Iron Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  Kinney stood up and grabbed his briefcase. “Yes, sir.”

  They walked out of the Oval Office, and Cora Parker snatched Kinney’s coffee cup as he passed.

  “By the way,” the president said as they walked down the hallway, trailed by Secret Service agents, “I hope you’ll make a special effort to get along with my wife.” Katharine Rule Lee was the director of Central Intelligence. “Because if you don’t, there’ll be hell to pay at home.”

  “I’ll do my very best, sir.”

  “See that you do.”

  The president’s press secretary fell into step with them, and they continued on toward the press room.

  Kinney couldn’t wait to call Nancy.

  FOUR

  TEDDY FAY WALKED OUT of the Algonquin Hotel and greeted the brisk new day. He hailed a cab. “Take me uptown on Madison,” he said to the driver. When they had reached 63rd Street, he told the driver to stop, and he walked across the street to a branch of the Bank of New York. A guard directed him to a desk at the rear, and the young woman behind it stood up to greet him, introducing herself.

  “I’m Albert Foreman,” Teddy said, seating himself beside the address. “I’d like to open an account.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Foreman,” the woman said, then began producing an application and signature cards. “Are you new in town?”

  “Yes, I just arrived last night, from Chicago. I’ve sold my business and retired, and I thought I might live in New York for a while. I’ve always loved the city.”

  “Welcome to town,” she said. “How much would you like to deposit?”

  Teddy handed her an envelope. “Five thousand dollars,” he said. “I’ll be wire-transferring a larger sum as soon as I have an account number.”

  “Here are some counter checks with your account number,” she said, handing him a packet. “Where are you living?”

  “At the moment, I’m at the Algonquin, but I’m on my way to do some apartment hunting right now. I’ll call you with the address when I’ve found something.”

  “Fine. Everything is in order. You may begin using your account immediately.”

  Teddy thanked her and left the bank. Outside, he used his cell phone to call a number he had memorized.

  “This is Mr. Allen,” a voice said.

  Teddy gave him his account number.

  “Password?”

  “Cayuse.” He spelled it.

  “Yes, sir, how may I help you?”

  “I’d like to wire two hundred thousand dollars to the following account number at the Bank of New York.” He read the number and the routing number, and Allen repeated it.

  “And your transfer password?”

  “Old Paint.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll wire the funds immediately; they’ll be in New York within the hour.”

  Teddy thanked him and hung up. He walked along Madison for a few blocks and went into a real estate office where he had made an appointment earlier, by phone.

  “Good morning, Mr. Foreman,” the agent said. “I’ve arranged viewings of three apartments that would seem to meet your requirements. The first is just around the corner.”

  He followed her to 610 Park Avenue. “This was formerly the Mayfair Hotel,” the agent said, “and it was converted to condos a few years ago.”

  Teddy had requested a condominium building, since he did not want to wait weeks for the board of a co-op building to investigate him. A condo board would only want a credit report.

  “It’s a full-service building; the restaurant, Daniel, is on the ground floor and provides room service.” They got onto an elevator and emerged on a high floor. “I sold this apartment three years ago, and my clients have gone on a round-the-world tour for a year, so the apartment is available for that time.” She unlocked a door.

  Teddy walked quickly through the place. It was really a two-bedroom hotel suite, beautifully furnished. “How much?”

  “Six thousand a month.”

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “You don’t want to see the other two?”

  “No, this is fine.”

  “They’ll want a credit check, of course.”

  “Of course, but I’ll pay the year’s rent in advance.” He took a check from the bank packet and wrote it out.

  “If you’d like to take a seat, I’ll see how quickly we can get this done,” she said.

  Teddy took a book of Winston Churchill’s speeches from a bookcase, sat down and began reading.

  Ten minutes later the woman returned. “Your credit report is fine, and the building manager has approved you,” she said. “And in view of your advance payment, I’ve gotten him to waive the security deposit.”

  “Then I’m home,” Teddy said.

  “Yes, you are.” She handed him the keys. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Not a thing,” Teddy said.

  They rode down to the street together, and Teddy took a cab back to the Algonquin. He cleaned out the safe, packed his bags and checked out. Fifteen minutes later, he was a resident of New York City. He called the bank and gave them his new address, then he began looking in the classified section of the newspaper for suitable work space.

  ____________________

  AN HOUR LATER, Teddy was looking at a three-room furnished space over a dry-cleaner’s shop on Lexington Avenue. “Does anyone live in the building?” he asked the super.

  “No, sir. The place is empty by six.”

  “What’s immediately below?”

  “A storeroom for furs. The cleaners store them there for clients.”

  “And above?”

  “The roof.”

  “I’ll take it.” He wrote the man a check for a year’s rent and was given the keys.

  Now all Teddy had to do was to begin shopping for tools. He already had a detailed list of what he would need, and he knew where to find them. He walked downstairs and out onto Lexington Avenue and hailed a cab.

