Matesev had pulled this off twice before so that the only time America knew he had been around was after he had left, after it had seen the force leave.
It had cost the services of three hundred men, because none of them could be used again. Each operation used one deep-planted force. Expensive in training and time, but during a crisis like this so definitely worth the cost.
"We have a special problem," he said. "We have to do a snatch on someone who might be unsnatchabie."
"Explain, sir," said one of his captains.
"He is an escapee from the parapsychology village in Siberia. He has special powers. He can hypnotize others instantly. A KGB unit failed to stop him at Berlin. He got out of the best protection in the village. I don't think he's stoppable. I think the minute he knows someone is going to try to snatch him, he will use his powers."
"So we are going to kill him?"
"Wrong. We are going to make sure we kill him."
"How?"
"Give me a little flexibility on that. I want to see what he's got. I'd rather spend forty-seven hours of the forty-eight hours we have to do our job in planning and preparing, than forty-seven hours of shooting up a building and one hour figuring out what went wrong. We'll get this little hypnotist good. "
"What about drugging him?"
"How do you know someone is drugged? You could be hypnotized to think he was, when he wasn't."
"You could be hypnotized to believe he is dead."
"That is why we are going to work in waves. He is not going to get all one hundred and fifty of us hearing and seeing the same things. First, we stake him out. He has an office on Fifth Avenue."
"A typical capitalist address," said one captain, glad to be using the language of communism again.
"Our consulate is just off Fifth Avenue, you idiot." Matesev assigned one unit to the stakeout, a second unit to back them up, and to the other eight units he gave the mission of procuring the proper weapons.
With the first two units, he isolated the building by intercepting all communication lines and putting them through his own command center. Vassily Rabinowitz did not know the day a new neighbor moved in downstairs that now Hypnotic Services of Fifth Avenue Inc. was located directly above a headquarters of the most effective commando squad in Soviet history.
In Washington, the President of the United States heard the one thing he never thought he would hear from the organization called CURE. When it had been organized, the need to keep its budget secret was just as great as keeping the organization itself a secret. So it was allowed to covertly tap into budgets of other departments. This avoided a hearing on its costs that would in turn, reveal its nature.
CURE could have run an entire country with its budget without anyone knowing where the cash went. Of course, Harold Smith was a man of the greatest probity. That was why he had been chosen to run this organization with an unlimited budget.
What the President had to deal with that day, besides the still mysterious danger from Russia, was the startling news from the man with the limitless budget.
"Sir," said Harold W. Smith, "I'm afraid we're going to need more funds."
To save America, CURE was going to have to pay the accumulated fortunes of five millennia of Sinanju Masters.
Chapter 6
On the day before the world was supposed to fall on him, Vassily Rabinowitz heard a terrifying story from Johnny Bangossa.
"They gonna do the job on you," said Johnny, wincing. Vassily had tried to make Johnny believe his brother never used to hit him. This, of course, the master hypnotist did easily. The wincing and ducking bothered Vassily. However, the moment Johnny Bangossa didn't believe that his older brother Carli (in the form of Vassily) would abuse him anymore, he became downright disrespectful, and even dangerous. Vassily had to get him to believe again that his brother Carli was a brutal, insensitive, and, cruel dolt.
This fact having been reestablished, Johnny Bangossa returned to his form of loyalty.
"What is this thing 'doing the job'?" asked Vassily. "I have heard you mention the same phrase in regards to romance. "
It had amazed Vassily with what hostility his men talked about the women they seduced. It was like a war. They talked of doing the job on this woman or that, of really "giving it to her," a phrase they would also use for beating up someone.
"Doing the job, Carli, is they're gonna kill you. Waste you. Off you. Give it to you."
"And how did you find out this information?"
"They tried to bribe me to set you up."
"I see," said Vassily. "How boring."
"Why is that boring?"
"Because they also did it with Rocco, Carlo, Vito, and Guido. This is the fifth plan to kill me. Why?"
"Carli, you know that you're cuttin' into their territory. They gotta make the move on you."
"The move. Didn't you make the move on the secretary?"
"No, that's a different move."
"How am I cutting into their territory? I just run a weight-loss, quit-smoking, sexual-problem clinic. That's all I do. I only try to protect myself."
"Well, you know the guys do a little stuff on the side. Rocco's got some narcotics, Carlo's got some prostitution, Vito does a little extortion, and Guido breaks people's legs."
"That's a business? That's a territorial territory?" asked Vassily, panicked at what America would consider a profitmaking enterprise. He had heard capitalism had evils but had always assumed most of it was propaganda from the Kremlin.
"That's what they're in, and you should be taking your cut. It's good business, especially the narcotics. "
"I don't want to be in narcotics, prostitution, extortion, and breaking people's legs, Johnny," said Vassily. What had gone wrong? All he wanted was to live in freedom and then after he was mugged all he wanted was to live in safety. Now he had to deal constantly with these hairy animals, and people were always trying to kill him.
"We got to do the job on them first. We gotta lay it on them. We got to really bang them hard," said Johnny Bangossa.
"I suppose we will have to fornicate them," said Vassily, trying to get into the spirit of it all. But it didn't seem to work. There were a full half-dozen men he was supposed to kill. Considering his powers, he thought, there had to be a better way.
"I'll meet with them," said Vassily.
"They'll kill you on the way to the meeting," said Johnny Bangossa.
"I'll tell Vito, Carlo, Guido, and Rocco to stop."
"Vito, Carlo, Guido, and Rocco will start workin' with the others. And we'll be done for."
"Is there any way I can get out of committing murder?"
"What for, Carli? We can have the whole thing. If we win."
While Vassily did not see breaking legs as winning something, there definitely was a major advantage to living through the day. But he had seen these men work for him. Their collective IQ was insufficient to build an outhouse.
He had also seen that reason was not something that appealed to them. They had two emotions, greed and fear. Usually they showed these two emotions in a combined form, which was anger. They were angry all the time.
The moment any one of them realized Vassily was not the man they thought him to be, he would be dead. He thought of running again. He even thought momentarily of running back to Russia. But in Russia, once he got back, they might think of a way to keep him there forever.
Something about the size of a fingernail decided Vassily's course of action that day. It was not an especially imposing thing, being a dull gray, and was rather soft for a metal. It was an ugly little piece of lead. What made it such an important piece was how quickly it was moving, faster than the speed of sound. And even more important, it was moving very close to Vassily's head. Three inches. He felt the wind of it in his hair as he got into the rear seat of his limousine. It cracked through a large plate-glass window on Fifth Avenue, and Guido and Rocco had their pistols out almost instantly.