CHAPTER 18

For a long while Caine couldn’t tell whether he was awake or not. Normally it isn’t very difficult to distinguish between sleep and waking. There is a sensation of returning consciousness, sounds begin to filter in, you start to stretch, open your eyes, and there you are, back in the world again. But when Caine felt consciousness returning, there was no sound, and when he opened his eyes, nothing happened. It was still pitch dark. He had no idea where he was.

So he tried it again, stretching and opening his eyes, but still there was nothing. He began to panic. Suppose he couldn’t wake up. Suppose he was dead, or in a coma. His body ached unmercifully, yet he felt the pain strangely comforting. I feel pain, therefore I am, he remembered. He couldn’t be dead. The dead feel nothing, the old Gypsy had told him, and after what the Gypsy had been through, he surely knew.

Then he began to remember. They had taken him directly to the old city prison and had begun to question him about Mendoza. He wasn’t sure what had infuriated them the most, his refusal to talk, or their anger when they found the vial with Mengele’s thumb in his pocket. Whatever it was, they had set to work with the rubber truncheons with a vengeance. His last memory was of being curled on the floor, his arms covering his head to protect it, while they flailed at him. But why couldn’t he see? My God, suppose he was blind! he thought, terror-stricken.

He touched his eyes with trembling fingers, but there was no physical damage he could feel. Then he began to explore his body carefully. He was lying on a concrete floor of what had to be a solitary cell. That could explain the darkness. His body felt like a mass of bruises, but there were no broken bones so far as he could tell. He staggered to his hands and knees and began to crawl around, exploring the darkness with one hand extended before him. His fingertips soon touched a smooth stone wall and he painfully stood up. He felt his way along the wall, counting his steps carefully, until he reached a corner. He felt along that wall, his hands caressing the coolness of a solid steel door, which provided the only opening to the cell. There was a small hinge on the bottom of the door, which he assumed was for food. He managed to lift it slightly and a barely discernible shaft of light crawled a few inches along the floor. Well, at least he wasn’t blind, he comforted himself.

He continued his circuit around the cell. Besides the door there was absolutely nothing else of note, except for a small, foul hole in the center of the floor, which was obviously supposed to be used for a toilet. Tiny scurrying sounds came from the hole and he really didn’t feel like investigating it further. The smell was nauseating and he wondered if anybody ever got used to it. By the time he completed his circuit, he had a fairly good idea of his prison.

He was in a rectangular cell, about six by eight feet, with stone and concrete walls and floor. He had no idea how high the ceiling was, but it was too high for him to reach. Except for the hole, the cell was completely empty, and the only way in or out was the steel door. They had taken his belt and shoelaces and everything he had had in his pockets. He had no idea how long he had been in there and absolutely no way of judging time. The darkness had a completely disorienting effect that way. It could have been hours—or days. There was no way to know. Still, it could be worse, much worse, he thought. Like the tiger cages Smiley Gallagher had taken him to see outside Hué. That was worse, all right.

There were hundreds of them, mostly captured VC, according to Smiley; but then he never entirely trusted anything Smiley ever said. From a distance it looked like a giant monkey cage at the zoo, but when he got closer, he realized that these prisoners would have sold their souls to get into a monkey cage.

The “tiger cages” were rectangular pits dug into the ground and covered by heavy wooden bars. Pits was the term Smiley used, but they were more like vertical graves. It was impossible to lie down or sit in them and they were too short to stand up in. The ground at the bottom was marshy and filled with snakes, scorpions, and centipedes, so that you couldn’t even stand squatting on it. Most of the prisoners tried to hang by their arms from the bars for as long as they could. That’s why it looked, at first, like a big monkey cage. The cages were open to the sun and the heat was intense. The air was filled with insane screaming and moaning. Most of them were covered with blood from head wounds, caused when they tried to kill themselves by pounding their heads against the wooden bars. It was like nothing Caine had ever seen. It was hell on earth.

“Why don’t you at least give the poor devils some water?” Caine had asked Smiley.

“Why bother? Most of them will be dead in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Nobody ever lasts longer than that in a tiger cage, anyway,” Smiley said.

“Forty-eight hours! Jesus Christ!” Caine exploded.

“Now, wait a minute! These are VC in there. Besides, we have nothing to do with it It’s under ARVN control. We’re just advisers, remember?” Smiley said defensively, a hurt expression in his piggy eyes.

“Well, why don’t you advise our gooks to give their gooks some goddamn water, Smiley? Why don’t you just do that?” Caine said carefully, trying to control his voice.

“I can’t do that, Johnny. It’s out of my hands. Besides, these are VC, goddamnit!”

“You bastard,” Caine hissed. “You fucking degenerate bastard!”

Smiley stood there in the hot sun, blinking unhappily.

