FIFTEEN
ARMED AND DANGEROUS
“I’m starving,” said Angel, sitting up on the bed a few minutes later.
“Okay, we can talk in the restaurant. Are you changing?”
She shook her head. She was going to stay in those sweats and that sweatshirt? In a beach resort?
It had been air-conditioned on the shuttle, so I’d left my long-sleeved Yankees shirt on. Now I pulled it off over my head. As I did, my Skyfall T pulled up too, so there I was, shirtless in front of her again. She didn’t look away. I pulled it down.
“Let’s go.”
There were two eateries at the resort. The Gazebo, a cool, tree-house kind of restaurant that looked out over the sea, and another spot called the Bizot Bar, which had a great view too, but was more of a burgerand-fries place. We wanted something quick, so we headed to the Bizot. We both got some spicy jerk chicken and sweet-potato fries, washing it all down with a fruit drink that had actual fruit in it, served in a tumbler about a foot high with lots of ice and a tiny umbrella. We sat on the porch overlooking the beach, hearing the sounds of the sea and people enjoying themselves. I should have been beside myself with joy, but I was looking around, wondering what W meant and how it might be connected to this heaven on earth. Nothing was evident. Ian Fleming, I thought—it might have something to do with him. Angel and I gazed out over the water, viewing the scene from behind our dark shades.
My cell phone pinged.
Q here.
Yes?
Got some news for you, Bond, big news.
My heart rate increased. I pulled my chair closer to Angel and showed her the screen. She looked down at it, gasped and bent closer to the phone; our cheeks were almost touching.
I found an American spy named Stanley Shick on this list of operatives that some spy geek has collected. Shick was very active in the early 1960s, CIA, international espionage.
So?
Take a closer look at his last name.
I glanced at Angel. “Shick?” I said to her, puzzled. Then I started moving the letters around. Angel must have done the same. “Hicks!” she cried out. I texted the name back to my little buddy.
Bingo, wrote Leon. Most spies had cryptonyms or code names. Stanley Shick’s was Guy.
“Guy Hicks!” whispered Angel.
“Wow!” I said out loud. “It’s him!”
A man had just sat down near us, alone at a table. He looked over at us and smiled.
He disappeared, Leon texted. Last seen September 1962.
The month before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Thanks a million, Q. I’ll debrief you when I get home.
We are waiting for you. And when I say we, you know who I mean.
I set the phone down and noticed a slightly disgruntled look on Angel’s face. She hadn’t liked Leon’s last sentence, but I wasn’t thinking about that.
“Guy Hicks vanished on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis!” I exclaimed as quietly as possible.
“He must have been eliminated,” said Angel.
“If that’s true, then who is in the house in Bermuda?”
“Adam, don’t jump to conclusions.” But her eyes looked worried.
“Grandpa,” I said.
“Don’t—”
“Grandpa took his name. He took his place too! It is him. It’s his scent on his shirts! Explain that!”
“But why would he take his place?”
I wasn’t listening. I felt like crying. Grandpa!
“Excuse me,” we heard someone say.
It was sometime between ten and eleven in the morning, so there was hardly anyone else in the bar, just us and the man who had come in after us and fitted himself into one of the wooden chairs at a table right next to us. I say “fitted” because he was, uh, a little heavy. Okay, he was fat, but there isn’t anything wrong with that, as long as you are healthy. Problem was, he didn’t look too fit. He was maybe sixty years old, with straggly, thinning hair poking out from under a truly ugly I ♥Jamaica hat that looked like a really cheap knockoff of a Tilley hat. He was wearing awful red jean shorts that showed his very white, stubbly, thick legs, and hard black shoes and black socks, the socks pulled up almost to his knees. On his substantial upper body he sported an ugly beach shirt with flamingos and flowers and bikini-clad women on it. But under it, he wore something that caught my eye—the same Skyfall T-shirt that I had on, though his stretched over two or three pretty hefty rolls of flab. I wasn’t judging him. He was likely a very nice man.
“I noticed your T-shirt, young fellow.”
He had sort of a squeaky voice and a slight lisp.
He squinted because he wasn’t wearing shades. His glasses were thick, and each lens was circular and about the size of a grapefruit or bigger. He looked like a portly, balding owl.
“Yes,” I said, “Skyfall. Great film.”
“Indeed. Are you kids from America?” He had an American accent himself. I couldn’t place it, but it sounded vaguely southern.
“Well, I am, but—”
“I am too,” said Angel quickly. She’d dropped her Bermudian accent instantly. Maybe she’d learned how to talk like an American from watching TV. It was startlingly—almost suspiciously—good.
“I’m from the great state of Tennessee,” he said with pride.
“We’re from Buffalo. He’s Leon and I’m Shirley,” said Angel, her accent flat. Wow, she was clever. Do Americans really sound like that?
