Killing Plato

“An hour before I land in Paris, the press will be told where I am and what I’m about to do. Half the fucking television cameras in the world will show up to meet me. I’ll walk off the plane and-”

“They’ll grab you and turn you over to the FBI. Even the French don’t have the balls to let you just wander around loose. You can’t buy them like you did the Thais.”

“Yes, I can,” Karsarkis smiled tightly. “They just cost a lot more.”

“What I’m trying to say,” I began, “is that if you-”

“Look, it doesn’t matter,” Karsarkis interrupted. “The French Minister of Justice has agreed to let me have my say to the press when I arrive. He assumes I’m going to stick a big one up some American asses and the little froggie bastard is wetting himself waiting for that.”

“And then what?”

“After that they can arrest me if they want to, but my guess is they won’t bother. Not after I’ve already told everything I know.”

“What do you know?”

“Ah, well. That’s always the problem isn’t it, Jack. Yes, what do I know indeed?”

I struggled to sit upright on the bed. The bandages pulled at my side and pinched my skin and I winced.

“You’re right, of course,” Karsarkis said when I was still again. “I didn’t come here this morning just to tell you I was sorry. I came here for a far more important reason.”

“Look, I’m not sure-”

“You are close to something very big, Jack. Closer than you know. Before I leave, I want to tell you what it is.”

Well, here we are, I thought to myself.

Plato Karsarkis is about to tell me whatever it is that he knows, whatever it is that somebody wants to kill him for knowing.

I closed my eyes and tilted my head back against the pillow. I should have stopped Karsarkis right then without hearing anymore. I should have just told him to get the hell out and leave me alone and that would have been that.

But, of course, I didn’t.

Sometimes the desire to know-just to know-turns into a feeling like the one you get when a beautiful woman catches your eye and doesn’t look away. You see her, and you want her, and you know perfectly well that you shouldn’t chase after her, that it will cost you, but you do it anyway. In the end, you chase after her anyway.

And then you pay for it, exactly the way you knew you would.

FORTY FIVE

Plato Karsarkis stood quietly in front of the windows, his hands in his pockets. It seemed to me that he stood that way for a very long time. Finally he turned around and examined metly small hospital room as if he were seeing it for the first time.

I said nothing. I just waited.

“Let’s start at the beginning, Jack,” Karsarkis said after a few moments passed like that. “Eventually maybe we’ll even come to the end.”

“It’s your story,” I shrugged, at least I shrugged as well as a guy lying in a hospital bed wrapped in bandages can shrug. “I’m hardly in any position to throw you out.”

Karsarkis walked over to the couch and sat down, slouching back as if he was settling in comfortably for a long chat. Outside the windows, the dawn looked as if it was further away than I had thought it was a few minutes before, but probably that was only my imagination.

“About eight years ago, a man I knew very well…” Karsarkis paused and cleared his throat. “His name doesn’t really matter. Anyway, I had just bought control of a Hong Kong company that had shipping interests in the South Pacific and he asked me to allow some American intelligence officers to operate a small freighter under the cover of this company. He told me its purpose was to supply some people in the region with whom the Americans had a covert relationship, and he readily admitted the supply process would include weapons. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I gathered it was a CIA operation and they probably wouldn’t tell me the truth even if I asked. So I kept things simple. I agreed. I didn’t ask for the truth.”

“What were you getting out of it?”

“Ah, well…” Karsarkis laced his fingers behind his head and studied the ceiling with what seemed to me to be unnecessary care. “There was a matter of an SEC investigation and some claims of securities fraud-pure horseshit, you understand-and my friend promised they would be dealt with. But I would have been delighted to help my adopted country regardless, Jack. Absolutely delighted.”

“Of course you would have.”

Karsarkis looked at me, but he said nothing else.

“So the CIA used your shipping company as a commercial cover in return for killing off an SEC investigation of you,” I said. “Am I supposed to be shocked? Maybe even morally outraged? I’ve heard worse.”

“That was just the beginning, my friend. The thin end of the wedge. There was another favor after that, and then another and another.”

“And more favors for you in return?”

“Naturally,” Karsarkis nodded without any apparent embarrassment. “When I set up Icon and shifted our group operations to Luxembourg, they suggested I form an entirely separate division to work with them. Technically, it was only another Hong Kong trading company called Global Resources that was controlled by Icon, but it was a lot more than that in reality. You have no idea, Jack, how much of American intelligence operates through perfectly ordinary looking companies like Global Resources. They use commodity brokers, air freight forwarders, oil drillers, all sorts of companies.”

“All part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, huh?”

“I doubt you have any understanding at all of the real scope of it, my friend. Any understanding at all.”

Karsarkis drew a deep breath and stood up. He stretched slightly and walked over to my bed, resting his hands on the rail at its foot.

“I never knew the whole ststrory. Only pieces here and there. Companies operating through Global Resources were used for secret construction projects, selling and shipping arms, money laundering, bribery, extortion, blackmail, disinformation, and plain old espionage. They acquired high-resistance steel and sold it to Pakistan for nuclear weapons research; they traded weapons for information with Abu Nidal; they built the Al Shifa chemical plant in the Sudan; they founded an executive jet service in Switzerland that made planes available to anyone anywhere with no questions asked. You get the idea, Jack. It was nothing less than the administrative apparatus of covert action on a grand scale. And it was all being done in my name.”

“So you’re saying …what? That you’re really a spy?”

“No, nothing so grand. Or nearly so clear. I was…” Karsarkis stopped and thought, searching for the right word, “a facilitator. I used my commercial resources to facilitate various operations by American intelligence about which I knew very little.”

“In return for what? A get-out-of-jail-free card from the SEC? An agreement by the IRS to look the other way? You played ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ and ended up in over your head. That’s about the size of it, isn’t it?”

Karsarkis smiled, once again without the slightest appearance of any embarrassment.

“Let me tell you how the Iraqi oil sales worked,” he said. “It’s a good example of the way these things were usually done.”

I said nothing.

“After the Vietnam War ended,” Karsarkis continued, “America lost interest in Asia. Americans largely turned their back on half the world for nearly two decades. In the period just before the first Gulf War broke out, at least some Americans started to realize they might be in trouble because of that.”

I listened, but still I said nothing.