The Monkey Handlers

by G Gordon Liddy

  Seventeen minutes later, as Stone washed the soap-soluble camouflage paint from his face and hands and scrubbed the blood from the blade of his knife, the sound of the water running in the bathroom awakened Saul Rosen. Saul wondered where his friend had been, then decided that it was none of his business. Stone returned to his bedroom and reset his alarm for his usual early-morning wake-up time. He would put in his full workout, keeping to his established pattern. In his SEAL culture, he’d have had a beer with Saul and talked over the op. Clicked off now, Stone was back into the lawyer culture, in which an after-action report to Saul was unthinkable. Instead, he started pondering ways and means of avoiding the legal consequences of his night’s activities.

  * * *

  Georg Kramer, hands stuffed into his pockets, was staring moodily out the window of his office at the Hudson, watching it flow past the Riegar dock facilities, when the speaker on his desk projected his secretary’s voice throughout the room: “Dr. Letzger is here.”

  Helmar Metz, seated behind the desk, pushed a button and said, “Send him in.”

  The office door opened and Letzger advanced directly to the desk and, without a word, handed Metz a manila folder. Metz opened it, took out several black-and-white eight-by-ten photographs, and set them aside, then read the typewritten report also contained in the folder. Georg Kramer walked over to try to read it over Metz’s shoulder. Metz glanced upward in annoyance and Kramer retreated. Letzger continued to stand before the desk, almost at attention.

  “You are a skilled forensic pathologist, Letzger,” Metz said. “The detail here is excellent. It is also very troubling.” He picked up the photographs and studied them carefully. The first depicted the nude full body of the controls operator Stone had slain. It was laid out on a standard stainless-steel autopsy table, complete with sink. The head was propped forward on a block. The second photograph showed the same body in the same position, but with the difference that the chest had been opened with a Y-shaped incision and the ribs separated and peeled back to reveal the internal organs—heart, lungs, liver, gallbladder, kidneys, and stomach. The next photograph was of the removed heart. A retractor was displayed holding apart the top of the organ where it had been sliced nearly in half.

  Metz picked up another photograph. It showed a section of the upper spine. It had been severed cleanly. Finally, there was a close-up picture of the left side of the corpse’s neck. A small slit appeared just inside the clavicle, in the hollow depression near its joint with the sternum. “Yes,” Metz said, putting the report back together and returning it to Letzger, “very troubling.”

  “What’s the problem?” Kramer asked. Metz ignored him and addressed Letzger: “Correct me if I’m in error, Herr Doktor,” Metz said. “Your man was killed by sliding a stiletto downward into the chest cavity through the depression between the neck and the clavicle. The blade was then rocked”—here Metz held out his arm, fist gripping an imaginary knife, and shoved it forward and back—“causing the blade to arc back and forth in the chest cavity, slicing the heart while moving in one direction and severing the spine in the other, nicht wahr?”

  “Ja, ja.”

  “I understand,” said Kramer, “why it is troubling that one of Dr. Letzger’s men was killed by an intruder, but why the concern over the method?”

  “Because,” Metz answered, his voice using the elaborate patience one would with a pesty child, “it is clear the killer was a professional. Moreover, he was skilled in a method known only to those highly trained in special warfare techniques. Not only that, I saw him. He did it under stress and at great speed, which means that he is not only specially trained, he is very experienced. He has killed that way many times before.” Metz’s voice grew loud and angry. “What was such a man doing here? Who sent him?”

  The question was answered by silence. Neither Letzger nor Kramer had anything to offer. Indeed, Kramer secretly took pleasure in Metz’s frustration. First the bungled attempt to obtain the Rosen woman’s photographs from the lawyer’s office—proving Letzger’s people no more competent under Metz than they had been under Kramer—and now it was apparent there were a few things Mr. Know-It-All did not, in fact, know.

  Metz calmed down. His voice was completely controlled when he said to Letzger, “Disposition of the body?”

  “He is with the Mexican. By now, there is no body.”

  “Explanation to the family back home?”

