hour or so.”
“So, his passing is not… imminent?”
“It’s not a matter of hours, no. But it could be any day. You can stay here as long as you like.” She glanced at the corrections officer, adding, “It’s been approved.”
I signed my name on the register, and the guard inside the glass booth buzzed Dr. Kern and me into the unit. I followed her down the brightly lit hallway, my heart pounding. Once the secured entrance was behind us, the prison unit looked much like any other hospital, with the exception of the corrections officers posted at each end of the corridor. There were probably a few more security cameras than in a regular hospital, but this was definitely not San Quentin. We passed several more rooms and finally stopped outside an open doorway.
“When is the last time you saw your father?” she asked.
“When I was fifteen years old.”
She arched an eyebrow. “In that case, I guess what I was about to say goes double: you should be prepared for a change in your father’s appearance.”
I had thought I was prepared, but hearing her say it made me realize that I wasn’t. “You’re right, I should be.”
“Do you want me to go in with you, or do you prefer to be alone?”
I had not yet thought about it, but the answer came quickly. “Alone.”
“That’s fine. If you need anything, you can push the red call button by the bed.”
“How much longer will you be here?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be around.”
I thanked her, which she acknowledged with a supportive nod. Then she retreated down the long corridor, and I turned to face the dark opening to my father’s room, where he lay deep in drug-induced sleep. After one tentative step forward, I stopped, the prognosis replaying in my mind.
I was suddenly wracked with guilt, my feet nailed to the floor. The last five days had been all about my father, and this was the third time since Monday that I’d tried to see him. That made for a grand total of three such attempts since my fifteenth birthday. Did that make me a lousy person? An angry young man, forever bitter that in finding his conscience, my father’s choice to turn against the mob had ended in the death of my mother? Or was I a good son who respected the courage of a father who had come to the painful realization that the only way to protect himself and his children was never to see them again? The answer was complicated, but I had no doubt that guilt was the reason I had jumped at Agent Henning’s offer to arrange for first-rate cancer treatment in exchange for six months of spying on Lilly in Singapore. I wondered if my father knew what I had done. I wondered if he would care.
I wondered, too, if guilt was the reason I felt the way I did about Lilly-that I was so desperate for
“Sir, you can’t hang out in the hallway,” the corrections officer said. I hadn’t even heard her come up behind me. “It’s not allowed. You either have to go into the room or go back to the waiting area.”
“Sorry,” I said, breathing out some of my anxiety. “I guess I’ll go in.”
55
B arber’s mind was on anything but charity, but he was stuck hosting a table for ten at a black-tie gala for yet another organization that had conferred “philanthropist of the year” honors on his wife and his checkbook. Vanessa lived for these events, and it annoyed her to no end when he checked his BlackBerry in the middle of one of her stories. But he might well blow his brains out if, yet again, he had to hear about Todd, “the world’s most fabiola-amazing decorator,” who had raced across Midtown, loaded up Vanessa’s Range Rover, and rescued $11,000 worth of ice sculptures that had been mistakenly delivered to the Waldorf instead of the Pierre.
Barber froze. Finally, the message he’d been waiting for: “Mr. W. will take your call now.” It was from the office of the national security advisor. He rose quickly, angry for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that an intellectual inferior like Brett Woods had the power to make him jump.
“Excuse me, everyone,” he said to his table guests, loud enough to be heard over a twenty-piece band that was playing Gershwin.
Vanessa shot him a death ray. She hadn’t even gotten to the part where a sudden stop on Fifth Avenue had broken a swan’s neck, but “clever Todd” had just told everyone it was a stuffed turkey.
“My apologies, but this may take a while,” said Barber.
“The White House calling again, Joe?” his tennis buddy asked with a smile.
Barber forced a little laughter. “No, those days are over.”
“Please hurry back,” his wife said flatly.
Barber walked quickly through the ballroom, weaving between banquet tables, avoiding eye contact with anyone who might grab him by the sleeve and corner him for a networking opportunity. He exited to the hotel’s mezzanine level, at the end of a long row of carved oak doors, leaving the buzz of the band and the crowd behind him. A staff member directed him down the hall to a vacant room, where he could make a call in private. It was a cozy, windowless business suite with a conference table, a fireplace, and a brass chandelier. He tipped her a twenty, closed the door, and dialed Brett Woods.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for three hours,” said Barber. “Did they not tell you it was urgent?”
“I was in a meeting with Clark,” he said, meaning the CIA director. “More trouble with Operation BAQ. The collateral damage is much broader than we thought.”
The innocent investors were collateral damage. “I thought all of Cushman’s investors had been accounted for.”
“Different kind of collateral damage. It seems that our intelligence on the terrorist connections of some of our targets was faulty.”
“Meaning what?”
“A number of the ‘suspected’ terrorist funders that were pulled into the Ponzi scheme had nothing to do with terrorism.”
Barber leaned against the marble mantel, not quite believing his ears. “The whole justification for Operation Bankrupt al-Qaeda was that these investors were financing terrorism. Are you telling me that we targeted a bunch of rich Arabs with no terrorist connections?”
“To some extent, yes.”
“Damn it! I should
“I didn’t say
“You assured me that the CIA had nailed down the terrorist-financing connection. I would never have given the green light otherwise.”
“That’s bullshit, Joe. Now that we got bin Laden, everybody wants to forget how desperate the administration was to strike a deathblow against al-Qaeda.”
“I wasn’t desperate. I wanted to get this right.”
“You knew this was an ambiguous situation. That’s the reason I recommended that we go to the CIA instead of the Justice Department. Justice couldn’t simply freeze their accounts under the Patriot Act-we
