Iron Orchid

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.