With a groan, Hadley kicked Stanley’s shin, as she would have if she knew him well. “Those men would know that contacting him by telephone or text would effectively be contacting us.”
“Unless it’s encrypted text.”
“Good point.” Hadley began typing a cable.
“How about this?” Stanley asked. “Do we know where on the Web he’s surfing?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. EBay-auto parts.”
“We’re capturing it?”
“Are you in the market for auto parts too?” Hadley resumed eating.
“When I was in Algiers, an MI6 tech intercepted bad guys’ messages embedded in online classified ads for used bathroom fixtures. They were using an encryption algorithm to mix the secret text into the pixels of the photos in a way that didn’t distort the pictures.”
She paused, fork midway to her mouth. “
“Would you ever look at classified ads for used bathroom fixtures, let alone buy a used bathroom fixture over the Internet?”
She smiled. He sat back and admired her. No acting required.
Throughout the rest of their meal, thoughts of covert operations receded.
15
The black water lightened to violet. Landfall. Charlie wasn’t sure whether he was happier about that or the fact that he hadn’t needed to use his speargun en route.
He and Drummond surfaced about fifty yards short of a secluded beach that shone silver in the moonlight. On the dark and densely wooded hills, thousands of lights glowed like embers. A gentle breeze whistled through palm fronds. Charlie thought of his surroundings in terms of obstacles to circumventing the local authorities-who were undoubtedly scouring the island-and getting to the Laundromat. Contacting Bream was out. The BirdBook had been left in the overnight bag last seen in the customs office. They had fled the airport with only what they had on them, wallets and the pill bottle Drummond always kept close at hand.
Charlie spat out his clammy mouthpiece. “It’s been over an hour since you hot-wired a vehicle. What do you say we find another one?”
Drummond held his mouthpiece close to his lips, as if ready to resubmerge. “Okay.”
A hundred yards up the beach stood a mass of stacked wooden lounge chairs. “Looks like a hotel there,” Charlie said. “What do you think?”
“It does.”
“What do you think we should do? Head toward it? Or away?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about this? Say you were a fugitive looking to shed your scuba gear and steal a car in order to get to a Laundromat in Fort-de-France. Would you be wary of a big hotel, where the security might be watching out for us, or would you be psyched about a crowded place where there are probably a lot of other people with our skin color, many of them on their fourth or fifth umbrella drink by now?”
“Ah. In that case, the relative ease of obtaining clothing and a vehicle would outweigh the cons, which would largely consist of a faxed alert that the graveyard-shift guards and receptionists may not even have seen.”
Unbelievable, Charlie thought.
They swam closer to the beach, then walked along the sandy sea bottom in their flippers. Gas-fed torches showed the way to landscaped gardens fronting a large resort hotel. As they drew closer still, the dark forms of guests came into view.
Drummond slowed a few yards from shore, body low in the surf, apparently casing the surroundings. When no one was in sight, he ambled onto the beach, his flippers and speargun bunched under one arm.
Charlie followed. The sand ended at a wall of bamboo stalks twenty to thirty feet high, red at their bases before morphing into a brilliant green. Drummond deposited all of his gear but his wet suit into their midst. Which made sense to Charlie. The lightweight neoprene suits had short sleeves and pant legs, not entirely out of place on guests strolling along the beach.
Without the wigs they’d worn at the airport, they looked less like the two men sought by local authorities. On the other hand, they looked more like the two men sought by the rest of the world’s authorities. But Drummond’s intuition seemed to be firing. So Charlie didn’t hesitate to replicate his father’s every move while trailing him up the beach and toward the hotel.
They crossed paths with a handsome middle-aged couple, apparently walking off dinner, arm in arm, their wedding rings and her diamond aglow. Flush from a bottle of wine or just the warm air, they both smiled, the wife offering a warm “Good evening.” Awaiting a reaction to the dripping scuba suits, Charlie could only muster a nod in greeting, but Drummond said, “How’re you doing?” as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
The man and woman appeared to care just as little, intoxicated with each other. As they passed, a wave sizzled up the sand, lapping their shins. “God, why didn’t we change into our swimsuits?” she said. “I’m dying for a dip.”
Charlie spotted a bamboo hut fifty yards ahead, between the beach and the hotel’s swimming pool. Nailed to the hut’s grass roof, at a slant, was a sign that read SANDY’S, hand-painted, intentionally slapdash. Probably a shop that sold suntan oils and lotions at three times the price guests would pay in town. Pointing it out to Drummond, Charlie said, “That place ought to have shirts and stuff.”
“It’s closed,” Drummond said.
“I know, but I was thinking that someone who can hot-wire an amphibious vehicle might be able to open a hut.”
The hut proved to be nearly as secure as a vault, an industrial version of the prefabricated metal storage sheds sold at home improvement stores-the bamboo facade was hot-glued to the exterior walls, synthetic grass was stapled to the roof. Its door and window were fastened by combination locks.
“An interesting piece of information about combination locks is that many have small keyholes on the back,” Drummond said.
Charlie eagerly flipped the lock over and spotted a tiny round keyhole in the upper right corner. “Excellent piece, Dad!”
“Did you know that many people use the same combination lock for years without ever noticing the keyhole, until a thief defeats it.”
“How does the thief defeat it?”
Drummond gazed down the beach, as if regarding a beautiful painting. “How would I know?”
“Say you were a onetime CIA operations officer, who took a five-day course in lock-picking when you were at the Farm …”
16
The shock of actually finding the Clarks might have bowled Stanley over if Hadley hadn’t seized his hand and steered him behind a grassy rise in the sand, out of the fugitives’ sight.
“Good choice of hotel,” he said under his breath.
“Next time we decide to take a ‘romantic stroll along the beach,’ remind me to request permission to bring a sidearm.”
Stanley had an AK-47 and three handguns in his apartment in Paris, but rarely took them to work, although, like now, they often would have come in handy. As opposed to FBI agents, CIA officers didn’t carry firearms-the bureaucrats usually withheld permission for fear of their operatives being exposed as CIA officers and of the resulting flaps.
Antibureaucratic vitriol sharpened Stanley’s senses. He regarded the stretch of beach where the Clarks had