  “Virulent disease contracted in the course of praiseworthy work in aid of humanity. Cremation—we’ll send the ashes of something—substantial check from the company. No problem.”

  “Sehr gut, Letzger. Danke.” Letzger understood the thanks as a dismissal and left. Metz checked the time, then picked up his secure telephone and looked pointedly at Kramer, who excused himself reluctantly and left the room. Metz then placed a call to Hoess. He would have to report this disturbing development, for which he had no explanation, and he might as well get it over with. At least the old woman that fool Hartmann had pushed in front of a bus in an effort to delay her had not died, and Schmidt had had sense enough not to harm the man found in the lawyer’s office. Bad enough that they hadn’t found the photographs.

  “Yes, Metz,” Hoess said as soon as the secure connection had been made. “I was about to call you. I have heard informally from GSG-Nine.” Hoess was referring to the West German government’s counterterrorist organization. “According to an unconfirmed report from a source that has proven reliable in the past, ‘Al Rajul’ is believed to be currently in the United States for purposes unknown. I suspect he’s there to check up on us. What is the progress on the product?”

  Metz was silent as this new intelligence sank in.

  “Metz? Are you there?”

  “Yes, sir. What you have just told me may very well explain something that has just occurred. There has been another intrusion. This time through the railroad entrance. The man was detected, but escaped after killing one of Letzger’s men. The method used makes it almost certain that he was a highly trained and experienced commando type. He could well be working for this ‘Al Rajul.’ If he is as wily as he’s said to be, there is no reason ‘Rajul’ would trust your assurances in spite of the hold he has over you through your son. He might well be trying to assess our progress independently. When we are successful, we shall have something possessed by no one else in the world—and many would want it badly.”

  “He cannot believe I would sacrifice my own son to double-cross him for profit!”

  “Why not? Such people have no honor; they are completely depraved. He would do something like that; why not you?”

  “Good God! What do you suggest?”

  “If he’s here, we don’t know what assets he has with him. His capabilities and intentions are unknown. Press your GSG-Nine contact for as much information as possible. In the meanwhile, send as many of my men over here as you can spare. Keep just a skeleton crew. The action will be here in any event, not where you are.”

  “But my son!”

  “We can only keep our end of the bargain and hope for the best just now.”

  “Very well. But keep after Letzger. The product must be completed and tested as soon as possible. Have them work shifts throughout the night.”

  “That is already being done.”

  “All right, all right. But from now on, when something happens like that intrusion, I want to know about it immediately, do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” The telephone went dead in Metz’s ear.

  * * *

  At 7:30 A.M., Saul Rosen left a note on the kitchen table for Michael Stone, who had not yet returned from the athletic center.

  Heading for Riegar to check things out. Coffee’s hot. Best to Aunt May,

  Saul

  By 7:45, Saul was seven blocks away from the Riegar plant. Although the words were still unintelligible, he could hear clearly the echoing of a loudspeaker. As he rounded a corner, Saul was surprised to see a group of highly modified Harley-D
avidson motorcycles lined up, front wheel to curb, in the middle of a quiet street of middle-class homes. He counted them. Thirteen.

  Rosen entered the street in front of the plant at its easternmost intersection, still three blocks from the plant entrance. Even there, the street was filled with people. Some carried signs denouncing animal experimentation in general; others denounced Riegar in particular. The people were of all ages. Little old ladies wore sweatshirts with a representation of a fur coat on the front. Superimposed over it was a red circle with a bar slanting across the coat. There was nothing festive about this gathering; the people were angry. Saul spoke to one of the anti-fur-coat women:

  “I just got here. How’s it going?”

  “They say the whole police force is out this morning. They used to just keep the gate area clear for the employees, but the word coming back is they’re pushing and shoving people. Getting nasty. There’s no excuse for that. Everybody knows we’re nonviolent; but people are getting upset.”

  Rosen nodded his thanks, then retreated to the intersecting street. He circled several blocks and came in on the railroad side, close to the gates. He went over the same fence Stone had the night before, the fence holding back the crowd, and he walked along the concrete foundation on the other side of it to get close to the plant, then climbed to the top of the fence for a better view. Saul didn’t like what he saw.

