Stuart Woods: Reckless Abandon

“Anything up this morning?”

“Well, a guy who says he’s an old friend of yours has been waiting for you for more than an hour.”

“Who is he?”

“He won’t say, and he won’t leave. Could you get down here and deal with him, please?”

“I’ll be right there,” Stone said. He got up and went downstairs to his office. As he came down the stairs he could see down the hall to the waiting area, and saw two long legs extended from a chair, with a very fine pair of shoes at the end of them.

“Good afternoon,” Stone said. He couldn’t see the face, but when the man stood up, it was familiar enough.

“Lance Cabot,” he said.

“So that’s his name,” Joan’s voice called from her office.

Lance offered his hand. “I’m sorry, perhaps I was being too cautious. I thought that if you called in and she gave you my name, you might not want to see me.”

“Come into my office,” Stone said, pointing the way. He was still trying to get his breath back. A little more than a year before, a man had walked into his office and offered Stone a lot of money to go to London to rescue his niece from the clutches of her bad, bad boyfriend, whose name had been Lance Cabot.

Stone had taken the job, only to learn that his client had used a false name and was trying to track down Cabot to kill him. The client, whose name turned out to be Stanford Hedger, was CIA, and Cabot was ex-Agency, then operating as a rogue. Stone had asked for help from a friend and had been contacted by British intelligence, who asked him to enter into a business arrangement with Cabot, who was trying to steal some important equipment from a military arms lab. With the help of an inside man, Cabot had stolen the item, presumably sold it to bad people, and had disappeared with Stone’s money. A couple of weeks later, to Stone’s astonishment, his money had been returned, along with the healthy profit Cabot had promised him.

Lance took a seat and crossed his legs. He was casually dressed in a tweed jacket and tan trousers, looking for all the world like a resident of New York, out for a walk and a cup of coffee.

“Can I get you some coffee?” Stone asked.

“Thanks, but your secretary provided that, in spite of her suspicions.”

“What brings you to New York, Lance?”

“I live here now, a few blocks uptown.”

Stone’s jaw dropped. “Aren’t you a fugitive? Is that why you’re here, looking for a lawyer?”

Lance shook his head. “I’m not a fugitive, and I don’t need a lawyer, at least for myself.”

“For someone else?”

“Maybe, but not just yet.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m baffled by all this. I thought you were being sought by every intelligence agency and police department in Europe, not to mention your own former people.”

“They’re not former,” Lance said. He fished a wallet out of his pocket and handed it to Stone.

Stone found himself staring at a CIA ID card, complete with photograph. “How long have you had this back?”

“I always had it,” Lance said. “Let me explain. When Hedger hired you-”

“Hedger was CIA, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was, but he was led to believe that I had gone rogue. That’s why he was looking for me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s complicated. I was sent over there to… well, ostensibly to acquire a British invention, a piece of military hardware, you will recall, and sell it to a Middle Eastern country-Iraq, as it happens.”

“The CIA wanted you to steal British military hardware and sell it to Saddam Hussein?”

“Yes. Well, not really. You see, Hedger wanted the hardware, too, ostensibly for our nuclear weapons program. He really wanted it to help him regain the Agency’s high regard, in which he had formerly been held.”

“This is very confusing: The Agency had two agents trying to steal the hardware, working at cross-purposes?”

“Now you’ve got it.”

“And you were supposed to sell it to Saddam Hussein?”

“Yes, and I did, but not before it had been modified to make it useless. It needed the right software, too, and he didn’t have that, but by that time, I had his money and was gone. You got a very nice slice of those funds, too. What did you do with the money?”

“I paid the taxes on it and invested the rest, as my accountant recommended.”

“Good,” Lance said. “Just what I would have done.”

“Lance, it worries me to think I did what you would have done.”

Lance laughed. “You have nothing to worry about, Stone. You’re clean as a whistle.”

“Does your agency know that I was paid the money?”

“Of course. I had a little trouble convincing them, but after I had repeatedly pointed out how valuable you had been to us, they agreed.”

“But I was supposed to be helping the British.”

“Well, yes, but you were really helping us all the time.”

“Did the British know this?”

Lance pursed his lips. “Not exactly, but they do now. After all, I helped rid them of a man in their midst who was willing to sell their technology to anybody. Why do you care?”

“As it happens, I’ve spent a good deal of time in the company of one of their people, a woman called Carpenter.”

“Felicity Devonshire?” Lance laughed aloud.

“I didn’t even know that was her name until a few months ago.”

“She’s a piece of work, that girl. Did you know that, at this very moment, she’s being considered to replace Sir Edward Fieldstone as head of her service? If she gets the job, she’ll be the first woman to do so. She was prominently mentioned in the last Birthday Honours List, too. She’s now Dame Felicity.”

“I didn’t know any of that,” Stone said. “We parted on less than the best terms.”

“Pity,” Lance said. “She’s a remarkable woman. My people are rooting for her to get the job.”

“Good for her. Now, why did you come to see me, Lance?”

Lance chuckled. “I thought I might send some more business your way.”

STONE’S FIRST REACTION was to send Lance on his way, but, as it happened, things had been a little slow in the way of work, and a fresh injection of business could help his cash flow. “What are we talking about?” he asked.

“Just a little legal work,” Lance replied, studying his well-manicured nails.

“Look at me when you lie to me, Lance.”

Lance looked up. “Why do you think I’m lying?”

“Because you’ve never said anything to me that was the truth. Ever.”

Lance shrugged. “Surely you understand that that was business. I was carrying out an assignment important to the national interest, and you were helping.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that.”

“I wasn’t allowed to tell you, and it was important that you didn’t know. In fact, you never would have been involved at all, if I hadn’t been in a situation of, shall we say, temporarily interrupted cash flow. I needed your quarter of a million, which you very kindly supplied, and you made a very tidy profit from the arrangement. Where else could you have gotten a return of four hundred percent in less than thirty days?”

“ Everybody was lying to me, especially Hedger.”

“Hedger is dead. Did I mention that?”

Stone took a quick breath. “No, you didn’t. Do I want to know how and why? I assume he didn’t keel over of a coronary.”

“No, he was expertly stabbed by somebody who worked for you.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Stone demanded.

“Remember those two retired British cops you hired to follow me around London and bug my house?”

Stone hadn’t known that Lance knew about that, so he said nothing.