The Whisper of the Axe Page 7

  “The CLA?”

  “A different part. The Air Opium part. They do a lot of business with my people. They’ll think you are a heroin buyer from some big department store in the States. They are glad to do a little favor now and then.”

  “Crazee.”

  “Normal.”

  “Better let your people come out here.”

  “Too many. This is a high-echelon committee thing. They don’t assimilate either. Try palming fifteen Chinese guys in Switzerland and you’ll have newspaper headlines like the World Series.”

  They shared a demi of Fendant while Teel thought everything over. Finally she spoke. “Okay. I’ll leave from Zurich for Bangkok three days from today but—one thing—no names and no passports. Dig?”

  “Sure.”

  There was no passport examination at Bangkok. Teel came down the ramp from the SwissAir jet and was greeted by a gorgeous blond guy—no names—who guided her across the tarmac to a Dassault Falcon ten-seater fan jet. There was no delay. They just took off. Teel decided the cabin had been decorated to look like a Colonel Sanders fried chicken joint. There was a bar so she made herself a Dr Pepper and vodka. Lashio was even more so than Bangkok. She was walked from the Falcon to a huge, four-engined Russian Myasishchev strategic bomber by an elderly English-speaking Chinese who tried to get her to talk about soccer. She was strapped into a bucket seat. The engines were turning over. She yelled, “Hey! Is this thing pressurized?” He nodded.

  They were airborne for about three hours. The plane came down at the almost-deserted Nan-Yuän military airport nine miles out of Peking.

  Two women and three men were waiting at the ladder. The men did not speak. The smaller woman was the interpreter, Tan Wen-sheng, born in Brooklyn. The other woman was Wang Hai-jung, a slight, bespectacled woman who was identified as being assistant to the Foreign Minister but who was also a niece of Mao Tse-tung. They were driven away in a limousine that was veiled with thin silk curtains. Teel could see out but no one could see in. They rode to Taio Tu Tai, the government guest-house compound, beside a lake in a Peking suburb. The three silent men were representative of the Social Affairs Department, which was the Intelligence Unit of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which corresponded to the Soviet KGB; an agent from the Foreign Intelligence Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which corresponded to the American CIA; and a man from the Political Department of the Defense Ministry; all cops.

  The next day Teel faced thirteen bone-weary bureaucrats who had been arguing since the night before. A Management Statistics Commissar chaired the meeting. Speaking P’u-t’ung-hua, as if to make it easier for the visitor, he said, “We feel an awesome regard for your beautifully conceived plan, Miss Teel.” The interpreter translated. Teel, being a lawyer, did not answer.

  The commissar said, “The drawback is the cost.” This was translated. Teel remained silent.

  “However,” the chairman said, “it is a question of correct funding. We have voted and have secured approvals for a willingness to support your plan with 38 percent of its requirement, providing Libya, Albania, Algeria, and Uganda will jointly supply the rest. In fact, now that France is disengaging herself from the West to join the Third World, I am sure France would want to contribute to your great struggle.”

  “No.”

  “No? Why?”

  “Listen,” Teel said, “when the smoke clears and the government of the United States, as it exists today, is overthrown and finished, I am going to owe you—right?”

  He shrugged daintily.

  “Right. So—I don’t also intend to owe Libya, Albania, Algeria, Uganda and France.”

  “We don’t see how else you can raise that kind of money.”

  Teel stared individually at each of the thirteen faces across the table. She stared most of them down. Over three minutes of silence passed. The Management Statistics Commissar said, “The Chairman of our Republic teaches thrift and lives thrift. It would be ungrateful if we were to agree to spend the entire amount ourselves, even if we could agree to spend the entire amount.”

  “Then why did you make me fly my ass all the way out here?”

  “Ass?” the interpreter inquired.

  “Rephrase,” Teel told her.

  “Because—mainly because—we considered you to be so advanced and enlightened with regard to the development of the plan itself, we felt certain you would have advanced ideas on funding as well.”

