Devil's Gate

42

Singapore, Malaysia, June 30

TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER being freed from the NSA’s clutches, Kurt and Joe landed in Singapore. They’d boarded a flight at Dulles, gladly paid through the nose for first-class tickets, and literally flew to the other side of the world.

A trip to the hotel to unpack and a call to an old friend who’d helped him years back had left Kurt with nothing to do but get some sleep. As it turned out, he was too damn tired to make it off the couch and fell asleep right there.

His two-hour nap ended when the phone rang in the darkness.

Startled awake as if he’d been jabbed with a cattle prod, Kurt lunged for the phone. He grabbed it as he tumbled off the couch, picking up the receiver just in time to prevent it from going to the message system.

“The White Rajah,” a voice he didn’t recognize said.

“What?” Kurt asked.

“You are Kurt Austin?”

“Yes.”

“I was told to call you,” the voice said. “And to explain where you will find what you’re looking for. The White Rajah.”

“Wait,” Kurt said. “What is the—”

The phone line went dead, and a dial tone soon followed. Kurt placed the receiver back on the cradle and leaned against the front of the couch.

“Where am I?” he mumbled to himself.

He remembered flying, changing planes at LAX, and then part of the next flight. He remembered checking in at the hotel. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Singapore.”

He looked around. The room was utterly dark except for a clock radio between the beds opposite him. The clock read 7:17 p.m. It felt like three in the morning.

Kurt stood awkwardly and pounded on the door to the adjoining room.

“Get up,” he grumbled to Joe. “Time to go to work.”

The door opened seconds later. Joe stood there, clean-shaven, hair gelled, wearing an Armani shirt and white linen slacks.

Kurt stared at him dumbfounded. “Don’t you sleep?”

“The night calls me,” Joe said, smiling. “Who am I to refuse?”

“Yeah, well, somebody else called me,” Kurt said. “So while I shower, you find out what on earth the White Rajah is. I’m guessing it’s a hotel or a bar or a street.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

Kurt nodded. “Someone’s going to meet us there,” he said.

“Who?”

“That’s the thing,” Kurt said. “I don’t have any idea.”

FORTY MINUTES LATER, looking refreshed and like a more conservative version of Joe, Kurt Austin marched into the friendly confines of the White Rajah, a restaurant and bar that had once been an old English gentlemen’s club in the Victorian era, when the English had a substantial influence on the island of Malaysia.

Kurt wandered through several large rooms with exquisitely carved mahogany paneling, hand-blown glass-block skylights, and overstuffed leather chairs and couches that looked as if Churchill himself might have once sat on them.

Instead of bridge tournaments between retired members of the British East India Company and captains of industry smoking pipes and thick cigars, he saw the young and wealthy of Singapore dining on oysters and knocking back expensive drinks.

An informal count registered the crowd to be mixed about fifty-fifty: half were Western expatriates and the rest local citizens or visiting Asian businessmen.

Circling back around to the front of the house, Kurt took a seat at the main bar, which appeared to be made from a thin sheet of alabaster lit from below. It looked almost like glowing amber.

“Can I get you something?” a bartender quickly asked.

Joe smiled. Kurt knew he’d been to Singapore before. “I’ll have a Tiger,” he said.

“Perfect choice,” the bartender said, then turned to Kurt. “And you, sir?”

Kurt was still looking around, scanning for someone, anyone he might recognize, including the contact he’d phoned upon landing. No one looked familiar.

“Sir?”

“Coffee,” Kurt said. “Black.”

The man nodded and hustled off.

“Coffee,” Joe said, apparently surprised at Kurt’s choice of beverage. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

Above them blue light flickered through the glass blocks of the skylight; either heat lightning in the distance or an approaching thunderstorm.

“I don’t even know what day it is,” Kurt said. “I barely know what planet we’re on.”

Joe laughed. “Well, don’t blame me if you’re up all night.”

“Somehow,” Kurt said, “I have a feeling I’m going to be.”

Kurt looked at the wall behind the bar. A six-foot canvas displaying a strapping Englishman in colonial garb stood front and center.

“Sir James Brooke,” Kurt said, reading the inscription on the brass plate at the bottom.

The bartender returned with their drinks and seemed to notice the focus of their attention. “The White Rajah,” he said.

“Really?”

“He put down a rebellion against the Sultan of Brunei in 1841 and was granted the title Rajah of Sarawak. He and his family ruled a small empire in what we now call Kuching for about a hundred years, until the Japanese invaded in 1941.”

“But Sarawak is across the strait,” Kurt said, knowing Sarawak and Kuching were on the neighboring island of Borneo.

“Yes,” the bartender said. “But when the war ended, the family gave the territory back to the British Empire. The club here was renamed in his honor.”

As the bartender shuffled off, Kurt took a sip of the rich, bold coffee, another step on the road to feeling like himself again.

Joe looked over at him. “So what are we doing in Singapore?” he asked. “Aside from getting a history lesson?”

Kurt began to explain. “Twelve years ago I did a salvage job down here,” he said. “One of my last jobs for the company before joining NUMA.”

Joe cocked his head. “Never heard this story.”

“It’s probably still classified,” Kurt said. “But since it matters now, I’ll give you the gist of it.”

