Harry laughed. “Well, thanks for that. Actually, one of our League members, Saul Rogers, used to be a Bible student, and he convinced me that the book is a gold mine of information about the Jews, regardless of how long ago it was written and whether or not most of them still believe it. If you and Adelaide can come over again next Sunday I’ll introduce you to Saul.
“But please don’t leave here today with the notion that I base my convictions about the Jews’ role in world affairs on the Bible. As you said, it is only suggestive. It doesn’t prove anything. But what you needed was a few suggestions, I thought. Proof is harder to come by. There’s no single thing which really proves what the Jews are and what they’re up to. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is the sort of thing one wishes one had as a compact, self-contained, all-encompassing proof. Unfortunately, that particular item probably isn’t what it purports to be. It’s just too neat to be genuine. The truth is generally not so tidy. I believe that on a subject as complex and difficult as that of the Jews, the truth can only gradually take shape in one’s mind as one accumulates more and more evidence, from many sources. The Old Testament is one of those sources. Perhaps you’re ready for a few more now.
“Let’s see: you’ve been studying their role in the news and entertainment media, which is certainly essential. How about a little recent history — say, the Second World War?”
“Yes, that’s something I’m interested in, and I intend to look into it soon.”
“Good. I have some books you should take with you to get started. Come in here.” Harry led the way into his study. He pulled a book from a shelf and handed it to Oscar. “If you appreciate Breker’s art, this one’ll get your blood boiling. It describes a few of the things our government did to ‘re-educate’ the Germans after the war. One of those things was to send teams of GIs with sledge hammers around to smash up Breker’s sculptures. Graphic works, paintings, they either burned or confiscated. Half the paintings in Germany’s museums and other public buildings were looted by special ‘re-education’ teams and locked away in government vaults. ‘Nazi art’ they called it. And I’m not talking about stuff with swastikas on it. They grabbed or destroyed all of the 20th-century art that didn’t fit in with their modernist theme, everything that was healthy and natural, everything that reflected the German view of life. The whole program was run by Jews. Their names are all in here.”
Harry selected another four books and gave them to Oscar. “These’ll be a good introduction. You can spend six months just exploring the origins of the war, political factors influencing its conduct, and its aftermath that are never treated in the books that make it to the review section of the New York Times.”
XVII
Oscar and Adelaide didn’t visit Harry and Colleen again the next Sunday. In fact, it was nearly three weeks before they saw their new friends again. Meanwhile Oscar kept himself busy.
First and foremost was his study project. He continued his efforts to understand the Jews, reading the books that Harry had lent him and obtaining others from the library that references in Harry’s led him to. At the same time, however, he began broadening the scope of his study, trying to answer for himself the more basic question of what had gone wrong in the Western world in the last hundred years or so to bring his race to its present sorry state. Was it an intrinsic flaw in Western civilization, was it the Jews, or was it a combination of things?
Oscar’s intuition told him that, regardless of what he eventually decided was the role of the Jews, there had to be fundamental errors in the way his own people had been doing things. He needed to pin those things down and develop some ideas as to the changes that had to be made to put the race back on course again. It wasn’t that he thought it would be anything he could accomplish by himself, but he had to have at least a direction for his activities. He had to know that what he was doing made sense in the framework of a larger plan. Ryan, after all, had been right. He had been reacting, doing the easy things, striking at any handy target which attracted his attention. He couldn’t afford to keep that up, for several reasons. One was Adelaide. Another was Ryan. The most important was his own need to know that when he risked his life he was doing it for the right reason, not just to relieve frustration by striking out blindly at an enemy he had not even clearly identified. So he studied and he thought.
And he killed Danny Feldman for Ryan. He had more or less decided that he would carry out at least that assignment, and he was tentatively thinking of doing it within a couple of weeks, after he had worked out a detailed scenario. Then, on the Wednesday after his visit with the Kellers, Ryan called again. Again they met in the metro station.
“You’ve got to take out Feldman right away.”
“I was planning to do that fairly soon. How about sometime toward the end of next week?”
“No. We’ve got to get him out of circulation within the next 48 hours. He can’t be alive after 4:00 PM Friday.”
“Dammit, Ryan, I have to figure the details of the job first. What’s the rush?”
“The rush is that things are moving faster in the Bureau than I had thought they would. Rizzo is being canned next week, by Wednesday at the latest, and the new head of the section will be named. The Director intends to do it before the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism begins holding hearings next Thursday. This could be a prelude to what I told you about last week: a new anti-terrorism agency. I know that the Director has been discussing that possibility with Senator Herman, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
“The problem is that the word has been leaked to the Hebe caucus in the Bureau — undoubtedly by the committee’s chief counsel, who’s a Jew. Now they’re scurrying around trying to head off my getting Rizzo’s position. I know that all of them, including Feldman, are holding a pow-wow this weekend in a motel in Alexandria. We’ll be listening to what’s said at that meeting, but it’s still essential to silence Feldman before then. If he’s at that meeting, I know exactly what he’ll say. He’ll be giving them all the details about that Klan operation last year, and then they’ll be figuring just how to use that against me. It’s the only way they can possibly block me now.”
