The 3rd Victim (46 page)

‘
We
owe
you
?’ bit Joe. He massaged his right temple with his fingers.

‘You think I'm proud of the way this played out?’

‘I think you and your friends at the Federal Bureau of Bullshit have no regard for the extent of the collateral damage you inflict on the people who unwittingly get drawn into your monumental fuck-ups.’

‘Okay,’ Leo's hands pushed out at the air in front of him, ‘like I said, I get that you're pissed, but bottom line, Joe, I can't take back what happened. What I
can
do, if you'll let me, is give you as much information as I can as to why. I'm breaking orders by even being here. If my superiors knew I was talking they'd have me on the first bus to Little Rock or Albuquerque or some other godforsaken hole in the ground. But I'm here because I
know
we owe you, I'm here out of respect, and no matter what else, that has to count for something.’

Joe hesitated.

‘I have one hour tops, Joe, before the brass from Washington arrive for their final debrief. They'll get what they need to put this case to bed and you'll get the truth.’

Another pause.

‘Joe,’ said David, indicating that it was okay – or perhaps that at this point they had no choice but to hear Simba out.

‘You fall short you'll regret it, Leo,’ said Joe.

‘You have my word,’ said Simba.

And finally Joe nodded for Simba to go on.

*

‘As soon as we made the link between Davenport and the man SOCA knew as Richard Cameron, I flew to London to be briefed by Special Officer Loxley and the team she had assigned to the investigation,’ Leo continued. ‘Our problem from the outset was that we had no proof they were doing what we suspected they were doing, or what they were planning in regards to the Boston end of their business given it was still in its infancy. So we decided to work this thing from the ground up, to infiltrate their operation early, a strategy SOCA were excited about given their entry into the pair's UK business came way too late.’

‘So you formed some sort of covert alliance?’ said David.

Leo's brow furrowed. ‘It wasn't …’

David suspected Leo was about to say the word ‘covert’, but then he obviously decided such a denial might be hard to argue.

‘It wasn't an alliance,’ Leo took another route. ‘At least not exactly. Winter and Cameron were on US soil and as such it was an FBI investigation.’

David heard Joe scoff.

‘But then how did you get permission for a SOCA officer to work on an operation tens of thousands of miles from her own patch of grass?’ asked David referring to Loxley.

‘We opened a temporary window for SOCA to assist in what was fundamentally an FBI initiative. It has been done before – it falls under a loophole created by Interpol involving sharing of relevant information in relation to a case of international significance.’

David looked at Joe, who was again shaking his head at Leo's ‘company line’ explanations. There was no doubt everyone in the room knew that Simba had been fudging this case from the outset. He and Loxley had struck some legally dubious deal in the hope that the end would justify the means, which was how this case got so screwed up in the first place.

‘You overstepped, Leo,’ said David.

Leo did not answer.

‘You knew the risks,’ said Joe.

‘Maybe, but I truly believed we could make this work,’ replied Leo, now turning to Joe. ‘You've worked with me long enough to know I have never been driven by some egotistical need to carve notches in my belt, Joe. True this case was a big one – it crossed international borders – and granted that if it had gone to plan then maybe the Bureau would have benefited from its success. But,’ Leo swallowed, ‘we were talking about manufacturing kids here, Joe, and while I have always prided myself on my ability to separate my personal views from my professional judgment, maybe I fell short, maybe this time the lines got blurred, maybe I wanted these guys a little more than I should have.’

David looked at Joe. It was not like either of them had never gone down a similar road before.

‘So how did it start?’ asked Joe after a pause. ‘With Special Officer Loxley here becoming the secretary Esther Wallace – or with Carlson posing as Hunt?’

‘It was a two-pronged approach,’ offered Loxley then. ‘And in order to give us any chance of success it had to be. We needed to infiltrate their operation from both ends – victim and client – or should I say those being tricked into providing their genetic material for profit and those willing to pay a premium to receive it.’

‘So you covered Davenport's end while Agent Carlson went after Walker,’ said Sara.

