Confessor

by John Gardner

  “Operation Fortitude is, for me, one of the greatest pieces of intelligence magic ever performed,” Gus continued. “It worked—which is the main thing in its favor. You just saw my assistant and myself change places in a magical manner, which is an illustration of how Fortitude was constructed. We made the enemy believe that we had armies massing in two different places, through the use of the Nazis’ senses. Their eyes and ears. We sent out a lot of en clair radio chatter between Army corps and battalions which did not exist. We filled fields and roads with dummy tanks, transport, aircraft. We used their own spies, turned by our notorious and exceptional Twenty Committee System—always written as the Roman XX: the double cross—to tell them what was not true. Just as, a moment ago, you thought I was in that trunk and my assistant was outside.” For those who could see, Gus had carefully plucked four red billiard balls out of the air and now held them between the fingers of his left hand.

  “Tonight,” he said, “I am not giving a lecture in the usual sense of the word. Rather, this is a demonstration of the principles we use as intelligence, and counter-intelligence, officers, to glean information, or to watch and monitor things we are not supposed to see, even though they are going on right under our noses.”

  By this time the billiard balls had vanished, one at a time, until he had only one left in his hand. He tossed the ball into the air, where it apparently changed color, becoming a white ball. As he continued to speak, so the white ball was joined by a bright blue ball, then a yellow, and finally a green ball, so that the four balls were between the fingers of his left hand.

  “We rely on subterfuge,” Gus said. “We rely on tricks of the light, misdirection, psychological advantages, and on electronic and optical secrets which, under the threat of great danger, puzzle the enemy and make him turn away just when we need him to be looking in another direction.” The multicolored balls in the left hand were now joined by the original red balls, which reappeared, one at a time, between the fingers of his right hand.

  “We steal, we misdirect, we draw attention away from agents or devices so that when our target looks again, he sees nothing.”

  He displayed the balls in both hands, brought the hands together and they were suddenly gone, a cloud of confetti appearing in the air in front of him.

  As he began speaking once more, Carole brought a table and a couple of other items onto the stage behind him.

  “These are the tricks of our trade,” said Gus. “They are also the tricks of unfriendly intelligence and terrorist organizations. The secrets, the theoretical rules by which we go into the field to filch the secrets of others, all run parallel to the theories I am demonstrating to you now. For instance”—Carole walked onstage and handed him a book—“for instance, who has read John le Carré’s The Russia House?”

  A sprinkling of hands came up. “I want someone who has not read this book but is interested enough to wish to read it. A show of hands would be nice … sometime today …”

  Some hands came up in the front row and Gus passed the book down to a lady whom Herbie recognized as a former field agent who had once worked in the Soviet satellite countries.

  “That book is yours,” Gus continued. “Yours as a gift, and you will be able to read it from cover to cover, but not while you are here. I want you to help me; do something for me. First, how many pages are there in this book?”

  The woman riffled through the pages and called out, “Three hundred and fifty-three.”

  The houselights had come up and Carole was down among the audience, carrying a file card, an envelope and a throw-away pen.

  He addressed Carole first. “I want you to move as far away as possible from the lady with the book.” She walked to the rear of the auditorium, and Gus picked up what looked suspiciously like a brick. “To make absolutely certain that I am not in collusion with anyone here,” he began, then turned quickly back to the woman officer who held the book: “Madam, we are not in collusion, are we? I want you to tell the audience truthfully that you are not working for me as a stooge.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Good. I’m going to hurl this brick at one of you, and then I want that person to throw it backwards, over his head. Whoever catches it then, and remains unhurt, will be asked to do something very simple.” He paused for the mild chuckles before saying “It’s a rubber brick—don’t worry” as he tossed the object to the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, sitting in the front row. “Sir, I want you to chuck the brick without looking. Just toss it hard over your shoulder, towards the back of the audience. This will get me off the hook if anyone does get hurt.”

  The CSIS threw the rubber brick over his shoulder and it was caught by a man whom Herbie recognized but could not put a name to.

  “Sir, you have the brick. I want to ask you, are we in collusion? Are you operating under my control, to use language we all know? Tell the truth.”

  The man with the brick shook his head vigorously and said that he was definitely not in collusion. Carole went to him, handed him the card, envelope and pen, retrieved the brick and disappeared through an exit at the back of the theater. The camera showed her leaving.

  Gus now told the spectator to take the card and write on it a three-digit number between one hundred and three hundred and fifty-three, which he pointed out would cover all the three-digit numbers in the book. He then asked him to place the index card in the envelope, seal it and have that envelope passed forward to the lady with the book. He stressed that it would be impossible for him to know the number contained in the envelope.

  When it had made its journey to the lady with the book, he explained, “The number inside that envelope is the number of the page I would like you to use. Don’t let me see it, but open the envelope and look at the number. You can show it to those near you. If you like, you can lift it up so that the gentleman at the back can identify it, but do not let me see that number. In fact, I will turn away until you have done this and found the page.”

  He turned his back to the audience, and even the camera did not pick up the number. The female with the book put the card back in the envelope and marked the page with it, then told Gus that all was done.

