Shibumi

He was in pretty bad shape… spent a couple of months in a hospital in Saigon… then he disappeared from our observation for a period before emerging as a free-lance counterterrorist. We have him associated with a long list of hits against terrorist groups and individuals, usually in the pay of governments through their intelligence agencies.” He spoke to the First Assistant. “Let’s run through them at a high scan rate.”

Superficial details of one extermination action after another flashed up on the surface of the conference table as Nicholai Hel’s career from the early fifties to the mid-seventies was laid out by Fat Boy. Occasionally one or another of the men would ask for a freeze, as he questioned Diamond about some detail.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Darryl Starr said at one point. “This guy really works both sides of the street! In the States he’s hit both Weathermen and tri-K’s; in Belfast he’s moved against both parts of the Irish stew; he seems to have worked for just about everybody except the A-rabs, Junta Greeks, the Spanish, and the Argentines. And did you eyeball the weapons used in the hits? Along with the conventional stuff of handguns and nerve-gas pipes, there were such weirdo weapons as a pocket comb, a drinking straw, a folded sheet of paper, a door key, a light bulb… This guy’d strangle you with your own skivvies, if you wasn’t careful!”

“Yes,” Diamond said. “That has to do with his Naked/Kill training. It has been estimated that for Nicholai Hel, the average Western room contains just under two hundred lethal weapons.”

Starr shook his head and sucked his teeth aloud. “Gettin’ rid of a fella like that would be hardern’ snapping snot off a fingernail.”

Mr. Able paled at the earthy image.

The PLO goatherd shook his head and tished. “I cannot understand these sums so extravagant he receives for his servicing. In my country a man’s life can be purchased for what, in dollars, would be two bucks thirty-five cents.”

Diamond glanced at him tiredly. “That’s a fair price for one of your countrymen. The basic reason governments are willing to pay Hel so much for exterminating terrorists is that terrorism is the most economical means of warfare. Consider the cost of mounting a force capable of protecting every individual in a nation from attack in the street, in his home, in his car. It costs millions of dollars just to search for the victim of a terrorist kidnapping. It’s quite a bargain if the government can have the terrorist exterminated for a few hundred thousand, and avoid the antigovernment propaganda of a trial at the same time.” Diamond turned to the First Assistant. “What is the average fee Hel gets for a hit?”

The First Assistant posed the simple question to Fat Boy. “Just over quarter of a million, sir. That’s in dollars. But it seems he has refused to accept American dollars since 1963.”

Mr. Able chuckled. “An astute man. Even if one runs all the way to the bank to change dollars for real money, their plunging value will cost him some fiscal erosion.”

“Of course,” the First Assistant continued, “that average fee is skewed. You’d get a better idea of his pay if you used the mean.”

“Why is that?” the Deputy asked, pleased to have something to say.

“It seems that he occasionally takes on assignments without pay.”

“Oh?” Mr. Able said. “That’s surprising. Considering his experiences at the hands of the Occupation Forces and his desire to live in a style appropriate to his tastes and breeding, I would have assumed he worked for the highest bidder.”

“Not quite,” Diamond corrected. “Since 1967 he has taken on assignments for various Jewish militant groups without pay—some kind of twisted admiration for their struggle against larger forces.”

Mr. Able smiled thinly.

“Take another case,” Diamond continued. “He has done services without pay for ETA-6, the Basque Nationalist organization. In return, they protect him and his ch

The men around the conference table scanned the details of Hel’s penetration into a notorious group of German urban terrorists that led to the imprisonment of the man after whom the group was named and the death of the woman.

“He was involved in that?”, Mr. Able asked with a slight tone of awe.

“That was one heavy number,” Starr admitted. “I shit thee not!’”

“Yes, but his highest pay for a single action was in the United States,” Diamond said. “And interestingly enough, it was a private individual who footed the bill. Let’s have that one, Llewellyn.”

“Which one is that, sir?”

“Los Angeles—May of seventy-four.”

As the rear-projection came up, Diamond explained. “You’ll remember this. Five members of a gang of urban vandals and thieves calling themselves the Symbiotic Maoist Falange were put away in an hour-long firefight in which three hundred fifty police SWAT forces, FBI men, and CIA advisers poured thousands of rounds into the house in which they were holed up.”

