I

As he pulled into the parking slot near the edge of the huge, asphalt lot an empty beer can crunched under one of the front wheels of the car. He turned off his lights and surveyed the area. Yes, this was a good spot; he had a clear view of each automobile turning from the lone entrance driveway into the lot, where it had to slow almost to a stop under the bright, mercury-vapor lamp there, and he also was well situated for seeing which row of the lot each vehicle eventually turned into. He pulled his coat more snugly around his neck, turned the radio dial until he found an FM station which was broadcasting his favorite Schubert sonata, and settled down to wait.

It was nearly 20 minutes before he spotted what he was looking for. A brown sports van barely slowed as it came bouncing up the entrance ramp. Its tires squealed as it made the turn at the top. For a single instant the faces of the two occupants were visible to Oscar: the driver, a mulatto with a bushy Afro, and the woman beside him, dark haired and with a rather broad nose, but still clearly White.

The van’s tall antenna with the orange ping-pong ball on top made it easy for him to follow the course of the vehicle with his eyes after it turned into the fourth lane down from where he was parked. Oscar waited until the van stopped, then he started his engine and swung out of his parking space, following the route taken by the other vehicle. He wanted another look at the couple before they went into the supermarket, just to be certain. Then he would choose another parking slot, as near the van as possible, and wait for them to return.

As he rolled cautiously along the asphalt between the two lines of parked cars, he did not see the couple in his headlights until he was nearly opposite their van. They were both standing near the passenger side of their vehicle, apparently arguing about something.

A sudden, reckless impulse struck Oscar: why not do it now, instead of waiting for them to go into the store and then come back? There were no other cars moving in the lane and no other pedestrians in sight, except at the far end, near the store entrance. Unfortunately, though, the brown van and the couple were on his right, and his passenger-side window was rolled up. It seemed to him too awkward to have to lean across the seat and roll the window down while they were watching.

Would he be able to turn his car around and drive back up the lane before anyone else came or before the couple moved? Perhaps he should get out of the car now and hit them on foot. His palms became sweaty, and he felt his muscles tighten as the possibilities flashed through his mind with lightning speed.

Just as he came fully abreast of the van he spotted a vacant slot three cars down, also on the right. Good! He would pull in there. If no one else had appeared he would back out and move down the lane in the opposite direction, with the van on his left this time.

In the cold night air the perspiration rolled down his cheeks in rivulets as he fought to calm his nerves. It was always this way just before an operation. Even back in ‘Nam, every time he’d had to take his F4 up on a run through that deadly North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire, he’d had to fight this jittery, sweaty feeling. Once he was in the thick of things, the fear disappeared; it was just before that was always the bad time— the time when it was still possible to back out.

His grip tightened convulsively on the steering wheel, and the motion of the car became jerky as he maneuvered into the parking space. An instant glance to the rear, and then he put his vehicle into reverse and backed it quickly around.

In another five seconds he was opposite the couple again. He stopped the car with a jerk, inadvertently killing the engine. Damn! And in the rearview mirror he saw a fat woman, two bags of groceries in her arms and a small child trailing her, walking down the lane, about 60 yards away. Both the bushy-haired mulatto and his rather dumpy, pasty-faced female companion stopped talking and turned to look directly at him. They were about eight feet from his open window.

An instant calm fell over Oscar, the expected calm for which he had been waiting. With a smooth motion, neither too hurried nor too slow but precise and deliberate, he lifted the rifle from beneath the blanket on the seat beside him, raised it to his shoulder, and, left elbow braced against the door, carefully squeezed off two shots.

The ear-shattering reports echoed through the huge lot, but Oscar remained calm as he put the rifle down, restarted his engine, and accelerated smoothly toward the exit ramp. As he turned at the end of the lane, he paused to glance back toward the van. The mulatto’s body was sprawled out into the roadway; the woman apparently had fallen backward, beside the van, and was not visible. Both shots had been head shots, and Oscar was quite certain both the man and the woman were dead. He had seen their skulls literally explode into showers of bone fragments, brain tissue, and blood as the high-velocity projectiles struck them.

The icy calm stayed with Oscar all the way home. Not until he had put the car in the garage, entered the house, and taken off his coat did it give way to the euphoria he always felt afterward. He whistled contentedly to himself as he gave his rifle a quick cleaning and then returned to the garage to change his license plates. It took him only two minutes to remove the special plates and replace them with his regular ones.

He carefully checked the adhesive-backed plastic letters and numerals which he had pressed onto the flattened plates. He had been worried about the adhesive not holding the thick plastic pieces to the metal, especially in this cold weather. He pried gently at the edge of a letter with the blade of his pocket knife. The adhesive resisted, then gradually yielded, so that he was able to work the blade between the plastic and the metal and, with a few seconds of effort, peel the entire letter loose. That was reassuring, but he was still mindful of the time, a few days ago, when he had arrived at home and found a number missing from the plate altogether! After that he had done some experimenting with different adhesives. It took him nearly 20 minutes to peel loose all of the plastic pieces and rearrange them into a new pattern this time, but he did not begrudge the extra effort required.

How fortunate, he thought, as he turned out the garage light, that his automobile was such a common model. There must be 10,000 tan Ford sedans practically indistinguishable from his in the Washington metropolitan area. Still, he was pressing his luck to keep using the same modus operandi. Six times in a little over three weeks— 22 days to be exact— with the same car, the same rifle, the same routine, just different parking lots and different license numbers, was really too much, he thought to himself.

But more than two weeks ago he had made up his mind that he would not vary his style until the news media broke their silence on the killings. There had been a big news splash after the first double shooting, three weeks ago. “Interracial couple gunned down in parking lot,” the Washington Post headline had screamed, and the other media also had stressed the fact that the two victims were a Black male and a White female, even though the newsmen had no way of knowing then that the gunman had a racial motive. The naughtiness of the notion that he might have apparently was too titillating for them to resist.

When the second double killing came four days later, it had been mentioned briefly on the inside pages of the Post and then quietly dropped. The third, fourth, and fifth pairs of shootings had been greeted with total media silence. The reason was clear: at some time between the second and third shootings it had dawned on the media people that the killings were racially motivated, and the realization frightened them. They didn’t want to encourage any would-be imitators, or even give hope to a great many Americans who would cheer anyone who might be going around picking off racially mixed couples.

By now the bastards really must be bursting at the seams trying to keep the lid on this, Oscar thought, grinning. They couldn’t hold out much longer. He had a strong hunch, approaching certainty, that tonight’s work would crack them wide open.

In the passageway between the garage and the house Oscar hesitated. He had some paperwork in the study to finish, if he were to have the new proposal ready in time for his meeting with Colonel Ericsson Thursday. But he couldn’t stomach the idea of any more paperwork tonight, and it already was a bit late for calling Adelaide. He decided to put in a couple of hours in the shop before bedtime. Happy with his decision, he snapped his fingers and began whistling again as he turned down the stairs to the cellar.

Oscar Yeager was a consulting engineer by profession, a tinkerer and occasional inventor by inclination. After leaving the Air Force in 1976, he had gone back to school and earned graduate degrees in both electrical engineering and computer science. He had begun hiring out as a consultant even while finishing his graduate work at the University of Colorado. After that he had set up shop in the San Francisco area and, through an Air Force acquaintance from his Vietnam days, now a contract officer in the Pentagon, had acquired a series of design contracts. It was these contracts which had led him to move to Washington four years ago.

Actually, Oscar didn’t have to work at all; the royalties coming in on one of his antenna patents were quite sufficient to meet his rather modest needs. He worked, not so much because he was eager to pile up more money in the bank, but because he thought it a good idea to keep his hand in. Furthermore, the extra income made it possible for him gradually to increase his stock of laboratory equipment, which was damned expensive. Anyway, the work fitted in nicely with his own tinkering inclinations, he did it all at home on his own schedule, and he almost never spent more than 20 hours a week at it.

Oscar moved easily between the racks of electronic equipment, carefully avoiding tripping over interconnecting cables, as he made his way to the corner where the computer quietly hummed and chittered to itself. He glanced at the sheaf of fanfold paper which the printer slowly had been disgorging all evening and noted with satisfaction that the calculations for the new antenna system were nearly finished. If things continued to go well, he just might have all the work done for which he was seeking another Air Force contract even before the contract was signed Thursday.

He wouldn’t tell Ericsson that, of course. He would dribble out results over the next six months. That would keep the Air Force happy and give Oscar plenty of opportunity to justify expenses to pay for the new spectrum analyzer he wanted.

If it weren’t for the damned paper shuffling, this government contract work would be ideal, Oscar reflected. But every contract required filling out literally hundreds of pages of absolutely asinine forms, for which the instructions were maddeningly obtuse. What percentage of his suppliers and subcontractors during the past three years were Blacks? the government wanted to know. How many were Spanish surnamed? How many were American Indians, Asiatics, or Aleutian Islanders? Were his percentages in each of the above cases at least equal to the percentages of the corresponding minorities in the work force in the county or municipality where the contract work was performed? Had he ever knowingly used contract funds to purchase supplies from a company not in compliance with regulations 148 c.(4) or 156 a.(1) of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? If so, why? Give full particulars. And on and on and on.

And the bastards actually checked all the answers! Once Oscar had tried to shortcut the paper work by scrawling “not applicable” across a whole page of questions which asked what percentage of the contractor’s advertising budget went to media oriented specifically toward minority markets, whether the pictorial or photographic material used in the contractor’s advertising depicted the contractor’s employees/customers as racially mixed (and if not, why not?), and the like.

The forms came back to him with an eight-page letter from one of the Pentagon’s regiment of Equal Opportunity compliance officers, full of unctuous cant about the essential nature of the government’s program for “racial justice” and demanding that each question be answered fully. Oscar finally had had to submit copies of his itemized balance sheets to convince the sanctimonious oaf that he did not advertise and had neither employees nor customers and could not, therefore, be expected to explain why his nonexistent illustrated advertisements did not show the required racial mix of smiling Black, Brown, Oriental, and White faces among his “employees/customers.”

He felt his temper rising as he remembered the paper work still facing him on the new contract. Well, perhaps he could coax Adelaide into doing all of it tomorrow evening. He put the thought of paper work out of his mind and flipped on the light in the shop. Oscar had converted his entire basement, originally consisting of two bedrooms, a recreation room, and a bath, to his special needs.

The computer and the electronics laboratory were in the recreation room, a chemical laboratory was in one of the bedrooms, a small but well-equipped machine shop was in the other, and the bathroom doubled as a photographic darkroom. Altogether he had more than half a million dollars worth of modern scientific instruments and tools at his disposal, and they served him well, both at work and play, with the border between the two types of activity often becoming quite fuzzy.

Tonight, for example, he intended to put the finishing touches on a project that had nothing to do with his Air Force contract work or with any other remunerative enterprise. And yet this was hardly a plaything, Oscar thought as he opened a cabinet and took out a tubular, metal device, carefully examining the threaded portion in one end. Satisfied, he put the device on a work table beside the smaller of his two precision metalworking lathes.

He reached into a drawer in the lower portion of the cabinet and removed an object wrapped in an oily rag. Discarding the rag, Oscar held a new, .22 caliber semiautomatic pistol with a long, cylindrical barrel in his hand. He quickly and expertly disassembled the pistol, returning everything but the barrel to the drawer.

An hour and a half later Oscar grinned with satisfaction as he blew away the last of the metal chips with an air hose and then screwed the tubular device smoothly onto the new threads he had just turned on the outside of the pistol barrel: a perfect fit! The threaded end of the aluminum-alloy tube snugged up tightly against the freshly cut shoulder on the steel barrel as the ball detent clicked into place. He could see no indication of misalignment between the barrel and the silencer when he sighted carefully down the bore. Now for the test.

Oscar reassembled and loaded the pistol and walked back into the electronics lab. A touch on a button concealed above the door frame caused a four-foot-wide section of the far wall to swing smoothly out at a right angle. Flipping a switch in the exposed recess turned on a floodlight at the far end of a long, horizontal tunnel lined with sections of 30-inch sewer pipe. Oscar ran a target down the wire to the end of the tunnel and seated himself comfortably beside the spotting scope at the firing bench. This basement target range, which he had built himself, was known only to him. With the concealed door to the recess closed behind him, he could fire even the largest of his rifles without a sound being heard in the house above him— or in his unsuspecting neighbor’s yard, beneath which the bullets impacted in the target area.

Tonight, however, noise was no problem, and he left the door open. He squeezed off ten rounds, each one making a sound about like a champagne bottle being uncorked, but not half so loud. The shots were grouped nicely inside a three-inch circle on the target, which was almost as well as he had been able to do before modifying the pistol. Oscar was satisfied; now he could change his modus operandi.

II

Last night’s shootings had been too late to make the morning paper, but the television news was full of them as Oscar fixed breakfast. As he had guessed they would, the masters of the media finally had decided to lift the curtain of silence with which they heretofore had shrouded his nocturnal parking-lot activities. The newscaster excitedly barked out the details: “...12 known victims of a mad killer... apparent racial motivation for the shootings... more than 200 FBI agents working on the case for the last two weeks... a tall, blond man sought as a suspect....”

At this last item Oscar became thoughtful. So someone had gotten a glimpse of him; it must have been the fourth shooting, when he had left his car and fired from a standing position. He strolled into the bathroom and looked searchingly at his reflection in the mirror: the deep-set gray eyes; the craggy lines of jutting nose and chin; the yellow stubble on his broad, heavy jaw; the somewhat oversized ears; the thin scar running diagonally across his left cheek, the consequence of a skiing accident some years ago; the high, smooth forehead beneath his uncombed, golden-blond hair. It was an easy face to spot in a crowd, unfortunately.

Well, it was almost certain that no one had gotten a clear view of his face, or there would have been more of a description, probably even an artist’s sketch. Still, he would have to be much more careful in the future. He had been almost deliberately reckless the first few times. Defiance of the authorities had been as much a motive as the abhorrence he felt for those selected as targets. There had been another motive too, he reflected, and it had weighed at least as much as the others: the therapeutic motive, the need to purge himself of the spiritual malaise which had been afflicting him increasingly in the last few years.

How had that begun? Oscar tried to remember. Was it after he moved to Washington, or had it started earlier? Probably earlier; he thought he could trace it all the way back to Vietnam. He just became much more aware of it in Washington.

In Vietnam it was basically the Vietnamese which had bothered him. He had arrived there with no particular prejudices, but he quickly acquired a strong distaste for Vietnamese of both sexes and all ages. He didn’t like their looks, their smell, their values, their behavior, or their company. He couldn’t see that it made the slightest difference whether they were ruled by a gang of communist gooks in Hanoi or a gang of capitalist gooks in Saigon. He would have been just as happy if the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese had been left alone to kill each other indefinitely.

Oscar certainly was no pacifist; on principle, he was opposed neither to wars in general nor to the Vietnamese “police action” in particular. He thought of his job in Vietnam as dangerous, but also challenging and exciting. Nevertheless, there were certain things which began to worry him, certain nagging ideas.

One was the utter hypocrisy and falseness of the U.S. government’s position. The South Vietnamese supposedly were America’s “allies,” and American forces were there in fulfillment of “treaty obligations.” But that was clearly nonsense. These were not the sort of creatures anyone would choose for allies; if America ever got in a jam and needed military assistance, there would be none forthcoming from this quarter.

The better he had gotten to know the Vietnamese, the more Washington’s self-righteous cant about “helping to preserve freedom” in Southeast Asia grated on his sensibilities. These gooks couldn’t care less about “freedom”— but even if that weren’t so, giving it to them wasn’t worth the life of a single one of his comrades. This was something Oscar thought about every time one of the fliers in his squadron failed to return from a mission, and every time he saw the rubber body bags being unloaded from a chopper.

If the government had told everyone that the action in Vietnam was simply a war game— Spartan-style practice to keep the U.S. military machine on its toes-and all the phony target restrictions imposed on the U.S. forces were part of the game, it would have been easier for him to accept. But to maintain the pretense that they were fighting for vital national objectives, and at the same time to do everything possible to avoid the military victory which could have been won: that turned Oscar’s stomach and left him with a deep bitterness toward the politicians, the masters of the controlled news media, and all the others who made up the “System” back home.

One other thing his Vietnam experience had given him was a deeper appreciation for people of his own kind. All the fliers in his unit were White— in fact, as fliers they were a highly selected group of Whites, an elite— and Oscar could not help contrasting them with both the ARVN troops and the Black GIs in the heavily integrated U.S. ground forces. It was not just his instinctive xenophobia responding to differences in appearance and speech; it was something deeper and more fundamental. The vibrations were different.

The Blacks felt it, and they used the word “soul” to express it: a good word, meaning the individual’s spiritual roots to all the past and future generations of his race. From these roots come everything: physical, mental, and spiritual. They determine not only what an individual looks like and the way he thinks and behaves, but his entire relationship to the world.

Take the word “pride,” for instance, another word much used by Blacks. It was manifested in wholly different ways by the various races. To Oscar and the other pilots it meant, essentially, self-respect, and it was based on the individual’s sense of achievement or accomplishment— most of all on his achievement of mastery of himself; it came across as an aura of dignity or, one might even say, of honor.

To Blacks, on the other hand, “pride” meant a sort of swaggering insolence, a pugnacious determination to get one up on “Whitey.” It manifested itself in the way of a barnyard pecking order. As for the Vietnamese, it was hard to say whether or not their language even had a word for such a concept. Probably the closest they came was something translated as “face.” As with the Blacks it was primarily a social thing, depending upon relationships with other individuals, while with the Whites it was much more a private, inner thing.

Oscar hadn’t personally liked all his fellow White fliers; there were a couple for whom he hadn’t even had much respect. He recognized the personal failings of his fellows: the weaknesses, the stupidities, the meannesses— military life bares a man’s true nature as no other life— but they nevertheless formed a natural community. Oscar understood them, and they understood him. They could work together on a common task and feel right about it, despite their individual differences. With the Blacks and the Vietnamese, neither Oscar nor his fellows could ever form such a natural community.

Oscar did not hate either the Vietnamese or the Blacks while he was in Vietnam, but he did become fully conscious that they were races apart. He became conscious of their innate differentness, as well as the differentness of their life-styles. He saw their folkways and their attitudes as products of race-souls wholly alien to his own, and this gave him a greater sense of racial self-awareness than he had felt before.

He did a lot of reading between missions, trying to understand better the significance of his newly heightened consciousness, trying to see it in a historical perspective. What began emerging in Vietnam and developed more fully in graduate school after he left the Air Force was a realization of the racial basis of history and of all human progress. Previously Oscar had seen history as a mere succession of events— battles, revolutions, technological advances— associated with dates and names, and he had a vague notion of progress as a sort of concatenation of events, with one political happening leading to another, one inventor or artist building on the work of a predecessor. His new conception placed the events in their human context, all the intimate details of which were essential for an understanding of the meaning of the former.

Take the Vietnam war as an example. Oscar could imagine himself as a history student reading about it in the 25th century. The account in the history book, if it were written the way most history books have been written, would tell of two countries, one rich and powerful, the other poor and backward and struggling to maintain its independence in the face of internal subversion and external aggression. It would relate a series of political and military developments in the poor country, as the rich country sent soldiers to help it against its enemies; it would describe the political reactions in the rich country to these developments; and it would analyze the way in which these political reactions prevented the rich country from utilizing its soldiers effectively to help the poor country, so that eventually the former had to withdraw its forces from the latter and leave it to be defeated by its enemies. The dates and places of every major battle, the numbers of troops involved, and the names of the leaders of the various political factions in both countries could all be set down without error or omission. Yet the whole account would be essentially meaningless.

The 25th-century history student could not possibly understand the Vietnam war unless he knew what the Vietnamese were like and what the Americans were like; unless he had already learned about the values, behavior, attitudes, and life-style of the Vietnamese the way Oscar had; unless he had a thorough comprehension of the decadent condition of American political life in the 20th century: of the hypocrisy, the cant, the concealed motives, the total irresponsibility of the leadership, the general ignorance and alienation of the citizens, the role of the media, the effects of the civil-rights movement on military morale, and a dozen other things.

History is a record of the thoughts and actions of people: not just political leaders and artists and inventors as individuals, but as members of the communities— racial, cultural, and religious— with which they share values and motivations, attitudes and tendencies, capabilities and aptitudes, specific strengths and weaknesses. It is, therefore, a record of the development and interaction of various human types: of races and ethnic groups, above all else. The record only has meaning when it is read with a comprehensive, detailed knowledge of the physical and psychical characteristics of the particular human type or types involved.

From the time that Oscar had understood this simple truth, the disturbing things which were happening around him after his return from Vietnam began to make some sort of sense. The growing use of drugs by young Whites; the open displays of homosexual behavior by an increasing number of them, with the blessing of the news and entertainment media; the appearance in public of more and more interracial couples— all of these things began to fit into a pattern which Oscar could understand. Understanding that the civilization of which he had felt himself a part was losing its sense of identity and therefore its ability to sustain itself was not only disturbing and depressing to Oscar, but also deeply frustrating, because he wanted to do something about it.

If he had been more of a political creature, Oscar might have thought about running for public office, perhaps even organizing a new political party. But he did not have the stomach for that sort of thing. He held a deep, visceral loathing for the whole democratic political process, as well as for every politician he had ever met in person or given notice to on the television screen. He could not, without a shudder of revulsion, imagine himself becoming a habitual liar and doing all of the other dishonorable things required to curry favor with a degraded and ignorant public and a corrupt media establishment, just so that he might win an election and the opportunity to attempt to reform the System from the inside.

Nor, he thought, was he the type to become a pamphleteer, so that he could rail at the System from the outside. Oscar was not only a man of few words, he was a man of action. His inclination was to do something about a problem, not talk about it.

What he did, when he finally decided to act, was begin shooting racially mixed couples in shopping mall parking lots. Not that he hadn’t given the matter quite a bit of thought first: he had considered many possibilities, from using his electronic expertise to “break into” commercial television broadcasts with a pirate transmitter and deliver his own message, to renting an airplane at a nearby airport and using it to bomb the Capitol building during a session of Congress.

