Banquo's Ghosts

by Richard Lowry

  Unsteady on his feet, Banquo touched the window. He looked down once more. The truck had its right turn signal on and was merging into the stream of downtown traffic again. He reached for his desk chair and sank into it. He knew what was going to happen next. He knew where his mind was taking him. It always did.

  Anyone who spent time in Beirut in the 1950s and ’60s spoke of its charm, its easy cosmopolitan sophistication—Paris on the Mediterranean. Of never being able to shake the feeling that you lived on the edge of the great Middle East, but with all the comfort and class of the Champs-Elysées. Monte Carlo with couscous and kabobs. Banquo had been there in another era, and he couldn’t shake what he had taken away from it, regret tinged with anger, an aching uncertainty about what might have been or, more importantly, what he personally might have prevented.

  That regret filled every crevice of his soul, arising out of a time when trusting the wrong person or a wrong gut instinct could mean disappearing into the abyss of swirling hatreds and rival agendas, where the only certainty was the barrel of a gun.

  Banquo had been stationed in Beirut for nearly eight months. Then came April 18, 1983, the day the U.S. Embassy was hit. As if to spit in America’s face, the bombers used a van stolen earlier from the Embassy itself. Four hundred pounds of explosives. Sixty-three dead.

  Among them: chief Middle East analyst Robert C. Ames, station chief Kenneth Haas, and six other CIA employees. In the 1970s, Idaho Senator Frank Church, along with Admiral Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter’s CIA chief, had degraded U.S. intelligence capabilities beyond recognition. In a single blow, CIA Director Turner had eliminated over eight hundred operational positions in what was called the Halloween Massacre. As far as Banquo was concerned, what Senator Church and Turner began back at home in 1977, Hezbollah finished off by killing those men in Beirut. Their experience, their contacts, their expertise—all wiped out, and they weren’t coming back.

  Banquo could still recall his safe house, a few white painted rooms in an office building on the Muslim side of the Green Line. There he ran a cutout, what appeared to be an export-import business. The last remnant of Agency operatives on the ground.

  It didn’t take long to finger who had blown up the Embassy. Such terror operations weren’t simple affairs. They require enough operational sophistication that many people know about them, and they needed a guiding spirit. A guiding hand—no such thing as spontaneous combustion. In this case, the organizer had a name and an address, and Banquo found them in the first twenty-four hours.

  The address: the Sheik Abdullah Barracks in Baalbek, Lebanon, home of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The name: Ayman Husseini, the red-bearded, oddly fair-haired head of operations. A complicated man with a degree in sociology from La Sorbonne and some graduate work at the University of Tehran. His pedigree impeccable: Iranian-provided, Iranian-approved, the bomber-in-chief to a nascent Hezbollah.

  Of course, there was a sheik in charge of public speaking. One Sheik Fadlallah, the “spiritual leader,” of the just-forming Hezbollah talked a good enough game. “What martyrdom is greater than a human bomb detonated in the enemy’s face? What spiritualism, what blessing greater than giving your body and life for the sake of Allah?”

  Oh, the Hezbo fellows had plenty of martyrs lined up, but all the virgins would go wanting without Husseini’s technical expertise. Fadlallah had the boys, but not the toys.

  Ayman Husseini provided the toys, and he adored them. A born tinkerer, a kind of cut-rate Edison who never took the trouble to invent a better light bulb. His father was a Western-educated electrical engineer in Tehran, his career waylaid when the Shah fell. His son didn’t seem to care or notice, so swept up had he been by love for Khomeini and the revolution. He had been part of the crowd of students that stormed the U.S. Embassy in 1979, then disappeared into Iranian intelligence. Now emerging to mastermind the destruction—not just the storming—of another U.S. Embassy.

  How did Banquo know about Husseini? The way he knew about so many other things: human frailty. Never be surprised by frailty, for without it you’re out of the spy business. And when such frailty hit him by surprise—when he was let down or tricked—he never cursed human nature, but only his own naïveté.

