The Monkey Handlers

by G Gordon Liddy

  Out came the little flashlight again. Before switching it on, Arno turned the adjustable lens to pinpoint, then cupping the light to shield it further, he ran it carefully around the crack between the door and the frame. There were no contacts that, if broken when the door was opened, would set off an alarm. Satisfied, he lifted the tiny beam to the joint where the frame had been welded to the roof. The shed was constructed of quarter-inch steel plate. Other than his relief at not having to defeat an alarm, the situation was what Arno had expected from a study of the building drawings Stone had provided.

  Arno unslung the Chinese Communist version of the AK-47 and placed it on the roof of the shed, then he did the same with his hands and pressed himself easily up onto it. He crawled to the front of the roof, looked over the edge at the door to gauge it, then reached into his pocket to withdraw a plastic kitchen-wrap package secured with cellophane tape. In the beginning glow of dawn, it looked like a typical package of cocaine confiscated by police. His straight razor-sharp Navy Mark 3 Mod O knife opened the package in one deft pass. From it, he lifted out a lump of dough he had prepared himself in Stone’s kitchen from Aunt May’s flour and tap water. He kneaded it between his fingers—still moist and pliable, thanks to the plastic wrap.

  Each moment increased the daylight, a curse because with it his concealment was vanishing, a blessing because his ability to see improved. Arno made a ring of dough roughly six inches in diameter and placed it on the steel roof in the center, several inches back from the edge of the side where the door was located. He pressed it into the steel, making the inside edge of the dough ring as vertical as possible. Finished, he sat back for a moment and carefully surveyed his work. Content with it, he glanced at his watch and went back into his pocket with renewed urgency.

  This time, Arno took out a package made of folded newspaper, taped shut at its seams. He sliced off the point of one corner, and from that crude spout poured the carefully blended fifty-fifty mixture of powdered rust and powder-fine aluminum filings inside the dough-outlined circle. When he finished, he smoothed the fine dust roughly level, then quickly held the newspaper over it as a gust of wind off the river threatened to blow it out of the ring.

  From a pocket on the opposite side of his jeans, Arno pulled out a “Gopher Gas” cylinder. In its red-paper covering with a fuse protruding from one end, it looked to him like either the largest firecracker in the world or the smallest stick of dynamite. From his watch pocket, he fished out a battered Zippo lighter that was a World War II souvenir of the late Harry Stone. It had been recharged hours before with charcoal lighter fluid in lieu of the real thing, but he had found it to work reliably with the substitute fuel.

  With the Zippo, Arno lit the fuse of the “Gopher Gas” cylinder, waited until it burned down almost to the cylinder, and then plunged the burning end deep into the powder inside the circle of dough. Immediately, he turned his face away to protect himself, first from the intense flaring heat of the ignited Thermit, and second from the deadly fumes of the hydrogen-cyanide gas generated by the still-burning cylinder. The incandescent Thermit, used commercially to weld steel, quickly burned a six-inch hole through the quarter-inch-thick steel plate of the shed roof as molten white-hot steel dripped into the interior and fell away into the elevator shaft. Arno hoped he hadn’t started a fire below.

  Slowly, the glowing white of the edge of the hole turned to red, but Arno didn’t have time to wait until the edge cooled sufficiently on its own to permit him to reach through it safely. A field expedient was called for. Arno stood, opened his fly, and urinated, trying his best to keep the stream on the hot edges by aiming at the residue of the incinerated dough. A fair amount of urine went into the hole. Maybe, Arno thought, it would put out any fire he might have started in the elevator shaft. He watched carefully as the effect of the urine on the steel changed from flash steam to, finally, rapid drying. The stream terminated before Arno had cooled the metal as much as he wished. “Damn,” he muttered to himself, “out of ammo.” He knelt and checked the rim of the hole with a quick stab of his finger. Safe.

