Chameleon

I

It was still dark when Marza awoke — that last minute or two before dawn when the sun was still caught behind the church spire out on Venezia and the first sanguine fingers of the day stretched out between the buildings and reached across the lagoon toward them. His wife lay beside him, asleep on her side, her flaming red hair fanned out on the yellow satin pillowcase, and for several minutes, his eyes half open, he admired her as she slept.

Hey, Marza, you lucky bastard, he thought. You have it all and this time it is all working. It is a good time for you, the best time of your life.

His eyes caught a glimpse of the silk nightgown lying on the floor where she had thrown it the night before, and he laughed very quietly to himself. They had been married for ten years, and she still surprised and delighted him with her recklessness in bed. Milena de la Rovere, the tempestuous actress, the red-headed tigress who had driven every director in Europe and Hollywood crazy, yet with him, after ten years, she was still his temptress and his lover.

Looking at the tattered nightgown, he remembered her kneeling over him on the bed, yelling raucously, at the top of her lungs, all the English ‘feelthy words’ he had taught her, and then popping the thread-thin straps at her shoulders and pulling the champagne silk gown down slowly, painfully slowly, over her breasts, until finally they could be held no longer and burst free, the nipples erect and waiting for him as she continued taunting him, patiently wiggling out of the gown and letting it drop around her knees, swinging one leg free and straddling him with it, then tearing the gown from the other leg and throwing it carelessly across the room.

‘Three hundred thousand lire,’ he had bellowed, laughing, ‘and she treats it like a Holiday Inn towel!’

‘The sheet Holeeday Eenn,’ she yelled back and started to laugh too. Then she leaned over Marza, and taking one of his nipples between her teeth, she began to move very slowly around, and he felt it get erect in her mouth before she began to suck it and then she looked at him. ‘Va bene?’ she asked mischievously.

‘Molto bene...’

She slowly ran her tongue from his nipple down to his navel, ringing it with her tongue. ‘E permesso...’

It was a whisper, and she concentrated on his stomach while awaiting the answer.

Marza groaned and then said, almost as quietly, ‘Don’t mention it.’

He lay on his back and smiled at her for a long time, feeling the tips of her fingernails, as light as butterfly wings, stroking his abdomen. Then her tongue, just as vague, a sense rather than a feeling. This was for him. It was a thing she loved to do to start things off. Then her lips brushed across the tip of his penis and he rose to her and then she enveloped him and began humming, a deep monotone, and Marza was lost. She seemed to be everywhere. With her tongue, her fingers, her lips. He began to move in rhythm with her, an almost involuntary response to her erotic overture. He could feel his heart pulsing in his throat. His fingers searched her lair, then she began to move her head and the moaning increased and he could feel the deep rumble in her throat vibrating against him as he grew harder and harder.

‘II tempo si è fermato per me’—’A small death,’ he breathed. ‘Time has stopped for me.’

And she answered, muffled, ‘Time does not exist.’

And then there was no more talking, and finally, when he felt he was about to explode, he slid down, pulling her up toward him as he did, and he ran his hand lightly down her stomach, felt her hair, then he squeezed her between two fingers and began moving his hand in slow circles and then both of them were moving and she was stroking him, still, drawing him closer and closer to her until he felt her fire envelope him. Her arms slid around his back and clutched him and as he was about to burst inside of her he chanted, over and over, ‘I give it up.

give it up... give it up...’ and finally, I love you.’

When they were married, the international gossips had given them a few months, a year at best. She was twenty and had been one of Italy’s brightest movie stars since she was seventeen. Marza was thirty-eight and was making a comeback. He had just won his third race in a row after having been written off as a washout by most of the sports writers and sponsors in the business. For three years he had been considered unbankable, a failed driver it thirty-five.

Then Noviliano, the great automobile maker, had come to him and offered him a fresh shot. A new car, experimental, temperamental, but insanely fast and stable. ‘It needs a man of experience,’ Noviliano told him. ‘I cannot trust this machine to some youngster.’

It was the beginning of the most successful relationship in racing history. Noviliano and Marza and the Aquila 333, a revolutionary automobile with heated baffles on the rear deck to ‘boil the air’ for stability, a cutback design, and a unique alcohol jet-injection fuel system that gave the car a fifty-mile range on everything else on the track, reducing its pit stops by at least a third.

It was a bitch, make no mistake, and Marza drove it like he was part of the frame. Nobody could touch him, and he was absolutely fearless, a man who scorned death. In an interview he once said, ‘I have seen death, two, three times, sitting on the fence waving at me. I say, “Fuck you, man, not yet. You don’t get Marza this time.” I think, if you are afraid of death, you should maybe be a cashier. This is not your game.’

When he met her, he was still on the way back up, and they were saying he would quit or be dead in a year, and besides, she was only twenty and how could he hope to keep her when every male between puberty and senility wanted her?

Marza and the Aquila 333 made racing history, and the car was to spawn one of the most exciting automobile ventures in modern times.

The faster her star rose, the faster he drove. For every hit film she made, he took another chequered flag. There was no competition between them. He delighted in her success and she saw in Marza what few others were ever permitted to see, a champion in every way, who loved her and respected her and treated her as a friend and a lover, not as a movie star. Others were intimidated by her beauty and her success. ‘Intimidation’ was a word he did not know. It was not part of his vocabulary. For Marza, intimidation was unthinkable.

And she adored him for it.

He drove with frightening skill, a man possessed, until Milena finally asked him to quit. He was rich beyond all dreams. There was nothing else for him to prove. And besides, Noviliano wanted him to work on a new idea, a new car that would have speed and grace and drive like a champion with a remarkable jet-injection engine that ‘would triple normal gas mileage. Not a racing car, but a Street car employing all the commercially practical aspects of the racer. Marza’s job was to test it and test it and test it until it was perfect.

The car was to be called the Aquila Milena because, as the Professor — the great Di Fiere, its designer — said, the car was like a rare and beautiful woman. It ‘was a tribute to Marza, having the car named after the thing he loved most in life. And what a car it was — it just might revolutionize the industry. The patent on the injection system alone could make them all millionaires again.

So he quit racing. And she quit acting. He found the perfect place for their new home, a knoll outside Malcontenta, on the edge of Laguna Veneta, overlooking her beloved Venezia, and he built a Greek villa for her, just twenty miles from the factory at Padua.

Turning his head, he gazed through the arched doorway, beyond the terrace and across the lagoon, toward Venezia, watching the sun edge from behind the church spire and slowly bathe the room with a translucent red glow. The best time of day for him. Always had been. He felt good. Today would be the perfect day to test the Milena. After all, he was taking its namesake to Monte Carlo for New Year’s Eve. Running the initial test would be his New Year’s present to himself.

She moved beside him, rolling over on her back; the satin sheet fell away and she lay sleeping before him, naked. He marvelled at her body, as he always had, longed for it again, but dawn was definitely not her time of day. A chill draft swept through the doors, moving the lace drapes in slow motion, as though they were underwater. He pulled the sheet gently back over her so she would not get cold.

Ten years she had given him, and there was not a moment he was sorry for. Grazie,’ he said softly. ‘ Tante grazie.’

He leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek, and then, after one final look at the blazing sunrise, went in to take a shower and dress. And before he left he went back and leaned over her and kissed her once more on the cheek and she opened one eye and smiled up at him and said, it, her imperfect English, Doan drive too fass.’

II

When Falmouth was first assigned the job by his section chief he made a list. It took him several days. First he wrote out his objectives, then he broke the job down into segments: on one side of the paper he listed the segments in chronological order; on the other side he listed the same segments in the order of the risk involved, starting with the high risk first. Then he very carefully edited them, combining both lists into what he felt was the safest and best way to execute the assignment.

They had provided excellent intelligence reports. Everything he had asked for. Plans of the car. A detailed map of the plant showing all the security positions. Photographs of the track itself. MO sheets on Marza, Noviliano Di Fieri and the three relief drivers, sheets which emphasized their personal as well as their work habits. And a rundown on the town of Padua: picturesque, highly provincial, known riot only for the Aquila Motor Works but also for the basilica of Sant’ Antonio and the Giotto frescoes, which attracted visitors from all over the world.

That was good. A tourist place. And there would be pilgrimages there, to start the New Year right. Much easier to operate, and it provided good opportunity for a cover.

It had taken them a month to put all that together. He planned the operation in Paris, in a small tourist hotel on the rue Fresnel, just below the rue de Longchamp and half a block from the river. It was near the heart of things but still quiet. He converted the flat into a private war room, with maps on the walls, train and plane schedules, photographs of the principals, plans of the car and the factory and the town.

He began by studying his road maps and transportation schedules. Falmouth put first priority on getting in and out of a place. Like any good intelligence agent, he put self-preservation on top of the list. After that he would concentrate on the job itself.

From Paris he could fly to Nice, then take the night train along the coast and across to Milan. There he would get a car and drive to Padua, a distance of perhaps one hundred and twenty-five miles.

Getting out would be more ticklish. Once the job was done, he would have to move fast without attracting too much attention. He would drive to Verona, take the train north through Trento and the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck and from there to Munich. Then he would fly back to Paris.

The only risky part would be the drive from Padua to Verona. But that was only forty-five miles, an easy hour’s drive. Hell, it would be an hour before the shock wore off, and If the job went the way he planned, nobody would be looking for him anyway.

He fed it all into the computer in his head, letting it simmer. revising the list each night, then memorizing it and destroying the written copy, and starting his emendations in the morning. Each time he revised the list, he memorized it and then destroyed it. Falmouth had been in the business a long time; he did not make mistakes.

It took ten days to devise what he felt was the perfect plan.

The toughest part of the job was getting to the car; plant security at Padua was impossible. Oh, it could be done, but the risk factor was high. There had to be a better way. He sat for hours studying the blueprints of the factory, then poring over the plans of the car itself, examining every part of the machine and the list of subcontractors.

