* * *
—
They slept straight through until the following morning, when Stone pulled back the curtains and let sunshine pour into the room.
“What’s happening?” Vanessa said.
“You have completed your spaceflight and are now on the plant Urg. Enjoy the sunshine. It may not last long.”
Vanessa sat up in bed and looked out the window. “Oh, it’s beautiful!”
“Didn’t I tell you it would be?”
“No.”
“I should have, but it could rain at any moment.”
As he spoke, it began to rain, hard.
“Is there a little man behind the curtain pulling levers to make that happen?”
“Nature requires no assistance.” He looked out the window. “It will stop by the time you’re ready for breakfast.”
“Do I have to get out of bed?”
“No, I’ll have breakfast brought up, that’s my usual practice.” He picked up the phone and ordered. By the time it had arrived, the sun was out again. Stone checked the radar on his iPhone. “I think that will last the rest of the day,” he said.
“I feel wonderfully rested,” she said.
“Twelve hours of sleep will do that for you.”
“Do you have horses?”
“For plowing or riding?”
“Riding, please.”
“I do, but finish your breakfast and digest it for a while first.”
Stone looked out the window and saw a Gulfstream 600 turning onto its final approach. “Here comes Viv and Mike Freeman,” he said. The two had met up in Singapore, and from there they flew together to England. He called Major Bugg and asked him to have the airplane met and refueled. “I expect they’ll stay at least overnight,” Stone said to him. “The crew will need to rest.” A few minutes later, Bugg called back. “Everyone is tucked in. I don’t expect you’ll hear from them until dinnertime. I’ll let the cook know the numbers.”
Stone hung up and finished his breakfast. Vanessa, he noticed, was sound asleep again.
* * *
—
They loped south from the house, across the meadow. “You up for jumping a stone wall?” he asked her. “Or we can go around and take the road.”
“I’m up for it,” she replied.
They sailed over the wall, now on the property of Arrington House, the country hotel that Stone and his French partner, Marcel du Bois, had made from a huge country house. The car park was full, he noticed.
They cantered past the airstrip, now sporting two Gulfstreams, his in the hangar, then down to a bend in the Beaulieu River, where they dismounted. Stone produced lunch from his saddlebag, and they sat down under a tree to smoked salmon sandwiches and half a bottle of champagne.
“I feel wonderful.” Vanessa sighed.
“Someone once said, ‘Nothing is more exhilarating than having been shot at and missed.’”
“It’s a lot better than the alternative, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Do you want to go up to London right away, or take a few days here first?”
“I like it here,” she said. “Plenty of time for shopping later.”
“As you wish.”
“Will you fuck me here, please?”
Stone looked up and waved at a passing boat, a few yards away. “I don’t think we want to be the entertainment for passing yachtsmen,” he said, “but, you may remember, I have a bed.”
“Then let’s go find it,” she said, scrambling to her feet and running for her horse.
14
When Stone and Vanessa came downstairs an hour later, Mike Freeman filled them in on what he’d been trying to tell Stone when their call was cut off. On closer examination of the hit list, he’d recognized the names of many of the victims. More than that, he had a suspect in mind for the killer: an ex–Strategic Services employee named Sig Larkin.
Dino got out his cell phone and made a call to New York. He came back shortly. “Larkin has three arrests,” he said, “two bar fights and a domestic violence. He agreed to get counseling for anger management and was released, on his own recognizance. Oh, one other thing: everybody on the list worked at Strategic Services at one time or another.”
“I knew I recognized some of the names, though not all,” Mike said. “But I remember Sig Larkin.”
“Tell me all about Larkin,” Stone said.
Mike led the two of them to a sofa. “I’ll tell you what I can.”
Stone and Dino sat.
“Larkin was hired initially as a security guard on the building staff. He was licensed and had had such experience. Not long after that, our whole security system went blooey, and we didn’t have a tech in the building. Larkin looked at it and said he could fix it. He got some tools from his car, and in half an hour had it up and running again. I figured someone who could do that with a very complex system at first sight was wasted as a security guard, so I introduced him to the head of our tech services department, and he hired him as an installer and trained him on our systems. He was a quick study, and in a week or ten days he was making calls to homes and offices where we had installed systems.”
“You said he was obstreperous,” Stone said.
“Right, he couldn’t work with anybody else. Usually, we sent a two-man team, but we started sending him alone. He was all right in dealing with customers, but he didn’t like partnering with another tech. He took a swing at a supervisor, and after that, he worked alone.”
“How long was he there?”
“Five, six years,” Mike said. “Eventually, we decided that we needed somebody in-house full time, so we pulled him off business and house calls and gave him a desk downstairs.”
“Would he have met the people on the hit list while doing his work?”
“Sure, he was all over the building.”
“Why would he send the list to me? I didn’t work in the building.”
“No, but you were there a lot—board meetings, visits with me, luncheons, etcetera.”
“Buy why am I even on the list?”
“He must have some reason for remembering you unfavorably. Remember, this is a man who takes offense easily. You might have insulted him without even knowing it.”
“Anything else about him?”