Second sight, p.30
Second Sight, page 30
Horace’s agents, posing as tourists from the Far East, were witnesses to the assassination. Using a video camera concealed in a baby carriage, they recorded the killing on tape, then followed the murderers home to a safe house across the French frontier in Annemasse. This led the American team to the terrorists’ support group, and, in due course, to Butterfly himself.
From Outfit file data the computer expert established that Butterfly’s false-true RIS name—that is, the one he used inside his own headquarters in Moscow—was Gherman Wolyinski. He spoke fluent Arabic and English and was an expert in small arms, explosives, and small-scale guerrilla operations.
“The strange thing about this operation,” Horace reported, “is that all of Butterfly’s shooters and all the supporting cast are Palestinian Arabs or bourgeois European leftists—romantic females, in about half the cases—who sympathize with the Palestinian cause. The question is, Why would they want to use Arabs to kill Chinese Communists?”
“I don’t know,” Patchen replied. “But since it involves Arabs I think we’d better ask the Memuneh.”
Patchen flew to Tel Aviv and told Yeho Stern everything the Outfit knew about Butterfly. Yeho listened intently—far more intently than Patchen, or the chief of any other secret service in the world would have done. Yeho’s country, Israel, was alone in the world, surrounded by enemies. His mother and father and every other member of his family except himself had perished in the Nazi death camps, and before that his ancestors had been murdered by Crusaders, burned at the stake by Inquisitors, raped and slaughtered by Cossacks, and torn apart by pious mobs whose members believed that Jews drank the blood of Christian babies. There was not the slightest doubt in Yeho’s mind that Israel’s enemies wanted to kill every Jew that Hitler had left alive, together with all their children and grandchildren down to the last infant who was suspected of having a single drop of Jewish blood in its veins. It did not take him long to form an opinion about the true purposes of Butterfly’s operations against the Chinese. Soon enough, Butterfly’s terrorists would start killing Jews—Yeho was sure of it. Making the killers wait to do their real work, to achieve their real reward, was just an exercise in control and discipline.
“He’s training Palestinians?” Yeho said. “Then all this is nothing but a rehearsal. This Russian is blooding his dogs. Next comes the real operation—against Israel, against the U. S.”
“But why kill so many Chinese?” Patchen asked. “Why not target Jews from the start, or even Americans?”
“Because he wants privacy,” Yeho replied. “Of all the people on earth, the Chinese are the most isolated, the least likely to tell the Western press what’s happening to them and who’s responsible. Not that the media, or even Western governments, would care. They’re only interested in what happens to white people.”
A troop of Japanese tourists, stunted homely people like Yeho in cheap foreign clothes, marched onto the Full-Moon Bridge behind a girl wearing a smart blue uniform and white gloves. They paused, listening obediently, while the guide described the bridge and the lake. Then they stepped to the rail one by one and fed rice balls to the carp, which had now schooled in such large numbers just beneath the surface that they resembled a rusty carnival mechanism that had fallen into the murky water.
“Give Butterfly to the Chinese?” Yeho said. “No, absolutely not.”
“Yeho, listen,” Patchen said.
“Why should I listen? Never. That’s all.”
Knowing who Butterfly was, watching him, identifying and monitoring his assets, had become Yeho’s most important operation because it could prevent the spilling of Jewish blood. If Butterfly was replaced by another Russian, it might take years to identify the newcomer. In the meantime Yeho would not know where the next assassination, the next bombing, the next kidnapping, the next enemy from among the millions who surrounded Israel, was going to come from. There was no question that Israel’s innumerable enemies would attack, one at a time or in concert. But when? where? using what weapons? Yeho would go to any lengths to discover the answers to these questions.
The Japanese tour group fell back into formation and marched away. Patchen handed Yeho a sheet of paper. Yeho accepted it reluctantly. It was a surveillance report filed by Horace’s team. Butterfly had left Moscow the day before, flying to Stockholm as a member of a Soviet sports delegation. There he had changed passports and traveled by ferry to Denmark and by train to Milan as a Canadian professor of social anthropology on sabbatical from his post at Carleton University in Ottawa. He was now registered under this false Canadian identity at a small hotel near Pesaro.
The Italian tourist season was over; the Germans who thronged the Adriatic beaches in summer had gone home. Butterfly was virtually alone in his hotel; he took long walks on the deserted beach, inhaling the salt air, while he waited for whoever he was waiting for. When he went out, he absent-mindedly left a well-worn Samsonite briefcase containing his false Canadian passport, his half-used round-trip ticket to Ottawa, his wallet with driver’s license, checkbook, credit cards, and family photographs, behind in his room. Also a knapsack full of scholarly journals and books and the typed manuscript of an article on marriage customs among the Greenland Inuit.
“How old is this report?” Yeho asked.
“Twenty-six hours.”
“All right,” Yeho said. “Tell me why you want to do this insane thing.”
“We think Butterfly is going to turn his networks loose.”
“What do you mean, turn them loose?”
Patchen handed over a large brown envelope. Yeho peeked inside, examining the contents without removing them. The envelope contained an eight-by-ten-inch X-ray print of a full-length silhouette of an adult male. Black images of hundreds of small rectangles were scattered all over the torso and legs.