And suddenly there it was, the perfect answer. An elaborate electronic computer system had been devised for the test runs. Instruments built into the dashboard would immediately provide digital readouts on every key part of the automobile, with the same readings transmitted to a board in the control tower at the track. Memory for the system was contained in a mini-computer the size of a small stereo tape deck located between the firewall of the car and the cockpit. At the press of a button, the digital readout would reveal speed which could instantly be converted into miles per gallon, miles elapsed, average speed per mile, gallons remaining, oil pressure, even stress on certain parts of the car, like the suspension system, the transmission and the front and rear axles.

It was a sophisticated system but not particularly revolutionary. General Motors had offered similar digital readout computers on its larger cars for more than a year. This computer was being modified to provide specific information on the Aquila Milena and was subcontracted to a small electronics specialist in Marseilles. There was little security in Marseilles. Nothing the firm was doing was a secret. It was relatively easy to get a schematic of the General Motors system from a dealer in Paris. For weeks, Falmouth pored over these plans until he knew the system perfectly.

The memory was contained on wafer-thin boards eight inches high and thirty inches long. Each of these boards contained dozens of electronic chips no larger than a fingernail. Now Falmouth put his knowledge of explosives to use. He designed and then made a series of tiny C-4 bombs, of what the French call plastique, which were no larger than the head of a match and flat and could be attached to the memory boards, and dabbed with paint. He interconnected the explosives by thin wires to the wires leading to the digital counter. He made up several long strands of wire containing a very thin phosphorus fuse that would run from the mini-computer to the gas tank and to the sensors in the roll bar and tie rods of the front axle. They were set to explode when the speedometer hit 90 miles an hour. At that speed the tie rods, which kept the front wheels in line, would be blown apart and the car would go out of control. The gas tank, too, would go a second or two later.

It took Falmouth more than a month to get the explosives ready. It was dangerous business, even for an expert like him. But getting into the small factory and planting the bombs on the memory boards was a piece of cake. He flew into Marseilles on the evening plane; shortly after midnight he picked the lock on a skylight, lowered himself into the plant and found the boards, lined up neatly in the testing room. The check slips told him what he needed to know: all of them had been approved and were ready for delivery but one, and it was not critical to his operation.

It took him hours to complete the job. He left the plant at a few minutes before five and returned on the morning flight back to Paris.

So far, so good.

He settled down to refine the overall plan. He had three more weeks. He grew a moustache and had his hair restyled, but he did not like it. Not long enough. He bought a shaggy black wig to cover his red hair, and the night before he left, he dyed the moustache black. He chose only casual clothes, the kind a free-lance photographer would wear: a pair of tan corduroy stacks, a white turtleneck sweater, a suede jacket, and hiking shoes with platforms and interior soles that added almost two inches to his normal five-eleven.

He was feeling good, very good, the morning he left.

When he arrived at the terminal in Milan, Falmouth went straight to the American Express office. A young gigolo in a formless jacket, with a narrow tie hanging from his open collar, peered at him through aviator sunglasses and said, ‘Si?’

Falmouth smiled, his casual, boyish, photographer’s smile. Buon giorno, signore. Scusi, c ‘è una lettera per me, Harry Spettro?’

The creep sighed and said in a bored voice, ‘Un momento,’ pulled open a drawer and leafed leisurely through the letters.

He looked up at Falmouth. ‘S-p-e-t-t-r-o?’

‘Si.’

‘Identificazione, per favore.’

Falmouth produced a fake driver’s license and passport. The young man’s eyes flicked back and forth between the picture in the passport and Falmouth. Satisfied, he nodded and handed the letter to him.

‘Mile grazie,’ Falmouth said with a grin and, under his breath, added, ‘You little prick.’

‘Prego,’ the kid said — Don’t mention it.

He went outside and tore open the envelope. Inside was a key and a brief message: ‘Locker 7541.’

He found the locker, took the heavy, flat leather case that was inside and placed it in his own suitcase and then went to the men’s room, where he checked the contents of the case. Everything he needed was there, including the car keys and another simple message: ‘Black Fiat 224, license XZ 592, terminal parking lot, row 7, section 2, ticket under spare tire.’ So far, it had gone well. He drove straight to Padua and checked into a small hotel.

It took him several days, longer than he had planned, to find a vacant room with a clear view of the ten-kilometre concrete test rink. He had almost decided to abandon the project until after New Year’s when he spotted the house from a pub. It sat up on a rise, back from the road, a three-story building facing due east.

High enough and aimed right. Now all he had to do was arrange to get a room on the backside. That was tougher than he thought. It was finally arranged only after some heated negotiations with the woman who owned the place, a fiery Italian widow who at first slammed the door in his face, then threatened to call the police if he persisted. But when he told her that he was there to photograph the basilica for Paris- Match, and that the local hotels were full, and then offered her what must easily have been ten times what such a room normally would rent for, she finally relented.

Her son was skiing in Austria for the holidays. Perhaps his room would be suitable. But she demanded quiet — no radio after nine o’clock and no visitors. She was a good Catholic and would not have the neighbours talking. The location was perfect, less than a mile from the track with a completely unobstructed view, and although the room was fairly small, it was comfortable and clean, its walls covered with photographs of skiers, skiing posters, maps of famous ski runs, and patches from famous resorts The son was more than an aficionado, he was a fanatic.

A dormer window faced the track. That was good, Falmouth thought. It would be almost impossible for anyone to see him from the Street and it provided a small shelf to work from. He locked the door and immediately went to work.

The case he had brought from Milan contained a Bausch & Lomb Discoverer telescope with a 15x to 60x constant focus zoom lens and a minimum field of forty feet at a thousand yards. It weighed less than six pounds with the tripod and was only seventeen and a half inches long.

The rifle was even more impressive. He had never seen one quite like it. It was nothing more than a barrel and firing chamber with a skeletonised aluminium stock, and it was thirty-three inches long, including the flash suppressor and silencer. The tripod was also aluminium. It was fitted with a laser scope he knew to be pinpoint accurate up to fifteen hundred yards. A five-shot clip dropped down below the firing chamber, fully loaded with 7.62-mm steel-point explosive shells. The whole rig didn’t weigh more than ten pounds.

Hair-trigger. The heat from his finger almost popped it.

Neat. Everything he had asked for, plus a little bonus. The rifle was strictly for backup. If the C-4 explosives didn’t work, he would have to make the shot — and what a shot it would be. Six hundred yards at an automobile moving 90 miles an hour on a ninety-degree path.

Sure, Falmouth.

He laughed to himself and shook his head. What the hell, it was strictly insurance anyway.

He set up the tripod and zeroed it and zoomed in on the entrance gate to the track. He could read the hinges on the gate, a helluva scope. He set up the rifle beside it, calibrated its scope and sighted it, and watched it change focus as he slid his aim up the track.

Beautiful.

I hope to God I don’t have to use it.

Now all he had to do was wait.

III

The office was empty when Marza arrived. It was a little after seven and the staff usually did not arrive until eight. He made a pot of coffee and checked the weather. Then he went to his office and changed into his racing gear: cotton long johns; a black fire-resistant jump suit with a red slash down one sleeve and the number 333 in blazing red across the back and the Aquila patch over his heart with the single word ‘UNO’ under it; white sweat socks and Adidas jogging shoes. He stuffed a pair of pigskin racing gloves in the knee pocket of the jump suit. And when he was ready he walked down the hail from his office to the private door to the garage and went inside.

The odour was an aphrodisiac to Marza. It wasn’t the smell of gasoline and alcohol and engine oil, it was what they represented, and he stood in the dark for a minute or two, his mind gliding back in time. There had been a lot of great days in his life and he savoured the fact that today would definitely be another one. Finally he turned the lights on.

The car sat alone in the middle of the garage. It was spotless, waxed like a mirror, and absolutely stunning, a low-slung sedan that was a masterpiece of styling, an aerodynamic marvel, its hood tapered and louvered, the top swept back, to avoid what Di Fiere called the aspetto di carro funebre, the look of the hearse, and the lines rolling gently back from the front fenders to the Ferrari-type rear deck. Di Fiere bad not tried to improve on that, ‘One does not improve on perfection, one accepts it,’ he said.

The instrument panel was filled literally from door to door with electronic gadgets. That would be Di Fiere’s job, operating the various control buttons which would give the observation tower’s mirror computer an instant readout of the car’s performance, one which would be printed simultaneously on a paper tape.

It gleamed like a jewel, even under the fluorescent lights, its jet-black coat disturbed only by the two thin bright-red racing stripes down either side because those were Marza’s colours and this car would be his someday and because ultimately he would be the one who would say, ‘It is ready,’ and they would go to the market and find out just how good they were.

Marza walked slowly around the car and swept his hand lightly over the roof, patted it affectionately and whispered, Va bene, signora, siamo soli —lei io e il Professore. Facciamogli vedere qualche cosa? Okay, lady, it’s just you and me and the Professor going to be out there, let’s show them something!

Then he went out into the brisk, clear, cold morning. There was just a breath of wind and that pleased Marza. In an hour or so, there would be none at all. Conditions were perfect. He rubbed his hands together and then started what had become a ritual. He walked the track, just as he had walked Le Mans and Raintree and Monza before every race, looking for cracks in the pavement, slick spots, picking up pebbles and branches and throwing them over the inside wall The ten-kilometre walk usually took him about an hour. Marza didn’t like surprises.

Signora Forti, Falmouth’s temporary landlady, awakened him at seven o’clock with coffee and a roll, the least she could do for what he was paying.

Grazie. Scusi, non sono vestito,’ he said, apologizing for not being dressed, and holding the door just wide enough to take the tray.

He put on pants and a T-shirt and then took the telescope and rifle out of the closet, setting them up on the tape marks he had laid out on the dormer sill. He put a tablet of graph paper and a small pocket calculator beside the scope. He had already calculated and programmed the distance between two marks on the back stretch of the track going into the far turn. By simply punching the calculator when the car passed the first mark, and then hitting it when it passed the second mark, he’d get the calculator to read out the exact speed. If the car topped 90 and nothing happened, he would have to do the shot. He took a sip of coffee and casually loosened the set screw on the rifle tripod and sighted through it.

