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Authors: R.J. Ellory

BOOK: A Simple Act of Violence
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‘Miss Joyce . . . seriously, I’m trying to appreciate your situation here. I’m trying to be as helpful as I can, and right now your attitude and manner isn’t helping any.’
‘Lord, you should listen to yourself, girl. I’m the one who came down here ’cause you people never called me back. You came down and got me from the desk . . . you wanted to talk to me, you wanted to help me understand what happened, and I ask you for one thing—’
‘Which I do not have the authority to tell you,’ Frances Gray stated flatly.
‘So what the fuck do we do now then? We wait for someone to come down here who does have the authority? That what we gonna do?’
Frances Gray smiled, but there was something ingratiating and insincere about it. ‘We’re going to conclude this interview, Miss Joyce, and I’m going to make some enquiries as to whether this information can be made available to you. That’s what I’m going to do.’
‘And I’m never gonna hear another word from you people, right? That’s the way it’s gonna go. Tell me I’m wrong.’
Frances Gray shook her head. She gathered up her file, her paper, her pen; she stood up, straightened her jacket and started toward the door. Once in the corridor she waited patiently until Natasha followed her out.
‘I’ll walk you back to the desk,’ Frances Gray said coldly, and already, even as she was being shown down to reception, Natasha Joyce was cursing her hot head, cursing her impatience, her flick-knife temper.
Attitude. That’s what Darryl used to say. There’s attitude, girl, and attitude is the same wherever, but sometimes attitude is gonna help you and sometimes it’s gonna get you all of nothing.
Frances Gray told Natasha Joyce she’d be in touch as soon as she could. She wished her a good day, turned on her heel and click-clacked away across the marble floor into echoes and then silence.
The man at the reception desk smiled. ‘Hope we were helpful,’ he said pleasantly.
Natasha smiled awkwardly. ‘Very,’ she said, her tone almost apologetic, and then she hurried out of the building into the late morning rainfall that had started in her absence.
 
 
 
 
R
ichard Helms, acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
in an address to the National Press Club, once said,
‘You’ve
just
got to trust us. We are honorable men.’
Captain George Hunter White, reminiscing about his CIA service,
said, ‘I
toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?’
These were some of the things from The After . . .
After the thing with my mother, and what my father did, and how he engineered my assistance . . .
 
Before that:
Patience personified. Standing there at the workbench, a tin canister of wax to my right, a line of wooden veneer strips to my left. One at a time. Smooth as glass. Smooth as jewellers’ rouge and mercury.
‘They
are thin,’ my father said.
‘Bend
them and they will snap like crackers. Take care to polish them until you can see your face reflected.’
‘What
are they for?’ I asked again.
Smiled, shook his head.
‘See
that board over there?’ He pointed with his dye-stained finger.
‘That
board has to be cut and shaped. When it’s sanded smooth I’m going to draw a pattern in it, and then I’ll cut indents and depressions in the pattern, and then the pieces of veneer you’re polishing will fit together to form a design.’
‘Inlay,’
I said.
He nodded.
‘Right.
Inlay.’
‘What’s
the board for?’
‘What’s
it for?’ he echoed.
‘What’s
anything for? It’s for its
own purpose, you know? Everything has a purpose, and when you understand that purpose—’
‘Seriously . . . what’s it for?’ I asked again
.
He reached out and gripped my shoulder. ‘I’ll
tell you when we’re done.’
I watched him working. He didn’t say a word.
Later, looking back, I was reminded of Catherine in some strange way.
Even in her silences she had more to say than anyone I’d ever known.
 
