The Double Game

39

A horn blast from the dawn ferry, reliable as an alarm clock, awakened me to my first morning on Block Island. I’d just enjoyed my soundest night of sleep in days. The ocean air probably had something to do with it. So did my new sense of security.

At the ferry terminal in Port Judith the night before, I’d telephoned David to let him know I was safely on American soil, and to expect me back soon in Georgetown. Having earlier heard my account of the strange Nethercutt funeral, he perked up right away when I mentioned Block Island.

“One last mission?” he said jokingly. “Sounds risky.”

“Oh, you know what they say,” I answered, playing along. “ ‘Caution is the enemy of discovery.’ “

“Hey, I just read that in A Spy for All Seasons!”

Which, come to think of it, was probably where I’d first seen it as well, too many years ago to count.

“Glad you found a copy. Maybe in a few days I’ll have more of them for you.”

“Reading you loud and clear, Dad.”

“Yes, well…” Had I missed something in that exchange? “Aren’t you just about due for fall break?”

“Coming up in two days.”

“Going anywhere?”

“Still deciding.”

“Well, drop me a text when you know, now that my cell phone’s back in action. And I should probably give you the name of my hotel.”

We traded small talk a few minutes more before it was time for him to head to dinner.

“Good luck, then, Dad.”

“Thanks. Same to you with your schoolwork.”

“Schoolwork. That’s a good one, Dad.”

“Uh, right. I’ll call when I’m back.”

Goodness. He was certainly getting wrapped up in those spy novels, if my one little reference got him that fired up.

But what intrigued me more, I suddenly realized, was the way the Lemaster quote-”Caution is the enemy of discovery”-made the perfect counterpoint to the advice Jim Angleton had given me when I was seven years old: “Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.”

Might Angleton also have uttered the same advice to Lemaster at one time, only to have his operative turn those words upside down in a later novel? I recalled Valerie Humphries’s tale of Angleton marking up his copy of The Double Game as if it were the Rosetta Stone, the key to everything. It made me wonder what must have caused Lemaster’s words to pop into my head just now, and why David had reacted to them so sharply. The mind works in strange ways, I suppose, especially when you’re still a bit foggy from a transatlantic flight.

After hanging up, I’d conferred with a weathered old shipping clerk at the ferry terminal, who assured me that none of the trucks for FedEx, DHL, or the other delivery services ever went ashore before nine a.m.

That meant today was probably the earliest Cabot could receive the book with the microdot, and even that would be pushing it. His farmhouse was less than two miles from my hotel, which gave me a few hours to eat breakfast, rent a bike, and get into position.

Block Island is only about ten square miles, and even on a bicycle you can reach any part of it in less than half an hour. The drawback to such coziness, especially now that most of the tourists were gone, was that I’d stand out. This was evident when I went down for breakfast at 7:10. I was alone in the hotel dining room.

I scanned my maps and drank coffee. The view out the window was of circling seagulls and slate clouds. The air held a premonition of winter, a briny rawness that made you long to curl up by a fire with something hot to drink. Litzi would like it here. Thinking of her made the room seem more desolate than ever.

“Here’s a refill for you.”

The waitress had materialized at my elbow. She spotted the picture of Cabot’s house right away.

“That’s a nice old place. You house hunting?”

I pushed a napkin over the photo, which only made me look more suspicious.

“Early stages. Just browsing for now.”

“That’s what they all say.”

She slid the check beneath the saltshaker and glided away.

Small places like this didn’t keep secrets well. If my snooping was too obvious I’d soon draw unwanted attention.

It felt good to stretch my legs on the bike, cranking it uphill in low gear as I pedaled out of town. The air was cold enough to numb my fingers, but sweat soon dampened my back beneath the rucksack. I’d packed a lunch and a big bottle of water along with the binoculars. Hardly anyone was on the road, which again made me feel conspicuous, and as I passed the few scattered houses near the turnoff to Cabot’s, I imagined his neighbors looking up from their breakfast tables to wonder who the stranger was.

His property was right across a gravel road from Wils Nethercutt’s. Their facing boundaries formed a rough V, reaching its vortex at the paved road to the south. The northbound dirt road bisected the V. The farther up it you went, the farther away you got from each of the diverging property lines. I was looking on the right for the nature preserve. The map showed that it was a quarter mile up the hill.

Halfway there I passed a footpath that crossed the dirt road from either side, with gates at the threshold of Cabot’s and Nethercutt’s properties. It was overgrown, barely used. Knowing their history as rivals, I wondered how many years it had been since anyone had walked from one place to the other.

