Need You Now (30 page)

Authors: James Grippando

BOOK: Need You Now

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I
waited outside the hospital room. Connie was inside. With my father.

Scully’s telephone had remained on through the crash, even after it. The FBI tech agents were able to triangulate the signal, and emergency personnel were there within minutes. Scully was pronounced dead at the scene. Connie was brought to Lemuel Shattuck. Her arm was broken, and she was pretty beat up. But she’d fought her way out of the ER to have a moment with Dad. Her
own
moment. I understood.

Andie sat in the hallway with me, waiting.

“How are the two corrections officers he shot?” I asked.

“The second one just got out of surgery and should recover. The first one . . .” She stopped, shaking her head slowly. “A wife, two kids in preschool. Horrible.”

She was right. The park ranger, Evan Hunt, and now a corrections officer. Their deaths were all horrible.

“This wasn’t done right,” she said. “We should have had snipers on the roof, more agents. The problem was that I was already supposed be back in Miami. It’s just impossible to pull together that kind of support when the plug has already been pulled, but I should have—”

“Andie,” I said, stopping her. “This was not your fault.”

I probably hadn’t convinced her, but she did seem to appreciate the sentiment.

We sat in silence for a moment. I was thinking about the ambulance ride with Connie. She’d recounted her conversation with Scully—how he’d cut a deal with Robledo, how he’d lied and told Dad that the CIA was behind the threats to expose his children if he didn’t confess to the murder of Gerry Collins. He’d made my father believe that he was just more collateral damage in the financial war on terrorism. Andie suspected that it was fear of charges of treason—or perhaps some lingering loyalty of an FBI agent to his country—that had kept Scully from telling Robledo what he’d managed to piece together about Operation BAQ.

Still, there were things that confused me.

“Why did you pick me to investigate Lilly?”

To Andie, the question had probably seemed to come out of left field. But for me the FBI investigation into Lilly Scanlon at BOS/Singapore was where it had all started. Knowing where it had finally led, it made no sense that Andie would have picked me. I simply didn’t believe in coincidences that big.

“This investigation was started before Scully retired,” she said. “He picked you.”

“Why?”

“The same reason he forced your father to confess: he didn’t get a dime until Robledo recovered the money that Collins had diverted from Cushman. After all he did to keep Robledo out of jail so that he could hunt down the money, the last thing he wanted was for the FBI to find it first. Clearly, he thought you were someone he could control.”

“What about you? You’re the one who signed me up. Why did you use me?”

“The operation was already approved by the time Scully was forced to retire. They brought me in from Miami to take over. I inherited his pick.”

“So it was just inertia?”

“You’d be amazed by the number of things that the bureau does for no other reason than that.”

I was feeling scammed yet again—not for myself, but for Lilly. “So Scully steered the FBI investigation toward Lilly so that it would go nowhere?”

“Nowhere,” said Andie. “You and I went there together, my friend.”

My head rolled back. “Lilly,” I said. “I don’t even know where to begin with her.”

“She’ll be okay,” said Andie. “We’ve been talking.”

I was aware of that. Lilly’s call from Connie’s bathroom had prompted Andie to contact me—which had sparked the formulation of Andie’s plan, the deathbed confession that had netted Mongoose and Barber.

“The question is whether Lilly will ever talk to me,” I said.

The door to my father’s room opened. Connie stepped out. Tears were in her eyes. My heart raced, as if knowing that it was about to be broken.

“What?” I asked.

She came to me, sat in the chair beside me, and took my hand. The expression on her face said it all, but she said it anyway.

“It’s time to say good-bye,” she said softly, pausing before she said my name, “Peter.”

Epilogue

T
he wedding was outdoors on a beautiful afternoon in April. At the Central Park Zoo.

Connie was a radiant bride dressed in an official scout leader uniform—dark blue skirt hemmed below the knee, yellow shirt with epaulets, and a Tiger Cub den leader neckerchief. Tom, undeniably her soul mate, wore khaki pants, a safari hat, and a Hawaiian shirt that was hard to look at without sunglasses. The snow monkeys watched from their rocky perch, their dark eyes seemingly filled with a mixture of confusion and amusement as the preacher pronounced them husband and wife, looked at Connie, and said, “You may kiss the groom.”

And, boy, did she.

For me, it was the first day since Dad’s funeral that thoughts of him hadn’t triggered pain or sadness. I felt as though he was watching, peering down at us from somewhere beyond one of the fluffy white clouds in the bright blue sky, happy for a daughter who deserved happiness.

Operation Bankrupt al-Qaeda had dominated the news for weeks. After Mongoose’s death, there was no one to activate his computer’s “safety valve,” and the internal Treasury memorandum on Operation BAQ had gone viral over the Internet. The federal multicount indictment in Washington, D.C., against former deputy secretary of the treasury Joe Barber and National Security Advisor Brett Woods had laid out the damning charges: within days of Cushman’s suicide, the national security advisor himself had made it clear that
no one
could ever find out that both Treasury and the White House had known about Cushman’s fraud and let it happen, and
no one
could ever know about the biggest blunder in the country’s financial war on terrorism. A congressional investigation was under way to determine how high knowledge and culpability ran in the White House, but the drumbeat was growing louder. Even those who weren’t talking about impeachment were quietly conceding that they were defending a “one-term president.” Barber’s trouble reached beyond Washington. The Manhattan district attorney was planning a murder-for-hire prosecution in connection with the execution-style shooting of Evan Hunt, though it seemed doubtful that the world would ever know the identity of the actual triggerman.