And again, from The After:
We realized that Reagan was a cocksucker.
Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Government, Administrative Head of the Executive Department, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Supposed to be answerable to no-one.
Three divisions of the United States government - Legislative, Executive and Judicial. Forget the Legislative - nothing but lawyers and penpushers, bureaucrats, faceless minions. Judicial covers the Supreme Court, has authority over all
U.S.
courts, deals with
‘interpretation
of the Constitution’ whatever the fuck that means, but even there we’re talking about the chief justice and eight associate justices, and they’re appointed by whom? That’s right, friends, the almighty cocksucker himself.
So we come to the Executive, and man, if this isn’t a beast of the most extraordinary dimensions. State, Treasury, Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Departments of the Interior, the Office of the White House, the National Security Council . . .
It goes on and on and on.
And the Central Intelligence Agency, in and of itself a magnificent oxymoron - we find these guys right there at the very top of the executive branch. Who are they? Let’s be honest with one another. They are the intelligence and covert operations and covert execution and wetworks and disestablishment and assassination
and coup d’état and undermining whatever the fuck is out there that in any way opposes ‘The Great American Way of Life’ unit of
the President of the United States. A personal fucking army. The dog soldiers.
Some of the people in the Central Intelligence Agency were good people.
But they were not good for long.
It’s a fallacy. You cannot have a corrupt and self-serving organization populated by people who are there for the very best reasons. People wind up in the CIA, and they either get with the program, or they understand what the program is and get the fuck out of there as fast as they can. And sometimes, as we all know,
they are taken out by force, the real definition of ‘extraordinary
rendition’.
And then you have people like me.
Started way back when, after the thing with my mom and dad. Way back when I was a kid and I didn’t know what the goddamn hell I was going to do with my life.
They saw something, the shepherds. That’s what they call them. The guys that go out and gather up the new flock for recruitment and indoctrination and training and all the things you go through, all the steps that whittle down the many into the few. The shepherds.
So they saw something in me. The loner. The loser. The one who didn’t fit. They were good. Man, were they good. Subtle, smart, insidious. Working on me. Finding my loyalties, my interests, the things I believed in, the things I didn’t. They ingratiated themselves into the very fabric of the university campus. They’d been there for ever. Lawrence Matthews. Professor of Philosophy, Virginia State University in Richmond. I’d been there little more than a year. My parents had been dead no more than eight or ten weeks. Changed my major. Caused a noise. Lawrence Matthews was patient, understanding, a good man. He understood that engineering had been my father’s choice, that math and physics and whatever was just not where I lived. English and Philosophy. That’s where I belonged, and after my father’s death that’s where I went.
Professor Lawrence Matthews was there to receive me, and receive me he did. Long discussions. Politics. Life. Death. The Hereafter. God as an icon, God as an identity. All so much horseshit and nonsense. Lawrence Matthews loved that shit. Man, he could talk you round in circles and make you disappear up your own ass. That was his business. Think they trained him as an interrogator, and when he burned out or got a conscience they posted him right there in Virginia State to keep an eye out for the future of the Company. He was a reader. He read people, and when he read something that made sense he would tell the shepherd. The shepherd would come, and he was a friend of Professor Matthews. And Professor Matthews’ friend was a good guy, a regular guy, and he could drink a beer and watch co-eds swing by and smoke cigarettes with the best of them.
My shepherd was named Don Carvalho, and I never did find out if that was his real name, and in all honesty it didn’t matter what the fuck his name was. He was there to do a job, and he did that job pretty much as good as anyone could ever do a job. Don Carvalho was a master of his own destiny, at least that was the way it seemed to me. He knew everything. Hell, he couldn’t have been much more than twenty-eight or nine, but it seemed to me that he knew everything there was to know about anything that counted. Don was a magician, a wizard, a spokesman for the oppressed minorities, a politician, a rebel, an insurgent, a spiritual terrorist for the aesthetes. Don was there to discuss Camus and Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and Soloviev, Descartes, Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Raymond Chandler, and the films of Edward G. Robinson. His father was a lawyer in Hollywood. His father knew people. His grandfather knew even more people, could tell stories about Cary Grant’s work for British intelligence, uncovering Nazi affiliations and sympathizers in the movie industry during the Second World War. Don Carvalho knew people who had worked under Joe McCarthy. His mother was Israeli, came from Tel Aviv, an early 1950s background intrinsically bound up in the formation of something named Mossad ha-Mossad le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim. The Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks. The Institute.
‘They have The Institute,’ Don Carvalho told me. ‘And we have
The Company.’
‘The Company?’
‘Central Intelligence Agency.’
‘Right,’ I said. ’The CIA. I know about them.’
And Don smiled, and shook his head, and placed his hand on my shoulder and said,
‘Oh
no you don’t, my friend, oh no you don’t.’
And then changed the subject.
That was how they worked. Give you a taste. Let you ask a question and don’t answer it. Fucking good. Catch-as-catch-can. Always testing, always watching, always trying to sound out your principles, your limitations, the extremes to which you’d be prepared to go to get your point across. They were after certainty, after an unquestioning belief in the Right Way To Do Things. Apparently. Or apparently not.
From the point I met Don Carvalho at Lawrence Matthews’ New Year’s Eve Party at the end of 1979 to my first Langley visit it was six months. Doesn’t seem like a long time now. Later Don told
me that my ‘courtship’ was one of the fastest he’d done.
It would be another year before I went into the field, and the things that intervened were some of the most important events of my life. At least that’s how I felt at the time. Now I know they were insignificant, all except one. The most important thing happened in December 1980. I was living in an apartment on the outskirts of Richmond. That’s when everything changed. That’s when everything I saw was colored with a different light.
That, very simply, was the end of who I was and the beginning of who I became.
And to think, it all started because of a girl in a turquoise hat.
FOURTEEN
By quarter after one Robert Miller believed that he’d grasped some small understanding of who he was looking at.
Catherine Sheridan was an enigma.
He was looking at a singularly unique and inescapably created identity. This was what he felt as he went through her bookcases, her paperwork, her correspondence, her diary. He studied her passport, her driver’s license, her bank cards, credit cards, checkbooks; he found photographs of places she’d apparently visited, people she knew, postcards that had been sent to her from someone who simply signed themselves as J.
Having called Reid to verify that CSU and forensics were through, that they were cleared for unlimited access to the house and its contents, Robert Miller and Albert Roth arranged the artifacts and aspects of Catherine Sheridan’s life in several ordered sections. They laid stuff out along the upper hallway carpet, and when there was insufficient space to cope with what they were doing they moved everything through into her bedroom. They pushed the bed against the wall and put the dresser and chair in the adjoining bathroom. Clothes, shoes, purses, such things as these were set over to the right. Across the middle of the floor they arranged several piles of paperwork - anything that related to finance, anything that connected to her identity, vacations and visits, personal correspondence (of which there was almost nothing), documents that related to the house and utilities. And when they were done they were once again aware of the fact that nothing seemed even to indicate her occupation. Miller went through her bank statements and, sure enough, at the end of each month, an amount of money was deposited. The better part of four thousand dollars arrived from something called United Trust on the last Friday of every month, and those deposits went back all the way to June of 2003.
‘Didn’t she come here three and a half years ago?’ Roth asked.
‘Far as I can gather, yes.’
‘So she arrives here in June 2003. There’s nothing pre-dating that. Every banking record only goes back that far, nothing earlier.’
‘Go through everything again,’ Miller said.

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