Combat

One

“The longer I live, the more I realize the less I know for sure.” That’s what my friend Quentin Kim used to mutter to me and curvy little Dana Martin in our Public Safety classes at San Jose State. Dana would frown because she revered conventional wisdom. I’d always chuckle, because I thought Quent was kidding. But that was years ago, and I was older then.

I mean, I thought I knew it all. “Public Safety” is genteel academic code for cop coursework, and while Quent had already built himself an enviable rep as a licensed P.I. in the Bay Area, he hadn’t been a big-city cop. I went on to become one, until I got fed up with the cold war between guys on the take and guys in Internal Affairs, both sides angling for recruits. I tried hard to avoid getting their crap on my size thirteen brogans while I lost track of Dana, saw Quent infrequently, and served the City of Oakland’s plainclothes detail in the name of public safety.

So much for stepping carefully in such a barnyard. At least I got out with honor after a few years, and I still had contacts around Oakland on both sides of the law. Make that several sides; and to an investigator that’s worth more than diamonds. It would’ve taken a better man than Harve Rackham to let those contacts go to waste, which is why I became the private kind of investigator, aka gumshoe, peeper, or just plain Rackham, P.I.

Early success can destroy you faster than a palmed ice pick, especially if it comes through luck you thought was skill. A year into my new career, I talked my way into a seam job — a kidnapping within a disintegrating family. The kidnapped boy’s father, a Sunnyvale software genius, wanted the kid back badly enough to throw serious money at his problem. After a few days of frustration, I shot my big mouth off about it to my sister’s husband, Ernie.

It was a lucky shot, though. Ernie was with NASA at Moffett Field and by sheer coincidence he knew a certain Canadian physicist. I’d picked up a rumor that the physicist had been playing footsie with the boy’s vanished mother.

The physicist had a Quebecois accent, Ernie recalled, and had spoken longingly about a teaching career. The man had already given notice at NASA without a forwarding address. He was Catholic. A little digging told me that might place him at the University of Montreal, a Catholic school which gives instruction in French. I caught a Boeing 787 and got there before he did, and guess who was waiting with her five-year-old boy in the Montreal apartment the physicist had leased.

I knew better than to dig very far into the reasons why Mama took Kiddie and left Papa. It was enough that she’d fled the country illegally. The check I cashed was so much more than enough that I bought a decaying farmhouse twenty miles and a hundred years from Oakland.

Spending so much time away, I figured I’d need to fence the five acres of peaches and grapes, but the smithy was what sold me. “The smith, a mighty man was he, with large and sinewy,” et cetera. Romantic bullshit, sure, but as I said, I knew it all then. And I wanted to build an off-road racer, one of the diesel-electric hybrids that were just becoming popular. I couldn’t imagine a better life than peeping around the Port of Oakland for money, and hiding out on my acreage whenever I had some time off, building my big lightning-on-wheels toy.

And God knows, I had plenty of time off after that! Didn’t the word get out that I was hot stuff? Weren’t more rich guys clamoring for my expensive services? Wasn’t I slated for greatness?

In three words: no, no, and no. I didn’t even invest in a slick Web site while I still had the money, with only a line in the yellow pages, so I didn’t get many calls. I was grunting beneath my old gasoline-fueled Toyota pickup one April afternoon, chasing an oil leak because I couldn’t afford to have someone else do it, when my cell phone warbled.

Quentin Kim; I was grinning in an instant. “I thought I was good, but it’s humbling when I can’t find something as big as you,” he bitched.

I squoze my hundred kilos from under the Toyota. “You mean you’re looking for me now? Today?”

“I have driven that country road three times, Harvey. My GP mapper’s no help. Where the devil are you?”

Even his cussing was conservative. When Quent used my full given name, he was a quart low on patience. I told him to try the road again and I’d flag him down, and he did, and twenty minutes later I guided his Volvo Electrabout up the lane to my place.

He emerged looking fit, a few grey hairs but the almond eyes still raven-bright, the smile mellow, unchanged. I ignored the limp; maybe his shoes pinched. From force of habit and ethnic Korean good manners, Quent avoided staring around him, but I knew he would miss very little as I invited him through the squinchy old screen door into my authentic 1910 kitchen with its woodstove. He didn’t relax until we continued to the basement, the fluorescents obediently flickering on along the stairs.

“You had me worried for a minute,” he said, now with a frankly approving glance at my office. As fin de siècle as the house was from the foundation up, I’d fixed it all Frank Gehry and Starship Enterprise below. He perched his butt carefully on the stool at my drafting carrel; ran his hand along the flat catatonic stare of my Magnascreen. “But you must be doing all right for yourself. Some of this has got to be expensive stuff, Harve.”

“Pure sweat equity, most of it.” I shrugged. “I do adhesive bonding, some welding, cabinetry, — oh, I was a whiz in shop, back in high school.”

“Don’t try to imply that you missed your real calling. I notice you’re working under your own license since a year ago. Can people with budgets still afford you?”

“I won’t shit you, Quent, but don’t spread this around. Way things are right now, anybody can afford me.”

It had been over a year since we’d watched World Cup soccer matches together, and while we caught each other up on recent events, I brewed tea for him in my six-cup glass rig with its flash boiler.

He didn’t make me ask about the limp. “You know how those old alleyway fire-escape ladders get rickety after sixty years or so,” he told me, shifting his leg. “A few months ago I was closing on a bail-jumper who’d been living on a roof in Alameda, and the ladder came loose on us.” Shy smile, to forestall sympathy. “He hit the bricks. I bounced off a Dumpster.” Shrug.

“Bring him in?”

“The paramedics brought us both in, but I got my fee,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you how an HMO views our work, and I’m not indigent. Fixing this hip cost me a lot more than I made, and legwork will never be my forte again, I’m afraid.”

I folded my arms and attended to the beep of my tea rig. “You’re telling me you were bounty hunting,” I said. It wasn’t exactly an accusation, but most P.I.s won’t work for bail bondsmen. It’s pretty demanding work, though the money can be good when you negotiate a fifteen percent fee and then bring in some scuffler who’s worth fifty large.

While we sipped tea, we swapped sob stories, maintaining a light touch because nobody had forced either of us into the peeper business. You hear a lot about P.I.s being churlish to each other. Mostly a myth, beyond some healthy competition. “I suppose I couldn’t resist the challenge,” said Quent. “You know me, always trying to expand my education. As a bounty hunter you learn a lot, pretty quickly.”

“Like, don’t trust old fire escapes,” I said.

“Like that,” he agreed. “But it also brings you to the attention of a different class of client. It might surprise even you that some Fed agencies will subcontract an investigation, given special circumstances.”

It surprised me less when he said that the present circumstances required someone who spoke Hangul, the Korean language, and knew the dockside world around Oakland. Someone the Federal Bureau of Investigation could trust.

“Those guys,” I said, “frost my cojones. It’s been my experience that they’ll let metro cops take most of the chances and zero percent of the credit.”

“Credit is what you buy groceries with, Harve,” he said. “What do we care, so long as the Feds will hire us again?”

“Whoa. What’s that word again? Us, as in you and me?”

“If you’ll take it. I need an extra set of feet — hips, if you insist — and it doesn’t hurt that you carry the air of plainclothes cop with you. And with your size, you can handle yourself, which is something I might need.”

He mentioned a fee, including a daily rate, and I managed not to whistle. “I need to know more. This gonna be something like a bodyguard detail, Quent? I don’t speak Hangul, beyond a few phrases you taught me.”

“That’s only part of it. Most people we’ll interview speak plain American; record checks, for example. The case involves a marine engineer missing from the tramp motorship Ras Ormara, which is tied up for round-the-clock refitting at a Richmond wharf. He’s Korean. Coast Guard and FBI would both like to find him, without their being identified.”

There’s an old cop saying about Richmond, California: it’s vampire turf. Safe enough in daylight, but watch your neck at night. “I suppose you’ve already tried Missing Persons.”

Quent served me a “give me a break” look. “I don’t have to tell you the metro force budget is petty cash, Harve. They’re overloaded with domestic cases. The Feds know it, which is where we come in — if you want in.”

“Got me over a barrel. You want the truth, I’m practically wearing the goddamn barrel. Any idea how long the case will last?”

Quent knew I was really asking how many days’ pay it might involve. “It evaporates the day the Ras Ormara leaves port; perhaps a week. That doesn’t give us as much time as I’d like, but every case sets its own pace.”

That was another old Quentism, and I’d come to learn it was true. This would be a hot pace, so no wonder gimpy Quentin Kim was offering to share the workload. Instead of doping out his selfish motives, I should be thanking him, so I did. I added, “You don’t know it, but you’re offering me a bundle of chrome-moly racer frame tubing and a few rolls of cyclone fence. An offer I can’t refuse, but I’d like to get a dossier on this Korean engineer right away.”

“I can do better than that,” said Quent, “and it’ll come with a free supper tonight, courtesy of the Feds.”

“They’re buying? Now, that is impressive as hell.”

“I have not begun to impress,” Quent said, again with the shy smile. “Coast Guard Lieutenant Reuben Medler is fairly impressive, but the FBI liaison will strain your belief system.”

“Never happen,” I said. “They still look like IBM salesmen.”

“Not this one. Trust me.” Now Quent was grinning.

“You’re wrong,” I insisted.

“What do you think happened to the third of our classroom musketeers, Harve, and why do you think this case was dropped in my lap? The Feebie is Dana Martin,” he said.

I kept my jaw from sagging with some effort. “You were right,” I said.

Until the fight started, I assumed Quent had chosen Original Joe’s in San Jose because we — Dana included — had downed many an abalone supreme there in earlier times. If some of the clientele were reputedly Connected with a capital C, that only kept folks polite. Quent and I met there and copped a booth, though our old habit had been to take seats at the counter where we could watch chefs with wrists of steel handle forty-centimeter skillets over three-alarm gas burners. I was halfway through a bottle of Anchor Steam when a well-built specimen in a crewneck sweater, trim Dockers, and tasseled loafers ushered his date in. He carried himself as if hiding a small flagpole in the back of his sweater. I looked away, denying my envy. How is it some guys never put on an ounce while guys like me outgrow our belts?

Then I did a double take. The guy had to be Lieutenant Medler because the small, tanned, sharp-eyed confection in mid-heels and severely tailored suit was Dana Martin, no longer an overconfident kid. I think I said “wow” silently as we stood up.

After the introductions Medler let us babble about how long it had been. For me, the measure of elapsed time was that little Miz Martin had developed a sense of reserve. Then while we decided what we wanted to eat, Medler explained why shoreline poachers had taken abalone off the Original Joe menu. Mindful of who was picking up the tab, I ordered the latest fad entrée: Nebraska longhorn T-bone, lean as ostrich and just as spendy. Dana’s lip pursed but she kept it buttoned, cordial, impersonal. I decided she’d bought into her career and its image. Damn, but I hated that …

Over the salads, Medler gave his story without editorializing, deferential to us, more so to Dana, in a soft baritone all the more masculine for discarding machismo. “The Ras Ormara is a C-1 motorship under Liberian registry,” he said, “chartered by the Sonmiani Tramp Service of Karachi, Pakistan.” He recited carefully, as if speaking for a recorder. Which he was, though I didn’t say so. What the hell, people forget things.

“Some of these multinational vessels just beg for close inspection, the current foreign political situation being what it is,” Medler went on. He didn’t need to mention the nuke found by a French airport security team the previous month, on an Arab prince’s Learjet at Charles De Gaulle terminal. “We did a walk-through. The vessel was out of Lima with a cargo of balsa logs and nontoxic plant extract slurry, bound for Richmond. Crew was the usual polyglot bunch, in this case chiefly Pakis and Koreans. They stay aboard in port unless they have the right papers.”

At this point Medler abruptly began talking about how abalone poachers work, a second before the waitress arrived to serve our entrées. Quent nodded appreciatively and I toasted Medler’s coolth with my beer.

Once we’d attacked our meals he resumed. Maybe the editorial came with the main course. “You know about Asian working-class people and eye contact — with apologies, Mr. Kim. But one young Korean in the crew was boring holes in my corneas. I decided to interview three men, one at a time, on the fo’c’sle deck. At random, naturally.”

“Random as loaded dice.” I winked.

“With their skipper right there? Affirmative, and I started with the ship’s medic. When I escorted this young third engineer, Park Soon, on deck the poor guy was shaking. His English wasn’t that fluent, and he didn’t say much, even to direct questions, but he did say we had to talk ashore. ‘Must talk,’ was the phrase. He had his papers to go ashore.

“I gave him a time and place later that day, a coffeehouse in Berkeley every taxi driver knows. I thought he was going to cry with relief, but he went back to the Ras Ormara’s bridge with his jaw set like he was marching toward a firing squad. I went belowdecks.

“A lot of tramps look pretty trampy, but it actually just means it’s not a regularly scheduled vessel. This one was spitshine spotless, and I found no reason to doubt the manifest or squawk about conditions in the holds.

“Fast forward to roughly sixteen hundred hours. Park shows at the coffeehouse, jumpy as Kermit, but now he’s full of dire warnings. He doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong about the Ras Ormara, but he knows he’s aboard only for window dressing. The reason he shipped on at Lima was, Park had met the previous third engineer in Lima at a dockside bar, some Chinese who spoke enough English to say he was afraid to go back aboard. Park was on the beach, as they say, and he wangled the job for himself.”

Quent stopped shoveling spicy sausage in, and asked, “The Chinese was afraid? Of what?”

“According to Park, the man’s exact English words were ‘Death ship.’ Park thought he had misunderstood at first and put the Chinese engineer’s fear down to superstition. But a day or so en route here, he began to get spooked.”

“Every culture has its superstitions,” Quent said. “And crew members must pass them on. I’m told an old ship can carry enough legends to sink it.” When Medler frowned, Quent said, “Remember Joseph Conrad’s story, ‘The Brute’? The Apse Family was a death ship. Well, it was just a story,” he said, seeing Dana’s look of abused patience.

Medler again: “A classic. Who hasn’t read it?” Dana gave a knowing nod. Pissed me off; I hadn’t read it. “But I doubt anyone aboard told sea stories to Park. He implied they all seemed to be appreciating some vast, unspoken serious joke. No one would talk to him at all except for his duties. And he didn’t have a lot to do because the ship was a dream, he said. She had been converted somewhere to cargo from a small fast transport, so the crew accommodations were nifty. She displaces maybe two thousand tons, twenty-four knots. Fast,” he said again. “Originally she must’ve been someone’s decommissioned D.E. — destroyer escort. Not at all like a lot of those rustbuckets in tramp service.”

Quent toyed with his food. “It’s fairly common, isn’t it, for several conversions to be made over the life of a ship?”

“Exigencies of trade.” Medler nodded. “Hard to say where it was done, but Pakistan has a shipbreaking industry and rerolling mills in Karachi.” He shook his head and grinned. “I think they could cobble you up a new ship from the stuff they salvage. We’ve refused to allow some old buckets into the bay; they’re rusted out so far, you step in the wrong place on deck and your foot will go right through. But not the Ras Ormara; I’d serve on her myself, if her bottom’s anything like her topside.”

“I thought you did an, uh, inspection,” said Dana.

“Walk-through. We didn’t do it as thoroughly as we might if we’d found anything abovedecks. She’s so clean I understand why Park became nervous. Barring the military — one of our cutters, for instance — you just don’t find that kind of sterile environment in maritime service. Not even a converted D.E.”

“No,” Dana insisted, and made a delicate twirl with her fork. “I meant afterward.”

Medler blinked. “If you want to talk about it, go ahead. I can’t. You know that.”

Dana, whom I’d once thought of as a teen mascot, patted his forearm like a den mother. I didn’t know which of them I wanted more to kick under the table. “I go way back with these two, Reuben, and they’re under contract with confidentiality. But this may not be the place.”

I was already under contract? Well, only if I were working under Quent’s license, and if he’d told her so. Still, I was getting fed up with how little I knew. “For God’s sake,” I said, “just the short form, okay?”

“For twenty years we’ve had ways to search sea floors for aircraft flight recorders,” Dana told me. “Don’t you think the Coast Guard might have similar gadgets to look at a hull?”

“For what?”

“Whatever,” Medler replied, uneasy about it. “I ordered it after the Park interview. When you know how Hughes built the CIA’s Glomar Explorer, you know a ship can have a lot of purposes that aren’t obvious at the waterline. Figure it out for yourself,” he urged.

