‘I said no, goddammit. NO!’ O’Hara slammed his fist on the solid oak table with such fury that the ice in the glasses rattled.
‘Lieutenant, you’re a journalist. ‘Whatever you fear ain’t gonna be solved by raising dogs in Japan. Or, for that matter, by turning down a chance any self-respecting reporter would commit murder to get.’ Howe took a sip of his vodka-laced tea and said, grinning, ‘Fifteen hundred_ Plus expenses. That’s seventy-eight thousand for the year. And a hundred-thousand- dollar bonus when you turn in the story.’
‘You sure make fast judgments there, Mr Howe. And here we just met.’
Howe picked up the letter and looked it over again. I was sure about you before I sent Gunn after you. This isn’t the Game, Lieutenant. I trust you.’
‘I’m not even sure I have the news judgment. What the hell story is worth a quarter of a million dollars?’
‘Well, if Deep Throat had come to me with Watergate and offered me the story for half a million dollars, I would have taken it like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘That give you an idea?’
O’Hara turned and leaned against the bulkhead. Outside, the first drops of rain began to pelt the deck.
‘Well, shit,’ O’Hara said.
Howe’s eyebrows arched. ‘Uh . . does that mean you’re interested?’
‘I owe you one, for getting me off the hook with Dobbs.’
‘Not on your life. I did that on my own, no obligation.’ But not Tony. He knew Falmouth. He had neutralized the Winter Man, and for that, O’Hara owed him. And even though Howe denied it, he felt an obligation there, too.
‘Shikata ga nai,’ he said.
‘Pardon?’
‘An old Japanese expression,’ O’Hara said.
‘And what does it mean?’
‘Freely translated, “fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t.”
‘Well, now, sir, I don’t mean to...’
But O’Hara wasn’t listening. He had made the decision. ‘Six days,’ he said half aloud. ‘The first of April is six days away.’
‘You can get anywhere in the world in six days,’ Howe said quietly.
O’Hara paused for a few more moments.
‘Okay, Mr Howe. I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll go find Falmouth and see what he’s got. But even if his info is worth the two hundred and fifty grand, I still want the option to walk away from it, let somebody else do the dirty work.’
Howe’s black eyes twinkled again. He held out the vise. ‘Done. Here’s my hand.’ And they shook. Then he said, ‘Son, you’re too good a reporter to walk away from any yam worth a quarter of a million dollars.’
‘Not if it’s gonna put me back in the middle of Shit City again.’
‘You’re a reporter, lad, not a goddamn spy.’
‘Call it what you will, I’ll be dealing with Tony and the Magician and that puts me back in the Game, like it or not.’
‘You know how to find this Magician?’
O’Hara smiled. ‘I can find the Magician.’
‘And is he also an agent?’
‘The Magician?’ O’Hara laughed. ‘Oh yeah. He’s the last of the red hot spies.’
7
The green-blue Caribbean gleamed below him like a jewel nestled in the hand of God. The Lear jet banked gracefully in the cloudless sky and soared down toward the island of St Lucifer. Coral reefs swept beneath the plane, shimmering deep in the clear sea, like bunches of tiny boutonnieres. Ahead of them, St Lucifer squatted in the blazing sun, a tiny island dominated by a single mountain peak cloaked in bright-green foliage. The main town, Bonne Terre, lay before them, its five-thousand-foot runway beckoning from the edge of town, like a long, bony finger.
From ten thousand feet it had stilt looked like the paradise he remembered, a fertile and unspoiled refuge hidden away between Guadeloupe and Martinique. Although still a French dependency, the island had its own governor and a police force of six. But as the plane whistled down to its landing, O’Hara saw the grim signs of encroaching civilization.
Two years before, when O’Hara had last been to St Lucifer, there was one hotel, which attracted erstwhile journalists, fishermen, expatriates, drunks and mercenaries, who preferred to call themselves soldiers of fortune. Even travel agents had ignored the island, finding it much too dull to recommend to anyone. So it had also become the perfect crossroads for peripatetic intelligence agents assigned to the Caribbean sector, most of them culled from the dregs of their respective agencies: alcoholics, misfits, over-the-hill operatives and men on the verge of mental breakdown, sent to this sunny Siberia, where they spent most of their time spying on one another. When something big came up, the first team was usually sent in. But routine intelligence business vas left to the misfits.
Two years had changed St Lucifer. The commercial lepers had finally discovered it, and the blight was evident from the air as they swept onto the runway. Hilton and Sheraton had invaded its lazy beaches, and condominiums had begun to spring up along the jungled coast, a harbinger of the Styrofoam and Naugahyde invasion that was imminent. O’Hara could see a golf course stretching out beside the once virgin west beach, and swimming pools glittered like vinyl puddles among the fancy homes on the outskirts of town. Even the main road, which twisted, like an eel, the hundred or so miles around the perimeter of the island, had been paved.
O’Hara could guess the rest: the gaining tables, with their semiliterate mobster overlords accompanied by sleek, overdressed, over-jewelled, classless broads. St Lucifer had become just another tacky, tasteless colony for the fat and ugly nouveaux riches and the ephemeral jetsetters. So much for paradise lost.
O’Hara was thinking about the Magician as the plane was taxiing on the runway. What was it Howe had asked — did he know the Magician?
O’Hara smiled to himself. Oh yes, he knew the Magician alright, the one the French called le Sorcier. And oh, what a yarn he could write about him. But the Magician’s unique success lay in the fact that nobody ever talked or wrote about him.
Nobody.
The has-been spy community protected his integrity because they needed him. The Magician was their encyclopaedia, a listening post for au.
Fate had chosen to throw the Magician, the Game and the Caribbean into the same pot, and in so doing, had created a marvellously catastrophic brew; a concoction of sheer madness. The Magician’s macabre sense of humour manifested that madness, while the Caribbean became a bizarre capsule of the insanity of the entire intelligence community. The Magician, a man with no training, no background in the Game, and no particular interest in it, was to become the master Monopolist of Caribbean intelligence; the owner of Boardwalk and Park Place with hotels; King Shit of the territory.
What were his objectives?
None. He had achieved this unique position for the sheer hell of it. It was his hobby. Michael Rothschild, alias Six Fingers, alias the Magician, alias le Sorcier, was wonderfully eccentric.
The Magician had been delighted to hear from O’Hara, delighted his old pal was still alive.
‘Sailor! So you fucked the goddamn Winter Man, after all,’ the Magician had cried out when O’Hara finally reached him via one of the most archaic and unreliable telephone systems in the world. As they spoke, static crackled along the line, like popcorn popping.
‘Poor help,’ O’Hara said.
‘Come on down!’ the Magician cried enthusiastically.
‘I’m looking for Falmouth.’
‘I got all the details.’
‘I’m running out of time.’
‘Don’t worry. It’s cool. I’ll put you with Tony.’