Yet he didn't need money. He had income from a Swiss bank account his father gave him and the checks were deposited in his Queens bank account with more regularity than his mother received her social security.
In fact, the only way Joe's wife had ever gotten him to marry her was to agree to have the wedding at the house. And why not? That's how they met. That's how they dated. And that's how he insisted on living. Well, that wasn't so bad. Lots of people had the disease called agoraphobia that kept them chained to their homes all the time.
Yet this was entirely different. She had picked up the phone for him in the other room because he was outside exercising. When she said it was a man talking about the sky he practically ran through the door. She listened in.
"Good afternoon. The sky seems a bit yellow today, don't you think?" asked the man on the other end. "More blue, I think. But who knows? Life is so strange, yes?" answered her husband, Joe.
"Riker's Island Stadium," said the man.
Joe hung up and began dialing other numbers. And giving orders. She had never heard him give orders before. He made fourteen phone calls and told every person at the other end the same thing.
"Riker's Island."
And then for the first time since she knew him, Joe Wilson, her husband, left their home. He kissed her lovingly good-bye and said something that terrified her.
"Look. I wasn't supposed to marry you in the first place. And you're a good kid. You've put up with a lot. An awful lot. You've let me stay at home all this time. But I want you to know that no matter what happens, it doesn't mean I don't love you."
"Are you leaving me, Joe? Are you leaving?"
"I love you," he said, and he was gone. The house seemed woefully empty without him in it. He had never left before, and the way he left so quickly and so easily told Mrs. Joseph Wilson he had never suffered agoraphobia at all.
The man called Joe Wilson took a New York bus to Riker's Island. The bus was unusually crowded that day, crowded with men, all going to Riker's Island, all in their late twenties and early thirties, all quite fit.
Riker's Island Stadium was not being used that day, and their footsteps echoed through the tunnels out onto the field. They all took seats at the fifty-yard line, looking every bit like some large team getting ready for a game.
But the man who came out of the tunnel was not a coach. No coach ever got this sort of respect.
He snapped his fingers and said, "Group captains," and ten men left the stands where the other 140 sat, and walked out onto the running track to speak to General Matesev, in his fine English suit.
"We are going to be out of America in two days maximum. If we can't leave on a plane peacefully we will shoot our way out at any point I select along the Canadian border. Any of you have men who you think are unreliable?"
All ten shook their heads.
"I didn't think so. You were all well selected," said Matesev with a little smile. The joke was that he had selected every one of them individually, men who could keep in training and wait for that one phone call.
Because the method he had devised to invade America at will with 150 men was as simple as good logic could make it. No 150 men could invade in a single body without being seen. But 150 separate men coming into a country one at a time over the course of a year would never be noticed, 150 men who would only have to wait for a single phone call to become a unified force again. One hundred and fifty men each trained to speak American English fluently, each trained as part of a team years before in Russia, now becoming that team again.
Matesev had pulled this off twice before so that the only time America knew he had been around was after he had left, after it had seen the force leave.
It had cost the services of three hundred men, because none of them could be used again. Each operation used one deep-planted force. Expensive in training and time, but during a crisis like this so definitely worth the cost.
"We have a special problem," he said. "We have to do a snatch on someone who might be unsnatchabie."
"Explain, sir," said one of his captains.
"He is an escapee from the parapsychology village in Siberia. He has special powers. He can hypnotize others instantly. A KGB unit failed to stop him at Berlin. He got out of the best protection in the village. I don't think he's stoppable. I think the minute he knows someone is going to try to snatch him, he will use his powers."
"So we are going to kill him?"
"Wrong. We are going to make sure we kill him."
"How?"
"Give me a little flexibility on that. I want to see what he's got. I'd rather spend forty-seven hours of the forty-eight hours we have to do our job in planning and preparing, than forty-seven hours of shooting up a building and one hour figuring out what went wrong. We'll get this little hypnotist good. "
"What about drugging him?"
"How do you know someone is drugged? You could be hypnotized to think he was, when he wasn't."
"You could be hypnotized to believe he is dead."
"That is why we are going to work in waves. He is not going to get all one hundred and fifty of us hearing and seeing the same things. First, we stake him out. He has an office on Fifth Avenue."
"A typical capitalist address," said one captain, glad to be using the language of communism again.
"Our consulate is just off Fifth Avenue, you idiot." Matesev assigned one unit to the stakeout, a second unit to back them up, and to the other eight units he gave the mission of procuring the proper weapons.
With the first two units, he isolated the building by intercepting all communication lines and putting them through his own command center. Vassily Rabinowitz did not know the day a new neighbor moved in downstairs that now Hypnotic Services of Fifth Avenue Inc. was located directly above a headquarters of the most effective commando squad in Soviet history.
In Washington, the President of the United States heard the one thing he never thought he would hear from the organization called CURE. When it had been organized, the need to keep its budget secret was just as great as keeping the organization itself a secret. So it was allowed to covertly tap into budgets of other departments. This avoided a hearing on its costs that would in turn, reveal its nature.
CURE could have run an entire country with its budget without anyone knowing where the cash went. Of course, Harold Smith was a man of the greatest probity. That was why he had been chosen to run this organization with an unlimited budget.
What the President had to deal with that day, besides the still mysterious danger from Russia, was the startling news from the man with the limitless budget.
"Sir," said Harold W. Smith, "I'm afraid we're going to need more funds."
To save America, CURE was going to have to pay the accumulated fortunes of five millennia of Sinanju Masters.
Chapter 6
On the day before the world was supposed to fall on him, Vassily Rabinowitz heard a terrifying story from Johnny Bangossa.
"They gonna do the job on you," said Johnny, wincing. Vassily had tried to make Johnny believe his brother never used to hit him. This, of course, the master hypnotist did easily. The wincing and ducking bothered Vassily. However, the moment Johnny Bangossa didn't believe that his older brother Carli (in the form of Vassily) would abuse him anymore, he became downright disrespectful, and even dangerous. Vassily had to get him to believe again that his brother Carli was a brutal, insensitive, and, cruel dolt.
This fact having been reestablished, Johnny Bangossa returned to his form of loyalty.
"What is this thing 'doing the job'?" asked Vassily. "I have heard you mention the same phrase in regards to romance. "
It had amazed Vassily with what hostility his men talked about the women they seduced. It was like a war. They talked of doing the job on this woman or that, of really "giving it to her," a phrase they would also use for beating up someone.
"Doing the job, Carli, is they're gonna kill you. Waste you. Off you. Give it to you."
"And how did you find out this information?"
"They tried to bribe me to set you up."