That spook ship Hughes’s people built had been designed to be flooded and to float vertically, sticking up from the water like a fisherman’s bobbin. Even the tabloids had exploited it. I thought about secret hatches for underwater demolition teams, torpedo tubes—“Got it,” I said. “Any and every unfriendly use I can dream up. Can I ask what they found?”

“Not a blessed thing,” said Reuben Medler. “If it weren’t for D — Agent Martin here, I’d be writing reports on why I insisted.”

“He insisted because the Bureau did,” Dana put in. “We’ve had some vague tips about a major event, planned by nice folks with the same traditions as those who, uh, bugged Tel Aviv.”

The Tel Aviv Bug had been anthrax. If the woman who’d smuggled it into Israel hadn’t somehow flunked basic hygiene and collapsed with a skinful of the damned bacilli, it would’ve caused more deaths than it did. “So you found nothing, but you want a follow-up with this Park guy. He’s probably catting around and will show up with a hangover when the ship’s ready to sail,” I said. “I thought crew members had to keep in touch with the charter service.”

“They do,” said Dana. “And with a full complement of two dozen, only a few of the crew went ashore. But Park has vanished. Sonmiani claims they’ll have still another third engineer when the slurry tanks are cleaned and the new cargo’s pumped aboard.”

“And we’d prefer they didn’t sail before we have another long talk with Park,” Medler said. “I’m told the FBI has equipment like an unobtrusive lie detector.”

“Voice-stress analyzer,” Dana corrected. “Old hardware, new twists. But chiefly, we’re on edge because Park has dropped out of sight.”

Quent: “But I thought he told you why.”

“He told me why he was worried,” Medler agreed. “But he also said the Ras Ormara will be bound for Pusan with California-manufactured industrial chemicals, a nice tractable cargo, to his own homeport. He was determined to stay with it, worried or not. Of course it’s possible he simply changed his mind.”

“But we’d like to know,” Dana said. “We want to know sufficiently that — well.” She looked past us toward the ceiling as if an idea had just occurred to her. Suuure. “Sometimes things happen. Longshoremen’s strike, — ” She saw my sudden glance, and she’d always been alert to nuance. “No, we haven’t, but little unforeseen problems arise. Sonmiani is already dealing with a couple of them. Assuming they don’t have the clout to build a fire under someone at the ambassador level, there could be one or two more if we find a solid reason. Or if you do.”

“I take it Harve and I can move overtly on this,” Quent said, “so long as we’re not connected to government.”

Medler looked at Dana, who said, “Exactly. Low-profile, showing your private investigator’s I.D. if necessary. You’re known well enough that anyone checking on you would be satisfied you’re not us. Of course you’ve got to have a client of record, so we’re furnishing one.”

I noticed that Quent seemed interested in something across the room, but he refocused on Dana Martin. “As licensed privateers, we aren’t required to name a client or divulge any other details of the case. Normally it would be shaving an ethical guideline.”

“But you wouldn’t be,” Dana said. “You’d be giving up a few details of a cover story. Nothing very dramatic, just imply that our missing man is a prodigal son. Park Soon’s father in Pusan would be unlikely to know he’s put you on retainer.”

Quent: “Because he can’t afford us?”

Dana, with the shadow of a smile: “Because he’s been deceased for years. I’ll give you the details on that tomorrow, Quent. Uhm, Quent?”

But my pal, whose attention had been wandering again, was now leaning toward me with an unQuentish grin. “Harve,” he said softly, “third counter stool from the front, late twenties, blond curls, Yamaha cycle jacket. Could be packing.”

“Several guys in here probably are,” I said.

“But I’m not carrying certified copies of their bail bonds, and I do have one for Robert Rooney, bail jumper. That’s Bobby.”

Dana and Medler both looked toward the counter, at me, and at Quent, but let their expressions complain.

“You wouldn’t,” I said.

“It’s my bleeding job,” said Quent. “Wait outside. I’ll flush him out gently, and if gentle doesn’t work, don’t let him reach into that jacket.”

I was already standing up. “Back shortly, folks. Don’t forget my pie à la mode.”

“I don’t believe this,” I heard Medler say as I moved toward the old-fashioned revolving door.

“Santa Clara County Jail is on Hedding, less than a mile from here. We’ll be back before you know it,” Quent soothed, still seated, giving me time to evaporate.

I saw the bail-jumper watching me in a window reflection, but I gave him no reason to jump. I would soon learn he was just naturally jumpy, pun intended. Can’t say it was really that long a fight, though. I pushed through the door and into the San Jose night, realizing we could jam Rooney in it if he tried to run out. And have him start shooting through heavy glass partitions, maybe; sometimes my first impulses are subject to modest criticism.

Outside near the entrance, melding with evening shadow, I listened to the buzz and snap of Joe’s old neon sign. I could still see our quarry, and now Quent was strolling behind diners at the counter, apparently intent on watching the chef toss a blazing skilletful of mushrooms. Quent reached inside his coat; brought out a folded paper, his face innocent of stress. Then he said something to the seated Rooney.

Rooney turned only his head, very slowly, nodded, shrugged, and let his stool swivel to face Quent. He grinned.

It’s not easy to get leverage with only your buns against a low seat back, but Rooney managed it, lashing both feet out to Quent’s legs, his arms windmilling as he bulled past my pal. I heard a shout, then a clamor of voices as Quent staggered against a woman seated at the nearest table. I stepped farther out of sight as Bobby Rooney hurled himself against the inertia of that big revolving door.

He used both hands, and he was sturdier than he had looked, bursting outside an arm’s length from me. Exactly an arm’s length, because without moving my feet, just as one Irishman to another I clotheslined him under the chin. He went down absolutely horizontal, his head making a nice bonk on the sidewalk, and if he’d had any brains they would’ve rattled like castanets. He didn’t even pause, bringing up both legs, then doing a gymnast’s kick so that he was suddenly on his feet in a squat, one arm flailing at me. The other hand snaked into his jacket pocket before I could close on him.

What came out of his right-hand pocket was very small, but it had twin barrels on one end and as he leaped up, Rooney’s arm swung toward me. Meanwhile I’d taken two steps forward, and I snatched at his wrist. I caught only his sleeve, but when I heaved upward on it, his hand and the little derringer pocketgun disappeared into the sleeve. A derringer is double-barreled, the barrel’s so short its muzzle blast is considerable, and confined in that sleeve it flash-burnt his hand while muffling the sound. The slug headed skyward. Bobby Rooney headed down San Carlos Avenue, hopping along crabwise because I had held on to that sleeve long enough that when he jerked away, his elbow was caught halfway out.

I’m not much of a distance runner, but for fifty meters I can move out at what I imagined was a brisk pace. Why Bobby didn’t just stop and fire point-blank through that sleeve I don’t know; I kept waiting for it, and one thing I never learned to do was make myself a small target. Half a block later he was still flailing his arm to dislodge the sleeve, and I was still three long steps behind, and that’s when a conservative dress suit passed me. Quentin Kim was wearing it at the time, outpacing me despite that limp. He simply spun Bobby Rooney down, standing on his jacket which pinned him down on his back at the mouth of an alley.

I grabbed a handful of blond curls, knelt on Bobby’s right sleeve because his gun hand was still in it, and made the back of his head tap the sidewalk. “Harder every time,” I said, blowing like a whale. “How many times — before you relax?” Another tap. “Take your time. I can do this — for hours.”

As quickly as Bobby Rooney had decided to fight, he reconsidered, his whole body going limp, eyes closed.

“Get that little shooter — out of his sleeve,” I said to Quent, who wasn’t even winded but rubbed his upper thigh, muttering to himself.

Quent took the derringer, flicked his key-ring Maglite, then brought that wrinkled paper out of his inside coat pocket and shook it open. “Robert Rooney,” he intoned.

Still holding on to Rooney’s hair, I gazed up. “What the hell? Is this some kind of new Miranda bullshit, Quent?”

“No, it’s not required. It’s just something I do that clarifies a relationship.”

“Relationship? This isn’t a relationship, this is a war.”

“Not mutually exclusive. You’ve never been married, have you,” Quent said. He began again: “Robert Rooney, acting as agent for the hereafter-named person putting up bail …”

I squatted there until Quent had finished explaining that Rooney was, by God, the property of the bondsman named and could be pursued even into his own toilet without a warrant, and that his physical condition upon delivery to the appropriate county jail depended entirely on his temperament. When Quent was done I said, “He may not even hear you.”

“He probably does, but it doesn’t matter. I hear me,” Quent said mildly. A bounty hunter with liberal scruples was one for the books, but I guess Quent wrote his own book.

“How far is your car?”

“Two blocks. Here,” Quent said, and handed me the derringer with one unfired chamber. I knew what he said next was for Rooney’s ears more than mine. “You can shoot him, just try not to kill him right away. That’s only if he tries to run again.”

“If he does,” I said, “I’ll still have his scalp for an elephant’s merkin.”

Quent laughed as he hurried away, not even limping. “Now there’s an image I won’t visit twice,” he said.

Twenty minutes later we returned from the county lockup with a receipt, and to this day I don’t know what Bobby Rooney’s voice sounds like. The reason why those kicks hadn’t ruined Quent’s legs were that, under his suit pants, my pal wore soccer pro FlexArmor over his knees and shins for bounty hunting. He’d suggested Original Joe’s to Dana because, among other good reasons, Rooney’s ex-girlfriend claimed he hung out there a lot. Since Rooney was dumb as an ax handle, Quent figured the chances of a connection were good. He could combine business with pleasure, and show a pair of Feds how efficient we were. Matter of fact, I was so efficient I wound up with a derringer in my pocket. Fortunes of war, not that I was going to brag about it to the Feds.

Dana and Reuben Medler were still holding down the booth when we returned, Medler half-resigned, half-amused. Dana was neither. “I hope your victim got away,” she said. If she’d been a cat, her fur would’ve been standing on end.

Quent flashed our receipt for Rooney’s delivery and eased into the booth. “A simple commercial transaction, Agent Martin,” he said, ignoring her hostility. “My apologies.”

She wasn’t quite satisfied. “Can I expect this to happen again?”

“Not tonight,” Quent said equably.

It must’ve been that smile of his that disarmed her because Dana subsided over coffee and dessert. When it became clear that Quent would take the San Francisco side — it has a sizable Korean population — while I worked the Oakland side of the bay, Reuben Medler told me where I’d find the Ras Ormara, moored on the edge of Richmond near a gaggle of chemical production facilities.

Eventually Dana handed Quent a list of the crew with temporary addresses for the few who went ashore. “Sonmiani’s California rep keeps tabs on their crews,” she explained. “I got this from Customs.”

Medler put in, “Customs has a standard excuse for wanting the documentation; cargo manifest, tonnage certificate, stowage plan, and other records.”

“But not you,” I said to Dana.

She shook her head. “Even if we did, the Bureau wouldn’t step forward to Sonmiani. We leave that to you, although Sonmiani’s man in Oakland, ah, Norman Goldman by name, has a clean sheet and appears to be clean. We feel direct contacts of that sort should be made as — what did you call it, Quentin? A simple commercial transaction. Civilians like to talk. If Goldman happened to mention us to the wrong person, the ship’s captain for example, someone might abort whatever they’re up to. If they see you rooting around, they’ll assume it’s just part of a routine private investigation.”

Maybe I was still pissed that our teen mascot had become our boss. “Implying sloth and incompetence,” I murmured.

“You said it, not I,” she replied sweetly. “At least Mr. Goldman seems well enough educated that he would never mistake you for an agent.”

“You’ve run a check on him, then,” said Quent.

“Of course. Majored in business at Michigan, early promotion, young man on the way up. And I suspect Sonmiani’s Islamic crew members will watch their steps around a bright Jewish guy,” she added, looking over the check.

Quent drained his teacup. “We’ll try to keep it simple; Park Soon could show up tomorrow. Then we’ll see whether we need to talk with this Goldman. Is that suitable?”

Quent asked with genuine deference, and Dana paused before she nodded. It struck me then that Quent was making a point of showing obedience to his boss. And his quick glance at me suggested that I might try it sometime.

I knew he was right, but it would have to be some other time. I shook hands again with Reuben Medler, exchanged cards with him, and turned to Dana. “Thanks for the feed. Maybe next time we can avoid a floor show.”

She looked at Medler and shook her head, and I left without remarking that she had a lot of seasoning ahead of her.

Two

It was Quent’s suggestion that I case the location of the Ras Ormara itself, herself, whatever. Meanwhile he made initial inquiries across the bay alone in his natural camouflage, in the area everyone calls Chinatown though it was home to several Asiatic colonies. It was my idea to bring my StudyGirl to record a look at this shipshape ship we’d heard so much about, and Quent suggested I do it without making any personal contacts that required I.D.

StudyGirls were new then, cleverly named so that kids who wanted the spendy toys — meaning all kids — would have leverage with Dad and Mom. Even the early versions were pocket-sized and would take a two-inch Britannica floppy, but they would also put TV broadcasts on the rollout screen or play mini-CDs and action games, and make video recordings as well. It was already common practice to paint over the indicator lights so nobody knew when you were videorecording. I’ll bet a few kids actually used them for schoolwork, too.

I took the freeway as far as Richmond, got off at Carlson Boulevard, and puzzled my way through the waterfront’s industrial montage. Blank-fronted metal buildings with ramped loading docks meant warehousing of imports and exports, and somewhere in there were a few boxcarloads of Peruvian balsa logs. Composite panels of carbon fiber and balsa sandwich were much in demand at that time among builders of off-road racers for their light weight and stiffness. I enjoyed a moment of déjà future vu at the thought that I might be using some of the Ras Ormara’s balsa for my project in a few months.

Unless my woolgathering got me squashed like a bug underfoot. I had to dodge thrumming diesel-electric rigs that outclamored the cries of gulls and ignored my pickup as unworthy of notice. Hey, they were making a buck, and this was their turf.

In a few blocks-long stretches, the warehouses gave way to fencing topped with razor wire, enforced isolation for the kind of small-time chemical processing plants that looked like brightly painted guts of the biggest dinosaurs ever. Now and then I could spot the distant San Rafael Bridge through the tanks, reactor vessels, piping, and catwalks that loomed like little skeletal skyscrapers, throwing early shadows across the street. You knew without a glance when you were passing warehouses because of the echoes and the sour, last-week’s-fast-food odor that drew those scavenging gulls. The chemical production plants no longer stank so much since the City of Richmond got serious about its air. And beyond all this at an isolated wharf, berthed next to a container ship like a racehorse beside a Clydesdale, the Ras Ormara gleamed in morning light. I wondered why a ship like that was called a “she” when it had such racy muscular lines, overlaid by spidery cargo cranes and punctuated by the gleam of glass. I pointedly focused on the nearby container vessel, walking past an untended gate onto the dock, avoiding flatbed trucks that galumphed in and out. I had my StudyGirl in hand for videotaping, neither flourishing nor hiding it. In semishorts, argyle socks, and short sleeves, I hoped I looked like a typical Midwestern tourist agog over, golly gee, these great big boats. If challenged I could always choose whether to brazen it out with my I.D.

I strolled back, paying casual attention to the Ras Ormara, listening to the sounds of engine-driven pressure washers and recording the logos on two trucks with hoses that snaked up and back to big tanks mounted behind the truck cabs. I could see men operating the chassis-mounted truck consoles, wearing headsets. Somehow I’d expected more noise and melodrama in cleaning the ship’s big cargo tanks.

Words like “big” and “little” are inadequate where a cargo vessel, even one considered small, is concerned. I guess that’s what numbers are for. The Ras Ormara was almost three hundred feet stem to stern, the length of a football field, and where bare metal showed it appeared to be stainless steel. All that cleaning was concentrated ahead of the ship’s glassed bridge, where a half dozen metal domes, each five yards across, stood in ranks well above the deck level. Two rows of three each; and the truck hoses entered the domes through open access ports big enough to drop a truck tire through. Or a man. Welded ladders implied that men might do just that.

I suppose I could have climbed one of the gangways up to the ship’s deck. It was tempting, but Quent had told me — couched as a suggestion — not to. It is simply amazing how obedient I can be to a boss who is not overbearing. I moseyed along, hoping I stayed mostly out of sight behind those servicing trucks without seeming to try. From an open window behind the Ras Ormara’s bridge came faint strains of someone’s music, probably from a CD. It sounded like hootchie-kootchie scored for three tambourines and a parrot, and I thought it might be Egyptian or some such.

