Thorne raised his eyebrows. ‘That, Detective Miller, is not the way you drink a 1929 Armagnac.’
Miller couldn’t look at the man. He looked, instead, at his own hands, the way they were visibly shaking.
‘You have come a little closer than anyone would have wished,’ Thorne said quietly. ‘I receive word from the desk that you wish to discuss a warrant. Then I receive word that you want to discuss United Trust.’ Thorne looked at him, his expression one of understanding. ‘You are a man out of your depth, Detective Miller, and the very best advice I can give you at this point is to leave my office, take your car, drive home, and get some sleep. Go back to work in a couple of days and forget that you ever heard of John Robey or Catherine Sheridan, or any of these other people that may or may not have been connected with this thing.’
‘This thing—’ Miller began.
‘This - thing - is what we called a sacred monster.’ Thorne smiled benevolently, looked like he knew exactly what Miller was going through.
Miller’s eyes widened. He’d heard the expression before. John Robey had used the self-same phrase.
‘Monstre sacré,’ he said, using the French. ‘Our Frankenstein. ’ He smiled broadly now, as if suddenly realizing the irony of everything. ‘One of our many Frankensteins,’ he added. He held the snifter in his hand and swirled it before raising it to his lips and sipping. ‘I would offer you another drink but it is very, very expensive and you don’t appreciate it.’
Miller leaned to his right and set the empty glass down on the table. ‘I don’t understand what is going on here . . .’
‘And I don’t know that you ever will,’ Thorne replied. ‘Fact of the matter is that there are so many parts to this, so many different viewpoints and understandings of how this thing has happened, that I don’t know that anyone has all the information - except perhaps John Robey. Perhaps out of all of us, John Robey is the one who knows the most.’
‘All of us?’ Miller asked. ‘You’re involved in this?’
‘I use us in the loosest sense. I include myself only because I have been aware of this thing for many, many years. It is not something that anyone wants to face. Many of the people who started this are now dead, and the vast majority of those who got any kind of inkling as to what was going on were summarily dispatched—’
‘Dispatched? Or murdered? Is that what you mean when you say dispatched? You’re talking about all these people who’ve been murdered, aren’t you?’
‘People? What people are these?’
‘The ones that Catherine Sheridan wrote in the books that she returned to the library.’
Thorne frowned. ‘I don’t know what you mean, detective . . . what books?’
‘Her and John Robey . . . she took some books back to the library on the morning of her death. We have them at the Second Precinct and we’ve found notations all the way through them . . . initials and dates, you know? We started working through them, trying to find out who all these people were.’
‘John Robey,’ Thorne said quietly, almost to himself. ‘To think that after all this time . . .’
‘They are names, aren’t they, the initials and dates in the book? We’ve already started going through them, cross-referencing them against missing persons reports—’
Thorne raised his hand. ‘Enough, detective. There is no need for me to be apprised of all the numerous details of your investigation. People have died. This I understand. People have been dying for twenty years over this thing—’
‘What thing? What are you talking about?’
Thorne was silent for a moment, smiling as if granting indulgence to a whim. He walked to the French windows. For a while he stood with his back to Miller, and then he turned.
‘Did you ever see a movie called A Few Good Men? Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, you remember?’
‘Yes, I know the one. I’ve seen it a couple of times.’
‘And what do you feel was the fundamental essence of that story, Detective Miller?’
‘I’m sorry . . . I don’t understand what this has to do with—’
Thorne stopped him. ‘Indulge me, detective.’
‘I don’t know . . . that authority can corrupt a man . . . that people in positions of power can forget—’
Thorne was shaking his head. ‘No, detective, quite the contrary. What the movie was trying to communicate was the complete impossibility of preventing the bigger picture. You really consider that taking one man out of the frame would make any difference at all? For every man that falls, there are three more ready to take his place.’
‘You’ve lost me, Judge Thorne . . . I don’t know that you and I are even talking about the same thing.’
‘Of course we are, detective . . . we’re talking about Nicaragua. ’
Miller’s eyes widened visibly.
