The Short Forever (12 page)

25

THEY DRESSED FOR DINNER AND DINED in a smaller room than last time, at a round table, the heavy curtains drawn to shut out the night, in the English fashion. Stone didn’t understand why the Brits did that; he enjoyed the long summer twilights.

The talk ranged through politics, sport, and the relationship between the English and the Americans. Stone noticed that Lord and Lady Wight, during this part of the conversation, seemed to feel that Lance was on their side of things, while Stone and Erica occupied the other. It was as Sarah had said; the Brits were very comfortable with Lance, considering him one of their own. Stone couldn’t figure out why.

Port was served with Stilton at the end of the meal, and Stone sipped warily from his glass, his hangover having only just disappeared. At some invisible signal, the ladies rose and left the room. Stone nearly went with them, but Lance signaled him to stay.

“Over here, the ladies go somewhere, and the gentlemen stick around for cigars,” Lance explained, lighting something Cuban.

Stone despised cigars—smoking them or smelling somebody else smoking them.

Wight did not light a cigar, but sniffed at Lance’s. “My doctor has taken me off them,” he said. “Bloody cruel, if you ask me.” He looked at a pocket watch from his waistcoat. “If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m turning in early. My respects to the ladies.” He got up and left.

They sat quietly for a moment, Stone playing with his port, Lance puffing his cigar and staring at the windows, as if he could see through the thick drapes and out into the night.

“You asked me a strange question the other day,” he said finally. “I’d like to know why.”

“About Hedger?”

Lance nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I have a lot to tell you about that,” Stone said.

Lance waved the cigar, as if motioning him onward.

“Last week a man showed up in my office, recommended by Woodman and Weld, and introduced himself as John Bartholomew.”

Lance shot him a glance.

“I take it you understand the significance of that name,” Stone said.

Lance shrugged slightly.

“He told me that he was concerned about his favorite niece—his dead sister’s child—that she had run off to England with someone of whom he suspected evil things. He retained me to come over here and see if I could disentangle the girl from the clutches of this ogre. Normally, I wouldn’t take on such an assignment, but he had passed muster with Woodman and Weld, and they had urged me to help him, so I came.”

“And how did he expect you to deal with this ogre?” Lance asked, blowing smoke in Stone’s direction.

Stone waved it off with his napkin. “I told him up front that I would not participate in harming him, and that I would not kidnap his niece. He said he would be content if I could get the ogre put into jail.”

Lance laughed, choking on his cigar smoke. “And how did he expect you to do that?” he was finally able to ask.

“He told me that you were supporting yourself by smuggling drugs into Britain—on your person, no less. I had a police contact; when I confirmed Bartholomew’s charges, I intended to put him onto you.”

“And now that you have been unable to confirm this information, what are your intentions?”

“I have none. I resigned from Bartholomew’s employ yesterday.”

“Oh? Why, pray tell?”

“I discovered that he had been lying to me.”

“And how did you do that?”

“I hired two former policemen—one to follow Bartholomew—”

“I imagine that came to naught,” Lance chuckled.

“Not entirely. My policeman had his pocket picked; that’s how I learned that his name is Stanford Hedger.”

“I don’t imagine Stan took kindly to that.”

“He did not. Some of his acquaintances put one of my policemen in the hospital.”

Lance nodded sagely. “Figures. What about the other one?”

“Oh, he was assigned to follow you; actually, the two of them took turns. I had your phones tapped, too.”

Lance turned and looked at Stone for the first time. “You
what
?”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t learn anything. The conversations were very boring. Except for one, that is.”

“And what was that about?”

“Apparently, someone wants something from you, and you don’t want to supply it. I believe you threatened to kill anyone who pressed the issue.”

Lance was obviously thinking back over that conversation. “No names were mentioned, as I recall.”

“That’s correct.”

“So, having left Stan’s employ, you’re back at square one?”

“No, square one was in New York, and now I’m in England and rather enjoying myself. I’m simply a tourist now; I returned Hedger’s expense money to him, having deducted a sum for the benefit of the injured policeman.”

“What else did Stan tell you about me?”

“He told me of your former, ah, business connection. He told me about the explosion in Cairo, in which, he believes, you were complicit.”

“Ungrateful bastard,” Lance said. “I saved his life, you know. I was about to walk into the building when it blew, knocking me down, and I dragged him out of the ruins, unconscious, and got him to a hospital.”

“Did you think he was dead?”

“That’s what I was told the following day. Then, last year, he turned up at a dinner party in Paris, where I was also a guest. Quite a surprise, I can tell you.”

“I can imagine. Why does Hedger want you in jail?”

