Need You Now (29 page)

61

I
ran to the elevator. Andie followed. I had no cell phone but she was able to dial Connie’s number on hers.

No answer.

I didn’t know how much time my father had left, hours or minutes, but standing around waiting for my sister to pick up her cell was not an option. The lockdown had triggered additional security, but Andie cleared us through it, and the express elevator took us to the main lobby. I went straight to the spot where Connie had been sitting. The television was still playing in the corner, but the lobby was deserted, no sign of Connie. The gunfire had clearly triggered an evacuation.

“Come with me,” said Andie.

She led me outside to the parking lot, where a group of people was waiting for the all clear to come back inside. It was a cold night, and falling snow flickered in the cones of yellow-white glow beneath the lampposts. People in the crowd were shifting their weight from one foot to the other, arms folded or hands in pockets, trying to stay warm.

“Connie!”

A few heads turned in response to my call, but no one responded. I went from person to person, searching. My sister was nowhere.

“Has anyone here seen a woman named Connie Ryan?” I asked in a loud voice.

A few people shook their heads. Most glanced in the other direction, ignoring me. Finally, a high school kid dressed in a hoodie and smoking a cigarette came forward.

“White chick?” he asked. “Blue coat?”

“Yeah.”

He took a drag from his cigarette. “Me and her was watching the Celtics game on the TV. She left with some dude about a half hour ago.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. They was arguing, like she didn’t want to go. I was gonna say something, but I guess they worked it out. Better not to get involved, you know?”

“What did the guy look like?” I asked.

The kid shrugged. “Big guy, kind of old for her. Fifties, I guess. An asshole, if you ask me.”

I looked at Andie, and she read my mind. “Scully,” we said to each other.

62

A
pair of headlights pierced the night as the white SUV rental headed down the highway toward Providence. Connie rode in the passenger seat, her hands tied behind her back. Scully drove. The dashboard rattled with the tinny sound of an overworked defroster struggling to clear the windshield. The
whump-whump
of the wipers pushed the falling snow from one side to the other.

“We trusted you, Scully,” Connie said.

His eyes narrowed. Some idiot driver in an approaching car had his high beams on, nearly blinding him. Scully flashed him back.

“Dad trusted you,” she said.

“Shut your trap, Connie. Your father was no Boy Scout.”

“He changed.”

“No, he didn’t. Your father lost everything in a Ponzi scheme, so he asked me for the name of another victim who would take Collins for a one-way car ride if they knew he was a fraud. I gave him Robledo’s name.”

“It wasn’t a crime for Dad to give Evan Hunt’s report to Robledo.”

“Robledo wasn’t
given
anything. I sold it to him.”

“My father wouldn’t have taken money from a man like Robledo. Not after everything he gave up.”

“You’re right. All your old man cared about was getting even with Collins for stealing his nest egg. But that report gave Robledo something that no one else in the world got. Robledo got a heads-up on Cushman’s fraud, and the chance to recover his money. Why shouldn’t I get a cut?”

“A cut of
what
? The money was already gone.”

He shot her a quick glance, and for an instant, Connie thought she almost saw the old Scully—a man who surely understood that Connie would never agree with what he’d done, but who didn’t want her to think he was evil. “There’s my dilemma, Connie.”

“Dilemma?”

His gaze returned to the icy road, but he kept talking. “One percent of two billion dollars is a lot of money. But I got one percent of nothing if Robledo couldn’t track down his money. It didn’t take a genius to see that Robledo would never recover a dime if he went to prison for killing Gerry Collins.”

Connie knew exactly what he was saying. “You pig!
You
forced my father to confess!”

“Your father was already sick with cancer. It wasn’t like he was going to be locked up forever.”

“You bastard! You used his kids against him, didn’t you? You were our handler. How could you threaten to out Patrick and me unless he confessed to something he didn’t do?”

He slapped her with the back of his hand. It landed with so much force that Connie’s head slammed against the passenger’s-side window.

“Connie! Oh, my God, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

She blinked hard, trying to shake off the blow and take the blur out of her vision. Scully’s apology left her equally dazed. Clearly he was at war with himself over his betrayal, the FBI version of an abusive spouse who returns home with a bouquet of flowers after pushing his wife down the stairs. The salty taste of her own blood trickled from her mouth as she spoke.

