"You'll be even less pleased when I explain," Diamond said. He turned to Starr. "Sit down. I want you to learn the magnitude of your screw-up in Rome."

  Starr shrugged with pretended indifference and slid into a white plastic molded chair at the conference table with its etched glass surface for rear projection of computer data. The goatherd was lost in admiring the view beyond the picture window.

  "Mr. Haman?" Diamond said.

  The Arab's nose touched the glass as he watched with delight the patterns of headlights making slow progress past the Washington Monument—the same cars that always crawled down that avenue at precisely this time of night.

  "Mr. Haman?" Diamond repeated.

  "What? Oh, yes! I always forget this code name I have been assigned. How humorous of me!"

  "Sit," Diamond said dully.

  "Pardon me?"

  "Sit!"

  Grinning awkwardly, the Arab joined Starr at the table as Diamond gestured the OPEC representative to the head of the table, and he himself occupied his orthopedically designed swivel chair on its raised dais.

  "Tell me, Mr. Able, what do you know about the spoiling raid at Rome International this morning?"

  "Almost nothing. I do not burden myself with tactical details. Economic strategy is my concern." He flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the sharp crease of his trousers.

  Diamond nodded curtly. "Neither of us should have to deal with this sort of business, but the stupidity of your people and the incompetence of mine makes it necessary—"

  "Now, just a minute—" the Deputy began.

  "—makes it necessary that we take a hand in the affair. I want to sketch you in on the background, so you'll know what we've got here. Miss Swivven, take notes please." Diamond looked up sharply at the CIA Deputy. "Why are you hovering around like that?"

  Lips tight and nostrils flared, the Deputy said, "Perhaps I was waiting for you to order me to sit, as you have the others."

  "Very well." Diamond's gaze was flat and fatigued. "Sit."

  With an air of having won a diplomatic victory, the Deputy took his place beside Starr.

  At no time during the conference was Diamond's snide and bullying tone applied to Mr. Able, for they had worked together on many projects and problems, and they had a certain mutual respect based, not upon friendship to be sure, but upon shared qualities of administrative skill, lucid problem analysis, and capacity to make decisions untrammeled by romantic notions of ethics. It was their role to represent the powers behind them in all paralegal and extradiplomatic relationships between the Arab oil-producing nations and the Mother Company, whose interests were intimately linked, although neither trusted the other farther than the limits of their mutual gain. The nations represented by Mr. Able were potent in the international arena beyond the limited gifts and capacities of their peoples. The industrialized world had recklessly permitted itself to become dependent on Arab oil for survival, although they knew the supply was finite and, indeed, sharply limited. It was the goal of primitive nations, who knew they were the darlings of the technological world only because the needed oil happened to be under their rock and sand, to convert that oil and concomitant political power into more enduring sources of wealth before the earth was drained of the noxious ooze, to which end they were energetically purchasing land all over the world, buying out companies, infiltrating banking systems, and exercising financial control over political figures throughout the industrialized West. They had certain advantages in effecting these designs. First, they could maneuver quickly because they were not burdened by the viscous political systems of democracy. Second, the politicians of the West are corrupt and available. Third, the mass of Westerners are greedy, lazy, and lacking any sense of history, having been conditioned by the atomic era to live on the rim of doomsday, and therefore only concerned with ease and prosperity in their own lifetimes.

  The cluster of energy corporations that constitute the Mother Company could have broken the blackmail stranglehold of the Arab nations at any time. Raw oil is worthless until it is converted into a profitable pollutant, and they alone controlled the hoarding and distribution facilities. But the Mother Company's long-range objective was to use the bludgeon of contrived oil shortages to bring into their control all sources of energy: coal, atomic, solar, geothermic. As one aspect of their symbiotic affair, OPEC served the Mother Company by creating shortages when She wanted to build pipelines over fragile tundra, or block major governmental investment in research into solar and wind energy, or create natural gas shortfalls when pressing for removal of price controls. In return, the Mother Company serviced the OPEC nations in many ways, not the least of which was applying political pressure during the oil embargo to prevent the Western nations from taking the obvious step of occupying the land and liberating the oil for the common good. Doing this required more rhetorical suppleness than the Arabs realized, because the Mother Company was, at the same time, mounting vast propaganda programs to make the masses believe She was working to make America independent from foreign oil imports, using major stockholders who were also beloved figures from the entertainment world to gain popular support for their exploration of fossil fuel, their endangering of mankind with atomic wastes, their contaminating of the seas with off-shore drilling and reckless mishandling of oil freighters.

  Both the Mother Company and the OPEC powers were passing through a delicate period of transition; the one attempting to convert Her oil monopoly into a hegemony over all other energy sources, so Her power and profit would not wane with the depletion of the world's oil supply; the other striving to transform its oil wealth into industrial and territorial possessions throughout the Western world. And it was to ease their way through this difficult and vulnerable period that they granted unlimited authority to Mr. Diamond and Mr. Able to deal with the three most dangerous obstacles to their success: the vicious efforts of the PLO to use their nuisance value to gain a share of the Arab spoils; the mindless and bungling interference of the CIA and its sensory organ the NSA; and Israel's tenacious and selfish insistence upon survival.

