by Jake Needham
“Now wait a minute, if you think—”
“I commit the truth into your hands, Jack. If they get me, you will be the only one left alive who knows what really happened. Be careful what you do with that knowledge.”
Karsarkis let his eyes linger on me for a moment and then he walked around from the foot of the bed and extended his right hand. Automatically I took it and we shook, but even as we did I wondered why I was shaking hands with this man.
“What do you expect me to do?” I asked.
“I really don’t know, Jack. I don’t know what I would do if I were in your place.”
Karsarkis raised a hand to his forehead in a mock salute. “Regardless, I’m off now. Wish me luck.”
Then, with a half-dozen strides, Karsarkis crossed the room and disappeared through the door. It swung shut behind him and closed with a snap that sounded harsh and final.
THROUGH THE WINDOWS I watched the palm fronds lift and churn in a rising wind. A carpet of trees stretched to where the dim edge of the Andaman Sea lay like a smudge on the far horizon. The sky was strung with rain clouds and the dawn mushroomed through them. The horizon was etched into the sky with a pure white light as finely grained as bone.
I picked up the envelope and I held it for a long time. Now that I knew what was in it, I could feel the tapes. Three microcassettes lying in a neat row.
After a while I pushed a finger under the flap and tore the envelope open. I dumped the cassettes out into my palm. They didn’t look like much. Just three ordinary Sony microcassettes with silver and red labels. No other markings. None at all.
Perhaps there was nothing on them, I mused, wishing for just a moment that would turn out to be true. But I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.
There was a drawer in my bedside table, and I opened it and dumped the cassettes inside. Maybe, I thought, someone would save me a lot of trouble and just steal them.
FORTY SEVEN
IT WAS NOT long after Karsarkis left before the drugs took me again. This time I fell into a sleep so fitful and shallow that I drifted in and out of it with every blink. I dreamed in disconnected bursts, like a man flipping through cable television channels with which he was unfamiliar.
Around nine a young girl in a nurse’s uniform woke me with a cup of very weak tea. Smiling, she pointed to a plastic tumbler of water on the table next to my bed, placed a small paper cup half full of pills next to it, and then slipped quietly out of my room. I sipped the tea and swallowed the pills and looked out the window.
For a while I wondered if my early morning conversation with Plato Karsarkis had been just another episode in my parade of pharmaceutically enhanced visions, or if it was something that had actually happened. Then I put my hand on the drawer in my bedside table and pulled it open. The three microcassettes with the silver and red labels lay inside exactly where I had put them. That seemed to settle that.
I leaned back against the pillows and was thinking about what Karsarkis had told me when I felt rather than heard the door to my room opening.
“Man, you look like you been rode hard and put up wet,” CW bellowed. He walked over to the bed and patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “How you feelin’?”
“Fine,” I replied automatically, then thought about it. “Actually, I feel like shit to tell you the truth.”
CW nodded slowly as if he was thinking about that, then suddenly he thrust a hand toward me and held out a stack of magazines. “This was all they had downstairs,” he said. “Couldn’t find a Playboy.”
Taking the stack from him, I put it down on my bedside table.
“Who is Marcus York?” I asked him.
My question caught CW off balance and he tried for a moment to look vague, but he was the worst actor I’ve ever seen, except of course for Sylvester Stallone.
“What do you mean?” he finally mumbled when I said nothing to take him off the hook.
“It’s a simple enough question. Who the hell is Marcus York? And don’t bother claiming that he’s a United States marshal. We’re way past that now.”
CW hitched up his pants and coughed unnecessarily, then he threw me a baleful stare. “He’s one sorry-assed motherfucker who thinks he’s slicker ‘en owl shit.”
“But whose sorry-assed motherfucker, exactly, is he?”
CW looked down and kicked at the floor with the toe of his boot like he was playing with gravel in the dirt.
“You may not believe me, Slick, but I got no goddamned idea. None. When this operation started, they told me I had to take this sorry sack of shit along and give him cover as a marshal. The bastard might be…”
CW stopped talking and his head bobbed around as if it had momentarily become detached from his shoulders.
“What?”
“Maybe CIA,” CW said. “I just don’t know.”
“It was York’s email the NIA gave me, wasn’t it?”
CW consulted a spot on the floor. “Yeah, I think it probably was.”
“Do you know where York is now?”
CW said nothing.
“You don’t know what’s happened to him?”
“I got no idea.”
“I do,” I said.
That got CW’s attention. “You do?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I killed him.”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
“He was one of the two hitters who attacked the car. York was the one I shot.”
“Ah, stop pulling my pecker, Slick.” CW cocked his head at me and I saw something like a half-smile on his face. “I saw those two myself. They was just local boys. Shit, I thought you were serious there for a minute.”
“I was serious. I pulled the helmet off the man I shot and I saw his face. It was Marcus York. There’s no doubt about it. Somebody switched the bodies.”
CW opened and closed his mouth. He looked as if he was experiencing a change of cabin pressure in an airplane. But he didn’t say anything.
