Iron Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  He trotted up the front steps of the building and quickly let himself in. The apartment was two floors up, and he listened to be sure they were not still in the hallway, then walked slowly and silently up the stairs.

  He stood outside her apartment door and placed one end of a listening device of his own construction in an ear and the other, microphone end, on the door. The two pieces were connected by a wire. The first thing he heard was ice cubes striking glass; they were mixing drinks. There was a minimum of conversation, then they moved out of the living room. No doubt where they were headed.

  Teddy waited three minutes, leaning against the wall next to the door, then produced a set of lock picks from a little wallet and in thirty seconds had the door open. He pulled down the knitted cap he was wearing, and it became a ski mask. He took his little Agency Keltec.380 from his overcoat pocket and screwed the silencer into the barrel. Then he stepped inside and very quietly closed the door behind him.

  He could hear the bed squeaking, and he knew that it took two people to make the other noises he was hearing. As long as they were vocal, he need not worry about being detected. He stepped to the bedroom door.

  Omar Said was in the saddle, pumping away. The girl’s face was turned toward Teddy, and her eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Then, as he approached the bed, she opened them.

  Teddy pointed the pistol at her and brought a finger to his lips. She now had to decide whether to sacrifice her life for her lover’s. She made her decision; she closed her eyes again. Teddy took another step and put one round into the back of Said’s head.

  The Syrian rolled off the girl and onto the floor on the other side of the bed. Teddy walked around the bed and put another round through his forehead. He looked back at the girl, who lay rigid on the bed, her eyes screwed shut.

  “Wait ten minutes before you call anyone,” Teddy said in Arabic. He didn’t speak or understand the language, but he had memorized a number of handy phrases. The girl nodded.

  Teddy left the apartment, listened for others in the hallway, then, hearing no one, walked downstairs, rolling his ski mask back into a cap. He took a look through the glass of the front door and saw Said’s chauffeur’s head laid on the headrest of his seat. He was asleep; no need to kill him.

  Teddy left the building and checked the block for surveillance. Nothing. He walked three blocks, checking, before he took a cab back to his own neighborhood.

  HOLLY STOOD OUTSIDE the Metropolitan, watching the last of the operagoers leaving the building. Lance, elegant in a cashmere topcoat and soft hat, came over and stood beside her.

  “He didn’t show,” she said.

  “He showed, but not here,” Lance replied. “I just got a call from Dino Bacchetti at the 19th precinct. A Syrian diplomat named Omar Said, who is an intelligence operative, was shot twice in the head while in the throes of passion at his girlfriend’s apartment.”

  “I don’t think Teddy will go to the opera next Friday night, either,” Holly said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  WILL AND KATE LEE were in bed, reading, when her private line rang. “Yes? Say again? This doesn’t make any sense; how long have we been watching him? That’s what I thought. Fay had already left the Agency when we started watching him. All right, we’ll meet in the morning and talk about it then. Good night.” She hung up.

  Will looked at her sideways but said nothing. She looked back at him.

  “Oh, all right, I’ll tell you. Teddy Fay didn’t show up at the opera tonight. While all our agents were enjoying Le Nozze de Figaro…”

  “I love that overture,” Will said.

  “Don’t interrupt. While they had the opera house staked out, Teddy killed a Syrian spy named Omar Said, who we’ve been surveilling for about four months, ever since he arrived in New York. He is… was attached to the Syrian mission to the U.N., and he had diplomatic immunity.”

  “Is Mr. Said a great loss to the U.N., the Agency or the human race?” Will asked.

  “Certainly not; he was a goatish, murderous son of a bitch, and the planet Earth is a better place without him.”

  “Then I take it we have no complaints?”

  “It’s an embarrassment to the Agency that a diplomat who was under our constant surveillance was murdered while we were lured away.”

  “You weren’t providing him with any sort of protection, were you?”

  “No, we were trying to catch him hobnobbing with terrorists, so we could arrest them and kick him out of the country.”

