KILLING PLATO by Jake Needham

Author:Jake Needham [Needham, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Half Penny Ltd (Hong Kong)
Published: 2011-12-08T15:00:00+00:00

THIRTY ONE

“LET’S DO IT like this, Jack. I’ll give you the printout of the file that was on the disk. After you read it, you can decide how much more you want to tell me.”

“Okay,” I agreed, popping some chicken into my mouth. “Sounds fair enough.”

“You want to read it now?”

“How long is it?”

“Thirty, thirty-five pages. Not long.”

“Now’s good then,” I said.

Without another word Darcy pushed back her chair and walked past me into the house. When she came back she placed at my elbow an unmarked manila file folder. I flipped it open and eyed the neat stack of pages stapled together inside it.

Darcy picked up her wine glass and tipped it in my direction. “Take your time, baby,” she said.

I worked my way methodically through the first twenty pages or so while I ate my salad and drank white wine. Normally salads weren’t my kind of dinner, but this one was extraordinary and the deep sweetness of the chicken’s richly charcoaled flavor more than made up for the piles of rabbit food I had to negotiate in order to get at it.

Darcy didn’t say a word while I read and ate, but I wouldn’t really have minded if she had. There wasn’t much in what I was reading and conversation wouldn’t have been any real distraction. The first ten pages could have been a transcription of some broadcast on CNN. It was nothing but a routine biography, a summary of Karsarkis’ indictment, and a few notes on his subsequent disappearance. I had read deeper stuff in People Magazine.

The second ten pages were a little more interesting, but not much. They consisted of excerpts from something that looked like a transcript of a pretrial deposition, but since the preparations for Karsarkis’ trial had taken place several months before and been extremely well publicized, it contained nothing explosive. The excerpts were all from the testimony of Cynthia Kim, Karsarkis’ personal assistant who was later murdered in Washington, and they concerned various technical details about the organization of Karsarkis’ corporate empire. What’s more, I saw nothing in any of them that seemed to bear one way or another on Karsarkis’ claim he had been acting at the personal request of the President of the United States when he sold embargoed oil for the Iraqis.

I finished reading the transcripts, pushed my salad bowl away, and wiped my mouth with my napkin.

“Seems like a bunch of useless garbage,” I said, speaking for the first time since I had begun to read.

Darcy finished her wine and looked past me, nodding almost imperceptibly to someone. The young girl immediately reappeared and began to clear the table.

“How far have you gotten?” Darcy asked.

“To the end of the deposition transcripts. Does it get any better?”

Darcy ignored my question. “We’ve got some pretty good double chocolate cake from the Oriental Hotel,” she said instead. “Can I tempt you?”

I shook my head.

“Nope. With the summer heat and everything else, I haven’t been running very much. I can feel the flab already.

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