Lucid Intervals

10

Stone sat with Felicity, tucked into a corner table at La Goulue, one of his favorite restaurants. “You seem a little tired,” he said, as she took her first sip of her Rob Roy.

“It’s the job,” she said, “and it doesn’t change much when I’m out of the country. Of course, when I’m in New York I have you to, ah, entertain me.”

“The pleasure is all mine.”

She smiled. “Don’t you believe it.”

“Tell me about the job,” Stone said. “As much as you can anyway.”

“There are the usual things,” she said. “Agents get themselves killed, sometimes for little or no reason. Last month I had two die in a car crash in Rome. Of course it was on that racetrack the Italians call the Piazza del Popolo. It’s insane.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have to make the phone calls and write the letters, and even in the case of the car crash, the spouses don’t want to believe there wasn’t foul play. They’ve spent years worrying that a husband or wife will be taken out by the opposition, and I think it’s something of a letdown when they’re lost to a simple accident.”

“Is running the firm more fun than working in it?”

Felicity thought about that for a moment. “Marginally,” she said finally. It’s more fun to know everything instead of just about your own assignment; it’s fun to put the pieces together when you have all the information, or at least all of it that’s available.”

“You don’t always have it all?”

“Of course not. Even in my position I can’t know everything, and Whitehall and Downing Street are insatiable; they have an almost religious belief that their service is all-seeing, all-knowing. We could be closer to that if they would triple our budget, but that’s not going to happen unless there’s another war.”

“What about terrorism?”

“MI-5 does all the domestic stuff; we’re the foreign service, and we did get about a twenty percent bump in the years after 9/11, but inflation has eaten that up. I still have to send one agent out when I’d rather send two or three. Deciding where to allocate the resources is the hardest part of the job.”

“Is there anything fun about it?”

“The equipment is fun. We’ve long since surpassed that Q fellow in the Bond films.” She leaned close to his ear. “I have a pen in my purse that can administer a drug without your feeling it. Then I could walk out in the middle of dinner, and you’d be dead of cardiac arrest before you got to dessert. And the autopsy would reveal nothing.” She smiled. “We call it the toe tag.”

“Is that the sort of information Stanley Whitestone was selling?”

She grimaced. “He was selling everything but, thank God, not the toe tag; that was after his time. If word got out about that, there would be husbands dropping dead every day in their dozens, and not a few wives, too.”

“That reminds me,” Stone said. He produced his iPhone, pressed a couple of buttons and showed her a minute or so of the Seagram footage. “I don’t know if this is the guy,” he said, “but we eliminated all the other candidates. This one has the virtue of dressing British and walking funny.”

“The quality is very good,” she said. “Amazing, in fact. Where did you get the equipment?”

“The cameras are high-definition, off-the-shelf stuff; the iPhone comes from the Apple Store at Fifty-ninth and Fifth.”

“Let me see it again,” she said, and she watched closely as he reran it.

“What do you think?”

“I think he walks funny,” she said, “and I’ve been trying to picture exactly how and why Stanley walked funny. If this is Stanley, then all that weight he has gained has accentuated his gait.” She handed the phone back to Stone. “This is a very good effort,” she said. “It would have taken a lot longer if my people had done it. Can you e-mail me the images?”

“Of course.” Stone tapped a few buttons. “It’s done.”

“Now,” she said, “can you find this man?”

“If he returns to the Seagram Building,” Stone said. “My guy has alerted security there to keep an eye out for him.”

“Have we heard from Dino and the FBI yet?” she asked.

“No, the FBI takes longer than my guys and your guys put together, but it’s a remarkable system for plucking faces out of the files. Do you think Stanley Whitestone might have committed a crime in this country?”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” she said, “but I’d be very surprised if the FBI or anybody else has caught him doing it.”

“Well, if he has been caught at something and his image pops up, the FBI will be all over this.”

“And if he should fall into their hands,” she said, emptying her drink, “he’ll tell them everything he knows about us and all he can make up, just to stay out of prison.”

“Perhaps I should have thought of that before asking Dino to do this.”

“No, I think it was the right thing; it might turn up something, and we might get to him before the FBI does.”

“Whatever you could say. I might still be able to stop Dino.”

“No, this isn’t going to be easy; we’re going to need every resource available. The trail is very cold.”

“As you wish.”

She looked at him closely. “Subject change,” she said. “Why are you still alone?”

Stone blinked. “Why are you?” he asked.

“My work,” she replied. “Now back to you.”

“I don’t know, really. They come and they go. I get dumped a lot.”

“Why?”

“I think they think I’m incapable of commitment.”

“Is that true?”

“No, I don’t think so, but I’m very careful about who I commit to. Don’t you think you’re blaming too much on your work?”

“I tried to explain this before: it works better if we’re both in the service. We are the only people who understand us. Say I married some barrister or stockbroker. There would be a constant schedule of work-related social events, and I would make very few of them. I work all hours, and men get lonely, just as women do. Men are not understanding when you tell them nothing about what you do. It drives them crazy.”

“I suppose I can understand that, but you’ve told me quite a lot tonight.”

Felicity laughed. “If, say, the Chinese or the North Koreans captured you and you told them everything I’ve told you, they would kill you because you told them nothing.”

“See,” Stone said, laughing. And then their dinner arrived.