  In bold, it was Mr. Diamond's role to control the CIA and, through the international power of the Mother Company, the actions of the Western states; while Mr. Able was assigned the task of keeping the individual Arab states in line. This last was particularly difficult as those powers are an uneasy blend of medieval dictatorships and chaotic military socialisms.

  Keeping the PLO in line was their major problem. Both OPEC and the Mother Company agreed that the Palestinians were a pest out of all proportion to their significance, but the vagaries of history had made them and their petty cause a rallying point for the divergent Arab nations. Everyone would gladly have been rid of their stupidity and viciousness, but unfortunately these diseases, although communicable, are not fatal. Still, Mr. Able did what he could to keep them defused and impotent, and had recently drained much of the potency from them by creating the Lebanon disaster.

  But he had not been able to prevent Palestinian terrorists from making the Munich Olympics blunder, which wasted years of anti-Jewish propaganda that had been thriving on the basis of latent anti-semitism throughout the West. Mr. Able had done what he could; he had alerted Mr. Diamond of the event beforehand. And Diamond sent the information on to the West German government, assuming they would handle the matter. Instead, they lay back and let it happen, not that protection of Jews has ever been a dominant theme in the German conscience.

  Although there was a long history of cooperation between Diamond and Able, and a certain mutual admiration, there was no friendship. Diamond was uncomfortable with Mr. Able's sexual ambiguity. Beyond that, he detested the Arab's cultural advantages and social ease, for Diamond had been raised on the streets of New York's West Side, and like many risen plebes was driven by that reverse snobbism that assumes breeding to be a personality flaw.

  For his part, Mr. Able viewed Diamond with disdain he never bothered to disguise. He saw his own role as a patriotic and noble one, laboring to create a power base for his people when their oil was gone. But Diamond was a whore, willing to submerge the interests of his own people in return for wealth and an opportunity to play at the game of power. He dismissed Diamond as a prototypic American, one whose view of honor and dignity was circumscribed by lust for gain. He thought of Americans as a decadent people whose idea of refinement is fluffy toilet paper. Affluent children who race about their highways, playing with their CB radios, pretending to be World War II pilots. Where is the fiber in a people whose best-selling poet is Rod McKuen, the Howard Cosell of verse?

  Mr. Able's mind was running to thoughts like these, as he sat at the head of the conference table, his face impassive, a slight smile of polite distance on his lips. He never permitted his disgust to show, knowing that his people must continue to cooperate with the Americans—until they had finished the task of buying their nation out from under them.

  Mr. Diamond was sitting back in his chair, examining the ceiling while he thought of a way to introduce this problem so that it would not seem to be entirely his fault. "All right," he said, "a little background. After the Munich Olympics screw-up, we had your commitment that you would control the PLO and avoid that kind of bad press in the future."

  Mr. Able sighed. Well, at least Diamond had not begun his story with the escape of the Israelites across the Red Sea.

  "As a sop to them," Diamond continued, "we arranged that whatshisname would be permitted to appear on the UN floor and unleash his slobbering fulminations against the Jews. But despite your assurances, we recently discovered that a cell of Black Septembrists-including two who had participated in the Munich raid—had your permission to run a stupid skyjacking out of Heathrow."

  Mr. Able shrugged. "Circumstances alter intentions. I do not owe you an explanation for everything we do. Suffice it to say that this last exercise in blood lust was their price for biding their time until American pressure saps Israel's ability to defend itself."

  "And we went along with you on that. As passive assistance, I ordered CIA to avoid any counteraction against the Septembrists. These orders were probably redundant, as the traditions of incompetence within the organization would have effectively neutralized them anyway."

  The Deputy cleared his throat to object, but Diamond hushed him with a lift of the hand and continued. "We went a step beyond passive assistance. When we learned that a small, informal group of Israelis was on the track of those responsible for the Munich massacre, we decided to interdict them with a spoiling raid. The leader of this group was one Asa Stern, an ex-political whose son was among the athletes killed in Munich. Because we knew that Stern was suffering from terminal cancer—he died two weeks ago—and his little group consisted only of a handful of idealistic young amateurs, we assumed the combined forces of your Arab intelligence organization and our CIA would be adequate to blow them away."

  "And it was not?"

  "And it was not. These two men at the table were responsible for the operation, although the Arab was really no more than an agent-in-training. In a very wet and public action they managed to terminate two of the three members of Stern's group... along with seven bystanders. But one member, a girl named Hannah Stern, niece of the late leader, slipped through them."

  Mr. Able sighed and closed his eyes. Did nothing ever work correctly in this country with its cumbersome form of government? When would they discover that the world is in a post-democratic era? "You say that one young woman escaped this spoiling raid? Surely this is not very serious. I cannot believe that one woman is going to London alone and manage singlehandedly to kill six highly trained and experienced Palestinian terrorists who have not only the protection of your organization and mine but, through your good offices, that of British MI-5 and MI-6! It is ridiculous."