‘See?’ Thorne said. ‘We are talking about the same thing. We’re talking about Nicaragua, an illegal war that was funded by drug smuggling and arms dealing. We’re talking about forty tons of cocaine a month coming in on CIA-PILOTED aircraft. We’re talking about CIA operatives . . . people who by reason of their jobs actually discovered some of what really happened out there and began to understand that the cocaine and arms, and everything else that happened, was simply too profitable to stop once this imaginary war was over . . .’
Miller rose suddenly. He wanted to leave. He was not ready to hear this. Everything that Robey had talked of was now being confirmed from the lips of a Washington judge.
‘Sit down, Detective Miller,’ Thorne said.
‘No,’ Miller said. ‘I’m out of here right now. I don’t want—’
‘What you want is the very least of our concerns,’ Thorne interrupted. ‘Sit down, or I will call for security and they will take you out of here and drive you to some godforsaken project building and kill you.’
Miller could not believe what he was hearing. ‘You’re a judge . . .’
‘Of course I’m a judge,’ Thorne replied. ‘And you’re a Washington Police Department detective, and the simple truth is that you have walked right round the edge of something without ever really understanding what it was you were looking at. And this John Robey?’ Thorne laughed. ‘John Robey thinks he can take apart something that we spent thirty years trying to build? He is one man, Detective Miller, one man alone, and if he thinks that there is even the slightest chance of breaking this thing to pieces then he is sorely mistaken.’
Thorne stepped away from the window and returned to the chair facing Miller’s. He sat down, made himself comfortable. ‘You want to understand what happened here?’ he asked.
Miller looked up. ‘Understand what? That the U.S. government is still smuggling cocaine out of Nicaragua?’
‘Not the government my friend, the CIA.’
‘The CIA?’
‘You remember Madeleine Albright? Secretary of State?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘She said that the CIA behaved as if it had battered-child syndrome.’ Thorne laughed. ‘I don’t know that I understand precisely what battered-child syndrome is, but the sentiment communicates nevertheless, don’t you think?’
Miller’s heart was running ahead of itself. He felt dizzy and nauseous.
‘You find yourself in a very compromising position, Detective Miller. You are nothing but the latest in a long line of people who, intentionally or unintentionally, have jeopardized a spectacularly profitable operation that has been keeping the CIA busy for many, many years.’
Miller was finding it hard to breathe. He looked back at Thorne.
‘Robey tried it before, you know, five years ago . . . with a CIA operative named Darryl King. Darryl King was broken in about three weeks. Heroin. Crack cocaine. They could have given him anything.’
‘Darryl King was CIA?’
‘As were Catherine Sheridan and Ann Rayner . . . Ann I knew. A nice lady, used to work for Bill Walford.’
Miller remembered the conversation in Lassiter’s office, the fact that the Rayner woman’s connection to Walford was sufficient reason to keep this thing out of the papers.
‘They were all CIA . . . the ones who were killed?’ Miller asked.
‘CIA, family of CIA, cohorts, colleagues, snitches, confidential informants . . . any of their extended family . . .’
‘But they can’t just kill people like that—’
‘What do you mean, they can’t kill people like that? They did kill people like that, Detective Miller. They killed an awful lot of people—’
‘For money?’
‘For money, yes. For money - and power. For political influence. How the hell do you think the CIA funds its operations? Do you have even the faintest inkling of the cost of some of these projects?’ Thorne waved his hand in a dismissive fashion. ‘Of course you don’t. The cocaine that comes in from Nicaragua pays for arms and for political favors; it pays for the subversion of foreign aggressors and the assassination of political figures. You don’t think we just go cap-in-hand to the Treasury Department and ask for three hundred million dollars, do you?’
