Need You Now

34

C onnie borrowed the zoo’s van for the day, and we headed to Boston. She drove. I tried not to breathe through my nose.

“Sorry. When one of our furry friends has an accident, it can take a week for the smell to go away,” she said.

By “accident” she didn’t mean fender bender. I rolled down the window a crack and drew in the cold air.

I hadn’t decided to visit Dad on a whim. Connie was against it. Had Evan sided with her in opposition, they might have been able to talk me out of it. The idea had blossomed around midnight, as I was taking one last look at Evan’s walls. The photographs he had taken over the years were an integral part of the Cushman timeline. Most required no explanation. Lilly with Gerry Collins. Lilly and me in Singapore. They prompted me to ask about the shots he’d snapped just before I ran him down in the park, the ones of Connie and me talking in front of the snow monkeys-where would they fit into the flowchart? “They don’t,” he’d said, which made me push for an explanation. The hour was late, and perhaps fatigue had caused him to drop his guard. Or maybe he had simply come around to the view that I deserved to know the truth: “Tony asked me to take those weeks ago, when he was still in North Carolina.”

That Dad had asked for pictures of Connie and me was no small thing. It was the reason Evan had suspected that we were Tony Mandretti’s children, the reason my confirmation of his suspicions had come as no surprise. More important, for me it was proof enough that Dad wished his children were still part of his life.

“Coming here is a big mistake,” said Connie.

We were driving through Brookline, ten minutes from Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. Connie had insisted on driving rather than taking the train so that she could talk freely en route-i.e., talk me out of it.

“We’ve been over this,” I said. “I’m not changing my mind.”

“What are you going to say to him?”

It was a good question. Maybe I was tired of being told that the people who mattered most to me were criminals and that I had to keep my distance. Dad. Lilly. It was time to claw back and take control of my personal life.

“I don’t know what I’m going to say,” I said.

We parked in the snow-covered visitors’ lot and followed the freshly salted sidewalk to the hospital’s main entrance. There was a separate registration window for visitation to the prison unit. Connie followed me to the desk, and I told the corrections officer behind the glass that I had come to see Sam Carlson.

“Visitation is by appointment only,” she said. “Department rules require at least twenty-four hours’ notice.”

Connie was shameless in her sarcasm. “Oh, what a pity. Come on, let’s go home.”

“Forget it,” I said. “We drove all the way here from New York. There must be some flexibility.”

“On a normal day, maybe,” the officer said.

It wasn’t a holiday or a weekend. “Today’s not a normal day?” I asked.

The officer didn’t answer. She took our names and asked us to wait right there. A minute later she returned, buzzed us through a locked entrance door, and led us down the hall. We passed an express elevator that serviced only the prison unit on the eighth floor. Just beyond it was a small vacant room, where the officer told us to sit tight. The room had no windows, and Connie took the only chair. The officer left and closed the door, and both Connie and I heard her secure it with a key from the outside. I tried to turn the knob, but it was locked.

“I’m getting a bad vibe,” Connie said.

“Brilliant, sis. It must be all the time you spend with zoo animals that gives you such a keen sense of danger.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t you dare insult me, Patrick. Who knows what kind of mess we’re in now? I told you we shouldn’t have come here.”

I heard I told you so , or words to that effect, several more times before the latch turned and the door opened. Andie Henning entered the room, closed the door, and glared at me with double-barreled death rays.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“What are you doing here?” I replied.

“There was a breach of security. Someone hacked into the hospital computers last night and added the name of a bogus priest to the list of pre-approved visitors. He came to see your father this morning.”

“Is Dad okay?” asked Connie, blurting out my exact sentiment.

“He’s fine,” said Andie. “He’s not even aware that he had a visitor. Needless to say, all visitation to the entire unit is suspended until we figure out what happened.”

Connie rose and formally introduced herself. “I presume you’re the FBI agent who arranged for Dad’s medical treatment?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said. Over the past few days Andie had been so much a part of my conversations with Connie, and vice versa, that I had forgotten they’d never actually met.

“No problem,” said Connie. “It’s all that time I spend at the zoo that gives me such a keen sense of common courtesy.”

Touché.

“Did I miss something?” asked Andie.

“Never mind,” I said. “Do you have any idea who the visitor was?”

“Nothing definite yet, but we have two solid leads. Security cameras captured some clear footage. We’re running images through a facial-recognition database, but that’s a needle in a haystack. We also have a match on a shoe print.”

