Stuart Woods - Iron Orchid

Teddy walked quickly through the place. It was really a two-bedroom hotel suite, beautifully furnished. “How much?”

“Six thousand a month.”

“I’ll take it,” he said.

“You don’t want to see the other two?”

“No, this is fine.”

“They’ll want a credit check, of course.”

“Of course, but I’ll pay the year’s rent in advance.” He took a check from the bank packet and wrote it out.

“If you’d like to take a seat, I’ll see how quickly we can get this done,” she said.

Teddy took a book of Winston Churchill’s speeches from a bookcase, sat down and began reading.

Ten minutes later the woman returned. “Your credit report is fine, and the building manager has approved you,” she said. “And in view of your advance payment, I’ve gotten him to waive the security deposit.”

“Then I’m home,” Teddy said.

“Yes, you are.” She handed him the keys. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Not a thing,” Teddy said.

They rode down to the street together, and Teddy took a cab back to the Algonquin. He cleaned out the safe, packed his bags and checked out. Fifteen minutes later, he was a resident of New York City. He called the bank and gave them his new address, then he began looking in the classified section of the newspaper for suitable work space.

____________________

AN HOUR LATER, Teddy was looking at a three-room furnished space over a dry-cleaner’s shop on Lexington Avenue. “Does anyone live in the building?” he asked the super.

“No, sir. The place is empty by six.”

“What’s immediately below?”

“A storeroom for furs. The cleaners store them there for clients.”

“And above?”

“The roof.”

“I’ll take it.” He wrote the man a check for a year’s rent and was given the keys.

Now all Teddy had to do was to begin shopping for tools. He already had a detailed list of what he would need, and he knew where to find them. He walked downstairs and out onto Lexington Avenue and hailed a cab.

HOLLY FOLLOWED THE MAP to the room number on her map, which turned out to be an underground firing range. She was issued an electronic noise-canceling headset and shown to an equipment room where she could leave Daisy. Someone had thoughtfully left a bowl of water and a blanket for her.

A dozen trainees had assembled in the range, and shortly, a short, thickly built man in what Holly assumed to be his late fifties, wearing an olive-drab T-shirt, army-issue fatigue trousers, black tennis shoes and a white-sidewall haircut, addressed them.

“You may call me Sarge,” he said in a clipped voice. “I will teach you how to shoot, if you do not already know how. Your employer does not issue a standard weapon, so you will fire many weapons- handguns, assault rifles and machine guns. You will learn how they work and to disassemble and reassemble them in light and dark. You will learn about silencers and flash suppressors. Someone else will teach you how to eviscerate others with knives and kill them with your hands. That is out of my line.”

He looked at a clipboard. “Harry One?”

Holly raised a hand. “Here, Sarge.”

“Have you ever fired a handgun?”

“Yes, Sarge.”

“Come over here and show me how you do it. Ears on, everyone. We didn’t bring you here to send you out into the world deaf.”

Everyone put on their headsets.

Sarge indicated half a dozen handguns lined up on a bench. “Take your pick, Harry One.”

Holly chose a standard Model 1911 Colt semiautomatic pistol. While pointing it downrange she removed the magazine and found it full and the chamber empty. She shoved the magazine back into the weapon, racked the slide, took up a combat position and emptied the weapon into the target, fifty feet away, at the rate of a round per second. She removed the magazine from the gun and returned it to the bench.

Sarge pressed a button, and the target traveled toward the group. He examined the tight group, all eight shots in the bull’s-eye, then turned back to his class. “I have been at this installation for an extended period of time, and that is the first time I have ever seen a trainee do that on the first day,” he said. “When I am done with you, you will all be able to do it.” He turned to Holly. “Harry One, you are my assistant instructor.”

Holly spent the next two hours teaching other trainees what Ham had taught her since she was a little girl.

When the class ended, Sarge pulled her aside. “Do you own a little nine-millimeter custom-made with Caspian parts?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“I know who made that weapon,” he said. “Not because I’m psychic but because he put his initials on the frame. That sonofabitch cost me the national shooting championship twice, and I can see he taught you what he knows. Before we’re done, you may learn some things he didn’t teach you. Now get out of here.”

Holly got out of there. She collected Daisy and made her way to the next room number on her schedule in another underground building. She entered the room and found three other trainees there, waiting. On a low platform at the end of the room was an array of safes and locks and prop doors.

“Come in and sit down, please,” an elderly man said. He had a thick German accent and was wearing a seedy cardigan sweater over a bright orange polo shirt, which Holly thought he had probably not chosen for himself. “You may call me Dietz.

“You are in this class to learn how to be a criminal,” Dietz said. “You will learn how to pick locks and jimmy windows and crack safes. I say, ”crack,“ because you will not be here long enough for me to teach you to open any safe in the world by learning the combination. With some, you will have to employ explosives, and I will teach you that, too. You may comfort yourself with the knowledge that if, by the end of your training, you have not measured up in some way and are dismissed, you will at least be able to earn a good living as a burglar.”

Everybody laughed.

Dietz picked up a remote control, pressed a button and a screen came down from the ceiling. He pressed another button and a slide of a cutaway view of a lock flashed onto the screen. “Now, we have here a common, domestic, double-bolt lock, in this case, a Yale.” And he proceeded to explain how it worked.

By the end of the class, two hours later, each of the students knew how to pick the lock, open it with a credit card or remove the lock from the door with tools. Holly thought she was going to enjoy this class.

HOLLY EMPTIED DAISY and went to lunch in the cafeteria. She chose her food, sat down and was immediately joined by a young Asian woman of around thirty. She was petite and very pretty.

“Mind if I sit down?” she asked. Her accent was completely American.

“Please do. This is Daisy.”

The woman scratched Daisy behind the ears and made baby talk, then she turned to Holly. “You’re Harry One, right? I’m Harry Three. There are five Harrys, and I’ve already met the others. I have a feeling we’re going to be working together when we get out of this joint.”

“Well, you’re way ahead of me,” Holly said.

“You were recruited by Lance Cabot, right?”

“I don’t think I should confirm or deny that,” Holly said. “How do I know you’re not a spy who’s just trying to get me to talk.”

“Yeah, well you’re right. Not that I’m a spy, but they told us not to say anything, right?”

“Right.”

“I was really impressed with your shooting,” Harry Three said.

“Thank you.”

“Where did you learn?”

Holly smiled and shook her head. “I’m not biting, Three.”