Stuart Woods_Stone Barrington 12

by Dark Harbor

  Stone waited, and the prompt appeared. “It’s there.”

  “Type in, all caps, TELOG.”

  Stone typed it in, and instantly a list of names and phone numbers appeared. “I have a telephone log.”

  “Tell me what the top line says.”

  “It says, ‘Cell’ and gives a number.” He read the number to Lance.

  “Thank you,” Lance said. “Now switch off the monitor and the computer, remove the disk and put it in Dick’s safe. It will be collected.”

  “Okay. Now what?”

  “Now I’ll run down the phone number and find out what the hell is going on. I’ll get back to you, maybe today, maybe not. Bye-bye.” Lance hung up.

  “Spooky,” Stone said.

  16

  THE PHONE RANG, and Stone picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Rawls,” a gruff voice drawled.

  “Good morning.”

  “You free for lunch? I’d like you to meet some people.”

  “Yes.”

  “Noon at the yacht club?”

  “Good.”

  “See you then.” Rawls hung up.

  The phone rang again. “Hello?”

  “It’s Lance.”

  “That was fast.”

  “I checked with the London station; Kirov means trouble is coming, watch your ass.”

  “A little late,” Stone replied.

  “Obviously, Dick’s contact hadn’t heard about his death.”

  “Is that it, trouble is coming?”

  “Kirov is used as a specific warning, based on solid information. It was just too late.”

  “What was the solid information?”

  “The man who called was a paid source of Dick’s; you’d call him a snitch. He was at a card game last week in East Germany when he overheard two players, Russians, discussing a revenge hit on a highly placed American. The snitch is Hungarian, but he speaks Russian.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t he call Dick last week, when it might have done some good?”

  “He was in jail; got into an accident while driving home from the card game, drunk.”

  “What was the revenge for?”

  “Apparently the Agency was responsible for the breakup of a large drug ring in which the two Russians had a stake. The hit was meant to be a warning to the London station.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Stone said. “They would send a hit man from Eastern Europe to a small island in Penobscot Bay just to send a message to London?”

  “I know it’s a stretch, but crime is worldwide these days; the whole thing could have been arranged with a single phone call or e-mail. Anyway, we know the result.”

  “I’m having lunch with Ed Rawls and some friends of his,” Stone said. “Is there any reason to think these same people would have an interest in Rawls?”

  “None that I know of. You can tell him about this; it might set his mind at ease. By the way, are you armed?”

  “No.”

  “Does Dick have any guns in the house?”

  “Well, he had the Keltec, but the state police have still got that. Why do I need to be armed?”

  “I’m not certain that you do, but I have some concerns.”

  “Please tell me about your concerns.”

  “When the man called and you answered, he said, ‘Is this Stone?,’ and you replied, ‘Yes,’ because that’s your name, too. So he thought he was talking to Dick, right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “This source is classed as unreliable, so he may be working both sides of the street. He may have called to make sure Dick was dead.”

  “Come on, Lance. Whoever killed Dick knows that he’s dead.”

  “Try and follow me: The shooter would have reported back to whoever sent him that Dick was dead, and it may very well be that the person who sent the shooter also killed him, for security reasons. The phone call could have simply been a check to see if the shooter was lying.”

  “I suppose that makes a perverted kind of sense,” Stone said.

  “These people would not casually kill a senior officer of the CIA; it would have been carefully planned, with cutouts at every level, to protect those who ordered the killing. Shooting the shooter is a very good cutout. If caught, he might give up the people who hired him to save his own neck.”

  “Well, yes, I’ve had some experience with that.”

  “Anyway, when you spoke to the guy this morning, that may have indicated to these people that the shooter lied about having completed the hit and that Dick is still alive and well. And you, of course, are also named Stone, and you are living in Dick’s house.”

  Stone sighed. “Are you doing anything about this?”

  “People from the London station are looking for Dick’s snitch as we speak. When they find him, they’ll work their way up the food chain until they find the people who gave the order for the hit.”

