Banquo's Ghosts

by Richard Lowry

  Over time, Johnson could swim thirty laps, had become somewhat richer, and had published a lot of inflammatory copy against the Catastrophe of Iraq. The Second Gulf War was very good to him and The Crusader, whose circulation spiked so high that even Jo von H’s business-savvy late hubby might have considered it a worthy investment. Johnson reported exclusively on the men and women of the Iraq prison scandal, “Dumb and Infamous: Guards of Abu Ghraib.” And was asked to leave his embedded position with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit after dubiously reporting the Tikrit Massacre of ten men, women, and children in the Salah ad Din Province by Marines of that unit. The controversy only gave him more publicity and enhanced his standing on the yowling Left.

  Yet another session around the dismal conference table.

  “All right, Peter, let’s start again.” Wallets’ flat, self-assured tone wouldn’t let him go. A steady drip-drip-drip. “A little ancient history of the personal kind. Can we go over it one more time?” Johnson rolled his eyes in exasperation.

  Sitting quietly a few feet away, Banquo glanced up from the Johnson file, nearly three inches thick and growing. A withering stare that never failed to chill him. The message: behave yourself. In this session Wallets was playing the role of the erudite, infinitely polite grand inquisitor, going over ground they had covered again and again.

  Wallets went on:

  “During the 1990s, extensive reporting on the ravages of sanctions in Iraq, and a Foreign Affairs piece, ‘The Dual Folly of Dual Containment: The Case for Engaging Iraq and Iran.’ After Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox in 1998, your private account in the Cantonal Bank of Switzerland received a payment in the amount of $75,000, in Swiss francs. What did you do with this money?”

  “This again?” He squirmed in his seat. “I told you I pissed it away.”

  “No, don’t lie. That’s not what you did with the money. Stop confusing reality with the kind of tall tales you tell yourself after you’ve had three too many.”

  Johnson shifted in his seat and said, “All right. It went to Giselle’s college bills. And as I’ve said before, it seemed to be the going rate for someone of my particular qualifications. I wrote and was widely read. Let’s call it a ‘thank you’ paid in advance.”

  “No one had to ensure your loyalty?” Wallets asked.

  “I would have done it for free. Like Mirabeau said, ‘I am paid, but not bought.’ ”

  “Who contacted you first? And where?”

  “Late 1998. At a cocktail party at a private residence in Westchester County, New York. A Maharaja’s estate. Then we all were ferried down in limos to a United Nations dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria for an African children’s fund, called Hands for Peace. They build schools, give vaccinations, adopt and foster children out of war zones. A perfectly legitimate charity. The man’s name was Breuer, a Dutch national with Dutch Shell, attached to that guy Brown’s office at the United Nations. But with a very vague-sounding job description. I remember his business card: Jan Breuer, United Nations Office of Oil Producing Countries—North American Relations.”

  “Mark Malloch Brown, the number two man in Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s/Kofi Annan’s New York office?”

  “That’s right. But Breuer isn’t with their office any more. Back to Dutch Shell. The first contact was merely to glad-hand me. It turned out we were both in Belgium three weeks later. I was covering The Hague and Breuer was on his way to Saudi Arabia, via the UAE and thence to Indonesia. He asked me if I’d care to relax in Dubai, on his nickel.”

  “So you went?”

  “And partied like it was 1999.” Johnson looked to see if either was amused. No.

  Wallets kept on: “Between 1999 and 2002, while several millions of Breuer’s money went into the Cantonal Bank of Zurich from which you took a measly cut, you wrote articles denigrating the United States containment effort against Saddam.”

  “Correct.”

  “If you were to guess at Jan Breuer’s secondary motive for contacting you, what would it be?”

  “You want me to guess?”

  “That’s what I asked. Would a man of your ‘particular qualifications’ have anything to offer besides the kind of press they want?”

  Johnson looked across the wide conference table. He couldn’t be sure what Wallets was driving at.

