Authors: Marc Olden
On Fifth Avenue the third man pulled the scarf from his face, touched the gold stud in his ear and looked up at a rust-colored sky, feeling the chill of the falling snowflakes and night air on his heated skin. He felt invincible; his
ki,
energy, was growing and his senses were so keen that he could hear wind and water from another time. Tonight when he stepped into the arena he would stamp his feet and shake the earth. He was protected by the rite of blood and by
Hachiman Dai-Bosatsu,
the great Bodhisatva, god of war. He was a sword, forged by the four elements of metal; water, wood and fire. He was true
bushi,
an invincible warrior.
Principle of five feelings and five desires, character flaws to be taken advantage of in your enemy
T
HE CAYMAN ISLANDS LIE
one jet hour south of Miami and 180 miles northwest of Jamaica. Measuring only one hundred square miles, the islands have a population of twelve thousand, descended from Scottish farmers, Europeans, Africans and shipwrecked buccaneers, who once terrorized the Caribbean under Sir Francis Drake, Henry Morgan and Blackbeard. They supported themselves by fishing and exporting shark skins, turtle products and dyewood. Grand Cayman is the largest island, a thin, flat splinter of coral, white sand and mangrove swamps.
In 1962, the Caymans, a dependency of Jamaica, refused to follow her lead and become independent of Britain. Instead the three islands—Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac—voted to remain a British Crown Colony, governing with its own constitution; foreign policy and defense were to be directed from London. Following the Bahamas, which had prospered by offering tax exemptions to foreign banks and multinational corporations, the Caymanians decided to turn their tiny and isolated community into a Caribbean Switzerland.
With the passage of a new trust law in 1966, the Cayman Islands became an international financial center, offering foreign companies a tax-free haven and allowing world banks to operate in the islands with a secrecy unmatched in the Bahamas or even Switzerland. Fifteen years later almost three hundred banks and over eleven thousand companies were registered in Georgetown, the capital of Grand Cayman, a presence representing hundreds of billions of dollars, all of it free from taxes and surveillance.
Or questions regarding origin.
The counting was almost completed. Eight million, three hundred thousand dollars in cash, hand carried from New York to Grand Cayman in three suitcases and placed on the desk of a Georgetown bank manager who was also a lawyer and one of seven members of the islands’ “executive council,” or cabinet. This allowed him to make the laws that assured his prosperity and confounded his rivals. He showed his clients old-fashioned courtesy, served them long Cuban cigars and Vieille Rhum from the French islands and, most important of all, kept secrets very well.
But there were indications that he was not without his own secrets and Trevor Sparrowhawk, sitting in the banker’s paneled office under a framed color photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, took note of them. A look had passed between the married banker and his much younger secretary, a sloe-eyed, voluptuous Jamaican who wore African blue lilies in her hair and a Lucien Picard wristwatch. Slap and tickle going on there, thought Sparrowhawk, who was more observant than most. The bridge of the banker’s nose sported dark indentations, a sign that he had recently given up wearing eyeglasses in favor of contact lenses and a more youthful appearance.
Sparrowhawk also knew that this man’s salary as a banker, while comfortable, did not match his earnings as an attorney, in which capacity he received a thousand dollars for each registration of a multinational corporation, most of which then included him on the board of directors. In ten years he had registered over a thousand companies, leading them into the shadowy world of offshore banking and tax avoidance. Framed certificates arranged on a bookshelf proclaimed that the banker, who wore the Eton public school tie, was also a member of several prestigious London clubs.
Of the five men in the banker’s office, only Sparrowhawk was not counting money. He was a mere observer, bored by the long hours of waiting; he spent most of his time at the second floor window, looking out at the Georgetown harbor and the unloading of a cruise liner from Caracas. And when that paled, he returned to his seat to read
Poems, Chieflly in the Scottish Dialect,
a Robert Burns first edition given to him by his wife as an anniversary gift. Closing the book, Sparrowhawk stood up and placed the book on his chair, then stretched before touching the floor, fingertips on the thick carpet. Not bad for a lad of fifty-five.
