by Stuart Woods
“I think we are, unless he turns up verifiably deceased.” He spat out a piece of green pepper. “You missed one. Why don’t you instruct your Technical Services Department to put together a device that detects green peppers on your pizza before you bite into them?”
Kate took a big bite of pizza to keep from talking, and they both ate quietly for a while.
“What happened today to make you feel bad about this?” Will asked.
“Teddy is creating internal problems for us. I’ve about decided to appoint Lance Cabot as DDO, but he’s had to go around Hugh English to deal with the Teddy thing, and Hugh doesn’t like being gone around.”
“Has he found out about it?”
“No, but Lance is using one of Hugh’s people on St. Marks, and it could get back to him.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and appoint Lance, retire Hugh English and get him out of there?”
“Because people like Hugh English don’t just dematerialize when they retire. If they find out they were unknowingly slighted when they were still at work, they end up giving television interviews and testifying to Congress about what a snake pit the Agency is and what a bitch I am, and it doesn’t do anybody any good.”
“Welcome to Washington,” Will said. “Look, all we can do with this or with anything else is to do what we think is right and let the chips fall where they may.”
She smiled, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s what I love about you,” she said. “Your childlike belief that if you do what you think is right, everything will be okay.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m president of the United States,” he replied, taking another huge bite of pizza.
“There’s something else.”
“Oh, God, not something else,” Will muttered through his pizza.
“The Teddy thing is overlapping with a British thing.”
“How so?”
“We have a suspect for Teddy on St. Marks, but our man down there thinks he could just as easily be one of the four men who robbed a currency transfer company at Heathrow Airport a few months ago. I expect you remember that.”
“I remember getting a phone call from my very good friend the British prime minister, asking me to instruct the entire U.S. law enforcement community to help catch them, as if I could do that, and I remember telling him that I would do anything I could to help him.”
“Yes, well…”
“So what I should be doing right now is picking up the phone and calling London to report our suspicions.”
“Technically speaking, yes.”
“Technically?”
“Sort of. I mean, we’re working on a firm identification of the guy, and if he turns out to be the British robber, then you can call your limey buddy.”
“Are we talking minutes, days, weeks or longer?”
“Maybe days. If we’re lucky.”
“So now I have another slice of green pepper on my metaphorical pizza.”
“For only a short time, I hope.”
Will spat out another sliver of green. “Kate-and this is a direct order from your president-fix this.”
“The green peppers?”
“The metaphorical green peppers.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
28
Holly took a seat on the cottage patio and poured herself a glass of whatever was in the icy pitcher. She sipped it. “Mmmm, what is this?”
“Some kind of rum punch, I think,” Stone said. “Thomas sent it over.”
“It’s delicious, but it doesn’t taste alcoholic.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Dino said. “I’ve had two, and it ain’t iced tea.”
“I think we should ask Irene to dinner,” Holly said. “To repay her kindness in inviting us.”
“Whatever you say,” Stone replied. “Do you hope to learn more from her?”
“I think this Robertson guy could be Teddy. Or maybe, Pemberton or Weatherby.”
“Who?”
“Robertson owns the Cessna 140; Weatherby and Pemberton are the Englishmen who bought the cottage that used to be Irene’s guesthouse and the one next door to that.”
“And why do you think one of them is Teddy?”
“Because Pemberton and Weatherby have the paper trail-passport, driver’s license, credit reports, et cetera that any innocent citizen would have.”
“And that causes you to suspect them of multiple murders, not to mention making a fool of the FBI, the CIA and everybody else who was after him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Robertson doesn’t have a paper trail, and Teddy would never use an identity that couldn’t be verified. He would look upon that as unprofessional.”
“What profession are we talking about?”
“You know-master criminal and all that.”
“I didn’t know master criminal was a profession. That kind of waters down the pool of professionals, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, stop it, Stone, you know what I mean.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“How many expatriate Brits do you suppose live on this island?”
“I don’t know; hundreds, maybe a few thousand.”
“And how many of them do you think might have perfectly ordinary paper trails floating in their wakes?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“All right, for the sake of argument, let’s say that ninety-five percent of them are who they say they are, and an investigation would back them up, and the other five percent are fleeing criminals with false passports.”
“What’s your point?”
“That would mean that the ninety-five percent-hundreds, perhaps thousands-would satisfy your criteria for thinking that they are Teddy Fay. Do you see where I’m going here?”
“The ninety-five percent don’t live next door to Irene Foster.”
“All right, I’ll give you that. Now you’ve isolated one criterion that doesn’t apply to the great mass. But it’s not an incriminating criterion, and it hardly resonates like, say, a DNA match.”
“Stone, Teddy through maybe years of careful preparation has ensured that we are never going to get a match of anything-DNA, fingerprint, photo, anything-because he has erased all those things from every computer that might harbor them.”
