Chapter 10 - Sins of the Father
We didn't go to the FBI field office in Newark.
"The field office has surveillance teams parked outside twenty-four hours a day," Marisol explained as she pulled the truck into an underground parking garage beneath a rundown office complex in Jersey City. "Cross has informants in the intake division. If an Amber Alert suspect walks through the front doors carrying a flash drive, the security guards will detain you for local police before you ever reach an agent."
"Then how do we reach Mercer?"
Marisol shut off the engine. She reached under her seat and pulled out an old leather address book.
"Mercer doesn't work out of the federal building anymore," she said. "He works out of a joint interagency annex near the naval shipyards in Bayonne. Off the books. He’s been building the Cross indictment for eighteen months, but he couldn't pull the trigger without physical access to the offshore clearing accounts."
She turned to me. "Stay here with Lily. Lock the doors. I'm going up to use the payphone on the concourse to verify his direct secure line."
"Marisol," I said, grabbing her sleeve.
She looked at me.
"Thank you," I whispered.
A rare, soft expression touched her battle-hardened face. She reached out, briefly squeezing my hand with her calloused fingers.
"Nobody helped me when he took my life, Anna," she said quietly. "I'm not watching him do it to you."
She slipped out of the truck, moving silently across the concrete toward the pedestrian elevator, disappearing into the shadows.
In the back seat, Lily was looking out the window at the concrete pillars.
"Mommy," she said, her voice small. "Where is Grandma?"
A sharp ache twisted inside my ribs. How do you explain to a three-year-old that her grandmother traded her safety for a three-thousand-dollar monthly stipend? How do you explain that the people who were supposed to protect you from the wolves opened the front door and invited the wolf in for Christmas dinner?
"Grandma is resting, sweetie," I said, climbing into the back seat beside her, pulling her small body into my lap. "We’re going to a new house soon. A house with a big yard and a puppy."
"With Daddy?"
"No," I whispered, kissing her soft curls, smelling the baby shampoo that was finally fading beneath the smell of cold truck exhaust. "Daddy can't come to this house."
A sudden sound shattered the quiet of the garage.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
I whipped my head around, my heart leaping into my throat. The Glock was sitting on the floorboard between the front seats.
Standing outside the driver’s side window was my father.
Tomas Varga looked like a ruined man. His wool coat was soaked through with freezing rain, hanging off his hunched shoulders. His face was gray, sunken, his eyes bloodshot and rheumy. He wasn't wearing gloves; his knuckles were blue and raw from the cold.
He tapped on the glass again, his breath fogging the window, his lips moving silently: *Anna. Open the door.*
I reached between the seats, picked up the Glock, and kept it in my lap beneath my coat. I lowered the window two inches.
"How did you find me?" I whispered, my voice shaking with fury.
"The truck," Tomas choked out, his teeth clicking together so hard I could hear them. "I... I knew Marisol’s old vehicle registration. When Victor showed me the security stills from the diner, I remembered the company truck she used to keep at the warehouse in Secaucus. I knew the garage she parked in. I came on the train, Anna. I walked from the station."
"Are you alone?"
"I'm alone!" he sobbed, pressing his bare, trembling palms against the glass. "I swear on your mother’s life, I’m alone! Look at me, Anna! I don't have a phone! Vance took my car! He took my wallet! They threw us out like stray dogs!"
I looked past him into the shadows of the parking deck. Nothing moved. Only the steady *drip-drip* of water leaking from an overhead drainage pipe.
"What do you want, Dad?"
"Give him the drive," Tomas pleaded, falling to his knees right there on the oil-stained concrete, his hands clasped together against the truck door. "Anna, I'm on my knees. I'm your father. I worked thirty years at that lumber yard. I gave you a roof, I paid for your college, I gave you everything! If you don't give him that drive, Daniel is going to die in that jail. They beat him, Anna. They beat his kidneys. He can't stand up!"
I looked down at the man who had slammed his hand on the dining table on Christmas Eve and shouted *Don't you dare* when I told him his son-in-law had broken my face.
"He framed Daniel four years ago, Dad," I said, my voice eerily calm. "He used your house to wash thirty million dollars of port authority bribes. Daniel’s signature is on the money laundering documents. Not Victor’s."
Tomas froze. His mouth hung open, saliva glistening on his lower lip.
"What?" he whispered.
"Victor never saved your house," I said. "He stole it the day you signed the papers. He owned you from the beginning. And when I ran, he didn't call the police because he wanted me back. He called the police because if the FBI opens that drive, Alan Cross goes to prison, and Victor goes with him."
Tomas stared at me. The realization didn't bring anger; it brought an absolute, crushing collapse. The last vestige of his pride crumpled, leaving behind only the pathetic, naked truth of his complicity.
"We... we didn't know," he whimpered. "Elena just wanted Daniel to have a good job. We just wanted to be safe."
"You wanted his money," I said. "You wanted to sit in his box seats at the stadium. You wanted to boast to the neighbors about your wealthy son-in-law. You saw the marks on my neck two years ago at Thanksgiving, Dad. You saw them, and you looked at the floor and asked Victor if he wanted more wine."
Tomas bowed his head until his forehead touched the cold truck door. He was weeping openly now, the ugly, shuddering sobs of a man who has realized that the foundation of his entire life was built on his daughter’s misery.
"Forgive me," he whispered into the metal. "Anna... forgive me."
Behind him, footsteps echoed across the concrete.
Marisol emerged from the stairwell. She stopped dead when she saw Tomas on his knees. Her hand went straight into her coat pocket, her eyes narrowing into slits.
"He's alone," I called out through the window. "He followed the truck from Secaucus."
Marisol walked over, looking down at my father with the cold detachment of a surgeon looking at a tumor that had already been excised.
"Get up, Tomas," she said.
Tomas lifted his head, his face streaked with dirt and tears. "Marisol... please."
"Mercer is waiting," Marisol said, ignoring him completely, looking at me. "The FBI has closed the perimeter around the federal building in Bayonne. We have a thirty-minute window before Vance’s people realize Mercer’s team has deployed."
She looked back down at Tomas.
May you like
"If you want to save Daniel's life," Marisol told him, "get in the back of the truck. And prepare to tell the grand jury that you were an idiot who signed whatever your son-in-law put in front of you."
***
