Forever and a Death

1

Colin Bennett drove his little Honda Civic out the East Coast Parkway to Changi International Airport, followed the signs to Terminal 2, and stopped as close as possible to the glass doors where the arriving passengers streamed out, deploying into the taxis and buses and limousines and private cars funneled into orderly ranks; neat and tidy and controlled, like everything else in Singapore.

His Timex said quarter to seven (he’d long ago pawned the Rolex), so the Air Singapore flight from Sydney should be landing just about now. Changi was noted for its efficiency; within fifteen minutes, that flow of incomers over there, through with Customs and reunited with their luggage, would include the travelers from Australia.

Bennett picked up the three pages of faxed photos from the seat beside him, and studied them once again.

Jerry Diedrich. Always with his mouth open, always looking aggravated and aggrieved. The perfect look for those morons at Planetwatch.

“This is your lucky day, boyo,” he told himself, and smiled out at the endless herd of travelers, waiting for Jerry Diedrich to appear. “You’ll have no trouble pickin him out,” he assured himself, “and the next thing you know you’ll be fat and happy again, and damn well time for it, too. God bless Richard Curtis and keep him warm and content.”

Colin Bennett had started talking to himself two years ago, after the wife and kiddies left. He didn’t blame Brenda, he knew he’d turned mean and solitary after he’d lost his job, but there hadn’t seemed to be any way to break out of the pattern. Self-destructive, nasty, he’d become someone no one wanted to be around except himself, so that’s who he talked to.

He didn’t blame Curtis either, for firing him. Curtis had had damn good reason. And Curtis hadn’t even known the full extent of the mess Colin Bennett had made of things. He didn’t know a man had died.

Bennett was a construction man by trade, or had been, a big burly fellow — too large for this Honda Civic, for instance, which he seemed to wear rather than ride in — who had worked for RC Structural for nine years before he’d made his beaut of a mistake. In that time, he’d moved up from crew foreman to works manager, running the whole damn site for the engineers. In those days, he was outgoing and popular, a cheerful rowdy sort of man who claimed he got along with everybody because he looked like everybody, which was very nearly true. His father had been half English and half Malay, while his mother was half Dutch and half Chinese, and the mixture had created a big man whose squarish face featured slightly uptilted eyes, a gently mashed nose, a broad mouth and high prominent cheekbones. His ears lay flat to his skull, and his hair was straight and thick and black, now beginning to gray at the sides.

Bennett was Singapore born and bred, coming into this world when the island was still a British Crown Colony, and he could still remember the three moments of great national celebration during his schooldays, when he and all the other children filled the streets with tiny waving flags. Independence in June of 1959, then joining the Federation of Malaysia on September 16, 1963, and then leaving the Federation to declare itself a republic on August 9, 1965. By the time he was grown and ready to join the workforce, the desperate economic conditions of that republic in its early days had been successfully overcome, and Singapore was ready for the explosive growth that quickly made it a financial powerhouse among nations.

It was that growth which had first attracted Richard Curtis to Singapore, long before the question of the Hong Kong takeover. Thirteen years ago he’d opened the Singapore branch of RC Structural, with Colin Bennett among his first employees. A hands-on man, Curtis had met Bennett several times in the next years, and Bennett was sure Curtis had had a lot to do with his rapid advancement. Curtis had trusted him, and until Belize, Bennett had deserved and repaid that trust.

Belize. Well, it’s over now. Has a page been turned? Has a new day dawned?

When the phone rang this afternoon, in his shabby little apartment off China Street, Bennett had been hopelessly studying yet again the help wanted ads in the Straits Times. These days, he had one part-time job as a messenger, and another unloading trucks at a lumber yard, but the work was dispiriting and the pay meager. Still, without references...

Then the phone rang. Not knowing what to expect, and not expecting very much, he’d answered, and the astonishing voice had said, “Colin, this is Richard Curtis.”

“Mr. Curtis!” It was like getting a phone call from God, it was that impossible.

“I’m calling from an airplane,” the astounding Mr. Curtis said, “and I want to make this fast.”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

“I’m wondering if you’re a more controlled person these days.”

“Oh, I am, sir! Honest to God.”

“If you do a little job for me, Colin, it might make me think better of you.”

“Oh, yes, sir. Just tell me what it is, sir.”

“There’s an annoying fellow from Planetwatch on this plane. Remember Planetwatch?”

“Oh, do I. Right buffoons.”

“Worse than buffoons, Colin. They can make trouble. This fellow, Jerry Diedrich, is determined to make trouble. Write that name down.”

“Yes, sir!” He already had the pen in his hand, hoping to find job offers to circle, and he wrote the name on the margin of the newspaper.

“When we hang up,” Curtis went on, “call Margaret, at my office there, tell her I said she should fax you whatever photos of Diedrich we have in the files. I’m sure there’s some, from newspaper pieces about us.”

Bennett had no fax himself, nor much of anything else, but the chemist out on China Street did, and would handle it for him. “Yes, sir.”

“Diedrich is traveling with two other people, a blonde girl in her twenties and a tall blond man of about thirty.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Our plane is to land at Singapore at six forty-five. Be outside the terminal. Find Diedrich and his friends and follow them, find out where they’re staying. Be sure it’s where they’re staying, so you’ll be able to find them again tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then come to my office at nine-thirty in the morning.”

“Yes, sir, I will. And... thank you, sir.”

So here he was, at crowded but efficient Changi, waiting in the little Honda Civic, watching those glass doors over there. In the sky, westward toward the city, the last of the rose daylight receded, and here, so close to the Straits, the air was softening, cooling from the day’s heat and humidity. The Honda’s air-conditioning had given up years ago, so Bennett sat here with the windows open, feeling the day’s sweat gradually rise from his face and the back of his neck, while over there the people kept streaming out, streaming out.

It was Curtis he saw first, the well-remembered solid bulk of the man, moving forward with that determined focused stride, following a Malay chauffeur laden down with a large suitcase and a thick garment bag, both in soft-looking tan leather. They crossed not far from Bennett, toward the line of limousines, but Curtis never looked away from the direct path of his progress, making a much straighter line than most of the pedestrians around him.

“A lesser man,” Bennett told himself in admiration, “would look around for me, want to know was I on the job. Not Richard Curtis. Richard Curtis knows what he wants to be done will be done, and that’s all there is to say about it.”

He looked away from Curtis, reluctantly, to concentrate again on the exit doors. Such a variety of persons came through those doors, a dozen races, speaking a hundred languages. Western clothing predominated, but there were saris and caftans and turbans and kaffiyehs as well, a great colorful sweep of people on the move.

Diedrich. Yes, that was him, and there was the blonde girl, “A damn pretty blonde girl,” he commented, feeling a brief wince of longing for Brenda, and saw the other one, the tall blond man, bony and angular, and said, “Now what the hell kind of boyo is that one?”

The three traveled light, the girl with no more than one fat shoulderbag, the two men each with vaguely military-looking shoulderbags and small gym bags. They joined the taxi line, and Bennett shifted into gear as he took note of the number of the cab they climbed into.

He led them out of the airport. There was only the one road, the one destination, and it seemed to Bennett he’d be less noticeable if he wasn’t behind his quarry the whole way. He had no idea, of course, if they knew about Curtis’s interest in them, but it was better to mind the details, all in all. “Mind the details, boyo,” he told himself, and felt another twinge of memory; the dam in Belize.

Airport Boulevard ran almost south out of Changi, and flowed smoothly into East Coast Parkway, the big new road built to service the big new airport. Now they curved westward, and the brightly lighted towers of Singapore stood out ahead of them, a crystal island on an island, shimmering with light that at times looked hot, at times looked very cold.

Bennett slowed, dawdling in the left lane, the evening breeze a noisy but welcome rush through the Honda’s open windows. Two minutes, less, and that taxi rushed by, the three in lively conversation in the back seat.

“Well, they aren’t suspicious of anything, are they?” Bennett commented, as he pulled in behind the taxi, three vehicles back. “Not worried, not looking around, not checking their back trail. Not concerned about a thing. Now, that makes it easier, doesn’t it?”

2

In his world, Richard Curtis moved from one tower to another. Everywhere he went, it seemed, there were plate glass views of sky and land and city and sea, sprinkled with the tiny unimportant dots that were human beings; barely to be noticed.

This Tuesday morning, Curtis was in his office, with its two walls of huge windows high above Marina Bay, by ten past nine. Margaret, his long-time secretary, an efficient selfless woman who was twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier than when she’d first come to work for him back in Hong Kong, was waiting for him with a variety of briefings and updates on RC projects in half a dozen parts of the world, but they’d barely gotten underway when the internal telephone on Curtis’s desk made its nasal buzz.

Margaret, standing beside the desk, answered the phone, spoke briefly, then told Curtis, “It’s reception. There’s a Mr. Bennett here, he says he has a nine-thirty appointment with you.”

“And so he has,” Curtis said.

He was pleased with himself. Yesterday on the plane, he’d gone methodically through the filing system in his brain and he’d come up with the perfect man to do what needed to be done. Colin Bennett would do anything to prove himself, redeem himself in Curtis’s eye, and Curtis knew it. A blank check, that’s what Colin Bennett was, for Curtis to spend as he saw fit.

“Tell them,” he said, “to put him in the small conference room. I won’t be long with him, and then we’ll get back to all this.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and relayed the order, as Curtis got up from the desk and left the office.

By the time Curtis got to the small conference room, an interior space without the usual panorama of windowed view, Bennett was already there. He didn’t look good. He was hangdog for such a big man, and shabby. The last few years hadn’t been good to him.

He was eager, though. He stood next to the free-form teak conference table, and when Curtis entered he fairly leaped to attention: “Good morning, sir! Good to see you after all this time.”

“And you, Colin.” First, Curtis shut the door, then he extended his hand.

Clearly, Bennett hadn’t known if he would be considered worthy of a handshake, and was hugely grateful that the answer was yes. He pumped Curtis’s hand, not too long, not too hard, then said, “I’ve got them, you know. I’ve got them right now.”

“Good man.”

“They’re in Little India,” Bennett reported, “in a place called Race Course Court Hotel, on Race Course Lane.”

“What kind of place?”

“One of these redone ones,” Bennett said. In addition to all the new hotels built in Singapore the last few years, a lot of the older seedier places had been given facelifts, with new plumbing and new wiring and the luxury of air-conditioning. “It’s mostly Americans there, I think. Young, not a lot of money.”

That sounded right for Planetwatch people. Curtis said, “Would there be phones in the rooms?”

“Oh, I should think so.”

“Good. Did they take a suite?”

“No, two rooms,” Bennett said, and his large flat face wrinkled in confusion. “I thought it would be man woman in one, man in the other, but it isn’t.”

“They’re fairies,” Curtis said.

“Oh.” Laughing at himself, Bennett said, “Thick, I am. And that’s a pretty girl to be wasted like that.”

You have no idea how she would have been wasted, Curtis thought, and said, “I’m going to send you to a shop in Sim Lim, called Vanguard Electronics.”

Bennett, apparently remembering Curtis’s instruction yesterday to write down Jerry Diedrich’s name, now whipped out a small notepad and pen from his pockets and repeated, “Vanguard, in Sim Lim.”

“You’ll ask for Charlie.”

“Charlie,” Bennett echoed, and wrote it down.

“I’ll have rung him,” Curtis said. “He’ll give you equipment for bugging their phone. The room where the men are, not the other one.”

“Oh, sure,” Bennett said.

“I’ll want you to check into this hotel— What is it?”

“Race Course Court Hotel.”

“Unattractive name,” Curtis decided. “You’ll check in there for the next few days, try to get a room near them. The phone bug is a radio, and its range isn’t very far.”

“Will do,” Bennett said.

“I’ll be paying for the bug,” Curtis told him, “but you should put the hotel and other expenses on your credit card, and I’ll reimburse you.”

Looking sheepish, Bennett said, “Mr. Curtis, I don’t have any credit cards just at this minute.”

So things are that bad for you, are they? Curtis said, “We’ll have to give you cash, then.”

“Wouldn’t it be better, sir, if I used a corporate card?”

It would not; Curtis didn’t want Bennett connected to RC in any way. He said, “I know what you mean, hotels don’t expect cash, but I wouldn’t want it to get to Diedrich somehow that someone from RC Structural was staying in the same hotel.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Bennett said.

“You’ll have a story for them,” Curtis suggested.

Bennett looked surprised, then smiled. “Well, I’m a local citizen,” he said, “with a Singapore passport, so I’m moving out of my house because the entire building is being fumigated and repainted, and the owner’s reimbursed us all in cash.”

“That’s very good.”

Bennett preened under the praise. He’d kill for me, Curtis thought, surprised to realize it was true. And that he might have to.

Turning away, Curtis said, “Let me just ring Margaret.”

“Yes, sir.”

Curtis rang Margaret from the phone on the long sideboard, saying, “Have someone bring me five thousand dollars,” meaning the Singapore dollar, worth slightly more than half the U.S. dollar. Hanging up, he said, “Colin, the situation here is this. This fellow Diedrich has a mole somewhere in these offices.”

Bennett looked both astounded and offended: “How could that be?”

“Maybe we’ll answer that when we find the mole. And that’s your job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The reason Diedrich is here,” Curtis explained, “and I know the only reason he’s here, is to find out my future plans, so he can disrupt them. That means he’ll be making contact with the person here who’s been feeding him information.”

Bennett said, “Excuse me, Mr. Curtis, but are you sure? When I worked for you, sir, everyone I knew was loyal.”

“A week ago today,” Curtis told him, surprising himself by how much had happened within the last week, “I performed an experiment at an island off the Australian coast. There had been no public announcement, there was no information about that experiment released outside these offices. But Diedrich and the Planetwatch ship were there.”

“Mm,” Bennett said, and shook his head. “You’re right, someone must have told them. Sir, I honestly can’t think why anybody’d act that way.”

Curtis shrugged. “As I say, I’m hoping you’ll have the opportunity to ask the fellow in person.”

“I’m to find him.”

“Yes, you are.”

Bennett said, “I’m to move into their hotel, bug their telephone, follow them when they go out. But, sir, I don’t know the people working here, how would I recognize the right fellow? I mean, if I hear a conversation on the phone, all well and good, but what if it’s just a meeting out on the street, or lunch, or whatever? It could be the right man, or it could be the wrong man.”

“Buy yourself a Polaroid camera,” Curtis told him. “You’re just a tourist, snapping photos, only the photos contain anybody Diedrich talks to.”

“Right, sir,” Bennett said, smiling. “That’s good.”

“Bring the pictures here, show them to me or, if I’m not here, Margaret. We’ll know if it’s one of our people.”

“I’ll do that, Mr. Curtis,” Bennett said, and there was a single knock at the door.

Curtis crossed to open the door, and it was one of the clerks, a young man named Hennessy, holding a thick white envelope, saying, “Miss Kembleby told me to bring this round, sir.”

“Thank you, Hennessy.”

Handing over the envelope, Hennessy gave Bennett a quick look of curiosity before Curtis closed the door. Curtis gave the envelope to Bennett and said, “If you need more, phone Margaret.”

“Oh, I won’t need all this much, sir.”

“Colin,” Curtis said, “I want you to buy yourself some fresh clothes. You know, to look a little more like an affluent tourist.”

Bennett, of course, understood that Curtis was actually saying, to look less defeated and shabby. His grateful smile was as much for Curtis’s tact as for his money.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you. You can count on me.”

3

Jerry couldn’t help his impatience, but it would be folly to call Mark during the day, at work. So they’d have to wait till the evening.

They were staying at an acceptable hotel in Little India, and they spent the morning familiarizing themselves with the area, which was mostly Hindu temples. The Veeram Kali Amman Temple, dedicated to Kali, the goddess of death and destruction, was the most dramatic, with its garish illustration of the black-skinned four-armed goddess ripping apart a human being who’d gotten too close. She was flanked by her sons, Ganeshi the elephant god and Murugan the child god, but she didn’t seem to Jerry particularly maternal.

At lunchtime they chose one of the handy vegetarian Indian restaurants. The meal was very good, in fact delicious, but it finished Jerry off. “No more,” he said. “If you two want to wear yourselves out, go ahead. I’m going back to the hotel and sleep for an hour. Maybe two.” Luther wanted to keep going but Kim sided with Jerry, and they separated outside the restaurant, Luther off to the local subway while Jerry and Kim limped homeward. A shower, Jerry kept thinking. That’s all I want, a shower, and then lie down and wait for Luther to come back.

The hotel facade had been given a gaudy overlay on the ground floor during a recent remodeling, large rectangular panels of golden plastic around a wide pair of dark-tinted glass doors. As Jerry and Kim neared the doors, Jerry already sensing the coolness within, smelling the clean water of the shower that awaited him, he heard an odd familiar sound, a kind of ripping or crinkling, and thought, I know that sound, and turned to see a man with a Polaroid camera, standing out at the curb, facing the hotel. The picture he’d just taken extruded even now from the camera, still formless and gray.

Jerry, not liking the idea, said, “Did you take our picture?”

“No, no,” the man said. “The front of the hotel.” He was a big burly man in a short-sleeved white shirt and pressed tan chinos. Filipino or Samoan, maybe, in his forties.

Jerry found the man intimidating, mostly because of his size, and he didn’t feel like forcing the issue. Still, privacy mattered for them right now. He said, “You’re sure we aren’t on that.”

“Well, I don’t know,” the man said, and looked down at the not-yet-developed picture. “It’s just for me,” he said, “the hotel where I’m staying.” The man shrugged. “If you’re in it, I’ll throw it away and take another one.”

Jerry sighed and decided it was good enough.

Kim had already gone in, drawn by the hope of air conditioning, and stood waiting for him in the lobby. She said, “What was that all about?”

“I don’t know, he was taking a picture of the front of the hotel, I thought we might be in it.”

Jerry looked back at the street, where the man hunched again over his camera. Moving farther from the doors, he said, “Taking a picture of the front of the hotel. Can you believe it?”

“Tourists take pictures of anything,” Kim assured him. “He wants to show his friends where he stayed in Singapore.”

“A Polaroid?” Jerry said. “Of this place?”

“I’m going to my room, Jerry, call me later.”

