Carnal Curiosity (12 page)

24

F
ive o’clock was approaching, and Stone still hadn’t heard from Ann. Joan buzzed. “Mike Freeman on one.”

He pressed the button. “Hi, Mike.”

“Good afternoon, Stone.”

“You sound like you’re on a satphone.”

“That I am—somewhere over Kansas, from the appearance of the landscape out the window.”

“Watch out for tornadoes.”

“Will do. I’m having dinner with your friend Teddy Fay, and I’ll be giving him your message.”

“Thank you, Mike. Tell him I wish I could present it myself.”

“I’ll do that. Everything else all right?”

“Well, let’s see, I was at a dinner party on Saturday night when four men with shotguns arrived and took all the available jewelry.”

“How interesting for you. Has the crime been solved?”

“Dino and I think Don Dugan is the mastermind. His company installed the security system.”

“Interesting. He didn’t strike me as the criminal type.”

“He did me. Dino, too.”

“Well, you see, I’ve never been a policeman. I don’t have your finely tuned perceptions where criminals are concerned.”

“You need a year on the NYPD. Maybe Dino can get you a detective’s badge.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the qualifications. Gotta run.”

“Take care, and thanks again for the delivery.”

—

M
ike Freeman walked into the garden restaurant at The Arrington, in Bel-Air, and looked around at the tables. He spotted Billy Burnett, aka Teddy Fay, entering from the other side, and they met in the center, where the headwaiter seated them. There was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and a special vase of flowers on the table. The two men shook hands and sat down, and a waiter appeared and opened the champagne bottle.

“Would you like a glass, Billy? This is an occasion for celebration.”

The waiter poured the wine, then disappeared. Mike picked up his glass. Billy didn’t.

“I’m sorry, Mike, I would be drinking this under false pretenses.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve thought about your very kind and generous offer, and I’ve decided not to accept.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Billy.”

“May I explain?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve been working for Peter Barrington and Ben Bacchetti at Centurion Studios for some months. So has Betsy, for that matter. At first I couldn’t imagine what I’d be doing there, except providing some security that I thought was no longer necessary, but as it’s turned out, I’m loving being in and around the film business, and so is Betsy. I started just doing odd jobs for them, but I’ve taken on more and more responsibility to the point where I’m working as an associate producer, and the boys have intimated that I might be producing my own films at some time in the near future. Betsy has taken over their travel and public relations department, and she’s very good at it.”

“Well, I’m happy for you both, Billy,” Mike said, “though I’m sorry you won’t be joining Strategic Services.”

“Thank you, Mike.”

“But there’s another cause for celebration.” Mike took an envelope from his pocket and held on to it for a moment. “This is a gift from Stone Barrington. He is very grateful to you for protecting Peter and for your friendship.” Mike handed over the envelope, but Billy didn’t open it.

“That’s very kind of him, Mike, but entirely unnecessary. Accepting money for what I did would lessen the good feeling I got from doing it.”

“It’s not money, Billy. Please open the envelope.”

Billy turned it over and looked at it, then he saw the rear flap.
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
was printed on it. He
opened the envelope and unfolded the certificate, signed by the president. Unexpectedly for both of them, Billy’s eyes welled with tears. “How is this possible?” he finally managed to ask.

“It’s possible because Stone Barrington is a very good friend of Will and Kate Lee,” Mike said.

“I feel very strange,” Billy said.

“Perhaps a little celebratory champagne will settle you.” He raised his glass again. “The future,” he said.

Billy raised his glass and sipped. “Suddenly, I feel that I have one. For a long time now, I’ve expected the life I’m leading to come to a sudden end at any moment.”

“The pardon brings with it the deletion of every mention of your name from every law enforcement database. You’re now a free man in every sense of the word. You can go back to calling yourself Teddy Fay, if you wish.”

Billy smiled. “I don’t think that name has been deleted from
every
database,” he said.

