Banquo's Ghosts

by Richard Lowry

  “Why, in heaven’s name?”

  Banquo thrummed the armrest again, but went on, his assured voice seeming to enclose DEADKEY’s head in a vice. “Because you’ve been sloppy and foolish. Your predilection for certain ‘art,’ and your ongoing nonsecure and . . . ah-hem,” he paused for a moment, “prurient instant messaging with a nice young lad in Chevy Chase, one of your school chum’s sons, just fresh from his bar mitzvah. Lovely gift by the way. So I come to present you some options. Take them, or not. If not, you know the number of Skadden, Arps as well as anyone.”

  Trevor Andover’s face went red, then deadly white as it sank in how thoroughly his colleague had bided his time and laid each chit in his secret strongbox, only to produce the bill when he needed it most.

  “Robert Wallets helped you with this, didn’t he? That goose-stepping brown shirt. And that fat, sloppy dyke you always use.”

  “Of course. Both very reliable. I believe in long-term relationships. Also two of my traders. They get bored. So I set them to tasks. Opposition research, mostly.” Banquo dropped the thrumming and took a cigar from a leather case from inside his jacket. He removed it from the wrapper and inhaled the fragrance.

  “There’s no smoking in the building.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Banquo held the cigar between his two first fingers; content to feel it there, then clipped the end, letting the nub drop to the carpet. “First of all, I may require your assistant, Bryce, for a while. It never hurts to have the son of an attorney general on your staff, if only for insurance purposes. I commend you on your choice of aide-de-camp. Also, control of the O’Hanlon investigation, which we have to change from a fishing expedition to a whale hunt.”

  The CIA-SPAN plasma screen showed a scene that Banquo paused to watch: a balding Muslim intellectual talking to an interviewer in Arabic. He wore a suit and one of those shiny ties so popular right now with talk show talking heads. The Teletype read: “Interview with Sheik Safwat Higazi, Egyptian preacher, Al-Nas TV, “I Have a Dream” speech, clarifying religious matters and fatwas where Muslims are free to kill Jews . . . .” Underneath the scholar’s smiling talking head the translation: “When I said what I said, I was dreaming a beautiful dream . . . that we were one country called the Arab Islamic States . . . This is the dream I dreamt . . . that the Israeli Jew, not just any Jew . . . in order to kill an Israeli, one must make sure that he is a Jew . . . that he is between twenty-one and fifty-four, the age of the reserves, and if she is a woman, she must be between twenty-one and thirty-four, which is the age of the reserves [for women], and even then [the killer] must be sure that she has no children . . . ”

  Banquo turned away from the screen in disgust. “Well, I’m glad he cleared that up. But the point is, I think, that I do believe him, and without reservation. Don’t you?” Here, he glanced at Deputy Executive Director Andover. “I see not. Well, that’s why we’re having this discussion. This man we just saw happens to be an Egyptian, but his views are commonly held not only by tens of millions of his countrymen, but also by hundreds of millions across the Islamic world. From country to country, capital to capital, mosque to mosque from Mauritania to Mongolia.”

  DEADKEY cleared his throat. “Is there a point?”

  Unperturbed, Banquo went on as before, “In a way I admire him. He wants the Jew dead, and he’s honest enough to say it. Which leaves people like us in a rather awkward position. Should we stand aside? Or stop him? And if we’re going to stop him, perhaps things have to change—so that it’s no longer simply reformers, moderates, and pro-Western politicians in the Middle East who wind up shot in the head or blown to pieces in their cars along with their wives and children. Ponder the question at your leisure.

  “Anyway, I will need from you real-time updated Long Eye satellite information over Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East on demand. We are going to turn our Peter Johnson problem into a Peter Johnson solution. Congratulations, Trevor, you’ve been promoted. You are now part of the big Us. That being: us versus them. As such you will string the Director along and maintain the story that this is a rogue operation—your favorite phrase—by a rogue journalist. You will feed that line to your friend Walter Pincus of the Post, among others. Meantime, I think the Iranians will want to know what they’ve really got in Johnson, and even if he starts implicating us immediately, it will take them a while to believe him. We have some time to play with.”

