Hour of the Assassins (44 page)

So C.J. was part of the Starfish Conspiracy and that meant Wasserman was too, right from the beginning. They had played him for a sucker all along. No, you allowed them to do it to you, he amended, and a terrible anger flooded his veins. It was time to stop being a pawn of the mysterious von Schiffen, he decided. It was time to strike back.

He sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the wall. The stone was cold and damp, soaking the back of his shirt. He shivered. Jesus, he thought. First it's too hot, then it's too cold. You're never satisfied. He wondered when they would feed him. Then his anger took hold. You're a man, not an animal waiting at an empty trough, he told himself. So be a man, goddamnit! You've got a mind. Use it! That's what it's for. Because unless you kill the Starfish, it's going to kill you.

But there isn't enough data, he objected. Oh, bullshit, there's never enough data. Figure it out anyway. After all you've got plenty of time. You're not going anywhere, he told himself.

What did he know about the Starfish, anyway? he wondered. They were all in on it somehow. C.J., Wasserman, Harris—that meant the Company—and ODESSA. Mengele had known about it too. The Starfish had wanted Mengele killed and had picked him to do the job. Why him? Obviously because they couldn't do it themselves. Why not somebody from the Company? Of course, because it was a dirty business and the Company wanted to disclaim any involvement if it all came out. That was probably why they wanted Mengele out of the way in the first place. Because something was about to come out and they didn't want the infamous Mengele to be associated with it. The Peruvian government was obviously involved, because they had landed on him like a duck on a June bug as soon as C.J. picked up the telephone.

How many did that make? he wondered. There was Wasserman, the Company, ODESSA, and the Peruvians. That made four. How many arms did a starfish have? Five, he thought. Unless von Schiffen was the fifth. What's in a name, anyway? Starfish was a funny name for an operation. So was von Schiffen, come to that, he mused. He stirred restlessly. He was getting close, he thought with a growing excitement. His shirt was soaking wet from the damp wall and he moved away from it, uncomfortably. Fucking water, he thought. And then he had it. Water!

Jesus, he thought with a sense of awe. Names mattered. Those fucking krauts!
Der Seestern
was a water animal! He thought back to his first interview with Wasserman, because there was something there that had bothered him right from the beginning. Something Wasserman had said. Then he remembered his confused dream in the jungle, after he drank the
ayahuasca
. The Wasserman monkey had said something from that first meeting. His subconscious mind had been trying to tell him something. Of course! Leipzig! Now he had it all, he thought darkly. He had thought there was something phony about the accent right from the beginning. The trouble was that he had been thinking in English and yet he had been dealing with Germans all along. He should have been thinking in German. The German names all had something to do with water. And as Koenig used to say, there are no coincidences in this business. Names mattered, all right. He had the what and the how. The only thing missing was the why, and he would get to the bottom of that soon enough.

The betrayal was complete. It was incredible! The Americans and the Peruvians and the Nazis were all in it together. How could the Company do it? he wondered. How could they do it after what happened in Vietnam? And then he remembered Talleyrand's line about the Bourbons. “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Well, the Bourbons were still running the show. Principles are mankind's most expendable baggage, he thought grimly. And they had used him to further their evil scheme and then tossed him on the garbage heap as soon as he was no longer needed. But they had made one mistake. He was still alive. And he wasn't playing their game anymore. He was on his own now. And it was very personal.

It was happening again, he thought with horror. It was Germany and Laos and Cambodia and Nam all over again. And he was the only one who could still stop it. They had made a mistake—he was still alive. And he was going to stop them just as he had stopped Mengele, he vowed. The job wasn't over yet. And nothing on earth was going to stop him. Nothing! He got up and began to pound on the steel door in a fury.

“I'm alive, you bastards! I'm still alive!” he shouted again and again. At last he slumped to the floor, exhausted.

Nothing happened. There was only the darkness and the terrible silence. He began to pace up and back, up and back, carefully counting his steps hour after hour, until he got into the rhythm of it. He had to plan his escape.

