Banquo's Ghosts

by Richard Lowry

  Johnson desperately wanted to sit down with Banquo and Wallets for a debrief, and kept calling, but the word always came back that they were busy and he should keep on with “legend building”—in other words keep writing his attacks on the U.S. government and apologies for our enemies. This was getting very old, and Johnson wanted to give it up soon, but he figured for now, “Those also serve who stay at home and write vicious defenses of appeasement.” The brains at Banquo & Duncan still thought him more useful with his street cred intact—indeed, bizarrely enhanced by his Iranian experience. Jo von H wanted to have a party in his honor. She thought he had been victimized by the CIA in Iran, so that’s what everyone else in their circle thought too. A plausible enough fairy tale.

  Speaking of which, he flipped to Hardball to catch the appearance Josephine had been promoting all day on The Crusader blog. Giselle came home from work, threw her purse and coat on a chair, and plopped down next to him. “Check it out,” he said, “Jo’s in fine form.”

  His Editrix came off the screen like an angel on fire: “After all the trampling on civil liberties, after all the money spent, all the phony alarms, this is what we get? No safer, no more secure. Just wall-to-wall paranoia and no security, Chris.”

  “Harrumph,” Johnson snorted. “All of a sudden she cares about security?”

  Giselle playfully hit him on his arm, “Be nice.”

  Johnson rolled his eyes.

  Giselle reminded him, “She went all-out for you when you were in Iran, and she pays the bills, doesn’t she?”

  “Only some of them,” Johnson replied.

  Chris Matthews was asking a rambling, machine-gun-style question, something about whether Josephine von Hildebrand and The Crusader trusted whether the government gave them the full story, ending with this clinker:

  “Do you think—we’ve got reports out there—do you think, you know what they’re saying, those so-called neocons—although they don’t seem very neo to me, con maybe, hah-hah—do you think—you know what I’m getting at here—and I’ve been around this town for a long time—do you think the Iranians were involved? ”

  Finally, the rub.

  One of among many things that mystified Johnson—that he appeared to be witnessing a successful government cover-up. How easily people, like good horses, wore blinders without complaint. The administration didn’t want to ’fess up to the Iranian sponsorship of the attacks. Bits and pieces about the Iranian role kept dribbling out, but the administration either stayed silent or shot down various erroneous details that tended to discredit the larger narrative, even if that narrative was true. The momentary political dynamic aided the administration’s cause. The right played up the Iranian angle, but the left reflexively dismissed it, and no one was inclined to believe the right since the Iraq WMD fiasco.

  The coverup was aided by hear-no-evil-see-no-evil press that seemed more concerned with the Dish du Jour—recently the revelation that a famous Hollywood actress, on the advice of a fashionable child psychologist in California, was raising her three adopted children via remote control through an elaborate system of interactive vid-cam links and talking stuffed animals.

  But Chris Mathews still chewed the bit in his teeth over government spying and lying, and Josephine rode him like a gelding.

  “No, Chris, I don’t think the government is telling us everything. But blaming Iran—that’s coming from the people who want another rush to war against another regime. No, what they aren’t telling us is how they messed up, and how much they’ve done to make damn sure young Muslim men the world over hate us, hate us, with a passionate commitment. My writer Peter Johnson has a new piece in The Crus—”

  Johnson hit the Off button on the remote.

  He and Giselle enjoyed some peace and quiet in their lives—treasured it, actually, after all that had happened. Loving the little things. They ordered seafood Pad Thai from the local Thai place and talked over dinner, Johnson really listening for the first time in a long time, perhaps the first time ever. His mind didn’t flit over the things he wanted to do the next day, or the arguments in his next piece, or the question of how soon he could extricate himself from the conversation to do whatever else he imagined he’d rather be doing: reading, drinking, skirt chasing, working, whatever. For once engaged, utterly engaged in this person across from him, who shared so much of him—of his genes, his history—but was utterly distinct, not just from him, but from anyone who’d ever graced this planet. Or ever would.