“Well, nice to meet you. I’m Homer Johnson.”
“Hello, Mr. Johnson.” I wanted to get back to Leon’s incredible information. How could I make Homer go away?
“Ring a bell?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, I am guessing you are a James Bond fan.”
“I suppose I am, a little bit.”
“Well, Homer Johnson is a little bit too.”
Mr. Johnson was indeed more than a little bit. I bit my tongue to keep from laughing. “More than a little bit of what, sir?”
“I am the world’s foremost expert on James Bond, if I may say so myself. Check it out. Homerjohnson007.com. That’s why I come here. I visit every year and stay in the Ian Fleming Villa. That’s where he actually lived, you know. It’s the most expensive place in the resort, but not a problem for Homer Johnson. Yours truly was a legend in the toilet-seat industry, you know. I ran four factories back home in my day. Johnson Toilet Seats—Sit on a Johnson and you’ll feel like royalty!” I tried to ignore that. I also hate it when people refer to themselves in the third person, using their full names. But he seemed harmless, and lonely too.
I imagined him prowling the resort every year, looking for people to impress with his 007 knowledge. Who knew how much of that he really had? He probably came here year after year just for that. It was kind of sad. He was also checking out Angel, which was kind of weird. She was a great girl, a really great girl, but not the sort guys check out. But this guy was going right at it. I had the sense that back in Bermuda, Angel really struggled to get along with people, but ever since we’d been on the road together, she was her true self. She smiled at people, even strangers. She was doing that now with Homer Johnson, and he was eating it up.
“You should pop by the Ian Fleming House and I’ll give you a tour.”
“Sorry,” I said. “We’re kind of busy.” I turned back to my phone, anxious to put the new facts together with what else we knew and fit it all to this setting.
Homer’s face fell. “Well, you know, my villa has the actual desk where he wrote the James Bond novels. Most folks don’t get to see that. It’s the chance of a lifetime. Homer Johnson will make you feel right at home. There’s lots of rooms. You could even stay a night.”
“Uh, thanks, but—”
“I know a lot about spies too.”
“You do?” asked Angel, now giving him a special smile. “How much?”
“I like to think it’s more than almost anyone else knows. Yep, made it my life’s passion. All of that secret-intelligence stuff, not only Bond.”
“How about the Cuban Missile Crisis?” asked Angel.
“Of course.”
“Stanley Shick?” asked Angel. She was good.
I watched for hesitation, for a swallow. But he just grinned. “My, don’t you know your stuff, little lady. He’s a rather obscure one, though many are. Code name Guy, eliminated in September of ’62. The story is that he had some association with the missile crisis. Curious you’d put those things together.” He eyed the two of us. “Very few people know about Shick. It was classified information until recently.”
Half an hour later, we entered Ian Fleming’s house at Goldeneye. It was, of course, even more awesome than our villa. It wasn’t in the main part of the resort with all the other buildings but a five-minute walk away, over a bridge and in a private area on a hill, overlooking its own stunning white-sand private beach. It was a sprawling one-floor, white-stone, almost ranch-style house set on a very green lawn with lush tropical plants and flowers and a private pool. The interior of the house, even on this warm day, seemed air-conditioned by nature, with the breezes blowing gently through the open doors and windows. It felt so cool inside—cool in every sense. It had indescribable style. Cool walls, cool floors, cool decoration—it was cool just to be here where he once was. It was like you were back in the best times of the 1960s.
There were pictures of Fleming everywhere, with other famous people. I imagined the parties that had taken place here! Angel was enthralled. I looked for Roald Dahl and Graham Greene or John Le Carré among the many black-and-white photographs but didn’t see them. No shots of Grandpa either, not even lurking in the background. I searched for the name Stanley Shick or Guy Hicks but didn’t see them either.
Then there was the desk, the desk, where Fleming had written every single James Bond novel. This was where he had created him. His novels actually weren’t so great, but what a character, what an influence on popular culture! Was it a good influence? It was all about guns and beautiful women, expensive cars and martinis (“shaken, not stirred”), and a stud of a secret agent.
But as interesting as all of this was, Angel and I weren’t there to be tourists. We just wanted to pick this weirdo’s brain. That was foremost in my mind… until I saw several Walther PPKs sitting on a table with a couple other pistols and a stack of clips filled with bullets. There were three or four suppressors too. Everything was out in the open.
“Wow,” I said, looking down at them. Angel and I exchanged a glance.
“Yes,” said Johnson with pride. He picked up one of the pistols. It looked very old. “This is a Beretta 418, which was James Bond’s first gun until an arms expert told Fleming that it was a ‘lady’s gun’ with no real ‘man-stopping ability.’ So 007 stopped using it after From Russia With Love—the novel, I mean. They mostly employed PPKs in the movies, from Connery through Lazenby, Moore and Dalton, until Brosnan turned to a P99. But Craig has brought the PPK back, the classic.”
