Banquo's Ghosts (39 page)

But such a job would have to be done by Americans. No turning to outside contractors. No trusting amateurs or conflicted locals. So Banquo ran it up the Langley flag pole. He knew it would go all the way to Bill Casey at the top, maybe beyond. And he waited. Each time the Hezbo got his hookers, Banquo worried one of the girls would displease the lad, ending their cozy relationship. Fretted that a word from the criminal underground running the prostitutes, Beirut’s pimps, would slip across the street to the terror network and no one would ever hear from the horny Hezbo again. Or perhaps the Hezbo lad might suddenly grasp the risks he was running, then just as suddenly back out, changing all the security procedures, times and places Banquo knew so well.

Each day he waited for word from Langley seemed an age. Each day without a decision his stomach twisted up more and more; after five weeks, even if there were no outward signs, his guts were telling him a story. And he diagnosed what the knots meant. At first, he thought they were anger. But it slowly dawned on him, not anger—foreboding. Fear. For his own safety? No. At what gift the future might bring.

Banquo never heard back from Langley. Eventually he dropped the plot. Even so, he kept stringing his Hezbo lad along just in case. More out of habit than anything else. And he waited again. This time for calamity.

Catastrophe came six months after the Embassy bombing that had gone unanswered—October 23, 1983. Twelve thousand pounds of TNT delivered to the Marine barracks at the Beirut International Airport in a yellow van. The explosion so large the plume of smoke formed a mushroom cloud above the four-story building, all in a moment reduced to rubble. Two hundred forty-one Americans dead. The worst day for the Semper Fidelis since Iwo Jima. The worst day for U.S. power projection since the Tet offensive. Banquo wasn’t surprised.

Langley sent a team from the U.S. to gather intelligence in preparation for retaliatory strikes against the perpetrators. Yet the director of operations pulled Banquo out. Perhaps because Langley wanted to claim insufficient intelligence for any further action. Banquo knew too damn much. So the good soldier handed everything over to the U.S. team and quit Beirut.

Sure enough, the guys from the U.S. came back home without striking even the feeblest blow. But they did, apparently, subcontract out to the Lebanese military the job of killing Fadlallah, the Talking Sheik. The Lebanese Military tried to do it with a car bomb, missed Fadlallah, and killed eighty civilians at a mosque. The U.S. got just as much of a black reaming as if it had carried out the attempt itself. And Banquo was reminded of a line from an issue of
National Review
back in the 1960s: “The assassination attempt against Sukarno had all the hallmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno.”

Back in the States, Banquo’s aborted scheme of retribution for the Embassy bombing never surfaced. One day when he was ruminating over it, a terrible thought occurred to him: that Langley’s non-answer hadn’t been an implicit no but an implicit
yes
, and it was he—not the nameless “they,” the chickenshit bureaucrats—who had left the predicate for the barracks bombing in place. As if he’d rammed the yellow suicide truck through the perimeter himself. The screams of those trapped under the rubble his alone to bear. And the mushroom cloud his too, a smoky apparition—Banquo’s own ghost.

That’s why he hated yellow trucks.

Wallets startled the boss when he came through Banquo’s half-open office door, dragging him from a sorrowful memory. Wallets knew that expression on the man’s face, long ago learning to let it go, bite his tongue, as if he’d interrupted someone indulging an embarrassing habit. Wallets looked at his shoes, and soon enough Banquo fixed his face and demanded, in his usual all-business tone, “What have you got?”

“We think we’ve got some other boys.”

“What do you mean?”

“Farah Nasir, the U.N.’s Farah Nasir. Junior service officer, Iranian Mission. She took a call from another young man. He said something about Klimteh.”

“Has anyone tossed their place?”

“It’s in Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy, do or die. Three of them living there, same circumstances as the others basically—cheap apartment, except these boys are neater. But all the same accoutrements. Paint, jeans, reinforced backpacks . . . ”

“Klimteh, eh?” Banquo tried the word out on his tongue: “Klimteh.”

“We figured out what that torn-up stuff was in the Workbench Boys’ place in Queens.” Wallets let it hang there. He liked it when he knew something that Banquo really wanted to hear, but he didn’t let it hang too long.

