Stone Cold (Camel Club 3)

Stone walked over to the cliffs with the agent tagging along. “Then he went out this way. Probably came in the same way.”

The agent looked down. “That’s sheer rock, a good thirty feet.”

“It’s not sheer. There’re plenty of handholds if you know where to look.”

“Okay, you climb up. But what about the going down part?”

“Well, since I don’t see anything around here you could attach a rope to, I’m assuming he jumped.”

The agent gazed at the swirling water far below. “That’s impossible.”

“Not really.” Stone thought, Actually, I did the same thing thirty years ago. Only it was fifty feet up and there were people shooting at me.

Stone drove back to D.C. with Alex.

“Not a bad morning’s work,” Alex said appreciatively.

“Knowing how it was done and finding out who did it are two very different things. Carter Gray had a lot of enemies.”

“Granted, but don’t you have any guesses? I mean he had to have some reason to want to meet with you.”

Stone hesitated. He didn’t like keeping things back from Alex, but sometimes honest disclosure, even for good reasons, turned out to be a bad decision. “I don’t believe it’s connected.”

He could tell Alex didn’t buy this statement, but he chose not to add to it.

As they drove on Stone stared out the window. Three men he’d worked with decades ago were suddenly all dead. Carter Gray had met to warn him about this strange chain of events. The very night of that warning he had been blown up. Whoever had done this had found three deeply covered, highly skilled former assassins and murdered them. And then he had succeeded in killing Carter Gray, a man who had few peers when it came to outwitting the competition.

A person smart enough to do all that could conceivably discover who Oliver Stone really was. And come and kill him too.

And maybe I would deserve it, Stone thought. Because the only thing he had in common with the dead men was that they were all former killers themselves.

CHAPTER 18

ANNABELLE STOOD OUTSIDE the gates of the cemetery where Stone was caretaker. After her talk with Leo and her conversation with Stone, she had made up her mind. This was not Oliver Stone’s fight. Friend or not, she could not allow him to get involved. If Bagger somehow killed him, Annabelle knew she could not live with that guilt.

The gates were locked, but with a tension tool and lock pick two minutes later they were open and she was on the front porch of the cottage. She slipped the note she had taken nearly an hour to compose, despite its brevity, under the door. A minute later she was back in her car. Three hours later she was riding into the sky inside a United Airlines jet. As the plane tracked the Potomac River on the climb out, Annabelle glanced out the window. Georgetown was directly below them. She thought she could see the little well-tended cemetery, his cemetery. Perhaps he was down there amid the hallowed ground working away at his tombstones, attending to the dead and buried, atoning for past sins.

“So long, Oliver Stone,” she said to herself. Good-bye, John Carr.

“I love this Internet crap,” Bagger bellowed as he stared at the papers one of his IT guys had just handed to him.

“It is quite amazing, Mr. Bagger,” the young bespectacled man began in an immodest tone. “And frankly—”

“Get the hell outta here,” Bagger roared and the terrified man fled.

Bagger sat down behind his desk and studied the papers again. He’d retained an Internet search organization. He didn’t know what their sources were and he didn’t really care. They had delivered, that’s all that mattered. Annabelle Conroy had walked down the aisle, over fifteen years ago, with a guy named Jonathan DeHaven. They had been married, ironically Bagger thought, in Vegas. The downside was there were no pictures of the happy couple, only the names. It had to be the same Annabelle Conroy, how many people getting married in Sin City would have that name? But he had to be sure. So Bagger picked up his phone and called a PI firm he had used in the past. These folks worked right on the edge of the envelope and occasionally skirted past that barrier. He loved them for it, and also because they got results. He would have put them onto Annabelle before now, but he wanted a piece of information for them to start with, and now he had it. When people got married they signed lots of documents. And they had to live somewhere and get things like insurance, and utilities and maybe wills and cars in both the names.

He chuckled. Annabelle had posed as a CIA operative when running her scam on him. Well, he would show the lady what real intelligence was.

He said into the phone, “Hey, Joe, it’s Jerry Bagger, got a job for you. A really, really important job. I need to find an old friend. And I need to do it fast because I want to wrap my arms around her and give the lady a nice big squeeze.”