Meanwhile, a bulky yellow extraterrestrial climbed from one of those domes trailing smaller hoses, and made his way carefully down the service ladder. When he levered back his helmet and left it with its hoses on deck, I could see it was just a guy with hair sweat-plastered to his forehead, wearing a protective suit you couldn’t miss on a moonless midnight. My luck was holding; he continued down the gangway to the nearest truck. Meanwhile I ambled back in his direction, stowing away my StudyGirl.

The space-suited guy, his suit smeared with fluid, was talking with the truck’s console operator, both standing next to the chassis as they shared a cigarette. Even then smoking was illegal in public, but give a guy a break ….

They broke off their conversation as I drew near, and the console man nodded. “Help you?”

I shrugged pleasantly and remembered to talk high in my throat because guys my size are evidently less threatening as tenors. “Just sightseeing. Never see anything like this in Omaha.” I grinned.

“Don’t see much of this anywhere, thank God,” said the sweaty one, and they laughed together. “Thirsty work. Not for the claustrophobe, either.”

“Is this how you fill ’er up?” I hoped this was naive enough without being idiotic. I think I flunked because they laughed again. The sweaty one said, “Would I be smoking?” When I looked abashed, he relented. “We’re scouring those stainless tanks. Got to be pharmaceutically free of a vegetable slurry before they pump in the next cargo.”

“Those domes sitting on deck,” I guessed.

“Hell, that’s just the hemispherical closures,” said the console man.

“The tanks go clear down into the hold,” said his sweaty friend.

I blinked. “Twenty feet down?”

“More like forty,” he said.

The console man glanced at his wristwatch, gave a meaningful look to his friend; took the cigarette back. “And we got a special eco-directive on flushing these after this phase. We have to double soak and agitate with filterable solvent, right to the brim, fifty-two thousand gallons apiece. Pain in the ass.”

“Must take a lot of time,” I said, thinking about Dana Martin’s ability to make people jump through additional hoops on short notice, without showing her hand.

“Twice what we’d figured,” said Consoleman. “I thought the charter-service rep would scream bloody murder, but he didn’t even haggle. Offered a bonus for early completion, in fact. Speaking of which,” he said, and fixed Sweatman with a wry smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” said his colleague, and turned toward the Ras Ormara. “For us, time really is money. But that ten-minute break is in the standard contract. Anyhow, without my support hoses it’s getting hot as hell in this outfit.”

“Hold still, it’s gonna dribble,” I said. I found an old Kleenex in my pocket, and used it to wipe around the chin plate of Sweatman’s suit, then put it back in my pocket.

“Guess I’m lucky to be in the wrought-iron biz,” I said. With a smithy for a hobby, I could fake my way through that if necessary.

“My regards to Omaha,” said Consoleman. “And by the way, you really shouldn’t be here without authorization. Those guys are an antsy lot,” he said, jerking his head toward the bridge. It was as nice a “buzz off, pal” request as I’d ever had.

I didn’t look up. I’d seen faces staring down in our direction, some with their heads swathed in white. “Okay, thanks. Just seeing this has been an education,” I said.

“If the skipper unlimbers his tongue on you, I hope your education isn’t in languages,” Consoleman joked.

I laughed, waved, and took my time walking back to the gate, stopping on the way to gaze at the much larger container ship as if my attention span played no favorites.

When I got back to my Toyota I rummaged in the glove box and found my stash of quart-sized evidence baggies. Then I carefully sealed that soggy old Kleenex inside one and scribbled the date and the specimen’s provenance. I’d seen Sweatman climb out of a cargo tank of the Ras Ormara and that fluid had come out with him. Quent might not do handsprings, but the Feebs got off on stuff like that.

I took a brief cell call from Quent shortly before noon, while I was stoking up at one of the better restaurants off Jack London Square. The maitre d’ had sighed when he saw my tourist getup. Quent sighed, too, when I told him where I was. “Look, the Feds are paying, and I keep receipts,” I reminded him.

He said he was striking out in Chinatown, just as he had in hospitals and clinics, but the Oakland side had its own ethnic neighborhoods. “I thought you might want to ride with me this afternoon,” he said.

“Where do we meet? I have something off the ship you might want Dana to have analyzed,” I said.

“You went aboard? Harve, — oh well. Just eat slowly. It’s not that far across the Bay Bridge,” he replied.

“Gotcha. And I didn’t go aboard, bossman, but I think I have a sample of what was actually in the Ras Ormara’s tanks, whatever the records might say. You’ll be proud of your humble apprentice, but right now my rack of lamb calls. Don’t hurry,” I said, and put away my phone.

Quent arrived in time for my coffee and ordered tea. I let him play back my StudyGirl video recording as far as it went, and took the evidence baggie from my shirt pocket as I reported the rest. “We have the name of the pressure-washing firm. No doubt they can tell some curious Fed what cleaning chemicals they use. What’s left should be traces of what those tanks really carried,” I said.

Quent said Dana’s people had already analyzed samples of the stuff provided by Customs. “But they’ll be glad to have it confirmed this way. Nice going.” He pocketed the baggie and pretended not to notice that I made a proper notation on my lunch receipt. We walked out into what was rapidly becoming a furry overcast, and I took the passenger’s seat in his Volvo.

Quent said we’d try an Oakland rooming house run by a Korean family. From the list we had, he knew a pair of the Ras Ormara’s crew were staying there. “You, uh, might want to draft your report while I go in,” he said as he turned off the Embarcadero. “Shouldn’t be long.”

“I thought you wanted me with you.”

“I did. Then I saw how you’re dressed.”

“I’m a tourist!”

“You’re a joke with pale shins. I can’t do a serious interview with a foreign national if you’re visible; how can I have his full attention when he’s wondering whether Bluto is going to start juggling plates behind me?”

I saw his point and promised to bring a change of clothes next time. Quent found the place, in a row of transient quarters an Oakland beat cop would call flophouses. Without a place to park, he turned the Volvo over to me. “I’ll call when I’m done,” he said, and disappeared into the three-story stucco place.

I did find a parking spot eventually. My printer was at home, but I stored my morning’s case report on StudyBint. Quent called not long afterward and, because he wore a frown only when puzzling things out, I hardly gave him time to take the wheel. “Something already?”

He thought about it a moment before replying. “Not on Park. Not directly, at any rate. But I’m starting to understand why our missing engineer was uneasy.” When giving Park’s name he had mentioned the ship to the rooming-house proprietor, who said she hadn’t heard of Park but named the two crew members who were there. The Korean, Hong Chee, she described as taller than average, late thirties. The second man, one Ali Ghaffar, was older; perhaps Indian. Pretending surprise at this lucky accident, Quent asked to speak with them.

Hong Chee was out, but Quent found his roommate Ghaffar in the room, preternaturally quiet and alert. Ghaffar, a middle-aged Paki, was a studious-looking sort wearing one of those white cloth doodads wound around his head, who had evidently been reading one of two well-thumbed leather-bound books. Quent couldn’t read even the titles though he got the impression they might be religious tomes.

Ghaffar spoke fair English. He showed some interest in the fact that an Asian speaking perfect American English was hoping to trace the movements of an engineer off the Ras Ormara. Quent explained that Park’s family was concerned enough to hire private investigators, blah-blah, merely wanted assurance that Park hadn’t met with foul play, et cetera.

Ghaffar said he had only a nodding acquaintance with Park. He couldn’t, or more likely wouldn’t, say whether Park had made any friends aboard ship, and had no idea whether Park had friends in the Bay Area. Ghaffar and Hong Chee had seen the engineer, he thought, the day before in some Richmond bar, and Park was looking fit, but they hadn’t talked. That’s when Quent noticed the wastebasket’s contents. He began pacing around, stroking his chin, trying to scan everything in the room without being obvious while doing it.

Personal articles were aligned on lamp tables as if neatness counted, beds made, nothing out of place. Quent took his nail clippers out and began idly tossing them in one hand as he dreamed up more questions, and he just happened to drop his clippers into the wastebasket, apologizing as he fished them out with slow gropes of bogus clumsiness.

Quent realized that Ghaffar was waiting with endless calm for this ten-thumbed gumshoe to go away, volunteering little, responding carefully. Quent said he’d like to talk with Hong Chee sometime if possible and passed his cell-phone card to Ghaffar, who accepted it solemnly, and then Quent left and called me to be picked up.

“So I ask you,” Quent said rhetorically: “What would a devout Moslem, who adheres to correct practices alone in his room, have been doing in a gin mill, with or without his buddy? Not likely. I don’t think he saw Park, I think he wanted me to think Park was healthy. And you haven’t asked me about the trash basket.”

“Didn’t want to interrupt. What’d you see?”

“Candy wrappers and an empty plastic pop bottle. Oh, yes,” he added with studied neglect, “and an airline ticket. I didn’t have time to read it closely, but I caught an Asian name — not Hong Chee’s — Oakland International, and a departure date.” He paused before he specified it.

“Christ, that’s tomorrow,” I said.

“I’m not through. Ghaffar is on the crew list as the ship’s machinist. You ever see a machinist’s hands?”

“Sure, like a blacksmith’s. Like he force-feeds cactus to Rottweilers for kicks.”

“Well, at the least they’re callused and scarred. Not Ali Ghaffar. He may know how to use a lathe, but I’d bet against it.”

“Then who’s the real machinist? Ships have to have one.”

“Do they? From what Medler and you tell me, and from what I saw on your video, the Ras Ormara might go a year without needing that kind of attention.”

He checked some notes and drove silently across town like he knew where he was going. Presently he said, as if to himself: “So Hong Chee has dumped what looks like a perfectly good airline ticket for somebody out of Oakland. Wish I’d seen where to. More particularly, I wish I knew how he could afford to junk it. And why he knows to junk it the day before the flight.”

“Me, teacher,” I said, putting up a hand and waving it. “Call on me.”

“Tell the class, Master Rackham,” he said, going along with it.

“Somebody else is funding him better than most, and he’s changed his departure plans because La Martin and company have put the brakes on whatever he had in mind.”

“Take your seat, you’ve left the heart of my question untouched. Is he worried for the same reasons as Park?”

“Suppose we give him a chance to tell us,” I said.

“Maybe we’ll do that. But I’m not sure he’s making plans for his own departure. Another Asian?”

“At a guess, I’d say the name is unimportant. How many sets of I.D. might he have, Quent?”

After a long pause, he exhaled for what seemed like forever. “Harve, you are definitely paranoid — I’m happy to say. Now you’ve torn the lid off this little box with a missing engineer in it, and I find a much bigger box inside, so to speak. And there wasn’t a second ticket there — so Ghaffar may still intend to go back aboard. Or not. But I’ll tell you this: Our machinist is no machinist, and he certainly isn’t spending his time ashore as if he had the usual things in mind.”

I couldn’t fault his reasoning. “So where are we headed?”

“Korean social club. Maybe we’ll find Hong Chee there.”

“And not Park Soon?” All I got was a shrug and a glance, and I didn’t like the glance. Quent found a slot for the Volvo in a neighborhood of shops with signs in English and the odd squiggles that weren’t quite Chinese characters; Hangul has a script all its own. “You might try calling Dana while I’m inside,” Quent said. “Let her know we’ve got a gooey Kleenex for her.”

So I did, and was told she was in the field, and I tried her cell phone. She sounded like she was in a salt mine and none too pleased about it. She perked up slightly at my offer of the evidence. “I’ll pick it up when we’re through here,” she said, and sneezed. “I thought the incoming cargo might be dirty, but the spectral analyzer says no. A few pallets are too heavy, though. My God, but wood dust is pervasive!”

“You’re in a warehouse,” I said, glad that she couldn’t see me grinning. Climbing around on pallets of logs probably hadn’t been high on her list of adventures when she joined up. “I haven’t seen the stuff, but if it’s that dusty maybe it’s not plain logs. Probably rough-sawn, right?”

She said it was. “What would you know about it?”

“I’ve seen how balsa is used in high-tech panels. The stuff is graded by weight per cubic meter and it varies from featherweight, which is highly prized, to the density of pine. In other words, pallets could vary by a factor of three or so.”

“Well, damn it to hell,” she said. “Excuse me. Scratch one criterion. What’s the significance of its being sawn?”

“Just that it may make it easier for you to see whether some of it’s been cut lengthwise with a very fine kerf and glued back.”

“What’s a kerf?”

“The slot made by a saw. Balsa can be slitted with a very thin saw-blade. It occurs to me that it might be the lighter timbers you should be checking for hollowed interiors. Bags of white powder aren’t that heavy, Dana.”

I think she cussed again before she sneezed. She said, “Thanks,” as if it were squeezed out of her.

“But I don’t think you’ll find anything,” I said.

She demanded, “Why not?” the way a kid says it when told she can’t ride behind the nice stranger on his Superninja bike.

“I just feel like whatever’s being delivered, if anything, hasn’t been. The monkey wrench your people threw into their schedule didn’t delay those pallets—gesundheit—but they’re behaving as if you did delay something. They’re waiting, apparently with patience.”

She said she’d get back to me and snapped off. To kill time, I played back our conversation on StudyBabe. Dana had a spectral analyzer with her? I had thought they were big lab gadgets. Right, and computers were room-sized — once upon a time.

While I was still muttering “Duhh” and thinking about possible uses of Dana’s gadgetry, Quent came down out of a stairwell in a hurry. He motioned for me to drive, pocketing his phone. “You love to drive like there’s no tomorrow, and I don’t. Please don’t bend the Volvo,” he begged. “Just get us across the bridge to Jackson and Taylor.”

While I drove, he filled me in on his fresh lead. He’d struck out again upstairs, but had just taken a call on his cell phone from Ali Ghaffar. His buddy Hong, said the Paki, had returned. Ghaffar had asked about Park. Oh, said Hong, that was easy; back at the gin mill, Park Soon had said he was considering a move to a nice room in San Francisco for the rest of his time ashore. Corner of Jackson and Taylor.

“Smack-dab middle of Chinatown. Didn’t say which corner, I suppose,” I said, overtaking a taxi on the right.

“No such luck. But there can’t be more than a half dozen places with upscale rooms on or near that corner. We can canvass them all in twenty minutes.”

I tossed a look at Quent. “You speak directly to Hong?”

“Watch the road, for Christ’s sweet sake,” he gritted. “I asked, but Ali said he was gone again. Very handy.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said, swerving to miss a pothole on the way to the Bay Bridge on-ramp.

Quent closed his eyes. “Just tell me when we get there.”

To calm him down I played my conversation with Dana. It pacified him somewhat, and I turned down the Volvo’s wick nearing Chinatown, which was a traffic nightmare long before the twenty-first century.

I chose a pricey parking lot near Broadway, and we jostled our way through the sidewalk chaos together. By agreement, Quent peeled off to take the two west corners of the intersection. Because some of the nicer little Chinatown hotels aren’t obvious, I had to ask a restaurant cashier. When she hesitated, I said I had a job offer for an Asian gent and knew only that he’d taken a nice room thereabouts. I said I hadn’t understood him very well.

Evidently, Asiatics have their own privately printed local phone books, but she didn’t hand it over and I couldn’t have read what I saw anyhow. She gave me five addresses, and three of them were on Quent’s side. I tipped her, hoping I’d remember to jot it down, and found the first address almost next door.

If there’s a small Chinatown hotel on a street floor, it’s one I never saw. I climbed three narrow flights before I saw what proved to be a tiny lobby through a bead curtain. A young Asiatic greeted me, very courteously, his speech and dress yuppily American. He heard my brief tale sympathetically. Sorry, he said, but no young person of either gender had registered in several days. Would I mind describing the employment I had to offer?

I said it was a marine engineer’s job, and I swear he said, “Aw shit, and me a journalism major,” before he wished me good day, no longer interested in my problems.

I crossed the street and began to search for the second address when my phone clucked. “Bingo,” Quent said with no preliminaries. “But no joy. Meet me at the car in ten. Until then you don’t know me.” No way I could mistake the implication.

He didn’t sound happy, and when I saw him on the street he had turned away, heading down Jackson. It’s a one-way street, and he walked counter to the traffic flow, something you do when you suspect someone may be trying to tail you in a car.

So I did the same on Taylor, which is also one-way, doubling back after a long block to approach Quent’s car on Jones — again counter to one-way traffic. If anyone followed me on foot, he was too good for me to make him.

I had paid the lot’s fee and was waiting in the Volvo when Quent appeared. “Oakland it is,” he said, racking his seat back to disappear below the windowsill. As I sought an on-ramp he said, “A man calling himself Park Soon rented a room for a week, not two hours ago; one flight up, quiet, expensive. Told the concierge he might be staying with a friend for a night or so but please to hold his messages and take names.”

“He’s not hard up for cash,” I said.

