Stone Cold

by David Baldacci

  red cell team. Or he did such work. Gray couldn’t envision the man’s career continuing, because he was undoubtedly Lesya Solomon’s son. And that meant he was a murderer. And he had to die before he ever came to court.

  Gray had already dispatched a team to Finn’s home. He lived in a cozy place in the suburbs; had a lovely wife and three darling children. He coached soccer in his spare time and from all accounts was a model citizen. And Gray was sure that when his men got to the house it would be empty. A phone call he received ten minutes later confirmed this.

  However, his team didn’t come away entirely empty-handed. In a safe in the garage they discovered some interesting details. They also found some paperwork about a storage unit. When they got there, they hit the treasure trove. It was filled with the histories of Bingham, Cole and Cincetti. And Carter Gray and Roger Simpson. And finally John Carr. Though nary a scrap of information could be found about Rayfield and Lesya, Harry Finn was undoubtedly their man. Only where was he now? And where were his wife and children? In hiding, of course. And it was up to Carter Gray to flush them out. He only hoped he would have better luck.

  Yet he sensed that he would. It was completely counterintuitive for them to do it, but for some reason Gray felt as though Stone, Lesya and Harry Finn were very close by. And if they were, they would succumb to a mistake at some point. It would not necessarily be their mistake. There was another factor to be put into the equation: Finn’s very ordinary family.

  He lifted his phone. “Put a trace on every credit and debit card and every cell and hard-line phone registered to the Finn family. You know where he works, so put surveillance on all his co-workers and his office. Watch the kids’ schools and Mom’s book club group. If they show themselves, take them. Move heaven and earth, but get them.”

  CHAPTER 84

  THEY HAD PASSED ANOTHER DAY sitting in the cellar and now the darkness was settling in. Stone, Finn and Lesya had spent the time developing a plan of action. The next night Stone’s team would assemble and they could execute that plan.

  Finn, who’d been pacing in increasing agitation suddenly said, “I have to see my family. Now.”

  Lesya started to protest but Stone asked, “Where are they?” Finn told him.

  Stone turned to Lesya. “You stay here. I’ll go with him.”

  “You’re going to leave me here, alone?” the old woman said.

  “Just for a little while,” Stone added. “You’ll be safe.”

  The two men left the cellar.

  “How bad is your wife?” Stone asked once they were outside.

  “Bad! And who the hell can blame her?”

  “We can get to them on the Metro and then it’s a bit of a walk.”

  “You were Army Special Forces in Nam,” Finn said. “I looked it up.”

  “And you?”

  “How do you know I was anything?”

  “I can just tell.”

  “SEAL. Look, we need weapons. They’ll have searched my house by now. I have a storage unit with some stuff in it, but they’ll have found that too.”

  “I have a place with guns,” Stone replied.

  Thirty minutes later, Stone waited outside while Finn entered the motel room in a run-down area of south Alexandria.

  His children immediately flew to him, nearly crushing him against the wall. Even George the Labradoodle got in the act, barking and jumping on his master. As Finn hugged his kids tightly, all their tears mixing together, he saw his wife through a tiny crevice between David and Susie. Mandy was sobbing too but made no move toward him.

  After a few minutes of hugs and cries, Finn managed to get his kids to sit down on a bed. Susie clutched the bear her grandmother had given her, tears trickling down her plump cheeks. Patrick nervously chewed on his bloody, bitten-down nails. He did that before every test and every ball game, Finn knew. And it pained him that his son was now doing it because of something his father had done.

  David eyed his dad nervously. “Pop? What’s going on?”

  Finn took a deep breath. He could no more tell them the truth than he could jump to the moon. On the way over he had thought of the lie he would use, but it didn’t seem so plausible now. He could never say, “I’m a killer, kids, and the cops are after me.” No he could never say that, because these were his children. They and Mandy were all he had. Mere justice didn’t constitute an adequate defense of what he’d done.

  “Something happened at work, Dave,” he began as Mandy looked on. In her eyes was stark fear, but also something else that devastated Finn: distrust. He put his hand out to her, but she drew back a little.

  He decided to abandon his cover story. He rose and leaned against the wall. When he was finally ready to speak he looked directly at them.

  “Everything you know about your grandparents, my mother and father, is a lie. Your grandfather didn’t come from Ireland and die in a car accident a long time ago. Your grandmother wasn’t from Canada. And she’s not in a nursing home because she belongs there.” He took another deep breath, trying not to focus on his family’s collective astonishment.

  And he told them. Their grandfather’s real name was Rayfield Solomon. He’d been a spy for the Americans. Their grandmother’s name was Lesya, a Russian, who’d been a spy for her country until coming over to the American side with Solomon and also marrying him.

  “They were framed by some people at the CIA,” he said. “Rayfield Solomon’s picture hangs on the wall at Langley, the ‘Wall of Shame’ they call it. But he doesn’t deserve to be there. He was killed by these same people so the truth would never come out. Your grandmother survived but has been in hiding ever since.”

