‘Hinge. Q-thirteen.’
‘Tape rolling.’
‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack—’
‘Voice clearance positive. ID positive. State your contact.’
‘Quill.’
‘We are routing.’
He was on hold for almost a minute before it was picked
‘This is Quill.’
‘I made the connection. The information was retrieved and destroyed.’
‘Excellent. And the connection?’
‘Terminated.’
‘Good. Problems?’
‘No problems.’
‘Sorry you had to interrupt your vacation.’
‘It worked out fine. I’ll be back at the Royal Hawaiian by dinner,’
‘Thank you. Happy New Year.’
‘The same to you. Aloha.’
It was an enormous room, menacing in its darkness, the hand sculpted molding around its ten-foot ceilings vaguely discernible in the eerie shadows cast by one small Oriental lamp in a corner. Bare hardwood floors glistened like the surface in an ice-skating rink; corners were pools of shadows. The only windows in the room, lining one entire wall, had once been exterior French doors, now glassed in to reveal a windowless hothouse filled with tropical ferns and flowerless leafy plants. The three or four small grow lights on the floor of the hothouse accentuated its greenery but succeeded only in creating ominous silhouettes of what little furniture there was in the main room.
The temperature in the room was exactly 82 degrees; it was always exactly 82 degrees.
The place was as quiet as a library. Except for the incessant ticking, like a time bomb ticking away the minutes of someone’s life.
Near the door was an ensemble of leather furniture: two large easy chairs and a seven-foot sofa separated by a low teak coffee table. The end tables were made of matching teak, and each held a Philippine basket lamp. The coffee table was empty except for a single oversized Oriental ashtray.
Two of the other three corners were bare except for antique temple dogs that squatted angrily under tall leafy ferns.
The other corner was dominated by a large oak campaign desk with eight hard-back chairs in front of it. The top of the desk was bare except for an old-fashioned wooden letter file, a large ashtray, a leather-bound appointment book and an elaborate red Buddha lamp with an old-fashioned fringed lampshade and a pull string.
And the box.
It was a plain white box about the size of a large dictionary. There was a red ribbon around it with a large frivolous Christmas bow.
The chair behind the desk loomed up like a throne, its giant back rising into the darkness. A cloud of smoke eddied out from the dark tombstone of the chair. ‘The only lamp on iii the room was the Buddha lamp. It slanted an eerie light over the desk, casting the white box in harsh shadows. Its heat sucked the smoke away from the chair, sent it swirling in little whirlpools, up through the lampshade.
There was a sound in the box, a scurrying. The top moved slightly, and then was still again.
The man in the chair moved forward. His long, narrow, skeletal head was topped by thin strands of white hair, carefully brushed from one side to the other. His cheeks were deeply drawn, each line and wrinkle accentuated by the light from the single lamp; his jaw tight, the -veins standing out along its hard edge like strands of wire. It was a face from the past, from history books and old newsreels and magazines, a stern, hawklike face, promising victory while defeat was still sour in his mouth, a vengeful face that conjured memories of the wrath of Moses and the zeal of John Brown.
General Hooker. The Hook. He had been called a military genius, compared by militarists and historians to Alexander the Great, Stonewall Jackson and Patton. Hooker, chased out of the Philippines by the Japanese early in the war, becoming the architect of the Pacific War, plotting every strategic move, studying every island as he edged closer and closer to the Japanese mainland.
Hooker had almost become a legend.
That son of a bitch, he said to himself. He was thinking about Douglas MacArthur. Dugout Doug, who had run the war from Australia while the Hook plodded wearily from one bleak atoll to the next in the bloody march toward Japan. True, the old bastard was quick with the praise as Hooker scored the victories, but he knew just what to say to the press, and when to say it, and ultimately the mantle of victory fell on MacArthur’s shoulders. There was no way to top the son of a bitch. On the day Corregidor fell, one of the blackest days in American history, while
