Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [40]
It was an extraneous detail.
“Dad!” he screamed.
Drummond looked up from refastening the woman’s ankles in time to dodge the glistening barb she swung like a dagger.
Charlie didn’t dare fire the speargun for fear of spearing his father. Instead he flung a family-sized bottle of sunscreen, striking her in the jaw. The container bounced harmlessly to the floor, but the diversion allowed Drummond to swat the weapon away from her.
It landed in a tall wicker basket full of flip-flops. Retrieving it, Charlie nearly sliced his fingertips on the razor-sharp edge of what had passed for the woman’s engagement ring. Pressure on the spring-loaded diamond must have caused the metal band to uncoil into a blade. She had probably cut through the twine around her wrists a while ago, then waited for the opportunity to strike.
As Drummond refastened her wrists and gagged her, Charlie heard footsteps outside. Kneeling, he peered out the ventilation grate to see two young men, but only from the neck down. He didn’t recognize the bodies, but there was no mistaking the muscular, boxy builds—ex-military contract agents were the darlings of black ops personnel directors. Both men wore polo shirts, crisp Bermuda shorts, and, probably in a nod to pragmatism over tourist cover, cross trainers rather than sandals. They strode purposefully toward the beach. In a moment, even if they found nothing suspicious, they would rush back to the lobby and lock down the resort.
“The fun never stops,” Charlie said to no one in particular.
“Finished,” Drummond said, looking up from a pile of spent kite string spools.
“Good. Unless there’s anything in here that they can use to draw attention to themselves or to escape—flashlight circuitry that could turn a tube of aloe vera into high explosive, anything like that?”
Drummond shrugged.
“What if you were them?” Charlie waved at their captives.
“I’d try to get my hands on that.”
Charlie followed Drummond’s eyes to the telephone by the register. Seeing no need to chance it, Charlie rendered the phone inoperable by slicing the outside wire with the woman’s ring. At the same time, he thought of a way to stymie the two searchers. Unfortunately, his plan required using a phone.
During the crash course in espionage that had been his past two weeks, Charlie had learned that intelligence agencies of the United States and her allies maintained house-sized computers that continuously intercepted and analyzed billions of phone calls, e-mails, and text messages. In one instance, a captured conversation between two terrorists over a pair of children’s walkie-talkies enabled the Mossad to corral a major weapons shipment from Cyprus.
Even on the hotel’s intercom, Charlie’s intended lifeline, his voiceprint would raise the digital equivalent of a red flag, simultaneously spitting his whereabouts—to within a five-foot radius—to those agencies seeking him. Paramilitary assault teams would storm Hôtel L’Impératrice in a matter of minutes.
If things went according to plan, however, in a matter of minutes Charlie and Drummond would already be driving away from the hotel. But first Charlie needed to get to an intercom. Followed by Drummond, he slipped through the bushes behind the relocked beach supply hut. He stopped short of the paved pool deck, within reach of a fiberglass coconut mounted on a pole resembling a palm tree. Inside the coconut was a house phone.
Reaching for the handset, he glimpsed the two young men in polo shirts and Bermuda shorts, no more than thirty yards away, prowling the beach like bloodhounds. He froze. And immediately regretted it—he knew his pursuers were trained to detect unnatural motions on their peripheries. In contrast, Drummond hid behind a thick tree, never breaking stride.
Neither young man appeared to notice.
Charlie couldn’t reach far enough into the fiberglass