The Collectors (Camel Club 2)

Should I kill him now? Or would that dig the hole even deeper? Seagraves eventually decided to forgo that lethal step. He would always have that option later. Hell, I’ll do it myself. One Triple Six to another. Young versus old, and young always won that battle. You get to live, Oliver Stone. For now.

But he would have to do something about the man. And there was no time like the present.

Two days after their last visit to DeHaven’s house Stone and Reuben rode on the latter’s motorcycle to a rare book shop in Old Town Alexandria. The name of the shop was in Latin, and translated meant “Book of Four Sentences.” Caleb had an ownership share in the place, which had once been named Doug’s Books, until Caleb’s brilliant idea to go completely upscale in the very affluent area. Stone was not here because he wanted to look at more old books. He kept some items at the shop that he needed to consult.

The owner of the shop, the aforementioned Doug, who now went by the more formal “Douglas,” allowed Stone unfettered access to his hiding place. This was so because Douglas was terrified of Oliver Stone, a man who’d been described to him by Caleb (at Stone’s prompting) as a homicidal maniac walking free solely on a legal technicality.

Stone’s secret room was in the basement behind a false wall that was opened by pulling a wire hanging in an adjacent fireplace. A former priest’s hole in the ancient building, it now contained many items from Stone’s past life, plus a collection of his journals filled with cuttings from newspapers and magazines.

With Reuben’s help he found and pulled several of these journals and took them with him. Reuben dropped him off at his cottage in the cemetery.

“Keep a close lookout, Oliver,” Reuben warned. “If that little dipshit Behan is involved in this, he’s got plenty of muscle and connections behind him.”

Stone assured him that he would be careful, said good-bye and stepped inside the cottage. He brewed some strong coffee, settled at his desk and started going over the journals. The stories he’d selected dealt with the assassination of the Speaker of the House, Robert “Bob” Bradley. And also the nearly simultaneous destruction of his home, an event that only the most naive could’ve thought was a coincidence. Yet there seemed to be no connection between Bradley’s obvious murder allegedly at the hands of a domestic terrorist group calling itself Americans Against 1984 and Jonathan DeHaven’s seemingly innocent death. The FBI had received a note from the group which said that Bradley had been killed as a first step in the war against the federal government. The terrorists promised more attacks, and security in Washington had been heightened in response.

As he turned the pages of his journal, something nagged at Stone, but he couldn’t quite pin it down. Bradley had been Speaker for a short period, after a political shake-up that had seen the incumbent Speaker and the majority leader both convicted of selling influence and laundering political campaign funds. Normally, the Speaker position would have followed party leadership lines, but with the top two men in jail, extraordinary measures were called for. And Bob Bradley, a powerful committee chairman with an impeccable reputation far removed from the tainted leadership ladder of his party, had been the political Moses buttonholed to lead his people out of this nasty thicket of impropriety.

He’d started by promising an ethical cleanup in the House of Representatives and an end to partisan politics. Many had promised that, and few if any had delivered on that pledge, yet it was thought that if anyone could do it, Bob Bradley could.

Stone turned to another journal and another story. This one dealt with Cornelius Behan, recounting how he had come to this country with no money in his pocket and built an international conglomerate from nothing but his own sweat and nerve. Defense contractors had the reputation, often well deserved, of playing fast and loose with ethical rules. Paying off congressmen for political favors was one of the oldest games played in Washington, and the tank and plane builders played it as well as anyone.

Stone finished reading the story on Behan, which detailed two enormous and recent wins for his business. One was from the Pentagon for a new generation conventional missile system and the other to build a massive new bunker for the Congress outside of Washington for use in case of a cataclysmic attack. While some cynics might argue that the best thing that could happen to the country in case of such a catastrophe would be the elimination of that august body, Stone supposed the country needed some continuity of government.

Each of these contracts was worth billions, and Behan had won them both. As the article explained, he had outflanked his opponents at every critical juncture. “It was as though he could read their minds,” the reporter had written. Stone didn’t believe in mind readers, but having been a spy as a young man, he did believe in stealing secrets.

