Iron Orchid

by Stuart Woods

  Finally, he mounted a 6x18 power Leupold zoom scope to the top of the L-shaped plating. He broke down the little pistol, removed the barrel and replaced it with the new, longer barrel, then reassembled it. Then he carved an eight-inch wooden grip and affixed it to the barrel, to protect his hand from the heat buildup when the weapon was fired. What he finished up with was a neat, small, very quiet rifle with a pistol grip that could be broken down and carried in a briefcase or raincoat pocket. This was perfect, but if the rifle were going to be effective at, say, a hundred yards, he was going to have to upgrade the ammunition; the standard.380 round was just not powerful enough.

  He hand-loaded a hundred rounds of ammunition with a 115-grain, pointed, lead-tipped bullet and a cartridge packed with five grains of Unique powder. That would give the round the extra velocity, accuracy and destructive power it would need to hit an eight-inch target dead center at a hundred yards. Still, the bullet would drop more than it would from a higher-powered rifle, so he was going to have to fire the rifle to sight it in for the range.

  IRENE ARRIVED in New York and followed Teddy’s instructions. She went to the fountain in Grand Army Plaza outside the Plaza Hotel at high noon and loitered for ten minutes. Then she set off across 59th Street and into Central Park. Teddy, who had been watching her from half a block away, was occupying a bench along the walkway toward the zoo, reading the Post. He dawdled a hundred yards behind her, looking for tails, then watched as she moseyed around the zoo and finally headed north.

  He followed her for half an hour, then, when he was sure she was not being tailed, called her cell phone.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a room booked in the name of Frances Williams at the Lowell Hotel, on East Sixty-third Street, between Park and Madison. Go there and check in, telling them that your luggage was delayed by the airline and will be delivered later. When you’ve satisfied yourself that you’re clean of tails, call my cell from your room and give me the room number.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  Teddy followed her all the way to the hotel, then walked past it and around the block again, making sure he was not followed. Halfway around, his cell phone rang.

  “Yep?”

  “Six one six. All is well.”

  He continued around the block, then entered the hotel, went straight to the elevator and rode to the eighth floor. He walked down two flights, and, after checking out the hallway, knocked on the door.

  There was a pause, and he was inside. Irene was already naked under a terry robe. He was out of his clothes in a flash.

  AN HOUR LATER, as they lay, half asleep, in each other’s arms, she spoke for the first time. “How about a nice, flashy Saudi prince with financial connections to Al Qaeda?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he murmured.

  “His name is Ali ben Saud, and he’s one of hundreds of Saudi princes,” she said. “What sets him apart is that he actually makes money, instead of just lying around and collecting whatever allowance the king allots him. He’s invested cleverly, too cleverly, we think. What caught our attention is that he invests more than his allowance, and we think the extra funds come from an Al Qaeda contact in Syria. There is constant activity in his accounts, money being wired here and there, some legit, some questionable.”

  “How sure are you of his involvement with Al Qaeda?” Teddy asked.

  “We’re sure, but we couldn’t prove it in a court of law.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He lives flashily, right here in New York. He’s an assistant secretary general at the U.N., and he has a big duplex apartment in the U.N. Plaza building.”

  “I love that building,” Teddy said. “I remember once a character in a movie saying that if there is a god, he probably lives in that building.”

  Irene laughed. “He has a penthouse apartment, and the building’s security is excellent, so it would probably be very difficult to get to him there.”

  “What’s his work schedule, and how does he get to the office?”

  “He leaves his apartment every morning at nine for work and walks to the main entrance of the U.N. building. Then he exits the U.N. building every afternoon at four, regular as clockwork, and walks home.”

  “That’s very cooperative of him,” Teddy said. “He must drive his security people crazy.”

  “He walks with an entourage of six or eight guards, who are heavily armed. Our people have observed this, but we’re not allowed to maintain any real surveillance on him, because he’s too well connected with Saudi officials in this country who have a lot of influence with the State Department. We haven’t even told the New York station of our interest in him, though that’s going to happen any day now.”

