Once a spy dc-1 Read online

  Drummond stepped out from behind his cabinet, head lowered, hands empty. Charlie glimpsed a thin plastic tube connected to the anesthesia machine, caught on Drummond’s right sleeve. The guards shared a look of self-satisfaction.

  Drummond placed his hands before him, as if to raise them in surrender. Isadora’s Zippo dropped from his left sleeve and into his left hand. He spun the spark wheel at once, transforming the invisible gas flowing from the thin plastic tube into a spray like a dragon’s breath. The operating room turned orange.

  Charlie averted his eyes; the guards’ primal howls painted the picture more than adequately. A burst of gunshots followed.

  Charlie looked to find the corrupt lieutenant dead on the floor. Also, Drummond had obtained the lieutenant’s gun and used it to put an end to the other conspirator.

  Simultaneously, a cardiac event monitor, the size of a kitchen television, hurtled through the air, thrown from behind Drummond by Cadaret.

  “Dad!” Charlie shouted in warning.

  Drummond looked to him, too late. The monitor crashed into his upper back, staggering him. Then Cadaret pounced. Other than a welt where the rock from the balustrade had struck his jaw, the killer appeared in the peak of health.

  He grabbed Drummond around his rib cage and rode him down. Drummond’s head banged into the floor, costing him his hold on the gun taken from the guard. He ended up flat on his back. Cadaret sat astride him, preventing him from regaining the gun.

  Drummond somehow sat up, like a jack-in-the-box, surprising Charlie. Cadaret appeared to have expected as much, but his eyes bulged with shock at what flashed in Drummond’s hand: the biggest of the hypodermic needles from the anesthesiologist’s tray. Drummond thrust it deep into Cadaret’s shoulder and hammered the plunger, flooding the killer with anesthesia.

  Presumably.

  Nothing happened.

  Cadaret laughed. “Must be a placebo.” He pried the needle from his shoulder, tossed it aside, and snatched up the guard’s gun.

  Fighting off queasiness, Charlie lunged for Isadora’s gun, prying it from her still-warm hand just as Cadaret pressed a thick muzzle into Drummond’s temple.

  “Drop it!” Charlie called out, glad to have kept the tremble out of his voice. From a crouch behind the instrument cart, he fixed the side of Cadaret’s head squarely in his sights.

  Cadaret didn’t flinch. Nor did he bother to look. “Whatchya got there, Charlie? Mom’s Colt?”

  Charlie noted the rearing horse etched onto the grip. “That’s right.”

  “Poor choice of names, in my opinion. It should’ve been Bronco or Mule, the way it kicks. My guess is, by the time you get off a decent shot, the three of us will be dead of old age.”

  “Go ahead and shoot him, Charles,” Drummond said, as if growing bored. Probably he sought to calm Charlie.

  Charlie suspected that the full contents of the anesthesia machine wouldn’t calm him now. The Colt’s grip was uncomfortably coarse, the heaviness of the pistol startling. He had blasted away with the gamut of weapons in virtual reality, but the only actual gun he’d ever held fired water. It was difficult just to keep the Colt steady. Although Cadaret was a mere twenty feet away, Charlie had no confidence he could hit him.

  “Yeah, go ahead, Charles,” Cadaret said. “But if you do, know that even if, somehow, you get a bullet into me, I’ll put two or three easy into Papa Bear’s head, and at least one through that flimsy cart you’re squatting behind and into your red zone.”

  He was articulating, practically verbatim, Charlie’s concerns.

  “He’s afraid of you, Charles, or he wouldn’t be gabbing,” Drummond said. “At this distance your bullet will probably kill him before he’s able to process that you’ve pulled the trigger. At worst it will knock him well beyond the point of being able to do anything to me, except by happenstance.”

  Charlie resolved to fire.

  Cadaret spun at him and pressed his trigger first. At the same instant Cadaret’s eyes rolled up into his head, leaving them white. The anesthesia had kicked in.

  Still the pressure of his finger against the trigger resulted in a blast from his gun.

  A bullet bored into the ceiling directly above Charlie, dusting his hair with bits of soundproof tile. Cadaret crumpled to the floor.

