Forever and a Death

1

Kim had never felt so alone, or so vulnerable. The late morning sun was hot, the day was beautiful, Brisbane reared up all around her like a glass version of the city of Oz, but alone here on this launch on the Brisbane River, tied up to a support at the southern end of the William Jolly Bridge, still she felt cold, with an interior cold the warm sun and the inviting city couldn’t reach.

She was alone in the world. Would George Manville come back? He had saved her life, out there on that ship, he had carried her here, and he had promised he would come back, but would he? Wasn’t it time for him to start taking care of his own life? Hadn’t he made it clear that from here on she was only a burden, an added difficulty when he had his own safety and his own future to worry about?

There had been no conversation at all at first. The nighttime journey in from the Mallory had been slow and bumpy, and had taken all of Manville’s concentration. Not that it had been hard to find the way; Brisbane was a bright pink dome of light against the blackness, just ahead of them to the west. But they were running without lights, in case Curtis’s killers decided to pursue them in one of the Mallory’s launches, and there was no telling what might be anchored or floating in the darkness out ahead. They didn’t want to foul their propellers with some fisherman’s cast-off net or somebody’s lost rope.

This launch was larger and more elaborate than the ones belonging to the ship. It had a proper cabin, with a galley and two proper bunks, one above the other, and Kim spent most of the night on the lower bunk, to ease the soreness as they jolted their way across the bay. Manville had to stay up at the wheel, so there was no conversation between them until, in early morning, she at last climbed out to look at the nearby city sparkling in the fresh sunlight and say, “What do we do first?”

“Hide,” he said, “while I try to find somebody who can help.”

Surprised, she said, “Hide? Aren’t we going to the police?”

“To say what?”

“But— They tried to kill us!”

“Who did? Kim, Captain Zhang isn’t going to back up anything we say, and why should he? And without him, who are we? A disgruntled ex-employee and an environment nut. You don’t even have ID, or a passport, or a visa for this country. What are you going to tell the police, and how are you going to prove it? You can’t even prove who you are.”

“But— They can’t, they can’t just do things like that, and get away with it!”

“Of course they can.”

Morning water traffic was coming out of the wide river mouth now, past the harbor cranes and warehouses and fuel storage tanks; commercial fishermen, barges, private sailboats, excursion boats to take the tourists to see the birdlife on St. Helena Island in the bay. Heading inbound against most of that traffic, Manville had to keep his attention on his steering, while Kim sat on the white vinyl-covered bench behind him and watched the city come closer and the day begin, and she wondered, once they got ashore, what they could possibly do.

The Brisbane River, as twisty as a discarded piece of string, meandered through nine miles of switchbacks through the city, flanked by new glass skyscrapers stacked next to colonial-era buildings of stone and brick. Kim felt she must look very strange, with her matted hair and her borrowed grubby sweater and jeans, and these rubber-tire-soled shoes, but there was so much river traffic, and so much going on ashore as well, that she soon decided nobody was paying any attention to them, and she relaxed a bit.

Several high bridges crossed the river, connecting the two halves of the city. Manville passed a number of them, then said, “Isn’t that a railroad station?”

It was, over there to the left. Just visible beyond some sort of park or fairgrounds. She said, “You want to take a train somewhere?”

“No. But they’ll have phones and phone books, and an ATM, and probably whatever else I need. Curtis knows by now that we got away, and I don’t know exactly what he’ll do, but he’ll certainly try to find us and at the same time he’s sure to try to make us look like criminals or crazies or something, just to protect himself. You might be able to get out from under, with that Planetwatch group to help you, but he could pretty well put a stop to my making a living anywhere in the world.”

“Oh, my God! I hadn’t even thought.”

“I can’t waste a lot of time,” he said. “I’ve got to get hold of some friends, start fighting back. There; we’ll stop there.”

It was a bridge. Just beyond the next curve in the river, the William Jolly, at a quieter place than that fairground back there. Manville cautiously steered them in toward the shallower water, tied the launch to a stanchion where he could get ashore and up to the roadway, and said, “You’ll be all right here for a while. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

“Okay.”

“If the river police come by, tell them your boyfriend went for beer.”

She smiled at that, and shook her head. “I’ll tell them you went for sunblock. Because that I could use.”

“I’ll bring some,” he promised, and said, “See you soon,” and left her there.

For how long? It seemed like hours. The sun was much higher in the clear sky, the humidity was moving from soft toward oppressive, and the constant river traffic kept the little launch bobbing at its tether. George Manville must have realized by now that he was much better off from here on doing things on his own. He’d even said that she’d be all right, better off than him, because she had Planetwatch to look out for her, and that he didn’t have any time to waste. So this would be the easiest way to get rid of her, wouldn’t it? He’d done the right thing up till now, he’d done wonderful things, rescuing her, saving her from being murdered, facing down those thugs. He even shot one of them, as startling to Kim as it was to the men who’d grabbed her. But now he was finished, she was safe, and he had his own life to worry about. So why would he come back?

So he isn’t coming back, she decided at last, and was depressed but not surprised at the idea. And now the question was, what should she do on her own? She had no money, no identification, knew nobody in Australia, and had probably been declared dead by the people of Planetwatch. She had a story no one would believe, and no other story to put in its place because it was true.

Should she try running the boat somewhere, farther inland? Should she leave the boat and walk to that railroad station and try to find a policeman to surrender to? That was probably best, though she couldn’t help a strong reluctance to leave the known world of this launch for the unknown world ashore.

Still, it was the thing to do, and she knew it, and she actually had one leg over the side of the boat when she looked up and saw him, coming down toward her from the bridge approach. Manville, solid and serious, arms loaded down with supplies, concentrating on his movements.

She felt such relief at the sight of him that she made a surprised cry, a “Hah!” that made him look up and call, “Wait. I’ll be right there.”

She stepped back aboard, and watched him come down. When she’d believed he wasn’t coming back, she’d done her best to hide from herself how deep was the disappointment she felt, but now she let it all come to the surface, how much she needed him right now, how frightened she was of being alone, in this place, at this time.

He clambered onto the boat, put down the bags he was carrying, and took a tube from his pocket. “Sunblock. Better put it on while we talk.”

“Oh, yes, thank you.” She took the tube and started spreading the white lotion on her forehead and nose and the back of her neck.

He said, “I’ve tried calling friends in San Francisco and in Houston, left messages for them both, I want to find out what’s going on with Curtis. But for now, what we should do is leave this boat right here, and take off.”

“Where?”

“The Gold Coast,” he told her. “Just south of the city, it’s the Australian version of Miami Beach, full of tourists. Very crowded. Nobody will find us there.” He lifted a shopping bag, held it out in her direction. “And you’d probably like a change of clothes,” he said.

2

Richard Curtis was supposed to be in Singapore right now. He was not supposed to be in this suite atop the Heritage, with its views out over the gaudy Botanic Gardens and Town Reach of the river, a fine hotel, a fine view, everything perfectly fine, except that Richard Curtis was not supposed to be here now, and the fact that it had become necessary was making him furious.

Morgan Pallifer was as furious as Curtis, and embarrassed and ashamed as well, which made him pace the sitting room like a wolf, punching his knuckles together, staring out past the terrace at the river as though magically he would see George Manville and the girl out there. He’d gone out last night with three men to do what should have been a simple task, getting rid of an already-injured girl and an engineer, and he’d come back with two men dead and the job not done. “He isn’t what you said he is,” he insisted, so angry and discomfited he was even daring to take out his feelings on Curtis.

All right. Curtis would permit that, just this once, for a little while. He understood and sympathized, up to a point. Pallifer had always been reliable and discreet, a good man for bad work, and Curtis could cut him a little slack. “Manville always used to be who I said he was,” he answered. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe he has some kind of Green Beret background I don’t know anything about.”

“I think your Chink captain told him we were coming,” Pallifer said.

“I don’t much care, one way or another,” Curtis said, and shrugged. “It’s over, and the only question is, what next.”

He had still been up north in Townsville when Pallifer made that second call last night, being so damn circumspect over the telephone that Curtis finally realized he was going to have to fly down to Brisbane and meet the man face to face this morning just to find out what in hell had gone wrong, even though he was supposed to fly to Singapore today, the three thousand miles over the land mass of Australia and the thousand islands of Indonesia to his new home at the tip of Malaysia. He had business there, other details of his construction deals around the world, but clearly it would have to wait.

Coming down here, he hadn’t believed it possible that both Manville and the girl could have escaped from Pallifer, both still be alive. He’d thought something had screwed up involving the crew of the Mallory, or maybe one of Pallifer’s team had turned out to be untrustworthy.

But, no. It was Manville, and he’d got clean away, and killed two of Pallifer’s people en passant.

Would Manville and the girl have come on to Brisbane? Yes. Manville wouldn’t want to keep her jouncing around on the water any longer than necessary, so they would certainly have come here, probably arriving an hour or two ago.

And then what? Do they go straight to the authorities? What do they say, and how much can they prove? And is there a way to head them off?

Possibly. Pallifer had been waiting here in the suite, pacing and raging, when Curtis had arrived. He’d told his story, in gruff monosyllables, and even before he was finished Curtis was making his first phone call, to Geneva. Nine hours earlier there, or fifteen hours later; in any case, around midnight. Bendix was not an early riser, Curtis knew. He left a message with Bendix’s secretary at the estate, then listened to the rest of Pallifer’s story, and now he was simply waiting.

Robert Bendix was a competitor of Curtis’s, in construction and finance. At their level, being competitors meant they were mostly partners, rarely fighting for an entire pie, usually content to share slices of the very large pies that came their way. Bendix was not one of the people he’d approached about the Kanowit Island deal, because Bendix was far too shrewd, far too skeptical; he’d have seen through Curtis’s Ponzi scheme in a minute. But there were other ways in which Robert Bendix could be of use to Curtis, just as, once or twice, Curtis had been of use to Bendix.

Now there was nothing to do but wait for Bendix to return the call, and in the meantime see if there was any way that Pallifer could still be useful, could make up for last night’s failure, God knows the man was willing. Glaring out the glass doors of the terrace, showing his teeth, Pallifer said, “They’re around here somewhere. The girl’s as weak as a kitten, they won’t travel a lot.”

“How would you find them?”

Pallifer said, “If they go to the law, the law’s gonna come to you, and that puts me on their tail. In a big city like this, automobile accidents happen all the time.”

“What if Manville doesn’t go to the law? He doesn’t have a very good hand to play with them right now, no proof, no witnesses. What if he’s smart enough to hide out for a while, until he and the girl can go somewhere else?”

Pallifer nodded, considering that. “You say the girl came off another ship. No documents on her?”

“Identification? None. No passport, no driver’s license, nothing.”

“If I was them,” Pallifer said, “and I didn’t want to bother with the law just yet, I’d hole up in one of the tourist sections around here, up or down the coast.”

“And how would you find them?” Curtis asked. “Drive up and down the beach?”

“Well, he has to pay his way, doesn’t he?” Pallifer said. “He’ll use credit cards, won’t he?” Pallifer turned his head to look at Curtis, and he was almost smiling. He said, “How hard is it to get a look at a man’s credit card history?”

“Not hard,” Curtis said, “if you want to wait two weeks or a month, to find out where they used to be.”

“He’s an American,” Pallifer pointed out. “Lots of tourists around here, but damn few of them American. He’s got to use his own name, because that’s what’s on the card. The transactions go through one of the banks here in Brisbane, don’t they?”

“I’m not sure how that works,” Curtis said, “but I have people who know. We’re looking for an American credit card being used somewhere around here today.”

“When I find ’em,” Pallifer said, “is it the same as before?”

“The girl should disappear,” Curtis told him. “No body, no questions, she doesn’t get to tell anything to Diedrich. If you can hold onto Manville, do, and let me know. He’s the engineer, he could still be valuable.”

“He could be trouble,” Pallifer said, and the phone rang.

“If he’s trouble, of course, you kill him.” Curtis picked up the phone: “Curtis.”

“Richard. It’s Robert here.” Bendix, though American, had been living in Switzerland for so long, avoiding U.S. Federal tax indictments, that he was beginning to develop a faint German accent.

Curtis said, “Robert, I have to admit I’m a little disappointed in you.”

Surprised, Bendix said, “What? Have I done something?”

“I have an engineer that works for me,” Curtis told him, “a brilliant man, George Manville.”

“I’ve heard the name.”

“Of course you have. I just now learned that he’s been betraying me.”

“I’m shocked to hear that,” Bendix said, sounding calm.

“He offered several of my business secrets for sale,” Curtis said. “Bids on projects, sourcings of materiel, things like that.”

“These grubby little people,” Bendix said. “Tsk, tsk.” He said it that way: tsk, tsk.

“He offered this information to you,” Curtis said.

“Why, the swine,” Bendix said. “I hope I threw him out on his ear.”

“I’m afraid,” Curtis said, “you gave him a hearing. I believe you even looked at some of the documents he’d stolen from me.”

“Perhaps I was drunk.”

“I’m here in Brisbane now,” Curtis went on, “where I just discovered this thievery, and I’m sorry, Robert, but I have no choice but to go to the police.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Bendix assured him. “Unfortunate, of course, but I quite see where you have no alternative.”

“None. It will probably mean, as well, that I’ll be forced to say some unpleasant things about you in the press.”

“Speaking of swine,” Bendix said. “Well, I’ve been spoken of unkindly before.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“Now, you know, Richard,” Bendix said, “I’m certainly not going to admit to having encouraged this fellow.”

“No, of course not.”

“However,” Bendix said, “I suppose I could manage not to deny it very forcefully either. I’m rather good, in fact, at being coy.”

Curtis laughed. “I’m sure you are. I’d like to watch some time.”

“Never. How’s Brisbane?”

“Warm. How’s Geneva?”

“Cold. Nice talking to you.”

“And you, Robert.” Curtis broke the connection, then dialed the hotel operator: “Police headquarters, please.”

3

Luther walked into their cabin and Jerry was still seated there, crosslegged on his bunk, gazing moodily at nothing at all.

“We’re there, Jerry,” he said. “Come outside and watch.”

Jerry came back from far away, and gave Luther a bleak look. Sighing, he said, “I’m dreading this, Luther.”

“The parents, you mean.”

“Of course the parents.”

“Well,” Luther said, “brooding in here isn’t going to get it over with any faster. Come out on deck, look at the world.”

“The world,” Jerry said, as though repelled by the idea, but he did obediently get up from his bunk and follow Luther out of the cabin. The two went single file down the narrow corridor and up the ladder to the foredeck.

Planetwatch III had already rounded South Head and was well into the harbor waters called Port Jackson, surrounded by the hugely sprawling city of Sydney. Ahead soared the perfect arch of Sydney Harbour Bridge, uniting the two halves of the city, while just this side of it and to its left sat poised the Opera House, that great gleaming white bird with folded wings.

Usually Jerry both enjoyed this view and was appalled by it, the great spread of massive buildings up the hillslopes from gleaming beaches both beautiful in themselves and horrible in their implications of massive environmental damage. He could dwell endlessly on the contradictions as their little ship steamed slowly westward into the harbor.

But not today. Today, Jerry saw nothing, because out there in front of him, somewhere in all that muscular teeming space, were Kim Baldur’s mother and father.

Of course they’d been told, as soon as possible. Two days ago Kim had gone over the side and disappeared, most certainly dead. As soon as Planetwatch III had gotten out of range of those deadly waves, Jerry had radioed to the Planetwatch office here in Sydney to report what had happened, and they in turn had notified the main Planetwatch headquarters in Seattle, who had informed Mr. and Mrs. Baldur in Chicago. Who had immediately flown here, and had been waiting for the slow-moving Planetwatch III since last night.

It was Jerry’s responsibility. It was his responsibility that Kim had done that rash thing, that foolish thing, thinking he would want her to do it, and so it was his responsibility to face the parents, answer their questions, accept whatever blame they wanted to put on him.

Today. Now. In that city, closing around him as the ship turned to port to enter Woolloomooloo Bay, closing around him like the gleaming white teeth in the jaws of the world’s most massive shark.

Planetwatch maintained a storefront office on George Street in The Rocks, a lesser tourist and shopping area overlooking Sydney Cove. Amid the restraint of the restored 19th-century buildings of the neighborhood, Planetwatch’s shop window of color photographs of ecological horrors blown up to gargantuan scale struck a strident note that only Planetwatch’s supporters couldn’t see.

It was in the conference room behind the store area that Jerry and Captain Cousseran, along with three local Planetwatch volunteers, met the parents, all of them seated on the uncomfortable green vinyl chairs around the free-form cream-colored Formica coffee table under the fluorescent ceiling lights, in the conversation area away from the main long rectangular conference table. Michael Baldur was a large man in his mid-fifties, with large jowls and black-framed eyeglasses and thinning gray hair; he was dressed in the same discreetly expensive dark blue pinstripe suit and white shirt and dark figured tie he would wear to his executive’s office in a large merchant bank in Chicago’s Loop. Kristin Baldur was a tiny woman who tried not to look as though she were in her late forties. Her medium-length ash blonde hair was carefully informal, her makeup insistently discreet, her Hermès scarf casually but perfectly draped over her padded shoulders. She had clearly been a beauty in her youth, of a delicate and more powerful sort than her healthily attractive daughter.

After awkward introductions, after a general refusal of an offer of coffee from one of the volunteers, after an uncomfortable pause, Jerry blurted out, “I want you to know, I feel horrible.”

They looked at him mildly, as though they didn’t know it was his fault, as though they thought he were just being conventionally sympathetic. Kristin Baldur even managed a polite smile as she said, “It must have been a terrible shock for you. All of you, on the ship.”

“It was,” Captain Cousseran said.

“We’ve been told,” Michael Baldur said, “she was volunteering in some way. I don’t entirely understand it.”

Jerry closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. This was the moment. Opening his eyes, he said, “She did it because she thought I wanted her to.”

Now they looked at him more closely. The father said. “Did you want her to?”

“No!”

Captain Cousseran, in the chair to Jerry’s right, said, “There was no warning. She told no one, asked no questions, merely leaped into the sea.”

Jerry wasn’t about to let himself be let off the hook that easily. Turning to the captain, he said, “But she heard me say there had to be a fail-safe. You know she did. She heard me say it was going to be safe, that’s why she went ahead.”

Captain Cousseran could be stubborn when he wanted. Shaking his head, setting his jaw, he said, “She went without warning, without discussion.”

Michael Baldur said, “My daughter was an impulsive girl, I know that.”

“But she wouldn’t have gone,” Jerry insisted, “if she hadn’t listened to me.”

Kristin Baldur smiled sadly at Jerry, and said, “Kim didn’t really listen to you, Mr. Diedrich. She would always jump first, and think about it afterwards. I don’t think she ever really understood the idea of personal danger. I was always afraid that, some time...”

Michael Baldur reached over to grip his wife’s forearm. Her smile had become fixed, her large eyes brighter.

Captain Cousseran broke through the moment, saying, “My regret is that we were unable to look for her ourselves. There was no question, of course. Still, it should have been our job to look for her and, if possible, find her.”

Michael Baldur said, “That’s something else I don’t entirely understand. Why didn’t you stay to help search?”

“We were trespassing,” Captain Cousseran told him. “We had been ordered away, and we had no choice but to obey. The other ship lowered two launches to study the island after the explosions, and to look for the — for your daughter. Captain Zhang assured me they would search for her, and I’m sure he did.”

“He wasn’t much help, I must say that,” Kristin Baldur commented.

Captain Cousseran, with obvious professional courtesy toward another mariner, said, “I’m sure he and his crew did everything they could.”

“No,” she said, “I mean when we talked to him.”

Jerry said, “When you talked to him?”

Michael Baldur explained, “The Mallory came into Brisbane early this morning. We flew up there to speak with the captain.”

“As much as we could,” his wife said. “He has practically no English at all. We could barely understand a word he said, and I’m not sure he ever grasped what we were trying to say.”

Jerry said, “But—” then left the thought unexpressed, bewildered by it. His memory of Captain Zhang’s voice on the loud-hailer was still all too clear: “I am asked to inform you...”

Why had Captain Zhang pretended not to understand or speak English? Had he been embarrassed in the presence of Kim’s parents, made uncomfortable by their grief? (Though in fact they were being very restrained, all in all.) Had it actually not been Captain Zhang who’d talked to them by radio from the Mallory, but some other crewman, or somebody connected to Richard Curtis? Or did Captain Zhang have something to hide, and that’s why he’d evaded the Baldurs? But what could he have to hide?

Before Jerry could respond, Captain Cousseran did, saying, “I never had trouble with Captain Zhang’s English, on the radio.”

“Well,” Kristin Baldur said, “if you can communicate with him, that’s wonderful. There are questions... well, we just wanted to know, know what happened, what it was like, and... even what the search was like. Captain Cousseran, if you and Captain Zhang can speak together, and understand each other, would you ask him that? How much did they look for Kim? How long did they spend on it? What made them give up when they did?”