  “Does anybody know you were surveilling him?”

  “Just the FBI. They were helping us.”

  “Then, if he wasn’t your charge and nobody knows you cared, why is it an embarrassment?”

  “It just is,” she said. She turned out her light, fluffed her pillow and turned away from him.

  “I suppose this terrible news means you’re not in the mood for…”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said, turning back to him.

  Late the following morning, Kate convened a meeting in her conference room. Attending were Hugh English, the DDO; his deputy, Irene Foster; Ian Thrush, the DDI; his deputy, George Weaver and, by television conference hookup from New York, Lance Cabot,

  “All right, Lance,” Kate said, “give us the whole thing.”

  “Good morning, Director,” Lance said.

  “Good morning from all of us.”

  “One of my officers, a new one named Holly Barker, while looking for Teddy Fay at the opera a week ago yesterday, found him, quite by accident. He walked up to her and invited her to join him for La Boheme. He was heavily disguised, and she didn’t recognize him, and she thought it might be a good idea to look around inside, so she accepted. He told her his name was Hyman Baum and that he was the retired owner of a dress business in the garment district.

  “After the opera, he invited her to join him. She declined, saying she would be traveling, and they said good night. Part of his disguise was a cane, ostensibly because he had had a recent knee replacement, but after they parted, Holly saw him sprinting for a cab. On the way home, she realized that she might have spent the evening with Teddy. Her suspicions were reinforced by the fact that our investigation determined that Mr. Baum did not exist.

  “He told her that he had the same seats every week; accordingly, last night we staked out the Met in large numbers, pulling people off other assignments. Teddy had exchanged his tickets three times with other operagoers, leading us on a wild goose chase around the hall. While we were chasing Teddy at the Met, he was dispatching Mr. Said, at the apartment of his girlfriend. We questioned her, and she said all she saw was a man in a ski mask with a small gun. She phoned the police, and one of our consultants, Lieutenant Dino Bacchetti, of the NYPD, called me. That’s it.”

  “There are two things that concern me here,” Kate said. “One: if Teddy didn’t show and went to the trouble of exchanging his tickets three times, he must have made Ms. Barker as one of us. How?”

  “Holly introduced herself, using her own name, but that would have meant nothing to Teddy, and she cannot think of any other reason he would know who she was. Neither can I or anybody else who has addressed the issue.”

  “Two,” Kate said. “Said has only been in the country for four months, and we have only been interested in him for that long. Since Teddy retired from the Agency more than a year ago, how would he have been aware of Said’s existence, let alone his presence in New York?”

  “I think that is an issue best addressed at your end of this hookup,” Lance said.

  Irene Foster half-raised a hand. “That information had to have come from inside,” she said, glad to be the one to point it out.

  “Or from someone on the New York task force,” Kate said. “Lance, question everyone there who knew about Said. While you’re at it, I want you to wring out Ms. Barker and figure out how he made her.”

  “Will do,” Lance said.

  “Hugh,” she said, addressing her DDO, “I want your people to make
a list of everyone in this building who knew we were surveilling Omar Said and put every one of them through the ringer- polygraphs, the works.”

  “Yes, Kate,” English said. He turned to his deputy. “Irene, this will be your baby; get on it as soon as we’re out of this meeting.”

  “Certainly, Hugh,” Irene replied.

  “Director,” Lance said from New York.

  “Yes, Lance?”

  “Holly Barker is with me, and she may have figured out how she was made.” Lance introduced an attractive woman to the group. “Tell them, please.”

  “Good morning,” Holly said. “A couple of days before I first met Teddy at the opera, my FBI partner and I checked out a record store called Aria, on the West Side, at Lance’s suggestion. My partner went in alone, and when he identified himself as an FBI agent, the clerk behind the counter refused to talk to him and told him to get out. The day after I met Teddy, I went back to the shop, looked around and bought a CD. I mentioned to the clerk that I had seen La Boheme the night before and that I wanted the recording, and she suggested a version.”