He settled on the shootings for three reasons. First, they were highly symbolic of America’s sickness and of the danger threatening his race. Everyone would understand immediately their significance and the motivation behind them. Second, they were personal and direct actions; they had more therapeutic value for him than a more impersonal blow against the System would have had. Third, and most important, they were acts that could easily be imitated by others. Very few men were capable of operating a pirate broadcasting station or carrying out an aerial bombing raid on the Capitol, but many could shoot down a miscegenating couple on the street.

The media masters obviously were aware of this third consideration, and that was the reason for their previous blackout on his activities. Now that the blackout was over they were attempting to forestall any would-be imitators by pouring on the venom. Before he had finished his breakfast, Oscar already had heard newsmen on three channels represent the shootings as the most depraved and reprehensible crimes imaginable. He grimaced as he listened to a fourth commentator grimly describe the gunman as “obviously a very sick person.” Clearly, there wouldn’t be much glory for him in this business.

III

Adelaide was still busily typing at the keyboard of the word processor in the corner of the living room when Oscar came up from the basement. He paused behind her for a moment, admiring the smooth grace of her neck and shoulders. She was, he reflected, one of the most attractive benefits of his relationship with the Air Force. He had met her four months ago in the Pentagon office of his Vietnam buddy Carl Perkins, where she worked as a civilian analyst. She had grown up in a tiny town in Iowa, earned a B.A. in mathematics from Iowa State University, and been in the Washington area a little longer than a year.

Although at 23 she was 17 years younger than Oscar, the two of them had been strongly attracted to one another, and he had made a date with her on that first meeting. The relationship had developed very nicely, and lately she and Oscar were together three or four times a week. She was bright, generous and helpful, and always cheerful, a refreshing antidote to his own tendency toward gloominess.

He would have asked her to move in with him by this time— and she certainly was waiting for him to ask— except that he hadn’t been able to reconcile his anti-System activities with that close a relationship; how could he hope to keep such things secret from a wife? Already it was awkward explaining to her why he was unavailable sometimes.

Impulsively, he leaned over her, slipped his arms under hers, and cupped both of her full breasts in his hands. She continued typing, but leaned back against his body as he began gently squeezing her nipples. He felt them hardening through the fabric of her blouse.

“Hey, you want me to finish this proposal for you, or what?” Adelaide giggled, still valiantly trying to type, but now also rubbing the back of her head provocatively against Oscar.

“What,” Oscar answered emphatically, with a grin. “It’s already nine o’clock, and I’ve been fantasizing about you all day. I don’t think I can wait any longer. Stay here tonight, and we’ll get up early enough tomorrow for you to finish the last page before you have to leave for work.” He moved his hands back under her shoulders and lifted her from her chair.

On her feet, she turned and flowed smoothly into his arms. He hungrily kissed her mouth, her neck, her ears, her mouth again. His hands fumbled briefly with a button and a zipper at the side of her skirt, and it fell to the floor about her ankles. He slid both hands into her panties.

She snuggled against him and whispered into his ear, “Hey, fella, don’t you think we should either close the drapes or go into the bedroom?”

“Oops! I forgot about the drapes.” Oscar blushed and hurried to the window, while Adelaide scooped up her skirt and disappeared into the hallway.

It was just after midnight when Oscar next glanced at his watch. He stood in the doorway to the bathroom for a few moments, hesitating with his hand on the light switch. Adelaide was asleep on the bed, lying half on her back and half on her side, uncovered, and the light streaming over Oscar’s shoulder from the bathroom cast the soft contours of her body into sharp relief. She was a beautiful woman, one of the most beautiful he had ever seen, long and lean and lithe, with silky-smooth skin, perfect thighs surmounted by a luxuriant bush of reddish hue, a flat belly, magnificent breasts, a graceful neck of extraordinary length, and a face so lovely, so pure, so childishly peaceful and innocent, that looking at it nestled gently there in the pillow, half obscured in the tangle of her long, golden-red hair, made his heart ache with desire, the way it ached when he watched an unusually spectacular sunset in the desert or came upon an especially glorious vista while hiking in the mountains. Adelaide was really a marvel of Nature, he thought.

Instead of turning out the light Oscar stepped over to the bed, gently brushed aside her hair, and kissed her softly on the lips, trying not to waken her. Despite his care, her lids opened wide as soon as Oscar’s lips touched hers. He gazed silently into the clear, blue depths of her eyes for a moment, and then he felt her arms pulling him down against her. He made love to her again, more vigorously this time than before, almost brutally, and then he turned and lay back against his pillow, while she snuggled into his arms and fell asleep again, with her head on his shoulder. The bathroom light was still on.

Oscar was very sleepy himself now, but he remained awake a few more minutes, thinking. Adelaide was a bright spot in his life, and he was extremely fond of her. But she had a meaning to him which went beyond personal affection. She was a symbol of everything that really mattered to Oscar. She was beauty and innocence and human goodness personified. She was the prototypal woman of his race. She was Oscar’s ultimate justification for his private war against the System.

Nothing was more important, it seemed to him, than to ensure that there always would be women like Adelaide in the world. Anything which threatened to preclude that possibility must be stamped out.

Oscar mused on the difference between his own system of values and that which seemed to be the norm— or at least that which was enunciated by the media spokesmen. They talked about individual rights and equality and the sanctity of life. To them, a flat-nosed, mud-colored, wiry-haired mongrel spawned by one of the mixed-race couples he had been shooting down was as precious as a golden-haired, blue-eyed little girl who might grow up to be another Adelaide. More precious, actually. Despite their prattle about “equality,” it was clear to Oscar that their vision of the future was one in which the mud-colored mongrels would inherit the earth. He shuddered involuntarily.

He remembered something he had witnessed in Washington a few years ago, during a period when crowds of White university students, Christian clergymen, Black activists, show-business personalities, and politicians formed outside the South African Embassy nearly every day to carry placards and chant slogans against apartheid. He happened to be walking past the embassy quite by chance when two South African women who worked there were going inside. They had stopped to show their passes to one of the policemen who formed a cordon on the sidewalk, keeping the demonstrators away from the entrance. One of the women was a tall, striking Nordic beauty, the other a rather plain brunette of average height.

Several of the demonstrators pressed forward to heap invective on the two. He noticed one young White woman in particular, probably a university student and probably not unattractive herself under normal circumstances, whose face was contorted with hatred as she shrieked, over and over, “Racist bitch! Racist bitch! Racist bitch!” It was clear that she was directing her spite specifically toward the tall blonde, almost as if that woman, more than her shorter and darker companion, represented everything the demonstrator had been taught to hate. A White clergyman standing a few feet away smirked approvingly. The clergyman was holding a placard which read, “All of God’s children, Black and White, are equal.” But some, apparently, were more equal than others!

It was the same with all of the tears the media people were spilling for Oscar’s victims. They blathered on and on about the sanctity of all human life, and about how no one had the right to judge another and take his life. Oscar thought about how few tears these commentators had to spare for the victims of ordinary criminals— rapists, muggers, armed robbers— who killed scores of people in the United States every day. In truth, they cared about some victims much more than others. He was sure, for instance, that they would all enjoy seeing him torn limb from limb or roasted over a slow fire.

It was entirely normal, of course, to care more about some people than others, to want to protect some and to see others destroyed. The difference between him and them was that he didn’t try to deny that fact— and that he wanted to protect his own and to destroy those who threatened them, while they seemed to hate their own and to love those who were utterly unlike themselves.

He had read enough literature from the 18th and 19th centuries— even from the first half of the 20th century— to be quite certain that his own values used to be the norm. How had the inversion of values taken place? He shook his head drowsily. That was something he never had been able to puzzle out, even when he was wide awake. Well, the answer could wait. He knew what he had to do, and tomorrow he intended to strike another blow.

IV

“More coffee, sir?”

“Yes, please,” Oscar told the waiter, as he placed the money for his check on the tray, mentally flinching at the amount. He leaned back in his chair and continued to survey the other tables in the restaurant, while a busboy approached to clear away the last of his dishes. He had chosen his table well for the purpose. It was in a dark alcove, partly screened from the main dining area by a large potted plant, so that Oscar could see without being seen. The restaurant was a pretentious, trendy one, just five blocks from the Capitol and frequented by the city’s power seekers, as well as by a fair number of real power wielders: legislators, upper-echelon bureaucrats, lawyers, newsmen, lobbyists.

During the course of his dinner Oscar had spotted several interesting prospects at other tables. He recognized Congressman Stephen Horowitz in a boisterous, noisy group just two tables away. Horowitz had been much on television recently, as his committee held hearings on a new bill to bring 100,000 Haitian immigrants per year into the United States. In an emotional speech just a week before, he had denounced those who opposed his bill as the very same “racists” who had been against his earlier bill, since enacted into law, to ban White South Africans from immigrating into the country. What a hideously ugly little man he was, Oscar thought, feeling a distinct itch in his trigger finger as he studied the legislator’s ratlike face, with its darting, beady, close-set black eyes and wide, leering mouth. But, really, shooting was too good for Horowitz. Oscar would much rather wait for a chance to catch the man alone and work him over with an ice pick, slowly.

Besides, he didn’t want to change targets that radically yet; he wanted to keep hitting mixed couples for a while, except now he intended to pick them from a higher tax bracket, in order to make an even bigger splash in the news media. And there was an excellent possibility at a table on the other side of the room, which Oscar unobtrusively had been keeping an eye on for the last half hour: a tall, light-skinned mulatto with two White women, both of whom seemed to be on intimate terms with him. Oscar had no idea who the women were, but he had seen the mulatto on the television news several times— once, in fact, with Horowitz, in a news conference held in the street in front of the South African Embassy. He headed an organization which lobbied for punitive legislation against South Africa and economic aid for Black-ruled African countries. Perhaps the women were employees of his organization, or perhaps just a couple of power groupies, a species all too common in this city.

Finally the mulatto paid his bill, then sauntered over to Horowitz’s table to pay his respects, one of the women hanging on each arm. Oscar rose and left the restaurant without looking again toward his intended targets. Outside he paused at a coin-operated newsrack and purchased a Washington Post. From the corner of his eye he saw the mulatto and his White companions emerge from the restaurant and turn to the left, down a tree-lined and imperfectly lighted sidewalk. Oscar followed at about 30 paces.

As soon as he was out of the brightly lighted area in front of the restaurant, he slipped his silenced pistol out of his coat and into the folded newspaper he was holding in his right hand. The trio in front of him turned the corner. By the time Oscar reached the corner they were entering a late-model, white Cadillac parked at the curb. He quickly scanned the area and sized up the situation, feeling the familiar tension in his muscles, the icy perspiration in his armpits. Although there was a moderate amount of traffic on the street with the restaurant, there were no moving vehicles on the side street. The nearest pedestrians were a group of five persons he had just passed on their way toward the restaurant; they were at least 100 feet away now, their backs to him.

Oscar increased his stride and drew abreast of the Cadillac as the mulatto closed the front passenger door on the two women. Oscar turned sharply to the right and intercepted him at the curb behind the automobile. As the mulatto looked up with surprise and annoyance at the large White man suddenly blocking his path, Oscar raised his pistol, still covered by the newspaper, and shot his victim between the eyes. The mulatto fell back heavily against the vehicle without uttering a sound, then sprawled into the gutter. Oscar fired two more carefully aimed shots into his head, then stepped forward and jerked open the door of the Cadillac. The women had not realized what was happening, and Oscar quickly and precisely shot each of them in the head once, then twice more. Then he turned and strode briskly back toward the main street.

Oscar glanced at his watch as he drove back across the Potomac into Virginia: just eight o’clock— still not too late to see Adelaide. He had told her he would be having dinner with some contract officers at Andrews Air Force Base that evening and would give her a call if he got away early. It hurt him to lie to her, but he could see no other way of dealing with the situation. The girl was intelligent and had basically good instincts, but he had no intention of burdening her with the knowledge of— and therefore the moral responsibility for— his private war. She had not been through the experiences in Vietnam he had, nor had she shared his prolonged soul-searching for an understanding of the meaning of many of the things happening around them— such as miscegenation. He was not at all sure that he would be able to make her accept the moral necessity of his actions. Like all women, she was much more likely to focus on the personal aspects— on what was happening to the individuals Oscar chose as targets— than on the impersonal justification for those actions and their implications for the future of the race.

Oscar had had to harden his resolve tonight to kill the two girls. He had no doubt at all that what he had done was right, but there was something in him that resisted doing violence to a woman of his race— even when she clearly deserved it. It had been easier in the supermarket parking lots. All of those women were obviously of the lowest type— worthless White sluts who had married Blacks because they had no better prospects among men of their own race. But the girls tonight had been moderately attractive, even classy. Too bad.

As for the mulatto, there definitely had been more satisfaction for Oscar in killing him than the other Blacks. Partly it was because this one had publicly declared himself an enemy of the White race by his actions against the Whites of South Africa, and partly it was because he was such an arrogant, swaggering, uppity nigger. Maybe, too, it was because the girls with him might have amounted to something under different circumstances. In any event, Oscar suspected that his increased satisfaction soon would be matched by increased anguish in the ranks of the enemy.

His suspicion was confirmed later that evening. He and Adelaide were sitting up in bed to watch the 11 o’clock news together, as they often did. Tonight the presentation was ragged and disorganized, the obvious result of the news team having gotten the tape of the day’s big story too late to edit it. Without any preliminaries the newscaster began, “It looks like the race killer has struck again!”

Oscar watched with fascination as the camera scanned the scene of his activity a mere three hours ago, now swarming with uniformed policemen, FBI agents, newsmen, and curious bystanders. FBI agents already had arrested a suspect and were questioning him, according to the newscaster. That brought an involuntary smile to Oscar’s lips.

The real focus of the news was on the mulatto Oscar had killed, Tyrone Jones. There was only a cursory mention of the two White women, and then a long eulogy on Jones and his role in “the struggle for freedom and equality in South Africa.” Senator Horowitz gave a brief interview, mentioning that he had been with Jones only a few minutes before the latter was shot, and that he had lost a “dear, dear friend.” Horowitz went on to say that he intended to call for a Congressional investigation of the Jones shooting and the other killings of racially mixed couples. Then he leaned toward the camera with a twisted leer on his face: “Anyone who thinks that he can halt the progress we are making in race relations, in our efforts to break down the old barriers of hatred and prejudice separating the races, by these murders is terribly mistaken. We will put all of the resources of our government behind the endeavor to track down the sick killer or killers responsible for them. America will continue its march toward a fully integrated society, and no one will be permitted to stand in the way.”

Then there was five seconds with the distraught parents of one of the women who had been shot. Adelaide shook her head in sympathy and murmured, “How terrible!”

“If she was with that Jones creature, she deserved to be shot,” Oscar responded.

“Oh, Oscar! How can you say that? That’s awful.”

Oscar sighed and said nothing, but he thought to himself that he was going to have to begin talking with Adelaide about some things— soon.

V

Oscar carefully laid aside the sheaf of clippings which he had assembled in his lap, stretched, yawned, leaned all the way back in his easy chair, and shut his eyes. It had been a busy week, and he needed a little time to think. He was almost grateful that Adelaide’s mother was ill and Adelaide had flown back to Iowa for the weekend to be with her. He had spent all of this quiet Saturday morning reading news reports and editorial comment from more than a dozen magazines and newspapers he had picked up at the newsstand last night after dropping Adelaide off at the airport.

Much of the news and comment were about him— and related matters.

For the past ten days there had been hardly anything else in the news. Two days after the Jones hit— Wednesday of last week— the media reported the bombing of the home of a racially mixed couple in Buffalo and the machine-gunning from a passing car of a racially mixed group of people standing in line to get into a San Francisco discotheque noted for its mixed clientele. Seven persons had been killed and a dozen more wounded in the latter incident, and the police had arrested two White suspects. There were no leads in the Buffalo bombing.

On Thursday, almost buried in the continued media hullabaloo over the San Francisco shooting, accounts were given of the killing in Chicago of two White women— sisters— alleged to have been involved with Black men, and the severe beating of a racially mixed couple in their apartment in Philadelphia.

Then the dam burst. On Friday there were reports of 19 major attacks on racially mixed couples or groups around the country. For the first time there was the admission that there were a number of different activists at work, although in each case reference was made to “the Washington hate killer,” and the incidents outside the Washington area were described as the work of “copycats.” Arrests had been made in more than half the incidents.

Oscar shook his head with disbelief as he read the details. Most of those who were copying him appeared to be acting with incredible carelessness. It was as if they were all good ol’ boys who had been sitting around with a beer in hand watching TV reports of one of his own exploits and had said to themselves, “Hey, neato! I think I’ll do that too.” And then they had gone out and done it, with only the most childishly inadequate preparation and planning. Weren’t there any serious people left in America?

More encouraging were the skinheads, who had taken up Oscar’s banner with real enthusiasm. There were many of them, they were highly visible, and they had no hesitation at all about wading into a racially mixed group with baseball bats, bicycle chains, and bricks. Whatever they did, of course, was wholly unplanned and more often than not was not lethal— although in one case a mixed couple had been knifed to death on a Cleveland street by several of them. On the whole, the race-mixers seemed to be more worried about encounters with roaming gangs of skinheads than with lone assassins.

The worry, in fact, had reached the point that mixed couples were openly expressing their fear of being seen in public. One news magazine reported that some White women in the Los Angeles area who formerly would have taken their mixed-race children shopping with them were now leaving them with neighbors instead. There was an interview with a Washington restaurant owner who estimated that the number of mixed couples at his tables had dropped off by more than eighty per cent since the attacks began being reported by the media.

The reaction by the System was vehement, vicious, and massive. Oscar was surprised. He had expected much media excitement and a major police effort, but he had never imagined there would be quite such an outpouring of rage and hatred. Some of the politicians, churchmen, educators, and others who had expressed themselves on TV had been almost incoherent with emotion. One Christian

evangelist had been shaking uncontrollably— not with sorrow but with anger— when he denounced the attacks on racially mixed couples as an unholy attempt to thwart “God’s plan for America.” A rabbi with similar sentiments was literally frothing at the mouth. The president of Yale University, Baldwin Giaccomo, wept as he confessed his “shame that I am White... [and] have skin of the same color as the sick, demented creatures” who were carrying out the racial attacks.

As he watched that last performance Oscar had idly wondered how the good scholar would respond if it were suggested to him that some of the attacks might be the work of Black separatists— Farrakhan’s Muslims, say— who had the same reasons for being opposed to miscegenation that racially conscious Whites had.

At the same time Oscar had realized that reason played no part in what he was witnessing. In some sense of the word all of these spokesmen were motivated by religious sentiment, even though a few of them might declare themselves as agnostics or atheists. They were motivated by a religious conviction that a racially mixed America was better than a White America, that a mulatto child was better than a White child, that a White woman who chose a Black mate was better than one who chose a White. They would deny it if the question were put to them starkly, Oscar knew; they would weasel and waffle and beat around the bush with platitudes about “human dignity” and “equality” and so on, but it was perfectly clear what they really believed.

Somehow Oscar had known all along that that was the way things were. He thought again of the hatred he had seen on the face of the young woman demonstrator in front of the South African Embassy and of the approval for that hatred on the face of the priest beside her. And yet he was still surprised. He knew that America had become thoroughly decadent, that decadence had grown deep roots, and that many segments of the population obtained their sustenance from those roots and would fight any attempt to pull them up. But this reaction to his attacks on miscegenation went far beyond the defense of vested interests. Oscar shook his head in wonder. There clearly was an unbridgeable gulf— not just in interests, but in understanding, in spirit— between himself and these people.

The printed commentary was more coherent than the televised statements but just as vicious. There were editorial calls for new Federal legislation imposing an automatic death penalty on anyone convicted of a racially motivated assault-and one of the most impassioned of these was from an editor who had for years been noted as an opponent of capital punishment.

The director of the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a lengthy letter to the editor of the New York Times that the ordinary civil rights of a criminal suspect should be suspended in the case of a White accused of attacking a non-White for racial reasons. A third writer— a Massachusetts legislator— proposed that, because of the difficulty in proving motivation, whenever a suspect was White and his victim non-White, the burden of proof be shifted to the defendant; he must prove that his actions had not been racially motivated in order to avoid the special penalties provided for “hate crimes.”

The prize for malice, however, was taken by one of the Washington Post’s regular columnists, David Jacobs. He had asserted in his column last Friday that it was clear from the pattern of killings in the Washington area and from the attacks on racially mixed couples elsewhere that the attackers were sexually frustrated White males who resented the greater sexual attraction which Black males had for White women. He provided a historical backdrop by attributing the same motive of White sexual inadequacy to the lynchings of Blacks earlier in the century. Jacobs then went on to generalize, saying that all White racism had its roots in sexual envy. White racism would continue to be the greatest evil confronting the world until there was no longer a White race, he concluded, and the best thing for the government to do was to hasten that day by encouraging even more racial intermarriage. A tax break for mixed couples would be a good step in that direction, he opined.

That column had infuriated Oscar when he first read it eight days ago. Rereading it today he could only wonder about people like Jacobs. What motivated them? Jacobs seemed to be in a different class from Yale’s guilt-stricken president or the outraged ministers and politicians. The words of his column radiated pure, cold hate. To him the White race was like a strain of especially dangerous spirochetes for which an antibiotic needed to be found.

At least, Oscar thought with considerable satisfaction, Jacobs would be writing no more columns for the Post. He had resolved to see to that himself last week, as soon as he had read Jacobs’ column. And he had carried out his resolve within a few hours.

Unfortunately for Jacobs, his column had not been the only thing in last Friday’s paper with his name on it. The “Style” section of the Post had reported a “publication party” to celebrate the appearance of a new book by another writer for the newspaper. The party, the “Style” article noted, was hosted by the author’s “colleague David Jacobs in his fashionable Jones Court condo.” The article had caught Oscar’s eye only because he spotted the ugly leer of Congressman Horowitz in a photograph of some of the guests at Jacobs’ party.

A quick call to the Washington Post had elicited the information that Jacobs normally didn’t arrive at his office until 2:00 PM. A check of a Washington street map showed Jones Court as a one-block long cul de sac. As it turned out there was only one building on the street that was a reasonable candidate for housing fashionable condominiums, and when Oscar drove into the unattended basement parking area just after noon he quickly spotted an automobile with a Washington Post staff sticker on the windshield.