“What did Hel have to do with that?” Starr asked.

“He had been hired by a certain person to locate the guerrillas and put them away. A plan was worked out in which the police and FBI were to be tipped off, the whole thing timed so they would arrive after the wet work was done, so they could collect the glory… and responsibility. Unfortunately for Hel, they arrived half an hour too early, and he was in the house when they surrounded it and opened fire, along with gas— and firebombing. He had to break through the floor and hide in the crawl space while the place burned down around him. In the confusion of the last minute, he was able to get out and join the mob of officers. Evidently he was dressed as a SWAT man—flack vest, baseball cap, and all.”

“But as I recall,” Mr. Able said, “there were reports of firing from within the house during the action.”

“That was the released story. Fortunately, no one ever stopped to consider that, although two submachine guns and an arsenal of handguns and shotguns was found in the charred wreckage, not one of the three hundred fifty police (and God knows how many onlookers) was so much as scratched after an hour of firing.”

“But it seems to me that I remember seeing a photograph of a brick wall with chips out of it from bullets.”

“Sure. When you surround a building with over three hundred gunhappy heavies and open fire, a fair number of slugs are going to pass in one window and out another.”

Mr. Able laughed. “You’re saying the police and FBI and CIA were firing on themselves?”

Diamond shrugged. “You don’t buy geniuses for twenty thousand a year.”

The Deputy felt he had to come to the defense of his organization. “I should remind you that CIA was there purely in an advisory capacity. We are prohibited by law from doing domestic wet work.”

Everyone looked at him in silence, until Mr. Able broke it with a question for Diamond: “Why did this individual go to the expense of having Mr. Hel do the hit, when the police were only too willing?”

“The police might have taken a prisoner. And that prisoner might have testified in a subsequent trial.”

“Ah, yes. I see.”

Diamond turned to the First Assistant. “Pick up the scan rate and just skim the rest of Hel’s known operations.”

In rapid chronological order, sketches of action after action flashed up on the tabletop. San Sebastian, sponsor ETA-6; Berlin, sponsor German government; Cairo, sponsor unknown; Belfast, sponsor IRA; Belfast, sponsor UDA; Belfast, sponsor British government—and on and on. Then the record suddenly stopped.

“He retired two years ago,” Diamond explained.

“Well, if he is retired…” Mr. Able lifted his palms in a gesture that asked what they were so worried about.

“Unfortunately, Hel has an overdeveloped sense of duty to friends. And Asa Stern was a friend.”

“Tell me. Several times this word ‘stunt’ came up on the printout. I don’t understand that.”

“It has to do with Hel’s system for pricing his services. He calls his actions ‘stunts’; and he prices them the same way movie stunt men do, on the basis of two factors: the difficulty of the job, and the danger of failure. For instance, if a hit is hard to accomplish for reasons of narrow access to the mark or difficult penetration into the organization, the price will be higher. But if the consequences of the act are not too heavy because of the incompetence of the organization against which the action is performed, the price is lower (as in the case of the IRA, for instance, or CIA). Or take a reverse case of that: Hel’s last stunt before retirement. There was a man in Hong Kong who wanted to get his brother out of Communist China. For someone like Hel, this wasn’t too difficult, so you might imagine the fee would be relatively modest. But the price of capture would have been death, so that adjusted the fee upward. See how it goes?”

“How much did he receive for that particular… stunt?”

“Oddly enough, nothing—m money. The man who hired him operates a training academy for the most expensive concubines in the world. He buys baby girls from all over the Orient and educates them in tact and social graces. Only about one in fifty develop into beautiful and skillful enough products to enter his exclusive trade. The rest he simply equips with useful occupations and releases at the age of eighteen. In fact, all the girls are free to leave whenever they want, but because they get fifty percent of their yearly fee—between one and two hundred thousand dollars—they usually continue to work for him for ten or so years, then they retire in the prime of life with five hundred thousand or so in the bank. This man had a particularly stellar pupil, a woman of about thirty who went on the market for quarter-of-a-mil per year. In return for getting the brother out, Hel took two years of her service. She lives with him now at his ch

Starr produced a low whistle. You’re telling me that this squack of Hel’s gets a quarter of a million a year? What’d that come to per screw, I wonder?”

