Once A Spy Part 22

Charlie felt like saying, 'I give that a three, on a scale of one to ten for Justifications for Playing G.o.d.' But the ideological mania*or possibly just plain mania*burning within Fielding would not be doused by any sort of reasoning. 'Got it,' Charlie said instead, as if he meant it.

Fielding seemed mollified. He pushed a thin, metal-jacketed projectile into the 'keyless remote,' then aimed the weapon at Charlie.

'Now, where is he?' Fielding asked.

Charlie looked away and considered his options. He watched the last log in the fireplace roll over, smothering the flame.

With resignation, he said, 'Upstairs resting.'

36.

With the keyless remote aimed at him, Charlie was forced to return the SIG Sauer, surrender the Walther he'd wedged into the back of his waistband, then silently precede Fielding up the stairs. keyless remote aimed at him, Charlie was forced to return the SIG Sauer, surrender the Walther he'd wedged into the back of his waistband, then silently precede Fielding up the stairs.

They came to a wide, dimly lit hallway lined with pastorals in oil and seven tall doors. Fielding turned with shoulders raised. Charlie pointed to the farthest door.

Fielding trod the creaky planks as gingerly as a cat. Charlie followed, just as careful to be quiet. Cooperating now was his only chance of survival.

At the door, Fielding waved Charlie ahead. Charlie gripped the crystal doork.n.o.b, twisted it without a sound, then tapped open the door. With the curtains shut, the room was nearly black, but the spill from the hallway sconces was enough to reveal, in silhouette, the man beneath the comforter on the four-poster bed, a halo of white hair against a pillow. Fielding inched past Charlie and into the room.

Charlie believed his greatest advantage was that Fielding wasn't expecting him to try anything. Elbowing his fear aside, Charlie backed into the hall and took a silent step toward the stairs.

He heard the snap of the light switch in the wall plate back in the bedroom. No light came on. Of course. He'd yanked the fuse twenty minutes ago. Still, in a second or two, Fielding would know he had captured not Drummond but Mort.

Charlie ran for all he was worth. To the landing. Fourteen stairs in four bounds. Then into the bathroom beside the den. He jumped onto the toilet seat*he'd closed it ahead of time. He dove through the already-raised window, landing in a p.r.i.c.kly hedge behind the house.

Bouncing to his feet, he raced to the toolshed. The open Durango sat on the structure's far side, driver's door open, engine idling softly, dashboard dimmed to nothing, and headlights off. Charlie flew in.

Now, conspicuous was desirable. He popped on the high beams, slammed the accelerator for maximum tire squeal, then tore into the gravel driveway.

Once the hilly driveway dipped to a point that the Durango was out of sight of the house, he swatted off the headlights and slowed to as close to a crawl as first gear would allow. He turned onto a pasture, then bobbed for about a hundred yards to a onetime hay barn, parking on the side that faced away from the house.

He opened the driver's door, in slow motion, for fear that the sound would carry over the open fields, slipped out, then closed the door just as gingerly. With an armful of winter clothing and other provisions found in the mudroom, he stole to the barn's side door and ducked inside.

Candicane was waiting. Drummond was dozing between a pair of horse blankets in the hayloft.

37.

Charlie led Drummond and Candicane out of the hay barn. 'Where were you?' Drummond asked at normal conversational volume. The fallow fields between them and the house had the acoustics of an amphitheater. In addition, the night was extraordinarily quiet; snow had begun to fall, and the flakes could be heard tapping down individually. Drummond and Candicane out of the hay barn. 'Where were you?' Drummond asked at normal conversational volume. The fallow fields between them and the house had the acoustics of an amphitheater. In addition, the night was extraordinarily quiet; snow had begun to fall, and the flakes could be heard tapping down individually.

'I was doing what I said I was going to do,' Charlie whispered.

'Oh.'

Charlie helped him onto the saddle, then pressed his own shoe onto one of the stirrups and winched himself aboard. Squeezing in ahead of Drummond, he draped the horse blankets over their legs for warmth, then gave a rendition of that fusion of cluck and kiss with which jockeys started racehorses.

And they were off!

The ride was b.u.mpy at first. It smoothed out as Candicane picked up the pace. At top speed, perhaps fifteen miles per hour, though she began to breathe hard*nostrils venting shafts of steam*Charlie felt like he was aboard a hovercraft. The house on Hickory Road shot aft. Quickly it was a flicker on the horizon, then it was swallowed by the night.

