Hell's Corner (50 page)
She nodded dumbly and then left. Stone watched her drive off and then went back inside his cottage.
Stone made a call to someone he’d only recently met, but with whom he’d formed a permanent alliance.
Joe Knox said hello on the other end of the phone.
“Joe, it’s Oliver Stone.”
The man’s response was classic Joe Knox. “I was wondering how long it was going to take before you called me in on this. I’ll be at your place in an hour.”
J
OE
K
NOX WAS A BURLY MAN
who at age fifty still had the build of the college linebacker he had once been. He and Stone had spent time in a max security prison together, without having had the benefit of a trial much less a conviction. Knox had been assigned to hunt Stone down by what turned out to be a rogue superior at the CIA. But having survived the prison ordeal largely by trusting each other, Knox and Stone had developed a strong friendship.
“I’ve followed it all,” Knox told Stone as they sat across from each other in Stone’s caretaker’s cottage. “Either in the papers or else scuttlebutt, official or otherwise, at the Agency.” Alex Ford had helped Knox’s daughter find her father when he’d been kidnapped and slapped in that prison, and Knox had never forgotten that. The expression on the man’s face clearly revealed his desire to bring in the people who’d put Alex near death.
“Let’s not waste time then,” replied Stone. “Which Mexican cartel has recently moved large amounts of money in the Caribbean bank chains and then rescinded a half-billon-dollar payment?”
“It’s not good, Oliver.”
“Carlos Montoya?”
Knox nodded. “When the Russians came in they sliced up his mother and his wife and his three kids and left them in a ditch. So no love lost there. He’s based on the outskirts of Mexico City. And even though his business has shrunk by about ninety percent he still has muscle and reach all over the world.”
“That’s actually good for our purposes. Friedman will have to exercise maximum caution. Which will slow her escape down.”
Knox thought about this. “She also has another problem.”
“She needs protection.”
“Obviously, but she won’t get it from the Latinos. None of them will side with her against a man like Montoya. And American muscle will probably stay away from her. They don’t like to get mixed up in presidential assassination attempts. The penalties are too stiff and the Feds coming after you are too many. She could go to the Eastern Europeans—the Russians don’t give a damn who they take on—or else the Far East Asians maybe.”
“Which means we have to find out if, say, a half dozen of them or more have slipped into the country in the last few days. Think you can find that out?”
“Even on a bad day,” said Knox. He paused, studying his hands. “So what’s the prognosis on Alex?”
“Not great,” admitted Stone.
“He’s a first-class agent and man.”
“Yes,” said Stone, “he is.”
“Saved our butts.”
“Which means we have to finish this the right way. For him.”
Knox rose. “I’ll have something for you within six hours.”
After his friend left, Stone walked out of his cottage and strolled along the paths between the graves. He reached a bench under a sprawling oak and sat down. He had already lost one close friend. Any moment now it could become two.
He eyed one of the old tombstones. In a cemetery not too far from here Milton Farb lay under the earth. Soon Alex Ford might be occupying a similar position.
It would either be Friedman or him. Both would not survive this. Not after what the lady had done.
Either he would walk away from this. Or she would.
There was no other way it could be.
T
HEY HAD SEARCHED THE WOMAN’S OFFICE
and found nothing. That wasn’t surprising, since she had officially been fired and had moved out of the space. But when they went through her home in Falls Church, they found nothing there either, and she clearly hadn’t moved out from there. But it was certain she’d left in a hurry, her timetable no doubt disrupted by the fast-acting Secret Service after being tipped off by Stone.
Stone and Chapman looked around one more time through the three-level end-unit town home that had been built in the early 1980s and where Marisa Friedman had lived since the year 2000.
“Ashburn gave me an inventory of what they took from here and it was pretty minimal,” said Stone to Chapman as the latter sat down in a chair and surveyed the room. “But there isn’t one personal photo, no scrapbooks, old yearbooks, nothing to show she had a family. She’s scrubbed herself clean.”
“She’s a spy, it obviously comes with the territory.”
“Even spies have lives,” Stone said firmly. “Much of their history might be invented, but they usually have some personal items around.”
“What do we know about her background?” asked Chapman.
“She was born in San Francisco. Only child. Parents both deceased.”
“How?”
“House fire.”
“You don’t think?”
“She was only four, so no, I don’t think she killed them. Her
parents had been wealthy, but the estate taxes took a real bite out of the money, and apparently the relatives who took her in weren’t that generous. They couldn’t deny she had brains, though. She went to Stanford undergrad. Harvard Law School. Then recruited by the CIA. She’s been one of their top field agents for a long time. The lobbying firm façade was a brilliant one. It let her go to places all over the world collecting intel and no one gave it a second thought.”
