very well. I expect a successful result.”
Nicholai didn’t bother with a concurring banality.
“Keep your hands off your face,” the doctor said to him. Turning to the nurse, he added, “If he doesn’t want anything for the pain, he doesn’t want anything for the pain. When he gets tired of playing the stoic, he’ll call you. Take your time getting there if you want a small measure of revenge.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“I do good work,” the doctor said to Nicholai. “You’re going to have to beat the women off with a stick.”
It took Nicholai quite a while to work through the idiom.
“There will be some minor paralysis of some small facial muscles, I’m afraid,” the doctor added, “but nothing you can’t live with. It will help you keep that indifferent front of yours.”
Nicholai never did call for the shot.
Nor did he move.
4
CAMOUFLAGED BY NIGHT and the monsoon’s slashing rain, the one they call the Cobra squatted perfectly still.
The Cobra watched the man’s feet plop down in the mud and slosh onto the trail that led toward the bushes where he would do his personal business. It was his routine, so the Cobra was expecting him. The assassin had sat and waited many nights to learn the prey’s habits.
The man came closer, just a few feet now from where the Cobra waited in the bamboo beside the narrow footpath. Intent on his destination, the man saw nothing as he wiped a sluice of rain from his face.
The Cobra chose that moment to uncoil and strike. The blade – silver like the rain – shot out and slashed the man’s thigh. The victim felt the odd pain, looked down, and pressed his hand to the bloody tear in his pants leg. But it was too late – the femoral artery was severed and the blood poured around his hand and through his fingers. Already in shock, he sat down and watched his life flow into the puddle that quickly formed around him.
The Cobra was already gone.
5
IF MAJOR DIAMOND was pleased that Nicholai Hel had accepted the deal, he wasn’t overly demonstrative in his enthusiasm.
“Hel’s a half-Nippo nut job,” Diamond said, “with scrambled brains.”
“Yes,” Haverford answered, “you had something to do with scrambling them, didn’t you?”
“He was a Commie agent.” Diamond shrugged. Sure, he’d roughed Hel up a little, used him as a guinea pig for some of the new pharmaceutical techniques. So what? They were at war with the Communist bloc and it was a dirty war. Besides, Hel was an arrogant young shit – that superior, condescending attitude of his just made you want to hurt him.
Diamond thought he’d left him far behind when he transferred to the new CIA and left Japan for the Southeast Asian assignment, but the troubling Hel was like a kite tail. They should have executed him when they had the chance – now they were going to use him as an
It was just like that pansy-ass pinko Haverford, another over-educated, know-it-all little prick. Shit, Haverford had fought
Now Haverford said, “Hel was not a Communist agent, a Soviet agent, or an agent of any kind. As your ‘interrogation’ of him proved, by the way.”
Haverford despised Diamond, from his looks to the core of his alleged soul. The man resembled nothing more than an overstrung guitar with a pair of thin lips and drooping eyelids, and the inner man was even uglier. A bourgeois thug who would have been a cheerful Nazi save for the accident of his American birth – more’s the pity – Diamond was the sort of intelligence officer that the army seemed to crank out like so many widgets – unimaginative, brutal, his prejudices undisturbed by thought or education.
Haverford hated him, his class, and what they threatened to do to America’s relationships in Asia.
John Singleton, head of the CIA’s Asia Desk, sat behind his broad desk observing the debate. His white hair lay over his craggy face like snow on a rocky mountain, his pale blue eyes were the color of ice.
He was truly a “cold warrior”; in fact, the coldest man that Haverford had ever known.
Singleton’s ruthlessness had made him a legend. The eminence grise of the Washington intelligence community, he was respected – even feared – from Foggy Bottom to Capitol Hill, even to Pennsylvania Avenue itself.
For good reason, Haverford thought. Compared to Singleton, Machiavelli was a naive choirboy and the Borgias subjects of a Rockwell painting. Standing beside Singleton, the devil himself would appear as the angel Lucifer
Chief of the OSS Asian Bureau during the war, Singleton was reputed responsible for guerrilla operations in China and Vietnam and was even thought to have been influential in the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After the war he had politically survived the “loss” of China, the surprise invasion of Korea, and even attacks from McCarthy and his cohorts. In fact, Singleton was probably more powerful now than ever, a fact that his many enemies, albeit quietly, attributed to his close relationship to Satan.
Now he looked across his desk at the two rival officers.
“Is Hel unstable?” he asked Haverford.
“To the contrary,” Haverford answered. “I’ve never met a man as self-possessed as Nicholai Hel.”
“What are you, in love with the guy or something?” Diamond chimed in, his mouth leering with the crude homophobic implication.
“No, I’m not in love with the guy,” Haverford answered tiredly.
“Kill this mission, sir,” Diamond said to Singleton. “It’s too risky and Hel is a loose cannon. I have much more reliable assassins in southern China that we could send to -”
“Hel is perfect,” Haverford said.
“How so?” Singleton asked.
Haverford laid out his reasoning – Hel was fluent in Chinese, Russian, and French. He was a trained martial artist who could not only execute the sanction, but do so in a way that would leave the manner of death ambiguous, a crucial factor in achieving the maximum positive result.
“Why is French important?” Diamond asked, smelling trouble.
“It’s why we brought you in for briefing,” Singleton said. “Ellis?”
“Hel’s cover will be a French arms dealer,” Haverford said, anticipating Diamond’s discomfiture with great pleasure, “selling weapons to the Viet Minh.”
Indeed, Diamond’s lips bent into a grimace.
“As that affects your Indochinese bailiwick,” Singleton said, “we thought you should know.”
Great, Diamond thought. I don’t have enough trouble trying to keep the Frogs from punting another war without my own team sending aid to the enemy? “You’re not telling me that you’re actually going to -”
“Of course not. It’s just a cover to get Hel to Beijing,” Haverford said. “But we didn’t want you overreacting to any radar pings you might pick up.”
Diamond glared at Haverford. “Keep your boy the hell away from my turf.”
“Don’t worry.”
But Diamond was worried. If knowledge of Operation X – and his real role in it – ever reached Washington… “X” was an Indochinese op, run by the Frogs, so he thought he had it nicely contained. Now this Hel business threatened contamination.
