Twice a Spy: A Novel by Keith Thomson

Author:Keith Thomson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fathers and sons, General, Suspense fiction, Spy stories, Thrillers, Suspense, Fiction, Espionage
ISBN: 9780385530798
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-08T08:23:38+00:00

Sure, Alice would have preferred traipsing across an Alpine snow-scape with the man she loved. But most of her life had been spent either dodging bullets or the metaphoric equivalent. Once, in fact, she’d been hit—just a flesh wound. At times, she would happily have paid for the peace and quiet now inflicted on her.

Especially because the Shaolin liked to practice meditation before a fight.

As Alice had learned in nearly a lifetime of devotion to Shaolin kung fu, channeling her inner energy allowed her to do things that her corporeal body alone could not. But it wasn’t easy. Shaolin monks had to spend years mastering meditation before they were allowed to think about fighting, or as little as throwing a playing card. Prior to writing the book of Shaolin kung fu, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma faced a wall for nine years without uttering a word.

Alice began by clearing her mind of all destructive energy. Combat, whether in self-defense or on the attack, demands pure intent, with all emotions under complete control, which is to say turned off.

After several hours, a plan came to her. It depended on a light switch plate the size of an index card that was fastened to the wall behind the sofa, two and a half feet from where she sat. If it were slung like a throwing star—the flat, star-shaped projectile that was the Shaolin weapon of choice—the light switch plate’s speed might exceed fifty miles per hour, making its sharp corners as lethal as a dagger.

The plate was held to the wall behind the sofa by two ordinary slot-headed screws, one above the light switch, one below, the latter a bit loose already. It would be a simple matter to undo the screws.

Well, not exactly simple.

First, Alice needed to position herself on the sofa so that the light switch was directly behind her, concealed from her captors’ view. Following each bathroom trip—they permitted her one every four hours—she inched closer. The fifth trip gained her position sufficient to execute sleight of hand, which time and again had proven the most useful component of her operations training. Sleight of hand is widely believed to work when the hand is quicker than the eye. In fact, it depends on psychology, primarily misdirection, larger actions distracting from smaller.

That her boots and socks had been confiscated presented an opportunity. When she stretched, which was only natural after so many hours on a sofa, the men’s attention went to the action of her legs and her feet. Initially, the goons appeared to pay little if any attention to “itches” she simultaneously scratched on her face or behind her ears. Soon they seemed to pay none at all. Moreover, Frank spent a lot of time surfing the Web on his phone. Walt, though he never let go of his Walther PPK, spent hours picking his cuticles. And the third man in the rotation—the Teutonic-looking helicopter pilot Alice nicknamed the Baron—as in Red—sometimes nodded off for a few minutes.

After about thirty hours, the light switch plate was ready for deployment.

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