Black Friday

  She smiled when she finally saw him and smoothly moved his way.

  “They set an hour for your appointment. Should we go some place? An hour isn’t that long,” she said.

  “I’d like to have a drink here with you. We have time. One drink.”

  Hudson signaled for the bartender, who came immediately in his crisp white shirt and black bow tie, like a man answering a very urgent summons. Hudson seemed to have a way of getting whatever he wanted, Billie had already noticed.

  She ordered the house white, finally smiling, shaking her head at Hudson—as if he was a little hopeless, bewildering certainly.

  A hundred and fifty dollars an hour, plus the O’Neal’s bar tab, seemed steep for the honor of tipping a drink with an attractive girl.

  “You don’t have to pay. I’ll say you didn’t show.” She said it, then was instantly flustered and embarrassed.

  Hudson was certain she hadn’t been doing this kind of work very long. Sometimes it happened to young actresses, to up-and-coming New York models.

  “I like you. I don’t think I understand you, but I like you,” she said.

  They looked into one another’s eyes, and it was as if they were all alone in the hectic, buzzing barroom. Hudson could feel a desire for her growing again.

  He leaned forward and kissed her cheek—he kissed her as gently as he had ever kissed anyone. He had the desire to get close, to try and open up a little with her.

  “Tell me something about yourself. Just one small thing…. It doesn’t have to be anything important.”

  She smiled again, actually seeming to be enjoying herself.

  “All right. Sometimes I’m too impulsive. I shouldn’t be offering you what’s commonly called a freebie. I could be fired. Now tell me something about yourself.”

  “I don’t even have enough money to pay this bar tab,” Hudson said and laughed.

  Billie Bogan started to laugh. “You really don’t?”

  “Really. Now tell me one true fact. Anything, just something true.”

  She hesitated, then shrugged. “I have two older sisters back in Birmingham. Back in England.”

  “They’re both married. Successfully married. And your mother won’t let you forget it,” Hudson said with a smile.

  “No. They’re both married all right. Right on the button there. That’s what you do if you’re a sensible girl in Birmingham. But neither marriage is successful. And, yes, my mother won’t let me forget. I’m still single.”

  Hudson continued to smile. He sipped his beer, cautiously watching her brown eyes, her lips slightly wet with wine. He found himself wondering what was going on inside her head.

  She laughed out loud, but nicely. “I’m completely losing it! I don’t believe what I’m doing. 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 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 weatherbeaten 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. It really isn’t a good idea.”

  “Billie what?”

  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.”

  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 warning signals that were going off everywhere, all at once.

  Chapter 37

  THE MORNING OF December 9 was a gloomy day in Washington. Even the stark, bare trees seemed to be gasping for light and life.

  A second emergency meeting was 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, 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 codeine number 4 he’d swallowed since Paris, his nerve endings felt as if they were being gnawed on.

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

  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.

  The President of the United States was dressed casually. He had chosen a navy Lacoste shirt and slightly wrinkled, knock-around khakis. He looked like a kind of regular guy, Carroll thought to himself. You could imagine him, in better times and another season, pottering around the backyard barbecue, poking the center of a sirloin for readiness. 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. 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 the space of a mere couple of days, his political moon had severely waned, shedding 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 artifacts, the physical proof of the past four days of 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, plus an unadorned white shirt. She wore a navy necktie in the form of a large bow.

  “Good morning to all of you—although I don’t know what might be good about it. To be 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 how to make this tragedy work to their advantage…

  “I will tell all of you this in strict confidence—the Western economy cannot survive a major crash at this time. Even a minor Market crash would be catastrophic.”

  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.

  The President again solicited information, new data 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 still inside his head. He was hazy after Paris. H
is body was still numb and cold following the shooting. And his arm was throbbing again.