“In your case,” Diamond said, “about a hundred twenty-five thousand.”

The PLO goatherd shook his head. “This Nicholai Hel must be very rich from the point of view of money, eh?”

“Not so rich as you might imagine. In the first place his ‘stunts’ are expensive to set up. This is particularly true when he has to neutralize the government of the country in which the stunt takes place. He does this through the information brokerage of a man we have never been able to locate—a man known only as the Gnome. The Gnome collects damaging facts about governments and political figures. Hel buys this information and uses it as blackmail against any effort on the part of the government to hamper his actions. And this information is very expensive. He also spends a lot of money mounting caving expeditions in Belgium, the Alps, and his own mountains. It’s a hobby of his and an expensive one. Finally, there’s the matter of his ch

“So,” Mr. Able said, “he lives in great splendor, this Hel of yours.”

“Splendor, I guess. But primitive. The ch

Mr. Able nodded to himself. “So a man of eighteenth-century breeding has created an eighteenth-century world for himself in splendid isolation in the mountains. How interesting. But I am surprised he did not return to Japan and live in the style he was bred to.”

“From what I understand, when he got out of prison and discovered to what degree the traditional ways of life and ethical codes of Japan had been ‘perverted’ by Americanism, he decided to leave. He has never been back.”

“How wise. For him, the Japan of his memory will always remain what it was in gentler, more noble times. Pity he’s an enemy. I would like your Mr. Hel.”

“Why do you call him my Mr. Hel?”

Mr. Able smiled. “Does that irritate you?”

“Any stupidity irritates me. But let’s get back to our problem. No, Hel is not as rich as you might imagine. He probably needs money, and that might give us an angle on him. He owns a few thousand acres in Wyoming, apartments in half a dozen world capitals, a mountain lodge in the Pyrenees, but there’s less than half a million in his Swiss bank. He still has the expenses of his ch

“A life of… what was the word?” Mr. Able asked, smiling faintly to himself at the knowledge he was annoying Diamond.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That Japanese word for things reserved and understated?”

“Shibumi?”

“Ah, yes. So even without taking any more ‘stunts,’ your—I mean, our Mr. Hel would be able to live out a life of shibumi.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Starr interposed. “Not with nookie at a hundred K a throw!”

“Will you shut up, Starr,” Diamond said.

Not quite able to follow what was going on here, the PLO goatherd had risen from the conference table and strayed to the window, where he looked down and watched an ambulance with a flashing dome light thread its way through the partially congealed traffic—as that ambulance did every night at precisely this time. Starr’s colorful language had attracted his attention, and he was thumbing through his pocket English/Arabic dictionary, muttering, “Nookie… nookie…” when suddenly the Washington Monument and the wide avenue of cars vanished, and the window was filled with a blinding light.

The goatherd screamed and threw himself to the floor, covering his head in anticipation of the explosion.

Everyone in the room reacted characteristically. Starr leapt up and whipped out his Magnum. Miss Swivven slumped into a chair. The Deputy covered his face with a sheet of typing paper. Diamond closed his eyes and shook his head at these asses with which he was surrounded. Mr. Able examined his cuticles. And the First Assistant, absorbed in his technological intercourse with Fat Boy, failed to notice that anything had happened.

“Get off the floor, for chrissake,” Diamond said. “It’s nothing. The street-scene film has broken, that’s all.”

“Yes, but…” the goatherd babbled.

“You came down in the elevator. You must have known you were in the basement.”

“Yes, but…”

“Did you think you were looking down from the Sixteenth Floor?”

“No, but…”

“Miss Swivven, shut the rear projector off and make a note to have it repaired.” Diamond turned to Mr. Able. “I had it installed to create a better working environment, to keep the office from feeling shut up in the bowels of the earth.”

“And you have been capable of fooling yourself?” Starr snapped his gun back into its holster and glared at the window, as though to say it had been lucky… this time.

With ruminantial ambiguity, the goatherd grinned sheepishly as he got to his feet. “Boy-o-boy, that was a good one! I guess the joke was on me!”

