Three Stone Barrington Adventures

by Stuart Woods

  “Phelan is waiting for you at Teterboro. You’ll be here in two, maybe three hours. Don’t forget my weapon.”

  “That’s the last thing I would forget,” she said. “I’m inside the house now and hurrying.”

  “Keep hurrying.” He hung up and called Strategic Services and asked for Mike Freeman.

  “Stone?”

  “Mike, you know where Jim is, don’t you?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “I’m with him, and he’s dead. A sniper got him no more than ten minutes ago, and I’ve already called the state police. Can you get into a cab without being seen?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “My airplane is at Teterboro, where Jim kept his. Felicity Devonshire is being flown up here. If you get there in a hurry, you can come with her. She’ll be in the crew lounge with the pilot, whose name is Dan Phelan.”

  “Will do.”

  “Watch your ass—these people may not be finished.”

  “Will certainly do.”

  Stone called Felicity and told her to wait for Freeman; then he hung up and looked at Jim Hackett’s corpse. It shouldn’t have ended this way, he thought.

  54

  The state police had been there for an hour when Captain Scott Smith came out of the house and onto the porch, where Stone was waiting. Hackett’s body was being removed.

  Smith held up a small, plastic bag with a slug in it. “This went through Hackett’s body, right past your head as you were rocking”—he pointed at the hole next to Stone’s chair—“through the exterior wall of the house and ended up imbedded in a plaster wall in the living room.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s a 30-06, probably a special load, given the velocity and penetration. A pro’s weapon. Who do you think did this?”

  “I don’t know,” Stone said. “Hackett had just begun to talk to me about his situation when he was hit. He was up here because he feared for his life.”

  “Did he tell you whom he feared?”

  “He didn’t have time,” Stone lied. His cell phone rang. “Excuse me. Yes?”

  “It’s Dan Phelan. We’re rolling with two passengers.”

  “Thanks, Dan.” He hung up. “I have a couple of guests arriving here by airplane in an hour or so; I’ll need to meet them at the airfield.”

  Captain Smith nodded. “Might these people have anything to do with Hackett?”

  “One of them, Mike Freeman, works with him, but I don’t think he knows anything about this. I talked with him before he got here.”

  “Be sure you come back here; I’m not finished with you yet.”

  “All right. We’ll go to my house, next door.”

  “I’ll come over there when I’m finished here.” He looked Stone up and down. “You might want to change those clothes.”

  “I’ll do that now,” Stone said, and then went upstairs. After he showered and changed, he called his caretaker and informed him of guests to come. He put his bloody clothes in the liner of the room’s wastebasket and then took it downstairs. “You want these clothes?” he asked Captain Smith.

  “Thanks,” Smith said, taking the bag and handing it to a subordinate. “Log this,” he said. “Mark it ‘clothing of the witness.’ ”

  “Have you had any luck finding the boat?” Stone asked.

  “No, and no luck with an airplane out of place at any local airfield. If I were the killer, I’d have dumped the rifle in the bay, motored to a cove nearby and anchored for the night, maybe longer. We’re not going to find him, unless we get very, very lucky.”

  Stone packed his bag and put it into Hackett’s car, then drove to the airfield. He preferred waiting there to waiting at the house, where he was only in the way. He sat in the car, numb, wondering how this had happened and if the fault somehow lay with him. He didn’t see his airplane until it whooshed in over the trees and settled onto the runway. Phelan taxied over to where he was parked and shut down the engine.

  Stone opened the airplane’s door and helped Felicity down the air stair. Mike Freeman was right behind her, and he shook Stone’s hand. Stone went to the luggage compartment and began removing their bags, and Freeman followed him.

  “Where’s Jim’s body?” he asked.

  “The police removed it from the house more than an hour ago. It will be on the mainland and on the way to the morgue in Augusta by now.”

  “Any sign of the perpetrator?”

