Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [74]
“Or even charter pilots?”
“Some charter pilots do better than others.”
Charlie sensed Bream could be persuaded to talk. He had first noted the pilot’s surplus of pride during their flight from Switzerland, when Bream gloated over fooling Charlie with his Skunk Works story. While clothing that made a man more difficult to identify was de rigueur in Spook City, Bream dressed to accentuate his physique. When fleeing the cellblock, he’d taken precious time to detail his “lucky” marksmanship on arrival at Detention III. And he was burning now to claim his share of credit for this operation. Charlie could practically feel the heat.
“So how do you think the Indians found us?” Charlie asked.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“So they did tell you?”
“Gimme a molecule of respect here, Chuckles.”
Bull’s-eye. “I thought you’re just a glorified courier.”
Bream sat back, shifting his focus to the instruments.
Charlie feigned interest in a cloud.
Bream cleared his throat. “After Fielding bit the dust, I heard from one of his goons, a guy named Alberto.”
Drummond stirred. “Gutierrez?”
“Know him?” Bream asked.
“Alberto Gutierrez and Hector Manzanillo were practically joined at the hip,” Drummond said.
Had the mention of the criminals sparked another episode of lucidity?
“Yeah, he was working for Fielding in Martinique,” Bream said. “He offered me a piece of intel so he could raise bail and have flight money. A hundred grand. It was the best investment I ever made. The Injuns are gonna pay me so much, even you couldn’t calculate the rate of return, Charlie.”
“So this guy, Alberto, knew about the bomb?” Charlie asked Bream.
“The bomb wasn’t exactly a secret at that point. The Culinary Institute of America had sent an interrogation unit to Îlet Céron. NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency, pretty much the same deal. But Alberto told me one thing that he hadn’t told anyone else: Korean Singles Online-dot-com.”
Charlie looked to his father for an explanation, but Drummond was drifting back to sleep.
With the satphone, Bream beckoned from the copilot’s seat. Charlie braced himself against the bulkhead and entered the cockpit in time to see the pilot open the Internet to a Korean Singles Online page dominated by a photograph of “Suki835,” a chubby teenage girl with warm eyes and a pretty smile.
Bream moused to her left earring, then zoomed in by a factor of a hundred or so, revealing eleven rows, each with ten columns of six seemingly random alphanumeric sequences. “If you figure out how to decipher this shit—which, thanks to some very expensive software and ten espressos, I managed to do—you get, Hounds lost Rabbit and Rabbit Junior at Utica and Fillmore in Brooklyn at half-past midnight. That mean anything to you?”
It had been two weeks, but Charlie would never forget the middle-of-the-night car chase through Brooklyn. A pair of Cavalry gunmen just missed him and Drummond. About fifty times.
“No idea,” he said.
Dropping the satphone back onto the copilot’s seat, Bream said, “That’s how Fielding communicated with his henchmen while they were hunting for you, Rabbit Junior. Reading through the rest of Suki’s private messages, I got the gist of the story. In one entry, Fielding warns that you boys might make a run to an experimental Alzheimer’s clinic in Tokyo, Jerusalem, or Geneva. And I already knew you’d gone to Europe—remember, I recommended the charter pilot who flew y’all to Innsbruck. So I thought, How many Alzheimer’s clinics could there be in Geneva? I put tails on a few Swiss docs. A day later, Arnaud Petitpierre drives to Gstaad and voilà …”
“I’m amazed,” Charlie said, which was an understatement. Not only had he just been handed proof of his and Drummond’s innocence; he now saw Bream’s laconic cowboy act as exactly that, an act. Clearly the pilot had managed every facet of the operation. The odds were irresistible that he would transfer the ADM personally.
The multimillion-dollar question was: Where?
“So have you got your mansion