Golden spoke up. “To make their fathers suffer.”
“They outright killed Caulkins daughter,” Gant noted. “Drowned her on the beach. Why didn’t they cache her? Does he get a different level of suffering?”
Gant waited, wanting to see what Neeley and Golden came up with. He realized he was looking for confirmation, a very strange sensation given he’d always worked alone.
“Leverage,” Neeley finally said.
Gant felt the thrill of the hunt begin to surge. “Yes. And leverage for what?”
“There’s only one reason for leverage,” Neeley said. “To get someone to do something.”
They all turned and looked at Roberts, who know was slumped forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.
“And he didn’t do what they asked him to,” Gant said.
“Jesus,” Neeley whispered as the implications sank in. Gant could see that Golden was still trying to figure it out. She’d learn, Gant thought. What had happened to her son had hurt her so deeply, he realized, that while it made her aware of the horror of what mankind was capable of it had also dulled her abilities.
While Neeley was reflecting on the horror that Roberts had allowed to be inflicted on his daughter, Gant was distracted by Golden’s voice on the intercom.
“I’ve pulled Finley’s file. Quite interesting.”
Gant simply stared at her, waiting for her to give him the information.
“I was wrong,” Golden finally said. “I said that Forten was the leader, but that the other two men displayed amazing initiative while separated from home. You,” she said, nodding at Gant, “ascribed that to them being highly trained special operations soldiers. But we didn’t know about Finley then.”
“How does he change things?” Gant asked.
“Finley is the leader. He’s the one who’s been coordinating all of it,” Golden said.
“We’ve picked up no indication of that,” Gant said.
“Finley’s childhood is very similar to Forten’s — I’m sure they bonded over that. The advantage Forten had though, was that he was moved around. Finley stayed with his mother for sixteen years before running away, forging a birth certificate and joining the Marines. He excelled in the Corps.” She looked up from her computer. “He was a trained sniper. Recorded seven confirmed kills in the first Gulf War and a dozen unconfirmed.”
Just what we need, another sniper, Gant thought.
“He left the Corps and joined the DEA. His service record is exemplary except there are several notes that he had a tendency to use extreme force and bend the rules.”
“I’m surprised the Cellar didn’t recruit him,” Gant said.
“There are a couple of abnormalities in his records,” Golden said. “His mother disappeared three years ago. Simply vanished. Finley was supposed to be undercover in Colombia at the time.”
Neeley stirred. “’Supposed to be’?”
“He was unaccounted for during the week of her disappearance,” Golden said. “But her body was never found and no record of him entering the country was ever discovered.”
“But he didn’t like his mother,” Gant said it as a statement, not a question.
“Right,” Golden said.
Gant thought about it. “So he gets betrayed by the CIA. Snarked up by the Cartel. The team gets betrayed. Snatched by the same cartel. Probably adjoining cells. A lot of bonding over the pain. Finley had worked the Cartel and he offers them a deal. Release the four, get them back in the States, and they’ll wreak murder and mayhem.”
“That’s the way it most likely developed,” Golden acknowledged.
Gant held up two fingers, indicating they should switch back to the frequency Roberts was on.
“Which one contacted you after Caleigh was kidnapped?” Gant asked. “Finley or Forten?”
Roberts slowly brought his head up from his hands. His eyes were hollow, dead. He simply stared at Gant without responding, although his lack of protest was confirmation.
“Which one contacted you?” Gant pressed. “Finley or Forten?”
“Finley.”
Gant glanced at Neeley. He was disgusted with Roberts but he felt another surge of excitement as he realized all the parameters of this mission had just shifted. “What did he want?”
“He wanted me to kill three men.”
“Cranston and the others?” Neeley asked.
Roberts shook his head. “The three men who were with me when we decided that giving Finley up to the Cartel was an acceptable price. CIA men. Two of them higher in rank than me. The Director of Operations and the Chief of Direct Actions.”
“And the third?” Gant asked.
“My brother.”
Neeley shifted angrily. “A little more detail might be helpful. When did he contact you? How?”
“I received a videotape via FedEx two days after she disappeared,” Roberts said. He sighed deeply. “It was of Caleigh. Chained to a tree. There was a partial cache report in the package also. The same as the one you guys received later. The note with it said if I did what they asked they’d send the rest of the cache report.”
“And you refused?” Even with all he’d seen over the years, Gant found this hard to believe.
Roberts stared at him. “Kill three people for one life? And I was supposed to believe that someone who would chain a young girl to a tree in the middle of the woods would keep his word? You know better than that. They would never have let her live.”
Gant knew there was no arguing the point with Roberts. He’d made some sort of pact with an inner devil and it was killing him. “What did you do?”
“I went to the Director of Operations and the Chief of Direct Actions. They did everything they could to try to find her using in-house resources. My brother went out into the field to try to find what he could.”
Gant knew Roberts was referring to the Direct Action section of the CIA — the one that did the dirty work. “But they had trouble working in the States?”
“Yes. And we couldn’t bring the FBI in.”
Gant glanced over at Golden. She didn’t look as shocked as she had at other things.
“But you knew it was Finley?” Gant asked.
Roberts nodded. “Had to be. He was the one who would want those men killed.”
“So Finley knew he was set up in Colombia?”
Roberts nodded. “Yes.”
“How?”
“I’ve asked myself that same question,” Roberts said, “and the only answer I could come up with is that the Cartel told him. Which answers the next question of how he got away. They let him go. Just like they let Lutz, Payne and Forten go. Which also explains how they got back into the United States illegally. The Cartel turned them and sent them back here for vengeance, which was fine with the Cartel. Cost them nothing to get several senior US agents killed.”
With this new information Gant was already trying to project ahead, thinking like the bad guys. “So using your daughter didn’t work. The question is will it work on Cranston?”
“Fuck,” Neeley muttered, pulling out her Satphone.
“Hold on,” Gant said.
“Cranston’s already at the safe house,” Neeley argued.
“Cranston won’t do anything until he’s there.” Gant indicated Roberts. “Right?” He asked Roberts.
The CIA agent nodded. “He’ll be under orders to take all of us out. He’ll wait.”
Gant glanced over at Golden. Once more she was shocked, taken out of her element into a realm where death and violence was the norm.
“What did they promise you if you do as they asked?” Gant stared hard at the man. “How were they going to release your daughter?”
“They sent me the same partial cache report. They promised to send the rest of it to whomever I designated if I did as they demanded.”
“Which you thought was a lie?” Neeley asked.