The Triangle Conspiracy

she couldn’t help going back to the case.

A week had gone by. The date had passed for the Coalition’s alleged attack on the National Bank of Commerce in downtown Memphis. Nothing happened. Yorkton had called her to say there was no sign of any communal radical group anywhere near the place where Daryn had said they would be.

So who was fooling whom?

Had Franklin Sanborn, phantom extraordinaire, fooled everyone? Had he angered Daryn by going against her wishes and saying he was going to use violence to achieve the Coalition’s stated goals? Was it a gotcha on the senator’s daughter? If so, was Sanborn’s sole purpose to embarrass Daryn? Had he just faded into the ether?

Or was this part of Daryn’s grand design anyway? She was a spoiled political princess, to be sure, but one who had a radical, revolutionary agenda of her own. Had she engineered the scheme just to escape her father’s tyranny and his politics forever? To get a free ride from Department Thirty?

But there was a problem with that scenario. Department Thirty wasn’t public knowledge. Most of the general public had heard of the Marshals Service’s WITSEC, but not Thirty. There were even government officials, highly placed ones, who didn’t know of the department’s existence.

Sean.

She kept coming back to her brother. How long had he known she worked for the department? Had he really blundered into the whole situation, like he said? Or was there something deeper and darker about her brother’s involvement?

Faith sighed, clutching the steering wheel hard. This is what she and Sean had become. She didn’t trust her own brother.

There were too many questions, and she was getting a headache.

I’ll fit right in, then, she thought. Sean was always hung over, and Daryn had her migraines.

Driving south, lulled by the mindless interstate travel, she almost missed the sign, lost as she was in her own questions.

MULHALL-ORLANDO ROAD, 1 MILE.

She’d spent nearly an hour musing on the whole situation. She’d passed the two exits for the town of Perry and hadn’t even noticed them. She was around forty miles from Oklahoma City.

MULHALL-ORLANDO ROAD, 1 MILE.

Mulhall.

According to Daryn, that was where it had all started. The jumping-off point for the Coalition’s nationwide activities.

But there hadn’t been any nationwide activities.

The only activity had been in downtown Oklahoma City. Faith thought it said something about what American society had become when “only” six deaths were treated as a reason to be grateful.

And according to both Daryn and Sean, it had originated right here.

She punched in Sean’s cell number on her phone. When he answered, she said, “Are you sober?”

“Faith?”

“I said, are you sober?”

“Well, I walked to that liquor store down the street, and they had-”

“Goddammit, Sean, are you sober enough to give me directions to that house where you said you stayed?”

There was a silence. “You mean in Mulhall?”

“Yes, in Mulhall!”

“What are you going to do?”

“Directions. Now.”

MULHALL-ORLANDO ROAD. An arrow, an exit sign.

Faith left the highway and pointed the Miata toward Mulhall.

She got turned around twice. Quite an accomplishment, considering the size of Mulhall, Oklahoma, Faith thought. But Sean’s directions had been from the south, and her approach was from the east.

She finally righted the Miata, heading north on U.S. 77. At the north end of town was a sign made of white brick, with black letters that read YA’LL COME BACK SOON. Faith slowed the car, looking for the gravel road Sean had mentioned.

She didn’t let herself think. She’d become a more instinctive person in the last few years, as opposed to someone who used to think only in terms of facts and evidence. Department Thirty had changed her that way, and it had been so subtle that she hadn’t even realized it was happening.

Doing things by the book would dictate that she call the Marshals Service for backup before going into a potentially unfriendly situation. Technically, the Mulhall house could be considered a terrorist staging area. People with an extreme, revolutionary, and ultimately violent agenda had made this house their headquarters.

Let’s just take a look, Faith thought, ignoring the voices that told her to follow the book. Department Thirty had no book. Department Thirty was its own book.

Stay safe and don’t let any of your cases be compromised. That was Department Thirty protocol, as Yorkton had told her many times. The rest was up to the individual officer.

She found the rutted driveway and turned left. Orienting herself, Faith realized she’d turned south, back in the direction of town. Sean had told her the house sat about a hundred yards back from the road. When she estimated she’d gone about fifty yards, she pulled the car off the driveway into the grass.

She reached into the glove compartment, took out her new SIG Sauer, and double-checked its load. Then Faith got out of the car and began to move slowly forward.

She couldn’t see the house yet. Sean had said it sat at the top of a small rise. For the moment she thought it worked to her advantage. Her car would be out of sight of anyone who might conceivably be in the house.

