In the movies and on television, loan sharks tended to be brutal, ruthless men who would begin breaking body parts in order to remind you of your obligation and would continuing doing so until you repaid your debt. I had no idea whether that was the case in actuality, but the look on Mark’s face now caused a heavy weight of dread to settle in the pit of my stomach.
“How much do you owe them, Mr. Jennings?” Claudia asked.
“Almost five hundred thousand dollars.”
My eyes almost bugged out of my head. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said his wife was into high-dollar gambling. I couldn’t conceive how often or how much you’d have to bet to dig yourself a hole that deep. Nor could I understand how, at a certain point, long before you were down almost half a million dollars, you didn’t just cut your losses and call it a day. I guessed that was why it was considered an addiction.
“And how did you manage to keep this information from coming out during your last background update?” Claudia sounded particularly curious about that part.
Mark’s face flushed, and he had the grace to look embarrassed. “The problem wasn’t anywhere near this bad during my last background update. And no one noticed it then. At least, no one asked me about it. But the situation has become considerably worse in the past few years, and my next update isn’t far away.”
“And you were trying to control the situation before your credit report was run again for your next update so your security clearance wouldn’t be revoked and you wouldn’t lose your job.” Claudia made a notation on her pad, and I suspected someone in Human Resources would get a very stern talking to sometime soon for having missed this the last time Mark’s finances were looked at. But then she refocused on our current predicament. “So, how, exactly, does your financial situation translate into attempting to orchestrate a hit on the president of Iran?”
Mark blinked, startled. “It wasn’t…Surely you’ve figured out that it’s not—” He broke off and fixed me with an intense look. The expression in his eyes as he stared at me was almost beseeching, although what he was asking for, I couldn’t have said. Perhaps he wanted forgiveness. Maybe he was hoping I’d interrupt and not make him say the words out loud. Unfortunately for him, it’d be a cold day in hell before I bailed him out of anything.
Mark seemed to realize this because he sighed heavily and scratched his cheek. He shifted his attention to Claudia as though he couldn’t bear to meet my eyes when he disclosed this next part. “The president of Iran wasn’t the target.” A long pause. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
“We did,” Claudia said with a slight nod.
“You just wanted to hear me say it?”
“Yes. But more than that, we want to know why.”
Mark’s facial muscles bunched, and I imagined he was pursing his lips behind his mustache. Or maybe chewing his bottom lip. It was tough to tell. His brow furrowed, and after a long moment of obvious consideration, he met my eyes again.
“You should’ve just left it alone,” he whispered softly, sounding truly sorry. “None of this would’ve happened if you’d just left it alone like I told you to.”
“The Akbari case,” I said, finally opting to actively participate in the conversation. The fact that he was more or less placing the blame for this entire debacle squarely on my shoulders was utterly absurd and infuriated me. But pointing that out to him would be akin to trying to reason with my conspiracy-theory-laden buddy Walker. I’d get nowhere and would only end up more frustrated for having tried. So I bit my tongue, figuratively speaking, and waited for him to go on.
“Yes. The night you went to interview him, I got a call that you’d been there. You were too close. And you’re like a goddamn dog with a bone. I knew you’d just keep digging and digging and that you’d eventually unearth me. I couldn’t risk it, so I tried to get you to stop, but you wouldn’t listen. You just had to keep going.”
“Well, killing me would have definitely made me stop,” I remarked dryly, trying not to let him see exactly how deeply that notion chilled me.
“Yeah.” Mark’s countenance now was glum. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed by dark circles. He appeared very tired. Idly, I wondered if he’d been having as much trouble sleeping lately as I had. The thought pleased me no end.
“Weren’t you at all concerned that it’d have been tracked back to you anyway, even if I were dead?”
Mark shrugged. “I didn’t see how. The Akbari case was completely unrelated to what was supposed to look like an assassination attempt on the president of Iran. Who would’ve ever connected them?”
“Except for me.”
“Yeah, well, you weren’t supposed to live, so I hadn’t counted on that.”
“The best-laid plans and all that,” I quipped icily.
“For what it’s worth, it wasn’t my idea.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Killing you,” Mark clarified. “It wasn’t my idea. They kept asking me if you were going to be a problem and if I’d managed to get my hands on whatever notes or documents you had on the case, but I couldn’t find anything. I looked.”
“That’s why you kept coming to my office and seeming surprised to see me there,” I said softly, just now putting the last few pieces together. “You were there to snoop around. You were expecting it to be empty. That’s why I found you going through my drawers. I always thought you were looking for ammunition to get me fired.”
Even when I’d realized his involvement, I still hadn’t been able to figure out exactly why he’d been ransacking my office. It made sense now that he said it, and I could’ve smacked myself for not having seen it before.
“I was looking for something that would keep the Iranians off my back. I thought if I could give them whatever you’d gathered on the case they might…It sounds stupid now.”
