Banquo's Ghosts (53 page)

“Unnamed
official
sources,” Banquo said, smiling. “Well, that clears it up.”

Bryce laughed. “I don’t know who those sources possibly could be, do you?”

“Sy Hersh has a piece in the
The New Yorker
saying you held prisoners down and tortured them with pliers with your own hands,” Johnson told Banquo.

“Ah, good ole Sy. With his usual commitment to accuracy. Where did he get that?”

“He says ‘former intelligence officials.’ ”

“Hah,” Banquo smiled. “His sources are always ‘former’ nobodies who haven’t been ‘anybodies’ since Vietnam.”

“Watch,” Johnson said, “he’ll probably win a National Magazine Award for it.”

Then they discussed what was happening in response to the attack. But with a warning from Banquo that Johnson couldn’t misunderstand: “You’re being included as a courtesy, Peter. Not for repeating
ever
—what you’re about to see. In this I bind you to me.”

Johnson nodded and said nothing, as he’d finally learned.

“I still think it’s a job for the BFF,” said Wallets.

“Uh, Giselle would think that’s ‘best friends forever’?” Johnson said, immediately forgetting everything he learned. This time, everyone laughed.

“The Big Fucking Fellas, the B-52s,” Wallets said.

“But they want to keep it quiet,” Banquo explained. “Officially, they want the attacks never solved, like the anthrax investigation. We may never know why the Iranians did it—at least not before the regime falls and we see the records. It might have been retaliation, tit-for-tat for your mission, Peter. Or maybe it’s just that aggression is what they do, and killing Americans is all the same to them, whether it’s on Saudi, Iraqi, or American soil. Or maybe they figured the more pain they inflict on us the likelier we are to leave their nuclear program alone. Could be a little of all of these things. My guess is that they simply thought they were good enough to get away with it—after all, the Grunge was in the pipeline long before we sent you in.

“But that’s just a guess. We do know that our return delivery is not going to be by Stratofortress, but something a touch more surgical. That
means the president preserves his options. He knows if it were publicly established that the Iranians did this, he’d have almost no option politically but to flatten them from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus, and that means a lot of innocent people die and we get blamed for it internationally. He wants to do it more subtle.”

“Subtle makes me nervous,” Wallets shifted in his seat.

“I know, but not to worry.” Banquo said. Then, “Ah, speak of the devil.” All eyes went to the flat screen on CIA-SPAN. The view from space jerked down to a closer and closer view: an indistinct brown, out of which slowly there emerged brown shapes, the dominant one a long line on the ground . . . a runway. The legend at the bottom of the screen read: “U.S.A.F. Air Strip Forward Sting, Irbil, Iraq, Zulu Time: 0545.”

Down the runway rolled a tiny white plane, its delicate features like a dragonfly or balsa-wood toy glider. A MQ-1 Predator, an armed unmanned aerial vehicle. Two slim dark shapes were visible perpendicular and underneath its wings, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. The seven-inch-wide, sixty-four-inch-long, ninety-nine-pound projectiles traveled at 950 miles per hour when launched, with an eighteen-pound shaped charge high explosive anti-tank warhead—the business end of American 21
^st
century precision warfare. From Lockheed Martin, with love.

The scene shifted courtesy of the Long Eye Satellite system. First: a grid of a city, a main thoroughfare, then a stretch of two blocks, and finally the top of a black sedan. The sedan bumped the car in front of it hard. A common traffic accident.

“Time to get out,” Banquo said to the screen.

As if he heard those words, the driver of the sedan got out and looked at the damage from the fender bender, then began arguing with the other driver, waving his hands. You could almost see his face.

“Look familiar?” Banquo asked Johnson; squinting, he couldn’t tell. Then shook his head no.

“No, why should you?” Banquo said to the screen. “Just one of the men who beat you. Sheik Kutmar’s chauffeur. But I imagine you were rather distracted at the time.”

No, Johnson didn’t recognize the man.

