Banquo's Ghosts (40 page)

“No. Of course not. I’m just reacting to what we already know. You have the Klimteh and Polak boys, rootless young Muslim men, engaged in suspicious activity with a known agent of the Iranian government. That’s all we need to know.”

“Well, not quite all, but they’ve definitely got funny names.”

Here, Banquo swept his overcoat under him and sat as well. “Patrick.” He started to speak, not talking down to the Justice lawyer, just speaking with a kind of Olympian calm that washed over the whole dingy room. “Patrick. Mr. O’Hanlon . . . Klimteh. Polak. Clearly not pronounced or spelled correctly. Instead, I offer you Gustav Klimt, late 19
^th
century painter. A favorite of mine, his
Athena
is a masterpiece. I offer you Jackson Pollock, 20
^th
century painter, some say the founder of modern art. Not really a favorite, since his pictures remind me of mental dementia, but still quite noteworthy. Our rootless lads go to art stores in search of lead-based paint and speak these unlikely names.”

From his quiet perch, Wallets’ eyes grew colder, awaiting some adequate reply from the lawyer.

O’Hanlon rubbed his temple with a thumb. “Fascinating. I grant you the words Klimt, however poorly pronounced, and Pollock are some kind of code. As in, ‘time to go to the art store and buy more paint,’ or ‘Shall we meet at the Atlantic Avenue subway station?’ And as you know, I believe all of this bears the closest scrutiny. But I need a crime to arrest them, and we don’t have spitting on a sidewalk right now. There’s no crime buying tubes of artist oils at Blick’s Art Supply. It’s not a crime to ride the subway. Even at 2 in the morning. Even if I had a crime, in my judgment we’d need to string them along to see what more we can learn, since nothing seems—whatever it is—to be imminent.” Wallets shifted in his seat, now clearly annoyed, but made no remark.

Banquo let the lawyer have his say. It was a say worth having. Then capped it off for him. “We think there’s a dirty bomb involved. We’re really not sure how. You’ve got them playing around with lead, presumably for protection. You’ve got firsthand knowledge of nuclear material coming over the Iranian border. And we have the Iranian connection in Farah Nasir. A supply officer for Hezbollah. A Quarter Master. What else do you need? Thirty thousand dead in a four-block radius?”

“Hey! Hey!” O’Hanlon raised his hands in protest. “I’m not from Hollywood. I’m Fordham law, y’know what I mean?”

“Fine, Fordham,” Wallets grumbled, speaking for the first time, then fixed the DOJ lawyer with his gray eyes: “You’ve got possession of stolen goods. The ripped-up dentist vests.”

O’Hanlon rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. And what? We’ll break them under the torture of doing community service, assuming we get a conviction? Do we have any evidence they
stole
these particular lead vests, or did they just buy them and then deface them?” O’Hanlon immediately regretted his sarcasm; no fool, he knew what they were driving at. But kept going anyway. Nothing changed the facts as stated:

“You guys have to stay in the
here-and-now.
My business is about reality—about what we know and what we don’t know. About never confusing the two. You’re chasing phantoms.”

Banquo took two of his fingers and smoothed one of his eyebrows: “Anticipation is priceless. When you have your crime, it’s too late. No one should
need
to tell you this. So find something. Parking tickets. Material witness. Conspiracy. Perhaps you’ll discover something more incriminating at the moment of arrest, if you catch my meaning.”

O’Hanlon recoiled at the implication. He never liked preachifying or speechifying at someone, but after his dad vanished and broke his mother’s heart, Mom had put him through school by working as a teacher by day, then clerked weekends at the local public library. Never once complaining, never once deviating from her gospel. No cheating, no corner cutting, no whining, no matter what temptations or obstacles life threw her way. O’Hanlon made her creed his own and intended to pass it on to his girls the way she passed it on to him, by living it every hour.

“Hold on now,” O’Hanlon said. “Don’t say another word, Mr. Banquo. I’ll pretend I never heard that. See: I’m an officer of the law. The
law
. I take this threat as seriously as anybody in this room; I see the dots—but nobody’s going to break the law as long as I’m sitting in this office.”

