Hothouse Orchid

52

Teddy Fay picked up the new, stick-on aircraft registration numbers at the design shop and drove home. He was working through a checklist of things he had to do before he and Lauren departed Vero Beach for good.

This was a different kind of escape for Teddy. Ordinarily when abandoning a location, he also abandoned his identity, his appearance and everything else about himself-he burned all his bridges-but he had made a decision not to tell Lauren who he really was, and that entailed becoming Jack Smithson permanently.

Teddy had been working for much of the day on fleshing out the identity: creating a better credit report, adding information to his pre-Vero Beach existence in north Georgia, creating the kind of past a real person would own. He had even fabricated the record of a past speeding ticket from Dalton, Georgia, with the fine paid on time.

Back at the beach house he had one last task: change the aircraft registration number on his airplane. It wasn’t hugely important, but it would make him a little more difficult to trace if anybody tried. He finished the job on the computer and logged out of first the FAA computer, then the Agency mainframe. The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me,” Lauren said.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Have you started cooking dinner yet?”

“Not yet, but soon.”

“Why don’t we go out tonight? You like barbecue?”

“Yeah, sure; every Georgia boy does.”

“There’s a great little joint on 1A that does wonderful things to a pig. Want to meet me there after work? Say, six?”

“Sure,” he said, noting the address.

“See you then.” She made a kissing noise and hung up.

Holly was sitting out behind the house in the late afternoon sun, with her bikini top off and the bottom pulled down, filling in her tan and watching Daisy play in the dunes when her cell phone buzzed. “Hello?”

“It’s me,” Lance said. “Are you near your secure room?”

“Yes.”

“Call me when you’re locked in and logged on.” He hung up.

Holly got to her feet, pulled up her bikini bottom, grabbed the bra top and called Daisy, who loped toward her. Inside the house, she put on a robe, just in case Lance wanted to talk face-to-face, and let herself into her little office. She logged on, then called Lance. “It’s Holly.”

“The geek has visited me again. Our intruder logged on twice today, most recently less than ten minutes ago. Because of a glitch, the geek could only track his last log-on, which was the FAA computer, and wasn’t able to figure out where in the FAA databases, so he doesn’t know what the intruder was doing there.”

“If he’s who you think he might be, he could be making a new pilot’s license for himself or creating an aircraft registration.”

“That’s right; our man flies himself.”

“Any news on his location?”

“He’s narrowed the possibilities to about a three-mile stretch of Vero Beach, less than a mile wide. I’m sending a map.”

Holly watched the screen as the image popped onto her computer screen. “It’s the southern half of Vero’s island,” she said.

“Yes, and somewhere between the western shore of the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic.”

“Well, it’s not exactly a street address, is it?” Holly asked.

“No, but we’re getting closer.”

“Are we really?” Holly asked. “We’re talking about three square miles of densely populated Florida, with God knows how many houses and apartment buildings.”

“I just thought you’d like to know,” Lance said. “Goodbye.” He hung up.

You just thought you’d like me to know, Holly thought. She had pretty much shaken off the desire to nail Teddy Fay, but Lance apparently hadn’t. She had her suspicions about Jack Smithson, but she had already decided not to pursue them.

She logged off the computer and locked the door behind her. Maybe it was time, she thought, to have another look at Jack’s house. She put on some jogging clothes and went outside. “Come on, Daisy,” she called, “we’re going for a run.”

Teddy sat with Lauren at the barbecue shack, eating Brunswick stew, a conglomeration of chicken, corn, tomato and, if you were in the right part of Georgia, maybe some squirrel or possum. Delicious. “How’s work,” he asked. “Are you making ready to pull out?”

“I’ve got one more job to do,” Lauren said. “Just a detail to wrap up.”

“How long?”

“A week; two, tops.”

“Have you told the boss?”

“No, I think I’m going to leave without giving notice.”

Teddy thought about that. Such an action might excite too much interest in Lauren’s departure. “Give him notice,” he said. “Hurd’s been good to you, and you owe him that.”

Lauren sighed. “You’re right. I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

Holly ran down the wet sand at a clip, a good three miles to where Jack’s guesthouse sat, just above the beach, with Daisy happily running alongside her. She reached the house a little after six, and, after ascertaining that neither Jack’s nor Lauren’s car was parked outside, she picked the front door lock and stepped out of her running shoes. “Daisy, stay here,” she said to the dog. Daisy sat down on the porch and watched as she went inside in her stocking feet.

Holly stood in the living room for a moment. Then she saw a flashing light on a black box on the desk in Jack’s study. There was an alarm system, and now it began making a chiming noise. She walked to the desk, picked up the phone and listened. All she got was a dial tone, so she knew the alarm system wasn’t calling a security service or Jack’s cell phone.

She didn’t know how much time she had, so she worked quickly. She went into Jack’s bedroom and rifled all the drawers and the closet, careful to leave no trace of her unauthorized presence. Then she went back into the study and switched on Jack’s computer. All she got was a window requiring a password, and she didn’t have time to work on that, so she shut it down again. She found no papers of any interest in the desk, only a few utility bills, already paid. She got up and opened what appeared to be a closet door, and it was, but it contained something very interesting: a Fort Knox safe with a digital lock. The thing was five feet high, and she reckoned it weighed six or seven hundred pounds.

Now why would Jack Smithson need such a large safe? Did he have a camera collection or, more likely, a gun collection? Or maybe a lot of cash? She would like to know, but she would need specialized equipment to get the safe opened, and she would have to get that from her house in McLean, Virginia.

She let herself out of the house and locked the door behind her. The alarm would reset itself after a few minutes, and she doubted if it recorded to a computer log, so Jack wouldn’t know she had been there.

She got her shoes on again, then took a couple of palm fronds from under a nearby tree and swept her path clean of hers and Daisy’s footprints all the way to the high-water mark. Then she jogged back to her house, arriving sweaty and tired.

She still had her suspicions, but she couldn’t back them up.