“Well?” Banquo said.

“X-ray vests from a dentist office. Taken apart at the seams. Flexible leaded cloth. And guess what?” There he went again. He couldn’t help himself.

This time Banquo didn’t rise to the bait but simply raised an eyebrow.

“There have been a couple of burglaries in dentist’s offices. Brooklyn and Queens. All the same. Late at night, nothing taken except the vests. NYPD arrested two guys coming out of a Pakistani dentist’s office three months ago. They made bail, overstayed their visas. Then skipped their court date. Now wanted on a bench warrant. The thing is . . .” and here Wallets put some colored printout on Banquo’s desk. “I think they finally realized how stupid it was to burglarize Ahmed the local tooth puller when they could get everything they needed online with a stolen credit card.”

The few colored pages were from
Pearsondental.com
. Vinyl Backed Lead Aprons. Corduroy Backed Lead Aprons. In Gray, Light Blue, Beige, Mauve, Wedgwood, or Jade Green. In Adult sizes. Child. Technician. Child size without collar. Technician with collar. “Multi-ply construction makes aprons flexible and comfortable. 3mm lead equivalency. In Vinyl, Corduroy, or Velour.”

Banquo got the point. “For the flexible lead cloth.”

“Yeah, it must be for the lead. Maybe even paid cash in a supply house.”

“So you’re telling me these are the dumbest Pudknockers on earth, stealing something they could have bought for cash?”

“Two were. And skipped bail. The others were quick learners.”

Neither of them said anything, lost in their respective thoughts.

“As for Farah—” Wallets couldn’t say it without thinking of the ubiquitous Farrah Fawcett poster of his youth. God, the actress had to be sixty now.

“Our Farah’s very careful. Never says anything incriminating like she knows she’s on a party line. Not about herself. Not about her superiors. But she’s not your run-of-the-mill Iranian diplomatic soldier bee. Yossi says she’s Al Quds, a major, with lots of field experience under her belt. He tried to get some pictures of her in Lebanon overseeing Hezbollah resupply during the border war. And several years ago in Argentina, our Farah was attached to the Iranian Embassy there during the Jewish cemetery desecration of 2004.”

Desecration? Polite way of saying it.

“So there’s no glass ceiling in Iranian intelligence. Farah Nasir. Yasmine Farouk. Who knew the Iranians were so broad minded.”

“One more thing.”

Banquo sighed, slightly impatient, but amused at the same time. Indulging Wallets. “We don’t need
one more thing
, Robert. Yesterday our
old friend Jan Breuer is dropped by a silenced .222 or .223 cal laser-sighted sniper rifle, and within minutes Anton Anjou of Banque Luxembourg asks Johnson to transfer $35 million through his account. And the gang that couldn’t shoot straight is making fancy lead-lined backpacks and cruising the subways. How many dots do we need to connect?”

This time Wallets didn’t hesitate. “What do you want to do about it?”

“Time for O’Hanlon to earn his pay.”

Wallets nodded. And his boss softened, “What was the last thing you wanted to tell me, Robert?”

Wallets found a seat across from Banquo. This time he really did stretch the pause, stretched it right to breaking point.

“I think we have a mole.”

Banquo put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward, turning his clasped hands into a steeple, severity flowing from him like a heavy weight. “So you’ve noticed.”

O’Hanlon didn’t feel as comfortable with his feet up on his trash bin in the presence of Banquo—it felt disrespectful somehow. “Sorry. Justice just doesn’t rate the digs of Banquo & Duncan,” he said, smiling and sweeping his eyes over his metal government-issued desk that could have been pulled from a public school principal’s office twenty years ago, but actually came from felon labor in federal prison. Wallets found a seat.

“We’re accustomed to all manner of working environments, Patrick,” Banquo said. “Nothing to forgive about your office furniture.” The man hadn’t bothered to take off his black overcoat, still standing. He changed his tone of voice to indicate the end of pleasantries: “We’ve got to roll these guys up, before someone gets hurt.” A flat demand. From his silent place in the chair Wallets’ eyes made the same demand.

“Do you know something I don’t?” O’Hanlon asked.