Maybe Captain Cousseran had belatedly realized, like Jerry, that there must be something odd going on here, with Captain Zhang suddenly bereft of English. He looked uncomfortable as he said, “I’m not sure how to get in touch with him, I have no idea where Mallory is by now, or where it’s going.”

“It’s in Brisbane,” Michael Baldur said. “It will stay there at least two weeks.”

Captain Cousseran didn’t look happy at that news. He said, “Are you certain? The owner can call for the ship at any—”

“Not now,” Michael Baldur told him. “It lost one of its launches on the way back. Apparently, some crewman did a very poor job when it was hauled back aboard after the search, and in the night it dropped off and was lost.”

Captain Cousseran frowned. “That’s very unlikely,” he said.

“But that’s what happened,” Michael Baldur said. “That’s what we were told in Brisbane. What with one thing and another. Captain, I must say I got the impression that’s a very sloppily run ship. In any event, the harbormaster in Brisbane won’t give the Mallory permission to sail until it has all its lifeboats, and it will be two weeks before they can replace that one and adapt it to the ship.”

Jerry said, “I’ll talk to him.”

They all looked at him in surprise. Michael Baldur said, “Talk to who? Captain Zhang?”

There’s something wrong here, Jerry thought. I have no idea what it is, and I don’t dare even to think it might mean that somehow Kim is still alive, it almost certainly doesn’t mean that at all, but something is definitely wrong. Captain Zhang loses his command of English. The Mallory loses one of its launches. There’s something wrong.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll leave in the morning, go up to Brisbane, talk with Captain Zhang.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” Kristin Baldur told him, as though to say she thought he’d need it.

4

On the drive south out of Brisbane on Pacific Highway, Manville and Kim discussed what they should do. He hadn’t managed yet to get in touch with either of his friends, the one in San Francisco or the one in Houston. The test at Kanowit Island had been on Tuesday, this was Thursday, and he needed to reach one or both of those guys before the weekend, which meant by noon, their times, tomorrow.

The question was, what would he say to them? What position was he in now, and what position was Kim in? Richard Curtis had clearly found himself in an escalating situation beyond what he’d originally intended, but where was he now? He’d gone from the simple hope that the Planetwatch diver wouldn’t survive, so as to free himself from Planetwatch’s — Jerry Diedrich’s — intense surveyal, on to acquiescence in a kind of passive killing of the diver, on to an active scheme to murder her, on to a feeling that Manville had to be murdered as well, because of Curtis’s own indiscretion. But what was his situation now? Had the threat from Curtis receded, or was it still as strong?

The original idea, that Kim should die in order to render Diedrich harmless, was no longer workable. She was off the boat, she was known by at least a few neutral observers to be alive, the scheme could not play out. On the other hand, though Manville and Kim could report they’d been attacked by Curtis’s people, they had no way to prove it. And although they knew Curtis was up to something illegal and dangerous, they didn’t know what it was — just something involving a soliton wave, and good luck explaining that to some policeman in a Brisbane precinct house. So, at this point, did Curtis consider them a peril, or merely a nuisance, or nothing at all?

Before they showed themselves to anyone, official or otherwise, they had to know how much danger they were in. They’d been lucky to escape from that first batch of men Curtis sent after them, but they weren’t apt to be that lucky again, and Curtis could hire all the men he needed.

So once they found a safe hiding place, they both had some telephoning to do, discreetly. Manville would try again to reach either Tom in San Francisco or Gary in Houston, while Kim wanted to talk to Jerry Diedrich, to let him know what had happened and to find out if he had any idea what Curtis’s scheme might be. First, though, to hide out, in a crowd.

The little red car Manville had rented was an Australian-made British-designed Ford, with the steering wheel on the right, because Australia follows the British system of driving on the left. “I feel as though I’m driving,” Kim said at one point, in the passenger seat beside him. “I keep pressing down on the brake, and there isn’t one.”

Barely half an hour south of Brisbane, the pastel world of vacationland began. Men and women and children dressed in pink and topaz and aquamarine strolled in couples or ricocheting family groups past buildings painted in pink and topaz and aquamarine. Sunburned overweight undressed bodies were everywhere. A glittery sheen of grease and excitement vibrated in the warm humid air. Then at Coomera, the northern rim of the Gold Coast, less than forty miles south of Brisbane, the crowds grew even denser, tourist hordes packed hip to hip and camera bag to camera bag. “One thing for sure,” Manville said, “nobody will find us here.”

Expensive high-rise hotels fronted the beach along Cavill Avenue, the main drag, but a block or two back from the sea were the economy motels. While Kim waited in the car, Manville checked into one of these. The room was clean and anonymous, with one bed along each side wall, and except for the cute paintings of koala bears over the beds could have been anywhere in the world.

Kim went straight to the smaller bed, a single along the right wall. “I’m starving,” she announced, and lay on her back atop the bedspread. “I’ll just rest for a minute, and then we’ll go get something to eat.” And fell sound asleep.

“What time is it?”

Manville looked up from his paperback, to see Kim half-risen, blinking at him in the dim illumination from the bedside lamp. “Hi,” he said, and looked at his watch. “Quarter to nine.”

“Day or night?”

He had shut the blinds over the only window. “Night.”

Slowly she blinked again, absorbing that information, then looked startled and said, “My God. I’ve been asleep...”

“Almost ten hours.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“I thought you needed it.”

“I thought I needed lunch.” She sat up the rest of the way, wincing and clutching briefly at her rib cage, then said, “Now I’m really starving. Now I need lunch and dinner both.”

“Fine.”

She rubbed her eyes. “What’s that you’re reading?”

He showed her the cover. “It’s a caper story, called Payback, by an Australian writer named Gary Driver. He’s imitating the Americans, but he’s pretty good. He’s teaching me how to behave in dangerous situations.”

Grinning at him, she said, “You behave fine.”

“Thank you.” With a nod of the head toward the packages on the bed next to him, he said, “I got you some stuff. Toothbrush, toothpaste. Some more clothes. Don’t know if they’ll fit.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful.” She put her legs over the side to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Maybe you want to shower and change before we go out.”

“I would. Is that okay?”

Getting to his feet, dropping the paperback on the empty bed, he said, “I’ll just try my friend in Houston again while you shower.”

She blinked around at the room. “Oh. There’s no phone.”

“There’s one by the office.”

“You’re going to call someone at this hour?”

“Thirteen-hour time difference. It’s quarter to ten tomorrow morning in Houston, Gary should be just coming into the office this minute.”

Rising, tottering a little, she said, “When you come back, I’ll be transformed. And hungrier than ever.”

“I’ll be quick,” he promised, and left the room, and walked around to the front of the building.

The pay phone was in an alcove just inside the office door, separated from the main part of the office by a plywood partition; not a lot of privacy, but some. Manville used his phone card to make the call, and after one false try got the receptionist at Gary’s offices. “Millbrook and Tennyson.”

There was no way to tell from that what sort of firm they were, but Gary Millbrook and his partner were architectural consultants, not the designers of structures for the most part but the people brought in by large corporate clients to vet the designs of others and make corrections and improvements where needed. George had worked with the company several times over the years, and he and Gary had gradually moved from a business relationship to an easygoing friendship.

“George Manville for Mr. Millbrook.”

“One moment.”

It was about three moments, in fact, and then Gary’s familiar voice came on, saying, “If you want to know do I believe it, of course I don’t. Is there something I can do to help?”

“What?” It seemed to Manville that Gary was starting well into the conversation, reacting to Manville before Manville had told him anything.

“I don’t know how you got Richard Curtis mad,” Gary went on, “but I assume he’s playing dirty pool here.”

“Gary, Gary, back up a little. What are you talking about?”

“The Wall Street Journal, of course.”

“What about it?”

“George? Aren’t you calling about the piece in today’s Journal, that I just read maybe three minutes ago?”

“I’m in Australia,” Manville explained. “I haven’t seen the Journal.”

There was a startled pause, and when Gary spoke again his manner was subtly different: “You mean you are in Australia?”

“Yes. Why? What does the Journal say?”

“It’s a short piece deep in the paper, they don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“What does it say, Gary?”

“It says that yesterday Richard Curtis swore out a warrant against you in Brisbane, Australia—”

“A warrant!”

“—for industrial espionage. You’re described in the piece— It’s short, I could read it to you, if you want.”

“Just tell me what it says.”

“It says you’ve been working for Richard Curtis.”

“That’s true.”

“And it says you were doing things for him having to do with a new destination resort he’s building out on the Great Barrier Reef.”

“Still true.”

“And that Curtis just now found out that you tried to sell trade and business secrets to a Swiss company called Intertekno, whose principal owner is a financier named Robert Bendix.”

“I’ve never heard of Robert Bendix, or Inter whatever.”

“He claims you went to Bendix personally and showed him some documents,” Gary said. “According to the Journal piece, Bendix neither confirms nor denies, and Curtis has a warrant for your arrest on various felony charges, including theft of privileged documents belonging to him, and you have disappeared. You were last seen in Brisbane.”

“I’m still in Brisbane,” George said. “Or near it.”

“Well, that’s probably not a good career move, George. On the other hand, you really shouldn’t try to come home, or leave that country for anywhere else, because they’ll surely grab you at the airport and then you will look guilty.”

“Oh, he’s done it to me, hasn’t he?”

“Give me your number,” Gary offered, “I’ll ask around, get the name of a good lawyer for you over there.”

“I’ll have to call you back,” Manville said. “What if I call you at noon your time, would that be too soon?”

“No, fine. I should have something by then.”

“Thanks, Gary.”

“You’re in a mess, huh?”

“A rotten one.”

“Tell me about it when it’s all over.”

“I’m looking forward to the day.”

“I’m afraid you broke the old rule, George,” Gary told him. “Never fight with somebody whose pockets are deeper than yours.”

“Now you tell me,” Manville said, but he didn’t feel much like joking. “I’ll call you in two hours.”

“I’ll be here.”

Walking back to the room, wondering what he would tell Kim, Manville thought, Curtis doesn’t have to have me killed, not anymore. He doesn’t have to kill me, because he just did.

5

The pleasant pale green skirt was a wraparound, which meant it had to fit her. The blouse was loose, creamy white, scoop-necked. The panties were stretchy, and would do for now. He had wisely not tried to buy her a bra.

All in all, Kim was satisfied not only with the clothing, but with Manville himself. From time to time, when she remembered the suddenness with which he’d shot that man on the ship, she felt astonishment all over again, because he just didn’t seem like that kind at all. He was so reserved and low-key most of the time that you didn’t ever expect anything sudden from him, and certainly never anything violent.

She had gotten over both her panic and her deep exhaustion by now, and was beginning to return to her normal optimistic self. She’d removed the Ace bandage in order to shower, and though her torso felt stiff and achy without it, and there were still twinges in her rib cage if she breathed too suddenly, she felt she’d rather try to live without that wrapping from now on. The long sleep had helped, the shower had helped, the fresh clothing had helped, and the knowledge that George Manville was reliably at her side helped a lot.

She heard him come back into the room after his phone call, and shouted, “Be right out!”

“Take your time.”

“Oh, no,” she said, but not to him, to her reflection in the mirror. “I’m too hungry to take my time.”

She finished with her hair — not much she could do about it, really — then washed the underwear she’d had on for the drive and hung it on the towel rack, and went out to find him seated cross-legged on his bed, reading his paperback novel again. He put it aside, stood, looked her over, smiled tentatively, and said, “Not so bad, I guess.”

“I’ve had better compliments,” she said.

He looked flustered: “No, I meant my part. The clothes.”

“They’re great,” she assured him, and turned in a circle, arms out. “But now,” she said, “I really have to put some food in here, before there’s nothing under these clothes but skin and bone.”

“There’s some kind of diner or cafe just down the street, doesn’t look too bad. We just have to be back here in two hours, so I can make another phone call.”

“You talked to your friend?”

“I’ll tell you all about it,” he promised, “while we eat.”

The best thing you could say for the place where they had their late dinner was that it wasn’t as garishly overlit as the similar place across the street. The food was acceptable, and there was beer; Fosters, in cans. Ladies could have a styrofoam cup with their beer, on request. Kim decided not to request.

Over the various fried foods, George told her about his phone call and what Richard Curtis had done. She stared at him, appalled: “But why?”

“Destroy my credibility,” he said. “No matter what I do now, it isn’t a case of me charging Richard Curtis with something, it’s just me reacting to the charge he’s made against me.”

“What an awful man he is,” Kim said, “Jerry Diedrich was absolutely right.”

George shook his head at her. “Not absolutely right,” he said. “He was sure I was going to destroy the reef.”

That made her stop eating to consider him thoughtfully and then say, “Two days ago, you were my enemy.”

“And now?”

Suddenly, she felt awkward. “Well, you’re not my enemy,” she said. “We know that much.”

When he came back to the room from his second phone call, she was feeling very sleepy again, probably because of all the food and the two beers, but she needed to stay awake to know what was going on. And also, her ribs were hurting again.

He came in and looked a little less grim than when he’d told her about Curtis’s mad accusations back at the cafe. “There’s somebody for me to call in the morning,” he said. “A business friend of my friend’s, here in Australia.”

“What can he do?”

“No idea. Maybe nothing. I’ll find out tomorrow morning.” He stretched, like a man who’s been too stiff and cramped in a too-confined space for far too long. “Right now,” he said, “I think we both need sleep.”

She said, “I shouldn’t have left that bandage off, I’m getting very sore again. Could you help me put it on?”

She picked the soft roll of it up from her bed, and handed it to him.

“Sure.”

As he took the two snaps off the bandage, she said, “Wait, I have to—” and pulled the blouse off over her head. “Okay.”

He looked at her, and became awkward again. “I didn’t know how to buy a, I don’t know how the—”

“That’s all right.” She held her arms out from her sides, so he could wrap the bandage around her torso. When he stepped close, it was only natural to rest her hands on his shoulders. He put his arms around her to start the bandage and she lifted her face up to him, and they kissed, and that was natural, too.

When they kissed again, he’d dropped the bandage onto the floor, so he could stroke the skin of her back with both palms. She murmured, and their teeth bumped, and she held him tighter, but then he pressed her close and the sudden pain in her ribs made her gasp and pull away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I forgot.”

“No. I’m sorry,” she told him, still holding to him, not wanting to let go. “Damn these ribs! George, what can we do?”

Slowly he smiled. “Well, it’s an engineering problem, isn’t it?” he said. “And I’m an engineer.”

6

Andre Brevizin entered the offices of Coolis, Maguire, Brevizin & Chin at exactly ten-thirty Friday morning, as was his wont. He exchanged the usual greetings with Angela Brother, the firm’s excellent receptionist, strolled down the hall to his own office, paused to look out at the usual morning bustle at the corners of George and Margaret Streets one flight below, sat at his vast desk, reached for the stack of newspapers placed there as usual by Angela, and the phone rang.

He blinked. He didn’t much like such suddenness. A lawyer in a highly respectable corporate firm with offices in one of the most prestigious and attractive locations in Brisbane, Andre Brevizin preferred a certain stateliness in his life, a certain moderation and order.

He lowered a severe brow at the telephone — an internal call it was, not external — permitted it to ring a second time, and only then did he pick it up: “Angela?”

“Jimmy Coggins on the line for you.”

Ah. Jimmy Coggins was an important corporate client, a construction company man and developer partly responsible for the ever-widening suburban sprawl around the center of the city. As such, he was both to be deplored and catered to. And of course, he was calling at this exact moment because he was well aware of the comfortably precise routines of Brevizin’s days.

“I’ll take it,” he decided, and pressed the button on the phone, and said, “Well, Jimmy, you know all my habits.”

“Only the least disgusting ones,” Jimmy assured him. “I take it you haven’t read the papers yet.”

“I was just reaching for them.”

“Take a look at the business section of the Herald,” Jimmy suggested. “Page forty-two.”

The Sydney Morning Herald lay beneath the Brisbane paper on Brevizin’s desk; the usual order. He brought it out, opened it flat on his desk to the appropriate page, and said, “What am I looking for? I don’t see your name here.”

“No, thank God. We’ll save those revelations for another day. The Richard Curtis piece.”

“Where— Oh, down here.”

It was a brief piece, tawdry, under the slightly misleading headline AMERICAN SOUGHT IN BRISBANE IN SPY CHARGE. Industrial spying, it was, the usual disgruntled ex-employee. All of them Americans, though it had happened right here in town. Or been reported here. “And?”

“Manville says he didn’t do it.”

“Jimmy, they all say they didn’t do it. When your turn comes, you’ll say you didn’t do it.”

“Somebody has to be innocent, Andre.”

“You think so?”

“Manville’s a friend of a very good friend of mine,” Jimmy said. “Also an American. My friend vouches for Manville, and that’s good enough for me.”

“But not good enough for a judge, I shouldn’t think. Jimmy, are you sending me this fellow?”

“I’d like to. On the QT.”

“On the dole, as well?”

“Oh, I think he could probably pay a modest fee. He doesn’t have Richard Curtis’s money, however.”

Brevizin had heard of Richard Curtis, here and there, but had never had direct dealings with the man. He had a vague impression of ruthlessness. He said, “Jimmy, I’m not a criminal lawyer, I couldn’t very well go to court with this fellow.”

“He needs advice, Andre, he needs to know what his options are. Apparently, there’s quite a bit more to the story.”

“There always is.” Brevizin sighed. “All right, have him give me a call.”

“He will,” Jimmy said. “At eleven-thirty, after your tea.”

Brevizin laughed. “You already told him to call, and when? Jimmy, you do know me too well.”

“And later,” Jimmy said, “you’ll tell me all about it.”

Brevizin’s first impression of George Manville, when the man arrived for his two-thirty appointment that afternoon, was not encouraging. He had a scuffed and ragged look about him, the hangdog manner of the already defeated. Well; adversity can take it out of a man.

Later, he would wonder if that first impression had simply been his expectation of what the man in today’s newspaper would be, or if in fact Manville had been that close to despair. Impossible to tell.

So here he was, recommended by the far-off friend of a business acquaintance. The things we get into, Brevizin thought, and came smiling around the vast desk as Angela let the fellow in. “Mr. Manville, how are you? Did Angela offer you coffee, whatever?”

“Nothing, thanks,” Manville said, and turned to smile a bit wanly at Angela. “Thanks.”

“It was easy,” she assured him, and backed out, smiling, and shut the door.

So Angela’s taken with him, Brevizin thought. Her instincts were usually good. “Come sit over here, it’s more casual,” he said, gesturing to the conversation area, an L of soft gray sofas and a large distressed-wood coffee table.

They sat catty-corner, and Brevizin leaned forward to touch the long pencil resting on the yellow legal pad he had waiting there. “All I know about you, Mr. Manville,” he said, “is what I read in the Sydney Morning Herald.”

“I’ve made the Wall Street Journal, too,” Manville said.

“Not in the way you’d have preferred.”

“No.”

“Jimmy Coggins says you deny the charge.”

“I don’t know Mr. Coggins,” Manville said, and met Brevizin’s eye. “Talked with him once on the phone, that’s all. I appreciate what he’s done, I’m grateful. But I don’t really mean anything to Mr. Coggins, so if you decide, at some point, you don’t want any more to do with all this, it’s okay.”

Brevizin found himself surprised and somewhat interested. Normally, a fellow in George Manville’s situation would cling to whatever help or encouragement he could find. To begin the conversation by assuring Brevizin that Jimmy Coggins wouldn’t go to the wall for him was unexpected. He said, “Thank you. But let’s not part company just yet. I really should hear your story.”

“I’d appreciate it. The first thing,” Manville said, “is that the published story is one hundred percent false. Curtis made it up. I’ve never met this man Bendix, never heard of him before last night. The documents Curtis is talking about are pretty vague, I couldn’t tell from the newspaper exactly what they were, but they don’t sound like things I ever had access to.”

“You’re saying Richard Curtis has gone out of his way to tell whole-cloth lies about you.”

“Yes.”

“And that he swore false statements in having that warrant made out.”

“Yes.”

“Not a thing we’d expect from a man in his position,” Brevizin pointed out.

Manville’s smile was bleak. “Part of the problem,” he said, “is that Curtis’s position is not what everybody thinks it is. I know the truth, and I know more than that. I suppose he thought I might talk, go to the police myself, so he did this... what do they call it? Pre-emptive strike.”

“What is the truth, Mr. Manville?”

“Curtis is broke,” Manville said, “or worse than broke. Conning his business partners, going deeper into debt every minute. He over-extended when he was trying to protect his Hong Kong businesses from the Chinese, and he hasn’t been able to get back.”

