How the hell did they locate this channel, Hooker thought.
Berger anticipated his reaction. He said, “The Company works in odd ways.”
“Not this odd.”
“Apparently whatever you do seems to require an immediate response.” He paused and stared at Hooker a moment. “And the Company doesn’t need to go into any explanations, either.”
“What about this call?”
“You are to contact this caller as soon as possible. They said you’d know how and didn’t go into any details.”
“Does Chana know about this?”
“I don’t think so. The Tellig was out at sea and you were en route to Peolle. I’d be their nearest source. I was informed that you could use our facilities if you wished.”
“I appreciate it, Charlie, but I’ll make out okay.”
In the short time he had been gone, a horde of helping hands had gotten the Mallis’ boat up on the dolly that ran up the ramp on the old rusted iron railroad tracks. This night they’d have it settled on the beach for inspection and repair, and whatever they found would be part of the folklore of the island. The story would go out, photographs would document the incident, and the bigger magazines would send their teams again to enhance the news that would add to the mystique of Peolle, creating another tourist attraction.
Hooker spit down in the sand, disgusted.
Tomorrow he’d look over the bottom of the boat himself. He’d be able to see what had hit that ancient hull that had a thousand feet of water under it. Briefly, he remembered what Kim Sebring had said about the movements of the plates in the earth below, but had there been an aberration like that it would have shown with an epochal destructive force picked up on every instrument around the world. No, there was no sudden rising of a new mountain from the subterranean belly of the underworld.
Billy stood at the wheel of the Clamdip, crossing the placid waters that gave off heat and a smell of a world apart. A round oval of a school of bait fish suddenly erupted on the surface, and out of seemingly nowhere the gulls and other seabirds appeared, descending on the rolling mass, gulping their fill until the bait fish disappeared as quickly as they had comeand the birds left too, squalling their satisfaction.
Judy said softly, “Are we going where I hope we’re going?”
“This time you can see how I live.”
“I know how you live.”
A frown touched Hooker’s eyes and he glanced at her.
“Billy told me.” She smiled.
“Am I a slob?”
“He said you take many medicines.”
“He’s wrong. I have them, but I don’t take them.”
“What are they for?” she asked.
“Painkillers, mainly. They’re all legal.”
“Do you hurt?”
He let out a small laugh. “Only when it rains. Down here it doesn’t rain much.”
The way he said it sent a sharp pang of sadness through her body. He was alone, but he wasn’t lonely. He would hurt, but he wouldn’t complain. He had a shell about him you couldn’t see yet knew was there, an invisible armor he didn’t want but had to have to protect others from becoming like him. Then she remembered his kiss and the way he had touched her and wondered for a moment if it was she who had the shell about her.
When she was in Mako’s quarters she understood Billy’s description of him living like a soldier. There were no luxuries. Everything was essential and everything was in its place. The building itself was a renovation of an earlier structure, obviously erected from the timbers and woodwork of old ships that had been storm-wrecked on the shores of the island. A stout wooden barrel under the eaves collected rainwater for an improvised shower while a hand pump brought groundwater up to the kitchen from a hand-driven pipe that went down thirty feet.
While she was on the porch listening to Billy telling her how his boss had successfully improvised to make his area a good base for his operation, she heard Mako rustling around inside, then begin speaking to someone in a muted tone. She motioned to Billy and they both moved out into the sand, watching the Clamdip riding alongside the dock.
Inside, Mako said to his old friend, “Man, I thought I had some security here.”
“Come on, pal, that’s my business too. I was with the Company myself, remember?”
“That was the old days. The Company’s changed their tricks.”
“The Company’s government. I’m business. Regulations don’t stand in the way of making a buck, kid, you know that. I still have my contacts too.”
Mako let out a short laugh and said, “I should have known. So, what have you got?”
There was the sound of rustling papers on the other end and his buddy said, “I hope you don’t want the details of all this...”
“I don’t.”
“Your subject, Anthony Pell, doesn’t like to leave tracks. He left his Hollywood address at eight in the morning, and there ended the Anthony Pell identity. At LAX he boarded a plane to Miamiand this is an assumption, understandusing the name Arthur Peters, the same initials. Most likely he had those stamped on his luggage. When he arrived in Miami, a limousine driver picked him up and took him to the Olivera Hotel, a small but very expensive place whose clientele seems to be heads of businesses who like to stay unseen.”
“That would be Tony Pallatzo, all right.”
“It figures.”
“He likes his first class accommodations,” Mako said, “but don’t tell me he stayed with the limousine.”
This time the voice at the other end chuckled back. “Hell, he went back to his old days on this one, Mako. They have those Rent-A-Wreck car places in Miami too. We checked every one of them before we located the AP initials again. This time it was Alfred Palmer, and like the airline deal, there was a credit card in that name too. We checked the addresses on the credit cards and they were commercial drops you could route mail through to another address. His was a post office box in West Los Angeles. He took a ten-year-old Ford, put thirty-eight miles on the odometer before turning it in again the next day. That one trip was just about all it took to go from the car rental place to the area you designated and back.”
“Beautiful, buddy. You did a great job.”
“You want confirmation?”
“Look, I got a few other goodies on this guy. He’s bad, real bad.”
“How many good guys do we know anyway?” Mako asked.
“Not too many, pal,” his old friend told him before he broke the connection.
Pell had played it cool, all right, Hooker thought. He wasn’t about to trust the job in this country to any underling. This was just too damn big to let anyone get a hold on it. And he would have covered himself with his bosses and they would have okayed the deal because Anthony Pell was a totally reformed hood, years from his origins, independently wealthy and absorbed in the big businesses of reputable men. But old Tony Pallatzo had made one big mistake. He had reverted to carrying out a hit in the only way he knew, with all the stupid supposed simplicity of a plain old street hood.
He did have one advantage. When he made the deal with the Becker Bank he must have sensed the possibility of the deal getting quashed before it was consummated. He could have had that strange intuition of the crooked, knowing that the committee of finance was affable, but the headman had a secret reservation about this new client. The mob had their own connections overseas too. Everything was in place and Becker was easy to drop. Even now there would be no uproar because the loan had already been repaid with interest.
“Cute,” Mako said to himself. “Very cute.”
When he slipped his hand into Judy’s she jumped, startled, then squeezed his fingers. “You walk like Billy.”