  Husseini’s weakness was hookers. Not for himself. Husseini was perfectly content to sit in a windowless room all day breathing the toxic fumes of whatever explosive he was mixing, or sniffing solder, and had already lost three fingers to a mishap while pursuing this passion. No, the ladies were directed to a mid-level Hezbo with access to the security arrangements at the Sheik Abdullah Barracks. All the randy lad needed to betray the barrack’s protocols was a safe hotel room and two hookers dressed devoutly on the outside but, underneath their burkas, clad with the sexiest frillies available in pre-Victoria’s Secret Beirut. That and $500 walking-around money a month.

  Banquo happily supplied both, but since his horny Hezbo never wanted any of the same women twice, there was some hustle involved to keep him adequately supplied. Even in Beirut, female companionship wasn’t inexhaustible. But well worth trying to make it so. Thus, thanks to a lot of girls, a little dough, and human frailty, he knew Ayman Husseini, the bomb maker, owned a car: a rundown Chevy sedan from the 1970s. He knew where Husseini kept his car: in a fenced compound near the Abdullah Barracks with an unusually large number of panel trucks. And most importantly, Banquo knew who Ayman Husseini trusted. No one outside of another former Khomeini-worshipping student from Tehran, who acted as his driver and all-around sidekick. Banquo knew how long it took his sidekick to exit the parking lot, swing around the corner, and pick up the bomb maker from the Abdullah Barracks. Banquo had even clocked their trip times, hither and yon. Some trips were shorter, some longer.

  Banquo’s team could attach a wad of plastique—radio-detonated C-4—to the bottom of that car, timed to kill Ayman Husseini, his swell friends, indeed the whole Abdullah Barracks, in the first three minutes as the car pulled out of the lot and came around front. A magical mysterious explosion of questionable origin. But what if the targets knew the origin of the blast? Radio-detonated C-4 often bore Uncle Sam’s signature. Even better. The Hezbos would know that the United States of America realized the import of Embassy bombings and that we could reach out and vaporize one of their top players, anyone we wanted. Even if the attacks didn’t stop altogether, we’d disrupt them; perhaps even force Hezbollah to abandon the next big bang in the pipeline. But most importantly—destroy once and for all the illusion that attacking America was free of reprisal, free of consequences.

  But such a job would have to be done by Americans. No turning to outside contractors. No trusting amateurs or conflicted locals. So Banquo ran it up the Langley flag pole. He knew it would go all the way to Bill Casey at the top, maybe beyond. And he waited. Each time the Hezbo got his hookers, Banquo worried one of the girls would displease the lad, ending their cozy relationship. Fretted that a word from the criminal underground running the prostitutes, Beirut’s pimps, would slip across the street to the terror network and no one would ever hear from the horny Hezbo again. Or perhaps the Hezbo lad might suddenly grasp the risks he was running, then just as suddenly back out, changing all the security procedures, times and places Banquo knew so well.

  Each day he waited for word from Langley seemed an age. Each day without a decision his stomach twisted up more and more; after five weeks, even if there were no outward signs, his guts were telling him a story. And he diagnosed what the knots meant. At first, he thought they were anger. But it slowly dawned on him, not anger—foreboding. Fear. For his own safety? No. At what gift the future might bring.

  Banquo never heard back from Langley. Eventually he dropped the plot. Even so, he kept stringing his Hezbo lad along just in case. More out of habit than anything else. And he waited again. This time for calamity.

  Catastrophe came six months after the Embassy bombing that had gone unanswered—October 23, 1983. Twelve thousand pounds of TNT delivered to the Marine barracks at
the Beirut International Airport in a yellow van. The explosion so large the plume of smoke formed a mushroom cloud above the four-story building, all in a moment reduced to rubble. Two hundred forty-one Americans dead. The worst day for the Semper Fidelis since Iwo Jima. The worst day for U.S. power projection since the Tet offensive. Banquo wasn’t surprised.

  Langley sent a team from the U.S. to gather intelligence in preparation for retaliatory strikes against the perpetrators. Yet the director of operations pulled Banquo out. Perhaps because Langley wanted to claim insufficient intelligence for any further action. Banquo knew too damn much. So the good soldier handed everything over to the U.S. team and quit Beirut.

