Severe Clear Read online

  BOOKS BY STUART WOODS

  FICTION

  Unnatural Acts†

  D.C. Dead†

  Son of Stone†

  Bel-Air Dead†

  Strategic Moves†

  Santa Fe Edge§

  Lucid Intervals†

  Kisser†

  Hothouse Orchid*

  Loitering with Intent†

  Mounting Fears‡

  Hot Mahogany†

  Santa Fe Dead§

  Beverly Hills Dead

  Shoot Him If He Runs†

  Fresh Disasters†

  Short Straw§

  Dark Harbor†

  Iron Orchid*

  Two-Dollar Bill†

  The Prince of Beverly Hills

  Reckless Abandon†

  Capital Crimes‡

  Dirty Work†

  Blood Orchid*

  The Short Forever†

  Orchid Blues*

  Cold Paradise†

  L.A. Dead†

  The Run‡

  Worst Fears Realized†

  Orchid Beach*

  Swimming to Catalina†

  Dead in the Water†

  Dirt†

  Choke

  Imperfect Strangers

  Heat

  Dead Eyes

  L.A. Times

  Santa Fe Rules§

  New York Dead†

  Palindrome

  Grass Roots‡

  White Cargo

  Deep Lie‡

  Under the Lake

  Run Before the Wind‡

  Chiefs‡

  TRAVEL

  A Romantic’s Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland

  MEMOIR

  Blue Water, Green Skipper

  *A Holly Barker Novel

  †A Stone Barrington Novel

  ‡A Will Lee Novel

  §An Ed Eagle Novel

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by Stuart Woods

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woods, Stuart.

  Severe clear : a Stone Barrington novel / Stuart Woods.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60053-5

  1. Barrington, Stone (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction.

  3. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. 4. Parties—Fiction. 5. Bel Air (Los Angeles, Calif.)—

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.O642S48 2012 2012025456

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is for Jeanmarie Cooper.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Stuart Woods

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Author’s Note

  1

  Scott Hipp turned off I-295 South in Fort Meade, Maryland, at the dedicated exit entitled “NSA Employees Only” and drove to the mirrored black building that is the headquarters of the National Security Agency. The NSA was that part of the United States intelligence community responsible for communications surveillance and code-breaking, and Hipp was its deputy director for cryptology, so he could park in the underground garage instead of in one of the eighteen thousand parking spaces surrounding the building.

  Feeling smug that he would return to a cool automobile instead of those baking outside, he inserted his ID badge in the elevator panel and rode up to his office on the top floor, which he entered at the stroke of eight A.M., as he did every day. Four people awaited him at his conference table, drinking his coffee.

  Hipp set his briefcase on the conference table and sat down. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said without preamble.

  The four exchanged some glances and shuffled through their papers.

  Hipp watched them with satisfaction, since he knew they knew there was not much he didn’t know.

  “How about a cryptology joke?” asked one of them, removing a sheet of paper from a stack.

  “Amuse me,” Hipp said.

  “Overnight down at Fort Gordon, one of our computers picked up a twenty-two-second cell phone conversation between someone in Afghanistan and someone in Yemen. The conversation was too brief to pinpoint locations, and much of it was garbled. The funny part is that, in the middle of the conversation, two English words were clearly spoken: ‘the’ and ‘Arrington.�
�”

  “That is terribly amusing,” Hipp said with a straight face. “It’s also very common, since English is a worldwide language, and foreigners often use phrases from or fragments of English.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Does anyone at Fort Gordon, or for that matter, anyone here have any thoughts on what the words mean?”

  “Well,” the man said, “I Googled it and there were essentially four hits, among a lot of duplication: first, there’s some techie businessman named Arrington who’s apparently famous in that world; second, there’s an old Virginia family by that name; third, there’s an Arrington vineyard; and fourth, there’s a new hotel opening in Los Angeles called The Arrington. I like that one best because it has the ‘The’ in front of it.”

  “Tell me about the hotel,” Hipp said.

