Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

  Stallard, probably because he was weakened, took the bait. His pallor lifted slightly. 'Constant questioning coupled with sleep deprivation can be just as effective and mentally destructive as physical torture.'

  'Rather that than mutilation,' Leith said firmly. 'The fact is that these guys have treated me a lot better than you did. And there's a simple reason for that.'

  Stallard remained silent.

  Leith leaned forward trying to convey the truth by the force of his words. 'There…is…no…conspiracy!'

  Stallard laughed.

  Leith continued. 'The guys who took us aren't part of some massive cabal. They're from the Office of Security, just doing their job of internally policing the company. They must have become suspicious about a group of people who were acting the way you were. You and Forbes, and God knows who else you haven't told me about, have been stealing information from company databases. On your instructions, and with Forbes approval I've been accessing the names and work histories of all the point men. Then, to top it all we've been meeting clandestinely out of work to discuss the data.'

  Leith sat back and folded his arms. 'They think we are part of some conspiracy, spying on our own employers. That's why they arrested us. That's why they've placed us in a Federal penitentiary, because it's all official. That's why they took a softly-softly approach to Durrell's capture. That's also why they keep asking us who we work for, not what we know about them. Just like Halliday and co. when they abducted me.'

  Stallard shook his head. 'I should have realised you were part of this. Everything has collapsed since you joined us. I must congratulate you for the way you stood up to the...troubles... we put you through.'

  'I'm not lying, Stallard. Can you explain all this any other way? Why we're not dead already?'

  Then he realised Stallard was only playacting. His accusation had seemed almost part of some routine; it lacked the venom which real belief should have given it. Leith guessed he'd worked out a lot of this for himself. He was probably just trying to make sense of it.

  The older man brushed a hand through his curly white hair. He looked away for several seconds. 'If it wasn't the company then who was it? Who would have the power to do all those terrible things?'

  'Well,' Leith hesitated, '...I have a theory, but you're not going to like it...'

  It took another week. He told his story again and again to a series of CIA interrogators, sticking doggedly to his interpretation of events despite levels of ridicule ranging from the deadpan to the histrionic. Eventually they wore him down to the point where he had desperate thoughts of telling them what they wanted to hear. They seemed to sense it too and immediately decreased the frequency of his interrogations, allowing him precious periods of sleep. Their questioning also underwent a sea change, the focus shifting away from supposed treason towards his crazy ideas.

  On the thirteenth day Elphinstone brought Leith's civilian clothes to his cell. 'I'll be sorry to see you go. I'm a student of human misery and I figured I could've got a Masters out of you at least.'

  'They're letting me go?'

  'Oh, I doubt it,' Elphinstone chuckled. 'It probably just means you're being arrested officially. They'll be taking you to another prison elsewhere. We just want to make sure we get our clothes back.'

  But it wasn't a prison van that was waiting for him: it was a limo. The men who accompanied him weren't wearing uniforms. The drive took about fifty minutes and brought them to the Parkway and the obliging sign above it pointing to the right saying 'CIA'.

  The flaming red of the trees had dulled a little in the three weeks since Leith had finished living a normal life. His eyes hungrily devoured the scene, a familiar sight made strange by his time in jail.

  The guard at the gate waved the limo through. There were no signs of the explosion Stallard had described. The limo swung left towards the main building, pulling up at a service entrance at the back.

  One of the men opened the door for him. 'Please follow me, Dr. Leith.' Tiny though this politeness was, it spoke volumes. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity Leith began to feel at ease.

  The conference room they took him to was at basement level. Two of the walls were covered in plain heavy drapes, perhaps to try and convince people they were above ground. It was a wasted effort: the material of the drapes and the thick grey carpet muffled all sound, making the room seem closed in. A large conference table was positioned at the far end of the room with a video projection screen to one side. On the table was the inevitable notebook.

  Really powerful men exude an intangible sense of their authority: Leith, callow though he knew himself to be, recognised this. Inherited power may endow similar properties, but it is a shallow thing compared to power which has been earned. These five men had had to work to get where they were. Little would worry them. Little was not within the sphere of their control. The CIA was often said to be a young man's firm but that was true only up to a certain level, above which seniority was associated with age and experience. None of these men looked under fifty.

  They were all ranged along the far side of the table opposite the single vacant chair. Despite their air of confidence, the men were not relaxed. They sat stiffly, hands clasped in front of them on the table.

  The man at the centre was very slim, his hair greyed to the point of whiteness. He had blue eyes in which Leith read a trace of the arrogance that power almost inevitably brings. 'Please take a seat, Dr. Leith,' he said, gesturing to the seat next to the notebook with a thin hand. Leith noticed with surprise that the two outer fingers were missing.

  There followed several seconds of silence during which Leith felt himself being weighed up like a suspect Rembrandt. 'No introductions?' he asked at last.

  The thin man shook his head. 'Who we are doesn't concern you, at least for the moment.' The man paused as though choosing his words carefully.

  Leith didn't give him a chance.

  'You all believe me, don't you?' he said, and was gratified by the reaction. The men seemed to draw back very slightly and even glanced at their neighbours. All except the thin man in the centre who showed no reaction at all.

