The truth jabbed me in the brain like a cranial probe. The faxes, the transcripts of KSM's calls, the methyl nitrate, Frank's options trades had all been boring deeply into my thoughts while India slept softly on my shoulder. Then I remembered a seminar on methyl nitrate I'd attended at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico maybe two years earlier. I knew little about it before, and still don't understand the chemistry today, but the practical effects were staggering. It was completely plausible for KSM to introduce the stuff into the fuel system of a plane. The plane would blow up into millions of pieces and devour the evidence in the conflagration. He could do the same with a refinery-somehow introduce it into the flow, and the whole thing blows apart. The only calling card methyl nitrate leaves behind is a bright ocher hue as it burns, not the orange-red flash of burning gasoline or jet fuel.
"Time the explosion to happen over the ocean, and only the albatrosses
and fishies will know," the instructor had told us. "Forensics cannot detect methyl nitrate residue, unlike with conventional explosives."
I sat bolt upright in bed. KSM was going to use "liquids" that would never be traced. And it was so much easier than trying to get plastic explosives on a plane. It was a foolproof way to protect his options trade. It couldn't be anything else. The question now was when.
India was awake. "What time is it?"
The room was dark. There was no traffic on the Quai du Mont-Blanc. I looked over at the clock on the nightstand. A little after three, I told her.
"Max, are you okay?"
"I will be. First tell me again about Vernon Lawson." Intuition leads. Facts follow. Somewhere in my descent-into-hell dream I'd been having, I'd seen the face of the journalist-whore who was ready to deliver my balls on a platter to readers of the Times and anywhere else willing to pick up the story.
India sat up beside me, plumped pillows for both of us, and as we sat there skin to skin in the dark, she told me what had happened.
It must have been almost six in the evening, she said. She left work early, stopped by a place in Georgetown to pick up some catfish. It wasn't just Simon's night off. The cook was gone, too, and the driver. She was going to bread the filets, then fry them up with red beans and rice, a favorite of Frank's from the old days when money didn't grow on trees.
The library doors were open when she got home. She could see two men sitting with her father. Frank rose immediately to greet her and close the doors before she tried to join them, but she got a good look at the guy I was certain was Vernon Lawson. Her physical description matched him to a tee.
"And Webber," I asked, "did you get a good look at him? Where was he sitting?"
"I'm not sure…"
"Sure of what?"
"Sure that it was Webber."
"But-"
"I never said that, Max. I never…" She let it trail off.
I was ransacking my memory. Hadn't she told me before that Webber was there? Or was it my need that made me hear it that way?
"Whoever it was was sitting off to the side, maybe behind the desk. I didn't get a look before Dad closed the doors."
"India-"
"All I can tell you is what I remember, you understand? You weren't there."
I put my arm around her, pulled her closer to me. She had gone cold all of a sudden. I rubbed her shoulder and neck until whatever it was had passed.
"I didn't care that he didn't invite me in," she began again. "That's Dad. The Old Boys taking care of business."
As she was starting up the stairs, though, she heard my name, or thought she did. Frank shushed whoever said it. That's when India went up to her room and pressed her ear against the floor vent. The third one-not her father, not the journalist-was saying that I was on the dole of some ex-GRU officer. The FBI was dragging its heels, refusing to issue an international fugitives warrant, but it wouldn't do any good even if they did. No one was going to execute it.
As she talked, I tried to imagine what a voice sounds like filtering from the floor below through an air vent. India had told me in Balabakk that Webber had hit on her. Did he send a mash note, a mash e-mail? If not, wouldn't she recognize his voice? And if not from that, then from some staff meeting, an orientation lecture?
"The journalist, Lawson, he said that the Times was ready to run his story that you'd gone to work for a hostile intel service. Then the other person said-"
"Said what?"
"Said that the story had to run as soon as possible. He told Lawson to find whatever confirmation he needed to write it."
"Are you sure?" I interrupted.
"He was adamant about it. You had to be stopped."
"Stopped from what?"
"No one said. Anyhow, Lawson didn't seem to know or care. He just wanted to burn you."
"But it didn't run. Or at least not so far."
"Believe me, Max. I don't know why."
Another dead end.
India reached over, patted my hand. "What did you say to Dad to make him so angry?"
"When he called me a well-hit three-wood in a tile bathroom?" It still hurt. Maybe because he wasn't that far off.
"A truth for a truth: It's your own rule, Max. Dad used to say you were damaged goods. I was always intrigued. I never knew what he meant. Are you?"
Ami?
"He said something had happened to you when you were a kid. I don't think even he knew what it was, but he said you would never get over it."
"He was right."
"Did you?"
"No. Not really, I guess. Just compensated around it the way people do in life."
"So," India said.
"So?"
"Are you going to tell me?"
"My mother," I began, "was born with the biological capacity to reproduce but with no maternal instincts. She despised me from conception. It was unfortunate. For me at least."
And so for the second time in my life, I told the story.
"Your aunt?" India asked when I was through. "The one who came and got you?"
"My mother's sister. The only one who even knew where we were. The only family I ever cared about. She died last year."
"And your mother?"
I shrugged, turned my palms up. "She used to contact my aunt occasionally. No more. Alive. Dead. I hope the latter."
