Banquo's Ghosts (38 page)

A long pause. “Hold on,” Wallets said. And he heard mumbling and then muffled sounds and finally a woman’s voice: “Hello?”

“Who’s this?” Johnson demanded, keeping an eye out behind him.

“Agent Smith. I’ve been working this case with Wallets. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Yeah. Tell me something. Has that Frenchie
salaud
been diddling my ex-wife
and
my daughter?”

A couple walking by looked at him a long time and then giggled when they were past him.

“Hold on.”

More mumbling at the other end of the call, and he thought he heard the word “cougar,” but it might have been his imagination; then another voice, a baffled-sounding male: “Hello???” Johnson knew the drill; he was getting passed down the food chain and didn’t like it.

“Who’s this?”

“My name’s Bryce. What’s yours again?”

“Oh, hell.” Anton floated out the front door, looking both ways and tilting his head up in recognition and smiling when he saw him further up the sidewalk. Johnson clapped his phone shut. “Peter!” Just as delighted to see him as he had been upstairs. “I know just the place to go,” and he hooked his arm in Johnson’s playfully and yanked him up the sidewalk.

He prattled on, while Johnson fumed and tried to think rationally. He kept coming back to what Wallets would want him to do, and that was unquestionable: Play it cool, and play out the string. Anton led them into a dark wine bar off Broadway called Veivers, where the Frenchman was hailed as if he were Norm arriving at the bar in an episode from
Cheers
.

They were served glasses of Pinot noir without asking and a tiny bowl of olives. Anton was still in prattling mode, as he popped an olive in his mouth and delicately removed the pit: “I’ve so enjoyed getting to know your family. Josephine is exquisite.” Johnson couldn’t help a tiny grimace, which Anton didn’t seem to notice. In any case the young man changed his tone and got down to business: “I’ve got myself into a spot of trouble. If you could help me, the debt would last my lifetime.”

Johnson raised his eyebrows and opened his hands,
pray tell
. Concern dripped off him like sweet beads of honey. “Anton, anything,” Johnson said, manfully trying to keep the sarcasm to himself. Right now the boy was all about tête-à-tête and the young fellow made every effort to seem sincere.

“There’s a man in Japan, an industrialist who wants to bid on a large New York real estate property. But he doesn’t want his name used for the simple reason that if this industrialist’s name were known, the price of the property would go through the roof. Simply because he
was interested. I made the foolish mistake of promising this industrialist I could handle the transaction for him. Now my reputation is at stake, as is the reputation of Banque Luxembourg. If I fail, he’ll take all his business somewhere else. And that amount is far larger than the bidding money on this single transaction. Ordinarily I would have asked Jan Breuer to help me, despite everything, but . . .” And here he drifted off.

Johnson took a deep breath. “I think I understand,” he said at last. “You want to have the industrialist’s money wired to my account and have me transfer it in my name into Banque Luxembourg for him. Like the currency says, legal tender for all debts public and private. And it makes sense; he wants it private. There are power-of-attorney papers involved, but there’s no law that says you can’t give money to someone to deposit, as long as the taxes are eventually paid.”

Anton sighed a huge breath of relief. “And they will be paid; I give you my word, Peter, and the word of Banque Luxembourg’s lawyers. No one expects you to pay the tax on a transaction of $35 million.”

Thirty-five million dollars. A real-estate buy for a wealthy anonymous Jap. Sure.

B
anquo stood at his tenth-floor office window at 30 Rockefeller Plaza looking down the promenade to Fifth Avenue and Saks Department Store. A yellow Ryder delivery truck had pulled up in the middle of the block. For what, he didn’t know, as deliveries never came in the front. It idled with its hazards flashing directly in front of the gold front doors, framed by an august stone entrance emblazoned at the top “SAKS & COMPANY.”

The truck glowed at Banquo, like Nasrallah’s turban on one of those satellite images, and it lit up the synapses down a well-worn path of Banquo’s mind. He felt his throat catch, and he couldn’t help what happened next, his imagination taking that Ryder truck parked outside the store, then leaping to a herky-jerky Zapruder 8mm film behind his eyes.

First, the exaggerated silence—then the sucking sensation. Finally the flash and boom as his office window shook. A cloud of concrete dust rolled down the Rockefeller Promenade, mixing with a thousand windows falling to the ground. Through the wafting smoke an awful clearing: the facade of the lower stories of the Saks building sheared away, metal rods drooping out of the front. The truck nonexistent and the passing traffic turned into twisted metal, unrecognizable except for an axle or chassis—right there on Fifth Avenue. Pools of blood. Limbs. Burned people, half naked and running heedlessly. Survivors
staring, their faces contorted in a kind of madness. The color of powdered concrete.

Unsteady on his feet, Banquo touched the window. He looked down once more. The truck had its right turn signal on and was merging into the stream of downtown traffic again. He reached for his desk chair and sank into it. He knew what was going to happen next. He knew where his mind was taking him. It always did.

Anyone who spent time in Beirut in the 1950s and ’60s spoke of its charm, its easy cosmopolitan sophistication—Paris on the Mediterranean. Of never being able to shake the feeling that you lived on the edge of the great Middle East, but with all the comfort and class of the Champs-Elysées. Monte Carlo with couscous and kabobs. Banquo had been there in another era, and he couldn’t shake what he had taken away from it, regret tinged with anger, an aching uncertainty about what might have been or, more importantly, what he personally might have prevented.