“It really does,” I said coldly. “Forgive me for not sounding more sympathetic, but it doesn’t sound like you tried all that hard to talk them out of killing me.”
“What was I supposed to do?” Mark shot back. “They were set on it. Do you really think anything I said would’ve made a difference?”
“Tell me something. Did you help them in any way?”
He hesitated for a fraction of a second. “What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly what I said. Did you help them try to kill me? Did you provide them any information they’d have found useful? Such as the location of the delegation? I only ask because we were supposed to have been at the UN long before the shooting occurred but only stayed where we were because the president had an impromptu meeting. So there’s no way the shooter could’ve known where we were if someone didn’t tell them.”
Mark averted his eyes and pretended to adjust his handcuff. “Maybe the shooter just camped out in that room and waited for a clear shot.”
“But he didn’t, did he? Because the protectee was never supposed to have been at the InterCon, which meant all of his arrivals and departures would’ve been from the covered garage of the Waldorf. And if someone took a shot at me when the protectee was nowhere nearby, it wouldn’t have looked like an assassination attempt on him. It would’ve looked like exactly what it was: an assassination attempt on me. No. Someone had to advise them on when would be the absolute best time to try that, and I think that someone was you.”
Mark’s jaw clenched, but his eyes remained riveted to his handcuff. It didn’t appear as though he would chime in with any sort of rejoinder any time soon, so I went on.
“Did you have somebody set up that meeting?”
Mark’s left eye twitched, and the corner of his mustache jumped immediately after. “My contacts did, yes. Through some of their associates. I didn’t get involved in the details. I didn’t want to know.”
I didn’t comment on that last part. “Because you needed to make sure he’d be out in the open or what you had planned wouldn’t work.”
Mark nodded. “Yeah. But my contacts weren’t positive about the date
or the time. They said they couldn’t risk making too many calls back and forth because the feds were already watching them. That’s why I had to be involved.”
“So you could give the shooter the correct location and time.”
Mark nodded again, and his eyes glazed over.
“How did you know what the detail was doing?”
“Most of the time I just listened to the radio.”
“And the other times?”
He hesitated. “I called Michael Prince and asked him.”
I closed my eyes for a second as that news washed over me. “Michael had no clue why you were asking, did he?”
“No. I kept our conversations short and made it sound like I was checking up on him more than the detail.”
God, I hoped Michael never found out about that part. He’d be devastated. “You told them where to shoot, too, didn’t you?”
Mark didn’t lift his head, but his gaze snapped up to meet mine. “What?”
“You told them I was wearing a vest. You told them they’d have to aim high so they could avoid my body armor.”
“Maybe they just assumed you were wearing body armor and compensated accordingly.”
“They could have, but I don’t think they did. I think you told them. I think that, left to their own devices, they’d have gone for a center-mass shot because it’s the easier target. And the vest I wear for protection is low profile. You can’t tell I’m wearing it underneath a suit, so they wouldn’t have known. No, I think you filled them in on that fun fact. And because you told them to aim high, Lucia is dead.”
“That wasn’t my fault. She wasn’t supposed to be there,” Mark cried, sounding indignant.
I was fuming. For the first time in my life, I understood what people meant when they said they saw red, but after a long moment of considerable internal struggle, I decided I didn’t want to get into that line of discussion with him. No good could come of it. Clearly, he was hell-bent on shifting the blame for Lucia’s demise off his shoulders altogether. Attempting to get him to see my point of view on the subject would get one of us beaten to within an inch of their life, and it sure as hell wouldn’t have been me. In the interest of avoiding my own trip to prison, I opted to change the subject.
“Speaking of things that weren’t counted on, what about your burner phone?” When Mark merely blinked at me, obviously confused, I clarified my sudden topic shift. “Why do you still have the burner phone you’d been using to communicate with the Iranians? After ‘the incident,’ surely you had to know it was dangerous to keep it. Why didn’t you get a new one?”
Mark sighed heavily. “I was going to. But then Dharma told me she’d given that number as a contact to a new guy she owed money to, and I was afraid if I dumped the phone, he’d think she was trying to get out of paying up.”
“You were afraid he’d find her and kill her.”
Mark nodded. “It wouldn’t have been hard for him to do it. She keeps to a pretty regular schedule, comes and goes at the same time every day. He could just grab her. Or the girls. I couldn’t risk it.”
Something occurred to me just then, at his mention of comings and goings. “The building entrance logs.”
“What?”
“You’ve been coming in early a few times a week for years.”
“How do you know that?”
“I looked.” I frowned as I attempted to discern why he might’ve done that. The flashbulb that went off in my head was almost blinding. “You’ve been taking counterfeit bills we’ve received from businesses and banks that haven’t been entered into evidence yet out of the vault and giving them to the Iranians. That’s why we kept seeing so many different types of notes connected to them. They’d been using all different kinds of notes because that’s what you’d been giving them.”