  “Did you identify yourself, Holly?” Kate asked.

  “No, ma’am, not in light of my partner’s experience. I thought I would go back after establishing myself as a customer and see what I could learn. My point is, at the opera I gave Teddy absolutely no reason to think I was Agency, and the only other point of contact could have been at the record shop.”

  “Do you think he might have been in the shop?”

  “No, I was the only customer, but I think it’s quite possible that he saw me either enter or leave the shop, or both.”

  “But why would seeing you there make him think you were Agency? You were just a woman buying a copy of La Boheme , for all he knew.”

  “Unless he followed me from the shop,” Holly said. “From there, I walked to Sixth Avenue and took a cab back to the Barn. If he followed me, he would know where the building is.”

  “But Holly, we’ve only been in the building for a couple of weeks; it’s brand new. How could he associate it with us?”

  “Maybe he saw someone he knew at the Agency going in or out,” Holly said.

  “Or,” Lance said, interrupting, “maybe he researched the address on the Agency’s computers.”

  “But we’ve locked him out of the computers,” Irene Foster said. “We’ve changed all the log-in codes.”

  “Then I think that puts the ball back in your court at Langley,” Lance said. “Maybe the codes should be changed again.”

  “Thank you, Lance,” Kate said, “and thank you, too, Holly; you’ve been a great help.”

  “Thank you, Director,” Holly said.

  Kate turned back to the group. “Call Technical Services and change the codes again. Irene, there are still a lot of people down there who knew Teddy. That would seem a logical place to start your internal investigation.”

  “Yes, Director,” Irene said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  LANCE CABOT AND KERRY SMITH were in a meeting in the twelfth-floor conference room when a call came in. Lance picked up the phone. “Yes?”

  “Director Robert Kinney for you or Agent Smith,” the operator said.

  Lance pressed the speaker button. “Director, this is Lance Cabot; I’m here with Agent Smith.”

  “Afternoon,” Kerry said. “Something has come up. Kerry, you remember the hangar at Manassas Airport where Teddy Fay had his workshop.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, sir,” Kerry replied.

  “This morning we had a call from the airport manager down there. Apparently, Fay had a second hangar, where he kept the Cessna he blew up, and the manager found it on a routine check this morning. There’s a lot of stuff in the hangar, but the man says he didn’t touch anything. I’d like you-and Lance, if he likes-to take a couple of people, fly down there and process the scene, see what you can come up with.”

  “All right,” Kerry said. “I’m on my way. Will you send a tech team from there to meet us? I suppose it will be about… three hours, before I can get there.”

  “Director,” Lance said, “if it’s all right, I’m going to let Kerry handle this; I have a lot on my plate here.”

  “Yeah, I heard about the Said thing,” Kinney said. “Send whomever you like.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Lance punched off the call. “Kerry, why don’t you take Holly and Ty with you?”

  “Okay. Do we have a chopper yet?”

  “Not our own; we have a service that operates out of the East Side Heliport. I’ll have someone call and book one.”

  HOLLY LOOKED OUT the window of the helicopter and saw Manassas Airport as they approached. It was a quiet little field nestled in the Virginia countryside. “Teddy had a workshop here?” she asked Kerry.

  “Yeah. He also kept an RV and a souped-up Mercedes sedan there, too. He crashed the Mercedes, running from the scene after he killed the speaker of the house and abandoned the car in a parking lot nearby. We don’t know what happened to the RV, and we didn’t know he had a second hangar. Apparently, he kept his airplane there. I should have ordered a search of all the hangars on the field.”

  The chopper settled onto a taxiway on the side of the field opposite Dulles Aviation, the FBO that serviced local and visiting aircraft. Two rows of hangars took up most of the space there. A man in a warm coat met them and introduced himself as the airport manager.

  “Your other people are waiting in a big van over by the hangar,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk you over there.”

