“Obviously. But dead. No, just store the rest of his stuff in the memory bank. I’ll come back to him later. Let’s have a look at the other members of his group.”
“It’s rolling up on your screen now, sir.”
LEVITSON, YOEL
BORN DECEMBER 25, 1954… NEGEV, ISRAEL…
FATHER KILLED… COMBAT… 6-DAY WAR… 1967…
JOINS MUNICH FIVE… OCTOBER 1972…
KILLED… DECEMBER 25, 1976… (IDENTITY BETWEEN BIRTH AND DEATH DATES NOTED AND CONSIDERED COINCIDENTAL)
“Hold that!” Diamond ordered. “Give me a little depth on this boy’s death.”
“Yes, sir.”
KILLED… DECEMBER 25, 1976… VICTIM (PROBABLY PRIMARY TARGET) OF TERRORIST BOMB…
SITE EQUALS CAFE IN JERUSALEM… BOMB ALSO KILLED SIX ARAB BYSTANDERS. TWO CHILDREN BLINDED…
“Okay, forget it. It’s unimportant. Return to the light scan.”
CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY EQUALS COEFFICIENT.001…
REASON FOR LOW COEFFICIENT EQUALS:
THISMAN NOW DEAD, sub MULTIPLE FRACTURES, sub COLLAPSED LUNGS…
YARIV, CHAIM
BORN OCTOBER 11, 1952… ELATH, ISRAEL…
ORPHAN/KIBBUTZ BACKGROUND (details available)…
JOINS MUNICH FIVE… SEPTEMBER 7, 1972…
CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY EQUALS COEFFICIENT.64±…
REASON FOR MEZZO-COEFFICIENT EQUALS:/p>
THISMAN CAUSE-DEVOTED, BUT NOT LEADERTYPE…
ZARMI, NEHEMIAH
BORN JUNE 11, 1948… ASHDOD, ISRAEL…
KIBBUTZ/UNIVERSITY/ARMY BACKGROUND (details available)…
ACTIVE GUERRILLA, sub NONSPONSORED (details of known/probable/possible actions available)…
JOINS MUNICH FIVE… SEPTEMBER 7, 1972…
CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY EQUALS COEFFICIENT.96±
REASON FOR HIGH COEFFICIENT EQUALS:
THISMAN CAUSE-DEVOTED AND LEADERTYPE…
SEE THIS! SEE THIS! SEE THIS! SEE THIS! THISMAN MAY BE TERMINATED ON SIGHT.
STERN, HANNAH
BORN APRIL 1, 1952… SKOKIE, ILLINOIS, USA…
UNIVERSITY/SOCIOLOGY AND ROMANCE LANGUAGES/ACTIVE CAMPUS RADICAL (NSA/CIA DOSSIERS AVAILABLE)…
SAYAGAIN!SAYAGAIN!SAYAGAIN!SAYAGAIN!
Diamond looked up from the conference table screen.
“What’s the matter?”
“Something’s in error, sir. Fat Boy is correcting himself.”
“Well?”
“We’ll know in a minute, sir. Fat Boy’s cooking.”
Miss Swivven entered from the machine room. “Sir? I have requested telephotos of the members of the Munich Five.”
“Bring them as soon as they print out.”
“Yes, sir.”
The First Assistant lifted his hand for attention. “Here it comes. Fat Boy is correcting himself in terms of Starr’s report on the spoiling raid in Rome. He just digested the information.”
Diamond read the rear-projected roll-down.
NEGATE PRIOR, RE: YARIV, CHAIM sub CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY…
CORRECTED COEFFICIENT EQUALS.001…
REASON FOR LOW COEFFICIENT EQUALS:
THISPERSON TERMINATED…
NEGATE PRIOR, RE: ZARMI, NEHEMIAH sub CURRENT IRRITANT POTENTIAL TO MOTHER COMPANY…
CORRECTED COEFFICIENT EQUALS.001…
REASON FOR LOW COEFFICIENT EQUALS:
THISPERSON TERMINATED…
Diamond leaned back and shook his head. “An eight-hour lag. That could hurt us someday.”
