Need You Now (22 page)

42

T
he subway ride from Midtown got Andie back to the FBI field office in lower Manhattan before six
P.M.
Barber had called their limousine meeting “unofficial,” but Andie intended to complete a formal interview report anyway. She was seated at her desk and about to start typing when Supervisory Agent Teese entered her office, closed the door, and delivered the news.

“We’re pulling the plug.”

Andie didn’t have to ask,
On what?
After eight months of investigating the movement of Cushman’s funds through BOS, however, she wasn’t about to simply pack her bags and fly back to Miami.

“Who made the decision?”

“Washington.”

“By ‘Washington,’ do you mean headquarters or someone outside the bureau?”

“The decision came to me from the director’s office.”

“That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

He pulled up a chair and sat facing her, surprisingly contrite. “I’m sorry about this, Andie. It’s not a matter of my backing down to the political will. It’s embarrassing, is what it is.”

“For the bureau, you mean?”

“For me, and for everyone else who’s been trumpeting the theory that the actual money in Cushman’s Ponzi scheme was one-tenth of the sixty billion dollars that most estimates put it at. I was certain that Cushman was a money-laundering operation with mostly paper losses.”

“So you’ve changed your tune: Patrick Lloyd was not holding out on us.”

“Not holding out,” he said.

“So the final chapter on this investigation will read how?”

He thought about it, and the expression on his face was like that of a man writing his own obituary. “There was no evidence that Cushman funds were laundered by anyone at BOS/Singapore, least of all Lilly Scanlon.”

“But getting back to the embarrassment factor: this is not just the shutting down of our investigation into BOS.”

“No. It’s a wholesale rejection of the theory that Cushman’s Ponzi scheme was a money-laundering operation, and that the only real money was the phony ten percent return that Cushman pretended to pay his investors.”

Andie was not one to say
I told you so
. “I think we both saw this coming.”

“You did. I should have. The reason the ‘paper loss’ theory got any traction at all was because, at first, so little money was recovered for the victims. That’s changing. Every day I get reports that lawyers are hot on the trail of real money—nowhere near the full sixty-billion-dollar loss, but much more than the ten percent that was posited by the money-laundering theory.”

Andie said, “This probably doesn’t make you feel any better, but there must be regulators feeling more heat than us for missing a sixty-billion-dollar fraud with real victims who lost real money.”

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head slowly, as if he’d just heard the world’s largest understatement. “The fallout is going to be huge.”

“How so?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.”

“I’d like to know. I think, after eight months of work, I
deserve
to know.”

Teese met her stare, but he was the one to blink. Andie didn’t take it as a sign of weakness. It was just a matter of fairness.

Teese said, “The view that the entire Cushman fraud was no bigger than six billion dollars of real money was an underlying assumption in the formulation of certain policies at Treasury.”

“Do you mean Operation BAQ?”

He hesitated, as if to measure his response. “Operation BAQ dates back over three years—before Cushman’s collapse.”

Andie connected the dots. “So that means it was known that Cushman was not legit.”

He didn’t offer a verbal response. Andie didn’t take his silence as a denial; he’d simply said all he could say, and she appreciated that. Even so, she pushed another button. “I met with retired agent Scully,” she said. “The handler for Tony Mandretti.”

“I know who he is. He worked out of this office for over twenty years.”

“The things he said about Operation BAQ were frankly difficult to swallow. But this conversation would seem to confirm everything he told me.”

Again, Teese didn’t answer directly. “Be careful with Scully.”

“That was my initial reaction,” she said. “But now my impression is that he was simply saying things that a retired FBI agent would tell another agent to make sure she didn’t become the bureau’s fifty-fourth special agent killed in the line of duty.”

“Scully is trouble,” said Teese. “You’d do well to stay away from him.”

Andie took the advice for what she thought it was worth. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Wrap it up. Go back to Miami.”

“What can I tell Patrick Lloyd?”

“That his cooperation is no longer needed. Nothing more.”

“What about his father?”

“He’ll receive medical attention until he passes. That satisfies our end of the deal.”

Teese rose, and he seemed ready to apologize once more, but he didn’t. Instead, he started for the door.

“Tell me something,” Andie said, stopping him. “How high does Operation BAQ go?”

