Black Market Page 14

  Less than an hour later she glided into the buzzing and crowded O'Neal's on West Fifty-seventh and Sixth. Hudson watched her from a stool at the bar. His head began to swim.

  Yes, he wanted to see her again. Billie… just Billie.

  She had on a long, speckled charcoal-gray coat and black leather boots to her thighs. A soft gray beret was placed carefully on the side of her flowing blond hair. She stood out in the tide of young and middle-aged businesswomen crowding into the popular bistro.

  She smiled when she finally saw him and smoothly moved his way.

  “I see you're coming up in the world. Finished and sold your play already, have you?”

  “That's a possibility. Or maybe I robbed a bank so I could afford to see you again.” His smile was quiet, genuine.

  Billie bowed her head slightly at the mention of payment for their time spent together. The unusual blush he'd seen at the hotel once again streaked her forehead and cheeks. He had the feeling she hadn't been in the business very long-though perhaps that was what he wanted to feel. Perhaps it was her best skill as an escort-to seem so innocent, such an ingenue.

  “They set an hour for your appointment. Should we go someplace? An hour isn't that long.”

  “I'd like to have a drink here with you. We have time. One drink.”

  Hudson signaled for the bartender, who came immediately, in his crisp white shirt and black bow tie, like a man answering an urgent summons. Hudson seemed to have a way of getting whatever he wanted, Billie had already noticed. He was very much in command for the Washington-Jefferson Hotel type.

  She ordered the house white, finally smiling and shaking her head at Hudson -as if he were a little hopeless, bewildering certainly.

  A hundred and fifty dollars an hour, plus the bar tab, seemed extremely steep for the honor of tipping a drink with an attractive call girl. He certainly didn't look as if he could afford it-but she knew enough not to put a lot of faith in appearances and superficial impressions.

  “You don't have to pay. I'll say you didn't show.” Then she seemed instantly flustered and embarrassed again.

  Now Hudson was quite certain she hadn't been doing this kind of work very long. Sometimes it happened to young actresses, to up-and-coming New York models.

  “I like you. I don't think I understand you, but I like you,” she said.

  They looked into each other's eyes, and it was if they were all alone in the hectic buzzing barroom. Hudson could feel a strong desire for her growing again. In his mind, he saw her rose-tipped breasts. He remembered her fast breathing as she came.

  He leaned forward and kissed her cheek-he kissed her as gently as he'd ever kissed anyone. He had the desire to get close, to try to open up a little with her. At the same time he felt a soldier's warning, an instinct powerfully holding him back.

  “Tell me something about yourself. Just one small thing… It doesn't have to be anything important.”

  She smiled again, seeming to be enjoying herself. The missing arm, the way he carried himself, made him quite dashing. “All right. Sometimes I'm too impulsive. I shouldn't be offering you what's commonly called a freebie. I could be fired from Vintage. Now tell me something about yourself.”

  “I don't even have enough money to pay this bar tab,” Hudson said, and laughed.

  “You really don't?”

  “Really. Now tell me one true fact. Anything, just something true.”

  She hesitated, then shrugged. “I have two older sisters back in Birmingham. Back in England.”

  “They're both married. Successfully married. And your mother won't let you forget it,” Hudson said with a smile.

  “No. They're both married all right. Right on the button there. That's what you do if you're a sensible girl in Birmingham. But neither marriage is successful. And, yes, my mother won't let me forget I'm still single. Are you honestly writing a play in that awful hotel? Your so-called garret?”

  “I have one particular story I have to get out about Vietnam. It's a factual story about what happened over there. Once that story is told, I think I can go on with the rest of my life. Not until then, though.”

  He sipped his beer, cautiously watching her blue, almond-shaped eyes, her lips slightly wet with wine. He found himself wondering what was going on inside her head right now.

  She laughed then, nicely. “I'm completely losing it! I don't believe what I'm doing right now. I really don't believe this.”

