Iron Orchid by Stuart Woods

master and get somebody in trouble, I took it with me, planning to find out to whom the gun was assigned. I put it in my safe, then I forgot about it. More than a year later, I found it in the back of the safe, and I took it to the range master and told him what had happened. He told me that he had already done some juggling with the books and reported the gun broken, unrepairable and destroyed. He told me to keep the gun, since it was off the records, so I did. I still have it somewhere.”
    “How much was the gun worth?” Dan asked.
    “I don’t know; that was seven or eight years ago. Right now, you could buy a new one for around nine hundred bucks on the Internet and have it shipped to a licensed dealer.”
    “The army lists the value of a new Colt .45 as a thousand and fifty dollars,” Dan said. “Although I doubt that the army owns a new one these days; they switched to the Beretta years ago.
    “So when you were asked if you had stolen anything worth more than a thousand dollars, you figured the gun was worth nine hundred?”
    “I just thought it was worth less than a thousand. After all, it wasn’t new. But during the test, I remember wondering what the value was now. I finally decided to stick with under a thousand, but maybe my momentary indecision caused the blip.”
    Bob and Dan looked at each other, and Bob shrugged. “What do you want to do?”
    “I’ll write an addendum to the examination, giving Holly’s explanation,” Dan said. “I don’t think we’ll hear any more about it.”
    “Anything else?” Holly asked.
    “No, I think that will do it,” Dan replied.
    “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said, then shook hands with both men and left the room, looking for Daisy.
    It was not until they were outside again that Holly realized she had been sweating profusely under her sweatshirt. She walked slowly to her next class, taking deep breaths to calm herself.
     
     
    TEN
    Teddy finished installing the Peg-Board on the walls of his workshop, and he began hanging his tools and outlining them with a Sharpie. Someday they would find this shop, though not before he wanted them to, and he wanted it to be just as well-ordered as the shop at his Virginia home, which the FBI had visited after he had abandoned it. Somehow, it was important to him to impress the FBI.
    When he had finished hanging the tools, he uncrated the multipurpose lathe and machine tool he had bought, set it on a thick, rubber pad, then secured it to the floor with lug bolts. Then he set up his computer station and began installing the software he had bought. He connected and tested the DSL connection he had arranged with the phone company, and then he set up a multistage connection to a server at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.
    When Teddy had been a highly placed member of the technical services department, he had had access to the mainframe, and before he retired, he had set up a system of downloading files and software to an external location, while making it appear that some other member of the agency had done so. Now he began identifying and downloading every document in the Agency in which his name was mentioned. The process took him most of the day.
    Then he began scanning the files, searching for any information that might be of use in finding out more about him. He had done this earlier in his career as an assassin, but now he wanted to eliminate anything that had surfaced about him since the Agency’s undoubted contact with the FBI to discuss him.
    It was past eight in the evening before he finished cleansing the Agency’s files of any useful reference to him. He took one more look around his new workshop, found himself pleased, then went back to his apartment and ordered a sumptuous dinner from Restaurant Daniel to be delivered to his apartment.
    As he dined, he thought about what the FBI must already know about him, and what they could find out from the trail of evidence he had left. They would certainly have