Stuart Woods - Iron Orchid

Immediately, Holly saw two men who could be Teddy Fay: one older looking, in a long topcoat with a short, gray beard, and another in a sheepskin coat and a tweed cap, with a big yellow muffler that partly covered his face. She looked away from both of them, then glanced back when she could. She made sure her cell phone earpiece was firmly in her ear, then she reached into a pocket and pressed the single key that connected her to the team leader,

“I’m here,” he said.

“I’ve got two candidates,” she replied without moving her lips. “Old man in topcoat with beard, younger man in sheepskin coat and tweed cap. Can’t be sure about either.”

“We’re on it.” He rang off.

Holly gave them another ample of minutes to identify the two men, then she called Daisy and headed back toward 64th Street, still walking quickly. She made the last few blocks in record time, and as soon as she was inside she called Lance.

“Yes?”

“I identified two prospects to the team,” she said.

“I know; they’re tracking both. The older man with the beard has been eliminated-he’s really old-but they’re still on the sheepskin coat. Come on back to work.”

Holly left some fresh water for Daisy, told her to guard the apartment with her life, and got a cab back to the office. She went immediately to Lance’s office.

“What’s going on?”

Lance was watching a jerky television image on a monitor next to his desk. “There’s the sheepskin coat,” he said. “He’s leading them on an erratic walk, and they’re having trouble keeping him in sight without losing him or blowing the tail. I’ve dispatched another team to help. You think it could really be him?”

“Well, it could be Larry David, I suppose.”

“I’m never going to be able to watch his show again without thinking about this,” Lance said, laughing. He picked up his phone and pressed a button. “I want one team member to get close; Holly’s here, and I want her to have a good look. Have someone approach and pass him from in front.”

Holly watched the screen, and a moment later the perspective changed: the camera was a block away, and the man in the sheepskin coat was walking toward it. The man and his pursuer stopped on opposite sides of the street for a traffic light.

“Zoom in as close as possible,” Lance said into the phone.

The camera began a slow zoom, and as it framed the man more tightly, he took off his tweed cap and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Holly got a good look at his face; he couldn’t have been older than forty-five. “Not him,” she said. “Too young.”

Lance spoke into the phone again. “He’s not our man,” he said. “Break it off; everybody back to the Barn.” He hung up the phone.

“I’m sorry, Lance, I thought he might be Teddy.”

“Don’t worry about it; the exercise was good practice for the team.”

TEDDY APPROACHED THE U.N. PLAZA BUILDING on foot. The elegant apartment house soared forty stories or more into the New York skyline. Teddy started near the front door and walked slowly toward the U.N. building, perhaps a block away. He wanted to see the area from the target’s perspective.

This was not going to be as easy as the others, since ben Saud would have up to eight armed guards with him. If Teddy tried to do a drive-by from a motorbike or bicycle, they’d cut him to pieces the moment he fired, maybe sooner. No, he was going to have to be stationary and, preferably, elevated. As he walked toward the U.N. he saw, across the street, a building under construction, a small office or apartment building. The steel structure was up, and the floors appeared to be in, but cladding of the exterior had not yet begun.

Attached to one side of the building was an elevator cage to get the workers up and down in a hurry. That would do for access, he thought, but not for escape. He broke off his walk to the U.N. and crossed the street. Two men were conferring on the sidewalk over a set of plans, one of them obviously the construction foreman, in his work clothes and yellow hard hat, the other in a business suit and topcoat but also wearing a hard hat. Building owner? Architect? As he passed them Teddy got a good look at a plastic I.D. badge clipped to his topcoat collar. It identified him as a New York City building inspector.

“You’ve got a couple of soft spots on the second-story temporary flooring,” he was saying, “and I want them beefed up today.” Teddy couldn’t hear the response, but he didn’t need to. He was concentrating on remembering as much detail as possible of the ID. badge the man was wearing. Then he saw something that immediately appealed to him. On the west side of the building, the side opposite the elevator, there was another way out. He liked that a lot.

Kerry Smith came into Lance’s office. “Any luck?” he asked Lance and Holly.

“No,” Lance said, “not our man. Good practice for the team, though; keeps them occupied.”

“Keeping them occupied is getting harder,” Kerry said. “I’m getting tired of writing reports that say, in essence, ”Nothing happened today,“ and I suspect that Washington is getting tired of reading them.”

“Okay, Holly,” Lance said, “just maintain your routine, keep going home every day at noon to walk Daisy, keep putting yourself out there for Teddy to see.”

“Okay,” Holly said, rising from her chair. “By the way, Lance, do you mind if I take two or three days off? My dad and his girlfriend are coming into town tomorrow.”

“Sure, we’ll try to struggle along without you.”

“You may as well pull the team off, too.”

“Okay. See you Monday.”

Holly left Lance’s office and went back to her own.

Kerry looked at Lance. “Are you really going to pull the team off?” he asked.

“No,” Kerry replied.

TEDDY GOT INTO THE CAR, carrying a briefcase, drove over to the West Side and headed north on the West Side Highway, which turned into the Henry Hudson Parkway, which turned into the Saw Mill River Parkway. Near the end he got off at the exit for Katonah and began driving around, looking for a very private spot.

After a few minutes he stopped on a small bridge. A stream passed under him, and on one bank he saw a well-worn footpath. Not likely anyone would be in the woods today, he thought. He pulled past the bridge onto the wide shoulder and got out of the car, carrying his briefcase. He half-walked, half-slid down the embankment to the footpath and began walking quickly upstream, away from the bridge. After a couple of minutes, there was a bend in the stream, and Teddy could no longer see the bridge.

It was cold and silent in the winter-stripped woods, and he walked for another quarter of a mile before he found a fork in the path, away from the stream. He stopped and spotted an oak tree with a knot in its trunk around eight inches in diameter on the other side of the stream. He estimated the distance to the tree to be twenty yards.

He walked up the right fork in the path, pacing off another eighty yards, then stopped and looked around. He seemed completely alone in the woods, and the only sound he could hear was the rush of the stream. Looking back, he could see the oak tree with the knot clearly.

Teddy sat down on a large rock and, after checking both ways on the path for company, opened the briefcase and began assembling his new Walther PPK-S rifle. That done, he disassembled it and went through the process another three times, getting faster. After the third time, he was down to thirty-five seconds, and he reckoned that was about as fast as he would get.

Teddy knelt behind the rock and rested the barrel of the silenced rifle on it. He took careful aim at the knot in the oak tree, adjusting the zoom scope, then he squeezed off a round. The rifle was pleasingly silent, emitting only a whispery pjffttt! The bullet struck a foot below the knot and barely grazed the trunk on the right side. Part of that must be trigger pull, he thought. He fired one more round, and it stayed a foot low, but was only six inches right.