Stuart Woods Holly Barker Collection

by Stuart Woods

  “Let’s put somebody on the subway eight hours a day and have him photograph every possible person who fits Teddy’s description as to height, weight and age.”

  “You’re talking about thousands of people,” Kerry said.

  “All right,” Holly said, “skip rush hour at both ends; Teddy probably would, since he doesn’t have to be at work anywhere. Photograph all the sixtyish, tallish, slenderish men between, say, ten and four, every day for a week, then run…no, we don’t have any photographs to compare them to…show the photographs to people who worked with Teddy at the Agency. Maybe somebody will give us a positive ID, and if we get that, then we’ll have a photograph to circulate.”

  “That’s a lot of work for a slim hope,” Lance said.

  “It would be, if we weren’t so desperate,” Kerry replied. “Even with a new murder every few days, this investigation is drying up. We don’t really have all that much for our people to do.”

  “All right, Holly, you set it up,” Lance said. “We’re probably going to need more than one body on each train.”

  “I’d suggest picking up every train at Ninety-sixth Street and riding it to Twenty-third,” Holly said. “I don’t know how many trains there are, but I’ll find out. When our people get to Twenty-third, they’ll turn around and go back to Ninety-sixth Street, and we’ll do it for five days.”

  “Sounds good,” Lance said. “I’ll call a meeting and assign you everybody who isn’t already following another lead. But I warn you, if we get something new, I’ll pull off as many people as it takes to run it down.”

  THE NEW ASSIGNMENT was received in stony silence by the group of eighteen unassigned agents in the conference room. Lance made his little speech, then turned the meeting over to Holly and left.

  “Questions?” Holly asked.

  “Yeah, just one,” an agent said, raising his hand. “Are you nuts?”

  “Have you got a better idea?” Holly asked. “Have you got another lead? Are you too busy for this?”

  The agent looked at the ceiling, and nobody else spoke.

  “All right, listen up,” Holly said, and she began reading a list of names from a clipboard. “You’re being issued concealed cameras; the lens can be worn in a lapel or on the brim of a baseball cap. We’re looking for full-frontal shots, here, folks, no backs of heads or pulled-down hat brims. We need faces, got it? Isn’t intelligence work fun?”

  She got back a collection of grumblings she was glad she couldn’t quite hear.

  FORTY-ONE

  WILL LEE, AT THE END of his daily national intelligence briefing, dismissed everyone but Kate Rule of the CIA and Bob Kinney of the FBI, then he held up a copy of the New York Times and pointed to a story in the lower left-hand corner of the front page. “I suppose you’ve seen this?”

  MIDEAST UN EMBASSIES CLAIM CIA

  IS MURDERING THEIR DIPLOMATS

  Both nodded.

  “Just for the record,” the president said, “tell me the CIA is not murdering Mideast diplomats.”

  “The CIA is not murdering Mideast diplomats,” Kate said. “I believe you know who is murdering them.”

  “I believe I do,” Will said, “and I’m getting very uncomfortable about knowing it. If this continues, we’re going to have to announce that Teddy Fay is still alive and working.”

  Bob Kinney spoke up. “I hope you won’t feel that is necessary right now, Mr. President.”

  “Well, Bob, you can always hope, but I’ve dug myself a hole, here, based on the advice of the two of you, and nobody’s getting me out of it. How close are we to arresting Fay?”

  “About as close as we were when we thought he was dead,” Kate said glumly.

  “All right, Madame Director,” Will said, “I want you to issue a statement, through your spokesperson, saying, as dryly as possible, that the CIA is not murdering Mideast UN diplomats. Let’s have that denial on the record, and be sure this guy at the Times gets the message. But I have to tell you both, I don’t know how much longer we can continue keeping a lid on the Teddy Fay story. I’ve had two calls from congressional leaders this morning, and they’re squirming in their seats, believe me. As much as I dread doing it myself, I don’t want one of them to be the one to break this to the press.”

