“Fine, Fordham,” Wallets grumbled, speaking for the first time, then fixed the DOJ lawyer with his gray eyes: “You’ve got possession of stolen goods. The ripped-up dentist vests.”
O’Hanlon rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. And what? We’ll break them under the torture of doing community service, assuming we get a conviction? Do we have any evidence they stole these particular lead vests, or did they just buy them and then deface them?” O’Hanlon immediately regretted his sarcasm; no fool, he knew what they were driving at. But kept going anyway. Nothing changed the facts as stated:
“You guys have to stay in the here-and-now. My business is about reality—about what we know and what we don’t know. About never confusing the two. You’re chasing phantoms.”
Banquo took two of his fingers and smoothed one of his eyebrows: “Anticipation is priceless. When you have your crime, it’s too late. No one should need to tell you this. So find something. Parking tickets. Material witness. Conspiracy. Perhaps you’ll discover something more incriminating at the moment of arrest, if you catch my meaning.”
O’Hanlon recoiled at the implication. He never liked preachifying or speechifying at someone, but after his dad vanished and broke his mother’s heart, Mom had put him through school by working as a teacher by day, then clerked weekends at the local public library. Never once complaining, never once deviating from her gospel. No cheating, no corner cutting, no whining, no matter what temptations or obstacles life threw her way. O’Hanlon made her creed his own and intended to pass it on to his girls the way she passed it on to him, by living it every hour.
“Hold on now,” O’Hanlon said. “Don’t say another word, Mr. Banquo. I’ll pretend I never heard that. See: I’m an officer of the law. The law. I take this threat as seriously as anybody in this room; I see the dots—but nobody’s going to break the law as long as I’m sitting in this office.”
The spymaster’s eyes fell to his lap. Then quietly: “You’re saving people, not the law. And if you make a mistake by moving now, you’ve only made a mistake, and everyone walks on. The Workbench Boys can go on innocently living their squalid outer borough existence.”
“All right, let’s forget probable cause for the moment,” O’Hanlon countered. “I’ve got a question for you.” O’Hanlon kicked the trash pail a little in frustration, making a hollow sound. “If it’s a dirty bomb, where’s the radioactive material?”
But Banquo countered fast. “Did you get a search warrant on the Texas Pedro Livery Service sedan, the six golf bags you tracked from King of Prussia Mall and the Valley Forge Golf Course?”
Here O’Hanlon stared at the ceiling for a moment. Admitting ruefully, “Judge Hamilfish wouldn’t give it to me. A theory or a guess isn’t probable cause. And all we’ve got is a couple of drums you saw on the back of a jackass six thousand miles from here.”
Wallets flashed him a look of daggers, but O’Hanlon didn’t care now. His mind boiled; to snoop or not to snoop, that was the question; everything eventually reached its limit. And the DOJ lawyer wasn’t gonna budge.
“Do . . . it . . . anyway,” Banquo said, measured, slow, a command.
O’Hanlon propped his feet up on the wastebasket and folded his hands over his belly. He brought his hands up to his chin, pursed his lips, and put them back down again. “No,” he answered at last.
“Do you read science fiction?” Banquo asked, from out of nowhere.
“I read those books you bought.”
“Ah . . . ” Banquo nodded to himself. “As you know, they’re about alien threats, threats that transcended the bounds and categories of what anyone thought was possible. Threats that couldn’t be defeated with conventional tools.”
“Yeah,” the Department of Justice lawyer said. “My problem is here and now,” O’Hanlon repeated, pointing to the floor. “I’ve got to stay in the here and now.”
What was left to say?
So Banquo and Wallets left O’Hanlon’s office without saying good-bye. From their cubicles, Bryce, Smith, and Wesson all watched them go without rising to greet them. O’Hanlon poked his head out the door and barked across the bull pen, “Hey!” He shouted to Smith, Wesson, and Bryce, “Anybody work here?”
