Emerald Buddha

Chapter 57

Senator Whitfield strode through the crowded restaurant to his customary table, a lacquered wooden booth in the rear of the eatery, well away from prying eyes, where more matters of state had been decided than in the Oval Office. The skin on his face hung like that of a tired dog, although his two-thousand-dollar suit was crisp and his burgundy tie radiated quiet authority.

The last week had been brutal — easily the worst he’d seen in his long years on the Hill. Every day brought new revelations that threatened to topple the power structure of the Beltway, and his phone rang from dawn to well after midnight as an unending litany of atrocities appeared online, with no obvious rhyme or reason.

Whitfield had long ago parked his ethics at the door, and he wasn’t so much surprised at the level of criminality that was the norm in government work as he was that the idiots at the DOD would keep records. It was mind-numbingly stupid, an invitation to exposure, and not a minute went by that he didn’t curse the worldview that insisted that everything be documented — including the sins.

That morning had been another shocker for the fourth estate — the record of a domestic assassination of a liberal journalist with a Milwaukee newspaper who’d been digging around money that had gone missing in Iraq. There it was, in black and white, as the operation had been described in detail, and now the bastard’s family was calling for an exhumation so the suicide ruling could be reviewed in light of the new information. Even though the apparatus had a chokehold on the press, some things couldn’t be ignored, and even the most pliant editors had to approve articles breaking the news and calling for heads to roll.

Whitfield ignored the veiled stares of the other power brokers in the room and waited for his ex-wife to appear. She’d flown back from Thailand two days earlier and had demanded the meeting. Margaret was a wonderful woman, but she had no idea how the real world worked, and the naiveté that had been charming when they’d been students in the idealistic sixties had been her downfall when he’d taken up public service and bowed out of practicing law. She’d been unable to accept the compromises that were called for, and by the time Christine entered high school, their marriage had been a tense cease-fire rather than a partnership of any real sort.

They’d gone their separate ways and hadn’t spoken for months at a time; when they did, it was to sort out some aspect of their property, which had been distributed equitably. The divorce had lacked the typical acrimony and more resembled a negotiated surrender of two tired armies, where it was largely unclear even after the victory parade who had actually won the encounter.

Her voice had been terse on the call, and he’d had to park his impatience at her demand when she’d mentioned Christine offhandedly. Margaret might have been unsuited for the Machiavellian schemes of Washington, but she’d learned a trick or two while they’d been married, and Whitfield knew better than to underestimate her. So he’d agreed to a late lunch, and now found himself staring bleakly across the restaurant as he waited for another in a seemingly unending parade of unpleasant shoes to drop.

A server approached in a white vest and matching bow tie, and smiled a welcome with a nod of his head. “May I get you a drink?” he asked, and Whitfield nodded. “Gin and tonic. Light on the tonic. And the ice.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. And how many are we expecting today?”

“Only one.”

“Very well. One gin and tonic on its way. I’ll bring water and bread in a moment.”

Whitfield waved him away, wondering for an instant whether bread and water was a crack at the rumors swirling around the town about investigations into his chairing of the defense department committee, but decided that it wasn’t. Not everything was about him, he reminded himself. His complicity in the crimes being aired on the web would be impossible to prove — at least, he hoped so. God help them all if his role had also been memorialized on the compromised servers. He’d be finished. But he’d take others down with him if he was disgraced; he’d see to that.

Whitfield had always believed that the lessons that had served the country well during the Cold War were valid in every walk of life. Mutually assured destruction kept everyone honest and reduced the tendency to view cogs in the machine like himself as expendable. Nobody was going to throw him to the wolves, he was certain — because if he began opening his mouth, the news on the web would seem like a trip to Disneyland compared to what he could recount.

Margaret entered the restaurant and made her way to the table, her expression as placid as a mountain lake — her ‘moon face,’ Whitfield had teasingly called it in the early years, before the term had taken on the aura of a ritual insult intended to demean. As so many things had. For an instant he wished he could take it all back, start over, and be the young firebrand who wasn’t afraid to tilt at windmills, Margaret at his side.

The server arrived with his drink and set it down in front of him, the glass carefully draped with a napkin to preserve its chill and conceal the amount of active ingredient the senator was having with his lunch. Whitfield waited until the man had left to unpeel his treat and take a healthy slurp, and wished it was reasonable to gulp it through a straw as he registered the look in Margaret’s eyes as she neared.

She slid in across from him and delivered a frosty smile. “Hello, Arthur. Oh, dear, you do look like you’ve been through the wringer, don’t you?”

“Nice to see you as well, Margaret.” He took another appreciative sip and set the glass down. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I wanted to let you know that our daughter is alive and well.”

Whitfield leaned forward. “You saw her?”

“No. I had an all too brief call while I was in Thailand. She was trying to explain why I’d probably never hear her voice again.” Margaret swallowed back a small sob.

“Why did she run?”

“You want to sit across from me and pretend that you don’t know? After all the news that’s broken, you’re as puzzled as I am?”

Whitfield’s expression hardened. “She’s in way over her head,” he warned. “I can protect her.”

“I tried to sell that. She wasn’t buying. She is, after all, our daughter, so she’s naturally suspicious.” Margaret studied him, and her gaze reminded him of a lab technician eyeing a specimen on a slide. “She doesn’t trust you. Which, based on the look on your face, makes two of us. You’ve never been able to hide your nature convincingly from me, you know. For years I told myself that it wasn’t you, but it is, and I accept that I made a mistake.”

