by Jake Needham
It was less than twenty minutes before the telephone in my room rang.
“Mr. Shepherd?” It was the voice of a different woman, her tone professional but with subtle hints of deference and warmth. “Mr. Redwine wonders if you are free for dinner.”
“That would be fine.”
“Do you know the Old Ebbit Grill?”
“I do.”
“Could you meet Mr. Redwine there tonight at eight?”
I told her I could.
“If you will give Mr. Redwine’s name to the hostess, they will seat you at his usual table.”
The Old Ebbit Grill is right across Fifteenth Street from the Treasury Building, barely a five-minute walk from the White House. I left the Mustang with the valet, then lingered out front for a few minutes examining the place’s Greek Revival facade. At exactly eight o’clock, I took a deep breath and pushed through the revolving glass door.
Naturally Billy hadn’t turned up yet. I declined the hostess’ invitation to go to Billy’s table and instead went into the bar to wait.
Down one wall of the bar was a line of booths with tufted, rust-colored velvet benches and forest-green tops. Each booth had a little table lamp with a yellow-cream shade that threw a dim but appealing glow. A huge, gilt-framed oil portrait of a woman with impossibly ivory-colored skin and an outsized rump hung just above the long mahogany bar and there were some stuffed deer heads scattered around together with one wild boar and something else I took to be a walrus. Heavy brass chandeliers, vaguely art deco in appearance, hung from a very high tin ceiling, undoubtedly fake. The tiny bulbs flickering inside frosted glass cylinders made them look almost like gaslights.
I slid into an empty booth, laid down the large manila envelope I had brought with me, and ordered a Bushmills and water. Somewhere far in the background I heard Frank Sinatra sing the first notes of “Nancy with the Laughing Face”.
When my drink came I slipped at it slowly and watched a television set tuned to CNBC that was hanging over the bar. It was discreet and silent, captions flickering over the bottom of the picture, and nobody but me seemed to be paying the slightest attention to it. The music changed to “Can’t We Be Friends”, then “That Old Feeling”, and finally, “I Can’t Get Started with You”.
Billy was an actor at heart, and when I saw him walking across the bar toward me about fifteen minutes later he looked every inch of one. He moved at a stately pace, rhythmically slapping a rolled-up copy of The Wall Street Journal against his thigh, nodding perfunctorily at the occupants of some tables and pointedly ignoring others. There were a couple of what I assumed to be Secret Service types trailing him and they sized me up professionally as he approached the booth. Since they didn’t shoot me, I guess I passed whatever test they were using.
“This fucking town,” Billy sighed as he sat down. “This goddamned motherfucking town.”
Then suddenly he straightened up and looked around as if he had just realized where he was.
“What the fuck are you doing in the bar?” Billy asked. “Didn amp;rs? arquo;t they offer to take you to my table?”
“I like bars. All kinds of interesting things happen in bars.”
Billy shook his head and slid back out of the booth. He nodded toward the main dining room and shortly afterward we settled in at a table in a far back corner of the restaurant. There was no one else within earshot and Billy’s escorts took another table strategically placed near the main entrance.
Almost immediately an elderly waiter in a long apron materialized and placed a drink at Billy’s elbow, a martini containing two olives impaled on a red plastic sword.
“Evening, Mr. Redwine.”
“Evening, Paul.”
I had brought my Bushmills from the bar so I lifted it and tilted the glass toward Billy in a half-assed toast. He lifted the martini glass in turn, tilted it at me, then took a long, slow pull.
“Man,” he said when he put it down, “that is so good.”
After that, Billy folded his arms and leaned back a little. He tilted his head slightly to one side and studied me with a half-smile on his face.
“So what kind of outrageous horseshit have you gotten yourself into this time, Jack, my boy?”
I reached across the table and put the brown envelope I had brought with me in front of Billy. Inside was the copy of the email intercepts Darcy had printed off Kate’s disk. I kept the cassettes in my pocket.
Billy eyed the envelope as warily as if I had just laid a rattlesnake down in front of him, which in a manner of speaking I guess I had.
“What?” he asked, looking back and forth from me to the envelope.
“It’s some stuff you ought to see.”
