David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

Faith noticed he’d called her Kat, not Daryn. She looked at him carefully. “I don’t need to know about that.”

“No, my point is-I didn’t hallucinate all this. I haven’t imagined stuff like that since I was going through puberty, believe me.”

Faith was silent for a moment. She remembered a line from the movie Amadeus. Mozart was trying to convince the emperor to let him write a certain opera for the court, and the emperor had said, “ Mozart, you are passionate…but you do not persuade.”

“Sean,” Faith said, softening her voice. “I think that girl’s got you tied up in knots, so you’re not even sure who you are, much less who she is.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“I don’t know what you’d call her. Some kind of a sexual predator, maybe? I hadn’t been in the room alone with her five minutes before she was trying to hit on me, Sean.”

Sean sat back.

“Isn’t is just possible that you took this job to find Daryn, you found her, and she manipulated you? Instead of you convincing her to go home, back to Washington and her father and respectability, that she convinced you to find another way for her to escape her father forever? And I just happened to be close by?”

Sean shook his head. “No.”

“Sean, please.”

“Faith, I’m telling you, as your brother and as a law enforcement officer, for God’s sake…maybe I’m a screwed-up officer but I’ve still been one for seven years. This was a real conspiracy. We need to find the other members of the Coalition. We need to find Sanborn.”

Faith looked at him, at those sad blue-green eyes that had made him so popular with girls in high school. “I’m not sure what to believe,” she said. “But then, that’s my job, to find whatever truth is skulking around in all the lies in this world, and then decide if I have to make up a new set of lies to protect that truth.”

Sean smiled for the first time since Faith had come home. “Now that is a tough job.”

“Yeah,” Faith said. She didn’t return the smile. “It is.”

FAITH DIDN’T KNOW IF DARYN MCDERMOTT WAS ADepartment Thirty case or not. She knew her brother thought Daryn qualified for the program. In observing Daryn, Faith believed she was genuinely afraid of retribution from this Franklin Sanborn. But much depended on whether the Coalition was truly growing and spreading, scheduling other similar acts against banks across the country. Just talking about who the Coalition was and what they had already done wouldn’t meet the “vital national interest” criteria of the department. Preventing other acts of terrorism would.

Still, Faith knew better than to dismiss things out of hand. She sent the list of banks to Yorkton. She spent forty-eight hours questioning Daryn intensively, never leaving the Edmond house, sleeping in her own sleeping bag across the hall from Daryn’s room while the two silent deputy marshals rotated in their twelve-hour shifts.

Daryn was confusing. She was indeed a chameleon, shedding one mood and putting on another as quickly as an eyeblink: the revolutionary, the academic, the seductress, the victim, and many others. Faith recorded all their conversations on microcassette, then listened to the playbacks, straining to pick up nuances and subtleties in the way Daryn responded to her.

Daryn gave her the names of towns where the other Coalition cells were supposedly waiting to strike the next targets. They were places like Franktown, Colorado, near Denver; Rosemark, Tennessee, outside Memphis; Marine City, Michigan, near Detroit, on and on. She had a memory for details, and she recited it all, everything Faith asked her. She didn’t hesitate. In that respect it was one of the best sets of intake interviews Faith had ever done.

Now, she thought, if only there’s a case.

She sent the information to Yorkton. Three days after Daryn moved into the Edmond house, Faith announced that she had to leave for a few days. She’d put off Leon Bankston long enough. His transfer was approved, and everything was ready for him to become Benjamin Williams and begin his new life. His new life as a college graduate, Faith thought wryly.

She and Hal Simon packed up the few things Bankston was allowed to take with him. She called Sean at her house and told him she’d be away, and was taking her car. She’d managed to convince him that it was in his best interest to stay out of sight for the time being, until she’d had time to figure out what was going on. He was strangely silent.

Keep it together, Sean, she thought. He’d taken cabs from The Village to Edmond twice already, trying to see Daryn. She or the marshals had met him at the door and kept him from setting foot in the house. Only after Faith threatened to actually have him arrested and thrown in a federal holding cell did he seem to get it. She left strict instructions with both teams of deputies that Sean Kelly was under no circumstances to be admitted to the house.

“By God, Kelly, but you’re a hard-ass,” Deputy Marshal Hunnicutt of the night shift had told her.

So she drove to Manhattan, Kansas. Since Simon had been babysitting Bankston for over a week, she gave him a break and let Bankston ride with her in the Miata for the six-hour drive. Bankston chattered most of the way about what a model citizen he was going to be, asking if he could join the Y and swim at their pool, how long until he was allowed to go to bars and pick up women…Faith understood Simon’s frustration. After an hour in the car with Bankston, she wanted to shoot him just to shut him up.

Faith stayed in Kansas for two days, getting Bankston into his apartment, going over last-minute details. As was the usual procedure, field officer Simon stayed behind. He would live undercover near the new recruit for anywhere from two weeks to six months, depending on how well Bankston did in his transition to Williams.

“At least I don’t have to live with him,” Simon said to Faith as she drove away. “Thank God for small favors.”

Faith drove south from Manhattan on a Friday morning under blue skies with only a few puffy cumulus clouds floating overhead. She took a back road, State Highway 177, winding lazily through the Flint Hills. The day was cool for late spring, but it felt good. She drove with the windows down, letting the clean air wash over her like waves.

She took several detours, crossing back into Oklahoma at Newkirk and passing through the historic oil town of Ponca City before finally picking up Interstate 35 for the last leg south.

She’d avoided thinking about Daryn McDermott and Sean and Franklin Sanborn and the Coalition for Social Justice for most of the trip. Dealing with a high-maintenance individual like Leon Bankston tended to crowd out everything else. But now, with the prairieland of northern Oklahoma sliding by at seventy-five miles an hour, and only Lee Ritenour’s guitar on the CD player as company, she couldn’t help going back to the case.

A week had gone by. The date had passed for the Coalition’s alleged attack on the National Bank of Commerce in downtown Memphis. Nothing happened. Yorkton had called her to say there was no sign of any communal radical group anywhere near the place where Daryn had said they would be.

So who was fooling whom?

Had Franklin Sanborn, phantom extraordinaire, fooled everyone? Had he angered Daryn by going against her wishes and saying he was going to use violence to achieve the Coalition’s stated goals? Was it a gotcha on the senator’s daughter? If so, was Sanborn’s sole purpose to embarrass Daryn? Had he just faded into the ether?

Or was this part of Daryn’s grand design anyway? She was a spoiled political princess, to be sure, but one who had a radical, revolutionary agenda of her own. Had she engineered the scheme just to escape her father’s tyranny and his politics forever? To get a free ride from Department Thirty?