by Jake Needham
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t have to come to you. I could have gone straight to the Senate Intelligence Committee. They would probably have been pretty interested. Held big public hearings. That kind of thing.”
Billy gave a little half-shrug. “We would have blown you right out of the water.”
“You mean you would have had me killed.”
I didn’t make a question out of it.
“Well…” Billy looked as if he was thinking about it. “Not unless we really had to.”
After that he snorted in a way he apparently thought amounted to an ironic laugh.
“I’m joking, Jack.”
“No,” I said, “you’re not.”
“Yeah, I am…mostly.”
After that we slipped off into a silence in which we avoided looking at each other. When it became obvious Billy was prepared to wait me out all night if he had to, I took a deep breath and slugged back the rest of my whiskey. Then I leaned forward and folded my arms on the table.
“You’re going to have to convince me all this was really okay, Billy. You really are going to have to convince me, or…”
“Or what?” he asked when I hesitated.
“I don’t know, Billy. I can’t tell you yet.”
Billy nodded slowly at that. He lifted his martini glass, but when he realized it was empty he put it down again. Then he leaned forward and folded his own arms on the table.
“Regardless of what Plato Karsarkis may have told you, Jack, and in spite of what you may think you’ve guessed on your own, there’s a lot more going here than you know about.”
“Guys like you always say things like that, Billy, but—”
He waved me impatiently into silence.
“It’s smelly shit. Stuff you would never believe. The only way anything is ever going to be okay is if some hero steps up and hammers a stake right through the bad guys’ fucking hearts.” Billy cocked his thumb and tapped himself in the chest with it. “That would be me.”
I said nothing.
“But to pull that off,” he went on, “I’ve got to have somebody I can trust to do a little business for me from time to time.” He squinted slightly, then reversed his hand and reached out and jabbed me in the chest with his forefinger. “That would be you.”
I pushed away his extended finger and folded my arms again.
“You’re a paper shuffler, Billy, just like I am. What do you think you’re going to do? Throw your laptop at the villains? Besides, you’ve got to find them first.”
“I can do that.”
“How?”
“It’s called reconnaissance by fire, my friend. You shoot at the trees. If somebody shoots back, they’re there.”
“Look, Billy, I don’t—”
“And there’s one other thing you need to know.”
I waited.
“Two weeks from tomorrow, the president is going to announce a little reshuffle in the White House staff.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Hardly.”
I watched Billy carefully. I could have sworn I saw him sit up a little straighter.
“The president is going to announce my appointment as his new National Security Advisor,” he said. Then he leaned back and cut me a major wink. “I’m going to be running the NSC.”
For a moment I was too flabbergasted to say anything, but Billy was plainly expecting me to so I did my best.
“Well, congratulations…” I fumbled.
“Thank you, Jack.”
“I mean…well, that’s great…but, Billy, after what I’ve told you tonight, how in the world could you even think about—”
“Just shut the fuck up, Jack. Let’s order some red meat and a lot of booze and you can hear me out. Then if you want to tell me to stick my offer straight up my ass, go ahead. But listen to me first. You owe your old roommate that much at least.”
Dinner went on for over an hour after that. Billy did all of the talking. I chewed at my food without tasting it, and I nodded and said uh-huh a lot, but looking back, I can’t remember what I ate or even very much about what Billy Redwine said to me.
When we exchanged goodnights on Fifteenth Street just outside the Old Ebbit Grill, Billy insisted I meet him at his office the following afternoon at four. At first I refused. I was tired and a little angry, and I hadn’t decided what I was going to do next, or if I was going to do anything at all. But I knew Billy wasn’t going to take no for an answer so eventually I gave up arguing with him and just nodded.
After that I stood for a long time on the sidewalk and watched as Billy and his minders crossed Fifteenth Street and walked back toward the White House. I followed them with my eyes until they were lost to sight behind the line of marble columns marking the north portico of the Treasury Building.
I have no idea at all why I did.
FIFTY THREE
I DIDN’T LEAVE a wake-up call so the next morning I slept late.
When I finally got up I ordered coffee and toast from room service, then pulled on a hotel bathrobe and retrieved the Washington Post from outside my door. I skimmed the paper while I was waiting for my breakfast and, after the waiter had come and gone, I turned on CNN. With half an ear I listened to the weather while I drank two cups of coffee, then I spread marmalade on a slice of toast and ate it.
I went to the bathroom and was coming out again when I heard Billy Redwine’s name mentioned. The main news had just begun and I sat down on the couch and watched while a smooth-skinned black woman with short hair and round glasses read the lead story.