‘I . . . I don’t—’
‘And then there is the question of national security,’ Thorne interjected. ‘After the war was over, after we ran out of Nicaragua with our tails between our legs, money was needed to keep people secure. The State Department, Defense, the National Security Council, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, even the CIA itself. There were people who needed to be protected, people who had made decisions regarding Nicaragua and the security of the United States who would have been in the line of fire if the truth had ever come to light. You’re talking about people who were needed to deal with Grenada in ’83, Libya in ’86, El Salvador, Panama, Iraq, the Sudan - people who are still needed to this day. And we had a duty, a sworn responsibility, to ensure that the decisions they had made for the good of the country were never questioned. The truth would have brought Reagan’s administration to its knees. Even his assassination attempt was an effort to distract peoples’ attention.’
Miller opened his mouth to speak.
‘Isn’t it now obvious, detective? He was supposed to be shot at. But, saying that, Reagan was never the brightest light in the harbor, so I don’t know what the hell they expected from him.’
‘This is insane . . . who the hell would do that? Who the hell would set up an assassination attempt on a president?’
‘The CIA,’ Thorne replied. ‘This is what they do. They stand on the wall. They stand on the wall and they defend America, and they do what’s right, and they do all the things that no-one else has the guts or the balls to do, and then they wonder what these liberal-minded assholes are bleating about in Congress when they talk about violations of civil liberties and the rights of foreigners to their own countries.’ Thorne leaned forward, his eyes brighter, as if he was now driven to tell Miller what he knew. ‘As far as the CIA is concerned no-one has the right to anything until the CIA confers that right—’
‘You can’t tell me that Hinckley was set up to kill Reagan—’
‘I’m not going to say one way or the other, but we were there to ensure that he could not. Oswald took the rap for Jack Kennedy, just as Sirhan Sirhan did for Bobby in the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. And who created an FBI mouthpiece for Woodward and Bernstein when they wanted Nixon out of the Oval Office? We did. This is what we exist for.’
Thorne leaned forward. ‘And shall I tell you why I’m talking to you, Detective Miller? Because you can do nothing about this.’
Miller was visibly taken aback.
‘There is no reason for you to be surprised. You want to know what happened to John Hinckley after he tried to kill Reagan? They shipped him off to the puzzle factory, pumped him full of psychiatric drugs, turned his mind to mush . . . probably shocked him into a coma. They told him to think one thing one day and then they contradicted it the next. Over and over and over. They confused him, disoriented him, made him question his own name, his own existence. They brought him to a state of such complete delirium that even if he’d remembered who’d told him to shoot Reagan he wouldn’t have been able to say it. Now he can say what the hell he likes because he looks crazy, he sounds crazier, and who the hell is going to believe a man who tried to assassinate the president of the United States of America?’
Miller felt real anger, the anger that had been building up inside him for days, and finally he was confronted with someone who knew more of what was going on than he did, and this person was taunting him.
‘This . . . this is un-fucking-real,’ Miller said. ‘I’m not crazy. I am a Washington police detective, and there’s a great many people who would be very interested to know what I have to say about—’
‘About what, detective? About some imagined conspiracy that goes back to the war in Nicaragua, a war that most Americans don’t even care to know about? Or John Robey, respected college lecturer, published author, long-listed for the Pulitzer, and how he was really an expert CIA-trained assassin, responsible for dozens and dozens of killings in Nicaragua - and in an endless number of other countries - all at the behest of his government controllers? That story, detective? Is that the story you want to tell the world? Or maybe the story of this Ribbon Killer, how some other one-time government-paid mercenary was instructed to clean up a couple of situations here in Washington, and he got creative, decided to use the old-style system of filing we employed out there?’ Thorne smiled, the expression of someone remembering some past pleasant moment.
‘Filing?’ Miller asked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Bodies . . . dozens of them. Stacked on a rack of wooden shelves and covered in tarpaulin. Used to douse them in lavender water, gallons of the stuff. Real sick . . . an awful smell, rotting bodies and lavender. Who in hell’s idea that was I’ll never know. And they used to tie a tag to them, a ribbon around the neck just like a luggage tag, and the tag would state the way in which they were to be disposed of. Some were to be found, others to disappear, and there were cleaning crews who dealt with that stuff once the bodies had been shipped in.’