Banquo's Ghosts (21 page)

Wallets nodded slightly, as if to say,
Yeah, right
, but instead said coldly, “Let’s talk about how I can help Department of Justice, for the Southern District of New York Case 228 known as: NYDOJ 228: Agents Smith and Wesson; subject: Banquo & Duncan; complainant: A. Bryce, redacted. Can we talk about that?”

O’Hanlon took his feet off his wastepaper basket. For Chrissakes. What
didn’t
he know? Investigation, redacted or not, totally blown. Mildly, he said, “I don’t know, Mr. Wallets. Can we?”

Wallets put his feet up on the other side of O’Hanlon’s wastepaper basket. “Your case has taken an unexpected turn. You’re working for us now.”

With superhuman effort, O’Hanlon kept the steam from rising into his head. Was it possible? Nobody at DOJ had bothered to give him a heads up, nobody at Langley. Was he to take the word of this grim messenger boy? “Let’s slow down a minute,” he said.

As if on cue the fax machine on a corner file cabinet whirred to life, spitting out a communication. From DOJ. Smith handed it to him. The official redirection. “Please show every accommodation and professional courtesy to—”

At this point O’Hanlon wished he’d sent Bryce away when he showed up at his doorstep that morning:
Did he need this?
On the other hand, he hadn’t been psyched by the pointless original investigation anyway. Say what you will, Banquo & Duncan at least appeared to be on the ball.

Cooperating with them would be unusual, but in his years in New York, O’Hanlon had gotten used to the CIA mucking around where it wasn’t supposed to. A playground for foreign diplomats and spies, the city always had provided the CIA leeway for working on domestic matters where it didn’t belong.

O’Hanlon let the fax drop to his desk. “Okay, I guess we’re working
with
you.”

Wallets took his feet off the wastebasket and uncrossed his arms. For the first time he looked like he didn’t want to drive his broad shoulders through someone or something until he got his way. “Should be advantageous to us both,” he said. “Now, you want to look across the river. There’s a girl who’s picked up some questionable friends.”

O’Hanlon glanced dourly at his two agents, Smith and Wesson, including Bryce.

“What kind of friends?”

“You tell me,” Wallets said. “Let’s find out.”

“Well, ladies, what do you say?” O’Hanlon said. “Shall we move our Federal Clown Show to Brooklyn?”

Which they promptly did, picking up their girl as she went to work that very next morning from the Brooklyn apartment and covering her 24/7 until they got somewhere. The minute the apartment door closed, a quick toss of Johnson’s pad. Nothing much.

Then traveling to work with her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On 83
^rd
Street east of Fifth, the Publications Department occupied a four-story annex. The department created the Metropolitan’s swank gift catalogue four times a year. Giselle proofed advertising copy, a job she took after leaving the 9/11 ruins of Salomon Smith Barney. It had been wangled by Johnson’s third ex-wife, Elizabeth Richards, Assistant Curator, because she liked the girl, still friends even after the divorce. It wasn’t Giselle’s fault if StepMama and Papa couldn’t get their act straight. So they tapped into the stepmom’s phone and PC too.

The surveillance was a combination of low tech and high, the old fashioned and the new. Agents Smith and Wesson followed Giselle on foot or by cab or subway, cell phones plastered to their heads and yapping like everyone else in New York. Bryce displayed an unexpected talent for picking locks and jimmying open doors. A talent learned from panty raids at Choate, no doubt.

They also had at their disposal one of the city of New York’s four spanking brand new federally funded microwave surveillance trucks; something the Department of Homeland Security finally did right. The mobile unit was concealed in a slightly beat-up panel van stenciled on the outside with red Chinese pictograms and in English, “Hung Fat Oriental Food Distributors—Long Island City,” like a purveyor truck for Chinatown restaurants. Inside, packed to the shock-absorbers with the latest listening and watching gear. So much of it had been miniaturized since 9/11, the Hung Fat van was actually roomy enough for the whole crew, including a technician. All manner of homing devices to track people, shotgun microphones, digital recorders, uplink to Langley, and, most importantly, microwave itself.