Banquo continued talking to the screen: “Keep him in there; let him make his cell phone calls. And you make your own. Time to get out of the way.” The driver made a gesture like a traffic cop as if to say, “Don’t bother to get out,” toward the passenger in the back of the sedan. Some more talking through the rolled down window: as though suggesting the passenger should just sit there, he’d fix it, call for another vehicle. Then the driver walked toward the side of the street with his hand up to his ear like he was making his own cell phone call.

“Another couple of steps. Go inside the café. Buy a coffee.”

The driver ducked under the awning of the café, ostensibly going inside.

Twelve seconds later, the screen went all white in a flash and then cleared to show a plume of black smoke and fire where the sedan had been. Window glass in the street. The terrible pause when no one moves those first few moments.

“Real subtle,” said Wallets, smirking.

“Where’s our guy?” Johnson said. “Is he still there? The driver, I mean. There he is.”

The driver was one of a number of people crawling out into the street from the various shattered storefronts around the explosion. He staggered toward the car and threw his hands in the air, putting them on top of his head in wailing grief. Even from a satellite you could tell.

“Give him the little gold statue now.”

The sedan was a mangled, flattened piece of burning metal.

“What does it look like to you, Wallets? We get our man?”

“Sheik Kutmar,” Wallets pronounced. “Officially with the virgins.”

Then Banquo did something utterly unaccountable. He got up from his desk, came over to Johnson’s chair, spread his arms wide, and hugged him. Wallets looked down out of embarrassment but couldn’t suppress the beginning of a smile that steadily grew. And Johnson saw Wallets smile—really smile, broad and easy—for the first time since the Iraq/Iran border.

Banquo seemed to catch himself, sat back down, and said in his usual, calm understated tone of voice, “That’s partly thanks to you, Peter. What started five years ago in these offices just ended on TV.”

Seeing Johnson’s confusion, Banquo explained: “During your incarceration, we kept busy and took out a little insurance.” Banquo went on, “We spirited the chauffeur’s family to Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian Coast. Then kept them in a small villa. His choice was silver or lead, as the saying goes. His family getting the lead first. Naturally, he chose silver. So the driver helped us arrange a fender bender in a busy street. Then made a cell phone call. Our final targeting sequence painted the sedan. Couldn’t miss, and—as you saw—Sheik Kutmar’s car happens to blow up.”

“That’s still a hell of a hole in the street to explain,” Wallets said, gesturing toward the smoldering scene on the screen.

“Well, yes,” Banquo said. “We won’t be able to do that again. There’ll be all sorts of crazy reports from the scene—flashing lights in the sky, UFOs. But they’ll figure it out. The thing is, we’ve had UAV flights over Iran since ’04. And the Iranians have never tracked them on radar because they were afraid we’d learn too much about their defense systems if they did. Now, that’ll change.”

He clipped the end of a cigar, as the CIA-SPAN shifted to something else. But no one bothered to watch. “So, we’ll be on to the next thing,” Banquo explained, looking first at his cigar as he rotated it in his fingers, then up over everyone’s head, as if he were addressing a memory. “One down, twenty-four to go. The top echelons of Iranian intelligence and the people who run the nuclear program are about to suffer a series of unfortunate events.”

What was there left to say?

After Johnson left, Banquo and Wallets sat alone for some moments. A brief quiet time, each lost in his own thoughts. At last Banquo sighed.

“Well, shall we get on with it?”

Wallets nodded silently, and they both rose from their chairs, Wallets taking a briefcase with him.

They returned to the same office once used to introduce a much less worldly Peter Johnson to his quarry and target, one Dr. Ramses Pahlevi
Yahdzi. Now, Yossi sat at the very same desk, looking like a swarthy, petulant Yul Brynner, called to account for some indiscretion. The eye patch added to his coldness, looking out at the world with the same bored insolence as ever.

