Page after page of the journal was turned as Stone took a painful walk through his past work for the U.S. government. Then he focused on several photographs he’d pasted on one page along with his handwritten notes and some bits of the “unofficial” record he’d managed to snag.
He was staring at the photos of his three Triple Six comrades, all now dead: Judd Bingham, Bob Cole and Lou Cincetti. And then he looked at the older bespectacled man in the picture at the bottom of the page.
“Rayfield Solomon,” he said to himself. The hit had been quick and efficient but still one of the most unusual of Stone’s career. It had been in Sa˜o Paulo. The orders had been clear. Solomon was a spy, turned by the legendary Russian operative Lesya, last name unknown. There was to be no arrest and no trial; it would be too embarrassing for the American public to endure; not that lengthy explanations were ever given to the Triple Six teams.
Stone remembered the man’s expression as they burst in the door. It was not fear, he recalled. At best it was mild surprise, and then his features hardened. He politely asked who had ordered him to be terminated. Bingham laughed, but as the leader Stone stepped forward and told Solomon. There was no official requirement to do this. Stone simply felt every doomed man had a right to know.
Rayfield Solomon was a man of average height and build, more professor than secret operative in appearance. But to this day Stone remembered those wondrous eyes that burned into him as he raised his pistol. It was a gaze that bespoke a brilliant mind behind it, and a man who was unafraid of the death knocking on his door. He was no traitor, Solomon said. “You will kill me, of course, but understand that you kill an innocent man.” Stone was impressed at how calmly the man spoke while four armed men encircled him.
“You will have been told to make it look like a suicide of course,” Solomon said. This too stunned Stone because those had been his exact orders. “I am right-handed. As you can see, the hand is larger, stronger, so I’m not lying to you. Thus, place the shot in the right temple. If you wish I will also hold the gun and place my finger on the trigger so that my prints are on the weapon.” Then he turned to Stone with a gaze that froze even the veteran killer. “But I will not pull the trigger. You will have to do the killing. Innocent men do not commit suicide.”
After it was over, the men left as quietly as they had come. An overnight ride on an American cargo plane operated by a shell company of the CIA carried them back to Miami the next day. Bingham, Cincetti and Cole went out partying that night because the team had been given a few days off, as a reward for a job well done. Stone did not join them. He never did. He had a wife now and a young child. He stayed alone in his hotel room that night. He stayed up all night, in fact. The image of Rayfield Solomon would not leave his mind. Every time he tried to close his eyes, all he saw was the man’s gaze ripping into him, the words eating away his soul.
I am an innocent man.
Stone hadn’t wanted to admit it then, but all these years later, he could. Solomon had been telling the truth. Stone had killed an innocent man. Somehow he had known that this death would come back to haunt him. In fact, the Solomon case was one of the reasons Stone decided to leave Triple Six. It was a decision that ultimately destroyed his family.
They had called him a traitor, just like they had Solomon. And just like Solomon he’d been innocent. How many more Rayfield Solomons might have wrongly died by his hand?
He closed the journal and the cab dropped him off a few minutes later. He called Reuben, because if Gray couldn’t find Stone he would use any means possible to flush him out, including kidnapping his friends.
Stone said calmly, “The big man we thought was gone isn’t. Is your phone listed in your name?” Stone thought he knew the answer because he knew Reuben very well.
“Nope, I’m actually piggybacking on a friend of mine’s service,” Reuben said evasively.
“Luckily you just recently moved and don’t have an official address. Otherwise I would’ve already had you relocate.”
“I got evicted from the other place, Oliver. Left in the middle of the night because I wanted to avoid a certain rental dispute.”
“Now everyone needs to lay low because friends of mine are valuable to him. I’ll check in later.”
He needed information from the inside and he needed it now. There was only one man who was in a position to give it to him. Stone hadn’t seen the fellow in thirty years, but figured now was a good time to get reacquainted. Indeed, he wondered now why he hadn’t made the visit decades ago. Perhaps he’d been afraid of the answer. Now he was no longer scared.
He had focused on the Rayfield Solomon case because, in his long career, it had been the one Stone felt the most regret for. After he’d been assigned to kill the man, Stone researched his background. He hardly seemed like a traitor, though that was not Stone’s case to make. He’d heard of Solomon’s personal link to the legendary spy Lesya. And if she’d survived and was still out there, the woman might be exacting her revenge on the people who’d killed Solomon. An innocent man.
CHAPTER 63
MAX HIMMERLING closed his book, yawned and stretched. Ever since his wife, Kitty, had died of cancer two years ago, his routine rarely varied. He worked, he came home, he ate a simple meal, he read a chapter in a book and he went to bed. It was an unexciting life, but his life at work was exciting enough. He had grown bald and fat in the service of his country. A nearly forty-year veteran of the CIA-he’d started there right out of college-his job was totally unique. Blessed with the most orderly of minds, he was like a central clearinghouse for the most diverse sort of matters. How would a coup in Bolivia or Venezuela orchestrated by the U.S. impact on the West’s interests in the Middle East or China? Or if oil dropped another buck a barrel, would it behoove the Pentagon to open a forward military base in such-and-such country? In a time of supercomputers and servers filled with trillions of bytes of data and spy satellites that stole your secrets from outer space, it made Max feel good that there was still a strong human element in the work of his agency.
He was unknown outside the corridors of Langley, was considered only a low-level bureaucratic grunt within it, and would receive neither wealth nor honors. Yet to the people who mattered, Max Himmerling was an indispensable asset to the world’s most elite intelligence-gathering agency. And that was enough for him. Indeed, after his wife’s passing, it was all he had left. His importance to his agency was represented by the two armed men who guarded the exterior of his house when he was home. Himmerling would retire in two years and dreamed of traveling to some of the places he’d analyzed all these decades. He was worried, though, that his money would run out before his life did. The government provided a good package and first-rate health care, but he hadn’t saved much on his own, and to continue living in this area, which he very much wanted to do, was expensive. He supposed he would cross that bridge when he came to it.
He lifted his tired, fleshy body from his easy chair and started up the stairs to his bedroom. He never made it.
The figure came from nowhere. The shock of the man standing in his living room nearly gave Max a heart attack. That was nothing compared to the shock he received when the intruder spoke.
“It’s been a long time, Max.”
Max put a hand against the wall to steady himself. He said in a shaky voice, “Who are you? How’d you get past the guards?”