Iron Orchid (Holly Barker 5)

“What do you suppose that was about?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” Holly said. At that moment, her cell phone vibrated, and she pulled it from her belt. “Hello?”

“Harry One?”

“Yes.”

“Is Harry Three with you?”

“Yes.”

“Both of you return to base at once. Go to the main house for a meeting in the conference room. Got that?”

“Got it.” She hung up.

“What is it?” Lee asked.

Holly put some money on the bar and indicated for Lee to follow her outside. When they were halfway to the car, she said, “They want us back at the Farm right now for a meeting at the conference room in the main house.”

“You think this is some sort of drill?”

“Who knows?” Holly asked, but she was willing to bet it had something to do with the explosion in New York.

As she was getting into her ca

r a shiny new pickup pulled into the parking lot, and a man got out. She didn’t recognize him immediately, but then she saw the bandage covering his nose. She breathed a sigh of relief as she left the lot and turned onto the highway.

ALL FIVE OF THE HARRY SUBGROUP were gathered around the conference table when Lance Cabot walked in. “Good evening,” he said. “I’m sorry to break into your first night of liberty, but something has come up.” He flicked a remote control, and a TV in the room replayed the report that Holly had seen on CNN, then he turned off the TV and turned on a slide projector. A picture came up of the same block before the explosion.

“This is what the house looked like this afternoon,” he said, flicking to another photo. “We’ve had it under surveillance for a couple of weeks, because we learned that the house is owned by an Iranian millionaire with ties to Iranian and Saudi intelligence. We think that the house may have sheltered a terrorist team that was planning an attack during the heads-of-state conference at the U.N., which starts tomorrow.

“In this series of photographs, you see what is apparently a uniformed messenger walk down the street carrying a parcel. He rings the bell, a guard comes to the door, signs for the package, and the messenger walks away.” He cut to a series of closeups of the messenger. “He appears to be a middle-aged man of medium height and weight. As you can see, the bill of his baseball cap prevents us from getting a clear shot of his face. It’s almost as if he knows he is being photographed. He disappears around the corner and is gone. Fifty minutes later, the house goes up.” He switched to a photograph of the house collapsing on itself.

“It would seem that the explosion was larger than one that would have resulted from a bomb in a parcel the size of the one delivered. We speculate that a bomb in the package set off other explosive material already in the house, causing it to collapse.” He switched on the TV again. “Here is a statement made by the Iranian ambassador to the U.N. a few minutes ago, from the steps of their embassy.”

The ambassador read from a single sheet of paper in his hand. “The house in the block behind our embassy was used to house embassy employees,” he said. “We believe that the CIA is responsible for this act of terrorism, in which a number of embassy employees died.”

Lance switched off the TV. “Let me assure you that we were not responsible for the explosion. Either the messenger delivered a bomb or someone inside, while building a bomb, accidentally caused an explosion. We do not routinely commit such actions on our own soil, and the DDO and the DDI are annoyed that we are being accused of doing so.

“All of you are being trained to join a new counterintelligence team that is being assembled in New York to prevent such acts in the city or, if they occur, to work with the FBI to learn the identities of the perpetrators. The attack today has caused the Deputy Director for Operations to believe that it is more important for your subgroup to be moved to New York immediately than to complete the last weeks of your training. Accordingly, your training has been terminated, and arrangements have been made for you to join the team.

“Tomorrow morning you will be issued with your credentials and reassigned to New York with immediate effect. Two of you have cars and will drive there; the other three will ride with you. You’ll be told tomorrow morning where to report. I’m not going to take questions now, because I don’t have any answers for you, so return to your quarters, get packed, get a good night’s sleep and report here tomorrow morning at seven a.m. That’s all, good night.” Lance left the room, and the group broke up.

Holly walked back to her room in a state of excitement.

NINETEEN

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN the following morning, Lance Cabot stood on a New York City rooftop with Hugh English, the deputy director for operations, and Robert Kinney, the brand new director of the FBI. They were looking down at all that was left of a townhouse. Lance had choppered up from Langley with the Deputy Director of Intelligence in the middle of the night, and he missed the sleep. He must be getting old, he thought.

The DDIO and the director were grim-faced, and Lance wasn’t sure if it was because of what they knew or what they didn’t know.

A young agent stepped up to Kinney and whispered something in his ear.

“Excuse me a minute, Hugh, Lance,” Kinney said and walked a few steps away with the agent. Lance could see his face as the agent delivered his news, and Kinney looked both astonished and outraged. “That’s impossible,” Lance heard him say. “I never did that.” Kinney came back to English and Lance. “This is Special Agent Kerry Smith,” he said, and introduced the two men. “He’s brought me some news, and it puts this incident in a whole new light.”

“What is it, Bob?” English asked.

“It looks as though the explosive used here was C-4, and that it came from the evidence room in our New York field station downtown.”