Once a Spy (7 page)

Charlie had heard
T-bone
applied only to beef, but he didn’t doubt its place in car chase terminology. Like Drummond’s take on teal cars, it didn’t seem like the stuff of delusion. So when Drummond added, “Stay as far to the left as you can,” Charlie pitched the Hippo that way and only afterward asked why.

Drummond’s response was forestalled by a hollow thud. A thin beam of light shone from a new poker-chip-sized hole between them in the steel wall dividing the cab from the cargo hold. A bullet must have first pierced the truck’s rear door, then burrowed through the newspapers. The hole in the windshield told the rest of the story.

Every last cell in Charlie tensed in anticipation of the next bullet. “I guess they don’t make five tons of steel like they used to,” he said.

Drummond seemed unusually relaxed. “Did Grandpa Tony ever tell you about his apartment on State Street?”

Charlie feared a non sequitur to top the Merrimack River. “No.”

“As you’ll recall, he lived in Chicago during the Capone mob’s heyday. Sometimes he’d hear machine-gun fire, and he’d peek out his window to see mobsters speeding by in a Cadillac that had been shot to Swiss cheese, followed by a police wagon that wasn’t in much better shape. Always though, the vehicles were speeding, and the drivers were alive. The point is, it’s extremely difficult to fire from one moving vehicle at another with any degree of accuracy. In all likelihood, they’re just trying to fluster you. One of us getting hit by a bullet would be a matter of incredibly rotten luck.”

“Then we’re in trouble,” Charlie said.

17

“Get over
as far into the right lane as you can,” Drummond said.

“The left lane, you mean?” Charlie wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly; air was howling like a jet through the bullet hole. Also, he thought, albeit based on video game car chases, the idea was to obstruct the shooter’s aim at the driver, not facilitate it.

“No, no, the right,” Drummond said. “I don’t want to let them get a line on our back right wheel well.”

As if on cue, the Dodge drifted to that side. The man in the passenger seat nosed a gun out of his window, braced the stout barrel on his side mirror, and tipped it toward the Hippo’s back right tire.

Charlie clocked the steering wheel. “Is he going for our gas tank?”

“Apparently.”

“I thought, outside of B-movies, bullets don’t ignite gasoline.”

“In general that’s true, but if he can put a hole in the tank, the diesel will gush out and soon we’ll run dry. And in the meantime, if he can blow the tire, all it will take is one spark and—”

“Big blob of fire?”

“Essentially, yes,” Drummond said.

Impressed by Drummond’s knowledge, as well as flabbergasted by it, Charlie nosed right, just as the man in the Dodge pressed the trigger. Drummond’s side mirror filled with the shot’s white glare.

The bullet struck the Hippo’s rear cargo door, decimating its upper hinge. Already ajar, the door swung outward. The lower hinge kept it dangling from the truck. It hammered the road, creating a comet tail of
sparks, until swinging sideways and clipping the trunk of a streetlamp. Charlie felt the high-pitched clank in his teeth.

Severed from the truck, the cargo door flew at the Dodge like a hatchet.

The Dodge swerved to avoid it. The door gouged the pavement a few feet ahead of the Dodge, cartwheeled past its windshield, and slammed into a cluster of garbage pails, scattering them like tenpins.

Charlie would have cursed the luck, but the monstrous banging and rumbling in the cargo hold seized his attention.

“The newspapers,” Drummond said.

“Or
Hippo
actually refers to a hippo,” Charlie said.

It was quickly evident that Drummond was right: The stacks of newspapers were toppling, due either to the collision with the streetlamp or suction through the rear doorway. Bundles of papers could be heard bouncing around, like corn in a popper. The side mirror showed the cargo hold disgorging hundreds of individual copies.

The Dodge slalomed to avoid the bulk of this tabloid-sized confetti. Sheet after sheet slapped its windshield, flattened, and stayed put. The driver had to lower his window and stick out his head to maintain his course.

A still-intact newspaper clouted him in the face, bloodying his nose. A page clung over his eyes, blinding him. He kept one hand on the wheel and swept the other wildly in an effort to peel away the paper.

The passenger shouted and pointed. The driver cleared his eyes in time to see the dumpster. Too late to dodge it.

