A Song Called Youth (57 page)

“Was that all.” Flat like that. No question mark.

“And he mentioned you.”

Howie had been staring at a moth-eaten elk’s head over the bar. Now his eyes jerked back to focus on Stoner; the artificial one took a micro-moment longer to line up with the other.

“How’s that implanted eye treating you, Howie?”

“Okay. I had some ghost-image problems with it. It picked up some TV station, I was seeing football players running through my office. And one of those AntiViolence executions, some guy getting his head blown open in front of a studio audience . . . I saw that while I was in the fucking cafeteria trying to eat my dinner. Blew away my appetite. Had to get my eye reinsulated. What’d Unger say about me, goddammit?”

“He said he heard you were a good buddy of mine. I said yeah. He said, ‘Alignment is everything, Stoner.’ I said, ‘Huh?’ and he said, ‘You should be careful who you pick to be your friends, Kimosabe. Pick people who’re on their way up.’ ” Stoner waited for Howie’s reaction. Howie just sat there, looking leaden, motionless, staring at his beer bottle. “What is it with you and him, Howie? What the hell was he talking about?”

“He was talking about the new Hiring Assessment Program, man. They make it sound nice with a name like that. Whitewash it.” He smiled bitterly at some private joke.

“Go on.”

Howie shook his head. “He’s an asshole, but he gave you good advice. You don’t want to know any more about it.”

“Yeah, I do. Come on, man. We known each other for a while. Hell, I married your niece, Howie. Come on.”

Howie sighed. “Okay. You asked for it. You’re going to think it’s paranoid bullshit, though. You ever wonder why I’m in AD now, after eighteen years in the field?”

“Sure, I wondered.” With a little embarrassment, because he’d assumed Howie had fucked up in some major way.

“Let me tell you something, I wondered too. I got twelve Special Commendations, I figured that was enough. I applied for desk work, figured something supervisory in Langley. Department Chief. Wanted to settle back with my family. So they transferred me, all right—to the fucking accounting department. Man, I got seniority, experience, training, education, and know-how over every fucking one of my five immediate superiors. You know? I got my masters in psych, I got . . . ” He broke off, swiped at an imaginary fly. “They don’t care about any of it. They said the Assessment Program evaluated me as being best suited for accounting. So I looked into this Assessment Program. It’s supposed to be based on a new ‘personnel efficiency study.’ Only there never was any such study. It just doesn’t exist. The whole thing was cooked up by Unger and the director, and so far it’s only been applied to blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, Jews, and anyone who’s even politically moderate. Nobody else.”

Stoner stared at him and shook his head in disbelief. “You’re saying they’re using this Assessment Program for racial discrimination? To ‘keep the niggers down?’ Howie—this is the twenty-first century. Even the CIA has to worry about race-discrimination suits . . . ”

“Do they? All that’s going to be quietly scotched by Congress, after . . . Well, the HAP program is just for starters. When they can, they
fire
blacks. Or . . . well, remember Winston Post?”

“Tall guy, used to be a basketball player, worked in personnel?”

“Yeah. It was him who first found out that this ‘efficiency study’ was bogus. He started complaining, talking lawsuits. Where is he now?”

“Come on—it was a car accident, man, brakes went out, that could happen to anyone.”

“Sure happened at a convenient time. And that was a brand new car the brakes went out on. Eight hundred miles on it. His wife tells me she called an ambulance, but it didn’t come for almost an hour and a half. She asked them how come they took so long and they said some plainclothes cops pulled them over and hassled them. And Winston bled to death in the wreck.”

“Jesus. That sounds like . . . ”

“Yeah. But don’t say you heard it here. I’m retiring as soon as I can. I’m getting out, man.”

“Maybe I ought to get out too.”

“What for? If Unger bothered to warn you, means he wants you to change sides. They’ve decided you’re valuable. You got that famous memory of yours, that talent for data search. And you’re not exactly a liberal. They know you got a bug up your ass about Communism.”

“Christ, the New-Soviets are blockading the Atlantic ports, fighting over the Panama canal, blockading the Space Colony, and they fucking invaded half of Europe, and you’re telling me I got
a bug up my ass
about ’em?”