Charlie directed the horse to the trailhead at the base of the ridge. A hand-painted trail marker pointed to Bentonville, a dot of civilization two miles due east over the Ma.s.sanutten Mountain, according to the atlas he'd used in formulating his plan, though possibly much longer along a windy, wooded trail. The hope was to obtain a vehicle in Bentonville.

Innumerable bends and inclines slowed Candicane to little more than a trot, but the trail seemed as familiar to her as her bit. Woods enveloped them. Charlie hadn't known that darkness could be so black. Or silent. Peace and quiet, he reflected, is an oxymoron to city dwellers accustomed to the soothing drone that's the sum of the subway, thousands of motor vehicles, and millions of people. He took in a deep breath of pine and felt flush with satisfaction at his escape. At all times, he kept a hand within reach of the saddlebag. When readying Candicane, he'd packed his mother's Colt, reloaded by Drummond with some of the armory's worth of bullets found in the Durango.

Candicane's mane now glistened with snow. Flakes turned to steam on impact with exposed parts of her hide. She slowed when a small stream came into view. Her breath was ragged.

'Maybe we should let her have a quick pit stop,' Charlie said.

'Maybe,' Drummond said, with misplaced decisiveness.

At the bank, Candicane halted and plunged her nose into the water. Charlie watched her shadow bobble on the far side as she drank. He noticed sharp impressions of hooves in the quarter-inch of snow there.

Anvils for hooves.

A rush of nausea nearly knocked him out of the saddle. 'Oh, Jesus,' he said. 'We've somehow doubled back over our own steps.'

If this troubled Drummond, he didn't show it, or say anything.

'Fielding and his backup team have to have figured out our game plan by now,' Charlie tried to explain. 'To track us, all they need to do is follow gigantic hoofprints through fresh snow.'

'I see.'

'I don't suppose you have any idea of what to do?'

'Get going?'

'I'm with you on that. The thing is, without knowing which way to go, it's fifty-fifty we gallop smack into them.'

Drummond looked at the stream. The spots of light bobbing atop the water appeared to transfix him.

'Dad, at least help me get our bearings.'

'Do you have a compa.s.s?'

'No, but don't you have some interesting piece of information' about moss*you can tell north by the side of the trees it grows thickest, something like that?'

'We need to find north?'

'East, actually, but north'll do the trick.'

'All the times we went camping, you never learned how to use the North Star?'

'We never went camping.'

'Oh.'

'What about the North Star?'

'If you draw an imaginary line from it to the ground, you have true north.'

'What if it's cloudy, like it is now, and you can't see the North Star?'

'If a crescent moon has risen before the sun sets, its illuminated side faces west. If it has risen after midnight, the bright side faces east.'

'Okay, what if you can't see anything. Like now, for instance?'

'You'd need a compa.s.s.'

Charlie was light-headed in reflection of his own shortsightedness. He could have had a compa.s.s*five of them, probably. As Mort had promised, the mudroom had anything a person could ever need. Charlie had had a pick not only of sizes in coats and hats, but styles. He packed the saddlebag only with bottles of water and a bag of trail mix. He added Hattemer's fountain pen, for no reason other than general utility. A fountain pen! A fountain pen! But he left behind enough tools to start a hardware store. He never even thought of a trail map; surely that mudroom had a drawerful. But he left behind enough tools to start a hardware store. He never even thought of a trail map; surely that mudroom had a drawerful.

He clucked Candicane back into drive, sending them splashing down the center of the stream. 'Hopefully this puts their idea of our course at a coin toss,' he said. 'And maybe we can spot another trail marker or a rooftop or a road.'

'Or a compa.s.s,' Drummond said.

Snow acc.u.mulated, thickening both Charlie's coat and hat by an inch in places. It provided unexpected insulation, but it burned the skin between his sleeves and gloves and at his collar and his extremities were numb. Drummond never complained, but he alternated between shivers and coughs. Poor Candicane wheezed with each step. All this was better, certainly, than getting caught by Fielding's team. Charlie sensed, though, that they were delving into woods so vast that, for all practical purposes, there was no other side; survival would be an issue even if Fielding and his men called it a night.

Probably Drummond had the answer. Stuck inside his head. In exasperation as much as desperation, Charlie turned around, locked eyes with him, and said, 'Beauregard.' He would have shouted it if not for the risk of divulging their position.

'Who's looking after him while we're away?' Drummond asked.

The best they could do now, Charlie thought, was stop and rest.

