Dirty Work (Stone Barrington 9)

“Maybe I can find out something.”

“I don’t want to know,” Dino said. “And if you want to keep rolling around in the hay with Miss Felicity Devonshire, you’d better not want to know, either.”

“You want to know why there are no charges against La Biche in Europe?” Stone said.

“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“Because the Brits got their information on her by torturing and killing her friends, so there’s nobody left to give evidence against her.”

“I didn’t want to know that,” Dino said.

“It’s how they work. These people don’t arrest criminals and try them. They put them in cellars while they extract information from them with tools, and when they’re done, their captives are done, too. They’re outside the law. They’re above the law.”

“Well then, if I were you, I wouldn’t piss off Carpenter.”

“When you and I were cops together, we had a common view of the law,” Stone said. “We believed in doing it by the book.”

“Well, not always strictly by the book,” Dino said.

“All right, we slapped around a few people, frightened a few guys, but we didn’t murder anybody.”

r /> “And I’m not going to start now,” Dino said.

“But you’re going to turn a blind eye to what these people are planning?”

“Stone, in this case, a blind eye is all I got.”

“You don’t want to see it.”

“You’re right, because, unlike you, I understand that there are two whole different worlds existing right alongside each other: There’s your world and mine, then there’s their world, where a crazy woman holds a grudge against their people and goes around killing them, plus a few other people along the way. How do we prosecute that? There’s never any evidence. And suppose I could, somehow, stop them from killing La Biche? What would I do with her? Pat her on the head and send her back to Europe to kill a few more people? I don’t have any evidence against her. Jesus, somebody’s got to stop her, and it ain’t going to be me.”

“This is depressing,” Stone said.

“It’s not depressing if you don’t think about it,” Dino replied.

35

Carpenter rushed into the building, went to her temporary office, deposited her coat, and picked up her notes. She made it to the conference room just as Architect took his seat.

His name, as everyone who worked for him knew, was Sir Edward Fieldstone, but when he had chosen a code name, his bent for carpentry and building came to the fore. He had a huge workshop at his country home in Berkshire, and his large estate was dotted with barns, sheds, workmen’s houses, and other structures that he had either built himself or supervised. He had come to the intelligence services by way of the Army and the SAS, and he was known to be partial to officers who had served in that unit, especially in Northern Ireland, where he had commanded it. His reputation from that time was one of being soft-spoken and completely ruthless.

Carpenter sometimes felt at a disadvantage for not having served in the Army. Her credentials in the service were, at the outset, hereditary, since her paternal grandfather and her father had both been intelligence officers—the former, during World War II, when he had been repeatedly parachuted into France to arm and train Resistance fighters, and the latter, who had been a specialist in dealing with Irish terrorists in mainland Britain. Those were considered historic credentials in the service, and Carpenter had worked hard to live up to them.

“Good morning,” Architect said softly, causing an immediate hush to fall on the room. He gazed around the table at the two dozen faces, a third of them women. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said finally.

“The subject—the only subject—of this meeting is one Marie-Thérèse du Bois, known also as La Biche, an aptly assigned sobriquet, if I may say so.” A tiny smile twitched at a corner of his mouth.

“I am sure that you have all read the dossier compiled on this woman, a dossier appalling in its nature and, especially, in its bearing on the members of this service. I need hardly tell you that she must be stopped.”

There was a murmur of assent around the table.

“Carpenter,” he said.

All eyes turned to her, and she felt her ears burning.

“Yes, sir?”

“Give us a little recap of her activities in this city over the past few days.”