other, while in Bosnia-Herzegovina full-fledged massacres take place between people who used to live together, and nobody appears to want to do anything. It's everywhere.
Discontent, suspicion, name-calling .. . violence. It's as though some terrible grand design is being shaped."
"What are you saying?" asked De Vries, staring at him.
"They're all meat for the new Nazi grinders, can't you see that?"
"I hadn't considered things on such a large scale. It's rather melodramatically far-reaching, isn't it?"
"Think about it. If Harry's list is right, even half right, how long have the discontents everywhere been approached and told that their grievances can be addressed, the grievers crushed once the great new order is in place?"
"That's not the 'new order' you Americans have talked about, Drew. Yours is a far more benevolent agenda."
"Suppose again. Suppose it's all a code for something else, a 'new order' going back fifty years. The New Order of the Reich to last a thousand years."
"That's preposterous!"
"Yes, it is," agreed Latham, leaning back in the booth and breathing hard.
"I took it to its zenith, because you're right, it couldn't happen. But a large part of it could happen, right here in Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Then what's the next step? After the multiple uprisings of people against people, religion against religion, new nations breaking away from the old?"
"I'm trying to follow you, and I'm not stupid. As Harry might say, where is the clarity?"
"Nuclear weapons! Bought and sold on the international markets, and perhaps, with their millions, too many in the hands of the Brotherhood, the new religion, the cure, and maybe, eventually, the refuge for all the discontents the world over, drawn to them, convinced of their invincibility. It happened in the thirties, and not a hell of a lot has changed in terms of those circumstances."
"You're way beyond me," said Karin, drinking her wine.
"I fight a spreading disease, as you called it, that killed Freddie. You see an imminent apocalypse I cannot accept. We've passed that stage in civilization."
"I hope we have, and I hope I'm wrong, and I wish to God I could stop thinking the way I do."
"You have an extraordinary imagination, very much like Harry's, except his was-is-sang-fro id Nothing is until analyzed without emotion."
"It's funny you say that; it's the difference between us. My brother was always so cold, so without feeling, I thought, until a young cousin of ours, a girl of sixteen, died of some kind of cancer.
We were kids, and I found him bawling his eyes out behind the garage. When I tried to help him as best I could, he yelled at me and said, "Don't you ever tell anybody I cried or I'll put a double hex on you!" Kid stuff, of course."
"Did you?"
"Of course not, he was my brother."
"There's "Something you're not telling me."
"Good Christ, is this a confessional?"
"Not at all. I simply want, to know you better. That's no crime."
"Okay. I worshiped the guy. He was so smart, so kind to me, running me through exam questions and helping me with my term papers, then in college, even selecting my courses, always telling me I was better than I thought I was, if I would only concentrate.
Our dad was always away on one of his digs, so who came up to see me at college, who yelled loudest at the hockey games-Harry, that's who."
"You love him, don't you?"
"I'd be nothing without him. That's why I damn near threatened him with a. hammerlock if he didn't get me into this business. He didn't like it, but there was a bastard organization called Consular Operations being formed that apparently wanted jocks who could think. I fit the description and made it."
"The colonel said you were a terrific hockey player in Canada.
He said you should have gone to New York."
"It was an interlude, a farm team, and I was pretty well paid, but Harry flew to Manitoba and said I had to grow up. So I did; the rest is what I am. The questions over with?"
"Why are you so hostile?"
"I'm not really. I'm good at what I do, lady, but as you've pointed out ad nauseam, I'm not Harry."
"You have your own attributes."
"Oh, hell, yes. Basic martial arts, but no expert, believe me. All those courses in enemy interrogation and manipulation, psychological and chemical; survival techniques and how to determine which flora and fauna are edible all that's ingrained."
"Then what bothers you so?"
"I wish I could tell you, but I don't even know myself. I think it's