Hour of the Assassins (45 page)

“Monroe Doctrine my ass! If you're going to be a pirate, at least fly the skull and crossbones. What we're talking about are Nazis, for Christ's sake! That means Peru would be a Nazi enclave, just as Paraguay is already. Chile is further to the right than Genghis Khan and if the Nazis make common cause with the Perónistas and their own fascists in Argentina, then most of South America, with all its potential riches, falls into ODESSA'S hands. And we'll have done it! Us! The good guys!” Caine retorted angrily.

“We've always known about your somewhat liberal tendencies,' Johnny,” Harris said, as if he were describing the symptoms of a disease. “Don't you think it's about time you grew up? The Company's job is to protect American interests. And if getting rid of a leftist Peruvian regime and securing oil for the U.S. in the middle of an energy crisis isn't in America's national interest, then what the hell is? You've had your head up your ass since Laos. Believe me, if this damned Mendoza business hadn't cropped up, we would have never pulled you in. You're a wild card, Johnny. We don't know which way you'll jump, that's why you were marked lousy in the Company. Unfortunately for us, you were the perfect man for the job. So we had to run you blind, without you knowing about it.”

“Did you know that Mendoza was Mengele?” Caine asked.

“No. That was a brilliant piece of work,” Harris admitted. “All we knew was what Sobil passed along from von Schiffen, that Mengele was somewhere in the Amazon. Naturally he had to be brought around the corner. With people crawling all over the Amazon in the middle of an oil boom, it was inevitable that someone would spot him. It wouldn't look good, us playing ball with a team that had Mengele on their side. If it had been almost anybody else, we might have tried another ploy. But the infamous Angel of Death of Auschwitz was a little too hot for us. You know how it is, Johnny. The public might get the wrong idea about what we were up to.”

“I can't imagine why,” Caine put in archly.

Harris ignored him. He drained his martini and signaled for another.

“His existence endangered the entire op. That's when we decided to run a mission. As soon as we knew Mengele was involved, we knew the Jews would be interested. That's how we connected with Wasserman. He agreed to act as the cover and to finance the Mengele phase. But nobody knew where Mengele was or how to get at him. We needed a specialist. You,” Harris said.

“Why didn't Mengele go to ground again?” Caine asked.

“Who the hell knows?” Harris shrugged. “He may have actually begun to believe in the role he was playing—the saintly Dr. Mendoza, the Albert Schweitzer of the Amazon. Maybe it was his way of expiating the guilt. Who knows? All we knew for sure was that he was adamant and that his refusal to leave his Amazon sanctuary caused a major power struggle within ODESSA. That's where you came in,” Harris said.

The flight attendant brought them another round. She stared at Caine like a kid with her nose pressed against the toy-store window. Harris glanced at her with annoyance and she moved away. Harris punched Caine's arm playfully. The martinis were starting to get to him. Any minute now he would be breaking into a sentimental song, Caine thought irritably.

“It really was a sensational op, Johnny,” Harris enthused, exhaling a miasma of gin at Caine. “Just sensational. You weren't officially connected to the Company anymore. You had the right languages and skills for the job. We baited the hook with money and a chance for you to be the knight in shining armor against a real, live dragon. There was even the beautiful damsel for you to play with. We thought of everything. That's why I was in Berlin. To make sure you got on the right track. It was a sensational op. We took every detail into account.”

“Except one,” Caine put in.

“Except one,” Harris admitted grudgingly. “We never figured you to get out of the jungle alive. Nobody knows how you did it, kiddo,” Harris said, and playfully punched Caine's arm again. Caine looked at Harris with his icy green eyes.

“Don't ever touch me again, Bob,” he said softly.

Harris looked away, then turned back to Caine with a truculent expression that gave him the cute-ugly appearance of a bulldog puppy.

“Let me tell you, when we spotted your ad in the
Times
, we all went into a state of shock. But you gotta believe me, Johnny, that was the one part of it that I didn't like. Sending you on a one-way mission. But I'm glad you made it, you son of a gun. That was the one part that bothered me.”

