A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘But they can’t just kill people like that—’

  ‘What do you mean, they can’t kill people like that? They did kill people like that, Detective Miller. They killed an awful lot of people—’

  ‘For money?’

  ‘For money, yes. For money - and power. For political influence. How the hell do you think the CIA funds its operations? Do you have even the faintest inkling of the cost of some of these projects?’ Thorne waved his hand in a dismissive fashion. ‘Of course you don’t. The cocaine that comes in from Nicaragua pays for arms and for political favors; it pays for the subversion of foreign aggressors and the assassination of political figures. You don’t think we just go cap-in-hand to the Treasury Department and ask for three hundred million dollars, do you?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t—’

  ‘And then there is the question of national security,’ Thorne interjected. ‘After the war was over, after we ran out of Nicaragua with our tails between our legs, money was needed to keep people secure. The State Department, Defense, the National Security Council, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, even the CIA itself. There were people who needed to be protected, people who had made decisions regarding Nicaragua and the security of the United States who would have been in the line of fire if the truth had ever come to light. You’re talking about people who were needed to deal with Grenada in ’83, Libya in ’86, El Salvador, Panama, Iraq, the Sudan - people who are still needed to this day. And we had a duty, a sworn responsibility, to ensure that the decisions they had made for the good of the country were never questioned. The truth would have brought Reagan’s administration to its knees. Even his assassination attempt was an effort to distract peoples’ attention.’

  Miller opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘Isn’t it now obvious, detective? He was supposed to be shot at. But, saying that, Reagan was never the brightest light in the harbor, so I don’t know what the hell they expected from him.’

  ‘This is insane . . . who the hell would do that? Who the hell would set up an assassination attempt on a president?’

  ‘The CIA,’ Thorne replied. ‘This is what they do. They stand on the wall. They stand on the wall and they defend America, and they do what’s right, and they do all the things that no-one else has the guts or the balls to do, and then they wonder what these liberal-minded assholes are bleating about in Congress when they talk about violations of civil liberties and the rights of foreigners to their own countries.’ Thorne leaned forward, his eyes brighter, as if he was now driven to tell Miller what he knew. ‘As far as the CIA is concerned no-one has the right to anything until the CIA confers that right—’

  ‘You can’t tell me that Hinckley was set up to kill Reagan—’

  ‘I’m not going to say one way or the other, but we were there to ensure that he could not. Oswald took the rap for Jack Kennedy, just as Sirhan Sirhan did for Bobby in the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. And who created an FBI mouthpiece for Woodward and Bernstein when they wanted Nixon out of the Oval Office? We did. This is what we exist for.’

  Thorne leaned forward. ‘And shall I tell you why I’m talking to you, Detective Miller? Because you can do nothing about this.’

  Miller was visibly taken aback.

  ‘There is no reason for you to be surprised. You want to know what happened to John Hinckley after he tried to kill Reagan? They shipped him off to the puzzle factory, pumped him full of psychiatric drugs, turned his mind to mush . . . probably shocked him into a coma. They told him to think one thing one day and then they contradicted it the next. Over and over and over. They confused him, disoriented him, made him question his own name, his own existence. They brought him to a state of such complete delirium that even if he’d remembered who’d told him to shoot Reagan he wouldn’t have been able to say it. Now he can say what the hell he likes because he looks crazy, he sounds crazier, and who the hell is going to believe a man who tried to assassinate the president of the United States of America?’

  Miller felt real anger, the anger that had been building up inside him for days, and finally he was confronted with someone who knew more of what was going on than he did, and this person was taunting him.

  ‘This . . . this is un-fucking-real,’ Miller said. ‘I’m not crazy. I am a Washington police detective, and there’s a great many people who would be very interested to know what I have to say about—’

  ‘About what, detective? About some imagined conspiracy that goes back to the war in Nicaragua, a war that most Americans don’t even care to know about? Or John Robey, respected college lecturer, published author, long-listed for the Pulitzer, and how he was really an expert CIA-trained assassin, responsible for dozens and dozens of killings in Nicaragua - and in an endless number of other countries - all at the behest of his government controllers? That story, detective? Is that the story you want to tell the world? Or maybe the story of this Ribbon Killer, how some other one-time government-paid mercenary was instructed to clean up a couple of situations here in Washington, and he got creative, decided to use the old-style system of filing we employed out there?’ Thorne smiled, the expression of someone remembering some past pleasant moment.

  ‘Filing?’ Miller asked. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Bodies . . . dozens of them. Stacked on a rack of wooden shelves and covered in tarpaulin. Used to douse them in lavender water, gallons of the stuff. Real sick . . . an awful smell, rotting bodies and lavender. Who in hell’s idea that was I’ll never know. And they used to tie a tag to them, a ribbon around the neck just like a luggage tag, and the tag would state the way in which they were to be disposed of. Some were to be found, others to disappear, and there were cleaning crews who dealt with that stuff once the bodies had been shipped in.’

  ‘And this was what Robey did . . . is that what you’re telling me? That Robey did that out in Nicaragua and then brought it back here?’

