Iron Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  “Bob?”

  “I’m still here, Kate. I take it that what you’re telling me is that Fay has somebody in the Bureau who’s feeding him stuff?”

  “I’m afraid that’s the best conclusion we could come to, based on the evidence. You can go ahead and blow, now.”

  “Kate, I’ve just come from a meeting with all my deputy and assistant directors who’ve been investigating this matter Bureau-wide. They’ve handed me a thick report on their investigation, and to give you the short version, they have determined that Fay’s information could not possibly be coming from anyone at the Bureau or from our computers. Their best recommendation is that it’s coming from the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  There was a short silence, then both of them burst out laughing.

  ____________________

  TEDDY FAY RODE DOWN the escalator into the East 63rd Street subway station and stood on the platform with twenty other people, waiting for the next train. A minute and a half later, there was a rush of cool air and a rumble as the train squealed to a slow halt.

  As the last moving car trundled past where Teddy waited, he caught a glimpse of a familiar face and figure aboard the car. The next car stopped where he stood, and the doors opened.

  Teddy hesitated, and people were surging around him.

  “C’mon, Mac,” a man said. “Get on or step aside.”

  Teddy stepped aside. The doors closed, and the train departed the station. The person he had seen in the previous car was the CIA operative Holly Barker, and she was with a younger, neatly dressed man, who had to be her partner.

  This was one coincidence too many, he thought. As he took the up escalator to the street, Teddy replayed his memory of the past few days, of his actions. He had made a mistake. He had met the scooter guy at the 23rd Street subway stop, and he had abandoned the scooter a block from that entrance. They were looking for him on the Lexington Avenue subway.

  They must be desperate, he thought, to spend manpower that way. At street level he hailed a cab. He’d stay off the subway for a while.

  FORTY-TWO

  A WEEK PASSED, and Holly and Ty went to Lance’s office to present their report. Lance and Kerry Smith waved them to a seat.

  Holly set a flat-screen monitor on Lance’s desk and placed the wireless laptop associated with it at a corner where she could easily access the keyboard.

  “Here’s what we’ve done,” she said, tapping some keys. The screen filled with passport-sized photographs of men in their late middle years. “We took eight hundred and forty-one digital photographs of men on the Lexington Avenue subway between the apparent ages of fifty-five and seventy-five. We eliminated slightly more than half, because they weighed too much and their faces were too full. Then I personally went through all the remaining photographs and eliminated all the men I felt could not possibly be our guy. I know this is subjective, but I’m the only one who’s actually set eyes on the man, even if he was disguised. We finished up with two hundred and ninety-two possible Teddy Fays, and we transmitted their photographs to Langley, specifically to the Technical Services division, where they were reviewed by a couple of dozen employees who had worked with Teddy or, at least, had seen him several times a week. The result is that not one of them identified a single photograph as Teddy Fay.”

  Kerry looked at the ceiling, and Lance sighed.

  “I took the additional step of ordering another sketch of Teddy, which was seen and commented on by all the people who had looked at the photographs, and here is the result” She placed a sketch on Lance’s desk.

  Lance and Kerry looked at the sketch for a long time.

  “It’s Larry David,” Lance said, finally.

  “We’ve heard about the resemblance before,” Ty said.

  “It’s useless,” Kerry said. “Unless we were looking for Larry David.”

  “He’s too bland,” Lance said, “too devoid of distinguishing features: no prominent nose, no beetle brows, no scars, no buck teeth.”

  “What can I tell you?” Holly said. “Teddy Fay is the Sir Alec Guinness of serial murderers. He’s a nearly blank canvas upon which he can stick prosthetics and hair and become somebody else.”

  “So we can’t post him on the ten-most-wanted list,” Kerry said. “We can’t call ‘America’s Most Wanted’ and nail him that way. It would never work, and we’d get thirty thousand phone calls from all over the country from people who think it’s their Uncle Harry or Larry David.”

