Jake Needham - Killing Plato

Anita stopped in the doorway instead of coming over to the desk to give me a little peck as she usually did.

“Hello, Jack.”

There was a brittle edge to her voice and I was left with no doubt Anita was unhappy with me for some reason. That was just great. Here I was under surveillance by persons unknown for reasons unknown and now my wife was apparently mad at me and I didn’t know what the reason for that was either.

“What’s wrong, Anita?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Why would you ask?”

Uh-oh .

Whatever it was, it had to be serious. When a woman says something like, Nothing’s wrong and why would you ask, my own personal rule of thumb is that you’re pretty well fucked right there.

“We have to talk, Jack.”

Stee-rike one!

“But not now. I’m very tired and I’m going straight to bed.”

Stee-rike two!

“Good night, Jack.” And with that Anita turned her back on me and walked toward the bedroom.

Stee-rike three and you’re outta there!

So far I was having a heck of an evening, wasn’t I? And hell, it was barely ten-thirty. The night was young. There was still plenty of time for a few more tons of shit to fall on me before the day officially ended.

Anita must have taken a sleeping pill because when I woke the next morning she hardly seemed to have moved all night. I showered and dressed, trying to do it quietly, and she never stirred.

I went into the study to pick up my briefcase and then, remembering I hadn’t brought it home with me, all at once I also remembered everything else from the night before as well. Since I hadn’t yet had even a drop of coffee, that wasn’t too swell.

The maid didn’t come in until eight and I briefly considered making some breakfast for myself, but with the apartment wired for sound and Anita apparently ready to rip into me about something as soon as she woke up, getting out of there as quickly as possible was far more appealing. I left by the front door, got into the car, and drove to the Starbucks in Amarin Plaza. Forty-five minutes later, thoroughly buzzed on the caffeine from a double-shot latte and riding a sugar high from ingesting a couple of blueberry muffins, I parked in the garage on campus, collected my notes from my office, and made it to my nine-o’clock class more or less on time.

I had plannedpus to give a lecture that morning on the development of international tax avoidance legislation, but I knew under the circumstances I’d never make it through something that tedious. Instead I fell back on the traditional refuge of every distracted academic who didn’t feel like lecturing and who’d had at least some practical experience in the subject at hand. I soft-shoed through a hastily improvised routine composed of my greatest and wittiest war stories.

I imagine former surgeons tell their students about patients whose lives they saved through their quick thinking, and no doubt every trial lawyer has a fund of anecdotes about criminals he freed with his clever tactics. But if you’ve been is a corporate deal guy like me, what you talk about when all else fails is money. Largely how you scored unholy piles of it for some client by being really sneaky. In Asia at least, those kinds of stories are always guaranteed to keep the kids absolutely riveted. Forget about life and liberty, you can almost hear the little bastards chanting, let’s get right down to all that pursuit-of-happiness stuff.

I ended the day’s entertainment with a flourish-always leave them laughing, somebody said-and speed-walked back to my office before a student could ambush me either with a genuine question or, more likely, a transparent attempt to suck up a little. My secretary wasn’t at her desk, but then Bun was seldom at her desk so I grabbed myself some coffee from the kitchen down at the end of the hall and then went straight into my office. After hanging out a Do Not Disturb sign I kept at the ready, I locked the door.

I flopped down into my desk chair and made myself comfortable. Then I propped my feet up on the side of a half-open drawer and sipped at my coffee. The time had clearly come to do some serious pondering.

But where to start? The last completely normal moment I could remember for weeks was when Anita and I had decided to go to the Boathouse for dinner. It had been a placid, soft-toned evening on the western beaches of Phuket and we were looking for nothing anymore exciting than a romantic dinner for two, which can be exciting enough all by itself if you get it right.

But where had that led?

The world’s most wanted fugitive was trying to become my new best friend and at the same time an undercover team of US Marshals was trying to recruit me to spy on him. Two powerful groups were tugging me in exactly opposite directions, and that was just if I was lucky. Maybe there were more than two groups who had me in their sights. If neither Karsarkis nor the US marshals were responsible for wiring my apartment, then I had somebody else on my tail, too, somebody who hadn’t yet shown himself.

I felt like a man who had started out skiing down a gentle slope only to discover he was really on Mount Everest. And he wasn’t wearing skis.

Everything was becoming clearer and fuzzier all at the same time. Perhaps if I told Jello the truth about what was going on, particularly the part about Karsarkis offering me a huge sum of money to try and get him a presidential pardon, maybe he would at least point me in the right direction. There were some pretty strict limitations as to how much Jello could tell me, of course, even if he did know something I probably ought to, but at worst he would probably tell me there was nothing he could say and I was on my own. I was already on my own, so what did I have to lose by asking?

I had just about talked myself into telling Jello the whole story and when my cell phone rang. I scooped it up and glanced at the number on the screen. I thought I recognized it as Jello’s so I answered.

“Hey, man, I was just thinking of you.”

“Ah, Jack, that’s so sweet. I didn’t know you cared.”

I looked at the telephone. It wasn’t Jello.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“I thought you said you were just thinking of me. Now you ask who this is? You’re a fickle motherfucker, Big Jack. Just when I was feeling all warm and loved, you jerk the rug right out from under me.”

“Tommy?”

“At your service, my friend. At your fucking service.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was expecting someone else.”

“So I gather.”

There was an awkward silence after that. I was waiting for Tommy to tell me why he was calling, but he apparently was waiting for me to ask, so eventually I obliged him.

“What do you want, Tommy?”

“You asked to see some files, didn’t you, Jack?”

In all the upheaval since last night I had completely forgotten the conversation Tommy and I had about the NIA’s intelligence files on Karsarkis.

“So your boss said you could give them to me?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? What does that mean?”

“It means my boss is going to give them to you.”

“Fine.”

“Okay. Here’s what you do, Jack. Go downstairs and-”

“Whoa, Tommy. I’m not in the mood this morning for a goddamned scavenger hunt. If your boss has got some files for me, tell him just send them on over.”

“No can do, Big Jack. Here are the ground rules. You talk directly to my boss. Maybe you get some stuff to look at and maybe you don’t. And even if you do, no notes and no copies. That’s it. Take it or leave it.”

I sighed and studied a point on my office wall that had nothing in particular to recommend it.