Black Market

“I have one particular story I have to get out about Vietnam. It's a factual story about what happened over there. Once that story is told, I think I can go on with the rest of my life. Not until then, though.”

He sipped his beer, cautiously watching her blue, almond-shaped eyes, her lips slightly wet with wine. He found himself wondering what was going on inside her head right now.

She laughed then, nicely. “I'm completely losing it! I don't believe what I'm doing right now. I really don't believe this.”

“Having a drink of white wine? At midday? Not that unusual in New York.”

“I think I have to go. I really should go. I have to call and tell them you didn't keep your appointment.”

“That's a problem. If you did that, they wouldn't let me see you again. I'd get a bad reputation as somebody completely unreliable. And we wouldn't want that, would we?”

“No, I guess we wouldn't. But I really have to go.”

“Well, that's not acceptable to me. No. Just hold on a minute.”

Hudson reached inside his weather-beaten, drab brown overcoat. He placed three fifty-dollar bills on the bar.

“Billie what? Tell me your last name, at least.”

“You can't afford this. Please, David. It really isn't a good idea.”

“Billie what? I thought you liked me.”

She looked as if she'd been slapped, as if someone in her lower-middle-class English family had caught her at this escort work in New York. She hesitated, then finally spoke up again.

“It's Billie Bogan. Like the poet Louise Bogan… ‘Now that I have your face by heart, I look…’”

“You look extremely beautiful to me. Let's get out of here, now.”

David Hudson hadn't felt this way in fifteen years. It was inconvenient, and the timing was terrible-but there it was.

Feeling-where there had been none for so many years. Intense feeling. And the warning signals were going off all at once.

15

Washington, D. C.

The morning of December 9 was a gloomy day in Washington, where even the stark, bare trees seemed to be gasping for light and life. A second emergency meeting was being held at the White House for members of the National Security Council and other officials associated with the Green Band inquiries.

As he waited patiently for the president to arrive, Arch Carroll was thinking about pain.

It was hard for him not to. His right arm, which was cradled in bandages and a temporary sling, would flare up every now and again. He'd flinch and curse before he had time to remind himself he was lucky just to be alive. Despite the Tylenol 4 he'd swallowed, his nerve endings felt as if they were being gnawed on.

Lucky to be alive, Carroll thought again. There were four fewer orphans in the world.

A morbid little syllogism clicked in his head.

A cat has nine lives.

I am not a cat.

Therefore I don't have nine lives.

So how many lives do I have? How many more chances if I keep playing the game this hard?

President Kearney finally entered the room, and everyone stood up.

The president of the United States was dressed casually. He had chosen a navy Lacoste shirt and slightly wrinkled, knockabout khakis. He looked like a kind of regular guy, Arch Carroll thought to himself. You could imagine him, in better times and another season, puttering around the backyard, poking the center of a sirloin on the barbecue. Carroll remembered that Kearney had two young boys. Maybe he played ball with them. But there wouldn't be much leisure for that these days. President Kearney had taken the brunt of press criticism over Wall Street, a case of the press creating a convenient scapegoat for the public. Suddenly, in just a few days, his political moon had lost almost all its former brightness.

The participants inside the White House conference room avoided formal handshakes this time. They'd all brought bulging leather briefcases and portfolios for the early morning meeting; the physical proof of the relentless investigations were there to be reviewed and acted upon.

Judging from the impressive look of the paperwork, someone had to have discovered something about Green Band, Carroll thought as the meeting began. He looked across the room at Caitlin Dillon, who smiled back at him. She, too, had an overstuffed briefcase. Today she looked businesslike and efficient in a tailored navy blue suit and an unadorned white shirt. She wore a navy necktie in the form of a large bow. For some reason Carroll found all this severity of style attractive.

“Good morning to all of you-although I don't know what might be especially good about it. To be perfectly blunt, I'm even more concerned than I was on Friday night.”

President Kearney certainly did nothing to relieve the strain as he delivered his opening remarks. He remained standing stiffly at the head of the long wooden table.

“Every reliable projection we have says that a stock market panic, a full-scale crash, may soon be on us… Some of the more manipulative bastards around the world have actually figured out how to make this tragedy work to their advantage…

“I will tell all of you this in strict confidence-the Western economy ca

The president had raised his voice, and there was the palest flash of his old campaign style, the inspirational voice, the characteristic firmness of the jaw-but then, as suddenly as the echo had come, it vanished. Justin Kearney looked like a man whose spirit had sagged entirely.

The president once again solicited information, and new data from around the table. Each adviser gave a succinct report on any findings relating to Green Band.

When his turn arrived, Carroll inched his chair closer to the conference table. He tried to make everything very quiet inside his head. He was still hazy. His body was numb and cold at times since the shooting in Paris. And his arm was throbbing again, a palpable pain.

“My news isn't good, either,” he began. “We have some concrete facts, some statistics, but not a lot that's worthwhile. The raw information about the bombing is complete, anyway. Five packages of plastique would be required per building. They could have leveled lower Manhattan if they'd wanted to. They didn't want to… They wanted to do exactly what they did. New York was a controlled, a tightly disciplined, demonstration. My team has spent forty-eight hours going through every terrorist contact that exists. There are no co

“There was a somewhat unclear but promising co

“Unfortunately, so many Wall Street computers and brokerage house records were destroyed, We have no way to determine the true stock market picture. We don't know if securities were taken, or if there's been a computer scam.”

The vice president, Thomas More Elliot, interrupted Carroll. Of all the men seated in the room, the stern New Englander seemed the sharpest, the most in control of himself. That morning, at least, Vice President Elliot looked more like the group's leader than the president.

“You're saying we still have no idea who it is we're dealing with?”

Carroll frowned and shook his head. “There haven't been any further demands. No bargaining. No contact whatsoever. They seem to have invented a completely new and terrifying game. It's a game where we don't even get to know what game we're playing! They move-then we have to try to react.”