The Triangle Conspiracy

FAITH AND HENDLER HAD CHILI AND BEER AT DIFFERENT Roads, where they listened to Faith’s friend Alex Bridge and her band, The Cove of Cork, play Celtic and American folk music until nearly midnight. They didn’t talk about the case. They were two normal people who cared about each other, out for a low-key evening on the town, two normal people de-stressing after a normal week.

For a while Faith even believed it.

She’d muted her phone while listening to the music, but she checked it every fifteen minutes or so, hoping against hope for a message from Sean. She tried to be furtive, but caught Hendler looking at her a couple of times when she was checking the phone.

“Relax,” he mouthed to her.

They’d gone back to her house to spend the night. They made love gently, tenderly. There was nothing frenzied or hurried about it. It wasn’t even about passion, Faith thought. It was connection, two people who needed to be with each other, and to express what they meant to each other. It felt good, and for a while Faith really could believe they were just two normal lovers.

She woke early, ran, showered, and dressed. Hendler was in the shower when she left. She pulled the curtain aside, leaned in, and kissed him.

“You’ll get your hair all wet again,” he said, wiping shampoo out of his eyes.

“So what?” she said.

“See you later,” Hendler said.

She was in her office by seven thirty, and at five minutes after eight her phone rang. It was Yorkton, and he was uncharacteristically blunt and straightforward.

“Do you have a televison?” he said without identifying himself.

“Not here in the office.”

“Find one, quickly.”

“What channel?”

“Pick one,” Yorkton said, and hung up.

Yorkton had sounded genuinely alarmed, and Yorkton never sounded alarmed. Faith jogged down the hall to the Marshals Service office. Several of the deputies were gathered around a TV set in one corner of the “bullpen” area. They looked up when she came into the room. Someone said, “Oh, no.” Several stared openly.

The group parted as Faith came closer. Chief Deputy Mark Raines, looking as always more like a banker than a U.S. marshal in his charcoal gray suit and his gold-rimmed glasses, stepped aside.

“Faith, you need to see this,” he said.

Faith stepped in front of the screen. The set was tuned to CNN. The graphic at the bottom of the screen read: The Capitol, Washington. News conference of Senator Edward McDermott (AZ).

“Oh, no,” Faith said.

“Didn’t I already say that?” someone said behind her. She thought it sounded like Leneski.

Senator Edward McDermott was a large, florid-looking man in his late fifties. His hair was completely silver, his eyes a dark brown-Daryn’s eyes, Faith thought. He wore a perfectly tailored suit that fashionably hid much of his bulk. He wore glasses, but kept taking them off and putting them on again, using them as pointers, waving them around. Faith wondered if he really needed them to see, or if they were just props.

He was holding a few sheets of paper in one hand, and he was speaking directly to the camera. By his side stood a perfectly groomed blond woman in her thirties. The current wife, Faith guessed.

“I’m not speaking just as a senator from Arizona,” he said. His voice was deep and resonant, no doubt honed by many courtrooms and campaign speeches. “I’m speaking as a father, as a family man whose job just happens to be in elective office.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Leneski said, behind Faith.

“You know by now that my daughter-my beloved Daryn, only twenty-four, with her entire life ahead of her-was murdered three days ago. It was brutal beyond words, a senseless act of depraved individuals with no respect for human life. But it goes deeper than that, much deeper.”

“What was she doing in Oklahoma?” shouted a reporter on the screen. McDermott shook his head. “I don’t have any answers. But I have many, many questions. Suzanne and I-” he nodded toward the blond woman, “-will be flying to Oklahoma City in a few hours to claim Daryn’s body, to take her back home to Arizona for burial in our family plot. That’s what she wanted.”

Liar, Faith thought. Daryn never felt at home in Arizona, and only went there when you went back to campaign.

“But my friends,” he went on, “something startling came to my attention the night Daryn was killed.” His posture seemed to soften. “You know that she and I disagreed about many things politically. She had some ideas that were, frankly, outside the mainstream. She’s done some things of which I do not approve, could never approve. I don’t know how much of that was youthful rebellion, but as wrong as many of her ideas were, she was passionate about them and believed in principle.” He held up the papers. “She’d been traveling. We hadn’t talked or seen each other in… well, in quite a while. But the night she died-only hours before her life was so violently ended-she wrote to me. She sent me this e-mail.”

Faith felt stones descend into the pit of her stomach.

“I won’t read all of it to you, because some of it is intensely personal. But there are parts of it that should concern all of us. Every American who believes in openness of government and the rule of law should hear what my daughter wrote a few hours before she was killed.”

