‘Why haven’t you told anyone about this before?’ the Magician asked Okari.
Okari smiled wistfully. ‘It was a personal matter,’ he said. ‘Besides, I did not understand the significance of all this, nor did Asieda-san. We had bits and pieces, scraps from their wastebaskets, memos on desks. They thought we knew much more than we did.’
The Magician was humming ‘C-Jam Blues’ and smiling. ‘I got an idea,’ he said. ‘This place is made out of stone, right?’
Okari nodded.
‘No metal in the walls?’
Okari shook his head. ‘Timber,’ he said,
‘Perfect.’
‘You going to let us in on the secret?’ asked O’Hara.
‘They have security cameras scanning this room, right?’ the Magician asked Okari.
‘Yes, near the ceiling. Some are stationary, some sniff the room like ferrets.’
‘And we got the production truck. There’s half a dozen videotape machines in there. All we gotta do, get us a coupla small microwave transmitters. Get inside, find the back of their monitors and hook the transmitters into their “video out” lug. It’ll change their scanner into cameras. We’ll pick up the signal in the live news truck outside and videotape it. What we’ll get is a continuous picture from inside the place.’
‘Where does one find such a transmitter?’ asked Kimura.
‘Oh, just about any radio shop,’ the piano player said, still grinning.
‘How do you get into this place?’ O’Hara asked Okari.
‘Up through the great stone drains at the foot of the wall. They lead to the dungeons, which are used only for storage. The grates are old. Once inside, I go to the locker room where the fixing men keep their uniforms. Once I have changed clothes, I come and go as I please. I rummage through wastebaskets, search Hooker’s desk, find something to unnerve him, to make my presence known. And then I send the chameleon.’
‘And what are the risks, other than those which are obvious?’ asked Kimura.
‘The computers are in what were once the dungeons,’ Okari said. ‘It would be risky to linger down there too long. The guards are all sumo and their leader is a man who has the smell of an animal. I have seen him twice. He is very restless. He wanders the halls and dungeons at all hours of the night with a guard dog. I am always cautious that he does not get close enough to recognize me. I call him Hitotsu-me.’
O’Hara looked up sharply. ‘One-Eye?’ he said. ‘Does he wear a patch?’
‘Hai. With a very bad scar.’ Okari drew an imaginary line down the side of his face.
‘I saw him today. I had the feeling he was watching me, and I also had the feeling I had met him before but I just—’
O’Hara paused, concentrating on the sketchy details of a face he had seen for only a few moments, isolating the vague details of that face in his mind and focusing totally on it. He said nothing for more than a minute, then: ‘No, I don’t think I know him. And yet there’s something familiar...’ He tried to concentrate, tapping his memory. ‘A picture, perhaps... No, the face itself is not familiar.’ He went back to the beginning of it, to his conversation with Falmouth on the boat. The Players...
‘Le Croix,’ he said.
‘Who?’ Okari asked.
‘A Frenchman. Le Croix is his nickname. He lost an eye in Algiers and crucified a couple of dozen rebels to get even. It could be him. There are no photographs of him in existence, he had them all destroyed. If it is Le Croix, you’re right— we’re looking down a hundred miles of bad road. For the purposes of this junket we need to give him plenty of room. Any other problems?’
Okari shook his head.
‘How did you figure all this out?’ Eliza asked. ‘Going up through the drains and all that?’
‘Very simple,’ said Okari; ‘you forget I lived there once. For three years it was my private playground. I know every stone in the place.’
11
Le Croix entered the dungeon stairwell in Dragon’s Nest and went down the wide stone staircase. The dog, an ugly mongrel, was expertly trained. It strode ahead of him, its nose first in the air, then along the ground, sniffing, alert.
Le Croix’s instincts had been sending out warnings ever since he saw O’Hara at the fortress earlier in the day. It was the first time since he joined Master that he felt threatened. For three years everything had gone perfectly, not a slip-up. Then things started going a little haywire. First there was the job on the Thoreau when Thornley was killed. Then Lavander was snatched, Then Garvey and Hooker pulled him into Dragon’s Nest to head up security. It seemed to him they were getting defensive, and Le Croix’s game had always been an offensive one. Now this reporter, who was supposed to lead them to Chameleon, seemed to be getting closer to them instead.
He hated the dungeons. They were cold and dank and the wind, crying through cracks in the mortar, was unnerving. Even the dog got spooky down here.
When he was sure the place was secure, he retreated back upstairs to the warmth of the security office and sat watching the monitor screen as the camera scanned the dungeon stairwell. Something was in the air, he could feel it as surely as he felt the cold drafts down below. He would have some coffee and check again in thirty or forty minutes. He did not trust the electronic devices. He did not trust anything or anyone but himself.
The wall of Dragon’s Nest rose out of the trees above them like an enormous gray shroud. They had climbed up the mountain from the road below and now they were at the mouth of a gaping water drain, its masoned stones green with centuries of moss. A trickle of water fell from its mouth and splattered on the rocks below. Red eyes glittered in the beam of O’Hara’s flashlight. The creature squealed and scurried back into the opening. Vines cluttered the entrance.
‘No wonder they’ve never paid any attention to this drain,’ O’Hara whispered. ‘You have to be crazy to do this.’
‘Welcome to madness,’ Chameleon said and slithered through the vines into the drain. O ‘Hara followed him, his hands slipping on the moss-covered rocks. The drain was four feet in diameter and long. It snaked out of light range. Far in the back, O’Hara could hear the steady trickle of a dozen streams echoing through the tunnel. Cold air moaned past them.
Chameleon moved on all fours, like a cat. And fast. They were both dressed in black pants and turtlenecks and black sneakers. Chameleon carried a rope with a small telescoping grappling hook on one end. They had four microwave transmitters, each wrapped in heavy Styrofoam, tucked in their sweaters. Nothing else but the flashlight.
They both crept along on all fours, their backs curved away from the top of the drain, past two feeder drains. At the third, Chameleon stopped. He pointed up and O’Hara flashed the light toward the ceiling. A shaft went straight up into the guts of the fortress. It was thirty or forty feet straight up to a grate at the far end. Chameleon put his back against one wall and his feet against the other and started shinnying up. It was a torturous ascent because the walls of the shaft were dripping wet. Foot by slippery foot he jerked his way up the narrow enclosure. When he reached the top he fastened the grappling hook to the grate and unwound the rope. It dangled down to O’Hara’s fingertips. He climbed up ii, hand over hand. He braced himself with feet and back while Chameleon very cautiously pushed up the grate and slid it aside.
The subterranean passage was grim. Only two lamps illuminated the low-ceilinged dungeons. What were once cells had been converted into storage bins, but the place still seemed to be permeated with soughs of torture and despair, as if history were whispering through its cold stoae corridors. It was the wind, keening through cracks in the walls and down the stairways,