He switched to the scope and zoomed up to full power, saw the familiar black jump suit with the splash of red on the sleeve. He could even read the word under the Aquila patch: ‘UNO.’

And the face — that dark, intense face with the granite-hard jaw and the unruly shock of black hair — Marza!

According to latest information, Marza would be in Monte Carlo with his wife until after the New Year. The first few tests were to be done by the relief drivers. Falmouth’s hand began to tremble slightly as he realized that h was about to kill Marza

— the idol of every woman, the hero of every daydreaming schoolboy, the fantasy of every man in Italy. Marza was a national hero — no, he was an international hero. Someday there would be statues of him in town squares. Everywhere he went, crowds gathered to see him, touch him, to chant: ‘Marza, Uno

Marza, Uno...’

This wasn’t part of the deal. This was definitely not part of the deal.

What was it Jack Hawkins kept saying in Bridge on the River Kwai? ‘There’s always the unexpected.’

Jesus, was that a parable! After twenty years in the business he should have known it was going too well. Anyway, the car was programmed for destruction, and that was bloody goddamn well that. But if the C-4 failed, if he had to take the shot, that was different. It was a tough enough shot, and with Marza behind the wheel...

He lit a cigarette and watched the racing king walk briskly all the way around the long track. And when Marza was through and had gone back into the factory, Falmouth dismounted the rifle. That was it. If the bombs failed, Marza would walk away from it.

Hell, Marza was one of his heroes, for God’s sake. He was not about to kill him with a gun. In fact, after twenty years in the business, he was hoping that, for once, for just this once, he would fail.

IV

Giuseppe di Fiere, who had so masterfully designed the Aquila 333 and the Milena, arrived at seven-fifty, his white hair tangled from the wind. Di Fiere was seventy-one years old and he drove his modified Aquila Formula One with the top down, rain, shine or snow, every day, the eighteen miles from his casa di campagna to the factory.

He had never been a driver. It was a failed dream, and it had died hard. He had started racing motorbikes when he was fourteen. By the time he was sixteen he was already making a name for himself. Then one Sunday afternoon on a dirt track at Vincenzion, coming out of the esses, he lost it. He could feel the bike going out from under him and he was down before he could react, his right leg trapped under the rear wheel, the bike, its engine still growling as it skittered crazily along the hard-packed track, dragging him along for fifty yards, grinding the leg into a formless, boneless mass before it began tumbling over and disintegrating insanely around him.

The doctors in the field tent took off the leg just below the knee, what there was left of it.

It had cost him his leg and his taste for driving, but not his love of racing, that was a part of his psyche, a blood dream, and so he did the next best thing, he began designing race cars. He studied engineering, became a mechanic for a while, studied aerodynamics and worked in the design department of the de Havilland airplane factory in England. While still in his twenties, he knew every nut and bolt and design element on every winning automobile ever made, tie scoured Europe for old relics and began restoring them. Before he designed his first successful car at the age of thirty-fo.ir, he was already an automotive genius.

And his cars won. He designed for the best — Ferrari, Maserati, Porsche. Now he had gorse full circle with the greatest of them all, Noviliano.

Marza was very special to Di Fiere. Perhaps he saw in Marza the son he never had or the driver he never was. Whatever. He agonized every time Marza was on the track, suffered every injury with him, vicariously won every time Marza won. He had educated Marza as a father would a son. For three years he had shared with Marza—and with nobody else, not even with the padrone, Noviliano himself — every agonizing detail, every heartbreak, every breakthrough, every triumph and failure in his pursuit of the perfect car. When he described it, even before it was committed to paper, it was as if he were talking about the woman he loved, describing her temperaments, her joys, her displeasures. He even told Marza how to talk to her, Out there on the track, so she would obey him and perform properly.

It was his fantasy come true: to have the resources of the finest automobile maker in the world to build his baby, and the best driver to test it. And because they were both passionate men, Marza understood the old man and knew that this car was no bitch, no flashy tramp; this car vas a lady — elegant, beautiful, the perfect champion. So Di Fiere had named it Milena, after the one thing Marza loved more than racing.

Noviliano arrived last, and predictably so. He was a man of tradition, disciplined and habitual. He arrived at the factory, six days a week, at precisely nine o’clock, a large man, almost six-five, his weight wavering around three hundred pounds. Yet everything about him was impeccable. He wore an impeccable blue three-piece suit, with an impeccable red carnation in the lapel, and an impeccable white shirt with the perfect blue-and-red Countess Mara tie_ His steel-gray hair and beard were trimmed impeccably. Nobody had ever seen Noviliano in anything less formal, or his hair mussed or his tie pulled down.

Elegance was Noviliano’s trademark. He was the perfect playboy, and was, in his own way, as good an advertisement for his cars as was Marza.

He was carrying a wine cooler in one hand and three champagne goblets in the other. He didn’t say a word, he just came in, put the bucket on a workbench ,took the bottle of Dom Pérignon from it and popped the cork. He filled each of the glasses, handed one to Marza and the other to the Professor. A hint of a smile played at the corners of his lips but it was almost obscured by his beard.

Marza turned to the Professor. ‘Did you see that, signore?

Hunh? I think it was a smile. Yes, by God, it was definitely a smile. The great padrone has finally smiled.’ Laughing, he raised his glass. The three goblets chimed as they tapped.

‘Salute,’ Noviliano said, ‘e grazie.’

Marza and Di Fiere each took a sip and put their glasses back on the workbench.

‘I’ll be watching from the control booth,’ Noviliano said.

He slapped Marza on the back and kissed Di Fiere on the cheek, then the two men got in the car and buckled up. Marza turned on the ignition and cranked it up and pulled the stick down into ‘D,’ and the Milena rolled smoothly out on to the track.

‘What do you say, Professor?’ Marza asked.

The old man leaned back, smiling ‘with great contentment. ‘Ready. Finally ready.’

Marza dropped it into the ‘1’ position and started off. ‘We’ll take her around once just to get warmed up,’ he told the tower.

The Milena moved Out smoothly, the green lights on the digital reader changing constantly as the Professor punched buttons, checking speed, mileage, engine heat, stress. Marza took it around the track at 35 miles an hour. The engine had been broken in on the bench and it cruised quietly, responding instantly to Marza’s commands. He let go of the wheel for a moment, marvelling at its stability, then did the back stretch of the track, driving with one finger on the wheel. He jiggled the wheel, felt the car respond, stopped and felt it settle back almost instantly.

‘It drives itself,’ he said.

The Professor smiled. ‘Grazie.’

They started the tests. The car performed magnificently twisting through the slaloms at 35, 40 and 45. Marza was amazed at the stability of the passenger sedan. Di Fiere had made the conversion from racing car to street car with immaculate precision, losing as little as possible in the transition. The Professor was keeping a running tab on the mileage, and the car was averaging better than 60 mpg, dropping off to 45 or 46 when accelerating. On the straights at 50, the digital counter zipped up to 70.

Buonissimo,’ he said with great satisfaction as he continued to push buttons and carry on an almost whispered conversation with the tape recorder, making suggestions which he would later evaluate when he listened to the tapes. He noted a tremor in the front suspension at 40 mph which he attributed to a slight overbalance for torque; he suggested increasing the alcohol mixture in the injection system to increase the mileage three or four mpg; he made note of a whistle in the window of the right door, which developed at about 52 mph.

Occasionally it was Marza who threw’ in an observation: ‘We should think about softening the springs on her, they’re too tight now. She rides a little too hard.’

But mostly he drove and talked to the car under his breath and silently revelled in the fact that he was the first person to drive a car which might someday be driven by millions of people.

Then he felt the Milena was ready t show some stuff. ‘I’m a little bored with this,’ he told the tower, ‘we’re going to try some accelerations.’

‘Good, let’s see what she’s got!’ Di Fiere said.

V

Falmouth was glued to the superscope, his fingers punching the ‘Start’ and ‘Stop’ buttons as the Milena passed the markers, his eyes flicking from the eyepiece to the calculator, checking the speed. It had gone as high as 40 once, then dropped back down.

Jesus, isn’t he ever going to let it out he thought.

Then he thought, maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll just do some preliminaries and save the fast tests for someone else.

Sure.

This is Marza, remember, the fastest driver in the world. He’s going to open it up. Before he’s finished today he’s going to have that son of a bitch wide open.

The car pulled to a stop at the far end of the track, pointed toward Falmouth. It suddenly took off, pulling out smoothly. It passed Falmouth’s markers and he checked the speed.

25

35.

Okay, he’s into acceleration tests. That would have been zero to 30.

He’s getting restless.

Falmouth watched the car move around the track to the start. It slowed to a stop again. Maybe this time, Falmouth thought. Maybe now he’ll go for it, push it on up there, over 85 mph.

Falmouth was chain-smoking now and there was a thin line of sweat high on his forehead, along his hairline.

The car moved out again. This time Marza did zero to 40. Then he seemed to pick up speed going around the near curve. Falmouth checked it out on the back-stretch markers. He was doing 65 and seemed to be picking up speed as he approached the far curve.

Marza drove the Milena through the far curve of the track at 70 miles an hour, and it felt as if he were driving on the flats.

‘Fantastico! he exclaimed, pulling into the straight. ‘Let’s goose her up a little — what do you say, Professor?’

Di Fiere beamed. ‘You bet! Let’s pinch the lady’s ass, shall we? Slowly, now — don’t force her!’

Marza raised an eyebrow, as if to say, ‘Are you telling me how to drive a car?’ and when the Professor pulled his head down into his shoulders in embarrassment and said ‘Scusi,’ Marza laughed and assured him, ‘No offense, my friend, it’s the excitement.’

Di Fiere stared at the digital readout as Marza began to let the Milena loose, watching it climb fast by tenths of a mile.

75.5.

80.

80.6.

82.

85.

85.7.

88.

89.

