Need You Now

by James Grippando

  “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

  Connie 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.

  65

  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 hav
e 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

  The 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 plan
ned 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

  JAMES GRIPPANDO 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.