by Stuart Woods
“Where have you come from, Lance?” Stone asked.
“Paris, of course. You should have known I’d take advantage of your hospitality.”
“I guessed. Whose is the Longitude?”
“The Agency shares it with another one or two. I use it as often as I can to keep it out of their clutches.”
They reached the front door of the house, left the cart and Lance’s luggage to others, and went directly to the library. Rocky and Ed sat in comfortable chairs with drinks, waiting.
“I believe we’re short a couple of ladies,” Rocky said.
“I believe that Dame Sarah is upstairs, changing, and Dame Felicity arrives by boat, and the cart is on the way to meet her.”
“Thank you, yes, Stone,” Lance said. “I would like a single malt—whatever you have—over ice.”
“Was I neglecting you, Lance?” Stone asked, picking up a bottle of Laphroaig and pouring a slug of it on rocks.
Stone poured himself one, in celebration of being on that side of the Atlantic, and joined the group.
“Where are Dino and Viv?” Lance said. “I had thought you were all joined at the hip.”
“We left on short notice,” Stone said, “and they couldn’t get free that quickly.”
“Ah.”
The door opened and Dame Sarah Deerfield entered, practically spilling out of a low-cut black dress, the look offset by snow-white hair. The men leapt to their feet and Rawls did the honors.
“May I introduce my friend, Dame Sarah Deerfield?” he asked.
“Call me Sally,” she said, shaking hands. “Almost everybody does,” she said, with a BBC accent.
“May I get you something to drink?” Stone asked.
“A large bourbon on the rocks,” she said.
Stone poured her a Knob Creek.
Sally had just settled in when Dame Felicity Devonshire bustled into the room. “Good evening, all,” she said. Introductions were unnecessary, since she knew everyone present. “Dear Sally,” she said, air-kissing. “What a nice surprise to see you here. I didn’t know you knew Stone.”
“I didn’t, Felicity, until about three minutes ago. I’m here at the kind invitation of Ed.”
“I’m so glad,” Felicity said, taking an offered chair. “And I come bearing disturbing tidings, I’m afraid.”
That stopped the crowd in their tracks.
27
Stone spoke up. “Well, now that you have our attention, Felicity, do tell us all.”
“I can’t say that I know all,” she said, “but on the boat, crossing the Beaulieu River, I had a call telling me that our late acquaintances, the Pentkovskys, have been replaced by a gentleman called ‘Serge the Greek.’ Or sometimes, just ‘The Greek.’”
Everyone stared blankly at her.
“Oh, none of you know who that is, do you? I’m so relieved. I thought I was going to be the only one who’d never heard of him.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Lance said, blithely. “I just don’t quite understand who he is. And I must say, it seems odd that the Russian Mob should take a Greek as their leader.”
“Oh, he’s only half Greek,” Felicity replied. “His mother was all Greek.”
“Thank you for clearing that up,” Lance said. “Now, who the hell is he?”
“One doesn’t know, does one?”
“Really, Felicity,” Stone said. “It’s unlike you to come to dinner uninformed.”
“Well, I’m at least as informed as anyone else here. Apparently.” She paused for a sip of her martini. “Oh, I was also informed that he worked his way to the top level of the Russian Mob as an assassin. There, that’s every bit of what I know.”
“That’s very unsatisfying,” Lance said, producing an iPhone and typing furiously with his thumbs for half a minute. “There, we’ll know more shortly.”
“Oh, I’ve got my people on it, too,” Felicity said.
“Of course you have,” Lance replied.
The butler entered the room. “My Lords and Ladies,” he intoned. “Dinner is served in the small dining room. If you will come this way.” He led them down the hallway and pushed open the double doors, where a candlelit table awaited them.
While they were being seated, Stone said quietly to the butler, “Geoffrey, for future reference, we have two Ladies present, but no lords. All of the gentlemen are American.”
“I was misinformed, Mr. Barrington. My apologies.” He left the room.
“I wonder,” Lance said, “if Geoffrey has been tasting the wines a bit too enthusiastically.”
“Entirely possible,” Stone said. “I would, in his place.”
* * *
—
They dined on three courses, omitting the fish, and there was some tension in the room because no one’s phone rang. They were back in the library with their port and brandy before Lance’s phone made a noise, followed immediately by Felicity’s. They both consulted their screens.
Lance cleared his throat, and they all turned toward him. “I’m very much afraid,” he said, “that the American intelligence community has nothing on a Serge the Greek.” He turned to Felicity. “How did your people do?”
Felicity shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”
Stone blinked. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible,” he said, “that neither of your firms . . .”
“It’s not possible,” Lance said. “It’s just very peculiar.”
“Most peculiar,” Felicity echoed.
Everyone sat quietly for a minute or so. Finally, Ed Rawls broke the silence. “May I offer a suggestion?” he asked.
