Iron Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  “Oh, Ham, stop it. You’d be perfectly welcome.”

  “I know we would, but we’d prefer a hotel.”

  “Give me a little time to get my feet on the ground, then come visit.”

  “Okay. How’s the work going?”

  “It’s good but frustrating. We’ve got a tough assignment, and it isn’t going as well as I’d like.”

  “Well, if you’re willing to say that, things must be going pretty badly.”

  “Now you’re getting the picture.”

  “Tell me about the apartment.”

  “I’ll wait and let you see it. Your daughter has come up in the world.”

  “I’ve been tempted to open that envelope you gave me.”

  “Don’t you dare, unless you hear I’m dead.” The envelope contained a copy of her will and the second credit card that would give Ham access to the Cayman bank account, plus a letter explaining everything.

  “Okay, it’s in my safe until the day. But you better not die before me; I’ll kick your ass.”

  “I know that. Listen, I’ve got to run; I’ve got a ton of work about to fall on me. I’ll call you next week. Love to Ginny.”

  “Bye-bye.” Ham hung up.

  “Come on, Daisy,” Holly said. “Let’s go shopping.”

  TEDDY FAY WAS WALKING to his workshop when he saw Holly Barker and her dog on the other side of the street. He watched her out of the corner of his eye without turning his head; it still made him nervous to see her around. She must live nearby, he figured.

  Once locked into his workshop, he fired up his computer and used the disks Irene Foster had given him to log into the CIA mainframe. He spent two hours constructing a file for a fictitious officer, Charles Lockwood, supplying Lockwood with a biography, an educational background, a service record, a financial history and the proper security clearances. To entertain himself, he had Lockwood reporting directly to Hugh English, the deputy director for operations. Now he could safely log into the mainframe at any time.

  When he was finished, he went into the personnel records and pulled up Holly Barker’s file. He read through it carefully, then read the Agency’s investigation report on her background and the record of her training at the Farm. She sounded like a good one, he thought. He read the account of the incident with Whitey Thompson, which the director of training himself had apparently witnessed, and was much amused by it. He had outfitted Whitey, once, for a mission in East Germany, and from what he had heard later, the man had turned out to be a disaster in the field, blowing the whole operation and almost getting two of his colleagues killed. After that, he had been banished to the Farm, where the Agency had figured he couldn’t get into too much trouble teaching trainees to kill people.

  HOLLY WENT TO A HARDWARE STORE called Gracious Home, which also had a furnishings shop, across the street. Lance had given her the name of the place, and it turned out to be a gold mine for what she needed for her apartment. She shopped for an hour, then filled out a charge account application, giving Morgan amp; Bailey as her employer. The front operation was turning out to be a very convenient thing to have as support. She felt almost like a real New Yorker, now, with an apartment and a conventional job and the business cards Lance had given her. She asked the store to deliver her purchases to her apartment building, then she walked the few blocks to Central Park and made her way downtown, sometimes jogging alongside Daisy to give her some exercise. She enjoyed herself. Tomorrow she would be back at work, looking for Teddy Fay.

  TEDDY SPENT THE AFTERNOON going through the operations directorate’s files on terrorist suspects attached to foreign embassies and with diplomatic immunity. He’d let the Agency take care of the clandestine individuals and groups who had no immunity. He’d deal with the ones the Agency and the FBI couldn’t touch, because of their diplomatic status.

  There were a surprisingly large number of them. He selected three and began downloading their dossiers from the CIA mainframe.

  HOLLY ARRIVED BACK at her apartment, where her purchases from Gracious Home were waiting for her. She put everything away, then ran a hot bath and slipped into the big, old-fashioned tub, while Daisy curled up on the mat next to her.

  There was something still missing in her life; she had been able to put it out of her mind while she was in training and after her arrival in New York, but now it was creeping back into her brain, and into other places, as well.

