the plastic picnic table bench. He would put most robots to shame, Alice thought.
“Lothario,” she said, her reserve diminishing.
“Is that a reference of some sort to Mr. Fielding?”
“To the best of my knowledge, it was generated at random, but, you know, sometimes the kids on the desk get frisky.”
“And the skipper?”
“Harold Archibald.” She shook off exhaustion. “Surely you have Hal on your spook scorecard?”
“Why don’t you fill me in? The complete details, please.”
“Senior officer, made a name for himself in the MI6 drug trafficking ops in the early eighties, subsequently fast-tracked with tours in Abu Dhabi, Prague, Paris, and Geneva before being given the keys to Counterproliferation back at the Firm.”
“Personal?”
“Public schoolboy-Epsom College and Magdalen College, Oxford. From a line of intelligencers. Granddad was Naval, Dad an MI5 officer in Logistics-”
Cranch snorted. “You can do better than that, Alice.”
“Do you think I could just make up ‘MI5 officer in Logistics’?”
“No, but I think you can give me something I can use. Does he drink? Does he do drugs? Does he do teenage boys?”
“All right, all right. He’s a good man. He devotes much of the little free time he has to charitable work. He’s been married for twenty-odd years to a well-liked estate agent named Mimi. They have three children who aren’t in any way brats-”
Cranch craned his neck across the table. “However?”
Alice fought an inclination to recoil. “However, an officer who worked for Hal in London was shifted to Nairobi last February. She was in her fourth month of pregnancy. It’s been said the baby boy bears quite a resemblance to him.”
If Cranch were to dial Harold Archibald, Alice knew, he would ring a telephone located at 85 Vauxhall Cross in London, the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service. If Archibald were at his desk, the forty-nine-year-old would probably answer, and, with his crisp, impeccably modulated Oxbridge accent, flatly deny everything she’d said. He would almost certainly add that he’d never heard of her. If pushed, he would purport to be a mid-level analyst whose greatest transgression in life was staying for a third pint at the tiny local down the block from the St. Alban’s commuter rail station before his two-minute drive home to the cottage he shared with his mother. And that would be the truth.
Alice wasn’t really MI6. She wasn’t even from Britain-but, as it happened, New Britain, in central Connecticut. Her actual employer was the National Security Agency of Fort Meade, Maryland. She’d absorbed enough of London during a six-month tour, however, that she could fool even actual MI6 agents. Feeding Cranch her contingency MI6 story bought a few hours, maybe the night-because of the time difference, much of England already had left the office for the night. By the time Cranch debunked her yarn, her backup team might be here. Had better be here. Cranch’s willingness to torture her suggested Fielding meant to extract whatever he could, then snuff her.
She weighed revising her fundamental guiding principle that hellish situations in the lives of her aliases beat any quiet minute in her own.
That philosophy had originated when she was eleven, a star student, actress, and athlete regarded by her parents, teachers, and hordes of friends as an indomitable firecracker. Then she tackled a murder case that was baffling local law enforcement. The victim was her father.
On a cold night, in an unlit parking lot across the street from a bustling New Britain pub, Stanley Rutherford had been shot in the head through the open driver’s side window of his car. An insurance salesman named Bud Gorman emerged as the prime suspect. Gorman’s wife was rumored to be Stanley Rutherford’s mistress, and he was at the pub for hours before and after the shooting. No one witnessed him leaving the pub, however, and an extensive search of the area yielded no gun.
Although Alice’s encounters with Gorman over the years were limited to greetings in the church parking lot and on the soccer field sideline, she had a strong sense that he was no murderer. She told her mother so. Jocelyn Rutherford had a potent mind and rectitude to match. She would have cried foul on Gorman’s behalf from the beginning, Alice thought, if not for the shock and grief.
“It’s plain as day he did it,” Jocelyn said. “It’s just a question of time until they get something on him.”
“But how could he have hidden the gun?” Alice asked. “The police even searched the sewers.”
“There are any number of good explanations. For one, he could have hidden it in his own car, then dumped it on his way home-into the lake, maybe, or buried it in the woods behind his house where it would be impossible to find.”
Alice thought it odd that her mother, shrewd as she was, would imagine that a man with the eyes of suspicious neighbors and law enforcement agents hot upon him would go into his woods and bury anything.
After school the next day, Alice begged out of soccer practice and rode her three-speed to Gorman’s street, snuck into the woods behind his house, and searched until it was too dark to continue. She found nothing. She searched there each weekday afternoon over the next week to the same result. She quit the soccer team and, later, the school production of Jesus Christ Superstar so she could continue searching. On her twenty-second afternoon, she spotted a pile of leaves and sticks arranged just so. The gun was buried beneath it.
She rode home and confronted her mother, who tried to strangle her. Alice fended her off with the steak knife she had at the ready. Her bicycle stood at the ready too, outside the kitchen door. She jumped on and pedaled to the police station. Both Jocelyn Rutherford and her lover, Gorman’s wife, Martha, were sent to prison for twenty years.
Alice was left desolate-on good days. She spent her free time alone at the library, where she became captivated by Jingde legends, particularly the story of the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, who fell out of favor and had to flee the court of the Liang emperor Wu in 527. Bodhidharma sought refuge at the Shaolin Monastery, where he faced a wall for nine years without uttering a single word. Afterward he wrote the book of Shaolin kung fu.
Letting schoolwork and friendships fall by the wayside, Alice immersed herself in the relatively solitary martial art, working on card-throwing more than anything. After hundreds of attempts, she acquired the ability to sling an ordinary playing card across her foster family’s garage with enough force that a corner would lodge in the cork dart-board. With thousands of repetitions, she could deliver the card to the target at approximately thirty miles an hour, so fast it cracked like a whip. About one-third of the time it landed in the bull’s-eye. Throwing at slightly higher speeds and with greater accuracy, Shaolin masters actually could stab an adversary with a card or even-by striking certain minute pressure points-put him into a coma.
Alice failed to find refuge with the Shaolin. A decade later, she finally found a measure of sanctuary: the job of covert operations officer. Deep cover roles allowed her a departure from her life of weeks at a time, sometimes as long as a year.
Now, thanks to Fielding, she stood to depart her life permanently.
Too much of a good thing, she thought.
24
Charlie was famished, dehydrated, and otherwise spent. Worse, his sweat had seeped into his wounds, along with sap, turning each step into its own ordeal. They had negotiated underbrush and low-hanging branches for miles. Even Drummond was breathing hard.
Finally the woods thinned, providing a glimpse of the general store’s yellow clapboarding. It felt like coming upon an oasis.
Charlie stopped behind a bush to study the area. The only vehicle in sight was the rusty Chevy pickup, in the same spot as this morning. The dirt lot and vast, colorless fields surrounding it offered hiding places. Although Drummond had been mostly cloudy throughout their trek, often humming discordantly, Charlie looked to him now to devise a tactic for approaching the store.
He found Drummond ambling out of the woods.