  “Yes, sir,” both directors said in unison.

  LATER THAT MORNING, Kate Rule sat in a meeting in her conference room with the deputy directors for intelligence and operations and their deputies.

  “All right,” Kate said, “let me have your reports on your internal investigation into who might be helping Teddy Fay with his little crusade.”

  Hugh English, deputy director for operations, spoke up. “Director, I’m going to let Irene Foster, who personally conducted the investigation, bring you up-to-date.”

  Kate turned and looked at the handsome, middle-aged woman across the table from her. “Irene?”

  “Director, under my supervision, every department head in the building has conducted an in-depth investigation of every channel of communication in and out of the Agency that could be a means of passing information to Teddy Fay. In addition, our computer services division has audited the computer time of every employee with level-one access to the mainframe, which is the only level at which this information could be accessed. Finally, two hundred and twelve employees who possibly could have had access or gained access to this information have been given class-one polygraphs, and every single one of them has passed. The only possible conclusion that we can draw from all this work is that the source of the information that Teddy Fay is getting is not inside the Agency.” She paused. “That’s my report, and I’ll stand by it.”

  “Director,” Hugh English said, “I’ve reviewed every aspect of Irene’s investigation and I’ve found it to be thorough and complete. I’ll stand by it, too.”

  Kate stared at English and Foster. “You are absolutely certain about your conclusions?”

  “To a great deal more than a reasonable certainty,” English replied.

  “Then where is Teddy Fay getting his information?” Kate asked.

  “Director,” Irene said, “Fay could be compiling this information from multiple sources—half a dozen agencies have bits and pieces of what he is learning—but the only other agency that has it all is the FBI. My reluctant conclusion is that the Bureau is the source of Teddy Fay’s information, and my report so states.”

  “Great,” Kate said. “Bob Kinney is going to love that.”

  “You want me to put it to Kinney?” English asked.

  Kate sighed. “No, Hugh, I’ll save that treat for myself.”

  Irene Foster stood and handed Kate a thick document. “Director, here is my written report. There’s an eight-page summary of the work up front, detailing the steps I took; the rest is substantiation: copies of interviews and polygraph tapes.”

  “Thank you, Irene,” Kate said. “That will be all, everybody.”

  The group shuffled out of the conference room, and Kate walked back into her office, picked up her phone and spoke to her secretary. “Please get me Director Kinney at the FBI.”

  A moment later her phone buzzed and she heard a male voice. “Kate? It’s Bob.”

  “Bob,” Kate said, trying not to sound weary, “can I buy you lunch over here today?”

  “What’s up, Kate?”

  “Something I’d rather tell you about when you’ve got half a bottle of wine in you. I’ll even send a chopper; you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t fit very well in helicopters, Kate,” Kinney said. “If it’s bad news, I’d rather hear it right now.”

  Kate sighed. “There’s good news and bad, Bob. The good news is we’ve conducted an extraordinary, in-depth internal investigation, involving thousands of employees and hundreds of polygraphs, plus an audit of everybody’s computer time, and the only conclusion we can come to is that Teddy Fay is not getting his information from the CIA.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of th
e phone.

  “Bob?”

  “I’m still here, Kate. I take it that what you’re telling me is that Fay has somebody in the Bureau who’s feeding him stuff?”

  “I’m afraid that’s the best conclusion we could come to, based on the evidence. You can go ahead and blow, now.”

  “Kate, I’ve just come from a meeting with all my deputy and assistant directors who’ve been investigating this matter Bureau-wide. They’ve handed me a thick report on their investigation, and to give you the short version, they have determined that Fay’s information could not possibly be coming from anyone at the Bureau or from our computers. Their best recommendation is that it’s coming from the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  There was a short silence, then both of them burst out laughing.

  TEDDY FAY RODE DOWN the escalator into the East 63rd Street subway station and stood on the platform with twenty other people, waiting for the next train. A minute and a half later, there was a rush of cool air and a rumble as the train squealed to a slow halt.

