Second sight, p.31
Second Sight, page 31
“Maybe, maybe not,” Yeho said.
But he was beginning to respect Horace. An all-Chinese team? He seemed to have a natural gift for work in which there were very few naturals. He stood up, yawned, and stretched.
“Are you in?” Patchen asked.
“Now he asks me,” Yeho said.
3
“WHAT DID BUTTERFLY SPILL?” YEHO ASKED ON HIS RETURN FROM China. By that time Butterfly had been in Horace’s possession for a week. “Are you sure you got everything?”
“Everything that time permitted,” Horace said.
He and Yeho faced each other across a table in the captain’s cabin of a rusty freighter bound for Haifa, where the crate containing Butterfly would be off-loaded, then transferred to a Chinese ship that had been diverted from Oran.
“What about my cousin?” Horace asked.
“They agreed to release him soon after we deliver Butterfly.”
“How soon?”
“As soon as the politicals say ‘yes.’ The CIS has no power to let him go on their own. Face is involved. If your cousin would just acknowledge his guilt there’d be no problem, but even after ten years he won’t unbend. They talk to him every day, trying to persuade him, and every day he refuses to confess.”
“Then they’d do well to give up. He’s not guilty; he’ll never say that he is.”
“You can tell them that when you get there, but it’s very difficult for them. They’ve had so many missionaries, first the Christians and then the Communists; they believe in redemption.”
“To answer your question about the interrogation of Butterfly,” Horace said, “the whole interrogation is on video tape. We have an unedited copy for you. In brief, we confirmed all the names and faces of Butterfly’s network. Also details of the network’s organization and training.”
“Confirmed?” Yeho said. “That means we already knew all that. What else?”
“More confirmation. Butterfly did in fact come to Italy to turn these maniacs loose. Moscow doesn’t want to know what they’re going to do. From now on there’ll be no Russian handlers, no cutouts, no communications, no further support. They’re cut off, on their own.”
“On their own?” Yeho said. “How can they be on their own when Russians are involved?”
“The Russians want total deniability. There’s no telling who these people might kill.”
“There is no list of targets?”
“No list; only categories. They simply swear an oath to kill Jews and all those who help Jews to disinherit and oppress the Palestinian Arabs.”
“But there must be a hit list of individuals,” Yeho said. “Otherwise how do they make choices?”
“That occurred to us, too,” Horace said. “But Butterfly insists that no such list exists. The whole operation was designed to be random, uncontrolled, unpredictable, with no two actions resembling each other.”
“Then why did they always use the same methods against the Chinese?”
“The method in those cases was dictated by the target. The Chinese are very regular in their habits.”
“True,” Yeho said. “And why? Because their service was founded on the principles of the RIS—leave nothing to chance, never depart from procedure, control every detail. And now you’re telling me the rules don’t apply to these Frankenstein monsters they’ve created?”
There was something wrong here. Yeho did not trust the results of interrogations carried out by the Americans. They were too fastidious in their methods. They worried about their own immortal souls and the Bill of Rights. They relied on drugs and the polygraph apparatus and the witchcraft of psychology. They were too easily satisfied with the paltry results yielded by these superficial methods. They never went all the way to the bottom of the prisoner’s mind because in their hearts they did not believe that any enemy was truly dangerous to them. America was too big, too rich, too young, too strong and healthy to imagine that any adversary could do it permanent, let alone fatal harm. Therefore the intentions of their enemies did not really matter to them. If worse came to worst, the Americans would go to war, win, and convert their defeated enemies into replicas of themselves.
To Yeho, the servant of an isolated and terrorized nation, the enemy’s intentions were a matter of life and death. He looked across the table at Horace Hubbard and said, “I would like to ask this Russian a few simple questions before you give him to his new owners. Without drugs.”
Horace turned his enormous hands palm upward in a gesture of generosity. “Be my guest,” he said.