“There won’t be any public announcement,” Mike said. “The president issued the pardon under seal, because of your past association with the CIA. You can go right on being Billy Burnett, if you like, but don’t flash that pardon to anyone, except in extreme circumstances.”

“Well, I’ve devoted considerable time to building my identity,” Billy said. “I’ve got a valid birth certificate, a genuine passport and driver’s license and Social Security number, credit cards, bank accounts, the works. It would be a great deal of trouble to change my name again, so I think I’ll just stick with William James Burnett. I’ve come to rather like the guy.”

They drank more champagne, then had a good lunch.

—

T
hat evening, Billy took Betsy to dinner at Michael’s, in Santa Monica, their favorite restaurant, and broke the news to her.

Betsy blinked. “You mean I won’t be Mrs. Burnett anymore? I’ll be Mrs. Fay?”

“No, we’re going to stick with Mr. and Mrs. Burnett,” Billy said. “Teddy Fay is still an infamous name in some quarters, even though the pardon removes it from all the federal and state law enforcement databases. I think we’ll let Mr. Fay rest in peace.”

“I’m so happy for you, Billy,” Betsy said. They finished their dinner, then went back to the apartment in Peter Barrington’s hangar at Santa Monica Airport.

As they crawled into bed, Billy said, “How would you like to live in a real house? We can go shopping for one tomorrow.”

“Oh, Billy,” she said, “in my whole life I’ve never lived in anything but furnished rooms, public housing, motels, and apartments. I would just love living in my own house.”

“Consider it done,” Billy said.

25

A
t mid-morning the following day, at the building near Washington, D.C., called Black Rock, which housed the National Security Agency, Deputy Director Scott Hipp sat, with a stack of files on his desk, doing personnel reviews. There was a soft knock at his open door, and he looked up to see Kathy Dorr, a young woman who was one of his brighter minions, standing there.

“Got just a moment, sir?”

“Sure, Kathy, come in and take a seat.”

She sat down and came directly to the point. “In conducting the daily review of the past twenty-four hours of our computer communications data scan, something interesting popped up.” Dorr handed the sheet of paper in her hand to Hipp.

Hipp looked at it. “Teddy Fay? That rings a bell, doesn’t it?”

“Yessir. Fay is a former long-term CIA employee who went rogue in a rather spectacular way some years back. Most of the story was suppressed, but he’s suspected, without much in
the way of actual evidence, of a couple of high-level murders, namely a speaker of the House and a Supreme Court justice, and he’s been a fugitive in all the years since.”

“As I recall, the evidence was mostly just speculation,” Hipp said.

“Nevertheless, sir, he’s been on a CIA watch list ever since.”

“Where did this data capture come from?”

“From a satphone call, probably from a corporate jet, somewhere in the Midwest. Present capabilities don’t make a tighter identification possible, but the call was made to the office of a New York City attorney named Stone Barrington.”

“Ah,” Hipp said. “Stone Barrington of the Arrington hotel incident of some time back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“As I recall, we picked up the name The Arrington on a scan much like this one, and that led to a successful resolution of a very serious situation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is the protocol for handling the interception of a name on the CIA watch list?” He wanted to see if she knew.

“Well, it would range—depending on the urgency—from an e-mail from you to the deputy director for operations, or someone on his staff, up to a director-to-director phone call.”

“Well, let’s not involve the directors on this one,” Hipp said. “I’ll deal with it myself. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, Kathy.”

“No further action required on my part?” Dorr asked.

“Nope. This one is probably less than it seems. Let’s not get the Agency’s bowels in an uproar.”

“As you wish, sir.” Dorr got up and left.

Hipp read the brief report again. Sometimes of a mischievous bent, he thought of sending it directly to the director of Central Intelligence, Lance Cabot, who would then distribute it, causing excitement or, perhaps, consternation up and down the Agency’s chain of command. He sighed. No, he didn’t want to get involved in that. Still, he had a bureaucratic responsibility to bring the matter to the attention of the CIA at a sufficiently high level that would allow him to wash his hands of it.