On the front stretch, Falmouth had checked it out at 62.8, watched it zap through the near turn without even dropping a tenth of a mile an hour, and then zoom into the back stretch.

Now he watched as the digital readout climbed over 80.

Good God, he’s going for it.

The back stretch swept under Marza and Di Fiere as the car moved out, climbing steadily without faltering, the digital reader flicking faster and faster.

82 ... Falmouth’s mouth turned to cotton as his fingers nimbly punched away at the calculator. Sweat dribbled down the side of his face and, annoyed, he swept it away with the back of his hand.

89.9.

‘E stupendo! Marza yelled.

They hit 90 and the C-4 went off on order.

When it exploded, the main force of the blast was directed down toward the ground, lifting the front of the car and instantly separating the tie rods that held the wheels in line. They popped apart like brittle sticks. The wheels went haywire. At the same time, the phosphorus wire fuse sizzled straight back along the frame toward the gas tank.

Marza was heading into the turn, leaning with the car, his arms extended almost straight out in a classic driving position, when he felt the blast in front of his feet. The fire wall shattered and a hot burst of gas rushed into the cockpit. A moment later the wheel was wrenched from his hands. The car went wildly out of control as he grabbed frantically for the steering wheel and tried to get it back. It swerved, ripping into the inside wall of the turn at about forty-five degrees, and the left front side of the car shattered. The fenders peeled back with the agonized scream of tearing metal, the engine was torn from its mounts and the air bags under the dash whooshed full and jammed Marza and the Professor into their seats.

The car careened off the wall and a moment later the gas tanks exploded. The Milena was catapulted across the track toward the other wall when Marza felt the rear blow out, felt the sudden, ghastly rush of heat and then the flames boiling through the back seat, enveloping both him and Di Fiere, and then the air bags burst.

The old man screamed once as the fire rushed into his nose and mouth and scorched his lungs. Then he was dead.

For Marza, it seemed to take forever, although it was no more than a second or two. As the car spun crazily across the track he saw his old enemy, that grinning, obscene apparition he had seen so many times before and shunned, sitting on the wall straight ahead of him, wrapped in flames, motioning to him, drawing him on, and as the car crashed headlong into the wall, Death opened his arms and the driver rushed to his embrace.

VI

Falmouth did not relax until the train was out of Verona station and well on its way north toward the Alps.

His heart was rapping at his ribs and his shirt was damp with sweat when he found his compartment and sat down. He leaned back, closed his eyes and hummed to himself, slowing everything down. He clocked off the list in his head, making sure it had gone right.

He was certain no one had seen him leave the house. The drive to Verona had gone off smoothly; he hadn’t even seen a policeman. He parked the car and checked the case in a locker, from which, he assumed, somebody had already claimed it. He looked at his watch.

Hell, by now someone in Verona was probably melting down the barrel.

He felt the train lurch under him. As it moved Out of the station he went into the bathroom, took off the wig, combed his red hair and shaved off the moustache. Then he burned the wig, driver’s license and passport issued to Harry Spettro and flushed them down. By the time the conductor tapped on the door, he was Anthony Falmouth again.

The ticket man, a short paunchy little fellow in his sixties with watery eyes, took his papers, ‘You are inglese?’ he said in a hushed, quivering voice.

‘Si,’ Falmouth replied.

‘And have you heard our tragic news?’

Falmouth did not want to hear it. Dumbly, he shook his head.

‘Marza is dead. Our great champion. The greatest sportsman in Italy since Novalari. Numero Uno è morto.’

A chill moved up Falmouth’s back. He said, ‘I’m very sorry.’ Then, after a moment, he added, ‘And how did he die?’

The conductor punched several holes in his ticket and then said, rather proudly, ‘In a car, of course,’ and went on.

When the conductor was gone, Falmouth sagged, It all went out of him and suddenly he was drained and overcome with sadness and he felt tears beginning to sting the corners of his eyes.

Hell, he said to himself, I’m getting too old for this kind of shit.

2

Harry Lansdale paused while making his customary rounds, leaning against the bulkhead of the towering Henry Thoreau and staring grimly through the porthole at the deck of the largest oil rig in the world. He had seen storms before, in every part of the world, but this one, this one was going to be a killer.

It was nearing midnight, and the sea was running 3° to — 40 Celsius and dropping. A harsh Arctic wind had been moaning down from the Beaufort Sea and across the barren grounds north of the Brooks Range since the night before. The temperature was still falling, the sea continuing to grow colder as the sun cast its gray, persistent dusk across the frigid north Alaska wastelands. The wind cried forlornly through the stub pines and grasslands, and the white foxes, foraging for lemmings, lamented their skimpy hunt with mournful dirges to the constant twilight. Chunks of ice were beginning to appear, drifting down from the Arctic Ocean into the Chukchi Sea, where the misting whitecaps tossed them about like wafers.

Now the winter gale, sweeping with fury across the open sea, assaulted the floating oil rig, one hundred and twenty-two miles from land, screaming through its rigging and snapping at its guy wires.

Lansdale was not concerned about the rig. It was built to take anything the Arctic furies could toss at them. From the air the Thoreau looked like a giant bug, with its four enormous steel legs dipping down deep into the thrashing sea. The rig was a monster, twice the length of a football field, its deck sixty feet above the water and the superstructure rising almost five stories above that. Its spidery legs thrust down two hundred feet below the surface of the sea and were anchored to the bottom, two hundred feet farther down, by steel cables.

Lansdale held the flat of his hand against the wall. Not a tremor. Not even the six-foot waves arid the brutal winds could shake his baby.

The Thoreau was indeed Lansdale’s crowning achievement; the largest semisubmersible rig ever built, a floating city, its towering concrete blocks containing apartments for the 200 man crew; three different restaurants, each serving food prepared by a different chef; two theatres showing first-run movies; and a solar dish that beamed in ninety different television channels from around the world to 21 inch TV sets in every apartment.

Everything possible was provided for the crew to make the endless days bearable, for the structure sat off the northwest coast of Alaska, one hundred and forty miles northeast of Point Hope, at the very edge of the polar car, possibly the loneliest human outpost in the world. And it s at on top of one of the richest oil strikes ever tapped.

Lansdale was not only chief engineer and manager of the project, he was its creator. For eighteen years he had dreamed of this custom-built Shangri-La at the edge of the world. It had taken him four years of planning, of fighting in board rooms and lobbying in bars and restaurants, to convince the consortium of four oil companies to take the chance.

What had finally swayed them was the man himself. Harry Lansdale knew oil; knew where to find it and how to get it. He was as tough as the Arctic and as unshakable as the rig he had built, a man who had devoted his life to pursuing the thick black riches bottled up beneath the earth. He had worked on rigs all over the world and, to prove it, had a list of them tattooed proudly down his right arm, like the hash marks on the sleeve of an old-line Army top kick — from Sweet Dip, the old Louisiana offshore rig, to Calamity Run in the North Sea, to the endless, sweeping desert fields of Saudi Arabia they had nicknamed the Sandstorm Hilton.

Oh, it had taken its toll, all right. At forty, his leathery face was craggy with hard-work lines, his hands sandpapered with calluses, his shaggy hair more salt than pepper. But to Lansdale, it was worth every line, every callus, every streak of gray. He smiled, raised the coffee cup and, tapping the porthole lightly, growled in a voice tuned by cigarettes and whiskey and not enough sleep: ‘Happy New Year, storm.’

Even at fifteen fathoms the sea was rough, its swells rolling beneath the six-foot waves on the surface. A thin sliver of light pierced the dark sea, followed by what at first might have appeared to be four banded seals struggling in formation through the grim waters. They were four men in winter wet suits, lashed together like mountain climbers by a nylon band, and pulled through the dangerous sea by an underwater scooter. A box the size of a child’s coffin was attached by nylon Lines to the scooter.

The man leading the small pack held his wrist close to his face mask. He had only one good eye. The other was a grotesque empty socket. He checked his compass and depth watch, constantly adjusting their direction. The narrow beam from his flashlight swept back and forth as he directed the beam into the dark sea. Then one of the men spotted it and his eyes widened behind the glass window of his face mask: a giant steel column sixteen feet thick and still as a mountain, defying the turbulent ocean, as flotsam swirled around it and then rushed on.

The leader steered the scooter up-tide from the column. keeping a safe distance from it, for one heavy swell could throw them against it and destroy both the men and their underwater machine. They hovered twenty feet away as the leader prepared a spear gun and fired the spear so that it slashed through the water past the steel leg before losing its momentum. The tide swept the cable around the column. Then the driver guided the scooter in three or four counterturns around the shaft, forming a taut line between them and the leg before steering the scooter into the tide, keeping the line taut.

The three others detached the coffin-like box and inched down the line toward the column.

Lansdale, making his swing through the installation as he did every night before going to bed, stepped inside the control room and stood watching the skeleton crew at work. It looked to him like the set of some sci-fi movie, its rows of computer readouts flashing on and off as the ingenious station pumped oil from several undersea Wells within a thirty-mile range into storage tanks built into the perimeter of the rig, and from there, through a twelve-inch line that ran along the bottom of the Chukchi Sea to a receiving station. near the village of Wainwright, a hundred and twenty-two miles to the east, where the Alaskan badlands petered out by the sea.

It was a revolutionary idea. And it -was working. For three months now, the station had been cooking like a greased skillet. Lots of little headaches, of course, these were to be expected. But nothing major. Now the Thoreau was operating with a skeleton crew of 102 men and 4 women, a hundred people fewer than normal, all of them volunteers who had passed up their Christmas furlough to work the station during the holidays.

Slick Williams, the electronics genius who ran the computer room, was sitting at the main console, his feet on the desk, sipping coffee and watching the lights flashing. He looked up as Lansdale came in. ‘Hi, Chief,’ he said. ‘Slumming?’

Lansdale laughed. ‘In this sixty-million-dollar toy?’ Around him was possibly the most sophisticated computerized operation ever built. ‘Keep an eye on the stabilizers, it’s getting rough out there.’

