Bloodland

by Alan Glynn

  And yet . . .

  He’s Jimmy fucking Vaughan.

  The man is a legend.

  And Oberon does own Paloma Electronics. It doesn’t own him, BRX, but that hardly matters, Rundle has been in thrall to Vaughan since he was a kid and would do anything for the man. As for political influence, that’s hard to quantify, but suffice it to say the chairman of the Oberon Capital Group has been at or near the centre of power in Washington, in one capacity or another, for the best part of fifty years.

  And a quick glance at Oberon’s current and past board members reveals a dizzying array of luminaries, including former presidents, secretaries of state, secretaries of the treasury, other cabinet members, five-star generals, prime ministers, Nobel laureates and media barons. Manna to conspiracy theorists, the Group was founded in the early 1970s and since then has woven itself into the very fabric of the economic, social and political life of the country. With hundreds of defence, aerospace, telecom and health care companies in its portfolio, Oberon is supposedly responsible for everything from the price of jellybeans to largely shaping US foreign policy over the last thirty-five years.

  The car pulls up at the foot of the Celestial.

  All of a sudden, Rundle is excited.

  He has always craved a closer working relationship with Vaughan and now this is stepping things up several notches. It may well be his last chance, too. Because Jimmy is old and has a slew of medical conditions, all under control, fine, but any one of which, at any time, could flare up and kill him.

  Rundle gets out of the car and strolls across the plaza.

  The BellumBot.

  Fucking incredible.

  *

  Jimmy gets into JFK a little after two o’clock local time on Monday afternoon. He takes a cab into the city, to the West Village, and checks into his hotel, the Stanley. Even though it’s small and a little dingy, the Stanley is pretty expensive, and Jimmy can’t really afford it. In fact, this whole trip, along with the one last week to Italy, is being paid for out of the remaining half of the advance he got to write the Susie Monaghan bio – an advance he’ll be expected to return in full when his editor finds out he’s no longer actually writing the book.

  But Jimmy was in a hurry, rooms were available and the West Village is a part of the city he’s familiar with, having once shared an apartment there for a couple of months when he was a student.

  He arranged the whole thing online in about ten minutes flat. But that was the easy part.

  Now that he’s here he has no clear idea what to do.

  Phil Sweeney gave him some numbers to call, so that should probably be his first task, but for some reason he’s reluctant to get started. He’s not sure what it is, a lack of confidence maybe, or a fear of being found out? When he expressed doubts like these on Saturday evening, Phil Sweeney told him to feck off, that all he had to do was say he was a freelance journalist working for the Irish Times or the Guardian.

  Or the BBC.

  That it was a confidence trick, like most things in life.

  That he’d be fine.

  Jimmy takes a shower. Then he goes out to walk around for a while and think about getting something to eat. It’s hot for April, at least hotter than he expected, and he’s overdressed. Life on the streets here has a familiar feel to it, by turns frenetic and chilled out, with lots of smells and colours. He spends some time sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park. A guy comes up and offers him some weed. Jimmy shakes his head and the guy wanders off.

  Some skaters roll past.

  Jimmy looks around.

  What the fuck is he doing in New York?

  How does he get from here, a park bench, to the fiftieth or sixtieth floor of one of those glass towers up there on the midtown horizon?

  And something else he idly finds himself wondering: is he still being followed?

  It was a feeling he couldn’t shake the other night.

  On one level it seems preposterous – deluded, paranoid. But given what he’s discovered about these people, what he’s been told, isn’t it the least they would be doing?

  Jimmy turns and looks over his shoulder.

  Evening has begun to fall and is enveloping the expanse of downtown.

  Suddenly, he’s hungry.

  Behind him here, there are dozens of places he could eat at. He’ll find one . . . but in a few minutes.

  He reaches for the phone in his pocket.

  First he needs to make a couple of calls.

  *

  ‘What do you want, a nine mil? I got Sigs, Glocks, Berettas, Mausers, whatever you want.’