Hipp went to his Agency contacts list on his computer and found just the right person to hand it off to. He typed a short note and clicked on the
SEND
button. There, he thought; no longer my problem.

At an anonymous building on the Upper East Side of New York, Assistant Director Holly Barker, the CIA’s New York station chief, sat at her desk listening, as attentively as she could manage, to a man who was trying to convince her that he deserved immediate promotion to a higher GS level. A soft ping sounded and she flicked her eyes to her computer monitor screen just long enough to see the words “Teddy Fay” appear in a box, then slowly fade away.

“Here’s how it goes,” she said, cutting off the man, while he paused to take a rare breath. “A quarterly review of all personnel is conducted by supervisory staff, who make recommendations to me based on rather rigid criteria determined by the Civil Service. If you wish your name to float to the top of that process, begin by impressing your immediate supervisor sufficiently to affect his opinion of your commitment, experience, and skills. Coming to me is a blatant violation of the chain of command. Is that perfectly clear?”

The man reddened. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ve been at this long enough to know that,” she said. “You shouldn’t inject our personal relationship into the process. Now go do good work.” God, she thought, she had worked with the guy for a while, but it wasn’t as though they were sleeping together.

The man made his escape, and Holly turned to her computer and opened her e-mail account. There it was: and the subject was
Teddy Fay
. She hesitated: opening this e-mail might very well be opening a large and unattractive can of worms. After a protracted period of unsuccessfully hunting Teddy, he and Kate Lee had made a kind of truce, to which Holly was a party. Simply put: if Teddy would permanently vanish and stay vanished, they would stop looking for him. With the greatest reluctance, she opened the e-mail.

To: Holly Barker
Assistant Director of Central Intelligence

1. A computer scan this day of the previous day’s volume of cellular and satellite traffic produced the name “Teddy Fay” in a satphone conversation between an unidentified aircraft somewhere in the United States and an attorney named Stone Barrington, in New York, New York.
   
2. Since the name “Teddy Fay” appears on a CIA watch list, interagency protocol requires that this office notify an official of your Agency’s operations directorate of the existence of this conversation.
   
3. This transmission meets that requirement.
   
4. Any further action, such as extracting the relevant conversation, would require the involvement of the FBI, who would then be required to seek a federal search warrant before reviewing the contents of the phone call.
   
5. Please acknowledge this transmission.
   

Scott Hipp
Deputy Director

National Security Agency

“Shit!” Holly said aloud and with feeling. She wished she had simply deleted the e-mail, but she had not. She had received the handoff of a hot potato, and if she wasn’t careful, she could get her fingers burned. She made a mental note: next Christmas, send Scott Hipp a festively gift-wrapped cyanide capsule.

She picked up her phone and dialed a number.

“Stone Barrington.”

“Are you free for lunch today?”

“I believe I am,” he said. “Who’s buying?”

“You are.”

“In that case, the Four Seasons at twelve-thirty.”

“Done.” She hung up. This thing better not be something, she thought.

26

S
tone directed Joan, when making the reservation, to request a corner table. CIA people did not converse in a relaxed manner in restaurants when civilians were seated on all sides of them.

He found Holly waiting at the top of the stairs by the bar. She was unusually prompt, and this made him suspicious. Instead of offering a cheek for a peck, she offered a hand. Uh-oh.

The headwaiter seated them at a corner table. “You’re looking well,” Stone said, offering a small smile.

“Mmmmf,” Holly replied.

“Well, sweetheart, what deep trouble are you in today?”

“I’m in no trouble at all,” she replied.

“Well, let’s review: you were prompt and on time, and you declined a kiss in favor of a handshake. These are not characteristics of the hotly sexual and wildly wanton woman I know so well. What’s up?”

She started to speak, but the waiter arrived to take their drink order. He raised his eyebrows in her direction.