by Marc Olden
In the early days of the firm’s existence there had been some discussion as to whether or not the elevator guard should be armed. Was it good or bad public relations? Would potential clients be alarmed or somehow reassured to know that the finger that pressed the starter button could in seconds wrap itself about a trigger?
Sparrowhawk claimed the last word. “Violence, dear friends, is the rhetoric of our day, unfortunately. As for those of you who feel that an armed guard in the lobby is extreme, let me join William Blake in noting that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I say there is nothing wrong if potential clients view an armed guard as a symbol of distrust on our part. Distrust, gentlemen, is our only protection against treachery.”
Thus the attendant/guard, who greeted Sparrowhawk before closing the elevator doors behind him, wore under his knee-length coat an Ingram M-11, a machine pistol that weighed less than four pounds and fired fourteen shots per second. As an added security precaution the guard, via a hidden beeper and using a code changed daily, checked in hourly with an upstairs supervisor.
On the forty-fourth floor Sparrowhawk stepped from the elevator still whistling Haydn, but faster now. A wave of the hand to the uniformed guards on either side of the elevator and then he was in the reception area of his office. “Mrs. Rosebery,” he said in crisp greeting to his secretary. Twenty minutes ago she had reached him on the car phone to report the arrival of the information he had requested on Michelle Asama.
Damned efficient, Mrs. Rosebery. Sixtyish, a long-faced Yorkshire widow in tweed suits and sensible shoes and with an unwavering belief that the world had slipped into darkness with the death of beloved King Edward VII in 1910. She claimed to be a descendant of Spencer Perceval, the only British prime minister ever to be assassinated. She herself had toiled for two prime ministers and had turned down a salary of twenty-five thousand pounds a year from a banker in the City to follow Sparrowhawk to America.
Sparrowhawk, after telling Mrs. Rosebery to hold all calls and messages, closed the door to his private office, a comfortable room of paneled walls, shelves of hand-bound books, copies of impressionist paintings and for a desk, a Louis XV commode veneered in tulipwood and kingwood and mounted in ormolu. He opened the drapes. Magnificent Manhattan lay at his feet as London never had. The view was heart stopping. Cloudless blue sky over the Hudson River; tugboats towing ships into West Side piers; thousands of skyscraper windows on fire with fiery sunlight; and on the street below, slow-moving specks that were people, cars, buses. Invigorating, all of it.
He clapped his hands. To work.
Behind his desk, bifocals resting on the tip of his long nose, he read about Michelle Asama.
The source of his information: Management Systems Consultants, its worldwide investigative connections and computers. The cream of former law enforcement personnel made up the company’s board of directors, its roster of officers, its chief investigators. CIA, FBI, the Justice Department Strike Force, New York Police Department, Israel’s Mossad, Interpol, New Scotland Yard, U.S. State Department, the French Surety, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the security division of top American multinational corporations. Men who had once worked in these organizations now worked for MSC because it paid the highest salaries in the private intelligence field.
Money, naturally, was a factor in luring top talent; Sparrowhawk received $750,000 a year, plus bonuses and expenses. But pulling down three times the average law enforcement salary wasn’t the only reason that former policemen, spies and investigators brought valuable files, expertise and contacts to MSC. Those who came here or to other private security companies were players, men hooked on the game, who could not live without intrigue or dirty tricks or investigations.
Sparrowhawk had assembled a formidable staff, one quite capable of relieving Michelle Asama and anyone else of the burden of their secrets.
On to Miss Asama.
Early records missing. Sparrowhawk frowned. Convenient. The absence of verifiable fact always allowed speculation to run rampant. Born in Saigon, but information on much of her life destroyed or lost in Communist takeover in 1975. Spent time in Tokyo, where available records claim she entered the world on August 29, 1953. Father was Japanese shipowner, mother the daughter of French importer. Parents died in Singapore hotel fire when she was fourteen. Thereafter she divided her time between Saigon and father’s relatives in Tokyo.