  “Good,” Teddy said. “That means I’ll have to deal with only his personal security people and not worry about surveillance from anybody else. I’ll have to go down to U.N. Plaza and take a look at the area.”

  “Not right now,” Irene said, pulling him toward her.

  “Oh, no, indeed not,” Teddy said, kissing her.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  HOLLY WAS HOME at lunchtime to walk Daisy, when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s the old man,” Ham said.

  “How you doin‘, Ham?”

  “Not bad. Ginny and I thought we might come up to New York and do some Christmas shopping.”

  “Great! It would be wonderful to see you, I can put you up, you know.”

  “Nah, suggest a good hotel. I told you why.”

  “There are two good ones in the neighborhood, though, the Lowell, on Sixty-third and the Plaza Athenee, on Sixty-fourth. They’ll both have thick walls.”

  “Okay, I’ll book us in.”

  “When you coming?

  “Tomorrow okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll see if I can get some time off, and if you’ll give me your flight information, I’ll have a car meet you.”

  “I’ll e-mail it to you. Bye.” He hung up. Ham had never been one for long telephone conversations.

  Holly got Daisy’s leash and left the building, headed for the park. She tried not to be self-conscious, tried not to look over her shoulder, but the thought that maybe Teddy might be following her never left her mind. They entered the park at 64th Street, walked past the zoo and headed north at a fast walk for Holly and a slow one for Daisy, but since she had a lot of sniffing and inspecting to do, the pace was good for both of them.

  At the Bethesda Fountain Holly looked around for a cop and, seeing none, unclipped Daisy and let her range around the open area, while Holly sat on the fountain’s edge and kept an eye out for the law. It was a one-hundred-dollar fine to have your dog off the leash in the park after nine a.m.

  Immediately, Holly saw two men who could be Teddy Fay: one older looking, in a long topcoat with a short, gray beard, and another in a sheepskin coat and a tweed cap, with a big yellow muffler that partly covered his face. She looked away from both of them, then glanced back when she could. She made sure her cell phone earpiece was firmly in her ear, then she reached into a pocket and pressed the single key that connected her to the team leader,

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “I’ve got two candidates,” she replied without moving her lips. “Old man in topcoat with beard, younger man in sheepskin coat and tweed cap. Can’t be sure about either.”

  “We’re on it.” He rang off.

  Holly gave them another ample of minutes to identify the two men, then she called Daisy and headed back toward 64th Street, still walking quickly. She made the last few blocks in record time, and as soon as she was inside she called Lance.

  “Yes?”

  “I identified two prospects to the team,” she said.

  “I know; they’re tracking both. The older man with the beard has been eliminated-he’s really old-but they’re still on the sheepskin coat. Come on back to work.”

  Holly left some fresh water for Daisy, told her to guard the apartment with her life, and got
a cab back to the office. She went immediately to Lance’s office.

  “What’s going on?”

  Lance was watching a jerky television image on a monitor next to his desk. “There’s the sheepskin coat,” he said. “He’s leading them on an erratic walk, and they’re having trouble keeping him in sight without losing him or blowing the tail. I’ve dispatched another team to help. You think it could really be him?”

  “Well, it could be Larry David, I suppose.”

  “I’m never going to be able to watch his show again without thinking about this,” Lance said, laughing. He picked up his phone and pressed a button. “I want one team member to get close; Holly’s here, and I want her to have a good look. Have someone approach and pass him from in front.”

  Holly watched the screen, and a moment later the perspective changed: the camera was a block away, and the man in the sheepskin coat was walking toward it. The man and his pursuer stopped on opposite sides of the street for a traffic light.

  “Zoom in as close as possible,” Lance said into the phone.