  Arno lay down on the rooftop and reached down through the hole he had just made in it toward the emergency release bar on the inside of the door. No good, he couldn’t reach it. He withdrew his arm, picked up the AK-47 by its pistol grip, removed the long, curved magazine, and carefully inserted the muzzle into the hole. When he got down to the pistol grip, he had to bend his wrist and rotate the weapon on its longitudinal axis forty-five degrees to get the pistol grip through the hole. Once that was accomplished, he was able to extend his arm enough to get the buttstock through, then his arm up to its shoulder, still holding on to the weapon by its pistol grip. He probed around until he caught the crossbar of the door release between the barrel and the high front sight, shoved it down, and released the door. Then he quickly shoved the door with the muzzle to swing it out as far as he could, threw his leg over the edge of the roof, and caught the door before its spring-loaded hinges could close it again. “Shit!” Arno said aloud as he awkwardly reversed the process to wriggle the AK-47 out of the hole while holding the door open with his foot. A few more colorful expletives and he succeeded.

  With one more kick to swing the door wide open enough to give him time to dismount the roof, Arno was ready to enter the shed. He retrieved the AK-47, reinserted the magazine, and moved inside.

  When Bitt closed the steel door of the elevator-maintenance shed behind him, he found that the early-dawn light that filtered through the air vent was insufficient, so he broke out the miniflashlight again and inspected the area. The floor beneath him consisted of a metal grating. There was a low safety railing between the edge of the grating and the abyss of the eighteen-story elevator shaft. The powerful motors were directly in front of him, poised over the centers of the two steel-rail frameworks in which the two cars slid vertically on greased rails. Neither car was to be seen. The motors drove the giant pulley wheels from which the cables were suspended. Each motor housing had a control panel with three buttons arranged vertically marked Up, Down, and Stop. The Stop button was in the middle.

  As he shone the flashlight around, Arno stopped the beam at the air vent’s side wall. There the mystery of why there was an emergency-exit release bar on the inside of the door was solved. He hadn’t been able to see it because, looking in from the vent outside, it hadn’t been visible. Outside the framework that held the cars was a simple steel-rung ladder set a good six inches into the masonry work of the shaft. It gave about as much protection against a passing car—should a stalled car from which one had escaped through the trapdoor start up again—as the space set into the tunnel walls of the subways in New York. The one on the opposite side had been obscured by the motors when he first looked in, and neither had been shown on the plans. Arno had expected to have to clamber down the framework to a horizontal air shaft, escaping death from a moving car by jumping onto the top of it in the unlikely event of someone using it in an office building at 0445 hours.

  Arno slung the AK-47 and used the ladder to start his climb downward. There was, he assured himself, sufficient room for an elevator car to pass him, but he hoped no fat man ever had to use the ladder to escape. He’d lose his ass—literally.

  As he descended floor by floor, Arno noted that the floor numbers were painted in large numerals on the outer elevator doors, the ones that protected the opening when a car wasn’t there and opened at the same time as the inner doors—the ones for the cars themselves. One story down, he paused to examine one with his flashlight. Seeing nothing of an opening mechanism at door level, he moved down a few feet on the ladder and looked upward from beneath. At the bottom of the outer doors was a striker plate. Obviously, when a car approached from above or below, a projecting striker hit the double-acting toggle switch and opened the outer door at the same time as the inner door. He resisted the temptation to check what he had deduced by operating one of the doors and kept descending.

  On his arrival at the twelfth floor, A
rno moved down a few feet and over onto the cage-rail framework and unslung the AK-47. With its muzzle extended out as far as he could reach with it, he tripped the switch and the door to the eleventh floor opened. Arno rolled up and out onto the floor and lay very still, looking. No one. At the end of the hall, he spotted what he was looking for, the door to the roof of the manufacturing wing. If all had gone well, Mike Stone, Wings Harper, and Pappy Saye were waiting in concealment on the other side of it. At a crouch, Arno moved swiftly to the door and stood still. Nothing. As he expected, there was another emergency crossbar device that opened the door. As he also expected, a glance upward disclosed the two rectangular blocks of an electrical alarm. One block was attached to the door frame and the other to the top of the door. Break the contact and all hell would break loose.

