They sat at the kitchen table, where a housekeeper served them a lobster salad, Stone’s favorite, and Hackett cracked a bottle of good California chardonnay.
“I have news for you,” Stone said.
“Good news, I hope.”
“Yes, indeed. You’re off the hook.”
Hackett stopped eating and looked at him. “The Whitestone thing?”
“That very thing.”
“Tell me all.”
“It is my understanding that the people in London . . .”
“The home secretary and the foreign secretary?”
“Yes, those people—have called it off.”
“Do they accept that I’m not Whitestone?”
“I don’t know about that, but I am reliably informed that they have no further interest in you.”
Hackett put down his fork and rested his forehead in a hand, his elbow on the table. “Thank God,” he said.
“Congratulations.”
“I was beginning to think I’d be on the run for the rest of my life.”
“Not anymore. Tell me, do you really think that British intelligence has the wherewithal to track you anywhere and cause your demise?”
“Well, they’re not the CIA, but they do have a long arm. As you have seen, finding one man is not all that hard, especially if he has as many business interests as I do.”
“Somehow I think of them as a smaller, cozier operation.”
“Again, compared to the CIA, perhaps they are. But over the years they have built up very good resources. Remember, they were in business before the United States had any kind of intelligence service.”
“I suppose so,” Stone said, “seeing that ours only goes back to World War II and the OSS.”
“Which became the CIA after the war,” Hackett pointed out.
“Do they have assassins on the payroll?” Stone asked.
“I should imagine so, though that service would be used rarely enough that they could rely on contract agents.”
“Are there really contract assassins in the world of intelligence?”
“Oh, yes,” Hackett replied. “I could put you in touch with two or three, should you ever require their services. Not that I have ever used them, of course.”
“Jim, from what you and Mike Freeman have told me about Strategic Services, you seem to be running your own private intelligence agency.”
“Yes, we are, but not on a governmental scale. And no national intelligence service would have our divisions for manufacturing, like our armored vehicle operation and our electronics section. Just between you and me, those divisions sell to several intelligence services on a regular basis.”
“Things like the telephone scrambler that we’ve been using?”
“Yes, but we still have a little more work to do on that,” Hackett replied. “In a few weeks we should have a prototype with much-improved sound quality on the level of, say, a cell phone.”
“I would imagine there would be a big demand for that from the business community,” Stone said.
“Indeed, yes. We’re already drawing up marketing plans. And it will work just as well on a single hotel room line as on an office system like yours. Also, the final prototype will be smaller than the unit you have.”