Iron Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  Teddy then opened the C-4 and began to knead two pounds of it into a shape, using a craft knife to define its lines until he had what he wanted. When he was satisfied, he sprayed the little sculpture with a gray fixative which both sealed in any detectable fumes from the explosive and caused it to look like stone.

  He then built a hollow plinth and assembled the necessary electronics, along with a detonator and a tripwire that could be fastened to a seam in the packaging. He also installed a receiver for a remote control.

  Tired from his day’s work, Teddy stretched out on his bed, pulled a blanket over himself and got eight hours of untroubled sleep.

  The following morning Teddy checked his assembly inside the plinth, fixed a lid to a bolt set into the sculpture and set the lid onto the plinth, screwing it into place. He took a moment to admire his handiwork, then he began packaging it in a tightly sealed wooden crate, taking care to boobytrap the lid. He addressed it to Ali Hakim and from the Agency’s files downloaded a stencil of the seal of the Royal House of Saud, which he affixed to the crate.

  AFTER A GOOD LUNCH from a Chinese restaurant across the street, Teddy dressed in khaki trousers, a white, short-sleeved button-down shirt and a bow tie, then he dug up a black baseball cap. The outfit looked nearly enough like a uniform. On the computer, he made and printed out a delivery log, then signed half a dozen of the blank spaces with fictitious names. He took the subway to 42nd Street, walked crosstown to the address of the townhouse and rang the bell.

  Shortly, a tough-looking man in a black suit answered the door. “Yes?”

  “Delivery for Mr…” Teddy consulted his log.“… Alley Hackim.”

  “Do you mean Mr. Ali Hakim?” the man asked.

  “Yeah, that must be it.” Teddy showed him the address on the crate, also displaying the royal seal on the lid.

  The man’s eyes widened at the sight of the seal. “We don’t usually accept deliveries on a weekend,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll send it back,” Teddy said, turning to go.

  “Wait!” the man yelled. “Does it have to be signed for by Mr. Hakim himself?”

  “No, you can sign,” Teddy said.

  The man stepped out onto the stoop, and Teddy gave him the clipboard. “Space number seven,” he said.

  “What is the name of your delivery service?” the man asked.

  “I’m from Eastern Freight Forwarders at Kennedy Airport,” Teddy replied. “This came in last night and cleared customs this morning. Have a nice day.”

  “Wait, where is your delivery truck?”

  “I took a cab,” Teddy said. “This was a high-priority delivery.” He gave a little wave and headed off toward the corner. Once there, he looked back. The stoop was empty.

  ALI HAKIM WAS DOZING in front of a soccer match on television, when his phone rang. “Hello, Hakim here,” he said.

  “Mr. Hakim, this is Osama, the security guard on duty at your office.”

  “Yes? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing, sir, but we’ve received a delivery addressed to you that bears the seal of the House of Saud.”

  “Have you X-rayed it?”

  “Yes, sir. It is a small statue of a horse.”

  Hakim smiled. It must be from a friend of his in Saudi intelligence. “I’ll be right over,” he said.

  Teddy waited patiently for forty-five minutes. He was about to leave when a black sedan pulled up in front of the townhouse and a man got out. Teddy checked the face against the photograph he had downloaded. Hakim himself. Teddy removed the remote control from his pocket, tapped in five minutes and activated it.

  It took several minutes to get a cab, and he was about to cancel the code when a taxi finally appeared. “Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street,” he said to the driver. He could walk from there.

  The cab pulled away and had driven for a couple of blocks when the detonator did its job.

  “What the hell was that?” the cab driver asked.

  Teddy looked back at the rising column of smoke and dust. “I don’t know,” he said, “but let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The driver stomped on the accelerator.

  EIGHTEEN

  HOLLY AND LEE ARRIVED at the Holiday Inn at seven, had a drink at the half-empty bar, then went into the dining room for dinner.

  Lee looked over the menu. “No Chinese noodles,” she said.

  “Looks like the steak is a safe bet,” Holly replied.

  “I’m game.”

  They ordered dinner and another drink. “So, Lee,” Holly said, “what brings you to Virginia?”

  “Oh, I drove down to see Monticello,” Lee said smoothly, “and it was too late to drive back to New York.”

  “Where do you live in New York?”

  “Mott Street, in Chinatown. My parents have a laundry and a restaurant there.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I keep books for my father and do the ordering for the restaurant. What about you? What do you do?”

  “I teach second grade in D.C. I came down here to see my parents and thought I’d stay the night before driving back.”

  “Where’d you go to school?”

  “At Georgetown.”

  The two women continued quizzing each other, running through their legends, until dinner arrived.

  “Well, that’s enough of that,” Lee said. “Who are you, really?”

  “I’m Harry One,” Holly said, “and you’re Harry Three.”

  Lee grinned. “I thought I might trip you up.”

  Holly grinned back. “Not as easily as that.”

  They finished dinner and went back into the bar for a nightcap. Holly looked carefully at every face; she didn’t want to run into Whitey Thompson, off his usual beat. She felt for the gun at her waist, too.

  “You carrying?” Lee whispered.

  “It was suggested that I should,” Holly whispered back.

