A courtroom of sorts had been organized in Ga’s vast and magnificent office. His desk and all his likenesses had been removed from this room, too. The Ndalan flag remained, flanked by what I took to be the flags of the armed forces and other government entities, but not by the presidential flag. The presidential conference table, vast and gleaming and smelling of wax, stood crosswise where Ga’s desk had formerly been. Through the window behind it Ga’s antelopes and gazelles could be seen, bathed in incandescent light as they bounded across the paddocks of his game park. Half a dozen grave men in British-style army, navy, and air force uniforms sat at the table like members of a court-martial. They were flanked by a half dozen others in black judicial robes and white wigs, clearly members of the supreme court, and a handful of other dignitaries wearing national dress or European suits.
All but the military types seemed to be confused by the entrance of the prisoner. In some cases this was obviously the last thing they had expected to see. Some if not all of them probably had not been told why they were there. Maybe some simply did not recognize Ga. Who among them had ever imagined seeing in his present miserable state the invulnerable creature the president of the republic had been?
If in fact there were any doubts about his identity, Ga removed them at once. In his unmistakable voice he shouted, “As president for life of the republic, I command you, all you generals, to arrest this man on a charge of high treason.”
He attempted to point at Benjamin but of course could not do so with his wrists chained to his waist. Nevertheless, it was an impressive performance. Ga’s voice was thunderous, his eyes flashed, he was the picture of command. For an instant he seemed to be fully clothed again. He gave every possible indication that he expected to be obeyed without question. But he was not obeyed, and when he continued to shout, the large constable did what he had done before, at the radio station. He clapped a hand over Ga’s mouth and pinched his nostrils shut, and this time prolonged the treatment until Ga’s struggle for breath produced high-pitched gasps that sounded very much like an infant crying.
The trial lasted less than an hour. Some might have called it a travesty, but everyone present knew that Ga was guilty of the crimes with which he was charged, and guilty, too, of even more heinous ones. Besides that, they knew that they must kill Ga now that they had witnessed his humiliation, or die themselves if he regained power. The trial itself followed established forms. Benjamin, as head of the national police, had prepared a bundle of evidence that was presented by a prosecutor and objected to by a lawyer appointed to defend Ga. Both men wore barrister’s wigs. Witnesses were duly sworn. They testified to the massacre of the beggars. The immaculate young captain testified that Ga had embezzled not less than fifty million American dollars from the national treasury and deposited them in secret accounts in Geneva, Zurich, and Liechtenstein. The court heard tape recordings of Ga, in secret meetings with foreign ambassadors and businessmen, agreeing to make certain high appointments and award certain contracts in return for certain sums of money. Damning evidence was introduced that Ga had ordered the death of his own brother and had perhaps fed him alive to hyenas in the game park.
Without retiring to deliberate, the court returned a unanimous verdict of guilty on all counts. Benjamin, who was not a member of the court-martial, did not join the others at the table and was not called to testify. He spoke not a single word during the proceedings. When Ga, who had also been silent, was asked if he had anything to say before the sentence was pronounced, he laughed. But it was a very small laugh.
The prisoner was delivered to Benjamin for immediate execution. After this the court-martial reconvened as the Council of the High Command, and in Ga’s presence—or, more accurately, as if Ga no longer existed and had been rendered invisible—elected the chief of staff of the army as acting head of state and government. Benjamin kept his old job, his old title, his old powers, and presumably, his pension.
I wish I could tell you for the sake of symmetry that Ga died the kind of barbarous death that he had decreed for others, that Benjamin fed him like a Thomson’s gazelle to the cheetahs or gashed his flesh and set a pack of hyenas on him under the stadium lights. But nothing of the sort happened.
What happened was this. The generals and admirals and justices and the others got into their cars and drove away. Ga, Benjamin, the sergeant, the two constables, and I went outside. We walked across the palace grounds, Ga limping in his chains, away from the palace, over the lawns. Animals in the zoo stirred. Something growled as it caught our scent. Only the animals took an interest in what was happening. The constables guarding the palace stayed at their posts. The servants had vanished. Looking back at the palace I had the feeling that it was completely empty.
When we came to a place that was nearly out of sight of the palace—the white mansion glowed like a toy in the distance—we stopped. The constables let go of Ga and stepped away from him. Ga said something to Benjamin in what sounded to me like the same language that Benjamin and the sergeant spoke to each other. Benjamin walked over to Ga and bent his head. Ga whispered something in his ear.
Benjamin made a gesture. The sergeant vanished. So did the two constables. I made as if to go. Benjamin said, “No. Stay.” The stadium lights went out. The sun was just below the horizon in the east. I could feel its mass pulling at my bones, and even before it became visible, its heat on my skin.
We walked on, until we could no longer see the presidential palace or light of any kind no matter where we looked. Only moments of darkness remained. Ga sank to his knees, with difficulty because of the chains, and stared at the place where the sun would rise. Briefly, Benjamin placed a hand on his shoulder. Neither man spoke.
