Banquo's Ghosts (22 page)

“You mean because of that?” Wesson said, pointing to a corner of the cheap flat.

“Yeah, exactly. Look at it. Soldering iron, wire spools, cell phones, chargers, magnifier with fluorescent bulb, top of the line Dell tower and wide flat screen . . . ”

“A work bench.”

First thing the next morning O’Hanlon himself rode in the Hung Fat van, more than pleased with their score, dubbing Abu Bakr and his two buds the Workbench Boys. Wallets failed to join them this time, giving them all a little more elbow room inside the cramped interior. They parked the Hung Fat van on 83
^rd
and watched Giselle go into the Metropolitan Museum’s Publications Department Annex.

“It’s a long shot,” O’Hanlon told Wesson, “but let’s see if they’ve rented some storage unit out in Queens or Staten Island, a bill or something. If they have, we’ll toss it.”

Suddenly Jordan the Technician became uncharacteristically agitated as he listened to something. “Shut up, shut up! Get a news program. Turn on a news program.”

“Whaddya got?” O’Hanlon demanded. They flipped on a regular TV, found a cable channel. “Who you listening to?”

“It’s Elizabeth Richards. The Curator’s office, somebody named . . .” he glanced at his PC monitor, “Josephine Parker von Hildebrand,
Crusader
magazine, Irving Place. She’s calling the stepmom about the girl’s dad. Very upset. Want me to put it on speaker?”

“Go ahead,” O’Hanlon said, as he watched the TV screen. Sheik Kutmar’s interview with the little-known NITV had finally broken through to Al Jazeera and thence to cable as the “credentials” of the American journalist had been confirmed. Now “under arrest” by elements of the Revolutionary Guards on charges of spying. The Fox News split screen showed the Sheik talking into that small microphone on the steps of the Majiles, while an insert showed a grainy photo of Peter Johnson.

High up on the entranceway of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a well-dressed woman ran out the main doors—Elizabeth Richards,
Stepmom-Third Wife, Assistant Curator—nearly tripping in her heels as she went tic-tac-tic-tac down the broad stone stairs, her elbows clamped to her sides, hands keeping balance. The distress in her body and face plain from thirty yards away. She ran across the staggered traffic of Fifth Avenue, up the curb, and into Publications Annex, crying now. In a few moments Giselle would know.

“Apparently,” O’Hanlon said, registering Wallets’ absence once more, “something’s come up.”

S
omehow Johnson had slept a few hours after being dragged from a vehicle, and—his hood finally removed—thrown in a heap on a sandy floor. Pure exhaustion. He awoke with sand gritting across his teeth, up his nostrils. Light entered the bare concrete cell from a small window high up a wall, the only light. And the first thing he realized was that he couldn’t rise. Get up even to his knees. He felt like the condemned Man in the Iron Mask, condemned to the Bastille to rot in obscurity with a metal head. All alone—well, not quite.

In a corner of the cell, in a mound of yellow sand, lay a bat. The tiny brown creature—its flimsy, veined wings curled about it—lay there as though in the cone of a miniature volcano. It looked at him without fear, as if to say,
This is where I live, do you live here too?
Johnson stared at it a long time. What else was there to do? Musing on its extraordinary intricacy. So fragile yet indomitable. Sandstorm outside, not to worry—I’ll sit it out in my little volcano. When it yawned with a tiny squeak, it seemed to smile at him.

He steadily grew more awake, his nerve endings working again.
Pain.
From a welt on his cheek. From both shoulders, where he’d been kicked and dragged hither and yon. Bruised tailbone; he’d smacked it against the van’s door frame. When he tried to crawl to his knees, his groin shrieked
no!
But he needed to take a leak, worse than he could ever
remember. He managed to crawl to the wall, unzip his pants. His knees would have to do. He tried to let go, really tried, but only razor blades came out. Like acid. Afraid even to look, afraid there’d be blood. All that effort yielded a few miserly squirts.

He looked. No blood. But the razor blades didn’t go away—they just receded into the background. Shaking, he clung to the wall for support.

Then, when he just began to think of lying down again, of finding some comfortable position, curled up like the bat, the goons slammed the door open. Light from outside blinded him, and he covered his eyes. The hood came back, the inside of it covered in grit and dirt. Dragged out of the cell and then tossed into a different vehicle. It felt to him like the back of an empty U-Haul truck. Hard metal floor. There was a lurch forward and then a bumpy ride. The fuel exhaust wafted through the floor, making him nauseous. He concentrated mostly on his spinning head and the effort not to throw up, or gag on a bout of dry heaves.

Yet through it all, snatches of shocking clarity came to him. First, he was sober and didn’t mind. Second, he felt
no self-pity. No guilt.

Self-pity and the guilt had been like the rumbling background noise of the saloon where he had lived much of his life. A philanderer and a drunk. Staggering from one lost moment to the next. Dreading more than most what Coleridge called the dread watch-tower of the absolute self.

And now both were gone. Vanished under the darkness of this shitty, sweaty, smelly hood. He was free of them. Shanghaied, beaten, pissing razor blades—yet free, free at last.

He had done something of consequence for once, something from which only others, not himself, had stood to benefit. The mullahs had to be very unhappy today,
inshallah
.

People always fantasized, Johnson mused,
if they’d only killed Hitler
—never really knowing who the mysterious, faceless “they” were.
They
would do it, that’s all people knew. Wishing
they
would take a hand. Well, now he’d taken a hand. Not the anonymous
they
. Peter Johnson. For good or ill, forever and ever. Amen.

