Banquo's Ghosts (2 page)

Or Nasrallah might leave his
fidai
—his body double—to wear the hand-me-downs in the ancient Oriental practice of employing a look-alike. The Sheik’s 7
^th
century answer to his 21
^st
century problem. All done with a little baksheesh. Six thousand Lebanese pounds to be exact, the princely sum of
four whole U.S. dollars
in cold cash. It could trump $20 million plus in hardware, software, and satellite time. All so some clown at Langley could write the line in the president’s daily brief tomorrow morning: “Nasrallah Leaves Iranian Embassy, Beirut: 0932Z.” Whether it was true or not.

“We’re losing,” Banquo whispered to the walls.

Had he made the problem even worse? The thought nagged him. Risking disaster by sending a gin-soaked scribbler to do a man’s job?

One of Banquo’s associates knocked on the office door, opened it a crack, and muttered, “Our guy’s on
Larry King
; we’ve got it on in the conference room. Wanna watch?”

“No, thank you.”

He already knew what Peter Johnson would say. After all, they had deliberately recruited the man for his solid leftist credentials and his easy way with fashionable agitprop. That’s exactly what made him useful. That, and his reputation as a drunk. Banquo had put an extra
pair of eyes on Johnson’s Lufthansa flight to watch their man safely through Tehran customs. During the flight Johnson pounded back enough First Class bourbons to embalm a horse. Now, two days in-country the fellow must be feeling pretty shaky. But not so shaky as to miss a TV appearance. Well and good—the firm didn’t pick him for his uprightness.

His associate stood at the door and seemed to be waiting for something more. “Glad he made the show,” Banquo told him. “Means he hasn’t gone off the rails.”

The door closed without reply. And the shadows engulfed him.

Banquo & Duncan. Some twenty-five years ago they let him pick his own name for the outfit, back when people had a sense of humor and Stewart Bancroft—his real name, long forgotten—had a little clout. No more. Now it was dog and pony shows for the congressional committees and frightened rabbits out in the field jumping at their shadows. But not much human intelligence. Banquo had watched the technology get smarter and smarter, the results weaker and weaker. With no real-life human eyes to spy.

Instead the powers-that-be gravitated to other priorities. “Voluntary” sexual harassment and racial sensitivity seminars. Bureaucrats wrote memos about memos. And if anything went wrong, they denied it had gone wrong, or blamed someone else for it going wrong, and resolved never ever to actually
do
anything ever again, lest someone somewhere construe it as having gone wrong.

Crises erupted over family-friendly construction projects. Delays and cost overruns had slowed the Men’s Bathroom renovations—an installation of two hundred quality Care Bear® changing tables “for your convenience.” When what—Mr. Mom
wet
himself? No matter. In case of emergency at a sensitivity seminar, there’d be a changing table for his convenience. And when the brutal workday came to a close at 4:30 PM, the Agency employees lined up in the Langley parking lot, shuffling off to their minivan carpools for their suburban commute home. To travel in herds.

If they ever saw the rare file photo of him in some forgotten file drawer, they might have glanced at it like a curiosity, a faded news picture from
the time before bitmaps and jpegs.
How quaint. A dinosaur in a tar pool. Oh, that’s what spies used to look like.
Every damn one of them smugly oblivious to the fact this dinosaur’s offspring roamed the world at his bidding. He might be stuck in a New York office, but his ghosts—collected over a lifetime—slipped beyond borders and barbed wire into every dark hollow. Last of a vanished breed, an anachronistic rebuke to the self-protective nappies in a nanny’s world.

Well into his mid-fifties, Banquo still owned a full head of hair, with a distinguished touch of gray around the sideburns. His features were handsome and regular, with the kind of strong jaw image-conscious male business types got chin implants to try to duplicate. A harder, lined face that didn’t need to ingratiate itself with anybody or smile all the time. Still, he paid attention to his appearance and was partial to striped suits and shirts with French cuffs. Like a sober, solemn judge in chambers, without his robes. He knew all the staff on the third floor of the 44
^th
Street Brooks Brothers on a first-name basis. A wise old wolf in dandy’s clothes. Stern and unforgiving.

He was conscious of the effect his looks had on others: men either subconsciously deferred to him or succumbed to envy. Yes, the way it should be. His good looks gave him that extra measure of persuasiveness with women. But in dangerous situations, both his allies and his enemies underestimated him as a pretty boy. In the case of the latter, to their mortal peril.

Banquo’s Cold War had been pretty hot, in El Salvador, in Western Pakistan, in Lebanon. Every plot, every betrayal, every death or near-escape never seemed to go away. Each left a vapor trail across his consciousness. His memories the undead, still walking the earth, restless spirits, rattling chains, slamming doors, and touching cold hand to shoulder in lonely moments. Faulkner would have understood. Banquo’s past wasn’t truly past.

It had pointed the way forward, providing an education in everything from the deepest recesses of the human heart to the most profound
grasp of the obvious
in how the world worked.
Or had pointed the way forward until recently.

