Lucid Intervals (Stone Barrington 18)

“I was beginning to think I’d be on the run for the rest of my life.”

“Not anymore. Tell me, do you really think that British intelligence has the wherewithal to track you anywhere and cause your demise?”

“Well, they’re not the CIA, but they do have a long arm. As you have seen, finding one man is not all that hard, especially if he has as many business interests as I do.”

“Somehow I think of them as a smaller, cozier operation.”

“Again, compared to the CIA, perhaps they are. But over the years they have built up very good resources. Remember, they were in business before the United States had any kind of intelligence service.”

“I suppose so,” Stone said, “seeing that ours only goes back to World War II and the OSS.”

“Which became the CIA after the war,” Hackett pointed out.

“Do they have assassins on the payroll?” Stone asked.

“I should imagine so, though that service would be used rarely enough that they could rely on contract agents.”

“Are there really contract assassins in the world of intelligence?”

“Oh, yes,” Hackett replied. “I could put you in touch with two or three, should you ever require their services. Not that I have ever used them, of course.”

“Jim, from what you and Mike Freeman have told me about Strategic Services, you seem to be running your own private intelligence agency.”

“Yes, we are, but not on a governmental scale. And no national intelligence service would have our divisions for manufacturing, like our armored vehicle operation and our electronics section. Just between you and me, those divisions sell to several intelligence services on a regular basis.”

“Things like the telephone scrambler that we’ve been using?”

“Yes, but we still have a little more work to do on that,” Hackett replied. “In a few weeks we should have a prototype with much-improved sound quality on the level of, say, a cell phone.”

&nb

sp; “I would imagine there would be a big demand for that from the business community,” Stone said.

“Indeed, yes. We’re already drawing up marketing plans. And it will work just as well on a single hotel room line as on an office system like yours. Also, the final prototype will be smaller than the unit you have.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Thank you.”

Stone took a deep breath and asked, “Jim, are you Stanley Whitestone?”

Hackett raised an eyebrow. “Probably not.”

“You’re not going to give me a straight answer on that?”

“Stone, it might be dangerous to do so, given your connections.”

“Dangerous for whom?”

“For Stanley Whitestone.”

Stone laughed. “All right, then, if you won’t answer that question, perhaps you’ll answer another.”

“You can ask,” Hackett replied.

“What was this all about? Why would the foreign secretary and the home secretary be so anxious to find and, perhaps, kill a man who left their service a dozen years ago?”

“Didn’t Felicity tell you?”