“Director,” Hugh English said, “I’ve reviewed every aspect of Irene’s investigation and I’ve found it to be thorough and complete. I’ll stand by it, too.”
Kate stared at English and Foster. “You are absolutely certain about your conclusions?”
“To a great deal more than a reasonable certainty,” English replied.
“Then where is Teddy Fay getting his information?” Kate asked.
“Director,” Irene said, “Fay could be compiling this information from multiple sources-half a dozen agencies have bits and pieces of what he is learning-but the only other agency that has it all is the FBI. My reluctant conclusion is that the Bureau is the source of Teddy Fay’s information, and my report so states.”
“Great,” Kate said. “Bob Kinney is going to love that.”
“You want me to put it to Kinney?” English asked.
Kate sighed. “No, Hugh, I’ll save that treat for myself.”
Irene Foster stood and handed Kate a thick document. “Director, here is my written report. There’s an eight-page summary of the work up front, detailing the steps I took; the rest is substantiation: copies of interviews and polygraph tapes.”
“Thank you, Irene,” Kate said. “That will be all, everybody.”
The group shuffled out of the conference room, and Kate walked back into her office, picked up her phone and spoke to her secretary. “Please get me Director Kinney at the FBI.”
A moment later her phone buzzed and she heard a male voice. “Kate? It’s Bob.”
“Bob,” Kate said, trying not to sound weary, “can I buy you lunch over here today?”
“What’s up, Kate?”
“Something I’d rather tell you about when you’ve got half a bottle of wine in you. I’ll even send a chopper; you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t fit very well in helicopters, Kate,” Kinney said. “If it’s bad news, I’d rather hear it right now.”
Kate sighed. “There’s good news and bad, Bob. The good news is we’ve conducted an extraordinary, in-depth internal investigation, involving thousands of employees and hundreds of polygraphs, plus an audit of everybody’s computer time, and the only conclusion we can come to is that Teddy Fay is not getting his information from the CIA.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.
“Bob?”
“I’m still here, Kate. I take it that what you’re telling me is that Fay has somebody in the Bureau who’s feeding him stuff?”
“I’m afraid that’s the best conclusion we could come to, based on the evidence. You can go ahead and blow, now.”
“Kate, I’ve just come from a meeting with all my deputy and assistant directors who’ve been investigating this matter Bureau-wide. They’ve handed me a thick report on their investigation, and to give you the short version, they have determined that Fay’s information could not possibly be coming from anyone at the Bureau or from our computers. Their best recommendation is that it’s coming from the Central Intelligence Agency.”
There was a short silence, then both of them burst out laughing.
____________________
TEDDY FAY RODE DOWN the escalator into the East 63rd Street subway station and stood on the platform with twenty other people, waiting for the next train. A minute and a half later, there was a rush of cool air and a rumble as the train squealed to a slow halt.
As the last moving car trundled past where Teddy waited, he caught a glimpse of a familiar face and figure aboard the car. The next car stopped where he stood, and the doors opened.
Teddy hesitated, and people were surging around him.
“C’mon, Mac,” a man said. “Get on or step aside.”
Teddy stepped aside. The doors closed, and the train departed the station. The person he had seen in the previous car was the CIA operative Holly Barker, and she was with a younger, neatly dressed man, who had to be her partner.
This was one coincidence too many, he thought. As he took the up escalator to the street, Teddy replayed his memory of the past few days, of his actions. He had made a mistake. He had met the scooter guy at the 23rd Street subway stop, and he had abandoned the scooter a block from that entrance. They were looking for him on the Lexington Avenue subway.
They must be desperate, he thought, to spend manpower that way. At street level he hailed a cab. He’d stay off the subway for a while.
FORTY-TWO
A WEEK PASSED, and Holly and Ty went to Lance’s office to present their report. Lance and Kerry Smith waved them to a seat.
Holly set a flat-screen monitor on Lance’s desk and placed the wireless laptop associated with it at a corner where she could easily access the keyboard.
“Here’s what we’ve done,” she said, tapping some keys. The screen filled with passport-sized photographs of men in their late middle years. “We took eight hundred and forty-one digital photographs of men on the Lexington Avenue subway between the apparent ages of fifty-five and seventy-five. We eliminated slightly more than half, because they weighed too much and their faces were too full. Then I personally went through all the remaining photographs and eliminated all the men I felt could not possibly be our guy. I know this is subjective, but I’m the only one who’s actually set eyes on the man, even if he was disguised. We finished up with two hundred and ninety-two possible Teddy Fays, and we transmitted their photographs to Langley, specifically to the Technical Services division, where they were reviewed by a couple of dozen employees who had worked with Teddy or, at least, had seen him several times a week. The result is that not one of them identified a single photograph as Teddy Fay.”
Kerry looked at the ceiling, and Lance sighed.
“I took the additional step of ordering another sketch of Teddy, which was seen and commented on by all the people who had looked at the photographs, and here is the result” She placed a sketch on Lance’s desk.
Lance and Kerry looked at the sketch for a long time.
“It’s Larry David,” Lance said, finally.
“We’ve heard about the resemblance before,” Ty said.
“It’s useless,” Kerry said. “Unless we were looking for Larry David.”
“He’s too bland,” Lance said, “too devoid of distinguishing features: no prominent nose, no beetle brows, no scars, no buck teeth.”
“What can I tell you?” Holly said. “Teddy Fay is the Sir Alec Guinness of serial murderers. He’s a nearly blank canvas upon which he can stick prosthetics and hair and become somebody else.”
“So we can’t post him on the ten-most-wanted list,” Kerry said. “We can’t call ‘America’s Most Wanted’ and nail him that way. It would never work, and we’d get thirty thousand phone calls from all over the country from people who think it’s their Uncle Harry or Larry David.”
“This is why I’m not a police officer,” Lance said glumly. “Or why I wasn’t until now. Being a spy was a lot more fun.” He turned and looked at Holly. “I don’t want you to feel badly about this,” he said. “It was a good idea, and it was worth the manpower; it just didn’t pan out; we weren’t lucky enough.”
“Any more ideas?” Kerry asked hopefully.
Holly looked at her feet. “Well…”
“What?” Lance asked. “Say it.”
“There was this one thing that happened in the subway, at the Sixty-third Street Station.”
“What?” Kerry demanded.
“As the train pulled into the station, I caught a glimpse of a man I’ve seen in my neighborhood. I don’t know his name, but I’ve sort of bumped into him a couple of times, and he fits the description. What makes me think of him is that he was standing on the platform when the car I was on passed, but he didn’t get on the train. I looked through all the other cars for him, but he wasn’t on the train.”