That regret filled every crevice of his soul, arising out of a time when trusting the wrong person or a wrong gut instinct could mean disappearing into the abyss of swirling hatreds and rival agendas, where the only certainty was the barrel of a gun.

Banquo had been stationed in Beirut for nearly eight months. Then came April 18, 1983, the day the U.S. Embassy was hit. As if to spit in America’s face, the bombers used a van stolen earlier from the Embassy itself. Four hundred pounds of explosives. Sixty-three dead.

Among them: chief Middle East analyst Robert C. Ames, station chief Kenneth Haas, and six other CIA employees. In the 1970s, Idaho Senator Frank Church, along with Admiral Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s CIA chief, had degraded U.S. intelligence capabilities beyond recognition. In a single blow, CIA Director Turner had eliminated over eight hundred operational positions in what was called the Halloween Massacre. As far as Banquo was concerned, what Senator Church and Turner began back at home in 1977, Hezbollah finished off by killing
those men in Beirut. Their experience, their contacts, their expertise—all wiped out, and they weren’t coming back.

Banquo could still recall his safe house, a few white painted rooms in an office building on the Muslim side of the Green Line. There he ran a cutout, what appeared to be an export-import business. The last remnant of Agency operatives on the ground.

It didn’t take long to finger who had blown up the Embassy. Such terror operations weren’t simple affairs. They require enough operational sophistication that many people know about them, and they needed a guiding spirit. A guiding hand—no such thing as spontaneous combustion. In this case, the organizer had a name and an address, and Banquo found them in the first twenty-four hours.

The address: the Sheik Abdullah Barracks in Baalbek, Lebanon, home of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The name: Ayman Husseini, the red-bearded, oddly fair-haired head of operations. A complicated man with a degree in sociology from La Sorbonne and some graduate work at the University of Tehran. His pedigree impeccable: Iranian-provided, Iranian-approved, the bomber-in-chief to a nascent Hezbollah.

Of course, there was a sheik in charge of public speaking. One Sheik Fadlallah, the “spiritual leader,” of the just-forming Hezbollah talked a good enough game. “What martyrdom is greater than a human bomb detonated in the enemy’s face? What spiritualism, what blessing greater than giving your body and life for the sake of Allah?”

Oh, the Hezbo fellows had plenty of martyrs lined up, but all the virgins would go wanting without Husseini’s technical expertise. Fadlallah had the boys, but not the toys.

Ayman Husseini provided the toys, and he adored them. A born tinkerer, a kind of cut-rate Edison who never took the trouble to invent a better light bulb. His father was a Western-educated electrical engineer in Tehran, his career waylaid when the Shah fell. His son didn’t seem to care or notice, so swept up had he been by love for Khomeini and the revolution. He had been part of the crowd of students that stormed the
U.S. Embassy in 1979, then disappeared into Iranian intelligence. Now emerging to mastermind the destruction—not just the storming—of another U.S. Embassy.

How did Banquo know about Husseini? The way he knew about so many other things: human frailty. Never be surprised by frailty, for without it you’re out of the spy business. And when such frailty hit him by surprise—when he was let down or tricked—he never cursed human nature, but only his own naïveté.

Husseini’s weakness was hookers. Not for himself. Husseini was perfectly content to sit in a windowless room all day breathing the toxic fumes of whatever explosive he was mixing, or sniffing solder, and had already lost three fingers to a mishap while pursuing this passion. No, the ladies were directed to a mid-level Hezbo with access to the security arrangements at the Sheik Abdullah Barracks. All the randy lad needed to betray the barrack’s protocols was a safe hotel room and two hookers dressed devoutly on the outside but, underneath their burkas, clad with the sexiest frillies available in pre-Victoria’s Secret Beirut. That and $500 walking-around money a month.

Banquo happily supplied both, but since his horny Hezbo never wanted any of the same women twice, there was some hustle involved to keep him adequately supplied. Even in Beirut, female companionship wasn’t inexhaustible. But well worth trying to make it so. Thus, thanks to a lot of girls, a little dough, and human frailty, he knew Ayman Husseini, the bomb maker, owned a car: a rundown Chevy sedan from the 1970s. He knew where Husseini kept his car: in a fenced compound near the Abdullah Barracks with an unusually large number of panel trucks. And most importantly, Banquo knew who Ayman Husseini trusted. No one outside of another former Khomeini-worshipping student from Tehran, who acted as his driver and all-around sidekick. Banquo knew how long it took his sidekick to exit the parking lot, swing around the corner, and pick up the bomb maker from the Abdullah Barracks. Banquo had even clocked their trip times, hither and yon. Some trips were shorter, some longer.

Banquo’s team could attach a wad of plastique—radio-detonated C-4—to the bottom of that car, timed to kill Ayman Husseini, his swell
friends, indeed the whole Abdullah Barracks, in the first three minutes as the car pulled out of the lot and came around front. A magical mysterious explosion of questionable origin. But what if the targets knew the origin of the blast? Radio-detonated C-4 often bore Uncle Sam’s signature. Even better. The Hezbos would know that the United States of America realized the import of Embassy bombings and that we could reach out and vaporize one of their top players, anyone we wanted. Even if the attacks didn’t stop altogether, we’d disrupt them; perhaps even force Hezbollah to abandon the next big bang in the pipeline. But most importantly—destroy once and for all the illusion that attacking America was free of reprisal, free of consequences.