The Truth Itself Read online

  The Latina nurse reappeared with a tray of food and a cocktail of pills that, in their kaleidoscopic profusion, made Nadja feel like she’d fallen through a rip in time and landed in The Valley of the Dolls.

  The woman loosened Nadja’s hands and helped her to sit up.

  She picked at the food—steamed fish and bland vegetables—and gobbled all the pills, praying they would take her back to limboland.

  They did.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lucien Benway sat behind the desk in his office, smoking, studying the photograph that Morse had placed before him, the only sign of his agitation his swinging feet, the highly polished toecaps of his little chukka boots barely scraping the Bukhara rug.

  Benway stood and walked across to the window and watched the snow falling onto the street outside his house as he sucked the last life from his Samsun, a pall of Turkish tobacco shrouding his huge head.

  He had worked from home for the last two years.

  One of the strictures that had come in the wake of Kate Swift’s treason was that he could no longer hang out his shingle. No offices. No staff. Morse was on the books as his chauffeur.

  Benway stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray wrought from the hoof of an African forest elephant, a gift from a genocidal sultan who had long since rotted to death in a Mombasa prison, and returned to the desk and studied the image of Kate Swift’s finger.

  “What is the exact provenance of this photograph?”

  “The forensic technician who ran the prints and the DNA shot it on a cell phone and sent it to me.”

  “Can he be trusted?”

  “She.”

  “She?” Benway raised his eyebrows.

  Morse shrugged. “Lying to me would not be in her best interests, sir. This intel is good.”

  “Who initiated the forensic work?”

  “The trail is murky, but it points to the Plumber.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What are the odds, Morse, of a finger being recovered from a crash site? A little better than the proverbial needle being found in the haystack?”

  “The Israelis found it.”

  Benway pondered this. “That Haredi crew?”

  “Yes, out there to recover the remains of the gymnastic team.”

  “They’re thorough.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Zealous, even.”

  “They believe it is their sacred duty to recover even the smallest part of a victim’s body. They don’t rest until they do.”

  “What does your technician say about the condition of the finger?”

  “Consistent with having been traumatically severed and burned.”

  Benway steepled his own fingers, the tips yellow with nicotine. “Harry Hook is still in Thailand?”

  “The last time we looked.”

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  Benway tapped the photograph. “A coincidence?”

  Morse shrugged. “Unlikely. My guess is that Danvers put Swift in touch with Hook.”

  “I’d tend to agree. But what would she want with Hook?”

  “His help?”

  “Yes, maybe. So she goes out there and dies in a plane crash?”

  “Planes crash.”

  “They do, they do. Particularly Asian ones, it seems. Still . . .” Benway turned to the window, watching snow swirling against the gray sky. “But the great mystery here, Morse, is why the White House is sitting on this little bombshell.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was all too good.

  Too tranquil and quiet.

  Kate was too happy.

  It made her nervous.

  Stop, she told herself. Be in the moment. Enjoy this. You’re just reacting to emotional bleed-through, to old stuff. Jumping at shadows.

  So she worked hard at relaxing as she walked down from the hut onto the beach, wearing a bikini, carrying a cloth and a bag with water and lotion like a tourist who’d fled the cold and was out here in the steamy tropics to get some sun and get laid.

  Which she had done.

  The feel of JP was still on her skin, the slight abrasion from his beard around her mouth. That sweet ache still in her core.

  She laughed out loud at the memory of that swinging hammock.

  What could have been awkward wasn’t. Not at all.

  Kate had left him last night and fallen into bed beside Suzie and slept deeper than she had in years and woke to see him out in the Zodiac, fishing.

  She’d thought he may be avoiding her and went into the kitchen to make Suzie a juice, but when he came in carrying a trio of little silver fish that still fluttered on the line, he gave her a smile that hinted at their secret, but keeping cool, not pushing anything.

  She’d liked him even more for that.

  Kate swam and dozed and watched her child at play and the day was maybe the best she could remember since she’d given birth to Suzie, taking a few months unpaid leave, against the wishes of Lucien Benway, who had succeeded Philip by then.

  Mrs. Danvers had cooed like a crone when she’d told him her news, but not Lucien who’d said, “You’re an operative. A warrior. You made a choice. Now you’re coming on like some girl with screaming ovaries who has got all broody and wants maternity leave.”

  But she had taken time out.

  Time for Suzie to be born.

  Time to nurse her.

  And what made her ashamed now, lying on the beach in Thailand, listening the whisper of the ocean, feeling her skin soaking up the sun, was that—as much as she’d loved her infant—she’d grown restless. Bored. Longed for the rush that came with action and danger.

  Dress it all up. Call it patriotism. And it had been, at first. Some kind of idealism. But now she knew better.

  She knew there would always be people like her, who did what they did not because they had to, but because they wanted to.

  She’d found a nanny, and Yusuf was at home most of the time—no adrenalin junkie, he, a brave man, sure, but also a man who could lounge around the house in grungy sweats, rolling on a blanket with their infant, delighting in each coo and drool, relaying everything in hyperrealist detail to her on their infrequent Skype sessions, when she could safely surface for a few minutes and talk to home.

