Stanley sat below deck of Corbitt’s USS Perk in a startlingly spacious living room with taxpayer-funded, rich mahogany paneling and a copper-plated bar containing a transatlantic crossing’s worth of single-malt whiskey. Every fixture or component involved either precious metal or crystal-even the Kleenex, dispensed from a crystal cube within silver latticework. There was a fireplace, too, with antique brass andirons piled with logs that required a third look before Stanley was sure they were fake. The only reminder that he was at sea rather than in an English gentlemen’s club was the set of pedestals, in place of legs, to fasten the seats to the floor-a floor swathed in antique Persian carpet.
The captives sat in a pair of red leather wing chairs. Wet and bedraggled, they seemed far less menacing this time around. Drummond was struggling to stay awake. Charlie was so frenetic in his narration of their adventure that he could barely stay seated. “Your capturing us is the best thing that possibly could have happened,” he was saying. “I know that sounds crazy now, but let me tell you what we’ve learned.”
“The best possible thing would have been if we’d gotten to you before you sold the bomb,” Stanley said.
“Who was the buyer?” asked Hadley. She sat to Stanley’s left on the camelback sofa, facing the fugitives-her thousand-euro heli-taxi ride from Martinique would probably be overlooked by headquarters in light of their having coralled the Clarks.
She aimed a Glock at them. After her experience with Bream, Eskridge had finally granted her permission to carry. The teakettle’s purple imprint was visible on her forehead. The gun was unnecessary, though. Shortly after Charlie’s Mayday calls had enabled Echelon to pinpoint his whereabouts, a second helicopter had landed on Corbitt’s yacht, depositing four marines with enough weaponry to stage a coup on some of the area islands. The yacht resounded now with the dull thuds of their combat boots. The opportunity to stay on deck and “command them”-Corbitt’s words-ended his protest over his exclusion from the debriefing.
“When we last saw the device, Bream’s men were loading the washer into a Zodiac,” Charlie said. “We have reason to believe they’re planning to ship the bomb to India. So you ought to have plenty of time to intercept them.”
Hadley looked to Stanley. “What do you think?”
“Nothing to lose by checking it out.”
She dropped the Glock into her shoulder bag and withdrew her new BlackBerry. She began tapping out a cable to Eskridge, at the same time saying to Charlie, “The thing that puzzles me now is how you could sell a weapon of mass destruction in the first place.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Stanley said. His concerns actually ran much deeper.
“It wasn’t a sale,” Charlie said. “It was ransom.”
He was polite, Stanley reflected, not petulant, or acting in any way that pointed to dissembling. “Why didn’t you go to the authorities?”
“The bad guys would have killed Alice. And the authorities would have tried to kill us. Like last night.” Charlie indicated Hadley with a tilt of his head. “But things are different now. Now we have proof of everything I told you. The Cavalry’s plot is all right there on the Web. A few minutes online and you’ll be able to see exactly how we were set up, plus how Bream was able to learn about the existence of the bomb.”
Her cable dispatched, Hadley placed the BlackBerry back into her shoulder bag. “This story sounds familiar,” she said to Charlie. “Don’t tell me: Bream revealed the whole plot to you as he was leaving you to die in a plummeting airplane instead of simply shooting you?”
“I wondered about that too,” Charlie said. “Whoever he really is, he’s got more than his share of ego. He was proud of his plan and wanted to brag about having outsmarted the best and the brightest. But he’s nobody’s fool. Maybe he wanted our deaths to look accidental. Why add the murder of a CIA Trailblazer to the list of reasons you have to hunt him? In any case, to verify my story, all you have to do is flip on the Internet, go to Korean Singles Online-dot-com, and throw some decryption software at Fielding’s hidden text. His mistake was not living long enough to delete it.”
“Well, I’d be shocked if Corbitt doesn’t have this brig equipped with high-speed satellite Internet access.” Hadley started to rise, presumably to go up on deck and ask the base chief.
“Hold on just a second,” said Stanley, turning to Charlie. “If what you’re saying is true, why wouldn’t Alice Rutherford or her NSA colleagues have taken action?”
“I was too busy landing the plane to mention Korean Singles Online-dot-com to her. And once we hit the water, I lost the phone-not that she’d have been able to stay on long. Odds are the same people who wanted us have sent a hit team after her too, right?”
“Probably so,” Stanley said. “We need to ensure that no one ever sees that Web content.”
“But it could exonerate these men, Bill.” Hadley searched his eyes for a clue to his thinking.
“It would be the death knell for the Cavalry.” Stanley lifted the Glock and its silencer from her shoulder bag.
Charlie froze. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
Even Drummond sat up.
Hadley looked to Stanley, eyes wide.
“I’m sorry, Hilary.” Twisting on the silencer, he aimed the gun at her.
The other night in the Haut-de-Cagnes safe house, Ali Abdullah-aka Austin Bellinger-had tried to make the case that his Cavalry was made up of bright and gallant patriots who gave no thought to flaps and didn’t waste time on the chains of cables seeking permission for action. They just went ahead and acted. Their actions often brought them into legal gray areas. Sometimes they simply broke laws. But always for the greater good.
Stanley left the safe house convinced that the Cavalry was the clandestine service he had dreamed of joining as a young man. He believed that exposure of the unit’s efforts to stop the Clarks, particularly the truth about the unfortunate Hattemer episode, would force soft and cowardly bureaucrats like Eskridge to roll up the operation. Stanley wanted to help prevent that. So when he was assigned to the Clark case the next day by Eskridge-it turned out that Bellinger had planted the seed in the head of his onetime groomsman-Stanley felt that he had found his calling, at long last.
Now he found himself hesitant to extinguish the lives of Hadley and the Clarks.
Unfortunate but vital to national security, he concluded.
Frozen in astonishment on the sofa, Hadley was an easy target. With the space between her eyes centered in the Glock’s sight, Stanley pulled the trigger.