  Arno lifted the duct tape that sealed his breast pocket and removed the twenty-five-foot metal measuring tape he’d taken from Harry Stone’s old toolbox. He pulled out a foot of the steel tape. Because it had been formed at manufacture with a slight bend, it stood out straight. Arno held it above him, ready, and depressed the release bar slowly until the latch was freed, then he painstakingly started to push the door outward. As the contact plates moved, but before they had moved far enough for the circuit to be broken, Arno touched the top side of the steel tape to the underside of the upper plate and the bottom side of the tape to the bottom plate. He then lowered his hand slightly to put tension on the tape and slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y, grimacing in concentration, he pressed the door open wider, all the while holding contact between the two electrical plates by means of the tape as it slowly played out from its spring-loaded reel, being pulled by the little tab at its end, which was hooked over the edge of the door top.

  Eighteen inches was about as far as Arno could continue the process without risking almost certain loss of contact. He was at that point now, but he dared not speak to hail Mike Stone and the others. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. They were waiting in the shadow and, alerted by the crack of light when the door first opened, had waited only until Arno’s face had come into view and they could identify him. Slowly, and with great care, each of the three men took his turn ducking under Arno’s extended arms and sliding into the empty but brightly lighted hallway of the twelfth floor of the Riegar tower, Pappy and Wings each carrying twenty-five-pound plastic trash bags full of the ammonium-nitrate fuel-oil mixture they had lugged up the steam pipe behind Michael Stone.

  As Pappy Saye entered, Arno said, “Where’s Saul?”

  As if in answer, out of the stillness of the dawn could be heard the screech of tires and the unmistakable “baaruuuup” of the Mustang being double-clutch downshifted twelve stories below.

  “That son of a bitch better be able to shinny up that pipe like a fuckin’ chimpanzee, goddamn it!” Arno said, his arms still straining upward. “What am I, the Statute of Liberty?”

  He was talking to himself, though; the other three had fanned out to clear the area. They returned just as Saul Rosen eased himself under Arno’s now-aching arms.

  “Here,” said Stone, concerned that by now fatigue might have led to a loss of control by Arno in the delicate task of bringing the door back in without breaking the contact, “let me give you a hand with that.” He took the outside end, and together the two men got the door safely closed without setting off the alarm. Then Stone took out a section of the plant plans from under his sweatshirt. It had already been folded in such a way as to display the twelfth-floor floor plan.

  “Here we are, and here’s the primate lab,” he said as he pointed to a door down the hall. “But we don’t dare make a move until we know for sure that they’re there. Saul, got your gear ready?”

  “Right here,” Saul answered, donning a lightweight set of earphones attached to what looked like, without close inspection, a miniature cassette player popular with joggers. As Saul plugged in what resembled a stethoscope, Stone went into his pocket and came out with a signaling mirror—a hand mirror with a tiny hole in its center through which one could look to direct flashes of sun at a target. He pointed to the area of the door into the primate lab. About seven feet up on the opposite wall was a small video camera aimed at the door area. “I don’t know the viewing area of that camera,” he said. “One thing’s sure: The guys downstairs monitoring the video-cams start seeing moving figures, we’ve had it on surprise. Gimme a hand.”

  With a small amount of stiff wire and duct tape, Stone attached the signaling mirror to the camera housing, holding it out in front of the lens at an angle so that it reflected back blank wall.

  “What happens when those guys don’t see no doors no more?” asked Pappy.

  “Sara said there’re banks of screens down there, all either doors or halls with blank walls. I’m countin’ on the guy monitoring, assuming he’s not asleep—par for the course for a rent-a-cop—not to notice one less door or one more wall. At any rate, the shit’ll hit the fan anyway as soon as we bust ’em out. And I’m not looking for that to take all day. Let’s go.”

  Saul Rosen started a systematic listening to the stethoscope—highly amplified—as he applied it to the wall. Abruptly he said, “That’s Sara!”

