The Gun Runner's Daughter (24 page)

Grimly, she pushed Nicky’s letter back into its envelope. Thinking: so. So I do have to make the choice.

What would she sacrifice?

Dee? She would deal him a terrible blow, she knew. But it would be a lesser one than the one he was delivering to her father, and it would be far less, far less, than what she would do to
herself.

Could she do it? she asked herself; but once again, at the end of the long fugue of thought, she came back to the one indisputable fact: her father might be guilty, but he was not guilty of the
crime for which they were scapegoating him.

And if she lost her father, the last remnant left to her of her childhood, she had lost everything.

And then the bar came back with its noise of glasses clinking and people talking and, in amazement at herself, Allison Rosenthal, Esther, knew that she was going to do a terrible, terrible
thing.

Spring 1992.
New Haven, Connecticut.

1.

To understand the death and resurrection of Nicky Dymitryck, it is not enough to look at the suspicious circumstances of his visit to Martha’s Vineyard late in the summer
of 1994. The course of events that resulted in his murder in a bathroom of Boston’s Logan Airport—and, incidentally, in the arrest of Allison’s father—had started two years
earlier, in the spring of 1992. And indeed: that he had been reported to the press as dead instead of, as was really the case, only very nearly dead was because, since the spring of 1992,
Nicky’s life had been continuously at risk. So much so that declaring him dead, for public purposes, had come to seem the only way out.

The incident that launched this series of events happened to Nicky in a fairly dramatic fashion. In this it was unusual: all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, most of Nicky’s
best work came from research into arcane government documents, multiple source comparisons of Freedom of Information Act requests, and double reads of policy analysis, rather than being approached
by mysterious strangers in hotel bars.

This one, however, came exactly that way, although the hotel bar in question was in neither Vientiane nor Beirut, but rather downtown New Haven, and Nicky was neither covering a war nor tracking
a gun runner but rather delivering the Porter Fellowship Lecture in Journalism.

The Porter is of course a great honor for a journalist, but the kind of journalists whom Nicky tended to know viewed it rather as the opportunity for some serious seduction of
people younger and much better looking than themselves. When he won the Porter, unfortunately, that wasn’t a big concern. For one thing, in 1992 he was about to be married, and the trip east
was, for someone who traveled as much as he, a sad waste of precious time with his fiancée. For another, he had been to college at that same institution. He hadn’t liked it then, and
he didn’t like it now. There was something pathetic, he had felt then, in the scared run for the status quo that by far the vast majority of his peers had been making. And there was something
tragic, he felt now, watching the audience at his five-lecture series, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Post-Cold War Arms Export Policy,” in the fact that by far the vast majority of them
seemed still to be doing the same.

That was why, his last night in town, instead of listening to undergraduate girls sing for drinks at Mory’s with the group of deans and professors who had awarded him the fellowship, he
was drinking alone at his hotel bar when he was approached by a tall, disarmingly handsome young man.

“Mr. Dymitryck?”

“Nicky,” he said automatically—even then, at thirty-three, he disliked being called “Mister”—as he looked up into the boy’s startlingly green eyes, so
green that they seemed to glow behind a fringe of blond hair. “Yes?”

“I wonder if I might talk with you a moment.”

“About?”

“Something private.”

An aura of booze hung around him like a cloud. He was dressed in Paul Stuart and wore a Rolex. And, while it was more a matter of intuition than vision, to Nicky it was as clear as day that this
boy had sought Nicky out to tell him something that the boy should not even have known.

“Then I advise you to wait.”

This surprised the boy. “For what?”

“Not for. Until. Until you’re sober. Otherwise, you’re going to regret telling me.”

The boy laughed, briefly.

“I doubt that. You know who’s going to regret my talking to you? Greg Eastbrook is going to regret my talking to you. Now, you just order me a drink and I’ll tell you a good
story. Okay?”

Half an hour later, the boy was gone, and Nicky was alone in his hotel room speaking on the phone, long-distance.

“Jay? Listen, you remember Mehmet Hourani? Turkish broker for Hussein, working out of Munich? Brokered chemical warhead sales to Iraq out of a Munich holding company until the Gulf
War?”

The person on the other end of the line seemed to remember, and to be commenting on it at length. At least, until Nicky went on.

“Jay, shut up a second, okay? I just met a kid who says that the sales were coordinated out of the NSC staff by Greg Eastbrook.”

Now, on the other end of the line, there was silence, and Nicky allowed his wide mouth to smile. Then, responding to a question, he said:

“I’ll tell you why I believe him. You know who I think he is? I think he’s the son of someone in the trade. He was drunk as a sailor, and as gay as a box of birds. I think I
just got a scoop from a kid who hates his daddy.”

A short silence while he listened. Then:

“No way. I’m going to Munich. Tomorrow, before someone tries to assassinate Hourani. Yeah, I met him at the Dubai air show. And I want to get this on camera. So get someone to meet
me, okay?”

Then he hung up, and called Lufthansa.

2.

Nicky Dymitryck never really got his interview with Mehmet Hourani—at least, not the part he was looking for.