Charlie looked on like a baseball fan whose cleanup hitter has just sent one deep.

The driver of the Dodge jogged his wheel counterclockwise, so rather than head-on, he struck the dumpster with his right front quarter panel. The car bounced back into the street, its hood tented, the right headlight gone. The quarter panel flopped off.

Still, the car resumed its pursuit.

“They don’t make dumpsters like they used to either,” Charlie grumbled.

The newspapers had been a lucky break, he thought. Per horseplayer
calculus, that severely diminished the chances of another lucky break, and it was hard to imagine escaping the Dodge, let alone lasting the night, without another half-dozen lucky breaks. As the horseplayers say, “Luck never gives; she only lends.”

“Go right at Fillmore,” Drummond said. “I have an idea.”

Charlie took the sharp right from Flatbush onto Fillmore Avenue, requiring that he not turn the wheel so much as wrestle centrifugal force for control of the truck. The axles and tires moaned, and it felt like the Hippo might split in two, with the cargo hold continuing down Flatbush on its own afterward. The whole of the vehicle careened onto Fillmore without harm, save to Charlie’s digestion.

Fillmore was a narrow, single lane through shuttered warehouses, or, as Charlie saw it, one big shooting alley. Without the cargo door, all they had to protect them from bullets was the cab’s very penetrable rear wall.

What the hell was Drummond thinking?

Charlie opened his mouth to ask when the side mirror again filled with a muzzle flash. A bullet pounded through the cargo hold wall and ricocheted around like a hornet.

The Dodge sped to within a half block behind them. The gunman leaned out of the passenger window for a better shot.

“How’s that idea going?” Charlie asked.

“Stop at the red.” Drummond pointed at the traffic light dangling ahead.

“The rule is except when someone is shooting you!”

“Simple tactic. Listen, and we’ll lose them.” Drummond sounded intrepid and full of conviction. Like Patton—or at least unlike anything Charlie had ever heard from his father or thought within his range.

And it steadied Charlie. He threw the gearshift into neutral and pressed the brake. The truck slid, tires grating against the street and sending a whiff of rubber into the cab. They came to a halt on the crosswalk at the intersection with busy Utica Avenue.

“Now get ready to turn right when I say so,” Drummond said.

Charlie clocked the steering wheel and tightened his sweaty grip on the gearshift knob.

A block to the left, on Utica Avenue, a green light loosed a herd of traffic led by an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer.

The Dodge, meanwhile, glided to a stop five or six car lengths behind the Hippo, close enough that Charlie could see the face of the man in the passenger seat—so mild mannered in appearance that hope flickered in Charlie that this was all some sort of misunderstanding about to be resolved.

With a grin, the man stuck his pistol out of his window and fired. Now that the vehicles were in idle, the report was earsplitting.

The round blew another hole in the cab’s rear wall, buzzed past Charlie’s right ear, and, on its way out of the cab, created a small cavity in the ceiling. Heart bouncing around inside his rib cage, he shoved the gearshift into first.

“Not until I say so,” Drummond barked.

“But—”

“Just hold on.”

The Dodge’s driver rolled down his window. He was a fair-complexioned young man with hard eyes and thin bloodless lips set too tight to smile. He balanced his pistol atop the lowered glass. His shot pinged the doorframe by Drummond’s head, creating a starburst. Drummond eyed it with an almost mocking indifference.

“Okay, we’ve held on long enough,” Charlie couldn’t help shouting.

“Just a few more seconds.” Drummond pointed to the dense traffic rumbling along Utica from the left, led by the eighteen-wheeler.

The Dodge rolled closer, and another booming shot punched into the rear wall of the cab, creating a hole just inches left of Drummond’s chest. The air filled with grainy orange haze that smelled of salt, the remains of a bag of corn chips on top of the dash.

The eighteen-wheeler rumbled to within a half block of the intersection. Any more time and the traffic would be in front of the Hippo, effectively turning Fillmore into a dead end.

“How about now?” Charlie meant the question to be rhetorical.

“Almost,” said Drummond, fixating on the eighteen-wheeler.

Bullets rained against the Hippo. The smoke and the ear-wrecking reports and echoes made it feel like being inside a thunderhead.

“Go!” Drummond shouted through it all.