When Jacobs came down to get into his car half an hour later, he never knew what hit him.

Thinking back over his killing of Jacobs, Oscar could hardly believe how easy it had been. There hadn’t even been the nervousness and perspiration which preceded each of his earlier operations. He had done the whole thing as calmly— one might even say as casually— as if he had been delivering a pizza instead of carrying out a daylight assassination. Part of that was undoubtedly due to an unusual concatenation of lucky circumstances: spotting the clue to Jacobs’ address immediately after reading his column, the writer’s late work schedule, the unattended garage, the staff sticker visible on the windshield, Jacobs’ prompt and convenient appearance at a time when there were no witnesses....

The swiftness with which the job had been finished gave Oscar a tingle of pride. He smiled to think how that swiftness of retribution must have unnerved Jacobs’ collaborators. But Oscar’s pride was tempered by concern: he must guard against overconfidence and carelessness. He had never before been reckless enough to go after a target in broad daylight.

Another little worry that nagged at Oscar as he sorted out the events of the past few weeks in his mind was a feeling of aimlessness. Where was he headed? What sort of ultimate outcome of his actions was he seeking? Was his activity to remain a sort of therapeutic hobby? Or now that he had achieved his initial aim of provoking a massive response to his attacks on mixed couples and had stimulated a certain amount of imitative activity around the country, perhaps he should quit while the quitting was good and marry Adelaide.

He sighed at the prospect. He knew that he couldn’t quit. He would fall back into the same malaise that had gripped him before. He was not the sort who could stand aside and watch the destruction of his race and his civilization like an uninvolved spectator. He had to act. Would it be sufficient, he wondered, to choose an occasional target— a David Jacobs, a Tyrone Jones, perhaps a Stephen Horowitz? Would that be enough to satisfy his conscience and still allow him to lead a more or less normal life with Adelaide?

He wasn’t at all convinced that it would. At the same time he was not especially inclined to continue shooting an interracial couple every three or four days. That hardly seemed worth the risk now. If he were going to continue taking chances, he was inclined to raise the stakes, to go after bigger game. But whom? And why? What was to be the overall plan?

Oscar had no answer. He sighed again and shifted in his chair. He glanced idly at the stack of newspapers and magazines on the table beside him, and his eye fell again on the picture in last Friday’s Washington Post of the guests at Jacobs’ party. He picked up the paper and stared hard at the face of Congressman Stephen Horowitz for a full minute. What ugliness! What utter malice! A faint, grim ghost of a smile slowly came to his lips, and he muttered to himself, “Mine not to reason why; mine but to do and die.”

He laid the newspaper aside. He had made up his mind about one thing, at least.

VI

Oscar might not be able to cure his aimlessness quite yet, but he was determined not to let carelessness become a problem. He intended to kill Congressman Horowitz— very carefully. He was pacing back and forth now, thinking hard. He slammed a fist into an open hand, increasingly excited as he turned over various possibilities in his mind and made his plans.

The telephone rang. It was Adelaide.

“Hello, love. My mom is pretty sick, and things here are a mess. I think I’d better stay through Tuesday, at least. Do you mind?”

“Sure, I mind, baby. But do whatever you think you should.”

Adelaide asked Oscar to call her office Monday morning and say that she had the flu and was too sick to come to the telephone.

“How’ll you explain your usual gorgeous, exuberant, bouncing self at the office on Wednesday? If you’re just over the flu, you should look pale, tired, and listless.”

“I’m counting on you to produce the desired effect by screwing me half to death Tuesday night, lover,” she laughed teasingly.

“Hey, sweetheart, you know that I’ll do my very best for you. But you thrive on it! The more often we make love at night, the better you look the next morning, and the paler I am. Total abstinence is the only way to make you look pale.”

Adelaide’s call added a new element to Oscar’s planning. He didn’t want to rush the Horowitz project, but it would be nice if he could get it done before she returned. It was becoming increasingly difficult to do his night work when she was in town, without arousing her curiosity.

Horowitz, he knew, was a night owl. Oscar had noticed his picture in the “Style” section more than once during the past year, and he had spotted the legislator on an earlier occasion in the same Capitol Hill restaurant from which he had tailed Jones. That had been the first time he had taken Adelaide out to dinner, when he wanted to impress her. But he didn’t think it would be a good idea to start eating there regularly. There was no telling how long it would be before Horowitz showed up again. Besides, it was the sort of place where everyone looked around to see who was at the other tables. Oscar had felt conspicuous there alone the last time, even sitting behind a plant. He needed some way to find out in advance where Horowitz would be on a given night.

No sooner had Oscar formulated the question in his mind, than he had the answer. Carl Perkins was always inviting Oscar to come along with him to the cocktail parties that one or another of the big defense contractors and the Beltway consulting firms seemed to be throwing every other night for their government friends. “It’ll give you a chance to meet some of our leaders in the Congress,” Carl had joked with him, knowing Oscar’s intense dislike of politicians. “There are always a dozen or so of ‘em there.”

The fact that Oscar was a non-drinker was only one of the reasons he had never accepted Carl’s invitations. But now he remembered the latest of them, which had been offered when he had called Carl last Wednesday. General Dynamics had just won a new billion-dollar contract and would be celebrating-Monday, Oscar thought it was. “It’ll be a big one,” Carl had said. “Everybody’ll be there.” And Oscar knew that Congressman Stephen Horowitz, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee among other things, almost certainly would be there too.

Oscar called Carl at his home. When he had finished discussing the paperwork detail on his current contract, which was the pretext for his call, he said, “Well, I expect to have some preliminary results

on the new antenna pattern by Monday afternoon. Maybe we can have a bite together Monday evening, and I’ll show you what I have.”

“Thanks, pal, but I can’t. I’ve got to be at the General Dynamics bash Monday. Why don’t you let me take you and Adelaide as my guests?”

“Where will that be?” Oscar responded tentatively, as if he were considering accepting the invitation.

“The mezzanine ballroom at the Shoreham. Starts at eight o’clock.”

“Thanks anyway, Carl, but I guess I’d better not. You know I’m not one for parties.”

“You ought to give Adelaide a break sometime and show her off in public. She’s too pretty for you to keep all to yourself.”

“She’s not really a party person either. Besides she has a bad headache today and thinks she may be coming down with the flu.”

“Oh, oh! Better tell her to stay away from the office until it’s gone. I can’t afford to have the flu now. I’ll be too busy until we get the new appropriations bill safely through the House. I’m scheduled to spend most of next week testifying before the Armed Services Committee.”

Oscar smiled. Carl didn’t know it, but Oscar was going to try very hard to change his schedule for him.

After lunch he drove to the Shoreham Hotel to look over the layout. The prospects for making the hit outside didn’t look good. The traffic situation around the hotel was very awkward. It would be too easy to get stuck trying to get away in a car. The whole sidewalk area in front was open, and there were floodlights everywhere. There would be no shadows to loiter in at night. Oscar counted six police patrol cars within 100 yards of the main entrance. Too many big shots and too much security at this hotel all the time. Anyway Horowitz, who was always accompanied by his chauffeur-bodyguard, would undoubtedly be driven right up to the front entrance and be picked up at the same spot. No chance there, except for a suicide attack.

Inside, things seemed a little more promising. The main entrance to the mezzanine ballroom was in a side corridor. Oscar slipped into the darkened room, which was not locked, flipped on the lights, and surveyed the exits. There were several service doors, but nothing marked “Ladies” or “Gentlemen.” That meant that the guests would have to use the rest rooms at the far end of the side corridor.

What were the chances that Horowitz would have to pee during the evening? Oscar wondered. At least, there would be a lot of coming and going between the ballroom and the rest rooms during the evening, making it much easier to slip inside without an invitation. If Oscar could get into the ballroom, he probably could get as close to Horowitz as he wanted. But what then? Try to slip something into Horowitz’ drink?

Oscar grimaced. That was fairy-tale stuff. Besides, he would be taking too big a chance by entering the ballroom; Carl or someone else he knew from the Pentagon might spot him, and he didn’t want anyone to know about his presence there. If Horowitz were killed, there would undoubtedly be a thorough checkout by the police afterward of everyone who had attended the party.

He turned the lights off and strolled down to the men’s rest room at the end of the corridor. It was palatial: the wash basins were set in wide, marble counters, and there was even a shoeshine stand. There was also a double row of metal lockers in an alcove of the rest room; perhaps the place doubled as a changing room for the male staff, and they kept their street clothes in the lockers. The space behind the lockers was barely lighted and conceivably could be used as a hiding place, but Oscar didn’t like the idea. Any guest who came into the rest room might peep behind the lockers merely from idle curiosity.

There was also a door at the opposite end of the rest room from the entrance, probably a storage closet. Oscar tried the knob. It was locked. Locks were a hobby of Oscar’s. He pulled a small plastic case from his jacket pocket, selected a tool from it, and had the door open in 15 seconds. It was a closet, a fairly large one, but it was empty, with dust lying thick on the shelves.

That was interesting! Because the closet wasn’t being used, there was very little chance that a hotel staff member would open it before or during the party. Oscar stepped inside and closed the door. Through the ventilation louvres in the upper panel he could see about five feet of tile floor directly in front of the closet door. He tried bending the inside edge of a louvre to increase his field of view, but the metal was too stiff for his fingers.

He opened the door for a little light and spotted a coat hook screwed into the back wall of the closet: one of the heavy, old-fashioned, cast-steel types. He unscrewed it, then wedged the end of it between two louvres and applied his weight. He closed the door and peered out again. This time he had a clear view of most of the room, and the louvres on the outside of the door showed no trace of his handiwork. Before he left he tore a blank page from his pocket address book, folded it into a tight wad, and wedged it into the opening in the striker plate on the door jamb. He adjusted the position of the wad so that the door, though still locked, could be opened with a strong jerk.

Oscar paused again at the entrance to the ballroom and stuck his head in for another quick look around. He didn’t like the idea of having to depend on Horowitz’ using the rest room— and, furthermore, on his being alone in the rest room for at least a few seconds— but he liked the idea of showing his face at the party even less. Better, he thought, to wait for Horowitz in the rest room and risk missing him than to risk being seen. If Horowitz didn’t show up, then he’d have to get him later somewhere else.

On his way down to the lobby, Oscar considered one other possibility: putting a bomb in the ballroom and killing everyone at the party. It was a small ballroom, about 50 feet square, and it had a suspended tile ceiling. He could slip back into the place this evening with a couple of suitcases full of dynamite and have the bomb in place in the ceiling, with a radio-controlled detonator, in five minutes. A stranger carrying a couple of suitcases into a hotel, at any time of the day, should elicit no curiosity.

He thought more about the bomb idea as he drove home, and he finally decided against it. For one thing he had no explosives on hand, and it might take more than two days to obtain some through normal channels. He didn’t want to rush things. He also didn’t like the idea of an indiscriminate massacre, which would probably kill Carl along with everyone else. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to go ahead and lay in a stock of explosives for future needs, though. He made a mental note to look into that when he had time.

Monday Oscar did some shopping. He visited two theatrical supply stores and purchased a wig, a pair of non-refracting eyeglasses, a makeup kit, and an assortment of false facial hair pieces: goatees, moustaches, whiskers, long sideburns, and so on.

At home Oscar found that the wig quite convincingly changed him from a blond to a brunette. A little color from the makeup kit applied to his eyebrows completed the transformation. The false eyeglasses changed his appearance even more. Examining the disguise in the mirror, Oscar was satisfied with all but one thing: the scar on his left cheek remained as noticeable as ever, and it was exactly the sort of detail a witness would remember.

He pasted on a set of long sideburns and side-whiskers. They effectively covered the scar, but the effect was too startling, especially with his piercing gray eyes peering out of all of the dark hair. He peeled the whiskers off and began experimenting with some of the other materials in his makeup kit. He finally settled for a large paste-on wart and half a dozen fake pimples. They didn’t hide the scar completely, but they broke it up enough so that a casual observer would see only a very bad complexion, rather than a scar.

He was pretty sure that any police sketch developed from witnesses’ descriptions would be far enough from the truth to be harmless. On the other hand there was no way he could make himself truly unrecognizable to someone who knew him— at least, not on such short notice. The shape of his head, the size and placement of his ears, his stature and bearing were all characteristic; more than once friends had spotted him at a distance in a crowd with only a rear view. Too bad he wasn’t one of those nondescript, inconspicuous little fellows that no one ever notices, he thought.

Oscar had selected his weapons the day before. One was a garrotte he had fashioned himself from a piece of high-tensile steel control cable, as strong as piano wire but more flexible, with wooden handles and a sliding lock which kept the loop constricted until a catch was released. He would use that if he caught Horowitz alone in the rest room. It would have the advantage of being completely silent.

His other weapon was a spring-loaded hypodermic syringe mounted inside the tube of a ballpoint pen. The outside of the pen was completely normal in appearance, but when the button on the end was depressed a thin hypodermic needle poked half an inch out of the other end, and a powerful spring ejected the contents of the syringe through the needle. Oscar had loaded the syringe with a milliliter of a concentrated solution of syncurine, a powerful and fast-acting muscle relaxant.

If one unobtrusively pushed the pen against a man’s leg or buttocks or back in a crowded room and fired it, the victim would feel the prick of the needle and a stinging sensation from the drug, and he probably would utter an exclamation and turn around to see what had happened or slap at the point of injection as at a stinging insect, but he would lose control of his legs and fall helpless to the ground within ten seconds and be completely paralyzed within 30 seconds. Death would inevitably follow from asphyxiation. If the assassin remained cool and feigned innocence, witnesses probably would not even notice the pen in his hand.

Oscar would use the pen if he could not catch Horowitz alone but could get close to him.

The last thing Oscar did before leaving home was spray the fingers on both hands with a clear, fast-drying lacquer. The lacquer made his fingers feel stiff and dry, but it also effectively prevented him from leaving fingerprints on anything he touched. It would be good for a couple of hours. He also had used it before making his survey of the hotel on Saturday.

As he drove to the Shoreham he felt the familiar tenseness and cold perspiration, and he was glad; he had been worried by their absence in the moments before he shot Jacobs and was afraid that without them he would become reckless. Probably, he thought, the difference was that he had acted against Jacobs in the heat of anger, whereas all of his other actions— like this one— were much more deliberate.

By the time Oscar had reached the mezzanine level of the hotel, just after eight o’clock, the tenseness and nervousness had been replaced by the usual icy calm. A dozen or so people were standing in the corridor outside the ballroom entrance, some of them holding drinks. Oscar quickly noted that all of those with drinks had adhesive name tags stuck to their coat lapels. Two men standing at the door seemed to be monitors, and as he passed the open doorway he saw a registration table just inside, where invitations were being checked and name tags issued. No chance of getting inside now, but things might relax a bit later in the evening. Oscar continued down the corridor toward the rest room.

There were two men in the rest room when Oscar entered. He took a place at one of the urinals and waited for the men to leave so that he could enter the closet. Unfortunately for Oscar, however, there was a steady traffic into and out of the rest room. He stood at the same urinal for five minutes, and still there was no opportunity to enter the closet. Oscar was beginning to feel conspicuous. He left the urinal and entered a stall.

Under the stall door he could see enough of the floor to monitor the occupancy of most of the room. After another 20 minutes, however, he began to despair of ever being alone in the rest room, much less being alone with Horowitz. He could not avoid a dark suspicion that everyone at the cocktail party had spent the whole evening beforehand drinking beer.

Finally there were no feet in Oscar’s field of view. He stood up and surveyed the room. A stall door at the far end of the row of stalls was closed, but otherwise the rest room was empty. He strode toward the closet and had his hand on the doorknob when the rest room door banged open behind him again. Damn! He turned around, preparing to resume his post in the stall.

The man walking toward the urinals looked straight at Oscar, and Oscar’s heart paused for a fraction of a second. It was Congressman Stephen Horowitz. Oscar tried not to let his emotion show on his face as he and Horowitz passed one another. How much time would he have before someone else came into the room or the man in the end stall came out? Ten seconds? He would be lucky if he had five seconds. It was now or never.

Oscar spun silently on his heel as Horowitz reached the urinals and began fumbling with his fly. He pulled the garrotte from beneath his jacket, swung the loop down over Horowitz’ head, and yanked the handles apart, all in a single, flowing sequence of motions.

As Horowitz’ hands jerked defensively toward his throat, Oscar applied every ounce of strength he had to the handles. The strangling wire lifted the smaller man clear of the floor, and his feet beat wildly in the air. Without waiting for Horowitz to stop struggling, Oscar jerked savagely backward on the garrotte and heaved him into the nearest stall. Supporting the still thrashing Horowitz with one hand, Oscar latched the stall door just as the rest room door banged open once more. He jammed Horowitz down onto the toilet seat and then sat heavily on top of him. He hoped no one would notice two pairs of feet under the stall door.

Although it seemed much longer, it could not have been more than another ten seconds until Horowitz gave one last, convulsive shudder and then ceased his struggle for air and life. Oscar saw a pool of urine spreading out across the floor of the stall as the man’s bladder emptied. Oscar kept his position for another two or three minutes, then felt for Horowitz’ pulse. There was none. He reached behind the man’s head and with some difficulty released the catch on the garrotte. The cable, which had cut deeply into the flesh of Horowitz’ neck, was dripping blood, and Oscar hastily wiped it dry with a wad of toilet paper.

Sounds of running water were coming from the wash basins, but Oscar could see no feet in the vicinity of his stall. Trying to avoid Horowitz’ urine, he slid under the partition into the adjoining stall, leaving Horowitz slumped back against the wall but still on the toilet seat. Before leaving his own stall Oscar flushed the toilet for effect, then walked toward the basins to wash his hands and check his wig.

While Oscar was standing before the mirror straightening his tie— and surreptitiously pushing the garrotte into a more secure position inside his jacket— two more men entered the rest room. One headed straight for the urinals, but the other surveyed the room as if looking for someone, then took a position against the wall opposite the stalls and folded his arms across his chest. Oscar had never seen the man before, but he knew with certainty that it was Horowitz’ bodyguard.

While drying his hands Oscar noticed that the pool of urine from Horowitz’ stall was spreading visibly onto the tiles beyond the door. As he left the rest room he heard the toilet finally flush in the other occupied stall. Things were about to become interesting.

Turning the corner at the end of the corridor and leaving the partygoers behind him, Oscar glanced quickly at his watch. He had been in the rest room 32 minutes altogether, the last five of them with Horowitz.

VII

Oscar, I want you to meet Harry Keller. He’ll help you with the new affirmative action contract compliance paperwork. He’s our expert. He’s also the only guy I know who’s more of a racist than you are.” Carl grinned as he introduced a large, heavy-set man with dark hair and huge, gnarled hands.

“You must be kidding,” Oscar replied, holding his hand out to the newcomer in Carl’s office anyway. “All of your people in the affirmative action section that I’ve had anything to do with so far are fairies and nigger lovers.”

“Oscar!” Adelaide gasped. Oscar had dropped by Carl’s office primarily to pick up Adelaide, whose car was being repaired, but had taken the opportunity to complain to Carl about a new batch of forms which had been sent to him by the Pentagon.

Harry laughed, and Carl said: “The day after he heard the news about Horowitz last week, Harry was passing out cigars in the office, while everyone else was at half mast.”

“You too?” Oscar directed his question to Carl.

“For the sake of appearance, Oscar, for the sake of appearance. After all, the man was head of the House Armed Services Committee, and all of our paychecks were dependent on him.”

“It was more than appearance for some people around here,” Harry contradicted. “That little creep in my section, McGann, actually got moist eyes and sniffles during the eulogy for Horowitz that came over the public address system Tuesday. When the Secretary got to the place in his speech about how much Horowitz had done to promote racial equality in the armed forces, McGann actually started sobbing. Now there’s a man who really feels for our colored brothers.”

Oscar snapped his fingers in recognition: “McGann! That’s the name of the man who sent me that really prissy letter last year when I didn’t fill in all of the blanks on an affirmative action questionnaire.”

“Sounds like him,” Harry responded. “He likes to go through the answers to those questionnaires with a magnifying glass, trying to sniff out the faintest scent of a bad attitude toward the government’s minority-coddling programs.”

“The man’s just trying to do his job and get ahead,” Carl said. “He knows what it takes to get promoted around here, which is more than can be said for you.

“You know what this guy did?” Carl pointed a thumb at Harry and turned to Oscar. “The FBI was swarming all over the Pentagon last week, because there were so many of our guys at the party where Horowitz was killed. While other people were taking the investigation very seriously and trying their best to answer the FBI’s questions, Harry was breaking everybody in the office up with his jokes about Blacks. Managed to get himself an official reprimand from his section chief.”

Harry’s rejoinder to this was, “Say, Oscar, do you know what the three happiest years of a nigger’s life are?”

“Sorry, I guess I don’t.”

“Second grade.”

Everyone laughed at that, even Adelaide. But then Carl lowered his voice and said, “For Christ’s sake, keep your voice down when you crack your Black jokes in here, Harry. I don’t want a reprimand in my personnel file too.”

“Actually, it’s too late for you now, Carl. I may as well confess. My real job here is to tell racial jokes and then turn in the names of everyone who laughs. After I make my final report the only White employees who’ll be left around here will be McGann and myself.”

Everyone laughed again.

Oscar and Adelaide ended up giving Harry Keller a ride home in response to his invitation to have dinner with him and his wife while he gave Oscar a crash course in dealing with the Pentagon’s latest forms. Harry’s wife Colleen was a pleasant, relaxed woman of about 40. She seemed not to mind the surprise dinner guests, even though she had just gotten home from work herself.

After dinner they sat drinking coffee and chatting. “How’d someone with your sentiments get involved in the affirmative action program?” Oscar asked Harry.

“Sentiments have nothing to do with it. In the Civil Service you just take what they give you— although the fact that I used to teach sociology at the community college— you know, NVCC— may have led them to select me for the affirmative action section. Sociology professors tend to have that kind of rep. Anyway, for a couple of years before I started working for the Department of Defense I spent all my time on the road, selling broadcast studio equipment and visiting customers, and Colleen and I were apart too much— although it was in that job that I first met her. She works for one of my customers in Washington. So I applied for a Civil Service position, and they stuck me in the contract compliance section at the Pentagon. I still moonlight for my old company, though, but now that work

is all by telephone.”

