Shibumi (4 page)

“Which rephrase?”

“THISMAN is now expressed as THISPERSON. Fat Boy must have digested the Mother Company’s becoming an equal opportunity employer.” The First Assistant could not keep the pride from his voice.

“That’s wonderful,” Diamond said without energy.

Miss Swivven entered from the machine room and placed five telephotos on Diamond’s desk, then she took her position below his dais, her note pad at the ready.

Diamond shuffled through the photographs for that of the only member of the Munich Five not known to be dead: Hannah Stern. He scanned the face, nodded to himself, and sighed fatalistically. These CIA imbeciles!

The First Assistant turned from his console and adjusted his glasses nervously. “What’s wrong, sir?”

His eyes half closed as he looked through the floor-to-ceiling window at the Washington Monument threatening to violate that same chubby cloud that always hung in the evening sky at this time. Diamond tapped his upper lip with his knuckle. “Did you read Starr’s action report?”

“I scanned it, sir. Mostly checking for spelling.”

“What was the ostensible destination of those Israeli youngsters?”

The First Assistant always felt uncomfortable with Mr. Diamond’s rhetorical style of thinking aloud. He did not like answering questions without the aid of Fat Boy. “As I recall, their destination was London.”

“Right. Presumably intending to intercept certain Palestinian terrorists at Heathrow Airport before they could hijack a plane to Montreal. All right. If the Munich Five team were going to London, why did they disembark at Rome? Flight 414 from Tel Aviv is a through flight to London with stops at Rome and Paris.”

“Well, sir, there could be several—”

“And why were they going to England six days before their Black September targets were due to fly out to Montreal? Why sit in the open in London for all that time, when they could have stayed securely at home?”

“Well, perhaps they—”

“And why were they carrying tickets to Pau?”

“Pau, sir?”

“Starr’s action report. Bottom of page thirty-two through middle of page thirty-four. Description of contents of victims’ knapsacks and clothing. List prepared by Italian police. It includes two plane tickets for Pau.”

The First Assistant did not mention that he had no idea where Pau was. He made a mental note to ask Fat Boy first chance he got. “What does all this mean, sir?”

“It means that once again CIA has lived up to the traditions of Bay of Pigs and Watergate. Once again, they have screwed up.” Diamond’s jaw tightened. “The mindless voters of this country are wrong to worry about the dangers of CIA’s internal corruption. When they bring this nation to disaster, it won’t be through their villainy; it will be because of their bungling.” He returned to his pristine desk and picked up the telephoto of Hannah Stern. “Fat Boy interrupted himself with that correction while it was backgrounding this Hannah Stern. Start me up on that again. And give me a little more depth.”

Evaluating both the data and the gaps, Diamond analyzed Miss Stern to be a fairly common sort found on the fringes of terrorist action. Young, intelligent mid-American, cause-oriented. He knew the type. She would have been a Liberal, back when that was still fashionable. She was the kind who sought “relevance” in everything; who expressed her lack of critical judgment as freedom from prejudice; who worried about Third World hunger, but shambled about a university campus with a huge protein-gobbling dog—symbol of her love for all living things.

She first came to Israel on a summer tour at a kibbutz, her purpose being to visit her uncle and—in her own words quoted in a NSA lift from a letter home—”to discover my Jewishness.”

Diamond could not repress a sigh when he read that phrase. Miss Stern obviously suffered from the democratic delusion that all people are created interesting.

Fat Boy ascribed a low coefficient of irritant potential to Miss Stern, regarding her as a typical young American intellectual woman seeking a cause to justify her existence, until marriage, career, or artsy hobbies defused her. Her personality analysis turned up none of those psychotic warps that produce the urban guerrilla who finds sexual expression in violence. Nor was she flawed by that desperate hunger for notoriety that causes actors and entertainers who, unable to remain in the public eye by virtue of their talents, suddenly discover hitherto unnoticed social convictions.

No, there was nothing in Hannah Stern’s printout that would nominate her for particular attention—save for two facts: She was Asa Stern’s niece. And she was the only surviving member of the Munich Five.

Diamond spoke to Miss Swivven. “Have Starr and that Arab… Mr. Haman… in the screening room in ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And have the Deputy there too.” He turned to the First Assistant. “You keep working on Fat Boy. I want a deep rescan of the leader, this Asa Stern. He’s the one who will bleed through. Give me a list of his first-generation contacts: family, friends, accomplices, associates, acquaintances, affairs, and so on.”

