by Blake Banner
And he walked with quiet, vigorous steps back toward the garden where we had found him. I turned to Dehan and spread my hands. She shrugged.
TWENTY FOUR
“He is Adrian Philips.”
We were sitting in Séamus McCaffrey’s Irish Pub and Restaurant on West Monroe Street. She had a Bud and I had a pint of the kind of beer that puts wiry red hair on your chest. We had been quiet for a while and she spoke suddenly, looking at the interlocking wet rings she was making on the tabletop with the base of her bottle. Then she glanced at me, like she thought I would disagree. “Adrian Simon Philips, ASP, the snake, the deadly killer, Ananda Sri Pannasiha. ASP.”
“You’re probably right.”
“So, what? He gets to kill all these people, what is it, twenty? Thirty? More? He has a spiritual epiphany and just walks away from his past? ‘I’m not that man anymore, so I am not guilty.’ Hennessy goes down, D’Angelo goes down, whoever else is involved gets taken down, too, and he just smiles and walks away.”
“That seems unlikely, don’t you think?”
“Well, what are we going to do about it?”
I took a long pull on my beer and gave a big sigh. “Well, before we decide that, we need to have a clearer understanding of what the hell is going on. And we should get that when he gives us all this material tomorrow.” She drew breath to complain and I cut her short. “But! There are a couple of things that have me a bit confused. For a start, if we are assuming that he is Adrian Philips, and he has had this great epiphany, that would explain why he wants the whole story to come out, and why he wants some form of justice done. But what it doesn’t explain is—one, why he did nothing for ten years after David was killed, and two…” I stared at her and frowned. “How the hell he expects to get away with it! He says he’s willing to testify at trial. But if he does, and he is Philips, D’Angelo and Hennessy will recognize him. There must be British officers who can identify him. There must be photographs of him at his old regiment. Once Hennessy’s team set out to show he is Philips, they will find proof. He’s not stupid. He is anything but stupid. So how the hell does he plan to pull it off?”
She thought about it, staring at the table and making Olympic symbols with her drink. “I don’t know. He’s playing mind games. All his clever philosophical bullshit, but in the end all he’s doing is trying to get away with murder.”
“Like I said, Dehan, you’re probably right.”
“And how the hell did he know about your wounds? He gives me the creeps, Stone. This guy is weird.”
“He’s very observant. I wasn’t moving naturally. My arm was stiff…”
“And the heart?”
“Like you said, mind games. Either way, we take the material back and, if it’s as good as he says it is, it becomes a Federal case and we hand the whole thing over to the Bureau. And they get to decide what they want to do with ASP.”
“I guess…” She went to take a pull from her bottle and found it was empty. She sat forward and pointed at my glass. “You want another?” I shook my head and she made to stand, hesitated and then sagged back in her chair again.
“So who killed Dave?”
I nodded. “I have been sitting here wondering the same thing. We’ve been on this crazy wild goose chase.” I smiled in a way that was rueful. “Which makes Carol Hennessy rather appropriately the goose who is going to get cooked, but we are no closer to answering those simple questions which we started out with.”
She stood and went to the bar, and I sat staring at nothing, but seeing David’s astonished face looking at somebody who was holding his gun with a steady hand. Somebody ruthless, cold, and deadly accurate. Somebody who had killed him with a single, well-placed shot, and had then left the gun right there on the bookcase and walked away.
Without the article.
Dehan came back with another Bud and another pint of Murphy’s bitter, which she put down in front of me.
“If you don’t want it you can throw it in my face. But I ordered bacon sandwiches and fries, so I figured you’d want a drink. “
“Thanks.”
“So here’s what happened. Don’t interrupt. Just listen.”
“Yes, Memsahib.”
“2007, after a lifetime of killing, Adrian Philips has an epiphany and decides he wants to make things right. He turns to Buddhism as a way of dealing with his conscience or his karma or whatever you want to call it. But he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in jail, so he stages his own death in Pakistan and moves to Sri Lanka, where he becomes a monk and calls himself Ananda Sri Pannasiha. And in this new identity, he does two things. One, he requests a transfer to the monastery here in Arizona, and two, he contacts Dave Thorndike of the New York Telegraph, a paper that is not afraid to get down and dirty and take on the big boys.”
“Good.”
“I said don’t. Now, thanks to the material that he is able to give Dave, Dave’s article progresses fast, and in February, he contacts Lee and tells him what he has. Lee freaks out and goes to Hennessy and tells her what Dave is going to do. Ordinarily, she would order Philips to deal with this kind of problem. But now Philips is the problem. The Asprin has become the Arsenic.”
“And now you are going to run into a problem.”
“Shut up. No I’m not. You were going to say, why would Lee kill Dave if Hennessy had already ordered Guzman to do it? Well, that’s simple. She’s a careful woman. She takes Lee’s information and she says nothing to him. She goes to D’Angelo and tells him to take care of it. He dispatches the order to Guzman.
“But meantime, Lee, keen to get in good with the powerful Hennessys, takes matters into his own hands.”
