“I thought it might help if I gave you a little background.”

“All right.”

“Will Lee, as you know, is now in his last term as president, and that means his wife, the lovely Katharine Rule Lee, is in her last years as our director.”

Stone nodded and sipped his brandy.

“Things are always changing in the intelligence game, but because of the president’s two terms and what turned out to be Kate’s calming presence, we at the Agency have had a rather long period of stability. There have been blips along the way, of course, among them various problems associated with the work of outside contractors.”

“Yes, I’ve read about those in the papers,” Stone said. “Particularly about the murder trial of a few of your mercenaries.”

“We do not accept that term,” Lance said. “These people are patriotic Americans, not simply hired guns. They actually save us money by performing many chores peripheral to our actual missions. We don’t have to train their people, you see; most are ex-military or ex-Agency or ex-something else, so they arrive with the requisite skill set.”

Stone continued to sip his brandy, which had warmed him down to his fingertips by this time.

“Because of some of the difficulties raised by previous contractors,” Lance said, “I am particularly interested in having Strategic Services on our team.”

“Because they’re clean?” Stone asked.

“Precisely. Jim Hackett has always operated in a highly ethical manner, and his reputation, and that of his company, is, as a result, impeccable.”

“And Mike Freeman wants to keep it that way,” Stone said.

“Of course, of course,” Lance replied, “and yet it is Mike himself who is the greatest threat to the company’s reputation.”

Stone stopped sipping brandy. “What do you mean by that?” he asked carefully.

“I think you may already know,” Lance said. “But I’m going to tell you anyway, just so all our cards will be on the table.” He took a sip of his brandy, then continued.

FIFTEEN

Lance sniffed his brandy and took another sip. “Freeman is not his real name,” he said, “or, at least, not the name he was given at birth. He was then called Stanley Whitestone.”

Stone sipped his brandy and waited.

“Mike was a well-brought-up young Englishman when he was recruited for MI6, which is, as you know, the Brits’ foreign intelligence service. He excelled there and many said he was headed for the top. Then he fell in love with a much younger woman. She was twenty-two or so, a student at Cambridge, and Mike was in his mid-thirties and married. Her father, who was an important member of Parliament, was not amused. He came down rather hard on the girl, who had, by this time, found herself pregnant. Mike stepped up; he left his wife and became engaged to the girl, but she decided to have an abortion. Afraid of calling attention to herself because of her father’s position, she did not go to a hospital. Instead, she called on her best friend at Cambridge, a medical student, to perform the procedure. The boy was gay and the son of another important MP.