Iron Orchid (16 page)

He could hear the bed squeaking, and he knew that it took two people to make the other noises he was hearing. As long as they were vocal, he need not worry about being detected. He stepped to the bedroom door.

Omar Said was in the saddle, pumping away. The girl’s face was turned toward Teddy, and her eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Then, as he approached the bed, she opened them.

Teddy pointed the pistol at her and brought a finger to his lips. She now had to decide whether to sacrifice her life for her lover’s. She made her decision; she closed her eyes again. Teddy took another step and put one round into the back of Said’s head.

The Syrian rolled off the girl and onto the floor on the other side of the bed. Teddy walked around the bed and put another round through his forehead. He looked back at the girl, who lay rigid on the bed, her eyes screwed shut.

“Wait ten minutes before you call anyone,” Teddy said in Arabic. He didn’t speak or understand the language, but he had memorized a number of handy phrases. The girl nodded.

Teddy left the apartment, listened for others in the hallway, then, hearing no one, walked downstairs, rolling his ski mask back into a cap. He took a look through the glass of the front door and saw Said’s chauffeur’s head laid on the headrest of his seat. He was asleep; no need to kill him.

Teddy left the building and checked the block for surveillance. Nothing. He walked three blocks, checking, before he took a cab back to his own neighborhood.

HOLLY STOOD OUTSIDE the Metropolitan, watching the last of the operagoers leaving the building. Lance, elegant in a cashmere topcoat and soft hat, came over and stood beside her.

“He didn’t show,” she said.

“He showed, but not here,” Lance replied. “I just got a call from Dino Bacchetti at the 19th precinct. A Syrian diplomat named Omar Said, who is an intelligence operative, was shot twice in the head while in the throes of passion at his girlfriend’s apartment.”

“I don’t think Teddy will go to the opera next Friday night, either,” Holly said.

THIRTY-TWO

WILL AND KATE LEE were in bed, reading, when her private line rang. “Yes? Say again? This doesn’t make any sense; how long have we been watching him? That’s what I thought. Fay had already left the Agency when we started watching him. All right, we’ll meet in the morning and talk about it then. Good night.” She hung up.

Will looked at her sideways but said nothing. She looked back at him.

“Oh, all right, I’ll tell you. Teddy Fay didn’t show up at the opera tonight. While all our agents were enjoying
Le Nozze de Figaro
…”

“I love that overture,” Will said.

“Don’t interrupt. While they had the opera house staked out, Teddy killed a Syrian spy named Omar Said, who we’ve been surveilling for about four months, ever since he arrived in New York. He is…
was
attached to the Syrian mission to the U.N., and he had diplomatic immunity.”

“Is Mr. Said a great loss to the U.N., the Agency or the human race?” Will asked.

“Certainly not; he was a goatish, murderous son of a bitch, and the planet Earth is a better place without him.”

“Then I take it we have no complaints?”

“It’s an embarrassment to the Agency that a diplomat who was under our constant surveillance was murdered while we were lured away.”

“You weren’t providing him with any sort of protection, were you?”

“No, we were trying to catch him hobnobbing with terrorists, so we could arrest them and kick him out of the country.”

“Does anybody know you were surveilling him?”

“Just the FBI. They were helping us.”

“Then, if he wasn’t your charge and nobody knows you cared, why is it an embarrassment?”

“It just is,” she said. She turned out her light, fluffed her pillow and turned away from him.

“I suppose this terrible news means you’re not in the mood for…”

“I didn’t say that,” she said, turning back to him.

Late the following morning, Kate convened a meeting in her conference room. Attending were Hugh English, the DDO; his deputy, Irene Foster; Ian Thrush, the DDI; his deputy, George Weaver and, by television conference hookup from New York, Lance Cabot,

“All right, Lance,” Kate said, “give us the whole thing.”

“Good morning, Director,” Lance said.

“Good morning from all of us.”

“One of my officers, a new one named Holly Barker, while looking for Teddy Fay at the opera a week ago yesterday, found him, quite by accident. He walked up to her and invited her to join him for
La Boheme.
He was heavily disguised, and she didn’t recognize him, and she thought it might be a good idea to look around inside, so she accepted. He told her his name was Hyman Baum and that he was the retired owner of a dress business in the garment district.

