The Monkey Handlers

by G Gordon Liddy

  “I must say,” said Stephanie, “that being a source of yours could prove very damaging to my waistline.” She picked up the menu, examined it, then ordered a Caesar salad. “Discipline,” she said, smiling, “I’ve got to exert discipline.”

  “You’re sure?” asked Sullivan. “Reuters c’n affard all y’want.”

  “Yes,” said Stephanie, “but I can’t afford all I want.”

  Sullivan ordered a flank steak and an Irish whiskey, neat, for himself. Stephanie acquiesced to a Chablis. “Well,” she asked, “what can I probably not help you with this afternoon?”

  “There has been an interestin’ tarn of events in the Riegar matter, my dear. A mister Eddie Berg, who has been makin’ himself prominent in front of the factory gates with his loud-hailer, exhartin’ the protesters to ever-more-vehement denunciations of the devil, did not show up at his post this marnin’. No one knows what’s become of him, or, if they do, will not tell me. I thought y’might have heard somethin’ about that from your laryer friend. Y’see, if I repart to me editors that the leader of the Riegar protesters has pulled out, they will not be satisfied with that as the story. They will want to know why he abandoned the cause. That is the story.”

  Stephanie waited until she had chewed the heart of lettuce in her mouth thoroughly before she said, “Why do you think Mr. Stone would know that?”

  “Because Mr. Berg is living with his client, Sara Rosen.”

  That statement was news to Stephanie, and she was unable to keep some of her delight from being reflected in her face.

  “Ah,” said Sullivan, “y’were not aware of that, then?”

  “It shows, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I wasn’t. So, obviously, Mr. Stone hasn’t taken me into his confidence in the matter. Nor is there any reason that he should.”

  “Of course,” Sullivan observed, “but there’d be no harm in askin’ the man, would there?”

  Stephanie blushed. “Mr. Stone and I are not on quite the familiar terms you assume.”

  Sullivan took a sip of whiskey and said casually, “Lovers’ quarrel?”

  “What?”

  “I’m a reparter, Miss Hannigan. I hear things. No offense.”

  “No offense taken. But I thought you were from Reuters, not the tabloids. Anyway, in the unlikely event I learn what you want to know in a manner that wouldn’t be unethical to reveal, I’ll tell you. I appreciate the meals, and we Irish have to stick together.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  “I suspect you’d drink to anything,” Stephanie teased.

  “Because I’m Irish?”

  “Because you’re a reporter.”

  “Touché. Breakfast tomorrow?”

  Stephanie’s bantering tone turned resentful. “I won’t be seeing Mr. Stone this evening.”

  “No, no,” Sullivan protested. “No quid pro quo. Strictly social. And early, won’t interfere with your schedule. Pick you up at five-thirty.”

  “Five-thirty! For breakfast? That’s insane!”

  “The reward’ll be breakfast with a view of the Hudson I guarantee you’ll not have dined to before.”

  “I wouldn’t get up at five A.M. for a view of heaven. Where is this place?”

  “Ah, lass, the mystery’s part of the allure. I’ll give y’a hint. It has to do with the angle of the sun in the early hours at this time o’ year. Are y’game?”

  Stephanie, challenged, paused only for a moment. “You’re on!”

  “Fine. Five-thirty, then.”

  “Won’t you need my address?”

  “Oh, I already have that.” Sullivan smiled.

  “You do?”

  “I’m a reporter, remember?”

  * * *

  Eddie Berg tried to stay awake and alert. To that end, he undertook to review the events that had led to his present unpleasant circumstances. One of his most valuable assets in life was that he never kidded himself. He might not show or admit them to others, but he knew his strengths and weaknesses. He had undertaken this mission with no more idea of how to go about it than could be gleaned from reading novels and watching motion pictures. The only uniform Eddie Berg had ever worn was that of the Boy Scouts of America.