“Wait wait, I’m coming.”

Riding up in the elevator, Jerry thought, I’ll sleep until Luther comes home, and then I’ll be with Luther until it’s time to call Mark. Six? Yes; call Mark at six.

He’d completely forgotten the tourist with the Polaroid camera.

4

Morgan Pallifer was nearing the end of his rope. Not only was he stuck on land, extremely dry land at that, with no significant body of water for hundreds of miles in any direction, but his job had somehow been reduced to that of babysitter. No action in it at all, no movement. Nothing to do, day and bloody night, but play nanny, with assistant nannies Steve and Raf. Now, there was nothing wrong with Steve and Raf, Pallifer had chosen them because they were professional and reliable in a crisis, but if you didn’t happen to have a crisis on your hands, those two were not what you might call stimulating company.

As for George Manville, Pallifer found him a disgusting disappointment. Where was the fire, the resistance, the defiance? Where were the escape attempts, the maneuverings to get at a telephone or a vehicle, the confrontations with his jailers? But no; all Manville did was sit around and read.

So Manville provided no diversion. The telly couldn’t hold him long (it could apparently hold Steve and Raf forever), and there wasn’t anything about ranch life that interested or amused him. He hadn’t spoken with Curtis or anyone else in the outside world since the hugger-mugger about pretending to be both George Manville and in Singapore. Except for the food, this was like being in jail.

Pallifer was seated on the verandah of the spare barracks on Tuesday afternoon, squinting out at the dry brown land in all that sunlight, wondering if he dared leave Steve and Raf here on their own for a day or two, to watch over Richard Curtis’s favorite engineer while Pallifer found himself a town somewhere on this continent with some action in it, and reluctantly he was acknowledging to himself that the newly richer relationship with Curtis was too valuable to risk, when the ranch manager, Farrelly, came out of the main house across the way and walked in this direction in the baking sun, little dust puffs rising around his boots at every step.

Pallifer watched him come, feeling mingled distaste and hope. He knew that both the Farrellys disapproved of him, as being some sort of unacceptable roustabout, and he returned the favor in spades; but would Farrelly be coming here with some sort of message? Something to end this damn inactivity?

Yes. “Phone for you,” Farrelly said, when he was close enough. “In the office.” And he turned around and headed back.

Pallifer rose to follow. He would have said a polite thank you, but the man had turned away too fast. Well, fuck you, too, Pallifer thought.

The office was actually a two-room complex, the outer one with a pair of desks for the Farrellys and a number of filing cabinets, the inner one a kind of mailroom, with fax and computers. These rooms were being kept locked when not in use so long as Manville was a guest in the house, so this was only the second time Pallifer had been in here.

Helen Farrelly sat at her desk, typing a letter on ranch stationery, but she stopped when Pallifer and her husband came in and said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Pallifer. The phone’s right there.”

So the woman was at least making an effort to be polite. “Thank you, ma’am,” Pallifer said, and crossed to the side table where the phone waited off the hook. He picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Mr. Pallifer?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“This is Otis,” said the dry and whispery voice, “from Unico Bank. Mr. Richard Curtis requested that we phone you about certain credit card information, concerning a Mr. George Manville.”

Pallifer’s spirits suddenly lifted. The trail! The credit card trail that would lead to the missing girl, if she were still there. Well, we can only hope.

A pen and notepad were by the phone. Picking up the pen, “Yes, go on,” he said.

“On Thursday last,” the whispery Mr. Otis said, “Mr. Manville made two telephone calls from the Brisbane area to the United States, charging them to a credit card.”

“Telephone calls.” Pallifer had been hoping for a hotel or some such thing, but of course hotels don’t put through the credit card slip until after the guest checks out. Hoping this might still be useful somehow, he said, “Can you identify where the call was made from?”

“Yes, of course,” Mr. Otis said. “Both calls emanated from a pay telephone on the property of the Lee-Zure-Lite Motel in Surfers Paradise.”

Bingo! “Surfers Paradise?” Pallifer asked, as he wrote the name on the notepad, “is that the name of a town?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Otis said. “On the Gold Coast, I believe.”

“Well, thank you,” Pallifer said. “That was Leisure Light Motel?”

“Yes. It has a rather unusual spelling,” Mr. Otis said, and went on to spell it.

Pallifer wrote that also on the notepad, thanked Mr. Otis again, said he wouldn’t be needing any more information, and hung up. Then he thanked Mrs. Farrelly, pointedly ignored Mr. Farrelly, and went outside, where Raf stood in the shade of the house, leaning against the wall. He straightened when he saw Pallifer, and said, “Our friend was here. He listens at windows.”

Pallifer stopped. “Does he.” He didn’t like that, it suggested Manville might be up to something after all, not just obediently waiting, the way Mr. Curtis thought.

Pallifer reflected; what, if anything, would Manville have heard? The phone table in the office was against a wall between two windows, but the windows were shut because of the air-conditioning. But say Manville could have heard his part of the conversation, what was there in it?

The name of the motel. He’d repeated it when Otis said it.

“Well, you know,” Pallifer said, “it might be a good thing to collect our pal and lock him away a while. I got to drive back to the coast, be gone overnight, that might excite Manville even if he didn’t hear anything. Where is he now?”

“He went back in the house.”

“You and Steve round him up, while I pack a bag.”

“Sure thing.”

Pallifer went back to the spare barracks and packed his smaller bag, and brought it to the main house. In the garage, he could choose between a green Land Rover and a white Honda Accord. The Land Rover appealed to him, but the Honda would be more anonymous once he got back around Brisbane, so he shrugged and tossed his bag into the trunk of the Honda. Then he went looking for Steve and Raf, to see how they were doing with Manville.

Not so good. “Can’t find him,” Raf said. He sounded more irritated than worried.

Pallifer felt the same way. “Well, where the hell could he be? He can’t go anywhere. If he’s hiding, it’s because he wants to catch somebody. So if he makes a move at you, just kill him and fuck the whole event. I can’t stay around here, I don’t want to lose the daylight. Tell the Farrellys I’ll call here tonight, find out what’s going on. If fucking Manville’s dead, so much the better.”

“What if, when we find him, he’s peaceable?”

Pallifer shook his head. “Then we go on babysitting,” he said. “And you lock him away till I get back.”

“Okay.”

Pallifer grinned, feeling better about things. “But if it turns out the job’s over,” he said, “that would be okay, too.”

Two hundred miles east of Kennison, with the sun low in the sky behind him, Pallifer pulled off the road — he was the only car in sight — got out of the Honda, and went around a hillock to relieve himself. When he came back to the car, Manville was seated in back, giving him a calm look.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Pallifer muttered, and went around to get behind the wheel. Staring at the irritating bastard in the rearview mirror, he said, “Now what?”

“Just keep going,” Manville said. “I like the way you drive, so keep doing it.”

“And where do you think you’re going?”

“Same place as you. Lee-Zure-Lite Motel.”

Pallifer nodded. “So you did hear things at that window.”

“If you’re going to that motel,” Manville said, “then Curtis still wants Kim Baldur dead, no matter what he said to me.”

“So the deal’s off, is that it?”

“That’s it. Drive, Mr. Pallifer.”

He might as well; there was no point just sitting here, on an empty highway. He put the Honda in gear, and they started again to drive east.

When he’d got into the car, back at Kennison, he’d put a pistol in the glove compartment, the one he figured to use on the girl. Now he glanced at the glove compartment, thinking about it.

Manville said, “It isn’t there anymore.”

“I thought not,” Pallifer said. He looked at that expressionless face in the rearview mirror, then watched the road. “You heard me on the phone, then you hid out till I put my bag in here, so you knew which car I’d be taking, and then you got in the trunk. Where were you, before?”

“On top of the framework for the garage doors, between that and the ceiling.”

“So you could look to see which vehicle I was gonna take. But what if I just got in it and drove away?”

“At first,” Manville told him, “I was going to drop on you as soon as you opened the driver’s door. But then, when you came in and opened and closed the trunk, and went away again, I saw I could do it more quietly.”

“Well, you’re pretty cute,” Pallifer said, and slammed on the brakes, sluing the wheel hard right across the empty road with his left hand while his right hand snaked inside his jacket to whip out his other pistol. Pressed against the door, he turned, whipping the pistol around, and Manville shot him in the head.

5

It was half an hour up the new dirt road through the jungle, twisting and turning up into the Mayan mountains of Belize. Colin Bennett, half asleep in his third-floor rear room in the Race Course Court Hotel, traveled in memory, however reluctantly, back to the day of the disaster. Outside the closed window here, the chattering sounds of Singapore continued as the day waned, but in the dim hotel room where Bennett sat beside the small radio receiver there was the heavy silence of the Belizean jungle, surrounding you as you drove up that yellowish white fresh dirt road, that new scar upward through the jungle to parallel the rushing cold Cobaz River. And at the end of the road was the worksite, the dam.

The Cobaz River was small but powerful, tumbling down the steep slopes out of Guatemala and down across Belize to empty into the Caribbean Sea, and the hydroelectric dam being built across it up here was as ecologically correct as it was possible for any construction of man to be. True, it would create a small lake where no lake had ever been before, but that was only an improvement. Otherwise, they would merely borrow the water to make electricity, then return it to the river, and the river would remain unchanged.

That had been the most difficult part to explain to the villagers downriver, that the dam had nothing to do with flood control, that the river would still occasionally flood as it always had, that from one-quarter mile below the dam the river would be exactly what it had been before.

The generating system couldn’t have been simpler. A tunnel was cut into the ground beside the lake, twelve feet in diameter, leading downward at a gentle angle. When it came parallel to the dam, inside the mountain, the tunnel became a vertical shaft, tapering smaller, dropping straight down three hundred feet to the blades of the turbines. The water, compressed, hasty, pulled by gravity, pushed by the weight of the lake behind it, hit the turbine with incredible force, enough to generate more electricity than this part of the world would be able to use for years to come.

A red light gleamed on the side of the radio receiver, to show it was working, but otherwise there was absolute silence. Jerry Diedrich had received one phone call earlier in the day from his partner, a man called Luther, merely saying he was on his way back, so Bennett knew the bug in the phone and this receiver were doing their job. But nothing was happening, no phone calls, nothing but the red light in the dusk inside the room, nothing to keep Bennett from reliving again the day of the disaster in Belize.

He was drinking too much in those days, it was part of what made him so genial, such a pleasant guy to be around. He wasn’t a mean drunk or a sloppy drunk, he was a cheerful drunk who made other people happy by his presence. But he was a drunk.

He’d wanted to get to the test. There was to be a test run, releasing the water into the tunnel for the first time, merely a five-minute test to be certain everything was working right, and he’d been eager to get to that test, to sense the power of the water rushing down, to see it come out into the daylight far below the dam, in the new channel they’d cut for it, so that the volume of water they’d borrowed would return to the main body of the river, restoring everything as it had been before. That’s what he’d wanted to see.

The engineers were supposed to be the ones to run the test, but they were taking too long about it. So far as Bennett could see, they were ready, they were at that stage, why delay? He was up at the dam, running the site, while the engineers were half an hour below, in the camp, in the mobile homes they used for offices. He was up there, and he was drunker than he seemed, and he said the hell with waiting. He said seal off the service entrance to the tunnel, and open the entry from the lake. Let’s let that water go!

Some of the workmen spoke Spanish and some Mayan. They all had a little English, which was the only language Bennett had (except for some Singlish, the staccato patois of Singapore, useless in Central America), but whatever language any of the workmen used, they didn’t have enough of it to make their objections plain. The boss insisted; eventually, they shrugged their shoulders and did what the boss said to do.

What he hadn’t known, or possibly what he’d forgotten, was that the tunnel hadn’t yet been entirely cleared out after the construction was done. There were two long folding tables in there, and several chairs, and some Coleman lanterns, and a stack of lumber, and a few other odds and ends.

Darkness fell inside the tunnel when the service entrance was closed, and then the water came thundering through. It snatched up everything that had been left behind, and hurled it all straight down three hundred feet of shaft to the turbine blades, smashing them into useless oars of twisted shining metal.

That was the disaster, or that was as much of the disaster as Richard Curtis knew about, and it had been enough to get Bennett fired that same day, and blacklisted from the entire industry ever since. And Curtis and the others didn’t even know the worst. There had been one thing more left inside the tunnel when Bennett had shut that door and started the water through. A man.

Sometimes in dreams he was that man, Daniel Foster, in that terrifying instant before the water hit. Wide-eyed in the darkness, hearing the roar, the rush of air that would have preceded the water. And then the slam.

There hadn’t been a trace of him, afterward.

“Hello, Mark?”

Bennett sat up straighter. Belize fell away, Singapore crowded in. A new voice said, “Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s Jerry. Can you talk?”

“Ho ho ho,” Bennett told himself, speaking softly, “is this it?”

Yes, it was. Mark’s young voice said, “Where are you? Are you here?”

“Yes, Luther and me. Can we meet somewhere? Is it safe?”

“No, it isn’t,” Bennett said, and broadly smiled at that warming red light.

“Sure it is,” Mark said. “Nobody suspects a thing, Jerry. Where shall we meet?”

6

Kim didn’t think it was fair. She was part of this, wasn’t she? She’d gone through as much as anybody on this; more. So why couldn’t she come along to meet this Mark person?

She and Jerry and Luther were having dinner in one of the Indonesian restaurants on Orchard Road, and she spent the entire meal hammering this point. They were in this together, weren’t they? She had as much reason to pursue Richard Curtis as they did; more. So why were they refusing to let her come with them to talk to their friend Mark?

At last, Luther gave her an answer. “Because,” he said, “it’s a gay bar.”

“So what?” she said.

Jerry said, “Kim, you don’t want to go to a gay bar.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“I’ve been in gay bars before,” she said airily.

Sounding interested, Luther said, “Really? Why?”

It had been a lie, of course, quick and thoughtless, and she saw no way to either defend it or explain it, so she pushed forward instead, saying, “Why do you have to meet in a gay bar anyway? Why not somewhere else?”

“Because we are gay,” Luther said, “and so is Mark. So it won’t be suspicious if we all show up there at the same time.”

“But if we showed up with you,” Jerry pointed out, “that would be suspicious.”

“Maybe I’m in drag,” she said, and they laughed, and she saw she wasn’t going to get anywhere. “I’ll want to meet him later, then,” she insisted. “Somewhere that tourists go, or something like that, so it won’t be suspicious.”

“We’ll arrange it,” Jerry promised.

It wasn’t much comfort, but it was all she was going to get, and she knew it.

They insisted on putting her in a cab. “I can walk,” she said. “It’s a beautiful night, it isn’t too far to walk.”

“It is, in fact,” Jerry told her, “but even if it weren’t, you don’t want to be wandering around the city streets after dark.”

“I like the city streets,” she objected, “and I wouldn’t be ‘wandering around,’ I’d be walking from here to Little India, and straight to the hotel.”

Luther said, “Kim, you have enemies in Singapore. You really do have to remember that.”

Which brought her up short. It was true, she did have at least one enemy in Singapore, in Richard Curtis. And Richard Curtis had people everywhere.

Would some of those people be looking for her? Would they have her picture? Would that awful man, that killer from the boat who’d chased her in Brisbane, be here now in Singapore, waiting for further orders from Curtis? He’d accidentally stumbled on her once; could it happen again? Could she be walking peacefully along a well-lit city street in Singapore and suddenly have a car stop beside her, that man appear again, with his friends?

“All right,” she said, “I’ll take the taxi.”

At the hotel, the cab was just pulling up to the curb when someone came bustling out of the gaudy entrance, waving his arm. “You have another customer,” Kim told the cabby, and climbed out, leaving the door open.

It was the man with the Polaroid camera. He hurried into the cab, looked quickly over at her, then shut the door and rolled the window up before telling the cabby where he wanted to go.

Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not snooping, she told him inside her head. What do I care where you’re going, it’s nothing to do with me. She turned away as the cab sped off, and went into the hotel, and up to her room.

The television set offered two channels in English, 5 and 12. Kim, restless, switched back and forth between the two for a while, then turned it off and went looking for the magazine she’d started reading on the airplane and never finished, a three-month-old copy of Scientific American.

At first, she couldn’t find it. She knew she’d put it on top of the free tourist magazine that had been in the room when she’d arrived, but it was no longer there. Nothing was on top of that magazine. Had she moved it somewhere else?

She searched the room, failed to find the Scientific American, then decided to see if there could be anything at all to read in the tourist magazine. She picked it up, and the Scientific American was underneath.

That’s not right, she thought. She’d never touched the tourist magazine before this second, so how could hers be under it? The maid hadn’t been in here since they’d gone out to dinner. No one was supposed to have been in here.

She searched the room once more, carefully, the drawers and the closet, and when she was finished she was sure. There was no doubt in her mind. Someone had searched the room.

7

The White Swallow, where Jerry and Luther were to meet Mark, was off Orchard Road not far from Istana Park, a quieter, more restrained place than many of the discos in Singapore, most of them awash with light and noise. British expats came to the White Swallow, and discreet bureaucrats and traveling businessmen. Downstairs were the dark bar in front and the dance floor in back, while upstairs was a quiet dining room.

Jerry and Luther had eaten dinner here before, but not tonight. Tonight, all they needed from the White Swallow was an after-dinner drink and a conversation with Mark.

But they only got the former.

They’d arranged to meet at nine-thirty. Jerry and Luther had arrived fifteen minutes early. They sat at the bar, a long crescent moon, its facade decorated with chrome swallows in flight. The bird theme was maintained throughout the place, upstairs and down, but most completely at the bar, where the counters and shelves along the backbar were covered with representations of swallows, brought here or sent here by customers from around the world. They looked at the birds, they drank their drinks, and at ten to ten Jerry said, “Something’s wrong.”

“Maybe he fell asleep,” Luther suggested.

“Do you think so? I’ll go phone him.”

Jerry did, and when he dialed Mark’s number he got Mark’s answering machine. He told it, “Jerry here, and where are you?”

Then he went back to Luther: “Answering machine.”

“Then he’s on the way.”

But he wasn’t. At ten-thirty Jerry said, “Maybe he thought we said ten-thirty,” but by ten forty-five that was looking untenable, too. “Something’s definitely gone wrong.”