‘Check,’ Williams said. ‘Tell Sparks to let me know if it gets too bad.’

‘Shit,’ Lansdale said, ‘I sat Out a hurricane on the first offshore rig ever built. A goddamn wooden platform fifteen years old. You could fit the son of a bitch in this room. Only lost one man. Silly bastard got hit in the head with a lunchbox flying about ninety miles an hour. Broke his neck. Otherwise, all we got was wet.’

Williams nodded. He had heard the stories before.

‘I’ll either be in the bar having a nightcap or in my apartment,’ the Chief said and left, walking down the hall to the weather room. Radar maps covered one wall, their azimuth bars sweeping in circles, covering a four-hundred-mile radius. The weatherman was just a kid, twenty-six, skinny, acned, long-haired, with glasses as thick as the bottom of a Johnnie Walker bottle. But he was good. Everybody aboard was good or they wouldn’t be there.

Below them, the heavy seas thundered mutely against the pillars.

‘We got a bitch comin’ up, Chief,’ said the youthful weatherman, who, for reasons of his own, had nicknamed himself Sparks, after the old-time radio operators.

‘What’s it look like?’

‘Hundred-mile winds, sleet, snow and big, I mean big, seas. And it’s already running four degrees below freezing. Anybody takes an accidental dip tonight, they got about five minutes in that water.’

‘Anybody takes an accidental dip tonight’ll be in Nome before we get a line to ‘em,’ Lansdale said.

‘These storms gimme the creeps.’

‘We been through worse, kid. Why don’t you knock off and catch a movie. They got that Clint Eastwood picture showing, the one with the ape.’ The theatres operated twenty-four hours a day.

‘I’m staying here. There’s no windows and you can’t hear much. I’ll sleep on that cot if I fade out. Besides, I got Cagney keeping me company.’ He pointed to one of more than a dozen monitor screens near the radar maps. The sound was turned down, but there was Jimmy Cagney, running through an oil refinery, shooting up everybody in sight.

‘There was a man,’ Lansdale said. ‘He makes those macho assholes today look like a bunch of Ziegfeld broads.’

Now Cagney was on top of one of the huge refinery globes and the FBI was trying to pick him off.

‘Watch this,’ the kid said. ‘This has got to be the biggest ending ever.’

Cagney was surrounded by flames, riddled with bullets and still fighting back. ‘Made it, Ma!’ he yelled. ‘Top of the world!’ And blooie !—there goes Jimmy and the refinery and half of Southern California.

‘Neat,’ said the Chief.

‘Neat,’ echoed the kid.

‘What are you pickin’ up?’

‘WTBS in Atlanta, Georgia. They show movies all the time. There’s a Japanese station that’s pretty good, too, but all the flicks are dubbed. It’s weird seeing Steve McQueen talking chinguchka.’

‘Okay, kid. Ride it out in here. I like devotion to duty.’

‘Shit,’ Sparks said, ‘if anybody had told me I’d end up here when I was taking meteorology at the University of Florida, I’d have switched to animal husbandry.’

‘You can’t make two hundred bucks a day getting cows to fuck, Sparks.’

‘No, but it’s a helluva lot more fun.’

The Chief laughed. ‘Well, if you get nervous, gimme a call. I’ll come hold your hand.’

The lights on the computer readout began to flash.

‘Here comes the report in from Barrow now,’ Sparks said. He punched out the word ‘TYPE’ on his keyboard and the report immediately flashed on one of the monitor screens.

‘Jesus, Chief, they’re reading winds up to a hundred and eighty knots. And waves! They’re running twenty to thirty feet along the coast. Temperature’—he whistled through his teeth—’forty-one below. Freezing rain. No shit, freezing rain. What do they expect, a fucking spring drizzle? This goddamn rig is gonna look like Niagara Falls by morning.’

‘Your language is getting terrible, Sparks,’ Lansdale said. ‘I may have to write your mother.’

‘You do and I’ll tell her who taught me.’

Lansdale laughed. ‘Lemme know if anything serious pops up,’ he said and left the weather room. Walking down the tunnel toward the bar, he could hear the heavy seas thundering at the steel legs below him and the wind shrieking in the rigging. He liked the sound and feel of the storm. The Thoreau was as sturdy as a pack mule and as indomitable as Annapurna.

He took the elevator to the second floor and went to the bar. Willie Nelson was lamenting on the jukebox, and there was a poker game in one corner under the head of a giant caribou one of the riggers had bagged on a weekend hunting trip to the Yukon. Lansdale loved it. It was the Old West, the last frontier, it was John Wayne and Randy Scott and Henry Fonda and the OK Corral all rolled up into one. He looked down the bar and saw Marge Cochran, one of the four women on the rig, a red-haired lady in her early forties who was a hardhat carpenter, Hard work had taken its toll on her, as it had on the Chief, but there was still the echo of a young beauty in her angular face and turquoise eyes. The work had kept her body lean and young. But despite the seams of her tanned face, she was a handsome woman, earthy and boldly honest.

The Chief kept watching her for a long time but she paid him no mind. Finally, as he bore in with his stare from the end of the bar, she turned briefly and a wicked little smile flew briefly across her lips.

Tough lady, he thought. Yeah, tough. Like a steel-covered marshmallow.

He ordered a Carta Blanca beer and gulped it down as a handful of technicians strolled in from the evening shift.

‘How about a game, Chief?’ one of them asked.

‘Rain check,’ Lansdale said. ‘1 need some shut-eye.’ And he left and went to his apartment on the third floor.

II

One hundred and fifty feet below Lansdale’s feet, the four men continued their perilous task. As the driver kept the scooter aimed up-tide, one of the scuba divers snapped the cable of the box to a clasp on his belt and shortened the line to twelve inches or so. He was obviously the most powerful swimmer, his biceps straining the thermal Suit as he moved down behind the leader.

The swell was sudden and monstrous, striking without warning out of the murky and violent sea, the tail of a twelve-foot wave on the surface ninety feet above them. It seized the scooter, flipping it up s that, for an instant, it seemed to stand on end, pointing toward the surface, before the driver got it under control. The line slackened for one deadly moment and then snapped tight again. As it did, it jerked out of the hands of the man with the box. The angry sea snatched him away from the line, sweeping him, end over end, and tossing him, like a piece of seaweed, toward the column. He thrashed his powerful arms against the treacherous, silent tide, but he was like a child caught in a deadly undertow, and the giant column was like a magnet. He spun end over end through the water and smacked against the column upside down, his head cracking like a whip against the enormous post. His body shuddered violently, a death spasm, arid a burst of red bubbles tumbled from his regulator and wriggled toward the surface.

The leader glared through his good eye and hauled in the limp form by the life line and peered through the face mask. The injured man’s eyes were half open and only the whites showed. Blood, gushing from his nose, was filling the mask. He shook his head toward the other members of the team and, unhooking the box, let the lifeless form go. The dying man was swept to the end of his life line by the harsh tide.

The leader swung his flippers toward the column and let the sea throw him up against it. The other diver joined him. Together they worked their way down the column until they found a welded joint. Struggling against the vicious sea, they lashed the box to the steel leg while the driver of the scooter tried to keep the machine aimed into the tide. When the box was secured, the leader pulled a handle on the side of it and the top popped off. He aimed his light into the opening in the box. It was a timing device. He set it for four hours and then he and the other diver worked their way back up the column to the steel line. The third diver hung grotesquely below them, his body battering the column. Bubbles no longer came from his regulator.

When they reached the scooter, the leader cut the line holding it to the column with a pair of aluminium wire cutters, and it lunged forward and the three huddled together, their companion, tossed by the undersea waves, dangling behind them at the end of the life line, as the leader checked his compass and pointed the flashlight into the darkness, guiding the scooter away from the deadly column.

They disappeared into the black sea, pulling their macabre bundle behind them.

III

A bank of monitor screens along one wall gave Lansdale a closed-circuit view of the control rooms and the exterior of the Thoreau. Sleet was sweeping through the rigging and almost straight out across the deck.

The wind’s up to a hundred and ten, maybe twenty, knots already, he thought, Gale force and picking up.

There was a tap on the door.

‘It’s open,’ Lansdale said.

Marge came in and closed the door and smiled at him for a couple of seconds and then snapped the lock on the door without taking her eyes off him.

‘You’re downright shameless,’ he said.

‘There’s no such thing on this barge,’ she said.

‘Barge! Jesus, that’s sacrilegious!’ He laughed. ‘You’re just going with me because I’m captain of the football team.’

‘Naw. I wanted to see if hardhats really make love with their socks on.’

‘Depends how cold it is.’

‘It’s about twenty below out there and falling.’

‘Then maybe I’ll keep them on.’

‘The hell you will.’

She walked across the living room, stopping for a moment at his bookcase. Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Franek’s Zen and Zen Classics, French and Spanish dictionaries, copies of Red Harvest and Blood Money by Dashiell Hammett. Through the porthole she looked out over the gray, bleak, endless sea, the waves lashed by sleet and wind.

‘It’s scary,’ she said. And then she turned her back on the window. ‘God, I’ll be glad to get back to civilization where it’s light in the daytime and dark at night.’

He made her a rum and Coke and carried it across the room to her. ‘Why the hell did you stay out here for the holidays anyway?’ he said. ‘It sure as hell wasn’t the bonus.’

‘It helps. Sixty-two fifty a day on top of a hundred and twenty-five. That’s almost a thousand dollars for two weeks. Anyway, one of my sons is someplace in Vermont with the college skiing team, and the other one is at his girl friend’s house in Ohio. What’s to go home to?’

‘That’s it?’

‘Well ... you’re here, too.’

‘I thought you forgot.’

‘Not likely.’

‘Are you divorced?’ he asked. They had never talked about personal things before.

‘Widowed. Married at twenty-two, widowed at thirty- seven.’

‘What happened?’

‘He worked himself to death. Forty-two years old. One day he went off to the office and the next time I saw him he was lying in a funeral home with some creep dry-washing his hands over him, trying to sell me a five-thousand-dollar casket.’