“Why’d you switch from teaching to selling?” Oscar asked.

“Teaching became too hard on my conscience. It just got to the point where I couldn’t tell all the lies and hide all the truths that were demanded of me. You wouldn’t believe the ideological straightjacket everyone teaching social sciences has to wear these days. One word that might offend some hypersensitive minority member, and they’ll heave you out on the road.”

“From what Carl says, you may be back on the road again soon,” Oscar replied. “My experience with those ‘love thy nigger’ types you’re working with now is that they have very little tolerance for anyone who doesn’t share their sick view of the world.”

“Oh, Carl exaggerates Actually, I manage to keep my mouth shut at the office most of the time. It’s just that I was so pleased when that bastard Horowitz got what he deserved that I couldn’t hold myself back.”

“Well, I don’t see how you manage to work at all in that environment. I can understand how someone like Carl puts up with it; he’s the least sentimental guy I’ve known. But it must be very hard on you having to keep your feelings bottled up inside and not being able to do or say anything. People with feelings need to be able to express them.”

“I agree with you completely, Oscar. And I do express myself. Just not at work— or, at least, not as much as I’d like. In addition to my job at the Pentagon and my moonlighting I work for the National League.”

“The National League? I’ve heard something about them— a neo-Nazi group, I believe. Is that right?”

“Depends on what ‘neo-Nazi’ means. That’s one of those labels like ‘fascist’ or ‘liberal’ that people stick on anything they’re opposed to. The news media call us ‘neo-Nazis,’ and that’s undoubtedly where you heard the term. The implications of that to most people are uniforms, swastika banners, and lots of ‘sieg heiling.’ But that’s not us at all. I’ve got nothing against uniforms and banners, but we don’t use ‘em.”

“What sort of things do you do?”

“Anything and everything that will help our cause.”

“Which is?”

Harry thought for a minute, then began slowly: “Our cause is a secure and progressive future for our race. We want a White world some day— a White world that is conscious of itself and its mission; a world governed by eugenic principles; a world in which the goal of families as well as governments is the upward breeding of our race; a cleaner, greener world, with fewer but better people, living closer to Nature; a world in which quality once again rules over quantity, in which people’s lives have purpose, in which beauty and excellence and honor once again have meaning and value.”

Before Oscar could respond Adelaide chimed in, “Harry, you sound just like my grandpa. He’s the racist in our family. He thinks that the whole world went to hell after the Second World War— says that if he’d known then what he knows now, he’d have gone to Germany and volunteered for the Waffen-SS instead of fighting in Roosevelt’s army.”

“You should have spent more time listening to your grandpa, sweetheart,” Oscar said. Then he added, “I like your cause, Harry. You said you do anything and everything to promote it. Can you give me some specifics?”

“Well, at this time most of our effort is educational rather than political. We’re trying to raise people’s consciousness on racial issues, and then to motivate and direct those whose consciousness we do have some effect on. So we publish a lot of materials with a racial message: books, magazines, video tapes. Most of our members are professionals who are able to participate in this effort in one way or another. For example, I translate a lot of German material into English for our publishing department, and I keep the equipment in our video studio working.”

“Harry’s too modest,” Colleen interjected. “He built the video studio from scratch and supplied all of the equipment. Whenever anything is being taped he’s the studio engineer, handling the lighting, the sound, the cameras, and everything else. Then he helps with the editing of the tapes.”

Harry shrugged modestly. “It was a natural assignment for me. After I began selling studio equipment I had to learn something about how it works and how to fix it. When we decided we needed a studio I was able to get my hands on a lot of good, used equipment for the organization for almost nothing.”

Changing the subject, he continued, “Now, Colleen here is a first-class expediter. She works as an assistant general manager for KZR-TV during the week, and on weekends she takes care of the office chores for the League’s Northern Virginia unit: purchasing, bill paying, banking, contacting members for meetings, and all the rest.”

“You said you translate German too. Are your parents from Germany?” Oscar asked. He was a little bothered by the neo-Nazi tag and was looking for a tie-in to images he had in his mind from hundreds of television movies he had seen as a teen-ager: men with cruel faces in black uniforms, the light glinting evilly from their monocles as they barked orders in guttural accents and their subordinates unleashed huge, vicious dogs on frightened Jews. It wasn’t that he believed in the literal reality of those images, but they bothered him nevertheless. Oscar always had been repelled by cruelty, whether to men or animals.

Harry answered Oscar’s question: “Yes and no. They were from what’s called Czechoslovakia today. They were born in Pilsen— a family of instrument makers there for more than a century— and then they lived in Prague until the end of the Second World War. I was born there in 1945. My father and older sisters were lynched by some of Mr. Roosevelt’s boosters among the Czech population, after quite a bit of rather horrible abuse I gather. My mother never could bring herself to tell me all the details, but it gave her nightmares until the end of her life. Anyway, she escaped with me to Germany, and then we came to this country when I was five.”

“So you’re Czech?”

“No, German. Can’t you tell from my name? It’s as German as yours.”

Oscar blushed. He thought of his name as English— and it was. But it also was German, he knew. The only difference was that the English spelled it with a “y” and the Germans with a “j.” It meant “hunter.” He also knew that Keller was a German name, now that he thought about it. And he knew that a German born in Czechoslovakia was no more a Czech than a Jew born in Poland was a Pole or a Swede born in China was a Chinaman. The English and the Germans and the Swedes were all part of the same family, all Germanic, regardless of where they happened to be born, just as Jews were Jews and Chinamen were Chinamen, regardless of their birthplace or country of citizenship.

Those were all things he had figured out for himself years ago. Sometimes, though, if he were not careful, he slipped back into old habits of thought which had been instilled in his mind through years of indoctrination by the schools and the entertainment media. Now, his thinking jogged by Harry’s remark, he realized that all of the nasty connotations of “neo-Nazi” applied to himself as much as they did to Harry. That realization made him uneasy, but at the same time it stimulated his interest in finding out more about Harry and Colleen and the National League.

He took a new tack: “You said your group wants a future for our race which is both secure and progressive. Do you see any contradiction between those two things?”

Harry laughed. “There’s been a lot of argument on that point. It’s clear that over the long haul— that is, over the millions and hundreds of millions of years— progress has been the result of struggle, of hardship, of adversity, of a brutal pruning and weeding of the stock by Nature’s harsh selection; in other words, it’s been the result of a lack of security. Those who are secure stagnate, and those who are insecure struggle and advance.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “races do die out. Sometimes conditions become so insecure that the whole race perishes. Conditions are such now that our race is in danger of perishing, partly because we’re being outbred by other races in the same ecological niche and partly because we’re miscegenating ourselves to death. It’s clear that we are in danger now of too much insecurity.”

“But,” Oscar responded, “we mustn’t abandon the general principle just because it seems to be working against us now. If we can’t cope with the present insecurity and other races can, shouldn’t we conclude that the cause of progress will be better served by their survival than by ours?”

“Of course, not,” Harry responded, a trace of impatience in his voice. “Progress comes when all the competitors in the game struggle for survival, and the most fit wins. Our race isn’t struggling. It’s lying down and dying. Our job is to wake it up. When it’s trying to survive, it’ll whip all the other races with its hands tied behind its back.

“To be sure, fitness is a more subtle concept than one might think at first. Part of fitness is having not only the ability but also the will to survive; more than that, it’s having a will that’s not susceptible to being tricked into going to sleep by a clever and deceptive competitor. That’s the heart of the problem. We’ve been tricked. But now we’re going to wake ourselves up again. That’s the task of the League.

“The only real question about the compatibility between security and progress comes when one already has solved the problem of racial survival. The question then is how we avoid stagnation once we have a White world. There are lots of ways to answer that, and some of our theoreticians debate the issue among themselves.

“But that’s really another subject altogether. Perhaps I could have stated things a little more clearly from the start by saying that we want first to assure the survival of our race by waking it up and reigniting its natural fighting spirit, and then we want to reorient its values and its way of looking at things so that it strives to continue bettering itself instead of relaxing once the competitive struggle among the races has been won. Part of the way we’ll try to assure progress undoubtedly will be to change our conditions of life as well as our attitudes, so that we can’t relax even if we want to. As I said, the theoreticians have a lot of different ideas about that.”

Oscar was impressed by the clarity of Harry’s thinking. The man might seem to be just a good ol’ boy, with his coarse appearance and his joking manner, but he clearly had a good mind and had figured out several things that were still rather fuzzy to Oscar. He said, “I’m sorry, Harry. I guess I was playing the Devil’s advocate when I asked that question. I really can’t argue with anything you’ve said.”

“So, you old neo-Nazi,” Harry grinned, “now that you’re out of the closet, why don’t you come to one of our meetings and meet some other people you’ll agree with?”

Oscar was intrigued by the prospect, but he was also cautious. Considering his recent activities, he really couldn’t afford to be associated with any group that the government would have its eye on. He gave Harry a noncommittal answer: “Thanks for the invitation, but I’m not a joiner. Anyway, I’d like to think about some of the things you said tonight before I’m bombarded with any more new ideas. Your high-powered logic has put me a little on the defensive. One thing I still can’t figure out is why the media people have stuck you with that ‘neo-Nazi’ label, just because you want to assure the survival of the race. After all, they’re White too.”

Harry and Colleen both started to speak at once. “They’re certainly not White,” Colleen blurted out first. “Virtually all of the media are controlled by Jews, and they call the tune for everyone else in the media. The elimination of our race is at the top of their agenda.”

Seeing the puzzled look on Oscar’s face, Harry took over: “First, Oscar, let me correct your impression that I’m a high-powered logician. The things I’ve told you tonight are things that all of us in the League have been thinking about for a long time. It’s not that we’re smarter than anyone else; it’s just that we stay conscious of certain things we believe are very important and which most other folks don’t think about much. If they did, they’d be able to argue about the issues just as well as we do. I regard one of the biggest benefits of my League membership as its effect on my consciousness: it keeps me pointed in the right direction and worrying about the things in life that really matter.

“Second, Colleen is absolutely right. The news and entertainment media are controlled solidly by Jews, and Jews aren’t White. Some of them may look White, but no racially conscious Jew thinks of himself as White, and the Jews as a group are the most racially conscious people on the face of this earth, by a big margin. They call their enemies— and that includes anyone they can’t control— ‘neo-Nazis’ because they’ve invested a lot of effort into making that a label of opprobrium; they’ve invested it with a heavy load of emotion, of feeling, so that most people react negatively to the word without having a clear understanding of what it means.”

Adelaide, who had been listening but not talking, broke her silence once more: “Now you’re sounding exactly like my grandpa again. He spent hours telling me about the Jews, but I never did understand it all.”

Oscar stood up. He didn’t like the way the conversation was heading. His fight against race-mixing was one thing, but he didn’t see any point in getting involved in anti-Semitism. He knew a lot of people didn’t like Jews, but so far as he was concerned they were White, and he’d known one or two who didn’t like Blacks any better than he did. He remembered one of his fellow graduate students back in Colorado, Dan Levine. He had never personally liked Levine, who gave him a creepy feeling, but the fellow certainly was Jewish, and he was always cracking jokes about Blacks, even more so than Harry. “Harry and Colleen, thanks for the dinner. Adelaide and I have to run. And thanks again for the invitation to attend one of your meetings, Harry. I’ll think about it and give you a call later.”

VIII

Oscar really did intend to think about what Harry and Colleen had said, but as it turned out he became preoccupied by other matters the very next day, and it was more than two weeks before his thoughts returned to their conversation. What absorbed his interest meanwhile was the continuing furor over his anti-miscegenation campaign and the assassination of Horowitz. It had been nearly a month since he had killed a racially mixed couple— Tyrone Jones and his two girl friends— and the news media were still in a virtual frenzy.

He still could not understand the intensity and duration of this frenzy. Drug gangs killed as many people on the streets of half a dozen of America’s larger cities every two or three days as he had killed in his whole campaign. Furthermore these drug-war victims were nearly all non-Whites and so were especially beloved of the media. Yet a recent drug shoot-out in Washington which had killed five Blacks and a Colombian mestizo didn’t even make the front page of the next day’s Washington Post, which was taken up almost entirely with a report of the shooting of another interracial couple in Chicago, a heavily policed public demonstration in Manhattan by interracial and homosexual couples demanding more police protection, and the latest statements from the FBI about their investigation of the Horowitz assassination. He suspected that a new plague could break out and carry away a million victims in a week, and the news media would not give it as much coverage as they were giving to his killing of Horowitz.

Part of it, he reasoned, was a special perversity on the part of people who went into journalism as a profession. Beyond the role of the media themselves in fanning the flames, however, there evidently were various special interests at work— interests which felt threatened or offended by Oscar’s activities. There were, he was surprised to learn, a number of organized groups of racially mixed couples, even one consisting solely of White males with Filipina wives. As he read of the existence of that particular group he felt regret that he had not devoted any of his nighttime efforts to its members.

Then there were the queers, who, despite their general antipathy toward the heterosexual world, seemed to have an affection for race-mixers, even those of the “straight” variety. Feminist groups also seemed to be especially incensed over his attacks on mixed couples. He couldn’t figure the connection there either. Was it that all spiritually sick people, no matter what their malady, felt that their interests coincided?

The churches, however, were easily the most vociferous of the boosters of the race-mixers. Right down the line, from the primitive charismatics of backwoods Fundamentalism to the blandest of Unitarians and the trendiest of Episcopalians, they roared out their approval of miscegenation and their solidarity with its practitioners. There were memorial vigils almost daily, for one or another of the couples he had shot, by groups of ministers and priests on the Capitol steps. If there were any Christian groups which were not marching in lockstep with the others, it was only one or two of the smaller Eastern Orthodox churches, whose congregations consisted mostly of aging refugees from eastern Europe.

Now the churches were formally joining hands with the race-mixing groups, the homosexuals, and the rest. There was a full-page announcement in the Washington Post of a mass march on the Capitol to demonstrate public support for a new package of legislation being debated by the Congress. The march, scheduled for the middle of the following month, was being organized by a new coalition of leaders from 30 or 40 groups. It was called the People’s Committee Against Hate, and the announcement in the Post listed several dozen of its members. The list was replete with bishops, cardinals, rabbis, and right reverends.

The legislation they were backing had been prepared by Horowitz and would have been introduced to the House by him if Oscar’s garrotte had not cut his legislative career short. Its key bill was called the Horowitz Bill in his honor. It would outlaw all organizations which restricted membership on the basis of race. It would ban all books, periodicals, and other printed matter which might “promote racial hatred,” and it provided for the establishment of a Federal Publications Board to examine and rule on any publications against which complaints were lodged. It would make any person who uttered, in the presence of witnesses, any statement denigrating a member of another race or expressing hostility toward members of his own race who associated with other races, liable to ten years imprisonment.

The news media conducted opinion polls three or four times a week and excitedly reported a growing public sentiment in favor of passage of the Horowitz Bill and its corollary legislation. Nearly 60 per cent of the public were for it, according to the latest poll. Oscar could only shake his head in wonder at the ease with which the American people could be manipulated by the media. It seemed as if all the media had to do was convince the public that everyone else was in favor of something, and then the sheep would fall all over themselves trying to get on the bandwagon.

The People’s Committee, Oscar noted, was headquartered in the Connecticut Avenue Congregational Church, just north of Georgetown in the District. Meetings were taking place there practically every day, with religious leaders, members of the Congress, Hollywood celebrities, and other public figures as guest speakers. The principal purpose of the meetings, so far as he could see, was to provide a continuing input to the media. All of the television news programs featured snippets from each meeting.

As Oscar turned over in his mind the idea of attacking the People’s Committee, he reflected on the fact that his assassination of Horowitz had not slowed down the race-mixers and their friends at all. If anything it had given them more ammunition to use in their campaign to stampede the public into accepting the massive curtailment of civil liberties which was inherent in the Horowitz Bill. He was pretty sure that if he shot one or two of the most prominent leaders of the People’s Committee or blew up their headquarters the news media would manage to turn that into another argument for passage of the bill.

Oscar realized that he was no strategist. Part of the problem was that there were too many variables involved in making the sort of decisions with which he was faced. He just didn’t have the time or the sources of information necessary to analyze each situation and predict the probable outcome of a given action on his part. He needed a general staff for that. He also needed a guiding principle, a program, a clearly defined goal, so that his individual actions reinforced one another. As it was he was acting on the basis of instinct, gut feeling, impulse, or whatever one wanted to call it.

Well, too bad about that! He would just have to follow his conscience and continue flying by the seat of his pants for the time being. One thing that his conscience told him was that his efforts were better spent going after the promoters of racial mixing than its practitioners. He had had such a good feeling after killing Horowitz that he really had a hankering now to take out a Senator or a bishop or a university president. That fit in with his general reasoning that he ought to continue escalating the conflict and leave the lower-level work to his imitators.

The latter had been giving a rather disappointing performance lately. Their activity seemed to have peaked about two weeks ago, around the time of the Horowitz hit. Now the papers were reporting only four or five serious attacks per day on mixed couples for the whole country. Part of the falloff seemed to be due to the high rate of arrests initially; the police, under extreme pressure from the media, were throwing all of their resources into the investigation of attacks on interracial couples. Apparently the supply of wild men, who would get the idea into their heads that they ought to follow Oscar’s example by killing a pair of race-mixers and then would run out and do it without further deliberation, was being used up. The activists still on the loose were being more careful. Someone in Chicago— or perhaps it was more than one person— seemed to be doing quite well, and there was a string of six unsolved double killings in the Seattle area with the same modus operandi, but there weren’t many bright spots elsewhere.

Another reason— a more encouraging one— for the decline in the number of attacks apparently was that, the recent demonstration in Manhattan notwithstanding, the race-mixers were going back into the closet to a certain extent; there just weren’t as many targets on the street as there had been. The media were frantically trying to counter this trend. Every checkout-stand tabloid featured front-page photographs of mixed-race celebrity couples, week after week: an aging Elizabeth Taylor with her latest Black boyfriend, or Black basketball star Cleon Brown surrounded by an admiring throng of blond coeds. The television networks dredged up all the films with a race-mixing theme they had in their collections and began running them. Every news program featured an interview with at least one mixed couple, and there were hardly any other types of guests to be seen on the TV interview shows. But a large percentage of the race-mixers quite obviously were frightened and would continue to try to maintain a low profile.

The Connecticut Avenue Congregational Church was a large complex of interconnected stone buildings behind an old-fashioned iron picket fence. Oscar drove past the front twice and took several photographs with his Polaroid camera. He noted the two uniformed policemen standing at the top of the stone steps leading to the front entrance to the main building and suspected that there would be more inside. Then he drove slowly down the alley behind the complex. The fence, about seven feet high, ran along that side of the property as well, but there was a lot of tall shrubbery just inside the fence, and it looked like it might not be difficult to get onto the grounds from the alley at night without being seen.

Back home Oscar studied his photographs of the complex. There were, he noted, steel bars over all of the lower-floor windows: an essential feature for any building in the District of Columbia these days. Almost certainly every window and door also was connected to an alarm system. He didn’t know whether the People’s Committee held its semi-public meetings in the main sanctuary or in a separate auditorium. In any case, only two buildings in the complex were large enough for the purpose, and he quickly decided that one of them almost certainly held only Sunday school classrooms. So it had to be the main building, a really massive structure. Was there any way to get a bomb into the building?

The service gate in the alley fence led into a parking area behind an annex building. The rear door bore a sign reading “Deliveries.” If he pretended to be making a delivery of office supplies, almost certainly he would be able to get a bomb no further than the annex without arousing suspicion. The main building obviously had a full basement, as indicated both by a stair descending to a basement door in the rear and by window wells for basement windows along the sides of the building. Again, bars and a probable alarm system seemed to make entrance to the basement no easier than to the ground floor. Could he get to the roof and then come in through an unprotected roof entrance?

Oscar made another reconnaissance, this time at night. A meeting was in progress, and it was clear from the pattern of lighted and unlighted windows that it was being held in the sanctuary, on the ground floor. Three basement windows near the front of the building were lighted, but the rest were dark. There were floodlights at the eaves level around the building illuminating the sides more or less uniformly, and there was another light over the basement door well. There were, however, a few dense areas of shrubbery at the sides of the building, toward the back, and the general pattern of windows in the building suggested that there almost certainly was a basement window well behind one group of shrubs.

He drove a block beyond the church, parked on a side street, and walked back to the alley which ran behind the complex. At a point where the fence was deeply shadowed by tall shrubs, he hauled himself over and then made his way silently to another group of shrubs closer to the building. Crouched close to the ground he pushed his way into the shrubbery and, as he had suspected he would, found himself next to a basement window well. Slipping his arm between the security bars and feeling the window sash with his fingers, he noted that it was made of wood rather than metal.

He placed his flashlight against the window glass and briefly illuminated the basement room into which it opened. It was a finished room, with framed pictures on one wall, but there were large stacks of cartons on the floor and on steel shelving against the far wall. Apparently the room was being used for storage. It was quite a large room, about 25 feet from front to back and extending more than halfway across the width of the sanctuary. The far end of the room was probably directly beneath the pulpit. There were doors in three walls, but they were all closed.

Back at his car again he glanced at his watch and remembered ruefully that he and Adelaide had dinner plans. As he drove toward her apartment, he formulated his plan of attack on the church.

IX

“Baby, I believe you’ve got the best set of tits on the East Coast,” Oscar said admiringly, as he watched Adelaide lean over the table to pour a cup of coffee for him, the candlelight accentuating the contrast between the curves and hollows of her naked body. Neither of them had bothered to put their clothes back on after they had made love.

“Oh, have you been taking a survey?”

Before Oscar could think of an appropriately witty response, Adelaide continued: “You must be doing something really fascinating with your evenings. If not a tit survey, then what? Do you realize that you’ve kept me waiting for you until after nine o’clock for the last three nights? You said we would be going out to eat this evening, and that even if your work held you up you would be here by eight at the latest. Here it is ten o’clock, and I’m fixing your supper again. I know you weren’t at home, because I called there an hour before you got here.”

