Iron Orchid by Stuart Woods Page B

that.”
    “Well, if you didn’t have the information at the time, you couldn’t give it to me, could you? Tell me why you think Fay is alive.”
    “There is incontrovertible physical evidence that the pilot’s door of the airplane was jettisoned prior to the explosion and that Fay made his way to a disused summer cottage, where he changed clothes, buried his parachute and stole a bicycle. He rode that to Kennebunk, where he ditched the bicycle and got a Greyhound bus to Boston. From there he got another bus to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he disappeared. We have so far been unable to trace his movements from there.”
    “Do you think he may still be in Atlantic City?” the president asked.
    “I think it’s more likely that he made his way to a major city— New York and Philadelphia are easily reached from there, but he could have backtracked and gone anywhere.”
    “I suppose I’ll have to make an announcement to the press,” Lee said.
    “Sir, I’d rather you didn’t, if that’s possible.”
    Kate chimed in. “Bob has a good point, Mr. President. It would be better if we didn’t announce to Fay that we’re still after him, and even if you made the announcement and Bob made Fay number one on the FBI’s most-wanted list, I doubt if that would be of much help. Fay is far too slick to get spotted by an ordinary citizen from a wanted poster.”
    “I see your point,” the president said. “All right, I’ll wait until you catch him, and then I’ll say I knew all along Fay was alive.”
    “Mr. President,” Kinney said, “I have to be absolutely frank with you. It’s very unlikely that we will catch Theodore Fay, unless he commits another murder.”
    “Bob is right,” Kate said. “Fay is an extremely resourceful man, and he knows how to disappear.”
    “Well,” Lee said, “I’m not going to sit around hoping he murders somebody else. We’ll keep this knowledge among the three of us and whoever else in both your agencies needs to know.” He paused for a moment. “And I think I’d better share it with the ranking members of both parties on the senate intelligence and judiciary committees.”
    “Thank you, sir,” Kinney said, standing up.
    “And thank you, Bob, for telling me about this.”
    As he and Kate Lee walked out to their cars, she tugged at his sleeve. “How can we help, Bob?”
    “I think the only thing you can do right now is to comb the Agency’s files again for any information about Fay that might be useful to us. I’ll assign Kerry Smith to go over what you find.”
    “I’ll give the orders as soon as I’m back in my office,” Kate said.
    They shook hands and went to their respective cars. Kinney left feeling a little relieved that the president had taken the news as well as he had.
     
     
    ELEVEN
    HOLLY STOOD WITH A DOZEN other trainees in the smaller of the two gymnasiums at the Farm. An instructor with a clipboard walked into the room, counted the names on his clipboard, counted the trainees, then tossed the clipboard aside. Another sergeant, Holly figured, but this one a marine. He was fiftyish, her height, wiry and had a severe whitewall haircut. At his age, only an ex-marine would walk around with that. What was visible of his hair was black, except for a white streak over his forehead.
    “Shut up,” he said, though everyone was already quiet. “You can call me Whitey, and when I talk, you listen.”
    Holly looked up into the rafters and involuntarily sighed.
    “Am I boring you?” Whitey asked.
    Holly gazed at him but didn’t reply at once.
    “No, sergeant,” she lied.
    “I told you to call me Whitey.”
    “No, Whitey.”
    “You’re a smartass, aren’t you?”
    “Possibly.”
    He glared at her for a moment, then turned back to the group. “This is a fighting class,” he said. “It is not a self-defense class; it is a hurting class, a maiming class, a killing class. As far as the Agency is concerned, the best opponent is a disabled or dead