“He’s also about my height and age,” said Quent, who was five-eight, pushing forty.

I’d had Park’s description. “The hell he is,” I said.

“The man who rented that room with a cash advance is,” Quent said. “Unless the lady was pulling my leg. And why would she if she wanted me to think it was Park? Park Soon is five-three. What’s wrong with this picture, Harve?”

“I might know if I got a look inside that room.”

“That was my thought, but it’s a risky tactic in a subculture that’s understandably wary, so I didn’t even try. The Feds can do it if they want to. They know how to lean on people to, ah, I think the phrase is, ‘compel acquiescence.’”

“Our own little Ministry of Fear,” I observed.

“Everybody’s got ’em, Harve. I even have one,” he said with a half smile, and pointed a finger at my breast. “And if I had to choose between Uncle’s and the ones run by people who call him the Great Satan, I choose Uncle.

“Meanwhile, we don’t know who’s pushing our buttons, waiting for us to show up, and watching us flail around all over hell. But I’d bet someone is, and I’d just as soon they didn’t pin a tail on us.”

I nodded, pointing the Volvo onto the Bay Bridge. “You don’t think Park could somehow be in on this,” I suggested.

“Not in any way he’d like. I don’t think Park is where anyone will find him anytime soon,” Quent replied grimly. “Whoever tried to create a fresh trail for him would probably be pretty confident he’s not leaving his own trail of crumbs. I really don’t like that idea, Harve. Well, maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.”

“When are we gonna drop that one on Dana?”

He levered himself and his seat erect; opened his phone. “Right away. She’s probably still in the field. I will bet you a day’s expenses Mr. Ghaffar knows who took that room for Park; the description fits Hong, of course.”

I nodded. “Should we go back and have a talk with him now?”

“Not yet, I want to be very calm for that, and at the moment I am peeved. I am provoked.”

“You are royally pissed,” I supplied. He nodded. “Me too,” I added, as he punched Dana’s number.

It was nearing rush hour by that time, but with a few extra twists and turns, I managed to satisfy myself that we weren’t tailed while Quent spoke with our pet Feeb. She said she’d meet us in twenty at the boathouse on Lake Merritt, in residential Oakland.

She was as good as her word, looking as frazzled as she’d sounded earlier but even more interesting, which irked me. No Feeb had the right to look that good. She took the perimeter footpath and we caught up to her, two visitors hitting on a cutie. When we found a park bench, she plopped her shoulder bag next to me. “If that specimen’s bagged, stuff it in here,” she said.

“And if not, where do I stuff it?”

She simply looked toward my partner. “While he figures out the answer to his own question, Quent: We’ve still drawn blanks at every bus terminal, airport and rail connection between Vallejo and Santa Clara. What’s your best guess on Park?”

Quent told her while I put my evidence in her bag. At his bidding I let her review the video I’d made. He described the timing of the connections we’d made and blunted the conclusions he and I had reached together. “Wherever Park is, and for whatever reason, I just have a suspicion he won’t surface again in the Bay Area,” he said. Then he described the Chinatown lead and told her flatly why he believed it was fugazi, a false trail.

She turned to me. “You’re uncharacteristically silent. What do you think?”

“Much the same. And I think Quent ought to borrow your spectral analyzer, if it’s small enough to put in a Bianchi rig.”

“Mine won’t fit in any shoulder holster I’ve seen,” she said, “but some will. The covert units are slower, though. Encryption-linked to a lab in Sunnyvale, which is why they can be so small. I’ve seen one implanted in a LOC-8. And they are very, very expensive,” she added. A LOC-8 was one of the second-generation GPS units with two-way comm and a memory just in case you wondered where you’d been. Combined with a linked-up analyzer it would be worth a new Volvo.

“You want me to ship out on the Ras Ormara or something,” Quent said to me, amused.

Dana turned to him again. “Better you than King Kong here. You look the part, and you could talk with the crew more easily.”

Quent: “You’re not serious.”

Dana: “Not actually shipping out, but you might try getting aboard while the new cargo is being loaded. A spectral analyzer needs no more than a whiff to do its job, and I’d hate to try to guess all the ways a cargo can be falsified.”

Quent was silent for a time. Then, “I’d never get aboard without the rep’s authorization, or the captain’s. There goes one layer of our deniability but yes, I could try it. Or Harve could, in a pinch.”

We kicked the idea around a bit, and then she excused herself and walked off a ways to use her phone while Quent and I watched boats slice the lake’s surface under psychedelic bubbles of sail. When she turned back, she was nodding. “You’ll need to learn how to use it,” she said.

Quent said if it was anything like the one she carried, she could show us using the specimen I’d collected. She simpered for him and said she should’ve thought of that herself. We found a picnic table and, sandwiched between me and Quent, Dana pulled a grey, keyboard-faced polymer brick from her bag and opened my evidence baggie next to it.

She stuck her forefinger into a depression labeled CRUCIBLE in the brick and pressed the CRU key. When she withdrew her finger its tip was covered by a filmy shroud, which she quickly stuck into my soggy tissue. Then she pushed the fingertip into another depression and pressed SAMPLE, and the brick whirred very faintly for an instant. Dana withdrew her finger, stripped the film off, and let it drop to the tabletop, an insubstantial wisp. Then after a silence, the brick’s little screen began to print gibberish at a rate too fast to follow.

“Essentially, a carbon ribbon wipes a bit of the specimen off the film — don’t ask me why it’s called a crucible — and analyzes it,” Dana murmured.

“What if you’re testing the air,” Quent asked.

“Wave your finger around for a moment. They say the crucible has microscopic pores on its surface,” she explained.

“And how many of those little mouse condoms are inside,” I asked, unrolling the discarded wisp for a better look.

“Rackham, you are a piece of work,” she said under her breath. Then more loudly, “A hundred or so. By that time the battery needs replacing.” When the little screen quit printing Martian, it showed a line with several numbered pips of varied height. She showed us how to query each number, which could be shown as chemical symbols or in words.

The biggest pip was for water, the next was for a ketone solvent, then cellulose, then something called Biopol.

I put my finger out and touched the screen. “Bad actor?”

“No. A polymer from genetically altered canola,” she said.

“How in the hell would you know that,” I demanded.

She let me stew for a moment. Then, “Customs. Biopol was the plant extract on the manifest. Quent would’ve figured that out and told you anyway,” she added grudgingly.

The trace of C₁₀H₁₈O, according to the screen, was eucalyptol. Dana pointed out that the heavily aromatic tree hanging over us was a eucalyptus. “So you see it’s pretty accurate.”

I said no it wasn’t, or it would’ve told us what the little condom was made of. She said yes it was and positively beamed, explaining that the analyzer knew to ignore the crucible’s signature. I gave up. The damned thing was pretty smart at that.

“At least we know the cargo was as advertised,” Quent said.

Dana nodded. “Including those pallets of wood. We ’scoped enough of it. So now we focus on the next cargo because no one has come ashore with sizable contraband, and the incoming cargo was clean.”

“Unless they’d already pumped it out into those trucks I saw,” I said.

“They didn’t,” said Dana. “One of the cleanout crew is one of ours. You don’t need to know which one. The Ras Ormara crew are watching him carefully enough to make us even more suspicious.”

“I wasted my time then,” I said.

“You proved the wharf isn’t all that secure,” Quent mused, and checked his wrist. “If you’re going to spring for a couple of those analyzers, ma’am, we should get to it.”

She reminded him that it was a loan, and there’d be only one. Thinking ahead as usual, he said as long as we were going to show our hand overtly as a P.I. team, he’d feel better going aboard if I went along. That meant I could contact the Sonmiani rep myself for the authorization and save some time.

“If you drop me off at my Toyota right away,” I said, “I might catch this Goldman guy before he leaves his office.”

We quick-marched back to the Volvo and Dana agreed to meet Quent back at the Sunnyvale lab in the South Bay.

I knew I was cutting it close for normal working hours but StudyBimbo found the Sonmiani number while Quent drove me to my pickup. I was in luck; better luck than Quent would find. One Mike Kaplan answered for Sonmiani Shipping, and put me through without rigamarole. That’s how my brief platonic fling began with my friend, Norman Goldman.

Three

When you first meet someone of your own sex that you like right away, no matter how hetero you are, you tend to go through something resembling courtship. When the other guy is equally outgoing, ordinary things sink into a temporary limbo: time, previous appointments, even mealtimes.

That’s how it had been with me and Quent, and it happened again with Norm. The reason he and his staff assistant had still been at the office was that the Goldman suite and Sonmiani’s office were over-andunder, in one of the smaller of those old Alameda buildings respiffed in the style they call Elerath Post-Industrial. I guessed that Sonmiani did a healthy business because the whole two-story structure was theirs.

It was a few minutes after five, but Goldman had said he’d leave the front door unlocked. Following the signs, I moved down a hallway formed by partitioning off a strip from the offices, which I could see through the glassed partition. One man was still in there, wearing a headset and facing a big flat screen. He looked up and waved, and I waved back, and he motioned for me to continue.

The place must have once doubled as a warehouse to judge from the vintage — now trendy again and clean as a cat’s fang — freight elevator. I obeyed its sign, tugging up on a barrier which met its descending twin at breastbone height. It whirred to life on its own, a bit shaky after all those years of service, and a moment later I saw a pair of soft Bally sandals come into view under nicely creased allosuede slacks. A pale yellow dress shirt with open collar followed, and finally I saw a tanned, well-chiseled face looking at mine. Hands on hips, he grinned. I couldn’t blame him; I’d forgotten how I was dressed.

We introduced ourselves before he jerked a thumb toward the glass door of what might have been an office, but turned out to be his digs. “Sorry about the time,” I said, as he ushered me into a big airy room with an eclectic furniture mix: futon, modern couch, inflatable chairs, and a wet bar. And some guy-type pictures, one of which had nothing to do with ships. I thought it would stand a closer look if I got the time. “I tend to forget other people keep regular hours,” I added.

“Couldn’t resist your opening,” he said, with a wave of his hand that suggested I could sit anyplace, and I chose the couch. “Anyone looking for the same crew member I’m looking for, is someone I want to meet. Besides, I’ve never met a real live — ah, is ‘pee-eye’ an acceptable buzz phrase?” He had heavy expressive brows that showed honest concern at the question, and big dark eyes that danced with lively interest. “And if it’s not, would some sour mash repair the damage?” His accent was Northeast, I guessed New York, and in Big Apple tempo.

“Maybe later,” I said. “But P.I. is a term always in vogue.”

“As long as I’m on Goldman time, I’ll have a beer,” he said, and bounced up like a man who played a lot of tennis. He uncapped a Pilsener Urquell from a cooler behind the bar, dipped its neck toward me, then took a swig of the brew before sitting down again. “We’ve about given up on Park, by the way. Do you suppose the dumb slope has gotten himself in some kind of trouble?”

I admitted I didn’t know. “That’s what the client wants us to find out. At this point, we’re hoping his personal effects aboard ship might point us in some direction. With your authorization, of course, Mr. Goldman. That’s what we had in mind.”

He nodded abstractedly. “Don’t know why not. And hey, my father is Mr. Goldman, God forbid you should mix us up.” His grin was quick and infectious. “It’s Norm; okay?”

I’d intended to keep this on a semiformal level but with Norm it was simply not possible. I insisted on “Harve,” and asked him if he ever felt ill at ease dealing with Moslem skippers. He got a kick from that; a ship’s captain might be Allah on the high seas, said Norm, but they knew who signed their checks. “No, it’s the poor ragheads who aren’t all that easy about me.” He laughed. “But Sonmiani’s directors include some pretty canny guys. As long as I keep cargoes coming and going better than the last rep, what’s to kvetch about?

“Actually the skipper probably will anyway. Gent with a beard, named something-Nadwi. A surly lot, Harve, especially when they’re behind schedule.” He stopped himself suddenly, shot a quick glance at me. “I don’t suppose it’s my bosses who put you onto our man’s trail. Nobody’s told me, but they don’t always tell the left hand what its thumb is doing. In a way I hope it is them.”

“Against my charter to identify a client, but let’s just say it’s someone worried about a young guy who’s a long way from home,” I said. A hint that broad was, as Quent had said, bending the rules a bit but that wasn’t why I felt a wisp of guilt. I felt it because I knew our real client wasn’t a deceased Korean.

Norm was understanding. He said he’d seen Park Soon exactly once, and that, while he was making his own inquiries, a couple of the crew who had their papers had claimed they saw the engineer in a bar. “They may have been mistaken. Or — hell, I don’t know. You couldn’t pick a more suspicious mix than we have on the Ras Ormara. Schmucks will lie just for practice. You can’t entirely blame them, you know. Some skippers skim company food allowances intended for the crews, though I don’t believe Nadwi does. I won’t have it, by God, and our skippers know it. There’s a backhander or two that I can’t avoid in half the foreign ports. A lot of their manning agencies are corrupt—”

“Backhander?”

“Kickback, bribe. It’s just part of doing business in some ports, and the poor ragheads know it, but they never get a dime of the action. Same-old, same-old,” he chanted, shook his head, and took another slug of Urquell.

His shirt pocket warbled, and he tapped it without looking. “Goldman,” he said, not bothering to keep the conversation private from me. I was struck by the openness of everything, the offices, Norm’s apartment, his dealings with people.

“I’m about squared away here, guv,” said a voice with a faint Brit flavor. “Thought I’d nip out for a bite.”

“Why not? You’ve been on Kaplan time for,” Norm consulted a very nice Omega on his wrist, “a half hour. Oh! Mike, would you mind running up here a minute first? Gentleman in an unusual business here I want you to meet.”

The voice agreed, sounding slightly put-upon, and after he rang off I realized it must be the man I’d seen in the office. It was obvious that Norm Goldman had the same view of formalities that I did, but something about his decisive manner said he might crack a whip if need be. I decided he was older than I’d first thought; maybe forty, but a very hip forty.

Then I took a closer look at that framed picture on his wall, a colorful numbered print showing one formula car overtaking another as a third slid helplessly toward a tire barrier. It was the Grand Prix of Israel, Norm said, adding that he was a hopeless fan. I said I shared his failing; worse, that I had half the bits and pieces of an off-road single-seater in my workshop awaiting the chassis I’d build. He crossed his arms and sighed and, beaming at me, said he might have known.

A quick two-beat knock, and Mike Kaplan entered without waiting. He was swarthy and slim, with very close-cropped dark hair and a nose old-time cartoonists used to draw as a sort of Jewish I.D. His forearms said he’d done a lot of hard work in his time. I got up. Norm didn’t, waving a hand from one of us to the other as we shook hands. “Mike Kaplan, Harve Rackham. Mike’s my second, and when we’re both out of the office, our young tomcat Ira Meltzer holds down the fort. Ira’s not in his rooms — where the hell is Ira — as if it were any of my effing business,” Norm added with a smile.

Mike said how would he know, and Norm shrugged it off. “Let me guess,” Mike said to me. “Wrestler on the telly?”

“That’s me,” I said, and pulled up my pants. “Harve, the Terrible Tourist.”

“Come on,” Mike said, because Norm was chuckling.

“I didn’t know they existed anymore, Mike, but you are looking at a private eye. In disguise, I hope,” said his boss, enjoying the moment. When Mike didn’t react, he said, “As in, private investigator. You know: Sam Spade.”

Mike Kaplan’s face lit up then, and his second glance at me was more appraising and held a lot more friendly interest. “Personally, I’d be inclined to tell him whatever he wants to know,” he said to Norm. I must have outweighed him by fifty kilos.

“If you knew, you might. But that would more likely be the job of the Ras Ormara’s skipper,” Norm replied. “You’re better at those names than I am.”

Mike shook his head in mock censure. “If you worked at it as I do, you’d get along better with them,” he said. “Captain Hassan al-Nadwi, you mean.” As Norm nodded, Mike Kaplan went on, “And what do we need from that worthy?”

I told him, and admitted we needed to look at the engineer’s effects as soon as possible — meaning the next day.

Mike allowed as how al-Nadwi would put up a pro forma bitch, but it shouldn’t really be a problem if I didn’t mind a lot of silent stares, and people on board who suddenly seemed to know no English at all. He said he’d call the skipper, stroke him a little, lean on him a little. Al-Nadwi knew who held the face cards. Piece of cake, he said.

Norm said he gathered I wasn’t working alone, and I told him about Quentin Kim, apologizing for the oversight. “If Park Soon left any notes in Hangul,” I said, “it’d be Quent who could read them. He speaks Korean, of course; that’s probably why he got the case. I’d be just as useful chasing down other leads.”