Still, the public debate had developed an intriguing vibe. No one had seemed too upset when “the body of suspected terrorist financer Manu Robledo” was found in Paraguay, though there were plenty of sensational (albeit accurate) reports that the killer had used a commando wire saw, that Robledo’s mutilated hands and feet were evidence of torture, and that his severed head had yet to be located. On a policy level, many in Washington decried Operation BAQ while, behind the scenes, breathing a sigh of relief that the $2 billion that might otherwise have funded terrorist operations was now . . . where?

Nobody seemed to know. Pundits speculated that it was buried deep in the
hawala
remittance systems run by Islamic extremists. Or in the vault of a “neutral” Swiss bank that had offices in Singapore.

“Very cool wedding,” I said.

Connie hugged me. “Come on. It’s time to throw the bouquet to my snow monkeys.”

Honestly, it was the ugliest bouquet I’d ever seen, but I suddenly understood why: it was made of edible blossoms suitable for monkey tummies. Not that there was any danger of those monkeys ever going hungry. Although Dad never knew that the quarter million dollars in his account had come from Treasury to keep him quiet about Evan Hunt’s report—not, as Scully had led him and Agent Henning to believe, from the CIA for a false confession—the fact remained that a nice chunk of money had passed through Dad’s estate to Connie and me. We’d donated most of it to the zoo. The rest went to Evan’s family.

I followed Connie along the stone walkway, but we were only halfway to her chosen spot for the bouquet toss when we stopped in our tracks.

“What’s wrong?” asked Tom.

Connie and I were facing in the direction of the red panda exhibit, our gaze fixed on the woman who was standing in the shade of a Japanese fern tree.

I hadn’t asked Connie if she was going to invite Lilly. This was her wedding, and I didn’t want to use her special day as a vehicle to reconnect. Lilly and I hadn’t parted on bitter terms, but we’d reached a mutual agreement that time apart was best. Last I’d heard she’d left banking. I wasn’t even sure if she planned to stay in New York. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I planned to stay.

“I invited her,” said Connie, “but I didn’t think she’d come.”

“She looks amazing.”

“Ya
think
?” said Tom.

Connie slugged him in the arm, then nudged me along. “Go say hello, dope.”

I took a half step, and though Lilly was at least hundred feet away, our eyes met. I detected a smile. Didn’t really see it. I just felt it.

“Okay,” I said, “here goes nothing.”

Oh, baby, I need your cow.

Acknowledgments

I didn’t think I would ever get to say this
again, but I want to thank my editor, Carolyn Marino. Carolyn and I did fifteen
novels together, the last of which was
Born to Run
in 2009. After a couple of novels without her, I’m thrilled to have her
back, along with her assistant, Wendy Lee. I also want to thank my agent and
friend, Richard Pine at Inkwell Management; Sally Kim for early edits on
Need You Now
; and two of the best proofreaders I’ve
ever known, Janis Koch (aka Conan the Grammarian) and Gloria Villa. I can assure
you that any mistakes in this novel are due to late changes I made after Janis
and Gloria had already read the galleys.

Connie Ryan gets a big thank-you for lending her
name and her love of scouting to the other Connie Ryan, who is a fictional
character in
Need You Now
. She now joins her
husband, Tom Bales, in the literary halls of immortality (Tom lent his name to a
character in
Intent to Kill
). Their generosity at a
character auction will benefit the children of St. Thomas Episcopal Parish
School.

Finally, to my wife, Tiffany. Thank you. I love
you. I need you . . . always.

JMG

May 14,
2011

About
the Author

J
AMES
G
RIPPANDO
is the
New York
Times
bestselling author of nineteen previous novels, including
Afraid of the Dark
,
Money to
Burn
,
Intent to Kill
,
Born to Run
,
Last Call
,
Lying with Strangers
,
When
Darkness Falls
, and
Got the Look
. He
lives in Florida, where he was a trial lawyer.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive
information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by James Grippando

Afraid of the
Dark*+

Money to Burn+

Intent to Kill

Born to Run*+

Last Call*+

Lying with
Strangers

When Darkness
Falls*+

Got the Look*+

Hear No Evil*

Last to Die*

Beyond Suspicion*

A King’s Ransom

Under Cover of
Darkness+

Found Money

The Abduction

The Informant

The Pardon*

And for young adults

Leapholes

* A Jack Swyteck
Novel

+ Also featuring FBI
agent Andie Henning

Credits

Cover photo montage: © Lynn Saville/Getty
Images (stairs in Central Park); Joshua Haviv/Shutterstock (Manhattan skyline);
Yolande de Kort/Arcangel Images (man)

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

This book is a work of fiction. The
characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and
are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

NEED YOU NOW
.
Copyright © 2012 by James Grippando. All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have
been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text
of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,
downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any
information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether
electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express
written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data

Grippando, James.

Need you now : a novel / James
Grippando.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-184030-2

1. Investment advisors—Fiction. 2.
Wall Street (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Fraud—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3557.R534N44 2012

813’.54—dc22

2011014345

Epub Edition January 2012 ISBN:
9780062097354

12 13 14 15 16
OV
/
RRD
10 9 8 7 6
5 4 3 2 1