  She needed a man.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  HOLLY SAT IN THE LITTLE THEATER on the eleventh floor of her headquarters, which the agents had begun calling the Barn. Kerry Smith, her FBI co-boss, was at the lectern; the screen behind held a sketch that Holly had worked on with an Agency artist.

  “This is a drawing of the man Holly Barker sat with at the Metropolitan Opera,” Kerry was saying, “minus the hat, the glasses, the nose and the bad toupee. This is the man we now know to be Teddy Fay.”

  It looked sort of like him, Holly thought, but he was so ordinary that he could qualify as the wallflower at any dance.

  “As you can see, there is nothing whatever distinctive about him,” Kerry was saying, confirming her judgment. “A description of him would probably match that of a hundred thousand other men in this city.”

  “He looks sort of like Larry David,” somebody said.

  “Who?” Kerry asked.

  “The guy who’s on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,” on HBO.“

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  “He does look a little like Larry David,” somebody else agreed. “But less distinctive.”

  “Swell,” Kerry said. “We also know that Fay likes the opera and that he has hairy forearms.”

  “How do we know he has hairy forearms?” somebody asked.

  “We had a frame of him from a security video at a church in Atlanta a few months ago, when he was trying to kill a TV preacher,” Kerry said. “He was disguised beyond all recognition, but he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and he had hairy forearms-gray hair.”

  “Do we have fingerprints?” somebody asked.

  “No, and we don’t have photographs, either,” Kerry said. “Fay went to great lengths to obliterate photographs of himself from the record of his life, such as it is. And when we got into his house in Virginia, every surface in it had been wiped down with Windex, so we don’t have any prints. None in his Maine house, either.”

  “What Kerry is saying,” Lance interjected, “is that everything we know about Teddy Fay adds up to just about zero, and that is remarkable. The man worked for the federal government, for the Agency, no less, for forty years, and when he retired, he vanished like a wisp of smoke. He’s faked his death twice: once after his retirement, when he managed to insert a death certificate into his home county records, and once when he jumped out of that Cessna on the Maine coast. We could legitimately consider him dead, except that he keeps killing people.”

  There was an uncomfortable stir in the room.

  “We need ideas,” Kerry said, “and I don’t care how crazy they are; Lance and I will listen to any suggestion.”

  Holly raised her hand. “Why don’t we pretend to be him?” she asked.

  “How would that help?” Kerry asked.

  “Well, could we say, after the fact, anyway, that the victims he chose were predictable?”

  “I suppose so,” Kerry said. “After the fact.”

  “So why don’t we make up a victim list, using Teddy’s criteria? Maybe we could get to one of them first, or at least, at the same time Teddy does.”

  “That is a very good suggestion,” Kerry said. “How would you go about it, Holly?”

  “Teddy is an Agency man; how would the Agency go about making a list of potential threats in New York City?”

  Lance stood up and walked to the podium, standing next to Kerry. “We have a watch list,” he said, “of threats working in United Nations embassies in New York, both people with and without diplomatic immunity.”

  “How many people are on that list?
” Kerry asked.

  “Probably between two and three dozen,” Lance replied. “Surely, the New York field office of the Bureau must have a similar list.” He looked at Kerry.

  “I’ll find out,” Kerry said.

  “Probably there’s a lot of overlap in our two lists,” Lance said. “What criteria should we use to assess these people, from Teddy’s point of view?” He posed the question to the room at large.

  Holly raised her hand again. “I think he would go after the ones the Agency and the Bureau can’t touch,” she said. “The ones with diplomatic immunity.”

  “Why?” Kerry asked.

  “Because he doesn’t care if they have diplomatic immunity, and he knows we have to care. The way Teddy sees things, he’s helping us, and in a weird kind of way, I suppose he is.”

  Lance broke into a broad smile. “Don’t ever let anybody outside this room hear you say that. Okay, Holly, you and your partner assemble a list of probable targets, using both Agency and Bureau recommendations. Anybody else have any ideas?”

  No one spoke.

  “All right, that’s it for the moment. Go back to your previously assigned duties.”