The sheer volume of counterfeit bills we received that way was staggering, and although our administrative staff worked tirelessly to keep up with the flow, they were fighting a losing battle. Unless we hired another two dozen people just for the purpose of logging in those bills that slipped through the proverbial cracks and weren’t identified as fake until it was too late, it’d always be like Sisyphus trying to push that gigantic boulder uphill only to have it roll back down before he could reach the top.
That shouldn’t have been a problem, though, because the bills were put in safekeeping in a special place in the evidence vault where they were supposed to stay until they could be properly catalogued, logged, entered into the system, and officially stored. The only people who had access to that vault were the bosses and the evidence technicians. If I wanted to go in there, I had to find someone to let me in. Whenever the administrative personnel went in to log the bills, they had to find someone with access to open the doors for them. And then there were standards and protocols in place for signing in and out of the vault that we were all instructed to follow. When I’d borrowed the prop counterfeit bill I’d brought with me the night I’d gone to interview Akbari, I’d had to sign that out, too.
Those policies and procedures coupled with the fact that we were all supposed to be “worthy of trust and confidence” meant that, in theory, the system should’ve worked perfectly. “Should have” was the key phrase in that statement. Clearly, the system had broken down somewhere. I guess when the higher-ups had been designing it, they hadn’t counted on someone perpetrating a breach of trust like the one Mark had just engineered. To be fair, I doubt anyone could’ve seen that coming.
Mark’s incredulous expression told me I was right. It also told me he couldn’t believe I’d managed to figure it out. That made two of us. I couldn’t have said why I’d had that thought just now. And I didn’t care. All that mattered was that I was correct.
“Have you been helping them perfect their own note, as well?” I wanted to know, thinking of the newest version of the Iranian note Rico and I had talked about the other day.
Mark averted his eyes and looked ashamed. “Yes.” The answer was barely audible.
“How much did they pay you for your services?” Claudia inquired.
“Enough to keep the loan sharks from pressing us too hard to repay our debts. We don’t always pay them as much as they’d like, but we can give them enough that they content themselves with various verbal threats and don’t resort to physical violence.”
It was my turn to sigh, and I slumped back in my chair. I folded my arms across my chest and scowled. This entire situation was all kinds of fucked up. I understood Mark had felt a duty to protect his family, I understood desperation, but to resort to those measures? I couldn’t fathom it. Not even a little. I contemplated the nuances of the situation repeatedly and still couldn’t come up with any plausible reason for why Mark had gone along with the plot to kill me. The longer I sat there mulling it over, the angrier I got. And underneath all that anger were scalding feelings of disappointment and betrayal. He may not have liked me, but damn it, he was supposed to have my back, not help someone try to put a bullet in it.
And speaking of murderous tendencies, I wanted to know one more thing. “Are they going to try again?”
Mark didn’t say anything, but he also didn’t look at me, which told me everything I needed to know. My heart started doing somersaults, and my hands trembled. I swallowed and clenched my fingers into my pant legs at my knees.
“How much do they know about me?” I asked. “How much did you tell them? Do they know my schedule? Where I live? Do they know about Allison?”
Again, Mark didn’t reply. I closed my eyes as a wave of terror threatened to drown me. My lower lip quivered, and I placed the palms of my hands over my roiling stomach as I tried to talk myself out of throwing up.
“Well, Mr. Jennings.” Claudia spoke up, breaking into my tumultuous thoughts and causing me to open my eyes. “I think we have all we need. Thank you so much for your candor. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we begin processing you?”
Mark was silent for a long time, his eyes downcas
t, looking like a completely broken man. I hadn’t thought he was going to answer her question, so I got up to leave. I’d made it as far as the door before his voice stopped me.
“I’m sorry.” It was soft. The barest trace of a whisper. But it was enough to make me pause with my hand on the doorknob.
I was unsure how to respond. His apology changed nothing. Lucia was still dead. I still carried the almost-unbearable weight of guilt for that because it was partially my fault. Allison and I—and maybe even Rory—might still be in danger. He’d taken the trust and loyalty of the men and women of this agency and trampled on it, an action that would likely have resounding repercussions. And not just for me, but for a whole host of agents—past, present, and future. Pretty words, no matter how heartfelt, couldn’t undo any of that. My hand tightened on the knob, and I swallowed against the churning in my gut.
“Ryan,” Mark said louder. “You have to believe me. I really am sorry.”
I stood there for another long moment with my back to him, trying to sort through all the possible responses that bubbled up behind my lips like a poker player sorts through the cards in their hand, choosing which to keep and which to discard. I had a ton of retorts to pick from, and they ranged from snarky to pathetic to heartfelt to downright cruel. In the end, I settled for silence and walked out of there without a backward glance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“You knew, didn’t you?” my dad said without preamble when I stepped into the hall. He’d been waiting for me and had ambushed me the second the door to the interview room swung shut behind me.
Worthy of Trust and Confidence Page 26
