Shibumi (25 page)

One of the team who was learning English to the end of getting a better job with the Occupation Forces slapped Nicholai on the shoulder and growled, “Clever, these Occidentals, at
orienting
themselves.”

And another, a wry boy with a monkey face who was the clown of the group, said that it was not a bit odd that Nicholai should be able to see in the dark. He was, after all, a man of the twilight!

The tone of this statement signaled that it was meant to be a joke, but there was silence around the campfire for some seconds, as they tried to unravel the tortuous and oblique pun that was the common stock of the monkey-faced one’s humor. And as it dawned on each in turn, there were groans and supplications to spare them, and one lad threw his cap at the offending wit.*

* The pun was almost Shakespearean in its sophomoric obliquity. It was formed on the fact that Japanese friends called Nicholai “Nikko” to avoid the awkward
l.
And the most convenient Japanese pronunciation of Hel is
heru.

During the day and a half in his cell devoted to an examination of this proximity sense, Nicholai discovered several things about its nature. In the first place, it was not a simple sense, like hearing or sight. A better analogy might be the sense of touch, that complicated constellation of reactions that includes sensitivity to heat and pressure, headache and nausea, the elevator feelings of rising or falling, and balance controls through the liquid of the middle ear—all of which are lumped up rather inadequately under the label of “touch.” In the case of the proximity sense, there are two bold classes of sensory reaction, the qualitative and the quantitative; and there are two broad divisions of control, the active and the passive. The quantitative aspect deals largely with simple proximity, the distance and direction of animate and inanimate objects. Nicholai soon learned that the range of his intercepts was quite limited in the case of the inanimate, passive object—a book, a stone, or a man who was daydreaming. The presence of such an object could be passively sensed at no more than four or five meters, after which the signals were too weak to be felt. If, however, Nicholai concentrated on the object and built a bridge of force, the effective distance could be roughly doubled. And if the object was a man (or in some cases, an animal) who was thinking about Nicholai and sending out his own force bridge, the distance could be doubled again. The second aspect of the proximity sense was qualitative, and this was perceptible only in the cases of a human object. Not only could Nicholai read the distance and direction of an emitting source, but he could feel, through the sympathetic vibrations of his own emotions, the quality of emissions: friendly, antagonistic, threatening, loving, puzzled, angry, lustful. As the entire system was generated by the central cortex, the more primitive emotions were transmitted with greatest distinction: fear, hate, lust.

Having discovered these sketchy facts about his gifts, Nicholai turned his mind away from them and applied himself again to his studies and to the task of keeping his languages fresh. He recognized that, so long as he was in prison, the gifts could serve little purpose beyond that of a kind of parlor game. He had no way to foresee that, in later years, his highly developed proximity sense Would not only assist him in earning worldwide reputation as a foremost cave explorer, but would serve him as both weapon and armor in his vocation as professional exterminator of international terrorists.

Mr. Diamond glanced up from the rear-projected roll down and spoke to the First Assistant. “Okay, break off here and jump ahead on the time line. Give us a light scan of his counterterrorist activities from the time he left prison to the present.”

“Yes, sir. It will take just a minute to reset.”

With the help of Fat Boy and the sensitive manipulations of the First Assistant, Diamond had introduced his guests to the broad facts of Nicholai Hel’s life up to the middle of his term of imprisonment, occasionally providing a bit of amplification or background detail from his own memory. It had taken only twenty-two minutes to share this information with them because Fat Boy was limited to recorded incidents and facts; motives, passions, and ideals being alien to its vernacular.

Throughout the twenty-two minutes, Darryl Starr had slouched in his white plastic chair, yearning for a cigar, but not daring to light up. He assumed glumly that the details of this gook-lover’s life were being inflicted on him as a kind of punishment for screwing up the Rome hit by letting the girl get away. In an effort to save face, he had assumed an attitude of bored resignation, sucking at his teeth and occasionally relieving himself of a fluttering sigh. But something disturbed him more than being punished like a recalcitrant schoolboy. He sensed that Diamond’s interest in Nicholai Hel went beyond professionalism. There was something personal in it, and Starr’s years of experience in the trenches of CIA operations made him wary of contaminating the job at hand with personal feelings.

As became the nephew of an important man and a CIA trainee-in-terror, the PLO goatherd at first adopted an expression of strictest attention to the information rear-projected on the glass conference table, but soon his concentration strayed to the taut pink skin of Miss Swivven’s calves, at which he grinned occasionally in his version of seductive gallantry.

The Deputy had responded to each bit of information with a curt nod of his head meant to create the impression that the CIA was current with all this information, and that he was merely ticking it off mentally. In fact, CIA did not have access to Fat Boy, although the Mother Company’s biographic computer system had long ago consumed and digested everything in the tape banks of CIA and NSA.

