Diplomatic Immunity (34 page)

36

“D
ON
’
T ASK,
”
SAYS PATRICK O
’
CONNER,
“
BECAUSE I CAN
tell you already the answer is no.”

I have found him up in UN Central, the Operations Room. He flicks off the PC, some e-mail he has been reading, and moves along the table.

“Your daughter, right?” Bending, he reads a fax as it comes off the machine. A report from our observer team in West Papua. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear yesterday, Sam. So listen up. Last time. It’s out of my hands.”

“The Headquarters Committee wants to hand her over.”

“They’re going to hand her over,” he corrects me, his voice surprisingly subdued. “And there’s nothing I can do about that.” He shoots a glance up at me. “Nothing you can do either.”

Dwight Arnold, the Operations chief, comes over then, and I step back while he and Patrick study the long fax from West Papua as it continues to run off the machine. They fall into a discussion of the implications. The Indonesians and the New Guineans are apparently accusing each other of incursions across their mutual border. Overnight, Indonesian soldiers have been murdered in a West Papuan town. A crisis brewing.

As I listen to Patrick muse on a possible escalation of the conflict, it occurs to me that with the vote behind us, real UN life, the daily lurch from one international crisis to another, has resumed. Toshio’s death, Rachel’s fate, these are questions that Patrick would now like to see pushed off the Legal Affairs agenda. My presence here is a stark reminder to him that that is not going to happen. Patrick tears off the fax, telling Dwight that he will take it straight up to the SG.

When I follow Patrick into the hall, his expression becomes pained. “Look, you want some time off, get some lawyers lined up for your daughter? Take it. Whatever you need.”

“I don’t want her to leave the UN grounds.”

He lifts a hand, calling for the elevator to wait. We get in with half a dozen others; I have to hold my tongue till we emerge on thirty-five.

“The Tunku went down and saw Rachel this morning,” I tell him.

Patrick peruses the fax as we walk. I try again. “He left her in tears.”

“Man’s a dickhead.” Patrick turns in to his office. He drapes the fax over his desk, then searches his in box. He starts talking about West Papua, the problems our observers are having; and when he crosses to the mini fridge, reaches in for an OJ, he has his back turned to me. I reach into my shirt pocket and depress the button on the recorder Mike has given me. Not a wire, but the best Mike could manage at such short notice. The recorder vibrates lightly against my chest.

“You got Rachel into this, Patrick. I’m not asking for remorse. But don’t you think you’ve some kind of obligation to use whatever clout you’ve got, wherever you’ve got it, to help me get her out?”

He downs the OJ in one gulp, then contemplates the empty plastic bottle a moment. “Remorse,” he says, tossing the bottle in the trash as he returns to his desk. “Waste of fucking time.” He bends over the fax, but after a few seconds I still haven’t spoken and he lifts his head. “Listen. If I detained Rachel for no good reason, why’s the Headquarters Committee handing her over to the cops? Why’s there a bunch of statements here”—he stabs a finger onto a file on his desk—“that put Rachel right in the frame? Are you blaming me for that too? Okay, so she’s your daughter, it can’t be easy. But, hey, get your head outta your ass. Open your eyes.”

“You honestly thought she was guilty. You really believe you just did your job.”

“I did my job,” he says. He squares the blotter in front of him, reaches for a sheet of paper, and takes a pen from the mahogany holder. He commences to write. “Now, how about you bugger off and do yours.”

Even from the opposite side of the desk I can see the name that Patrick had scrawled at the top of the page: Gary Sumner. The Australian ambassador to the UN. Patrick, it seems, has decided to implement his exit strategy, to pull the cord on his parachute. After the debacle of yesterday’s vote, Patrick O’Conner knows that his glory days here at Turtle Bay are behind him. So he is doing what you would expect a man like Patrick to do—he is using his current position to help ease his passage into his next job. The West Papua situation is an ongoing foreign policy nightmare for the Australians, their gratitude for firsthand information from the field would be immense. This might have been going on for months. Probably has been, I think as I watch Patrick’s pen glide.

“So you won’t help me?”

Patrick mutters something inaudible. I slide the FBI report from beneath my arm and place it down by the blotter. Then I open the report so that the title page is visible. Patrick’s glance wanders across; after a moment he reaches and casually flips through the report with his left hand.