  Drummond said to Charlie, “Fine stall tactic.”

  Charlie couldn’t tell whether he was kidding. Through a general daze, he replied, “Thanks, I was worried the fear I was going for wasn’t quite playing.”

  Drummond hurried to his feet. “Now comes the hard part,” he said, plucking the gun from Mortimer’s corpse.

  18

  In the dressing room, Drummond burrowed through scrubs cabinets. “I worked up an escape route,” he said, as if that were something he usually did, like turning on the lights when entering a dark room. He tossed Charlie a surgical gown, cap, pants, a mask, and a pair of disposable booties.

  “You want to leave disguised as doctors?”

  “As it happens, it worked for me at a similar facility in Ulaanbaatar, a couple of years ago, just after the Tiananmen Square protest.”

  Charlie began to put on the scrubs in the faint hope that his father’s plan was more substantive than the Marx Brothers’ plot it smacked of. Clearly a high percentage of Drummond’s mental channels were open. At issue were those that weren’t. He never said “a dozen” if he meant eleven or thirteen; only twelve. Similarly he used “a couple” exclusively for 2.000. The Tiananmen Square protest was not a couple of years ago, not by anyone’s measure; Charlie had been in grade school at the time.

  As if sensing Charlie’s misgivings, Drummond added, “In Ulaanbaatar, my life came down to getting through a single door. It had granulated tungsten carbide locking bolts and eight inches of steel and Manganal hard plate-or enough to repel a tank. Opening it from outside required an eye scan, a thumbprint match, and a numeric code. But opening it from inside required only knowing how to use a push bar, which I did, and no one saw me do it. As you may have noticed, there are hardly any surveillance cameras here, and obviously the guards are elsewhere. The security in these places is geared toward keeping people out, not in. Our job is to get away without being noticed, and that’s all about camouflage.” He launched himself toward the exit. “You’ll see as we go.”

  Charlie’s concerns were allayed. Until Drummond inexplicably bypassed the exit door and headed back into the operating room. Charlie stumbled after him toward the recovery room. The doctors and nurses were startled as Drummond smashed through the double doors.

  “All of you come with me except your patient and you and you,” Drummond said. With Mortimer’s gun, he pointed to the anesthesiologist and a nurse-the two men closest in size to himself and Charlie.

  Charlie realized that Drummond’s idea was to pose as part of an evacuating surgical team, while retaining its original number and composition. Once more he felt better about the idea’s cogency, but he wondered whether incorporating the doctors and nurses added too many variables, not least of which was their cooperation.

  No sooner did the thought strike him than the surgeon instructed his team, “We’re not going anywhere.” With a bold step forward, he told Drummond, “Our first responsibility is the well-being of the patient.”

  “I’m aware of that, sir,” Drummond said. “It’s my hope that the club’s security force is aware of it too. Now, please?” He indicated the door.

  The surgeon stood fast.

  “Sir, what’s your name?” Drummond asked.

  “Rivington.”

  “Dr. Rivington, I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if you don’t do exactly as I say.” Drummond waved his gun at the rest of the men and women. “That goes for every one of you.”

  They all shuffled into the operating room. Following alongside Drummond, Charlie could practically see the fear rising off them.

  “Now I want you to place that man on a gurney,” Drummond told them. He pointed to the unconscious Cada
ret. “Put an oxygen mask on him, plus the fishing hat and the sunglasses your patient had on, and a blanket.”

  Charlie didn’t entirely understand the thinking, but it wasn’t the time for Q amp; A. The doctor act would play better, he guessed, with a patient, and Cadaret was a more manageable prop than the real patient.

  While the members of the medical team readied Cadaret, Drummond threaded an IV stand through the handles of the recovery room doors. If the nurse and anesthesiologist sought to thwart the escape, they would have to break down the doors.

  Next Drummond snatched the handset from the wall-mounted intercom and dialed 9. When it was answered, he exclaimed, “This is Rivington in the OR. We have a code green!” Then he tore the intercom from the wall.

