Banquo took a breath. “That’s what happens if we’re lucky. If we’re not so lucky things could be much, much worse. President Ahmadinejad ushers in The End of Days. His promise to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ is kept. Several technologically enhanced dirty bombs are detonated in the cities of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, their population centers poisoned. No one claims responsibility, but Arab populations across the Middle East erupt in spontaneous celebration. The United Nations in New York issues a strongly worded statement condemning the violence and asks Israel to refrain from ‘disproportionate’ retaliation.”
Banquo paused again. “Contrary to expectations due to internal miscommunications and a strong peace contingent in the Knesset—the IDF does not immediately retaliate against any Arab or Persian country. Casualties, dead and wounded, in the Jewish cities reach a hundred thousand. First five thousand initial deaths, then lingering radiation sickness from a contaminated water supply. As the country staggers toward collapse, rogue elements of the Israeli Air Force execute their own action, code named Down from Sinai—simultaneously bombing Qom, Tehran, Riyadh, Mecca, Cairo, and Damascus with thermonuclear weapons. Arab and Persian casualties are estimated at 60 to 70 million—”
Banquo’s refined and assured voice floated across the room. The little man at the desk did not look up. Peter Johnson found his hands sweating despite himself, and he rubbed them on his trousers.
“At this moment, various Jihadi sleeper cells in the United States are activated. Even as a resolution in the United Nations is unanimously passed by all countries—and quietly supported by a Democratic administration—which demands that the surviving Jews in the United States pay ‘reparations’ to the afflicted countries. To no one’s surprise and to little avail, many of America’s richest Jews willingly offer to comply. One of the few who doesn’t is George Soros—who emigrates to New Zealand, and just in the nick of time.”
Banquo wasn’t even looking at Johnson but examining his trimmed and clean fingernails. “You see, the five steamer-trunk sized ‘suitcase’ nukes placed here by the KGB during the Cold War, and which we’ve been looking high and low for, lo these many years, are suddenly discovered in various storage facilities and locked water closets in the subterranean basements of various urban skyscrapers. But not by us. By guys named Vronksy and Karenin and Karamazov, who want to kick us while we’re down. Four of them don’t go off, given that they are Soviet engineering at its most reliable—but one does. Along with a few of those dirty bombs that proved so useful in Israel. Well, they’re useful here too. Miami, Chicago, New York, Seattle, almost every major city gets one. Casualties of more than one million U.S. citizens. And no one claims responsibility. All property and casualty insurance of any nature whatsoever defaults. The United Nations relocates to parts of Westchester County in order to issue another strongly worded statement. Five million people attempt to flee the tri-state New York City area. Later generations will call it, ‘The Great March to Nowhere.’ ”
Banquo stared at nothing in particular for a moment or two, then snapped back and looked at Johnson with a little smile.
“How did Cyril Connolly put it, Peter, although prematurely?”
“‘Closing time in the gardens of the West.’”
“Precisely. Call me an alarmist; argue with some of it. Fill in your own details if you like. They don’t matter; the trajectory on which we are headed matters. Nothing else.”
“There are ways to stop this,” Banquo continued, after a breath. “The United States can for the second time—the Iraq war of course being the first—launch a pre-emptive war based on shaky intelligence. Intelligence that is not going to be accepted by the collective tyrants, crooks, bed wetters, and pantywaists of the so-called ‘international community.’ But take it from me—we will never do it. Even if we did, we wouldn’t be able to destroy Iran’s physical assets, short of using bunker-busters or mini-nukes. What American president wants to have a couple little Nagasakis to his name? Eh, Peter? You’re the political writer.”
Banquo kept driving nails into the coffin of current delusions:
“So we continue to squeeze the Iranians with economic sanctions and hope something comes from it. The triumph of hope over experience, right, Peter? You’ve been married how many times? We will never be able to levy enough sanctions to convince the Iranians to abandon dreams of the strategic doomsday weapon they nearly have within their grasp. Never. The Russians and Chinese have opened the toy soldier store seven days a week, selling on credit. Did you notice any dirty bombs going off in Moscow or Beijing in my scenario?
