For centuries governments have sought to protect their secrets. The Romans recorded strategic information on wax tablets as well as the more expensive papyrus, the ancient equivalent of the super-computer. Tony Rhodes, an agent in place, uses a cookie jar to conceal his codebook and operational notes. Tony is hiding on Guernsey in the British Channel Islands the target of an FBI probe as well as a terrorist group. Forced out of his lair he heads for a local barbershop whose owner has an affection for knick knacks.
Excerpt:
That was the image he fought to capture and keep, his secret love, his Achilles heel. God he loved Trish enough to cut her loose while she was young.
Trish lived in Del Mar, California, married to a successful movie producer named Roland Cutler. The desire to kill Cutler flared from time to time—this morning was such an occasion. Tony put it down to nerves. The movie industry fascinated Tony because of all the ways money could move, across borders, into shake and bake corporations that dissolved after the film’s completion.
Tony dressed before attending to the chores his three-room suite demanded. He made the bed arranging the quilt into a tri-fold on the edge of the bed. Langley approved of a well-made bed with nurse’s corners and a hint of stretch to the material. The young guys coming over from the Army Special Forces all made their beds that way.
When the cell phone rang Tony hesitated before answering. “Zero three nine,” he said.
“Sorry to bother you,” a man said. “I must have misdialed.”
“Is it about my ad in the paper?” Tony asked.
“The Ariel Square Four? What sort of shape is it in?”
“Clean. Rebuilt.”
“That’s too much bike for me,” the man said. “I’ll call back Sunday if I change my mind.”
“All right,” Tony said, his excitement mounting.
“Saddlebags?”
“It’s all original.”
“That’s the Mark II model, the four piper?”
“Yeah, it’s a ’55.”
“Such a classic. I doubt it will last until Sunday.”
Tony rang off slipping the phone into his jacket pocket. He didn’t need a codebook to understand that his counterpart in MI5 had just delivered a warning. He glanced around the bedroom before deciding to head for town as usual.
His landlady, Mrs. Duscherre, had taken to puttering in the garden beneath his window, a garden of leggy rose bushes and shade plants in the sun. She clucked and wheezed, pruning the already pruned, waving to Tony whenever he appeared n the porch, as though waving goodbye.
“Good morning Mr. Tidyman,” she said in a singsong voice that grated on his nerves.
“Yes,” he said standing on her porch. “Thank you.”
His response, always the same, never failed to produce a frown. Tony had interviewed a cartel leader in Panama a few years earlier and every time Tony said “good morning,” the man always said, “thank you.” This went on for two weeks before Tony asked the drug lord why he kept thanking him when he greeted him. “I thank you for not killing me this morning, Colonel.”
Tony loved being called Colonel.
When he thanked his landlady Tony was being sincere. The reference was lost on Mrs. Duscherre who seemed to have beat the rush into middle age somewhere in her twenties.
He doffed his hat and she watched him go.
Mrs. Duscherre had been reluctant to rent the suite to him. Every thirty days he enjoyed raucous sex with an English woman, a woman with airs and a disdainful manner. Nothing in the lease forbade sex although it was understood to be in poor taste. He waved at her from the pavement like a man off to war instead of breakfast.
Tony paid the rent that morning, spooning out the dough, his scarred fingers playing with the bank notes while she pretended not to look. Her kitchen captured the odors of week old bacon and burnt toast. Tony always wore his duty free slug of Beau Rivage Cologne when he paid the rent because a man who smells like an Ottoman prince is a man to be feared.
She’d noticed the strangers in the saloon car the previous week. They had parked on her road directly in front of Mrs. Hare’s even though the Hares no longer rented rooms. She had the impression that the men were watching her house, a feeling of intrusion she disliked intensely. When she telephoned the police, they’d sent a car around for a look but the strangers had left.
Mr. Tidyman paid promptly, a boon in the off-season, but spring brought the promise of English tourists, perhaps a sturdy German family going everywhere on foot.
Yes, she thought, by May she would nudge Mr. Tidyman out the door.
Once out of sight Tony picked up his pace. Tony had a calendar on his refrigerator. Beneath a stunning photo of the cliffs on Sark read the legend “Paradise is the Channel Islands.” He’d written “blood diamonds” in the box marked “things to do.” If Special Branch kicked his door in while he was in town, he estimated they would devote a month to puzzling over the handwritten note.
He had today, possibly tomorrow, to make arrangements, alert his network, destroy evidence, plant false leads, preserve his best identity, grab some lunch and get a haircut from the fat guy on the esplanade. Halfway to the Promenade Tony reversed direction retracing his steps toward the rooming house.