Here, the technician, Jordan, a young, shiny-faced black guy who always wore a flat-brimmed classic tan-and-brown San Diego Padres cap and operated with quiet, deliberate movements, occasionally pausing to unwrap Bonomo taffy or tear into a bag of Lay’s potato chips.
Jordan could monitor multiple groups of targets on multiple screens or even split monitors, plus sound, if you could drop a mini-mike close enough to the action. And not just out in the open either—around corners, behind doors, and even walls; through twenty feet of concrete into a subbasement; through the steel of a bank’s safe on ground level; or fifty stories up in a high-rise apartment building. The targets looked like the images from the movie
Predator
, but you could still distinguish facial features, as preprogrammed templates.

With staggering effort a faceless team of code-writing drones had reduced the whole city to a global positioning grid, street by street and room by room, not quite down to the last closet or stairwell, but damn close enough. In this way, when Wesson, Smith, or Bryce spotted a promising mark, they could swoop in. All under the gray eyes of Robert Wallets.

O’Hanlon’s leggy agents scored that first evening as if they’d been working the case for weeks. Giselle’s date picked her up from work on 83
^rd
Street and took her to dinner. He was a good-looking boy, with the kind of handsome, manicured appearance only a sophisticated city dweller can manage. The sporty, casual open shirt, the loafers, the managed scruff, and the $300 slacks didn’t hurt either.

Smith and Wesson followed the couple south on the Downtown IRT subway line to Astor Place in the village. Using their cell phone cameras, enhanced imaging and passport photo database, they soon pegged the lad as Anton Anjou, twenty-seven, associate account representative in the local Banque Luxembourg. The French kid oozed beaucoup euros, flashing a gold Rolex and a gold link bracelet as if he didn’t mind losing either or both to a mugger or a bet.

All of this was meticulously gone over and analyzed the following day at the B & D offices, where they’d regularly gather since their “redirection.”

“Where’d she meet him?” Banquo wanted to know.

“We think a gallery opening,” Bryce told him. “The Caselli Gallery doing Art Spiegelman for a
New Yorker
spread back in June. Frenchie bought her a Spiegelman original from the Maus book. $25,000 on his AmEx.”

“How do we know he gave it to her?”

“She’s got it hanging in the apartment. We checked.”

“Does he stay there?”

“He did last night,” Wallets told him. “But I’ll bet she stays over with him a lot—he’s got quite the townhouse on Grove Street; all four floors renovated. This kid is
loaded
. Nephew of some sort of duke.”

“
Mais oui. That
Anjou. His uncle has been investing with us since ’73. Only a fraction of the family fortune, you understand. About four million, high-risk stuff. Now about the girl. Is our gal seeing anyone else?”

“Not a chance.” This from Agent Wesson. Then Agent Smith, pointing to a picture, “Look at her. She’s a good girl.”

Giselle was not a leggy beauty with sky-high cheekbones and a perfectly dimpled chin. She had been named prior to anyone knowing about
that
Giselle. Tom Brady probably wouldn’t have given her a second look. Still plenty pretty with a $250 color-tint blonde ’do. Sure, a little thick in the middle, a round face, and yet to lose all her baby fat. Maybe never would. But most of the men in Manhattan who’d never date world-famous supermodels would be happy to be with her. It didn’t look like Anton thought he was slumming.

The second night she was decked out, in knee-high shiny black boots and a silver shimmering blouse with the top three buttons undone. Smith and Wesson with Bryce along traipsed after the lovebirds to a place across town on 14
^th
Street, Dirty Disco. Either a small club or a large lounge, depending on how you looked at it. Groups of people sat on the low-to-the-ground leather. The 100K sound system pumping out house and 1980s hip-hop ensured everyone would go home with their ears ringing. A small dance floor was crowded with dancers, seemingly jerked this way and that by the bass beat that made your feet vibrate if you stood still on the floor. No pictures possible in the barely lit club, and forget about recording anything.