  “Having a drink of white wine? At midday? Not that unusual in New York.”

  “I think I have to go. I really should go. I have to call and tell them you didn't keep your appointment.”

  “That's a problem. If you did that, they wouldn't let me see you again. I'd get a bad reputation as somebody completely unreliable. And we wouldn't want that, would we?”

  “No, I guess we wouldn't. But I really have to go.”

  “Well, that's not acceptable to me. No. Just hold on a minute.”

  Hudson reached inside his weather-beaten, drab brown overcoat. He placed three fifty-dollar bills on the bar.

  “Billie what? Tell me your last name, at least.”

  “You can't afford this. Please, David. It really isn't a good idea.”

  “Billie what? I thought you liked me.”

  She looked as if she'd been slapped, as if someone in her lower-middle-class English family had caught her at this escort work in New York. She hesitated, then finally spoke up again.

  “It's Billie Bogan. Like the poet Louise Bogan… ‘Now that I have your face by heart, I look…’”

  “You look extremely beautiful to me. Let's get out of here, now.”

  David Hudson hadn't felt this way in fifteen years. It was inconvenient, and the timing was terrible-but there it was.

  Feeling-where there had been none for so many years. Intense feeling. And the warning signals were going off all at once.

  15

  Washington, D. C.

  The morning of December 9 was a gloomy day in Washington, where even the stark, bare trees seemed to be gasping for light and life. A second emergency meeting was being held at the White House for members of the National Security Council and other officials associated with the Green Band inquiries.

  As he waited patiently for the president to arrive, Arch Carroll was thinking about pain.

  It was hard for him not to. His right arm, which was cradled in bandages and a temporary sling, would flare up every now and again. He'd flinch and curse before he had time to remind himself he was lucky just to be alive. Despite the Tylenol 4 he'd swallowed, his nerve endings felt as if they were being gnawed on.

  Lucky to be alive, Carroll thought again. There were four fewer orphans in the world.

  A morbid little syllogism clicked in his head.

  A cat has nine lives.

  I am not a cat.

  Therefore I don't have nine lives.

  So how many lives do I have? How many more chances if I keep playing the game this hard?

  President Kearney finally entered the room, and everyone stood up.

  The president of the United States was dressed casually. He had chosen a navy Lacoste shirt and slightly wrinkled, knockabout khakis. He looked like a kind of regular guy, Arch Carroll thought to himself. You could imagine him, in better times and another season, puttering around the backyard, poking the center of a sirloin on the barbecue. Carroll remembered that Kearney had two young boys. Maybe he played ball with them. But there wouldn't be much leisure for that these days. President Kearney had taken the brunt of press criticism over Wall Street, a case of the press creating a convenient scapegoat for the public. Suddenly, in just a few days, his political moon had lost almost all its former brightness.

  The participants inside the White House conference room avoided formal handshakes this time. They'd all brought bulging leather briefcases and portfolios for the early morning meeting; the physical proof of the relentless investigations were there to be reviewed and acted upon.

 
Judging from the impressive look of the paperwork, someone had to have discovered something about Green Band, Carroll thought as the meeting began. He looked across the room at Caitlin Dillon, who smiled back at him. She, too, had an overstuffed briefcase. Today she looked businesslike and efficient in a tailored navy blue suit and an unadorned white shirt. She wore a navy necktie in the form of a large bow. For some reason Carroll found all this severity of style attractive.

  “Good morning to all of you-although I don't know what might be especially good about it. To be perfectly blunt, I'm even more concerned than I was on Friday night.”

  President Kearney certainly did nothing to relieve the strain as he delivered his opening remarks. He remained standing stiffly at the head of the long wooden table.

  “Every reliable projection we have says that a stock market panic, a full-scale crash, may soon be on us… Some of the more manipulative bastards around the world have actually figured out how to make this tragedy work to their advantage…

  “I will tell all of you this in strict confidence-the Western economy cannot survive a major crash at this time. Even a minor market crash would be catastrophic.”

