Game of Greed

by Charlotte Larsen

  There is a brief silence while Francis seems to absorb the news. “Go back over everything. Make sure make absolutely sure that you are not missing anything, or have gotten your interpretations mixed up. Thomas, make sure!” With that, he slams the phone down.

  Angela enters, but he dismisses her. He realizes he needs to get his feelings under control before he does anything or talks to anybody. He undresses and changes into a tracksuit, then enters a small gym next door to his bedroom. He turns on the TV and gets on the treadmill. With the sound from the TV muffled in the background, his body challenged by a steep climb on the treadmill, his mind gradually calms down.

  Had Wharton fooled them all? Had he had a deal with Schwartz from the very beginning? Or had he been persuaded after his captivity to ensure his own and his company’s safety? Had Schwartz planned this from the very first conversation in Amsterdam, only sending Francis running off in the wrong direction, while he, Schwartz, prepared his master plan? Or was the merger with Remington a second prize, something to mend a bruised ego because Francis actually had prevented the original plan from being executed by exhausting Schwartz’s leverage with the corrupt partners?

  In one scenario, he had indeed beaten Schwartz to the punch, but in another, Schwartz had had him fooled from the very beginning. The latter is just too painful to contemplate, but Francis forces himself to face that very possibility openly. Now, if Schwartz had him fooled from the beginning, and Francis basically played right into his hand, then it was obvious that the capture of Jo was no idle coincidence. However, if Francis had indeed prevented Schwartz from pulling the rug out from under Smith, Turner, and Stevenson, the capture of Jo and the death of Bhante Padman most likely had been efforts to weaken Francis’s organization. If that were the case, they might still be in danger if certain instructions were yet to be carried out.

  Francis jumps abruptly off the treadmill, turning it off, and walks briskly back to the bedroom, where he calls Angela on the house extension. “Get everybody on a conference call. Now!”

  The forest is unnaturally quiet; only birds and insects lend their voices to a gentle musical backdrop for his meditation. He concentrates on the sounds, picking each individual one out. It is no longer a symphony of sounds, but highly distinct and specific voices of the world. A single bird here, a single insect there. He distinguishes their joy, their plights, his body a complicated, intricate set of processes. With his mind’s eye, he follows the blood’s circulation in his body, the breath oxygenating every single cell, releasing excess toxins. His senses are heightened, there is lightness in his body, and his breath is the only stable sense of self. His mind is luminous. He’s not happy or unhappy. He just is.

  Somebody else’s intention stirs in him. A call. A voice. A message. He can’t tell exactly who it is, but he knows with the same certainty with which he tasted this morning’s rice that somebody is trying to get in touch with him. He slowly pulls himself out of the meditation. His hands meet in front of his chest, greeting Buddha in whatever form he may have at that particular moment.

  Dhammakarati walks down the narrow path toward the communications center, greeting monks, nuns, and laypeople along his way. Lotus flowers face the sun, the delicate frangipani perfuming the air. Hibiscus flowers aggressively display their beauty. The curry-colored dirt paths dye the hem of his robe a light red, almost orange. The color of thinned blood. The blood of a passionless person living in the tropics. A monk’s blood, he thinks, with an uncharacteristic sadness.

  But not the blood of a monk who has dedicated his life to the dual goals of serving Buddha and saving mankind in some form or other. A monk who has to balance the incongruous opposites of never harming another living being, and yet applying violence as a means of getting results. It is a duality not for the faint-hearted, a duality that can only be resolved in the deepest recesses of a meditating mind. In a place where even Buddha’s teachings become obsolete in their transience. He knows that place. He needs that place to stay alive.

  Never in a hurry, he moves with the dignity befitting a senior monk. He will know in due time what is waiting for him. No reason to anticipate. No reason to think a thought through before it is ready. Just like one never moves toward an enemy until the moment is ripe. It is a waste of energy to force what isn’t ready. He knows this, too.

  However, a nagging thought keeps penetrating the calmness of his mind. Something disturbs him, but he cannot put his finger on it. It was something he saw yesterday. A shadow. A movement too sudden for quiet monastic life. A jarring tone in a symphony.