  “I think he was in a boat moored in the harbor, maybe two fifty, three hundred yards away. Not a difficult shot in no wind and with the right weapon, scope and ammo.”

  Freeman nodded. “Where are we going now?”

  “To my house, next door to where Jim was staying.”

  “I’ve got a hundred phone calls to make to clients before they hear about this on the news,” Freeman said.

  “You can use my phone,” Stone said.

  He shook Phelan’s hand and thanked him. Phelan got back into the airplane and started the engine. Driving down the road toward his house, he saw his airplane take off and turn to the southwest.

  Stone drove to the house, which Seth, the caretaker, had already opened and where he had made rooms ready. Stone showed Freeman where he was sleeping, then led Felicity to the master suite, her second visit there.

  “I gather this Mike Freeman worked for Hackett,” she said.

  “His number two.”

  “He hardly said a word from the time we met.”

  “He has a lot on his mind. I expect he’s already phoning clients around the world to tell them what’s happened. He has to protect the business now.”

  She nodded and sat down on the bed. “Tell me what you and Hackett talked about.”

  Stone laid it all out for her. When he had finished, he asked, “Did you know about the two kids?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I remember when it happened, but I didn’t know the full story until recently. That’s when I threatened Palmer with exposure.”

  “Hackett predicted that, if they killed him, they’d go after you, too,” Stone said, “because they’d be afraid you’d talk.”

  “I’m about to do that now,” she said. “Can I use this phone?” One line was already lit up.

  “Yes, use the next line. You’re sure you want to do this?”

  “The only way I’ll know I’m safe is if everybody else knows what I know.”

  “You may have a hard time proving it,” Stone said.

  “I don’t have to prove it,” she replied. “They’ll probably never go to prison, but I want it hung around their necks.”

  “Are you going to resign?”

  “No, but I’ll bloody well see that Palmer and Prior do. I’ll go to the prime minister if I have to.”

  “I’ll be downstairs.” He turned to go, but she stopped him.

  “Stone, did Hackett admit that he was Whitestone?”

  “He wouldn’t confirm or deny it,” Stone said. “He kept referring to Whitestone in the third person. Still . . .”

  “I think he was Whitestone. That’s what I’m going to put out. I want an end to all this.”

  “You would know better than I how to handle it in London,” he said. The light went out on the phone. Downstairs, Stone found Mike Freeman talking to Captain Scott Smith, and he joined them.

  “You can’t think of any business reason why anyone would want to do this?” Smith was asking Freeman.

  Freeman shook his head. “I’ve been going over this in my mind since Stone called me, and I can’t see how it could be business-related,” he said.

  “Surely, yours is the kind of business where a man could make enemies,” Smith said, sounding skeptical.

  “You’d have to understand Jim,” Freeman replied. “He was a charming man, and he went out of his way to treat people decently, even those who didn’t like him. He worked hard not to make enemies.”

  “How about a competitor? Surely, he would be resented by people who had lost contracts to him.”

 
Freeman thought about it. “I think that, in his early days, he went after business pretty hard, but for the ten years I’ve been with him, he pretty much sat back and let the business come to him. He was a very popular man.”

  “Was he married?”

  “Divorced, many years ago, in England.”

  “Has he been seeing someone else’s wife?”

  Freeman shook his head. “That wouldn’t be Jim. He loved beautiful and accomplished women, but they were all single.”

  “Jealous boyfriend of one of his women?”

  Freeman shrugged. “If so, he never mentioned it.”

  Stone spoke up. “He would have to be a jealous boyfriend who was a pro at this sort of thing.”

  “Agreed,” Smith said. “Should I talk to the lady upstairs about this?” he asked.

  Stone shook his head. “She’s a friend visiting from London. She wouldn’t contribute anything to your investigation.” God knows, he thought, that’s true.

  55

  The three of them sat at dinner, prepared by Seth’s wife, Mary, eating quietly. Mike Freeman’s reticence seemed to affect them all.