“Please do,” Felicity replied.
“I expect that the files of both your firms are, or rather, were, bursting with information on Mr. Greek. It appears that someone has been at your computers and done some erasing.”
“That is an alarming possibility,” Lance said, “but, nevertheless, an intriguing one.”
“I suggest,” Ed said, “that you have your people consult your backup files.”
“If someone has erased his files,” Stone said, “wouldn’t he also erase the backups?”
“Not necessarily,” Ed replied. “The Agency’s last-ditch files are hard copies, and they are tucked away in a former mine somewhere in the western United States. Is that not so, Lance?”
Lance drew a deep breath and heaved a sigh. “It is so, but I’m not sure how recent the most recent files are.”
“Time to find out,” Ed said.
Lance’s thumbs went to work again, and he got an answer almost immediately. He put his phone away. “Sometime tomorrow,” he said. “Perhaps the day after.”
“Felicity?” Stone said. “You don’t seem to be sending any requests to search the tucked away hard copies.”
“I’m afraid,” she said, “we don’t have any hard copies tucked away.”
“I am shocked,” Lance said, not sounding shocked, “but not surprised. Our British cousins have, for some time, enjoyed lording over us our reliance on nonelectronic storage systems, which they perceive not as archival, but as archaic. Perhaps they will now see the error of their ways.”
“Perhaps,” Dame Felicity said, “but perhaps not.”
Stone snuck a glance at his watch. “Felicity, may we offer you shelter for the night?”
“Thank you, Stone. It has begun to rain, and the river is unpleasant in an open boat under those circumstances.”
Stone had already reserved the room next to Lance’s for her, but he left her to search it out, suspecting that she might find Lance’s room along the way. Rawls and Sally Deerfield were looking very chummy, too. Presently, they all went up to bed.
* * *
—
What are the sleeping arrangements?” Rocky asked as they were undressing.
>
“In my arms,” Stone replied.
“Not us: the others.”
“I will leave them to sort that out for themselves. Each of the guest rooms are furnished with bedclothes and dressing gowns.”
“I did notice Felicity casting a hungry look at Lance a couple of times . . .”
“So did I,” Stone said, climbing into the bed.
“But Lance wasn’t returning them.”
“It is part of Lance’s makeup that he does not wish others to know what he does or what he thinks, unless he chooses to be revealing. Tonight, he has chosen to reveal nothing.”
“Whereas I,” she said, climbing in naked beside him, “choose to reveal everything.”
“And lovely it is in the moonlight,” Stone said, reaching for her.
“I noticed that you have not observed the British tendency to close the curtains at dusk.”
“The moonlight is why I have not,” he said, kissing her on a breast.
“I didn’t say anything earlier,” Rocky said, “but I have heard a few things about Serge the Greek.”
Stone curtailed his activities and sat up in his bed. “Tell me,” he said.
So Rocky told him about Serge the Greek.
28
Rocky sat up, too. “Serge the Greek has been, for the past few years, very close to Pentkovsky the younger, while being despised by Pentkovsky the elder. Night or day, Serge has never been far from the elbow of Anton. They were classmates at the GRU academy, and the nature of their relationship was formed there.”
“And what was that nature?”
“Likely, but not certainly homoerotic,” she said. “Neither of them, while appearing often in public with women, was known to have any lasting relationship with a member of the opposite gender. But other parts of their relationship were established in those early days at their academy. Anton as the dominant and Serge as the slightly submissive.”
“‘Slightly submissive’?”
“While Anton was the boss, Serge never did anything that, even for a moment, would have made him look submissive. There are people, now dead, who made the mistake of commenting on their relationship in his hearing.”
“Touchy on that subject, was he?”
“To the extreme.”
“Tell me,” Stone said. “If Serge was always at Anton’s elbow, where was he at Hong Fat, when Ed Rawls blew Anton’s brains out?”
“In the kitchen,” Rocky replied. “Serge is a keen cook, and he asked the management if he could watch the chef preparing their dinners. Ed chose that moment to get his rounds off, and since he was using a silenced weapon, Serge did not immediately notice what was happening, because of the clattering of pots, pans, and dishes. But a few seconds later, the screams from the dining room caught his attention. By that time, Ed was out of there. When Serge emerged from the kitchen and viewed the carnage, he had two ways to try and catch up with the killer, and he chose the wrong one, giving Rawls all the time he needed to depart the neighborhood.”
“How did you acquire this knowledge?”
“I serve with a small division of the Agency, which we and others sometimes call ‘the Pod.’ We pursue our own cases and operations, and have sources of various kinds of information exclusive to us. Lance pays little attention, unless he needs something we specialize in.”
“And what does the Pod specialize in?”