  “Maybe I have,” Teel said. “But if I did, your country’s position would have to be negotiated way downward.”

  “We would like to hear your ideas for raising three billion dollars,” the chairman said.

  “We will finance it ourselves with a minimum amount of help from you. So little help from you that your equities in this entire revolution are going to drop from a possible fifty-percent position to something close to five to seven percent.”

  “Very well. Since we will not fund you, but are willing to help you, we will accept the reduced equities—as you call them—and rely on your good will.” He turned in each direction at the table to get confirmation. Everyone agreed while the interpreter broke it down for Teel.

  “I can finance the whole thing with opium,” Teel said flatly, not concealing that this had been the way she had always intended to finance her war. “You find me the raw opium and set up six Number Four heroin processing plants, get me a great chemist like Joseph Cesari or his half-brother, Dom Albertini, and the people of the United States will buy the heroin from me and shoot it and we’ll save them in the promised land.” She looked away from them sadly as the interpreter translated.

  The Deputy Foreign Minister spoke in English with the faintest accent of San Mateo, California, from the far left end of the table. “May I say, Miss Teel,” with a voice big enough to have been produced by an opera singer, “that we have certain international agreements? That is, China has become a co-guarantor, with the United States, that the government of Taiwan will be allowed to receive all Number Four heroin manufactured in Laos and northern Thailand. We don’t allow opium inside China except to produce medicinal morphine, but heroin has become the most important export of Taiwan, and opium is the only cash crop for the mountain peasants of Laos, Thailand, Burma, and our own Yunnan Province. These countries and Taiwan are at our borders. Of the four, two are poor but two are financed and armed by your country. Therefore, since we will not allow opium in China, we are agreeable to allowing these countries to grow it and sell it. In that way we keep the peace. In that way, the American CIA, which is sort of a Waffen SS, is pleased to transport the opium, with the help of the Military Advisory Command of Vietnam, because, in return, they gain the cooperation of everyone in Southeast Asia for the plans of conquest they have.”

  “Amen,” Teel said. “If Taiwan takes the Laotian and Thai production, that leaves plenty for us in Burma and Yunnan.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Then build me six Number Four plants. But, please-French chemists. The Chinese chemists out of Hong Kong only understand Number Three. We can’t sell Number Three. Only the French know how to make the pure and a man like Cesari can turn out forty kilos of Number Four a week, per plant. A Hong Kong man is lucky if he can produce fifteen.”

  “How much will these Number Four heroin plants cost?” the Management Statistics Commissar asked prissily.

  Teel seemed to look at him when she answered but it could have been that she wasn’t seeing him. “It’s a big price, baby,” she said. “The highest. It’s gonna cost my own soul and the bodies of a few million brothers. Shit takes its toll, baby. Shit takes its toll.”

  The second meeting convened at eight fifteen the next morning. The membership of the committee had shifted to an entirety of four military men. The agenda called for a discussion of guerrilla officer training. Teel wanted seven men and five women trained in every aspect of urban guerrilla warfare toward the specific execution of her plan for the Thirty Cities.

  The Chinese
explained that they had established two guerrilla training camps for foreign guerrillas in the Tsinghai Province. These had every facility of faculty and equipment. Fourteen countries were at present participating in the indoctrination of officers.

  “On a generalized guerrilla training program?” Teel said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I don’t want that for my people. I want them trained to execute this plan.” She slapped the Plan on the table in front of her. “How long is the present course?”

  “Two years, four months.”

  “No good for my plan.”

  “My colleagues have already agreed that your people should stay with us for three years.”

  “I want the course programmed for four full years,” Teel said. “These people will appreciate it more if it comes out to the equivalent of an American college education.”

  The officer made a note. “When will you want them to begin?”

  “I’m gonna let you know about that. And how much help I’m going to need from you to get them inside China.”

