‘Oh yes.’
‘Did Quill tell you to kill Chameleon?’
‘You must find the ant before you can step on it.’
‘Did Quill tell you to find Chameleon?’
Danilov nodded slowly. He was staring at one of the candle flames, as though hypnotized.
‘And that’s the reason?’
He nodded. ‘Failure. They wanted me to do that job in Hawaii, too, but I was too far away. Couldn’t hold that against me.’
‘What job in Hawaii?’
‘The man with the pictures from the Thoreau.’
O’Hara looked at the Magician, his eyebrows rising into question marks.
‘You mean the oil rig that sank?’ the Magician asked.
‘Yes. Where we lost Thornby.’
‘You mean Thornley, the British agent?’ said O’Hara. ‘Yes, only he changed all that. Buried at sea, I understand. Poetic, don’t you think?’
‘Did Thornley recruit you into Master?’
‘Yes. Paris. Three years ago. My first job was ... was Simmons. Texas. In Houston. Gave him the old whack with the umbrella. Dead in six hours. Heart attack. They never knew.’ He smiled and winked.
‘Let’s get back to the Thoreau for a minute. Did they actually sink the Thoreau?’
‘Yes. With all hands. A hundred and some. Eighty million... a hundred million dollars. It was a terrifying feat. All we lost was Thornley, hardly a fair trade, yes? Took out one of the legs with plastique.’
‘And they wanted you to get pictures of the rig that someone else had taken, is that it?’
‘The photographs were of the pumping system. Very revolutionary, But they didn’t want to see them, they just wanted them destroyed, and the chap that took them. All the same day. Quaint, eh?’
‘What do you mean, the same day?’
‘The same day they sank the Thoreau was the day they wanted me for the take-out in Hawaii. I suppose they got someone else to do it. I was in London, couldn’t get out. Bad weather. Not surprising.’
‘Daniov, who ordered the take-out n Chameleon?’
‘The phone.’
‘Was it Quill?’
‘Yes.’
‘Quill gave you a sanction on Chameleon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘There are no reasons. There are never any reasons.’
‘Can you guess?’
‘He has become a problem.’
‘Doesn’t he run Master?’
He nodded.
‘So Quill wants to get rid of Chameleon and take over the whole operation?’
Daniov shrugged. ‘There are no reasons,’ he said. Outside, the storm had subsided. Thunder still rumbled between the mountain peaks.
‘Where is Chameleon?’
‘I lost him.’
‘Where did you lose him?’
‘Tokyo.’
‘He lives in Tokyo?’
Daniov shrugged again. ‘Perhaps.’
‘So Quill ordered you to seek and destroy Chameleon and you followed him to Tokyo and lost him. Is that when you ran?’
‘No. Found him and lost him in Tokyo.’
‘Where? Where did you lose him?’
‘On the street. Poof! he was gone.’
‘How did you get on to him?’
‘Too long. One thing and another. Others failed before me.’
‘Danilov, how many people have you killed for Master?’
‘How many?’
‘All right, who?’
‘Simmons in Houston, Richman in New York, Garcia in Los Angeles, a man in Teheran, another in Greece. And . . . it was cold and rainy. . . always cold and rainy - . . jolly man. Fat. The boat man. This was in .. . in. . .‘ His memory had clouded over again.
‘Did anyone other than Quill ever give you an assignment?’
‘Cutout.’
‘Who?’
He shook his head. ‘Left a message at hotel. “Your football tickets are at the box office.” That way I knew to get him at the arena.’
‘Which one was this?’
‘Simmons. I remember now, the one in the rain.., that was in Japan. Bridges. Name was Bridges. The jolly shipbuilder. Fat man. Got him coming out of a restaurant.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘I ... don’t remember...’
‘Danilov, how did you recognize Chameleon in Tokyo?’
‘I ... don’t remember.,.’
‘And you’ve never met Quill.’
‘Quill is a voice. Chameleon is a ghost. Midas is lost.’
‘Midas? Who is Midas?’
‘Midas...’
‘Is it a person? A place?’
‘I ... don’t remember...’
He looked up very suddenly, sat straight up in the chair with his hands on his knees, the umbrella at his side. ‘The teacher will now recite Pound. You can recite Pound, can’t you? What a strange name—Ezra. What a heavy burden to put on a son.,
‘Danilov...’
And then he fell to his knees and began a bizarre litany:
‘Nabikov, Ivan, a street in Paris, on his way to work. Gregori, Georg, London, right in front of Parliament. . .‘ and continued chanting the list of his victims.
‘You lost him, Sailor,’ said the Magician.
‘Damn!’
‘You got a lot.’
‘He knows a lot more.’
‘Not tonight. He’s gone back in his rabbit hole.’
Daniov looked at them, his alabaster eyes twinkling with madness again. And roaring like a forest beast, he grabbed the umbrella and jumped up and began slashing at the candlesticks.
‘He’s lost it, man. Let’s get the shit outta here.’
O’Hara and the Magician backed toward the door as the madman continued to smash out the candles. He charged through the darkness when they reached the door, the deadly umbrella held like a spear before him. They ducked out the door and slammed it shut.
‘Wow!’ said the Magician, ‘that was a cl—’
The umbrella came slashing through the window in the door, its tip brushing O’Hara’s hair. He fell sideways and slammed the bolt shut.
Daniov began to scream. He screamed as they made their way back through the serpentine passageways to the gate. He was still screaming as they were lowered, one by one, down from the pinnacle of hell.
15
‘Okay, so you broke Lavander’s code,’ said the Magician. ‘Let’s see what you got.’
Rested, showered and attended by fresh fruit and coffee, they hovered over Izzy as the Magician prepared to conjure information from its memory, his fingers poised over the computer’s keyboard as though it were a Steinway. He was humming ‘Body and Soul’ as he urged the computer to talk to him.
Eliza explained that she had run several combinations of sentences from the Lavander book through the computer, trying to break the code by trial and error. Then she began thinking about what the Magician had said: if it was not written down, it would have to be simple because nobody could remember twenty-six letter substitutions. Twenty-six. The alphabet. And she remembered from her childhood a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet: ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’
Her next step had been to experiment with the alphabet, running it forward and in reverse under the sentence, trying to decipher his alphabetic code. That didn’t work.
‘So,’ she said, ‘I left the sentence on the monitor, and then
I started running the alphabet under it, moving one letter to the
end of the alphabet each time. In other words, I started with
b as the first letter, then c. I got up to I and that was the
The Magician said, ‘So what we got is...’
‘The quick brown fx imps v lazy dg.
‘And under that we put the alphabet, starting with I instead of
‘lmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk...’
‘Put em all together and what’ve yuh got?
‘Thequickbrownfxjmps vlazydg...’
‘lmnopqrstuvwxyzabcd efghijk...’
‘And there it is. L equals t, mequals h, and so forth.’ He turned to Eliza. ‘Neat.’
‘Yeah, pretty good, Gunn,’ O’Hara said. ‘L for Lavander, that’s easy to remember too.’