Educated in Tokyo and Paris, with business courses in America (UCLA). Unmarried, no children, no criminal record. No available hospital records, indicating no major illnesses. She owned one-third of Pantheon Diamonds, money having been left to her by her father. A Japanese conglomerate, whose name Sparrowhawk recognized, owned the other two-thirds. So far, nothing out of the ordinary about the lady. Clean as the proverbial hound’s tooth.
Sparrowhawk sipped tea and continued reading. Pantheon dealt primarily in gems, rarely buying industrial diamonds. Miss Asama was known to the Diamond Trading Company, an organization that handled sales for the world’s principal diamond producers. Ten times a year the DTC invited buyers to sales, known as sights, held in London, Lucerne, Johannesburg, Antwerp, Tel Aviv. Only 230 customers a year qualified to attend the sights, no easy matter since South African syndicates, which controlled the diamond trade, had to approve each name. Miss Asama had qualified with ease.
Pantheon sold to the best-known jewelry designers in the world, as well as to exclusive shops in a dozen countries. The three-year-old company was a profit maker and apparently Miss Asama was the reason; her grasp of the business ranged from a knowledge of marketing to the cutting and polishing of stones. She was highly paid and was no figurehead. She actually ran the company.
Sparrowhawk paused to light a Turkish cigarette. Rare that a woman, and a young woman at that, rose so fast and so high in the Japanese business world, a totally male preserve. The Englishman used his gold pen to make a check mark on the report. Either the lady was setting records for efficiency, or she had friends in high places. She would not be the first woman to trade her favors for a boost up the corporate ladder.
And this too caught his eye: Michelle Asama had no personal credit cards. Not one. Company credit cards and a company expense account, but zero in the way of personal credit cards. Personal purchases apparently paid for in cash. Another check here.
Neither Sparrowhawk nor his wife Unity had personal credit cards. It was a protection against prying eyes, a way of keeping out of the computers of credit bureaus and banks, who too easily turned over information to anyone who asked for it.
MSC clients paid in cash, too. Along with oral agreements, this was a safety measure to keep information on security matters from falling into the wrong hands. Cash, for the most part, was untraceable. That made it a protection, one more brick in the wall of secrecy around Sparrowhawk and the people who hired him to guard their lives and property. Did this mean that Michelle Asama had something to hide?
Records indicated she had no trouble with U.S. Immigration, taxes, police or their Japanese counterparts. And yet …
Major. One word. How much of life had turned on just one word.
Nor could Sparrowhawk erase from his mind eyewitness accounts of her disposal of those two American halfwits a few days ago.
“A woman against two men?” Robbie had said. “No doubt about it, the lady’s good.”
“When you say good, how many years of practice are we talking about?”
“Well, major, I’d say at least five years. That’s how long it takes to learn basic karate techniques. And that’s if you practice three times a week minimum. You get your confidence from experience, no other way, and that lady sure sounds confident to me. I mean from what you tell me she could have killed those clowns, really done a number on them. But she did just enough, know what I mean? Now that’s cool. That’s really being in charge.”
He paused. Then, “If what those three girls told you is true, especially the part about the kiai, the lady, whoever she is, is really i
nto karate.”
Sparrowhawk said, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but would you say that her kiai, as you call it, indicates a deep commitment to this karate business? Does it make her special in any way?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Would it make her some sort of samurai? Remember, she could have seriously harmed those louts, but didn’t. From what I can gather, samurai have some sort of higher calling in the martial arts. Or are supposed to have.”
“Hey, anything’s possible. I mean you’re right, she could be a samurai or related to one, I suppose. In the old days Japan had a lot of women samurai. They killed, too. Just like men. Sometimes they were better. They could get close to a man where another man couldn’t, know what I mean?”
“Quite.”
“Yes, sir. Tough ladies, those Japanese.”