I nodded. “That’s possible. And the article and the laptop are not there because Dave has already given them to Lee, who now hands them over to Hennessy.”
“That was my big finale, and you stole my thunder.”
“Sorry. Do it again. I’ll pretend.”
“Take a hike.”
The bacon sandwiches arrived and I realized how hungry I was. We ate in silence until there was nothing left but crumbs on our plates, and she sat picking at those with her fingers.
I said, “You figure Lee for the kind of man who would kill somebody like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“It was cold. Steady hand, took aim, looking right into his face. Didn’t flinch. It takes real cold blood to do that. I wouldn’t be able to shoot someone in the head while they were looking me in the eye.” I shrugged and smiled. “I just don’t see that in Lee.”
She made a face. “He was ruthless enough to shop his friend to Hennessy. Greed and ambition can do crazy things to a person.”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
She frowned. “You think Philips did it?”
“If that is Philips, he is certainly cold and professional enough to do it.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
* * *
We stayed the night at the Hotel Don Carlos next door and the following morning, under fresh, blue skies, we drove out again to the Top of the World Stupa, to meet with Ananda again. The unenlightened being on reception smiled beatifically at us and told us that Nayaka Ananda was waiting for us at the pagoda behind the stupa, where he had met us the day before, and we retraced our steps up the long track.
He was seated on the floor in the lotus position and appeared to be meditating. When we were crossing the bridge, he opened his eyes and watched us approach. As we climbed the steps he stood, in a single fluid movement, and bowed to us.
“Good morning, Carmen, good morning, John. Please, will you sit?”
We greeted him and sat, and he picked up from the floor a military rucksack and placed it on the table in front of me.
“I think you’ll find everything you need to close your case in here. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. I have no secrets.”
I opened the sack and extracted a number
of A4 notebooks, a case of rewriteable CDs and DVDs, and an album of photographs. While I was doing that, Dehan said, “I have some questions.”
Ananda smiled. “I thought you might.”
“I think you’re full of shit. I think your story is bullshit, I think you are Adrian Philips, and I think you got religion as part of your midlife crisis and now you want to clear your conscience of all the murders you’ve committed without having to face the music. So you’ve invented this cock and bull story about how Adrian Philips is dead but you knew him intimately, but it’s bullshit. You are Adrian Philips, and you can’t run away from yourself.”
He held her eye throughout her speech with no expression at all on his face. When she’d finished, he waited a moment, then said, “That isn’t a question, Carmen. That is just a statement of your perception.”
“More bullshit.”
Now he smiled. “Frame your question. What is it, exactly, that you want to know?”
She was struggling and looked at me for support. I said, “I want to know how you expect to get away with it. You have offered to be a witness at the trial. You told us yourself that Philips met with Hennessy and D’Angelo several times. If you go into the witness box, they will see you and recognize you. You’re on the FBI’s wanted list. Once Hennessy and D’Angelo finger you, the FBI will be all over you like a rash. There must be photographs of you back in England, with the regiment. How do you think you are going to pull this off?”
He looked a little bit amused and again waited for me to finish. When I was done he said simply, “I am not Adrian Philips. Adrian Philips is dead. So there is nothing for me to get away with or pull off. And it seems to me that you are wasting valuable time and effort in attempting to prove that your perception is the truth, rather than seeing things as they really are. When I give evidence at the trial, you will have your answer.”
A small white bird with a bright yellow face landed on a rock in the pond opposite the pagoda and started to peck at the water. He watched it for a moment and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was looking at a man who was deeply at peace with himself. I asked him, “Did you kill David Thorndike?”
His face creased up and he started to laugh. “No, John, of course not.” He thought for a moment. “He was killed, probably, on the night of Friday the 5th March, 2008. You are welcome to check the records of the stupa. You will find that that Friday, as every other Friday for the last ten years, I was in meditation at the meditation hall for the whole evening.”
Dehan said, “When you heard that Dave had been murdered, why didn’t you come forward and inform the authorities that you had all this information?”
He listened to the question, then gazed at the bright morning, at the pond and at the tiny bird, still standing on the rock.
“Carmen, I know you don’t trust me or believe me, and there is no reason why you should. But trust yourself, trust what you know to be truth. The last person whom I offered this information to died because he had it. Kama is a real thing. It is not a theory or an hypothesis, or a mystical force. It is a true system, a process, that responds to our actions and our intentions.
“So, if I had come forward and offered this information, which is so loaded with cruel, destructive intentions—if I had come forward and offered it to some investigator, what would my purpose, my intention, have been? To bring peace? To bring joy?”
She scowled. “Justice! To bring justice!”
“What is justice, Carmen?”
“More philosophical bullshit!”
He smiled and nodded. “Yes, that’s what I think it is, too.” She opened her mouth but he raised a hand and stopped her. “I have asked you a question. What is justice? You have answered me with ugly noises and implied insults, but with no reasoned thought. I am going to ask you to think about the question, for yourself, and answer it. You have committed your life to the pursuit of justice, it might be a good idea if you had a clear understanding of what it is. In the meantime, unless you have any other questions for me, I think it is time for us to part.”