“They know which side looks like a winner. And it’s not us. Oil at a couple hundred dollars a barrel means Mr. Putin or his nearest henchman can dream of endless Soviet Summers. Can shut down the press at will by friendly persuasion, hostile takeover, or murder most foul in London Sushi bars, leaving them free to slaughter whomever they like in any former Soviet so-called republics. As for the Celestials, Beijing has been cushioning itself against this kind of oil shock for years: employing side deals with grubby Third World greaseballs the world over. Pardon my French. When the shock hits, China will likely move in to directly administer these areas, finally securing its share of colonial spoils a mere century late, with names like The Caribbean Kowloon Oil Company or Hong Kong Energy—and again, who is going to stop them from walking into Taiwan or even Indochina? Beg your pardon, I mean Vietnam. A nuclear-free Japan? We’ll all be the Castratos of the Straits of Hormuz.”
Banquo looked right at him. The always glib Johnson had nothing to say, feeling slightly stupid standing in the middle of the room on that fine Persian rug in front of everyone. He didn’t even shrug or meet the sophisticated man’s eyes. He looked down.
“There is one way out,” Banquo continued at length, “that could avert all these terrible consequences.” He paused, weighing his words. “But such a way out would take a very unusual fellow. A loose cannon. Someone flagrantly on record opposing the U.S. government. Someone so unreliable that no one in their right mind could possibly think we’d entrust him with even the simplest of errands. An amateur, a simpleton, a naïf, a cad with a history of heavy drinking and erratic behavior. A corrupt letch so utterly unaccountable he’d go off half-cocked at the first opportunity like the jack-in-the-box everyone knows he is.”
Banquo stopped again. Wallets, hunched over in his chair with his elbows on his knees, looked up from the carpet, arched his eyebrows at Johnson.
Banquo picked up his thread again. “Human capital matters more than anything else in this world. There are such things as indispensable men, Peter. The Dr. Yahdzi whose simulacrum you see here is one. All those centrifuges, all the nuclear infrastructure, the countless millions spent—none of it matters without the man who knows the physics and the engineering: the one man capable of bringing a 7th century Islamic tyranny into the nuclear 21st century, without the slightest moderating influence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Age of Reason. That single man is on the verge of delivering to crazed monkeys high on Apocalyptic crack a supply of radioactive handguns, matches, and gasoline—then sending them into a kindergarten with unsupervised children and hoping for the best. That’s why I introduced you two just now. You see, you could be an indispensable man too.”
Now Banquo leaned toward Johnson, almost in a posture of pleading: “You can stop all of this, Peter, perhaps delay it enough that other events will intervene. Cooler heads. The tectonic plates of world politics will eventually pause, adjust, relax. Then we can avoid the earthquakes, the next tsunami, the next volcanic eruption. We just need a little time.”
For all this elaborate Greatest Game gumbo, most of which made Johnson want to sneer, he knew enough not to laugh this time. Laid starkly in front of him was a real bit of derring-do: the place where all the jokes came to die in the face of a single mission. His mission. Not some document drop, shady banking, or some cheesy bribe. But something much darker. Something irrevocable.
F
or the first time since his arrival into the little romper room, the man playing Dr. Yahdzi stopped his deskwork and looked up. Measuring Johnson with a stare.
Wallets nodded an unspoken command in the armed guard’s direction. The Turk un-holstered his .40 caliber Beretta, yanked the slide chambering a round, and left the cocked firearm on the desk in front of “Dr. Yahdzi.” The little man glanced at the weapon, then went back to his papers. The Turk returned to his place by the door.
Johnson sucked a breath in disbelief, contemplating the gun. This monster was ugly: big and black, heart-attack serious with death written on it from butt to muzzle. Big enough to give any Metrosexual the vapors. Nothing like the little Dick Tracy popgun back at Dobbs Diesel.