‘A little bitter there.’

‘A little bitter? Maybe. Just a little. It sure turned my life around.’

‘Did you love him?’

‘Oh, I ... sure. Sure I loved him. He was a nice man.’

‘Christ, what an epitaph. Here lies Joe, he was a nice man.’

‘His name was Alec.’

‘It’s still a lousy epitaph.’

‘Well, he wasn’t a very exciting man. He was ... comfortable. Alec was wonderfully comfortable.’

‘So how come you end up a carpenter? On this barge, as you put it.’

‘I was into restoring antiques. It got out of hand. Next thing I know I was a full1ledged hardhat. How about you? A master’s degree in engineering and an armful of tattoos. That doesn’t fit, either.’

‘You can thank an old bastard name of Rufus Haygood for that.’

‘Rufus Haygood?’

‘Yeah. I was finishing my thesis at the University of Louisiana and these hotshot interviewers from ITT and Esso and AT&T and Bell Labs were giving me all this steam about how good it was gonna be workin’ for them, and one day old Rufus comes up to me and says he’s ramrodding a wooden jack-up rig out in the Gulf and he says, “I’ll give you ten silver eagles an hour, which is more than you can make dancin’ with those goddamn lard-ass bastards, and I’ll teach you everything there is to know about the oil game and you can teach me about books”—and I find out, you know, he never went to school. So for the next seven years I dragged around with him from one rig to another and he’d give me shale and blowholes and rigging for an hour or two, and I’d give him Shelley and Coleridge and Hammett for an hour or two back. But I learned about oil, yessiree.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He’s with your Alec, wherever that might be. Drowned. Fishing in some dipshit lake in Florida. Got drunk and fell out of the boat. The old bastard never did learn to swim.’

Outside, the wind wailed past the window, peppering it with sleet.

‘Wonderful night to stay in,’ Marge said. ‘We could build a fire and snuggle up.’

‘If we had a fireplace.’

‘We can make believe,’ she said.

‘I haven’t been laid for three months.’

She held up four fingers. ‘Gotcha beat by a month,’ she said.

‘You’ve got a reputation as the Thoreau virgin,’ Lansdale said.

‘Been checking up on me, hunh?’

‘Well, it’s my job, make sure everybody on this rig is happy. We can’t afford morale problems.’

‘I’ve got one you can take care of right now,’ she said, closing in on him.

Lansdale said, ‘You are shameless.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘ain’t it a kick in the ass.’

He laughed, a big laugh, and nodded. ‘Ain’t it, though,’ he said.

And laughing too, she ripped open her work shirt. She was not wearing a bra. Her breasts, firm from the hard work on the rig, stood out, the nipples already signalling her desire.

Lansdale stood near the wall, staring at her. He shook his head. ‘Incredible,’ he mumbled, tearing off his shirt and throwing it on the floor.

She was still seven or eight feet from him. She zipped down the fly of her jeans very slowly.

‘Need some music?’ he asked.

‘Unh unh.’

He sat down on the bed, leaning back on his elbows, watching every little move she made. She was swaying back and forth as she slowly slid the jeans over her hips and let them fall away. A curl of black hair peeked over the top of her bikini panties. She turned away from him, still swaying, and began to tighten and loosen her buttocks. She had an absolutely incredible ass.

‘Hard work sure becomes you,’ he said.

She hooked her thumbs under the edge of the panties and slipped them down partway, still moving, still swaying to the music in her head.

He zipped down his pants and pulled them off. He was rock-hard and bulging against his Jockey shorts. She looked at him over her shoulder, began moving backwards toward him, turning as she reached the edge of the bed and sliding her hand under her panties, caressing herself as she looked down at him. He could hear her fingers sliding through her lips, She knelt between his legs on the edge of the bed and began massaging his hard penis through the shorts, then finally she slipped her hand under them, pulled them down to his thighs, and began stroking him. He jerked, involuntarily, surprised by her callused hand. But she had a special talent, rubbing the underside of his penis with the palm of her hand while her fingers stroked the top.

Lansdale closed his eyes, ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you ought to patent that.’

‘Just the beginning,’ she said, and leaning over, sucked him into her mouth, her teeth nibbling at him. He leaned forward, reached out, and took one of her breasts in his hand and caressed it with his fingertips, letting the palm of his hand barely touch the nipple. Her tongue darted and traced the length of him and he sat up a little more, sliding his hand down to her hard belly, his fingertips just touching the edge of her panties. She began to hunch, moving against his hand. He could feel the moisture through the silk, feel her distending clitoris as he stroked the length of her vagina.

She started to laugh, but then the laugh became a soft moan. ‘Goddamn,’ she cried out. Her legs began to tremble and she fell on her side next to him, grabbed his head and thrust it between her legs. He ripped her panties off and sucked her hard clitoris into his mouth, moving his head in tight little circles and flicking his tongue.

Her fists tightened in his hair, guiding his head as she moved with him. She began to tighten all over. She sucked in her breath, held it, then let it out in short spurts. And again. And again. She rose against him, hooking her heels behind his hips.

The tempo increased, her breaths coming shorter, the movement faster. Then all the muscles in her body seemed to freeze, her head moved slowly back, her legs straightened, her breathing stopped for a moment, and then she began to cry out and thrash her head back and forth and she came.

‘Oh God,’ she cried, ‘enough,’ but he didn’t stop and she felt it building again, felt the trembling, the fire streak down her nerves and envelope her entire body and she began coming again and she could not talk and her breath seemed to be caught in her throat and then suddenly it all burst out at once.

He rolled over on his back, slipped his arm under her waist and dragged her to him, lifting her so she was lying on her back on his chest and she reached down, found him and shoved him into her, while he stroked her breasts with one hand and masturbated her with the other.

‘No... more,’ she gasped, but he couldn’t stop. He thrust harder and harder, faster and faster, his fingers fleeting over her mound and as she tightened around him, he finally exploded with a great cry of relief and then he began to laugh, and a moment later she came again. He raised his knees and pressed down on her thighs and stayed in her as long as he could as the storm howled past the window.

IV

Lansdale awoke sharply from a deep, untroubled sleep. He lay on the bed for a moment, blinking his eyes, wondering what had awakened him so abruptly. The lights in the bedroom were still on and Marge lay beside him, sleeping soundly. it was 3:05 A.M. He sat up and grabbed the hot-line phone and punched out the number of the stabilizer control room. It only rang once before someone answered ‘Hello.’

‘This is Chief, who’m I talkin’ to?’

‘Barney Perkins.’

‘Everything all right down there?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Lansdale was stunned by Perkins’ response. He jumped up, cradling the phone between his shoulder and ear, and grabbed clothes from the floor, chairs, wherever they had fallen a few hours before.

‘What d’ya mean, you’re not sure?’

‘We got a... uh . .. like a tremor, Chief.’

‘Tremor?’

‘Yeah. There was like... I dunno, it was like . . . the whole rig shivered...’

‘Shivered? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

Lansdale was watching the monitor as he spoke, looking at the exterior of the Thoreau, draped with ice, like some primitive ice castle. Searchlights played the seas around the rig.

The waves were battering the legs, smashing small ice floes to bits.

‘I think maybe ... uh, maybe we took a hit from . .. maybe a small iceberg or something.’

‘“Or something” my ass. There’s no “or something” out there, for Christ’s sake. I’ll be right down.’

He slammed down the phone, Then he picked it up and punched out the number for the radio room.

‘Radio room. Harrison.’

‘Harrison, this is Chief. Check the area for surface craft right now. Find out if we got anything in the area.’

‘Jesus, what’s—’

‘Don’t fuck around, do it! Call me back.’

Marge turned over, eyeing him sleepily.

‘What is—’ she began, but he cut her off abruptly. He was across the room, pulling life jackets and thermal suits from the bottom of a closet. He tossed them to her. ‘Get this on fast and come on.’

The phone rang again and he snatched it up.

‘Yeah?’

‘Chief? It’s Harrison again.’

‘What’ve ya got?’

‘A Greek tanker, running the troughs at quarter speed.’

‘Where?’

‘Hell, if the weather was clear we could see it. About three miles northwest, heading toward the Strait,’

‘Listen to me, Harrison. Something may have bumped us. Call the tanker and tell her we may need help.’

‘You want me to give her a May Day?’

‘Just do exactly as I said, tell her we may be having trouble and we’d like a courtesy call. I’ll get back to you from Stabilizer Control.’

He was still watching the monitor, then he felt it again, it was a tremor, like a light earthquake. Glasses jingled on the bar. Then it settled again.

She was pulling on the thermal long johns and there was panic written in her earthy features. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I dunno,’ Lansdale said. ‘Maybe something hit us. I got to get down to Control. Ready?’

He was dressed only in long johns with a life jacket over them.

‘Can I put some clothes on?’ she asked.

‘No! Let’s get going — now. Right now.’

At 3:04:58, the thermal explosives attached to the north leg of the Thoreau had gone off on schedule. There were actually two blasts. The first was an implosion, which rent the welded joint of the steel leg and split it open. The second was more formidable. The shock wave from it rippled the water despite the raging waves. It almost finished the job, but not quite. As the terrifying power of the second explosive was released, it split the leg, the crack edging up the column, ten or twelve feet. Air bubbles poured from the wound. The air seal, meant to provide additional buoyancy, was destroyed. The sound was largely drowned out by the storm, but the explosion itself telegraphed up the leg and jarred the rig. The leg, although buffeted by the heavy seas, held valiantly at first. But the joint began to oscillate as the twenty-foot sea wrenched it back and forth. Then it separated, and another tremor riffled up to the station. Still it held, flexing before the storm, the welded seam gradually tearing around the girth of the steel shaft. Above, the wind wailed torturously at the buildings, adding extra stress to the already shattered leg. Then with the agonizing screech of metal tearing, the leg finally surrendered to the sea and separated. It seemed poised for a moment, this spidery shaft tossed by the sea, and then the twenty thousand tons of steel and concrete above it, urged on by the wind, leaned into the ruined column and it plunged, like a needle, toward the bottom, four hundred feet below.

