He chuckled. Annabelle had posed as a CIA operative when running her scam on him. Well, he would show the lady what real intelligence was.

He said into the phone, “Hey, Joe, it’s Jerry Bagger, got a job for you. A really, really important job. I need to find an old friend. And I need to do it fast because I want to wrap my arms around her and give the lady a nice big squeeze.”

CHAPTER 19

WHEN STONE ARRIVED back home he saw the note. Instinctively knowing what it was before he even opened it, he still took his time reading through it. When he was done he sat back and sighed deeply. Then he got angry. He called Reuben, Milton and Caleb. He told them there would be a meeting of the Camel Club that night at his cottage. Though Caleb whined about having to work late to finish a project, Stone insisted that he be there. “It’s important, Caleb. It has to do with our friend.”

“Which friend?” he’d said suspiciously.

“Susan.”

“Is she in trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll be there,” Caleb said without hesitation.

Stone spent the next few hours working in the cemetery, shoring up old tombstones that always seemed to lose their grip on the earth after a rainstorm no matter how many times he straightened and reinforced them. He was not merely doing busy work. He wanted to get something that had been buried for a long time, both in the ground and also in his mind.

The old tombstone had a statue of an eagle perched on top. Pretending to be trying to straighten the headstone in case anyone was watching, Stone let it fall to the ground as though by accident. Revealed underneath was a small hole in the dirt. In this hole was a rectangular-shaped airtight metal box. Stone lifted the box out and placed it in the trash bag he was using to collect weeds. He left the tombstone on its side, dusted off his hands and went inside the cottage with the bag.

At his desk he opened the box with a key he kept taped behind the light switch panel in his tiny bathroom. He spread the box’s contents out in front of him. This was his insurance policy, in case anyone ever came looking to do him harm. Stone had been smart enough to know that what he was being asked to do for his country could be seen, from another perspective, as simply crimes done under the flimsy banner of counterintelligence. He had been told on countless occasions that if he or his team members were ever caught during one of their missions, they couldn’t rely on Uncle Sam to bail them out. They were on their own. To young men possessing special skills and insane levels of confidence that had seemed like a challenge they couldn’t refuse.

He and men like Lou Cincetti and Bob Cole had often joked, in sessions of gallows humor, that if their capture seemed imminent they would each simply shoot the other, fittingly leaving the world together, as a team. Yet as the years passed and the killings went on, Stone had started collecting information and documentation from these “tasks.” Uncle Sam could say he wouldn’t be there for him, but it was another thing altogether if Stone could hold his agency accountable. In the end none of it had mattered, though. His wife had died, his daughter was lost to him and the people who’d ordered his destruction, simply because he didn’t want to kill anymore, had never suffered a single minute for it.

Stone stared at one photo for a long time. It was from Vietnam when he’d still been a soldier, albeit one with highly specialized skills. He had been given the assignment of assassinating a North Vietnamese politician, a man the enemy had been rallying around. Normally, long-range sniping was done by a team. You had lookouts and spotters and people to check the wind and other weather conditions. However, Stone had been sent in alone, charged with a task that even for him seemed impossible. He would be dropped by chopper into a jungle crawling with Viet Cong. He was to travel five miles by foot over dangerous terrain and kill the man at a rally that would be attended by over ten thousand people, with massive military security. He was then to reverse his tracks and travel miles back to an assigned spot that would be difficult to find in the daylight, much less at night. The chopper would be there precisely four hours after dropping him off. It would make one pass. If he wasn’t back in time, Stone was target practice for the Viet Cong.

Ostensibly he’d been chosen for what amounted to a suicide mission because he was the best they had; the finest shooter and the most tireless in the field, it was generally acknowledged. Back then Stone was a machine. He could run all day and night. He had been dropped into the South China Sea from a chopper once, and swam miles through rough water to kill someone deemed hostile to the United States. From half a mile away he’d placed a shot through the man’s head while he sat at his kitchen table reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette. Then he’d swum back out and been picked up by a sub.

Yet with the assignment in Vietnam Stone had suspected his superiors were making a statement about his increasingly reluctant attitude about the war. Some of them were no doubt praying he would fail. And die. He hadn’t accommodated them that night. He had killed the politician from a challenging distance even for a top sniper using a scope that expert marksmen today would have laughed at. Stone had made it back to the clearing to find the chopper about to turn off after its single pass. He knew the pilots had seen him but apparently couldn’t be bothered to come back to get him. He put a heavy-caliber round right through the open cargo doors to show them the error of their ways.

They had landed, only momentarily, but enough to allow him to jump on the skids. As the chopper flew off, shots poured at them from the jungle below. Stone had run that night like never before in his life. Yet, still, he hadn’t been that far ahead of a battalion of angry North Vietnamese. It had been that successful assignment that had garnered the attention of the CIA, and resulted in his induction into the “esteemed group” of government assassins known as the Triple Six Division.

The Triple Six was a component that even most people at the Agency didn’t realize existed. They probably slept better for not knowing. Yet every “civilized” country had its assassins who did things to protect their national interests, and America was certainly entitled to hers. At least that was the company line.

Stone turned to another piece of paper with some names on it and a photo attached. They were Stone, Bob Cole, Lou Cincetti, Roger Simpson, Judd Bingham and Carter Gray. This was the only photo he knew of that had all six men in it. And it had only been possible because, after a particularly difficult mission, they had all gone out and gotten drunk as soon as the plane touched back down on American soil. As Stone looked into his mostly unlined face from decades ago, a killer’s confident face that had no idea of the personal hardship and loss to come, he felt a heaviness in his chest.

He squinted at the picture of the tall, elegant man that Roger Simpson had been back then. Simpson had never been a field agent; instead, like Carter Gray, he’d orchestrated the activities of Stone and the others from a relatively safe distance. He had gone on to the political arena where he was still tall, still handsome. However, the ambitious streak he possessed that had seemed a very positive attribute when he was younger had turned him over three decades later into a devious plotter and a man who never forgot a slight no matter how trivial. Not content merely to be one of a hundred senators, he desperately wanted the presidency, and had worked long and hard to win it. And when the term of the current president ended, it seemed that Simpson was indeed a front-runner to take his place. His wife, a former Miss Alabama, gave him a glamour quotient that the somewhat stiff Simpson could never have inspired himself. It was discreetly and anonymously bandied about that Mrs. Simpson didn’t really enjoy her husband’s company all that much. Yet apparently she wanted to be First Lady badly enough to play along.