“After the opera, he invited her to join him. She declined, saying she would be traveling, and they said good night. Part of his disguise was a cane, ostensibly because he had had a recent knee replacement, but after they parted, Holly saw him sprinting for a cab. On the way
home,
she realized that she might have spent the evening with Teddy. Her suspicions were reinforced by the fact that our investigation determined that Mr. Baum did not exist.

“He told her that he had the same seats every week; accordingly, last night we staked out the Met in large numbers, pulling people off other assignments. Teddy had exchanged his tickets three times with other operagoers, leading us on a wild goose chase around the hall. While we were chasing Teddy at the Met, he was dispatching Mr. Said, at the apartment of his girlfriend. We questioned her, and she said all she saw was a man in a ski mask with a small gun. She phoned the police, and one of our consultants, Lieutenant Dino Bacchetti, of the NYPD, called me. That’s it.”

“There are two things that concern me here,” Kate said. “One: if Teddy didn’t show and went to the trouble of exchanging his tickets three times, he must have made Ms. Barker as one of us. How?”

“Holly introduced herself, using her own name, but that would have meant nothing to Teddy, and she cannot think of any other reason he would know who she was. Neither can I or anybody else who has addressed the issue.”

“Two,” Kate said. “Said has only been in the country for four months, and we have only been interested in him for that long. Since Teddy retired from the Agency more than a year ago, how would he have been aware of Said’s existence, let alone his presence in New York?”

“I think that is an issue best addressed at your end of this hookup,” Lance said.

Irene Foster half-raised a hand. “That information had to have come from inside,” she said, glad to be the one to point it out.

“Or from someone on the New York task force,” Kate said. “Lance, question everyone there who knew about Said. While you’re at it, I want you to wring out Ms. Barker and figure out how he made her.”

“Will do,” Lance said.

“Hugh,” she said, addressing her DDO, “I want your people to make a list of everyone in this building who knew we were surveilling Omar Said and put every one of them through the ringer— polygraphs, the works.”

“Yes, Kate,” English said. He turned to his deputy. “Irene, this will be your baby; get on it as soon as we’re out of this meeting.”

“Certainly, Hugh,” Irene replied.

“Director,” Lance said from New York.

“Yes, Lance?”

“Holly Barker is with me, and she may have figured out how she was made.” Lance introduced an attractive woman to the group. “Tell them, please.”

“Good morning,” Holly said. “A couple of days before I first met Teddy at the opera, my FBI partner and I checked out a record store called Aria, on the West Side, at Lance’s suggestion. My partner went in alone, and when he identified himself as an FBI agent, the clerk behind the counter refused to talk to him and told him to get out. The day after I met Teddy, I went back to the shop, looked around and bought a CD. I mentioned to the clerk that I had seen
La Boheme
the night before and that I wanted the recording, and she suggested a version.”

“Did you identify yourself, Holly?” Kate asked.

“No, ma’am, not in light of my partner’s experience. I thought I would go back after establishing myself as a customer and see what I could learn. My point is, at the opera I gave Teddy absolutely no reason to think I was Agency, and the only other point of contact could have been at the record shop.”

“Do you think he might have been in the shop?”

“No, I was the only customer, but I think it’s quite possible that he saw me either enter or leave the shop, or both.”

“But why would seeing you there make him think you were Agency? You were just a woman buying a copy of
La Boheme,
for all he knew.”

“Unless he followed me from the shop,” Holly said. “From there, I walked to Sixth Avenue and took a cab back to the Barn. If he followed me, he would know where the building is.”

“But Holly, we’ve only been in the building for a couple of weeks; it’s brand new. How could he associate it with us?”

“Maybe he saw someone he knew at the Agency going in or out,” Holly said.

“Or,” Lance said, interrupting, “maybe he researched the address on the Agency’s computers.”

“But we’ve locked him out of the computers,” Irene Foster said. “We’ve changed all the log-in codes.”