On the surface the Thoreau, mortally wounded, yielded to the storm and as the north leg collapsed it listed, bobbed back and was immediately struck by a mountainous wave. Steel cables snapped like twigs. Its wintery shroud crumbled and shards of gleaming ice, caught in the wind, whistled through the air. Then the Thoreau tipped over. Its north perimeter plunged into the sea and the tower collapsed, smacking the waves and shattering immediately, bits and pieces of it washing back over the partially submerged deck. As it keeled over, the eight lines pumping crude oil into its tanks were torn loose, twisting in the wind like snakes, spewing crude into the wind. Electrical circuits exploded like fireworks, and the raw oil flooded through the cavernous room where the system converged. When the oil reached the hot lines, the room exploded. The six men on duty were roasted as the room blew up in an enormous mushroom of fire that filled it and burst through the side of the building before it was swept away by the wind and sea.

Inside the stricken rig, men were tossed about like toothpicks, crushed under furniture, thrown through smashed portholes. The lights went out. Most of them, trapped in darkness, died in panic and fear.

The Thoreau lay on its side, held momentarily by the other legs, as the sea pounded it and the waves crashed against its five-story superstructure, which now lay sideways in the water.

Lansdale was standing in the doorway of his apartment, urging Marge to hurry, when suddenly the earth seemed to tip crazily underfoot.

‘My God, we’re rolling over!’ he screamed as the floor bounded up at him. When he fell, his legs dangled through the open doorway. He clutched frantically at the walls, which now, insanely, had become the floor, trying to keep from falling back into the apartment. As the Thoreau tipped, there was a crescendo of destruction. Glasses, furniture, anything not tied down, poured through the hallways of the five-story build-

As Lansdale struggled to pull himself out of the gaping doorway he could hear shrieks echoing up through the corridors of the dying structure. He turned back, looking down into the apartment. Marge lay crumpled in the corner, covered by furniture and debris. She was unconscious. Lansdale needed a line to get down to her. Then he heard the oil explode and felt the whole structure tremble. At the far end of the corridor the force of the oil explosion tore the door off and blew away half the wall. Frigid, damp air rushed through the hail. The lights went out. Lansdale turned his flashlight down into the ruined topsy-turvy apartment. The porthole, now submerged in the raging sea, could not withstand the pressure. Its rivets suddenly began popping like champagne corks. The round window burst open and a geyser of freezing water gushed up through it. Lansdale jumped to his feet and started down the hallway. Then the rig rolled again and this time he was thrown against the ceiling, now the floor, of the hallway. And then the sea rushed through the doorways and he saw the mountain of water pour down and engulf him.

The shock of the below-freezing seawater numbed him. He held tenaciously to his flashlight as he was swept along the hallway by the torrent. He clutched at an open doorway, but his fingers slipped away from it and he was trapped in the submerged corridor. His lungs were bursting as he frantically felt the walls, trying to find an opening, anything to get free of this watery trap. But the frozen sea was already taking its toll, and the shock of the icy water robbed him of breath.

My God, I’m drowning, he thought.

And then he was in a glistening underwater wonderland, numbed beyond pain or caring, his lungs wracked with spasms, and as the flashlight slipped from his fingers and tumbled away, its beam diminishing to a pinpoint, he opened his mouth, like a fish in a bowl, and the sea flooded in, and his life, too, blinked

The Henry Thoreau lay upside down. The cables that had held it firmly to the bottom were either uprooted or had snapped. Its once mighty legs pointed straight up. Buffeted by the storm, they bent before the gale and then were torn from their mounts on the deck. Their air pockets burst. The escaping air hissed out. And the Thoreau plunged straight down, four hundred feet, leaving in its wake a trail of bubbles, debris and bodies which bobbed upward, like innocent toys from a stricken dollhouse, toward the raging surface of the Chukchi Sea.

V

The Greek tanker, ploughing through the gale, arrived on the scene forty minutes after the Thoreau had gone down. The tanker’s searchlights swept the area, picking out one life raft with three bodies lashed to it. Three men, all frozen to death. For more than two hours the tanker lay in the troughs of the pounding waves while several volunteers recovered one corpse, then another. When the captain finally decide4 to abandon the search, they had fished fifteen men and a woman out of the sea. There was no sign of the Thoreau.

By eight o’clock the next morning the storm had passed, and the sea, although still running high, had lost its muscle, the storm clouds raced onward, sweeping south toward the Bering Strait and Nome. Winds were down to twenty to twenty-five knots. Three more bodies were recovered. The captain sent a simple message to the Air Force rescue station at Point Barrow, two hundred miles northeast of the disaster area:

‘Henry Thoreau down in 70 fathoms. Location: 72 degrees north, 165 degrees west. Nineteen bodies recovered. No survivors. Holding position. Please advise.’

The Russian air station at Provideniya, just south of the Bering Strait, offered assistance, but three Air Force rescue planes arrived on the scene forty minutes after the tanker’s message and reported no signs of life or the fated oil rig. They thanked the Russians but declined help. One of the planes swept low over the tanker and wiggled his wings in a final salute to the Thoreau and its crew.

‘This is Air Force 109,’ the pilot radioed the tanker. ‘Please drop a marker and you are relieved. Thank you and Happy New Year.’ He banked sharply and joined his formation and the three planes headed back toward Barrow.

On the bridge, the man who had led the scuba-diving team the night before peered through powerful binoculars, watching the three planes leave. He had been there all night, watching the rescue attempt. Now he lowered the glasses. There was a patch over his right eye now, and a deep red scar ran, from his hairline to the edge of his jaw, down the right side of his face. He nodded to the captain, left the bridge and went to the radio room, where he sent a simple message:

‘Mission accomplished. Scratch Thornley. Le Croix.’

That afternoon, eight hours before the beginning of the New Year, the man whose neck had been broken planting the explosives on the leg of the Thoreau the night before, was buried from the deck of the tanker as it ploughed southward toward the Bering Sea.

3

Eddie Wolfnagle was on top of the world. It was a gorgeous day, the temperature was in the mid-eighties, and the sun was blazing, except for an occasional downpour that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly. He guided the rented Honda along the Hana Road, Which had started out as a respectable two-lane blacktop and now had petered out into a dirt road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. As the road got narrower, the forest got thicker, so that before long he was driving under a canopy of mango, kukuis, African tulip blossoms and pink Rainbow Shower trees. Hidden among them, parrots squawked indignantly aid ruffled the rainwater out of their feathers, and to his left, a hundred yards below, the Pacific Ocean was putting on quite a show, smashing at huge boulders with twenty- and thirty-foot breakers.

Paradise.

Everything was paradise. The night before, he had scored some unbelievable Maui grass. He had been shacked up at the Intercontinental Maui at Makena Beach for three days with a gorgeous model from London. In eight hours he was flying first class to LA. The next day he had tickets on the thirty-yard line for the Rose Bowl game, with an even thou down on Michigan plus ten over Southern Cal, the biggest bet he had ever made in his life.

And here he was, in a rain forest on the back side of Haleakala, the ten-thousand-foot volcano that dominates Maui. He had read all about the Seven Pools of the Kings, which was supposed to be a sacred place where the Gods lived and where, centuries before, princes from all the Hawaiian islands had come in their outriggers with their entourages to be coronated king.

Eddie felt like he was in an old Dorothy Lamour movie he had seen on television when he was a kid.

He got out of the car and lit a cigarette. He was wearing a fringed suede jacket, Tony Lama boots, which lifted him to nearly five-nine, Polo jeans and a Stetson cowboy hat. Shit, it was bouncing his way. And about time. He watched a high school kid as he dove from one clear pool to the next, working his way down the mountainside until he reached the pond at the bottom. The kid rolled over on his back, spat water two feet in the air and closed his eyes as the spray from the surf splashed up over the rocks.

Eddie had come a long way from swimming in the Harlem River when he was a kid. Goddamn! He was feeling good. And why not? He could afford all this now, could afford trips to paradise and London motels and pot at four hundred dollars a lid. In less than an hour he, Edward (NMI) Wolfnagle, once cashiered out of the Marines in disgrace, was going to be worth a cool hundred grand. What would Vinnie and the bunch back in Canarsie think of that?

Hey, Vinnie, lookit me, ain’t I hot shit, cruising through paradise and tonight I’m flying first-fucking class to LA and tomorra I’ll be watching the Rose Bowl from the thirty-yard line and in a few more minutes I’ll have one hundred big ones in hard-fucking-cash in my two-hundred-dollar-fucking-hat.

He yelled out loud, a good solid Texas geehaw.

‘Way to go, Eddie,’ he shouted to nobody in particular.

He got back in the car and drove deeper into the forest, past other rented Hondas parked haphazardly around the small bathhouses near the road. A heavyset Hawaiian in a red print shirt and wash-and-wear pants stepped into the road and flagged him down. He showed Eddie a badge.

‘State police,’ he said in precise English. ‘May I see your license, please.’

‘Sure,’ said Eddie. ‘Anything wrong?’

No, sir, just checking. I see you’re from the mainland. Better be careful if you leave your vehicle. Take all your valuables with you. There’s a lot of car theft in the islands.

Young punks, y’know. Grab and run. That’s why none of the locks on these rentals work. They just bust ‘em open.’

‘Thanks, Officer.’

‘Yes, sir. We don’t want anybody goin’ home mad.’ He smiled.

‘Am I headed right for Mamalu Bay?’

‘Straight ahead another ten miles or so. You can’t go anyplace else. You’ll have to turn around there, though. There’s a road through the Haleakala lava field but it’s just for Ranger use. Very dangerous.’

‘I was planning to do just that,’ Eddie said amiably, and went

Hinge parked his car before he got to the bridge at the Seven Pools and hiked up the mountainside to the edge of the Haleakala lava field, then followed it down to the bay at the end of the road. It was an easy hike, going ever the ridge that way, not more than three miles. And although it was hot and the humidity was high, Hinge did not sweat. Hinge never perspired.