“Just a second, sir.” The First Assistant introduced two questions into the computer, then one modifier. “Ah… sir? The first-generation list will have… ah… three hundred twenty-seven names, together with thumbnail sketches. And we’ll cube as we move to second-generation lists—friends of friends, etc. That’ll give us almost thirty-five million names. Obviously, sir, we have to have some kind of priority criterion.”

The First Assistant was right; a critical decision; there are literally thousands of ways in which a list can be ordered.

Diamond thought back over the sketch on Asa Stern. His intuition was tickled by one line: Profession and/or cover… Farmer, Journalist, Poet, Historian. Not, then, a typical terrorist. Something worse—a romantic patriot.

“Order the list emotionally. Go for indices indicating love, friendship, trust—this sort of thing. Go from closest to most distant.”

The First Assistant’s eyes shone as he took a deep breath and lightly rubbed his fingers together. This was a fine challenge demanding console virtuosity. Love, friendship, trust—these imprecisions and shadows could not be located through approaches resembling the Schliemann Back-bit and Non-bit Theory. No computer, not even Fat Boy, can respond to such rubrics directly. Questions have to be phrased in terms of nonfrequency counts and non sequitur exchange relationships. In its simplest form, actions performed for no measurable reason, or contrary to linear logic,
might
indicate such underlying motives as love or friendship or trust. But great care had to be exercised, because identical actions could derive from hate, insanity, or blackmail. Moreover, in the case of love, the nature of the action seldom helps to identify its motivational impulse. Particularly difficult is separating love from blackmail.

It was a delicious assignment, infinitely complicated. As he began to insert the first probes into Fat Boy, the First Assistant’s shoulders twisted back and forth, as though he were guiding a pinball with body-english.

Miss Swivven returned to the work room. “They’re waiting for you in the theater, sir.”

“Good. Bring those telephotos along. What on earth is wrong with you, Miss Swivven?”

“Nothing, sir. My back itches, that’s all.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

Darryl Starr sensed trouble in the air when he and the Arab received curt orders to report to the viewing room at once. His fears were confirmed when he found his direct superior sitting gloomily in the auditorium. The Deputy International Liaison Duty Officer nodded a curt greeting to Starr and grunted once toward the Arab. He blamed the oil-rich Arabian sheikhdoms for many of his current problems, not the least of which was the interfering presence of Mr. Diamond in the bowels of the CIA, with his snide attitude toward every little operational peccadillo.

When first the oil-producing Arabs had run a petroleum boycott against the industrialized West to blackmail them into withdrawing their moral and legal commitments to Israel, the Deputy and other leaders of CIA proposed putting on line Contingency Plan NE385/8 (Operation Six Second War). In terms of this plan, CIA-sponsored troops of the Orthodox Islamic Maoist Falange would rescue the Arab states from the temptations of greed by occupying more than 80 percent of its oil facilities in an action calculated to require less than one minute of actual combat, although it was universally admitted that an additional three months would be required to round up such Arab and Egyptian troops as had fled in panic as far as Rhodesia and Scandinavia.

It was agreed that Operation Six Second War would be undertaken without burdening the President or Congress with those decision-making responsibilities so onerous in an election year. Phase One was instituted, and political leaders in both Black and Muslim Africa experienced an epidemic of assassinations, one or two at the hands of members of the victim’s own family. Phase Two was in countdown, when suddenly everything froze up. Evidence concerning CIA operations was leaked to congressional investigating committees; lists of CIA agents were released to Leftist newspapers in France, Italy, and the Near East; internal CIA communications began to be jammed; massive tape erasures occurred in CIA memory banks, denying them the “biographic leverage” with which they normally controlled American elected officials.

Then one afternoon, Mr. Diamond and his modest staff walked into the Center carrying orders and directives that gave the Mother Company total control over all operations touching, either directly or tangentially, the oil-producing nations. Neither the Deputy nor his colleagues had ever heard of this “Mother Company,” so a quick briefing was in order. They learned that the Mother Company was a consortium of major international petroleum, communications, and transportation corporations that effectively controlled the Western World’s energy and information. After some consideration, the Mother Company had decided that she could not permit CIA to continue meddling in affairs that might harm or irritate those oil-producing friends in consort with whom she had been able to triple profits in two years.