  A cordon of police, facing the crowd, arms linked, were shoving it back from the entrance. The crowd was offering no resistance, but the sheer mass of humanity—Saul estimated that there were fifteen hundred people in the gathering—led to continuing body-to-body contact with the police.

  About twenty people deep into the crowd, and up against the plant fence not far from where Sara had gone over it the night of her arrest, Eddie Berg was standing precariously three-quarters of the way up a seven-foot stepladder, holding a portable loud-hailer in front of his mouth with one hand and some papers in the other. Saul was disturbed to see his sister at the foot of the ladder, trying to hold it steady against the jostling of the crowd that was being pushed toward them by the police. Even more disturbing was the sight of shaven-headed, heavily tattooed men, about a dozen of them dressed nondescriptly in blue jeans and a variety of T-shirts and sweatshirts, who were slowly working their way through the crowd toward Eddie Berg and Sara.

  Eddie, reading from the papers in his hand as he spoke, was oblivious to all else. As he read, he got more and more emotional. “Right here, Alstone Chase in The Wall Street Journal, listen to this: ‘Nearly half the six-billion-dollar budget of the National Institutes of Health subsidizes research on vertebrate animals”—he paused for dramatic effect, looking directly into the lenses of the television cameras and emphasizing his next words—“‘killing around twenty million, among them one hundred seventy-four thousand dogs, fifty-three thousand cats, one hundred eight thousand five hundred wild animals, and nearly fifty-five thousand primates.’

  “In one experiment, blinded cats were made to jump into pails of water. In another, rats were fed gin and vodka to determine which got them drunk faster. In still another, dogs were drowned in various saline solutions, to see if the amount of salt in water affects the rate of drowning. Several veterinary schools break the legs of dogs and cats to teach students how to mend them.… ‘Much research,’ noted biomedical researcher Dr. Henry Heimlich told me, ‘is cruel and unnecessary.’”

  “Cruel and unnecessary!” Berg shouted over and over as the television cameras zoomed in. “Cruel and unnecessary!”

  Rosen swept his gaze over the assembly. To the left, at the intersection being kept clear by police so that Riegar plant workers could park in the company lot and walk across the street to enter the plant, an unmarked police car was parked. Two men in civilian clothes occupied the front seats. From time to time, the driver would pick up a microphone and speak into it.

  “Cruel and unnecessary! Cruel and unnecessary!” The crowd was picking up Eddie Berg’s chant and shouting it in unison at the plant workers as they filed through the police cordon. More and more of the crowd picked up the chant as the words worked their way back through it, block after block.

  Inside the parked unmarked police car, Detective Sergeant Walter Fisher spoke to the assistant district attorney seated next to him. “He don’t have no permit for that loudspeaker. I checked. That’s a violation of a city ordinance. We could bust him right now. Then we show the judge he’s just out for Discon an’ ask him to keep him locked up.”

  “Locked up?” asked the young prosecutor. “For failure to get a loudspeaker permit? C’mon, Walt, the judge’d have me committed for observation.”

  “So, how about RICO? I read all ya need is two priors and it’s a racketeer-influenced criminal somethin’. I mean, they busted half of Wall Street for a couple phone calls.”

  Assistant District Attorney Mark Cole laughed. “You mean the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Yeah, well, you’ve got a point there. Discon and failure to get a loudspeaker permit is a lot more than what they busted some of those Wall Streeters on. Two problems, though. One, RICO’s a federal beef. Two, the courts don’t like it. Comes sentencing time, instead of giving out telephone numbers, they’re giving ’em what you get for Failure to Keep Right.” Cole patted Fisher on the shoulder. “You’re a good cop, Walt, but better let me do the legal thinking.” He looked out the windshield. “Things look like they’re getting kinda nasty out there. Now, if there’s any violence, that’s a different story. Lock up all you can grab. There’s no First Amendment right to violence, and it really pisses off the judges. Know what I mean?”

