Iron Orchid (Holly Barker 5)

Lance looked at his watch. “Give me fifteen minutes to get a team together, then go home to lunch.”

FORTY-THREE

TWO DAYS AFTER the incident in the subway, Teddy saw Holly Barker again. She was leaving her building and, apparently, headed for the park, since she had her dog with her.

Since seeing her on the train, Teddy had gone back and read her file from the Agency again, and this time he had Googled her and read the newspaper accounts of the big cases she had been involved in when she had been chief of police in Orchid Beach, Florida. It made amazing reading, since it concerned a small-town police officer, and Teddy was intrigued. He thought he would like to get to know her personally, but the business on the train bothered him.

He followed Holly at a distance of more than a block, then, as she entered the park at 64th Street, he turned down Fifth Avenue and simply walked away. He hadn’t spotted a tail, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He got on the Fifth Avenue bus and watched to see if anyone got on behind him, or if a car were following the bus. Seeing nothing, he got off in the Fifties, walked over to Madison and took the bus back uptown, constantly watching for a tail.

As he got off the bus at 63rd Street, he saw Holly cross the street a block ahead, apparently headed back to her apartment building. He turned down 63rd, walked to Park and crossed the street, looking back in time to see her enter her building. He glanced at his watch. Lunch time. She must have come home from her office just to walk the dog. He loitered around the corner long enough to watch her leave the building, then he walked to Lexington, took a cab and got out a block from the CIA building. Ten minutes later Holly appeared on foot and walked into the building.

Once again checking for tails, Teddy walked to Third Avenue, took the bus uptown, and, after walking around the block a couple of times, went into the building that housed his workshop.

He hung up his coat and sat down at the computer, logged on to the Agency mainframe and ran a non-Agency search on her name. This time a new reference appeared: a website for some sort of financial management firm, Morgan amp; Bailey. Holly was listed on the site as a senior vice president. Obviously, the firm was an Agency front, and they had gone to the trouble to create the website to lend verisimilitude to the legend.

It occurred to him that Holly was living above her means, if her Agency salary was all she had. Perhaps she was taking a salary from Morgan amp; Bailey, to help her establish credentials in the city, or perhaps the firm was paying for the apartment.

He went back to the news clippings and read the story reporting the death of her fiance, who was an innocent bystander at a bank robbery and got in the way. He ran a search on the fiance, Jackson Oxenhandler, and discovered that he had been a prosperous lawyer in Orchid Beach. Maybe she had inherited his estate. That would make her, perhaps, prosperous enough to afford an apartment on Park Avenue.

It was clear to Teddy that, based on her career in the military, plus her very successful career as a police chief, Holly Barker was a very smart and motivated woman. If he had needed further evidence of that, her training report from the Farm showed plenty of guts and initiative. He would have to be careful to limit his contact with her in the neighborhood, and if she showed any interest in him, he would have to pull up stakes and find a new place to live.

THERE WAS A NOTE on Holly’s new desk: “See me-Lance.” She went and knocked on the door that connected their offices.

“Come in,” he said.

She found him at his desk, looking at photographs. “You wanted to see me?”

“The team had a sighting of a man who may have been following you for a couple of blocks.”

“When?”

“In the last hour. He went in your direction until you entered the park, then he got on a bus downtown.” He beckoned her to his side of the desk.

Holly looked at the photographs; they were taken from more than a block away with a low-resolution digital camera. ”He’s a blur,“ she said.

“That’s as much as we could enhance it,” Lance said. “Don’t believe everything about surveillance you see on TV.”

“I can’t make him from these,” she said, shuffling through the prints. “Did anybody follow him when he broke from me?”

“The team lost him when he got on the bus. We’re going to have to add vehicles, obviously.”

“I feel guilty about soaking up this much manpower,” Holly said.

“Have a seat,” Lance said, walking around the desk and sitting next to her on his sofa. “I’m concerned about you.”

“Why?”

“You look depressed.”

Holly laughed. “So do you.”

“I guess we’re all a little depressed about how this is going.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that we may be the wrong people for this work?” Holly asked. “I mean, my class’s training was cut short, and not much of it has been useful to me on this assignment. A few years as a cop in Florida was better training for this.”

“It occurs to me every day,” Lance said, “but what can I do? I can’t call Langley and tell them to shut us down. That would be admitting failure, and the failure would go into the personnel file of everybody in this station. The Agency culture can tolerate a certain amount of failure, because operations frequently don’t pan out, but the culture would look askance at admitted failure, especially of a project and a unit commissioned directly by the president

of the United States. We don’t really have a choice; we’re going to have to catch Teddy Fay or die trying. If we can do that, praise will rain down upon us, good things will be said about us in our fitness reports and we will be princes in our realm.”