Charlie was woken by a rapid crunching of hooves through snow. His sleep had been so deep, he’d lost the ability to gauge how long it had been. Still, he was exhausted, and dehydration had left him woozy. The rest of him was sore or stiff. Seeing he was alone in the tent, panic jolted him to alertness.
He looked outside to find Drummond scurrying back from the tree Candicane had been tied to.
“Where’s the horse?” Charlie asked.
“On her way home, I’d imagine,” Drummond whispered. Her bulky blanket was draped over his shoulder.
“What, were you cold?”
Drummond pointed at a looming, black hill. “Listen…”
Charlie distinguished the far-off beat of helicopter rotors from the rhythmic patter of the stream.
“They’ll have infrared,” Drummond said. “The horse was too big a target.”
“What about us?”
“Not with the horse blankets over us, if we pack snow onto them. We can appear no more anomalous than ripples on a pond.”
Charlie didn’t see the entirety of the plan. But Drummond was clearly back online, meaning the plan was almost certainly good.
Drummond spread his horse blanket flat on the ground and began packing powder on top of it. Charlie tugged the other blanket free of its makeshift tent poles and anchors.
“How long do you think we can hide here like this?” Charlie asked.
“We’ll have to move, otherwise they’ll find us. Once you’ve put about two inches of snow on top of the blanket, get underneath it. Use the Velcro straps on the underside to fasten it at your wrists and ankles and to your belt, if you can.”
“But we still don’t know which way to go.”
“East is that way.” Drummond pointed.
“How do you know? Is it that moss grows on the north side of trees?”
“It does. It also grows on the south, east, and west sides. What I did was, I took the steel clip off the fountain pen in the saddlebag, flattened it, magnetized it by rubbing it through my hair, then dangled it from a shoelace. It pointed to the nearest magnetic pole, which is, of course, north.”
“Oh, that old trick. Good, I was worried you wouldn’t find the fountain pen.”
With the snow-packed horse blanket covering him, Charlie crawled after Drummond. They moved slowly enough that the snow, for the most part, stayed in place on top of the blankets, providing extra insulation from the cold. The problem was the frozen and jagged terrain. Charlie’s suit pants offered little more protection than another sixteenth of an inch of snow would have. His bones became circuitry for shivers. Factoring in an increasingly potent wind, he considered that his body temperature might drop to thirty-two degrees on its own.
He turned his thoughts to Gary Carter of the New York Mets.
It helped.
When the wind reached enough of a howl that no one farther away than Drummond could hear him, Charlie said, “So, Dad, I have some office scuttlebutt to catch you up on.” He filled him in on the happenings at the house.
Drummond’s pace through the snow never varied nor did he act shaken or surprised in any other way. “Around the time I went on disability, there was an NSA operator named Mariateguia in Lima who, we thought, had figured out what we were doing,” he said. “Word was that the Shining Path discovered him as a traitor and executed him, though I suspected Nick somehow was behind it-I never got the chance to look into the matter. In any event, what you’ve described tonight is ample evidence that Nick is resorting to tactics that put him at a level with the most contemptible of our enemies. I have to say, though, that in my case, he’s not entirely wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I am a liability.”
“Please don’t tell me that you’ve gotten me into the frozen middle of nowhere and made a compass out of a pen clip and a shoelace just to pop your L-pill?”
“When I first made plans to go to Switzerland, the lapses had barely begun. Now, I could fall into enemy hands and be utterly defenseless.”
“There are how many Americans, three hundred something million? Out of that many, we ought to be able to find enough people to look after even you.”
“But the cost and the risk-”
“What about ‘We take care of our own’? To have heard Burt Hattemer tell it, it’s a cornerstone of democracy.”
“That’s not wrong either.”
“Well, the problem is good old Nick and the rest of your Cavalry kids got the lesson somewhere,” Charlie said, in bitter realization of exactly where, “that business comes first.”
Drummond said nothing. For several long seconds, Charlie heard only lashes of wind against them and the squeaking of snow as they crawled through it. He suspected that, in spite of the conditions, his father was simmering.