The van lurched, and he fought the feeling of a fist gripping his guts and shoving them back up his throat.

Two miserable hours later, Johnson sat on a wooden chair, hood still over his head. Hands and feet tied. He heard the sound of traffic somewhere outside the room. The sound of footsteps reached his chair, coming from behind. Once more the sack came off. Johnson blinked, even though the room was darkened. The air tasted stale but a thousand times better than breathing inside the sack. He saw the outlines of shuttered windows. A table with a lamp, chairs around the table. No one sitting there yet, the lamp switched off. Beside the table a video camera for recording purposes and a TV monitor, switched off.

A familiar voice came to his ears. “Let’s be clear about one thing, Mr. Johnson.”

A pause. The figure came around to where Johnson could see him. Sheik Kutmar in his familiar robes floated into his line of vision. The trim, clipped beard, the dark and knowing eyes. He approached the table, swept his robes behind him, and sat in a chair.

“You are a bandit with no one to claim you. We can take you outside, cut off your head, and sell the video on the web. Who’s to stop us? Unless you’re prepared to be completely frank with me, you will never get out of here alive. Because no one has an interest in a failed assassin.”

The Sheik scooted back in his chair. The metal legs made a teeth-on-edge scraping sound on the concrete floor. He turned on the light, more so he could make notes than shine it into Johnson’s face, like when the Movie Nazis gave the brave prisoner the “Treatment.” Johnson’s bladder was hurting him again. The words “failed assassin” echoed in his ears.

He heard the door open behind him and footsteps. Then a figure in his view.

Johnson blinked. He thought he was hallucinating. It was the sweet girl of his napping reveries, the proto-feminist of his imagined Iranian future—Yasmine.

She was glowing and more striking than ever, the effect sharpened by her green headscarf and the harder set of her mouth. Johnson
struggled to look behind him, as if there were some sort of joke that he could understand if only he could see back to who was stage-managing it.

He began to sweat, as he did as a child in school when he didn’t have the answer to a problem or he had said something embarrassingly wrong—a flop-sweat breaking out on his forehead at the sight of Yasmine and at the word “failed.”

“I’m sure Sheik Kutmar told you of the consequences of resisting us,” Yasmine began, her voice expressionless. At this point, resistance was the furthest thing from his mind.

“But you . . . , ” he said.

“I was assigned long ago by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security to watch Dr. Yahdzi. We’re not as childish as you think, Mr. Johnson.”

“But why?”

“Because he is,” and here she paused weighing her words. “Unreliable. An unreliable member of our team. But useful nonetheless.”

Our team. So she
was
a rocket scientist after all. Something about his doubting eyes made her cut him to the quick.

“Professor Yahdzi hasn’t seen his wife in seven years,” Sheik Kutmar added. “Didn’t even know what his children looked like anymore. They died in a car crash last year. A simple accident. A pity.”

Johnson obsessed over the tense: “
Is
?
Is
unreliable?”

“Present tense,” Yasmine said. “You failed to kill him, Mr. Johnson.”

Johnson contorted his body to one side and that fist gripped his guts again, this time sending acid burning up his throat. His nose began to run. He tried to spit the bile out of his mouth, blowing as hard as he could, but it hung on his lips and chin. He tried to wipe his nose and mouth on his shoulder, but couldn’t do it, too constrained.

“Are you finished?” the pretty olive face in the scrap of green cloth asked him, flatly.

He tried to say, “But—but,” but not much came out.

“But what, Mr. Johnson? Shouldn’t a ‘famous’ journalist ask better questions?”

He managed.

“But why—who? Why the gun on the dashboard?”

“The driver was your contact on the inside. He did everything the Americans wanted him to do—except . . .” She trailed off, and the revolver from the dashboard appeared in her hand. She shook a couple of empty shells from the wheel. Then showed him the box where they came from, brass casings, powder cartridges. Hollywood blanks.

“
That
he did for us,” she continued, “because we found him out and paid him a visit in front of his parents, wife, and son.” No point elaborating the threat. “He performed admirably, but still paid a price.”

She removed something from her pocket and, with a curl of contempt on her lips, tossed it casually across the table at Johnson. It tumbled awkwardly, like an eight-sided die from a game of Dungeons & Dragons, and came to rest. Johnson saw it clearly. An opal ring. Smudged with a stain that looked like blood.

“Such amateurs,” Yasmine practically spit out. “You Americans aren’t very good at this. At least not since overthrowing Mosaddeq, and even there you bumbled and fumbled and got lucky. Your masterly manipulations then were a concoction of our fevered national imagination. Sending a sodden journalist to do a man’s job. A sad joke.”

So the whole thing had just been a fantasy of his own self-importance. No guilt this time, but shame overcame him in a rush. His body contorted; the razor blades were coming back.

“You . . . I thought you . . .” But she cut him off.

“I’m a patriot, Mr. Johnson. I believe it is our national right to possess a nuclear weapon. We are a great nation. Israel has one. India, Pakistan. Do you know what our country was like at the beginning of the twentieth century? A backwater. Take the village we were in the other day, a dung heap: multiply it the nation-over. Now we are close to taking our place in the sun. If you had killed Yahdzi, it would have hurt us badly. Set us back years. But we would have ended up in the same place. Kill the mullahs; topple the regime; we’ll still be in the same place. Kill me. There are millions more like me. We will still be in the same place.”