by Jake Needham
“You amp;rsnd quo;re shitting me,” I said.
Kate shook her head.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Why in God’s name would they have been trying to kill me?”
“If you’re working with Plato, there are people who assume you know what he knows.”
“But I’m not working with Karsarkis.”
“There’re people who probably assume you are.”
“And he hasn’t told me anything.”
“They would probably assume he had.”
“And you think whoever is doing all of this goddamn assuming would send two goddamned gunmen to ambush Mia’s car and kill everybody in it just to get me? Just in case I actually do know whatever it is I’m supposed to know?”
“You can put it together that way.”
I stared at Kate. “Oh, man,” I sighed, “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I feel like I got you into this, Jack,” Kate said.
I noticed Kate’s voice had turned businesslike. So much, apparently, for the personal warmth part of our program.
“Until I figure out how to get you out of it, a team of my best people will be with you around the clock. You can trust them absolutely.”
“With my life?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Gee, then I guess my worries are over.”
“They can’t get set up until morning, but I’ve got local police all around this hospital until then. Don’t worry. We’re not going to give them a second chance.”
“Give who a second chance?”
Kate glanced briefly out the window, which there was very little point in doing since it was pitch black out there. Then she put her hand on my shoulder and gave it a little squeeze.
“I don’t know. The truth is I just don’t know for sure.”
But of course I did. I knew. For sure.
“And you think the marshals had nothing to do with this?” I probed again.
“No.”
This time I was watching Kate’s eyes when she answered and I decided she believed what she was saying. She didn’t know about Marcus York, I was certain of that now, but something still kept me from telling her.
“What about the email intercepts?” I asked, trying to make up my mind how to play it from there. “They had to mean something.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack.”
“Kate, I’m talking about the email intercepts, those transcripts you gave me…”
“I never gave you anything.”
I was a little slow-witted right then, I realized, but not that slow-witted.
“Okay,” I said. “I see.”
“I’m glad.”
Kate may not have known specifically about Marcus York trying to kill me, but she knew there was something out there. She also knew it was something ugly and something neither of uspec understood. She wanted to get as far away from it as she possibly could. I could hardly say I blamed her.
“So,” I said after mulling that over for a bit, “if I told anyone you had given me copies of the NIA email intercepts from the US Marshals that implied they were actually here to kill Karsarkis rather than return him for trial…”
“I imagine most people would have a hard time believing that. Without copies of the intercepts, of course, which you don’t have.”
“Which I do have,” I said.
Kate went completely still.
“You couldn’t have gotten past the security routine in that file,” she said after a moment.
“You’re right,” I said. “I couldn’t have.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“But I know people who could. Did, in fact.”
Kate measured me with a long look. As she did, she bit unconsciously at her lip. One tooth made a little white mark there and I looked at it until it had faded away.
“All right,” she said after a time had passed in silence. “So what are you going to do?”
I blew out a breath and popped my lips.
“Maybe I’ll just go back to sleep,” I said, “and think about everything again tomorrow.”
“That’s probably the best thing for you to do.”
Kate smiled and started to turn away, but then to my surprise, and possibly to hers as well, she reached out and stroked my hair with the tips of her fingers. Her cool hand lingered on my forehead as she might let it linger on the face of an injured child. I could see a thought come into her eyes like a dark bird, stay a moment, and then fly away.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” she said after a moment or two had passed that way.
I was about to say something in reply, something that would tell Kate how happy I was she was there right then and that she would be coming back, but before the thought could shape itself into words, the drugs took me and I was gone.
FORTY FOUR
When I woke again Kate was gone. All the lights in my hospital room were off. Even the glow of the aquarium had been extinguished by some thoughtful soul who must have feared it would disturb my sleep.
My eyes searched the room for the clock. They did not find the clock, but what they did find made me lose all interest in the time.
Plato Karsarkis was sitting on a chair at the end of my bed. He was wearing jeans, a black golf shirt, and black loafers without socks. One leg was draped casually over an arm of the chair and he was facing away from me as if he was studying the heavy draperies that covered the windows.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Karsarkis tilted his head back and turned it toward me without moving his body.
“I would think first you’d want to know how I got in. Your girlfriend is supposed to have this place locked down tighter than a gnat’s asshole.”
I let Karsarkis’ characterization of Kate pass. I was hardly in any state to engage in a pointless debate.
“Apparently not,” chI said instead. “I gather you walked right in.”
“Ah, well…” Karsarkis made a little movement with his hands he probably thought was self-deprecating. “People like me do pretty much what we want to do. You said as much once yourself, didn’t you?”
I didn’t take the bait.
“So,” I repeated instead, “what are you doing here?”
“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry for what’s happened. I wish now I hadn’t gotten you involved in this.”
“Mia’s the one who’s dead,” I said, “not me.”
“Yes, well…”
Karsarkis swung his legs to floor and pushed himself out of the chair. Its springs squeaked in the stillness. He took a few steps toward me and put both hands on the rail at the foot of my bed.
