former colleagues.
Charlie looked to Drummond for reassurance. His father just stood watching the Zodiac assembly like a kid at the circus. From the big case, Corky had produced bright red fiberglass boards that snap-locked together, forming a plastic deck big enough to support a Clydesdale. Jinnah meanwhile unrolled a giant rubber bladder and plugged an electric pump into a portable generator. In seconds the bladder took the shape of a hull and the men transformed metal pipes into a cargo hold and a base for seats and a control panel.
Turning back to Bream, Charlie asked, “Wouldn’t two tourists suddenly chartering a flight to Europe set off alarm bells?”
“Yeah. That’s why your pilot files a local flight plan. Once you’re out of Saint Lucia, he’ll call in a revised or emergency flight plan-he’ll know how to play it. When you land, you may have to answer a few questions …”
“But at least we’ll be out of Dodge,” Charlie said. He was generally satisfied with the plan, in no small part because it gave him one more chance to draw Bream out. And this time, he knew just how to do it.
41
The twin-engine plane climbed into clouds.
“You have to tip your hat to those Indians,” Charlie said to Drummond, across the aisle in the first of three rows. “I mean, all the intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the world couldn’t find us, but somehow they did. And now they’ve managed to score themselves the terrorists’ equivalent of the Holy Grail.”
Despite the conversation, following the bumpiest takeoff since Kitty Hawk, Drummond nodded off.
As Charlie had hoped, Bream turned around in the cockpit. “The thing you’ve got to ask about your so-called intelligence agencies is just how bright their best and brightest really are,” the pilot said. “For one thing, why are they making less money than plumbers?”
“Or even charter pilots?”
“Some charter pilots do better than others.”
Charlie sensed Bream could be persuaded to talk. He had first noted the pilot’s surplus of pride during their flight from Switzerland, when Bream gloated over fooling Charlie with his Skunk Works story. While clothing that made a man more difficult to identify was de rigueur in Spook City, Bream dressed to accentuate his physique. When fleeing the cellblock, he’d taken precious time to detail his “lucky” marksmanship on arrival at Detention III. And he was burning now to claim his share of credit for this operation. Charlie could practically feel the heat.
“So how do you think the Indians found us?” Charlie asked.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“So they did tell
“Gimme a molecule of respect here, Chuckles.”
Bream sat back, shifting his focus to the instruments.
Charlie feigned interest in a cloud.
Bream cleared his throat. “After Fielding bit the dust, I heard from one of his goons, a guy named Alberto.”
Drummond stirred. “Gutierrez?”
“Know him?” Bream asked.
“Alberto Gutierrez and Hector Manzanillo were practically joined at the hip,” Drummond said.
Had the mention of the criminals sparked another episode of lucidity?
“Yeah, he was working for Fielding in Martinique,” Bream said. “He offered me a piece of intel so he could raise bail and have flight money. A hundred grand. It was the best investment I ever made. The Injuns are gonna pay me so much, even you couldn’t calculate the rate of return, Charlie.”
“So this guy, Alberto, knew about the bomb?” Charlie asked Bream.
“The bomb wasn’t exactly a secret at that point. The Culinary Institute of America had sent an interrogation unit to Ilet Ceron. NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency, pretty much the same deal. But Alberto told me one thing that he hadn’t told anyone else: Korean Singles Online-dot-com.”
Charlie looked to his father for an explanation, but Drummond was drifting back to sleep.
With the satphone, Bream beckoned from the copilot’s seat. Charlie braced himself against the bulkhead and entered the cockpit in time to see the pilot open the Internet to a Korean Singles Online page dominated by a photograph of “Suki835,” a chubby teenage girl with warm eyes and a pretty smile.
Bream moused to her left earring, then zoomed in by a factor of a hundred or so, revealing eleven rows, each with ten columns of six seemingly random alphanumeric sequences. “If you figure out how to decipher this shit- which, thanks to some very expensive software and ten espressos, I managed to do-you get,
It had been two weeks, but Charlie would never forget the middle-of-the-night car chase through Brooklyn. A pair of Cavalry gunmen just missed him and Drummond. About fifty times.
“No idea,” he said.
Dropping the satphone back onto the copilot’s seat, Bream said, “That’s how Fielding communicated with his henchmen while they were hunting for you, Rabbit Junior. Reading through the rest of Suki’s private messages, I got the gist of the story. In one entry, Fielding warns that you boys might make a run to an experimental Alzheimer’s clinic in Tokyo, Jerusalem, or Geneva. And I already knew you’d gone to Europe-remember, I recommended the charter pilot who flew y’all to Innsbruck. So I thought, How many Alzheimer’s clinics could there be in Geneva? I put tails on a few Swiss docs. A day later, Arnaud Petitpierre drives to Gstaad and voila …”
“I’m amazed,” Charlie said, which was an understatement. Not only had he just been handed proof of his and Drummond’s innocence; he now saw Bream’s laconic cowboy act as exactly that, an act. Clearly the pilot had managed every facet of the operation. The odds were irresistible that he would transfer the ADM personally.
The multimillion-dollar question was: Where?
“So have you got your mansion picked out?” Charlie asked.
“Haven’t been mansion-hunting yet. I’ll be sure and send you a postcard, though.”
Charlie played wistful. “I’m sure you’ve at least thought of how you’ll celebrate your successful delivery of the ADM.”
“Not really. I play ’em one at a time, and this ballgame ain’t over.”
“If it were me, as soon as I got paid I’d head straight to the best restaurant in town, order a bottle of 1954 Louis Latour and a lobster the size of a tricycle.”
Bream scoffed. “It’ll be 2010 Budweiser, thank you, and, if you must know, a rack of ribs.”
“The collateral won’t affect your appetite?”
Bream reddened. “
“I suppose so.”
“If I told you it keeps me up just about every night, would that make me less of a villain in your eyes?”
“Should it?”
“Yeah. It’s not an easy decision to make. But our country needs the wake-up call. If the best and brightest were really on this case, it wouldn’t be so easy to pull off.”
That was the last thing Charlie heard.
Until the air, rushing like a freight train into the cabin, woke him.
The cabin door dangled out of the plane.
Bream was gone.
Maybe he was beneath the chute that bloomed behind the plane, framed by a violet sunset.
Charlie was back in his seat, buckled in. The sky was really beautiful, he thought.
For some reason, he wasn’t worried. Plus Drummond was still asleep. If this were any big deal, he’d be up, right?