He smiled and picked up the model that was exactly like Grandpa’s, a black 7.65mm.
“Would you like to hold it?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He handed it to me. Every time I held one of these babies, it gave me a thrill…and also made me feel bad. I mean bad as in “not good.” It fit right into your hand, so practical and deadly.
“Yes, James Bond’s weapon of choice. Hitler’s too, by the way.”
He started showing us around the house. His pride and joy seemed to be the “007 bedroom,” which was the master suite. He smiled at Angel as he showed it off, which was kind of creepy. I tried to turn his mind to other things.
“You must know all sorts of inside facts about the missile crisis.”
“Well, the public doesn’t know what really went on—never does. People think it was just Kennedy and Khrushchev in a showdown. You know, they always talk about JFK going on TV and telling the nation that we were on the brink of nuclear war and Khrushchev doing the same sort of thing back in the Soviet Union, firing off inflammatory letters about world destruction, but it involved many other players. There were secret things going on all the time, and by that I don’t mean just the CIA’s U2 spy planes flying over Cuba and taking pictures of the missiles being constructed.”
“Spies?”
“Yeah, lots of them. The CIA knew all about their missiles and capabilities, and their spooks knew about ours. That takes a lot of boots on the ground.”
“When things got hot in 1962,” asked Angel, “what really happened behind the scenes?”
“Well, first of all, imagine that there are several hundred million lives at stake on both sides, and the fate of the world is hanging in the balance. You have dictators in the Soviet Union and Cuba freaking out, and Kennedy in the White House trying not to unleash his huge army or press a button to drop the nuclear bomb…and people from both sides in a secret meeting in a Chinese restaurant in suburban Washington.”
“Really?” I said.
“But the real legwork was likely done by secret agents of ours inside the Soviet Union and those working for the bad guys inside the US of A. There were likely all sorts of very secret and dangerous get-togethers.”
“Was Stanley Shick part of it?”
“I would bet he was, though no one can say for sure. He’d definitely be a candidate.” Johnson walked over to his laptop, which he kept on a separate desk littered with notes. “I may have an image of him somewhere.” He sat down. Angel and I quickly moved over and stood behind him, eyes locked on the screen. “Ah, yes, there he is. This isn’t very clear. There aren’t many photos of him.”
The image came onto the screen. It was grainy, so it was hard to make out the exact features of the man looking back at us. But I had seen many photos of my grandfather in his youth and middle age, and this wasn’t him.
Why had Grandpa taken this man’s place? I thought. Did he help to kill him?
“Shick was eliminated for sure?” I asked.
“Well, not for sure, my boy. Nothing is for sure in the world of espionage, but he vanished on the eve everything was going down across the water in Cuba. My theory is that he was sacrificed somehow. He knew something. Maybe one side wasted him, needed to. Maybe he was a double agent or maybe a double agent was the cause of his elimination. Maybe someone gave him up.”
You are a traitor. The words on the envelope came back to me like a bullet to the heart. The other words too: You deserve to die. They now had an ominous meaning. I burned to know who wrote them, and what W meant. Did W pen those words…in anger?
“Ever heard of a spy named David McLean?” I asked.
“Donald, yes. Not David.”
I remembered Angel mentioning that name back in Bermuda. “Could it be the same guy?” I asked, spelling out Grandpa’s last name.
“Donald’s last name began with M-A-C,” said Homer. “He was one of the Cambridge Five double agents, pretty famous. Kim Philby and all, you know.”
I felt some relief: saved by an extra A.
“But now that you mention it,” mused Homer, “David McLean…that seems a little familiar. Can’t place it though.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“Does the letter W mean anything to you in spy terms?”
He gave me a suspicious look. “Why would you ask that? Sounds like you know something. W?” To my relief, he grinned. “Maybe William Stephenson? Spy master!”
“We should go,” I said. “Thanks for the tour.”
On the way out I looked at the Walther PPK again, and the magazine clips with the bullets, and the suppressors. I remembered my desire to arm myself. I didn’t want to, but I had no idea what we could be in for. Angel saw my look.
“Mr. Johnson,” she said, gaining his attention.
He glanced over at her. She pulled up her sweatshirt just enough to expose her stomach. “Something bit me right here, probably a local insect. You must know about them. You seem awfully well informed.” She actually batted her eyes at him. She was full of surprises. “I hope it wasn’t something poisonous. Care to take a look?”
His gaze locked onto her bare midriff. Mine did too, actually, for an instant. Her skin was smooth and beautiful, and her waist awfully slim and curvy under that old sweatshirt. It was very surprising, almost shocking. But I knew my job. I stepped back and palmed one of the suppressors and a clip of PPK bullets, six to the magazine.