  Eddie was scared. His bravado with his captors was an attempt to mask it. It did not occur to him that his fear was a demonstration of his bravery. He had entered the dread confines of the gloomy and mysterious, hissing and rumbling Riegar plant in spite of his fear. He was also resourceful, to a point. Eddie had gained entry by mixing with the personnel entering for the next shift personnel. When he found them all punching their cards in the time clock, he just shuffled by with the rest of them, wearing an old jacket and cap, used his height to reach up to the top row of cards, plucked one at random, stamped it in the machine, and put it back where he found it. From there, it was just a question of finding a place to hide until the last employee had left, then making his way to where the animals were being experimented upon, photograph them with the Minox, hide again until the next mass exodus, and make his escape. It had not occurred to him that double punching time on shift would lead to the interrogation of the employee whose card he had appropriated, and then a search for an intruder.

  The security-service guards had been no problem. It was the others who found him. He knew when he heard the words from behind him, “Hände hoch!” that he had been detected by those the locals so resented and the animal activists had come to hold in particular contempt: the torturers themselves, the feared and hated monkey handlers. He was determined to remain awake and alert but, despite his resolve, he finally fell asleep.

  They came for Eddie Berg late at night. The Mexican prisoners, who slept much of the day, were awake and watched a now-familiar routine: four large muscular men approached Eddie’s bunk. One leaned over and shook him gently. His eyes opened, and he stared upward for a few seconds before comprehension hit him and he started to bolt upward.

  Two sets of exceedingly strong hands gripped Eddie’s upper arms and wrists so tightly that they became numb almost at once. Another hand held his jaw with such strength, it felt on the verge of dislocation. The man held the forefinger of his other hand in front of his mouth and shook his head. Eddie felt completely helpless and decided to obey instructions in the hope that a slip in his captor’s alertness might give him an opening to—do what? Eddie wasn’t sure, but he was confident he’d think of something. He’d gotten in, hadn’t he? No one had ever told Eddie Berg that getting in was easy, that getting out was the trick.

  To his surprise, the men did not walk Eddie through the door referred to with such fear by the two Mexican prisoners. Instead, they took him out the way he came in, then into another room that he recognized from Sara’s description as the one in which she had hidden herself, the computer-monitoring room. The two men who had visited him in the closet were waiting for him.

  “Good evening, Mr. Berg. You slept well, I hope?” It was the big one, the one so thick in the shoulders, who spoke to him.

  “Where’s my lawyer?”

  “You have a one-track mind, Mr. Berg. I have told you that I want to know what you came here to do, both last night and the other evening, when you so skillfully killed one of my employees. Now, then, there are two ways we can go about this: the intelligent way, which is for you to acknowledge your situation and just tell us what we want to know, or the difficult way—difficult, that is, for you.”

  “Next thing,” said Eddie Berg, “you’re gonna tell me I have relatives in Milwaukee, and you have ways of making me talk, right? I’m surprised you haven’t asked to see my papers. I knew I was in the hands of a bunch of lunatics when you started talkin’ about my having been here before and killed somebody. Now I find I’m in the middle of a fuckin’ World War Two movie. I don’t believe this.”

  “You will be a believer very shortly, Mr. Berg. And my congratulations. You are about to complete your mission. You came twice to see what we do here. Miss Rosen photographed
certain of our equipment while it was not in use. Now you shall see it in use. I think Dr. Letzger would be able to explain it best. Herr Doktor…”

  Letzger took the lead in walking over to the computer banks. Metz followed at Eddie’s side, and the four guards followed behind. Eddie glanced at them. They were alert to his every move. The party stopped before the row of elevated cathode-ray-tube terminal screens.

  There were twelve screens. All but three were dark. The lighted screens bore the captions “Primate No. 1,” “Primate No. 2,” and “Primate No. 3.” All three carried physical descriptions by length and weight in centimeters and kilograms. Next came vital signs: blood pressure, pulse, and respiration rates. Then the more sophisticated measurements, an apnea monitor that read leads to the diaphragm to measure chest movement. It determined whether the subject’s breathing had been interrupted or stopped altogether. An oximeter measured the amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood; an electromyograph measured the strength of particular muscles. An echocardiogram kept track of the T and S waves causing the ventricles of the heart to contract, and an electroencephalogram measured the alpha and delta brain waves. There was a mark to show when the delta wave was slow enough to indicate coma.

