The Triangle Conspiracy

4

FAITH KELLY DOUBTED SHE WOULD EVER HAVE grandchildren, but if she did, she could imagine telling them the story:

Once upon a time, I was a deputy United States Marshal. But then I got caught up in a secret unit of the Justice Department called Department Thirty, and it helped to protect some bad people. See, we thought that these bad people could help us catch other bad people and keep them from doing bad things, so instead of punishing these bad people, we protected them and gave them new names and new jobs and made them promise to stay out of trouble. We did things like protecting the two most notorious assassins in the world. And there was this one time that I was forced to shoot a man. He’d worked for years and years to become very powerful and wanted to topple the president. And how about this one-I found out that the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court was actually a murderer.

Oh, grandma, the kids would say, you’re just making all that up.

And she would smile. Of course I am. You caught me. Now go to bed.

Faith had learned a few things in the last year, ever since she’d been given her first Department Thirty recruit. Aside from that first one-where the recruit actually turned out to be innocent, a pawn in a scheme that brought down the chief justice-she’d learned that there were two types of recruits: those who were guilty and had been caught red-handed, yet continued to protest their innocence; and those who cheerfully and arrogantly admitted their guilt, almost proud of their crimes, even proud to a point of getting caught, of being asked to tell their story.

Leon Bankston fell into the latter category. He sat at the kitchen table of the safe house in the Oklahoma City suburb of Yukon, crossing and uncrossing his legs and smiling at Faith. Faith had wanted to smash his face in several times, but she forced herself to keep her mind on the job.

“You know, Leon,” she said, “I understand you. I can see your perspective on this. It’s the whole ‘honor among thieves’ thing. You haven’t disputed for a second that you smuggled those guns onto that truck, or that the truck was headed to Galveston to transfer the load to a ship, or that the ship was bound for Iraq. You know what you did.”

“That’s right,” Bankston said. He was a small man in his forties, bald except for a few tufts around his ears, with quick eyes that darted all around the room at every sound. “I did what I did. That’s my living. I’ll do my couple of years in a federal country club, then I’ll be back in business and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Faith stood up and stretched. At five ten, she was a good four inches taller than Bankston, her body slim and toned. She wasn’t quite in the shape she’d been in when she ran the New York and Boston Marathons, but she still ran. It was her only obsession, other than trying to stay above the mud and muck of her job. She passed a hand through her hair, still not used to its new short cut. Her Irish-red hair had fallen to the middle of her back for most of her life, but she’d finally had it cut into a short shag a couple of months ago, the kind of haircut that magazines liked to describe as “sassy.” Faith had laughed at that-she was sassy enough without a haircut, but she had to admit it was low maintenance.

“There’s just one problem, Leon,” she said, leaning over the table.

“What’s that, beautiful?”

She smiled. “First thing is: if you call me ‘beautiful’ or ‘sexy’ or ‘doll’ one more time, I’m liable to kick you in a place where it would really, really hurt.” She leaned in close to him, her face inches from his. “You believe I could do that, don’t you?”

Bankston’s smug look faltered. “Ah…yes. Yes, I believe that. Yes.”

“Very good.” She stood up again to her full height, rolling the kinks out of her back. She badly needed a run. “Second thing is, you really don’t know what you did. I mean, you know you smuggled a bunch of illegal weapons. We agree on that part.”

Bankston nodded.

“But see, the world is a lot more complicated now than it used to be. What used to just be considered smuggling might now be considered aiding and abetting terrorists.”

“Hey, you can’t blame me for whatever someone else does with guns that I just happened to move.”

“Oh, actually I can blame you for that. You may have heard of the Patriot Act.”

“Oh, shit,” the man said.

“Uh-huh. You see, Leon, if the United States government has even an inkling that you’ve done anything that would lead to those weapons getting into the hands of, say, Iraqi insurgents, then that means you can be held under the Patriot Act. That means you don’t get to hire a slick lawyer. You can actually be held without being charged. And it won’t be in a federal country club either, Leon. I can make a phone call and see that you’re escorted to Guantanamo Bay. Trust me, that’s no country club.”

“But-”

“I know, I know, you’re just a smuggler. You’ve been doing business for twenty-five years. You already did one stretch in federal custody in the eighties. This isn’t the eighties, Leon.” She leaned in again. “Frankly, you’re in deep, deep shit. But we already know that you’re not at the top of the food chain, that you’re part of a larger network doing business with these various terror groups.” Faith began to tick items off on her fingers. “You give me names, dates, places, bank accounts. You’re afraid the others involved will come after you. But see, you won’t exist anymore. Your trail goes cold right here, right now. I have a new name for you-Benjamin Williams. Ben Williams can start a new job, and I’ve picked out a nice town for him to live in. Manhattan, Kansas-it’s a pleasant college town, not far from Kansas City. Since you’re so good with supply and demand, Ben Williams will get a job as an inventory control manager for the warehouse operations of a major retailer.”

“What about college? Could I have a degree? I never got to finish mine, you know.”

And in that instant, Faith knew she had him. Once they became a part of the fantasy in any way, the deal was closed. She smiled. “We can give Mr. Williams a degree in business management from the University of Colorado.”

