Need You Now

He shot her a quick glance, and for an instant, Connie thought she almost saw the old Scully-a man who surely understood that Connie would never agree with what he’d done, but who didn’t want her to think he was evil. “There’s my dilemma, Connie.”

“Dilemma?”

His gaze returned to the icy road, but he kept talking. “One percent of two billion dollars is a lot of money. But I got one percent of nothing if Robledo couldn’t track down his money. It didn’t take a genius to see that Robledo would never recover a dime if he went to prison for killing Gerry Collins.”

Connie knew exactly what he was saying. “You pig! You forced my father to confess!”

“Your father was already sick with cancer. It wasn’t like he was going to be locked up forever.”

“You bastard! You used his kids against him, didn’t you? You were our handler. How could you threaten to out Patrick and me unless he confessed to something he didn’t do?”

He slapped her with the back of his hand. It landed with so much force that Connie’s head slammed against the passenger’s-side window.

“Connie! Oh, my God, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

She blinked hard, trying to shake off the blow and take the blur out of her vision. Scully’s apology left her equally dazed. Clearly he was at war with himself over his betrayal, the FBI version of an abusive spouse who returns home with a bouquet of flowers after pushing his wife down the stairs. The salty taste of her own blood trickled from her mouth as she spoke.

“That’s what Dad wanted to tell Patrick today, isn’t it?” she said. “That Scully is dirty.”

Scully was no longer smiling. His audience of one was spitting the vitriol of an angry mob. He focused on his driving, the tires humming on the snow-covered highway.

“I still don’t hear a denial,” Connie said.

“He doesn’t know.”

“What?”

“If it’s any comfort to you, your father never knew I stabbed him in the back. When I got Treasury to pay him some money for agreeing to sit on the Cushman report, I told him that it was compensation from the CIA for his confession-that if he didn’t take the deal, and that if he ever claimed he was framed, it was the CIA who would hand his kids over to the Santucci family. As far as he knew, the CIA had to keep Robledo out of prison for Operation BAQ to work. To this day, he thinks I was just the messenger.”

“You’re even worse than I thought you were.”

“Hey, at least I let him have the money.”

“Yeah, money he couldn’t even use to pay for his own cancer treatment once he was in prison.”

Scully kept one hand on the wheel and dialed his cell.

“Who are you calling?” asked Connie.

“Your dumbass brother,” he said. “Be still and behave yourself. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

63

I had no phone, but my number rang to Andie’s cell. It had taken a tech agent in the Boston field office all of thirty seconds to program the wireless hijacking and reroute my calls to Andie.

“It’s Scully,” she told me.

We were still in the parking lot, seated in the back of an FBI van that had arrived on the scene. Andie quickly plugged her phone into the mobile audio system. Her phone rang a second time-this time over the van’s surveillance speakers.

“You want me to take it?” I asked.

“Yes. Play this exactly the way I told you to play it. And keep Scully on the line as long as possible so that our techies can triangulate a location.”

On the fourth ring she hit Talk and handed me the phone.

“Scully, where are you?” I asked.

Andie gave me a quick thumbs-up, letting me know that she could hear the conversation just fine.

“I have your sister,” he said.

“Good. Bring her back. Dad wants to see her.”

He was on to my act. “Don’t play dumb,” he said. “I will hurt her.”

I’d never heard that tone from Scully, and it chilled me. The man was clearly desperate.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want?”

“For starters, you need to keep your mouth shut. If you go to Agent Henning or anyone else with any of the things your father told you, Connie’s dead.”

Again I felt chills. It was clear that Scully had no idea that the FBI was involved and that it had all been a setup-that my trip to Boston to see my father, the whole idea of a deathbed conversation, was something that Andie and my father had coordinated with me in order to draw out Mongoose and Barber. Andie slipped me a note: Don’t tell him you haven’t talked to your father.

“I hear you,” I said into the phone.

“It would have been much better for everyone if he had taken his secrets to the grave. But he just had to share all the things Agent Scully told him, didn’t he?”

I was tempted to play along and stall, but with Connie’s safety on the line, I was afraid to wing it.

Scully pushed harder. “What did he tell you, Patrick?”

Andie handed me a note. I wasn’t sure if I was just buying time for the tech agents to triangulate the call, or if it was another strategy, but I followed her script.

“Dad told me that he was forced to confess,” I said as I grabbed a second note from Andie. “But it was Robledo who killed Collins.”

“I know he told you more than that.”

I looked again at Andie, who handed me yet another note. “He said Operation BAQ would fail if Robledo was locked up for murder. That’s why-”

I stopped, bordering on panic. I wasn’t sure that Andie had written down her thoughts correctly.

Scully said, “That’s why what ?”

Andie underlined her words, reaffirming the message. I delivered it as written: “That’s why Dad believed you when you lied and told him it was the CIA that forced him to confess.”

Scully paused, and when he finally spoke, he sounded a bit philosophical. “So the poor bastard finally figured out it was me.”

It was confirmation of the theory Andie had scribbled out on her notes. She gave me a signal to keep him talking, but Scully had never really stopped.

“Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it, Patrick?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. Scully’s betrayal had been difficult for me to comprehend-the way he’d turned against my father, against Connie and me, against the bureau. Money could make people do worse things, I supposed. But his mention of “payback” made me realize that something more personal was also driving him.

“My father was the stain on your perfect career. That’s what this is about, isn’t it, Scully?”

He answered in a low, angry voice. “I told him and your mother both: stay away from each other. The fact that her maiden name was Santucci didn’t make it any easier for me to protect her. I made it crystal clear that the mob would put a gun to her head if they thought for one minute that she could reveal where your father was hiding.”

“But Dad wouldn’t listen.”

“Neither one of them listened.”

“So they killed her,” I said, the words catching in my throat. But I had to push through this. “She was killed