James Grippando - Need You Now

“Agent Henning has offered to help us, and that’s the way I’m leaning,” said Lilly.

She wasn’t being unreasonable, but I looked at Scully and suddenly felt as though I’d found an old friend.

“Grab Connie’s phone in the kitchen and let Henning know where we are, if that makes you feel better,” I said. “But take off your coat. We should stay awhile.”

T he subway ride from Midtown got Andie back to the FBI field office in lower Manhattan before six P.M. Barber had called their limousine meeting “unofficial,” but Andie intended to complete a formal interview report anyway. She was seated at her desk and about to start typing when Supervisory Agent Teese entered her office, closed the door, and delivered the news.

“We’re pulling the plug.”

Andie didn’t have to ask, On what? After eight months of investigating the movement of Cushman’s funds through BOS, however, she wasn’t about to simply pack her bags and fly back to Miami.

“Who made the decision?”

“Washington.”

“By ‘Washington,’ do you mean headquarters or someone outside the bureau?”

“The decision came to me from the director’s office.”

“That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

He pulled up a chair and sat facing her, surprisingly contrite. “I’m sorry about this, Andie. It’s not a matter of my backing down to the political will. It’s embarrassing, is what it is.”

“For the bureau, you mean?”

“For me, and for everyone else who’s been trumpeting the theory that the actual money in Cushman’s Ponzi scheme was one-tenth of the sixty billion dollars that most estimates put it at. I was certain that Cushman was a money-laundering operation with mostly paper losses.”

“So you’ve changed your tune: Patrick Lloyd was not holding out on us.”

“Not holding out,” he said.

“So the final chapter on this investigation will read how?”

He thought about it, and the expression on his face was like that of a man writing his own obituary. “There was no evidence that Cushman funds were laundered by anyone at BOS/Singapore, least of all Lilly Scanlon.”

“But getting back to the embarrassment factor: this is not just the shutting down of our investigation into BOS.”

“No. It’s a wholesale rejection of the theory that Cushman’s Ponzi scheme was a money-laundering operation, and that the only real money was the phony ten percent return that Cushman pretended to pay his investors.”

Andie was not one to say I told you so . “I think we both saw this coming.”

“You did. I should have. The reason the ‘paper loss’ theory got any traction at all was because, at first, so little money was recovered for the victims. That’s changing. Every day I get reports that lawyers are hot on the trail of real money-nowhere near the full sixty-billion-dollar loss, but much more than the ten percent that was posited by the money-laundering theory.”

Andie said, “This probably doesn’t make you feel any better, but there must be regulators feeling more heat than us for missing a sixty-billion-dollar fraud with real victims who lost real money.”

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head slowly, as if he’d just heard the world’s largest understatement. “The fallout is going to be huge.”

“How so?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.”

“I’d like to know. I think, after eight months of work, I deserve to know.”

Teese met her stare, but he was the one to blink. Andie didn’t take it as a sign of weakness. It was just a matter of fairness.

Teese said, “The view that the entire Cushman fraud was no bigger than six billion dollars of real money was an underlying assumption in the formulation of certain policies at Treasury.”

“Do you mean Operation BAQ?”

He hesitated, as if to measure his response. “Operation BAQ dates back over three years-before Cushman’s collapse.”

Andie connected the dots. “So that means it was known that Cushman was not legit.”

He didn’t offer a verbal response. Andie didn’t take his silence as a denial; he’d simply said all he could say, and she appreciated that. Even so, she pushed another button. “I met with retired agent Scully,” she said. “The handler for Tony Mandretti.”

“I know who he is. He worked out of this office for over twenty years.”

“The things he said about Operation BAQ were frankly difficult to swallow. But this conversation would seem to confirm everything he told me.”

Again, Teese didn’t answer directly. “Be careful with Scully.”

“That was my initial reaction,” she said. “But now my impression is that he was simply saying things that a retired FBI agent would tell another agent to make sure she didn’t become the bureau’s fifty-fourth special agent killed in the line of duty.”

“Scully is trouble,” said Teese. “You’d do well to stay away from him.”

Andie took the advice for what she thought it was worth. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Wrap it up. Go back to Miami.”

“What can I tell Patrick Lloyd?”

“That his cooperation is no longer needed. Nothing more.”

“What about his father?”

“He’ll receive medical attention until he passes. That satisfies our end of the deal.”

Teese rose, and he seemed ready to apologize once more, but he didn’t. Instead, he started for the door.

“Tell me something,” Andie said, stopping him. “How high does Operation BAQ go?”

He stood there for a moment, showing no reaction. Finally, he turned away, no answer, and left the office. Andie turned back to her computer, the blank report of her conversation with Joe Barber still up on the LCD.

That high, huh? she said to herself, answering her own question.

S cully clocked me at just under eight seconds.

“Not too shabby, Patrick,” he said. “A shot-to-shot reload of two seconds or less would get you into law enforcement, but not bad at all for a guy who hasn’t touched a gun since he was a teenager.”

We’d started with basic gun safety instruction, and for the next hour it was a series of dry-fire drills: draw, reload, target transition, and visualization skills. The Sig Sauer had felt a bit small in my hand, so we went with the Glock 9 millimeter. The fit was right, and it was much lighter weight than I’d expected. Everything was still step by step for me: Is the slide locked back? press magazine release → magazine is clear → grab new magazine → insert new magazine with correct orientation → release slide. But with enough practice I would store procedural memory, and the operation would become second nature. At least that was the theory.

“Tomorrow morning we can get to a range and do live fire,” said Scully.

“Patrick, don’t you have a job?” asked Lilly.

Her continued disapproval of firearms came through in her tone, but the question did remind me of the e-mails that were piling up on my BlackBerry since I’d removed the battery.

Scully dug into his duffel bag again. “Lilly, do you want to try the Sig Sauer?”

“No, I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, you can put away your Glock, your Smith and Wesson, your bazooka, and whatever else you’ve got in there. I’m serious, Patrick. Are you going into the bank tomorrow?”

I didn’t know the answer, didn’t know much about tomorrow at all.

A knock at the door broke the tension. Our pizza had arrived, a thin-crust, New York-style marvel from Gino’s on Central Avenue. Maybe not the best pizza in the entire universe, but definitely the best in the neighborhood. At Connie’s suggestion, we gathered around the kitchen table and turned the evening into more than just a weapons tutorial. We talked as the slices of pepperoni with extra-gooey cheese disappeared. Connie had a box of brownie mix left over from her last scout meeting, so she put a batch in the oven. None of us had room to eat them after knocking off a pizza, but there was nothing like the smell of brownies baking to change the mood in a room. Soon we were deep into Abe Cushman and Gerry Collins, four separate threads weaving into a single tale. Much of the focus was on Agent Henning, from my first communications with her eight months earlier, to Scully’s recent conversation. The honesty between Scully and me seemed to loosen Lilly’s tongue, and she opened up about her source. Her voice didn’t quake the way it had the first time she’d talked about him, but I could hear her throat tightening at times.