  Kate away in places where minarets sprouted from deserts and women were black wraiths and men with AK-47s and IEDs were ready to kill for and die for some tangled iteration of a faith that had been strained through fear and hatred and honed by America and its recruitment and its desertions and its black ops and its drones and it’s never ending, monolithic, Coca-Cola fueled crusade, with its boots on the ground actions, and its proxy armies—just the looters and rapists and crazies of the day, who were co-opted and armed and set loose and would be disavowed next week and would turn, just as sure as the world turned, would turn on their once friend now enemy and would hate, hate, hate.

  Kate, lying with her feet in the water, tried to push this away.

  She’d spoken out, hadn’t she?

  Spoken out about how Washington used the Benways, the private contractors (who weren’t private, who were just the administration sailing under false flags) to do everything that was filthy and debased, while the men in Langley and the Pentagon and the Oval Office—and the women, too, they were part of it with their clicking heels and their power suits and their helmets of hair and the look in the eye that said, once we were oppressed, and we fought the battle and we have fucking won the right to take names and kick ass and too fucking bad if the asses that are kicked are brown and black and poor and civilian and female and underage lost out in the backlands of the planet—sat in their climate-controlled hush and did what they did, certain of their righteousness.

  And Kate’s speaking out, hadn’t that been just a manifestation of her selfishness?

  Her hurt.

  Her pain.

  Her grief.

  Yes, she’d blown the whis
tle on the illegal operations and the civilian deaths and the lack of accountability and a suit or two had been forced to resign and Benway had been sent into limbo, unfriended by the powerful cronies he’d admired so very much, gone from show dog to mongrel pariah in five seconds flat.

  For which he hated her enough to kill her.

  But, really, wasn’t she just saying, you murdered my husband, you bastards, and you will pay? I will make you pay.

  I will do my patriotic duty and call you out on your transgressions. But I will have my pound of flesh.

  She sighed this away, closing her eyes in the shade of the umbrella, and with the hot breeze flapping the fabric with a sound like a bird taking flight she fell asleep, the day taking flight too, lazily winging its way toward the horizon with its streaks of cumulus and its oranges and its reds and its velvety blues.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Philip Danvers sat at the desk in his musty, book-lined study on the top floor of his old house. The dormer window offered a view over the frosty woods, the encroaching suburbs invisible from where he sat and if not for the laptop on the desk he could have been in the rural Virginia of his canny grandfather who’d parceled off acres of farmland for development, making himself and his descendents obscenely wealthy.

  But Danvers wasn’t admiring the view. He sat staring at the finger in the ziplock bag that lay on the desk beside a dog-eared copy of Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Danvers, as his days grew fewer, had come to find the reflections of the Trappist monk soothing.

  And the recollection that Merton had died in Bangkok—electrocuted by a faulty fan as he stepped from his bathtub—the victim (or so insiders like Danvers had come to learn) of a CIA assassination, his criticism of the Vietnam War making him no friend of LBJ’s—added a synchronous zest to his musings.

  Darkness came suddenly and Danvers clicked on the desk lamp, the bulb throwing the amputated finger into vivid relief.

  He saw the nail, ragged and grime encrusted.

  He saw the seared, blackened skin.

  He saw the frayed flesh above the knuckle where the digit had been severed.

  And when he saw Kate Swift and her daughter walking away from him at Berlin’s Holocaust Monument he felt a grief so absolute that he closed his eyes and sank his head into his hands, a moan of lamentation escaping his skinny old lips.

  The keening, shockingly, turned to laughter as he saw Harry Hook—the Harry Hook of more than a decade ago, his good looks blurred only slightly by time and careless living—raising a glass of Cutty Sark, saying, “Cheers, sport,” and when Danvers opened his eyes and regarded the finger anew, he understood that what he was seeing was at once Kate’s fifth digit (fingerprinting and DNA testing had made that indisputable) and evidence that Harry Hook was still out there, his brilliance undimmed.

  Danvers stood, grunting at the jab of pain in his nether regions, and walked across to the window, staring out.

  If Lucien Benway was the zealot, cloaking his sociopathy in Reagan and Bush-era jingoism, and Kate the patriot—her allegiance to flag and country forged as a fourteen-year-old standing in her school uniform on a lower Manhattan sidewalk watching the Towers fall, inhaling the dust of the dead—then Harry Hook was the visionary.

  The seer.

  The magus.

  And this thing had all the hallmarks of his genius.

  Yes, a plane had crashed.

  Yes, Kate’s finger had been recovered from the wreckage.

  But had Kate and her daughter been on that plane?

  The passenger manifest of the low cost Asian airline was a mess: there was evidence that at least three of the deceased were traveling on stolen passports, many of the victims’ names were misspelled and some didn’t appear on the list at all, and the authorities remained uncertain of exactly how many people had died.

  But, standing at the window, his breath condensing on the frosted pane, Danvers knew in his toxic old water that this was the work of Harry Hook.

  And, inspired by this insight, the dying man decided that he, too, was capable of one last act.

  A swansong, if you liked.

