by Jake Needham
Then John took a slow step toward Barry. Before I realized what he was going to do, he swung his right leg in an extended arc like a football kicker going for a long field goal. He caught Barry squarely in the left ear with the steel-capped toe of his heavy leather boot and Barry’s head lifted off the ground. It reached the limit of the length of his spine, then it rebounded into the dirt. Barry screamed.
“Whoa, whoa!” I yelled at Just John. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m giving this piece of shit a taste of what’s coming unless he tells me what he did with our money.”
“They’re going to kill me, Jack!” Barry screamed again. “They’re going to kill me!”
“Shut up, Barry!” I snapped. “They’re not going to kill you. The government doesn’t kill people. They just arrest you, put you in prison, and somebody there kills you.”
Then I turned on John. “You don’t have to rough up the poor bastard. I can tell you how to find the money.”
Phony Frank perked up his ears. “You can?”
“Say pretty please.”
“Fuck you, asshole.”
“Okay, close enough.”
I was starting to get to this guy, whoever he really was, and I liked that a lot.
“Everything’s on the ABC computer system,” I told him, “and I know how to log into it.”
Phony Frank looked skeptical.
“That’s not enough,” he said. “You’d need to have the address for the right part of the bank’s network.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Then you’ve got to have the current access codes.”
“I’ve got them, too.”
“Gale gave them to you?”
“Nope. I found them on Dollar’s computer.”
“Weren’t they encrypted?”
“Yes, but I got someone to take care of that for me.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you that.” I cut Just John the biggest wink I could manage without hurting my face. “There’s a lot of top-secret shit involved. But I’m sure you understand, don’t you, John?”
Phony Frank didn’t seem amused. “Are you just jerking me off here, you little shit? If you are, I’m going to be one unhappy son of a bitch.”
“If I had a laptop and a data line, I could show you what I mean. But I don’t.”
“As luck would have it,” Phony Frank said with a nasty smile, “you do.”
He pointed at the Cherokee that was still standing in the compound and gave me a little push in its direction. Frank, John, and I walked toward it, but Jello stayed where he was.
“Do you roll over and play dead, too?” I called back over my shoulder.
“Look, Jack, stop being an asshole,” Jello shouted at me. “I’m just a local cop and these guys are making the rules. Everybody takes orders from somebody.”
When we got to the Cherokee, Phony Frank opened the passenger door and gestured for me to slide in. He pointed to an IBM ThinkPad clamped into a bracket mounted over the console between the front seats.
“You know how to use that?”
“I think I can manage.”
“It’s running a standard Windows communication package through a satellite hookup. Just put the address into the browser and you’ll be in business. Unless you’re completely full of shit, of course. Then you’ll be just plain fucked.”
I booted up the ThinkPad, opened the browser, and typed in an address. Phony Frank and John bent into the Cherokee and watched over my shoulder.
The host computer’s identifiers started rolling across the screen and I brought up the login box. I shifted my head just enough to block their view as I typed an access code, then quickly hit Return. When the main screen opened, I began clicking through menus.
“What the fuck is all that shit?”
Phony Frank’s mouth was so close to my ear that I could feel his breath when he spoke.
I stopped typing and twisted my head toward him. “Do you want me to stop and give you a lesson on the structure of commercial banking databases, or do you want me to get you the information you’re looking for?”
Frank didn’t bother to answer, so I turned back and resumed typing. After a few more moments a large spreadsheet opened and I pointed to the first column of numbers.
“There it is. Those are the dates of every transfer out of the ABC that Barry Gale personally ordered and the Fed wire number for each of them.”
Then I opened another file, this one a plain text document with three long columns.
“This is a list of the same Fed wire numbers, but viewed from the opposite side of each transaction.”
I moved the cursor around the screen like a pointer.
“Here’s each wire number, and when you follow across it matches up with an amount, a receiving bank, and the account name and number in the bank where the transfer went.”
“What’s this stuff at the bottom?” Just John asked.
He pointed to another list of names and numbers that appeared as I scrolled down to the bottom of the file.
“Just some notes somebody made when they were working out all the transactions. They don’t mean anything.”
“So this is all we need to find our money?” John asked.
“Look, I’m giving you a list of all the banks and account numbers where Barry stashed everything he transferred out of the ABC. What you do with it is up to you.”
John still looked as if he thought something wasn’t quite right, but Phony Frank was grinning as he stepped away from the Cherokee and straightened up.
“Well, I’ve got to hand it to you, Jack.” He spoke in a tone that I thought tried hard to hit a note of respectful admiration, but it came out sounding mostly smug. “You really did our job for us.”
“I’ll start checking my mail for a letter of gratitude from the president,” I said. “You’ll need these files. I’ll save them to a folder on the desktop.”
When I had finished I shut the laptop down and closed it.
“Done,” I said, and got out of the Cherokee.
Back across the compound, Jello was still faithfully standing guard over Barry Gale.
“Good dog,” I said when we all trooped back, but Jello ignored me.