4
WHEN YEHO FOLLOWED HORACE DOWN INTO THE HOLD OF THE LITtle ship and saw the arrangements that had been made for the interrogation of Butterfly, he could not believe his eyes. The box in which the prisoner was confined was wired for closed-circuit television and sound. Horace sat Yeho down in front of a row of monitors and switched it on. Butterfly’s face, familiar to Yeho because, courtesy of Horace Hubbard, he had seen so many photographs of it, appeared immediately in fall color. The eyes were dull, the face slack. He was seated in a metal chair, his wrists and ankles secured by heavy straps.
“Is he drugged?” Yeho asked.
“He’s hung over from drugs, but the primary effects have worn off,” Horace replied. “He may be a little disoriented. After all, he’s a Russian and he’s in the hands of the Mongols.”
“Does he remember being drugged?”
“Yes, of course. But in theory he doesn’t remember what he said to us while under the influence.”
“Then he doesn’t know that you know that Jews are the real target?”
“No. He thinks the Chinese have grabbed him for what he did to them.”
“Why does he think that?”
“Because all he sees when he’s conscious is angry yellow faces. And all he hears is angry questions about the Chinese murders.”
Horace threw another switch. The features of one of his young Chinese operatives appeared, wearing a headset like an airplane pilot’s, with earphones and microphone. This man was inside the box with Butterfly. He had a Chinese haircut and a Chinese wrist-watch; he held a Chinese version of the Soviet 9mm Makarova pistol in his hand. He was dressed in blue overalls made in China and laundered with Chinese soap; he had been eating Chinese food for several weeks so that he smelled like a Chinese. A photograph of Chairman Mao and a poster quoting him hung on the wall (“WE CAN LEARN WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW. WE ARE NOT ONLY GOOD AT DESTROYING THE OLD WORLD, WE ARE ALSO GOOD AT BUILDING THE NEW.”).
“Just like the movies,” Horace said. He put on a headset and handed another to Yeho. Then he spoke into the microphone in English, a series of codewords that were gibberish to Yeho. The man inside answered in Mandarin. Horace responded in the same tongue; it was obvious that he was explaining Yeho’s presence and giving instructions. Finally he turned to Yeho. “Just ask your questions. Wong will repeat them to Butterfly in Russian and you’ll hear the answers over the headset.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you mean, Memuneh?”
“This is as close as I get?”
“Unless you can turn yourself into a Chinese, I’m afraid it is. I’ll leave you to it.” Horace got up to leave. Looking down on Yeho, who now wore a headset clamped to his large, fuzzy head, his eyes danced with amusement. “Memuneh?” he said.
“What?”
“No loud noises, please.”
“Very funny,” Yeho said. “Out!”
Horace departed, grinning at his own joke. Thirty years before, in time of war, as the youthful chief of an irregular intelligence unit, Yeho made a practice of questioning enemy prisoners in pairs consisting of one man who knew something of value (or was suspected of knowing something of value) and a second man who was known to have no useful information whatsoever. This second man could be anybody—an Arab culled from a POW stockade or even captured specially for the occasion—but he was indispensable to the success of the interrogation. He and the man who knew something would be locked in the same cell for several hours or several days, depending on the time available.
After they had gotten to know each other, Yeho would have the two men brought to him, always at night, at some remote and secret place in the desert. They would find him sitting in a tent behind a bare desk with two empty chairs in front of it. After the prisoners’ ankles had been shackled to the chairs Yeho would order the guards to untie their hands and remove their blindfolds. He would offer them cigarettes and sweetened tea. As they smoked and drank together in this parody of hospitality, he would chat with them in fluent Palestinian Arabic, a dialect in which he knew several dozen dirty jokes and many amusing anecdotes. Yeho was an excellent storyteller, and he could usually break through the prisoners’ natural wall of suspicion and fear in a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes. By that time they would actually be laughing at his jokes; because they were afraid, they laughed very hard.
