Free Diamond Head by Charles Knief Page B

British fellow in a deerstalker, waving his meerschaum, sagely telling me it was all quite elementary, my dear Caine.
    This was beyond my experience. My training had been to plan and perform high-risk, high-reward operations using a small team of similarly trained specialists, each of us capable of extreme violence. Get in, get done and get out. Be gone before the smoke cleared and the dust settled. As a civilian my jobs tended to be similar but were more of a protective nature, preventing others from achieving what my own teams could have done. Imagine the worst scenario and plan for it. Protect the executive and his family from harm, make certain his stay in the Islands would be a pleasant one. With that kind of problem I was in my element. But in this arena I was the amateur, stalking the grizzled gladiator, armed only with my wooden sword.
    I closed the file and locked it away again. I washed out the glass in the galley and put on my Nikes for my evening run.
    This time I ran the bike path all the way to Pearl City. It’s a ten-mile round trip from my slip in the marina to the Monkey Bar and back. The sun had already gone down when I returned. It was pitch black under the canopy of kiawe trees near the end of the run and I felt a little uneasy padding through there. If someone had ill feelings toward me this would be where they would have the best advantage. But this path was the only access to the base on foot. There was no way around it. Thinking that I was retracing Souza’s path, I felt patches of ice from my neck to my shoulder blades. I increased my pace
until I reached the well-lighted parking lot near the Marina Restaurant.
    An empty Duchess welcomed me home, creaking a lonely tune through her rigging. I’d managed to convince myself that Thompson was somehow connected to Mary’s murder and I was committed to finding the leverage to reach him, regardless of what it took.
    After changing, I spent a quiet hour on deck smoking a Cuban Romeo y Julietta and thinking of a way to gain access, reflecting on what I’d learned about Thompson from Louise, from Katherine Alapai, and from Chawlie.
    It took about that long to reach a decision. Sometimes the direct approach is the best one. In this case it looked like the only one.

 
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    11
    A t nine o’clock the next morning I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe in the shadow of the Pacific Tower waiting for CAT Productions, Inc., to begin its business day. All I’d managed to deduce so far was that “CAT” was Carter Allen Thompson’s initials.
    I’d already visited CAT’s floor twice and found the entire floor locked off the elevator. For the past twenty minutes I’d entertained myself in the open-air pastry shop with a morning paper, a cup of coffee and a bear claw. The paper told me things I didn’t want to know about people for whom I cared little or nothing. Someone in the Middle East had done something unforgivable. Congress had done something unprintable. The president had done something unpardonable. A hurricane was thrashing Guam and a tropical storm was forming off the coast of South America, gaining strength as it pushed its way into the Pacific. It wasn’t a problem yet, but it was causing concern to the local weather people who were paid to be concerned about such things.
    I was dressed in my best Hawaiian business sincere, in a raw silk sport coat, a white Oxford-cloth shirt with an open collar and tropical-weight wool trousers. Both the jacket and the pants were natural colored, offsetting my deep-water tan. I
carried an aluminum Haliburton briefcase. It was a prop designed to make me look like a successful businessman from Kahala. The briefcase was filled with Sunday’s Advertiser.
    By nine-thirty most of the office workers had been busy for over an hour. I’d read all there was to read in the paper and I didn’t want another cup of coffee. I walked around the block, pausing outside the