  “So we are going to lie to everyone we know,” Andover said. “Cover up an assassination scheme. And then what? Send in the Marines to rescue your clown? Or better yet, suicide him? And remind me, what do we—sorry, Us—get out of all this?”

  Banquo looked gravely at the pale slice of white bread across the desk. “We’re going to get him out, and if we don’t get him out, we’re going to minimize the damage of not getting him out,” and here Banquo dropped his voice, “one way or the other.”

  “Just so I’m perfectly clear. What’s stopping them from squeezing your newest employee like a lemon?”

  “Nothing. Let them. What’s he got to say? Not much. The twenty-four-hour hold-out rule doesn’t even apply to him.”

  Andover looked away and shook his head, muttering to himself in horror at the entire business, “The risk.”

  “There’s a word!” Banquo responded, as if Andover had been addressing him. “I have another for you: ‘Prevail.’ You know that one, right? Look it up on the thesaurus feature on your computer if you don’t. We’re going to try to disrupt the Iranian program again and again, until it’s clear that other means are necessary. We’re playing to win, Trevor. Add the word ‘victory’ to your vocabulary.”

  DEADKEY snorted in contempt. “OK, let’s see where your man is.” He turned to the laptop on his desk and hit a few keys. The image on the CIA-SPAN plasma screen shuddered for a second, then crystallized to clarity. A satellite shot of the earth from a hundred miles up. In one corner of the screen the word “Asset” appeared, then a blinking cursor, awaiting an answer.

  “You have a code name for your drunken scribbler?” Andover asked. “Save me the trouble of looking it up.”

  “Bartleby. Case sensitive.” Banquo paused. “And now you know.”

  DEDCI Andover smirked. “I’d prefer not to.” He struck a few more keys, then typed in “B a r t l e b y,” which appeared dutifully from the cursor on the large flat screen. He hit Enter, and the Long Eye satellite image found its target, zooming downwards toward earth in huge jumps: Forty miles. Twenty miles. One mile. One thousand feet. Thirty feet. Longitude and Latitude. It wasn’t Tehran but another city. Maha%#!*—something—the letter field space couldn’t quite get a grasp on the proper name. Then finally straightened itself out. Mahabad. Local time. Name of the street, number of the building. But buildings in this part of town didn’t have numbers, so that space was left blinking N/A. First you saw a visual of the structure’s roof, the common layer-cake type, flat squares. As the view came closer, the words—signature mode—came up on the screen as the satellite system switched from visual to the software filtering program that detected what lay below. The image of the structure dissolved into mist as Long Eye found what it was looking for. A radiation signature.

  Finally, fifteen feet. What you saw was a living suit of clothes, pants and jacket, filled out in human form. Just like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. The cursor space now read: Bartleby, Peter Johnson.

  When offered the low-grade uranium-dioxide dye by Langley, lately used on turbans, Banquo had decided to give it a try. Nothing to lose. So his team impregnated every shirt and jacket, pants, skivvies, and socks they could find in Johnson’s wardrobe. At least a hundred articles in all—spiriting them out of his closet and back again during his two-week camping trip. Chances were he’d pack some, and pack some he had. Unless his captors stripped him naked, Long Eye could find him. So far, so good.

  “Operations wants to call our special fabric tagging ‘After-glow.’ But the Director thinks it’s too effeminate,” DEADKE
Y remarked. Clearly, he didn’t think so.

  Banquo shrugged. “I think by the time this organization decides on a name for your fancy dry cleaning our opponents will have figured it out. Then we’ll have a dozen naked men on payroll with no clothes, and we can go back to the occasional suppository or rice-chip.”

  Oh, how Andover hated him. But even if he despised the guts encasing Banquo’s cold heart, the man deserved credit. After all this time, still in the game, surviving every attempt to castrate the last hard men of secret war, perfectly capable of doing things out of necessity that quailed fainter hearts. Shocking the geldings and their attorneys at law.

  Andover held his tongue. In every sense, Banquo had him, check and mate. Still a last kernel inside DEADKEY wouldn’t relent, like a spoiled child arguing with deserved punishment. “Even if I’m sent to a federal country club for an entirely platonic friendship with a bar mitzvah boy, what makes you think I could ever agree to this?”

