Banquo's Ghosts

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

—Rich Lowry

 

 

 

—Keith Korman

—Aeschylus

H
e sat in a ramshackle office chair staring at the little red light in the video camera and let the little red video light stare right back. Sounds trickled into his head from the earpiece, the familiar theme music of the cable news show six thousand miles away and then that raspy voice from the guy who never missed the chance to ask a cream-puff question:

“And joining us live from Tehran, the daring journalist Peter Johnson. The same Peter Johnson who has an opinion about everything and now boasts exclusive access to the Iranian government, its officials, its mullahs, its power brokers. Every beard and every turban.” The raspy familiar voice
did
like its own sound. “So tell us, Peter, how’re they treating you over there?”

“Fine, Larry. Fine.” Johnson smiled. God, he could feel how pasty and blotched he looked. His skin a moist rubber mask. And the strands of hair he tried to comb onto his forehead from his scalp hinted at the merest plausibility of bangs. A suave geek. The perfect intellectualoid. “I think they’re glad to have someone over here
listening
to them for once.”

An awkward pause due to satellite delay, then Larry King’s disembodied voice slid into Johnson’s ear like sand. But it was too late; Johnson had already started to talk again. He couldn’t help it, a natural reflex to fill any dead air. Chat show guestitis. When he finally became
disentangled from Larry, the host got out, “I noticed you’re growing a beard—does it help you fit in over there?”

“Not much can help a sophisticated New Yorker fit in over here, Larry.” Johnson looked unshaven, with blue circles beneath his eyes. He could guess what anyone familiar with his reputation must have been thinking—hung over, maybe barely sober. If only they knew how hard it was to get a drink in this crummy town. Dry mouth, dry streets.

The dingy studio room at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance-Foreign Press and Media Department smelled of unwashed feet; a faded cityscape poster of “exotic” Tehran hung on the wall behind him, his backdrop for the CNN setup. An evening shot, streams of cars, the fairy lights of Scheherazade, all frozen. It might have been snatched from an Iran Air tourist office—about the time of the Shah. Along with the table, the chairs, the grime on the walls. Nothing here was new.

A bearded technician crouched behind the camera, impossible to make out from the glaring single spotlight aimed straight at Johnson. He smelled of tobacco and French cologne. A nice enough fellow when he had introduced himself, helping with the earpiece and mike. Soft, gentle hands; clean, manicured nails. Johnson had already forgotten his name. Was it Mohammed-Muhammed, first name and last?

The gravelly voice came again. “Now tell us, Peter—nuke or no nuke?”

This was easy. He hoped no one thought the moisture tickling his shiny forehead was panic sweat—oh, what he’d give for some powder right now.

“Unequivocally, no nuke, Larry. What can I say, except what everyone else knows? This is another put-on, another confabulation by the same people who always lust after another good war. What people don’t realize is that Iran’s oil reserves aren’t inexhaustible, and that this government is planning for the future by developing an alternative source of energy. I am told by my sources in the Ministry of Energy that by the year 2015 nearly 20 percent of Iran’s domestic power will be nuclear, and this will preserve oil, this country’s most important source of revenue. Larry, some powerful people in America apparently believe they are the only ones who should be allowed to get rich off of oil.”

Huh-han-huh—Larry bleated out his practiced laugh that was something between a chuckle and a smoker’s cough. Now the tough question, or what passed for it: “Okay, you know this is coming. We’ve got those bloggers claiming you took money from the Hussein government in Iraq back before it fell.”

“But who’s paying them to make those accusations? Web loggers? Why don’t we just call them what they are. Web
Liars
. Let’s see the proof, Larry. Otherwise it’s just a smear.”

“So no Cypriot vineyards in your portfolio? No stock from the Nigerian Parking Garage Corporation in Lagos?”

“I don’t think so, Larry. I don’t even own a car. And . . . to quote Dracula, ‘I never drink—
wine
.’ ”

Larry harrumphed again. “We’ll leave it right there, with Peter Johnson, the controversial journalist, live from . . .” The earpiece went dead. The light switched off. Mohammed-Muhammed emerged from behind the camera and gave him thumbs up, then chuckled and shook his head.

Johnson wiped his forehead and looked at the technician with an open-palmed gesture. “What?”

“You don’t take Saddam’s money?” the technician asked, as he walked beside Johnson toward the door. Then, incredulous: “Why not? Everyone take Saddam’s money.
But not you?
Hah.” Mohammed-Muhammed threw him an easy, gracious smile, before opening the door and stepping aside to usher his journalist out with a broad sweep of the hand. “I don’t believe you.”

