INTERVENTION (27 page)

May we sit down? The intermission is nearly over.

Montedoro inclined his head graciously.

Your associates whom we met outside are resting in the men's lounge. They'll probably feel much better after a good night's sleep. The fellow on the floor will require prompt hospitalization. Porcaro and LoPresti, however, will receive their treatment from me.

O'Connor's two companions had gone to Joe Porks and relieved him of his burdens. They guided him to the fourth seat at the front of the box near to LoPresti and sat him down, then retired again to the shadows. The five-minute-warning chime sounded. People began returning to their seats in the boxes to the right and left. They paid no attention to the mobsters and their uninvited guests.

"He's talking," Falcone whispered, his eyes bulging with terror, "but he
ain't
talking."

Montedoro was staring at Kieran with shrewd speculation. "So you're Camastra's edge. No wonder he made you. No wonder he raised you to consigliere."

"I have other talents as well, Don Guido. If you help reorganize the Commission and put it into efficient operation, you may benefit from my unique abilities yourself. And so may Don Vicenzu, and other businessmen of honor."
But first we must settle another matter.

Falcone said hesitantly, "It wasn't me ordered the hit, O'Connor. You know that, don't you? You're a counselor. Untouchable. But LoPresti was burned because you undercut us on the bidding last year for the Montréal Connection. That was a pipeline he sweat blood to bring in, and the froggies were all ready to deal—until you convinced 'em otherwise." He gave a weak laugh. "Maybe now we know
how
you convinced 'em."

"I'm not a miracle-worker," Kieran said. "My ... influence isn't long-lasting and it certainly doesn't extend over distances. What I offered Montréal was a better deal and safer conditions of transfer, using the Saint Lawrence Seaway. No danger of hijacking, no payoffs to cops or customs, and payment direct to Switzerland. Chapelle explained all that to LoPresti. It was a simple business matter, Don Vicenzu, but your man chose to treat it as a personal affront. He's stupid and shortsighted and vindictive, and so is his animal, Porcaro."

"I agree," said Falcone.

The lights in the Opera House were dimming and the patrons settled down. Applause greeted Maestro Lopez-Cobos as he entered the pit and motioned for the players in the orchestra to rise.

Then there will be peace between Chicago and the Falcone Family, Don Vicenzul

The don spoke in a harsh whisper. "I swear it. I swear it."

And you are a witness to this, Don Guidol?

"I am," said Montedoro.

The hall had become very dark. The conductor raised his baton and the pianissimo notes of an organ began the overture to Act Four of
La Favorita.
LoPresti and Porcaro sat beside Falcone with only the rise and fall of their shirt-fronts signaling life, apparently held in a trance by the two associates of O'Connor who were glaring at the backs of their necks. Kieran rose to his feet and put his right hand on Porcaro's head and his left on LoPresti's. The paralyzed men started violently and O'Connor himself suppressed a groan.

This ... is not revenge, you understand. Only simple justice. A restoration of order. Don Guido, your men should be able to cope with the disposal of this pair without too much difficulty. It will be an educational experience for them.
We
will send them in on our way out.

And then O'Connor and the two men with him were gone, and the gold brocade curtain opened on the handsome Ming Cho Lee set of a monastery courtyard in Spain. The stage illumination lit the faces of the audience. Falcone was aware of a faint, peculiar odor. He leaned over and saw that the eye sockets of his henchmen had become streaming wells of dark fluid, and that neither man was breathing even though they both sat very straight in their luxurious chairs.

ALMA-ATA, KAZAKH SSR, EARTH

10
JULY
1979

H
E WAS THE
most self-effacing member of the delegation of Indian parapsychology scholars visiting Kazakh State University, and afterward many staff members at the Bioenergetics Institute (including the Director) denied that he had been there at all. But the truth was that he had been the one who arranged for the tour in the first place, as a pretext for meeting Yuri and Tamara.

