Iron Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  Bob opened the folder. “You lied on your polygraph,” he said.

  “No,” Holly replied evenly. “I did not.”

  “The examination you have just taken is the most sensitive and reliable in the world. Nobody beats it; certainly not you.”

  “I didn’t lie on the examination.”

  “I’m giving you an opportunity to come clean, and this is the only opportunity you will have to do so and explain yourself.”

  “I have nothing to come clean about,” Holly replied.

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Tell me what, exactly, you think I’m lying about.”

  “You know, exactly, what you lied about.”

  “No, I don’t. I am baffled by your accusation.”

  “Tell us right now, or you’re out of here.”

  “Well, I guess I’m out of here,” Holly said, standing up.

  “Sit down.”

  ON THE OTHER side of the glass, Lance Cabot sat with the more senior polygraph examiner, watching Holly’s responses. “I believe her,” he said.

  “She lied,” the examiner said.

  “How certain are you?”

  “She said no, and I got a reaction that indicated a lie.”

  “How big a reaction?”

  “A small one, admittedly, but in my professional judgment, she lied.”

  HOLLY HAD INTERROGATED many prisoners during her careers as a military and civilian police officer, and she was determined to stand her ground.

  “Not only did you lie on your polygraph,” the man said, “but you have now made yourself liable for criminal charges.”

  “You, sir,” Holly replied, “are full of shit.”

  The man slammed his fist down on the table top. “Liar!” he shouted. “Do you think we want liars in the CIA?”

  The other man, who was older and grayer, spoke up. “Bob, why don’t you go get a cup of coffee and let Holly and me chat for a minute?”

  Bob stalked out of the room without a word.

  The other man gave Holly a rueful grin. “I’m sorry about that, Holly,” he said. “Bob is pretty intense about his work, and he sometimes gets a little too excited. My name is Dan, and I want to help you straighten this out, if I can.” His tone was fatherly and reassuring.

  Ah, the good cop, Holly thought. “I’ll be happy to help in any way I can,” she said, trying to sound conciliatory.

  “That’s great, Holly,” Dan said, “because we don’t want this conversation to be an impediment to your career.” He tapped the thick folder on the desk. “I’ve read your service record, and it’s a very fine one. Of course, your CO. put some stuff in there after he was acquitted at his court-martial, but that’s easy to see through. It’s clear to me that you were telling the truth, and he was lying.”

  “Thank you,” Holly said, and she meant it. The words made her feel good inside, but she knew that made her vulnerable to what Dan was trying to do.

  “Now, why don’t you tell me about your questionable answers on your polygraph,” he said, “and I’ll do whatever I can to fix this.”

  “Dan,” Holly said, “I’d like to help, but I just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I gave truthful answers to all the questions I was asked. Now, it might help if you told me what you think I lied about.”

  “First of all, Holly, I believe you. I don’t think you lied. You seem like an honest person to me. However, Bob is very good at what he does, and he is convinced that you lied.”

  “Well, why don’t you get him in here with his record, and let’s go over the answer he’s concerned about.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not how we do things here.”

  “Well, Dan, I have to tell you that I don’t think very much of how you do things here. Not so far, anyway.”

  “Holly, I think we’re both trying to straighten this out, but I have to stick to procedures.”

  “Is your procedure to accuse me of lying with no evidence of what you think I’m lying about?”

  “Of course not. We just have to be very careful here. We don’t want this thing to rise up and bite us on the ass, or you either, a few years down the road.”

  “Well, Dan, in that case, I think you should either reexamine me or launch a full-scale investigation into what you consider my lie.”

  “I’m trying to avoid those alternatives,” Dan said.

  “Well, you’re not trying hard enough,” Holly replied.

  BEHIND THE GLASS, Lance was chuckling to himself. “Are you sure you want to go up against this woman?” he asked Bob.

  “I still think she lied.”

  “So, reexamine her. Do it now.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. She knows what she lied about, so she’ll be expecting the question, and she may know enough about the polygraph to beat it.”

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to launch an investigation based on this blip,” Lance said. He looked over his shoulder. “Bob, get back in there and tell her what she lied about. Maybe we can elicit some sort of confession, or at least, a concession that she might not have been entirely truthful.”

  “Whatever you say, Lance,” Bob replied, then left the room.

  BOB WALKED back in and sat down. “I’ve got the record, here,” he said, opening a file. “You were asked if you had ever stolen anything from the Army.”

  “And I replied, 'yes,'” Holly said.

  “Then you were asked if you had stolen anything worth more than a thousand dollars,” Bob said.

  “And I replied, 'no.'”

  “That’s where the problem is, Holly.”

  “I don’t see the problem.”

  “What did you steal?”

  “A Colt.45 pistol. Well, I didn’t exactly steal it.”

  “Tell us about it.”