Luther said, “We should go back to the hotel, we’ll find out tomorrow what happened.”

“This is very frustrating,” Jerry said.

“It is.”

“And worrisome.”

“That, too.”

They taxied back to Race Course Court, where the desk held two messages for them. The first was from Mark, and it read: “Empress Place 12:30 tomorrow.” The second was from Kim, and it read: “Whenever you get in, call me. I’m awake, and I want to hear everything.”

“Oh, God,” Jerry said. “You call her, Luther, I don’t think I could go through it twice.”

8

Richard Curtis had many projects afoot, in many parts of the world, but his days seemed to be increasingly filled by the one project he couldn’t admit to in public. Wednesday morning was supposed to be devoted to the first consultation with the architects on the Kanowit Island construction, but there were two interruptions that morning, both having to do with this other matter, which seemed lately to be consuming more and more of his life.

Well, that was only right, in a way. Of all the projects, this was the only one that could save his life.

He’d been meeting with the architects, in the large conference room, for less than fifteen minutes, looking at the rough sketches, the general plans, placement of the airfield, the tennis courts, the offshore protected scuba area, when Margaret came in with a note: “Mr. Tian in your office.”

“Thank you, Margaret,” Curtis said, and to the architects he said, “I beg your pardon, this won’t take long, but I do have to see this gentleman.”

He left them huddling over the plans, muttering together, and returned to his office, where Jackie Tian stood at the windows, looking out. He nodded at Curtis and, by way of greeting, said, “You do like views.”

“Some of them,” Curtis said. “Sit down, Jackie, how’s Hong Kong?”

“Pestering,” Tian said, and joined Curtis at the L of sofas making up the conversation area.

Jackie Tian was a tough Hong Kong Chinese, a blunt short man with a hard-muscled compact body and heavy bony forehead, who had been an official with a rather corrupt trucker’s union when he and Curtis had first met, years ago. He’d been one of Curtis’s more useful contacts in Hong Kong, part of that web of influence and power he’d had to leave behind when the mainland bastards took over. Though the city’s new rulers had cleaned up that union pretty well, nothing had ever been proved against Tian, and he was still there.

When this plan had come to Curtis, he had known that Jackie Tian was the perfect man to put together the work on the ground. Because of various criminal convictions from his early days, Tian couldn’t get permanent residence for himself anywhere in the world outside Hong Kong (or, now, China), and he had as much reason as Curtis to hate the city’s new rulers, so he’d been very willing to listen to Curtis’s scheme, and to become an active part of it. He was the one who’d found the crews in Hong Kong, had put together the front corporations, had started the construction.

Tian didn’t know the whole scheme, of course. If Tian were to find out what the end result of all this labor was meant to be he wouldn’t for a second go along with it. He wouldn’t be able to go along with it. So he knew only what he had to know; he knew about the gold.

This was their first meeting in a month, and Curtis was anxious to know how Tian was progressing, so when they sat at right angles to one another on the sofas he said, “How are we coming along?”

“Slow,” Tian said.

Curtis frowned. “Jackie, we have to get moving on this. The longer it takes, the greater the chance somebody will notice something.”

“It’s tough, Mr. Curtis,” Tian said. “The land, the permits, all that was easy. Easier than when the Brits were in charge. But now we’re in construction, and that part’s slow.”

“Construction doesn’t have to be slow, Jackie.”

“Not going up,” Tian agreed. “We’re doing that like normal, we’ve got a perfect construction site there, you can’t tell a thing.”

“Good.”

“But going down, that’s something else.”

“Why?”

“We can only do it at night,” Tian pointed out, “and we’ve got to be slow because some of those bank buildings have motion sensors. We aren’t in the banks, but we’re close, and we’ve got to be careful. Then, when we open a wall, we’ve got to close it again every morning. It all takes time, Mr. Curtis.”

Of course it did. Curtis knew very well that too much haste could destroy this project, make somebody suspicious, alert the wrong people. But he felt such pressure on himself to get it done and finished and behind him that he found it hard not to exert that same pressure on Tian. “We have to get moving on this, Jackie,” he said. “What if we hired more men?”

Tian shook his head. “Mr. Curtis, we got to keep this secret, and that means I got to hire men I already know, that I know I can trust to keep their mouths shut. I’ve already got them all. There’s nobody else in the world that I’d want down in them tunnels.”

“All right,” Curtis said. “We had to make six connections. How many are done?”

“Three.”

Curtis didn’t like that at all. “Jackie, what are we looking at here? Another month?”

“Shorter than that,” Tian assured him. “We’ll have the fourth done this week.”

“Can they work seven days?”

Tian considered that. “Well, maybe,” he said. “For a lot of money.”

“Not a problem.” Since Curtis was spending his future anyway, risking everything on this one gamble, it hardly mattered what commitments he made.

“If we did seven days,” Tian said, “we might be done in fifteen, maybe less.”

“Do it,” Curtis said. “And is the submarine there?”

“Got delivered last week. The box said it was a fuel storage tank, and that’s what it looks like.”

“It will do the job, though,” Curtis said.

Tian shrugged. “If you say so. I don’t know what you want it for.”

“Another part of the operation,” Curtis told him. “You’ll see it on the day.”

“Fine,” Tian said. “I’d hate to ride in it, I’ll tell you that.”

“The submarine?” Curtis shook his head. “No one’s going to ride in that. That isn’t what it’s for.”

“Well, it’s down in the finished part of the basement,” Tian said. “In its box.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing it.”

“You’re coming over?”

“Yes.”

Tian nodded. “I guess you have to. When?”

“Next week.”

“I don’t know,” Tian said, and frowned. “You know we’re not gonna be ready next week.”

“I can’t wait,” Curtis said. “Jackie, I Just can’t wait any longer. I’ll help dig.”

Tian laughed, but Curtis meant it.

He was back with the architects for less than half an hour, after saying goodbye to Tian, who’d fly back to Hong Kong this afternoon, when the second interruption came. This time, they were discussing the cisterns under the tennis courts. Being a coral island, Kanowit had no ground water to speak of, so the resort would depend for its water on collecting rain, and the most useful surface for that purpose would be the tennis courts. They would be sloped, too minimally for any player to notice or be affected by, and rainwater would drain to a downspout into a deep cistern on which the courts would be built.

They were looking at the options for the filtration systems that would be needed, and the most efficient way to move the water to the hotel buildings, when Margaret returned with another note: “Mr. Bennett is in the small conference room.”

“Damn it,” Curtis said, “this is somebody else I absolutely have to see. I’m sorry, I promise this will be the last interruption.”

The architects assured him they had nothing but time, and he went away to see Colin Bennett, who already looked less hangdog and more like his former self. The new clothing helped, and so did the confident smile.

Curtis shut the door behind himself, didn’t bother to shake hands, and said, “Did you find him? So soon?”

“I’ll have him today,” Bennett said. Even his voice was more self-assured. “I thought I had him last night, but something must’ve gone wrong.”

“Wrong? Are they alert? Do they know you’re watching?” Curtis was suddenly aware he might have picked the wrong man for this job, or a man who was no longer right for this job or any other.

But Bennett smiled an easy smile and said, “They don’t have one idea about me. What happened was, they talked on the phone yesterday around six to somebody named Mark.”

“From here?”

“Don’t know yet. Another poofter, apparently. They made an arrangement to meet at the bar at the White Swallow last night at nine-thirty. That’s one of your more discreet places for fellows like that. Not for the hot young lads, you know, more for their uncles. Fellows who carry umbrellas, you know.”

“You went there?”

“It wasn’t exactly as easy as that, Mr. Curtis,” Bennett said. “I don’t look like their customers, you know. So I have this neighbor of mine, in the flats near me, he is more their style, and he’s as hard up as I’ve been lately, or he wouldn’t be living there. So I offered him twenty dollars plus drinking money to do my watching for me. We drove over, got there a few minutes before the time, and when I looked in they were already there. I pointed them out to Fan — he’s the chap — and he went in and made some new friends, and I sat in the car just down the block. Fan’s job was to come out and give me the high sign when this Mark showed up, so I could get his picture, but he never showed.”

“Scared off?” Curtis asked. “By what?”

“Beats me,” Bennett said. “Your two fellas stayed there at the bar almost two hours. Two or three times, I went to the door and looked in. Just to be sure Fan was keeping his mind on the job at hand, and there was Fan, and there was the two, and nobody else. Later on, Fan told me they looked at their watches a lot, and after a while one of them went to make a phone call, and finally they just up and left. I gave Fan money for a taxi, and scooted off back to the hotel myself, so I’d be there before them, which I was. And the first thing they did was call the girl, room to room.”

Smiling, Curtis said, “Did they.”

Bennett laughed and shook his head. “All they had to do was walk down the hall and talk to her face to face, and I wouldn’t know a thing right now. But they phoned her instead.”

“So you heard it.”

“And I heard them say this Mark stood them up, and they didn’t know why, but when they got back to the hotel there was a message from Mark they should meet him today at Empress Place at twelve-thirty.”

Curtis frowned. “Empress Place? That’s the big hawker stand off the Fullerton Road, isn’t it?”

“That’s the one.”

“I’ve never been there,” Curtis said, “but you see it from the bridge. It’s huge, isn’t it? How does anybody find anybody there?”

“That’s their problem, Mr. Curtis,” Bennett said. “I’ve already found my pair. And when they find their friend, why, I’ll find him, too.”

9

Kim sat in the crowded bus, gazing at the teeming city they crept through. She’d told Jerry and Luther this morning about her discovery that her room had been searched, and was pleased when they didn’t waste time doubting her. Jerry said, “Somebody’s followed us, that’s what it is, from Australia. Maybe that’s why Mark didn’t show up last night.”

“We’ll soon know,” Luther said.

They got off the bus at Esplanade Park and crossed to Empress Place, a large open-air pedestrian area overlooking the Singapore River. The sprawling hawker center nearby was open-air, with booths and stalls for the food vendors and many tables, some in dappled shade, many in direct sun. The place was crowded and busy, but they soon found a table.

Luther looked at his watch. “Twelve-thirty exactly,” he said, “I’ll tell you the truth, Kim, I’d like it if he would show up this time.”

“You think he might not?”

“I was sure he’d appear last night,” he said, “and I was wrong.”

They ate, ordering food from three different stalls, and the food was all good. But where was Mark? They’d taken their time, and here they were, finished, and here Mark wasn’t. Their only choice, Jerry said, was to wait, to give him, say, an hour. Though that hadn’t worked the last time.

Kim said, “I’m going to wander,” choosing the word deliberately, and got up before either of the men could tell her not to. “I won’t go far, I promise, and I won’t be away long. And if I see your friend’s here. I’ll come right back.”

There wasn’t much they could do but look dubious, which they did, and which she ignored. She got up and roved among the stalls and the many people eating their lunches. Beyond the hawker center, the city itself from here looked serene, the tall new glass office blocks rising smoothly among the old colonial-era buildings, the traffic sweeping by on the Anderson Bridge, the river endlessly flowing, the white Empress Place Building massive without being intimidating. She walked among the crowds for about five minutes, and was away from the hawker center entirely, over by the Empress Place Building, when a young man, Caucasian, slender, in white shirt and dark slacks, stopped in front of her, and said, “Here.”

Automatically, she took the folded piece of paper, and he hurried around her and off. When she turned, astonished, to call after him, he was walking briskly away toward Cavenagh Bridge.

She looked at what he’d handed her and it was a sheet of white paper, folded twice. A note.

That was Mark! She was convinced of it. That was Mark, and in her hand was the explanation for his continuing non-appearance.

She thought, I should bring this back to Jerry and Luther. Then she corrected that thought: I should read this, and then bring it to Jerry and Luther.

There were benches along the pedestrian path in front of the Empress Place Building. Kim found a free spot, sat down, looked around, saw nothing unusual — what would be unusual? what should she look for? — and unfolded the paper.

It was letterhead, Richard Curtis’s letterhead, which startled her. RC STRUCTURAL it said across the top, with the Singapore office address and phone numbers and fax numbers and e-mail address. Handwritten in the middle of the page in neat small script was: “Jerry, you are being followed by a man from Curtis. In fifteen minutes, take the #167 bus south. Be sure you’re the last ones on the bus. M.”

Her hands were trembling when she refolded the paper. She stood, feeling suddenly awkward, and stuffed the paper into her jeans pocket. It was as though she had stage fright, this sudden self-consciousness. She’d forgotten how to walk normally, and it seemed to her she lurched like some not-well-made robot as she made her way back to the hawker center and the two men at the table.

“Well, there you are,” Jerry said, but Luther had looked at her face, and he said, “What is it, Kim? What happened?”

Wordlessly, she handed Luther the folded paper, then sat down. Luther opened it, and Jerry leaned close to his shoulder so they could both read it. “No reaction, Jerry,” Luther said quietly, not looking up. He refolded the paper and pocketed it.

Kim could see that Jerry wanted to react all over the place, but all he did was look wide-eyed at Kim and say low, as though not to be overheard, “Mark gave you that?”

“It must have been him,” she said. “He just stopped in front of me, handed me the note, and went right off. I didn’t have a chance to say a word to him.”

Jerry said, “I don’t see what the point is in taking a bus. If somebody’s following us, they can certainly follow a bus.”

Luther said, “I’m sure Mark has something in mind.”

“But what? He doesn’t even say where to get off the bus.”

“We’ll find out,” Luther said. “Come on.”

The #167 bus was crowded enough to have standees, but they weren’t all jammed tightly together. Kim and Jerry and Luther stood in a group, holding on as the bus swayed down Collyer Quay, and it seemed unlikely to Kim that any of the obvious tourist types on the bus could be the person who was following them. So, had they gotten away?

The bus made another stop, and among the people who got on was the young man who’d given her the note. He looked around, not appearing to recognize them at first, and she noticed that Jerry and Luther also remained deadpan. Then he came toward them and stood near Jerry. “Why don’t you all cluster around me?” he asked quietly.

They did, and Jerry said, “Where is he?”

“In a taxi, following the bus.”

“Jesus, Mark,” Jerry said. “So where can we meet?”

Mark grinned at him. “We are meeting, Jerry. This is it.”

“Very clever,” Luther said. “May I introduce Kim Baldur. Kim, this is Mark Hennessy.”

They exchanged nods, and then Luther said, “How do you know it’s somebody from Curtis?”

“Yesterday morning,” Mark said, “Mr. Curtis’s secretary had me carry five thousand dollars in cash to Mr. Curtis in the small conference room. There was a man in there with him, I just got a quick look at him and I don’t think he noticed me at all. Last night, I was about to go into the bar to meet you two, and I saw the same man in a car parked just down the block. Today, I saw you arrive, and the same man was behind you.”

“Hired by Curtis,” Luther said.

“It would seem that way.” Mark Hennessy was an American, Kim was pretty sure, but he’d been away from the United States long enough for his accent to begin to slip, to move into something more general and foreign, with traces of Britishness. He said, “It’ll be easy to pick him out. He’s a bulky man, Eurasian, and he’s carrying a Polaroid camera.”

Kim said, “A Polaroid!”

Jerry said, “Mark, he’s staying at our hotel.”

“Then he’s probably tapped your phones,” Mark said. “Which would explain why he knows what you’re going to do.”

The bus trundled along, now leaving Raffles Quay and starting down Shenton Way. Passengers got on and off, and Jerry kept his voice low, but Kim could hear the stress in it. “Mark, we can’t keep meeting on buses all the time.”

“Well, the fact is, we don’t have to,” Mark said. “I don’t have that much to report. The main thing going on now in the office is the preparations for Kanowit Island, the construction and all that.”

“Curtis is planning something else,” Luther said, “something much worse. We just don’t know what.”

“Something to do with the ocean,” Jerry said. “There’s a destructive ocean wave he can make.”

“Same as at Kanowit,” Mark said, and shrugged. “Haven’t a clue,” he said. “I’ll tell you, though, he had a visitor from Hong Kong this morning.”

Luther said, “Really? I thought he’d burned all his bridges to Hong Kong.”

“This is a labor thug called Jackie Tian,” Mark told them. “He and Curtis were tight in the old days, in Hong Kong. I doubt Tian has any influence anywhere else.”

Luther said, “You think Curtis is planning something around Hong Kong? He does have a grudge against them, god knows.”

Jerry said, “But it has to be something to do with that wave, that soliton wave.”

“Listen,” Mark said, “I’ve got to get off here, I’m going to be late getting back to the office as it is. Jerry, here’s the phone number of a friend of mine, he’s somebody we can trust. I’ll be at his place every day at six. You call me from a pay phone, not from your room, and I’ll tell you what if anything I’ve learned.”

“Very good,” Jerry said, pocketing the small card Mark had given him. “I’ll have some Planetwatch folks do some digging — quietly. Without telling them why.”

Mark said, “And I’ll snoop around, see if I can find anything that uses the soliton.”

Luther said, “You have access to that sort of information?”

“I can get access,” Mark said. “I was part of the support team for Kanowit. I didn’t go out to the island, but I filled special requests. George Manville used to phone me all the time.”

Kim started. “You know George Manville?”

“Of course. I like him, to tell the truth, I think he’s a good guy.”

Kim found she could hardly speak. “How is he these days?”

“No idea,” Mark said. “Haven’t seen him since he went off to Kanowit.”

Kim said, “But didn’t he come back to Singapore with Mr. Curtis?”

“Not that I know of,” Mark said. “Haven’t seen him around, anyway. Do you want me to look him up?”

“Not needed,” Jerry said, putting a hand on Kim’s shoulder. “We know all we need to know about George Manville.”

All at once, Kim wasn’t so sure about that.

10

“I don’t like this,” Colin Bennett told himself. “I think they’re up to something.”

What he didn’t say out loud, because he didn’t want to have to acknowledge it to himself, was that he thought they were onto him. “Don’t queer this with Curtis,” he begged himself, whispering inside the car, afraid to overhear himself.

But there was no denying there was a difference in the manner of those three people. He’d become aware of it only gradually, so he couldn’t say for certain when the change had taken place, but it seemed to him it had been after their hawker center lunch on Wednesday.