The two G-Women and Bryce stood on the sidewalk watching the passing traffic and tried to decide which of them would least stand out. Bambi, Thumper, or the Preppie? Finally it was decided that Smith and Bryce would go. In case someone went to the rest room, they’d have both the men’s and women’s covered. Bryce loosened his tie and rolled
his French cuffs on the outside of his suit jacket Wall Street trader-style, while Smith opened her tailored shirt another notch, and passed her sidearm to her partner. “There’s no way I’m packing in this zoo. Too crowded.”

Braced for the worst, the two shouldered their way into the midst of the dancing, drinking, grinding bodies. As arranged, Bryce hung back, and Smith got hit on within thirty seconds, letting various gentlemen buy her drinks that she managed somehow to avoid actually drinking. She flitted from gentleman to gentleman with a butterfly’s grace, pretending to be offended by something or other they said and telling them, with a pouting smile, “See you later.”

Until she had the one she wanted. He came from a group of three, him and two buddies, not at all fitting in. What would you call them? Swarthy foreigners? Middle Eastern
types
? Hell, they could have been Greeks or Cypriots just off the boat. But they weren’t.

They were what you’d call Queens Boulevard
haute couture
from the cheap stores that lined the immigrant avenue. Cheesy knockoffs that would have seemed the sultan’s robes in their country-of-origin, but downtown made them stand out as never-gonna-bes waiting for an imminent arrest by the Fashion Police. All three had sat, staring hard at Anton and Giselle, as though to cement the two in their collective minds. Anton seemed oblivious to their staring as he paraded his conquest in front of them. But there was something about his manner that implied yes, he knew them, yet acknowledged nothing. Giselle, for her part, like many women who loved the attention paid to them by one man, seemed oblivious to all others.

Smith noticed the table-lurkers watching. When she caught one fellow’s eye, the others reproached their pal for taking the bait. But the eager one snapped something at his friends that in any language translated to “Why don’t you have another glass of shut-the-fuck-up?”

His conversation with Smith was rudimentary and bordering on crude. His name was Abu Bakr ibn Tahlal. Student visa, economics, New York University. Did she know where Jordan was? Did she have many boyfriends? When the liquor began to work on him, his hands began to stray, and she excused herself to the Ladies’ Room. Abu Bakr
exchanged a few “I’m scoring” looks with his friends and eagerly awaited her return.

Which never came. And after fifteen minutes of lounging, his buddies laughed Abu back to their table for being such a sap. He sat, occasionally looking in the direction of the Ladies’ Room, hoping against hope there had just been some misunderstanding. They all still kept an eye on Giselle and Anton. And when those two left, Moe, Larry, and Curly waited a few moments and left behind them.

The French nobleman took his princess back home to Brooklyn but didn’t join her for the night, begging off with some excuse, which she took quite well—giving him a long smacker and him giving her some squeeze before she tripped upstairs. In another ten minutes he was sitting in the Acropolis Diner with the three musketeers, speaking a fluent mixture of French and Arabic. Where the three got very angry at Monsieur Anjou and where he told them to
“Calmez-vous. Main-tenant et toujours!”
with a long extended finger in their faces like he was scolding children.

The DOJ Clown Show got it all in the Hung Fat van.

Wallets decided they should follow Abu Bakr and his two pals back to their own lodging, where they hit pay dirt. The three “students” lived together in a cramped smelly Brooklyn walk-up. Here, they did a fair bit of cursing, mostly at the unfairness of the world and how could a woman see anything in that French fairy. It’s always the money, the money. But his time was coming too, when his money wouldn’t count shit. Then some more arguments whether to fire up the DVR to watch “Jeck Bow” on
24
or
Disparate Housewives
, and fuk yeh, always pay the cable bill.

Back in the van, the whole gang was wedged in, watching the monitors. The technician quietly informed everyone, “You guys can knock off for the night. I’ll get a Sniffer in there under the door and take a reading. But I can tell you right now—we’re gonna get traces.” Wallets knew what he meant: a sensor probe on a wire that registered explosives.