For his part, Mr. Able had maintained a facade of thin boredom and marginal politeness, although he had been intrigued by certain episodes in Hel’s biography, particularly those that revealed mysticism and the rare gift of proximity sense, for this refined man’s tastes ran to the occult and exotic, which appetites were manifest in his sexual ambiguities.

A muted bell rang in the adjoining machine room, and Miss Swivven rose to collect the telephotos of Nicholai Hel that Mr. Diamond had requested. There was silence in the conference room for a minute, save for the hum and click of the First Assistant’s console, where he was probing Fat Boy’s international memory banks and recording certain fragments in his own short-term storage unit. Mr. Diamond lighted a cigarette (he permitted himself four a day) and turned his chair to look out on the spotlighted Washington Monument beyond the window, as he tapped his lips meditatively with his knuckle.

Mr. Able sighed aloud, straightened the crease of one trouser leg elegantly, and glanced at his watch. “I do hope this isn’t going to take much longer. I have plans for this evening.” Visions of that senator’s Ganymede son had been in and out of his mind all evening.

“Ah,” Diamond said, “here we are.” He held out his hand for the photographs Miss Swivven was bringing from the machine room and leafed through them quickly. “They’re in chronological order. This first is a blowup of his identification picture taken when he started working for Sphinx/FE Cryptography.”

He passed it on to Mr. Able, who examined the photograph, grainy with excessive enlargement. “Interesting face. Haughty. Fine. Stern.”

He pushed the picture across to the Deputy, who glanced at it briefly as though he were already familiar with it, then gave it to Darryl Starr.

“Shee-it,” Starr exclaimed. “He looks like a kid! Fifteen-sixteen years old!”

“His appearance is misleading,” Diamond said. “At the time this picture was taken he could have been as old as twenty-three. The youthfulness is a family trait. At this moment, Hel is somewhere between fifty and fifty-three, but I have been told that he looks like a man in his midthirties.”

The Palestinian goatherd reached for the photograph, but it was passed back to Mr. Able, who looked at it again and said, “What’s wrong with the eyes? They look odd. Artificial.”

Even in black and white, the eyes had an unnatural transparency, as though they were underexposed.

“Yes,” Diamond said, “his eyes are strange. They’re a peculiar bright green, like the color of antique bottles. It’s his most salient recognition feature.”

Mr. Able looked obliquely at Diamond. “Have you met this man personally?”

“I… I have been interested in him for years,” Diamond said evasively, as he passed along the second photograph.

Mr. Able winced as he looked at the picture. It would have been impossible to recognize this as the same man. The nose had been broken and was pushed to the left. There was a high ridge of scar tissue along the right cheek, and another diagonally across the forehead, bisecting the eyebrow. The lower lip had been thickened and split, and there was a puffy knob below the left cheekbone. The eyes were closed, and the face at rest.

Mr. Able pushed it over to the Deputy gingerly, as though he did not want to touch it.

The Palestinian held out his hand, but the picture was passed on to Starr. “Shit-o-dear! Looks like he went to Fistcity against a freight train!”

“What you see there,” Diamond explained, “is the effect of a vigorous interrogation by Army Intelligence. The picture was taken some three years after the beating, while the subject was anesthetized in preparation for plastic surgery. And here he is a week after the operation.” Diamond slid the next picture along the conference table.

The face was still a little puffy in result of recent surgery, but all signs of the disfigurement were erased, and a general tightening-up had even removed the faint lines and marks of age.

“And how old was he at this time?” Mr. Able asked.

“Between twenty-four and twenty-eight.”

“Amazing. He looks younger than in the first photograph.”

The Palestinian tried to turn his head upside down to see the picture as it passed by him.

“These are blowups of passport photos. The Costa Rican one dates from shortly after his plastic surgery, and the French one the year after that. We also believe he has an Albanian passport, but we have no copy of it.”

Mr. Able quickly shuffled through the passport photos which, true to their kind, were overlit and of poor quality. One feature caught his attention, and he turned back to the French picture. “Are you sure this is the same man?”

Diamond took the picture back and glanced at it. “Yes, this is Hel.”

“But the eyes—”

“I know what you mean. Because the peculiar color of his eyes would blow any disguise, he has several pairs of noncorrective contact lenses that are clear in the center but colored in the iris.”

“So he can have whatever color eyes he wants to have. Interesting.”

“Oh yes. Hel runs to the ingenious.”

The OPEC man smiled. “That’s the second time I have detected a hint of admiration in your voice.”

Diamond looked at him coldly. “You’re mistaken.”

