‘Absolutely non-political, old man. Strictly business. American Electric paid the bill. Guardio was planning to nationalize the power companies, and AE had fifty million invested down there. Thornley went in four months ahead and began plotting with the generalissimos. I went in a month before the coup, took me that long to work up the kill. I took out Guardio while he was in church. The generals closed all the doors, trapping the family and loyalists inside. There was a force of four hundred mercenaries just over the border, maybe thirty miles away. Guardio wasn’t cold yet when they hit the park across from the church in choppers. Backup for the army. I was back in New York having dinner at the Four Seasons that night. The mop-up took four days and the price tag was two million dollars.’
‘They have their own army?’
‘A brigade of British Highlanders, under contract to the British Army with agreement that they can take leave anytime, as long as the country isn’t under some kind of military alert. They can be put in the field, fully equipped, in less than thirty days,’
‘We can’t prove any of this,’ O’Hara said.
He got up and leaned over the stern, watching the motors churning up the wake. There were too many holes and not enough details. He needed more names, possible defectors. Anyone who would talk to him. He focused on the sound of the engines, going to the wall again. But it didn’t work. Something stronger than details was pulling at him. This had the makings of a great story and now his reporter’s instincts were humming. He felt the excitement of a scoop nibbling deep in his stomach. But be needed more than Falmouth. He needed to cross-check before he started doling out Howe’s money.
‘How about Thornley?’ he asked. ‘If I can turn him up, it would be a good starting place.’
‘I haven’t seen him since the Guardio business.’
‘Any defectors? Anybody else ever run?’
Falmouth hesitated. He gave himself some thinking time by lighting another Gitane.
‘Well?’ said O’Hara.
‘Do we have a deal?’ Falmouth said.
‘Not yet. I couldn’t begin to put a story together with what you’ve told me. I need names to go with faces, and faces to go with jobs. And I want to know who it is that’s on the run.’
‘I never said anyone was.’
‘You can’t be the first one to want out of this madness.’
‘The world is mad!’ said Falmouth. ‘You were in the Game for five bloody years, O’Hara, didn’t you learn anything from it? With greed comes money and with money comes power, and that’s what it’s all about.’
‘Not the world I want to live in.’
‘Right, Sailor. So here’s your opportunity to change it. Do you doubt I’m risking my life telling you all this?’
O’Hara considered an answer but Falmouth pressed on, ‘Just remember, where there’s a need, there’s always something or someone to fill it.’
‘And that someone is Chameleon?’
‘Chameleon’s just the beginning.’
‘It’ll do for starters. Who is he?’
‘Ah, who is he indeed? A faceless figure. A wisp of air, never seen by the Players, or none that I’ve met. Chameleon’s all I know, and that from some of the other boys I’ve worked with. But he’s the head of it, I’ve heard that often enough to know it’s the truth.’
‘You don’t know where the headquarters is? Where this Chameleon operates from?’
‘No. I can tell you all I know about him in about thirty seconds. He’s Oriental and he’s been around awhile. That’s why you’re a natural for this one, ok man. You know Japan as well as you know your left hand, and you know the Players, so you can understand the significance of what I’m saying.’
‘How do you know he’s an Oriental?’
‘From Thornley. From others I heard he was the most dangerous one in the bunch. It was Chameleon burned Cohn Bradley.’
‘Bradley’s dead?’
‘Aye. Popped up in the East River with a bullet in his brain. Somebody wanted Chameleon taken out and Bradley thought he was up to the job. Got his bloody head blown off. That’s what you get for thinking.’
‘Who wanted him out?’
‘I don’t know the answer to that, but I would guess it was one of the enemy.’
‘You make it sound like war, Tony.’
‘And that it is. But not a cold war, Sailor,’ and he leaned over and said in a rasping stage whisper, ‘a bloody dollar war.’
‘How does this Chameleon conduct business, how does he run this crazy show you’re talking about, if nobody has contact with him?’
‘Through Master.’
‘Master?’
‘A computer. Everything is done by computer. The only human Contact I have on the top side is a man named Quill.’
‘He’s your cutout?’
‘Yes.’
‘Quill?’
‘Yes, Quill.’
O’Hara shook his head. ‘Sounds like you’ve been reading too much Dickens,’ he said.
‘Well, that’s his name, dammit. Quill. Never met him and the only way to reach him is through Master.’
‘And Master’s the computer?’
‘Right. To get into it, you have to go through a series of checks. Voice prints. Number intersects. Variable code names, like that. The operation’s so simple it’s terrifying. A job comes in. Quill programs Master, determines the best man for the job and makes contact. Everything is taken care of. Tickets, money, contacts, hotel reservations, cars. Even weapons, if there’s something special you might need. The pay is deposited in the account of your choice before you get your bags packed. It works as smooth as sand running through an hour glass.’
‘What about the man himself — what’s his background?’
‘Never seen him. Wouldn’t know him if he came up out of the water there and spit in my eye.’
‘You’ve been at this for eighteen months, you’ve never seen any of the top Players?’
‘And maybe never will. It isn’t necessary.’
‘How about some of the operations?’
As the sun swept overhead, boring relentlessly down on them, Falmouth detailed the Guardio operation and then went on, describing the accidental murder of Marza and the destruction of the Aquila car, how he set up the bomb in the computerized dash, where he stayed, trains and planes he took.
‘The Aquila job was so clean they’re still trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s delayed work on the car for months. They still haven’t recovered from the shock of Marza’s death.’
‘I want a deposition from you with all those details.’
Falmouth thought for a moment. ‘When the money’s paid,’ he agreed.
O’Hara pondered that for a moment and then nodded. ‘That seems fair enough,’ he said. ‘There’s got to be a pattern to all of this, something that ties it all together.’
‘I tell you, Sailor, stop looking for some kind of logical order to it.’
But O’Hara’s mind was trained to consider both the logical and illogical possibilities of any situation. There has to be some common thread, some ultimate goal in this madness, he thought, but Falmouth laughed at him when he said so.
‘It’s the Game for fun and profit, plain and simple. There’s a fortune being made. What do you think the Marza play cost? My end was a hundred and fifty thousand. They probably charged the client half a million.’
O’Hara was still unconvinced. To him, there had to be an overall objective to the Master operation other than ‘fun and games.’ Perhaps only Chameleon knew what it was.
‘You try to figger some kinda conspiracy in it, you’ll have a Chinese puzzle on your hands,’ Falmouth insisted. ‘Sometimes the jobs make no sense at all.’ He recounted Hinge’s tale of killing a man in Hawaii to retrieve the negatives of a dozen photographs, then destroying the film he had just killed to acquire.
‘And who is this Hinge?’ O’Hara asked.
‘Bloody cowboy. Kills without thinking or hesitation. Men or women, no matter. He can do the trick with gun or knife, he can do it with darts or with rope. Hell, he could probably spit us both to fucking death.’