Stone Cold Read Free

usual. That was the problem; he could feel nothing in his limbs now, nothing at all. His gaze ran down his arm until it reached his left hand. He tried to rub the fingers together but his mind’s command apparently was not reaching the digits.
    Yet earlier there
had
been something on his fingers. It had felt slick, like Vaseline. You could rub and rub and never get it to feel dry. He had washed his hands when he got home, and that seemed to do the trick. The fingers didn’t feel slick anymore. He didn’t know if it was due to the soap and water or to whatever it was having evaporated.
    Then the truth hit him like a .50 caliber round.
Or absorbed. As in absorbed into my body.
    Where had his fingers become wet? He strained his mind to think. Not this morning. Not at the store, or the deli. After that? Perhaps. Getting in the car. The car handle! If he could have managed it, Ross would’ve sat up in a Eureka! moment. But he couldn’t manage it. He could now barely breathe. All that emitted from his mouth was a sort of shortened wheeze. The door handle of his car had been slicked with something that was now killing him. He eyed the phone on the nightstand. Two feet away and it might as well have been in China for all the good it would do him now.
    In the darkness the figure appeared beside his bed. The man wore no disguise; Ross could make out his features even in the weak light. He was young and normal-looking. Ross had seen thousands of faces just like that and had paid little attention to any of them. His job had not involved normal; it had encompassed extraordinary. He couldn’t imagine how someone like this man had managed to kill him.
    As Ross’ breathing became more labored, the fellow pulled something from his pocket and held it up to him. It was a photo, but Ross couldn’t make out who was in the picture. Realizing this, Harry Finn flicked on a small penlight and shone it on the photo. Ross’ gaze ran up and down the image. Still recognition didn’t come until Finn said the name.
    “Now you know,” Finn said quietly. “Now you know.”
    He put the photo away and stood silently looking down at Ross as the paralysis continued to wend its way through. He kept his gaze on the other man until the chest gave one last erratic heave and the pupils turned glassy.
    Two minutes later Harry Finn was walking through the woods at the back of Ross’ house. The next morning he was on a plane, this time in the main cabin. He landed, drove home, kissed his wife, played with his dog and picked the kids up from school. That night they all went out to dinner to celebrate his youngest child, eight-year-old Susie, being named to portray a talking tree in a school play.
    Around midnight, Harry Finn ventured downstairs to the kitchen, where George the faithful Labradoodle rose from his soft bed and greeted him. As he sat at the kitchen table and stroked the dog, Finn mentally crossed Dan Ross off his list.
    Now he focused on the next name:
Carter Gray,
the former chief of America’s intelligence empire.

CHAPTER 4
    A NNABELLE C ONROY stretched out her long legs and watched the landscape drift by outside the window of the Amtrak Acela train car. She almost never took the train anywhere; her ride was typically at 39,000 feet where she popped peanuts, sipped watered-down seven-dollar cocktails, and dreamt up the next con. Today she was on the train because her companion, Milton Farb, would not set foot on anything that had the capacity and intent to leave the ground.
    “Flying is the safest way to travel, Milton,” she’d informed him.
    “Not if you’re on a plane that’s in a death spiral. Then your chances of dying are roughly one hundred percent. And I don’t like those odds.”
    It was hard to argue with geniuses, Annabelle had discovered. Still, Milton, the man with the photographic memory and a budding talent for brilliantly lying to people, had done good work. They had left Boston after a successful job. The item was