Middle Man

by David Rich

  “Who is out there?”

  “It’s Victor,” he said. “One of my boys.”

  I was glad for the darkness so he could not see my expression. I wanted Victor much more than I wanted Bannion. I moved close to the window and peeked out. Cars and trucks lined the dark street. Victor would have an easy time with me if I went out. I did not think I could appeal to our past together. I ached to get him, but the mission was clear: Bannion was the goal. Victor would have to wait.

  “He thinks I have millions of dollars on me,” Bannion said.

  “Isn’t that what you wanted everyone to think?”

  He chuckled. “You know me too well, Mr. Hewitt.”

  “We must go,” Rajan said.

  I took hold of Bannion. “Call me Rollie.”

  26

  Bannion did not want to escape. He did want to chat, though. The old days, the days of undeclared war and glory: Central Africa, Central America, anywhere a general or a despot got the idea that training his cannon fodder would prolong everyone’s agony, Bannion found money and a temporary home. He had grown up operating on his own, much as I had, homeless by the time he was fifteen. Eventually, he found his way into the British Army and discovered that he was good at telling people what to do and teaching them how to do it. So he struck out on his own. Free from the constriction of the Army, Bannion combined his talent for villainy with his talent for organization and training. “People love being told what to do,” he said. “As long as it is something they think will give them an advantage. But the next step, Rollie, they seldom know how to take the next step. They continue to need me to tell them what to do.”

  He wanted me thinking about his story and his wisdom and not thinking about the reason he was cooperating and why he wanted to cross the border into Turkey. I thought I knew. I just did not know how he planned to get rid of me. I expected it would involve an offer.

  “What does ‘DS’ stand for in DS Security?”

  “Nothing anymore, I imagine. My boys are killed, most of them, anyway. And the rest scattered. My plans failed. I’ve disappointed so many who depended on me.”

  He could have been the reincarnation of Dan. Meaner, more lethal, equally devious. I was part of his plan. I did not know my role.

  “What was the plan?” I asked.

  “You don’t expect me to confess, do you, Rollie? Have you ever confessed?”

  “I never staged a coup.”

  “I will tell you, though, that you were wrong about something at dinner. Defending the oil fields is a better position to be in than attacking them. Those defending the fields control the flow of the oil and therefore the flow of the money.”

  We reached Dohuk around sunrise. Like Erbil, Dohuk was booming, construction sites every way we turned, and next to them old, tired, low structures begging to be included in the makeover. Rajan gave the orders without explanation and was never questioned by his men. I did not want to question him either. He might have been grateful to me for saving him. He might have just wanted to see Bannion out of the country. He might have been using us as bait. A PKK man drove us and pretended not to understand English. Bannion occupied the backseat: the grand poobah in his carriage. I turned to face him so I spent much of the time looking for followers. I did not spot anyone. The threat of Victor nestled in my spine like an irritating parasite. And I did not think Gill was finished looking for me.

  We stopped in an industrial area for about ten minutes, just parked alongside the four-lane road. A panel truck passed us, slowed down, and we followed it for about a mile right into a warehouse.

  It was a coffee and tea warehouse if anyone asked or gave it a quick look. It was a liquor warehouse behind the fake walls and in the basement. Liquor was valuable in the Kurdish sections; they were brimming with energy and the taste of freedom, and the PKK needed money. Smuggling the booze across from Turkey gave them access to bribed border guards and the chance to smuggle guns and bombs, too.

  Rajan was waiting in the small office. He told us we would start out again in the late afternoon. I could not use my passport and they did not trust Bannion using his. The Asayish had put up roadblocks and was guarding the border crossings into Turkey. The Peshmergas were out in force, too. I asked Rajan about the news reports.

  “They want you. They want me.”

  “What’s the fallout from the assassination attempt? Is there a political change?” He shook his head. “What about the oil fields? Any violence there?”

  “I haven’t seen any reports of that,” Rajan said. “I have men who work at the Ain Sifni fields. They’re at work this morning.”

  “Who is guarding the fields?”

  He said he would find out.

  We started out toward the border in the panel truck. After an hour, we pulled over. Bannion and I were put in the back, snug among the rugs for export. Two hours later, we arrived at a mountain cabin built of stone, a crumbling place. A stream trickled past on the left, and a stone well sat just a few yards from the porch. Again, Rajan preceded us.

  “The border is too hot right now. Perhaps in a few days it will calm down. Like a fever.”

  “And if it doesn’t.”

  “Maybe you’ll become a shepherd.” He swept his arm across the barren mountainside where no sheep were ever going to live. We were in a hollow, surrounded by crags and cliffs and slopes. No view, not easily viewed.

  I slept through the night and deep into the morning. Rajan was gone. Two of his men remained. One was cooking on a propane stove and the other sat outside on the porch with a rifle. Rest had wiped away the fog shrouding Bannion. To understand Bannion, I only had to ask myself what Dan would be doing if he were in Bannion’s position.

  Bannion wanted to get the money. I was enabling his getaway. He would be my new best friend until I was maneuvered to the edge of a cliff.

