Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [110]
The unbelievably resourceful Alice Rutherford had killed the remaining mercenaries—Carlo Pagliarulo, Lothar von Gentz, and Klaus Wagner—saving Bream the trouble. And in helping Charlie land the plane, she had helped perpetuate the Punjab diversion. Otherwise Morrison, monitoring the flight, would have stepped in via radio.
And if Alice now reported what she’d learned about Bream, fine. He no longer existed, effectively.
Nosing the yacht into his slip at the sleeping Mobile Bay Marina, he telephoned the local CBP office. “Hey, y’all, Tom Efferman here, fresh back from the beautific island of Saint Lucia,” he told the voice mail. As he’d anticipated, the office had long since closed for the day.
Tom Efferman was a damned fine alias. In 1976, in rural Blue Ridge, Georgia, a horse bucked, throwing five-year-old Thomas Efferman to the ground. The animal’s front hooves slammed onto the boy’s head, permanently damaging his brain. He subsequently left his mother’s trailer only on Christmas, if he was able.
Four years ago, Bream—born in 1971 in Nashville and given the name Maddox Mercer—learned of the boy when hacking the database of an organization that delivered holiday meals to the homebound. Thomas Efferman’s social security number was all Bream needed for the state of Georgia to send a copy of the boy’s birth certificate to an accommodation address he’d set up in Montgomery, Alabama. With the birth certificate in hand, obtaining an Alabama driver’s license under the name Thomas Efferman was a relatively simple matter of passing the driver’s test. The boating license was simpler still.
Prior to meeting with Qatada, Bream—as Efferman—had offered to rent the Campodonicos’ yacht. The couple needed money, having underbudgeted their retirement and overestimated the sales of books about tribal rock paintings. In the Campodonicos’ patrician yacht club social set, renting carried a stigma. Bream had figured that out in advance of contacting them. In person, he suggested, “How about we just tell folks I’m your nephew or cousin?”
Now he steered their yacht’s starboard side even with the dock. Technically, he couldn’t go get his Budweiser—or disembark at all—until he had either passed a CBP inspection or received the call from CBP releasing him. But the CBP folks were in bed, and the cops enforced the shipboard regulation with less frequency than they busted up penny-ante poker games.
As he bounded onto the quiet dock, two Mobile policemen materialized out of the darkness.
Standing unnaturally straight, Bream said, with a slight stammer, “Evening, officers, how y’all doing?” As an innocent man would.
“ ‘Evening, sir,” both cops said as they hurried past on the way to Clem Clemmensen’s boat.
Bream guessed ol’ Clem had backed the wrong sheriff.
As the radiant Mobile skyline shrank in his rearview mirror, Charlie thought of Arcangues, a French colt named after the village in Aquitaine. Arcangues had only raced on grass in Europe before being shipped to California in 1993 to compete in the Breeders’ Cup on Santa Anita’s dirt track. Sent off at odds of 133 to 1 and under a last-minute replacement jockey, Arcangues caught up to the powerful bay Bertrando in the homestretch, beat him to the wire, and became arguably the greatest in the history of long shots.
Charlie put the odds that he could securely communicate with Alice even higher. But even if he could tell her why he’d driven south and what he’d subsequently learned about Bream, neither she nor her NSA colleagues—who were busy grilling her in Geneva—could do anything about it.
When he called her on his cell as he drove out of Mobile, he recognized that he would have to tell her a cover story.
“Eskridge