Stone Cold

He stayed up all night, in fact. The image of Rayfield Solomon would not leave his mind. Every time he tried to close his eyes, all he saw was the man’s gaze ripping into him, the words eating away his soul.

I am an innocent man.

Stone hadn’t wanted to admit it then, but all these years later, he could. Solomon had been telling the truth. Stone had killed an innocent man. Somehow he had known that this death would come back to haunt him. In fact, the Solomon case was one of the reasons Stone decided to leave Triple Six. It was a decision that ultimately destroyed his family.

They had called him a traitor, just like they had Solomon. And just like Solomon he’d been innocent. How many more Rayfield Solomons might have wrongly died by his hand?

He closed the journal and the cab dropped him off a few minutes later. He called Reuben, because if Gray couldn’t find Stone he would use any means possible to flush him out, including kidnapping his friends.

Stone said calmly, “The big man we thought was gone isn’t. Is your phone listed in your name?” Stone thought he knew the answer because he knew Reuben very well.

“Nope, I’m actually piggybacking on a friend of mine’s service,” Reuben said evasively.

“Luckily you just recently moved and don’t have an official address. Otherwise I would’ve already had you relocate.”

“I got evicted from the other place, Oliver. Left in the middle of the night because I wanted to avoid a certain rental dispute.”

“Now everyone needs to lay low because friends of mine are valuable to him. I’ll check in later.”

He needed information from the inside and he needed it now. There was only one man who was in a position to give it to him. Stone hadn’t seen the fellow in thirty years, but figured now was a good time to get reacquainted. Indeed, he wondered now why he hadn’t made the visit decades ago. Perhaps he’d been afraid of the answer. Now he was no longer scared.

He had focused on the Rayfield Solomon case because, in his long career, it had been the one Stone felt the most regret for. After he’d been assigned to kill the man, Stone researched his background. He hardly seemed like a traitor, though that was not Stone’s case to make. He’d heard of Solomon’s personal link to the legendary spy Lesya. And if she’d survived and was still out there, the woman might be exacting her revenge on the people who’d killed Solomon. An innocent man.

CHAPTER 63

MAX HIMMERLING closed his book, yawned and stretched. Ever since his wife, Kitty, had died of cancer two years ago, his routine rarely varied. He worked, he came home, he ate a simple meal, he read a chapter in a book and he went to bed. It was an unexciting life, but his life at work was exciting enough. He had grown bald and fat in the service of his country. A nearly forty-year veteran of the CIA-he’d started there right out of college-his job was totally unique. Blessed with the most orderly of minds, he was like a central clearinghouse for the most diverse sort of matters. How would a coup in Bolivia or Venezuela orchestrated by the U.S. impact on the West’s interests in the Middle East or China? Or if oil dropped another buck a barrel, would it behoove the Pentagon to open a forward military base in such-and-such country? In a time of supercomputers and servers filled with trillions of bytes of data and spy satellites that stole your secrets from outer space, it made Max feel good that there was still a strong human element in the work of his agency.

He was unknown outside the corridors of Langley, was considered only a low-level bureaucratic grunt within it, and would receive neither wealth nor honors. Yet to the people who mattered, Max Himmerling was an indispensable asset to the world’s most elite intelligence-gathering agency. And that was enough for him. Indeed, after his wife’s passing, it was all he had left. His importance to his agency was represented by the two armed men who guarded the exterior of his house when he was home. Himmerling would retire in two years and dreamed of traveling to some of the places he’d analyzed all these decades. He was worried, though, that his money would run out before his life did. The government provided a good package and first-rate health care, but he hadn’t saved much on his own, and to continue living in this area, which he very much wanted to do, was expensive. He supposed he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

He lifted his tired, fleshy body from his easy chair and started up the stairs to his bedroom. He never made it.

The figure came from nowhere. The shock of the man standing in his living room nearly gave Max a heart attack. That was nothing compared to the shock he received when the intruder spoke.

“It’s been a long time, Max.”

Max put a hand against the wall to steady himself. He said in a shaky voice, “Who are you? How’d you get past the guards?”

Stone stepped into the small wash of light from a table lamp. “You remember the Triple Sixes, don’t you, Max? How about John Carr? That name ring any bells for you? If it does, even after all these years, you can pretty much figure out how I got past the two idiots lying unconscious outside that you call guards.”

Max stared up fearfully into the face of the tall, lean man standing across the room from him. “John Carr? It can’t be. You’re dead.”

Stone stepped closer to him. “You know everything that goes on at CIA. So you knew John Carr wasn’t in that grave they dug up.”

Max slumped back down in his chair and looked pitifully at Stone. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You’re the great brain. You always figured out the best logistics for our missions. They almost always went off without a hitch. And when they didn’t you were always thousands of miles away. So what the hell did you care? It was our asses on the line, not yours. So tell me, great brain, why am I here? And don’t disappoint me. You know how I hate to be disappointed.”

Max drew in a sharp breath. “You want information.”

Stone glided forward and put a vise grip on Max’s arm. “I want the truth.”

Max grimaced from the pressure on his arm, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. His strength was mental, not physical. “About what?”

“Rayfield Solomon. Carter Gray. And anyone else you know who had his finger in that debacle.”

Max had shuddered at the mention of Rayfield Solomon. “Gray’s dead,” he said quickly.

Stone’s long fingers tightened on the man’s arm until a bead of sweat broke over Max’s forehead. “That’s not what I meant by being truthful.”

“His home was blown up, damn it!”

“But he wasn’t in it. Now he’s out there, plotting and planning, just like he always did. Only I’m the target. Again. And I don’t like it, Max. Once was enough.” Stone squeezed harder.

“Look, you can crush my arm if you want, but I can’t tell you things I don’t know about.”

“I’m not going to crush your arm.” Stone let go and slid a knife out from his coat sleeve.

Max wailed, “John, you’re not a killer anymore. You got out. You were always different. We all knew that.”

“That didn’t seem to help me back then. My wanting to get out almost cost me my life.”

“Things were different back then.”

“So people keep telling me. But once a killer, always a killer. I did it very recently, in fact. In self-defense. But I still killed a man. Slit his throat from ten feet away. And he was a former Triple Six. I guess they’re not making ’em like they used to.”

“But I’m defenseless,” Max pleaded.

“I will kill you, Max. And it will be in self-defense. Because if you don’t help me, I’m a dead man. But I’m not going alone.” He placed the edge of the blade against Max’s quivering carotid artery.

“For God’s sake, John, think what you’re doing. And I lost my wife recently. I lost Kitty.”

“I lost my wife too. I didn’t have her nearly as long as you had your Kitty. But then you probably were the one