The Triangle Conspiracy

That’s Sean, Faith thought bitterly. He might pass out dead drunk, but he’ll be damn sure he doesn’t spill anything or knock anything over. Wouldn’t want to make a mess, after all.

“Hey!” she called, kicking at the edge of the couch.

Sean stirred slightly, moved an arm, stayed asleep.

“Wake up!”

He didn’t move.

“Shit,” Faith muttered.

She slapped his leg. He rolled over, away from the edge of the couch.

Sean was wearing heavy-soled hiking boots. Faith grabbed one, unlaced it, and pulled it from his foot. She started hitting him lightly with it, working up his body.

Sean finally started moving. “Hey,” he said thickly.

“Wake up! Wake up before I get to your head!”

She hit his rib cage with the boot and he rolled over defensively, finally coming up in a half-sitting position.

“What the hell, Faith,” he said. “Let a guy get a nap.” He squinted; then his hands went to his temples.

“Some nap. I specifically told you not to stop anywhere, not to get a drink. I wanted you to come straight here.”

“What…well, shit, Faith.” Sean pressed his hands tightly to his head. “I…shit, I can’t think.”

“Now that’s a surprise.” She flung the boot at him. He put up his hands in a halfhearted effort to deflect it. “Ow! What’s the matter with you?”

“I told you to come straight here!”

Sean’s eyes seemed to clear. “Well, you know what, baby girl, I don’t take orders from you. You’re getting just a little bossy for my taste.”

“Can you possibly be that stupid, or that drunk, or both?” Faith kicked the air in front of her. “You’re hooked up with an extremist group, you’ve been screwing around with a senator’s daughter, and you’ve dragged Department Thirty and me into it. Right now you’d better damn well take orders from me.”

“Can’t I just sleep for a little while? I’ve been through a lot of shit the last week. I bought a bottle just to-”

“Don’t even say it, because I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care what today’s excuse is. Go in the bathroom, wash your face, do whatever you have to do so you can pay attention to me. We have a bit of a problem.”

Sean focused on her with great effort. “Problem? Is Daryn all right?”

“She’s fine for the moment.”

“What do you mean, ‘for the moment’?”

“Dammit, you sober up and then we’ll talk.”

Faith stalked down the hall to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her. In a strange mimicry of Sean, her own hands were shaking, but from rage instead of alcohol. She remembered something Cara Dunaway had told her, about an alcoholic’s only three choices: Get sobered up, get locked up, or get covered up. Sobriety, jail, or death.

Her brother had faced a real potential of the second, with all of this mess. She worried about how dangerously close he might be skating to the third.

She stomped about the room like an enraged lioness, losing track of time. A knock sounded at her bedroom door.

“Faith, I’m here,” Sean said. “Let’s talk. What’s going on?”

She opened the door. Water dripped off his face and he’d smoothed out some of the wrinkles in his shirt. “Can you pay attention?” Faith snapped.

“I can always pay attention,” Sean shot back. “Whether I’m shit-faced or not, I can comprehend what someone says to me.”

Faith shook her head. “I can’t believe you.”

“You have something to say? Something about Daryn?”

They walked down the hall to the living room. “Six people died at Chase, Sean, including a toddler. Nearly thirty were hurt.”

Faith lowered herself onto the couch. It was still warm from where Sean had lain. She pounded an arm-rest. “What the hell are you trying to pull? Be straight with me, Sean. No bullshit, I just want to know and I want to know right now.”

“Trying to…nothing. Christ, Faith, the guy told us he felt the Coalition had to get people’s attention, that speeches and demonstrations wouldn’t do it alone. Ask Daryn. Ask any of the Coalition people. Let’s find them-they all heard it. Thirteen people were standing there listening when he said that.”

“But still nothing from your Coalition. No claims of responsibility, no speeches, no demonstration following the bomb. Nothing. Zero.”

Sean came to the couch and sat down at arm’s length from his sister. “I don’t know…it’s real, Faith. This isn’t some bullshit fantasy, and it isn’t booze either. Daryn is real, the Coalition is real. Franklin Sanborn is real. For Christ’s sake, I lived at the house for a week. I didn’t just imagine that. I can tell you exactly where it is, every bump in the road up to it. And believe me, there are a lot of damn bumps on that road, way back in the country. Kat and Britt and I slept in the room upstairs at the end of the hall. Jesus, Faith, I had both of those women every night.”

Faith noticed he’d called her Kat, not Daryn. She looked at him carefully. “I don’t need to know about that.”

“No, my point is-I didn’t hallucinate all this. I haven’t imagined stuff like that since I was going through puberty, believe me.”

Faith was silent for a moment. She remembered a line from the movie Amadeus. Mozart was trying to convince the emperor to let him write a certain opera for the court, and the emperor had said, “Mozart, you are passionate…but you do not persuade.”

“Sean,” Faith said, softening her voice. “I think that girl’s got you tied up in knots, so you’re not even sure who you are, much less who she is.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“I don’t know what you’d call her. Some kind of a sexual predator, maybe? I hadn’t been in the room alone with her five minutes before she was trying to hit on me, Sean.”

