Stuart Woods_Stone Barrington 14

gotten nice royalty checks every year, and after his so-called death, they were paid to an offshore bank.”
    â€œYou said Teddy has a history of always having an escape route?”
    â€œThat’s right. When they found him at the cottage in Maine, he got out through a tunnel and made his way to the little airport there before they could catch up to him. That’s why the navy fighters were ordered after him.”
    â€œWell, as far as I can tell, there’s only one way up and down this mountain, and that doesn’t augur well for an escape plan.”
    â€œGood point.”
    They looked at the view for a few more minutes, then drove back down Black Mountain.
    â€œI’ll ask Thomas about other routes up and down the mountain,” Stone said. “He’ll know.”

    B ack at the cottage, Holly produced a satellite telephone and went outside to call Lance. She returned after a few minutes. “Irene has some savings besides her pension and an inheritance from her father, for a total of a little over two million dollars,” she said.
    â€œThat ought to be enough to buy a house here and renovate it,” Stone said. “We’ll ask Thomas; he probably knows what she paid; he seems to know everything else around here.”

    T hey had lunch served by Jacob on their terrace, and in the middle of it their telephone rang.
    Jacob came out of the house with a cordless phone. “It’s Mr. Hardy for you,” he said, handing the phone to Stone.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œI thought you’d like to know that Irene Foster just came into the dining room for lunch,” Thomas said, “and she’s with a man I’ve never seen before.”

9
    S tone and Holly walked into the dining room, took seats at the bar and, without looking around, ordered piña coladas. They made a point of gazing into each other’s eyes and touching a lot, then Holly turned toward the tables and leaned against the bar.
    â€œSee them?” Stone asked.
    â€œGive me a minute,” she said. “It’s crowded.” She looked some more. “Don’t turn around, but I’ve got ’em. I think.”
    â€œWell, is it they, or is it not?”
    â€œOkay, it’s Irene. I’ve never seen the guy before.”
    â€œDescribe him.”
    â€œDon’t know about height; he’s sitting down. Mid-fifties, reddish brown hair, gray at the temples. It’s like that color when men use something to cover the gray? I don’t know why they bother, it’s so noticeable. He’s heavier than Teddy.”
    â€œPeople gain weight.”
    â€œThey don’t grow hair,” she said. “From here, it doesn’t look like a wig, and the first time I saw Teddy—both times, I guess—he was wearing wigs. But his colleagues at the agency said he had been going bald for years, and the last time they saw him, he was nearly completely bald on top.”
    â€œHair transplants?”
    â€œOn St. Marks? Before that, I don’t think he had the time; he was a busy fellow, killing people.”
    â€œDid he really kill the speaker of the house, Efton?”
    â€œThe FBI thinks so, but there was no physical evidence to connect him to the crime. The Agency thinks he killed that Supreme Court justice, the young one who died in the auto accident.”
    â€œThe one who drove off a mountain in Maryland?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œAnd a Secret Service agent was driving his car?”
    â€œAn SUV.”
    â€œWhy does the Agency think he was murdered? I never read anything about that in the papers. It was an icy road in the mountains.”
    â€œIt took nearly a year to figure it out, but the secret was in the chip that controlled the car’s electronic stability system.”
    â€œA faulty chip?”
    â€œNot faulty; altered.”
    â€œAltered how?”
    â€œThe stability system works by applying the brakes selectively to the wheels when it senses a skid. It does it faster than a human can, and it can brake just one wheel. The chip had been altered so that when it sensed the skid, it applied the brakes not to the correct wheels but to the opposite wheel or wheels. So instead of defeating the skid, it made it immediately worse. The driver couldn’t keep up with it.”
    â€œAre they sure it wasn’t a manufacturing fault?”
    â€œNo, but this sort of thing had never happened before.”
    â€œThat the