Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [9]
Charlie waved his dismissal. “I kept the secret from her not because I don’t trust her, but because there was no reason to burden her with it.”
“Jesse James leveraged your feelings for her,” Drummond said. “How could he or whoever he’s working for have known that you’d developed feelings for her?”
“Using a mosquito drone …” Charlie left it at that, averse to telling his sometime-puritanical father exactly what the miniature camera might have recorded.
Also Charlie was now wrestling with the fact that during his brief time in Spook City, everyone he’d met had either deceived him or tried to kill him. Even his own mother, who had faked her death when he was four—he’d believed she was dead until encountering her just two weeks ago, when she offered him and Drummond safe haven. Fifteen minutes later, she handed them over to Cavalry assassins before reversing course and getting herself killed.
And Alice herself was no innocent. When Charlie first met her, the day before he met his mother, Alice had posed as a social worker at the Brooklyn senior center that “rescued” his father. Her true goal had been—what else?—intel. In reality, she had no home, no money, and no family aside from her mother, who was currently serving the fifteenth year of a twenty-year sentence for murdering Alice’s father. Alice’s “rendition” might easily have been staged.
But Charlie wasn’t convinced. “No one, not even the most sociopathic spook, is as good an actor as she would have had to be,” he said.
“Probably so,” said Drummond. “The bond between you would have been obvious even to a drone. It was obvious to me, after all. We can also rule it highly unlikely that the rendition was a government operation.”
“Why?”
“They would have neutralized us. I’m a thorn in their side and too unstable to be deployed to locate a bomb, whether or not they know it’s a fake. And if they do know it’s fake, they certainly don’t want anyone else knowing, which is all the more reason to silence me. If they meant to send me bomb-hunting regardless, they would have opted for a path of lesser resistance than a highly chancy airborne op.”
“Like what?”
“They could have simply offered us immunity.”
“So we’re dealing with good, old-fashioned bad guys?”
“Bad guys with a window, however small, into the NSA or CIA. Maybe they have a confederate within one of those agencies.” Drummond sucked at his lower lip, a measure of self-restraint in Charlie’s experience.
“They’re going to kill her, whatever we do, aren’t they?” This was at the top of the list of questions that had kept Charlie up all night. “You never cooperate with kidnappers as a rule, right?”
“Actually, there’s good reason to believe they’ll let her live if we do what they want. Ninety-nine percent of kidnappers are in it just for the payout, and to get it, they have to trade their hostage.”
“Is there anyone we can go to? Her NSA friend, maybe?”
“No. Too risky for us. Too risky for Alice.”
“So then what are the options?”
“Just one: Cooperate.”
Charlie raced to prioritize his questions. Drummond might go days before another episode of lucidity. “Do you know where the ADM is hidden?”
Drummond shrugged. “I might. Let me look at the map.” He set a Swiss road atlas on the comforter and flipped it open. As Charlie was worrying about the choice of a local road atlas, Drummond whispered into his ear. “There’s a self-serve Laundromat on rue Joseph Compère in the Pointe Simon area of Fort-de-France, Martinique’s main city. As usual, the device is concealed within a Perriman Pristina model washing machine. This one is among a bunch of washers and dryers locked in the storeroom in the back. The manager is a cutout, which as you may know is a player who knows as little as possible. Her name is Odelette. She’ll have the key. There also may be a key to the storeroom in the gap behind the detergent dispenser and the wall. If all else fails, it’s not hard to detach the ventilation grate.”
If not for the possibility that they were under surveillance, Charlie would have pumped a fist. “What