  To their credit and Finn’s relief, his children seemed to readily accept his explanation, even be excited by the revelations. “But what is the truth?” David asked. “What were they framed for doing?”

  Finn shook his head. “I can’t tell you, son. I wish I could, but I can’t. I only found out a short time ago.”

  “Where’s Grandma?” Patrick asked.

  “I’m going back to her after I leave you.”

  Susie flung herself around Finn’s leg. “Daddy, you can’t leave. You can’t leave us,” she wailed. The sounds were cracking Finn’s heart in half. He could barely breathe as the tears streamed down his daughter’s face. He lifted her up and held her. “I’m sorry, baby, but I promise you one thing. Are you listening? Can you listen to Daddy for just a minute? Please, baby, please?”

  Susie finally stopped crying. She and her brothers stared at their father. They were so still, it didn’t seem like any of them were actually breathing.

  “I promise you this: that Daddy will fix everything. And then I’m going to come and get all of you and we’re going to go back home and everything will be like it was. I promise you. I swear to you that it will.”

  “How?”

  Everyone looked at Mandy, who now moved toward her husband.

  “How?” she said again, her voice rising. “How will you fix it all? How will you make everything like it was? How can you possibly fix this . . . nightmare?”

  “Mandy, please?” Finn glanced at the kids.

  “No, Harry. No! You’ve been deceiving me, the kids, for how long? How long, Harry?”

  “Too long,” he said quietly. He added, “I’m sorry. If you just knew—”

  “No, we don’t want to know.” She took a struggling Susie from his arms. “I called Doris, our next-door neighbor. She said men came to our house today and searched it. When she tried to ask them what was going on, they said they were looking for you, Harry. They said that you were a criminal.”

  “No! NO!” Susie screamed. “Daddy is not a criminal. He’s not, he’s not!” She started hitting her mother. Finn grabbed Susie away and clutched her tightly. “Susie, you never do that, you never hit your mother. She loves you more than anyone in the whole world. You never do that. Promise me.”

  A tearful Susie said, “But you’re not a bad man, are you?”
/>   Finn looked desperately at Mandy and then at his sons, who stared at him, their faces pale, their eyes wide in fear.

  “No, he’s not, Susie. Your father is not a bad man.”

  They all turned to look at Oliver Stone, who had just come quietly in the door. George the dog hadn’t made a peep. He just sat next to Stone looking up at him.

  “Who are you?” Mandy demanded fearfully.

  “I’m working with your husband to try to right some wrongs. He’s a good man.”

  “I told you, Mommy,” Susie said.

  “What’s your name?” Mandy asked.

  “That’s not important. What is important is that Harry has told you the truth, or as much of it as he can and still keep you safe. It was incredibly dangerous for him to come here tonight, but he insisted. He even left his mother, who is old and frail, to come and see you, because he was so worried. He had to see you.” He looked at Mandy. “He had to.” Mandy’s gaze went from Stone to her husband. Finn slowly put out his hand. She slowly took it. Their fingers instantly gripped like steel.

  “Can you right these wrongs?” Mandy asked, looking at Stone anxiously.

  “We’re going to try our best,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”

  “And you can’t go to the police,” she said.

  “I wish we could, but we can’t. Not yet.”

  Finn put Susie down and picked up the bear she’d dropped. “I told Grandma how much you love your bear.” Susie clutched it with one hand and her father’s leg with the other.

  After twenty minutes, Stone told Finn they had to leave. At the door Mandy slid her arms around her husband and they hugged while Stone and the children kept a respectful silence.

  “I love you, Mandy, more than anything in the world,” Finn said into her ear.

  “Just make things right, Harry. Make things right and come back to us. Please.”

  After they left, Finn turned to Stone. “Thanks for what you did in there.”

  “Families are the most important things there are.”

  “You sound like you speak from experience.”

  “I wish I did, Harry, I wish I did. But I don’t.”

  CHAPTER 85

  DAVID FINN WAS VERY UPSET about the events of the night before and he welcomed the opportunity to get out of the motel room and go to the grocery store. The room they were staying in had a kitchenette and their mother had been fixing their meals there.

  When he was in the checkout line he realized that he didn’t have enough cash, so he pulled out the debit card his mother had given him for safekeeping but then told him not to use. But what could it really hurt, he thought.

  A lot, as it turned out.

  As soon as the card was swiped through the receiver, an alert signal was received electronically in a room two thousand miles away. It was then relayed to CIA headquarters and nearly instantly thereafter to Carter Gray. Within two minutes’ time four men had been dispatched to the location where the card had been swiped.

  David was barely halfway back to the motel when the car pulled over and two men got out. The tall boy was swallowed up between their bulk, thrown in the car and it was rolling, all in less than five seconds. Thirty minutes later he was twenty miles away in a dark room secured to a chair. His heart was pounding so fast he could barely breathe. He said in a low voice, “Dad, please come and help me. Please.”

  The voice came out of the darkness. “Dad’s not coming, David. Dad’s not coming ever again.”

