Bannerman's Ghosts

by John R. Maxim

  There was one photo of her. Or believed to be of her. The notation on it read, “Almost certainly Stride.” It had to be at least ten years old. He found it in his file on another old friend, the Israeli, Yitzhak Netanya. Netanya, who now headed up the Mossad, was with the Shin Bet when the picture was taken. She was in the photo with him, as were several other people. It was a candid shot, not posed. No hint of when or where. Tel Aviv, most likely. Perhaps some diplomatic function.

  Stride easily stood out; she was an elegant young woman. The photo showed her full length and in profile. Tall and lean, athletic-looking, and yet very feminine. Yes, feminine, thought Clew. That surprised him. She also had a warm and easy smile on her face. He’d never thought of Stride as ever smiling. In the photo she was speaking to an elderly gentleman, her right hand lightly touching his chest as she spoke. The man clearly seemed to like her; he seemed comfortable with her, which meant that he probably didn’t know who she was.

  The reason for the “Almost certainly Stride,” was that was she was disguised on this occasion. She had dark hair, dark eyes and dark skin in this photo, but none of that darkness was genuine. She wore wigs and tinted contacts when she worked for the Israelis, the better to pass as an Arab. The original Elizabeth was fair-haired and fair-skinned. Her eyes, Clew now recalled, required those contacts because of their unusual color.

  He remembered being told that they were amber, almost yellow. They’d been compared to the eyes of a stalking cat. Those of a cheetah, locked onto its prey, a cheetah getting ready to pounce. Clew wondered if anyone would have made that comparison if she’d never gone near the Middle East and had never become the Black Angel. If, as a girl, she’d had the sense to stay home, those eyes would have been simply pretty.

  Clew hit several keys to combine all he’d found into something approaching a chronology. “Hello, Elizabeth,” he said under his breath. “So let’s see who you were and how you happened.”

  Home, to his surprise, had been Houston, Texas. Clew blinked when he read that. Coincidence? Maybe. That was also the home of Bourne Industries. But Stride hadn’t been born there. She wasn’t even born American. Elizabeth was born in Saudi Arabia, but of European parents, not Arabs. Her birth parents had made the fatal mistake of traveling to that country unmarried, her mother pregnant. Both were arrested, her father was deported. Her mother was thrown into Az-Zahran prison where Elizabeth was born four months later.

  An American couple got wind of her birth. The Americans, Richard and Hannah Stride, were over there working for Aramco Oil, he a geologist, she a nurse.

  Hannah was unable to bear children of her own and had jumped at the chance to have this beautiful blond infant. She’d been urged to adopt her by some righteous Saudi friends. These friends told her that she’d also be rescuing the baby because the non-Muslim infant would otherwise have been sold. She’d be somebody’s little blond sex toy.

  Soon afterward, they moved with her back to the States where Elizabeth grew up quite normally. She knew early on that she’d been adopted, but she’d been protected from knowing the truth about the circumstances of her birth. Her adoptive father died when she was fifteen. Her adoptive mother lived to see her graduate from college, but then she, too, passed away. Elizabeth found some papers in her mother’s effects that named her biological parents.

  She felt compelled to travel back to her birthplace and learn what she could about her parents. The story is that she learned more than was good for her. Her search took her to the same Saudi prison in which her birth mother had been confined. She was promptly arrested. She was never told why. She was held in that prison for more than a year, repeatedly beaten and raped by the guards. Her disappearance eventually led to inquiries by the American consular staff. The Saudi warden decided to get rid of her. He could have killed her and buried her in an unmarked grave, but he decided for some reason to let the sun do it. He had her dumped, half dead, in the searing desert up near the Jordan border. She was found and nursed by an Arab woman who herself was later murdered for that act of kindness. She was rescued again by Amnesty International, or at least that’s who her saviors said they were. In fact, they were Mossad. They were Israeli agents. They ended up recruiting and training Elizabeth and putting her hatred to work.

  “Mr. Clew?” It was Alex. He said, “Sir, we’re running late.”

