Chameleon

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Chameleon Page 33

by William Diehl


  Danilov 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 l and that was the key."

  The Magician said, "So what we got is ...

  "The quick brown fx jmps v lazy dg ...

  "And under that we put the alphabet, starting with l instead of a:"Imnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk ...

  "Put em all together and what've yuh got?"T h e q u i c k b r o w n f x j m p s v l a z y d g ...

  "l mn o p qr s t u v w x yz a b c d e f g h i j k . . .

  "And there it is. L equals t, m equals 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."

  "Does that qualify me to work with you big-timers?"

  "Well, it's a good start," O'Hara had to admit.

  "Thanks a damn bunch," she said.

  "So we got a code, where do we go from here?" the Magician said, ignoring their banter.

  Eliza had set up a temporary key-definition library in the computer, replacing the letters on the keyboard with the code letters, and had typed almost all of the information from Lavander's notebook into the computer.

  "What's the file name?" the Magician asked her.

  "LAV/1."

  The Magician typed out "LAV/1" and the screen filled with rows of words and figures. Many of the entries were names of banks with lists of deposits under each heading. Most of the remaining entries, however, were names of companies with coded lists of figures under them.

  "Christ, here's a bank in Grand Cayman with over a hundred grand in it!" The Magician was genuinely awed.

  "So far, there are deposits listed in there for almost a million dollars," Eliza said, "but that's not what's really interesting. He's got production figures, oil-field capacities, refinery operations, everything you can imagine on a dozen or more oil companies, how much they say they pay for crude oil, how much they really pay. It's an encyclopedia of juicy information."

  She pointed to two figures on the monitor screen. "Published Reserve Capacity versus Actual Reserve Capacity," she said. "In every entry, the actual reserves are millions of barrels higher than they report. They're lying to the public, O'Hara."

  "What's so surprising about that? They kill people, blow up oil rigs, assassinate politicians. What's a little lie to the public mean to them? They have to do something to justify ripping us off."

  "That's a bit cynical, isn't it?"

  "Realistic," O'Hara said.

  "What's all this got to do with Chameleon?" the Magician asked.

  "I've said all along, there's got to be a pattern to this. An objective other than just killing for profit. I think we're right in the middle of some kind of international oil scandal."

  "Maybe Hinge killed Lavander to get this book and you beat him to it—maybe it's just that simple," Eliza said.

  "It's a possibility," said the Magician.

  "Yeah, in which case every company in that book has a motive for killing the old boy," Eliza said.

  "We need to turn up one bad guy," O'Hara said. "Without at least one client we can name, the story falls flat. What the hell motivates the people who hire Master? Who wanted Lavander assassinated? Why was the Thoreau sabotaged? Why was Marza's car blown up? Who was behind the murders of Simmons and the rest of them? Not just generally. Specifically, why were these things done?"

  "I could make a coupla good guesses," the Magician said.

  "Not worth a doodly-shit," Eliza said. "I see his point."

  "And if we can't get it?" said the Magician.

  "What we need is Chameleon himself," said O'Hara. "You tried military and naval intelligence, right?"

  The Magician nodded.

  "How about the OSS?"

  "Their files went into the CIA when they reorganized," the Magician said. "I've already checked them."

  "How about inactive cases?" O'Hara said. "Maybe they've got him cubbyholed somewhere. Go back to MI. I've turned up more than one sleeper by checking deep."

  The magician punched Military Intelligence Files and queried the index.

  "Hell," he said, "we got 'Inactive, U.S.,' 'Inactive, Europe,' 'Inactive ...' Look at all this shit."

  "Call up Inactive and run Chameleon through them all."

  The Magician started pounding Izzy's keys and kept coming up with the same answer: "No such file." Then, under "Inactive, Japan," they got a strike:—Chameleon. N/O/I. Head of Japanese training unit for intelligence agents. On list of war criminals, 1945-1950. Believed killed at Hiroshima, 8.6.45. Declared legally dead, 2.12.50.

  Period.

  "What's N/O/I. mean?" Eliza asked.

  "'No other identification,' " said O'Hara.

  They stared at the entry for a long minute. Finally O'Hara said, "He must've been on the hot list. Took them five years to declare him dead."

  The Magician said, "Not much there."

  "It seems like it would be a common code name, Chameleon," Eliza said. "Maybe there's more than one."

  "Maybe," O'Hara said. "Or maybe he didn't die at Hiroshima."

  "He'd have to be, shit, close to seventy. That was more than thirty-five years ago."

  "You don't stop functioning when you're seventy," said O'Hara. But he tucked the information in the back of his mind for future use.

  "Let's go on to something else," Eliza said. "What other outside sources can Izzy tap?"

  "Name it. UPI, the New York Times, Washington Post, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the CIA, the British Secret Service, la Surete ..."

  "Can we feed the names we picked up from Danilov in this thing and scan some of them for information?"

  "That's what it's made for, and it's not 'this thing,' Sailor," said the Magician. "Just call it Izzy. Anything this smart should be treated with a little respect."