Deputy Executive Director Andover usually arrived in his office by around 7:30 AM, before his secretary, who didn’t get there for another hour. Miss Lithesome, as he nicknamed her, sat, at a desk outside his office, surrounded by a faux wooden semicircular wall from which she gazed out at the world. You had two choices of female style at Langley: matrons of honor—the librarian, schoolmarm types who could surmount any bureaucratic obstacle—or cute Mary Kay types who could find the ladies’ room, but only in an emergency. DEADKEY picked the latter, considering her a tasteful office accessory like the Jonathan Adler ceramic pieces on his desk. Coming out of the elevator, Andover was startled to see someone new sitting by her desk, waiting. Banquo.
Andover headed straight toward his door and unlocked it with his keycard, Banquo following. “You couldn’t even let me know you were coming?”
“I didn’t want to call too late—or too early,” Banquo replied.
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Stewart. What do you want?” Andover commenced his usual morning routine as if Banquo weren’t there. Plugging in the hot water for his tea. Turning on his computer. Spreading the front page of the Washington Post on his desk in front of him. Spinning the dials on his classified drawers to open them for business.
Banquo sat uninvited in the chair directly across from Andover’s fortress desk, leaving on his black overcoat, and came straight to the point:
“I need someone to big-foot O’Hanlon. He needs to make some arrests. Middle Eastern men, mostly. Maybe a dozen or more. And I need them detained and at my disposal, maybe indefinitely. Today, just for starters.”
Andover expelled his breath derisively, “Pffhh. You needn’t have come all this way; you should have emailed. What else do you need?” he asked, a tiny crease of a smile across his thin blue lips.
DEADKEY’s attitude didn’t surprise Banquo, but he expected to break him down quickly. “There’s something afoot. What it is I don’t know, but I suspect,” he paused, cleared his throat, “we have every reason to believe—”
“It’s a dirty bomb,” the Deputy Director filled in, completing the thought.
Banquo hesitated for a dark moment.
“In case you’re wondering,” Andover said, “I figure you’re always going to think it’s a dirty bomb. You’re like the global warming people. If it’s hot outside, it’s global warming; if it snows outside, it’s global warming. For men like you, Stewart, it’s dirty bombs. The sole reason for your existence.”
Banquo girded himself for another bitch-fest, then calmly tried to reestablish the previous terms of their agreement. “We had an understanding, Andover.”
“Yes,” the Deputy Director agreed amicably. “But sometimes conditions change.” He carefully poured his hot water in a mug and swished his tea bag back and forth in the water, “we had an understanding—had—past tense.” He contemplated his tea for a moment and directed his gaze across the wide desk.
Then patiently, as if explaining to a child: “Stewart, we’ve known each other many years, but I’m not going to sit here and let you start a war with Iran. You tried to kill one of their scientists; now you’re hatching some scheme to kidnap one of their diplomats. And finally you want to throw some kids into jail so you can send that ugly ‘Turk’ of yours, that Persian thug or Iranian Jew or whatever he is—to pull out their fingernails. Well, I’m not going to let you do that.”
Banquo searched Andover’s face, which seemed complacent as he lifted his tea bag from his mug, held one hand with a paper napkin under it to keep it from dripping, then dropped it carefully in his wastebasket. “There,” he said to himself under his breath and met Banquo’s eyes.
“Yossi got out of the hospital only last week,” Banquo started. “I can’t imagine—”
“Ah-
ah-ah,” Andover said, wagging his finger, like he was shooing away a cat from scratching a sofa. “Well, I can. I can well imagine. So I don’t want to hear any of your sophistry or fevered justifications. Stewart, you’ve always had a tendency to cast your net too widely. But the fishing expedition ends today. You’ve gone too far and you must be stopped. And so you will.”
Banquo felt his feet slipping out from under him even as he sat before Andover’s desk. In the back corner of his mind a curious thought tugged his sleeve. How in heaven’s name did Andover know about his plot to briefly snatch—if all else failed—a diplomat? Farah Nasir. And perhaps pump her for information? Banquo always kept things vague—“Middle Eastern men, mostly”—and never used the word “diplomat.” So how the hell did DEADKEY know? In this case, knowledge was power. One thing to justify such an act retrospectively, but another to make the case for it beforehand.
“Look, Trevor,” Banquo started. This felt like begging.