“How did you spring me?” Caine asked. Maybe it had bothered Harris to send him around the corner. Harris was a little too fastidious to enjoy wet work. It really wasn't his field. Harris fancied the role of the
éminence gris
, the man behind the throne with clean hands and a Colgate smile.

Harris raised his glass in a silent toast to himself, then drained the martini with a flourish. He popped the olive in his mouth and chewed it, obviously pleased with himself.

“It's been a rough two days, Johnny. You don't know what I've had to go through to get hold of you.”

“Remind me to cry when you get to the sad parts, Bob,” Caine said. Harris grimaced, his expression implying that field agents never did appreciate what a senior case officer had to go through.

“We did a deal with Presidente Diaz. It was the only way. The Peruvians were planning a big show trial for you. It was quite a scenario: CIA spy kills the good Dr. Mendoza, the saint of the Amazon, as a part of an American imperialist plot. The Commies and the Third World press would have had a field day with it! By the time I got to Lima to try and plug the dike, you were front-page news all over the world,” Harris said.

That was true enough, Caine thought. They had escorted him from his cell under heavy guard and with great care, as though he were a shipment of delicate porcelain. They returned his belongings to him in the warden's office, where he put on his linen suit. They returned everything to him, except the vial with Mengele's thumb. When Caine asked about it, Harris nudged him. That was obviously part of the deal. But that didn't matter anymore. All that mattered to him was that they returned his keys intact. Most of the keys were phonies, but two were critical; the safety-deposit keys to boxes in L.A. and New York. He was going to need them if he was ever going to stop the Starfish and get out of this alive.

There hadn't been enough time to wash up before he left the prison. The Peruvians were clearly anxious to get him off their hands. They drove Harris and Caine to the airport in a giant motorcade, flanked by hundreds of soldiers and security police. The police kept a swarm of shouting newsmen and photographers away from him as they ushered him through the terminal and onto the Braniff jet to Los Angeles which Harris had arranged to have standing by. It wasn't until they were safely aboard in the first-class cabin and the plane had taken off that Caine was able to head for the lavatory. He ignored the curious stares of the few first-class passengers as he made his way back to the lavatory, where he shaved and washed. His white linen suit was smudged and wrinkled, giving him the appearance of one of the seedier characters in a Humphrey Bogart movie and he tried to smooth it out as best he could. He felt almost human again by the time he made his way back to his seat.

“How did the Peruvians know that I had been with the Company?” Caine wondered aloud.

“They didn't at first,” Harris remarked with a snort of derision. “For them the Company is simply a convenient scapegoat for anything that goes wrong. If a traffic light goes out in Lima, they're liable to blame it on CIA agents. It was one of their standard propaganda ploys. This time it just happened to be true,” Harris said with a shrug.

“Poor misunderstood CIA. What was the deal, anyway?”

“Obviously we couldn't let you stand up in court before the world press and blow the Starfish wide open. That would have made the beating we took on Chile from the Congress and the press look like a love-in. Anyway, I made a deal with Diaz and sweetened it with good old Yankee
dolares
.

“The deal is that we won't reveal that Mendoza was really Mengele. Diaz was very sensitive to charges that the Peruvian government was providing a haven for Nazi war criminals. In exchange they turned you over to us and let the CIA off the hook. It was all a mistake. Subsequent evidence now indicates that the saintly Dr. Mendoza died of snakebite. Flags are flying at half-mast in his honor all over Peru. The United Nations is thinking of issuing a commemorative plaque,” Harris said, his voice unctuous with mock sympathy.

Caine pressed the seat button and leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. He was feeling tired and knew that soon he would need all the energy he could get. The irony of it, he thought. Honoring Mengele's memory. And yet in this topsy-turvy world it made a curious kind of sense. In the army the brass often covered up a fiasco by handing the culprit a medal. But then the whole damned op had been an exercise in irony from start to finish.

“It's ironic,” he muttered.

“What is?” Harris asked.

“Mengele wasn't killed for the Jews at all. He was killed to help the Nazis,” he said disgustedly.

“You're in the big leagues now, kiddo. You can't tell the players without a Scoreboard these days,” Harris said.