With that, we sat in silence holding hands. I had been drunk, stoned, a
twenty-year-old college student unpracticed in deceit when I'd told Chris the story. Now I was sober, a liar par excellence, in bed with a woman not much older than I was then, a graduate of the same university. Life has weird circular harmonics, I've found, if we just listen to them. But we move on, too. We become different people. And that night in Geneva, thinking about what I had just recounted and all that had happened over the last months, I felt as if I could almost see my entire life's story coming together: the Baluchs and KSM; Beirut and Buckley; Webber and Frank Beckman and John O'Neill; Murtaza Ali Mousavi and his dentist and Millis's displaced brain; abandonment, loss, and recovery; the search for truth that would never, ever let me alone.
Isn't that what every introductory perspectives course teaches in art school, that at the horizon, all points converge?
I'll tell the story one more time, I thought, to Rikki, when she's old enough to understand. Only a few years more. It can die with her.
India was shaking quietly beside me, on the verge of tears, I realized. To forestall, I asked her if she knew either Rousset or the Saudi billionaire, her father's partner. She'd heard him mention them but never met either.
"It doesn't make sense," she said. "Dad knows Rousset is about to be indicted in New York for selling Kazak oil to Iran. He stopped doing business with him at least a year ago."
That was another dot clear and bold. If Rousset was about to be indicted, there was only one reason for Frank to give me his number: burn me, dirty me up in some illegal oil deal, dispose of me for good.
India got up, put on a robe, and went to the minibar. She poured herself a straight-up Scotch. "Want one?" I didn't. She got back into bed, farther away than she'd been earlier, no more skin to skin.
"Dad's in even worse trouble than I told you."
"You never told me anything."
"I shouldn't be saying any of this."
She did anyhow. India didn't know exactly what had happened, but she was beginning to piece the picture together. Frank was deep into commodities speculation and the options market. Airlines. Insurance companies. Especially oil. A lot of the money he played with was borrowed from his
Saudi partners, as was a lot of the advice he acted on, such as how much crude they were pumping on a day-to-day basis. If his Saudi friends told Frank they were about to cut back on production or there was a problem with a field, he bought calls on oil-bets that the price of oil would go up. If they were ratcheting production up, he bet the other way. It was easy money, and for several years Frank made an absolute killing. Even when he was betting someone else's money.
My intuition was looking better and better: Like some incorrigible capitalist Delphic oracle, Frank had built his fortune by seeing into the future.
Trouble was, after a while, he started tapping other sources of information. Half a dozen times, when his Saudi partners went long on oil, he went short and got creamed.
"I know," India said, catching my glance. "I'm curious how Dad and his partners bet against the market and got it right so often."
Actually, I didn't think there was any question about it now: insider trading. Channing's networks fit right into their uncanny success.
"How do you know all this?" I asked. She was just out of college. It wasn't the sort of research a daughter usually undertakes on her father.
"I already told you. I read his e-mails and faxes. He's all I've got; I have no choice but to be interested."
It served my interests, too, I thought.
"So what's he going to do?" I asked.
"He's playing the spot oil market hard."
"With his Saudi friend?"
"Not this time. With David Channing. The trades are in Dad's name to hide Channing's hand."
"Did you ever hear the name BT Trading?"
"No. Never."
India and I talked until six in the morning, running through all the possibilities. We both knew we weren't getting anywhere.
"Did you find the key to the safe-deposit box?" I finally asked her.
"Keys," she corrected. "They were in Dad's desk drawer-two of them."
"Bring them with you?"
She nodded.
"Get dressed," I said, throwing the sheets back.
I had coffee sent up while she washed and dressed.
From Cornivan, Geneva's main railroad station, to Annemasse is a twenty-minute trolley ride. The trolley passes through a border crossing, but neither the Swiss nor the French bother checking passengers.
In Annemasse, we took a taxi to Bons-en-Chablis, a French village that had yet to be gentrified. It probably wouldn't be for a long time because you couldn't see Lac Leman from any part of it. The taxi dropped us in front of Electromanager du Lac, a well-known fence for illegal arms.
I'd never been in the store before, but as with Carthage Voyages, I'd read about the place in cable traffic. Geneva station and the French police independently used it to keep tabs on anything from arms to stolen pluto-nium. It was a nice deal for Jean-Marc, the owner; he got protection for his fencing in return for passing on an occasional tip.
Jean-Marc emerged from the back room when he heard the bell above the door ring. A slight man, maybe forty, with horn-rim glasses and a tweed coat, he didn't look much like a black-arms dealer.
"I work with Pat," I said, sticking my hand across the counter to shake his.
Pat Graner was the chief in Basle, Jean-Marc's case officer.
"He should have called."
"I know," I said, shrugging my shoulders in apology. "No problem. Call him now if you like."
I knew it was Pat's habit not to get into the office on Saturday until after eleven.
"Where are we?" India asked when Jean-Marc slipped behind the curtain, no doubt to make sure I really worked with Pat.
"This guy's an informant," I said.
"Oh, fuck, I might as well go home and resign."
"They'll never know you were here."
"What are we doing?"
"Finding out why your dad's in trouble."
"Here?"
"No. At Michelle Zwanzig's."
"Max?"
Jean-Marc was back before I could respond. He must have decided not to call Pat after all. "How can I help you?"
Jean-Marc didn't flinch when I asked him for a spin dialer, an ultrasound generator, and a five-inch pneumatic gun.
"Max?" India asked again when he disappeared. More of an edge this time. As if she could hear glass breaking in the distance.
"Props."
"No, seriously."
"Break-in stuff."
"Christ almighty, I'm outta here." She actually turned around to leave, but she didn't resist when I took hold of her wrist.
"It's not like we're going to use it against someone we don't know. It's your dad's own office."
"Forget it. Sneaking over the border into Lebanon was one thing; breaking and entering is entirely different."
"You're not going in; I am."