  “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say giving me a $75,000 bribe I didn’t really need was his way of drawing me closer to Mama’s teat. You see, they get all the glowing press they want; they don’t need me just for that. My buddy at Newsweek writes this crap all the time, and no one pays him . . . ”

  Johnson noticed Banquo and Wallets’ eyes locking, and Johnson began to wonder about the provenance of his Newsweek buddy’s new Jaguar. “But I am an honest John Q Citizen, and that’s valuable in and of itself. Because getting money from point A to point B is slightly more difficult than most people realize. Say you have a group of men in a London suburb who want to accomplish certain tasks. This requires money. But how do you get it to them? I think Jan Breuer had the notion this drunken scribbler Peter Johnson might eventually do some banking for him and some of his closest friends. But that raises the stakes considerably. A bribe can hurt my reputation and get me a letter from the IRS. So what. But transferring funds from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia on its way to Amsterdam or Wycombe, that could get you jail. Or dead.”

  The cool, sober eyes of Wallets seemed hooded for a moment, and he nodded silently, seemingly pleased with the answer. Silence fell around the table. And suddenly Johnson sensed all their talk had finally come to an end. Confirmed a moment later when Banquo closed the cover on his file with a soft slap, and Wallets calmly asked:

  “What are your plans for the next two weeks? Whatever they are, you’ll have to change them. We’ve been together six years creating your legend, going over your pedigree. It’s time you learned some fieldwork.”

  “I’m fifty, for crying out loud—”

  Wallets held up a stern hand. Then sarcastically, “We never mention a lady’s age.” He glanced at his watch. “I’d say that’s enough for today. Thank you, Peter. You can show yourself out.”

  As the skyscraper shadows darkened the streets of Manhattan, Banquo poured Wallets a large slug from the decanter of Armagnac he kept on a lower bookshelf right between Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler and The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski.

  The magisterial voice had come down a few notches. It was the truth that mattered now.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  Wallets looked into his Armagnac and took the first taste.

  “I think I’m going to love torturing this guy to death in North Carolina for two weeks.”

  Banquo harrumphed. “That goes without saying. Have you decided who you’re going to bring along?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Marjorie wrote me today. Says she’s getting fat. And doesn’t like it.”

  “She wrote you?”

  “Of course, she always writes me.” Banquo inhaled the fragrance. “For all its flaws, the United States Postal Service is the single best way to keep a secret. If you’ve learned nothing all these years with me, learn that!” The man contemplated his drink for a moment, then took a draught. “And if you’ve learned nothing about women, learn this. Their weight—good, bad, or indifferent—is always a secret.” He took another deep satisfying drink.

  “Now stop twiddling and answer me,” he said. “What do you think? Is Johnson really with us? Can he do it?”

  Wallets took his glass to the clean office window and looked out onto Fifth Avenue. So many people swooshing by who had no idea these sorts of conversations took place—let alone so close to the imperial windows of Saks Fifth Avenue. He frowned and shrugged. Murder was always a nasty business. Assassination, executive action, termination—call it what you like. But call it unpredictable.

  “It’s always the same, Banquo. Unless you want to hire a sniper or shoot a commercial airliner out of the sky . . . you never know.” />
  All that time to prepare the patsy. Now the only truth: you never know.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Patrician

  A few hundred miles south of New York City in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the highway lights were coming on along Old Dominion Road—the broad artery that passed before the entrance to Langley Air Force Base and many other military and intelligence operations on the southern corner of the Chesapeake Bay. In a seventh-floor office nearly identical to the one in Rockefeller Center the double wooden doors were marked:

  DEDCI: Deputy Executive Director Central Intelligence

  The office of Trevor Andover. Nicknamed by friends and foes alike “DEADKEY,” as if this were a real codename. It wasn’t. His codename was a random series of letters and numbers.