  There followed data that varied, such as “reaction, positive/negative, rejection, time to rejection, and test substance.” These were followed by times, chemical formulas, and more data that was meaningless to Berg.

  “It is here,” said Letzger, “that we monitor each primate. All are connected to the computer. There is a display terminal for each. Because of the hour, there is no one here to observe the terminals—all the desks, as you can see, are empty—but the computer, fortunately, does not sleep. It continues the monitoring twenty-four hours a day and stores it for our examination and evaluation later. The information monitored is, as you can see, quite complete.”

  “Like hell it is,” said Eddie. “Where on your screens does it monitor pain?”

  “Very observant of you, Mr. Berg. Believe me, if we could, we would. Unfortunately, no one has yet devised a way to do that. Perhaps you will be able to help us in that regard. Come. The subject primates themselves are in here.”

  Letzger led the way to the door through which Sara had entered the room from the laboratory. Eddie recognized that they had come in somewhat of a circle. The door they were approaching led into the room so dreaded by the Mexicans. Letzger paused before it. “Correct me if I am wrong, Mr. Berg. It is the position of the animal-welfare activists that there is such a difference between the physiology of humans and that of other animals that product testing, for example, or drug testing on animals for human efficacy is, essentially, useless. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then you will be happy to learn, sir, that we are in complete agreement.”

  On Eddie Berg’s astonished “What?” Dr. Letzger opened the door.

  15

  The M.S. Aka Maru, totally unladen, her fuel and freshwater tanks empty, rode at her mooring at Albany, New York, so high out of the water as to appear ungainly. Actually, she was anything but. One of the very latest high-technology freighters produced by the shipyards of Japan, Aka Maru made money for her owners because, thanks to computerization, she could be operated by a crew that would have left a good-sized rowboat undermanned. Just who the fortunate owners were was lost in the fog of interlocking corporations chartered by such major maritime powers as Ghana. Her flag of convenience was Panama, which took care of any union and safety problems. The “M.S.” before her name stood for “motorship,” meaning that her propulsion was diesel.

  The scribe marks running down from Aku Maru’s waterline to the Hudson River grew fewer as she took on sufficient fuel oil to navigate halfway around the world; then she cast off and headed south in the channel, only to halt again and anchor off Hyde Park, New York, to let down hoses that would pump aboard the potable fresh water available there at no cost from underground springs feeding into the riverbed. More scribe marks had settled into the water when she finished, hauled anchor, and proceeded the short distance farther south to Rhinekill, where her captain steered her skillfully into the dock at the Riegar pharmaceutical plant.

  The nighttime mooring was watched intently by an observer posted on the road above the railroad entrance to the plant. The dark was no inconvenience because the viewer watched through binoculars equipped with an ITT F4937/Generation III image-intensifier tube, a commercial variant of the military model. Through it, he took in every detail of the vessel and counted the few crew visible helping with the mooring lines. A sound below on the railroad tracks distracted him.

  A diesel-switch engine pushing a two-manway tanker car huffed to a stop, and a brakeman carrying a lantern and a ball-peen hammer walked up alongside the car. He tested the wheels for structural integrity by tapping them with the hammer. The singing ring indicated there were no cracks in the steel. As if on impulse, the brakeman swung his ball-peen at the great tank itself. The deep, hollow, gonglike sound left no doubt that it was empty. As he put down the night-vision binoculars and brought up his left wrist, Brian Sullivan looked at his watch and noted the time.

  * * *

  Georg Kramer knocked at the door of his own office. It was well after hours, but Helmar Metz was using the place as living quarters. There was no answer. Kramer entered and went straight to his desk. He activated the LPC-10 secure telephone that was still housed in Metz’s briefcase sitting on the desk, then, consulting a card taken from his wallet, he dialed Germany, where it was already business hours. Walter Hoess answered his LPC-10 himself. “Ja.”