A small wooden sign marked the entrance to the nature preserve. Sandy trails disappeared into the underbrush. I locked the bike at a rack and pulled the binoculars and bird book from the pack. An older couple emerged on foot on one of the trails, half out of breath from their morning stroll. The man took a look at my gear and frowned.

“Little late to be bird-watching this far north, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you never know. You always get some stragglers on the flyway.”

Whatever that meant. He looked skeptical.

“Well, good luck with it.”

Great. If I looked out of place to them, how would I look to Cabot and his assistant if they spotted me up on the hillside, poking around in the brush? Too late to worry about that now.

I trooped through the browning underbrush, stirring sparrows from cover. It smelled good up here, the clean scent of late autumn. Nearing the top of a slight rise I spotted Cabot’s shingled rooftop, and as I crested the hill the whole place came into view-the weathered front porch with its wooden railing, green shutters, and glass-paned aluminum storm door. The porch faced south, and I was facing east, with the Atlantic visible beyond the house, down the slope of the island. Maybe two acres of brown grass surrounded the house, enclosed by more underbrush. On the far side was a pretty stand of birches, already stripped of their leaves. An oyster shell driveway led up to a clapboard garage, where a black Jeep Cherokee with rusted rear panels was parked outside. Unless there was something else parked inside, this was the only vehicle, and I presumed it was Kyle Anderson’s.

I found a viewing spot that offered reasonable cover and sat in the crunchy brown grass, scattering a few grasshoppers. I pulled out the binoculars to scan the house. Every curtain was closed. They were the lacy kind, like you saw in Europe. No smoke from the chimney, but who’s to say he’d even have a fire going at this time of day, or at all? A heating-cooling unit to the left of the house hummed into action, throbbing like a refrigerator in an empty kitchen.

It didn’t look at all like the nerve center for the kind of odyssey I’d just been on. Then again, the most effective spies in my favorite books were always ordinary-looking men-Folly with his lumpy suits and split-level home in the Virginia ’burbs, Smiley the Chelsea homebody, wiping smudged glasses with his necktie. In their world, and in Cabot’s, James Bond and Johnny Fedora were aliens from Planet Hollywood.

Such thoughts kept me occupied for maybe an hour before I began to grow restless. I got out the bird book, flipping the pages. The only ones I’d seen since arriving were gulls and sparrows. I was admiring the long red bill of the American Oystercatcher when I was startled by the slam of a storm door.

I looked up and saw the big fellow I remembered from the funeral, Kyle Anderson, stepping off the porch and walking up the drive. I followed with the binoculars, and when he disappeared into the underbrush I stood, ready for pursuit. I was on the verge of leaving when he reappeared with a folded newspaper in hand. There must have been a delivery box at the end of the drive.

He went back inside. A few seconds later I heard faint strains of music. A symphony by Mahler, another Austrian-Bohemian like Litzi. I gazed east toward the sea. In only a few hours it would be nightfall on her side of the Atlantic. Nothing else stirred. I hunched lower into the grass. This was tougher work than I’d expected.

Just after eleven a.m. I took out my lunch, eating the sandwich but saving the apple and the chips. By 2:30 they were also gone, and shortly after four o’clock I swallowed the last of the water. Only four other people had wandered past me on the trails, and fortunately none had seemed overly curious about the middle-aged man with binoculars.

I stifled a yawn and stood to take a leak, scattering more grasshoppers. I had just zipped up when I heard tires popping against the shells on the driveway. I moved back into position and there it was, a white FedEx van with blue and orange trim, rolling to a stop behind the Jeep. Cabot’s handyman in Vienna had worked fast. I raised the binoculars and settled back onto the matted grass.

The deliveryman left the engine idling as he carried a clipboard and a small box across the porch. Anderson answered his knock and signed for the package with the door ajar. The afternoon sunlight caught the gleam of something or someone behind him, and as the deliveryman retreated I saw the spokes of a wheelchair. Adjusting the focus, I made out the outline of a seated figure, mostly in shadow. The only distinguishable feature from this distance was a shock of white hair, which I saw just as Anderson was shutting the door. Cabot had the bait. The only question now was if and when he’d bite.

Nothing more happened until dusk. Lights came on in the kitchen and living room, and I thought I heard a television. Anderson emerged shortly afterward, still alone, and not carrying anything. He wore a light jacket but there were no bulges in the pockets. It was six o’clock.

When he got into the Jeep I headed back toward the bicycle, eager to catch him before he drove out of sight. I made it down to the junction of the paved road just in time to see his taillights receding in the opposite direction, toward an intersection where he turned right, toward town. I would never catch him, but the town was small enough that it would probably be easy to find the Jeep.

