by Stuart Woods
BOOKS BY STUART WOODS
FICTION
Severe Clear†
Unnatural Acts†
D.C. Dead†
Son of Stone†
Bel-Air Dead†
Strategic Moves†
Santa Fe Edge§
Lucid Intervals†
Kisser†
Hothouse Orchid*
Loitering with Intent†
Mounting Fears‡
Hot Mahogany†
Santa Fe Dead§
Beverly Hills Dead
Shoot Him If He Runs†
Fresh Disasters†
Short Straw§
Dark Harbor†
Iron Orchid*
Two-Dollar Bill†
The Prince of Beverly Hills
Reckless Abandon†
Capital Crimes‡
Dirty Work†
Blood Orchid*
The Short Forever†
Orchid Blues*
Cold Paradise†
L.A. Dead†
The Run‡
Worst Fears Realized†
Orchid Beach*
Swimming to Catalina†
Dead in the Water†
Dirt†
Choke
Imperfect Strangers
Heat
Dead Eyes
L.A. Times
Santa Fe Rules§
New York Dead†
Palindrome
Grass Roots‡
White Cargo
Deep Lie‡
Under the Lake
Run Before the Wind‡
Chiefs‡
TRAVEL
A Romantic’s Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland (1979)
MEMOIR
Blue Water, Green Skipper
*A Holly Barker Novel
†A Stone Barrington Novel
‡A Will Lee Novel
§An Ed Eagle Novel
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2013 by Stuart Woods
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Woods, Stuart.
Collateral damage : a Stone Barrington novel / Stuart Woods.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-60913-2
1. Barrington, Stone (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Mystery fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.O642C67 2012 2012037742
813’.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Also by Stuart Woods
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Elaine’s, late.
Stone Barrington opened the taxi door. “Wait for me,” he said. “I won’t be long.” He got out of the cab and looked around. The yellow awning was gone, but “Elaine’s” was still painted on the darkened windows. A film of soap obscured the interior, but Stone found a bare spot and put his hands up to shield from the glare. What he saw was, in short, nothing.
The book jackets, photographs, and posters that had adorned the walls for forty-seven years were gone. The bar and mirrors behind it were still there, but there were no stools. The dining room contained no tables or chairs and no blue-checkered tablecloths. The two old pay phones still hung on the wall near the cashier’s stand at the bar; they had always been the only phones in the place.
For a tiny moment Stone could hear the babble of a crowded room, chairs scraping, people calling the length of the room to say hello to a friend. Then a passing bus obliterated the sounds and returned Stone to the present. He got back into the cab and gave the driver his home address.
His cell phone buzzed at his belt. “Hello?”
“It’s Dino. Where are you?”
“At Elaine’s.”
A brief silence, then: “You shouldn’t do that.”
“You’re right,” Stone said. “The memory is better than the reality. Have you had dinner?”
“I was just thinking about it.”
“Where’s Viv?”
“She’s working.”
“Come over and I’ll make you some pasta.”
“You, yourself?”
“Me, myself. I can cook, you know.”
“There was a rumor, but I never believed it.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Okay. Oh, how are we dressing?”
“Unarmed,” Stone said.
“I’m always armed.”
“Then you can check your gun at the door.”
“Whatever you say.”
“How late is Viv working?”
“Until ten.”
“Tell her to come over after, and I’ll save her something.”
“I’ll see if she’s brave enough.”
“See ya.” Stone hung up.
—
At home, he shucked off his jacket in the kitchen and checked the fridge. It was stuffed, as usual. Helene was an overshopper, and she liked to be ready for anything.
Stone found some Italian sausages, some mushrooms, some broccoli rabe, and some garlic. He sliced the sausages and tossed them into a skillet with a little olive oil, and they began to sizzle. He ran some water into a pot and put it on to boil for the pasta. He found some ziti in a cupboard and tossed it into the boiling water, then he chopped some onion and the garlic and tossed them into the pan with the sausages, followed by the mushrooms and rabe.
