TEN YEARS AFTER PAUL CHRISTOPHER WAS ARRESTED AND IMPRISoned by the Chinese Communists, David Patchen met in Tokyo with a man named Yeho Stern. Patchen had become Director of the Outfit only two weeks before, and this was his first meeting with the head of a foreign intelligence service since his appointment. Yeho Stern did not congratulate Patchen on his promotion. He had no manners in the usual sense of the word; he had stripped his personality and appearance of all bourgeois traits as a matter of ethnic pride and did not want to be mistaken for anything but what he was, a Jew who had, by a miracle, escaped with his life from Christendom and now had the means to defend himself and others against its murderous delusions. To Yeho, courtesy was strictly utilitarian, and its only rule could be expressed in a single sentence: Never do anything that might compromise secrecy. Yeho regarded this encounter, which had been arranged without explanation on short notice, as a breach of etiquette. In more than twenty years of clandestine meetings, he and Patchen had never before met outdoors, let alone in a foreign country inhabited by a different race of people. Even among their own kind they were a noticeable pair: Yeho was a stout but very short man, almost a midget, while Patchen stood over six feet high and looked even taller because he was so gaunt.
Now they stood side by side on the Full-Moon Bridge of the Korakuen Garden in central Tokyo. It was very early in the morning on a cold, smoggy day, but the park was already full of Japanese. Tame carp hung in the murky water beneath the bridge, waiting to be fed. Yeho did not look down at the gold and silver fishes, some of them older than the oldest living human being; they were irrelevant. Sound carried over still water. That was relevant.
“Why did you choose this place for a meeting?” he asked, looking around him in all directions before he spoke and then barely voicing the words.
“I wanted to talk to you before you left for China tomorrow,” Patchen said.
Despite the clammy archipelagic weather, Yeho wore his Jerusalem clothes: a short-sleeved shirt that exposed his stubby, muscular arms, rumpled cotton trousers, sandals, no necktie. He always wore sandals; he did not own a necktie, and it was said that he did not even know how to tie one. He was called Yeho by his equals, never Stern, which wasn’t his name in any case, but the shortened form of the name his family had been given in 1787 when Austria passed a law requiring all Jews living within its borders to adopt Germanized surnames. Prosperous families were named for jewels (Rubin) or flowers (Rosen) or for admirable traits such as honesty (Ehrlich). Most ordinary people, who could not pay bribes, were given one of four utilitarian names derived from their appearance: Schwarz (black), Weiss (white), Klein (little), Gross (big). The wretched were saddled with jokes as names. Yeho’s ancestor, a tanner who reeked of puer, the solution of hot water and dog dung in which animal hides were steeped after being treated with lime, had been entered on the rolls as Hundsstern, or “dog star.”
On arrival in Palestine Yeho shortened it to Stern, a resonant name in the story of the creation of the Jewish state. In his own organization, and within the Outfit, where Yeho had many admirers but few acquaintances, he was called the Memuneh, the Big Boss. This did not offend his otherwise invincible modesty.
In order to look into Patchen’s face without straining his neck, Yeho had to stand several steps away. He had large translucent ears, and because he was standing with his back to the morning sun, they glowed bright pink.
“So,” he said. “Speak.”
Patchen said, “I want to do the Chinese a favor.”
Yeho clucked his tongue. “Another one?”
In China, where Americans had been forbidden to tread for more than twenty years, Yeho was welcome as an honest broker. In addition to the business he carried out in the name of his own service, he had also done many favors on Patchen’s behalf. These had usually taken the form of small but valuable gifts that were useful to the Chinese in their operations against their archenemy, Soviet Russia—a piece of hardware, a scrap of information that completed a puzzle, a timely warning. Yeho had never asked for anything in return for these benefices, but after delivering them he always inquired, discreetly, about the American prisoner, Paul Christopher, so that the Chinese would understand where the favor really came from.
So far they had shown no sign that they would ever let Christopher go; in their penal methods, the Chinese placed great emphasis on remorse, confession, and reform, but Christopher refused to admit his crimes against China. Unless he confessed and apologized, they explained, he was doomed.
On the Full-Moon Bridge in Tokyo, Patchen looked into Yeho Stern’s upturned face and said, “I want to give them Butterfly.”
“Give them Butterfly?”
Yeho threw up his stubby arms in disbelief and turned his back.
Butterfly was the cryptonym by which Patchen and Yeho, and two or three others, knew an operative of the Russian intelligence service—they called it that, or the RIS, never “the Soviet intelligence service” or “the KGB,” because in their opinion there was no such thing as the Soviet Union, only the Russian empire operating under an assumed name.
