Hot Mahogany

18

Saturday morning dawned bright and beautiful, with the nip of autumn in the air, and Stone and Holly slept in each other’s arms.

Holly stirred. “Why don’t you stay for the weekend?” she asked. “There’s nothing for you to do in the city, is there?”

“Except find Barton’s secretary,” Stone muttered.

“You might be more likely to find it here,” she said.

Stone opened an eye. “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

“Well, one of the things about attending classes at the Farm is that they turn you into a pretty good cat burglar.” The Farm was the CIA’s training facility.

“Yeah, but they yanked you out after only a few weeks and put you to work.”

“That’s true, but I’ve been going back a couple of days a week to complete my training. Lance says it will look better on my record when promotion time comes.”

“So what have they taught you at the Farm?”

“Oh, lock picking, safecracking, the foiling of alarm systems, silent killing – all sorts of good stuff. Oh, and I can kill you with my thumb.”

“Please don’t. Have you killed anybody?”

“Not yet, but you don’t want to cross me.”

Stone kissed her. “What can I do to keep you sweet?”

“You know what,” she breathed in his ear.

He knew, and he did it.

After a long lunch at the Mayflower Inn, they called Barton and went back to his house. He took them into the study.

“We want to get into Abner Kramer’s house,” Holly said.

“Correction,” Stone said. “She wants to get into Kramer’s house.”

“I think that’s a terrible idea,” Barton said.

“How else are we going to know if he has your secretary?” Holly asked.

“I don’t think Ab has it,” Barton replied.

“Have you got a better candidate?” Stone asked. “You’ve said he’s the only person you told about it. You’ve also said that, when he wants something, he gets it, and the implication was that he doesn’t care how.”

“He wouldn’t steal from me,” Barton said. “After all, I gave him the basis of the fortune he’s made.”

“And you cut him and the others out of the deal on the Saint-Gaudens double eagle,” Stone pointed out. “Ab could be nursing a grudge, and how better to get back at you than to take your most prized possession?”

“We just want to look around,” Holly said.

Stone pointed at Holly. “She just wants to look around.”

“Oh, yeah?” Holly said. “What do you want to do, hold my coat?”

“I’d be happy to hold your coat,” Stone said.

“Holly,” Barton said in a fatherly tone, “why do you think you can even get inside the place? Ab, no doubt, has state-of-the-art security in place.”

“I’ve been trained by the best to breach state-of-the-art security,” Holly said. “All I need is a few tools that I can buy at the local hardware store.”

“Come on, Barton,” Stone said, “let her at least case the joint.”

“Is there some vantage point from which we could take a look at the estate from a distance?” Holly asked.

“As a matter of fact, there is,” Barton replied.

They followed Barton’s directions, turning off the highway and onto a dirt track that wound for miles through the woods. Twice they had to get out of the car and move fallen tree limbs aside in order to pass. Finally they got out of the car, and Barton, carrying a binocular case, led them a few yards into the trees.

The hillside fell away, and they found themselves looking across a small lake at the back of a large house, perhaps half a mile away. A barn and some outbuildings stood to one side, enclosed by a stone wall.

Barton took his binoculars from the case and handed them to Holly. “Here you go. They’re fifteen power at full zoom, so you’ll need to brace against a tree to hold them steady.”

Holly braced herself and synchronized the two eyepieces. “Wow,” she said softly. “These things are great.”

“Let me take a look,” Stone said. He received the binoculars and braced against a tree. “ ‘Wow’ is right,” he said. “I can see a picture on a wall, right through a window.”

“Do you see a large mahogany secretary?” Barton asked.

“Sorry, no.”

Holly tugged at his sleeve and demanded the binoculars back. “He wasn’t lying about the painters,” she said. “I can see a corner of a van behind the stone wall, and a man in white coveralls just came and took a bucket out of it and went back into the house.”

“There’s got to be a caretaker,” Stone said.

“There is,” Barton replied. “I know the fellow. He would probably live in the little house you can see a part of behind the barn.”

“So when the painters leave, there’ll still be somebody there.”

“Of course. You don’t just drive away and leave a house like this, containing an important collection, all by itself.”

“What kind of security is there likely to be, Holly?” Stone asked.

“Oh, every door and window in the house will be wired, and there’ll be motion detectors galore, sensors under the rugs. Like that.”

“Will there be battery backup?”

“Of course, and maybe a generator, too.”

“So, if we could cut the power, the generator would come on automatically?”

“Yes.”

“So we could fix the generator so it wouldn’t come on, then cut the power?”

“But there’d be a battery backup. It would be crazy not to have that.”

“Where would the batteries likely be?”

“Inside the house, probably. But the generator would be outside, since it’s noisy when it comes on.”

“How noisy?”

“Probably like a big truck idling. They’d have a big one for a place like this, at least twenty kilowatts, I’d imagine.”

“Right,” Stone said. “When you’ve got that much money, you don’t tolerate the slightest inconvenience. The power goes off in the middle of your favorite TV program, you want it back on instantly.”

Holly panned the scene with the binoculars. “I see a power transformer on a pole about a hundred yards from the house,” she said. “We’d have to knock that out in such a way that it would appear to be a normal failure. Short it out. Could take them a while to reset it.”

“Then what?” Barton asked.

“I want to watch the painters leave for the day,” she said, “and then I want to go to the hardware store before it closes.”

“Impossible to do both,” Stone said. “Give me a list, and I’ll go now. I can be back in an hour.”

Holly took a notebook from her pocket and began scribbling. She handed it to Stone. “No shortcuts, no substitutions.”

“Right.”

“Stone,” Barton said, “there’s a gate where you can drop us along the way. It’s closer to the house.”

“All right.”

Stone dropped them a mile back down the dirt road.

“We’ll leave the gate open,” Barton said. “You can drive closer to the house with your lights off, but don’t slam any car doors.”

“I’ll be back shortly,” Stone said. He drove away reminding himself that he was not – not – going to enter that house.