Twice a Spy

windshield. If the compass was working, the boat was headed due west. Toward the center of the bay.

He stood at the wheel, using all of his weight to absorb blows from oncoming waves.

When the clock flashed 3:00, he had put more than a mile between him and the marina. Or far enough.

Now to get overboard with the life raft.

Lest the yacht continue smack into a commercial freighter, he cut the engines, plummeting the dusky vicinity into graveyard silence broken only by the slapping of the water and his own heavy breathing as he ran out onto the bow.

He slid to a stop and tore away the Velcro straps binding the bright red Zodiac raft to the inside of the railing. About ten feet long, it had a stern-mounted outboard motor that looked like it had plenty of zip.

The raft wouldn’t budge. A padlock at the end of a thick stern line fastened it to the yacht’s uppermost rail. Charlie looked on the back of the lock. No miniature keyhole. He might be able to cut the line with a knife or saw, however. And a couple of minutes.

He had 1:43.

He considered diving overboard and swimming away. Hypothermia beat disintegration.

Instead he held the barrel of the Glock two feet from the padlock. He shielded his face, and pulled the trigger. Either the sound or the shrapnel stabbed his eardrums; he couldn’t be sure which. Regardless, there was no longer any trace of the lock.

He heaved the Zodiac into the water. Trying not to think about the fifteen-foot drop, he straddled the rail. He glimpsed the LED blink from 1:00 to:59 as he leaped.

His weight and momentum torpedoed him into water that felt so cold it should have been ice.

He resurfaced to find the Zodiac drifting away, faster than he could swim. Ordinarily. Lungs shrieking for air, he reached the raft, perhaps seventy-five feet from the yacht, or a good thousand feet closer than he needed to be.

As he climbed aboard, he jerked the cord, starting the little outboard motor on the stern. Grabbing the tiller, he set a straight course. The raft shot ahead like a dragster just as a blinding flash cleaved the fog, followed by a boom so intense that his hearing quit, replaced by sticky blood and maddening pain.

A tower of water of biblical proportions rose from the disintegrating yacht. The force of the explosion swatted a helicopter out of the sky and tipped over sailboats as far away as the eastern shore.

The Zodiac shot into the air like a kite, Charlie clinging to it until he was no longer able to stay conscious.

19

He awoke at the center of a flock of tiny, sylphlike particles of light. He was seeing stars. Spectacular, but probably the result of a concussion, judging by the pain.

Shaking his vision clear, he found himself on the Zodiac, the motor still bubbling away, though icy water streamed through the holes in the hull, swamping most of the bow.

Chunks of the yacht had hacked into his running suit. The two layers of long underwear notwithstanding, blood coated him. Each wave that sprayed his wounds felt like a hundred fresh cuts. Still he was alive, and the knowledge that he’d succeeded in getting the bomb far enough away from shore relegated the pain to mere discomfort. He felt himself smiling, ear to bleeding ear.

A police boat sprinted from the eastern shore toward the shaft of smoke that had been the yacht, a quarter of a mile away. Through the scattered fog, he could see two more police boats charging from the opposite side of the bay.

As his hearing began to return, he discerned from the tumult of waves the whine of a motor, spotted the motorboat, and made out a figure at its helm. A woman. Hand held as a visor against the vapor, she was scanning the area where the yacht had been.

Alice!

Even in hazy silhouette, she was beautiful.

“Where are you?” she called out.

“Here,” he croaked through a throat caked with salt and blood.

She didn’t look his way.

He swallowed, then tried again. “Alice.” It came out as a wheeze. Something was seriously wrong with one of his lungs.

She steered away from the Zodiac.

Fog was resettling over the bay, shrouding the police boats in the vicinity of the yacht’s wreckage. Charlie doubted he would be able to get to them, meaning his survival would come down to a race between Alice and hypothermia.

He thought of firing the Glock to draw her attention. Before he could reach for it, the Zodiac’s bow rose sharply. He turned and looked over his shoulder.

Bream clung to the stern.

Charlie considered that he was hallucinating.

“She’s looking for me,” Bream said weakly, but all too real. Somehow he’d made it off the yacht and then clung to the Zodiac’s stern line.

“A lot of people are going to be looking for you.” Charlie reached for the Glock.

It was gone.

“You don’t get it, Charlie Brown. She’s with me.” Bream still hung on the stern to the right of the motor. Evidently he lacked the strength to climb aboard. “I knew you and Daddy were in Switzerland because she told me.”

Charlie recalled Drummond wondering if Alice orchestrated the rendition herself.

“That would mean she had herself kidnapped and shot at,” Charlie said.

“Exactly.” Bream seemed to exult in the revelation. “The whole point of the rendition was to give her an alibi. For her ‘captors’ we handpicked mercenaries who had a track record of running to intelligence agencies to get cash for tips, so the CIA would establish that she’d been the victim of a rendition. That way, who the hell would ever think she was helping me?”

Charlie regarded Alice through the thickening fog. She was leaning over her motorboat’s prow, still searching the waves and calling out. He made out a gun in her right hand.

“And she just happened to phone right when the plane was going down?” Charlie asked.

“We wanted you to give the spiel about Punjabi separatists,” said Bream.

“Otherwise she would have let the plane crash?”

“Otherwise we wouldn’t have set you up in a plummeting plane in the first place.”

“So it was nothing personal? Just another day at the office in Spook City?”

Biting back a grin, Bream nodded slowly.

“You’re just telling me this to distract me, aren’t you?” Charlie said. And hoped.

“You’re learning.” Bream raised the Glock. “Just too late.”

He had difficulty steadying the barrel, what with his lower half still submerged and lashed by waves and the rest of him swaying and lurching along with the Zodiac, but at a firing distance of six feet, even with gale force winds added to the mix, he would have excellent odds of hitting Charlie.

“You need me alive,” Charlie said.

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Cheb Qatada isn’t going to pay a dime for your services. You’ll want to know where the treasure of San Isidro is hidden.”

“Why would you tell me?”

“To distract you.” Charlie kicked the tiller as hard as he could. It swung the outboard motor toward Bream. The whirring propeller blades sawed into his pelvis. Hot blood pelted Charlie’s face and stippled much of the raft.

Bream tried to scream but got a mouthful from a wave. Still he fired.