I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck as I stared at the drawing on the napkin. "It's close enough."
Garth asked Veil, "What do you think are the chances of Sinclair being a member?"
"Nonexistent," Veil answered without hesitation. "A member of Black Flame might have gone off to the Sorbonne, or joined the army, in order to further the aims of the organization, but it's unlikely. If he did, he would operate subtly. Sinclair's been the ringleader of his own three-ring circus for twenty years. He doesn't begin to fit the complete profile of a Black Flame assassin."
"Even more to the point," I offered, "he wouldn't have ripped off ten million dollars from his own people. So there doesn't seem to be much chance-"
"Oh, Jesus," Veil interrupted suddenly. His voice was soft, but there was an air of certainty in his tone.
I turned in my chair, looked into his bright eyes. "What?"
Veil cocked his head to one side, frowned slightly as he stared off into space. I could tell he was far ahead of us now, his mind searching for other connections, answers to questions we had not yet asked.
"Veil?"
He glanced at me, Garth, and Harper, and then his gaze came back to me. "He's an ex-member."
"I thought you said there were no ex-members; there aren't even any ex-novitiates."
Veil's only response was to slowly shake his head back and forth. He seemed lost in his own thoughts, the vision he had suddenly experienced.
"Go ahead, Veil," Garth prompted quietly. "Just tell us what you're thinking."
"There weren't supposed to have been any members who weren't Japanese," Veil answered distantly. "But now I'm thinking. . that the key may have been Sinclair's father. Garth, you said the man was totally immersed in Japanese culture. He arranged for the son to train in the martial arts at a very young age, and the boy was a natural. So the son progresses as far as he can go with the standard sensei, teaching standard techniques. But the father wanted more. What if-and all I'm saying is what if- the father approached a leader of Black Flame, perhaps through some contact he had made, and offered up his son to them in the ancient tradition?"
Harper sighed. "You're saying the father was willing to put his son in grave danger just so the boy could find work one day as an assassin? I don't think so."
"That wasn't the point, Harper," Veil replied quickly, making no effort now to hide his growing excitement. "The father wanted the son to have the opportunity to become the great martial arts master the father thought he could be. He could have been indulging his own pride, as well. He was an American, so maybe he didn't know, or fully appreciate, the kind of people he was dealing with. Or maybe he was simply betting that his son could break free of them after he'd learned the lessons the father wanted him to have. And that's precisely what the young John Sinclair did. He was accepted as a novitiate, he took their secrets, and then he left."
I winced inwardly. "And Black Flame retaliated by killing his parents. It could explain the mysterious circumstances of their deaths."
"True," Garth said. "But why not simply kill the son? Or at least kill him in addition to the parents?"
"They may have tried, and failed. Maybe John Sinclair was never that easy to trap, even as a young man. There's also a possibility Black Flame considered it even greater punishment to leave the son alive after murdering his parents, allowing him to suffer what must have been considerable grief and guilt."
"God," Harper said, and shuddered. "If it's true, that's so terrible, so sad." She paused, took a deep breath, continued, "Assuming this Black Flame society really does exist, and that the present circumstances and past history are about how Veil describes them, why are these people still hanging around here? If Veil's theory is true, I can understand why they would be interested in killing John Sinclair, but we can assume they've been working toward that goal for years. They've eliminated all people and evidence linking them to Cornucopia. So why don't they just fade away?"
"They want to kill Mongo," Garth answered, once again looking around at all the windows and exits in the restaurant, as he and Veil had been doing all evening. "They feel he's a loose end. They know he came here on an errand for Neuberger, and they're not sure how much he knows about Cornucopia and them. They would still want to kill Sinclair, but they may consider Mongo an even greater threat to them at the present time. For whatever reason, Sinclair has never exposed them; they fear Mongo might know enough to do exactly that."
Harper brushed a strand of hair back from her face. "Given the premises we're operating under, that's fair enough reasoning. But it doesn't explain why John Sinclair is sticking around too- if he really is. What does he want?"
"To destroy Black Flame," Veil said, his tone once again distant. He tapped his index finger once, firmly, on the tabletop. "It sounds like the ultimate in ninja bullshit stories, and yet it just might be true. He wants to finish a duel that began when a young John Sinclair stole Black Flame's secrets and walked away from them, continued with the murder of his parents in retaliation, and may have resumed in Vietnam when a man who may have been a Black Flame leader took advantage of his assignment working for the CIA to try to destroy Sinclair by involving him in Cooked Goose, by feeding him explosive information that the leader calculated would get him killed by his own countrymen."
"I agree that it sounds like the ultimate you-know-what," Garth said in a neutral tone that made it impossible for me to gauge how much, if any, of it he thought might be plausible. He paused, looked at me, continued, "I also agree it just might be true. Some of it anyway."
In the silence that followed I struggled to share Veil's vision, to see things the way he saw them. I tried to imagine a Japan-obsessed father with intimate knowledge of and love for that culture discovering, to his joy, that his son had a preternatural talent for the martial arts, virtually Japan's national sport. Then I tried to imagine that same father learning of Black Flame, or suspecting its existence, and then, perhaps partially to feed his own ego, deciding to test the decidedly dark waters of Black Flame's powers using his own son as a plumb line. The son, of course, would have eagerly accepted the challenge of seeing if he could receive Black Flame training, ingest their secrets, and then escape-spiritually as well as physically-from their clutches.
The son had met the challenge posed by the father, but neither had fully gauged Black Flame's ruthlessness, or its implacable will for vengeance.
Years had passed. Whether Black Flame had truly been unable to catch up with Sinclair, or had simply been biding its time waiting for exactly the right moment to exact a full measure of retribution for what they considered his betrayal, was impossible to determine with certainty, as was any complete scenario. But if there was any truth at all in the scenario we were patching together out of little more than motes of data in thin air, it seemed Black Flame had waited until after Sinclair had become a war hero before striking at him. It could mean their strategy had been to disgrace him as well as kill him, to see him branded a traitor by his countrymen before being executed. Involve him, against his will, in the monstrous Cooked Goose.
But Sinclair's physical and mental abilities had continued to grow, perhaps beyond even Black Flame's reckoning. He had escaped that psychological and physical snare; he'd rejected the whole idea of Cooked Goose, as the Black Flame advisor had calculated he would, but then managed to kill his own would-be assassins and walk, unscathed, out of Southeast Asia. This the Black Flame master had definitely not calculated.