Stone Barrington 27 - Doing Hard Time

Teddy Fay is following Peter?”
    “Neither of those options is a sane possibility. If it’s Teddy, it’s just an enormous coincidence.”
    “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Dino said. “I believe in evidence.”
    “Dino, your whole life is a long series of coincidences, going back all the way to your conception.”
    “Let’s not talk about my parents’ sex life, okay?”
    “If they had conceived you on a different night, everything could have been different—you could have been a girl. Then think about the rest of your life, right up to meeting Viv. If the department had assigned her to a different precinct, you might never have met her.”
    “He has a point, Dino,” Mike said. “Stone, I know a little about Teddy Fay, but fill in the blanks for me, and from the beginning.”
    “All right: Teddy worked at the Agency for more than twenty years, nearly all of them in Technical Services. For at least fifteen of those years, he was the deputy director of the department, which meant that, when an agent was sent out on a mission, Teddy supplied all the background and equipment for him—passports, visas, clothing, weapons, secret fountain pens that do amazing things, et cetera.”
    “Well, fifteen years of that would give him all the tools he needs to disappear in America.”
    “Exactly.”
    “He killed a couple of people, didn’t he?”
    “There are rumors that he shot the speaker of the house at the time—Eft Efton. The evidence was by no means conclusive, though.”
    “How does this guy finance himself? Doing odd jobs like working at a filling station?”
    “Holly says he’s an inventor—he designed a lot of those household gadgets that you see in TV infomercials, and some of them made millions. She thinks he’s set up a way to collect the royalties into one or more offshore bank accounts.”
    “I guess that’s doable,” Mike said.
    “I actually met him once. So did Dino.”
    “Tell me about that.”
    “Holly Barker got sent down to an island in the Caribbean, St. Marks, where a retired CIA agent lived. I forget her name, but she and Teddy had reportedly had an affair. Dino and I went along to provide her some cover, and when we got there we met the woman’s boyfriend, a fairly elderly guy who may have been heavily disguised, but I couldn’t spot a toupee or anything else. Holly believed him to be Teddy, and she had been sent there to be sure that he never left the island alive. When he finally ran, she got off a couple of shots at him and may have wounded him, but we never knew. A couple of years ago, Holly told me that he called her at the Agency. There was a CIA officer who had become obsessed with finding him, and Teddy told her to call the guy off or he would kill him. Teddy proposed a kind of truce.
    “Holly called the man off, but he persisted, and he was found a few days later in his own bathtub, with his wrists slit. Holly got another call from Teddy, saying he was done, and that was it. Nobody heard from him again.”
    “There’s a novel in that story,” Mike said.
    “Well,” Stone said, “I’m not going to write it. I want nothing further to do with Teddy Fay. I consider him extremely dangerous, and I certainly don’t like the idea that he may now have made my son’s acquaintance.”
    “He’s not dangerous to anybody except people who are trying to hunt him down and kill him,” Dino pointed out.
    “Nevertheless,” Stone said.
    “I’m trying to think of ways to help,” Mike said, “but if this guy is as good as you say he is, we’re not going to find him. If he contacts Peter, though, then we might have a good chance.”
    “That’s what I don’t want to happen,” Stone said.
    “Well, you’re not in charge of that. Just tell Peter to let you know if he contacts him.”
    “I’ve already done that.”
    “One final question: Suppose he is Teddy Fay, and you find him—what then?”
    Stone stared at the ceiling.
    “I want to hear this, Stone,” Dino said. “Answer the man.”
    “All right, I don’t know.”
    “How about this,” Mike said. “If you meet him, just tell him you know who he is and you don’t want him around your son.”
    “You think that might work?”
    “He obviously doesn’t want to be identified.”
    “He might take umbrage,” Dino said. “I wouldn’t want Teddy Fay taking umbrage at me.”
    “Good point,” Mike said. “Tell you what, Stone. If this guy turns up, say nothing to him out of the ordinary—just tell