“Now we’ve both lost people we loved,” he said.
For a moment, I didn’t see what Karsarkis was talking about, then Anita’s face faded into my consciousness like a transparency projected on a screen.
I said, “It’s not the same thing.”
“It is, in a way,” Karsarkis said. “There are all kinds of losses.”
“Your wife was cut to pieces by rifle fire and left to bleed to death. Mine just found somebody she liked better.”
“Either way there was no way for either of us to avoid the final outcome,” Karsarkis said. “How such things happen is less important than that they have.”
“Do you ever think about anything except yourself?”
“Actually, I was thinking mostly about you, Jack. About what you’ve lost.”
“I’ll bet you were.”
Karsarkis took a deep breath and glanced away, but when he looked back at me his face showed such weariness and resignation that for a moment I was almost embarrassed at the way I was treating him.
“You’re right, of course,” he said. “It’s just…well, I guess we all have our own ways of dealing with things.”
“Some of which aren’t very attractive,” I said.
Karsarkis nodded slightly as if he hardly cared one way or the other, then he fold
ed his arms and stood silently for a while, looking at the wall over my head.
“First Mike O’Connell, then Mia,” I said. “They’re getting closer.”
“They are, aren’t they?”
“You know who it is.” I didn’t bother to make a question out of it. There was no reason to.
Karsarkis seemed to weigh the idea for a while as if he were genuinely considering its nuances and implications.
“Yes,” he finally nodded. “I do.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me at the beginning?”
“I assumed it would scare you off, that you wouldn’t be willing to help me if you knew.”
He had me there. He was probably right.
“Some very bad things have happened, Jack. Some things no one wants anyone to know about, ever. Your country has a greater intere1emst in keeping them buried than anyone.”
“My country? Not your country?”
To that, Karsarkis offered the smallest smile I had ever seen.
“I don’t have a country,” he said.
“Maybe you should get one. A little loyalty to something might be just the ticket for you.”
“Oh, I had a country once, and I was loyal as hell. I risked everything for it. Then they fucked me. Flat out fucked me. That’s why I don’t have one anymore.”
I remained silent, waiting for the rest of it. I did not have to wait very long.
“They came to me, Jack. They came to me and asked me to do a dirty job because they thought I was a hard enough man to do it. There are always a lot of those jobs around, but most of them go begging because there aren’t a hell of a lot of people to do them. I agreed, of course. Agreed without conditions. My adopted country was asking for my help. And besides, I thought it was right.”
“Agreed to do what?”
“I put my ass right out there and risked everything,” Karsarkis continued, ignoring my question. “I asked other people to do the same thing, and then the bastards walked away and left me twisting in the wind when they decided I didn’t matter any longer. I learned a real lesson there, I did. I could teach a course on loyalty. Maybe I could lecture to some of your classes on the subject. What do you think?”
A minute or two passed in silence after Karsarkis’ outburst. I studied the pattern in the vinyl upholstery on the chair at the foot of my bed. It wasn’t a very interesting pattern.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” I said after a while. “I don’t believe you came just to say how sorry you are that you got me involved.”
Karsarkis straightened slightly, shifting his weight back onto his heels.
“No,” he said, “you’re right. I didn’t.”
Karsarkis unfolded his arms, then folded them back again and fixed his eyes on mine.
“I’m leaving Thailand.”
“When?”
“This morning.” Karsarkis glanced at his watch. “I have a plane waiting at the airport,” he said. “I’ll be gone in an hour.”
“To where?”
“Paris.”
“Paris? Why Paris?”
Karsarkis shrugged slightly. “At least maybe I can get a decent meal before they shoot me.”
Abruptly Karsarkis turned away and strode to the windows. Putting his hands on the drapes he paused and then, as if in an afterthought, he glanced back at me.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
I shook my head. He pushed the drapes open and shoved them as far apart as they would go.
It was almost sunrise. I could see the faded disk of a three-quarter moon fighting an unpromising battle against the rising light. Moisture glowing with an otherworldly intensity ringed the moon in a halo. I knew Phuket would be wet with rain before the morning was out.
“They’re going to get me, Jack. The bastards can get anybody they want, even me. Once I thought I was bigger than theidty are. But I’m not. And they can.”
Karsarkis spoke without turning around. He just kept staring out the window, his eyes seeing visions I could not even imagine.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
When Karsarkis turned back toward me his face was perfectly still. Then he put both his hands in his pockets and tilted his head slightly to one side.
“An hour before I land in Paris, the press will be told where I am and what I’m about to do. Half the fucking television cameras in the world will show up to meet me. I’ll walk off the plane and-”
“They’ll grab you and turn you over to the FBI. Even the French don’t have the balls to let you just wander around loose. You can’t buy them like you did the Thais.”
“Yes, I can,” Karsarkis smiled tightly. “They just cost a lot more.”
