Don Winslow: Satori

“Hel’s a half-Nippo nut job,” Diamond said, “with scrambled brains.”

“Yes,” Haverford answered, “you had something to do with scrambling them, didn’t you?”

“He was a Commie agent.” Diamond shrugged. Sure, he’d roughed Hel up a little, used him as a guinea pig for some of the new pharmaceutical techniques. So what? They were at war with the Communist bloc and it was a dirty war. Besides, Hel was an arrogant young shit – that superior, condescending attitude of his just made you want to hurt him.

Diamond thought he’d left him far behind when he transferred to the new CIA and left Japan for the Southeast Asian assignment, but the troubling Hel was like a kite tail. They should have executed him when they had the chance – now they were going to use him as an asset?

It was just like that pansy-ass pinko Haverford, another over-educated, know-it-all little prick. Shit, Haverford had fought with the Viet Minh during the war, and what the hell kind of name is Ellis, anyway?

Now Haverford said, “Hel was not a Communist agent, a Soviet agent, or an agent of any kind. As your ‘interrogation’ of him proved, by the way.”

Haverford despised Diamond, from his looks to the core of his alleged soul. The man resembled nothing more than an overstrung guitar with a pair of thin lips and drooping eyelids, and the inner man was even uglier. A bourgeois thug who would have been a cheerful Nazi save for the accident of his American birth – more’s the pity – Diamond was the sort of intelligence officer that the army seemed to crank out like so many widgets – unimaginative, brutal, his prejudices undisturbed by thought or education.

Haverford hated him, his class, and what they threatened to do to America’s relationships in Asia.

John Singleton, head of the CIA’s Asia Desk, sat behind his broad desk observing the debate. His white hair lay over his craggy face like snow on a rocky mountain, his pale blue eyes were the color of ice.

He was truly a “cold warrior”; in fact, the coldest man that Haverford had ever known.

Singleton’s ruthlessness had made him a legend. The éminence grise of the Washington intelligence community, he was respected – even feared – from Foggy Bottom to Capitol Hill, even to Pennsylvania Avenue itself.

For good reason, Haverford thought. Compared to Singleton, Machiavelli was a naïve choirboy and the Borgias subjects of a Rockwell painting. Standing beside Singleton, the devil himself would appear as the angel Lucifer before the fall.

Chief of the OSS Asian Bureau during the war, Singleton was reputed responsible for guerrilla operations in China and Vietnam and was even thought to have been influential in the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war he had politically survived the “loss” of China, the surprise invasion of Korea, and even attacks from McCarthy and his cohorts. In fact, Singleton was probably more powerful now than ever, a fact that his many enemies, albeit quietly, attributed to his close relationship to Satan.

Now he looked across his desk at the two rival officers.

“Is Hel unstable?” he asked Haverford.

“To the contrary,” Haverford answered. “I’ve never met a man as self-possessed as Nicholai Hel.”

“What are you, in love with the guy or something?” Diamond chimed in, his mouth leering with the crude homophobic implication.

“No, I’m not in love with the guy,” Haverford answered tiredly.

“Kill this mission, sir,” Diamond said to Singleton. “It’s too risky and Hel is a loose cannon. I have much more reliable assassins in southern China that we could send to -”

“Hel is perfect,” Haverford said.

“How so?” Singleton asked.

Haverford laid out his reasoning – Hel was fluent in Chinese, Russian, and French. He was a trained martial artist who could not only execute the sanction, but do so in a way that would leave the manner of death ambiguous, a crucial factor in achieving the maximum positive result.

“Why is French important?” Diamond asked, smelling trouble.

“It’s why we brought you in for briefing,” Singleton said. “Ellis?”

“Hel’s cover will be a French arms dealer,” Haverford said, anticipating Diamond’s discomfiture with great pleasure, “selling weapons to the Viet Minh.”

Indeed, Diamond’s lips bent into a grimace.

“As that affects your Indochinese bailiwick,” Singleton said, “we thought you should know.”

Great, Diamond thought. I don’t have enough trouble trying to keep the Frogs from punting another war without my own team sending aid to the enemy? “You’re not telling me that you’re actually going to -”

“Of course not. It’s just a cover to get Hel to Beijing,” Haverford said. “But we didn’t want you overreacting to any radar pings you might pick up.”

Diamond glared at Haverford. “Keep your boy the hell away from my turf.”

“Don’t worry.”

But Diamond was worried. If knowledge of Operation X – and his real role in it – ever reached Washington… “X” was an Indochinese op, run by the Frogs, so he thought he had it nicely contained. Now this Hel business threatened contamination.

Diamond turned to Singleton. “Sir, I’d like to be kept current with all phases of the operation, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ll be briefed,” Singleton assured him. “Ellis, keep him posted on everything you do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Ellis, if you could stay for a moment.”

Diamond left the meeting. Nicholai Hel free, he thought in the elevator. He felt the involuntary tremor in his leg. Face it, he thought, you’re afraid of the guy, and with good reason. He’s a trained killer with a grudge against you.

And then there’s Operation X.

If there’s even the slightest chance of that getting out.

He couldn’t allow it to happen.

“Does Hel know the identity of his target?” Singleton asked Haverford.

“I haven’t told him yet.”

Singleton thought this over for a few moments, then asked, “Is there anything to what Diamond said? About Hel being a loose cannon?”

“I don’t think so,” Haverford answered. “But I’ve taken the caution of providing, to mix nautical metaphors, an anchor.”

Singleton dismissed Haverford, then checked his schedule with his secretary and saw that he had a few moments for reflection. He went into his private study, sat down at his table, and contemplated the Go board in front of him.

He’d been at this game against himself for some weeks now, and the shapes of the opposing stones were slowly becoming beautiful. They could almost be called graceful in the delicate interplay between the yin and yang of opposites. Only on the go-kang did life promise perfect balance.

Diamond would be Diamond and Haverford would be Haverford – they were virtually fixtures on the board.

But Hel…

Singleton moved a black stone.

Hel would soon learn the identity of his target and would be, shall we say, motivated.

But to do what?

How would this Go player respond? It was not an exaggeration to say that the immediate future of Asia depended on the complex persona of Nicholai Hel.

An “anchor,” Singleton mused.

How interesting.

SOLANGE WAS as lovely as her name.

Her hair was the color of spun gold swirling with streams of amber, her eyes as blue as a midday sea. An aquiline nose betrayed the Roman colonization of her native Languedoc, but her full lips could only have been French. A light spray of freckles disrupted an otherwise almost monotonously perfect porcelain complexion, and the soft curve of her high cheekbones prevented what might be an unfortunate severity. She was tall, just a head shy of Nicholai’s height, longlegged and full-bodied, her breasts stretching taut the simple but elegant blue dress.