Lee Vance: The Garden of Betrayal

Reggie and I had been sitting in the front seat of his car when he showed me the card and the photo. After I regained my composure, we worked out several versions of what might have happened. White’s men-Anton Rastin and his associates-had to have known where I lived, and what my family looked like, and when they could expect Claire to leave our building. One possibility was that the Christmas card had nothing to do with their knowledge-that they learned what they needed to know by observing us. Another was that White discovered that Alex and I were close and had Alex’s home or office searched for information about me. And yet another was that White had Rastin lean on Alex, and that Alex gave the card up voluntarily, because he was afraid Rastin would reveal his insider trading to the SEC or to his father.

Doris Carabello’s fingerprints were on the photo of Kyle also. The two sets of prints-hers and Alex’s-similarly lent themselves to several different explanations. Narimanov wanted Alex to sell me on the Saudi data. White would have instructed Doris to pressure Alex, but Alex’s trading indiscretions at Torino were years past, potentially difficult to prove in retrospect and certainly outside any statute of limitations. It’s possible that Doris gave him the photo as a threat, to underscore the viciousness of the people she represented. Or that Alex guessed at Doris’s involvement in Kyle’s death and demanded information about Kyle as the price of his cooperation. He knew how badly my family needed closure. Or maybe Doris shared the photo with him to remind him of his own complicity in my son’s murder, and to drive home the leverage she had over him. What seems certain is that Alex, consumed by guilt, wrote the anonymous e-mail to Reggie and then committed suicide two days later.

I rinsed and racked my lunch dishes in the kitchen and then built a small fire in the living room fireplace. I fed the card and the photograph into the flame individually, stirring the ash to make sure they burned completely. Clifford White was dead. Doris Carabello and Karl Mohler had vanished, presumably victims of Narimanov’s ruthless tidiness. Alex’s true role in Kyle’s death would likely never be known, unless he’d confessed more to his father in his letter than Walter had revealed. In retrospect, I couldn’t help wondering if a confession might not have been responsible for Walter’s abrupt change of heart toward me. Walter was ruthless to the core, but even he would have been shocked to learn that Alex had played a role in my son’s death.

Regardless, I didn’t plan to ask any more questions. It was time to move on: The Alex I wanted to remember was the friend I’d had before the pride and greed of his father’s milieu had destroyed him, not the shattered wreck who might have betrayed me. Amy had captured my feelings when I told her that Claire, Kate, and I were moving to California to start over: “That’s good,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “Let the dead bury the dead. Matthew eight: twenty-two.”

“Amen,” I’d murmured back. “Amen.”

I was setting one of the corner posts when I glanced up and noticed a distant dust trail moving toward me. It was late afternoon; the wind had risen, but it was still hot. I put away my tools, wiped sweat from my brow, and squatted down in the shade of the barn to wait. A white Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up a few minutes later. Ari was driving, Shimon in the front passenger seat. They both got out and looked around, their eyes masked by sunglasses. My muscles protested as I stood up.

“What do you do for water?” Shimon asked.

“You’re a farmer?”

“More than you.” He snorted. “I grew up on a kibbutz.”

“There’s a big lake a mile east that feeds an aquifer directly under our property. I had a study done before I bought the place. Water’s never been a problem here, even in drought years.”

“It’s lovely,” Ari said approvingly. “Mazel tov.”

“Thanks. You want something to drink?”

Shimon shook his head, arms folded.

“What we’d like is to know why we’re here.”

“Unfinished business,” I said easily, not having expected any pleasantries. “You disappeared without telling me how you fixed Senator Simpson.”

The senator had held a press conference the week after White died, to announce his withdrawal from the presidential race for personal reasons. One of his reasons had been distress at the untimely passing of his closest aide. He’d closed with an impassioned appeal for donations to the American Heart Association.

“A quiet word here and there about the senator’s libido,” Shimon said. “The Republicans don’t want a Bill Clinton.”

“And relations between America and the Persian Gulf States?”

“Fluid,” Ari suggested.

I smiled, but Shimon looked annoyed.

“Unchanged. The French withdrew their security proposal to the Saudis. They seem quite put out with the Russians these days.” He took his sunglasses off and rubbed his eyes. “There is some reason other than your curiosity for me to have traveled seven thousand miles to see you, isn’t there?”

I nodded, gesturing toward an old windmill a few hundred yards away. The blades were spinning slowly, the iron shaft creaking on ancient bearings.

“The windmill drives the pump that lifts water from the aquifer. I had an engineer out here the other day, to talk about replacing it with a more modern windmill so I could do a little cogeneration at the same time. I mentioned that I planned to install a solar array as well, so I could get myself off the grid. He laughed. Oil’s cheap, he explained, because of the financial crisis. It would take forever to get any kind of payback on my investment. His advice was to do nothing.”

Shimon shrugged.

“We made another round of the Western governments, identifying Rashid as the source of our Saudi estimates. No one wants to talk about an energy problem twenty years from now. They’re all preoccupied with unemployment and stimulus plans and budget deficits.”

“They’d focus if they really understood the consequences. We’re running out of time.”

“So, what do you want us to do?” Ari asked.

“Send me Rashid’s information. The real information. I still have an audience.”

“Possible,” Shimon said, frowning, “but this is a political problem-”

“I read the news accounts of Narimanov’s plane crash,” I said, deliberately interrupting him. “And I made a few phone calls. It’s interesting. The plane dropped off radar almost a hundred miles away from the crash site, and the search-and-rescue team never found Narimanov’s body. There’s a German air base nearby. I’m not usually a big conspiracy theorist, but it made me wonder: What if the crash was staged, so the Germans-or their friends-could secretly grab Narimanov?”

Shimon stared at me, his eyes hooded.

“Mohler was feeding money to dozens of bank accounts,” I continued. “White told us that Narimanov controlled business and political leaders all over the world. If Narimanov was secretly in custody, whoever held him would have leverage over everyone he’d been bribing.”

“Tread lightly here,” Ari advised softly. “Very, very lightly.”

“Let me be very clear,” I said. “I’m not threatening anybody with anything. Nothing I know or suspect goes any further, ever. But I want you to know that I’ve established a nonprofit organization to promote awareness of impending energy shortages and to lobby for more action on alternative energy strategies. Walter Coleman gifted us an endowment. It would be nice if the business and political leaders who were on Narimanov’s payroll were encouraged to be supportive as well.”

“That’s it?” Ari asked.

“That’s it.”