A few yards from the road he turned and walked back into the thick foliage. He sat down and took a paper bag from his coat pocket, spreading the contents on the ground: a cigar, a thick ball-point pen, a small package of cotton, a thermometer, a hypodermic needle.

After removing the ball-point cartridge, he broke both ends off the pen, and then slowly augured the shaft through the centre of the cigar. He blew out the tobacco and sighted through it:

the tube of the pen formed a perfectly dean shaft through the cigar. He roughed up one end, concealing the hole. Next he broke the thermometer and holding the hypodermic needle between his fingers, he carefully dribbled two or three drops of mercury into its aperture, Next he took a wooden match out of his pocket, lit it, blew it out and twisted it into the opening of the needle, trapping the mercury inside. He wrapped the end of the match with wadded cotton and then inserted the handmade dart into one end of the cigar. He put the other end in his mouth, stuffed his trash in the paper bag and put it in his back pocket. Then he leaned back against the tree.

The forest got thicker and the road narrower. A sudden downpour thrashed the trees. Wild birds yelled back. It got so dark that he turned on the lights. Then, just as quickly, sunrays swept down through the trees, pock marking the road ahead. A few miles farther on, he suddenly drove out of the woods. The lava field lay ahead, and to his left the Pacific Ocean, as far as he could see.

The place was deserted.

Eddie Wolfnagle got lonely.

He got out of the car and looked around. There were no other cars. Nothing. Nothing but the ocean, the forest behind him and the awesome, black-ridged river of petrified lava ahead, sweeping down the mountainside straight into the ocean, the outfall of a volcano that once, thousands of years ago, had inundated over half the island, leaving behind a crater bigger than the island of Manhattan. The gray-black plateau stretched ahead as far as he could see. To his left it rolled gently down toward the sea, then suddenly fell away, dropping a hundred feet or so down to the ocean.

Jesus!’ he said aloud.

A barrier closed off the road. The sign nailed to it read:

DANGER! LAVA FIELD, ROAD UNSAFE.

THIS ROAD IS PERMANENTLY CLOSED.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

HALEAKALA NATIONAL PARK

US RANGER SERVICE

A twig cracked behind him; he turned and saw a man coming toward him. He was about the same height as Eddie and was using a branch as a walking stick.

Eddie was a little surprised. If this was Hinge, he looked like a real square. Butch haircut? A polyester suit? Jesus, where’s he been? And he was younger than Eddie had imagined, and fair-skinned. For some reason, Eddie had expected Hinge to be dark. Maybe even with gray hair. This guy - hell, this guy was hardly thirty.

‘Hinge!’ Wolfnagle called out to the man, who smiled vaguely and nodded. ‘Hey, all right! I’m Eddie Wolfnagle.’

They shook hands and Hinge said, ‘Let’s get in the car, in case somebody comes by.’

‘Good idea,’ Eddie said.

They got in the Honda.

‘Where’s your car?’ Wolfnagle asked.

‘I’m camping out,’ Hinge said. ‘Up the draw there, a mile or so.,

‘Oh.’ Wolfnagle began feeling anxious. This was the moment he had been dreaming about for two months. Now it seemed too easy. ‘Uh ... maybe ... uh, you should show me something. You know, some identification.’

Hinge took a brown manila envelope out of his breast pocket and dangled it from his fingertips. ‘This should be enough,’ he said. ‘You have my goods?’

‘Right here.’ Eddie took a roll of 35-mm film from his coat pocket and held it up with two fingers, but as Hinge reached for it, Eddie let it drop into his fist. ‘Well...’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and grinned.

For just an instant Hinge’s eyes went cold, but it passed quickly and he smiled. He handed Eddie the envelope. Eddie gave Hinge the film and opened the envelope. Packets of nice, poppin-fresh hundreds. He riffled them with the dexterity of a Vegas croupier.

Hinge took a jeweller’s loupe from his pocket, and pinching it in front of his left eye with his eyebrow, unspooled a foot or so of film, which he held up toward the light.

‘Whaddya think?’ Eddie said, still counting.

‘So far, so good. You have close-ups of everything?’

‘You’re lookin’ at it, old buddy. Plans and the actual installation. Just what the doctor ordered, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘All here,’ Eddie said and giggled like a kid. ‘I can’t believe it, man. A hundred grand. You know something? I don’t think my old man made a hundred grand his whole fucking miserable life.’

‘Congratulations.’

Eddie took off his Stetson, dropped the envelope in it and put it back on. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you need something else, I’m your man, okay? I can steal the crutch off a cripple, he won’t know it till his ass hits the ground.’

‘I will be in touch.’

‘I started boosting when I was nine. Stole my first car when I was twelve. Could hardly see over the steering wheel. I did, skit, coupla hundred jobs before I was sixteen. Never got caught. Never seen the inside of a slammer.’

‘You’re lucky.’

‘it’s talent. A little luck, maybe, but mostly talent.’

‘I mean you are lucky never to have been in prison. How did you manage this job?’

‘Right place at the right time. Security on the rig was nothing. The plans? That was a break. They had them all out one night, checking something in the transfer station. When they was through, they asked me would I run ‘em back down to engineering. I sez sure, no problem, then I just stop off in my room on the way, whip out the old Minolta, bim, bam, boom, I got myself an insurance policy.’

‘Just off the sleeve like that? No planning?’

‘You got it. You stay alert, things pop your way. Look, I knew I had something, see. I knew somebody, somewhere, would like a shot at those plans. All I hadda do was find the somebody. Then you pop up. What a break!’

An amateur, Hinge thought. Just a blunder. But it was lucky the word had gotten to him first. ‘How can I be sure you don’t have copies? You could be peddling this material to our competitors.’

‘Look, that’d be dumb. I wanna do more business with you guys. I wouldn’t cut my own throat.’

‘That’s acceptable,’ Hinge said.

‘You have the drop in Camden, New Jersey, right? It’s my sister. I’m tight with the bitch.’

‘Yes.’

Wolfnagle winked. ‘I’m gonna be travellin’ awhile.’

‘You deserve a trip.’

‘Yeah, right. Well, uh, anything else?’

‘Yeah. Got a light?’

Did he have a light? Bet your ass, He had a fucking Dunhill lighter, that’s what he had. He took out the gold lighter, flipped it open, struck a flame and leaned over to light the cigar. He heard a faint poof, saw ashes float from the end of the cigar and then felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his throat.

At first he thought a bee had stung him. He brushed frantically at his neck.

Something bounced off the dashboard and fell on the

He reached down and picked it up. It was a dart of some kind. He stared at it.

Dumbly.

It was going in and out of focus. His skin began to tingle. His hands had no feeling. His feet went to sleep.

Then the tingle became pain, sharp, like pinpricks, then the pain got worse. His skin was being jabbed with needles, then knives. He tried to scratch the pain away but he could not move. A giant fist squeezed his chest. He gasped for breath. Nothing happened.

He turned desperately to Hinge, and Hinge was a wavering apparition, floating in and out of reality. Wolfnagle looked like a goldfish, with his eyes bugged out and his lips popping soundlessly as he tried to breathe.

It had been a good shot, straight to the jugular. The mercury worked swiftly, thirty or forty seconds after hitting the bloodstream, and when Wolfnagle began to thrash, Hinge grabbed him by the arms and jammed him hard against the car seat. Now he went into hard spasms and Hinge almost lost him. He was stronger than he looked. The seizure lasted a minute or so, then Wolfnagle’s teeth began to rattle, and then they snapped shut. There was a muffled rattle deep in his throat. His body stiffened. His eyes rolled up and crossed. Hinge heard him void.

Hinge held him for a few moments more, then released him. He seemed to shrink as he sagged slowly into the seat. His chin dropped suddenly to his chest. Hinge tipped Wolfnagle’s hat and the brown manila envelope slipped into his hand. He reached over and took the dart from ‘Wolfnagle’s stiffening fingers. He pressed two fingers into Woifnagle’s throat. There was no pulse.

Hinge got out of the car. The wind blew up from the sea, rattling the palm fronds and sighing off into Haleakala’s crater. A bird screamed and darted off through the trees. Then it was quiet. So far, so good.

He went around to Wolfnagle’s side of the car, released the brake and pushed the car in a slight arc until it faced the ocean. There was nothing between it and the sea but a couple of hundred yards of black, ridged, petrified lava. He looked around again. They were still alone. He started the ear and the engine coughed to life. He raised the hood and pulled the automatic throttle out an inch. The engine was roaring. He went back to the driver’s side and pressed in the clutch with his walking stick, dropped the gear shift into first, held the door with his free hand and then jumped back, releasing the clutch and slamming the door. The rear tires screamed on the hard surface. The engine was revving at almost full speed. The car lurched forward, picked up speed, struck the edge of the lava bed and leaped over it. It wove erratically toward the sea, then turned and started back up the incline, teetered for a dozen feet or so and flipped, roiling side over side, until it reached the drop-off. It flipped over the edge, soaring down, down, down, and smacked into the ocean. A geyser of water plumed up and was carried away by the hard wind. A wave washed over the car, then another, until finally Hinge could only see its trunk. Then a heavy swell shattered it against the lava wall. The ocean foamed and receded. The car was gone.

Hinge hurried back into the woods, walked to the top of the ridge and sat down for a moment. It was quiet, except for the wind and faraway boom of the surf. He smiled to himself, realizing that the cigar was still in his mouth. He crumpled up the cigar and held out his hand, watching the tobacco blow away, then burned the paper bag containing the rest of the paraphernalia.

Hinge was feeling good now. It had gone off without a hitch. So much for the little thief. He took out the roll of film, held his lighter under one end and watched the flames devour it. Then he went back to his car.

Hinge did not make the call until he got back to the Honolulu airport. He dialled the 800 number and vas surprised at how fast the call went through.

‘Yes?’ the voice on the other end said.

‘Reporting.’

‘State your clearance.’

‘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.’