Caine massaged his closed eyelids with his fingertips. Blue and yellow spots floated across the darkness, and for a second he was reminded of the butterflies. He opened his eyes and he was back in the cabin, looking out the window at the pale blue sky. Far below he could see a small white cloud floating on the wind like a dandelion. He turned away from the tranquil skyscape and looked at Harris. Peace was just a dream, he reminded himself. The Starfish was still running.

“Tell me, Bob. Has it occurred to you planning genuises that the ousted left might not take kindly to a Nazi regime?” Caine asked. Harris lit a cigarette with a gold Dunhill lighter and exhaled slowly and evenly. He picked a fleck of tobacco off his lower lip.

“You haven't been listening, Johnny,” Harris began patiently, like a teacher with a not-very-bright pupil. This is a first-class op. Everything has been taken into account. Everything. If the left wants to try something, we'll be ready.”

“You realize you're talking about a guerrilla war. One that just might tear the whole South American continent apart,” Caine said.

“Well, naturally we intend to keep the Russkies out of our backyard. I think we can safely assume that an ODESSA-backed government will be appropriately thorough in handling political extremists. Of course, there is a contingency plan just in case things do get out of hand.”

“You mean advisers, Special Forces, Company men—that sort of thing,” Caine prompted.

“Well, that would be the only logical way to handle it,” Harris admitted.

“Sensational, Bob. Just sensational. It's just like Nam all over again, only this time we'll be fighting for the Nazis instead of Diem. I've got to hand it to you guys. You've come a long way, baby. There's just one thing—”

“What's that?” Harris said, looking speculatively at Caine, as though he were trying to guess his weight.

“What are you going to do about me? I'm the only one who knows all about the Starfish and can prove it. You didn't haul me out of Peru so that I could come back and sell my memoirs to
The Washington Post
. So what are you going to do about me?” Caine said, his emerald eyes focused directly at Harris, as though he were peering at him over a gun barrel.

Harris sighed heavily. This was the touchy part, the question he had been waiting for. He trotted out his sincere smile, like a singer with a single tune.

“We've decided to put you on ice, Johnny. There's a Senate Intelligence Subcommittee investigation starting and we want to make sure you don't testify. So we're going to put you in cold storage for a while. Don't worry, kiddo. We'll take care of you,” Harris said and winked, invoking the esprit de corps of the professional agent.

“What about C.J. and Wasserman?” Caine asked.

“Her, too. We'll keep Wasserman under surveillance, of course. Besides, he knows it's in his own interest to keep his mouth shut.”

Caine stared at Harris and shook his head slowly. Harris really had him figured for an idiot, he thought. Not even the greenest recruit would fall for that two-bit bedtime story. There was only one way that they could ever be sure he wouldn't spill his guts.

“You'd be better off terminating me, Bob. Safer that way,” Caine said quietly.

“Now, Johnny, don't talk that way. You're family. And you handled this Mendoza business just great,” Harris said, shaking his head. “Don't go off the deep end on this, kiddo. Remember, I'm your friend.”

“That's what Benedict Arnold told George Washington,” Caine replied.

“Now just wait one damn minute, Johnny boy. You're the assassin, not me. You're the one who murdered Mengele for money—and the Nazis. So don't go all ‘Holy Joe' on me, kiddo,” Harris retorted angrily.

Caine turned away and stared out the window for a long while. When he turned back, Harris was grumpily sipping at another martini, an adolescent pout on his boyish face.

“We're all assassins, Bob. Don't you know that yet?” Caine inquired quietly. He didn't wait for an answer and pulled down the windowshade and pressed the seat button to a reclining position. He leaned back gingerly, as if entering a hot bathtub, and closed his eyes. The hum of the jets sounded in his ears like the constant roar of the surf on some distant shore.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are on our final approach to LAX and will be landing in approximately ten minutes. Please fasten your seat belts and observe the No Smoking sign. The weather in Los Angeles is slightly overcast and a pleasant seventy-two degrees. On behalf of Captain Wilson and the flight crew, we want to thank you for flying Braniff and hope you'll fly with us again. Have a pleasant day,” the flight attendant's metallic voice announced over the loudspeaker, with all the spontaneity of a tape recording.