“No, I’m not going to ‘look.’ Taking diplomats hostage is something the Iranians have proven themselves better at than us, don’t you think? We’re not going that route. Nor are you going to kidnap any of the Muslims you’ve been tailing . . . ”
“In a lawfully sanctioned process—”
“Yes, lawfully. But if you didn’t get your way, you were going to go around O’Hanlon and the law and snatch them yourself. Deny it. Of course, you can’t. The last time we talked, the term ‘rogue agent’ came up. That would have been one of yours. The drunken scribbler.”
“Yes, and another matter came up as well, your interest in a young ... ” Banquo knew he was losing this argument.
The wagging finger came again:
“Stewart, Stewart—you’re in no position to pressure me. Can you prove your allegations? And if you can, can you do so in a way that doesn’t implicate Banquo & Duncan in the use of extralegal procedures to spy on one of your superiors?” He went pffhh again, for emphasis. “I don’t think so.” Then the thin lips smiled ever so slightly again. “I hope you’re not in a rush to get back to New York, Stewart. Our internal affairs people have a few routine questions, and the FBI will be sitting in with those useful 302b report forms they use, so you’ll be liable to charges if you lie. Don’t make us call the Washington Post so Ruth Lipsky can write stories like ‘Troubled Agent at Nexus of Iran Flap.’ ”
Banquo suddenly felt hot in his overcoat. Could he really be outmaneuvered by this slippery eel? A bureaucrat’s bureaucrat? Even with the threat of sexual blackmail he still couldn’t bring DEADKEY to heel. The bar mitzvah boy was probably off spring skiing in the Andes. Right time of year for it. Bloody hell.
And who was the back channel to Andover, the rat? Was O’Hanlon a shrewder bureaucratic player than he seemed? Bryce? Maybe the young fink had never left his former boss? Spying on Banquo and leaking across the Potomac? God help the little prep school boy if it turned out that way.
“Andover, you don’t know what you’re doing,” Banquo started, but he could feel himself pleading. Yes, this was begging:
“It’s not about me. It’s about what we know, and what’s happened. Consider the other day. All three major New York airports are disrupted by obnoxious, belligerent passengers, ignoring security protocols on religious pretexts. WINS News shows up before the authorities. And we go on a wild goose chase. That’s a diversion.”
Banquo paused. Then for emphasis: “In the midst of this chaos a border patrol checkpoint in Nogales is overrun. Yesterday, we tracked a livery car from Nogales to the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Two Iranian nuclear scientists come to America under the protection of the UN’s Iranian office. And in Brooklyn we’ve found unemployed yet self-sufficient young Middle Eastern men lining backpacks with flexible lead aprons and taking showers in a homemade decontamination tub—”
For the first time in many years, Banquo found his voice rising. “What is it about these dots you cannot connect?” Mastering himself once more, the spy master tried to get this man to see the light. “It’s not about me, Deputy Director. It’s about what’s going to happen, not if—but when. And when you’re wrong, are you going to take responsibility? When they’re calling you before some congressional committee, are you going to explain how you could have stopped it, but didn’t because one of your colleagues used a drunken scribbler? Are you going to take the hit, while I become the Cassandra no one listened to?”
Banquo saw he was getting nowhere. Andover thought he had all the answers today.
“Should I put it in intragovernmental language?” DEADKEY asked with a sneer, “We non-concur. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth doing violence to our way of government, to our reputation, to our relations with a potentially dangerous country—and the rest of the world. We’ll be shutting down the team as soon as I can bring this clown show to the attention of the Director. O’Hanlon will be off the case. Wallets can take a vacation. The surveillance resources will be reassigned.”
Trevor Andover poured himself another cup of tea. He tried to fake some warmth, some camaraderie.
“Look, you’re not the only one with back channels. We have a few down here too—so many Iranians worth listening to—because they’re reaching out, because they’re scared and want to be heard. And try as you may, I’m not going to let you spoil a chance for dialogue before it happens.”
“Dialogue . . . ” Banquo whispered, aghast but totally controlled. He wanted to yell now. He’d heard that word before. Always before something terrible happened. A Yellow Truck Word.