  “You remember the movie star Vance Calder, who was murdered some years back? The hotel is being built on the grounds of his former home, something like twenty acres, in Bel-Air, a top-scale residential community in L.A.”

  “Home of the Bel-Air Hotel, I believe,” Hipp replied.

  “Right,” the man said. “The hotel is being named for his widow, née Arrington Carter, who herself was murdered early last year. Curiously, both Mr. and Mrs. Calder were murdered by former lovers.”

  “Any apparent significance there?” Hipp asked.

  “Not really, just a coincidence. The hotel is having a grand opening soon—apparently it’s a hot ticket out there.”

  “If it’s a hot ticket in L.A.,” Hipp observed, “there are probably not many invitations circulating in either Afghanistan or Yemen.”

  “That occurred to me, sir.”

  “In what language did the cell phone conversation take place?”

  “A combination of Urdu and Arabic. Not enough was captured to make any sense of it.”

  “All right,” Hipp said. “Put ‘The Arrington’ on the phraseology watchlist and let’s see if anything pops up. I don’t think a single mention of the name is grounds for any sort of alert at this point.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said, scribbling a note on the message and setting it aside.

  The meeting went on for another hour, five men trying to find some evil intent in the overnight traffic. At nine-thirty, Hipp closed his briefcase and stood up. “I’m due at the White House at eleven,” he said. “You people finish up somewhere else. I need the office.”

  The four men shuffled out, and Hipp spent a few minutes going over calls and correspondence with his secretary.

  Hipp arrived at the White House at ten forty-five and was admitted to the cabinet room in the West Wing. By eleven there were eight representatives of other intelligence and security agencies present, and the president of the United States entered the room on time. Everyone stood, and he told them to sit, and the meeting began.

  —

  An hour and twenty minutes later, the meeting broke, and Hipp went down to the White House Mess to get some lunch before driving back to Fort Meade. He chose a table by himself, but a moment later, the president’s chief of staff, Tim Coleman, walked up. “Hi, Scott, mind if I join you?”

  “Not even a little bit,” Hipp replied.

  “How’d your meeting go?”

  “Like most meetings—nothing monumental was decided. Sometimes I think all this agency cross-talk has gone too far.”

  “I know how you feel,” Coleman said. “That’s why I wasn’t there.”

  A Filipino waiter came with menus, and they ordered.

  A discussion of the troubles of Tiger Woods ensued, and the two men agreed that all the man had to do was to win a couple of tournaments and he’d be back on track. They were on coffee when Hipp, trying to keep the conversation going, told Coleman about the capture of two English words in a foreign telephone conversation.

  “What words?” Coleman asked.

  “‘The Arrington.’”

  Coleman looked at Hipp. “What do you think it means?”

  “Could be a new hotel about to open in L.A.,” Hipp said. “I put it on the phraseology watchlist, and we’ll see if it comes up again.”

  Coleman stood up. “I gotta get back to work, Scott. Good to see you.”

  “Same here, Tim.”

  Coleman turned to go, then stopped. “Say, let me know if your watchlist catches that phrase again, will you?”

  Hipp was about to ask why, but Coleman was already striding across the room.

  —

  Tim Coleman went back to his office, and on the way in he said to one of his secretaries, “Get me the director of the Secret Service, please. Right now.”

  2

  Stone Barrington arrived at the offices of Strategic Services, his most important legal client, and was shown to a large conference room. A large object under a sheet dominated the table, and half a dozen men and women stood, chatting idly and drinking coffee.

  At the stroke of three P.M. Michael Freeman, chairman and CEO of Strategic Services, the world’s second-largest security firm, entered. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “please be seated.” Everyone found a chair.

  “I know most of you have already met, but let me take a moment to review. To my immediate right is Stone Barrington, legal counsel to Strategic Services, and the largest individual investor in the hotel. Strategic Services is, of course, a significant investor, as is Superlative Hotel Management, or Super, as we like to call it, and they are represented here by David Connor, CEO, to Stone’s right, and by Morton Kaplan, to my left, who is serving as the executive director of our hotel. At the other end of the table are Katie Rogers, Super’s marketing director, and Caroline Hugenot, the director of design for the hotel, and finally, Dick Trevor, who leads the architectural team for us.