“I like Colorado.”

“There you go. Leon, you have to work with us. You have to come in. You don’t have a choice. You don’t want to be screwing around with the Patriot Act. Your partners or bosses will never know what’s happened to you. And before too long, they’ll be the ones headed to Guantanamo, not you. You’ll be in Kansas, with a rock-solid new identity.”

Leon Bankston looked at her for a moment. For a few seconds he looked pensive, almost repentant. Then the small-time crook was back. “Ah, those bastards,” he finally said. “They never paid me what they should have, anyway.”

“Welcome to Department Thirty,” Faith said.

Bankston talked for four hours. It was nearly six p.m. before Faith packed up her tape recorder and her notes. She summoned her field officer, a big soft-spoken man named Hal Simon, to babysit Bankston. As case officer, Faith’s job was to bring in the recruits, create the identities and manage their placement in the community, then manage the cases while the protectees adjusted to their new lives. But she didn’t do protective duty during the period between. Leon Bankston had already ceased to exist, and Benjamin Williams had yet to be fully brought into existence. Being Irish Catholic, Faith thought of it as limbo, and her job on this case did not extend to sitting with the man.

She left the house, promising Simon and Bankston that she would be in touch during the next step of the process. Now she had to create a report that would be sent up the line to the director of Department Thirty, a man named Richard Conway, but whom Faith thought of as Dean Yorkton, the name he’d been using when she first met him nearly four years ago. From Yorkton the report- Bankston’s statements about his activities and those of his associates-would then go directly to the attorney general of the United States for final approval. When the AG signed off on it, she would complete the paper trail that created Benjamin Williams, and would send him off to Kansas.

She drove away from the suburban safe house, which was on a street with the absurdly suburban name of Hyacinth Hollow Road. In five minutes her gold Mazda Miata was on Interstate 40, headed east toward Oklahoma City proper.

She picked up her cell phone and speed-dialed Scott Hendler’s number. When she heard his drawling “Hello,” Faith smiled. What did that mean, she wondered, when the way the man answered the phone actually made her smile?

“Hey, you,” she said.

“Hey, yourself,” Hendler said. “How goes the…you know?”

Even though Scott Hendler was a special agent in the Oklahoma City field office of the FBI, she couldn’t discuss cases with him. Department Thirty was an open secret in the Justice Department, but the other agencies within DOJ treated it like a relative no one wanted to claim. Outside DOJ, Thirty was completely shrouded in shadows.

“I’m done for today and moving right along,” Faith said. “And now…” She lowered her voice sexily. “I’m up for something…hot.”

Hendler’s voice lowered as well. “Well, you know, you can always count on me for something…hot.”

They both laughed. “Chili at Different Roads?” Faith said in a normal voice. “I think Alex Bridge is playing there tonight.”

“Meet you there,” Hendler said.

There was an awkward moment’s silence, the same as with every phone conversation they had. Dry humor aside, Faith always sensed that Hendler wanted to say something more, something about love, at the end of every phone call. But she hadn’t used the l-word with him so far, and didn’t know if she would. She came from a family that didn’t just throw terms of endearment and public displays of affection around. Hendler evidently wanted such things from her, but then, he was patient with her. They’d gone in the space of two years from being professional acquaintances to friends to outright lovers, but Faith was still conscious of always holding part of herself back. She knew she got the very best part of Scott Hendler, and she treasured it. But she still couldn’t give him everything. There were parts of herself that even she couldn’t find, much less open them up to someone else.

“Down the road,” she said, and clicked the phone off.

Just enjoy it, she reminded herself. Things were good for now. She was finally learning how to do the job, and to keep the moral ambiguities of it at bay. Her own demons, and the parts of herself that she’d walled off, stayed hidden for the most part. Scott Hendler was a good man, and they enjoyed each other’s company.

Why borrow trouble? Faith thought, just as she passed the city limits sign for Oklahoma City.

5

WHEN SEAN HAD LEFT TUCSON AND POINTED HIS Jeep southwest toward Arivaca and, ultimately, Sasabe, he’d actually thought he would never see his apartment again. He would just drive away from it all-his furniture, his stereo, his hundreds of compact discs, even his own personal gun, a forty-caliber semiautomatic Glock 23.

But here he sat, at the wooden dining room table he’d scavenged from an antique shop in Oro Valley two years ago. He’d refinished it with great care, then worked on the four chairs, one by one, over the course of six months. The apartment was always a surprise to people-they didn’t expect a young single guy to be as neat and tidy as he was. It always amused Sean that his sister, Faith, was such a slob. Because she was female, it was expected that she would be into cleaning, yet he knew Faith could rarely be troubled to even pick up her dirty laundry. So they had both confounded what was expected of them, in more ways than one.

Sean was no longer buzzed by all the whiskey he’d drunk in the Sasabe cantina. He’d left the little bar with a renewed sense of purpose. Even if the purpose was skulking around in the life of Senator McDermott’s promiscuous, politically radical daughter, it was a chance, and it held possibilities.

He made himself a bologna sandwich, opened a bottle of Dos Equis, and spread out the papers from the packet Tobias Owens had given him. There was something that looked like a briefing