  He lets the thought pass, knowing that it will return with more substance attached once it is ready. He can’t do anything to compel it anyway.

  Halfway toward the communications center, he sees an anxious young monk running toward him. “You’re most wanted, Bhante,” he stammers. “There is a conference call for you.” Dhammakarati nods and places a gentle hand on the young monk’s shoulder. The epitome of peace and calm.

  Three days later, Francis learns that another monk is dead. Same procedure. Same inscription. Dhammakarati’s hunch had been right; somebody indeed had been inside the gates of the monastery. Somebody uninvited.

  With a heavy heart, he dials Jo’s number.

  Chapter 22

  In the dark hours of a late winter afternoon in Copenhagen, Jo puts down the phone with a shiver. Her worst fears are materializing. Although she understands and even, with some reluctance, respects Francis’s decision to demoralize Schwartz himself and dissuade his clients from following him rather than using violence, she finds the price they are paying much too high. Another monk is dead! How many need to die before somebody takes it seriously?

  She paces her apartment for the better part of a half hour, her anger building and partly replacing the fear. There is no way she will allow him to jeopardize all the hard work they have done over the years. And there is absolutely no way she will allow Dhammakarati to be placed unwittingly in harm’s way. And right on the tail of these thoughts, her hatred of de Lingua returns in full force. When has she ever loathed another human being thus?

  She’s about to speed-dial Dhammakarati when a semi-articulated idea disrupts her thinking. What is it? What is this shadow of knowledge, this thread of insight that she can’t get her head around? Something is moving in the periphery of her consciousness. Something important. By now she has learned to take her instincts, half-baked though they may be, seriously enough to examine them under the bright light of analysis. In most cases, they turn out to be guiding her in the right direction.

  The only thing to do to actually speed up the process of maturing and materializing this vague mental hint is to overcome her desire to act, and instead sit down to meditate. It is not easy in her current state of excitement, anger, and fear. But years of training have her down on the pillow and entering a state of deep meditation in a few moments.

  An hour later, she breathes deeply, puts her palms together in front of her chest, and lets her head fall forward. Her mind is clear. She knows what to do. Now she can allow her more analytic thinking to complete the task of planning, examining risks, and evaluating consequences.

  She collects a stack of large drawing paper, colored pencils, her Mac, her phone, and a large pot of tea, and sits down at the worktable in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Frederick’s Church in central Copenhagen. The light is fading, and early evening is approaching, bringing with it the dark night of a northern country. For the next couple of hours, she fills page after page with drawings and notes. By ten, she has one single piece of paper containing a list of twelve points that will take her from now to the completion of the operation. Successful or not. Each point is described and illustrated in detail on individual pages. Her plan is organized around the standard covert-ops guideline: what, how, who, when.

  The first thing she needs to do is to get reliable intel as to the “what,” and since she cannot very well allow Francis to know of her plan, she’ll need
to access some of her own resources. Resources that she believes, hopes, that Francis doesn’t know about.

  She knows him too well. He will never allow her to go back, nor would he ever condone what she’s going to do. She needs to go off the reservation for this job. To go rogue and act on her own. With no backup, no organization to fall back upon. She knows this is likely the most dangerous operation she has ever contemplated, yet she has no choice if she’s ever to trust in her own judgment and courage again. Francis, with his delicate views of violence and his preference for mind games and tactical solutions, will never understand the depth of her conviction; he will never grasp her complete certainty that this is precisely the thing to do. The right thing to do.

  What she needs to know is the extent of this man’s organization, a complete description of his personal habits, a list of physical assets including weapons and hideouts, and a current update on his movements. There is no way she can extract this kind of intel on her own. Not without being detected either by him or by Francis. She doesn’t know which is worse: to be stopped dead, literally, or to be deterred from action by Francis and have to sit on her hatred and raw instincts, maybe forever.

  There is no other way than to get ahold of some of her old buddies from her training days. She can think of one in particular who would be perfect for the job. But whether he’s available or even alive she doesn’t know. Krause has been active in espionage all his adult life, learning the trade in the late phase of the Cold War. Unlike most of his contemporaries who were ditched by the digital revolution, however, Krause seems to have been born to make use of all things computerized.