“He doesn’t want me in jail; he wants me dead. It would be easy to arrange, of course, if he could get me into a jail; then he could hire somebody to put a shiv in my liver.”

“Why wouldn’t it be easy to make you dead?”

“Because I know too much about him, and he doesn’t know who else I’ve told. For all he knows, there’s a neat little manuscript tied up with red ribbon, waiting in a safe-deposit box at my bank.”

“Is there?”

“Too bloody right there is.”

“Then it’s ironic that he wants you dead for the very same reasons he can’t afford to kill you.”

Lance grinned broadly, the first time Stone had ever seen him do so. “I like the paradox,” he said.

“Tell me some of what you know—not enough for Hedger to want me dead, of course. How does he operate?”

“Oh, Stan manages to use his official connections to arrange unofficial profits for himself.”

“Funny, that’s what he said about you.”

“I use every connection at my disposal,” Lance said readily. “The difference is, I waited until I had left our mutual employer to use them, whereas Stan is still employed and using his contacts to the hilt. There are rules about that.”

“But if you haven’t already made his activities known to his employer, why would you now?”

“That’s what worries Stan, apparently. Personally, I don’t give a shit what he does to make a buck, as long as it doesn’t endanger my own prospects. What Stan fears is that, in competing with him in business, I might turn him in, to get him out of the way. He could end up in prison if I did, you know. At the very least, he’d be bounced out of his job, and without any pension or benefits. He’s only a few years away from retirement, and he wants all that, in addition to the illicit wealth he’s accumulated over the years.”

“These activities have made him rich, then?”

“Not rich enough for Stan’s liking,” Lance replied. “I think he wants to live like a potentate when he retires.”

“Is there that much to be made?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“How much do you know about Stan?”

“I’ve learned that he was something of a wild man in the Company, at least in his youth, and that at least some of his superiors didn’t trust him.”

“That’s accurate information,” Lance said, “as far as it goes.”

“It’s about all I know, so far,” Stone said.

“All right, I’ll tell you about Stan.”

Stone leaned forward, eager to learn.

26

LANCE CABOT GOT UP AND LED STONE into the library, then settled into a leather sofa, inviting Stone to join him.

“What about the ladies?” Stone asked.

“They’re in the drawing room nattering away,” Lance said. “If they want us, they’ll hunt us down.” He had brought the decanter with him, and he refreshed Stone’s port glass and his own.

Stone waited patiently for him to begin.

“Stanford Hedger got out of Yale in the early sixties,” he said, “and he went straight into the Company, having been recruited well before graduation by a professor who later recruited me. It was a good time to join up; he was just completing his training when the Cuban invasion came along—hadn’t had a posting yet, so he couldn’t be blamed for what happened at the Bay of Pigs. But a lot of his superiors were blamed, and a lot of them left the Company, leaving an unusual amount of room for early promotion. Stan was good at languages; he had French, Russian, German, and more than a smattering of Arabic. Later he came by Hebrew, which impressed the Israelis. He was still at the military language school in Monterey, California, when the Bay of Pigs invasion came to grief. It’s a wonderful school; they teach you things like perfect military German or Russian, the idea being that when they got ready to put somebody over a border, he’d blend in.

“Stan got put across what was then the East German border, dressed as a colonel—Stan looked a lot older than he was. He wrought havoc on the other side; he’d walk into a military command when the senior officer was out, flash some bogus orders signed by the Soviet commander, issue a lot of ridiculous orders, and it would take them days, sometimes weeks before they’d get everything straightened out again. He was one step ahead of them for three or four months, then, as they were closing in on him, he hit a West German worker on the head, stole his clothes, and rode back into West Berlin on the S-Bahn, the elevated railway that took several thousand essential workers back and forth to the East from the West every day. It was a bravura performance, almost entirely solo, and it brought him to the attention of the higher-ups—got him decorated, it did.”

“Not a bad start for a bright young man.”

“It was a lot better than not bad, and it helped that Stan came out of a background that the agency loved and trusted—Choate, Yale, and half a dozen of the very best clubs. His father worked for Wild Bill Donovan in the OSS during World War Two, and by that time he was the head of an important New York brokerage house. If you’d tossed the two dozen top men at the Company in a room together and told them to design the perfect agent, they would have come up with Stan.”

“What came next for him?”

“Vietnam. By ’sixty-five, he was on the ground there, in Laos, Thailand, wherever he could do the most good. He was one of two or three guys who invented Air America, the CIA-fronted airline that flew people, equipment, drugs, and all sorts of contraband all over Southeast Asia. He made some money out of that, legend has it.”

“Was he motivated by money?”