“I see your point,” Drummond said. “It’s valid. Also, I’ve been remiss, and I’m going to rectify it.”
The contrition threw Charlie. “Rectify what?”
“Alzheimer’s disease shouldn’t be fatal to a thirty-year-old. I’m going to take care of my own.”
Charlie appreciated the sentiment. Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s disease, on top of the circumstances, probably dictated the sentiment would be fleeting.
“No doubt Fielding will pin Burt’s death on me,” Drummond said. “What we need now is to buy some time.”
“You know somewhere that sells that?”
“Brooklyn. If we can just get a vehicle-”
“And drive to Brooklyn? Why not just save gas and drive right to Langley?”
“Brooklyn’s so obvious that, ironically, it will provide an element of surprise. Also I have a safe house there that no one else knows about. For years, under an alias, I’ve rented one of the little offices in the back of the Desherer’s building.”
For more than a century, Desherer’s Sweet Shop on Bedford Avenue, with its iconic art deco front, was a favorite destination of every kid in Brooklyn. Every kid except Charlie, that is, and not by his choice. “So all of the times I wanted to go to Desherer’s, your litany of horrifying facts and figures about sugar…?”
“I didn’t make those up. But I did have an ulterior motive. Desherer’s is as crowded as any place in the neighborhood. If I were wary of surveillance, I could enter the candy store, then exit from the offices having changed my hat or coat or face. It wouldn’t have done to run into you there or have the people who worked there see you with me.”
As they crept down a dark slope, Charlie reflected that as he learned more of the truth, the corresponding scenes from his youth were no longer as bleak.
“I’ve always kept a flight kit there in case I ever needed to disappear,” Drummond said. “It has travel documents and enough cash to tide us over until we can draw on the Bank of Antigua account.”
Charlie sensed that another bleak scene was about to be re-rendered in Technicolor. “What Bank of Antigua account?”
“The numbered account with eight million dollars. Remember, I told you-”
“Yeah, I know, but at the time I figured you were delusional. With all due respect, you’re okay now?”
“Just a bit chilly.”
“The thing is, you said you made the money at Perriman.”
“Correct.”
“But at Perriman, you really were just an appliance salesman, right?”
“When I started there, as a loyal company man would, I elected to take my bonus in stock options, which were close to worthless in the aftermath of the Chubut fiasco. But my end of the business ended up being very profitable-bombs that cost relatively little to make sold for hundreds of millions-and it was least conspicuous to keep the profits in Perriman, so the stock price increased.”
“So why didn’t you ever buy a new car? Or a new chateau?”
“My role was middling sales executive, not multimillionaire arms dealer. Also, there was nothing I needed. The Olds is reliable; I rarely drive it more than five thousand miles per year-”
“Well, if you want to get me a Christmas present this year…” Charlie felt giddy in spite of the enormous odds against surviving to spend a dime of the fortune.
“There is one hitch,” Drummond said.
“It’s eight million in Antiguan dollars?”
“You’ll need to leave the country, likely for an extended period of time. You’ll be able to say no good-byes, and while you’re away, you can’t have contact with anyone you know. You won’t be able to maintain connections to any aspect of your current life.”
Charlie considered shedding his current life a significant net gain. Only one negative came to mind: He would miss having that beer with Helen. Which was silly, of course. She was a spook. Probably she’d meant to poison the beer.
“I suppose I can handle it,” he said.
The tree limbs and needles began to hiss. A helicopter rose over the hillcrest.
Mimicking Drummond, Charlie stopped and became a random mound of snow on the hillside. As the helicopter thundered overhead, the only movement on the hill was that of snowflakes stirred by the rotor blades.
The ship flew on to the ridge behind Charlie and Drummond.
The racket receded into the usual babble of wind and woods.
“Get up now, both of you, nice and slow,” came the voice of a man behind them. Charlie saw the shadow of a machine gun. “Hands up high where I can see them.”