Brevizin dropped the pencil onto the pad and leaned back. He would have a story for Jimmy Coggins after all. Smiling at Manville, he said, “The reason I’m beginning to believe you, Mr. Manville, I myself have heard some very vague rumors that Richard Curtis might be in some sort of financial trouble. This firm’s corporate clients include a number of builders, some private bankers, venture capital investors, people who have had or might have dealings with Curtis’s companies. People are beginning to tell one another to be careful of doing business with Richard Curtis, though nobody knows exactly what the problem is.”

“He’s his own Ponzi scheme,” Manville said. “He’s losing money every day, and he has to keep bringing more in to keep the facade going. And he knows it can’t last much longer. I didn’t know there were already rumors starting about him, but he may know.”

Brevizin said, “He told you how much trouble he was in?”

“Yes. He was trying to enlist me on his side.”

“In what?”

“I’m not sure,” Manville said, and spread his large hands, workman’s hands. “He told me he had a way out, it was illegal and dangerous, but it was going to make him a whole lot of money, and if I kept quiet my share would be ten million U.S. dollars, in gold.”

Brevizin squinted. “He said what?”

“Now you’re beginning to not believe me again,” Manville said. “Mr. Curtis told me my share could either be ten million dollars in gold or, if I’d wait a little while, the same amount in a Swiss bank account. I think I was supposed to be impressed.”

“Why were you having this conversation?”

Now Manville too sat back in the sofa, though he didn’t seem very relaxed. He said, “I’ve been working for Mr. Curtis for over a year, on a project out by the barrier reef. I’ve been developing a new technical way to deal with landfill, a cheaper way to convert land to new uses, and we just tried it, Tuesday of this week.”

“Tried it.”

“We set off measured explosions in tunnels in an island out by the reef,” Manville explained.

“That sounds risky.”

“It isn’t, really,” Manville said, “but we did have some environmental protesters, from a group called Planetwatch.”

“Oh, you touch another button,” Brevizin told him. “Planetwatch has been an irritation to more than one of my clients. Including Jimmy Coggins, come to think of it. All right, what happened?”

“A diver from their ship,” Manville told him, “a woman, went into the water just before the explosions, even though they’d all been told there was no fail-safe, no way to stop the countdown. Which was my fault, I should have taken every contingency into— Well. That doesn’t matter here.”

“She was in the water, near the island, when your explosions went off?”

“Yes.”

“And she was killed.”

“Well, no.” Manville did that bleak smile again. “Though Mr. Curtis would have preferred it. For a while, we all thought she was dead, but she survived. And then Curtis wanted to kill her, as though the explosion — or the shock wave, really — had done it, in order to get Planetwatch off his back.”

Brevizin said, “Mr. Manville? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. It was because I didn’t want him to do it that he told me what his situation was, and offered me the ten million dollars.”

“If you’d kill the girl?”

“No, simply if I’d step aside.”

Brevizin looked over at the window, then back at Manville. “You’re saying he’s that desperate.”

“I think anybody would be,” Manville said, “in his situation. There’s a fellow with Planetwatch named Jerry Diedrich...” He paused and looked at Brevizin.

Who shook his head. “Don’t know the name.”

“Well, for some reason, he has a personal vendetta against Richard Curtis, and shows up wherever Curtis is doing anything at all that involves the environment. Curtis definitely doesn’t want Diedrich around when he makes that move of his to get all the money, and he thought a dead diver could tie up Diedrich and Planetwatch in the Australian courts long enough for Curtis to finish whatever he’s doing.”

Nodding, Brevizin said, “It might. But we’re a long way from you and Robert Bendix and industrial espionage.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go along with him,” Manville said. “I told him I didn’t want Kim to die.”

“Kim. You knew this woman?”

“We met this week, after the event. What happened was, Mr. Curtis and the people investing with him in Kanowit Island — that’s where we were — they helicoptered off on Wednesday. Wednesday night, I found out from the ship’s captain that he’d been ordered to slow us down so we could go past Moreton Island late at night, so some people could come aboard to kill the two of us. We managed to get away, and now Mr. Curtis is afraid we’ll go to the authorities, so he made that charge of his own first. Ruin my credibility before I say anything.”

“It should work,” Brevizin said. “I don’t suppose you have any evidence, any proof, any signed confessions?”

“No, I’m sorry,” Manville said, and sounded as though he really was. Too worried, in other words, to have much sense of humor.

Brevizin said, “Well, do you have anything that would serve to substantiate your story?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Manville said. “I don’t have much. I have my own reputation, over the years. Kim and I both tell the same story, and we never knew one another before this week. And the Mallory, the ship we were on, might still be in harbor here. It lost a launch as a result of the business with us, they won’t be able to sail until they replace it.”

“The Mallory,” Brevizin said, and made his first note of the meeting.

“Since I don’t know this man Bendix,” Manville said, “I can’t think why he’d say I tried to sell him anything.”

“He and Curtis could be friends,” Brevizin said, dismissing it. “That aspect doesn’t bother me.”

“Tell me what bothers you,” Manville said. “If it’s something I know anything about, I’ll tell you.”

“I believe you’re probably accurate about Curtis’s finances,” Brevizin said, “and I can make a few calls after this meeting to confirm. I find it hard to believe that any businessman, legitimate businessman, would send out killers to murder two people. Hard, but not impossible. I believe, if I check into it, a ship called Mallory will be in harbor here, missing a launch. I believe it is possible you were framed, for the purpose of shutting you up. I believe it is also possible that everything you’ve said is the invention of a desperate man who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.”

“It could look that way,” Manville agreed, “I know that.”

“Unfortunately,” Brevizin said, “if I choose to believe your story, then I must also believe you don’t have the answer to what’s still most troubling me. Which is, what does Curtis plan to do that’s illegal and dangerous, and when does he plan to do it? And, come to think of it, where? Here?”

“You’re right, that’s the part I don’t know,” Manville said. “I’m sorry. I get the impression it might have something to do with Hong Kong, but only because those are the people he blames for his troubles. And even if that’s right, I don’t know what the plan is.”

“And it must be intended to happen fairly soon,” Brevizin pointed out, “if it would be before Planetwatch got over the legal embarrassment of negligently causing the death of one of their own divers.”

“Oh, yes,” Manville said, “I’m sure it’s soon. I don’t think that house of cards of his can last very much longer.”

“All right,” Brevizin said, “conditionally I believe you. I should probably advise you to turn yourself in to the authorities, to let me begin the legal process, but that would leave your friend Kim alone, and if someone has tried to kill her before they might try again.”

“I think so, too,” Manville said.

“Do you want to tell me where you’re keeping yourselves?”

“Down on the Gold Coast.”

“Good God. Can you stand it?”

“For a while,” Manville said.

“Then you’ll have to stand it for the weekend,” Brevizin told him. “There’s nothing more to be done today. I’ll talk to some people, look into the situation. Assuming I don’t run across anything that suggests you’re a really accomplished liar and fantasist, you should ring me Monday morning at... eleven o’clock.”

“I will. Do you want to meet Kim? She’s three blocks from here, in one of the street cafes on the Mall.”

“Monday will do,” Brevizin told him. “I’ll probably want you to bring her with you then.”

“She wanted to make a phone call of her own,” Manville said. “To this guy Jerry Diedrich, from Planetwatch. They have an office down in Sydney, she thinks she can find him through there. I said I’d ask you, and she’ll call him if you say okay.”

“I don’t see why not,” Brevizin said, “if only on the concept that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Diedrich is unlikely to betray either of you to Richard Curtis.”

“Very unlikely,” Manville agreed.

“And Planetwatch,” Brevizin went on, “no matter how much they might irritate my clients and me in other contexts, they do have an organization and they might be of help to you.” Brevizin rose, and reached across the coffee table to shake Manville’s hand. “Keep out of sight over the weekend,” he advised, “and ring me Monday.”

“I will. And thank you, Mr. Brevizin, you’ve given me hope.”

“Not too much hope, please,” Brevizin cautioned. “Not yet.”

7

Kim sat over her second cappuccino, now long cold, and watched the pedestrians surge endlessly by. It was as though two giant machines, just out of sight, one at each end of the Mall, kept spewing these people out, in their amazing diversity, and sent them striding or strolling forward along the Mall, finally to be gobbled up again by the machine at the other end, altered into new sizes and shapes, and pushed back out to do the same thing the other way.

The Mall was two long blocks of Queen Street, here in the heart of Brisbane, where motor traffic was not permitted. Stores and restaurants filled the buildings along the way, upstairs as well as down, and spilled out into open-air cafes like the one where Kim sat and waited for George to finish with the lawyer. Shoppers and tourists and simple strollers filled the Mall from end to end, as crowded and noisy and lively as the streets of the Gold Coast, but more upscale.

Kim wondered how much longer George would be. He’d left her forty Australian dollars, so she could go on ordering cappuccino forever, but that lost its charm eventually. Also, the Ace bandage, around her torso again, was beginning to feel too tight, and starting to itch; she’d love to be back in the little room in Surfers Paradise, comfortably naked. With George. She sighed, looked around at the people at the other tables here in the cafe — couples or families, she the only single — then looked out again at the schools of passersby, and saw the killer.

It was him. He walked with two other men she’d never seen before, he in the middle, talking intently, they listening intently, and she recognized him at once. She’d never forget that man, or how he’d looked when he’d taunted George, asking if he could shoot a human being, saying George couldn’t do it, and then George did it.

Of course he’s here. Brisbane is where the Mallory was coming, and the Mall is where everybody in Brisbane walks sooner or later. But why now? Why not half an hour from now, when I’m gone from here?

Kim looked down at her trembling hands in her lap, hoping to seem like someone searching in a handbag for a tissue or change or whatever, hoping the man would just keep moving by, keep on with his intense conversation, pay no attention to the world around him, and when she looked up she stared directly into his eyes. The three of them had stopped out there, like a rocky island in the sea of pedestrians, and they were all staring at her.

Everybody moved at once. The killer shouted something to the other two, pointed at Kim, and the three leaped forward, at the same instant that Kim jumped to her feet, knocked over her chair behind her, turned to her right, and ran.

Through the tables, through the tables, breathlessly apologizing to the people seated there, afraid to look back. Hedged planters marked the boundary of the cafe, with a narrow space between two. Too narrow; something plucked at the wraparound skirt, tried to pull it off her. She clutched at bunches of skirt at both hips and kept running.

Now she looked back and they were farther away, but still chasing her. They’d had to go around the planters, but they were moving fast, and they were big enough to simply knock people out of their way, while Kim had to duck and dodge around the strollers.

The Myer Centre. She ran in, snaking around shoppers laden with bags, nearly bowling over a girl trying to offer a perfume sample, dodging to the left only because the aisle ahead was too clogged.

She wanted to call for help, but who would understand? What would she say? She didn’t have time to think, only to run.

They were back there, behind her, two in the same aisle as her, one coming faster along a more open aisle to the right. One of them was shouting; the killer, straight behind her, he was waving his fist and shouting.

“Stop! Stop! Stop, thief! She stole my wallet! Stop her!”

No, no, that’s ridiculous, that isn’t real. But it is real. And if somebody were to stop her, hold her for them, they’d finish her off before she could explain. And already people were reaching for her, wide-eyed and astonished but with clutching hands to stop the running girl.

An exit. She had to get out of here, outside, away from confinement, narrow aisles, too many bodies. Brushing aside the hands that tried to hold her, she hurtled out the exit onto some different street, not the Mall at all, but a regular street with traffic through which she ran heedless, while astonished drivers slammed on their brakes and blared their horns.

An alley. It was Elizabeth Arcade, running between Elizabeth and Charlotte Streets, though she didn’t know that. She ran into it, past a hamburger restaurant called Parrot’s on her right and a sign for an upstairs vegetarian restaurant called Govinda’s on her left, and straight down the arcade.

Another look over her shoulder. They were still back there, still running hard, the killer still shouting his horrible absurd demand.

The end of the arcade. She veered left, because that way there were fewer people in her path. She ran, leaving a sea of startled faces in her wake, and at the next corner there was a crowded bus just taking on passengers, the last man pressing in, pushing himself on, the door about to close.

Kim ran full tilt into the bus, slamming into the last man’s back, shoving a whole phalanx of people deeper into the bus ahead of her, as the door snicked shut behind her, and the bus moved away from the curb. She ignored the comments and the dirty looks, ignored the crush, and managed to twist around just enough to look over her shoulder, out the window. They had stopped back there, panting, holding their sides, moving together to confer.

The bus was so crowded she had no opportunity to pay before it stopped again, not far enough along this street.

She jumped backward to the curb the instant the door opened, spun around, looked only straight ahead, and ran.

Two blocks later, out of breath, she slowed to a walk, and looked back, and they were gone. She stopped. She’d lost them.

And herself. Slowly catching her breath, she looked around at this new street. She hadn’t the slightest idea where she was.

8

She wasn’t there.

Manville double-checked, walked both ways along the Mall, frowning at the people at the tables in other open-air cafes, and she was at none of them. He’d been right the first time; there was where he’d left her, at that table in the middle of that particular cafe, where the young couple now giggled together like the newlyweds they no doubt were.

Where was she? She wouldn’t just leave. That didn’t seem right. Did something spook her?

Whatever had happened, there was nothing for Manville to do but wait here. Wherever Kim had gone, she would certainly come back to this spot to find him.

There was an empty table in the second row. He took it, waited a couple of minutes for the waiter to arrive, ordered a cappuccino, then looked off to the right, the long way down the Mall. All those bobbing heads, all those people, in random movement, no rhythm, no pattern. Would Kim suddenly appear among them?

Movement made him turn his head, and there was now somebody seated next to him. He was in his forties, heavyset, a bruiser with a large round head, thick bone above his eyebrows, a broken nose. Manville had never seen him before, but he knew at once that this man was connected to the killers on the ship. And that something bad had happened to Kim.

The man leaned forward, as though he wanted to deliver a secret. “George Manville,” he said.

Manville looked carefully at him. The man’s large bony hands rested on the table, empty. He didn’t act threatening, he was just there. “Yes,” Manville said.

The man nodded. “If you look out there,” he said, his voice raspy but soft, his accent showing him to be a local, “you’ll see a fella that isn’t walking. He’s looking at you. He’s got his hands in the pockets of kind of a big raincoat.”

Manville looked. “I see him.” It was another stranger, cut from the same cloth as this one.

The man said, “If I stand up and walk away from this table, and you don’t stand up and follow me, that bloke’s gonna take a machine pistol out of his pocket and blow your head off. And probably a few other heads around here, too. He’s got rotten aim.”

Manville said, “Where’s Kim?”

The man smiled. “You wanna talk to her? Come along.”

“She’s all right?”

“Sure,” the man said. “Just a little out of breath, that’s all.”

Manville had no idea what he meant by that, except that Kim must still alive. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

“I thought that’s what you were gonna decide,” the man said, and patted the table. “Leave some loot for the waiter, there’s a good chap.”

Manville did as he was told, and the man stood and walked away, without a backward glance. Manville got to his feet and followed, aware of the other man trailing along behind.

Down at the end of the Mall, on the corner with George Street, stopped illegally at the curb was a large black Daimler limousine. The man ahead of Manville walked directly to it and opened the curbside rear door. “Get in,” he said.

Manville did, and the man followed him, as Manville saw, seated in the rear of the limo, the leader of the killers from the ship. From the corner of his eye, he saw the man with the machine pistol get in the front, next to a liveried chauffeur.

Manville was in the middle of the rear seat, the leader to his left, the other man to his right. Kim wasn’t here.

The chauffeur started the Daimler purring away from the curb, and the leader smiled at Manville’s profile, not in a friendly way. “And now,” he said, “the rematch.”

9

Morgan Pallifer liked the way things were going. He was closer to Richard Curtis, more important to Curtis, than he had ever been. He had the use of this nice Daimler belonging to Curtis, that even came with a chauffeur hired by Curtis, who knew to do what he was told and keep his mouth shut. He had a nice wad of cash from Curtis, enough to keep him going for months, with more to come, a lot more. And now, three or four days ahead of schedule, he had his hands on George Manville.

Oh, he would have gotten Manville anyway, that wasn’t a problem. Curtis’s people were watching the banks, and no later than Monday he’d have known where Manville and the girl were hiding out. He’d still know, come Monday, and the way things were, he’d probably find the girl there. She’d lost Pallifer and his new pals, that was true, but she’d also lost Manville, and what else would she do but go back to whatever mouse hole they’d been hiding in, to wait for her protector to return? Where else could she go? Nowhere. So she’d most likely still be there, wherever it was, hoping for the best, when Pallifer and his friends dropped by to scoop her up on Monday.

But for now, he had the more important one, he had Manville. Curtis had wanted Manville alive, at least temporarily, at least if it wouldn’t be too much trouble; the girl he simply wanted gotten rid of, so that could happen at any time. Curtis would be very pleased to know that Manville was already in their hands.

Pallifer was pleased, too. The events on the Mallory still rankled. He and Arn had had to finish off Bardo and Frank, both wounded by Manville. He’d told Curtis that it was Manville who’d killed them, because you never tell anybody you did some killing, but in fact Manville had left the two of them alive but useless. Pallifer couldn’t carry them, couldn’t nurse them, couldn’t fix Frank’s broken bones or dig that bullet out of Bardo. He had no more use for them, so what could he do but drop them into the sea, once that miserable Chink captain came slinking down to see what was what and finally agreed to untie him and Arn?

Which was why he’d had to go around among people he knew, people he’d been connected with in the past, to find new partners. Arn had got spooked out there on the Mallory, and didn’t want any more of this job, so he was out, and these new fellas were in. Steve on the other side of Manville, and Raf up front. Pallifer had already worked with both of them more than once, and knew he could count on them.

And now, after he brought them aboard, the job was turning out so simple and easy, he barely needed them at all. Already he had Manville, and the girl was such a piece of cake he could almost send a cabdriver to pick her up. In fact, maybe that was the thing to do. Make Manville write a note, send it with a cabby, pop the girl in privacy and comfort, at Pallifer’s leisure.

Well, that was the pleasure for next week. For now, as the chauffeur purred them out of downtown, skirting Albert Park, heading out Musgrave Road to leave Brisbane toward the west, Pallifer reached forward to the black leather pouch mounted on the side panel behind the door, took out the cellphone, and called Richard Curtis at the hotel. He got a secretary, who said Curtis was out. “Tell him it’s Morgan,” Pallifer said. “Tell him I took early delivery on that package he wanted. I’m bringing it out to the ranch.”

“He’ll know what this is about?”

“Oh, yes,” Pallifer said, and winked at the stolid-faced Manville next to him on the wide seat. “He’ll be happy at the news,” he assured the secretary, and broke the connection, and twisted around a bit more to look at Manville head on. “Give me your ear, you,” he said.

Manville didn’t react at all, so Pallifer poked him in the chest with a hard finger. “And give me your eye, too, while you’re at it,” he said.

Now Manville did look at him, and once again Pallifer was startled for just a second by how cold and deadly those eyes could look. But then he caught himself, he reminded himself who was in charge here now, and he grinned into those eyes as he said, “I’m about to tell you what’s happening here.”

Manville said, “Where’s Kim?”

“Oh, Kim is it? The hero’s been getting his reward, has he? Hear that, Steve? The hero’s been getting his reward.”

Steve was looking out his side window at the passing bustle of Brisbane, not interested in the conversation. So Pallifer quit his grinning, and said to Manville, “She run away from us. Would you believe that? She run away clean, but that’s why we knew you’d show up at the same place.”

“Oh,” Manville said, and turned to look at the back of Steve’s head. “That’s why you said she was out of breath.”

Steve turned to give Manville his own cold look. “I’m done with talk for today,” he said, and turned aside, and looked out the window some more.

Pallifer said, “Steve isn’t your social type. Steve is more your killer type. And the situation is, Mr. Curtis asked Steve and Raf and me to collect you and Kim — Kim? is that it? — yeah, Kim. To collect you and Kim, because he misses you. He said to me, he said, ‘Morgan, that George Manville is a right smart engineer, I could use his brains some more, so would you just collect him and bring him to me, so we can let bygones be bygones?’ And I said, ‘Mr. Curtis, I will. But what if it turns out this Manville makes trouble?’ And you know how he is, Mr. Curtis, you know how he talks. He just shrugged, you know how he does, and he said, ‘Oh, if he makes trouble, kill him.’ Now, you know I’m not lying to you, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Manville said.

“And this isn’t a lie, either,” Pallifer told him. “You pestered me out on that ship, you truly did. I didn’t like it, and I must say I don’t like you. Now I know Mr. Curtis would like it better if you didn’t make any trouble, but I’d like it better if you did. You follow me?”

“I won’t make trouble,” Manville said.

“Well, that’s a shame,” Pallifer told him, “although it will make Mr. Curtis’s day. Now, we got about four hundred miles to travel, so just you take it easy, don’t do any scheming with that bright brain of yours, and everything will be okay.”

Apparently, Manville believed him. To Pallifer’s astonishment, the son of a bitch folded his arms, put his head back, shifted his body around into a more comfortable position on the seat, and closed his eyes.