  “I have one more introduction to make. Ladies and gentlemen, The Arrington.” Freeman took hold of the sheet covering the object on the table and, with a flourish, whipped it off, revealing a large model of the hotel. Everyone applauded.

  “I know you’ve all seen the place at some stage of the construction, but this will be the first bird’s-eye view that any of us has seen, unless someone owns a helicopter I don’t know about.” Freeman produced a laser pointer and switched it on.

  “The front gate is here, of course, and the drive takes arrivals up the hill to the reception building, which is an expansion of the Vance Calder house and contains the reception desk, concierge staff, phone exchange, bell captain’s office with adjacent luggage storage space, and the executive offices. Behind that building, where the Calder pool once was, is the house built for Arrington Carter Barrington and her husband, Stone Barrington, and next to that is the former Calder guest house, now Cottage One.”

  Freeman continued to point out the new pool, the par-three, nine-hole golf course, the tennis courts, gymnasium, cottages, and buildings containing rooms for both guests and their traveling staffs. “Most of the parking is underground, leaving the roads and paths free for the electric carts that will transport guests and their luggage to their accommodations.

  “We have an indoor theater seating three hundred people and an outdoor amphitheater built into the hillside that seats fifteen hundred. There is a mini-mall here, containing a spa, hair salon, and eight top-end shops and boutiques. A guest who arrives having lost all his luggage can reequip himself or herself there in an hour or less.”

  Freeman pointed to two large cottages in a secluded corner of the property. “These are our two presidential cottages, and after weeks of diplomacy, negotiation, and security planning, I can finally divulge what most of you do not know: two days before our grand opening, the presidents of the United States and Mexico will meet to conduct final negotiations and the signing of a new trade and immigration treaty between the two countries, covering all sorts of things that you will read about in the newspapers. Additionally, both presidents will attend our grand opening celebration.

  “The Arrington is an ideal location for such a meeting, especially since it will not yet have any gues
ts except Stone Barrington and his party, and I can assure you that between the United States Secret Service and the people of Strategic Services, there will be security rivaling that of the White House.”

  More applause and happy smiles.

  “There are two hundred suites, fifty rooms, three restaurants, and everything else a guest’s heart could desire. As you may know, Centurion Studios has underwritten the grand opening celebration, and they have taken twenty-five suites for that night. Many of their out-of-town guests will be staying on for some days. Centurion has also seen that the crowd attending the celebration will be a star-studded one. One thousand invitations were sent out all over this country and the world, and I’m told that there have been more than nine hundred acceptances. Before you ask, the invitation list is now closed, but then you all had the opportunity of inviting guests.

  “Now, I’d like to ask Mort Kaplan to take us through the schedule of events on opening day.”

  —

  Kaplan stood up. He was a tall, slender, handsome man of around fifty in a Savile Row suit and a tan. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” Kaplan took them, step by step, through the schedule of the opening day and gave them their suite assignments. “Since all of our guests will be arriving on the same day, I would be grateful if you could check into the hotel with your luggage the previous day. The Secret Service will have your names at the gate. We’ve rented a fleet of golf carts, which will bear our logo, to supplement our own fleet of electric vehicles, so that will help us deal with the rush. We will also have a dozen check-in stations at the front desk, instead of the usual four. Each guest will receive a rather expensive gift box and a packet of information, including a map of the property, table assignment for dinner, and other amenities.”

  Kaplan continued for most of an hour, then thanked everyone and sat down.

  “Thank you, Mort,” Freeman said. “That was very impressive, and I’m sure everything will go smoothly. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our meeting. I’m sure I’ll see you all at the grand opening.”

  The group chatted among themselves for a few minutes, then filed out and headed for the elevators. Mike Freeman tugged at Stone’s sleeve. “Stick around for a minute, will you?”

  “Sure, Mike.”