“I’m afraid I have already revealed more than I had intended to. It’s best that I reveal no more, unless it becomes clear to me that the knowledge is needed.”
“So now you’re going to clam up?”
“I have already done so. Now,” she said, “where were we?”
They quickly found their place.
* * *
—
Early in the morning the whir of the electric cart could be heard from the forecourt, and Stone looked out the window in time to see Felicity depart in it for the dock and her boat.
“Anything interesting?” Rocky asked, rolling over.
“Just Felicity leaving, but we can’t know from which room.”
“I got tiny vibes from her,” Rocky said, “that made me think she has almost as much interest in women as in men.”
“You are not mistaken,” Stone said. “And you should be careful, while being nice to her, not to encourage her in that direction, unless you, too, are interested.”
“I am not.”
“Then never let her think that you might be, or one morning, you’ll wake up with her in your bed.”
“She’s head of MI5, is she?”
“No, MI6, the foreign branch. MI5 is more like our FBI, dealing with domestic matters.”
They stopped talking.
“What is that noise?” Rocky asked.
“That was the sound of one or more men in boots running through the gravel of the driveway,” Stone said, getting up and heading for his dressing room.
“Shall I come?”
“No, I’m expected to take an interest, and as soon as I have, I’ll come back for breakfast.”
Stone finished dressing and left the room without another word. He ran lightly down the stairs, almost colliding with Major Bugg, the estate manager, on his way up.
“What’s wrong?” Stone asked.
“Trouble,” Bugg said, panting a little. “One of the Strategic Services men has been found dead, with a knife wound to his throat.”
“Then you’d better call Chief Inspector Holmes,” Stone said.
“I have already done so.”
“And call Dame Felicity’s house and inquire of her health from one of the staff.”
Stone went to the library and debated with himself whether to call Mike Freeman at this hour and wake him up, or wait until later. He called the number.
“What?” Mike said.
“It’s Stone. Bad news. One of your people from your London station was knifed last night and is dead. The police are on their way.”
“I’ll send my station chief, Philip Charter, down from London. Do you know him?”
“We met once, I think. We’ll be ready for him.”
“I know those men well,” Mike said. “Not just anybody could get a knife into any of them without suffering serious damage himself. See if you can find another body, or evidence of a wounding.”
“Certainly.”
“Philip is a Brit. He commanded the Special Air Service, before he retired.”
“Good to know.”
“Don’t try to keep anything from him or ease the blow.”
“Got it.” The two men hung up.
Stone went outside and waited on the front steps for the Hampshire constabulary to show up. They didn’t take long.
Inspector Holmes got out of the Range Rover, walked to where Stone stood, shook his hand. “Tell me everything,” he said.
Stone told him what he knew and some of the background, while Holmes nodded and walked quickly with him down the drive toward the river, where Major Bugg stood by a lump under a blanket.
“Dame Felicity is safe in her bed,” he said to Stone. “We didn’t wake her.”
“How is Dame Felicity involved?” Holmes asked.
“She isn’t. She was here for dinner last night and left the house about sunrise.”
“Is this where you found the body?” Holmes asked Bugg.
“Yes, one of his colleagues found it around seven am.”
“Then the murderer wouldn’t have collided with Dame Felicity,” Holmes said.
“It could have been close,” Stone said.
Holmes turned to one of his men. “I want a body temperature,” he said. “Don’t wait for the medical examiner.”
29
At mid-morning, Colonel Philip Charter got out of a large Mercedes SUV. Stone saw him coming and greeted him on the
front steps. “Good morning, Colonel,” Stone said. “I’m Stone Barrington.” Charter was smaller than Stone, about five-nine, he reckoned, and very trim and fit-looking, appearing to be in his early fifties, with thick gray hair trimmed fairly short.
“Good morning, Mr. Barrington,” he replied, offering his hand. “May I see the body of my colleague?”
Stone drove him there in the cart. Charter whipped away the blanket and examined the man thoroughly, front and back. While they were there, the medical examiner arrived in his van and conducted his own examination. “Dead around three hours,” he said. “Apparent cause of death, exsanguination, as the result of a wound to the artery, applied from behind.”
“I would have thought that impossible,” Charter said, “knowing the man and his capabilities.”
The ME gently rolled him over. “Ah, the knife wasn’t his first wound,” he said. “He was shot from behind at the base of the skull, a small-caliber round, probably a .22. He would have expired virtually instantly, knowing nothing. The knife wound was merely an insult.”
Charter grimaced. “Which will be repaid in full.”
“Come back to the house, and let’s talk,” Stone said.
Charter refused to move until his colleague’s body had been carefully put on a stretcher and placed in the van, then he got back into the cart.
Neither of the two men spoke again until they were comfortably seated in the library and had been served coffee.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like breakfast?” Stone asked.
“I seem to have lost my appetite,” Charter replied.
