What Comes Around

CHAPTER 2

He threaded his way, tacking smartly through the teeming Thorofare. It was crowded as hell, always was this time of year, especially this Fourth of July weekend. Boats and yachts of every description hove into view: the Vinalhaven ferry steaming stolidly across, knockabouts and dinghies, a lovely old Nat Herreshoff gaff-headed Bar Harbor 30; and here came one of the original Internationals built in Norway, sparring with a Luders; and even a big Palmer Johnson stink-pot anchored just off Foy Brown’s Yard, over a hundred feet long he’d guess, with New York Yacht Club burgees emblazoned on her smokestack. Pretty damn fancy for these parts, if you asked him.

As was his custom, once he was in open water he had put her hard over, one mile from shore, and headed for the pretty little harbor over on the mainland at Rockport. Blowing like stink out here now. Clouding up. Front moving in for damn sure. He stood to windward at the helm, both hands on the big wheel, his feet planted wide, and sang a few bars of his favorite sailor’s ditty, sung to the tune of an old English ballad “Robin on the Moor”:

The words caught in his throat.

He’d seen movement down in the galley below. Not believing his eyes, he looked again. Nothing. Perhaps just a light shadow from a porthole sliding across the cabin floor as he fell off the wind a bit? Nothing at all; and yet it had spooked him there for a second, but he—

“Hello, Cam,” a strange-looking man said, suddenly making himself visible at the foot of the steps down in the galley. And then he was climbing up into the cockpit.

“What the hell?” Cam said, startled.

“Relax. I don’t bite.”

“Who the hell are you? And what the hell are you doing aboard my boat?”

Cam eased the main a bit to reduce the amount of heel and moved higher to the windward side of the helm station. He planted himself and bent his knees, ready for any false move from years of habit in the military and later as a Special Agent out in the field. The stranger made no move other than to plop himself down on a faded red cushion on the leeward side of the cockpit and cross his long legs.

“You don’t recognize me? I’m hurt. Maybe it’s the long hair and the beard. Here, I know. Look at the eyes, Cam, you can always remember the eyes.”

Cam looked.

Was that Spider, for God’s sake?

It couldn’t be. But it was. Spider Payne, for crissakes. A guy who’d worked for him at CIA briefly the year before he retired. Good agent, a guy on the way up. He’d lost track of him long ago… and now? There’d been some kind of trouble but he couldn’t recall exactly what.

“Spider, sure, sure, I recognize you,” Cam said, keeping his voice as even as he could manage. “What in God’s name is going on?”

“I knew this might freak you out. You know, if I just showed up on the boat like this. Sorry. I drove all night from Boston, then came over to the island on the ferry from Rockland last night. Parked my truck at Foy Brown’s boatyard and went up to that little inn, the Nebo Lodge. Fully booked, not a bed to be had, wouldn’t you know. Forgot it was the Fourth weekend. Stupid, I guess.”

“Spider, you know this is highly goddamn unprofessional. Showing up unannounced like this. Uninvited. Are you all right? What’s this all about?”

“How I found you, you mean?”

“Why you found me, Spider.”

“Well, I remembered you always had a picture of a sailboat in your office at Langley. An oil painting. A black boat at a dock below your summer house in Maine. I even remembered the boat’s name. Maracaya. So, when I couldn’t get a room, I went downstairs to the bar there and had a few beers. Asked around about a boat called Maracaya. One old guy said, ‘Ayuh. Alden ketch. She’s moored out to the Hooker place, out to the end of Crabtree Point.’ And here I am.”

“No. Not here you fucking are, you idiot. How’d you get aboard? I’ve got a kid, looks after the boat. He’d never let you aboard.”

“Cam, c’mon. It was four in the morning. Everyone was asleep. I climbed aboard and slept in the sail locker up forward. Say, it’s blowing pretty good out here! Twenty knots? Think you should put in a reef?”

“Spider, you better tell me quick why you’re here or you’re swimming back. I am dead serious.”

“I sent you a letter. A while back. You remember that? I asked for your help. I was in a little trouble with the French government. Arrested by the French for kidnapping and suspicion of murder. No body, no proof. But. Sentenced to thirty years for kidnapping a known Arab terrorist off the streets of Paris. Guy believed responsible for the Metro bombing that killed thirty Parisians in 2011. I was the number two guy in our Paris station, Cam! Operating within the law. Rendition was what we did then.”

“Come to the point. I don’t need all this history.”

“I’d had a brilliant career. Not a blemish. And, when I got in trouble, the Agency threw me under the bus.”