Dino came into the kitchen and tossed his coat on a chair. “Jesus, that smells pretty good,” he admitted.
“Be ready in ten, fifteen minutes,” Stone said. “Pour us a drink.”
Dino went to the kitchen bar, filled a pair of glasses with ice, then filled one with his usual Johnnie Walker Black scotch and the other with Stone’s Knob Creek bourbon, then handed it to Stone. “Okay, what was the place like?”
“Bereft of all humankind and Elaine. Bereft of everything, come to that.” The contents of the place had been sold at auction, along with Elaine’s personal effects. Stone had bid on some books but didn’t get them.
“You know,” Dino said, taking a bite of his scotch, “I think she’d be happy that we can’t find a new place.”
“She wasn’t that mean-spirited,” Stone pointed out.
“She was about other joints. I’m still afraid to go to Elio’s.” Elio was a former Elaine’s headwaiter who had opened his own restaurant a couple of blocks down Second Avenue.
“Yeah, me too. I only went once, just to say hello to Elio, but I never let her find out. She would have stabbed me with a fork.”
“Or worse.”
Stone found a hunk of Parmigianino-Reggiano in the fridge and dug the grater out of a drawer. He drained the pasta, forked some onto two plates, dumped some sausage onto the plates and grated a lot of the cheese over them, then he set them on the table and got a bottle of Amarone out of the wine closet and opened it. “Sit yourself down,” he said.
Dino did, and they both ate hungrily.
—
When Viv showed up, they hadn’t even cleared the table; they were just sitting there, drinking and talking.
“Just like Elaine’s,” Viv said. “Without Elaine.”
Jasmine Shazaz sat in a car parked in Mount Street, London, with a cell phone in her hand. She watched as, fifty yards away, a government Jaguar pulled up in front of the Connaught Hotel and stopped. A man in a dark suit waved the uniformed doorman out of the way as he reached for the car’s rear door, then opened it himself. Another man Jasmine recognized from newspapers and television as a high government official left the hotel and walked toward the open car door, got in and hipped his way across the seat to the left side.
The Special Branch detective, who had been holding the door open, got in behind him and closed the door. The car moved a few feet to Mount Street, the driver looked both ways, then turned left.
Jasmine pressed the phone button on her smartphone, chose a number, and looked out her windscreen. It would take three seconds to connect the call. She pressed the button. “Three, two, one,” she counted, and as she spoke the word “zero,” the glass front of the Porsche dealer’s building at the bottom of Mount Street blew outward, followed by a large ball of flame.
The explosion rocked her car and enveloped the government Jaguar, which was directly in front of the Porsche dealer. The car took the full force of the explosion and was lifted off the pavement, rolling over. The gas tank exploded, creating a secondary ball of flame. The job was done.
Jasmine put her car in gear and, ignoring the broken glass and small rubble on the hood of her car, made a U-turn from her parking space, drove up to South Audley Street, crossed it, then a block later turned left into Park Lane. Sixty seconds later she was in Hyde Park, and five minutes after that she took a seat at the Serpentine Restaurant in the park and perused the menu. Her lunch date arrived a moment later and sat down.
“I believe there was some sort of explosion over around Berkeley Square,” he said, in perfect, upper-class English, though his appearance was Mediterranean, perhaps even Middle Eastern.
“That must be why we’re hearing all those fire engines and police cars,” she said.
“Let’s see if there’s any news,” he said, taking a smartphone from his jacket pocket and switching it on. A moment later they were watching ITV News as a slide appeared. “Breaking News,” it said.
A young woman, hastily arranging her skirt, gazed into the camera, then read from a sheet of paper in her hand. “ITV News has a reliable report that some sort of bomb has gone off in Mayfair, perhaps in Mount Street. Our reporter, Jason Banks, has just arrived at the scene. Jason?”
