Not quite able to follow what was going on here, the PLO goatherd had risen from the conference table and strayed to the window, where he looked down and watched an ambulance with a flashing dome light thread its way through the partially congealed traffic—as that ambulance did every night at precisely this time. Starr’s colorful language had attracted his attention, and he was thumbing through his pocket English/Arabic dictionary, muttering, “Nookie… nookie…” when suddenly the Washington Monument and the wide avenue of cars vanished, and the window was filled with a blinding light.
The goatherd screamed and threw himself to the floor, covering his head in anticipation of the explosion.
Everyone in the room reacted characteristically. Starr leapt up and whipped out his Magnum. Miss Swivven slumped into a chair. The Deputy covered his face with a sheet of typing paper. Diamond closed his eyes and shook his head at these asses with which he was surrounded. Mr. Able examined his cuticles. And the First Assistant, absorbed in his technological intercourse with Fat Boy, failed to notice that anything had happened.
“Get off the floor, for chrissake,” Diamond said. “It’s nothing. The street-scene film has broken, that’s all.”
“Yes, but…” the goatherd babbled.
“You came down in the elevator. You must have known you were in the basement.”
“Yes, but…”
“Did you think you were looking down from the Sixteenth Floor?”
“No, but…”
“Miss Swivven, shut the rear projector off and make a note to have it repaired.” Diamond turned to Mr. Able. “I had it installed to create a better working environment, to keep the office from feeling shut up in the bowels of the earth.”
“And you have been capable of fooling yourself?” Starr snapped his gun back into its holster and glared at the window, as though to say it had been lucky… this time.
With ruminantial ambiguity, the goatherd grinned sheepishly as he got to his feet. “Boy-o-boy, that was a good one! I guess the joke was on me!”
Out in the machine room, Miss Swivven threw a switch, and the glaring light in the window went out, leaving a matte white rectangle that had the effect of sealing the room up and reducing its size.
“All right,” Diamond said, “now you have some insight into the man we’re dealing with. I want to talk a little strategy, and for that I would as soon have you two out of here.” He pointed Starr and the PLO goatherd toward the exercise and sun room. “Wait in there until you’re called.”
Appearing indifferent to his dismissal. Star ambled toward the sun room, followed by the Arab who insisted on explaining again that he guessed the joke had been on him.
When the door closed behind them, Diamond addressed the two men at the conference table, speaking as though the First Assistant were not present, as indeed in many ways he was not.
“Let me lay out what I think we ought to do. First—”
“Just a moment, Mr. Diamond,” Mr. Able interrupted. “I am concerned about one thing. Just what is your relationship to Nicholai Hel?”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, come now! It is evident that you have taken a particular interest in this person. You are familiar with so many details that do not appear in the computer printout.”
Diamond shrugged. “After all, he’s a mauve-card man; and it’s my job to keep current with—”
“Excuse me for interrupting you again, but I am not interested in evasions. You have admitted that the officer in charge of the interrogation of Nicholai Hel was your brother.”
Diamond stared at the OPEC troubleshooter for a second. “That’s right. Major Diamond was my brother. My older brother.”
“You were close to your brother?”
“When our parents died, my brother took care of me. He supported me while he was working his way through college. Even while he was working his way up through the OSS—a notoriously WASP organization—and later with CIA, he continued to—”
“Do spare us the domestic details. I would be correct to say that you were very close to him?”
Diamond’s voice was tight. “Very close.”
“All right. Now there is something you passed over rather quickly in your biographic sketch of Nicholai Hel. You mentioned that he required, as a part of his pay for doing the Peking assignment that got him out of prison, the current addresses of the three men involved in beating and torturing him during his interrogation. May I presume he did not want the addresses for the purpose of sending Christmas cards… or Hanukkah greetings?”
Diamond’s jaw muscles rippled.
“My dear friend, if this affair is as serious as you seem to believe it is, and if you are seeking my assistance in clearing it up, then I must insist upon understanding everything that might bear upon the matter.”
Diamond pressed his palms together and hooked the thumbs under his chin. He spoke from behind the fingers, his voice mechanical and atonic. “Approximately one year after Hel showed up in Indo-China, the ‘doctor’ who had been in charge of administering drugs during the interrogation was found dead in his abortion clinic in Manhattan. The coroner’s report described the death as accidental, a freak fall which had resulted in one of the test tubes he was carrying shattering and going through his throat. Two months later, the MP sergeant who had administered the physical aspects of the interrogation and who had been transferred back to the United States died in an automobile accident. He had evidently fallen asleep at the wheel and driven his car off the road and over a cliff. Exactly three months later, Major Diamond—then Lieutenant Colonel Diamond—was on assignment in Bavaria. He had a skiing accident.” Diamond paused and tapped his lips with his forefingers.
“Another freak accident, I suppose?” Mr. Able prompted.
“That’s right. As best they could tell, he had taken a bad jump. He was found with a ski pole through his chest.”
“Hm-m-m,” Mr. Able said after a pause. “So this is the way CIA protects its own? It must be quite a satisfaction for you to have under your control the organization that gave away your brother’s life as part of a fee.”
Diamond looked across at the Deputy. “Yes. It has been a satisfaction.”
The Deputy cleared his throat. “Actually, I didn’t enter the Company until the spring of—”
“Tell me something,” Mr. Able said. “Why haven’t you taken retributive action against Hel before now?”
“I did once. And I will again. I have time.”
“You did once? When was– Ah! Of course! Those policemen who surrounded that house in Los Angeles and opened fire half an hour before schedule! That was your doing?”
Diamond’s nod had the quality of a bow to applause.
“So there is some revenge motive in all of this for you, it would seem.”
“I’m acting in the best interest of the Mother Company. I have a message from the Chairman telling me that failure in this would be unacceptable. If Hel has to be terminated to assure the success of the Septembrists skyjacking then, yes, I shall take some personal satisfaction in that. It will be a life for a life, not, as in his case, three murders for one beating!”
“I doubt that he considered them murders. More likely he thought of them as executions. And if my guess is right, it was not the pain of the beatings that he was avenging.”
“What, then?”
“The indignity of them. That’s something you would have no way to understand.”
Diamond puffed out a short laugh. “You really imagine you know Hel better than I do?”
“In some ways, yes—despite your years of studying him and his actions. You see, he and I—accepting our cultural differences—are of the same caste. You will never see this Hel clearly, squinting as you do across the indefinite but impassable barrier of breeding—a great gulf fixed, as the Qoran or one of those books terms it. But let us not descend to personalities. Presumably you sent those two plebes from the room for some other reason than a desire to improve the quality of the company.”