  Gus retreated behind a rather beautiful card table with inlaid green baize. Herbie recognized this as the table he had seen in one of the previous videos. A pad of paper lay on the table, and a group of around four pieces of laminated card, held together with a bulldog clip, rested against the right side. The cards measured around two feet by eighteen inches.

  Gus picked up a pen and began to speak again. “First, madam,” looking at the lady with the book, “I would like you to concentrate on the number of the page which has been chosen at random by another member of the audience. Good. I need complete silence during this, because it is not the easiest thing to do. It requires great concentration. Now, madam, would you simply think of the number. The number of the chosen page …Think harder …Try and imagine that you are thinking of the number so hard that you can see that number hanging right here, right in front of my eyes …Good …Good …Yes, you’re very good at this.” He jotted down something on the pad, picked up the larger cards and removed one from the bulldog clip, turning it sideways and at the same time picking up a black marking pen. He started to write something on the card in front of him, saying that he thought he had the correct number.

  “Now,” he continued, “I want you to read—to yourself—the first line of the chosen page. Tell me when you’ve read it and then concentrate on the first few words. That’s it …Do it as you did before …Think of the words hanging just above my eyes …Good. Yes …” He wrote on the laminated board. “Good. That’s it. Now, would you tell me, was the page number three hundred and twenty-seven?”

  The spectator looked surprised. “Yes.”

  “Sorry I could not get all of that first line, but it begins ‘trawl that was worth a damn.’” He turned the board to face the audience, and there it all was, written in large black marking pen: “Pag
e 327. trawl that was worth a damn.”

  “Yes.” She looked even more bewildered. “Yes …How the …?”

  “Watch your language, madam.” Gus wagged his finger at her. “We have some very reserved gentlemen here. For those who believe there is no need for an explanation,” he said with a smile. “And for those who do not believe there is no need for an explanation.”

  The applause was long and hard, so that Gus finally had to stop them. “That is how we must be seen to collect intelligence. It is how we must be seen to have secrets passed back from field agents to case officers. We all know that the old-fashioned agent in the field is back as flavor of the month, because electronic or satellite intelligence cannot look into the minds of those who would be our potential enemies, just as the wonders of electronics cannot see things that are truly well disguised and hidden. What I am showing you are demonstrations of devious means which should activate your senses, start your brains working. Think about this …” He picked up a boxed deck of cards and threw them out into the audience, where they were caught by a beefy-looking man three rows back.

  “Okay.” Gus stared unsmiling at the man. “Take the cards from their box. Now cut them and complete the cut. Take the top card. Do not look at it. Just put it into your pocket. Look through the cards just to be sure that it is an ordinary pack. Now put the pack back into the box.”

  The beefy man did as he was instructed.

  “In order for me to find out what card is in your pocket, I would have to either get you to take it out or go through the pack you are holding. Right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Even you do not know what the card is. Right?”

  “Correct again.”

  “Then how do I know it is the seven of spades? Look and see for yourself.”

  The spectator, and almost the entire audience, laughed nervously and broke into more wild applause as the man held up the card in his pocket, showing that it was, indeed, the seven of spades.

  “Keep the cards. A gift from me—and a club I know who really owns them.”

  He continued, talking about the way in which their agents should be invisible, and repeated that what he was doing was really a demonstration in the secret arts. “You probably think I am simply doing magic tricks or conjuring, but this is important. I have no need to give away any secrets for you to realize that the theory behind what I am doing is that same theory which has been drummed into the heads of intelligence, and counter-intelligence, officers from the beginning of time. The craft of intelligence is also the craft of the magician and illusionist. We are both the second oldest professions in the world, and we rely upon mundane things like misdirection—as we saw in World War II in Operation Fortitude and, incidentally, in the Gulf War when Saddam Hussein’s officers disguised trucks as missile launchers, and Scud missile launchers as trucks. The Iraqi military played an exceptionally good game of deception. Almost as good a game as the British magician Jasper Maskelyne played when—using tarps and lights, fires and a strobe on a pole—he made the Italian and German night bombers think that the harbor of Alexandria actually lay a mile up the coast in the bay of Maryut.”

  He proceeded to perform several other baffling pieces of magic, including a silver ball that floated across the stage, around Gus’s body and even right out into the audience. A beautiful illusion. (Herb looked it up in one of Gus’s books later and, found it was generally known as the Okito Floating Ball, supposedly invented by Theo Bamberg, the great Dutch magician who performed as an Oriental, calling himself Okito—a slightly garbled anagram of Tokyo. Okito came from a long line of Dutch magicians, but in truth the beautiful illusion was created by David P. Abbott, a magician and loan shark from Nebraska. As Herbie said, “Each day I learn more about the magical history.”)

  He also performed a small piece on his table—placed downstage so that it could be seen by everyone—introducing a small covered stand that contained a seven-inch Samurai sword, locked between a pair of wooden posts.

  Borrowing a ring from an American intelligence officer in the front row, Gus vanished the ring from his hands and, upon taking the golden covering off the stand, showed that the ring was now threaded onto the Samurai sword—an impossibility, as the sword had to be unlocked from its stand to remove the ring.