  The vehicles were gone and that suited me because it gave us a feeling of time stretching without end, which I hoped might exhaust Bannion. Dan always arranged an out, a pressing appointment, a not so secret assignation, and most reliably and most fantastically, the demands of being a single father. I had never seen Dan stranded in this way, so I had an extra reason to look forward to my sessions with Bannion.

  Though he was big and a bit blubbery, Bannion was hardy. Uphill did not make him breathless enough to stop his storytelling. I did not tell him I wanted the money; that admission would give him too great an advantage. I assumed that he assumed the money was my interest. I inquired, instead, about which Americans were involved beyond the two generals I had met.

  “I started out with a dream, Rollie. A dream of controlling this vast untapped pool of oil. Me, a boy of the streets. But I needed partners. Always look for partners with power. That’s the rule, and it meant dealing with the Americans. I admit that their eagerness to join was something of an astonishment. They mistrusted their own government even as they risked their lives to serve it, even as they bragged endlessly about it. It was never a matter of betrayal for them. They convinced themselves they were merely extending the policy and serving their country’s interest. Their own profit was an unspoken fact of life. Like self-abuse.”

  He wanted me to laugh, so I did. He wanted me to tsk-tsk, too, so I did. He spewed names. We stopped and sat on flat rocks and I wrote down the names on a pad I found at the cabin.

  “They were generals and colonels, big shots one and all, diplomats, too, and they thought that since they spent years giving orders, they could begin a new empire, blaze a trail, but they were followers one and all, Rollie. They ended up taking orders from me. I just had to lie low and let them pretend they were in charge. But you understand this, Rollie. I can tell. You view them the same way I do. You knew General Garner, didn’t you?”

  “Did I?”

  “We should have been partners.”

  I knew what to do, but I hesitated. The lifetime of
Dan proximity mandated that I reply, “I don’t think that partnership would work.”

  “Close the door partway. Leave it open a crack,” Dan would say. “That sliver of light thrown into the hallway is magnetic, Rollie boy.”

  But did Dan magic work on Dan? It was always easy to hate him, easy to marvel, easy to absorb the lessons and employ them to survive. Easy to work on everyone else. But Bannion had all the knowledge. He had engineered a project far larger and more ambitious than anything Dan had ever imagined. Bannion would recognize my moves. I hesitated, not sure if I did so fearing success or failure.

  “I don’t think that partnership would work.”

  “If I had you with me from the start, we would be kings by now.” I didn’t answer. “You know it’s true.”

  “I know that we can’t go backward. Who did you have in the diplomatic corps?” The rule: Change the subject to make him stick with it.

  The names of diplomats meant nothing to me. I wrote them down as if they did. “Tell me who you work for now, Rollie. This is hardly a fair exchange.”

  I spewed a bunch of plausible lies describing a DIA agency similar to SHADE. I called it PLG for Post Liberation Group. I said they chose me for my language skills.

  “I should think they chose you for many reasons, perhaps some of the same reasons I would choose you.” He widened his eye to exclaim his admiration and his roly-poly cheeks rose with his smile. When he let go, everything fell at once like a popped balloon. “I had a man in the U.S., a Colonel McColl, quite a capable man. Did you know him?”

  Only well enough to kill him. But Bannion did not suspect that yet. He wanted to know if I was aware of the buried money. “His name was mentioned,” I said.

  Below us, a truck labored up the rough track toward the cabin. We walked back. A PKK man was unloading supplies from the truck. He ignored Bannion’s questions about how long we would be there. After dinner, we sat on the porch, watching the darkness slide across the mountainside. He was shameless enough to say he had “reached for the stars.” I was being wooed.

  “We go into these conflicts with goals. But it’s the goals that hold us back. It’s like this: You see a beautiful woman and you decide you must have her phone number and you set out for that. But what if you could have gotten more, so much more. The mission defines your limitations. It holds you back if you allow it to. Think of the Americans stopping in the first Gulf War. They could have changed the world if they had just followed their noses. In Bosnia, I saw opportunities to make millions. Not lawfully, mind you, but opportunities nonetheless. And it was my responsibility to face the truth. If I hadn’t, I never would have been able to help the Kurds. I never would have met Maya.”

  He paused and made sure to hold my eyes. He wanted to see if I had slept with Maya. After a while, he said, “I won’t ask what went on between you two. It was over for us long ago, long ago. I don’t think it could have been any other way. She was attracted to me as someone who was seizing opportunities, and to satisfy her, I would have had to spend all my time seizing her. If she likes you, then I take it as a confirmation of my assessment of you. She is not a woman to spend her passions frivolously.”

  It was like eavesdropping on Dan and his guests. Opportunities missed, wistful regrets, lessons learned. And just as I was expecting the proposal, he stood and said, “Don’t like talking important matters with these fellows listening in. Zealots, you know, can never be trusted.” His timing was perfect. He went inside. I sat there letting the endless questions pop and sparkle and fade like the stars.

  The morning was a duplicate of the previous day: clear and cloudless. The PKK man said we would not be moving out for hours, at least. Bannion and I hiked the same route. I asked how long he served in the Army. I overpraised my current job as a way of showing my doubts. He mentioned timing as the key to making a decision to go civilian.