The rim of the sun appeared on the horizon. And then with incredible buoyancy and radiance, as if slung from the heavens, the entire star leaped into view. Benjamin stepped back a pace, pointed his Webley at the back of Ga’s head, and pulled the trigger. The sound was not loud. Ga’s body was thrown forward by the impact of the bullet. Red mist from his wound remained behind, hanging in the air, and seemed to shoot from the edge of the sun, but that was a trick of light.
Benjamin did not examine the corpse or even look at it. I realized he was going to leave it for the hyenas and the jackals and the vultures and the many other creatures that would find it.
Benjamin said to me, “You have seen everything. Tell them in Washington.”
“All right,” I said. “But tell me why.”
Benjamin said, “You know why, Mr. Brown.”
He walked away. I followed him, not sure I could find my way out of this scrubby wilderness without him but not sure, either, whether he was going back to civilization or just going back.
SLEEPING WITH MY ASSASSIN
ANDREW KLAVAN
BORN IN NEW YORK CITY as one of four sons of the popular liberal talk-show host Gene Klavan, who cohosted Klavan and Finch and then hosted Klavan in the Morning, Andrew Klavan (1954– ) grew up and identified himself early in life as a liberal and a Jew, both of which changed as he grew older. He described himself as an agnostic for some years before converting to Christianity, and he is now an active writer and blogger with libertarian conservative views. He hosts The Andrew Klavan Show, a satirical political podcast on The Daily Wire. He also is a contributing editor to City Journal and his essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among other places.
As a mystery writer, Klavan has enjoyed both popular and critical success, with five Edgar Allan Poe nominations, two of which were winners: Mrs. White (1983), coauthored with his brother Laurence under the pseudonym Margaret Tracy, which was the basis for White of the Eye, a film released in 1987 starring David Keith and Cathy Moriarty, and The Rain (1988), under the pseudonym Keith Peterson.
In 1992, he was nominated for an Edgar in the Best Novel category for Don’t Say a Word, which later became a 2001 fi
lm that starred Michael Douglas, Sean Bean, and Brittany Murphy. His novel True Crime (1995) was filmed and released four years later with Clint Eastwood as director and star, featuring Isaiah Washington, LisaGay Hamilton, and James Woods. Klavan wrote the screenplays for the Michael Caine vehicle A Shock to the System (1990), a mystery based on the novel by Simon Brett, and the horror film One Missed Call (2008). He also wrote the story and cowrote the screenplay for Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer (2018), which featured Michael Beach, Dean Cain, Janine Turner, and Nick Searcy, who also directed.
Demonstrating his versatility, Klavan has written a series of thrillers for young adults called The Homelanders, including The Last Thing I Remember (2009), The Long Way Home (2010), The Truth of the Matter (2010), and The Final Hour (2011).
“Sleeping with My Assassin” was originally published in Agents of Treachery (New York, Vintage, 2010).
SLEEPING WITH MY ASSASSIN
ANDREW KLAVAN
I KNEW WHY she had come—of course I did—but I fell for her anyway—of course. That was what she’d been designed for and who I was, who they’d made me. I didn’t even question it much, to be honest. I’d come to hate philosophizing of that sort by then. Endless discussions about nature versus nurture or fate versus free will. In the end, what are you even talking about really? Nothing: the way words work, the way the human brain puts ideas together—what we’re capable of conceiving, I mean, not the real, underlying truth of the matter. I’m sure there’s some logic to a person’s life and all that. Some algorithm of accident and providence and inborn character that explains it. Maybe God can work it out, if he exists and has a calculator handy. Maybe even he shrugs the whole thing off as a pain in the celestial ass.
But for me, in the event, it was more poetry than philosophy or math. I saw her and I thought, “Ah, yes, of course, that’s who they would send, isn’t it?” She was death and the past and my dreams incarnate. And I fell for her, even knowing why she’d come.
* * *
—
I had premonitions of the end as soon as I read about the train wreck. I saw it on the Drudge Report over my morning coffee and suspected right away it was one of ours. A computer glitch on the D.C.–New York corridor. A head-on collision, twenty-seven dead, no one, seemingly, to blame. They were still digging bodies from the smoking wreckage when the FBI announced it wasn’t terrorism. A likely story. Of course it was terrorism. By afternoon and through the two days following, various Islamist groups were claiming credit by way of various YouTube videos featuring various magi with greasy beards and colorful noses and utterly ridiculous hats. That was a likely story, too. Those hate-crazy clowns—they didn’t have the network for it, not in this country.
Which meant it was a genuine riddle. Because we did have the network, but we had no cause.
* * *
—
I worried at it for a day or two, trying to sort out the possibilities. Stein was our man on the eastern railways, and I suppose, after so many decades of silence and unknowing, he might have just flipped and pressed the button. But he was always a stolid character, unlikely to go rogue. And anyway, instinct told me this was something else, something more disturbing. It had the smell of geniune catastrophe.
Finally, the anxiety got to be too much for me. I decided to take a risk. I couldn’t contact Stein himself, of course. If we weren’t active, it would be a useless danger. If we were, it would mean death to us both. Using my cover, I called a contact at the Agency instead—a threat analyst in the New York office—and he and I took a lunchtime stroll around the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to be.