Sounds like a campaign speech, Faith thought.

McDermott took off his glasses. His wife laid her hand on his forearm. “She wrote:

I’m scared, Daddy. Really, really scared. You know I’ve always had an agenda to promote, and I met some other people that felt the same way I do. We formed a group, and we were planning to travel around the country, doing demonstrations and helping people understand our agenda. I was out here in Oklahoma when I met them, so that’s been our headquarters. But Dad, after I was around these people for a few weeks, I realized they didn’t want the same things I did. These people are violent! They want to destroy banks to show how money corrupts our political and social system. I agree with the idea, but they’re talking about terrorism, Dad!

McDermott stopped. His voice had cracked the last time he read the word Dad.

He waited a moment. Faith stared at the screen. She thought the veneer of the politician had just melted a little, and she was finally seeing the Edward McDermott who’d lost his daughter. He may have been a terrible father, but in the final analysis, he was still a father and his daughter had been taken from him in a horrible manner.

McDermott cleared his throat. His wife’s hand moved from his forearm to his shoulder. He looked at her as if drawing strength. “She goes on:

I couldn’t go through with being a part of terrorism. That’s not what my ideas are all about. On the way to the first target, a bank in Oklahoma City, I called the FBI. The other leader of the group threatened me. He said he’d have me killed, Dad. He said he’d come after me and kill me.

McDermott lost all semblance of control, bowing his head and turning at an angle away from most of the cameras. Faith saw tears rolling down the man’s cheeks.

“Jesus,” said someone in the room with Faith. A man’s voice, but she couldn’t tell whose. She felt eyes on her.

Suzanne McDermott gently took the papers from her husband’s hands and stepped to the microphone. She looked poised and confident. “Let me,” she said to her husband, then looked at the cameras. “I’ll read you the rest of what the senator wanted to share with you from my stepdaughter’s e-mail. She says:

I knew I shouldn’t have been with that group, but I really believed we agreed on things. I knew I was guilty of conspiracy to commit terrorism. But I thought I could still stop them if I told someone. I knew the government would want this information. Maybe even you don’t know about this, Dad, but there’s a part of the government that will give protection and new identities to people who’ve committed crimes, even terrorism-related crimes, if you have information for them.

“Oh my God,” Mark Raines said. Faith had never seen his composure slip before.

I went to them. I asked them to protect me. This government agency is called Department Thirty.

Faith’s cell phone began to ring.

Suzanne McDermott kept reading.

A woman named Faith Kelly was assigned to be my case officer. She asked me all kinds of questions and said she’d investigate my information. Then she came back and said she couldn’t find any evidence. No evidence! I was all the evidence they should have needed!

Faith felt a chill crawl down her spine. Her phone stopped ringing, then started again.

This Kelly woman told me they couldn’t protect me, since my information didn’t check out. She just sent me on my way, and here I am, Dad. I’m very, very frightened. These people I was with-I think they’ll kill me. I just wanted you to know, in case something happens. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry I disappointed you so much. I never meant to hurt anyone, and I tried to do the right thing.

Now Suzanne was crying as well. She stepped away from the microphone. Her husband had composed himself and stepped back in front of the cameras.

“My daughter, my only child, wrote this to me a few hours before she was murdered. By the time I checked my e-mail in the morning, she was hanging dead in a tree in Oklahoma City.” The glasses went on, then came off again. He pointed them straight toward the cameras. “Department Thirty. Remember that name. You’re going to be hearing it more and more, because I’m going to find out what happened. If they could have protected my daughter from these terrorists, and they didn’t, because this case officer, this Faith Kelly, could find no evidence, and then my daughter was killed…” He put the glasses back on and used his index finger to jab the podium. He spoke slowly, precisely. “There will be hell to pay. Hell to pay.”

Reporters started shouting questions.

“Faith?” said Deputy Derek Mayfield, the first person who’d befriended her when she was assigned to the Oklahoma City Marshals Service office.

Faith’s phone was ringing again. She barely registered that Mayfield and others were talking to her.

Faith watched the screen, even as the cameras pulled back to show a long shot of the Capitol steps, then cut back to the news anchors in Atlanta.

But I couldn’t, she thought. I couldn’t protect her. There was nothing to support her story. Nothing!

Only Sean. Only her brother supported Daryn McDermott’s story, and he was gone.

I should have protected her anyway.

She remembered Daryn hanging in the tree.

Faith shook her head and backed away from the TV set. They were all watching her.

“Faith, what can we do to help you?” Raines asked.

Faith shook her head.

“I have to go,” she said.

She turned and ran from the office.

She finally anwered her phone when she was alone in her office.