  At the hangar, Kerry met the head of the tech team. “Are we worried about booby traps?” the man asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Kerry said. “The manager has already been in there today, and he’s still with us. You take your people in first and establish a perimeter around whatever evidence is there, so we can get out of this cold.”

  The man nodded and signaled for his three assistants to follow him. He opened the door of the hangar and looked around, then turned back to Kerry. “You can come in,” he said; “everything is down at the other end.”

  Holly followed Kerry into the hangar, which was brightly lit. She stood just inside the door and waited for the head of the tech team to do a quick survey of the items in the hangar. He came back after a few minutes.

  “Okay, we’ve got tire tracks of an airplane, Michelin tires, tricycle gear. That’s consistent with the Cessna 182 RG Fay was flying, until he blew it up. We’ve also got a set of Goodyear Wrangler tracks. That’s a truck tire often used on SUVs and RVs, and the width of the vehicle is consistent with an RV or a rental truck. When we have precise measurements, we should know which. There are also a lot of miscellaneous tools and scraps of materials.”

  “Check everything for prints,” Kerry said. “To this day, we don’t have Fay’s prints, not even from his house in Maine.”

  “How does somebody not leave prints in his own house?” Holly asked.

  “We think he cleaned up the place before he left the last time. He had only been back for a few minutes when we went in. His house in the Virginia suburbs was also clean of prints, the first time I’d ever seen a house with no prints at all.”

  “Yeah, I was the tech team leader on that one,” the tech guy said, “and I’d never seen that either. This guy is really something. By the way, I won’t put this in writing, but it’s my guess that the truck or RV was driven out of here some time after the airplane left.”

  “Any idea how recently?”

  “Days, is my guess. Why don’t you folks get a cup of coffee or something and come back in, say, two hours?”

  Kerry nodded and led them out of the building. The airport manager drove them to the terminal, and they got sandwiches from the machines in the pilots’ lounge.

  TWO HOURS LATER, they were back in the hangar. “Tell me about it,” Kerry said.

  The tech team leader laughed. “Teddy’s done it again: not a print anywhere, and believe me, we’ve looked everywhere. The guy is a neat freak
, paranoid to a turn.”

  “Is there anything at all interesting here?” Kerry asked.

  “We’ve determined that the vehicle was an RV, consistent in size with one manufactured by Winnebago. If you find it, we can match it to the tracks in here. One other thing, we found this.” He held up a small plastic bag with an object inside.

  “Looks like a computer chip,” Kerry said.

  “It is; automotive. It’s from the central computer of an SUV, a stock-standard chip, no alterations. Can you associate that with anything?”

  Kerry thought for a minute. “Yes,” he said. “The Supreme Court justice killed in the automobile accident.”

  “Right. The chip we recovered from that vehicle had been altered to reverse the commands sent from the onboard computer to operate the automatic stability control. If the car went into a skid, for instance, the ASC would cause one or more wheels to brake in order to correct the skid. The replacement chip did the opposite, causing it to skid even more. Fucking ingenious.”

  “Well, anyway,” Kerry said, “it lets us tie Teddy to the death of Mr. Justice What’s-his-name.”

  “It would, if we had found any material evidence that Teddy had ever been in this hangar,” the tech guy said. “Without prints or other evidence, we can’t prove he was here.”

  “Better circumstantial evidence than no evidence at all,” Kerry said.

  “if you say so,” the tech guy replied. “But this Teddy is really something, you know?”

  “I know,” Kerry replied.

  Holly knew, too.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  HOLLY GOT BACK shortly before dark and took Daisy for a run, cutting over to Park Avenue. She liked the broad boulevard, with its garden down the center and its elegant apartment buildings. She wondered what a small apartment on Park cost, and if there were any small apartments. She could afford to buy something, if it wasn’t too outrageous, and she was getting tired of living in what amounted to a dormitory. There was almost no privacy, unless she locked her door, and if she did that, she felt claustrophobic in her small room.