The visitors had seen nothing of the laboratory where the young biophysicist and his wife worked, since it was under the Cosmic security classification. Instead they toured the Kirlian facility, where scanning devices purported to monitor the nonphysical aura of living things. Although one or two of the delegates asked indiscreet questions about corona discharge effects and water vapor, most were suitably impressed. In the afternoon there was a tea, presided over by the Director of the Institute, where the delegates were given the opportunity to mingle with the various project supervisors and a few of the percipient subjects whose psychic powers were under analysis. Yuri and Tamara were there, introduced simply as "biocommunications specialists." They said very little and slipped away early, and forgot about the group of Indian scholars almost at once. Their attention was fully occupied by the matter of Abdizhamil Simonov. There were rumors that Andropov himself was taking a personal interest in the KGB's inquiry into the mind-controller's sudden death.

That evening, as Tamara was putting little Valery and Ilya to bed, Yuri received a phone call from the Director.

"A distinguished member of the Indian Paraphysics Association tour group has asked for a personal meeting with you and your wife." The Director's voice was strained and overly formal. "He was told that such an appointment would be difficult to arrange, since it would have to be approved by Moscow. This did not deter him. He ... prevailed upon me to phone the Comrade Academician himself with the request. It was approved."

Yuri could only say, "How unusual!"

"You will meet this Dr. Urgyen Bhotia in the main lobby of the Hotel Kazakhstan as soon as possible. He is a Tibetan resident of Darjeeling, and he wishes to speak to you about certain studies he has made that are relevant to your work. Show him every courtesy." Before Yuri could respond, the Director hung up.

Tamara came out of the children's bedroom with lifted brows.

He transferred the amazing gist of the conversation to her in an instant, adding: I have no idea what this is all about but we are going to have to see this guru and postpone our discussion with Alia and Mukan until later tonight I'll call them while you get Natasha to baby-sit.

When everything was arranged, they took a bus across town to the soaring new hotel on Lenin Avenue, where only the most distinguished visitors were housed. No sooner had they come into the air-conditioned lobby than the strangely influential Tibetan was there bowing. He was a short, sturdy man with very brown skin, dressed in crisply pressed trekker's garb.

"Dr. Gawrys and Madame Gawrys-Sakhvadze, I am Urgyen Bhotia. I thank you profoundly for coming here, and apologize for causing you inconvenience. I hope you will forgive my summoning you in such a precipitate manner, but I have waited nearly five years for this moment."
Shall we stroll outside in the cool of the evening!

Yuri froze in the act of shaking hands. Tamara said: I think that would be wise. Have you taken the cable car up Koktyube Hill?

Not yet but I hear it provides a marvelous view of the city.

Yuri said: You
know
us and our work? How can this be?

The Tibetan laughed and said, "This is not my first visit to your lovely city of Alma-Ata, but it is my first opportunity to enjoy it with all my physical senses! Let us walk."

He casually took an arm of each of them when they were outside and guided them across Abai Avenue into the gardens of the Lenin Palace of Culture as though he were the host and they the visitors. The fountains were lit with the coming of dusk and the spray from them was cooling and welcome. A heavy scent of flowers arose from the formal gardens and Urgyen paused to admire them.

"So many lush growing things in this splendid, modem city! The aether sings with vitality." He might have been any age from forty to sixty. His head was shaved and his cheeks were such a bright red that they might have been rouged. His teeth were very white and perfect and his eyes, almost hidden in a mass of deep creases when he smiled, were an unusual hazel color.

Tamara said, "It is clear that you are one of the adept—unlike your colleagues. You will please tell us how you came to know of our psychic faculties and of our work, since both are closely guarded state secrets."

"I know you," the Tibetan said, "because I have been blessed with an ability to perceive the bioplasma of the brightest ones across great distances. My vision extends only throughout Asia. But for more than twenty years now, since leaving Tibet, I have studied the soul manifestation by means of what you would call remote-viewing. I saw the two of you for the first time in 1974, when you were newly come to Alma-Ata, a double mind-star more brilliant than any I had found before. Since then I have watched, I rejoiced in the birth of your two brilliantly ensouled sons, and now I anticipate with you the coming of your third child, a daughter."

"It
is
a girl?" Tamara exclaimed.

"Most assuredly." Urgyen searched the faces of the young couple, ruefully acknowledging the mental barricades they had erected against him. "Please do not be afraid of me. My only wish is to help you at this very difficult time, when you two and the many immature minds under your care find yourselves at a moral crossroads."

