Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [6]
“It’s a rendition.”
“A rendition of what?”
“In layman’s terms, a kidnapping.”
“You’ve kidnapped Wendy? Why?” Charlie feigned the shock of an ignorant vacationer, less of a stretch than he would have liked.
“It’d be a tragedy if we’ve kidnapped someone named Wendy,” said the cowboy. “See, we’re after Alice Ann Rutherford.”
“Alice Ann Rutherford?” Charlie repeated as if bewildered.
“If it helps, she was born in New Britain, Connecticut, on October 17, 1980, she’s currently absent without leave from the National Security Agency, and she lives with you.”
An icy gust slashed through Charlie’s sweater, stinging his chest. He resisted the urge to wrap his arms around himself, afraid the movement might spur the kidnapper to precipitous use of his trigger. “Okay, okay. So what do you want?”
“An ADM. You know what that is, right?”
Charlie knew atomic demolition munitions only too well. They were portable Soviet-made bombs with a ten-kiloton yield. Under the auspices of the CIA, his father had founded the Cavalry with the objective of putting malfunctioning ADMs into the hands of terrorists who believed they were purchasing working weapons of mass destruction. The ultra-classified operation had succeeded for the better part of three decades. When Drummond fell prey to Alzheimer’s, his own men decided it best to sacrifice him in order to maintain the secret and safeguard the identities of their operatives. Charlie had learned the secret just two weeks ago, while trying to figure out why assassins were preventing him from putting his father in a nursing home. Before that, he’d known the old man only by his cover as a stern and straitlaced appliance salesman.
“You can’t exactly get ADMs on eBay,” Charlie said.
Jesse James grinned. “So why don’t you ask your dad?”
Charlie eyed his shoe tops. “There’s a problem with that.”
“Isn’t your father Drummond Clark, Central Intelligence Agency operations officer, born in New York, New York, on July 14, 1945?”
“He was. He passed away twelve days ago.”
If Charlie’s father—who in fact was still alive—held to form this evening, he had heard the helicopter and momentarily would appear, as if out of thin air, with a gun to Jesse James’s head. Alzheimer’s had acted like a wrecking ball on Drummond Clark’s memory retrieval mechanism and had ravaged his ability to process the present. As with most people suffering from the disease, he still experienced random episodes of lucidity, however. And danger tended to jolt him into clarity. So Charlie’s plan was simply to buy time.
“Why don’t we sit in the car, where it’s not freezing?” Jesse James pointed at the passenger seat with his gun, making the question rhetorical.
As soon as they were inside, he turned on the ignition, sending hot air from the vents and a delicate piano concerto from the speakers. The BMW was certainly more pleasant than the bitter outdoors, but it would complicate Drummond’s assault. If he were to appear out of thin air now, Jesse James could just drive away. And the car’s tinted glass might veil Charlie’s execution.
“I’m sure you’d like Interpol to believe your father’s dead, but I don’t,” the cowboy said, fishing a satellite phone from inside his jumpsuit. “Not unless you can convince me that this is his twin brother.”
He punched a few keys. The phone’s display filled with a shaky, greenish-gray video of the chalet taken through one of the leaded glass windows. Drummond sat at the dining table, reading a newspaper.
“I can have the mosquito drone zoom in on the newspaper’s date if you have any doubt this is live feed, but it might take me a while,” Jesse James said.
Charlie felt a measure of relief. “So you actually do just want an ADM?”
“Yeah. Remember the to-do with the helicopter and Alice?”
Charlie could share the secret that the ADMs were duds, but Jesse James might not believe it. And even if he did, the consequences would be grave. If Cavalry customers got wind of the fact that their vaunted arsenals couldn’t blow up a balloon, the identities of countless American operatives and their