  “You worried about running into the instructor guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want to go to Buster’s?”

  “Yes, it’s his regular hangout, I’m told.” Holly looked up at the TV over the bar, which was tuned to CNN. Somebody was reporting from a helicopter over New York. The camera panned from a shot of the U.N. to a nearby street, then zoomed in closer to reveal a large gap between two townhouses with a big pile of rubble at the bottom. “Excuse me,” she said to the bartender, “can you turn that up for a minute, please?”

  “The explosion occurred late this afternoon,” the reporter was saying, “and no one has any idea if anyone was inside the house. Firemen can’t even start going through the rubble until the houses on either side of the site can be shored up. Although the police are refusing comment, we’ve heard from sources inside the department that the explosion is thought to be connected with the upcoming meeting of heads of state at the U.N. We’ll keep you posted as details come in. Now back to the studio.”

  “Thanks,” Holly said to the bartender. “You can turn it back down.”

  “What do you suppose that was about?” Lee asked.

  “I don’t know any more than you do,” Holly said. At that moment, her cell phone vibrated, and she pulled it from her belt. “Hello?”

  “Harry One?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Harry Three with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Both of you return to base at once. Go to the main house for a meeting in the conference room. Got that?”

  “Got it.” She hung up.

  “What is it?” Lee asked.

  Holly put some money on the bar and indicated for Lee to follow her outside. When they were halfway to the car, she said, “They want us back at the Farm right now for a meeting at the conference room in the main house.”

  “You think this is some sort of drill?”

  “Who knows?” Holly asked, but she was willing to bet it had something to do with the explosion in New York.

  As she was getting into her ca
r a shiny new pickup pulled into the parking lot, and a man got out. She didn’t recognize him immediately, but then she saw the bandage covering his nose. She breathed a sigh of relief as she left the lot and turned onto the highway.

  ALL FIVE OF THE HARRY SUBGROUP were gathered around the conference table when Lance Cabot walked in. “Good evening,” he said. “I’m sorry to break into your first night of liberty, but something has come up.” He flicked a remote control, and a TV in the room replayed the report that Holly had seen on CNN, then he turned off the TV and turned on a slide projector. A picture came up of the same block before the explosion.

  “This is what the house looked like this afternoon,” he said, flicking to another photo. “We’ve had it under surveillance for a couple of weeks, because we learned that the house is owned by an Iranian millionaire with ties to Iranian and Saudi intelligence. We think that the house may have sheltered a terrorist team that was planning an attack during the heads-of-state conference at the U.N., which starts tomorrow.

  “In this series of photographs, you see what is apparently a uniformed messenger walk down the street carrying a parcel. He rings the bell, a guard comes to the door, signs for the package, and the messenger walks away.” He cut to a series of closeups of the messenger. “He appears to be a middle-aged man of medium height and weight. As you can see, the bill of his baseball cap prevents us from getting a clear shot of his face. It’s almost as if he knows he is being photographed. He disappears around the corner and is gone. Fifty minutes later, the house goes up.” He switched to a photograph of the house collapsing on itself.

  “It would seem that the explosion was larger than one that would have resulted from a bomb in a parcel the size of the one delivered. We speculate that a bomb in the package set off other explosive material already in the house, causing it to collapse.” He switched on the TV again. “Here is a statement made by the Iranian ambassador to the U.N. a few minutes ago, from the steps of their embassy.”

  The ambassador read from a single sheet of paper in his hand. “The house in the block behind our embassy was used to house embassy employees,” he said. “We believe that the CIA is responsible for this act of terrorism, in which a number of embassy employees died.”

  Lance switched off the TV. “Let me assure you that we were not responsible for the explosion. Either the messenger delivered a bomb or someone inside, while building a bomb, accidentally caused an explosion. We do not routinely commit such actions on our own soil, and the DDO and the DDI are annoyed that we are being accused of doing so.

  “All of you are being trained to join a new counterintelligence team that is being assembled in New York to prevent such acts in the city or, if they occur, to work with the FBI to learn the identities of the perpetrators. The attack today has caused the Deputy Director for Operations to believe that it is more important for your subgroup to be moved to New York immediately than to complete the last weeks of your training. Accordingly, your training has been terminated, and arrangements have been made for you to join the team.

  “Tomorrow morning you will be issued with your credentials and reassigned to New York with immediate effect. Two of you have cars and will drive there; the other three will ride with you. You’ll be told tomorrow morning where to report. I’m not going to take questions now, because I don’t have any answers for you, so return to your quarters, get packed, get a good night’s sleep and report here tomorrow morning at seven a.m. That’s all, good night.” Lance left the room, and the group broke up.

  Holly walked back to her room in a state of excitement.

  NINETEEN

  SHORTLY AFTER DAWN the following morning, Lance Cabot stood on a New York City rooftop with Hugh English, the deputy director for operations, and Robert Kinney, the brand new director of the FBI. They were looking down at all that was left of a townhouse. Lance had choppered up from Langley with the Deputy Director of Intelligence in the middle of the night, and he missed the sleep. He must be getting old, he thought.