“I’m really sorry, baby,” Oscar replied contritely. “I’ve just had a lot of running around to do the last few days. I spent all day at the computer working on the new contract, and then there were several chores I had to take care of this evening.”

“All right, honey. I didn’t think that you had been with another woman, because you certainly were terminally horny when you got here. I just wish you could arrange your work schedule so that we could have more time together. I start feeling sorry for myself sitting here in my apartment alone, night after night. Why can’t you do your chores while I’m at work? Knowing the Air Force as I do, I’m sure that no contract you have with them could keep you as busy as you seem to be sometime.”

Oscar really ached to level with her. Instead he replied, “I’ll try to do better, baby. I really will. How was your day?”

Adelaide talked to him from the kitchen while she continued preparing their meal. Oscar occasionally interjected a comment or an answer, but his mind was busy on the more serious matter of the whole relationship between the two of them. Was there any way he could share with her his feelings and concerns?

He remembered a debate he had had with some of the other fliers back in Vietnam. It was during a period when the news media were featuring plans and proposals for an increased role for women in the armed forces. The initial proponents were the feminists and their supporters on the left, whose position was that women differed from men only in the configuration of their genitalia and could do virtually anything men could do, including fly military aircraft in combat, and do it just as well. The only reason they weren’t doing it already was the repressive effect of society’s “sexism,” which on the one hand erected barriers of custom and law against women and on the other hand stunted their potential by brainwashing them into accepting traditional female roles. If the laws were changed, and if little girls were raised just like little boys— given baseball bats and cap pistols instead of dolls— they would grow up just as capable as men of being Green Berets or combat pilots.

The other side of the issue was represented by those whose only argument was that “society isn’t ready for women to go into combat yet.” At least, they were the only ones on the other side of the issue who were admitted into the forum by the media, creating the impression that the opponents of a military combat role for women really had no ground to stand on. So it wasn’t long before the trendier politicians and bureaucrats, even some of the nation’s military leaders with political ambitions, also took up the banner of the feminists.

The general opinion among Oscar’s fellow airmen was that the feminist position was insupportable. There were one or two exceptions, but they were shallow men of a contrary disposition who always

could be counted on to champion any unnatural cause, the freakier the better. Oscar was sure that no man who had flown in combat really believed that a woman could be a good combat pilot, no matter how fast her reflexes, how fine her coordination, how keen her vision.

The feminists claimed that men had an advantage as fighters only because they had more muscle, and that the advantage vanished in those combat situations where muscle wasn’t decisive: combat flying, for example. Oscar, on the other hand, realized that men weren’t better fighters because they had more muscle, but that men had more muscle because it gave them an advantage in their natural role as fighters. In women, even though they might be the most excellent of athletes, the fighting hormones were missing— and more: the fighting instinct, the innate fighting micro-skills, finely honed over a million generations of primate evolution, during which the males were the hunters and fighters, and the females the nurturers.

The cleverly crooked way in which the news media had handled the issue reinforced Oscar’s already well developed distrust of the journalistic profession. But the debate had interested him and had led him to think about the psychic differences between men and women and the deep roots of these differences in the evolutionary past of the race.

Adelaide was a bright girl, one of the brightest he had ever known, and that pleased him. She could knowledgeably discuss some aspects of his antenna design work with him; she had even suggested a better algorithm than he had been using for one series of radiation calculations. She also was witty and well read for her age: in talking with her he could use a historical simile to illustrate a point, and she could respond in kind. Her intelligence made her a better companion.

Nevertheless, her mind did not work in the same way his did, and he was aware of the differences, subtle and slight as they might seem to a less perceptive observer. For one thing, her mental world was smaller, her horizon closer. What was real to her was the here and now; the past and the future, like distant landscapes in the present, were of much less interest. She was a good, practical worker on limited projects, but the mapping of world-historical vistas and making plans to transform them would seem unreal to her.

For another thing, Adelaide was not a generalizer. Her focus was on the trees, not the forest. She saw people as individuals. He did too, of course— but he also saw them as members of larger categories: as representatives of their races, their social classes, their religions, their interest groups. To understand a man, one had to consider what he was, where his roots were, his vital interests, with whom he identified— not just his individual idiosyncrasies.

The popular wisdom was on her side, of course. Everyone was supposed to see others only as individuals. But he was quite sure that she was not simply conforming to an artificial norm. Adelaide was not an artificial girl; quite the opposite. She had little use for pretense or convention. She was completely unmoved by all of the swirling currents of political and social trendiness.

He remembered her reaction when two obviously “gay” men had swished into a restaurant once where they were eating, sat down at a table near theirs, and held hands as they perused the menu. Despite the vogue homosexuals were enjoying, she had displayed a natural revulsion for the spectacle. She laughed at Black or Jewish jokes, if they were really funny. When he had lectured her once on the subject of the difference in intelligence between Blacks and Whites, and more generally, the difference in the ways the minds of the two races worked, she had found his analysis convincing.

But when an interracial couple was assassinated, she saw two people murdered, not a blow against miscegenation. He was sure that her reaction was natural and feminine, not ideological. And he had noticed the same general pattern in other women as well. All of this did not mean that Adelaide could not be brought around to an acceptance— perhaps even an approval— of what he was doing, just that it might not be easy. He decided to begin the task.

“Sweetheart, suppose we didn’t know each other, and one of the Blacks at the Pentagon asked you for a date— say, that Black captain who gives you the eye whenever he comes into Carl’s office while you’re there— how would you react?”

Adelaide answered as she placed the final dishes on the table and sat down: “Actually, the man propositioned me the first week I was there. And I told him very sweetly, ‘Thanks, but I’ll have to check with my doctor first to see if it’s all right. I’ve tested positive for AIDS, and I don’t know whether or not it’s in the contagious stage yet.’ I guess the word got around, because I haven’t had another proposition from a Black in more than a year. The other White girls are pestered by them all the time.”

“You never told me about that. I’m surprised that you were ready for him with such an effective turnoff.”

“It’s my standard response to randy Blacks. One of the first things I learned in college was that an answer like that is the only thing that’ll work. They simply won’t take a polite ‘no’ for an answer. It’s got to be either, ‘Buzz off, nigger,’ or something like my AIDS answer. During my first year at Iowa State they were really a problem. I was completely unprepared for it. There had been no Blacks at all in my high school— none in the whole county where I grew up, for that matter. But there were lots of them, most from out of state, at the university. They made such a nuisance of themselves I felt like a bitch in heat. I didn’t want to be rude, and I didn’t want to be thought a racist. I also didn’t want to date any of them. I just wasn’t attracted to them. Besides, it was general knowledge that girls who did date them usually got raped if they didn’t give in voluntarily. They called it ‘date rape,’ but it was still rape— very often gang rape. The university administration gave the girls no backup at all. They wouldn’t even admit there was a problem. Fortunately, I had a roommate who knew the score, and she helped me cope.”

“Weren’t there any support groups for White girls on campus? What about the church groups?”

“Are you serious, Oscar? The church groups were the worst of all. They thought their mission was to save girls like me from racism, not from being raped. They were always organizing dances and other social functions, and their big concern at every function was to pair off the White females with Black males. White men who showed up were made to feel unwelcome. They were so obvious about it!

“The only organized groups on campus which made an issue of rape were the feminists, but they

didn’t say anything about the racial aspect, of course.”

“Of course. But I’ll bet the racial conditions on campus helped them with their recruiting.”

“Probably did. A lot of women who had had bad experiences with men— especially with Black

men— were full of anger that no one else sympathized with them or would help them, and so they turned to the feminists.”

“How did you manage to avoid falling into their clutches and being converted into a man-hater?” Oscar asked only half seriously.

“I was tempted to join one of the feminist groups during the time when I felt most insecure, as a freshman, just for moral support. And I probably would have, except the feminists’ agenda, even in the least militant groups, went way beyond providing moral support for women. Most of them weren’t just angry about the way women were treated; they were angry that they were women, instead of men, although they would never admit that. They campaigned against rape, but when you got to know them you realized that what they were really angry about was having to be on the bottom. To put it crudely, they wanted to be the rapists instead of the rapees, the fuckers instead of the fuckees. And since I’ve always been happy to be on the bottom, as long as there was a good man on top, I couldn’t empathize with them.”

“I’m grateful for that, baby. It would have been a real loss to the race if you’d become a dyke.”

“Well, at least a loss to you, I hope,” she smiled. “I don’t know that I’m doing the race much good.” “Hmm. True. We ought to do something about that. We need to think seriously about getting you

pregnant. It’s really a crime against Nature for someone with your genes not to have five or six kids.”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“Looks like I’ve put myself on the spot again,” Oscar smiled. Then he frowned. “You know, baby, I’ve got some loose ends that I have to take care of. With a schedule like I’m keeping now we couldn’t really have much of a home life together. I hope that I can work some things out in the next couple of months which will let me go into the business of being a husband and father with a clear conscience.”

“Honey, it’s true that your work schedule is pretty aggravating to me sometimes. But couples all over the world raise families with worse problems.”

“I appreciate your flexibility, baby. One of the reasons I love you is that you seem able to take into stride almost any sort of problem which comes up, without complaining. But I believe I really am near the point of being able to make some changes which will be good for both of us— and for our children. I need to concentrate my energies on these things for just a while longer.”

Oscar could see the disappointment and pain in Adelaide’s eyes, and his soul writhed. He did not want to lie to her, but that is what he was doing. For the truth was that he had no clear idea of what lay ahead for him. What could he hope to have resolved in a couple of months? If he kept escalating his war against the System, he would likely be dead or in prison in that time. On the other hand, it was hard to imagine how he could escalate the war beyond what he was planning to do to the People’s Committee Against Hate. The only possibility seemed to be to find a way of continuing the war by legal— or, at least, less risky— means. But how? He had drawn a blank every time he had tried to think along those lines.

He didn’t know what else to say to Adelaide. There was simply no point in telling her exactly what he was doing. Even if she were ideologically and emotionally prepared to accept that knowledge, there was nothing she could do to help; she would just be frightened and worried. Yet he felt that he must tell her something. He didn’t want her to think he was stalling because he didn’t want to marry her. And he desperately wanted her to understand his motives, to share his conviction that he had to fight the evil that was threatening the whole meaning of their existence.

He tried again, his voice serious and, at first, hesitant: “You know how I feel about a lot of the changes that are taking place in this country, sweetheart. I’ve mentioned most of them to you at one time or another: the growth in racial mixing, the flood of non-White immigrants pouring into the cities, the increasingly obvious crookedness and lack of responsibility of the politicians, the destructive bias of the news and entertainment media, the breakdown of the country’s morale, the decay of discipline and of standards everywhere, the loss of any sense of racial or cultural identity on the part of the dwindling White majority.

“I guess most people have thicker skins than I have, and they don’t let these things bother them. But they do bother me— a lot. They bother me so much that it’s hard for me to take anything else very seriously. My work has become for me nothing more than a way of making money. I can’t get excited about it when I see so many other things going on— more important things, terrible things— that call out for my intervention. It’s hard to plan ahead, to think about a career, when the future looks like the sort of place I wouldn’t want to live in— or have our kids live in.

“1 want to fight it, baby. I feel that I have to fight it. Nothing else seems real or worthwhile to me except fighting it. Nothing else but you, that is. When I’m with you I can put everything else out of my mind for a few hours. I can think about you and me, here and now. I can see you, feel you, hear you, smell you. I can luxuriate in your beauty, your softness, your womanliness, your sexiness, your love. But when we talk about marriage and children, then I have to think about more than here and now. I have to figure out how I can fight and also be a responsible husband and father at the same time. That’s my problem, sweetheart, and I’m trying to work it out.”

There was silence for a long moment, as the two looked into one another’s eyes. Then Adelaide spoke: “Honey, you’re an unusual man. You’re not like any other man I’ve ever known. I think that your attitude is quixotic. I don’t like many of the things that are happening today myself. I don’t like some of the directions the world is headed, and I’d change them if I could. But I can’t, and you can’t either. There’s nothing we can do. Anyway, our responsibility is not to take care of the world, but to take care of ourselves as best we can. There’s a lot of dirt out there, and we can’t change that. But we can keep our own lives clean and make clean lives for our children. That’s all we can do.”

“Maybe not even that much, baby. Sure, I guess you and I can keep ourselves clean. But things are falling apart pretty fast out there, and I’m not at all certain that we’ll be able to guarantee clean lives for our kids. They’ll be growing up in a country in which their own race will be barely a majority— and a badly fractured and split majority at that, while the minorities at least know how to stick together and vote together.

“And I guess that if I were a cold-blooded gambler 1 wouldn’t put any of my money on a bet that we can do anything to head off the catastrophe. But I’m still not quite as sure as you are that nothing can be done. Perhaps I am quixotic, but for me while there’s life there’s hope. And I have to try. I wish I could make you understand how I feel about the inevitability of doing whatever we can, regardless of the odds.”

Oscar thought for a moment, then he continued: “I guess you’re aware of the gang rapes of White girls by bands of young Blacks which have been going on around here. Usually the news media won’t say much about it, but it’s really on the rise. There was that rape of the jogger in Rock Creek Park last week, for example, in which more than 20 teen-aged Blacks grabbed the girl and spent nearly two hours raping her repeatedly, right on the jogging path. Then they cut her throat and left her to die. It wouldn’t have made such a splash in the media if she hadn’t been a senator’s niece.

“Suppose you and I were walking through the park and had come on that scene while the raping was in progress. Suppose I were unarmed, and it was a good mile to the nearest telephone. Some men, I suppose, could tell themselves that there was nothing they could do, except start running for the telephone, in the hope that they could get the cops there in 20 or 30 minutes. But for me there would be no choice. If the girl were a member of my race I would have to charge right into those Black animals and do whatever was humanly possible to rescue her. If I ran away I would not be able to live with myself. I would feel dirty and dishonorable forever afterward.

“And that’s sort of the way it is with me and the world. It’s my world, my race’s world, and it’s being gang-raped. I’d feel dishonorable, I couldn’t be at peace with myself, if I didn’t do what I could— even though doing it might come between you and me.”

Adelaide smiled. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more,” she quoted.

“Exactly, my lovely Lucasta, exactly,” Oscar came back.

“Well, honey, I’m still sure you’re quixotic and that there’s absolutely nothing you can do to change the course of history. But I just want you to know”— and here Adelaide’s voice became low and husky— “that if you decide to go to war against the whole world, I’ll be your camp follower, if you’ll have me. And if you charge unarmed straight into the gates of Hell, I’ll be running along behind you as fast as I can, if I believe you still love me.”

Tears glistened in Adelaide’s eyes, and Oscar found that he had a lump in his throat so hard that he could not speak. All he could do for a moment was reach clumsily across the dinner table and grasp her hand. His motion knocked over one of the candlesticks, which sputtered out. Then he rose swiftly from his chair, crossed to Adelaide’s side of the table while she herself stood up, and crushed her tightly in his arms. They stood there silent and motionless, a single column of shadowed, gleaming flesh illuminated by the flickering light of the remaining candle.

X

Two nights later Oscar was ready to move against the People’s Committee. He had prepared his tools and supplies, and the weather was right: a steady rain that would keep people indoors and muffle any noise he might inadvertently make.

Furthermore, the group had given special billing to the meeting being held tonight. The governors of Massachusetts and Wisconsin would be there to present resolutions of their respective state legislatures urging the Congress to pass the Horowitz Bill. Cardinal O’Rourke and Rabbi Rosen of the National Judeo-Christian Interfaith Council would be principal speakers, along with a Barry Shapiro of something called the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, who also was to be the master of ceremonies. Several Congressmen would be attending.

The media would be well represented, which was good. The more of those rotten sons of bitches he could blow to hell, the better. Unfortunately, however, there probably would be especially heavy police protection tonight. Oscar’s only real concern was that there not be any policemen patrolling the alley behind the church.

He drove first down the side street just north of the church complex. As he approached the alley entrance, his heart sank: a police cruiser was parked in the alley, blocking access, its nose projecting onto the sidewalk. He drove on around the block. The other end of the alley was clear. Peering into this end of the alley through the rain, which now had become quite heavy, he could not see the cruiser at all. He found a parking space only about 50 feet beyond the alley, on the other side of the street: quite a piece of luck, considering the large attendance at the meeting in the church. Oscar had spotted no other vacant spaces nearby and had been afraid he would have to carry his heavy, bulky equipment several blocks.

Before he stepped out of the car, he checked the pockets of his trench coat; all of the smaller items he needed were in place. He then walked around to the passenger door, slipped a heavily padded rope around his neck and across his shoulders underneath his coat, and carefully eased two 90-pound cylinders of acetylene, one fastened to each end of the harness, out of the passenger area. When he stood up the two cylinders hung to his knees and were covered by his coat. They doubled his girth, however, and he could not stand even a casual inspection at less than 50 yards without arousing immediate suspicion. Worse, he could not walk in anything approaching a normal fashion. The best he could manage with the load was an extremely awkward waddle.

He was nearly pooped by the time he reached the right spot in the iron fence, more than 100 yards down the alley. Fortunately, the police cruiser was still far enough away so that he could make out its outline only when it was occasionally illuminated by the headlights of a passing car on the side street ahead. As long as the cops stayed inside their vehicle, they certainly would not be able to see him.

He slipped out of the harness and then pushed the cylinders one at a time through the fence. They were a tight fit, and one stuck halfway through. He had to use all his strength to pull the pickets apart enough to free it. Then he went over the top himself, somewhat more awkwardly than the first time, but without losing any of the contents of his pockets. He rested for a couple of minutes, squatting in the wet darkness of the shrubs, before looping the rope over his shoulders again and crawling the remaining 25 yards to the building.

Once he had pushed his way through the shrubs concealing the window well and was stretched out along the basement wall with his head and shoulders next to the window, he was able to relax. From here on it would be a piece of cake. If he weren’t quite so wet and cold he would even enjoy it. First he pulled his battery-operated drill from his right pocket, and then the half-inch bit with the turned-down shank. He tightened the bit in the chuck, dropping the chuck key in the process and groping in the mud and blackness for nearly a minute before finding it again. The plastic coating on his fingers made them clumsy and hampered his sense of touch as well.

Drilling a hole through the wooden window sash took only a few seconds. Oscar next pushed the end of a half-inch plastic tube into the hole, The other end of the tube was connected to one of the acetylene cylinders, which in turn was connected to the other by a four-foot length of rubber hose. He opened the valves wide on both cylinders and tensed as the gas roared through the tube and into the basement. To him the sound seemed as loud as a freight train rushing by at high speed, but he told himself that it probably would be barely audible over the noise of the rain to someone in the alley— or inside the sanctuary above, where the meeting was in progress.

He had intended to stow his drill and set a time squib while the cylinders were emptying, but the force of the flow caused the plastic tube to writhe and twist so violently that he had to hold it to prevent its coming out of the sash. Only after about five minutes had the pressure in the cylinders dropped to the point where he could safely release the tube.

The atmosphere in the large basement room must be pretty close to 10 per cent acetylene by now, Oscar estimated. Anything over 2.5 per cent would explode. By the time the cylinders were completely empty, the acetylene content of the room should be as high as 12 percent, assuming the leakage under the doors into the rest of the basement wasn’t excessive. He had noted during his first reconnaissance that the heating plant for the whole church complex was located in an annex; at least, that was the only building with a chimney. That eased his fear of a premature explosion due to gas leaking into a part of the basement where a furnace might be located. Still, he didn’t want to hang around any longer than necessary, because as gas seeped into other parts of the basement a spark from any source might cause a detonation.

He pulled a squib from his pocket and prepared to set it for 30 minutes. It was a device he had built himself, but it was modeled on similar ignition devices he had seen in Vietnam. It was a metal tube six inches long and just under half an inch in diameter. When a protective cap was unscrewed from one end, a protruding sockethead screw became accessible. He had taped an Allen wrench to the squib beforehand, so that he wouldn’t have to grope in his pocket for it. A ball detent made it easy to turn the screw the exact distance desired: five minutes for each “click.” Zero “clicks” was for instantaneous ignition, but in practice that meant approximately 30 seconds. When one had set the position of the screw one jammed it forcefully against any hard surface to rupture a tiny ampoule of acid inside the tube and begin the countdown.

Oscar had just fumbled the wrench into the socket, relying entirely on his badly impaired sense of touch, when the light in the basement room suddenly came on. He froze in horror, anticipating the explosion. Almost immediately, however, he realized that if there were going to be an explosion from the turning on of the light it would have been instantaneous. Probably the light switch was one of the modern, silent ones, using a mercury contactor in a sealed glass tube. If it had been an older, mechanical switch, he probably would be dead now, the spark from the closing of the contacts having set off the explosive mixture in the room.

All of these thoughts raced through his head in a split second. Now he had to act just as quickly. Obviously, someone had opened the door to the room. Perhaps the odor of the acetylene had been detected upstairs, or perhaps it was the sound of the rushing gas. In any case, the alarm would now be sounded, and the church would be evacuated. Furthermore, with a door open he couldn’t count on the concentration of gas in the room remaining at the explosive level for more than a minute or so.

Without further thought he dropped the Allen wrench and slammed the end of the squib against the stone wall. Then he yanked the acetylene tube from the sash and pushed the squib into the hole. It clattered on the basement floor as Oscar scrambled to his feet. No time now to retrieve his nearly empty acetylene cylinders. He left them in the shrubs and sprinted for the fence.

He was over the top and halfway back to his car when the ground shook under his feet. An instant later the shock wave traveling through the air hit with an immensely satisfying boom. It seemed to Oscar that it had been less than 30 seconds since he had activated the squib. Not until he reached his car did he turn and look back toward the church. The building was still standing, but it was nearly obscured by a huge pall of black smoke. No flames were to be seen, but dense, black smoke was pouring from the windows of the sanctuary— which meant that the blast must at least have blown a substantial hole in the floor.