So far as he could tell, at that lunch their friend Mark had once again failed to appear; at least, Bennett hadn’t seen them meet or exchange words with anybody. At one point, the girl had wandered off by herself, but it was the men who knew Mark and expected to meet with him, so Bennett had stuck to the men, and he was absolutely certain that nobody had approached them.

Then the girl had come back, and they’d had some palaver, looked at a map or something — he was discreetly too far away to see exactly what that was — and then took a city bus to nowhere in particular, as though they were no more than tourists.

In fact, since then, they’d behaved as though that’s really all they were, tourists. There were no more phone calls from or to Mark from their hotel room. They went out in the mornings, but not to anywhere in particular, as far as he could tell. Late in the afternoon on Thursday and Friday, Jerry Diedrich made brief phone calls from a pay phone wherever they happened to be, but no secret rendezvous followed; and on Saturday he didn’t even do that.

Something had changed. They had been urgently trying to meet this fellow Mark — a disloyal employee of Richard Curtis’s, that was certain — and they had failed twice to meet him, and now they acted as though they didn’t care. As though they had no agenda at all.

There was only the one explanation possible. Somehow.

In some way, they’d come to realize they were being observed. And they would do nothing to make trouble for themselves or their friend Mark so long as they knew the observation was ongoing.

This was no good. Bennett had phoned Curtis on Friday, to assure the man he was still on the case but that nothing had as yet turned up, and Curtis had told him, “We can’t take much longer on this.”

“I’m on them, Mr. Curtis, night and day.”

“I have to leave the city next week,” Curtis had said. “I need this situation resolved before then, Colin. Can I count on you?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Curtis.”

But it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. The less urgency Diedrich and his friends showed, the more urgency Bennett felt. Curtis wasn’t paying him to sit around in hotel rooms and cars. Curtis was paying him to solve a problem called Jerry Diedrich, and he wasn’t solving it.

And now here it was Sunday, and the three of them left the hotel in mid-morning and, after a brief stop at the local Planet-watch storefront, walked to where they could catch the #7 bus, westbound. Out Orchard Road they went, in the bus, Bennett unhappily trailing after in his little Honda, feeling the heat of the day, having to stop a block or so back every time the bus stopped, having no idea where they were going because they didn’t talk to one another on the phone anymore. They rode the bus all the way out to the end of Orchard Road, then walked on to Holland Road and the entrance to the Botanic Gardens.

The Botanic Gardens! Bennett knew it well, it was an annual event when he was a schoolchild for a class trip out to the Botanic Gardens. The city was proud of the Gardens, and deservedly so. It was natural for schoolchildren to visit, and tourists. But it was not at all natural for a grown-up native Singaporean to be hulking around the Botanic Gardens all by himself in the hot humid middle of a Sunday, and Bennett found his frustration and unease steadily edging over toward resentment.

Would they at last meet the mythical Mark here? Unless Mark had disguised himself as a Boy Scout troop, Bennett didn’t see how it was possible.

We can’t have another week like this. Time to do something. Time to do something Richard Curtis will like.

11

Monday was a day of frustrations and irritations for Richard Curtis. First, when he arrived in the offices at nine-thirty that morning, Margaret presented him with a fax from Jackie Tian in Hong Kong:

“Diver unavailable. Arrested on smuggling. No substitute yet.”

This was bad news. The project needed a skilled scuba diver, skilled and trustworthy, and Tian had a man who had been used in any number of dubious operations in the past, sabotage and smuggling, working for management and labor and government, whoever would pay him. This was a hell of a time for the man to be caught.

And if Tian had no substitute, what was Curtis supposed to do about it? He did use divers himself sometimes, in his construction projects around the world, but they were all legitimate employees, simple workers skilled with scuba equipment; none of them could be approached with this assignment.

“Margaret,” Curtis said, “ask Personnel to put together a list of all scuba divers in our employ. On any of the projects.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want their work history,” Curtis said, “with us, of course, but also, where we know it, with others. And any personal information we might have on each of them would be good.”

“Yes, sir.”

She went off to take care of that, and he returned to the Kanowit architects.

This project was both fascinating and frustrating in a number of ways. To begin, with, it was a relatively small island, and they would have to pack it with a lot of different elements without giving the impression of overcrowding.

Then there was the soliton, the way the island had been recreated, which would leave a deceptively smooth and inviting surface. Down inside there, however, would be undigested chunks of the old Japanese buildings, and jagged blocks of coral. For items like cisterns, swimming pool, basements, the golf course lake, they would very literally be digging into the unknown, with always the possibility of creating a subsidence or discovering an air pocket.

The most elegant solution seemed to be to build all underground structures separately, aboveground, and then sink them into the new soil of Kanowit. It would be the most reliable way to build there, but it was full of complexities.

Curtis loved this work. He loved thinking about it, he loved finding the problems and then working on the solutions. He loved working with like-minded men and women, who could give the same kind of concentration and devotion as he to this kind of problem.

(That’s why he’d so enjoyed working with George Manville, and why he’d been so reluctant to end the relationship by ending Manville. Could that still be worked out, somehow? He doubted it.)

It was twenty past eleven when Margaret interrupted: “Mr. Farrelly, from Australia, on the phone, Mr. Curtis,” she said.

Why, I was just thinking about Manville, Curtis thought, and this must be something about him. Good or bad? “I’ll be right there,” he told Margaret, and said to the architects, “This won’t take long.”

No problem, they assured him, in the usual murmuring way, going back to the blueprints before he had left the room.

At his desk, he picked up the phone, said hello, and Albert Farrelly sounded worried: “This man Raf here wants to talk to you, Mr. Curtis.”

Raf? That was one of Pallifer’s men. Why didn’t Pallifer come on himself? “Put him on,” Curtis said, and a minute later the raspy voice said, “Morning, Mr. Curtis.”

Curtis said, “Where’s Pallifer?”

“Well, that’s the thing, Mr. Curtis,” Raf said. “Nobody knows.”

“Nobody knows?”

“Well, sir, last Tuesday, Morgan got a phone call from some banker, I dunno what about—”

Curtis knew. The location of the Manville-Baldur hideyhole, no longer a factor. “What did Morgan do?”

“He said he had to go back to Brisbane, just for the one overnight, we should lock up Manville while he’s gone.”

With all the other details to think about, Curtis realized, he hadn’t remembered to tell Pallifer that the search for Kim Baldur in Australia could stop now, that she was here in Singapore. He hadn’t really thought about Pallifer at all since leaving Australia, had simply assumed everything was in position there, waiting for further orders from him.

He said, “You locked up Manville. And then?”

“Well, that’s it,” Raf said. “We couldn’t find him.”

“Couldn’t find— For how long?”

“Ever since, Mr. Curtis.”

Curtis took a second to absorb that. “Are you telling me,” he said, “George Manville has been missing since last Tuesday? For a week?”

“Both of them, Mr. Curtis.”

“Both of them? What both?”

“Morgan, too,” the man said. “We looked for Manville and couldn’t find him, all of us, and Morgan thought maybe Manville heard some of the phone call, so Morgan just took off before it got dark, and told us to lock up Manville when we found him, but we never did.”

“A week ago.”

“We kept expecting Morgan to come back,” Raf said. He sounded worried, almost embarrassed, like a man who wasn’t used to such emotions.

“Clearly,” Curtis said, “Manville left with Pallifer.”

“No, sir, I don’t think so,” Raf said. “Morgan put his bag in the trunk, and the fella wasn’t there. And when he drove away, there wasn’t anybody in the back or on the roof or like that, or we’d of seen him.”

“Then Manville took off, on foot,” Curtis said. “And Pallifer caught up with him.”

“I’ve driven all around out there, Mr. Curtis,” Raf said, “in the Land Rover, and I don’t find anything. Not the car, not either man.”

Curtis said, “Manville could not have walked anywhere from Kennison, it’s not physically possible. He and Pallifer must have met up, somehow, there’s no other explanation.”

“Yes, sir,” Raf said. “Except, if they met up, and if Morgan killed him, I’d of heard from Morgan by now. And if they met up, and Manville killed Morgan, we’d all have heard from the law by now.”

Two men dead in the desert; the thought crossed Curtis’s mind. They’d met somewhere out there, and neither survived.

But then, why wouldn’t Raf have come across the car? Curtis said, “This makes no sense.”

“Mr. Curtis,” Raf said, “yesterday, I phoned Billie, you know, Pallifer’s girlfriend in Townville, said have you heard from him, she said no, now she’s worried. I’m sorry I did that, but I thought you ought to know.”

“So no one has seen or heard from either man since last Tuesday.”

“Yes, sir.”

Curtis would be leaving Singapore in two days, on Wednesday. His travel plans showed him flying to Manila on the first leg of an inspection tour of RC Structural projects. Only Margaret would know where he was really going, and she wouldn’t tell anyone.

He tried to work out the implications of this situation. Assume that both Manville and Pallifer are dead, because if one of them was alive somebody would know about it. Assume that one or both bodies would eventually turn up. Would anything lead back to Curtis? He said, “You and, er...”

“Steve.”

“Yes. You and Steve stay there until Thursday. If you hear nothing from anybody by then, you should just go home and consider the job finished, and I’ll get your money to you through what’s-her-name? Billie?”

“Morgan’s girlfriend, yes, sir.”

“I have her address. If anything at all happens between now and Thursday, let me know at once.”

“Yes, sir, I will. Mr. Curtis, I’m sorry I took so long to get to you, but I figured maybe, Morgan’d been stuck here a while, he might just want the weekend to himself. It’s when he didn’t come back today I figured there might be something up.”

“Well,” Curtis said, “keep me informed.”

“I will, sir.”

It’s out of control, Curtis thought, as he hung up.

That was the one thing he wouldn’t be able to stand. He had to remain in control of the whole enterprise, he couldn’t let any part of it begin to spin away on its own.

Where was Pallifer, dammit? Where was Manville? What was coming at him, from what unforeseen quarter?

The phone call from Bennett Monday afternoon was the last straw on the day. He’d finished with the architects at last and was back in his office, getting caught up on some other details, preparing for departure on Wednesday, when Margaret buzzed to say, “Mr. Bennett on the line, sir.”

Curtis said, “Good,” as he reached for the phone, thinking, at last, perhaps, some good news.

Not at all. “Still no change, Mr. Curtis,” Bennett said, by way of hello.

The man was sounding hangdog again; Curtis didn’t like that. He said, “Colin, this doesn’t make any sense. They came here with a mission, they started on that mission, they arranged to meet this spy in my organization, this person named Mark, they didn’t meet him, and now they’re doing nothing. How did they spend the weekend?”

“They went to the Botanic Gardens.”

“For God’s sake, Colin, there must be something else going on, right under your eyes!”

It was first the loss of the scuba diver, and second the double disappearance of Pallifer and Manville, and now Colin Bennett was still failing to learn anything at all of any use. Curtis felt all of his anger and frustration coming out in this last phone call, and he didn’t care.

Defending himself, more hangdog than ever, Bennett said, “I swear, Mr. Curtis, they haven’t been out of my sight. There isn’t a thing they do that I don’t know about, and they’re just not doing anything at all about you and your business.”

“You’ll have to search their rooms,” Curtis decided.

“I already did that, sir. When they went to dinner Friday, I made sure they’d stay put a while, and I went and searched, and I didn’t find a thing. Mr. Curtis, could I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead,” Curtis said.

“How many people named Mark work for you?”

“Probably a hundred,” Curtis told him. “I employ thousands, Colin, a first name isn’t enough to go on. Now, I’m leaving Singapore for a while on Wednesday. If we don’t have any progress on the Jerry Diedrich front by then, we’ll just drop it. Come into the office Wednesday afternoon, see Margaret, she’ll have some money for you.”

“Mr. Curtis, I’m doing—”

“You know what I want,” Curtis snapped. “I want to know who the spy is. I want to know why Diedrich singles me out for all this attention. Those are the two questions. It really shouldn’t be impossible to answer them, Colin, it really shouldn’t.”

Miserably, Bennett said, “No, sir, it shouldn’t.”

“Thank you for your efforts, Colin,” Curtis said, and hung up.

12

He was always there. They caught only occasional glimpses of him, but he was nevertheless there, all the time, lurking. And they pretended not to notice.

Jerry didn’t know what to think about it. The man always in their background, like something from a silent movie, a constant ominous presence, never getting any closer but also never going away. He hadn’t done anything other than follow them, but the threat he implied was serious, and the man he worked for was serious.

If only they could find out what was going on. Every day at six, except on the weekend, Jerry had phoned Mark’s friend, and spoken with Mark, and every day Mark had absolutely nothing new to tell. Their visits to the Planetwatch offices had yielded nothing either, partly because Jerry didn’t feel he could tell them the whole story, but mostly, he believed, because Curtis was just too skilled at covering his tracks. Whatever he was up to, he was keeping it to himself — or doing a damn good job of hiding it in plain sight. Either way, no one had managed to dig anything up.

Jerry longed to be back on Planetwatch III, doing work he understood and was good at. But Richard Curtis was planning something horrible, the man was evil and needed to be stopped, and who else was there to stop him?

Not that they were stopping him. They’d been in Singapore a week, and were no closer to figuring things out than they’d been on arrival.

And then, Monday, Mark had news. They’d stopped at an outdoor bar near a payphone. While Luther ordered beer for them all, Jerry went to make his call. “I still don’t know what’s going on,” Mark said, “but something is, for sure.”

“Why?” Jerry asked, feeling suddenly breathless. “What’s happened?”

“First thing this morning, a fax came in from that guy I told you about. Jackie Tian?”

“A fax? From Hong Kong?”

“I got a look at it,” Mark said, “and I wrote it down from memory, so I may have a word or two wrong, but I’ve certainly got the gist.”

“Tell.”

“It said, ‘Diver unavailable. Arrested for smuggling. No substitute.’ That’s all.”

“Diver,” Jerry echoed. “A scuba diver, you think?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. If it has something to do with the soliton.”

“In Hong Kong?” Jerry said. “Or off Hong Kong, I guess. Taiwan? That’s the nearest large island.”

“Then maybe that’s where Curtis is going,” Mark said. “That’s my other news. He’s leaving Wednesday. The story is he’s going to Manila first, and then on to other places where we have projects, as a kind of inspection tour, but I think that’s a fake. He isn’t setting it up like a normal business trip. Usually, they’d have me phone people he knows in the various locations, give out his itinerary. He isn’t doing that this time.”

“Then where is he going?”

“Maybe Taiwan,” Mark said. “I’ll try to find out. Wherever he’s going... it certainly seems he’s going there to do whatever he’s going to do.”

“Oh, god, Mark, and we still don’t know a thing!”

Mark said, “What if you went to the police?”

“And said what? In Singapore? Richard Curtis is one of their most respected businessmen. We don’t have any proof, we don’t even know what he plans to do.”

“I’ll see what I can find out tomorrow,” Mark said. “But it isn’t easy.”

“Oh, I know it isn’t, Mark, you’re being wonderful, you really are.”

“Not yet I’m not,” Mark said. “Let’s hope I can be.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Jerry said, and went back to the others to tell them Mark’s news. “If Mark can find out where Curtis is really going,” he finished, “maybe we could get there first, head him off somehow.”

“If he can’t,” Luther said, “maybe we should just go to Hong Kong, try to find out more about this Tian person.”

Kim said, “Do you know anybody in Hong Kong?”

“No,” Jerry said. “But Kim, we do have to do something.” He gulped beer, felt it hit his nervous stomach. He gestured toward the restrooms. “I’ll be right back.”

He rose from the table and headed for the gents’, a small and rather smelly room at the rear of the building with (thank god) a window open onto a back alley. Not much air came in, and not much smell went out, but Jerry hoped not to be in here long.

He wasn’t. He finished in the stall and when he pushed open the stall door to step outside the follower was there, standing at the sink, Jerry was so startled he almost forgot to pretend he didn’t know who the man was. “Excuse me,” he murmured, and started around the man, who turned and swung the piece of iron pipe hard, smashing it into Jerry’s forehead.

13

“I don’t want any more beer,” Kim said.

Luther said, “When Jerry comes back, I’ll settle up and go to the hotel.”

“Where is Jerry?” Kim asked. “It’s been a while.”

Luther looked at his watch. “See if you can get our bill, I’ll collect Jerry.”

He went away, and Kim gestured to the waiter that they wanted the check. He nodded and went away inside and soon came out with a rectangular black plastic folder advertising American Express. Kim let it sit there.

But now, where was Luther? This was becoming a long time. Were they having some sort of talk in the men’s room? A fight, maybe? Or had they just left without her?

Twice the waiter passed, giving her a raised-eyebrow look, and twice she merely smiled blankly at him. She was about to dig out her own limited cash when Luther sat down, abruptly, across from her, as though he’d been dropped there. He had a very strange expression on his face, like someone who has heard an inexplicable but frightening noise. He said, “He isn’t there.”

This made no sense. Kim looked toward the restrooms. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s gone, Kim, he isn’t there.”

Kim looked more closely at Luther, saw the sudden anxiety there beneath the disbelief. Instinctively she reached out to put a hand on his forearm as she said, “Luther! He can’t be gone.”

“No one in the men’s room,” Luther said. “None of the staff remembers seeing him go in or come out.”

“But— He went in there, we saw him go in. And he didn’t come out, Luther, we’d have seen him.”

Luther abruptly stood, and stared hard at everything he could see up and down the street and around the tables. She thought he was looking for Jerry, but when he sat down again he said, “That man isn’t here. The one who’s been following us.”

“Luther... What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.” He had a stunned look. He said, “Did Jerry confront him? Jerry wouldn’t confront him.”

“You think Jerry ran away? Or that man ran away and Jerry followed him? But still, how could he come out here past us?”

“There’s a window,” Luther told her. “In the men’s room, rather small, but you could climb out it.”

“But why would he?”

“Maybe he saw something?” Luther shook his head. “If he suddenly saw something, no time to tell us, had to follow...” Another headshake. “Or did that man attack him? But why would he, after all this time, why change what he’s doing? And Jerry can handle himself, he’s no pushover.”

She squeezed his forearm, saying, “He’s all right, we know that. There’s an explanation.”

