by The Cool War
When they were apart he traced the gentle edge of bone before her left hip with his fingers and said, “You know, I didn’t really expect this, but I’m awfully glad about it.” Their eyes were only inches apart, and she looked into his carefully, then kissed him, shook her head, sat up and glanced at her watch.
“Take your aspirin,” she said, “and then let’s talk. I’ve got twenty-five minutes left to turn you.”
“Turn me into what?” he asked, swallowing obediently.
“Turn you into a double agent, Horny,” she said.
He slid to the edge of the bunk and sat next to her. He brushed her bare shoulder with his lips thoughtfully. “Oh, yes,” he said. “My little problem.”
“It’s actually our problem, Horny. But that’s the deal they’ll give you. If you’ll work with them they’ll let you go. They’ve got a plan. They’re going to ransom you— exchange you for somebody the Team’s got hidden out in Texas. Don’t ask me who; I don’t know.”
Hake said consideringly, “I don’t really know how high a price the Team puts on me.”
She said, “Well, to be frank, Horny, the twins don’t really think it’s very high. They’ll let themselves be bargained down—of course, assuming that you go along. Otherwise there’s no deal for you. Or maybe for me, either,” she added. “If they, ah, dispose of you I really don’t think they will want me to be around as a possible witness to murder.”
That was a new thought, and a soberingly unwelcome one to Hake. He put his arm around her warm, damp waist, but she did not yield. “So we have to talk, Horny. I don’t think there ought to be any moral question for you. I can’t believe that you want to be loyal to a bunch of destructive lunatics. It’s not just the PCP, or bribing half the disk jockeys in Europe to play narco music, or counterfeiting the pound, or jiggering everybody’s computer nets. Or spreading disease, or insect pests, or allergenic weeds, or—”
“I didn’t know about the narco music,” Hake said. “And what’s that about the computers?”
“All the time, Horny. How do you think they finance themselves? Or, for that matter,” she added honestly, “how do you think I do? I’m not saying I really like the way my side operates. They spy on you, we spy on you. They trick you, I trick you.”
“I like the way you do it better,” he observed. “What do you mean, you spy on me? Is that how you knew I was going to the Team in the first place?”
“Certainly. We don’t have the resources the Team does,” she said bitterly, “but we do what we can. I have an old school friend who—no, never mind who she is. We don’t have time. I have to persuade you to turn around.”
“Oh,” said Hake, “I thought you knew that. I’m turned.”
She looked at him. “You’re sure?”
“Sure?” He laughed. “What I’m sure of is that I’m getting real tired of being used. But I’m willing to try it your way.”
She studied him carefully, then shook her head. “All right,” she said. “Now all we have to do is hope the Reddis don’t change their mind. And—” she glanced at her watch— “we still have twenty minutes.”
He pulled her toward him, but he had misunderstood her meaning. She resisted. “Wait a minute, Horny. Now it’s time for me to ask you the question.”
“What question?”
“The one I told you I was going to ask: Why did you do all this?”
He said peevishly, “I thought we’d just been over all that. I don’t know.”
“But maybe I do. I have a theory. Don’t laugh—”
He was a long way from laughing.
“I have to start from the beginning. What do you know about hypnotism?”
Hake took his arm away from her and said, “Leota, I’m not an impatient man, but if you’ve got a point I wish you’d get to it.”
“Well, that is the point. You act hypnotized. Do you understand what I’m saying? Whatever anybody tells you to do, you do. You’re suggestible. Just like someone in a hypnotic trance state.”
“Oh, hell.” He was exasperated. “I can’t be hypnotized to do things I wouldn’t do otherwise—that’s a fact! Everybody knows that.”
“They do? How do you know it? Have you made a study of hypnotism?”
“No, but—”
“No, but you sure as hell act as if you were! Don’t give me knee-jerks, Horny. Think about it.”
“Well—” He thought for a moment, and then said cautiously, “I admit that I don’t altogether understand what I’ve been doing the last couple of months. I’ve wondered about it. I went along with any lousy thing they suggested quick enough—as you point out.”
“I don’t mean it critically, Horny. The opposite of that. You couldn’t help yourself, if you were hypnotized.”
He looked at her. “How sure are you of any of this?”
“Well, not very,” she admitted. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Is there any other way to explain it? You can’t even call it reflex patriotism. You went along with me, too, when I told you not to report me.”
He looked up with a spasm of hope. “But—that was against the Team!”
Leota shook her head. “Men! That’s male ego for you. You’d rather believe you were a skunk of your own free will than a helpless dupe. But the fact is, that’s a strong sign of the trance state. It’s called a tolerance of incongruities. It means you act as though mutually conflicting things are both right, or both true.”
He protested, “It’s all impossible! They couldn’t hypnotize me without my remembering it!”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t, but—”
She said, “It could have been a post-hypnotic suggestion to forget. Or you might not have been aware of it in the first place. They could have slipped you a drug. Planted a tape under your pillow. I don’t know. All I’m sure of—”
She was interrupted by the sound of the door being unlocked. The Reddi with the scar over his brow looked in on them, his right hand resting on the holster of a pistol. He smiled.