“Then I think that puts the ball back in your court at Langley,” Lance said. “Maybe the codes should be changed again.”

“Thank you, Lance,” Kate said, “and thank you, too, Holly; you’ve been a great help.”

“Thank you, Director,” Holly said.

Kate turned back to the group. “Call Technical Services and change the codes again. Irene, there are still a lot of people down there who knew Teddy. That would seem a logical place to start your internal investigation.”

“Yes, Director,” Irene said.

THIRTY-THREE

LANCE CABOT AND KERRY SMITH were in a meeting in the twelfth-floor conference room when a call came in. Lance picked up the phone. “Yes?”

“Director Robert Kinney for you or Agent Smith,” the operator said.

Lance pressed the speaker button. “Director, this is Lance Cabot; I’m here with Agent Smith.”

“Afternoon,” Kerry said. “Something has come up. Kerry, you remember the hangar at Manassas Airport where Teddy Fay had his workshop.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir,” Kerry replied.

“This morning we had a call from the airport manager down there. Apparently, Fay had a second hangar, where he kept the Cessna he blew up, and the manager found it on a routine check this morning. There’s a lot of stuff in the hangar, but the man says he didn’t touch anything. I’d like you—and Lance, if he likes—to take a couple of people, fly down there and process the scene, see what you can come up with.”

“All right,” Kerry said. “I’m on my way. Will you send a tech team from there to meet us? I suppose it will be about… three hours, before I can get there.”

“Director,” Lance said, “if it’s all right, I’m going to let Kerry handle this; I have a lot on my plate here.”

“Yeah, I heard about the Said thing,” Kinney said. “Send whomever you like.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lance punched off the call. “Kerry, why don’t you take Holly and Ty with you?”

“Okay. Do we have a chopper yet?”

“Not our own; we have a service that operates out of the East Side Heliport. I’ll have someone call and book one.”

HOLLY LOOKED OUT the window of the helicopter and saw Manassas Airport as they approached. It was a quiet little field nestled in the Virginia countryside. “Teddy had a workshop here?” she asked Kerry.

“Yeah. He also kept an RV and a souped-up Mercedes sedan there, too. He crashed the Mercedes, running from the scene after he killed the speaker of the house and abandoned the car in a parking lot nearby. We don’t know what happened to the RV, and we didn’t know he had a second hangar. Apparently, he kept his airplane there. I should have ordered a search of all the hangars on the field.”

The chopper settled onto a taxiway on the side of the field opposite Dulles Aviation, the FBO that serviced local and visiting aircraft. Two rows of hangars took up most of the space there. A man in a warm coat met them and introduced himself as the airport manager.

“Your other people are waiting in a big van over by the hangar,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk you over there.”

At the hangar, Kerry met the head of the tech team. “Are we worried about booby traps?” the man asked.

“I don’t think so,” Kerry said. “The manager has already been in there today, and he’s still with us. You take your people in first and establish a perimeter around whatever evidence is there, so we can get out of this cold.”

The man nodded and signaled for his three assistants to follow him. He opened the door of the hangar and looked around, then turned back to Kerry. “You can come in,” he said; “everything is down at the other end.”

Holly followed Kerry into the hangar, which was brightly lit. She stood just inside the door and waited for the head of the tech team to do a quick survey of the items in the hangar. He came back after a few minutes.

“Okay, we’ve got tire tracks of an airplane, Michelin tires, tricycle gear. That’s consistent with the Cessna 182 RG Fay was flying, until he blew it up. We’ve also got a set of Goodyear Wrangler tracks. That’s a truck tire often used on SUVs and RVs, and the width of the vehicle is consistent with an RV or a rental truck. When we have precise measurements, we should know which. There are also a lot of miscellaneous tools and scraps of materials.”

“Check everything for prints,” Kerry said. “To this day, we don’t have Fay’s prints, not even from his house in Maine.”

“How does somebody not leave prints in his own house?” Holly asked.

“We think he cleaned up the place before he left the last time. He had only been back for a few minutes when we went in. His house in the Virginia suburbs was also clean of prints, the first time I’d ever seen a house with no prints at all.”