by Jake Needham
“He demanded the crash site be completely locked down until American personnel could get here. I figure in about another hour the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the DEA, the military spooks, and God only knows who else will be crawling all over this place and carting away everything you see. After they’re done, we probably won’t even have to clean up.”
“Probably not,” I agreed.
“Jack, if there might be anything out there…” Kate waved her arms vaguely over the devastation, “anything at all that it might be better for us—or you—your fellow countrymen don’t find when they take over the site, this is the only chance you’re going to have to tell me about it.”
“If I knew of anything like that, I would tell you, Kate, but I don’t.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“Because you’re a deeply cynical woman with a suspicious nature who is professionally paranoid about nearly everything?”
Kate said nothing. She just walked away, picking a cautious path forward through the field of wreckage. Not really knowing what else to do, CW and I followed.
After about twenty yards, Kate stopped and pointed at the mangled rubber trees lining both sides of the swath the dying aircraft had dug through the landscape. “When there is a crash right after take-off,” she said, “there’s generally a large fire because the plane is fully loaded with fuel.”
I could see most of the rubber trees were scorched and blackened although not really burned. A number of them were still damp from the morning rain and looked to be wholly untouched.
“There was no fire here,” Kate said. “Plato’s Gulfstream would have had thirty thousand pounds of jet fuel in its tanks when it hit, but there was no fire.”
She looked at me to see if I understood the significance of that.
“You’re saying the impact was so great the fuel vaporized before it could catch fire,” I said.
She nodded.
“Then the explosion was probably just large enough to shear off the tail section and cut the control cables,” I said. “Most of the plane would have been left intact. Those poor bastards rode it all the way down, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “I think they did.”
“Son of a bitch,” CW muttered to himself.
The three of us continued to walk slowly south, picking our way through things I did not want to examine too closely. After another fifty or sixty yards, we reached what appeared to be the center of the horror.
“Do you know exactly who was on the plane?” I asked Kate.
“Just Plato,” she said, “and two pilots and two cabin attendants. No one else we know of.”
“But you are absolutely sure Plato Karsarkis was on this airplane?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “We had the airport under surveillance. We watched him board, and we watched the plane take off.”
“Some people aren’t going to believe he’s dead, you know.”
“Maybe not, but he is.”
“There’s no doubt in your mind?”
“None at all. Whoever it was, they finally got him.”
I nodded at that, but I didn’t say anything.
One of the two men in short-sleeved white shirts caught up with Kate again. He began to murmur into Kate’s ear and she turned away from us, listening.
“What do you think, Slick?” CW asked me under his breath.
“I don’t know.”
“You figure it was foreign terrorists?”
“No.”
“Than who the fuck was it?”
I took a deep breath. “I think it was you, C.W, or somebody a lot like you.”
“Ah, shit, Slick, you couldn’t really think…” CW trailed off. He took a couple of steps away from me and half turned his back. Then he just stood there, his hands jammed in his pockets, shaking his head.
The sightseers were already starting to gather. Men, women, and children had materialized through the trees from nearly every direction and the noise level was rising with each new group of arrivals. Some people picked through the debris looking for things of value, while others shoved and jostled to get a better look at the devastation.
I noticed a whole family pushing eagerly forward. There was a mother, a father, and two little children who couldn’t have been more than four or five. The mother had one child, the father had the other, and they held both of them high above the crowd so the children could see as much of the horror as possible.
A few uniformed police moved around the debris making ineffectual efforts to keep sightseers away, but they were overwhelmed and disoriented men and they accomplished nothing. I watched one policeman climb into the lower branches of a badly mangled rubber tree about twenty yards away. He reached up above his head and began pushing with his hands, trying to dislodge something tangled there. Although it took me a few moments, I eventually realized the policeman was heaving at a headless human torso.
The torso had been wedged so tightly into the tree’s branches that the policeman couldn’t move it regardless of how hard he pushed. Shifting his weight slightly and holding the trunk with one hand, he reached up again and tried tugging at it instead.
Almost immediately the torso disintegrated. A flood of yellow fluid poured down over the policeman’s head, followed by strips of gray flesh and coils of pinkish intestines.
The man slid backwards out of the tree, fell to his knees on the ground, and vomited down the front of his shirt.
FIVE MONTHS LATER
New York City
Washington, D.C.
“America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets…It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here’s to them.”
—James Ellroy
American Tabloid
FORTY NINE
THE FALL TERM at the university began in September, but it began without me. That was an arrangement agreeable all around. I didn’t feel a great deal like teaching and the university didn’t feel a great deal like employing a professor whose face had been in half the newspapers in the world after shooting a man to death during the murder of Plato Karsarkis’ wife and her security guards.
As one might expect in Thailand the separation was accomplished with massive amounts of face-saving on all sides. I asked the university for a leave of absence based on a detailed account of the injuries I suffered in the attack in Phuket, and the university granted me a leave of absence based on its deeply sympathetic feelings for me and its sincere hope I would return to my post at an early date.