  “And what, do you estimate, are the chances of their reaching the top of the food chain?”

  “I think good; the Agency does not take lightly the murder of their officers and especially the murder of an officer’s family in the United States. I’ll keep you posted on developments. In the meantime, buy a shotgun and watch your ass.” Lance hung up.

  Stone called his secretary, Joan. “Hi.”

  “Good morning.”

  “I’d like you to send me some things, overnight.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Go up to my dressing room, find my golf shoes—they’re the ones with the plastic spikes…”

  “No kidding?”

  “…and also a pair of brown alligator moccasins and a pair of boat shoes.”

  “They’re the ones with the nonslip soles, I guess.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. Also, go into the safe in my dressing room—you have the combination—and send me that little .45 that Terry Tussey made for me, the one with the pearl handle. Send the holster next to it—make sure it fits, that it’s the right one—and the heavy gun belt that’s hanging on my belt rack. Also, send three magazines and the double-magazine holder that’s with the holster, and send me a box of .45 caliber ammo, the Federal Hydrashock. Got all that?”

  “Is it the shoulder holster you want or the belt holster?”

  “The belt holster…. Oh, what the hell, send both.”

  Joan read back the list to him. “Anything else?”

  “Oh, send me a couple of thousand in cash, too, just put it in an envelope and stick it in a shoe.”

  “The usual denominations?”

  “Plenty of smaller bills.”

  “Will do. I’ll send along some mail, too.”

  “Good-bye.” Stone hung up. Now, if he could just survive until tomorrow.

  17

  ED RAWLS WAS ALREADY SEATED at a corner table when Stone arrived at the little yacht club. They shook hands, and Stone sat down.

  Rawls pushed a slip of paper across the table. “Send checks in those amounts to those addresses for the yacht and golf club memberships,” he said. “You’re in.”

  “Already?” Stone asked, astonished. It usually took a while to get into any club.

  “You had good backers, and like I told you, your cousin, Dick, was highly regarded around here,” Rawls replied. “You met the three requisite members at lunch here yesterday. The committee met last night, and it got done.”

  “Thank you, Ed. I’m sure I’ll enjoy using both. Who am I meeting today?”

  “See the two guys standing on the dock?”

  Stone turned and saw two elderly men standing outside, one sweeping the horizon, the other looking toward shore. “What are they doing?”

  “Just checking. They would never go into any building without checking, especially in light of recent events.”

  The screen door to the club was bumped open by an electric invalid scooter, and its rider moved it quickly toward their table.

  “Stone, this is Don Brown,” Rawls said. The other two men c
ame in and sat down. “And this is Harley Davis and Mack Morris.”

  Stone shook hands all around. “Gentlemen, glad to meet you.”

  “We’re a kind of club of old boys,” Rawls said. “We call ourselves the Old Farts.”

  “Your reputation precedes you,” Stone said.

  The three men looked wary and exchanged glances. “How’s that?” Mack Morris asked.

  “I told you, he knows Lance Cabot,” Rawls said. “In fact, Stone is one of Lance’s contract people. And he’s Dick Stone’s first cousin.”

  Everybody nodded, seemingly satisfied with Stone’s credentials. They all ordered sandwiches and iced tea and chatted desultorily about golf and boats for a while, then Rawls called the meeting to order, after a fashion.

  “My sources are telling me somebody ordered a hit on Dick,” he said, without preamble. Everybody became very still.

  “We know why?” Davis asked.

  “Haven’t gotten that far yet,” Rawls replied.

  Stone spoke up. “My information is a revenge killing, in return for the Agency’s busting up a drug ring in East Germany.”

  “Your information?” Don Brown asked, with laconic incredulity.

  Stone shrugged.

  “Details?” Brown asked.

  “I answered Dick’s office phone, and somebody used a code word, Kirov, which turned out to be a warning.”

  “Okay,” Brown said.

  “Problem is, the caller may have thought I was Dick.”

