Or the BBC.
That it was a confidence trick, like most things in life.
That he’d be fine.
Jimmy takes a shower. Then he goes out to walk around for a while and think about getting something to eat. It’s hot for April, at least hotter than he expected, and he’s overdressed. Life on the streets here has a familiar feel to it, by turns frenetic and chilled out, with lots of smells and colours. He spends some time sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park. A guy comes up and offers him some weed. Jimmy shakes his head and the guy wanders off.
Some skaters roll past.
Jimmy looks around.
What the fuck is he doing in New York?
How does he get from here, a park bench, to the fiftieth or sixtieth floor of one of those glass towers up there on the midtown horizon?
And something else he idly finds himself wondering: is he still being followed?
It was a feeling he couldn’t shake the other night.
On one level it seems preposterous – deluded, paranoid. But given what he’s discovered about these people, what he’s been told, isn’t it the least they would be doing?
Jimmy turns and looks over his shoulder.
Evening has begun to fall and is enveloping the expanse of downtown.
Suddenly, he’s hungry.
Behind him here, there are dozens of places he could eat at. He’ll find one… but in a few minutes.
He reaches for the phone in his pocket.
First he needs to make a couple of calls.
‘What do you want, a nine mil? I got Sigs, Glocks, Berettas, Mausers, whatever you want.’
Tom Szymanski studies the guy for a moment. This isn’t how he’d normally do this. How he’d normally do this would be to stand in a gun store and shoot the breeze with the gentleman behind the counter, a retired serviceman probably, and then proceed to the transaction – only problem here is he doesn’t have a licence and in New York City getting one takes time.
So it’s back channels, it’s a bar on Avenue C, it’s sitting in a booth opposite this jittery little spic fuck and hoping for the best.
‘You got a Beretta M9?’
‘Yeah, I got everything, my friend.’
I’m not your fucking -
‘How much?’
Haggle, haggle, and then it’s back here in half an hour. And half an hour after that again Szymanski’s back in his hotel room, loaded M9 on the bed, plus a bag of weed and a gram of coke. The drugs he bought because he could, they were right there in his face.
I got everything.
And it was the minimum he could have bought, really, because this guy had things Szymanski’s never even heard of, so-called research chemicals that are guaranteed to…
But Szymanski didn’t give a shit, he was just being polite.
He’s actually not interested in getting high. It’s not how he’s feeling at the moment, not where his head is at.
Where that is exactly, however, he isn’t too sure either.
Since he read about Senator Rundle in the paper before the weekend he’s had a strange laser-precision focus on everything around him. It’s like he’s already high. It’s like he’s somehow wired into this, with the story seeming to pop up on his grid every few hours or so – mentions on TV, for example, interview clips, a magazine cover at a newsstand he passes, snatches of a conversation he overhears in a store or in an elevator.
Hey, what do you make of that Senator Rundle?
And each time, in his mind, it jerks him back to Buenke, to this blubbering fuckwad framed in the doorway of the SUV, staring bug-eyed as Tube walks right up and pops one into the side of Ray Kroner’s skull. Then Ray’s body on the ground, in a heap, his twisted face visible, the top of his head.
Fuck.
Szymanski looks at the gun on the blanket, stares at it, concentrates.
Then Rundle being huddled away, past the other bodies, into a car, on to the airstrip, back to Paris… the big lie no doubt already forming, the stench of it everywhere within hours.
Jesus, how long can this go on? How intense can it get? And what if… what if Rundle secures the nomination? What if he goes on to win the election, for Christ’s sake? Four, possibly eight years of this shit?
Szymanski lowers himself onto the edge of the bed.
And every day? Every time he turns on his TV? Or goes online? Or walks out on the street? Or wakes up? No fucking way, Jack. It’d be intolerable, that’s what it would be.
He stretches out his arm.
It would be intolerable, so he’s not going to let it happen. It’s that simple.
He picks up the gun.
It has to be.
Jimmy spends most of Tuesday morning walking around midtown, familiarising himself with various locations – the BRX Building on Fifth, another office building on Lexington (one where he’s read that Gideon Global have their headquarters, even though he sees nothing there to indicate that they do), and a restaurant near the Flatiron where he’s meeting Bob Lessing, a friend of Phil Sweeney’s from what both men referred to, in separate conversations, as the ‘old days’.
Jimmy doesn’t know how useful any of this is going to be, but it makes him feel like he’s doing something.
The restaurant near the Flatiron is French and casual, and Bob Lessing is a guy in his late fifties wearing a grey suit and a bow tie. Apparently, he and Phil Sweeney worked together in the eighties and have been friends ever since. Lessing runs a PR firm here and specialises in strategic communications and risk analysis for large companies working overseas.
Of the three people Jimmy called yesterday evening, from the numbers Sweeney gave him, Lessing was the only one available to meet at such short notice.
‘So, Jimmy,’ he says, taking a piece of bread from the basket on the table, ‘how is the big man these days?’
‘He’s good. I don’t see him that often, but he’s good.’
Jimmy doesn’t know if Lessing is aware that Sweeney is, or might, be sick. Jimmy himself doesn’t know, but he’s assuming – assuming cancer of some kind.
At the same time, Jimmy is agitated. He’s not here to talk about Phil Sweeney.
After a few minutes, Lessing seems to sense this and moves things on. ‘Phil told me you might need a little help.’
‘Yeah, I’m… I’m working on a story.’
Jimmy explains, but couches it in fairly neutral terms, keeps it general. He doesn’t make any direct charges against the ‘parties’ involved or mention the Africa dimension. Phil told him to do this, and that Lessing would read between the lines.
As they eat, Lessing asks a series of questions that demonstrate – to Jimmy’s surprise, alarm almost – that he has indeed read between the lines, and very adeptly.
When their coffees arrive, Lessing goes silent for a bit. Then he says, ‘OK, here’s the thing, I’ve never worked with BRX, or Gideon, but I can tell you something, you have your work cut out here. BRX is privately owned, so no shareholder meetings, no reports, no information, and that’s how they like to keep it. Clark Rundle is also notoriously media-shy. As for Gideon Global, what I hear is that they’re specialising a lot these days in competitive intelligence and domestic surveillance – NSA contracts mostly – so trying to penetrate them? Forget it. One whiff, and they’ll penetrate you, if you catch my drift.’ He stirs sugar into his coffee. ‘You see, I work on the opposite side of the fence from you, and a lot of what I do is actually keeping people like you at bay. Or subtly veering you in certain directions. Perception management. Therefore even though I don’t work for BRX my gut instinct here is to protect them, and to obfuscate. But one thing I will tell you, and this is something I’ve learned from being in this business more than thirty years, and it’s this… that people fuck up. All the time. They make mistakes, and do stupid things, and in big companies like BRX a huge amount of time and energy goes into covering these mistakes up. And people like you, if you dig hard enough, if you make enough of a pain in the ass of yourself, sometimes you get results. Sometimes.’ He nods at the waiter for the check. ‘So what I’m going to do is refer you to one of the biggest pains in the ass on your side of the fence. She’ll be able to help you with this, whatever this thing is you have. More than I can. Corporate watch, all that stuff, it’s her, er… her métier.’ He takes out his BlackBerry. ‘I’ve dealt with her a good few times, and she’s very smart. Ellen Dorsey.’ He looks up. ‘You ready? Here’s her number.’