Stuart Woods - Shoot Him If He Runs

Stone sneezed salt water and headed back for the beach. He walked back to the cottage, passing a naked couple along the way, and stood under the outdoor shower, washing off the salt. Holly joined him after a moment, and they soaped each other.

“So,” she said, “how do you like being a spy so far?”

“I’m not the spy, you are. I’m here under my own name, remember.”

“So you are.” She grabbed a towel and began drying herself, while Stone dried her back.

“What do you want to do today?”

“I want to have a look at Black Mountain,” she said, “from the top.”

They borrowed Thomas’s station wagon and drove out of the resort and along the beach. When they came to a fork in the road, with a sign pointing to Black Mountain, Holly said, “Stick to the beach; let’s not be too obvious. You have to be sneaky when you’re a spy.”

“Whatever you say.” Stone drove along the beach road, and they entered and left a small village.

After half an hour of sightseeing Holly said, “Okay, now let’s head for Black Mountain.” She looked up at the mountaintop. “The old man seems to be shedding his gray hair.”

Stone made his way back to the fork and took the other route. The road rose quickly as they made their way, and soon it was more humid, and the vegetation changed. “St. Marks seems to have a rain forest,” Stone said. “I never knew that.”

They passed a construction crew working on the road. “Looks like they started at the top and worked their way down,” Holly said as the road wound back and forth toward the peak over new tarmac.

They passed a few houses, most of them set close to the road, but as they climbed, the houses got larger and were set farther back. Near the top of the mountain they came to a roundabout with a parking area. Stone pulled over, and they got out of the car and looked at the view. They could see all the way back to English Harbour and could have counted the yachts in the marina if they had wished.

Holly put a hand on Stone’s shoulder. “Don’t turn around, but there’s a gate on the other side of the roundabout, and a driveway going up a little higher. When we walk back to the car, follow the road with your eye, and you’ll see a bit of rooftop in the trees. I’ll bet that’s Irene Foster’s place.”

“Does Irene have money?” Stone asked. “Because this has got to be prime real estate up here, and Thomas said she renovated the place. I wouldn’t think she could do that on a government pension.”

“I’ll ask Lance when I talk to him later today,” she replied. “Why, do you think she’s getting money from Teddy?”

“I don’t know, what do you think?”

“Teddy has never been strapped for funds. He’s an inventor, has a bunch of patents on various things, including some of that stuff you see sold on the television shopping channels, choppers and slicers. Word is that over the years, he’s gotten nice royalty checks every year, and after his so-called death, they were paid to an offshore bank.”

“You said Teddy has a history of always having an escape route?”

“That’s right. When they found him at the cottage in Maine, he got out through a tunnel and made his way to the little airport there before they could catch up to him. That’s why the navy fighters were ordered after him.”

“Well, as far as I can tell, there’s only one way up and down this mountain, and that doesn’t augur well for an escape plan.”

“Good point.”

They looked at the view for a few more minutes, then drove back down Black Mountain.

“I’ll ask Thomas about other routes up and down the mountain,” Stone said. “He’ll know.”

Back at the cottage, Holly produced a satellite telephone and went outside to call Lance. She returned after a few minutes. “Irene has some savings besides her pension and an inheritance from her father, for a total of a little over two million dollars,” she said.

“That ought to be enough to buy a house here and renovate it,” Stone said. “We’ll ask Thomas; he probably knows what she paid; he seems to know everything else around here.”

They had lunch served by Jacob on their terrace, and in the middle of it their telephone rang.

Jacob came out of the house with a cordless phone. “It’s Mr. Hardy for you,” he said, handing the phone to Stone.

“Hello?”

“I thought you’d like to know that Irene Foster just came into the dining room for lunch,” Thomas said, “and she’s with a man I’ve never seen before.”

Stone and Holly walked into the dining room, took seats at the bar and, without looking around, ordered piña coladas. They made a point of gazing into each other’s eyes and touching a lot, then Holly turned toward the tables and leaned against the bar.

“See them?” Stone asked.

“Give me a minute,” she said. “It’s crowded.” She looked some more. “Don’t turn around, but I’ve got ’em. I think.”

“Well, is it they, or is it not?”

“Okay, it’s Irene. I’ve never seen the guy before.”

“Describe him.”

“Don’t know about height; he’s sitting down. Mid-fifties, reddish brown hair, gray at the temples. It’s like that color when men use something to cover the gray? I don’t know why they bother, it’s so noticeable. He’s heavier than Teddy.”

“People gain weight.”

“They don’t grow hair,” she said. “From here, it doesn’t look like a wig, and the first time I saw Teddy-both times, I guess-he was wearing wigs. But his colleagues at the agency said he had been going bald for years, and the last time they saw him, he was nearly completely bald on top.”

“Hair transplants?”

“On St. Marks? Before that, I don’t think he had the time; he was a busy fellow, killing people.”

“Did he really kill the speaker of the house, Efton?”

“The FBI thinks so, but there was no physical evidence to connect him to the crime. The Agency thinks he killed that Supreme Court justice, the young one who died in the auto accident.”

“The one who drove off a mountain in Maryland?”

“Right.”

“And a Secret Service agent was driving his car?”

“An SUV.”

“Why does the Agency think he was murdered? I never read anything about that in the papers. It was an icy road in the mountains.”

“It took nearly a year to figure it out, but the secret was in the chip that controlled the car’s electronic stability system.”

“A faulty chip?”

“Not faulty; altered.”

“Altered how?”

“The stability system works by applying the brakes selectively to the wheels when it senses a skid. It does it faster than a human can, and it can brake just one wheel. The chip had been altered so that when it sensed the skid, it applied the brakes not to the correct wheels but to the opposite wheel or wheels. So instead of defeating the skid, it made it immediately worse. The driver couldn’t keep up with it.”

“Are they sure it wasn’t a manufacturing fault?”

“No, but this sort of thing had never happened before.”

“That the chip company would admit.”

“Right.”

“Well, it’s a very clever way to murder somebody, but that kind of attempt would have a very low success rate. I mean, the killer would have to know that the car would be in conditions conducive to an accident.”

“It was public knowledge that the justice had a house in the mountains, and the weather report for the day is all the information Teddy would need.”

“Okay, I buy it. Can I turn around and look at these people now, please?”

“You can look at the guy up close; he’s headed this way.”

Stone turned and looked at the man, who had come up to the bar on the side opposite from Holly. She was right about his hair; colored, but real.