‘So you’re Bobby Hooker,’ Eliza said.
‘I am Okari Asieda,’ the tattooed man said. ‘Bobby Hooker no longer exists.’
He revealed to them private feelings which he could never share before, how he had hated and feared Asieda-san for months and how Asieda-san with patience and wisdom had finally won him over, had explained the meaning of the Tendai and the most ancient myths and how to live in the forest and fish the sea.
‘And when the war was over and he set off on his Walk of a Thousand Days, I went with him, begging at doorways, walking from one end of Japan to the other, as he sought the wisdom of Zen. And always there was time for the lessons. He taught me the Way of the Secret Warrior, the Moves of the Sword, the Language of the Creatures. He taught me honour, respect and love. And finally, he revealed to me the seventh level of the higaru-dashi.’
‘And he never attempted blackmail? Extortion?’ the Magician asked.
‘He never asked for anything after his brother died.’
O’Hara leaned back, staring at the imaginary boxes hanging in the air before him, looking back through time. Slowly the pieces began to fall into place. The sequence became obvious to him.
What Hooker and his elitist friends needed was a power base of their own. From that, they could begin monopolizing other related companies. There was only one problem: monopolies were illegal. But an oil consortium of separately owned corporations, each with its own autonomy — that would be perfect. The key was AMRAN, They formed the consortium, then killed the key men in the member corporations and put their own people in. In effect, they owned every company. They owned Hensell, Alamo, Sunset, Intercom, Am Petro and San-San and all its subsidiaries. They even controlled a bank in Boston. The common thread was oil.
There were still a few empty boxes,
‘I keep wondering why they blew up Marza’s car,’ Eliza said.
‘It made it easier to take over Aquila.’
‘And,’ the Magician said, ‘do you know what was so special about that car?’ Eliza shook her head. ‘The fucker was supposed to get fifty, sixty miles to the gallon. It would have revolutionized the auto business. Do you realize how that would have cut into AMRAN’s profits?’
‘My god,’ Eliza said. ‘Are they that greedy?’
‘Money’s no longer the game,’ O’Hara said. ‘They’ve got all the money they need. Now the game is pure power.’
‘Then why did they sink the Thoreau?’ Eliza asked. ‘If the AMRAN people were wooing Sunset Oil as a potential member of the consortium, they were destroying an eighty-million-dollar asset that might someday belong to them. Isn’t that kinda cutting off your nose to spite your face?’
‘Maybe it was a squeeze play,’ said the Magician. ‘Maybe Sunset was a holdout, and it couldn’t afford to be a holdout anymore after the rig got knocked over.’
‘That’s a good theory,’ said O’Hara. ‘But let’s look beyond it for a minute. Why were the pictures lifted in Hawaii and then destroyed?’
‘Because nobody needed them,’ the Magician said.
‘Then why buy them?’
‘So nobody else would!’ Eliza said.
‘That’s what I think,’ said O’Hara. ‘Which indicates that whoever had the man killed had the details of something on the Thoreau.’
‘The pumping station,’ said the Magician. ‘Gotta be!’
‘If that’s the case, there were two reasons for destroying the Thoreau. One was to put Sunset in a financial bind. The other was because AMRAN already had the plans for the pumping station. They wanted the pictures off the market. So AMRAN is probably using that pumping station itself.’
‘It’s interesting,’ O’Hara said. ‘Hooker denies any knowledge of Midas.’
‘What is Midas?’ asked Okari.
‘We think it’s an oil field, maybe the largest in the world. But we don’t know where it is.’
‘And I think I know why,’ Eliza said.
They all turned toward the tiny reporter, who was wearing one of her million-dollar smiles.
‘Well?’ O’Hara said.
‘It’s underwater. Kraft American said the underwater dish built by Bridges was called Midas. Midas is the heart of the oil field, it’s the pumping station for the whole operation. And it’s all under the sea, the perfect hiding place.’
‘But where is it’?’ the Magician asked.
‘I think I can help there,’ Okari said. ‘I have seen the room from which they direct everything. It is enormous, perhaps forty meters high. And there is a huge map with odd-shaped TV screens recessed in it.’
‘They’re called diod screens,’ said the Magician. ‘Free form.’
‘These TV screens show their operations all over the world. They can watch everything that goes on in this empire of theirs.
There is one in particular, near Bonin, which has this undersea dish you speak of. They have TV pictures inside and out. And there are also ships down there, it is like some great graveyard of old tankers.’
‘Beautiful,’ said the Magician. ‘That’s the answer to the tankers. They sink them and Store oil in them. I’ll bet more than one skipper has vanished in that part of the ocean in the last few years.’
‘And Yumishawa has a new refinery on the Bonin Islands, less than a hundred miles away,’ said Okari.
‘So they pump oil from their underwater storage ships to their refinery as they need it. Christ, what an ingenious operation,’ said O’Hara.
‘They been on to this for — what, thirty years?’ the Magician said. ‘Why didn’t they start pumping oil back then? Why wait?’
‘They couldn’t do anything before this,’ Eliza said. ‘Not without revealing the existence of the strike. That’s their ace in the hole. It gives them almost unlimited oil reserves. Just think what that means in the marketplace. The longer they keep it under wraps, the more powerful they become.’
‘Yes,’ Kimura reflected, ‘if one sells coconuts, the world knows one has a tree.’
‘Very patient men,’ Okari put in.
‘Why not?’ said the Magician. ‘Look at the payoff.’
‘And Lavander got it because he was hired to appraise the field when they started to make their big move,’ Eliza said. ‘It was in his book. He knew the potential. Hell, the poor fool just knew too much for his own good.’
‘They probably had plans to hit him even before he was lifted,’ the Magician said. ‘They only had one problem
Chameleon, who seemed to knew everything they were doing.’
O’Hara was deep in thought, trying to construct the abstract boxes in the air into basic realities He was sure the answers to all their questions were there, now he had to clarify them. But he could not clear the image of Hooker from his mind, To dishonour the great wartime hero seemed almost like dishonouring history, besmirching America’s victories — and that troubled him. Yet Hooker had dishonoured himself. What hatreds, what frustrations, could have smouldered so deep inside him that they twisted his senses until he found relief in the dark side of his soul? He had betrayed his trust, designed a monolith of greed financed by elitists as dishonourable as he, and created a nightmare empire in which murder and robbery were taken for granted and executed by vipers: Hinge, Danilov, Le Croix, yes, even Falmouth. Hooker must be destroyed. But how? The answer was simple: with the truth.
How to do it was the problem.
‘We need to get inside and get photographs of that board, particularly close-ups of the pumping station,’ O’Hara said. The question is how.’