  “After shooting on the range one day, I found a.45 that somebody had left on the bench. Rather than turn it over to the range master and get somebody in trouble, I took it with me, planning to find out to whom the gun was assigned. I put it in my safe, then I forgot about it. More than a year later, I found it in the back of the safe, and I took it to the range master and told him what had happened. He told me that he had already done some juggling with the books and reported the gun broken, unrepairable and destroyed. He told me to keep the gun, since it was off the records, so I did. I still have it somewhere.”

  “How much was the gun worth?” Dan asked.

  “I don’t know; that was seven or eight years ago. Right now, you could buy a new one for around nine hundred bucks on the Internet and have it shipped to a licensed dealer.”

  “The army lists the value of a new Colt.45 as a thousand and fifty dollars,” Dan said. “Although I doubt that the army owns a new one these days; they switched to the Beretta years ago.

  “So when you were asked if you had stolen anything worth more than a thousand dollars, you figured the gun was worth nine hundred?”

  “I just thought it was worth less than a thousand. After all, it wasn’t new. But during the test, I remember wondering what the value was now. I finally decided to stick with under a thousand, but maybe my momentary indecision caused the blip.”

  Bob and Dan looked at each other, and Bob shrugged. “What do you want to do?”

  “I’ll write an addendum to the examination, giving Holly’s explanation,” Dan said. “I don’t think we’ll hear any more about it.”

  “Anything else?” Holly asked.

  “No, I think that will do it,” Dan replied.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said, then shook hands with both men and left the room, looking for Daisy.

  It was not until they were outside again that Holly realized she had been sweating profusely under her sweatshirt. She walked slowly to her next class, taking deep breaths to calm herself.

  TEN

  Teddy finished installing the Peg-Board on the walls of his workshop, and he began hanging his tools and outlining them with a Sharpie. Someday they would find this shop, thou
gh not before he wanted them to, and he wanted it to be just as well-ordered as the shop at his Virginia home, which the FBI had visited after he had abandoned it. Somehow, it was important to him to impress the FBI.

  When he had finished hanging the tools, he uncrated the multipurpose lathe and machine tool he had bought, set it on a thick, rubber pad, then secured it to the floor with lug bolts. Then he set up his computer station and began installing the software he had bought. He connected and tested the DSL connection he had arranged with the phone company, and then he set up a multistage connection to a server at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

  When Teddy had been a highly placed member of the technical services department, he had had access to the mainframe, and before he retired, he had set up a system of downloading files and software to an external location, while making it appear that some other member of the agency had done so. Now he began identifying and downloading every document in the Agency in which his name was mentioned. The process took him most of the day.

  Then he began scanning the files, searching for any information that might be of use in finding out more about him. He had done this earlier in his career as an assassin, but now he wanted to eliminate anything that had surfaced about him since the Agency’s undoubted contact with the FBI to discuss him.

  It was past eight in the evening before he finished cleansing the Agency’s files of any useful reference to him. He took one more look around his new workshop, found himself pleased, then went back to his apartment and ordered a sumptuous dinner from Restaurant Daniel to be delivered to his apartment.

  As he dined, he thought about what the FBI must already know about him, and what they could find out from the trail of evidence he had left. They would certainly have discovered his visit to the cottage north of Kennebunkport and perhaps even have found his parachute. Now they would be checking all modes of transportation to Boston and beyond, and, once they had run down everything, they would know that he had taken the bus to Atlantic City. From there it would be tougher. The only possibility they had of tracking him from Atlantic City would be if they located the concierge who had arranged the limo to New York, and then the driver.

  If they, indeed, traced him to New York, they would have to deal with two possibilities: one, that he might have left the city by any number of means for any number of destinations; two, that he had chosen to disappear among the eight million inhabitants of the city. In the first case, they were bound to find at least dozens of men traveling alone to various destinations; in the second, they would start from what they knew about him, that he was a simple man who had always lived simply. It was for that reason that he had chosen an expensive apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Besides, it was fun not to live simply anymore. He doubted if they had been able to determine the extent of his financial resources, so it was unlikely that they would suspect him of high living.

  He finished his dinner, put his tray table outside his door for collection, then turned to the New York Times, specifically to the Arts section, where he perused the schedule of the Metropolitan Opera. He had never had enough of the opera and the theater during his working days, and he intended to make up for it. He ordered tickets for half a dozen performances by phone, paying with a credit card, then turned to the book of Winston Churchill’s speeches he had been reading.

  BOB KINNEY SAT in his first daily national security briefing with the president, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the attorney general, the director of Central Intelligence and the national security advisor. The president heard reports from all of them, saving Kinney for last.

  “Bob, what do you have for me today?” the president asked.

  “Mr. President, following your instructions I have ordered a top-to-bottom survey of the Bureau’s security, and I expect to have written reports and recommendations from all the relevant people by the end of the month. As soon as I’ve had a chance to digest their reports, I’ll submit a written report to you outlining what steps I intend to take.”

  “Excellent. Have you had an opportunity to look for housing yet?”

  “The General Services Administration has put someone in touch, and my fiancee is screening them for me. I’ll let the final decision be hers anyway.”