The spymaster’s eyes fell to his lap. Then quietly: “You’re saving
people
, not the law. And if you make a mistake by moving now, you’ve only made a mistake, and everyone walks on. The Workbench Boys can go on innocently living their squalid outer borough existence.”

“All right, let’s forget probable cause for the moment,” O’Hanlon countered. “I’ve got a question for you.” O’Hanlon kicked the trash pail a little in frustration, making a hollow sound. “If it’s a dirty bomb, where’s the radioactive material?”

But Banquo countered fast. “Did you get a search warrant on the Texas Pedro Livery Service sedan, the six golf bags you tracked from King of Prussia Mall and the Valley Forge Golf Course?”

Here O’Hanlon stared at the ceiling for a moment. Admitting ruefully, “Judge Hamilfish wouldn’t give it to me. A theory or a guess isn’t probable cause. And all we’ve got is a couple of drums you saw on the back of a jackass six thousand miles from here.”

Wallets flashed him a look of daggers, but O’Hanlon didn’t care now. His mind boiled; to snoop or not to snoop, that was the question; everything eventually reached its limit. And the DOJ lawyer wasn’t gonna budge.

“
Do . . . it . . . anyway,
” Banquo said, measured, slow, a command.

O’Hanlon propped his feet up on the wastebasket and folded his hands over his belly. He brought his hands up to his chin, pursed his lips, and put them back down again. “No,” he answered at last.

“Do you read science fiction?” Banquo asked, from out of nowhere.

“I read those books you bought.”

“Ah . . . ” Banquo nodded to himself. “As you know, they’re about alien threats, threats that transcended the bounds and categories of what anyone thought was possible. Threats that couldn’t be defeated with conventional tools.”

“Yeah,” the Department of Justice lawyer said. “My problem is
here and now,
” O’Hanlon repeated, pointing to the floor. “I’ve got to stay in the here and now.”

What was left to say?

So Banquo and Wallets left O’Hanlon’s office without saying good-bye. From their cubicles, Bryce, Smith, and Wesson all watched them go without rising to greet them. O’Hanlon poked his head out the door and barked across the bull pen, “Hey!” He shouted to Smith, Wesson, and Bryce, “Anybody
work
here?”

Deputy Executive Director Andover usually arrived in his office by around 7:30 AM, before his secretary, who didn’t get there for another hour. Miss Lithesome, as he nicknamed her, sat, at a desk outside his office, surrounded by a faux wooden semicircular wall from which she gazed out at the world. You had two choices of female style at Langley: matrons of honor—the librarian, schoolmarm types who could surmount any bureaucratic obstacle—or cute Mary Kay types who could find the ladies’ room, but only in an emergency. DEADKEY picked the latter, considering her a tasteful office accessory like the Jonathan Adler ceramic pieces on his desk. Coming out of the elevator, Andover was startled to see someone new sitting by her desk, waiting. Banquo.

Andover headed straight toward his door and unlocked it with his keycard, Banquo following. “You couldn’t even let me know you were coming?”

“I didn’t want to call too late—or too early,” Banquo replied.

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Stewart. What do you want?” Andover commenced his usual morning routine as if Banquo weren’t there. Plugging in the hot water for his tea. Turning on his computer. Spreading the front page of the
Washington Post
on his desk in front of him. Spinning the dials on his classified drawers to open them for business.

Banquo sat uninvited in the chair directly across from Andover’s fortress desk, leaving on his black overcoat, and came straight to the point:

“I need someone to big-foot O’Hanlon. He needs to make some arrests. Middle Eastern men, mostly. Maybe a dozen or more. And I need them detained and at my disposal, maybe indefinitely. Today, just for starters.”

Andover expelled his breath derisively, “Pffhh. You needn’t have come all this way; you should have emailed. What else do you need?” he asked, a tiny crease of a smile across his thin blue lips.

DEADKEY’s attitude didn’t surprise Banquo, but he expected to break him down quickly. “There’s something afoot. What it is I don’t know, but I suspect,” he paused, cleared his throat, “we have every reason to believe—”

“It’s a dirty bomb,” the Deputy Director filled in, completing the thought.

