Lucid Intervals (Stone Barrington 18)

Felicity turned toward Stone. “Can I get to your fax machine in Dick’s office?” she asked. “It’s late in London; I may have something by now.”

Stone unlocked his cousin’s little office. Felicity went to the fax machine and came back with a couple of sheets of paper. The headline screamed:

FOREIGN MINISTER AND HOME SECRETARY BLAMED BY MI6 IN MURDER OF U.S. SECURITY FIRM CHIEF

Felicity handed the other sheet to Freeman.

Freeman read it. “And I thought Jim was being paranoid,” he said. “He predicted what would happen.”

Stone spoke up. “You mean, when he told you about this you didn’t believe him?”

“Jim had a way of drawing worst-case implications from any problem,” Freeman said. “It worked for him in business a lot of the time, but I’ll admit, this sounded a bit far-fetched to me. Obviously, I was wrong.”

“You can take some comfort in the fact that he acted on his instincts by coming up here,” Stone said. “Have you any idea how the assassin might have located him?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Freeman said. “How did he contact you and ask you to come up here?”

“He gave me a prototype of a phone scrambler your people are working on,” Stone replied. “I got a call from him last night.”

“Then that has to be it,” Freeman said.

“You mean a scrambled message was intercepted? Didn’t the thing work?”

“It worked between landlines and landlines,” Freeman replied, “but I just learned this morning that some cell towers have not yet been equipped with the requisite electronics to scramble every call when one end of the conversation is from a cell phone.”

“But how could they intercept a cell phone call from up here? They wouldn’t have known where it was.”

“They could intercept it from

your phone,” Freeman said.

“Remember,” Felicity interjected, “the foreign secretary knew you were in touch with Hackett.”

Freeman looked at Stone. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Felicity spoke up. “I hired Stone to help find Stanley Whitestone,” she said.

“Was Jim Whitestone?” Stone asked.

Freeman shook his head. “I don’t know. If he was, he never confirmed it to me.”

“Tell me,” Stone said, “if Jim were Whitestone, would he have had the resources to establish an identity as Hackett twelve years ago?”

“Yes, but he would have had to establish that identity longer ago than that. Still, he could have done it.”

Felicity went to the bar and poured herself a brandy, then went and stood at the window, looking out on the harbor. A big moon was rising as the sun set, illuminating the boats at their moorings.

There was a slapping noise, and Felicity emitted an involuntary shout and fell to the floor.

Stone dove for the light switch, and the room went dark. He crawled across the floor past Freeman to where Felicity lay and turned her over.

“I’m all right,” she said. “What was that? There was this noise right in front of me.”

Freeman spoke up. “I can see from here,” he said. “The window is broken, but it didn’t shatter.”

Stone crawled out of the living room and found a flashlight in a kitchen drawer. He got down and crawled back to Felicity, then played the light on the broken window. “Good God!” he exclaimed. “There’s a bullet stuck in the glass.”

“Impossible,” Freeman said.