Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [294]
“If he does, can we repeat the experience?” Clark asked.
Pasternak turned. “Yes, we can—almost indefinitely. I’ve heard around the shop at Columbia that the East German Stasi used this technique to interrogate political and espionage prisoners, and that it was uniformly successful. They stopped using it—I don’t know why. Maybe it was too evil even for them. As I said yesterday, this is off the syllabus from the Josef Mengele School of Medicine. The guy who ran the Stasi was Jewish, as I recall—Marcus Wolf, I think his name was—and maybe it affected him on that basis.”
“How are you feeling, Rich?” Hendley asked.
“I’m fine. But he isn’t.” The doc paused. “Will they still execute this guy?”
“Depends on who ends up getting him,” Hendley replied. “If the FBI gets him, he’ll go through the federal court system, and if he does, then eventually he goes night-night at Terre Haute, Indiana, after due process of law. That’s not our concern, really.”
Because what he’s just been through was quite a lot worse than that, Pasternak didn’t say. His conscience was under control, but it was making noise. This really was out of Josef Mengele’s play-book, and that wasn’t something calculated to make a New York Jew happy. But his brother’s body had never been recovered, squashed to atoms by the collapsing WTC tower. He didn’t even have a grave that he could visit with Mike’s kids. And this bastard had made that happen, and so Rich Pasternak told his conscience to be quiet. He was doing if not God’s work, then his family’s work, and that was fine with him. His conscience would have to be quiet about it.
“What’s this guy’s name exactly?” Pasternak asked.
Clark handled the answer: “Saif Rahman Yasin. He’s child number fifty-plus of his father, a man of commendable vigor, his dad was, also tight with the Saudi Royal Family.”
“Oh? I didn’t know that.”
“He hates the Saudi Royals more than he hates Israel,” Clark explained. “They tried to whack him about six years ago, but they blew the mission. He hates them because of corruption, so he says. I guess they have some—I mean, a huge amount of—money controlled by a relatively small number of people, and you’re going to get some, but compared to Washington, it isn’t all that bad. I’ve been there. I learned the language there back in the 1980s. The Saudis I’ve met are pretty good people. Their religion is different from mine, but hell, so are the Baptists. The Saudis want this mutt dead more than we do, believe it or not. They’d love to drive him to Chop-Chop Square in Riyadh and take his head off with a sword. To them, he’s spit on their country, and their king, and their religion. Three for three, and that’s pretty bad over there. Doc, the Saudis are not the same as we are, but neither are the Brits, okay? I’ve lived there, too.”
“What do you think we ought to do with him?”
“Above my pay grade, sir. We can always kill him, but better to do that in public—hell, do it at halftime at the Super Bowl with instant replay and color commentary from the network TV crew. I could live with that. But it’s really a bigger question than that. He’s a political figure, and his removal will be a political act also. That always screws things up,” Clark concluded. He had little in the way of political instincts, and didn’t really want any. His world was a simpler one: If you did murder, then you died for