The Short Forever(103)

“Oh, yes.” He had forgotten. He went into the kitchen, found a knife, and cut the button from his sleeve.

“What are you doing?” Dino asked.

“I’ll tell you later.” He went back into the drawing room and handed Mason the button, pen, and car keys.

“Thank you,” Mason said, then turned to go.

“There’s nothing you can tell me?” Stone asked.

“It’s not my place,” Mason replied. “Thank you for your assistance; you got your passport back?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t delay leaving the country, if I were you.”

“I’ll be gone before sundown,” Stone replied.

“Yes, sundown; that’s when you Americans get out of town, isn’t it?”

“Only in Westerns.”

“Well, I suppose this has been a sort of Western, hasn’t it? Except we didn’t get the bad guy in the end.”

“Will you?”

“A personal opinion?”

“Sure.”

“We’ll get Morgan one of these days. As for Cabot, I doubt if Morgan can identify him, so we don’t actually have anything concrete on which to base a prosecution. And to tell you the truth, I doubt if my management would prosecute him if we did. This whole business has been terribly embarrassing for them, as well as for Carpenter and me.”

“I’m sorry,” Stone said.

Mason shook his hand. “Don’t be; in a week or two, the whole thing will have blown over for us. Take care.”

“You, too.” Stone showed him out.

Stone went into the kitchen, where Sarah had joined everybody. “I want everybody ready to leave for Heathrow in an hour,” he said, checking his watch.



Sarah drove them, and walked Stone as far as the security checkpoint. “I had hoped you might stay for a long time,” she said.

“I’m an American and a New Yorker. As much as I like it here, I know where home is.”

“And after I went to all that trouble,” she said.

Stone frowned. “Trouble?”

“Well, I had to, didn’t I? Daddy is nearly broke, and if he’d lost any of the lawsuits, he’d lose everything, even the house. I had to do something; then you turned up, and it became even more imperative.”

Stone stared at her. “Jesus, Sarah, you didn’t . . .”

“Didn’t I?” she asked. She kissed him and walked away.

Dino and Erica joined Stone. “You don’t look so hot,” Dino said.

“Just a little shaken,” Stone said.

“What, she told you the truth?”

“Yes, in a way; nothing that I could testify to, though.”

“Jesus, Stone, I knew all that; why didn’t you?”

“I guess I didn’t want to know.”

“Yeah, you’re good at that. Come on, we’ve got a rocket ship to catch.”

As the Concorde roared down the runway, Stone looked at Erica sitting beside him, reading a magazine. “You don’t seem terribly upset about Lance,” he said.

She shrugged. “He told me something like this might happen someday. I’ll hear from him, eventually.”

Stone reflected that he was finally doing what “John Bartholomew” had hired him to do: bring home Erica Burroughs. He settled into his seat. What with the time change, they’d arrive in New York before they left London.





Chapter 60



STONE WAS AWAKENED EARLY THE following morning by the telephone. For a moment he was disoriented, thinking he was at the Connaught or in the late James Cutler’s bed. He glanced at the clock; he had slept for twelve hours. “Hello?” he croaked into the phone.

“It’s Carpenter,” she said. “You sound awful.”

“I was asleep,” he said.

“Oh, yes, the time difference; it’s lunchtime here.”

“Right.”

“Mason said you wanted an update?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“There’s good news and bad news; which do you want first?”

Stone groaned. “The bad news.”

“My management have categorically refused to reimburse you for your monetary loss. They feel no responsibility.”

“That’s sweet of them. Tell me the good news.”

“It comes in two parts: first, we caught Morgan in Hawaii.”

Stone sat up in bed. “Did he have my money with him?”

“No, he didn’t.”

Stone fell back into the bed. “Why are you torturing me?”

“I said the good news came in two parts.”

“All right, what’s part two?”

“Morgan checked in for his flight only shortly before it departed, so his luggage didn’t make it aboard the aircraft.”