Free Stone Cold by David Baldacci Page A

of a spark to do it.”
    “True. We’ve got some bomb-sniffing dogs coming out. Unless they turn up some dynamite or C4, we might have to look at the gas angle more closely.”
    Stone suddenly remembered what he needed to. He left the agent and rejoined Alex.
    “Anything occur to you?” Alex asked.
    “You fill the house with gas by manipulating the pressure. A light spark will ignite the gas, but if Gray is asleep you can’t count on that. And you don’t want him to smell the gas and escape. So you have a man standing about two hundred yards from the back of the house, near the cliffs over there. He fires an incendiary bullet through the window. The bullet passes through the glass, igniting on impact and triggering the gas explosion. If they find a colored bit of metal in there it may be from the bullet’s nose. Incendiary rounds are typically colored so people don’t mix them up.”
    Alex nodded thoughtfully. “But how would he get away? The front was blocked. Unless the guard who got burned passed out and didn’t see the guy get by him.”
    Stone and Alex walked back over to the agent. “Any evidence of the person leaving through the woods over there?” Stone asked the FBI man.
    The agent shook his head. “We’ve been all over it. No trace, and there would have been. And there’s no easy way to get back to the main road from there.”
    “But the person could have left directly by the main road, then?”
    “Don’t think so. I forgot to mention that the guard who got burned said the guy who helped him ran back this way, not toward the road.”
    Stone walked over to the cliffs with the agent tagging along. “Then he went out this way. Probably came in the same way.”
    The agent looked down. “That’s sheer rock, a good thirty feet.”
    “It’s not sheer. There’re plenty of handholds if you know where to look.”
    “Okay, you climb up. But what about the going down part?”
    “Well, since I don’t see anything around here you could attach a rope to, I’m assuming he jumped.”
    The agent gazed at the swirling water far below. “That’s impossible.”
    “Not really.” Stone thought,
Actually, I did the same thing thirty years ago.
Only it was fifty feet up and there were people shooting at me.
    Stone drove back to D.C. with Alex.
    “Not a bad morning’s work,” Alex said appreciatively.
    “Knowing how it was done and finding out who did it are two very different things. Carter Gray had a lot of enemies.”
    “Granted, but don’t you have any guesses? I mean he had to have some reason to want to meet with you.”
    Stone hesitated. He didn’t like keeping things back from Alex, but sometimes honest disclosure, even for good reasons, turned out to be a bad decision. “I don’t believe it’s connected.”
    He could tell Alex didn’t buy this statement, but he chose not to add to it.
    As they drove on Stone stared out the window. Three men he’d worked with decades ago were suddenly all dead. Carter Gray had met to warn him about this strange chain of events. The very night of that warning he had been blown up. Whoever had done this had found three deeply covered, highly skilled former assassins and murdered them. And then he had succeeded in killing Carter Gray, a man who had few peers when it came to outwitting the competition.
    A person smart enough to do all that could conceivably discover who Oliver Stone really was. And come and kill him too.
    And maybe I would deserve it,
Stone thought. Because the only thing he had in common with the dead men was that they were all former killers themselves.

CHAPTER 18
    A NNABELLE STOOD OUTSIDE the gates of the cemetery where Stone was caretaker. After her talk with Leo and her conversation with Stone, she had made up her mind. This was not Oliver Stone’s fight. Friend or not, she could not allow him to get involved. If Bagger somehow killed him, Annabelle knew she could not live with that guilt.
    The gates were locked, but with a tension tool