“It’s not Fat Boy’s fault, sir. It’s an effect of rising world population and our own information explosion. Sometimes I think we know too much about people!” The First Assistant chuckled at the very idea. “By the way, sir, did you notice the rephrase?”
“Which rephrase?”
“THISMAN is now expressed as THISPERSON. Fat Boy must have digested the Mother Company’s becoming an equal opportunity employer.” The First Assistant could not keep the pride from his voice.
“That’s wonderful,” Diamond said without energy.
Miss Swivven entered from the machine room and placed five telephotos on Diamond’s desk, then she took her position below his dais, her note pad at the ready.
Diamond shuffled through the photographs for that of the only member of the Munich Five not known to be dead: Hannah Stern. He scanned the face, nodded to himself, and sighed fatalistically. These CIA imbeciles!
The First Assistant turned from his console and adjusted his glasses nervously. “What’s wrong, sir?”
His eyes half closed as he looked through the floor-to-ceiling window at the Washington Monument threatening to violate that same chubby cloud that always hung in the evening sky at this time. Diamond tapped his upper lip with his knuckle. “Did you read Starr’s action report?”
“I scanned it, sir. Mostly checking for spelling.”
“What was the ostensible destination of those Israeli youngsters?”
The First Assistant always felt uncomfortable with Mr. Diamond’s rhetorical style of thinking aloud. He did not like answering questions without the aid of Fat Boy. “As I recall, their destination was London.”
“Right. Presumably intending to intercept certain Palestinian terrorists at Heathrow Airport before they could hijack a plane to Montreal. All right. If the Munich Five team were going to London, why did they disembark at Rome? Flight 414 from Tel Aviv is a through flight to London with stops at Rome and Paris.”
“Well, sir, there could be several—”
“And why were they going to England six days before their Black September targets were due to fly out to Montreal? Why sit in the open in London for all that time, when they could have stayed securely at home?”
“Well, perhaps they—”
“And why were they carrying tickets to Pau?”
“Pau, sir?”
“Starr’s action report. Bottom of page thirty-two through middle of page thirty-four. Description of contents of victims’ knapsacks and clothing. List prepared by Italian police. It includes two plane tickets for Pau.”
The First Assistant did not mention that he had no idea where Pau was. He made a mental note to ask Fat Boy first chance he got. “What does all this mean, sir?”
“It means that once again CIA has lived up to the traditions of Bay of Pigs and Watergate. Once again, they have screwed up.” Diamond’s jaw tightened. “The mindless voters of this country are wrong to worry about the dangers of CIA’s internal corruption. When they bring this nation to disaster, it won’t be through their villainy; it will be because of their bungling.” He returned to his pristine desk and picked up the telephoto of Hannah Stern. “Fat Boy interrupted himself with that correction while it was backgrounding this Hannah Stern. Start me up on that again. And give me a little more depth.”
Evaluating both the data and the gaps, Diamond analyzed Miss Stern to be a fairly common sort found on the fringes of terrorist action. Young, intelligent mid-American, cause-oriented. He knew the type. She would have been a Liberal, back when that was still fashionable. She was the kind who sought “relevance” in everything; who expressed her lack of critical judgment as freedom from prejudice; who worried about Third World hunger, but shambled about a university campus with a huge protein-gobbling dog—symbol of her love for all living things.
She first came to Israel on a summer tour at a kibbutz, her purpose being to visit her uncle and—in her own words quoted in a NSA lift from a letter home—”to discover my Jewishness.”
Diamond could not repress a sigh when he read that phrase. Miss Stern obviously suffered from the democratic delusion that all people are created interesting.
Fat Boy ascribed a low coefficient of irritant potential to Miss Stern, regarding her as a typical young American intellectual woman seeking a cause to justify her existence, until marriage, career, or artsy hobbies defused her. Her personality analysis turned up none of those psychotic warps that produce the urban guerrilla who finds sexual expression in violence. Nor was she flawed by that desperate hunger for notoriety that causes actors and entertainers who, unable to remain in the public eye by virtue of their talents, suddenly discover hitherto unnoticed social convictions.