Banquo's Ghosts (13 page)

For the first time since his arrival into the little romper room, the man playing Dr. Yahdzi stopped his deskwork and looked up. Measuring Johnson with a stare.

Wallets nodded an unspoken command in the armed guard’s direction. The Turk un-holstered his .40 caliber Beretta, yanked the slide chambering a round, and left the cocked firearm on the desk in front of “Dr. Yahdzi.” The little man glanced at the weapon, then went back to his papers. The Turk returned to his place by the door.

Johnson sucked a breath in disbelief, contemplating the gun. This monster was ugly: big and black, heart-attack serious with death written
on it from butt to muzzle. Big enough to give any Metrosexual the vapors. Nothing like the little Dick Tracy popgun back at Dobbs Diesel.

Everyone seemed to be waiting for him to do something. At last Wallets’ sober voice filled the room. “Peter, you have a chance to save the world. The little rat lives; millions die. The little rat dies; peace really does get a chance. Well?”

Johnson didn’t move, didn’t blink an eyelash, didn’t even trust himself to shrug his shoulders. He knew what they wanted. And for an instant he swore he’d swoon. Hit his chin on the desk, go out cold. But the feeling passed, and he stood there on the Persian rug with the terrible question staring him in the face. What to do?

Wallets took a deep, quiet breath. “Show us.”

“I’m not comfortable pointing—”

“
Show us
.”

He gave Wallets a long doubtful look. Then tried to reach for the Beretta but his hand trembled from wrist to fingers with palsy. Like a hundred-year-old man. He stared at the shaking thing. How
embarrassing
.

“It’s only adrenalin, Peter,” Wallets said. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”

He felt stripped bare. He had walked into this room expecting a visit to Banquo & Duncan like any other. Some pointed conversation, maybe a few awkward questions, but he had long ago stopped letting that bother him and even felt warmly now toward Wallets after their roughing it together in North Carolina.

In other words, he had felt comfortable, in control. Which meant never being in a situation where anything fundamental was at stake.

And now they wanted him to pick up that instrument of death and enact a murder, an act that might not change history as they said, but would certainly change his life—perhaps end it. Confronting him was a choice more momentous than he’d ever faced. He looked at the black gun, and it loomed so large he imagined it being too heavy to lift, that he could yank at it with both hands and it wouldn’t budge. He looked at his trembling hand again and took two steps toward the desk. But suddenly the weakness in his hands spread to his knees, sapping the strength from the rest of his body. Slowly, he turned his back on the little man and slid gingerly to the floor.

He propped himself up against the desk with his back to Yahdzi and put his elbows on his knees and his hands on his head. “I think we need to talk,” he said to the dead silence of the room.

And they talked. Banquo pulled up a chair for his journalist, while he, Banquo, and Wallets all scooted together in a semicircle and talked it through. Johnson noticed something different in their tone. They weren’t talking to him like a recalcitrant outsider or someone who needed to be coaxed or cajoled into anything. But as equals, as an insider. Johnson liked the feeling, if not what he was hearing.

The “scientist” stayed at his desk, working at figures and reading physics books as the hours passed. He deserved some sort of prize for staying in character, Johnson thought. Yossi stood at the door, then leaned against it, and finally pulled up a stool at his post. They talked over the method (uncertain), the legality (none), and the ethics (dubious but defensible)—then went over it again and again and again.

The facts really weren’t in dispute. Iran declared war on the United States at the time of the Khomeini Revolution, thirty years ago. Spreading a reign of terror from Tehran to Buenos Aires. That made Dr. Yahdzi a kind of soldier, a combatant.

“No one who is serious about these matters—a category, alas, that excludes nearly all your journalistic colleagues—could regret a nuclear-neutered Iran. Only the pathologically deluded believe in nuclear moral equivalence. The rest of us live in dread, dread at a horizon of burned cities and millions dead. Bombing in retaliation for any Iranian recklessness would be indiscriminate, killing countless innocents whose only offense is living in the wrong Iranian city. But
one
shot. One precisely targeted shot could delay the reckoning for years.”

Johnson couldn’t argue. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. And as far as he could see there was only one upside to the deal. In a strange way this was
for the children,
as the cliché went. His child especially. One single act to give them a world where Giselle would never have to ask again, “Why did they do this? Tell me,
why?
”

Banquo explained how his legal and personal exposure would be total. Should Johnson complete the act successfully, he would be a hired assassin in the eyes of Iranian law—and everyone else. Red Queen Justice: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.”

And here Banquo opened the door a little wider.

“We have someone on the inside,” he explained. “You’ll have to allow the situation to mature, ripen. There will be a signal for you to act, but we can’t tell you what it is because, frankly, we don’t know yet. But when you’re on the ground, it will become manifest to you. An obvious opportunity. I wish I could tell you more. I wish I knew more. But our man inside—a great Iranian patriot in my mind—is putting it all on the line. Everything. In the most difficult of circumstances.”

Johnson sensed a kind of challenge in Banquo’s eye:
Could the same be said of him?

Everyone went quiet, and Johnson was about to pipe up with, “Okay, even if I grant all this . . . ” when Dr. Pahlevi Yahdzi’s voice startled them all:

“It’s a terrible burden for anyone, a terrible burden.” He shook his head, and bent his eyes again toward his papers.