Yes, thought Sparrowhawk, remembering how the Chihara women had died when he, Robbie and Dorian had come for them. In a lifetime of soldiering he had never seen anyone, man or woman, die with more courage. A mother and her two daughters. Ready to meet death. Death always came too early or too late. That’s how it had been with Sparrowhawk’s family and that’s how it had been in his life as a soldier. It came sooner or later, but it always came, this door of darkness, this great unknown, this tragic last act.
It always came.
11
NORTHERN ENGLAND IS A harsh and rugged region split north to south by the mountains. To the west lie the high peaks of the Cumbrians, and to the east the windy and desolate North York moors. The natural barriers of mountains and moors form obstacles to communication and exchange; they foster provincialism and a fierce loyalty to one’s own town or village. In the north one finds a robust national patriotism, one stronger than any existing elsewhere in the British Isles.
Northern people have always been fighters. They took up swords against the Vikings and the Scots and in the War of the Roses, the long struggle between the great families of York and Lancaster for the throne of England. The Industrial Revolution began here, with children working nineteen-hour days for a penny a week in “dark, satanic mills.” Class wars between factory owner and worker found gritty and unyielding northerners on both sides, refusing to bend or compromise.
Trevor Wells Sparrowhawk was born in northern England’s key city of Manchester, in a row of cheap terrace houses darkened by smoke from steel and textile mills. His father, a schoolteacher, named him after a grandfather who was a nineteenth-century trade unionist and H. G. Wells. His mother was a seamstress and a socialist, forever opposing the capitalists who sweated northerners in unsafe foundries and factories.
While Trevor’s father gave him a lifelong love of literature, it was his mother who taught him that law and justice did not exist, that the world was governed by might or mercy.
In the north, a boy became a man at an early age. By fifteen Sparrowhawk was in his third year in the steel mills, a stocky, strong lad determined to survive. Those who didn’t survive were his relatives, friends and neighbors, dead from mine explosions, consumption, starvation, black lung. Strikes, hunger marches and massive rallies failed to prevent more dying. When Britain went to war with Germany for the second time, the dying only increased. A 1941 Luftwaffe bombing raid, aimed at Manchester’s factories, killed Sparrowhawk’s parents and two sisters, leaving him with no reason to remain in a city that had brought so much death into his life.
Lying about his age, he enlisted in the army. “Not to worry, lad,” a cheery lance corporal said to him. “It’s war and the devil knows it. He’ll make room in hell for the likes of you and me. Besides, if you’re the right sort you’ll come to love war, especially if you’re winnin’. ’Tis the excitement what matters, nothin’ else. Neither the good nor bad of it. Just the excitement.”
Sparrowhawk was never to hear a better reason for war’s appeal to him. For the first time in his life power, a gun, lay in his hand. The pleasure was as exquisite as reading Shelley alone by a quiet lake.
He took to soldiering with enthusiasm, excelling during training and showing a particular combination of discipline and independence that brought him to the attention of the Special Air Services Brigade, a newly formed commando unit. It was a secret and elite corps, specializing in hit-and-run raids and in pinpointing targets behind enemy lines for RAF bombers. More choosy about its recruits than any other branch of service, the SAS trained in four-man teams for the most dangerous operations of the war. Sparrowhawk’s SAS unit was shipped to North Africa, where it teamed with the Long Range Desert Group to destroy hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft on the ground. The commandos also demolished tons of badly needed German war supplies.
Next, the SAS was sent to Sicily, France and Holland. So effective were they that Hitler ordered them hunted down and disposed of at all cost. Ensuring that SAS men who fell into German hands would face torture and certain execution. In a Normandy village a French double agent betrayed Sparrowhawk’s four-man team to the Gestapo, who cut out the tongue of one commando and broke his spine with iron bars. A second was set afire in the courtyard in front of Sparrowhawk’s cell.
But before Sparrowhawk and the remaining team member could be disposed of, a British bombing raid inflicted heavy damage on the village, flattening buildings, including the jail, and freeing the pair.
“Toddle on ahead, mate,” Sparrowhawk said to his friend. “A matter to dispose of first, then I’ll catch up to you.”