  ‘No, God almighty, no. Robey would never have done that. Robey was, I should say is, a very grounded man. No, the one that you people were dealing with was someone else entirely . . . in fact you know him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The body you found in the trunk of the car . . . that, detective, was your so-called Ribbon Killer . . .’

  ‘And who the hell was he?’ Miller asked, and even as he asked, he understood that the truth was far worse than anything he might have imagined.

  ‘Who was he? His name was Don Carvalho, but who he was is of no importance at all. He was given instructions to deal with certain matters, he added an embellishment of his own for some reason no-one knows or cares, and he had to be excused from the playing field. The fact that John Robey was the one who dealt with that issue might be interesting to you.’

  ‘Robey killed him?’

  ‘Apparently so . . . but only because he wanted to prevent Carvalho from killing you.’

  Miller was hardly able to breathe.

  ‘Don’t be so alarmed, detective . . . I should think that by now you would be undisturbed by any further revelations. Robey had a purpose in mind for you. He turned many years ago . . . turned against the company, against his own mentors and colleagues. He and Catherine Sheridan believed that the world had a right to know what happened in Nicaragua, what is still happening now, and for obvious reasons this could not be allowed to occur. The fact that he sent documentation to these people . . . Barbara Lee, Ann Rayner, the first one . . . I’m sorry, I don’t recall her name—’

  ‘Mosley. Margaret Mosley.’

  ‘Yes, that was it . . . the fact that after this fiasco with Darryl King five years ago he had the nerve to start this thing over, this bleeding heart liberal bullshit about the rights and wrongs of what happened back then—’ Thorne thumped his clenched fist on the arm of his chair and Miller jumped.

  ‘There is no question of rightness or wrongness when it comes to the security of a nation.’

  ‘You’re crazy . . . you’re fucking crazy—’

  Thorne raised his hand. ‘I h
aven’t finished . . .’ He paused for a moment. ‘The public has judged you, Detective Miller, and they found you guilty. Doesn’t matter what the coroner’s enquiry said. Doesn’t matter what testimony your friend Marilyn Hemmings might have presented . . . the public has labelled you a maverick, a rogue cop. They believe without question that the police are more than capable of protecting their own, so it came as no surprise when you were exonerated in the murder of Brandon Thomas. They never expected it to be any other way.’

  Miller was incredulous. ‘How the fuck do you—’

  ‘Come on, detective, you can’t honestly believe that this matter has gone unnoticed. Who the hell did you think James Killarney was? The FBI? You think the FBI was interested in the deaths of five lonely women, one of them black, and from the projects? Somehow I don’t think so. Killarney is CIA, as much as Robey ever was. He brought those reports straight to us.’

  ‘What d’you mean, straight to us? Who the hell are you people?’

  ‘You people? That’s who we are, Detective Miller. We are just “you people”. We are the ones who see the grand scale of all of this. We’re not down there concerning ourselves about the next paycheck or who our wives might be sleeping with or where we’re gonna take the kids on vacation. There is a certain view of the world that is maintained, detective . . . the view of the world that people want to see, the way they want it to remain, and we are the very people who give the world - or most of the world - exactly what it wants. The fact that we use the CIA for these operations, well . . .’

  ‘You believe this?’ Miller interjected. ‘You actually believe this stuff you’re telling me?’

  Thorne smiled condescendingly. ‘I figured you for a man of some depth, you know? I believed you might have a higher degree of perception than your average blue-collar factory worker. But you have proved me wrong. I am seldom wrong, detective. Being wrong is something that a man in my position cannot afford. The future of the current administration, the administrations that are put in place beyond this one, beyond even the span of my life . . . these are things we decide now. These are the matters that concern people like me, not whether a few people who looked a little too closely at something wound up dead.’

  Thorne took a deep breath and rose from his chair. He walked to the French windows once again and stood with his back to the room.

  ‘My advice, Detective Miller, is that you walk away from this. As far as you are concerned you are very lucky to be alive. You should have died in place of Detective Oliver. Do not consider that you have earned yourself a reprieve. I cannot guarantee that you will make it to the end of the day, let alone the end of the week, but if you walk away from this, if you accept the fact that this investigation now belongs to the FBI, then maybe, just maybe, you might disappear quietly from the minds of certain men. Some people are dead. It isn’t as though we’re talking a great many people. Fifty, a hundred, what does it matter? They should have walked away, just as you should now. But they didn’t walk away . . . they wanted to know what was going on, even though instinct and intuition would have told them that it was more trouble than it was worth. When people enrolled with this program they enrolled for life, and then they learned something of the truth of Nicaragua, believed that the authorities, perhaps even worse the public, had a right to know. They reported their findings to their superiors, and their superiors came to us, and we took care of things. They made an agreement, and then they broke that agreement. John Robey, Catherine Sheridan, Darryl King. It didn’t do them any good. Sheridan and King are dead, Robey is on the run somewhere, and though he might be one of the best killers the CIA ever trained he is still little more than one man against the might of the United States government and all its associated agencies. And as far as all the others are concerned, they were paid to protect the security of this nation, and they were found wanting . . .’ Thorne looked directly at Miller. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Miller felt as if a string was slipping through his fingers, and attached to that string were all the answers he wanted . . .