  All the time, he talked of how the performing art of magic as entertainment mirrored exactly the way in which the tradecraft of intelligence gathering had evolved over the decades.

  He reminded them that at least one American illusion builder had been employed by the American secret service to build hiding places into cars and other vehicles to smuggle documents, and even people, out of the old Soviet Union—and how this could well happen again, as the world was now more dangerous than it had been during the iceberg days of the Cold War.

  Finally, he came to the end of this extraordinary demonstration. “Always think of the psychology of deception; the use of optical illusion, the manner in which to hide in plain sight, and move invisibly.” He lifted a hand, twisted it in a circle and threw it down, dramatically. A sudden cloud of smoke covered him, and as it cleared, all that appeared to be left was a butterfly with a wingspan of approximately four feet. The butterfly seemed to hover in the center of the stage, then break up before the audience’s eyes into hundreds of red and yellow butterflies, fluttering in a great cloud; then they, too, vanished. In their place was a dove. The dove flapped its wings and flew out over the audience, high up to perch somewhere behind the camera’s eye as the tape slowly faded to the inevitable music again—the “Ritual Fire Dance.”

  Big Herbie looked at Bex, whose manner had changed. She saw him staring at her and snapped, “All right, Herb. So I was impressed. It was wonderful, but they’re still only tricks.”

  “Sure.” Herb scratched his head. “Sure, they’re tricks. But these are the kind of tricks you can translate into the work we do every day of our lives. The man’s a bloody genius.”

  There was a long pause, then Bex spoke: “You realize what you just said, Herb? You said the man—Gus—is a bloody genius.”

  “Was? Is? What’s the difference?”

  “Life and death.”

  Samira, Nabil and Ramsi settled their bill and left the Cavalieri Hilton in Rome at just after nine the next morning. This was a relatively easy job. Through contacts in Italy, the Yussif team had arranged for the complete bombs to be left in a camera shop within the Stazione Termini—Rome’s largest railway station. The bombs were large and packed into two aluminum camera cases. One was destined for the American Embassy in the Via Vittorio Veneto, while the other was to be placed inside Bernini’s Palazzo di Montecitorio—the seat of the lower house of the Italian Parliament.

  A lot of plastique was crammed inside the chunky, solid cases and, if set correctly, would cause a great deal of damage and probably many deaths.

  They arranged for Nabil and Ramsi to go into the shop and collect the bombs while Samira watched from some distance. There was an operational rule among the Intiqam teams that only two members of the cells should be together at dangerous moments. They did not realize how dangerous this particular moment was really going to be.

  At eight o’clock on the previous evening, a call had come in to the main police headquarters in Rome and a female voice told the operator that the people who had planted the bombs close to the Luxembourg and Bourbon palaces in Paris were now in Rome. Two of them would be picking up bombs the next day. She gave the exact location of the camera shop, spoke flawless Italian, assured them this was no hoax and was off the line before anyone had a chance to trace where the call came from. The Caller ID showed it was not placed in Rome itself, and all indications were that the woman was telephoning from somewhere overseas.

  The Italian authorities never treat any terrorist tip-off call as a possible hoax. Because of Italy’s complex political history—plus terrorist attacks ranging from the first Red Brigade units to Italian fascist extremists—their anti-terrorist organizations have been
organized and reorganized again and again. Nowadays most anti-terrorist operations are dealt with by a unit within the paramilitary Carabinieri, and it was the duty officer of this section of the Carabinieri who was called in to listen to the recording of the woman’s telephone warning.

  So it was that on the following morning, when Nabil and Ramsi went into the camera shop, they were under surveillance not only by Samira but also by a large force of unseen Carabinieri. Once the two members of the Intiqam cell were inside the shop, armed, uniformed men surrounded the whole of the railway station, while another group, in civilian clothes, moved in towards the shop. The general public were ushered away by uniformed police officers concerned lest the terrorists exploded one or both bombs in a last, desperate suicide act.

  Samira saw what was happening and walked away, distancing herself from the two men. If the worst came to the worst, she knew it would be up to her to make a run back to London.

  As Nabil and Ramsi emerged, carrying the two heavy aluminum cases, pistols and automatic weapons appeared in the hands of the plainclothesmen, and one officer shouted for the two Intiqam men to stop, put down the cases and place their hands over their heads. Ramsi, suddenly terrified by what he saw, forgot all his long training. By trade he was a bomb maker, happy to spend his time in some cellar or back room building devices that would cause death and horrible injury. He knew what his specialty would eventually accomplish, but like a pilot aiming his smart bombs from thousands of feet above the target, he was, by the nature of his work, detached from face-to-face combat, where instant death lay in the pistol in your hand. Ramsi was also at another disadvantage. He had been angry when briefed for these missions in Paris and Rome. Hadn’t he been sent with the team to build the bombs that would be used against their enemies? Hadn’t he received special training to arrange explosives, fuses and timers? Hadn’t he been given the most important job of teaching other members of the team to plant bombs, to set timers, to handle the explosives safely? Now he had been sent out to pick up bombs assembled by others in order to carry out the missions.