As he drove home, wet but happy, the first emergency vehicles went screaming past him in the opposite direction. It wasn’t until the next morning, however, that he was able to hear a fairly accurate news report on the effects of the blast. Not only the pulpit, but the entire speakers’ platform behind it had been blown right through the roof of the church, he learned. All of the notables on the platform— two governors, three Congressmen, a Senator, a cardinal, two bishops, a prominent rabbi, a TV talk-show host, two leading Hollywood actors, a much-acclaimed feminist writer, the head of a homosexual rights organization, the president of the NAACP, the B’nai B’rith’s Shapiro, and four others, unnamed— had perished. Parts of some of them were still being scraped off the rafters of the sanctuary. In addition there were 41 dead, most from smoke inhalation, among the audience and the media personnel. Oscar’s empty acetylene cylinders had been found, and the bombing already was being denounced as “the hate crime of the century.”

That label was a challenge to Oscar. What could he do next that would eclipse his snuffing of the People’s Committee? He had time to consider the matter, because he came down with a cold that very day— due at least in part, he suspected, to his exposure and exertion in the downpour of the previous night.

It was a Saturday, and Adelaide came over early. When she saw his condition she insisted that he stay at home and spend most of the weekend in bed under her ministrations. He complied without objection, glad for the rest and finding that he enjoyed being fussed over and waited on by her. With her as a nurse, having a cold was almost a pleasure.

More than ever he wanted to order his life in a way that would allow him to give her security and happiness and to father her children. And more than ever he felt compelled to continue combating the evil forces which were destroying the very basis for the future existence of her kind. He wrestled with his dilemma during most of the following week, mentally re-exploring every possible avenue of activity which might provide a resolution.

One of the thoughts that kept recurring to Oscar was that everything he had done so far was like hacking at the heads of a Hydra. He was unable to inflict a mortal wound, and the harder he hacked, the more formidable the beast became. The latest evidence of this was the demand by several members of the Congress that, in response to last week’s bombing, the Horowitz Bill be rushed to a vote as soon as possible. There clearly was a much larger supply of people who needed killing than he could ever hope to kill by himself. If he did not soon find a vital organ to strike at, all of his efforts would end up being counterproductive.

But what was a vital organ? The Congress? Not really; it seemed more to be a mere instrument of the forces of decay rather than the guiding will. Besides, he could kill hundreds of politicians, and the institution of Congress would continue its destructive work. The same was true of the news media; no matter how many journalists he killed, the press and the television networks would stay on their same, deadly course.

If he could not destroy a vital organ, perhaps there was some way of controlling one. Newspapers could be bought and sold, even television networks. The trouble was that the amounts of money required were simply beyond reach; big-city newspapers exchanged hands for $100 million or more, networks for billions. He could successfully rob banks or operate a counterfeiting press for 50 years without accumulating enough capital to buy the Washington Post.

By Thursday afternoon he still had no answer. The following Monday was a holiday for Adelaide, and he had promised to take her skiing over the three-day weekend. They would be leaving for the ski area tomorrow afternoon, and Oscar would be busy tomorrow morning completing several errands. Tonight he had to crank out some more results for Carl. And this afternoon it was necessary to take the car to the garage for a wheel alignment and a tune-up. He did not get home again with the car until after seven o’clock.

XI

Oscar hung his coat in the hail closet and headed for the kitchen to pour himself a glass of orange juice before beginning the night’s work. Halfway into the kitchen, he knew something was wrong an instant before he heard the voice.

“Freeze, Yeager! FBI! Raise your arms over your head and face the wall. Now step back one pace and lean forward with your hands against the wall.”

Oscar felt numb. For a fraction of a second he considered going on the attack. The man behind him, sensing his thought instantly, snarled, “Try it and you’re dead, Yeager.”

The man expertly frisked him, removing the Smith and Wesson Airweight .38 special which Oscar always carried tucked into his waistband.

“All right, Yeager, you can turn around now— slowly. Sit in that chair. We’re going to have a nice, long talk.”

For the first time Oscar saw the man who had disarmed him. He was a sturdy-looking, gray-haired man in his mid-fifties, about four inches shorter than Oscar, with steely blue eyes. He was wearing a business suit, and he held a revolver pointed unwaveringly at Oscar. He looked like an FBI agent, but Oscar already could sense that something other than an ordinary arrest was taking place. Why was there only one agent? The FBI never operated like that. He was not left wondering for long.

“Well, Yeager, let’s get right to the point. I know what you’ve been doing. I’ve known for the last two weeks, even before you smoked that Hebe Shapiro and his stooges in the church over on Connecticut Avenue. God, that was a good job!” The man chuckled approvingly, but his revolver remained pointed at Oscar’s chest.

“You could have been arrested as soon as I had you identified from the prints you left in the john at the Shoreham when you killed Horowitz. The only reason that we’re sitting here now is that I like your style, Yeager. And I have some work for you— some real man’s work, instead of the kid stuff you’ve been wasting your time with.”

“Are you telling me,” Oscar asked, unable to conceal his incredulity, “that the FBI approves of whatever it is you’re alleging I’ve done?”

“Hell, no, Yeager! If anybody else at the Bureau knew what I know, you’d be chained to the wail in one of our maximum-security cells in the basement of the Hoover Building right now. The point is, I didn’t tell anyone else. I kept my information on you to myself. It was pure luck that of all the potential evidence we picked up at the Shoreham I gave everything else to other agents to check out and kept for myself the one item which led somewhere— namely, the print of your right thumb on a page from your address book which you had wadded up and jammed in the lock on the rest-room closet where you waited for Horowitz. I ran it through our Fingerprint Section and came up with your name and Air Force identification number.

“At that point the only thing on my mind was a wild hunch that maybe, just maybe, you were the guy we were looking for-and that there was no need to share the glory in nabbing you with anyone else yet. So I made you my own special project, while everyone else was working on other leads, none of which led them anywhere.

“I slipped into your place one night when you were staying over at your cutie’s apartment and had a look at your layout in the basement. That’s when I knew. At that point I should have swooped down on you with one of our SWAT teams, cameramen from all three networks, and a prepared statement for the press. I would have gotten my salary raised three grades. Instead, I spent two weeks finding out everything there is to know about you: all the places you lived when you were growing up, what your teachers in high school thought about you, your record in the Air Force, your graduate studies in Colorado. I talked with two of the girls you dated there, told them it was for a security clearance. I know you better now than your mother does.

“And I stayed on your tail and watched you do the job on Shapiro’s People’s Committee Against Hate.”

“Why?” Oscar asked.

“Well, that takes a little explanation.” The older man leaned back in his chair for a moment. He still held his revolver in his hand, but he was resting it in his lap now instead of keeping it aimed directly at Oscar’s chest. He sighed. “I’ve been with the Bureau for 33 years. I’ve been the deputy chief of our Anti-Terrorism Section for the last nine years. I worked my way up back during the days when I was proud to be an FBI agent. Did you know that my father was in the Bureau for 26 years before I became a special agent? We were in the Bureau together for seven years, until he retired. He died two years ago.”

“I recognize you now,” Oscar replied, his numbness gone. “I saw you on the CBS Evening News last year, when the FBI was rounding up all of those Ku Klux Klan people. You were the one in charge of the FBI task force. Your name is Ryan— William Ryan.”

Ryan did not respond directly to Oscar. He paused to gather his thoughts, then began again, speaking with more emphasis: “I’ve watched the Bureau change from a first-class law-enforcement agency to a politicized, mongrelized, third-rate secret-police bureaucracy, with the level of morale and efficiency you’d expect to find in Panama or Nicaragua. In the last 15 years the Jews have taken over the place and ruined it. Not that you find them out on the street busting the Mafia or shooting it out with Colombian drug smugglers like the rest of us. No, they’re too busy running the ‘racial sensitivity’ classes all the agents have to take. And heading our Affirmative Action office. And worming their way into the Counterespionage Section, so that they can make sure we don’t catch too many more of their cousins from Israel swiping American military secrets.

“Things change slowly in the government. From day to day you don’t notice much difference. But it mounts up. It used to be a rare thing for an agent to go bad. Hoover would drum a man out of the Bureau for trying to beat a parking ticket or writing a bad check. In the last two years we’ve had 19 agents convicted on various felony charges— everything from selling drugs and pimping to spying for the Soviet Union. Eight others managed to beat the charges against them, and four of those guys are still with the Bureau!”

“Yes, I read about several of those cases in the newspapers,” Oscar commented drily.

“Hell, not a tenth of it gets in the papers!” Ryan exploded. “We’re able to keep most of it covered up. You know what I saw just last week? I went down to our analytical lab to check on the results of a test on some material from a crime site. There was no one in the lab, but I heard some noise coming from the stock room. I opened the door and found one of our Black special agents screwing the White lab technician on a table! And you know what? There wasn’t a damned thing I could do to either of them! I filed a report, of course, but these days something like that is regarded by the bureaucracy as in the same league with being reported for loitering at the water cooler.”

Ryan paused again, studying Oscar’s face for a minute before continuing. “What’s happening in the Bureau is just a reflection of what’s happening everywhere. When America started going bad, there was no way for the Bureau to escape the same fate. If I’ve got you figured right, you’ve had about the same reaction to the general decay, Yeager, as I’ve had to the decay of the Bureau. The difference is that you’ve done something about it, and I haven’t. I’ve just had to take it, year after year, and let the pressure build up.”

“So, there are still some decent men in the FBI!” Oscar exclaimed in surprise. “I thought you fellows had all joined the other side.”

“Oh, we have, Yeager, indeed we have, and you’d better believe it! You just don’t understand the secret-police mentality,” Ryan chuckled. “Don’t you ever get the idea into your head that you can confide in anybody at the FBI. There are lots of us over there, especially the old-timers, who have decent instincts, men who hate the same rottenness you do and would like to have their children grow up in the same kind of world you would want for your kids. But we work for whoever signs our paychecks, and we clobber anybody who raises his hand against the System we’re part of. We may be secretly glad when you waste some race-mixer in a parking lot, but we’d fall all over ourselves to be the first to nail you for it. We’re the Jews’ mercenaries, and we earn our keep. Not only that, we take personal offense when some son of a bitch like you challenges us.”

Oscar thought for a second, then responded, “In other words, you got more than 150 Klansmen convicted last year on charges of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Blacks, because that’s the job you’re paid to do, but you didn’t really enjoy it as much as you pretended to when you were describing the investigation and the arrests on tele....”

“Wrong!” Ryan interrupted. “You still don’t understand the secret-police mentality. I enjoyed busting those turds more than just about anything I’ve done for the Bureau. I wasn’t pretending at all when I described them as ‘the scum of the earth.’ I know what you’re thinking, Yeager. You’re thinking that those Klansmen’s hearts were in the right places, that they were just doing in their own way what you were doing in yours. But they were bums, losers. They were stupid. And they made the mistake of thinking they were smarter than we were. They challenged us. They waved their pricks in our faces. And so we cut their balls off.”

“All right. I guess I’ve challenged you too. So now what are you going to do about it, Ryan?”

“That depends on you, Yeager. If you’re a reasonable man, who knows when somebody’s got him by the balls and accepts the fact, then maybe we can work together. On the other hand, if you want to play hard-ass with me, I’ll crucify you. I’ll call in the media right now and let ‘em show me on the late

news tonight walking you out of here in handcuffs.”

“I regard myself as a reasonable man. What sort of work do you have in mind?”

“That’s the answer I wanted to hear,” Ryan beamed. “Don’t worry about the work. You’ll love it. It’ll just be more of the same sort of thing you’ve proved yourself so good at. Except from now on I’ll be choosing your targets for you.” He paused for a moment, and the twinkle faded from his eyes. When he continued his voice was hard and icy. “Before we get into the details I want to impress on you that I’m a careful man, Yeager— a very careful man. There’s no way out of this for you, except to do exactly what I tell you. If you ever try to double-cross me, it won’t be handcuffs for you— it’ll be a cold slab. And don’t even think about trying to get the drop on me. It won’t solve your problem for you. No others in the Bureau know what I know about you now, but I’ve taken steps to ensure that if anything happens to me they soon will.”

There was silence as Ryan paused again to gather his thoughts. Oscar’s face remained expressionless, but his mind was busy. He doubted Ryan’s last claim; the man didn’t strike him as the kind to waste his time on a futile, post-mortem revenge. He wouldn’t have been likely to leave any of his evidence lying around his Bureau office where others might find it prematurely, because that would spell problems for him as well as for Oscar. If he really had taken any steps, then he should have spelled them out for Oscar. Only by being credible could they serve as an effective deterrent.

Suppose Ryan had left a sealed envelope with his wife. What could there be in it that would hold up in court, if Oscar had just one day to clean up a few loose ends and dispose of some incriminating items, such as his ordnance? A single thumb print by itself wouldn’t convict him. At the thought of that thumb print he kicked himself mentally. He had been so careful to avoid leaving prints every time he had carried out an action! And then he had left one during a reconnaissance! And he hadn’t even used that rest-room closet for the action!

Focusing on Ryan again, Oscar decided that if the man would let down his guard for just a fraction of a second, he could jump him, dispose of the body, and take some hasty measures to protect himself from a subsequent investigation— if there ever were one. If nothing happened for a month or two, he could then resume his former activity.

That course of action appealed to him much more than letting himself be used as Ryan’s private hit man. He tried not to let his new resolve show in a tensing of his muscles. Jumping Ryan would not be easy. He would need total surprise.

XII

“I think I’ll let you take out Kaplan first,” Ryan resumed reflectively, almost as if he were thinking aloud. “That’s David Kaplan, the little Hebe who’s the number-three man in my own section. The other kikes in the Bureau are priming him to be jumped over my head to become chief of the Anti-Terrorism Section when the present chief gets canned for not being able to catch you.”

“Is that why you want to get rid of him?” Oscar asked, allowing himself a slight smile. “You want the job for yourself?”

“You misjudge me, Yeager. I don’t want you to bump him off just because he’s a career threat. What kind of a jerk do you think I am?” There was exasperation in the other man’s voice. “He’s a Jew, dammit! He’s one of the Yids who’re taking over the Bureau.”

Oscar hesitated, his puzzlement showing in his face. “You’ve mentioned Jews two or three times. Just what is it you have against them?”

It was Ryan’s turn to look puzzled. “What do you mean, what do I have against them? I hate them for the same reasons you do. Now let’s cut the crap and get down to business. Pick up that pad from the desk— slowly and carefully. I’m going to give you a complete personal rundown on Kaplan— physical description, work schedule, daily itinerary, personal habits— and I want you to take notes.”

Oscar held up his hand. “Now wait just a minute, Ryan. If I’m going to be killing people for you, first I’d like to have at least a general idea of your rationale. I’m one of those troublesome types who needs to know why before he carries out an assignment. In this case I really haven’t the foggiest. I think you’ve assumed that I know some things I don’t. For one thing, I’ve never been fond of Jews as a group, but I don’t really hate them, and I don’t understand your references to their taking over the FBI. Why would they want to do that?”

The puzzled expression on Ryan’s face had changed to a look of utter amazement as Oscar spoke. He stared wide-eyed at Oscar. “Jesus Christ! I can’t believe it! I do not believe what I’m hearing! You sound like some ignorant goy who learned everything he knows from watching TV. You sound like the typical American voter. But you can’t be that stupid. You didn’t knock off Congressman Horowitz just because he was such an ugly bastard. You didn’t blow up that B’nai B’rith honcho, Shapiro,just because he had bad breath. You didn’t waste that kike columnist at the Washington Post, Jacobs, just because his opinions were too liberal for you. You’re not going to try to tell me that it’s just a coincidence they all happened to be Jews. Come off it, Yeager!”

Forgetting for a moment his resolution to watch for the first possible opportunity to jump Ryan and letting his irritation show, Oscar leaned forward in his seat and stabbed a finger at Ryan. “As a matter of fact, it is just a coincidence. I didn’t even know Jacobs was Jewish. I shot him simply because he was the most obnoxious writer on the race question at the Post. I wasn’t really aiming at Shapiro when I bombed the People’s Committee; he just happened to be one of the people on the platform when I blew the place up. And I didn’t kill Horowitz because he was Jewish; I killed him because he was the leader of the race-mixing faction in the House.”

“Right! Just like Senator Mandelbaum is the head of the race-mixing faction in the Senate. Perhaps you hadn’t noticed that he just happens to be a Hebe too,” Ryan snorted in derision.

“Well, what if he is? What does that prove? There are plenty of race-mixers who aren’t Jewish,” Oscar replied somewhat defensively.

“Omigod, I believe the man is serious,” Ryan moaned, clapping his free hand to his head and rolling his eyes up. “I suppose you also didn’t realize that Shapiro was pulling all of the strings in the People’s

Committee Against Hate from the beginning, that all of those preachers and actors and faggots on the Committee were just window dressing?”

Oscar didn’t answer, but he tensed, ready to hurl himself at the other man. Before he could move, however, Ryan was staring straight at him again. And although Ryan’s right hand was still resting casually on his leg, the muzzle of his pistol remained pointed steadily at Oscar’s chest.

“Maybe I overestimated you, Yeager. Maybe you’re not smart enough for what I have in mind: a good tactician, perhaps, but certainly no strategist,” Ryan mused. “But then, a good tactician is all I really need. I’ll be the strategist. You don’t have to understand the reasons for what you do.”

“Try me,” Oscar shot back. “You tell me the significance of the fact that Jewish people are somewhat more heavily involved than members of other religious groups in the effort to ram miscegenation down America’s throat. You explain to me what that has to do with Kaplan and a Jewish plot to take over the FBI. I’ll listen. Maybe I’ll even understand.”

Ryan glanced at his watch and sighed. “Yeager, if you’ve managed to live 40 years and still believe that the Jews are only a religious group, there’s no way I can make you see the light tonight. It would take a week just to get you started toward an understanding of the Jews. I assumed you already had figured them out, but I guess I was wrong.” Ryan shook his head sadly.

For a moment the older man remained undecided, then he sighed again, leaned back in his chair, and began: “All right, Yeager, you’ve noticed that Jews are more heavily involved in efforts to encourage race-mixing than others are. Have you also noticed their involvement in the news and entertainment media?”

Oscar blushed, feeling a bit like a retarded pupil. “Well, of course. Everyone knows that there are a lot of Jewish people in the media. It’s their forte.”

“Yeah, it’s their fort, all right. Fort with no ‘e.’ It’s their fortress, their citadel, their strategic headquarters for their campaign of annihilation against our kind,” Ryan replied bitingly. “I suppose you believe that the reason the Jews own everything in Hollywood and the other strongholds of the entertainment industry is that they just have a knack for show business. Is that it? And I suppose you believe that, as a religious group, they acquired that knack from attending synagogue services. Or maybe it comes from their kosher diet. Right?”

Oscar’s blush became more intense. “Well, they’ve always been good businessmen too. Some families get a good start in certain businesses, and then their descendants become more entrenched with each generation, like the Krupps in armaments and the Vanderbilts in railroads,” Oscar answered lamely.

“You’re reaching, boy, you’re reaching. It’s natural enough for a son to step into his father’s shoes in the family business. Nothing sinister in that. But when all the sons in a family head for other businesses— other businesses in the same industry, that is— owned by families quite different from their own, and start buying them out and taking them over, and helping their cousins do the same, then one should at least suspect that this particular family wants to control the industry in question. And when one sees other families which are related in some distinctive way to this one— all the same ethnic minority, say— doing the same thing in the same industry, one should be even more suspicious.

“The Jews aren’t the only minority in this country which behaves more or less like that, of course. There are the Hindus and the motel business, for example— or Gypsies and the used-car business. But then, owning a motel, or even a chain of motels, doesn’t give a person quite the same clout as owning a big Hollywood production company or the New York Times, does it?

“In fact, Yeager, just think about it: I know that you aren’t active in any church, but I also know that your family was Lutheran. Now let’s just imagine. Let’s just forget about the real world for a minute and suppose that all of the Lutherans in Europe— your own ancestors— were a really tightly knit, well organized minority, and that the non-Lutheran majority despised them, hated their guts, based on centuries of bad experiences with them. And suppose that until about a hundred years ago there were only a handful of Lutherans in this country— a few scouts or advance men, one might say— and that these advance men then sent word back to the rest of the Lutheran tribe in Europe that the pickings were good in the United States, that the really rough work of fighting the Indians and taming the wilderness was done, and that the time was ripe to move in and take over.

“And suppose three or four million of your relatives then came pouring into the country over the course of 30 years or so, remaining just as tightly knit as they had been in Europe, bearing the same burning hatred for the rest of the human race, and utterly determined to get the upper hand. The first thing they’d have to do, of course, would be to get a toehold. So they’d take over whatever industries were available— the pushcart trade, the rag business, pawn shops— and move up from there into more lucrative endeavors, like the garment industry, the fur business, chain stores, and wholesale trade.

“So eventually they’ve established themselves in this country, salted away plenty of loot, learned the local folkways, blended into the local scenery as well as they can, and are ready to go for the jugular. How would they do it? How would you do it? By getting a corner on the button-hook market? By aiming at a stranglehold on the proctology profession?”

Oscar remained silent, and Ryan continued his monologue: “No, you know the answer as well as I, Yeager. They’d start grabbing the mass media. In Europe they exercised their control through money, through banking. They worked from the top down, by making themselves invaluable to the rulers as moneylenders. Here things are different, more democratic. Here the person who controls public opinion wields more real power than the banker. Of course, the Lutherans wouldn’t be shy about grabbing control of the moneylending business here, either. But if their aim was not just to gain wealth for themselves, but to dominate and then destroy the nonLutheran majority among whom they lived, more than anything else they’d go for every medium of entertainment and information they could get their acquisitive hands on. They’d go for Hollywood. They’d go for Broadway. They’d go for radio. They’d go for the newspapers and magazines and comic books and book publishers. And, of course, when TV came along later they’d control that too.”

“Well, I admit that Jewish people are as thick as fleas on a dog in Hollywood, but....”

Ryan cut him off explosively, “Kee-rist, Yeager! Cut out that ‘Jewish people’ crap before I gag.”

“All right. So the Jews control Hollywood. And it’s true that the sort of entertainment Hollywood

produces these days seems almost calculated to promote racial mixing and other forms of degeneracy. But....”

“There’s no ‘almost’ about it, Yeager,” Ryan interrupted him again.

“I don’t see how you can be so sure about that. The Mafia distributes drugs, which certainly are destructive to our society. But I believe it’s pretty clear that the Mafia’s aim is simply to make money, not to destroy society. They’re simply taking advantage of a vice which already existed. How do you know the Jews don’t have the same sort of motivation?”

