FOR THREE DAYS, they lived quietly, dining at the Mayflower Inn or cooking at home. They drove the country roads, gazing at the Connecticut winter. It snowed. Peter and Stone made a snowman in the front yard.
Late in the afternoon of the third day, while Arrington and Peter were napping and Ilsa was helping to get dinner started, Stone drove down the hill toward Washington Depot, the little business district, to get some wine for dinner. His cell phone vibrated, and he pulled into the empty parking lot of the Episcopal church, remembering that this was a place where cell-phone reception was possible.
“Hello?”
“It’s Lance.”
“Hello, Lance.”
“Where are you?”
“Out of town.”
“Where out of town?”
“I don’t think I should say on the phone.”
“I’ve been trying to call you.”
“Cell-phone reception is dicey here.”
“Don’t you ever check your voice mail?”
“Not since I left the city. What’s up?”
“We identified Billy Bob from a single thumbprint found in the Hummer.”
“And?”
“It’s not good news.”
“Tell me.”
“His real name is Jack Jeff Kight.”
“You mean, Knight?”
“Without the n. Kight.”
“So, who is Jack Jeff Kight?”
“Born in Plainview, Texas, thirty-nine years ago, son of a used-car dealer and a waitress mother. Attended the local schools, barely got out of high school. Juvenile delinquent, of a sort—joyriding in other people’s cars, fights at the local roadhouses, that sort of thing. Got a local girl pregnant, stole some money to buy her an abortion in Juarez, got caught. He was given a choice—two years in jail or three years in the military. He picked the Marines.”
“Sounds pretty ordinary.”
“He wasn’t. He tested very bright in the Corps. Very physical, breezed through basic at Parris Island, breezed through advanced infantry training. He qualified for the Navy Seals and was about to start training, when an Agency recruiter came across him.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Well, yes. He was lifted from the Corps fifteen years ago and sent to Camp Peary.”
“The Farm.”
“Yes. He did extraordinarily well there, learned many skills, seemed made for covert work, the wet kind. Then he killed another trainee. With his hands.”
“So why isn’t he at your little establishment in Leavenworth?”
“Claimed it was self-defense; a couple of witnesses backed him up. Another witness claimed he provoked the other guy, but he got through the investigation and was returned to training. Less than a month later, he got into a fight with an instructor and got his ass kicked, but when the instructor was walking away, Jack Jeff picked up a board and fractured the man’s skull. This time, he got the boot. The Corps didn’t want him back, so a general discharge was arranged, and Jack Jeff vanished into the hinterland. Five weeks later the instructor whose head he had broken had a seizure, collapsed and died. Apparently, too much time had elapsed between the original injury and the death to prove murder, and anyway, our boy was gone. The Agency never heard of him again, until now.”
“What were some of those skills he picked up at the Farm?”
“Hand-to-hand combat, explosives, weapons, communications, document forgery, the opening of locks and safes, the bypassing of alarms of all sorts and how to create false identities and cover his tracks. Among others. He was there for nine months.”
“Everything a boy needs to know to carve out a criminal career for himself.”
“Everything but experience. He got that over the next decade and a half, doing the con jobs that we know about and, probably, a lot that we haven’t discovered, yet. Apparently, he didn’t kill anybody until the hooker at your house, but we can’t be sure of that. Are you at your place in a nearby state? I’ll send some people up to watch you.”
“Don’t bother; we’re doing just fine.”
“You took Arrington with you? What about her child?”
“Him, too. Look, Lance, we’re okay. There’s no way Billy Bob could know about this place.”
“How about the little piece about your house in Architectural Digest two years ago?”
Stone felt ill. “How would he run across that?”
“How’d you find out about Billy Bob’s past?”
“Google. That’s a long shot.”
“It’s how I found you.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Exactly. You must learn that working for us entitles you to certain protections.”
“I suppose you want to put us in the Agency’s Protect Your Consultant’s Ass program and ship us off to Omaha, or someplace?”
“Tell the truth, I’d rather send a team up there and hope Jack Jeff shows up.”
“You want to turn us into bait?”
“Bait is alive. Corpses are dead.”
“All right, but can you do it without Arrington noticing?”
“I can do it without you noticing.”
“I’d rather notice.”
“If you see a very Irish-looking fellow—thirtyish, red haired, red faced, chunky—he’s mine. Name of McGonigle. There’ll be others. McGonigle is all you need to notice.”
“All right, when?”
“They’re already on their way.”
“Are you going to tell the local cops? You don’t want to get them rousted.”
“I’ve been in touch with them. I trust you are now armed?”
“To the teeth.”
“Don’t let Arrington or the boy go anywhere without you. The team won’t be as effective, if they have to split up.”
“Oh, there’s a nanny, too, Swedish, name of Ilsa.”
“Keep everybody close. If there are errands to be run, send Ilsa. I’ll let McGonigle know about her. Oh, there was one other piece of information, goes to the motive of our boy.”
“What’s that?”
“You remember a little German man named Mitteldorfer?”
“Oh, Christ, yes.” Stone and Dino had sent him to prison, and, once out, he’d made repeated attempts to kill them.
“There’s a nexus: Jack Jeff has visited him a number of times in prison, using other names. We’ve no idea how they first made contact, but apparently, he’s annoyed with you at having Mitteldorfer put away a second time.”
“Yeah, he kept trying to kill us. Get some people on Dino, too, will you?” Stone said.
“I’ll do that. Talk to you later.”
“Lance?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.” But Lance had already hung up.
Stone drove on to the wine shop, but he hurried. He returned to find the house still quiet. Even Ilsa wasn’t making any noise in the kitchen.
He went in there to put the wine in the kitchen rack, and Ilsa was still sitting at the kitchen table, where she had been shelling peas, but now, she had fallen asleep, her head on the table.
Stone put away the wine and went to wake her, then he stopped, confused. She had been shelling peas, not cutting tomatoes. There were no tomatoes for dinner. Still, there was a lot of tomato juice on the kitchen table, and some had spilled onto the floor. He walked slowly around the table and saw where the red came from.
Ilsa’s throat had been cleanly, surgically cut.