Half a mile down the turnoff I saw the Jeep parked in the lot of a natural foods store, well short of town, one of those boutique groceries where everything sells at a premium. Only two other cars were there, so I kept my hat on and my face down and went inside. Anderson was seated toward the back, at a small metalwork table by a coffee counter where a milk frother was hissing.

“Order’s up, Kyle,” a girl called out.

He thanked her and grabbed his mug, then sat back down to browse through the store’s copy of the New York Times while he sipped foamed milk from the top of his cup. Anderson hadn’t struck me as a latte guy, but I guess you never know. I picked up an apple and a bottle of fruit juice, then eased toward the meat counter, pretending to look at the Delmonicos marked at $17.95 a pound.

“Help you, sir?”

“Just looking.”

After a few minutes more I began to feel conspicuous, so I paid for my items, then sat on the small front porch, gazing off into the gathering darkness. I checked my watch. 6:20. Ten minutes later I heard a chair scrape followed by the beeping of the register. I averted my face as Anderson emerged with a six-pack of beer and a grocery bag-probably the makings of tonight’s dinner-then hopped into the Jeep. If he’d noticed me on the porch, he hadn’t reacted, but I still felt uncomfortable.

By the time he got back to the house the whole interlude would have lasted nearly forty minutes. It had the feel of a daily ritual, and I filed it away as a possible window for action. God knows he must get stir-crazy, cooped up all day with Cabot, especially with winter coming.

By the time I got back into position it was nearly too dark to see where I was going on the path. The whine of a stove fan filtered up from the house, and before long I smelled meat frying and heard the first notes of an old Van Morrison album.

I gave it another two hours. By then it was so chilly I could barely keep my teeth from chattering. At nine a light went on upstairs, and the ones downstairs switched off. Bedtime for Cabot. I packed up, groped my way to the bicycle, and pedaled to the hotel, oddly drained by the long and mostly uneventful day. I walked into town for a later dinner, but hardly had an appetite until the waitress brought a steaming bowl of chowder and a tall glass of beer, which got the juices flowing enough for a cheeseburger and fries.

“Here for the fishing?” she asked.

“Bird-watching,” I said, sticking stubbornly to cover.

I was in bed by ten-thirty. If Cabot bit, he would do it soon, so I set the alarm for ninety minutes before the dawn ferry, then fell asleep to the muffled sound of voices from the TV in the next room.

The sun was a sliver of orange peel peeking above the gray rim of the Atlantic when Anderson propped open the storm door and pushed Cabot’s wheelchair onto the porch. I raised the binoculars, fingers freezing, and saw a frowning old man draped in an Army blanket. Two clawlike hands poked from the opening, clutching the FedEx box in his lap. He had swallowed the bait. Now he was about to run with it. I stood, ready to move.

Anderson pushed the chair down a ramp to the ground. Then Cabot waved him off. His right hand let go of the box and punched at a set of controls, guiding the chair forward under its own power. Anderson followed him around the left side of the house toward an oyster shell path that led across the back lawn and disappeared into the underbrush. I’d brought the bike up the trail with me today to be better prepared for a quick getaway, and I pedaled hard toward the dirt road, quickly reaching the pavement and turning toward Cabot’s place. Then I turned up his driveway. If they’d changed course in the meantime and were now coming out in the Jeep, then I’d meet them head-on, busted for sure.

But as the house came into view I saw the Jeep still parked at the garage. I hid the bike in the underbrush and ran toward the house, using it to shield me from the trail in the back. I went the same way they’d gone, to the left, then peered around the corner toward the back. They were still somewhere off in the brush. I sprinted across the back lawn to follow them.

Twenty yards into the brush the path became a plank walkway that curved left through marshland, with high grasses and reeds to either side. I slowed down, not wanting to make a clatter on the boards or come upon them without warning. I heard voices and stopped. Just around the bend I could see that the walkway led to a small dock on a salt pond. They were out on the end of it, and Anderson was lifting Cabot out of the wheelchair into an aluminum skiff with an outboard motor. I kept out of sight, following their progress by sound-a few grunts of effort, sloshing water from the rocking skiff, the pull of a starter rope, then the sputtering roar of the motor. I smelled the oily smoke and heard Anderson rev away from the dock. When I peeped around the corner, the skiff was heading toward the center of the pond, and their wake was coming ashore through the reeds. Anderson was at the stern, steering with the motor. Cabot sat up front, propped on boat cushions, his white hair stiff in the breeze. He stared straight ahead, as rigid as a carved bowsprit.

