Banquo's Ghosts (41 page)

And who was the back channel to Andover, the rat? Was O’Hanlon a shrewder bureaucratic player than he seemed? Bryce? Maybe the young fink had never left his former boss? Spying on Banquo and leaking across the Potomac? God help the little prep school boy if it turned out that way.

“Andover, you don’t know what you’re doing,” Banquo started, but he could feel himself pleading. Yes, this was begging:

“It’s not
about me.
It’s about what we know, and what’s happened. Consider the other day. All three major New York airports are disrupted by obnoxious, belligerent passengers, ignoring security protocols on religious pretexts. WINS News shows up before the authorities. And we go on a wild goose chase. That’s a
diversion.
”

Banquo paused. Then for emphasis: “In the midst of this chaos a border patrol checkpoint in Nogales is overrun. Yesterday, we tracked a livery car
from Nogales
to the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Two Iranian nuclear scientists come to America under the protection of the UN’s Iranian office. And in Brooklyn we’ve found unemployed yet self-sufficient young Middle Eastern men lining backpacks with flexible lead aprons and taking showers in a homemade decontamination tub—”

For the first time in many years, Banquo found his voice rising. “What is it about these dots you cannot
connect
?” Mastering himself once more, the spy master tried to get this man to see the light. “It’s not
about me,
Deputy Director. It’s about what’s going to happen, not if—but when. And when you’re wrong, are you going to take responsibility? When they’re calling you before some congressional committee, are you going to explain how you could have stopped it, but didn’t because one of your colleagues used a drunken scribbler? Are you going to take the hit, while I become the Cassandra no one listened to?”

Banquo saw he was getting nowhere. Andover thought he had all the answers today.

“Should I put it in intragovernmental language?” DEADKEY asked with a sneer, “We non-concur. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth doing violence to our way of government, to our reputation, to our relations with a potentially dangerous country—and
the rest of the world.
We’ll be shutting down the team as soon as I can bring this clown show to the
attention of the Director. O’Hanlon will be off the case. Wallets can take a vacation. The surveillance resources will be reassigned.”

Trevor Andover poured himself another cup of tea. He tried to fake some warmth, some camaraderie.

“Look, you’re not the only one with back channels. We have a few down here too—so many Iranians worth listening to—because they’re reaching out, because they’re scared and want to be heard. And try as you may, I’m not going to let you spoil a chance for dialogue before it happens.”

“
Dialogue
. . . ” Banquo whispered, aghast but totally controlled. He wanted to yell now. He’d heard that word before. Always before something terrible happened. A Yellow Truck Word.

“What time is it?” Andover asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What time is it?”

Banquo looked at his wristwatch. “8:05.”

“Good,” Andover said. He seemed pleased about the time. He struck a speed dial button on his phone, keeping it on speaker. Banquo closed his eyes and let his mind whirl around his possibilities, not bothering to listen. Helplessness consumed him. A feeling he’d experienced only twice in his career. Once in Lebanon and then once again in the dark days of the Central American problem. Even in the bad moments, even in El Salvador, when the congressional restrictions had closed in, he had always found a work-around. What was his work-around now? He heard Andover say that he, Banquo, was in his office and they should come up and get him.

Andover hung up and rose from his chair. He approached Banquo and tossed a business card in his lap. For Skadden, Arps. “Now get the hell out of my office and let me work.”

Word came down from Langley and DOJ later that day: O’Hanlon and his team were to shut down the Hung Fat van show. No more Hung Fat van, no more Jordan, no more twenty-four-hour stakeouts of all and
sundry characters. No more break-ins and subway rides or King of Prussia Mall visits in the dead of night. O’Hanlon would go back to his usual fare of drug dealers, gang-bangers, fences, and the occasional sloppy mobster (as if there were any other kind these days). As for Banquo, O’Hanlon understood that he wouldn’t be hearing from him for a while. If ever again.

The gang didn’t take it well. A pall descended on Smith, Wesson, and Bryce when their boss brought them the news. A sense of helpless frustration. Bryce took it the worst, perhaps because he once admired Deputy Executive Director Andover. His adolescent fantasies drifted toward heroic rebellion, but he lacked the will or a plan. After he’d actually done something for once—hunting and tracking their targets—his old boss had cut off everyone’s proverbials. And for what? Part bureaucratic grand panjandrum routing a rival, the other part intellectual vanity. Victory? Never heard of it. The whole business gave off the sickly reek of complacency and surrender: if you bottled it into a men’s cologne, you’d name it Nabob.

O’Hanlon sat in his office, feet on the wastebasket, holding the inter-agency memo directing his team to stand down, displaying it to Smith and Wesson like a bid paddle at an auction, “Think of it this way: common criminals are about to get more attention from us then they’d like.” His two agents stared back at him with Bambi and Thumper eyes. When they left, he placed the memo carefully at the top of his right-hand desk drawer, where he put things that annoyed him he’d rather forget.

