Cam Hooker was semiretired from the Agency now. He’d been Director under George H.W. Bush and had had a good run. Under his watch, the CIA was a tightly run ship. No scandals, no snafus, no bullshit, just a solid record of intelligence successes around the world. He was proud of his service to his country and it pained him to see the condition it was in now. Diminished, that was the word, goddamnit. How could the bastards, all of them, let this happen to his magnificent country?
He shook off such thoughts, leaving them well ashore as he stepped aboard his boat. He went aft and climbed down into the cockpit. First thing he did, he kicked his topsiders off so he could feel the warm teak decks on the soles of his feet. He felt better already. Smell that air!
Ben Sparhawk had thoughtfully removed and stowed the sail cover from the mainsail. Cam grabbed the main halyard, took a couple of turns around the starboard winch and started grinding, the big mainsail blooming with fresh Maine air as it rose majestically up the stick.
Some days, when there was no wind to speak of, he’d crank up the old Universal diesel, a forty-two-horsepower lump of steel that had served him well over the decades. Now, with a freshening breeze, he winched the main up, loosing the sheets and letting her sails flop in the wind. The jib was roller-furling, one of his few concessions to modernity, and at his advancing age, a godsend for its ease of use. He also had a storm trysail rigged that he’d deploy when he got out beyond the harbor proper.
“Shove that bow off for me, Ben, willya?” he said, putting the helm over and sheeting in the main.
“Aye, Skipper,” the kid said, and moments later he was pointed in the right direction and moving away from the dock toward the Thorofare running between North Haven and Vinalhaven islands.
He turned to wave good-bye to the youngster, saw him smiling and waving back with both hands. He was surprised to find his old blue eyes suddenly gone all blurry with tears.
By God, he wished he’d had a son like that.
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.”