Banquo's Ghosts (52 page)

Johnson was about to give her a lecture . . . that she should never mistake American freedom for American weakness, that our vicious political debate didn’t mean we lacked unity of purpose, that dissent is our true strength. All the well-worn words. But before he could, the cast of characters at a Jo von H party flitted through his mind, the West-hating, postmodern, gender-bending, self-congratulatory super-rich and talented
mediocrities
—the whole collection of “progressives” who, as the saying went, wouldn’t take their own side in a fight, even if they
knew which side they were on. Heaviness settled on Johnson, weariness. He didn’t want to argue any more.

Then a hot flash across his brain: What was he arguing with her for in the first place? Wasn’t this just a symptom of the problem, the lack of clarity and purpose? Didn’t it mean she had a point? In any other society, they’d have taken her downstairs to some obscure tunnel and shot her in the head. Then left her body in the sewer—a condign punishment for a woman guilty of murder and terror. An Agent Enemy of State.

He shook his head, as if to banish the thought. Yasmine must have been mystified at his strange, prolonged silence.
No, we’re civilized,
he told himself.
We’re civilization.
But that carries the responsibility, the obligation to defend it.

He thought back to that Iranian van in the sandstorm. Despite everything, once more
proud
he’d pulled the trigger, and of his association with men and women who had made it possible for him to pull it. He thought of the New Yorkers killed, and the malevolence loosed on the city’s streets that day. Of Wesson. The image of Giselle with a hood over her head knifed through him again. Never far away. He planned to keep the jpeg file of it in his phone, to forever remind him. His eyes filled, but he managed to control himself. Sure, he’d pull the trigger again, if that’s what it took, if that’s what it took to keep this woman and all her people in the darkest corners of the earth.

He finally fixed his eyes on Yasmine again: “You tried to take what’s precious from me, my daughter and my city. Soon the Stone Age is coming for you, Yasmine Farouk, PhD. Don’t complain. Get used to it. You’re going to live in that Stone Age a long, long time.”

Johnson turned his back on her. He hadn’t proven to be much of an interrogator, but any lingering doubts about his role in this fight had been burned away. He left the room and the woman, but resolved never to leave the struggle, never leave the resistance, so long as there was an enemy to resist and a world to defend. For better or worse, his own civilization had come to claim him.

He punched up his cell phone as soon as he left the cage and dialed Giselle: “Honey, I’m coming home.”

J
ohnson sat around the apartment for the next two weeks or so, taking in the media circus around the attacks. It was a big enough deal, and deservedly so, but not quite the apocalypse. Matters might have turned a lot worse. One hundred eighty-three Americans dead, including Agent Wesson, who got a police funeral and honor guard that stretched twenty blocks. As for the city’s infrastructure and public commons: Union Square, Trump Towers, parts of Grand Central, the Christopher Street subway station, J. Hood Wright Park in West Harlem, the San Remo Hotel, P.S. 158, the Bayard Taylor School on York Avenue on the Upper East Side, along with the Friends’ Seminary Private School on 16
^th
Street, and an abandoned factory near the Gowanus Canal were off-limits indefinitely. As were the safe houses and their immediate vicinity: a single family house in Queens, a ten-story apartment building in Brooklyn, a condemned former crack den on the Lower East Side, a house in Staten Island where backpackers had rented the basement, an apartment in Lefrak City, and a boathouse in Amityville. A complicated and expensive cleanup began.

Every subway car in the New York City transit system had to be scanned for the Grunge. In the end, seventeen Bombardier subway cars retired permanently. Much later, a scandal ensued when two of the cars were sold to entrepreneurs in Nevada for use as eating establishments
called Manhattan Diners, one in Reno, the other in Roswell, New Mexico.

The Workbench Boys disappeared into the pocket of the federal government as “enemy combatants.” Most didn’t live out the month, dying of radiation poisoning in various high-security prison infirmaries. Only Banquo knew what happened to Yasmine Farouk, PhD. And the fate of the Iranian Diplomats? Actually, all requested and were eventually given amnesty and U.S. citizenship in a deal with the Justice Department, brokered by the State Department and assigned to the Middle East Desk. They were working for us now. Anton Anjou continued to live in Greenwich Village. Johnson took him out to lunch once in order to warn him off Giselle. He needn’t have bothered. One of the Iranian Diplomats had moved in.

Johnson desperately wanted to sit down with Banquo and Wallets for a debrief, and kept calling, but the word always came back that they were busy and he should keep on with “legend building”—in other words keep writing his attacks on the U.S. government and apologies for our enemies. This was getting very old, and Johnson wanted to give it up soon, but he figured for now, “Those also serve who stay at home and write vicious defenses of appeasement.” The brains at Banquo & Duncan still thought him more useful with his street cred intact—indeed, bizarrely enhanced by his Iranian experience. Jo von H wanted to have a party in his honor. She thought he had been victimized by the CIA in Iran, so that’s what everyone else in their circle thought too. A plausible enough fairy tale.

Speaking of which, he flipped to
Hardball
to catch the appearance Josephine had been promoting all day on
The Crusader
blog. Giselle came home from work, threw her purse and coat on a chair, and plopped down next to him. “Check it out,” he said, “Jo’s in fine form.”

