David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

It was a little past noon, and the brilliant skies of morning had turned to drizzle. You don’t like the weather in Oklahoma, wait five minutes, someone had told her shortly after she moved to the state. It was especially volatile in spring: sunshine, heat, wind, thunderstorms, even tornadoes-all in the space of a single day. She’d seen it many times by now.

She wasn’t really hungry, adrenaline pumping in overdrive, but she’d learned in doing recruitments-or “intakes”-that she got so wrapped up in things that she sometimes simply forgot to eat, and would then suddenly find herself sapped of energy when her adrenaline crashed. So she drove through McDonald’s, ate without tasting, and made her next call as she drove south through Edmond.

“Richard Conway,” said a voice she knew well.

She had to wait a moment, as she always did. She knew the voice, the precise, occasionally pompous diction, but he wasn’t Conway to her, and never would be. He was still Dean Yorkton in her mind. Ironically for the present case, he’d been a field officer, living next door to Frank and Anna Elder in the neighborhood she’d just left, for more than twenty years. Now he was the director of Department Thirty, administering the unit from a tiny unmarked office in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

“Mr. Director,” she said, knowing how he liked formality.

“My dear Officer Kelly,” Yorkton said. “I haven’t heard your voice in a while, though I was just preparing to type you a message giving you the go-ahead on the Bankston case.”

Faith nodded. “Good. I’ll move him as soon as I can. I’m calling about something new that’s come my way.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Have you heard anything about a bombing of the Chase bank building here in Oklahoma City this morning?”

“It was on CNN. Dreadful business. I know that building well, from when I lived there. Though it wasn’t Chase then…that was three or four bank mergers ago. From the coverage I’m seeing here, it could have been much worse than it was.”

“I don’t know details yet,” Faith said. “What I do know is that I have one of the lead conspirators in the bombing sitting in the safe house in Edmond.”

Long pause. “He came to you?”

“She. And yes, she was brought to me.”

“What do you mean, she was brought to you?”

Faith slowed through a construction zone on Santa Fe. All parts of Oklahoma City were under construction these days, it seemed. “It’s complicated.”

“Yes?”

“I know, I know, everything we do is complicated. Actually, my brother brought her to me.”

“Your what?”

“My brother.” She explained Sean’s involvement, omitting any references to his drinking. By the time she’d explained what she knew of the situation, she was out of Edmond, on the Broadway Extension crossing Interstate 44.

“Oh my,” Yorkton said when she’d finished. “This is messy, isn’t it? How did your brother know about your job? Oh wait a moment…he’s Customs, isn’t he? So he knew of our existence, then put two and two together and brought the girl to you for protection. You didn’t actually tell your brother you worked for Department Thirty, did you?”

“No, of course not.”

“That would have been a severe breach of security protocols.”

“Blah, blah, blah. I know that. What’s your take on the girl?”

“A senator’s daughter. Very, very messy. But if she’s truly the force behind this coalition, she could qualify. If we can prevent any other bombings from happening…”

He was counting political brownie points, Faith knew. That was what he did, what she supposed he had to do. She had enough difficulty grappling with Department Thirty’s mission at times, just as a case officer. She wasn’t sure she could have handled the political end of it.

“You’ll investigate her information, of course,” Yorkton was saying.

“I’m moving on it now.”

“Send me the list of targets.”

“I’ll do it as soon as I get to the office. Can you run this Franklin Sanborn name?”

“You sound uncomfortable about it.”

“I am,” Faith said. She steered around a slow-moving truck. “I know the name. I’m positive I know Sanborn, but I’ve come up totally empty so far. When the local cops were running this as a missing persons case, they looked for him, and he’s a phantom. But I don’t think so. I know him, I’m just not sure why.”

“I have confidence in your abilities, Officer Kelly,” Yorkton said. “If he’s there to be found, you’ll find him, I’m sure. And you have access to almost every resource that I do. But I will do some checking on this end.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep you updated.”

She ended the call and drove on. A deep, irrational part of her didn’t want to know damage estimates or the death and injury toll from the Chase Tower bombing. She couldn’t make herself listen to the radio news. She was in the middle of it now, and even worse, so was Sean.

Her own brother.

Her hero.

Her handsome, intelligent, intuitive big brother. The one who kept things neat and tidy and who could cook gourmet meals and who was popular with small kids and animals. When the Kellys gathered in Chicago for the big Memorial Day reunion-dozens and dozens of relatives, from as far away as California and Vermont, and one time some distant cousins had come from County Wicklow, Ireland-the young children were drawn to Sean as if magnetized. She’d finally realized it was because he was one of them, childlike to the end. He rarely considered consequences, whether it was rolling down a hill with his little cousins or drinking whiskey for breakfast or being sexually manipulated by a vixen like Daryn McDermott. He had an innocence that betrayed all he’d done and all he’d seen. Faith supposed she no longer had that, and the children could sense it, gravitating toward their cousin Sean instead of their cousin Faith.

Sean. If only he’d thought about the consequences.

If only were the two most useless words in any language. That sounded like something her father would say. The thought made Faith a little sad.

Downtown was cordoned off after the bombing, so Faith had to backtrack to the Tenth Street exit and drive several blocks west, before working her way back to the courthouse. She saw a handful of FBI and ATF officers she knew on the streets, talking in small groups. She thought she also caught a glimpse of Detective Rob Cain, huddled in a knot of uniformed officers a few blocks away from Bank of America Plaza.

She parked in the garage, then walked right in the front door of the federal courthouse. There was no lockdown in progress. The security guard simply nodded to her as she put her SIG Sauer in the tray and passed through the metal detector.

“Ms. Kelly,” he said.

“Hey, Clayton,” she said. She went through the detector without setting it off, then retrieved and holstered her SIG. “Much excitement over here?”

“Nah,” Clayton said. “They locked us down for a while, but we were on top of it pretty quick.”

“I had to leave,” Faith said. “I’ve been out of the loop for a couple of hours.”

Clayton looked at her but knew better than to ask questions. “Well, your friend is upstairs.”

“Which friend?”

Clayton smiled. They both knew she didn’t have that many friends that would visit her at the courthouse. The guard motioned to the top of his own head and drew a little circle with his index finger.

“Bald spot,” he said.

Faith smiled. “Thanks, Clayton.”

“He said he’d wait for you down in the Marshals’ office.”

She took the ornate stairs to the second floor and turned down the hallway. To her surprise, Hendler was standing in the hall across from her office door. He was wearing his dark blue FBI windbreaker over his standard white shirt and red tie, with charcoal gray suit pants. Faith, who’d once prided herself on “dressing for success,” felt suddenly scruffy in her uniform of blue jeans and a polo shirt. Her only jewelry was the tiger’s-eye gem Sean had sent her from Arizona, encircled by stainless steel wire and worn on a thin black string around her neck.