Stone Cold

by David Baldacci

  wasn’t there.”

  “I know of a few more, but without his tripping himself up, nothing you can use.”

  “Just so you understand, I’ve only believed about half of what you’ve told me.”

  She started to say something but Alex said, “But I’m not going to press it.”

  Annabelle eyed him curiously. “Why not?”

  “Because Oliver told me not to ask too many questions. He said you were a good person with an imperfect past.”

  Annabelle studied him closely. “So who was John Carr?”

  “He worked for the U.S. government doing some highly specialized work.”

  “He killed people, didn’t he?”

  Alex looked around but the place was empty and the girl at the counter was too busy reading about Britney Spears’ latest comeback in People to waste time eavesdropping on them.

  “He doesn’t do it anymore. Not unless he has to. Not unless someone’s trying to kill him, or his friends.”

  “I saw him kill a man,” Annabelle said. “He did it with a knife. Just a flick of his wrist and the man was dead. But the guy was trying to kill us.” She fiddled with her coffee cup. “Do you have any idea what’s really going on with him?”

  “Did you hear about Carter Gray’s house blowing up the other night?”

  “Yeah, I read about it.”

  “Well, Oliver and Gray go way back, and not in a good way. Oliver was at his house, at Gray’s request, shortly before it blew up. And it was no accident. Oliver had nothing to do with it, but somebody else did. Somebody else who might just have Oliver on his target list.”

  “So he’s got someone looking to kill him too?”

  “Looks that way. And that’s why he didn’t want to hang around any of us.”

  “And I was really upset that he abandoned me.”

  “Hey, he called me in. I might only be the JV, but I’ve been known to get a few good punches in from time to time.”

  “That stuff I said before about you being a bureaucrat.”

  “I believe the exact phrase was classic bureaucrat.”

  “Yeah, well, I take it back. I appreciate your help.”

  “I need to make a few calls. And then I can help you fill in some of the details now that we have the concept nailed down.”

  She returned his grin. “I’ve never met a fed like you before, Alex Ford.”

  “That’s okay, you’re a new one in my book too.”

  CHAPTER 62

  AS THE NIGHT SETTLED IN Oliver Stone knew he was still being followed. Well, now was the time to say good-bye to the shadows. He ran for a cab and gave the driver an address in Alexandria. With deadly men in pursuit of him he was heading to a rare book store.

  The taxi dropped him off in front of the shop on Union Street a block from the Potomac River. With the hunters behind him Stone hurried inside, nodding at the owner of the place, Douglas. The man had used to be called simply Doug, and had once sold pornographic comic books out of the trunk of his Cadillac. Yet he harbored a secret passion for rare books and a desire to be rich. That dream had gone unfulfilled until Stone had hooked him up with Caleb. Now Douglas ran a successful high-end rare book store. As part of the bargain Stone was given access to the place at all times, and had a room in the cellar area that he used to store some of his most important possessions. And it also provided something else that Stone was going to use right now.

  Stone reached the cellar, unlocked a door and entered the room where an old fireplace sat, long unused. He reached inside the fireplace opening, where next to the damper switch was a small pull cord. He tugged and a door on an old priest’s hole-like chamber swung open. The room was filled with boxes stacked neatly on shelves, well above the flood line.

  Stone opened a box and pulled out a journal that he stuffed in his bag. From another box he drew out a set of clothes, including a floppy hat, and changed into them. From a small metal box he took out an object that was more precious to him than all the gold in the world. It was a cell phone. A cell phone with a very special message carefully preserved on the built-in recording device.

  When he left he did not reverse his path and go upstairs. He walked down a different passageway, toward the river. He unlocked one more door, passed through, knelt down, pulled on an iron ring that was seated into the floor, yanking hard, and a square of floor came up on hinges. He dropped through, traversed a dark tunnel that smelled of river, dead fish and mold, clambered up a set of rickety stairs, unlocked another door and came out behind a clump of trees. He passed along a footwalk by the river and plopped into a small boat owned by Douglas that was docked at one of the slips.