Joe pulled his chair closer and glanced around as if looking for spies. Kurt laughed a bit.

“An E-6B Prowler got into trouble and went down in the South China Sea,” he said. “It was a prototype. There was all kinds of equipment on it that we didn’t want the other side finding, and the other side included China, Russia, and North Korea.”

“Still does, for the most part,” Joe said.

Kurt nodded. “The pilot was using a new side-scan radar and running right along the edge of Chinese airspace. We had reason to believe he’d gone off course and crossed over the line.”

“Ah,” Joe said. “I can see why that would be a problem.”

“You know the rules of salvage,” Kurt said. “In the open ocean it’s finders, keepers, but if that plane was even one foot inside Chinese territorial waters and they found out about it they’d park half their fleet on top of it and shoot at anyone who came within ten miles. Even if it wasn’t, we knew they’d be after it.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Chance of a lifetime.”

“Exactly,” Kurt said. “So we concocted a story that we’d rescued the pilot and recovered the wreckage. Even faked video of him being pulled out of the sea and wing sections being hauled aboard a tender. In the meantime, my team and I rounded up a group of locals who could look for the wreck and salvage it without raising any suspicions from the Chinese.

“The guy who helped set it up was a CIA contact known as Mr. Ion. This guy is a half American, half Malaysian operator. He knew everybody and how to get pretty much anything. Still does, from what I hear. But he works the middle ground. You can usually trust him to do what he says and keep it quiet, but you can’t count on him not working for the other guys once you’re gone.

“Anyway, he helped us build the team, including a guy who was with us from Day One. Andras.”

“Was he a problem?” Joe asked, tipping back the beer.

“Not until the very end,” Kurt said. “He even sniffed out a traitor who was connected with the Chinese secret service. But after we set up the lifting rig and got ready to make our move, we caught some bad weather. Three days of sitting made me nervous. Too close to the finish line to pause like that. I decided we would lift the Prowler despite the weather. I rounded up the team, but Andras was nowhere to be found.”

“What happened?”

Kurt took a slug of the coffee. “We got out to the site, and the aircraft was gone. Word was, Andras had been bought out by the Russians. They were just starting to fall in love with capitalism, and one of the things they were selling like hotcakes was MiGs. With the avionics and technology in the Prowler, they could have leapt forward a generation overnight.”

“So that guy was a snake even back then,” Joe said.

Kurt nodded.

“What’d you do?”

“On my first dive to the sunken jet, I’d rigged up fifty pounds of charges. My orders were to blow the plane up if we couldn’t lift it or if we pulled it off the bottom and got caught by the Chinese. The explosives were still on the plane, and they were armed and just waiting for a signal. I uplinked to the satellite and triggered them. Somewhere over Kamchatka a Russian jet exploded. Poor souls flying it probably had no idea what their cargo was.”

Joe shook his head softly. “Rough business.”

“Yeah,” Kurt said, feeling a tinge of remorse for the poor flight crew even after all this time. “So is this. And this time when someone suffers, I’m going make sure it’s Andras.”

Joe looked around. “I’m with you. You think we’re going to find him here?”

“Not him,” Kurt said. “But someone who knows how to find him.”

Kurt picked up the coffee and took another sip.

The way he saw it, Andras had beat him twice. No doubt the man had been paid when he handed the E-6B Prowler over to the Russians. The explosion was their problem. And if history was any guide, he was probably already counting the cash for delivering the kidnapped scientists to whoever they were given to. Then again…

Kurt looked up at the oil painting of the White Rajah. He remembered Andras insisting he’d be a king when this was all over. He wondered what the man was up to.

Kurt finished the coffee and motioned for another. As the bartender refilled his mug, Kurt turned around to check the room.

He assumed whoever had called him would be able to find him and then some kind of deal for the exchange of information would be crafted. But, so far, no one had approached, no note had been passed, no waiter or bartender had suggested another party was waiting to see them.

All around, the patrons dined, glasses clinked, and the occasional flash of blue lightning lit up the skylight above, but nothing out of the ordinary happened.

It was odd. At times in his past, Kurt had felt a sixth sense telling him he was under surveillance. He didn’t even feel that here. It was more like they’d been shunted off to a siding and left there to rot, like a railcar rusting to pieces in waist-high weeds.

He began to wonder if he’d been fed bad information.

And then the double doors across from him opened and a trio of men came in. Two hulking bodyguards. With dark-tanned faces and square jaws, they looked more Samoan than Malaysian.

In front of them was a smaller man, mostly American-looking with some Malaysian features. He had soft eyes, relatively smooth skin. Short dark hair spiked with gel stood atop his large round head, one that seemed way too big for his narrow-framed body. The slightest touch of gray could be seen at his temples.

From his clothes and casual manner he might have been able to pull off mid-to late thirties, but Kurt knew him to be older, pushing late forties by now.

“Ion,” Kurt said, standing.

The man turned upon hearing his voice. He focused on Kurt from a spot between his two bodyguards. Recognition took a few seconds, and then a smile washed over Ion’s face.

The smile was false and forced, and it vanished almost as quickly as it had come. A sign that could mean only one thing: trouble.