by Jake Needham
But now I understood completely.
What Karsarkis had wanted me to do all along was to carry a message to the White House, to my old roommate Billy Redwine in particular. The message was to have been that Plato Karsarkis wanted off the hook for everything he had done or he would make them pay. He would tell the world what they had done, what the White House had done, and he would bring them down with him. He would bring them all down.
Plato Karsarkis might be dead, but the soul of his message still lived on the three little cassettes I had in my possession. The time had come for people to start doing the right thing, not because Karsarkis would expose them if they didn’t, but just because it was right.
I tossed the New York Times onto the couch and got dressed. Then I packed and took a cab to LaGuardia, where I caught the Delta Shuttle to Washington.
FIFTY ONE
BILLY REDWINE AND I hadn’t actually spoken since the time a year or so ago when he had flown all the way to Phuket to hear my tale about the Asian Bank of Commerce and the string of dead bodies somebody in Washington had been leaving across Asia to hush up the real story behind its collapse.
I was at National Airport waiting for my bag and trying to decide what to do now that I was in Washington when I noticed a big Hertz sign at baggage claim. That sounded like as good a start as any, so I went out to the curb, caught the yellow and black Hertz bus, and about half an hour later was tooling up the George Washington Parkway in a shiny red Mustang that smelled of new vinyl and old tobacco.
I pushed the radio buttons and found an oldies station and all at once I remembered how much I missed cruising the streets of a city listening to music on a car radio. In Bangkok or Hong Kong or Singapore, they didn’t get the idea at all. Driving just for the sheer hell of it was such an American thing to do. It wasn’t a concept that translated very well.
The disk jockey started playing the original Rolling Stones version of Honky Tonk Woman and I slapped out the rhythm on the steering wheel with my palms.
Damn, that feels good.
When I got to Key Bridge, I turned off the Parkway and crossed over the Potomac into Georgetown. A brisk wind slashed at the city from the east, bringing with it a damp chill off the water and leaving piles of yellow leaves splotched with crimson banked like snowdrifts against the hubcaps of parked cars. The wind spun the dry leaves into miniature tornadoes and lifted scraps of paper and sailed them over the car like tiny squadrons of paper airplanes. The Four Seasons was full, but the Georgetown Inn had a room, so I left the car with the doorman, got my bag out of the trunk, and checked in.
Then I picked up the telephone and called the White House switchboard.
I left a message with a woman who identified herself as Billy Redwine’s administrative assistant. I think that meant she was his secretary. She was cool and correct, and her voice contained no suggestion she expected my call ever to be returned by anyone at all, let alone by Billy Redwine.
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 façade. 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 sipped 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’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 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 in 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, damn,” 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?”
“Sure,” 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 wer
e 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 me, 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.
