John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

“Right.”

“Kind of archaic, isn’t it?”

D’Anconia shrugged.

“Well,” Burke said, “it doesn’t matter, really. Half the companies we form are generics like the Two-One-Two Corporation or ABX.”

D’Anconia thought some more. “You said there was some kind of declaration?”

“Right. The declaration says that the company is brand-new, and that the directors don’t have any claim against its assets. Nor will they, if they’re dismissed. And they always are. The package you get includes their resignations – signed, but undated.”

“What about the bank account? Can the nominees-”

Burke shook his head. “No. You’re the only signatory. Which reminds me, I’ll need your passport.”

“My passport?”

“For the bank.”

“What’s the bank got to do with it?”

“They need to know who you are,” Burke explained. “Someone walks in off the street, says he’s you… the bank has to be sure. Trust me, you want the bank to be sure.”

D’Anconia extracted a passport from his overcoat, and pushed it across the desk.

The colors were a surprise. Blue and gold. He’s Chilean? “I’ll just be a minute.” Burke crossed the room to a copying machine in the corner. The machine came to life. After a moment, a light flared. He turned to the emergency contact page, where an address in Santiago had been penciled in. The copying machine flared a second time.

“Is that it, then?” d’Anconia asked. “We’re all set?”

“Almost,” Burke replied. Returning to the desk, he handed the passport back to his client, and sat down. “Diga me, es su primer viaje a Irlanda?”

For a moment, d’Anconia didn’t move. Then he cocked his head to the side, and held Burke’s gaze for what seemed like a long time. Finally, he said, “Si, vale. Primer tiempo.”

Burke smiled. The guy’s accent was about as Spanish as a California roll. “Well,” he said, “it’s a great country.”

“So let’s do it then,” d’Anconia said. Reaching into his coat, he pulled out a leather wallet, fat with bills. Counting out thirteen one-hundred-euro notes, he laid them on the desk in a sort of fan.

Burke gathered the bills together, and put them in a lockbox in the bottom drawer. Then he wrote out a receipt, and handed it to d’Anconia. “So I can forward everything to the address in your passport? To Santiago?”

D’Anconia looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m not going to be there for a while. But I’m going to need the bank details – wire-transfer codes and all – as soon as possible. I think the best thing to do would be to send it all to my hotel.”

Burke winced, and shook his head. “A hotel-”

“-is all I can give you. I’ll be in Belgrade, at the Esplanade, for a couple of weeks.”

With a sigh, Burke made a note. “The thing is, there’s going to be correspondence.”

D’Anconia frowned.

“It’s unavoidable. But I can put you on the Hold Mail list,” Burke told him. This was a roster of clients who should never be contacted by the firm. Any communications should originate with the client himself. The concern of people on the Hold Mail list, almost universally, was the concealment of assets – from wives, creditors, and governments.

“Excellent,” d’Anconia said.

“But you’ll have to check in with us from time to time. There’s an annual tax. If it isn’t paid, the corporation will lose its standing.” Burke could see that d’Anconia wasn’t listening. Maybe he didn’t care what happened to the company. Maybe he’d use it for a single transaction, and walk away. If so, it was no skin off Burke’s nose. With a smile, he got to his feet, signaling an end to the meeting. The two men shook hands, and d’Anconia let himself out the way he’d come in.

Burke shook his head, and smiled ruefully. Moving to the window, he watched as his client left the building, shoulders hunched against the rain.

He’s either avoiding taxes, or evading them, Burke decided. Either way, it wasn’t any of his business. Let the IRS do its job, and he’d do his.

Even so, there was something about d’Anconia that bothered him, and it wasn’t his nationality. No, the thing that bothered Burke about d’Anconia was his name. It was somehow familiar, like the name of a second- or third-string celebrity.

Maybe that’s it, Burke thought. Maybe he’s an actor.

He could imagine him playing a doctor on TV – a brilliant young surgeon who, just for the fun of it, killed the occasional patient.

Wilson stood with his back to the wall, watching the ragheads dip the cans, one by one, in buckets of gasoline. He’d been in the warehouse all day, so the gas was in his clothes, in his hair, in his pores. He could taste it. Which was frustrating, because he desperately wanted a cigarette. But even if he went outside, he couldn’t just light up. If he did, he’d go off like a flare.

The other thing about going outside was his babysitters: Zero and Khalid. Around twenty years old, they wore boots and jeans and American T-shirts (“Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!”), and carried Heckler & Koch submachine guns as casually as umbrellas. They went with him everywhere, thanks to Hakim, and it was getting on his nerves. The one guy’s English was almost nonexistent, but the other one spoke it well. The real problem was: They wanted to be his friends. They wanted to go to America! So they were constantly mugging in his direction, bobbing their heads and smiling insanely, as if to say, Death to America, but not to you, my friend! For you – falafel! For us, green cards!

He told Hakim: I don’t need a bodyguard, much less two – much less the Fukwitz twins! The Arab insisted, and maybe he was right. Beneath its veneer of Gallic and Arab civility, Lebanon was a tinderbox. Always had been, always would be. And Baalbek was just… so much kindling.

A flyblown crossroads in the Bekaa Valley, the city lay at the foot of a long, bare hill, crowned by the Sheikh Abdullah barracks. This was the fort where American hostages had been kept, chained to radiators and pipes, during the 1980s. Hakim wanted to show him the cells, but there hadn’t been time and, anyway, Hakim didn’t trust the Syrian intel people who were headquartered there. Which was too bad, because Wilson knew something about prisons, was interested in prisons – and he wondered about the cells. Had the hostages been able to see the ruins across the road? It would have made a difference – because the ruins were as spectacular as they were unexpected.

From an engineering standpoint, they were mind-boggling. There was a brochure at the hotel. It said they were the remains of a Roman sanctuary. The centerpiece was the Temple of Jupiter, a colossus assembled on a foundation so broad and deep that it contained more stone than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

It was a wreck now. Fifty columns lying in the grass, tumbled this way and that, as if a forest of stone had been felled.

To the Romans, it was “Heliopolis,” City of the Sun. The brochure said that it was here, on the trade route between Damascus and Tyre, that the apostle Paul saw the Light. You’d think there’d be a plaque or something, but there was nothing. Just a flyer on a telephone pole, advertising the summer music festival that took place each year amid the ruins. This year: Björk and Sting.

The warehouse in which Wilson stood, wishing he could smoke, was a prefab hulk with broken windows and rusting joints. Set back from the road on an acre of hardpan, it was cold inside – except where the welders worked.