The Triangle Conspiracy

Sean backed a few steps away from the border. Faith followed after a moment. The guard went inside. Faith noticed his hand had never left the butt of his gun.

“Jesus, Faith,” Sean said softly. “I didn’t-”

“And yes, to answer your question,” Faith said, “I thought you’d done it. I thought you killed Daryn out of some kind of booze-induced sexual obsession with her, and I thought you killed Scott because he was getting close to you in the investigation.”

Sean lowered his voice to a whisper. “How can you think that of me? I mean, this is me, Faith. Anyone else, yeah. They’d look at the evidence and figure it was pretty conclusive. My car, the blood, the gun, the semen. But how could you think that?”

“What have you given me to disprove it? Huh? You’ve lost your job, you’re desperate, out here searching for some senator’s daughter. You’re drunk all the time, you don’t listen to anything I say. You’re sick, Sean, and when people are sick they’re not the same people anymore. You’re not the brother I grew up with.”

Sean scuffed the sand at his feet. He was silent for a long moment, then he said, “I didn’t kill her, Faith. God as my witness, I didn’t kill Daryn and I didn’t kill Scott.”

“I know you didn’t kill Scott. Your friend AJ verified that you were here when Scott was murdered.”

Sean nodded. “But you don’t believe me about Daryn.”

“I don’t know what to believe.” She looked him in the eye. “But I know this: you’ve been manipulated, very carefully and very skillfully manipulated into the position you’re in. I think Daryn was too, though there are some things about her I still don’t understand.”

“What do you mean, I was manipulated?”

“Franklin Sanborn.”

“But I thought you couldn’t find any evidence that he even existed. Hadn’t you decided that Daryn and I made him up?”

Faith shrugged. “For a while, I was leaning in that direction. I couldn’t find him. No one could. He was a ghost.”

Sean looked off into the distance. “That night, the night Daryn was killed. Sanborn followed me after I left her apartment, after we’d…he followed me. He found me passed out in the parking lot of a truck stop. He told me if I hurried, I might catch the real killer. It’s like he was taunting me, daring me to go.”

“I know who he is,” Faith said. “I figured it out when I found that book you pulled out of my shelf at home.”

Sean looked at her, the question on his face.

“The Secret Six by Edward Renehan. It’s about the Civil War.”

“Oh, I remember that. I remember thinking, ‘Since when is my sister into reading about the Civil War?’ ”

“I’m not. That book was sent to me.”

Sean nodded briskly. “There was an inscription, something about ‘until we meet again.’ I thought it was strange, but I was wasted so I didn’t think anything else about it after that.”

“Franklin Sanborn,” Faith said. “I know now that he’s real, all right. Not by that name, of course. He has more identities than I want to think about, and I’d thought he was gone for good. You see, when I knew him, his name was Isaac Smith.”

35

THEY WALKED A FEW STEPS TOWARD SASABE. Sean stopped at the first yard they came to. It was fenced with barbed wire, and a few chickens wandered through it. “Isaac Smith,” he said. “That name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Faith sighed. “Do you remember last year, when the chief justice of the Supreme Court resigned?”

“Yeah. Cole, wasn’t it? Something about a family crisis. It surprised everyone, because he was relatively young, as Supreme Court justices go.”

“Right. Well, there was no family crisis.”

Sean leaned on a fence post. “Are you trying to tell me Department Thirty was somehow involved in the resignation of a Supreme Court justice?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. This man, this Isaac Smith, was in the middle of it. We think his real name was Mikhail Gerenko.”

“Russian?”

“Ukrainian. His father was a Soviet physicist who defected when Mikhail was a boy. They came to this country, but by then the Cold War was essentially over. The boy, Mikhail, wound up bitter and angry. He happened on a new and lucrative line of work that let him vent his own anger and make money at the same time.”

“What?”

“His clients would hire him to destroy a person’s life. Instead of simply assassinating them with a quick bullet to the head, he would ruin them. Take their lives and twist them around, destroy the things and the people they cared about until their own lives were completely devastated. For example, there was one government lawyer that he was hired to ruin. The man was by all accounts honest in his job, faithful to his wife, good to his children. Who knows what the agenda was that brought him down? But Gerenko, or Smith as he was known by then, seduced the man, made him question his own sexuality, carried on a torrid homosexual affair for six months, then dropped him. He’d convinced the lawyer that he was really gay and should leave his family. The lawyer did, left behind his wife and kids. Then Smith disappeared to leave him twisting in the wind. The lawyer wound up jumping off a bridge and drowning himself in Chesapeake Bay.”

Sean whistled. “Nice guy. So how did he get from Gerenko to Smith?”

“Somewhere along the way, Gerenko became obsessed with the American Civil War, and particularly with John Brown.”

“Whoa, what? John Brown? You mean like Harper’s Ferry? That John Brown?”

“That’s the one. Isaac Smith was an alias Brown used when he was preparing for the raid on Harper’s Ferry.”