Before Ryan could respond Oscar continued, “Actually, I shouldn’t let you bully me into saying the Jews. Some Jews take advantage of our society’s vices in order to make money. Most Jews don’t. My dentist, Dr. Steinberg, is a Jew, I believe. The newsstand where I buy magazines is operated by a Jew. One of the contract people I deal with in the Pentagon is Jewish— excuse me, a Jew— and so was one of my best professors at Colorado. I simply can’t buy the theory that they’re all part of some gigantic conspiracy to destroy our race. I think that you’re making a lot of unjustified assumptions.

“Our race certainly is being destroyed. But it’s we ourselves who are the destroyers. We’ve let ourselves become decadent. We’ve lost our sense of identity and purpose. We’re wallowing in our own vices. We’ve left ourselves open to exploitation by everyone else on the planet.

“If you want to pin the blame on a more specific group, you can blame your own employers, the greedy, gutless, lying politicians and bureaucrats who run the rotten and irresponsible government for which you’re working.”

Ryan shrugged. “Yeager, I have to agree with a large part of what you’ve said. The American people are decadent. The politicians are crooked— and believe me, I’ve seen a lot more solid evidence of that than you can even imagine in your wildest fantasies. The government is rotten. We have brought a lot of our present grief down on ourselves.

“But I’m not one to make unjustified or unnecessary assumptions. In that regard I’m a true disciple of Occam. Nor did I get where I am in the Bureau by being a crackpot theorist. There is solid, irrefutable, unambiguous evidence for everything I’ve said about the Jews— and plenty of it, although one may have to dig a bit to find all of it.

“I see from the books in your bookcase that you’ve done a little reading in history. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that you failed to learn much about the Jews, though. You have to be able to read between the lines of most history books written in the last 50 years in order to follow the Jews’ trail. It’s a taboo subject. There are lots of older books with explicit information in them, but you’ll only find most of those in the larger university libraries, certainly not in bookstores. If you’re interested I’ll give you a list of titles sometime. By the way, you didn’t know that I have a master’s degree in history from Georgetown University, did you? Really, I’m not just a dumb cop, Yeager.”

Ryan paused for a second and then continued: “Of course, you’re right when you say that your dentist and the Jew who runs your neighborhood newsstand aren’t participants in a conspiracy to destroy us. I’m sure that most Jews in this country have their hands full just making the payments on their condos and putting their kids through dental school. They don’t have time for much conspiring.

“But you’re also wrong. It depends upon how you look at it. I’ll give you an example. The United States fought a war against Germany a few years back. It was a bloody, hard-fought war. It was a deadly serious war. Americans were told that Germany was our enemy. Germans were told that America was their enemy. We killed millions of them, and they killed hundreds of thousands of us.

“Now you can easily convince me that there were lots of German dentists and newsstand operators and university professors who didn’t hate Americans and who weren’t conspiring against us. They were just ordinary Germans, whose hands were full earning a living and raising their families. Some of them may not even have agreed with the policies of their government. Is it fair to say that all these Germans were our enemies?”

Ryan paused for effect and then answered his own question: “Of course, it is. They were our enemies because they paid with their taxes for the bullets their soldiers used against us. Even if they weren’t in the trenches and the tanks, they were keeping the home front going, in one way or another. They thought of themselves as members of the German nation, and we were at war with the German nation.

“Do you get the idea, Yeager? Your Jewish dentist pays his taxes too, with his contributions to the United Jewish Appeal. He may not be in the front lines with the fellows from B’nai B’rith, but you can bet that he does his part on the home front in lots of little ways. He votes for the politicians who vote for your taxes to be sent to Israel. He writes letters with the right slant to the editor of the Washington Post. He’s probably very civic minded, working with the PTA, where he can keep an eye on the teachers hired by the school board; serving on the county library board, where he can have some input into the types of books the library stocks; and acting as a patron of the local art museum or theater group, where he can ensure that we get a few carved African masks and tom-toms in the museum or some really freaky stage performances, with an affirmative action cast.

“Or maybe your dentist is one of those really rare Jews who doesn’t pay a bit of attention to what the B’nai B’rith tells him and doesn’t even buy Israel Bonds. He still thinks of himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people— the Jewish nation, the Jewish race, whatever you want to call the damned thing— is at war with our people, make no mistake about it.

“I’ve been in the front lines of one little part of that war long enough to have a pretty good understanding of it. Actually, my understanding began even before I joined the Bureau. My dad used to tell us at the dinner table about his work during and right after the Second World War. He had been working mostly on internal subversion until the war began, then they put him in the counterespionage section. That’s when he learned about the Jews.

“These days whenever people hear about espionage during the war they think of German agents landed by submarine with maps of defense installations, or Japs with secret radio transmitters, that sort of thing. Actually the counterespionage people in the Bureau spent only about ten per cent of their time during the war catching Nazi and Jap spies, because they had to spend 90 per cent of their time trying to keep the Jews from stealing every secret we had and passing it along to the Soviet Union. My dad could never get over the fact that we were fighting the war for the Jews in the first place, and they showed their gratitude by selling us out to the Reds.

“If you learned anything at all from those history books,” Ryan waved toward the bookcase, “you know that Roosevelt had been doing everything he could in 1940 and 1941 to provoke the Germans into declaring war. He had the Bureau fingering German agents in this country to the British, who had been at war with the Germans since September 1939, of course, and then playing dumb when those agents were murdered. He had our Navy tracking German ships and reporting their positions to the British, so they could be sunk. He let his Jewish Treasury secretary, Morgenthau, seize German assets in this country. Finally he ordered our Navy to shoot at German ships on sight. Hitler, however, refused to be provoked. Roosevelt eventually had to get us into the war by the back door, by setting us up for the Japanese ‘surprise’ attack on Pearl Harbor.

“And all the time a cabal of Jewish ‘advisors’— Morgenthau, Baruch, Frankfurter, Rosenman, Cohen— was telling him exactly what to do and when to do it. And in turn they were on the phone every day with the head Jews in New York, London, and Moscow. Hoover had taps on half the telephones in Washington, and he knew everything that was going on.

“After the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 , Jews in every one of our defense establishments began swiping secret documents and giving them to the Soviets. Hoover complained to Roosevelt about it, but FDR wouldn’t let him arrest them. About all Hoover could do was quietly warn some of the top military people and the big industrialists doing defense work, so that they could move Jewish subordinates to less sensitive positions and tighten up security. After Pearl Harbor, of course, the Soviet Union was officially our ‘ally.’ But even though Roosevelt continued to protect the Jews, Hoover kept the Bureau on top of everything that was going on, collecting evidence and biding his time.

“Then when FDR died early in 1945, Hoover lowered the boom on the kikes. The Bureau rounded up hundreds of them who were involved in espionage work for the Soviets. That’s when my dad saw how the Jews are organized, how they work together and back each other up. Terrific pressure was brought on Hoover to stop arresting Jews for espionage. He would have caved in if he hadn’t spent years gathering the means to protect himself. He had confidential dossiers on most of the top politicians. One of them would get an angry call from Morgenthau or one of the other Jewish leaders, demanding that something be done to curb the FBI. The politician would in turn call Hoover, and Hoover would invite him to drop by the Bureau for a friendly chat. Then Hoover would show him a few choice items from his personal dossier. The politician would immediately forget all about trying to pressure Hoover into halting the investigation of Jewish spies.

“Eventually, though, Hoover was forced to compromise with the Jews. A few dozen of them who had been caught red-handed— most notably the Rosenbergs and their accomplices— were put on trial and convicted. The investigative files on hundreds of others were quietly closed. And from that time on the Jews were determined to capture the Bureau for themselves. As long as Hoover was alive, however, they couldn’t do much. And he built a lot of internal roadblocks into the FBI bureaucracy to slow them down even after he died in 1972.

“But they are persistent bastards, and they are well on the way to completing their takeover of the Bureau. It won’t make much difference who’s appointed Director after that; they’ll control the internal workings of the Bureau— what’s left of it— and do whatever they please. I’ve fought them to the extent I’ve been able. But I have a family, and I’m not the martyr type. Everything I’ve done has been in the way of bureaucratic infighting. I’ve gone by the book.

“Fortunately, however, there is a provident God in heaven, and he has delivered you into my hands. You’re going to do some of the things I’ve wanted to do but couldn’t.” Ryan glanced at his watch again. “Now start taking notes, Yeager. I haven’t got all night.”

XIII

The Kaplan job was not difficult. Armed with a detailed knowledge of the man’s habits and weekly schedule, a description of his automobile, and a wealth of other personal data, Oscar quickly laid his plans.

Kaplan was addicted to pornography, Ryan had told him. He kept a stack of kinky photographs in his desk and regularly showed them around the office to the other agents, despite the fact that most of them did not share his obsession and looked at the photographs now and then only from a morbid curiosity to see what weird, new perversions the Jewish agent was drooling over at the time. Kaplan was so hung up on the stuff, Ryan had said in a tone of obvious disgust, that he stopped by a porno store just four blocks from the Hoover Building every Wednesday evening on his way home; the store normally received its shipments of new stock on Wednesdays.

The idea of using Kaplan’s vice as a means for bringing about his downfall appealed to Oscar. The porno store itself did not seem auspicious as a site, however. It was a narrow stall in the middle of an extraordinarily busy block, with no obvious parking facility. Furthermore, the timing of Kaplan’s after-work visits to the store would make it necessary for Oscar to do his work in daylight. Nevertheless, he decided to be present at the expected time of Kaplan’s next appearance there.

Decked out in the same wig, fake glasses, and other paraphernalia he had used at the Shoreham and with a brand new silenced pistol— a duplicate of the one he had used on Jones and Jacobs, with the same silencer screwed onto the muzzle— in a shoulder holster under his coat, Oscar strolled into Hyman’s Novelty Book and Photo Shop for a quick look around, half an hour before Kaplan was due to leave his office. He had had to park more than six blocks away. He couldn’t understand why Kaplan favored this particular porno store. There were three others in the same block, all larger, better lighted, and with more stock. Perhaps the appeal of this place was that it seemed to have relatively little business, and so a customer concerned about not being seen in such an establishment might feel more secure, or perhaps it carried some line of filth that the others didn’t. Perusing the shelves he saw a sampling of just about every kind of perversion one could imagine: sadism, bondage, homosexuality, bestiality, interracial sex, and various other practices that seemed so bizarre to him that it was hard to imagine anyone deriving sexual pleasure from them. About all that seemed to be missing was material dealing with straight sex between men and women of the same race.

The man behind the counter, a grossly overweight, dark, greasy-looking specimen with a cigar in his mouth, was eyeing Oscar closely. Oscar glanced at his watch, strolled out, and took up a post two doors down, where he could appear to be absorbed in a study of the book titles in a crowded display window, yet still keep an eye on the entrance to Hyman’s place.

He spotted Kaplan nearly a block away as the latter emerged from his car, which he had just parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant. If Oscar were to hit the man when he returned to his car, there would be scores of witnesses.

He made a quick decision. He had been watching the sparse traffic in and out of Hyman’s door, and he knew that there were no customers in the shop at the moment, nor was anyone else likely to enter in the next minute. So Oscar himself quickly re-entered the store, about 15 seconds ahead of Kaplan.

Even as he came through the door he had his pistol in his hand, and he fired two shots into the proprietor’s forehead at a range of about four feet without breaking his stride. The latter toppled sideways off his stool into the dark, narrow space behind the counter. The noise of the body crashing to the floor was louder than that of the silenced pistol shots, but Oscar was certain that no one on the busy, noisy sidewalk would notice either sound.

He continued a dozen feet down the narrow shop’s single aisle, then turned on his heel just beyond a wire display rack of paperback books, which sufficed to conceal his gun hand. Oscar’s head was bent over the rack as if he were examining a book, but he was peering over the top of his glasses at Kaplan as the man entered the shop.

Kaplan glanced with curiosity at the unattended counter and halted for a moment before hesitantly walking further into the shop, toward Oscar. When he was eight feet away, Oscar raised his hand and shot the man six times in the chest and head, firing rapidly. Kaplan fell face down, and Oscar bent over the body and fired two more shots into the back of his head.

Oscar ejected the empty magazine from his pistol and slipped in a loaded one, then leaned over the counter and fired four more shots into the side of the proprietor’s head before returning the weapon to its holster. Finally, he took two small plastic packets of white powder from his coat pocket, kneeled beside Kaplan’s corpse, and pressed the man’s dead fingers onto them several times before sliding the packets into a pocket of Kaplan’s suit coat. As an afterthought he took Kaplan’s wallet.

The cocaine— both the idea and the actual packets— had come from Ryan, who thought it would be better to muddy the water a bit by leaving a hint that Kaplan’s killing may have been connected to casual drug dealing instead of to his regular line of work. There was an average of two drug-related murders a day in Washington, and so the hint should meet little resistance.

Oscar buttoned his coat and stepped out onto the sidewalk. As he turned the corner at the end of the block he glanced back briefly. No one was near the entrance to Hyman’s store. Back at his car he noted that it had been less than an hour since he had left home. He still had one errand to do before meeting Adelaide, and he should be able to finish it without missing the 7:30 deadline he had promised her he would try to keep.

His next stop was the Library of Congress, where he had the amazing good luck to find a parking space only two blocks away. He had tried to obtain some of the books he wanted at the suburban libraries, but, as Ryan had indicated, they were not to be found there. Here he expected his search to be more productive.

He had spent the first four days after his encounter with Ryan just trying to become accustomed to his changed situation, turning over in his mind the various possibilities now open to him. It was something that needed getting used to. The skiing trip with Adelaide had helped him orient himself. He had spent several more hours talking with her about race and human quality, race and history, racial conditions in America, the racial prospects for the future, and his own need to act against the manifest evil of the genocide he saw taking place, all without getting into the specific details of what he had been doing.

At the same time he had been puzzling over a new element in the picture: the Jews. After hearing what Ryan had said about Jews, his first inclination was to dismiss the man’s remarks as cranky anti-Semitism, just as he had dismissed Keller’s views on the Jews earlier. He had seen enough of that sort of mindless bigotry, and he had no patience with it. Ryan, with his old-fashioned, Irish-Catholic conservatism, had probably imbibed his dislike of Jews from some paleolithic Jesuit teacher in parochial school who still taught that Jews were “Christ killers,” in defiance of the new party line from the Vatican. And Keller was tied in with that neo-Nazi group, which explained his own theories about the Jews.

One thing that made it hard to put the issue out of his mind was that neither Ryan nor Keller fit his mental image of a religious bigot. Both men were obviously quite intelligent and well informed. Keller was a trained scholar, and even Ryan might be considered one; certainly the FBI official showed none of the religious narrow-mindedness and superstition Oscar had encountered among more primitive Christians, Protestant and Catholic. And Keller didn’t even profess Christianity. Keller especially, with his laid-back, easygoing manner, just wasn’t the uptight, neurotic “hater” Oscar expected an anti-Semite to be.

Beyond these considerations there was a certain plausibility to what both men had said, and that really bothered him. He was sure there was a “catch” somewhere— that the apparent sense their statements made would fall apart under closer scrutiny. So far, however, in going over their arguments in his mind and in referring to books in his own library, he had not been able to find the flaw. He had a list of a dozen or so reference books he wanted to consult in the Library of Congress in order to settle the issue.

It was during the long drive home from skiing Monday night, when Adelaide had gone to sleep with her head in his lap, that he had first been able to reflect on the reasons why Keller and Ryan’s anti-Semitism troubled him. More than the negative stereotype of Jew-haters he had accepted uncritically from the mass media, there was the conflict with his own ideas on race and history, which had not come to him easily and were not easily to be abandoned.

He realized that in the past he had had a tendency to be one-dimensional in his thinking on the subject. The dimension was intelligence. In Oscar’s scheme the races of man were ordered in a simple hierarchy of intelligence. Individuals differed, of course, but on the average one could with reasonable accuracy judge the intelligence of races by noting their historical accomplishments— or by observing the performance of a large enough sample of individuals in the present. By either standard Blacks were an inferior race, and interbreeding between Whites and Blacks could only pull the former down. Jews, on the other hand, were clearly as intelligent as any other Whites— perhaps more so, if one judged them by current performance rather than by historical accomplishment, which, he had to admit, was rather scanty, despite their own vainglorious boast of being the inventors of monotheism and a moral light to the nations down through the ages.

The more he examined his racial scheme, the more he saw its inadequacies. It really was too simple. There were too many facts it didn’t account for. Orientals, for example, clearly were different from Whites, both physically and psychically, but was it accurate to say that they were inferior? Certainly not on the basis of intelligence, as measured by standard IQ tests. How, then, to fit them into his racial hierarchy?

Clearly, the reality of racial difference was multi-dimensional. Average intelligence was only one of many, many characteristics which differed from race to race. In fact, what he called “intelligence” undoubtedly was a composite characteristic, which ought to be resolved into a number of components; some races seemed smarter in one way, others in another way.

Blacks, for example, had a capacity for verbal and behavioral mimicry which often concealed a real inadequacy in cognitive intelligence. He had seen through this protective coloration in school, where he had observed a number of Blacks with remarkably well-developed social skills, who were able to move comfortably in White circles and gave the impression of being alert and capable. They talked like Whites and dressed like Whites; they had separated themselves from the bulk of their race and seemed more like Whites than Blacks, if one ignored the obvious physical differences.

When put to the test, however, not one of them could measure up to White intellectual standards. Most of them seemed to be aware of that fact themselves, and so steered clear of situations where they would be put to the test. They avoided the rigorous disciplines like the plague, concentrating themselves in the pablum curricula, and the very few who did take mathematics, engineering, or science courses performed with uniform mediocrity.

So if one were evaluating races on the basis of the kind of intelligence required to be a good actor or public performer, Blacks would have a much higher relative rating than if judged on the basis of their ability to deal with abstract concepts and solve problems. One had to be very careful in talking about “inferiority” and “superiority.” The terms made sense only when referred to a specific, well defined characteristic. A race judged inferior on the basis of one characteristic might be superior on the basis of another.

That was all well and good. He needed to refine his views substantially. He had been too simplistic in the past. Instead of analyzing things carefully and dispassionately, he had reacted hotly to the obvious fraud being perpetrated by the news and entertainment media, which tried to persuade everyone that Blacks were “equal” to Whites in intelligence, creativity, originality, and enterprise: that their feelings, tendencies, and thought processes were exactly like those of Whites— or were exactly like those Whites would have if their circumstances were the same as those of the Blacks. And in reacting he had focused on the most easily refutable element in the fraud: namely, that Blacks had the same cognitive intelligence, on the average, as Whites.

So what were the implications of a more realistic, multidimensional view of racial differences? How should that affect the role of the Jews in his scheme of things? Both Keller and Ryan had disagreed with his assumption that Jews were racially White. A couple of the books he was seeking dealt with the racial history of the Jews. He wanted to absorb the facts first and then think about the implications.

And what if the Jews’ origins in the Middle East and their subsequent history gave them a significantly different genetic heritage from Whites of European ancestry? Keller and Ryan had suggested that the Jews possessed a special sort of inborn malevolence, a genetically based hatred of the world, which expressed itself in an all-encompassing, though cleverly concealed, campaign against their White neighbors. To Oscar that seemed fantastic.

More specifically, Keller and Ryan had made some allegations about the Jewish control of the news and entertainment media and the way in which that control was used. If true, those allegations would go a long way toward supporting their whole case against the Jews. If false, Oscar could fairly easily dismiss the case. Several of the books he was seeking at the Library of Congress were concerned with the men who ran the mass media.

XIV

What Oscar had expected to be a brief, simple research project— the checking of a few dozen facts, perhaps the reading of a book or two— turned out to be neither brief nor simple. He had spent an average of six hours a day for the past ten days poring over the 300-plus pages of photocopies he had made Wednesday of the previous week at the Library of Congress and over a good two dozen books to which that material had led him, the latter obtained through interlibrary loan via the Arlington library. It was Saturday afternoon now, and he was worried. Not only had he failed to disprove Ryan and Keller’s thesis about the Jews, but he had convinced himself that they were at least partly right.

That is, he had verified several of their claims about what Jews were doing now and had done in the past; he still was far from ready to accept their assertion that the Jews as a whole regularly conspired together and acted in concert or that their collective motivation was to destroy the White race, however. In fact, he had turned up a couple of instances where the Jews seemed clearly to be divided into groups at odds with each other. And there were long periods of history during which they were quite powerful in one country or another, but apparently made no effort to destroy their hosts there.

One topic he had concentrated on was the Jewish role in the mass media, both because it was a matter of crucial importance and because the evidence was fairly easy to gather. He now realized that it was not just Hollywood the Jews controlled, but virtually the entire entertainment industry. In each entertainment medium he had examined— films, radio and television broadcasting, mass-circulation magazines, mass-market paperback books— the Jewish presence was overwhelming, and it consisted of much more than a few Jewish executives at the top. The largest producer of television entertainment programs, for example, was MCA, Inc., and virtually every director and officer of the giant corporation was a Jew.

The same was true of the news industry: every medium, and virtually every organ of every medium, was under either direct or indirect Jewish control.

What really amazed Oscar was the extent and depth of the Jewish influence in the media. In news, for instance, the top three newspapers in the country, in terms of influence— the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal— were all owned outright by Jews. There were many small, independent newspapers owned by non-Jews, and a few large ones as well, but even in these he found a surprisingly high percentage of Jews in key editorial positions.

Furthermore, he was made aware of the fact that it was not the nickels and dimes from subscribers which paid the editors’ salaries and made the publishers’ profits— it was the revenue from advertisers. The biggest advertisers in every big-city newspaper Oscar examined were the chain stores and department stores, and the Jewish presence in these was heavy enough so that if the Jewish businessmen in any city were unhappy with the editorial policies of the local newspaper and withheld their advertising from it, it could not survive.

