David Ellis - In the Company of Liars

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to tell you anything else. You can’t know what’s going on, Jess. You can’t. You have to trust me. You trust me, don’t you?”

“I-of course.”

“Okay. Did you-have you spoken to anyone tonight? Make any calls or anything like-”

“No,” she says. “I’ve been sitting here freaked out. You were gone so long.”

“I know, baby. I’m sorry.” She motions to the house. “We have to get back inside. Now, listen. I’m going to tell you inside, for the benefit of whoever’s listening, that I killed Sam. Just refuse to believe it. That’s fine. We’ll talk for a few minutes, then you’ll go to bed. Try to sleep, Jess. I promise you we’re going to be fine. Then, in the morning, you have to leave. You have to leave and not come back to this house until this thing is over. You can’t speak to your dad about this, either. I’m going to talk to him, okay? But you can’t. When this is over, you’ll understand why.”

Jessica looks back at the house. “We have to go in,” she says.

“Yes.” Allison steers her daughter, whispers in her ear. “This is going to turn out fine, Jess,” she promises.

Secrets. She lived with them for over a decade, maybe since the day she and Mat married, though she cannot rewind and know this. She did not love him. She did not love the man she spent over twenty years with, with whom she had a daughter.

Secrets never stay secret. She couldn’t live with it forever, and once Jessica was in college, it seemed the time.

And secrets, now, with Sam. Anethical dilemma, he said twice over the phone during the last week, but he wouldn’t elaborate. Wouldn’t even discuss it with her face to face.

A secret. Sam wouldn’t tell her.

And neither had she told him. A secret. Probably the same secret. She knows, too.

The FBI already seems to know. They have already seized Mat’s bank records. Mat told her-in the way he does-over dinner, in January. They had promised to do it, to see each other, to keep in touch. Mat often drank too much but really overdid it on that occasion.

They think I bribed some senators, he said, spitting out the words as if they were poison.

It didn’t take Einstein to fill in the gaps. It had been a big victory for Mat, when he got that bill out of the Senate last year, the prescription-drug bill. A big but controversial victory, involving a sudden vote change on the part of three different senators. That kind of behind-the-scenes arm-twisting might look bad to the public, but it makes legends out of lobbyists. Mat was a big winner in that deal.

Allison had noticed it when they were settling up on the divorce in December, a month earlier. Several large withdrawals from their bank account. About thirty thousand dollars, withdrawn in cash, over the last several months. She decided that she wouldn’t care, wouldn’t mention it. Maybe he had a mistress. Maybe he was trying to protect himself financially, stealing from the pot before it was divided up. She didn’t know and she didn’t care. She had plenty of her own money. If a peaceful resolution of the marriage cost her thirty thousand, it was the best money she had ever spent.

She didn’t know Mat was putting the cash in the hands of state legislators.

An ethical dilemma, Sam told her, twice in the last week, over the phone. He wouldn’t elaborate. A secret. He must have known.

She had the same secret, and neither of them wanted to tell the other because of who was involved.

Allison closes the book she’s reading. She’s hungry. It’s just after seven in the evening and she hasn’t eaten all day. Her stomach is in revolt.

Oh, she was so stupid, overreacting like a schoolgirl. Sam was admiring Jessica at the party, and she drives all the way down to the capital to make Sam fire her? Even accuses him of sleeping with Jess?

She had connected the three things like a paranoid, insecure child. Her daughter’s comment, that she was interested ina guy at work and Allisonwouldn’t approve. Sam’s mention of an ethical dilemma. And then Sam’s look at Jessica at that party.

She covers her face with a hand. She wishes she could wipe yesterday off the calendar. Just remove Friday, February the sixth from the books, and explain to her daughter in a thoughtful, mature way that the man for whom she is carrying a torch is actually Mommy’s boyfriend now.

She’ll do it. She’ll call Sam and apologize for her childish behavior.

She’ll talk to Jessica and explain everything.

Jane McCoy stands, silently, over the body of Sam Dillon. Owen Harrick walks out of the kitchen. “It’s clean,” he says. “We swept the whole place. The wire is gone.”

“Positive?” McCoy whispers.

“Positive. It’s clean, Jane.”

Other agents, two men and a woman, emerge from other parts of the house, all standing around the body of Sam Dillon.

“So we’re clean here,” McCoy confirms.

Every agent nods.

“Okay,” she says, her voice above a whisper for the first time-far above a whisper. “Then can someone tell me how the hell this happened?”

“Nobody thought he’dkill him,” says Owen Harrick. “He never gave any indication. You saw Haroon’s e-mail, Jane.”

Yes, she did. Since he first arrived in the U.S., Ram Haroon has had an e-mail address set up-pakistudent@interserver.com.Whenever Haroon needed to communicate with the U.S. government, he sent an e-mail to himself, secure in the knowledge that the government was monitoring the site and reading the message, too. He would have to be careful with the text, in the incredibly unlikely event that the Liberation Front was hacking into the site, too, but he would be able to get his message across to the feds.

It had been through this e-mail address that Haroon informed the FBI, a few months ago, that he had made contact with a front man who was now calling himself Larry Evans. It was through this e-mail address that Haroon informed them, last week, that Larry Evans was carefully watching two people, Sam Dillon and Allison Pagone, because there was some fear that Dillon had become wise to the operation at Flanagan-Maxx and had told his girlfriend, Allison, about it.

“Haroon said Evans was going to watch and wait,” Harrick agrees. “Not kill.”

“You guys didn’t see him come in?” McCoy asks, looking at the trio of agents assigned to watch the house.

“No. He slipped in when the food was delivered about six-twenty.”

They know this now. The Bureau has been watching and monitoring, by video, the property surrounding Sam Dillon’s house. Larry Evans was good. He snuck into the house when Sam Dillon was answering the front door. The problem is, Larry Evans not only escaped Sam Dillon’s attention; he faked out three federal agents.

“We saw him leaving, which was when we called you,” one of the agents says.

Yes, and then they went to the video and hit rewind, saw Larry Evans pick the lock through the back entrance at six-twenty-just as Sam Dillon was answering the front door-and saw him leave again about ten minutes after seven.

“I can’t believe this,” McCoy mumbles to herself. She looks at Harrick. “We’re good on Allison Pagone?”

“Yeah. We’ve got her covered.”

“Make sure of it, Owen. No one else is dying tonight.”

“What do we do now?” Harrick asks.

McCoy walks around the room delicately. “We don’t do anything, is what we do. We can’t be seen here. We have to go.”

“We leave this body here?” Agent Cline asks.

“Hell yes, we do. What do you suggest? We call the police? Maybe we should just call up Larry Evans and tell him we’re interested in him.”