“Anyway, you and Unger are in the same camp that way—he hates the Reds too and anyone they can call ‘socialist.’ So they want you solidly with them when they purge the Agency. And when they purge the rest of the government, and maybe the whole fucking country . . . ”

“Hey—now you’re getting paranoid.”

“Right. Sure. But you know who’s behind this Assessment Program? Our friends in the Second Alliance. The SA. Post saw the memo—it was on their recommendation. Who you know that’s more racist than the SA, man, huh? You read that Kupperbind file. And where’s Kupperbind now? Let me tell you something, Stoner . . . these bastards have just begun. Before they’re through, it’s going to be a white, white world, my friend . . . ”

The Island of Malta.

“We can’t really be alone,” Steinfeld said. “But sometimes it feels as if we are.”

Torrence nodded.

They were in a villa on the island of Malta, in the Mediterranean Sea. A little chill was creeping into the evening air, but compared to the Alps, it was almost balmy here. Deep winter in Malta was like early fall in New York.

The villa was a Mossad safe house. It was high and narrow, an anomaly in the landscape. Nothing but trees and scrub and boulders around it for ten acres square. The villa’s designers could have sprawled it out comfortably, like many Mediterranean country houses. But they’d chosen the gaunt effusion of an Italian town house. It was three narrow stories, with a balcony on each of the upper stories; the top balcony faced north, the lower faced east. There was a ten-foot brick wall around the property, topped with barbed wire. Cameras and infrared detection devices were snugged discreetly in the trees. It was perfect for the Mossad’s purposes: It commanded a view of the fields and olive orchards beyond its grounds; it could be defended from the balconies in two directions, and the wall would help ensure privacy. To the east, beyond an olive orchard, was the sea. To the south, forty yards behind the house, was the barn, actually a hangar, just big enough for a chopper with its switch-back blades secured.

Steinfeld, Torrence, Claire, Danco, and an Englishman named Chiswell were sitting around the old wooden table in the gray stone kitchen. Chiswell was a tall, basset-faced man with wispy brown hair and a melancholy intensity.

Torrence shifted in his seat, wincing, feeling the bandages rasp on his wounds. He sat on pillows, because the Mossad medic had dug some fragments from his buttocks.

They were into their third cup of coffee after dinner. They were cleaned up, in fresh clothing, and well-fed, and in safe, warm surroundings—and they all felt like hell.

The light was fading, the room darkening visibly minute by minute. No one felt like getting up to turn on the light. Their faces were increasingly veiled by deepening shadow.

Steinfeld sat across from Torrence, hunched over the table, an empty pewter coffee cup between his hands. He turned it back and forth in his palms like a potter. “What we’ve got is this: about four hundred troops coming from France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland. Solely NR. And we’re in touch with the alignments: the Communist party of France, the Italian Leninists, a cadre of anarchists . . . all of them have gone underground, so it’s hard to say how many they number, and harder still to work steadily with them. But we’re in touch. The Communists, especially, are doing some very good organizing.” He sounded distant, almost mournful.

Claire sounded even more distant when, her voice almost too faint to hear, she asked, “Isn’t it . . . unwise to bring everyone here? We’ll all be one target, then.” Torrence looked at her, wondering again if she’d been through too much. She was wearing a gray, much zippered pilot’s jumpsuit the Israelis had given her. As she spoke, she sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window at the tangerine smear of sunset.

Steinfeld said, “Yes, it’s a risk for us all to regroup in one place. But the Fascists have made it impractical for us to work the way we worked before, at least for now. They’ve got complete military control of France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Northern Italy, and Greece. They’re consolidating control in six more countries, including England. Legally speaking, their control is supposed to be temporary, and it’s supposed to be only in terms of law enforcement, but in most places they’ve succeeded in placing their puppets in administrative positions. They’ve got a lot of grass-roots support from the white, native Europeans because the SA does tend to bring order to chaos, wherever they appear, things do become orderly, and where there are still rails intact . . . ”

He didn’t have to say it: the trains run on time.