  Banquo stood before the desk and sighed. Sometimes repetition helped:

  “Three simple reasons. First, because you’re not going to get away with cutting me loose on this—I’ve been playing this game as long as you have, Trevor. Second, because we’ve got a man down in Iran, and even a coward like you has to realize it’s best to salvage the situation, turn it to our advantage, before feasting on our own. And third, because you’re a bloodless worm. Have I missed anything?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Attack of the Green Slime Body-Snatching Triffids

  Inside the U.S. Attorney’s office at 86 Chambers Street, O’Hanlon showed Agent Wesson, Agent Smith, and Bryce a book he had been reading. It was an old book, a paperback. He fanned the pages and then showed them the cover, a yellowish-green image of vines entangling fleeing people. “I went on Amazon and found Banquo’s last book purchase. So I bought it too: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. I’m a bit of a sci-fi buff but had never read it. It’s a 1950s novel about a genetically altered species of mutant walking killer plants that take over the earth.”

  The two agents stared at him blankly. Bryce looked first at his shoes, then at the ceiling as if embarrassed to be in the presence of a man losing his senses. O’Hanlon kept on: “The plants were farmed for their seed oil, you know, like corn oil or safflower. They could walk on their three stalky legs, so they planted roots where the ground was best, then ranged at will. Men kept them in herds. But the mutant walking plants possessed one serious hazard, a whipping tendril with poisonous sacs. Unless properly neutered, very dangerous. But controllable. Until a doomsday device concocted by some Evil Government, in the form of a spectacular green meteor shower, blinded nearly every living soul on earth. The lucky few who either slept through the deadly spectacle or worked underground awoke to find themselves owners of the world. With only one competitor: the mutant plants, now escaped off their reservation, who would soon overrun the stinking remains of civilization, a collective intelligence, hunting down every warm body—Triffids—and the leeks shall inherit the earth.”

  Again blank stares greeted O’Hanlon, and so he explained. “If we’re going to investigate the man, we should investigate his mind as well. What kind of fellow reads a book like this?” He tossed the paperback across his desk for them to examine. “Who knows, maybe between you three potted plants you can make me one good Triffid. Banquo’s blind to us. Go hunt him.”

  U.S. Attorney O’Hanlon’s investigation started out like every other investigation: court-ordered wiretaps, lists of probable cause, in this case possible securities fraud, put to a pliant judge, under investigation himself and willing to do any favor offered. Moreover the operation had no name, just a file number: NYDOJ 228: Agents Smith and Wesson; subject: Banquo & Duncan; complainant: A. Bryce, redacted.

  The two agents allowed the redacted Bryce a small desk outside their offices. A desk with no telephone, no PC, but at least a chair, making him sit there like the class dunce in detention, waiting for them to include him in their Girl Scouts ritual campfire. Which they eventually did, letting him do scut work of every description—for which he was thoroughly grateful, if only to break the monotony of staring at taupe-colored walls. And eventually he even got to use his own laptop.

  Every day or so at 6 PM the two women and their boy gathered in O’Hanlon’s office to review the day’s results, going something like this:

  O’Hanlon: “Well?”

  Agent Wesson: “Standard trading. Volume about $10 million on a couple dozen trades. The rest of the portfolio lost a few points. Nothing serious. No communication whatsoever between the B & D computers and any suspicious entity, including Langley. It’s all bank-to-bank, account-to-account. Banquo is on the phone constantly. He orders lunch delivered to the office from one of the delis on the concourse. Chicken salad on white, lettuce, mayo. Dr. Pepper. His traders go upstairs to the Rainbow Room; B & D has a reserved table—the two swells live it up. Clams casino. Steak. Two martinis. Later, the first night shift trader comes in and starts to follow the dateline around the globe, L.A., Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Sydney, and so on. He’s relieved by the Late Late shift, same thing, Berlin, The Bourse, Paris, London. The night guys play a lot of online chess and poker and cruise porn. One of them is seeing a gal he met on a site called Cheating Wives. We can follow her around if you want. Another is planning a trip to Vegas for a miniature modelers’ convention, where he’s going to receive an award for constructing a realistic WWII Panzer diorama named Counterattack Below Monte Casino in 3:40 scale. I saw a picture of it online; it’s really nice. Then the whole shebang starts all over again. These guys are the most boring people in the world.”