Stone leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. If Bradley’s predecessor had been in Behan’s pocket and Bradley had promised a crackdown on corruption, it might be worth it to take the new crusader out. There was no guarantee that Bradley’s successor would be any more cooperative to folks like Behan, but there was also the factor of intimidation. Would a new Speaker be inclined to go full bore ahead with Bradley’s pledge to bring ethics back when that same promise might have led to his colleague’s violent death? The terrorist group could simply be a smoke screen, and an unverifiable one at that.

Stone had initially started thinking about Bradley’s death because there was only one connection he could see between the man’s murder and DeHaven’s. And that connection was Cornelius Behan, a man who’d made billions by selling myriad things that killed lots of people, all in the name of peace.

Was it Behan’s men in the D.C. Public Works van? Could they have somehow caused the Secret Service to retreat like that? Or was it another agency, working closely with Behan, that had taken on the role of running interference for him? People had debated for decades the existence of the military-industrial complex. Stone had never wondered about it. He had participated in that complex for years. If it was anything like it was thirty years ago, it was a potent force to be reckoned with. It was also a force that would not hesitate to eliminate people who got in the way. Stone also knew this from personal experience. After all, he used to be one of the “eliminators.”

He would have Milton find out as much as possible about Bradley and Behan. Milton could get into databases that he had no business being on; yet those were always the most interesting ones. Stone would go to Bradley’s demolished home to see if anything turned up there. And he needed to return to Jonathan DeHaven’s house because he had to look through that telescope again, and not because he was anxious to be titillated by another episode of Behan’s sex show. No, there was something very obvious that he had completely overlooked.

A sudden chill hit him, and he rose to start a fire. Then he stopped and rubbed his skin. He was cold, very cold. What the hell had the woman said? He struggled to recall her exact words. “Your temperature is coming back up.” Yes, that’s what the nurse taking care of Caleb had said. It had struck him as odd, because in a hospital one would normally hear that you were recovering if your temperature were coming down. But she had said he was almost up to normal, he was certain of it.

Stone grew very excit

ed. Something was finally starting to make sense. He grabbed his cell phone to call the others but then stopped as he gazed out the window. From here he had a direct line of sight onto the street that bordered the cemetery. A white D.C. Public Works van was parked there. He could see it clearly under the streetlight.

Stone immediately drew away from the window. He called Reuben but it didn’t go through. He looked at his cell phone. He had no power bars. Yet there was always a strong signal in this area. He glanced out the window. Jammers. He tried his hard-line phone. It was dead.

He grabbed his coat and hurried to the back door. He would clamber over the rear fence and make his way through a labyrinth of Georgetown streets to an abandoned dwelling he occasionally used as a safe house. He cautiously opened the door and stepped outside. The fence was in sight.

The shot to his chest stopped him cold and dropped Stone to his knees. Already lapsing into unconsciousness, Stone looked over at the man standing there, wearing a black hood and holding the gun with both hands. It seemed to Stone that the man smiled even as his victim fell to the hard ground and lay still.

CHAPTER 26

IT WAS THE DARKNESS OF INTER-rogation. Stone recognized this as soon as he awoke. It was so black that not only could Stone not see any part of his body, but it seemed as though he had no body. He was barefoot, painfully thrust up on his tiptoes, and his hands were bound over his head. The place he was in was very cold. These places were always cold because cold wore you down faster than heat. He could sense that not only was he shoeless, he was also naked.

The voice called out from the blackness. “Awake?”

Stone nodded.

“Say it,” the voice commanded.

“Awake,” Stone answered. He would only give them the minimum, nothing more. He had been through this before, albeit three decades ago when a mission had gone awry and he had found himself a prisoner in a land where no American would ever want to be held captive.

“Name?”

This was exactly what he’d been dreading.

“Oliver Stone.”

Something hard hit him on the back of the head, momentarily stunning him.

“Name?”

“Oliver Stone,” he said slowly, wondering if the blow had cracked his skull.

“Okay for now, Oliver. DeHaven?” the voice said.

“Who?”