For the past year and a half Yeho and Patchen and a very small group of people from their two organizations had been paying close attention to Butterfly. He came to their attention after he managed the assassination or kidnapping of half a dozen agents of the People’s Republic of China in Europe and Africa. On the surface, these were senseless operations. The victims were doing the Russians no harm, and even if the opposite had been true, it is seldom good practice for an intelligence service to kill an enemy it knows, because the victim will only be replaced by one that it does not know and must therefore identify and neutralize at great expense in time, manpower, and money.
It was the very pointlessness of these operations that aroused Patchen’s curiosity: if there was no apparent purpose to an act, it followed that there must be a hidden purpose. In order to discover what the RIS’s secret motive was, he set up a team to watch Butterfly, putting Horace Hubbard, Paul Christopher’s younger cousin, in charge of this operation. Patchen trusted Horace absolutely on the basis of his bloodlines, but he was qualified in other ways, too: after leading a Marine rifle platoon in Korea he had concentrated in Chinese at Yale and later learned Arabic while working for the Outfit in the Middle East. He had worked for Barney Wolkowicz in Vietnam, where he mastered Vietnamese and was the last American known to have seen Christopher before he vanished into China. Horace had a flair for dangerous operations, and because he spoke so many Oriental languages he was credited with understanding the Eastern mind. He put together a group that included several American Chinese, with a sprinkling of Chinese refugees from Vietnam, and with the help of an Outfit computer expert, targeted the Chinese missions in Europe whose intelligence officers were most likely to be hit next.
The computer expert, a spinster whose specialty was the laws of probability, predicted that the next killing would take place in a neutral country—possibly Austria, but more probably Switzerland because it provided a larger number of escape routes. Within a month another Chinese was shot to death as he waited in the Parc Mon Repos in Geneva for a contact. As in all previous cases, the assassins used a silenced Czech-made 7.65mm Skorpion machine pistol, firing all twenty rounds from the magazine into the target’s back from a range of about one meter.
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.”
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 aparment 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.”
“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?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Yeho said.
But he was beginning to respect Horace. An all-Chinese team? He seemed to have a natural gift for work in which there were very few naturals. He stood up, yawned, and stretched.
“Are you in?” Patchen asked.
“Now he asks me,” Yeho said.
“WHAT DID BUTTERFLY SPILL?” YEHO ASKED ON HIS RETURN FROM China. By that time Butterfly had been in Horace’s possession for a week. “Are you sure you got everything?”
“Everything that time permitted,” Horace said.
He and Yeho faced each other across a table in the captain’s cabin of a rusty freighter bound for Haifa, where the crate containing Butterfly would be off-loaded, then transferred to a Chinese ship that had been diverted from Oran.
“What about my cousin?” Horace asked.
“They agreed to release him soon after we deliver Butterfly.”
“How soon?”
“As soon as the politicals say ‘yes.’ The CIS has no power to let him go on their own. Face is involved. If your cousin would just acknowledge his guilt there’d be no problem, but even after ten years he won’t unbend. They talk to him every day, trying to persuade him, and every day he refuses to confess.”
“Then they’d do well to give up. He’s not guilty; he’ll never say that he is.”
“You can tell them that when you get there, but it’s very difficult for them. They’ve had so many missionaries, first the Christians and then the Communists; they believe in redemption.”
“To answer your question about the interrogation of Butterfly,” Horace said, “the whole interrogation is on video tape. We have an unedited copy for you. In brief, we confirmed all the names and faces of Butterfly’s network. Also details of the network’s organization and training.”
“Confirmed?” Yeho said. “That means we already knew all that. What else?”
“More confirmation. Butterfly did in fact come to Italy to turn these maniacs loose. Moscow doesn’t want to know what they’re going to do. From now on there’ll be no Russian handlers, no cutouts, no communications, no further support. They’re cut off, on their own.”
“On their own?” Yeho said. “How can they be on their own when Russians are involved?”
“The Russians want total deniability. There’s no telling who these people might kill.”
“There is no list of targets?”
“No list; only categories. They simply swear an oath to kill Jews and all those who help Jews to disinherit and oppress the Palestinian Arabs.”
“But there must be a hit list of individuals,” Yeho said. “Otherwise how do they make choices?”
“That occurred to us, too,” Horace said. “But Butterfly insists that no such list exists. The whole operation was designed to be random, uncontrolled, unpredictable, with no two actions resembling each other.”
“Then why did they always use the same methods against the Chinese?”
“The method in those cases was dictated by the target. The Chinese are very regular in their habits.”
