Stone Cold

CHAPTER 17

STONE WALKED NEAR the wreckage of Carter Gray’s house with one of the FBI agents and Alex Ford.

“Gas explosion?” Alex asked the agent.

“That’s what it looks like, although I’m not sure how it was possible. The place wasn’t that old. And it had all the latest safety features.”

Stone was staring at what was left of the house he’d been sitting in only last night. “Where was his body found?”

“Sorry, can’t say. The remains of a body were found in the bedroom.”

“Positive ID?”

“Suffice it to say that we consider this a homicide investigation regarding the owner of the property.”

“Did you find the driver to confirm Oliver’s story?”

The agent shook his head. “The man’s gone missing. He was with the CIA. Not sure what the story was there. Of course, that means we just have your word for it that he drove you home,” he added, eyeballing Stone.

“If I were going to blow up the man I wouldn’t have told anyone I was meeting with him, especially a United States Secret Service agent. And I certainly wouldn’t have done the deed on the very night I did meet with him.”

“The fact that the house blew up right after he met with you is the reason you’re a suspect,” the agent countered.

“And it’s also the reason I’m out here,” Stone said. “Because the faster you find the real killer, the sooner I’m off that list.”

“Anyone else around?” Alex asked.

The agent nodded, his gaze still on Stone. “A guard. He came out of the guesthouse over there and got hit by some debris and was actually on fire. He says he remembers somebody knocking him down and putting out the flames. He passed out and the next thing he remembers is being put in the back of an ambulance. He’s in the burn unit at a hospital in Annapolis. He’ll be okay.”

Alex said, “So there was somebody else out here last night.”

The agent was still staring at Stone, who raised his hands and said, “You can check me for burns, if you’d like.”

“It wasn’t the other guy, the driver?” Alex said quickly while giving Stone a “knock it off” look.

“The guard was in so much pain he could only see it was a guy,” the agent admitted. “But if it was the driver why should he have run off?”

“He would if he had something to do with the explosion,” Stone noted. “And the fact that he’s gone missing now? Not to tell you how to run your investigation, but it is something to think about.”

“We have thought about it,” the agent said gruffly.

“Find anything useful in the house?” Stone asked.

“If we did, you would not be on the list of people we would inform.”

Stone smiled, turned away and saw it. He said slowly, “Well, since I’m not in the loop you won’t mind if I just take a walk along the cliffs. Be sure to keep me in your line of sight in case I make a run for it.”

As he walked away the agent said to Alex, “Okay, fed to fed, who the hell is that guy?”

“Someone I’d trust my life with. Someone I have trusted my life with.”

“Care to share?”

“No, it’s national security stuff and you’d never believe me anyway.”

The agent stared at the rumpled Stone. “National security! The guy looks borderline homeless.”

“Actually, he works in a cemetery,” Alex said helpfully.

The agent just shook his head and then followed Stone, who was over near the cliffs.

What had caught Stone’s eye was the gas regulator post. As he headed toward it the same agent called out, “We’ve checked that out already. Obvious point.”

“And?”

“And it was working fine and no forced entry.”

“There wouldn’t be any sign of forced entry if the person knew what he was doing. But the gas pressure can be manipulated from here?”

“Presumably. But we checked the box and the pressure hadn’t been changed.”

Stone recalled the long window of Gray’s house looking out onto the cliffs. There was something gnawing at his memory. He turned back to the agent.

“Well, if you can change the pressure, you can change it back.”

“Okay, anything else strike you funny?” the man asked.

“Let’s say you greatly increase the gas pressure going into the house, which blows out the safety overrides. In seconds the place is filled with gas.”

“But you need something to ignite that gas.”

“Turning on a light would create enough of a spark to do it.”

“True. We’ve got some bomb-sniffing dogs coming out. Unless they turn up some dynamite or C4, we might have to look at the gas angle more closely.”

Stone suddenly remembered what he needed to. He left the agent and rejoined Alex.

“Anything occur to you?” Alex asked.

“You fill the house with gas by manipulating the pressure. A light spark will ignite the gas, but if Gray is asleep you can’t count on that. And you don’t want him to smell the gas and escape. So you have a man standing about two hundred yards from the back of the house, near the cliffs over there. He fires an incendiary bullet through the window. The bullet passes through the glass, igniting on impact and triggering the gas explosion. If they find a colored bit of metal in there it may be from the bullet’s nose. Incendiary rounds are typically colored so people don’t mix them up.”

Alex nodded thoughtfully. “But how would he get away? The front was blocked. Unless the guard who got burned passed out and didn’t see the guy get by him.”

Stone and Alex walked back over to the agent. “Any evidence of the person leaving through the woods over there?” Stone asked the FBI man.

The agent shook his head. “We’ve been all over it. No trace, and there would have been. And there’s no easy way to get back to the main road from there.”

“But the person could have left directly by the main road, then?”

“Don’t think so. I forgot to mention that the guard who got burned said the guy who helped him ran back this way, not toward the road.”

Stone walked over to the cliffs with the agent tagging along. “Then he went out this way. Probably came in the same way.”

The agent looked down. “That’s sheer rock, a good thirty feet.”

“It’s not sheer. There’re plenty of handholds if you know where to look.”

“Okay, you climb up. But what about the going down part?”

“Well, since I don’t see anything around here you could attach a rope to, I’m assuming he jumped.”

The agent gazed at the swirling water far below. “That’s impossible.”

“Not really.” Stone thought, Actually, I did the same thing thirty years ago. Only it was fifty feet up and there were people shooting at me.

Stone drove back to D.C. with Alex.

“Not a bad morning’s work,” Alex said appreciatively.

“Knowing how it was done and finding out who did it are two very different things. Carter Gray had a lot of enemies.”

“Granted, but don’t you have any guesses? I mean he had to have some reason to want to meet with you.”

Stone hesitated. He didn’t like keeping things back from Alex, but sometimes honest disclosure, even for good reasons, turned out to be a bad decision. “I don’t believe it’s connected.”

He could tell Alex didn’t buy this statement, but he chose not to add to it.

As they drove on Stone stared out the window. Three men he’d worked with decades ago were suddenly all dead. Carter Gray had met to warn him about this strange chain of events. The very night of that warning he had been blown up. Whoever had done this had found three deeply covered, highly skilled former assassins and murdered them. And then he had succeeded in killing Carter Gray, a man who had few peers when it came to outwitting the competition.

A person smart enough to do all that could conceivably discover who Oliver Stone really was. And come and kill him too.

And maybe I would deserve it, Stone thought. Because the only thing he had in common with the dead men was that they were all former killers themselves.