At this point he would tell his best joke, and while they were still laughing at it Yeho would produce a .455-caliber Webley revolver from the drawer of his desk and, without the slightest warning or change of demeanor, shoot the extra prisoner, the one who knew nothing, between the eyes. The Webley, which made a deafening noise when it went off, delivered a soft lead bullet with enough force to lift the target into the air and fling him a considerable distance backward, chair and all.
The victim’s skull was, of course, shattered by the impact, and the survivor, sitting right next to him, was drenched by a shower of brains, blood, and splintered bone. Yeho would give him no opportunity to recover from the shock. Instead, he would cock the Webley by thumbing back the hammer, point it directly at the survivor’s head and say, in the same genial tone of voice in which he had been telling jokes only a moment before, “Now, my friend, there are a few simple questions I would like to ask you.”
The Outfit’s technology was no substitute for this sort of intimate contact and direct action, and an RIS man who had been promised— personally, by Yeho—to the Chinese intelligence service was not the same as an Arab captured in Samaria. But Yeho had no choice but to accommodate to the situation as he found it. Besides, he was no more anxious to be seen by Butterfly than Horace was to have him seen. He switched on his microphone.
“Hello, Wong,” he said. “To make things simple, I’m going to speak Russian. Is that all right? Touch your chin for yes, touch your cheek for no. I don’t understand Chinese.” Wong touched his chin. Yeho said, “Do you have to go to the toilet?” Wong touched his cheek. “Good,” Yeho said, “because this may take a long time.” In the other monitor, he watched Butterfly, who was paying close attention to Wong’s signals; although he was strapped into a chair like a murderer (which, of course, he was) awaiting electrocution, the man was alert, he was watchful, he hadn’t given up. “Good,” Yeho said again. “Let’s begin.”
After a lifetime of inducing confessions from people like Butterfly, Yeho held certain basic principles. All spies are liars, it is their métier, and like ordinary liars they live in a panic, knowing that the truth about themselves may be discovered at any moment—or worse, is already known by people who are too disgusted, or too clever, to confront them with it. A spy under questioning by the enemy is in a state surpassing dread because he knows that he must sooner or later tell the truth. His captors will use any means to get it out of him, and sooner or later he will spill what he knows because he cannot stand the pain, or because he is so exhausted that he will do anything for sleep, or because he wants to have the long-festering secret in his breast removed by his interrogator as a tumor on the lung is excised by a surgeon, permitting the patient to breathe freely with at least one lung. Half a life is better than none. But he knows that this is a delusion. There is nothing waiting for him after the ordeal is over, not even half a life. This is his choice:
if he does not yield he will die; and if he yields, he will die. He is only valuable, and therefore alive, so long as he does not talk. The worst thing he can imagine is that the person who is asking him questions already knows the truth, and like the examining angel on the day of judgment, is adding up his evasions for no other purpose than to add to the weight of his punishment.
This was Butterfly’s case. He may not have known what he had been asked or what he had answered while under the influence of drugs, but he knew that he had been under their influence. What had he done? What had he spilled? Why did he feel so guilty?
“Connect him to the lie detector,” Yeho said into his microphone.
Wong did so, strapping the blood pressure cuff onto Butterfly’s arm, the device that measures breathing onto his hairy chest, the part that detects sweating onto the palm of the hand. Yeho had no faith in the polygraph; too many categories of human beings were immune to it. Africans, Asians, and psychopaths laughed at it. As a practical matter it only worked on people who came from cultures that controlled human behavior by instilling guilt and mandating supernatural punishment. It had no power over those who were not possessed of a Western conscience. Yeho connected the polygraph to Butterfly because he was a Communist and probably also a vestigial Christian as nearly all Russians were, and therefore the creature of the two most implacably confessional faiths ever invented.
“Put the machine where the prisoner can see the needles,” Yeho said into the microphone on his headset. The machine, autopens whispering over the graph paper without human intervention, would remind him of what he had to do in order to be saved. Or so Yeho hoped.
