Need You Now

by James Grippando

It was the kind of news no one wanted to receive, but I was checking Barber’s reaction. Under my witness protection profile-the life I had been living-Patrick Lloyd’s father was deceased. I wondered if Barber realized that we were talking about Peter Mandretti’s father. If he did, he did not let on.

  “Would you like me to forward the call again?” his assistant asked.

  I had my BlackBerry with me; confronting Barber about the spyware was part of the plan I had discussed with Scully.

  “Yes, please do,” said Barber. “Forward it to his BlackBerry.”

  The way he’d said it confirmed in my mind that Barber was behind the spyware, or that he at least knew it was installed. But in a “family emergency” it wouldn’t have made sense to insist on using another phone, anything less expeditious.

  His assistant went back to her desk. My BlackBerry vibrated in my pocket. “I can take it in the lobby,” I said.

  “Please, use my study,” said Barber.

  His offer of privacy was, of course, pointless, since he would hear it anyway through spyware. But after the doctor’s call, my actions were those of a son anxious for news about a family emergency that involved his father, so I stepped into the study that was adjacent to his main office and took the call. The woman on the line introduced herself as an oncologist, Dr. Alice Kern.

  “I’m calling about a patient named Sam Carlson,” she said.

  “Is he…”

  “No. But the situation is grave. We don’t have any family information on file, but he tells us that you are his son.”

  I took a deep breath. “So he’s conscious?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long does he have?”

  “You should come immediately. Special arrangements have been made for you to stay at his bedside until it’s time.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “You’re welcome.

  “Does he know I’m coming?”

  “Yes. He specifically asked for you.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He indicated that there is something he wishes to tell you face-to-face.”

  Enough had been said on a phone with spyware. I didn’t push the doctor to speak further. “Tell him I’m on my way.”

  The call ended, and my knees felt like rubber. I knew that I had to hurry, but for a moment I couldn’t move. I was scared for my dad, for my sister, for myself. I felt sorry for Evan Hunt and his family. I wanted to call Lilly, but I didn’t dare use the BlackBerry that the Wall Street bully in the next room had essentially converted to his own use with spyware. His ego was everywhere, even in this private study, the walls of which were covered with still more glass-encased articles about him from newspapers and magazines. It was sickening-and then, suddenly, it was an epiphany.

  The Forbes article on the wall caught my attention-almost slapped me in the face. I stepped closer and locked eyes with the tough, take-no-prisoners persona of “Joe Barber, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Treasury” staring back at me. Standing to his left in the photograph was the assistant secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, charged with overseeing the production and analysis of financial intelligence for use by policy makers in combating illicit financial activities. To his right was the assistant secretary for Terrorist Financing, responsible for developing anti-money laundering and counterterrorist financing policy.

  But what snagged my full attention-what reached out, grabbed me by the neck, and shook me-was the subtitle in small but bold letters:

  Is al-Qaeda broke?

  “Holy shit,” I said aloud.

  I suddenly knew who Robledo’s clients were, knew why an undercover agent had duped him into investing $2 billion through Gerry Collins, knew why Treasury had ignored Evan’s thirty-eight red flags and allowed Cushman to collapse, knew what BAQ meant. I knew everything.

  Most of all, I knew that I was running out of time.

  I tucked away my BlackBerry and hurried out the door, apologizing to Barber on my way, though surely he didn’t deserve one. There was an express elevator from the executive suite, so I didn’t bother stopping for my overcoat. In less than sixty seconds I was in the ground-floor lobby, pushing through the revolving doors at the bank’s main entrance. The sidewalk on Seventh Avenue was bustling with nine-to-fivers headed for the subway, eager to start their weekend. The zoo’s white van was at the curb, where we had agreed last night that Connie would meet me, and I jumped into the passenger seat.

  “We need to go to Lemuel Shattuck right now. It’s an emergency.”

  “Is Dad okay?”

  “A doctor called saying that I needed to get there as soon as possible, that there’s something Dad wants to tell me.”

  “Oh, my God, he’s dying.”

  I hated to see such pain in her expression, but we had to move. I took my BlackBerry from my pocket and removed the battery.

  “What are you doing?

  “The spyware in here could have GPS tracking. Taking out the battery disables it.”

  “If there’s spyware on that phone, they already know you’re headed to the hospital.”

  “Call me paranoid, but I don’t want the guy who killed Evan Hunt knowing exactly where I am on the road between here and Boston.”

  “Okay, but if it’s a tracking chip, it has its own power source. Removing the main battery won’t disable it.”

  I figured a scoutmaster would know. I rolled down the window and tossed the phone into the street. A passing bus ground it into the pavement.

  “That will,” I said.

  “If you were a scout, I’d pull your world conservation badge.”

  “Drive, Connie.”

  53

  T hat Friday, just after dark, Mongoose’s flight touched down at Westchester County Airport, a two-runway operation that served one of the largest fleets of corporate jets in America. The other passengers on board worked for the same hedge fund in Greenwich, just across the Connecticut state line in affluent Fairfield County. Mongoose didn’t know them, didn’t care why they were flying back from Ciudad del Este before dawn, and hadn’t said a word to them since takeoff. Commercial nonstops from Ciudad del Este to New York were nonexistent. With $2 billion in the pipeline, Mongoose had jumped all over the open seat on a chartered Gulfstream jet, even if the car ride from White Plains to Midtown was over an hour.