  Sure enough, the guys from the U.S. came back home without striking even the feeblest blow. But they did, apparently, subcontract out to the Lebanese military the job of killing Fadlallah, the Talking Sheik. The Lebanese Military tried to do it with a car bomb, missed Fadlallah, and killed eighty civilians at a mosque. The U.S. got just as much of a black reaming as if it had carried out the attempt itself. And Banquo was reminded of a line from an issue of National Review back in the 1960s: “The assassination attempt against Sukarno had all the hallmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno.”

  Back in the States, Banquo’s aborted scheme of retribution for the Embassy bombing never surfaced. One day when he was ruminating over it, a terrible thought occurred to him: that Langley’s non-answer hadn’t been an implicit no but an implicit yes, and it was he—not the nameless “they,” the chickenshit bureaucrats—who had left the predicate for the barracks bombing in place. As if he’d rammed the yellow suicide truck through the perimeter himself. The screams of those trapped under the rubble his alone to bear. And the mushroom cloud his too, a smoky apparition—Banquo’s own ghost.

  That’s why he hated yellow trucks.

  Wallets startled the boss when he came through Banquo’s half-open office door, dragging him from a sorrowful memory. Wallets knew that expression on the man’s face, long ago learning to let it go, bite his tongue, as if he’d interrupted someone indulging an embarrassing habit. Wallets looked at his shoes, and soon enough Banquo fixed his face and demanded, in his usual all-business tone, “What have you got?”

  “We think we’ve got some other boys.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Farah Nasir, the U.N.’s Farah Nasir. Junior service officer, Iranian Mission. She took a call from another young man. He said something about Klimteh.”

  “Has anyone tossed their place?”

  “It’s in Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy, do or die. Three of them living there, same circumstances as the others basically—cheap apartment, except these boys are neater. But all the same accoutrements. Paint, jeans, reinforced backpacks . . . ”

  “Klimteh, eh?” Banquo tried the word out on his tongue: “Klimteh.”

  “We figured out what that torn-up stuff was in the Workbench Boys’ place in Queens.” Wallets let it hang there. He liked it when he knew something that Banquo really wanted to hear, but he didn’t let it hang too long.

  “Well?” Banquo said.

  “X-ray vests from a dentist office. Taken apart at the seams. Flexible leaded cloth. And guess what?” There he went again. He couldn’t help himself.

  This time Banquo didn’t rise to the bait but simply raised an eyebrow.

  “There have been a couple of burglaries in dentist’s offices. Brooklyn and Queens. All the same. Late at night, nothing taken except the vests. NYPD arrested two guys coming out of a Pakistani dentist’s office three months ago. They made bail, overstayed their visas. Then skipped their court date. Now wanted on a bench warrant. The thing is . . .” and here Wallets put some colored printout on Banquo’s desk. “I think they finally realized how stupid it was to burglarize Ahmed the local tooth puller when they could get everything they needed online with a stolen credit card.”

  The few colored pages were from Pearsondental.com. Vinyl Backed Lead Aprons. Corduroy Backed Lead Aprons. In Gray, Light Blue, Beige, Mauve, Wedgwood, or Jade Green. In Adult sizes. Child. Technician. Child size without collar. Technician with collar. “Multi-ply construction makes aprons flexible and comfortable. 3mm lead equivalency. In Vinyl, Corduroy, or Velour.”

  Banquo got the point. “For the flexible lead cloth.”

  “Yeah, it must be for the lead. Maybe even paid cash in a supply house.”

  “So you’re telling me these are the dumbest Pudknockers on earth, stealing something they could have bought for cash?”

  “Two were. And skipped bail. The others were quick learners.”

  Neither of them said anything, lost in their respective thoughts.

  “As for Farah—” Wallets couldn’t say it without thinking of the ubiquitous Farrah Fawcett poster of his youth. God, the actress had to be sixty now.

  “Our Farah’s very careful. Never says anything incriminating like she knows she’s on a party line. Not about herself. Not about her superiors. But she’s not your run-of-the-mill Iranian diplomatic soldier bee. Yossi says she’s Al Quds, a major, with lots of field experience under her belt. He tried to get some pictures of her in Lebanon overseeing Hezbollah resupply during the border war. And several years ago in Argentina, our Farah was attached to the Iranian Embassy there during the Jewish cemetery desecration of 2004.”

  Desecration? Polite way of saying it.

  “So there’s no glass ceiling in Iranian intelligence. Farah Nasir. Yasmine Farouk. Who knew the Iranians were so broad minded.”

