Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [8]
“Where’s Alice?” Drummond asked.
Sliding one of the heavy pine chairs out from the table, Charlie sat across from him. “She was kidnapped,” he said. It came out matter-of-factly; if he weren’t so numb, he might have shrieked it.
“Kidnapped! Are you certain?”
“I guess, technically, she was rendered. Or renditioned.”
“What happened?”
Charlie filled him in.
“Well, that certainly is a problem.” Making a steeple out of his fingers, Drummond gazed out at the dark shapes of the mountains, seemingly contemplating a solution. After a few moments, he asked, with uncharacteristic alarm, “What are we going to do about dinner?”
Charlie spent most of the night gazing at the empty space on the other side of the mattress. The closest he found to a diversion was watching the digits change on the clock radio.
At 5:14 Drummond banged on the door.
“You okay?” Charlie asked.
“I woke up this morning feeling as well as I have in quite some time. And I’m almost certain that Alice was kidnapped.”
“Well … yeah.” Last night Charlie had detailed the rendition five or six times in hopes of sparking Drummond’s memory of the ADM. To no avail.
Drummond made a beeline for the clock radio, snapping on Alpine folk music and turning up the volume. “I mean it was a straight kidnapping, as in an operation offering the safe return of the captive in exchange for something.”
That sounded pretty lucid. Charlie strained to hear over the accordions.
Seeing Charlie look at the radio, Drummond said, “In case of eavesdroppers. And in case of eavesdroppers who might have been able to filter out the music, I raised the heat—I hope you’re not uncomfortable.”
Noting the hot air whining through the registers, Charlie shook his head. “Enough about me. Do you remember all the plot points: Jesse James from the helicopter? Hidden ADM?”
Drummond sat at the foot of the bed. His eyes glowed with much more than just the moonlight spraying through the gap in the drapes.
Hallelujah, thought Charlie. Lucidity.
“If he were smart, what Jesse James told you is—”
“Lies.” Charlie had already concluded as much. “No, fifty percent lies, but you wouldn’t have any way of knowing which was which. I just need to catch up on a few things.”
“Shoot.”
“Had Alice been in touch with anyone?”
“Yes.” During the night, this had become Charlie’s leading theory as to the genesis of the rendition. “The other day she took, like, eighty-seven trains and buses to Zurich, went to a public library, and sent one of those supposedly untraceable Hushmails to the personal account of an NSA inspector general she trusts.”
“What did she write?”
“Basically, that she wasn’t dead, and that your old Cavalry pals had framed us for Hattemer’s murder in order to get the finding.” A presidential finding had waived Executive Orders 11905 and 12333 banning assassinations by U.S. government organizations, thereby enabling the Cavalry to off the Clarks with impunity. “She was hoping to open a dialogue, maybe get us off the Whack-on-Sight list. She asked the guy to reply using Hushmail.”
Drummond looked at the ceiling, pondering the matter.
Or so Charlie hoped. Drummond’s episodes of lucidity lasted forty minutes on average, but sometimes they were as brief as two minutes.
“I think the rendition is coincidence,” Drummond said.
“So you believe in coincidences too?”
“There are coincidences and there are unbelievable coincidences. It’s possible that someone ‘made’ her while she was in Zurich or en route, but given the extensive planning and practice a helicopter rendition of this nature requires, it seems more likely that the kidnappers were already well into preproduction. Also it’s possible that Alice orchestrated the kidnapping herself. She could sell the ADM for a king’s ransom—she