Jake Needham - Killing Plato

“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 knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.

There was a drawer in my bedside table, and I opened it and dumped the cassettes inside. Maybe, I thought, someone would save me a lot of trouble and just steal them.

It was not long after Karsarkis left before the drugs took me again. This time I fell into a sleep so fitful and shallow that I drifted in and out of it with every blink. I dreamed in disconnected bursts, like a man flipping through cable television channels with which he was unfamiliar.

Around nine a young girl in a nurse’s uniform woke me with a cup of very weak tea. Smiling, she pointed to a plastic tumbler of water on the table next to my bed, placed a small paper cup half full of pills next to it, and then slipped quietly out of my room. I sipped the tea and swallowed the pills and looked out the window.

For a while I wondered if my early morning conversation with Plato Karsarkis had been just another episode in my parade of pharmaceutically enhanced visions, or if it was something that had actually happened. Then I put my hand on the drawer in my bedside table and pulled it open. The three microcassettes with the silver and red labels lay inside exactly where I had put them. That seemed to settle that.

I leaned back against the pillows and was thinking about what Karsarkis had told me when I felt rather than heard the door to my room opening.

“Man, you look like you been rode hard and put up wet,” CW bellowed. He walked over to the bed and patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “How you feelin’?”

“Fine,” I replied automatically, then thought about it. “Actually, I feel like shit to tell you the truth.”

CW nodded slowly as if he was thinking about that, then suddenly he thrust a hand toward me and held out a stack of magazines. “This was all they had downstairs,” he said. “Couldn’t find a Playboy.”

Taking the stack from him, I put it down on my bedside table.

“Who is Marcus York?” I asked him.

My question caught CW off balance and he tried for a moment to look vague, but he was the worst actor I’ve ever seen, except of course for Sylvester Stallone.

“What do you mean?” he finally mumbled when I said nothing to take him off the hook.

“It’s a simple enough question. Who the hell is Marcus York? And don’t bother claiming that he’s a United States marshal. We’re way past that now.”

CW hitched up his pants and coughed unnecessarily, then he threw me a baleful stare. “He’s one sorry-assed motherfucker who thinks he’s slicker ‘en owl shit.”

“But whose sorry-assed motherfucker, exactly, is he?”

CW looked down and kicked at the floor with the toe of his boot like he was playing with gravel in the dirt.

“You may not believe me, Slick, but I got no goddamned idea. None. When this operation started, they told me I had to take this sorry sack of shit along and give him cover as a marshal. The bastard might be…”

CW stopped talking and his head bobbed around as if it had momentarily become detached from his shoulders.

“What?”

“Maybe CIA,” CW said. “I just don’t know.”

“It was York’s email the NIA gave me, wasn’t it?”

CW consulted a spot on the floor. “Yeah, I think it probably was.”

“Do you know where York is now?”

CW said nothing.

“You don’t know what’s happened to him?”

“I got no idea.”

“I do,” I said.

That got CW’s attention. “You do?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I killed him.”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“He was one of the two hitters who attacked the car. York was the one I shot.”

“Ah, stop pulling my pecker, Slick.” CW cocked his head at me and I saw something like a half-smile on his face. “I saw those two myself. They was just local boys. Shit, I thought you were serious there for a minute.”

“I was serious. I pulled the helmet off the man I shot and I saw his face. It was Marcus York. There’s no doubt about it. Somebody switched the bodies.”

CW opened and closed his mouth. He looked as if he was experiencing a change of cabin pressure in an airplane. But he didn’t say anything.

It started to rain just then. CW and I watched in silence as fat drops slapped against the windows, joined together into little streams, and ran down the glass. Even from inside the room I felt like I could smell the dense aroma of wet trees and damp earth that always accompanied rainfall in the tropics. I remembered the ring I’d seen around the moon at dawn and I wondered how long the rain would last.

When the door from the hallway opened again, CW and I looked around at the same time. Kate took a step into the room and stopped. She obviously knew CW and she didn’t seem particularly happy to find him in my hospital room.

But then I caught something else in her expression, too, and I knew she had something to tell me, something that was about to change everything.