Chameleon

by William Diehl

  "What in hell are we doing out here in the middle of nowhere?"

  "Nobody can sneak up on you out here."

  "Getting a little paranoid, aren't you?"

  "There's good reason," he said, without explaining the remark.

  O'Hara had never seen him this edgy. But Falmouth changed his mood quickly. "Pour yourself some more mud and try one of Cap's bagels. We'll get under way. Take a little sun, catch a fish or two. I'll tell you a story will turn your toes up."

  "Can we set the lines while we're lyin' idle?" Cap'n K. asked, interrupting them as he emerged from below. For the next few minutes there was a flurry of activity. The captain turned the Miami Belle out toward the open sea and tied down the wheel. He came back to the stern, dragged a four-foot barracuda out of the bait box and buried a hook the size of a grappling iron deep in its gills. He threw the hook overboard and fed the line out about fifteen feet, then set the rod in a bracket in the gunwales. He pulled up some slack in the line, hooked it over a small pulley and reeled the line out to the point of the outrigger and set it in place with a clothespin.

  He repeated the procedure with the other rod, using a tattered fishhead for bait. Then he leaned on the side of the boat. "Just remember," he said, "the big ones, the billfish, they hit twice." He held up two fingers to make his point.

  "First time, they use that schnozz on the end of their nose, they use that to stun their meal, they lay back a second or two, whap, they hit again. That time the hook goes in, okay? You'll know it. When they make that first hit, the line'll snap outa the outrigger, the line picks up the slack so the bait don't run away from the fish, then bang, he'll hit it again. Then you haul ass, toot-sweet, set that hook in good, or the fucker'll spit it out. Then it's you and him, one on one." He waved disdainfully at the other rod. "The other line's fixed for smaller stuff. They'll hit it and dive deep. Maybe we'll pick up something tasty for dinner."

  He went back to the bridge and eased up the throttles. The bait skittered along the surface of the water, fifty or sixty feet behind the boat.

  Falmouth settled down in one of the two fighting chairs in the stern. "I figgered we'd mix a little pleasure with business," he said. "Grab a chair and let's chat."

  "For the record, Tony, why me? Why pick a guy on the dodge?"

  "Well, Sailor, we know each other and you know the territory and you know I'm not a bullshitter.... Who else would I pick, Walter-bleedin'-Cronkite? Stickin' it to that bloody Winter Man and bringin' you in, I felt I owed you that. Once done, you're the best man I know for the job."

  "Job?" O'Hara said.

  "It's what you do now, isn't it? Reporting for a living." Falmouth lit a cigarette and threw the match to the wind.

  "How come you turned down the Winter Man's offer?" O'Hara asked.

  "Hell, we're friends. Also I don't like him. It's bastards like that give the Company a bad name. Besides, Sailor, I wasn't all that sure I could turn you up. I'm not a tracker. My specialties are planning and execution. And even if I had turned you up, I wasn't that sure I could take you."

  He looked stone-hard at O'Hara for a moment, then laughed.

  "Anyway," he said, "what son of a bitch would kill a buddy for a lousy twenty-fiver, right?"

  "Maybe that's why that cheap bastard got such bad help," O'Hara said.

  Falmouth took off his shirt and threw it on top of the catch box. "To begin with," he said, "I'll have to tell you a little story, for it to make sense, if there is any sense to it at all, Sailor. It will put the whole thing in proper perspective. But you won't mind. It's one helluva yarn.

  "This was in the fall, eighteen months ago. I had pulled a really shit job. But for two years, most of them had been. I got to tell you, Sailor, I was fed up with the Service. Squalid little executions. Agents who'd turned around. Doubles. Defectors. This one was up in Scotland. M.I.5—which, as you know, is basically counterespionage—had turned up a mole in a very sensitive spot in one of our nuclear installations, way the hell and gone out in nowhere. A place called Tobermory, on the Island of Mull, over in western Scotland. Colder than a banker's heart and as dreary as a Russian love story. This chap had been sleeping for twelve years, moving slowly up the ladder until he was where they wanted him. I don't remember now what turned him up. Like I said, it was an edgy situation. He was politically connected, an earl, something like that. Home Office didn't want to go through a messy trial. So they sent me in.