  “This is why I’m not a police officer,” Lance said glumly. “Or why I wasn’t until now. Being a spy was a lot more fun.” He turned and looked at Holly. “I don’t want you to feel badly about this,” he said. “It was a good idea, and it was worth the manpower; it just didn’t pan out; we weren’t lucky enough.”

  “Any more ideas?” Kerry asked hopefully.

  Holly looked at her feet. “Well…”

  “What?” Lance asked. “Say it.”

  “There was this one thing that happened in the subway, at the Sixty-third Street Station.”

  “What?” Kerry demanded.

  “As the train pulled into the station, I caught a glimpse of a man I’ve seen in my neighborhood. I don’t know his name, but I’ve sort of bumped into him a couple of times, and he fits the description. What makes me think of him is that he was standing on the platform when the car I was on passed, but he didn’t get on the train. I looked through all the other cars for him, but he wasn’t on the train.”

  “Why do you think he didn’t get on?” Lance asked.

  “I think he may have seen me,” Holly replied. “I didn’t make eye contact with him, but if he’s Teddy Fay, he knows me from the opera. Maybe he saw me on the train and balked.”

  “That makes sense,” Kerry said. “God knows the guy has good instincts. If he saw someone on the train whom he knew to be CIA or FBI, that would be enough to keep him off it.”

  “Maybe he even guessed what we were doing,” Lance said. “Does he know where you live, Holly?”

  “The first time I saw him was when I was coming out of my building,” Holly said.

  “Well, if he saw you arriving at the Sixty-third Street station on the train, and he knows that’s the one nearest your building, and you didn’t get on there or get off, maybe he put it together.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t have gotten onto the trains myself,” Holly admitted. “It was such shitty duty that I thought I ought to share it with the others.”

  “The first thing you have to get used to when you’re supervising people, Holly, is handing people shitty assignments without pity,” Lance said. “From now on, I don’t want you on any surveillance detail of any of the potential victims we’re watching. I don’t want Teddy to spot you in a car or on a street, except where you live.”

  “All right,” Holly said. “But what can I do around here?”

  “Consider yourself reassigned as my assistant. Ty, we’ll find you another partner.”

  Ty nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “The only time I want you to be seen by Teddy is in your own neighborhood-at your building, walking Daisy in the park, shopping, that sort of thing. Clear?”

  “Yes, Lance.”

  “We should have Holly followed at those times,” Kerry said.

  “Right,” Lance agreed. “I want a team of four on Holly every time she leaves her apartment building. I want them well back from her, constantly changing places, and I want the team changed twice a day. Holly, I want you to carry your cell phone with an earpiece in your head at all times. Program the team number into it so that you can call them if you spot your man. I don’t want you to be seen using the cell phone, and don’t move your lips when you talk. This guy spooks easily, and we don’t want to cause him the slightest anxiety.”

  “Okay,” Holly said.

  Kerry spoke up. “And if you literally run into him, be nice, let him pet Daisy, but don’t attempt to engage him in more than perfunctory conversation; don’t be interested in him, go
t it?”

  “Got it,” Holly said.

  “On the other hand,” Lance said, “if he appears to have an interest in you, don’t put him off. Behave the way you did at the opera; just don’t go overboard or appear too curious about him. Is he someone who, in the normal course of your life, you might find attractive?”

  “No, not really, though I liked him at the opera. I wouldn’t want to fuck him, if that’s what you mean.”

  Lance looked chastened. “I wasn’t suggesting that you should. What I meant was, if a mutual attraction seemed natural, you might exploit that to your advantage, but if not, don’t fake it.”

  “I understand.”

  “Can I be on the team?” Ty asked.

  “No,” Kerry said. “If he saw Holly on the train, he might have seen you, too, and your presence would spook him immediately. We have this little advantage that he’s seen Holly on the street before, so it won’t alarm him to see her on the street again.”