It was more than four hundred miles, though not many more, all of it almost perfectly due west. Out of the city of Brisbane, they stayed on route 54 past Ipswich and Toowoomba, on the rim of the Great Dividing Range, and on to Dalby, where they left the main road for the almost as big Route 49, dipping slightly south to run across the Darling Downs, the great fertile flatlands, boring but fecund, with mile after mile of cotton and wheat, sprawling ranches, tiny towns, huge sky.

Twice they stopped for everyone to walk off into the fields to relieve themselves, both times with Manville where the others could keep a close eye on him. At St. George, with darkness just creeping up behind them, the sun out in front of them floating downward toward the broken line of hills to the west, they stopped to refuel, again giving Manville no opportunity to make a move unseen.

Beyond St. George, with a great bruised sunset burning its way down the sky, the chauffeur squinting and ducking his head behind his dark glasses, the farms of the Darling Downs petered out, giving way to herds of grazing sheep and cattle, none of whom paid any attention in the gathering darkness to the occasional passage of headlights out on the road. The land looked dryer here, reaching away in brown folds, like a tumbled blanket.

At the small settlement of Bollen, they turned left again, onto a much smaller and more twisty road, climbing into dry hills. They passed Murra Murra, barely a dozen lights in the blackness, and then turned off onto an unmarked dirt road that twisted up into the dark, posting back and forth, detouring around the hillocks. They drove past groups of shaggy-coated cattle that blinked in their headlights and shuffled slowly out of their way, bumping their shoulders together as they went. They drove on for three or four miles, over rolling open country, the Daimler taking the terrain like a good powerboat on a moderate sea, and then all at once they crested a rise and a bowl of lights appeared before them, down a farther hill, like a wide low glass jar full of fireflies.

It was a house, a ranch, what the Australians call a station, a sprawling adobe structure, two stories high, ablaze with light. Spotlights mounted high on the exterior walls flared on the road, showed a helicopter squatted with drooping rotors near the entrance, made tiny sharp black shadows among the tough grasses that covered these hills.

“Look at that,” Pallifer said, nudging Manville, who didn’t respond, and pointing at the helicopter, as they drove on by it.

“Your friend Mr. Curtis, he’s so excited to see you again, he flew out here already.”

The Daimler drove past the front of the house, with its deep wooden-posted porch dotted with rough wooden benches and small tables, and followed the faint track of the road around to the side, where a tan overhead garage door in the flank of the building, near the rear, one of three such doors in a row, all the same color as the adobe of the building, was already lifting up out of the way, welcoming them.

The Daimler drove inside, into a space already flanked by two other vehicles, under strong overhead lights. The garage door, one solid piece of metal in an electrically operated track, angled back down again and snicked shut. A minute later, all the exterior lights went out.

10

“Let me do the talking,” Jerry said.

“I always do,” Luther told him.

They’d flown up from Sydney this morning, as Jerry had promised Kim’s parents he would, but then had wasted precious time on the wrong assumption that Captain Zhang would be living on his ship. The crew members they’d approached had been no help at all, either not speaking English or pretending not to, but then a smooth young Japanese gentleman in a suit had come by, at the gangplank where Jerry and Luther were frustratingly being held, not permitted even to board the Mallory, and the gentleman had turned out to be with the company that was replacing the ship’s missing lifeboat. He it was who told them that Captain Zhang was staying at a hotel in town, the Tasman Crest — “As am I myself” — during the time the ship was forced to remain in harbor.

The Tasman Crest was a mid-range smallish hotel near City Hall that seemed to cater to Asian businessmen almost exclusively, which was probably why their cabdriver had seemed surprised when they gave it as their destination. The young woman at the desk rang the captain’s room for them without result.

“You could wait for him,” she offered, with a gesture toward a seating area nearby.

“Thank you,” Jerry said, and they went over to sit on broad low chairs with thick pale green cushions and bamboo arms. A fountain was nearby, a gentle plash of water onto polished stones, an unobtrusive white noise which would make any conversation in this place something close to confidential.

Jerry was feeling more and more frustrated. “We don’t know what he looks like, only the sound of his voice. What if he isn’t in his uniform? He could go in and out a dozen times, and we wouldn’t know.”

“She said she called room 423,” Luther said. “And the key is in that slot, along with a message. Possibly two messages. Jerry, don’t turn around, I can see it fine from here. We just have to wait.” And when Jerry didn’t respond to that: “What are we going to do tonight?”

They’d decided to spend tonight in Brisbane, staying at a Sheraton because Planetwatch got a group discount, so now Jerry permitted Luther to distract him with a discussion of how they’d spend their evening. There were good seafood restaurants here, and good jazz clubs, and other clubs that might be of interest. They wouldn’t be bored.

“Ah,” Luther said, and got to his feet.

As did Jerry. Turning, he saw the girl at the counter just handing the key and the message or messages to a man who was indeed not in uniform but in a rather shabby brown suit. The man had a gloomy and defeated air about him.

It was as they crossed the lobby toward the man, who must be Captain Zhang, that Jerry said, “Let me do the talking,” and Luther gave his agreement. Meanwhile, the man had turned away from the desk, moving toward the elevators on the farther side of the lobby, and Jerry had to trot to try to catch up.

Though the girl at the desk solved that problem, calling, “Captain Zhang. You have visitors.”

The captain turned around, still holding his key and messages, looking more frightened than curious, and very wary when he saw two men he didn’t know approaching him.

Jerry stopped in front of him. “Captain Zhang?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Jerry Diedrich from Planetwatch. We talked the other day, by radio.”

Now the captain looked like a frightened rabbit, backing away, eyes slipping to the sides, looking for a hole to hide in. “No no,” he said. “You must talk to the company, Mr. Curtis—”

Jerry pursued him, saying, “When Kim Baldur’s parents came to see you, you didn’t speak English.”

“I could not talk to them,” the captain said. He was almost running backward, unwilling to turn away from them but wanting desperately to escape. “I cannot talk to you. Mr. Curtis has lawyers, you must see them. Please, not me.” He was at the elevators now, and one was just opening, releasing three businessmen with briefcases, deep in discussion. The captain ducked around them into the elevator, and Jerry and Luther went in after him.

The captain stared at them in horror. “You can’t follow me!”

Luther said, “Of course we can,” and leaned forward to press button number 4. “You’re in 423,” he said.

The door closed; they started to rise. The captain tried to be stern, not very effectively. “I have nothing to say to you,” he insisted. “I wrote a report for the authorities, that’s all—”

“You signed a report,” Luther corrected. “Some of Curtis’s lawyers wrote it.”

The elevator door opened, and the captain could be seen to be torn between horrible choices. He didn’t want to stay in here with these two people, but he didn’t want to let them approach any nearer to his room either.

Luther held the door, and spoke in an almost kindly way. “Your floor, sir.”

The captain stepped out, jittering, and they went out with him. But then he refused to go any farther. He stood where he was in the hall, in front of the elevators, sullen but unmovable. “I have nothing to tell you,” he said. He wouldn’t look at them either, but kept frowning at some invisible spot at waist height between them. “I did my report. I was very upset by what happened. I thought I would lose my job. I need my job, I have a family, I have daughters, I thought we were all destroyed. I felt... I felt very bad for that girl, so young and pretty and... it was not my fault. I would never hurt another person, you must believe me. I would never hurt anyone. It’s not my fault.”

Jerry said, “What about her parents? You pretended you couldn’t speak English. What about them?”

“I felt so— I couldn’t talk with those people, such sad people, I have daughters, I have daughters, what could I say to those people? How everybody looked for her and nobody found her, and if they found her she’d only be dead. They know that, I can’t say that. How could I talk to those people? I pretended, because I felt such badness for them.” He shook his head. “And I cannot talk to you. If you follow me to my room, I will call the desk and have them send people to take you away, arrest you. You must leave me alone.”

He turned away, scurrying off down the wide pale corridor. Jerry would have followed, but Luther grabbed his arm, holding him back. Jerry looked at him, surprised, and Luther shook his head, then turned to push the down button for the elevator.

Jerry watched the captain pause at a door some way down the hall. He never looked back. He fumbled with the key in the door, dropped his messages, scooped them up, hurried inside. The door slammed, as the elevator arrived.

As they rode down, Jerry said, “Why did you stop me? If we just kept at him—”

“No,” Luther said. “He’s covering up, he’s hiding something, and it scares him so much he won’t talk. He really won’t talk, Jerry, he’s too scared. So all we know is, there’s something hidden. We’ll have to find out what it is some other way.”

The elevator door opened at lobby level, and as they stepped outside Luther said, “The first question, of course, is how did he know she was pretty?”

Jerry thudded to a stop, as though he’d walked into an invisible wall. He spun around for the elevators, crying, “We have to—”

“No, Jerry,” Luther said, holding him by the arm again. “We’ll find out, but we’ll find out someplace else. And it is possible, of course, that Kim’s parents showed him a photo of her, though unlikely.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Exactly. But we know he pretended not to speak English with them because he was afraid of making exactly that kind of slip. So what we now know for sure, there’s more to the story. Come on, we’ll go back to the hotel and decide what to do next.”

Jerry was dissatisfied, but he let Luther lead him. They took a cab across to their own hotel, with its larger and more impersonal lobby, and as they were crossing it a voice called, “Jerry! Jerry!”

Jerry turned, and saw coming toward him, hurrying toward him, face grimacing with strain, the ghost of Kim Baldur. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fainted.

11

Trembling, Zhang Yung-tsien dropped his two messages onto the floor, while trying to unlock the door to his room.

He was so nervous, so afraid those two strange men would rush up behind him and push him into the room, trap him there, force him somehow to tell them what they wanted to know, that he fumbled with the two flimsy slips of paper on the floor, and lost his balance, and would have toppled forward into his room if his shoulder hadn’t hit the doorjamb.

His fingers felt like fat sausages, but he clutched at the crinkled slips of paper, and straightened, and lunged into the room, the door automatically closing behind him. He fell back against the door, eyes closed, the key and messages held tight in the hands crossed over his chest. His breath was loud in his ears.

They did not pursue. No knock on the door, no shouts in the hall. They’ve given up.

Zhang opened his eyes, and there was the room, his home ashore until Mallory should be ready to leave port. It was a small room, but very neat, the colors pale without sentimentality, not like the pastel palette of the Americans. The room’s creators were Japanese, not Chinese, but still he had felt more at home here than in the American-made world he had so much to inhabit.

One of his messages, from his wife, Yanling, was in Chinese, the ideograms neatly penned. The other, yet another question from the insurance company adjuster, was written in English, the letters just as neat. He had trouble focusing on either, and held one in each hand, looking back and forth from one to the other, then finally giving up and placing them side by side on the dresser.

He was having trouble with his breath, he couldn’t seem to inhale. The air in the room felt cold and lifeless, and it was hard to gain nourishment from it. He crossed to the window to open it wide, and immediately the warm moist air from outside flowed in to conquer the air-conditioning. He could feel it as a soft caress against his skin.

What was he going to do? What could he do? The people kept coming to ask questions, and he was so afraid, so confused, that he never knew how to answer, what to tell them, what to try to conceal.

The girl was alive. Could he have told her parents that? But then so many more questions would have come from them, questions he was terrified to answer. What had happened on the ship? What had been intended, and by whom? And what was Captain Zhang’s role in it all?

The girl was alive, or she’d been alive when she’d left the ship with that engineer. But was she still alive, were either of them still alive, or had some other of Curtis’s men caught up with them? Should he say the girl was alive, if he didn’t know?

But what if she were still alive, and finally came forward, and told everything that had happened on the ship? Then people would know he had lied, and they would demand to know why.

He had never wanted to be involved in this. He was good at his work, and that was all he’d wanted. He wasn’t supposed to have these burdens.

He sat on the side of the bed. Next to the telephone were a ballpoint pen and a notepad, the name of the hotel at its top in Japanese and English. Zhang picked up pen and pad and wrote, under the letterhead, “Yanling.”

What would he say next? What would he tell his wife? There was insurance; they would be taken care of. This way, there would be no shame and no disaster. But how could he tell her all that, on a scrap of paper in a hotel room, under a name in Japanese and English?

“I love you,” he wrote, and put the pad and pen back next to the telephone, and got to his feet.

It all started because of the girl, the diver. If she had not launched herself into the sea, nothing bad would have happened.

Zhang reached the window, and bent forward. Without pausing, he put both hands on the windowsill and launched himself headfirst into the air.

12

“I’m really sorry, Jerry,” Kim said yet again, and yet again he gave her his rattled martyr look and said, “It’s all right, Kim, it really is.”

When she’d first seen him collapse like that, downstairs in the lobby, she’d thought he’d been shot, that one of Richard Curtis’s killers had found her and fired at her and missed and killed Jerry. But then Luther dropped to his knees beside him, and called, “Jerry! Jerry!” and Jerry’s eyes fluttered, and Kim realized he’d only fainted.

Not only; she wouldn’t dare say he’d only fainted. Jerry was taking it all very seriously. And it’s true he’d hit the floor hard, falling sideways, bruising his left hip and raising a shiny bump on his head, above his left ear, just in front of the hairline. Luther kept putting fresh wet, cold washcloths on it, from the bathroom sink, so it wasn’t getting any worse, but it wasn’t getting any better either.

As Luther and Kim together had helped the quivering Jerry back to his feet, he’d looked at her with still-frightened eyes and said, “You aren’t a ghost. You’re real.”

“I’m real, Jerry,” she promised him, and for the first of many times she said, “I’m really sorry,” and he assured her it was all right, and she and Luther helped him to rise and walk to the elevator. They went up in it together and into their room, which was a surprising mess, clothing and luggage and personal effects strewn just everywhere, the bed rumpled and unmade.

Kim helped Luther straighten the top cover so Jerry could lie down. Luther went away for the first of the wet washcloths, and Kim told her story.

Parts of it she had to tell more than once, particularly the suggestion that George Manville, Richard Curtis’s chief engineer on the Kanowit Island project, creator of the shock wave that had reconfigured the island and threatened the delicate coral of the barrier reef and almost killed Kim herself, wasn’t a villain after all. Not a bad man, but a good one.

“He saved my life,” she told them more than once, and described how astonishingly Manville had shot the killer, and how brilliantly he’d arranged their escape from the ship, and how, through some friend of his in Houston, he’d even made contact with a lawyer here in Brisbane who was going to help them all, but how now it was all messed up.

“I don’t know where he is,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

“Got on with his life, I suppose,” Jerry said. He still didn’t get it.

But Luther did, by now. He said, “You’re sure it was just coincidence, them seeing you there. The people who chased you.”

“Yes, of course, it had to be,” she said. “Only George knew where I was, and if he was going to turn me over to those people he could have done it a long time ago. In fact, he never had to save me in the first place.”

Luther said, “Would they have known you were waiting for Manville?”

“Probably. They knew I’d got off the ship with him, they probably figured we were hiding out together.”

“So,” Luther said, “they might have gone back to where they saw you, deciding that you had been waiting to meet up with Manville again.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” she agreed. “I got so lost, running away from them, it took me forever to find the Mall again, and of course by then he wasn’t there.”

Luther said, “So either he was captured by them or he escaped the way you did.”

“I went to the parking lot where we left the car,” she said. “George rented this little red car, and it was still there. I called the lawyer’s office, but it was almost five o’clock by then, and everybody was gone. He wasn’t at the Mall, and he didn’t pick up his car. So that’s when I tried to call you two, at the Planetwatch office down in Sydney, and the people there said you were up here, and which hotel, so I just waited in the lobby. And I’m really sorry, Jerry.”

“It’s all right, Kim, it really is.”

“Well,” Luther said, “there’s nothing we can do now. It’s nearly six o’clock on a Friday afternoon, everybody’s gone away for the weekend. What I suggest you do, first you should call your parents.”

“Oh, my God, I have to!” Kim said, startled by the realization. “They were told I was dead, weren’t they? What time is it in Chicago?”

“They’re here,” Luther said. “Well, not here, in Brisbane, but here in Australia.”

Kim blinked. “They are? Why?”

“Because you’re dead,” Jerry told her. His voice sounded hollow, as though he were speaking from a tomb.

“I’m really sorry, Jerry,” she said, almost reflexively by now.

Luther said, “They’re down in Sydney, in a hotel there, you should phone them soon.”

“Yes. I will. But then, what about George?”

“I think,” Luther said, “Manville was right when he said you shouldn’t go to the police yet, until he’d had legal advice. But now things are different. I think you should stay here tonight” — Jerry gave him a startled look, and Luther went smoothly on — “we’ll get you a room as close to this one as we can, and then in the morning you can telephone the place where you and Manville were staying, to see if he’s come back. If he hasn’t, we’ll go look for the car in the parking lot. If it’s still there, I vote we go to the police.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Jerry said. “This is Richard Curtis at his worst, his absolute worst. I know some people think I harp on him too much, but now you get a sense of the man, you see what it is he’s capable of, what we’re up against. The police, absolutely.”

“Thank you, Jerry,” Luther said, and said to Kim, “Do you want to call your parents from here, or wait till you’ve got your own room?”

“You call, Luther,” Kim said, “if you don’t mind. Talk to them first. Prepare them. I don’t want to cause any more people to faint.”

Lying in yet another bed, in yet another room, this time with the brightness of Brisbane beyond the curtain over the one window, Kim felt very strange. It had been a weird rollercoaster day, being chased by those people, losing George, finding Jerry and Luther, talking on the phone with Mom and Dad, and then having dinner with Jerry and Luther as though they were all three equals together, in a way that had never been true on the ship.

She’d also made another batch of the same small purchases: toothbrush, toothpaste, lipstick, all the usual. And more clothing, outer and under, enough to carry her for a few days, all bought with money borrowed from Jerry. And a new cotton shoulder bag to put it all in. And by now Mom would have phoned Aunt Ellen in Chicago to go over to the house, pack up Kim’s passport and wallet, which had just arrived there today, and air express it all back to Sydney, to arrive on Monday. So, except for George, things seemed to be going pretty well.

George. She was tired, but she couldn’t sleep, here in this strange new bed, all alone. Every time she moved, the sheets above and below her felt rough and cold. When she lay still, the big flat hard-mattressed bed seemed immense, as big as a football field. If she put her left arm out to the side, that other unused pillow over there was a big cold mound, an alien that didn’t belong with her.

Last night had just been the beginning with George, and yet already being here without him seemed unnatural. She wanted the feel of him, the solidity of him, the knowledge that he was there. To have had it just begin, and then stop like this, was terrible.

She needed to sleep, because tomorrow would be another crowded day, but she remained awake, her mind skittering around recent events, and always coming back to George. To remember how he had been last night, so gentle and then so strong, did not lead her toward sleep at all, but she couldn’t help the thoughts, they just kept swirling around and around, constantly there.

Is he all right? Where is he? What’s happened to him?

13

There was a knock at the door.

Manville looked at it more in irritation than surprise. “You’re the ones who locked it,” he called. “What do you want me to do?”

The key was already turning in the lock, with a loud snick, before he was finished speaking, and then the door opened and a young woman entered, in a tan pantsuit, smiling apologetically, saying, “I did not want to startle you.” A pile of clothing was over her arm. “If I may?”

He stepped to the side. She’d left the door open, and the hall looked empty from where he stood, but he didn’t doubt one of the men who’d brought him here was out there, or some other goon of Curtis’s, leaning against the wall, casual but making damn sure Manville stayed where they wanted him.

The young woman laid the clothing on the bed, neatening it, smoothing out wrinkles, then turned to smile at Manville again and say, “Mr. Curtis asks you to come to dinner in thirty minutes. You may refresh yourself in the bathroom there, and here are garments that we hope will fit you. The door will not be locked now, sir. In thirty minutes, if you would go out and to your right, and at the end of the hall turn left, that is the dining room. Thank you.”

She dipped her head and left, closing the door behind her. There was no sound of the key turning in the lock.

Manville guessed he’d been in this room now no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. He hadn’t looked at his watch when he’d first come in, assuming they’d be leaving him in here overnight.

They’d driven directly into the garage inside this building, and as they’d gotten out of the Daimler, all of them stiff, stretching, a young man in the same kind of tan pantsuit as this woman had opened an interior door at the left end of the garage, stepped forward through it, and called, “This way, please.”

Manville had paused to note the other two vehicles parked there, a tan Land Rover and a kind of dune buggy made mostly out of chrome pipe, and then he’d followed the man, while the leader of the thugs who’d captured him — Morgan, he’d called himself — had followed Manville into that broad low-ceilinged hall outside, with what looked like Navajo carpets on the red tile floor and framed aboriginal art on both walls. At the first open door on the right the man in the pantsuit had turned and made a please-enter gesture.

“That means you,” Morgan had said, and Manville had stepped into this room, and the door had shut behind him, with the unmistakable scrape of the key being turned in the lock.