  'That's certainly an overstatement,' his tones were cold and precise, 'but, yes we are...interested in some of the things you've been telling your interrogators.' He pointed to the notebook. 'We brought you here to try and prove what you say is true. We have access to copies of all the data you used on your last day in Dr. Forbes department. If you want more data from the net then we can get it for you. Our suspicions aren't sufficiently allayed to give you direct access to the net, however.'

  'How's Forbes?'

  The man nodded. 'She'll recover. The bullet missed her spine.'

  'Durrell?'

  The man smiled grimly. 'Bombed, crushed, garrotted. I'm told it was nothing he couldn't handle.'

  'OK. Now tell me why I should cooperate with you. Have you any idea what I've been through?'

  'You were party to the unsanctioned removal of data from the Langley net. That was treason.' The man clearly felt no need for further justification.

  'I was under the orders of Comptroller Stallard.'

  The thin man shook his head. 'No good. You knew Stallard was working outside of his authority — in fact outside of the CIA— altogether. Don't waste our time.'

  Leith regarded him silently for a moment or two the checked the sheet of paper placed next to the notebook for log on instructions. 'OK. I'll play it straight — though it's a strategy that's done me no good at all so far. What put me onto this was the very specific and often strange way people were being killed.' He looked up at the men. 'Do you know the details of the Middleton case?'

  The thin man nodded.

  The notebook was set up with the same command set he was used to. He soon found the sequence he wanted.

  'The deaths of the three men were strangely fitting considering the crimes they'd committed. Real eye-for-an-eye stuff. People who I've talked to put it down as a slaying/suicide gay
thing, and I don't blame them. They'd just about convinced me I was wrong when Durrell's men kidnapped me. Stallard showed me stuff shot by a security camera at the Vegas massacre. It was to show me that the 'conspiracy' was involved in more than the Woodhaven thing. Instead it reminded me of some other unpalatable facts that had already got me in trouble.'

  He ran through the full Las Vegas sequence, then clicked back through the final few frames in the conference room until the mobster Bari had just backed against the wall.

  He pointed. 'This guy was capo to the Pittsburgh boss. The capo's called Bari, the boss Scipio. Bari was the sole survivor of the shoot-out in the outside corridor.' He ran the video frames of Bari's last few seconds.

  'The autopsy showed Bari was hit by one peripheral shot which took off the back of his head. It blew out most of his occipital lobes.' On the screen Bari moved and his hand came up to feel the wound.

  There were expressions of distaste from some of the men. Leith waited for a few seconds then continued.

  'Bari had spent fifteen years working his way up through the ranks of the Mob. He was Scipio's nephew so he had his patronage from the start. Pittsburgh police have linked Bari with a series of underworld hits, most recently of several Colombians.' He called up a digitised frame from a second file. Front and back pictures of a dead Hispanic male appeared on the screen. Most of the back of the man's head was missing.

  'The dead man was called Cesar Torres, one of Pittsburgh's Colombian fraternity. He was the most recent casualty of the narcotics war between the two gangs. He was the victim of a car-to-car hit.' His throat felt suddenly dry and he poured himself a glass of water from a carafe placed by the terminal.

  'Seems Torres had been waiting at some lights when a car pulled up beside him. Either the assassin was a bad shot or Torres started to pull away just before the gun was fired. The bullet didn't hit him dead centre, but caught him towards the back of his skull.

  'There was one witness who managed to pick out Bari's face from the mugshots. But she withdrew her statement when she found out who it was. There was no other evidence against him. The car he used was torched, leaving nothing for forensics. The gun was never found.'

  He looked back at the men. They were all looking at him closely. He began to feel nervous. Things which had seemed certainties in Drake were losing cohesion. It was such a crazy idea. He cleared his throat.

  'What I'm saying is, Bari was killed in a way closely resembling the way he killed Torres.' He hit another key and the scene flipped back to the conference room before the massacre.

  'Was this sort of thing true for the other Mobsters too? Trouble was these guys were very active, the killings they were suspected of involvement in soon mounted up.

  'But Mob killings are fairly standard, usually involving shots to the head or heart, and usually directly from the front or back. The only other variables are the type of gun and the range of the shot. Bari's death was easy to correlate because it was so non-standard. All I can say about the others is that as yet there is no inconsistency with the eye-for-an-eye hypothesis. Assuming of course that it transfers up to those who gave the orders,' he indicated the gang leaders, 'because some of these, particularly the ones who inherited their empires, probably never killed anyone directly in their lives.'

  He turned back to his audience. 'I won't waste your time with more details but basically the same modus operandi applies to a number of other incidents, as least those where the background is checkable.' He started to count off on his fingers. 'The murdered mercenaries employed by ranchers in the Amazon— most were ex-Contras; the piles of dead Real IRA and Loyalists found in Dungannon; the massacre of the drug army in the Shan states of Burma; the elimination of two Israeli counter terrorist squads; the destruction of at least four Central American death squads. I can show you the details, but perhaps you'd prefer a summary?'

  There were a couple of nods. Leith noticed the man on the far left gave the crispest, most severe one. Leith guessed he was military.