“Can I load this one up now so we can get out of here?” he asked Phony Frank instead.
“I’ll take care of him,” Phony Frank replied, bending down over Barry.
When I thought back on it later, I was certain I hadn’t seen the gun until Frank fired.
FIFTY ONE
COPS SOMETIMES CALL the .22 caliber Colt Woodsman the hit man special. The gun is too small to have any real stopping power and it’s useless for self-defense; but load it with hollow points and fire it point-blank into a man’s head and it’s a foolproof killing machine.
Phony Frank had produced the gun from somewhere and pressed it against Barry’s temple when he bent down. I didn't see it and the two little popping noises it made when he pulled the trigger twice in quick succession were the first sign I had that something had gone badly wrong.
“You goddamned bastard!” I screamed uselessly when I realized what he had done.
Just John was ready when I lunged at Phony Frank, wrapping me in a bear hug and holding me while I futilely thrashed around.
Jello half pulled his service revolver, but Frank quickly straightened up and laid the muzzle of the Woodsman under Jello’s chin. Jello just stood there with a puzzled expression on his face waiting for his brain to catch up with his eyes.
“Put it on the ground, Jello.” Just John spoke in a soft and soothing voice. “Put it on the ground and then we’ll all have a nice little talk.”
“I’m not having any talk with you bastards!” I yelled. “You murdered that man in cold blood!”
I kicked back hard with my right heel and caught Just John squarely on his shin, but he never even flinched.
Jello lowered his arm and slowly bent his knees, laying his service revolver fla
t on the ground. Phony Frank scooped it up and slid it into a pocket of his jacket.
“I’m just doing what they told me to do, Jello,” he said.
Phony Frank watched Jello cautiously, but Jello still seemed more puzzled than alarmed by what was happening.
“My instructions were to locate the missing funds and then eliminate the cause. I guess it’s obvious why I couldn’t tell you that up front. I’m sorry, Jello. Really.”
“You’re sorry?” I barked at Frank.
“Not for him,” Phony Frank nodded toward the handcuffed corpse on the ground. “I’m sorry I had to string Jello along without telling him the whole story.”
“But why kill Barry?” I asked. “I got your goddamned money for you.”
“Barry Gale compromised a top-secret national security operation. Any way you slice it, Jack, you know we’re not going to leave him running around loose. You can’t imagine how much he knows.”
“Is that why you killed Howard and Dollar, too? Because of what they knew?”
“Every operation has losses, Jack.”
“I know as much as they did, maybe more now. And so does Jello. You going to kill us, too?”
Phony Frank swung the Woodsman away from Jello and took a lazy step toward me. “Well, you raise an interesting point there, Jack, a real interesting point. If it was up to me...”
Phony Frank slowly spread his hands in a gesture that left little doubt as to what his preferred choice was.
“But it’s not up to me. The guys who tell me what to do say you both walk away. Too many bodies in an operation, they figure, and people start snooping around. Besides, we’re sure that when you calm down and think everything through, you’ll both be safe bets.”
“I’ll tell you what, partner, your lap dog of a local cop over there may be okay, but I’m anything but a safe bet!”
Phony Frank was smirking now and I would have liked nothing better than to smash that look right down his throat.
“I don’t think you’ll be any problem, Jack. You’re a player now.”
“I’m a what?”
“You’re a player. You’re part of one of the great secrets of history. Look at it this way. If the guys we’re backing succeed in overthrowing the Chinese government and taking over the whole country like we think they will, you’ll probably get a goddamned medal. A secret one, of course.”
Phony Frank looked down and kicked the toe of his boot through the loose dirt. In the silence, the sound of it was like a wave breaking over stones.
“Hell, man, even if the little Chink bastards fuck up and the whole plan turns to shit, you’ll be one of the few guys around who knows how close we came to changing the world. That’s what a player is, Jack. That’s you now.”
Just John had loosened his grip on me and I shook him off and took several steps away.
“I’ll go to the press and burn you.”
“You really believe all that the-truth-shall-make-you-free crap, don’t you, Jack?” Phony Frank snorted. “You poor jerk.”
“You might get a few reporters going for a while,” Just John said. “But no respectable publication will ever print a word you tell them. We’ve got that covered. Maybe you’d get your own web page with the other conspiracy nuts, but that’s about the best you can hope for.”
“It’s all wrapped up, Jack,” Phony Frank said. “Tighter than a gnat’s asshole.”
He smiled serenely at me. “You got no place to go. Nobody to listen to you.”
“I’ve got a top-ranking officer in the Thai police as a witness. That’s got to count for something.”
We all looked at Jello.
“That true, Jello?” Just John asked. “You see anything here tonight that you might want to talk to somebody about?”
Jello looked at the ground and said nothing. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“There you go, Jack.” Phony Frank shook his head in mock sympathy. “A good witness is hard to find these days.”