  And he smiled to himself with the wonder of such simple things he’d missed so profoundly and for so long. “Dad, what is it?” Giselle asked him when she noticed his strange look. But he just shook his head.

  From downstairs the lobby buzzer rang; he and Giselle shared a glance of restrained suspicion. But it turned out to be a bicycle messenger late on a delivery. A simple manila envelope. Johnson opened it. A photograph and a cover sheet. The cover sheet was a hospital form noting the death of an unknown subject due to radiation poisoning of an unknown origin. The hospital name blacked out. The photograph showed Yasmine.

  No longer that alluring flower he remembered, not even the arrogant interrogator, nor even the defiant prisoner of the Waldorf-Astoria. The face was nearly black with clotted blood and withered, shrunken in on itself. At some point she must have self-contaminated as she went about her deadly tasks. Touched by the Grunge. A dead vampire. Queen of the Damned.

  He slid them both back into the envelope, fingers trembling slightly.

  His cell phone rang.

  Wallets.

  He wanted him to come in first thing in the morning.

  The offices of Banquo & Duncan hummed like a reborn hive. When Johnson walked off the Rockefeller elevator, it seemed as if twice as many people worked there. The double doors to the old man’s office stood open.

  Banquo waved Johnson in hurriedly without getting up, then immediately turned to his email and phone, for the moment distracted. Johnson watched the spymaster and saw the same Banquo he’d always known: impeccably dressed, even-voiced, but intense. Yet Johnson saw a difference that took a while for him to pin down—an exuberance emanating from the head of the firm that hadn’t been there before.

  Johnson thought of the Shakespeare line about there being a tide in the affairs of men. Coming to him at last: “There is a tide in the affairs of men. / Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” After a long time, Banquo’s tide was running again in his favor, and he was riding the current. The dinosaur had clawed his way out of his tar pit.

  First order of business: they caught up on the press.

  “Check this out,” Bryce said. Somehow Trevor Andover’s assistant never managed to return to Langley and now drew a salary from B & D. He handed Banquo the front page of the Washington Post and pointed to a story below the fold in the right hand corner, bylined Ruth Lipsky. The headline read, “Top CIA Official Ousted,” and the lede: “The Deputy Director of the CIA has resigned amid criticisms that he ignored key intelligence in the weeks leading up to last month’s incidents in New York City, unnamed official sources say.”

  “Unnamed official sources,” Banquo said, smiling. “Well, that clears it up.”

  Bryce laughed. “I don’t know who those sources possibly could be, do you?”

  “Sy Hersh has a piece in the The New Yorker saying you held prisoners down and tortured them with pliers with your own hands,” Johnson told Banquo.

  “Ah, good ole Sy. With his usual commitment to accuracy. Where did he get that?”

  “He says ‘former intelligence officials.’ ”

  “Hah,” Banquo smiled. “His sources are always ‘former’ nobodies who haven’t been ‘anybodies’ since Vietnam.”

  “Watch,” Johnson said, “he’ll probably win a National Magazine Award for it.”

  Then they discussed what was happening in response to the attack. But with a warning from Banquo that Johnson cou
ldn’t misunderstand: “You’re being included as a courtesy, Peter. Not for repeating ever—what you’re about to see. In this I bind you to me.”

  Johnson nodded and said nothing, as he’d finally learned.

  “I still think it’s a job for the BFF,” said Wallets.

  “Uh, Giselle would think that’s ‘best friends forever’?” Johnson said, immediately forgetting everything he learned. This time, everyone laughed.

  “The Big Fucking Fellas, the B-52s,” Wallets said.

  “But they want to keep it quiet,” Banquo explained. “Officially, they want the attacks never solved, like the anthrax investigation. We may never know why the Iranians did it—at least not before the regime falls and we see the records. It might have been retaliation, tit-for-tat for your mission, Peter. Or maybe it’s just that aggression is what they do, and killing Americans is all the same to them, whether it’s on Saudi, Iraqi, or American soil. Or maybe they figured the more pain they inflict on us the likelier we are to leave their nuclear program alone. Could be a little of all of these things. My guess is that they simply thought they were good enough to get away with it—after all, the Grunge was in the pipeline long before we sent you in.