  FIVE

  HOLLY FOLLOWED THE MAP to the room number on her map, which turned out to be an underground firing range. She was issued an electronic noise-canceling headset and shown to an equipment room where she could leave Daisy. Someone had thoughtfully left a bowl of water and a blanket for her.

  A dozen trainees had assembled in the range, and shortly, a short, thickly built man in what Holly assumed to be his late fifties, wearing an olive-drab T-shirt, army-issue fatigue trousers, black tennis shoes and a white-sidewall haircut, addressed them.

  “You may call me Sarge,” he said in a clipped voice. “I will teach you how to shoot, if you do not already know how. Your employer does not issue a standard weapon, so you will fire many weapons- handguns, assault rifles and machine guns. You will learn how they work and to disassemble and reassemble them in light and dark. You will learn about silencers and flash suppressors. Someone else will teach you how to eviscerate others with knives and kill them with your hands. That is out of my line.”

  He looked at a clipboard. “Harry One?”

  Holly raised a hand. “Here, Sarge.”

  “Have you ever fired a handgun?”

  “Yes, Sarge.”

  “Come over here and show me how you do it. Ears on, everyone. We didn’t bring you here to send you out into the world deaf.”

  Everyone put on their headsets.

  Sarge indicated half a dozen handguns lined up on a bench. “Take your pick, Harry One.”

  Holly chose a standard Model 1911 Colt semiautomatic pistol. While pointing it downrange she removed the magazine and found it full and the chamber empty. She shoved the magazine back into the weapon, racked the slide, took up a combat position and emptied the weapon into the target, fifty feet away, at the rate of a round per second. She removed the magazine from the gun and returned it to the bench.

  Sarge pressed a button, and the target traveled toward the group. He examined the tight group, all eight shots in the bull’s-eye, then turned back to his class. “I have been at this i
nstallation for an extended period of time, and that is the first time I have ever seen a trainee do that on the first day,” he said. “When I am done with you, you will all be able to do it.” He turned to Holly. “Harry One, you are my assistant instructor.”

  Holly spent the next two hours teaching other trainees what Ham had taught her since she was a little girl.

  When the class ended, Sarge pulled her aside. “Do you own a little nine-millimeter custom-made with Caspian parts?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “I know who made that weapon,” he said. “Not because I’m psychic but because he put his initials on the frame. That sonofabitch cost me the national shooting championship twice, and I can see he taught you what he knows. Before we’re done, you may learn some things he didn’t teach you. Now get out of here.”

  Holly got out of there. She collected Daisy and made her way to the next room number on her schedule in another underground building. She entered the room and found three other trainees there, waiting. On a low platform at the end of the room was an array of safes and locks and prop doors.

  “Come in and sit down, please,” an elderly man said. He had a thick German accent and was wearing a seedy cardigan sweater over a bright orange polo shirt, which Holly thought he had probably not chosen for himself. “You may call me Dietz.

  “You are in this class to learn how to be a criminal,” Dietz said. “You will learn how to pick locks and jimmy windows and crack safes. I say, ”crack,“ because you will not be here long enough for me to teach you to open any safe in the world by learning the combination. With some, you will have to employ explosives, and I will teach you that, too. You may comfort yourself with the knowledge that if, by the end of your training, you have not measured up in some way and are dismissed, you will at least be able to earn a good living as a burglar.”

  Everybody laughed.

  Dietz picked up a remote control, pressed a button and a screen came down from the ceiling. He pressed another button and a slide of a cutaway view of a lock flashed onto the screen. “Now, we have here a common, domestic, double-bolt lock, in this case, a Yale.” And he proceeded to explain how it worked.

  By the end of the class, two hours later, each of the students knew how to pick the lock, open it with a credit card or remove the lock from the door with tools. Holly thought she was going to enjoy this class.

  HOLLY EMPTIED DAISY and went to lunch in the cafeteria. She chose her food, sat down and was immediately joined by a young Asian woman of around thirty. She was petite and very pretty.

  “Mind if I sit down?” she asked. Her accent was completely American.

  “Please do. This is Daisy.”

  The woman scratched Daisy behind the ears and made baby talk, then she turned to Holly. “You’re Harry One, right? I’m Harry Three. There are five Harrys, and I’ve already met the others. I have a feeling we’re going to be working together when we get out of this joint.”

  “Well, you’re way ahead of me,” Holly said.

  “You were recruited by Lance Cabot, right?”

  “I don’t think I should confirm or deny that,” Holly said. “How do I know you’re not a spy who’s just trying to get me to talk.”

  “Yeah, well you’re right. Not that I’m a spy, but they told us not to say anything, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I was really impressed with your shooting,” Harry Three said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Where did you learn?”

  Holly smiled and shook her head. “I’m not biting, Three.”

  “Oh, shit!” Three replied, looking disgusted. “This goes against every natural instinct I have. I always want to know everything about everybody, and in this place I can’t find out nothing about nobody.”