The waiter was hovering again, but Luther was too distracted to notice. “If he’d left a message, a note, but there’s nothing.”

Kim said, “Luther,” and nodded at the waiter.

“What?” Luther looked up, understood, and said, “Oh, yes, of course.”

While Luther got his wallet out and fished out a card, Kim said, “Something urgent happened, and he had to hurry away. He’ll expect us to go back to the hotel.”

“Yes, of course.”

“He’ll get a message to us there,” Kim went on, “as soon as he can. It could be there now, for all we know.”

“Yes. You’re right, Kim. I’m sure you’re right.”

There was no message at the hotel, nor did they see the hulking follower anywhere, either outside or in the lobby. As they rode up together in the elevator, Kim said, “Do you think we should phone the police?”

“Not yet,” Luther said.

She followed him into his room, his and Jerry’s. It was very messy, as always. She sat in the one chair, by the window, while he paced.

He said, “We could still hear from him.”

“Of course we could. How long has he been gone? Half an hour?”

“Closer to an hour,” he told her.

“He’ll call. Or he’ll show up.”

“What we’ll do, Kim, we’ll have dinner, we’ll spend the evening here, and in the morning—”

“In the morning! Luther...”

“If we haven’t heard from Jerry,” Luther went on, “then we’ll call the police.”

“Jerry will be back long before then,” she said, but it sounded stupid even as she was saying it.

14

Bennett did not dare think about the future. All he could possibly do was concentrate on the present, on the difficult tasks that faced him right now. Hitting the Diedrich fellow in the face with the iron pipe had been the easy part, almost the pleasurable part. But immediately after that, the job got complicated.

Quickly, before anybody else came into the men’s room, he had to stuff this suddenly heavy inert body through the narrow opening of the window into the narrow stone-floored alley outside. Not a dirty alley, though, a very clean alley. The Singapore authorities demanded cleanliness everywhere, and backed up their demands with fines: one thousand dollars Singapore for littering. So even the alleys are frequently swept, rubbish is never allowed to accumulate, and though Bennett’s victim was now bleeding from his cut forehead and his ears, and though he hit the alley stone hard, he didn’t get dirty.

“That’s good, then,” Bennett told himself. “Well begun is half done.” He clambered out the window after Diedrich, touched his throat for a pulse to be sure he was still alive, “You’re not worth much dead, are you, not at this point,” then hurried away down the alley to the side street where, fortunately, he had parked his car.

The alley was just barely wider than the Honda. Honking at the many pedestrians that jostled around him, muttering, “Can’t you see a man’s trying to do a piece of work here,” Bennett backed the little car into place, the rear of it filling the alley mouth. Just enough room left for him to squeeze by.

The Honda was a hatchback. Raise the rear, and now the car almost completely blocked the view of anybody passing by on the street. Not that anybody cared. After one disapproving glare at this car stuck halfway into the sidewalk, everybody just kept on going by, concerned with their own affairs.

Bennett loped like a gorilla back to the body, which hadn’t moved. “Hello, there, you still alive? Yes; good.”

He picked Diedrich up like a sack of flour over his shoulder, and ran half-stumbling back to the car.

At the Honda, he dropped Diedrich into the well, not gently, and pulled over him some of the old blankets and tarps he kept back there. “There you are, all tucked in, eh?” Then he shut the hatchback, squeezed around the car, got behind the wheel, and drove away from there. (He saw the other two, still at the same table, as he went by, and muttered a farewell.)

Very well, what now? Richard Curtis had two questions that must be answered by Colin Bennett before Curtis would leave Singapore in two days’ time. Only Jerry Diedrich knew the answers to those questions, and in trailing him Bennett had come to be convinced that he wasn’t going to answer those questions, not willingly. It seemed to him, if he could at least find Mark, the elusive Mark, then he could go and lean very heavily on Mark, and force him to tell why Diedrich had such a very special antipathy toward Richard Curtis.

But in a week, a full week, Bennett hadn’t even been able to accomplish step one. He could not fail Richard Curtis. Yet all he had left was today and tomorrow.

So the answer seemed obvious. He had to pluck Diedrich away from his friends, control him, and get the answers out of him directly, one way or another.

So he’d started, he’d begun, he’d gone this far. He had Diedrich unconscious and under control in the back of the Honda. But he couldn’t keep him in the Honda indefinitely. There had to be somewhere Bennett could deal with him at leisure, ask the questions and take the time to get the answers.

This was one of the crux points, when it was vital to concentrate exclusively on the present and think not at all about the future. There is no future, there is only this one step at a time, and the step now is to take this fellow home.

Well, that was the choice, wasn’t it? Bennett had access to no other indoor area, not where he could keep a prisoner. Singapore is a nation and a city, but it’s also an island, narrowly contained, heavily populated and cultivated. There were no remote lakes with seasonal lodges he could break into, no desert ghost towns, nowhere on the island that he could reach that wasn’t already observed and occupied. So it was his own home, and nothing else to say about it.

At last he turned off China Street into an alley, somewhat wider than the alley behind that bar. “Home sweet home, by God,” he announced, feeling grim.

On both sides of the alley, recently built but old-fashioned three-story buildings rose, neat but uninviting. Back here, the ground floors were open, parking for the residents who lived in the apartments above.

There was little pedestrian and no vehicular traffic back here. Bennett pulled Diedrich from the Honda, shouldered him with one blanket around him so that he was a bit less obviously a human body, and carried him up the two flights of narrow metal exterior stairs and along the outside concrete balcony to his door. It was hard to unlock the door, but Bennett didn’t want to have to put the body down and pick it up again, so he persevered, commenting to himself along the way, while Diedrich bobbed on his shoulder, and finally he succeeded.

The apartment was as narrow as his garage space down below, but it went all the way through to the front. In the back, where he entered, was his kitchen, with a small bath beyond that. Next to the bath, a narrow hallway led to his small living room, illuminated by a square skylight in the middle of the celling. A closed door beyond that led to an even smaller room, with his bed and dresser and the window overlooking the side street below. If he leaned out his window, he could see the traffic on China Street, passing by down at the corner.

In the car, he’d decided what to do. He would keep the door between the living room and the bedroom closed, and also the door between the hall and the kitchen. That would give him and Diedrich a small suite of living room and bath, with only the living room’s skylight and the bath’s exhaust fan. Diedrich would have no view out any window except the sky, so he wouldn’t be able to describe to anybody afterward even what neighborhood he’d been in.

Bennett considered. “Should I wear a mask, or maybe blindfold Diedrich?” He thought about it, the blindfold in particular, but he knew for sure they’d spotted him trailing them, they knew who he was. “Oh, they know it’s me, no question.” Curtis would simply have to—

This was one tiny chink of opening into the future, unavoidable, but not to be looked at too closely. Curtis would simply have to move Bennett out of Singapore once this was all over, get him a job far away on one of his other projects. (Not Belize, but somewhere.) If he stayed away from Singapore five or ten years, working in other parts of the world, that ought to do it. “Or I might decide never to come back.”

Once he had Diedrich deposited on the bare living room floor, Bennett went away to the tool drawer in his kitchen for duct tape and the underwear drawer in his bedroom for a clean white sock. He taped Diedrich’s wrists behind him, and taped his ankles, then stuffed the sock into Diedrich’s mouth. As he did so, though, he noticed that Diedrich’s breathing was very stuffy and labored, and shortly after he’d gagged him with the sock the man began to jerk and convulse. It was clear he’d stopped breathing, that something had damaged his nose — somehow the pipe had done some damage, perhaps to his sinuses — and he needed his mouth to breathe. Reluctant, but having no choice, Bennett pulled the sock out of his mouth again, and Diedrich gasped and panted and then settled down to his previous labored wheeze.

There was blood on the sock, just a little. Bennett didn’t like that. He tossed the sock in with the dirty laundry, then scooped it out of there and threw it in with the trash under the sink. “Now, you are being stupid,” he told himself, and got it back out of the trash and put it with the laundry again.

All this work had made him hungry. He had waffles he could heat in the toaster, and he could make tea. He had a narrow kitchen table and one chair, and he was seated there, eating his waffle, smelling the aroma from his teacup, when the hoarse voice in the living room yelled, “Help!”

In no hurry — no one in this neighborhood would answer a single cry like that, in the middle of the day, in English — Bennett got to his feet and walked into the living room, where Diedrich had twisted around to a half-seated position.

He stared wide-eyed and slack-mouthed at Bennett, then put his head back and screamed, “Help!”

Bennett crossed to give him a straight jab into that damaged nose. Diedrich fell back, stunned with pain, making little bird noises in his throat. Bennett stood over him and said, “If you shout out anymore, I’ll do something to make you really hurt.”

Diedrich stared at him. Bennett could see rationality come slowly back into those eyes, rationality and fear and hate. That’s all right, boyo, he said, almost out loud. Go ahead and hate me, I don’t mind. He said, “You ready to talk to me?”

“You’re crazy! They’ll get you, don’t you know they’ll—” Bennett kicked him in the ribs. Diedrich shut up, breathing through his open mouth, and Bennett said, “That’s then. This is now. Maybe it’s all true, and some day you’ll get to stand there and laugh and watch the coppers carry me off, all trussed up like a Christmas goose. But that’s then. Right now, I’m in charge. You follow that?”

“I’m your prisoner,” Diedrich said, almost challengingly, as though daring Bennett to admit to such an enormity.

“You are my prisoner,” Bennett agreed. “And I’ll tell you God’s truth, boyo, I never had a prisoner before, so I’m not that certain sure how to take care of you. I got to control you, that’s obvious, but I don’t want to hurt you too much and have you die on me, do I? You’d like to help me keep you alive, now, wouldn’t you?”

Diedrich stared at him, without answering.

Bennett shook his head, and poked the man’s rib cage gently with his foot; not a real kick, just a reminder of the kick of a moment ago. “One thing I believe about having a prisoner,” he said, “is when I speak, the prisoner answers. The prisoner talks when I want him to talk and shuts the fuck up when I want him to shut the fuck up. Now, have you got that?”

“Yes.” The word came out strangled with hate and fear, but it came out.

“Very good.”

Bennett felt he could sit down now, that the point of looming over Diedrich had been made, so he dragged his TV chair over and sat where he could always kick Diedrich if he had to, and said, “It’s very simple, Mr. Jerry Diedrich. I have two questions, and you’re going to give me the answers, and then we’re done with one another.”

“You’re going to kill me,” Diedrich said. Now, oddly enough, he sounded more angry than scared. Possibly he was mourning himself.

Bennett said, “Now, why would I want to do that? You’ll give me my two answers and I’ll be grateful, and what kind of gratitude is it kills the man that made me grateful?”

“I can identify you.”

“Where? When? To who? Look around, boyo, do you even know where you are?”

“I can identify you,” the fool stubbornly insisted.

“Only if you see me,” Bennett pointed out. “You don’t know my name, you don’t know anything about me.”

“Curtis sent you.”

“Somebody named Curtis, you think.” Bennett nodded, considering that. “And how many employees does this Curtis have?”

“Criminals? Killers?”

“Oh, now you’re hurting my feelings,” Bennett told him. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He hadn’t been so relaxed and at ease with himself in ages. He said, “I’m no criminal, Mr. Jerry Diedrich, I’m less of a criminal than you are. Do you think you’ll be looking at those police photos, and there I’ll be, and you’ll say, ‘That’s him, there he is, the handsome devil there!’ Is that what you think?”

Diedrich looked away. Bennett’s high spirits seemed to have a dampening effect on him. He said, “What do you want from me?”

“There, now,” Bennett said. “Simplicity itself. To begin with, Mark’s last name.”

Diedrich stared at him. “Never!”

“Oh, don’t talk about never, Jerry Diedrich,” Bennett said. “There isn’t a man in the world, not a man alive, who won’t answer every question put to him if only it’s put in the right way. Do you think I want to hurt you?”

“You already did. My nose, my...” He shook his head, feeling very sorry for himself.

“All right, then,” Bennett said. “Do you think I want to hurt you more?”

“Probably,” Diedrich said.

He’s going into despair all of a sudden, Bennett thought, and knew despair could only strengthen Diedrich’s resistance. He needed Diedrich to feel hope, to feel motivated to do as he was told.

Bennett got to his feet, and Diedrich flinched, but wouldn’t look directly at him. Bennett went out to the kitchen and got his barely sipped tea and brought it back and knelt beside Diedrich. “I’ll give you a bit of tea,” he said, “to clear your mouth. You’ve a bit of blood in your throat, this’ll help.”

Diedrich pressed his teeth together. Through the clenched teeth, he said, “What’s in it?”

For answer, Bennett took a swig, swirled it around in his mouth, and swallowed. Like a lab technician making a report, “Tea,” he said, “with real sugar and imitation cream. Care for some?”

“No.”

Bennett shrugged and got to his feet. “More for me, then,” he said, and drank it down. Then he smiled at Diedrich and said, “What’s Mark’s last name?”

“No.”

A kick in the ribs, same spot. “Yes, boyo.”

“No.”

Kick. “Yes.”

“No.”

He’s trying to faint, the fairy bastard, Bennett thought. He’s trying to goad me into doing something that’ll make him pass out, so he won’t have to answer my questions.

“We’ll see about this,” he said, and carried his teacup back to the kitchen, where he ruminated while he finished his waffle and washed it down with a glass of cold water.

Back in the living room, Diedrich hadn’t moved. Bennett walked through into the bedroom and pulled that sock once more out of the laundry. Bringing it back with him, carefully shutting the bedroom door, he knelt before Diedrich and showed him the sock and said, “Do you see what this is?”

Diedrich gave the sock a dull look, then apparently remembered he was supposed to respond to questions, so he said, “Yes.”

“It’s a sock.”

“Yes.”

“I was using it to gag you, so you wouldn’t be shouting for help and like that, such as you did, but when I put it in your mouth, turns out, your nose isn’t working. So I had to take it out again. It was like this.”

Diedrich tried to fight, but Bennett was stronger. He pried his jaws apart and stuffed the sock inside. “And now I’ve got to wash me hands, you see,” he said, and got to his feet, and turned away from the strangling sounds Diedrich made, his legs kicking on the floor.

Bennett went into the bathroom and washed and dried his hands. When he came back out, Diedrich’s eyes were popping, his face was mottled dark red, he was straining every muscle in his body. Bennett casually pulled the sock from his mouth, and Diedrich made horrible sounds, flopping like a captured fish in the bottom of the boat. Breathing seemed to be painful for him, but at least it was possible.

Bennett sat in his chair to wait for Diedrich to be recovered enough to talk. He wasn’t a cruel man, he didn’t do this sort of thing, had never done this sort of thing, but he had no choice, did he? In for a penny, in for a pound. And he’d always believed, if you take on a job, you do it as best you know how.

No self-satisfied smug little poofter like Jerry Diedrich was going to ruin Colin Bennett’s life, and that was that. That was that. No second thoughts about it.

“Feel better, Jerry?”

“It hurts.” The man spoke in barely a whisper, but he spoke.

“I think a hospital would do you a world of good, boyo,” Bennett said. “I’d like to help get you to hospital, you know, just as soon as you answer my questions.”

“What’s—” The hoarse voice stumbled and stopped, rattled, wheezed, then tried again. “What’s the other question?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Bennett said. “One question at a time, I think. So what’s Mark’s last name?”

“No.”

“Ah, Jerry.” Bennett knelt beside him with the sock.

Diedrich stared at him in terror. “You’ll kill me! You’ll kill me before you know!”

“Oh, no, Jerry,” Bennett assured him. “I’ll keep a very close eye on you. I’ll be here to protect and safeguard you. Now, open wide.”

“Mmm! Mmm!”

Once again Bennett forced the jaws open, and Diedrich yelled, “Sansan!”

“What was that?” Bennett released him and leaned back.

Diedrich’s head hung. “Hennessy,” he whispered.

“Well, thank you, Jerry,” Bennett said. “Mark Hennessy, thank you.”

“God forgive me,” Diedrich said, and lowered his forehead to the floor.

“Don’t blame yourself, Jerry,” Bennett told him. “I told you, no one refuses to speak. Eventually, you know, everybody speaks.”

Diedrich lay gasping, eyes closed, forehead pressed to the floor. Bennett doubted he’d need the sock again, but he left it on the floor, too far for Diedrich to kick, but plainly in his sight.

Bennett’s telephone was in this same room. Through thick and thin, he’d kept the telephone, paying for it as best he could, knowing it was his only lifeline, and now at last it was paying off, wasn’t it? The job offer he’d prayed for, he’d kept the phone for, was here, wasn’t it? Came over the phone, as he’d thought it would.

And now the phone was useful again. It stood on the small table beside the sofa. Bennett went over there, sat, and dialed the number Curtis had given him, his home phone, for the evening. A servant of some sort answered, and Bennett said, “Colin Bennett here, for Mr. Curtis, if he’s in.”

Across the way, the gasping Diedrich didn’t react. His forehead was still pressed to the wood floor, possibly because it was cooler there. Bennett was pretty sure the man had told the truth, but he wanted it to be very clear that any of his stories would be checked up on right away.

“Bennett.”

“Good evening, sir. Do you have, sir, by any chance, a fellow working for you called Mark Hennessy?”

Diedrich, on the floor, moaned a little. Curtis was silent, a stunned silence, and then he said, he half-whispered, “My God. I never would have—” Another little pause, and then, “Of course. But how do they even know each other? No, that doesn’t matter. Thank you, Colin, that’s very good.”

“I should have the other answer for you very soon, sir,” Bennett said. He felt elated, he felt his chest swelling, he felt lightheaded, he felt better than he’d felt in years. “And tomorrow, sir, if I may,” he said, “I’d like to come talk to you. About my future, you know.”

Another little pause. Curtis knew what he meant. How would he react? It all depended on this one answer, right now.

“Of course, Colin,” Curtis said, sounding frank and willing. “We should have a discussion. I’ll be here most of the day.”

I’m made, Bennett thought, and couldn’t help smiling as he said, “Thank you, sir.”

He hung up, and except for that one moan when he’d heard Hennessy’s name, Diedrich had done nothing; no reactions, no moves. He still sprawled there, twisted, as Bennett had left him.