CHAPTER 19

WHEN STONE ARRIVED back home he saw the note. Instinctively knowing what it was before he even opened it, he still took his time reading through it. When he was done he sat back and sighed deeply. Then he got angry. He called Reuben, Milton and Caleb. He told them there would be a meeting of the Camel Club that night at his cottage. Though Caleb whined about having to work late to finish a project, Stone insisted that he be there. “It’s important, Caleb. It has to do with our friend.”

“Which friend?” he’d said suspiciously.

“Susan.”

“Is she in trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll be there,” Caleb said without hesitation.

Stone spent the next few hours working in the cemetery, shoring up old tombstones that always seemed to lose their grip on the earth after a rainstorm no matter how many times he straightened and reinforced them. He was not merely doing busy work. He wanted to get something that had been buried for a long time, both in the ground and also in his mind.

The old tombstone had a statue of an eagle perched on top. Pretending to be trying to straighten the headstone in case anyone was watching, Stone let it fall to the ground as though by accident. Revealed underneath was a small hole in the dirt. In this hole was a rectangular-shaped airtight metal box. Stone lifted the box out and placed it in the trash bag he was using to collect weeds. He left the tombstone on its side, dusted off his hands and went inside the cottage with the bag.

At his desk he opened the box with a key he kept taped behind the light switch panel in his tiny bathroom. He spread the box’s contents out in front of him. This was his insurance policy, in case anyone ever came looking to do him harm. Stone had been smart enough to know that what he was being asked to do for his country could be seen, from another perspective, as simply crimes done under the flimsy banner of counterintelligence. He had been told on countless occasions that if he or his team members were ever caught during one of their missions, they couldn’t rely on Uncle Sam to bail them out. They were on their own. To young men possessing special skills and insane levels of confidence that had seemed like a challenge they couldn’t refuse.

He and men like Lou Cincetti and Bob Cole had often joked, in sessions of gallows humor, that if their capture seemed imminent they would each simply shoot the other, fittingly leaving the world together, as a team. Yet as the years passed and the killings went on, Stone had started collecting information and documentation from these “tasks.” Uncle Sam could say he wouldn’t be there for him, but it was another thing altogether if Stone could hold his agency accountable. In the end none of it had mattered, though. His wife had died, his daughter was lost to him and the people who’d ordered his destruction, simply because he didn’t want to kill anymore, had never suffered a single minute for it.

Stone stared at one photo for a long time. It was from Vietnam when he’d still been a soldier, albeit one with highly specialized skills. He had been given the assignment of assassinating a North Vietnamese politician, a man the enemy had been rallying around. Normally, long-range sniping was done by a team. You had lookouts and spotters and people to check the

wind and other weather conditions. However, Stone had been sent in alone, charged with a task that even for him seemed impossible. He would be dropped by chopper into a jungle crawling with Viet Cong. He was to travel five miles by foot over dangerous terrain and kill the man at a rally that would be attended by over ten thousand people, with massive military security. He was then to reverse his tracks and travel miles back to an assigned spot that would be difficult to find in the daylight, much less at night. The chopper would be there precisely four hours after dropping him off. It would make one pass. If he wasn’t back in time, Stone was target practice for the Viet Cong.

Ostensibly he’d been chosen for what amounted to a suicide mission because he was the best they had; the finest shooter and the most tireless in the field, it was generally acknowledged. Back then Stone was a machine. He could run all day and night. He had been dropped into the South China Sea from a chopper once, and swam miles through rough water to kill someone deemed hostile to the United States. From half a mile away he’d placed a shot through the man’s head while he sat at his kitchen table reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette. Then he’d swum back out and been picked up by a sub.

Yet with the assignment in Vietnam Stone had suspected his superiors were making a statement about his increasingly reluctant attitude about the war. Some of them were no doubt praying he would fail. And die. He hadn’t accommodated them that night. He had killed the politician from a challenging distance even for a top sniper using a scope that expert marksmen today would have laughed at. Stone had made it back to the clearing to find the chopper about to turn off after its single pass. He knew the pilots had seen him but apparently couldn’t be bothered to come back to get him. He put a heavy-caliber round right through the open cargo doors to show them the error of their ways.