  “Did you call all your clients?” Stone asked him, in an effort at conversation.

  “Just about,” Freeman replied.

  “How are they taking it?”

  “Shock, mostly.”

  “Did you tell them he was murdered?”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Freeman replied. “It’s probably already on the evening news.”

  Stone polished off his wine and set down the glass. “Let’s go find out,” he said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost six-thirty.”

  He led Freeman and Felicity into the living room and switched on the lights and the big flat-screen TV.

  “Earlier today,” the anchorman was saying, “James Hackett, the head of the worldwide security firm Strategic Services, was shot to death by a sniper at a friend’s home on an island in Maine.”

  There followed an interview with Captain Scott Smith. “We have no suspects at this time,” he said, “but the case bears the earmarks of a professional killing.”

  They watched as various experts were interviewed. All suggested a contract murder. The news show moved on to other stories.

  Freeman turned to Felicity. “What about you?” he asked. “Any idea who might be responsible for this?”

  “Listen,” Stone said, pointing at the TV.

  “This breaking news just in,” the anchorman said. “A London newspaper is reporting that the director of MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, is charging that Foreign Minister Douglas Palmer and Home Secretary Eric Prior are jointly complicit in the murder of James Hackett. The paper goes on to say that Palmer and Prior believed that Hackett was a former MI6 agent named Stanley Whitestone, who disappeared twelve years ago, and that the two cabinet ministers held him responsible for the deaths of Palmer’s daughter and Prior’s son at that time. We hope to have more on this before the program’s end.”

  Felicity turned toward Stone. “Can I get to your fax machine in Dick’s office?” she asked. “It’s late in London; I may have something by now.”

  Stone unlocked his cousin’s little office. Felicity went to the fax machine and came back with a couple of sheets of paper. The headline screamed:FOREIGN MINISTER AND HOME SECRETARY BLAMED BY MI6 IN MURDER OF U.S. SECURITY FIRM CHIEF

  Felicity handed the other sheet to Freeman.

  Freeman read it. “And I thought Jim was being paranoid,” he said. “He predicted what would happen.”

  Stone spoke up. “You mean, when he told you about this you didn’t believe him?”

  “Jim had a way of drawing worst-case implications from any problem,” Freeman said. “It worked for him in business a lot of the time, but I’ll admit, this sounded a bit far-fetched to me. Obviously, I was wrong.”

  “You can take some comfort in the fact that he acted on his instincts by coming up here,” Stone said. “Have you any idea how the assassin might have located him?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Freeman said. “How did he contact you and ask you to come up here?”

  “He gave me a prototype of a phone scrambler your people are working on,” Stone replied. “I got a call from him last night.”

  “Then that has to be it,” Freeman said.

  “You mean a scrambled message was intercepted? Didn’t the thing work?”

  “It worked between landlines and landlines,” Freeman replied, “but I just learned this morning that some cell towers have not yet been equipped with the requisite electronics to scramble every call when one end of the conversation is from a cell phone.”

  “But how could they intercept a cell phone call from up here? They wouldn’t have known where it was.”

  “They could intercept it from your phone,” Freeman said.

  “Remember,” Felicity interjected, “the foreign secretary knew you were in touch with Hackett.”

  Freeman looked at Stone. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Felicity spoke up. “I hired Stone to help find Stanley Whitestone,” she said.

  “Was Jim Whitestone?” Stone asked.

  Freeman shook his head. “I don’t know. If he was, he never confirmed it to me.”

  “Tell me,” Stone said, “if Jim were Whitestone, would he have had the resources to establish an identity as Hackett twelve years ago?”

  “Yes, but he would have had to establish that identity longer ago than that. Still, he could have done it.”

  Felicity went to the bar and poured herself a brandy, then went and stood at the window, looking out on the harbor. A big moon was rising as the sun set, illuminating the boats at their moorings.

  There was a slapping noise, and Felicity emitted an involuntary shout and fell to the floor.