  19

  The “surgical team” hurried up the ramp to the lobby. Drummond brought up the rear, his gun trained on the real doctors and nurses from beneath his surgical gown. Charlie was glad Drummond had assigned him, along with the scrub nurse, to push the gurney. The solid side handles enabled him to appear steady.

  At the top of the ramp, the clubhouse resounded with taproom chatter and the occasional ring of silver against china-none of the hurried tread of guards’ jackboots or the rattle of rifles he’d been bracing for. He considered that the club members, accustomed to the sounds of gunfire from the various ranges, had been given no reason to think anything was out of the ordinary-and ordinary encompassed a lot at this place.

  As they turned onto the marble hallway, the scrub nurse narrowly avoided ramming her side of the gurney into a member-one of the tennis players Charlie and Drummond had been marched past in the portico on arrival. He wore a madras sport coat now and was drinking scotch from a tall glass. Given their surgical caps and masks and gowns, Charlie put the odds of the man recognizing them now at astronomical. The problem was that the fright in the scrub nurse’s eyes was like an alarm beacon.

  The tennis player hopped out of her way. “Code Green?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” she said tremulously. It came off as urgency.

  “Godspeed,” he said, raising his glass to exhort the team.

  Only at the Monroeville Hunt and Fish Club, Charlie thought.

  “This way,” said Drummond, pointing to the door across the hall-the library, according to the letters chiseled into its marble archway. Because going to a library made no sense, Charlie expected the big oak door to veil something else, hopefully the armory.

  The door indeed opened to a library, a lofty room with leather-bound books crammed into creamy pine shelves so high that three tiers of balconies were necessary to access them. Inside, two octogenarians sat hunched over a backgammon board the size of a suitcase. They nodded to the team in polite greeting and returned to their game. In their time here, Charlie thought, they probably had seen so many surgical teams rushing past that the sight rated as less compelling than double twos.

  Within the bookshelves on the far wall was a round-topped door leading to the terrace. The frosted glass transom and side lights offered no clue whether club guards-or the National Guard-waited outside.

  Drummond gingerly drew the bronze handle, the door opened inward with a lengthy creak, and he peered out.

  “Okay,” he said, beckoning the team.

  Charlie was last onto the empty terrace.

  “Now to the tennis courts,” Drummond said, starting toward the path. The “news radio” helicopter sat quietly on the far court.

  “Can you hot-wire a helicopter?” Charlie asked, curious as much as anything. He took it for granted Drummond could pilot one.

  “Most helicopters don’t require keys,” Drummond said. “There’s nothing to-” He was interrupted by a loud and spine-chilling rifle bolt lock-and-load.

  Charlie turned around slowly, as did Drummond and the doctors and nurses. The older of the two backgammon players stood in the library doorway, eyeing them down the barrel of an enormous rifle-quite possibly the one used to bag the elephant in the entry hall. He said, “Those of you who would rather not be on the receiving end of an eleven-millimeter round, place your hands in the air.”

  Isadora’s Colt was tucked into Charlie’s waistband, beneath his gown. He raised his gloved hands because, like the doctors and nurses, Drummond was raising his.

  Swinging the rifle toward Drummond, the backgammon player asked, “Are you pretending not to remember me, Drummond?”

  “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else, sir,” Drummond said, his voice raspier and a half-octave lower than usual.

  Not a bad play, Charlie thought. In all the surgical garb, Drummond could be almost anyone.

  “It’s Carlton Otto, old man,” the backgammon player said. “I was on the plane that got you out of Ulaanbaatar!” He called into the library, “Archie, where in the blazes is security?”

  This was the kind of luck that caused veteran gamblers to leave the profession, Charlie thought, when the palm of Drummond’s right glove exploded into rubber scraps. A bullet-somehow he’d maneuvered the barrel of his gun into the glove-flew high, smashing apart the transom. Glittery shards rained onto Otto, sending him sprawling back into the library.

  Charlie looked on in wonder. At the same time, like the doctors and nurses, he dropped to the flagstones in fear of return fire from Otto’s veritable cannon. Another shot by Drummond kept Otto inside.

  But the escape plan was in critical condition: From the clubhouse roof came a siren-a fusion of whine and honk so shrill that Charlie wasn’t sure whether it was an alarm or a weapon. Inquisitive members appeared at windows overlooking the terrace.