“That’s what Dad wanted to tell Patrick today, isn’t it?” she said. “That Scully is dirty.”

Scully was no longer smiling. His audience of one was spitting the vitriol of an angry mob. He focused on his driving, the tires humming on the snow-covered highway.

“I still don’t hear a denial,” Connie said.

“He doesn’t know.”

“What?”

“If it’s any comfort to you, your father never knew I stabbed him in the back. When I got Treasury to pay him some money for agreeing to sit on the Cushman report, I told him that it was compensation from the CIA for his confession—that if he didn’t take the deal, and that if he ever claimed he was framed, it was the CIA who would hand his kids over to the Santucci family. As far as he knew, the CIA had to keep Robledo out of prison for Operation BAQ to work. To this day, he thinks I was just the messenger.”

“You’re even worse than I thought you were.”

“Hey, at least I let him have the money.”

“Yeah, money he couldn’t even use to pay for his own cancer treatment once he was in prison.”

Scully kept one hand on the wheel and dialed his cell.

“Who are you calling?” asked Connie.

“Your dumbass brother,” he said. “Be still and behave yourself. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

63

I
had no phone, but my number rang to Andie’s cell. It had taken a tech agent in the Boston field office all of thirty seconds to program the wireless hijacking and reroute my calls to Andie.

“It’s Scully,” she told me.

We were still in the parking lot, seated in the back of an FBI van that had arrived on the scene. Andie quickly plugged her phone into the mobile audio system. Her phone rang a second time—this time over the van’s surveillance speakers.

“You want me to take it?” I asked.

“Yes. Play this exactly the way I told you to play it. And keep Scully on the line as long as possible so that our techies can triangulate a location.”

On the fourth ring she hit Talk and handed me the phone.

“Scully, where are you?” I asked.

Andie gave me a quick thumbs-up, letting me know that she could hear the conversation just fine.

“I have your sister,” he said.

“Good. Bring her back. Dad wants to see her.”

He was on to my act. “Don’t play dumb,” he said. “I
will
hurt her.”

I’d never heard that tone from Scully, and it chilled me. The man was clearly desperate.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want?”

“For starters, you need to keep your mouth shut. If you go to Agent Henning or anyone else with any of the things your father told you, Connie’s dead.”

Again I felt chills. It was clear that Scully had no idea that the FBI was involved and that it had all been a setup—that my trip to Boston to see my father, the whole idea of a deathbed conversation, was something that Andie and my father had coordinated with me in order to draw out Mongoose and Barber. Andie slipped me a note:
Don’t tell him you haven’t talked to your father.

“I hear you,” I said into the phone.

“It would have been much better for everyone if he had taken his secrets to the grave. But he just had to share all the things Agent Scully told him, didn’t he?”

I was tempted to play along and stall, but with Connie’s safety on the line, I was afraid to wing it.

Scully pushed harder. “What did he tell you, Patrick?”

Andie handed me a note. I wasn’t sure if I was just buying time for the tech agents to triangulate the call, or if it was another strategy, but I followed her script.

“Dad told me that he was forced to confess,” I said as I grabbed a second note from Andie. “But it was Robledo who killed Collins.”

“I know he told you more than that.”

I looked again at Andie, who handed me yet another note. “He said Operation BAQ would fail if Robledo was locked up for murder. That’s why—”

I stopped, bordering on panic. I wasn’t sure that Andie had written down her thoughts correctly.

Scully said, “That’s why
what
?”

Andie underlined her words, reaffirming the message. I delivered it as written: “That’s why Dad believed you when you lied and told him it was the CIA that forced him to confess.”

Scully paused, and when he finally spoke, he sounded a bit philosophical. “So the poor bastard finally figured out it was me.”

It was confirmation of the theory Andie had scribbled out on her notes. She gave me a signal to keep him talking, but Scully had never really stopped.

“Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it, Patrick?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. Scully’s betrayal had been difficult for me to comprehend—the way he’d turned against my father, against Connie and me, against the bureau. Money could make people do worse things, I supposed. But his mention of “payback” made me realize that something more personal was also driving him.

“My father was the stain on your perfect career. That’s what this is about, isn’t it, Scully?”

He answered in a low, angry voice. “I told him and your mother both: stay away from each other. The fact that her maiden name was Santucci didn’t make it any easier for me to protect her. I made it crystal clear that the mob would put a gun to her head if they thought for one minute that she could reveal where your father was hiding.”