  “So,” Harley Davis said, “if they think Dick is still alive, somebody may make another house call.”

  Stone nodded. “So I’m told.”

  “Are you armed, Stone?” Rawls asked.

  “I will be tomorrow.”

  “That may not be soon enough. I’ve got a shotgun in the car you can borrow until you’re equipped.”

  “Thanks.”

  Their sandwiches arrived, and everybody ate in silence for a while.

  “For what it’s worth, Ed,” Stone said, “Lance didn’t think any of this had spilled over on you.”

  “It’s nice that Lance thinks that,” Rawls said, “but he don’t know everything.”

  “Who knows everything?” Mack Morris observed.

  There were affirmative grunts around the table. Then Rawls’s three cohorts began to grill Stone.

  “How come you’re Dick’s first cousin and we never heard of you?” Harley Davis asked.

  “There was a rift in the family,” Stone said. “I spent a summer up here when I was eighteen, and that was about the only contact we had with the Boston branch. I had a great-aunt who lived in New York. She was the only one who was friendly.”

  “What was the cause of the rift?” Don Brown asked.

  “My father left Yale to become a carpenter in New York. He was also a member of the Communist Party for a little while.” He watched the four men exchange glances.

  “How little a while?” Harley asked.

  “A couple of years. His family disowned him, and my mother’s family disowned her for marrying him.”

  “She was a Stone?”

  “Yes, Matilda.”

  Don looked up from his sandwich. “She a painter?”

  “Yes.”

  “My wife was a painter; she thought your mother was the greatest artist since Rembrandt.”

  “My father thought so, too.”

  “Where’d you go to school?”

  “New York public schools, then NYU, both undergraduate and law.”

  “You ever run into Sam Bernard there?”

  “He taught me constitutional law.”

  Harley looked at Rawls. “I’m surprised Sam didn’t recruit him.”

  “He tried, but Stone preferred the NYPD,” Rawls replied.

  “That was dumb,” Harley said.

  Stone couldn’t help laughing. “It was pretty good, actually, until I took a bullet in the knee.” That wasn’t all of it, but it was as much as he told people.

  “I heard that wasn’t all of it,” Mack said.

  Stone suppressed another laugh.

  “We’re careful people,” Rawls said, “by nature and by training. We do our homework.”

  “What did you hear?” Stone asked.

  “I heard you were a pain in the ass to your superiors, particularly on that last homicide you worked, and they took advantage of your injury to bounce you.”

  “That’s a fair description,” Stone said. “Did you also hear I was right about the homicide?”

  “I heard you were a little right,” Mack replied, “but that your partner had to save your ass before it was over.”

  “That’s fair, too, I guess,” Stone admitted.

  Mack turned to Rawls. “I guess he’ll do,” he said.

  Stone felt lucky: the approval of the yacht club, the golf club and the Old Farts, all in one day.

  THAT NIGHT, he slept with Rawls’s shotgun on the floor next to his bed.

  18

  STONE WAS WORKING on Dick’s estate when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “This is the Dark Harbor Shop. We have a package for you. Can you come pick it up?”

  So much for overnight delivery, Stone thought. “Sure. Be right over.” What the hell, he had to pick up a newspaper anyway. He drove into the village and to the shop.

  “Heavy,” the girl commented, handing the package to him. “You got guns in there?”

  Stone smiled. “Just shoes with shoe trees in them.”

  “Feels like guns,” she said, returning to her work at the soda fountain.

  Stone bought a paper and went back to the house. He unwrapped the package, put his golf shoes with his clubs in the garage and the new loafers in his dressing room upstairs. He took a few hundred in cash from the money Joan had sent and put the rest in the safe. She had also sent a light, Italian cotton Windbreaker, which would be useful for covering the gun as well as for the cool Maine days. Trust Joan to think of that.