  Ty fell into step with Holy as they left the room. “That was brilliant,” he said.

  “No, just logical,” she replied.

  “I’m going to start thinking of you as Spock.”

  “I don’t have the ears for it,” she said, “but putting together this list ought to be more fun than keeping surveillance on that record store.”

  “I’ll second that,” Ty said.

  Holly looked her partner up and down. He was wearing a new tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers and a yellow-striped shirt with a knit tie. “Ty, you’re looking pretty swift these days.”

  “I took your advice,” he said, “and bought some new clothes. I hope I look less like an FBI agent.”

  “Let your hair grow a bit,” she said. “Then you’ll look less like an agent.” He was a nice boy, but he wasn’t going to solve her man problem. “Excuse me a minute,” she said. “I forgot to ask Lance something.” She went back into the room and found Lance still in his seat.

  “Something I can do for you?”

  “I just wanted to thank you for setting up what I needed for the co-op board application,” she said. “I moved in yesterday, and the place is great.”

  “Glad to be of help,” Lance said. He went back to the pad in his lap, then looked up again. “Something else?”

  “Well, yes. I wonder if it would be okay if I… got in touch with Stone Barrington. I mean, if it would be okay from a security standpoint.”

  Lance seemed to suppress a smile. “Sure, why not? After all, he’s under contract to the Agency, so he’s one of us, in a way.”

  “Thanks, Lance.” Holly turned and walked out of the room again, happy.

  Thirty-eight

  THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES and the director of Central Intelligence were sitting on the floor of the White House residence living room, eating pizza, drinking beer and watching “The West Wing.” A commercial break arrived.

  “You know,” Will said, “Jed Bartlet has an easier time being president than I do.”

  “What? With his getting shot in an assassination attempt and his daughter getting drugged by her boyfriend and kidnapped and having to let John Goodman be president and throw him out of the Oval Office? You think that’s easier?”

  “Well, not that stuff, maybe, but he seems to have an easier time being right than I do. And Leo, his chief of staff, seems to do all the hard work, too. My chief of staff doesn’t do all the hard work.”

  “You don’t have the slightest idea what she does when she’s out of your sight,” she said. “She probably works three times as hard as you do.”

  “Are you questioning my work ethic?” Will asked. “You wound me.”

  “Oh, horseshit! Sure, you work hard, well, pretty hard anyway. And anyway, there are compensations when you’re president.”

  “What compensations?” Will demanded. “I don’t see any compensations. I mean, you could say I get driven everywhere, but I’d really rather drive myself, but the Secret Service won’t let me, except on the farm, and even then they get all nervous.”

  “Poor baby,” she cooed, patting his knee.

  “And why can’t I ever get a pizza through security while it’s still hot? I hate cold pizza, except at breakfast, and why won’t Domino’s leave the green peppers off the Extravaganza special, like I ask them to?”

  “Well, maybe if they knew the Extravaganza was for the president instead of the guard at the main gate, they’d pay more attention.”

  “I thought of that, but the Secret Service won’t let me tell them it’s for me; I guess they’re afraid there’s somebody at Domino’s who would poison me if they knew. And why can’t I own a Porsche instead of a Suburban? I always wanted a Porsche.”

  “Then why didn’t you have one before you were president? I like Porsches.”

  “Because I was a senator, and I had to drive a Suburban, because it was built in Georgia-at least, I think it was. And even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t be seen driving a foreign car. Can you imagine what the Republicans could make of that? ”A white wine-drinking, quiche-eating, “West Wing”-watching, Porsche-driving president?“ They’d go nuts.”

  I think the American people might like a pizza-eating, beer-drinking, Porsche-driving president,“ she said, handing him another beer. ”Wouldn’t the NASCAR dads like that, if they knew?“

  “A Heineken-drinking president who wouldn’t eat good American green peppers on his pizza? I doubt it. They’d barbecue me at a tailgate party, or something.”