  The DDIO and the director were grim-faced, and Lance wasn’t sure if it was because of what they knew or what they didn’t know.

  A young agent stepped up to Kinney and whispered something in his ear.

  “Excuse me a minute, Hugh, Lance,” Kinney said and walked a few steps away with the agent. Lance could see his face as the agent delivered his news, and Kinney looked both astonished and outraged. “That’s impossible,” Lance heard him say. “I never did that.” Kinney came back to English and Lance. “This is Special Agent Kerry Smith,” he said, and introduced the two men. “He’s brought me some news, and it puts this incident in a whole new light.”

  “What is it, Bob?” English asked.

  “It looks as though the explosive used here was C-4, and that it came from the evidence room in our New York field station downtown.”

  “How can that be possible?” English asked. “Do you suspect one of your own people?”

  Kinney shook his head. “Here’s how it went: a man in a suit walked into the evidence room, presented credentials that identified him as an FBI agent and presented a letter, ostensibly signed by me and endorsed by the AIC, authorizing him to remove four pounds of C-4 from the evidence room to transport to D.C. as evidence in a trial. The man’s I.D. said his name was Curry. There is no agent by that name, but by God, the name was in the database that confirmed his I.D.”

  “How could an outsider get hold of a verifiable I.D. card for an agent who doesn’t exist?” Lance asked.

  “Hugh,” Kinney said, “has Kate spoken with you about the Teddy Fay problem?”

  “Oh, God,” English said, nodding.

  Lance was baffled. “Teddy Fay is dead, isn’t he?”

  “Not anymore,” Kinney replied.

  HOLLY AND HER FOUR TEAM MEMBERS were in the conference room on time. A man they didn’t know came in and put a cardboard box on the table.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Mr. Cabot couldn’t be with you this morning; he’s in New York with the DDL.” He reached into the box and removed five heavy brown envelopes and distributed them among the group, calling each by name. It was the first time Holly had heard any of their names.

  “First, please pass me the I.D. cards you were issued when you arrived at the Farm.”

  The group turned in their I.D.'s.

  “Now open your envelopes,” the man said. “Inside you’ll find a leather wallet with your permanent I.D. card, which bears your photograph, your right index fingerprint and your signature. It also contains, on a magnetic strip, much other information from your service record, including a copy of your DNA profile. The card identifies you as an officer of the CIA and explicitly authorizes you to carry concealed weapons, not just firearms, in the fifty states and the territories of the United States. Should you be sent abroad on duty, you’ll be provided with other weapons authorizations.

  “Also in the envelope is a copy of your commission, and you will return that to me to be placed in your service record. Also in the envelope is a box of five hundred business cards. Generally speaking, you are not to identify yourself as a CIA officer unless circumstances demand it, but if you must, you’ll have these two means of identification. The phone number on your business card is a Washington number, but any calls you receive will be routed to an electronic mailbox or to your local number, upon your instructions.

  “Also in the envelope is a card with a New York City address and a street map showing its location. You will present yourselves at that address by three p.m. today. Your car, if you own one, will be garaged in the basement of the building, and you will be temporarily housed there until other arrangements are made. Memorize the address and phone number and the directions, then return the card and map to me.

  “Sally Liu,” he said to Harry Three, “you will ride with Holly Barker and her dog in her car. William Knox, you will take Harvey Kite and Jennifer Fox in your car.

  “We’re done here, so now you are to go to the armory, where you will be
issued appropriate weapons. Within certain limits, you’ll be allowed to choose them. Thank you, good luck and goodbye. Make us proud of you.” The man gathered up the envelopes and left the room.

  “Sally Liu,” Holly said, “I’m Holly Barker.” She introduced herself to the other three and memorized their names.

  “What kind of piece are you going to ask for?” Sally asked as they left the main house and walked toward the armory.

  “I don’t know, really; I brought a handgun with me.”

  They walked into the armory to find Sarge, their firearms instructor, waiting for them.

  “I hear you folks are headed for some active duty,” he said.

  “If you say so, Sarge,” Holly said.

  “What do you want to pack, Holly?”

  “I’ve already got my nine-millimeter; how about something smaller for backup?”

  Sarge went to a drawer and came back with a tiny, black pistol and a metal tube. “Seen one of these?”

  “At a gun show once.”

  “It’s a Keltech.380 that has been reworked by Technical Services and fitted with a silencer, which they made for us.” He reached into another drawer. “Take an ankle holster and a pocket holster for it. You happy with your gun leather?”

  “Yes,” Holly said.

  “How about a knife?”

  Holly grimaced. They had had training with knives, but Holly found them distasteful.

  Sarge chucked and handed her a black switchblade. “Take this,” he said. “You never know.”

  Holly dropped the knife into a pocket and signed for her weapons.

  “Good luck, kiddo,” Sarge said. “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too, Sarge.”

  “If you ever get tired of field work, we can always use you on the Farm.”

  “Thanks.” She took her weapons and walked slowly toward the car, where Daisy waited for her.

  Sally Liu caught up with her in the parking lot. “I can’t believe we’re out of here,” she said, hoisting her bags into the back of the Cayenne, next to Holly’s.