Sounds of muffled footsteps reached him through the steel door. There was a grating sound as the hinge opened and a tin plate slid in. Then the footsteps receded. He examined the plate by the dim light of the hinge, which he held open. The plate held a small portion of watery fish soup. It smelled disgusting and he almost dropped it as his stomach turned. There was something floating in it. He touched it and it turned over and stared back at him. It was a fish eye. But he would have to keep up his strength if he was to escape, he thought, and forced himself to slurp it all down.

He resumed pacing, hour after hour in the darkness. He no longer noticed the stench, or gagged when he swallowed the fishy water, which seemed to be the only item on the menu. They had to come for him soon, he thought. The darkness and the silence were getting to him. And he was getting weaker all the time. Judging by the stubble of beard on his face, he had been there several days already and it seemed that they fed him the watery plate only twice a day. He didn't know how much longer he could last.

He tried and rejected one plan after another, counting out each move in rhythm to his endlessly shuffling steps. No matter what he did, conditioning would matter and he forced himself to do push-ups till he collapsed. Then he did sit-ups until his stomach hurt so much he could scarcely breathe. Then he went back to push-ups. He began to evolve a regular routine. One hour of push-ups and sit-ups, one hour of pacing up and back, then back to the exercises. He estimated the time by counting twenty breaths to the minute, twelve hundred breaths to the hour.

He was constantly hungry. Thoughts of elaborate meals tantalized him and he spent hours planning the meals he would have if he ever got out. He could almost taste a big steak and fries, but the thought only made him hungrier. He couldn't shake it. Hunger was a dull, gnawing ache that never went away. He could feel it even while he slept. The whole thing was impossible, he thought. He was getting weaker all the time. Besides, what could one man, alone, unarmed, and in solitary confinement, do to stop the powerful forces that were gathering like storm clouds. Don't think that way, he told himself, warming himself on the fire of his anger. One man can do anything if he's willing to die for it.

By the end of what he estimated was the third day, he had a plan worked out. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was all he had. It depended on the notion that they apparently wanted to keep him alive, probably for a murder trial. That was the heart of it, that they wanted to keep him alive and he was now willing to die.

He would have to make his move in court, at a hearing or trial or whatever their procedure was. It would be the one place where he probably wouldn't be handcuffed or under heavy guard. He would have to get near a guard, disarm him, and shoot it out, or grab the judge or someone important as a hostage. They'd probably never agree to let him escape. If he could get out, he could go to ground, contact Sam, and arrange a clandestine flight to the States. But that was probably a pipe dream. More likely he could hold them off for a while and try to get his message through to reporters, to try and blow the Starfish wide open. It probably wouldn't help, but it was the best he could do. He ought to be able to hold off the security police long enough for that, he thought.

They'd kill him in the end, of course. And then try to hush it up by claiming he was some kind of a lunatic, or a political terrorist. But somebody might believe him. Feinberg would know the truth. And maybe Amnon and a few others. That was all he could hope for. They'd kill him anyway—the Bourbons would see to that. They always did. But at least this way he would have chosen his death. It wasn't much, he admitted. But at least it was something.

Now that he had a plan, he felt a certain sense of relief. The die was cast and all that remained was the acting out. When the time came, he would be ready. He remembered how Koenig always used to quote his favorite line, slapping his ruler against the poster of it that he'd had made up and tacked to the blackboard. It was something that Louis Pasteur had said: “Chance only favors the mind that is prepared.”

He was in the middle of a push-up when he heard the sounds of approaching footsteps. It sounded like a number of men. He leaped to his feet, his heart beating with the frenzied rhythm of a voodoo drum. The footsteps paused outside the door and he backed against the wall. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he could hardly catch his breath.

The steel door opened with a loud clang and the cell was filled with blinding light. He threw his arms over his eyes to shield them against the agonizing brightness. He heard someone step into the cell and there was a murmur of voices. Squinting his eyes open the tiniest crack, he could just make out the dim figure of a man silhouetted against the white, smoky light flooding the doorway. Gradually his eyes began to focus and then he could begin painfully to see. Except that they had come for him too late, because he knew he must be crazy. He simply couldn't be seeing what he was seeing, he thought despairingly.

Bob Harris was standing there in the doorway.

