“It’s what you eat in Finland. You take them fresh out of a lake, just scoop them up off the bottom in a wooden box with a chickenwire bottom. You throw them straight into the pot and watch them turn color. I can eat a hundred at a sitting. Now what’s this about Caracas and Gregorius?”

“You’re getting disgustingly fat, Charlie.”

“I’ve always been fat. As for disgusting, I could diet it off, given the inclination. You, on the other hand, would need to undergo brain surgery. I’d prescribe a prefrontal lobotomy.”

“Then you’d have no one left to spice your life.”

“Spice? I thought it was hemlock.”

“In this case more likely a few ounces of plastique. That seems to be Gregorius’ preference. And you do make a splendid target, Charlie. I can picture two hundred and umpty pounds of blubber in flabby pieces along the ceiling. Gregorius would be most gratified.”

He’d mentioned Gregorius now; it meant he was ready to get down to it and I slumped, relieved; I no longer enjoy volleying insults with him — they cut too close and it’s been a long while since either of us believed they were jokes. Our mutual hatred is not frivolous. But we need each other. I’m the only one he can trust to do these jobs without a screw-up and he’s the only one who’ll give me the jobs. The slick militaristic kids who run the organization don’t offer their plums to fat old men. In any section but Myerson’s I’d have been fired years ago — overage, overweight, overeager to stay in the game by the old rules rather than the new. I’m the last of the generation that puts ingenuity ahead of computer print-outs.

They meet once a month on the fifth floor to discuss key personnel reassignments and it’s a rare month that goes by without an attempt being made by one of the computer kids to tie a can to my tail; I know for a fact Myerson has saved me by threatening to resign: “If he goes, I go.” The ultimatim has worked up to now but as we both get older and I get fatter the kids become more strident and I’m dubious how long Myerson can continue the holding action. It’s not loyalty to me, God knows; it’s purely his own self-interest — he knows if he loses me he’ll get the sack himself: he hasn’t got anybody else in the section who knows how to produce. Nobody worthwhile will work for him. I wouldn’t either but I’ve got no choice. I’m old, fat, stubborn, arrogant and conceited. I’m also the best.

He said, “Venezuela is an OPEC country, of course,” and waited to see if I would attend his wisdom — as if the fact were some sort of esoterica. I waited, yawned, looked at my watch. Myerson can drive you to idiocy belaboring the obvious. Finally he went on:

“The oil-country finance ministers are meeting in Caracas this time. Starting Thursday.”

“I haven’t been on Mars, you know. They have newspapers even in Helsinki.”

“Redundancies are preferable to ignorance, Charlie.” It is his litany. I doubt he passes an hour, even in his sleep, when that sentence doesn’t run through his mind: he’s got it on tape up there.

“Will you come to the point?”

“They’ll be discussing the next round of oil-price hikes,” he said. “There’s some disagreement among them. The Saudis and the Venezuelans want to keep the increase down below five percent. Some of the others want a big boost — perhaps twenty-five or thirty percent.”

“I plead. Tell me about Gregorius.”

“This is getting us there. Trust me.”

“Let’s see if I can’t speed it up,” I said. “Of course it’s the Mahdis —”

“Of course.”

“They want Israel for themselves, they don’t want a Palestinian peace agreement, they want to warn the Arab countries that they won’t be ignored. What is it, then? They’ve arranged to have Gregorius explode a room full of Arab leaders in Caracas? Sure. After that the Arab countries won’t be so quick to negotiate a Middle East settlement without Mahdi participation. Am I warm?”

“Scalding. Now I know you’re awake.”

“Barely.”

The Mahdi gang began as an extremist splinter arm of the Black Septemberists. The gang is small but serious. It operates out of floating headquarters in the Libyan desert. There’s a long and tedious record of hijackings, terror bombings, assassinations. Nothing unique about that. What makes the gang unusual is its habit of using mercenaries. The Mahdis — they named themselves after the mystic who wiped out Gordon at Khartoum — are Palestinians but they’re Bedouins, not Arabs; they’re few in number and they’re advanced in age compared with the teen-age terrorists of the PLO. The Mahdi staff cadre consists of men who were adults at the time of the 1947 expulsion from Palestine. Some of the sheikhs are in their seventies by now.

Rather than recruit impassioned young fools the gang prefers to hire seasoned professional mercenaries; they get better results that way and they don’t need to be concerned about generation-gap factionalism. They are financed by cold-blooded groups of various persuasions and motivations, most of them in Iraq and Germany.

They had used Gregorius at least twice in the past, to my knowledge: the Hamburg Bahnhof murders and the assassination of an Israeli agent in Cairo. The Hamburg bomb had demolished not only a crowd of Israeli trade officials but also the main staircase of the railroad station. The Cairo setup had been simpler, just one victim, blown up when he stepped onto the third stair of his entrance porch.

Gregorius was a killer for hire and he was well paid; apparently his fees were second only to those of Carlos the Jackal, who had coordinated the Munich athlete murders and the Entebbe hijack; but Gregorius always chose his employment on ideological grounds — he had worked for the PLO, the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Rhodesian rebels, the Cuban secret service, but he’d never taken a job for the West. Evidently he enjoyed fighting his own private war of liberation. Of course he was a psychotic but there was no point dwelling on his lunacy because it might encourage one to underestimate him; he was brilliant.

Myerson said, “We’ve got it on authority — fairly good authority — that the Mahdis have hired Gregorius for two targets in Caracas. Ministers. The Saudi and the Venezuelan. And of course whatever bonus prizes he may collect — bombs usually aren’t too selective.”

“How good is ‘fairly good’?”

“Good enough to justify my pulling you off the Helsinki station and posting you to Venezuela.”

“All right.” If he didn’t want to reveal the source he didn’t have to; it wasn’t really my affair. Need-to-know and all that.

Myerson got down to nuts and bolts and that pleased me because he always hurries right through them; they bore him. He has a grand image of himself as the sort of master strategist who leaves tactical detail to junior staff. Unhappily our section’s budget doesn’t permit any chain of command and Myerson has to do his own staff work and that’s why I usually have to go into the field with a dearth of hard information; that’s one reason why nobody else will work for him —Myerson never does much homework.

“It could happen anywhere,” he concluded. “The airport, a hotel lobby, a state banquet, any of the official ministerial meetings, a limousine. Anywhere.”

“Have you alerted Venezuelan security?”

“I didn’t have to. But I’ve established your liaison out of courtesy.”

In other words the tip had come from Venezuelan security. And they didn’t feel confident of their own ability to contain Gregorius. Very astute of them; most small-nation security chiefs lack the humility to admit it when a job is too big for them.

Myerson continued, in the manner of an afterthought, “Since we don’t know where he plans to make the strike we’ve taken it upon ourselves to —”

“Is that a royal ‘we’?”

“No. The fifth floor. As I was saying, it’s been decided that our best chance at him is to lure him into the open before the ministers begin the conference. Of course he doesn’t tempt easily.”