The Triangle Conspiracy

They landed in Oklahoma City in the late afternoon. After only one day in the desert, the air of the plains seemed thick and humid to Faith. The sky seemed to be split: over the airport in south Oklahoma City, it was a dazzling blue with few clouds. To the north, it was gray and overcast with storm clouds building.

“Where are we going?” Sean asked as Faith rented another SUV.

“You told me he said the Coalition was going to regroup at Mulhall,” Faith said.

“But didn’t you already check there? You said the house was empty except for some homeless guy.”

“But now I wonder,” Faith said. “I think that homeless guy may have been one of Smith’s people, one of your Coalition people. I think that somehow Smith hurriedly cleaned out the house so it would look like no one had been there, and left one person there to let him know when I came looking. He would have known I would investigate the house eventually, and he was ready. He was waiting for me.”

Sean shook his head. “Now you sound like you’re talking to yourself.”

“Maybe I am.”

“That doesn’t make sense, though. He would have known that if you didn’t find anything to back up Daryn’s and my story about the Coalition’s plans after Oklahoma, that you’d reject Daryn from Department Thirty. What was the point of having her request protection, just to be rejected?”

“Oh, it makes perfect sense,” Faith said, but offered no more.

With the rush-hour traffic headed north out of the city, it took them nearly an hour to reach the exit for Guthrie. Sean showed Faith the route he had taken when he drove Daryn and Britt there the first time, passing over the Cimarron River and Skeleton Creek into Mulhall.

By the time they passed through the town and found the turn at the north end, the sky was almost black and the wind had begun whistling from the northwest. A few fat drops of rain smacked the windshield. Faith stopped at the foot of the rutted driveway and reached across Sean into the glove compartment. She took out the fanny pack, the same one she’d retrieved from where she’d dropped it near the border in Sasabe. She unzipped it and checked the load in her Glock. There was no safety on this model. It was ready to fire.

Faith didn’t try to hide their approach at all. She didn’t leave the SUV down the driveway from the farmhouse. She drove right up to the clearing and parked next to the dark luxury sedan there.

“Bastard,” she said, looking at the car.

With Sean beside her, she moved up the steps. She remembered which one creaked, and stepped especially hard on it. She wanted him to hear her. She wanted him to know she was here, and that the game was over.

She hauled open the screen door, the one that had flapped in the wind and startled her the first time she came here.

Nothing would startle her this time.

Faith twisted the doorknob and stepped into the house.

The man sat in an old bentwood rocking chair with a wicker seat. He was rocking back and forth, a book in his hands.

“Bravo,” Isaac Smith said. “It actually took you less time than I thought it would. I suspect it was difficult to convince your brother to come back with you. I wasn’t betting you’d be able to do that part. I should never underestimate you, should I?”

He looked the same as he always had: a few years older than Faith, completely unassuming, of medium height and build, dressed in a way that would let him blend into the wallpaper. But then, that was the idea. The focus was never to be on Smith himself, but on what he could do.

“Sanborn,” Sean said.

“Agent Kelly,” Smith said. “Or Mr. Sullivan, if you prefer. Please, let’s avoid confusion. Your sister knows me best as Isaac Smith. Let’s stick with that, shall we?”

“Why?” Sean said. “For Christ’s sake, why? Why all this?”

“Your sister knows,” Smith said.

Faith slowly drew her gun from behind her back, placing it where Smith could see it. “Like I told you in Arizona, Sean, it was all about Smith and me. Everything that happened, happened so he could do to me what he did to so many others. I deprived him of being able to play his games with others, so he decided he’d play them with me.” She shook her head. “Didn’t you read the fine print when Yorkton promised you a new life under Department Thirty?”

“Indeed I did. There was all kinds of legalistic nonsense about adhering to the letter and spirit of the law, not breaking the law or conspiring with others to break the law, et cetera, ad nauseum. I remember it well.”

“But it didn’t apply to you.”

Smith shrugged. “This was personal.” He smiled, and Faith wanted to take the gun and smash his face in.

“You see, Sean,” Faith said, “this man had just pulled off something major, something amazing. He reached back more than a century to an obscure frontier massacre and used it to bring down a Supreme Court justice. He destroyed God only knows how many people along the way. My friend Alex Bridge was very nearly one of them. But I stopped him.”

“No, you didn’t,” Smith said. “The justice still fell, didn’t he?”

“And so did you. I should have killed you on those rocks in Galveston Bay, but my boss had other ideas. So you got a new identity and spilled what you knew about your previous jobs. Where did they send you, by the way? Who are you now?”

“Do you think that matters?” Smith said. “You have no idea how many identities I can create for myself. My ‘relocation’ has been a minor inconvenience. The only loose thread has been you, and now you’ve been tied up nicely.”

“Indiana, was that it?” Faith said, ignoring the jab.

“Evansville. Lovely country, right along the Ohio River. I’m a software trainer named David Corcoran. I’ve had the flexibility to travel, which was very important in bringing my plans together.”

Thunder cracked outside. Faith heard rain blowing against the windows of the old house.