“Well, then, we’re left with kidnapping the three of them, locking them up somewhere and torturing them until one of them admits he’s Teddy-the George W. Bush method of extracting admissions from people we hate. And, of course, under torture, anybody will admit to anything, so all three of them might admit to being Teddy.”
“No, no, we’re going to have to rely on deduction to make the identification.”
“Ah, detective work!” Dino interjected.
“Well, yes.”
“Well, a tiny problem: we have no evidence to work with to deduce that any of the three of them is Teddy. You see the difficulty?” Dino spread his hands and looked sorrowful.
“Let’s get some evidence, then.”
Stone sighed. “We could break into their houses and ransack them, in the hope that if one of them is Teddy, he’s stupid enough to leave his old birth certificate or passport lying around.”
“Stone…”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that Teddy has made it virtually impossible for us ever to identify him by any means known to criminal investigation.”
“How about eyewitnesses?” Genevieve interjected.
“Eyewitness to what?” Holly asked.
“To Teddy. He worked at the CIA all those years; there must be dozens, maybe hundreds of people who knew him, who could identify him if they saw him. Photograph all three of them and send the pictures to Lance. Let him circulate them and see if he gets a bite.”
Dino looked at his girlfriend with admiration. “I think we might have a spot for you at the NYPD,” he said.
Holly looked at her watch. “I have to call in,�
�� she said.
29
Holly first called Bill Pepper.
“I’m here.”
“Me too.”
“Scramble.”
“Scrambled.”
Pepper came back with his voice-from-a-barrel. “What’s up?”
“When a foreigner applies to buy a house in St. Marks, does he have to attach a photograph to his application?”
“Yes, a passport photograph.”
“Can you hack into the government computers and get me the photographs of Robertson, Pemberton and Weatherby?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“How long will it take?”
“A few minutes.”
“Can you e-mail them to me in, say, an hour?”
“Probably. Is this about Teddy Fay?”
“The idea is, I’ll look at them, and if one of them could conceivably be Teddy, I’ll send them to Lance, and he can show them to Teddy’s former coworkers for ID.”
“Makes sense to me.”
She gave him her e-mail address. “I’ll be standing by.”
“Later.” He broke the connection.
Holly called Lance.
“Lance Cabot.”
She explained about the photographs she was going to send.
“Excellent,” Lance replied. “How soon?”
“Maybe an hour or so; check your e-mail.”
“Good. Anything else?”
“Yes; I think we’re about done here.”
“You’re giving up?”
“Our stay is nearing its end, and we have not been able to identify Teddy. Our best shot is that he’s Robertson, Pemberton or Weatherby; if we can’t get an ID from these photos, then we have nowhere else to go. Our well is dry.”
“That’s discouraging.”
“Well, we’re discouraged. I want to have one more dinner with Irene Foster, though. Maybe we’ll glean something from her.”
“And her boyfriend? Pitts?”
“I think he may have already sailed for home.”
“You’re satisfied that he’s not Teddy?”
“He isn’t, unless Teddy knows how to grow hair on a bald scalp. Pitts doesn’t wear a toupee.”
“All right, call tomorrow. I’ll send the jet for you at, say, noon the day after.”
“Good.” She hung up and called Irene.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Irene, it’s Ginny; how are you?”
“Very well, thanks; are you still on the island?”
“We leave on Saturday. I was hoping that you could join us for dinner tonight at the inn.”
“Love to; is Harry invited, as well?”
“Is he still here?”
“He seems to like the island.”
“Of course; bring him along. Seven-thirty?”
“That’s grand; we’ll look forward to it.”
Holly hung up, went into the house, got her laptop and took it out to the patio, where lunch was just being served.
“What’s with the computer?” Stone asked.
Holly glanced at the butler, who finished serving and went back inside. “Pepper is going to e-mail me the photographs of Robertson, Pemberton and Weatherby that were attached to their applications to buy a house here, and then I’m going to take Genevieve’s brilliant suggestion and e-mail them to Lance, if I think one of them might be Teddy.”
“Good.”
“By the way, the jet is picking us up at noon the day after tomorrow.”
“Regardless of what we learn?”
“These photos are our last gasp; if none of them is Teddy, we’re out of here. If one of them is Teddy, we’re out of here, too. Dealing with him is somebody else’s job.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Me too,” Dino said. “The sight of that shark off our beach nixed the place for me. I’m not going back in the water past knee-deep.”
“Oh, Dino,” Genevieve said, “the shark was just doing what sharks do. We’ve only seen him once, and he probably won’t be back.”
“I’m not going in the same ocean with him,” Dino said, digging into his seafood salad. He held up a forkful. “I’m happy to eat his lunch, but I’m not going to be his lunch.”
They ate in a leisurely fashion, and after an hour had passed, Holly checked her e-mail.
There was an e-mail from Ham: “Are you coming by here on your way back to D.C.?”
“I’ll see if we can stop by and pick up Daisy on the way back,” she responded, “but I won’t be able to stay. Give my love to Ginny.” She signed it and sent the mail.