“You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“No? What’s funny is that when she was telling me why she was going to see through Liu’s work and ensure that it saw the light of day, she reminded me just a little of you. Stubborn, committed and, above all, fearless.” Margaret paused. “What happened to you, Arthur?”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No. Not that I’d tell you if I did. But she asked me to deliver a message. So here I am.”

“Fine. What is it?”

“That when you keep company with demons, you become one yourself.”

“You must enjoy saying that very much,” Whitfield said softly.

“It gives me no pleasure.” Margaret checked something on her phone. “I’m afraid you’ll be eating alone, Arthur. I thought I could manage it, but I seem to have lost my appetite.” She slipped from the booth and stood. “I hope all this was worth it. Your daughter. Me.”

Whitfield clutched his glass as she made her way to the entrance and left, his mind racing. He struggled to rise, but his chest suddenly cramped, and the most incredible pain he’d ever experienced shrieked through his synapses as his heart seized. He fumbled for the edge of the white linen tablecloth and then sat back, his breathing so shallow it resembled that of a baby bird fallen from its nest.

The server returned and took the senator’s drink off the table and walked unhurriedly to the kitchen. He didn’t stop until he was out the rear service door, where a van waited with its engine idling. He climbed into the passenger seat and dropped the glass into a garbage bag, and then peeled off his latex gloves, taking care not to handle their exterior, and tossed them in as well. The neurotoxin he’d used wouldn’t show up on any autopsy report, and the good senator’s passing would be mourned for the loss of his moderate voice and Solomon-like judgment.

The server removed the mustache he’d affixed that morning and pulled the putty from his nose — just a small amount was sufficient to alter his appearance, he’d found through trial and error. He looked at the driver and nodded once.

“Drive.”

General Holt watched the Potomac rush by, the moon silvering its surface. A few late night joggers pushed themselves along the riverside path as the last balmy breeze of autumn stirred the trees around them. He’d spent the day in a series of panicked meetings with anonymous men whose deeds were now making headlines, and he was bone tired. Of everything. The subterfuge, the denials, the palpable fear in the rooms he drifted in and out of, unable to offer reassurance. The excrement had hit the fan good and well — with remarkable vigor, as one wag had said on television that morning.

And now he’d been summoned like a schoolboy for a clandestine conference with a man whom nobody said no to, presumably to have his ass chewed out and his future threatened. Holt would take it stoically, as was his custom, and assure him that damage control was being undertaken, and that they would all survive this, as they had so many other calamities. That Holt was expected to act as a lapdog to the most influential figures in the world didn’t strike him as odd at all — in his experience, the hubris that inflated them with grandiose importance was always the first to dissipate, leaving them demanding that he, little more than a foot servant, do something to protect them from the antiseptic of sunlight.

He glanced over to admire a young woman who was approaching on the path, obviously athletic even in a hoodie and shorts. Holt might have been in the twilight of his years, but he could still appreciate beauty for its visceral pleasure. In his mind he wished her nothing but well, as she aged, became a parent, wrinkled and stooped as the unforgiving years had their way, and ultimately, turned to dust.

The pop of her suppressed pistol could have been mistaken for a distant backfire. Holt stared at her through fading eyes as her expression never changed and she fired three more rounds into his skull, the second one extinguishing his life, the rest for grisly show.

Another robbery gone wrong in an area beset by crime would go unremarked. The woman’s long legs glided along the pavement, leaving the husk of Holt lying ruined by the water, his lifeless gaze staring accusingly into nothingness.

A week later, Daniels watched the CNN coverage of the unfolding train wreck in Washington with a bitter smile as steel drums pulsed from the beach veranda, the mild surf luminescent in the starlight. The bartender strode over and tilted his head at Daniels’ drink — a blood-red fruit punch concoction that had enough rum in it to lay an infantry platoon low.

“’Nother one, mon?” the islander asked in his musical accent.

“No, Cliff, I think I’ve had enough. See you tomorrow.”

“You bet, mon. Take it slow, you hear?”

“Is there any other way?”

Daniels’ voice sounded slurred, even to him, but he didn’t care. His life had fallen apart, but like the proverbial phoenix, he’d been reborn. Over his career it had been child’s play to secret away enough money in offshore locales to be able to run — so much cash sloshed around in the system that you had to be a fool not to see the possibility. The trick had been to avoid being greedy, and to shave off a sliver at a time, which was never missed. “Shrinkage,” he muttered to himself, smiling at the retail term for pilferage. “Just a little shrinkage, mon. T’aint no thang.”

He’d covered his tracks sufficiently and was enjoying his fourth night on Ambergris Caye, Belize’s best kept secret, as far as he was concerned. It was a country that boasted more spottings of fugitives on the FBI’s most wanted list than any other, no doubt a function of labile borders and English as the official language, as well as a reputation for discretion from a populace that had its own affairs to contend with.

He padded along the beach to his hotel, the reef in the near distance glowing from abundant marine life with each surge, and didn’t register the two islanders who darted from one of the darkened bungalows that lined the strand until it was too late.

Neither man spoke, letting the steel in their hands do the talking for them. When they ambled away thirty seconds later, Daniels had been stabbed eighteen times. The terminal stroke had penetrated his skull through his eye. The tallest of the pair slid a wad of hundred-dollar bills from Daniels’ wallet and threw the empty billfold far into the water. Neither looked back at the dead man lying half in the surf, his blood staining the white sand inky in the moonlight. Violence against tourists was an increasing problem as the beleaguered country battled drug gangs intent on moving in from Honduras and Mexico, and the headlines would meet with disapproving head shakes over breakfast as the vacation spot ramped up for another long day under the tropical sun.