  Director Andover was a pale, trim man with something of a bloodless undertaker about him. The aptly named DEADKEY stared out a window at the passing suburban traffic. Behind him an ever-present plasma flat screen flickered with images. He turned from the passing evening traffic to catch the latest offering on his Eye Spy global scope. The satellite’s name: Long Eye; longitude and latitude: 33˚ 54’ N 35˚ 28’ E; time: 15:45Z; place: LEBANON Beirut. A city square as seen from space. Caption: “Hezbollah ‘Celebration’ South Beirut: 15:45Z.”

  The scene showed a hundred thousand people in a Beirut city square, a sea of yellow flags. The crowd chanted: “Allah Akbarh, God is Great.” But what they were celebrating was anybody’s guess—no elaboration on Long Eye, no explanation.

  Climbing onto a stage draped over with a giant yellow cloth, Sheik Nasrallah, the Hezbollah warlord, appeared in his usual black turban, followed by his retinue and security men. Three of his retinue’s turbans flashed yellow “here we are!” as they headed onto the stage, then disappeared against the bright yellow cloth. Yellow on yellow didn’t show up, a glitch—the color of the marker should automatically change. He’d have to talk to Bryce about that. Another damn glitch. But what troubled Deputy Director Andover was the great man himself. Nasrallah’s turban was not yellow. The carefully marked turbans were getting spread around to the wrong heads. And Nasrallah’s headgear wasn’t blinking.

  Andover went back to the window, disgusted. He’d have to talk to Bryce about that too. See if they could plant a blinking turban on the great man’s head. What was the bloody point if the turban didn’t blink? Ahhh—the young lad himself knocked and entered without waiting.

  “You wished to see me, sir?”

  “Yes, Bryce, take a chair.” His assistant sat. Bryce was of slender build. He wore wire-rimmed glasses under short curly hair that he tried to keep under control with a prodigious amount of mousse making the top of his head shiny and seemingly impregnable. Andover looked back out his window.

  “You know, Bryce, I brought you over, and up, I might add, from the State Department’s backwater Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the office of nobodies, because I know your father. The Attorney General of the United States. And your father, the Attorney General of the United States, told me you were a smart kid and a fast learner. Smart and fast. Smart and fast. I’d like you to be one of those things. Either will do.”

  Bryce sat back in his chair prepared to listen, staring calmly at Deputy Director Andover’s back. The patrician always started out this way. First came the tongue-lashing, then came the lecture in which DEADKEY showed how impressively learned he was, then came the requests for action. Nothing new here.

  The deputy director took a deep breath, “I’ve directed the Action Center to unplug our assets in Turdistan at the request of State. The striped-pants know-it-alls think they’re going to referee the spoiled brats at Turtle Bay to force the turbans to lift their nuclear skirts for us. Okay, so we’ll play nice for a month or two.”

  Bryce blinked at all the name-calling, but Trevor Andover always had an adder’s tongue.

  Translation: The State Department has requested any pathetic vestiges of our human intelligence personnel in Iran to lay low or withdraw to Kurdistan, while they took their bloody good time dancing a minuet at the United Nations with the president of Iran, he of the nuclear skirts, in hopes of forcing him to do something stupid, either show us his hand, castrate himself into a political eunuch, or bluff himself into a war. Any of the above would do. But it would probably turn out to be Russian roulette, with neither set of diplomats knowing which way the gun really pointed.

  Andover turned and picked up a paper on his desk. “Now I’ve got a red flag from DOS that they’ve processed three—get that? three—Green Books, plus visas, and confirmed plane tickets for Tehran International, and sent the blank Green Books to Banquo & Duncan in New York. Photos TBS.”

  Translation: The Directorate of Support notified the Deputy Executive Director that they processed three Green Books, i.e., Passports—color green for the Middle East—in this case Iranian Passports, with photos TBS—To Be Supplied later by Banquo & Duncan. Therefore Banquo’s gang in New York was planning on sending three of their people into Iran, on some sort of look-see, cloak-and-dagger op. Despite the Deputy Executive Director’s direct orders, orders from DEADKEY stating to all departments and agencies: Stand Down.