“But Dad wouldn’t listen.”

“Neither one of them listened.”

“So they killed her,” I said, the words catching in my throat. But I had to push through this. “She was killed
on your watch
. Not a very career-enhancing move in the bureau, I suppose. Losing the mother of two children.”

“Are you playing shrink on me, Patrick?”

“No. Just calling your ‘payback’ what it is. When Robledo waved all that money under your nose, it wasn’t so hard for you to grab it at my father’s expense, was it?”

“Not as hard as it might have been. But that’s all in the past. Let’s deal with the present. I don’t want to have to hurt your sister.”

“I don’t want you to hurt her, either.”

“Then forget what you know about your father and me. Forget that I gave him Robledo’s name. Forget especially that I ever mentioned Operation BAQ or the CIA to him.”

I didn’t know the ins and outs of constitutional and criminal law, but I was pretty sure I recognized the voice of a former FBI agent who was looking at potential charges that ranged from obstruction of justice to treason.

“That’s fine with me, Scully,” I said. “Everything that was said in the hospital was between my father and me. Just don’t hurt my sister.”

“Good. Now, I need you to follow my instructions—to the letter.”

“I’m not going to help you go on the run with an escape plan, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You will, or your sister pays.”

I swallowed hard. Saying it would have sounded like heroic hyperbole, but I truly thought it: I wished he had taken me instead of her.

“I want to talk to Connie,” I said.

“Shut up and listen.”

“No. I need to know she’s still alive. Put her on.”

He didn’t refuse right away, which I took as a good sign. I was about to prod one more time when he answered.

“Fine. I’ll let you hear her voice.”

Andie gave me the stretch sign, though she was openly frustrated that her tech agents needed still more time to pinpoint the call.

“That’s not enough,” I told him. “How will I know it’s not just a recording? She has to talk to me—to answer a question from me.”

Again, I took his hesitation to mean that he was considering it. I nudged.

“A former FBI agent should know my request is reasonable,” I said.

“Fine. You can ask her a question.
One
question.”

Andie gave me a signal that said her techies were almost there. But Scully was no dummy, and I had the sense that he knew exactly how long he could stay on the line without being triangulated. The thought of his hanging up seconds before his position could be determined was more than I could bear.

“Patrick?” said Connie.

I could hear the fear in her voice, but I knew Connie wasn’t the type to be beaten by fear.

Scully was back on the line. “Ask your question, Patrick. You got ten seconds.”

He was definitely timing the call. Andie gave me the stretch sign again, and I could see the angst in her expression. Triangulation wasn’t the answer. It was time to take things into my own hands, and the right question suddenly popped into my head. I was thinking of a conversation that Connie and I had once had about our mother, after her death. We’d talked about what a terrible mistake it is to get in the car when you know it’s a one-way ride. How you should kick, scream, pull hair, and gouge eyes—whatever it takes not to end up in the car.

And if the abductor still manages to force you inside the car, you do everything you can to crash it.

“Connie,” I asked, “what should Mom have done?”

64

C
onnie was staring straight ahead through the windshield. The snowflakes were huge, and they splattered against the glass on impact, making it virtually impossible to see more than one or two car lengths in front of their SUV. It was not a night to be out on the road in New England.

What should Mom have done?

Connie’s hands were tied behind her back. The side of her head was still throbbing from Scully’s backhanded slap. She was at his mercy, but Patrick’s question energized her. It gave her hope. It gave her a plan. She could hear the packed snow beating against the floorboard, drawn up from the road by the spinning tires. Scully was driving with one hand on the wheel, his right arm extended so that he could hold the cell phone to Connie’s ear.

What should Mom have done?

Connie opened her mouth, but no words came. She bit down on his hand, her jaws locking onto him, her teeth digging down to the bone.

Scully screamed like a wounded snow monkey.

Connie leaned to her right, refusing to let go, hanging on to her prey with the tenacity of a hungry pit bull. She pulled so hard that she dragged his upper body halfway across the console, nearly into her own seat. Connie was in control—but their SUV was completely out of control, spinning, whirling across the icy highway. It slammed into the guardrail with too much force and at precisely the wrong angle. It hopped the rail and rolled over once, then again, continuing to roll all the way down the steep, snowy embankment.

More rolls than Connie could count before she blacked out.