Until the intellectuals and policymakers called off history about five minutes after the end of the Cold War. Until U.S. intelligence agencies were directed to monitor environmental degradation of the ozone layer and facilitate a nonexistent “peace process.” Until his tradecraft of a lifetime was left to molder away by less talented, less committed, less imaginative people, who didn’t understand that their well-meaning indulgences would bring the most gruesome consequences: the death of innocents and smoky ruins soaked in blood. A vapor trail that wasn’t a ghost of the mind. Thousands obliterated under a smoke-smudged sky falling back to earth the merest three miles from his office, on an innocent September morning.

So very quietly, all alone, Banquo hatched a plan no one else would understand or dare. Send a sodden, fashionable journalist to slay the Monster in his lair—before another September morning came to pass.

All from the comfort of an obscure office. Banquo & Duncan.

Forgotten even to the sublime powers that be. Forgotten to a succession of White House Chiefs of Staff, Special Advisors, heads of the National Security Agency, and a parade of agency directors who could barely organize their pencils on their desk. Same outfit. Same mission. Democrat or Republican administration, corrupt or honest. No matter who was in charge, Banquo & Duncan existed to execute unspoken decisions and deniable intentions. In every administration the same bloody mission: Win the War.

Didn’t matter which.

Now merely the upstairs maid’s room of a monstrous bureaucratic mansion. Where the technocrats sent forlorn plans to curl up and die. Where they sent missions they had no intention of carrying out, so they could tell some congressional committee a given nettlesome problem was being “handled with all due dispatch.”

Banquo got up from his desk, closed his office door behind him, and went to the conference room to see who was still around. Nobody. Everyone had left for the evening, but Larry King still talked to a lonely conference table, a mess of take-out Chinese food boxes, empty soda cans, and paper plates. The custodial engineers of Synch Office Cleaning, under the command of Mr. Synch, would get it later. A quiet grayish man, who once served previous regimes and administrations and therefore possessed clearance. Officially retired, no doubt—but still needing a job to perform. He glided like a phantom in a gray custodial uniform in and out of the offices when the lights were dark and desks empty, once a kind of spy, now a janitor. An old soldier who Banquo treated with the grave respect and deference due any warrior, a survivor of battles only he remembered.

And if their new man, Johnson, came through all right—he would be entitled to the same respect. For his own battle in Iran, never to be forgotten.

A couple of years back one of Banquo’s staff hung a framed replica of Fox Mulder’s famous Alien Saucer poster on the wall above the bank of televisions. Except this poster showed Saddam’s noble profile superimposed over a mushroom cloud. The caption stayed the same though, a comment on the Agency’s egregiously wrong “slam dunk” insistence that Iraq had WMDs when none could be found: “I Want To Believe.”

So for the good of the firm and reasons of professional grit the senior and
only
partner of Banquo & Duncan had left it there.

To hang forever as a warning.

P
eter Johnson’s driver waited for him outside the studio, in a pink Yugo with “MahdiCab” stenciled on the side. His Information Ministry guide opened the cab door while Johnson kept his unreliable hands safely at his sides. Those bourbons on the plane still beckoned him. If anyone noticed, they didn’t let on, and the two men drove him back to the Azadi Grand Hotel across town, a white concrete monolith that boasted “Lobby Coffy shop available 24 hours” on all its brochures.

Like every cab in the Middle East, the interior was tarted up in the latest Islamic Fashion, which hadn’t changed in fifty years. Nauseating light green or pink surrey fringe along the inner windshield; large air freshener in the shape of minaret capstone; golden lines from the Koran in Farsi script on miniature scrolls hanging from every surface. The radio blasted music into Johnson’s brittle ears that sounded like chanting with a lot of feedback on the sound system—just like back in New York. Even in this terribly sober moment, Johnson imagined what the script on the hanging scrolls said—just to amuse himself:

Or:

Or:

He resisted trying these lines out on the Ministry man sitting beside him, knowing full well that discretion is the better part of valor anywhere east of the Danube and south of Venice. Kahleed, his Ministry of Information guide, was an incurious fellow with a close dapper beard, Armani shirts, and the clean manicured nails any professional seemed to have in this part of the world. Johnson had asked him to dinner at the hotel several times, but each time Kahleed politely refused, appearing content to pick him up, drop him off, and make sure he didn’t wander too far. Once again, Johnson offered the fellow a meal at the hotel, but once again Kahleed demurred, as he always did, with the words, “Perhaps tomorrow.”

The air conditioning in the hotel chilled the shirt on his back, lovely and cool and making him think of gin and tonics at sundown on Cape Cod, of evenings hanging out on a front porch with Giselle, his daughter and only child. They took their most recent vacation together, and Dad marveled at his girl, ladylike and all grown up. At least as grown up as any kid could be racing through her twenties.

As usual, Johnson headed for the concierge to check his messages, but before he was halfway across the lobby, his cell phone chimed. Coverage was spotty in Tehran, and he was always pleasantly surprised when it worked. A voice message beeping in. A woman’s voice: Josephine Parker von Hildebrand. His first ex-wife from Oxford days.
And
his Boss. How did a fellow’s life turn out like that? To mangle the words of a great man:
an enigma wrapped in a mystery inside a riddle.

“You were
mah
velous,
dah
ling.” Purposely mimicking Billy Crystal in the old
Saturday Night Live
bit called Fernando’s Hideaway—although with her you never quite knew what was playacting and what was just her. She meant his appearance on CNN’s King, obviously.