never.”

“Everyone should see it,” Ty assured her.

“We'll be traveling at Mach 1.6. Flying over the pole, we should be there in a bit more than four hours,” Oliver continued. “Given that it is nine hours earlier in California, we'll arrive five hours before we left. By that time, should reports of Ty's involvement with our mission here surface, they can be as quickly dismissed as fanciful by his presence at home.”

“If Frost's still alive, he'll know otherwise,” Ty said.

“Who will believe him?”

“That's just the sort of thing you never know, isn't it?”

Isabella, her moist eyes wide open, looked up at Ty as though she had suddenly found her way through a bewildering thicket. “You really do believe that Philip murdered Ian, don't you?” she beseeched him.

Ty glanced at Oliver.

“Philip had the most to gain,” Oliver said, “and perhaps the most to lose if he didn't.”

“Ian was a player, not a killer,” Ty told Isabella. “His blood ran warm, not cold. I can't prove it yet, but I strongly suspect that every killing that took place as this plot unwound was expedient, above all, for Philip. Ian's death, as Oliver's just said, fits that description. So do the deaths of many others, including Colonel Zhugov and, when you think about it, Luke Claussen's father.”

Isabella breathed heavily, her fury at the completeness of her betrayal by a man she had once thought she loved rising as her head shook in disbelief. “It's awful.”

“It's
over,
” Ty told her.

“Only for the moment,” Oliver said quietly, then looked out from the oversize window as the QSST completed its ascent to fifty-five thousand feet. With the setting sun rising before it and the sky above permanently dark, it burst through the sound barrier.

“I didn't hear
anything,
” Isabella remarked when the digital airspeed indicator flashed this fact.

“Nor did anyone on the ground,” Oliver said. “This plane's equipped with sonic-boom-suppression technology.”

Ty regarded his friend circumspectly. “Is that a joke?”

Oliver shook his head. “The speed of light's next.”

Now, as the plane banked, through the window that framed Isabella's profile Ty observed the gentle curvature of the earth.

“What do you mean by ‘only for the moment'?” Isabella asked Oliver a few seconds later.

“That out of sight isn't necessarily out of mind,” Ty interjected. “I think that's what Commander Molyneux was trying to say.”

“Don't mistake me,” Oliver elaborated. “I'm thrilled we recovered the warheads. That was the most important thing. But I hate it that Frost got away, just as I hate it that events forced us to act as quickly as they did. I'd like to have tracked down the entire conspiracy for intelligence purposes, to have neutralized, and I mean for good, every bloody one of those bastards. It tears my guts out that that diabolical murderer eluded us—and with money and, no doubt, those jewels! Nevertheless, he escaped for today, not forever. He'll pop back into sight sooner or later. He won't be able to help himself.”

“I hope you're right,” Ty said, “but if you are telling me to expect another call, much less another unannounced visit and summons from you, I am going to change my number and beef up the security at La Encantada.”

“You won't do that,” Oliver said.

“I will.” Ty's forceful insistence dissolved into a smile.

“Tell me it doesn't piss you off every bit as much as it does me. Tell me you wouldn't relish another—this time
final—crack at Philip Frost.”

Ty paused in reflection. “You know I can't tell you that,” he said. “You know
exactly
how I feel.”

Oliver drew a long breath. “That's all I wanted to hear,” he said. “Look, I don't know about you, but I'm knackered. There are two cabins at the rear of the plane. You two take the one to starboard. It's the owner's.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Ty relented. “You
are
staying on with us in Los Angeles, Ollie, aren't you? I hope so.”

Oliver shook his head. “Someone's got to return this toy.”

Ty winked at his friend.

In their cabin Isabella suddenly shuddered. “I don't know what to think,” she whispered.

“Don't think anything,” Ty told her.

“How is that possible?”

“With experience,” he promised. “This never happened.”

Isabella considered this, disbelief and hurt suddenly swimming in her jade green eyes. “None of it?” she asked softly. “What about the parts worth remembering?”

Ty drew her to him and kissed her. “Those, darling, are between us.”

.