Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [11]
Drummond liked to use the horses to simplify matters for Charlie. Occasionally he did it gratuitously, in Charlie’s opinion, venting dismay that his gifted son had buried himself at the track.
Charlie hesitated, wishing Drummond had chosen a baseball analogy instead. “They call a horse like that a ‘lobster on the board,’ meaning the tote board. Being wary of a free lobster, I’d study the horse’s past races, then nose around the track to learn about his recent workouts. Maybe he’s sick or injured or—”
“Good,” Drummond said without a smile. “The job here will be similar, but more perilous. It’s a matter of finding tracks and then following them through the jungle, back to the tiger’s lair. The counterintelligence folks call that ‘walking back the cat.’ ”
The more Charlie contemplated the “simple trade,” the more foolish he felt for having imagined he could simply waltz in and out of Spook City, a place where everyone lied for a living and thought no more of hiring an assassin than people elsewhere did of calling a plumber. A place where no horseplayer with a half-decent grasp of the odds would dare set foot. At least not by himself.
They called him Fat Elvis because there had been so many unsubstantiated sightings of him. And because he was overweight, or at least believed to be. He was also thought to be Algerian, and to have done a brisk illegal munitions trade in France during the past year. As far as anyone in the CIA Paris station knew, his name was Ali Abdullah. The closest any of them had come to seeing him was the soft-focus headshot on the most wanted lists.
Yet terrorists had no trouble finding him. According to numerous accounts, he’d sold a group of Moroccan agitators the mass of penthrite they used to turn a waiter and a family of five into ashes at a Parisian bistro last summer.
“He’s schtupping our nanny,” Jerry Hill said. They were in the small, bulletproof conference room at the U.S. Embassy in Paris that the CIA used to interview walk-ins.
“That would be great,” said Bill Stanley, favoring his prematurely arthritic right hip as he lowered himself into a chair on the other side of the table. “I’m speaking from the point of view of national security, of course, not your nanny.”
“Hey, if she’s collateral in terminating that prick, it’d be no huge loss.”
If Stanley had first heard Hill over the phone, he would have taken the voice for that of an elderly woman. In fact the walk-in was a fifty-five-year-old Californian with the hollow eyes and gaunt frame of a refugee camper. He wore a linen blazer over a tennis shirt and a pair of sweatpants. His hair, too blond for a man of fifty—or a boy of fifteen, for that matter—stood on end as if he’d just stuck one of his fingers into an electrical socket.
Ninety-eight percent of walk-ins were either nutjobs or knew nothing of value to the agency. Based on Hill’s appearance, the marines stationed at the embassy’s Avenue Gabriel entrance would have ordinarily bet their paychecks that he belonged in both categories. His physique was attributable to a rigorous Pilates regime, however, and his blond hair stood on end thanks to a stylist and a hair products conglomerate in which he owned a controlling interest. And the marines knew this not from any database but from Entertainment Tonight. Who hadn’t watched either the live television broadcast or the subsequent viral YouTube footage of Hill stabbing the air with his Best Director Oscar while delivering his expletive-laden I-told-you-so speech to a list of detractors dating back to junior high?
Stanley pulled his chair closer to the table. “The marine guards said you have photographic evidence?”
“We’ve got a place down in Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat,” Hill said, almost in apology. He glanced around the room, probably just realizing that other