Stone Cold

think, still talk. He said a few words and none of them constituted a mumble. His face didn’t seem lopsided. He had felt no pain beforehand, other than his usual. That was the problem; he could feel nothing in his limbs now, nothing at all. His gaze ran down his arm until it reached his left hand. He tried to rub the fingers together but his mind’s command apparently was not reaching the digits.

Yet earlier there had been something on his fingers. It had felt slick, like Vaseline. You could rub and rub and never get it to feel dry. He had washed his hands when he got home, and that seemed to do the trick. The fingers didn’t feel slick anymore. He didn’t know if it was due to the soap and water or to whatever it was having evaporated.

Then the truth hit him like a.50 caliber round. Or absorbed. As in absorbed into my body.

Where had his fingers become wet? He strained his mind to think. Not this morning. Not at the store, or the deli. After that? Perhaps. Getting in the car. The car handle! If he could have managed it, Ross would’ve sat up in a Eureka! moment. But he couldn’t manage it. He could now barely breathe. All that emitted from his mouth was a sort of shortened wheeze. The door handle of his car had been slicked with something that was now killing him. He eyed the phone on the nightstand. Two feet away and it might as well have been in China for all the good it would do him now.

In the darkness the figure appeared beside his bed. The man wore no disguise; Ross could make out his features even in the weak light. He was young and normal-looking. Ross had seen thousands of faces just like that and had paid little attention to any of them. His job had not involved normal; it had encompassed extraordinary. He couldn’t imagine how someone like this man had managed to kill him.

As Ross’ breathing became more labored, the fellow pulled something from his pocket and held it up to him. It was a photo, but Ross couldn’t make out who was in the picture. Realizing this, Harry Finn flicked on a small penlight and shone it on the photo. Ross’ gaze ran up and down the image. Still recognition didn’t come until Finn said the name.

“Now you know,” Finn said quietly. “Now you know.”

He put the photo away and stood silently looking down at Ross as the paralysis continued to wend its way through. He kept his gaze on the other man until the chest gave one last erratic heave and the pupils turned glassy.

Two minutes later Harry Finn was walking through the woods at the back of Ross’ house. The next morning he was on a plane, this time in the main cabin. He landed, drove home, kissed his wife, played with his dog and picked the kids up from school. That night they all went out to dinner to celebrate his youngest child, eight-year-old Susie, being named to portray a talking tree in a school play.

Around midnight, Harry Finn ventured downstairs to the kitchen, where George the faithful Labradoodle rose from his soft bed and greeted him. As he sat at the kitchen table and stroked the dog, Finn mentally crossed Dan Ross off his list.

Now he focused on the next name: Carter Gray, the former chief of America’s intelligence empire.

CHAPTER 4

ANNABELLE CONROY stretched out her long legs and watched the landscape drift by outside the window of the Amtrak Acela train car. She almost never took the train anywhere; her ride was typically at 39,000 feet where she popped peanuts, sipped watered-down seven-dollar cocktails, and dreamt up the next con. Today she was on the train because her companion, Milton Farb, would not set foot on anything that had the capacity and intent to leave the ground.

“Flying is the safest way to travel, Milton,” she’d informed him.

“Not if you’re on a plane that’s in a death spiral. Then your chances of dying are roughly one hundred percent. And I don’t like those odds.”

It was hard to argue with geniuses, Annabelle had discovered. Still, Milton, the man with the photographic memory and a budding talent for brilliantly lying to people, had done good work. They had left Boston after a successful job. The item was back where it needed to be and no one had thought to call the cops. In Annabelle’s world of high-stakes cons that was equal to perfection.

Thirty minutes later, as Amtrak’s only bullet train service wound its way down the East Coast and pulled into a station, Annabelle glanced out the window and involuntarily shuddered when the conductor announced they were arriving in Newark, New Jersey. Jersey was Jerry Bagger land, although thankfully the Acela train didn’t stop at Atlantic City where the maniacal casino boss had his empire. If it did Annabelle wouldn’t have been on it.

Yet she was smart enough to realize that Jerry Bagger had every motivation to leave Atlantic City and come looking for her wherever she might be. When you ripped a guy like that off for $40 million, assuming that Bagger would do his best to tear thousands of pieces of your flesh off one at a time was hardly irrational thinking.

She glanced over at Milton, who looked about eighteen with his boyish face and longish hair. In reality the man was pushing fifty. He was on his computer, doing something that neither Annabelle nor anyone else below the level of genius would be able to understand.

Bored, Annabelle rose, went to the cafe car and purchased a beer and a bag of chips. On the way back she spied a New York Times lying discarded on one of the cafe tables. She sat down on a stool, drank her beer and munched her chips as she idly turned the pages looking for that one bit of information that might spark her next adventure. Once she got back to Washington, D.C., she had some decisions to make, chiefly whether to stay put or flee the country. She knew what her answer should be. A no-name island in the South Pacific was the safest place for her right now, where she could just wait out the tsunami named Jerry. Bagger was in his mid-sixties and her long con against him had without a doubt considerably raised the man’s blood pressure. With a little luck he’d soon croak from a heart attack and she would be scot-free. However, she couldn’t count on that. With Jerry you just had to figure that all your luck would turn out to be bad.

It shouldn’t have been a difficult decision and yet it was. She had grown close, or as close as someone like her could get, to an oddball collection of men who called themselves the Camel Club. She smiled to herself as she thought about the foursome, one of whom was named Caleb Shaw and worked at the Library of Congress. He reminded her remarkably of the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz. Then her smile faded. Oliver Stone, the head of this little band of miscreants, was something altogether more. He must’ve had one hell of a past, Annabelle thought-a history that might even surpass hers in the unusual and extraordinary department, and that was saying something. She didn’t know if she could say good-bye to Oliver Stone. She doubted she would ever run across another one like him.

Her gaze flicked up at a young man passing by who did not attempt to hide his admiration for her tall, curvy figure, long blonde hair, and thirty-six-year-old face that, if it didn’t actually hit the “wow” level, came awfully close. This was so despite a small, fishhook-shaped scar under her eye; a present from her father, Paddy Conroy, the best short con artist of his generation, and the world’s worst father, at least in his only child’s estimation.

“Hey,” the young man said. With his lean physique, tousled hair and expensive clothes that were designed to appear cheap and grungy, he looked like an Abercrombie amp; Fitch ad. She quickly sized him up as a privileged college kid with far more money than was healthy and the insufferably cocky attitude to match.

“Hey back at you,” she said and returned to her newspaper.

“Where you headed to?” he asked, sitting down next to her.

“Not where you’re headed.”

“But you don’t know where I’m going,” he said in a playful tone.

“That’s sort of the point, right?”

He either didn’t get her point or didn’t care. “I go to Harvard.”

“Wow, I never would’ve guessed that.”

“But I’m from Philly. The Main Line. My parents have an estate there.”

“Wow again. It’s nice to have parents who have estates,” she said in a clearly uninterested tone.

“It’s also nice to have parents who are out of the country half the time. I’m having a little party there tonight.