Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [62]
L … E … S … S … E … R …
To Charlie, anything other than C-L-A-R-K spelled hope.
The rough orange prison jumpsuit chafed Charlie’s underarms and inner thighs as he mounted the three flights of stairs to the cellblock. Drummond followed close behind, trailed by Bulcão, who prodded them now and again for no apparent reason. Their footsteps in the cramped stairwell were amplified by the moisture on the moss-spotted walls, making it sound like a racquetball game was taking place.
“I heard about another innocent guy in a fix like this,” Charlie said, as if trying to make small talk. “A war hero. Happened to be very wealthy too.”
“From selling weapons?” Bulcão glanced sidelong at Drummond.
“I’m in appliances, actually,” Drummond said in earnest. “Perriman.”
“The guy I’m talking about made his fortune in the stock market,” Charlie said. “One of the jailers believed that he was innocent and let him ‘pick the lock.’ To show his gratitude, the guy gave the jailer five thousand dollars.” Charlie and Drummond had about half that much in their wallets, last seen at intake being dumped into the brown paper bag.
Bulcão spat an invisible seed out of the side of his mouth. “I know you’re not trying to bribe a law enforcement official, my friend.”
Charlie widened his eyes. “Huh?”
“You guys are Public Enemies number one and number two in Martinique. If you somehow escaped, even without any help from me, and without Guard Miñana and Alejandro the maintenance guy looking the other way, we all would be let go, probably do some time too. Just speaking for me, say you gave me a million bucks. After I got out of the can—if I ever made it out—the cops would be watching for years to see how I’m paying my bills. Best job I could get probably’d be hacking pineapples, and if I spent more than a field hand’s pay, the Inspector General’d throw me right back in jail. If my wife goes to some fancy store in town and gets herself a dress, back to jail. If my son gets a bicycle that isn’t secondhand …”
In other words, Charlie thought, no.
Carlo Pagliarulo thought little of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, Italy’s military intelligence agency. He got the message that SISMI felt similarly about him. In 2005, after twelve years as an operative, he was demoted to deputy operations coordinator, a glorified term for gofer, hardly the job he’d hoped for when first signing on out of college. The salary was decent, though, the benefits even better, and he felt secure in his job since terminations were rare in the intelligence community—agencies were usually reluctant to have an ex-operative out and about with a grudge, and, of course, secrets to sell. Yet within a year, due to chronic lateness to work, drunkenness, and allegations of sexual harassment, Pagliarulo was let go.
It was his big break.
Foreign intelligence services scoured associations of former soldiers and law enforcement officers in the hope of securing assets with half of Pagliarulo’s skill set. Two weeks after his termination, he was making more per week than he had at SISMI just to run a pair of Geneva safe houses for MI6, a job that took no more than a couple of hours a day, leaving him plenty of time for other gigs, like the rendition in Gstaad and subsequent work as one of the captive’s babysitters. And this evening alone, while shopping for groceries, he stood to pick up enough additional cash to buy a villa in San Remo.
At an under-heated but still crowded supermarket in Moudon, an unremarkable town about an hour northwest of Geneva, he resisted a fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano, instead dumping a cardboard cylinder of factory-grated Romano into his cart. The American woman was supposed to get as few clues as possible about where she was being held.
“Excuse me, do you know if the pesto’s any good here?” asked a man pushing a cart half full of TV dinners.
His Italian was good, but