  "My cutout was this pissy little bastard named Coalhelms, who did everything as inconveniently as possible. He was a typical civil servant. A really horrid little man. Anyway, there I was, waiting for Coalhelms to show up with the background on the mark. We were to meet at the Thieves' Inn, an ale house right on the sea, up over the rocks. Got to be the loneliest pub in the bloody fucking world. Always foggy and damp so it cuts through you. I was taking a dram and sitting there, letting my eyes get accustomed to the place, for it's all candlelit, and I was looking across the room, kind of not focusing on anything in particular and suddenly I realized I was staring at this giant of a bugger sitting at the bar and he's looking back at me with the coldest pair of eyes you've ever seen in all your life. Yellow-haired he was, and wearing tweeds with one of them country-squire, gnarled-up shillelaghs. And a tweedy cap over one eye. Beard and mustache, curled up and waxed at the corners, like a Highland colonel. He looked the perfect Scottish squire.

  "And he was—except when I knew him he had red hair, and when last I saw him he was wearing a navy wet suit and his name was Guy Thornley. I recognized him quickly, even though I hadn't seen him for eight years or more.

  "You may have forgotten who Guy Thornley was, although I'll wager the name is familiar to you. Thornley was attached to M.I.5, and his specialty was underwater surveillance and sabotage. But he was a bit of a rogue agent. Did what he wanted. The summer of nineteen sixty-eight, the Russians brought several warships up the Thames for some kind of political shindig and among them was a wireless trawler, an electronic spy ship. It was much too tempting a morsel for Sir Guy to pass up, so he decides to go down and take a peek at her underbelly.

  "Nobody ever saw him again. The Thames didn't give him up. There was never another word from him. He vanished.

  "The accepted theory is that the Russians had a scuba lock team down there, they wasted Thornley, then took him aboard the trawler and dumped him when they were well out at sea.

  "An acceptable and logical theory. I believed it myself until that October night eighteen months ago. Sitting there in the Thieves' Inn, looking at him, I knew there was no mistake on his part that I recognized him, and no mistake on mine that he made me.

  "What I did, I went outside and lit up a fag. I figgered whatever he was up to, I might as well give him some room. If I had known what he was up to, I would have got out of there straightaway, although I doubt I would have got far.

  "I wasn't two puffs into the butt, he comes sauntering out. There we are, in fog as thick as chocolate syrup, and he says, 'Coalhelms isn't coming, old man.' Just like that.

  "'Twas like I stuck my finger in an open socket. The hair on my arms stood up as straight as the Queen's Guard. It was a setup, of course; the worrisome thing was that I had walked into it eyes open. I was in the drop because I had trusted that office monkey and suddenly there I was, standing there in the fog with the ocean crashing down below us, talking to a bloody ghost. Worse, I knew we weren't alone. Someone else was close by, I could feel him breathing down my neck. I figgered to hear Thornley out, however it played.

  "He had seen my K-file, that was obvious, for he knew about Guardio and Trujillo and that take-out in Brazil four 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 nonpolitical,' 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 Romo-loff, 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 of lads from the British antiterrorist group.

  "And to top it off, a couple of real beauts: Danilov, the Bulgarian jeweler 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 with us, I'll tell you this much: he's outlived his usefulness. He's proved to be a bad 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 hook. 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 Kimoto, 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 Danilov the Jeweler, 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 through your overcoat."

  O'Hara remembered Danilov well; short, squat, a face round as a cabbage, pencil-thin mustache, thick glasses accentuating gleaming, beady eyes tucked among thick folds of flesh, his tongue, a snake's tongue, constantly licking nervously at his lips, as though sensing some unsuspecting prey nearby. And the omnipresent black umbrella with its pinhead of death lurking in the tip.

