here for this lousy spaghetti? When we come we volunteer. So get on with it.'
Giancarlo nodded; he found her entertaining. 'Of course. Of course,' he said.
Giancarlo took his time. He ate and said contemplatively, 'The spaghetti is not so bad.' They all laughed and right off that laugh he said, 'The operation is directed against the President of the United States. He must be liquidated. Mr. Kennedy is linking our organization with the atom bomb explosion in his country. His government is planning special operations teams to target us on a global basis. I have come from a meeting where our friends from all over the world have decided to cooperate on this operation.'
Livia said, 'in America, that's impossible for us. Where would we get the money, the lines of communication, how can we set up safe houses and recruit personnel? And above all, the necessary intelligence. We have no base in America.'
Sallu said, 'Money is no problem. We are being funded. Personnel will be infiltrated and have only limited knowledge.'
Giancarlo said, 'Livia, you will go first. We have secret support in America. Very powerful people. They will help you set up safe houses and lines of communication. You will have funds available in certain banks. And you, Annee, will go in later as chief of operations. So you will have the tricky part.'
Annee felt a thrill of delight. Finally she would be an operational chief. Finally she would be the equal of Romeo and Yabril.
Livia's voice broke into her thoughts. 'What are our chances?' Livia asked.
Sallu said reassuringly, 'Yours are very good, Livia. If they get onto us, they'll let you ride free so they can scoop up the whole operation.
By the time Annee goes operational, you will be back in Italy.'
Giancarlo said to Annee, 'That's true. Annee, you will be at the greater risk.'
'I understand that,' Annee said.
'So do I,' Livia said. 'I meant, what are our chances for success?'
'Very small,' Giancarlo said. 'But even if we fail, we gain. We state our innocence.'
They spent the rest of the afternoon going over the operational plans, the codes to be used, the plans for the development of the special networks.
It was dusk when they were finished and Annee asked the question that had been unasked the whole afternoon. 'Tell me, then, is the worst scenario that this could be a suicide mission?'
Sallu bowed his head. Giancarlo's gentle eyes rested on Annee and he nodded. 'It could be,' he said. 'But that would be your decision, not ours. Romeo and Yabril are still alive, and we hope to free them. And I promise the same if you are captured.'
CHAPTER
17
CHRISTIAN KITE'S SPFCIAL division of the FBI ran computer surveillance on the Socrates Club and members of Congress. Klee always started his morning going through their reports. He personally operated his desktop computer, which held personal dossiers under his own secret codes.
This particular morning he called up the file of David Jatney and Cryder Cole. Klee had a fondness for his hunches and his hunch was that Jatney could be trouble. He no longer had to worry about Cole; that young man had become an enthusiastic motorcyclist and bashed his head against a stone cliff in Provo, Utah. He studied the video image that appeared on his monitor, the sensitive face, the dark recessed eyes. How the face changed from handsomeness in repose to one of frightening intensity when he became emotional. Were the emotions ugly or just the structure of the face? Jatney was under a loose surveillance, it was just a hunch.
But when Klee read the written reports on the computer, he felt a sense of satisfaction. The terrible insect buried in the egg that was David
Jatney was breaking out of its shell.
David Jatney had fired his rifle at Louis Inch because of a young woman named Irene Fletcher. Irene was delighted that someone had tried to kill Inch but never knew it was her lover who had fired the shot. This despite the fact that every day she beseeched him to tell her his innermost thoughts.
They had met on Montana Avenue, where she was one of the salesgirls in the famous Fioma Bake Shop, which sold the best breads in America. David went there to buy biscuits and rolls and chatted with Irene when she served him. One day she said to him, 'Would you like to go out with me tonight? We can eat Dutch.'
David smiled at her. She was not one of the typical blond California girls. She had a pretty round face with a determined look, her figure was just a little buxom, and she looked as if she might be just a little too old for him. She was about twenty-five. But her gray eyes had a lively sparkle and she always sounded intelligent in their conversations, so he said yes. And truth to tell, he was lonely.
They started a casual, friendly love affair; Irene Fletcher did not have the time for something more serious, nor the inclination. She had a five-year-old son, and he lived in her mother's house. She was very active in local politics and was intensely involved in Eastern religions, which was not at all unusual for a young person in Southern California.
For Jatney it was a refreshing experience. Irene often brought her young son, Campbell, to meetings that sometimes lasted far into the night, and she simply wrapped her little boy in an Indian blanket and put him to sleep on the floor as she vigorously pointed out the merits of a candidate for political office or the latest seer from the Far East. Sometimes David went to sleep on the floor with the young boy.
To Jatney, it was a perfect match-they had nothing in common. He hated religion and despised politics. Irene detested the movies and was interested only in books on exotic religions and left-wing social studies.
But they kept each other company, each filled a hole in the other's existence. When they had sex they were both a little offhand, but were always friendly. Sometimes Irene succumbed to a tenderness during sex that she immediately minimized afterward.
It was helpful that Irene loved to talk and David loved to be silent. They would lie in bed and Irene would talk for hours and David would listen.
Sometimes she was interesting and sometimes she was not. It was interesting that there was a continuous struggle between the real estate interests and the small homeowners and renters in Santa Monica. Jatney could sympathize with this. He loved Santa Monica; he loved the low skyline of two-story houses and one- story shops, the Spanish-looking villas, the general air of serenity, the total absence of chilling religious edifices like the Mormon tabernacles in his home state of Utah. He loved the great expanse of the Pacific, lying unobscured by glass and stone skyscrapers. He thought Irene a heroine for fighting to preserve all this against the ogres of the real estate interests.
She talked about her current Indian gurus and played their lectures on her tapes. These gurus were far more pleasant and humorous than the stem elders of the Mormon Church he had listened to while growing up, and their beliefs seemed more poetic, their miracles purer, more spiritual, more ethereal than the famous Mormon tablets of gold and the angel Moroni. But finally, they were just as boring with their rejection of the pleasures of this world and the fruits of success on earth, all of which Jatney so desperately desired.
And Irene would never stop talking, she achieved a kind of ecstasy when she talked even of the most ordinary things. Unlike Jatney, she found her life, ordinary as it was, altogether meaningful.
Sometimes when she was carried away and dissected her emotions for a full hour without interruption, he would feel that she was a star in the heavens growing larger and brighter and that he himself was falling into a bottomless black hole that was the universe, failing and falling while she never noticed.
He liked too that she was generous in material things but thrifty with her personal emotions. She would never really come to grief, she would never fall into that universal darkness. Her star would always expand, never lose its light. And he was grateful that this should be so. He did not want her company in the darkness.
One night they went for a walk on the beach just outside Malibu. It seemed weird to David Jatney that here was this great ocean on one side, then a row of houses and then mountains on the other side. It didn't seem natural to have mountains almost bordering an ocean. Irene had brought along blankets and a pillow and her child. They lay on the beach and the little boy, wrapped in blankets, fell asleep.