This was normally a guestroom, apparently, with only the vertical bars outside the one window to suggest a prison; but probably all the ground floor windows were barred in a building as remote as this. The room contained a double bed, more native-looking throw rugs on the floor, a dresser and an easy chair beside a round table bearing a reading lamp. The compact bathroom next to it had an extremely small window, not barred, a telephone-booth-type shower, and more than enough towels.

Manville had expected to be left here by himself, locked in, to brood and worry and be the subject of psychological warfare. But now, to be suddenly presented with a change of clothes and a dinner invitation, threw him off; which might have been the idea.

Still, he should take what comfort he could. The shower was fine, with a clear lucite door and plenty of hot water and a big white bar of soap. Standing in there, letting the spray roll over him, easing the stiffness in his joints, he wondered again, for the thousandth time, what had happened to Kim. Those three had seen her — accidentally? somehow on purpose, following them? — and she’d escaped, and then they’d come back to the cafe to pick him up, and he’d walked right into it. So what would Kim have done next?

She might have gone to the police. Presumably there was a report somewhere that she was dead, so when she turned up alive, even without identification, it might force the authorities to take notice; though not necessarily to believe her fantastic accusations against a rich and respectable businessman.

Or she might have called the Planetwatch people, that guy Jerry Diedrich she’d mentioned a number of times.

He turned off the water, and stepped out of the shower.

The clothing he’d been given provided everything but shoes, and it all fit very well. Underwear, socks, dark gray slacks, pale blue buttoned shirt but no necktie, light gray sports jacket. The left pocket of the sports jacket contained two three-year-old tickets to La Bohème at the Sydney Opera House, suggesting this jacket had been left behind, forgotten by some houseguest, and never retrieved.

At the appointed time, Manville left his no-longer prison and followed the woman’s directions. Down the hall he went to the right, then a left, and there was the dining room.

Low ceilings seemed to be the norm here, but otherwise the place was lavish. The dining room was actually one end of a very long room that was a parlor at the farther end, all deep sofas and chairs on animal skin rugs, with a broad gray-stone fireplace taking up much of the far wall. There was no fire lit at the moment, but the room was comfortably warm. A pair of refectory tables, dark wood, bearing muted lamps, stacks of magazines, framed photos, marked the dividing line between parlor and dining room.

Four people were seated, very low, in the sofas down there; Richard Curtis, and three others Manville didn’t recognize, two women and a man. One of the women saw Manville enter and said something to Curtis, who immediately looked over, waved a hand over his head, and called, “There you are! Be right there.”

Manville waited. Closer to him was a long dark wood dining table, big enough to seat twelve. Five elaborate place settings took up the left half of the table. Apparently Morgan and his friends would eat somewhere else; in the kitchen, maybe, or out back with the dogs.

The four people approached, Curtis smiling like a host. Saying, “Well, George, you look rested. Good. A hell of a long drive, isn’t it?”

“Not too bad, in that car,” Manville said. He was surprised at the calmness of his response, but could see nothing else to do. It’s a natural instinct, apparently, to be polite to somebody who’s being polite to you, return friendliness with friendliness, good manners with good manners.

Curtis went so far as to make introductions: “George Manville, may I introduce Albert and Helen Farrelly, they run Kennison for me, and Cindy Peters, an old friend visiting for the weekend. George,” he told the others, “is a brilliant engineer, absolutely brilliant. We’ve been working together for a year and a half now, haven’t we, George?”

“About that,” Manville agreed. Not so long ago, he wanted to say, while everybody exchanged friendly greetings, you were sending people to kill me, then to kidnap me, imprison me. Has one of us lost his mind? But dinner party politeness was just too strong a force; he couldn’t say a word.

Curtis even rubbed it in, saying, “It’s too bad your friend Kim couldn’t be with you, George, we’d make an even number. Well, we’ll do what we can. I’ll be father at the head of the table here, George, you take that place there on the right, Helen, you between George and me, Cindy, you on my left, and Albert, if you’d sit across from George?”

Everybody did, and Manville saw Curtis extend his foot toward what must be a call button in the floor, because almost immediately two servers in the tan pantsuits came out with plates of crisp green salad.

Manville said to Helen, on his left, “Kennison?”

Surprised, she said, “The station. This place, you’d call it a ranch. And the house. This is Kennison. You didn’t know that?”

“I came here unexpectedly,” Manville said.

Wine was being poured. Around the server’s arm, Curtis said to Manville, “Kennison’s a great place, George, I wish I could be here more often myself. I’ll show you around, I think you’ll be surprised and pleased.”

“I’m already surprised,” Manville told him, and Curtis laughed.

When the five glasses had been filled with an Australian white wine, a chardonnay, Curtis proposed a toast. “To the good life, in a good place, to getting it and keeping it.”

They all drank to Curtis’s toast, Manville last and only a sip. It was a good clean wine, nicely cold. He would have to be alert not to drink too much of it.

As they started their salads, Manville looked more carefully at these three new people. He might be needing allies soon; would any of them fit the bill?

Albert and Helen Farrelly were a middle-aged, comfortable-looking couple, both overweight, both with the leathery cheeks of people who spend a lot of time outdoors, as they would do if they were the overseers of a large ranch. They were Australian, by their accents, and they seemed on very easy terms with their employer.

Would the Farrellys help? They came across as decent people, not criminals, but Captain Zhang was a decent man, too, and look at what he had been prepared to do. How vital was this job, this life, to the Farrellys? Helen Farrelly spoke of Kennison as though it were heaven on earth, and her husband smiled and nodded in agreement; how willing would they be to risk it, or lose it, for a stranger?

Cindy Peters was about thirty, a poised girl, pleasant, well-spoken, also Australian. An old friend of Curtis, visiting for the weekend.

There’s no comfort here, Manville told himself, as the salad plates were removed, replaced by plates of a butterflied boneless chicken breast with lightly sauteed vegetables. And more wine. I have to count on nobody but myself.

Manville turned to Curtis. “How long have you had this place? Kennison.”

“Seven years. It was my second wife’s idea. She’s Australian, she wanted a footprint in her homeland, so we bought this. She’d have liked to keep it after the divorce, but by then I was in love with it. And not with her, you know?”

“I didn’t know you were ever married,” Manville said. He wanted to encourage this new friendliness in Curtis, this companionship, until he could find a way to escape.

“I was married twice,” Curtis told him. And sounding more grim than before: “The second one was the mistake.” Then he lightened again, and turned to rest his hand on Cindy Peters’s, saying, “You don’t mind if I talk about my wives, do you?”

“Just so you don’t bring them around,” she said.

“No fear,” he told her, and turned back to Manville to say, “My first wife died at thirty-nine of leukemia.”

Cindy Peters looked shocked and embarrassed, as Curtis had no doubt intended, and Manville said, “I’m very sorry.”

“So was I, George, so was I. Isabel was my life to me. She got me started in business, what a team we were going to be.” His jaw set and his eyes looked angry, and he said, “Isabel would have known how to deal with the goddam mainlanders. She was Hong Kong born and bred, she’d have tied them in knots, not run around wasting time and money like me.”

Manville said, “She was Chinese?”

“No, a Brit,” Curtis said. “Her background was. Her grandfather came out, started a construction company on the island, over a hundred years ago. Called it Hoklo Construction, which was a joke, because the Hoklo were 17th-century pirates from China that settled in Hong Kong and then assimilated and disappeared, so anybody could be Hoklo. Anybody could be a pirate, you see?”

Manville said, “It’s an interesting point.”

“One Isabel’s grandfather always kept in mind,” Curtis said, “as should have his successors. Anyway, the grandfather built the business, and went back to England to marry, and had children, and his first two sons took over the business, and Isabel was a daughter of the second son. I was just a roustabout from Oklahoma, my father was in construction but in a small way, little tract houses in developments in the dirt around Tulsa, not like Hoklo. They were big, always, from the beginning, building the big godowns the Chinese used for waterfront warehouses, putting up office buildings, apartment houses. I was always interested in travel, seeing something other than the tan dirt of Tulsa, and when I got to Hong Kong I took a job for a while with Hoklo, and met Isabel, and that’s where it all started.”

Manville said, “You went into the firm.”

“I became the firm,” Curtis said, and his voice was harsh again, but then it softened as he said, “The difference between the first generation and the third, you see, the first generation has to work for it, and the second generation at least gets to see their parents work for it, but the third generation gets it handed to them on a plate, with no idea there’s any work involved. Isabel’s brother and two of her cousins were supposed to take over the company, and it would have been like having the company taken over by the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

“You took it away from them.”

Curtis smiled. If tigers smiled, it would look like that. “I showed them what it was like to be in a fight,” he said.

“And lose,” Manville suggested.

“I was always the one to bet on,” Curtis said. “And then, no sooner was it mine, mine and Isabel’s, than it hit her.”

Cindy Peters put a sympathetic hand on his forearm. “That must have been horrible.”

He nodded at her, “It killed me, Cindy. I was dead before she was, and she was dead in five months.”

“Oh, Dick. I don’t know what to say.”

“Thank you, Cindy.”

Manville noticed, but thought that Cindy did not, that his smile to her was patronizing, that it said, thank you for your sympathy, but you’re too shallow to know what I really went through. He holds himself aloof from the human race, Manville thought, and that’s why he can be so dangerous.

Curtis turned back to Manville to say, “It was because I missed Isabel so much that I married again, which was probably the biggest mistake of my life, and I know you know I’ve made a number of mistakes.”

“We all do,” Manville said.

“But I don’t get mad at other people’s mistakes,” Curtis said. “Not the way I get mad at my own. The thing is, George, it’s too goddam easy for a man to be an idiot. I married Rita because she looked like Isabel. Looked like. They couldn’t have been more different, they— I’ll let it go at that. When I realized— Well. I’ll let it go at that.”

Manville said, “Is Rita still alive?”

Curtis laughed. He seemed genuinely amused. He said, “I’m not Henry the Eighth, George. Rita and I divorced, seven months into the marriage. She got a damn good settlement. She doesn’t think so, of course, but she did.”

Curtis turned away, the veneer of friendliness gone, his attention back on the food on his plate, and Manville picked up his knife and fork as well; it was time to quit, while he was ahead.

At the end of the meal, as though a sudden gong had gone off, though in fact there had been no signal at all that Manville could see, both Farrellys thanked their employer, told Manville and Cindy how lovely it had been to meet them both, patted their mouths with their napkins, rose, said good night, and left the room, through a wide doorway down at the living room end.

Manville, starting to rise, said, “I should go, too. Thank you—”

“Wait, George,” Curtis said. “Cindy, George and I have a little boring business to talk over, and then I’ll be up.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll be reading.” And she too on her way out assured Manville it had been a pleasure to meet him.

Once they were alone, Curtis gestured toward the living room. “Let’s get comfortable over there, let them clear this away.”

“All right.”

As they walked across the long room, Curtis said, “Brandy? A cordial? After-dinner drink?”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

Curtis patted Manville’s shoulder. “Come on, George, you don’t have to be wary with me.”

Manville looked at him, astonished. “Of course I do.”

Curtis shrugged and shook his head, as though abashed. “Well, I suppose you do,” he said. “Or you have reason to think you do, which is the same thing. Take that chair, it’s comfortable and it isn’t impossible to get out of.”

They sat at right angles, and Curtis seemed to be thinking for a minute how to phrase himself. Then he said, “I owe you an apology, George. And I offer it.”

“Thank you,” Manville said, wondering what on earth was coming next.

“With an explanation,” Curtis said, and grinned at him. “Mea culpa, but with an explanation. Okay?”

“Fine,” Manville said.

“You know the situation I’m in, I told you some of it.”

“You told me some,” Manville agreed. “I guess you thought you told me too much.”

“I was running on panic, George,” Curtis said, “what should have been a perfect day was completely destroyed. Your technique on Kanowit Island was perfect, it showed me I can do it again when I need to. My investors were happy, very impressed. But all of a sudden there was Jerry Diedrich, that son of a bitch, spoiling my day yet again. And I realized, the man would find some way to trip me up when I was ready to make the move, the real move. Don’t worry, George, I’m not going to tell you any more about that move. I maybe didn’t tell you too much, out there on the Mallory, but I almost did. It’ll be better for both of us if you don’t know any more than you know now.”

“Fine by me.”

“The thing is, I panicked,” Curtis said. “And then one damn thing led to another. First, Diedrich is going to destroy me. But no, he killed a diver and I can destroy him. No, the goddam girl’s alive, I’m back to square one. But she should be dead, She’s beat up enough, maybe she’ll die. Maybe there’s no reason for her to live. And you know, if you hadn’t intervened, between us, Captain Zhang and me, we would have finished her off.”

“I know you would.”

“And we would have been wrong. I would have been wrong, completely wrong. But I didn’t realize that then. And I was damn angry at you when you interfered, as you know.”

“You made it pretty plain,” Manville said. “The people you sent out made it plain.”

“You astonished me, George,” Curtis said. “I admit it, I was astonished. You’re a handier man than I gave you credit for. But the point is, you did handle it. You handled me, and you handled the men I sent out, and now you and the girl are both still alive, and I realize I’m in no worse shape than I was before, I can still go ahead the same as ever. I can defuse Jerry Diedrich some other way, and I’ve got nothing to get in my way except my own damn foolishness. I didn’t have to panic, I didn’t have to make you an enemy, it was foolish of me, and I regret it. When I was trying to do you harm, George, you knew I wasn’t in my right mind, didn’t you?”

“I suspected,” Manville said.

“All right, George,” Curtis said. “I’d like us to start all over, from now. And I have a deal to offer.”

“A deal?”

“I’d like you to stay here a few days,” Curtis said. “A week or two at the most. Think of it as a vacation.”

“Why?”

“So I can find you if I need you.” Now Curtis was intense again, leaning forward in his own soft low chair, saying, “George, you know I’m going to do something big, and you know it’s going to be soon, and you know I’m going to use the soliton.”

“That’s what you told me.”

“I felt I could trust you, George. In a funny way, I still do.” He gave Manville a keen look, and a rueful smile, and said, “You probably think the question of trust goes the other way.”

“If it’s a question,” Manville said.

“Oh, it is, George, it is. But here’s the thing. I think I can pull this off on my own, but there may be questions I can’t answer. The people I’m working with aren’t your caliber, George. I’d like to think, if I got stuck, I could give you a call, right here, and ask you a question in a general way, not too specific, nothing that makes you a collaborator or an accessory or any of that, and you would answer it.”

“For the ten million in gold, again?”

Curtis shook his head. “I don’t know why money doesn’t interest you, George, that’s one thing I can’t figure out.”

“It interests me,” Manville said.

“Then there’s hope. Look, George, if you stay here, no more than two weeks, I promise, probably a lot less, I’ll give you whatever it is you want. Money, no money, that’s all right with me. The first thing, though...” His smile this time was sly, pleased with itself. “You know about the industrial espionage?”

“I’ve been in a number of newspapers,” Manville told him. “Yes, I know about it.”

“I’ll get rid of it,” Curtis said. “Guaranteed. I’ll explain it was my error, you weren’t the guy, sorry I blackened your name, a public apology and you’re cleared and as good as new. All right?”

This was important. If Curtis did this, whatever else happened, Manville would be able to get on with his life. As it now stood, no one on earth would hire him. He said, “When?”

“Tomorrow,” Curtis told him. “Saturday isn’t a problem, with news. I’ll get it on CNN International by tomorrow night.” Pointing generally away at the interior of the house, he said, “We’ve got dish reception here, you’ll see it for yourself.”

“It would be good. If you did that,” Manville agreed.

Curtis said, “George, you see now how easy I can knock you down, and how easy I can pick you up again.”

“Yes.”

“So I’m just asking you to help me, in a small way. And otherwise I’m only asking you to keep out of the way. Because believe me, I don’t need Pallifer and his friends—”

“Who?”

Curtis laughed, surprised. “No formal introductions, eh? The people who brought you here.”

“Pallifer. He’d be the one I met on the ship. Morgan?”

“The same. And you don’t ever have to meet him again, George. And you don’t have to read about yourself in the newspaper, either. Just take a little vacation, right here at Kennison. Do you ride?”

“Horses? No, I never have.”

“We have horses here, you could learn,” Curtis offered. “Albert taught me to ride, and if he could teach somebody like me, he can teach anybody. It’s a relaxing place, George, a beautiful time out from the cares of the world. I envy you, I honestly do, ten days or two weeks in this place, no worries, no problems.”

Manville said, “And Kim?”

Curtis looked blank. “What about her?” Then he suddenly seemed to understand. “Oh, what am I going to do about her!”

“Yes.”

“Nothing, George, why should I? If she was dead on the ship, then she’s a club I can beat Jerry Diedrich with. Now she doesn’t mean a thing, and I’ll get at Diedrich some other way.”

“But what if she went to the police?”

“And said what, George? That I did something to her? I saved her life, that’s all, rescued her from the sea, carried her safe to shore in my own yacht. If somebody tried to harm her in any way, what does that have to do with me?” Curtis leaned closer to say, “George, if I could swat you down without half-trying, what sort of threat is this girl?”

“You’re not afraid she’ll raise questions.”

“About what? No, George, I’m safe from her, and therefore she’s safe from me.”

Was that true? Curtis was so devious, yet so apparently straightforward, that Manville had constant trouble figuring out what the man really wanted, what he really meant, what was lie and what was truth. “Your people were after her today,” he said.

“To find you,” Curtis told him. “That was the only reason. Then they did find you, so they weren’t looking for her anymore.”

Again, what Curtis said was plausible, without being quite persuasive. Manville brooded on it, trying to think his way through Curtis’s words, while the man watched him, half-smiling. He said, “What if I don’t want to stay here? What if I want to leave, tomorrow?”

Curtis sat back, but didn’t lose the half smile. “I hope you won’t feel that way, George. I hope we don’t have to deal with it. I tell you what.” He sat up again. “Sleep on it. We’ll talk again tomorrow morning, Cindy and I aren’t leaving until after lunch. Think it over, and we’ll talk, and as soon as we’ve reached an agreement you can sit there and watch me get on the phone to get rid of that espionage story. Immediately. All right?”

There was nothing to be gained by arguing. “All right,” Manville said.

“Fine.” Curtis got to his feet, and so did Manville. “We’ve worked well together, George,” Curtis said. “I’m sorry it turned bad for a while.”

“So am I.”

Curtis put his hand out. Hiding his surprise, Manville took it, and Curtis shook his hand with self-conscious pomp, as though some important international treaty had just been signed. “I’m glad we had this talk, George,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Good night.”

“Good night,” Manville said, and turned away.

As he walked back down the long room toward the dining area, its table now cleared, headed back toward his no-longer prison, or possibly prison again, Manville was very aware of Curtis behind him, standing as Manville had left him, unmoving amid the low sofas, the great gray stone wall of fireplace behind him, watching Manville recede. He’s wondering if he’s pulled it off, Manville knew. He’s wondering if he has me fixed in place, or if I’m going to go on being a pest. And I’m wondering the same thing myself.

If I tell him no tomorrow, I’ve thought it over, and I don’t want to stay here, beautiful and restful though Kennison might be, what then? Will he just allow me to leave, like that? Unlikely. If I don’t give him my parole, what else would he do but simply make me a prisoner?

What was it that Curtis was going to attempt, sometime in the next ten days or two weeks? If Manville did nothing about it, would he regret that? Would people be hurt, or even killed? What is Richard Curtis up to?

Should he try to escape tonight? Assuming the door to his room was left unlocked, should he try to get out of here? It was impossible to believe they would have left any of the vehicles where he could get at them, but even if they did, which way would he drive? The road into here was barely a track in the dirt, difficult enough for Curtis’s own chauffeur to find at night, and constantly blocked by stray cattle. Kennison was who knew how many thousands of acres in size. There was no way to get off it tonight.

Tomorrow? Were Pallifer and the other two still around? Manville for a giddy second visualized Albert Farrelly teaching him to ride a horse and then, magically, Manville atop the horse, racing over the downs to freedom.

He left the dining room, and started down the empty hall toward his room. Curtis had been ingratiating tonight, persuasive, reasonable, plausible; but Manville wanted none of it. He wanted nothing but to leave this place. For now, he entered the small neat guestroom and shut the door. Richard Curtis is at his most dangerous, he thought, when he seems the most sane.

14

Jerry was amazed and delighted at how seriously the police were taking their story, which they’d now told three times. The first time was to a detective in the police station where he and Luther and Kim had gone to report the disappearance of George Manville, the second was to his superior at the same station, and now the third time was to an extremely senior inspector in his office here in police headquarters.

The inspector was a very tall, large-framed tweedy man with thick gray brushlike hair and astonishingly dainty granny glasses perched on his hawk nose. His name, he said, was Tony Fairchild, which seemed too diminutive for such a large man, and as he listened he made many notes on a legal pad on his desk in tiny crabbed writing that surely no one else would ever be able to read.

