Diplomatic Immunity Read Online Free PDF

gathering information for the Secretariat, sometimes as a special envoy representing the Secretary-General at cease-fire negotiations, putting the reasonable view to men whose only real interest was in slitting each other’s throats.
    And Toshio was never one to confine himself to the boundaries of the inevitable cordon sanitaire decreed by the local authorities. He went out into the field, tried to see firsthand what conditions were really like, what was actually happening to the people whose tragic fate it was to be born into the front lines of hatred. Twenty-five years a Secretariat staffer, he had heard all the lies. He had seen more evil than any man should be asked to see, maimed and suffering humanity in all its wretched forms, and who could blame him if after this he had finally given up on the world? Down in that unlit basement room, surrounded by those posters of starving children, doesn’t that seem possible? That he reached for a peace that life couldn’t offer?
    And yet I just don’t see it. Not Toshio.
    “How does suicide square with the Council vote?” I ask. “One minute he’s campaigning against the Japanese seat, the next he just offs himself?”
    At the end of the path Patrick stops suddenly.
    “You don’t see any connection there?” he asks me.
    “With the vote?”
    But Patrick’s look is suddenly abstracted; a thought has just occurred to him. “You’re sure there was no note?”
    “Nothing.”
    Patrick ruminates awhile; in the end, I have to ask him what he’s thinking.
    “How much would Hatanaka have sacrificed to screw Japan’s chance at a Council seat? That’s what I’m thinking.”
    It takes me a moment. Then I get it. “You’re not serious.”
    “Why not? Part of Jap tradition, isn’t it? Bushido, whatever they call it. Who was that guy? Mishima? Like a grand protest thing. If Hatanaka did that, then left a note saying what a bad idea he thought a Jap seat was, Christ, can you imagine the headlines?”
    “There was no note,” I say firmly.
    “Check his office,” he tells me. “And his apartment.”
    I suggest that we should first wait and see what Mike finds on the tapes, but Patrick waves that aside as if I am simply being obtuse. He has decided on the answer. The answer is suicide. And this is, frankly, the worst example yet of just how badly Patrick’s judgment is being impaired by his preoccupation with the vote. There is just no way Toshio committed suicide to make a political point, I don’t care how much he might have wanted to derail the upcoming vote. But confronting Patrick head-on, I know, is useless, so I don’t even try. As we turn and head back down the path, I wonder aloud about notifying the Japanese consulate.
    “No need,” says Patrick.
    I glance at him.
    “He’s on a UN passport,” Patrick reminds me.
    “He’s a Japanese national.”
    “Is this Japan?”
    At the top of the terrace steps I touch Patrick’s arm, and we both stop. “Patrick, he’s dead. It doesn’t matter how he died, we have to notify the embassy. His relatives have to be contacted. This isn’t something you can keep under wraps.”
    “We just need two days.”
    “If you believe you can keep this secret until the vote. If you think you can get Mike to go along with that—”
    His fantasy deflated by this quick reality check, he looks down at his feet. What he is thinking about, I suspect, is not Toshio Hatanaka but Patrick O’Conner. How to handle this disastrous situation, how to limit any damage it might do to the campaign for the Japanese seat. How to protect his own career.
    “There’s probably no note,” I say. “And I really don’t think it’s suicide anyway.”
    “Suicide, murder,” Patrick mutters. “Once the word gets out that the opponent in chief of the Jap seat’s dead in the bloody basement, all fucking hell’s going to break loose. First thing they’ll do is make a play to shuffle the agenda.”
    From Patrick’s point of view, a catastrophe.