Iron Orchid (Holly Barker 5)

“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.”