Banquo's Ghosts (8 page)

He learned to listen—and at the same time absorbed almost word for word Banquo’s discourse. The man always had a telling little detail or an appropriate quotation. “Did you know King Farouk in Egypt owned two hundred red cars—and banned anyone else from owning a red car in the country?” “When the Saudis first did a census and found out just how sparsely populated the country was, they immediately doubled the figure. A touching belief in the power of the convenient lie.” When they first discussed the Iranian revolution, Banquo urged him, “Always remember your Orwell, Peter:
One does not establish the dictatorship in
order to safeguard the revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
” And on and on.

Through it all Johnson grew truly weary of the conference room. It amazed him how much you could hate a simple room in a stupid high-rise office building in stupid Manhattan. It was like being in the principal’s office after school, only worse. And he’d learned to despise Banquo’s factotum for the West Point, Parris Island, super-trained, smart asshole jarhead he was. Soldier boy had smooth-talked the soused scribbler that night in the diner. Brought him into the fraternity. But now he had him by the scruff of the neck. Every day was pledge night, the hazing going on for years. And Johnson was sick of the paddle.

Three sessions a week after work, then one more on Saturday mornings at Wallets’ club, The New York Athletic Club. Another thing Wallets taught him—how to behave. Friday nights, no longer a debauch, as he had an appointment at the club in the morning. Five laps in the pool, then ten, then twenty. He built up slowly. Oddly, the perfect place to talk, as this was the Bankers’ and Brokers’ Saturday morning hangover cure: The Big Apple’s manly swells lay semi-naked about the poolside in lounge chairs, pots of coffee or pitchers of orange juice at their elbows, with towels about their sodden carcasses and over their heads—dead to the world. The high marble atrium softly echoed with their grumbles and moans, but mostly snoring. Later, the poor dears would retire to the steam room to sweat out the remnants of Friday night, but not before Johnson and his host had gone over the week’s particulars in every detail. When the first sot sadly shuffled through the steam room door at the stroke of ten, Wallets and Johnson got up to leave.

Over time, Johnson could swim thirty laps, had become somewhat richer, and had published a lot of inflammatory copy against the Catastrophe of Iraq. The Second Gulf War was very good to him and
The Crusader
, whose circulation spiked so high that even Jo von H’s business-savvy late hubby might have considered it a worthy investment. Johnson reported exclusively on the men and women of the Iraq prison scandal, “Dumb and Infamous: Guards of Abu Ghraib.” And was asked to leave his embedded position with the 26
^th
Marine Expeditionary
Unit after dubiously reporting the Tikrit Massacre of ten men, women, and children in the Salah ad Din Province by Marines of that unit. The controversy only gave him more publicity and enhanced his standing on the yowling Left.

Yet another session around the dismal conference table.

“All right, Peter, let’s start again.” Wallets’ flat, self-assured tone wouldn’t let him go. A steady drip-drip-drip. “A little ancient history of the personal kind. Can we go over it one more time?” Johnson rolled his eyes in exasperation.

Sitting quietly a few feet away, Banquo glanced up from the Johnson file, nearly three inches thick and growing. A withering stare that never failed to chill him. The message:
behave yourself.
In this session Wallets was playing the role of the erudite, infinitely polite grand inquisitor, going over ground they had covered again and again.

Wallets went on:

“During the 1990s, extensive reporting on the ravages of sanctions in Iraq, and a
Foreign Affairs
piece, ‘The Dual Folly of Dual Containment: The Case for Engaging Iraq and Iran.’ After Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox in 1998, your private account in the Cantonal Bank of Switzerland received a payment in the amount of $75,000, in Swiss francs. What did you do with this money?”

“This
again
?” He squirmed in his seat. “I told you I pissed it away.”

“No, don’t lie. That’s
not
what you did with the money. Stop confusing reality with the kind of tall tales you tell yourself after you’ve had three too many.”

Johnson shifted in his seat and said, “All right. It went to Giselle’s college bills. And as I’ve said before, it seemed to be the going rate for someone of my particular qualifications. I wrote and was widely read. Let’s call it a ‘thank you’ paid in advance.”

“No one had to ensure your loyalty?” Wallets asked.

“I would have done it for free. Like Mirabeau said, ‘I am paid, but not bought.’ ”

“Who contacted you first? And where?”

“Late 1998. At a cocktail party at a private residence in Westchester County, New York. A Maharaja’s estate. Then we all were ferried down in limos to a United Nations dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria for an African children’s fund, called
Hands for Peace
. They build schools, give vaccinations, adopt and foster children out of war zones. A perfectly legitimate charity. The man’s name was Breuer, a Dutch national with Dutch Shell, attached to that guy Brown’s office at the United Nations. But with a very vague-sounding job description. I remember his business card: Jan Breuer, United Nations Office of Oil Producing Countries—North American Relations.”

“Mark Malloch Brown, the number two man in Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s/Kofi Annan’s New York office?”

“That’s right. But Breuer isn’t with their office any more. Back to Dutch Shell. The first contact was merely to glad-hand me. It turned out we were both in Belgium three weeks later. I was covering The Hague and Breuer was on his way to Saudi Arabia, via the UAE and thence to Indonesia. He asked me if I’d care to relax in Dubai, on his nickel.”