Harris was elegant as ever, in a gray three-piece tropical worsted suit, smoking a cigarette as though he were posing for a magazine layout. Harris wrinkled his nose with distaste at the stench in the cell.

“Jesus, Johnny. Whatever you're wearing, it isn't exactly Chanel Number Five,” Harris said.

CHAPTER 19

“Oil,” Caine said finally and glanced out the window at the shiny blue surface of the Pacific, far below.

“What the world needs now is oil, sweet oil,” Harris crooned off-key to the tune of an old love song. He reached up and pressed the button for the pretty blond flight attendant in the modish yellow Braniff uniform that made her look like an extra on the
Star Trek
set. When she came over, Harris ordered another round of martinis. As she walked back to the first-class cabin bar, Harris contemplated her cute behind with a dreamy smile of pleasure.

“So that was the why behind the Starfish,” Caine mused.

“Biggest damn strike since the North Slope in Alaska. That's what started all the balls bouncing. It was first brought to our attention by Sobil National, a consortium of American companies headed by Sobil Oil, the company who made the first strike on the Santiago River, a tributary of the Marañon. You were closer than you knew with that Petrotex cover, Johnny. You almost blew it right then and there,” Harris said, glancing around to make sure they weren't overheard.

The flight attendant returned with the drinks and a couple of extra bags of peanuts. She almost spilled the drinks, because she couldn't take her eyes off Caine. That was hardly surprising, considering the fact that his picture had been plastered across the front page of every major newspaper in the world for the past two days. Caine smiled absentmindedly at her and she responded with an inviting grin. Caine sipped moodily at his drink and she turned away with a shrug. The martini had that vaguely metallic taste that he always associated with pressurized cabin air.

“Then Sobil Oil was the fifth arm of the Starfish,” Caine said. Harris nodded.

“How did von Schiffen and ODESSA get involved?” Caine asked.

Harris lit two cigarettes and handed one to Caine, as if he were Paul Henreid about to tell Bette Davis that the affair was over.

“That was the funny part,” Harris admitted. “Nobody knows who or where von Schiffen is. All we know for sure is that von Schiffen heads ODESSA. Von Schiffen acquired the mineral and oil rights to almost the entire Peruvian Amazon about twenty years ago as a perfectly legitimate business investment, using some of ODESSA'S vast funds. At the time most of his
Kameraden
probably thought he was crazy, but ODESSA isn't exactly run in a democratic fashion. Anyway, von Schiffen owned it all.

“Sobil had information indicating that the left-wing military junta that runs the Peruvian government planned to nationalize the Amazon oil fields and that's when we got involved. If the Peruvians took over the fields, the American consumer would have never seen a drop of that oil. The biggest oil strike in history, right in our own backyard, found by us and they were going to lock us out of it.

“It went right to the top, Johnny. The DCI himself took it to the National Security Council and they gave us our marching orders: The energy crisis is the moral equivalent of war and we were to secure the Peruvian oil for the U.S. no matter what the cost. Out of that came the Starfish Conspiracy.”

Caine angrily stubbed out his cigarette and stared out of the window at the endless ocean. Somewhere in the shadowed depths of the sea thousands of starfish were undoubtedly crawling. They always came back, he though grimly. The Bourbons. The Nazis. Like starfish, they could regenerate themselves from the tiniest fragment. A starfish cannot be killed, only exterminated, he thought.

“So we decided to overthrow the legitimate Peruvian government and replace it with a Nazi regime who agreed to sell us the oil. Congratulations, Bob. You've risen to a new low,” Caine said, realizing how stupid he sounded. Insulting Harris was like pouring water on a duck.

“Not a Nazi regime, Johnny,” Harris said mildly, bringing out his sincere smile as though it were a gift. “A coalition government of right-wing Peruvian Army officers and certain acceptable representatives from ODESSA. Shit, ever since the leftist General Velasco was forced out in '75, the junta has been moving to the right, thanks to a few key ODESSA appointments in the right spots—and a little help from us. And why the hell shouldn't we pursue our own interests? We were well within our rights. Monroe Doctrine and all that. Besides, we're the ones who found the oil in the first place.”