Trevor Wells Sparrowhawk was a stocky, red-faced Englishman whose needle-thin nose jutted out over a thick black mustache, with ends pointed and waxed. His full head of silver hair hid the remains of a right ear mangled in the Belgian Congo by a drugged Simba wielding a panga. His dark gray eyes were narrowed in a squint, suggesting a permanent suspicion of mankind. He wore the SAS lapel pin on his tweed jacket, proudly regarding his service in that elite British commando unit as the most satisfying of his long military career. These days Sparrowhawk lived and worked in America, where he was chief operating officer and a director of Management Systems Consultants, a private intelligence service.
On one side of the large black oak desk the Caymanian banker and two assistants stopped counting to enter printout totals from individual calculators into a ledger kept by the banker. Opposite them, and with a calculator of his own, sat Constantine Pangalos, a high-powered New York attorney whom Sparrowhawk and two of his agency guards had escorted with the money from New York to St. Petersburg by car and from there by jet to the Cayman Islands. Pangalos was fortyish, a dark and hairy little man, with thick eyebrows over a hooked nose and a decided preference for other men’s wives. Sparrowhawk was convinced that the man’s lechery and abominable table manners would have found him quite at home with Rasputin. Pangalos had once been a noted federal prosecutor, in charge of a task force investigating organized crime. But how he worked for organized crime, for the Paul Molise family of New York. As did Trevor Sparrowhawk.
Another cruise liner arrived in the harbor. Sparrowhawk heard the three blasts of its deep horn and the answering whistles from the fishing boats.
“Finished.”
A tired Pangalos flopped back in his chair and massaged strained eyes with his fingertips. He spoke to Sparrowhawk, whom he disliked—the feeling was mutual—without turning around. “You can call New York now. Tell our friends three days.”
The Englishman rose from his chair, the Burns poems under one arm. Paul Molise, junior and senior, would be delighted to hear they were getting the eight million back so soon. Washed, of course. This particular laundering scheme was the brainchild of Paul junior, a financial wizard who had graduated from Harvard Business School and was responsible for his family’s move into legitimate investments: nursing homes, shopping centers, savings and loan associations and real estate.
Management Systems Consultants also laundered its share of dirty money, but that was not its primary function. Under Sparrowhawk’s shrewd direction it gathered information vital to Molise interests. The information came from the police files, congressional committees, corporate board meetings, union bargaining sessions, the IRS, FBI, secret court testimony and the federal witness protection program. It came from former lawmen now on the company payroll, who used their contacts to secure computer tapes, data bank information and copies of memos, dossiers and reports.
Sparrowhawk had turned Management Systems Consultants into a profitable company. It had legitimate security contracts with leading corporations ranging from hotel chains to fast-food restaurants. It performed investigations for top law firms, politicians and foreign businessmen. It furnished bodyguards, in-house security for banks and federal plants, performed debugging and wiretapping and made employee background checks. Most of its clients thought the company was legitimate and efficient; they didn’t know that private information about each of them was accessible to a crime family.
Though backed by Paul Molise and his father, Management Systems Consultants was Sparrowhawk’s domain. He insisted that wet work, killing, be left to the wogs, so as not to bring MSC under scrutiny. The company was to restrict itself to washing money and collecting intelligence.
“Men see wrong even in the righteous,” he had said to Paul Molise. “The suspicious mind has only to know a little to suspect much more. American law enforcement is that suspicious mind. It surely has both of us under surveillance, you more than me. In any case, a corpse draped around the company water cooler is apt to discourage business and cause our board of directors to leap up and down like a fiddler’s elbow.”
In the Georgetown banker’s office Sparrowhawk said to Pangalos, “I’ll telephone from outside. Gives me a chance to stretch my legs. By the way, should anyone inquire, when may I say you’ll return to New York?”
“When I get there. I have things to do in Miami.”
“I’m sure.”
Pangalos slowly turned his small dark head to lock eyes with Sparrowhawk. The staring contest ended with the Greek snapping at the banker, “Let’s keep it rolling. We finished the counting, but there’s paperwork to take care of. I’d like it done while we’re young, okay?”
Sparrowhawk watched Pangalos indulge in a protracted fingering of his crotch. Insatiable bastard. One of Pangalos’s clients, a producer of television news in New York, had been too busy to accompany his wife to Florida, where she had fled to escape a November snowstorm. She was now waiting for Pangalos to join her at a Spanish villa in Key Biscayne.