“So it’s true,” Sean said. He’d begun to circle around to the side of Smith’s rocking chair. “You really did all of this to get revenge on my sister.”

“Revenge? Oh, don’t be simpleminded. Revenge is so banal. No, this was a lesson to be taught.”

Sean shook his head. “You prick. What did you do to Daryn? How did you get her tied up in this scheme?”

“That was quite easy, actually,” Smith said. “I simply had to be patient and keep my eyes open. Her agenda was no secret. She’d been very public about it. She wanted to get at her father and score her own political points. She offered herself to The Cause.” He spoke the last two words in a grand, mocking tone. He glanced at Faith. “But you know that now, don’t you?”

“Faith?” Sean said.

Faith looked at her brother. “Remember what I said, that Daryn had committed suicide? Maybe someone else pulled the trigger, maybe someone else put the rope around her neck and lifted her into that tree, but it was suicide, all right.”

“I don’t understand,” Sean said.

“Daryn was dying,” Faith said.

Smith smiled.

“At first I couldn’t explain it,” Faith said. “I simply thought she was dangerous, maybe sociopathic. Her behavior was so erratic-intellectual and articulate one minute, vulgar and profane the next. Plus the headaches. She had those terrible headaches, and they got worse and worse as time went on. That should have been a giveaway, but then, I wasn’t looking for it.”

“What are you saying?” Sean demanded.

“Daryn had a glioblastoma multiforme lodged on her frontal lobe.”

“A brain tumor,” Smith added. “Completely inoperable. She would have been dead in another three months.” He spread his hands apart. “So she offered herself for The Cause, to be used in whatever way would serve her agenda the best. She rather liked the idea of being a martyr, instead of dying at twenty-four from some useless cancer. This way, she would die for something ‘greater than herself.’ Or so she believed.”

“I don’t believe you,” Sean said. “Daryn was willing to let herself be killed so you could get to Faith?”

“Well, of course, Daryn didn’t know my true motivations. As far as she knew, I was Franklin Sanborn, professor of communication, and shared her agenda for social and political change. But yes, Agent Kelly, she put her life in my hands. She was about to lose it anyway, and she was already growing weaker. You saw that, didn’t you?”

Sean appeared to agonize. He clenched his fists at his sides. “After the bomb, down on Main Street after the car crashed into the wall, you had the gun on Daryn. You said something about a moment of pain, then no more pain at all, and something about how she’d probably enjoy that. I didn’t know what you meant.”

Smith smiled. “Observant, much like your sister. It must be a family trait.”

Thunder cracked again. Faith saw a cloud-to-cloud lightning flash through the side window. The clouds seemed lower, a solid wall of them across the dark sky.

“But I still don’t understand,” Sean said. “She knew then that you were going to kill her? You’d already set this up. Why go through all of that?”

“From the moment you met Tobias Owens in Sasabe, everything was an illusion, Sean. Nothing you saw or heard or felt or did was real. Any interaction you saw between Daryn and myself was for your benefit, to continue the illusion. Tobias Owens wasn’t even real. He, of course, was not Senator McDermott’s counsel. He was an ambulance chaser from Phoenix who had no scruples and wanted a fast buck. See where it got him.”

“He’s right,” Faith said. “None of it was real. He used Daryn and you to get to me, to devastate me in every way imaginable. I had to watch my own brother falling apart, and it twisted me to the point that I suspected him of murder. Sean, she very carefully drew you in. You thought you were getting close to her so you could convince her to go home. But she knew who you were all the time. That was the whole point. She even got you to participate in her Coalition.”

“But why me?” Sean said. “You couldn’t know that I was going to screw up at work and be so desperate that I’d go along with Owens.”

“Oh, no,” Smith said. “You did that all by yourself. I’d identified you long ago as your sister’s biggest weakness. I saw what you were doing to yourself and knew it was only a matter of time until something happened that pushed you over the edge. I just had to hope that Daryn lived long enough to do her part.”

“How could you know?”

Smith looked at Sean as if he were a child who didn’t comprehend the day’s math lesson. “I watched you, of course. Just as I did your parents, at various times. Family ties can almost always be used against a person. You’re the living proof of it.”

Faith stared at Smith in disbelief. “You believed Sean was my biggest weakness?”

“Of course. And in exploiting his weakness, I exploited yours at the same time. It was a simple and beautiful plan, and it worked beyond my wildest expectations.”

Sean put his hands to his head, as if it were about to burst. “All of this…the attacks on the banks. That whole business with Daryn being angry at you for wanting to use explosives…that was staged? I mean, you slapped her. You-”

“It was good theater,” Smith said, crossing his legs at the ankle. “Remember, everything was staged. The two men who broke into Daryn’s apartment while you were there with her? The ones who ran you off the road? The incidents were created to form a bond between the two of you, to put you on the run, to put you in a position to come here, to be dependent on each other.”

Faith brought the gun up in her hand. She pointed at Smith with it, coming closer to the rocking chair. “All of it was designed to make Sean-and eventually, me-believe that Daryn McDermott was