Bennett crossed to sit in the chair again, within reach of the man, and waited, and it must have been a good five minutes before a long shuddering breath wracked Diedrich like an internal storm, and he rolled over onto his side, his face slack, eyes dull. “You might as well,” he whispered.

Bennett watched him. “Might as well?”

“Go on.”

“Ah, question number two, you mean.”

Diedrich closed his eyes. He was too weary, perhaps, to respond to a rhetorical question.

Well, that was all right. Bennett could cut the fellow a little slack, now that the resistance was done. He said, “You have a special kind of hate for Mr. Curtis. Not the environment stuff, all that stuff. With you, it’s personal. So that’s the question. What do you have against Richard Curtis in particular?”

Diedrich frowned, eyes still closed. Then his eyes opened and his head turned and he frowned at Bennett for a long time, as though trying to understand a foreign language, one that was now vital to understand. Then, calmly, as though they were merely having a conversation together here, he said, “You already know.”

That was an odd answer. Bennett brushed it aside.

“Jerry Diedrich,” he said, “I wouldn’t ask you a question if I already knew the answer, now, would I? That ain’t sensible, is it? So just tell me, and don’t, you know, prolong it.” (‘Prolong the agony,’ he was going to say, but corrected himself in mid-sentence, because he didn’t want to be unnecessarily cruel.)

Something happened in Diedrich. Out of nowhere, he’d found some shred of his old defiance. Sounding angry again, astonishing Bennett, he said, “Ask Curtis, if that’s what you want to know!”

Mildly, Bennett told him, “It was Mr. Curtis said I should ask you, you know that, no use beating around the bush.”

“He knows, he already knows!”

Bennett sighed. Why this delay, why this complication? “Diedrich,” he said, “look at that sock on the floor there, and pull yourself together. Never mind who knows what, or what you think in that very stupid mistaken head of yours. What do you have against Richard Curtis?”

Diedrich actually did obey orders. He stared blinking at the sock. He looked very desperate. He said, not a whisper, but a voice so low Bennett could barely hear it, “Daniel Foster.”

What? Bennett felt a terrible cold knife run up his back. Was this whole thing an elaborate scheme aimed at him, not at Diedrich after all, but at Colin Bennett, to get him to confess to the awful thing he’d done? Daniel Foster, in the water tunnel, when the lights went out, and the sound of the rushing water came.

Bennett could hear the sound of the rushing water in his ears. It was so loud he could barely hear himself over it. He said, “What was that name? What about that name?”

Now Diedrich turned his bitter, despairing, hate-filled, enraged eyes on Bennett. “Curtis threw him away,” he said, his voice strangled again, as though he’d just had another treatment with the sock. “He killed him, and covered it up, and made him disappear from the world as though he’d never been!”

“Diedr—”

“But he did exist! I loved him! I loved him, and we were going to—”

He’d half-risen in his agitation, and now he fell back and stared at the ceiling. “My letters came back, unknown. I phoned, Central America, oh, no, nobody of that name here. But I kept asking, and met people, and later on I found out, I found out from people on the crew, it was an accident! The kind of accident you get from people who don’t care about other human beings! Greedy, inhuman! An accident! And they covered it up, and threw him away like a dead dog, and he’s so powerful, Curtis, he’s so powerful, that nobody can touch him! I can touch him! I’ll get him, and I’ll get him, and I’ll get him, and we’ll see how powerful he is.”

Diedrich turned blazing eyes on Bennett. “He hires you scum, he can hire thousands of you scum, and it doesn’t matter. You can kill me in this room, you’re going to kill me in this room and we both know it, but it doesn’t matter. Curtis is going to pay. He is going to pay.”

Bennett stared at the man on the floor. What could he possibly do with this news? Mr. Curtis wants the answers to two questions, and I just gave him the answer to the first, but now what about the other? Can I give him that answer, ever?

“Mr. Curtis, this man, this organization behind this man, they’ve been after you for years now, they’ve been plaguing you for years now, because they blame you for a horrible crime you don’t know anything about, that I did, that I hid from you, not from them, I’m the cause of your troubles, Mr. Curtis, there’s the answer to your question, and can I have that job now, that we talked about?”

Now, for the first time, Bennett did allow the door to the future to slide fully open, allowed himself to look through. And for the first time, he saw that, in that future, there was no Jerry Diedrich.

15

Jerry felt the difference. In the air in the room. Through all of this, through the terror, and the pain, and the helpless rage, there had always been some faint hint, some touch of the possibility of belief, that he would live through this, that something would happen, some rescue, or that this man actually would believe he was safe in dumping Jerry somewhere, alive, after he’d finished with his questions.

But not anymore. Some chill had entered the room, the chill of death. Jerry didn’t know why, or exactly at what point it had come in, but it was here now, and all at once his situation was a million times worse. Before, there’d been, however unrealistically, a sliver of hope. Now, it was gone.

Could he get it back? Could he return to wherever they’d been before, no matter how dreadful that had been? He looked at the hooded eyes of the other man, his slightly puffy and unhealthy cheeks, his blunt-fingered hands, the shambling strength of his body, and even though the man was the same brute he’d been before, there was also something new in him now, something implacable and unreachable.

Oh, could he get back to the way it was before? Feeling his throat close up again with pain and terror, he croaked, “Why do you do his work? Why do you do his dirty work?”

The man shook his head. He seemed to think about what to answer, or whether to answer at all. Then he sighed, and it was as though he felt he owed Jerry something, some return for murdering him; which scared Jerry even more.

“You’re wrong, you know,” the man said. “You got hold of the wrong idea. You know about the blind men and the elephant?”

This was a surprise. Was it hope again, a return to human contact? Jerry said, “Each blind man thinks it’s a different animal. They touch different parts, the trunk, the tusks, the leg.”

“You got hold of a part, and you got it wrong,” the man said, “and that’s the story, that’s your whole story right there.” He chuckled a little, and his meaty shoulders moved. “You’re a lesson in the dangers of prejudice, that’s what you are.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. Richard Curtis is a rich man, and he goes his own way, and he don’t give a damn about you, so all you can see is he must be an evil sort of person.”

“He is.”

“He doesn’t know a thing about Daniel Foster, you know,” the man said.

Jerry looked at him. Some sort of wound seemed to open up in his heart, something hollowing and mean. He said, he whispered, “What do you know about it?”

“I was drinking, you see,” the man said. “Not justifying myself, excusing myself, you understand that. It’s just I was a drinking man in those days, and it made me careless sometimes.”

Barely daring to breathe, feeling that new emptiness in his heart, Jerry whispered, “You were there?”

“I swear to you, on my manhood,” the man said, “I had no idea he was still in that tunnel. I didn’t know all those planks and such were in there. Boyo, I was fired. I been out of work ever since, and only because what I did to the turbines. Do you think, if Richard Curtis knew I flung a man down that shaft, he’d take my side?”

Jerry could only stare at him, helpless, knowing he was hearing the truth, and knowing the truth was worse than anything he’d ever imagined.

The man said, “I’ve been a guilty fellow and a beaten fellow for a long time. My marriage broke up, I was blackballed everywhere. Not looking for sympathy, you know what I’m saying, but I’ve been punished. Oh, you can believe that. You wanted somebody punished for what happened to your friend, well, you got your wish.”

“If Curtis didn’t...” Jerry began, but then didn’t know what it was he even wanted to ask.

The man nodded at him. “Curtis knew you were there,” he said. “For a long time, Mr. Curtis, he’s known you were out there, a thorn in his side. A mosquito, but a bad mosquito. You know, he didn’t say to me to kill you, that isn’t the sort of man we’re talking about here. He said to me, Colin, find out who’s the traitor in my camp, and for the love of God, Colin, find out what this fellow Diedrich has against me.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Jerry said. He couldn’t look at the man anymore.

“Well, so I’ve done the job,” the man said. “Haven’t I, Jerry Diedrich?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a willing worker, you know, I’m deserving of trust. I’m deserving of a second chance. Don’t you think so?”

“You’ll get your second chance,” Jerry said, not trying to hide the bitterness he felt.

“Well, but there’s the rub,” the man told him. “I’ve given Mr. Curtis the information on this fellow Hennessy, so he’s pleased with me for that. But can I answer his other question? Can I tell him why it is you’ve been hounding him all this while?”

Jerry looked at him, and now he understood why the temperature in the room had changed. He whispered, “I’ll never tell anybody, I swear.”

“Now, why would I trust you?” the man asked him. “What sort of relationship have we had, you and I, that I would trust you? You’ve already told your lover friend there, haven’t you? The German boy.”

“No! I never told anyone!”

“You? A bigmouth like you?” The man seemed almost amused by him. “And the girl with you,” he said, “You couldn’t resist telling her, could you, for a sympathetic smile?”

“Honest to God, no, I never told— I never told anybody, I never will tell anybody!”

“Oh, I know that,” the man said.

“Please. Please. I swear to you, I’ll never say a word, you can trust me, not a word to anybody, I’ll never bother Curtis again. I’ll—”

“I know all that,” the man said, and stood. “I know all that, because you’re going to keep your mouth shut.” He went down on one knee beside Jerry. “You know the saying,” he said. “When you want somebody to shut up and keep shut up, what is it you say?”

He waited, but Jerry didn’t answer. Finally, almost gently, the man gave the answer himself: “Put a sock in it.”

16

Mark Hennessy.

Being driven to the office Tuesday morning, Curtis couldn’t get over how obvious it had been all along. Someone named Mark was passing along to Diedrich and Planetwatch information about Richard Curtis’s affairs. And there was Mark Hennessy, all along, right there in his main office.

Was that why it had never occurred to him that this Mark might be that Mark? There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of his employees named or nicknamed Mark, and his suspicions had always leaped over the nearest Mark to any and all of those out there, and now he thought the reason was that this was the nearest Mark. A young man who’d worked for Curtis for eight or nine years, who had always been capable and intelligent and willing and self-effacing. One wouldn’t even think of this Mark as a traitor.

But he was. And now the question became, what to do about it.

The simple and obvious remedy would be to merely fire him, without a reference, telling the little turncoat why, and then to hire someone else in his place. Or, more likely, choose someone already in the firm to be moved up a step. That would be the simple and obvious way, but when Curtis thought back to all the trouble Planetwatch had caused him in the last several years, all made possible by this one little sneak inside his own company, it made him too angry for a mere firing to satisfy. No, there had to be more to it than that, when it came to Mark Hennessy, something that would give more satisfaction. And Curtis thought he might know just what would do the trick.

He wondered how Bennett had smoked Hennessy out. Not that he doubted the truth of it, not for a second, but he was just curious to know how Bennett had done it. The man had certainly come through, exactly as Curtis had hoped. There might even be a place for him, somewhere, in the organization, later on; time would tell. And it would be a fine further boost for Bennett’s prospects if he could also find out what Jerry Diedrich’s goddam problem was.

The office was quieter today. The Kanowit architects had gone, with ledgers full of notes, and would return in a month, with revised sets of plans. (In a month, all this other would be behind him. In a month, he would be himself again.)

So the office was quieter today, mostly because it was winding down in preparation for the boss’s departure. To Manila, most of them thought, all except the absolutely reliable Margaret. And to Manila Mark thought, too, fortunately.

Curtis told Margaret to buzz him in, and when the fellow arrived Curtis struggled to hide his disgust. “Good morning, Mark,” he said, and managed his usual easy smile.

“Morning, sir.” Mark seemed as open and boyish as ever, as guileless and as transparent.

But of course Mark had never been open and transparent, had he?

Well, Curtis could be a dissembler, too, when he needed to be. Offering his false smile to the false Mark, he said, “You know I’m off to Manila tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir, of course,” Mark said.

“You’re one of the few people I can trust, Mark,” Curtis said.

“Well, thank you, sir,” Mark said, looking both pleased and surprised. “I appreciate that.”

“I can trust you, can’t I?” Curtis asked, and was immediately afraid he’d gone too far.

But Mark’s smile redoubled, as he said, “Of course you can, sir! I hope you can always trust me.”

“I’m sure I can.” Curtis patted the rotten fellow’s arm. “So I’m going to tell you something that no one else in the office knows, except Margaret.”

Mark looked alert. “Sir?”

“I’m not actually going to Manila.”

Even more alert. “No, sir?”

“I’m in the middle of something— Mark, if my competition found out, or those goddam tree-huggers...”

“Oh, I understand,” Mark said.

“Where I’m going,” Curtis told him, “and you really must keep this under your hat—”

“Absolutely, sir.”

“Is Sydney.”

Mark was obviously startled. “Sydney?”

“I’m actually taking a flight to Sydney, tomorrow,” Curtis told him, “and the reason I’m telling you, I’ll want you to come along.”

“Sir! I’d be delighted.”

“I need somebody I can count on, while I’m there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Our flight leaves at eleven in the morning,” Curtis said. “Margaret will help you with any paperwork you need, and a car will pick you up and bring you to Changi in the morning. See her, and then take the rest of the day off, to pack and get yourself ready.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Mark extended his hand, which Curtis reluctantly took. “Mr. Curtis,” he said, “I do understand the faith you’re showing in me, and I assure you I’ll do my level best to live up to it.”

And be phoning Diedrich the second you get home, Curtis thought, to give him the news. And good luck to you both. “See you at Changi,” he said.

Once the little rat was out of the office, the next order of business was Bennett. Curtis called the Race Course Court Hotel, where Bennett was registered under his own name, and left a message for him to phone Richard, no number given. Then he waited, wondering where Bennett was at the moment. Finding out the truth about Jerry Diedrich, maybe. That would be good.

17

Bennett woke late, feeling languorous. It was a delicious feeling of physical contentment. He stretched and turned in the hotel bed, feeling the good sheets, the fluffy pillow, the light blanket, and the pleasant cool dryness of air-conditioned air. He felt like a man who’d just finished a long and complicated job and could now think of it as a job well done.

Of course, in truth, the job wasn’t done, not yet. Diedrich would certainly have talked about Daniel Foster with his German friend, the tall blond fellow, and with the girl. So long as they were in Singapore, so long as they existed, they were a danger to Colin Bennett, because the circumstance just might arise in which they could tell that story to Richard Curtis, and Curtis would have to believe it.

What about Mark Hennessy? He certainly must know the story, too, and he was physically closer to Curtis, he could blab it at any time. But would Curtis be likely to believe Hennessy now, to believe anything Hennessy might say? Hennessy could easily already know the story of Bennett’s downfall — most people in the company had heard about his destruction of the turbines — and Curtis would simply think Hennessy was making up the rest, to get even with the man who’d exposed him.

No, it was the other two who were the problem, Luther Rickendorf and Kim Baldur. They were the ones who had to be gotten rid of, before Bennett could report to Richard Curtis on the demise of Jerry Diedrich.

Bennett had decided, at last, that the way to handle the Diedrich matter with Curtis was to tell him a modified version of the truth. That he’d captured the fellow, and brought him home, and trussed him up, and forced him to reveal the name of the spy in RC Structural. But then, he would say, it turned out he hadn’t been a very efficient interrogator, he hadn’t realized exactly how much pressure he was putting on Diedrich, and the fellow had died before he could describe his grievance against Curtis.

Yes, that ought to do it. It wasn’t a murder, it was an accidental death, done in Richard Curtis’s service. Curtis hadn’t asked for it, but he could only be pleased by the result. No more Jerry Diedrich to pester him, ever and ever. Who cares what his grievance was. It died with him.

Last night, when he’d finished talking with Diedrich, Bennett had gone out to a nearby Chinese noodle shop for dinner, a place where they knew him by sight. Then he’d gone to a kung fu movie in the neighborhood, and after that, when he got home, Diedrich was dead. In the darkness of night, it hadn’t been too difficult to carry the body back down the stairs to his Honda and stuff it under the hatchback, the same as he’d brought him here, though this time not breathing. (He’d reclaimed his sock, and now it had definitely gone into the garbage.)

It was a long drive he’d then taken, over to the Central Expressway to get out of central Singapore, then west on the Ayer Rajah Expressway all the way to the end, and on out Jalan Ahmad Ibrahim past the Jurong Bird Park to the Jurong Industrial Estate, the new area reclaimed from swamp and filled with manufacturing and housing.

Down in here, at night, there were quiet dark streets leading south to the water’s edge and the Straits of Jurong. Here is where Bennett stripped Diedrich of all identification, finally removed the lengths of duct tape from his wrists and ankles, and rolled him into the water. He would float or sink or whatever he might do, and eventually be discovered and would most likely be a natural death.

True, there wouldn’t be water in his lungs, so he wouldn’t be thought to have drowned. But he could have fallen into the water and hit his face against something and died that way. In any event, what was there to link this body to Colin Bennett? Nothing.

The other two would be more complicated. Lying in bed, in no hurry to rise, he thought about ways to kill them, and then smiled at his own thoughts. He’d never deliberately considered killing anybody before, and hadn’t originally intended (so far as he knew) to kill Diedrich, but now that it had been done, something new had opened up inside Bennett, because now he saw what a solution this was. How easy, and how permanent. The solution to so many problems.

Well, he should get to it, shouldn’t he? They’d be missing Diedrich, they might have already reported his disappearance to the police. Before they made too many waves, before they did too much talking to too many people, he should stop them. The good new permanent way.

Bennett rose and dressed. The hotel had no restaurant, but they put out a simple breakfast buffet in a corner of the lobby every morning. Bennett went down there to have coffee and a pair of pastries, then crossed to the desk, not expecting any messages, but just to be certain, so long as he was here.

“Yes, Mr. Bennett, one message, it came in this morning.”

Call Richard. Bennett’s pulse jumped, he squeezed the slip of paper tight. He felt like a dog who’s been called by his master, but it wasn’t a bad feeling, a humiliating feeling, it was good, it was positive, it meant he was wanted and useful and productive again.

What should he do first? Call Richard, or take care of the other two? He was tense with the pressure to take care of the other two, not even knowing where they were, if they were in the hotel, who they might be talking to. But how could he not respond to this call, from Richard?

He hurried back to his room, and made the call, and was immediately put through to Curtis, who said, “Colin, I’m going to want you to take a trip.”

Bennett hardly heard that; his own news was so pressing. He said, “Sir, you don’t have to worry about that fellow anymore.”