  They settled down to work, scanning the wire services and newspapers to get information on the victims. It was tiring because it was boring, typing in requests, getting "No info available" back. Hours went by. It was amazing how many Simmonses and Richmans popped up, obviously not connected. Then they got a hit.

  They had queried United Press International to scan Houston newspaper obits from October 1976 through October 1977 for Merrill Wendell Simmons. According to Danilov, he had killed Simmons three years earlier, which would have been in the spring. But the cutout had left his "football tickets" at the box office, which would indicate Danilov was mistaken on the date. It might have been in the fall.

  Danilov was mistaken. It had been three and a half years. The machine spelled out:-UPI/Ref/Houston Chronicle/11.12.76/p.1C@File: HUCH/76/11/12/NWS./2555-242.

  "Let's see who h
e was," O'Hara said.

  The Magician typed out the file number and the obit appeared on the screen.—Houston, November 12 (UPI)—Millionaire oil tycoon Merrill Wendell ("Corkscrew") Simmons, former SMU quarterback, who parlayed a single oil lease won in a poker game into the sprawling American Petroleum Corporation, died of a massive heart attack at his home in suburban Houston tonight. He was 56 years old.

  The business magnate had appeared in excellent health and had attended an SMU homecoming game in the afternoon. He complained of feeling ill while preparing steaks on an outdoor grill in his backyard and collapsed a few moments later. Simmons was rushed to Houston General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 7:25 p.m.

  A fairly detailed biography followed.

  "Well, that's one confirmed kill for Danilov. Who's next?"

  It was their first break and it renewed their energy. They kept seeking information, checking and cross-checking each name and the new leads it created. Slowly, the information began building up.—Jack "Red" Bridges, President, Bridges Salvage Corp., Tokyo, Japan, died, heart attack, 6.21.77.

  —Arnold Richman, Sunset Oil International President, died on business trip to New York, 2.9.77.

  —Abraham Garcia, President and Chairman of the Board, Hensell Oil Co., died of a heart attack on a business trip to Los Angeles, 9.18.78.

  "That's the four of them. He must have been telling the truth," O'Hara said.

  "This Chameleon has a real hard-on for oil companies," the Magician said. "Three oil-company execs have been kayoed, plus the Thoreau was sabotaged."

  "Let's not forget Lavander," Eliza said, "he was in oil up to his eyebrows. And speaking of that, all of the companies these guys worked for are in this book. Just look, here's Hensell ... Am Petro ... Sunset ..."

  O'Hara looked at the decoded entries which Eliza had run off on the printer. On the second line of each of the three entries was the word "AMRAN."

  "What's AMRAN?" O'Hara asked.

  "I dunno," the Magician said. Eliza just shrugged.

  "Can we find out from Izzy here?"

  "I'll try Dow Jones."

  Half a dozen references popped up immediately.

  "Bingo!" cried the Magician. "Now we're cookin', man. Let's scan the profile outline from the Wall Street Journal."

  "What's the date?" O'Hara asked.

  "November 9."

  "Pretty recent. Let's see it."

  The outline flashed on the screen:

  —AMRAN Ltd. Consortium formed October 28, 1979. Comprised of Intercon Oil Corp., American Petro Ltd., Hensell Oil Products Corp., Sunset Oil Intern'l Inc., The Alamo Oil Company, The Stone Corporation, Bridges Salvage Corp. Objectives: Stronger market position, joint experimental ventures, consolidation of markets, increased financial strength. Chief Executive Officer: Alexander Lee Hooker, Gen of the Army (Ret.); V.P., Operations: Jesse W. Garvey, Gen, U.S. Army (Ret.); V.P., Marketing: (Position vacant since death of Vice President Ralph Greentree, 1.3.80.) Chief Financing Institution: First Boston Common Bank. Home office: Tanabe, Japan.

  "I'll be damned. I thought the Hook was dead. I haven't heard anything about him in years," O'Hara said. "And their main base is in Japan."

  "Where's Tanabe?" asked Eliza.

  "On the east coast of Honshu, about a hundred miles from Kyoto. Desolate goddamn place."

  "Chameleon's really got it in for AMRAN," said Eliza. "He's killed most of the executives in the consortium. The Thoreau was owned by Sunset Oil. The guy who was killed on Maui had pictures from the Thoreau."

  "Anybody wanna take bets on how old Ralphie Greentree died?" said the Magician.

  "Just for the hell of it, Magician, check Alamo and see if they've had any recent deaths in the high echelons."

  The Magician asked for a profile on Alamo Oil. There it was, four lines down: —David Fiske Thurman, Chairman of the Board, Alamo Oil Company, killed in single-car wreck, outskirts of Dallas, Texas, 4.8.77.

  "Try Ralph Greentree."

  —Ralph Greentree, former Executive Vice President of Alamo Oil Company and Marketing V.P. of AMRAN, drowned while vacationing in Honolulu, 1.3.80.

  "It's getting better," O'Hara said. "Guess who was on Maui two days before that?"