  Tom Szymanski studies the guy for a moment. This isn’t how he’d normally do this. How he’d normally do this would be to stand in a gun store and shoot the breeze with the gentleman behind the counter, a retired serviceman probably, and then proceed to the transaction – only problem here is he doesn’t have a licence and in New York City getting one takes time.

  So it’s back channels, it’s a bar on Avenue C, it’s sitting in a booth opposite this jittery little spic fuck and hoping for the best.

  ‘You got a Beretta M9?’

  ‘Yeah, I got everything, my friend.’

  I’m not your fucking –

  ‘How much?’

  Haggle, haggle, and then it’s back here in half an hour. And half an hour after that again Szymanski’s back in his hotel room, loaded M9 on the bed, plus a bag of weed and a gram of coke. The drugs he bought because he could, they were right there in his face.

  I got everything.

  And it was the minimum he could have bought, really, because this guy had things Szymanski’s never even heard of, so-called research chemicals that are guaranteed to . . .

  But Szymanski didn’t give a shit, he was just being polite.

  He’s actually not interested in getting high. It’s not how he’s feeling at the moment, not where his head is at.

  Where that is exactly, however, he isn’t too sure either.

  Since he read about Senator Rundle in the paper before the weekend he’s had a strange laser-precision focus on everything around him. It’s like he’s already high. It’s like he’s somehow wired into this, with the story seeming to pop up on his grid every few hours or so – mentions on TV, for example, interview clips, a magazine cover at a newsstand he passes, snatches of a conversation he overhears in a store or in an elevator.

  Hey, what do you make of that Senator Rundle?

  And each time, in his mind, it jerks him back to Buenke, to this blubbering fuckwad framed in the doorway of the SUV, staring bug-eyed as Tube walks right up and pops one into the side of Ray Kroner’s skull. Then Ray’s body on the ground, in a heap, his twisted face visible, the top of his head.

  Fuck.

  Szymanski looks at the gun on the blanket, stares at it, concentrates.

  Then Rundle being huddled away, past the other bodies, into a car, on to the airstrip, back to Paris . . . the big lie no doubt already forming, the stench of it everywhere within hours.

  Jesus, how long can this go on? How intense can it get? And what if . . . what if Rundle secures the nomination? What if he goes on to win the election, for Christ’s sake? Four, possibly eight years of this shit?

  Szymanski lowers himself onto the edge of the bed.

  And every day? Every time he turns on his TV? Or goes online? Or walks out on the street? Or wakes up? No fucking way, Jack. It’d be intolerable, that’s what it would be.

  He stretches out his arm.

  It would be intolerable, so he’s not going to let it happen. It’s that simple.

  He picks up the gun.

  It has to be.

  *

  Jimmy spends most of Tuesday morning walking around midtown, familiarising himself with various locations – the BRX Building on Fifth, another office building on Lexington (one where he’s read that Gideon Global have their headquarters, even though he sees nothing there to indicate that they do), and a restaurant near the Flatiron where
he’s meeting Bob Lessing, a friend of Phil Sweeney’s from what both men referred to, in separate conversations, as the ‘old days’.

  Jimmy doesn’t know how useful any of this is going to be, but it makes him feel like he’s doing something.

  The restaurant near the Flatiron is French and casual, and Bob Lessing is a guy in his late fifties wearing a grey suit and a bow tie. Apparently, he and Phil Sweeney worked together in the eighties and have been friends ever since. Lessing runs a PR firm here and specialises in strategic communications and risk analysis for large companies working overseas.

  Of the three people Jimmy called yesterday evening, from the numbers Sweeney gave him, Lessing was the only one available to meet at such short notice.

  ‘So, Jimmy,’ he says, taking a piece of bread from the basket on the table, ‘how is the big man these days?’

  ‘He’s good. I don’t see him that often, but he’s good.’

  Jimmy doesn’t know if Lessing is aware that Sweeney is, or might, be sick. Jimmy himself doesn’t know, but he’s assuming – assuming cancer of some kind.