It started to rain just then. CW and I watched in silence as fat drops slapped against the windows, joined together into little streams, and ran down the glass. Even from inside the room I felt like I could smell the dense aroma of wet trees and damp earth that always accompanied rainfall in the tropics. I remembered the ring I’d seen around the moon at dawn and I wondered how long the rain would last.
When the door from the hallway opened again, CW and I looked around at the same time. Kate took a step into the room and stopped. She obviously knew CW and she didn’t seem particularly happy to find him in my hospital room.
But then I caught something else in her expression, too, and I knew she had something to tell me, something that was about to change everything.
I raised my eyebrows, waiting.
“He’s dead,” she said.
I said nothing. I didn’t even need to ask Kate who she was talking about.
“He was leaving Phuket this morning,” she went on. “His plane exploded just after takeoff.”
While I thought about that, CW walked over to the windows and peered out as if he might be able to see the crash site just by looking hard enough through the rain.
“Now ain’t that a hell of a thing?” he said after a few moments, his voice subdued.
After a few moments of silence, I pushed myself into a sitting position and swung my feet over the side of the bed.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Kate asked.
“I want to have a look at the crash site.”
“What on earth for, Jack?”
“I don’t see why I have to have a reason.”
“They just took two bullets out of you. You can’t go anywhere.”
“How are you planning on stopping me?” I asked.
I stood up and started toward the closet, my hospital gown flapping open over my bare ass. As my feet hit the floor, each impact traveled straight to the stitches in my side. I tried not to wince.
“I could always steal your pants,” Kate smiled.
“You could.�
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“But that isn’t really necessary.”
When I opened the closet, I saw what Kate meant. It was completely empty.
“Would somebody get me some goddamned clothes?” I asked.
Kate said nothing. She just looked at me.
“Please?” I asked.
“Are you sure about this?” Kate asked.
“Absolutely sure,” I said.
A few minutes later I was wearing a blue scrub suit and a dirty pair of green flip-flops Kate had scrounged from somewhere. We were all out in the hallway before I remembered the cassette tapes lying in the drawer in my bedside table. My previous desire to have someone steal them had evaporated.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I forgot my watch.”
Back in the room I walked around the bed and opened the drawer in the sidetable. I stood for a moment, looking down at the three cassettes lying there, willing them to speak or move or do some damn thing, but of course they didn’t. They just lay there.
The scrub suit had two deep pockets and I scooped up the cassettes and shoved them down into the left-hand one. Then I slipped on my watch, buckled the band, and walked out to where CW and Kate were waiting for me in the hallway.
FORTY EIGHT
IF YOU HAVE never been at the scene of a plane crash, I can tell you now your first encounter with one will be the most horrifying and unsettling experience of your lifetime.
The world never lacks for terrible images: a subway car reduced to a smoking skeleton by a suicide bomber; bodies piled one on another in a shallow ditch alongside a nameless road; the rubble of a village bombed into oblivion by mistake, or perhaps on purpose. Still, there is some particular revulsion that comes with contemplating the destruction brought about by a plane crash. Perhaps it is because the impact is always so violent; perhaps it is because the bodies of the human beings who were on the aircraft are so grotesquely mutilated; or perhaps it is just because the dead are so easy for us to identify with.
People who die in plane crashes are generally healthy and prosperous people with no notion their lives are about to end in sudden terror. When the corpses are found, they have usually been torn to pieces by the massive impact and the body parts scattered over the ground with the most mundane sort of litter: books, newspapers, bits of fabric, pieces of wire, and shoes. There are always so many shoes. It always adds up to the same picture. Right up until the moment of impact, these were people very much like us, people living altogether normal lives, lives not unlike our own.
It may be the smell that gets to you first rather than the sight. The combination of burning jet fuel, melted plastic, singed fabric, and charred flesh is like nothing else you have ever smelled. Or it may be a recognizable piece of the aircraft or even the sight of pieces of human bodies that causes your stomach to begin churning, but churn it will. You will feel dizzy and faint, and you will fight back nausea. I know all this is true for the simplest of reasons: that was exactly how it was for me when we reached the wreckage of Plato Karsarkis’ plane.
It had stopped raining and the morning had turned bright blue and nearly cloudless. Kate took barely twenty minutes to race north on the main road from the hospital to the airport. We were opposite the east end of Phuket’s only runway when I spoke the first words any of us had spoken since we got into Kate’s car.
“Where the hell is it?” I asked, looking around at a scene that appeared so utterly normal it was almost disconcerting.
Kate pointed vaguely ahead of us and continued driving north. CW was in the back and he leaned forward, pushing his head up between our seats. “What kind of plane was it?”
“Plato had a Gulfstream in Bangkok,” Kate said. “His pilots brought it to Phuket to pick him up.”
There it was again, I thought to myself. Not Karsarkis. Not even Plato Karsarkis. Kate referred to him simply as Plato. It probably meant nothing, but I noticed it nevertheless.
“He boarded and the plane took off to the east, over the island,” Kate continued. “There was an explosion of some kind.”
“Were there any survivors?” I asked.