Mrs. Duscherre was in the front garden when Tony returned. The house had been Gestapo Headquarters during the German occupation and he wondered if his landlady’s forebears had been around back then.
“A bit on the warm side,” she said before firing up a duty free Silk Cut. “Odd weather.”
“Warm weather in March. Go figure.”
Tony entered the kitchen relieved to be alone. He grabbed several items from the silverware drawer, stuffed his pockets and left. He locked the door and went down the stairs.
Mrs. Duscherre was confused by his comings and goings, the look on her face one of pasty authority. Tony doffed his hat and she looked away. Once on the sidewalk he walked briskly under the shade of the chestnut trees and Dutch Elms toward St. Peter Port’s esplanade.
A Jaguar Vanden Plas glided past him near the small roundabout above the harbor. The tinted windows and low profile made it hard to discern how many occupants were in the car but his instincts said three. Three men, two in front, one in back. Wide boys from what little he’d seen, men designed for action.
He ducked into the street of shops near the Town Church. Tony strolled the narrow lane before stopping abruptly to admire a floral display. He sauntered across the crowded street toward a pub with tables scattered on the sidewalk. Lunch was winding down, one of the waiters smoked a cigarette, contemplating the tourists as they passed.
He followed the signs for Hauteville House where Victor Hugo had lived in exile for fourteen years. Tony doubled back, walking at a fast pace, eyes peeled for the Jaguar.
In a shop called Cornet Tony purchased a ceramic cookie car. The saleslady assured him he would be very pleased with the purchase. The jar depicted a mouse in farmer’s overalls wearing a yellow scarf. With a removable head the cookie jar had a capacity of some two quarts, she said, plenty of room for goodies.
“You must have grandchildren,” she said.
“Sweet tooth.”
After the grandchildren crack Tony allowed her to wrap his treasure in the previous day’s edition of the Financial Times. He forked over five pounds, dumped the change into his pocket and left the shop. The fat man’s barbershop was two minutes away, but Tony devoted fifteen minutes to evasion tactics, varying speed and direction every ninety seconds, backtracking past the Cornet clutching his mouse.
The cobble stone street was the width of a large alley. He entered the pub, ordering an ale and a plowman’s lunch. The landlord wiped the table down with a cloth before trundling off to fill the order. Tony took his package into the Gents and locked the door behind him.
After unwrapping the cookie jar, Tony lifted the mouse head free and glanced inside. He removed a bag of diamonds from his jacket pocket and dropped the bag into the cookie jar. Next he deposited a forged Canadian passport in the name of Henri Dumond of Trois Riviere, Quebec. Henri was okay for third world borders, but wouldn’t pass muster in Europe.
Someone rapped on the door. “Out in a sec,” Tony called. Footfalls sounded from the hall.
Tony removed his tweed jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He unfastened a bracelet on his left wrist, gold encrusted with sapphires before taking off a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. He strapped on a Casio watch with a plastic band, slipped the Rolex and the bracelet into the cookie jar. He paused for a moment. He really liked the Rolex—a gift from a deposed African dictator. Tony removed a second Rolex from his right wrist, a lady’s Oyster Perpetual.
The knock on the door was more insistent.
“Yeah, just a sec.”
Tony hesitated before dropping the Frozen Rope codebook into the cookie jar. On page forty-one of the book the names were written in plain text. He jotted the date on the upper right margin, closed the book, and placed it inside the ceramic mouse. Tony replaced the head, put on his jacket, rewrapped the cookie jar and left the bathroom.
A pleasant looking woman ushered her son forward. “All right, Jeremy, best hurry.”
Tony ate his lunch, drinking the ale, his eyes on the pub’s front door. He wondered if Sammy Moyer had gotten the message that Brazzaville was too hot in June. Tony wanted Sammy to run, but he hadn’t gotten the confirmation telex at the Bank of Lyon.
Sammy had provided a list of names, broken loose from network intercepts, vetted by no one other than Sammy. The list was the sort of raw intelligence that analysts would study for weeks, but the information frightened Tony and his immediate visceral response was belief. Some fool in Hollywood had written a screenplay based on real events, Tony’s personal history developed for the silver screen.
Another fool had green lighted the project and hired Tony’s daughter to star. Only a handful of people knew of his brief marriage three decades earlier, let alone that the union had produced a child. In his line of work secrecy was vital and he’d taken steps to protect their identities. Now her name was on a list of potential targets, and he was fucked if he knew how that might have come to pass.
Tony paid his bill, picked his up his cookie jar and headed for the door