Chameleon (6 page)

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.’