David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

“Faith?” Sean said.

Faith looked at her brother. “Remember what I said, that Daryn had committed suicide? Maybe someone else pulled the trigger, maybe someone else put the rope around her neck and lifted her into that tree, but it was suicide, all right.”

“I don’t understand,” Sean said.

“Daryn was dying,” Faith said.

Smith smiled.

“At first I couldn’t explain it,” Faith said. “I simply thought she was dangerous, maybe sociopathic. Her behavior was so erratic-intellectual and articulate one minute, vulgar and profane the next. Plus the headaches. She had those terrible headaches, and they got worse and worse as time went on. That should have been a giveaway, but then, I wasn’t looking for it.”

“What are you saying?” Sean demanded.

“Daryn had a glioblastoma multiforme lodged on her frontal lobe.”

“A brain tumor,” Smith added. “Completely inoperable. She would have been dead in another three months.” He spread his hands apart. “So she offered herself for The Cause, to be used in whatever way would serve her agenda the best. She rather liked the idea of being a martyr, instead of dying at twenty-four from some useless cancer. This way, she would die for something ‘greater than herself.’ Or so she believed.”

“I don’t believe you,” Sean said. “Daryn was willing to let herself be killed so you could get to Faith?”

“Well, of course, Daryn didn’t know my true motivations. As far as she knew, I was Franklin Sanborn, professor of communication, and shared her agenda for social and political change. But yes, Agent Kelly, she put her life in my hands. She was about to lose it anyway, and she was already growing weaker. You saw that, didn’t you?”

Sean appeared to agonize. He clenched his fists at his sides. “After the bomb, down on Main Street after the car crashed into the wall, you had the gun on Daryn. You said something about a moment of pain, then no more pain at all, and something about how she’d probably enjoy that. I didn’t know what you meant.”

Smith smiled. “Observant, much like your sister. It must be a family trait.”

Thunder cracked again. Faith saw a cloud-to-cloud lightning flash through the side window. The clouds seemed lower, a solid wall of them across the dark sky.

“But I still don’t understand,” Sean said. “She knew then that you were going to kill her? You’d already set this up. Why go through all of that?”

“From the moment you met Tobias Owens in Sasabe, everything was an illusion, Sean. Nothing you saw or heard or felt or did was real. Any interaction you saw between Daryn and myself was for your benefit, to continue the illusion. Tobias Owens wasn’t even real. He, of course, was not Senator McDermott’s counsel. He was an ambulance chaser from Phoenix who had no scruples and wanted a fast buck. See where it got him.”

“He’s right,” Faith said. “None of it was real. He used Daryn and you to get to me, to devastate me in every way imaginable. I had to watch my own brother falling apart, and it twisted me to the point that I suspected him of murder. Sean, she very carefully drew you in. You thought you were getting close to her so you could convince her to go home. But she knew who you were all the time. That was the whole point. She even got you to participate in her Coalition.”

“But why me?” Sean said. “You couldn’t know that I was going to screw up at work and be so desperate that I’d go along with Owens.”

“Oh, no,” Smith said. “You did that all by yourself. I’d identified you long ago as your sister’s biggest weakness. I saw what you were doing to yourself and knew it was only a matter of time until something happened that pushed you over the edge. I just had to hope that Daryn lived long enough to do her part.”

“How could you know?”

Smith looked at Sean as if he were a child who didn’t comprehend the day’s math lesson. “I watched you, of course. Just as I did your parents, at various times. Family ties can almost always be used against a person. You’re the living proof of it.”

Faith stared at Smith in disbelief. “You believed Sean was my biggest weakness?”

“Of course. And in exploiting his weakness, I exploited yours at the same time. It was a simple and beautiful plan, and it worked beyond my wildest expectations.”

Sean put his hands to his head, as if it were about to burst. “All of this…the attacks on the banks. That whole business with Daryn being angry at you for wanting to use explosives…that was staged? I mean, you slapped her. You-”

“It was good theater,” Smith said, crossing his legs at the ankle. “Remember, everything was staged. The two men who broke into Daryn’s apartment while you were there with her? The ones who ran you off the road? The incidents were created to form a bond between the two of you, to put you on the run, to put you in a position to come here, to be dependent on each other.”

Faith brought the gun up in her hand. She pointed at Smith with it, coming closer to the rocking chair. “All of it was designed to make Sean-and eventually, me-believe that Daryn McDermott was part of this radical group, but that it had become too radical for her and she wanted out. You’d chosen Sean very carefully, exploited his alcohol weakness, made sure he and Daryn got to be mutually dependent on each other. Then you even went so far as to stage a real attack-one that actually killed innocent people. You thought nothing of killing a two-year-old child in order to dress the stage. Then, after Sean brought me into it and asked for Department Thirty to protect Daryn, you yanked the rug out from under it.”

“Erase all evidence,” Smith said, sweeping a hand around the room. “Then you would have to cut Daryn loose. Tell her she was rejected. Send her back out into the world, where she was afraid of Franklin Sanborn.”

Understanding gradually crept onto Sean’s face. “And then kill her. Faith and Department Thirty would get the blame.”

“Senator McDermott did a fine job reading his daughter’s impassioned letter on national television,” Smith said. “There she was, at the eleventh hour, trying to be reconciled to her father, only hours before her death. Now Department Thirty has been taken to the public, and so has its renowned Officer Kelly. McDermott can rant and rave about a federal government department out of control, a department that could have protected his darling daughter from terrorists, but chose not to. And look what happened to her! Your department will be dismantled. There will be Congressional hearings, and you’ll be the star witness. How’s our mutual friend, Director Conway, handling all this, by the way?”

Faith had to think for a moment, that Conway equaled Yorkton. “He can take care of himself, and the department,” she said. “You might be surprised.”

“It’ll take a lot for you and the department to overcome this,” Smith said. “But it won’t matter to me. I’ll be gone. I already have my next identities in place. No more David Corcoran of Evansville, Indiana. I hate to leave Franklin Sanborn behind, though. I wondered when you would make that connection.”

Faith felt a chill. She had never before felt that she could simply raise her weapon and destroy another human being. The man she had killed two years ago had been purely self-defense. He’d shot at her, and at others, and she’d simply shot back. This was different. Smith was, as far as she could tell, unarmed. She recalled that he usually preferred to stay away from weapons himself, leaving actual violence to his “subcontractors.” It would be easy to simply erase him from the face of the earth.

She raised the gun. She took aim at a spot on his chest.