“I’m afraid you just don’t understand what this war is all about, Johnny. That’s your trouble,” Smiley said.

It was still there, he thought. The war would never go away for any of them. “You never came back,” C.J. had told him. And then she betrayed him. Well, he was coming back, all right, Caine thought grimly. He had a few scores to settle.

The thought that it had been C.J. who had betrayed him gnawed at him like a cancer. There wasn’t even a shadow of a doubt that it had been her. There was no way to connect the oilman McClure in Pucallpa, with the mysterious Señor Smith in Lima. The only ones who could have fingered him were Father José, Fong, and Sam and he doubted that any one of them would have informed the authorities. And even if they had, they had no idea where he was in Lima or what name he was using. Besides, he had been clean as a whistle in Lima. He was sure of it. There was no one else. It had to be C.J. She must have made a call when she went to the ladies’ room. That was why she had been so nervous. She needed practice, Caine thought grimly. Well, give her time and she’d get better at it, he thought.

So C.J. was part of the Starfish Conspiracy and that meant Wasserman was too, right from the beginning. They had played him for a sucker all along. No, you allowed them to do it to you, he amended, and a terrible anger flooded his veins. It was time to stop being a pawn of the mysterious von Schiffen, he decided. It was time to strike back.

He sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the wall. The stone was cold and damp, soaking the back of his shirt. He shivered. Jesus, he thought. First it’s too hot, then it’s too cold. You’re never satisfied. He wondered when they would feed him. Then his anger took hold. You’re a man, not an animal waiting at an empty trough, he told himself. So be a man, goddamnit! You’ve got a mind. Use it! That’s what it’s for. Because unless you kill the Starfish, it’s going to kill you.

But there isn’t enough data, he objected. Oh, bullshit, there’s never enough data. Figure it out anyway. After all you’ve got plenty of time. You’re not going anywhere, he told himself.

What did he know about the Starfish, anyway? he wondered. They were all in on it somehow. C.J., Wasserman, Harris—that meant the Company—and ODESSA. Mengele had known about it too. The Starfish had wanted Mengele killed and had picked him to do the job. Why him? Obviously because they couldn’t do it themselves. Why not somebody from the Company? Of course, because it was a dirty business and the Company wanted to disclaim any involvement if it all came out. That was probably why they wanted Mengele out of the way in the first place. Because something was about to come out and they didn’t want the infamous Mengele to be associated with it. The Peruvian government was obviously involved, because they had landed on him like a duck on a June bug as soon as C.J. picked up the telephone.

How many did that make? he wondered. There was Wasserman, the Company, ODESSA, and the Peruvians. That made four. How many arms did a starfish have? Five, he thought. Unless von Schiffen was the fifth. What’s in a name, anyway? Starfish was a funny name for an operation. So was von Schiffen, come to that, he mused. He stirred restlessly. He was getting close, he thought with a growing excitement. His shirt was soaking wet from the damp wall and he moved away from it, uncomfortably. Fucking water, he thought. And then he had it. Water!

Jesus, he thought with a sense of awe. Names mattered. Those fucking krauts! Der Seestern was a water animal! He thought back to his first interview with Wasserman, because there was something there that had bothered him right from the beginning. Something Wasserman had said. Then he remembered his confused dream in the jungle, after he drank the ayahuasca. The Wasserman monkey had said something from that first meeting. His subconscious mind had been trying to tell him something. Of course! Leipzig! Now he had it all, he thought darkly. He had thought there was something phony about the accent right from the beginning. The trouble was that he had been thinking in English and yet he had been dealing with Germans all along. He should have been thinking in German. The German names all had something to do with water. And as Koenig used to say, there are no coincidences in this business. Names mattered, all right. He had the what and the how. The only thing missing was the why, and he would get to the bottom of that soon enough.

The betrayal was complete. It was incredible! The Americans and the Peruvians and the Nazis were all in it together. How could the Company do it? he wondered. How could they do it after what happened in Vietnam? And then he remembered Talleyrand’s line about the Bourbons. “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Well, the Bourbons were still running the show. Principles are mankind’s most expendable baggage, he thought grimly. And they had used him to further their evil scheme and then tossed him on the garbage heap as soon as he was no longer needed. But they had made one mistake. He was still alive. And he wasn’t playing their game anymore. He was on his own now. And it was very personal.

It was happening again, he thought with horror. It was Germany and Laos and Cambodia and Nam all over again. And he was the only one who could still stop it. They had made a mistake—he was still alive. And he was going to stop them just as he had stopped Mengele, he vowed. The job wasn’t over yet. And nothing on earth was going to stop him. Nothing! He got up and began to pound on the steel door in a fury.

“I’m alive, you bastards! I’m still alive!” he shouted again and again. At last he slumped to the floor, exhausted.