  “Poor baby,” she said, patting his knee again.

  “And another thing: why can’t I just let Teddy Fay run amok? He’s doing a better job of killing America’s enemies than a certain intelligence agency I could name. Why do I have to sic the law on him?”

  “Tell you what,” she said. “You give me a written authorization to kill America’s enemies, regardless of their diplomatic status or location, and I’ll run amok for you. I’d like nothing better than machine-gunning fake diplomats in sidewalk cafes in Paris or planting bombs in the cars of the terrorists’ Swiss bankers.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” Will laughed. “You’d be out there shooting them yourself, wouldn’t you?”

  “Damn straight, I would!”

  “Would you settle for heating up this pizza? It’s getting pretty clammy.”

  Kate got to her feet and grabbed the box. “Oh, all right. I guess heating pizza will have to do,” she said as she disappeared into the kitchen.

  The commercials ended, and Will went back to watching “The West Wing.” He resolved to try to be more like Jed Bartlet.

  THIRTY-NINE

  TEDDY FAY TACKED THE PHOTOGRAPHS of five men and one woman on his bulletin board and sat back to read each of their files. For some reason-it may have been the man’s face-he strongly wanted to go after one Hadji Asaam who, under another name, was listed as a chauffeur at the Iranian embassy. Asaam was an assassin, pure and simple, and he had already been in the country for eight days. How long before he would be instructed to ply his real trade? Of course, there would be Agency or FBI surveillance on him, but he would find a way to lose them when he wanted to work. In the meantime, he was driving an attache around New York, probably learning the streets.

  His decision made, Teddy went to a newsstand and bought several newspapers. Back in his shop, he went carefully through the classifieds, until he found something that suited him in the Village Voice:

  Vespa 180, only 1200 mi, pristine, $3K for quick sale.

  He called the number. “I’m interested in your Vespa,” he said. “If it’s as described in the paper, I’ll buy it for cash today.”

  “It’s exactly as I described it,” the young man said. “You’ll love it.”

  “You have the registration and the insurance card?”

  �
�Yep.”

  “You have the title? It doesn’t have a loan on it, does it?”

  “Nope, I have the title.”

  “Can you meet me at the Twenty-third Street Lexington subway stop at two o’clock? We can do the deal right there; I’ll bring cash.”

  “Sure, I’ll be there. What’s your name?”

  “Jeff Snyder. Yours?”

  “Bernie Taylor.”

  “See you at two, Bernie.” Teddy hung up.

  He went through his makeup kit and selected a prominent nose and a large mustache. Half an hour later he was somebody else. At one-thirty, he walked down the street to the subway stop at 63rd and Lex, and took the train downtown. At street level, Bernie was sitting on the scooter, waiting.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” Teddy said, indicating that Bernie should take the passenger seat. Teddy hadn’t driven a Vespa for years, but how much could have changed? He drove quickly around the block; the engine ran as it should, and the gears shifted smoothly. Teddy stopped.

  “You’ll throw in the helmet for three grand?”

  “Sure,” Bernie said.

  Teddy handed him an envelope containing thirty one-hundred-dollar bills. He waited while Bernie counted the money carefully without actually salivating.

  “Here’s the registration and title,” he said. “And the insurance card, but you’ll have to change it to your name. Oh, and it has a full tank of gas.”

  “A pleasure doing business with you,” Teddy said. He pocketed the papers and drove away. Back at his workshop, he parked the scooter in the downstairs hallway and went upstairs to start planning his surveillance, based on the daily schedule of the attache Asaam would be driving. He would not have long to wait, since the attache was picked up daily at precisely six p.m. and driven to his apartment twenty blocks away. Teddy liked the idea that it would be at rush hour.

  At five o’clock, Teddy dressed in black coveralls over his clothes, checked his makeup and went downstairs for the scooter. With the helmet and goggles, plus the makeup, he would be unidentifiable. He wiped the scooter for prints, then put on his driving gloves and pushed it into the street.