“Who took this?” Yeho asked.
“We did, in Milan, while he was waiting for his bags. Those are two-ounce gold ingots, two hundred and twenty of them, sewn into his coat and pants. The photo-analysts think he’s also carrying a lot of cash in that money belt and in false bottoms—more than a million dollars.”
“And you think he’s going to give all this loot to somebody?”
“To his Arabs. And then he’s going to wish them luck and say goodbye.”
“Why?”
“Think about it.”
Yeho saw Patchen’s point. Butterfly’s mission had been to create an asylum full of lunatics, and then unlock the doors and let them go. He was going to give them twenty-eight pounds of gold and a million dollars in currency, tell them they could kill anyone they wanted to kill, and say goodbye. Butterfly and the RIS had never had any intention of controlling the monster they had created. They wanted these terrorists out of control, acting according to no discernible plan—and, above all, disconnected from themselves. When the slaughter began, they would deny that they knew anything about the terrorists.
Yeho gave Patchen back his documents. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me the scenario.”
2
HORACE HUBBARD ARRIVED IN TOKYO FROM MILAN THAT NIGHT. YEHO Stern and Patchen met him at two o’clock in the morning in the Bubble, as the soundproof, Plexiglas room in the basement of the American Embassy was called. Yeho was much more comfortable here, where no listening devices, not even the Outfit’s, could possibly exist. He put his elbows on the transparent tabletop and studied Horace’s long, equine face. It was unshaven and pale, but the merry eyes showed not even the smallest sign of fatigue after a twelve-hour flight over the Arctic.
“You look like your uncle,” Yeho said.
“More like my father, actually—I inherited his dark hair,” Horace replied. “You knew my uncle?”
“A long time ago. He was a benefactor to me and many others.”
Horace nodded, unsurprised, and let Yeho’s reply go at that; he was used to meeting people who had some reason to remember Hubbard Christopher with gratitude; very often they were Jews. It was astonishing how many of these unhappy people the Christophers—Paul, too, after his parents were gone; he had inherited the weakness—had rescued or befriended.
Knowing that Yeho had a sweet tooth, Horace had brought a large sack of jelly doughnuts with him, and he opened the bag, releasing the smell of baked goods, and offered them around. Yeho selected one and took a bite. He did not touch the weak American coffee furnished by the Embassy.
“So, Horace,” Yeho said. “You’re the head kidnapper. What’s this stuff inside the doughnut?”
“Red bean paste,” Horace replied. “They put it in everything sweet.”
“It could be poisoned.”
“I suppose so, but I picked out these doughnuts myself.”
“You speak Japanese?”
“Enough to get the doughnuts I want.”
“Are you personally also picking out everything for this operation?” Yeho asked. “The right men, the right plan, the right equipment?”
“Keep the equipment to a minimum,” Patchen said. “No fancy stuff. This is just a plain old-fashioned kidnapping.”
“The voice of Headquarters,” Yeho said.
His own weakness for the gadgetry of espionage was well known. He equipped his agents with invisible ink, with luggage with secret compartments, with miniature radios, with code books that destroyed themselves when ampules of acid concealed in their spines were crushed in the instant before capture. In his day Yeho had been a great field agent, a master smuggler. During the British mandate in Palestine, when he was a young operative in the Jewish Underground, he had carried a pistol through many check points by taking it apart and taping the disassembled pieces to various parts of his body with flesh-colored tape to which he had glued body hair plucked from the thick mats of black fur on his chest and back. Even when the British stripped him naked they did not discover the pistol. He used it to kill three people—two Arabs and a Sephardic Jew from London whom he suspected of being an agent of the RIS, which was already, even then, trying to penetrate the future secret service of the unborn Jewish state.
“Tell me, young man,” he said to Horace. “Do you know about the fuse on the bomb that was supposed to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944?”
Horace knew all about the bomb and the plot by German aristocrats to kill Hitler and end the war, but he shook his head no. He wanted to listen to this man, no matter what the subject, in the same way that a young physicist would want to listen to Einstein.
“This particular bomb had to be a time bomb, to allow the assassin time to get away,” Yeho said. “But it had to be silent, no ticking clock, because everything was very hushed in the presence of the Führer. A special trigger was invented—a wire inside a glass capsule submerged in acid, inside a metal tube. When you crushed the tube with a pair of pliers, the glass capsule broke and the acid ate through the wire in a stated number of minutes, tripping the detonator. The technology was amazing for 1944. It made the conspirators feel very good. ‘Look how much smarter we are than Hitler to have such a bomb,’ they said to themselves. They were aristocrats, the flower of the German nobility, all vons and zus. The assassin, Colonel Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, smuggled the bomb into Hitler’s presence in his briefcase. First, in the toilet, he broke the tube with his pliers, which wasn’t easy because he only had one arm and one eye as a result of war wounds—no offense, David. He placed the briefcase at the target’s feet, under the conference table, and left the room. Another man who knew nothing, suspected nothing, pushed the briefcase six inches across the floor because it was in his way. Because he did this, the briefcase with the bomb and its wonderful silent trigger was now in a different position—the leg of the table stood between Hitler and the bomb, so when it went off most of the force of the explosion was absorbed by the table leg. All that happened to Hitler was that his eardrums were broken and he suffered a little concussion. He thought that the Teuton gods had saved him so that he could carry out his great destiny. His secret police tortured the bluebloods who had tried to kill him, then wrapped piano wire around their necks and hung them on meat hooks. His photographers made movies of them as they died, quite slowly, and Hitler watched these movies while maybe five million extra people, Jews mostly, died because he was still in charge and the war didn’t end for another eleven months … What is the moral of the story, Horace?”