“—according to Vernon Jackson, the Park Service patrol officer who discovered the body just after seven this morning. Ft. Macy Park is a little-visited civil war monument on the Potomac River in Northern Virginia and the presence of Redwine’s Mercedes in the parking lot just off the George Washington Parkway at such an early hour had attracted the attention of the patrol officer. Upon investigation, he found Redwine’s body on a grassy slope about two hundred yards into the park. At this hour details remain sketchy, but sources tell CNN the cause of death appears to have been a single gunshot wound to the head. Redwine’s death is being investigated as a suicide. There has not yet been any comment from the White House although the President is expected to issue a full statement this morning. In other news at this hour—”
I pushed the mute button on the remote and sat without moving for a long while as I watched the woman’s lips flap silently. Once she reached up and pushed her glasses back against the bridge of her nose with her forefinger, but the gesture was quick and absent-minded and I imagined she did all the time without really noticing it.
A little later I stood up and walked over to my breakfast tray and poured another cup of coffee.
The coffee was cold, but I drank it anyway.
THREE DAYS AFTER that, late in the afternoon, I took the Mustang and drove out the George Washington Parkway to look for Ft. Macy Park. The day was overcast and bloodless and the Potomac River oozed lazily toward the Atlantic under a distant pewter sky.
The entrance to the park was marked by nothing but a small highway sign half hidden by a curve. I almost missed it.
A narrow asphalt road ran slightly uphill from the Parkway through a thick forest of oak and birch trees and it ended in a small parking area surrounded by a low, grassy bank. A deep coating of dead brown leaves covered the asphalt. They crunched under my tires as I parked the car.
Ft. Macy had been part of Washington’s defensive perimeter during the civil war, but there was little recognizable left of it now, just a few forlorn-looking cannons and some earthwork mounds heavily overgrown with weeds. As I stood in the parking area looking around, I couldn’t see any obvious pathways or jogging trails leading into the interior of the park, but I had brought a copy of TIME magazine that had a detailed story about Billy’s death, so I took it out and folded it back to the page with a map of the park that illustrated where his body had been found.
&
nbsp; The climb up the bank surrounding the parking area was harder than it looked and my loafers slipped and slid on the decaying leaves. Eventually I hauled myself up to the top by pulling on a dead branch that was hanging off a birch tree. On the other side of the bank was an undulating beige and yellow ocean of leaves that stretched all the way to the Potomac River broken only by clumps of tall, spindly trees mostly bared of their leaves, a few rusted iron cannon supported by wooden wagon wheels, and one lonely-looking picnic table.
I consulted the map in TIME again, turning it to match the contours of the land, and I traced a course with my eyes toward the spot where Billy’s body had been found. Starting down the back of the slope in that direction, I slipped on the leaves and fell, but I caught myself with my hands before I was completely down and kept going. My feet made crackling noises in the dead grass and far in the distance I could hear the sound of the Potomac River where it squeezed through a rocky narrows just below the park.
According to the magazine, Billy was stretched out on his back on a grassy slope about two hundred yards into the park, so neatly placed he might have already been embalmed and laid out for viewing. He looked as if he had shot himself once in the roof of the mouth with a .38-caliber revolver. The bullet went straight into his brain and he died almost instantly. There had been very little blood.
The slope wasn’t very hard to find. It was near the river, just past the one lonely picnic table, but it was covered with tall weeds rather than grass and it was more like three hundred yards away from the parking area, not two.
On the whole, it was a strange place for a suicide. If you intended to kill yourself, why would you work so hard to get to a place that had so little to recommend it? Why would you stumble hundreds of yards in the dark through rotting leaves and up and down pathless slopes before you sat down in a patch of weeds, put the gun barrel in your mouth, tasted the sour metal and your own fear, and pulled the trigger?
I stood on that slope for a long time looking down at the place where Billy’s body had been. There was a fresh coating of leaves over everything now and no suggestion at all that anything out of the ordinary had ever happened there. Still, I had no difficultly picturing it. I could imagine Billy’s body laid out right there, neatly dressed in a white shirt and dark suit, stark in its contrast against the yellow and tan leaves.
I took the cassettes Plato Karsarkis had given me out of my pocket and juggled them back and forth, shuffling them from one hand to another. Just three little plastic boxes capable of doing more damage to the White House than the biggest truck bomb.
But now that Billy was dead, what were the tapes? Proof that someone close to the president had gone too far? That someone with the president’s ear may have been behind some slick and shadowy operation and then tried to cover it up when it spun out of control? That someone so racked with guilt over what he had done had gone out in the dead of night and shot himself through the head?
That would be that, wouldn’t it? Mystery solved, blame assigned, case closed.
You deserve a better epitaph than that, Billy, my friend. You really do.
I began unspooling each of the cassettes with my fingers. As I worked I watched the narrow brown tape slide through my hands and snake to the ground. Curling into the rotting leaves right on the spot where Billy’s body had been found, it fell in masses of loops and whirls almost invisible against the russet-colored compost.
Just as I finished it started to snow. The flakes were big and wet and turned to water as soon as they hit. I pulled up the collar of my jacket and wiped the wet snow off my face.