“Nothing from Pepper?” Stone asked.
“Nope.”
“How long was it supposed to take?”
“He said a few minutes to hack into the government computer, and he’d have them to me in an hour.”
Stone checked his watch. “It’s been an hour and a half.”
“Maybe he got busy at work.”
Another hour passed, then two hours, and still nothing had arrived from Pepper. Late in the afternoon, Holly called Lance.
“Lance Cabot.”
“It’s your humble servant; something’s wrong.”
“What?”
“Pepper was supposed to e-mail me the photos within an hour after we talked. It’s been five hours, and I’ve heard nothing.”
“I suppose he could have become occupied with something else at work, but still, that doesn’t sound right.”
“I’m only supposed to call him at midday on the satphone, so I can’t communicate.”
“Hang on, let me think.”
“Okay.” Holly waited through three or four minutes of silence.
Lance came back on. “Bill has probably already left the office for the day. And I tried his home; no answer.”
“But if he didn’t have the photos, he could have e-mailed me to let me know.”
“I know, and it doesn’t sound right. I’ve had a look at Bill’s file, and he has a sister in Miami named Doris Pepper. She’s forty-six years old, five-six, a hundred and forty pounds, blonde and pretty. She teaches sixth grade at a public school in Miami. Tomorrow morning, after nine, call Bill’s office, but not on the satphone.” He gave her the number. “When he comes on the line tell him you’re a friend of his sister, and you promised her you’d call him for her. She’s fine, et cetera, et cetera.”
“And what is my purpose for the call?”
“To find out if he’s okay. Don’t talk long, and before you hang up, tell him his sister said to drop her an e-mail sometime. I want to know exactly what his response is. Call me on the satphone as soon as you hang up.”
“Okay. Do you think something is wrong?”
“I always think something is wrong when an agent doesn’t do what he says he’ll do.” Lance hung up.
30
Holly and her party went directly to their table at the inn, but Irene was late and without Harry.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, “and Harry’s even later. He had some business he had to take care of at the marina.” She sat down and accepted a rum punch from the pitcher on the table.
“So Harry’s sticking around for a while?” Stone asked.
She smiled. “I must admit, I’m getting used to having him here. He’s good around the house, and a lot of things I was letting go are getting taken care of.”
“Good around the house,” Genevieve said, leering. “I’ll bet he is.”
“Well, that, too,” Irene admitted. “It’s been so long since I lived with a man, I’d forgotten what it was like.”
Holly felt the same way, but she didn’t say so. “What are your long-term plans, Irene? Are you going to make this your permanent home?”
“I guess it already is,” she replied, sipping her drink. “I’ve settled in very well, which wasn’t the case in St. Barts. I’m too old to start learning a language, and everybody here speaks English, and the government is stable-no bands of rebels in the hills. I think St. Marks may be heaven for me.”
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“Does Harry feel the same way?”
“Well, he hasn’t been here long enough for that to happen, but he likes it, and he’s comfortable here. He may also get on his boat and sail away; we’ll see how it goes.”
“That’s a good attitude when dealing with men,” Genevieve said. “Just see how it goes.” She gave Dino a sidelong glance.
“On the other hand,” Dino said, “that attitude doesn’t work so well with women.”
“Why not?” Holly asked.
“Well, you go along for a while, seeing how it goes, and you think you’ve got it all figured out, then they change everything.”
Stone spoke up. “Well, if we’re going to listen to Dino’s theories about women, this is going to be a very long and boring evening.”
“Oh, here’s Harry,” Irene said, waving him over.
Harry bustled in, greeted everybody, took a seat and poured himself a glass of rum punch. A waiter appeared with a fresh pitcher and took the nearly empty one away. “Man, that’s good!” he enthused, taking a long draft of his drink.
“Did you get your work done at the marina?” Irene asked.
“Yep, the boat is in the best shape of its life.”
“You sticking around for a while?” Stone asked.
“Maybe. I’ve done Virginia, and Ft. Lauderdale seemed too crowded for me, though if I stay longer that would be the best place to sell the boat.” He smiled at Irene. “And nobody in either place cooks like Irene.” He slapped his belly. “I’ve been putting on weight.”
“I’m going to put you on a diet,” Irene said.
Stone felt his cell phone vibrate and stood up. “Excuse me; phone call.” He walked toward the bar. “Hello?”
“It’s Lance.”
“Hi, what’s up?”
“I tried to call Ginny, but she didn’t answer on either the satphone or her cell phone; is she all right?”
“Yes, of course; we’re at dinner at the inn with Irene Foster and her friend Harry. Why wouldn’t she be okay?”
“I’ve been unable to locate Bill Pepper or his wife, and I’m worried. I just wanted to be sure Ginny was all right.”
“Has this ever happened before?”
“Standard operating procedure is for Pepper to always be reachable within an hour of the initial contact.”