  Kramer spoke English. Those sons of bitches Metz and Letzger had tried to keep it secret from him, but by God he hadn’t been running this plant for seven years without being wired into what was going on. This was the news Hoess had been waiting for, and, as it should be, it would be he, Kramer, who conveyed it. “I wanted to tell you immediately, sir. It’s been done. We have it.”

  “It has been tested?”

  “Chemically, sir. The proof test will be run tonight. But it’s just a matter of form. The manufacture has already begun. The ship is here to receive the order. We shall make the deadline you set.”

  The sense of relief in Hoess’s voice puzzled Kramer, who was unaware of the hostage situation. “Well done, Kramer! Put Metz on. I want to be sure the shipment leaves without a hitch.”

  “I’m not sure just where he is at the moment, sir.” Kramer couldn’t keep the resentment out of his voice. “It’s after hours here. I’ll leave a message for him to contact you as soon as he returns. But you may rest assured I will see to it that—”

  “Yes, yes. Of course, Kramer. You have my complete confidence. Nonetheless, I want to speak to Metz as soon as possible.”

  “Certainly, sir. I…” But Kramer was speaking into a dead telephone.

  * * *

  “See you a minute, Saul?”

  “Sure, Mike.” Saul Rosen got up from in front of the television set, grateful for the break in his seemingly endless staring at videotape of the Riegar computer screens. The recordings were not exactly high-definition, and from screen to screen were uncoordinated. There was no one to tell Saul what the data meant. He was bored, and his eyes were tired.

  Michael Stone led the way into his office, then said, “Saul, in a minute I’m going to call the rest of the guys in and ask them what stuff they brought from home—personal weapons and such. I don’t want to blow your cover, so I’m asking you privately. What else did you bring up from Washington with that synchronizer thing?”

  “Hell, Mike, I’ve got the Browning Hi-Power. You saw it almost as soon as I got here.”

  “I know. I don’t mean that. What other electronic assets have you got?”

  “Not much. I told you straight what my mission was. I’ve got some tapping gear, but as I said, Riegar’s overseas commo’s gonna be encrypted. I don’t have anything to deal with that, just phones like you’ve got here in your office. Other than th
at, I do have some ultrasensitive hard-wire listening gear, mikes, amplifier, and, of course, I have the layout of the plant and offices, floor by floor, to help select what to try to zero in on. I’m supposed, for example, to try for the computers in the research labs, but it’s not easy. I pretty much take what I can get. I mean, I wasn’t sent up here to go to war, you know. Shit, I’ve got only one spare mag for the Browning!”

  “Okay, thanks, Saul. That’s what I’ll limit myself to when we have the meeting. The Browning. Do me a favor. Call the others in, okay?”

  “You got it.” Saul left to assemble the others, and Stone stared out of his office window into the darkness. They would be light on assets, his little band. No one would have anything like the material he had in his sea chest upstairs.

  Saul returned with Pappy Saye, Arno Bitt, and Wings Harper in tow. They sat around the office, looking at Stone expectantly. “Okay,” he asked, “who brought what to the party?”

  Saul Rosen, who knew the question was coming, spoke first. “Nine mil. Browning Hi-Power. Two loaded magazines.”

  The other men looked at him respectfully. All were familiar with the high reputation of the last modification John Browning had made on his famed short-recoil-operated semiautomatic pistol. They knew the staggered box-column magazines held thirteen rounds each. With one in the chamber, that totaled twenty-seven rounds, usually more than ample for resolving serious differences of opinion with persons not prepared to be reasonable.

  Pappy Saye spoke up next: “A three-fifty-seven Magnum. Smith & Wesson, large frame, five-inch barrel. Box of shells. An oldie but goodie; cylinder’s got recessed chambers for the cartridge heads. Don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

  “Sounds like a self-description, don’t it?” asked Wings Harper. They all laughed. They laughed even harder as Pappy retorted, “Yeah, ’least I don’t have to blacken my face to keep from shinin’ like the full moon hanging’ over a ridge line.”