Lucid Intervals

51

They sat at the kitchen table, where a housekeeper served them a lobster salad, Stone’s favorite, and Hackett cracked a bottle of good California chardonnay.

“I have news for you,” Stone said.

“Good news, I hope.”

“Yes, indeed. You’re off the hook.”

Hackett stopped eating and looked at him. “The Whitestone thing?”

“That very thing.”

“Tell me all.”

“It is my understanding that the people in London…”

“The home secretary and the foreign secretary?”

“Yes, those people-have called it off.”

“Do they accept that I’m not Whitestone?”

“I don’t know about that, but I am reliably informed that they have no further interest in you.”

Hackett put down his fork and rested his forehead in a hand, his elbow on the table. “Thank God,” he said.

“Congratulations.”

“I was beginning to think I’d be on the run for the rest of my life.”

“Not anymore. Tell me, do you really think that British intelligence has the wherewithal to track you anywhere and cause your demise?”

“Well, they’re not the CIA, but they do have a long arm. As you have seen, finding one man is not all that hard, especially if he has as many business interests as I do.”

“Somehow I think of them as a smaller, cozier operation.”

“Again, compared to the CIA, perhaps they are. But over the years they have built up very good resources. Remember, they were in business before the United States had any kind of intelligence service.”

“I suppose so,” Stone said, “seeing that ours only goes back to World War II and the OSS.”

“Which became the CIA after the war,” Hackett pointed out.

“Do they have assassins on the payroll?” Stone asked.

“I should imagine so, though that service would be used rarely enough that they could rely on contract agents.”

“Are there really contract assassins in the world of intelligence?”

“Oh, yes,” Hackett replied. “I could put you in touch with two or three, should you ever require their services. Not that I have ever used them, of course.”

“Jim, from what you and Mike Freeman have told me about Strategic Services, you seem to be running your own private intelligence agency.”

“Yes, we are, but not on a governmental scale. And no national intelligence service would have our divisions for manufacturing, like our armored vehicle operation and our electronics section. Just between you and me, those divisions sell to several intelligence services on a regular basis.”

“Things like the telephone scrambler that we’ve been using?”

“Yes, but we still have a little more work to do on that,” Hackett replied. “In a few weeks we should have a prototype with much-improved sound quality on the level of, say, a cell phone.”

“I would imagine there would be a big demand for that from the business community,” Stone said.

“Indeed, yes. We’re already drawing up marketing plans. And it will work just as well on a single hotel room line as on an office system like yours. Also, the final prototype will be smaller than the unit you have.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Thank you.”

Stone took a deep breath and asked, “Jim, are you Stanley Whitestone?”

Hackett raised an eyebrow. “Probably not.”

“You’re not going to give me a straight answer on that?”

“Stone, it might be dangerous to do so, given your connections.”

“Dangerous for whom?”

“For Stanley Whitestone.”

Stone laughed. “All right, then, if you won’t answer that question, perhaps you’ll answer another.”

“You can ask,” Hackett replied.

“What was this all about? Why would the foreign secretary and the home secretary be so anxious to find and, perhaps, kill a man who left their service a dozen years ago?”

“Didn’t Felicity tell you?”

“I’m not entirely certain she knows,” Stone said. “If she does, she wouldn’t tell me.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it would do any harm to tell you. After all, you’ve shown me that you know how to keep a confidence.”

“I’m all ears,” Stone said.

“Felicity probably didn’t tell you that both the foreign secretary and the home secretary, earlier in their careers, had connections with MI6.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“The home secretary, whose name is Prior, had a more informal connection, but the foreign secretary, whose name is Palmer, was actually, for a time, an agent.”

“I’ve never heard that,” Stone said.

“And you didn’t hear it here,” Hackett replied.

“Did they know you-rather, Whitestone-on a professional basis?”

“They did, Palmer more closely, since he worked with Whitestone. They were such good friends that Palmer invited Whitestone down to his place in the country for a weekend on one occasion.”

“Sounds chummy.”

“Oh, it was. Prior was there, too. He was a parliamentary private secretary to a previous home secretary at that time.”

“Does their enmity for Whitestone date to that weekend in the country?”

“I suppose you could say that in that weekend lay the germ of their enmity.”

“What happened there?”

Hackett sighed. “All right, here goes. Pay attention. Palmer had a daughter, a beautiful and brilliant girl, who was a doctoral candidate at Cambridge. She was twenty-four.”

“How does she come into this?”

“In spite of the age difference, she and Whitestone were drawn to each other, and an affair ensued.”

“Are you telling me that this whole business hinges on a May-September affair?”

“It went further than that,” Hackett said. “The girl found herself pregnant, as the British like to say.”

“And Whitestone was the father?”

“He was the only candidate,” Hackett said. He was gazing out the window at Penobscot Bay now.

“Wouldn’t he marry her?”

“Alas, he was already married, and a divorce would have taken two years to achieve, assuming his wife was agreeable to the split.”

“So what happened?”

“Things became more complicated,” Hackett said.