Stone Cold (Camel Club 3)

“I’ll get through this.”

“I’m sorry, Annabelle.”

She sat down in a chair. “All these years I’ve hated my father because I thought he just let my mother die. Then I find out he didn’t . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“And now you lose him too,” Alex finished for her. “But at least you found out before he died, Annabelle. And he knew that you knew.”

“He could’ve gotten out of that truck. He could be alive right now.”

“For six months of the cancer eating him away?”

She stared up at him. “For six months of being with me. I would’ve taken care of him. I guess he thought blowing himself up was a better alternative.”

“No, maybe he wanted to get Bagger even worse than you did. Maybe he was willing to die to avenge his wife and your mother. At the very least you have to admire the guy’s courage.”

“I do,” she finally said. “But I still wish he hadn’t done it.”

“And he gave you that scar. He wasn’t the world’s greatest father.”

“But he was my father,” she said quietly.

“And a criminal.”

“Alex, I’m a criminal.”

“Not to me, you’re not.” There was an awkward pause before Alex added, “You said you weren’t hungry, but I’m going to make some coffee. And when you’re ready to talk, we’ll talk. How does that sound?”

“Can I take a shower first? I feel really, really dirty.”

He showed her to the bathroom that was off his bedroom, and then he went into the kitchen, washed up, put on a pot of coffee and cleaned himself up. By the time he was done, she was out of the shower. She walked into the kitchen wrapped in one of his bathrobes.

“Hope you don’t mind,” she said.

Her hair was wet and hung down straight.

“Shower make you feel better?”

“Not even close.”

They drank the coffee mostly in silence. Then Alex built a fire in the living room fireplace, and Annabelle sat on the floor in front of it, holding her hands out to the flames.

She said in a low voice, “I guess the FBI will have a bunch of questions for me.”

“Some. But I can help you field them, if you want.”

“Thanks for helping me.”

“You put your life on the line too.”

She gazed up at him. “Can you sit with me? Just for a little while?”

Alex got down on the floor and they sat quietly in front of the fire as the flames slowly died.

Carter Gray was brooding. None of Carr’s people had been located. Then another possibility occurred to him: the Secret Service agent, Alex Ford. He and Stone were tight. They had been at Murder Mountain together. He knew as much of the truth about what Gray had done as did Stone. If he got Ford, used him as bait? It would be a little tricky. The man was a federal agent. He couldn’t just kidnap him. Or maybe he could if he somehow discredited him first. This was a favorite tactic of Gray’s. Destroy the reputation of the victim first—indeed, make him appear to be a criminal—and then seize him at his most vulnerable. It was far easier to do than most people would have thought. And by the time it was all figured out, it wouldn’t matter. Gray made a couple of calls and put the operation into motion.

He quickly received a call back from a mole of his at the FBI. The man there had some interesting news. He told Gray the details of what had happened that night with Ford and Jerry Bagger. And also that Ford had a woman with him, a woman apparently of questionable past. They had walked away from a fiery explosion in Washington. Ford had told the FBI that he would talk to them tomorrow. He had presumably gone home with the woman.

Gray thanked his spy and hung up.

This new intelligence changed things remarkably.

Alex Ford’s career was just about to take a nasty turn for the worse.

CHAPTER 81

AFTER ANNABELLE WENT TO BED, Alex sat up in the kitchen drinking another cup of coffee. He glanced every now and then in the direction of the bedroom as he thought things over. But what really was there to think over? The case was done, the bad guys vanquished. This was where the movie ended, the credits rolled and maybe some outtakes played. In the real world, of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. There would be enough paperwork to fill out to clear-cut a small forest. And then an internal investigation to ensure that nothing Alex had done had improperly led to a bunch of men getting blown up over the Potomac. Explanations would be made and corroborated and Alex was confident that relatively soon, many months from now, it would all be over.

Yet he didn’t want it to end. Not really. Because that scenario would mean that Annabelle would be on her way. He sighed. She would probably be on her way regardless. And maybe that was a good thing, at least officially. After all, she was a con, and he was a cop, and if that wasn’t human oil and water, he didn’t know what was.

He glanced in the direction of the bedroom once more. No, it just isn’t that simple, is it?

When she woke up what could he do? Ask her to please stay? He could invent some lie. You have to stay until the official inquiry is complete. That sounded totally bogus even to him. Annabelle would see right through it.

The next second he stopped thinking about that issue. They were just about to receive visitors, unwelcome ones from the looks of things.

Alex bent low, slipped to the window and looked out. Down the gravel drive, nearly out of sight, was a vehicle that he didn’t recognize. It was a nondescript black van. Alex hated nondescript black vans. They often carried nondescript men with large guns and bad attitudes. This fear was confirmed when he grabbed a pair of night binoculars from a shelf and used them to take a closer look. There was a small satellite receiver pod on the roof of the van. And if he’d still had lingering doubts, the movement in the bushes next to his house erased them. People in the bushes, satellite vans, maybe the glint of rifle optics in the moonlight—none of it was making Alex feel too good right now. And he’d thought nearly losing his life once already tonight was enough.

Yet this was a tad different from the encounter with Jerry Bagger. This had government strike team written all over it. And why would the government be bothering with one of its own? Alex nearly instantly answered his own question.

Carter Gray couldn’t find Oliver Stone so he’d decided to cast his net wider. Whether this was actually true or not, Alex wasn’t going to wait to find out. He had already had one near-death face-off with Carter Gray at Murder Mountain; he had no desire to go for a second round.

He grabbed a set of keys off the hook over the kitchen phone and raced to the bedroom. Clamping a hand over Annabelle’s mouth in case she screamed at being awoken from a dead sleep, he whispered, “Someone’s outside. Get dressed. Fast. We have to roll.”

Annabelle had barely thrown on her clothes and grabbed her bag when two men came through the front door and another pair through the rear. They had body armor and MP-5s and Alex’s pistol would be no match for them. So he opted for going out the door off the kitchen leading to the garage.

“Stop!” one of the armored men called out to them from the hall.

Alex had no intention of doing anything other than running like hell. He only bothered to open the garage door enough to let his Corvette scoot underneath, clearing it by about an inch. He grabbed another gear and they shot down the gravel road past the van right as the front door of his house burst open. As the Corvette spat rocks in all directions, bursts of machine-gun fire zipped over their heads. Annabelle ducked down in her seat.

“Damn it!” Alex cried out.

“Are you hit?” Annabelle said anxiously, as she sat back up.

“No, but I think one of the shots hit the car.”

He screeched onto the main road, keeping his foot mashed to the floor. He looked in the mirror and breathed a sigh of relief. There was no one back there.

“Alex, what’s happening?”

“I wish I knew, Annabelle.”

“Where are we going?”

“I wish I knew that too. Hold on.”

He speed-dialed one of his buddies at the Service’s WFO, or Washington Field Office, where he was stationed.

“Bobby, it’s Alex. Something really weird is going on, man.”

“Like what?”