“The way I like it,” the big man replied. “Never could understand that decaf crap. Like drinking nonalcoholic booze. Why bother?”

Stone nodded and sipped his own coffee.

“We don’t have much time, Mr. Barrington, so I’ll come to the point. I have a niece, my dead sister’s only child, name of Erica Burroughs.” He spelled the name. “She’s twenty, dropped out of Mount Holyoke, has become involved with a flashy young man named Lance Cabot.”

“Of the Massachusetts Cabots?”

“He’d like people to think so, I’m sure, but no, no relation at all; doesn’t even know them. I checked. Young Mr. Cabot, I’m reliably informed, earns his living by smuggling quantities of cocaine across international borders. Quantities small enough to conceal on his person or in his luggage, but large enough to bring him an income, you follow?”

“I follow.”

“I’m very much afraid that Erica, besotted as she is, may be assisting him in his endeavors, and I don’t want to see her end up in a British prison.”

“She’s in Britain?”

Bartholomew nodded. “London, living with Mr. Cabot, quite fancily, in a rented mews house in Mayfair.” He opened a briefcase and handed Stone a file with a few sheets of paper inside. “Don’t bother reading this now, there isn’t time, but it contains everything I’ve been able to learn about Cabot, and something about Erica, as well. What I’d like you to do is to go to London, persuade Erica to come back to New York with you, and, if it’s possible without implicating Erica, get young Mr. Cabot arrested. I’d like him in a place where he can’t get to Erica. For as long as possible, it goes without saying.”

“I see.”

“Will you undertake this task? You’ll be very well paid, I assure you, and you will lack for no comfort while traveling.”

Stone didn’t have to think long, and mostly what he thought about was Sarah Buckminster, another relationship he’d managed to fuck up, though it wasn’t really his fault. “I will, Mr. Bartholomew, but you must understand that I will be pretty much limited to whatever persuasion I can muster, within the law, and whatever influence with the authorities I can scrape up. I won’t kidnap your niece, and I won’t harm Cabot, beyond whatever justice I can seek for him, based on crimes that are real and not imagined.”

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A Holly Barker Book †A Stone Barrington Book ‡A Will Lee Book