He got to Munich, and he found Hourani’s house at Harlanstrasse 14. And Hourani, surprisingly, let him in: he was, it turned out, somewhat in fear for his life, just then, and that made
him eager to go on record. He didn’t, however, want to talk about Eastbrook. He wanted to talk about Ronald Rosenthal, which he did, and dutifully, Nicky took down the rather prosaic details
of the Bosnian sales that would, two years later, put Allison’s father in jail. Only when that was done, and Nicky had turned the conversation back in time to Colonel Eastbrook and the Iraqi
tilt, did Nicky’s cameraman begin to run tape. Which was fortunate, for Nicky’s memory of what happened over the next few minutes was wiped, instantly, clean and never returned
again.

The surviving film shows three establishing shots: the living room in low spring daylight; a close-up of Hourani, sweating in a dark suit, and a medium-zoom to include Nicky, in jeans and a
black shirt, holding papers. Then there is a flash and a sudden electric zip, and the video dies while the audio—which was on a separate and, luckily, digital deck—after a silence comes
back to the sound of moans.

It is not hard to imagine what had happened. The blast that spiked the DAT was loud enough to shatter windows on the street side of the house. It came from behind Hourani, nonnegotiable,
absolutely without preamble. The couch—Biedermeier, very likely—splintered in the middle, throwing clouds of stuffing into the air. The man in jeans, protected by the interviewee, who
was in the process of coming, literally, apart, was tossed over the low back of his armchair into a set of glass bric-a-brac on oak shelves.

As for the cameraman, the newspapers reported it plainly. The shoulder-mount video camera shattered into the side of his face, which disintegrated while his right ribs and hip caved inward. His
right leg was severed in a jagged line running from his gluteus inferioris to his kneecap, half of which was left exposed.

The screen, showing darkness, plays his moans for perhaps three minutes. Then there is silence. It seems to last a long time. But it is only a few moments until there sounds the tinkling of
glass and a groan, and then the dialing of a phone and a voice saying, over and over again, too loud and with an American accent: “Police. Emergency. Harlanstrasse 14. Police. Emergency.
Harlanstrasse 14. Police.”

As the commentator on
Nightline
explained when they aired the tape, the blast would have temporarily deafened Nicky, and he was repeating himself on the telephone in the hope that someone
would hear.

3.

It was neither the violence nor the death: there had been far too much of both in his life since, at twenty-one, Nicky had turned down graduate school fellowships from the three
best American Studies departments in the country and gone to answer telephones and fetch coffee for the furthest-left-wing editor in the country, submitting to years of Jay’s infamously cruel
clerical abuse before winning his first chance to proofread, then, after years of Jay’s famously niggling editorial demands, finally being allowed, at last, to report. Oddly, once he had let
Nicky loose, Jay supported his every venture, and so Nicky had gone from a life of Blackwing number two pencils and editorial markings to a tour of the most shocking violence and death the world
had, really, to offer. In Rwanda he had been the first to enter a barn where three hundred Hutu women and children had been massacred by machete and machine gun. In Islamabad he had seen sixteen
adult men hanged, one after the other after the other, during four hours on a sunny afternoon. As for more direct experience, Nicky’s small body had borne interrogations in cities as diverse
as Kinshasa and San José, and a close inspection of his back showed that one of these interrogations had involved something that most people only hear about: a horsewhip.

It was, rather, the futility. This was the closest he had ever gotten to Eastbrook, and by 1992 it had been nearly ten years that Nicky had been following this singular man’s tracks
through the major hot spots of the world. In fact, it was the hunt for Greg Eastbrook that had led Nicky to writing for the
NAR
instead of, like his classmates James Dix, Ellen Dyson, and
Thomas Barrett, writing for, respectively, the
New York Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and the Honorable Gentleman from Connecticut. No one but Jay Cohen—a La Penca survivor
and one of the plaintiffs in the Christic Institute suit—thought it was possible to convict anyone from Eastbrook’s little underworld, and no one but Stan Diamond, Jay’s SDS
comrade who had since made one of the country’s biggest fortunes in telecommunications, was willing to pay to try.

That the
NAR
had allowed Nicky to pursue Greg Eastbrook for the ten years since the joint committee on Iran-contra had first granted him immunity from prosecution was because, precisely,
the magazine was generally considered—by the kinds of people who had been Nicky’s classmates—the “alternative media.” They were not quite right about that.

True, the
NAR
’s longtime emphasis on tracking the movement of American armaments, legally and illegally, to their various uses around the world was hardly calculated to develop a
viable advertising rate base, especially since this field led the
NAR
less to high-profile scoops in war zones than to detailed reviews of often highly arcane U.S.-Israeli transactions,
foreign military grants, and defense contracts.

But it was also true that its subscribers included nearly every current employee of the U.S. intelligence services and the Foreign Service, much of the Council on Foreign Relations, and many
members of the U.S. Congress. As it was true that the
NAR
had long been supplied to the Kremlin as intelligence, translated by supposed KGB analysts in Washington, until Gorbachev’s
staff reformed the practice by buying an airmail subscription, as Castro had done since the first issue. As had Noam Chomsky, as had Jesse Helms, as had Daniel Ortega and Theodore Shackley.