  “But that’s just a guess. We do know that our return delivery is not going to be by Stratofortress, but something a touch more surgical. That means the president preserves his options. He knows if it were publicly established that the Iranians did this, he’d have almost no option politically but to flatten them from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus, and that means a lot of innocent people die and we get blamed for it internationally. He wants to do it more subtle.”

  “Subtle makes me nervous,” Wallets shifted in his seat.

  “I know, but not to worry.” Banquo said. Then, “Ah, speak of the devil.” All eyes went to the flat screen on CIA-SPAN. The view from space jerked down to a closer and closer view: an indistinct brown, out of which slowly there emerged brown shapes, the dominant one a long line on the ground . . . a runway. The legend at the bottom of the screen read: “U.S.A.F. Air Strip Forward Sting, Irbil, Iraq, Zulu Time: 0545.”

  Down the runway rolled a tiny white plane, its delicate features like a dragonfly or balsa-wood toy glider. A MQ-1 Predator, an armed unmanned aerial vehicle. Two slim dark shapes were visible perpendicular and underneath its wings, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. The seven-inch-wide, sixty-four-inch-long, ninety-nine-pound projectiles traveled at 950 miles per hour when launched, with an eighteen-pound shaped charge high explosive anti-tank warhead—the business end of American 21st century precision warfare. From Lockheed Martin, with love.

  The scene shifted courtesy of the Long Eye Satellite system. First: a grid of a city, a main thoroughfare, then a stretch of two blocks, and finally the top of a black sedan. The sedan bumped the car in front of it hard. A common traffic accident.

  “Time to get out,” Banquo said to the screen.

  As if he heard those words, the driver of the sedan got out and looked at the damage from the fender bender, then began arguing with the other driver, waving his hands. You could almost see his face.

  “Look familiar?” Banquo asked Johnson; squinting, he couldn’t tell. Then shook his head no.

  “No, why should you?” Banquo said to the screen. “Just one of the men who beat you. Sheik Kutmar’s chauffeur. But I imagine you were rather distracted at the time.”

  No, Johnson didn’t recognize the man.

  Banquo continued talking to the screen: “Keep him in there; let him make his cell phone calls. And you make your own. Time to get out of the way.” The driver made a gesture like a traffic cop as if to say, “Don’t bother to get out,” toward the passenger in the back of the sedan. Some more talking through the rolled down window: as though suggesting the passenger should just sit there, he’d fix it, call for another vehicle. Then the driver walked toward the side of the street with his hand up to his ear like he was making his own cell phone call.

  “Another couple of steps. Go inside the café. Buy a coffee.”

  The driver ducked under the awning of the café, ostensibly going inside.

  Twelve seconds later, the screen went all white in a flash and then cleared to show a plume of black smoke and fire where the sedan had been. Window glass in the street. The terrible pause when no one moves those first few moments.

  “Real subtle,” said Wallets, smirking.

  “Where’s our guy?” Johnson said. “Is he still there? The driver, I mean. There he is.”

  The driver was one of a number of people crawling out into the street from the various shattered storefronts around the explosion. He staggered toward the car and threw his hands in the air, putting them on top of his head in wailing grief. Even from a satellite you could tell.

  “Give him the little gold statue now.”

  The sedan was a mangled, flattened piece of burning metal.

  “What does it look like to you, Wallets? We get our man?”

  “Sheik Kutmar,” Wallets pronounced. “Officially with the virgins.”

  Then Banquo did something utterly unaccountable. He got up from his desk, came over to Johnson’s chair, spread his arms wide, and hugged him. Wallets looked down out of embarrassment but couldn’t suppress the beginning of a smile that steadily grew. And Johnson saw Wallets smile—really smile, broad and easy—for the first time since the Iraq/Iran border.