Smith was distracted all the rest of that day. She sat with her chin on her hand staring at the computer screen, then shut it down when night came on. There was still one last thing she had to know. One last score to set straight. The Farah Nasir Lincoln. Tracked to a shady junk lot in a bad section of Queens. The team would have, assuming the judge relented on the warrant, gotten to it eventually. Not now.

Obviously there would be no return trip to Nogales, Texas, in its future, the limo soon to be stripped down and junked altogether. She
had a photo of its position in the lot and took a gypsy cab there alone sometime after midnight.

By the book? Of course not. She had learned growing up with all those brothers to take what she wanted, and if she stepped over the line, some girlish coquettishness usually deflected the consequences. She justified this excursion by thinking of it as a personal thing. She wasn’t going to use anything she found in the court of law, so no harm no foul. She was just . . . kitty-kat curious . . . nosy.

The junk yard lot stood in an industrialized area with little in the way of industry, out near JFK. Abandoned warehouses and dead-end streets with grass growing through cracks in the sidewalk. Smashed glass glimmering in the sickly yellow of the sodium street lights with the sound of jet planes overhead. So lonely it could have been Wichita, not the city that purportedly never sleeps.

Smith got out of the cab down the block from the lot and walked the rest of the way, her footsteps echoing around her, a sound the bustle of New York rarely allows you to hear. It unnerved her, and she couldn’t help looking behind her more than once. She should have asked Wesson along. Spooky. Like when you go down into the dank basement as a kid and suddenly feel a tingle on the back of your neck and run all the way up the steps into the kitchen, panting. Flushed and embarrassed at having been scared. She jumped at the sight of something moving, across the road, waddling actually. An opossum. A damn opossum in New York City.

She chuckled at the rodent and crossed the street and knew right where she wanted to enter the lot. She took a pair of metal bolt cutters from a gym bag and started in on the chain-link fence. No way she’d climb that thing, topped with barbed wire angled out toward the street. No, she’d get in down low, forcing her way through the hole barely big enough for a kid. And damning all through her teeth as she caught her jacket on a bit of wire.

But two minutes later she was making her way through the hulks of cars in various states of disrepair, squeezing between the fender of one, almost touching the side of another, as if it were some particularly chaotic New York traffic jam in a state of suspended animation.

She arrived at the Nogales Livery Lincoln, and she went around to the trunk. From the gym bag, she fished out her Banquo & Duncan-issue Geiger counter and got a low-static reading. A little bump. She began to feel urgency now. The gym bag gave up a hammer and pry bar. She slipped them out and with her sweaty hands began to jimmy the back lock. She was good at this, but she needed to keep her hands from shaking in order to pop the trunk.

She closed her eyes and breathed for calm, and felt for that little snickety hitch within the car and finally got it. With a deep click the trunk bounced all the way open, the trunk latch hanging by a sliver of broken metal. She stuck the counter inside and began to get readings that crackled like a car radio in the middle of a thunderstorm with nonstop lightening. Off the scale. Hot as hell, very hot.

Then she heard a bark. It sent a jolt through her. She put her counter back in the bag, slammed the trunk closed, but it bounced open again. Barks mixed with snarls raced toward her through the car graveyard until they were all one long stream of canine malice, and she could hear an animal’s body clambering over cars, claws against the metal adding to the mayhem. She had her back against the trunk and looked to see if she could see it coming—when it rushed right up to her. She got the trunk down and jumped on it, then up on the roof, losing an Annie Sez two-inch pump.

The junkyard dog crashed into the back of the car and jumped up, its teeth bared in an evil smile. She couldn’t even tell its breed, just angry, mean, and ready to rip. The dog tried to climb onto the back again and slid off, its body twisting, all insistent muscle. Smith didn’t know whether to try to make a run for it or stay put. The beast finally got up on the car and was lunging toward her again, paws slipping on the back window, when she pulled the .32 Beretta, the sissy girly gun, the one with no stopping power, and shot the mutt straight in the skull, the sound of the shot trailing off in the distance for a long time. It was the loudest shot she’d ever heard.

The dog had slipped down to the trunk, limp, its head smoking. Smith heard a voice shouting and then a siren.

O’Hanlon looked at the green numbers of his digital clock when the phone next to his bed rang. 1:43 AM. Smith’s voice. “Do you want to hear the bad news or the bad news?”

“What’s up?” he croaked.

“The trunk of the Lincoln is as radioactive as Love Canal.” O’Hanlon was impressed. “Shit. And the other bad news?”

“I’m under arrest.” Her voice faded from the phone. “What the hell precinct is this?”

I
t started innocuously enough on the northwest corner of Manhattan, so quietly almost nobody noticed. Initially the problem surfaced at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center: a dozen modern steel-and-glass buildings and a few older brick ones that competed with the towering silver spans of the George Washington Bridge for the New York skyline. A small city of nearly twenty thousand medical personnel devoted to the care of its inner-city community and the science of higher medicine, where, miraculously, neither was shortchanged.