Sweet Revenge

Chapter One
    New York, 1989
    Stuart Spencer hated his hotel room excessively. The only advantage to being in New York was that his wife was in London and couldn’t hound him about sticking to his diet. He’d ordered up a club sandwich from room service and was savoring each bite.
    He was a portly, balding man without the jolly disposition expected from one with his looks. A blister on his heel plagued him, as did a persistent head cold. After he’d gulped half a cup of tea, he decided with cranky British chauvinism that Americans simply couldn’t brew decent tea no matter how much they tried.
    He wanted a hot bath, a cup of good Earl Grey, and an hour of quiet, but, he feared, the restless man standing by the window was going to force him to postpone all of that… perhaps indefinitely.
    “Well, I’m here, dammit.” Scowling, he watched Philip Chamberlain twitch back the curtain.
    “Lovely view.” Philip gazed out at the wall of another building. “Gives such a cozy feel to this place.”
    “Philip, I feel compelled to remind you that I dislike flying across the Atlantic in winter. Moreover, I have a backlog of paperwork waiting for me in London, and the bulk of it is on account of you and your irregular procedures. So, if you’ve information for me, please pass it on. At once, if that’s not too much to ask.”
    Philip continued to look out the window. He was edgy about the outcome of the informal meeting he’d demanded,but nothing in his cool manner so much as hinted at the tension he felt.
    “I really must take you to a show while you’re here, Stuart. A musical. You’re getting dour in your old age.”
    “Get on with it.”
    Philip let the curtain fall back into place and moved smoothly toward the man to whom he’d reported these last few years. His occupation demanded confident, athletic grace. He was thirty-five, but had a quarter of a century of professional experience behind him. He had been born in London’s slums, yet even when young he’d been able to finesse invitations to society’s best parties, no small accomplishment in the days before Britain’s rigid class consciousness had broken down under the onslaught of the Mods and the Rockers. He knew what it was to be hungry, just as he knew what it was to have his fill of beluga. Because he preferred caviar, he had made certain he lived a life that included it. He was good, very good, at what he did, but success hadn’t come easily.
    “I have a hypothetical proposition for you, Stuart.” Taking a seat, Philip helped himself to tea. “Let me ask you if over the last few years I’ve been some help to you.”
    Spencer took a bite of his sandwich and hoped it, and Philip, wouldn’t give him indigestion. “Are you looking for a salary increase?”
    “A thought, but not precisely what I have in mind.” He was capable of producing a particularly charming smile which he could use to great effect when he chose. And he chose to do so now. “The question is, has having a thief on Interpol’s payroll been worthwhile?”
    Spencer sniffed, pulled out a handkerchief, then blew. “From time to time.”
    Philip noted, wondering if Stuart had, too, that this time he had not used the qualifier “retired” before “thief,” and that Stuart had not corrected the omission. “You’ve gotten positively miserly with your compliments.”
    “I’m not here to flatter you, Philip, merely to learn why the devil you thought anything was important enough to demand I fly to New York in the middle of the damn winter.”
    “Would you care for two?”
    “Two what?”
    “Thieves, Stuart.” He held out a triangle of the club sandwich. “You really should try this on whole wheat.”
    “What are you getting at?”
    There was a great deal riding on the next few moments, but Philip had lived most of his life with his future, with his very neck, riding on his actions in a matter of moments. He’d been a thief, and an excellent one, leading Captain Stuart Spencer and men like him down blind alleys and dead ends from London to Paris, from Paris to Morocco, from Morocco to wherever the next prize waited. Then he’d done a complete about-face and begun to work for Spencer and Interpol instead of against them.
    That had been a business decision, Philip reminded himself. It had been a matter of figuring the odds and the profit. What he was about to propose was personal.
    “Let’s say, hypothetically, that I knew of a particularly clever thief, one