‘Oil tankers, old man, oil tankers. Why feed the Greek industry when we can build our own?’
‘Self-sufficiency?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And The Stone Corporation?’
‘It’s a holding company for several power facilities in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, some other Southern states.’
‘It also owns oil refineries, doesn’t it?’
The general put another match to his pipe, using the time to further study O’Hara. We must not underestimate this man, he thought.
‘Yes.’
‘Here in Japan?’
Hooker nodded. ‘Right down at the foot of the hill. The Yumishawa works. We keep them busy. It is the second largest in the world.’
‘And you ship oil from other parts of the world to be refined here?’
‘Right again. I can arrange a tour for you, if you’re interested.’
‘Perhaps later in the week.’
Hooker slowly released a billow of smoke toward the ceiling. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I think you’ll find it educating.’
‘Is Yumishawa profitable?’ O’Hara asked.
Hooker smiled. ‘We’re not a charitable organization; we’re in business to make money. Yumishawa had the capacity we needed.’
‘Is that what brought you back to Japan?’
‘AMRAN is an international company. We use several Japanese refineries. Also, I happen. .. uh, to—’
Hooker’s eyes seemed to cloud over as he spoke. He looked as though he were daydreaming. ‘—like living here.’
The old man was having difficulty concentrating. Dark memories had begun to intrude and linger in his mind, sharp and persistent memories. He listened intently to O’Hara, trying to crowd them out of his consciousness, but they remained, edging out reality...
It was the second — no, it must have been the third chameleon.
He remembered the box, although there was nothing distinctive about it, just a plain white box, and he remembered staring at it for a very long time, listening to the creature moving about inside it as hate welled up inside him.
He had been in Sydney for two months, plotting the island steppingstone campaigns that would take them closer and closer to Honshu. The house was a white frame Victorian mansion that had once belonged to a governor, a spacious and airy place that had been converted into his campaign headquarters. There were security MP’s everywhere.
And yet she had managed to get inside — with the box.
She stood before him in the big room, her face as placid as a lake, that inscrutable countenance revealing nothing. Life had been kind to her. Her skin was clear and smooth, and her almond-shaped eyes alert.
‘I remember you as being much prettier,’ he lied.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said O’Hara.
‘Oh, excu — My mind wandered. Business...’ His voice trailed off.
‘I was asking whether you yourself initiated AMRAN,’ O’Hara said.
‘In a way. It came together almost 0-ut of... uh, necessity. Several of the companies had lost their. . . executive officers during the negotiations. Each time it happened we virtually had to start over, dealing with new people.’
‘What happened to these key people?’
‘Died. Natural causes mostly. Three died of — no, maybe it was four — heart attacks, and there was an auto accident. . . At any rate, there were a great many delays. Frustrating, y’know, trying to put this together with these sudden changes in management...’
He was speaking almost by rote, for his mind kept skipping backwards in time.
In the Philippines, politics had kept her quiet and in her place. Politics and one hundred American dollars a month, a cheap enough price to avoid a scandal that would have ruined his career.
How, in the middle of a war, had she found her way from Luzon to Australia?
The box answered that question.
Chameleon had arranged it. No question about that. Twice before, the boxes had come. Inside each was his signature, a single chameleon. There had been no message in the first one, only a small snapshot of the boy standing in front of a Shinto temple in Tokyo. He looked terrified.
Hooker’s intelligence people had devoted months trying to get a fix on Chameleon. Even their agents in Japan knew very little. He was head of a special branch of the Japanese secret service. Nobody had come up with his real name.
The second chameleon, a month or so later, had accompanied the first real message Hooker received. Typed neatly on a small piece of paper, it said simply: ‘The issue is negotiable
Nothing more.
Then, after two more months of agonized waiting, she had tome to verbally deliver the message to him. The ultimate insult.
The snapshot was sadistic. Bobby, sitting in a child’s coffin. The boy looked tired, possibly even drugged.
‘What does he want?’
It must be done quickly. In the next week.’
‘What does he want?’ Hooker had demanded, angry to find himself negotiating with a Japanese officer and a concubine.
She closed her eyes and repeated, as if by rote, ‘He will exchange Molino for Admiral Asieda, whom the British are now holding prisoner here in Australia.’
God, how he hated her. And yet, h was still attracted by her sensuality. He wondered if her body had changed through the years and he thought about her, lying naked beside him. For three years it had been a state secret . Only Garvey knew.
The general, only six months a widower, sleeping with a seventeen-year-old house girl and then sending her away after she bore his son. God, how the magpies at the Officers’ Club would have chirped over that. And his superiors? They would have destroyed him.
Now he hated her all the more because, in his own weakness, he had lived a lie for three years and now it was coming back to haunt him. Staunchly Christian, he was needled by guilt as he stared at her. ‘You should be shot as an enemy agent,’ he told her.
‘I want my son back alive,’ she said...
plane crash,’ O’Hara was saying.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Hooker said, snapping back to reality.
‘I said Robertson, of The Stone Corporation, was killed in a private plane crash.’
‘Yes. Wasn’t supposed to fly himself, y’know. Company policy. But when you’re president of the corporation, who does the chastising, eh? That put us back a bit. We were close to an agreement with Stone when the accident occurred. There was also that chap in, uh, Dallas...’
‘David Fiske Thurman, Alamo Oil.’
Hooker looked at him, obviously surprised. ‘You’ve certainly done your homework, young fellow. Thurman always was a madman behind the wheel. Unless I’m mistaken, he had several close calls before that.’
O’Hara pressed on, clarifying information before forcing the issue of Chameleon.
But the general began to slip again.
What nerve. To give him, the second highest ranking officer in the Pacific command, an ultimatum. He was infuriated.
‘Here’s what I think of that bastard,’ Hooker said to the woman. He grabbed the lizard, held it out with one hand and squeezed its writhing body until it was dead. The creature dangled from his fist. He threw it back in the box.
‘Take that back to the son of a bitch with my compliments.’
‘You will let him kill Molino?’
‘His name is Bobby.’
‘His name was Molino until you stole him from me. What a coward you are.’
‘Woman, you’re pushing my patience beyond its limits.’
She, too, had lost her composure. ‘I want that agreement. It is the least you can do. You left him once...’
‘Left him! It was an act of fate. I didn’t abandon the boy,
‘The boy. The boy. That’s all he ever was to you, the boy. You took him away from me once. Unless you do this thing, I will tell them that you raped me in your house at Bastine, that you—,
‘Raped you! I’ve never seen a pair of legs open faster in my life. He’s my son and I’ll call him what I want to call him. You have no claim on him. He’s mine, adopted on record. All other records have been destroyed. You couldn’t prove ... anything.’