“What’s this?”

Nemesis, I think. The undoing of Patrick O’Conner.

But what I say is “Don’t screw me around.”

He continues to flip through the report, his look becoming thoughtful. Finally he lifts his eyes. “The Dale woman,” he decides aloud.

“Where I got it isn’t the issue here. You had this three weeks ago. Three fucking weeks.”

“What can I tell you? You think you should have seen it earlier?” He closes the report. “You’re probably right.” And then, unbelievably, he returns to his memo on West Papua. He consults some legal pamphlet. He writes.

“Patrick, you’ve been covering up for Lemtov. Protecting his ass, for chrissake, are you going to deny that?”

He makes a face. “You want to go upstairs, speak to the SG, ask him how I’ve been protecting Lemtov’s ass?” Patrick points his pen to the ceiling. “Go on. Be my guest.”

“You’re full of it.”

He rises from behind his desk and crosses to the bookshelves. His hand trails over the leather spines. “Go and ask him. Ask him why the guy you think’s been protecting Lemtov’s ass has trooped up to the thirty-eighth floor with daily updates on Toshio’s investigation of that FBI report.” Removing a heavy volume, he brings it back to the desk. “Ask him that.”

Toshio’s investigation of the FBI report? I say the only thing I can think of. Bullshit.

“What do you think Toshio was doing in Basel?” he asks me. A question I intended to ask him. Patrick lays a finger on the FBI report. “He was looking into this as I told him to. And maybe if you’d done as I told you to, you wouldn’t have made such a bloody pig’s ear of this. Maybe your daughter wouldn’t be in the shit she’s in. You wanna blame someone, try looking a little closer to home.” Patrick picks up his pen and returns to his memo, referring to the thick volume now as he writes.

I feel unsteady on my feet. Patrick’s explanation. His attitude. At last, way too late, I seem to be getting something that resembles the truth.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

Patrick sticks his tongue into his cheek. Then he recaps his pen and kicks back in his chair. He swivels left and right. “Hatanaka was investigating the Special Committee. A month ago he’s telling me he’s cracked it, that he had the guy. Asahaki.” Patrick swears. He still cannot quite believe it. “Asahaki. Christ, how likely was that?”

“You thought Toshio was lying to you?”

“Let’s say I wasn’t too sure about his motives. This was a month before the vote on the Japanese seat. It seemed a little too convenient, you know. The self-appointed opponent in chief of the Japanese seat. Him up there, pointing the finger at the Japanese ambassador, crying fraud. If that got out, he knew bloody well what that’d do to Japan’s chances.”

I turn that one over. “And you did too.”

“Sure, I knew it too. I told Toshio to hold off, show me more evidence, anything, wait till the vote was over. After that he could have Asahaki arrested in the street for all I cared.” He glances down at the report. “We were still butting heads over it when that thing arrived.”

Quite a moment, if he is telling me the truth. An independent source, the FBI, suddenly fingering Lemtov as a big-time crook.

“Once he read the report,” says Patrick, “even Toshio had to admit that maybe the Special Committee fraud wasn’t all down to Asahaki. Toshio knew he had to do some more work on it. At least take another look at Lemtov.”

“You showed the Bureau report to Toshio immediately?”

My surprise surprises Patrick. “Of course I showed it to him immediately. I wanted him off Asahaki’s back.”

He gives me a curious look. And my belief in a Lemtov-O’Conner association begins to waver. Would a money-laundering associate of Lemtov’s, even a man with Patrick’s brazen front, be reacting like this? I remark that Pascal never mentioned the Bureau report to me.

“Nyeri wasn’t told. Just me, Hatanaka, and upstairs.” The SG.

“Dieter?” I ask.

Patrick shakes his head. But it seems incredible that Dieter Rasmussen, the head of Internal Oversight, wasn’t informed, and I say so. Patrick rises, walks around his desk, and seats himself on the sofa arm.

“Listen,” he says, “we weren’t going to announce it to the world just like that. This is the U.S. accusing the deputy Russian ambassador. I mean, think about it. How did we know this was a genuine FBI report and not something dreamed up by the U.S. State Department to stir up trouble for the Russians? Using us here in the Secretariat to do their dirty work.” He points. “Which, incidentally, is why you weren’t told.”