  “One more thing.”

  Banquo sighed, slightly impatient, but amused at the same time. Indulging Wallets. “We don’t need one more thing, Robert. Yesterday our old friend Jan Breuer is dropped by a silenced .222 or .223 cal laser-sighted sniper rifle, and within minutes Anton Anjou of Banque Luxembourg asks Johnson to transfer $35 million through his account. And the gang that couldn’t shoot straight is making fancy lead-lined backpacks and cruising the subways. How many dots do we need to connect?”

  This time Wallets didn’t hesitate. “What do you want to do about it?”

  “Time for O’Hanlon to earn his pay.”

  Wallets nodded. And his boss softened, “What was the last thing you wanted to tell me, Robert?”

  Wallets found a seat across from Banquo. This time he really did stretch the pause, stretched it right to breaking point.

  “I think we have a mole.”

  Banquo put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward, turning his clasped hands into a steeple, severity flowing from him like a heavy weight. “So you’ve noticed.”

  O’Hanlon didn’t feel as comfortable with his feet up on his trash bin in the presence of Banquo—it felt disrespectful somehow. “Sorry. Justice just doesn’t rate the digs of Banquo & Duncan,” he said, smiling and sweeping his eyes over his metal government-issued desk that could have been pulled from a public school principal’s office twenty years ago, but actually came from felon labor in federal prison. Wallets found a seat.

  “We’re accustomed to all manner of working environments, Patrick,” Banquo said. “Nothing to forgive about your office furniture.” The man hadn’t bothered to take off his black overcoat, still standing. He changed his tone of voice to indicate the end of pleasantries: “We’ve got to roll these guys up, before someone gets hurt.” A flat demand. From his silent place in the chair Wallets’ eyes made the same demand.

  “Do you know something I don’t?” O’Hanlon asked.

  “No. Of course not. I’m just reacting to what we already know. You have the Klimteh and Polak boys, rootless young Muslim men, engaged in suspicious activity with a known agent of the Iranian government. That’s all we need to know.”

  “Well, not quite all, but they’ve definitely got funny names.”

  Here, Banquo swept his overcoat under him and sat as well. “Patrick.” He started to speak, not talking down to the Justice lawyer, just speaking with a kind of Olympian calm that washed over the whole dingy room. “P
atrick. Mr. O’Hanlon . . . Klimteh. Polak. Clearly not pronounced or spelled correctly. Instead, I offer you Gustav Klimt, late 19th century painter. A favorite of mine, his Athena is a masterpiece. I offer you Jackson Pollock, 20th century painter, some say the founder of modern art. Not really a favorite, since his pictures remind me of mental dementia, but still quite noteworthy. Our rootless lads go to art stores in search of lead-based paint and speak these unlikely names.”

  From his quiet perch, Wallets’ eyes grew colder, awaiting some adequate reply from the lawyer.

  O’Hanlon rubbed his temple with a thumb. “Fascinating. I grant you the words Klimt, however poorly pronounced, and Pollock are some kind of code. As in, ‘time to go to the art store and buy more paint,’ or ‘Shall we meet at the Atlantic Avenue subway station?’ And as you know, I believe all of this bears the closest scrutiny. But I need a crime to arrest them, and we don’t have spitting on a sidewalk right now. There’s no crime buying tubes of artist oils at Blick’s Art Supply. It’s not a crime to ride the subway. Even at 2 in the morning. Even if I had a crime, in my judgment we’d need to string them along to see what more we can learn, since nothing seems—whatever it is—to be imminent.” Wallets shifted in his seat, now clearly annoyed, but made no remark.

  Banquo let the lawyer have his say. It was a say worth having. Then capped it off for him. “We think there’s a dirty bomb involved. We’re really not sure how. You’ve got them playing around with lead, presumably for protection. You’ve got firsthand knowledge of nuclear material coming over the Iranian border. And we have the Iranian connection in Farah Nasir. A supply officer for Hezbollah. A Quarter Master. What else do you need? Thirty thousand dead in a four-block radius?”

  “Hey! Hey!” O’Hanlon raised his hands in protest. “I’m not from Hollywood. I’m Fordham law, y’know what I mean?”