Twice a Spy by Keith Thomson Read Free Book Online Page A

magazine.
    Charlie felt a swirl of joy tempered by fear that this was old video.
    “Can I talk to her?” he asked.
    “You are,” Bream said.
    As if alerted to a new entry to the room, Alice turned, then rose and hurried toward the camera, beaming, apparently, at an image of Charlie.
    A potent mix of joy and guilt left him speechless. He managed, “Are you okay?”
    “Wonderful,” she said, “with a bow on top”—one of her codes signifying that the “wonderful” had in no way been coerced.
    Charlie tried to sort through his jumble of thoughts, not least of which was their predicament. “I forget what my there’s-no-gun-to-my-head code is,” he said. “But there’s no gun being held to anybody’s head on this end. Where are you?”
    “For some reason they won’t tell me—”
    Bream pressed a button on his phone. The display went black. “Okay, obviously, she’s fine. For now. So where to?”
    Charlie needed to be cautious. “Martinique.”
    “I already knew that. Can we be any more specific?”
    “Dad said the city of Fort-de-France. The way it usually works is, once he gets to a place, things become familiar to him. Don’t worry, we’ll find the thing.”
    Wariness slitted Bream’s eyes. “Wonderful.”

Now that the satphone call was over, Alice expected that her captors would again secure her wrists and ankles and duct tape shut her mouth. The tape came off only when they fed her pieces of nutrition bar or let her sip water through a long rubber tube—a precautionary measure, she thought, which they were wise to use.
    Her mastery of Shaolin kung fu included the ability to sling objects with extraordinary speed and accuracy. She could toss a playing card at forty miles per hour, creating force sufficient to stab an adversary and even, if she struck certain minute pressure points, put him into a coma. If she could get her hands on the satphone, she could throw it at the man she thought of as Frank—he had the Frankenstein monster’s broad shoulders and lumbering gait. His face was hidden by a novelty-store black cotton mask with reflective bulbs over the eyes. He’d yet to say anything within her earshot.
    She knew less about her other captor. She called him Walt for his gleaming blowback-operated semiautomatic Walther PPK. By waving the pistol one way or another, he indicated
Get up from the sofa
or
Sit back down on the sofa and let Frank tie you up again
.
    Once she took out the two of them, she would take her chances with the helicopter pilot, who in all likelihood was spending his break time in an adjacent room. Since being chloroformed in Gstaad, she could remember only this room, which might well be a cell in an upscale gulag. A better guess was an apartment in Geneva, rented under an alias. Or an isolated Swiss country house, in which case the duct tape over her mouth was a small bit of deception: She could scream her lungs out hereand no one would hear. The blacked-out windows, unrelenting Muzak from unseen speakers, and an electric air freshener that sprayed a sickly sweet vanilla scent were all intended to keep her from picking up clues.
    Still, she had some hints. Her old NSA-sponsored black ops unit had developed something of a niche in renditions. For discretion’s sake, the number of captors was usually kept to three, all mercenaries with allegiance only to their numbered offshore bank accounts. They were fed a cover story regarding the operation. The duct tape over their captive’s mouth was meant to keep the
captors
from hearing the truth.
    Alice hungrily eyed the satphone. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you’ll let me check my e-mail?” she said to Frank.
    He shook his head.
    So he understood English.
    “How about just letting me know the score of the Patriots game?” she tried.
    If he were to check the Web, she might snare the phone and launch it toward Walt.
    Frank stayed mum.
    Walt made one of his usual series of gestures:
Sit back down on the sofa. Let Frank