  As the last moving car trundled past where Teddy waited, he caught a glimpse of a familiar face and figure aboard the car. The next car stopped where he stood, and the doors opened.

  Teddy hesitated, and people were surging around him.

  “C’mon, Mac,” a man said. “Get on or step aside.”

  Teddy stepped aside. The doors closed, and the train departed the station. The person he had seen in the previous car was the CIA operative Holly Barker, and she was with a younger, neatly dressed man, who had to be her partner.

  This was one coincidence too many, he thought. As he took the up escalator to the street, Teddy replayed his memory of the past few days, of his actions. He had made a mistake. He had met the scooter guy at the 23rd Street subway stop, and he had abandoned the scooter a block from that entrance. They were looking for him on the Lexington Avenue subway.

  They must be desperate, he thought, to spend manpower that way. At street level he hailed a cab. He’d stay off the subway for a while.

  FORTY-TWO

  A WEEK PASSED, and Holly and Ty went to Lance’s office to present their report. Lance and Kerry Smith waved them to a seat.

  Holly set a flat-screen monitor on Lance’s desk and placed the wireless laptop associated with it at a corner where she could easily access the keyboard.

  “Here’s what we’ve done,” she said, tapping some keys. The screen filled with passport-sized photographs of men in their late middle years. “We took eight hundred and forty-one digital photographs of men on the Lexington Avenue subway between the apparent ages of fifty-five and seventy-five. We eliminated slightly more than half, because they weighed too much and their faces were too full. Then I personally went through all the remaining photographs and eliminated all the men I felt could not possibly be our guy. I know this is subjective, but I’m the only one who’s actually set eyes on the man, even if he was disguised. We finished up with two hundred and ninety-two possible Teddy Fays, and we transmitted their photographs to Langley, specifically to the technical services division, where they were reviewed by a couple of dozen employees who had worked with Teddy or, at least, had seen him several times a week. The result is that not one of them identified a single photograph as Teddy Fay.”

  Kerry looked at the ceiling, and Lance sighed.

  “I took the additional step of ordering another sketch of Teddy, which was seen and commented on by all the people who had looked at the photographs, and here is the result.” She placed a sketch on Lance’s desk.

  Lance and Kerry looked at the sketch for a long time.

  “It’s Larry David,” Lance said, finally.

  “We’ve heard about the resemblance before,” Ty said.

  “It’s useless,” Kerry said. “Unless we were looking for Larry David.”

  “He’s too bland,” Lance said, “too devoid of distinguishing features: no prominent nose, no beetle brows, no scars, no buckteeth.”

  “What can I tell you?” Holly said. “Teddy Fay is the Sir Alec Guinness of serial murderers. He’s a nearly blank canvas upon which he can stick prosthetics and hair and become somebody else.”

  “So we can’t post him on the ten-most-wanted list,” Kerry said. “We can’t call up ‘America’s Most Wanted’ and nail him that way. It would never work, and we’d get thirty thousand phone calls from all over the country from people who think it’s their uncle Harry. Or Larry David.”

  “This is why I’m not a police officer,” Lance said glumly. “Or why I wasn’t until now. Being a spy was a lot more fun.” He turned and looked at Holly. “I don’t want you to feel badly about this,” he said. “It was a good idea, and it was worth the manpower; it just didn’t pan out; we weren’t lucky enough.”

  “Any more ideas?” Kerry asked hopefully.

  Holly looked at her feet. “Well…”

  “What?” Lance asked. “Say it.”

  “There was this one thing that happened in the subway, at the Sixty-third Street station.”

  “What?” Kerry demanded.

  “As the train pulled into the station, I caught a glimpse of a man I’ve seen in my neighborhood. I don’t know his name, but I’ve sort of bumped into him a couple of times, and he fits the description. What makes me think of him is that he was standing on the platform when the car I was on passed, but he didn’t get on the train. I looked through all the other cars for him, but he wasn’t on the train.”

