Read Lucid Intervals (2010) for Free Online Page B

screen anymore.” He looked through one of the van’s darkened windows across the street. No sign of Dolce. “Bob, there’s something else.”
    “What?”
    “I’m being stalked by a tall, slender, dark-haired woman. She stands across the street and stares at my house.”
    “Maybe she’s in real estate.”
    “No. I know her. She was traveling with a keeper, but she knifed him the day before yesterday, then disappeared.”
    “You want somebody in the house?”
    “Yes, please. Joan is frightened, and I have a houseguest, too. I don’t want them hurt.”
    “Do you want the stalker hurt?”
    “No, not if it can be avoided.”
    “I’ll put Peter Leahy on it,” Cantor said.
    “Tell Peter to cuff her, if he can, but tell him to watch his ass; she’s very good with a knife.”
    “Jesus, Stone, where do you find these women?”
    “There’s only one like her,” Stone replied, “and she found me.”

10
    S tone sat with Felicity, tucked into a corner table at La Goulue, one of his favorite restaurants. “You seem a little tired,” he said, as she took her first sip of her Rob Roy.
    “It’s the job,” she said, “and it doesn’t change much when I’m out of the country. Of course, when I’m in New York I have you to, ah, entertain me.”
    “The pleasure is all mine.”
    She smiled. “Don’t you believe it.”
    “Tell me about the job,” Stone said. “As much as you can anyway.”
    “There are the usual things,” she said. “Agents get themselves killed, sometimes for little or no reason. Last month I had two die in a car crash in Rome. Of course it was on that racetrack the Italians call the Piazza del Popolo. It’s insane.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I have to make the phone calls and write the letters, and even in the case of the car crash, the spouses don’t want to believe there wasn’t foul play. They’ve spent years worrying that a husband or wife will be taken out by the opposition, and I think it’s something of a letdown when they’re lost to a simple accident.”
    “Is running the firm more fun than working in it?”
    Felicity thought about that for a moment. “Marginally,” she said finally. It’s more fun to know everything instead of just about your own assignment; it’s fun to put the pieces together when you have all the information, or at least all of it that’s available.”
    “You don’t always have it all?”
    “Of course not. Even in my position I can’t know everything, and Whitehall and Downing Street are insatiable; they have an almost religious belief that their service is all-seeing, all-knowing. We could be closer to that if they would triple our budget, but that’s not going to happen unless there’s another war.”
    “What about terrorism?”
    “MI-5 does all the domestic stuff; we’re the foreign service, and we did get about a twenty percent bump in the years after 9/11, but inflation has eaten that up. I still have to send one agent out when I’d rather send two or three. Deciding where to allocate the resources is the hardest part of the job.”
    “Is there anything fun about it?”
    “The equipment is fun. We’ve long since surpassed that Q fellow in the Bond films.” She leaned close to his ear. “I have a pen in my purse that can administer a drug without your feeling it. Then I could walk out in the middle of dinner, and you’d be dead of cardiac arrest before you got to dessert. And the autopsy would reveal nothing.” She smiled. “We call it the toe tag.”
    “Is that the sort of information Stanley Whitestone was selling?”
    She grimaced. “He was selling everything but, thank God, not the toe tag; that was after his time. If word got out about that, there would be husbands dropping dead every day in their dozens, and not a few wives, too.”
    “That reminds me,” Stone said. He produced his iPhone, pressed a couple of buttons and showed her a minute or so of the Seagram footage. “I don’t know if this is the guy,” he