“Apparently none of your blokes gave it a second thought that she had been turned either. Weaver looked ready to piss in his pants.”
Stone looked around the modest confines of the town home. “Not exactly a mansion.”
“So this is all about money, isn’t it?” Chapman said derisively. “I knew I hated the witch the minute I first saw her.”
“This is all about a
lot
of money,” said Stone. “A billion dollars can make just about anyone do just about anything and worry about rationalizing it later.”
“I can’t believe you’re defending her.”
“The only thing I’m wondering is when I find her can I keep myself from killing her?”
“Do you mean that?”
Stone turned away from her. “There’s nothing here that can help us.”
“So where do you really think she is?”
“Every airport surveillance video has been reviewed. Every TSA agent questioned. Every piece of paper one needs to travel by air in this country examined. Which leaves car, bus or train. She doesn’t have a car registered to her. A rental car is too problematic for a number of reasons. Bus the same. Besides I just don’t see a near billionaire traveling by Greyhound.”
“Private jet?”
“Checked. Nothing. There are holes in that arena certainly, and we can’t be absolutely sure she didn’t take private wings, but that’s the best we can do.”
“So a train somewhere
north,
to a big city? You really think that’s it? But if you think she sent a lookalike by train to Miami, it seems like she’d want to stay far away from the train station.”
“Friedman thinks eight moves ahead. She would have run through the analysis you just laid out, figured what we might think and done the opposite.”
“Right instead of left,” responded Chapman.
“Which means getting to her will not be easy. And bringing her in will be even harder.”
His phone buzzed. He answered it. Joe Knox was on the other end.
Stone listened for several minutes. “Thanks, Joe, now if you can put markers on credit cards, cell phones, what? Right, I knew you’d already thought of that. And this is all between you and me, okay? Right, thanks.”
He looked at Chapman. “She’s even better than I thought.”
“What do you mean?” Chapman asked nervously.
“I thought she would have hired muscle from either Eastern Europe or Asia.”
“Okay, so what did she do?”
“She hired a team from each one. Six and six.”
“Why would she hire two teams?”
“Two walls between us and her. And if one team for some reason turns on her or gets paid off by Carlos Montoya?”
“She has another team to fall back on.”
“And if I’m reading her right, she’ll keep each team independent and perhaps ignorant of the other.”
“Outer and inner wall. Classic defensive position,” said Chapman.
“We pierce one with casualties, we have another line to get through. Then maybe we don’t get through at all.”
“And where are these guys right now?”
“The big city to the north.”
“New York?”
“Which means that’s where I’m headed.”
“Where
we’re
headed,” corrected Chapman.
“Look, I—”
“Right, you don’t have a chance in hell of not taking me with you.”
“This isn’t your fight.”
“Look, that bitch tried to kill me too. So you’re not the only one wondering whether you can keep yourself from pulling the trigger.”
S
IX HOURS LATER A FELLOW
named Ming, who was part of Friedman’s Asian protection team, came to the surface. He was known as a highly paid mercenary who sidelined as a hired killer. No case could ever be built against him, mainly because witnesses kept disappearing. Probably against orders, Ming had used his credit card to buy some lunch at a deli in the South Bronx.
That was still a big area, but they’d managed to whittle it down some. They could trace no rental cars to anyone on the watch list Friedman might have hired. Cabs in the Bronx were not as plentiful as those in Manhattan and there was no record of Ming being in New York before, which probably stopped him from trying to figure out how to use the subway. So based on all that, Joe Knox assumed he was probably on foot when he went for his meal.
On the phone he told Stone, “Let’s figure in a six-block radius with the deli as the center point. It’s a lot of ground to cover, but not nearly as much as we had to check before.”
“That’s good work, Joe.”
“So who do you have on your hunting team?”
“Harry Finn, Mary Chapman from MI6 and me.”
“And me.”
“No, Joe, not you.”
“Alex Ford saved my life. I owe him this.”
“I thought you were going to retire.”
“I will, right after this. How we getting up there?”
“Private wheels. For all I know Friedman has a way to put markers in the electronic system too, so rentals are out.”
“We can take my Rover. When do you want to leave?”
“You really sure about this?”
“Don’t ask again. But what about the rest of the Camel Club?”
“Reuben is shot up. I don’t want Annabelle going anywhere near this. And Caleb, well.”
“Enough said.”
They headed out at four in the morning. Knox drove. Stone rode shotgun. Finn and Chapman were in the rear seats. Stone had explained the plan to them the previous night. Except for Knox they were all disguised, just in case Friedman had scouts out doing what they were doing. Friedman might have gotten a look at Finn when he was tailing Turkekul and Stone was not willing to take any chances.