On the down side, she would be in the open as she approached. There wasn’t much tree coverage here. She could see groves of trees in the distance, but in the immediate area the trees had been cleared. Evidently this had been working farmland at one point. She noticed barbed wire fencing along both sides of the driveway. Perhaps livestock had been run here as well.

She smiled to herself. Here I am, a kid from suburban Chicago, paying attention to things like barbed wire fences way out in the country. Just another way in which she’d come millions of miles away from the person she used to be.

She kept the SIG in her right hand, pointed at the ground, watching her path carefully, not wanting to step in a hole and twist her ankle. Something buzzed near her face. She waved away a dragonfly.

The trail began to incline slightly upward. Faith’s pulse quickened. She moved a little faster, almost at a jog, as if an unseen hand were tugging on her shirt, urging her forward.

A few trees were grouped to her right now, just outside the fence. She moved toward them, hugging them closely. The trail flattened out again and she saw the house.

It was completely ordinary, neither a hovel nor a mansion. She’d seen many houses just like it as she’d driven through rural Oklahoma over the last few years.

She emerged from the trees. The first thing that caught her attention was a rusting real estate sign staked to the ground in front of the house, just outside the fence that surrounded its small front yard. That it had a fence around it was unusual. Most farm and ranch homes in this part of the country didn’t have front yards per se. Perhaps a family with very young children had lived here at some point, and put in the fence to keep the little ones from wandering away.

Faith thought of a two-year-old toddler, going with his mother to the bank. Anger flared in her again.

She approached from the north side. Everything was quiet. There was no movement. No cars sat in the clearing before the fence. While the white house wasn’t in obvious disrepair, it didn’t look inhabited, either.

She moved closer, eyes darting everywhere, up, down, all sides, taking in everything. She passed in front of the gate. There were tire tracks in the red dirt, at a logical place where a car would have parked. Next to them was a second set of tracks.

Someone had been here, and recently. It had rained within the last couple of days, which meant the tracks were fairly new or the rain would have washed them away.

The house was listed for sale. It wasn’t inconceivable that the realtor had shown it in the last day or two. That would explain the two sets of tires. A mundane, ordinary explanation. No Coalition. No potential terrorists.

Faith opened the gate-it squeaked-and started toward the house. There was no sidewalk, only a trail of bricks flush with the ground. She took slow, deliberate steps, concentrating on both her own breathing and her surroundings, achieving that eerie sense of disconnectedness she often felt when her senses were on high alert.

A strong wind gust came up from the south, to her left. Above her, something crashed.

Faith whirled, placing her SIG in the two-handed firing stance.

She slowly let out a breath. The unlatched screen door had been standing open, and it had slammed in the breeze. She carefully put the SIG into the pocket of her windbreaker and started up the steps.

The second one creaked. She felt a loose board shift under her foot. A bird called from somewhere near. A blue jay or a cardinal, she thought, though she could never keep the two straight. This part of the country was filled with them.

Faith blinked. An empty Michelob can sat on the porch railing, the lettering on the can faded as if it had been in the sun for a long time. A Tostitos bag with a few chips trailing out of it blew across the porch in front of her like some kind of latter-day tumbleweed. An open package of Trojan condoms sat on the lip of one of the front windows.

The window was dusty. She drew a line in the dust with her index finger, then rubbed a circle, feeling the grit under her palm. She peered through the circle.

The front room was totally empty.

There was no furniture whatsoever. The wood floor looked as dusty as the window.

“I’ll be damned,” she whispered, unaware she’d spoken aloud.

According to Daryn and Sean, thirteen people had been living in this house scarcely more than a week ago. Could the Coalition have cleared out any sign of them in that amount of time, leaving no trace?

Of course, but to clear out furniture, there would have to be a lot of coming and going, trucks filled with the items being moved. Would a group like Daryn had described want the townspeople of Mulhall to see them moving things around? She doubted it. News traveled fast in small towns, and the people of Mulhall would have had to notice such an operation.

The other answer was that Daryn and Sean were both lying.

Faith’s throat tightened. She blinked as another burst of wind stirred up more of the dust on the porch.

She pulled on the screen door that had slammed a few minutes earlier. The frame door behind it was ajar. She took the SIG out of her pocket again, then pushed on the door and stepped over the threshold, her eyes immediately seeking out the trouble spots, the corners.