He stood there for a moment, showing no reaction. Finally, he turned away, no answer, and left the office. Andie turned back to her computer, the blank report of her conversation with Joe Barber still up on the LCD.

That high, huh?
she said to herself, answering her own question.

43

S
cully clocked me at just under eight seconds.

“Not too shabby, Patrick,” he said. “A shot-to-shot reload of two seconds or less would get you into law enforcement, but not bad at all for a guy who hasn’t touched a gun since he was a teenager.”

We’d started with basic gun safety instruction, and for the next hour it was a series of dry-fire drills: draw, reload, target transition, and visualization skills. The Sig Sauer had felt a bit small in my hand, so we went with the Glock 9 millimeter. The fit was right, and it was much lighter weight than I’d expected. Everything was still step by step for me: Is the slide locked back? press magazine release → magazine is clear → grab new magazine → insert new magazine with correct orientation → release slide. But with enough practice I would store procedural memory, and the operation would become second nature. At least that was the theory.

“Tomorrow morning we can get to a range and do live fire,” said Scully.

“Patrick, don’t you have a job?” asked Lilly.

Her continued disapproval of firearms came through in her tone, but the question did remind me of the e-mails that were piling up on my BlackBerry since I’d removed the battery.

Scully dug into his duffel bag again. “Lilly, do you want to try the Sig Sauer?”

“No, I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, you can put away your Glock, your Smith and Wesson, your bazooka, and whatever else you’ve got in there. I’m serious, Patrick. Are you going into the bank tomorrow?”

I didn’t know the answer, didn’t know much about tomorrow at all.

A knock at the door broke the tension. Our pizza had arrived, a thin-crust, New York–style marvel from Gino’s on Central Avenue. Maybe not the best pizza in the entire universe, but definitely the best in the neighborhood. At Connie’s suggestion, we gathered around the kitchen table and turned the evening into more than just a weapons tutorial. We talked as the slices of pepperoni with extra-gooey cheese disappeared. Connie had a box of brownie mix left over from her last scout meeting, so she put a batch in the oven. None of us had room to eat them after knocking off a pizza, but there was nothing like the smell of brownies baking to change the mood in a room. Soon we were deep into Abe Cushman and Gerry Collins, four separate threads weaving into a single tale. Much of the focus was on Agent Henning, from my first communications with her eight months earlier, to Scully’s recent conversation. The honesty between Scully and me seemed to loosen Lilly’s tongue, and she opened up about her source. Her voice didn’t quake the way it had the first time she’d talked about him, but I could hear her throat tightening at times.

“Agent Henning told us that he’s a former government agent,” said Lilly. “He was shot by Manu Robledo.”

“She heard that from me,” said Scully.

“What else did you tell her?” I asked.

“Basically everything I know. He survived the gunshot, but a spinal injury apparently left him in horrible chronic pain. He got addicted to painkillers to the point that he was permanently disabled.”

“That explains the anger, I suppose.”

“Henning has offered us protection,” said Lilly.

“Is that so?” said Scully.

“You sound skeptical,” I said.

“You look even more skeptical,” he said, firing right back.

“Don’t get me wrong, I like Henning,” I said.

Scully waited for me to say more, then gave me the appropriate prompt. “But . . .”

I drew a breath, long enough to focus my thoughts. It was the FBI’s promise of first-rate treatment for my father’s illness that had drawn me into this mess, and at bottom this was still all about my father. Connie and Lilly already knew my position, and I wanted Scully’s view on the fundamental issue that had kept Henning and me from seeing eye to eye.

“I’ve never been able to get Henning to seriously consider the possibility that my father didn’t actually kill Gerry Collins.”

Scully wiped a glob of pizza sauce from his sleeve and said, “That’s probably because he confessed.”

Connie jumped in. “There’s absolutely no physical evidence.”

“His fingerprints were at the scene of the crime,” I said, playing devil’s advocate.

Scully scoffed and shook his head. “Collins was murdered in his car, and Evan Hunt’s written report was found on the front seat. Your father’s fingerprints were on Evan’s report. To me, the only thing the fingerprints prove is that your father handed the report to Manu Robledo, and Robledo gave it to Collins.”