Horace looked across the table. “Leave nothing to chance,” he said.
“Right,” Yeho said. “When most people hear that story, they say there was something wrong with Stauffenberg’s bomb. But there was nothing wrong with the bomb. It functioned perfectly. There was something wrong with the assassin. He was very brave, very daring. But he was a snob and he could not stop being a snob even to rid the world of a monster. He armed the bomb and excused himself. Not because he was afraid to die, but because Stauffenbergs don’t die in the same room with scum like Adolf Hitler; it simply isn’t done.”
Horace did not argue with Yeho’s conclusions about the attempt on Hitler’s life. Instead, speaking without notes, he described, step by step, the plan to kidnap Butterfly. The actual abduction would be handled by a team of five Outfit employees, all highly trained commandos. They would seize the Russian on the beach, give him an injection, throw him into an inflatable Zodiac boat equipped with a high-speed outboard motor, ferry him to a larger boat waiting offshore, interrogate him on board, then bring him ashore somewhere else and give him to the Chinese.
“How long has this team trained together?” Yeho asked.
“More than a year,” Horace said.
“Too long,” Yeho said. “They’ll be so pent up they’ll kill everybody. What’s their age?”
“Late twenties, early thirties.”
“Too old. You have to get them when they’re nineteen for this kind of work, while they’re still enthusiastic. Twenty is too old.”
“They’ll be all right,” Horace said. “We recruited most of them when they were nineteen.”
“And they’ve been rehearsing ever since for the real thing? How do you know they won’t just kill everybody when you turn them loose?”
“That’s why they rehearse, so they won’t act on impulse.”
“You guarantee results, is that what you’re telling me?”
“No. But there’s no Stauffenberg factor.”
Yeho peppered him with questions designed to detect some hidden flaw, some possible failure, in every aspect of the operation.
“When you go ashore you will go to a safe house,” he said. “Does this safe house have a secret room?” he asked.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Horace replied.
He would have said more, but Yeho interrupted him. “Good. This is extremely important. The entrance must be perfectly concealed. Inside, in the secret room behind the wall, you must put everything you might conceivably need—water in sealed bottles, food in cans, weapons, a transceiver radio with earphones, and two containers that can be tightly sealed, for body slops. Also some lime, to deodorize the slops. Your enemies have five senses, remember.”
Yeho, as a boy, had hidden from the Nazis in just such a secret room as he described. Even the family of Viennese who took over the apartment after his parents went to their deaths at Auschwitz never suspected that the room existed, or that he was inside it, waiting. He lived with them like a mouse for three years, slipping out at night to steal food and water and dispose of his bodily wastes.
Horace knew this; it was a famous story in the secret world. “We’re going to keep the prisoner in a box,” he said.
“A box? What box?”
“Actually it’s a portable cell, disguised to look like one of those crates they load onto ships.”
“What’s inside?”
“Besides Butterfly? A chair, bolted to the box, and the straps binding him to the chair so that he won’t rattle around.”
“What about piss and shit?”
“All the conveniences you mentioned will be provided.”
Yeho plunged on. “How do you protect the box?”
“With two men inside it with the prisoner—it’s quite a large box—and six outside. He’ll stay inside until we hand him over to the Chinese.”
“Box and all?”
“Yes. After we’ve asked our questions—and whatever questions you want us to ask on your behalf.”
“You expect the prisoner to volunteer his answers?”
“No. We’ll use drugs.”
“That’s all you’ll use?”
“We think that will be enough.”
Yeho peered at Horace, looking for the slightest trace of a smile. He saw none. Horace’s eyes were friendly, interested, and utterly free of scorn and contempt, like Hubbard Christopher’s eyes.
“What if the Chinese are delayed?” Yeho asked. “What if the opposition finds out you have him and where he is? How will you hide him?”
“In the first case, we’ll move the box,” Horace said. “In the second, we’ll shoot him.”
“Don’t be saucy,” Yeho said; his English idioms, learned from a prewar grammar for Austrian schoolchildren, sometimes surprised native English-speakers. “There’s one thing you haven’t explained to me,” he continued. “What happens if Butterfly ever gets traded back to the Russians and he tells them what the Outfit did to him?”
“First he’d have to know the Outfit did it,” Horace said. “He won’t. Every member of my team is Chinese; he won’t see anybody who is not Chinese. He doesn’t speak the language. He’ll be full of sodium pentothal and other good things. Do you think he’ll know the difference between Chinese-Americans and Vietnamese Chinese and the Chinese-Chinese he meets in China?”
