“Was that when they indicted you for the oil s Jaales?”
“It was a neat move, I have to admit. Painting me as a traitor for selling embargoed Iraqi oil pretty well gutted any claim I might make that I’d been nothing but a delivery boy for the NSC in Indonesia. Cynthia was the only person who knew the truth of it, at least the only person I had any contact with who knew, and she had always been straight with me. Without her, the NSC could pin the weapons and explosives shipped to Indonesia solely on me whenever they wanted to.”
“And Cynthia was dead.”
“I see you have now grasped the second part of my problem. Cynthia would have told the truth,” he said. “Cynthia would have saved me.”
At first, what Karsarkis was saying came to me only fleetingly, like a sudden draft through an empty room. Then suddenly I understood it all. The truth broke over me like a cold ocean wave.
“You’re saying someone working for the NSC killed Cynthia Kim?”
“Yes.”
“They killed her because she knew the NSC was behind the shipments, not you?”
“Yes.”
“They killed her because she was going to testify to that?”
“Yes.”
“And then they killed Mike and Mia, and they tried to kill me to warn you to keep your mouth shut?”
“The others, yes. But I’m not sure about you. Maybe it was just a coincidence you were in the car with Mia that day.”
Karsarkis looked like he was about to say something else, but instead he walked back over to the green vinyl chair where he had been sitting when I first saw him. His back was to me and I couldn’t see what he was doing, but when he turned around again he was holding a white, letter-sized envelope. He gave me a half-smile, rueful and cheerless, and tossed it onto my bed.
“Fortunately for me, however, all is not entirely lost.”
I eyed the envelope. It wasn’t flat like it would have been if it had folded paper in it. It was slightly lumpy.
“After the Bali bombing there was a panicked debriefing of Cynthia by some NSA and White House people,” he said. “They conducted the debriefing in Singapore. Because they didn’t want Cynthia anywhere near the embassy, they used the Four Seasons Hotel for it, but they were in such a hurry they ignored even the most basic security precautions.”
Karsarkis looked at me as if he wondered whether I caught the importance of that. I said nothing.
“Cynthia was scared,” he went on. “She wasn’t sure whether they would try to hang Bali on me or on her, but she knew damned well they weren’t going to let it be tied back to the White House. She asked me to arrange to bug the suite at the Four Seasons where the debriefing took place. Mike took care of it. Cynthia’s questioners never suspected a thing.”
I glanced at the envelope again. I had no doubt now what was in it.
“I have the original tapes myself, and those…” Karsarkis inclined his head toward the white envelope, “are the only copies.”
“What’s on them?”
“Two NSC people and a very senior White House official talking to Cynthia damage limitation with respect to the Bali bombing. They wanted to make sure there was no way to connect it seto their screwed-up operation.”
Karsarkis watched me with a slight smile when he said that and I felt the pieces of his story beginning to come together in my mind.
“A senior White House official?”
“Uh-huh,” Karsarkis said, his expression neutral.
“That wouldn’t happen to be anyone I know, would it?”
“It’s a funny old world sometimes, Jack.”
Things that never made any sense before were beginning to click together like pieces of an animated jigsaw puzzle that had all of a sudden lurched into motion and started to assemble itself.
“Does the NSC know about the tapes?”
“When the rumors started about Cynthia testifying for me, they guessed we had something, but they couldn’t be sure what it was.”
“This was behind the pardon all the time, wasn’t it?” I watched Karsarkis carefully. “If I had gone to the White House with a pardon application, they would have known you really
“Yes, I think they would have looked at it that way.”
“Even you wouldn’t have had the balls to ask for a pardon if you didn’t have something pretty good to trade for it.”
“As always, Jack, you seem to have cut straight to the heart of things.”
“And that was why you needed me all along. I have a personal connection to the man whose voice is on these tapes. You wanted me to blackmail him, to blackmail the White House. That was how you intended to get your pardon.”
“Yes, that’s all true.”
“You used me.”
“Of course. What are friends for?”
I couldn’t look at Karsarkis any longer, so I let my head fall back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling.
“It was all just a game of pin the tail on the donkey,” I said after a while. “And I was the goddamned ass.”
After that, neither one of us said anything else for what felt like a very long time.
“They might still get to you,” I said after a while, breaking the silence.
“I doubt it. After I spill everything in Paris, I’ll have too much light on me. They won’t dare touch me then.”
“And if you’re wrong, or you don’t make it to Paris?”
“That’s the reason I came here this morning, Jack. That’s why I’m leaving the copies of the tapes with you.”
“Now wait a minute, if you think-”
“I commit the truth into your hands, Jack. If they get me, you will be the only one left alive who knows what really happened. Be careful what you do with that knowledge.”
Karsarkis let his eyes linger on me for a moment and then he walked around from the foot of the bed and extended his right hand. Automatically I took it and we shook, but even as we did I wondered why I was shaking hands with this man.
“What do you expect me to do?” I asked.
“I really don’t know, Jack. I don’t know what I would do if I were in your place.”
Karsarkis raised a hand to his forehead in a mock salute. “Regardless, I’m off now. Wish me luck.”
Then, with a half-dozen strides, Karsarkis crossed the room and disappeared through the door. It swung shut behind him and closed with a snap that sounded harsh and final.
Through the windows I watched the palm fronds lift and churn in a rising wind. A carpet of trees stretched to where the dim edge of the Andaman Sea lay like a smudge on the far horizon. The sky was strung with rain clouds and the dawn mushroomed through them. The horizon was etched into the sky with a pure white light as finely grained as bone.
I picked up the envelope and I held it for a long time. Now that I knew what was in it, I could feel the tapes. Three microcassettes lying in a neat row.
After a while I pushed a finger under the flap and tore the envelope open. I dumped the cassettes out into my palm. They didn’t look like much. Just three ordinary Sony microcassettes with silver and red labels. No other markings. None at all.
Perhaps there was nothing on them, I mused, wishing for just a moment that would turn out to be true. But I