  He loaded the three magazines she had sent, put two in the little magazine pouch, then slapped one into the beautiful little custom-made Terry Tussey .45, with its Damascus steel slide, black anodized lightweight frame and mother-of-pearl handle. Small guns were a specialty of Terry’s, and this one weighed only twenty-one ounces, tiny for a .45.

  He took off his belt and threaded the two-by-quarter-inch gun belt through his trouser loops, adding the magazine pouch and the gun holster at the appropriate points. With the belt tightened and the gun in its Mitch Rosen holster, everything felt secure, with the gun lying flat against his side and at an angle. When he slipped on the light windbreaker or a sweater, or left his shirttail out, everything would be concealed. He drew the .45, worked the slide, put on the safety and added another round to the magazine. With the pistol loaded, cocked and locked, ready for use, he felt better.

  Stone called Ed Rawls. “My equipment has arrived. May I return your shotgun without getting blown away?”

  “Come ahead. Blow the horn three times as you reach the gate, and I probably won’t kill you.”

  Stone followed Rawls’s instructions to the letter and pulled into the clearing before the little house without incident. Rawls came out to meet him, and Stone handed him the shotgun. “There’s still one in the chamber, and the safety’s on,” he said.

  “Come on in,” Rawls said. “Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Rawls poured him a cup from a Thermos and handed it to him. “So what are you packing?”

  Stone removed the .45 from its holster, popped out the magazine, ejected the cartridge in the chamber, locked back the slide and handed it to Rawls.

  Rawls thumbed the slide catch, aimed it out the window and squeezed off an imaginary round. “Sweet trigger,” he said. “Who’s Tussey?”

  “A guy out in Carson City, Nevada. I saw something of his in a magazine, and we talked on the phone a couple of times. I’ve got a couple more of his guns, too.”

  “I never had any need for a gu
nsmith,” Rawls said. “Tech Services supplied what we needed. It didn’t have pearl grips, but it always worked good.” He handed back Stone’s gun.

  Stone picked up the ejected round, reloaded the pistol, cocked and locked it and returned it to its holster.

  “I had a call from Lance a minute ago,” Rawls said. “He tried you first, but I guess you’d already left the house.”

  “What news?”

  “Bad news: The two Russians Dick’s source overheard at the poker game are very bad actors named Gorky and Rastropov, former KGB. Like a lot of their colleagues they discovered that there was money to be made when the Soviet Union crumbled, and their training and experience, combined with their sociopathic tendencies, make them very dangerous. The Berlin station is looking for them now, but they’ve gone to ground, and it won’t be easy to find them. The word’s out, though, and you never know. If they buy a pack of cigarettes in the wrong shop, they’re toast.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Use the burglar alarm and sleep lightly,” Rawls replied.

  “Will do.”

  “You’ve got a very secure house, you know. Did you ever take a close look at the front door?”

  “No. I’ve noticed it’s heavy.”

  “Take a look at mine,” Rawls said, beckoning him to the front door. He opened the door and showed Stone the edge. “It’s two one-inch-thick sheets of mahogany with a half-inch of steel plate sandwiched between. The door frame is steel, too, and it’s bolted to eight-by-eight posts set in concrete. It’s hanging on eight hinges.” He turned the thumb bolt on the inside, and three extra-large bolts slid out of the door, one each at the top and bottom of the door and the third in the traditional spot.

  “That’s very impressive,” Stone said. “What about the rest of the house? The windows, for instance?”

  “They’re all steel-framed, and the glass is armored and an inch thick. Dick’s house has the same.”

  “None of it seemed to work for Dick.”

  “He made a mistake; everybody does it sooner or later. If he’d had the Kirov call promptly, nobody would ever have gotten into the house alive. I’m surprised you didn’t find any weapons in the house.”

  “I looked in all the cupboards,” Stone said. “I couldn’t find anything. I figure Dick kept the Keltec at his bedside. He heard something in the night, put on his pants and went downstairs. Somebody disarmed him, sat him down at the desk and shot him with his own gun, then went upstairs and shot his wife and daughter. He was wearing only trousers when they found him.”