Severe Clear (Stone Barrington 24)

“I’ve got a contact in London who I think is lying to me, but I can’t prove it.”

“I should think you’d get lied to a lot, in your business,” Stone said.

“I feel out of my depth,” Holly said. “I’m accustomed to playing offense, not defense.”

“I wish I could help,” Stone said. “Why don’t you talk with Felicity? Maybe she can help.”

“We had a long chat last evening,” Holly said, “and she’s working her side of the pond.”

“Have you done everything you can do?”

“I’ve done everything I can think of, which may not be the same thing.” Her phone rang. “Excuse me,” she said, and walked away a few yards.

“It’s Tom. Scramble.”

Holly scrambled. “Shoot.”

“We haven’t got much: There’s a hotel in South London by that name, could be a drop. There’s Algernon Moncrieff, a character in The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde, and there’s a short story and then a novel called Flowers for Algernon, made into a movie called Charly that starred Cliff Robertson. He got an Academy Award for his performance. That’s it. Nobody here can think of anything in either work that would relate to al Qaeda or spying or anything else.”

“Okay, Tom.”

“We’ll keep at it.”

“Sure, call me.” Holly hung up and went back to where Stone had sat down.

“Anything new?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

52

Hamish opened the closet door and took the key to the steamer trunk from his pocket, opened it, and swung open the door. The finely machined panel glowed in the light from the overhead bulb.

Hamish inserted his T-key into the slot at the top of the panel and turned it ninety degrees to the right. With a click, the clock was powered, displaying a row of zeros. Hamish checked his wristwatch, added the number of hours until eight-thirty P.M., then carefully tapped the hours and minutes into the keypad. He took a deep breath and let it out, then he pressed the enter button, and the clock began its downward march to zero.

The concert would begin at seven P.M., perhaps a few minutes later. It was scheduled to run until eight-thirty, so the device would detonate at about the time of the last number in the concert, or, perhaps, during an encore. Even if the detonation came late there would still be fifteen hundred people in the Arrington Bowl, among them the presidents of the United States and Mexico. All the others—movie moguls, movie stars, entertainers of various skills, the cream of

Los Angeles society, business leaders—would simply be cannon fodder for the greatest lethal attack on the United States ever recorded. Upward of a million people would die in an instant—many more of their injuries or radiation sickness in the months and years to come.

The loss of the great Osama bin Laden would be avenged. Any evidence of the perpetrators would be vaporized in the initial blast, so no one would ever know who had caused it, until the announcement was made worldwide on the Internet. Neither he nor Mo nor Jasmine nor any of the people who had helped them would ever be known to the authorities. Wynken, Blynken, and Nod would be dead.

Hamish checked his watch again: he would leave The Arrington at three P.M.; his flight from LAX would depart at five P.M. and arrive in London after a nonstop flight at midmorning the following day. He would drop off his luggage at his house, then have lunch at his club.

He closed the trunk and locked it, then put the two keys into his pocket. He would have time for a nice lunch at the patio restaurant; he had already booked the table, late, for two P.M.

He packed his two Vuitton cases with his clothes and set them near the front door for collection by Hans, then he showered, shaved, and began to dress for lunch.

—

Holly Barker returned to the presidential cottage with the president and the first lady after the press conference. The president seemed in a particularly good mood, and so did the first lady.

“Lunch in half an hour,” Kate Lee said, and at that moment, Holly’s phone rang.

“Holly Barker.”

“It’s Tom Riley: scramble.”

She scrambled. “Yes, Tom?”