Out in the machine room, Miss Swivven threw a switch, and the glaring light in the window went out, leaving a matte white rectangle that had the effect of sealing the room up and reducing its size.

“All right,” Diamond said, “now you have some insight into the man we’re dealing with. I want to talk a little strategy, and for that I would as soon have you two out of here.” He pointed Starr and the PLO goatherd toward the exercise and sun room. “Wait in there until you’re called.”

Appearing indifferent to his dismissal. Star ambled toward the sun room, followed by the Arab who insisted on explaining again that he guessed the joke had been on him.

When the door closed behind them, Diamond addressed the two men at the conference table, speaking as though the First Assistant were not present, as indeed in many ways he was not.

“Let me lay out what I think we ought to do. First—”

“Just a moment, Mr. Diamond,” Mr. Able interrupted. “I am concerned about one thing. Just what is your relationship to Nicholai Hel?”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, come now! It is evident that you have taken a particular interest in this person. You are familiar with so many details that do not appear in the computer printout.”

Diamond shrugged. “After all, he’s a mauve-card man; and it’s my job to keep current with—”

“Excuse me for interrupting you again, but I am not interested in evasions. You have admitted that the officer in charge of the interrogation of Nicholai Hel was your brother.”

Diamond stared at the OPEC troubleshooter for a second. “That’s right. Major Diamond was my brother. My older brother.”

“You were close to your brother?”

“When our parents died, my brother took care of me. He supported me while he was working his way through college. Even while he was working his way up through the OSS—a notoriously WASP organization—and later with CIA, he continued to—”

“Do spare us the domestic details. I would be correct to say that you were very close to him?”

Diamond’s voice was tight. “Very close.”

“All right. Now there is something you passed over rather quickly in your biographic sketch of Nicholai Hel. You mentioned that he required, as a part of his pay for doing the Peking assignment that got him out of prison, the current addresses of the three men involved in beating and torturing him during his interrogation. May I presume he did not want the addresses for the purpose of sending Christmas cards… or Hanukkah greetings?”

Diamond’s jaw muscles rippled.

“My dear friend, if this affair is as serious as you seem to believe it is, and if you are seeking my assistance in clearing it up, then I must insist upon understanding everything that might bear upon the matter.”

Diamond pressed his palms together and hooked the thumbs under his chin. He spoke from behind the fingers, his voice mechanical and atonic. “Approximately one year after Hel showed up in Indo-China, the ‘doctor’ who had been in charge of administering drugs during the interrogation was found dead in his abortion clinic in Manhattan. The coroner’s report described the death as accidental, a freak fall which had resulted in one of the test tubes he was carrying shattering and going through his throat. Two months later, the MP sergeant who had administered the physical aspects of the interrogation and who had been transferred back to the United States died in an automobile accident. He had evidently fallen asleep at the wheel and driven his car off the road and over a cliff. Exactly three months later, Major Diamond—then Lieutenant Colonel Diamond—was on assignment in Bavaria. He had a skiing accident.” Diamond paused and tapped his lips with his forefingers.

“Another freak accident, I suppose?” Mr. Able prompted.

“That’s right. As best they could tell, he had taken a bad jump. He was found with a ski pole through his chest.”

“Hm-m-m,” Mr. Able said after a pause. “So this is the way CIA protects its own? It must be quite a satisfaction for you to have under your control the organization that gave away your brother’s life as part of a fee.”

Diamond looked across at the Deputy. “Yes. It has been a satisfaction.”

The Deputy cleared his throat. “Actually, I didn’t enter the Company until the spring of—”

“Tell me something,” Mr. Able said. “Why haven’t you taken retributive action against Hel before now?”

“I did once. And I will again. I have time.”

“You did once? When was— Ah! Of course! Those policemen who surrounded that house in Los Angeles and opened fire half an hour before schedule! That was your doing?”

Diamond’s nod had the quality of a bow to applause.

“So there is some revenge motive in all of this for you, it would seem.”

“I’m acting in the best interest of the Mother Company. I have a message from the Chairman telling me that failure in this would be unacceptable. If Hel has to be terminated to assure the success of the Septembrists skyjacking then, yes, I shall take some personal satisfaction in that. It will be a life for a life, not, as in his case, three murders for one beating!”

