David Baldacci - Stone Cold

“How?”

Everyone looked at Mandy, who now moved toward her husband.

“How?” she said again, her voice rising. “How will you fix it all? How will you make everything like it was? How can you possibly fix this… nightmare?”

“Mandy, please?” Finn glanced at the kids.

“No, Harry. No! You’ve been deceiving me, the kids, for how long? How long, Harry?”

“Too long,” he said quietly. He added, “I’m sorry. If you just knew-”

“No, we don’t want to know.” She took a struggling Susie from his arms. “I called Doris, our next-door neighbor. She said men came to our house today and searched it. When she tried to ask them what was going on, they said they were looking for you, Harry. They said that you were a criminal.”

“No! NO!” Susie screamed. “Daddy is not a criminal. He’s not, he’s not!” She started hitting her mother. Finn grabbed Susie away and clutched her tightly. “Susie, you never do that, you never hit your mother. She loves you more than anyone in the whole world. You never do that. Promise me.”

A tearful Susie said, “But you’re not a bad man, are you?”

Finn looked desperately at Mandy and then at his sons, who stared at him, their faces pale, their eyes wide in fear.

“No, he’s not, Susie. Your father is not a bad man.”

They all turned to look at Oliver Stone, who had just come quietly in the door. George the dog hadn’t made a peep. He just sat next to Stone looking up at him.

“Who are you?” Mandy demanded fearfully.

“I’m working with your husband to try to right some wrongs. He’s a good man.”

“I told you, Mommy,” Susie said.

“What’s your name?” Mandy asked.

“That’s not important. What is important is that Harry has told you the truth, or as much of it as he can and still keep you safe. It was incredibly dangerous for him to come here tonight, but he insisted. He even left his mother, who is old and frail, to come and see you, because he was so worried. He had to see you.” He looked at Mandy. “He had to.” Mandy’s gaze went from Stone to her husband. Finn slowly put out his hand. She slowly took it. Their fingers instantly gripped like steel.

“Can you right these wrongs?” Mandy asked, looking at Stone anxiously.

“We’re going to try our best,” he said. “That’s all we can do.”

“And you can’t go to the police,” she said.

“I wish we could, but we can’t. Not yet.”

Finn put Susie down and picked up the bear she’d dropped. “I told Grandma how much you love your bear.” Susie clutched it with one hand and her father’s leg with the other.

After twenty minutes, Stone told Finn they had to leave. At the door Mandy slid her arms around her husband and they hugged while Stone and the children kept a respectful silence.

“I love you, Mandy, more than anything in the world,” Finn said into her ear.

“Just make things right, Harry. Make things right and come back to us. Please.”

After they left, Finn turned to Stone. “Thanks for what you did in there.”

“Families are the most important things there are.”

“You sound like you speak from experience.”

“I wish I did, Harry, I wish I did. But I don’t.”

DAVID FINN WAS VERY UPSET about the events of the night before and he welcomed the opportunity to get out of the motel room and go to the grocery store. The room they were staying in had a kitchenette and their mother had been fixing their meals there.

When he was in the checkout line he realized that he didn’t have enough cash, so he pulled out the debit card his mother had given him for safekeeping but then told him not to use. But what could it really hurt, he thought.

A lot, as it turned out.

As soon as the card was swiped through the receiver, an alert signal was received electronically in a room two thousand miles away. It was then relayed to CIA headquarters and nearly instantly thereafter to Carter Gray. Within two minutes’ time four men had been dispatched to the location where the card had been swiped.

David was barely halfway back to the motel when the car pulled over and two men got out. The tall boy was swallowed up between their bulk, thrown in the car and it was rolling, all in less than five seconds. Thirty minutes later he was twenty miles away in a dark room secured to a chair. His heart was pounding so fast he could barely breathe. He said in a low voice, “Dad, please come and help me. Please.”

The voice came out of the darkness. “Dad’s not coming, David. Dad’s not coming ever again.”

Stone, Finn, Lesya, the rest of the Camel Club and Alex and Annabelle were congregated in the cellar. Standing in the center of the room, Stone made introductions, and then told them the entire story. They sat back, an enraptured audience. Several of them occasionally glanced over at Lesya or Finn.

“My team and I killed Rayfield Solomon,” Stone concluded. “We killed an innocent man.”

“You didn’t know that, Oliver,” Milton protested, a response that Reuben and Caleb echoed.

Stone had noted gratefully that his fellow Camel Club members had taken his frank admission of being a former government assassin attached to the Triple Six Division of the CIA without much surprise.

As Caleb had pointed out, “We knew you weren’t a retired librarian, Oliver. I can sniff those folks out pretty easily.”

Lesya said, “Why do they call you Oliver? Your name is John Carr.”

Milton, Reuben and Caleb all exchanged curious glances. Stone looked at Lesya and said, “Have you kept your real name all these years?” Lesya shook her head. “Well, neither have I. For obvious reasons.”

Stone next looked over at Alex Ford. “Alex, you’re the only lawman here. And since what I’m proposing isn’t exactly lawful, you can bail out now.”

Alex shrugged. “I care about the truth as much as the next person.” He shot Lesya a glance. “But to play devil’s advocate for a minute, how do we know her story is true? We only have her word for it that all this happened. What if Solomon really was a spy? What if she didn’t come over to the American side? I mean, I’ve heard of Rayfield Solomon. And it seems like the gent was guilty as charged.”

All eyes turned to Lesya.

Stone said, “I have my own reasons for believing her, including someone at the CIA who would know.”

“Granted,” Alex said. “But we’re all going to be risking pretty much everything here. So I’d like to know it’s for the right cause. I mean, if she was this terrific spy she must be a pretty damn good liar.”

Stone started to say something else, but Lesya put up a hand and rose. “I will defend myself if you don’t mind. I’m actually surprised the question is only coming up now.” She gripped her walker, flipped it upside down, took off the foam booty and unscrewed the covering on the metal tube. Out came two rolled-up pieces of paper.

“These are the written orders we received from the CIA. We insisted on it because of the magnitude of what we were being asked to do.”

They all read through them. They were each on CIA letterhead, addressed to Lesya and Rayfield Solomon. The first instructed them to carry out the assassination of Yuri Andropov; the second, that of Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko. Each had Roger Simpson’s signature at the bottom. Everyone looked stunned.

“I take it you didn’t trust Simpson,” Stone said.

“We only trusted each other,” she replied.

“That’s Simpson’s original signature,” Stone said. “I know it well.”

“There’s no countersignature from the president?” Alex said incredulously. “Are you telling me you killed two heads of the Soviet Union on the orders of, what, a low-level case manager?”