‘That was the general idea,’ replied Loxley. ‘And while Agent Carlson managed some success when it came to sourcing said buyers from Jim Walker's client list, we hit a wall when it came to building concrete evidence on Davenport's specific activities. He was careful, his patient list cleverly manipulated. To the naked eye it looked exactly as any IVF specialist's patient list should look.’

‘Which meant that in your role as Esther Wallace, you could only do so much,’ continued Sara.

‘Yes,’ Loxley nodded. ‘In short I was nowhere near close enough. We needed to get closer to the victims and the only way to do that was to –’

‘To win one over – to bring a so-called victim over to your side,’ said Sara.

‘Yes,’ replied Loxley.

‘And you were that victim,’ said Sara, now looking at Sienna.

Sienna managed a smile. ‘Quite a brave choice on their part, don't you think – approaching the wife of the very man they were targeting?’ She looked at David. ‘You want to know why I agreed to it.’

David nodded. ‘You said you loved your husband.’

‘And yet I believed them when they told me what he was capable of.’

David nodded again. ‘Why?’

‘Because they predicted the future – not literally, of course, but sadly for me, close enough.’

*

‘It was Special Agent Carlson who approached me,’ said Sienna after taking a sip of her water. ‘We were at a corporate dinner, one of those high-profile black-tie do's where men such as my husband go to network. My husband was very good at it, you see – making friends, impressing clients – and on this particular night this included asking the CEO of Biogen Idec – a woman named Gayle Casablancas – to dance.’

‘He was on the dance floor when Special Agent Carlson approached you?’ asked David, struck by the brazenness – or rather the riskiness – of it all.

‘Yes. Jim was dancing with Gloria Casablancas so Special Agent Carlson – who I knew as Daniel Hunt – asked me to dance.’

Sara looked at David before turning to Sienna. ‘He told you while you were dancing mere feet from your husband?’

Sienna nodded.

‘It was a window,’ said Carlson, finally chiming in. ‘We had to be careful. Walker was smart. I could not risk meeting with his wife at a separate location. All I wanted to do at that point was get her to listen and promise not to share what I had to tell her with her husband. I talked. She listened. I may not have convinced her but I told her enough to get her thinking and to receive her assurance that she would contact me the following day for further information. I would have liked to brief her in more detail but at that point her husband cut in.’

‘
Your husband cut in
?’ repeated Sara, incredulous.

Sienna nodded. ‘Perhaps it is my British heritage, but I managed to hold it together. I danced, and smiled, and did not tell him a word of it.’

‘But why
not
?’ asked Sara, still unable to understand it. ‘He was your
husband
and Daniel Hunt was just …?’

‘Special Agent Carlson's last words to me hit home,’ said Sienna. ‘He told me the FBI believed that Jim and Dick would use me too. He said they knew that we had had fertility tests at Dick Davenport's surgery and that it would be most likely that we would be told that we were unable to conceive naturally. And he told me that this would be a lie, and that there was a chance they would use this lie to harvest my eggs for manufacture, and that the FBI had already acquired intelligence that suggested there might be an order for a child containing my superior DNA. He said that if things continued as the FBI suspected they would, I would lose control of my rights as a mother, of holding on to any child my eggs were used to conceive.’

‘And you believed him?’ asked Sara. ‘Just like that?’

‘Under the circumstances,’ replied Sienna, her eyes now meeting Sara's, ‘I had no choice.’

Sara saw it. ‘They'd already told you that you were infertile?’ she said. ‘That if you wanted to have children, you had no choice but use IVF?’

Sienna nodded. ‘Dick called to tell us earlier that evening. He said that while the news was a blow, he would not rest until we held our own child in our arms. He made us a promise, a professional and personal vow, and I was so grateful … no, not just grateful, I was excited.’ She swallowed. ‘It was the best and worst night of my life.’

The conversation fell away then as everyone in the room took a breath. David could see it taking shape – the investigation that one moment they felt on top of, and the next had run away from them with such speed that it had left their heads spinning.

He found himself angry at their using Sienna as they had, and while he knew that her relationship with Walker had set her on a course toward destruction the moment that it was formed, he also wondered what might have happened if the FBI had not intervened, if Sienna might have come out of this wounded, but with her daughter in her arms.