  “The best way to bring the men in is through the war zone in South Vietnam. It is an easy matter to get Americans as far as Saigon. We can take over from there.”

  “Good,” Teel said. “That’s great.”

  “We’ll probably have to move the women differently. We could include your women with the trainee candidates from Latin America.”

  The third meeting convened at one twenty that afternoon for a discussion of Chinese representation in Teel’s command.

  “We want to have our own man there to liaise with you. Immediately.”

  “That’s reasonable,” Teel said.

  “He is qualified to be your chief of staff.”

  “That’s good. Who is he? I want to meet him first and, if I like him, we’ll make a deal. But I agree to the principle.”

  The Chinese choice was Colonel Pikow (the only name Teel ever got for him), the former director of the Guerrilla Training Camp and Guerrilla War College Studies for the People’s Republic. He was a tall man next to his compatriots. He was unusually silent. He looked Mongolian but that was mostly western Chinese. (The Tsinghai Province was populated largely by Tibetans and Mongolians.) His most impressive strength (for a soldier) was his intelligence. Teel liked him after the first hour with him; he was a born second-in-command who knew that was as high as he wanted to go. Teel innovated; Pikow implemented. In later years Teel would tell Jonas, her brother, that Pikow had meant more to the movement than any other factor she could name, excluding herself. During that first hour, Teel told Colonel Pikow that she wanted China to approach the guerrilla movements of Uruguay, Japan, Ireland, Palestine and Vietnam to second experienced specialists to her command in the United States. She would pay them on whatever basis they chose. “When our leaders graduate in China, I want them to enter a finished organization—everything done and established, everything—so that they can realize instantly that what they had been taught for four years was not a lot of makeshift theories but a program for an army they were taking over—an army as ready to fight, as impatient to kill as they were.”

  Pikow agreed. He said he agreed with her ideas, all of them, and that whereas he was to liaise with her organization to provide information for the People’s Republic, he was, first and foremost, her man, and he would clear all signals with her before they went out. He said he knew all international guerrilla organizations because he had taught most of them. He would contact them. It was not something that they should need to take up with the Defense Ministry. He would choose the men she needed for the jobs they would be required to fit within the Teel Plan. He held out his hand. “We will make a good war,” he said. Teel and he shook hands earnestly.

  12

  1966–1968

  Bart Simms was given only five European assignments in their two-year tour in Locarno. He wasn’t away from home much, which was best for Enid’s and his own happiness. He never knew the people involved, not even as public newspaper figures. There were only three men and two women whom he was required to kill. Enid told him, at the beginning, to reassure him: “You know these people must deserve to get it. When a government of the importance and wisdom of the United States, and the freedom for which it stands, decides that a man must be liquidated with extreme prejudice, you simply have to know he has it coming.”

  “I suppose so,” Bart said.

  The jobs were straight duty assignments within the work for which he had been trained at considerable expense. With the exception of a single instance, he completed all the assignments successfully with a single-shot Liberator M1942 pistol, the agency’s preference for assassination work. It was a good weapon, manufactured by the Guide Lamp Corporation, a part of General Motors, proving that what was good for General Motors wasn’t necessarily good for everybody else. Actually, the weapon was a sentimental carry-over from the days when “the old boys” at the agency had used it in the OSS for the same work. Its short, smooth-bore barrel was very accurate. Its simple twist-and-pull breechblock opened so that the round could be placed in the chamber. However, the shooter did have to be good, and work up as close as possible because if the shot missed, it was a complicated business to reload, the pistol requiring that some suitable implement be pushed down the barrel to eject the used cartridge case. The agency had lost relatively good men because of that feature but those men had been assumed to be sure shots so it was their own fault, not the Liberator’s, Langley reasoned.

  The actual on-the-spot work was a lot different from the training, Bart told Enid when he got back from completing the first assignment. He explained how he had asked himself at the moment before he was sure he was going to murder for the first time (a) isn’t this extraordinary work for a Harvard man to be doing? (b) how had Evel Knievel felt about his first gigantic jump?

