Twice a Spy

wave, he indicated the lavish home. “Maybe even do time.”

Perspiration darkened Falzone’s sideburns. “If I give you a name, we’re good?”

“It depends a lot on what name you give me.”

“Is there a way you can work it that the person doesn’t find out I told you?”

“Sounds exactly like the kind of person I’m looking for. And yes.”

Falzone dug at a cuticle, saying nothing.

“I’ve never met him,” he said finally, at a whisper. “I’d never even heard of him until he called me that night, the twenty-ninth.”

“Good.” Stanley meant to coax him.

“The girl, April, her company had used him in the Caribbean-Martinique, I think. He does air charter down there under the name J. T. Bream.”

6

“That volcano erupted, killing all of the town’s thirty thousand inhabitants but one,” Drummond said, extracting Charlie from much-needed slumber.

“Volcano?” Charlie blinked the sleep from his eyes. He could do nothing about the whiskey-induced headache.

The interior of the jet, like the sky, was copper in the setting sun. Drummond stabbed an index finger against Charlie’s window, pointing at what appeared to be a greenish cloud rising from the ocean.

“You think that’s a volcano?” Charlie said.

Drummond chewed it over. Or he was focusing intently on refastening his seat belt. Charlie couldn’t tell which. He figured the old man was a 4, tops.

The plane dipped, revealing the green cloud to be a round-topped mountain, coated with lush jungle. Soon Charlie distinguished individual trees, standing almost as close together as carpet fibers, their leaves shimmering in the last of the day’s light.

“Mount Pelee, yes.” Drummond seemed pleased to have recaptured his train of thought. “It virtually split in half on May 8, 1902. An interesting piece of information is that the lava traveled into the town of Saint-Pierre at two hundred and fifty miles per hour, thwarting all of the citizens’ attempts to escape it.”

Charlie reckoned that his father might be correct about the volcano. Drummond had always had an uncanny ability to retain volumes of what he-and usually he alone-considered interesting pieces of information. Upon learning that Drummond had spent his life as a spy rather than an appliance salesman, Charlie recognized that the Interesting Pieces of Information functioned like Clark Kent’s plain business suit and thick eyeglasses, hiding the hero beneath. Sometimes the information offered Charlie critical glimpses of Drummond’s unconscious. Other times it was drivel.

“But you said there was one survivor.”

“Right,” said Drummond. “Cyparis was his name, as I recall, and he was protected from the thirty-six- hundred-degree Fahrenheit ash and poisonous gas because he was underground at the time, in a stonewalled cell in the town jail, awaiting hanging. After the lava cooled, he became a star attraction in P. T. Barnum’s traveling circus.”

Charlie was given hope in his own predicament. “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change,” he said. An old track adage.

Drummond regarded him strangely. “Where are we?”

Make that a 3 on the lucidity scale, Charlie thought. “A guess is over whatever country has Mount Pelee in it.”

“Mount Pelee? That’s at the northern tip of Martinique, the eastern Caribbean island that’s an overseas department of France.”

Charlie hadn’t imagined Martinique being so expansive but, rather, a beach-rimmed dot of an island. Like Drummond, he gazed out the window. Red adobe roofs began to show through the forest. As the jet descended, the roofs grew closer together, soon outnumbering the trees. Lights from other buildings, streetlamps, and streams of vehicles created a glowing dome. Such a vast and populous metropolis would exponentially complicate their task.

“Fort-de-France,” said Drummond, as if encountering a long-lost friend.

“Not the one-washer town I had in mind,” Charlie said.

7

“Did you know that you’re my sixth wife?” Stanley asked as their DC-8 heaved into the clouds above San Juan’s Luis Munoz Marin International Airport.

“Fancy that, you’re my sixth too,” Hilary Hadley said. “Husband. Plus I had a wife once for an op at the Carnaval in Rio.”

In signing off on the covert action, Eskridge had suggested Stanley “honeymoon” in Martinique for the usual reasons: A “wife” would augment Stanley’s tourist cover. In fact, any companion adds credibility-a mere nod of corroboration by a second party almost always causes the target’s trust-governing synapse to fire. In addition, women are better able to elicit information from the Breams of the world, which is to say men.

Hadley had the sort of good looks that were accentuated by a charcoal suit, perfect for the part of a businesswoman, though Stanley sensed a free spirit beneath the Armani. He knew that some of the most gifted actors were drawn to clandestine service for the opportunity to lose themselves in roles for months at a time.

Not everyone who could act could deceive, however.

“So what do you know about us?” he asked.

“My passport, driver’s license, business cards, and all of the charge cards weighing down my insanely expensive Italian handbag say I’m Eleanor Parker Atchison, forty-seven and proud to admit it, a partner at Lerner, Marks and Hopkins, the law firm about which I’ll go on ad nauseam before it occurs to me to mention that I also have been married for seven years, to you, dear, Colin Wesley Atchison, CFO of GleamCo, an industrial cleaning products conglomerate and a topic that gets your juices flowing much more readily than any aspect of your personal life, save golf. It is for your beloved pastime that we are currently en route to shop for a condo within a chip shot of Les Trois-Ilets’ Empress Josephine course, designed by the incomparable Robert Trent Jones. We already own an adorable hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old farmhouse in Litchfield, Connecticut, like every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in our Park Avenue social set, but we rarely use it because we prefer the office on Saturdays, when the phones are quiet, people don’t stick their heads through our doorways, and we can get things done.”

Stanley was impressed with her command of her cover. Even better was her ability to act the part: During the remaining hour of the flight, as they wove additional legend to fit their operational goals, Hadley turned into Eleanor Atchison before his eyes. He particularly liked the way her speech became clipped the moment conversation shifted to their domestic life-this was a woman with more important things on her mind. Yet when it came to the circumvention of Internal Revenue property tax codes, she was effusive, as if narrating a grand adventure.

As the DC-8 began its descent to Martinique, she argued that the quality of the material and the stitching made her handbag worth the extra nine hundred dollars. Although the argument was preposterous, her conviction left Stanley convinced.

He found himself admiring the play of the silk suit pants on her long legs, like gift wrap. Glimpsing her diamond ring and her wedding band, he felt a twinge of disappointment, before realizing that, like his own gold band, it was just cover.