He began to ask questions at random. What was Butterfly’s mother like? His father? Their names? The color of their hair? Eyes? Tall? Short? Humorous? Serious? What favorite food had his mother made, him? What kind of a house had the family lived in? Where was it? Did he have sisters, brothers? What were their names? Did the children all sleep together? Had he ever fucked his sisters? What would his mother think if she knew he was a murderer? He asked the questions over and over again until he got answers. It did not matter whether the answers were correct; in fact it was better if Butterfly lied because each lie added a few grams to his burden of guilt. Yeho just wanted him to talk, to get into the habit of responding. Then he asked him questions about his recruit ment into the RIS, his training, his assignments, his operations, repeating the same simple, even simple-minded questions over and over until he got some sort of answer—a lie, a joke, an insult, anything as long as Butterfly used his voice, as long as it took for him to begin to get the impression that he was smarter than his questioners.
Yeho kept up the drumbeat of stupid questions for fourteen hours while the ship’s engines throbbed, driving it eastward through placid seas. Wong was replaced by a second Chinese, and that man by a third. To keep himself awake Yeho took amphetamines (his own, from his own pill box that he always carried with him). Butterfly was permitted no sleep, no food, no water, no opportunity to relieve himself. The box in which he was imprisoned was connected to an air conditioner—America!—- and Yeho had the temperature turned as low as it would go. The interrogators put on jackets; on the TV monitor, Butterfly’s half-naked image shivered.
Finally Yeho struck. He said (the young Chinese inside the box said for him), “Why do you call this cell of Arab terrorists ‘the Eye of Gaza’?”
This was the first reference he had made to Butterfly’s network.
“There is no cell.”
“What did you say?”
“There is no such cell.”
“Now you are lying. Look at the machine. It knows; the pens are going crazy. Do you think we don’t know when you’re lying? Do you think we don’t remember what you told us after we gave you the drugs?”
Butterfly was silent.
Yeho said, “All we want is for you to tell us the truth while you’re conscious. How else can we know that you’re sincere? How else can we help you? Answer me. Why do you call this cell ‘the Eye of Gaza’?”
“I don’t know,” Butterfly croaked, barely able to speak; he had had nothing to drink for all these hours. “The Arabs named it that.”
“Which Arab?”
“All of them together.”
“Which Arab?”
Yeho repeated this question many times. Finally Butterfly answered: “Hassan.”
“Who is Hassan?”
Butterfly sighed; Yeho heard his expelled breath in his earphones. On the TV monitor he saw him close his eyes.
“Open your eyes,” Yeho said. “You are not allowed to close your eyes. You know that.”
Butterfly opened his eyes and looked down at the polygraph, the kilometers of tape covered with jagged peaks drawn by the automatic pen. The lines were flat now, three black squiggles across the snow bridge of the graph; the liar’s vital signs were very weak.
Butterfly cleared his throat, long and convulsively.
“Give him water,” Yeho said. “Not too much.”
Butterfly drank. The dam broke. Butterfly could not spill enough. He told Yeho everything—all about Hassan, the leader of the cell. The details of this man’s personality, of his skills, of his intentions, sent a cold shock, an actual icy sensation, along Yeho’s spine.
“This man is a psychopath,” he said.
“Yes, he is,” said Butterfly in sober agreement. “In my opinion, a homicidal maniac.”
“What are his future targets?”
“Not the Chinese. You needn’t worry on that score. That was just training. I didn’t choose the targets; I protested; I wanted to hit Americans, or at least West Germans. Never good Marxist-Leninists like our Chinese comrades. There was no malice on my part.”
“We understand. If not us, then who is this Hassan going to kill?”
“Jews. They were always the real target. He would have done it anyway. We just made it possible for him to do what he would have done in any case.”
“What Jews?”
“His goal is to kill all of them, complete the Final Solution; he’s an Arab Heydrich. He even asked us for weapons to do that—poison gas.”