“Am I? I see. Are these the most recent pictures you have of the ingenious—but not admired—Mr. Hel?”

Diamond took up the remaining sheaf of photographs and tossed them onto the conference table. “Sure. We have plenty. And they’re typical examples of CIA efficiency.”

The Deputy’s eyebrows arched in martyred resignation.

Mr. Able leafed through the pictures with a puzzled frown, then pushed them toward Starr.

The Palestinian leapt up and slapped his hand down on the stack, then grinned sheepishly as everyone glared at his surprisingly rude gesture. He pulled the photographs over to him and examined them carefully.

“I don’t understand,” he admitted. “What is this?”

In each of the pictures, the central figure was blurred. They had been taken in a variety of settings—cafés, city streets, the seashore, the bleachers of a jai-alai match, an airport terminal—and all had the image compression characteristic of a telephoto lens; but in not one of them was it possible to recognize the man being photographed, for he had suddenly moved at the instant of the shutter click.

“This really is something I do not understand,” the goatherd confessed, as though that were remarkable. “It is something that my comprehension does not… comprehend.”

“It appears,” Diamond explained, “that Hel cannot be photographed unless he wants to be, although there’s reason to believe he’s indifferent about CIA’s efforts to keep track of him and record his actions.”

“Then why does he spoil each photograph?” Mr. Able asked.

“By accident. It has to do with this proximity sense of his. He can feel concentration being focused on him. Evidently the feeling of being tracked by a camera lens is identical with that of being sighted through the scope of a rifle, and the moment of releasing the shutter feels just like that of squeezing a trigger.”

“So he ducks at the instant the picture is being taken,” Mr. Able realized. “Amazing. Truly amazing.”

“Is that admiration I detect?” Diamond asked archly.

Mr. Able smiled and tipped his head, granting the touch. “One thing I must ask. The Major who figured in the rather brutal interrogation of Hel was named Diamond. I am aware, of course, of the penchant of your people for identifying themselves with precious stones and metals—the mercantile world is richly ornamented with Pearls and Rubys and Golds—but never-the-less the coincidence of names here makes me uncomfortable. Coincidence, after all, is Fate’s major weapon.”

Diamond tapped the edges of the photographs on his desk to align them and set them aside, saying offhandedly, “The Major Diamond in question was my brother.”

“I see,” Mr. Able said.

Darryl Starr glanced uneasily toward Diamond, his worries about personal involvement confirmed.

“Sir?” the First Assistant said. “I’m ready with the printout of Hel’s counterterrorist activities.”

“All right. Bring it up on the table. Just surface stuff. No details. I only want to give these gentlemen a feeling for what we’re facing.”

Although Diamond had requested a shallow probe of Hel’s known counterterrorist activities, the first outline to appear on the conference table was so brief that Diamond felt called upon to fill in. “Hel’s first operation was not, strictly speaking, counterterrorist. As you see, it was a hit on the leader of a Soviet Trade Commission to Peking, not long after the Chinese communists had firmed up their control over that country. The operation was so inside and covert that most of the tapes were degaussed by CIA before the Mother Company began requiring them to give dupes of everything to Fat Boy. In bold, it went like this: the American intelligence community was worried about a Soviet/Chinese coalition, despite the fact that there were many grounds for dispute between them—matters of boundaries, ideology, unequal industrial development, racial mistrust. The Think Tank boys came up with a plan to exploit their underlying differences and break up any developing union. They proposed to send an agent into Peking to kill the head of the Soviet commission and plant incriminating directives from Moscow. The Chinese would think the Russians had sacrificed one of their own to create an incident as an excuse for breaking off the negotiations. The Soviets, knowing better, would think the Chinese had made the hit for the same reason. And when the Chinese brought out the incriminating directives as evidence of Russian duplicity, the Soviets would claim that Peking had manufactured the documents to justify their cowardly attack. The Chinese, knowing perfectly well that this was not the case, would be confirmed in their belief that the whole thing was a Russian plot.

“That the plan worked is proved by the fact that Sino-Soviet relations never did take firm root and are today characterized by mistrust and hostility, and Western bloc powers are able to play one of them off against the other and prevent what would be an overwhelming alliance.

“The little stumbling block to the ingenious plot of the Think Tank boys was finding an agent who knew enough Chinese to move through that country under cover, who could pass for a Russian when the necessity arose, and who was willing to take on a job that had slight chance of success, and almost no chance for escape after the hit was made. The operative bad to be brilliant, multilingual, a trained killer, and desperate enough to accept an assignment that offered not one chance in a hundred of survival.

“CIA ran a key-way sort, and they found only one person among those under their control who fit the description…”