  Clew said, “Just another few minutes.”

  The Israelis had told her that they’d used their sources to find out what became of her real parents. They were Romanian nationals from the north of that country, both of ethnic Germanic descent. Her father had been a star soccer player. Her mother was a medical student who traveled with his team as a trainer and masseuse. The team was in Saudi Arabia for a match at the time when they were arrested by the Mutawain, the Saudi religious police. Her father, deported, bribed his way back in and set about searching for her mother. He was betrayed, caught and hung within days. His body was left dangling for a week.

  The warden of Az Zahran prison, meanwhile, had taken a fancy to her mother.

  Even before Elizabeth was born, he offered her a more comfortable cell if she, in return, would accommodate him. She rebuffed him, he beat her, lashed her face with a strap. She was badly scarred, no longer so attractive. The warden gave her to his guards who raped her repeatedly, just as they later raped Elizabeth.

  Clew knew that rape was commonly practiced in many Middle East prisons. It is used to humiliate, break the spirit. The warden dropped by to see how well it was working. He told her that her baby was to be sold. She attacked him, spit at him, raked his cheek with her nails. This time he beat her to death.

  Clew wondered how the Mossad could have known this. He supposed that a guard might have witnessed these events and then told tales out of school. But he wouldn’t have put it past the Mossad to embellish or even invent. He didn’t doubt that Elizabeth’s birth parents had been killed, but describing their deaths in vivid detail seemed to him a motivational tactic.

  If so, the tactic certainly worked. She became their avenger all over that region. What made her effective as an instrument of vengeance – aside from her personal hunger for it - was the fact that she was a woman. Dressed in an abaya, fully veiled, fully covered, she could come and go on the streets of any city attracting no more notice than a shadow.

  She did get that warden. She cut his throat to the bone while he sipped an orange fizz at a sidewalk café in Riyadh. She found two of his guards and cut off their right hands. In the Arab world, this was a terrible fate. The left hand is considered unclean. It is used for ass-wiping and aiming to piss. The right hand is used for all polite contact. Never touch another Arab with the left. Never hand him something with it, never wave to him with it. A man who has had his right hand cut off is doomed to a life of humiliation, ostracism. That was why she didn’t kill them outright.

  When Elizabeth’s personal scores had been settled, she went on to dispatch any number of known terrorists and anyone who happened to be with them. She found one who’d bragged of bombing an Israeli school bus and had killed or maimed many children. She left that one alive, but with no eyes, no tongue, and without the means of siring his own offspring.

  The newspaper story that related that incident remarked that she had strong feelings about children. It said that she couldn’t have any of her own as a consequence of her treatment in prison. But two later stories said she couldn’t have children because she’d been shot outside a hotel in Bucharest. She’d gone there on a mission of mercy.

  She had traveled to Romania with an Israeli delegation. They’d gone there to buy Jews who wished to emigrate. This was during the Ceausescu regimes, or rather, just at the end of it. The regime was willing to release all such Jews, but only at a price of so much per head. The average going rate was four thousand dollars, payable in either gold or diamonds. Elizabeth had asked to be part of this mission because she hoped to learn something about her roots and whether she might still have relatives there.


  Martin Kessler had also turned up in Bucharest. It seems he was there doing much the same thing for ethnic East Germans who wanted to emigrate. No honor among fellow communists, thought Clew. The greedy Ceausecus made everyone pay. Kessler might or might not have known Stride by reputation. More likely, he spotted her with the Israelis and began asking questions about her. Fascinated by her looks and by her bloody history, he contrived to meet her at a relocation conference hosted by the Swiss Red Cross. Kessler tried to charm her, but she wasn’t much interested. She did not regard him as a serious man because he didn’t seem to believe in much of anything, least of all the system he worked for. He was also too much of a swash-buckler for her taste. He was gleefully reckless. An adventurer. Kessler, however, knew his way around Romania and he offered to help her trace any blood relatives who were surely still living in that country.