  Stone, Finn, Lesya, the rest of the Camel Club and Alex and Annabelle were congregated in the cellar. Standing in the center of the room, Stone made introductions, and then told them the entire story. They sat back, an enraptured audience. Several of them occasionally glanced over at Lesya or Finn.

  “My team and I killed Rayfield Solomon,” Stone concluded. “We killed an innocent man.”

  “You didn’t know that, Oliver,” Milton protested, a response that Reuben and Caleb echoed.

  Stone had noted gratefully that his fellow Camel Club members had taken his frank admission of being a former government assassin attached to the Triple Six Division of the CIA without much surprise.

  As Caleb had pointed out, “We knew you weren’t a retired librarian, Oliver. I can sniff those folks out pretty easily.”

  Lesya said, “Why do they call you Oliver? Your name is John Carr.”

  Milton, Reuben and Caleb all exchanged curious glances. Stone looked at Lesya and said, “Have you kept your real name all these years?” Lesya shook her head. “Well, neither have I. For obvious reasons.”

  Stone next looked over at Alex Ford. “Alex, you’re the only lawman here. And since what I’m proposing isn’t exactly lawful, you can bail out now.”

  Alex shrugged. “I care about the truth as much as the next person.” He shot Lesya a glance. “But to play devil’s advocate for a minute, how do we know her story is true? We only have her word for it that all this happened. What if Solomon really was a spy? What if she didn’t come over to the American side? I mean, I’ve heard of Rayfield Solomon. And it seems like the gent was guilty as charged.”

  All eyes turned to Lesya.

  Stone said, “I have my own reasons for believing her, including someone at the CIA who would know.”

  “Granted,” Alex said. “But we’re all going to be risking pretty much everything here. So I’d like to know it’s for the right cause. I mean, if she was this terrific spy she must be a pretty damn good liar.”

  Stone started to say something else, but Lesya put up a hand and rose. “I will defend myself if you don’t mind. I’m actually surprised the question is only coming up now.” She gripped her walker, flipped it upside down, took off the foam booty and unscrewed the covering on the metal tube. Out came two rolled-up pieces of paper.

  “These are the written orders we received from the CIA. We insisted on it because of the magnitude of what we were being asked to do.”

  They all read through them. They were each on CIA letterhead, addressed to Lesya and Rayfield Solomon. The first instructed them to carry out the assassination of Yuri Andropov; the second, that of Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko. Each had Roger Simpson’s signature at the bottom. Everyone looked stunned.

  “I take it you didn’t trust Simpson,” Stone said.

  “We only trusted each other,” she replied.

  “That’s Simpson’s original signature,” Stone said. “I know it well.”

  “There’s no countersignature from the president?” Alex said incredulously. “Are you telling me you killed two heads of the Soviet Union on the orders of, what, a low-level case manager?”

  “Do you think the president of the United States would actually put his signature down on such an order?” Lesya said with equal incredulity. “Our chain of command was what we worked with. If it came down that chain we had to rely on it being approved from the top. If we couldn’t rely on that, we couldn’t do our jobs.”

  “She’s right about that,” Stone said. “Triple Six operated the same way.”

  He was examining the letter against the lightbulb. He glanced at Lesya. “There’s a code line next to the watermark.”

  She nodded. “That special encoded paper was only available from at least one level above Simpson.”

  “Carter Gray?”

  “Yes. We knew the orders had really come through Gray. And it was our experience that if they came through Gray, they had come from the top. We didn’t trust Simpson that much. He was a loose cannon.”

  “But Gray might have played you for the fall guy too,” Stone pointed out. “The president might not have authorized the killings.”

  She shrugged. “There is always that possibility. I am sorry but I did not have the opportunity to go to your White House and ask the president personally if he wanted me to kill two Soviet leaders,” she added in a bristling tone.

  “Why didn’t you take this letter to the authorities back then?” Alex said.

  “I ha
d no reason to even think of doing so until Rayfield was killed. Even then I didn’t know he’d been murdered by the Americans until much later. Then an attempt was made on my life when Harry was still a child. At that point I knew we had been betrayed. We had to go into hiding. I spent decades finding out the truth, the people responsible. But even so, how could I use this evidence? I was a Russian spy. It was only Rayfield, Simpson and Carter Gray who knew I was a double agent. If I had come in from the cold even with this evidence no one would have believed me. They would have just killed me.” She paused and looked at each of them as they stared back at her in some disbelief. “You think your people would hold back from doing something like that?” She glanced at Stone. “Ask him.”

  “I believe you, Lesya,” Stone said. “I know it could have happened exactly that way.”

  “Rayfield and I were married in the Soviet Union. I was already carrying Harry. We couldn’t tell anyone we were married, either Soviet or American. We assumed double lives, new names, eventually settled in America. Rayfield spent as much time with us as he could. When Harry was still small Rayfield severed almost all ties with us. Someone was after him. He knew this. His fear was confirmed in Sa˜o Paulo. He was still