  'The CIA's files are probably the most comprehensive intelligence files in the world.' He saw the thin man raise his eyebrows.'Or maybe the KGB had bigger files back in the day, if our own figures are to be believed.

  'Anyway, I obviously couldn't trace the past histories of all the victims. All I can say is that in the thirty or so case histories which I was able to check properly, there were no inconsistencies with this kind of tailored-revenge hypothesis.'

  The thin man interrupted. 'Wait a minute. Getting back to the Mafia chieftains. They must have had men killed in all sorts of ways. It could be chance that their deaths matched so closely.'

  'Agreed, though the Mafia aren't usually that bloody nowadays. No, I didn't include the dead Mafia or Colombians in the figure of thirty I just gave you.'

  He looked for reactions but found none.

  'I'm sure you've already grasped the most important point but I'd better state it explicitly.' Leith paused and looked at each man in turn.' I found all this out retrospectively. Even in the case of Middleton I only looked because he was dead in suspicious circumstances. How did the person who was responsible for all this know that Middleton was involved in terrorism in the first place? It's the same story with the Irish, the Israelis and so on. Retrospectively they appear guilty as sin, but there was usually nothing to alert us to their true affiliations before they died.'

  He put his hands flat on the table. 'OK, that's all bad enough. It implies that the mysterious people behind all this, let's call them System X for want of a better name, have access to a lot more information than any single intelligence service. But there is a second and even more incredible factor demonstrated by the Las Vegas killings. It's something everyone has shied away from,' he sighed and glanced at the man on the right. 'The fact is that these actions are so effective that they just couldn't have been done, at least not by any means we're familiar with.'

  He called up the video from the casino. Like a sleazy circus act brought back for an encore, the mobsters did their dying again. While this was going on he continued speaking. 'Over a hundred and thirty Mobsters were holed up in the hotel, some remaining in their own rooms which were spread throughout the two wings. Yet they were all killed without a single one of them firing a shot in return. They had neither been drugged or gassed before they were killed. There were no chemicals in their bloodstreams inconsistent with the usual range of narcotics or pharmaceuticals men like that would be expected to consume. Within the ranges of error inherent in estimating times of death, all these men died more or less simultaneously.'

  He looked again at the military man. 'Durrell was pretty impressed by this operation and claimed that at least eighty men must have been involved. But he was bullshitting; he just couldn't bring himself to recognise the facts. No counter-terrorist or military commando team is that good. Delta Force, SAS, you name it. It just couldn't be done.

  'It might be tempting at this point to give way to superstition. Powers beyond our understanding: an almost Biblical form of punishment. At first sight there seems almost no other explanation. Divine retribution — what else could it be?'

  He stopped and studied the men. The thin man waited a few seconds then asked: 'Well?'

  Leith smiled. 'I've had a lot of time to think while you kept me in prison. I've been working things out. Let me run one thought by you. It's an idea which might explain why you,' he turned to the military man, 'are here.'

  He paused for effect. 'Something's gone wrong with a few, or even perhaps all, of our nuclear weapons, right?'

  The sleek, relaxed, powerful individual suddenly paled dramatically. Leith almost whooped with exultation as he felt that heavy, greasy thing called power come his way.

  He noticed that two of the company guys were looking at the military man expectantly. They clearly hadn't been told but the realisation was dawning and they couldn't hide their surprise.

  Leith leaned back in his seat and fastened his angry gaze on each man in turn. He smiled but with
out humour. 'I know and understand things that you're desperate to find out. What's happening is the most important thing the world will ever face in our lifetimes, but you haven't got any sort of handle on it at all.' He started to take off his jacket as he talked.

  'Throughout this whole miserable time I've acted in nothing but simple good faith.' Now the jacket was off he rolled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal the bandages. Despite the pain he began to tug the plaster off. It made a loud ripping sound.

  'For acting like a boy scout, for working for the sake of the CIA and, indirectly, the American people, I've been kidnapped, threatened, interrogated, shot at and mutilated.' The plaster came away to reveal the four stitched holes and the massive purple bruise covering his upper arm. Leith was gratified to see it looking so horrible. He glared back at the men. They stirred edgily in their seats.

  'I'm not very happy,' he said just before the eruption came and he was on his feet yelling at the top of his lungs, 'in fact I'm fucking furious!'

  The thin man's face pinched up and he looked sourly at Leith for a few seconds, then he nodded and gestured for Leith to sit down again.

  'You're right, Dr. Leith. You've been treated abominably. I'd like to apologise on behalf of the company. My name, by the way, is Niedermeyer. I'm Deputy Director, Intelligence. Before you judge us too harshly bear in mind that we thought we too were acting in the interests of the nation.'

  'No more prison?'

  Niedermeyer shook his head. 'We'll also make financial reparations for the pains you've suffered. Your career record will remain unblemished. Now will you help us?'

  'I want more, Niedermeyer. I've had enough of being the fall guy. If you really want to find out what's going on then you need me. But I'll have to run the show, not Nevis, Forbes, Stallard or whoever you put in their place. I'll be the boss.'