Kate glanced briefly at me without expression.
We continued northward on what I knew was the main highway leading to the twin bridges that were Phuket’s only connection to the mainland. Just where the highway made a sharp bend to the west, I saw a large sign set in the median strip between the lanes. In white lettering on a blue background, it said, Have a Nice Trip!
Kate pulled out her mobile phone and pushed a button. The conversation was short and I missed what she said, but right after that she slowed the car and turned off at an open wooden shed that was painted bright green. We bumped over a rough dirt track in the general direction of the airport, but I still saw no sign of anything unusual. No fire, no smoke. There was no noise either. The world around us seemed almost unnaturally quiet.
We came to a junction where the track we were driving on intersected another, but there was a closed gate to our left so clearly no one had gone that way. People racing to the site of an airplane crash do not stop to close gates behind themselves. Kate paused briefly, but then she continued straight on.
After another mile or two, I saw it.
Off to our left a grove of rubber trees was hacked and mangled as if a giant lawnmower had sliced through them. Chunks of metal, brightly-colored wiring, scattered papers, pieces of cloth, and lumps of beige plastic were everywhere.
Kate pulled the car to the side of the road. The blue pickup truck and the clutch of motorcycles parked there looked as if they had been abandoned in haste. We all got out without saying a word.
There was a scar through the trees about five hundred yards long and at least thirty or forty yards across. It ran away from the road and between two low hills, bisecting a narrow gully that still had a shallow layer of water in the bottom from the morning rain. On the other side of the gully the trees were more severely hacked and the concentration of debris was greater.
All along the scar a gruesome mixture of wreckage and human remains coated the landscape. Apart from the plane’s engines that were indestructible masses of hardened steel, there were few pieces of wreckage of any size at all. But worse by far was what I could plainly see entangled in the orange life jackets, fragments of metal, and endless loops of colored wire. Half-buried here and there in the sandy ground, even hanging from the limbs of trees, were what had unmistakably once been parts of human beings.
There were a half-dozen brown-uniformed police down near the main body of debris, but they seemed to be in shock and were hardly moving at all. Two other men in short-sleeved white shirts and nondescript dark pants appeared from somewhere and Kate walked over to meet them. The three of them stood in a tight little knot, just out of earshot, and they murmured in low voices. Otherwise, the whole panorama was oddly silent.
When I could bear looking at the wreckage no more, I glanced away and looked down at my feet. A red toothbrush lay in the dirt just in front of my left foot. I hesitated a moment, then bent down and picked it up. It was an Oral B, the same brand I used.
“Goddamn, Slick,” CW breathed out. “I ain’t never seen nothing like this before in my whole fucking life.”
I turned the red toothbrush over and over in my hands and nodded to CW. But I said nothing at all.
“It was Plato’s Gulfstream,” Kate said when she returned from talking to the two men. “No doubt about it. The explosion occurred while the aircraft was climbing away from the airport. It wasn’t a big enough explosion to destroy the plane. Just big enough to cripple and crash it.”
“Could it have been an accident?” I asked, knowing of course that it wasn’t.
Kate glanced at me. “You don’t think so and neither do I.”
“I don’t get it,” CW said. “If somebody wanted to kill Karsarkis, why a small explosion? Why not just blast him right out of the sky?”
“My guess is they were trying to do just enough damage to make certain the plane went down more
or less intact,” Kate said. “Normally planes take off from Phuket out over the sea. That’s deep water out there. If the plane went down there, and it went down intact, we would have never found any wreckage.”
“But it didn’t go down at sea,” I said. “Because the pilot took off in the opposite direction.”
Kate nodded.
“Why would anyone…” I started to ask, but then I trailed off.
I realized the answer was pretty obvious. The only reason somebody would want the wreckage intact and at the bottom of the sea was because they didn’t want the wreckage found, and the reason they wouldn’t want the wreckage found was they expected something to be in the wreckage that they didn’t want found.
Kate had obviously figured it out, too. “What was Plato carrying, Jack?” she asked me right on cue. “What did he have with him that somebody wanted lost forever?”
“Got me,” I shrugged.
Kate watched me, her face as flat as a dinner plate. “From the moment I walked into your hospital room and told you what happened,” she said, “you never expressed the slightest surprise Plato was leaving Phuket today.”
I thought about it, eyes half closed. “Okay,” I said after a moment, “so I knew Karsarkis was leaving. He came to the hospital this morning and told me.”
“Why did he do that?” Kate asked.
“He said he wanted me to know he was sorry he had gotten me into all this.”
“Where was he going?”
“I don’t know.”
“You weren’t curious enough to ask?”
“I wasn’t.”
Kate didn’t even try to be polite about it. “I don’t believe you, Jack.”
“Hey, I understand,” I said, spreading my hands in the universal gesture of innocence. “Sometimes I have a little trouble believing me, too.”
Kate shook her head and looked away. We all fell silent.
“The American ambassador called the prime minister about the time the first reports of the crash came in,” Kate said after a few moments. “How do you suppose he found out about it so fast?”
“Beats me,” I said.