Bloodland: A Novel (16 page)

But –

Curiously.

That isn’t what happens.

‘Holy
fuck
, Jimmy.’

‘What?’

‘What do you mean
what
? Jesus. Are
you
drunk now, too?’ He pauses. ‘Listen to me, Jimmy, this is … this is
very
fucking serious.’

Jimmy stares at the
Vanity Fair
page on the computer screen. Why is it so serious? Is it the fact that Larry Bolger was drunk at ten o’clock in the morning? Is
that
what Sweeney is afraid will get out?

It’d make sense.

Because it can hardly be the other thing.

‘Jimmy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you
hear
me? I said this is very serious. You cannot repeat a word of what Bolger said, not to anyone.’

‘But –’

‘If this gets out it will be a complete fucking disaster.’

Jimmy swallows. ‘If
what
gets out, Phil, the fact that he was drunk?’

‘
No
, shit, that’s the least –’

And then he stops, obviously struck by what he is about to say.

But Jimmy is struck by it, too. He looks again at the stuff on his desk. ‘The least
what
, Phil?’ he says. ‘The least of his problems?’ There is a long silence, which tells Jimmy more than any possible answer to the question. ‘Phil,’ he says eventually, ‘you can’t be serious. I was ready to dismiss this. I thought if there was a story here it might be, I don’t know, his struggle with the booze or something, his struggle with
reality
, which certainly wouldn’t be anything
I’d
want to write about.’ He pauses. ‘But
this
–’

‘
Write?
You won’t fucking write anything, Jimmy. I set you up with this and if it didn’t work out, fine, you walk away from it, we’ll find you something else, but –’

‘No thanks, Phil, and I’ll write whatever the hell I want to write.’

‘That was a confidential conversation, Jimmy, you can’t go around quoting –’

‘I have no intention of quoting him, or even of referring to him. All I’m going to do is look into this. I’m a journalist, Phil. What do you expect me to do?’

No answer. Another pause. Sweeney regrouping. Then, ‘Look, Jimmy, you’re not going to find anything, you’re –’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because … oh
fuck
.’

Jimmy feels strangely calm through all of this, relieved almost, as though he has been liberated. It’s a feeling that has crept up on him, and as he listens to the normally confidant and sure-footed Phil Sweeney floundering at the other end of the line, he grows in confidence himself.

‘Maybe I won’t find anything, Phil. But this is way too serious an allegation to ignore.’ Glancing at the screen again, and then at one of his notebooks, he decides to take a chance. ‘With too many serious names in the mix. Clark Rundle.’ He pauses. ‘Don Ribcoff.’

As the silence that follows this expands to fill the room, Jimmy’s eyes widen. Eventually, he says, ‘Phil?’

After another moment he hears a slow, laboured intake of breath. ‘Jimmy, listen to me. Leave this alone, will you? I’m serious. You’ve
no
idea what you’re getting into here.’

Jimmy agrees but he isn’t about to say so.

‘I’ll see you around, Phil,’ he says and hangs up.

*   *   *

On three separate occasions, as he sits in Bolger’s apartment, Dave Conway feels his phone vibrate in his pocket.

Afterwards, walking along the corridor towards the elevator, he takes the phone out and checks it – three missed calls, all from Phil Sweeney.

He stops at the elevator and presses the ‘down’ button.

His hand is shaking.

The elevator door opens and he steps inside.

What can Phil Sweeney tell him at this stage that he doesn’t already know? The damage is done.

He calls him anyway.

‘Phil.’

‘Dave, my God, where have you been? This is a nightmare. Larry and the kid? We shouldn’t have put the two of them together,
big
fucking mistake.’

See?

‘Yeah.’ Conway presses the button for the ground floor. ‘But how much does this … what’s his name again? The kid?’

‘Jimmy Gilroy.’

‘Right. How much does he know?’

‘Not much, as far as I can tell. But of course now he’s like a dog after a bone. Plus, he’s got names. Whether these came from Larry or not I don’t know. It wasn’t clear.’

‘Names, what do you mean, names?’

As the elevator car descends, floor by floor, Conway feels his insides descending even faster.