  “He must have been scared witless,” Enid said, “and so must you have. Weren’t you?”

  “Correcto profundo.”

  “That is an entirely normal feel,” Enid said.

  Getting nerved up to carry through the first two assignments was rough, but after that he knew in his heart he had it made. He knew he had made the right choice because the agency had shown him what realism was.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, hon,” Bart said to Enid, “I know what realism is now.”

  “A viewpoint most Americans sorely lack,” Enid reassured him.

  Other lawyers, businessmen, even politicians who voted for death every day were a bunch of helpless idealists compared to what the agency had made him, Bart told Enid. Realism? Jesus, yes! It was so real it could make him weep. He couldn’t bear to upset Enid so he tried to control it and to weep only when he was alone, like in the loo, but if he had had too many uppers he could lose control and there was nothing he could do about the weeping. He had looked straight into Reality—right at it. He knew what reality was and he detested it. Jesus! People talked about being realists. They didn’t know what they were talking about. Because someone had to live in a rathole in a slum, that didn’t make that person a realist, for Christ’s sake. Because Uncle Herbert had to own some of those slums as part of his overall portfolio, that didn’t make Uncle Herbert a realist. Realism was when a young girl, say a nice-looking, decent-looking girl who happened to have a lot of crazy political ideas that ran against the grain of the power pattern—not some reject who was shooting shit or some kind of a crazy, acid-dropping dyke or something—just a young girl with a lot of wrong ideas about how people should be housed or something, with a sweet face—not pretty, not anything he could go for, not anything like that—but, well, a nice girl but a boat rocker, kind of a troublemaker—and you had to end her life for her. Well, shit. You sat right across from her on the stone floor, holding her long hair in your left hand and pulling her head back with it and she pretended that she thought you were just threatening her. Her eyes told that she knew it was no threat, that this was it, but she wasn’t scared as much as she should be. She was able to talk wit
hout breaking or screaming. You had to admire her. For just a few moments you even thought maybe it shouldn’t happen to her, that you should let her go if you could only think of what kind of deal you could make with her.

  Then the young girl began to talk to him as if she were teaching him something important, he tried to explain to Enid, sobbing in her arms. The young girl’s eyes filled up as she saw that she knew something he would never know. She said it was going to bother him much later if he killed her. She said he was some kind of talking dog who didn’t know what he was doing at all. Then—unfairly—suddenly and unfairly—she told him her name—Louisa. That was unfair because nothing was impersonal anymore. He had to kill her. He and Enid had figured out the route to the top of the mountain. But if he didn’t kill her, then back to the salt mines in some Wall Street law firm. Good-bye Senate and other plans. Louisa! He pushed on the razor and pulled it across her throat until it stopped at the vertebrae as he jerked downward on her hair. It had to be done this way, the Resident said, for its effect on her people when they found her. Son-of-a-bitch!

  When Bart and Enid finished their two-year tour in Locarno, Bart was replaced by a young Swiss woman. Bart was instructed by the Resident to advertise the house for rent in the local paper and to rent it only to a woman who would be wearing a yellow hat. The girl in the yellow hat was called Signora Marton-Hess. She paid him a deposit of Sw. Fr. 400. He told her she would be welcome to occupy the house on the first of the month. He was amazed and dismayed that such a superior type of young woman was to take over liquidation services; she seemed so, well, Swiss. Eleven hours after he had rented the house another woman rang at the gate saying she had come to rent the house. He explained that the house had been rented. The woman pointed to her hat, a yellow hat, and said it was impossible that the house had been rented. Even asleep she would have been a grim-looking woman. Bart realized that a mistake had been made but, very stiffly, he told the woman that the house had been rented and clanged the gate shut. “That’s the trouble with those old fuckers at Langley,” he told Enid. “They are so committed to cloak-and-dagger nonsense that they naturally foul up.”