As the radiant Mobile skyline shrank in his rearview mirror, Charlie thought of Arcangues, a French colt named after the village in Aquitaine. Arcangues had only raced on grass in Europe before being shipped to California in 1993 to compete in the Breeders’ Cup on Santa Anita’s dirt track. Sent off at odds of 133 to 1 and under a last-minute replacement jockey, Arcangues caught up to the powerful bay Bertrando in the homestretch, beat him to the wire, and became arguably the greatest in the history of long shots.
Charlie put the odds that he could securely communicate with Alice even higher. But even if he could tell her why he’d driven south and what he’d subsequently learned about Bream, neither she nor her NSA colleagues-who were busy grilling her in Geneva-could do anything about it.
When he called her on his cell as he drove out of Mobile, he recognized that he would have to tell her a cover story.
“Eskridge must have given you an awful lot of confidence in the agency’s efforts if you’re on a casino crawl,” she said. She spat out “casino” the way she might have said “brothel.”
“He made a very strong case for my going to a casino.”
“Wasn’t it you who said the best chance you have at a casino is to stay outside?”
Although he’d braced for it, her implicit disappointment stung him. In Gstaad, she’d once called his life at the track “tragic.”
“Haven’t I ever told you about Joseph Jaggers?” he said.
“You said that you wanted to name a dog Jaggers, when you get a dog.”
He’d meant when they got a dog.
“He was a nineteenth-century British engineer who thought that even slight imbalances in a roulette wheel might result in certain outcomes. At the casino in Monte Carlo he discovered that the ball wound up more often in nine of the compartments. When he started playing, he broke the bank.”
“Ah. So you’re headed to Mississippi to make a study of certain outcomes.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just need some R amp; R.”
He wished he’d simply said that he was going to hit some golf balls, or that he just wanted to lie around a pool and read sports magazines. Either would have sufficed to confuse his true target audience, the CIA personnel he believed were eavesdropping. It wasn’t Eskridge’s style to leave things to chance.
“How about, once I’m done here, we rendezvous at Le Diamant?” Alice asked. She maintained that the beach resort at the southern tip of Martinique received five stars only because there were no six-star ratings.
“Sounds great.”
“Super,” she said, but with so little of her usual enthusiasm as to cast doubt on the plan.
He hoped she would be proud of him when she knew the truth. At least the eavesdroppers now had corroboration for his three-hour drive to Choctaw, Mississippi. He wanted to give them all the help he could in tracking him to the Golden Sun Hotel and Casino.
He and Alice talked over next steps, dependent on the completion of her meetings in Geneva. He signed off with a cheerful, “Call me when you have the green light.” He did not say that he intended to leave his cell phone at the Golden Sun when he fled.