“Stuff?”
“You going to look at it?” I asked. “Or are we going to dance around a little first?”
Billy laughed at that, then he extracted a pair of half-glasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on. I watched his face as he flipped quickly through the pages, although he remained mostly expressionless. Taking a sip of his martini, he went back to the beginning and read carefully through everything, then slid the pages back into the envelope and returned his reading glasses to his jacket pocket.
“So,” I asked, “what do you think?”
“I think you’ve got some pretty good contacts in Thailand.”
“Is what I read there true?” I pointed to the envelope. “Were the marshals in Phuket with instructions to kill Karsarkis?”
“Ah, Jack…” Billy shifted his weight slightly and ran his fingers up and down the stem of the martini glass. “Everything around here is a little true and nothing is completely true. You ought to know that.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Billy. Why were the marshals really in Phuket? To bring Karsarkis back, or to kill him?”
“It’s not that simple, Jack.”
“Yes, it is that simple.”
“Look, Jack, there were different people there. They had…different responsibilities.”
Billy flicked a glance at his minders, then he cleared his throat and tapped at the table with his forefinger.
“We?ustif were hoping Karsarkis would see the wisdom of coming back on his own. On the other hand, if we could have found a way to snatch him, we would have done it. I don’t mind telling you that. But nobody really wanted to kill him.”
“Which means you might have. If you thought you had to.”
“Yeah, we might have if we thought somebody else was going to snatch him first.”
“God damn, Billy-” I started in, but he interrupted me before I could get started.
“What else could we have done, Jack? Just sat there with our thumbs up our butts while Karsarkis became Exhibit A in the great hit parade of American fuck-ups? Hell, Karsarkis would probably rather we’d shot him than let the crazies get him.”
“Look, Billy, there’s something important here that you don’t know anything about.”
Billy nodded slowly. “That wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Karsarkis was going to spill it all,” I said. “He thought if he just told the world everything he knew, that would protect him. Then no one would want to kill him anymore to shut him up.”
“How do you know that?”
“Before Karsarkis got on that plane, he came to see me. He told me he was going to go public.”
“Huh,” Billy said. “How about that?”
“There’s more.”
Billy said nothing.
“He told me exactly what it was he was going to spill.”
Billy blinked then, twice in rapid succession, but otherwise his eyes gave nothing away.
FIFTY TWO
“Plato Karsarkis spilled the beans to me before he got on his plane, Billy. He spilled the fucking beans to me about everything he had been doing and all the rest of it as well.”
“And by the rest of it you would be referring to…”
“Cynthia Kim, the NSC operation in Indonesia, and the explosives and detonators used i
n the Bali bombing.”
Billy didn’t say anything right away. He just scratched the back of his neck and examined the ceiling, which kept me from seeing his face clearly. I assumed that was the whole idea.
“And there’s one other thing you ought to know, too, pal,” I went on before he could regroup. “Karsarkis bugged your debriefing of Cynthia Kim in Singapore. He had tapes of the whole thing, tapes with your voice on them.”
Billy stopped pretending to study the ceiling and shifted his eyes back to mine. “Have you heard them?” he asked.
“No,” I answered truthfully. “I haven’t.”
“But you’re sure he had them.”
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely sure.”
“How can you be so sure if you didn’t hear them?”
“You’ve known me for over twenty years, Billy. Would I tell you I was sure if I wasn’t?”
Billy’s expression never changed. He was a cool one. Whatever else he might be, I had to give him that at least.
“Well,?="jdamn,” he sighed, flicking his eyes around the room and then back to mine before taking a deep breath. “Don’t that beat all?”
Looking back it was probably only a minute or two before Billy spoke again, but at the time the silence had seemed to stretch on for much longer than that.
“Do you know if he had the tapes with him when his plane blew up?” Billy asked.
“Not for sure.”
“But you think he did.”
I nodded.
“What about copies?” Billy asked. “Were there any copies?”
“There may have been,” I said, avoiding Billy’s eyes. I wondered if Billy noticed me avoid his eyes, but he just nodded slowly a few times, giving no indication of it if he had.
“I could always have those guys,” he inclined his head toward his security men, “come over here and torture you.”