  “I believe I can deduce that you were not an English teacher in your past life.”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” Three said, glumly. “You sound just like my mother, except you don’t have a Chinese accent.”

  “And that you are a first-generation American,” Holly said.

  “Yeah, sure; big deal, Sherlock. Well, look, it’s my guess that all five of the Harrys were recruited by Lance and that we’re all going to be working together when we finally bust out of here. Any idea how long it’s going to be?”

  “All I’ve been told is that we’ll be here until we’re ready,” Holly said. “I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets by saying that.”

  “I think Lance is hot, don’t you?”

  “You don’t really expect me to answer that, do you? You’re probably wired, for God’s sake.”

  “You want me to strip down right here in this weird dining room? You know, they don’t even have any noodles here? How can a nice Chinese girl get along without noodles? My mother would really be pissed, if she knew.”

  “Maybe if you put in a request, they would serve some noodles.”

  “A request to who? That guy Hanks already said they weren’t going to answer any questions.”

  “It wouldn’t be a question; it would be a request. Why don’t you write it down and hand it to one of the restaurant workers?”

  “Well, all right, but I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  Holly finished her lunch with Harry Three without divulging any information about herself, but it wasn’t easy. Three would make a great interrogator, she thought.

  AFTER LUNCH and a short walk with Daisy, Holly found her way to her next class. Only it wasn’t a class. She walked into an office, and a woman at a desk said, “Harry One? Sit down. You are scheduled for a polygraph at this time.”

  Oh, shit, Holly thought.

  SIX

  WILL LEE STEPPED TO THE PODIUM in the White House press room. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to announce that I have accepted the resignation of James Heller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, effective immediately. I have no further comment on his resignation. Mr. Heller will be making his own announcement later today.

  “I am pleased to announce that I have appointed Robert Kinney as the new director of the FBI. Mr. Kinney began his law enforcement career with the New York City Police Department, where he established an outstanding investigative record and rose to the rank of detective lieutenant, before being recruited to the FBI fifteen years ago. There, he blazed a trail of successful investigations and held increasingly important administrative positions, most recently, that of deputy director for investigations. I have every confidence that Director Kinney will make great strides in preparing the Bureau for a bright new future as our nation’s premier law enforcement agency.

  “I have one other announcement of importance. In furtherance of the rebuilding of our country’s national security, I will today send legislation to the Congress to remove the FBI from the Department of Justice and make it a freestanding agency, with the director reporting directly to the president. Mr. Kinney has time to take a few questions.”

  Lee stepped aside, and Kinney approached the podium. He had been surprised and delighted by the president’s announcement. He wondered why the attorney general had not attended the meeting where he was appointed. He pointed at a woman reporter in the front row who looked vaguely familiar from television.

  “Mr. Kinney, what progress has been made in the Theodore Fay case?”

  “The search for wreckage of Mr. Fay’s airplane is just about over, and the Coast Guard has found, as we expected, only small pieces of the airplane.”

  “Have you found Mr. Fay’s body?”

  “We believe that it no longer exists as such,” Kinney replied. “The very powerful explosion would have had the same effect on Mr. Fay’s body as on the airplane itself.”

  “Is there any chance that Mr. Fay got out of the airplane before the explosion?”

  “Conversations with the two pilots pursuing Mr. Fay’s airplane have convinced us that he had no opportunity to escape the airplane before the explosion.”

  “So the Fay case is now cl
osed?”

  “Except for follow-up and administrative details, yes.”

  The questions continued for another five minutes before the president’s press secretary called a halt. The president walked Kinney to the White House portico and his car.

  “Your announcement came as a surprise to me,” Kinney said.

  “We’ve been working in-house for months on that move,” Lee said, “and we’ve played it pretty close to our vests. The attorney general isn’t particularly happy about it, of course, but he understands the need to elevate the Bureau to agency status. And, of course, it will give you a freer hand.”

  The two men shook hands, and Kinney got into his car, reaching for his cell phone.

  “There’s a better phone in your armrest, sir,” the driver said. “And by the way, this is now your official car. We dropped Mr. Heller at his home half an hour ago. I’m Agent Tom Murray.”

  “Good to meet you, Tom,” Kinney said, reaching for the phone. He called his home, and Nancy Kimball answered.

  “I saw you on TV,” she said immediately.

  “Damn, I wanted to tell you myself.”

  “This is a great day.”

  “You bet it is. Why don’t you work on the details of getting us married as soon as possible, and I’ll book us a table somewhere spectacular for dinner tonight.”

  “Will do,” she said,

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He hung up, and the car continued to the Hoover Building. As Kinney left the car he was approached by a man in a blue suit, showing an I.D. card.

  “Good morning, Director Kinney,” he said. “I am Agent Marvin Green of the United States Secret Service, and I will be in charge of your security detail.”

  Kinney shook the man’s hand but was puzzled. “Since when does the director of the FBI get Secret Service protection?” he asked.