“I doubt that he considered them murders. More likely he thought of them as executions. And if my guess is right, it was not the pain of the beatings that he was avenging.”

“What, then?”

“The indignity of them. That’s something you would have no way to understand.”

Diamond puffed out a short laugh. “You really imagine you know Hel better than I do?”

“In some ways, yes—despite your years of studying him and his actions. You see, he and I—accepting our cultural differences—are of the same caste. You will never see this Hel clearly, squinting as you do across the indefinite but impassable barrier of breeding—a great gulf fixed, as the Qoran or one of those books terms it. But let us not descend to personalities. Presumably you sent those two plebes from the room for some other reason than a desire to improve the quality of the company.”

Diamond was stiffly silent for a moment, then he drew a short breath and said, “I have decided to pay a visit to Hel’s place in the Basque country.”

“This will be the first time you have met him face to face?”

“Yes.”

“And you have considered the possibility that it may be more difficult to get out of those mountains than to get in?”

“Yes. But I believe I shall be able to convince Mr. Hel of the foolishness of attempting to assist Miss Stern. In the first place, there is no logical reason why he should take on this assignment for a misguided middle-class girl he doesn’t even know. Hel has nothing but disgust for amateurs of all kinds, including amateurs in terror. Miss Stern may see herself as a noble soldier in the service of all that is right in the world, but I assure you that Hel will view her as a pain in the ass.”

Mr. Able tilted his head in doubt. “Even assuming that Mr. Hel does look upon Miss Stern as a proctological nuisance (whether or not he reflects on the happy pun), there remains the fact that Hel was a friend of the late Asa Stern, and you have yourself said that he has strong impulses toward loyalty to friends.”

“True. But there are fiscal pressures we can bring to bear. We know that he retired as soon as he had accumulated enough money to live out his life in comfort. Mounting a ‘stunt’ against our PLO friends would be a costly matter. It’s probable that Hel is relying on the eventual sale of his Wyoming land for financial security. Within two hours, that land will no longer be his. All records of his having bought it will disappear and be replaced by proof that the land is held by the Mother Company.” Diamond smiled. “By way of fringe benefit, there happens to be a little coal on that land that can be profitably stripped off. To complete his financial discomfort, two simple cables to Switzerland from the Chairman will cause Hel’s money held in a Swiss bank to vanish.”

“And I imagine the money will turn up in Mother Company assets?”

“Part of it. The rest will be held by the banks as transactional costs. The Swiss are nothing if not frugal. It’s a Calvinist principle that there is an entrance fee to heaven, to keep the riff-raff out. It is my intention to perform these fiscally punitive actions, regardless of Hel’s decision to take or reject Miss Stern’s job.”

“A gesture in memory of your brother?”

“You may think of it that way, if you like. But it will also serve as a financial interdiction to Hel’s being a nuisance to the Mother Company and to the nations whose interest you represent.”

“What if money pressures alone are not sufficient to persuade him?”

“Naturally, I have a secondary line of action to address that contingency. The Mother Company will bring pressure upon the British government to spare no effort in protecting the Black Septembrists involved in the Munich Olympics debacle. It will be their task to make sure they are unmolested in their skyjacking of the Montreal plane. This will not require as much pressure as you might imagine because, now that the North Sea oil fields are producing, England’s economic interests are more closely allied to those of OPEC than to those of the West.”

Mr. Able smiled. “Frankly, I cannot imagine the MI-5 and MI-6 lads being an effective deterrent to Mr. Hel. The greater part of their energies are applied to writing imaginative memoirs of their daring exploits during the Second World War.”

“True. But they will have a certain nuisance value. Also, we shall have the services of the French internal police to help us contain Hel within that country. And we are moving on another front. It is inconceivable that Hel would try to enter England to put the Septembrists away without first neutralizing the British police. I told you that he does this by buying blackmail material from an information broker known as the Gnome. For years the Gnome has evaded international efforts to locate and render him dysfunctional. Through the good services of Her communications subsidiaries, the Mother Company is beginning to close in on this man. We know that he lives somewhere near the city of Bayonne, and we’re actively involved in tightening down on him. If we get to him before Hel does, we can interdict the use of blackmail leverage against the British police.”

