David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

And that, really, was all. Faith didn’t keep any photographs on her desk, nothing that said anything personal about her. This office is not my life, she reminded herself constantly, so it shouldn’t look like my life. Still, in unguarded moments-sometimes alone, sometimes with Scott Hendler-she wondered if it wasn’t becoming her life after all, her own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

She raised the blinds behind the desk, which looked out on the Oklahoma City National Memorial, across Northwest Fourth Street. She only looked for a moment, though-she had mixed feelings about the place. Even though she hadn’t lived in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, when the Murrah Building was destroyed, she’d felt the sadness and outrage of the rest of the country when watching the news reports. Then she’d wound up living here, assigned to Oklahoma when she joined the Marshals Service. She understood what the memorial meant, but for her, it also stirred up personal feelings. It was there, standing under the Survivor Tree, that she’d been recruited- forced, she often thought-to join Department Thirty by now-director Yorkton.

Faith turned to her computer and booted it up, then waited a moment. She took a few minutes, as she did every day, to mentally review the cases under her jurisdiction as a regional Department Thirty case officer. She now had seven in her region, which encompassed New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. She currently had two cases living in Texas, one in Oklahoma, one in Kansas, three in Missouri, and none in Arkansas. She’d inherited all but two from her predecessor. She’d processed two new ones in the past year, one of them going to St. Charles, Missouri, one to Enid, Oklahoma. Leon Bankston would make eight, which was a pretty good case load. Case officers weren’t privy to the cases of other regional officers-Yorkton often trumpeted the virtues of compartmentalization-but she thought one of the other regions had a dozen cases, and one of the others had only three. It was a strange and surreal program, and some aspect confounded her nearly every day.

But then, she thought, maybe the very fact that she hadn’t figured out all the angles yet kept her alert. Yorkton seemed to be pleased with her. Her field assistant, Simon, gave her wary respect, though Faith was still leery of him.

All of her cases were fairly self-sustaining right now, and there was no major administrative work to be done. She’d have to begin annual reviews in another couple of months, but for now, her little corner of the shadow world was running smoothly.

Back to Leon Bankston, gun runner extraordinaire. Faith smiled. Actually, Bankston was an idiot, which explained why he wasn’t further along in the underworld. The truck into which he’d smuggled the weaponry had an expired license plate, just waiting for an alert Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper to pull it over.

First she called the safe house and talked to Simon. Bankston, soon to be Benjamin Williams, was doing fine. He was obsessing about various details of the house and getting on Simon’s nerves, but was otherwise all right.

“Just get him out of here soon,” Simon said, “or I may have to kill him.”

She had a couple of steps left in completing the Williams identity. The attorney general still had to give his go-ahead, but the AG always followed the department’s recommendation without fail. She had the documents creating his background-birth certificate, Social Security card, school records, college degree, work history, references. She just had to make the final arrangements for someplace for him to live, and iron out the details of his employment. Employers of Department Thirty protectees never knew their employees’ real identities or what they had done, only that they were being guaranteed a job through a federal placement program. Sometimes Faith used a Department of Labor cover, sometimes Department of Education, when dealing with the employers.

She spent two hours on the phone working out the details, still awaiting the official go-ahead. Then she sat back, having caught up everything she needed to do today. She was about to call Sean and tell him to meet her downtown for lunch, when Hendler called on her cell.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Hendler said.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Faith repeated, and smiled.

“Lunch?”

She thought for a moment. “What about a three-some?”

Hendler started laughing.

“You know what I mean,” Faith said. “For lunch.”

“Ah, dammit,” Hendler said. “Just when I thought-”

“Watch it, pal. You never know who’s listening.”

“Right, right. Your brother joining us for lunch?”

“And smart too,” Faith said. “Yep. I was just getting ready to call him.”

“I’ll meet you in front of the courthouse at eleven thirty.”

“It’s a date,” Faith said, and clicked off before the awkward end-of-call silence could come.

She started to call Sean, then put the phone down again. It would only take a quick e-mail, and she could find out about Sean being “on leave” from ICE. Department Thirty had access to every database the United States Government possessed, through The Basement, which was the entity that did the actual creation of the new identities for protectees. Faith had no idea how many people worked in The Basement, or its physical location. It was alleged to literally be in the basement of one of Washington’s myriad government buildings. The Basement had access to everything, and Faith had access to The Basement.

“Sean,” she said aloud, without even realizing it.

Her big brother. Something wasn’t right about him now. She didn’t know if it was booze or the stress of the job. He’d been married briefly-less than a year-right after he moved to Arizona, and he never talked about it. He’d never mentioned his wife’s name to Faith in the five-plus years since the divorce. Neither of their lives, brother’s or sister’s, had quite turned out the way they’d always envisioned.

“Sean,” she said again.

She typed a message to The Basement.

The Basement returned her e-mail in less than half an hour. She skipped over the details of Sean’s background-she knew that well enough.

She quickly learned that his career with the Customs Service, later ICE, had been a twisting carnival ride. In the first couple of years, before Customs was absorbed into Homeland Security and reorganized into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he had no fewer than six commendations. Most were garden-variety bureaucratic notes, but one talked about his outstanding service in helping to break up a ring that was importing young Mexican girls into Arizona and selling them as sex slaves. Things had deteriorated quickly thereafter. She began to read vaguely worded reprimands, just the sort of thing a supervisor would write when an underling had screwed up but the supervisor still thought highly of him overall.

The reprimands became more specific as time went by, and they began to reference a growing problem with alcohol. At one point, an ICE-appointed counselor had referred Sean to undergo outpatient alcohol treatment and to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The final entry in the file, dated two days ago, written by Special Agent in Charge Weller, noted that Special Agent Sean M. Kelly had been placed on administrative suspension without pay, pending a termination hearing. The reason: severe dereliction of duty, related to uncontrolled consumption of alcohol.

“Oh, shit, Sean,” Faith said. “Why couldn’t you-” She choked off the words.

Her big brother. Her only sibling. No wonder he didn’t want their father to know he was here. All the talk about Joe Kelly trying to control their relationship aside, Faith knew that the old man would see right through any talk about Sean being “on leave,” and would demand to know why.