  “Will you bust him immediately, if I see him?” Holly asked.

  “No. We’ll have the team get in touch with Kerry or me for that decision. They’ll tail him from a distance and report it if he goes into a building. I want to know where he lives and where he does his work. He has to have some sort of workshop somewhere, either in his home or nearby, and the equipment, weapons, disguises, etcetera, that we might find there would be very useful in prosecuting him. This guy might have an identity so tight that we might have trouble breaking it in court. We’re going to need all the ammunition we can get. Remember, we don’t have photographs, fingerprints or DNA to work with.”

  “Right,” Holly said. “How do you want me to proceed?”

  “Do you bring Daisy to work with you every day?”

  “No, just sometimes.”

  “On the occasions when you don’t, you go home to walk her?”

  “Yes, I go home at lunchtime. She only needs walking once after I go to work, then when I come home again.”

  “Start having lunch at home and walking Daisy then. When you’re off duty, take her with you when you leave the house. We want it to be easy for Teddy to spot you.”

  “All right.” Holly groped for words.

  “What?”

  “What about my… personal life?”

  Lance looked sympathetic. “If there are times when you don’t want a team on you, let me know, and I’ll pull them. If you should run into Teddy then, you can always call it in.”

  “Thank you, Lance.” Not that she had a personal life, but she was still thinking about Stone Barrington.

  Lance looked at his watch. “Give me fifteen minutes to get a team together, then go home to lunch.”

  FORTY-THREE

  TWO DAYS AFTER the incident in the subway, Teddy saw Holly Barker again. She was leaving her building and, apparently, headed for the park, since she had her dog with her.

  Since seeing her on the train, Teddy had gone back and read her file from the Agency again, and this time he had Googled her and read the newspaper accounts of the big cases she had been involved in when she had been chief of police in Orchid Beach, Florida. It made amazing reading, since it concerned a small-town police officer, and Teddy was intrigued. He thought he would like to get to know her personally, but the business on the train bothered him.

  He followed Holly at a distance of more than a block, then, as she entered the park at 64th Street, he turned down Fifth Avenue and simply walked away. He hadn’t spotted a tail, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He got on the Fifth Avenue bus and watched to see if anyone got on behind him, or if a car were following the bus. Seeing nothing, he got off in the Fifties, walked over to Madison and took the bus back uptown, constantly watching for a tail.

  As he got off the bus at 63rd Street, he saw Holly cross the street a block ahead, apparently headed back to her apartment building. He turned down 63rd, walked to Park and crossed the street, looking back in time to see her enter her building. He glanced at his watch. Lunch time. She must have come home from her office just to walk the dog. He loitered around the corner long enough to watch her leave the building, then he walked to Lexington, took a cab and got out a block from the CIA building. Ten minutes later Holly appeared on foot and walked into the building.

  Once again checking for tails, Teddy walked to Third Avenue, took the bus uptown, and, after walking around the block a couple of times, went into the building that housed his workshop.

  He hung up his coat and sat down at the computer, logged on to the Agency mainframe and ran a non-Agency search on her name. This time a new reference appeared: a website for some sort of financial management firm, Morgan amp; Bailey. Holly was listed on the site as a senior vice president. Obviously, the firm was an Agency front, and they had gone to the trouble to create the website to lend verisimilitude to the legend.

  It occurred to him that Holly was living above her means, if her Agency salary was all she had. Perhaps she was taking a salary from Morgan amp; Bailey, to help her establish credentials in the city, or perhaps the firm was paying for the apartment.

  He went back to the news clippings and read the story reporting the death of her fiance, who was an innocent bystander at a bank robbery and got in the way. He ran a search on the fiance, Jackson Oxenhandler, and discovered that he had been a prosperous lawyer in Orchid Beach. Maybe she had inherited his estate. That would make her, perhaps, prosperous enough to afford an apartment on Park Avenue.