  He engaged the Merc outboard and headed south, his white stern light the only sign of him in the darkness. He ran the boat up on the shore about two miles north of Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, tying its bow line to a tree. He hoofed it to a gas station and called a cab from a pay phone.

  On the ride back to town, Stone read through the journal. These records represented a significant part of his distant past. He had started keeping them almost immediately after he was recruited into the CIA’s Triple Six Division. He had no idea if the CIA still had the division operational and didn’t know if the men who’d attempted to follow him tonight were part of that element. However, he assumed that if they were ordered to kill him they would carry out the task with suitable skill.

  Page after page of the journal was turned as Stone took a painful walk through his past work for the U.S. government. Then he focused on several photographs he’d pasted on one page along with his handwritten notes and some bits of the “unofficial” record he’d managed to snag.

  He was staring at the photos of his three Triple Six comrades, all now dead: Judd Bingham, Bob Cole and Lou Cincetti. And then he looked at the older bespectacled man in the picture at the bottom of the page.

  “Rayfield Solomon,” he said to himself. The hit had been quick and efficient but still one of the most unusual of Stone’s career. It had been in Sa˜o Paulo. The orders had been clear. Solomon was a spy, turned by the legendary Russian operative Lesya, last name unknown. There was to be no arrest and no trial; it would be too embarrassing for the American public to endure; not that lengthy explanations were ever given to the Triple Six teams.

  Stone remembered the man’s expression as they burst in the door. It was not fear, he recalled. At best it was mild surprise, and then his features hardened. He politely asked who had ordered him to be terminated. Bingham laughed, but as the leader Stone stepped forward and told Solomon. There was no official requirement to do this. Stone simply felt every doomed man had a right to know.

  Rayfield Solomon was a man of average height and build, more professor than secret operative in appearance. But to this day Stone remembered those wondrous eyes that burned into him as he raised his pistol. It was a gaze that bespoke a brilliant mind behind it, and a man who was unafraid of the death knocking on his door. He was no traitor, Solomon said. “You will kill me, of course, but understand that you kill an innocent man.” Stone was impressed at how calmly the man spoke while four armed men encircled him.

  “You will have been told to make it look like a suicide of course,” Solomon said. This too stunned Stone because those had been his exact orders. “I am right-handed. As you can see, the hand is larger, stronger, so I’m not lying to you. Thus, place the shot in the right temple. If you wish I will also hold the gun and place my finger on the trigger so that my prints are on the weapon.” Then he turned to Stone with a gaze that froze even the veteran killer. “But I will not pull the trigger. You will have to do the killing. Innocent men do not commit suicide.”

  After it was over, the men left as quietly as they had come. An overnight ride on an American cargo plane operated by a shell company of the CIA carried them back to Miami the next day. Bingham, Cincetti and Cole went out partying that night because the team had been given a few days off, as a reward for a job well done. Stone did not join them. He neve
r did. He had a wife now and a young child. He stayed alone in his hotel room that night. He stayed up all night, in fact. The image of Rayfield Solomon would not leave his mind. Every time he tried to close his eyes, all he saw was the man’s gaze ripping into him, the words eating away his soul.

  I am an innocent man.

  Stone hadn’t wanted to admit it then, but all these years later, he could. Solomon had been telling the truth. Stone had killed an innocent man. Somehow he had known that this death would come back to haunt him. In fact, the Solomon case was one of the reasons Stone decided to leave Triple Six. It was a decision that ultimately destroyed his family.

  They had called him a traitor, just like they had Solomon. And just like Solomon he’d been innocent. How many more Rayfield Solomons might have wrongly died by his hand?

  He closed the journal and the cab dropped him off a few minutes later. He called Reuben, because if Gray couldn’t find Stone he would use any means possible to flush him out, including kidnapping his friends.

