David Kent - The Triangle Conspiracy

Mercifully, Faith passed out.

FAITH DIDN’T REMEMBER THE ARRIVAL OF THELogan County Fire and Rescue squad, nor did she remember talking to the sheriff’s deputy about the young woman with the back of her head blown off in the ruins of the house. She didn’t recall the MedEvac helicopter, or her arrival at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center trauma facility. Incongruous with everything else, she vaguely recalled music, something light and feathery. A flute, perhaps.

When she awoke, she was in a hospital room, and the lights were very bright. She saw IV lines, and both her feet were propped up. She turned her head and saw her friend Alex Bridge sitting beside her bed.

Alex was thirty-one, half Comanche, with the high cheekbones and deep dark eyes common to Native Americans. Her hair was short, dark, and straight, though she’d highlighted it with red and blond streaks. She wore jeans and sandals and a Kerrville Folk Festival T-shirt and held a wooden flute in her hands. Faith could see the tattoo on her upper arm, a crown of thorns intertwined with roses and crosses.

Faith stared at her, as if she weren’t quite sure Alex was real. She put out a hand.

Alex clasped her hand, putting her flute aside. “Hey, Faith Siobhan. Man, you Irish redheads are tough.”

Faith coughed. She didn’t trust her voice.

“Don’t,” Alex said. “You’re going to be okay, but it may be a while before your next marathon.”

“Sean?” Faith managed to say.

“He wasn’t there. Your brother wasn’t there, Faith. They were digging all night. The rescuers dug through tons of debris, they scoured that house and the whole countryside. Your brother’s body wasn’t found. He may have made it out. While you were delirious, you kept asking for him…talking to him.”

Faith nodded. “He saved me. Pushed me down into the basement.”

Alex squeezed her hand. “They found a girl there, too. Her name was Brittany Ray. She was twenty-one.”

Faith closed her eyes. She nodded again.

Alex let go of her hand. Her voice changed. “You mentioned Smith, while you were delirious. Was it…”

Faith nodded a third time. Alex had been one of Smith’s victims last year. One of the personas he’d adopted for that “job” had been that of Alex’s husband. He’d fathered her child, then made her believe he’d been killed. Alex had later confronted him on the beach at Galveston, and Faith had never before or since seen the kind of courage Alex Bridge displayed then, facing down the evil that was Isaac Smith.

Alex lowered her voice. “I thought he was under protection.”

Faith held her breath. She remembered Smith- I win.

And the bastard had walked away from Mulhall a free man.

“No,” Faith whispered.

Alex leaned forward.

A plan formed in Faith’s mind.

“I need a computer,” she said.

“What?”

“A computer with Internet access. Can you get a laptop?”

“Mine’s at home,” Alex said, confused.

Faith suddenly looked alarmed. “What time is it? How long have I been here?”

“Ten hours or so. It’s nearly seven in the morning.”

“Where’s Daniel?”

Alex smiled. Daniel was her one-year-old son. Faith had been there when he was born three months premature, and had carried him in her arms to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “Don’t worry. He’s with my dad. He’s fine. But I had to get here. I guess in your delirium, you told them to call me.”

“Need that computer. I need it fast.”

“Why? They won’t let you use a laptop in here.”

Faith lay back against the pillow. Her hair felt gritty. “Yes, they will. Smith isn’t going to win.”

Alex looked at her quizzically, but stood up. “Give me half an hour.”

Faith was instantly asleep as soon as Alex left the room, and woke when she returned.

Alex plugged in the laptop while Faith adjusted herself on the bed. A nurse came in, looked at the clock, and said, “What’s all this?”

“Business,” Faith said, staring at her.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Kelly, but you can’t use that in here. It will interfere with-”

Faith had Alex hand her a pen, and she scribbled a phone number on an envelope Alex had had in her purse. She handed the envelope to the nurse.

“What’s this?” the nurse said.

“The phone number for a man named Yor-Conway. He’ll tell you I have permission to use this laptop right here, right now, for a few minutes.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t let you-”

“And if you don’t like him,” Faith continued, “he can put you in touch with the attorney general of the United States. And if that’s not good enough, you can speak to the president.”

The nurse stared at the envelope with Yorkton’s phone number. “I’ll need to speak to the nursing supervisor.”

“You do that.”

Alex shook her head as the nurse left. “You tough Irish redheads.”

“Just don’t cross us,” Faith said.

She logged onto the Internet, then using her high-level passwords, accessed the Department of Justice’s massive database. She did a search using “John Brown’s Body.”

“What are you looking for?” Alex asked.

“The file of the people Smith destroyed before last year. The people whose lives he ruined.”

“Why?”

“Do you have any more paper?”

Alex dug in her purse and handed another scrap of paper to her. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Faith felt suddenly alert, as if she’d been given a direct shot of adrenaline. “Smith broke the law again, so he’s not eligible to stay under our protection.”

“But won’t he just disappear, use another one of his aliases?”

Faith nodded. “That’s what he said he’d do. But if I know him like I think I do, he’ll go back to where he’s been living and pack up his books. Maybe nothing else, but he’ll want to keep all his history books, to take them with him into his next identity.”

“So? I still don’t get it. It’s not like you can tell the people he ruined what his new name is.”

Text began to scroll across the little screen of the laptop.

“Can you?” Alex said. “Faith?”

Faith began making notes, her impulse telling her to hurry, hurry.

“Faith?” Alex said. “You don’t have that information.”

“He’s so damned arrogant,” Faith said. “He told me his new name, his new occupation, and the city where he lives.”

Alex sat back. She waited a long moment, struggling with her own emotions.

“Faith,” she said, and the tone made Faith look at her. “If you tell those people, someone’s likely to kill him.”

Faith’s green eyes met Alex’s dark brown ones.

“You can’t,” Alex said.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t wished him dead a thousand times.”

“Yes, I have. That’s not the point. You can’t…you’re an officer. And this would…I mean, it’s not like it’s self-defense, like when you chased after him on the beach last year.”

Faith thought of Britt and Daryn and Scott…and Sean, dead or alive. She thought of Smith’s words: As long as I’m alive, you’ll never have peace, Officer Kelly.

“Yes, it is,” Faith said.

A week later

THE NEWS CONFERENCE WAS IMPRESSIVE.

Senator Edward McDermott stood once again on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and once again choked back tears as he talked about his daughter.

“Because she felt she couldn’t talk to me,” McDermott said, “she hid from me the fact that she’d been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. I didn’t know until after…” McDermott coughed. He sniffed into the microphone. “…after the autopsy on her was completed. After I learned this, I was put in touch with Dr. Byron Barth at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, one of the world’s leading neurologists. He told me…he said that with this disease, as it progressed, Daryn would have exhibited erratic behavior, and she could have experienced delusions, even hallucinations.”