There was a brief startled silence, and then: “Oh?”

“He’s gone, sir,” Bennett said. “He won’t be back.”

“You’ll have to tell me all about it,” Curtis said. “Later. What I want you to do, Colin—”

“Yes, sir.”

“—is check out of that hotel, but keep your luggage in your car. You have your passport?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s a foodstall at Changi named Wok Wok, do you know it?”

“I can find it, sir.”

“Good man. One o’clock. Be ready to travel.”

“Yes, sir,” Bennett said, thinking, it isn’t even ten now. I’ll have almost three hours to find them and deal with them, no problem, no problem.

“See you then.”

“Thank you, sir,” Bennett said, and hung up, and got to his feet. Pack first. Pack, check out, load the car, then come back in and deal with them.

He moved quickly, but not scrambling; he was very sure of himself. He packed his one large bag, carried it downstairs, paid the rest of his bill in cash, and took the bag out to the Honda, putting it where Diedrich had recently been. Then he was ready.

He wished he had a gun. The best he had was the length of iron pipe he’d used on Diedrich. Well, it had done the job with him, it would do the job with the other two. When he went back into the hotel, his shirt hung outside his pants, so that the pipe stuck under his belt would not be seen.

He’d kept his room key, and the clerk hadn’t thought to ask for it. He went through the lobby, quietly, attracting no attention, and took the elevator to the fourth floor, where his room had been.

It felt a little odd, to enter a hotel room after one has quit it. As though he’d been wrested, for just a minute, out of the normal movement of time, been jogged back or to the side, like a knight’s move in chess.

His former room was at the back of the building, overlooking a tumble of shed roofs and the rears of other buildings. The rooms of Rickendorf and Baldur were down one flight and also at the back. When he’d installed the listening device in the telephone, he’d come down the fire escape, a quick and simple route. The doorlocks were too good, beyond Bennett’s capacity to pick, but the windows at the back of the hotel had not been changed when the place was refurbished, and were locked with merely an old-fashioned latch that Bennett could open with a tableknife stuck between the sashes. That was the way he’d done it last time, and that’s the way he’d do it now.

The girl first. If she were there, Bennett would find some way to get in and kill her. If she weren’t there, Bennett would go in and search, maybe find out where she was, or wait for her to come back.

He opened the window, and leaned out, and one flight up two Chinese men in white coveralls were painting the fire escape. Painting it shiny black enamel. They saw Bennett and waved and smiled at him, and Bennett waved and smiled back, then withdrew into the room and shut the window.

Damn. Painting the fire escape; who ever heard of such a thing? Yes, fire escapes must be painted, like anything else, but no one’s ever seen a fire escape being painted.

So it meant he couldn’t do it that way, that’s all.

Another way. All right, let’s do it.

Bennett felt increasing urgency and increasing determination. He would do it, and now. He left his former room, now truly for the last time, and took the stairs down one flight.

He hurried to Baldur’s room, pulled the pipe out from under his shirt, and knocked on the door.

“Hello?”

Close to the door, imitating Diedrich’s voice and accent as best he could, he called, “Kim? Have you seen Luther?”

“Jerry?”

The door opened, and Bennett cocked the length of pipe up by his shoulder, and in the doorway was the girl. He hesitated, just a second — but in that second, she recognized him, and saw the pipe in his hand, and understood what he planned.

They lunged at the same instant, she to shut the door, he to push it open. She almost managed to slam it shut, but he wedged his foot in the space, ignored the pain when the door hit his foot, and shoved against it with his whole body.

She was strong, surprisingly so, and she was screaming helphelphelp! but he was stronger, and slowly he forced the door farther open.

Noise down the corridor. The elevator door was opening down there. Bennett heaved, and the door sprang open, and he leaped inside.

She was still screaming. She ran across to the bathroom as he slammed the front door and followed. She got into the bathroom before he could reach her, and he heard the snick of the lock, but he didn’t care. A bathroom lock?

Pounding on the door they’d just left. A male voice yelling KimKimKim! The German fellow? Deal with him next, deal with the one in the bathroom now.

He lifted his foot and kicked the bathroom door next to the knob, and at the same time he heard the German kick at the front door. But that door was much stronger than this one. He could finish here with plenty of time to take care of the German.

He kicked the bathroom door again, and it snapped open, and he sprang forward, and she sprayed hairspray into his eyes, pressing hard with both hands on the top of the aerosol can, spray shooting into his startled eyes and into his nose and into his open mouth.

He couldn’t see! It burned his eyes and he couldn’t see, but she was still in the confines of the bathroom, and he moved forward, arms spread, and she kicked him between the legs.

He felt her brush past him, but could do nothing about it. Bent, the pipe dropped, he scraped at his face, turning, trying to see, wiping at his eyes, and the first thing he saw was the girl opening the door, and then some man he’d never laid eyes on in his life before came running into the room.

Bennett raced out of the bathroom to the window, flung it open, rolled over the sill and out onto the fire escape just before the man could reach him. Rolling on his back on the fire escape, he kicked up with both feet into that face as the man started out after him, and the man fell back into the room.

Bennett tore down the fire escape and in among the sheds, running the maze, finding a way out of here to the street, while the Chinese painters watched him in amazement.

18

George Manville?

Kim stared at him, this apparition, as astonished by Manville’s presence as by that other man who’d suddenly attacked her with an iron pipe. She stared at him as he chased the other man across the room, the man diving out the window, George trying to go out after him, the other man kicking him back, kicking him in the face, George falling backward.

Only then did she come out of her momentary paralysis, start to move. Dropping the hairspray can on the bed, she hurried over to George, went to her knees beside him, called his name.

He was stunned, and there was a fresh scrape on his right cheek, bleeding a little, like four shallow claw scratches. He focused on her, or tried to: “Where is he?”

She moved to the window, looked out and down, and saw the man just dropping from the bottom of the fire escape into a jumble of lean-tos and sheds down there. Hearing chatter above her, she looked up and saw two painters pointing at the fleeing man. Seeing Kim, they pointed at her, and started to laugh.

What did they think was going on here, what did they think the story was? Kim smiled weakly at them and turned back to the room, to find George shakily getting to his feet, propping himself with the bed. “Sit down, George, sit down,” she said, holding his arm, helping him to sit on the side of the bed. “I’ll get a cloth.”

She hurried back to the bathroom, now with its broken door, and ran warm water over a washcloth. Bringing that out to George, she bent over him to dab at the scratches, to clean away any dirt there might have been on that man’s shoes, and found herself meeting George’s eyes, three inches away.

He smiled at her, crinkling the area of the wound.

“God, it’s good to see you,” he said.

In the police van, he explained some of what had been going on, and how he happened to be here. “After Curtis smeared me,” he said, “I had to go along with him, at least for a little while, so he’d clear my name.”

“I thought that was the reason,” she told him, although in fact she hadn’t been at all sure.

The police van was large and roomy, meant to carry a dozen officers at a time. In it now were only the police driver and a second policeman in front, plus Kim and George in back. They were traveling without siren or flashing lights, crossing Singapore toward Tanglin police station on Napier Road. “Your friend Luther’s there,” George had told her, “he was telling the police about Jerry when I came in.”

Now, on the way, he said, “I was being held at a station Curtis owns in the middle of Australia, very isolated. When I found out Curtis wasn’t keeping his part of the bargain, that he was still trying to send that man of his to kill you, the one who came out to the boat—”

“Him,” she said, and shuddered, remembering the man. “Don’t tell me he’s in Singapore.”

“He’s dead,” George said, the word coming out very flat. She would have asked him to explain more, but he went straight on, saying, “I got away from there and made my way back to Brisbane, and went to see the lawyer again. Brevizin. That was Wednesday. At first, he didn’t want to see me at all. Curtis had been to him—”

“Curtis is everywhere,” she said.

He shook his head and said, “It seems like that sometimes. Anyway, Curtis had hired him to take care of any legal problems with his yacht and with Captain Zhang killing himself. You see, the whole point was, if Curtis is his client, I can’t be.”

“He is everywhere,” she repeated.

“Well,” George said, “ultimately I did convince Brevizin to see me, and I told him what had been going on, everything I knew, and he finally agreed to look into it. Friday afternoon he called to tell me we were going to meet a police inspector named Tony Fairchild, which we did.”

Kim said, “And had Curtis been to him, too?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” George told her. “He interviewed Curtis because of Zhang’s suicide, and Curtis told him I was not only back working with him but was here in Singapore. He had somebody, God knows who, pretend to be me and talk to Fairchild from Singapore and convince him it was all a tempest in a teapot.”

Kim said, “Why go through all that?”

“Because otherwise Fairchild and Brevizin were going to meet, and they would have found out right away they’d been told conflicting stories, and they’d have known there was something there to be investigated. This way, everyone just let it drop.”

“With you stuck in the middle of Australia.”

“Right. So Friday the three of us met, Brevizin and Inspector Fairchild and me, and we untangled some of the lies, and Fairchild said he’d look into it all very quietly, which I suppose he must have done over the weekend, because yesterday, first thing in the morning, we had another meeting, the three of us, and made some phone calls, and the end result is, Fairchild and I took a late flight here last night.”

Surprised, Kim said, “Both of you?”

“Yes. Brevizin paid for it — he doesn’t take kindly to being played for a fool. Fairchild has no jurisdiction here, of course, but Brevizin felt, to get the Singapore authorities to take this question seriously, Fairchild would need to be here, to give an unbiased take on events.”

Kim said, “What question do you mean?”

“The basic question,” George said. “What is Richard Curtis going to destroy, and when is he going to do it?”

19

Tony Fairchild thought his Singaporean opposite number was more or less an ass. Wai Fung, inspector of police, the exact identical rank to Fairchild, was a slender man of middle years who seemed determined not to let anything at all ruffle the orderly progression of his day, his life, his career. He seemed to believe that he was not in his position as police inspector to solve crimes, bring malefactors to justice and affirm the rule of law (all of which Fairchild believed in passionately), but was here merely to maintain calm, as though he were an usher at a cinema on a Saturday afternoon.

Which meant, of course, that Wai Fung was having a great deal of trouble accommodating the notion that he should go out and ruffle the existence of a prominent Singaporean businessman like Richard Curtis, nor that he should concern himself with the cares and woes of a provincial policeman from far-off Australia, nor that he should want to involve his island nation in the murk of international intrigue, particularly if it might at all have any bearing on Hong Kong, which is to say, China. So all in all, Wai Fung was being a smiling obstructionist.

On the other hand, Fairchild had to admit to himself that a part of his antipathy to Wai Fung was no doubt caused by his own unease. First, he was uneasy because he was out of the world he knew and into a world where he had neither insights nor standing. But even more importantly, he felt unease, even embarrassment, because he had already once before fallen down on this job so miserably and completely.

It had taken no more than three minutes of the first meeting among himself and the lawyer Brevizin and the real George Manville for Fairchild to realize he’d been snookered, by the smooth-talking Curtis and by the false Manville, telephoning him from Singapore (and even that wasn’t certain) to say he’d had minimal dealings with Kim Baldur and in fact actively disliked her.

If Fairchild hadn’t allowed himself to be lulled into inactivity by that phone call, he’d have kept his original appointment with Brevizin and the whole plot would have unraveled right then, or at least begun to. Instead of which, they’d lost a week, more than a week, and Fairchild blamed himself.

As an overachiever from the Sydney slums, a bright boy who’d always had to provide his own impetus in life, Tony Fairchild was a stern taskmaster when it came to his own actions. He didn’t like to fail, he didn’t like to be sloppy, and he didn’t like to be cozened, and all of those things had happened in the Richard Curtis affair. So he was (and grudgingly he knew this) taking it out on the unaccommodating Wai Fung.

Fairchild and Wai Fung and a few of Wai Fung’s younger staff and the German, Luther Rickendorf, now sat together in a conference room in the station, waiting for George Manville to return with Kim Baldur. Jerry Diedrich had gone missing, presumed kidnapped, possibly dead, and that meant Kim Baldur was very likely also at risk; it had been agreed that the circumstances might now be too risky for Kim to travel by herself around Singapore, so rather than just telephoning her at the hotel and telling her to get a taxi, Manville had gone to fetch her. When Fairchild thought about the alacrity with which Manville had volunteered to be the one to go get the Baldur woman, he could only wince at his gullibility when he’d accepted the sneers of that other ‘Manville’ as genuine.

The hall door opened, and Manville came in, with a distraught-looking Kim Baldur, and a police escort. Kim turned to Rickendorf, seated near the door, to say, “Oh, Luther, he attacked me!”

Rickendorf and Manville both started to speak, but Wai Fung surprised Fairchild by slicing through them with a suddenly steely voice: “Who attacked you? You say you were attacked?”

She looked around briefly, but clearly understood that Wai Fung was the person of importance in this room. She said, “The man who’s been following us. Didn’t Luther tell you about him?”

Rickendorf said, “I told them, Kim.”

“The man from Richard Curtis,” Kim said, sounding contentious and bitter.

“From Richard Curtis,” Wai Fung echoed. “Mr. Rickendorf made a similar assertion, but unfortunately lacked proof. May I hope you have brought the proof? The proof,” he said, “may be of any sort. Fingerprints, documents, eyewitnesses—”

“George saw the man, he can describe what happened.”

“Very well,” Wai Fung said, and gestured at the conference table. “Why don’t we all sit down?”

They did, and Fairchild pulled out his small notepad and black-ink pen.

Manville said, “When I got to the hotel, when I got out of the elevator, I saw this man forcing his way into Kim’s room.”

Wai Fung said, “You knew he was forcing? She was not inviting?”

“She was screaming for help,” Manville said.

Wai Fung said, “Very well.”

“I ran down there,” Manville went on, “and pounded on the door, but he’d closed and locked it. Kim was still calling for help. Then I heard a crashing sound. I didn’t know it then, but—”

“No, no, please, Mr. Manville,” Wai Fung interrupted. “Tell it to us in the order in which you knew it.”

“All right,” Manville said. “I heard a crashing sound. I was trying to kick down the door, but it took a few tries. When I finally got it open Kim was there, looking very frightened. She was holding a can of something—”

“Hairspray,” Kim said.

“The bathroom door was broken and the man was coming out of there, rubbing at his eyes.”

Fairchild looked up from his notepad. “Well done,” he told Kim.

Manville said, “He ran for the window. I chased him, but he got out the window and when I tried to follow him he kicked me.” He touched an angry-looking scrape on his right cheek.

Wai Fung looked around at them all. “I take it that is it? You don’t know this man? His name?”

Kim said, “He’s been staying at our hotel. A Eurasian man, big and bulky. He carries a Polaroid camera.”

Rickendorf said, “Inspector,” and Fairchild automatically turned toward him, but of course it was Wai Fung he meant. “Inspector,” he said, “we believe he put bugs in our telephones. They’re probably still there.”

“Interesting,” Wai Fung said, and turned to Kim to say, “This man. When he attacked you, did he have a weapon of any kind?”

“A piece of pipe,” she said, “Like an iron pipe, I don’t know, six inches long?”

“And do we still have this pipe?”

“I gave it to your people downstairs,” Manville said.

Wai Fung said, “Is that it? No witnesses?”

Manville, with a very slight edge, said, “I’m the witness.”

“From the mark on your face, Mr. Manville,” Wai Fung told him, “you were a participant. A witness is an outside observer. I take it there were none of those?”

“As a matter of fact,” Kim said, “there were.”

They all looked at her in surprise. Sounding not completely pleased, Wai Fung said, “And who was that?”

“When I looked out the window,” she said, “while he was running down the fire escape, there were two painters out there, painting the fire escape.”

Wai Fung said, “And what did they see, exactly?”

“They saw the man roll out of my room, kick George in the face, and run down the fire escape.”

Now Wai Fung made a note, then peeled off the top sheet of his pad and gave it to one of his assistants, with quickly murmured instructions. Then Wai Fung turned back to the others. “Whatever may have happened in Ms. Baldur’s room this morning — and we will investigate, I assure you — the connection between this incident and Richard Curtis remains, at least to my eyes, invisible.”

Rickendorf said, “Inspector, my friend Jerry has a friend working for Curtis. That friend told us last Wednesday that he had seen a man in Richard Curtis’s office who fit the description of the man who attacked Kim. He said he himself had carried an envelope containing five thousand dollars to Curtis, and that he’d seen Curtis give the envelope to this man.”

Wai Fung said, “And this friend’s name?”

Fairchild watched waves of indecision cross Rickendorf’s face, like speeded-up cloud systems on a TV weather broadcast.

“Mr. Rickendorf,” Wai Fung said, “without this person’s statement, what do I have? Mere assertions. Your assertions.”

Rickendorf said, “Would it be all right if I telephoned him?”

“Certainly,” Wai Fung said.

20

Though Wok Wok was just off a main passenger corridor at Changi Airport, a broad main pedestrian thoroughfare full of foot traffic and some wheeled traffic as well, the food stall also had a section at the rear, behind the kitchen module, that was quiet and unobtrusive. Here is where Curtis placed himself, at one that afternoon, and here is where Bennett eventually found him, coming around the corner of the kitchen, lugging one huge battered suitcase, “A perfect place, sir,” he said, by way of greeting, “A perfect place.”

Curtis didn’t know why Bennett looked so disheveled. There were stains on his shirt, his hair was spiky, and he had the general look of someone who’s been trying to run through brambles. As the man sat down, across the table, Curtis said, “What’s happened to you?”

“That girl,” he said, and sounded bitter.

“Girl? Kim Baldur, you mean?”

“Yes, sir.” Bennett slowly shook his head, seemed to think about what he wanted to say, and began, “Mr. Curtis, some things went like they should, and some didn’t.”

“Well, tell me about them.”

“I could see they were onto me,” Bennett said. “Not me, I don’t think they spotted me in particular, but they knew they were being watched. It had to be. At first they were all in a hurry, making phone calls, setting up meetings, and then all of a sudden they’re not, they just wander around the city, they don’t make any more phone calls, they don’t even call between their rooms anymore. So they’re waiting me out, I could tell.”

“Hennessy must have told them somebody was on their tail.”

“There’s a chap I’d like to meet,” Bennett said.