  “My news isn’t good either,” Carroll began. “We have some facts, some statistics, but not a lot that’s worthwhile. The raw information about the bombings is complete, anyway. Five packages of plastique were 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 rightly disciplined demonstration. My team has spent forty-eight hours going through every terrorist contact that exists. There are no connections to this group.

  “There was a somewhat unclear, but promising connection with the European black market,” Carroll continued, flipping a page on his notepad. Maybe it would have been more promising if Michel Chevron had survived, if some ID had been found on the man he’d shot in Paris. There were too many ifs and maybes; twice as many as the usual police case. One thing was certain, you couldn’t build an arrest around conditionals.

  “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, broke in on Carroll. Of all the people seated in the room, the stern New Englander seemed the sharpest, the most in control of himself. That morning the Vice-president 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.”

  “Comments?” Elliot asked, his tone clearly acerbic.

  The blank faces staring at Carroll certainly weren’t encouraging or supportive. The heads of the enforcement agencies were especially cool and distant. The Cabinet members were mostly business-management types who didn’t understand the problems of police work in the field. They were indifferent to the trials and demands of a start-from-scratch street investigation.

  The Senate majority leader finally spoke. Marshall Turner’s familiar voice was Southern and boomed like an echo in a West Virginia cavern. “Mr. President, I’m afraid this simply will not do. All of what I’m hearing is unsatisfactory. Late last week, we came that close to a full economic collapse in this country.”

  “That’s what we’re told, Marshall.”

  “Now you tell us we’re still in serious danger, maybe even worse danger. A second Black Friday is being discussed. I feel it’s our responsibility to make certain we have our best investigative apparatus in place. Now, as I understand it, the Federal Bureau and the CIA are both being underutilized in the current manhunt for terrorists.”

  The tone in the Senator’s voice was offensive to Carroll. He stared at the political leader, who had the kind of swollen pink face you might encounter in the sawdust-filled back room of a country store.

  Phil Berger, the Director of the CIA, stepped into the silence. He was a small, lean man whose head, starkly bald and shining under the lights in the room, came to a domed point. He reminded Carroll of a hard-boiled egg sitting in an eggcup.

  Berger spoke, “The FBI and the CIA are working twenty-four-hour shifts. There’s no question of underutilization.”

  “All right. Let’s not fight among ourselves.” The President abruptly rose at the conference table.

  Justin Kearney looked at Carroll and said, “I made a hard decision late yesterday. I would have called you, but you weren’t in New York.”

  “I was in Paris getting shot at.”

  The President ignored Carroll’s remark. “Effective immediately, I’m ordering the following changes. I want you to continue to run the part of the operation that deals directly with known terrorist groups. But I want Phil Berger to supervise the overall investigation of Green Band, including the investigation of terrorists inside the U.S. You’re also to give the CIA a complete record of your personal contacts, all your files.”

  Carroll stared incredulously at Kearney. He was almost certain it wasn’t legal for him to give his record files to the CIA. He also had the feeling he’d just been floated down the Potomac on a leaky raft. Thanks for all your past help, but your team’s working methods leave something to be desired.

  He turned away from the President who seemed to have reached this decision single-handedly. That troubled and perplexed Carroll. But there was something else, one thing that disturbed him even more.

  It was the boardroom coldness, the sterile, Big Business atmosphere that was growing up everywhere in the government. It was all this super-secrecy, the super-deceit—usually under misleading cover of “security,” and “need to know.”

  They made the command decision, and they no longer felt they had to explain themselves to anybody.

  “I guess I understand, Mr. President, and I’m afraid I have to quit under those circumstances. With all respect, I resign, sir. I’m out of this.”

  Carroll got up and walked out of the conference room, then out of the White House. It was over for him.

  Chapter 38

  APPROXIMATELY AN HOUR LATER, Carroll sat inside an Eastern shuttle jet destined for New York. Outside, an electrical storm whipped the sky.

  From his window he could see dramatic black clouds rushing by. He stared at the gathering storm and felt overwhelmed by a curious loneliness.