Mr. Able smiled. “You have a fertile mind, Mr. Diamond—when personal revenge is involved.” Mr. Able turned suddenly to the Deputy. “Do you have something to contribute?”

Startled, the Deputy said, “Pardon me? What?”

“Never mind.” Mr. Able glanced again at his watch. “Let’s do get on with it. I assume you didn’t ask me here so you could parade before me your array of tactics and interdictions. Obviously, you need my help in the unlikely event that all the machines you have set into motion fail, and Hel manages to put the Septembrists away.”

“Exactly. And it is because this is a bit delicate that I wanted those two buffoons out of the room while we talked about it. I accept the fact that the nations you represent are committed to protecting the PLO, and therefore the Mother Company is, and therefore CIA is. But let’s be frank among ourselves. We would all be happier if the Palestinian issue (and the Palestinians with it) would simply disappear. They’re a nasty, ill-disciplined, vicious lot whom history happened to put in the position of a symbol of Arab unity. All right so far?”

Mr. Able waved away the obvious with his hand.

“Very well. Let’s consider our posture, should everything fail and Hel manage to exterminate the Septembrists. All that would really concern us would be assuring the PLO that we had acted vigorously on its behalf. Considering their barbaric nature, I think they would be mollified if we took vengeance on their behalf by destroying Nicholai Hel and everything he possesses.”

“Sowing the land with salt?” Mr. Able mused.

“Just so.”

Mr. Able was silent for a time, his eyes lowered as he tickled his upper lip with his forefinger. “Yes, I believe we can rely on the PLO’s sophomoric mentality to that degree. They would accept a major act of revenge—provided it was lurid enough—as proof that we are devoted to their interests.” He smiled to himself. “And do not imagine that it has escaped my notice that such an eventuality would allow you to slay two birds with one stone. You would solve the tactical problem at hand, and avenge your brother at one stroke. Is it possible that you would rather see all your devices fail and Nicholai Hel somehow break through and hit the Septembrists, freeing you to devise and execute a maximal punishment for him?”

“I shall do everything in my power to prevent the hit in the first instance. That would be best for the Mother Company, and Her interests take priority over my personal feelings.” Diamond glanced toward the First Assistant, It was most likely that he reported directly to the Chairman on Diamond’s devotion to the Company.

“That’s it then,” Mr. Able said, rising from the conference table. “If there is not further need for me, I shall return to the social event this business interrupted.”

Diamond rang for Miss Swivven to escort Mr. Able out of the building.

The Deputy rose and cleared his throat. “I don’t assume you’ll be needing me?”

“Have I ever? But I’ll expect you to keep yourself available to execute instructions. You may go.”

Diamond directed the First Assistant to roll back the information on Nicholai Hel and be prepared to project it at a slow enough rate to accommodate the literacy of Starr and the PLO goatherd, who were returning from the exercise room, the Arab rubbing his inflamed eyes as he put his English/Arabic dictionary back into his pocket. “Goodness my gracious, Mr. Diamond! It is most difficult to read in that room. The lights along the walls are so bright!”

“I want you two to sit here and learn everything you’re capable of about Nicholai Hel. I don’t care if it takes all night. I’ve decided to bring you along when I visit this man—not because you’ll be of any use, but because you’re responsible for this screw-up, and I’m going to make you see it out to the end.”

“That’s mighty white of you,” Starr muttered.

Diamond spoke to Miss Swivven as she reentered from the elevator. “Note the following. One: Hel’s Wyoming land, terminate. Two: Swiss money, terminate, Three: The Gnome, intensify search for. Four: MI-5 and MI-6, alert and instruct. All right, Llewellyn, start the roll-down for our blundering friends here. And you two had better pray that Nicholai Hel has not already gone underground.”

Gouffre Porte-de-Larrau

At that moment, Nicholai Hel was 393 meters underground, revolving slowly on the end of a cable half a centimeter thick. Seventy-five meters below him, invisible in the velvet black of the cave, was the tip of a vast rubble cone, a collection of thousands of years of debris from the natural shaft. And at the base of the rubble cone his caving partner was waiting for him to finish his eleventh descent down the twisting shaft that wound above him like a mammoth wood screw turned inside out.