Banquo hesitated for a dark moment.

“In case you’re wondering,” Andover said, “I figure you’re always going to think it’s a dirty bomb. You’re like the global warming people. If it’s hot outside, it’s global warming; if it snows outside, it’s global warming. For men like you, Stewart, it’s dirty bombs. The sole reason for your existence.”

Banquo girded himself for another bitch-fest, then calmly tried to reestablish the previous terms of their agreement. “We had an understanding, Andover.”

“Yes,” the Deputy Director agreed amicably. “But sometimes conditions change.” He carefully poured his hot water in a mug and swished his tea bag back and forth in the water, “we had an understanding—
had
—past tense.” He contemplated his tea for a moment and directed his gaze across the wide desk.

Then patiently, as if explaining to a child: “Stewart, we’ve known each other many years, but I’m not going to sit here and let you start a war with Iran. You tried to kill one of their scientists; now you’re hatching some scheme to kidnap one of their diplomats. And finally you want to throw some kids into jail so you can send that ugly ‘Turk’ of yours, that Persian thug or Iranian Jew or whatever he is—to pull out their fingernails. Well, I’m not going to let you do that.”

Banquo searched Andover’s face, which seemed complacent as he lifted his tea bag from his mug, held one hand with a paper napkin under it to keep it from dripping, then dropped it carefully in his wastebasket. “There,” he said to himself under his breath and met Banquo’s eyes.

“Yossi got out of the hospital only last week,” Banquo started. “I can’t imagine—”

“Ah-ah-ah,” Andover said, wagging his finger, like he was shooing away a cat from scratching a sofa. “Well, I can. I can well imagine. So I don’t want to hear any of your sophistry or fevered justifications. Stewart, you’ve always had a tendency to cast your net too widely. But the fishing expedition ends today. You’ve gone too far and you must be stopped. And so you will.”

Banquo felt his feet slipping out from under him even as he sat before Andover’s desk. In the back corner of his mind a curious thought tugged
his sleeve. How in heaven’s name did Andover know about his plot to briefly snatch—if all else failed—a diplomat?
Farah Nasir
. And perhaps pump her for information? Banquo always kept things vague—“Middle Eastern men, mostly”—and never used the word “diplomat.” So how the hell did DEADKEY know? In this case, knowledge was power. One thing to justify such an act retrospectively, but another to make the case for it beforehand.

“Look, Trevor,” Banquo started. This felt like begging.

“No, I’m not going to ‘look.’ Taking diplomats hostage is something the Iranians have proven themselves better at than us, don’t you think? We’re not going that route. Nor are you going to kidnap any of the Muslims you’ve been tailing . . . ”

“In a lawfully sanctioned process—”

“Yes, lawfully. But if you didn’t get your way, you were going to go around O’Hanlon and the law and snatch them yourself. Deny it. Of course, you can’t. The last time we talked, the term ‘rogue agent’ came up. That would have been one of
yours.
The drunken scribbler.”

“Yes, and another matter came up as well, your interest in a young ... ” Banquo knew he was losing this argument.

The wagging finger came again:

“Stewart, Stewart—you’re in no position to pressure me. Can you prove your allegations? And if you can, can you do so in a way that doesn’t implicate Banquo & Duncan in the use of extralegal procedures to spy on one of your superiors?” He went
pffhh
again, for emphasis. “I don’t think so.” Then the thin lips smiled ever so slightly again. “I hope you’re not in a rush to get back to New York, Stewart. Our internal affairs people have a few routine questions, and the FBI will be sitting in with those useful 302b report forms they use, so you’ll be liable to charges if you lie. Don’t make us call the
Washington Post
so Ruth Lipsky can write stories like ‘Troubled Agent at Nexus of Iran Flap.’ ”

Banquo suddenly felt hot in his overcoat. Could he really be outmaneuvered by this slippery eel? A bureaucrat’s bureaucrat? Even with the threat of sexual blackmail he still couldn’t bring DEADKEY to heel. The bar mitzvah boy was probably off spring skiing in the Andes. Right time of year for it. Bloody hell.