‘So you agreed to help them?’ said David after a time.

‘Yes,’ said Sienna. ‘After the banquet we met several times in discreet locations. I was introduced to Special Agent in Charge King and to Senior Officer Loxley. My job was to stick close to Jim, to listen, to learn. But my real worth was not in my investigatory skills, but in my genetics.’

‘How so?’ asked Sara.

Sienna went to answer, but Catherine Loxley held up a hand.

‘In all fairness to Sienna, I feel this question should fall to me as this is where my culpability began. I underestimated Walker's ego, you see. I suspected he would want to combine Sienna's reproductive cells with a complementary male genetic equal but Davenport had not scheduled any simultaneous seminal extractions from any of the male patients on his books. I could map them, via his procedural appointments, but as I said, I underestimated Walker. I did not realise he had decided upon himself as the supplier of the superior genetic material to produce the son ordered by a couple demanding genetic excellence – a son Agent Carlson had tracked through his investigations into Walker's activities at Hunt and Associates.’ Loxley swallowed.

‘By the time I knew about Walker's genetic involvement it was too late. Davenport had created his embryos. Sienna had already been implanted with the embryo. This took us by complete surprise as we never dreamed he would actually allow Sienna to be implanted with a product with such profit potential, even if the embryo was a girl. But in the end, given there was no order for a female child. Walker obviously saw the embryo as a concession. The girl was excess created while Davenport was trying to produce his male, and allowing Sienna to have her was Walker's way of keeping the wife happy and, I might add, in the dark.’

The room fell silent once again as David, Sara and Joe took this in.

‘So the plan was to wait until a sperm sample had been extracted and combined with Sienna's eggs illegally – at which point you could prove her cells were being fertilised without her permission,’ said David.

‘Yes,’ replied Loxley.

‘But they
had
been combined – but with your husband's,’ continued Sara, now focusing on Sienna.

‘Yes.’

‘So from an evidentiary sense, you were left with nothing.’

‘Yes.’

‘And that was when things started to come apart,’ said Sara.

Sienna swallowed. ‘Yes,’ she said, before taking a breath and repeating, ‘Yes.’

*

If they had been in court this was where the Judge would have called for a recess. This was hard going – professionally, emotionally. While they were discussing the logistics of a criminal investigation with an intelligent woman and experienced agents, they were also talking about the brutal murder of a child – and not just any child,
the
child of the woman now swallowing back tears across from them. It was true, Eliza was essentially killed because of a series of mistakes that were made, and David tried to imagine how this must have felt – not just for Sienna, but for the man who now met his eye across the table, the man who up until recently David had hated more than any other – Eliza's biological father, FBI Special Agent Michael Carlson, alias ‘Daniel Hunt’.

‘My turn,’ said Carlson, perhaps sensing that if he and Sienna were going to make it through this briefing, they needed to stay on track.

David nodded, indicating for Carlson to go on.

‘From the very beginning we knew that if we had any chance of building a case against Winter and Cameron, we needed to infiltrate their business from the profit end. And this wasn't just because we wanted Winter and Cameron, it was also because we wanted to issue a mass indictment against their clients. When we went into this thing, we were pretty sure that most of the clients were aware that the children they ordered were created without parental consent, and when I infiltrated Walker's communication system, we were able to prove it.’

But David was shaking his head. ‘Hold up. Before we get into his connection with his clients, we need to know how in the hell you fooled Walker in the first place. The media were all over you as Hunt. You were the golden kid, the new financial wunderkind. You took over two floors of a Financial District office building, for god's sakes. You had employees, operating systems.’

Carlson looked at King who nodded in consent for Carlson to go on.

‘It's not like we hadn't done similar things before, David,’ he said. ‘Do you know how many boiler rooms the FBI infiltrated in the eighties? The Bureau has become quite practised in the skill of deception.’

‘Maybe,’ argued David, ‘but in Walker's case, didn't he think it was odd that you fired all his colleagues, that he was the only man left standing when …?’