Something about that simple declaration struck Johnson as a powerful act of empathy. Dr. Yahdzi had stated just what Johnson himself felt but didn’t want to admit—how scared, worried, and confused he was. How burdened. And the phrase “even unto death” came to Johnson’s mind and floated around in his head, signifying he knew not what. But his eyes misted, and he couldn’t meet anyone’s gaze.

“He’s right,” Banquo said, filling the silence. “From the moment you start to move against Yahdzi, your life is forfeit. We would understand if you prefer to decline.” Would they even attempt to rescue him?

“What happens if I say no?” Johnson asked.

Banquo gestured to Yossi the Turk, whose chin was nearly on his chest but who roused himself to stand up and unlock and open the door: “There’s the door.”

Johnson ignored the gesture, found it almost insulting, and changed the topic. “So assuming I seize the opportunity, and assuming I’m not eager to have a close encounter with the Iranian cattle prods, how do I get out?”

“Ah,” said Banquo. Then simply left it at that. Wallets looked down at the carpet, with an elbow on a knee, his chin in his hand, and audibly expelled some air through his nostrils. “There
will
be a way out. We’ll never be very far from you,” Banquo said at last. “But the first thing you can do is to help yourself. From the minute you start, every move you make counts. Do what makes sense. But don’t wait for the cavalry, Peter.”

Johnson suddenly wondered how much they’d care if he got dead, so long as he took the pride of Persian Physics with him. The answer was obvious and not particularly reassuring.

“And when I get caught?”

Again, that awkward silence.

“What am I supposed to say? What am I supposed to tell them?” Johnson asked again.

“It doesn’t matter really,” Banquo replied, without acknowledging his discomfort. “For any number of reasons. They’ll most likely put you through the ringer, perhaps use sodium pentothal or something like it. But that never works like in the movies, and you’ll probably just babble on about Camus or your last girl. Moreover, as far as our connection with you is concerned, first, you’re a provable liar, Peter.
Provable.
And second, no matter what you say,
we’ve never heard of you.
” Johnson’s mind flitted over the tape recorder he had slipped in and out of some of their sessions, and he smiled to himself. Home Insurance, he called it. For just this eventuality.

“So the U.S. government . . . ?” he asked, letting the question hang, unstated.

“A little history,” Banquo replied. “When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, invaded
a whole country,
the Politburo decision memo was entitled ‘Concerning the Matter of A.’ And you’re not even the invasion of a country, Peter. You’re just a journalist.”

“Uh-huh,” Johnson said.

Wallets tapped Johnson’s forearm. “But if you say no, none of this happened. We have been operating on the basis of trust. If you breathe a word, I’m sure the IRS will discover a keen interest in those questionable cash payments from abroad on which you paid no taxes.”

Johnson didn’t have anything to say to that, but Wallets wasn’t finished. “So, please, whatever you do, don’t try to be clever with us.” He pointed to Dr. Yahdzi.

The faux scientist fished around inside his suit jacket pockets, found something, and placed it on top of his paperwork. Johnson’s cute Sanyo miniature tape recorder and the half dozen mini tapes he’d made. He’d hid a couple of the tapes in the offices of
The Crusader
, Jo von Hildebrand’s desk, for Chrissakes, and the rest in an envelope addressed to his literary agent in his
own
Citibank safe deposit box.

Johnson started to mumble an apology, but Banquo waved him off. “Consider your options, Peter. If you want to move forward, we need to come back in here for a long session and go over specific scenarios. I don’t envy you. There are no good choices. But I would argue doing nothing has far worse consequences, ones that you won’t be able to drink away. You are implicated now, one way or another. You represent a unique opportunity to secure victory at the price of one bullet. Fellows like you don’t come around very often, Peter Johnson. But when they do, I simply cannot resist demanding of them what they
say
they want.”

“My ceremony of innocence is drowned?” Johnson mused, almost to himself.

“You know your Yeats,” Wallets said.

Johnson pursed his lips. What was there left for him to say? Nothing. Just a decision. To go or not to go. A million years ago, it seemed, he’d asked to join
la résistance.
But that was before anyone asked him to pick up a gun and point it at another man. It still sat, with all its black metallic solidity, in the same spot on Yahdzi’s desk.

Banquo stood up. “Let us know your decision today or tomorrow.”

Later, alone in Banquo’s office, once more Wallets looked at his boss. “Do you really believe all that crap you fed him?”

Banquo stared at the huge plasma TV screen; CIA-SPAN showed mobs from the Religion of Peace burning effigies of the Pope for baptizing a prominent Muslim writer. He forgot the screen and pondered the thick file on Johnson before him. Slowly, he opened it and began turning the pages; then paused—a page caught his eye. It had come from very early on in the process, when Banquo read everything
Johnson had ever written. Examining the man like a bug under a glass. Combing his past for anything that might give Banquo & Duncan a clue to the man and his character. Even going back to a tiny screed in a defunct Oxford magazine called
Scrivener
. The article about the old nursery rhyme in Orwell’s
1984
:

Ending with the dark lines:

But something in those bells spoke of a long buried, long ignored deep care for the past and regret at a great civilization slipping into oblivion. It spoke well of the student Johnson, that he could see as much. They’d paid the scribbler five measly pounds.

“It’s not important what I believe,” Banquo murmured softly, finally answering Wallets’ question. “It’s only important what
he
believes.”