Steinfeld went on. “And, of course, the white Christians see them isolating the Algerians and the other blacks and immigrants in assigned ghettos, arresting anyone black or Arab or Jewish who so much as sneezes. And the white Christians who are prejudiced respond favorably when they see that. And even the ones who were formerly liberal . . . ” He shrugged. “Jack Smoke once said that social chaos has a way of making conservatives. When there is privation, famine, constant danger, some low instinct seems to make people suspicious of strangers, or of anyone at all different. Open minds will slam shut . . . ” He paused to sigh. The darkness thickened in the room. “There are only a few courses open to us. We can run to the States and work there to try to awaken the public to what’s going on over here. The SA’s American people are manipulating the news, censoring things without seeming to. Here, they don’t permit journalists to accompany NATO troops in Europe. People in America don’t know what’s happening here. But Smoke and Witcher and their team are working on changing that already, and if we leave Europe, the continent’s only resistance core will be gone.”

By insisting on keeping all political activity out of the NR—except, of course, for its primary mandate—Steinfeld had made the New Resistance a resource available to Communists, capitalists, anarchists, republicist conservatives, liberals; all flavors of those persuasions, as long as they were opposed to the Second Alliance. New NR recruits sometimes joined on their own; others might be assigned by the Socialist Workers Party, or the Libertarian Party—but all were required to take a mortally serious vow that clearly stated they would put all political disagreements with other Resistance fighters aside, giving first priority to the struggle with the New Fascism. Steinfeld’s organization supplied the sundry Communist and anarchist resistance cadres with money, weapons, and sometimes hiding places; in return, the cadres provided intel, safe houses for traveling NR actives, and sometimes military reinforcement. They coordinated their sabotage efforts, and together managed to keep the SA off-balance.

Occasionally there were polite ideological arguments in the NR ranks. Some of the republicists muttered about the danger of giving Communists resources that would help them survive so they’d be around after it was all over.

But Steinfeld had said, “There will always be Communists. I’m against all dictatorships—even dictatorships of the proletariat. But we have to learn to live with Communists.”

At such times Levassier, who was a Trotskyite, would complain bitterly of Steinfeld’s patronizing tone with respect to the People’s Revolution, and he would insist that the dictatorial phase of Communism was only temporary, in order to enforce revolutionary reforms, and he would go on to quote Marcuse’s claim that the so-called free world was a dictatorship that used media and conformist conditioning to enforce its dominion. “Zuh Grid,” Levassier said: “All zuh television and Internet, all electronic media, banking computer systems, all of zis—this is their gulag . . . ”

NR political discussions were always mild and rhetorical, never became real infighting.

They were all too urgently aware of the real fight.

“If core NR escapes to the USA,” Steinfeld said, “we weaken the other resistance groups. But—SA surveillance on the continent is so tight, we’re finding it tougher to get away with anything. And people are frightened.” He made a gesture that almost seemed to convey despair. It was difficult to tell; his face was lost in shadow. “They’re beginning to turn our people in.”

“So what does that leave us?” Torrence asked.

And the room grew darker yet.

Steinfeld took a deep, rheumy breath. “The Fascists have two European headquarters—Paris and Palermo. The Sicilian headquarters is also their center of communications, and one of their top air bases. According to our information, Colonel Watson and five other top Second Alliance officials will be in Palermo in early March to evaluate the European situation. They’ll be in conference with Crandall by satellite. If they decide the situation is amenable, they’ll move into the second phase of their campaign to take control of Europe. They’ll announce something called the Self-Policing Organization of European States. SPOES will claim it’s the core of a new economic and political unity that will protect it from the ravages of New-Soviet and American interference, and from the war itself. It will be . . . ”

“ . . . A new Axis,” Danco burst out. “Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Tojo, in the last century. Now we will have Le Pen, Sinsera, and the other SA puppets.”

Steinfeld said simply, “Yes.” After a moment he added, “In effect, they will be announcing the birth of a new Fascist state.”

No one spoke for a full minute. Then Torrence said, “You want to raid their Palermo HQ? That it?”

Steinfeld grunted in assent. His chair creaked mournfully as he shifted his weight, leaned back.