  She doubts Krause is even his real name, but its German connotations seem somehow fitting for a man who is upright, extremely precise, and absolutely independent, never placing his loyalties in any one person or organization for very long.

  The problem is how to get in touch with him. There is only one way to do that, as far as she knows, and that is to place a classified ad in the lost-and-found-section of the New York Times a rather quaint method of contact that brutally exposes Krause’s ripe old age.

  It takes her only a few minutes to compose a message that would seem harmless to the uninitiated. The ad announces the loss of a female Bengal cat, three years old, one ear missing. For contact, she gives a Hotmail address registered in the name of an alias she’s never used before. Jo is not naïve. She suspects at least a handful of desk analysts across the world pore over every edition of every major newspaper for hints of terrorism, arms dealing, or drug trafficking. But she makes sure to use the exact phrase Krause gave her years ago to memorize, should she ever need him. She calculates that Krause will get in touch within twenty-four hours after the ad appears, which means inside of two days. Provided he’s still alive.

  There is really no point in planning anything before she gets the information she needs. She knows from experience that planning prior to having sufficient knowledge of the “what” is, at the very least, a waste of time, and at worst may push the action in the wrong direction. She clears the table, hides her notes in the usual hiding place, and goes to bed.

  Thirty-six hours later, she receives an e-mail message in her Hotmail account. It appears to be an invitation to the opening of an art exhibition in London, one day from now. She quickly packs a small bag, and within an hour, she exits the basement parking lot in her own car, having planned to drive to London via a Calais-Dover ferry. She estimates she can do that in approximately fifteen hours, leaving her just enough time to find a hotel and get a brief rest. The drive will give her the opportunity to consider all options and make sure that she’s indeed ready to go ahead. A fifteen-hour cooling-off period. She congratulates herself on her prudence and allows herself a moment of self-satisfaction.

  As the small car speeds south past the border between Jutland and Northern Germany, in New York Francis wakes up with a start. His body jolts up in bed, and his mind seems to race around in circles; something is off. But what? He reaches out for his phone and calls Angela. Her voice is calm and normal, and he can’t bring himself to disclose his discomfort. All he asks is whether any news from Dhammakarati has arrived during the night. Angela reads out a short message she’s received on their secure phone, which states that Dhammakarati is fine; he has secured the monastery by deploying his bando team to guard the perimeter, and he has called back every monk who was outside on a retreat and prohibited everyone else from leaving the monastery. He, himself, will be laying low for a while to avoid any unnecessary risks.

  So, there is no cause for concern in that area. But what, then? Francis’s next call is to Thomas to ask whether he has come up with any new insights since they talked the night before. If he has, Thomas seems unwilling to let Francis in on the news, which is his typical reaction when he is not certain. Thomas is of the school that believes information should be verified and precise, or not shared at all. Information shared too soon, he believes, often endangers an operation significantly. After years of working with Thomas, Francis has given up on pushing him for news. He won’t get it anyway.

  Finally, and with a significant degree of apprehension, Francis calls Jo. She picks up on the third ring, and he can tell she’s in the car probably on a highway, by the sound of it. “Where are you?”

  Jo hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “Just took the car out for a spin. Need to clear my head. Can I help you with anything?”

  Francis doesn’t answer straight away. He knows she’s lying, but with her, it is always a delicate balance between keeping her on a tight leash and giving her some degree of freedom. He considers that she must have a reason for lying to him and decides to let her run with it for the moment. “No, not really. Just wondering whether you’d fancy having dinner in Copenhagen tonight. I need to see Thomas.” If she can lie, so can he.

  “Oh, I am sorry, but I was planning to spend the night in Jutland with my dad,” Jo says. “Unless, of course, you want me in Copenhagen, Francis?”

