“Does it show?”
“You look like you’ve been sitting in a corner eating canaries all morning.”
Congreve waved the comment away and sat down on the nearest rattan chair. He carried a lot of excess weight and was always glad of a place to sit.
“Alex, pay attention. This is serious. You don’t by any chance know someone, a former high-ranking CIA officer, by the name of Artemis Payne, do you?”
Hawke looked up.
“Who did you say?”
“Payne. Artemis Payne.”
“You’re joking.”
“I assure you that I am not, Alex, joking.”
Hawke scratched his chin, realizing he’d forgotten to shave. Bermuda did that to you.
“We called him Spider-Man,” he said. “Or, to his face, just plain Spider. No idea where it came from. But it fit. A rather venomous creature to be honest.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Spider Payne. I know him all right. I worked with him a couple of times in the past. The Caribbean. But Africa, mostly. A deeply troubled man. Why?”
“He might be your chap, Alex. You can draw straight lines through the late Steven Dedalus, CIA head in Dublin, to Cam Hooker at Langley, and now Harding Torrance in Paris, and they all intersect in the same place. The doorstep of one Artemis Payne. He’s your man, all right. I’d bet the farm on it. Not the whole CIA “Farm” of course, just my own little lean-to shed down in Lynchburg.”
“Apart from the CIA intersections, is there any other evidence that makes you think Artemis is our guy?”
Ambrose got to his feet, laced his fingers behind his back and began pacing back and forth. A little affectation he’d picked up from his idol, the incandescent Sherlock Holmes, Hawke had always assumed. “Are you quite ready?” Ambrose said.
“Quite.”
“Artemis Payne, widely known in the press at the time of his trial as the Spider Man. Currently wanted for kidnapping and suspicion of murder by the French government. Interpol has a standing warrant for his arrest for murder. He received a thirty-year sentence in French courts and skipped. Disappeared completely.”
“What triggered all this?” Hawke asked.
“A CIA rendition op gone bad, apparently. Don’t forget, this was all shortly after 9/11. A French citizen, a shopkeeper believed by Payne to be an Al Qaeda commander, was kidnapped off a Paris street and never seen again by his wife and family. The French police went after Payne for it. Arrested and convicted. He appealed to Washington and the CIA for help. The White House disavowed his existence. So did CIA. Payne was politically inconvenient. Hung out to dry. There’s your motive, obviously.”
“Yes.”
“Payne lost everything in the aftermath of the trial. His reputation, his house, family, money, the lot of it. He went underground. Nobody’s seen him since.”
“Hmm.”
“Is that really all you have to say? Just ‘hmm’? After the mountains of intel I’ve been sifting through this last week?”
“Oh, do sit down and relax. I know you’re wound up about this but it’s bad for your nerves to be so excitable.”
“Alex, if you think I drove all the way out here to be—”
Hawke looked up, his blue eyes suddenly gone dead serious as the reality of Ambrose’s news sank in. He said: “Spider is extraordinarily dangerous. In a bad way, I mean.”
“There’s a good way?”
“Yeah. People like me. And even you.”
Ambrose sat back on the planters chair and accepted another frosty iced tea delivered by Pelham on a silver tray.
“Will that be all, sir?” Pelham asked Hawke.
“Thank you, Pelham, yes. Most kind.”
Congreve watched this formal exchange with a smile of bemused indulgence and said, “We’ve now got precisely one week. We’re going to need a lot of help to find this character, Alex. No trail at all. He went from Europe to Miami to Costa Rica where two paths diverge in a wood. Then it all goes stone cold. We’re going to need formidable manpower and time to track his movements and see where it all leads so—”
“Not necessarily.”
“Why not? What are you thinking?”
“NSA tracks all these guys who go rogue. Emails, texts, mobile calls, obviously. All I need is a number for him. Everyone has a number, no matter where they’re hiding.”
“Then what?”
“I call him up. Out of the blue. Long time, no see, Spider. What are you up to these days? Doing well?”
“Alex, please. Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t think that will arouse suspicion? He knows you have close ties to CIA at the highest levels. He’ll be waiting for you, poised to sting.”
“I want him to be suspicious. Listen. He compromised my position once. Morocco. Long time ago. I was working out of La Mamounia, running a former Al Qaeda warlord for months, had him buying Stinger missiles at the underground arms bazaar for me. Spider, who always owed the wrong people a lot of money, got offered a tidy sum for my name and he gave me up. Almost got me killed, that nasty bastard. I went after him with a vengeance. Found him hiding in some hellish rathole or other in Tangiers. Locked myself inside with him for two days. Came as close to turning out his lights as I could without pulling the plug, believe me. Told him if I ever saw his face again, I bloody well would kill him.”
“He’s afraid of you.”
Hawke laughed.
“Oh, I’d say so. Yes. I’d say Artemis Payne is very definitely afraid of me.”
“Then follow the logic, Alex. As soon as he knows you’re looking for him, he’ll run. He’ll dive deep. Or, worse, he’ll lay a trap for you.”
“I don’t think so. You don’t know him like I do. I think as soon as he believes I’m looking for him, he’ll come looking for me. That’s what any smart guy like Spider would do. You don’t sit around and wait, you don’t spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. No. You go on offense. Eliminate the threat. It’s smart. That’s what I’d do, too.”
“You want him to come here? To Bermuda?”
“I do. And, believe me, he will.”
“Then what?”
“I have no earthly idea. I’m no bloody fortune-teller.”
“What?”
“I have to make it up, Ambrose.”
“There is that, I suppose.”
“Right. And you have to help me because this guy is good. And he’s not only smart, he’s a vicious killer, and he’s utterly ruthless. And, to make matters worse, at this point he’s got absolutely nothing left to lose.”
“I wonder. Have you been experiencing any suicidal thoughts lately, Alex?”
“Please, Constable, don’t be ridiculous. Many people have tried to kill me over the course of my career, and more often than not I’ve managed to show them the folly of that ambition.”
Congreve uttered one of his trademark sighs of exasperation.
“All right, then. What do you need, Alex? I mean, right now?”
“I’ll need people watching the airport round the clock, people who know what he looks like. Get a likeness from CIA. Also, same setup at the steamship docks in Hamilton and out at the Royal Navy Dockyards where the cruise ships land. I want to know the second the Spider man sets foot on this island.”
“Done. What else?”
“Your brain, if you’re not using it at the moment. We need to figure out every last detail of where and how this little reunion should occur.”
Congreve said, “Do it here.”
“What?”
“Right here at Teakettle Cottage. Gives you the advantage.”
“Why?”
“Your own turf, that’s why. You cannot arrange something like this, Alex. You’ve got to sit tight and let the fly come to the spider, as it were.”
Hawke laughed at that.