“Instead of eavesdropping, why don’t you just blow up the motel and solve your Jewish problem in the Bureau for good?”
“Are you crazy? We don’t do that sort of thing. And I couldn’t afford to have you do it either. Jesus, can you imagine the stink that would make — especially after Kaplan? They’re already suspicious as hell about what happened to him. If all the rest of the Hebes in the Bureau suddenly got knocked off, every Jew in Congress, every Jewish organization in this country, and every Jew in the news media would be screaming his lungs out. I can’t afford any more heat when Feldman goes — and there shouldn’t be any, if you do the job right.”
“So I’ve got 48 hours to figure this one out and then execute it. You expect a lot, Ryan.”
“I have faith in you, Yeager. Now the thing about this Feldman job is it mustn’t look like a hit. Understand? It’s got to look like something else happened to him. I can help you with that to save you some time. When you leave here take the briefcase there on the floor beside me. In it you’ll find one of our special gadgets. It’s a dart pistol, which is effective up to a range of about 50 feet, although it’s better to get in closer if you can. There are two darts with it. They’re loaded with a very special drug: a powerful heart stimulant that’ll cause his heart to literally tear itself apart. An autopsy will show the cause of death to be a heart attack. The drug itself is hydrolyzed to the point where it can’t be detected in the victim’s blood after 12 hours. All you’ve got to remember to do is get the dart out of him after he drops.”
“It seems to me I’ve got one other little problem too. How do I keep him from shooting me before the drug does its thing?”
“The drug is very fast. His heart will be convulsing within 15 seconds of the time the dart hits him. He’ll be in so much pain then he won’t be able
to do anything but roll around on the ground. His heart will have damaged itself irreparably within 30 seconds, and he’ll be unconscious by that time. I’m sure you’ll be able to stay out of harm’s way for the first ten or 15 seconds.”
“What does the FBI use gadgets like your dart gun for? Do you people really perform assassinations, like some of the paranoid leftists have been claiming for years?”
“Nah. We got this one from the Israelis. They use it against the leaders of Palestinian demonstrations in the Occupied Territories; they pop ‘em right on the street without attracting attention or causing a commotion. They probably use it for assassinations in other countries too. It’s rumored that they’ve knocked off former Nazi Party members all over the world with similar guns.”
“Fascinating. The fact remains, I’ve got to hit Feldman either this evening or tomorrow evening. I can hardly walk into your headquarters and shoot him in his office while he’s at work.”
“Or tomorrow morning, before he gets to work — even Friday morning, but don’t put if off any later than that. Good luck, Yeager. And remember, be careful! The bastard is dangerous.” Ryan smiled and then turned on his heel and headed for the door of a subway train which had just stopped at the platform. Oscar picked up the briefcase.
After returning home he studied his scanty notes on Feldman. The man was 40 years old, married — to an Israeli woman — and had four children. He lived with his family in the Maryland suburb of Silver Spring. He was a moderate drinker and had regular habits, without any obvious quirks, as in the case of Kaplan. His only known weakness was gambling. He usually played poker with four other Jews on Thursday evenings, rotating the location from one home to another, and he and his wife made at least four trips a year to the casinos of Atlantic City or Las Vegas.
Oscar rubbed his head. In order to catch the man outside, it seemed that he would have to find a suitable location near the man’s home and wait for him to leave for work in the morning or come home in the evening. That might be reasonable if he used his rifle; he might hope to find an unobtrusive place to park and pick the man off from a distance without even leaving his car. But that would cause serious problems for Ryan. How in hell was he going to get within 50 feet of an armed, trigger-happy killer like Feldman so he could use his dart gun, unless he could hide in some shrubbery beside the man’s front door? He sighed. The first thing was to drive out to Silver Spring and look things over.
The Feldman residence was a large, new-looking house set more than a hundred feet back from the street behind half an acre of well-tended lawn. The graveled driveway curved around to the side of the house, where Oscar could just make out a garage door in the end wall as he drove past and then what appeared to be a tennis court beyond that. The Bureau evidently paid its minions well. A dozen large shade trees dotted the lawn, but there were no useful shrubs near either the front door or the garage door — just very low, ornamental plants. Besides, it was almost certain that the garage door had a radio-controlled opener, and that Feldman would enter and leave his car only inside the garage and would use an inside door between the garage and the rest of the house. Damn!
Then Oscar caught a glimpse of something from the corner of his eye which produced an instant spark of inspiration: a child’s bicycle was leaning against one of the posts supporting the tennis net. That was the way to do it! He scouted out a good parking place some three blocks away and stopped his car there to look at his notes again. The Thursday-night poker games, according to Ryan’s information, began at eight o’clock and lasted until about midnight. That meant that Feldman would be leaving home between 7:30 and 7:45 tomorrow evening — well after dark — unless the game were being held at his house this week. There was one chance in five of the latter being the case.
