“I don’t know.”

“You knew before. What’s changed?”

“I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling about this.”

“You want to call off Lance Cabot and his people?”

“It might be the best thing.”

“Look at it this way: you’re testifying before a committee of Congress: you can testify, truthfully, that you did everything you could to catch him and failed. That’s not a great thing, but it’s not terrible, either.”

“It’s not terrible, if I testify to that after the election.”

Will ignored that remark. “But if you’re asked if you gave an order to stop pursuing him, and you answer truthfully, then we’re both in what I believe the most eminent political scientists refer to as deep shit.”

“Not if I answer that I became convinced, after a thorough search, that Teddy is dead.”

“If you thought he was dead, why were you conducting yet another search? That’s what Congress would ask.”

“You mean, now that we’ve started, we’re stuck with it?”

“I think we are, unless he turns up verifiably deceased.” He spat out a piece of green pepper. “You missed one. Why don’t you instruct your Technical Services Department to put together a device that detects green peppers on your pizza before you bite into them?”

Kate took a big bite of pizza to keep from talking, and they both ate quietly for a while.

“What happened today to make you feel bad about this?” Will asked.

“Teddy is creating internal problems for us. I’ve about decided to appoint Lance Cabot as DDO, but he’s had to go around Hugh English to deal with the Teddy thing, and Hugh doesn’t like being gone around.”

“Has he found out about it?”

“No, but Lance is using one of Hugh’s people on St. Marks, and it could get back to him.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and appoint Lance, retire Hugh English and get him out of there?”

“Because people like Hugh English don’t just dematerialize when they retire. If they find out they were unknowingly slighted when they were still at work, they end up giving television interviews and testifying to Congress about what a snake pit the Agency is and what a bitch I am, and it doesn’t do anybody any good.”

“Welcome to Washington,” Will said. “Look, all we can do with this or with anything else is to do what we think is right and let the chips fall where they may.”

She smiled, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s what I love about you,” she said. “Your childlike belief that if you do what you think is right, everything will be okay.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m president of the United States,” he replied, taking another huge bite of pizza.

“There’s something else.”

“Oh, God, not something else,” Will muttered through his pizza.

“The Teddy thing is overlapping with a British thing.”

“How so?”

“We have a suspect for Teddy on St. Marks, but our man down there thinks he could just as easily be one of the four men who robbed a currency transfer company at Heathrow Airport a few months ago. I expect you remember that.”

“I remember getting a phone call from my very good friend the British prime minister, asking me to instruct the entire U.S. law enforcement community to help catch them, as if I could do that, and I remember telling him that I would do anything I could to help him.”

“Yes, well…”

“So what I should be doing right now is picking up the phone and calling London to report our suspicions.”

“Technically speaking, yes.”

“Technically?”

“Sort of. I mean, we’re working on a firm identification of the guy, and if he turns out to be the British robber, then you can call your limey buddy.”

“Are we talking minutes, days, weeks or longer?”

“Maybe days. If we’re lucky.”

“So now I have another slice of green pepper on my metaphorical pizza.”

“For only a short time, I hope.”

Will spat out another sliver of green. “Kate-and this is a direct order from your president-fix this.”

“The green peppers?”

“The metaphorical green peppers.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

28

Holly took a seat on the cottage patio and poured herself a glass of whatever was in the icy pitcher. She sipped it. “Mmmm, what is this?”

“Some kind of rum punch, I think,” Stone said. “Thomas sent it over.”

“It’s delicious, but it doesn’t taste alcoholic.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Dino said. “I’ve had two, and it ain’t iced tea.”

“I think we should ask Irene to dinner,” Holly said. “To repay her kindness in inviting us.”

“Whatever you say,” Stone replied. “Do you hope to learn more from her?”

“I think this Robertson guy could be Teddy. Or maybe, Pemberton or Weatherby.”

“Who?”

“Robertson owns the Cessna 140; Weatherby and Pemberton are the Englishmen who bought the cottage that used to be Irene’s guesthouse and the one next door to that.”

“And why do you think one of them is Teddy?”

“Because Pemberton and Weatherby have the paper trail-passport, driver’s license, credit reports, et cetera that any innocent citizen would have.”

“And that causes you to suspect them of multiple murders, not to mention making a fool of the FBI, the CIA and everybody else who was after him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Robertson doesn’t have a paper trail, and Teddy would never use an identity that couldn’t be verified. He would look upon that as unprofessional.”

“What profession are we talking about?”

“You know-master criminal and all that.”

“I didn’t know master criminal was a profession. That kind of waters down the pool of professionals, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, stop it, Stone, you know what I mean.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“How many expatriate Brits do you suppose live on this island?”

“I don’t know; hundreds, maybe a few thousand.”

“And how many of them do you think might have perfectly ordinary paper trails floating in their wakes?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“All right, for the sake of argument, let’s say that ninety-five percent of them are who they say they are, and an investigation would back them up, and the other five percent are fleeing criminals with false passports.”

“What’s your point?”

“That would mean that the ninety-five percent-hundreds, perhaps thousands-would satisfy your criteria for thinking that they are Teddy Fay. Do you see where I’m going here?”

“The ninety-five percent don’t live next door to Irene Foster.”

“All right, I’ll give you that. Now you’ve isolated one criterion that doesn’t apply to the great mass. But it’s not an incriminating criterion, and it hardly resonates like, say, a DNA match.”

“Stone, Teddy through maybe years of careful preparation has ensured that we are never going to get a match of anything-DNA, fingerprint, photo, anything-because he has erased all those things from every computer that might harbor them.”

“Well, then, we’re left with kidnapping the three of them, locking them up somewhere and torturing them until one of them admits he’s Teddy-the George W. Bush method of extracting admissions from people we hate. And, of course, under torture, anybody will admit to anything, so all three of them might admit to being Teddy.”

“No, no, we’re going to have to rely on deduction to make the identification.”

“Ah, detective work!” Dino interjected.

“Well, yes.”

“Well, a tiny problem: we have no evidence to work with to deduce that any of the three of them is Teddy. You see the difficulty?” Dino spread his hands and looked sorrowful.

“Let’s get some evidence, then.”

Stone sighed. “We could break into their houses and ransack them, in the hope that if one of them is Teddy, he’s stupid enough to leave his old birth certificate or passport lying around.”