  ‘There are things you don’t understand, Detective Miller. That is something I can appreciate, but we only want one thing from you. We want you to walk away from this, walk away quickly and quietly. Accept the fact that you did a good job, you learned some things, but now it’s time to take the advice of Frank Lassiter and Nanci Cohen and find another case to work on.’

  ‘I want to know some things,’ Miller said calmly. ‘I think I am owed that much . . . owed some answers. There are too many things that don’t make sense for me to just turn around and forget everything that’s happened.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, detective . . . doesn’t matter how many things might or might not make sense.’

  ‘But you know what’s happened here. You can answer the questions for me.’

  ‘And why on earth should I do that?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Because, like you said, it doesn’t matter what I know . . . I can’t do anything about it. People wouldn’t believe me, not only because of the sheer impossibility of believing it, but also because they already believe I am a liar, a dirty cop.’

  ‘Yes. Like I said, you have been judged by the world, Detective Miller, and they have found you wanting.’

  ‘So give me enough of an understanding to be able to walk away and forget about it. What’s to lose? That’s the thing you see, the thing about Washington police detectives, they’re stubborn . . . once they have a hold on something they won’t let go.’

  Thorne laughed. ‘I like you, Detective Miller. I respect the fact that you have managed to stay alive this long . . . Alright, for no other reason than that it will do you no good, I will answer your questions. But I will answer only the questions that I want to answer, and those I do not I will refuse, okay?’

  ‘Who killed the first three women?’

  ‘The first three ever, or the first three you knew about?’

  ‘The ones I know about, Mosley, Rayner and Lee.’

  ‘They were killed by Don Carvalho, your trunk victim - and Ribbon Killer.’

  ‘But he was CIA?’

  Thorne nodded.

  ‘And this thing with the ribbons was—’

  ‘Was just some stunt that he pulled . . . and even if Robey hadn’t found him and killed him, he wouldn’t have lasted the week after he killed the black woman.’

  ‘Natasha Joyce?’ Miller asked.

  ‘The one from the projects with the daughter? Yes, she was also killed by Carvalho.’

  ‘And Catherine Sheridan?’

  ‘You will have to ask John Robey about her.’

  ‘Was she also killed by this man Carvalho?’

  ‘Like I said, you’ll have to speak to your friend Professor Robey.’

  ‘And they were all killed because they knew about the Nicaraguan situation?’

  Thorne laughed suddenly, unexpectedly. ‘The Nicaraguan situation? Now you’re really beginning to sound like Capitol Hill there, Detective Miller. You’re beginning to sound like an old hand at this sort of thing.’

  ‘Is that why they died? Because they knew what happened out there?’

  ‘No, of course not. There are many, many people who know what happened out there, detective. If we got rid of everyone who knew what happened out in Nicaragua then most of Congress and all of the Senate . . . hell, you’d have three-quarters of the United States administration being buried at Arlington. The CIA uses some judgement, you know? Some sense of restraint. They make decisions that no-one else is capable of making. They make executive decisions, and once those decisions are made they are passed down through controllers and station chiefs and section chiefs and God only knows who else, and right at the end of the food chain you have people like John Robey and Donald Carvalho. The people you are so concerned about were killed because they found out that drug money was still pouring into the CIA’s coffers long after the war in Nicaragua was over.’

  ‘And the CIA sent assassins to murder th
em,’ Miller said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Cleaners, mechanics, hitters, fixers, dispatchers . . . any number of different job descriptions.’

  ‘And how many of these people are there?’

  Thorne frowned. ‘I have absolutely no idea, and even if I did know, that’s not a question I would be willing to answer.’

  ‘And who orders that people should die?’

  ‘No comment. We go back to the wall, don’t we, Detective Miller? The wall that has to be guarded by someone . . . by someones I should say.’

  ‘A wall against what? Against some imagined communist infiltration? Hell, it’s not the 1950s anymore.’

  ‘And the reason it’s not the 1950s, the reason there is no longer a Cold War? I’ll tell you why, detective . . . because we did things like El Salvador, Libya . . . things that would never have been paid for had it not been for Nicaragua. Because there were people like me and John Robey and Catherine Sheridan who believed enough in what was right and democratic to go out there and do something about it.’

  ‘You really believe that?’ Miller asked. ‘That flooding the United States with hundreds of tons of cocaine in order to pay for illegal wars is actually justified?’

  ‘Oh come on, detective, don’t be so naïve. These people you’re talking about . . . blacks and Hispanics, the Cubans, the Mexicans . . . if they hadn’t gotten coke from the Nicaraguan sources, it would have come from any of a dozen other places. Seems to me we did them a favor. We gave them the highest grade coke they’d ever had. These people are animals, they do what they’re going to do regardless of what anyone tries to tell them. They take drugs. They’ve always taken drugs. They’re going to take drugs from here on out and there’s nothing, not a single thing you or I or anyone else can do about it.’

  ‘You really believe this, don’t you? You really believe that this is how the world is and you can just dictate who lives and who dies.’

  ‘You make it sound like I have some sort of God complex,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Looks to me that it’s not far from the truth.’