  It was clear to Teddy that, based on her career in the military, plus her very successful career as a police chief, Holly Barker was a very smart and motivated woman. If he had needed further evidence of that, her training report from the Farm showed plenty of guts and initiative. He would have to be careful to limit his contact with her in the neighborhood, and if she showed any interest in him, he would have to pull up stakes and find a new place to live.

  THERE WAS A NOTE on Holly’s new desk: “See me-Lance.” She went and knocked on the door that connected their offices.

  “Come in,” he said.

  She found him at his desk, looking at photographs. “You wanted to see me?”

  “The team had a sighting of a man who may have been following you for a couple of blocks.”

  “When?”

  “In the last hour. He went in your direction until you entered the park, then he got on a bus downtown.” He beckoned her to his side of the desk.

  Holly looked at the photographs; they were taken from more than a block away with a low-resolution digital camera. ”He’s a blur,“ she said.

  “That’s as much as we could enhance it,” Lance said. “Don’t believe everything about surveillance you see on TV.”

  “I can’t make him from these,” she said, shuffling through the prints. “Did anybody follow him when he broke from me?”

  “The team lost him when he got on the bus. We’re going to have to add vehicles, obviously.”

  “I feel guilty about soaking up this much manpower,” Holly said.

  “Have a seat,” Lance said, walking around the desk and sitting next to her on his sofa. “I’m concerned about you.”

  “Why?”

  “You look depressed.”

  Holly laughed. “So do you.”

  “I guess we’re all a little depressed about how this is going.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that we may be the wrong people for this work?” Holly asked. “I mean, my class’s training was cut short, and not much of it has been useful to me on this assignment. A few years as a cop in Florida was better training for this.”

  “It occurs to me every day,” Lance said, “but what can I do? I can’t call Langley and tell them to shut us down. That would be admitting failure, and the failure would go into the personnel file of everybody in this station. The Agency culture can tolerate a certain amount of failure, because operations frequently don’t pan out, but the culture would look askance at admitted failure, especially of a project and a unit commissioned directly by the president
of the United States. We don’t really have a choice; we’re going to have to catch Teddy Fay or die trying. If we can do that, praise will rain down upon us, good things will be said about us in our fitness reports and we will be princes in our realm.”

  “Well, I guess that’s better than admitted failure,” Holly said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  ON A THURSDAY NIGHT Holly called the duty officer and asked him to pull the team off her for the night. Then, she dressed in a cashmere sweater and slacks that showed off her ass in a favorable light, put on her coat and got a cab to 88th Street and Second Avenue. She got out, took a deep breath and walked into Elaine’s.

  Thursday was the busiest night of the week, she knew, and she reckoned it was her best chance to “bump into” Stone Barrington. She hoped to God he wasn’t with someone else.

  Gianni, the headwaiter, spotted her and came and kissed her on the cheek. “Holly! Long time! You meeting Stone?”

  “Well, no, but if he’s here, I’ll say hello.”

  Gianni turned and pointed at a table along the wall. Stone and Dino Bacchetti, his former partner on the NYPD, were having drinks and arguing about something. “Let’s break this up now,” Gianni said, taking her arm and walking her back to the table. “Look who’s here,” he said to Stone.

  Stone was on his feet, looking surprised, and so was Dino. Everybody hugged and kissed. “Join us?” Stone asked.

  “Sure,” Holly replied.

  “Gianni, bring Holly a Knob Creek on the rocks,” Stone said, and Gianni departed for the bar. Stone was a lawyer who was counselor to a prestigious New York law firm, Woodman amp; Weld, and his specialty was handling the cases Woodman amp; Weld did not want to be seen to be handling. He was also one of Lance’s recruits as a consultant to the Agency. So was Dino.

  “Excuse me a minute,” Dino said, apparently giving them a moment. “Be right back.” He walked toward the men’s room.

  “So, you and Dino were really going at it when I came in. What’s going on?”