“So you went?”

“And partied like it was 1999.” Johnson looked to see if either was amused. No.

Wallets kept on: “Between 1999 and 2002, while several millions of Breuer’s money went into the Cantonal Bank of Zurich from which you took a measly cut, you wrote articles denigrating the United States containment effort against Saddam.”

“Correct.”

“If you were to guess at Jan Breuer’s secondary motive for contacting you, what would it be?”

“You want me to guess?”

“That’s what I asked. Would a man of your ‘particular qualifications’ have anything to offer besides the kind of press they want?”

Johnson looked across the wide conference table. He couldn’t be sure what Wallets was driving at.

“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say giving me a $75,000 bribe I didn’t really need was his way of drawing me closer to Mama’s teat. You see,
they get all the glowing press they want; they don’t need me just for that. My buddy at
Newsweek
writes this crap all the time, and no one pays him . . . ”

Johnson noticed Banquo and Wallets’ eyes locking, and Johnson began to wonder about the provenance of his
Newsweek
buddy’s new Jaguar. “But I
am
an honest John Q Citizen, and that’s valuable in and of itself. Because getting money from point A to point B is slightly more difficult than most people realize. Say you have a group of men in a London suburb who want to accomplish certain tasks. This requires money. But how do you get it to them? I think Jan Breuer had the notion this drunken scribbler Peter Johnson might eventually do some banking for him and some of his closest friends. But that raises the stakes considerably. A bribe can hurt my reputation and get me a letter from the IRS. So what. But transferring funds from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia on its way to Amsterdam or Wycombe, that could get you jail. Or dead.”

The cool, sober eyes of Wallets seemed hooded for a moment, and he nodded silently, seemingly pleased with the answer. Silence fell around the table. And suddenly Johnson sensed all their talk had finally come to an end. Confirmed a moment later when Banquo closed the cover on his file with a soft slap, and Wallets calmly asked:

“What are your plans for the next two weeks? Whatever they are, you’ll have to change them. We’ve been together six years creating your legend, going over your pedigree. It’s time you learned some fieldwork.”

“I’m fifty, for crying out loud—”

Wallets held up a stern hand. Then sarcastically, “We never mention a
lady’s
age.” He glanced at his watch. “I’d say that’s enough for today. Thank you, Peter. You can show yourself out.”

As the skyscraper shadows darkened the streets of Manhattan, Banquo poured Wallets a large slug from the decanter of Armagnac he kept on a lower bookshelf right between
Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler and
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosinski.

The magisterial voice had come down a few notches. It was the truth that mattered now.

“Well, what do you think?”

Wallets looked into his Armagnac and took the first taste.

“I think I’m going to love torturing this guy to death in North Carolina for two weeks.”

Banquo harrumphed. “That goes without saying. Have you decided who you’re going to bring along?”

“No, not yet.”

“Marjorie wrote me today. Says she’s getting
fat
. And doesn’t like it.”

“She
wrote
you?”

“Of course, she always writes me.” Banquo inhaled the fragrance. “For all its flaws, the United States Postal Service is the single best way to keep a secret. If you’ve learned nothing all these years with me, learn that!” The man contemplated his drink for a moment, then took a draught. “And if you’ve learned nothing about women, learn this. Their weight—good, bad, or indifferent—is
always
a secret.” He took another deep satisfying drink.

“Now stop twiddling and answer me,” he said. “What do you think? Is Johnson really with us? Can he do it?”

Wallets took his glass to the clean office window and looked out onto Fifth Avenue. So many people swooshing by who had no idea these sorts of conversations took place—let alone so close to the imperial windows of Saks Fifth Avenue. He frowned and shrugged. Murder was always a nasty business. Assassination, executive action, termination—call it what you like. But call it unpredictable.

“It’s always the same, Banquo. Unless you want to hire a sniper or shoot a commercial airliner out of the sky . . . you never know.”

All that time to prepare the patsy. Now the only truth: you never know.

A
few hundred miles south of New York City in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the highway lights were coming on along Old Dominion Road—the broad artery that passed before the entrance to Langley Air Force Base and many other military and intelligence operations on the southern corner of the Chesapeake Bay. In a seventh-floor office nearly identical to the one in Rockefeller Center the double wooden doors were marked:

The office of Trevor Andover. Nicknamed by friends and foes alike “DEADKEY,” as if this were a real codename. It wasn’t. His codename was a random series of letters and numbers.

Director Andover was a pale, trim man with something of a bloodless undertaker about him. The aptly named DEADKEY stared out a window at the passing suburban traffic. Behind him an ever-present plasma flat screen flickered with images. He turned from the passing evening traffic to catch the latest offering on his Eye Spy global scope. The satellite’s name: Long Eye; longitude and latitude: 33˚ 54’ N 35˚ 28’ E; time: 15:45Z; place: LEBANON Beirut. A city square as seen from space. Caption: “Hezbollah ‘Celebration’ South Beirut: 15:45Z.”

The scene showed a hundred thousand people in a Beirut city square, a sea of yellow flags. The crowd chanted: “
Allah Akbarh
, God is Great.” But what they were celebrating was anybody’s guess—no elaboration on Long Eye, no explanation.