“Obviously you read the file, Darcy. I meant for you to. I’m just asking if you were able to get a hard copy, too.”
Darcy picked up her glass and tried her wine. Apparently it met with her approval because she drank some more of it before she put the glass down and cleared her throat.
“Avoiding the copy restrictions was child’s play,” she said. “I already told you that’s just off-the-shelf stuff. The timer was a little harder. The NIA put a routine on the disk that works like an email destruct timer. You trigger it by opening the file, then you have an hour to read everything before the destruct routine goes active. After it does a simple algorithmic will run and corrupt all the files on the disk by changing the data into random characters. It’s really very clever, very thorough. They wanted to make sure everything disappeared after you read it.”
“But you beat it.”
“Sure, I beat it, darling. You know I did.”
“You get a hard copy?” I asked. “Or just a clean copy on another disk?”
“Got both.”
“Damn you’re good.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
I chuckled appropriately. “Well, Darcy, let me at least tell you I appreciate it.”
“I want you to tell me a lot more than that.”
“I’m sorry?” I asked.
“What I said, darling, is that I want you to tell me more than that you appreciate it. I want you to tell me why the hell the NIA is giving you files about Plato Karsarkis.”
I thought about that briefly.
“Are you just generally curious, Darcy?” I asked carefully when I was through thinking. “Or do you have some specific reason for wanting to know.”
“I don’t think you realize what you’re getting into here, Jack.”
“I’m not getting into anything.”
“The hell you’re not. I read the newspapers. There’s a copy of today’s
I played with my wine glass and wondered how much I ought to tell Darcy. She wouldn’t usually ask questions like this, but I suppose I should have been prepared. Plato Karsarkis was hardly a usual subject.
“Look, Darcy, the NIA asked me to do something for them. I told them I wanted to see some of their internal files before I made up my mind whether I would do it or not. They gave me that disk, and frankly I have no idea what’s on it.”
“But you do know it concerns Plato Karsarkis.”
It was a statement, not a question, so I didn’t say anything. I just sat quietly and watched Darcy nod slowly as if she was putting some things together.
“They know where Karsarkis is,” she said after a moment, “but I guess you already realize that.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Do
“Uh-huh.”
There was a pause and in the silence I listen to the low hum of the pool pump in the distance and the rhythmic buzzing of the cicadas in the trees.
“I’m worried about you, baby,” Darcy said very quietly after a minute or two had passed. “You’re playing in the big leagues with stuff like this. I’d like to watch your back, but I can’t if you won’t trust me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust, Darcy. I wouldn’t have given you that disk if I didn’t trust you. I just don’t want you to get involved. It can’t be a good thing.”
“Then why are
I had no answer for that so we both sat in silence while the young girl returned and served us both from a large wooden salad bowl heaped with greens and slices of chicken topped with croutons and smothered in Caesar dressing. As I cut a sliver of chicken and rolled it through the dressing, Darcy selected a bread stick from a basket on the table.
When Darcy snapped the breadstick, the sound of it cracked in the silence like a shot.
THIRTY ONE
“Let’s do it like this, Jack. I’ll give you the printout of the file that was on the disk. After you read it, you can decide how much more you want to tell me.”
“Okay,” I agreed, popping some chicken into my mouth. “Sounds fair enough.”
“You want to read it now?”
“How long is it?”
“Thirty, thirty-five pages. Not long.”
“Now’s good then,” I said.
Without another word Darcy pushed back her chair and walked past me into the house. When she came back she placed at my elbow an unmarked manila file folder. I flipped it open and eyed the neat stack of pages stapled together inside it.
Darcy picked up her wine glass and tipped it in my direction. “Take your time, baby,” she said.
I worked my way methodically through the first twenty pages or so while I ate my salad and drank white wine. Normally salads weren’t my kind of dinner, but this one was extraordinary and the deep sweetness of the chicken’s richly charcoaled flavor more than made up for the piles of rabbit food I had to negotiate in order to get at it.
Darcy didn’t say a word while I read and ate, but I wouldn’t really have minded if she had. There wasn’t much in what I was reading and conversation wouldn’t have been any real distraction. The first ten pages could have been a transcription of some broadcast on CNN. It was nothing but a routine biography, a summary of Karsarkis’ indictment, and a few notes on his subsequent disappearance. I had read deeper stuff in People Magazine.
The second ten pages were a little more interesting, but not much. They consisted of excerpts from something that looked like a transcript of a pretrial deposition, but since the preparations for Karsarkis’ trial had taken place several months before and been extremely well publicized, it contained nothing explosive. The excerpts were all from the testimony of Cynthia Kim, Karsarkis’ personal assistant who was later murdered in Washington, and they concerned various technical details about the organization of Karsarkis’ corporate empire. What’s more, I saw nothing in any of them that seemed to bear one way or another on Karsarkis’ claim he had been acting at the personal request of the President of the United States when he sold embargoed oil for the Iraqis.
I finished reading the transcripts, pushed my salad bowl away, and wiped my mouth with my napkin.
“Seems like a bunch of useless garbage,” I said, speaking for the first time since I had begun to read.
Darcy finished her wine and looked past me, nodding almost imperceptibly to someone. The young girl immediately reappeared and began to clear the table.
“How far have you gotten?” Darcy asked.
“To the end of the deposition transcripts. Does it get any better?”
Darcy ignored my question. “We’ve got some pretty good double chocolate cake from the Oriental Hotel,” she said instead. “Can I tempt you?”
I shook my head.
“Nope. With the summer heat and everything else, I haven’t been running very much. I can feel the flab already. Just coffee for me.”
“
coffees
The girl bobbed her head without raising her eyes and slipped away with such gliding grace that I watched her until she disappeared into the house.
“They get younger all the time, don’t they, Darcy?”