Other plainclothes detectives were in and out of the small but sunny office, going on mysterious errands at nods and hand gestures from Fairchild, returning with equally mysterious nods or headshakes of their own. Sometimes they returned with small slips of paper, which they put on his desk and at which he barely glanced.

Saturday morning. Before breakfast, Kim had come to their room, where she’d phoned the motel in Surfers Paradise, to be told that George Manville had not as yet returned. After breakfast at the hotel, she’d led them to the parking lot where the red car was still where Manville had left it. So then they’d gone to the police.

By now, it was nearly eleven o’clock, and Jerry was beginning to feel talked out. Kim had described the events on the ship at length, Jerry and Luther had described their own activities, Kim’s parents’ whereabouts in Sydney were given, the parents’ unprofitable meeting with Captain Zhang related, Jerry and Luther’s own encounter with Zhang told, and finally the disappearance of George Manville.

Oddly, Fairchild seemed for a while most interested in Captain Zhang, wanting to know every detail of the encounter between him and Jerry and Luther, asking if they’d been in Zhang’s hotel room for even a second. “I would have,” Jerry told him, “I’d have gone right on in and insisted he tell us the truth, but Luther wouldn’t let me.”

“Hard to know if that would have made a difference,” Fairchild said, and at last left that issue to say to Kim, “The lawyer Manville was going to see. His office was in the Mansions in George Street?”

“I think so,” Kim said. “I think that’s what he said.”

“And he told you the name, but you don’t remember it.”

“I’m sorry,” Kim said. “I didn’t know I was going to have to.”

“Of course not,” Fairchild agreed. He was managing to be both remote and sympathetic at the same time. “There aren’t that many lawyers in the Mansions,” he said. “Was it a European name or an Asian name, do you remember?”

“It sounded European, I think,” she said, “but it wasn’t anything ordinary.”

Fairchild brooded, gazing at the far wall over his granny glasses, then he frowned at Kim and said, “Just a minute. You say Manville got to this lawyer through a friend in America.”

“An architect in Houston, he said. I’m sorry, I don’t know his name either.”

“Building trades,” Fairchild said. “Manville is in that line, his Houston friend is, he would have sent him on to someone in the same sort of line here, so it’s a lawyer who represents architects or developers or— Would the name be Andre Brevizin?”

“Yes!” Kim said, delighted. “That’s what he said. I remember it sounded like too nice a name for a lawyer.”

Fairchild laughed. “I expect we have areas of agreement, Miss Baldur,” he said. “Although I doubted it at first, when I heard the story you wished to tell.”

“Richard Curtis, you mean,” she said.

Fairchild nodded. “Among other things. But let us look at what I began with. Two days ago, in this city, your Mr. Curtis brought a complaint to the police — not to me, I’m sorry to say, I wish I’d met the man, considering subsequent events — a complaint charging a former employee, one George Manville, with industrial espionage and theft. I’ve had a looksee at the complaint itself, and he did seem to have sufficient evidence for the charge.”

Jerry wanted to break in here with a ringing denunciation of Richard Curtis as a polluter and a well-known liar, but he restrained himself.

“Now this morning,” Fairchild went on, “an unknown young American lady, yourself, with no identification but claiming a friendly relationship with the same George Manville, presents herself to the police with a wild story of kidnapping, piracy, attempted murder and the suspicious disappearance of the man Manville himself, all pointing to Richard Curtis as the villain. I must admit. Miss Baldur, at first blush you did not bring us anything we could be expected to take seriously.”

“But you do take it seriously,” Kim said. “I can see you take it seriously.”

“For one reason only,” Fairchild told her. “It is why you were brought to this office, and not dealt with rather summarily at a lower level.”

Kim, looking uncertain, possibly a little afraid, so that Jerry had the urge to grasp her hand but again restrained himself, said, “Why is that?”

Fairchild lowered his head enough to look at them all, one at a time, over his granny glasses. Jerry had to force himself to meet that steady look. “I take it,” Fairchild said, “none of you has had any dealings with Captain Zhang Yung-tsien since your unsatisfactory interview with him yesterday.”

Jerry felt heat rising in his cheeks. Had Zhang dared to put in his own complaint? He said, more hotly than he’d intended, “Inspector, if Captain Zhang suggests we—”

Fairchild stopped him with an upraised hand. “Not at all,” he said. “Captain Zhang went out his hotel room window yesterday afternoon, very near to the time you and Mr. Rickendorf spoke with him.”

Jerry could only stare, open-mouthed. His first reaction was: I did it! I pressed him too hard, I forced him, I should have found a better way, a quieter way... “Oh God. What have I done?” He covered his face with his hands.

He wasn’t really aware of the charged silence in the room until Fairchild broke it by saying, “Mr. Diedrich? What have you done?”

Then Jerry realized what he’d said, what he’d implied, and he lowered his hands, showing his flushed face, and said, “No no no! I mean — we shouldn’t have pressed him so hard, I had no idea he...” Turning, he said, “Luther, you know what I mean!”

Luther said to Fairchild, “Did he leave a note?”

“Hard to say,” Fairchild said.

Luther gave a small smile of disbelief and said, “Inspector, how can it be hard to say if he left a note?”

“On the memo pad beside his bed,” Fairchild explained, “in Chinese, was his wife’s name, and ‘I love you,’ nothing more. If it’s a suicide note, it’s certainly an ambiguous one. The other possibility is that he was just starting a letter to his wife when he was interrupted by his murderer.”

Jerry said, “Oh, my God! You don’t think we—”

Luther, gently but firmly, said, “Stop, Jerry. The inspector doesn’t think we have anything to do with it at all.”

“Well, if it was suicide, you did,” Fairchild said. “In a way. You made it clear to Captain Zhang that the questions would only continue, and only get worse.” He tapped one of the pieces of paper that had been delivered to his desk. “Miss Baldur’s parents have confirmed to the Sydney police your account of their meeting with Captain Zhang. It is clear he did speak English, and it is clear he pretended not to be able to, because he was afraid to be questioned on the subject of Miss Baldur. Now that Miss Baldur is alive, rather than dead, we can understand why he was afraid.”

“He felt guilty,” Jerry said, feeling mixed emotions himself. “He was guilty.”

Fairchild tapped a fingernail on his desk, then said, “You may all consider yourselves lucky that Captain Zhang became as desperate as he did, or that someone else became that desperate, because the captain’s death is, so far, absolutely the only confirmation we have of your story. Whether it’s suicide or murder, it effectively eliminates the weakest link.”

Luther said, “Inspector, you still think it might be murder?”

“We can’t rule that out, not yet. There was no sign of struggle. There was that note, however ambiguous. There was the timing, immediately after you two questioned him about Miss Baldur. We would, however, prefer not to be too hasty in our conclusions. There’s no need to close that issue at once.”

A policeman had brought in another slip of paper while Fairchild was talking, and placed it on his desk. Fairchild looked at it, raised an eyebrow, and looked back up at Kim. “Well, we seem to have another potential corroboration of your story. Looked at a certain way.”

Kim said, “What? What’s happened?”

“This morning,” Fairchild told her, “less than an hour ago, from an undisclosed location, Richard Curtis announced he’d been misinformed about George Manville, that Manville was innocent of the charges brought against him two days ago. All charges have been dropped and Manville is once again employed by Curtis Construction. This was a sort of press conference, a teleconferencing hookup with a number of prominent business newspapers and television outlets, including CNN, which is where we got it. George Manville is no longer charged with any crime.” Fairchild tapped the piece of paper. “It would seem, Miss Baldur,” he said, not without sympathy, “that your friend is Richard Curtis’s friend now.”

15

After lunch, Curtis went riding for an hour with Albert Farrelly. Albert showed him the new swales that had been bulldozed since he’d been here last.

“It’s terrific work, Albert,” Curtis said. “First-rate work.”

They rode on, and Curtis said, “Albert, you know that George Manville is staying here for a week or two.”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Albert said. “We’ll take care of him, make him feel at home.”

“Do that. But the truth is, Albert,” Curtis said, as they rode side by side, quartering westward now, looping toward home, “he’s not actually a guest here so much as a prisoner — though he doesn’t know it. Or I hope he doesn’t know it.”

Surprised, Albert said, “Prisoner? I thought he was a friend of yours. Isn’t he who you were talking about, on the TV?”

“He is. I had to give him that, Albert,” Curtis explained, “because he’s in a position where he could make a lot of trouble for me, over the next few weeks, if he really wanted to. And I think he may want to.”

“Good heavens, Mr. Curtis, why?”

“It’s hard to know why a man turns against you,” Curtis said. “I thought we worked well together. It may be he thought I was taking too much credit, or not paying him well enough, or who knows what. He knows my plans, a big construction job coming up, and he could make a great deal of trouble for me if he decided to. That’s why I want him to stay here. He agreed, all right, but I have to tell you I don’t entirely trust him.”

Solemnly, Albert said, “Mr. Curtis, what do you want me to do?”

“Keep an eye on him. Don’t let him have any of the vehicles, for any reason at all. It would be better not to let him near a phone; remove them all, except in your office and bedroom, and keep those doors locked.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if you think he’s planning something he shouldn’t,” Curtis went on, “those three fellows that brought him here, that are over in the spare barracks, they’ll take care of things for you. Just talk to Morgan Pallifer. But not unless there’s something you don’t think you can handle by yourself.”

“Those fellas,” Albert said, and he couldn’t entirely keep a tinge of distaste from his voice, “aren’t the sort I’m used to, Mr. Curtis.”

“I feel the same way about them,” Curtis assured him. “But sometimes we have to use the tools at hand. One or more of them may leave for a while early next week, but most of the time they’ll be here, and we’ll make sure Manville knows it. Oh, and if Morgan wants to use the phone, let him use the one in the office.”

“Yes, sir.” Albert managed a shaky laugh. “Even in a paradise like this,” he said, “life can get complex can’t it?”

“It surely can,” Curtis said.

Leaving the horses with Albert, Curtis walked over to the building they called the spare barracks, a long low adobe shoebox of a structure, with a verandah on one long side. Entering the building, Curtis heard the sound of the TV, followed it, and found the three men sprawled on sofas, watching an old MGM musical, the bright colors looking bruised on the screen. “Morgan,” Curtis said, and gestured, and Pallifer got to his feet, glanced one last time at the girls dancing in white crinoline, and came out of the room with him.

“We’re off in a few minutes,” Curtis told him, as they walked together down the hall. “Now, I’ve got my agreement with Manville, and I think he’s the kind will stick to it, but in case he does try to leave, you’ll stop him.”

As they went out the wide door to the verandah, Pallifer said, “How hard do I stop him?”

They stood under the verandah roof. Curtis squinted across at the adobe main house, dun-colored, disappearing into the landscape despite its two-story height. “You don’t kill him,” he said, “unless you absolutely have to. But if he makes trouble... let me put it this way. I don’t need him to be able to walk, I just need him to be able to think.”

“For two weeks maximum, you say.”

Curtis looked at Pallifer, the leathery face, the cold sharp eyes, the bony brow. What a nasty son of a bitch, Curtis thought. I’m glad I own him, and nobody else. “When I’m finished what I’m doing,” he said, “you and Manville can work out whatever problems you two might have, makes no difference to me.”

Pallifer smiled his mean little smile. Those small white teeth weren’t his own, but they gave him the right carnivore look. He said, “How will I know when you’re finished?”

Curtis laughed. He was so full of his secret that it kept bubbling out of him, he couldn’t help it. “You’ll know,” he promised, and patted Pallifer’s rock-hard shoulder. “Don’t worry, Morgan, you’ll know.”

“If you say so,” Pallifer agreed.

Curtis looked at the main house again. Manville was in there somewhere. Fixed in place? Time would tell. “About the girl,” he said.

“No change, I take it.”

“No change. Monday or Tuesday, you should know where she is. As far as the world’s concerned, she’s already dead, somewhere else, so you shouldn’t leave any bodies lying around, to confuse things.”

“I got that.”

Curtis nodded at the main house. “And he shouldn’t know,” he said. “It could make the agreement come unstuck.”

“I’ll play Manville like a guitar,” Pallifer promised. “The way those old rock stars used to. Play it and play it, and at the end you smash it up.”

The shower connected to the master bedroom was almost a room in itself, a large square space with two tiled walls and two clear lucite walls. Washing off the trail dust from his ride with Albert, Curtis felt good, better than he’d felt in months, maybe years. Revenge was coming, and profit was coming. When he was finished, he’d be the richest man he knew, one of the richest men in the world. And safe as houses. Even if there were people who suspected he’d had something to do with the disaster, nobody would be able to prove it. The evidence would be gone, destroyed, buried like the Japanese barracks on Kanowit Island. Washed clean away, like the orangey-tan dust of Kennison, swirling away down the shower drain.

Cindy was in the main room, packing her overnight bag when he came out. “Call one of the boys to take our things to the chopper,” he told her, crossing the room to the closets. “I just have to say a word to George, and we’re off.”

He found Manville in the library, reading a history of the early days in Australia, when it was being settled by convicts from Britain. Brisbane, Curtis remembered, was settled exclusively by convicts who’d committed fresh crimes after arriving in Australia; what a beginning.

“We’re off, George.”

Manville closed his book and rose from his low leather chair. “I guess you’ll be phoning me,” he said.

Curtis noticed that, from where Manville had been sitting, he’d had a clear view out a window to the spare barracks and the verandah. Had he watched Curtis and Morgan talk together over there? Did he guess any of what they’d been saying to one another? Curtis said, “If you need anything while you’re here, ask Morgan, he’ll be traveling back and forth.”

“And keeping an eye on me,” Manville said.

Curtis’s smile was easy, relaxed. “I trust you, George,” he said. “You’re a man of your word, and so am I.”

“It does take two,” Manville agreed.

Curtis stuck out his hand. “We’ll talk.”

Why did Manville always seem so surprised, every time Curtis offered to shake hands? I’m accepting you as an equal, you damn fool, Curtis said inside his head, be grateful for it.

Manville did consent to the handshake, grasping Curtis’s hand briefly, then letting go. “Have a good trip,” he said.

Curtis was almost out of the house, following Cindy, when Helen Farrelly called to him from down the hall. “You go ahead,” he told the girl, “I’ll catch up.”

Helen bustled up to him, but not, as he’d expected, merely to say goodbye. “We’ve had a phone call just a few minutes ago,” she said. “Some sad news.”

“Oh?”

“The captain of your yacht. Captain Zhang?”

What now? Curtis thought, and knew at once that this was fresh trouble. “Yes? Captain Zhang?”

“He’s killed himself, Mr. Curtis,” she said. “And no one knows why.”

16

The flight from Brisbane to Sydney was full, and delayed, so that they sat on the ground for twenty minutes before takeoff. Kim didn’t care. She was too full of everything else that was happening to worry about simple problems like travel delays. She was both eager and apprehensive, eager to see her parents, and apprehensive about George Manville.

Could George really have caved in to Richard Curtis, the way everybody else thought, even that police inspector, Fairchild? She couldn’t believe it, and yet what other explanation was there? Why would Curtis clear George’s name — as casually as he’d smeared it — if George hadn’t agreed to come over to his side, to help him in whatever it was he was scheming?

But how could she have been so wrong about him?

They’d given Kim the window seat, with Jerry in the middle seat to her left, and Luther on the aisle. She sat and looked out at other planes landing and taking off, little trucks scurrying busily this way and that, and her brain scurried like the little trucks around the problem of George Manville, while beside her Luther and Jerry talked. Until something Luther said attracted her attention, and she turned away from the dreary sight of Brisbane International Airport to say, “What was that? Where are you going from Sydney?”

“Singapore,” Jerry repeated.

“But why?”

“Curtis, of course,” Jerry said, surprised at her. “If what he’s up to next is so damn important, if he was actually willing to commit murder just to keep me from finding out what he’s doing — and I must say I didn’t know I was that important in his life, the bastard, and I’m glad I am — well, I have to find out what he’s doing, don’t I?”

“I suppose,” Kim said. She hadn’t been thinking about Richard Curtis at all.

Jerry said, “And his headquarters is in Singapore, and I just happen to have a friend in his offices there, he’ll know what’s going on, or he’ll be able to find out.”

“This is the man,” Kim said, “that told you things before, about what Curtis was doing.”

“Like Kanowit Island, for instance,” Jerry said. “Yes. So we’ll go to Singapore, Luther and I, and we’ll find out what Curtis is up to, and we’ll stop him cold.”

“I’ll come with you,” Kim said, so quickly that the words were out of her mouth almost before the thought was in her head.

Jerry frowned at her. “Why? Kim, haven’t you been kicked around enough?”

“I want to know what George is up to,” she said. “If Richard Curtis is based in Singapore, and if that’s where he’s planning whatever it is he’s going to do, then that’s where George will be.”

Luther, leaning forward to speak past Jerry, said, “Kim, if you’ll take advice from an old campaigner in the wars of love, forget the name George Manville. Go home to Chicago with your mother and father.”

Kim knew that Luther meant well, and that he felt kindly toward her, but every time he tried to say something sympathetic, it came out sounding like an order that you were almost honor-bound to disobey. “Thank you, Luther,” she said. “You may be right, but I just can’t walk away from all this until I know what’s going on. If you and Jerry don’t want me along, I’ll go to Singapore on my own.”

“It’s not that at all,” Jerry said. He put a hand on Luther’s arm.

Luther shook his head. “If you’re that determined to go into the lion’s den, Kim,” he said, “and Jerry’s determined to let you, better you stick with us.”

“Thank you,” she said, and the plane jerked forward, on its way at last.

Tired, cranky passengers pressed against one another like cattle in a chute, getting off the plane. Kim just let the movement take her, not really caring anymore, but then she saw her dad’s face back there among the people waiting, and next to him Mom, and she waved her arm high above her head and saw them start when they spotted her, and she began pushing and shoving along with everybody else.

Greetings were breathless, and incoherent at first, until they got away from the deplaning crowds, and then her dad said, “I rented a car, just follow me. Is that all your luggage?”

She held up the new string bag she’d bought this morning in Brisbane. “It’s all I’ve got.”

Dad turned to Jerry and Luther, saying, “We’ll give you a lift to the hotel.”

Kim’s mom put her arm through Kim’s, leaning in to say, “When I thought you were dead, Kim, it was the worst day of my life.” Kim pulled her close. Her chest still ached, but she didn’t care.

She’d tell them about Singapore later. They’d try to argue her out of it, like Luther had, and she’d stand her ground, and maybe there’d be tears or shouting. But that would be later. Right now she just felt so good to have her mom’s hand in hers and to squeeze it tight.

17

By Sunday afternoon, Manville was edgy, tense, frustrated. He was also desperately bored. He knew his best move right now was not to move at all, to stay here at Kennison as though he intended to stick to his bargain with Curtis, but it wasn’t easy. Still, if he did stay put, just for a few days, if he gave the impression he intended to make no trouble, then Curtis should have no reason to go on pursuing Kim, and the clearing of Manville’s name would not be interrupted, and when the time was right he could still do his best to stop Curtis from whatever scheme the man had in mind.

But it was hard, it was very hard. Manville was active by nature, a doer, not a contemplater. There was nothing to do here at Kennison, and beyond that, he was absolutely alone now, since Curtis had clearly said something to the Farrellys; they were cold now, distant, utterly unlike the friendly couple at dinner the first night. Now he ate his meals alone, served by silent staff members in their tan pantsuits.

He had access to almost the entire house — he stayed away from what was clearly the Farrellys’ quarters, and they kept the downstairs office locked when they weren’t in it — and he was permitted to roam the nearby countryside as well. At times, he sat and watched television, without absorbing any of it, or he leafed through books in the library without taking in the words. And every minute was interminable.

His room wasn’t locked at night, and the servants treated him as though he were an ordinary houseguest. But the vehicles in the garage had had their ignition keys removed, and whenever he went for a walk he was aware of Steve or Raf, some distance away, keeping an eye on him. And, worst of all, there were no telephones.

It had to be deliberate. There wasn’t a telephone to be seen, not even in the kitchen, though there were phone outlets here and there, and it seemed to Manville he remembered a telephone on a particular end table in the living room when he’d had his first surreal conversation with Curtis.

So Curtis didn’t want him making contact with the outside world, which wasn’t a surprise. But he needed to. He needed to know when the time was right to get out of here, and more than that, he needed to try to reach Kim.

He’d had no contact with Kim since he’d gone to see the lawyer, Brevizin. She’d escaped from Curtis’s men then, but was she safe now? Had she managed to contact her friends at Planetwatch?

Also, she probably knew by now that Curtis had taken back his charges against Manville, which would have to look as though Manville had despite everything gone back to work for Curtis, had become her enemy again. He wanted her to know that wasn’t true.

But how could he reach her, how could he reach anybody in the outer world, without a telephone? Kennison was a huge sprawling estate in the middle of nowhere. The nearest neighbor, supposedly, was more than fifty miles away.