Everyone seemed to be waiting for him to do something. At last Wallets’ sober voice filled the room. “Peter, you have a chance to save the world. The little rat lives; millions die. The little rat dies; peace really does get a chance. Well?”
Johnson didn’t move, didn’t blink an eyelash, didn’t even trust himself to shrug his shoulders. He knew what they wanted. And for an instant he swore he’d swoon. Hit his chin on the desk, go out cold. But the feeling passed, and he stood there on the Persian rug with the terrible question staring him in the face. What to do?
Wallets took a deep, quiet breath. “Show us.”
“I’m not comfortable pointing—”
“Show us.”
He gave Wallets a long doubtful look. Then tried to reach for the Beretta but his hand trembled from wrist to fingers with palsy. Like a hundred-year-old man. He stared at the shaking thing. How embarrassing.
“It’s only adrenalin, Peter,” Wallets said. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”
He felt stripped bare. He had walked into this room expecting a visit to Banquo & Duncan like any other. Some pointed conversation, maybe a few awkward questions, but he had long ago stopped letting that bother him and even felt warmly now toward Wallets after their roughing it together in North Carolina.
In other words, he had felt comfortable, in control. Which meant never being in a situation where anything fundamental was at stake.
And now they wanted him to pick up that instrument of death and enact a murder, an act that might not change history as they said, but would certainly change his life—perhaps end it. Confronting him was a choice more momentous than he’d ever faced. He looked at the black gun, and it loomed so large he imagined it being too heavy to lift, that he could yank at it with both hands and it wouldn’t budge. He looked at his trembling hand again and took two steps toward the desk. But suddenly the weakness in his hands spread to his knees, sapping the strength from the rest of his body. Slowly, he turned his back on the little man and slid gingerly to the floor.
He propped himself up against the desk with his back to Yahdzi and put his elbows on his knees and his hands on his head. “I think we need to talk,” he said to the dead silence of the room.
And they talked. Banquo pulled up a chair for his journalist, while he, Banquo, and Wallets all scooted together in a semicircle and talked it through. Johnson noticed something different in their tone. They weren’t talking to him like a recalcitrant outsider or someone who needed to be coaxed or cajoled into anything. But as equals, as an insider. Johnson liked the feeling, if not what he was hearing.
The “scientist” stayed at his desk, working at figures and reading physics books as the hours passed. He deserved some sort of prize for staying in character, Johnson thought. Yossi stood at the door, then leaned against it, and finally pulled up a stool at his post. They talked over the method (uncertain), the legality (none), and the ethics (dubious but defensible)—then went over it again and again and again.
The facts really weren’t in dispute. Iran declared war on the United States at the time of the Khomeini Revolution, thirty years ago. Spreading a reign of terror from Tehran to Buenos Aires. That made Dr. Yahdzi a kind of soldier, a combatant.
“No one who is serious about these matters—a category, alas, that excludes nearly all your journalistic colleagues—could regret a nuclear-neutered Iran. Only the pathologically deluded believe in nuclear moral equivalence. The rest of us live in dread, dread at a horizon of burned cities and millions dead. Bombing in retaliation for any Iranian recklessness would be indiscriminate, killing countless innocents whose only offense is living in the wrong Iranian city. But one shot. One precisely targeted shot could delay the reckoning for years.”
Johnson couldn’t argue. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. And as far as he could see there was only one upside to the deal. In a strange way this was for the children, as the cliché went. His child especially. One single act to give them a world where Giselle would never have to ask again, “Why did they do this? Tell me, why?”
Banquo explained how his legal and personal exposure would be total. Should Johnson complete the act successfully, he would be a hired assassin in the eyes of Iranian law—and everyone else. Red Queen Justice: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.”
And here Banquo opened the door a little wider.