“Not at first, probably, but agents in that sort of situation suddenly start seeing it lying around on the ground in neatly tied bundles, and it’s hard not to pick up some of it. Stan spent it as fast as he made or stole it, though; he had an establishment in Saigon that included a townhouse that had formerly belonged to a French governor, a chauffeured Rolls-Royce of a certain vintage, and a mistress who was said to be the most beautiful and the most sexually adventurous female for a thousand miles in any direction. He entertained on a scale not often seen outside the loftier regions of French society—a superb cellar had come with the house—and his guests included everybody of importance who came through the city: journalists, presidential advisiors, senior military figures. It was said that the only reason Hanoi never tried to blow the house to smithereens was that all the servants were Viet Cong, and they reported everything that happened there. Stan, of course, maintained he was running them as double agents.”

Stone had to laugh.

“When the whole thing finally came crashing down, Stan got out on the last helicopter leaving the embassy. You remember a photograph of an American slugging somebody who was clinging to the chopper as it rose?”

“Yes.”

“Look closely, allow for age, and you’ll see that it was Stan. It made him more famous than ever, in certain circles.”

“What happened to the mistress?”

“Funny you should ask. Stan abandoned her at the end, but it’s said that, within a week of the fall of Saigon, she was living with the commandant of what had suddenly become Ho Chi Min City. She had the house all ready and waiting for him. Eventually, she got out of the country and ended up in LA, where she is now running the most exotic bordello the town has ever seen. I’ll give you the number, if you’re going to be out there anytime soon.”

“You never know. What did he do after Vietnam?”

“He had a number of dull postings after that, kept his head down until nobody remembered whose fault Vietnam had been. I met him in the early eighties, when I arrived at the Farm.”

“What farm was that?”

“The Farm is the training school for the covert side of the agency, and by that time, Stan was running it. It’s the intelligence equivalent of an army officer becoming the commandant at West Point.”

“I see.”

“I think Stan saw something of himself in me—though, of course, a slightly dimmer bulb—so he did a lot of mentoring with me and got me into the Monterey school.”

“What language?”

“Arabic; I initially learned it in bed from a Lebanese girlfriend at Yale, and after the Monterey school, I was very good with it. Stan saw that I got a Middle Eastern assignment, a good one. I still can’t tell you much about that, but it involved slinking around various deserts, in mufti, listening a lot. I was limited by my Western appearance, but I did all right. I became something of a specialist, too, at listening in on interrogations and interpreting not just language, but all of the subject’s words and actions. The downside was, I had to watch the interrogations through a two-way mirror, and they were never pretty.”

Stone didn’t want to think about that.

“The friction with Stan started when I began to develop my own sources and collaborators. He was working out of the Cairo embassy by then, his cover being something like agricultural attaché, and he ran a tight ship. When I wouldn’t share my contacts with him or anybody else, he began to ride me. I was mingling a lot in the upper reaches of Middle Eastern society, too, so some of my sources were very well placed. I’d write reports giving a lot of good information, which Stan would always say was worthless because I wouldn’t ascribe it to a verifiable source. Then I began getting reports past him, directly to Langley, which is against Company policy, and that drove him nuts. The Company has a chain of command, just like the military, and if you violate it, you have to be very, very careful. Stan’s problem was that my information in these reports nearly always turned out to be accurate, and it made Stan look bad that he hadn’t passed them on to Langley himself.”

“I can see how that might annoy him.”

“Then the explosion of the safe house happened, and after he recovered from that, I’ve been hearing from old friends, he became diminished in the eyes of his superiors and something of a has-been in the eyes of his inferiors. That’s when he really started going for the main chance.”

“And he hasn’t been caught at it?”

“Stan’s too smart to get caught in the usual ways. Somebody would have to turn on him, and that’s why he worries about me. Sometimes I think that if I could sit down at dinner with him, I could put his mind at rest, but he regards me as as much of a business competitor now as a threat to his personal security.”

“I can see that it’s a difficult situation,” Stone said.

Lance looked sad. “One of us is not going to survive this situation,” he said. Then he looked grim. “And it isn’t going to be me.”

Then the ladies came looking for them.

“I think you’re going queer for Lance,” Sarah said. She was lying on top of Stone, having just drained him of most of his precious bodily fluids.

“What?” Stone managed to say, still panting.

“The two of you went into this huddle after dinner, and I think you’d still be there, if I hadn’t come in and dragged you away.” She began toying with his penis.

“You’re not going to find any joy there,” Stone said. “Not after what you’ve just put me through. I may take weeks to recover.”

“Nonsense,” she said, squeezing. “You’re recovering already.”

Stone groaned.

“I’m going to make you forget about Lance,” she said, traveling down his torso with her tongue, until she had him in her mouth.

She was absolutely right, Stone thought. Lance was right out of his mind.