“Oh, you will,” Curtis told him, and smiled at the thought. “But go on. They were stalling.”

“And I couldn’t, because of you going to go away. So I snatched Diedrich and took him home—”

“Home!”

“That’s the only place I had, Mr. Curtis. I set it up so he wouldn’t know where he was, and I asked him the questions, and he told me about Hennessy, but then, I misjudged or whatever, and he was done for. It was an accident, but there it is.”

“Don’t worry about it, Colin,” Curtis told him. “I know it was an accident, and I for one will not miss him.”

“No, sir. Nor I.”

The waitress, a tiny ancient woman barely taller than the table, now brought their meals, and they had to remain silent while she distributed the dishes. Curtis took the opportunity to study Bennett, this shambling messy creature across from him, and consider what he had done and what he seemed willing to do. He hadn’t realized how much of a brute Bennett was, and the knowledge was both pleasing and alarming. The man could be even more useful than Curtis had thought, but he would also be more dangerous, because he clearly wasn’t very smart. To take Diedrich home!

The waitress left, and Curtis said, “Where is he now? I mean, the... Not at home anymore?”

“In the Straits of Jurong.”

“No bullets in him? Knife wounds?”

“No, sir. A broken nose, as might be.”

“All right. But how did the girl get into this?”

“It seemed to me, sir,” Bennett said, “you wanted her out of the way.”

“I never said such a thing, Colin.”

“No, sir, you didn’t. But I read between the lines, like. And I went after her. And some boyo I never saw in my life come along and queered the pitch, and I had to scarper.”

“A passerby?”

“No, he knew her, he kept calling her name, when he was trying to get into the room.”

Curtis wasn’t sure he wanted to know this entire story, but he couldn’t help himself. “What room?”

“Her room, in the hotel,” Bennett said. “I got in and it would’ve been all right, but this fellow come along and she managed to let him in, and that was it.”

“Colin,” Curtis said, and smiled thinly again, “are you ready to travel?”

“Yes, sir, I am,” Bennett said.

Curtis put down his chopsticks long enough to take the envelope from the attaché case on the floor beside his chair. “This is your ticket,” he said. “You’re flying to Taipei at three o’clock.”

“Taipei,” Bennett said, sounding surprised, but he asked no questions.

“When you get there,” Curtis told him, “you don’t go through Customs. Can you carry that bag aboard?”

“It’s a bit big, but I’ve done it in the past.”

“Good. At the airport in Taipei, go to the transit passengers area, there’ll be someone there to meet you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’ll take you to a small charter plane that’s got a flight plan to Okinawa, but you aren’t going to Okinawa, you’re going to Kaohsiung, at the southern end of the island.”

“Sir, if I may,” Bennett said, “why are we saying I’m going to Okinawa?”

“Because that’s international, and you will never have actually entered Taiwan. You’re a transit passenger, no checked luggage, there’ll be no record of your having been in Taiwan at all.”

“Okay, fine,” Bennett said, though clearly he didn’t understand why that was necessary.

Well, he didn’t have to understand. In fact, it was better if Bennett were never to understand that Curtis was keeping a wall between them, that Bennett was a non-person in Curtis’s life. Curtis said, “At the airport in Kaohsiung, someone else will meet you and drive you to the docks, where I’ve chartered a small ship. You’ll board and wait for me, and I’ll join you tomorrow.”

“Okay, Mr. Curtis.”

Curtis smiled. “And I’ll have a pal of yours with me,” he said.

Bennett looked puzzled.

“Mark Hennessy,” Curtis said, and the big man’s grin made him shiver.

21

Eating lunch at home, a salad of the perishables he’d already had in the kitchen, Mark Hennessy wondered about the trip, what it would be like and what kind of experiences he’d have there. Mark had worked for RC Structural ever since college, first in the field and the last three years here in the head office, and all he knew of the world was the places where Richard Curtis had sent him.

Mark Hennessy had nothing against Richard Curtis. In many ways, he liked and admired the man. He certainly was grateful for the job he had. As for the extracurricular activities he’d engaged in over the years, well, his goal wasn’t to hurt the man seriously, just to do his part in a small way to provide some checks and balances. Left to his own devices, Curtis would do things from time to time that could to some extent be harmful to the environment, so keeping Jerry and Planetwatch on his case was probably doing the world some good. But it wouldn’t actually hurt Curtis — it would just keep him honest, or a tiny bit more honest. The man would no doubt be angry if he ever found out, and would probably fire Mark on the spot, but his business wouldn’t be crippled or anything.

But—

But Mark thought it was probably time to stop. Jerry had made himself just a little too irritatingly known to Richard Curtis, just a little too annoying all around, and coming here to Singapore was maybe not the smartest thing he’d ever done. Curtis had set that fellow on Jerry’s trail, and was taking it all quite seriously, so it was surely time for Mark to hang up his espionage gloves.

Particularly with this new level of responsibility and trust that had suddenly come his way. Curtis was taking him along on this trip because he trusted Mark. Which meant, from now on, it would be a good idea if Curtis actually could trust Mark.

The phone rang. His immediate thought, staring across the room at where the phone was mounted on the wall beside the fridge, was that Curtis had changed his mind. He’d be taking someone else on the trip, after all.

Mark rose and crossed to pick up the phone, and was both relieved and troubled to recognize Luther’s voice. Troubled, of course, because Luther was part of the conspiracy he’d just foresworn.

What Luther had to say, though, was worse than he’d anticipated: “Mark, Jerry has disappeared, and we’re talking to the police.”

“What? You mean he just wandered off?”

“We think he was kidnapped. We think the man you told us about did something.”

“Good God, Luther, what do you mean did something? Kidnapped? People don’t kidnap people.”

“Well, they do,” Luther said. “And Jerry’s disappeared, yesterday, while we were having a beer, after he talked to you.”

Mark didn’t know what to think. This wasn’t the way he’d visualized what they were doing, with disappearances and police and accusations of kidnapping. There had to be some explanation. He said, “Maybe he’s following a lead.”

“No, Mark.”

“Well...” He didn’t want this phone call, he didn’t want any of this. He said, “Thank you for the warning, Luther, and I certainly hope Jerry turns up very soon.”

“I need to give the police your name,” Luther said.

“My name? For heaven’s sake, why?”

“You’re the only link between that man and Richard Curtis. You saw him with Curtis, you saw Curtis give him money, you saw him following us, you told us about him.”

“Oh, Luther, no,” Mark said. “You’ve got to leave me out of this.”

“I can’t,” Luther said. “The police have to find Jerry, and they can’t find him unless they go to Curtis, and they won’t go to Curtis just on what Kim and I tell them. You’re the only link to Richard Curtis.”

“Luther, no, it’s just — it’s just not possible. I’m going to—”

“Mark, we have to—”

“It’s Sydney, Luther.”

A stunned little silence, and then: “What?”

“Luther, the big secret trip Curtis is taking, he’s going to Sydney! I just found out this morning. And he’s taking me.”

“Mark, I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do,” Mark insisted. “Curtis is going on this trip, you remember I told you I knew he wasn’t really going to Manila, and this morning he told me the truth. He’s going to Sydney, and he wants me to go with him because he trusts me. Don’t you see? I’m going to find out what he’s doing, Luther.”

“Jerry is more important,” Luther said.

“Jerry is fine,” Mark assured him. “This is what you’ve been wanting to find out, all this time. I still don’t know what he’s up to, but at least now I know where. Sydney. And I’m going with him.”

“Jerry—”

“Luther, if you tell the police I’m the one who’s been spying for you, and if they tell Curtis, he won’t take me with him. He’ll fire me instead, and then where are you? Where am I? Where is anybody?”

“Where is Jerry, that’s the point,” Luther said.

“Jerry’s fine.” Mark felt frantic, felt it all slipping away. Everything was perfect, and now this had to happen. “Luther,” he said, being very firm, “don’t tell the police it was me.”

“I have to—”

“Don’t use my name, Luther.”

“Mark, I’m very worried about Jerry.”

“I understand that, I know you are, but this just ruins everything, destroys everything. Don’t use my name.”

Sounding unhappy and conflicted, Luther said, “I may have to, Mark.”

“If you do,” Mark told him, “I’ll deny it. You won’t gain anything, because I’ll just deny the whole thing.”

“You can’t.”

“I can. And I will. And if you give the police my name, and I say I have no idea who you are or what you’re talking about, where’s your credibility then? Eh? Luther?”

“You haven’t listened to me, Mark.”

“I have listened to you, and I—”

“Jerry is missing.”

“He’ll come back! But this chance won’t come back! You are not going to spoil this, Luther.”

“Don’t you care about Jerry?”

“Of course I do. Luther, I have to hang up now, I have to pack,” Mark said, and cradled the phone before Luther could say anything more.

22

Walking back to police headquarters after Luther’s unsatisfactory phone call to Mark Hennessy, and after a pair of heated exchanges over a bolted lunch, Kim kept insisting they should give Mark’s name to the police anyway and Luther kept explaining that that would be worse than no help, because Mark would deny it and Inspector Wai Fung was just looking for an excuse to do nothing.

Well, of course he’ll do nothing, Manville thought. If Mark had been willing to come forward, it would have been a bit harder for Wai Fung to do nothing, but he still would have managed it.

What was there for the Singapore police to do, anyway? Manville and Kim had sworn out their complaints against the unknown assailant, and if the police found the man no doubt they’d be happy to put him in jail, but what would they do, or what could they do, about Richard Curtis? Unless they themselves tied Curtis to the assailant, the Singapore police would have nothing to make them at all interested in going after the man, and given Curtis’s influence locally they weren’t likely to try very hard to find something to make them interested.

In any event, Curtis’s main crime wasn’t that he was behind the assaults. His main crime he hadn’t even committed yet: mass destruction of some sort while stealing a large quantity of gold.

When Luther had come back from his phone call to Mark, he’d brought one piece of news with him, which Manville still couldn’t quite figure out. Curtis was going to Sydney. That was the secret behind the false destination of Manila.

But why Sydney? No doubt there was gold in the banks of Sydney, but was he planning to use the soliton there somehow? Sydney wasn’t an island. There was water there, obviously, but what could he possibly be planning to do? The soliton worked in a confined space, not in open water; you needed divers, working in tunnels, setting controlled explosions. Did he think he could somehow use the technology to raise a tsunami off the coast of Australia? It was preposterous. Any engineer could have told him it wouldn’t work. And even if it could have worked, why there...?

Manville kept silent as the three of them walked back to the police station, letting Kim and Luther argue out the problem of Mark Hennessy. Luther finally said, “The point now is to find Jerry. If they haven’t... hurt him yet, there’s still a chance.”

Manville was thinking about the millions of other people Richard Curtis hadn’t hurt yet. The inhabitants of Sydney, or wherever his target really was. But he appreciated why Luther’s main concern was Jerry. “We can press that point with Wai Fung,” he said. “He might not think he has a reason to go after Curtis, but he certainly has a reason to look for the guy who assaulted Kim and me — and took Jerry.”

But Wai Fung was ahead of them. At first he was late, sending one of his assistants to apologize for the delay; they sat around the conference table for about forty minutes until the inspector arrived. “I do apologize for having made you wait,” he announced, as he entered the room, “but I believe you will forgive me in just a moment.” He took a photograph from his jacket pocket. “Mr. Manville, do you recognize this man?”

Manville took the picture, a squarish black and white head-shot, for a driver’s license or a passport. It was the man who’d attacked Kim.

Manville looked up at the expectantly smiling Wai Fung. “That’s him. The man in Kim’s hotel room.”

Wai Fung dipped his head. “Would you show the photo to Miss Baldur, please?”

“Of course.”

Manville passed her the picture and she said, “Yes, that’s him.”

Wai Fung said, “Excellent,” and extended his hand for the photo.

Giving it back, Manville said, “Congratulations, inspector. That was fast work.”

“The man did not make it difficult,” Wai Fung said. “His name is Colin Bennett. He is a Singaporean.” Wai Fung sat. “Although he lives in Singapore, in an apartment near China Street, he has been staying at the Race Course Court Hotel for the last week.”

“Since we’ve been there!” Kim said.

“He moved in the day after your arrival, and he checked out this morning, shortly before the attack on you. He used his own name, and he paid in cash. He explained to the hotel clerk that his building was being fumigated and the landlord was paying for him to stay in a hotel until the work was completed.”

Fairchild said, “But his building was not being fumigated.”

“No, of course not.” Wai Fung looked around at them all and said, “There was a small radio device installed in the telephone in one of your rooms. As you predicted.”

Luther was nodding. Kim was, too, but there was something in Luther’s expression, Manville thought, that was less hopeful than in Kim’s, a sort of fearful expectation. Jerry’s name had not been mentioned yet.

Wai Fung said, “A squad has been sent to this man Bennett’s home. We’ll bring him in and see what he has to say for himself.”

Kim said, “Ask him who hired him. Ask him about Richard Curtis.”

“No,” Luther said. “Jerry. Ask him where Jerry is.”

“Oh, we’ll ask him many questions,” Wai Fung promised them both. “He will grow quite tired of our asking him questions, I assure you. But since you’ve brought up the matter of Richard Curtis once more,” and his gaze shifted from Kim to Luther, “are you now prepared, Mr. Rickendorf, to produce this employee of Richard Curtis who’s been supplying you with information?”

Luther gave an unhappy shake of his head. “He’s afraid to lose his job. He won’t come forward.”

“A pity,” Wai Fung said.

Fairchild spoke up in the silence that fell. “So we have a man who does exist, this Colin Bennett, who did move into that hotel for the apparent purpose of keeping an eye on these people, who lied to the hotel clerk about his reasons for staying at the hotel, and who assaulted Ms. Baldur earlier today. What else do we know about him?”

“He’s a laborer of some sort,” Wai Fung said. “We don’t yet have his entire history, but we soon will. I would say he doesn’t have the money needed to spend a week at that hotel, not out of his own pocket. So yes, someone did hire him to watch those three people.” He shrugged. “When he gets here, that’s one of the questions we’ll ask him.”

“And about Jerry,” Luther insisted.

Wai Fung nodded to him and said, “Mr. Rickendorf, I do promise you we will do everything we possibly can to find your friend.”

“Please,” Luther said, as a uniformed policeman came in with a note, which he gave to Wai Fung, then left. Wai Fung opened the folded sheet of paper, read it, then said, “Mr. Bennett is not at home, although it looks as though he’s been there recently. There are indications that he may be traveling. We’re looking now to see if he’s left the country.”

“He could be hiding,” Luther said, “where he’s got Jerry.”

“If so, we’ll find them both,” Wai Fung told him. Looking around the table, he said, “I think there’s nothing more for us to do together at this point. I will telephone you all when we have further news.”

23

The call came less than thirty-six hours later.

They were shown into the same conference room, where they took the same seats as last time, and a moment later Wai Fung and his assistants came in. This time, Wai Fung wasn’t smiling. He looked grim and troubled.

He stopped just inside the doorway, looked around at the people at the conference table, and said, “I have news, none of it good, some of it very bad. Mr. Rickendorf, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but your friend is dead.”

“No!” Kim cried, though of course they’d known it all along.

Luther said nothing, and after Kim’s outburst they all seemed to be enclosed within Luther’s silence. In that silence, Wai Fung made his way to his seat, laced his fingers on the table, looked at his hands, and said, “He was in the water, in the Sebarok Channel, found this morning.”

Fairchild said, “Drowned?”

“No. His nose had been broken, and it would seem he strangled. Or was strangled. There are indications that duct tape had recently been on his wrists and ankles.”

Luther still said nothing.

Wai Fung took a deep breath. “It is possible, though not certain, that the length of pipe you retrieved from Colin Bennett, Mr. Manville, was used to break Mr. Diedrich’s nose. Tests are being done, but it will probably remain inconclusive.”

Fairchild said, “Any further news about Bennett?”

“I was about to come to that,” Wai Fung said. “Yesterday afternoon, just a few hours after the attack on Miss Baldur, Colin Bennett flew to Taiwan.”

George, beside Kim, said, “Taiwan!”

Wai Fung gave him a sour smile, “Yes, Mr. Manville, and Richard Curtis flew to the same destination today, in the company of an employee of his named Mark Hennessy.”

Kim blurted, before she could even think about it, “He’s the spy!”

Startled looks from everybody. Wai Fung said, “Is he. Well, he may just wish he’d come forward, in that case.”

George said, “You think Curtis knows?”

“We were told Hennessy was a last-minute addition to the trip,” Wai Fung said. “His officemates were surprised Curtis took him.”

George said, “All right. So the question is where in Taiwan are they and what are they doing there.”

“It is complicated,” Wai Fung said. “Mr. Bennett, arriving at Taipei, did not go through immigration, but transferred directly to a charter plane with a flight plan to Okinawa. But,” he said, raising a hand to forestall Manville’s interrupting, “in fact the flight did not go to Okinawa, it went to Kaohsiung instead, at the southern end of the island.”

Fairchild said, “Still in Taiwan, in other words.”

“Yes. The charter pilot has been located by the Taiwanese police and has confessed his part in the deception. Richard Curtis and Mark Hennessy took the exact same route today, with the same false flight plan to Okinawa. What happened when they reached Kaohsiung, we don’t know.”

George said, “He took a ship. The three of them took a ship.”

Wai Fung looked interested. “You seem very sure of that,” he said.

“From Kaohsiung,” George told him, “it’s four hundred miles across the South China Sea to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is the place he blames for his troubles. He says he’s going to get gold, and the banks of Hong Kong are full of Chinese gold. I don’t know how he’s going to do it, but somehow he’s going to use the soliton in Hong Kong. To create a great deal of destruction and make off with at least some of that gold.”

Kim said, “The fax. Remember, Luther? Mark told us a fax had come to Curtis from a man in Hong Kong— Luther? What did he call him?”

“A labor thug,” Luther said. His voice was low and measured and emotionless. It was terrible to hear. “Named Jackie Tian.”

“Tian visited Curtis here, very recently,” Kim told them. “And then he sent a fax from Hong Kong, saying they were going to have to find another diver, because their diver had been arrested on smuggling charges.”

“A diver,” George said. “So it is Hong Kong, and it is the soliton, and it’s going to be very soon.”