Diamond glanced at him tiredly. 'That's a fair price for one of your countrymen. The basic reason governments are willing to pay Hel so much for exterminating terrorists is that terrorism is the most economical means of warfare. Consider the cost of mounting a force capable of protecting every individual in a nation from attack in the street, in his home, in his car. It costs millions of dollars just to search for the victim of a terrorist kidnapping. It's quite a bargain if the government can have the terrorist exterminated for a few hundred thousand, and avoid the antigovernment propaganda of a trial at the same time.' Diamond turned to the First Assistant. 'What is the average fee Hel gets for a hit?'
The First Assistant posed the simple question to Fat Boy. 'Just over quarter of a million, sir. That's in dollars. But it seems he has refused to accept American dollars since 1963.'
Mr. Able chuckled. 'An astute man. Even if one runs all the way to the bank to change dollars for real money, their plunging value will cost him some fiscal erosion.'
'Of course,' the First Assistant continued, 'that average fee is skewed. You'd get a better idea of his pay if you used the mean.'
'Why is that?' the Deputy asked, pleased to have something to say.
'It seems that he occasionally takes on assignments without pay.'
'Oh?' Mr. Able said. 'That's surprising. Considering his experiences at the hands of the Occupation Forces and his desire to live in a style appropriate to his tastes and breeding, I would have assumed he worked for the highest bidder.'
'Not quite,' Diamond corrected. 'Since 1967 he has taken on assignments for various Jewish militant groups without pay—some kind of twisted admiration for their struggle against larger forces.'
Mr. Able smiled thinly.
'Take another case,' Diamond continued. 'He has done services without pay for ETA-6, the Basque Nationalist organization. In return, they protect him and his chateau in the mountains. That protection, by the way, is very effective. We have three known incidents of men going into the mountains to effect retribution for some action of Hel's, and in each case the men have simply disappeared. And every once in a while Hel takes on a job for no other reason than his disgust at the actions of some terrorist group. He did one like that not too long ago for the West German government. Flash that one up, Llewellyn.'
The men around the conference table scanned the details of Hel's penetration into a notorious group of German urban terrorists that led to the imprisonment of the man after whom the group was named and the death of the woman.
'He was involved in that?', Mr. Able asked with a slight tone of awe.
'That was one heavy number,' Starr admitted. 'I shit thee not!''
'Yes, but his highest pay for a single action was in the United States,' Diamond said. 'And interestingly enough, it was a private individual who footed the bill. Let's have that one, Llewellyn.'
'Which one is that, sir?'
'Los Angeles—May of seventy-four.'
As the rear-projection came up, Diamond explained. 'You'll remember this. Five members of a gang of urban vandals and thieves calling themselves the Symbiotic Maoist Falange were put away in an hour-long firefight in which three hundred fifty police SWAT forces, FBI men, and CIA advisers poured thousands of rounds into the house in which they were holed up.'
'What did Hel have to do with that?' Starr asked.
'He had been hired by a certain person to locate the guerrillas and put them away. A plan was worked out in which the police and FBI were to be tipped off, the whole thing timed so they would arrive after the wet work was done, so they could collect the glory... and responsibility. Unfortunately for Hel, they arrived half an hour too early, and he was in the house when they surrounded it and opened fire, along with gas- and firebombing. He had to break through the floor and hide in the crawl space while the place burned down around him. In the confusion of the last minute, he was able to get out and join the mob of officers. Evidently he was dressed as a SWAT man—flack vest, baseball cap, and all.'
'But as I recall,' Mr. Able said, 'there were reports of firing from within the house during the action.'
'That was the released story. Fortunately, no one ever stopped to consider that, although two submachine guns and an arsenal of handguns and shotguns was found in the charred wreckage, not one of the three hundred fifty police (and God knows how many onlookers) was so much as scratched after an hour of firing.'
'But it seems to me that I remember seeing a photograph of a brick wall with chips out of it from bullets.'
'Sure. When you surround a building with over three hundred gunhappy heavies and open fire, a fair number of slugs are going to pass in one window and out another.'
Mr. Able laughed. 'You're saying the police and FBI and CIA were firing on themselves?'
Diamond shrugged. 'You don't buy geniuses for twenty thousand a year.'
The Deputy felt he had to come to the defense of his organization. 'I should remind you that CIA was there purely in an advisory capacity. We are prohibited by law from doing domestic wet work.'
Everyone looked at him in silence, until Mr. Able broke it with a question for Diamond: 'Why did this individual go to the expense of having Mr. Hel do the hit, when the police were only too willing?'
'The police might have taken a prisoner. And that prisoner might have testified in a subsequent trial.'
'Ah, yes. I see.'
Diamond turned to the First Assistant. 'Pick up the scan rate and just skim the rest of Hel's known operations.'
In rapid chronological order, sketches of action after action flashed up on the tabletop. San Sebastian, sponsor ETA-6; Berlin, sponsor German government; Cairo, sponsor unknown; Belfast, sponsor IRA; Belfast, sponsor UDA; Belfast, sponsor British government—and on and on. Then the record suddenly stopped.
'He retired two years ago,' Diamond explained.
'Well, if he is retired...' Mr. Able lifted his palms in a gesture that asked what they were so worried about.
'Unfortunately, Hel has an overdeveloped sense of duty to friends. And Asa Stern was a friend.'
'Tell me. Several times this word 'stunt' came up on the printout. I don't understand that.'
'It has to do with Hel's system for pricing his services. He calls his actions 'stunts'; and he prices them the same way movie stunt men do, on the basis of two factors: the difficulty of the job, and the danger of failure. For instance, if a hit is hard to accomplish for reasons of narrow access to the mark or difficult penetration into the organization, the price will be higher. But if the consequences of the act are not too heavy because of the incompetence of the organization against which the action is performed, the price is lower (as in the case of the IRA, for instance, or CIA). Or take a reverse case of that: Hel's last stunt before retirement. There was a man in Hong Kong who wanted to get his brother out of Communist China. For someone like Hel, this wasn't too difficult, so you might imagine the fee would be relatively modest. But the price of capture would have been death, so that adjusted the fee upward. See how it goes?'
'How much did he receive for that particular... stunt?'
'Oddly enough, nothing—m money. The man who hired him operates a training academy for the most expensive concubines in the world. He buys baby girls from all over the Orient and educates them in tact and social graces. Only about one in fifty develop into beautiful and skillful enough products to enter his exclusive trade. The rest he simply equips with useful occupations and releases at the age of eighteen. In fact, all the girls are free to leave whenever they want, but because they get fifty percent of their yearly fee—between one and two hundred thousand dollars—they usually continue to work for him for ten or so years, then they retire in the prime of life with five hundred thousand or so in the bank. This man had a particularly stellar pupil, a woman of about thirty who went on the market for quarter-of-a-mil per year. In return for getting the brother out, Hel took two years of her service. She lives with him now at his chateau. Her name is Hana—part Japanese, part Negro, part Cauc. As an interesting sidelight, this training academy passes for a Christian orphanage. The girls wear dark-blue uniforms, and the women who train them wear nuns' habits. The place is called the Orphanage of the Passion.'
Starr produced a low whistle. You're telling me that this squack of Hel's gets a quarter of a million a year? What'd that come to per screw, I wonder?'
'In your case,' Diamond said, 'about a hundred twenty-five thousand.'
The PLO goatherd shook his head. 'This Nicholai Hel must be very rich from the point of view of money,