  The president had raised his voice, and there was the palest flash of his old campaign style, the inspirational voice, the characteristic firmness of the jaw-but then, as suddenly as the echo had come, it vanished. Justin Kearney looked like a man whose spirit had sagged entirely.

  The president once again solicited information, and new data from around the table. Each adviser gave a succinct report on any findings relating to Green Band.

  When his turn arrived, Carroll inched his chair closer to the conference table. He tried to make everything very quiet inside his head. He was still hazy. His body was numb and cold at times since the shooting in Paris. And his arm was throbbing again, a palpable pain.

  “My news isn't good, either,” he began. “We have some concrete facts, some statistics, but not a lot that's worthwhile. The raw information about the bombing is complete, anyway. Five packages of plastique would be required per building. They could have leveled lower Manhattan if they'd wanted to. They didn't want to… They wanted to do exactly what they did. New York was a controlled, a tightly disciplined, demonstration. My team has spent forty-eight hours going through every terrorist contact that exists. There are no connections to this group.

  “There was a somewhat unclear but promising connection with the European black market,” Carroll continued, flipping a page on his notepad. Somewhat unclear, he thought. Maybe it would have been promising if Michel Chevron had survived, if some ID had been found on the man he'd shot in Paris. There were too many ifs and maybes, twice as many as in the usual police case. One thing was certain, you couldn't build an arrest around conditionals.

  “Unfortunately, so many Wall Street computers and brokerage house records were destroyed, We have no way to determine the true stock market picture. We don't know if securities were taken, or if there's been a computer scam.”

  The vice president, Thomas More Elliot, interrupted Carroll. Of all the men seated in the room, the stern New Englander seemed the sharpest, the most in control of himself. That morning, at least, Vice President Elliot looked more like the group's leader than the president.

  “You're saying we still have no idea who it is we're dealing with?”

  Carroll frowned and shook his head. “There haven't been any further demands. No bargaining. No contact whatsoever. They seem to have invented a completely new and terrifying game. It's a game where we don't even get to know what game we're playing! They move-then we have to try to react.”

  “Comments?” Vice President Elliot asked, his tone clearly acerbic. “On Mr. Carroll's contributions.”

  The blank faces staring at Carroll certainly weren't encouraging or supportive. The heads of the enforcement agencies were especially cool and distant. The cabinet members were mostly business-management types who didn't understand the problems of police work in the field. They were indifferent to the trials and demands of a start-from-scratch street investigation.

  The Senate majority leader finally spoke. Marshall Turner's familiar voice was southern and boomed like an echo. “Mr. President, I'm afraid this simply will not do. All of what I'm hearing is unsatisfactory. Late last week we came that close to a full economic collapse in this country.”

  “That's what we're told, Marshall.”

  “Now you tell us we're still in serious danger, maybe even worse danger. A second Black Friday is being discussed. I feel it's our responsibility to make certain we have our best investigative apparatus in place. Now, as I understand it, the Federal Bureau and the CIA are both being underutilized in the current manhunt for terrorists.”

  The tone in the senator's voice was offensive to Carroll. He stared at the political leader, who had the kind of swollen pink face you might encounter in the sawdust-filled back room of a country store.

  Phil Berger, the director of the CIA, stepped into the uncomfortable silence. He was a small, lean man whose head, starkly bald and shining under the lights in the room, came to a domed point. He reminded Carroll of a hard-boiled egg sitting in an eggcup.

  Berger said, “The FBI and the CIA are working twenty-four-hour shifts. There's no question of underutilization.” He turned his eyes toward Carroll. “And I'm sure Mr. Carroll is giving it his very best, even if he hasn't managed to come up with anything.”

  “All right. Let's not fight among ourselves.” President Kearney abruptly rose from the conference table.

  Justin Kearney looked at Carroll and said, “I made a hard decision late yesterday. I would have called you, but you weren't in New York, Archer.”