Norm donated a quizzical look. “I didn’t realize there were other leads.”

New friend or not, there are times when you see you’re about to step over the line. That can reach around and bite you or your friend sometimes in ways you can’t predict. I said, “There may not be. If there were, I couldn’t discuss them. ’Course, if Quent stumbled on one, it wouldn’t surprise me if you got wind of it later.” I let my expression say, the game’s a bastard but rules are rules.

“I respect that. Can’t say I understand it, but I respect it,” said Norm.

“Good,” I said. “So for all I know, Quent may come alone to the ship and send me off in another direction.”

Norm’s reaction warmed my heart. “But — I was going to go along because you were,” he said. “Spring for lunch, pick your brains about racing, — uh-unh; you’ve got to go along, Harve.”

“I’ll try, but it’s Quent’s call. He’s my boss,” I said.

A sly half smile, and one lifted brow, from Norm. “Well,” he said softly, reasonably, “just tell him the real call is Norm Goldman’s. And Goldman is an unreasonable asshole.”

Mike Kaplan laughed out loud and jerked his head toward Norm while looking at me. “I’ve been saying that for ages,” he said.

After Kaplan promised to set up a visit to the ship for me and Quent, he left us. I told Norm that just about cleared my decks for the day, and said I’d take one of those Czech beers if the offer was still open. We jawed about our tastes in racing — I couldn’t see his fascination with dragsters; he thought karts were kid stuff. He showed me around his place while we discussed Norm’s good luck in falling heir to a floor of rooms that split so nicely into three apartments. Whatever Sonmiani paid their seamen, Norm and his staff obviously were in no fiscal pain. Finally, we bonded a little closer over the fact that both of us placed high value in working with people we liked.

I promised Norm he’d like Quent because they shared a subdued sense of humor, though he might find my old pal oddly conservative considering the career he chose. That was the chief way, I said, that Quent’s ethnicity showed.

Norm said believe it or not, I’d find Kaplan had a touch of the prude. He added that it couldn’t be the man’s Liverpool upbringing, so maybe it was the Sephardic Jew surfacing in him. It was a comfort, he said, to know he could be gone a week and feel confident that the office was secure in the hands of Mike Kaplan. I’d find Ira Meltzer a frank Manhattan skirt-chaser, he said, which could get a bit wearing but Ira was a real mensch for hard work.

I tried to call Quent about the good news, but got his tape. I didn’t call Dana Martin because I didn’t want to seem secretive, and I sure wasn’t going to talk with a Fed in front of Norm.

And when he suggested we go looking for dinner-on him, or rather on Sonmiani, he reminded me — I said it might be better if we called a pizza in because I was tired of people looking at me funny. I was catching on to his dry humor by then, and laughed when he said with a straight face that he couldn’t imagine why they might.

“Pizza’s a good idea,” he said, “but we could order it from anywhere. How about from your workshop?”

He was as serious about it as most race-car freaks, and the idea of a forty-minute drive didn’t dismay him. It was long odds against a deliveryman finding my place, I said, but we could pick that pizza up on the way. He’d be driving back alone for the first few miles on dark country roads, I cautioned. He said he had a decent Sony mapper, so he was up for it if I was, but if I had any objection we could do it another time.

Objection? Hell, this would be the first time I could recall that I’d had two guests in one week, and I said as much while we rode the rocking old elevator down.

Eventually, using our phones while he followed me out of town in his enviable, cherried-out classic black Porsche Turbo, I suggested we save time by my cobbling up a couple of reubens on my woodstove. He agreed, and when we hit the country roads I tried Quent again without success.

Now I could call our pet Feeb, who sounded slightly impressed that I was still at work. She liked it even better that Sonmiani’s people were receptive to our private search and would help us snoop aboard ship, the next day.

Quent, she said, had taken the Loc-8 with its hidden spectral analyzer after playing with it under lab tutelage. She thought he might be cruising around Richmond trying to find crewman Hong Chee. Reception, especially in some of the popular basement dives, wasn’t all that reliable. I told myself Quent could cruise the ethnic bars better as a singleton and besides, I was working in a way, schmoozing with a guy who could hinder or help us. No doubt Quent would call me when he was ready.

Dana wasn’t so happy with my suggestion that the Feds canvass airline reservation lists scheduled for the next few days, just to see if they got any hits on the Ras Ormara’s crewlist. Did she think it was pointless? Maybe not entirely, she admitted, before she hung up. I still think Dana was simply pissed because she hadn’t already gotten around to it.

No need to worry about Norm Goldman’s ability to keep my pickup in sight. He stayed glued to my back bumper, perhaps to prove that he had a racer’s soul. But Jesus! A Pooch Turbo tailing an old Toyota trash hauler? My sister Shar could’ve done it. Even so, he must’ve bottomed his pan following me up the lane to my place. A moment later my phone chirped.

I hoped it was Quent, but, “Harve? Is this a gag? How much farther is it,” asked a slightly subdued Norm.

I asked if he could spot the old white clapboard farmhouse past the orchard ahead, and he said yes. “That’s it. We’re on my acreage now,” I said. With hindsight, I think he had started to wonder whether his new friend had something unfriendly in mind for him.

My workshop was still more than half smithy then, a short walk from the house, and we parked beside it. I toggled a key-ring button that unlocked the side door, and its sensor lit the shop up for us as I approached.

Norm stepped inside with the diffidence of an acolyte in a cathedral, ready to be awed by a genuine racing-car shop. It may have been a disappointment. The most significant stuff I had on hand was the specialized running gear, protectively bagged in inert argon gas, but he spent more time studying my half-sized chassis drawings and the swoopy lines I had lofted to show the body shells I hadn’t molded yet. When I saw him rubbing his upper arms I realized it was chilly for him. “You might enjoy looking at some recent off-road race videos,” I said, “while I get the kitchen stove warmed. Or you could sit on top of the stove,” I cracked. “Takes about ten minutes to get that cast-iron woodhog of mine up to correct temperature.”

So we closed up the shop and I used my century-old key to get us past the kitchen door. I explained my conceit, keeping the upstairs part of the house turn-of-another-century except for a few sensible improvements: media center, smoke and particulate detectors, a deionizer built into a squat wooden 1920s icebox. I couldn’t recall whether I’d left any notes on my desk or screen downstairs, so I didn’t mention my setup there.

I showed Norm to the media center in my parlor, swore to him that the couch wouldn’t collapse, and left him with a holocube of the recent Sears Point Grand Prix. I’d be lying if I said I was worried about Quent, but while rustling up the corned beef, cheese, and other munchables necessary to a reuben I kept expecting him to call. I thought he might wind up his day by driving out, and we could all schmooze together. I thought wrong.

Just for the hell of it, I opened a bottle of Oregon early muscat for our sandwiches. A bit on the sweet side, but, to make a point, I reminded Norm that Catalonians serve it to special guests and I admired their style.

After supper we skimmed more holocubes and played some old CDs, and I was yarning about the time I had to evade a biker bunch when I heard my phone. It had to be Quent, I thought; and in a way it was. I said, “Sorry, you never know,” to Norm, went into the back bedroom, and answered.

It was Dana, terse and angry. “You won’t like this any better than I do,” she warned me, and asked where I was.

I told her, and added, “I sure don’t like it when I don’t know what’s up, boss lady. Tell me.”

She did, and a flush of prickly heat spread from the back of my neck down my arms. I only half heard the essentials, but every word would replay itself in my mind during my drive back to Richmond.

“Give me a half hour,” I said. “The Sonmiani rep is here with me. He might be some help tracing some of the crew’s movements if there’s a connection.”

“Say nothing tonight; Sonmiani might be one of those firms that demand advocacy no matter what.”

“Firms like yours,” I said grimly, and regretted it in the same moment. “Forgive me, I’m — I need to go out and slug a tree. See you in thirty.”

Norm must have been sensitive to body language because he stood up as I stumped through the parlor door. I told him I had to drive back into town as soon as I changed clothes. To his question I said it wasn’t anything he could help with; just a case that had taken a new turn. He asked whether my Korean boss let me go along on the Ras Ormara thing. I replied that there wasn’t much doubt I’d make it, and promised to give him an early-morning call. Then I hurried into my bedroom for a quick change, my hands shaking.

As I slapped the closures on my sneakers I heard the Porsche start up, and Norm was long gone when my tires hit country-road macadam. Not so long gone that I didn’t almost catch him nearing Concord. I hung back enough to let him find the freeway before me. After all, there wasn’t any need for breaking records now; hard driving was simply the only way I could use up all that adrenaline before I met the Feds off the freeway in East Richmond, near the foothills. I kept thinking that from downtown Richmond to some very steep ravines was only five minutes or so. And wondering whether my buddy Quent had still been alive during the trip.

Linked to Dana by phone, I found the location a block off the main drag, a long neon strip of used-car lots and commercial garages. Evidently Dana’s people had shooed the locals away, though a pair of uniformed cops still hung around waiting to control the nonexistent crowd, and I seemed to be it. The guys doing the real work wore identical, reversible dark jackets. I knew that “F B I” would be printed on the inner surfaces of those jacket backs and, when Dana waved me forward, a strobe flash made me blink.

I saw the chalk outline before I spotted the partially blanketed figure on a foldable gurney in the extrawide unmarked van. The chalk lines revealed that Quent had been found with his legs in the street, torso in the gutter, head and one arm up on the curb. The stain at the head oval looked black, but it wouldn’t in daylight.

We said nothing until I followed Dana into the van, sitting on jump seats barely out of the way of a forensics woman who was monitoring instruments while she murmured into her headset. The gadget she occasionally used looked like my StudyFrail but probably cost ten times as much. I leaned forward, saw the misshapen contours of a face I had known well. I knew better than to touch him. I think I moaned, “A www, Quent.”

“He was deceased before he struck the curb, if it’s any consolation,” said Dana. “Long enough before, that he lost very little blood on impact. Presumption is that someone dropped him from a moving vehicle.”

I couldn’t help wondering what I’d been doing at the time. Nodding toward the forensics tech, I managed to mutter, “Got a time of death?”

Dana said, “Ninety minutes, give or take.” I would’ve been licking my fingers right about then. “We thought it might have been accidental at first.”

“For about ten seconds,” said the tech dryly. She wasn’t missing anything. Her gloved hand lifted Quentin Kim’s lifeless wrist. It was abraded and bruised. She pointed delicately with her pinkie at the bluish fingertips. The nails of the smallest two fingers were missing. The cuticles around the other nails were swollen and rimmed with faint bloodstains, and the ends of the nails had been roughened as if chewed by some tiny animal. “He still had a heartbeat when this was done,” she added.

“Pliers,” I said, and she grunted assent. “Somebody wanted something out of him. But how could pulling out fingernails be lethal,” I asked, shuddering by reflex as I tried to imagine the agony of my close friend, a friend who had originally hired me for physical backup. Fat lot of good I had done him ….

The tech didn’t answer until she glanced at Dana, who nodded without a word. “Barring a coronary, it couldn’t. But repeated zaps of a hundred thousand volts will give you that coronary. Zappers that powerful are illegal, but I believe Indonesian riot control used them for a while. The fingernails told me to look for something else. Nipples, privates, lips, other sites densely packed with nerve endings.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. She was implying torture by people who were good at it, and I lacked the objectivity to view the evidence.

“But that’s not where I found the trauma,” said the tech. “It showed up as electrical burn marks in a half dozen places where a pair of contact points had been pressed at the base of the skull, under the hair. Not too hard to locate if you know what you’re looking for. The brain stem handles your most basic life support; breathing, that sort of thing. Electrocute it hard, several times, and it’s all over.”

“It’s not over,” I growled.

“It is for him,” the woman said, then looked into my eyes and blinked at whatever she saw. “Got it,” she mumbled, going back to her work.

“Under the circumstances,” Dana said, not unkindly, “you may want to break this one off without prejudice. Even though there may be no connection between this and the particular case you’re working. Quentin had other active cases, and we know he’s not above working two at once, don’t we?”

“I resent that word ‘above.’ We also know how we’d bet, if we were betting,” I said.

“You are betting, Rackham. And stakes don’t go much higher than this.”

Neither of us could have dreamed how wrong she was, but I could dream about avenging my pal. I said, “I’m feeling lucky. Where’s that Loc-8 with the analyzer? I’ll learn to use it by tomorrow. Maybe Norm Goldman can divert some people’s attention. He’ll be with me.”

She said she’d be glad to, if she knew where it was. “It might be in Quentin’s Volvo; the Richmond force is on it, too. It could turn up at any time,” she said.

She led me out of the van again and into its nightshadow. “There’s not much point in going aboard that ship until we find you an analyzer. Preferably the one Quent had. Don’t contact Goldman’s people again until we do.”

“He might call me. We hit it off pretty well, and he could be an asset,” I said.

“He may be, at that,” she said as if to herself, then sighed and shifted her mental gears with an almost audible clash. “You may as well go home, there’s nothing you can do here. I called you in only because I knew you two were close.” A pause. “You’d have told me if Quentin had called you tonight. Wouldn’t you?”

“About what?”

“About anything. Answer my question,” she demanded.

Before that tart riposte was fully out of her mouth I said, “Of course I’d tell you! What is this, anyway?” When she only shook her head, I went on, “I kept my phone on me at all times because I kept hoping he’d call. I was getting uncomfortable because, normally, he’d have called just for routine’s sake. I called him a couple of times, that’s easy enough for you to check. I’d like to know where you’re going with this.”

“So you don’t feel just a touch of, well, like you’d let him down, left him waiting? A little guilty?”

Her tone was gentle. In another woman I might’ve called it wheedling. And that told me a lot. “Goddamned right I feel guilty! I did let him down, but not because I put him off when he called. He never called, Martin. Why don’t you just say ‘dereliction of duty’ and be done with it? And be glad you’re half my size when you say it.”

I turned and stalked off before she could make me any madder, wondering how I was going to get any sleep, wishing Quent had called in so I’d know where he’d gone. Wishing I had that Loc-8 so I’d have a reason to go aboard the Ras Ormara. And suddenly I realized how important it was that I find the gadget for its everyday use. Hadn’t Dana said she’d be glad to lend me the damn thing if she knew where it was?

I was pretty sure where it would be: in the breakaway panel of the driver’s side door in the Volvo. Quent had padded the pocket so he could keep a sidearm or special evidence of a case literally at hand.

But the Volvo was missing. If it were downtown, it should already have been spotted. If it was a Fed priority, the Highway Patrol would have picked it up five minutes after it hit a freeway. Very likely someone had hidden it, maybe after using it to dump poor Quent along Used Car Row. Maybe it was in the bay. Maybe parked in a quiet neighborhood, where it might not be noticed for a day or so. Maybe in a chop shop someplace, already being dismantled for parts for other used cars ….

Used Car Row! What better place to dump an upscale used car? I fired up my Toyota and drove slowly past the nearest lot, noting that a steel cable stretched at thigh height from light pole to light pole, with cars parked so that no one could cruise through the lot or hot-wire a heap and cruise out with it. Or dump a stolen car there.

Several long blocks later I lucked out, not in a car lot but at the end of a row of cars outside a body-and-fender shop. I hadn’t remembered the license; it was that inside rearview of Quent’s that stretched halfway across the windshield just like mine did, one of those aftermarket gimmicks every P.I. needs during a stakeout or traffic surveillance.

Pulling on gloves, I parked the pickup out of sight and flicked my pocket flash against the Volvo’s steering column. The keys were in the ignition. Knowing Quent as I did, I avoided touching the door plate. In fact, though the racket should have brought every cop in town, I didn’t touch the car until, on my fourth try, the old bent wheel rim I’d scrounged managed to cave in the driver’s side window, scattering little cubes of glass everywhere.

By that time the alarm’s threep, threep, whooeeeet, wheeeoot parodied a mockingbird from hell and for about thirty seconds I expected to see gentlemen of the public safety persuasion descending on the scene. Only after I got the keys out and unlocked the driver’s side door did the alarm run out of birdseed and blessed silence overtook the place once more.

Fed forensics are better than most folks think, so while I intended to tell Dana what I’d done, I wanted it to be at a time of my choosing. That’s why I didn’t climb inside the car. I just opened the driver’s door and checked the spring-loaded door panel.

And good old Quent, following his procedures as always, had squirreled away the Feds’ tricky little Loc-8 right where it would be handy, and whoever had left the Volvo there hadn’t suspected the breakaway panel. I pocketed the gadget, left the keys in the ignition again, and drove like a sober citizen back to the freeway and home. I could hardly wait to check out the Loc-8’s memory. Every centimeter of its movements through the whole evening would have been recorded-unless Quent or someone else had erased it.