  “You’re a wise man, Bob. Have you made any personnel changes yet?”

  “I’ve appointed Special Agent Kerry Smith to be my chief of staff, sir, but I intend to make other changes as part of a more sweeping revamping of the Bureau’s management. It will be some weeks before I’ll be ready to do that.”

  “I understand. Well, that wraps it up for today. Thank you all for coming.”

  As the group was shuffling out, Kinney stepped up to the president. “Mr. President, may I have a moment alone?”

  “Of course, Bob.”

  “And I’d like for the director of Central Intelligence to stay, as well.”

  “Kate, hang on a minute, will you?” Lee said.

  When the room had been cleared the president invited Bob and Kate Lee to sit down again. “Now, what is it, Bob?”

  “Mr. President, I have to tell you that, at the time of my appointment, I inadvertently misinformed you about the disposition of the Theodore Fay case.”

  “How so?”

  “When I returned to the Bureau, after the press conference, I learned that evidence had surfaced, literally, indicating that Fay parachuted from the airplane and survived the explosion.”

  The president grimaced. “And we’ve been telling the press that was resolved.”

  “Yes, sir; I’m very sorry about that.”

  “Well, if you didn’t have the information at the time, you couldn’t give it to me, could you? Tell me why you think Fay is alive.”

  “There is incontrovertible physical evidence that the pilot’s door of the airplane was jettisoned prior to the explosion and that Fay made his way to a disused summer cottage, where he changed clothes, buried his parachute and stole a bicycle. He rode that to Kennebunk, where he ditched the bicycle and got a Greyhound bus to Boston. From there he got another bus to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he disappeared. We have so far been unable to trace his movements from there.”

  “Do you think he may still be in Atlantic City?” the president asked.

  “I think it’s more likely that he made his way to a major city- New York and Philadelphia are easily reached from there, but he could have backtracked and gone anywhere.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to make an announcement to the press,” Lee said.

  “Sir, I’d rather you didn’t, if that’s possible.”

  Kate chimed in. “Bob has a good point, Mr. President. It would be better if we didn’t announce to Fay that we’re still after him, and even if you made the announcement and Bob made Fay number one on the FBI’s most-wanted list, I doubt if that would be of much help. Fay is far too slick to get spotted by an ordinary citizen from a wanted poster.”

  “I see your point,” the president said. “All right, I’ll wait until you catch him, and then I’ll say I knew all along Fay was alive.”

  “Mr. President,” Kinney said, “I have to be absolutely frank with you. It’s very unlikely that we will catch Theodore Fay, unless he commits another murder.”

  “Bob is right,” Kate said. “Fay is an extremely resourceful man, and he knows how to disappear.”

  “Well,” Lee said, “I’m not going to sit around hoping he murders somebody else. We’ll keep this knowledge among the three of us and whoever else in both your agencies needs to know.” He paused for a moment. “And I think I’d better share it with the ranking members of both parties on the senate intelligence and judiciary committees.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Kinney said, standing up.

  “And thank you, Bob, for telling me about this.”

  As he and Kate Lee walked out to their cars, she tugged at his sleeve. “How can we help, Bob?”

  “I think the only thing you can do right no
w is to comb the Agency’s files again for any information about Fay that might be useful to us. I’ll assign Kerry Smith to go over what you find.”

  “I’ll give the orders as soon as I’m back in my office,” Kate said.

  They shook hands and went to their respective cars. Kinney left feeling a little relieved that the president had taken the news as well as he had.

  ELEVEN

  HOLLY STOOD WITH A DOZEN other trainees in the smaller of the two gymnasiums at the Farm. An instructor with a clipboard walked into the room, counted the names on his clipboard, counted the trainees, then tossed the clipboard aside. Another sergeant, Holly figured, but this one a marine. He was fiftyish, her height, wiry and had a severe whitewall haircut. At his age, only an ex-marine would walk around with that. What was visible of his hair was black, except for a white streak over his forehead.

  “Shut up,” he said, though everyone was already quiet. “You can call me Whitey, and when I talk, you listen.”

  Holly looked up into the rafters and involuntarily sighed.

  “Am I boring you?” Whitey asked.

  Holly gazed at him but didn’t reply at once.

  “No, sergeant,” she lied.

  “I told you to call me Whitey.”

  “No, Whitey.”

  “You’re a smartass, aren’t you?”

  “Possibly.”

  He glared at her for a moment, then turned back to the group. “This is a fighting class,” he said. “It is not a self-defense class; it is a hurting class, a maiming class, a killing class. As far as the Agency is concerned, the best opponent is a disabled or dead opponent. Is that dear?”

  “Yes, sir,” the class replied as one man, except for Holly, who replied, “Yes, Whitey.”

  Whitey heard this and glared at her again. He walked over and stuck his face in hers. “You don’t want to call me ‘sir,” huh?“

  “You asked me to call you Whitey,” Holly replied.