Nothing happened. There was only the darkness and the terrible silence. He began to pace up and back, up and back, carefully counting his steps hour after hour, until he got into the rhythm of it. He had to plan his escape.

Sounds of muffled footsteps reached him through the steel door. There was a grating sound as the hinge opened and a tin plate slid in. Then the footsteps receded. He examined the plate by the dim light of the hinge, which he held open. The plate held a small portion of watery fish soup. It smelled disgusting and he almost dropped it as his stomach turned. There was something floating in it. He touched it and it turned over and stared back at him. It was a fish eye. But he would have to keep up his strength if he was to escape, he thought, and forced himself to slurp it all down.

He resumed pacing, hour after hour in the darkness. He no longer noticed the stench, or gagged when he swallowed the fishy water, which seemed to be the only item on the menu. They had to come for him soon, he thought. The darkness and the silence were getting to him. And he was getting weaker all the time. Judging by the stubble of beard on his face, he had been there several days already and it seemed that they fed him the watery plate only twice a day. He didn’t know how much longer he could last.

He tried and rejected one plan after another, counting out each move in rhythm to his endlessly shuffling steps. No matter what he did, conditioning would matter and he forced himself to do push-ups till he collapsed. Then he did sit-ups until his stomach hurt so much he could scarcely breathe. Then he went back to push-ups. He began to evolve a regular routine. One hour of push-ups and sit-ups, one hour of pacing up and back, then back to the exercises. He estimated the time by counting twenty breaths to the minute, twelve hundred breaths to the hour.

He was constantly hungry. Thoughts of elaborate meals tantalized him and he spent hours planning the meals he would have if he ever got out. He could almost taste a big steak and fries, but the thought only made him hungrier. He couldn’t shake it. Hunger was a dull, gnawing ache that never went away. He could feel it even while he slept. The whole thing was impossible, he thought. He was getting weaker all the time. Besides, what could one man, alone, unarmed, and in solitary confinement, do to stop the powerful forces that were gathering like storm clouds. Don’t think that way, he told himself, warming himself on the fire of his anger. One man can do anything if he’s willing to die for it.

By the end of what he estimated was the third day, he had a plan worked out. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all he had. It depended on the notion that they apparently wanted to keep him alive, probably for a murder trial. That was the heart of it, that they wanted to keep him alive and he was now willing to die.

He would have to make his move in court, at a hearing or trial or whatever their procedure was. It would be the one place where he probably wouldn’t be handcuffed or under heavy guard. He would have to get near a guard, disarm him, and shoot it out, or grab the judge or someone important as a hostage. They’d probably never agree to let him escape. If he could get out, he could go to ground, contact Sam, and arrange a clandestine flight to the States. But that was probably a pipe dream. More likely he could hold them off for a while and try to get his message through to reporters, to try and blow the Starfish wide open. It probably wouldn’t help, but it was the best he could do. He ought to be able to hold off the security police long enough for that, he thought.

They’d kill him in the end, of course. And then try to hush it up by claiming he was some kind of a lunatic, or a political terrorist. But somebody might believe him. Feinberg would know the truth. And maybe Amnon and a few others. That was all he could hope for. They’d kill him anyway—the Bourbons would see to that. They always did. But at least this way he would have chosen his death. It wasn’t much, he admitted. But at least it was something.

Now that he had a plan, he felt a certain sense of relief. The die was cast and all that remained was the acting out. When the time came, he would be ready. He remembered how Koenig always used to quote his favorite line, slapping his ruler against the poster of it that he’d had made up and tacked to the blackboard. It was something that Louis Pasteur had said: “Chance only favors the mind that is prepared.”

He was in the middle of a push-up when he heard the sounds of approaching footsteps. It sounded like a number of men. He leaped to his feet, his heart beating with the frenzied rhythm of a voodoo drum. The footsteps paused outside the door and he backed against the wall. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he could hardly catch his breath.

The steel door opened with a loud clang and the cell was filled with blinding light. He threw his arms over his eyes to shield them against the agonizing brightness. He heard someone step into the cell and there was a murmur of voices. Squinting his eyes open the tiniest crack, he could just make out the dim figure of a man silhouetted against the white, smoky light flooding the doorway. Gradually his eyes began to focus and then he could begin painfully to see. Except that they had come for him too late, because he knew he must be crazy. He simply couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing, he thought despairingly.

Bob Harris was standing there in the doorway.

Harris was elegant as ever, in a gray three-piece tropical worsted suit, smoking a cigarette as though he were posing for a magazine layout. Harris wrinkled his nose with distaste at the stench in the cell.

“Jesus, Johnny. Whatever you’re wearing, it isn’t exactly Chanel Number Five,” Harris said.