  Stone said calmly, “The big man we thought was gone isn’t. Is your phone listed in your name?” Stone thought he knew the answer because he knew Reuben very well.

  “Nope, I’m actually piggybacking on a friend of mine’s service,” Reuben said evasively.

  “Luckily you just recently moved and don’t have an official address. Otherwise I would’ve already had you relocate.”

  “I got evicted from the other place, Oliver. Left in the middle of the night because I wanted to avoid a certain rental dispute.”

  “Now everyone needs to lay low because friends of mine are valuable to him. I’ll check in later.”

  He needed information from the inside and he needed it now. There was only one man who was in a position to give it to him. Stone hadn’t seen the fellow in thirty years, but figured now was a good time to get reacquainted. Indeed, he wondered now why he hadn’t made the visit decades ago. Perhaps he’d been afraid of the answer. Now he was no longer scared.

  He had focused on the Rayfield Solomon case because, in his long career, it had been the one Stone felt the most regret for. After he’d been assigned to kill the man, Stone researched his background. He hardly seemed like a traitor, though that was not Stone’s case to make. He’d heard of Solomon’s personal link to the legendary spy Lesya. And if she’d survived and was still out there, the woman might be exacting her revenge on the people who’d killed Solomon. An innocent man.

  CHAPTER 63

  MAX HIMMERLING closed his book, yawned and stretched. Ever since his wife, Kitty, had died of cancer two years ago, his routine rarely varied. He worked, he came home, he ate a simple meal, he read a chapter in a book and he went to bed. It was an unexciting life, but his life at work was exciting enough. He had grown bald and fat in the service of his country. A nearly forty-year veteran of the CIA—he’d started there right out of college—his job was totally unique. Blessed with the most orderly of minds, he was like a central clearinghouse for the most diverse sort of matters. How would a coup in Bolivia or Venezuela orchestrated by the U.S. impact on the West’s interests in the Middle East or China? Or if oil dropped another buck a barrel, would it behoove the Pentagon to open a forward military base in such-and-such country? In a time of supercomputers and servers filled with trillions of bytes of data and spy satellites that stole your secrets from outer space, it made Max feel good that there was still a strong human element in the work of his agency.

  He was unknown outside the corridors of Langley, was considered only a low-level bureaucratic grunt within it, and would receive neither wealth nor honors. Yet to the people who mattered, Max Himmerling was an indispensable asset to the world’s most elite intelligence-gathering agency. And that was enough for him. Indeed, after his wife’s passing, it was all he had left. His importance to his agency was represented by the two armed men who guarded the exterior of his house when he was home. Himmerling would retire in two years and dreamed of traveling to some of the places he’d analyzed all these decades. He was worried, though, that his money would run out before his life did. The government provided a good package and first-rate health care, but he hadn’t saved much on his own, and to continue living in this area, which he very much wanted to do, was expensive. He supposed he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

  He lifted his tired, fleshy body from his easy chair and started up the stairs to his bedroom. He never made it.

  The figure came from nowhere. The shock of the man standing in his living room nearly gave Max a heart attack. That was nothing compared to the shock he received when the intruder spoke.

  “It’s been a long time, Max.”

  Max put a hand against the wall to steady himself. He said in a shaky voice, “Who are you? How’d you get past the guards?”

  Stone stepped into the small wash of light from a table lamp. “You remember the Triple Sixes, don’t you, Max? How about John Carr? That name ring any bells for you? If it does, even after all these years, you can pretty much figure out how I got past the two idiots lying unconscious outside that you call guards.”

  Max stared up fearfully into the face of the tall, lean man standing across the room from him. “John Carr? It can’t be. You’re dead.”

  Stone stepped closer to him. “You know everything that goes on at CIA. So you knew John Carr wasn’t in that grave they dug up.”

