The Truth Itself

by James Rayburn

  She’d moaned and tugged at the belts, but when the boat was underway she’d been distracted by the noise and the spray, the life jacket forgotten.

  It had been Hook’s idea, back on the island, that they split up on the trip to the mainland. That Kate and JP take a boat together and once they’d gone he and Suzie follow. It would make them less conspicuous. Kate and JP would be just another couple of suntanned lovers and Hook and Suzie a grandfather and granddaughter on a jaunt.

  Kate hadn’t liked the idea, but she’d finally agreed.

  She’d walked the kid down the beach and spoken to her for a while and the girl had looked back at Hook and then said something to her mother and nodded and smiled and why this should have filled him with some sort of pride he couldn’t fathom. But it had.

  The ocean flattened out and Hook removed his arm from around Suzie’s shoulders, but the child stayed close to him.

  “Can I tell you something?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “I have a grandmother and a grandfather back in America. My daddy’s mommy and daddy.”

  “Okay.”

  “I called her grammy and I called him papa.”

  “That’s nice,” he said.

  “I haven’t seen them for a long time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I miss them.”

  “You would.”

  “Do you think they miss me?”

  “I know they do.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.”

  He put a hand on her knee. “What your mom did was a very brave thing. Do you know that?”

  She stared up at him. “When she fought the people who killed my daddy?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t easy. And it has made your life tough, I know. But she did it because she had to do it. Because it was the right thing to do. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “Okay then.”

  They sailed a while in silence, the rocking of the boat, the endless flat ocean and the treacly sunshine lulling Hook into a kind of stupor and he thought the kid had fallen asleep when she said, “Harry?”

  “Yes?”

  “My mommy told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “Told me who you are.”

  He couldn’t think of what to say, so he said nothing.

  “So, can I call you grandpa?” she asked.

  Hook, overcome by some emotion he battled to name couldn’t find his voice, the roar of the long-tail’s engine filling the yawning silence.

  Then he cleared the block in his throat and said, “Yes. I’d like that.”

  Suzie wrapped her little pipe cleaner arm around him, laid her head on his chest and fell asleep and for a moment he forgot about the dead man’s gun in his waistband, forgot about what he’d done the night before, even forgot about what awaited them on the shore and allowed himself to be happy.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  For the first time in over forty years Philip Danvers was actually spying, was out there in the field, covertly tailing a man.

  He’d spent so long behind a desk—the last decades of his career feverishly devoted to politicking, to keeping afloat the great lie that he and he alone, given endless resources and almost limitless power, could set the skewed world back on its axis—that he’d forgotten the primal charge that came with stalking another human being.

  Of course following David Burke was a cakewalk, even for a septuagenarian who was busy dying of prostate cancer that was metastasizing at the speed of a bullet train. Very different to Danvers’s last operation in the field, in still-bisected Berlin, when he’d tailed a KGB agent who’d been codenamed Nijinsky because he’d been so light on his feet, a man so skittish that he’d jumped at shadows and fled at the whiff of a tail, disappearing into a warren of alleys in Kreuzberg, or evaporating into Kaiser’s supermarket on Ku’damm, even the most expert of followers left looking silly.

  At last it had fallen to Danvers—the case officer, the desk man, the urbane figure propping up the bar at the Hotel Zoo with the Brits, matching them pink gin for pink gin and bettering them, frequently, in banter and sarcasm, winning their admiration if not their trust; or wallowing in smoky bierstube with Bundesnachrichtendienst agents, conversing with them in Berlinisch German with such easy fluency that many refused to believe he wasn't a son of the soil—to do the legwork.

  He’d shadowed Nijinsky unseen and had finally captured him on film meeting with the senior British diplomat who (or so it emerged) he had turned years before.

  Ah, how the pink gins had flowed at the Zoo’s cocktail bar . . .

  But that, as they say, was then and this was now.

  Now being 19th Street Northwest Washington D.C. Danvers sat in his parked Volvo and watched as David Burke, sumo-sized in his bulky jacket, left a taxi, sidestepped a brace of bicycles chained to low poles and found a path between the snow-filled flowerbeds that lined the sidewalk outside The Palm restaurant.

  The man moved with a new sense of purpose and confidence. He was riding high on the latest Fingergate revelations: it was now taken as gospel that Lucien Benway had swatted that plane from the Asian sky on the orders of the POTUS himself.

  Danvers’s little homage to Harry Hook had been more successful than he had dared to hope or imagine, and the outsized man disappearing into the eatery had sung the libretto to perfection.

  Knowing Burke’s whereabouts was not an act of clairvoyance—Danvers had called him an hour ago, from his burner phone.

  “What are your movements today?” he’d asked.

  “The editor of the Post is taking me to lunch at The Palm,” Burke had said, unable to hide his smugness. “Why do you ask?”

  “I may have something more for you.”

  “What?”

  “Just keep your phone on and we’ll talk.”

  Danvers had killed the call, stood up from behind his desk, gripping the wooden top so hard his knuckles had turned white as he’d waited for the pain in his netherlands to pass. He’d wiped his brow with a handkerchief, gathered his old leather satchel from the sofa and made his way down to his Volvo, driving sedately into the city.