“Ah, I see you are making good progress, sweetie,” he observed as Leota grabbed for her beach dress and held it before her.
She said coldly: “We’ve made the deal, Rama. Now it’s up to you to work out an arrangement for a trade.”
“I see,” he said, studying them in amusement. “Yes, perhaps something can be done. When my brother returns we will speak further. But how can we know that Reverend Hake will keep his word to us?”
Neither Hake nor Leota answered; there was no obvious answer to give. The Indian nodded. “Yes, that is a difficulty. Well, I had thought that you might wish to come on deck, my dear, but perhaps you prefer to remain here?”
He smiled—it was almost a friendly smile, at least a tolerant one, Hake was astonished to discover—and closed the door behind him.
Hake and Leota looked at each other. Hake said, “Ah, about what he was saying. How do you suppose they’re going to make sure I keep my bargain?”
“I don’t have a clue, Horny, except that it probably will be in a way you don’t like. The easiest thing would be to kill you if you don’t. If the Team can plant somebody who can get at you when they want to, and I can, then it’s a real good bet that the Reddis can, too. Or it might be something a lot worse.”
“Such as?”
She said angrily, “The worst thing you can think of. Or worse than that, the worst thing either of them can think of. Addict you to a drug? Give you a fatal disease that they keep providing you the medicine for? I don’t know. They’ll think of something.”
The future began to look rather dubious to Hake. “But maybe it won’t be that bad,” she added, trying to reassure him. “There’s nothing you can do about it anyway, right? Whatever it is, it’s better than floating up on the docks of the Bay of Naples.”
“Why Naples? I thought we were around Capri?”
“You’d have to ask them why. Last I saw, we were tied up to some industrial dock. If you listen, you can hear trai
ns in the freight yards.”
He listened, putting his arm around her again, but heard nothing he could identify. “Well,” he said, “as it looks like we still have some time—”
“Wait a minute, Horny.” She was still listening, with an expression of puzzlement. There was a faint, rapid patter of feet on the deck outside, and then something that was almost a splash.
She stood up, pulling the dress over her head. “Something’s going on,” she announced, and opened the door a crack. There was no one outside. “I’m going to take a look. You’d better stay here.”
“No. I’m coming too.”
“Then stay back.” She crossed to the deck door, which was slid fully open, and looked around. Hake came up behind her and peered over her shoulder. They were moored to ancient wood pilings, alongside a bulkhead. Greasy water lapped against the wood, and beyond the bulkhead were bulbous, immense tanks of some sort. It was night time, but the tanks were brightly lit, and around and among them Hake saw figures moving cautiously closer. There was no sign of either of the Reddis.
“Oh, Christ!” she whispered. “It looks like your boys are coming after you. Or, more likely, after the Reddis and me. Rama must’ve seen them and taken off!”
“What will happen to you?” Hake demanded.
“Nothing real good,” she said worriedly. “Hake, Fm going to get out of here. You stay. You’ll be okay. If you can, stall them.” She ran into the cabin and came out again, strapping the scuba tanks on hurriedly.
“Wait!” he protested. “I want to see you again!”
She paused for a second, regarding him. “Oh, Horny,” she said, “you are so bloody naive.” She kissed him hard and fast, and lowered herself over the far gunwale. Minutes later, when the first of the approaching men had reached the short gangplank, Hake came out of the cabin With his hands up.
“It’s me!” he cried. “Thank God you got here! They’ve all taken off that way, not more than five minutes ago—if you hurry you can catch them!” And he pointed down the waterfront toward the likeliest, darkest spot.
VIII
Yosper was having a high old good time. He took command of the little ship like a corsair, dispatched his pirate crew in all directions, himself straddled the quarterdeck and strutted back and forth. He did not neglect the perquisites of conquest. He found three bottles of Piper-Heidsieck nicely chilled in the cabin aft and shared them with Hake while they supervised the search.
The pursuit on land came up empty. Dietrich, fresh out of a Neapolitan jail, reported that there was no one in sight; he had paid off the hired hoods and sent them away, and the quarry had escaped. I’m glad, Hake thought; one out of three glad, anyway. But Yosper’s bright old eyes were on him. “Don’t look so happy,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do. D’you know what we had to do to get you out of this? First we had to find you. Tracked down the boatman, located a witness in the tour boat outside the Grotto. Then we had to message back to Washington for spy-satellite photos to track this ship. Then we had to hire half a dozen muscle to come in after you.”
“I’m sorry to have put you to the trouble.”
“Sure you are. Dietz! Go on below and give Mario a hand checking this ship out, then we’ll all celebrate.”
Hake wasn’t listening. He was calculating. The worst thing about owing somebody your life was that it became difficult to be rude to him. But for how long? A week?
Well, two or three days, anyway. At a minimum, for longer than would help him now, when he urgently wished for license to tell Yosper to piss off, and didn’t have it. The man was an arrogant ass, and was repetitively proving it.
“—give it back now.”
Hake woke up. “What?”