  He tells her to go ahead with her plans, that they can talk tomorrow, and hangs up. Now he’s certain she’s lying. He could get her car checked. Like the cars of all his staff, Jo’s is equipped with a tracking device that enables them to come to each other’s rescue, should the need arise. But she would find out, and it would only endanger the trust she has in him. He thinks for a while. Jo might have removed the tracking device. She surely would know not only where to look for it, but how to remove it in a way that would not alert the observation computer. He lies back in bed, calmer now that he knows the source of his unease. It is Jo. She’s up to something. And his only option, if he wants to maintain their relationship, is to let her go off the reservation. Sighing deeply, he pulls himself up, reaches for the phone, and orders breakfast.

  “I’m sorry I’ve dragged you across the world, but it became clear to me that we cannot solve this in a conference call,” Francis says while extending his hand to Dhammakarati.

  “Never mind. It doesn’t really matter.” Dhammakarati shrugs in an archetypical Indian way and, for a brief second, his cultural background penetrates the robes of the monk.

  Francis leads the way into the study, where Angela is waiting with an English-style high tea. The two men sit down opposite each other, and Angela closes the door softly behind her.

  “Let me get straight to the point, Dhamma. I fear that Jo has become very upset by the latest news of another murder in your Sangha. And for Jo, upset equals action. I don’t know how well you really know her?” His eyes search for clues in Dhammakarati’s face but find nothing to indicate the depth of their relationship.

  “Not too well,” Dhammakarati responds, his eyes locked on Francis’s. “Not too well.”

  Francis nods slowly, but whether in acknowledgment of the truth or in recognition of somebody else equally trained in giving answers that only provide more questions, it is hard to know. “You see, despite her cool, analytical exterior, she is deep down a passionate person. Only this passion requires v
ery particular reasons to come alive. And I am absolutely certain that your dead monks, coupled with the humiliation de Lingua exposed her to, is exactly the right combination to make her burst.” He ponders for a while. “Also, when I talked to her on the phone less than forty-eight hours ago, I got the distinct impression that she was lying to me. Which is unusual. She has concealed things from me in the past, but I can’t recall her ever making an outright lie. And the strange thing is, I am certain she knew I would know, but that she somehow played on the gentleman side of me to let it slip, to let her be for a little while. And up until last night, I was reluctantly content to do so. But then Angela told me that she’d tried to get hold of Jo for some unimportant administrative thing, and Jo’s cell phone sounded as if it were abroad before going to voice mail.”

  He looks at Dhammakarati. “And that’s when I called for you. If she is traveling, I can think of one only place she might be going, and that is to Sri Lanka to look for de Lingua.”

  Dhammakarati doesn’t answer straight away. He is weighing his loyalties. On one hand is his current master, who has just hauled him across the world only to send him back again, but who otherwise is not only fair but serves a cause that fits right into his own life mission. And on the other hand is this woman whom he hardly knows, yet knows better than he has known any other person who has been dear to him in his life. It doesn’t take him long to decide, having come from a tradition of unquestioned loyalty to a master. “What do you want me to do, Francis?”

  “I want you to find her and stop her by any means necessary from doing harm to de Lingua. She will not only ruin her own life, but she will jeopardize the organization.” He looks beseechingly at Dhammakarati. “You know that we don’t condone the use of violence except for self-defense. We use other means. Our task is not to take out de Lingua, however unsavory he is, but to prevent Schwartz from pulling the rug out from under Smith, Turner, and Stevenson, which we have accomplished and to discourage him from doing anything like this in the future. That is our part in the game: Schwartz destroys; we protect. And to that end, I am willing to go very far. But not murder. Or violence. Besides, there are far worse fates than death. And I have pledged myself and this organization,” his arms sweep the room, “to using wits over violence any time, to outsmart, outmanoeuvre, out-tactic anybody who is not playing the game in a decent way. I’ll come after anyone who ruins for greed and avarice. I’ll hunt down the last person who steals a coin from the poor but I will not murder an individual when a large and very significant organization may come tumbling down if we’re only smart enough.” He seems to have forgotten Dhammakarati, having whirled himself into a mental frenzy, although his appearance is as cool and collected as always. “This is exactly what we do! We do maximum harm by minimum effort to greedy, unethical corporations that can’t find their right from their left. We help them see the light. We do this through stealth and intelligence and moral superiority. These are our weapons. Not guns or knives or small explosives. Mind! And mind only.”