Charlie released the clutch and crushed the gas. With tires screaming, the Hippo bombed onto Utica. Its back end barely missed the eighteen-wheeler’s front fender.

The truck driver reflexively slammed on his brakes, sending his gargantuan vehicle into an abrupt, sliding deceleration. All sound was lost beneath the howl of his eighteen tires.

To avoid rear-ending him, the young woman driving the Honda Accord darted to the right, into a lane that was parking spaces by day.

The trailer jackknifed right, filling that lane too. The Accord came to a shrieking stop a foot short of a collision.

The teal Dodge, flying onto Utica, needed to pass the Accord. To the left was the jackknifed trailer. To the right, the sidewalk. The Dodge leaped onto the sidewalk, a viable byway, if not for the streetlamp the driver had no way of seeing. With a deafening thunk, it stopped the Dodge dead.

In the remains of Drummond’s side mirror, Charlie saw the streetlamp protruding from the teal hood like a stake. Much of the car was accordioned. Inside, the gunmen angrily swatted aside swollen air bags.

Exultant, Charlie said, “I hope that streetlamp is okay.”

Gunning the Hippo away, he watched until the gunmen were specks. Left behind with them was his last shred of doubt about Drummond’s claim. In place of it came awe and a thousand questions he was dying to ask.

“So now what?” he said for starters.

“This may have something to do with work,” Drummond said.

Against a new tide of panic, Charlie said, “I know, I know—you work for the government. Clandestine operations.” He rushed his words to make use of Drummond’s last bits of light. “I need to know where exactly?”

Drummond sat up again. He eyed the bullet hole in the ceiling.

“I hope it doesn’t rain,” he said.

Part Two
Secrets of Appliance Sales

1

Fielding met
Alice under strange circumstances.

He was in Havana, at a cocktail party. “Another woman asked to meet you, Nick,” the hostess told him. “I’m going to have to start handing out numbers.”

His physical appearance had something to do with it. He would have been just another bright-eyed, fortysomething surfer from San Diego, though, if not for his string of finds, which ranged from a cache of centuries-old gold coins to the wreck of a legendary pirate ship. And the thirty-room villa it bought him, which came with its own island off Martinique, didn’t hurt.

At the same time, his success had made life tedious. The motives of others were increasingly obvious to him, and almost always economic. And he’d seen enough of the world to know it was the same everywhere. Drinking restored some of the edge—or so he rationalized it.

No amount of alcohol could make this gold-digger fest endurable, he thought. With the right woman, however, the night might be salvaged.

The woman he had in mind was Mariana Dominguez, aged ninety-four. She could be found on the veranda of the Hotel Nacional, rolling tobacco leaves from her own field into cigars that he believed were the finest on the island and possibly the world. “They’re going to earn you sainthood,” he liked to tell Señora Dominguez.

On the way out of the party, he traded the bartender a roll of ten-peso notes for a bottle of dark rum. He worked the foil from the cap as he strolled along the deserted Malecón. He admired the once-majestic Spanish town houses, now boarded up to keep out squatters. It was an
especially dark night. If not for the slapping of waves against the seawall, Havana Bay could have been mistaken for a vacant lot.

Because of the waves, at first, he couldn’t hear what the man ahead was saying, just the cruelty in his tone. Drawing closer, Fielding made out, “What’s a matter,
puta
, you too good for us?” spoken with a heavy Cuban accent.

Fielding accelerated, soon discerning from the shadows a trio of street toughs surrounding a cowering young woman. The tough closest to her face repeated, “You too good for us?” A stout man with apelike facial hair, he reminded Fielding of Blackbeard.

The woman was a jogger and, taking into account the way her muscles swelled her running tights, a devoted one. Also she was lovely.
And
a redhead—Fielding’s favorite. Minus the terror, he thought, her eyes would be spectacular.

The thugs reared on his approach, probably wondering whether he was drunk or crazy.

“Buenas noches, amigos,”
he said. “I’m hoping you can direct me to the Hotel Nacional.”

Blackbeard aimed a thick finger at the radiant, twin-spired colossus a half mile down shore. “See that?” he said. It was the only structure in sight bigger than a house. The other men sniggered.

“Thank you ever so kindly,” Fielding said, starting toward it.