“True,” Yeho said. “And why? Because their service was founded on the principles of the RIS—leave nothing to chance, never depart from procedure, control every detail. And now you’re telling me the rules don’t apply to these Frankenstein monsters they’ve created?”
There was something wrong here. Yeho did not trust the results of interrogations carried out by the Americans. They were too fastidious in their methods. They worried about their own immortal souls and the Bill of Rights. They relied on drugs and the polygraph apparatus and the witchcraft of psychology. They were too easily satisfied with the paltry results yielded by these superficial methods. They never went all the way to the bottom of the prisoner’s mind because in their hearts they did not believe that any enemy was truly dangerous to them. America was too big, too rich, too young, too strong and healthy to imagine that any adversary could do it permanent, let alone fatal harm. Therefore the intentions of their enemies did not really matter to them. If worse came to worst, the Americans would go to war, win, and convert their defeated enemies into replicas of themselves.
To Yeho, the servant of an isolated and terrorized nation, the enemy’s intentions were a matter of life and death. He looked across the table at Horace Hubbard and said, “I would like to ask this Russian a few simple questions before you give him to his new owners. Without drugs.”
Horace turned his enormous hands palm upward in a gesture of generosity. “Be my guest,” he said.
WHEN YEHO FOLLOWED HORACE DOWN INTO THE HOLD OF THE LITtle ship and saw the arrangements that had been made for the interrogation of Butterfly, he could not believe his eyes. The box in which the prisoner was confined was wired for closed-circuit television and sound. Horace sat Yeho down in front of a row of monitors and switched it on. Butterfly’s face, familiar to Yeho because, courtesy of Horace Hubbard, he had seen so many photographs of it, appeared immediately in fall color. The eyes were dull, the face slack. He was seated in a metal chair, his wrists and ankles secured by heavy straps.
“Is he drugged?” Yeho asked.
“He’s hung over from drugs, but the primary effects have worn off,” Horace replied. “He may be a little disoriented. After all, he’s a Russian and he’s in the hands of the Mongols.”
“Does he remember being drugged?”
“Yes, of course. But in theory he doesn’t remember what he said to us while under the influence.”
“Then he doesn’t know that you know that Jews are the real target?”
“No. He thinks the Chinese have grabbed him for what he did to them.”
“Why does he think that?”
“Because all he sees when he’s conscious is angry yellow faces. And all he hears is angry questions about the Chinese murders.”
Horace threw another switch. The features of one of his young Chinese operatives appeared, wearing a headset like an airplane pilot’s, with earphones and microphone. This man was inside the box with Butterfly. He had a Chinese haircut and a Chinese wrist-watch; he held a Chinese version of the Soviet 9mm Makarova pistol in his hand. He was dressed in blue overalls made in China and laundered with Chinese soap; he had been eating Chinese food for several weeks so that he smelled like a Chinese. A photograph of Chairman Mao and a poster quoting him hung on the wall (“WE CAN LEARN WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW. WE ARE NOT ONLY GOOD AT DESTROYING THE OLD WORLD, WE ARE ALSO GOOD AT BUILDING THE NEW.”).
“Just like the movies,” Horace said. He put on a headset and handed another to Yeho. Then he spoke into the microphone in English, a series of codewords that were gibberish to Yeho. The man inside answered in Mandarin. Horace responded in the same tongue; it was obvious that he was explaining Yeho’s presence and giving instructions. Finally he turned to Yeho. “Just ask your questions. Wong will repeat them to Butterfly in Russian and you’ll hear the answers over the headset.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you mean, Memuneh?”
“This is as close as I get?”
“Unless you can turn yourself into a Chinese, I’m afraid it is. I’ll leave you to it.” Horace got up to leave. Looking down on Yeho, who now wore a headset clamped to his large, fuzzy head, his eyes danced with amusement. “Memuneh?” he said.
“What?”
“No loud noises, please.”
“Very funny,” Yeho said. “Out!”
Horace departed, grinning at his own joke. Thirty years before, in time of war, as the youthful chief of an irregular intelligence unit, Yeho made a practice of questioning enemy prisoners in pairs consisting of one man who knew something of value (or was suspected of knowing something of value) and a second man who was known to have no useful information whatsoever. This second man could be anybody—an Arab culled from a POW stockade or even captured specially for the occasion—but he was indispensable to the success of the interrogation. He and the man who knew something would be locked in the same cell for several hours or several days, depending on the time available.