  The images would remain, as well as the imagery of Falmouth trapped in a nightmare of his own making, performing a pagan ritual of death as his "initiation."

  The concept was terrifying, the Players, themselves, proving the Game far more dangerous than he had imagined.

  "Christ, din't I teach ya better'n that?" Cap'n K. barked from the bridge. The big fish had thrown the line and was gone.

  The captain throttled back and came to the stern and baited the big hook again. "Ya didn't snag him," he said irritably. "That was a two-hundred-pounder there, Tony. Two-hundred-pounder!"

  "We're talking business," Tony said, setting the line and clamping it by clothespin to the outrigger.

  "Fishin' and talkin' don't mix," snapped the captain. He returned to the bridge and slammed the throttles forward.

  The activity jarred O'Hara back to reality. He waited until Falmouth was back in his chair.

  "Did you really burn Coalhelms?" he asked.

  Falmouth looked at O'Hara, his gray eyes turning flinty for just a moment, then he nodded. "That I did, Sailor."

  "Why?"

  "It was just like any other job."

  "For twenty-five thousand dollars?"

  "That's not the point."

  Falmouth's candor shocked O'Hara. "The point! Why didn't you just go to M.I.5, turn Thornley up for the deserter he is?"

  Falmouth seemed to collapse in the middle. His shoulders sagged. His face drew in, the creases around his eyes and mouth growing deeper. His voice was haunted, the voice of a man whose sins were parading past him, the bodiless faces of his victims hovering before his eyes.

  "Look," he said finally, "I'm tired, okay? I'm pushing fifty. I don't run as fast as once I did. Nor jump as high, nor move as quick. You can't stay tops in the Game much past forty. You forget things. Your eyes start to go. You don't have the stamina you once had. Your reflexes are shot. You start making little mistakes now and again. Not fatal ones, but when it happens, that black angel whispers in your ear just the same."

  "Christ, there must've been something you could—"

  "You just don't get it, do you, man? You're trying to make a moral issue where there are no morals. Dontcha see, lad, I had no choice. You bet your sweet lovin' ass I did it. And thankful I did now, or I'd be long gone. You don't retire from this bunch. You botch it, try to get out, you're a dead man. What I'm
saying, Sailor, you retire in a box and that's the only way. Well, I ain't lookin' to get laid out in McGinty's front room with a hole in me. I've always planned on dying in bed. So forget the moral judgments, hey? We're not here for judging, we're here to pop their balloon. You blow this operation open, and I'm a free man. Otherwise I'm on the dodge for the rest of my life, which is not a thing I have a taste for right now."

  There were a few moments of uneasy silence.

  "It isn't easy, you know, admitting you're losing your edge, when that's all you've got."

  And more silence. Is this really it? O'Hara wondered. Is it that simple? Is Tony too scared to resist some nameless, faceless assassin in the dark? Or is there more to it? Some kind of plot? He examined his own paranoia, but found no answers. Falmouth's self-entrapment made as much sense as anything else so far in his chilling yarn.

  He changed the subject. 'What's the objective of all this and who the hell's Chameleon?"

  Falmouth leaned back, closed his eyes and let the sun bake his face. The pain of admitting that he was growing too old for the Game faded slowly from his handsome features. "The objective is greed."

  "What companies are involved?"

  "The biggest in the world. Our enemies are their competition. If the enemy's got somethin' your client wants, steal it. If you can't steal it, kill the ones who're doing the work.

  "Blow up their laboratories. Burn 'em out. Slow them down. Drive 'em out of business. Steal their secrets. Our clients? Hell, you name it. United Telephone, Continental Motor Company, Sunset Oil, the Boston Common Bank and Trust, Global Steel ..."

  He waved his hands to indicate the futility of listing them all.

  Talk, O'Hara thought. So far Falmouth had given him very little but talk. Nothing could be proven. "All I'm hearing is talk," he said.

  "All right, how about Guardio, the South American strong man. Did you hear about his assassination while you were on the dodge?"

  "They do have newspapers in Japan, Tony," O'Hara said, managing a smile.