Everything was not immediately obvious, of course. He had had to do quite a bit of digging to come up with all the facts, repeatedly checking lists of directors against biographical reference works to determine the ethnicity of doubtful cases. As an example, in checking out the Hollywood film industry he thought at first he had found a substantial non-Jewish moviemaker in the Walt Disney Studios. Further investigation revealed that although the company’s founder, Walt Disney, had been a Gentile, within a few years after the man’s death his heirs had been bought out by Jews, and Walt Disney Studios was currently as Jewish as the rest of Hollywood. Likewise with some of the other entities in the world of the mass media: Gentile names would be prominently associated with them, but when one looked closer one found that they were subsidiaries of other outfits, with Jews at the helm.

What did it all mean? It was becoming clear to Oscar that the Jews, just through their control of the mass media, had the potential for being the nasty adversaries of the White race Ryan and Keller claimed they were. And were they not in fact acting as adversaries? Were not the mass media the most racially destructive force at work in the world today?

As far back as Vietnam he had recognized the newspaper and television news people as an especially treacherous pack of scoundrels, who had deliberately set out to prevent an American victory and had succeeded. At the time he had put this down to a pro-communist bias. But could it not just as well have been that what they wanted to prevent was a White victory, and that their bias was anti-White more than pro-communist?

The trouble with that was that the majority of the rank-and-file news people weren’t Jews; they were Whites, and yet he remembered them as a perverse, lying, smirking gang of bastards, who could hardly conceal their glee at every American reverse and who made a point of grossly misrepresenting everything they reported. Did they behave like that because their Jewish bosses told them to? Oscar didn’t believe it. He was sufficiently familiar with human nature to recognize all of the little signs which told him that their behavior was voluntary.

The same could be said for many of the aspects of the disintegration of White society after the Vietnam war. The media enthusiastically promoted every form of degeneracy and sickness, but the White population certainly was putting up no resistance to them. Could one fairly blame racial mixing, permissiveness and the decline of standards of behavior and performance, feminism, liberalism, the explosion of homosexuality, modern anti-art, the replacement of traditional White music with rock and other non-White forms, the spread of drugs, and a thousand other ills on the mass media, just because the media provided a tolerant atmosphere for these things? Couldn’t it be that everyone, the general public as well as the media people, including the Jews, was just going along for the same ride? If that were the case, then the most the Jews could be blamed for was a failure to use the power of their news and entertainment media to combat degenerative tendencies in the population: in other words, a sin of omission rather than one of commission.

He really needed to talk to someone, and so he gave Harry Keller a call and arranged to meet him Sunday afternoon.

Then he called Adelaide to tell her he had finished his work for the day and to make arrangements for dinner. “I know it’s only four o’clock, baby, but why don’t you come on over now? I’ve been beating my brains out with a crash study program, and now I need your presence badly.”

“Uh-huh! What you mean is you need my body.”

“Well, that too.”

“Oscar, you’ve been promising for more than a week to help me find a new pair of skis. Why can’t we do that now?”

There was a slightly plaintive note in her voice. And it was true: her present skis were a little too long for her, and she had trouble keeping them under control. Furthermore, the bindings weren’t satisfactory. They were her first skis, and she really hadn’t known what she was doing when she bought them. After approximately her twentieth fall during their skiing trip two weeks ago, he had told her he would buy new skis and bindings for her as soon as they returned home. He had already put her off twice since then, first because he was preparing for the Kaplan job, and then because he was absorbed in his research project.

“Okay, sweetheart, we will. We can make love after dinner. Bring your boots over, and we’ll take care of it. I think the store is open until six.”

Then Ryan called. He didn’t identify himself, but the voice was unmistakable: “Meet me at the entrance to the Clarendon metro station in 20 minutes.”

“Is that really necessary? I have another appointment now. Can we meet tomorrow morning instead?”

“Yeager, you’d better be at that metro station in 20 minutes.” Then Ryan hung up.

Shit! He really had to figure out how to get Ryan off his back soon. It was a sticky situation. Looking at it from Ryan’s point of view, if Oscar ever got caught by someone else— the local police, say— how could Ryan be sure Oscar wouldn’t involve him in order to gain some advantage? Even now, Oscar probably could tell a pretty convincing story about why he killed Kaplan, how he knew so many personal details about his victim, and so on.

No, clearly Ryan couldn’t afford to give him many more assignments. And for the same reason, Ryan couldn’t afford to arrest him himself. In fact, if the FBI agent wanted to sleep easily at night, he couldn’t even afford to let Oscar continue living much longer. Very soon Oscar was going to have to deal with Ryan, before Ryan dealt with him. Even the meeting Ryan was demanding for this afternoon might be intended for the latter purpose.

Oscar didn’t think so, though. Ryan had been too cold and peremptory on the telephone. If the man’s intention were to lure Oscar to his own execution, he would have been a little friendlier and more expansive, in order to lull Oscar’s suspicions. He hoped his intuition was correct as, with a heavy heart, he called Adelaide again to postpone their shopping date a third time.

Just inside the entrance to the metro station he spotted Ryan. He squeezed his left arm against the reassuring hardness of the weapon in his shoulder holster as the other man gestured to him to follow and began walking down the stairs toward the train platform. They took up a position in the shadow of a column near the far end of the platform with their backs against the station wall, where they could talk without being overheard and without being conspicuous.

“Congratulations, Yeager. You did a first-class job on Kaplan— not only putting the coke in his pocket like I suggested, but hitting him inside that sleazy porno joint. The details are gossip all over the Bureau. I saw to that. The Yids who had been pushing that perverted little turd as Yahweh’s gift to the Bureau are keeping pretty quiet now.” Ryan grinned, genuinely pleased.

“Now, listen carefully. Your next target is a man named Daniel Feldman. He’s 33 years old with black hair and dark brown eyes. His hair is in tight ringlets close to the skull, almost like nigger wool. Medium complexion, maybe slightly on the ‘olive’ side. Height five feet, ten inches. Medium build, about 160 pounds. His nose isn’t big, but it’s definitely Jewish, if you know what I mean.” Ryan paused, watching Oscar’s face.

Oscar said nothing, and Ryan pulled a photograph from his pocket and held it where Oscar could see it: “Study the face. You can’t have this photo, so remember the details. Notice his cocky little grin. The bastard is always grinning. It’s his trademark. At first I thought it’s because he’s nervous, insecure. Another thing that might lead a person to believe that is that he’s a little jerky in his movements, and he always talks fast, like he’s wound up too tight.

“Now I think the grin is calculated; it’s Feldman’s way of keeping people off their guard. And let me warn you, Yeager, he’s a lot more dangerous than any rattlesnake you’ll ever see, so be careful. He’s a cold-blooded killer, and if you make a false move you won’t get a chance to make another move. He doesn’t play by any rules at all. If he even thinks you might be after him, with no evidence at all, he’ll blow your brains out in front of 50 witnesses and worry about justifying himself later.”

“Whom does he work for? The Mafia?”

“No, he’s one of us, believe it or not,” Ryan replied with a trace of incredulity in his voice, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. “He’s one of our dirty tricks specialists. The Bureau does a lot of things it really shouldn’t, things which aren’t strictly legal— in fact, some things which are illegal as hell.

Feldman learned his tricks in the Israeli Defense Forces. He’s a dual citizen. More than half of our dirty tricks people are.

“Let me tell you just one of the things he did for us. When we rounded up all of those Klansmen last year and put them away on conspiracy charges, it wasn’t as clean an operation as you might think. We first grabbed a couple of them, pressured them to squeal on three or four of their buddies, pressured some of those in turn to squeal on others, and so on until we had them all.

“Most of those Klan jerks are easy to pressure; generally the ones who talk toughest and have the biggest arsenal of weapons at home are the easiest. Just tell ‘em how many years they’re facing and then stick ‘em in a holding cell with about 30 niggers for the night. By morning they’re ready to testify against their own mothers.

“But some of the bastards are stubborn, and we have to use more pressure. One of the weak ones told us that a buddy had a case of hand grenades, but when we grabbed the buddy he wouldn’t tell us where he had his grenades stashed. I was there in this guy’s house with three other agents and Feldman. We had handcuffed his wife too, as an accomplice. That’s standard procedure. We generally have to let the women go later, but it gives us more leverage in persuading a man to talk if we’ve arrested his woman.

“The guy’s two kids were there too: a seven-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl, a good-looking little thing. So when the guy refuses to talk, Feldman starts playing with the girl, talking dirty to her, pinching her tits, putting his hand on her ass. Pretty soon he has her crying and scared out of her wits, backed up against a wall. I and another agent were holding the guy, and a third agent was holding his wife. The guy was putting up a big ruckus, shouting and cursing us, but not offering to tell us where his grenades were.

“Without any warning Feldman suddenly takes out his pecker, grabs the girl by her hair, starts screaming at her, and forces her to her knees. Then, in front of the guy and his wife and little boy, he puts his gun to her head and makes the girl give him a blow job. The guy goes right out of his mind. Before Feldman even has his pecker in her mouth, he’s telling us where he buried the grenades. But Feldman goes ahead and makes the girl finish. It really made me sick.”

“You were there too, Ryan. What happened is your responsibility too.”

“Yeah, that’s why Feldman’s gotta go. We’ve got others just as bad, but Feldman’s the only one I’ve worked with directly. He’s the only one who can say I ever broke the rules. He’s the one threat they can use against me if I make an open move against the Jews in the Bureau.”

“What the hell is a police agency like the FBI doing with maniacs like Feldman working for it in the first place?”

“Jesus, Yeager, you’re a dumb bastard! Feldman’s not a maniac. He’s just a Jew. He never really loses his cool. What he did to that girl— everything he does— is calculated, cold-blooded meanness. Why do you think he didn’t rape her or beat her up instead? Because then there’d be physical evidence. Then she could go to a doctor, and he’d back up her story. It might even get in the papers, and we’d be in a mess. As it was he didn’t leave a mark on her. He used terror to make her do what he wanted, and that doesn’t show the way a beating would. Who’d believe the girl or the guy or his wife? They’re redneck White racists, the lowest of the low in the eyes of the media. The news people just laugh at them when they complain about some of our methods.

“Of course, I don’t approve of Feldman’s tactics. He goes too far. In most cases we could get the same results without being quite so brutal. Still, every police agency needs people who’re willing to be rough and break the rules, otherwise we’d lose our grip on the situation. We’ve got to be tougher and meaner than the guys we’re up against, or we won’t be able to control them. The trouble today is that our people, the ones who’d like this to be a decent country, are too soft. The Whites we’re recruiting

into the Bureau from the universities now are mostly wimps. They grew up believing in flower power and equal rights for criminals. They’re wimps with guns and badges, but still wimps.

“So we’ve got a lot of these dual-citizenship Jewboys from the IDF in the Bureau to do the dirty work. They really know how to be vicious. They all practiced on Palestinians before we hired them. Christ, you ought to hear some of the stories Feldman tells about how they interrogate Palestinians over in Israel. They use the same principle he used on the Klan guy— that is, they make the poor bastard watch while they beat up on his wife and kids— only a lot worse. Over there they don’t have to worry about physical evidence. They can use brute force as well as terror. Raping Palestinians’ wives and daughters is one of the mildest things they do. He told me how they castrated an eleven-year-old Palestinian kid to force a confession out of a suspected terrorist— cut the little boy’s balls off with a pair of scissors while his father was watching.

“As I said, I don’t approve of that sort of thing myself. If you keep doing a good job for me like you did on Kaplan, we’ll be able to get all the kikes like Feldman out of the Bureau.”

“I must say, Ryan, what you’ve told me about Feldman would make this particular assignment a real pleasure. But how much longer do you think this little partnership of ours can go on? You don’t really think you’re going to get me to kill every Jewish agent in the FBI, do you?”

“The partnership will last as long as I want it to last, Yeager— unless you develop suicidal tendencies before I’m through with you,” was the icy reply.

“Ryan, you talk pretty tough, but, believe it or not, I’m not going to let you use me for your purposes indefinitely.” Oscar’s voice was calm but very firm. “You think you’ve got me by the balls. But I’m sure you understand that I’ve also got you by the balls now. You start squeezing, and I’ll start squeezing.

“Or maybe you figure you can safely terminate me when you’re done with me or when I start giving you trouble— killed while resisting arrest, eh? It might behoove you to take into consideration the fact that I don’t find such a prospect agreeable, and I’m not the type to just sit and wait for it to happen. I might decide to terminate you first and take my chances on what’ll happen after that.

“So listen to this, Ryan. For the last 17 days I’ve been the junior partner in our enterprise, but now I’ve decided to give myself a promotion to full partner. Either you explain to me just what your plans are, and then we both decide that it will be mutually beneficial for us to continue working together, or we dissolve the partnership here and now— with or without bloodshed. What do you think about that, partner?”

“Yeager, you are a pain in the ass. I don’t owe you a goddamned thing. You owe me everything. I’ve saved your butt.” Ryan had switched from a threatening tone to one of exasperation. “This isn’t the time or place to talk about long-range plans. If you absolutely have to know the reasons behind the assignments I’m giving you, I’ll tell you later, when we have more time to talk. Now, the best place for you to catch Feldman....”

Oscar interrupted impatiently, “I guess you didn’t understand what I just told you, Ryan. Good-bye.” Oscar started to walk away.

Ryan’s right hand shot out toward Oscar’s left arm. Oscar intercepted the other man’s hand with his own left hand, and they locked grips. At the same time Oscar spun away from Ryan on his left heel, keeping his right hand out of reach as it went for his pistol, which he kept concealed beneath his coat while aiming at Ryan’s chest.

“You son of a bitch!” This time there was barely controlled fury in Ryan’s voice.

“Easy, boy!” Oscar came back. “I’ve got the drop on you now. Remember, I said it could be either with or without bloodshed. Push me just a little more, and I’ll kill you right here.”

For nearly a minute the two men remained motionless and tensed for action. Then the fury slowly drained from Ryan’s eyes, and he relaxed his grip on Oscar’s hand. “All right, Yeager,” he sighed, “we’ll talk.”

“Fine. I’m going to turn your hand loose now so no one else on the platform will get the wrong idea about us, but I’m going to keep you covered. Don’t get an urge to scratch any itches inside your coat.”

Ryan cleared his throat. “The situation is this: my boss— that’s Vic Rizzo, chief of the Anti-Terrorism Section— has been given an ultimatum. The Bureau is under terrific pressure to stop you, and now the Director has set a time limit for Vic. The Jews in the Bureau have been sniping at Vic and me for a long time, gradually undermining our positions, especially Vic’s, with the aim of jumping Kaplan over me to section chief as soon as they could get rid of Vic. When you started snuffing interracial couples in January, they really turned up the heat on him— started leaking hints to the press that the reason you hadn’t been caught is that he’s incompetent.

“Now, of course, they’ve lost their candidate. And unless you do something really stupid, I can keep you from getting caught. In other words, in about a month I’m going to be chief of the Anti-Terrorism Section.

“That wouldn’t be so important if Vic would take a stand against the Jews, but he won’t. We’ve discussed the situation a hundred times. He’s afraid of them. He knows they’ve been trying to get him out for years, but he won’t fight back. I will— very discreetly, of course.

“In the past ten years the Anti-Terrorism Section has become one of the most important departments in the Bureau. In the future it’ll be the most important, judging by the way American society is going. That’s why the Jews were so hot to have Kaplan as its chief. The thing about it is that, with the exception of the Counter-Espionage Section, everything else the Bureau does is concerned with ordinary criminal activity: bank robberies, drugs, kidnapping, wire fraud, and the rest. The Anti-Terrorism Section, on the other hand, is concerned with political acts— the sort of thing you’ve been doing, the sort of thing those Klan assholes were talking about doing, the sort of thing the Puerto Rican nationalists have been doing off and on for 50 years. The FBI has been evolving toward a national political police force whose main job is not to solve crimes but to protect the System from those who want to overthrow it or change it by unconstitutional means. We’re becoming an American version of the KGB.

“The country is unraveling, and our job is to hold it together— or, at least, to slow the process. With close to two million non-White immigrants pouring into the country each year— Hispanics, Haitians, Asians— with our central cities largely taken over by drug gangs, with Black wolf packs roaming out of control, with White kids learning about life in jungle-style schools where they’re preyed on by non-Whites, with political corruption in Washington and in every statehouse and city hall growing by leaps and bounds, and with all the other crap that’s going on now, the White majority that used to be the backbone of the country is breaking up, losing its grip. We’ve lost our sense of community, of solidarity. People don’t care about the country any more; they’re busy just taking care of themselves and their families. The country has become atomized into a million different factions, all yelling for what they want, and to hell with everybody else.

“Some people try to get what they want using their money and their political influence. That’s okay. Others try to use violence or the threat of violence. That’s not okay. That’s terrorism. That’s what we’re paid to prevent.

“Used to be most of the terrorism was from the left: war protesters bombing banks and burning down ROTC buildings during the 1960s. After the Vietnam war it started coming more and more from the right: Whites against school busing, abortion clinic bombers, tax protesters. That’s when the Jews decided it had to be stopped. They also were becoming more worried that the Arabs would carry the Palestinian struggle to this country.

“Anyway, the time is almost here when the government can’t survive without an effective antiterrorism force. There’ve been rumors in the Bureau for some time that the Anti-Terrorism Section eventually will be split off from the rest of the Bureau and will become the basis for a brand new Federal agency. We’re going to be the new Praetorians. And I’m going to have something to say about the way those Praetorians are used. I’m going to make sure the right people are in the key positions everywhere in my section, so that there’ll be no chance of the Jews taking it over. Feldman has to go, for the reason I’ve already mentioned. Then there are maybe three others we’ll have to deal with in order for me to have a free hand. So don’t worry about having to kill every Hebe in the Bureau.”

“Well, Ryan, there still are a couple of things about your career plans that make me a little uneasy,” Oscar replied. “First, you’re basing everything on your assumption that there’s really a Jewish conspiracy to take over the FBI and use it to the detriment of our race. Since we last met I’ve checked out a few things about the Jews, and they’ve certainly got their fingers in enough pies to make a reasonable man worry, but I’m still not convinced there’s any conspiracy or even any malice behind their activities. Furthermore, I can’t imagine the FBI being more hostile to our race under Jewish control than it is now. So it’s difficult for me to see how my knocking off another four Jewish agents for you is going to further my own cause— to the extent I have a cause.

“And second, it seems to me that if I were in your shoes, the first thing I’d want to do after becoming head honcho in the Anti-Terrorism Section is put one Oscar Yeager out of action and take credit for it. I couldn’t afford to have him continue raising hell and be blamed for not catching him. I’d be afraid of ending up like Rizzo. And I couldn’t afford to take the chance that someone else would catch him first and find out what he knows. So I’d capture him single-handedly, then have to shoot him when he tried to escape. That would solve a couple of problems for me and at the same time prove to my superiors that they’d made the right move when they gave me Rizzo’s job. What do you say to that, partner?”

“Jesus, Yeager, if you can’t imagine the FBI being more of a threat to the survival of our race than it is now, you haven’t got much imagination. Right now all the Bureau does is enforce civil rights laws you happen not to like. If the Jews take over they’ll use the Bureau to run everyone they consider a threat to their own plans right into the ground— and I mean everyone, those who obey the laws as well as those who don’t. It’ll be just the way it was in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ‘30s, when Jewish secret police commissars like Jagoda and Yezhov had everyone murdered who had a book hostile to the Jews in his personal library, who was reported to have made an anti-Semitic remark, who even seemed too patriotic or too proud of his family or too honorable in his personal conduct.

“I mean, Christ, we get away with enough shady stuff now, but there are limits; we have to be careful that we don’t get on the wrong side of the news media. If the Jews were running the Bureau there wouldn’t be any limits, because they wouldn’t have to worry about the media blowing the whistle on them. Creeps like Feldman wouldn’t be restricted to redneck Kluxers; they could do anything they wanted to anybody’s daughter.”

“Hold it a second, Ryan. I hate to interrupt, but you just referred to Jagoda— Genrikh Jagoda, I believe his name was— the notorious Soviet secret police commissar. As I mentioned, I’ve been checking out a few things. I ran across an anti-Semitic tract that also said he was Jewish, but it gave no further information to back up that claim. It also claimed that most of the other Soviet commissars were Jews too. Do you really know that Jagoda was a Jew?”

“Sure. The man’s real name was Herschel Yehuda. And about half of the commissars were Jews during the 1930s: that in a country where Jews made up about one per cent of the population. But stay away from the anti-Semitic tracts when you’re trying to check out things like that. Most of those tracts are trash. The people who write them are notoriously careless with their facts. Go straight to the horse’s mouth. The Jewish publications themselves back during that period used to brag about how their brethren in Russia were running the show. Every time one of them got a big promotion, it was reported in the Jewish papers and yearbooks. We’ve got all of that stuff on microfilm in the Bureau library, from the days when part of our job was to keep an eye on the Reds. You can also find it in the Library of Congress, if you know how to look for it.

“Anyway, Yeager, that’s what you should be doing if you still believe that it’s just a coincidence that the Jews have always managed to be right in the middle of every bit of anti-White and anti-Western nastiness from the days of the Roman Empire right down to their control of the news and entertainment media today. There’s nothing I can say here this afternoon that’ll convince you it’s planned and it’s malicious. You’ll have to convince yourself by looking at the evidence, piece by piece, until you’ve seen so much of it that the preponderance overwhelms you.”

Ryan paused for a second, then continued: “As for your second concern, look at it this way. You’re not going to continue raising hell like a one-man terrorist army after I’m head of the Anti-Terrorism Section. You’re right: I couldn’t afford it. And you’re too smart to waste your talents that way.

“Until now you’ve just been striking out blindly. Of course, Horowitz was a key player, and even a good strategist may have decided to take him out. But all of the others you’ve hit— with the exception of Kaplan— have been targets of opportunity. You’ve just been reacting. You haven’t been planning. You’ve been doing what was easiest, taking out somebody who irked you at the moment, instead of doing what made the most sense in the context of a worthwhile objective.

“Now we can plan together. I have instant access to information you could never get by yourself: the information we need for effective planning. We’ve got everything about everybody in the Bureau’s computers. We can not only pick the right targets together, but I can substantially improve your chances of getting the job done and getting away safely. You’ve got a nice little shop in your basement, but when it comes to special weapons and related gizmos, I can supply you with stuff you couldn’t dream of making for yourself.”