A Safe House

3

They were served a large lobster salad and a bottle of a good Napa chardonnay, well chilled. She showed no tendency to talk while they were eating.

“Ms. Jacoby?” Stone said, when they were having coffee.

“Jenna, please.”

“Jenna, you’re clearly an intelligent person, so I’m not going to treat you as a dumb housewife.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m going to ask you some questions, and I would be grateful for honest and detailed answers. If you can give me that, then you will be safer in my care. And I will know what is going on here, which, at this moment, I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?” she asked.

“I don’t know why, instead of being treated as a domestic beef, one followed twice by attempted maiming or murder, the chief federal intelligence agency has involved itself in this affair, which would normally be investigated by the police, the sheriff, or the Texas Rangers.”

“I believe I told you that my husband has the power to make those agencies go away and return to giving speeding tickets, or whatever they normally do.”

“That part I understand,” Stone said. “What I don’t understand is why the CIA is interested in you and your domestic circumstances and why it’s a good idea to hide you.”

“Oh,” she said. “That.”

“Yes, that.”

She gazed out a window. “I was recently interviewed, at some length, by investigators from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.”

“What, as briefly as you can tell me, did they want to know?”

“They wanted to know if a United States senator of my acquaintance is involved with at least one foreign intelligence service, that of the Russian government, to the extent of being a spy for them against his own country.”

Stone blinked and tried to digest that.

“I know,” she said. “I was dumbfounded, too, when that came up during my interview.”

“How did you respond?”

“With an affirmative reply.”

“How did you come to the attention of these committee investigators?”

“When I suspected my husband of such activity, I called the only person I knew who was involved with American intelligence.”

“Lance Cabot,” Stone said tonelessly.

She furrowed her brow. “And how did you come to know that?” she said. She looked around, as if for a way to escape an airplane at forty thousand feet.

“It was Lance who interrupted my dinner with Dino last evening and asked me to provide you with a safe house.”

“A ‘safe house’?”

“It is a term used by intelligence agencies to describe a place where a person of interest can be sequestered from contact with others, in order to assure that person’s safety.”

“Is that where we are going now?” she asked.

“Lance didn’t brief you on this?”

“I haven’t spoken to Lance since yesterday, when I first called him.”

“I see.”

She looked out the window. “We appear to be flying across the Atlantic Ocean,” she said.

“Let me explain, to the extent that I can: Lance wants you in a safe place, and he knows that I have a house in the countryside of southern England, which has its own landing field, one dating back to World War II. He knows that I am acquainted with his British counterpart, Dame Felicity Devonshire, who is the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service and my neighbor there, and who will be assisting us in ways not yet known to me. He doubts that your husband or his Russian colleagues will be able to figure out where you have gone. So Lance has had you smuggled aboard my airplane, not even mentioning your gender, let alone your name or that of your husband.”

“How large a house?” Jenna asked him.

“Large, by American standards; cozy, by the measure of the British aristocracy. You will be quite comfortable, I assure you.”

She looked out the window again and thought about it. “Do you have horses?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“For riding?”

“Yes, not for plowing.”

Jenna smiled for the first time. “Then I am sure I will be quite comfortable,” she said. “How long will I be there?”

“I think that will be up to Lance Cabot,” Stone said, “but I’m sure he will consult with you on that matter. Let me give you the lay of the land.”

“Please.”

“The house is Georgian, but has, in recent years, been thoroughly renovated. So it has, as the Brits like to put it, ‘all mod cons.’ ”

“All modern conveniences?”

“Flush toilets and everything.”

“Tell me about this landing field.”

“The British intelligence services requisitioned the property at the onset of the war — as they did of many other country houses. And they constructed the airfield, which still does not appear on any aeronautical chart, as a facility for launching and retrieving intelligence officers to and from France. After the war, the property was returned to its original owners, who maintained the airfield up until the time I bought the place, and I have continued to do so. When we land, we will be met by customs officials from nearby Southampton Airport, who will admit us to the country. If I know Dame Felicity, their attention will be brief.”

“Wallace would have Heathrow and Gatwick watched,” Jenna said.

“Thus Lance’s choice of me and my house.”

“What is your relationship with Lance?”

“We chat from time to time,” Stone replied. “Occasionally he makes an outrageous request of me, as I do of him. For his own convenience, he has appointed me an associate director of the CIA.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Absolutely nothing,” Stone replied. “Except what Lance wants it to mean on some occasion or other.”

“Well, Stone, it seems that I have fallen into what was once known as ‘a pot of jam.’ ”

“I’ll do my best to see that you remain there,” Stone said.