Stuart Woods - Shoot Him If He Runs

“You’d think.”

“Ms. Barker thinks this guy, Robertson, might be Teddy Fay.”

“The one you think is the escaped airport bandit?”

“I’m right; I know I am.”

“Excuse me, but aren’t you the guy who thought that coffee merchant in Cairo was Osama bin Laden?”

“That has nothing to do with this. Besides, the guy was very tall. And he had a beard.”

“Right. So tell me why you think Robertson isn’t Teddy Fay.”

“Instinct.”

“Uh-oh, instinct. You should never follow your instincts, darling. Let me guess, Robertson looks like Teddy.”

“He looks like the description of Teddy that Lance gave Holly Barker.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Come on, Billy, use your noodle a little; just consider it. What about Robertson conflicts with what’s known about Teddy Fay?”

Pepper was silent. “Teddy wouldn’t be stupid enough to use an identity that couldn’t be confirmed.”

“Nothing else, huh?”

“Not much.”

“Name some little thing about Robertson that conflicts with his being Teddy.”

“His identity doesn’t check out, okay? All right, nothing else, but nothing conflicts with his being Barney Cox, either.”

“Tell me, in your wildest dreams, who would you rather be responsible for bringing in: Barney Cox or Teddy Fay?”

“Well, Barney Cox, of course. If I brought in Teddy Fay, nobody would ever know; Langley would sit on it.”

“Lance would know, and if he gets the DDO job, that would be nice.”

“Yeah, but only Lance would know, and suppose he doesn’t get the job?”

“The director would know, and that means the president would know.”

“Why do you think that? You think Lance would tell her if I busted Teddy? He’d see that he and his acolyte, Barker, got the credit; then he’d get credit for sending her down here. And the director wouldn’t tell the president until he’s out of office. He wouldn’t want to know a thing like that.”

“You have a point.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe we’d get a nice transfer out of it?”

“What’s wrong with St. Marks? I’m working practically alone-ah, with the woman I love-in my very own country; I have nobody local breathing down my neck, except the guy at the embassy. And you’re having the time of your life; your tennis game has never been better.”

“If we were a couple of years from retirement, St. Marks would be heaven,” she said. “But we have careers ahead of us. In another year, Langley will forget we’re here, and we’ll be left to rot on the vine. But if you could make Robertson as Barney Cox, the Brits would love you for it; maybe you could join MI6.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you. Think of some way we can make hay out of Barney Cox.”

“If we were the police, we’d be world-famous in an instant, have our pictures in every newspaper in the world, but that’s not who we are, is it? If we’re responsible for busting Cox, only the Agency is going to know; Langley is not even going to tell the Brits.”

“They’d be very pleased if we busted Cox for the Brits. They could lord it over MI6 for years.”

“Well, there is that. All right, you want me to see what I can find out at the tennis club?”

“Does Robertson play tennis?”

“He’s a new member; I checked.”

“You’ve been holding out on me, haven’t you?”

“I only checked today. I win the blow job!” She shucked off her nightgown.

“Hang on, I don’t even remember what the bet was about. How do I know you won?”

She grabbed him by the hair and drew his face into her lap. “Trust me,” she said.

They forgot about calling Lance.

Lance asked for and got an appointment with the director, and he presented himself at the appointed time. His morning conversation with Barker had been interesting.

“Good morning, Lance,” Kate Lee said, waving him to a chair. “What do you have to report?”

“We’ve identified a man in St. Marks as, possibly, Teddy Fay.”

“Great!”

“Stone Barrington interviewed a man at the airport who showed him a small airplane belonging to a recently arrived Englishman, calling himself Robertson. There’s no British paper on this character at all, so he’s obviously not who he says he is, and he more or less fits Teddy’s description.”

“Now what?”

“Problem is, Bill Pepper, on his own hook, has made a different identification.”

“Pepper’s our man in the casino down there, isn’t he? The computer whiz?”

“Right.”

“Who does Pepper think the man is?”

“He thinks he’s one of the four men who robbed a currency-transfer company at Heathrow a few months ago, name of Barney Cox.”

“I remember the incident; a hell of a lot of money, wasn’t it?”

“Over a hundred million quid.”

“Hard to handle that much cash, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but with careful planning, it could be done. Private jet to a country with amenable banks, numbered accounts, et cetera.”

“How much does a hundred million pounds sterling weigh?”

“Let’s see, the biggest sterling note is fifty pounds; you could get a million in a large briefcase.”

“So a hundred large briefcases would do it?”

“Or ten manageable-sized crates. As I recall, they used a large van to remove the money from Heathrow.”

“They’d need a big private jet, then.”

“Or a not-very-big cargo plane. Of course, the Brits would be all over that sort of flight.”

“They could truck it across the channel and fly from anywhere in Europe.”

“Yes, they could, if they waited for things to cool off enough.”

“So you think this Robertson could be Cox?”

“It’s possible.”

“Just as possible as if he’s Teddy Fay, then.”

“I’m afraid so. The reason I came to you about this is that Bill Pepper doesn’t work for me. He did me a favor and met briefly with Holly Barker to tell her what he knows about Pemberton. She was also interested in the evil Colonel Croft, né Benet, of Haiti.”

“Why?”

“Their cottage is bugged, and she suspects Croft, a logical assumption.”

“Have they blown their mission?” Kate asked.

“No, they’ve been careful. But as I was saying, Bill Pepper reports to Hugh English, through one of his deputies, and should you decide to mention this Robertson to the Brits, I don’t want to ruffle Hugh’s feathers by having him know that I’ve talked to Pepper without going through him.”

“Why didn’t you go through him?”

“Because I don’t think he would have given me permission. This was a benign contact, nothing that would jeopardize Pepper’s work down there. Also, Hugh English doesn’t know about our looking for Teddy, and I didn’t think you’d want him to.”

“Yes, well, there is that. Pepper has cracked the government computers down there, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, that’s how he began his background check on Robertson; he checked the info on his application to buy a house.”

“One thing about Robertson that doesn’t sound like Teddy: he has no paper in Britain,” Kate said. “It doesn’t sound like Teddy to create a legend with no paper behind him. All his experience is in new identities with a lot of depth.”

“I’ll grant you that, but Teddy can’t have the resources he did when he was at home, here. He may have taken a certain amount of paper with him-passports, that sort of thing-but to build an identity in depth, he’d need more than just an Internet connection. He’d need British passwords and codes that he couldn’t get without the Agency’s people and equipment. That may be why this identity is so shallow.”