Ahead, the bank sloped up to a plateau shrouded by trees. 'Why don't we hang out up there until the sky clears one way or the other and we can figure out which way's which?' he said. 'Maybe rig up some kind of shelter?'

'Good idea.'

Charlie suspected Drummond's response would have been the same to a suggestion that they go for a swim.

At the top of the slope, Charlie tethered Candicane to a tree and covered her with one of the horse blankets without any difficulty. Drummond sat at the plateau's edge. From forty feet up, the water looked like a shimmering band. An otherworldly vapor rose to be absorbed by the blackness. Drummond watched as if it were a thriller.

Charlie found a fallen branch that was about four feet long*just right. He drove its sharp end through the snow and into the ground so that it stood parallel to Drummond's left side. Drummond didn't appear to notice. Charlie planted a second, similarly sized branch a few feet to Drummond's right. Next he balanced the other horse blanket across the tops of the branches, so that it hung over Drummond like a tent.

Only now, with his view blocked, did Drummond take note of Charlie's efforts. 'What are you doing?'

'Making a shelter.'

'Good idea.'

Charlie weighted the corners of the blanket with rocks. He tossed in small sticks and pine straw to serve as a floor*without it, he figured, the snow would melt beneath them and they would get as wet as if they had gone swimming.

After much tweaking, he finally lowered himself into his construction. He was gratified that it didn't collapse. It felt wonderful to take the weight off his legs, weary and chapped from the riding, and the horse blanket's fleece lining served as a balm to his frozen and cracked skin. There was barely enough room for both him and Drummond, though; the closeness was uncomfortable. And that didn't even rate as a problem in the dismal greater scheme of things.

'Well, here we are camping, Dad,' he said. 'One for the category of Be Careful What You Wish For, huh?'

'I wish we had gone camping,' Drummond said.

It sounded heartfelt, but Charlie dismissed it as another automatic response.

38.

Fielding sat at the wheel of his rental car, driving to Bentonville on a calculated hunch. His BlackBerry showed live feed of three Apache helicopters preparing for takeoff from York River Gardens, a half-completed vacation condominium development in mid-Virginia that was purportedly in Chapter Eleven. As Fielding knew, its gray brick exterior, intentionally left unpainted, really housed a sort of Special Forces la carte. York River Gardens was one of several such outposts around the country maintained by the Office of Security. at the wheel of his rental car, driving to Bentonville on a calculated hunch. His BlackBerry showed live feed of three Apache helicopters preparing for takeoff from York River Gardens, a half-completed vacation condominium development in mid-Virginia that was purportedly in Chapter Eleven. As Fielding knew, its gray brick exterior, intentionally left unpainted, really housed a sort of Special Forces la carte. York River Gardens was one of several such outposts around the country maintained by the Office of Security.

To Fielding, the Apaches' bloated engines, floppy rotors, Bigfoot skids, fins, guns, and launchers all looked to have been attached during a game of pin the tail on the donkey; it was hard to imagine the ships getting off the ground. But as he could attest, having flown in several, they could reach twenty thousand feet and two hundred miles per hour. Also they were ideal for searching the Blue Ridge. The dense canopy of trees there could hide a house painted Day-Glo yellow from the drones*and most helicopters*but the Apaches had extraordinary turret-mounted sights with three fields of forward-looking infrared. Unless the night warmed to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the old man and the punk would be seen. The helicopters' sensors relayed to Fielding's BlackBerry that the current ground temperature was 28.41 degrees.

The Clarks could dig in or seek the cover of a cave, but either would leave them vulnerable to trackers. More likely, Fielding thought, they would attempt to flee the ridge. Once they showed as little as a nose, the thirty-millimeter chain gun located under each Apache's fuselage could pick them off at 625 rounds per minute. And if they were out of range of the guns, an Apache h.e.l.lfire missile could obliterate their entire ridge.

'Actually, one Apache's plenty,' Fielding said over the phone to Bull, who was at Hickory Road, liaising with York River Gardens in order to augment the five-man team he already had combing the ridge.

'But, sir, we'll need to cover as much as forty square miles,' Bull said.

'More, by my math. The problem is a resident woken up in the middle of the night by one of those behemoths can imagine a reason for it being there. Three of those behemoths and we're all but writing the lead for the a.s.sociated Press manhunt story that Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr will read at breakfast.'

'Got it. What about trackers?'

'It depends.'

'York River has a unit that can pick up a trail on a dry cement floor. No one will ever see them*'

'Trackers are a good idea.' Fielding didn't want to waste time discussing how, time and again, manhunts had proven the futility of deploying trackers unfamiliar with a specific area. 'Let me just see if I can scare up anyone around here first.'