I nodded. “Thank you, Ananda.”
“Thank you, John. Please be careful with your cargo. It is dangerous.” He turned to Dehan, who was looking at him like he had sprouted antennae from his head. “Carmen, I hope you find what you are looking for.”
And a moment later, he was down the steps and striding along the path toward the bridge. I watched him go and I wasn’t sure whether to smile or not. I had seen the tattoo he had on his forearm. It was half concealed by his saffron robe, but at one moment, while he was talking, the robe had slipped. He had made no effort to hide it. It was a winged dagger with a motto across it, ‘Who Dares Wins’. The emblem and the motto of the British SAS.
In the end I smiled, shoved the files back in the rucksack, and stood. “Come along, Little Grasshopper. Let’s get back to the Big Apple and cause a bit of mayhem and pandemonium.”
We walked slowly through the peaceful sunshine, listening to the faint twitter of distant birds and the ripple of water from all the streams and fountains that played here and there throughout the complex. And somewhere, nearby, there was the deep, resonant chime of a large, tubular bell.
TWENTY FIVE
We caught American Airlines out of Phoenix International at twenty-five after four that afternoon, and landed at La Guardia five hours later, at fifteen minutes after eleven, New York time. I slept all the way and arrived feeling exhausted, with a hellish mixture of numb aches and shooting, stabbing pains in my shoulder.
The airport was practically empty as we came out of arrivals, and I was suddenly acutely aware that our weapons and our badges were locked in the Jag in the secure parking lot. We crossed the echoing, cavernous hall, looking over our shoulders, and stepped into the cold, New York January night. Like me, Dehan was scanning every corner and every shadow, every car and every pedestrian. But nobody knew we were there. Nobody knew where we had been. Not yet.
We got the shuttle to the parking garage and finally made it to the car. Dehan drove and neither of us spoke all the way home. My shoulder was killing me. When she finally pulled up and killed the engine, she looked at me.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
I nodded and reached for the handle to open the door. She put her hand on my knee. “Wait.”
She pulled her Glock, cocked it, and climbed out of the car, scanning the street in both directions. I swore to myself, drew my weapon, and got out, too.
She said, “We’re clear.”
Condensation billowed from her mouth, luminous under the streetlamps. I opened the trunk and took out our bags, hiding the pain as I lifted them. I carried them up to the porch and she followed, still covering the street. I unlocked the door, flipped on the switch, and we went inside. Then we checked every room. When we knew we were safe, she smiled at me and said, “Weird, huh?”
“Yeah.” I watched her go to the kitchen and get a glass of water and two painkillers. She brought them to me and I took them and sat. “I’ll tell you what it brings home to me, Dehan. We can’t hang around for the Feds. We have to act and act now. I’ve got some pizzas in the freezer. We stick them in the oven, make a gallon of coffee, and spend the next two or three hours, however long it takes, going through the evidence. When we know it’s watertight, we tell Newman—I don’t care if it’s four AM, we wake him up. And first thing in the morning, we make our arrests. Then, when the DA is primed and the suspects are in custody, we hand it over. Right now we are sitting ducks, and the longer we wait, the greater the risk.”
She nodded. “Yeah, let’s do it.”
And for the next four hours, we ate pizza, drank a gallon of coffee, and waded through reams of evidence, photographs, DVDs, and CDs. The evidence was not compelling, it wasn’t damning. It was conclusive. There was absolutely no question that D’Angelo and Carol Hennessy had conspired in the murder of every name on the list and a few besides. There was no doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that Carol Hennessy had ordered their
assassinations. David had been right. This was not dynamite. It was nuclear, and when this shit hit the fan it would be the biggest scandal of the century. Questions would be asked from the lowliest barstool in Hunts Point to the Senate, in every newspaper and on every talk show around the world—how was it possible for this woman to get away with what she had done for so long? Where were the checks and balances? Where was the constitutional machinery that was supposed to make this kind of thing impossible?
When we had finished, Dehan flopped back in her chair and rubbed her face with her hands. Then she sat and stared at me for a long moment. “Stone, however many we put inside, or the Feds put inside, how many will get away?”
“I don’t know, Dehan, but after this is over, it is going to be much, much harder for these parasites to do this kind of thing. For that much at least, we need to thank Ananda.”
She grunted and I grabbed my phone and called Inspector John Newman at his house, where he was sleeping. It was five in the morning.
* * *
By fifteen minutes after six we were in the briefing room at the station. We had four teams plus myself, Dehan, and the Inspector, who turned to me now and said, “Detective Stone, this is your show.”
I stood and faced the room. Sixteen cops, twelve uniforms and four detectives specializing in company fraud, all looked back at me, frowning, aware that something extraordinary was happening, but not sure what.
“First, let me say that what is discussed in this room this morning stays strictly among us. People’s lives are at stake. One careless comment or phone call, and people could die. Us included.