  He found himself humming Tchaikovsky as he hurried down the creaking staircase, grabbing a coat and a hat as he went out to where his old Volvo waited. Still humming as he drove faster than he should have past the bare white oaks to a strip mall in one of the advancing suburbs in search of a pay phone.

  TWENTY-NINE

  David Burke, a great bear of a man, his soft white body covered in a pelt of black hair, sprawled naked in post-coital languor across the marital bed of his Foggy Bottom apartment, watching a CNN follow-up piece on Michael Emerson. It was a shameless bit of puffery, colleagues in the media waxing lyrical about what a talent he had been, how moral, ethical, fearless.

  Jesus Christ, all they weren’t saying was that he’d often taken strolls across the Dead Sea.

  Burke’s wife, also naked but physically his polar opposite—a tiny redhead with a Norman Rockwellian spray of freckles across her elfin nose—came in from the bathroom and caught him in the act, even though he quickly surfed to MTV, pretending to bop to an old Pearl Jam thing he hadn’t heard since his Columbia days.

  “So how are you adjusting to not having a bête noir?” Janey said, in that achy breaky voice that moved effortlessly from the gutter to the cotillion.

  “Come on, that’s overstating things.”

  “You’re telling me that when you heard Mike Emerson was dead there wasn’t an element of schadenfreude?” she said, sliding in under the comforter.

  “Schadenfreude?”

  “Hey, everybody needs to hate somebody sometime.”

  “That’s catchy.”

  “What did you hate most about him? That he won the Pulitzer or that he got so much strange?”

  “Strange? Strange? What are you a frat boy?”

  “Oh, I’ll be a frat boy if you want me to be,” she said, dipping down and tonguing him and making him hard again.

  Then, typical ADHD Janey, she sat up, taking a baggie of weed and cigarette papers from the bedside drawer and started to roll a joint.

  As he watched his wife’s deft little fingers Burke tried to keep his mind clear of the annoyance, no the rage—call it what is fucking was—that Michael Emerson had walked away from The Washington Post to take some fancy on-line gig in Paris the very day that Burke was fired from the same newspaper for fighting too long and too loud with its executive editor, protesting his refusal to publish a piece on extra-judicial killing that his boss had called nothing more than wish-fulfillment and fantasy held together by overwrought adverbs.

  Burke had lifted a heavy spherical award from the editor’s desk, gripped it in his palm, and pirouetted like the shot putter he had been in college, convinced until the very last second that he had the orb securely in his grasp (his intention merely to intimidate) but the projectile flew from his sweaty hand and narrowly missed braining the cowering man on its way to shattering the window of his office.

  Ten minutes later, Burke, his sorry belongings dumped in a box, had been escorted by security guards from the building, and now he found himself unemployable.

  His wife lit the doob, took a good hit, and held it out to him as she leaked smoke from mouth and nose and made little huh huh huh sounds.

  As he was about to take the spliff the landline rang.

  It was such a rarity—the instrument left unused in the hallway, neither of them getting it together to call Verizon and cancel—that Burke obeyed some Pavlovian impulse, leaving the bed and padding toward the front room and the quaintly ringing analog phone.

  “Let it go, Dave,” his wife said, coughing, “it’ll just be a telemarketer.”

  But Burke shoved aside a pile of magazines and newspapers and lifted the receiver and said, “Yeah?”

  He listened, said, “Yes. Yes, okay,” and then was left with the purr of dial tone in his ear.

  He walked back into the bedroom, scratching his right ass-che
ek in a ruminative fashion.

  “That was Philip Danvers,” he said.

  Janey squinted at him through the smoke. “Danvers, Danvers, Danvers . . .”

  “The Gray Ghost.”

  “Jesus, yes! He called you?”

  “He called me.”

  “C’mon, you’re being punk’d.”

  “It was him. I swear.”

  “How did he have your number? Our fucking number.”

  “Exactly.”

  She shivered and hummed a few bars of the X-Files theme.

  “He wants to meet me in a park,” Burke said, stepping into a pair of boxers.

  “A park?”

  “Yeah, in Bethesda. Right now.”

  “That’s so The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What does he want?”

  “I dunno. He hung up before I could ask.”

  “You’re going?”

  “Fucking straight I’m going.

  “What are you going to wear?”

  “What am I going to wear?”

  “You’ve got to look the part. You have to wear a trench coat.”

  He found his Levis on the floor and pulled them on, along with a check shirt and a sweater and a pea jacket. He wound a scarf around his neck.

  “I’ll let you leave with this uplifting thought,” Janey said.

  “What?”

  “Michael Emerson couldn’t pull off that scarf right now.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “No, it’s not funny, it’s true.”

  “It’s funny because it’s true.”

  “Whatever. Be careful, Dave.” She hugged her knees under the comforter, her brow furrowed.

  “Chill,” he said, “this is D.C. not Damascus.”

  “Exactly.”

  THIRTY

  Sleep eluded Harry Hook.

  He lay on his bed, sweating, listening to the scuffs and shuffles coming in from the jungle, smelling the mingled scents of Kate Swift and her daughter, still trapped in the folds of the linen. A clean, vanilla, smell. Powdery. The smell of everything he’d never had in his life.