The frustration was grinding him down. What if he just gave up this whole plan? He was faking agreement with Curtis, going along with him as though their differences were settled, only to find out what the man was up to; but what if he stopped? What if he managed to escape, though he didn’t yet see how he could do that, and made his way back to Brisbane? Found Kim, went with her to the lawyer, then went to the police? What would Curtis do then?

Three things, that Manville could think of. He would bury Manville and Kim under a horde of lawyers. He would turn Pallifer and the others loose again, to hunt Manville and Kim down and rid himself of them forever. And he would go on with his plan, whatever it was, with no one left to stop him.

Sunday afternoon. Manville roamed the house. In the game room, trying to distract himself, he shot a little pool, and found he had to resist the urge to smash something with the cuestick. On a side wall in here stood a glass-doored gun rack; it was unlocked, and it was empty.

No more pool. He roamed again, and came to the door of the office, which was shut and locked, the Farrellys being away in their own quarters or somewhere else on the grounds. Beyond this door would be telephones, and guns, and keys to the various cars. He touched the knob, waggled it. Tonight, could he manage to break in here?

“Oh, sir, please be careful.”

He turned, and it was the woman who’d brought him the change of clothes his first night. He said, “Yes?”

She came toward him down the hall, smiling in a friendly way, but looking concerned. “You must be careful with that door,” she said. “There’s a very loud alarm, when it’s locked. If you break the circuit, it would be terribly embarrassing.”

Manville took his hand away from the knob. “Embarrassing,” he said. “Yes, I suppose it would.”

18

It was becoming a joke, but not one Curtis appreciated. Every time he tried to get to Singapore, it seemed, he wound up back in this same penthouse suite in the Heritage in Brisbane. This time, he was waiting to be interviewed by some local policeman named Fairchild, and the subject, stupidly enough, was Captain Zhang.

Killed himself. The man killed himself. Why in God’s name did he have to go and do that? And at this time of all times, when the last thing Richard Curtis wanted was official attention. What he planned to do was going to be very loud and very obvious and very destructive, and half the police officers in the world would be looking for the person who’d put it together. Curtis intended to keep himself well in the clear, before, during and after. He wanted not the slightest suspicion pointed in his direction. He was a businessman, he had a solid reputation, he was already rich; who would look at Richard Curtis?

Unfortunately, there were now two people who could cause the police to at least glance in the direction of Richard Curtis. They didn’t know enough to stop him ahead of time, but they could certainly finger him afterward, and Curtis had no desire to be a man in hiding the rest of his life. So those two people had to be dealt with, and then no one else could be permitted to learn anything at all about what was to come.

But at least he had a plan. Pallifer would get rid of the girl in the next couple of days, and Manville would remain on ice at Kennison, to be useful if necessary during the operation, and to be dispatched immediately after. So the situation was tricky, but it could be handled. It would be handled.

And now, in the middle of it, damn Zhang has to kill himself! The police would want to know why, of course, and Curtis would have no explanation, nothing but baffled sorrow and sympathy. Zhang had been a good employee, Curtis had had no idea anything was wrong; maybe at home? Without answers, the police would keep asking questions, but Curtis knew better than to make something up. Remain baffled, and wait for it to blow over.

Would Zhang have confided in anybody else on the crew?

It seemed unlikely, but just to be on the safe side, tomorrow morning every man of them would leave Australia. Curtis would lease another ship, hire a captain, man the new ship with the old crew, and send it any damn place; Singapore, why not?

“Probably get there before I do,” he muttered, glowering at the Botanical Gardens down below, and the doorbell softly ding-donged.

Three o’clock exactly. Police Inspector Fairchild was a prompt man, apparently. Let him be impatient, too, Curtis thought, as he crossed to the door, let him not give a single shit about some dead Chinaman.

On the phone, Inspector Tony Fairchild had sounded like an older man, gruff-voiced, perhaps pedantic. In person, though, he was something else, more impressive and, if you were the kind to be intimidated, intimidating. He was considerably taller than Curtis, big-boned with very little body fat, and with large big-knuckled hands. He had a hawk head, topped by a stiff brush of gray hair, and he had turned what must be a habitual squint into something that looked more like a disapproving frown. “Mr. Curtis,” he said.

“Come in, Inspector. You’re prompt.”

“I thought you’d appreciate that, being a businessman,” Fairchild said, as they shook hands. “Time is money, isn’t that it?”

“That is certainly it,” Curtis agreed. “Come sit over here.”

As they crossed to the sofas, Fairchild looked around in approval, saying, “The last time I was in here, it was to pick up a pair of stock swindlers. Lived high, they did, for a while. These days, to them, I’m afraid, time is only a sentence.”

They sat, and from his various pockets Fairchild took a notebook, a pen, and a pair of tiny granny glasses. “Captain Zhang Yung-tsien,” he said.

Curtis sighed, and shook his head. “Poor Captain Zhang. I am absolutely astounded.”

“No hint this was coming?”

“None. Well, in truth, I don’t know the man — I mean, I didn’t know the man that well.”

“Only as an employee.”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Three years.”

“You get to know a man in three years, don’t you, Mr. Curtis?”

“If you’re around him all the time,” Curtis said. “The Mallory is a luxury, Inspector, that I justify by having business meetings on it. I had one last week. Before that, it was probably four months since I’d been on the ship. In three years, I suppose I’ve been around Captain Zhang for a total of less than two months.”

“What does he do— There you are, I’m doing it, too. What did he do with himself the rest of the time?”

“Yachts are not fast,” Curtis said. “If I want him in San Francisco, let us say, two weeks from today, he should leave Brisbane by Wednesday at the latest. Most of the time, Captain Zhang was moving the Mallory toward where I wanted it next, without me being aboard.”

“And when you were aboard, it was usually business.”

“Always,” Curtis said. “I have a station out beyond the Darling Downs, that’s where I go to rest, when I can. That’s where I was when the word came about Captain Zhang.”

“You’d gone there from the ship.”

“Yes.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Fairchild said, peering at Curtis over the top of his little glasses, “this most recent time, what business were you doing on the ship?”

“We’re planning a new destination resort,” Curtis told him, “on an island out by the reef. I have partners, and we were looking at the first stage of construction.”

Fairchild had opened his notebook to a page covered with cramped little writing. He gazed through his glasses at it, then over them at Curtis again, and said, “This work was in the charge of an engineer named Manville?”

“George Manville, yes,” Curtis said, and laughed. “You’ve probably seen our names together in the news, just yesterday.”

“Yes, I did,” Fairchild agreed. “First, he’d stolen secrets from you, and second he hadn’t.”

“It’s a long story,” Curtis said. “I’m sure it has nothing to do with Captain Zhang.”

“Still,” Fairchild said. “I’m the tidy type, I like to roll all the pieces of string onto the same ball.”

“Someone had stolen privileged information from me,” Curtis said. “It looked as though it must have been Manville. Angry, I made too hasty an accusation. Robert Bendix is a competitor of mine, who either did or did not pay for these documents. At first, he wouldn’t say anything, which is why I thought Manville must be guilty, but it was merely that Bendix didn’t want to have to point to the actual thief. Bendix and I know each other, we’re friendly rivals, so eventually we spoke on the phone and he cleared Manville’s name, and I was happy he had. George and I have always gotten along very well.”

“And where is Mr. Manville now?”

“On his way to Singapore,” Curtis said. “Which is where I’m supposed to be right now, myself. My main office is there.”

“So if I wanted to talk to Mr. Manville,” Fairchild said, “I’d have to go through your Singapore office.”

“That would be simplest,” Curtis agreed. “But what do you want with George? He knew Captain Zhang even less than I did.”

“Still, he might have some ideas.” Fairchild frowned at his notes again. “I believe there was a young woman guest on your ship as well,” he said. “One Kimberly Baldur.”

Curtis didn’t like this. The conversation had been ranging too far from Captain Zhang almost since they’d sat down together. And now Kim Baldur. What is this police inspector up to?

The girl has gone to the police. That has to be the answer. She told who knows what story, and at the same time Curtis and Manville are in public with accusations and then retractions, and to top it all Captain Zhang has to commit suicide. Naturally this inspector is intrigued; what’s going on here?

All right, he’s talked with Kim Baldur. What does she know? Nothing that matters, not if this police inspector can be dealt with here and now. Tread carefully, and all will be all right.

Curtis chuckled. “Kimberly Baldur. Kim. Yes. Not exactly a guest.”

“Tell me about her.”

Curtis did, from the explosions on Kanowit Island to her unconscious in a cabin when he and his business partners helicoptered back to Townsville. And through it all, Fairchild took no notes; meaning he already knew all this.

At the end, Fairchild said, “What happened to Kimberly Baldur next?”

“I have no idea,” Curtis said. “I haven’t been interested enough to ask. I assume she got off the ship here in Brisbane.”

“Well, no,” Fairchild said. “She had no passport or other identification, as I understand it, but there’s no record of her arrival at Immigration, and there would be.”

Curtis did his own angry frown. “Just a second,” he said. “The reason Mallory’s still here is because she lost a lifeboat. I was told it was just an error, carelessness when the boats were brought back aboard at Kanowit. Does Kim Baldur have something to do with that boat?”

“Ms. Baldur says,” Fairchild answered, admitting his knowledge at last, “that people boarded the ship out by Moreton, intending to do her harm, and she and George Manville escaped.”

Curtis displayed astonishment. “Pirates? This close to Brisbane? I’ve never— There are things like that hundreds of miles from here, but not in these waters.”

“It is her belief,” Fairchild said, “that you sent those people.”

“Me? Good God!”

“She believes you wanted her dead,” Fairchild went on, “to help you deal with your problems with Planetwatch.”

“This is a very crazy and very paranoid young lady,” Curtis said. “Inspector, I have lawyers to deal with the groups like Planetwatch, and they do it very well. The situation is, the environmentalists are on one side, and the developers are on the other, and we both lobby government, and compromises are worked out, so that business can go on and the planet is once again saved. That’s the way it works. We’re businessmen, we don’t kill people. Inspector, I do not know of one businessman in the world who ever murdered an environmentalist. The idea is absurd.”

By now, Fairchild was smiling. “I suppose it is,” he said. “Put it that way, and I do see what you mean. And if it weren’t for Captain Zhang’s suicide, I would be most inclined to think of Ms. Baldur as a young woman with far too much imagination. But here we have it. Captain Zhang. Why did he kill himself? You profess not to know. Would you like to hear Ms. Baldur’s theory?”

“I’d love to,” Curtis said, “though I have the feeling I should be eating popcorn while listening to it.”

Fairchild acknowledged that with the thinnest of smiles, and said, “She is convinced you wanted her dead, in order to tie up Planetwatch in the courts. She believes you wanted Captain Zhang to do the job, but that when he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, you arranged to have men intercept the ship, and ordered Captain Zhang to slow down to help the villains get there. She believes Captain Zhang was a basically good man who grew despondent at the things you’d asked him to do, and who grew afraid there would be too many questions directed at him. When Ms. Baldur’s parents tried to talk to him, he pretended not to speak English. None of us can understand why he’d do that, unless he had some guilty knowledge.”

Curtis sat back in the sofa, “Inspector,” he said, “you may be right. I’d never even suspected the man.”

Fairchild raised an eyebrow. “Of what?”

“I assume it’s some sort of smuggling,” Curtis said. “As I say, I’m rarely on the Mallory. Captain Zhang had the ship to himself most of the time. He could have been smuggling who knows what — dope? jewels? even people, for all we know — for years.”

Fairchild now was taking notes, and his expression was intense, brow furrowed. He said, “So you’re saying, these people who came aboard—”

“They weren’t from me,” Curtis told him. “I’ll say that flat out, that’s not the sort of thing I do. So if there were these people, and if Captain Zhang slowed for them, then they must have had something to do with him. And here was an unwanted witness, Kim Baldur, so naturally they tried to kill her. But she escaped, and Captain Zhang realized the truth would come out. No wonder he pretended he couldn’t speak English. And then he saw there was no way out. Or just the one way out.”

Fairchild flipped back and forth between new notes and old. “Ms. Baldur says she left the ship with George Manville.”

“Well, I don’t know why she’d say that. Unless— Inspector, when did she say that about George Manville? Was it after I’d accused him, but before I admitted I was wrong?”

“As a matter of fact,” Fairchild said, “yes.”

“Then there you are,” Curtis said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The woman had no proof, no corroboration. In her fantasy, she thought Manville would agree to her story, to get back at me.”

“After you accused Mr. Manville,” Fairchild said, “did he, do you know, consult a lawyer locally, named Brevizin?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Curtis said. “I’m sure he consulted someone, but I don’t know who.”

“I’m wondering what he might have said to Mr. Brevizin.”

“Inspector,” Curtis said, “let me end this. Tomorrow I’ll arrange for George Manville to phone you from Singapore.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Fairchild said.

“Believe me,” Curtis told him, “if George had been involved in piracy and hugger-mugger on the Mallory, he would have mentioned it. He’s not one to keep a good story to himself.”

Fairchild laughed, and put away his notebook. “I’m sure you’re right.” Standing, he said, “I appreciate your time, Mr. Curtis.”

He’s converted, Curtis thought. All he has to do is hear from Manville tomorrow, and the new story is in place: Zhang was a smuggler, it was his associates who attacked Kim Baldur, and however she got off the ship it wasn’t with Manville. A dead smuggler and a disbelieved fantasist, and I can get on with my work.

Also getting to his feet, Curtis said, “Inspector, I meant to send a note and a check to Captain Zhang’s wife. I’m sorry it turned out he was betraying me, using my ship that way, but I’ll still send the note and the check.”

“Very good of you, Mr. Curtis,” Fairchild said.

“Without saying anything about these suspicions,” Curtis added. “We could still be wrong, I think. There could still be some other explanation.”

“I doubt it,” Fairchild said. “But we will, of course, keep an open mind.”

“Of course.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Curtis.”

“Good afternoon, Inspector.”

The instant Fairchild was gone, Curtis crossed to the telephone, and called the station. Helen Farrelly answered, in her quarters, and Curtis said, “Helen, would you unlock the office and let Morgan Pallifer in there and tell him to call me at the Heritage in Brisbane?”

Yes, she would, and everything was fine there, no trouble, and five minutes later the phone rang.

“Curtis.”

“Morgan here.”

“Morgan,” Curtis said, “I want you to spend some time today and tomorrow morning with Manville.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I want you to listen to him, because I want you to be able to do him by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Do him?”

“I mean talk like him. Talk enough like him on the telephone so that a man who’s never met him will believe it’s him.”

“That shouldn’t be hard. We’re both American.”

“Yes, but there’s the sound of the voice, the tone, if one person was going to describe it to another. Your voice is a little higher-pitched. Anyway, you can do it. And tomorrow at one you’ll call my office in Singapore, and ask for Margaret.”

“Margaret, yes.”

“Margaret will patch you in to a call to Brisbane, to a police inspector named Tony Fairchild.”

“I get it. I’m calling from Singapore.”

“And you’re George Manville. And on that last night on the Mallory, you slept like a baby, heard nothing, saw nothing, left the ship in Brisbane the ordinary way next morning. And you didn’t see Kim Baldur that morning, but you didn’t think about it. And you’re happy to be working for Richard Curtis again, and you’ll give Inspector Fairchild the number in Singapore— Margaret will tell you — where he can call you back if he needs any more.”

Morgan Pallifer laughed. “I’ve never delivered anybody’s last words before,” he said.

19

Andre Brevizin entered the offices of Coolis, Maguire, Brevizin & Chin at exactly ten-thirty Monday morning, as was his wont, and Angela Brother, the firm’s excellent receptionist, raised two fingers as she said, “Two calls.”

“Good God,” Brevizin said. “Before I even get to my office? My papers? I’m not sure I like the pace you’re setting, Angela.”

“They’re both interesting,” Angela promised.

“At this hour? Try me.”

“The one is from a police inspector, Tony Fairchild. He rang at nine this morning, he wants to meet with you sometime today.”

“A police inspector? As a client, or as a policeman?”

“As a policeman. You can help with his enquiries.”

“We’ll see about that. And the other?”

“Richard Curtis.”

It took a second for the penny to drop, and then Brevizin said, “Angela! No!”

“Yes. He would also like an appointment. I promised to call them both.”

“Yes, indeed. What do we know about this policeman? What’s his name again?”

“Tony Fairchild. I’ve put notes on your desk. He’s something high up in criminal investigation. He’s the one who captured Edders and Petersen, remember? The stock fraud people.”

Some of Brevizin’s friends had been caught up in the Edders and Petersen swindles; Brevizin remembered it well. Had some client of his now been doing something iffy in the market? “We’ll talk to him second,” he decided. “This afternoon. Richard Curtis first. Let’s try for eleven-thirty, after my tea.”

Richard Curtis was as Brevizin had imagined him; a tough man, exuding power and energy. He dressed casually but well, and his eye and handshake were firm. Brevizin, in his enquiries over the weekend, had heard a few faint hints of shakiness in the Curtis empire, but nothing drastic and nothing solid. The man himself seemed solid enough, and not at all shaken.

They sat together where on Friday Brevizin had talked with George Manville, and Curtis got immediately to the point: “I believe you had a conversation last Friday with a friend of mine, George Manville.”

Brevizin smiled amiably. “A friend of yours?”

“We’re friends now,” Curtis said, taking no offense. “And I believe we’ll stay friends. This little flurry is over.”

“Flurry.”

“George told you what we’re doing on Kanowit Island?”

“The destination resort, yes.”

“And his technique for reshaping the land.”

“Yes,” Brevizin said. “I won’t claim I understood it, but he did tell me.”

“Fine.” Curtis sat back and spread his hands. “It is George’s technique, more than anyone’s, I’ve never denied it, and it’s brilliant, and I’ve never denied that. And I pay well for it. George is a top man, and he gets top wages, or any one of my competitors would steal him away in a minute.”

Curtis paused, as though Brevizin might want to comment on that, but Brevizin merely continued to smile at him, so he went on, saying, “I’m afraid George got greedy, decided he wanted more than top wages, he wanted to be a partner, to own a piece of me. I don’t work that way, Mr. Brevizin. I’ve had operations with partners, where each shared the same financial risk, put the same amount in the pot, took equal shares out. Expertise is not enough. Expertise does not get shares, it gets wages. You, for instance, are very well known in corporate legal circles in Australia. George chose well.”

“Thank you,” Brevizin said.

“You bring great expertise to your clients,” Curtis said, “and in return they pay you very high fees.”

“They do.”

“But they do not give you pieces of their companies.”

“Point taken,” Brevizin said.

“That’s what this whole thing has been about,” Curtis said. “George made his demands, I turned them down. He didn’t know how to get at me, force me to agree, and he concocted this little scheme. I told you he’s brilliant, which doesn’t mean he’s practical. He thought he’d play hardball with me by running down my reputation, and continue to smear me until I came around. Spread rumors that I’d gone bust, for instance, I don’t know if he gave you that one.”

Brevizin smiled, and waited.

Curtis shook his head, waggled a hand. “I’m sorry, no,” he said, “I wasn’t asking you to repeat your conversations with a client. I’m merely saying this is the sort of rumor he was trying to spread within the industry, and he might have done it with you. No matter. The point is, the rumors got back to me, as they will, and as he wanted them to.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I can play hardball, too,” Curtis said, and he looked as though he very well could. “I don’t need my reputation smeared, I don’t need him spreading wild stories about what a desperate man I am — you wouldn’t believe the things that have come back to me—”

“I might,” Brevizin said, “but as you say, no matter. You decided to play hardball as well.”

“I cooked up a charge against him,” Curtis said, almost defiantly, as though challenging Brevizin to say he’d been wrong. “Industrial espionage.”

“Well, well,” Brevizin said. “You do surprise me, Mr. Curtis. On Friday, Mr. Manville insisted the charges against him were made of whole cloth, and I said then I found it improbable that a reputable businessman like yourself would lie under oath in an affidavit about such a thing. And now you yourself tell me you did.”

“Because I knew I could undo it at any time,” Curtis said, “and because I knew no one would ever be able to prove I lied. Because it was the one way to bring George Manville to heel.”

“I’d wondered about that announcement over the weekend,” Brevizin said, “retracting the charges. I’d wondered if you’d been forced to reverse yourself, but you say no.”

“George gave up his rebellion,” Curtis said, “as I’d thought he would. He’s back in Singapore now, at my main office, where I’m headed this afternoon. It was always more ego than greed, in any case, with George, and we’ve worked out a compromise. A clearer demonstration of the value I place on him. Change of title, better staffing. The truth is, Mr. Brevizin, I think I was taking George too much for granted, there was wrong on both sides, and it won’t happen again.”

“Then the story he told me last Friday...”

