Banquo's Ghosts Read Online Free Page B

plates, then to their mouths. They exchanged the occasional word, then quietly went back to their meal, as if at a funeral. Johnson ignored them.
    Opposing tables of Chinese and Russian trade-representative types squared off across the room. The Russians were sober and agitated. A Russian-made Tu-154 commercial jetliner of Iran AirTour had crashed at Meshed Airport that very afternoon, with thirty or so dead. After the spectacular crash and burn of Karl Marx, crappy planes doing the same just added insult to injury. One of the Russians was talking nonstop and using his hands as “wings” trying to explain what happened. Russian commercial aircraft had been crashing all over the world since the end of the Cold War, so this wasn’t exactly “news”—but being sober didn’t make it any better.

    From his table seat Johnson thought the Chinese, for their part, seemed pleased with themselves. As representatives of the new master race, they had come to conquer and were deep in the process, drunk on power, the true nectar of the gods. Sales of Red Chinese missile parts to the Iranian Ministry of Defense: $1.3 billion. Import guarantees of light crude from a newly renovated Kharg Island: $750 million. A twenty-five-year bargain to develop natural gas: $100 billion.
    On top of all that, a table full of grumpy Russians spilling caviar onto their ties and trying to explain why Soviet-designed planes kept falling out of the skies—priceless.
    Johnson finished and headed upstairs. When he opened his suite door and flipped on the light, the first thing he saw was the set-up on the table. A large silver bucket of ice, a bowl of limes, a wooden cutting block, a knife, a bottle of Schweppes Tonic, and a blessed liter of Tanqueray. The green bottle smiled at him like a long lost friend. He reached out to touch it, savoring its sexy emerald curves. The little white note said, “Compliments of Al Jazeera.” Compliments indeed, Praise Allah. He was saved.
    And then from around the world Banquo’s schoolmaster’s voice warned, Go easy, Peter . . . It took a full moment to get the insistent voice out of his head and back to its proper place in the old man’s spartan Rockefeller Center office.
    The room smelled of must and rosewater but soon filled with the aroma of gin and tonics. He stood at the window overlooking the city, idly sucked the lime juice from a rind, and stared across the hot expanse of air dotted with those Scheherazade fairy lights, but this time with the traffic moving. Miles and miles of snaking cars, white lights coming and red lights, blinking brighter on and off, going the other way. The muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer. Someone somewhere was always praying in this country. He took a long draught that went down without complaint, stringent and quenching. Looking across the city at night, he felt as if he were standing on a great precipice, the immensity in front of him prompting the sort of contemplative reverie you get on a mountaintop or looking out over the ocean.
    Knowing that for better or ill he was stepping off into some irrevocable chain of events from which there was no way back. He thought of God,
or the idea of God, and suddenly wished that for once in his life he believed. How he might have given the gift of faith to his daughter. Even faked it for Giselle’s sake. Let her grow up and decide for herself, whether to believe or not. Instead of breaking the notion of God like every other childhood fantasy—leprechauns, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy— no, Giselle, there is no Santa Claus. The thousand little ways adults wring the magic out of a child’s life.
    He looked down at the ice cubes, marooned, and stacked one on another at the bottom of his empty glass. Chances were excellent he was going to drink too much.
    No, not tonight. One more, a stiff one, but not four more. Empty out most of the bottle just for show. With the taste of grit in his mouth and a touch of sadness, the better