  Fisher smiled. He glanced out at the crowd and noted the skinheads getting closer and closer to Berg. “Way ahead of you, counselor, way ahead of you.”

  As Fisher spoke, Saul Rosen went back along the fence, then over it behind the crowd. He bolted to the parking lot and joined the Riegar workers walking toward the gate protected by the police. As he arrived in front of the gate, Rosen eased over to his left as close as possible to the police line and slowed, watching for an opportunity. It came when an officer got into a shoving match with a demonstrator who was trying to hold his footing. In the brief moment that the officer had his arms unlinked and raised, Saul Rosen dropped and charged, football lineman–style, between the officer’s legs, which were spread wide for maximum stability. In a moment, Rosen was two-deep into the crowd. He wriggled to his feet and pressed his way over to his sister. “C’mon!” he shouted to her over the bellowing of the loud-hailer and the chanting, shouting crowd. “Trouble! You guys gotta get out of here. Follow me!”

  Eddie Berg was oblivious. He was caught up in the hypnotic trance of his own voice and the crowd’s mass response.

  “I’ve got to stay with Eddie,” Sara shouted to her brother, gripping the ladder. “He needs me!”

  “He needs a fucking straitjacket!” With that, Saul Rosen used a military come-along move to break his sister’s hold on the ladder, threw his arm around her shoulder and over her mouth to stop her shouts, and, bending the two of them over, began to worm his way toward the outside of the crowd, shouting, “Look out! She’s gonna be sick!” Pressed as they were, the crowd found a way to avoid what it was sure was the imminent projection of vomit in an unpredictable direction.

  As Sara and Saul Rosen arrived at the fringe of the crowd, three skinheads made it to the foot of Eddie Berg’s ladder. Two grabbed him by the legs to drag him down while a third shook the ladder violently to throw him off it. Berg used the loud-hailer to bash the heads of the men who had his legs, and their scalps spouted blood from deep gashes. The blood ran down into their eyes and, partially blinded, they instinctively dropped their grasp to feel for the source of the bleeding. With a shout, the third hoodlum put his shoulder to the ladder and gave it the same thrust he had the training sled when he was on his high school football team. The ladder went over and so did Eddie Berg—right over the fence and onto the grounds of the Riegar plant. Before
he could catch his breath and get to his feet, plant guards had swarmed over him, cuffed him, and hustled him over to the police stationed inside the gate. “Got him trespassing,” said the guards.

  “You sure did,” grinned the senior officer. He triggered his transceiver and reported the good news to Fisher. The report squawked through the speaker in the detective’s police car. As the static burst of squelch terminated the message, Assistant District Attorney Cole looked over at Fisher and said, in a voice heavy with scorn, “I’m supposed to prosecute a guy for being knocked over a fence?”

  “Yeah,” said Fisher, “I know.… Shit!”

  Four blocks away, as Saul Rosen continued to struggle with his sister, a mid-sized Ford sedan bearing a rental-car bumper sticker pulled over to a stop beside them. On the top of the dashboard, a portable scanner radio, its red diode blinking disconcertingly back and forth, stopped every time a police or fire frequency was triggered and blared out whatever was broadcast. Brian Sullivan turned down the volume and said, “Miss Sara Rosen, we meet again. Are ya in distress, lass?”

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Sullivan. No, it’s just my stupid brother playing big brother, little sister. I was with my boyfriend, you know, Eddie Berg? The guy who’s leading the rally? And asshole here just fucking kidnaps me! You wanna help, tell him to let me go. Eddie needs me.”

  “Ah, lass, I’m afraid you can’t be much help to him now—”

  “What? What happened? Is he hurt? I swear, I’ll kill—”

  “No, no, no. Not to be worryin’. He just got knocked off his ladder and inta the hands of the guards on t’other side of the fence. ’Tis in the hands of the constables he is, arrested for trespass and quite safe. Listen, hear it for yourself.” With that, Sullivan keyed a tape recorder on the seat next to him and played back the report to Detective Fisher.