Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [3]
Readying a twenty-franc note for two flutes of champagne, Alice advanced in line. “Look, if they’re really that good, they’re going to get us no matter what, so better here than a yodeling hall.”
She could always be counted on for levity. It was one of the things Charlie loved about her. One of about a hundred. And he barely knew her.
He was wondering how to share the sentiment when a young blonde emerged from the corridor behind the grandstand, a Golden Age starlet throwback in a full-length mink. Breathing hard, perhaps from having raced to catch up to them. Or maybe it was the basset hound, in matching mink doggie jacket, wrenching her forward by his expensive-looking leather leash.
Clasping Charlie’s shoulder, Alice pointed to the dog. “Is he the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen or what?”
Charlie realized that pretending not to notice the dog would look odd. Acting natural was part of Countersurveillance 101. The best he could muster was “I’ve always wanted a schnauzer.”
“Why a schnauzer?” Alice asked.
All he knew about the breed was that it was a kind of dog.
The starlet looked at them, her interest apparently piqued.
“I just like the sound of schnauzer,” Charlie said.
The woman continued past as a slovenly bald man stumbled out of a Port-o-Let, directly into her path. She smiled at him.
Women like her don’t smile at guys like that, Charlie thought. Especially with Port-o-Lets in the picture.
Alice noticed it too. She yawned. “Well, what do you say we head back to Geneva?”
Charlie knew this really meant leave for Gstaad, sixty miles from Geneva.
Fast.
As he and Alice entered the parking lot—a plowed meadow across the street from the Lac de Morat—she maintained a vivacious conversation, raving first about the white-turf races and then about a new refrigerator she had her eye on.
They approached the silver-gray BMW 330 sedan she’d rented under a Norwegian alias. The 330 was one of the ten most popular models in Switzerland and number one in Gstaad, where they were renting a chalet, or, more accurately, where the fictitious CFO of her fictitious Belgian consulting firm was renting a chalet.
They intentionally bypassed their 330 in favor of another silver-gray BMW.
“Oh, wait, that’s not us,” Alice said.
Doubling back provided the opportunity to glimpse reactions from the twenty or so other drivers returning to the parking lot. Charlie spotted a man fumbling with his keyless remote. Probably a result of the champagne in his other hand. Or the champagnes that had preceded it. Everyone else proceeded directly to their cars.
Gstaad was a forty-five-minute drive from Avenches, or could have been if not for Alice’s choice of SDR—surveillance detection route. At the first green light they came to, she sent the BMW skidding into a looping right turn. At its apex, with Charlie clutching his armrest so that centrifugal force wouldn’t dump him onto Alice, and when she ought to have tamped the brake, she crushed the accelerator, rocketing them onto a side street. She had the right combination of creativity and controlled recklessness to win a NASCAR race, he thought.
“I think we left my stomach back at the light,” he said.
Her eyes darted between the mirrors. “We’ll probably be able to go back and get it. I’m pretty sure we don’t have a tail.”
He exhaled, before she added, “But we need to be absolutely sure.”
She took a last-second left at the next intersection, cutting across a lane of oncoming traffic and entering a shopping mall. One car swerved. A van braked sharply, the driver screaming and shaking his fist. The car directly behind the man braked and skidded, narrowly missing rear-ending his van.
Alice concerned herself just with the vehicles that had been behind the BMW. All simply continued along.
“That sure would have surprised a tail,” Charlie said. “Or convinced him that you took Driving Training at the Farm.”
She laughed. “Or in Rome.”
Exiting the mall, she