  Stone dove for the light switch, and the room went dark. He crawled across the floor past Freeman to where Felicity lay and turned her over.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “What was that? There was this noise right in front of me.”

  Freeman spoke up. “I can see from here,” he said. “The window is broken, but it didn’t shatter.”

  Stone crawled out of the living room and found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer. He got down and crawled back to Felicity, then played the light on the broken window. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “There’s a bullet stuck in the glass.”

  “Impossible,” Freeman said.

  “No, all the glass in this house is armored. The CIA installed it when Dick was building the house.” He held the light steady, so Freeman and Felicity could see.

  “Well, thank God for the CIA!” Felicity said.

  Stone got out his cell phone and called Captain Scott Smith’s office and was transferred to his cell.

  “Captain Scott Smith,” he said.

  “Captain, it’s Stone Barrington. Our assassin is still out there; he just took a shot at my house. Fortunately, the armored glass stopped the bullet.”

  “I’ll get a chopper over there right away,” Smith said.

  “Hang on,” Stone said. He crawled to the back door and opened it. The sound of a boat’s engine could be heard leaving the harbor. He looked outside. “Captain, there’s a boat leaving the harbor right now. It’s just turning the point, headed south. It’s not wearing any nav lights.”

  “We’re on it,” the captain said. “I’ll call you if we have any luck.” He hung up.

  Stone stood up. “I think we’re all right now,” he said, helping up Felicity, who was still clutching her glass of brandy. “You didn’t spill a drop,” he said.

  “Well,” she replied, “it’s awfully good brandy.”

  56

  It was past midnight by the time the state police had cleared the house. “You folks had better get some sleep,” Captain Scott Smith said as he left.

  Stone shook his hand and closed the door behind him. “How is everyone?” he asked.

  “Wide awake,” Felicity replied.

/>   “I’m wired,” said Freeman.

  “I’m not sure this is over,” Stone said. “Why don’t we get out of here right now and fly to Teterboro?”

  “I’ll pack,” Felicity said.

  “I’ll arrange a car to meet us,” Freeman said. “And I think you two should stay again at our company suite at the Plaza.”

  “That’s good for me,” Stone said.

  LESS THAN AN hour later Stone taxied to the end of the short Islesboro runway. He switched on the pitot heat, centered the heading bug and turned on the landing light and strobes.

  “Want me to call the speeds for you?” Freeman asked. He was in the copilot’s seat, while Felicity sat in the rear of the airplane.

  “Please do,” Stone replied. He set the takeoff speeds so that they would appear next to the airspeed tape on the primary flight display, then he stood on the brakes and shoved the throttles all the way forward to the takeoff detent. The ribbons on the power display rose and stopped at full power. Stone released the brakes, and the airplane leapt forward.

  “Airspeed’s alive,” Freeman said. “Seventy knots. V1, rotate!” Stone put both hands on the yoke and pulled it sharply back, and the Mustang began to climb.

  “That is a very short runway,” Freeman breathed.

  At 700 feet Stone pulled the throttles back to the climb detent, switched on the autopilot and turned the heading bug to the southwest. Then he went into the flight plan and tuned in ENE—Kennebunk—their first waypoint, pressed direct, enter, enter and NAV on the autopilot. The airplane picked up the GPS heading for Kennebunk, and they climbed at 3,000 feet per minute into the cool Maine night.

  At flight level 330, 33,000 feet, Stone let the airplane gain some airspeed, then pulled the throttles back to the cruise detent. There was nothing more to do until they picked up the Automated Traffic Advisory Service, ATIS, at Teterboro.

  “Are you enjoying flying the Mustang?” Freeman asked.

  “I am,” Stone said.

  “Then continue to use it whenever you like,” Freeman replied.

  “Did Jim plan for a succession?” Stone asked.

  “He did. The documents are signed and in the safe in his office. I’ll present them to the board in a few days, but as of right now, I’m CEO, and it will stay that way.”