  O’Hanlon to Bryce: “Okay, what about you?”

  Bryce: “Around 6ish, I join Agent Smith on roving stakeout. It’s sort of an overlap thing—Banquo goes to dinner, generally a top-end restaurant, Le Cirque, the 21 Club. Then he goes home. Three times a week his Chinese cook makes dinner. Sometimes a lady friend visits, the widow Mrs. Dorothy Faneuil Farmer-Madison, Park Avenue socialite, and mother of celebutant Tiffany Farmer-Madison.” An item from the New York Post’s Page Six—about the Farmer-Madisons’ renting out the Fifth Avenue Jimmy Choo’s boutique for Tiffany’s seventeenth birthday party and letting all the girls take home a pair of $500 shoes—slid across O’Hanlon’s desk and thence directly into a file.

  “Sometimes he reads, sometimes he rents DVDs from Netflix. The last three delivered were The Thing from Another World, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Green Slime.”

  Here Bryce paused as the U.S. attorney mused out loud: “First he’s reading about killer plants. Now he’s watching 1950s sci-fi. The Thing is about soldiers and scientists in an arctic research facility finding a frozen creature from a flying saucer. The creature can’t be killed and has a cellular structure similar to vegetable matter.” Bryce snorted. O’Hanlon ignored him and continued, “As everyone knows, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about killer man-mutating pods. And The Green Slime speaks for itself. A killer mould on our space station.”

  “Maybe he’s worried about a fungus among us,” Agent Wesson volunteered dryly. Agent Smith looked at her askance as if saying, You just had to, didn’t you?

  Bryce picked up again. “Other than Mrs. Madison, he’s a monk, except the three drinks a night before bed. I know this because I’ve counted his bottles in the trash. Armagnac. $200 and a smile to the doorman let me scrounge to my heart’s content. I go back to my hotel about 1 AM, after Agent Smith returns from a couple hours sleep or that other agent relieves me—I didn’t catch his name.”

  The first time Bryce gave his report, O’Hanlon said nothing. Merely glanced in Wesson’s direction. And she seemed to acknowledge his eyes. The second time the Irishman glanced even more pointedly in Smith’s direction, and the second agent squirmed, gritting her teeth in frustration. The third time, Bryce finally added, “Once again I got back to the hotel after the other guy relieved me. The Grand Hyatt is really nice; I meant to thank you.”

/>   O’Hanlon finally growled, “Glad you like the Hyatt. They built it special for you. What other agent?”

  Wesson put her head in her hands in dismay.

  While Smith countered, “We tried to tail him. To nail him down. He’s practically a ghost.”

  Then came the proverbial knock on the door.

  “Come in,” O’Hanlon grumbled. He seemed to know what was coming. The door opened. A gray-eyed man stood there, suit and tie, plenty of poise, no nonsense and all business.

  “Mr. O’Hanlon, my name is—”

  But the lawyer held up a hand, interrupting, “I know you from somewhere. Wait a minute; lemme think.”

  “Can I come in?” And there was something else about the newcomer; he seemed to bring a chill with him into the room. The kind of presence that made people catch their breath, take a step back. You could see it in the faces of agents Smith and Wesson, a touch of flush, a touch of fluster; Smith fussed with her hair; Wesson smoothed down her skirt. Tiny little gestures, but very uncharacteristic for both of them. And O’Hanlon didn’t like it. “Oh, for Chrissakes have a seat.” The newcomer found a chair and sat. Finally it dawned on the lawyer.

  “I got it!” O’Hanlon exclaimed. “Wallets.” Then to the others, “A couple of years ago we got a tip from your firm about a guy named Hammoud, a Lebanese Al Qaeda creep who had it in for the Holland Tunnel. God, how could I have forgotten that! ” He shook his head in dismay at his own lapse. Then sighed, “I never made the connection. Too many cases come through here . . . ”

  With his memory returned to him O’Hanlon didn’t need any further introduction. He said to Bryce, “Is this the agent who relieved you?” Bryce’s ears turned red. Wesson harrumphed. Agent Smith made no remark, a wry smile on her face.

  “So how did you know where to find me?” Bryce asked, chagrined.