‘He mentioned Rundle. And Don Ribcoff.’

‘
What?
’

‘I think he was bluffing, but it means he’s not working in a vacuum.’

‘Well, can you take care of him?’

The elevator door opens onto the hotel lobby.

‘That depends, Dave. What do you mean exactly?’

Conway doesn’t know. He needs time to think.

He steps out of the elevator.

He needs time to remember. Because how much, actually, does Phil Sweeney himself know? Not everything, that’s for sure. He’d know that certain things happened – but not, in every case, how or why they happened. He’d know names and dates – but not, in every case, their full significance.

There’s a balance to be struck here and Conway needs to be careful. In any case, Phil Sweeney probably isn’t who he should be talking to about this.

Not anymore. Not going forward.

‘Talk him out of it’, he says. ‘That’s what I meant.’

‘Well, I’ll see what I can do, Dave. I suppose there’s still a couple of buttons I can press.’ He pauses. ‘Did you talk to Larry?’

‘Yeah, he’s…’ Conway swallows, still in shock. ‘I don’t know, he’s out of control.’ He stands next to a marble pillar in the lobby. ‘Right now, he’s the very fucking definition of a loose cannon.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I’m not sure, Phil. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m up to my neck in this rescue package at the moment and I’m not going to let anything jeopardise it.’

What’s he saying here?

‘Right.’

He’s saying that if this shit gets dredged up again, if questions are asked, if names are mentioned and dots are joined – then that’s it. He may as well pack it in. But that also, basically, he’s not going to
allow
that to happen.

So who
does
he talk to?

‘Look, Phil,’ he says, resolve hardening. ‘You deal with this Gilroy fella, OK? Call him off, do whatever you have to do, because I don’t ever want to hear his name again. As for Larry, I really don’t know. I’m going to have to think about it.’

But the fact is he’s already thought about it.

Already thought it
through
.

And it didn’t take him long.

The important decisions usually don’t.

After he’s done with Phil Sweeney, he keeps the phone in his hand. He crosses the lobby and goes outside. There’s an early evening chill in the air. He stands under the portico.

He gazes out over the hotel’s manicured front lawn.

He looks back at the phone and scrolls through his list of contacts. He finds what he’s looking for. It’s a long time since he’s used this number.

He calls it. He waits. It rings.

‘Good morning, Gideon Global. How may I help you?’

‘Yes, can you put me through to Don Ribcoff, please.’

5

J
IMMY HAS BEEN HANDED SOMETHING ON A PLATE HERE
, it’s just that he doesn’t know what it is exactly. If Phil Sweeney had opted for Bolger being drunk as the major cause of concern, Jimmy would have had no inclination to take the matter any further. But Sweeney was rattled on the phone and made it obvious that the real problem was
what
Bolger said, not the state he was in when he said it – a position that only moments earlier Jimmy himself, and all on his own, had somehow managed to reason his way out of.

Now he’s right back into it.

But with no sense of direction, no compass.

A clue to the answer may lie somewhere among all this stuff on his desk. Or it may not. But so far that’s all he’s got.

He sorts through the papers again and reorganises them.

The event at Drumcoolie Castle was the Fifth International Conference on Corporate and Business Ethics, previous ones having been held in places such as Seattle and Johannesburg. It was a three-day event – a wall-to-wall roster of papers, panels, lunches, receptions and dinners, and with an extremely impressive list of attendees. But reading through the programme and subsequent newspaper reports, Jimmy gets no real sense of what the event was like, no sense that it was anything other than as intensely boring as it seems now on paper.

He goes through the list of attendees again.

Apart from a few obvious and well-known ones, the only name that sticks out on the list is one of the two that Bolger mentioned – Clark Rundle. The other name he mentioned, Don Ribcoff, doesn’t appear on the list – or, indeed, in any of the other materials Jimmy has assembled about the conference. But that doesn’t have to be significant. Nothing he has found out about Rundle means anything to him either.