“We’ll both dispose of it,” the commando said.
Lacking the papers and weapons, they hid until midnight, then made their way to the edge of town, to the small farm where the treacherous double agent lived. Moving from shadow to shadow they slipped into the barn to wait. They knew the traitor’s routine. Dinner, followed by Camembert cheese and apple brandy, then a trip to the barn to tend cows and a pair of horses. Hungry, filthy, red eyed from lack of sleep, the commandos looked around for weapons.
An hour later the traitor, relaxed and smoking a long clay pipe, strolled into the barn. Sparrowhawk, wielding a sickle taken from behind the door, beheaded him and stuck his head on a pitchfork. The grisly trophy was left standing in a stall and facing a mare about to foal.
“Nietzsche’s Gentlemen,” the SAS’s detractors called it. A private undisciplined collection of thugs and psychopaths quick to do the dirty work in the name of king or queen. Sparrowhawk, who stayed on with the regiment after the war, knew better. There was no more disciplined group of soldiers in the world than the SAS; its standards were so high that troopers with years of experience in other regiments failed to qualify for the SAS no matter how hard they tried.
Snobbery was another reason for the criticism; the SAS had little respect for rank, an attitude unacceptable to regular army officers in a class-ridden society. SAS officers were respected only on the basis of performance, not commission. The unit’s secrecy also lent credence to much of the criticism leveled at it. But secrecy was necessary, for the quiet wars now being fought against communism were delicate exercises in edged diplomacy and killing.
Quiet wars protected oil rights, gold mines, shipping lanes, friendly leaders. With cold efficiency, Sparrowhawk and the SAS plied their trade in Malaya, Borneo, Africa, South Arabia. It was an exciting and dangerous time and Sparrowhawk was never happier. He had found his Holy Grail, the beige SAS beret and cloth badge bearing the well-known winged dagger.
When he was thirty-five he met and married Unity Palethorpe, the sister of an SAS trooper, a shy woman one foot taller. From the beginning they loved each other deeply. She was intelligent, reserved and devoted, seeing him as heroic and sensitive. They shared a love of books, animals, Haydn and a reverence for the monarchy. “We married and lived happily ever after,” Sparrowhawk said of her, quoting Churchill’s description of his own marriage.
They had one child, a daughter Valerie, who, with her golden hair and fair skin, Sparrowhawk called his piece of the sun. He loved them both, the tall, plain woman and the little girl who delighted
in wearing the decorations awarded to her father in secret and unpublicized SAS ceremonies. It pleased him that among his daughter’s first words were “Free beer,” the SAS recall code that drew the men back to base to pick up uniforms and equipment for a mission. But her mother stopped the child from saying “Double tap,” the SAS code for two shots in the head.
For Sparrowhawk the only release he needed from his work was time with Unity, the two strolling arm in arm through the woods or along a country road while he told her of the intrigues, betrayals and assassinations concocted in Whitehall’s corridors of power, to be dealt with by “Nietzsche’s Gentlemen,” often at the cost of their lives.
“You’ve got clowns in Whitehall,” he told her, “who paint their damned faces red with our blood.”
That’s when he spoke to her of those who had failed “to beat the clock,” who had been killed and their names inscribed on the SAS regimental clock tower in Hereford.
Sparrowhawk said to his wife, “I’m beginning to believe that all of life is a preparation for death. Can’t say as I like the idea. Makes God out to be a witless ass if he can’t think of a more clever ending than that.”
In his forties, Sparrowhawk, now a major, was relieved from active duty and assigned to administrative duties at SAS headquarters. Restless and ill at ease behind a desk, he soon tired of working with recruits and greeting members of Parliament on inspection tours. He was a soldier; he craved the excitement of combat. But combat was a young man’s job. Sparrowhawk endured desk duty as long as he could, for less than a year. Then he resigned to work for a London security firm composed of ex-SAS men like himself. The firm, however, went bankrupt and Sparrowhawk, with a family to support, was forced to work as little more than a hired muscle.