“Was a pack of lies. Well, no,” Curtis amended himself, “it was half a pack of truth plus half a pack of lies. We were in dispute, that’s true. He is the creator of the technique we used on Kanowit Island, that’s true. I did knowingly falsely accuse him and deliberately put him in a very difficult position, that’s also true. But the rumors of my poverty and desperation, well — what did Twain say? ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration.’ ”

“And the girl he told me about? Kim Baldur?”

Curtis made a sour face. “Yes, I’m afraid George did hook up with those Planetwatch people for a while. Trying to get at me any way he could, of course. Those people are insane, I really believe they are. They’re likely to say anything.”

“Some of my clients have crossed their path,” Brevizin said, “and I must say their reaction is much the same as yours.”

“It takes a very particular kind of person, it seems to me,” Curtis said, “to believe it’s your job to rescue something as large as a planet.”

Brevizin laughed. “I must repeat that,” he said, “to one or two friends of mine.” Manville, he was thinking, had been very glib and plausible last Friday, and Curtis is being very glib and plausible today, with utterly opposed stories to tell. Either could be lying, anything could be the truth, but Brevizin found himself leaning more toward Curtis’s version, for two reasons. First, the fact that Manville was unquestionably back working with Curtis again, something he’d be unlikely to do if he really believed Curtis was trying to kill him. And second, the fact that Curtis’s story didn’t have any melodrama in it.

“But now,” Curtis said, “as to why I’m here. George was very impressed by you, so that’s why you’re the one I’ve come to.”

“Thank him for me.”

“I will. What’s happened is, we’ve had another problem, out of the blue. The captain of my yacht had been using it, when I wasn’t around, for smuggling. We don’t yet know what, or who he was dealing with, only that he thought he was about to be exposed, and last Friday he killed himself. Here, in Brisbane. The ship is here—”

“The Mallory.”

“Of course, George would have mentioned the ship. The investigation into Captain Zhang is just getting underway; in fact, I had a conversation yesterday with the policeman in charge, Inspector Fairchild.”

Brevizin smiled and nodded. “I’ve heard the name,” he said.

“My ship has been used,” Curtis said, “without my knowledge or permission. In an ongoing criminal enterprise. I don’t know what legal ramifications this could hold for me or the ship, in Australia. In some countries, the ship would be impounded. Now, I must get back to Singapore today. I would like to retain your firm to represent my interests in connection with the Mallory, for so long as she remains here.”

“We don’t do criminal work, you know,” Brevizin said.

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Curtis told him. “I should think it would mostly be negotiating with the proper authorities. If a criminal lawyer is eventually needed, I’d be happy to accept your recommendation.”

“Thank you.”

“So that’s why I’m here,” Curtis said.

Brevizin said, “Mr. Curtis, are you also here to undo the things Mr. Manville said to me on Friday?”

Curtis beamed. “Of course! He and I both went pretty public before we settled down. I’ve made his reputation whole again, but he can’t quite do the same for me. Rumor is hard to kill. Yes, I would definitely like you to squelch the rumors anywhere you find them. If you’re afraid this would be a conflict of interest, I’ll have George phone you from Singapore tomorrow. We are of one mind now.”

“No, I understood that from CNN,” Brevizin said. “Well, you know, I must say I quite enjoyed the image of you as some sort of rampaging freebooter. But, as usual, reality, though less enjoyable, will have to do.”

“Then you’ll accept me as a client?”

“I had not actually accepted Mr. Manville as a client, expecting to see him back here today, so there is no conflict of interest. Yes, of course, I’ll see what needs to be sorted out with the Mallory, and if I happen across any rumors about you I’ll laugh them to scorn.”

“Thank you,” Curtis said, and as they both stood, he said, “You might call Inspector Fairchild, see how he’s coming along.”

“I’m sure I’ll speak with him,” Brevizin said.

20

Tony Fairchild was making notes to himself, in the tiny crabbed writing he’d learned as a boy, when there’d never been enough money for food, much less for paper. These days, he wrote in small memo pads appropriate to the size of his penmanship, because he was well aware that his writing looked ridiculous on something the size of, say, a legal pad, where a lonely Tony Fairchild paragraph would be a tiny forested island in a great yellow sea.

He was writing notes to himself about Captain Zhang, and George Manville, and Kim Baldur, and Richard Curtis.

He was writing mostly questions, not because there weren’t any answers but because there were far too many answers, and they didn’t fit together. Usually, it was the policeman’s job to get the principals in an investigation to open up and tell their stories; this time, only dead Captain Zhang had ever shown the slightest inclination to keep his mouth shut.

If only the stories jibed in some way, in any way at all. Being a self-made man from a poverty-stricken family, who’d never gotten a boost up from a bloody soul, Fairchild was naturally anti-Curtis in his sentiments, naturally assumed that the richest man in the room was always the biggest villain, and yet this time the rule didn’t seem to hold true.

For Kim Baldur to be telling the truth, Curtis would have had to overreact to a truly astonishing degree at the presence of Planetwatch next to his Kanowit Island property. Fairchild had had people look into Curtis’s history, and had found plenty of pugnacity there, any number of lawsuits and lawyers, but absolutely nothing extra-legal, if you didn’t count the normal businessman’s corner-cutting. Curtis’s struggles a few years ago with the Chinese authorities, after Hong Kong had been returned by the British, had been monumental and had ultimately got him nowhere, but even then he’d limited himself to the courts. Oh, there’d probably been a bribe or two here and there along the way, but that too was only business.

So Fairchild thought it most probable that Curtis was being maligned here, though he wasn’t entirely certain why, and that was one of his biggest questions. What did Kim Baldur hope to get out of all this? Why would she tell these stories if they weren’t true?

Baldur was clearly under the control of that fellow Diedrich; could he be the one behind it? Fairchild hadn’t taken to Diedrich at all, had found him hyperbolic and melodramatic and probably basically untrustworthy, but could it possibly be that Baldur was merely parroting stories Diedrich had fed her, with no other reason than that Diedrich, who had an acknowledged antipathy to Curtis, was hoping to make some extra trouble for the man along the way? It seemed a very strange thing to do; and yet.

Sergeant Willkie stuck his carrot-topped head in at the office door: “Sir, a Mr. George Manville on the line, from Singapore.”

Fairchild looked at the small clock on his desk: eleven-fifty. That would be nine-fifty in the morning in Singapore, which would be about right. Curtis would have briefed Manville first, of course. He said, “Sergeant, tell them I’m in the loo, I’ll call right back within five minutes, and get a phone number. Once you’ve got it, say, ‘Oh, here he is,’ and put me on.”

“Right, sir.”

Fairchild put down his pen. Much would depend on what Mr. Manville had to say for himself. Had he left the Mallory in mid-ocean, with Kim Baldur? Had the two of them kicked around Brisbane together for the latter half of last week?

There was just one verifiable point in the opposing stories: Baldur claimed to have left the ship with Manville, Curtis claimed that Manville had left the ship alone. One story had to be false, one storyteller a liar.

Sergeant Willkie’s head appeared again: “He’s on the line, sir.”

“Very good.” Fairchild picked up the phone: “Fairchild here.”

“Good morning, Inspector.” It was an American voice, of course, mid-range, but with some faint tinge of accent in it, as though the speaker had been away from home a long time. Which was probably true, Manville being an engineer whose work history was almost exclusively around the Pacific Rim. “George Manville here,” the voice went on. “Mr. Curtis says you want to talk to me.”

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Manville. Mostly it’s about Captain Zhang Yung-tsien. You knew him on the Mallory, didn’t you?”

“Well, I don’t say I knew him. We said hello once or twice.”

“Didn’t you have your meals with him? I understood you’d been a few weeks on the ship, out at Kanowit Island.”

“Oh, sure, I ate with the officers, but they mostly gabbed together, you know, and I don’t talk any of that. I had my own people I worked with, didn’t have much to do with the crew.”

“Ah. You remember Kim Baldur.”

“The idiot from Planetwatch. Oh, yeah, I remember her.”

“Were you together with her in Brisbane at all?”

“Together with her?” The disgust in the man’s voice certainly sounded genuine, “I was never together with that piece at all. Why would I be together with her?”

“Well, did you leave the ship together?”

“I never even saw her that morning, she wasn’t around for breakfast. Still in bed, I suppose. I was up and out, soon as we docked. I had things to do.”

“Such as see Mr. Brevizin.”

A little pause, and, “Who?”

“The lawyer, Brevizin. You—”

“Oh, right! When Mr. Curtis and I had our little, whadayacallit, difference of opinion. That’s all over now.”

“But that was one of the things you had to do, see Mr. Brevizin. Were you doing other things at the same time, having to do with Richard Curtis? Other people you were seeing?”

“That’s all done,” Manville said. His voice had risen half an octave, he sounded as though he might be getting irritated, or upset. “I don’t have to talk about that.”

“Mr. Manville, I’m not accusing you of anything, I merely—”

“Captain Zhang killed himself, that’s what I heard, and that’s what you’re looking into. That’s what you’re looking into, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is, but—”

“I was on his ship for a while, ate some meals at the same table with him, heard him talk Chink with his crew, and that’s it. If you want to know why he did the chop on himself, you’ll have to ask somebody else.”

“I see,” Fairchild said. Firmly holding down his own irritation, he said, “Well, I appreciate your speaking with me, in any event.”

“Inspector, I’ll tell you the truth,” Manville said.

He was sounding more and more like a tough guy, less and less like an engineer. “I want to get along with Mr. Curtis these days,” he said, “and he asked me to call you, so here I am. But I don’t think he wants me to talk about me and him, so that’s what I’m not gonna do.”

“I understand completely,” Fairchild said. “Thank you, Mr. Manville. If I want to call you again...”

“I’m here,” Manville said. “Working hours.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

Fairchild replaced the receiver, and sat tapping his pen point against his memo pad, but wrote nothing down. Manville had not been exactly as anticipated, but on the other hand it was now easier for Fairchild to understand the battle of wills that had gone on last week between him and Curtis. He sounded like a man who could be quick to anger and quick to action. A diamond in the rough, it could be, a fellow from the wrong side of the tracks like Fairchild himself, got his education, became an engineer, highly thought of, but with the guttersnipe still there inside him, ready to be called upon.

And Manville supported Curtis, that was the important thing. So that should settle it; except that it didn’t, not quite. Something faintly buzzed at Fairchild’s attention, some fold in the fabric. Or it could be simply the possibility that Manville was lying now merely to cement his newly good relationship with Curtis.

But had Manville’s reaction to Kim Baldur’s name been a lie? Surely not. That had been real contempt in the man’s voice. Baldur’s description of Manville’s heroics against the thugs who’d boarded the Mallory certainly fit with the man Fairchild had just encountered, but that man wouldn’t be likely to save Kim Baldur from anything. Push her in harm’s way quicker than offer a helping hand.

Five minutes had passed, by the desk clock. Time to make sure no one was pulling a fast one. Fairchild buzzed for Sergeant Willkie, and when he appeared said, “Call that Singapore number, would you? And buzz me when it starts to ring.”

“Right, sir.”

Fairchild sat thinking, and the buzzer sounded, and he picked up to hear the phone ring, and then a female voice: “RC Structural.”

“Mr. Curtis, please.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Curtis won’t be back until tomorrow.”

“Who’s second-in-command there at the moment?”

“Did you want Mr. Lowenthal?”

That was right, according to Fairchild’s information, that was one of Curtis’s vice-presidents. Fairchild said, “No, let me speak to Mr. Manville, please.”

“May I tell him who’s calling?”

“Inspector Fairchild.”

“One moment, please.”

It was in fact forty seconds by the clock, and here was Manville’s tough voice again: “That was quick.”

“It turned out I do have one more question,” Fairchild told him. “Sorry to interrupt your work.”

“Don’t worry about it. What’s the question?”

“During your time at Kanowit Island, did any other ships come by, make contact with Captain Zhang or anyone else on the crew?”

“Naw. We were alone out there until the very end, when those Planetwatch idiots showed up.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Manville.”

“Any time.”

Fairchild hung up, satisfied. That was Manville, and he was in Singapore, and that was the office number of RC Structural.

There was nothing here. It was all smoke and mirrors. The public catfight between Curtis and Manville had got caught up in a young woman’s self-aggrandizing fantasies, and that was that. Captain Zhang had killed himself, for whatever reason, without a doubt. The two Planetwatch people had watched him unlock his door and enter his room. Very soon thereafter, he had leaped from the window. There was not the slightest sign that anyone else had been in the room. It was not murder, it was suicide, and the case was closed. If Zhang had been engaged in smuggling of some sort, the story would come out sooner or later. For now, there were other cases to think about. It had seemed briefly that Zhang’s death would lead to some more complex situation, but it had all dissolved into nothingness.

Fairchild tapped the buzzer on his desk, and when Sergeant Willkie’s head popped into view in the doorway he said, “Call that lawyer, Brevizin, thank him for making himself available, and tell him I won’t need to speak to him after all.”

“Right, sir.”

As a result of which, Inspector Fairchild did not get to hear Andre Brevizin describe the events involving Kim Baldur, both on the Mallory and here in Brisbane, that George Manville had last Friday related to him.

21

The corporate jet owned by RC Structural had cost sixty-five thousand dollars U.S. per month merely to exist, with its crew and its parking slot at Hong Kong International Airport, and the expenses went even higher whenever Curtis actually used it to go anywhere, so that was the one contraction he’d permitted himself when the money started to tighten and the mainland bastards were squeezing him like an orange. He’d moved his operations to Singapore, but did not move the plane to Changi Airport there, selling it instead — at a decent price, at least — to one of the Chinese businessmen growing sleek on the carcass of the city they’d just killed.

Which meant, these days, when Curtis had to undertake a long flight, he went commercial. But that was all right; he usually took Singapore Air, they knew him, and they treated him well. In fact, he wasn’t at all certain, after this current operation was finished and he was rich again, that he’d buy another jet for himself. That was, at his level, no longer a toy that impressed anybody.

Today’s flight was at five in the afternoon, it would take under four hours, and arrive in Singapore before seven.

The Daimler that Curtis had loaned Pallifer, that had been used to spirit George Manville away to Kennison, was back in Curtis’s possession, along with Harben, the driver, so he rode out to Brisbane International in smooth quiet, spending most of the trip on the phone with aides in his office in Singapore. He’d been away from his workaday business too long.

It would be good when this other stuff was out of the way, mission accomplished, and he could go back to being an ordinary businessman again. He thought of it that way, an oddity, one extraordinary act in the life of an ordinary businessman, who’d been driven to this extreme. But there was so much tension in this plan, and so much he was called on to do that he would never even have thought of doing before. When he’d said, with passion, to that policeman, that he’d never heard of a businessman killing an environmentalist, he’d meant it, meant that it was true, and it was true, and it was something entirely different that, in another compartment in his brain, Richard Curtis was now planning to kill many more than merely one environmentalist. They’d pushed him to it, those bastards, they’d left him no choice but this, to play the game just as hard as they did. Harder.

The airline’s meet-and-greet waited for him at the curb in front of the terminal building. She was an attractive young Asian woman in a dark blue uniform, a clipboard held to her breast by her left forearm in echo of the Statue of Liberty. She’d been the one to walk Curtis through this process three or four times before. Her smile was radiantly welcoming. “Good afternoon, Mr. Curtis. So nice to see you again.”

“And you.” He didn’t remember her name, if he’d ever known it.

She turned to speak a quick word to the skycap waiting behind her, and he nodded, and moved toward the car as Harben came around to open the trunk. “Your luggage will be taken care of,” she said, “and I have your ticket, so all I need is your passport. You’d like to come to the lounge?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

There was great bustle at the main doors to the terminal, down to his right, but the meet-and-greet led him away to the left, down a quiet corridor where they were almost immediately alone. This passage not only took him to the VIP lounge, it also meant he was not in the main part of the terminal three minutes later, when Kim Baldur and Jerry Diedrich and Luther Rickendorf arrived in a cab.

Curtis had a scotch and water in the lounge while the meet-and-greet took his passport and ticket away to handle the formalities for him. He read a Wall Street Journal he found there, and was amused to see that the paper still thought there was some story left in his little public dance with George Manville. Neither he nor George were actually mentioned, but the story, a rehash of various questionable activities by Robert Bendix and his Intertekno over the last several years, was clearly inspired by last weekend’s flap. So now Bendix receives a little unwelcome publicity, while Curtis goes about his business unobserved; things couldn’t get much better than that.

Half an hour later, the meet-and-greet was back, to smilingly hand him his passport and ticket, and escort him to the plane, along with two other businessmen, one a Brit, the other Japanese. Their route was back hallways, mostly empty, not emerging into the normal public area until they were almost to the gate, where the last of the other passengers were straggling aboard. Standard first-class passengers would have been boarded first, for the coach passengers then to sidle past on their way back to steerage, but the ones brought by the meet-and-greet arrived last, when the fuss and bustle were over. At the gate, the meet-and-greet wished her trio a bon voyage and went away, clipboard still shield-like at her breast, while Curtis and the other two were now greeted by equally smiling and equally attractive stewardesses, who took hand luggage (Curtis had none) and drink orders, and escorted their VIPs to their seats.

Curtis always took an aisle seat, for greater mobility; and what is there to see out of a plane window, after all? Today, his seatmate was a purple-jowled angry-eyed American, already at work, reading what appeared to be a legal brief and making small meticulous notes on a yellow legal pad.

Curtis was immediately reminded of the policeman, Fairchild, and his own crabbed notes, even smaller than this fellow’s handwriting, in that notebook of his. Well, he’d done what he could, with both Fairchild and the lawyer, Brevizin, to put out the fires Manville and Kim Baldur had started. With just a small amount of luck, the whole episode would quickly blow over and be forgotten. No crime, no criminals, nothing to investigate, no cause for suspicion. One Chinese sea officer, dead by his own hand, and one idiotic young woman with an overly rich imagination; nothing more.

He accepted his scotch and soda and silently toasted his own success. His seatmate, after one quick scowling glance to reassure himself that Curtis wasn’t a beautiful woman, had gone back to work, which was also a plus. Curtis wasn’t one for chitchat on airplanes.

Almost immediately, they were taxiing, and as the pilot’s voice told the crew to prepare for takeoff the stewardess came by to reclaim Curtis’s now empty glass, and just like that they were in the sky. Curtis pushed his seat back and his leg rest out, and dozed, smiling, thinking of how well things were going.

Half an hour later, some alteration in engine sound or plane movement brought him awake, to see his lawyer friend still busy. Time for a magazine. He would prefer Scientific American to Black Enterprise, but he’d take what was there. Rising, he walked back to the eye-level shelf where the magazines were stacked, looked through them, settled for Newsweek, and glanced down the aisle at the crowded coach section as he was about to turn back to his seat.

Jerry Diedrich.

Curtis stopped. He had never actually met Diedrich, but he’d seen him at a distance several times (several irritating times), and he’d seen Diedrich’s self-satisfied face in newspapers at least twice. That was him, in the aisle seat of three, talking with a very animated young woman in the middle seat.

Kim Baldur.

It had to be. Curtis had never seen her conscious, but he remembered that sleeping face, and this was her.

And how very lively she was, alive.

Baldur and Diedrich, together, on their way to Singapore. And the man on the other side, the window seat, the blond Germanic-looking one; was he part of the group? Yes; he turned and spoke to the other two, then looked out his window again, at the nothing out there.

Curtis turned away, not wanting to be recognized. He went back to his seat, the forgotten magazine still in his hand, and the stewardess asked him if he was ready for his snack. Yes. And wine? White, please.

While he ate the caviar, and the shrimp, and the hearts of palm, and the other delicacies, Curtis considered the situation. Those three were on their way to Singapore.

There could only be one reason. They hadn’t succeeded in obstructing him in Australia, so they would pursue him to Singapore. They had a mole somewhere in his organization, a spy, he was sure of it; they’d learned he was traveling back today and were on his trail. Diedrich would stop at nothing, would use every advantage, to interfere, to cause trouble. And this time it just couldn’t be allowed.

Who is the mole? Who is the spy in my camp? How do I find him, and how do I get rid of him — and of those three back there?

This new project kept constantly moving him into areas beyond his experience as a businessman. In all his enterprises, he had nearly two thousand permanent employees, plus the thousands more hired for specific short-term jobs in construction and the like, but who among them would be useful for the tasks he now had to assign? Those three would get off the plane in Singapore. They had to be met somehow, they had to be dealt with. The spy in Curtis’s bosom had to be dealt with.

In the seatback ahead of him there nested a telephone. Who could he call, and what could he say, to have these problems taken care of? He thought about his employees, the ones he knew, and he tried to pick and choose and find the right one. He had no one in Singapore like Morgan Pallifer, and it was too late now to phone Pallifer back in Australia and tell him to hurry in their wake. The three had to be intercepted somehow when this plane landed.

Who in Singapore did he know, and trust? Who could handle a thing like this?

The remains of the snack were taken away. Curtis slid his tray into its space in the armrest. He leaned forward and snapped out the telephone.