Free Stone Cold by David Baldacci Page B

and lock pick two minutes later they were open and she was on the front porch of the cottage. She slipped the note she had taken nearly an hour to compose, despite its brevity, under the door. A minute later she was back in her car. Three hours later she was riding into the sky inside a United Airlines jet. As the plane tracked the Potomac River on the climb out, Annabelle glanced out the window. Georgetown was directly below them. She thought she could see the little well-tended cemetery,
his
cemetery. Perhaps he was down there amid the hallowed ground working away at his tombstones, attending to the dead and buried, atoning for past sins.
    “So long, Oliver Stone,” she said to herself.
Good-bye, John Carr.
    “I love this Internet crap,” Bagger bellowed as he stared at the papers one of his IT guys had just handed to him.
    “It is quite amazing, Mr. Bagger,” the young bespectacled man began in an immodest tone. “And frankly—”
    “Get the hell outta here,” Bagger roared and the terrified man fled.
    Bagger sat down behind his desk and studied the papers again. He’d retained an Internet search organization. He didn’t know what their sources were and he didn’t really care. They had delivered, that’s all that mattered. Annabelle Conroy had walked down the aisle, over fifteen years ago, with a guy named Jonathan DeHaven. They had been married, ironically Bagger thought, in Vegas. The downside was there were no pictures of the happy couple, only the names. It had to be the same Annabelle Conroy, how many people getting married in Sin City would have that name? But he had to be sure. So Bagger picked up his phone and called a PI firm he had used in the past. These folks worked right on the edge of the envelope and occasionally skirted past that barrier. He loved them for it, and also because they got results. He would have put them onto Annabelle before now, but he wanted a piece of information for them to start with, and now he had it. When people got married they signed lots of documents. And they had to live somewhere and get things like insurance, and utilities and maybe wills and cars in both the names.
    He chuckled. Annabelle had posed as a CIA operative when running her scam on him. Well, he would show the lady what real intelligence was.
    He said into the phone, “Hey, Joe, it’s Jerry Bagger, got a job for you. A really, really important job. I need to find an old friend. And I need to do it fast because I want to wrap my arms around her and give the lady a nice big squeeze.”

CHAPTER 19
    W HEN S TONE ARRIVED back home he saw the note. Instinctively knowing what it was before he even opened it, he still took his time reading through it. When he was done he sat back and sighed deeply. Then he got angry. He called Reuben, Milton and Caleb. He told them there would be a meeting of the Camel Club that night at his cottage. Though Caleb whined about having to work late to finish a project, Stone insisted that he be there. “It’s important, Caleb. It has to do with our friend.”
    “Which friend?” he’d said suspiciously.
    “Susan.”
    “Is she in trouble?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then I’ll be there,” Caleb said without hesitation.
    Stone spent the next few hours working in the cemetery, shoring up old tombstones that always seemed to lose their grip on the earth after a rainstorm no matter how many times he straightened and reinforced them. He was not merely doing busy work. He wanted to get something that had been buried for a long time, both in the ground and also in his mind.
    The old tombstone had a statue of an eagle perched on top. Pretending to be trying to straighten the headstone in case anyone was watching, Stone let it fall to the ground as though by accident. Revealed underneath was a small hole in the dirt. In this hole was a rectangular-shaped airtight metal box. Stone lifted the box out and placed it in the trash bag he was using to collect weeds. He left the tombstone on its