"The Triangle Conspiracy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kent David)

5

WHEN SEAN HAD LEFT TUCSON AND POINTED HIS Jeep southwest toward Arivaca and, ultimately, Sasabe, he’d actually thought he would never see his apartment again. He would just drive away from it all-his furniture, his stereo, his hundreds of compact discs, even his own personal gun, a forty-caliber semiautomatic Glock 23.

But here he sat, at the wooden dining room table he’d scavenged from an antique shop in Oro Valley two years ago. He’d refinished it with great care, then worked on the four chairs, one by one, over the course of six months. The apartment was always a surprise to people-they didn’t expect a young single guy to be as neat and tidy as he was. It always amused Sean that his sister, Faith, was such a slob. Because she was female, it was expected that she would be into cleaning, yet he knew Faith could rarely be troubled to even pick up her dirty laundry. So they had both confounded what was expected of them, in more ways than one.

Sean was no longer buzzed by all the whiskey he’d drunk in the Sasabe cantina. He’d left the little bar with a renewed sense of purpose. Even if the purpose was skulking around in the life of Senator McDermott’s promiscuous, politically radical daughter, it was a chance, and it held possibilities.

He made himself a bologna sandwich, opened a bottle of Dos Equis, and spread out the papers from the packet Tobias Owens had given him. There was something that looked like a briefing paper, probably prepared by Owens, as it was written in thick legalese-six words when two would suffice. He leafed through it, muddling through the dense prose.

Daryn Anisa McDermott was twenty-four years old and had been born in Washington to Senator Edward McDermott and his first wife, Regina Statham McDermott. The two divorced when Daryn was seven, and thus began the senator’s experiments in finding the perfect political trophy wife. He’d tried three more thus far.

Daryn only spent vacations, the occasional holiday, and most campaign seasons in Arizona, having been raised primarily in Washington. Owens was right-she’d received a sociology degree from Georgetown, and to Sean’s surprise, he saw that she’d graduated third in her class. Impressive. So Daryn McDermott was no bubbleheaded political princess.

She’d first begun moving in radical political directions during college, naturally. With the conservative ascendancy in American politics, Daryn practically ran in the other direction, especially on social, “moral” issues. Sean read a snippet of a paper she’d written her senior year, in which young Daryn called for the “over-throw” of traditional values and “dismantling” of old ways of thinking, to scrap the social order and begin again, to let the “ruling classes” know that the “real” people of America were “in revolt.”

Strong language, Sean thought. The birth of a radical. But then, how much of Daryn McDermott’s radicalism was true conviction, and how much was sticking it to her father, the father who dumped her mother and then had little to do with his daughter except as a campaign prop? The father who was firmly in the “family values” political camp, and who was a part of the ruling class his daughter railed against.

He put aside the bio and started looking through the newspaper and magazine clippings of Daryn’s various demonstrations. There was a copy of the famous picture from the Associated Press, of Daryn marching naked in front of the U.S. Capitol, a black strip superimposed across her breasts and pubic area. There were a couple of photos that seemed like more conventional protests: outside the gates to a coal mine in West Virginia, a factory in Ohio. But most were taken with Daryn standing shoulder to shoulder with groups of other women, sometimes street prostitutes, sometimes call girls or “escorts.”

Sean tried to follow Daryn’s arguments in an article clipped from Newsweek, which included photos from a march she’d led-the “hookers’ march,” a local paper had called it-in downtown St. Louis. Daryn never tried to talk women out of a life of prostitution. She campaigned for them to choose the life, and if they so chose, to do it safely and legally, without fear of either disease or the police.

Sean read her quote: “Some women are forced here because of circumstances. Some women are forced here to feed their children. Some women are forced here to feed their own habits. And some women, regardless of what polite society may think, aren’t forced here at all! They choose to be here! Women should be free to make that choice, right or wrong!”

He sifted through more photos. Another one from the Associated Press caught his eye. Daryn was a small woman, only five two or so, and she may have been all of 110 pounds. But she wore her hair long, often twisted into intricate braids, and her brown eyes blazed with intensity, intelligence, and fury. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but was an arresting physical presence.

I did fall under her spell myself once, Tobias Owens had said.

Sean was beginning to see how that would be the appropriate term. He could understand how a woman like Daryn McDermott would indeed cast a spell.

Sean scrutinized the photo, holding it up under the light. In it, Daryn was wearing a button-down shirt with several buttons undone, showing a great deal of cleavage. That was exactly the point, Sean quickly surmised. She wanted the photographer to see the tattoo at the top of her left breast. In swirling Old English lettering was tattooed the word justice.

“Jesus please us,” Sean muttered.

The photo, of course, mainly captured Daryn. Sean read the caption: Daryn McDermott, 23, daughter of U.S. Senator Edward McDermott of Arizona, at a rally to legalize prostituion, on the steps of the State Capitol, Oklahoma City.

Just off-center from the camera shot, though, was another woman, with dark straight hair and hollowed cheeks. She was wearing a denim miniskirt and white pullover. Large hoop earrings dangled from her ears. One of her eyebrows was pierced as well. She was young, barely into her twenties, Sean guessed. Her face was half-turned, gazing at Daryn with something like awe. The other woman’s arm was linked through Daryn’s.

They didn’t even bother to identify her, Sean thought. Just some anonymous hooker, lost in Daryn McDermott’s wake.

Sean took another pull of Dos Equis, then felt the apartment grow very still.

He saw the way the other woman was looking at Daryn, the way her arm was hooked through Daryn’s, her own fingers curling lightly over Daryn’s wrist.

On the steps of the state capitol, Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma City.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sean said.

He traced a finger over the prostitute’s face. “I’ll bet you’ve talked to her,” Sean said to the photo. “I bet you know where she is. Because you love her, don’t you, honey?”

He put the photo down and opened his laptop. In his e-mail program, he found his sister’s address and entered it in the address box. Then he sat for a moment. He didn’t call Faith very often. He sent her an e-mail now and then, usually when he was toasted, and couldn’t remember later what he wrote. Her own e-mails to him consisted mainly of asking what the hell his last e-mail to her had meant.

Sean smiled at the thought of his baby sister, eighteen months younger than he. His best friend, his worst nightmare. She wasn’t in the Marshals Service anymore. She’d told their father that she was doing “special projects” for DOJ. She’d been interested in WITSEC-the Witness Security Program-when she was with the Marshals, so Sean thought he knew what Faith was doing now. He’d never spoken or written the words Department Thirty to her, but that had to be what she was doing. No one in the federal law enforcement community talked about Thirty if they could help it. Even talking casually about Thirty was asking for trouble.

But his sister still lived in Oklahoma City, and she liked it there. That much Sean knew. He believed in fate. The fact that he’d found a lead to Daryn McDermott in the same city where his sister lived meant he was on the right trail. He was doing the right thing. He knew it.

Sean drained the last of his beer and typed a message to his sister:

Here comes trouble, Sister. See you soon.