  "Hinge," Eliza said.

  "Right. Greentree drowned three days after Hinge killed the man on Maui and lifted the film from the Thoreau. Honolulu's a thirty-minute plane ride from Maui."

  "What else?"

  "Try one more. Try this Stone Corp., see what we can find out."

  Izzy revealed the following:—The Stone Corporation. Holding company in the power and energy field. Corporation's widespread holdings are not a matter of public record, but are known to include nuclear power plants in Ga., N.C., Ala., Fla. and national and international oil-refining properties. Temporary Executive Officer, Melvin James, replacing C. L. K. Robertson III, who died in crash of private plane, 6.25.78.

  "Jesus," said the Magician, "I'd like to think some of these people actually died in accidents. But I've got serious doubts."

  "How about this final entry?" Eliza said. They had overlooked the last paragraph of the outline:

  Newest acquisition: merger with Japanese conglomerate, San-San. 5.10.79.

  "What's this San-San?" Eliza said.

  "It's a very powerful company over there," said O'Hara. "But I really don't know much about it."

  "I've had it," the Magician said.

  He got up and stretched. Eliza slipped behind the keyboard, changed disks and started feeding the last few entries from Lavander's book into Izzy.

  "Don't you ever get tired?" the Magician asked in a somewhat annoyed tone.

  "It's youth," O'Hara said.

  Their energy had carried them for hours and now, suddenly, all three of them seemed to fall apart at once. They decided to take a break and let Izzy print out the remaining entries in Lavander's book.

  Eliza, spotting the entry as they were leaving for dinner, said, "O'Hara, better look at this."

  There it was, on the print-out, one of the last entries:—Midas/Io.354,200/109,12/lgr.Ghawar/es.2bb./d.0-112.

  The three of them hunched over the printer, staring at the entry for several seconds.

  "'Midas is lost ...'" O'Hara said.

  "What?" said Eliza.

  "That's what Danilov said, 'Midas is lost.' Midas isn't a person, it's a company or place. Wonder what all these figures mean. And what is 'Io.'? And 'Ghawar'?"

  "I haven't seen another entry like this," Eliza said. "Usually you can tell what the figures mean."

  "I'm too tired to figure out what anything means anymore," the Magician said. "I gotta get some shut-eye."

  "Okay, let's pack it in. Izzy can run the print-out on all this and we'll take it with us.'"

  "Take it with us where?" asked Eliza.

  "Japan."

  "Japan!"

  "Right. AMRAN's in Japan. Hooker's in Japan. Bridges was in Japan, Chameleon's in Japan, San-San is in Japan. Obviously there's only one place to be, so let's all get some rest. The next stop is Tokyo."

  BOOK THREE

  Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by any competent journalist or historian.

  —JOSEPH PULITZER

  1

  ETCHED IN THE GOLDEN TABLETS on the wall of the ancient Japanese temple of Oka-Ri, it is written: "The seasons change with the days, man's memory changes with the years." An English poet, centuries later, expressed the same thought more succinctly: "In the end, all history is memory and gossip."

  There were days when General Hooker would sit alone for hours in the darkness of his office, companioned only by the faulty machine in his chest, gleaning the troubled days of his past to conjure faltered memories. On the blackest of these days he could hear the thunder of cannon and the cry of bugles, but his mind's eye saw only swirls of dust, clouding faded days of glory. Names and faces eluded him like ghosts at sunrise, and the names of places drifted in and out of his tick-tock solitude wit
hout streets, spires or parks.

  Only Garvey knew and understood Hooker's agony. It was Garvey alone who came to his aid when the old man sometimes cried aloud, calling the names of fallen comrades or forgotten battlefields.

  "Did you call, General?" he would say.

  And the general would repeat the name, and Garvey, his own memory blemished by time, would make up a face and an incident and a place to go with it, and Hooker, satisfied, would return to his uneasy reverie. He had been writing his memoirs for ten years and had amassed a gigantic manuscript. Editing it, sorting truth as reality from truth as Hooker wished it were, would have taken another decade, and so the manuscript was unpublishable.

  There were rare occasions when the dust of yesteryear dissipated for an hour or so and Hooker would have a very clear vision of the past. These experiences were almost orgasmic for the old man. He would sit entranced, watching the moments play out through glazed and age-grayed eyes. And so, among the hundreds of handwritten pages of tainted facts, there was a handful of brilliantly re-created battle scenes and incredibly precise character studies. All the rest was imagination.

  Hooker was not a prisoner of his past. Weeks might go by when he attended to business lucidly. But there were those days when he would awaken and tell Garvey, "Colonel, I'm going to work on my memoirs today," and he would disappear into the office and Garvey would cancel appointments, rearrange schedules, make the proper apologies, and carry out most of the business as usual. Two or three times during those days, Garvey would respond when he heard Hooker calling out.

  This was just such a day, although Garvey had reminded him of his appointment with O'Hara later in the afternoon. Should he cancel?

  "No. That wouldn't be prudent," Hooker said and winked. He was feeling good.

 

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