No one at CIA seriously considered opposing Mr. Diamond and the Mother Company, which controlled the careers of most major governmental figures, not only through direct support, but also by the technique of using their public media subsidiaries to blacken and demoralize potential candidates, and to shape what the American masses took to be the Truth.

What chance had the scandal-ridden CIA to resist a force with enough power to build pipelines through tundra that had been demonstrated to be ecologically fragile? Who could stand against the organization that had reduced government research spending on solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy to a placating trickle, so as to avoid competition with their own atomic and fossil-fuel consorda? How could CIA effectively oppose a group with such overwhelming dominance that She was able, in conjunction with its Pentagon flunkies, to make the American public accept the storage of atomic wastes with lethal half-lives so long that failure and disaster were absolutely assured by the laws of antichance?

In Her takeover of CIA, the Mother Company had no interference from the executive branch of the government, as it was nearing election time, and all public business is arrested during this year of flesh-bartering. Nor did She really worry about the post-election pause of three years before the next democratic convulsion, for the American version of representative government assures that such qualities of intellect and ethics as might equip a man to lead a powerful nation responsibly are precisely the qualities that would prevent him from subjecting himself to the debasing performances of vote begging and delegate swapping. It is a truism of American politics that no man who can win an election deserves to.

There was one awkward moment for the Mother Company when a group of naïve young Senators decided to inquire into Arab millions in short-term paper that allowed them to manipulate American banks and hold the nation’s economy hostage against the possibility—however remote—that the United States might attempt to fulfill its moral commitments to Israel. But these probes were cut short by Kuwait’s threat to withdraw its money and crumble the banks, should the Senate pursue. With exceptional rhetorical adroitness, the committee reported that they could not say with certainty that the nation was vulnerable to blackmail, because they had not been permitted to continue their investigations.

This was the background to the Deputy’s feelings of petulance over loss of control of his organization as he heard the doors of the auditorium bang open. He rose to his feet as Diamond entered at a brisk pace, followed by Miss Swivven who carried several rip-sheets from the Fat Boy printout and the stack of photographs of members of the Munich Five.

In minimal recognition of Diamond’s arrival, Starr lifted most of the weight off his butt, then settled back with a grunt. The Arab’s response to Miss Swivven’s arrival was to jump to his feet, grin, and bow in jerky imitation of European suavity. Very nice looking woman, he told himself. Very lush. Skin like snow. And most gifted in what, in English, is referred to as the knockers.

“Is the projectionist in the booth?” Diamond asked, sitting apart from the others.

“Yes, sir,” Starr drawled. “You fixin’ to see the film again?”

“I want you fools to see it again.”

The Deputy was not pleased to be grouped with a mere agent, and even less with an Arab, but he had learned to suffer in silence. It was his senior administrative skill.

“You never told us you wanted to see the film,” Starr said. “I don’t think the projectionist has rewound it yet.”

“Have him run it backward. It doesn’t matter.”

Starr gave instructions through the intercom, and the wall lights dimmed.

“Starr?”

“Sir?”

“Put out the cigar.”

…the elevator door opens and closes on the dead Japanese gunman’s head. The man returns to life and slides up the wall. The hole in his palm disappears, and he tugs the bullet out of his back. He runs backward through a gaggle of schoolchildren, one of whom floats up from the floor as a red stain on her dress is sucked back into her stomach. When he reaches the lightblurred main entrance, the Japanese ducks as fragments of broken glass rush together to form a window pane. The second gunman jumps up from the floor and catches a flying automatic weapon, and the two of them run backward, until a swish pan leaves them and discovers an Israeli boy on the tiled floor. A vacuum snaps the top of his skull back into place; the stream of gore recoils back into his hip. He leaps up and runs backward, snatching up his rucksack as he passes it. The camera waves around, then finds the second Israeli just in time to see his cheek pop on. He rises from his knees, and blood implodes into his chest as the khaki shirt instantly mends itself. The two boys walk backward. One turns and smiles. They saunter back through a group of Italians pushing and standing tiptoe to greet some arriving relative. They back down the lane to the immigration counter, and the Italian official uses his rubber stamp to suck the entrance permissions off their passports. A red-headed girl shakes her head, then smiles thanks…