  The camera began a slow zoom, and as it framed the man more tightly, he took off his tweed cap and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Holly got a good look at his face; he couldn’t have been older than forty-five. “Not him,” she said. “Too young.”

  Lance spoke into the phone again. “He’s not our man,” he said. “Break it off; everybody back to the Barn.” He hung up the phone.

  “I’m sorry, Lance, I thought he might be Teddy.”

  “Don’t worry about it; the exercise was good practice for the team.”

  TEDDY APPROACHED THE U.N. PLAZA BUILDING on foot. The elegant apartment house soared forty stories or more into the New York skyline. Teddy started near the front door and walked slowly toward the U.N. building, perhaps a block away. He wanted to see the area from the target’s perspective.

  This was not going to be as easy as the others, since ben Saud would have up to eight armed guards with him. If Teddy tried to do a drive-by from a motorbike or bicycle, they’d cut him to pieces the moment he fired, maybe sooner. No, he was going to have to be stationary and, preferably, elevated. As he walked toward the U.N. he saw, across the street, a building under construction, a small office or apartment building. The steel structure was up, and the floors appeared to be in, but cladding of the exterior had not yet begun.

  Attached to one side of the building was an elevator cage to get the workers up and down in a hurry. That would do for access, he thought, but not for escape. He broke off his walk to the U.N. and crossed the street. Two men were conferring on the sidewalk over a set of plans, one of them obviously the construction foreman, in his work clothes and yellow hard hat, the other in a business suit and topcoat but also wearing a hard hat. Building owner? Architect? As he passed them Teddy got a good look at a plastic I.D. badge clipped to his topcoat collar. It identified him as a New York City building inspector.

  “You’ve got a couple of soft spots on the second-story temporary flooring,” he was saying, “and I want them beefed up today.” Teddy couldn’t hear the response, but he didn’t need to. He was concentrating on remembering as much detail as possible of the ID. badge the man was wearing. Then he saw something that immediately appealed to him. On the west side of the building, the side opposite the elevator, there was another way out. He liked that a lot.

  Kerry Smith came into Lance’s office. “Any luck?” he asked Lance and Holly.

  “No,” Lance said, “not our man. Good practice for the team, though; keeps them occupied.”

  “Keeping them occupied is getting harder,” Kerry said. “I’m getting tired of writing reports that say, in essence, ”Nothing happened today,“ and I suspect that Washington is getting tired of reading them.”

  “Okay, Holly,” Lance said, “just maintain your routine, keep going home every day at noon to walk Daisy, keep putting yourself out there for Teddy to see.”

  “Okay,” Holly said, rising from her chair. “By the way, Lance, do you mind if I take two or three days off? My dad and his girlfriend are coming into town tomorrow.”

  “Sure, we’ll try to struggle along without you.”

  “You may as well pull the team off, too.”

  “Okay. See you Monday.”

  Holly left Lance’s office and went back to her own.

  Kerry looked at Lance. “Are you really going to pull the team off?” he asked.

  “No,” Kerry replied.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  TEDDY GOT INTO THE CAR, carrying a briefcase, drove over to the West Side and headed north on the West Side Highway, which turned into the Henry Hudson Parkway, which turned into the Saw Mill River Parkway. Near the end he got off at the exit for Katonah and began driving around, looking for a very private spot.

  After a few minutes he stopped on a small bridge. A stream passed under him, and on one bank he saw a well-worn footpath. Not likely anyone would be in the woods today, he thought. He pulled past the bridge onto the wide shoulder and got out of the car, carrying his briefcase. He half-walked, half-slid down the embankment to the footpath and began walking quickly upstream, away from the bridge. After a couple of minutes, there was a bend in the stream, and Teddy could no longer see the bridge.

  It was cold and silent in the winter-stripped woods, and he walked for another quarter of a mile before he found a fork in the path, away from the stream. He stopped and spotted an oak tree with a knot in its trunk around eight inches in diameter on the other side of the stream. He estimated the distance to the tree to be twenty yards.