I stood quietly and looked off across the compound. The wall was too high for me to see the ocean from where we were, but I could smell the salt in the heavy night air. Somewhere not very far away there were lovers cuddling on palm-lined beaches, fishing boats dragging home nets filled with lobsters, children playing tag on scruffy jetties, and seaside shacks filled with tourists drinking at wobbly tables. Somewhere out there, I reminded myself, normal people were still living normal lives.
But that was beyond the wall, out in the world I had left behind. Or that had left me behind.
“You’ve really got to face it, Jack.”
Just John’s voice was gentle now. He sounded like a priest trying to talk somebody out of jumping off a bridge.
“You’re on the inside now. You’re one of us.”
All I could do was stand and shake my head. I looked back at Barry Gale’s body lying face down in the dirt, his arms still handcuffed behind him. The Colt had left two tidy little holes in Barry’s left temple. Thin streams of drying blood had run down from each wound and joined together into a single, thicker stream just above Barry’s ear. It was a neat, professional job of extinguishing a man’s life.
“I’m not one of you,” I said after a while. “I’m nothing like you.”
FIFTY TWO
THE MORNING AFTER they shot Barry Gale, I woke well before daybreak and sat out on the balcony at the Phuket Yacht Club watching the ocean turn from black to blue steel as the sky slowly lightened. I ordered a pot of coffee from room service and made a promise to myself that by the time it was all gone I would decide.
A hard little seed of anger had formed inside me overnight. I cherished it. I nursed it. I willed it to grow.
It grew.
And after I finished the last of the coffee, I knew exactly what I was going to do.
I lifted the telephone and made the call I had been mentally rehearsing on and off as I tossed restlessly through the night, struggling with dark dreams that either made no sense, or worse, did.
It took me quite a while to reach the man I wanted to reach, but after I did and I told him enough to get his attention, he said he would leave immediately. Still, it would take him at least a full day to get to Phuket, possibly longer.
After that I walked the beach for an hour wondering if I had done the right thing.
When I got back to the hotel I wandered around until I found a shop and bought some T-shirts, a pair of running shoes, and a bathing suit. Around noon I called Anita, but I didn’t tell her much. I said that I’d had to go out of town for a couple of days and that I would explain when I got back. Surely the whole story sounded unbelievably strange to her, but I guess she must have heard something in my voice because she didn’t question me too closely. She only told me to keep safe and left it at that.
Later in the afternoon I put on my running shoes and jogged listlessly on Nai Harn Beach for a half-hour. I was pleased and a little surprised to find that the footing was firm and I began stretching myself, pushing harder and harder until I was up to my usual pace. Almost before I realized it, I had covered several miles and with each crunch of my shoes on the hard-packed sand I became still more certain.
Yes, you’ve done the right thing. You’ve got to try at least.
The longer I ran the more my conviction hardened and I ran the beach that afternoon until the blood pounding in my ears was all I could hear and the ache of my legs was all I could feel.
Then I did it all over again the next morning. And I did it once more the next afternoon.
IT WAS MY third morning in Phuket. I finished my run and came back to my room and found him sitting quietly on the floor outside the door. We talked until early afternoon and I told him everything. Then we ordered some sandwiches and coffee from room service and I went over it all again. This time he took notes.
When I was done he started asking long and detailed questions and I answered them all as well as I could. It was almost six that evening before we both finally fell silent.
&nb
sp; Tired of talking, we walked out onto the terrace and watched in silence as the sun slid toward the surface of the sea, aiming itself exactly at a gap between two tiny islands that were several miles offshore. Five or ten minutes must have passed without either of us saying another word.
Eventually it was my visitor who broke the silence.
“What made you so sure I didn’t know about all this already, Jack?”
“I wasn’t sure.” I thought about it some more. “You just don’t seem to me to be a guy who would be part of this kind of thing.”
“Too honorable?”
“Not really. Just too smart.”
We let our half-smiles hang in the air for a moment.
“How long have we known each other, Jack?” the man finally asked.
“Oh God, I don’t know. We were roommates our last year at Georgetown, so I guess that makes it… what? Twenty-odd years now?”
The man nodded. “Yeah, about that.”
The sun hid behind a cloud for a moment and the terrace slipped into a gray half-light.
“When I was first appointed White House counsel, I heard from everybody I’d ever met. I had a million best friends. You were probably the only guy I’d ever known who didn’t call me.”
“I was probably the only guy you’d ever known who didn’t want anything from you then.”
“But you do now.”
“Yeah.”
“Then lay it out for me, Jack. Tell me exactly what it is that you do want.”
I put it as plainly as I could.
“I want to be absolutely certain the president knows about this. If he does, and it’s what he wants, then there’s not a damned thing I can do about it no matter what I believe. But if he doesn’t know, he ought to, then he can do whatever he thinks he should.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The bottom rim of the sun touched the ocean at last and we watched silently as the huge red ball slid through the horizon.
“I can tell you right now, Jack, nothing like this came out of the White House. I don’t know who these guys are, but they’re not ours. It sounds to me like somebody at the Pentagon or CIA has gone way over the edge.”
