“Oh, somebody has an auto accident on an icy road, or maybe he has a few sips of a dioxin cocktail. Satisfaction comes slow in this game.”

Stone looked at his watch. “I’d better be going; I have to make some calls, and I still have quite a lot of work to do on Dick’s estate.”

“Tell you what, let’s play golf tomorrow morning—nine holes at, say, ten and then I’ll take you to lunch at the yacht club. Pick you up at Dick’s at nine-forty-five?”

“Sounds good,” Stone said. He shook hands with Rawls and went to his car. As he drove back up Ed Rawls’s drive, the gate was open again. Then, in his rearview mirror, he saw it close behind him.

11

STONE DROVE BACK TO the house and called Lance’s cell phone.

“Yes?”

“It’s Stone.”

“Everything all right?”

“So far. Tell me about Ed Rawls.”

There was silence for a moment, while Lance thought about it. “Oh, God,” he said. “Ed lives up there, doesn’t he? I’d forgotten.”

“Tell me about him.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything you’ve got time for.”

“All right. Ed was a second-generation guy; his father worked for Bill Donovan in the OSS during World War Two and was with Dulles when the Agency was created. Ed became a star in Operations; he initially made his name as a new agent in Vietnam. He had a talent for recruiting, even people whose language he didn’t speak, but it didn’t take him long to learn the language. He ran teams of South Vietnamese into Laos and the North to gather intelligence, take and interrogate prisoners and destroy weapons stockpiles; he jumped out of airplanes into the jungle, got what he was after and walked home if a chopper couldn’t get to him without attracting too much attention.

“By the time the war was over, he was a near legend, and by the time I met him, when I was in training, he was the actual thing. He was a great mentor, and everybody loved him, except the colleagues who had to compete with him.

“After the Farm, he was posted to Berlin and made a whole new name for himself then. He preceded Dick in running the London station, then he got caught in bed with somebody’s wife and got sent to Stockholm, which was a demotion. Ed never could keep his cock in his pants, and the cold winters didn’t slow him down.