When instructors at the Farm say a student has 'a good nose,' they mean an a.n.a.lytical ability seemingly independent of the five ordinary senses, the intangible 'it' quality vital to being a good operations officer. In 1994, lacking such a nose, one of Fielding's fellow first-year 'Perriman Appliances sales a.s.sociates' walked up to the wrong Jordanian roadblock and was halved by a fifty-caliber round. On the same desert road, Fielding held back, for reasons he couldn't articulate, even with the luxury of hindsight. The best he could summon for his incident report was, 'It didn't smell right.'

Tonight, on pitch-black Virginia country roads about which his GPS offered only the most cursory information, he followed his nose through Bentonville*a hamlet comprised of a metal-roofed church, a couple of tiny stores, and a post office that shared s.p.a.ce with a construction company. At the live bait shack at the end of town, he turned up an unlit dirt road leading into the mountains. It brought him to a solitary, shabby, corrugated steel Quonset hut with neon Bud signs in the windows and ten-point antlers above the door. This was Miss Tabby's, according to the metallic letter decals running down one side of the doorframe. A jukebox had the place throbbing to a rockabilly beat.

Fielding parked among the forty or fifty vehicles, mostly pickups. He popped open his collar b.u.t.ton and loosened the knot of his tie an inch or two, to where it would be hanging after a s.h.i.tty day at the office and a couple of grueling hours in traffic. As someone who'd just endured such a drive would, he hauled himself out of his car with a groan and rolled the kinks out of his neck. Despite the fresh snowfall and towering, aromatic pines all around, the muddy lot reeked of stale beer and urine.

The door beneath the antlers opened onto a bar faced with split logs and gaps where other logs had fallen off. Every barstool was occupied, as were all the chairs at fifteen or twenty tables. In the orange-plum glow of illuminated brewery promotions, another three dozen men and women stood elbow to elbow. More still played pinball, darts, or pool. Through a ma.s.s of cigarette smoke at the far end of the room, Fielding saw mere forms around a pool table. Among them, he sensed, were the men he wanted: meth men. The Blue Ridge was littered with methamphetamine labs. Many of the cooks were descendants of the notorious Blue Ridge moonshiners. Like their ancestors, they were expert hunters and trackers who were vicious in defense of their turf. They thought nothing of unloading rifles on sheriffs. And most were expert shots.

Wandering their way, Fielding practically felt a breeze from all of the heads turning. It wasn't that anyone recognized him. It was because he was wearing a suit.

Once upon a time, when entering rough-and-tumble places, he was tempted to dress down or affect a tough guy's swagger. Experience had taught him to shun artifice whenever he could. The closer to his base of experience he could play it, the less he needed to fabricate; the less he needed to fabricate, the more convincing he could be. Here he would try to pa.s.s himself off as a Capitol Hill lawyer, a breed he knew well*too well, he lamented. Should anyone ask, he would say he dealt 'Tina'*a fashionable name for meth in crystalline solid form*to subsidize his own fun. Probably they wouldn't ask; they would just a.s.sume he was ATF or DEA.

Seventy-five cents got him into a game of eight ball, but only because that was the house rule*he may as well have set a shiny badge down on the pool table along with his three quarters, given the players' standoffishness. He was pleased to see several of them were missing teeth, a hallmark of meth usage.

While playing, he didn't partic.i.p.ate in their conversation about the bowl games. He kept looking to the door. Twice he asked his partner, 'Sorry, man, are we stripes or solids?' A few times he stepped away and grumbled to himself. Picking up a bottle of Heineken and a double shot of rum from the bar, he forgot to collect his fourteen dollars in change. This was obviously a man preoccupied.

When he felt the others' curiosity peak, he tossed back the rum and stormed out of the bar.

Halfway to his car, he sensed a man approaching from behind. He whirled around, the way someone who was scared would. As he'd hoped, it was one of the pool players, the gaunt kid who'd been his partner. Twenty-five or so, he wore a Lynchburg Hillcats baseball cap with the bill low, shading his bland features and drawing attention to sideburns so chunky Fielding suspected they'd never come in contact with scissors.

'Oh, hey,' Fielding said, with fake relief.

'Hey, I was just wondering if everything's okay with you, man?'

So he was the meth men's scout.

Fielding kicked at the ground. 'Sure, fine, whatever. Thanks.'

'You staying around here?'