The normal functions of the Loc-8’s little screen hadn’t been compromised, so I was able to scroll through its travels beginning with Quent’s departure from the Sunnyvale lab early in the evening. I brewed strong java and sipped as I made longhand notes with pen on paper at my kitchen table. Say what you will about old-fashioned methods, nothing helps me assemble thoughts like notes on paper.

Quent had driven back via the Bay Bridge to Richmond at his ordinary sedate pace, and the Volvo had stopped for two minutes or so halfway down a block in the neighborhood where he had spoken earlier in the day with the so-called machinist. If he hadn’t found a parking slot, I guessed he had double-parked.

Next he had driven half a mile, and here the Loc-8 had stayed for over an hour. At max magnification it showed he must have used a parking lot because the Volvo had been well off the street. I noted the location so I could interview the parking attendant, if any. From the locale, I figured Quent had been cruising the ethnic bars and game palaces, maybe looking for our missing engineer or, still more likely, the machinist’s roomie. Then the car had left its spot, found the freeway, and headed south through Oakland to the Alameda, not in any special hurry.

But when the Volvo’s trail traversed a long block for the second time, I checked the intersections. There was no mistake: Quent had circled the Sonmiani offices a couple of times, then parked in an adjacent alleyway, the same one Norm used for his Porsche as access to the garage entrance of the first-floor offices. As well as I could recall, I hadn’t been gone from there long when Quent arrived to do his usual careful survey of the whole layout before committing himself. That would fit if he’d intended to meet someone like Mike Kaplan or the other guy I hadn’t met — Meltzer. Someone whose phone number he didn’t have. Maybe he had been confident I was still there.

But if he had been trying to contact me, why hadn’t he just grabbed his phone? Obviously he hadn’t thought it was necessary. That meant he wasn’t worried about his safety, because Quent had told me up front that he’d rented me, as it were, by the pound of gristle. And, like most P.I.s, Quent worked on the premise that discretion was the better part, et cetera. The P.I. species is often bred from insurance investigators, a few lawyers, ex-military types, and ex-cops. Guess which ones are most willing to throw discretion in the dumper ….

Despite the lateness of the hour, my first impulse was to call Norm and ask him a few questions about what, or whom, Quent might have met there. But what would he know? He’d been tailgating me out past Mt. Diablo at that time. Another thing: Nearing my place I had called Quent to no avail. Had he gone inside by then? Or he could have met someone in another car. Illegal entry wasn’t Quent’s style. I decided that if he had been looking for me, he’d have called before parking there. The car had stayed there for about five minutes and then its location cursor virtually disappeared, but not quite. With its signal greatly diminished, it said the Volvo had been driven into Norm’s garage. There it had stayed for about an hour.

Then when the cursor suddenly appeared with a strong satellite signal, the Volvo went squirting through the Alameda as if someone were chasing it. It would’ve been dark by then as the cursor traced its way up the Nimitz Freeway to the Eastshore route, taking a turnoff near Richmond. I was feeling prickly heat as I keyed the screen back and forth between real time and fast-forward, because in real time Quent never drove with that kind of vigor.

I concluded he hadn’t been driving by then. The Volvo had gone some distance up Wildcat Canyon near Richmond’s outskirts, now driving more slowly, at times too slowly, then picking up the pace as it turned back toward the commercial district. There was no doubt in my mind where this jaunt would end, and for once I nailed it. The Volvo sizzled past the spot where a chalk outline now climbed a boulevard curb, turned off the main drag, and doubled back and forth on a service road before it stopped. The site was approximately where I had found the Volvo.

The screen said more than two hours passed before the cursor headed toward my place, duly recording the moment when I stole the gadget — recovered it, I mean; Dana had clearly said she wished she could lend it to me. Had she been lying? Probably, but it didn’t matter. I had the gimmicked Loc-8 and I had time to fiddle with its hidden functions, having watched while Dana showed another one off while sitting on a park bench between me and Quent.

And I had something else: a cold hard knot of certainty that someone working for my new friend Norm Goldman was no friend of Quent’s. Or of mine.

Four

I did sleep, after all. Worry keeps me awake but firm resolve has a way of grinding worry underfoot. I woke up mad as hell before I even remembered why, and then I sat on the edge of my bed and shed the tears I never let anyone see.

Then I dressed for a tour of the Ras Ormara. I’m told that the Cheyennes used to gather before a war party and ritually purge their bellies. They believed it sharpened their hunting instincts, and I know for a fact that if you expect a reasonable likelihood of serious injury, your chances of surviving surgery are better on an empty stomach. For breakfast I brewed tea, and nothing else, in memory of my friend.

Around nine, I called Norm Goldman and asked if my visit was on. He said yes, and asked if my Korean boss would be coming, too. I told him I hadn’t been able to raise Quent, before I realized the grisly double entendre of my reply. We agreed to meet at the slip at ten-thirty. I went downstairs and made a weapons check. Assuming the guys who took Quent down were connected with the ship — and I did assume it — somehow it just seemed a natural progression for them to make a run on me on what was their turf. Especially if Quent, in his agony, had admitted who was running the two of us.

I ignored my phone’s bleat because its readout didn’t identify the caller and there was no message, and I figured it might be my Feebie boss with new orders I didn’t want to follow.

With my StudyChick in one jacket pocket, the Loc-8 in the other, my Glock auto in its breakaway Bianchi against my left armpit and the ex-Bobby Rooney derringer taped into the hollow of my right armpit, I felt like the six-million-gadget man. My phone chortled at me as I drove into town. Still no ident for the caller, and I didn’t reply, but this time there was a message and it was clearly Dana’s voice on the messager.

She was careful with her phrasing. “The car’s been found, but not our property. Whoever has it is asking for a grand theft indictment. But the real news is, someone with political pull back East has complained at ministerial level about the, and I quote, unconscionable interference with Pacific Rim commerce. We’re now obeying a new directive. Absent some solid evidence of illegal activity by the maritime entity — and nothing ironclad is present — we’re terminating the operation. Of course last night’s felony will be pursued by the metro force.

“I want you to report to me immediately. After what’s happened, it makes me nervous not to know whether you’re still pursuing the operation. If I knew, it would probably make me even more nervous. Just ask yourself how much your license is worth.” No cheery good-byes, no nothing else.

I wanted to answer that last one, though not enough to call her back. While my license was worth a lot to me, it wasn’t worth Quentin Kim’s life. She might not know it, but I could make a decent living as a temp working under someone else’s license. If Dana Martin’s people dropped out, whatever the Richmond homicide detail found they’d almost certainly discover that their suspects had sailed on the Ras Ormara. Good luck, Sergeant, here’s a ticket to Pusan and the damnedest bilingual dictionary you ever saw …

I played the recording back again, trying to listen between the lines. If Dana had been thinking how her message would sound when replayed for her local SAC, she’d have said just about what she did say. Did she suspect the Volvo’s window had been busted by clumsy ol’ Harve, who had the Loc-8 and was now en route to the docks? If so, she evidently wasn’t going to share that suspicion with her office.

She had also made it plain that I’d have bupkis for backup, leaving an implication that until I got her message, I was still on the case. Or I could just be reading into it what I wanted to read.

What I wanted to read at the moment were my notes, not an easy task in what had now become city traffic.

With twenty minutes to burn, I pulled over beside a warehouse near the wharf and scrolled over my notes hoping to identify the next cargo. The stuff Sonmiani wanted to load was something called paraglycidyl ether, a resin thinner. Quent had checked a hazmat book on the off chance that it might be really hazardous material.

The classic historic screwup along that line had been the burning shipload of ammonium nitrate in 1947 that was identified only by its actual intended use as fertilizer. However, Quent had found that this cargo wasn’t a very mean puppy though it was flammable; certainly not like the old ethyl ether that puts your lights out after a few sniffs.

When I checked the manufacturing location I found that the liquid was synthesized right there, not merely there in Richmond but in one of the fenced-off chemical plants with an address off the boulevard facing me. I drove on and found a maze of chemical processing towers, reactor tanks, pipes, and catwalks a half mile past the Ras Ormara. A gate was open to accept a whopping big diesel Freightliner rig that was backing in among the storage tanks, carrying smaller tanks of its own like grain hoppers. For a moment I thought the driver would bend a yellow guide barrier of welded pipe and wipe out the prefab plastic shed that stood within inches of the pipe. Near the shed stood a vertically aligned bank of bright red tanks the size of torpedoes. I recognized the color coding, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near if that shed got graunched.

The driver stopped in time, though. He was no expert, concentrating on operating his rearview video instead of using a stooge to damned well direct him, and I thought he looked straight at me when he was only concentrating on an external mirror directly in front of him. He didn’t see me any more than he would’ve seen a gull in the far background.

It was Mike Kaplan.

I couldn’t be wrong about that. Same caricature of a beak, same severe brush cut and intense features. And why shouldn’t it be him? Okay, using a desk jockey to drive a rig might be unusual, and I had thought Kaplan was slated to take the ship tour with me. But if the Federected barriers to Pacific Rim commerce had come tumbling down during the morning as Dana claimed, an aggressive bunch of local reps might be pitching in to make up for lost time.

I wondered what, if anything, Kaplan might be able to tell me about what had happened in that office building early on the previous night. He had left before Norm and I did, but how did I know when he had come back? The third guy — Seltzer? Meltzer! — was one I hadn’t met, but without any positive evidence I had already made a tentative reservation for him on my shit list.

It was only a short drive back to the gate that served the Ras Ormara. This time the gate was manned, but Norm Goldman, in a ritzy black-leather jacket, leaned with a skinny frizzle-haired guy against the fender of his Turbo Porsche, just outside the fencing. Norm recognized me with a wave and called something to the two guys at the gate as I parked beside the swoopy coupe.

The skinny guy with Norm turned out to be Ira Meltzer, who spoke very softly and had a handshake that was too passive for his workhardened hands, and wore a denim jacket that exaggerated his shoulders. When Meltzer asked where my partner was, I said he hadn’t answered my calls, so I figured he wasn’t coming.

Neither of them seemed to find anything odd about that. If Meltzer knew why Quent wasn’t coming, it was possible that Norm might know. I didn’t like that train of thought; if true, it made me the prize patsy of all time. And if they had learned from Quent who it was that had been giving him orders, they would assume I already knew what had happened to him. While I thought about these things, the three of us stood there and smiled at one another.

Then Meltzer said, “By the way, aboard ship it’s the captain’s little kingdom — except for government agencies. And you’re private, am I right?”

I agreed.

“Then if I were you, I wouldn’t try to go aboard with a concealed weapon.” His smile broadened. “Or any other kind.”

He didn’t actually say I was carrying, and it took a practiced eye to spot the slight bulge of my Glock, but I didn’t need an argument with the honcho on board. “Glad you told me,” I said, and popped the little black convincer from its holster. I unlocked the Toyota and shut my main weapon in the glove box. “I carry my GPS mapper; it’s a Loc-8. And I’ve got a StudyGirl for notes. That a problem?”

Meltzer looked at Norm, who made a wry grimace. “Shit, Ira, why would it be? In fact, you might carry one of ’em openly in your hand, Harve. I’ll do the same with the other, and I’ll give it back once we’re aboard. I don’t think al-Nadwi will get his shorts in a wad. I’m supposed to carry a little weight around here, even with these ragheads.”

Meltzer said he supposed so, and I handed over StudySkirt, carrying the Loc-8 in one hand. We left our vehicles near the gate and walked in side by side toward the Ras Ormara.

The commercial cleanup outfit I had previously seen on the wharf was finally leaving, a bright yellow hazmat suit visibly untenanted in a niche near the truck’s external console. I recognized two of the three guys in the truck’s cab, and Consoleman, now the driver, waved. When Sweatman, the guy who had worn the suit, pretended he didn’t notice us I knew which of them the Feds had co-opted on the job. I would’ve given a lot to talk with him alone right then.

Norm waved back, his good spirits irksome to me though I couldn’t very well bitch about it. He kept looking around at the skyline and the wheeling gulls, taking big breaths of mud-flavored waterfront air that I didn’t find all that enticing. Wonderful day, he said, and I nodded.

As we walked up the broad metal-surfaced ramp leading to the ship, Norm made a casual half salute toward the men who stood high above on deck to meet us. Other men in work clothes were shouting words I couldn’t understand as they routed flexible metal-clad hoses around forward of the bridge. A couple of them wore white head wraps.

The skipper took Norm’s hand in his in a handshake that seemed clumsily forced, but he shook mine readily enough, unsmiling, as Norm made formal introductions.

Captain Hassan al-Nadwi had a full beard and an old sailor’s rawhide skin, bald forward of his ears, but with chest hairs curling up from the throat of his work shirt. He wore no socks, and the soles of his sandals must have been an inch thick.

He spoke fair English. “You want see engineer quarters? Go. Much much work now,” he said, friendly enough though shooing me with gestures. He gave an order to one of the two men, evidently officers, who stood behind him, then turned away to watch his work crew.

“You come, okay. I show where Park, eh, sleep,” said the Asian, a hard-looking sort whose age I couldn’t guess. He led us quickly through a portal, Norm giving me an “after you” wave, and down a passageway sunlit by sealed portholes. Another doorway took us through a room dominated by a long table surrounded by swiveling chairs that seemed bolted in place. Finally, we negotiated another passage with several closed doors, and as the crewman opened the last door I had a view of the skyline through the room’s portholes.

The Asian stood back to let us in, pointing to one of three bunks in the room. “Park, okay,” he said, and paused, with a sideways tilt of his head. Somewhere in the ship a low thrumm had started, and I could feel a hum through the soles of my shoes. He seemed to talk a bit faster now as he stepped quickly to a bunk with a half-filled sea bag on it. “Park, okay,” he said, then moved to a table secured to the metal. Wall? Bulkhead? Whatever. “Park, okay,” he said again. I recalled Quent saying once that all Korean kids took English courses. I figured maybe this guy had cheated on his exams.

I pulled out the table’s single drawer, which was so completely empty in a room shared by three guys that it fairly screamed “total cleanout job.” “Okay,” I said. At my reply the crewman turned on his heel, obviously in a hurry to be off. “Wait,” I said. The crewman kept going.

Ira Meltzer said something singsong. The crewman stopped in the doorway, not pleased about it. Meltzer looked at me.

“Ask him if there was any other place Park kept any of his personal effects,” I suggested.

“I’ll try,” he said, and then said something longer. The crewman said something else. Meltzer said, “Nae,” which was damn near all the Korean I knew, meaning “yes.”

The man said something else; glanced at Norm as if fearing eye contact; then, when Meltzer nodded, left hurriedly. “He doesn’t know of any. I guess this is all,” he said, and nodded at the bunk.

As I unlatched the hasp that closed the sea bag, I could hear quick footfalls of a running man in the corridor. Norm laughed. “Skipper keeps the crew on a tight leash,” he commented.

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. I knew he was explaining the Korean crewman’s hellacious hurry to me. And I wasn’t sure if that was the best explanation. In fact, I sat down on the bunk so that I wouldn’t have my back to my trusty guides while I carefully pulled out the contents of the bag to inspect them, one by one.

A small cheap zippered bag held toilet articles, soap, and a prescription bottle of pills with instructions in Spanish. After that, a pair of worn Avia cross-trainers; socks; a set of tan work clothes, and a stained nylon windbreaker. A heavy hooded rainproof coat; a couple of girlie mags; two pairs of work gloves, one pair well worn. A small, pre-palmtop book full of engineering tables, which I flipped through without finding any handwritten notes.

I saw Meltzer take a peek at his watch, so I decided to use up some more time. “Norm, you have that StudyGirl of mine?”

He handed it over. “You find something?” In answer I shook my head. He squatted for a closer look and, I figured, to see what notes I might make.

I used the audio function, first citing the date and location. As I placed each item back in the big bag I described it, and asked if Norm could translate the label on the pill bottle.

He couldn’t, but Meltzer could. While I spelled out “methacarbamol,” he said, “Muscle relaxant,” practically running his words together.

I announced for the audio that this was my complete audit of Park Soon’s effects left aboard ship. I added, in traditional P.I. third-person reportage, “The investigator found nothing more to suggest the subject’s itinerary ashore, or whether he intended to return. In the investigator’s opinion, the value of the bag’s contents would not exceed a hundred dollars.” By the time I’d latched the bag and placed it back on the bunk, the combined silences of Norm and Meltzer hung like smoke in the little room. They were being nice, but clearly they wanted me the hell out of there.