“Yossi, a recap of recent history if you don’t mind,” Banquo began. “I want to thank you personally for extracting Johnson from the bazaar, for arranging the safe house, for stocking the trunk of our getaway car. Your forethought allowed the team to heal up and then pass the bandit roadblock in Kermanshah. A brilliant bit of soldiering. But there are certain things still troubling us.”

The spymaster paused. “For instance, there’s the untimely death of Jan Breuer.”

Yossi had an elbow on the clear desk, his chin propped on it. He didn’t say anything or make a gesture.

“This look familiar?” Wallets asked, opening a brief case and pulling out a Leupold Night Vision rifle scope.

“Rifle sight,” Yossi said.

“Very good,” Wallets said, calmly. “Very useful for dropping some unlucky bloke standing on Second Avenue, no?”

“Depends on how good you shoot,” with a shrug.

Wallets nodded. “Well, we all know your skills.”

Yossi looked unimpressed. What did it take to get this guy’s attention? Wallets grew impatient, drew a Marlboro out if his pack, and lit it, annoyed. But Banquo made a tiny sweeping motion to him with his hand:
take it easy, not yet.

Yossi sometimes reminded Banquo of that prisoner described in Primo Levi’s
Survival in Auschwitz,
whose innate bestiality allowed him to thrive in the camp, a world better suited to him than any sane one. For Yossi, the world of intelligence was something like that—double-crosses, uncertainty, and violent opportunism his most natural element.

“We don’t want this to get ugly,” Banquo said, glancing to a corner of the office. The black soundproof isolation booth from the Astor Ballroom waited for a chance to prove its worth again. Wallets saved one from the Waldorf as an afterthought, sensing a day like this would eventually arrive.

Yossi snorted in disbelief. “You want me torture myself?”

Banquo ignored the aside. “We have the scope; we have the rifle that you lodged in a gutter in a corner of the roof and the ballistics. We have a witness who saw a large bald man headed down the fire escape around 8 PM at 345 East 76
^th
Street, catty-corner from Il Monello. We can always add your fingerprints at a later date. What we don’t have is a motive. Care to provide?”

“He bother people,” Yossi said.

Now it was Wallets’ turn to show incredulity. “
Lots
of people bother people.”

Banquo hushed him with his hand again. “Who, Yossi?”

“He annoy people whose money he steal,” Yossi said.

Typical and plausible. Breuer had skimmed too much from his corrupt transactions, and someone had finally demanded final payment. But who?

“Jan Breuer was a contemptible human being in many ways,” Banquo said, in a confiding tone. “But he was important to us. Indeed, we couldn’t get anything done without contemptible human beings. He kept us apprised of who was taking what money, giving us an opportunity to use vulnerable marks for our own purposes or publicly discredit them if they wouldn’t play along. How do you think all the George Galloway bribes went public? This also gave us one Peter Johnson. He turned out to be ripe for the plucking for the right reasons, but knowing he was on the take first brought him to our attention. A good résumé detail if you will. And if he double-crossed us, well then it would have been more than just bloggers pointing out his dubious investments in Nigerian parking garages.”

Yossi looked at him as if to say,
Your point is?

“So you killed a very valuable asset to us. And now you’re going to tell us why, or you’ll face a capital murder case. The strongest we can arrange.”

“No,” Yossi said, shaking his head and smiling. “No. Then I tell everything, everyone.”

Banquo knew what he meant. And he was right, of course. A public trial would be a disaster, and Yossi would become the hero of the press
corps just as soon as he started singing about tormenting people for the United States government. Banquo had hoped Yossi wouldn’t think it through so well. Too bad. Plan B.

“You should be a lawyer in your next life, Yossi,” Banquo smiled. “Put the legal proceedings aside; there’s still the matter of a certain girl-friend.” A zaftig beauty from Morocco. “One Miss Esmeralda? And a ten-year-old son living in Jersey City with a very uncertain immigration status. It might be that they could be unceremoniously deported, to say . . . any number of countries with no fondness for the kith and kin of a rogue agent who betrayed them, killed their operatives, stole their money,” Banquo paused. “Well, you get the idea.”