I would like to say it was over then, that it ended there.
But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.
Billy Redwine hadn’t committed suicide, of course. He was murdered, shot in the head and dumped in a rundown park because somebody bigger than he was thought it would be better that way.
There was always somebody bigger, wasn’t there? There was always one more rung on the ladder.
It was never over. It never ended.
I jammed my hands in my pockets and started the long walk back to the car.
THE END
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A WORLD OF TROUBLE
PROLOGUE
I HAVE THE right to remain silent and mostly I have exercised that right. Anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law. I have the right to an attorney. If I cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for me.
That’s what they told me.
Of course, I figure it’s mostly crap. If I don’t start talking pretty soon, telling them what they want to hear, they’ll haul me out to a little room somewhere in the back and beat the shit out of me.
So let’s get one thing straight right now. Before they come back.
I am not who they say I am. I am not a criminal, not a spy, certainly not an assassin. I am not any of those things.
Maybe I cut a few corners here and there. I would admit to that. But at every turn I tried to do what seemed to me to be right. When you come down to it, that is my only real defense. I did what seemed to me to be right.
There is a pathetic air to that claim. I understand that. And it is something that embarrasses me. But nevertheless it is the truth, so I say it whenever they ask why I did what I did. At least, I think it is the truth. I am not absolutely certain I know what the truth actually is anymore.
Five years ago I was a high-flying lawyer in Washington, D.C., well enough connected to the masters of the universe to occasionally lunch at the White House mess. Three years ago, for reasons I will skip over now, I left the United States to become a professor of international business at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. It was not long before I had a beautiful Italian-born girlfriend, a woman who would later become my wife, and together Anita and I moved into one of Bangkok’s toniest apartment buildings.
That was when I really hit my stride. Half the companies in Asia seemed to want an American academic on their board of directors. Particularly one with connections in Washington who had been publicly hailed as an expert in international finance and money laundering. There was money and there was prestige. There were private jets and there were suites at famous hotels. There was, let’s face it, ego stroking on an international scale. It was like a blow job that never stopped. It was a great time. The best.
Today, on the other hand, is not a great time. Not the best.
I am no longer a professor of anything. I am no longer on anyone’s board of directors or taking meetings with those good corporate citizens who were lined up outside my office door just a few months ago. I was a reluctant player in a little drama with an international fugitive just slightly less notorious than O.J. Simpson, one who thought I was his ticket to a White House pardon, and I attracted a lot of attention. All of it bad.
And that, as they say, was that.
Goodbye Chulalongkorn University. Goodbye corporate directorships. Goodbye private jets. Goodbye suites in famous hotels. Goodbye blow job.
I earn my living these days practicing law again. Or at least that is what I say when someone asks me what I am doing since I have no better answer. I work by myself in a one-room office in Hong Kong that is above a noodle shop. I live alone in a borrowed apartment. And I have absolutely no idea where, or with who, Anita may be anymore. There’s a pattern there, but it’s one I try not to dwell on.
In order to convince myself I was really a lawyer again, I had to have at least one client, of course. I had known Charlie for a while and he offered to become my first client and I took him on gratefully, without a second thought. It was just that simple. It never once occurred to me back then that having Charlie for a client would lead me straight to where I am today, sitting here in this chair, waiting for the FBI goons to come back
and say what is to become of me.
Perhaps if I can explain to you what really happened, if I can convince you this is all just a terrible mistake, I can convince them, too. Perhaps I can even convince myself.
The problem is where to start. This is a story with a lot of beginnings. Sadly, it still has only one ending. All the same, I must begin somewhere, so I will do so here.
On a gloomy day in January in, of all places, Dubai, a tiny city-state in the United Arab Emirates perched on the edge of the Persian Gulf.
Just before dawn that morning a brief but furious storm had rolled in from the desert and left the whole city smelling like a roll of aluminum foil.
Oh wait, I almost forgot.
My name is Jack Shepherd.
But that may be the last thing I tell you of which I am completely and absolutely certain.
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
ONE
THE BLACK MERCEDES S500 pulled to the curb and stopped. Shepherd opened his eyes. He didn’t much like what he saw when he did.
“I thought we were going to your office,” he said.
“We are,” the man in the backseat with him replied.
“This isn’t your office.”
“I need to stop here first.”
“What for?”
General Chalerm ‘Charlie’ Kitnarok didn’t answer. He just opened the rear door and got out, and his driver and security man jumped out right behind him. Charlie bent back down and beckoned. Shepherd was the only person left in the car, so he sighed and got out, too.
Shepherd stretched and yawned and he damn well took his time doing it. It was only mid-morning in Dubai but he hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours on the overnight flight from Hong Kong and he was dog-tired and grumpy. He rolled his shoulders and looked around. They weren’t anywhere near Charlie’s office. They were parked on Baniyas Road a little west of the St. George Hotel, just outside the souk.