"You say you have watched us," Yuri stated. "How close has your astral scrutiny been? Have you read our minds?"

"You know from your own remote-viewing studies that such a thing is impossible. Nor can I read them now unless you freely give access. Nevertheless, I am aware of the temptations bedeviling you and the dangers that you face. I asked myself and the Compassionate Lord if it was my duty to advise you."

"And what," Yuri inquired coldly, "did your heavenly oracle say?"

"I was helped to understand that, in spite of certain inhumane actions you have abetted, you are both persons of goodwill. You have rejected the false joy of the great determinism that hands over the individual conscience to a group and evades personal responsibility. You know you are free, and you know you will have to make choices. Too many people of your nation deny this difficult truth. They do not understand that the human mind must cultivate both soul and spirit if it is to be integral."

"You will have to explain that," Yuri said.

They walked on, across the palace concourse and into trees where cicadas were beginning to buzz.

Urgyen said, "A month ago there was a meeting of leaders in Vienna. The President of the United States and the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev signed a strategic arms limitation treaty. At one of their conferences, which took place in the Soviet embassy in Vienna, a person from your Bioenergetics Institute named Simonov exerted coercive and mind-altering force upon the American President, throwing him into a state of confusion and irrationality that still persists ... The Chairman of your KGB was so elated by Simonov's success that he made arrangements to send the man to Washington, where he would be able to exert his inimical influence upon other American leaders, as ordered. The plan was aborted when Simonov dropped dead while jogging on the university campus."

"An autopsy showed that his heart was enlarged and weakened," Yuri said. "It is a disability that often accompanies great psychic exertion. I myself am under a physician's care for similar symptoms."

"Exactly," said Urgyen sadly.

They walked in silence. Ahead was the brightly lit funicular station, the goal of many other evening strollers.

Tamara said, "Abdizhamil Simonov was a tribal shaman before he was recruited to the Institute, a petty and vicious man who resisted all our efforts to dissuade him from cooperating in Andropov's scheme. He was half mad, a menace to world peace. The KGB thought they could control him, but we knew they could not."

Urgyen nodded. "There was also Ryrik Volzhsky, a strong coercer and an incorrigible corrupter of children. You have in your special program at the Institute more than sixty youthful psychics. When Volzhsky persuaded your Director to assign him to the pedagogical staff, both of you admonished him to restrain himself. He laughed. Two days later he was found drowned in the Bolshaya Alma-Atinka River."

"The normals can only agonize in their impotence when confronted by evil," Yuri said. "They can only utter foolish curses or wish the destruction of the wicked. We are more fortunate."

"The soul would say so, but not the spirit," said the Tibetan.

They came to the ticket office, where Yuri paid. Then the three of them got into one of the crowded red-and-yellow cablecars. The other holidaymakers made room for pregnant Tamara near the window, and a moment later they were soaring up the hillside, suspended in the clear air, with the discussion now relegated to telepathy.

Yuri said: So you presume to judge me and castigate me with your pious Eastern word-play ... Soul and spirit! Talk instead of life and death! Talk of a pair of fearful children become the toys of power-corrupted old men who would use marvelous mind-powers as weapons rather than dedicate them to the good of humanity!

Urgyen said: But if you kill even in a cause that seems just are you any better than your oppressors?

Tamara said: We regretted the deaths bitterly. Yuri acted only after serious reflection.

Urgyen said: In Tibet in the eleventh century the poet Milarepa had mental powers like yours. He was able to strike his enemies dead from afar. But only after he renounced his usurpation of god-power did he become a saint.

Yuri said: We aren't saints. We are only persons wanting to survive. Yes I killed and because I am a Pole and a Catholic I was tormented and I wish there had been another way but there was not. Once I was timid little Jerzy snatched from my parents in
iodz
bullied and cajoled into mental slavery thinking there was no helping it. Then came Tamara! In Leningrad the scientists studied us and tested us and the military men tried to convince us that our duty was unquestioning loyalty and service to the state. But Tamara knew better and helped me to know also. Her dear father was exiled because he dared to protest and publicize the GRU's treatment of us and of other psychics.