Both statements were, of course, utter crap. After the kind of publicity I’d had, a Thai university wouldn’t have touched me with a rubber-insulated cattle prod. And for my part, the bullet wounds had healed completely within a few weeks following my return to Bangkok. It was the invisible wounds that caused all the pain after that.
I thought of Anita constantly: where she was now, and what she was doing. Over and over I summoned up a picture of her and each time it opened in my mind like an image projected on a screen. I would lean toward it, studying the detail, tracing its edges, looking for whatever it was I had not seen there before; but I could not find it. There was nothing that I had not seen there before. That was the part that really frightened me, of course. Even now, even knowing the truth of it now, I still could not see anything I had not seen there before.
It was not until after the school term had actually begun that I started to think about what I was going to do with myself. I had no classes to teach and perhaps I never would again, but at the very least I had none for a while. I had resigned all of my corporate directorships as well and the consulting work I sometimes did had dried up of its own accord. When people hire a lawyer for a matter that they need handled discreetly, on the whole they prefer to hire someone whose public profile is discreet as well. That pretty much ruled me out now.
For what was probably the first time in my entire adult life I had no obligations at all. That wa
s when I discovered something that a whole lot of other people no doubt already knew. When you find yourself at loose ends, you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about lunch. I ended up reading a lot, which I didn’t mind, but with Anita gone the apartment was still and depressing and I started spending more and more time every day trying to think of some place to go just to get out of it.
One night in early November, I was at home eating a tuna sandwich and watching CNN when I heard a report that Plato Karsarkis’ daughter Zoe had died of leukemia in New York. On impulse, I had thrown a few things into a bag that very night, taken a cab to the airport the next morning, and flown to New York for her funeral.
Even now, I’m not sure exactly why I did that. Maybe it just seemed like a convenient excuse to spend some time under what might be a kinder sky. I could hardly claim I was doing it for Zoe. I had never even met her. And I sure as hell wasn’t doing it for Plato Karsarkis.
The plain fact was that I had thought about Karsarkis as little as possible since his plane had smashed into that grove of rubber trees in Phuket, and I had not thought at all about what he had told me in my hospital room that morning before it happened. I hadn’t listened to the tapes he had given me. Never even considered it. I had tucked all three of them away in a bottom drawer of my desk together with the transcripts of the email intercepts Kate had given me, and I had not taken them out or even thought about them since I had put them in there. I’m sure a psychiatrist could have come up with a term for how I had managed to bury the whole subject so completely, maybe even why, but I didn’t much want to know what it was. I already knew far more than I wanted to know about far too many things.
Karsarkis had claimed that my old Georgetown roommate, Billy Redwine, now counsel to the president, was on those tapes. If he was, and if — as Karsarkis claimed — Billy’s voice was recognizable talking to Cynthia Kim about components used in the Bali bombings having originated from a covert National Security Council operation, then the White House would be in very deep shit. At least it would be if the tapes ever became public.
I really had no doubt what Karsarkis had told me about the content of the tapes was true. That was precisely why he had wanted me as his point man in pitching for a pardon in the first place. Pardon applications were filed with the White House counsel’s office. If I had filed Karsarkis’ pardon application with Billy Redwine, he would have guessed immediately that Karsarkis had, as they say, an ace in the hole—and that his old Georgetown roommate was threatening him with what was nothing short of extortion.
The Thai Airlines flight left Bangkok at dinner time and took me nonstop to Los Angeles. I grabbed a shower and a few hours’ sleep at a Hilton on Century Boulevard, then I took the hotel shuttle back to the airport and caught an early morning American Airlines flight to New York.
From thirty-five thousand feet the western half of the United States has always seemed lunar to me: unidentifiable rings that look like craters, ranges of mountains that appear impassable, and a latticework of thin white lines scratched into the reddish-brown earth. I drank black coffee and watched Nevada become Utah, and I thought about the people who two centuries before had worked their way westward over that very landscape on horseback or even on foot. If they had realized what they were getting into, if they could have seen the place whole from thirty-five thousand feet like I could now, I was willing to bet they would have said to hell with this and just stayed home.
But they couldn’t see what they were getting into, of course, so they just kept going. Like the rest of us did when we were digging a hole for ourselves, they moved forward step by step, no single step seeming all that important, but the sum of all those steps propelling them into the heart of a wasteland so terrifying that surely they would have turned and fled if they could have seen it for what it really was.
I was still trying to decide what to make of that dazzling insight when jet lag took me and I fell into a deep if short-lived sleep.
FIFTY
ZOE’S FUNERAL WAS at a Catholic church on Eighty-Third Street near Park. Predictably it drew a crowd of television and newspaper photographers, but there were actually fewer lenses poking at Zoe’s small, rose-covered coffin than I had expected. I gathered, in death, Plato Karsarkis was already on the inevitable slide to becoming nothing more than yesterday’s news. Another year and he would be in somebody’s whatever-happened-to column.