His Editrix came off the screen like an angel on fire: “After all the trampling on civil liberties, after all the money spent, all the phony alarms,
this
is what we get? No safer, no more secure. Just wall-to-wall paranoia and no security, Chris.”

“Harrumph,” Johnson snorted. “All of a sudden she cares about security?”

Giselle playfully hit him on his arm, “Be nice.”

Johnson rolled his eyes.

Giselle reminded him, “She went all-out for you when you were in Iran, and she pays the bills, doesn’t she?”

“Only some of them,” Johnson replied.

Chris Matthews was asking a rambling, machine-gun-style question, something about whether Josephine von Hildebrand and
The Crusader
trusted whether the government gave them the full story, ending with this clinker:

“Do you think—we’ve got reports out there—do you think, you know what they’re saying, those so-called neocons—although they don’t seem very neo to me, con maybe,
hah-hah
—do you think—you know what I’m getting at here—and I’ve been around this town for a long time—do you think the Iranians were
involved?
”

Finally, the rub.

One of among many things that mystified Johnson—that he appeared to be witnessing a successful government cover-up. How easily people, like good horses, wore blinders without complaint. The administration didn’t want to ’fess up to the Iranian sponsorship of the attacks. Bits and pieces about the Iranian role kept dribbling out, but the administration either stayed silent or shot down various erroneous details that tended to discredit the larger narrative, even if that narrative was true. The momentary political dynamic aided the administration’s cause. The right played up the Iranian angle, but the left reflexively dismissed it, and no one was inclined to believe the right since the Iraq WMD fiasco.

The coverup was aided by hear-no-evil-see-no-evil press that seemed more concerned with the Dish du Jour—recently the revelation that a famous Hollywood actress, on the advice of a fashionable child psychologist in California, was raising her three adopted children via remote control through an elaborate system of interactive vid-cam links and talking stuffed animals.

But Chris Mathews still chewed the bit in his teeth over government spying and lying, and Josephine rode him like a gelding.

“No, Chris, I don’t think the government is telling us everything. But blaming Iran—that’s coming from the people who want another rush to war against another regime. No, what they aren’t telling us is how they messed up, and how much they’ve done to make damn sure young Muslim men the world over hate us, hate us, with a passionate commitment. My writer Peter Johnson has a new piece in
The Crus
—”

Johnson hit the Off button on the remote.

He and Giselle enjoyed some peace and quiet in their lives—treasured it, actually, after all that had happened. Loving the little things. They ordered seafood Pad Thai from the local Thai place and talked over dinner, Johnson really listening for the first time in a long time, perhaps the first time ever. His mind didn’t flit over the things he wanted to do the next day, or the arguments in his next piece, or the question of how soon he could extricate himself from the conversation to do whatever else he imagined he’d rather be doing: reading, drinking, skirt chasing, working, whatever. For once engaged, utterly engaged in this person across from him, who shared so much of him—of his genes, his history—but was utterly distinct, not just from him, but from anyone who’d ever graced this planet. Or ever would.

And he smiled to himself with the wonder of such simple things he’d missed so profoundly and for so long. “Dad, what is it?” Giselle asked him when she noticed his strange look. But he just shook his head.

From downstairs the lobby buzzer rang; he and Giselle shared a glance of restrained suspicion. But it turned out to be a bicycle messenger late on a delivery. A simple manila envelope. Johnson opened it. A photograph and a cover sheet. The cover sheet was a hospital form noting the death of an unknown subject due to radiation poisoning of an unknown origin. The hospital name blacked out. The photograph showed Yasmine.

No longer that alluring flower he remembered, not even the arrogant interrogator, nor even the defiant prisoner of the Waldorf-Astoria. The face was nearly black with clotted blood and withered, shrunken in on itself. At some point she must have self-contaminated as she went about her deadly tasks. Touched by the Grunge. A dead vampire. Queen of the Damned.

He slid them both back into the envelope, fingers trembling slightly.

His cell phone rang.

Wallets.

He wanted him to come in first thing in the morning.

The offices of Banquo & Duncan hummed like a reborn hive. When Johnson walked off the Rockefeller elevator, it seemed as if twice as many people worked there. The double doors to the old man’s office stood open.

Banquo waved Johnson in hurriedly without getting up, then immediately turned to his email and phone, for the moment distracted. Johnson watched the spymaster and saw the same Banquo he’d always known: impeccably dressed, even-voiced, but intense. Yet Johnson saw a difference that took a while for him to pin down—an exuberance emanating from the head of the firm that hadn’t been there before.

Johnson thought of the Shakespeare line about there being a tide in the affairs of men. Coming to him at last: “There is a tide in the affairs of men. / Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” After a long time, Banquo’s tide was running again in his favor, and he was riding the current. The dinosaur had clawed his way out of his tar pit.

First order of business: they caught up on the press.

“Check this out,” Bryce said. Somehow Trevor Andover’s assistant never managed to return to Langley and now drew a salary from B & D. He handed Banquo the front page of the
Washington Post
and pointed to a story below the fold in the right hand corner, bylined Ruth Lipsky. The headline read, “Top CIA Official Ousted,” and the lede: “The Deputy Director of the CIA has resigned amid criticisms that he ignored key intelligence in the weeks leading up to last month’s incidents in New York City, unnamed official sources say.”