Iron Orchid

“Thank you,” Holly said, and she meant it. The words made her feel good inside, but she knew that made her vulnerable to what Dan was trying to do.

“Now, why don’t you tell me about your questionable answers on your polygraph,” he said, “and I’ll do whatever I can to fix this.”

“Dan,” Holly said, “I’d like to help, but I just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I gave truthful answers to all the questions I was asked. Now, it might help if you told me what you think I lied about.”

“First of all, Holly, I believe you. I don’t think you lied. You seem like an honest person to me. However, Bob is very good at what he does, and he is convinced that you lied.”

“Well, why don’t you get him in here with his record, and let’s go over the answer he’s concerned about.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not how we do things here.”

“Well, Dan, I have to tell you that I don’t think very much of how you do things here. Not so far, anyway.”

“Holly, I think we’re both trying to straighten this out, but I have to stick to procedures.”

“Is your procedure to accuse me of lying with no evidence of what you think I’m lying about?”

“Of course not. We just have to be very careful here. We don’t want this thing to rise up and bite us on the ass, or you either, a few years down the road.”

“Well, Dan, in that case, I think you should either reexamine me or launch a full-scale investigation into what you consider my lie.”

“I’m trying to avoid those alternatives,” Dan said.

“Well, you’re not trying hard enough,” Holly replied.

BEHIND THE GLASS, Lance was chuckling to himself. “Are you sure you want to go up against this woman?” he asked Bob.

“I still think she lied.”

“So, reexamine her. Do it now.”

“It doesn’t work that way. She knows what she lied about, so she’ll be expecting the question, and she may know enough about the polygraph to beat it.”

“Well, I’m certainly not going to launch an investigation based on this blip,” Lance said. He looked over his shoulder. “Bob, get back in there and tell her what she lied about. Maybe we can elicit some sort of confession, or at least, a concession that she might not have been entirely truthful.”

“Whatever you say, Lance,” Bob replied, then left the room.

BOB WALKED back in and sat down. “I’ve got the record, here,” he said, opening a file. “You were asked if you had ever stolen anything from the Army.”

“And I replied, 'yes,'” Holly said.

“Then you were asked if you had stolen anything worth more than a thousand dollars,” Bob said.

“And I replied, 'no.'”

“That’s where the problem is, Holly.”

“I don’t see the problem.”

“What did you steal?”

“A Colt.45 pistol. Well, I didn’t exactly steal it.”

“Tell us about it.”

“After shooting on the range one day, I found a.45 that somebody had left on the bench. Rather than turn it over to the range master and get somebody in trouble, I took it with me, pla

“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 co

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 sca

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 di

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 discovered his visit to the cottage north of Ke

If they, indeed, traced him to New York, they would have to deal with two possibilities: one, that he might have left the city by any number of means for any number of destinations; two, that he had chosen to disappear among the eight million inhabitants of the city. In the first case, they were bound to find at least dozens of men traveling alone to various destinations; in the second, they would start from what they knew about him, that he was a simple man who had always lived simply. It was for that reason that he had chosen an expensive apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Besides, it was fun not to live simply anymore. He doubted if they had been able to determine the extent of his financial resources, so it was unlikely that they would suspect him of high living.