  The regime, at this time, was on the verge of collapse. There were popular uprisings everywhere. Stride and Kessler, during their search, happened to turn up at a couple of the hot spots. The Romanian Secret Police had been watching them and concluded that they must be up to no good. They could not be arrested; they had diplomatic passports, so the Secret Police found another way to teach the Israelis

  a lesson.

  The regime, always looking for a new source of income, had set up a training camp just outside Bucharest for Hamas and Hezbollah fighters. The base had been funded by Iran. The Secret Police alerted Hamas to the presence of the woman who was called the Black Angel. It was Hamas, in fact, who’d put the price on her head, with payment guaranteed by the Saudis.

  Stride and Kessler arrived back in Bucharest. A team of gunmen had set up an ambush outside the Excelsior Hotel. Kessler spotted them, too late: he did push her aside, but Elizabeth took three of their bullets.

  It took Stride almost a full year to recover. Kessler stayed with her, protected her, cared for her, except when he and the other Israelis were tracking down the people responsible. He found the man who had given the order, a colonel in the Secret Police. Kessler threw him out of a window. He went to Geneva with the Israelis

  because that’s where the regime had stashed all the diamonds that they’d been paid for thousands of émigrés over the years. The Romanians were also racing to Geneva to grab that stash for themselves. There was, as Clew recalled, a good deal more killing, but the Israelis did get their diamonds. They carried off bags of them, all superior gem quality, all cut and polished and assorted by weight. A few weighed as much as five carats. The collection was worth almost forty million dollars. They gave Kessler a bag worth over two million. All two carats or less. They were the easiest to sell. They called it a finder’s fee.

  Kessler and Elizabeth stayed in Europe together. Kessler had no job to go back to. East Germany was imploding by that time as well. Elizabeth never went back to Israel. But in Europe they still had to stay on the move because Elizabeth was still

  worth a million dollars dead, twice that if delivered alive. As if that wasn’t enough to make their lives less than restful, word had somehow got out that Kessler had kept the entire forty million worth of diamonds. There were several attempts to capture one or both and coerce them into giving up the stones. It turned out that the Israelis had spread that story in order to avoid having to account for the diamonds they had recovered. They weren’t thieves. They didn’t keep them for themselves. They did the same thing the CIA used to do before the congress passed another of those moralistic laws that effectively castrated that agency. They used them to fund other sensitive operations for which there could be no formal budget.

  If Kessler did take her to the lodge in Chamonix, this would have been a good time to do it. She’d certainly be safe there and she was probably still healing. But they couldn’t stay forever and it wasn’t a life. It must have been their last stop before they decided to leave Europe and try to get lost in America. They tried to settle down in one place or another, but either someone managed to track them down or Kessler would get bored and get himself into trouble.

  Kessler had found, in an American drugstore, a brand of cigarillos called Swisher Sweets. He thought they were something that gay people smoked. Elizabeth told him that they had no such connotation, but Kessler was still amused by the name. Kessler only smoked cigars, hand-rolled, good Cubans, but he bought some Swisher Sweets all the same. Stride may have wondered what he wanted with them, or perhaps she knew that it was useless to ask. By that time, she’d probably given up trying to understand the workings of his mind. So unknown to her, at least in the beginning, Kessler would go out and look for a saloon in a blue-collar section of town.

  He’d flounce in, affecting an effeminate manner. He’d put his Swisher Sweets on the bar and order a frozen daiquiri. This was guaranteed to elicit some comment from one or more other patrons. Inevitably, some cowboy or biker would insult him. He would respond meekly, which invited more abuse, until the bully went too far and either crowded him or touched him. Kessler would take him apart. Bannerman said that Kessler didn’t always leave unscathed, but that it would take at least three men to defeat him. Kessler didn’t seem to mind an occasional defeat. It was worth it as long as he got in his licks. He felt that it kept him in trim.

