Dark Harbor (Stone Barrington 12)

“Come ahead. Blow the horn three times as you reach the gate, and I probably won’t kill you.”

Stone followed Rawls’s instructions to the letter and pulled into the clearing before the little house without incident. Rawls came out to meet him, and Stone handed him the shotgun. “There’s still one in the chamber, and the safety’s on,” he said.

“Come on in,” Rawls said. “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

Rawls poured him a cup from a Thermos and handed it to him. “So what are you packing?”

Stone removed the .45 from its holster, popped out the magazine, ejected the cartridge in the chamber, locked back the slide and handed it to Rawls.

Rawls thumbed the slide catch, aimed it out the window and squeezed off an imaginary round. “Sweet trigger,” he said. “Who’s Tussey?”

“A guy out in Carson City, Nevada. I saw something of his in a magazine, and we talked on the phone a couple of times. I’ve got a couple more of his guns, too.”

“I never had any need for a gunsmith,” Rawls said. “Tech Services supplied what we needed. It didn’t have pearl grips, but it always worked good.” He handed back Stone’s gun.

Stone picked up the ejected round, reloaded the pistol, cocked and locked it and returned it to its holster.

“I had a call from Lance a minute ago,” Rawls said. “He tried you first, but I guess you’d already left the house.”

“What news?”

“Bad news: The two Russians Dick’s source overheard at the poker game are very bad actors named Gorky and Rastropov, former KGB. Like a lot of their colleagues they discovered that there was money to be made when the Soviet Union crumbled, and their training and experience, combined with their sociopathic tendencies, make them very dangerous. The Berlin station is looking for them now, but they’ve gone to ground, and it won’t be easy to find them. The word’s out, though, and you never know. If they buy a pack of cigarettes in the wrong shop, they’re toast.”

“So what do we do?”

“Use the burglar alarm and sleep lightly,” Rawls replied.

“Will do.”

“You’ve got a very secure house, you know. Did you ever take a close look at the front door?”

“No. I’ve noticed it’s heavy.”

“Take a look at mine,” Rawls said, beckoning him to the front door. He opened the door and showed Stone the edge. “It’s two one-inch-thick sheets of mahogany with a half-inch of steel plate sandwiched between. The door frame is steel, too, and it’s bolted to eight-by-eight posts set in concrete. It’s hanging on eight hinges.”

He turned the thumb bolt on the inside, and three extra-large bolts slid out of the door, one each at the top and bottom of the door and the third in the traditional spot.

“That’s very impressive,” Stone said. “What about the rest of the house? The windows, for instance?”

“They’re all steel-framed, and the glass is armored and an inch thick. Dick’s house has the same.”

“None of it seemed to work for Dick.”

“He made a mistake; everybody does it sooner or later. If he’d had the Kirov call promptly, nobody would ever have gotten into the house alive. I’m surprised you didn’t find any weapons in the house.”

“I looked in all the cupboards,” Stone said. “I couldn’t find anything. I figure Dick kept the Keltec at his bedside. He heard something in the night, put on his pants and went downstairs. Somebody disarmed him, sat him down at the desk and shot him with his own gun, then went upstairs and shot his wife and daughter. He was wearing only trousers when they found him.”

“Sounds right,” Rawls said. “I don’t think anybody rang the doorbell; that would have woken the girls. I think what happened was, Dick didn’t lock up right and didn’t set the alarm system. By the way, the system isn’t monitored locally. If somebody set off a motion detector or something, an alarm at Langley would go off.”

“Are there motion detectors?” Stone asked. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s why Dick didn’t have a dog. If you have a dog, it has to be highly trained, so you can forego the motion detectors. Otherwise, they have to be set high enough so that a dog won’t set them off, and intruders can duck under them.”

“Dick sounds too careful to have made a mistake.”

“Everybody does, eventually.”