  “Right. I was in Paris, getting shot at.”

  The president ignored Carroll's remark. “Effective immediately, I'm ordering the following changes. I want you to continue to run the part of the operation that deals directly with known terrorist groups. But I want Phil Berger to supervise the overall investigation of Green Band, including the investigation of terrorists inside the United States. You're to report directly to Phil Berger. You're also to give the CIA a complete record of your personal contacts, all of your files.”

  Carroll stared incredulously at President Kearney. He was almost certain it wasn't legal for him to give his record files to the CIA. He also had the feeling he'd just been floated down the Potomac on a leaky raft. Thanks for all of your past help, but your team's working methods leave something to be desired.

  He turned his face away from the president, who seemed, in his Olympian wisdom, to have reached this decision single-handedly. That fact troubled and perplexed Carroll. But there was something else, one thing that disturbed him even more.

  It was the general boardroom coldness, the sterile big business atmosphere that was growing up everywhere in the government. It was the supersecrecy, the superdeceit usually under the misleading cover of “national security” and “need to know.” They made the command decision, and they no longer felt they had to explain themselves to anybody.

  “I guess I understand, Mr. President, and I'm afraid I have to quit under those circumstances. With all due respect, I resign, sir. I'm out of this.”

  Arch Carroll got up and walked out of the conference room, out of the White House entirely. It was over for him. Washington was a bureaucratic company town, and he just didn't want to work for the company anymore.

  Approximately an hour later, Arch Carroll was in an Eastern shuttle jet destined for New York.

  Outside, an electrical storm whipped the sky. From his window he could see dramatic black clouds. He stared at the gathering storm, and he felt overwhelmed by a curious loneliness.

  It was at times like these he missed Nora most. Nobody he'd met before or since was as good at making him feel whole; nobody else seemed able to make him laugh at himself. And that was the real trick, being able to laugh when you needed to-and right now, Arch Carroll needed to laugh at something.

  He felt Caitlin Dillon
's hand on his arm. Turning, he gave her a weary half smile. She was trying her hardest to be sympathetic, to be kind.

  “You must know it isn't your fault. Everybody's frustrated, Arch. Green Band didn't just do a number on Wall Street, it created an atmosphere of panic. Our president, who is turning out to be even less decisive than I imagined he'd be, made a panicky decision. That's all.”

  She patted his arm, and he felt like a kid with a scarred, bloody knee. This warm, almost maternal, streak in Caitlin surprised him.

  “It isn't your fault. You've got to keep that in mind. Washington is loaded with scared men making inadequate decisions.” She paused before asking, “What will you do? Go into legal practice? Draw up wills? Deed of trust? Maybe something like corporate law?”

  Carroll drifted back from somewhere distant inside his mind. Her light sarcasm didn't escape him. He even welcomed it. Law, he thought. The reason he'd never used his degree was because he couldn't stomach the idea of law tomes, of hunting down precedents in the dust of unreadable books, of having to fraternize with other lawyers. They were a breed that depressed the hell out of him.

  He was quite for a time. Then he said, “Can you honestly imagine me reporting to that CIA clown Phil Berger?”

  Caitlin shook her head. A puff of smoke surrounded her face a moment, and she blinked. “He's an egghead in more than one sense of the word. The man must have been hatched.”

  Carroll suddenly roared. The storm rocked the plane a moment. “When I was a kid, my mother used to give us, hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. Some tradition from the old country. All of us kids would beat the tops open with our spoons. That's what I should have had back there in the White House. A goddamn big spoon to beat on Phil Berger's head.”

  Carroll turned his head toward Caitlin Dillon. She was laughing, too. It was a musical laugh, like some quirky tune you couldn't forget, one that ran through your mind in a tantalizing way but you couldn't put a name to. “You surprise me. You really surprise me.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You look so damn straight and businesslike, but you've got this weird sense of humor underneath all that-”