  He walked up the right fork in the path, pacing off another eighty yards, then stopped and looked around. He seemed completely alone in the woods, and the only sound he could hear was the rush of the stream. Looking back, he could see the oak tree with the knot clearly.

  Teddy sat down on a large rock and, after checking both ways on the path for company, opened the briefcase and began assembling his new Walther PPK-S rifle. That done, he disassembled it and went through the process another three times, getting faster. After the third time, he was down to thirty-five seconds, and he reckoned that was about as fast as he would get.

  Teddy knelt behind the rock and rested the barrel of the silenced rifle on it. He took careful aim at the knot in the oak tree, adjusting the zoom scope, then he squeezed off a round. The rifle was pleasingly silent, emitting only a whispery pjffttt! The bullet struck a foot below the knot and barely grazed the trunk on the right side. Part of that must be trigger pull, he thought. He fired one more round, and it stayed a foot low, but was only six inches right.

  He adjusted the scope for elevation and turned the knurled knob two clicks to bring it into horizontal alignment. He fired another shot, and the bullet struck the tree at the bottom of the knot and a little left. He adjusted twice more, until he squeezed off a round that struck the knot dead center, then just to be sure, he fired two more rounds, both of which were nearly in the original bullet hole. That’s it, he thought. I’m sighted in for a hundred yards.

  He got up, walked around a bit, then shoved in another magazine, stood and fired another six rounds from an unbraced standing position. He started wide but gradually brought his fire on target. The center of the knot was now a crater, and he was putting every round into it.

  Satisfied, he quickly disassembled the rifle, packed it into the fitted briefcase and began walking back to the car. A few minutes later, he was back on the Saw Mill, heading south for the city, enjoying the drive.

  ____________________

  THE PHONE RANG in Holly’s apartment.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s your old man.”

  “You’re in already?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “How’s the Lowell?”

  “Very nice; better than I’m used to. Can I buy you lunch?”

  “No, but I’ll take you, Pick you up in fifteen minutes?”

  “We’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  Holly phone
d La Goulue, a restaurant at 65th and Madison she passed every day while walking Daisy, and made a reservation. She walked Daisy, played with her for a bit, gave her a cookie and told her to be a good girl, then she went to meet Ham.

  THE RESTAURANT was warm and cozy, and they were given a nice corner table. Ginny, Ham’s girlfriend, was a good-looking woman with bright red hair who had taught Holly to fly the year before, and this was her first time in New York.

  They ordered, then Ham spoke up. “So, how’s the work going?”

  “Not so hot,” Holly said.

  “Can’t you find Teddy?”

  Holly’s eyebrows went up.

  “It wasn’t so hard to figure out,” Ham said. “There’ve been three or four murders around the U.N. the past few weeks, and I don’t believe the Agency is committing them. I always thought he might have gotten out of that airplane.”

  “He did,” Holly said. “Ginny, you can’t hear this, and if you do, you have to keep it to yourself.”

  “Don’t worry, Holly, my lips are sealed,” Ginny replied.

  “She knows how to zip up,” Ham said. “Now, why haven’t you found this guy?”

  “Because he’s very, very smart,” Holly said. “I figured he might be using the Lexington Avenue subway to get up and downtown, so we staked it out and photographed every likely candidate, but I swear to God, I think he spotted me and got out of there, instead of onto the train.”

  “You? Why would he know you?”

  “Because I met him at the opera, and he invited me to use a spare ticket. He was beautifully disguised, though, and I never tumbled to him until I saw him later, ignoring what he said was a bad hip or knee or something and running like a jackrabbit for a cab.”

  “Isn’t there some way to lure him out from his cover?” Ham asked.

  “Maybe me. I think he lives in my neighborhood, so we’ve had a team following me, in case I see him.”

  “That would explain the guy across the street who keeps changing places with a woman,” Ham said, nodding toward the window.