She looked like she wanted a hug, but I shook her hand and gave her a pat on the back instead.
“Good thinking, excellent thinking,” I said. She gave me a weak smile.
Up close to Angel, I realized how silly I was being about her. Sure, she was a nice girl, but I had actually been imagining that I was starting to like her. She wasn’t Shirley, who had stood by me through all the times I hadn’t been so nice. My girl was one in a million. She was at home, looking out for Leon, waiting for me. I told Angel we needed to take a deep breath and think about what we had to do next. I pulled out my phone and texted Shirley, telling her I was in New York, checking out something about Grandpa.
I know that sounds weird. It’s a bit complicated. I’ll fill you in later.
I expected her to text right back. But she didn’t. Of course, I thought, she’s asleep.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said. “We can talk on the way.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Why? John doesn’t know where we’re staying.”
“I wouldn’t count on that.”
“Really? How would he know? I used assumed names.”
“If he’s got anything to do with the CIA or MI6, he’ll know. They can find anyone, anywhere.”
“CIA? Surely you don’t think he’s—”
“I don’t know what he is—that’s my point. I don’t think we should take any chances.”
She was right. But all our clothes were back there. And we both had to get some shut-eye. Or did we?
“We don’t need any sleep, do we, Angel Dahl?”
Even though she didn’t like that name, she smiled at me. “No, Mr. McLean, we don’t. We’re in New York. And we have a mission to accomplish.” She gazed up at the magnificent Rockefeller Center. We’d head out when the stores opened and buy some clothes. I’d get her whatever she wanted, though I knew that wouldn’t be much.
We leaned over the gate. Happy couples swirled past in front of us, the sound of their blades cutting the ice and a recorded Christmas carol all we could hear. Angel stood very close to me. As we talked, we tried to take the information we had and make something out of it, make some decisions. We really couldn’t go back to the hotel. John was still after us, and I had only a few days left to get my task done. We had to make some progress, now. But try as we might, we still couldn’t figure anything out.
Then I thought of Leon. I didn’t know why I hadn’t considered contacting him before. Sure, it was about four in the morning, but he’d respond. I knew he would. He had a voice-activated iPhone with a touch screen that he could operate with a stylus he held in his mouth. He always kept his phone plugged in and by his bed. He’d answer, especially if he knew it was me.
“I have this friend,” I told Angel. “He’s got this muscle disease and he’s in a wheelchair. He can’t use his limbs much and…this disease, this IBM thing, it’s going to kill him. But he’s really smart. Really, really smart. I think he’s a genius.”
She smiled. “He’s your friend?”
“Yeah, I help him out.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, it’s no big deal. My point is, he might be able to make something out of our clues. I’ll text him.”
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
“I know.”
Q! I texted. We have a problem here in New York.
Ten seconds later, my phone pinged. NYC? Wow. Been talking to your boy Webb, helping him out. He’s getting around too. Hey, you said “we”! Got a chick with u? Better not! Shirley is the best!
I know. Angel’s just a friend.
Angel? Friend? Is that Bad Adam texting me or u?
He’s the only person I’ve ever told about Bad Adam. Shirley doesn’t even know. I especially don’t want to tell her. It would scare her, and she might think I’m nuts.
Never mind that, Q. We have a problem for u to solve.
Shoot.
I imagined him in his room, lights out, lying there in his bed, unable to move much, the stylus in his mouth, happy to be talking with me. I often wondered what he thought about at night when the lights went out. I didn’t have time to tell him everything that had happened in Bermuda. The whole Grandpa thing would blow him away. So I simply told him that we were searching for someone or something, we weren’t sure which, but we were pretty sure it had something to do with spies, and all we had for clues were the letter W, which kept turning up, and a glass eye on a desk.
What kind of glass eye?
What did he mean by what kind? It was a glass eyeball! But then I remembered something strange about it. I thought of that first riveting moment in Grandpa’s office in Paget. The iris on the eye…it was gold.
Had some gold on it, I texted.
Goldeneye! he immediately answered.
All I knew about Goldeneye was that it was the name of a James Bond movie, one with Pierce Brosnan as 007. It wasn’t a particularly good one, done ages ago, in 1995. I’d only seen it once. I couldn’t even remember much about it. Bad Adam recalled the Bond Girls, of course, especially Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp, who liked to kill men with her thighs during, shall we say, romantic moments. It was the first James Bond movie Brosnan did and the first one not taken directly from an Ian Fleming novel.
Thanks, Q. I think. I signed off.
As we walked away from 30 Rock, I was talking out loud about Goldeneye. Angel was kind of quiet, just letting me ramble on.
“Why would Grandpa be so into Goldeneye?”
“Mr. Know.”
“Right, Mr. Know. Why would Mr. Know be so into it? It’s just a Pierce Brosnan Bond flick.”
“He was all right—better than Timothy Dalton.”
“But why does Know have nothing on his desk but a golden eye?”
“Because it must mean a lot to him, a whole lot.”
“Goldeneye? A lame Bond movie? It isn’t even from a Fleming novel.”
Angel stopped in her tracks. “It’s more than that,” she said.
I turned around.
“More than that?”
“I remember now. That movie was given that name for a specific reason.”
“And that was?”
“Goldeneye is a place, a very important place.”
“A place?”
“It’s Ian Fleming’s home in Jamaica. It’s where he wrote all the Bond novels.”
My heart leaped. “Really?”
“They filmed scenes for Dr. No around there. I read somewhere that it’s a resort now.”
I stood there thinking. Grandpa or Mr. Know knew Fleming. Angel had said that he talked about him all the time. He hated William Stephenson and loved Ian Fleming. I was willing to bet that something had happened down there in Jamaica, something traumatic, something that Grandpa was involved in. Or, at the very least, there was some secret there that might unravel all of this. I could just feel it. Goldeneye. He kept that eye to remember it by. Maybe the answers were there in the Caribbean? W knows. W marked the spot. That’s what he often said into the mirror. Was the spot somewhere in that resort? I thought of our third clue—the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cuba was in the Caribbean too. I thought of Dr. No, of the scenes on the beach there, of the blue tropical waters and the heat. Then I thought of Mr. Know. We had the money and a couple of days. Jamaica.
“Ready for another plane ride?” I asked Angel Dahl.