  "It would be ridiculous. But Miss Stern is not going to London. We are quite sure she went to France. We are also sure that she is now, or soon will be, in contact with one Nicholai Hel—a mauve-card man who is perfectly capable of penetrating your people and mine and all the British, of terminating the Black Septembrists, and of being back in France in time for a luncheon engagement."

  Mr. Able looked at Diamond quizzically. "Is that admiration I detect in your voice?"

  "No! I would not call it admiration. But Hel is a man we must not ignore. I am going to fill you in on his background so you can appreciate the special lengths to which we may have to go to remedy this screw-up." Diamond turned to the First Assistant, who sat unobtrusively at his console. "Roll up the printout on Hel."

  As Fat Boy's lean, prosaic data appeared, rear-projected on the tabletop before them. Diamond quickly sketched out biographic details leading to Nicholai Hel's learning that General Kishikawa was a prisoner of the Russians and scheduled for trial before the War Crimes Commission.

  Japan

  Nicholai requested and received a leave of absence, to free his time and energy for the task of locating the General. The next week was nightmarish, a desperate struggle in slow motion against the spongy but impenetrable barricades of red tape, autonomic secrecy, international mistrust, bureaucratic inertia, and individual indifference. His efforts through the Japanese civil government were fruitless. Its systems were static and mired because grafted upon the Japanese propensity toward overorganization and shared authority designed to lessen the burden of individual responsibility for error were elements of alien democracy that brought with them the busy inaction characteristic of that wasteful form of government.

  Nicholai then turned to the military governments and, through perseverance, managed to piece together a partial mosaic of events leading to the General's arrest. But in doing so, he had to make himself dangerously visible, although he realized that for one living on forged identity papers and lacking the protection of formal nationality, it was perilous to irritate bureaucrats who thrive on the dysfunctional status quo.

  The results of this week of probing and pestering were meager. Nicholai learned that Kishikawa-san had been delivered to the War Crimes Commission by the Soviets, who would be in charge of prosecuting his case, and that he was currently being held in Sugamo Prison. He discovered that an American legal officer was responsible for the defense, but it was not until he had deluged that man with letters and telephone calls that he was granted an interview, and the best he could get was a half hour squeezed into the early morning.

  Nicholai rose before dawn and took a crowded train to the Yotsuya district. A damp, slate-gray morning was smudging the eastern sky as he walked across the Akebonobashi, Bridge of Dawn, beyond which crouched the forbidding bulk of the Ichigaya Barracks which had become symbolic of the inhuman machinery of Western justice.

  For three-quarters of an hour, he sat on a wooden bench outside the counsel's office in the basement. Eventually a short-tempered overworked secretary showed him into Captain Thomas's cluttered work room. The Captain waved him to a chair without looking up from a deposition he was scanning. Only after finishing it and scribbling a marginal note did Captain Thomas raise his eyes.

  "Yes?" There was more fatigue than curtness in his tone. He was personally responsible for the defense of six accused war criminals, and he had to work with limited personnel and resources, compared to the vast machinery of research and organization at the disposal of the prosecution in their offices above. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, Captain Thomas was idealistic about the fairness of Anglo-Saxon law, and he drove himself so hard that weariness, frustration, and bitter fatalism tainted his every word and gesture. He wanted nothing more than to see all this mess over and return to civilian life and to his small-town legal practice in Vermont.

  Nicholai explained that he was seeking information about General Kishikawa.

  "Why?"

  "He is a friend."

  "A friend?" The Captain was dubious.

  "Yes, sir. He... he helped me when I was in Shanghai."

  Captain Thomas tugged the Kishikawa brief from under a stack of similar folders. "But you were just a child then."

  "I am twenty-three, sir."

  The Captain's eyebrows went up. Like everyone else, he was fooled by Nicholai's genetic disposition toward youthful appearance. "I'm sorry. I assumed you were much younger. What do you mean when you say that Kishikawa helped you?"

  "He cared for me when my mother died."

  "I see. You're British, are you?"

  "No."

  "Irish?" Again the accent that was always identified as being from "someplace else."

  "No, Captain. I work for SCAP as a translator." It was best to sidestep the irrelevant tangle of his nationality—or rather, his lack thereof.

  "And you're offering yourself as a character witness, is that it?"

  "I want to help in any way I can."

  Captain Thomas nodded and fumbled about for a cigarette. "To be perfectly frank, I don't believe you can help all that much. We're understaffed here, and overworked. I've had to decide to concentrate my energy on cases where there is some chance of success. And I wouldn't put Kishikawa's in that category. That probably sounds cold-blooded to you, but I might as well be honest."

  "But... I can't believe General Kishikawa was guilty of anything! What is he being accused of?"

  "He's in the Class A grab bag: crimes against humanity—whatever the hell that means."

  "But who's testifying against him? What do they say he did?"

  "I don't know. The Russians are handling the prosecution, and they're not permitting me to examine their documents and sources until the day before the trial. I assume the charges will center around his actions as military governor of Shanghai. Their propaganda people have several times used the label: 'The Tiger of Shanghai.'"

  "'The Tiger of—!' That is insane! He was an administrator. He got the water supply working again—the hospitals. How can they...?"