  For Elizabeth, however, this was one straw too many. She was grateful to him and she knew that he loved her, but finally enough was enough. She moved out and said it was over. He stayed in touch all the same and continued to watch over her, presumably hoping that she would relent. But then she died on that exercise bike, this time for real, a few months later. Kessler, disconsolate, went back to Europe where he wandered, aimless, for a year or so. Nothing was the same. He sank into a depression. He checked into the same Bucharest hotel where he had first stayed with Elizabeth. He ordered a bottle of room service champagne. He drank it and then Kessler shot himself.

  Clew had found that hard to believe at the time. Kessler was nothing if not resilient. He had never seemed the type to feel sorry for himself. But the champagne part rang true. A final toast to Elizabeth. And his suicide had been reliably confirmed by the new Romanian government. They’d shipped his body back to his home town of Leipzig where Kessler was still a hero to many. They put up a statue over his grave. Clew had heard that children still come to his grave. They leave flowers and sometimes a yellowed copy of one of his old comic books.

  “Mr. Clew?” He heard Alex Rakowsky behind him. “We’re already a half hour late.”

  Clew looked at his watch. Alex was right. His staff would soon be gathering for his regular morning briefing. But that briefing would have to be delayed a bit longer while he put a call through to Liberia. He reached for his fanny pack, took out his Beretta and clipped it onto his belt. He drew out his PDA and said, “One more minute.” He pressed the rewind button on its recorder. He hit stop, then play, but for only a few seconds. He heard his own voice say, “Have a nice day, Mr. Bourne,” followed by Bourne asking why they’re called “ghosts.” Their voices had been muted

  by the fanny pack, but the quality was adequate. He hit stop again. He placed the PDA into its cradle that sat it at the side of his computer. He downloaded several files into the device, including the one with that photo. He’d re-read them when he wasn’t so rushed.

  Alex asked him, “Did you find what you needed?”

  “Not entirely. But more than I expected.”

  “If you don’t my asking, how secure is that computer? I mean, what if someone hacked into it? Could they?”

  Clew nodded. “They could, but they wouldn’t get anything. They’d need the encryption code to begin with. It’s got a firewall system that will destroy all the files

  if they try to get in some other way.”

  Alex asked, “Destroy them? Where would that leave you?”

  “Inconvenienced. For ten minutes. There are more where these came from.”

  Clew had reached to shut down his machine when a light flashed to show that he had mail. Not ordinary e-mail. It was specially encrypted. H
e’d need to type in another code to read it.

  Alex said, “Bet that’s your office asking why you’re still here.”

  “Encrypted? I don’t think so. That’s what telephones are for.”

  As if to prove it, he hit several keys, taking care to block Alex’s view of the board. A message dropped down. It was still encrypted. But he recognized the six-character code of the sender. Clew smiled. He muttered a name to himself. He added, “Speak of the devil.”

  “Problem?” asked Alex.

  “Oh, no. Just a friend.”

  The code was Paul Bannerman’s. Clew shook his head bemusedly. His first thought was that Bannerman must be reading his mind. Calling him this morning. Today of all days. Was he calling him to ask, “What’s all this about Stride?” But there was no way that Bannerman could have heard about his encounter with Bourne. Or at least he didn’t think so. Not this quickly. It had to be on some other subject.

  He decrypted the message. All it said was, “Please call me. I might need a favor. And Susan asks whether we’ll see you next week.”

  Clew understood the last part of that message. It was asking whether he would be coming to Westport for a gathering that Bannerman was hosting. The occasion was the birth of his and Susan’s second child. It was due, well…now. Any time now, thought Clew. The gathering had started as close friends and family. Clew hadn’t thought that he’d be invited. But the guest list seemed to be growing by the day. There were people coming from as far away as Moscow. It was looking more like a convention.

  Clew would call Bannerman from his office on the scrambler. Regarding the gathering, he’ll say, “Sure. Wouldn’t miss it.” Then he’ll ask Bannerman what favor he needs. And as long as we’re talking favors, thought Clew, he’d ask Bannerman what he might know about Stride. He wouldn’t wait for that slave ship to be seized.