“Congratulations.”
“I was beginning to think I’d be on the run for the rest of my life.”
“Not anymore. Tell me, do you really think that British intelligence has the wherewithal to track you anywhere and cause your demise?”
“Well, they’re not the CIA, but they do have a long arm. As you have seen, finding one man is not all that hard, especially if he has as many business interests as I do.”
“Somehow I think of them as a smaller, cozier operation.”
“Again, compared to the CIA, perhaps they are. But over the years they have built up very good resources. Remember, they were in business before the United States had any kind of intelligence service.”
“I suppose so,” Stone said, “seeing that ours only goes back to World War II and the OSS.”
“Which became the CIA after the war,” Hackett pointed out.
“Do they have assassins on the payroll?” Stone asked.
“I should imagine so, though that service would be used rarely enough that they could rely on contract agents.”
“Are there really contract assassins in the world of intelligence?”
“Oh, yes,” Hackett replied. “I could put you in touch with two or three, should you ever require their services. Not that I have ever used them, of course.”
“Jim, from what you and Mike Freeman have told me about Strategic Services, you seem to be running your own private intelligence agency.”
“Yes, we are, but not on a governmental scale. And no national intelligence service would have our divisions for manufacturing, like our armored vehicle operation and our electronics section. Just between you and me, those divisions sell to several intelligence services on a regular basis.”
“Things like the telephone scrambler that we’ve been using?”
“Yes, but we still have a little more work to do on that,” Hackett replied. “In a few weeks we should have a prototype with much-improved sound quality on the level of, say, a cell phone.”
“I would imagine there would be a big demand for that from the business community,” Stone said.
“Indeed, yes. We’re already drawing up marketing plans. And it will work just as well on a single hotel room line as on an office system like yours. Also, the final prototype will be smaller than the unit you have.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Thank you.”
Stone took a deep breath and asked, “Jim, are you Stanley Whitestone?”
Hackett raised an eyebrow. “Probably not.”
“You’re not going to give me a straight answer on that?”
“Stone, it might be dangerous to do so, given your connections.”
“Dangerous for whom?”
“For Stanley Whitestone.”
Stone laughed. “All right, then, if you won’t answer that question, perhaps you’ll answer another.”
“You can ask,” Hackett replied.
“What was this all about? Why would the foreign secretary and the home secretary be so anxious to find and, perhaps, kill a man who left their service a dozen years ago?”
“Didn’t Felicity tell you?”
“I’m not entirely certain she knows,” Stone said. “If she does, she wouldn’t tell me.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it would do any harm to tell you. After all, you’ve shown me that you know how to keep a confidence.”
“I’m all ears,” Stone said.
“Felicity probably didn’t tell you that both the foreign secretary and the home secretary, earlier in their careers, had connections with MI6.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“The home secretary, whose name is Prior, had a more informal connection, but the foreign secretary, whose name is Palmer, was actually, for a time, an agent.”
“I’ve never heard that,” Stone said.
“And you didn’t hear it here,” Hackett replied.
“Did they know you-rather, Whitestone-on a professional basis?”
“They did, Palmer more closely, since he worked with Whitestone. They were such good friends that Palmer invited Whitestone down to his place in the country for a weekend on one occasion.”
“Sounds chummy.”
“Oh, it was. Prior was there, too. He was a parliamentary private secretary to a previous home secretary at that time.”
“Does their enmity for Whitestone date to that weekend in the country?”
“I suppose you could say that in that weekend lay the germ of their enmity.”
“What happened there?”
Hackett sighed. “All right, here goes. Pay attention. Palmer had a daughter, a beautiful and brilliant girl, who was a doctoral candidate at Cambridge. She was twenty-four.”
“How does she come into this?”
“In spite of the age difference, she and Whitestone were drawn to each other, and an affair ensued.”
“Are you telling me that this whole business hinges on a May-September affair?”
“It went further than that,” Hackett said. “The girl found herself pregnant, as the British like to say.”
“And Whitestone was the father?”
“He was the only candidate,” Hackett said. He was gazing out the window at Penobscot Bay now.
“Wouldn’t he marry her?”
“Alas, he was already married, and a divorce would have taken two years to achieve, assuming his wife was agreeable to the split.”
“So what happened?”
“Things became more complicated,” Hackett said.
52
They sat quietly for a moment while the housekeeper cleared away their lunch dishes. When she had finished, Stone asked, “Complicated? How?”
“Part of what I have to tell you was not directly known by Whitestone; he figured it out later.”
“Tell me.”
“Palmer’s daughter-Penelope-told Whitestone she wanted to have the child, that she would wait for him to get a divorce and marry her.”
“And how did Whitestone feel about that?”
“He was very willing, and he told her so in no uncertain terms.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Alas, no. Penelope was terribly frightened of what her father would do if he found out about her pregnancy, and, of course, she could hardly conceal it for long.”
“So she had an abortion?”
“Abortion was legal at the time, but she was afraid to go to a clinic, for fear that the gutter press would find out. She knew her father was planning a political career, and she was afraid the news would ruin his chances. He was going to run for a Conservative seat in the district where his country home was. It was a very conservative district-with a small C-you see.”
“So, what did she do?”
“She had a friend who was a medical student, and she confided in him. He had seen a D & C performed, and even though he had not performed one himself, he agreed to do the procedure. A bank holiday weekend was coming up, and they borrowed a country cottage outside Cambridge. He brought the necessary instruments and