Sean sat back.

“Isn’t is just possible that you took this job to find Daryn, you found her, and she manipulated you? Instead of you convincing her to go home, back to Washington and her father and respectability, that she convinced you to find another way for her to escape her father forever? And I just happened to be close by?”

Sean shook his head. “No.”

“Sean, please.”

“Faith, I’m telling you, as your brother and as a law enforcement officer, for God’s sake…maybe I’m a screwed-up officer but I’ve still been one for seven years. This was a real conspiracy. We need to find the other members of the Coalition. We need to find Sanborn.”

Faith looked at him, at those sad blue-green eyes that had made him so popular with girls in high school. “I’m not sure what to believe,” she said. “But then, that’s my job, to find whatever truth is skulking around in all the lies in this world, and then decide if I have to make up a new set of lies to protect that truth.”

Sean smiled for the first time since Faith had come home. “Now that is a tough job.”

“Yeah,” Faith said. She didn’t return the smile. “It is.”

23

FAITH DIDN’T KNOW IF DARYN MCDERMOTT WAS A Department Thirty case or not. She knew her brother thought Daryn qualified for the program. In observing Daryn, Faith believed she was genuinely afraid of retribution from this Franklin Sanborn. But much depended on whether the Coalition was truly growing and spreading, scheduling other similar acts against banks across the country. Just talking about who the Coalition was and what they had already done wouldn’t meet the “vital national interest” criteria of the department. Preventing other acts of terrorism would.

Still, Faith knew better than to dismiss things out of hand. She sent the list of banks to Yorkton. She spent forty-eight hours questioning Daryn intensively, never leaving the Edmond house, sleeping in her own sleeping bag across the hall from Daryn’s room while the two silent deputy marshals rotated in their twelve-hour shifts.

Daryn was confusing. She was indeed a chameleon, shedding one mood and putting on another as quickly as an eyeblink: the revolutionary, the academic, the seductress, the victim, and many others. Faith recorded all their conversations on microcassette, then listened to the playbacks, straining to pick up nuances and subtleties in the way Daryn responded to her.

Daryn gave her the names of towns where the other Coalition cells were supposedly waiting to strike the next targets. They were places like Franktown, Colorado, near Denver; Rosemark, Tennessee, outside Memphis; Marine City, Michigan, near Detroit, on and on. She had a memory for details, and she recited it all, everything Faith asked her. She didn’t hesitate. In that respect it was one of the best sets of intake interviews Faith had ever done.

Now, she thought, if only there’s a case.

She sent the information to Yorkton. Three days after Daryn moved into the Edmond house, Faith announced that she had to leave for a few days. She’d put off Leon Bankston long enough. His transfer was approved, and everything was ready for him to become Benjamin Williams and begin his new life. His new life as a college graduate, Faith thought wryly.

She and Hal Simon packed up the few things Bankston was allowed to take with him. She called Sean at her house and told him she’d be away, and was taking her car. She’d managed to convince him that it was in his best interest to stay out of sight for the time being, until she’d had time to figure out what was going on. He was strangely silent.

Keep it together, Sean, she thought. He’d taken cabs from The Village to Edmond twice already, trying to see Daryn. She or the marshals had met him at the door and kept him from setting foot in the house. Only after Faith threatened to actually have him arrested and thrown in a federal holding cell did he seem to get it. She left strict instructions with both teams of deputies that Sean Kelly was under no circumstances to be admitted to the house.

“By God, Kelly, but you’re a hard-ass,” Deputy Marshal Hunnicutt of the night shift had told her.

So she drove to Manhattan, Kansas. Since Simon had been babysitting Bankston for over a week, she gave him a break and let Bankston ride with her in the Miata for the six-hour drive. Bankston chattered most of the way about what a model citizen he was going to be, asking if he could join the Y and swim at their pool, how long until he was allowed to go to bars and pick up women…Faith understood Simon’s frustration. After an hour in the car with Bankston, she wanted to shoot him just to shut him up.

Faith stayed in Kansas for two days, getting Bankston into his apartment, going over last-minute details. As was the usual procedure, field officer Simon stayed behind. He would live undercover near the new recruit for anywhere from two weeks to six months, depending on how well Bankston did in his transition to Williams.

“At least I don’t have to live with him,” Simon said to Faith as she drove away. “Thank God for small favors.”

Faith drove south from Manhattan on a Friday morning under blue skies with only a few puffy cumulus clouds floating overhead. She took a back road, State Highway 177, winding lazily through the Flint Hills. The day was cool for late spring, but it felt good. She drove with the windows down, letting the clean air wash over her like waves.

She took several detours, crossing back into Oklahoma at Newkirk and passing through the historic oil town of Ponca City before finally picking up Interstate 35 for the last leg south.

She’d avoided thinking about Daryn McDermott and Sean and Franklin Sanborn and the Coalition for Social Justice for most of the trip. Dealing with a high-maintenance individual like Leon Bankston tended to crowd out everything else. But now, with the prairieland of northern Oklahoma sliding by at seventy-five miles an hour, and only Lee Ritenour’s guitar on the CD player as company,