It was too risky to move farther out the walkway, so I stepped off the planks and immediately sank ankle-deep in the goo. The muck nearly pulled my shoes off as I moved awkwardly forward, pushing through the high grasses until I was a few feet from the water’s edge. I still had cover but could see across the pond.

Anderson angled the boat left as a loon dived out of sight. He throttled back and cut a small circle as they reached a faded orange buoy, like the ones lobstermen use. Cabot’s initials were marked crudely on the side. Anderson cut the engine and nimbly latched on to the line of the buoy with a boathook, which he used to pull them closer. When the bow bumped the buoy, Cabot himself grabbed the line and gave a few feeble tugs before Anderson stepped forward in the rocking craft and began hauling up the line, hand over hand. By now I had the binoculars out and could see everything in detail.

He pulled up at least ten feet of streaming rope before the rusting cage of an old crab pot emerged in a cascade of water. The trap dripped as he swung it into the skiff. A gray canister was inside it, roughly the size of a cooler and dripping with algae. They both looked around the pond a few seconds to see if anyone was watching. I held my breath and kept still. The wet ooze had filled my shoes, and my toes were numb.

They turned their attention back to the trap. Cabot muttered something, and I saw Anderson working at a combination lock. A metallic snap was audible across the water. He opened the side of the trap, pulled out the canister, and slowly unscrewed the top. It was watertight, and inside it was a yellow dry bag, the kind kayakers use. It, too, was marked with Cabot’s initials. Inside the dry bag were four sealable plastic bags, each big enough to cook a turkey in, and each was filled with banded stacks of documents and folders. It was Cabot’s stash, his Holy Grail of stolen and privately collected intelligence. Mine, too. My breath came in short bursts. Between the cold and the excitement it was all I could do to hold the binoculars still.

Cabot opened the FedEx box and withdrew the Oppenheim book that I’d left at the Vienna dead drop only two mornings ago. All of my work, and all of his, was encapsulated in this makeshift treasure chest, which Anderson was now resealing to put back inside the trap. He clicked the lock, took one last look around, and heaved the bulky crab trap back over the side. It sank in a hiss of bubbles.

That’s when I realized I’d better get the hell out of there. But it was too late now to try to beat them back up the path. Anderson had already pulled the starting cord, and even if I made it through the muck in time I’d make a terrible racket, and leave muddy tracks on the planks.

So I crouched lower in the reeds, soaking myself and the binoculars as the skiff swung around toward the dock. I shivered nervously as I listened to them go through the whole routine in reverse, with Anderson lifting Cabot back into the wheelchair. All the while I hoped Anderson wouldn’t notice the path I’d cut through the reeds. Fortunately some clouds had come up, and it was still gloomy enough that visibility was poor once you left the open space of the pond.

I heard the whine of the wheelchair motor. Neither man spoke as they headed back toward the house. After they passed I remained still for another ten minutes, waiting for the storm door to slam shut. My fear was that Anderson would go into town in the Jeep and see my bike stashed in the brush at the head of the driveway. But after the door closed there was only silence, but for the lonely call of a loon. I sloshed back to dry land and worked my way around the perimeter of the underbrush, an arduous but necessary route to keep anyone in the house from spotting me. It took me nearly an hour to reach the bicycle, and I didn’t breath easily until I rolled onto the main road and was on my way into town.

Back at the hotel, the desk clerk gaped at me as I trooped across the lobby holding muddy shoes in my right hand. My pants were soaked from the thighs down. The binoculars were dripping, and I smelled like a marsh. I smiled and nodded as if it were all in a morning’s work of vigilant bird-watching, and he nodded back, seemingly horrified.

Eric Ambler, I thought. I had become like a prototypical leading man in an Ambler novel, one of those Everyman types who blunders into something bigger than himself, then keeps tripping over his own two feet while the professionals circle for the kill. If it wasn’t so foolhardy it might even be funny. Give me enough time and maybe I’d be like Jim Wormold, the vacuum cleaner salesman in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, who faked intelligence reports to earn extra cash only to have all his dark postings start coming true, leaving him caught in the middle. High comedy, except at the moment I didn’t feel like laughing. But at least I knew that Curtin and the Hammerhead were out of the picture, safely detained back in Vienna. That alone made me feel better.

In my room I peeled off the wet clothes and hopped into the shower, and by the time I emerged-clean, pink, and reenergized-I had worked out my plan of action for the afternoon and on into the next day. There were holes in it-almost any ambitious plan has holes when there is only one person to carry it out-but its simplest and most appealing attribute was this: By nightfall tomorrow, for better or for worse, the game would be over.