  Andover sat behind the desk, flipping the red flag notification into the wastebasket.

  “I want you to go to New York. Tonight.”

  “All right. But why didn’t we simply email the old fart and request his presence for dressing down?”

  “On what pretext, pray tell?”

  “Cut off his funds. He’ll come down.”

  Andover’s mild blue eyes grew exasperated. He rose from his place, went to a bookshelf, and took out a bound folder the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, then tossed it into Bryce’s lap. His aide jumped as it hit his thighs.

  “Young man, sitting on your prep-school pecker is the $30 billion Central Intelligence Agency Budget for the year 2006, several years out of date. In it you may indeed find the $5 million our Agency spends on our old friend Banquo. Actually it’s only $2.5 million, as we share it with some clowns with the White House’s NSA guys, or the National Intelligence Director’s office. I can’t remember which, and they don’t even know.”

  What came next was a rebuke:

  “Banquo’s shop actually runs on about $35 million a year. He has four expert Exchange Traders working the street 24/7/365 who last year alone beat the S&P by seven points. You think our crummy $2 million is going to get him down to this office? Have a Pimm’s Cup on me. That ‘old fart’ as you call him is actually ‘old school.’ He pays his way. A government operation that turns a profit every year, even in down markets—imagine that. Just because the director doesn’t take him seriously doesn’t mean he doesn’t rightly take himself seriously.”

  Without a touch of embarrassment Bryce reversed himself completely. “What should I do in New York?”

  “Thank you for asking. I want you to dig up the son of Banquo’s old associate—Fanon, O’Bannon—”

  “O’Hanlon. Deputy U.S. Attorney, Southern District. His dad was Banquo’s partner?”

  “I’d stick to ‘associate.’ And you march right into that cheap Mick’s office and get us wiretaps. Brain whatever judge you have to. Home and office.”

  “You want it official then?”

  “Clearly. I want a record.”

  “So you want Banquo & Duncan’s phone and personal computers tapped? Do you also want surveillance to include the physical office space too?”

  “No, no point. That boy scout of his sweeps the suite twice a week. But I do want roving taps on street-side conversations.”

  “If he’s old school like you say, he’s very careful.”

  “True enough,” Andover admitted. “But everyone slips up once in a while.”

  Without saying farewell, Bryce rose and left DEADKEY’s office. The plasma screen had frozen in pixilated fragments, how nice . . . electronic modern art. Put it in a museum. Director Andover realized he’d forgotten to tell Bryce about the turbans and th
e software color glitch. The screen cleared, but only to a pleasant blue field this time with the caption: sorry, temporarily out of service . . .

  The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York kept his offices at 86 Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. But Bryce didn’t go there; instead he went to O’Hanlon’s house in the Westchester suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson just as the commuters were leaving for the city. What used to be called a “bedroom” community was really Manhattan North, with houses starting at $600,000 up from $200,000 not ten years ago, three- and four-bedroom Tudors with a half an acre’s lawn and swell backyards, on roads named Maple Street, Oak Lane, and Shady Dell. Places the lower-middle class clawed their way to from ugly Bronx streets, way back in the dark ages of the 1950s and 1960s, and thought themselves damn lucky. Now the sons and daughters of those early Westchester pioneers clung on with their fingernails, Mom taking that extra job just to pay the property taxes.

  Bryce watched from the sedan’s window, as O’Hanlon’s family got ready for the day. First the two girls came out the front door, hovered over by the Missus and packed into the school bus with their Pokemon knapsacks. Then O’Hanlon himself, carrying a briefcase and large stainless steel coffee mug. The Missus would drive him to the Hudson branch of Metro-North in the white Ford minivan. Bryce got out of the sedan, leaving the door open.