  As he’d driven his mind had traveled back two decades, to that restaurant in Beirut when Harry Hook had regaled the young acolytes with tales of deception and birdsong.

  The Bryn Mawr blond, the one Hook had ignored so studiously that he could not have made his attraction plainer to Danvers, had won her place in his bed by leaning forward, her pert young breasts (fetchingly displayed in a tight knit top) brushing the white linen tablecloth, and saying, “Harry?” in a Marilynesque whisper.

  None of the other neophytes had dared address Hook—least of all by his given name—but here she was, leaning in and smiling and saying, again, “Harry?”

  Hook had paused his monologue, blinked, moved a stray lock of dark hair that dangled over his left eye, sipped at his arak and said, “Yes?”

  “Surely the time must come when the little dickey bird,” the pink tip of her tongue had peeped through her lips as she’d said this, and Danvers could almost feel the sexual smolder rising from Hook like heat from blacktop, “has sung all he needs to sing? When, if he sang any more, he may, well, ruin things?”

  Hook, his slightly bloodshot eyes for her and her alone, had smiled and said, “Oh you’re a clever little thing aren’t you?” He’d waited until two spots the size of poker chips had appeared on the coquette’s cheekbones before he’d continued. “Yes. Just as important as finding the nightingale and letting it sing is choosing the moment when it must come down from the rooftop and be still.”

  “But, Harry,” she said, “what if it has fallen in love with the sound of its own voice? What then?”

  Hook, smiling so broadly his eyes were almost lost in the laugh lines that radiated out from their corners (lines that women had found so irresistible) had shaken his head and said, “Now, now, that’s more than enough shoptalk.”

  And he�
��d stood and taken the blonde’s hand and led her out into the hot Beirut night, leaving behind him a vacuum that even Danvers, no slouch as an orator, had struggled to fill.

  The aged Danvers sat outside the D.C. restaurant and listened to the radio, hearing report after report that damned Lucien Benway as the tool of a murderous administration.

  He was so lost in this drama of his creation that he almost missed Burke, who shook the hand of a sleek, gray-haired man—a frequent, somewhat self-satisfied media presence—who stepped into a waiting taxi. Burke was about to hail his own cab when Danvers hit speed dial on his disposable phone and stopped the bearded man’s arm as he raised it and caused his hand to dip into the folds of his fleecy jacket.

  He watched Burke lift out his phone. “Yes?”

  “Turn up Jefferson Place.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do as I say.”

  Obedient as a St. Bernard the big man turned left and strolled past a brutalist office building that loomed over a series of row houses. Danvers, wearing his coat and hat, was behind him and hit redial again, the reporter lifting his phone to his ear.

  “Go into the alleyway,” Danvers said.

  “Why?”

  Danvers rang off and the big man stopped, looked around, and then walked down the alley that opened after the houses, deserted but for a box truck that blocked it midway: a Sysco vehicle making a delivery to the service entrance of one of the many restaurants. The cab of the truck was empty.

  When Burke reached the truck he turned and saw Danvers advancing toward him. “Hey, why’re we rendezvousing here?”

  By way of reply Danvers produced a .38 pistol with a suppressor from the folds of his Burberry and fired twice into Burke’s chest. Burke folded to his knees as if to pray and Danvers placed the suppressor against the big man’s skull and finished him off.

  He stepped over the corpse, squeezed past the truck and continued along the alleyway to N Street, turned left and walked slowly back toward his car.

  He was invisible. Nobody saw an old man.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Janey Burke had never been in a peep show booth, but she felt a powerfully voyeuristic sensation as she stood at the glass window and watched the morgue attendant hover over the sheet-covered corpse on the gurney.

  The uniformed woman at her side asked her if she was ready and when Janey said she was—in a voice that was admirably level—the cop nodded and the attendant lifted the sheet with a flourish worthy of a magician’s assistant.

  Seeing her husband’s dead face—even though she’d been preparing herself for this since the woman cop and her male partner had appeared at her door a half-hour before and told her that David had been shot dead in a Northwest alleyway—prompted a rush of emotion so intense that her knees buckled and she had to send out a hand to the wall to steady herself.

  The cop took her arm. “Are you okay, Mrs. Burke?”

  “Yes,” Janey said, filling her lungs with air thick with formalin and something more sinister that she didn’t care to name.

  But she wasn’t okay.

  Never, ever again would she be fucking okay.

  When the cops had broken the news in her hallway Janey had wanted to swing around and shout at David (the David, who in her imagination, was in the kitchen making coffee and eating leftovers straight out of the fridge in the way that made her crazy) and say, “You see, asshole? I fucking told you so!”

  But she’d just nodded and said, “Where is he?”

  “At the morgue. We need you to identify him. If you want to call somebody to be with you?”

  She’d shaken her head. “Take me to him.”

  Janey had pulled on a coat and a beanie and when the cops led her down to the prowl car, apologizing that she had to sit in the back, she must have looked like some juvenile offender to the couple of rubberneckers who stood watching.