He wondered whether Ryan might know about that but decided almost immediately not to try to contact him; no point in upsetting him at this stage. The poker game would be his one chance of catching Feldman after dark, and there was nothing to be lost by trying it. If Feldman didn’t go out tomorrow night, then Oscar would have to try again Friday morning when the man left for work — a much riskier enterprise. He drove past the house one more time to study the tree he had tentatively picked on the first pass: a big one, about halfway up the drive and 30 feet or so to the right of it. Now he had just one more thing to do before tomorrow night: steal a child’s bicycle.
He found one on his way home: a bit dilapidated and rusty, with red fenders and balloon tires, about two-thirds the size of an adult bike. He spotted it leaning against a cinderblock wall at the end of a small shopping mall and pulled his car up beside it. Within half a minute he had it in the luggage compartment and was on his way again. He spent the rest of the afternoon studying, until Adelaide arrived for dinner at six.
When he parked in his preselected spot the next night, it was exactly seven o’clock. He took the bicycle from his trunk and rolled it along the sidewalk toward Feldman’s house. As he neared his destination he became painfully aware that the sidewalks in the area were quite brightly illuminated by streetlights, and he reproached himself for not having returned after dark the previous night in order to survey the lighting of the area and spot any potential problems. He actually had intended to do so, but Adelaide had been even more affectionate than usual, and after an unusually energetic and pleasurable series of romps with her he had fallen asleep and not awakened until she pulled the covers off him at 6:30 in the morning.
The sidewalk ended several hundred yards before he reached Feldman’s driveway, and once there he noted that although the front and sides of the house itself were well lighted by floodlamps the nearest streetlight was more than 200 feet away, and the area around the tree he had picked was in deep shadow. “The Lord takes care of sinners,” he muttered to himself with relief.
He had barely settled himself behind the tree when he heard the sound of the garage door opening; Feldman must be leaving earlier than he had estimated. He hastily placed the bicycle in the center of the drive about ten feet closer to the street than his tree and then darted back into its shadow. As he expected, Feldman’s car braked sharply and halted directly opposite his tree. He heard the door opening, Feldman cursing, and then footsteps in the gravel. When he peered around the tree Feldman, spotlighted by his own headlights, was bending over to pick up the bicycle.
As the man straightened up, a dart struck him between his shoulder blades. He cursed loudly in Hebrew and whirled around, still holding the bicycle, but he was blinded by the glare of the headlights and could see nothing in Oscar’s direction. He dropped the bicycle, drew a pistol, and ran back toward his car, still cursing. Oscar ducked back behind his tree and waited. Within a few seconds the cursing stopped, and Oscar heard a strangled scream, followed by unintelligible, animal-like noises.
Feldman was crumpled on the grass beside the open driver’s door, his purpling face contorted. Oscar quickly located the dying man’s pistol on the ground and lifted his body enough to slip it back into its holster. He plucked the shaft of the spent dart from the back of the man’s coat, picked up the bicycle, and rolled it back toward his own car, whistling softly as he went. He should admit it to himself, he thought: he really enjoyed this sort of thing; furthermore, he wasn’t at all bad at it.
On his way home he stopped at the shopping mall where he had found the bicycle and carefully leaned it against the wall again, just the way it had been the day before.
XVIII
Oscar was obliged to spend a portion of his time during the next few days preparing an interim report on his antenna design study for the Air Force. The design actually had been completed months before, but the immediate task was the extraction of a portion of the work from his calculations and their arrangement in a research report. The task was complicated by the need to obscure sufficiently the methods used so that the design work would seem more difficult than it actually had been. He intended to stretch this particular contract out just as long as he could, with appropriate
cost overruns, of course. Fortunately, the Air Force was very accommodating in such matters.
The rest of his time was occupied by his principal study project. He had reached a stage in this where it helped him to clarify his ideas by discussing them with Adelaide, who was assisting him each evening with the preparation of the antenna report. He regarded their discussions as a way of raising her racial consciousness as well.
“Baby, it’s certainly hard to get to the truth of this Jewish question,” he said, putting down the book he had been reading and looking over at her. She was finishing the stapling of the five finished copies of the report. “I’m on my fourth book about the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It’s quite clear that the Jews played a dominant role in it. In fact, the revolution never could have gotten off the ground without their participation. Its principal theorists, starting with Karl Marx, were Jews; it was financed by Jewish capitalists; and most of its officers and activists also belonged to the tribe. Without them Lenin would have been broke and practically alone. He would have had no operating funds and no lieutenants to carry out his schemes. What’s not entirely clear is their motivation. Harry Keller would say that the revolution was simply a Jewish stratagem for gaining power for the Jews in Russia.
“On the other hand, everything the Jews themselves have written about it claims that the appeal communism had for them was based on their desire to promote social justice. Their hearts ached for the oppressed workers, and they felt a sense of moral outrage over the corruption and abuses of power in the czarist government. Some Jewish writers go so far as to say that the Jewish religion compelled them to take the side of the working class and to promote equality. In other words, their motivation was pure altruism.
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