“I shall take Robbie with me,” said Sparrowhawk, referring to one of the two agency guards waiting outside the door. “Martin can stay behind. Should you need a runner to bring a message to me I daresay he’ll have no trouble locating me in a town this size.”
Pangalos smirked. “Maybe you can find some bimbo down here to sit on Robbie’s face.”
“Perhaps I shan’t be around the next time you annoy Robbie.”
Frowning, Pangalos chewed a thumbnail, remembering how close he had come. Sparrowhawk had stepped in between the two of them and calmed Robbie down, but it hadn’t been easy. A remark about Robbie never going out with women had set him off and almost cost Pangalos his life. Robbie was lethal.
He was expert in Tae Kwan Do and Okinawa-Te, in Kung Fu and Shotokan. In knife fighting and Bo-jitsu, stick fighting. He and Sparrowhawk had first met in Saigon, where Robbie was a SEAL and Sparrowhawk had worked for the CIA, Both also worked for the Mafia, which had managed to make a big profit out of the Vietnam War. At Management Systems Consultants, the thirty-year-old Robbie worked as bodyguard, as courier for cash and vital papers and as martial arts instructor to company personnel. Sparrowhawk was proud that Robbie successfully competed in major karate tournaments, where he had become a nationally ranked competitor. With only one child—a daughter—Sparrowhawk saw Robbie as the son he would have liked to have, and the lad showed his respect by calling Sparrowhawk major.
In Saigon, where Paul junior and Sparrowhawk had first discussed forming Management Systems Consultants, the major had made it clear that Robbie was to be part of the deal. This was not merely a gracious gesture to a comrade-in-arms; the lucrative contract and wide latitude of freedom offered Sparrowhawk did not rule out the possibility of treachery from the Italians. Robbie would be a handy chap to have around.
Sparrowhawk was suddenly alert. Something was wrong at the other end of the phone in New York.
Paul Molise was supposed to have answered. Instead Sparrowhawk heard another voice, mockingly polite and barely suppressing laughter. An alarm went off in the Englishman’s mind. As arranged, he was using a public telephone in Georgetown to reach a public telephone in Manhattan, one that should have been free from wiretaps. The voice that greeted Sparrowhawk seemed to know he was out of the country.
“Paulie says he’s sure you did a good job down there. He wants you to pass the information on to me.”
The information. Molise’s eight million, now untraceable in a Cayman bank, would return to America in three days as loans to businesses controlled by Molise. Also, Molise would be allowed tax deductions for interest payments on the loans.
And in the telephone call fifteen minutes earlier Sparrowhawk had arranged for someone—not an employee of Management Systems Consultants—to carry out a contract killing for the Molise family within the next forty-eight hours.
The silver-haired Englishman, receiver to his ear, drew deeply on an oval-shaped Turkish cigarette and stared at a Pride of Burma, whose scarlet and gold blossoms made it one of the world’s most beautiful trees. Two American college girls, made giggly by
ganja,
cycled past on their way to Seven Mile Beach, fins and snorkel masks dangling from handlebars. One, the blonde, reminded Sparrowhawk of Valerie, his daughter, and suddenly he remembered his promise to bring her some coral jewelry.
“Hey, I know you’re there,” said the voice. “I can hear you breathing.”
Bloody bastards are on to us, thought Sparrowhawk. One bloody bastard in particular.
He put a hand over the mouth of the receiver and with his head signaled Robbie to come closer.
“Manny Decker,” whispered Sparrowhawk. Robbie’s eyebrows rose.
“That’s him on the phone?”
“Keep your voice down, dammit. Whoever it is, is trying to disguise his voice with a handkerchief over the mouthpiece. But I’ll give you cards and spades it’s Decker.”
“Son of a bitch. How did he find out which phone we’d be calling in New York? How the hell did he even know we were down here?”
Sparrowhawk, struggling to control his anger, stared at the setting sun, a bright red ball that had turned the sea into crimson glass. Jesus in heaven, how he hated to be hunted.
“Doesn’t matter how he came to know. He’s a police officer.”