Join the club,
Johnson thought.

The door shut behind him, and Johnson was out in the stuffy hallway, staring at his bare dry hands. His fingers trembled ever so slightly. From lack of drink? From the daggers of the man’s smile? Or from thoughts of the test to come?

Didn’t matter. He remembered the promise. It seemed long ago and far away, made by a man sitting at a well-appointed desk.
We’ll provide a gun when the time is right.
When the time is right. Sheesh.

He stuffed his dry, shaky hands in his pockets and left the building.

S
tewart Banquo’s office in 30 Rockefeller Plaza overlooked the skating rink and the spill pools of the promenade. The sounds of midtown Manhattan evening traffic, coursing down Fifth Avenue, drifted through the thick glass of the window into his wood-paneled office. The chiseled lettering in gold on the double oaken door read

Or so everyone was told. As for Duncan, a pure cutout, dead as Jacob Marley, since no such personage ever existed at all. Tonight Banquo sat at his desk, a man alone. The bare, polished surface gleamed at him from a green-shaded banker’s desk lamp, his own murky reflection featureless, like a face staring up from the vast deep. The rest of the room in shadow.

The large plasma TV screen across his darkened office showed its pretty, high-definition colors, way too effective for the grainy moving images coming through the military satellite broadband feed. Jerky shots as if coming from a small hand-held camera, now posted like YouTube for general dissemination in the intelligence community. A Middle Eastern locale: “Southern Lebanon, town of Bint Jbeil” read the white caption. A daytime street scene: hovels, rubble, apartment buildings. A dozen men marched three prisoners out into the street, the jerky
video following them along. The prisoners stumbled toward a bullet-riddled wall, wearing knock-off jogging sweats, Michael Jordan wear, an Ice T-shirt—hopelessly out of date. Clumsily, they kneeled. The dozen men—executioners with hoods—let fly with AK-47s into the prisoners’ backs and heads. The closed captioning-style line of type at the bottom of the Langley feed read:

So Hezbollah was knocking off some local opposition, while some dung beetle taped it all for posterity and propaganda—“presumably.” Was it a sign of weakness or of strength, of an impending operation or of business as usual? Well, Human Intelligence Operations at Langley “cannot confirm.” In other words, situation normal: nobody knew jack.

The image on the plasma monitor smoothly dissolved and reformed. No more jerky YouTube propaganda but the real deal: a spy satellite enhanced image. A new feed from Langley’s C-SPAN. The military had what it called “happy snaps,” satellite pictures famous for mesmerizing any civilians sitting around a table at a meeting. This stuff put happy snaps to shame. Southern Lebanon again. Though the only way you could tell would be by reading the captions. The satellite’s name: Long Eye; longitude and latitude: 35˚ 28’ E 33˚ 54’ N; time: 0932Z; place: LEBANON Iranian Embassy, Bear Hasan, Beirut. Four men in turbans came out of the Iranian Embassy and got into a waiting Mercedes sedan. The Mercedes drove off. The image jumped again, back to the men walking to the car, and zoomed in closer and closer until it seemed you were standing ten feet over one of the turbans. Now the turban began to turn yellow-green, as though to identify itself.
See? This turban. Here I am.
The caption on the feed read: “Nasrallah leaves Iranian Embassy: 0932Z.” Ah, so some clever PhD at Langley had figured out how to paint the Shiite’s turban with some low-grade uranium dioxide, once used in ceramic glazes. Then a kind of black-light filter on the satellite teased out its color. You see? We can see him from space.
Banquo pursed his lips and thought: Not bad. Probably bribed the man’s turban-winder. Yes, such men existed, earning their bread in Oriental countries, winding turbans for a living. Countless thousands of such men, as common as barbers in the West, from London to Bangkok. And easily enough bribed if you could find them. Just one problem: if the client was smart, and Nasrallah was smart enough, he’d be bribing his turban-winder too. Ensuring loyalty. Now another fellow could be wearing the turban, maybe his brother-in-law, or some unrelated poor sap, or even the local administrator of a Red Crescent Hospital whose untimely demise at the hands of the geniuses who thought up this turban-dying scheme would give rise to international outrage. Not that Nasrallah even needed to know about Langley’s clever fabric-tagging system. Assassins had been poisoning people’s garments in that part of the world for a thousand years. It paid to be careful. A paranoid might wear a new turban every day.