  “Your luggage will be on the tarmac,” said the flight attendant.

  “Got none,” said Mongoose. No bags would naturally prompt a few questions at customs, but that was easier than trying to explain traces of blood, bone, and soft tissue on a commando wire saw.

  The “enhanced interrogation” of Manu Robledo had taken about two hours. Using the nylon rope from his tool kit, Mongoose had completely immobilized his prey, flat on his back, in the bathtub. Robledo’s arms were up over his head, his wrists tied to the plumbing fixtures. The assistance rail on the wall at the other end of the tub was strong enough to secure his feet, shoes off. The drain could handle any amount of blood, but just to make sure that Robledo didn’t bleed out too soon, Mongoose had fastened a tourniquet around both wrists. Then he’d gone to work.

  The left thumb had been first. Ignoring the muffled pleas for mercy, Mongoose had wrapped the wire around the base and pulled in rhythmic fashion: left, right, left right. All Robledo could do was grab the wire, but the result had been a severed index finger along with the severed thumb. As a general proposition, a wire saw took anything that got in its way-and Robledo’s right thumb was next. Had it not been for the gag in his mouth, Robledo’s screams would have awakened the entire hotel. But he was powerless to resist, save for the futile grasp of the wire saw, and the result was the same: simultaneous severance of his thumb and index finger. Mongoose had paused to allow Robledo to get a full grasp of his condition, making sure that Robledo watched as, one by one, he’d flushed the digits down the toilet. Then he’d tied another tourniquet to Robledo’s ankle. The big toe would have been too predictable. He wrap
ped the wire saw around the middle of the foot, through the center of the arch, pulling it tight. From the look in Robledo’s eyes, he’d begun to feel the pain even before the wire had torn into his skin. An opportunity had presented itself. Before starting the back-and-forth, Mongoose had looked Robledo in the eye and said, “I’m going to give you the chance to tell me everything. Do you want that chance?”

  Robledo had nodded eagerly.

  Talk, talk, talk. The starting point had been the Church of Peace and Prosperity International, which Robledo explained was a front for a data-mining operation that would identify and then recruit angry young Islamic extremists who were already in the United States and who could be persuaded to blow themselves up in shopping centers. There was nothing that Robledo would not have told him. At some point, however, the risk of someone hearing his screams was too great. Not that anyone in Ciudad del Este would bother to call the police, not that the police couldn’t be bought off even if they came. As it was, Robledo had even confessed to participation in the worst terrorist attack ever against an Israeli diplomatic mission, the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992. False confessions were a definite hazard of wire saw interrogation. But it was a fact that no one had ever been prosecuted for the murder of twenty-nine and wounding of dozens more, many of them schoolchildren, in that bombing.

  You never know.

  Mongoose was through airport customs and immigration before six o’clock. He was walking toward the taxi stand when his cell phone rang. It was Barber.

  “Joey baby, how are you?”

  “I told you to stop calling me that. Listen to me.”

  Mongoose waved off a taxi and stood at the curb as Barber filled in the details of his meeting with Patrick Lloyd. The fact that Tony Mandretti had called for his son, had something to tell him from his deathbed, was of special interest.

  “What are you afraid of, Joey? That Daddy is going tell his little boy about the crooked man who lives in a crooked house and runs a crooked bank?”

  “No, asshole.”

  “Oh, I know,” Mongoose said, his voice laden with even more sarcasm. “You’re afraid Mandretti’s going to tell his son that he didn’t kill Gerry Collins, and that our own government paid him to confess.”

  “I know you believe that, but it’s simply not true.”

  “Bullshit. You don’t have to know everything about Operation BAQ to understand that it couldn’t work unless Robledo was on the outside leading his investors down the road we’d paved for them.”

  “You believe that. Mandretti believes it. Patrick Lloyd will believe it once he hears it from his father. I’m telling you that it is absolutely not true, but somebody planted that seed, and this is going to be a classic case of ‘perception is reality’ if I don’t crush this right now.”

  Mongoose said, “It’s just not clear to me why this is my problem to fix.”

  “Try this on for size: you won’t see ten cents of the recovered money if this father-son reunion blows the lid off Operation BAQ. You got nothing on me if that secret gets out.”

  Mongoose considered it. “Funny how life works, isn’t it? I remember sitting in your study not too many hours ago, offering you a partnership.”

  “Don’t go there.”

  “Our interests actually seem to align here, partner.”

  “Brilliant. Just don’t call me your partner.”

  “That’s fine, Little Joe. Where is Lloyd now?”

  “He and his sister are driving to Boston.”

  “I’ll head them off.”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You and I may be forced to sleep together, but I am not going to roll over and put myself in the position of having to explain the sudden disappearance of two young and perfectly healthy people like Patrick and his sister. Work from the other end: silence the sixty-year-old man who’s already on his deathbed.”