“That’s
the fingerprint evidence?” I asked.

“That’s it,” said Scully, “lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Oh, my God,” said Lilly.

She looked at me from across the table, and I could see the change. Scully and his stash of weapons had temporarily pushed her away from me, but his explanation of the fingerprints seemed to bring her back to my side—perhaps further into my camp, the
Mandretti
camp, than she’d ever been—as if the last obstacle had been cleared.

“Your dad really is innocent,” she said.

No one spoke for the next minute, and Lilly’s words—the conclusion of the only person in the group who could remotely qualify as an outsider—seemed to hang over us.

“Does that mean that the man who killed Gerry Collins also shot Evan?” asked Connie.

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Scully.

I had my own theory. “Like I told Lilly at Tearrific, I’m convinced that whoever killed Evan was listening to our phone conversation right before he was shot. Evan told me that he cracked the code on the encrypted data we got from Barber. Fifteen minutes later he was dead, and his computer was gone.”

“Then add my source to the list of suspects,” said Lilly. “But Manu Robledo is still at the top.”

I reached for my BlackBerry and laid it on the table. “The list is growing,” I said. “There’s a reason I carried both an iPhone and a BlackBerry. Love the apps and the Internet on the iPhone, but my BlackBerry is issued by BOS with enhanced security, as hacker-proof and impenetrable to spyware as the largest Swiss bank in the world can make it.”

Scully said, “Your point being that anyone who eavesdropped on your BOS BlackBerry . . .”

“Is probably working from inside BOS,” I said, finishing Scully’s thought.

“You mean Joe Barber?” said Lilly.

“Maybe I do.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Lilly said. “Why would he call us into his executive suite,
give
us the files that contain the encrypted memorandum about Operation BAQ, and then kill Evan for cracking the code?”

“He gave me your files, Lilly. You didn’t know the BAQ memo was in there. Maybe he didn’t know, either.”

Lilly considered it. “Two billion dollars is a lot of money to most of us. But we’re talking about Joe Barber and the Bank of Switzerland. I just don’t see Barber at the heart of a BOS conspiracy to kill Evan Hunt over money.”

“Barber was deputy secretary of the Treasury. Your source is a former government agent who was working on a secret operation for Treasury. I’m not saying they’re working as a team, but it would appear that there is much more than money at stake.”

“Money or no money, killing Evan Hunt would be a very desperate act.”

Scully said, “Desperate men do desperate things. Let me borrow your phone for a couple of hours, Patrick.”

“For what?”

“I have a tech expert I work with. Former FBI. If there’s spyware on your BlackBerry, he can unravel it.”

I slid the phone across the table to him, along with the battery I’d removed at Tearrific.

Scully said, “Lilly, let’s check yours, too, just in case.”

“My phone isn’t issued by the bank. I had to give up my BOS BlackBerry when they fired me.”

“Let’s check it anyway,” said Scully.

She gave it up, the battery separated from the phone, just like mine. “I suppose if Patrick’s comes back with spyware and mine doesn’t, that would tell us it was a BOS job.”

“Good point,” I said, “but I have a sixth sense about how this is going to play out. Scully, let’s do the target practice another time. I’m going into the bank tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t put it off,” he said.

“I know, but—”

Connie’s landline rang, cutting me short. I checked the number. “It’s Agent Henning,” I told the group.

“She must have heard you say that you’re going into the bank tomorrow,” said Connie. She was kidding, but only half kidding.

“You told me I could call her on Connie’s phone,” said Lilly, “so I left her a voice mail and told her we were here.”

“Take it,” said Scully.

I answered the call, and with just a few words from Andie, I knew that something had changed. I could hear it in her voice.

“First, let me say that what I’m about to tell you will have no impact on your father’s health. Nothing has changed in that regard. He will remain at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital as long as necessary, and he will continue to get first-rate medical treatment as long as he needs it.”

“Okay, thank you for that. But I’m getting the feeling that something is definitely wrong.”

Andie hesitated, and I glanced at the concerned faces around the kitchen table. Finally, Andie’s voice was in my ear.

“I’m sorry, Patrick. I hate to do this on the phone, but things have happened fast. There is going to be a major change in our working relationship.”