“I said, you might as well give us back the bracelet now,” Yosper repeated, pointing to the silver bangle on Hake’s arm. “We won’t need it any more on you. Served its purpose. We knew you’d go off to see her, long’s we didn’t catch her at the Pescatore. So we kept you tagged. You didn’t move ten feet without registering. But the boat was a surprise, and by the time we could follow you were out of range.”
Silently Hake unstrapped the band and passed it over, as Mario and Dieter came up from the hold. The Italian was carrying a flat metal box, and they were both looking worried. Yosper scrambled to his feet.
“It’s defused,” said Mario, breathing hard. He handed it to Yosper, who accepted it with care.
“Yeah,” he said. “It would have blown this ship up easy enough. And then—” He gazed out at the spherical tanks, only yards away, and Hake was astonished to see that the old man was grinning. “Fifty thousand metric tons of liquid hydrogen!” he breathed. “Man! What a blowup that would’ve been! You see what kind of people your girl friend’s mixed up with, Hake?”
“Smart, though,” said Dieter. “It’s one of ours.”
Yosper frowned, then shook his head. “They’re a crafty pair. You’re right. If the Eye-ties had found pieces of this, we would’ve taken the rap, and, man, we all would’ve been in the soup! They must’ve got it when they were working on the North Sea job.”
Hake sat up. “Hey! Are you saying they worked for you?”
“Not any more. They take their work too seriously, Hake. Killing’s against our charter,” he said virtuously, “except in unusual circumstances. But they like it. You’re lucky to be alive. If you hire them and don’t want killing it costs extra, would you believe it?”
“I don’t understand you people,” Hake said.
“Because we use mercenaries? Grow up, boy! Don’t get means mixed up with ends. We’re doing right. The Reddis are only tools we use when we have to. You don’t ask a gun if it believes in democracy. You just want to know that when you pull the trigger it’ll go off.” He handed the box back to Mario. “In the old days,” he went on severely, forbearingly, “we understood that. I don’t blame you for getting mixed up now. How can you give it all you’ve got when you’re told we must never drop a bomb or fire a rocket or kneecap an enemy or blow up a bridge? But those are the rules. We don’t make them. We just do what we’re told—and we use what we have to to do it.”
Hake sat back, letting the words wash over him. Yos-per’s morals were not a concern of his, he told himself. He had other concerns, and he was not in the least sure of how to handle them, or how they were going to come out He found himself studying Mario and Dieter, who sat in rapt attention to the old man. Precisely as if they hadn’t heard all this before, as they surely had; exactly as if it were worth hearing at all. It was very strange that everyone he met—Yosper, Dieter, Mario, Leota, even Jessie Tunman, even the Reddis—behaved as if they were all quite sure of their role in the world and the righteous necessity of getting on with it. While he wasn’t sure at all. And Yosper kept right on talking:
“—old days at the United Nations, shee-it! We knew who was who! Knew how to handle them, too. Get a Rumanian charge d’affaires in bed with a nigger boy and show him the photographs, then he’d come along! Or hook a Russian code clerk on heroin and hold his supply up. World was a lot simpler then, and if you want my opinion better. We were doing God’s work and we knew it. ‘Course, we still are, but sometimes— Ah, well,” he twinkled, “you’re getting tired of hearing me, aren’t you, boy? And those lumps on your head probably don’t feel too good, and you’re likely getting hungry. Dietz, you get rid of that thing—” he nodded toward the bomb— “and, Mario, you bring the car around. Champagne’s all gone, and it’s about time we ate.”
The questions in Hake’s mind all wanted to be central, and all kept colliding with one another. How seriously, for instance, should he take his deal with the Reddis to “turn”? They hadn’t actually released him; he had been rescued. But still they might have their ways to enforce cooperation. And before he had that one even properly sorted out, much less solved, there was another: Had Leota really gotten safely away, and where was she now? And that was nudged away by, What about the Team project for supporting messianic rel
igions? What about for God’s sake his church? Was it getting along without him? How much reality was there in Leota’s crazy conjecture about being hypnotized? And back to wondering if Leota was safe.
The advantage of a head full of unsorted thoughts and problems was that it kept his mind off Yosper’s interminable chatter. Which went on as they moved between the great double-walled spheres of hydrogen, became louder as they cut between the thumping compressors that kept the hydrogen liquid, recessed briefly as they stood by the immense hot-air vents that roared 150-degree waste heat into the already sultry Italian sky—there was some risk that one of the not very alert fuel-depot guards might hear—and resumed full momentum in the Cadillac that Mario steered athletically along the waterfont, up through a tangle of climbing, narrow streets and into the parking lot of a huge hotel atop the Vomero. Hake was given twenty minutes to clean himself up, pat water on his bruises and change into fresh clothes out of the bags that Mario had obligingly brought from Capri, and then it was a reprise of the night before at La Morte del Pescatore. They had, again, the best table in the house. It looked out over the Bay, with Vesuvius’s cratered peak illuminated in red, white and green searchlights a dozen miles away, and Yosper was saying, “Veal, Hake! If you don’t want fish, take veal; it’s the only kind of meat the Italians understand, but they know it well.” The pills that Leota had given him had