  “That actually makes sense,” said Mongoose, “but I’m not sure there’s time.”

  “Use the corporate helicopter. It will have you in Boston at least two hours before Patrick and his sister can drive there.”

  “It’s not just a race between Patrick Lloyd and me. We’re talking about the hospital’s prison unit. The place is on high alert since that phony priest got through security.”

  “Yeah, and I wonder who the phony priest was,” Barber said.

  “Never mind that,” said Mongoose. “You said special arrangements were made for Patrick to be at his father’s bedside. The question is, how do I get at his bedside?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of that,” said Barber.

  Mongoose smiled. “Still have friends in high places, eh, Joey?”

  “Just get on the helicopter,” said Barber. “I said I’d take care of it.”

  “One more thing,” said Mongoose, his tone very serious. “I understand that whomever you hired to take out Evan Hunt also took his computer with the encrypted Treasury memo.”

  “I didn’t hire-”

  “Spare me the lame denial,” said Mongoose. “I just want you to know that it doesn’t matter what you did with that computer, my safety valve is in place. Every day, your memo on Operation BAQ is automatically reset to go straight to the media at midnight, unless I manually deprogram the e-mail blast. The day I die is the day that memo launches. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” said Barber.

  “Good,” said Mongoose. “Make sure it’s crystal clear to your friends in high places.”

  54

  C onnie and I drove nonstop to Boston and reached Lemuel Shattuck Hospital around nine o’clock. It was after the prison unit’s regular visitation hours, but this wasn’t a regular visit. Even so, the corrections officer at the ground-floor entrance told us that only one visitor at a time was allowed in the room.

  “You go,” said Connie. “He asked for you.”

  I completed the visitation paperwork, and my sister returned to the main lobby, where the Celtics game was playing on a flat-screen TV so small that Kevin Garnett looked like a Lilliputian, albeit one who could dunk. Searches were mandatory for all visitors, but in my case it was made all the more necessary by the fact that the metal detector showed no cell phone on my person, which the guard found utterly unbelievable for anyone whose work address was on Wall Street. He rode with me in the express elevator to the eighth floor, where another officer was posted at the locked entrance to the prison unit. Dr. Alice Kern met me in the waiting area, on the visitors’ side of the security doors, and introduced herself.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “We had to give him something for his pain, which, of course, makes him drowsy. He’s asleep.”

  “But he asked me to come because he had something to tell me.”

  “Honestly, you got here much faster than I expected. You’ll have your time with him. He’ll come around in an hour or so.”

  “So, his passing is not… imminent?”

  “It’s not a matter of hours, no. But it could be any day. You can stay here as long as you like.” She glanced at the corrections officer, adding, “It’s been approved.”

  I signed my name on the register, and the guard inside the glass booth buzzed Dr. Kern and me into the unit. I followed her down the brightly lit hallway, my heart pounding. Once the secured entrance was behind us, the prison unit looked much like any other hospital, with the exception of the corrections officers posted at each end of the corridor. There were probably a few more security cameras than in a regular hospital, but this was definitely not San Quentin. We passed several more rooms and finally stopped outside an open doorway.

  “When is the last time you saw your father?” she asked.

  “When I was fifteen years old.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “In that case, I guess what I was about to say goes double: you should be prepared for a change in your father’s appearance.”

  I had thought I was prepared, but hearing her say it made me realize th
at I wasn’t. “You’re right, I should be.”

  “Do you want me to go in with you, or do you prefer to be alone?”

  I had not yet thought about it, but the answer came quickly. “Alone.”

  “That’s fine. If you need anything, you can push the red call button by the bed.”

  “How much longer will you be here?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be around.”

  I thanked her, which she acknowledged with a supportive nod. Then she retreated down the long corridor, and I turned to face the dark opening to my father’s room, where he lay deep in drug-induced sleep. After one tentative step forward, I stopped, the prognosis replaying in my mind.

  It could be any day.

  I was suddenly wracked with guilt, my feet nailed to the floor. The last five days had been all about my father, and this was the third time since Monday that I’d tried to see him. That made for a grand total of three such attempts since my fifteenth birthday. Did that make me a lousy person? An angry young man, forever bitter that in finding his conscience, my father’s choice to turn against the mob had ended in the death of my mother? Or was I a good son who respected the courage of a father who had come to the painful realization that the only way to protect himself and his children was never to see them again? The answer was complicated, but I had no doubt that guilt was the reason I had jumped at Agent Henning’s offer to arrange for first-rate cancer treatment in exchange for six months of spying on Lilly in Singapore. I wondered if my father knew what I had done. I wondered if he would care.

  I wondered, too, if guilt was the reason I felt the way I did about Lilly-that I was so desperate for something good to come out of a bad situation.

  “Sir, you can’t hang out in the hallway,” the corrections officer said. I hadn’t even heard her come up behind me. “It’s not allowed. You either have to go into the room or go back to the waiting area.”

  “Sorry,” I said, breathing out some of my anxiety. “I guess I’ll go in.”

  55