“Jesus, Stone, where do you find these women?”
“There’s only one like her,” Stone replied, “and she found me.”
10
Stone sat with Felicity, tucked into a corner table at La Goulue, one of his favorite restaurants. “You seem a little tired,” he said, as she took her first sip of her Rob Roy.
“It’s the job,” she said, “and it doesn’t change much when I’m out of the country. Of course, when I’m in New York I have you to, ah, entertain me.”
“The pleasure is all mine.”
She smiled. “Don’t you believe it.”
“Tell me about the job,” Stone said. “As much as you can anyway.”
“There are the usual things,” she said. “Agents get themselves killed, sometimes for little or no reason. Last month I had two die in a car crash in Rome. Of course it was on that racetrack the Italians call the Piazza del Popolo. It’s insane.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I have to make the phone calls and write the letters, and even in the case of the car crash, the spouses don’t want to believe there wasn’t foul play. They’ve spent years worrying that a husband or wife will be taken out by the opposition, and I think it’s something of a letdown when they’re lost to a simple accident.”
“Is running the firm more fun than working in it?”
Felicity thought about that for a moment. “Marginally,” she said finally. It’s more fun to know everything instead of just about your own assignment; it’s fun to put the pieces together when you have all the information, or at least all of it that’s available.”
“You don’t always have it all?”
“Of course not. Even in my position I can’t know everything, and Whitehall and Downing Street are insatiable; they have an almost religious belief that their service is all-seeing, all-knowing. We could be closer to that if they would triple our budget, but that’s not going to happen unless there’s another war.”
“What about terrorism?”
“MI-5 does all the domestic stuff; we’re the foreign service, and we did get about a twenty percent bump in the years after 9/11, but inflation has eaten that up. I still have to send one agent out when I’d rather send two or three. Deciding where to allocate the resources is the hardest part of the job.”
“Is there anything fun about it?”
“The equipment is fun. We’ve long since surpassed that Q fellow in the Bond films.” She leaned close to his ear. “I have a pen in my purse that can administer a drug without your feeling it. Then I could walk out in the middle of dinner, and you’d be dead of cardiac arrest before you got to dessert. And the autopsy would reveal nothing.” She smiled. “We call it the toe tag.”
“Is that the sort of information Stanley Whitestone was selling?”
She grimaced. “He was selling everything but, thank God, not the toe tag; that was after his time. If word got out about that, there would be husbands dropping dead every day in their dozens, and not a few wives, too.”
“That reminds me,” Stone said. He produced his iPhone, pressed a couple of buttons and showed her a minute or so of the Seagram footage. “I don’t know if this is the guy,” he said, “but we eliminated all the other candidates. This one has the virtue of dressing British and walking funny.”
“The quality is very good,” she said. “Amazing, in fact. Where did you get the equipment?”
“The cameras are high-definition, off-the-shelf stuff; the iPhone comes from the Apple Store at Fifty-ninth and Fifth.”
“Let me see it again,” she said, and she watched closely as he reran it.
“What do you think?”
“I think he walks funny,” she said, “and I’ve been trying to picture exactly how and why Stanley walked funny. If this is Stanley, then all that weight he has gained has accentuated his gait.” She handed the phone back to Stone. “This is a very good effort,” she said. “It would have taken a lot longer if my people had done it. Can you e-mail me the images?”
“Of course.” Stone tapped a few buttons. “It’s done.”
“Now,” she said, “can you find this man?”
“If he returns to the Seagram Building,” Stone said. “My guy has alerted security there to keep an eye out for him.”