And just as badly, I wanted to stick around. I hadn’t found anything suspicious to use the analyzer on, and in any case these guys were right at my elbow. Norm stepped into the corridor and waited expectantly.

“Just one more thing,” I said, following him into the corridor. “I wonder if the captain would let me see Park’s workstation. You never know what he might’ve left lying around.”

Meltzer exhaled heavily as we retraced our steps. Norm shot me a pained smile. “I’ll ask. In case you’re wondering, they just got their clearance this morning, so they’re hoping to get under way today. I’d like to see them do it, Harve.”

“Message received,” I said. “I guess that’s why Mike Kaplan isn’t with us.”

“He’s doing three men’s work in the office this morning,” said Norm.

And as I tried to read Norm’s expression, Meltzer saw my glance and chimed in, “It’s always like this at the last minute. He isn’t even taking calls.”

So he lies and you swear to it, I thought. Aloud I said, “I promise to keep out of the way. I just need to cover all the bases.” And one base is the discovery that my new friend may not be that good a friend.

We found our way back on deck. A faint, musky odor lay on the breeze, reminding me of rancid soy protein. The rushing thrum in the ship’s innards was more pronounced as we neared the bridge. It seemed to be coming from those big cargo tank domes that protruded from the forward deck plates. “Wait here,” said Norm.

Meltzer stopped when I did. He pulled out a cigarette and, as he lit it, I could see that his hands trembled. It wasn’t fear, I decided; not a chill, either, because of the way he was smiling to himself.

It was suppressed excitement.

And when the phone in my pocket gave a blurt, Ira Meltzer jumped as if I’d goosed him. “It’s probably Quent,” I said. “Let me take it over here.” By now I was virtually certain he knew Quentin Kim would not be making any more phone calls. But maybe he didn’t know that I knew.

I walked back far enough for privacy, unfolding my phone, casually holding my StudyWench at my side so that its video recorded Meltzer. “Rackham,” I said. I didn’t want to pull the Loc-8 out until I could make it look like a response to this call. I’d lugged the damn thing aboard to no purpose.

“Your location is known,” said Dana Martin. Sweatman had evidently done me a favor. “Are we clean?” Meaning, ‘is our conversation secure?’

Meltzer was watching my face. “More or less. Our Mr. Park didn’t leave anything aboard that might tell us—” I said.

Until her interruption I had never heard her speak with a note of controlled panic. “Get out of there aysap. A.T.F. liaison tells us that ether compound can be converted in the tank to a component of a ternary agent. Do you understand?”

I smiled for Meltzer. “Not exactly. Where are you?”

“Sunnyvale. We have to arrive in force, and that could take an hour. Listen to me! Binary nerve gas isn’t deadly ’til two components are mixed. A ternary agent takes three. A relatively small proportion of an ether derivative is one. Our other asset just confirmed that the second component is already aboard. No telling how much is there, but to be effective, it’s needed in far greater amounts than the ether derivative.”

The rushing noise aboard the Ras Ormara and the deep vibrations abruptly resolved themselves in my mind into a humongous pump, dumping something into those newly cleaned cargo tanks. A hell of a lot of something. “Does it stink like bad tofu?”

“Wait one.”

“Make it quick,” I muttered with a smile for Meltzer, seeing Norm as he walked back toward me, a sad little smile on his face.

I was still waiting when Norm showed me a big shrug and headshake. “I’m sorry. Park didn’t even have a particular workstation anyway,” he said.

On the heels of this came Dana’s breathless, “That’s what you’re smelling, Rackham. Judging from the order form for ether, and assuming they intend to convert it to another compound, we predict an amount of ternary agent that is — my God, it staggers the imagination. Component three is a tiny amount of catalyst, easy to hide. If they have it, you’re on a floating doomsday machine.”

Norm Goldman now stood beside me. “Copy that,” I said, with a comradely pat on Norm’s shoulder to show him there were no hard feelings. “Hell of a secretary you are if you don’t even know where Quent is. Look, I expect I’ll be having lunch with a friend. I’ll call in later.” With that, I folded my phone away.

Norm took my arm, but very gently. “Part of my job is knowing when not to bug the troops, Harve. Sorry.” We moved toward the gangway ramp.

Somewhere in the distance, the double-tone beeps of police vehicles dopplered off to inaudibility. I hoped the audio track of my StudyBroad was picking up the sound of whatever it was that surged into those huge tanks, and then I released the button and pocketed my gadget. If the ether component was still being loaded for transfer, or if its conversion was complicated, there might be some way to slow them down. “About lunch,” I began, as Meltzer followed us down to the wharf.

“Hey, listen, I’ll have to take a rain check on that,” said Norm, as if answering my prayer. “Mike will need help in the office. Before the clearance came through I even had a lunch reservation for a nice place where I run a tab, up in San Rafael. Promise me you’ll do lunch there today anyway. My treat. Just give ’em this,” he said, fishing a business card from his wallet, scribbling a Mission Avenue address in San Rafael on the back of the card. “Have a few drinks on me. Promise me you’ll do that.”

“It’s a promise,” I said, as we walked toward our vehicles. Hey, if he had lied to me I could lie to him ….

Because San Rafael lay to the northwest, I gave a cheery wave and drove off as if keeping my promise, tugging on my driving gloves. Then I reached over and retrieved my Glock as I doubled back toward the place where I’d seen Mike Kaplan loading up. Minutes later, while I redlined the Toyota along the boulevard, I managed to call Dana. “I’m circling around to where they’re loading ether into a big rig,” I said over the caterwaul of my pickup. “Why not call the Richmond force and get them to meet me there until you show up? Someone should’ve already thought of that.”

“They have casualty situations in both high schools at the other end of town, called in almost simultaneously ten minutes ago. Perps are adults with automatic weapons. It’s already on the news and traffic is wall-to-wall there. And we’re having trouble getting compliance with metro liaison staff.”

That was weasel-talk for getting stonewalled by city cops who have had their noses rubbed in their inferiority by Fed elitists too many times and who might not believe how serious the Mayday was. I didn’t take time to say, “what goes around comes around.” Of course that sort of rivalry was stupid. It was also predictable.

I growled, “I’ll give odds those perps are decoys to draw SWAT teams away from here. Bring somebody fast. Strafe the goddamn ship if you have to; I’ll try to delay the load of ether. Am I sanctioned to fire first?”

A two-beat pause. “You know I can’t authorize that. Let me check with our SAC,” she said.

I made a one-word comment, dropped the phone in my pocket, and swung wide to make it through the open gate.

Fifty feet inside was the nose of the Freightliner, and behind it two guys in coveralls and respirator masks stood on its trailer fooling with transfer hoses. A guy in street clothes stood near the gate, jacket over his arm, and it barely registered in my mind that the guy was Ira Meltzer. The yellow-pipe barrier, protection for that long utility shed, ran from beside the rig almost to the gate. I made a decision that I might not have made if I’d had time to think.

My Toyota weighed something over a ton, and was still doing maybe thirty miles an hour. The Freightliner with its load might’ve weighed over twenty tons, but it wasn’t in motion. I figured on moving it a little, probably starting a fire. I popped the lever into neutral as my pickup blew past the openmouthed gate guard, then tried to hit the pavement running. Meanwhile my Toyota screeched headlong down the guide barrier, which kept nudging my vehicle straight ahead. Straight toward the nose of the towering Freightliner.

The scrape of my pickup’s steel fender mixed with shouts from the gate man, and I lost my balance and went over in a shoulder roll. Inertia brought me back to my feet and nearly over again, and I heard a series of reports behind me just before my poor old pickup slammed into the left fender of the Freightliner with an earsplitting wham that was almost an animal scream.

Guttural little whines told me someone’s ricochets were hitting distant metal, and I somehow managed to clear that knee-high barrier of four-inch pipe without slowing. I ducked — actually I tripped and fell — behind the utility shed, and saw the common old lock on its door. I was in full view of the diesel rig and turned toward it, drawing my Glock.

I had expected an instant fireball, but I was wrong. Big rigs have flame-resistant fiberglass fenders these days, and only one fat tire on each side up front. The Toyota’s entire front end was crammed up into the splintered shreds of truck fender, and the cab leaned in the direction of my four-wheeled sacrifice. With a deflated front wheel, that Freightliner wasn’t going anywhere very fast.

And the reason why nobody was shooting at me from the truck was that the Toyota’s impact had shoved the entire rig back, not by much, but enough to crimp the already tight fit of transfer hoses. The guys in respirators were wrestling with a hose and shouting, though I couldn’t understand a word. As I stood unprotected in the shadow of the shed Meltzer pounded up, an Ingram burp gun in hand. I guess he didn’t expect me to be standing so close in plain sight as he rounded the shed.

Because Meltzer was six feet away when he pivoted toward me, it was an execution of sorts. The truth is, we both hesitated; but my earlier suspicions about his dealings with Quent must have given me an edge. Meltzer took my first round in the chest with a jolt that made dust leap from his shirt, and went down backward after my second round into his throat, and I risked darting farther into the open because I needed his weapon.

A burst of three or four rounds grooved the pavement as I leaped back. I saw a familiar face above a black-leather jacket, almost hidden behind the remains of the Freightliner’s fender, holding another of those murderous little Ingrams one-handed. I fired once, but only sent particles of fiberglass flying, and Norm Goldman’s face disappeared.

He called, “Majub!”.

I heard running footsteps, and whirled to the shed’s metal-faced door before they could flank me. With those big red tanks standing nearby I had a good idea what was in the shed, so I put the muzzle of my Glock near the hasp and angled it so it might not send a round flying around inside. The footsteps halted with my first round, maybe because the guy thought I could see him. I had to fire twice more before the hasp’s loop failed, and took some scratches through my glove from shrapnel, but by the time I knew that, I was inside the shed fumbling with two weapons. A drumming rattle on the shed didn’t sound promising.

From behind the Freightliner’s bulk, Norm’s voice: “You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?”

I didn’t answer. I was scanning the shed’s interior, which was lit by a skylight bubble. About half of the machinery there was familiar stuff to me: big battery-powered industrial grinders and drills, a hefty Airco gas-welding outfit, a long worktable with insulated top, a resistance-welding transformer, and tubes with various kinds of wire protruding, welding and brazing rod. Above the table were ranks of wrenches, fittings, bolts, a paint sprayer — the hardware needed to repair or revise an industrial facility.

And I could hear Norm shouting, and voices answering. Simultaneous with gunshots from outside, several sets of holes appeared in both sides of the shed at roughly waist height.

Norm yelled again, this time in English. “Goddammit, Majub, don’t waste it!”

And the response in another slightly familiar voice and genuinely English English: “Sorry, guv. We do have the long magazines.” So Mike Kaplan’s name was also Majub. What’s in a name? Protective coloration, I thought. Noises like the tearing of old canvas came from somewhere near. I squatted and lined up one eye with a bullet hole, but not too near the hole. By moving around, I caught sight of my wrecked Toyota. Norm and a guy in coveralls were ripping the fiberglass away as best they could. It might take them ten minutes to change that tire if I let them.

I darted to the end of the shed nearest the action and put a blind short burst from the Ingram through the wall, with only a fair guess at my targets. Because I stood three feet from the plastic wall, I didn’t get perforated when an answering burst tore a hole the size of my fist in the wall.

I had taken out one man and there were several more. They seemed partial to Ingrams, about thirty rounds apiece, meaning I was in deep shit. And when I heard the hiss of gas under pressure, the hair stood up on my nape. Those big red torpedoes just outside were painted to indicate acetylene. I hadn’t noticed where the oxygen tanks were, but they had to be near because of the long twinned red and black hoses screwed into the welding torch.

And acetylene, escaping inside that shed from a bullet-nicked hose, could blow that entire structure halfway to Sunnyvale the next time I fired, or when an incoming round struck a spark. I darted toward the hiss, wondering if I could repair the damage with tape, and saw that it was the black oxygen hose, not the red one, which had been cut. A slightly oxy-rich atmosphere wasn’t a problem, but if I’d had any idea of using a torch somehow, it was no longer an option.

Outside, angry jabbers and furious pounding suggested that Goldman’s crew was jacking up the Freightliner’s left front for a tire change. It would be only a matter of minutes before they managed it, and another round through the shed reminded me that Kaplan was deployed to keep me busy. From the shafts of sunlight that suddenly appeared inside when he fired, I could tell he was slowly circling the shed, clockwise.

That long workbench with its insulated top must have weighed five hundred pounds, but only its weight anchored it down. If I could tip it over, it should stop anything short of a rifle bullet if and when Kaplan tried to rush the door, and I could fire back from cover. Maybe.

I took off my jacket to free my shoulders and tried to tip the table quietly, but when I had the damn thing halfway over, another round from Kaplan whapped the tabletop a foot from me and I flinched like a weenie. The muted slam of the tabletop’s edge was like a wrecking ball against the concrete floor. My shirt tore away under the arms so badly that only the leather straps of my Bianchi holster kept it from hanging off like a cape.

Then I scurried behind the table and tried to visualize where Kaplan might be. Ten seconds later another round ricocheted off a vise bolted to the tabletop. But I saw the hole where the slug had entered, made a rough judgment of its path, and recalled that Kaplan was still moving clockwise. He had fired from about my seven o’clock position, so I used Meltzer’s Ingram and squeezed off three rounds toward seven-thirty. The astonished thunderstorm of his curses that followed was Wagnerian opera to me, but his real reply was a hysterical burst of almost a dozen rounds. A whole shelf of hardware cascaded to the floor behind me, and I crouched on the concrete.

Maybe I hadn’t hurt Kaplan badly, but he didn’t fire again for a full minute. A handful of taps, dies, and brass fittings rolled underfoot, the kind of fittings that were used for flammable gases because brass won’t spark. I stood up and found that I could see through the nearest bullet hole toward the Freightliner. My good buddy Norm was barely visible, wrestling a new tire into position. I thought I could puncture it, too, then recalled that late-model tires would reseal themselves after anything less than an outright collision. Then I noticed that the end of that four-inch railing of brightly painted yellow pipe was within a foot of the truck. The pipe was capped; one of those extra precautions metalworkers take to prevent interior corrosion in a salt-air environment.

And that made me rush to another hole at the end of the shed to see if the other end was capped.

It was.

Which meant, if there weren’t any holes in the rail of pipe, I just — might — be able to use it as a very long pressure tank.

I duck-walked back behind the overturned table and routed the hoses with the welding torch along the floor, where they couldn’t be struck again. Among all the stuff underfoot were fittings sized to match those that screwed the hoses into the torch, and taps intended to create threads in drilled holes of a dozen sizes. Five minutes before, they’d all been neatly arranged, but now I had to scavenge among the scattered hardware. Not a lot different, I admitted to myself, from the chaos I sometimes faced in my own workshop. My best guess was that I’d never face it again.

Another round from Kaplan struck within inches of the big battery-powered drill I was about to grab, and the new shaft of sunlight sparkled off a set of long drill bits, and I gave unspoken thanks to Mike-Majub while promising myself I would kill him.

I knelt and used a half dozen rounds from the Ingram to blow a ragged hole in the wall at shin height, hearing a couple of ricochets. My Glock wasn’t all that big, but its grip gouged me as I wallowed around on my right side, so I laid the weapon on the floor where it would still be handy.

Lying on my side, I could see the near face of the pipe rail in sunlight six inches away, with bright new bullet scars in its yellow paint. Like the big acetylene tanks outside, its steel was too thick to be penetrated by anything less than armor-piercing rounds. That’s what carbide-tipped drill bits are for.

One of the scars was deep enough to let me start the drill bit I eyeballed as a match for the correct brass fitting, and while I was chucking the long bit that was the thickness of my pinkie, I heard Mike-Majub yelling about the “bloody helo.” A moment later I understood, and for a few seconds I allowed myself to hope I wouldn’t have to continue what seemed likely to become my own personal mass murder-and-suicide project. The yelling was all about the rapid thwock-thwock-thwock-thwock-thwock of an approaching helicopter.

It quickly became so loud the shed reverberated with the racket from overhead, so loud that dust sifted from the ceiling, so loud I couldn’t even hear the song of the drill as it chewed, too slowly, through the side of the pipe rail just inches outside the shed wall. Someone was shouting again, in English I thought, though I couldn’t make out more than a few words. A few single rounds were fired from different directions and then the catastrophic whack of rotor blades faded a bit and I could understand, and my heart sank.

“ … Telling you news crews don’t carry fucking weapons, look at the fucking logo! Don’t waste any more ammunition on it,” Norm yelled angrily.