  Drummond scooped Charlie up from a flagstone by the nape of his gown. “Push the gurney to the helicopter,” he shouted over the siren. “I’ll cover you.”

  The heavy gurney would turn what might be a ten-second dash down the winding path into a gravel-ridden ordeal. “But the doctor game’s up,” Charlie reminded him, hoping he didn’t require the reminder.

  “We need him,” Drummond said of Cadaret.

  Charlie couldn’t imagine why. But on account of all the other things he’d experienced today that he would have thought unimaginable, he demurred.

  20

  While sliding Cadaret’s bulk from the gurney and onto the cabin’s bench seat, Charlie watched Drummond free the rotor blades from their restraints, leap through the right cockpit door, and strap himself into the pilot’s seat without glancing at the complex seat belt. Instead he swatted switches on the overhead console, illuminating the instrument panel.

  Charlie took a moment to marvel: Just yesterday, he’d thought parallel parking was his father’s greatest skill.

  Turning his attention to the instrument panel, Drummond became a flurry of switch throwing. With one instrument came a loud, harsh drilling noise. He pulled one of the headsets from the overhead center post and popped the cups over his ears.

  Worming his way from the cabin into the cockpit, Charlie didn’t need to be instructed to do the same. The headset reduced the remaining second or two of drilling to a mild drone. He heard clearly as Drummond explained, into his pipe-cleaner microphone, “That was the fuel valve, a dead giveaway someone’s about to take off in your helicopter.” With a wispy grin he indicated the clubhouse. “Unless you can’t hear it over your rooftop alarm sirens.”

  Charlie smiled-the revelation that his father had a lighter side was almost as startling as the revelation that he was a spy. Fastening himself into the copilot’s seat, Charlie had the sensation of sitting beside someone he’d just met for the first time.

  Although this was Charlie’s first time aboard a real helicopter, PlayStation’s version had familiarized him with some of the controls, including the cyclic, the stick that tilts the rotor blades in order to direct the ship, as well as the collective, the big lever between the pilot and copilot seats that governs ascent. Drummond rolled the motorcycle-handle-style throttle atop the collective, then placed a finger on the starter button. Charlie assumed Drummond would now press the b
utton, the engine would bellow, the ship would throb, and they’d bound into the sky.

  But Drummond had more switches to flick and buttons to press. Other than the toggles overhead labeled FAN and XPNDR-which Drummond avoided-Charlie couldn’t guess their functions. ENDCR? RMI? INV? Most of the dials and gauges and other glass bubbles on the instrument panel had no labels at all.

  When Drummond finally pressed the starter button, the engine whine drowned out the siren. Now everyone on the club grounds knew both precisely where Drummond and Charlie were and what they were up to. Still, the ship sat on the tennis court, with Drummond continuing to tweak the instruments.

  Helicopter takeoff wasn’t as simple as PlayStation portrayed it, Charlie thought, or even as simple as an Apollo launch. Unless one of Drummond’s blocked mental channels was to blame.

  “Would there be a way to speed things up,” Charlie asked, “if, say, hypothetically, more bad guys were about to show up any second and shoot at us?”

  Drummond tapped the temperature gauge. “Overheating during the start can cause catastrophic engine failure, which would be worse.”

  “Sorry, don’t mind me,” said Charlie. Feeling his face redden, he turned away, focusing intently on the altimeter.

  It read 0 feet, of course.

  Drummond cracked the throttle. Fuel howled into the engine. The rotors awoke. The blades tingled. The helicopter went nowhere. Drummond was fixated on the temperature gauge.

  Charlie noticed a flash of light from the terrace. Without ado, Drummond jerked open his window, drew his gun, and fired. More than a hundred feet away, a guard grabbed at his shoulder and toppled over the balustrade. A rifle fell from his hands, its scope catching the sunlight and replicating the flash Charlie had seen a moment ago.

  “Forgetting how you even spotted him, I wouldn’t have thought that shot was possible,” Charlie said.

  His attention back on the instrument panel, Drummond said, “The hard part is acting like I do it all the time.”