Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [63]
“You want good pesto, you gotta go to Corrençon,” Pagliarulo said, which may or may not have been true, but it was their recognition code.
The man was Blaine Belmont, the U.S. embassy’s legal attaché—official terminology for spook. Belmont pushed his shopping cart to the end of the line five deep at the butchers’ counter, where a pair of bleary-eyed meat cutters worked in slow motion. Pulling his own cart up behind Belmont’s, Pagliarulo checked for surveillance. Belmont nodded his own assessment that they were clean.
Pagliarulo wasted no time. “I’m doing grunt work for a guy who I’ve figured out is planning to flip an ADM to the United Liberation Front of the Punjab.”
Belmont turned to face him, with no more excitement than if Pagliarulo had said it was going to snow tonight. “Yeah?”
“He’s somehow getting it from another American. I’ve only caught a glimpse of that guy, over satphone, but I could ID him from photos. The deal is, he delivers the bomb, he gets back the package we’re storing. I’m pretty sure you know her, Alice Rutherford.”
Belmont shrugged.
“I could give you enough information to get the bomb and the bad guys,” Pagliarulo added.
“If?”
Afraid the American would laugh at the price, Pagliarulo steeled himself. “One million.”
Belmont studied a tower of sausage links behind the smudgy glass. “That’s probably fair for a tip that bags a rogue WMD. Which means HQS’ll have me counter six hundred and settle at seven-fifty—if they determine it’s worth a dime. Seven-fifty about what you really figured on?”
Pagliarulo’s confidence rose. “The price is one million dollars.”
“Look, I don’t give a crap, it’s not my money. I’ll tell you what, I’ll talk to my chief of station when I get back to campus. If things go like they should, we’ll have a dollar amount tomorrow morning at the latest. Then somebody will send a text message to your cell addressed to a Hans, asking Hans if he wants to down a few at the Hofbräuhaus, something like that. Delete the message, then hightail it to the hypermarché in Corrençon and we’ll see if the pesto lives up to its reputation. Fallback, meet right here tomorrow, same time. How’s that for a game plan?”
Pagliarulo’s answer was forestalled by a butcher’s summons to the counter. Presumably to maintain his cover, Belmont bought a chicken.
Sure, Alice would have preferred traipsing across an Alpine snow-scape with the man she loved. But most of her life had been spent either dodging bullets or the metaphoric equivalent. Once, in fact, she’d been hit—just a flesh wound. At times, she would happily have paid for the peace and quiet now inflicted on her.
Especially because the Shaolin liked to practice meditation before a fight.
As Alice had learned in nearly a lifetime of devotion to Shaolin kung fu, channeling her inner energy allowed her to do things that her corporeal body alone could not. But it wasn’t easy. Shaolin monks had to spend years mastering meditation before they were allowed to think about fighting, or as little as throwing a playing card. Prior to writing the book of Shaolin kung fu, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma faced a wall for nine years without uttering a word.
Alice began by clearing her mind of all destructive energy. Combat, whether in self-defense or on the attack, demands pure intent, with all emotions under complete control, which is to say turned off.
After several hours, a plan came to her. It depended on a light switch plate the size of an index card that was fastened to the wall behind the sofa, two and a half feet from where she sat. If it were slung like a throwing star—the flat, star-shaped projectile that was the Shaolin weapon of choice—the light switch plate’s speed might exceed fifty miles per hour, making its sharp corners as lethal as a dagger.
The plate was held to the wall behind the sofa by two ordinary slot-headed screws, one above the light switch, one below, the latter a bit loose already. It would be a simple matter