She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. She’d known from day one of rehearsal that Fielding subjected everyone in his close circle to these trials, often taking pages from Torquemada’s book. She was prepared. Unless Fielding or Cranch had a source within her group (highly unlikely, given the paucity of evidence against her), she could maintain her innocence, then resume her investigation of Fielding with relative impunity.
“This is a nightmare,” she said, dabbing tears. “What can I do to convince you?”
“There is one way,” Cranch said. “Did you happen to notice the coffinlike device Hector and Alberto wheeled into your bathroom?”
“It would have been hard not to.”
“Do you know what it is?”
She allowed her jaw to tighten, as if to counter a chatter. “No.”
“It’s like a polygraph machine, just simpler and more effective.”
Really she knew all about the “water bed,” including a bullet-points bio of the KGB Mengele-wannabe who’d devised it. The tank’s twenty-five-centimeter-deep basin was filled with enough tepid water that an interrogation subject, stripped naked and forced to lie inside, had a mere two centimeters of clammy air to breathe once the casket-style lid was closed. After just an hour, it was common for subjects to fall into a semipsychotic state. Their subsequent interest in responding truthfully to interrogators’ questions was like a drowning man’s desire for a life ring. Alice had been subjected to the water bed for two hours during her training. As it happened, it stirred fond memories of the sensory deprivation tank she’d enjoyed at a California spa a few years earlier. The KGB’s black-out goggles and earmuffs enhanced the experience, she’d thought.
Regardless, if it came to torture, Cranch might extract the truth from her. No one could withstand every instrument of torture, and surely this character had more where the water bed came from.
“So the thug on the Malecon spoke like a cliche thug,” she ventured. “Isn’t it common knowledge that they all get their lingo from the same television programs?”
“I seem to recall reading something along those lines,” Cranch said. “And I imagine that Mr. Fielding would grant you that. Actually, it occurred to him that the Malecon episode was staged only after he’d already learned-by a fluke-that you were a spy. What happened was, while you were supposedly spending Christmas with your friends in Connecticut, he came into possession of an audio file with a voice that sounded like yours, except with an American accent. He had it checked. The voiceprint matched. Lo and behold, you spent your holiday in Brooklyn posing as a social worker named Helen Mayfield.”
Shock made Alice feel like she was about to implode. She hid it, but it didn’t matter. She’d been caught climbing into the cookie jar.
15
The pool was a conundrum. Fielding called it a pool for lack of a better term. There were probably smaller lakes. Through a physics-defying feat of engineering, two of its five sides extended over a high cliff, giving swimmers the sensation of being at the edge of a flat Earth. Its installation had run him more than four million dollars, not including the bribes and headache remedies attendant to half the population of Martinique protesting the bulldozing of a thousand-year-old Carib burial ground. He wondered whether it was worth it. He was, after all, a beach man.
His doubt was dispelled this morning, when the sight of the pool knocked his prospective customer’s breath away.
The thing could pay for itself today, Fielding thought, several times over.
His prospect, Prabhakar Gaznavi, an Indian real estate billionaire, sat across the antique crystal table in the middle of the pool, atop a level, ninety-five-square-foot coral reef, accessible by the gangway from Captain Kidd’s Adventure Galley. Word was the portly Gaznavi’s stomach was the way to his wallet, so the breakfast buffet included twin eggs Benedict (a specialty of the sous chef, with eggs from a native hen and those of a beluga sturgeon), Swiss chocolate waffles with raspberries picked and put on a plane in the Willamette Valley hours ago, and four enormous platters of fresh local fish and a fifth with a nearly-as-fresh salmon from Nova Scotia. Also there were a raw bar; a pile of langoustine tails; an entire roasted rib eye; nine giant silver shell bowls, each with a different tropical fruit, and a tenth with the fruits in a medley; and the usual pastries, along with Gaznavi’s reputed favorite, cinnamon rolls, their trails of steam still pointing the way to the oven.
Gaznavi helped himself to just a single cinnamon roll. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m on a diet.” Fielding had known that ahead of time too, otherwise he would have had the head chef recalled from vacation so the kitchen could ready the A menu.
“How’s your appetite for treasure?” Fielding asked.
“Much stronger,” Gaznavi said.
In the world of treasure hunting, as little as an anchor from a lesser-known shipwreck could net six figures and land the diver on magazine covers. Fielding’s in-box brimmed with fat checks written by complete strangers more interested in a share of the glory than investment. They never asked where the money went. There were no regulations beyond taxes, and Fielding paid his taxes in full and without fail. Nowhere in his filings, though, did he mention the gifts certain investors received: illegal munitions.
“The gift that I hope will persuade you to invest in the Treasure of San Isidro Expedition, LLC,” he told Gaznavi, “is a Soviet-made atomic demolition munition.”
“I’m interested,” said the Indian, who was the chief benefactor of the United Liberation Front of the Punjab, a violent Islamic separatist group. But he seemed no more interested than he was in his cinnamon roll-he’d taken only a token nibble. His droopy eyes and sagging cheeks were set so that, even when jolly, he appeared sullen.
This guy must clean up at poker, Fielding thought.
Fielding snapped into salesman mode. Smiling to warm the table a degree or two, he said, “It has a ten- kiloton yield and it’s portable. During the Cold War, the Soviets’ invasion plan for Europe called for deployment of these babies at bridges and dams, to keep defending armies at bay-that sort of thing. And if the West came East, the Russkies had ADMs waiting in underground chambers-think nuclear land mines.”
Squinting through shimmering bands of light projected by the pool, Gaznavi asked, “Is it one of the Karimovs?” He was referring to the two bombs Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov admitted had gone missing during the Soviet Union’s dissolution.
Fielding saw an opportunity to impress with his expertise and, at the same time, discredit his competitors. “Actually, there are no Karimovs,” he said.
Gaznavi flicked a speck of frosting off his lapel. “I saw the speech myself.”
“President Karimov’s speech?”
“It was on CNN.”
“I saw it too. He said a couple of nukes had been misplaced.”
“I’m confused, Mr. Fielding.”
“Call me Nick. If I had friends, they would.”
“Nick, if you heard him say nukes had been misplaced…?”
“If a politician in that part of the world says something on the record, that proves it’s untrue,” Fielding said.
Gaznavi emitted a phlegmy chuckle.
Pleased, Fielding added, “There’s no way that a nuclear weapon could be misplaced, if you think about it.”
“I don’t know. Hundreds upon hundreds were transported from the outlying republics on ancient coal- powered trains and Russian trucks that stall every other kilometer. For all to have made it home safe and sound would be an unprecedented logistical feat-and the Russians are famous for tripping over their own red tape.”
“Except when it comes to a nuclear warhead. Losing one would be tantamount to NASA forgetting where it parked one of the space shuttles.”
“What about the three suitcases?” Gaznavi said. He meant the three suitcase-sized nuclear bombs reportedly pilfered from an undermanned Eastern European storage facility in the late 1990s by members of a Russian organized crime family, then sold in the Middle East.
