“Why do you think he didn’t get on?” Lance asked.
“I think he may have seen me,” Holly replied. “I didn’t make eye contact with him, but if he’s Teddy Fay, he knows me from the opera. Maybe he saw me on the train and balked.”
“That makes sense,” Kerry said. “God knows the guy has good instincts. If he saw someone on the train whom he knew to be CIA or FBI, that would be enough to keep him off it.”
“Maybe he even guessed what we were doing,” Lance said. “Does he know where you live, Holly?”
“The first time I saw him was when I was coming out of my building,” Holly said.
“Well, if he saw you arriving at the Sixty-third Street station on the train, and he knows that’s the one nearest your building, and you didn’t get on there or get off, maybe he put it together.”
“I guess I shouldn’t have gotten onto the trains myself,” Holly admitted. “It was such shitty duty that I thought I ought to share it with the others.”
“The first thing you have to get used to when you’re supervising people, Holly, is handing people shitty assignments without pity,” Lance said. “From now on, I don’t want you on any surveillance detail of any of the potential victims we’re watching. I don’t want Teddy to spot you in a car or on a street, except where you live.”
“All right,” Holly said. “But what can I do around here?”
“Consider yourself reassigned as my assistant. Ty, we’ll find you another partner.”
Ty nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“The only time I want you to be seen by Teddy is in your own neighborhood-at your building, walking Daisy in the park, shopping, that sort of thing. Clear?”
“Yes, Lance.”
“We should have Holly followed at those times,” Kerry said.
“Right,” Lance agreed. “I want a team of four on Holly every time she leaves her apartment building. I want them well back from her, constantly changing places, and I want the team changed twice a day. Holly, I want you to carry your cell phone with an earpiece in your head at all times. Program the team number into it so that you can call them if you spot your man. I don’t want you to be seen using the cell phone, and don’t move your lips when you talk. This guy spooks easily, and we don’t want to cause him the slightest anxiety.”
“Okay,” Holly said.
Kerry spoke up. “And if you literally run into him, be nice, let him pet Daisy, but don’t attempt to engage him in more than perfunctory conversation; don’t be interested in him, got it?”
“Got it,” Holly said.
“On the other hand,” Lance said, “if he appears to have an interest in you, don’t put him off. Behave the way you did at the opera; just don’t go overboard or appear too curious about him. Is he someone who, in the normal course of your life, you might find attractive?”
“No, not really, though I liked him at the opera. I wouldn’t want to fuck him, if that’s what you mean.”
Lance looked chastened. “I wasn’t suggesting that you should. What I meant was, if a mutual attraction seemed natural, you might exploit that to your advantage, but if not, don’t fake it.”
“I understand.”
“Can I be on the team?” Ty asked.
“No,” Kerry said. “If he saw Holly on the train, he might have seen you, too, and your presence would spook him immediately. We have this little advantage that he’s seen Holly on the street before, so it won’t alarm him to see her on the street again.”
“Will you bust him immediately, if I see him?” Holly asked.
“No. We’ll have the team get in touch with Kerry or me for that decision. They’ll tail him from a distance and report it if he goes into a building. I want to know where he lives and where he does his work. He has to have some sort of workshop somewhere, either in his home or nearby, and the equipment, weapons, disguises, etcetera, that we might find there would be very useful in prosecuting him. This guy might have an identity so tight that we might have trouble breaking it in court. We’re going to need all the ammunition we can get. Remember, we don’t have photographs, fingerprints or DNA to work with.”
“Right,” Holly said. “How do you want me to proceed?”
“Do you bring Daisy to work with you every day?”
“No, just sometimes.”
“On the occasions when you don’t, you go home to walk her?”
“Yes, I go home at lunchtime. She only needs walking once after I go to work, then when I come home again.”
“Start having lunch at home and walking Daisy then. When you’re off duty, take her with you when you leave the house. We want it to be easy for Teddy to spot you.”
“All right.” Holly groped for words.
“What?”
“What about my… personal life?”
Lance looked sympathetic. “If there are times when you don’t want a team on you, let me know, and I’ll pull them. If you should run into Teddy then, you can always call it in.”
“Thank you, Lance.” Not that she had a personal life, but she was still thinking about Stone Barrington.
Lance looked at his watch. “Give me fifteen minutes to get a team together, then go home to lunch.”
FORTY-THREE
TWO DAYS AFTER the incident in the subway, Teddy saw Holly Barker again. She was leaving her building and, apparently, headed for the park, since she had her dog with her.
Since seeing her on the train, Teddy had gone back and read her file from the Agency again, and this time he had Googled her and read the newspaper accounts of the big cases she had been involved in when she had been chief of police in Orchid Beach, Florida. It made amazing reading, since it concerned a small-town police officer, and Teddy was intrigued. He thought he would like to get to know her personally, but the business on the train bothered him.
He followed Holly at a distance of more than a block, then, as she entered the park at 64th Street, he turned down Fifth Avenue and simply walked away. He hadn’t spotted a tail, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He got on the Fifth Avenue bus and watched to see if anyone got on behind him, or if a car were following the bus. Seeing nothing, he got off in the Fifties, walked over to Madison and took the bus back uptown, constantly watching for a tail.
As he got off the bus at 63rd Street, he saw Holly cross the street a block ahead, apparently headed back to her apartment building. He turned down 63rd, walked to Park and crossed the street, looking back in time to see her enter her building. He glanced at his watch. Lunch time. She must have come home from her office just to walk the dog. He loitered around the corner long enough to watch her leave the building, then he walked to Lexington, took a cab and got out a block from the CIA building. Ten minutes later Holly appeared on foot and walked into the building.
Once again checking for tails, Teddy walked to Third Avenue, took the bus uptown, and, after walking around the block a couple of times, went into the building that housed his workshop.
He hung up his coat and sat down at the computer, logged on to the Agency mainframe and ran a non-Agency search on her name. This time a new reference appeared: a website for some sort of financial management firm, Morgan amp; Bailey. Holly was listed on the site as a senior vice president. Obviously, the firm was an Agency front, and they had gone to the trouble to create the website to lend verisimilitude to the legend.
It occurred to him that Holly was living above her means, if her Agency salary was all she had. Perhaps she was taking a salary from Morgan amp; Bailey, to help her establish credentials in the city, or perhaps the firm was paying for the apartment.
He went back to the news clippings and read the story reporting the death of her fiance, who was an innocent bystander at a bank robbery and got in the way. He ran a search on the fiance, Jackson Oxenhandler, and discovered that he had been a prosperous lawyer in Orchid Beach. Maybe she had inherited his estate. That would make her, perhaps, prosperous enough to afford an apartment on Park Avenue.