Carnal Curiosity - Stuart Woods Page 0,31
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
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