  “Why do you think he didn’t get on?” Lance asked.

  “I think he may have seen me,” Holly replied. “I didn’t make eye contact with him, but if he’s Teddy Fay, he knows me from the opera. Maybe he saw me on the train and balked.”

  “That makes sense,” Kerry said. “God knows the guy has good instincts. If he saw someone on the train whom he knew to be CIA or FBI, that would be enough to keep him off it.”

  “Maybe he even guessed what we were doing,” Lance said. “Does he know where you live, Holly?”

  “The first time I saw him was when I was coming out of my building,” Holly said.

  “Well, if he saw you arriving at the Sixty-third Street station on the train, and he knows that’s the one nearest your building, and you didn’t get on there or get off, maybe he put it together.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t have gotten onto the trains myself,” Holly admitted. “It was such shitty duty that I thought I ought to share it with the others.”

  “The first thing you have to get used to when you’re supervising people, Holly, is handing people shitty assignments without pity,” Lance said. “From now on, I don’t want you on any surveillance detail of any of the potential victims we’re watching. I don’t want Teddy to spot you in a car or on a street, except where you live.”

  “All right,” Holly said. “But what can I do around here?”

  “Consider yourself reassigned as my assistant. Ty, we’ll find you another partner.”

  Ty nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “The only time I want you to be seen by Teddy is in your own neighborhood—at your building, walking Daisy in the park, shopping, that sort of thing. Clear?”

  “Yes, Lance.”

  “We should have Holly followed at those times,” Kerry said.

  “Right,” Lance agreed. “I want a team of four on Holly every time she leaves her apartment building. I want them well back from her, constantly changing places, and I want the team changed twice a day. Holly, I want you to carry your cell phone with an earpiece in your head at all times. Program the team number into it so that you can call them if you spot your man. I don’t want you to be seen using the cell phone, and don’t move your lips when you talk. This guy spooks easily, and we don’t want to cause him the slightest anxiety.”

  “Okay,” Holly said.

  Kerry spoke up. “And if you literally run into him, be nice, let him pet Daisy, but don’t attempt to engage him in more than perfunctory conversation; don’t be interested in him, got it?”

 
; “Got it,” Holly said.

  “On the other hand,” Lance said, “if he appears to have an interest in you, don’t put him off. Behave the way you did at the opera; just don’t go overboard or appear too curious about him. Is he someone who, in the normal course of your life, you might find attractive?”

  “No, not really, though I liked him at the opera. I wouldn’t want to fuck him, if that’s what you mean.”

  Lance looked chastened. “I wasn’t suggesting that you should. What I meant was, if a mutual attraction seemed natural, you might exploit that to your advantage, but if not, don’t fake it.”

  “I understand.”

  “Can I be on the team?” Ty asked.

  “No,” Kerry said. “If he saw Holly on the train, he might have seen you, too, and your presence would spook him immediately. We have this little advantage that he’s seen Holly on the street before, so it won’t alarm him to see her on the street again.”

  “Will you bust him immediately, if I see him?” Holly asked.

  “No. We’ll have the team get in touch with Kerry or me for that decision. They’ll tail him from a distance and report it if he goes into a building. I want to know where he lives and where he does his work. He has to have some sort of workshop somewhere, either in his home or nearby, and the equipment, weapons, disguises, et cetera, that we might find there would be very useful in prosecuting him. This guy might have an identity so tight that we might have trouble breaking it in court. We’re going to need all the ammunition we can get. Remember, we don’t have photographs, fingerprints or DNA to work with.”

  “Right,” Holly said. “How do you want me to proceed?”

  “Do you bring Daisy to work with you every day?”

  “No, just sometimes.”

  “On the occasions when you don’t, you go home to walk her?”

  “Yes, I go home at lunchtime. She only needs walking once after I go to work, then when I come home again.”