“You could,” I said, “but you probably won’t.”
“No.” Billy made a little popping sound with his lips. “I probably won’t.”
The waiter returned unbidden and replaced Billy’s empty glass with a fresh martini. I noticed he didn’t offer to do anything along similar lines with my nearly empty glass of Bushmills.
“So what happens now?” Billy asked after he had taken a sip.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess I was hoping…”
I stopped talking and stared for a minute at a spot on the tablecloth.
“I really don’t know,” I said again.
Billy nodded as if that all somehow made perfect sense.
“Look, Jack…”
Billy paused. He look as if he was trying to make up his mind about something and I waited for him to decide on whatever it was.
“A lot of things are more complicated than they seem,” he said after a moment.
“Did your people blow up that plane, Billy?”
“My people?” Billy smiled slightly at that, although I thought he looked tired and a little sad when he did. “No, not my people.”
“But somebody’s people?”
Billy put his glass down again and adjusted its position slightly. He didn’t say anything.
“Then let me put this plainly just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding between us,” I said. “You’re willing to let me think it is at least possible someone in the government of the United States blew up a plane in order to kill Plato Karsarkis and keep him from telling the world what he knew about White House involvement in covert operations that turned sour.”
Billy leaned across the table. Lowering his voice he tapped me on the back of the wrist with one finger.
“You do not have the first fucking idea how much is possible, Jack. Governments do things all the time that in your wildest imagination you would never begin to believe. We do what we do because-”
“Oh, please,” I interrupted. “Spare me the for-the-sake-of-the-greater-good speech. Could you just do that for me?”
“S?uo;Oh, plure,” Billy said. “I can do that for you. If you want me to.”
We sat for a while in silence again after that, me looking at the wall behind Billy and him watching the room over my shoulder.
“Who was it, Billy?” I asked him finally. “Who sent those guys to kill Karsarkis?”
Billy shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.
“How about me then? I asked. “Who send those guys who tried to kill me?
“You may not believe this, Jack, but nobody wanted to kill you.”
“You’re right. I don’t believe that.”
“They thought it was Karsarkis in that car,” Billy said. “It was just a coincidence that you were there instead.”
“Nothing about any of this shit ever turns out to be a coincidence,” I said. “Besides, Karsarkis told me it was you who was behind it.”
“Me?”
“Not you personally. The White House. The National Security Council. The boys in the basement. You were the ones who wanted to keep Karsarkis from talking because you were afraid of what he was going to say. You were the ones who wanted to shut him up.”
Billy Redwine nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
“Was it you, Billy? Did you send those guys to Phuket?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“I…don’t…fucking…know.” Billy waved his hand quickly back and forth through the air as if that would brush it all away. “What part of that don’t you understand?”
“If you wanted to know, you would.”
“Listen to me for a second here, Jack. Just listen to me.” Billy spoke in the kind of soothing tone normally reserved for dealing with animals that were dangerous and unpredictable. “You’re playing in the big leagues now. Be careful.”
“Is that some kind of a threat, Billy?”
He pushed his tongue into one cheek and held it there a while, and I thought I saw in his eyes the look of a decision being made.
“You know more about international money and banking than anybody I’ve ever met, Jack, and that’s where the action is these days. We could use somebody like you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come work with us.”
“Us? Who’s us? The White House? NSC? The CIA?”
“Ah, Jack…” Billy shook his head slowly, “things aren’t that simple anymore.”
“What the fuck does that mean? Sometimes you play your cards so close to the vest I’m not sure you’re holding any. Anyway, you can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am. Dead fucking serious. You haven’t put a foot wrong so far. I’m very impressed.”
“Exactly what was it I did that was so damned impressive?”
“You didn’t do anything, Jack. There you are, handed one of the really ugly secrets of our time, and you didn’t do a damned thing. You stayed calm and unruffled, and eventually you came to?ou are, hame, which is exactly what you should have done.”
“Then I wonder why I’m really not all that proud of myself right now?”
“I need you with me, Jack,” Billy pressed.
“What would you have done if I’d gone public?” I asked.
“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 e
ach 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 tr?="1ees. 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?”
