years ago. He knew almost every job I’d ever done, Coalhelms had obviously lifted the file for him.
‘Top-secret information, right?
‘Not on your life. Because it wasn’t Thornley on some deep cover job, nothing like that. What happened is, he offered me a bloody job! Guaranteed me a hundred thousand a year. Told me I’d be called in only when needed. I could live anywhere in the world I wanted to, and all the transactions would be cash deposits in any bank of my choosing.
“We’re non-political,” he says. “This is strictly business. Our clients are the biggest companies in the world. You might say we’re a personal service for world industry. You handle your first assignment, which is a breeze, properly, and you can take early retirement from the Service and live as good as Prince Charlie.”
‘I was that stunned, I could hardly talk. And then he tells me some of the other chaps who’re in on the Game, counting them off on his fingers, and it was then the scope of this Service, as he called it, came clear to me, for he was talking about the best lads in the business.
‘Gazinsky, the KGB man who kidnapped Zhagi Romoloff, right from under the West Germans’ noses; Kimoto, the dapper little Japanese saboteur; Charley Simons, probably the best electronics man in the CIA, maybe in the world; Taven Kaminsky, the tough Jew who set up Israel’s antiterrorist outfit; Kit Willoughby from Australia; Amanet, the Iranian arsonist from the Savak; a couple f lads from the British antiterrorist group.
‘And to top it off, a couple of real beauts: Danilov, the Bulgarian jeweller turned assassin, maybe the most dangerous - man in the bunch. Those skilled hands of his developed a pellet no bigger than the head of a pin infused with a single drop of riticin. Do you know about riticin? A drop no bigger than a grain of sugar can kill a horse. The pellet is air-injected, right through clothing.
‘And finally, the Frenchman known only as Le Croix, who was in charge of the French torture squad in Algeria for two years, had all pictures of himself destroyed, and got his name because he used to crucify his victims.
‘An impressive rogue’s gallery of the keenest and most cold-blooded operatives in the world. Not a thimbleful of warm blood in the lot.
‘My options were pretty bleedin’ thin. Try to take out Thornley, and some shooter lurking behind me in the fog? A dead man’s choice.
‘Go along with it until I got out of the drop, then turn up Thornley and run for my life? There’d always be a Gazinsky or a Lavanieux or a Danilov behind me, waiting to drop the curtain on me.
‘Or listen to his proposition, buy a little time maybe? It wasn’t the money. Hell, there wasn’t any option. I knew that somewhere in that fog my executioner was waiting for my decision.
‘It was join or die. They had made up their minds they wanted me. They left me little damn choice in the matter.
‘What’s a feller to do —right? And now that I’m in, what’re my options? Stay in until I fuck up and either they kill me — or somebody else does. Or run.
‘My first job — my initiation, as Thornley called it — paid me twenty-five thousand dollars.
“Who’s the mark?” I asked.
‘And Thornley says, “Coalhelms.”
‘Just like that. I could hardly get my wits together, it’s that shocked I was. Finally I says to him, “Why? Other than he’s an insufferable little squeeker.”
“You never need to know the why of a thing,” Thornley says. “If it’s to be done, there’s a reason for it. But since it’s your first time out e’ us, I’ll tell you this much: he’s outlived his usefulness. He’s proved to be a baa security risk for your people.”
“They’re your people, too,” I said.
“Not anymore,” he says. “Nor yours, either, after tonight.”
‘Actually, Coalhelms was nothing more than a test.
“And just who in hell runs this club?” I asked.
‘And that was the first time I ever heard of Chameleon.’
Bang!
The line on the port side twanged loose from its outrigger and screamed through the reel: aweee-aweee- aweee-aweee...
It was a game fish, breaching long enough to jump high in the air once, then spitting out the hock. O’Hara used the momentary distraction to try to correlate everything Falmouth was saying.
He ignored the brief fishing drama, concentrating instead on the steady throb of the motors, using the sound as a kind of mantra, slipping briefly into a trancelike form of meditation. Kimura called it shidasu hakamaru, ‘going to the wall.’
To O’Hara, it was like being in a bright white room with no seams or doors. Against this glaring white milieu he projected images and words, imbedding them in his memory. He had only a vague visual recollection of Thornley, but there were others he knew:
Gazinsky, the tall Russian with the cadaverous head and eyes like a cat, always a bit of food in his beard; Tosiru Kirmoto, the Buddha-like Japanese with his three-piece suits and white-on-white shirts, who had once blown up four Russian missile pads and got out without losing his breath; Amanet, the sleek, black-haired little Savak terrorist, whom he once saw in Algiers, drinking fresh goat’s blood as if it were a cocktail.
Then there was the Frenchman, Le Croix. Tall, short, fat, thin? He had no visual impression of the man other than that he had once heard Le Croix had lost an eye in the fighting in Algeria and had exacted a terrible price for it — he had personally executed twenty-two Algerian rebels.
Finally, there was Daniov the Jeweller, whom he had seen only through binoculars, strolling through the Tuileries in Paris. ‘Remember that face,’ his partner had told him, ‘he is one of the most dangerous men in the Game. And watch the umbrella. There’s an air-injection needle in the tip, loaded with poison. He can hit you right