So it was only some TV station’s eye in the sky; lots of cameras, but no arms. As a cop I used to wish those guys were forbidden to listen to police frequencies. This time, as the noise of the circling newsgeek continued in the distance, I gave thanks for the diversion and hoped they’d at least get a close-up of me as I rose past them.

The bit suddenly cut through and I hauled it back, burning my wrist with the hot drill bit in my haste to fumble the hardened steel tap into place. Of course I couldn’t twist the tap in with my fingers, but in my near panic, that’s what I tried.

Another round hit the shed, and this time the steel-faced door opened a few inches. Bad news, because now the shooter could see inside a little. I wriggled to my knees and looked around for the special holder that grips a tap for leverage. No such luck. But another round spanged off the door, and in the increased daylight I spotted that bad seed among good tools, a pair of common pliers. They would have to do.

Because I was on my knees at the end of the overturned table and reaching for the pliers when Mike-Majub rushed the door, I only had time to grovel as he kicked the door open and raked the place with fire. I don’t think he even saw me, and he didn’t seem to care, emptying his magazine and then, grinning like a madman, grabbing a handgun from his belt as he dropped the useless Ingram.

Meanwhile, I had fumbled at my Bianchi and then realized the Glock lay on the floor, fifteen feet behind me. But I was sweating like a horse, and the irritant in my right armpit was now hanging loose, and the tatters of my shirt didn’t impede my grasp of Bobby Rooney’s tiny palmful of bad news. Tape and all, it came away in my hand as I rolled onto my back, and the grinning wide-eyed maniac in the doorway spied my movement. We fired together.

Though chips of concrete spattered my face, he missed. I didn’t. He folded from the waist and went forward onto his knees, then his face. The top of his head was an arm’s length from me and I had made a silent promise to him ten minutes previous and now, with the other barrel, I honored it.

Blinking specks of concrete from my vision, eyes streaming, I grabbed the pliers, stood up, vaulted over the tabletop, and kicked the door shut before scrambling back to the mess I had made. Pliers are an awful tool for inserting a steel tap, but they’ll do the job. Chasing a thread — cutting it into the material — requires care and, usually, backing the tap out every turn or so. I wondered who was moaning softly until I realized it was me, and I quit the backing-out routine when I heard the Freightliner’s starter growl.

Then Norm Goldman called out: “Let him go, Majub, it won’t matter.”

The tap rotated freely now. I backed it out quickly. “If he answers, I’ll blow his head off,” I shouted, and managed to start the little brass fitting by feel, into the threaded hole I had made. When it was fingertight I forced it another turn with the pliers. Then I pulled the torch to me with its twinned slender snakes of hose, one of them still hissing. To keep Norm talking so I’d know where he was: “Some Jews you turned out to be,” I complained. “Who am I really talking to?”

The Freightliner snicked into gear, revved up, and an almighty screech of rending metal followed. The engine idled again while Norm shouted some kind of gabble. Then, while someone strained at the wreckage and I adjusted the pliers at the butt of the torch: “I am called Daud al-Sadiq, my friend, but my true name is revenge.”

“Love your camouflage,” I called back. Now a louder hiss as the acetylene fitting loosened at the torch while I continued to untwist it. With the sudden unmistakable perfume of acetone came a rush of acetylene, which has no true odor of its own. The fitting came loose in my hands and I shoved the hose through the hole, to fumble blindly for the fitting. “I especially like that ‘my friend’ bullshit,” I called.

“In my twenty years of life in the bowels of Satan I have been a true friend to many,” Norm-Daud called back in a tone of reproach, everything in his voice more formal, more rhetorical than usual. Now it became faintly whimsical. “Including Jews. You’d be surprised.”

“No I wouldn’t,” I called, knowing that if a hot round came through now it would turn me into a Roman candle. My own voice boomed and bellowed in the shed. “How else could you learn to pass yourself off as your own enemy?” I tried to mate the fittings without being able to see them. Cross-threaded them; felt sweat running into my eyes; realized some of it was blood; got the damned fittings apart and began anew.

The Freightliner’s engine revved again. Norm-Daud called, “Not the real enemy. Western ways are the enemy, but I could be your friend. Heaven awaits those of us who die in the struggle; do you hear me, Majub? What can this man do but send you to your glory an hour sooner?”

I knew he was goading his buddy into trying to jump me or to run. “He’s just sitting here with the whites of his eyes showing,” I lied, to piss my friend-enemy off. The sigh of escaping acetylene became a thin hiss, then went silent. In its place, a hollow whoosh of gas rushing unimpeded into an empty pipe fifty feet long, starting slowly but inevitably — if the bank of supply tanks was full enough, and if there weren’t any serious leaks — to fill that four-inch-diameter pipe that was now a pressure tank.

“We will all find judgment when I reach the Ras Ormara,” Norm-Daud called happily.

“The Feds know about your ternary agent, pal, and they’re on the way. That tub isn’t going anyplace,” I called.

That set his laughter off. “So you’ve worked that out? Fine. I agree. And no one else will be going anyplace, downwind, from the Golden Gate to San Jose. What, two million dead? Three? It’s a start,” he said, trying to sound modest.

Then the Freightliner’s engine roared, and the rending of metal intensified. The big rig was shoving debris that had been my Toyota backward. I didn’t know how fast my jury-rigged tank was filling, and if I misjudged, it wouldn’t matter. I grabbed up my Glock and the burp gun and darted to the door I had kicked shut.

I had jammed it hopelessly.

I began to put rounds through the wall, emptying my Glock in a pattern that covered a fourth of an oval the size of a manhole cover. When I’d used that up I continued with the Ingram until it was empty. The oval wasn’t complete. That’s when I went slightly berserk.

I kicked, screamed, cursed and pounded, and the oval of insulated wall panel began to disintegrate along the dotted line. With insulation flying around me, the Freightliner grinding its way toward the boulevard in a paroxysm of screaming metal, I saw the oval begin to fail. I could claim it wasn’t hysteria that made me intensify my assault, but my very existence had focused down to shredding that panel. When it bent outward, still connected at the bottom like the lid of a huge tin can, I hurled myself into the hole.

For an endless moment I was caught halfway through, my head and shoulders in bright sunlight, an immovable target for anyone within sight. But I was on the opposite side of the shed from the big rig, and when the wall panel failed I found myself on hands and knees, free but without a weapon.

Twenty feet away stood a huge inverted cone on steel supports, and beyond that a forest of braces and piping. As I staggered away behind the pipes one of Norm-Daud’s helpers saw me and cut loose in my direction, ricochets flying like hornets. Meanwhile the Freightliner moved inexorably toward the open gate, the Toyota’s wreckage shoved aside, the massive trailer trundling its cargo of megadeath along with less than a half mile to go. I hadn’t so much as a stone left to hurl at it.

But I didn’t need one. Funny thing about a concussion wave: when that fifty-foot pipe detonated alongside the trailer, I didn’t actually hear it. Protected by all that thicket of metal, I felt a numbing sensation of pressure, seemingly from all directions. My next sensation was of lying on my side in a fetal curl, a thin whistling in my head. Beyond that I couldn’t hear a thing.

I must have been unconscious for less than half a minute because unidentifiable bits of stuff lay here and there around me, some of it smoking. The trailer leaned drunkenly toward the side where my bomb had exploded, every tire on that side shredded, and gouts of liquid poured out of its cargo tanks from half a hundred punctures. Still addled by concussion, I steadied my progress out of the metal forest by leaning on pipes and supports. I figured that if anyone on the truck had survived, I’d hear him. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that I was virtually stone deaf for the moment.

Not until I saw the blood-smeared figure shambling like a wino around to my side of the trailer, wearing the remnant of an expensive black-leather jacket. He was weaponless. One shoe was missing. He threw his head back, arms spread, and I saw his throat work as he opened his mouth wide. Then he fell on his knees in a runnel of liquid chemical beside the trailer, and on his face was an unspeakable agony.

A better man than I might have felt a shred of pity. What I felt was elation. As I stalked nearer I could see a headless body slumped at the window of the shrapnel-peppered Freightliner cab. Now, too, I could hear, though faintly as from a great distance, a man screaming. It was the man on his knees before me.

Standing three feet behind him, I shouted, “Hey!” I heard that, but apparently he didn’t. I put my foot on his back and he fell forward, then rolled to his knees again. I would have hung one on him just for good measure then, but one look at his face told me that nothing I could do would increase his suffering. Even though his bloody hair and wide-open eyes made him look like a lunatic, a kind of sanity returned in his gaze as he recognized me.

Still on his knees, he started to say something, then tried again, shouting. “What did this?”

I pointed a thumb at my breast. “Gas in a pipe. Boom,” I shouted. He looked around and saw the long shallow trench that now ran along the pavement. The entire length of the shed wall nearest the pipe rail had been cut as if by some enormous jagged saw, and of course the pipe itself was nowhere. Or rather, it was everywhere, in little chunks, evidence of a fragmentation grenade fifty feet long.

He looked up at me with the beginnings of understanding. “How?”

I could hear him a little better now. “Acetylene is an explosive all by itself,” I shouted. “Can you hear me?” He nodded. “You store it under pressure by dissolving it in acetone. Pump it into a dry tank and it doesn’t need any prompting. As soon as it gets up to fifteen or twenty pounds pressure — like I said: boom,” I finished, with gestures.

He showed his teeth and closed his eyes; tears began to flow afresh. “Primitive stuff, but you would know that,” he accused in a voice hoarse with exhaustion.

I nodded. “The new model of Islamic warrior,” I accused back, “so all you know is plastique. Ternary agent. The murder of a million innocents.”

“There are no innocents,” said the man who had been, however briefly, my friend. Why argue with a man who says such things? I just looked at him. “There are many more like me, more than there are of men like you,” he said, the words rekindling something fervid in his eyes. “The new model, you said. Wait for us. We are coming.”

My eyes stung from the tons of flammable liquid around us. When I reached out to help him up, he shook his torso, fumbling in his pockets. “Get away,” he said. “Run.”

Only when I saw that he had pulled a lighter from his pocket did I realize what he meant. I scrambled away. An instant later, the whole area was ablaze, and for all I knew the tanks on the trailer might explode. Daud-al-Sadiq, alias Norm Goldman, knelt deeply and prostrated himself in the inferno as though facing east in prayer as the flames climbed toward his warrior’s heaven.

The metro cops got to the scene before anyone else, and after that came the paramedic van. Aside from cuts on my face and arms and the fact that the whistle would remain in my head for hours, I had lucked out. I could even hear ordinary speech, though it sounded thin and lacked resonance.

Captain Hassan al-Nadwi and several of his crew weren’t so lucky in my view but, in their own view, I suppose they found the ultimate good luck. Using automatic weapons, they had tried to prevent a boarding party. One competence the Feds do have is marksmanship. No wonder the remaining crew were so hyperactive that morning; they were going to heaven, and they were going now.

Dana Martin pointed out to me after I handed over her cracked, useless Loc-8 gadget an hour later, that there had probably never been any intention on the part of the holy warriors to sail beyond the Golden Gate again. Their intent was evidently to start up their enormous doomsday machine and, if possible, set it in motion toward San Francisco’s crowded Fisherman’s Wharf. The crew would all be dead by the time the Ras Ormara grounded; dead, and attended by compliant lovelies in Islamic heaven while men, women, kids, pets, and birds in flight died by the millions around San Francisco Bay.

Dana said, “We came to that conclusion after we found that all the Korean crew members but one had reservations of one kind or another to clear out of the area,” she told me. “They knew what was coming. Once we realized how much of the major component they must have to react with all that stuff on the trailer, we knew they were using the ship itself as a tank. An external hull inspection wouldn’t pick that up.”

“You lost me,” I said.

“You know that most ships are double-hulled? Well, the Ras Ormara is triple-hulled, thanks to a rebuild by the Pakistanis. The main component of the ternary agent was brought in using the volume between the hulls as a huge cargo tank. I think Park Soon must have found the transfer pipes, and they couldn’t take a chance on him.”

“Three hulls,” I muttered. “Talk about your basic inside job. You think the entire crew knew?”

“Hard to say, but they wouldn’t have to. It doesn’t take but a few crewman to pull away from the slip. The North Koreans helped set the stage, but most of them don’t believe Allah is going to snatch them up to the highest heaven,” she said wryly.

“I don’t get it. Which one of them did,” I prompted.

“The one who was an Indonesian Moslem,” she said. “He was on the truck crew with the perp who passed himself off as Norman Goldman.”

“Then he’s a clinker over there.” I nodded across the boulevard toward the still smoking ruin. “Really keen of you people, assuring me what a great guy Norm Goldman was. Who did your background checks: Frank and Ernest?”

She didn’t want to talk about that. Journalists had a field day later, second-guessing the Feds who failed to penetrate the “legends,” the false bona fides, of men who had inserted themselves into mythical backgrounds twenty years before. And in twenty years a smart terrorist can make his legend damned near perfect.

Dana Martin preferred to concentrate on what I had done. I had already set her straight on the carnage at the chemical plant. She had it in her noggin that I had started the fire. The truth was, that’s exactly what I would have done first thing off, if I’d had the chance. I didn’t say that.

“I still don’t see exactly how you detonated your bomb,” she said. I responded, a bit tersely, by telling her I didn’t have to detonate the damned thing. Acetylene doesn’t like to be crowded in a dry tank, and when you try, a little bit of pressure makes it disassociate like TNT.

“I’m no chemist,” she said, “but that sounds like you’re, ah, prevaricating.”

“Ask a welder, if the FBI has any. If he doesn’t know, don’t let him do any gas welding. End of discussion.”

Her big beautiful eyes widened, not even remotely friendly. I knew she thought I’d been carrying some kind of incendiary device, which has been a sore point with Feds for many years, ever since the Waco screw-up. She kept looking hard at me. Well, the hell with her — and that’s what I said next.

“You’re under contract to us,” she reminded me.

“You offered to cut me loose early today,” replied. “I accepted, whether you heard me or not. Keep your effing money if you don’t believe me. Oh, don’t worry about sweeping up,” I said into her astonished frown. “I’ll testify in all this; I’ve got nothing to hide.”

And while she was still talking, I walked away from there with as much dignity as a man can muster when his clothes are in tatters and his only vehicle lies in smoking shreds.

Actually I did have something to hide: gratitude. I didn’t want to try explaining to Dana Martin how I felt about the brilliant, savage, personable, murderous Daud. I wasn’t sure I could if I tried.

There was only one reason why he would’ve made me promise to drive the miles to San Rafael for lunch: to make certain I wouldn’t be a victim of that enormous, lethal cloud of nerve gas that would be boiling up from the Ras Ormara. And while he could have grabbed my ankles when he set himself alight, he didn’t. He told me to run for it.

He would kill millions of people he had never seen, yet he felt something special for a guy who had befriended him for only a few hours. I didn’t understand that kind of thinking then, and I still don’t.

I do understand this: A man must never trust his buns to anyone, however intelligent and friendly, who believes there’s a bright future in suicide. And as long as I live, I will be haunted by what Daud said, moments before he died. There are more of us, he said. Wait for us. We are coming.

Well, I believe they’ll come, so I’m waiting. But I’m not waiting in a population center with folded hands. I’m recounting the last words of Daud al-Sadiq to everyone who’ll listen. I’m also erecting a cyclone fence around my acreage, and I’m in the process of obtaining a captive breeding permit. That’s the prerequisite for a guard animal no dog can ever match.

About the Author

DEAN ING has been an interceptor crew chief, construction worker on high Sierra dams, solid-rocket designer, builder-driver of sports racers — his prototype Magnum was a Road & Track feature — and after a doctorate from the University of Oregon, a professor. For years, as one of the cadre of survival writers, he built and tested backpack hardware on Sierra solos. His technothriller, The Ransom of Black Stealth One, was a New York Times best-seller, and he has been finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo awards. His more humorous works have been characterized as “fast, furious, and funny.” Slower and heavier now with two hip replacements and titanium abutments in his jaw, he pursues his hobbies, which include testing models of his fictional vehicles, fly fishing, ergonomic design, and container gardening. His daughters comprise a minister, a longhorn rancher, an Alaskan tour guide, and an architect. He and his wife, Gina, a fund-raiser for the Eugene Symphony, live in Oregon, where he is currently building a mountainside library/shop.

Harve Rackham and Dana Martin have appeared in two previous novellas, “Pulling Through” from the collection of the same name, and “Vital Signs” which appeared in the science fiction series Destinies.