Clark Rundle is the Chairman and CEO of BRX, which is a privately owned engineering and mining conglomerate with operations in over seventy countries around the world. Founded in the late nineteenth century by his great-grandfather, Benjamin Rundle, the company quickly went from producing machine parts to building railroads, highways, pipelines and hydro-electric dams. Over the decades there seems to have been a revolving door of sorts between the boards of BRX and various administrations in Washington, but that, Jimmy assumes, is standard operating procedure at this level.

None of which, in the context of what Jimmy is concerned about here, means or proves anything.

Same with the second guy. A quick internet search reveals Don Ribcoff to be the CEO of Gideon Global, a private security company with operations in dozens of countries worldwide – including Iraq and Afghanistan. Lately, according to one report that Jimmy finds, Gideon have been withdrawing from direct military engagement and increasing their presence in the areas of corporate competitive intelligence and domestic surveillance.

But again, so what? This is shit he has found on Wikipedia. It brings him no nearer to formulating even the bones of a theory about what might have happened. He could gather similar information on the dozens of other executives at the conference, but what good would it do? While there must be some reason Bolger singled out these two names, Jimmy doesn’t believe he’s going to find it on the internet.

He gets up and goes over to the window.

As he gazes out across the bay, which is disappearing behind a shroud of evening mist, Jimmy re-runs the conversation with Bolger in his head.

‘
Think about it. She wasn’t the only one.’

‘
The only one what?’

‘
The only one who died in the fucking crash, you gobshite.’

And suddenly it seems so obvious.

He goes back to his desk, shuffles through some papers and finds what he’s looking for.

The passenger list.

It was a privately leased helicopter, piloted by Liam Egan, with five passengers on board. Apart from Susie Monaghan, there was Ted Walker, Gianni Bonacci, Ben Schnitz and Niall Feeley. He has extensive notes on each of these men, and he glances through them now. But nothing new jumps out at him.

It’s stuff he’s been over a hundred times before.

Ted Walker was a top executive at Eiben-Chemcorp, thirty-eight years old and big into extreme sports. The trip was believed to have been organised by him in order to showcase to fellow danger junkie Ben Schnitz some ideal paragliding spots along the north Donegal coastline. Schnitz was a senior vice president at Paloma Electronics.

Also assumed to have been an extreme sports enthusiast, Gianni Bonacci was director of a UN Corporate Affairs Com-mission, and Niall Feeley, an executive at Hibinvest, was known to have been a close friend of both Ted Walker’s and Gary Lynch’s – Gary Lynch having been the guy Susie Monaghan had just broken up with.

The theory at the time was that Susie went along with Feeley in a desperate attempt to make Lynch jealous.

Fine.

But according to Bolger, Susie was collateral damage. So does this eliminate Niall Feeley too? Was he collateral damage as well? Is Ted Walker’s brother being a friend of Phil Sweeney’s significant? And what about the other two?

Jimmy looks over the papers again. He doesn’t know what to think. Nothing presents itself as significant, and everything does. Which isn’t much of a help.

He needs to widen his frame of reference. He needs to get out there and talk to someone.

But where does he start?

It takes him a few minutes of rummaging around – through notebooks, the phone directory, online – to come up with a couple of numbers.

Ted Walker’s brother, Freddie. This is a brash move and it will probably piss Phil Sweeney off no end, but he feels it’s legitimate.

He dials the number. It rings and then goes into message. He hangs up.

The second number he has unearthed is for Gary Lynch.

It’s the same story.

But this time he leaves a message.

Please give me a call.

*   *   *

Rundle sits at his usual table at the Orpheus Room, nursing a gimlet, waiting for J.J. to arrive. Don Ribcoff did his best this afternoon, but apparently the senator couldn’t be dissuaded from engaging with the media pack at JFK or from then doing a couple of hastily arranged appearances on cable news shows. Rundle caught one of these back at the office and although the whole time he was watching it his heart was in his mouth nothing disastrous happened. Apart from the brace on his hand and wrist, J.J. looked good. He was calm, composed, and constantly made the point that he didn’t want all of this hoopla to be a distraction from the more serious issues he and his fellow delegates had been so focused on in Paris. It was a performance, of course, but Rundle was relieved to see that J.J. seemed to be in full control of his faculties.