I draw back. This is one angle that I missed totally: the possibility that this report is just a pack of lies. It simply had not occurred to me that my countrymen would do that. And though I do not believe they have, I can see now the impossible position in which Patrick found himself. My connection with Jennifer automatically excluded me from the loop. Patrick really did no more than his job in having Toshio check the report out alone.

The recorder in my pocket whirs quietly. What it has recorded is no good to me at all.

“So why Basel?” I say. “Why did Toshio need to go there?”

“We needed to confirm some transactions from the FBI report, authenticate the thing.” Patrick shrugs. “We decided the U.S. Federal Reserve wasn’t necessarily going to be a reliable source, they might have been gotten to by State. I know some people at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel.” His glance drifts away. “Toshio saw them. Confirmed a few major transactions from the FBI report. After that we knew the report was kosher. Lemtov was definitely laundering money.”

“For whom?” I say. “From what?”

“You want my guess, it’s tied in with all the IMF loans that disappeared into the Kremlin. Toshio guessed drugs. But, hey, take your pick, the way that country’s run, it could be any bloody thing. That wasn’t our problem. Our problem was Lemtov, how he was abusing his diplomatic accreditation.”

It all sounds so plausible. Except for one thing. “Did you ever mention to Toshio that you and Lemtov had been in Basel together three years ago?” Patrick’s eyes return to mine slowly. “That conference on money laundering,” I say.

Patrick studies me awhile, thoughtful. Then he points at me. “You think I’m tied up with Lemtov.”

I don’t answer. I look at him and wait. At last he puts his hands over his face. “Christ almighty,” he says. “You’ve got a damn genius, you know that? A genius for getting things wrong.” His hands drop, he goes back to his desk. “Is that what you’re doing here? You figure I’m in something with Lemtov, I can get him to take the pressure off the Headquarters Committee, get his friends to retract those statements, set Rachel free?”

“You attended that conference with him in Basel.”

“I didn’t attend it with him. He attended it. I was there to give a seminar.” Patrick signs his memo to the Australian ambassador, then folds it. When he lifts his eyes, he sees by my look that I am not satisfied. “That’s what happened. What do you want, an affidavit?”

I ask him if he would like me to take what I now know to Dieter Rasmussen.

Patrick touches his forehead and swears. Because he knows that if I take what I have to Dieter, Dieter will have Internal Oversight tear him apart. Not telling them about the FBI report, screwing around with my investigation of Toshio’s murder, failing to adequately explain his connection with Lemtov. After yesterday the SG will not be stepping in to protect him, and the Australians will not want to take Patrick on in any capacity whatever if he comes to them trailing a cloud of UN scandal.

Patrick chews it over. And finally decides that he cannot afford to let me tear a hole in his parachute. “All right, I gave a seminar at the damn conference. It was just for a handpicked few. Senior officials from countries we were all worried about. Central America. The ex-Soviet countries. Places where drugs and crime had bought their way into politics. Money laundering was the big worry. Money laundering under the protection of the state, what that could do to the financial system. My job was to give these guys an idea of the legal loopholes, what they should be watching out for. Things they could stamp out themselves or report directly to the BIS.”

“And Lemtov was there.”

Patrick nods. “The focus of the seminar was a hypothetical case I put together. We spent the whole day on it.” When he looks up, his cheeks have flushed a light shade of pink. “The hypothetical case was of a high-ranking diplomat. One who laundered money under cover of diplomatic immunity.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“There’s no reason for you to mouth that around,” he says, pointing with the memo.

I look down at the FBI report, then back up. “You taught him how to do it. You showed Lemtov how it was done, and he went out and did it.”

“Lemtov wasn’t a bloody diplomat back then, and I wasn’t vetting these guys anyway.” And as soon as Patrick saw the FBI report, he tells me, he acted on it. “Frankly, what you’ve got into your head about me covering up for Lemtov, it’s a bunch of crap.” He slips the memo about West Papua into his breast pocket. “So now that you know, how about you get off my back.” He moves past me toward the door.

But my astonishment at the bizarre nature of Patrick’s complicity in Lemtov’s crime is fast turning into something else. Taking the FBI report from his desk, I pivot.