“Please try to understand that we’re on your side,” the man said.
“Interesting,” said Drummond, as he often did to avoid creating an awkward gap in conversation. He fastened the knot behind the man’s neck and moved on to the woman.
“We can help you,” she said.
Charlie considered that the sole aim of their conversation was diversion.
The man craned his neck to look Charlie in the eye. “We all want resolution to your case, right?”
There was a certain affability etched across his broad face, and his eyes were full of a forthrightness that didn’t seem like artifice. Langley must have invented a new sort of contact lens, Charlie thought. But on the off- chance this really was one of the good guys, he said, “The problem is that your company’s idea of resolution is diametrically opposed to ours.”
“I’m not so sure. What’s yours?”
“Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, stuff like that.”
“Those perks come with responsibilities,” the man said. “In your case, answering to charges of a capital crime.”
Charlie sighed. “Have you asked yourself why you don’t have spears running through you already? The only times we’ve ever hurt anyone have been in self-defense.”
“What about Hattemer?”
“I’m sure the Cavalry did a great job of littering the scene with our fingerprints and nose hairs and whatever, but anybody who thinks the Cavalry are good guys has to have been drugged by them.”
The man shrugged. “What motive would they have had to kill Hattemer?”
“Not
Drummond had fled the scene of the killing just two weeks ago, yet his friend’s murder seemed to be news to him.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Charlie said. They could ill afford the distraction now. He turned to the man. “Their motive was to keep him quiet.”
“Interesting,” the man said, with a bit too much enthusiasm.
“We’d better gag them now,” Charlie said to Drummond.
“Check.” Drummond pressed a rolled-up T-shirt over the man’s mouth, stretched it around his ears, and knotted it behind his head. If Hattemer’s murder remained on Drummond’s mind, he gave no sign of it.
“I wish you could trust us,” the woman said.
“Same,” said Charlie.
She smiled. “In the interim, my only request is that you don’t leave my arms so high behind my back. One of my fellow officers in Farafra developed blood clots in both shoulders after just one hour with his arms tied behind a tree.”
Grunting acquiescence, Drummond loosened the kite string, allowing her wrists to fall even with her waist.
Charlie thought of Farafra, or at least the silver screen version, with its centuries-old sandstone spires and backdrop of date palms on sparkling Egyptian sands. What he wouldn’t give to go there someday with Alice. As much as any city on earth, Farafra conjured romance and adventure and …
It was an extraneous detail.
“Dad!” he screamed.
Drummond looked up from refastening the woman’s ankles in time to dodge the glistening barb she swung like a dagger.
Charlie didn’t dare fire the speargun for fear of spearing his father. Instead he flung a family-sized bottle of sunscreen, striking her in the jaw. The container bounced harmlessly to the floor, but the diversion allowed Drummond to swat the weapon away from her.
It landed in a tall wicker basket full of flip-flops. Retrieving it, Charlie nearly sliced his fingertips on the razor- sharp edge of what had passed for the woman’s engagement ring. Pressure on the spring-loaded diamond must have caused the metal band to uncoil into a blade. She had probably cut through the twine around her wrists a while ago, then waited for the opportunity to strike.
As Drummond refastened her wrists and gagged her, Charlie heard footsteps outside. Kneeling, he peered out the ventilation grate to see two young men, but only from the neck down. He didn’t recognize the bodies, but there was no mistaking the muscular, boxy builds-ex-military contract agents were the darlings of black ops personnel directors. Both men wore polo shirts, crisp Bermuda shorts, and, probably in a nod to pragmatism over tourist cover, cross trainers rather than sandals. They strode purposefully toward the beach. In a moment, even if they found nothing suspicious, they would rush back to the lobby and lock down the resort.
“The fun never stops,” Charlie said to no one in particular.
“Finished,” Drummond said, looking up from a pile of spent kite string spools.
“Good. Unless there’s anything in here that they can use to draw attention to themselves or to escape- flashlight circuitry that could turn a tube of aloe vera into high explosive, anything like that?”
Drummond shrugged.
“What if you were them?” Charlie waved at their captives.
“I’d try to get my hands on
Charlie followed Drummond’s eyes to the telephone by the register. Seeing no need to chance it, Charlie rendered the phone inoperable by slicing the outside wire with the woman’s ring. At the same time, he thought of a way to stymie the two searchers. Unfortunately, his plan required using a phone.
18
During the crash course in espionage that had been his past two weeks, Charlie had learned that intelligence agencies of the United States and her allies maintained house-sized computers that continuously intercepted and analyzed billions of phone calls, e-mails, and text messages. In one instance, a captured conversation between two terrorists over a pair of children’s walkie-talkies enabled the Mossad to corral a major weapons shipment from Cyprus.
Even on the hotel’s intercom, Charlie’s intended lifeline, his voiceprint would raise the digital equivalent of a red flag, simultaneously spitting his whereabouts-to within a five-foot radius-to those agencies seeking him. Paramilitary assault teams would storm Hotel L’Imperatrice in a matter of minutes.
If things went according to plan, however, in a matter of minutes Charlie and Drummond would already be driving away from the hotel. But first Charlie needed to get to an intercom. Followed by Drummond, he slipped through the bushes behind the relocked beach supply hut. He stopped short of the paved pool deck, within reach of a fiberglass coconut mounted on a pole resembling a palm tree. Inside the coconut was a house phone.
Reaching for the handset, he glimpsed the two young men in polo shirts and Bermuda shorts, no more than thirty yards away, prowling the beach like bloodhounds. He froze. And immediately regretted it-he knew his pursuers were trained to detect unnatural motions on their peripheries. In contrast, Drummond hid behind a thick tree, never breaking stride.
Neither young man appeared to notice.
Charlie couldn’t reach far enough into the fiberglass coconut to grasp the handset without exposing his position.
As he waited for the men to continue down the beach, a cool gust off the bay made the tree limbs and bushes sway noisily. A variation on opportunity knocking, he thought. He reached slowly until his fingertips knocked the handset from its cradle and into his other hand.
The men on the beach didn’t turn to look.
Charlie extended the handset back toward the coconut until the rounded earpiece pressed the CONCIERGE button on the telephone’s keypad. As the line rang, Charlie took the handset and withdrew, in synch with a windblown palm frond, into the shadows between the bushes and the shack.
“
“Hi, this is Mr. Glargin,” Charlie whispered. “We’re staying here at L’Imperatrice and, well, my young