  When we reached the flat section, he said, “You must know about the money.”

  “The buried money? That was a good plan.”

  “It was. It was.”

  “Yours? The plan, I mean.”

  “Safe haven, that’s what I thought. I must have a safe haven for these riches we found. Remember, I snuck into Erbil before the war started. Finding that money was a top priority from the beginning. They all pretended it was found by accident. They were like kids searching for hidden Christmas presents whenever the folks turned their backs; it was the only thing on their minds. But the generals did not know how long the war would last. They couldn’t say how long we would have to hide it until the moment came to put our plan into action. They could not trust each other, though they never said that out loud. Suggesting the U.S. as a safe haven solved everything.”

  “I heard it’s all been found. All the graves located.”

  “Have you?”

  “Maybe you waited too long.”

  “Do you know the most difficult thing in the world, Rollie? More difficult than cold-blooded murder. More difficult than restraint or patience. Or sincerity.” He stopped and seemed to consider what else was difficult in life. His eye darted around, checking each corner of the world for something left behind. “It’s knowing what you really want.”

  “You mean it took you all those years to decide how to spend the money?”

  He stopped the gangster, fake friendliness. His voice became a naked growl. “I think you know exactly what I mean.”

  I did. I knew because there could be only one answer, and I was the only pupil in the class that had been taught this lesson. Bannion had betrayed everyone. The plot to take over Kurdistan was a decoy, a still photo for the cover of the brochure. The ambitions and dreams of the military men and the diplomats were turned against them, used as a leash to parade them and then tie them to the porch. Bannion knew the secret: They would not go out without that leash.

  The money was always for Bannion and only Bannion.

  “They helped you hide it and you had until the U.S. pulled out to perfect your exit. Most of what you had to do was wait. But knowing what you really want is harder than patience.”

  “The best plans evolve. Time is an ally.” He read from The Book of Dan, chapter one.

  Time was an ally, and I worked for time. The story that McColl or someone else spilled the locations took the pressure off Bannion. He would not have to face the moment when his partners faced rotting corpses where they expected crisp hundreds.

  “You must have been delighted to get rid of McColl.”

  He looked at me for a long time and I thought I had revealed too much. Did he already know I was the one who had busted McColl?

  “McColl was a problem from the start. He had no business digging up that grave in Oklahoma. Just impatient. And by accident he picked the one that some other guy had looted. Someone I never heard of. Bad luck for him, bad luck for McColl.”

  “Good luck for you.” I was struck by a previously unknown urge to brag about Dan, to claim the connection and tout his brilliance. I resisted, though it bothered me to hear him relegated to anonymity. I know Dan would have said it was an advantage. But this was vanity: A diminished Dan diminished the luster of my hatred and fascination for him.

  Just as the day before, we saw a truck bouncing up toward the cabin. Neither of us moved.

  “How many graves did McColl know about? Graves with money in them.”

  Bannion shrugged. “Let’s just say the odds were good that McColl would have found a body rather than dollars. Considering his obsessive behavior, I would not have enjoyed dealing with that situation. Instead, that behavior led to his demise.”

  I waited. He waited. I tried counting up the graves claimed, the money found, tried tallying how much might be left. To reassure him of my ignorance, I would have to act as if I thought I knew it all.

  “Only three graves have been dug up with any money. That leaves plenty of millions still in the gro
und.”

  “Knowing what you want, Rollie, that’s what it’s all about in the end.”

  On the way down to the cabin, I asked about the kidnapping and the million dollars.

  “Oh, the million was a nice bonus and a chance to get to know you. Just made up on the spot. You were a gift. The PKK was the missing piece all along, and you delivered them to me. The fake assassination plot came late. The generals and others were pressing for action. We needed a fall guy.”

  A quick scam inside the larger scam. No opportunity missed. Threads that could never be unraveled.

  He went on unprompted. “I made some arrangements, set some contracts with certain officials of the Regional Government that said if there should be a national crisis, my company would be hired to oversee the oil fields. It was that simple. Who guards the fields controls the flow.”

  “Who is going to take it over now?”

  “Your friend Mr. Gill thought he might. Not my problem now.”

  “What does the ‘DS’ stand for?”

  “Oh, partners I had.”

  Rajan was waiting for us.

  27

  Rajan handed me binoculars so I could take a look at the Habur Gate, the border crossing to Turkey. Barbed wire protected the sides of the road leading in, and if you got past that, rolling brush stretched far enough to give even the worst marksman time to make the shot. The approach was more than fifty trucks deep, clogged by the line of rifle-toting Peshmergas doing the slow search.

  “I just wanted you to see it in the daylight,” Rajan said. “Tonight there will be a diversion. Guards are bribed. You’ll get through. From there, it is not far to the U.S. base at Adana.”

  “You coming along?”

  “I am saying good-bye. I cannot go near the gate.”

  We shook hands and I thanked him. We both looked at Bannion sitting in the truck.

  “Why did you help me?”

  Rajan laughed. “Karkukli’s servants liked the way you handled Zoran.”