“What I’m trying to say,” I began, “is that if you-”
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” Karsarkis interrupted. “The French Minister of Justice has agreed to let me have my say to the press when I arrive. He assumes I’m going to stick a big one up some American asses and the little froggie bastard is wetting himself waiting for that.”
“And then what?”
“After that they can arrest me if they want to, but my guess is they won’t bother. Not after I’ve already told everything I know.”
“What do you know?”
“Ah, well. That’s always the problem isn’t it, Jack. Yes, what do I know indeed?”
I struggled to sit upright on the bed. The bandages pulled at my side and pinched my skin and I winced.
“You’re right, of course,” Karsarkis said when I was still again. “I didn’t come here this morning just to tell you I was sorry. I came here for a far more important reason.”
“Look, I’m not sure-”
“You are close to something very big, Jack. Closer than you know. Before I leave, I want to tell you what it is.”
Well, here we are, I thought to myself.
Plato Karsarkis is about to tell me whatever it is that he knows, whatever it is that somebody wants to kill him for knowing.
I closed my eyes and tilted my head back against the pillow. I should have stopped Karsarkis right then without hearing anymore. I should have just told him to get the hell out and leave me alone and that would have been that.
But, of course, I didn’t.
Sometimes the desire to know-just to know-turns into a feeling like the one you get when a beautiful woman catches your eye and doesn’t look away. You see her, and you want her, and you know perfectly well that you shouldn’t chase after her, that it will cost you, but you do it anyway. In the end, you chase after her anyway.
And then you pay for it, exactly the way you knew you would.
FORTY FIVE
Plato Karsarkis stood quietly in front of the windows, his hands in his pockets. It seemed to me that he stood that way for a very long time. Finally he turned around and examined metly small hospital room as if he were seeing it for the first time.
I said nothing. I just waited.
“Let’s start at the beginning, Jack,” Karsarkis said after a few moments passed like that. “Eventually maybe we’ll even come to the end.”
“It’s your story,” I shrugged, at least I shrugged as well as a guy lying in a hospital bed wrapped in bandages can shrug. “I’m hardly in any position to throw you out.”
Karsarkis walked over to the couch and sat down, slouching back as if he was settling in comfortably for a long chat. Outside the windows, the dawn looked as if it was further away than I had thought it was a few minutes before, but probably that was only my imagination.
“About eight years ago, a man I knew very well…” Karsarkis paused and cleared his throat. “His name doesn’t really matter. Anyway, I had just bought control of a Hong Kong company that had shipping interests in the South Pacific and he asked me to allow some American intelligence officers to operate a small freighter under the cover of this company. He told me its purpose was to supply some people in the region with whom the Americans had a covert relationship, and he readily admitted the su
pply process would include weapons. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I gathered it was a CIA operation and they probably wouldn’t tell me the truth even if I asked. So I kept things simple. I agreed. I didn’t ask for the truth.”
“What were you getting out of it?”
“Ah, well…” Karsarkis laced his fingers behind his head and studied the ceiling with what seemed to me to be unnecessary care. “There was a matter of an SEC investigation and some claims of securities fraud-pure horseshit, you understand-and my friend promised they would be dealt with. But I would have been delighted to help my adopted country regardless, Jack. Absolutely delighted.”
“Of course you would have.”
Karsarkis looked at me, but he said nothing else.
“So the CIA used your shipping company as a commercial cover in return for killing off an SEC investigation of you,” I said. “Am I supposed to be shocked? Maybe even morally outraged? I’ve heard worse.”
“That was just the beginning, my friend. The thin end of the wedge. There was another favor after that, and then another and another.”
“And more favors for you in return?”
“Naturally,” Karsarkis nodded without any apparent embarrassment. “When I set up Icon and shifted our group operations to Luxembourg, they suggested I form an entirely separate division to work with them. Technically, it was only another Hong Kong trading company called Global Resources that was controlled by Icon, but it was a lot more than that in reality. You have no idea, Jack, how much of American intelligence operates through perfectly ordinary looking companies like Global Resources. They use commodity brokers, air freight forwarders, oil drillers, all sorts of companies.”
“All part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, huh?”
“I doubt you have any understanding at all of the real scope of it, my friend. Any understanding at all.”
Karsarkis drew a deep breath and stood up. He stretched slightly and walked over to my bed, resting his hands on the rail at its foot.
“I never knew the whole ststrory. Only pieces here and there. Companies operating through Global Resources were used for secret construction projects, selling and shipping arms, money laundering, bribery, extortion, blackmail, disinformation, and plain old espionage. They acquired high-resistance steel and sold it to Pakistan for nuclear weapons research; they traded weapons for information with Abu Nidal; they built the Al Shifa chemical plant in the Sudan; they founded an executive jet service in Switzerland that made planes available to anyone anywhere with no questions asked. You get the idea, Jack. It was nothing less than the administrative apparatus of covert action on a grand scale. And it was all being done in my name.”