After they had gotten to know each other, Yeho would have the two men brought to him, always at night, at some remote and secret place in the desert. They would find him sitting in a tent behind a bare desk with two empty chairs in front of it. After the prisoners’ ankles had been shackled to the chairs Yeho would order the guards to untie their hands and remove their blindfolds. He would offer them cigarettes and sweetened tea. As they smoked and drank together in this parody of hospitality, he would chat with them in fluent Palestinian Arabic, a dialect in which he knew several dozen dirty jokes and many amusing anecdotes. Yeho was an excellent storyteller, and he could usually break through the prisoners’ natural wall of suspicion and fear in a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes. By that time they would actually be laughing at his jokes; because they were afraid, they laughed very hard.
At this point he would tell his best joke, and while they were still laughing at it Yeho would produce a .455-caliber Webley revolver from the drawer of his desk and, without the slightest warning or change of demeanor, shoot the extra prisoner, the one who knew nothing, between the eyes. The Webley, which made a deafening noise when it went off, delivered a soft lead bullet with enough force to lift the target into the air and fling him a considerable distance backward, chair and all.
The victim’s skull was, of course, shattered by the impact, and the survivor, sitting right next to him, was drenched by a shower of brains, blood, and splintered bone. Yeho would give him no opportunity to recover from the shock. Instead, he would cock the Webley by thumbing back the hammer, point it directly at the survivor’s head and say, in the same genial tone of voice in which he had been telling jokes only a moment before, “Now, my friend, there are a few simple questions I would like to ask you.”
The Outfit’s technology was no substitute for this sort of intimate contact and direct action, and an RIS man who had been promised— personally, by Yeho—to the Chinese intelligence service was not the same as an Arab captured in Samaria. But Yeho had no choice but to accommodate to the situation as he found it. Besides, he was no more anxious to be seen by Butterfly than Horace was to have him seen. He switched on his microphone.
“Hello, Wong,” he said. “To make things simple, I’m going to speak Russian. Is that all right? Touch your chin for yes, touch your cheek for no. I don’t understand Chinese.” Wong touched his chin. Yeho said, “Do you have to go to the toilet?” Wong touched his cheek. “Good,” Yeho said, “because this may take a long time.” In the other monitor, he watched Butterfly, who was paying close attention to Wong’s signals; although he was strapped into a chair like a murderer (which, of course, he was) awaiting electrocution, the man was alert, he was watchful, he hadn’t given up. “Good,” Yeho said again. “Let’s begin.”
After a lifetime of inducing confessions from people like Butterfly, Yeho held certain basic principles. All spies are liars, it is their métier, and like ordinary liars they live in a panic, knowing that the truth about themselves may be discovered at any moment—or worse, is already known by people who are too disgusted, or too clever, to confront them with it. A spy under questioning by the enemy is in a state surpassing dread because he knows that he must sooner or later tell the truth. His captors will use any means to get it out of him, and sooner or later he will spill what he knows because he cannot stand the pain, or because he is so exhausted that he will do anything for sleep, or because he wants to have the long-festering secret in his breast removed by his interrogator as a tumor on the lung is excised by a surgeon, permitting the patient to breathe freely with at least one lung. Half a life is better than none. But he knows that this is a delusion. There is nothing waiting for him after the ordeal is over, not even half a life. This is his choice:
if he does not yield he will die; and if he yields, he will die. He is only valuable, and therefore alive, so long as he does not talk. The worst thing he can imagine is that the person who is asking him questions already knows the truth, and like the examining angel on the day of judgment, is adding up his evasions for no other purpose than to add to the weight of his punishment.
This was Butterfly’s case. He may not have known what he had been asked or what he had answered while under the influence of drugs, but he knew that he had been under their influence. What had he done? What had he spilled? Why did he feel so guilty?
“Connect him to the lie detector,” Yeho said into his microphone.
Wong did so, strapping the blood pressure cuff onto Butterfly’s arm, the device that measures breathing onto his hairy chest, the part that detects sweating onto the palm of the hand. Yeho had no faith in the polygraph; too many categories of human beings were immune to it. Africans, Asians, and psychopaths laughed at it. As a practical matter it only worked on people who came from cultures that controlled human behavior by instilling guilt and mandating supernatural punishment. It had no power over those who were not possessed of a Western conscience. Yeho connected the polygraph to Butterfly because he was a Communist and probably also a vestigial Christian as nearly all Russians were, and therefore the creature of the two most implacably confessional faiths ever invented.
“Put the machine where the prisoner can see the needles,” Yeho said into the microphone on his headset. The machine, autopens whispering over the graph paper without human intervention, would remind him of what he had to do in order to be saved. Or so Yeho hoped.