  At the same time, Jimmy is agitated. He’s not here to talk about Phil Sweeney.

  After a few minutes, Lessing seems to sense this and moves things on. ‘Phil told me you might need a little help.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m . . . I’m working on a story.’

  Jimmy explains, but couches it in fairly neutral terms, keeps it general. He doesn’t make any direct charges against the ‘parties’ involved or mention the Africa dimension. Phil told him to do this, and that Lessing would read between the lines.

  As they eat, Lessing asks a series of questions that demonstrate – to Jimmy’s surprise, alarm almost – that he has indeed read between the lines, and very adeptly.

  When their coffees arrive, Lessing goes silent for a bit. Then he says, ‘OK, here’s the thing, I’ve never worked with BRX, or Gideon, but I can tell you something, you have your work cut out here. BRX is privately owned, so no shareholder meetings, no reports, no information, and that’s how they like to keep it. Clark Rundle is also notoriously media-shy. As for Gideon Global, what I hear is that they’re specialising a lot these days in competitive intelligence and domestic surveillance – NSA contracts mostly – so trying to penetrate them? Forget it. One whiff, and they’ll penetrate you, if you catch my drift.’ He stirs sugar into his coffee. ‘You see, I work on the opposite side of the fence from you, and a lot of what I do is actually keeping people like you at bay. Or subtly veering you in certain directions. Perception management. Therefore even though I don’t work for BRX my gut instinct here is to protect them, and to obfuscate. But one thing I will tell you, and this is something I’ve learned from being in this business more than thirty years, and it’s this . . . that people fuck up. All the time. They make mistakes, and do stupid things, and in big companies like BRX a huge amount of time and energy goes into covering these mistakes up. And people like you, if you dig hard enough, if you make enough of a pain in the ass of yourself, sometimes you get results. Sometimes.’ He nods at the waiter for the check. ‘So what I’m going to do is refer you to one of the biggest pains in the ass on your side of the fence. She’ll be able to help you with this, whatever this thing is you have. More than I can. Corporate watch, all that stuff, it’s her, er . . . her métier.’ He takes out his BlackBerry. ‘I’ve dealt with her a good few times, and she’s very smart. Ellen Dorsey.’ He looks up. ‘You ready? Here’s her number.’

  Fifteen minutes later, sitting on a bench in the park in front of the Flatiron, Jimmy calls Ellen Dorsey. He’s heard of her, even read some of her stuff online – from Rolling Stone, The Nation, Parallax, Wired – and he’s intimidated.

  Of course.

  ‘Yep? Ellen Dorsey.’

  But that’s not going to stop him.

  ‘Hi Ellen, my name’s Jimmy Gilroy, I just got your number from Bob Lessing.’

  Silence.

  That’s what Lessing told him to say.

  Then, ‘Call me back in ten minutes.’

  Click.

  Ten minutes. He does a quick Google search on his phone. She’s thirty-nine. From Philadelphia. There’s a roll call of articles she’s written, stories she covered, awards won. There’s a link to a clip of an appearance she once made on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but he can’t access it.

  He checks the time and calls her back.

  ‘Jimmy Gilroy, yeah? So, Bob tells me you’ve got something. And he assures me that you’re not a plant. Bizarrely enough, I trust Bob, so shoot.’

  Jimmy pauses. ‘Not over the phone.’

  ‘Of course, right. Not over the phone. You know what, let me give you my address. You come here. I’m working, but we can talk.’

  This is all happening pretty fast.

  She lives near Ninety-third and Amsterdam. He walks a few blocks over and takes the subway. On the train up, he wonders what Bob Lessing said about him on the phone. At no point did Jimmy make it clear to Lessing who he was or wasn’t working for. He deliberately left it vague and Lessing didn’t ask.

  He gets off at Ninety-sixth and Broadway, goes back to Ninety-third and wanders along until he finds her building.

  She buzzes him up.

  It’s still hot and he’s still overdressed and as he walks up to the fourth floor he feels like he’s going to faint.

