‘That’s what I think,’ said O’Hara. ‘Which indicates that whoever had the man killed had the details of something on the Thoreau.’
‘The pumping station,’ said the Magician. ‘Gotta be!’
‘If that’s the case, there were two reasons for destroying the Thoreau. One was to put Sunset in a financial bind. The other was because AMRAN already had the plans for the pumping station. They wanted the pictures off the market. So AMRAN is probably using that pumping station itself.’
‘It’s interesting,’ O’Hara said. ‘Hooker denies any knowledge of Midas.’
‘What is Midas?’ asked Okari.
‘We think it’s an oil field, maybe the largest in the world. But we don’t know where it is.’
‘And I think I know why,’ Eliza said.
They all turned toward the tiny reporter, who was wearing one of her million-dollar smiles.
‘Well?’ O’Hara said.
‘It’s underwater. Kraft American said the underwater dish built by Bridges was called Midas. Midas is the heart of the oil field, it’s the pumping station for the whole operation. And it’s all under the sea, the perfect hiding place.’
‘But where is it’?’ the Magician asked.
‘I think I can help there,’ Okari said. ‘I have seen the room from which they direct everything. It is enormous, perhaps forty meters high. And there is a huge map with odd-shaped TV screens recessed in it.’
‘They’re called diod screens,’ said the Magician. ‘Free form.’
‘These TV screens show their operations all over the world. They can watch everything that goes on in this empire of theirs.
There is one in particular, near Bonin, which has this undersea dish you speak of. They have TV pictures inside and out. And there are also ships down there, it is like some great graveyard of old tankers.’
‘Beautiful,’ said the Magician. ‘That’s the answer to the tankers. They sink them and Store oil in them. I’ll bet more than one skipper has vanished in that part of the ocean in the last few years.’
‘And Yumishawa has a new refinery on the Bonin Islands, less than a hundred miles away,’ said Okari.
‘So they pump oil from their underwater storage ships to their refinery as they need it. Christ, what an ingenious operation,’ said O’Hara.
‘They been on to this for — what, thirty years?’ the Magician said. ‘Why didn’t they start pumping oil back then? Why wait?’
‘They couldn’t do anything before this,’ Eliza said. ‘Not without revealing the existence of the strike. That’s their ace in the hole. It gives them almost unlimited oil reserves. Just think what that means in the marketplace. The longer they keep it under wraps, the more powerful they become.’
‘Yes,’ Kimura reflected, ‘if one sells coconuts, the world knows one has a tree.’
‘Very patient men,’ Okari put in.
‘Why not?’ said the Magician. ‘Look at the payoff.’
‘And Lavander got it because he was hired to appraise the field when they started to make their big move,’ Eliza said. ‘It was in his book. He knew the potential. Hell, the poor fool just knew too much for his own good.’
‘They probably had plans to hit him even before he was lifted,’ the Magician said. ‘They only had one problem
Chameleon, who seemed to knew everything they were doing.’
O’Hara was deep in thought, trying to construct the abstract boxes in the air into basic realities He was sure the answers to all their questions were there, now he had to clarify them. But he could not clear the image of Hooker from his mind, To dishonour the great wartime hero seemed almost like dishonouring history, besmirching America’s victories — and that troubled him. Yet Hooker had dishonoured himself. What hatreds, what frustrations, could have smouldered so deep inside him that they twisted his senses until he found relief in the dark side of his soul? He had betrayed his trust, designed a monolith of greed financed by elitists as dishonourable as he, and created a nightmare empire in which murder and robbery were taken for granted and executed by vipers: Hinge, Danilov, Le Croix, yes, even Falmouth. Hooker must be destroyed. But how? The answer was simple: with the truth.
How to do it was the problem.
‘We need to get inside and get photographs of that board, particularly close-ups of the pumping station,’ O’Hara said. The question is how.’
‘Why haven’t you told anyone about this before?’ the Magician asked Okari.
Okari smiled wistfully. ‘It was a personal matter,’ he said. ‘Besides, I did not understand the significance of all this, nor did Asieda-san. We had bits and pieces, scraps from their wastebaskets, memos on desks. They thought we knew much more than we did.’
The Magician was humming ‘C-Jam Blues’ and smiling. ‘I got an idea,’ he said. ‘This place is made out of stone, right?’
Okari nodded.
‘No metal in the walls?’
Okari shook his head. ‘Timber,’ he said,
‘Perfect.’
