Stone Cold

The agent stared at the rumpled Stone. “National security! The guy looks borderline homeless.”

“Actually, he works in a cemetery,” Alex said helpfully.

The agent just shook his head and then followed Stone, who was over near the cliffs.

What had caught Stone’s eye was the gas regulator post. As he headed toward it the same agent called out, “We’ve checked that out already. Obvious point.”

“And?”

“And it was working fine and no forced entry.”

“There wouldn’t be any sign of forced entry if the person knew what he was doing. But the gas pressure can be manipulated from here?”

“Presumably. But we checked the box and the pressure hadn’t been changed.”

Stone recalled the long window of Gray’s house looking out onto the cliffs. There was something gnawing at his memory. He turned back to the agent.

“Well, if you can change the pressure, you can change it back.”

“Okay, anything else strike you funny?” the man asked.

“Let’s say you greatly increase the gas pressure going into the house, which blows out the safety overrides. In seconds the place is filled with gas.”

“But you need something to ignite that gas.”

“Turning on a light would create enough of a spark to do it.”

“True. We’ve got some bomb-sniffing dogs coming out. Unless they turn up some dynamite or C4, we might have to look at the gas angle more closely.”

Stone suddenly remembered what he needed to. He left the agent and rejoined Alex.

“Anything occur to you?” Alex asked.

“You fill the house with gas by manipulating the pressure. A light spark will ignite the gas, but if Gray is asleep you can’t count on that. And you don’t want him to smell the gas and escape. So you have a man standing about two hundred yards from the back of the house, near the cliffs over there. He fires an incendiary bullet through the window. The bullet passes through the glass, igniting on impact and triggering the gas explosion. If they find a colored bit of metal in there it may be from the bullet’s nose. Incendiary rounds are typically colored so people don’t mix them up.”

Alex nodded thoughtfully. “But how would he get away? The front was blocked. Unless the guard who got burned passed out and didn’t see the guy get by him.”

Stone and Alex walked back over to the agent. “Any evidence of the person leaving through the woods over there?” Stone asked the FBI man.

The agent shook his head. “We’ve been all over it. No trace, and there would have been. And there’s no easy way to get back to the main road from there.”

“But the person could have left directly by the main road, then?”

“Don’t think so. I forgot to mention that the guard who got burned said the guy who helped him ran back this way, not toward the road.”

Stone walked over to the cliffs with the agent tagging along. “Then he went out this way. Probably came in the same way.”

The agent looked down. “That’s sheer rock, a good thirty feet.”

“It’s not sheer. There’re plenty of handholds if you know where to look.”

“Okay, you climb up. But what about the going down part?”

“Well, since I don’t see anything around here you could attach a rope to, I’m assuming he jumped.”

The agent gazed at the swirling water far below. “That’s impossible.”

“Not really.” Stone thought, Actually, I did the same thing thirty years ago. Only it was fifty feet up and there were people shooting at me.

Stone drove back to D.C. with Alex.

“Not a bad morning’s work,” Alex said appreciatively.

“Knowing how it was done and finding out who did it are two very different things. Carter Gray had a lot of enemies.”

“Granted, but don’t you have any guesses? I mean he had to have some reason to want to meet with you.”

Stone hesitated. He didn’t like keeping things back from Alex, but sometimes honest disclosure, even for good reasons, turned out to be a bad decision. “I don’t believe it’s connected.”

He could tell Alex didn’t buy this statement, but he chose not to add to it.

As they drove on Stone stared out the window. Three men he’d worked with decades ago were suddenly all dead. Carter Gray had met to warn him about this strange chain of events. The very night of that warning he had been blown up. Whoever had done this had found three deeply covered, highly skilled former assassins and murdered them. And then he had succeeded in killing Carter Gray, a man who had few peers when it came to outwitting the competition.

A person smart enough to do all that could conceivably discover who Oliver Stone really was. And come and kill him too.

And maybe I would deserve it, Stone thought. Because the only thing he had in common with the dead men was that they were all former killers themselves.

CHAPTER 18

ANNABELLE STOOD OUTSIDE the gates of the cemetery where Stone was caretaker. After her talk with Leo and her conversation with Stone, she had made up her mind. This was not Oliver Stone’s fight. Friend or not, she could not allow him to get involved. If Bagger somehow killed him, Annabelle knew she could not live with that guilt.

The gates were locked, but with a tension tool and lock pick two minutes later they were open and she was on the front porch of the cottage. She slipped the note she had taken nearly an hour to compose, despite its brevity, under the door. A minute later she was back in her car. Three hours later she was riding into the sky inside a United Airlines jet. As the plane tracked the Potomac River on the climb out, Annabelle glanced out the window. Georgetown was directly below them. She thought she could see the little well-tended cemetery, his cemetery. Perhaps he was down there amid the hallowed ground working away at his tombstones, attending to the dead and buried, atoning for past sins.

“So long, Oliver Stone,” she said to herself. Good-bye, John Carr.

“I love this Internet crap,” Bagger bellowed as he stared at the papers one of his IT guys had just handed to him.

“It is quite amazing, Mr. Bagger,” the young bespectacled man began in an immodest tone. “And frankly-”

“Get the hell outta here,” Bagger roared and the terrified man fled.

Bagger sat down behind his desk and studied the papers again. He’d retained an Internet search organization. He didn’t know what their sources were and he didn’t really care. They had delivered, that’s all that mattered. Annabelle Conroy had walked down the aisle, over fifteen years ago, with a guy named Jonathan DeHaven. They had been married, ironically Bagger thought, in Vegas. The downside was there were no pictures of the happy couple, only the names. It had to be the same Annabelle Conroy, how many people getting married in Sin City would have that name? But he had to be sure. So Bagger picked up his phone and called a PI firm he had used in the past. These folks worked right on the edge of the envelope and occasionally skirted past that barrier. He loved them for it, and also because they got results. He would have put them onto Annabelle before now, but he wanted a piece of information for them to start with, and now he had it. When people got married they signed lots of documents. And they had to live somewhere and get things like insurance, and utilities and maybe wills and cars in both the names.