Chapter Nineteen
Interstate 395
“Leave me alone!” yelled Savage, clinging to the highway fence.
“Ted!” shouted Serge. “I’m on your side!”
“Go away!” Ted yelled back. “You’re… Wait, how do you know my name?”
“I’m a big fan.”
“Bullshit! You’re with the Company!” His fingertips went red to purple. “I know how this ends. You’re walking along on a spring day, and a car pulls up. Maybe it’s someone you know, someone you trust, and they ask if you want a ride…”
“This ain’t that movie, Ted. Come on down.” Serge took a step back to defuse the standoff. “You’ve been through a lot.”
Coleman struggled up the rest of the embankment and lay down in the dirt. “I don’t like the chase part.”
Ted really wasn’t looking forward to climbing the fence. He dropped and fell to his knees. Serge helped him up.
“Thanks,” said Savage. “So if you’re not in the trade, how do you know my name?”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t in the trade, just not with the Company.”
“Then who are you?”
Serge clicked the heels of his sneakers together and gave a quick salute. “Serge A. Storms, patriot-in- waiting.”
Coleman pushed himself up from the ground and walked toward Ted. “You need to mellow out. I have some coke.”
“You do?”
Coleman poured a generous bump on the back of his hand and Savage vacuumed. He snorted deep with zooming eyes.
“Dammit.” Serge steadied Ted. “He was spastic enough before.”
“It’s what he needed,” said Coleman. “I know this territory.”
Ted nodded. “Right, Miami. Should have known. World capital of ex-spook, paramilitary, soldier-of-fortune, dummy-front-corporation, back-channel, plausible-deniability, invisible-ink, yabba-dabba-doo…”
Serge smiled patiently. “Why don’t I buy you a drink and bring you back down?”
“Now you’re talking!”
“Me, too?” asked Coleman.
Serge seized his collar. “No more rocket dust for him.”
“But he likes it.”
“That’s the problem.” Serge straightened out his pal’s shirt. “I’ve got a rare chance to pick the brain of a famous spy, and I can’t have you turning it to hamburger.”
Ted walked over. “So where are we going?”
“I know the perfect place.” Serge led them back to Biscayne Boulevard and hailed a cab. “Just a mile or so down the road, but another world away.”
“Where?” asked Ted.
“Churchill’s,” said Serge. “Heard of it?”
“Heard of it? I could have bought the place with my tabs.”
A taxi pulled over.
“Churchill’s?” said Coleman. “What’s that?”
Serge and Ted looked at each other and laughed as they all got in.
The pastel Paradise taxi sped north. A small plastic palm tree stood on the roof. The driver jabbered nonstop on a cell phone in Swahili. A pine-tree air freshener on the rearview battled the jerk-chicken upholstery. The radio on “Classic Mo-Bastic Reggae! 107.5 FM, Miami!”
“So where do you know me from?” asked Ted.
“The news. I watch it all the time. Even when I don’t watch it. I leave CNN on at night for white noise, but you know how you hear something in your sleep and it infiltrates your dream? And then Larry King is chasing me through a misty forest while Tori Spelling reveals all. ” Serge shook with the willies. “I can’t leave it on anymore. Anyway, that’s when I heard about your case. How you were ‘outed.’ ”
“They betrayed me.”
Coleman raised his hand. “I don’t know what’s going on again.”
“You gave them your whole life,” said Serge.
They turned left off Biscayne onto Fifty-fourth. Jimmy Cliff from the radio:
“… The harder they come…”
“Then they got that TV prick to disclose my classified status.”
“… The harder they fall…”
Serge swayed to the music. “You’re with friends now.”
“… One and all…”
“Serge.” Coleman nervously tapped his shoulder. “Where are we?”
“Little Haiti. We’re putting another distinct Miami district into play.” Serge leaned over the front seat and handed the hack a twenty. “Let us out here.”
“But we’re still a few blocks from your stop,” said the driver.
“I like to take in the neighborhood on approach. Here’s another ten.”
“It’s your funeral.” The cab screeched off.
Coleman looked around an arid landscape of sunken-eyed scavengers milling outside barricaded buildings. He clung to the nearest arm: “Serge, that guy coming toward us on the sidewalk is swinging a giant machete.”
“Are other people around?”
“Yes, lots.”
“Does it seem unusual to them?”
“No.”
“Then it shouldn’t to us.”
Onward up Second Avenue.
Coleman pointed again. “There’s one of those double-decker buses from that other country.”
“England,” said Serge. “See the building next to it? Churchill’s, one of Florida’s most venerable watering holes.”
“Seems a little out of place in this neighborhood,” said Coleman.
“Totally out of place,” said Serge. “A British pub in Little Haiti catering to Goth kids. Non sequiturs rock my world.”
They walked another block and went inside the pub’s corner entrance beneath a large portrait of the former British prime minister and a sign: U NDER O LD M ANAGEMENT.
A block back, an SUV with tinted windows pulled up to the curb.
Coleman climbed a stool. “The bar’s empty.”
“An empty bar at midday is the perfect place for spies to meet. No eavesdroppers. And the arrival of any potential adversary can’t go unnoticed.”
They didn’t notice two men in off-the-rack suits arrive at a table up front.
Ted looked around. “Where are the Goth kids you mentioned?”
“They only come out at night.”
Bartender: “What can I get you fellas?”
“Bottled water,” said Serge.
“Whiskey,” said Ted.
“It’s on me,” said Serge.
“Make it a double.”
The woman returned with drinks.
“Thanks.” Serge twisted off the plastic cap. “Can I take pictures?”