“So Gerenko adopted the same alias that Brown did.”

Faith nodded. “Yes. But after everything that happened last year, Smith was offered protection by Department Thirty.”

“What? You protected this guy?”

“No. I didn’t protect him. Actually, I wanted to kill him, and almost did. But I was overruled-my boss thought he’d be a ‘nice catch’ for the department. And so he disappeared into Thirty. A few weeks after the last time I saw him, that book came in the mail.”

Sean thought for a long moment, gazing off toward Mexico, avoiding his sister’s eyes. “Sounds to me like there’s more than one obsession running through this. This Smith was obsessed with you, Faith.”

Faith blanched. She’d never quite thought of it in that way. She knew Isaac Smith hated her. Because of the way Faith had done her job, he’d had to stop practicing his “trade,” and even though he’d been given yet another new identity and relocated far away from her-she didn’t know where-she knew he would carry an anger at her for interrupting his business. Faith thought he was the classic sociopath, the one who believed the rules didn’t apply to him.

“You’re right,” Faith said quietly.

“But I still don’t understand how you decided he was Sanborn, and what he has to do with all this. Who’s his client, and who is he supposed to be ruining? Daryn, her father, you, me, your friend Scott? What’s it all about?”

Faith rubbed her scar. She felt suddenly exhausted. Grief, rage, pain…they were working their toll on her.

And that’s what he wants, she realized.

It started to become sickeningly clear. Even when she’d seen the book, had figured out why she knew the name of Franklin Sanborn, she still hadn’t understood why. She’d still been naive enough to think that Smith might send her a book from wherever he was now, might write a cryptic notation in it, but that he wouldn’t-couldn’t-do anything else.

Isaac Smith-Franklin Sanborn-was his own client.

And Faith was the target.

He’d wanted to make her his ultimate conquest, to see her life tumbling out of control, destroying the people around her. He’d done his homework-that was Smith’s trademark, after all, the painstaking research and detail he put into his “jobs”-and found her brother, and knew of his weakness. He would have learned of her relationship with Hendler, and he already had an idea of how difficult it was for Faith to commit to a relationship, how far she’d come with Scott.

All of this, every bit of it, had been accomplished under the nose of Department Thirty and Director Yorkton. Somehow Smith had found a willing vehicle in Daryn McDermott, though she had no doubt that Daryn had been manipulated as well.

“I should have killed him,” Faith said, not realizing she’d spoken aloud.

“Oh?” Sean said.

“On a beach at Galveston, a year ago, I had the chance and the justification. He’d already shot at civilians, and with everything else he’d done, if I’d been a little quicker, none of this would have happened. You, Daryn, Scott…it was all an elaborate plan to get at me, somehow. There are still holes in it, but he was after me all this time.”

Sean was silent for a long time. “You still didn’t tell me about the name Sanborn, about how you figured it out.”

“The first time I heard the name, I knew I recognized it, but I didn’t know from where. After I saw the book on the floor, I picked it up and looked at it, read the dust jacket. The use of that name was a message to me. Smith wanted to me to figure it out, to know who was doing this. Franklin Sanborn was one of the ‘Secret Six,’ this small group of Northern abolitionists who funded and supported John Brown in the revolt he wanted to start. The real Sanborn was an educator, a professor. He was even a friend of Emerson and Thoreau.”

“A professor,” Sean said. “He used that cover with the Coalition, too.”

“More of Smith’s sense of irony.” Faith kicked the ground with the toe of her boot. “Son of a bitch! He wanted me to know it was him. He wanted me to see what he was doing to me, that even though he was exiled and relocated, he could get to me. He must have been planning this almost from the moment he went under with the department. Son of a bitch!”

Sean moved away from the fence post and looked down at his sister. His eyes had changed. Ever since he’d arrived at her house two weeks ago, Faith had seen little but an alcoholic haze, a dullness, in her brother. Now his blue-green eyes flashed anger.

His voice, when he finally spoke again, was tightly controlled. “So this was all about you?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Think about something, Faith. Just a few minutes ago you accused me of not being able to think of anything except about how it affected me. Turn that around. Why would someone go to these lengths to get to you? Are you that important, Faith?”

Faith stared at him, unable to speak. The words had been swept out of her, as if a desert wind had blown them off toward the distant mountains.

“Are you that big a deal now, just because you’re working for Department Thirty? Because you can play around with people’s lives and create new people, just because you think it’s in the ‘national interest,’ are you that important? Huh? You’ve been trying to prove something your entire life. Did you prove it? Did you finally prove you were a big deal? Do you think you’d finally get Joe Kelly’s approval?”

“Stop it, Sean.”

“Except…oh, wait a minute, you can’t tell anyone you work for Thirty, so no, Dad can’t approve, can he? So maybe all this is in your own mind, Faith. Maybe I’m a boozer, but maybe you’re just