  “You’re certain?” asked Stone.

  “She’s my sister, for Christ’s sake!”

  “What about Eddie Berg?”

  Saul listened intently, then became agitated. “No. But some guy with a German accent’s talking to Sara about some experiment and she can join Berg in a few minutes. They … wait a minute.” Saul moved the stethoscope. “He’s giving orders in German … something about ‘put them all inside.’ From the number answering up, I’d say we got something like six bad guys at least in there.” His face turned white.

  “What is it?”

  “Somebody screamed. God!”

  “Sara?”

  “No,” Saul said, his voice shaky, “a man.”

  Stone looked at Saul sharply. Saul caught the look and said, “I’ll be okay. Only hurry, Mike. My sister’s in there!”

  Stone looked down at the plans again. “Okay,” he said, speaking rapidly, “listen up. Wings, Pappy, leave the fertilizer here; go with Arno. On the floor below’s where they keep the animals. Arno’ll show you how to get down there. Take some trash bags with you. Use your knives. Be quick and quiet. You know what I want in those bags. Get it back here on the double. Fuck it. Use the elevator. Time is everything. Saul and I’ll set up the breach.”

  “On the way,” said Pappy. The others turned to follow him to the elevator bank.

  “Okay,” Stone said to Saul, “this is an interior, non-load-bearing wall—”

  “Mike!” Saul said, his voice forced, urgent. “Skip the fucking engineering lecture, for Christ’s sake. Just tell me what to do! They could be doing something to Sara right now!”

  Stone reached out and grabbed Saul’s shirt just below the neck and jerked him so close their faces were inches apart. He spat out his words, hard, fast, and cold. “Listen, goddamn it. You’re losing it. I don’t give a fuck who’s in there or what’s going on. I’m telling you what I’d tell any SEAL new to the teams. I don’t want to detect emotion one in you. A SEAL team is a machine and we’ve got no use for weak parts. Now click on or so help me, the next time you break, I’ll grease you myself and send your body home to your mother in a rubber bag with a note telling her how you died a hero. Got that?”

  Ashen and chastened, Saul said only, “Yes.”

  Stone let go of Saul and picked up his prior conversation as if nothing had happened. “Okay, we’ve got drywall over aluminum studs. Insulated. Not for heat and cold but for sound. We’ll have to get rid of that, but we’ve got to be quiet. First hint of trouble, those guys in there’ll whack out Sara, Eddie, and any other witnesses. Us, too, and claim the lot of us were burglars. Which, of course, we are. Keep listening with that thing. I need to know if anything alerts them, or if they call in the cavalry.”

  Stone whipped the slender double-edged Gerber from its scabbar
d. He put the blade point waist-high against the drywall and pushed it until he felt the resistance stop. Quickly, he slid the blade in until the scalloped teeth could come to bear, then sawed a cut toward his right, trying to find the right balance between speed and quiet. In a few inches, he heard the distinctive sound of the blade teeth hitting aluminum. The Gerber would go through the studding material, but he couldn’t risk the sound. Nor did he need to; he just reversed direction and cut over to the adjacent stud two feet to the left. At the stud, he started a cut upward alongside it for about two feet, then across and down again until he was able to remove a rough square of drywall. Then he went to work picking out the sound-deadening material.

  As Stone removed it, he discovered the secret of the silence from the laboratory. The plans called for two-by-four-inch studding, as in a normal dividing wall, but the studs had been doubled so that there was eight inches between the Sheetrock of the outside and inside wall. Stone had not only to remove the insulation, eight inches thick, from the hole he had cut, but to dig down and get out another good twelve inches’ worth of the stuff below the bottom of the opening. By the time he had done so, the other three had returned, their jeans blood-smeared from wiping off their hands, bearing bulging plastic trash bags.

  “Must be gettin’ old,” Pappy whispered. “Never bothered me to slit Charlie’s throat in Nam, but them pigs and rabbits and dogs never did no harm to anybody.”