  Banquo seemed to catch himself, sat back down, and said in his usual, calm understated tone of voice, “That’s partly thanks to you, Peter. What started five years ago in these offices just ended on TV.”

  Seeing Johnson’s confusion, Banquo explained: “During your incarceration, we kept busy and took out a little insurance.” Banquo went on, “We spirited the chauffeur’s family to Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian Coast. Then kept them in a small villa. His choice was silver or lead, as the saying goes. His family getting the lead first. Naturally, he chose silver. So the driver helped us arrange a fender bender in a busy street. Then made a cell phone call. Our final targeting sequence painted the sedan. Couldn’t miss, and—as you saw—Sheik Kutmar’s car happens to blow up.”

  “That’s still a hell of a hole in the street to explain,” Wallets said, gesturing toward the smoldering scene on the screen.

  “Well, yes,” Banquo said. “We won’t be able to do that again. There’ll be all sorts of crazy reports from the scene—flashing lights in the sky, UFOs. But they’ll figure it out. The thing is, we’ve had UAV flights over Iran since ’04. And the Iranians have never tracked them on radar because they were afraid we’d learn too much about their defense systems if they did. Now, that’ll change.”

  He clipped the end of a cigar, as the CIA-SPAN shifted to something else. But no one bothered to watch. “So, we’ll be on to the next thing,” Banquo explained, looking first at his cigar as he rotated it in his fingers, then up over everyone’s head, as if he were addressing a memory. “One down, twenty-four to go. The top echelons of Iranian intelligence and the people who run the nuclear program are about to suffer a series of unfortunate events.”

  What was there left to say?

  After Johnson left, Banquo and Wallets sat alone for some moments. A brief quiet time, each lost in his own thoughts. At last Banquo sighed.

  “Well, shall we get on with it?”

  Wallets nodded silently, and they both rose from their chairs, Wallets taking a briefcase with him.

  They returned to the same office once used to introduce a much less worldly Peter Johnson to his quarry and target, one Dr. Ramses Pahlevi Yahdzi. Now, Yossi sat at the very same desk, looking like a swarthy, petulant Yul Brynner, called to account for some indiscretion. The eye patch added to his coldness, looking out at the world with the same bored insolence as ever.

  “Yossi, a recap of recent history if you don’t mind,” Banquo began. “I want to thank you personally for extracting Johnson from the bazaar, for arranging the safe house, for stocking the trunk of our getaway car. Your forethought allowed the te
am to heal up and then pass the bandit roadblock in Kermanshah. A brilliant bit of soldiering. But there are certain things still troubling us.”

  The spymaster paused. “For instance, there’s the untimely death of Jan Breuer.”

  Yossi had an elbow on the clear desk, his chin propped on it. He didn’t say anything or make a gesture.

  “This look familiar?” Wallets asked, opening a brief case and pulling out a Leupold Night Vision rifle scope.

  “Rifle sight,” Yossi said.

  “Very good,” Wallets said, calmly. “Very useful for dropping some unlucky bloke standing on Second Avenue, no?”

  “Depends on how good you shoot,” with a shrug.

  Wallets nodded. “Well, we all know your skills.”

  Yossi looked unimpressed. What did it take to get this guy’s attention? Wallets grew impatient, drew a Marlboro out if his pack, and lit it, annoyed. But Banquo made a tiny sweeping motion to him with his hand: take it easy, not yet.

  Yossi sometimes reminded Banquo of that prisoner described in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, whose innate bestiality allowed him to thrive in the camp, a world better suited to him than any sane one. For Yossi, the world of intelligence was something like that—double-crosses, uncertainty, and violent opportunism his most natural element.

  “We don’t want this to get ugly,” Banquo said, glancing to a corner of the office. The black soundproof isolation booth from the Astor Ballroom waited for a chance to prove its worth again. Wallets saved one from the Waldorf as an afterthought, sensing a day like this would eventually arrive.