“Match to what?” I asked.

“The floors on eight were polished clean last night, and the video surveillance showed us exactly where our suspect walked, so we were able to pull up a clear shoe print.”

Connie said, “I would have thought you needed a soft surface, like carpeting, to pick up a shoe print.”

“Actually, the best shoe prints are on hard surfaces, like tile,” said Andie. “Or the polished marble floor of a park ranger’s bathroom.”

I caught her drift. As did Connie, who looked at Andie with concern. “So the man who strangled that park ranger was just here in my dad’s room this morning?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Andie. “You two should go back to New York. Even if you are going to ignore my advice to stay away from here, today is obviously not the day to push to see your father.”

“She’s right,” said Connie.

I understood, but I was determined to make the most of the trip. “Andie, what about BAQ? Have you made any headway on decoding that?”

I could tell that she had, but she paused to measure her response. “Your instincts were correct,” she said. “BAQ is not a random sequence of letters. It stands for Operation BAQ.”

“What is Operation BAQ?”

“If I answered that question, I would have to turn in my badge.”

“If it’s a matter of negotiation, I’m prepared to share the name of a certain account holder at BOS/Singapore.”

“Manu Robledo,” she said.

“You know about him?”

“It’s been a productive morning,” she said. “At this point, I’m confident that I know more about Robledo than you do.”

“Then I presume you’re going to arrest him.”

“For what?”

“For putting a gun to my head and threatening to send me the way of Gerry Collins if he doesn’t get back the money he lost.”

She shifted, uneasy. I sensed that the bureau’s party line was coming, and that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. “As of this point in time, the FBI doesn’t have sufficient evidence to substantiate as a matter of fact that the attack took place.”

As I’d expected: the party line. “You disappoint me, Agent Henning.”

“I told you when it happened that you should have called me immediately. You even washed the powder burns away from your neck. There’s no physical evidence.”

“You could at least bring him in for questioning.”

“I’ve told you all I can about the FBI’s position on Robledo. There’s nothing more to say.”

I felt the need to convince her otherwise, to demonstrate that our mutual exchange of information was still worth her while. The memo was my best angle.

“BAQ is a Treasury operation, isn’t it,” I said.

I didn’t expect her to confirm it, but clearly my educated guess had piqued her interest. “Why would you say that?” she asked.

“It’s a fairly easy deduction. My tech guy did his best to decode all the data in Lilly’s files. He was able to extract the letters BAQ from a memo that was encrypted on the order of a national security memorandum. You just told me that BAQ is a government operation of some sort.”

“I didn’t say it was a Treasury operation.”

“You didn’t have to. The only government memorandum Lilly ever mentioned to me was a Treasury memo stating that she and BOS/Singapore represented the most promising lead in the search for the Cushman money.”

“How would she know about a memo?” asked Andie.

“Lilly got the same threat I did: hand over the Cushman money or die. She told him she didn’t know anything about it, but he showed her proof that she was lying.”

“He showed her the memo?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to credit what I was saying, but I could see her concern as the realization sank in: in the world of quid pro quo, she owed me.

“I want to see the memo,” I said, getting right to the point.

“I can’t do that.”

“Lilly has already seen it. Why can’t I?”

“My guess is that she didn’t see the classified version.”

“There are two versions?”

“One version has all the classified information concealed. There are black bars on the page wherever anything has been redacted.”

“I want to see the classified, unredacted version of the Treasury Department’s Operation BAQ memorandum.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Sorry you feel that way,” I said. “I suppose I could take the encrypted file to someone who knows how to decode it. Maybe the Russian embassy can help me.”

“That’s not funny,” she said.

“I’m not laughing,” I said.

“You’re messing with treason.”

“You’re messing with my life and my family.”

Neither of us had raised our voice, but I could feel the heat from the exchange.

“Clearly, the smart thing is for us to work together,” Andie said.

“Agreed. I’m offering to hand over the encrypted file I have in my possession and to keep quiet about it. But I want to know what’s in it.”

“You’re asking too much.”

“You’re giving too little.”

Andie did not respond. I signaled to Connie that it was time to leave. “Think about it,” I told Andie as I opened the door. Connie exited first, and I followed. “But think fast,” I said. “I instructed my tech guy to be very careful with that encrypted file, but accidents do happen. I’d hate for him to hit the wrong button and send the thing viral over the Internet.”

I closed the door, leaving Agent Henning alone in the room to consider the proposal on the table.