Need You Now

That made sense, and I realized that it was at such a high level of encryption that she wouldn’t have been able to read it even if she had known it was there. But I had to discount my assessment of everything Lilly said by a serious I-want-you-back factor.

“Patrick, are you okay?”

Just seeing Lilly could do terrible things to my ability to focus. “Yeah, sorry.”

“So now can I see the memo, please?”

“The short answer to that question is yes.”

She was wary, the way most people react if they’re smart enough to know that the long answer always swallows up the short answer.

“You don’t have it, do you?” she said.

I drew a breath, and it was hesitation enough for Lilly to get up to leave. “You are such a liar, Patrick.”

“Lilly, wait. I do have it.”

She stopped, threw me a look that said You’d better not be lying , and slid back into the booth.

A waitress came, and we ordered coffee. Decaf for Lilly. The aversion to caffeine told me that she hadn’t been sleeping well, which added to my own sense of regret.

“Lilly, I am really sorry that-”

“Stop,” she said. “Let’s not go there.”

“Right,” I said, pulling myself back together. “Here’s the deal with the memo.”

I paused, not sure where to start. Our talk outside the building after the meeting in Barber’s office had ended in disaster, mostly due to the way I’d skirted around my involvement with the FBI.

“Go ahead,” she said. “You were saying.”

I leaned closer, as if to emphasize that I was sharing a secret. “Do you remember last time we spoke, when I said I went to Singapore as part of an official investigation?”

She rolled her eyes. Clearly, it wasn’t a pleasant memory. “Yes.”

“It wasn’t an investigation for some warring faction of the Santucci family,” I said, using her words. “It was for the FBI.”

The waitress brought our coffee, which was a good thing, because it forced Lilly to keep her composure. The waitress left, and Lilly listened as I explained my deal with the FBI-cancer treatment for my father in exchange for any information I might find that Cushman was laundering money through BOS/Singapore.

“You mean information that I was helping Cushman launder money through BOS/Singapore,” said Lilly.

I was getting no wiggle room. “Well, yes.”

“So, the bottom line hasn’t changed. You were spying on me.”

“I didn’t even know you when I cut the deal. Everything changed after I met you. And once we started seeing each other, I never lied about my feelings for you.”

“ ‘Love at first sight’ was not a lie?”

“Lilly, don’t count this against my feelings for you now, but I never told you it was love at first sight.” I nearly gasped, not because of my honesty, but because I was starting to sound like a reject from The Bachelor .

“I know you didn’t,” Lilly said, lowering her eyes. “When I said love at first sight, maybe I was channeling my own feelings to you.”

She looked at me, and I at her, and after a moment I could see that we had come to the same critical realization: this was nauseating.

“ Oh, baby, I need your cow ,” I sang.

Lilly smiled, and then we shared a little laugh. I wanted to reach for her hand, but the feel-good moment hadn’t made our problems go away.

“So,” said Lilly. “The memo?”

She was back to the heart of the matter, but her tone was softer. I told her about the trip to Boston to see my father, the conversation with Andie Henning.

Lilly asked, “Do you think Agent Henning will actually show you the decrypted memo?”

“There’s a chance,” I said. “But there’s at least an equal chance that my tech guy will decode the encrypted version I already have.”

My BlackBerry vibrated. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let it ring through to voice mail. “Lilly, I know this isn’t a pleasant memory, but I wanted to ask you about the day you were attacked. When you actually saw the memo.”

“We went over this the last time we were here.”

“I know, but so much has changed. Tell me not just what you read, but how he showed it to you, what he said to you. Everything.”

She took a breath, then let it out. “Okay. It was my last week in Singapore. I went for a run early, like I always did, before it got too hot. There’s a path by the beach that’s really beautiful when the sun comes up. I was in the zone, cruising along, and suddenly, I was down on the ground, my face in the sand. Before I really knew what was happening, he was sitting on my spine and I was pinned underneath him. My instinct was to fight back, but I was tired from the run, and he was way too strong. When he grabbed me by the hair, it was like he was going to pull it right out. Then I felt the gun at the back of my head.”

This version of events had more details than the one before, and her voice was starting to quiver. I gave her a moment.

“Then what?”

“It was a lot like what happened to you in Times Square. He said it was time to turn over the money that was funneled to Cushman through BOS.”

“Did you say anything?”

“I said I didn’t know a thing about Cushman. That’s how I ended up with the powder burn I showed you the last time we sat at this table. He pulled the trigger, jerked the gun away just enough for the bullet to brush past my neck. The silencer probably kept me from going deaf, but it told me I was dealing with someone who knew what he was doing.”

It was more than “a lot like” what had happened to me. It was virtually identical. “How did the memo come into it?” I asked.

“I kept saying over and over, ‘It’s not me, you’ve got the wrong person!’ He pulled my head up by the hair again and…” She swallowed hard, then continued. “I thought he was going to put a bullet in my head. But that was when he put the memo under my nose, literally, right in the sand.”

“You’re sure it was a Treasury Department memo?”

“It was on Treasury letterhead. I supposed it could have been a fake, but why would he forge it? He’d only be fooling himself.”

“Tell me everything you remember about it.”

“It was quick, so what I remember most is the part that mentioned me by name. Something like: ‘Treasury’s most promising lead as to concealment of proceeds from the Cushman fraud remains Gerry Collins’ banking activities at BOS/Singapore, and the key person of interest at BOS has been identified as Lilly Scanlon.’ ”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“Not really. He focused me on the key language. It wasn’t like he gave me time to read it from start to finish.”

My BlackBerry rang again, the same number as before. This time I realized it was Evan, so I begged Lilly’s pardon and answered.

“What’s up?”

“Got some good news,” Evan said.

“Tell me.”

He chuckled, then did a really bad imitation of a Russian spy: “I broke the code, comrade.”