Realizing the big man had no sense of humour, absolutely none, Rothschild slipped him the envelope.
‘You’re off the wall, y’know that,’ Bob growled under his breath and lumbered out of the place.
Rothschild figured that was the end of that. But two weeks later Oscarfield appeared again. ‘That vas nice, the way you handled that,’ he confided. ‘Really put old Bob to the test. I heard about it.’ He slipped Rothschild another two bills.
Four hundred dollars for not playing ‘Moon Over Miami.’ Rothschild was impressed. After that, Oscarfield used him frequently as a drop. He never saw Bob again. Pretty soon another agent decided to use Rothschild as his Caribbean drop, then another. Then there was Haversham, a British operator with M16. Then an Israeli named Silverblatt. And a Frenchman named...
Within five years Rothschild was the postman for the entire Caribbean intelligence community. He became adept at steaming open envelopes. Then he got into cryptology. It became a hobby. Breaking codes. Keeping files. Cross-references. Before long, Rothschild was quite aware that most of the spies in the islands spent most of their time spying on one another. Sometimes members of one agency even spied on other members of the same outfit. Sometimes they didn’t even know they were both members of the same agency. The madness of it all appealed to Rothschild’s love of the perverse. He began to feel a sense of power. Occasionally he would change the messages slightly, just to see what would happen. In one such instance he almost started a revolution in Guatemala. It was marvellous. It gave the Magician an entirely new outlook on life.
So when he moved to St Lucifer to become pianist in residence at the Great Gustavsen, the epicentre of the Caribbean undercover network just naturally shifted to St Lucifer. Rothschild became so important that once, when he went to the States for a three-week vacation, the entire intelligence community was thrown out of whack. At one time there were eighteen operatives, representing every major country in the world, staying at the Great Gustavsen, waiting for le Sorcier to return.
By the time he acquired Isidore he was knocking down almost five thousand a month in retainers, from the CIA, the KGB, the Sureté, M16, and every other outfit in the network.
Isidore opened up whole new vistas. With Isidore his power became even greater.
Voilà! May I present Izzy,’ Rothschild said as he opened the door to Isidore’s room.
Isidore’s room was a walk-in closet.
Isidore was an Apple II mini-computer.
O’Hara stared at it in mute appreciation, It was beautiful and very compact. It had a keyboard with a telephone cradle attached to it, and it had its own monitor screen and its own high-speed Kube printer. The main box, Izzy’s brain, was about a foot square, with three gates in the front and a large square ready light. A cassette recorder was attached to the telephone modem on the keyboard. The telephone was also equipped with a speakerphone.
Into it, Rothschild had fed mountains of information. But he also made the computer available to agents on a confidential basis, always leaving the room so they could tap out their identification and open up the files of their home-base computers. A video camera built into the wall and aimed at the screen enabled him to collect all of the various codes and machine language necessary to tap into the main computers of most of the major intelligence agencies. By using phone taps, he had also recorded the agents making access calls to their computer centres, and by combining these information banks with his own computer, he had both visual and verbal contact with them.
It was a marvellous hobby.
And it made the Magician one of the most dangerous people in the world.
Having explained his wonderful toy, Rothschild sat down and spread his hands. How about that?’ he said proudly.
You mean you can plug into the base computers for the CIA, the KGB, like that?’ O’Hara asked.
Mostly on a level-two basis, but in some cases I can even tap their top-secret files.’
Where did you get this thing?’
‘Miami. Anybody can buy them. It’s learning to use them that’s the secret. Let me show you how it works.’ He slid a picture on the wall to one side, revealing a large wall safe. He spun the dials and opened the safe. It was filled with cassette tapes and floppy disks and video-tapes. He took out a cassette deck and three disks.
He put a disk in each of the gates, and the cassette in the small tape recorder. ‘These disks store information,’ he explained. ‘The first one has the program on it. That’s what makes all this work. The cassette has the phone access information on it. Once I get the computer on the line, all I need is the proper access code and I can get a visual print-out on the screen.’
He picked up the phone and dialled a number.
‘I hope the phones are working today,’ he said. I’m calling the access line at Langley.’
‘The CIA computer?’
‘Yeah.’
Joli nudged O’Hara. ‘He spends so much time in here, that is why he needs help to run the business,’ he whispered.
Rothschild punched the speaker phone buttons. O’Hara could hear the phone ringing. The connection broke and a voice said, ‘This is Langley Base One. Your identification, please.’
Rothschild put the phone in the cradle attached to the keyboard of the computer and pressed the ‘Play’ button on the tape deck. A recorded voice said: ‘This is Oscarfield, C-One clearance, two-level.’
Rothschild pressed the ‘Pause’ button on the tape deck.
The voice said: ‘Voice ID complete. Access, please.’
Rothschild pressed the ‘Play’ button again: ‘Two-level, file access.’
The voice answered: ‘Tracking, two-level, file access.’ There was a pause and then: ‘Proceed.’
He pressed the ‘Play’ button again. Oscarfield’s taped voice said: ‘Modem readout, two-level.’
Pop! The monitor screen was filled with questions and blank spaces. Rothschild filled them in:
Access identification: OFLD
Agent sector: FIELD
Agent access: L-2
Agent clarity: B-532
Subject name: O’HARA, FRANCIS
Subject agency: PRIVATE
Was subject formerly attchd? Yes x No
Previous afltn: CIA
File Leveclass="underline" BASE
Photos: YES
Other info: NO
Accessing file.
The light on the side of the computer began to blink. After two or three seconds it stopped and a message appeared on the screen:
Press code key to continue...
Rothschild pressed two-three-five and the screen cleared for an instant and then O’Hara’s file flashed on-screen.
‘I’ll be damned,’ O’Hara said.
‘It is truly magic,’ said Joli. ‘The whole world speaks to him on this machine.’
Rothschild pressed a key and the small white cursor moved rapidly down the screen. He stopped at a listing for ‘Current assignment’:
Subject is on special assmnt. Deep storage.
No contact anticipated for several months.
‘The Winter Man really covered his ass, Sailor. As far as your current report goes, you’re a fuckin’ mole somewhere for the CIA. That way he doesn’t have to account for you for maybe a year, until the file is reviewed. So a couple of months from now he’ll send down a report that your assignment fell through, then he’ll report that you’ve retired. As far as your file goes, nobody will ever know you were on the run for a year, dodging his fuckin’ goons.’
Rothschild typed in ‘ACCESS,PHOTO.SUBJECT,CURRENT’ and the letters appeared across the bottom of the monitor screen. He punched the return button on the keyboard and a computerized photo of O’Hara appeared on the screen. He was iii a navy uniform.
‘Hell, that picture was taken when I was in the Navy!’ O’Hara said.
‘You look like a child,’ said Joli.
‘It gets weird sometimes,’ said the Magician.
‘How did you get onto this thing, Michael?’