There was nothing particularly strange about this. There are plenty of gabby spooks around. You’d be surprised. A lot of these guys are just overeducated bureaucrats playing Spy vs. Spy. They graduate with an ideology and maybe some computer skills but no real sense of evil whatsoever. Secrecy doesn’t mean that much to them. Gossip is the only real talent they have—and the only real power they have—and they know you have to give to get. Buy them a drink and they’ll spill state secrets like your Aunt May talking about Cousin Jane’s abortion: all raised eyebrows and confidential murmurs and theoretically subtle hints you’d have to be an idiot not to understand.
But Jay—I’ll call him Jay—was different. He’d been in Afghanistan, for one thing. He’d seen the sort of things people do to one another on the strength of bad religion or through the logic of misguided ideas or just out of plain monkey meanness. He knew the moral universe was not a simple machine in which you pour goodness in one end and goodness reliably comes out the other. All this made him better at his job than the academic whiz kids, more circumspect, more paranoid and thoughtful, less likely to make an easy trade for information. Subtlety, in fact, was the whole point for him. The unsaid thing that left open a world of possibilities. Which was his world—because the way Jay saw it, you never really knew.
We were on the walkway beside the wreckage pit, moving in slow, measured steps amid a quick, jerky, time-lapse lunch crowd. We were shoulder to shoulder, our eyes front. Both of us in overcoats, both of us with our hands in our pockets. It was a biting October day.
Jay made the slightest gesture with his head toward the damage. Not dramatic at all—barely perceptible. But just enough to answer my objections to blaming the jihadis, just enough to say, They did that, didn’t they?
“That was different,” I said. Muttering, tight-lipped. “Primitive. Plus they got lucky. Plus we were stupid then.”
“Oh, we’re stupid now,” he said with a laugh. “Believe me.”
“Still.”
He looked at me as we walked along—looked until I turned and read his eyes. I saw that he was puzzled, too; he smelled catastrophe, too.
“You know something?” he asked me.
I shrugged. I didn’t. “There was some chatter before the fact,” I said. “They knew it was on the way.”
This was just a guess, but I felt sure it was a good one. It was the only reason I could think of why the YouTube wise men in their absurd hats should have had any measure of credibility with Jay at all. I could tell by his reaction that I’d gotten it right. There had been chatter. They had known.
Jay pursed his lips and let out a breath, a whispered whistle. We both faced front again. I saw him nodding from the corner of my eyes, confirming my suspicions.
“So why are there no fingerprints?” he wondered aloud.
* * *
—
Well, exactly. That was the question. Because the Arabs leave fingerprints. They pretty much have to. They pretty much want to, but even if they didn’t, they would. Because they don’t have the network. They aren’t implanted, integrated, invisible the way we are. How could they be? Think of our preparation, the time we had to establish ourselves here. Time enough, in fact, so that the whole point and purpose of us passed away.
Which brought me right back where I’d started. They had the cause but not the network. We had the network but not the cause. I couldn’t make any sense of it, and it had me worried. I kept circling around it in my mind as I walked uptown on Broadway toward my office.
It was a long walk in the brisk, wistful weather. Soon enough, the useless round of reasoning wore itself out, and I wasn’t thinking at all anymore but had drifted instead into daydreams.
I’d always been like that, a dreamer, all my life. Lately, though, the quality of the dreams had changed. There was an aspect of compulsion to them, maybe even of addiction. They’d acquired a disturbing and ambient realism, too. I was there sometimes almost more than I was here. I wanted to be there more. I found a kind of peace when I was dreaming that I never had otherwise.
It was always about the Village. Always about Centerville. Not memories of my childhood, mind you. I had those, too, but the daydreams were something different, something more pathetic really, when yo
u consider it. In the daydreams, I was in my hometown again but as a man in his early thirties, say, a man some quarter century younger than I am now but some fifteen years older than I was when I left the Village for good. I suppose, if you wanted to get psychological about it, you could say I was imagining myself at my father’s age, the age my father was when I was little. But I think, more to the point, I was dreaming about myself at an age when I was still romantic but not unrecognizably young, more like myself than a seventeen-year-old but vigorous enough to play the handsome hero of a love story.
That’s what they were, my daydreams: love stories. Their plots are too childish and embarrassing to go into at length, but a few details give their flavor. The setting played a major role: Centerville’s green lawns and trim clapboard houses, the Stars and Stripes waving above the verandas, the bikes and trikes rattling along the sidewalks. Churches, parks and ponds, and elm-shaded walkways. And the school, of course, the gray-shingled, all-American elementary school. The world of my boyhood, in other words.
She—the girl, the love interest—was variously named Mary or Sally or Jane. Smith was always her last name. Mary or Sally or Jane Smith. She was always very prim and proper—sometimes shy, sometimes warm and outgoing, but always proper and modest as good women were back there, back then. That, I think, was the heart of what I pined for. Not the Village’s peaceful lawns and houses—or not only its lawns and houses and tree-lined walks—but the sweetness of its women, their virginity or at least their virtue or at least what I had thought as a boy was their virtue and had so admired and desired and loved.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 155