Karsarkis’ ex-wife, Zoe’s mother, was both younger and more striking than I had expected. She was tall and very thin, and her blonde hair was twisted up into what I think women call a French braid. A black Chanel suit set off her pale skin and her blue eyes looked both warm and guarded at the same time.
When the brief ceremony ended, she stood and crossed herself, and then while we all waited respectfully in silence she left the church alone by the center aisle. Strangely, just as she passed me she turned her head slightly and caught my eye. Normally I would have looked away, but she didn’t, so I didn’t either.
For a moment it seemed almost as if she was going to stop and say something to me, although I couldn’t imagine what it would be. She didn’t stop, of course, but stranger still, she tilted her head slightly in my direction as she moved past and appeared to mouth something that looked to me exactly like thank you. Then she continued out of the church onto Eighty-Third Street. By the time I had made my own way outside, she was gone.
I had no idea at all what that could have been about, or even if I might have imagined the whole thing. No idea at all.
Back at the hotel that night I ordered a burger and a beer from room service and I watched Monday Night Football until I realized I didn’t give a damn about American football anymore. After that, I went down to the bar mostly just to have something to do. Pleased to find the place nearly deserted, I took a stool and sipped a Bushmills and water in silence.
The television set at the end of the bar was tuned to New York One, a twenty-four-hour cable news channel that featured mostly local news. I didn’t pay much attention to it until I happened to glance up and see the church where Zoe’s funeral had been held that afternoon.
“Could you turn that up?” I called out to the bartender.
The ferret-faced man who looked like Al Pacino with bad hair was washing glasses in a sink at the other end of the bar. He dried his hands on the towel hanging over his shoulder, then picked up a remote control and raised the television’s volume.
As I listened to a woman reporter deliver a rambling and unnecessarily detailed description of Zoe’s funeral, the bartender eased over, tilted his head up, and watched along with me. The reporter wrapped her story with a brief account of Plato Karsarkis’ own death in a plane crash and then summarized some of the more outrageous stories that had swirled around him in life.
“Good riddance,” the bartender mumbled in a thick Eastern European accent of some kind. “The bastard.”
“I’m sorry?” I asked automatically, not entirely certain I’d heard the man correctly.
“I said the bastard got what he deserved,” the bartender repeated, gesturing with his towel toward the TV set. “Plato Karsarkis getting killed like that, I meant. Not the little girl dying, God bless her.”
I said nothing.
“That scumbag was a piece-of-shit criminal and everybody treated him like a movie star,” the bartender snorted in disgust. “Made a fortune helping the rag heads kill people. Got what he deserved, if you ask me.”
“There was never a trial,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis might not have been convicted of anything if one had taken place.”
The man snorted again. “I expect you got that right, pal. Make the crime big enough and nobody ever did it. Notice how that always works?”
The bartender tossed his towel up in the air, caught it smartly, and scrubbed a spot off the bar. Then he turned the television set back down and returned to washing his glasses.
I let him, finishing my whiskey in silence.
The next morning, wrapped i
n a hotel bathrobe and trying to read the New York Times over toast and coffee, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about what the bartender had said.
He was right about one thing, of course. The really big crimes had little or nothing to do with justice. What they had to do with was power. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. What I didn’t understand, at least not yet, was exactly what the really big crime had really been in this case.
Was it Plato Karsarkis’ deal to peddle smuggled oil and launder the profits? Was it corrupt Asian politicians taking payoffs when their countries bought the oil? Was it some cockamamie National Security Council scheme to subvert Indonesia? Was it the secret diversion of American weapons to terrorists who then used them to kill hundreds of kids? Was it somebody, maybe even the Americans in the White House who had set the whole scheme into motion in the first place, murdering people in an effort to retrieve tape recordings implicating them in the plot?
Or was it something worse? Something even worse than that.
Was it that a few powerful men knew exactly what they had done; that their scheming and plotting had set in motion events that they could no longer control; that innocents had been killed as a consequence; and that they were all going to get away with it?
When I thought about it that way, a hard knot of anger began to form deep within me. If they did get away with it, wouldn’t I be responsible now? Didn’t I possess both the means and the ability to see they didn’t get away with it?
I knew I had to forget all about abstract concepts like good and evil, fairness and injustice, honor and shame. What I had to focus on now was power. Who had it, how they used it, and where it was.
I knew where it was.
The White House was just at the other end of the Delta Shuttle, hardly more than an hour from New York.
In the bottom of my bag there was a flat manila envelope and inside that envelope was the printout of the NIA files Kate had given me together with the three microcassettes Plato Karsarkis had committed into my care. When I had packed in Bangkok, I had put them into my suitcase without really understanding why I was doing it.
