was drained of the noxious ooze, to which end they were energetically purchasing land all over the world, buying out companies, infiltrating banking systems, and exercising financial control over political figures throughout the industrialized West. They had certain advantages in effecting these designs. First, they could maneuver quickly because they were not burdened by the viscous political systems of democracy. Second, the politicians of the West are corrupt and available. Third, the mass of Westerners are greedy, lazy, and lacking any sense of history, having been conditioned by the atomic era to live on the rim of doomsday, and therefore only concerned with ease and prosperity in their own lifetimes.
The cluster of energy corporations that constitute the Mother Company could have broken the blackmail stranglehold of the Arab nations at any time. Raw oil is worthless until it is converted into a profitable pollutant, and they alone controlled the hoarding and distribution facilities. But the Mother Company's long-range objective was to use the bludgeon of contrived oil shortages to bring into their control all sources of energy: coal, atomic, solar, geothermic. As one aspect of their symbiotic affair, OPEC served the Mother Company by creating shortages when She wanted to build pipelines over fragile tundra, or block major governmental investment in research into solar and wind energy, or create natural gas shortfalls when pressing for removal of price controls. In return, the Mother Company serviced the OPEC nations in many ways, not the least of which was applying political pressure during the oil embargo to prevent the Western nations from taking the obvious step of occupying the land and liberating the oil for the common good. Doing this required more rhetorical suppleness than the Arabs realized, because the Mother Company was, at the same time, mounting vast propaganda programs to make the masses believe She was working to make America independent from foreign oil imports, using major stockholders who were also beloved figures from the entertainment world to gain popular support for their exploration of fossil fuel, their endangering of mankind with atomic wastes, their contaminating of the seas with off-shore drilling and reckless mishandling of oil freighters.
Both the Mother Company and the OPEC powers were passing through a delicate period of transition; the one attempting to convert Her oil monopoly into a hegemony over all other energy sources, so Her power and profit would not wane with the depletion of the world's oil supply; the other striving to transform its oil wealth into industrial and territorial possessions throughout the Western world. And it was to ease their way through this difficult and vulnerable period that they granted unlimited authority to Mr. Diamond and Mr. Able to deal with the three most dangerous obstacles to their success: the vicious efforts of the PLO to use their nuisance value to gain a share of the Arab spoils; the mindless and bungling interference of the CIA and its sensory organ the NSA; and Israel's tenacious and selfish insistence upon survival.
In bold, it was Mr. Diamond's role to control the CIA and, through the international power of the Mother Company, the actions of the Western states; while Mr. Able was assigned the task of keeping the individual Arab states in line. This last was particularly difficult as those powers are an uneasy blend of medieval dictatorships and chaotic military socialisms.
Keeping the PLO in line was their major problem. Both OPEC and the Mother Company agreed that the Palestinians were a pest out of all proportion to their significance, but the vagaries of history had made them and their petty cause a rallying point for the divergent Arab nations. Everyone would gladly have been rid of their stupidity and viciousness, but unfortunately these diseases, although communicable, are not fatal. Still, Mr. Able did what he could to keep them defused and impotent, and had recently drained much of the potency from them by creating the Lebanon disaster.
But he had not been able to prevent Palestinian terrorists from making the Munich Olympics blunder, which wasted years of anti-Jewish propaganda that had been thriving on the basis of latent anti-semitism throughout the West. Mr. Able had done what he could; he had alerted Mr. Diamond of the event beforehand. And Diamond sent the information on to the West German government, assuming they would handle the matter. Instead, they lay back and let it happen, not that protection of Jews has ever been a dominant theme in the German conscience.
Although there was a long history of cooperation between Diamond and Able, and a certain mutual admiration, there was no friendship. Diamond was uncomfortable with Mr. Able's sexual ambiguity. Beyond that, he detested the Arab's cultural advantages and social ease, for Diamond had been raised on the streets of New York's West Side, and like many risen plebes was driven by that reverse snobbism that assumes breeding to be a personality flaw.
For his part, Mr. Able viewed Diamond with disdain he never bothered to disguise. He saw his own role as a patriotic and noble one, laboring to create a power base for his people when their oil was gone. But Diamond was a whore, willing to submerge the interests of his own people in return for wealth and an opportunity to play at the game of power. He dismissed Diamond as a prototypic American, one whose view of honor and dignity was circumscribed by lust for gain. He thought of Americans as a decadent people whose idea of refinement is fluffy toilet paper. Affluent children who race about their highways, playing with their CB radios, pretending to be World War II pilots. Where is the fiber in a people whose best-selling poet is Rod McKuen, the Howard Cosell of verse?
Mr. Able's mind was running to thoughts like these, as he sat at the head of the conference table, his face impassive, a slight smile of polite distance on his lips. He never permitted his disgust to show, knowing that his people must continue to cooperate with the Americans—until they had finished the task of buying their nation out from under them.
Mr. Diamond was sitting back in his chair, examining the ceiling while he thought of a way to introduce this problem so that it would not seem to be entirely his fault. 'All right,' he said, 'a little background. After the Munich Olympics screw-up, we had your commitment that you would control the PLO and avoid that kind of bad press in the future.'
Mr. Able sighed. Well, at least Diamond had not begun his story with the escape of the Israelites across the Red Sea.
'As a sop to them,' Diamond continued, 'we arranged that whatshisname would be permitted to appear on the UN floor and unleash his slobbering fulminations against the Jews. But despite your assurances, we recently discovered that a cell of Black Septembrists-including two who had participated in the Munich raid—had your permission to run a stupid skyjacking out of Heathrow.'
Mr. Able shrugged. 'Circumstances alter intentions. I do not owe you an explanation for everything we do. Suffice it to say that this last exercise in blood lust was their price for biding their time until American pressure saps Israel's ability to defend itself.'
'And we went along with you on that. As passive assistance, I ordered CIA to avoid any counteraction against the Septembrists. These orders were probably redundant, as the traditions of incompetence within the organization would have effectively neutralized them anyway.'
The Deputy cleared his throat to object, but Diamond hushed him with a lift of the hand and continued. 'We went a step beyond passive assistance. When we learned that a small, informal group of Israelis was on the track of those responsible for the Munich massacre, we decided to interdict them with a spoiling raid. The leader of this group was one Asa Stern, an ex-political whose son was among the athletes killed in Munich. Because we knew that Stern was suffering from terminal cancer—he died two weeks ago—and his little group consisted only of a handful of idealistic young amateurs, we assumed the combined forces of your Arab intelligence organization and our CIA would be adequate to blow them away.'
'And it was not?'
'And it was not. These two men at the table were responsible for the operation, although the Arab was really no more than an agent-in-training. In a very wet and public action they managed to terminate two of the three members of Stern's group... along with seven bystanders. But one member, a girl named Hannah Stern, niece of the late leader, slipped through them.'
Mr. Able sighed and closed his eyes. Did nothing ever work correctly in this country with its cumbersome form of government? When would they discover that the world is in a post-democratic era? 'You say that
'It would be ridiculous. But Miss Stern is not going to London. We are quite sure she went to France. We are also sure that she is now, or soon will be, in contact with one Nicholai Hel—a mauve-card man who is perfectly capable of penetrating your people and mine and all the British, of terminating the Black Septembrists, and of being
