James Grippando - Need You Now

Zach smiled, as if the statement were naïve. “That’s not the way it works. Virtually all spyware is programmed to alert the master when the target-in this case, Patrick-is actually using his telephone.”

“But I use my phone a lot,” I said. “Someone would have to listen to hours and hours of crap in the hope of getting ten seconds of meat, unless there’s a way to refine it further.”

“There is,” said Zach. “More sophisticated spyware can be programmed to alert the master only when you communicate with certain phone numbers.”

“So it’s possible that when Evan called to tell me about the decryption, the ‘master,’ as you call him, received an automatic alert that I was on the phone with Evan.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell by looking at my phone if that alert system was, in fact, part of the spyware?”

“No. That would only be in the master’s equipment.”

“Damn. Nothing’s ever easy,” I said.

“You got a plan to deal with someone like Joe Barber?” Zach asked.

“Is that spyware on my BlackBerry still active, even though you’ve analyzed it?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” said Zach.

“Then the answer to your question is yes,” I said. “I do have a plan.”

L illy didn’t like what she was hearing. Too much scheming, Too much at stake, too much former FBI involvement.

Ex-FBI, ex-lover, ex-anything. They all have an ex to grind, pun intended.

“Excuse me,” she said as she pushed away from the kitchen counter. Her smartphone was fully charged, so she unplugged the cord and took everything with her. Patrick didn’t even notice her get up. Scully and his tech buddy were talking over each other, and Patrick was in the middle.

“You’re not going to bed, are you?” asked Connie, surprised.

“Bathroom,” said Lilly. She left the kitchen, taking little steps. The official Boy Scouts of America 100th Anniversary sweatpants that Connie had loaned her for the night were long enough to cover her feet like footies. She was virtually sliding across the tile floor to the master bathroom off Connie’s bedroom. She could hear the strategizing in the kitchen right up until she switched on the light and closed the bathroom door.

Lilly went to the sink and looked in the mirror. Frightful. Weeks of worry had left bags beneath her eyes that were way beyond the miracle of any concealer. But that was merely the superficial toll. The youthful gleam in her eyes, the sparkle from within, had completely vanished. Fear had replaced it, the fear of being trapped. It had been a while since she’d heard from her source-the ex-federal agent who wanted to protect her. Another ex. Another ax to grind. Lilly knew it was just a matter of time before he gave her another assignment.

A sharp pain gripped her abdomen. It was her “funny tummy,” as she called it, but there was nothing funny about it. This episode was so bad that she doubled over, unable to stand, and sat on the tile floor. Leaning against the wall was the only way to hold herself up. She breathed in and out until the pain subsided.

I can’t do this anymore.

Lilly closed her eyes to consider her options. There weren’t many-and the really good ones totaled zero. She chose the least of the worst. She powered on her telephone: 2:13 A.M. That didn’t matter. The invitation had been to “call me anytime.” Lilly had committed the number to memory. She dialed and counted the rings until she heard the voice on the line. A sleepy voice that simply grunted out the word “hello.”

“It’s Lilly Scanlon, please don’t hang up.”

There was a pause on the line, perhaps a moment to check the clock on the nightstand and see what godforsaken time of day it was. “Lilly, is everything okay?” asked Agent Henning.

“I’m sorry to call you at this hour, but I-I don’t know who else to turn to.”

“It’s fine. I’m glad you reached out to me.”

The pain cut through Lilly’s abdomen again. She gritted her teeth and struggled through it. “I can’t talk here.”

“Where are you?”

“Still in New Jersey. Can we meet somewhere? Just you and me?”

“Not Patrick?”

“No. Not Patrick.”

There was another pause, as if Agent Henning were thinking through the schism. “Okay, that’s fine,” Henning said. “I can meet you anywhere, anytime. Right now, if you want.”

“No, not now. Patrick is going into the bank in the morning. I can’t get away until then.”

Get away? Lilly wondered how that must have sounded to an FBI agent, but there was a light knock on the bathroom door before she could clarify.

Connie asked, “Lilly, are you okay in there?”

Lilly’s heart raced. She tightened her grip on the phone, whispered the meeting place she had decided upon prior to making the call-“Septuagesimo Uno Park, nine A.M.”-and quickly hung up.

“Lilly?” called Connie.

She kicked herself for having chosen a park with a Latin name, the pronunciation of which she’d mangled. No way Henning had understood. Lilly banged out a clarifying text message, adding for good measure that it was on Seventy-first Street at West End.

Another knock. “Lilly?”

Lilly pushed herself up from the floor, took a deep breath to calm her nerves, and opened the door. She was face-to-face with Connie.

“Were you on the phone?”

Lilly didn’t know whether to lie or tell her the truth. “No,” she lied.

“Oh. I thought I heard you talking.”

“No,” said Lilly-but it was a squeak, her nervous helium voice. She tried to cover with an explanation. “I was just checking my voice mail.”

Connie gave her a funny look. “Whatever. Anyway, Patrick has a question for you. Can you join us?”

Join us. Of all the simple questions Lilly had heard in her lifetime, that one had to be the most complicated.

“Sure,” said Lilly, “whatever you need.”

M ongoose was on the move. He did his best work at four A.M.

More than three years had passed since his last visit to Ciudad del Este. That one had been the capstone in a string of nine visits over a four-month period, all paid for by the U.S. government, all under the name Niklas Konig, a wealthy investor from Berlin. German was only one of five languages he spoke fluently, and on his first visit with Manu Robledo he’d spoken mostly Spanish. By their fifth meeting, he had befriended Robledo. By the eighth, they’d forged a business relationship. After the ninth, Robledo had traveled back to Miami with him to meet his Cushman connection, Gerry Collins. Collins had already been brought on board: Mongoose, personally, had sat him down, told him that Treasury was fully aware that he and Cushman were running a Ponzi scheme, and promised that Collins could get off with a prison sentence of ten years-as opposed to ten decades-if he cooperated. Operation BAQ had launched without a hitch. Manu Robledo and his highly suspect clientele would take a $2 billion loss without ever knowing that they’d been set up. A thing of beauty, and a perfectly acceptable result under a public policy cost-benefit analysis, if only Cushman’s scheme had, in fact, been worth the mere $6 billion that Treasury had estimated, not $60 billion.

Morons.

Mongoose climbed another step in the dark stairwell, then stopped. A bumpy puddle-jumper flight from São Paulo had left him with a nearly unbearable pain that radiated down his leg. Another painkiller would have been useless. After three years of living on pills, his system had built up a tolerance. Excruciating pain was a way of life, though sometimes it was so bad that it was impossible to stay on task. The pain-more specifically, the pills-had definitely made it impossible for him to remain with the agency. At least that was what the psychiatrists and pain-management specialists had told the bureaucrats on the disciplinary review panel. Shitheads, all of them.