The camera jerked about, then stabilized. A man was clipping a microphone to his lapel, then he looked up and saw the camera. “Good afternoon, Jane,” he said. “I’m standing a few yards from the northwest corner of Berkeley Square.” He looked over his shoulder, and the camera zoomed in past him. “As you can see, there has been a very large explosion up there, and it appears that the location was the building housing the Porsche sports car dealership. The front of the building has disappeared, and the fire brigade has just arrived on the scene and are connecting their hose pipes as we speak. The events have only just occurred—I and my crew were on the other side of the square, interviewing a police spokesman about a robbery that occurred in Bruton Place a little over an hour ago. The policeman we were interviewing immediately called New Scotland Yard and reported the explosion, then ran toward the burning building. We moved our equipment as quickly as we could, and this is as close as we could get.”
“Jason,” the anchor said, holding a finger to an ear, “we’re just getting a report from a Westminster correspondent that the foreign secretary is lunching at the Connaught Hotel, about fifty meters up the street from the blast location, and we have a unit on the way there to interview him and see if we can get any further information.”
The camera went back to Jason Banks. He was moving up the street to get closer to the burning building. “Jane, we’ve been able to get a few yards closer, and if our camera can zoom in on that burning motorcar sitting on top of two other cars … Zoom in on it, damn you!” The camera zoomed in on the burning car. “That was, until a few moments ago, a Jaguar motorcar, and as you can see, the front number plate begins with the letters FO, identifying it as a government vehicle assigned to the Foreign Office. We can only hope that is a horrible coincidence and that the foreign secretary is still enjoying his after-lunch port at the Connaught.”
A police car with its lights and siren on came close to running down Jason Banks as it raced toward the burning vehicle. “Shit!” the reporter yelled. “That was close. Let me see if I can get a word.” He began jogging toward the police car, which had stopped a few yards away and was disgorging two high-ranking police officers, judging from their insignia.
“Excuse me, Inspector,” Banks said, thrusting a microphone at one of them, “but does that number plate on that Jaguar belong to the foreign secretary?”
The response to his shouted question was a stout forearm across the face, nearly causing him to eat his microphone. “Get out of the way, you bloody fool!” the officer yelled.
Banks fell back, nursing his lips with the back of his hand. “As you can see, Jane, the inspector is in no mood to chat. Perhaps you can get a confirmation on this number plate.” He began reading the letters and numbers.
“Yes, Jason, we’ll do that,” the anchor said, scribbling down the numbers, then ripping a sheet off a pad and throwing it at someone off camera. “Run that number down!” she shouted at the person, then she recovered
herself. “If you are just joining us, what we know so far is …”
—
The man switched off his smartphone. “I think we can order lunch now,” he said to Jasmine, while beckoning a waiter.
“Order me the Dover sole,” Jasmine said. “And I think, perhaps, a bottle of champagne would be in order.”
Holly Barker, assistant director of Central Intelligence, took her seat at the table in the conference room of her boss, Katharine Rule Lee, the director of Central Intelligence. She was well rested after a couple of days off following a meeting between the presidents of the United States and Mexico, which she had attended in company with the director.
The final seats at the table were filled at fifteen seconds before nine o’clock, according to the GPS-controlled clock on the wall, and at the stroke of nine, the director entered the room and sat down.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Kate Lee said. “Thank you for coming. Holly, what’s on our agenda for this morning?”
“Good morning, Director,” Holly replied. “DDO Lance Cabot has three reports from foreign stations, to start us off.” She nodded at Lance.
Cabot shuffled some papers. “Our station in Lagos, Nigeria, was the target of a Molotov cocktail earlier today. The bottle shattered on the wrought-iron fence, and only slightly splashed the facade of the building. A Marine guard extinguished the flame almost immediately. No one has, as yet, claimed credit, but we suspect either an antigovernment insurgent group or, perhaps, the government itself. Take your pick.” He set aside a sheet of paper, then continued. “We have penetrated the administrative offices of an army base in …” Lance stopped as a middle-aged woman walked behind him, tapped him on the shoulder, and placed a sheet of paper in front of him. He read it, then looked up.