  On the drive over, talking to the police officers through the mesh, the male cop—who had atypically (at least to Janey’s mind) surrendered the wheel to his colleague—told her that the driver of a Sysco truck had found David’s body. Nobody had seen who had shot him, although the cop assured her that because David had been such a media figure—his words—he was certain that more information would surface.

  The woman cop, looking at Janey in the rearview, had said, “We have to ask you this Mrs. Burke, but do you know who might have done this? Did your husband have any enemies?”

  When Janey had replied, “Why don’t you knock at the door of 1600 Penn and ask?” the cops had exchanged a look and then shut up for the rest of the ride to the morgue.

  Janey turned away from the viewing window and walked down the corridor, the cop in her chunky uniform, all aclatter with walkie-talkie, handcuffs, a nightstick, a gun and a can of mace, dogging her heels.

  At a desk near the door of the morgue Janey was asked to sign for a plastic bag containing David’s effects. The bag was discreetly opaque and she had no impulse to peer inside. Just as she’d had no desire to see the rest of David’s body beneath the sheet.

  She would remember him as big and furry and warm and horny. There was no room in her consciousness for the cold husk back in the freezer room.

  She signed for her dead husband’s things and left the morgue, the woman taking her arm when a bank of flashbulbs detonated in her face, the male cop clearing a path through the media who shouted questions at her.

  Janey was shamed by the memory of, back when she was still a reporter, doorstopping the family of a just-dead ten-year-old boy (the victim of gang violence in Washington Highlands) and lobbing questions at them, not even noticing their stunned, folded-in faces, so convinced was she of the importance of her journalistic calling.

  The cops got her in the back of the car and the woman whooped the siren to clear the media vultures and as the car nosed out into the street Janey listened to the light tap of rain on the roof, drops like tears trickling down the windshield, mocking her dry ducts.

  There would be no tears for David.

  Not until Lucien Benway had paid for this.

  SIXTY-SIX

  “Is this your handiwork?” Benway asked, standing by his desk with his arms folded, the Anglepoise lamp glaring off his bespoke silk shirt as he stared up at Morse.

  “No, sir, it is not.”

  “You did not follow David Burke down that alleyway and put a bullet in his skull?”

  “Negatory, sir.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Morse, dial down the argot.”

  “My apologies, sir.”

  Benway swung away from Morse, grabbing for the TV remote to silence the whorish CNN anchorette with the Tartar cheekbones who insisted on pronouncing his name “Lootcheen Banway” as she as good as tried and convicted him of the “assassination” of David Burke.

  In the act of twisting, a searing white-hot pain shot up Benway’s back and neck and into his right temple, where it seemed to explode and, for a few seconds, he saw flashes of light and bile rose in his throat.

  Gasping, feeling cold sweat on his grooved forehead, he sank into his chair and waited for the agony to pass.

  Morse said nothing, staring down at him as if he were a lab rat.

  When he could speak again, Benway, through clenched teeth, said, “Then the question is, who did?”

  “I can’t offer an opinion, sir.”

  “Because all they’ve done is martyr that addled-headed hack and left me directly in the line of fire.”

  “Sir, permission to speak?”

  “For god's sake, man, spit it out.”

  “We need to prove that Kate Swift is alive.”

  “Yes, Morse. We do. By Jesus, we do. Any ideas?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was being rhetorical, but let’s hear it.”

  “I reached out to a Mossad connection in Jerusalem and he shared with me something that I feel is significant, sir. A member of the Israeli disaster team rec
overing bodies from the wreckage of AirStar Flight 2605 was also in Thailand during the 2004 tsunami.” Morse paused. “Harry Hook was still operational at that time. They were both on the island of Phuket.” Pronouncing it Foo-ket.

  “That’s Poo-ket, Morse. Like doggy doodoo.”

  “Noted, sir.”

  The pain in Benway’s back was momentarily forgotten as he stared up at Morse. “That is significant.”

  “I’m pleased you share my excitement, sir,” the tall man said, deadpan.

  “Where is this Israeli now?”

  “Still in Thailand. The recovery of the remains of the gymnasts is expected to take a few more days.”

  “You enjoyed your visits to Thailand, Morse?”

  “Yes, sir. Except for the climate the people and the food.”

  Despite himself Benway laughed and immediately regretted it when a spur of bone plucked at his thoracic nerve like a lute and the pain flared.

  “Well, pack your Speedo and some weapons-grade sunblock and hop on over to the Land of Smiles and have a word with this Haredi.”

  Benway closed his eyes and waved a tiny hand at the pallid man who evaporated like a twist of smoke.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Kate, licking a smear of Massaman green curry off her finger as she plated the cornucopia of street food that Hook had brought with him when he’d delivered Suzie to JP’s house, realized that she was presiding over a bizarre family dinner: grandfather, daughter, granddaughter and the daughter’s love interest, all seated at the kitchen table of the Frenchman’s charmingly scruffy bungalow.

  This was the closest she’d come to a family gathering since Yusuf had died, and a sudden sadness washed away the lingering balm of sun and sea and sex that had allowed her to consciously forget what was still coming her way.

  JP, as if reading her mind, touched her hand and said, “You’re okay?”