  He doesn’t.

  Ellen Dorsey is waiting for him. She’s small and lean and spiky, with short dark hair and blue eyes. She’s wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt.

  ‘Come on in.’

  They shake.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me.’

  She holds the door open for him. He walks into the apartment. In a weird way, and though a lot bigger, it’s not unlike his own. Books everywhere and a desk covered in shit. Hers backs onto a window, overlooking the street, so when she’s working at it, the idea is, presumably, she’s facing the room, less distraction.

  She goes over and sits behind it now, and indicates for him to take the chair in front of it.

  ‘I’m in the middle of an article,’ she says, ‘with a looming deadline, so you’ll excuse me if I multi-task for a bit here.’

  ‘No, of course, fine, go ahead, I won’t keep you long anyway.’

  ‘Tea, you want some, or water, or –’

  ‘No. I’m fine.’

  Ellen Dorsey nods and then starts clacking away at her keyboard, looking down at her notes. ‘So,’ she says, ‘talk.’

  Jimmy starts, fixing his gaze on a knot in one of the floorboards.

  He tells it pretty succinctly, and doesn’t hold back as he did with Lessing. He explains about the biography. He describes his conversations with Larry Bolger and Dave Conway. Then he spells it all out – the conference, the mine, the thanaxite, Gianni Bonacci, the helicopter crash.

  BRX, Gideon Global.

  At one point he realises that the clacking has stopped and he looks up.

  Ellen Dorsey is staring at him. ‘Holy shit,’ she says, holding her mouth open. ‘Holy shit.’ Then she laughs and shakes her head. ‘You couldn’t make this up, so I’m assuming you haven’t.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ He shifts his weight in the chair. He realises he has made quite an impression on her. ‘My only problem,’ he says, ‘as you’ve probably guessed, is the lack of hard evidence.’

  Dorsey nods. ‘Sure, sure, but still.’

  First time he’s heard that.

  ‘The other thing I don’t have’, he goes on, deciding to lay all his cards on the table, ‘is a job. This started out as something else, a book about that actress who died in the crash. So I don’t have resources, or any kind of support.’ He pauses. ‘I came here to New York because it seemed like the next logical move.’

  Dorsey considers this, swivelling in her chair. ‘Have you made contact with any of the principals? Do they know you’re looking into this?’

  ‘Not directly, but someone knows.’ He tells her about the break-in at his apartment. ‘
Also, I’m not sure, but I have the impression I’m being followed.’

  Dorsey laughs again. ‘Well, if you’re not, you certainly will be when you leave this place. I get a lot of attention from interested parties. You get used to it.’ She stops swivelling. ‘By the way, what’s the connection with Bob Lessing?’

  Jimmy explains – the eighties, Phil Sweeney, his old man.

  Dorsey seems to get it. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Look. This is an incredible story, and I’ll be honest with you, it doesn’t surprise me one bit. The scramble for resources in Africa has thrown up a lot of nasty shit going back for the last, what, hundred, hundred and fifty years? But the problem, as you say, is proving it. With companies like BRX, guys like Rundle, that takes a lot of work, a lot of digging, a lot of time. You don’t come at them head-on or they’ll crush you, in some cases literally. You gnaw at them, like a tiny rodent they can’t see until it’s too late. And that’s the thing about this job. It’s got a glamorous image, but most of the time it’s mind-numbingly boring.’

  Jimmy wants to say, I know, believe me, but he holds back.

  ‘So, what have we got here?’ she says, shunting her chair forward and leaning on the desk. ‘I’m the one with experience and connections, you’re the one with the story, is that it?’

  He supposes it is, and nods.

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to give me time to think about it, do a little background. How long are you here?’

  Jimmy’s heart sinks. ‘End of the week.’

  She clicks her tongue. ‘Hhhm. I got to finish this.’ She taps the pile of notes on her desk. ‘Let me call you tomorrow, OK? Then we can sit down and hammer it out.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it.’