“The Agency, Spider, had nothing to do with it. That decision came down out of the White House. It may surprise you to learn that the President was more concerned about our relationship with one of our most powerful European allies than you. It was a delicate time. You’re a victim of bad timing.”

“My whole fucking life is destroyed because of bad timing?”

“I’m sorry about that. But it’s got nothing to do with me. I retired prior to 9/11, remember? Frankly? I never approved of rendition in the first place. Enhanced interrogation. Abu Ghraib. All those ‘black funds’ you had at your disposal. Not the way we played the game, son. Not in my day.”

“Look. I asked you to help me. I’ve yet to get a response, Cam. So now I’m here. In person. To ask you again. Right now. Will you help me? They ruined my life! I lost everything. My job, my shitty little farm in Aix-en-Provence. My wife took the children and disappeared. Now there’s an international warrant for my arrest by the French government and my own country won’t step in, Cam. All my savings gone to lawyers on appeal. I’m broke, Cam. I’m finished. Look at me. I’m falling out the window.”

“Jesus Christ, Spider. What do you want? Money?”

“I want help.”

“Fuck you.”

“Really?”

“You screwed up, mister. Big-time. You jumped the shark, pal. You’re not my problem.”

“Really? You don’t think I’m your problem, Cam? Are you sure about that?”

Spider stood up and took a step closer to the helm. Cam turned his cold blue eyes on him, eyes that had cowed far tougher men than this one by a factor of ten.

“Are you threatening me, son? I see it in your eyes. You think I may be getting a little long in the tooth, don’t you, pal, but I’ll rip your beating heart out, believe me.”

“That’s your response, then. You want me to beg? I come to you on bended knee, humbly, to beseech you for help. And you say you’ll rip my heart out?”

The man was weeping.

“Listen, Spider. You’re obviously upset. You need help, yes. But not from me. You need to see someone. A specialist. I can help you do that. I’ll even pay for it. Look here. I’m going to flip her around now and head back to the dock. I’ll see that you get proper care. Uncleat that mainsheet, will you, and prepare to come about. It’s really blowing out here now, so pay attention to what you’re doing.”

They locked eyes for what seemed an eternity.

“Do what I said,” Cam told him.

Cam realized too late what Spider was going to do.

In one fluid motion the rogue agent freed the mainsail sheet to allow the boom to swing free, grabbed the helm, put her hard over to leeward and gybed. The gybe is the single most violent action you can take on board a big sailboat in a blow. You put yourself in mortal danger when you turn your bow away from the wind instead of up into it. You stick your tail up into the face of the wind and she kicks your ass. Hard and fast.

The standing rigging and sails shrieked like wounded banshees as the huge mainsail and the heavy wooden boom caught the wind from behind and came whipping across the cockpit at blinding speed.

Spider knew the boom was coming, of course, and ducked in the nick of time. Cam was not so lucky.

The boom slammed into the side of the old man’s head, pulverizing the skull, spilling his brains into the sea, and carrying him out of the cockpit and up onto the deck. Only the lifelines saved him from rolling overboard.

Spider stared down at his old mentor with mixed emotions. At one point he’d worshipped this man. But rage is a powerful thing. He’d been ruined by Cam and others like him at the highest levels of the Agency. He knew he himself was going down soon, but he was determined not to go down alone. Revenge is another powerful thing.

He knelt down beside the dead man, trying to sort out his feelings. A lock of white hair had fallen across Cam’s eyes and he gently lifted it away. He tried for remorse but couldn’t find it inside himself anymore.

It looked like someone had dropped a cantaloupe on the deck from up at the masthead. A dark red stain flowed outward from Hooker’s crushed and splintered head, soaking into the teak. What more was there to say? An unfortunate accident but it happens all the time? Tough luck, Cam, he thought to himself with a thin smile.

Another victim of bad timing.

Spider grabbed the helm, sheeted in the main, and headed up dead into the wind. When the boat’s forward motion stalled, he grabbed the binoculars hanging from the mizzen and raised them to his eyes. He did a 360-degree sweep of the horizon. Nothing, no other vessels in sight, nobody on the shore. He was about a mile and a half from the shoreline. The trees encroaching down to the rocky shorebreak would provide good cover.

He looked at his watch and went below to don his wet suit for the short swim to shore. The old ketch would drift with the currents. Once back on terra firma, he could disappear into the woods, bury the wet suit, and walk to town in his bathing suit, flip-flops, and T-shirt. Just another hippie tourist day-tripper, come to celebrate America’s independence with the Yankee Pilgrims and Puritans.

The next ferry to the mainland was at noon.

He’d checked off yet another name on his list.

Maybe it was true. That the old Spider was indeed a man without a future.

But he still had plenty of time to kill.