“We have someone on the inside,” he explained. “You’ll have to allow the situation to mature, ripen. There will be a signal for you to act, but we can’t tell you what it is because, frankly, we don’t know yet. But when you’re on the ground, it will become manifest to you. An obvious opportunity. I wish I could tell you more. I wish I knew more. But our man inside—a great Iranian patriot in my mind—is putting it all on the line. Everything. In the most difficult of circumstances.”
Johnson sensed a kind of challenge in Banquo’s eye: Could the same be said of him?
Everyone went quiet, and Johnson was about to pipe up with, “Okay, even if I grant all this . . . ” when Dr. Pahlevi Yahdzi’s voice startled them all:
“It’s a terrible burden for anyone, a terrible burden.” He shook his head, and bent his eyes again toward his papers.
Something about that simple declaration struck Johnson as a powerful act of empathy. Dr. Yahdzi had stated just what Johnson himself felt but didn’t want to admit—how scared, worried, and confused he was. How burdened. And the phrase “even unto death” came to Johnson’s mind and floated around in his head, signifying he knew not what. But his eyes misted, and he couldn’t meet anyone’s gaze.
“He’s right,” Banquo said, filling the silence. “From the moment you start to move against Yahdzi, your life is forfeit. We would understand if you prefer to decline.” Would they even attempt to rescue him?
“What happens if I say no?” Johnson asked.
Banquo gestured to Yossi the Turk, whose chin was nearly on his chest but who roused himself to stand up and unlock and open the door: “There’s the door.”
Johnson ignored the gesture, found it almost insulting, and changed the topic. “So assuming I seize the opportunity, and assuming I’m not eager to have a close encounter with the Iranian cattle prods, how do I get out?”
“Ah,” said Banquo. Then simply left it at that. Wallets looked down at the carpet, with an elbow on a knee, his chin in his hand, and audibly expelled some air through his nostrils. “There will be a way out. We’ll never be very far from you,” Banquo said at last. “But the first thing you can do is to help yourself. From the minute you start, every move you make counts. Do what makes sense. But don’t wait for the cavalry, Peter.”
Johnson suddenly wondered how much they’d care if he got dead, so long as he took the pride of Persian Physics with him. The answer was obvious and not particularly reassuring.
“And when I get caught?”
Again, that awkward silence.
“What am I supposed to say? What am I supposed to tell them?” Johnson asked again.
“It doesn’t matter really,” Banquo replied, without acknowledging his discomfort. “For any number of reasons. They’ll most likely put you through the ringer, perhaps use sodium pentothal or something like it. But that never works like in the movies, and you’ll probably just babble on about Camus or
your last girl. Moreover, as far as our connection with you is concerned, first, you’re a provable liar, Peter. Provable. And second, no matter what you say, we’ve never heard of you.” Johnson’s mind flitted over the tape recorder he had slipped in and out of some of their sessions, and he smiled to himself. Home Insurance, he called it. For just this eventuality.
“So the U.S. government . . . ?” he asked, letting the question hang, unstated.
“A little history,” Banquo replied. “When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, invaded a whole country, the Politburo decision memo was entitled ‘Concerning the Matter of A.’ And you’re not even the invasion of a country, Peter. You’re just a journalist.”
“Uh-huh,” Johnson said.
Wallets tapped Johnson’s forearm. “But if you say no, none of this happened. We have been operating on the basis of trust. If you breathe a word, I’m sure the IRS will discover a keen interest in those questionable cash payments from abroad on which you paid no taxes.”
Johnson didn’t have anything to say to that, but Wallets wasn’t finished. “So, please, whatever you do, don’t try to be clever with us.” He pointed to Dr. Yahdzi.
The faux scientist fished around inside his suit jacket pockets, found something, and placed it on top of his paperwork. Johnson’s cute Sanyo miniature tape recorder and the half dozen mini tapes he’d made. He’d hid a couple of the tapes in the offices of The Crusader, Jo von Hildebrand’s desk, for Chrissakes, and the rest in an envelope addressed to his literary agent in his own Citibank safe deposit box.
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