Stuart Woods - Hothouse Orchid

New Jersey, she finally remembered, but what city? She couldn’t remember. She went to the state of New Jersey website and, after working her way through multiple levels, she found it: Juvenile Criminal Records. She typed in Bruno’s name again, and the message came up: “Record sealed by the court.”

So, he did have a juvenile record. She wrote down the URL, then minimized the website and returned to the Agency site. Giving her password again, she entered a subsite called Unlocksmith, which demanded her authority for entry. The system had already identified her by her password, but it wanted a higher authority. She knew Lance Cabot’s entry code, even though she was not supposed to, and she entered that, followed by the URL of the juvenile case files.

After a few seconds, she was greeted with the message: “This site is available only to authorized personnel. Any attempt to enter without proper authority is punishable by up to one year in prison and a $10,000 fine.” There would be a record that somebody had visited the site, but the New Jersey authorities would never be able to trace it back to the Agency, because Unlocksmith entries were self-obscuring. Any attempt to backtrack would be met with gobbledygook.

She typed in Bruno’s name once more, and there was his record in all its glory: two assault-on-minor charges, one male, one female, and one conviction for statutory rape. She examined all three case files. The assault-on-minor charges consisted of one incident of schoolyard bullying that had put a younger boy in the hospital for two days and one incident of sexual assault on a twelve-year-old girl when Bruno had been fourteen-a harbinger of things to come.

The statutory rape charge had come when Bruno was sixteen and the girl thirteen. The initial charge was rape, but the girl had testified that her participation had been consensual, and, with the agreement of her parents, the charge had been reduced to one count of statutory rape and the sentence was one year in prison, suspended on condition of good behavior, record to be expunged after that, except it hadn’t been expunged. All three incidents had occurred in Morristown, New Jersey.

Surely, these cases would have been of interest to an investigator or a prosecutor, but, since the file was sealed, they would be inadmissible in court. And Bruno had had a clean record since the age of sixteen. Or maybe he had just stopped getting caught.

She Googled New Jersey newspapers and went to the Star-Ledger website, where she searched various topics, from sexual assault on a minor to rape and rape-murders. She began calling up the news reports and reading them. Finally, she found what she had been looking for: the body of a fifteen-year-old Morristown girl had been found in a local river after she had been missing for eleven days. She had been raped and strangled. Holly found a dozen other articles on the case, the last one three years after the incident. The case had never been solved.

She dug through the local police department records but could find no mention of any suspects being questioned. All right, she thought, assume the worst: all this had happened thirty-five years earlier, before DNA testing; Bruno would never be connected with the crime, even if he had been guilty of it. She logged off the various sites, but before she could log off the Agency system, a message appeared on her screen:

CALL ME ON A SECURE LINE. CABOT.

She picked up the Agency phone and dialed Lance’s direct line.

“Cabot,” he said.

“It’s Holly. You left me a message.”

“What are you doing?” he asked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re visiting sealed court records, somewhere in darkest New Jersey, using my authority. What are you doing?”

“Oh, that,” she said.

“Yes, that.”

“There’s been a series of rapes and murders locally.”

“Locally where?”

“In or around Orchid Beach.”

“You are supposed to be down there, clearing your brain and resting up to reenter the fray, and you’re messing with a serial rapist?”

“And murderer. He’s killed two of them.”

“The city and state still maintain police forces, do they not?”

“They do.”

“Then why are you involved?”

“I was one of the victims.”

Lance was silent for a moment. “You were raped?”

“No, but I was unconscious, and had passersby not come to my rescue, the worst could have happened.”

“Are you all right, Holly?” Lance was almost solicitous.

“I’m all right, Lance, honestly I am. I spent one night in a local hospital, recovering from a dose of Rohypnol, administered by the perpetrator.”

“Will you be able to identify him?”

“No. I hate to say this, but it all happened so fast.”

“You’re sure you’re all right.”

“I’m sure. I’ve had the proper medical care.” Including two dates and one roll in the hay with Josh, she thought.

“All right, then, use my authority to do any searches you need to,” Lance said. “Apart from being drugged and nearly raped and murdered, are you having a nice vacation?”

“Just lovely,” she said. “Apart from that.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Goodbye.” Lance hung up.

Holly printed out the news reports and put them into a file folder, then she relocked the office and started thinking about dinner.

The phone rang. “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s Josh. How about dinner?”

“You’re on,” she replied.

While Holly was working on her Agency computer, another user had logged on from the Bahamas, routing his connection through a number of other computers around the country. Teddy Fay knew the CIA computer system better than most of its employees, and he routed through the mainframe to connect with the Federal Aviation Administration’s list of U.S.-registered aircraft at a level that allowed him to edit. He created a new entry, gave the airplane a registration number that had not been assigned to any other airplane and entered the name and bogus address in South Florida that he had chosen for himself. That done, Teddy packed up his laptop, got up from his makeshift desk in a corner of the ramshackle hangar he had rented for the past few weeks and put the case into the luggage compartment of his airplane, along with the possessions he considered necessary to maintain whatever identity and appearance he chose.

For some years now, Teddy had been retired from the CIA, where he had been a highly placed member of the Technical Services Department, the division of the Agency that supplies its agents with identities, passports, disguises, weapons, clothing and any other resource they require to roam the world, doing the bidding of their masters. Almost since the day of his retirement, Teddy had been a fugitive, having employed the skills he learned during his thirty-year career to deliver his own brand of justice to those who had disagreed with him, some of them highly placed in the government.

He had faked his death a couple of times, but he knew there were those at the Agency who still wanted him even more dead. His greatest protection lay in the fact that the denial of his existence was just as much in their interests as in his.

His Cessna airplane, a model 182 retractable, sported a new paint job that masked a number of replacement-skin panels where the aircraft had taken fire from one of the Agency’s minions some weeks before. He shook a rolled-up sheet of plastic from a cardboard tube, peeled a layer of it away and applied it to the rear of the airplane, repeating the process on the other side. Then he peeled off another layer, leaving his brand-new registration number affixed to the airplane.

That done and the airplane packed, he swung open the doors of the battered hangar and, employing a tow bar, rolled the airplane out onto the weedy tarmac. Ten minutes later he was headed north-west at a very low altitude, nearly skimming the waves. Whenever he saw a boat in the distance he swung astern of it and kept far enough away so that no one aboard could note his tail number, then he resumed his old course, using the onboard GPS units.