“General,” CIA deputy director Harvey Schenler said wearily, “I don’t believe fantasies of that type contribute much to our deliberations.”
Brown snorted. “Most of the problems the new regimes in eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union are now facing were caused by the Communists’ grotesque mismanagement, incompetent central planning, believing their own propaganda, lying to everybody, including themselves, cheating, bribery, favoritism — the list goes on for a couple dozen pages. Now that the Commies have become the political opposition, they’re preaching hatred of the Jews, trying to blame them for the collapse of the whole rotten system. It’s 1932 in Germany all over again. Now you people in the CIA seem to think that if the Communists get back in power, in some magical way this nuclear weapons control problem will just disappear. Bullshit!”
Schenler’s tone sharpened. “I think you owe me and my staff an apology, General. We have said no such thing here.”
“You’ve implied it. You just stated that we have to keep our lines of communication open to the Commies, treat them as legitimate contenders for power.”
“We’re not suggesting the United States should aid their return to power.”
Brown cleared his throat explosively. “Then I apologize. I’ve become so used to double-talk and new age quack-speak from you people, I’m easily confused. Perhaps today we can dispense with the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo and get down to brass tacks.”
Schenler paused for several seconds as he looked at the page before him. He had an apology and a challenge. He decided to accept the apology and return to the agenda items.
Brown’s outburst was the only bright spot in the meeting, Jake Grafton found to his sorrow. These weekly strategy sessions, “strategizing” the civilian intelligence professionals called it, were usually exercises in tedium. Today was no exception. No facts were briefed that hadn’t already circulated through the upper echelons. Most of what ended up on the table were policy options from CIA analysts, career researchers who were theoretically politically neutral. Jake Grafton didn’t believe it — the only politically neutral people he had ever met were dead.
So the items discussed here were really policy alternatives that had made their long, tortuous way through the intestines of the Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps the most monolithic bureaucracy left on the planet. Like General Brown, Jake Grafton looked at these nuggets without enthusiasm. Larded with dubious predictions and carefully chosen facts, these policy alternatives were really the choices the upper echelons of the CIA wanted the policymakers to adopt. The researchers gave their bosses what they thought the bosses wanted to hear, or so Brown and Grafton believed.
Alas, these two uniformed officers well knew they couldn’t change the system. So they listened and recorded their objections.
Schenler sometimes argued. Most of the time he just took notes. Grafton never saw the notes. About fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and an ivy league education, Schenler was an organization man to his fingertips. “I’ll bet the bastard hasn’t farted in twenty-five years,” General Brown once grumbled to Jake.
Jake also took occasional notes at these soirees, doodled and watched Schenler and his lieutenants perform the usual rituals.
Today, when he finally concluded that General Brown had given up, he went back to doodling. He used his pencil to doctor up his copy of a reproduction of a current Russian anti-Semitic poster that had been handed around before Brown fired his salvo. The crude drawing depicted two rich Jews — they had to be Jews: guys with hooked noses wearing yarmulkes — counting their money while starving women and children watched. In one corner a man with a red star on his cap observed the scene. Jake penciled a swastika on his chest.
“What is this?” Jake held up a piece of paper and waved it at Toad Tarkington.
“Ah, Admiral, if you could give me a little hint…”
“You put this here, didn’t you?”
Jake Grafton had been going through his morning mail pile when he ran across Toad’s masterpiece, a summary of everything in the computer about the demise of Nigel Keren. It was short, only one page, but pithy, full of facts. Toad knew the admiral was partial to facts.
“Oh,” Toad said when Jake held the paper out so he could see it, “that’s just a little thing I put together for your information.”
The admiral stared at him with humor. “I know everything I want to know about Nigel Keren.”
Toad had rehearsed this, but looking at Jake Grafton, his little speech went out the window. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely.
“I know how he was killed,” the admiral said.
Toad gawked.
The admiral put the paper on the desk in front of him and toyed with it. “A publishing mogul alone on a large yacht, no one aboard but him and twelve crew members, all male. The ship is three days out of the Canaries when he eats dinner alone — the same food that all the crew was served — and spends the rest of the evening walking the deck, then goes to his stateroom. The next morning the crew can’t find him aboard. Two days later his nude body is found floating in the sea. A Spanish pathologist found no evidence of violence, no water in the lungs, no heart disease, no burst blood vessels in the brain, no evidence of suffocation. In short, the man died a natural death and his corpse somehow went into the sea. None of the crew members knows anything. All deny that they killed him.”
When Jake fell silent Toad added, “Then his media empire broke up. Apparently large sums of money, hundreds of millions, may have been taken. If anyone knows, they aren’t saying. Keren’s son says the deceased father just made too many leveraged deals and the worldwide recession caught them short.”
The admiral merely grunted.
“Perhaps there was a stowaway aboard the yacht,” Toad suggested. “Or a small vessel rendezvoused with the yacht and an assassin team came aboard.”
“No. The British checked with every ship in the vicinity and interrogated the crew thoroughly. And if he was assassinated, how was it done?”
“You tell me,” Tarkington muttered.
“Remember that top secret CIA progress report that went through here a couple of months ago on the development of binary chemicals?”
Toad nodded once.
“When I saw it then, I thought of the Keren case,” Jake Grafton continued, “but I forgot all about it until the other day when I was staring at that photo Judith Farrell donated to the cause. And I confess, I used the computer yesterday after you left to reread the Keren file.” He smiled at Toad. “It would have occurred to you sooner or later.”
“Binary chemicals.”
“That’s right. The poisons of the past — arsenic, strychnine, that kind of thing — all had a couple of major drawbacks. If given in sufficient quantity to do the job they killed very quickly, before the killer had a chance to leave the scene of the crime. And there was always the problem of killing too many people, anyone who ingested the poisoned food or drink. Binary chemicals remove those drawbacks. You give your victim one chemical, harmless in itself, perhaps serve it in the punch at a party. Everyone drinks it and no one is the wiser. It’s absorbed by the tissues and so remains in the body for a lengthy period, at least several weeks. But it’s benign, produces no ill effect. Then at a later date the assassin serves the other half of the poison, also quite benign by itself. And the second half of the brew combines with the first half in the body of the victim and becomes a deadly poison. The victim goes home and goes to bed and the chemical reaction takes place and his heart stops. No one will suspect poison. Even if they do, investigation will reveal that everything the victim ate and drank was also ingested by other people.”