  It was at times like these when he missed Nora most Nobody he’d met before or since was as good at making him feel whole; nobody else seemed able to make him laugh at himself. And that was the real trick, being able to laugh when you needed to—and right now, Carroll needed to laugh at something.

  He felt Caitlin Dillon’s hand on his arm. Turning, he gave her a weary half smile. She was trying to be sympathetic, to be kind. But she wasn’t Nora.

  “You must know it isn’t your fault. Everybody’s frustrated, Arch. Green Band didn’t just do a number on Wall Street, it created an atmosphere of panic. Our President, who is turning out to be even less decisive than I imagined he’d be, made a panicky decision. That’s all.”

  She patted his arm and he felt like a kid with a scraped, bloody knee. The warm, almost maternal streak in Caitlin surprised him.

  “It isn’t your fault. Washington is loaded with scared then making inadequate decisions.” She paused before asking, “What will you do? Go into legal practice? Draw up wills? Deeds of trust? Maybe something like corporate law?”

  Carroll drifted back from somewhere distant inside his mind. Her light sarcasm didn’t escape him. He even welcomed it Law, he thought. The reason he’d never used his degree was because he couldn’t stomach the idea of law tomes, of hunting down precedents in the dust of unready able books, and having to fraternize with other lawyers.

  He was quiet for a time. Then he said, “Can you honestly imagine me reporting to Phil Berger?”

  Caitlin shook her head. “He’s an egghead in more than one sense of the word. The man must have been hatched.”

  Carroll suddenly laughed. The storm rocked the plane a moment. “When I was a kid, my mother used to give us hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. Some tradition from the old country. All of us kids would beat the tops open with our spoons. That’s what I should have had back there in the White House. A big spoon to beat on Phil Berger’s head.”

  Carroll turned toward Caitlin Dillon. She was laughing now. It was a musical kind of laugh, like some quirky tune you couldn’t forget one that ran through your mind in a tantalizing way but you couldn’t put a name to it.

  Carroll finally shook with laughter. “You surprise me. You really surprise me.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You look so damn straight and businesslike, but you’ve got this weird sense of humo
r.”

  “Weird for a Wall Street business type, I guess. For a dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner. A Presbyterian.”

  Carroll laughed some more, and it felt pretty good. Tension knots in his neck were finally loosening up. “Yeah. Of course. For a country hick from Ohio.”

  “My father taught me that you need a good sense of humor to survive Wall Street. He survived it, though just barely.”

  Caitlin gazed at Carroll, saying nothing more. She had stopped laughing and her expression was serious; her eyes searched his face. She looked as if maybe a small important gear had just shifted inside her mind.

  Carroll watched her, conscious of something happening in his own body. For a moment, he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was betraying Nora, betraying a memory—

  Christ, it had been a long time since he had reacted like this; he was aware of how deprived he was, how hungry he’d become. He raised one hand, his fingers trembling slightly, and he placed the palm against the side of Caitlin’s face.

  Tenderly, he kissed her.

  And then the moment was over as suddenly as if it had never happened.

  Caitlin Dillon was looking from the window at the theatrical cloud display and talking about how soon they’d be back in New York—and what Carroll wondered was whether he’d really kissed her?

  When Carroll arrived back at No. 13 Wall, all that remained was for him to clear out his desk and leave the world of pointless stakeouts and twenty-hour work days. It was easy and mostly painless, he thought. Something he probably should have done a long time ago.

  He was interrupted by a knock on his door. When he turned, Walter Trentkamp was standing there. The FBI man walked slowly across the room. He leaned against the cluttered desk and sighed loudly.

  “I’d quit too if I had an office like this.” Trentkamp frowned. He stared around the room. “I mean, I’ve seen bleak before.”

  “What can I do for you, Walter?”

  “You can reconsider the decision you made in Washington.”

  “Did somebody send you up here? Did they tell you to go talk some sense into Carroll?”