He began to ask questions at random. What was Butterfly’s mother like? His father? Their names? The color of their hair? Eyes? Tall? Short? Humorous? Serious? What favorite food had his mother made, him? What kind of a house had the family lived in? Where was it? Did he have sisters, brothers? What were their names? Did the children all sleep together? Had he ever fucked his sisters? What would his mother think if she knew he was a murderer? He asked the questions over and over again until he got answers. It did not matter whether the answers were correct; in fact it was better if Butterfly lied because each lie added a few grams to his burden of guilt. Yeho just wanted him to talk, to get into the habit of responding. Then he asked him questions about his recruit ment into the RIS, his training, his assignments, his operations, repeating the same simple, even simple-minded questions over and over until he got some sort of answer—a lie, a joke, an insult, anything as long as Butterfly used his voice, as long as it took for him to begin to get the impression that he was smarter than his questioners.
Yeho kept up the drumbeat of stupid questions for fourteen hours while the ship’s engines throbbed, driving it eastward through placid seas. Wong was replaced by a second Chinese, and that man by a third. To keep himself awake Yeho took amphetamines (his own, from his own pill box that he always carried with him). Butterfly was permitted no sleep, no food, no water, no opportunity to relieve himself. The box in which he was imprisoned was connected to an air conditioner—America!—- and Yeho had the temperature turned as low as it would go. The interrogators put on jackets; on the TV monitor, Butterfly’s half-naked image shivered.
Finally Yeho struck. He said (the young Chinese inside the box said for him), “Why do you call this cell of Arab terrorists ‘the Eye of Gaza’?”
This was the first reference he had made to Butterfly’s network.
“There is no cell.”
“What did you say?”
“There is no such cell.”
“Now you are lying. Look at the machine. It knows; the pens are going crazy. Do you think we don’t know when you’re lying? Do you think we don’t remember what you told us after we gave you the drugs?”
Butterfly was silent.
Yeho said, “All we want is for you to tell us the truth while you’re conscious. How else can we know that you’re sincere? How else can we help you? Answer me. Why do you call this cell ‘the Eye of Gaza’?”
“I don’t know,” Butterfly croaked, barely able to speak; he had had nothing to drink for all these hours. “The Arabs named it that.”
“Which Arab?”
“All of them together.”
“Which Arab?”
Yeho repeated this question many times. Finally Butterfly answered: “Hassan.”
Butterfly sighed; Yeho heard his expelled breath in his earphones. On the TV monitor he saw him close his eyes.
“Open your eyes,” Yeho said. “You are not allowed to close your eyes. You know that.”
Butterfly opened his eyes and looked down at the polygraph, the kilometers of tape covered with jagged peaks drawn by the automatic pen. The lines were flat now, three black squiggles across the snow bridge of the graph; the liar’s vital signs were very weak.
Butterfly cleared his throat, long and convulsively.
“Give him water,” Yeho said. “Not too much.”
Butterfly drank. The dam broke. Butterfly could not spill enough. He told Yeho everything—all about Hassan, the leader of the cell. The details of this man’s personality, of his skills, of his intentions, sent a cold shock, an actual icy sensation, along Yeho’s spine.
“This man is a psychopath,” he said.
“Yes, he is,” said Butterfly in sober agreement. “In my opinion, a homicidal maniac.”
“What are his future targets?”
“Not the Chinese. You needn’t worry on that score. That was just training. I didn’t choose the targets; I protested; I wanted to hit Americans, or at least West Germans. Never good Marxist-Leninists like our Chinese comrades. There was no malice on my part.”
“We understand. If not us, then who is this Hassan going to kill?”
“Jews. They were always the real target. He would have done it anyway. We just made it possible for him to do what he would have done in any case.”
“What Jews?”
“His goal is to kill all of them, complete the Final Solution; he’s an Arab Heydrich. He even asked us for weapons to do that—poison gas.”
“Why poison gas? Why not an atomic bomb?”
“He knows nobody would ever give him that. Gas, maybe—it could come from anywhere. It has certain historical associations.”
Photographic images from Auschwitz and Treblinka flashed in Yeho’s brain. He said, “Tell me names, times, places.”
“Names I can give you; we gave them a shopping list. But there is no timetable. That’s the beauty of the operation, it’s absolutely random and completely unpredictable.”
Butterfly reeled off a list. Yeho recognized all the names but one.
“The Ja’wabi?” he said. “Who are they?”
“I’m not sure. We’d never heard of them, either. It seems that they’re some tribe of desert nomads who’ve been masquerading as Moslems even though they’re really Jews. Some German Hassan met in East Berlin, a former member of the SS, told him all about them. The idea of these Jews touching the Holy Koran drove him wild; it was like a sexual reaction. That was when he asked for the gas.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“No. But he’ll find a way. Madmen are very resourceful.”