  Max slumped back down in his chair and looked pitifully at Stone. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “You’re the great brain. You always figured out the best logistics for our missions. They almost always went off without a hitch. And when they didn’t you were always thousands of miles away. So what the hell did you care? It was our asses on the line, not yours. So tell me, great brain, why am I here? And don’t disappoint me. You know how I hate to be disappointed.”

  Max drew in a sharp breath. “You want information.”

  Stone glided forward and put a vise grip on Max’s arm. “I want the truth.”

  Max grimaced from the pressure on his arm, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. His strength was mental, not physical. “About what?”

  “Rayfield Solomon. Carter Gray. And anyone else you know who had his finger in that debacle.”

  Max had shuddered at the mention of Rayfield Solomon. “Gray’s dead,” he said quickly.

  Stone’s long fingers tightened on the man’s arm until a bead of sweat broke over Max’s forehead. “That’s not what I meant by being truthful.”

  “His home was blown up, damn it!”

  “But he wasn’t in it. Now he’s out there, plotting and planning, just like he always did. Only I’m the target. Again. And I don’t like it, Max. Once was enough.” Stone squeezed harder.

  “Look, you can crush my arm if you want, but I can’t tell you things I don’t know about.”

  “I’m not going to crush your arm.” Stone let go and slid a knife out from his coat sleeve.

  Max wailed, “John, you’re not a killer anymore. You got out. You were always different. We all knew that.”

  “That didn’t seem to help me back then. My wanting to get out almost cost me my life.”

  “Things were different back then.”

  “So people keep telling me. But once a killer, always a killer. I did it very recently, in fact. In self-defense. But I still killed a man. Slit his throat from ten feet away. And he was a former Triple Six. I guess they’re not making ’em like they used to.”

  “But I’m defenseless,” Max pleaded.

  “I will kill you, Max. And it will be in self-defense. Because if you don’t help me, I’m a dead man. But I’m not going alone.” He placed the edge of the blade against Max’s quivering carotid artery.

  “For God’s sake, John, think what you’re doing. And I lost my wife recently. I lost Kitty.”

  “I lost my wife too. I didn’t have her nearly as long as you had your Kitty. But then you probably were the one who worked the logistics of the hit on me out on
your nice, neat paper.”

  “I had nothing to do with that. I only learned about it after the fact.”

  “But you didn’t go running to the authorities about it, did you?”

  “What the hell did you expect me to do? They would have killed me too.”

  Stone pressed the blade harder against the man’s flesh. “For a genius you sometimes say stupid things. Tell me about Rayfield Solomon before I lose my patience. Because this is all about Solomon, isn’t it?”

  “He was a traitor and you killed him, on orders.”

  “We did kill him, as ordered. Roger Simpson said it came right from the top. But there’s obviously more to it. A lot more. Was Solomon innocent? And if he was, why were we ordered to kill him?”

  “Damn it, John, just let it go! The past is dead.”

  Stone’s knife cut into Max’s skin a millimeter beside the artery, and a drop of blood appeared. “Was Solomon innocent?” Himmerling said nothing. He just sat there with his eyes closed, his chest heaving.

  “Max, if I sever this artery, you will bleed to death in less than five minutes. And I will stand here and watch while you do.”

  Himmerling finally opened his eyes. “I’ve kept secrets for nearly forty years, and I’m not going to start talking now.”

  Stone swung his gaze around the room and stopped at the pictures on the mantel. A young boy and girl.

  “Grandkids?” he asked with an edge to his voice. “Must be nice.”

  A trembling Max followed the man’s gaze. “You . . . you wouldn’t dare!”

  “You people killed everyone I loved. Why should you get any better treatment? I’ll kill you first.” He pointed at the pictures. “And them next. And it won’t be painless.”

  “You bastard!”

  “That’s right. I am a bastard. CIA-built, owned and operated. You know that as well as anyone, don’t you?” Stone looked once more at the photos. “Your last chance, Max. I won’t ask again.”