“What time is it?” Andover asked.
“Excuse me?”
“What time is it?”
Banquo looked at his wristwatch. “8:05.”
“Good,” Andover said. He seemed pleased about the time. He struck a speed dial button on his phone, keeping it on speaker. Banquo closed his eyes and let his mind whirl around his possibilities, not bothering to listen. Helplessness consumed him. A feeling he’d experienced only twice in his career. Once in Lebanon and then once again in the dark days of the Central American problem. Even in the bad moments, even in El Salvador, when the congressional restrictions had closed in, he had always found a work-around. What was his work-around now? He heard Andover say that he, Banquo, was in his office and they should come up and get him.
Andover hung up and rose from his chair. He approached Banquo and tossed a business card in his lap. For Skadden, Arps. “Now get the hell out of my office and let me work.”
Word came down from Langley and DOJ later that day: O’Hanlon and his team were to shut down the Hung Fat van show. No more Hung Fat van, no more Jordan, no more twenty-four-hour stakeouts of all and sundry characters. No more break-ins and subway rides or King of Prussia Mall visits in the dead of night. O’Hanlon would go back to his usual fare of drug dealers, gang-bangers, fences, and the occasional sloppy mobster (as if there were any other kind these days). As for Banquo, O’Hanlon understood that he wouldn’t be hearing from him for a while. If ever again.
The gang didn’t take it well. A pall descended on Smith, Wesson, and Bryce when their boss brought them the news. A sense of helpless frustration. Bryce took it the worst, perhaps because he once admired Deputy Executive Director Andover. His adolescent fantasies drifted toward heroic rebellion, but he lacked the will or a plan. After he’d actually done something for once—hunting and tracking their targets—his old boss had cut off everyone’s proverbials. And for what? Part bureaucratic grand panjandrum routing a rival, the other part intellectual vanity. Victory? Never heard of it. The whole business gave off the sickly reek of complacency and surrender: if you bottled it into a men’s cologne, you’d name it Nabob.
O’Hanlon sat in his office, feet on the wastebasket, holding the inter-agency memo directing his team to stand down, displaying it to Smith and Wesson like a bid paddle at an auction, “Think of it this way: common criminals are about to get more attention from us then they’d like.” His two agents stared back at him with Bambi and Thumper
eyes. When they left, he placed the memo carefully at the top of his right-hand desk drawer, where he put things that annoyed him he’d rather forget.
Smith was distracted all the rest of that day. She sat with her chin on her hand staring at the computer screen, then shut it down when night came on. There was still one last thing she had to know. One last score to set straight. The Farah Nasir Lincoln. Tracked to a shady junk lot in a bad section of Queens. The team would have, assuming the judge relented on the warrant, gotten to it eventually. Not now.
Obviously there would be no return trip to Nogales, Texas, in its future, the limo soon to be stripped down and junked altogether. She had a photo of its position in the lot and took a gypsy cab there alone sometime after midnight.
By the book? Of course not. She had learned growing up with all those brothers to take what she wanted, and if she stepped over the line, some girlish coquettishness usually deflected the consequences. She justified this excursion by thinking of it as a personal thing. She wasn’t going to use anything she found in the court of law, so no harm no foul. She was just . . . kitty-kat curious . . . nosy.
The junk yard lot stood in an industrialized area with little in the way of industry, out near JFK. Abandoned warehouses and dead-end streets with grass growing through cracks in the sidewalk. Smashed glass glimmering in the sickly yellow of the sodium street lights with the sound of jet planes overhead. So lonely it could have been Wichita, not the city that purportedly never sleeps.
Smith got out of the cab down the block from the lot and walked the rest of the way, her footsteps echoing around her, a sound the bustle of New York rarely allows you to hear. It unnerved her, and she couldn’t help looking behind her more than once. She should have asked Wesson along. Spooky. Like when you go down into the dank basement as a kid and suddenly feel a tingle on the back of your neck and run all the way up the steps into the kitchen, panting. Flushed and embarrassed at having been scared. She jumped at the sight of something moving, across the road, waddling actually. An opossum. A damn opossum in New York City.
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